Previously, we’ve seen a few things that you can do to help your home page convert better. Implementing these can have excellent results as far as helping the conversion rates on your website. Here are some more things to consider when you want to increase the conversions that your home page will bring you.

Add Social Media Buttons

Even though users may not buy something from you right away, they might still be interested in your business and what it offers. For this reason, adding social media buttons that let your users follow you on popular social networking sites like Facebook and Google + is an excellent way to make them remember your website for the future, even though they didn’t get anything from it today. Of course, adding social media buttons on your product pages is also important, especially if you are selling items directly from your website.

Add a Bookmark Button

Again, adding a bookmark button to your site serves a similar purpose to what social media buttons do: they help users remember your business and makes them more likely to go back to your website when they’re ready to buy. Encourage users to bookmark your site as a way to keep in touch so they can check your site out later for any future products or promotions. Otherwise, you may have users who may have bought something from your site, but couldn’t remember what it was and they ended up on a competitors website instead when they were searching for yours.

Make Your Contact/Help Information Prominent

Sometimes a user would like more information about your business or your products before they make an order. This is why you should always include some FAQ or Help pages on your site, especially if you are running an e-commerce website. In any case, having a “contact us” button featured prominently on your home page is a great way to encourage people to contact you if they have a question. Make it open a pop up with a contact form where the user can fill in their name, email and message to you, so that you can get back to them right away if they have something to ask.

Let Users Create Content

Websites that have user generated content tend to do quite well. For examples of this, check out many travel websites, which dedicate an entire section of their website to user reviews of travel products, as well as having a discussion forum available where different people can discuss travel related topic. Some of the biggest e-commerce sites like Amazon also do it by letting users post ratings and reviews of products they’ve bought from the site. User generated content gets you free original content on your site, thus helping with SEO. It also helps improve the user experience, as your users will feel that they have a voice and can interact with your site better.

Many online marketing experts will tell you something like “the money is in the list”. Well, this is actually true if you have a mailing list of interested and targeted subscribers who actually see a need to buy the products that you are promoting. But having good subscribers and lots of them is not the only thing that need to be important for you if you have a mailing list and send out newsletters. Even having 100 000 subscribers on your list will not do you any good if they never click on any of your links or even read your messages. Here are a few tips that will help your interactions with your mailing list become more productive and profitable for you.

• Mind the Rate at Which You Send Out Your Messages

Unless you really need to send out daily updates for some reason (such as having a site that collects industry news each day), avoid sending out your newsletters too often. If they didn’t find anything too interesting in the first few days, many users will either unsubscribe or start ignoring your messages if you send them out too often. Remember, it is better to communicate with your list once a week and have some conversions on your products, rather than bombarding your subscribers with daily messages only to end up losing half of them before the month is over.

• Include a Calls to Action

This doesn’t only apply to items that you are selling, but also if you are just sending visitors to your website for something, such as to read one of your blog posts, or to watch a video. Including a call to action will make it more likely that they will go ahead and visit your site.

• Be Brief and Direct

Avoid making your email messages too long. People get dozens, sometimes hundreds of emails each day. They don’t always have the time to completely read each of them. If they see a wall of text, they just go into TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) mode and simply don’t pay any attention to the message. Keep your communications brief, direct and to the point. If you need to explain more or give additional information, link to a blog post or a page on your website. Websites and blogs are better made to convey longer information to your readers. Also, one of the goals of newsletters would be to get people on your site as well. From there, it is possible that they could buy something, or keep reading other things on your website for information on products and services that might be useful to them.

• Include Contact Information in Your Messages

It happens that subscribers sometimes forget who you are, especially if they are subscribed to many mailing lists. Include things such as your email address for questions, the URL of your main business website, as well as links to your social media profiles. It will remind your readers as to who you are and also will give a more “human” feeling to your message, with ways for people to contact you if they want to know more about something they saw in it.

The landing page is the first thing that any visitor which clicks on your ads will see. As such, it is most important that you make a good first impression with your visitors from the very beginning. After all, if they don’t like what they see, many will simply leave right from the start. However, there are a couple of very simple things that you can do to make your landing page a successful and high converting one.

