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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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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Don't Just Sit There! Start Getting The Proper SEO For Your Business

SEO could benefit many businesses who are looking to increase their online presence and drive more targeted traffic to their websites. Unfortunately the SEO industry is not known for its transparency and this can be confusing for businesses that are wondering just what exactly they will be getting in return for their investment.

What Should your SEO be Doing for Your Business?

It is important to know exactly what your SEO will be doing for you and how they will provide you with measurable results. Be wary of any SEO who offers a guaranteed ranking, it is impossible to guarantee a ranking with Google or any other search engine!

Any SEO who can guarantee results without even knowing which keywords you want to target is using this as a marketing ploy, how could they guarantee results if you wanted to compete for keywords like "Apple", "Google" or "Facebook"?!

Without conducting keyword research it is impossible to tell how likely the success of an SEO campaign will be and how long it is likely to take. SEO is an ongoing process of research, testing and analysis. It takes careful planning to identify the best keywords and to then put a solid strategy in place to rank for those keywords.

On-site and Off Site SEO

SEO takes into account factors that are both on-site and off-site. On-site SEO entails an analysis of your website. It involves looking at many factors including the site structure, use of keywords, the sites content, page loading times and the HTML and CSS that the site is built with. Good on-site SEO benefits the end user and also helps to avoid any technical "Gotchas" that search engines don't like, such as duplicate content.

A good SEO will start by analyzing your site and making recommendations to improve an optimize the site for both users and search engines. Off site SEO involves creating relevant backlinks from other sites to yours.

Each backlink is counted by the search engines as a vote for your site. Websites are given an authority score called Page Rank. Each time a site links to you it shares a little bit of its page rank with you, links from high authority sites share more of this page rank than lower authority sites. Incoming links to a site are known as backlinks.

To Follow or to Nofollow...

Some links carry no authority at all, many links carry a nofollow attribute that tell the search engines not to count that link as a vote. Webmasters and bloggers might add this attribute themselves if they don't their link to be counted as a vote for the external site or it could be automatically added by the platform they are using to publish their content, this is often the case when a site offers its user to add comments or content and the webmaster has little control over what links get created by the sites contributors.

Links without the nofollow attribute are termed "dofollow" and pass page rank from your page to the linked page. In HTML there is no actual dofollow attribute, dofollow happens by default in the absence of a nofollow attribute. You should never nofollow internal links as this will cause any page rank that would have been passed to that link to just evaporate!

Where Did You Get Those Links?

You should ask your SEO how they will create backlinks, a good SEO will try to build a varied backlink portfolio for you. This portfolio should include high value links that are found in bodies of text such as blog posts. These usually carry the most page rank but also require the most work as the SEO will need to build connections with blog owners and often provide the content themselves.

Any good SEO will look for quality over quantity, anyone promising a high number of links is probably best avoided. The search engines like to see "Natural Links of Love", a few high quality links will go a lot further than many low quality links.

Other linking strategies include using quality business directories or commenting on blogs and forums as well as using social media and social bookmarking sites.

Link exchanges are best avoided as these two way links don't look like natural links. Search engines can see the Internet as a series of connected nodes and easily detect unnatural patterns like this.

Your Business, Your Needs

Your SEO should talk with you about your business needs and goals and also try to understand as much as they can about your target audience. If they don't do this then they are unlikely to pick keywords that will attract and convert the right audience for you business. They should conduct extensive keyword research and be able to identify the keywords that will bring in more of the right traffic. Traffic is useless if it doesn't convert!

Added Value

Your SEO should also be able to research your competition and tell you what keywords they are targeting and also how much time it is likely to take to compete for the same keywords. They should also be able to come up with alternative strategies if those keywords are far too competitive for your budget or to bring in traffic while you work towards competing for the main keywords.

SEO takes time, it doesn't happen overnight. Your SEO should be able to provide you with a monthly report that shows how you are progressing through the search engine results for your keywords. They should also be able to run PPC campaigns on your behalf and also create content and copy for your site.

