Wednesday, 17 April 2013

Tips on How to Increase Adwords Conversions

No matter how much money you spend on advertising, you will want to make sure that our ads are being as profitable as they are meant to be. Following are some ways in which you can increase your Google Adwords conversion rate and make the most of your advertising budget.


Determine Who to Reach


Determining who to reach is the most important aspect of drawing up a marketing strategy. It will determine which keywords you advertise for, how much you sell your products for and even how many keywords you bid for on Google Adwords.


Do some research on your target demographic to find out what they want and need. If you have been in business for some time, chances are you have seen which products are the most popular and who is buying them. Use this information to make your online advertising appeal to the people who are most likely to not only click on your ads but also buy something from you.


Make sure your price is competitive. You do not want to sell yourself short, but sometimes the Google ad conversion problem has nothing to do with ad placement and everything to do with the fact that your prices are too high. Do some market research, consider the average annual budget of the people you are trying to sell things to and price your products accordingly.


Choose the Right Keywords


Google Analytics has a helpful tool that lets you see how many companies are bidding for any given keyword. Choose keywords that are not overly competitive if you want to get noticed.


It can be a good idea to choose a number of exact match keywords and then advertise for these using the daily budget system. Google Adwords’ daily budget system enables you to put up ads in the early morning and have them automatically taken down at night, which will save you a lot of money.


Analyzing Ad Performance


After a month or so, use conversion software to determine which keywords are generating the most sales. Any ads that are doing reasonably well should be left alone. Many companies have lost a lot of money and a large number of potential customers by messing around with good ads in an attempt to make them better.


Ads that are not doing well should be taken down or tweaked. Consider not only how many sales an advertisement is generating but also clicks and leads. If an ad is not making much money but is bringing a lot of people to the site, then consider leaving it up for awhile longer. After all, if people are coming to the site and the bounce rate is not unreasonably high; chances are that these ads will, over time, generate a profit.


Site Editing


If a lot of people are clicking on a particular ad but the conversion rate is very low, then make sure the page in question works properly. If there are any glitches on the page or it is slow to load, then this will drastically lower the ad conversion rate.


If your page is working properly, then see what can be done to make the product more attractive. Consider offering a discount, or getting people who have already bought the product in question to write up positive product reviews.


It should be noted that it almost always takes time to set up a profitable Google Ads campaign. Furthermore, the job is never done, because an ad that performs well today may not perform well a month or six months from now. However, it is possible to turn a profit using this method of advertising if you do careful research beforehand.


Make sure your site is properly laid out and functioning properly and then determine who you want to sell things to and which products you want to promote. Choose keywords carefully, monitor chosen keywords to see how each one is performing and then tweak your advertising campaign as needed in order to bring in good results. Do this and your ad conversion rate is sure to increase.



Tips on How to Increase Adwords Conversions

How to Get a First Place Ranking in Google

While there are a large number of blogs and sites claiming that they can get first page Google rankings in a matter of a few weeks or months, these statements are simply untrue. Getting a first place ranking in Google takes time, effort and a lot of hard work. However, it is possible to get high rankings if one follows the steps outlined below.


Choose the Right Keyword


Choosing the right keywords makes all the difference in the world. To start with, consider what your target demographic is and what sorts of keywords they would search for online. Next, check these keywords out in Google Analytics to find out how much competition there is for any given keywords and how many people search for any particular keywords in a single day.


Choose clear keywords that directly relate to what you have to offer. These keywords may be three or four words long or as long as seven or ten words. The length of the keyword does not matter; what matters are relevance and the amount of competition that you will be up against.


Putting Keywords in the Right Place


Once you know what keywords you want to use, be sure to put them in the right place. Make sure a primary keyword is added as part of the domain name and add the keywords to the website header, footer and in title tags. You will probably also want to use your chosen keywords if you set up a Google Adwords campaign.


Getting Quality Backlinks


Getting quality backlinks to your site is important. Google has a multifaceted standard of measurement for determining how to rank any given site and way in which it determines a site’s ranking is by measuring how many quality backlinks the site has.


