Knowing Your Audience

Digital Marketing

Improve Usability

Internet marketing is quickly becoming one of the most popular advertising options available. The Internet reaches a worldwide audience and is available 24 hours a day. For this reason more and more potential customers are turning to the Internet for a variety of reasons including researching products and services and making purchases. As more and more consumers turn to the Internet for these reasons, it is important for businesses to establish an online presence. This is so important because failure to do so may result in their competitors gaining an edge over them in competing for sales. While it is important for business to begin Internet marketing campaigns it is also important for these same businesses to realize basic advertising principles still exist and they cannot neglect these principles. Most importantly those who advertise online have to be aware of who their target audience is and how to reach this audience.

As with any marketing campaign, business owners should do some market research before they launch their Internet marketing campaign. Ideally this will involve hiring a research consultant with a great deal of experience in conducting and evaluating this type of market research. The results of this research should determine the basic demographic information for the target audience. The results should also include information on how to reach this target audience. A business that cannot afford to hire a consultant to conduct this market research should still make an effort to obtain this information on their own. This can be done through informal polls of current clients. This information may not be as comprehensive as the information obtained in a more formal study but it can still provide a great deal of insight into the best way to reach the target audience.

Simple Viral Marketing

Digital Marketing

Viral Marketing

Creativity

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.  It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.  While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing. While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Open Source is Your Friend

Digital Marketing, Technology

Open Source

If you’ve spent any lengthy amount of time on the Internet, you’ve probably heard of open source software but might not have fully understood what it is and why it even exists.  This article will describe this recent phenomenon and describe some of its benefits for the software using community. In a nutshell, open source software is software made by everyone – for everyone. The hopes behind its development is that through its open access, it will evolve into something that represents the true desires of computer users. Through a wide network of user involvement, the software in question is enhanced and debugged without costs or administrative politics.

Traditionally, software is developed behind closed doors. A team of professional coders build it but the community at large isn’t part of its conception. It’s costly to produce and as you can probably guess, that cost is passed on to the end-user: the consumer. Open source software on the other hand is free. Free to download, free to install, free to use, free to modify, and free to share.

The Web Community Scale

Digital Marketing

The Web Community Scale

Recently I was reading an article about how being on the web is about being in a community. Yes? A community… But it’s hard not to think  that there most be some sort of scale, to determine who the better players are. And who’s moving this community forward into innovation and keeping the community on cutting edge. So that’s when I had envisioned this scale. At the top of this web community you have innovators & inventors, in the middle you have your movers & shakers, and at the very bottom you have your copiers & pasters.

Improve Sales Through Your Website

Digital Marketing

Improve Sales Through Your Website

Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales. However, here are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.

The first method is to weave in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your salesletter, not to your whole audience.

Make It Easy To Buy From Your Site

Digital Marketing, UX Design

Make It Easy To Buy From Your Site

Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, but have you ever thought that you’re making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don’t know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won’t buy if they find the process cumbersome.

First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.

The Importance of a Sitemap

Digital Marketing

The Importance of a Sitemap

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well-constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

Search Engine Friendly Pages

Digital Marketing

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There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

Optimize Your Images for The Web

Digital Marketing, UX Design

Website Redesign

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

The Damn Truth about Affiliate Marketing

The Damn Truth About Affiliate Marketing

Digital Marketing

There is an over saturation of affiliate marketing programs out on the web today and many so-called internet entrepreneurs who have become millionaires from such affiliate marketing programs. In all of the information I have consumed, I found very little to be helpful. If you are reading this, thinking “just tell me which affiliate marketing programs are going to make me rich” or “how do I get free traffic to increase my affiliate marketing earnings,” you might as well close out of the browser now, and just give up affiliate marketing altogether right now.

There is no secret success tool to get rich quick with affiliate marketing. Instead what I can do is share my own research with you about my trails and tribulations in the affiliate marketing world.

Affiliate Marketing

Let’s start off with which top 6 affiliate marketing programs I have used on current and past sites:

Google Adsense – PROS: One of the best affiliate marketing programs out there today. Awesome control panel, lots of media options for delivering ads including mobile based ads. Super easy to implement into any website,  including your YouTube channel. CONS: Very easy to get banned from program for sometimes no apparent reason, or false reasoning, typically “fraud clicks,” which is usually just bologna.

AdBrite – PROS: Very simple approval process and semi-relevant ads. Great media selection for delivering ads, including full-page ads. Simple to implement into most websites. CONS: Small payout for CPC, no big ROI.

ShareASale – PROS: Awesome GUI on the control panel, wide selection of advertisers. You pick which advertisers you want to place on your website, if advertiser accepts you as a worthy publisher. CONS: Control Panel not intuitive enough for beginners to affiliate marketing.

Commission Junction – PROS: Large selection of advertisers, easy to sign-up, multiple payment options. CONS: Almost to large selection of advertisers, which can be overwhelming and confusing to most amateur affiliates.

Kontera – PROS: Best link based affiliate marketing program out there in terms of GUI and implementation. CONS: Ads are sometimes not very relevant for your audience.

Chiticka – PROS: Could not find any, but kept coming up in my research. CONS: Non-relevant ads, Poor control panel, minimal delivery options for ads, not very user-friendly.

Now out of all of these affiliate marketing programs, I have only received checks from two of them; and that was Google Adsense and AdBrite. That is not to say the other programs won’t payout, but in regards to earning revenue the fastest, I got my first check from Google Adsense, then shortly after AdBrite. Granted it took over 3 months to get any sort of revenue. Don’t get a excited is was barely enough to afford, oh let’s say a Kindle Fire. In addition, I ran the Google Adsense and AdBrite advertising programs a lot longer then any others.

For affiliate marketing programs to truly work, you need a few good elements:

  • Lots of website traffic, I’m talking at least 1,000+ visitors a day
  • A clean and easy to navigate website
  • Original daily content
  • A strong following on social media websites like facebook and twitter
  • A decent size of the subscriber that you can email market to
  • Time and patience…