Nobody Would Want To Pay Twice! My Advice For Websites Revenue

There are a lot of articles on the internet right now that showcase predictions for the next year and the trends that will dominate web marketing.  I would say websites have increasingly become the primary channel for sales of goods and services. Many small and medium enterprises (SME) rely heavily on their websites for their revenue. However, it is surprising how little attention is paid to analysis and measurement of this vital sales channel.

In my previous articles, I have discussed the role of content and keywords as a tool to promote the service or product you offer in your website and then the way of evaluating a website performance based on many factors. Online advertising is one of these factors that could help to let people interact with your site and increase engagement, but at the end you should learn to hammer the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.

Therefore, without tracking your profits on any Ads you spend, that means you don’t know if you’re making money or not, this in turn will lead to only one fact; you’re not going to be in business very long!

In this article I’ll give you simple formulas to calculate your ROI and show you how to measure KPI’s for the top three advertising goals.

Measuring your Return on Investment (ROI)

For instance, when you have a small business, I believe you likely don’t have a big accounting department to track and analyze your ad budget spends. Which is true!

But as I mentioned above you still need to learn how to hammer the nails. Perhaps this still seems like a paradox. How can you think carefully about not losing your customers and still be carefree about their options? I assure you that they are separate process. 

It is too simple when you adopt the ROI technique, if you’re spending money and you’re not getting back more money than you’re spending - you’re wasting your hard earned cash and means you are losing customers (Audiences).  You’ve got to stop the leak. You also should know if one Ad is generating more profits than another - so you can put more money into the profitable one.

Measuring your ROI doesn’t have to be overly complicated. You do need to do a bit of math, but, hey, that’s part of business. Let’s take a look at how to calculate your ROI.

A Simple Calculation for your website ROI 

As you likely know, your Return on Investment is basically a ratio of your net profit over the costs you spend to get the profit.  To put it in an equation, your ROI looks something like this:

Your ROI is your revenue less your cost of the thing you sold divided by the cost of the goods sold.

So, for example, let’s say you sell necklace. The cost to produce one necklace is $10, and you sell them for $20. You sell 100 of them from advertising them for example on Google. Your revenue (as you can see) is $2,000. Your cost to produce them was $1,000. And you spent, let’s say, $500 in advertising.

Your ROI is:  2,000 - (1,000 + 500)/ (1,000 + 500).

Do the math. Your ROI ratio is .33, which is 33%.

Measuring your Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Key performance indicators (or KPI) are metrics that measure the performance of a task against the objective that it was set out to do. In other words, it is finding out how you are doing to attain your business objectives. While KPIs can be applied in just about any working environment, in can be an effective method to measure the performance of your online business.

What I would like to say, you will never make your mark in your online business, unless you develop a respect for your content and quality of the service you offer. This is what I have pointed out in my previous articles

 

So, metrics can either be represented as a ratio or a number to measure certain tasks in relation to the objectives of your business. In the SEO field, Revenue, Visits and Page Views are measured through numbers while Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate and Average Sales are measured by ratios. These two forms of metric generally make up KPIs.

To find an effective KPI, you must first understand the objectives of your online business very well because this will be the basis for setting up your KPI. Outline your objectives into specific measurable goals. Then select a Key Performance Indicator for each goal.

To set an example as I gave you for ROI, let’s define a conversion as a completed sales transaction. To calculate a conversion, the basic formula can be: 

Conversion Rate= (Total Transactions/Total Number of Visits) * 100.

That is (6 transactions/50 visits) * 100 = 12% Conversion Rate. And so 12% is your Key Performance Indicator for your Sales Conversion Rate. In this example, it is obvious that having a score of 12% is below the expected performance of your goal for sales conversion. Having this sort of information will allow you to target which area to focus on as you try to improve the performance of your conversion rate. In this case you can try to optimize the functionality of your website.

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Building Your Content Hub is A Way To Build Your Brand!

There are thousand topics talks about how to build a content that driven website. Last 5 years you may have noticed a change in the way you are consuming content. With more and more large companies looking to find ways to connect to their ideal consumer there has been a shift in the way content is being developed and shared.

To begin with, I would like to give a brief about the way of building a content driven website which could help to boost your business in marketplace.

There is quite of planning involved in developing a content rich website. Here are step-by-step instructions that will make it a simple task:

Do your research

Use a keyword research tool find theme-related keywords that are high in demand and relatively low in supply. Find a sufficient amount of profitable keywords that will enable you build 50 to 100 pages that are focused on an individual keyword. This process will also allow you to evaluate your concept to make sure that there is enough demand and that the market is not totally saturated with competition.

