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Making Money With Squidoo – 3

November 25, 2009 By 2 Comments

Thousands of marketers have realized the incredible profit-generating benefits of Squidoo.  The time to capitalize on this relatively new Web 2.0 marketing opportunity is definitely now.  As Squidoo’s popularity continues to grow, the availability of niche keyword lens titles will diminish.  As of this writing, there are still highly profitable niche keywords available to use as niche lens titles.

If your desire is to make a profit with your Squidoo lenses, there are several important steps you need to implement to ensure success. 

1.  Perform serious keyword research for your lens.  This must be your first step.  The keywords in the title of your Squidoo lens are just as important as the title of any website.  Use a good keyword tool such as Overture or even Good Keywords to search for keywords that are searched between 2000 and 50,000 times per month.  Although Squidoo is doing quite well in the search engines, I wouldn’t be over-zealous and use keywords that are searched for over 50,000 times per month.  Squidoo allows you to submit up to 20 tags, so you should use all 20 tags and be sure to use 3-4 keyword phrases to make up each keyword.  They seem to work better with Squidoo.

2.  Provide useful content on your Squidoo lenses such as articles and product reviews.  This will increase your lenses’ popularity with consumers and with the search engines.  Also, don’t flood your lens with lots of affiliate links as this could be viewed as spamming by the Squidoo staff and may get your lens deleted.  One to three affiliate links is plenty.  You will also need to use at least three additional modules.  I recommend using the Ebay, Amazon and RSS modules.  RSS feeds will provide fresh content to your lens which is always appealing to the search engines.  Be sure the RSS feed you use is relative and updated often.

3.  Find quality incoming links to your Squidoo lens.  This is very important to your rankings in the search engines.  The sites which link to your Squidoo lens should have a page rank of 4 or higher.  Incoming links that work well with Squidoo are social bookmarking sites, classified ad sites like Craigslist and social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace.  Be sure to follow these websites’ guidelines.  It’s also a good idea to place a link to your Squidoo site on your blog.

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Making Money Through Product Resell Rights

November 25, 2009 By 3 Comments

Resell rights come in many forms and sizes. They can come in large packages with many products bundled together and offered for an almost suspiciously low price. Or they can be offered on a single product for a four-figure sum. There are also different types of rights offered allowing you to do different things.

Basic resell rights only give you the right to sell the product. You cannot claim the product is your own and you do not have permission to offer the resell rights to anyone else. Basic resell rights are usually the cheapest, so it may be easier to make a profit. Check the terms for how much you can charge for the product or if it can be given away, perhaps as a bonus with something else. There may also be conditions for distributing the product from membership and auction sites. If you are buying rights to software make sure you know the product well enough to deal with any troubleshooting enquiries. Some software rights sellers are prepared to deal with enquiries themselves. The product may also come with a web sales page that you can use, but check for any restrictions.

Master resell rights often include a web page with the product. They give you the right to sell the product and you can also pass on this right to your customers. However that is as far as it goes. Your customers cannot give the resell rights for the product to their customers. The best master resell rights packages will include a zip file containing everything you need to put on your download page.

There are two types of resell rights that may be referred to as private label rights. One type is where you are given the resell rights for a finished product and you are also allowed to put your name on the product as the author. This type of product is a ready-to-sell information or software product. You cannot change it other than put your name on it.

The second type of private label rights is also known as source code rights. The product is not a finished ready-to-sell item. Instead it will be the raw source material that you can use to produce a finished item. Programs will be in the source code format; information products will be in a word processor format, like MS Word.

You can change the product in any way you want. You can add your name as author, add more content, omit parts or split it into several products. You may also be able to sell resell rights and even master resell rights. Terms and conditions should be posted, so check them carefully. Most private label rights packages also come with a web page and graphics that you can use for selling.

If you have found a resell rights product that you think you can sell you need to do some basic market research before purchasing. How many people are searching for this type of product? How many competing products are there? Have you seen the product available elsewhere?

If you are going to sell on the internet you need to have access to the following skills. You must be able to edit web pages, create payment links and upload the product and web pages to a server. If you are buying private label rights you must also be able to edit the product. This is especially important if you are buying rights for software.

There are many ways you can sell products on the internet. You can usually set up your own website or add the sales page to your existing site. You could invest in pay per click ads or ezine ads. You could write articles. If you have private label rights to a book you can use some of the content to produce articles or even a free report for viral marketing.

