WebMastersLoom

As Web 2.0 becomes more prevalent and important to the internet economy many savvy businesses are incorporating blogging, social networks and video into their marketing tool chest. One service which is certain to not only raise eyebrows of “White Hat SEOs” but also excite the interest of internet marketers is BlogsVertise. This company offers bloggers the opportunity to get paid for including the links of advertisers into their blogs and conversely enables advertisers to get their product or service exposed to readers and generate back-links to their own sites in the process.

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Your website does not stand much chance of selling anything if it pays scant regard to the user.

In other words your Site Visitor’s experience, in terms of the following, is what will make your site sell or smell!

The following 7 guidelines are all equally important and will determine the success of your website.

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Web hosting affiliate programs give webmasters the opportunity to earn commission by referring their website visitors to a web hosting company site. When a person signs up for a web hosting package and has been referred by an affiliate, commissions are usually paid in a lump sum ranging from $30-$60.

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Can you really get a website even without knowing anything about code, and without paying a fortune? Find out.

The days when websites were primarily distinguished by their code are long gone. Nowadays, the web is a true publishing medium that favors well thought-out ideas. You can get a professional-looking website online in minutes with many website building services and software. But what should you look for? What are the features you really need and which are just clutter?

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Scam or not?

I started looking for opportunities to make money on the internet a little over a year ago when my company went out of business and I lost my job. I had a good job with what I thought was a good company until one day out of the blue I was told our company is shutting down next week and I am loosing my job. So there went my $70,000 a year income that took me 15 years to get to that level. I knew I would not be able to find another job that would pay me $70,000/year. So I started looking for ways to make money myself instead of looking for another job. (more…)

Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.

When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb?

After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think the main reasons for dot-coms failure are:

• Poor business plan. In the last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned companies that clearly couldn’t reach profitability.
• Poor company promotion. This applies both offline and online. Two newspaper ads and word of mouth are not enough.
• Poor financial management. Fancy offices, free food, does it ring a bell?
• Poor Human Resources management. With lots of cash in their hands, many start-up companies hired too many people or, even worse, hired unqualified staff. The hiring of friends and relatives often returned no value on investments.
• Errors in the company’s Web site. Sometimes hundreds of errors could be found in one Web page. Yes, those Web site builders should go back to school- if they ever went to school for HTML at all.

I’ll focus my comments on the last reason:

How Errors in the Web Site Can Affect the Company’s Health

It’s clear that you can make money on the Web if you have customers. You have customers if you have viewers- “traffic” in the geek’s language. And you get traffic if your site is easy to find — near the top — in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That’s not so easy to achieve.

First of all your site has to be indexed by the search tools: Search Engines and Web Directories.

Although some Search Engines will eventually find your site by themselves, most of the time this only happens if somebody links to your site. In the case of a NEW site, having existing links is almost impossible. Rather than wait for links to be made, start a submission campaign.

A big no-no is submitting a Web site using submission software. Using software of this type may be quick and easy, but some Web Directories and Search Engines do NOT accept automated submissions.

It’s true that manual submission is a time consuming process — you’ll have to read AND follow each Search Engines’ submission guidelines, to effectively perform the submission ? but it’s a necessary step.

Most of the defunct sites I’ve checked had only a modest presence and visibility in the Search Engines.

Let’s say that you submitted your site correctly, you waited a reasonable amount of time – usually few weeks ? for the Search Engines to process your submission, but your site does not appear near the top in the Search Engine Results Pages.

You’re wondering why, right? Well, one or more of the following reasons might apply:

1) Your submission was not accepted by the Search Engines. If you used spamming techniques, such as:

• Repeating keywords in the keyword meta tag or using text in the same color as the background, some Search Engines might refuse to index your site.
• Page redirection — including cloaking — or building artificial links farms can sometimes be seen as spam by some Search Engines. These links farms involve building Web pages for the sole purpose of creating links to the targeted site. For more about spam please read my article:

“Search Engine Spamming Sucks!” [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html ]

Some Search Engines also have difficulty in indexing pages that use frames or Flash.

2) Your submission was accepted, but your site is not listed in the Top 10-30. Because very few people check pages after the first 30 results, you want to be in the Top 10-30. There are many reasons why a site is not listed high.