Form a written plan

Prepare a three-tier plan for your content using the keywords. The first tier will be your homepage and should focus on the concept keyword that represents your niche or theme. The second tier will consist of introduction pages with keywords that are related to your navigation buttons. The third tier represents content pages that focus on keywords related to your second-tier pages.

Upload the content to your website

It is wise to add the content to your website as it is developed and make sure that it is submitted to the search engines. After you have about 30 pages of content, you can start promoting your site by getting it listed in directories, engaging in article marketing, participating in industry-related forums and blogs, social marketing, etc.

Continue to add content to your site and participate in link building activities

The more content that you have, and the more high-quality incoming links that you establish, the better your website will do in the search engines. Visitors also love content driven websites. If you provide the information that they are looking for, it develops credibility for you and you will likely convert many of your website visitors into repeat and referring customers.

Build up a content hub for your business

In the context of marketing, it’s a place where various types of content – articles, videos, images, etc – exist for the purpose of engaging audiences and spreading knowledge and information to current and future customers.

As Daniel Newman explains, we’re no longer living in a time where brands can simply publish content about themselves and successfully connect with their audiences. Newman puts it perfectly when he says today’s world of marketing “is more about sharing and collaborating and with that generosity comes interest, loyalty, and commitment to a brand.”

I would say, creating a content hub doesn't only apply to large businesses or corporate, and it also doesn't have to take a lot of budget and/or time.

Therefore, if you have a big business or even small business and you want to generate revenues for your business or product you offer, you need to not only choose the best products and services to represent, but you need to drive traffic to your newly created hub pages.

For example, if you are marking information products for home based business owners, you could create a hub page offering information and resources to network marketers. When this niche of people land on your hub pages, they will find valuable articles, blogs, reviews and other resources to help them grow their businesses. And, if they find your hub page valuable, they will likely return again and again. And when this occurs, you are increasing your opportunities for generating direct sales whether in terms of getting more traffic or hits.

Before one week, I was browsing American University of Shrajah Website www.aus.edu and I have found AUS web team have established successful affiliate digital strategy when they built faces.aus.edu which I believe it will another way to driving massive traffic to AUS website.

From my perspective, this is a great way to take best advantage to enhance your business or services you offer and get more reputation enhancement. Here we can back to my previous phrase and ask ourselves how do we choose which platforms to engage on? 

In the same time, I would say it is a real challenge between concentrating on the website we drive, and how should we coordinate all the many parts of our company’s social media presence in content hub. So at the end we and you should have strategy to use your company website as the hub of your product or service business to boost your business reputation

In summary a content hub can be used to:

- Increase website traffic
- Increase the time visitors spend on your website
- Increase brand awareness
- Establish thought leadership
- Increase social sharing
- Increase leads and lead conversion

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Must-Know Before Embarking On Online Business

Online marketing has given a lot of women and men a whole new way to make money and achieve financial independence. If you would like to start or establish new business you need to sketch out a road map for your own web marketing venture, it's necessary for you to have an understanding of the most crucial elements that are going to contribute to your long-term success! 

In the same time, you need to deal with all these elements in efficiency and competently to sidestep let downs when building your online business, something that besets the majority of entrepreneurs.

Do you ask yourself what are these vital factors? 

For me I would say the first thing you need to concentrate on when putting up an online business is your market. 

Studying the market is considered an essential role in starting any online business, it's imperative to determine the specialization you will go with and see if this market has a need for the products and services that you will sell. 

Market research is definitely needed in this specific stage because you have to make sure that there are buyers for what you're planning to offer. A good rule of thumb is to concentrate on a niche market that you're sincerely fascinated with and in which you see many issues that you can give exceptional solutions for.

When you do a market research or selecting a suitable niche there are some steps you need to follow. As mentioned above, you need to differentiate in the services or product you offer and adding more values. The other things you should bear in mind are that you have to pinpoint a market that doesn't have a great deal of competition, provides rewarding options, and has a relatively big audience that is open to new products and services. If your selected market fulfills all of these criteria, then it shows you that it is possible to start a lucrative enterprise in it.

Once you convinced and have decided which niche to go for, you need to choose the products and services that you'll publicize within this certain market. Once again, this is classified as part of market research, and your services and products need to be suitable for your selected niche market. 