The first step would be simply to ensure that your landing page is relevant to what you are saying in your ads. So for example, if you are having a certain promotion where customers get 50% off a certain product or service that you are selling, make sure that your landing page shows this in a prominent manner. Because if a visitor clicks on your ad and then doesn’t see anything related to what they just saw on the ad they’ve clicked, they would think the promotion is finished, or feel misled and then leave the page.

Including a strong call to action is an important thing if you want your landing page to be successful and bring you the conversions that you need. At the end of the landing page, you should tell the reader what they should do and include a “click here” type of button to make them continue to the specific page on your website. So for example if you are running an online apparel store and you have a 50% off promotion on pants, put a button on your landing page that will redirect the visitor to the pants section of your website. This is a lot better than simply having one which will just continue on to the main page of your site.

A good landing page is one that is cleanly designed and that is specific to a certain promotion, or product that you would like to showcase. For this reason, you should avoid having any elements on the page that are not related to what you are promoting in your ads. While you may think that this could increase sales, in reality it will not, as it can simply lead to confusing the visitor even further if you overwhelm them with information right from the start. This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to up sell or cross sell with your site visitors. However, this should be done later on in the buying process and not simply on your landing page. If you have several different items that you are promoting, then it is better to make separate landing pages and ad groups for each of them, instead of putting everything together on one landing page.

The final piece of advice when it comes to constructing landing pages is that you should always want to test out a few designs first. Split test your landing pages to see which ones would produce the best results and bring you the most conversions.

Previously, we’ve seen quite a few ways to improve the overall conversion rates on your website. If you have an e-commerce site which sells something online, then conversions are obviously something that you want to have. Here are some more ways to increase your website‘s conversion rates in addition to what we’ve covered before:

• Optimize your website for mobile visitors

Depending on the geographical location of the visitors that you are targeting, as well as your niche, anywhere from 10% to 25% of website visitors will be using mobile devices such as smart phones. What does this mean to you? Quite simply, you need to make sure that your website will work well to someone who is using a mobile device to access it. All parts of your site should be functional on mobile browsers, especially the checkout process. If a visitor that is using a smart phone notices that your website is not loading as it should, then they will obviously go somewhere else, which is definitely not what you want when it comes to your sales.

• Find ways to capture visitors contact information

In most cases, this will be limited to just their e-mail address. It is also a good idea to give visitors a certain incentives in exchange for getting their e-mail. For example, you could have a contest where one of your subscribers will win a free product. Or if you offer intangible products, such as e-books or software, you could give a free trial of your software, or a free guide in exchange for the user signing up for your mailing list.

Some of you may think: how does this increase conversions? The user is not buying anything right now… Well, even though they are not making a purchase at the moment, they may very well return to buy something later on. By getting their e-mail address, you will obviously be able to send them a newsletter which contains information about your business, updates on your products and current promotions.

• Include videos on your site

Including videos on your website can increase conversions by giving your website a look of authority on your niche. These can include instructional videos, a presentation of what your business is, as well as customer testimonials. Whether the video should play automatically when your page is opened is still the topic of debate. Some believe that it simply annoys users to have to hear your video if they didn’t want to, while others say that it will focus the customers attention to the video. In any case, you can put up a video on your site and simply put in a call to action for the visitors to watch it if they want to.

If you follow the tips that were presented in this series, you should definitely see at least some improvements in your conversion rates. But of course, there are many other things that you can do, which are left only to your own creativity.

Besides issues that are more related to your products rather than your marketing, there are also certain things on your site which could affect your conversion rates. Obviously, you will want as many visitors as possible to purchase something from you when you are selling something online. Here are some more things to do which can increase your conversions:

• Create landing pages specific to your marketing campaigns

If you have advertising campaigns going on which focus on a specific product, or a specific promotion, then you need to create a landing page that reflects it. Don’t simply direct people to your “home” site and then let them find what they want by themselves. Sure, some will. But many others won’t and will simply leave.

So let’s say that you sell clothing online and have a promotion in which jackets are 50% off. You will want to create a landing page specific for that promotion and then from it, direct visitors to the jacket section of your website.