Resell rights offer the advantage of not having to produce your own material. However, you need to be sure the product is good quality and that you have a good marketing plan.

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Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 2

November 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In Part 1 of our series on bounce rates, we explored how to drill down into your metrics to find the numbers that really matter. But that left us with an unsettling question. For the users that do bounce but shouldn’t…what is missing that would pull them into your site?

Look at where your traffic is coming from and where it is landing
Many people think that a high bounce rate means there is a problem strictly with the content on the page. While that can be the case in part, you should take a step back and look at where people are coming from and the messages they see before arriving to your site to fully diagnosis a high bounce rate. For example, let’s look at the following user interaction…I’ll be the guinea pig.

I’m thinking of buying a new turbocharger for the Subaru WRX I race on the weekends. So I search for turbochargers.

google search turbochargers 580 Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 2

Then I click on a PPC ad that mentions the following items:

  • Unbeatable prices
  • Turbochargers in stock
  • Free shipping

I think to myself, “Great! This is exactly that I am looking for.” I initiate a click and this is the page I am greeted with:

xtreme psi 580 Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 2

Where is free shipping?
Where are the in-stock items?
And most importantly… WHERE ARE THE TURBOCHARGERS?!

If you just looked at the content of the site in a vacuum, you would find it acceptable. But users being directed to this site from that PPC ad have expectations that this page isn’t fulfilling.

I have seen many people in this situation look at their site metrics and when they see the high-bounce rate, just keep radically changing the page without any real regard to the user’s thought sequence. They get frustrated when the page continues to underperform.

And remember, I am just using my quest to break the local time trial record in my tuned-up WRX as an example. These principles do not only apply to landing pages or companies running paid traffic.

Text links (on other sites directing traffic to your pages), emails, and newsletters set just as much expectation as paid search banners. For external links, use a research tool like Yahoo Site Explorer to investigate the links to your pages along with the messages being communicated. Then evaluate if your page connects with those messages (If you’re uncomfortable with how your page is presented, contact the owner of the page to edit the links. You will be surprised how willing people are to make those edits if you ask nicely.)

Of course, giving customers the information they need is only the beginning. If we really want to address the bounce rates of key segments we are concerned about, we must get them to act…

On Wednesday, Part 3 will examine how you get visitors to act by giving them a clear path for what to do next.

Have additional questions? Other metrics you’d like to look at? Use the comments section below or shoot me a tweet me at: @ctrentmarketing

Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 2

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing, Online Marketing, Optimization, Pay Per Click Tagged With: , , , , ,

Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 1

November 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

iStock 000003651112XSmall Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 1Bounce rate is the metric that makes many marketers wake up in a cold sweat. Many Research Partners are consumed (dare I say haunted?) by this metric.

I don’t want to water down the power of bounce rates. But as with most metrics, it isn’t as simple as following a rule of thumb like “keep the number of bounces low.”

So in this series of posts, I’ll take a closer look at what your bounce rates are really telling you… and what is just an imaginary monster under the bed. Let’s look past the anxiety and hone in on what we can learn from these numbers. And, perhaps in the process, help you sleep a little better at night.

Analyze the action that a “typical” user will take on your page

Why does the visitor come to your site and what are they planning on doing there? Answering this question can help you determine if they’re leaving because the site isn’t delivering on some level, or if they simply got what they were looking for and moved on. To show you an example of what I’m talking about, let’s take a look at what may be happening on your blog.

I hear marketers worry about blog bounce rates quite often, so let’s think about how a typical reader views one. You probably post the most recent information right at the top where it is easily accessible – quite convenient for your readers. So the typical returning reader likely reads that fresh content and then heads elsewhere. This would be counted as a bounce since the user has not engaged in any navigation.

Also, readers who already like your blog and have added it to their feed aggregator tend to get in a click-happy mode and just read snippets of news. They might see your new post pop up, read it for a little bit, then move to the next article in their queue. These news reader programs allow users to sift through posts, find an interesting one, arrive at that page, and then leave. Again, if that is the only interaction they have with your site, it will be counted as a bounce.

If you are running a web program that lets you segment your visitors, and look at metrics like bounce rate, break up different sources of traffic into new users and returning users. Only then can you really learn from your bounce rates.

