A fairly well known marketing pro came to this one forum one day and started a thread about how simple it was to earn money on the web. Well, on first reading, it was good. It was short and to the point. Well, another member queried some of the points and on reflecting on the questions, I spotted that there might have been more elaboration and further clarification. The basic point of capture page is to draw the attentions and focus of its visitors to act on one thing and also select getting additional information.

The content on a capture page should ideally be kept at minimum. It shouldn't be lengthy and should be such which draws its readers instant. If you give too much info on your capture page, you'll lose your visitors as they may navigate to some other internet site.

Here is a recent exchange with a client regarding questions about site branding, traffic generation and marketing for their information product website. It might be helpful to other site owners who want to improve visitor engagement to their brand. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to contact me with any marketing, branding and promotion questions for your business. (Note: The names and site links are changed to protect the privacy of my client.)

Q: Dwayne – I know you are knowledgable with internet marketing and blog promotion, etc.  We have been experimenting with traffic generation under the theory that it will warm visitors up to our product, but we seem to be getting luke warm reception when submitting posts to reddit.  We did find that a link to our site inserted in a blog comment could generate decent hits, but I was wondering if you knew of any other sites that might give us more ideas. – Thanks! Neal

Hi Neal;
Yes sir, blog commenting works well and gives you decent backlinks. Of course you are selling a niche product so targeting is more important for you than just bulk traffic. Remember since the launch of Caffeine the three legged table rule is 100% in effect so you must satisfy all three value metrics in order to grow and maintain authority and SERPs.

I took the liberty of looking at your site. You are trying to market an information product on Seduction Techniques right? The first thing I recommend you focus on is the site experience and content. We can talk about niche traffic generation later. First develop the product and conversion scenaio…

Here are a couple of suggestions:

Landing impact:
What are you doing on this site? Why do I not know at a glance? When a visitor lands on your site they should know right away where they are and what they might get here. You have less than 5 seconds to accomplish this. The back button is calling…
So how about a visual (metaphor) image – above the fold – to let me know I’m in a place where men go to learn how to approach and attract women?

The blocks of text on the site are crazy long. Break that stuff up. No one wants to read pages of text in long paragraphs. Forget the grammar rules for paragraphs you learned in school and use the copy writing rule instead. No more than 5 lines of text without a full double break space. Break your copy into little info-nuggets – not big intimidating blocks of text. (People quit reading web copy in the 90′s… They want bullets and short clips of text they can follow by scanning).

Conversion scenario:
Where is my gift? Give me something to make me engage the site please. Yes, you have to bribe me or you suck. Where is my free ebook? Where is my video? What about a ’10 ways to attract hot girls’ list? Some kind of swag please. Give me something to engage me. Also note if your free gift and bonuses are valuable enough they can be used as link bait. You then have something to blog and brag about. So consider developing a free gift that everyone who joins your list or Likes you on Facebook or follows you on Twitter gets just because you’re that kind of great humanitarian.

Hint: Recently video has been shown to be the absolute most effect free gift. Easy and instant! Videos also help engage the visitor. For example a video giving away the ‘ultimate secret’ of seduction to people who connect with your site could promise to share a really cool secret – but then give them three in the video. Don’t be stingy! Over-deliver. Then use the closing section of the video to upsell into your real product. And of course the whole operation gets uploaded to Youtube, Vimeo, Daily Motion etc…

Speaking of social reach… Where are your social signals? No feeds? No social site badges? Where are your FB and Twitter signals? Don’t have time for Twitter and Facebook? Oh no problem – then your site is a relic — like a dusty old mausoleum statue… isn’t it quaint? Better get that fan page up and running and push your blog content to it and to your twitter stream using plugins (free and easy). You can’t possibly expect busy people to actually visit your site every day hoping you have provided a new nugget of info for them – you have to reach out and give them an dead simple way to see your content. Hint: Social media.

Aesthetics:
I understand you’re going after the whole spartan blog look here but if you are trying to promote a product or service you must hype the benefits. Pictures of the sexy women your clientele could possibly attract would be a good start. You need some compelling images to tease the visitor into engaging the site and returning. Does not have to be pornographic or anything – just a couple provocative images here and there would go a long way.

Your choice of design colors is fine for what you’re doing. White is a trust color so the white background is fine. You will need to figure out a third color to complete the design at some point. Use this free site to play with brand color ideas and when you find something you like make note of the colors so you can try to integrate them into your site. http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Nuts and bolts:
- You are not using permalinks (search engine friendly URL rewrites) in your blog settings. This is a must to help elevate your site to bots so they can pick up your content.