• Use live chat

While not all of us can have people available 24 hours a day to chat with site visitors, if you are able to this is definitely one good way to increase your conversion rates. When someone is browsing your site, by using certain live chat scripts, you can interact with them and ask them if there is something specific they are looking for or if they need some help navigating through your site. Many people will appreciate the fact that you are giving them personal attention and will feel re-assured that there are actual human beings behind the site they are visiting. This is basically called “proactive” live chat, because you are engaging with the website visitor before they contact you.

If you have limited resources, you can also use a “reactive” live chat support model. This means putting a button on your site that allows the visitor to chat with you if they have a question. While it may not seem like much, it can make a difference in conversions. Once again, you need to remember that people are not that patient and do not have big attention spans. Putting up a prominent live chat button with representatives ready to answer their questions could have a very positive impact on your sales, as many people don’t really want to wait several hours to get a response by email, and during that time, there are high chances that they will actually go look for the same product or service from someone else.

There are still many other things you can do on your website to improve conversions. Tomorrow we will discuss some other on-page factors that can be used to increase the conversions that you get from your traffic.

One of the ways to earn money by using CPA networks is by using a content locker, also called a gateway on your website. This is something that can be used with incentive offers to increase conversions. Now what exactly does a gateway do? The principle is very simple. When a user gets to your page, a content gateway will pop up, asking them to complete a CPA offer before they get access to the content presented. These offers are usually short email submits or mobile offers that pay around $1 to $2 a lead.

Is this better than simply having CPA text ads or banners on your site? Well, the answer is usually yes. Many people are used to seeing ad banners, especially the cheesy “Shoot X to get an iPhone” type of ads and will usually ignore them. However, with a content gateway, they will actually have to complete one offer before they get access to the content that they want. Sure, some of them will simply walk away and go to another website. However, some of the visitors will complete the offer, especially if they are really looking forward to seeing the content that is presented on your website.

Many of you may be thinking: sounds great! How do I set this up on my site? There are essentially two ways to do this: either you can sign up for a CPA network such as CPA Lead or Adscend Media, that offers CPA content locking gateways, or use a third party script with incentive offers from another network. Of course, the first would be much easier, as the script has already been designed by the CPA network and all you would need to do is to insert some pre formatted code on your website. If you do use a third party script with another network, make sure that you only do so with incentive offers. Also, discuss with your affiliate manager first to see if you are allowed to do so, to make sure that there are no restrictions on this type of marketing with the network that you are using.

One question that remains is: should you use this on your site at all? The answer here will vary. If you have a completely new website that you’ve just started sending traffic to, then this might be a good idea. However, on the other hand if you have an established site with plenty of regular visitors, you may want to think twice before using a content locker on it. This is because if you are already making a good amount of revenue from these visitors from “regular” CPA offers or pay per click ads, you might risk losing some of your regular traffic if these visitors don’t really like the idea of filling out a CPA offer to get to your content. But there is always a compromise, for example you can set up a “premium” section of your website that requires filling out a CPA offer to access. Or you could display the gateway only to random users, or after they have visited a certain amount of pages on your website.

If you are promoting any type of affiliate offer online, such as a Clickbank product or certain types of CPA offers, you will probably be searching for ways to increase your conversions and thus your revenues. Generally, there are two ways to promote an offer, either direct linking to the offer or creating a landing page. But there is a type of landing page that is being often used by internet marketers out there due to its potential to bring in more conversions: the multi product review page.

Now how does it work and is it complicated to set up?

What this type of landing page consists of is basically creating a comparison of a few offers (usually around 3) of the same category. So if you are promoting a dog training guide on Clickbank, you will basically include information and your affiliate link to 3 different Clickbank dog training products. Your reviews will need to be informational and generally positive, but it is possible to give ratings to the products and make one product appear as slightly better than the other ones. The other products are still “good” and useful to the buyer, it’s just that the top one offers the best value, or the best information, etc.

Setting it up is quite easy. Of course, the page needs to look good to the user and “professional”, not like something an 9 year old put together for his elementary school computer class. You just need to use a template that is related to your niche and structure the information well. You can find many review site templates for free just by browsing internet marketing forums or by doing a quick Google search. Some minimal web design is required, but you only need to know how to use a basic web editor. No need to design fancy graphics, logos, flash movies, etc. Then just get a domain related to your niche and upload it to the server. For some ideas on how the page is supposed to look like, just take a peek at how your competitors pages are doing and structure yours accordingly.