Many SEO's will also be able to promote you via social media and advise you on other Internet marketing techniques such as building mailing lists for email campaigns.

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How Blog Can Improve Your Business in 7 Ways

If you are interested to do business online, you are encouraged to blog.

You may be wondering why you should blog and whether it is worthwhile for you to do so.

Here are a few good reasons why you should blog.

1) Rank well with search engines

Blogs allows you to keyword optimized for search ranking purpose. You can put keywords in your blog title, blog post heading, description, comment invitation, archive titles, trackback links and category name.

Search engine loves blog. They love fresh content. Therefore a blog that updates everyday has better ranking with the search engines than a blog that updates once a week.

2) Building a relationship

People who visit your blog read your articles and eventually build a relationship with you. A blog allows the readers to know the blogger's opinion or personality much better.You can initiate conversation with your readers in your blog. You can also invite comments or ask questions to your readers. You can find out what are their needs are and how you can meet those needs.

3) Inexpensive way to promote your business

A blog is an inexpensive way to promote your business compare to any other method. You can share with your readers what is happening with your business and what are the changes that is to come.. You can post articles about your products in your blog.

4) Show passion and commitment to your industry

Blogging allows you to show passion and commitment to your readers about your industry. If you do not have a strong passion for your industry, you will not be able to sustain your blog long term. Most successful bloggers usually have their blogs for a period of time and as a result of that they start to reap their rewards for their blogging.

5) Old articles still being read

When you write a good article in your blog, the article does not stay forgotten. Search engines can still pull out your old articles for readers to read if your content is good and has good keywords to it.

6) Alternative Traffic Source

Bloggers like to link and network together. If other bloggers finds that your blogs is interesting and point your blogs to their readers, you will find that you have traffic coming from their blogs. Traffic coming from those blogs is at zero cost and some of their readers may end up being your customers.

7) Build reputation as an expert

Blogging can establish you as an expert in the particular field. When people read your blogs, they can judge for themselves how good you are in the field. You gain exposure in the industry and if you give good content in your blogs most of the time, soon you become an expert. People will trust you and whatever you recommend, they will believe you.

With all the reasons stated above, it is worthwhile for you to blog for your business. So let's not waste time and start blogging.

Want to learn more about blogging or internet marketing? Please contact me @ any time

Good Luck!

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Want To Step Up Your Business? You Need To Build An Online Community

Search Engine optimization is an effective method to enhance the value of your website and market your online business. Every day, things are changing in SEO. If you’re not already working on creating new technique and adapting different strategies, today’s the day.

And it’s your time, use it and don’t waste it!

I am not saying the existing SEO is dead or that backlinks around are obsolete, or whatever all that crazy talk is that's been going around. It's that there's a way to integrate all the pieces into the big picture of building a better company by building an online community around it.

When I studied the marketing module in my MBA @ University of Cumbria , I have discovered in marketing strategy program there are lots of benefits to building a community around your company, but if I had to choose a few, here are my filtered top five:

It will help you to build your record in Google’s algorithms


Building an online community is one of the best ways to weather Google’s algorithms. If you're continually chasing the algorithm, you're putting all of your power in what Google's going to do next. If you're building a community around your business, you're putting the focus where it belongs: on your business. Building a strong company and brand isn't something that Google can take away.

There are many benefits to building online communities. One of those being the SEO benefits it can have for your organization’s website. Google algorithm updates such as panda and penguin removed many of the old ways of ‘doing SEO.’ They represent the lengths to which Google will go to try to weed out poor or low-quality content.

It will add more value to your business


Today, the Internet can be a great tool for businesses if you learn to properly use it for marketing and selling, but it hurts businesses that try to survive without it. As the number of people going online increases (due to the growth in mobile devices and mobile internet speeds). The future of every business involves online marketing and e-commerce solutions that replace or accent traditional selling methods, and here's the information that proves it.

For me, I always looking to build up an online business, and try to focus on one direction when start building online community. You have to do a bunch of stuff to better serve your customers like creating quality content and resources, enhancing your product or services, and improving your systems and processes. Doing these things adds equity and value to your business and attracts the right customers to your community.


