April 6, 2012
Non-Fiction, Small Business Startup, Technology Matters
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If you are concerned about the performance of your website, here are a few top tips to help you improve it.
*Optimize Your Site Load Time
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to browse an online store that is loading slowly. It is also unprofessional and erodes trust that you are a professional site.
Keep in mind that a lot of people will want to browse many products before buying. They will often open as many as ten different product windows all at once using tabbed browsing and compare items side by side. Your server needs to be able to respond to these kinds of requests with blazing speeds.
If you are still on shared hosting, or worse still, trying to use a free site to run your online business, it is time to get an ecommerce-optimized dedicated server to help speed up the page serving and shopping process. Then visitors will be happy to browse your high-performance site and you will be to handle the volume of orders you will be hoping for.
*Run compelling new promotions regularly
Come up with different promotions and use them to boost your sales. This can be an incredibly effective way to get a lot of sales in a short period of time. This is also a great strategy for any month that might be slow in your business.
Check your sales volume at least once a week and check your monthly goals and targets—if you don’t have any, you should set them. Then check your progress at the middle and third week of the month. If you are not going to meet your targets, set up an online special sale and email the people on your marketing list to tell them all about it. Also encourage them to pass the information along to any friends and family who might be interested.
*Be able to process credit cards safely and securely
Merchant account services can be difficult to obtain when you are first starting out in business, and expensive too. Instead of applying for a merchant account, think about using PayPal. 24% of online shoppers report it as their preferred method of payment because it is convenient, safe and secure.
PayPal processes transactions from all of the major credit cards, plus accepts electronic transfers from banks and even cash if people go into a MoneyGram location. So if you are not accepting PayPal, you should be. Most people who use it already have an account set up, so all they have to do to shop is to remember their email address and password. Even if they do not have an account, they can pay by credit card and you will only be charged modest transaction fees.
*Have a catalog and shopping cart
In PayDotCom (PDC), which uses PayPal as a clearing gateway, you can create a catalog and even a shopping cart of all of your products. You can also change the prices any time you like. If you were thinking of creating a monthly membership site, you could also set up regular payment schedules. You can even organize a free trial, or introductory pricing for your membership site. There is nothing better for your business than recurring revenue. It helps you predict your income each month and not leave you prey to the huge ups and downs of passing customers who just happen to come to your site and buy.
PayPal will take a percentage and PayDotCom will also charge a small fee themselves, but the advantage is in the flexibility of all the cataloging and payment options. With PayPal, you have to create one button and program it, all at a time. If you want to make a change, you have to start again, and replace the button on your site. With PDC, you can change the price or product details at any time and the button will change automatically on your site. You can put special date limits on the promotions, such as a special holiday sales price, and more. The more options you offer people, and the more products, the more likely they will be to buy.
If you feel your site is not performing as well as it should, try these strategies to build a better website. Focus on improving conversions of browsers into buyers, and see what a difference it can make to your online revenue.
Further Reading
How to Track and Test Your Online Business Success (Marketing Matters)
Information Marketing Success: How to Make the Most of Your Online Content for Increased Traffic and Profits (Marketing Matters)
How to Conduct Market Research Effectively to Grow Your Online Business (Internet Marketing Success Secrets)
How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing Even Without a Website (Marketing Matters)
Powerhouse Profits: 15 Fast Ways to Boost Your Online Revenue (Marketing Matters)
February 1, 2012
Business Matters, Marketing Matters, Non-Fiction, Technology Matters
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One of the most significant keys to success on the Internet is getting website traffic. The more visitors you have, the more prospective customers, and your chance to turn them from browsers into buyers and boost your sales and profits.
You will have already laid the foundation with a great website full of content. If not, then start with the basics, putting up keyword optimized pages, with your keywords all tagged appropriately. Once you do this, the search engines will start to find your site. Then it will be up to you to convince a human being that your site is worth paying attention to.
Here are three of the best ways to drive free traffic to your site on a regular basis.
1-Add content to your site daily
Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking. Content is what search engine spiders look for and index. Without it, there is nothing to index or rank.
Give visitors and search engines a reason to come to your site. Make a commitment to provide daily, optimized content and your traffic will soar. If you are using a blog platform like WordPress, just upload your content, set the scheduler to publish at a date in the future, and in this way you can load up a month’s worth of content in less than a day.
2-Get social.
Now more than ever before, Internet marketing is about building a relationship with your user, and being part of a larger community. Whether you offer a forum on your website or you participate in social networking sites, social networking is a valuable free traffic generating tactic.
Sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for generating links and traffic to your site. It does take time to get started, but once you create a profile and then post content, links to your site, and ideas which generate conversation, you will start to get found. People will Like you or Follow you and word will spread about your site.
Another great thing about social networking is that you can search for like-minded people. You don’t just have to hang around chatting with anyone, you can chat with any one of a number of dog agility training groups. Find the group that is right for you, and join in to start connecting with your prospective customers, to help generate free traffic.
3-Create buzz about your site.
If you use a blog platform, there are ways to post your content on your site, and then tweet about it or list it on Facebook using a WordPress plugin. You can do the same with your marketing emails through the Aweber email marketing platform.
Therefore, you can not only do the work once and then use it in various ways, the more ways you use it, the more likely that people will pass along the information to people they think might also be interested in it. They can forward your email to a friend, re-tweet it, or post it on Facebook.
If enough people spread the word about your site, it can be said to go viral, and get a great deal of buzz. One of the best ways to create buzz is through a great free special report or must-have product at a super price.