Why should I use this method? Will it be profitable?

This is profitable due to the fact that the user will feel more as if you are “on their side” and presenting information on various products, rather than pitching one product which will look like you are trying to sell them something.

While it is quite unlikely that someone will buy multiple products from the review site (since they all do pretty much the same thing), this is different for free offers. For example, if you are promoting survey sites, free biz opp leads or free dating site signup offers, a user could register at more than one of the sites thus making you more revenue than if you would have only been promoting a single offer. Feel free to try this method with different kinds of offers and see what the results are, then adjust your campaigns accordingly.

If you are going to place some ads online, you need to be sure that your entire ad campaign has been planned well so that you can maximize your chances of success. Here are some thing that you can do to make that happen:

Determine what your objectives are

When you promote affiliate or CPA offers, you naturally want to earn as much commissions as possible. It’s always a good thing to set certain goals for each advertising campaign that you make. How many sales / leads are you planning to get each day on each offer that you are running?

Set up a budget

If you are going to use paid advertising methods, such as pay per click ads, media buys, etc., think about how much money you will be willing to spend on each campaign per day. If you are running several ads at the same time, split up your budget accordingly, depending on what offer you want to promote in priority.

Think of the creatives that you will use

If you use text based ads, think up of some ads that will catch the attention of the reader, all while maintaining a good traffic quality. See what your competitors are doing and what their ads look like. Remember that while CTR is important, conversions are what you are after. If the offer that you are promoting requires the user to buy something, avoid using words that could make the reader think they are getting something for free. You will simply end up with hundreds of visits from freebie seekers and very little, if any, actual conversions. If you use graphic ads, set up ads using several different banners. Remember that the banner with the highest conversion rate on the network may not always be the best converting one for you.

Set up a way to track your results

Unless you are only running one campaign with one ad, having a solution to track where the most visitors and conversions are coming from is crucial to being a successful marketer. This will allow you to see exactly which ads and which keywords are the most profitable for you. There are many free scripts out there that you can install on your landing pages which can help you do just that. Even something as simple as using a different landing page for each ad copy can help you track your results.

Be prepared to make changes

While some “experts” out there claim that they have a method to make money online which is simply “set and forget”, the truth is actually different. Sure, you can simply leave things running for a few days, weeks even without optimizing or making changes. But remember that the whole “online business” industry is rapidly evolving. Therefore, you need to monitor your results on a daily basis, and make adjustments such as changing your landing pages, removing keywords that are not profitable, changing you ad copy a bit, etc.

You may have seen the term PPV advertising somewhere and wondered what it was. After all, this is an online advertising method that is not as popular as other ones out there, like pay-per-click ads, media buying or e-mail marketing. It basically consists of showing a pop-up or pop-under ad on a user’s computer. The thing that makes it different from traditional media buying is that the pop-up is the result of the user having some adware from the PPV company installed and running on their computer. This adware often gets installed when the user downloads certain web applications such as toolbars, screen savers, etc. While adware often has negative connotations within the computer world and some people protest its use, due to privacy concerns or the software affecting the system’s stability, it is not illegal in any way. The user has consented to being shown ads on his or her computer when they have installed an application which contains the adware. Furthermore, should a user no longer want to see the ads, all they would have to do is to stop using the software in question and uninstall it from their PC.

One of the advantages of using PPV ads to promote offers is that the traffic is targeted. Your website will pop up when the user enters a certain key phrase in a search engines or accesses a certain URL. It is also very cheaply priced, in fact you can get clicks for most keywords for very low prices, often fractions of a cent.

It also has all of the features provided by other advertising networks, such as the ability to target users in a certain geographic region and the possibility of setting up several different campaigns with different budgets. Most PPV networks also support pixel tracking, which will make it a lot easier for you to track conversions when you are sending traffic to CPA offers.