Find out what the Demand for the product is:

If I'm going to be a food vendor at golf game, what should I sell there? I may really like Ice cream. Maybe I get up every morning and eat Ice cream for breakfast, and drink some ice chocolate with vanilla flavor.

Then I have a Frozen Yogurt after lunch. So, I really love ice cream, know a lot about them, and think ice cream is the greatest thing in the world! Does that mean that I should sell ice cream at that golf game? Well, it's something that I know people like to eat at golf games.

I know people do buy them at golf games. However, there are things I don't know yet. For example, how many people at that particular game are likely to want to buy ice cream? Generally, ice cream is a good bet to sell at a golf game. However, I may not know the area very well.

Ice Cream is pretty good and refresh during the summer, people just eat them up left and right at golf games. During cold weather, I doubt there is same demand. Am I right?

For instance, I have seen there is a new pre-launch website name canadabazaar.ca The website seems fully functional classified. I have checked the online marketing strategies which they are using to attract user and get traffic, I really like it 

Working on examine your products and services, and dedicate sufficient time to scrutinizing them and also ensuring that they are of efficient and has a good quality  is considered an initial step of business success

Most consumers are savvy buyers and they would find out when you are publicizing unsatisfactory products and services; if they think you're attempting to sell them stuff that are subpar, you wouldn't bring in any buyers or earnings!

It is necessary that you keep things simple, particularly when you are only starting your online marketing business. Even though it might be possible for you to produce your own products and services and come up with original strategies to showcase them, you first need to try to stick to what other internet marketers before you have carried out.

At the end all of these web marketing strategies are based on driving traffic to your website. While valuable, they pale in comparison to the best source of organic traffic which is proper search engine optimization. Therefore, all of your work will be moot unless you convince end users to visit your site. Therefore, you should have a solid traffic creation scheme and carry out appropriate web development, SEO and keyword research in order to invite consumers and persuade them to sign up for your subscriber list as well as tell their family and close friends about you. All of these initiatives are going to need your time and effort; you may undertake them on your own or find corporations and contractors to help you out.

SEO refers specifically to your website's ranking in the search engines. The higher your ranking, the more traffic you will receive. Of course, this raises questions as to how you would boost your site's ranking. There are many ways this is achieved and they include: link building throughout the internet; designing your website with keywords that people search for when looking for similar material; and using meta tags in the HTML of the site so that the search engine robots smile on it when they index sites. Does this sound a little difficult for a novice to perform? If it does, don't worry. There are professional services that can handle your SEO work for you and deliver tremendous results.

To sum up, build a website and do the necessary legwork, you and your home-based business would flourish and have longevity! It is always advisable for business proprietors to be ready, and you have to be completely conscious of what you must do and what can happen in order to realize success.

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International SEO Strategy To Boost Your Business Abroad!

If companies and businesses in Canada planning to reach the rapidly expanding abroad, increasingly sophisticated international internet audience, they must get smarter about international search engine optimization.

I don’t mean the traditional and domestic SEO, I am talking about international version boosts the likelihood that a particular website will rise to the top of search results, thereby enabling increased conversion rates.

The challenge internationally is to sketch out a clear plan and select the right SEO strategies for an enormous number of locales, cultural norms and languages. For those creating and implementing an international SEO program, it’s helpful to adhere to three key principles.

Know the international SEO needs before publish it abroad.

International SEO is instrumental in helping businesses get found online and ensuring your visitors or potential visitors stick around once they land on your site. 

Don’t make your international SEO strategy as step two. It should be part of your planning process from the moment you decide to expand internationally.
That planning process begins with keyword research. Determine what keywords your target customers are likely to use. Will they search for your products using the exact translation, or are there local slang terms you need to know?

This information is essential to developing an international website that is optimized for the key factors evaluated by search engine algorithms: meaningful, fresh content that is keyword-specific; descriptive tagging; rich media; social media distribution plans; and internal and external links.

Don’t make global SEO a follow-up item on your globalization to-do list. It should be embedded in every step of the marketing and sales strategy.

Monitor and update your content periodically and continuously.

You should pay close attention to content that is changing regularly and to keywords used in your business website. If you’re not seeing any results, means there is something wrong and you need to consider updating your keywords and track the impact the changes have on your rankings. Make sure you re-submit your website for indexing every time you make a change to ensure your changes are captured by the relevant search engines.

Align your SEO strategy with social media activity.