You can get backlinks from highly rated, relevant sites by looking up popular blogs related to your products and then leaving insightful, helpful comments on these blogs, together with your website link. You will also want to set up a Facebook business page and blog to help promote your site and get more traffic.


Use YouTube


YouTube can be a shortcut for those who want to get high rankings for free. Google owns YouTube and often automatically gives relevant YouTube videos first page ranking. If you have added your website URL in the video description section, chances are that YouTube can boost your site’s rankings dramatically and help you generate a lot of site traffic.


The video does not have to be long or complex, but it should have clear sound and picture. It should also have highly relevant tags to make it search engine friendly.


Local Optimization


Local optimization is a particularly good option for any business that caters to a particular city or state. While there are some things that can be sold both online and offline, a lot of people search for local products and services on a daily basis.


You can optimize your site on a local level by signing up for Google places, submitting your site to local business directories and putting your company address on Google Maps. Using Foursquare is also a good idea; this specialized social media site gets millions of visitors every single month and is used by those who want to find a local business that is offering a good deal on any given item.


These are some basic ways in which you can, over time, get first place Google rankings for your site. While these tips will take time to put into place, they do not cost a lot of money to implement and are tried and proven ways in which you can boost your Google search engine rankings.


While there is no magic formula for online success, you will increase your chances of success dramatically if you put a priority on making your site search engine friendly. A site that is high quality and properly optimized will, over time, attract an ever-growing number of visitors and earn a high ranking on Google and other major search engines.



How to Get a First Place Ranking in Google

Web Development as a Career

Take a moment to look at the screen around the words you are reading. Look at the colors, designs, images, video capsules and how they’re placed. You are looking at a webpage made by a professional web developer. Web development is a growing field where you can flex your creative muscles and yet not be a starving artist.


Thousands of business websites launch every year but not all of them gain traffic. As a web developer, your job is to make your clients’ websites stand out from the crowd. You want to get as many eyeballs as possible to look at your clients’ websites. This is not only an art but an evolving science.


What Does a Web Developer Do?


Web developers do a wide variety of jobs for their clients, but basically it comes down to:



  • Making new websites

  • Revamping existing websites

  • Maintaining websites


Although those are the main three jobs of a web developer, a lot of steps go into creating, revamping and maintaining websites. Specific jobs include:



  • Running websites on different browsers

  • Website security and general bug fixing

  • Choosing graphics, colors and fonts

  • Adding new content and any links to that new content

  • Finding the right web applications for websites

  • Learning various mark-up languages like HTML, XHTML, PHP and CSS

  • Learning design software like Photoshop or Dreamweaver

  • Making the website function smoothly on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.


Where Do Web Developers Work?


Web developers encounter many different job environments. Some web developers work from home while others work in a traditional office. You may get paid a regular salary or only get paid after each job. Web developers may work with an established internet marketing company or do solo work as a freelancer. Anywhere you can find an Internet connection can turn into your workplace.


Some web developers may have to travel extensively, depending if their bosses or their clients require it. Web developers working as consultants may do the most travel. Even in this age of Skype and videoconferencing, there’s nothing like being able to meet a client face to face.


Required Training


Although you do not have to have a degree in order to work as a web developer, degrees make you more attractive to employers. Major in any computer-related field like computer science or information technology. You can take online courses for a certification in web design and development.



Web Development as a Career

Tuesday, 16 April 2013

5 Smart Ideas on How You Can Build Customer Loyalty Online

Building a successful business requires a great deal of planning, investing, researching and plain hard work. Attracting customers to your business is the first step towards helping your company to grow. Building customer loyalty will solidify your growth efforts.



Connecting with your customers is a must for building loyalty. This requires that you work on strengthening your business relationships through regular communication. The Internet and mobile phone connections offer many opportunities to stay in touch with your customers. You can utilize these means to develop a marketing strategy that will encourage greater customer patronage and loyalty. The following provides some ideas on how to use online services to help you increase customer loyalty.



