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Sunday

Squidoo - What Is It All About?

Do You Squidoo?

Squidoo! What in the world is that? Squidoo is an easy to use website that will help you to promote your blog, your website, or personal or affiliate product that you may be selling. It is also considered to be a form of social networking.

Squidoo has you create a page, which is also called a lens. From this lens, you can actually direct others on the Internet to the places that you would like for them to visit. In other words, you provide links to sites you want to promote.

Your lens can be easily built to suit you. You can use your lens to tell others what matters to you, to teach others something of interest to you, or to let others know about products you have for sale.

By using Squidoo, it is possible to get more organic visitors to your own blog or website. This, then, will allow you to make more sales of your product. However, having a Squidoo lens comes with a bonus. The creators of Squidoo earn revenue for every lens that is created. As the owner of your lens, you are entitled to half of what Squidoo earns. You can then choose to keep your share and have it sent to you or you can choose to have it sent to your favorite charity.

Users of Squidoo have created their own community. A lot of word of mouth promotion is going on which increases traffic and sales at other sites. Many Squidooers have several lenses because they have found that this is a valuable tool for increasing traffic to their other sites.

A Squidoo lens is easy to build and consists of only one page. Squidoo has provided very easy to follow, step by step instructions. It will show you how to place your links to other pages, lenses, websites or even individual webpages. You are in control of where your Squidoo lens links.

One of the nice things about having a Squidoo lens is that once it is up and running,it does not require much effort from you in order to maintain it. In fact, you can easily maintain a Squidoo lens in about fifteen minutes a week. That is all it takes. And, if done correctly, you may not even need that fifteen minutes.

All in all, if you have a blog or website and want to generate more traffic, you should certainly consider creating a Squidoo lens. But before you do, learn the important steps to doing it right with Squidoo Harvest.



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Wednesday

Back-end Selling Ideas For Increasing Internet Marketing Profits

Back-end selling is a technique that every Internet marketer should take the time to master.

Back-end selling is basically the technique of getting a customer to buy something else. The second purchase can take place immediately after the customer has bought from you the first time or it can occur weeks or months later.

Either way, it is a very profitable technique. If your Website is generating a reasonable number of sales but the sales process lacks a back-end offer, then you are effectively losing out on hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Once you have set up the process you can pretty much forget all about it as it will run on auto pilot and quietly generate a passive income for you.

So, what does a back-end selling campaign involve?

First you will need a product to sell on the "front end", i.e. on a page of your Website. When someone visits the page and buys the product, the moment the transaction is completed they will be redirected to a new web-page, commonly known as a "thank you page".

Thank You Page

The function of a thank you page is to thank the customer and offer some information about how to access the product. That will only take up two or three lines, leaving the rest of the page blank for you to do what you like with.

The rest of the page can be used as a second sales page to make a follow up offer to the customer. If the customer likes what he sees and purchases the product, congratulations! You have just made a back-end sale.

The "thank you" page is the place where you most commonly see back-end offers, but it is not by any means the only place where you can make such offers.

Back-end Sales Via Email

As your front-end sales grows, so does your customer mailing list. While most of your e-newsletter content should be useful and informative for the reader, every so often you can include a "back-end offer" in your e-newsletter and send it out to your mailing list. This could be in the same week as the purchase was made, or several months or even several years later.

Abandoned Shopping Cart Page

Many people begin a purchasing transaction only to cancel it and leave the shopping cart. If the shopping cart is a PayPal cart, for example, the visitor will be automatically directed to another page.

You can set up the page so that the customer is redirected to another one of your web-pages. Write a short message of apology and reassurance. Then, make the customer a second offer. Make it better than the first offer by throwing in some nice extras and also by strengthening the guarantee.

This technique needs some careful handling as the customer has just pulled out of purchasing the product, but when done well it is a great way to try and rescue a lead who would otherwise leave your site probably never to return.

404 Error Pages

Sometimes someone makes a mistake when they type in the address of one of your web-pages, or perhaps the page no longer exists. In either case the visitor will be confronted with a 404 page announcing that the page being searched for does not exist.

