Internet Marketing Blog to help you succeed online

If you have a new site or blog, initially you ll find that you don’t get a lot of traffic or your traffic is like a roller coaster ride high on some days and low on other days. Don’t get intimedated by this trend even the best of bloggers go through such a traffic cycle.

More traffic does not alway mean more sales, qualified traffic leads to better sales. You can convert low traffic by ensuring that your site is tuned for conversion.

1. Ensure you have a neat layout :
If you are a blog owner, ensure you have a neat blog theme depending on your niche I recommend you to use the Ultimate Blogging Theme if you have a blog about Internet Marketing, Blogging or Make Money Online. This is a tried and tested theme for successful conversions even if you are a new blogger or have less traffic.

2. Understand your Surfers :
What do people surf on your site, where do they come from , what are the keywords that drive people to your site from search engines, how can you leverage those keywords in your post to get better conversions and higher traffic for search engine, Improve banner placements and Call to action in your articles. You need to push the surfers to the right places which deliver the right traffic.
To drive conversions with low traffic you need to understand every move of your surfer on your blog or website.

3. Use Google Analytics
I use Google Analytics on my blogs, its the best free tool available online. Ensure you install and understand the analytics package, Google Analytics is free and a good place to start, understand which pages your visitors are entering on and make sure you funnel these visitors to your “sales page”.

If you have an article or sub-page which is attracting the visitors, ensure this page delivers the information they are looking for but also encourages them to visit other pages within your site.

4. Ensure you pre-sell well :
Getting the traffic to your page is the hard part, don’t let yourself down when they arrive, ensure you mirror the key selling points, benefits and features of the product you are recommending.

Ensure you have completely pre-sold the product before letting them leave your site, as an affiliate you have done your job, it is now down to the merchant to ensure they close the sale. Ensure you are promoting the products that convert the best, a poor converting merchant site can undo all your hard work. I recommend that you work only with well know affiliates like Market leverage, Niche More etc.

5. Split Test

You can try different header text, different call to actions or complete pages, why not create 3 more index pages which different approaches and see which ones convert best?

6. Use clear call to actions :
Your visitors are looking for guidance, ensure you clearly explain where they should go next. If they land on a product review, give them a number of different opportunities to visit the product’s landing page. If your surfers visit your index page, ensure you show them the path you wish them to take.

You don’t need deep pockets to succeed during a credit crunch simply innovation, determination and the right guidance.

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Just in case you ve missed the Thanksgiving Contest, you can send in your entries by end of today - 10 th November 2008, Eastern Standard Time. So far the blog has received more than 80 entries for the contest, more than 1200 views and more than 130 comments for the contest post.

The term “Thanksgiving Contest” was number two on Google and was the main driver for visits to this post. If you have not yet taken part this could be your chance to win some great promotions for your blog or site.

Enter the Thanksgiving Contest and make your blog count.

The contest winners will be announced by end of this week.

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Google has kicked of a series of videos for optimising Adsense . This seems to be an effort to help publishers to get most out of their adsense, while this should have happened much earlier when Google dominated the publishers’ site monthly income. They seem to have realised that publishers are making a better income of their sites without Google adsense, I don’t have Google adsense on my blog, but I make a decent income from adsense on my other websites.

The better publishers make out from the program, the better the program will continue to perform and better the ROI for Google.

This is one of the first videos of the series and it looks at ad sizes, and Google recommends them big. They suggest the following sizes.

- 300 x 250 medium rectangle.
- 728 x 90 leaderboard
- 160 x 600 skyscraper

As per Google Adsense team , these sizes have proven to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you ve receiving all ad types, you ll find that advertisers will specifically target yuoir sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find the ad that they are interested in.

If you have downloaded Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets , you ll be in a better position to capitalize adsense revenues and be a few years ahead in the adsense game. Ad placement is an art rather than a science, if there were a way to just insert ads for maximum clicks, everybody would be doing it, but there isn’t. It take creativity and experimentation to make money from adsense.

I can see why Google would recommend the larger sizes, because they will be more likely to catch the eys, but if they ar eplaced poorly within the sites design, I doubt if the sizes will make much of a difference. It certainly wont make a difference in your adsense revenues. 

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I enjoy networking with successful people in any profession. I believe success rubs success. Successful people give off a positive entrepreneual energy that is contagious.

So when John Chow sent out an invite to join the Dot Com Pho in Toronto, I did not want to miss the chance. It is rare that you get a chance to spend quality time with someone who is a wealth creator and one of the top bloggers making close to USD $40,000 a month from blogging telling people how to make money blogging. Amazing .

How many of you had a chance to meet Bill Gates or had a chance to dine with Warren Buffet ? It just does not happen.

I was interested to learn a few blogging tips and to get a business mindset from John. John was very open to share lots of information about his blog, affiliate marketing and recent blog events.

I just had one question for John, How do I make my blog as successful as Johnchow.com

John shared with me some of his blog secrets that made him successful. I share the same with you.

- Change your thinking : To become successful you need to change your thought process. Change your thinking from an employee to a business owner. We all get stuck with the 9 to 5 employee mentality which does not help while running a business. This is one of the most critical aspects of being an entrepreneur. “Change your thinking, change your bank balance”.

- Create a community : Focus on create unique content that will help your readers comming on your blog. Focus on creating communities with your users. Creating communities will increase readership and loyalty in the log run. Interact with your users at every level. An example of this is John Chow’s Dot Com Pho where his readers are invited to share ideas and interact.

- Go viral : Looks for online and offline ways to go viral. The traffic that comes from going viral will take your blog to another level. Use the power of social media like Digg, Twitter, Technorati to leverage the viral effect.

- Build a network : Build a network of other bloggers and interact with people all the time. Larger your network better the support for your initiatives from fellow bloggers and your network.

I thanked John for giving me entrepreneurial insights from his heart, I hope I can practise these to help me be a better blogger and a great entrepreneur.

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