Blogs



Business blogs offer great opportunities to connect with your clientele. Through a well maintained blog, your customers can stay informed of your latest products and services at a glance, which can save them time and effort in looking for what they need. Blogs can serve many useful purposes that will benefit your clientele. You can pass on valuable information to your customers about your business niche by posting well written articles on your site. Customers with special interest in your line of work will appreciate useful information that you share. You can even invite customers to comment on any of the articles posted to encourage interaction between you and other customers with the same interests. This can help promote a closer knit community among your loyal clientele.



Social Networks



Through the use of social networks, you can keep in touch with your customers anytime, anywhere and encourage two-way communications. Three popular networks that you can consider using are Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Choose the site or sites that are more relevant to your particular business. Through these medium, you can attract customer attention to product promotions, special discounts, current events, incentive programs, etc. that your company has to offer. You can also encourage customer participation in posting comments about products and services they have received.



Emails



Emails have long been used in marketing campaigns to attract new clientele. They are also an extremely effective means of building customer loyalty. By sending short email newsletters to your regular customers, you can keep them updated on your latest products and projects as well as offer special discounts and deals that will whet their appetite for more. Many customers look forward to seasonal or promotional deals at certain times of the year as well as discounts for special occasions. Your follow-up could be just the reminder they need to reconnect with your business and avail themselves of all that you have to offer.



Texting



When used properly, mobile phone texting can be a great marketing tool. It enables you to connect instantly with former customers and keeps you at the forefront of their mind. You can use short, concise messages to notify customers of upcoming sales, discounts and rebates. Encourage customers to sign up instantly for incentive programs that provide special bonuses, promotional deals or free giveaways by answering your text right away. By researching your company’s product sales records, you’ll have a better idea of what products customers are interested in to get them coming back for more.



Video Marketing


This is an area that has seen extensive growth in recent years and with good reason. Through video marketing, you can connect with existing customers by providing informational and how to videos on whatever products or services they need. Your videos should provide substance and value to your clientele, demonstrating your experience and credibility in your field. This will encourage them to seek your valuable products and services when they have need.



When it comes to strengthening customer relationships, do remember that a major factor in building customer loyalty is trust. Customers appreciate doing business with a company that provides quality products and services and has their best interests at heart. By establishing a business relationship based on mutual respect and trust, you can count on a solid customer base where loyalty continues to grow.



5 Smart Ideas on How You Can Build Customer Loyalty Online

How to Track SEO Performance

SEO is undoubtedly essential to running a successful internet based business. Without good SEO, a webiste will never get noticed by potential customers and business partners, which is why many companies spend thousands of dollars on getting top rankings.


However, it is not enough to simply apply SEO strategies such as getting good backlinks, using keywords in the right locations and submitting articles to article directories such as Ezine and Suite 101. You also have track your SEO performance if you want to gauge whether or not your SEO strategy is as successful as it should be.


When tracking SEO performance, you will want to look at the following factors:


– Where site visitors are coming from


– Which links are leading to the most sales


– Social media shares and bookmarks


– Advertisement based leads and ROI



Tracking Site Visitor Information


Tracking site visitor information is very important, as you want to find out which sites are referring the most people to your site. Google should be near the top of the list; if it is not, then you will need to work on your keyword strategy to increase organic traffic.


You also want to find out the geographical location of most of your visitors. This can be done easily using Google Analytics. If you see that a large number of visitors are coming from a certain area, this means that there is an interest in this area for what you have to offer and you may want to consider doing a local SEO campaign to target the area in question.


Sales


You also want to find out which links are bringing in the most sales. it is entirely possible for most of your visitors to be coming from one or two particular links while most of your sales come from entirely different links.


Finding out which links have the highest return on investment will help you know where and who to target with a strategic marketing plan. It will also help you see which products are in high demand and which may need to be marketed in a different way or even discontinued altogether.


