How Much Money Are You Really Making Online?
You probably know how much you make from one sale – but do you really know how much it costs you to make that sale?
The businesses that make the most money online know how much it costs them to make a sale and they are continually working to improve the performance of every part of their online marketing strategy to reduce this cost.
When performance goes up it costs less to drive sales, which means more money in your pocket and more sales from the same advertising budget.
Let’s walk through an example…
Say you have an e-commerce store that sell basketballs online. You buy a basketball for $30 from your supplier and sell it on your website for $55. This means you have $25 to play with to make the sale of the basketball, or a $25 margin.
Marketing the product to get targeted consumer traffic to the website will bring your costs up and reduce your margin, but so long as the cost to get one sale does not exceed your margin of $25, you’re making money.
2010 Online Marketing Predictions
As the year comes to an end many business owners will be taking the time over the holidays to review their goals and to adjust their marketing strategy for 2010.
With that in mind, here are our top 10 online marketing predictions for 2010:
1. Mobile Marketing
Over the past few years mobile marketing has had a lot of mention in the press, but the ability of the average business owner to take advantage of mobile marketing has been limited. With the debut and massive uptake of the iPhone by consumers, mobile marketing has quickly become a viable marketing channel for many businesses of all sizes. In fact, we are already seeing some very promising results from some of the mobile marketing initiatives which we have implemented.
How To Use Search Engine Marketing to Increase Brand Awareness
Recent research in consumer behaviour has shown that 76% of consumers use search engines when making decisions about the sites or stores from which to purchase products. Search engine marketing takes advantage of this trend by having your website appear in front of these consumers when they are searching for something online.
Search engine marketing has been used for over a decade to increase sales and build businesses online. What many people don’t realise is that brand awareness can also be built using search engine marketing (ie pay-per-click advertising & search engine optimisation) and can provide additional benefits that may not be achieved through other online marketing mediums. With this in mind, there are specific techniques for implementing search engine marketing campaigns that can also help build brand awareness online.
17 of the Most Common SEO Myths
Some people refer to the SEO industry as the ‘wild west’ because there are no rules or regulations outlining who can provide SEO advice or services… and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who take advantage of this.
There are many self-proclaimed ‘SEO experts’ who, armed with a limited knowledge of SEO and some industry jargon, give businesses incorrect advice or (even worse) charge for services.
The main problem with the SEO industry is that it can take 6, 12 or even 18 months to achieve results for competitive keyword phrases which means an incorrect decision of who to listen to or which company to work with can be disastrous.
Here is a list of the most common SEO myths which you can use for your own SEO or when deciding which SEO company to work with. Of note, these myths are related to Google, which controls the majority of the search market in Australia and the USA.
What is the Future of PageRank?
Before we discuss the future of PageRank it is important to understand what it is.
PageRank is a numeric value assigned by Google of the importance of a web page. PageRank is scaled between 0 and 10 with 10 being the highest rank.
Your PageRank is based on the number of websites linking to your website and the number of websites linking to them, and so on. The more links you have pointing to your website the higher your PageRank will be.
How To Avoid Google’s Duplicate Content Penalty
Achieving top SEO rankings for competitive keyword phrases is one of the most valuable and most difficult marketing goals to achieve. While there are many SEO strategies you need to implement to achieve top rankings, there are also many pitfalls you need to avoid at the same time. One of those pitfalls is duplicate content.
Duplicate content is a phrase coined by Google that refers to the same content (ie wording) being used across multiple websites and / or pages on the Internet. The content may be exactly the same or it may be slightly different (ie 10%) but is seen as the same by Google.
Over the years the response by Google to websites or web pages it deems to have duplicate content is referred to as ‘duplicate content penalties’. Duplicate content can be intentional or unintentional in nature, but the effects are usually the same:
How To Use Google Analytics To Increase Sales
Google Analytics is one of the best tracking and analytics software packages on the market. Most of the biggest sites on the Internet use Google Analytics to track their visitors. Look at the top ranked sites in Google and most of them have Google Analytics installed.
Don’t let the fact that the software is free to install and easy to use detract from the level of reporting that is available. Used correctly, Google Analytics can provide you with the information you need to take your website from ordinary to extraordinary.
While Google Analytics has an astonishing number of reports available, you can use the following reports to increase the performance of your website and, in turn, your sales and profits.
Keyword Research – How To Select The Best Keywords for SEO
Successful SEO campaigns all have one thing in common… the selection of the right keywords to focus efforts upon.