It will help you have purpose


There’s a lot of effort involved in building a community around your brand, and it’s not just about creating content or being on social media just because everyone else is doing it. When you’re strategic about community building, it forces you to identify goals and put a solid purpose behind your efforts.


It will help you stand out


If you’re committed to the process of building a community, you are going to be doing a great deal of self-discovery and applying older marketing model (acronym AIDA). It stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. In parallel you should look out your window and write down all the businesses that provide a product or service within your sight. During this process you’ll determine what you’re all about, what you love to do, and what it’s going to take to help you stand out among the competition.


It will put the focus on goals, not tools

Building an online community isn’t a bunch of fluffy stuff. I would say, in trying to differentiate your company, the temptation is to try to do everything for everyone. Determine what you do best and focus on that. Let your customers engage into your story, products, services and business. It’s the seamless integration of tools like SEO, social media, content marketing, email marketing, and all kinds of other important stuff (like hard work and passion). But in order for the tools to be effective, they’ve got to be driven by a strategy that is rooted in the goals of your whole business.

Want to know what really matters to your audience? Ask them and then listen (really listen) to their answers. It’s about making meaningful connections. It’s about building relationships and giving without the expectation of receiving something in return.

A present for you

For the past several months, I have been writing a lot about how to know on your market, keywords and topics, understand your marketing funnel and how to attract customers to it. And now, lucky for you, I'd like to share our process for how to build an online community for your business. 

Whether you’re building a community from scratch, or you’re working to grow an existing one, you can use this process to get your community rolling or optimize and leverage what you already have.

Developing a powerful online community provides you with the perfect platform to both promote and engage with your customers, providing significant benefits for your business

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Want A Thriving Business? Build Up A Website For Your Business!

Having a website for your business is considered an essential role to success your business and it is a necessity to compete in today’s business environment.  An effective website can often describe your products and services, explain how customers can get in touch with you.  In competition market today, a website is a given for any successful business -- regardless of size or industry.  Without a website, businesses won’t be taken seriously and likely will decrease their chances of being found by new customers.

Last week I have attended networking meetup session for ( business network) I discovered that 43 percent of small business owners still weren’t using social media because they didn’t feel it was important to their business. I really surprised, and these statistics has pushed me to open a discussion with some of people who has SMBs and doesn't have any online business page whether in social media or a website or an Internet presence at all.

May be you have a question says; there is some businesses who are doing phenomenally well without a website, how they can do that? I agree with you, too. But I often wonder how much better they could be doing if they took the time to invest in one. And when I say “website,” I don’t mean an electronic version of that brochure they ‘have been holding out for the past 10 years. I mean a legitimate, well-thought-out site that is designed to inform, engage and convert their audience.

Based on that, I would like to list a few benefits that come along with creating a usable website for your small business. Let me know why you think it is (or isn’t) important for a SMB to have a website in 2015.

1. You stop being invisible.

I am not trying to promote the online pages, but by creating a website you stop being invisible to the people trying to find your product or service online. More and more studies in marketing are telling us about the positive effect where customers are learning to research online before buying offline. They’re typing their problems or needs into the search engine of their choice and are researching the companies that appear for those queries. If you don’t have a web presence, there’s no chance of you showing up and you never even enter into their thought process. In 2015, you can’t afford to be invisible. Am I right?

2. You help control your rankings.

The amount of fresh content, the amount of traffic your site has, the amount of getting your way in search engine optimization that can help to control your position in your site shows up and for which queries. By creating optimized content, building relevant links and creating a brand that customers want to engage with in along with how long visitors stay engaged on your site, and whether they recommend it to others - all of these are factors in SEO ranking.

 

 

3. You create another sales tool.

A website is a powerful sales tool and one that allows you to address your customers’ concerns, give them the information they need to make a decision and create compelling calls to action. I would say your website is your home turf where people can go to seek out trusted information about your company and engage with you on a more personal level. 