If SEO and social media work in different directions and don't communicate nearly enough, they can't form a well-coordinated, comprehensive International marketing plan. Therefore, it's extremely important that SEO is integrated into social media activity. What follows are some specific tactics that can be used to increase the impact that your social media activities have on International SEO performance.

To break into promising regions in the Americas, Europe and Asia, companies need to focus on above principles to all of their electronic communication points with customers and therefore maximizing their prospects for success

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Direct Your Content Marketing To Be Authentic .. It is Time Now!

Last week I was lucky enough to be on of attendees in a session that hosted by Meetup group E-Business to discuss the fundamentals in the field of digital marketing and its effect in and business. And while the entire talk was informative and entertaining, one bit really stood out. He asked a good question about social media “Whether or not it’s a good idea to outsource social media”. One of the participants unequivocally said no, and pushed the need to be authentic. That idea of authenticity struck me. That word used to mean something and it seems has real impact on business. He mentioned the authenticity is still vital for a successful social media campaign, and anyone worth their salt should be striving to present an authentic voice through their social channels.

Content is a king and acceleration for the business growth!

I opened this piece with a story for a reason. I believe you will ask why Yasser Al Mimar needs to go through this part of story to open the subject. I would say, readers like to be able to connect with content, and content is still one of the best ways to keep your online marketing authentic. After all, you are producing and creating the fodder for this form of marketing, so you imbue your content with your personality and voice. It’s as close as your audience can get to talking to you, without really talking to you. That is why I believe that content is still the primary focus for social marketers.  Simply put, content is what your customers are looking for. Specifically, people want detailed and in-depth information that supports their decision to buy something from you. If you can provide this, then you have your foot in the door. Or you’ve got their feet in yours, however way you look at it.

A survey by Social Media Examiner found that 58% of marketers still rank content as their most valuable social marketing tool. Yes, there are SEO benefits to content marketing, but it trumps visuals, audio, and curated posts for reasons beyond search engine ranking – it’s an authentic representation of your voice, and a good reminder for your audience that a living, breathing, thinking person is behind the profiles that they follow.

It can be hard for any business to cultivate its voice. After all, your company isn’t a celebrity and sitting on the throne of stardom in the market place! But your brand does have a voice. And it is that voice that sets you apart from your competitors. People will follow you through your various social channels because they like that voice. So you need to work to cultivate it, and keep your presence authentic.

Good content, quick responses and an actual person to monitor and interact through your feeds will do wonders for your social marketing campaign. Authenticity isn’t just a pointless corporate buzzword– it’s the very keystone to your company’s social success.

In that day, I had discussion with one of keynote speakers and other participants. I had clarified very important point that relates with my work and business.  As webmaster and digital marketing experience, I mentioned: “Content is King.” And everyone in web marketing knows that. A website's content, even more so than its products, is what attracts visitors. People are coming to your website need to have the sign kind of interest to get wherever you are giving and delivering. 

There are two important aspects of web content. For simplicity's sake, I'll call them Quantity and Quality.

Quality means that the content should be well written and be free from those embarrassing typos that make visitors wonder if your website really knows what it's talking about. For our purposes, however, it also means that content should be rich in keywords, informative and interesting, so that the visitor feels they've learned something. Such is the power of Quality content.

Quantity, on the other hand, means that your website should be updated regularly with new content added. A visitor may return to an informational article once, or even two or three times, but if your website's content never changes, eventually, there will be no reason for him to return.

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Going With Fresh Content is A Key For Successful SEO

In 2003, engineers at Google filed a patent that would rock the SEO world. Named Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update, the patent not only offered insight into the mind of the world’s largest search engine, but provided an accurate road map of the path Google would take for years to come.

Google Team have came up with Google’s Freshness Update, which places greater emphasis on returning fresher web content for certain queries. Exactly how Google determines freshness was brilliantly explored by Justin Briggs in his analysis of original Google patents. Justin deserves a lot of credit for bringing this analysis to light and helping to inspire this post.

Although the recent Freshness Update received a lot of attention, in truth Google has scored content based on freshness for years.

How Google Scores Fresh Content

Google Fellow Amit Singhal explains that “Different searches have different freshness needs.”

The implication is that Google measures all of your documents for freshness, then scores each page according to the type of search query. While some queries need fresh content, Google still uses old content for other queries (more on this later.)