That is a great piece of "Internet real estate" that can be put to good use as a back-end sales spot.

One other place where you can seek to generate back-end sales is in the download file. If you are selling zipped program files, sales letters etc, include a sales page with a compelling offer and a link to the web-page where the goods being offered can be bought.

What type of product can you offer on the back-end?

There are several options, depending on what niche you are marketing to, but here are a few of the more obvious ones for the marketing niche:

* Software programs
* Newsletters
* Products such as heavily discounted ebook or software packs.
* Public Label Rights packages
* Product upgrades
* Affiliate program memberships

Selling on the back-end offers Internet marketers many opportunities to generate repeat sales from their customer base. For this reason it is worth making the effort to cultivate your customers' trust and to implement some back-end sales techniques.

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Saturday

Why You Should Use Google Analytics On Your Web Site

Google offers a free statistical tool to analyze your website visitors. It is called Google Analytics. It is very easy to use. Once you sign up with the service and add the URL of your website, you get a snippet of Java Script code that you add onto every web page you want to track.

Google Analytics tracks visitors from all sources, including display ad campaigns, PPC (pay per click) campaigns, organic searches from search engines, email marketing, bookmarks, websites that have your inbound links, and other digital sources like URLs embedded in PDF files or Power Point slides. It designed for online marketers who want to track visitors to their sites for improving user experience and conversions.

Why do you want to use Google Analytics? There are several reasons for that.

You want to know if your marketing campaign is going in the right direction or not. For example, if you are doing article marketing to drive traffic to your site, you want to know the article directories that are the most effective in sending visitors to your website.

You don't want to waste your time submitting articles to directories that are not sending you any traffic or a very low amount of traffic. You can write more articles and submit to only those directories that are sending you a good amount of traffic.

If you are using a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign, you should use split testing to test the effectiveness of different ads. You want to know which ads are performing better than the others in terms of conversions. If you integrate Google Analytics with your AdWords PPC campaigns, you will be able to track the effectiveness of each ad you are using in your PPC campaigns.

Using data from Google Analytics, you will be able to find the pages that are getting the most traffic from search engines, bookmarks and inbound links. Knowing this information helps you spend time on optimizing only those pages that are getting the most traffic.

You can work on providing improved user experience of your site on those high traffic pages. Make it easy to navigate those pages from anywhere in your site. Place a "What is new" about your site on those pages.

If you're selling ads on your site to advertisers directly, you need a visitors portfolio of your site. This portfolio contains information about the number of monthly unique visitors to your site, visitors' geographic locations, the number of page views per visitor, the bounce rate of visitors, etc.

The more information about your visitors you can provide to your prospecting advertisers, the better is your chance of commanding a premium price for advertisement spots on your site. Google Analytics will help you develop a visitors portfolio of your site.

Even if you are not going to use visitors data immediately, you can still sign up for Google Analytics and let the tool start collecting visitors data about your site. When you need those data, you will have them in your Google Analytics account.

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Niche Discovery Tactics Gurus Don't Teach But Use Themselves

Every internet marketer knows the importance of discovering good and profitable niches. Many internet marketing gurus have a very simplistic way of teaching about niche discovery. The sum total of some gurus' teaching on this can be summarized as:

1. Choose a topic that you like, have experience or are interested in.

2. Take the main keyword from this topic and plug it into a keyword research tool.

3. Look at the search count. If it is about 30,000 per month, it's a good niche. If it is below 30,000 searches, there is very little market and therefore it is not a good niche. If it is way above 30,000 searches, there is probably too much competition and therefore it is risky to enter this niche market.

That's it. Based on those three steps, you are supposed to find a niche. What's wrong with such a teaching?

Firstly, there is no research into the competition. No step is taken to discover how strong a competition you face in that niche.

Secondly, there is no research into long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are defined as keyword phrases of at least 4 words (the more words, the better). Every marketer knows the importance of long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can lead you to lucrative sub-niches.