 

4. Enhance your business brand image to public:

Your website is an effective way to build your brand image. Not just your logo, the way your content is arranged, your layouts are setup will influence the professionalism of your business. By creating a website, you set up shop on the Internet and show customers that this is where they can come to find information about you, to read articles that you’ve written and to learn more about your company and the way of selling your image. All of these things build authority. Without a website, you’re at a huge disadvantage as a small business owner trying to speak to your customers.

5. Stay ahead of the competition and expand your customer base

A website enables you to stay ahead of and keep up with your competition. If your competition is online, they will be finding all of the customers searching for products and services in your industry. Without a website you are missing out on all that business. A professionally designed website also allows you to expand your business into new markets far beyond the local customer base that you used to reach with print ads or the yellow pages.

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Questions You Need To Ask Your Business About Web Strategy and Web Services

In world business today we notice there is intense competition on the business front, web technology and efficient communication is the need of the day. For instance, Information Communication Technology has grown by leaps and bounds for the growth of business.

This need for evolution has thrown a shadow on many sectors in information technology, as web strategist I would say, web technology brings in another need to make this information selectively observable and its visibility to be changed on the fly.

Today, in the business world, web services provide a mechanism of communication between two remote systems, connected through the network of the web services. These services are based on a set of standardized rules and specifications, making it more portable.

About a year ago I was doing my research on how to boost your business in a way that change revenue concept. I realized that no matter how good the websites your company built were, they were often failing to live up to their potential. The problem was the organizations I worked with were failing to manage the sites effectively.

Before go through into my article I have a story I faced when I was supporting one of my friends when he started his business. I once had dinner with my friend who owned an food trading company with $1.5 million in annual sales. He had asked for my help to market to his current customers in Calgary, so one of my recommendations was to create web strategy for his company website. He loved the idea, so I gave him a few details on how it would work when we had a third meeting in Trib Steakhouse. In that day I put all my questions on the table and asked him following questions; what does your website do for your business? Who looks at it? How do they find it? How does it compare to your competitors? Are people sharing your content and talking about you?

Therefore, I’ll be honest with here and say; it has been a steep learning curve. In 2013 I was doing my MBA program and I have gone through a crash course in business marketing strategy and the tools of marketing consultants which presented by Prof. Freddy Nager.  I have learned so much and discovered so many invaluable techniques.

However, I have also discovered that companies or organizations should focus on couple of things to boost their online business in a positive way which include web strategy and web strategy.

What is web strategy?

As I have discussed on my previous articles, the web is an essential part of doing and improves organization business in the market (regardless of whether you operate in the public, private, or not-for-profit sector). For this reason we have seen there are a lot of online services had built a website to generate income with very little planning; because they have an idea, worked on it and the next day they start building the website, without putting any goals or objectives for the website that meet company vision. With a strategy I hoped that we could move the web in  same direction, therefore web strategy is playing a key role in driving website to achieve company vision and snap the profit.

Simply, web strategy is like a business plan, but it is the plan for your website. In it you outline a road map for your website. You outline obstacles and challenges you expect to face, your plan to overcome those obstacles, and goals that will determine whether you’ve been successful.

What is a web service?

Web services are client and server applications that communicate over the World Wide Web’s (WWW) Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), web services provide a standard means of inter-operating between software applications running on a variety of platforms and frameworks. It is any piece of software that makes itself available over the internet and uses a standardized XML messaging system. For instance, a SEO service is considered as web services.

I believe you got the idea about those two essential elements in online business success, and if you want to get ahead of the pack, you need a personalized a clear strategy that fits with your business goals and your organizational culture. You’ll also need to figure out the right way to deploy and new web technology and use your resources to make your goals achievable. The most significant benefits associated with these two elements is the potential to bring in consumers from around the globe.

A great website is about so much more than simply design, in fact today a great looking site should be a given, making it work for you is the challenge and that's our strength.  Of course we do all the usual web related things, all the 'geeky' stuff, all the creative stuff but we do this in a business context, that's why we are different.

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