Singhal describes the types of keyword searches most likely to require fresh content:

-- Recent events or hot topics: “occupy oakland protest” “nba lockout”
-- Regularly recurring events: “NFL scores” “dancing with the stars” “exxon earnings”
-- Frequent updates: “best slr cameras” “subaru impreza reviews”

Google’s patents offer incredible insight as to how web content can be evaluated using freshness signals, and rankings of that content adjusted accordingly.

Understand that these are not hard and fast rules, but rather theories consistent with patent filings, experiences of other SEOs, and experiments performed over the years. Nothing substitutes for direct experience, so use your best judgement and feel free to perform your own experiments based on the information below.

1. Freshness by Inception Date

A webpage is given a “freshness” score based on its inception date, which decays over time. This freshness score can boost a piece of content for certain search queries, but degrades as the content becomes older.

The inception date is often when Google first becomes aware of the document, such as when Googlebot first indexes a document or discovers a link to it.

2. Document Changes (How Much) Influences Freshness

The age of a webpage or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage plays a role.

For example, the change of a single sentence won’t have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.

3. The Rate of Document Change (How Often) Impacts Freshness

Content that changes more often is scored differently than content that only changes every few years. In this case, consider the homepage of the New York Times, which updates every day and has a high degree of change.

"For example, a document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static over time. Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."

4. Freshness Influenced by New Page Creation

Instead of revising individual pages, websites add completely new pages over time. This is the case with most blogs. Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.

Some SEOs insist you should add 20-30% new pages to your site every year. This provides the opportunity to create fresh, relevant content, although you shouldn’t neglect your old content if it needs attention.

"UA may also be determined as a function of one or more factors, such as the number of “new” or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time. Another factor might include the ratio of the number of new or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time versus the total number of pages associated with that document."

5. Changes to Important Content Matter More

Changes made in “important” areas of a document will signal freshness differently than changes made in less important content. Less important content includes navigation, advertisements, and content well below the fold. Important content is generally in the main body text above the fold.

 Boilerplate Changes Count Less for Freshness      "…content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as Javascript, comments, advertisements, navigational elements, boilerplate material, or date/time tags, may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA." 

6. Rate of New Link Growth Signals Freshness

If a webpage sees an increase in its link growth rate, this could indicate a signal of relevance to search engines. For example, if folks start linking to your personal website because you are about to get married, your site could be deemed more relevant and fresh (as far as this current event goes.)  That said, an unusual increase in linking activity can also indicate spam or manipulative link building techniques. Be careful, as engines are likely to devalue such behavior.

"…a downward trend in the number or rate of new links (e.g., based on a comparison of the number or rate of new links in a recent time period versus an older time period) over time could signal to search engine 125 that a document is stale, in which case search engine 125 may decrease the document’s score."

7. Links from Fresh Sites Pass Fresh Value

Links from sites that have a high freshness score themselves can raise the freshness score of the sites they link to.  For example, if you obtain a link off an old, static site that hasn’t been updated in years, this doesn't pass the same level of freshness value as a link from a fresh page – for example, the homepage of Wired.com. Justin Briggs coined this FreshRank.

"Document S may be considered fresh if n% of the links to S are fresh or if the documents containing forward links to S are considered fresh."

8. Changes in Anchor Text Signals may Devalue Links

If a website changes dramatically over time, it makes sense that any new anchor text pointing to the page will change as well.

For example, If you buy a domain about automobiles, then change the format to content about baking, over time your new incoming anchor text will shift from cars to cookies.

In this instance, Google might determine that your site has changed so much that the old anchor text is no longer relevant, and devalue those older links entirely.

"The date of appearance/change of the document pointed to by the link may be a good indicator of the freshness of the anchor text based on the theory that good anchor text may go unchanged when a document gets updated if it is still relevant and good."  

9. User Behavior Indicates Freshness

What happens when your once wonderful content becomes old and outdated? For example, your website hosts a local bus schedule... for 2009. As content becomes outdated, folks spend less time on your site. They press the back button to Google's results and choose another URL. 

Google picks up on these user behavior metrics and scores your content accordingly.

"If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively."

Conclusion:

The goal of a search engine is to return the most relevant results to users. For your part, this requires an honest assessment of your own content. What part of your site would benefit most from freshness?

Old content that exists simply to generate page views, but accomplishes little else, does more harm than good for the web. On the other hand, great content that continually answers a user's query may remain fresh forever.

Be fresh. Be relevant. Most important, be useful.



Source: Cyrus Shepard to Advanced SEO

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