Secrets to Good Website Headlines
By · CommentsSecrets to Good Website Headlines
Here at websitementor, I am so excited to be delivering all this valuable information straight to your desk top and can’t wait to hear your success stories.
I’d like to start by covering some of the areas where the most improvements can be made to your site. But first…
…Do you know what the most important part of your website is?
Your Graphics, Copy, Navigation? Nope!
It’s your Headline
It’s also the most overlooked element in most unsuccessful websites.
Successful marketers spend much off their time testing and improving headlines as sales increases of up to 400% is not unheard of.
You only have a maximum of 10 seconds to grab your visitors’ attention and compel them to stay on your site. You have to make every second count by enticing them with the words that make them want to keep reading.
So what make a good headline?
Well it shouldn’t be some kind of mission statement and it certainly doesn’t start with “Welcome to”.
Your headline must clearly state a benefit your visitor is going to receive by staying on your site and it must be specific.
For example one of our clients sells a hairdressing dvd course.
“Welcome To Fast Track Hairdresser Training”
Doesn’t quite do the job does it?
However, if we were more specific and included a benefit you’d get far better results for example…
Discover How To “Fast-Track” Your Way To
Becoming A Top Hairdressing Stylist!
Even a complete novice can use these insider secrets to speed from
shampooer to top stylist or start cutting hair for profit in just 2 weeks!
…does a much better job.
Simple changes to your headline can have dramatic results to your sales and is something you should test on a regular basis.
Even the headline above can be improved on and by spending some time testing different headlines you’ll soon find the one that works best with your website and target audience.
To Your Success
Mark Bowden
Increase Sales with Testimonials
By · CommentsIncrease Sales with testimonials
The Power of Correctly Formatted Testimonials
No matter what you sell whether product or service, online or offline you can dramatically increase sales by displaying testimonials from previous customers that are happy with your product or service.
Even those of you that are using testimonials could increase sales by formatting them correctly. Firstly let’s take a look at how you can acquire those first few testimonials to get the ball rolling. Let’s assume that your website is brand new and you have not made any sales yet.
How to get testimonials
My first suggestion would be to contact a few people that your product or service would appeal to and offer them a free copy, trial, loan etc.. In exchange for a review of the product.
Simply send them the product and ask them to fill out a questionnaire, you can then use the completed questionnaire to create a testimonial.
The most basic testimonial you can use is a text only testimonial. However, even these can be extremely powerful when formatted correctly.
So what does a correctly formatted testimonial look like?
1) Every testimonial should contain the customers name and their city or county. This provides added credibility that the testimonial is genuine.
2) The testimonial should alleviate or address concerns that the visitor may be having about purchasing your product.
3) You should bold, underline or italicise the benefits or the main points of the testimonial. This make it easier for the reader to skim read the testimonials and you are drawing their attention to the parts that matter.
A good example below:-
Asking The Right Questions
As we have covered already to acquire testimonials you’ll need to ask for them but how and what you ask can make all the difference.
Why not send all of your previous customers a simple questionnaire.
Here’s some questions you might want to ask them:-
Did you have any concerns before purchasing?
Was the product shipped on time?
Is the product what you expected?
How have you benefited from the product?
What do you particularly like about the product?
Etc…
Don’t forget to ask if you can use their feed back on the website.
By creating testimonials from questionnaires you will not only discover new concerns that customers may have had before purchasing you can now alleviate similar concerns new customers might be experiencing.
Each piece of sales copy on the web should answer all objections that a new purchaser might have and testimonials formatted in this way are a fantastic way to achieve that quickly and efficiently.
Boost The Power Of Testimonials With Images Audio & Video
Remember the most basic testimonial is a text only testimonial. By incorporating Images, Video & Audio you can dramatically increase their credibility. Although “faking” testimonials is illegal adding audio and especially video removes any concerns that the testimonial is not genuine.
How to Make Article Marketing Interesting
By · Comments
Article Marketing: Making It Interesting!
When it comes to producing articles for your article marketing campaign, you may find yourself staring at a flashing curser on the screen while you decide what to write. Here are some tips to help you decide not only what you should be writing, but also how to keep it structured, interesting and relevant to your business.
What To Write About
Once you decide to write an article marketing campaign, the first thing you should do is decide on your list of topics. Think about the questions that your customers ask you most regularly. There will be a number of issues that crop up time and time again. Also you can ask your customers what they would like more information on, and what is most relevant to them. If you’ve got a strong viewpoint on something to do with your industry, or there have been important developments that have made mainstream news recently, don’t be afraid to comment on them.