There are, however a few downsides to buying PPV traffic. Not all PPV networks are open to public registration, therefore you may need to be referred by an existing user in order to get it. Furthermore, unlike PPC networks, where you can pre-pay for amounts as low as $10 or $20 and get started, most PPV networks will require that you deposit far more in your account. In fact, it is not uncommon to see deposit requirements of $500 to $1000. The traffic does not start immediately either. You will need to wait a few days for your URL to be approved and traffic sent to it.

Despite these drawbacks, PPV advertising is used by many successful CPA marketers and affiliates in order to push their offers. If used correctly, it can generate tremendous amounts of profits for you due to the fact that the traffic is both targeted towards your chosen keywords and comes much cheaper than in other types of ads. After all, would you rather pay $0.005 per click with PPV, or $2 per click on Adwords?

Whatever type of online product you are promoting, whether it’s an ebook on Clickbank, or a CPA offer, you would need to get traffic to your offer. We all know that: if you get no traffic, you get no conversions and therefore no revenue. Google Adwords is one of the most popular online advertising tools that is used by internet marketers to get targeted traffic directly to their offers. Here is a quick overview of how it works:

Adwords is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising service. This means that you will pay for every click that is sent to your website, rather than the amount of times that your ad is displayed, or a flat rate for a certain period of time. The amount that you will pay for each click will depend on various factors. First is the competition for the keywords that you are targeting. Keywords that are quite broad in nature, such as “dog” or “computers” will cost you less, but the traffic will also be of lower quality than if you had used more specific keywords. This is quite simply due to the fact that these people will often not be in buying mode, but rather searching for general information about various products.

Keywords like “dog training guide” or “computer repair service” will yield much better results, but will cost you more for each click. Another factor that influences price is what other people are bidding for that keyword. The more competition for a certain keyword, the higher the average bid price will be. For example, most keywords related to financial products, such as “insurance” or “credit cards” can cost anywhere between $5 to $40 or more for a single click.

In Adwords, you will write a short text ad, composed of a title, 2 short lines of text and a link to your site. The ads themselves mainly appear on Google’s search results when someone searches for a keyword that you have bid on. The position of your ad will mainly depend on how much you bid. If your bid is higher than the other competitors, your ad has a better chance of appearing in the first position, highlighted on top of the search results. Google Adwords also uses the Google content network to distribute ads, however you may turn this option off in your account. This will make your ad appear on sites that have content related to your keywords. For example, if you are selling dog training guides, your ad could appear on a forum that talks about dogs.

Mastering the Google Adwords system will take you some time and practice. Therefore, you should do as much research as possible before launching a campaign on it. Believe me, mistakes on Adwords could be very costly for you. The good news is that many webhosting companies give a free voucher of $50 to $100 that you can use to create your first Adwords campaign, when you sign up for a hosting account with them.

If you are new to internet marketing, you may be in search of some reasonably priced traffic sources in order to send traffic to your sites and the offers that you promote. After all, if no one clicks on your links, your will not make any sales or earn any commissions from affiliate programs. There are many ways to get traffic to your site. Some are perfectly legitimate and will give you productive and targeted traffic that will result in conversions for you. Some other sites sell you what could be referred to as “garbage traffic”. Allow me to explain a bit more in detail:

Bulk traffic sites

Sites such as BuyHitsCheap offer to sell packages of thousands of visitors for very low prices. They also make claims that this is “real traffic” from “real visitors” and will result in “potential customers”. While the first two statements are technically true, the second one is quite unlikely to occur. Here’s why: these sites use “popunders”, which basically load the website in a popup that goes under the browser’s current window. Few people will actually bother to look at your site and most will simply find the popunder annoying and close it right away. So you definitely won’t get any customers. Now think logically for a second. They sell 10 000 visitors for $12.50. If you promote a product that gets you a $15 commission and you get a conversion rate of 1/2000 (which would be atrociously low in other means of advertising), you would earn $75, more than 5 times what you spent. If this was possible, a lot of us would be millionaires right now.

Paid to click sites

These sites often claim that they can get you “real visitors” at very low costs. Now make no mistake about it, the visitors will probably be quite real. But the problem is, they won’t really care about your site or your product. These sites pay their visitors a fraction of a cent in order to click on a link and keep your site open for a period of time, such as 15 to 30 seconds. Most people on these types of sites won’t even bother looking at the websites that they have clicked through to and will simply end up closing your site after the timer expires, so that they can move on to the next site and possibly end up earning a few pennies a day.