- Use Pages instead of Posts for persistent content. Don’t put page content in a post. Make it a static page. You can then write a post about it and link it so you take advantage of the ping services, but critical persistent information should be main menu content.

– Your header image is does not link to your home page. Did you realize your visitors must use their back button to return to your index page if they drill down to article page? This frustrates surfers and they often double-click the back button because you made then use it. Don’t depend on the web browser for site navigation.

- Your site does not allow comments. Why would you prevent your visitors from engaging you? Comments are the easiest way to generate conversion activity on your website. You need conversion activity on your site to satisfy the third leg of the three legged table = ACTIVITY. Without visitor engagement and activity your site can have all the backlinks and content in the world and still be totally irrelevant.

Hint: Let people leave comments – but moderate the comments of course using your blog settings and once you start to choke on the comment spam flip your site settings so that visitors must by registered and logged in to comment. This create more activity and conversions.

This is just a quick set of suggestions Neal. We can certainly go deeper into any of these topics at your convenience. Feel free to ask questions about any of the issues. Once you have the site ready for prime time we can talk about the secrets of magnetic traffic seduction.

At your servers…
Dwayne

Posted via email from Dwayne Coots

A client recently asked some great questions and I thought they deserved to be seen by our readers.

Dwayne,
Thank you for your information.  We have been working to address all  the issues you made us aware of.

If I understand the areas we need to address they are as follows:
1. Our Centric
2. Our Social Message
3. Our Internet Outreach
4. Our Branding
5. Our Website Design

Am I missing anything?

1. The Centric
Tenlittlelaws.info is the website at this time, but the focus is not  on the Ten Commandments as much as it is on the Kingdom of God.  The  Commandments are the elementary laws that teach people how to have  basic love for one another.  The ultimate result is developing the  character to be a citizen through baptism for the Kingdom of God when  Christ returns.  All people will have an opportunity to learn of God’s  way.

Revelation 21:1-3 is the focus point!
Rev 21:1-3 KJV  And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first  heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more  sea.  2  And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from  God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  3   And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle  of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his  people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

Where exactly this fits into the Categories I don’t know.  We’re still  rolling it over in our minds.  We have done some checking on the  keywords and the numbers are not very high for “kingdom of God”,  ”God’s Kingdom”, “Preaching the Gospel” or “Ten Commandments”.  Can  you assist us in better defining out niche?  Do you have a certain  link we can go and check the keywords?  The Rovin Search Engine  Visible was where I was trying to check keywords.

2. Our Social Message
Can you give me an example?  Is it the same as the message on the  Twitter and WordPress blog, and Facebook websites by getting people to  engage?  Mrs. Harrison and I have been working on a power point  presentation we were going to make into a video for the website.   Would this be more likely used on the social pages?

3. Our Internet Outreach
I’m assuming this would be tied to the blog etc.?

4. Our Branding
We have a logo, which I need to make some modifications too.  I’ll be  making those adjustments.  I have a logo which you can use until the  revisions are made.  It will be generally the same, size, color etc.   I have a colored logo and a pencil sketch of the logo which I like.   Both are attached.  The Logo depicts Revelation 21:1-3.  The Scripture  and the logo would the same branding.

5. Our Website Design
We have allocated $750 as our beginning budget, but when you break it  down into hours, it’s only thirty hours.  Everything we’ve discussed  up to this point will need to be scaled back.  I don’t know how much  you can get done in thirty hours.

At this point I would say that the look of the website could stay the  same, but the CMS and SEO codes would be the focus point.  I would  like to have a new design, but I believe it’s functionality is more  important than it’s looks.

We need more of a break down and get specific about what we hope to  achieve in this venture.  As you said before, we need a clear  understanding of what is going to happen and the cost.  If we can have  some design changes in the looks that won’t take away from the  functionality design then we can proceed to change the looks.

With this all being said, have I given you enough information you can  generate a plan of action on your part.  I keep thinking that the  redesign of the website has to be driven by us if we hope to keep the  cost down by us giving you a look and you executing it; otherwise, the  hours would be spent on design work.  Please don’t hold back, I need  you to be blunt and to the point with what we’re discussing.  I need  to make decisions based on your input.

