Increasing Profits by using Marketing Tactics

Giving Your Visitors What They Want

Too many times a web master will create a site that has meaningless information about their business. The problem is, web traffic cares less about your business and more about the what they want. Don’t appeal to their interests, and you’ve lost them.

So how do you appeal to these visitors?  The easy answer, “Give them what they want.” The more important question you should ask is, “What do my visitors want?” To answer this question, you need to research three imperatives

1. Who are your visitors?
2. What attracted them to your site originally?
3. What do they want when they come to your site? Once you know who your visitors are, what attracted them and what they are interested in, it becomes very simple to attract and retain them.

The next question, “How do I find this out about my visitors?” There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. First, ask them. Open up a dialogue with your visitor and find out more about them point blank.  A second way way to learn more about your customers is by using traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics. Not only will this software track the number of customers and the number of pages accessed, but it will also show pinpoint locations where your visitors reside, how long visitors spend on your site, how often they return to your site, as well as the amount of visitors who come to your page and immediately exit it.  With this valuable information it becomes much easier to provide unique and quality content that your customers will love.

Bring in More Traffic

Once you have created a reason for your visitors to stay on your site you need to learn how to attract more visitors to your unique content.  You have many options to build a constant flow of traffic to your site. We discuss two of the most important tactics to build traffic in this section.

If you want immediate traffic now, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the way to go. I offer a fair warning though, carelessness and lack of expertise can lead to a waste of your money.  If you are new to PPC advertising we recommended to use a budget of $5 or less a day and use one of the most popular PPC systems: Google Adwords. One great benefit of using Google Adwords is that it connects directly to Google Analytics for extra detailed reporting. If done right, you’ll find PPC advertising as a very valuable tool in bringing in new sales every month.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another must in traffic building for those who are serious about maximizing their profits. SEO is a way in which you can have your website ranked higher within search engines, thus creating more traffic to your website. SEO is done in two parts: First, your website must be search engine friendly. Second, there must be other websites linking to your site.

Gear your website to make money

While you want to provide your web traffic with the content that they want, you also need to make it easy for them to make you more money. Does your website make it difficult for your visitors to sign up for a membership or make a purchase? Why? Make it easy for them, and your visitors will respond appropriately.

You can make it difficult for your visitors to make you money in many ways. Give them too many options to nonprofitable actions, making your navigation confusing and cluttering your web pages with random text and graphics.  Get your customers attention to a profitable action by using varying degrees of contrast, color and font choice.  When in doubt use different approaches on different pages and measure the results.

Don’t stop there, there are other ways to increase your online sales.  From branding, and benefit centered marketing to cross promotions and improving “Call to Action” you will see a major bump in website revenues.

Hire an Expert

Like trying to do your own plumbing, Trying to do web design and marketing by yourself can lead to more bad than good.  Sure, if your dedicated and take time to get the proper experience you can do fine.  But if your serious about turning a higher profit for your website right now, you’ll be better off hiring a professional.

70 Header Graphics

This year, more than ever, I wanted to do my part by giving back this holiday season. So here’s what I came up with:

I created a special package of 70 eye-catching header graphics to be used on your websites, blogs, or other projects. 20 of the header graphics are specifically to replace the Kubrick header on the WordPress default theme.

The price of the package is just $5 and I’m donating $2.50 of each sale to The Salvation Army. On December 24, I plan on issuing a cheque to The Salvation Army for the amount I’ve raised up to that point.

Your support is greatly appreciated. If you would like more information, please visit:
http://karenblundell.com/headers.php

ICANN: $185,000 for your own Top Level Domain Extension

With new rule changes in the management of top level domain name extensions, look to see a number of new web addresses become available over the next few years. ICANN has released its draft application guidebook for those who may be considering registering their ideas as an alternative to dot com. The summary is basically: $185,000 in application fees are required, you must be an organization in good standing with an established history and infrastructure in domain name licensing / registration, and you must pass a review period which will include the filing of objections from other claimants to the extension name under consideration. Organizations that claim to represent a particular community must establish proof that they actually do represent the group officially. The PDF file with all the information on the process can be downloaded at:

http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/draft-rfp-24oct08-en.pdf

The newest TLD to be launched under these guidelines is the .tel extension, a sponsored TLD registered with the Telnic Corporation. Telnic is planning a global telephone book type of directory with contact information linked to DNS settings. According to Wikipedia, “.tel is about publishing contact data: phone numbers, SIP addresses and so on directly in the DNS, not on html-based websites.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel

.tel registration has opened for registered trademark owners:
December 3rd, 2008 – February 2nd, 2009

After that, they are expecting a “landrush” – registrations open to the public but at a premium price: February 3rd, 2009 – March 23rd, 2009

With general availability under standard prices opening March 24th, 2009.

According to Telnic, with the .tel extension a business can:

• Join a global online directory that provides you instant worldwide exposure…
• Integrate all your means of communication in a single place under your control…
• Update and manage your contact information and keywords in real time…
• Increase your search engine visibility through descriptive keywords…
• Provide a fast way for your customers to connect with you in a single click from any mobile device…

Individuals can:

• Manage all the ways people can reach you in a single place that’s yours forever
• Protect your private data
• Take back control of your personal information and share it securely
• … all without the need to build, host or manage a website.

Source: http://telnic.org/

There are 5 types of information that can be stored on a .tel domain.

• Contact Information – telephone numbers, mobile phone numbers, email, VoIP, fax numbers, etc
• Content Links – http & ftp addresses
• Navigation Links – By country, city, branch, department, etc.
• Geolocation – Map information
• Indexable Text – Keywords & Information

Source: http://telnic.org/business-discover1.html

In a sense, Telnic is combining elements of a web directory, social network, and SEO link exchange with a TLD organization to standardize it, which is an interesting and innovative business model which separates it from the way all of the other TLDs operate. Apparently, Jeff Pulver also contested for this domain extension with a VoIP business model, but lost out in the end to Telnic.

See Jeff Pulver’s blog at: http://www.pulver.com/

Of the seven domains introduced in the last round of TLD expansion in 2001-2002, .biz, .info, .name, and .pro were unsponsored while .aero, .coop, and .museum were sponsored and restricted. Less than half of those are used popularly, and even then, .biz, .info, and .name are marginal to the point of being irrelevant for most published websites. Most people have probably never heard of .pro, which Wikipedia sites at less than 7,000 registrants at the beginning of 2008. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pro)

So, will the new TLDs be successful, and what is coming next? In an old article written during the time that .mobi and .xxx were under consideration, the W3C committee actually came out against them.

“The addition of new top-levels domains is a very disturbing influence. It carries great cost. It should only be undertaken when there is a very clear benefit to the new domain. In the case of the proposed .mobi domain, the change is actually detrimental… The first effect is a little like printing more money. The value of one’s original registration drops. At the same time, the cost of protecting one’s brand goes up (from the cost of three domains to four, five, …).”

“The value of each domain name such as example.com also drops because of brand dilution and public confusion. Even though most people largely ignore the last segment of the name, when it is actually used to distinguish between different owners, this increases the mental effort required to remember which company has which top level domain. This makes the whole name space less usable. Is it fair to reduce the value of these domains which have been acquired at great cost by their owners?”

Source: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD

It will be interesting to see what happens, expect the large multinational corporations to snap up proprietary TLD name extensions (.ibm, .mac, .ebay etc.) and registrars to gamble on launching another series of “landrushes” with TLDs based on marketing campaigns. Telnic has clearly set apart the management of .tel from other TLDs, hopefully other firms will come up with new business models that make the investment worthwhile. Even with the possibility of brand dilution, these improvements will only strengthen the value of dot com.