Here is a segment created in Google Analytics to look at new visitors and help us splice the data more deeply:

analytics settings lrg1 Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 1

Now that you have segmented your visitors, what are they really telling you? I wouldn’t be too concerned if older users are bouncing. As we learned from getting in the mind of the typical return visitor, they likely just want to see your most recent post.

But if new users are bouncing, then you have more cause for alarm. Why aren’t your posts pulling them in to a deeper engagement with your blog? If you’re looking at a homepage, what is missing that would pull them into your site?

On Monday, Part 2 will take a closer look at where your traffic is coming from and where it is landing on your site to help you answer these questions.

Have additional questions? Other metrics you’d like to look at? Use the comments section below or shoot me a tweet me at: @ctrentmarketing

Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 1

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing, Online Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: ,

Web Clinic Extra: Surprising Wins from 2009

November 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

During our November 11 web clinic, Surprising Wins from 2009: Using insights from an uncertain economy to drive 302% growth, Boris Grinkot, Adam Lapp, and Paul Clowe answered questions from our audience on a range of topics pertinent to our research from this year.

We often don’t have time to answer all the questions from our international audience on the live web clinics. So we’re launching a new feature on the blog – Web Clinic Extra. We distilled the best questions and posed them to Researchers Boris Grinkot and Adam Lapp for our first episode:



get flash player Web Clinic Extra: Surprising Wins from 2009


The complete Flash version of the web clinic, along with a downloadable research brief (PDF), are now available on MarketingExperiments.com. If you have additional questions, use the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Web Clinic Extra: Surprising Wins from 2009

Filed Under: Landing Page, Marketing, Marketing Q&A, Online Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , ,

Eloqua Experience 2009: Why choosing the right KPI is essential to gaining ROI

November 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Senior Manager Boris Grinkot recently attended the Eloqua Experience 2009 Global User Conference in San Francisco. He sat down to answer a few questions about his key takeaways for online marketers…

Q: You were the only non-Eloqua employee to have a booth in the Marketing Effectiveness Zone. Users from around the world sought your advice about conversion rate optimization. Was there any pattern to the challenges marketers brought you?

Most websites are not really having a conversation with the customer. They are not guiding the customer through the page. And, most importantly, they are not testing their pages. They may test an email message or a form with Eloqua, but they don’t test the whole page.

There is massive room for improvement to optimize landing pages to ensure they are customer-focused, and then continually improve the results generated by those pages through testing.

Q: Measuring those results was also a major topic of conversation at Eloqua Experience?

eloqua exp 09 Eloqua Experience 2009: Why choosing the right KPI is essential to gaining ROIYes. Eloqua is seeking to standardize key performance indicators, or KPIs, that CxOs use to measure results in much the same way financial accounting uses key ratios and cash flow statements, income statements, and balance sheets. Today, most measurements in web analytics – like visitors per month, for example – do not directly translate to a standard accounting metric, such as net revenue.

Q: Based on past statements we’ve received from web clinics and here on the blog, KPIs are a little misunderstood by some marketers. How can readers choose and use KPIs effectively?

In our research, we find marketers most frequently tend to look at numbers like conversion rate, bounce rate or number of visitors. While these numbers can be meaningful within the context of page or process functional performance, they don’t necessarily do a good job of measuring the financial performance.

Revenue per visitor is usually an essential KPI that connects online customer behavior to a financial outcome. While this is a more straightforward KPI to calculate for ecommerce sites, even if you have a lead-generation site, you should understand the value of each lead to determine your revenue per visitor.

Average order size can also be a meaningful KPI that helps you distinguish customer segments (e.g., collectors vs. gift shoppers) or test functional changes like in-cart upsells. Choosing the right KPIs is a big topic, but the short of it is that you need to distinguish between behavioral, demographic, and financial metrics and use them appropriately.

Q: So the important thing to remember is, that while some metrics might be useful in an intermediate step, the overall goal should be a revenue-based number?

Absolutely. For testing and optimization, you need those intermediate numbers.

For example, if you’re optimizing just one step of a shopping cart, conversion rate or clickthrough are important testing metrics. But you don’t want to lose sight of the big picture – which would be overall revenue or revenue per visitor. Let’s say you’ve optimized a step and more visitors are clicking through, but they are less motivated and in the end are buying less. If you don’t have that overall revenue KPI, and you just looked at conversion rate, you would erroneously assume that you have definitively improved your shopping cart.