To be blunt, I think that if you have a commitment to reach out to people, deliver your message in various forms and media, engage them where they are congregating, provide them with compelling messages of hope, relieve their fear, offer help when asked and ask them to help you promote your program, reward them with a unified and beneficial message, and be a leader; you will win. In your life and in your ministry brother.

As far as a plan of action:
1 – Gather a logical outline of the main categories of your site (not the one you have now but the idea one you want). Making sure you do not confuse titles of articles with categories of content.  This will become your new navigation system

2 – Make a list (a tweet sheet) of at least 100 small quotes and scriptures that provide guidance. Keep each quote below 100 character – including spaces – so we still have room for a shortlink back to your site.

3 – Make a list of the prime keywords that you would like to attack. You can acquire this using the Google public keyword suggestion tool. Just go to Google and type in Keyword suggestion tool and Google usually puts its tool at the top. Limit your list to 50 keywords for now that have the most searches.

4 – Take each keyphrase from this list and sort it into the category structure you set up in step #1. So each keyphrase is now under the site navigation in one category or another.

5 – Take each keyphrase and do research on it to compose an informative article on it of at least 500 words. Make sure the article is 100% about that keyphrase. You can have opinion of course, but it should be about the topic. Compile the images you want to use or illustration as well as any supporting information like Youtube video links, tables and charts, links etc so each article is a nice little niche information package.

6 – Go over each article and look for every opportunity to utilize the other keywords in your master list. Highlight those in the copy because when you publish them those keyphrases will be used as cross links to your other articles and sections to provide SEO buoyancy for the site.

7 – Extract the most salient points of interest from each article. Use that to make a talking point outline you can adlib a video/audio/podcast delivery from. We’ll need this later to drive a multimedia marketing campaign for you.

8 – Compile a list of the top 20 or 30 most authoritative sites you would most like to get a link from. Then compose a open honest email message you can send to their administrator at a later date to solicit a link exchange.

9 – Compile a list of all the people you know and prepare a message for them asking them to visit your new site and to consider please mentioning your site to their friends, visit your facebook organization page and liking it, and also to follow your updates on Twitter.

10 – Compile a series of short messages that welcomes someone to your ministry, explains the mission you are on, delves into the message you are giving and how it will benefit them. Design this series of messages in a conversational voice (like you are talking to them in an email) and keep them in bite size chunks of 100 to 300 words each. Develop them in a logical sequence that will take the person from welcome to full understanding and even to loyal supporter. This series will become your first email autoresponder series. We’ll plug that into MailChimp to interlock with your other social messages.

Okay sir this should be a good start. Ironically I stopped at 10 steps (probably the marketer in me) but it should be plenty to get started with.

We can begin the site migration and CMS process any time. but this will give you plenty to work on so the project is always in a forward motion.

Thanks;
Dwayne

On the promotional side of things A1 really kicks because of the tools they provide to experts. Anyone who publishes content to the web knows the tool set is so important to making the most of your time. I also loved the speedy approval process and extra SEO support coded into the directory article and topic pages.

Looking at the content publishing side of the equation, the most important thing I noticed was the ease of use to repub their content. How about this for features?

• Killer RSS grouping
• One click print option
• One click Republish (including HTML and raw text versions!)
• Tag list and SEO freindly titles

So if you need a great source of top drawer free content click over to A1articles.

When you operate an Internet based business, all the world is your customer. The problem for most web-based businesses is reaching out to the world and getting your offer seen in a raging sea of competition, crowd noise, and surfer confusion. It’s critical to your survival to provide the best product or service, but it’s equally important to get the message out to potential customers. The solution is to hire a professional like seo essex . This can solve many of your traffic problems.

No matter how good your lead generation, in-house marketing or list building efforts are, the key to adding zeros to bottom end of your bottom line comes from adding new buyers. New customers are the foundation of our entire future marketing effort. So it follows that the acquisition of new customers is the master key to your business success or failure.

It’s common for internet businesses to get stuck in a SEM or SEO sales channel and marketing strategy that leaves them in a narrowly focused competition pool. Here they fight it out with other trapped marketers vying for a share of a fixed volume of daily searches. Each competitor has their list of keywords and live or die over how many sales they can win from the daily available inbound search volume.

So how do we fish new buyers out of this stagnant pool of traffic? We reach outside of our fixed list of keywords. But not just any new keywords will do. We must find keywords that are returning traffic at levels we can pull fish, er potential customers out of.

Search Suggestion Tools

There are several ways to learn what people are searching for and to new build keyword silos to bring them into our network. We’ll go into content creation and keyword farming in later articles. Today we want to focus on a great way to find the missing link between what we think our market is about and what the public thinks it is about.