Using one of these strategies can help you get more traffic to your site quickly. Using all four on a regular basis can give you maximum results in the form of steady streams of traffic that can take your business to the next level.
FURTHER READING:
30 Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Website TODAY (Marketing Matters)
September 22, 2011
Technology Matters
No Comments
by Evelyn Trimborn and Jeff Hamilton
***Get Top Technology Tips to Grow Your Business, and Profits***
For many modern business owners, the accelerated rate of change and growth in relation to existing and new technologies can be bewildering. With so many new gadgets, software and websites such as social media sites, it can be confusing to decide what will be here today and gone tomorrow, and what is worth paying attention to.
Many of these technologies offer the promise of not only more revenue, but a way of doing things better, faster and cheaper. In order to gain a competitive advantage and use it to enhance the success of your business, you need to be able to sort out what is relevant to your business, and what isn’t.
Then you need to take rapid action with any new technology that can help you stay ahead of the curve.
Time is of the essence when it comes to taking advantage of a great opportunity. This can be especially true given the current economic recession in the US and in many parts of the world.
In this timely guide, the authors, both top marketers and technologists who consult on all aspects of digital marketing and publishing, discuss the main technologies that your online business should be using now.
You will get a comprehensive strategy for keeping up to date on the latest technological breakthroughs, and how to decide whether or not they will be worth integrating into your business and marketing plans.
The authors also discuss the most common mistakes that business owners make in relation to adopting technology in their business, and how to avoid them.
A handy series of appendices offer you some of the top technologies that you should be aware of and using in your business in order to make money on the Internet quickly and easily using your existing website.
If you do not yet have a website, these tools will enable you to launch and grow a new site quickly, one that will enable you to sell products and services online, process credit card payments, and offer value to your customers.
These technologies will also help you market your website effectively. Best of all, most of them will not cost anything other than the fees for setting up your website domain registration and website hosting.
If you have been looking for the best ways to stay ahead of the technology curve and gain competitive advantage over others in your industry, this guide will help you bring your business to a whole new level thanks to the wonders of the latest technologies.
If you are just starting out in business, then these technologies can give you the competitive edge you need to succeed, starting today.
Word Count=17,750
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: THE BENEFITS OF KEEPING UP WITH TECHNOLOGY
CHAPTER 2: HOW TO KEEP UP WITH TECHNOLOGY
CHAPTER 3: THE MAIN MISTAKES TO AVOID WHEN IT COMES TO KEEPING UP WITH TECHNOLOGY
CONCLUSION
12 APPENDICES, INCLUDING:
APPENDIX 1: HOW TO USE GOOGLE ALERTS TO MONITOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS ONLINE PRESENCE
APPENDIX 2: HOW TO KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR COMPETITION EASILY
APPENDIX 3: HOW TO SET UP PAYPAL ON YOUR WEBSITE
APPENDIX 4: HOW TO SELL YOUR PRODUCTS ONLINE WITH WORDPRESS ESTORE PLUG-IN
APPENDIX 5: HOW TO CREATE A WORDPRESS MEMBERSHIP WEBSITE
APPENDIX 6: GOOGLE PPC VERSUS BING PPC
FURTHER RESOURCES
Author Jeff Hamilton runs his own consulting firm, Technology Leadership LLC, with several like-minded colleagues. The Technology Leadership blog covers topics on how to get the most from current technology, to emerging technologies, to new leadership initiatives, and staying ahead of the curve in these precarious economic times.
Author Evelyn Trimborn is a freelance journalist on a wide variety of how-to subjects and is a popular contributor to blogs on small business and Internet marketing topics. She is a successful affiliate marketer and can be found at Accent Marketing Group Inc., offering her expertise to a variety of clients eager to take advantage of all the business and marketing opportunities the Internet offers.
Buy Now: How to Use Technology to Grow Your Online Business (Technology Matters)
February 21, 2011
Business Matters, Technology Matters
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by Jeff Hamilton
Who is Doing the Bulk Of The Work In Your Organization?
Technology hiring strategies tend to favor the candidate who possesses an alphabet-soup of degrees, programming languages, and software.
However, in many cases, the applicant who has a wider range of work experience, or additional ‘soft skills’ not listed in the job description, can often be a better choice.
In addition, the ‘generalist’, rather than the specialist, can often bring valuable knowledge and expertise into the company hiring them.
Whether a candidate’s motivation to interview is mostly for the paycheck, or for a more compelling reason, is another vastly underrated evaluation criterion in the selection process.
Understanding a candidate’s behavior and motivation is an excellent predictor of suitability for a job or career position, and their likelihood to not only make significant contributions, but be loyal to the company and team.
In this report, Jeff Hamilton describes in detail how this assessment can be done, to ensure that companies in a position to hire even in these difficult economic times can be certain that they are really getting the best value for their time and money.
25 8 x 11 pages, 5,000 words
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Hamilton was born in New York City to an academic family. After completing his BSc from the State University of New York, he immediately entered the workforce in the research and technology fields.
After a number of years managing computer-driven research for academia, he switched careers to managing Information technology systems for large, multi-national for-profit corporations.
He worked his way through his MBA and advanced up the corporate ladder to work and consult at the largest financial firms in New York City.
He now runs his own consulting firm, Technology Leadership LLC, with several like-minded colleagues. The Technology Leadership blog covers topics on how to get the most from current technology, to emerging technologies, to new leadership initiatives, and staying ahead of the curve in these precarious economic times.
You can visit it and subscribe to the free newsletter at:
http://Technology-Leadership.com/faq
Buy Now: Technology Hiring Strategies