Social Media Shares and Bookmarks


You will also want to keep track of your social media sites and see how they are performing. While social media sites may not bring in immediate traffic and sales, they perform a valuable service by helping to create an awareness of your brand name and what you have to offer. Some good social media sites to use include Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter.


Social sites such as Reddit and Digg are good for sharing your blog content. Each of these services has a way in which you can keep track of views, bookmarks, shares, likes, subscribers, etc. Your site statistics area should show how many visitors come to the site via any one of these avenues.


Keeping Track of Advertising ROI


If you are investing money in Google Ads or some other form of advertisement, you will naturally want to make sure the money being spent is well worth the investment. You can keep track of Google Ads using Analytics. Yahoo and Bing have their own advertisement platforms and webmaster sites with detailed report statistics.


If you work with affiliates, develop a number of banner ads that affiliates can place on their sites. Track these banner ads to see which ones are bringing in the most visitors and revenue. This can be done using one of the many affiliate ad creation and tracking programs available from various companies.


Optimizing and promoting your site online is very important, but you also want to make sure that your hard work is paying off and resulting in sales and leads. Take some time on a regular basis to analyze your sources of traffic and see which links and sites are the most profitable in terms of generating traffic and sales. Getting help from a professional SEO agency can also help you to better target your market, especially if you are new to marketing and/or not particularly tech-savvy.



How to Track SEO Performance

Sunday, 14 April 2013

Test Post from Creative Development - Web Design Sydney, SEO and Adwords Partner

Test Post from Creative Development - Web Design Sydney, SEO and Adwords Partner http://www.creativedevelopment.com.au

Thursday, 28 February 2013

Wordpress Site Been Hacked?

Had your wordpress website hacked? We have been helping a lot of businesses overcome this problem, so we thought we would set out the steps we take to remove malware warnings and viruses. If you have had your website branded on Google with the dreaded "This site may harm your computer" dont panic. The first thing you always do is was rage and deny that there is anything wrong. Use the Unmask Parasites tool, to find the problem and where it is, this will give you a few clues as to what you are looking for in your problem. Often you will find a hidden iframe link to a ".to" website or some other malicious domain. We are no security experts, but we do understand how basic hackers work. This advice is meant as a guide, don't sue us if you get it wrong. There are two things to keep in mind when working with this sort of problem. The hacker has a malicious intent, so whatever they are doing it will leave traces and links to files or websites. The hacked will also try to cover their tracks, and in the end sometimes the only thing you can do is set fire to your server.

 The hacker will have created, or forced, a way into your system that will be different to the traces they leave. You have to address this problem before your virus/malware problem will really go away. This can sometimes mean your host is infected or it might just mean your password is insecure. Don't Panic Create a fresh backup of your WHOLE website and database, marked "infected". Also, search for iframes, and basecode64(). Sometimes it will be hard to find all the files that will be infected, but the best places to start are the header, footer, load-template and admin files.

Right now you are looking for confirmation that this code is part of your problem. You can delete these references, but there may be more you have missed. Ultimately you will have to install a fresh version of your template, but we will get to that in a minute. Get to the Cause Search around on the web. There are common security problems associated with Tim Thumb, like WooThemes framework and an old version of TimThumb, which was originally compromised. This will also give you an idea of the problem you have, and how to solve it. The cause of your problems could be anything, it could be your theme, someone might have guessed your password, anything.

 From us sending in the request to the Malware warning being removed took less than 8 hours. In all we lost almost a full day of traffic from Google, which is about 50% of the total. If your issue is a compatibility problem, then you need to download a recent copy of your theme. Upload a copy of your theme to your server and go into the admin section and reactivate your theme. Make sure both your theme and the system are up to date, and you can see that it is activated in the back end. If this still gives you a white screen of death, then you will need to look in the www section of your host.

When looking at your website in a file manager or FTP you should only see the files on this page. The fastest way to reset your installation is to delete all the files, excluding your wp-config file, and the folders, from the root. Then upload the files from a fresh download of the system. This way you will remove any random index.html files or something that is blocking the index.php file from executing.