Q: What are some other caveats when choosing a KPI?

Even if you choose the right KPI, you can still get bad information by not looking at individual channels. You may have good revenue per visitor, but that number is just an average. What if one channel is delivering ten times the revenue per visitor of another channel? That is important information to have, especially if you’re paying for traffic, because you need to understand how that spend converts to revenue.

Q: What is the overall benefit of choosing the right KPI for C-level reporting?

By focusing on dollars instead of traffic, business leaders gain a deep understanding about how the investments they make impact revenue generated through the website. If you invest more in a site, what ROI are you getting?

Clickthroughs and conversion rates only muddy the answer to this question. You need numbers directly related to the spend of each campaign. And not in the aggregate, but specific to a channel – so you know that investing X in PPC, email, TV, or even print will lead to a return of Y.

The other upside, which I’m glad Eloqua is pushing, is that numbers like overall revenue, revenue per visitor, or cost per acquisition bring web metrics much closer to standard accounting. These numbers give CxOs the best indicators of their site’s performance in a format they are used to seeing.

Use the comments section below or post your questions to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Eloqua Experience 2009: Why choosing the right KPI is essential to gaining ROI

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing, Marketing Q&A, Online Marketing Tagged With: ,

Best Way To Take Advantage Of Adwords Tool

November 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Its very easy to subscribe for Adwords, but using it is not easy .It would not be easy to get the results you like for the price you could afford. Affiliate X by Chris & Ken X is the best course on starting your online business. After setting up your Adwords account, you need to download a peice of software on your machine to assist you get success.

On the internet you will find dozens of various You can accomplish lots of tasks with Adwords this program and examines that can help you in creating a very profitable campaigns.

If you re new to Adwords, you may not know which software will work the best, so you may try a couple of different programs before you land on the ones that really help. If you have been playing Adwords game and know how to use it correctly, you might need to know what you require this program to do for you.

Either way, you can look for free or paid Adwords Software. Just being a paid program does not make it better than a free one . Several free Google Adwords software are highly effective and would do just what you need.

WIth the help of some Adwords editors you could create a websites that could help you get high score on Google system meaning you will get high rankings on the Google SERPS (Search Engine Return Pages) for your keywords.

These free softwares would also help you create good quality ads to go on Google system!

Another inexpensive Adwords softward download helps you find highly popular keywords that still only attract a few advertisers who are bidding on the word. The more advertisers means, you need to pay higher price per click.

So you want to find keywords that are popular search terms,however not very well known with advertisers. For this kind of keywords you just required to pay $.05 or per click.

There is one more great software that would help you find fraud clicks.These can be costly during an Adwords campaign, and you want to try your best to avoid this.

There is one more tool to find the relevant keywords in your market. It s brainstorming on autopilot as it explores your web site and comes in up with a kind of language that will work for you.

Moreover, there are some tools available in the market to analyz your entore website, They will check the keyword phrases used by the competition, find out potential markets for you and very easily customiz almost every aspect of the application

With the help of another great software you would easily monitor your entire Adwords account without the need to open a browser. You can click through pages, enter logins and passwords, and perform routine operations quickly and easily, as well as schedule tasks. If you are planing to start your online business, check out The Affiliate X program by Chris X.

Some of the most popular as well as the most common Adwords software programs develop lists of keywords that may be relevant to your product. You dont need to wait for weeks to gather this data it would be done for you automatically, It would be done easily with this powerful softwares.

Employing an Adwords package platform or two may help you in going the most out of your Adwords campaign.

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Conversion Diagnosis: ACS Creative – Please Help Me Decide Where to Click!

November 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In our October 28 web clinic, we discussed how to use color, shape, location, size, and motion to help guide our website visitors to where they should click. We all know designing web pages is somewhat of an art, especially for companies like ACS Creative. But designing the most effective webpages is also a science. You have to assess every element on the page to determine whether or not it:

  • Helps guide the visitor to the primary objective
  • Distracts the visitor from the primary objective
  • Neither hurts nor helps conversion

I would like to thank ACS Creative for attending the webinar and also for submitting their page for expert review; it definitely takes a certain degree of bravery. Of course, our goal is not to tear you down, but to help you implement the most effective page possible.