Structure
If you’re new to writing articles, it can be helpful to structure the information you intend to write about before you embark on the actual article itself. Your first paragraph should introduce what it is you’re going to talk about, followed by the points you’re making, then rounded off with a final paragraph in conclusion and (most importantly) the link to your website, your name and company details.
The Competition
Look at what your competitors are doing. Do they post a lot of information online that people can access for free? If so, there probably isn’t going to be mileage in providing exactly the same information.
How can you make your viewpoint different from theirs?
If there’s something that they do that you disagree with, say so – but be prepared to explain why. One of the key components to using article marketing successfully is to make your information better, or different from, the stuff that’s already out there. Don’t though give away your trade secrets – remember that anyone can access the information you put on the internet, and that includes your competitors.
Don’ts With Articles
The trick with article writing is to ensure that what you are writing is of value to the reader. If your article begins to sound like a brochure or advertisement, it’s too sales oriented and is unlikely to hold a reader’s attention for long.
One of the best exercises you can do is to ask yourself whether your customer or someone who could become a potential customer would be pleased to read your article, what they would think of your business once they’d read it, and whether it holds their attention from beginning to end. If you can answer yes to all of these, you’ll have an engaging, high quality article that you can be proud of.
Any thoughts or questions? Please leave a comment!!
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Opt In Strategies
By · CommentsTop 3 Opt In Tactics
ShareThisPage With Your Community & Friends!
A great deal of thought must go into your Opt In strategy, as you already know your opt in list will become the most valuable part of your business and on average potential customers will require 7 point of contact from you before they make a purchase.
It therefore stands to reason that more Opt Ins, over time, will result in more sales.
Some time ago you could gather a huge amount of Opt Ins simply by offering a free subscription to a newsletter. However, these days you’ll get better results if you offer a little more incentive for you visitors to opt in. This could be a free report, audio download or even something sent through the post.
In another article I’ll cover some ideas you can offer to your visitors but for this issue I’d like to talk about the different kinds of Opt In tactics.
The Static On Page Opt In Form
The static Opt In Form will usually sit on a web page, always visible, containing your Opt In offer. This usually appears either at the top right or top left of a web page and should immediately be visible to a visitor on your website.
If not then you’ll get far more Opt Ins if you move your opt in form up to the top left or top right of your web page, if visitors have to scroll to see you’re your opt in form then you’ll be loosing a huge amount of potential subscribers and customers.
You should expect to sign up aprox 10% of your visitors into subscribers using this kind of form
Hover, Drop In Opt In Forms
The Hover Ad or Drop In Form drops in over the top of your web page and contains your Opt In offer and Opt In form. The visitor is then clearly presented with your Opt In Offer & Opt In Form. They can then either close your drop in ad or subscribe.
We’ve found that a drop in Opt In form seriously out performs the statics version and saves you extra space on the web page itself, although you may want to use both.
You can decide weather or not the drop in ad shows only onece per visitor or each time a visitor lands on the page and is definitely something you should test.
You should expect to sign up aprox 10% to 20% of your visitors into subscribers using this kind of form
The Squeeze Page
The squeeze page is designed to do one thing and one thing only and that is to collect opt ins from visitors.
The squeeze page is a page dedicated to your opt in offer and visitors have only 2 options. A) Sign up for your newsletter. B) Leave your website.
Now although that might sound a bit harsh they collect far more opt ins than any other strategy and is something you should definitely test.
Usually the squeeze page contains a video & a freebie for signing up or entering their data and is usually used as a pay per click landing page rather than the home page.
You should expect to sign up aprox 15% to 40% of your visitors into subscribers using this kind of form. I’ve even heard from people who experienced 50%.
Try testing the different opt in strategies and see which works best for you
Getting the Most From your PPC campaigns
By · CommentsHow To Get The Best
Results From Your
Pay Per Click
Campaigns!
By Mark Bowden
Website Mentor
PPC Pay Per Click is one of the most powerful ways to instantly drive traffic to a sales page or website. Before we think about SEO and traffic generating campaigns we always test websites and sales pages with pay per click traffic first and there’s a few very good reasons for that.
Firstly with PPC you can turn the tap of traffic on and off at will, and secondly PPC traffic is far easier to monitor and track.
This allows you to test the sales process of a website very effectively. Also whichever industry you are in you’ll find that some of your keywords convert into sales far more than other keywords and it’s those keywords that we ide-ally would like to optimise our website for when it comes to natural SEO (Search Engine Optimisa-tion).
Now I appreciate that many of us already have fully working online businesses that are attracting traffic and sales as we speak and in many cases we don’t have the same luxury but there are many ways you can still monitor and improve your PPC campaigns to get the very best ROI.
