Stand Out with Webinars

Have you ever thought of how many websites offer (almost) exactly the same features as your own website? By now the majority of blogs, content, affiliate websites or product-selling websites are just duplicates of many other similar websites. With the amount of competition in every sector of the internet marketing your website has to offer something extraordinary to stand out from the rest! But how can you find something which will make your conversion rate reach new heights that every internet marketer dreams of?

A really good way to stand out from the rest and convert your visitors to converting customers is by doing webinars. This concept has been around for some 15 years now, but it is still a pretty rare sight on the internet today. The concept is both simple and, if executed correctly, very effective.

The newest type of webinars is Google's very own Google Helpout, where people from the Google+ community can offer their expertise as a hangout to other members of Google+. Since it has only been around for a few month, nobody actually know the effect using Google Helpout has on the SEO of a website, but experts seem to agree that it will infact have a positive effect on a website's search engine ranking. Even if it doesn't, the service is a great way to make people aware of your product or service, as the Google+ community is massive and constantly continues to grow.

For the more standard webinar, there are a lot of providers to choose from. A popular and recommended webinar is GoToWebinar. They have an easy setup and a lot of helpful features including the option of recording the webinar which I will get back to.

If we look at the method of creating a webinar, the first thing to consider is what the topic of the webinar should be. The ideal topic of the webinar would be something that you or anyone else working on the website or in the company has an in depth knowledge about. Obviously, anything can become a topic of expertise when putting your mind to it, but the more convincing you are when speaking about something, the more authoritative you will seem to the attendees, and correspondingly, the more trustworthy your website will be perceived.

Before actually presenting the webinar, it is important to promote the event a good period time before, so your visitors will hopefully be exposed to the advertisement several times. Give them as many details as possible about the webinar. What, when, where, for how long, and maybe even give them a sneak peak so they will know what it is all about.

During the actual presentation of the webinar, it is of course recommended to mention your product or service to the attendees. However, it is important to not become too much of a salesman. Make the content of the webinar the main focus, and try to the extent possible to connect the topic of the webinar to whatever you are selling. This might seem obvious, but the more related your product or service is to the topic of the webinar, the more likely the attendees will remember it and come back to buy it.

A good way to end the webinar is by doing a Q&A session, so always make sure there is time for questions to be asked and answered. This will make the participants feel involved, and make sure that they leave with a positive feeling. When the webinar is over it is time to take advantage of this positive feeling amongst the attendees by following up with them by phone or email. Send them special offers and discounts, and in general make them feel like they are important to you. The crucial part of the follow up is doing it as quickly as possible after the webinar to take maximum advantage of the good feeling you have left in the attendees.

If successful, make sure to put the recording of the webinar on your website or on youtube to give new visitors the feeling that you connect with them. Next time you host a webinar, make the video a part of the promotion to get even more attendees resulting in even higher conversion rates.

Don't Let Your Visitors Bounce - Three Tips to Keep your Bounce Rate Low

As we had explained in a previous blog (click here to read it) about which web data metric is better, page views or unique views, we pointed out that while some websites prefer to have a lot of visitors, other websites care more about having returning visitors who enjoy the content of the website, even if in total there are fewer visitors. Besides looking at page views and unique views, another way to find out whether or not a website’s visitors enjoy the content of the website is by looking at the bounce rate.

For those not aware of the term, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your websites and leaves again without viewing any other pages on your website. So if your websites bounce rate is 80%, this means that 80% of the people visiting your website only looks at one page. This can potentially tell you a lot about your site. Many affiliate sites such as landing pages for example, are not meant to have the visitor go to more than one page on the website. Other ways a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing for your website is if the a lot of these visitors only viewing one page on the other hand click on advertisements or sign up for the product offered on the website.

Having said that, more often than not a high bounce rate is a bad sign for a website. The longer a visitor stays on a website and the more pages he visits, the bigger the chance there is for him to either sign up for something or purchase a product on the site. Having a high bounce rate shows that while you might be able to attract visitors to your website, you are not able to interest them enough once they are there to have them visit more than one page. The reasons for this can be many. The obvious reason would be that the content of the page is boring or unappealing. Another way to scare visitors away swiftly is to have a bad website design or too many advertisements.

More interesting than the reasons for a high bounce rate are the ways how decrease a high bounce rate.