How do we do that? And what does it cost?

Search Engine Suggestion is the answer and it’s completely free

Here we go to the various online tools (overt and covert) to gain intelligence on what Search Intent Anticipation (SIA factor) suggestions engines are returning for your base keywords. The idea is to reach out beyond your own ideas of what your market is interested in and to see what real human traffic is looking for. Very often, this simple process will break you out of a marketing rut by opening new sales channels you can work on — to market them or even develop new products.

Please note that since most major search engines have refocus on monetized search, their main interest is in delivering quality search results. A big component of result quality is to anticipate and drill the surfer down to where they need to be when they started the search session. So the concept is to anticipate the surfer’s needs and deliver the best suggestions to fill in the blanks created by the surfer’s gap of imagination, laziness, or lack of keyword or typing skills, etc…

Also note that since the engines really want to monetize you they are always balancing Visitor Value (VV factor) with accurate anticipation. Even if they don’t admit it, there will always be heavy algorithmic gravitational pull towards commerce-specific results. You can be assured that commerce will play a factor because profitable search engines survive by driving traffic to monetized search.

A shocking but simple rule: If there is high search volume there will always be monetized search.

Why is that? Because anything that has a high volume of search will create a focus and concentration of human interest that will in turn lure Internet marketers into the game. Internet Marketers love the crowd because as P.T. Barnum claimed there is a sucker in every crowd.

So even on innocent subjects and strongly academic search terms, human interest generates the search volume and the search volume generates marketing interest, which in turns ignites search activity (remember that Internet marketers have to constantly study the subject to steal content to power their content-centric internet marketing information product marketing efforts).

But I digress… What we want to focus on is the margin created between human interest and marketing interest. Why? Because in that gap are seething pools of fish for you to drop a baited line into. And one of the best tools to discover the gap and create whole new channels you can exploit for free is search suggestion.

Google for example now has search suggestion based on absolute metrics. Just hit their main search site for real time search suggestions. Type in a few letters of your key phrase and the suggestions are instantly delivered to you. As a bonus they also throw in the number of indexed page results. Yahoo, has been providing these for a long time and they still work great. MSN Live and Ask.com are also helpful, but their anticipation-suggestion engine is very strongly weighted to commerce results. This makes sense considering their market positioning and struggle for share.

It’s easy and free to add new life to your web marketing by using the free tools provided by the search engines. So go for it! And happy fishing.

Work: The work and time it takes to build good authority sites with high visitor value and long lasting serps positioning.

versus…

Worry: The stress over when those quickly ranked machine gun affiliate traps, slick redirects and frame pages will get nerfed or even flagged as spam.

Whether you’re designing an affiliate internet marketing plan from scratch, or if you already have affiliates sites deployed, you always need more testing and feedback to monitor your conversion-path effectiveness. The most common ways to adjust are spinning and split testing pre- and post-click components like ad copy, anchor phrases, and landing page copy. But if you operate networks of thin affiliate sites you are very limited in how effective your spin-post-test cycles can be since the goal is direct injection into the sale channel from the initial search click.

Thin affiliate sites have minimal original copy and limited visitor value. It’s tough to bring them up the serps and get these kinds of pages organically ranked. No kidding right? No not really. The cause-effect relationship between value and organic ranking is made more difficult by the constant adjustment required to address ever changing search algorithms and ever increasing human-assisted page ranking.

But thin sites have one huge advantage; deployment speed. While everyone else is hoeing away on their content, trust relationships, and logical link building, the thin affiliate farmer has already grown a huge 100 acre co-op and by shear scale has socially self-promoted their sites into the top 10 or 20.

Unfair? Unethical? Slimy? Maybe so, but that’s not the point of this post. Let’s get back to main idea: The choice that YOU as a web developer and marketer have to make when planning your deployment strategy for a certain niche or product line.

You may find my attitude callous but honestly I don’t waste much time thinking about which way to go. I want to do what works best for my clients. The real choice depends on the market. Let me explain.

When you approach a campaign that is affiliate based you are faced with strong competitive challenges from other affiliates and also from the product/service originator. Competing affiliates create market buzz but that buzz quickly turns into noise once everyone breaks into the game — or if you are late to the party and there is already strong brand and social exposure working against you.

Competition from the brand is also a serious challenge — especially these days, when SEO consultants are everywhere (ahem). It is no secret that many companies are collapsing their affiliate programs and putting the resources into brand and buzz building and dabbling in social link promotion.