Thirdly, there is no research into the tendency of the searchers to buy. It's not only a matter of whether the searchers have money or not. Some people in a particular niche market may have money but are not intending to buy anything.

So here's how the gurus really do their niche and keyword research:

1. Examine your own interests, abilities, knowledge, experiences. Anything from these may be a potentially good niche to market to.

2. Identify what's hot in the market i.e. what is currently the most talked-about thing, what's buzzing or new in town. Is this a potential niche?

3. From the above two steps, identify potential niches. Then run these potential niches through these 'filters':

a. Are people in this niche ready to buy and not merely information seekers or looking for freebies? For example, 'how to score an 'A' in your SAT examination' would probably not be a very lucrative niche because it would interest only students who may not have the money to buy anything much.

b. Is there a problem that the people in this niche cannot solve themselves? Any niche involving technical expertise would nicely fit into this criteria. For example, 'how to solve Windows Vista registry problems' would likely be a good niche because very few people are technologically competent enough to deal with these problems.

c. Do the people in this niche have an urgent crisis that needs to be overcome? The more urgent the better. For example, 'how to stop your teenager's drug habit' is an extremely urgent crisis that begs for answers.

d. Is there an 'evergreen' need in this niche that is not a just a fad? 'How to improve your golf swing' is an evergreen need compared to 'strategies for World of Warcraft' (World of Warcraft is a PC game). Once the fad for World of Warcraft is over, the market in this niche disappears.

Obviously, the more 'yes' answers you get to the above questions the more potentially profitable a niche is.

4. Once you have identified a potentially profitable niche based on the steps above, it is time to look for some long-tail keywords. These long-tail keywords will reveal some sub-niches which you can further profit from. For example, if you type in 'golf swing' into Wordtracker, you would get a whole list of related searches. Look for keyword phrases with four words or more. Some of them are 'stack and tilt golf swing', 'biomechanics of golf swing', 'what is the proper weight distribution during the golf swing' etc.

5. To find out how much competition there is in this niche, simply type in all the keywords you have into Google's free keyword analysis tool. This tool will give you the estimated advertiser competition (which is the same as marketer competition), average search volume for the previous month and average monthly search volume. The great thing is that this tool also gives you synonyms for the keywords which means you get more keyword suggestions. You identify keywords with as little competition but as many searches as possible.

The steps above represent a much more complete way of niche discovery. You will not only find profitable niches but also the relevant keywords that go with these niches. By doing this you make a solid start in your niche marketing.

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How to Make Money From Your List

Making money from your list is one of the hardest aspects of Internet marketing to learn, but once you do, you are set. By learning how to make money from your list you are in complete control of your earnings, no more worrying about what Google will do to your website's rankings the next time the spider comes around.

By now you probably know how to build a list, or at least how to start getting people to sign up for your list. Just about anybody can get people to sign up for their list, but how do you make money from them?

The simplest answer to this question is to test and track. It is not the answer most people want to hear but it is the surest path to making money form your list.

What to test and track is an important a question. Again the simple answer is to test everything.

Here is a list to get you started thinking:

1. Day of the week message is sent: Some people find that sending their email message on a Monday results in fewer sales because people are getting back into their work week and don't have time to read email. Tuesdays or Thursdays seem to work better.

2. Subject line: This too can have a dramatic effect on how many people open and read your message. You want your subject line to sound compelling, but not appear as SPAM.

3. Length of email: The optimum length varies by niche, so you will have to test and track this, but remember, shorter emails are more likely to be read.

4. Placement of links in email: Usually the links placed higher up in the email body will get a higher percentage of clicks, so put higher paying clicks near the top.

5. Frequency of mailings: Some people email their list monthly, some daily, and some several times a day. If what you have to say is interesting why not contact your list more often. Naturally some people will think you are spamming them, but by now most people have double opt-in lists so people are getting what they signed up for.

Remember that making money off your list is not easy, and it will also vary by how responsive your list is. Don't be discouraged if it takes a year or more to learn to make money off your list, because once you do, you will have a cash machine for life.


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