The most common reasons are:

• The lack of your main keywords in the content of the page, in the Title tag and in the Description and Keyword meta tags. Ultimately it all depends of the Search Engines? algorithm- the criteria used by the Search Engines to rank pages.
• HTML errors. Examples include unclosed tags, unquoted attributes, improperly nested tags, missing the ALT attribute on images. Any of these will affect your site’s accessibility, reducing your potential client pool.

A Web site with HTML errors can look fine in Explorer, strange in Netscape or Opera and totally unreadable in a text browser. Although Explorer has the largest market share, an important percentage of net surfers use other browsers. Don’t forget the more than 50 million people in the USA with disabilities. Many of the latter use text/voice browsers.

Other Types of Errors in Web Sites

Proper HTML coding is very important but the structure and the layout of the pages are equally important. I saw sites without ANY way to contact the company: no email address, no “contact page”. I saw sites so crowded that it was almost impossible to find my way around. I saw sites with ugly color schemes. I saw a site so “heavy” that it took nearly three minutes to download the Home Page.

According to statistics, users have very limited patience when it comes to loading a page. If after eight seconds they cannot see the page, they leave. And we all know what that means or the success of a Web site.

I not only saw all those errors in sites that are now gone but I also found them in sites that are still alive, including, incredibly, some Fortune 500 companies’ Web sites.

So Do We Dot-Com or Not?

The answer is a resounding YES! But with one condition, learn from your predecessors.

How can a dot-com become profitable? I don’t pretend to know ALL the answers. If I did, I would be millionaire by now.

Advice for Forming and Managing Your Company:

• Develop a sound business plan, with clear, credible ways to get to profitability. Venture capitalists are much more cautious than a few years ago. They invest less and are more selective in this risky business. They want value returned for their money. After all, statistics show that 9 out of 10 startups fail.
• Handle your money wisely. Enough said.
• Hire only the people you REALLY need and be sure ALL of them are professionals.

Advice Regarding the Web Site that Supports Your Company:

• Do the right thing when you prepare the Web site. Hire reputable professionals to build and promote your cyber adventure. If you already have a Web site, remember that a Web site can easily be redesigned and properly resubmitted to search tools.
• Have your site designed according to W3C Recommendations – the Official HTML coding rules. Yes, this takes time and it’s much easier to use an HTML editor, but the results are much better when properly coded by hand. Watch your site’s accessibility and usability. Don’t forget to test and validate the code. Talking about testing, do yourself a favor: check the spelling on your pages.
• Do not use spamming techniques. You might not be caught today, but one day the Search Engines OR your competitors will find you. Search Engines sometimes will use this reason to ban your site FOR LIFE.

For more about spam please read my article:

“Search Engine Spamming Sucks!” [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html ]

• Avoid gizmos: JavaScripts, Flash or frames. Bells and whistles will NEVER help your page’ ranking. In fact, it will hurt your site’s indexing or ranking in the Search Engines and will annoy most of your viewers. So, just don’t do it!
• Have interesting content in your pages, content that grabs your viewer’s attention. No matter how beautiful your site is, no matter how much professional promotion you made, if the site doesn’t grab viewer’s interest, he will leave ? you guessed it — to your competitors’ sites.

Also, use the Title tag, the Keyword and Description meta tags in your HTML coding to list targeted keywords from the contents of your pages. This helps the Search Engines rank your site higher.

• Promote the site thoroughly. Submit the site properly to Search Engines and Web Directories and pay special attention to the link popularity issue- contact Webmasters of related sites to ask them to include a link to your site. Yes, it takes time, but it’s worth it.

So, let’s see: do we dot-com or not? You bet we do! There are tremendous opportunities on the Internet. Find your niche, follow the rules, work hard and you’ll make it.

It will not be easy but if you believe in your dream and set realistic expectations, you’ll be successful.

Good luck!

The answer is YES, thanks to TrafficCleaner.com!

In this article I will shortly describe my own experience about how I now generate income through the normally useless and inevitable percentage of poor traffic getting on my website. This is new and amazing and was just not possible before!