Keyword selection can make or break your SEO campaign because all of the work done after this stage is based upon the keywords that have been selected: select the wrong keywords to focus on and the next 12 months of SEO will return less than 100 visitors per month; select the right keywords and your business will grow in leaps and bounds.
Before expanding further on how to find the right keywords for your SEO campaign it is important to define what a keyword is and the different types of keywords available.
How To Get Top Google Rankings?
Ranking at the top of Google for the right keyword phrase can help your business grow at a rate faster than nearly any other form of advertising. Because of this very reason the race to achieve top rankings for high value keywords is becoming faster and more difficult every single day.
SEO experts are continually trying to figure out the various factors that Google uses to rank websites (the Google Algorithm) while Google is constantly working at improving and changing its algorithm to make it difficult to figure out.
While nobody knows all the factors that make up the Google Algorithm (and there are hundreds) there are certain ranking factors which most SEO experts know and use to achieve top Google with great success.
The following ranking factors have been proven to assist with ranking your website at the top of Google. The list has been broken down into on-page SEO factors, which are optimisations you can make on your website, off-page SEO factors, which are mostly concerned with link building, and negative ranking factors, which should be avoided to ensure solid rankings.
How Much Should SEO Cost?
How much you should spend on SEO is a difficult decision to make, especially as the investment made today is not returned for 3, 6 or even 12 months in the future. At some stage this is a decision any business person seriously looking to grow their business online will have to make.
There are many important factors that need to be considered when deciding how much to invest in SEO with the most important factor being how competitive the market is. For example, if you are looking to move into a highly competitive area, such as ‘home loans’, expect to pay a lot more than you would for a less competitive niche like ‘goldfish food’. You won’t get rankings for ‘home loans’ with a $150 a month spend when banks and other financial institutions are spending +$10,000 per month for the same keywords.
The cheapest solution is never the best and is, in most cases, a much more expensive option in the long term when you factor in the opportunity cost of not achieving results. Achieving results in any competitive market is difficult at the best of times and requires a powerful off-page SEO strategy utilising a number of content-based strategies.
How To Choose An SEO Company
Narrowing down the best SEO Company may be easier once you know which ones to avoid. Once you take those companies out of the equation, some simple research and the right questions will make it clear who the best providers are. Final selection is then all about your individual business needs and your budget projections.
The path is, however, fraught with many pitfalls. You must not be persuaded out of your money by less than scrupulous providers looking to make a quick buck and wooing you with technical jargon.
If you have limited or no knowledge of SEO then I’d suggest that your starting point is some general research to grasp the basic implications of good SEO practices.
For those with a good grasp of SEO, you may at one time even have wondered why you’d need a specialist provider if you already have a good understanding SEO yourself. Actually, knowing how it works and why it works are vastly different. To say nothing of the dynamic nature of SEO, so read on.
WordPress SEO Tips
Wordpress is without a doubt one of the most popular open source platforms available for blogging. The popularity of Wordpress stems from its simplicity of use combined with the customisations available to improve SEO rankings.
Some of you already using Wordpress may not even understand the scope of what can be achieved with it. There are customisations, modules, plugins and themes that can significantly improve your rankings in the search engines.
Link building practices aside, here are some Wordpress customisations that will assist your SEO rankings.
Please note-this information only applies to Wordpress sites hosted on your own domain.
5 Simple Actions To Protect Your SEO Rankings
You invest tens of thousands of dollars and many months, maybe even years, implementing search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies to improve your search engine rankings to drive sales and profits for your company.
You implement blogging, article marketing, social bookmarking, link building, press releases and a host of other strategies on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis…
You’re ranking on the first page of Google for your most valuable keyword phrase and your business is growing as a result.
You ensure that you are on top of every part of your SEO strategy, ensuring that your rankings remain high…
But have you thought about everything?
Probably not.
Split-Testing : The Secret Weapon of Experienced Online Marketers
Since the early 1900s, the best direct marketers have used some form of split-testing to improve their sales messages. Marketers like John Caples split-tested with coupon codes to tell which of a number of separate ads produced the best response, changing one item at a time until they found a winning formula. Split-testing is how direct marketers continually increase their profits over time.
With the ease of tracking on the Internet and the advent of low-cost or free software programs, split-testing is something that all online business owners should be implementing each month. It is an ongoing process.
Twitter… Does It Work For Small Business?
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard or read about a new website called Twitter.
Although Twitter is a relatively new service, it has been receiving some great press and is starting to be used by many small businesses and large companies around the world – including some major media companies, marketing companies and computer companies…
In fact, ABC has its own Twitter feed, which they reference at the end of some of their shows.
So a few months ago I decided to see for myself what this Twitter thing was all about…