One commonality I keep discovering both with my own experience and our regular entrepreneur interviews is that PPC campaigns should never be out sourced to an-other company.
Although there are many good pay per click manage-ment companies out there that will create a good cam-paign for you, every single time I speak to someone who has done this and then taken back the reins and managed it for themselves has had much better results.
I guess at the end of the day nobody knows your business, target market and buying patterns of your traffic like you do.
So it makes sense that you are the person in control of the traffic you buy.
For those that don’t fully understand, here’s how Pay Per Click works in a nut-shell.
Let’s use Google’s example. When you conduct a search using Google and you are presented with the 1st page of results it is made up of…
3 results at the top with a blue or pink background (Not always displayed) which is the top 3 PPC Ads.
The main body of the search results which are naturally indexed websites. and the right hand side re-sults which consists of the remaining PPC Ads.
This is the same for page 2,3,4,5 and so on. When you set up a PPC campaign with Google
(Google Adwords) you can create a 4 line advert for your website.
A Headline, 2 Lines of text and the URL for your site. You then decide which key-words you would like to display your advert for and how much you are pre-pared to pay every time someone clicks on your ad and visits your website. Hence the name Pay Per Click.
The order of the pay per click results Generally this works on a Bid-ding basis.
For example let’s say I have an ad that I want to display for the keyword “Fishing Tackle” and lets also assume that I am prepared to pay 15p for each click that I get.
If I have a competitor that also wants his ad displaying for the same keyword and he is prepared to pay 20p per click, his ad will generally be placed above mine.
However, there are other con-tributing factors to the order of the displayed ads. Such as, how relevant the ad is to the page it is pointing to, the amount you set as your daily budget and also the amount of “click throughs” you get from your ad.
For example my 15p ad may appear above my competitors 20p ad if I get more click throughs and my target page is more relevant.
Basically that’s how the whole thing works.
Now it doesn’t take a genius to realise that if you are not con-verting a certain percentage of those visitors into paying cus-tomers you can soon lose your shirt and many do!
So here’s my top tips for get-ting the very best return on your pay per click investment.
Number 1: Track the per-formance of EVERY key-word.
It is vital that you set up Google analytics on your web-site (Free) and have your web designer set up the ecommerce section. This will allow you to monitor how much you have paid for a particular keyword and also how much revenue you have made from visitors who used that particular keyword to find your site.
Many site owners are simply guessing which keywords are working for them or they take overall statistics such as the total Adwords cost and the to-tal revenue.
At least they are tracking something. But, what if one of their mainly used keywords just isn’t converting into sales and costing a large portion of the budget—how would they know?
Tracking each individual key-word is extremely important if you want to get the most from your PPC Campaign.
Number 2: Set up different “ad groups” based on “keyword clusters”
Google Adwords allows you to set up separate groups of ads and my advice would be to set up separate ads for different keyword clusters for a couple of reasons.
Firstly a keyword that is searched for which also ap-pears in your ad is Bolded and makes your ad pop out from the crowd.
The second reason involves the page you are directing your ad traffic to.
As I mentioned earlier one of the ways you can get your ad higher for less is to make the ad & the key-words you are bidding on more relevant to the page you are directing the traffic to.
Let’s assume I have a fish-ing site again which sells all things “fishing” from tackle to books and DVDs.
I would create a completely separate ad group for my fishing books page.
This would then give me a separate Ad which now cor-responds to the keywords I have for fishing books eg: Fishing Books, Books For Fishermen, Fishing Tips Book etc…
The ad would then direct visitors to the page I have created that sells fishing books and that page should
also contain the keywords that I have set up in the PPC ad group. I would then do exactly the same for Fishing tackle and fishing DVD’s etc…
Number 3: Create compel-ling ads OR “Pre Qualify” if necessary
Remember the ad you create must be compelling for the visitor to click through and visit your website.
Besides including the main keywords you are bidding for in the ad try to also include a benefit driven message that compels the reader to click through to your site and see what you have to offer.
Now on the flip side you might find that some of your key-words are driving huge amounts of click throughs which can be costly if only a small percentage are convert-ing into buyers.
One of the ways you can im-prove the quality of the visi-tors that actually click through to the website is to “Pre Qualify”.
This means that you craft the ad so that only serious visi-tors, buyers or prospects click through to the site.
One of the ways you can achieve this is by including a price or make it clear that the information or service is for sale and not free.
Many web surfers are looking for free information so Pre Qualifying maybe a way for your to weed out those that are only looking for free information.
This is something you should definitley test.
You should expect to see less visitors but a higher conversion rate for those keywords.