Here is the 3 most effective ways to decrease your bounce rate:

• First -  The best thing to do first to make sure of is that visitors immediately know what your site is about when arriving at your homepage. People do not have the patience to spend time on figuring out what the website is about and will quickly move on to a different website if it is not clear.
• Second - Having professional design is a major factor in keeping your visitors longer on your website. The design should not only please the eyes of the visitor, but also gives them an indication on how serious or professional your website is. As a bonus, a good design can make the eyes of the viewer focus on specific areas of the site, making them explore your site more thoroughly.
• Third - A feature most people enjoy is multimedia. Images and videos makes the site more interesting, and keeps the visitor at the page longer, decreasing the bounce rate. Just make sure not to have too much multimedia on the page, as this can increase the loading time of a page, and if the page is too slow to load the visitor will leave immediately increasing your bounce rate. Not to mention search engines punishing your ranking as a they prefer websites with low loading time.

But the ultimate secret in keeping your bounce rate low and the main way  to keep your visitors at your website is by having good content. The most used cliche in internet marketing is “content is king”, and without the king, your website is likely to have a very high bounce rate regardless of whether or not you follow the other 3 steps.

                          

Bots Are Filling Up the Internet

This research was brought to you by the blogger Igal Zeifman from Incapsula.

Social Media Is Growing - And You Should Be Growing With It!

Social media plays a big part in internet marketing today. Whether you own a blog, an ecommerce site, affiliate site etc., social media plays a big role in your business. Or at least it should. 3 years ago social media was just another way of saying ‘facebook’, but since then the social media scene has exploded with options and possibilities for websites to reach out to its target groups. The most significant social media today platforms are Google+ and Facebook with Twitter a close third, but also Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr now have a big audience. What social media platform a website should focus on of course depends on what business it runs, but there is no doubt that a general focus needs to be put on social media.

The confusing part in all the social media hype is where it is most beneficial and hence where the biggest emphasis should be put when engaging in social media. Is it for SEO purposes mainly, or is it to create traffic and relationships for your website? The answer is that there is no right answer. It first and foremost depends on what kind of marketing strategy you run with your website. However, it is not yet entirely clear to the business how much social media affects the SERP. Lots of testing is showing that Google+ engagement and in particular ‘+1’s have the biggest effect from a SEO perspective, but most experts agree that to post and create social media content entirely for the purpose of SEO would be a big mistake.

The reason that it would be a mistake is not the uncertainty of the extent to how much social media engagement affects SEO. Everyone agrees that it certainly doesn’t hurt doing it unless black hat tactics are being used. No, the real reason that it would be a mistake is that by focusing solely on SEO, the website miss out on all the networking potential there is in social media. This is where people are, and by being where others in the same niche as you are, you can get the traffic to your website more easily than through the SERP.

In the long run it is all connected. The more followers/like/retweets you get, the more authority your website will get, and the bigger is the likelihood that your ranking will be better. The SEO part of social media might take a while, but building relationships will benefit your website almost immediately driving traffic to your website.

Why CRO Beats Everything!

It is almost impossible these days to speak about ‘internet marketing’ without also in some way mentioning SEO. Search Engine Optimization (a.k.a. SEO) has become one of the most vital tools in internet marketing, used to bring more traffic to a website as a result of a higher ranking on search engines, in particular Google. Despite having written a great deal about the importance of good SEO’ing, this blog has also several times pointed out that SEO alone doesn’t create success in internet marketing, but that content plays an important role too. A term, however, which is not spoken about as much as it deserves to be, trumps both SEO and content.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is, simply put, the practice of increasing the amount of online sales and leads on a website, without increasing the amount of web visitors. That is, taking the traffic you get to your website and turning it into something which converts. That could be sign ups, purchases made, downloads etc. So why is this more important than SEO?

Taking an example from the “real” world can help to explain. A company buys a bunch of highway billboard ads, but the letters on the billboard are too small to read. While the billboard gets lots of traffic (literally), it doesn’t convert as the people driving by can’t even read what the text says! The SEO in this case is fine, but when the user experience doesn’t match the efforts of the SEO, the users will just drive by, and the company, or in the internet marketing world the website, won’t profit from the high amount of traffic.