So before you flex your affiliate site creative muscle, consider a balance of thick and thin affiliate properties. Sure, thin sites can help you achieve faster conversions, but high quality pages build real link equity and will help you survive in the long run…and isn’t this all about the long run?

Talk soon;

Dwayne

It is mostly included on the purchase of online marketing software, so if you're a newb, then it is recommendable to have one. Each day you ought to be doing something to help grow your business and make you more sales. It provides handy information regarding online marketing together with the software designed for it, and it contains the correct use of online marketing tools like pop up advertisements. Correct use of pop up windows is vital in web marketing scheme, so it is important to find out about it. Simply look for a trustful web selling software product around and pay focus in learning its basics.

It occurs each day. I cannot tell you how often someone will query a person’s perspectives and all of a sudden it becomes private. Can’t we just leave our egos at the door and debate things rationally? I don't have any doubt this latest event is going to return to bite this person on the fanny. When you do, you only finish up looking petty and childish. As for yourself, please take this guidance to heart. When searching out an internet site promotion company, you should have a look for firms which offer that breadth of thinking. Not only do they attempt to generate valuable and original content for the customer ( or counsel concerning how to do this ), but they employ a selection of methods and processes to deliver consistent, top of the range traffic to a domain, and increase the amount of conversions from each action to maximize the potential results. The services they are going to offer should ideally include : E-mail Promoting Forum and blog promoting pay-per-click campaigns landing-pages Conversion tracking and metrics Ebooks and article promotion services promotional release distribution Optimized content creation Social networking and bookmarking Video and audio content and promotion As well as the trusty on and offpage optimization needed to get the search engine listings. For each company looking to market online, there'll be a different mixture of methods which should yield the most impressive results, dependent on product, brand, audience and more.

Dwayne – You seem kind of like a guru on the online shopping stuff. My husband and I want to try and make some extra money by doing something online. We both have jobs but we figure we can spend about 3 hours on each weeknight and one weekend day to make a go of selling something on the net. We have a few hundred (maybe $500) to put into it. Can you suggest anything? We see the wholesale and dropship ads all over. Does that work?.

Answer:

Howdy Kelly;

Okay that is a great dream and a nice nest egg to start with. First you’re not going to replace your day job any time soon with a $500 investment, but with a little elbow grease and several weekends you can parlay that into something that will pay a car note and maybe create some mad money to boot.

First while I urge you to look into wholesale and dropship options, don’t just leap into anything just because of a sales pitch. Remember that landing page sales copy can be very persuasive and is designed to separate you from your money before you have time to carefully consider. So look into these options then come back and ask for any further advice once you find one you like.

Also consider novelty. Suppliers for novelty items like sexy panties and gag gifts are also an option.

Wholesale or Dropship products:

These are fun. There are aggregators like Doba and Simplix who you pay a fee to and they give you access to many ‘so-called’ wholesale products. Be careful because they are usually closer to 25% off retail so not really wholesale.You can also look into getting individual products and specializing once you find a good wholesale source. For example you can look are and select say, wholesale sunglasses to get started. Setting up a specialty stand at a flea market or the corner of a busy parking lot can make you more in a weekend than a year of eBaying the junk at Doba.

Remember that a lot of other folks are out there trying to make a few extra bucks on the web. If you take a moment to think and talk about differential marketing (how you can be different from everyone else) it can pay off tons.

We want to hear how it goes so please write back.

Thanks again;

Dwayne

His heart is in the game. He is working hard to promote his program and is making the right moves to stay connected socially. He has Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc… but what he does not have is a good solid Internet connection.

Grrr. So I’m chipping away at him to get with one of those internet satellite providers that are always advertising on TV. Don’t get me wrong this client has money. He is not afraid to invest in his business and Internet marketing program, but he is hesitant to get a broadband account.

These day – I keep telling him — you just have to have broadband to do anything worthwhile. How are you going to manage a viral video campaign if you can’t stay connected long enough to watch a Youtube video (much less upload one).  This is just one example of why he needs to just take the plunge.

I hooked him up with a link to myWildBlue so he can get started. It’s about $100 to get set up and starts at $50 per month. This is nothing for a marketer — particularly when it give you the freedom to run a mailing list, chatrooms, and other broadband features. Plus it frees up your phone line.

Since most of the folks who read me already have broadband, guess I’m preaching to the choir eh? LOL

Dwayne