However, this strategy should be carefully monitored espe-cially if you rely heavily in pay per click for generating sales.
Now when you first set up your pay per click campaigns it’s very tempting to start throwing in lots of keywords and key-word phrases in an effort to get more traffic through to your website and that’s ok especially if you are tracking the perform-ance of those keywords very carefully.
However, what if you entered the key word “Glasses” into your ppc campaign?
Think about that for a moment. Would you be displaying your ad in front of those who are looking for eye glasses, beer glasses or wine glasses?
Well you would actually be dis-playing your ad in front on any-one who types in to Google the word glasses which includes any other words they type in such as wine glasses.
Obviously if we’re selling eye glasses or prescription glasses we wouldn’t want our ad being clicked on by anyone searching for beer or wine glasses.
This can come in to play with all kinds of products.
Imagine for a minute that you sell “Fishing Reels” and you stock many of all the differ-ent makes on the market, but not “shimano” or “okuma” fishing reels.
Again you would not want to display your ad for those people specifically looking for something you cannot sell them.
So first of all I’d like to show you how to do just that.
When entering your key-words and keyword phrases in to the campaign or ad group there are few differ-ent ways to enter them which will affect when your ad will be displayed.
Here are the different char-acters you can place around your keyword to affect when they will be displayed:-
Keyword = Broad match
“Keyword” = Match ex-act phrase
[keyword] = Match ex-act term only
-keyword = Don’t match this term
So as an example you might have.
“Fishing Reels”
-shimano
-okuma
But lets explain what each variation means.
Broad Match
Let’s use the Fishing Reels example again.
If you have fishing reels set up as a broad match your ad will be displayed when someone types in “fishing reels” but also for just “fishing” and “reels”.
So when the search term con-tains either or both the words in any order your ad will be shown.
It may also be shown when someone includes either of those words in a longer phrase such as “Fishing Reel Reviews” as broad match will also dis-play plurals or variations of your keyword.
A broad match is likely to get you lots of impressions and lots of traffic. However, much of that traffic will be highly un targeted and expensive.
Phrase Match
Phrase match is much more targeted than broad match yet still has some flexibility.
If we use “Fishing Reels” in the campaign as a Phrase match your ad will be displayed only when someone uses both words in the same order as the phrase match exactly and not including plurals or varia-tions.
However, it may also be dis-played when some one uses those words in that order as part of a longer phrase such as “buy fishing reels online” or “where to get fishing reels”
It will not be displayed for terms such as “Fishing Reel” or “Reels For Fishing”
Using phase match is much more targeted so you will ex-pect to see less impressions and clicks but the visitor is highly targeted to what you have on offer.
Exact Match
If we surround the key word or phrase with square brackets for example [Fishing Reels]
The ad will only be displayed when someone searches using the term Fishing Reels exactly.
So if someone searched for “Buy Fishing Reels” or “Fishing Reel” your ad will not be dis-played.
Exact match is great if you have a large list of key phrases but you will lose some traffic that may potentially buy from you.
Exact match is extremely tar-geted.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords can be used in campaigns or ad groups where you are using either broad match or phrase match key phrases.
For example let’s say I have a Fishing Reels ad group contain-ing some “Phrase match” Phrases such as…
“Fishing Reels” “Fishing Reel”
“Scierra Fishing Reels”
Remember I don’t supply “Shimano” or “Okuma” reels.
Normally because I have set up a phrase match a search for “Shimano Fishing Reel” or
“Shimano Fishing Reels” would display my advert
To stop this from happening we can add a negative key-word.
You would add your phase match keywords as normal and then add -shimano and –okuma at the end of you
keyword list eg:-
“Fishing Reels”
“Fishing Reel” “Scierra Fishing Reels” -shimano
-okuma
This would prevent my ad from being show when any part of the search term con-tains either shimano or okuma.
Now there’s some great tips there to make sure that you’re not paying for any unwanted traffic.
If you’ve just set up your pay per click campaign and you’ve put all your key-words into a broad match campaign you can dramati-cally reduce your advertis-ing costs without losing sales by following the guide-line here.
Target your visitors is by location.
When setting up your Google pay per click cam-paign you can target the entire world, only English speaking countries, specific countries and even just towns and cities.
This feature opens up great potential for local busi-
nesses who can only supply to the immediate area.
Again this is an area that many online businesses ne-glect and wind up spending a fortune on unwanted traffic.
Now, if I have an online fishing tackle website and I only ship to the UK it’s pointless me ad-vertising in any other country that one is obvious.