I run a small web shop selling perfumes and other popular beauty products. My daily average visitors are between 1’000 and 1’500, so I get around 50K unique visitors every month. The site generates approx. 15’000 $ revenues a month. I really enjoy this business. However, the net income still does not allow me to give up my regular job without second thoughts.

I am not really an internet freak, but doing this business now since 2001, I’ve developed my skills enough to start managing and seeing through the relevant issues. Therefore, I’ve signed up with a traffic analyzing company to check and understand how and from where my traffic comes from. The results surprised me: an entire 30% of my traffic (!) is coming from countries from which I’ve never ever received one single order (India, China, Pakistan, etc.) … and I do not think this will drastically change any time soon.

This is a serious issue, as it means that about 20K visitors a month my web shop receives, are statistically a waste.

As I could not get this “waste” feeling out of my mind, I was timelessly thinking about how I could possibly turn this useless traffic into something a bit more positive. Searching through the web I finally found an application which sounded very smart and easy indeed: manage the traffic I want to allow on my web shop while blocking, forwarding and selling the traffic I do not need somewhere else and even saving server resources and costs while doing so!

As it seemed so easy, I signed up for TrafficCleaner.com, a remote IP filtering service which is FREE and allows me with just a few clicks to manage the quality of the traffic I want to get on my web shop. It was really as easy as 1, 2 and 3 to sign up, install and select the countries I wanted to allow or to filter.

In the meantime, I created a simple web page with Google Adsense and Kanoodle advertisements and I now simply send the unwanted filtered traffic to that URL.

The results were surprising: during the first week I sent over 4’000 visitors to that page and through Adsense and Kanoodle I received an average of 0.12 $ per click. About 10% of the visitors clicked on one of the advertisements links and that only generated an extra income of about 200 $ in the first month since using the application.

But there is even more. After starting to use the IP filtering service, my bandwidth needs dropped 35%, and my server really got faster. My site has a better connect time and therefore provides a better and faster service to my potential customers.

So this is my conclusion: I do believe and recommend that anyone who is doing business through the internet should seriously consider using TrafficCleaner.com application to save costs, enhance resources and make some extra profit!

As many webmasters and regular web-surfers would know, an online forum community is a great place to meet large groups of people online. Forums provide a means through which visitors to a website can interact with one another and exchange ideas or reviews of products or just talk about anything under the sun. Acute marketers and webmasters will already know that these communities are often excellent places for free advertising.

Word-of-mouth advertising can be used to refer to advertising by which people pass on the marketing message through communication between people. A forum community provides just the setting for word-of-mouth advertising to spread due to its nature of discussion and community structure. Any one member who joins the community is entitled to post his/her thoughts by creating new forum threads or to reply to others or counter someone else’s arguments. Every post that is made is an opportunity to spread some word-of-mouth advertising. This is often done through forum profiles and signatures. A signature is a small description of the member. Most forum communities have no qualms about members posting some self-advertising messages in their signatures, as long as the advert is not too obtrusive. Therefore, forum members can make use of their signatures to post links to their websites or links to products that they are selling. By participating actively in forum communities, one can easily reach a large audience. Because everyone on the forum who participates in the discussion is reading the posts of all members in the discussion as well as signatures, an attractive link will arouse their interests and incite them to click on the link to go to your advertised site. Imagine the impact that this would have in a forum community with thousands of members and your signature appearing in thousands of posts. The boundaries in this form of word-of-mouth advertising is limitless as it largely depends on how much you post and participate in the discussions. The more you participate engagingly, the more times your links appear and the more chances people get to see and interest them to view your site.

Of course, care must be taken to ensure that you are following the proper etiquette as specified by the forum community and that you do not spam the forums. Spamming happens when someone joins in every discussion and posts useless comments that are not constructive. Spammers are often penalized by being banned from the forum for spamming their links in the forum.

Do you understand the numbers that your web site generates? Do you know how many sales your site actually generates? Do you know how you can apply that knowledge to your business and cause it to grow?

I will answer all of the above, and also discuss how to use statistics to enhance your web business through the use of sales, traffic flow, uniques, hits, click-through rates, and many other important business factors. Part 1 focuses on sales and traffic, while part 2 is all about where your traffic is coming from (and how to get more of it!). Part 2 will be discussed in the next issue of our newsletter – so be sure to stay tuned!

