Website Marketing Resource

There are some smart and sneaky techniques that can help you increase your sales when executed properly.

Hold a discount sale on your web site. Use the sale to get rid of excess inventory, gain new or repeat customers, and increase your sales.

Most businesses pick a theme for their sale, like a Halloween Sale.

Below are six unique online sales themes you could use:

Nobody’s Visiting Today Sale

Every online business has low visitor and sales day through the week. My days are Tuesdays and Thursdays.You could sell your products or services for cheaper to increase and sales on your slow days. You could have this advertised right on your web site.

Time Of The Day Sale

Periodically , pick out a time of the day like 5 to 7 pm to lower your prices. With online sales you need tell people the time zone. Announce your scheduled times ahead of time in your e-zine. This will give people enough time to plan when they will visit your web site.

Product Or Service Of The Day Sale

If you’ve subscribed to an seo newsletter for longer than a week, you’re well aware that writing articles with tips and advice pertaining to your website’s subject is a great way to generate links and traffic. But what if you can’t write or are afraid to write? Well, if you can write software, you’re still in luck! In this article I’ll show you a trick that can still garner you hundreds of links and won’t require you know the difference between adjectives and adverbs.

I’ll use my own little website as an example (I freely admit that I am neither a web designer nor a programmer). My wife and I own By Request DJ & Karaoke Company. Obviously, we specialize in weddings dances, school dances, company parties, and karaoke. We recently went through the process of converting all our CDs to compressed digital audio files which are played from a computer rather than hauling around thousands of CDs. In the process of ripping and encoding our music, I found many tasks were very repetitive and time consuming. Since I know a smattering of Visual Basic, it was simple to write a utility to automate these tasks. I figured that if it was helpful to me, some other DJ might find it helpful to, so I called my utility MP3G to ZIP and made it available for download from my website. I also decided to submit it to a few freeware sites just so it was easier to find.

Making the following changes to your title tag can help improve ranking and increase targeted traffic to your website:

Include keyword phrases in your title tag:

Think of a title tag as the name above a shop. Imagine you are walking down a busy street with shops on either side of you. However every shop window is boarded up and all that is visible is its name. You mean to purchase a new Hi-Fi system and need to locate a suitable store. You look at all the names but are getting confused as to which one is for you. All of a sudden you see a store with ‘Hi-Fi and Electrical’ in its name. You enter and purchase your spanking new Hi-Fi system, but it is a bit expensive. And little did you know but the store next door also sold Hi-Fi systems but for a lot cheaper. However its name did not indicate this. In fact its name sounded more like a jewellery shop than an electrical store.

A search engine is rather like the shopper in the above example. It sees the title on each web page and determines whether this would be a good result to return based on its text. If you search for ‘Hi-Fi’ it is highly likely that some of the results returned will have ‘Hi-Fi’ in their title.

Do you know what kind of sites are suitable link partners for your site?

If you do give yourself a gold star since many seem not to. At least based on the questions I get.

You see most think small. Too small. And limit the potential universe of perfectly good linking partners.

In fact many seem to think relevant means “sites exactly like mine”. So if they had a site about “juggling midget circus clowns” the small thinkers would say they could only trade links with other juggling midget circus clown sites.

Hogwash.

I call this stinkin’ linkin’ thinkin’ and frankly it drives me crazy! Because there are any number of related sites that have little to do with juggling midget circus clowns but are still perfectly good link partners. Because their visitors are just like the ones the owner of the clown site covets.

Remember too you typically get three things out of any link trade

PR

Traffic

Link Reputation (from the link text you use)

Almost any link trade should give you PR and Link Rep. While trading links with relevant sites will get you traffic. Some more than others naturally.

Business thrives on competition.

You’ve to be aware of your competition and do something to remain on top.

So how do you eliminate your competition without bloodshed? You must create a niche for your business. A niche is something that makes your business different from your competitors. To compete with other businesses nowadays (especially online) you need something that nobody else can copy. One of a kind!

First you must know who your competitors are. Is your business the only one of its type? I doubt it. If so, it won’t be for long. Do you know your exact target audience? If not, you will have to find out this information before creating any kind of niche.

Below are two internet marketing online secrets to come up with a competition eliminating niche.

1. Just Ask! The first way to come up with a niche is to think like your target audience or customers. Know their exact needs, wants, goals, problems and interests. There’re two ways to do this: The first way is to put yourself in their shoes, think like them. The second way is to give them polls and surveys to find out what they’re thinking. Pick a niche that none of your competitors are using. If you can’t find one that your competitors aren’t using pick one to improve.