So before you hire an expert in SEO to get the most visitors as possible to your website, make sure that the website is ready for all that traffic by optimizing elements such as color, text size, graphics placement, page layout, price, order process, etc. Luckily there is also ways to combine CRO and SEO which are presented well in this blog by Chris Goward: (http://www.widerfunnel.com/conversion-rate-optimization/how-to-combine-conversion-optimization-with-seo), so you will not be overwhelmed by the many different terms to keep track of.


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Getting the edge by Retargeting

In a competitive market as Internet Marketing has developed into over the years, it has become exceedingly important to have an edge over one's competitors. One of the ways to gain that edge is by retargeting. First of all, to those unfamiliar with the concept, retargeting is to target users that previously have been visiting your site, whether that being a specific part of your site or just the site in general, by having adverts pop up on other websites they visit. This way, you only target consumers who are more likely to be interested in the product you are selling.

Sounds simple, right? Well, it is assuming that it is done properly. Research has shown that more than 50% of consumers notice retargeting ads, and this is likely to affect their decision of whether or not to purchase the product. This statistic shows us how important these ads are, and when executed well they can be the most valuable tool for success. Retargeting itself isn’t a guarantee for success though. It demands unique banner ads, custom landing pages and ongoing optimization in order to have the optimal effect on the potential costumers.

The banners themselves shouldn’t be too official, but instead have a personal touch over them, preferably with some humor added to them. Making them unique makes the ad have a bigger chance of catching the person’s eye thereby causing to have a memory of them visiting your site in the first place. Another way of catching the eye of the consumer is by offering them a promotion or some kind of bonus. Remember, we are talking about people who have already visited your website, so the vast majority of them have an interest in your product, and an added benefit could be the exact thing to turn an interested customer into a buying customer.

While retargeting can be a successful tool, it is important to remember the saying ‘everything in moderation’. You don’t want to have your ad being in the face of your potential customers every time they visit a website. Being too pushy can scare people away. It’s all about finding the right balance, which is why in order for retargeting to succeed you need patience and lots of trial and error.

That being said, when you do find the right balance, retargeting can be the factor which brings you in front of your competitors and win over a lot of customers which would have been lost otherwise.

Internet Marketing Conundrums - Which is better; unique visitors or page views?

The question to many - if not all - internet marketers is to ask themselves is which number is more important; Unique visitors or Page views? To try answering this questions we first have to fully understand the two terms.

A unique visitor is an individual user who has been to your website. No matter how many times the same user visits your site from his device or the same browser, the person will only be counted once. If the user chooses to visit your site from a different device or/and a different browser it will be counted as a new visitor.

Page views on the other hand, is the total amount of time your page has been visited. If the same user visits your site 100 times in one day, the page view count will increase by 100.

I will set up two scenarios to demonstrate what to look for when viewing the unique visitors number and the page number.

Let’s say that a website has a low unique visitors number but a relatively high page view number (the page view number can never be lower than the unique visitor number), meaning the difference between the two numbers is big. The difference shows us that the site has a small new audience, but of from that group of users many of them return. This indicates that while the site does not reach a big new audience, the users visiting the site are pleased with the content and come back for more. A benefit of this is that Google Algorithms read this website as a valuable source of information

On the other spectrum we have a scenario where a site has a high amount of unique visitor and an equally high amount of page views, meaning the difference between the two numbers is small. The small difference together with the high amount of page views shows that the site has a big audience, but most of the users visiting the website do not return, indicating that the site might have a good SEO strategy, but the users visiting the site do not particularly like the content. This is good statistic for internet marketers who's strategy is to market with landing pages or review websites.

Which of these two scenarios is preferable depends on what kind of website we talk about. For a blog having dedicated readers is very valuable, while an affiliate getting money on a CPM basis from advertising will prefer having a lot of visitors even if it means they won’t return.

For a good search engine rankings both unique visitors and page views are taken into consideration. Additionally, length of visit also plays a role in determining the ranking. So even if unique visitors are not important on it’s own merit, everyone wants a high SERP ranking, so focusing solely on SEO is just not enough. There needs to be some good content to back it up.

With all this being said, unique visitors and page views are of secondary importance compared to conversions and sales. That’s what matter in the end of the day! Unique visitors and page views however are unarguably a good hint on how a website can improve, and using the numbers for exactly that purpose will undoubtedly improve both conversion rates and sales while moving up in the rankings.