Sales

The most obvious statistic for many businesses is sales.

Here are 2 of the most pertinent questions every business needs the answers to:

• How many sales do you make per day/month/year?
• How much profit do you make per sale?

Not hard figures to find, but how many sales actually came from your Internet business? Often it is easy to gather this figure simply by looking directly at either online sales, or by asking your customers (“How did you find us?”). But sometimes the Internet is just one part of a very complicated sales process. You may make all your sales in person, but how many of your clients go home and research your products/services using information found on your web site?

These are the questions you need to find answers to in order to estimate how many sales were completed due to your Internet presence but not necessarily completed online. If you make sales online, the answers are easy. If you sell real estate or other “in person” products or services, then you have to ask your customers individually. Either way, it will come down to a concrete number that can provide insight into how you can grow your business.

Profits

From the number of sales made per month, you can easily figure out your gross sales amount. Then you have to take your expenses per sale into account and figure out your profits. Only cost of sale expenses should be deducted and NOT one-time expenses such as overhead. On the Internet, this would normally be the cost per click of pay-per-click campaigns (such as Google AdWords or Yahoo Marketing Solutions), or the CPM (cost per thousand) for banner ads, and of course, your direct costs for the item or service being sold. Once you have these figures in hand, you can then calculate your profit per sale.

Traffic

So now that we know how many sales we make per month, and how much profit we’re actually making off of those sales, let us take a look at how many potential customers walk through our virtual store. There are many different statistics for web site traffic: page views, hits, daily uniques, monthly uniques, etc… Which one should you be using? From my own experience, I recommend using daily uniques.

Daily uniques measures how many unique visitors come to your site in a single day. By that we mean that no single user is counted twice in the same day even if they visit the store several times within a twenty-four hour period. Thus, if someone comes to your site four times on Monday, and six times on Tuesday, he/she would only count as two daily uniques.

Page Views measures how many times your page is viewed (usually including reloads). Page views are also counted for each page. Thus, if someone comes to your site four times on Monday and views eight pages each time, and six times on Tuesday (viewing two pages each time), you would measure (4 x + (6 x 2), or 44 page views.

These statistics are usually available through your server’s statistics program. Alternatively, you could also use one of a myriad of other statistics programs available on the Internet. For most of our clients we set up www.hitbox.com on their sites. With our daily uniques per month figure in-hand, we suddenly have some very powerful numbers to work with.

Conversions

Conversion is the measure of how many people who visited your site were subsequently converted into clients of some sort. Measuring how many uniques turn into buying customers is one method of conversion, but you could also measure how many visitors your site gets vs. how many visitors sign up to your newsletter, or how many of them go to a specific page, or how many send you an email, etc… These are all measures of conversions, and simply use the ratio of sales (or sign ups, emails, etc…) to visitors (or uniques).

Let us assume our site has the following statistics:

• Sales: 100/month
• Gross: $250/sale
• Average Profit: $150/sale
• Daily uniques: 12 000/month

In the above example, we have 100 sales per month, and 12000 daily uniques per month, thus our conversion ratio is 1:120 or 0.83%. Not such a bad ratio, especially for items that cost $250 each. Most markets would want a ratio of 1% or 2%, but of course each industry is different.

Analysis

Using our imaginary numbers (profit of $150/sale, gross $250/sale) we can then figure out how healthy the online business really is. At 100 sales a month, we are grossing $25 000 per month, and profiting $15 000 per month. At this point in our analysis, we can now see that there are three ways in which to improve the site:

1. Increase profit margin
2. Increase conversions
3. Increase traffic

1. Increasing profit margins involves lowering costs or raising prices, both of which fall out of the context of this article.

2. Increasing conversions involves optimizing the usability of your web site; usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. For more information on usability and how it can help your Internet business, go to www.useit.com.

3. Increasing traffic involves improving your link network, your PPC campaign, or your search engine optimization. We will look at the latter in detail in Part Two of this article (exclusively available by signing up to our FREE Monthly Newsletter at www.RedCarpetWeb.com). Part Two will also discuss referrers, search engine keyphrases, search engine positions, and how to use these statistics to increase your sales. Don’t miss out! Sign up for the Newsletter today and learn how you can make the most of all your web statistics and improve your Internet business.