Webmasters are always looking for ways to increase their traffic and exposure. This is natural and will never change. No one is ever content with their traffic levels.

But problems arise with this reality as well. While it is good to be motivated to get as much traffic as possible, it is tempting to try and cut corners and use tactics that are temporary rather than permanent solutions.

And there are myriad tactics that can take your entire business down the tubes as well. The trick is not to be tempted with short-term gain over long-term income from your web business.

Many webmasters are aware that “content is king” and that you have to brand your site to make sales and build credibility. But most people only take these facts at face value and only as they pertain to the search engines. Big mistake.

Your content is your lifeblood for more reasons than search engine placement. This is your “face” on the net.

So if you’re using new strategies to bring in more targeted traffic, make sure you don’t use something that could kill your business just to get some short term traffic.

You probably have already heard about the new marketing tool from Google.com on the Internet. Their advertising service is called "Adwords" and allows you use Google.com for marketing. Your ads will be displayed on Google’s website when people initiate a search. Your ads can also be displayed very targeted among many thousand websites that partner with Google in a program called "Google AdSense". Adwords is the Google.com version of a pay-per-click advertising model. That means users click on your ad and will be redirected to your website or a specific URL that you have selected when creating your ad campaign.

What do you need to know about Adwords? Adwords is a way to spend a lot of money on advertising very very fast. BUT ? Adwords is also a way to spend marketing money very selective to a targeted audience. Adwords can be very expensive for the advertiser if not properly planned and tested.

When you setup a Google Adwords ad campaign, you choose certain keywords for which your ad will appear on search results on Google.com. You also specify the maximum amount of money that you are willing to pay for each click. Remember - the Google Adwords program is a PPC (Pay per Click) model and you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and hence visits your website.

Link popularity is the single most influential factor for determining how well a web site will perform in search engine rankings. A web site’s link popularity is computed from the number and more importantly, the quality of links pointing to a web site.

Link Popularity history

To gain a better understanding of link popularity it is useful to know why it became so crucial for search engine rankings. In the past a web page’s ranking was determined, amongst other factors, by the number of keyword occurences within ‘on-page’ elements i.e. in page text, META tags, title tag.

When web developers learned that they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages the search engines had to get a bit smarter. They were using ‘on-page’ elements to determine relevance so it was only natural that they would look to elements out of direct control of the web page creator i.e. ‘off-page’ elements. Search engines made the assumption that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing to a web site, the more popular the web site is and therefore a more quality resource. This worked nicely in theory but in practice it was also to be abused.

RSS and Blogs are the topics of the moment. Seems like everyone is talking about it. Granted, there is too much hype about RSS and Blogs.

But where there’s hype - there’s interest!

And with good reason - RSS is posed to be the break out technology of 2005. Those who don’t take full advantage of it will be left behind.

If you need convincing - here are 10 reasons why you should put RSS on your site:

1. It’s easy and fast! Not to mention Free! You can use a free service like eBlogger and publish your Blog and RSS feed within minutes. You can even place or publish your Blog/RSS Feed on your own site without knowing ‘html’ or ‘xml’. It’s all done for you!

Repeat - it’s simple to use and very convenient. Publishing your blog is only a few clicks away. (If you need help - just use the link at the end of this article.)

2. Syndicate Your Content. RSS stands for ‘really simple syndication’ and it’s just another way of passing along your information. With the popularity of ‘MyYahoo’ and the ‘Firefox’ browser (which has a built-in RSS feed reader) - syndicating your content has gotten even simpler.

There are a few internet marketing online secrets that when implemented, will force your customers to keep coming back to buy from you.

Some of the factors that are involved in getting repeat business are: pricing, quality of products and services, excellent customer service etc.

One of the best ways is to reward your customers for their repeat purchases.

Here are three internet marketing online, effective customer reward programs you can implement:

(1) Number Of Purchases

This program is based on the number of purchases made by any customer. You could give away a free product or service to any customer that makes ten or more purchases. To make the program more effective you could require a set time period that all ten purchases must be made by.

(2) Dollar Amount

You can require a certain dollar amount be spent before the customer receives a reward. Tell customers if they spend over $50 in one month at your web site they get a 50% discount on their next purchase. You could also just reward one customer who spends the most every month with a bigger reward like a vacation.

(3) Points System