Below is the page ACS Creative submitted for live optimization. For this blog post, we would like to introduce a new Interactive Blueprint feature; just hover over the page to see the potential eyepath problems we have identified. Once you have found an area of interest, click to reveal our comments and recommendations.

First, we see that ACS Creative has designed a very clean and professional website. But I have to ask, where do you want your visitors to click?

This task, surprisingly, is not that easy to determine to the untrained eye. Here’s why:

  1. The main “Web Services” image is moving visitors towards incorrect “implied” direction. If you notice, only one of the eight arrows is pointing towards the main objective. The others are pointing towards the supplementary blue image, the top navigation, the footer, and also towards that big red “X” that contributes negatively to your bounce rate.
  1. The screen shot of the Stratford University website is bright blue and the footer is bright red, and both are drawing the eyepath away from the “gray” buttons.
  1. Multiple objectives! Let’s say I do ignore the elements with more emphasis than the primary objective or I quickly scan them then revert back to the gray buttons, I still have to make a decision. And yes, the decision is not that difficult, but it is a decision nonetheless. It takes extra time. It is an extra step between deciding to act and acting. What should I click on? Web Services or Contact Us? I may want web services but I may also want to contact you for more information. It can become confusing.

If I were designing a version of this page to test, I would reconsider the percentage of width of the page dedicated to the primary web services objective. It should definitely be more than 50%, thus de-emphasizing the “size” of the bright blue secondary objective that is the Stratford University screenshot.

I would also create some space between the buttons and the footer. Show the visitors that the bright red footer is not that important by using a lower “position” on the page.

And finally, the buttons need to be a “color” that stands out from the page as a whole, the footer, and the secondary images. You may consider making the footer gray and the buttons red. Also regarding the buttons, the one which has the most importance to conversion should be a red button and the other one should be a simple text link… easy to see, but not overshadowing where you want most visitors to click.

Good luck!  Let us know if you decide to test this strategy and what your results are.

Conversion Diagnosis: ACS Creative – Please Help Me Decide Where to Click!

Filed Under: Landing Page, Marketing, Online Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , ,

Study Guide for Today’s Web Clinic: Surprising Wins from 2009

November 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In today’s web clinic, our analysts will discuss their most valuable lessons learned from four of 2009’s most suprising experiments. Not to be outdone, here on the blog we’re sharing four of our favorite posts from around the blogosphere. These posts offer quick takeaways you can put to use before the year is out:

  • Five Grammatical Errors that Make You Look Dumb – I’m a writer, so of course the inimitable Copyblogger leads the list. But this post is really for you, the non-writing marketer. These tips won’t make you the James Joyce of marketing, but they’ll keep you out of trouble for when you don’t have a professional writer around. And you won’t even have to worry about learning to use snooty writer words like “inimitable.”
  • Lead Generation Poll shows converting leads-to-sales pipeline is biggest frustration – Of course, the best writing in the world is useless if it only brings in leads that don’t produce. Our colleague, B2B pro Brian Carroll, shows you how to create closed-loop feeback huddles with your sales team to ensure that the leads you send down the pipeline have a better chance coming out green.
  • Top 10 Subject Line Words That Get Opens – Maybe all these words won’t be news to you, but if they help your free newsletter bring in an additional sale or two, this could be a great holiday season. Party! (couldn’t work that one into a sentence). As the above poorly worded sentences show, there is more to writing successful subject lines than just throwing in a few commonly used words. However, at the very least this list may give you some new ideas to test.
  • Call To Action Buttons: Does Size Matter? – In the end, it all comes down to that big click. And to find out what moves your customers most, you have to test. Linda Bustos offers some great tips to keep in mind as you optimize your call to action. Follow her advice, and hopefully you’ll be rewarded with many clicks this holiday season.

BONUS: After looking back at 2009, I couldn’t help but wonder what marketers predicted was going to happen this year. Personally, I’m still waiting for the chance to buy a flying car, so I always take these lists with a grain of salt. But it sure is fun to look back at looking ahead… The Big List of 2009 Marketing Predictions.

Study Guide for Today’s Web Clinic: Surprising Wins from 2009

Filed Under: Landing Page, Marketing, Online Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , ,

The Most Important Part of Internet Marketing

November 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

Even though there are more sides to internet marketing than just email marketing (permission based), email has been the foundation that our business sits on.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , ,
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