Traffic exchanges

Many of these services claim to give you free traffic and the ability to earn views to your site simply by looking at other people’s sites. Anyone with half a brain will know that this concept is quite flawed. No one will be interested to sign up for anything on your site, much less buy something from you. All they will want is to get visitors to THEIR site as well. Traffic exchanges are simply little more than a waste of time.

If you are running CPA or affiliate campaigns, or even selling your own digital product, you are probably used to advertising through various online mediums. Pay per click ads, media buys, online directories, these kinds of things. After all, that’s what an “online business” is all about, right? Maybe so, but there are also many other advertising opportunities for you to explore.

Let’s see some simple examples. Say you’re running a simple email or zip submit offer that gives the buyer a chance to get coupons for pizza, or maybe to get a free gift card from Best Buy or Wal Mart. Sure, there are many places where you can advertise these offers online, but have you tried to do some marketing in the “real world”? It is actually quite simple, all you have to do is this:

1. Buy a domain that’s relevant to your offer, and have it redirected to it.
2. Design and print out some fliers promoting it. You can do this with any printer, or pay a professional printing company to print them for you. Many printing companies can print full color fliers at very low prices now, so the cost isn’t something you would worry about too much.
3. Distribute them at strategic locations.

Now the last part is quite important if you want to see some results and conversions. If the offer that you are running is “Win an iPod Touch!”, putting up your fliers in nursing homes may not necessarily be the best idea. But giving them out in a college campus could be a brighter one. But what if, say, you live in the middle of the desert and the nearest city is hundreds of miles away? There’s ways around that too. You can simply outsource the whole process to someone who lives near a more desirable location for your marketing. You can find someone to do print the fliers out for you and distribute them on places like Craigslist, on forums or on some freelancing sites. Just make sure that they post proof, such as a video taken with their cell phone of them actually passing out your fliers. A popular site where you can find people to do such simple tasks is Fiverr.com. It costs $5 per gig and many people would be willing to do things like pass out fliers, cards or wear your website on their t-shirt for the day for this amount.

Naturally, there are also many other offline advertising methods for you to explore. For example, you can place ads in newspapers and promote your site there. Due to the fact that this costs a bit more than simply giving out fliers, you may want to try it with an offer that pays out a bit more per lead or sale. You could, say promote some dog training guides from Clickbank in your newspaper ad. The possibilities are practically endless, so remember to think outside the box!

A great attraction marketing guru, Seth Godin.

Attraction marketing is simply drawing people into your products and services by attraction. Pretty straightforward huh? Well if it isn’t, the best way i can think about attraction marketing is by telling people and showing them what you are capable of and what sort of value you can bring to them. There are a ton of great ways you can do this — but the general system is to create valuable content, no matter the medium, that shows you are an expert in what you are talking about and can teach someone (or provide someone) with the knowledge you have for a given area of expertise or need.

Offering eBooks is one of the attraction marketing techniques which is useful towards providing leads which will eventually turn into conversions for your marketing campaigns. The use of eBooks can be diverse as you can take advantage of preexisting options which are free to distribute or even write your own eBook which can provide some information samples which readers will want to learn more about. This makes it possible to ask them to continue learning more by purchasing a product or joining a system.

Social media attractors are some of the most effective options that you have at your disposal for attraction marketing. Creating an account on a social media website is easy and provides plenty of people to start networking in. Make sure to add in a large amount of interests which are similar to what you will be marketing and send requests to others for mutual associations. These requests can be friendship, followers, and many other types of associations depending on the social media network. Once a network of about 50 or so people has been achieved, start providing interesting information about the product or system that you are marketing. Most users will be intrigued and at least check out what you posted.

Conventional websites are the tried and true method for attraction marketing. Using the old process of creating a website, specializing in a niche or range of niches and creating content to fill the sites with information that readers will want to stick around for is the real way to make use of the sites. Visitors to websites will usually make an assumption about the website in the first few seconds of their visit. It is always true that the more pleasing the aesthetic feel of the site is, coupled with what information it contains, will always help to provide attraction marketing leads.