But on the flip side if I do ship worldwide I could carefully select the countries in which I want my ads to appear, it would also be worth my while creating a separate campaign specifically for each country using different keywords and terminology.
This would make tracking the effectiveness of each countries pay per click campaign a whole lot easier.
I would probably find that the conversion rates vary with each country and I might need
to adjust the campaign budgets accordingly.
Pay Per Click is an extremely powerful way to instantly ac-quire targeted traffic to your website if done correctly.
Many online businesses at-tempt pay per click and fail. They jump to the conclusion that it just doesn’t work, when in actual fact it works amaz-ingly well providing that you make sure you are targeting the correct people and carefully track your progress and results using Google analytics.
Make sure you put a good deal of thought and effort into your pay per click campaign and who you are targeting.
Failing to plan is definitely planning to fail when it comes to pay per click and that can be very costly indeed.
To Your Success
Mark Bowden
Free Publicity for Your Website
By · CommentsA super way to generate free publicity for your website, watch this short video below:-
Please let me now your thoughts, in the comments section below.
Keep A Diary Of Your Numbers Every Month
By · CommentsGet To Know Your Numbers
Some of you may be sceptical about changing your website, some of you will not even give it another thought and some of you will test different strategies, headlines etc in a bid to maximise your conversion rate.
Guess who will be the most successful?
Exactly, if you’re not prepared to test different headlines, strategies and sales systems on your website you’ll never realise it’s true potential and I’m not just talking about small percentage increases here I’m talking about sales increases of up to 400%.
Think about that. What would a 400% sales increase do to your bottom line?
Now not all of your tests will yield rewards & some may actually reduce sales. The thing is not to think of these as failures rather think to yourself, I’ve successfully identified one strategy, headline etc that doesn’t work with the market I am targeting and move on to the next one.
So how do you test each of your changes?
Firstly, you need to have your tracking software in place.
Google analytics is very powerful, free and easy to set up. Most of you by now should have this up and running on your site, if not head over to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and check it out.
Next you’ll need to know which stats to monitor.
At the most basic level you need to be tracking the total amount of unique visitors to your sales page each month.
Note: server hits & server requests do not tell you the amount of unique visitors, in fact, toady server hits and requests are pretty much useless to us for monitoring results.
You also need to be tracking the total amount of sales and sales revenue generated by each sales page on your website.
With this information you can calculate your website conversion rate and your average transaction price.
How to calculate website conversion rate:
EG: 25 (Sales) ÷ 1000 (Visitors) x 100 = 2.50 (2.5% Conversion Rate)
How to calculate average transaction price:
EG: £1′200 (Rev) ÷ 25 (Sales) = 48.00 (£48.00 Average Transaction Value)
(Note: average transaction value is important for a special issue I am planning where you can dramatically increase your profit with just a couple of simple changes watch this space!)
If you’ve not yet been monitoring, tracking & recording these statistics you’ll need to start right away and leave your website alone for at least 1000 visitors over a minimum of 1 month.
Why?
Firstly this will give you a good base line of how well your website is performing at the moment including all the peaks and troughs of the month with a suitable amount of visitors.
Secondly each and every change you make to your site should be monitored over the same period of time.
Now although we can monitor through the same period of time your traffic will vary slightly which is why you need to calculate your websites conversion rate.
Once we are consistently monitoring these results making and monitoring changed is simple.
However, (and this is important) only make one change at a time and then monitor the results over 1 month and at least 1000 visitors.
Why? Well the answer to that is simple.
Let’s say you changed your headline and at the same time changed your guarantee statement and your sales conversion rate didn’t change.
What if your headline doubled sales and the guarantee actually halved sales or vice versa.
How would you know?
You wouldn’t, if you actually do this you’d think oh we’ll sales didn’t change let’s move onto something else, oblivious to the fact that you could be doing twice as many sales.
So it’s extremely important that you’re patient and make only one change each month and then monitor and track your results.
However, occasionally it will be glaringly obvious throughout a month that a change may be dramatically hurting sales, in this case simply put the change back and come up with something else.
There’s no point in waiting an entire month if you’re noticing a huge difference in the wrong direction.
Keep to this system and test something new every month. I promise you’ll dramatically improve your websites conversation ratio.
Especially as I’ll be giving you great strategies and tips over the coming months that have made huge differences to both our websites and the many clients we coach.
For those of you who don’t want to wait an entire month to cover a wide range of changes you can use “Split Testing”. This is where you monitor the sales and conversion rates of 3 or 4 sales pages at the same time.
Whilst this is simple to do with information products or one page sales process systems it can be extremely difficult with multiple product or catalog based style websites.
Until next time
Mark Bowden
