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Translating your website into an online global business

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

These days having a website to promote yourself to the local community is not enough.

The beauty of the internet is that you have the potential to reach a totally global audience.
Even if you are only a small home based business, your little business can compete with the biggest companies online.

To do this though you need to think outside your corner of the globe.

Here are a few tips to make your website more ‘globally accessible’:

Communication is the Key
While it is all good to develop your website in English, remember there are many online visitors from other nationalities that may want to view this and don’t have perfect English skills.
If you regularly check your website statistics you will most likely see visitors from many foreign countries, and if your website is only in English you may be missing online sales due to the language barrier.
Make sure your website can be easily translated into other languages.
This is so simple yet rarely do you see translation tools added to most websites.
Google offers a free script that you simply add to your webpages which allows visitors to easily convert your HTML website to their native language by simply choosing the language they like!
Simple go to Google’s Translation page http://translate.google.com and select Tools and Resources and you will see the code you need to add to make your website translatable.

Is your Domain Name Global?
While the domain of your country is perfect for attracting local traffic, such as .co.uk, .com.au, etc, making sure you also have the .com domain is a must for global business.
You may not realise this, but Google.com and your local Google list your business very different, and tend to give preference to the domain that suits the local region more.
So if you are in Australia your .com.au domain will work great, but if you type in the same search term in say Germany’s Google, you probably won’t show up with your .com.au domain. In fact many international search engines won’t even add you to their local online search engines if you aren’t a .com domain.
Also, if you were in Australia and a .co.uk domain name came up in Google would you be as likely to purchase with them as you instantly realise they are in another country? Statistics show most people don’t, however they will purchase from a .com even though they are still in another country, because it is accepted as a global domain name.

Optimising your Website for International Traffic
Many people don’t consider the difference in the English language between countries, and a term that is popular in your country may not be the same in a foreign english speaking country.

For instance, in Australia you might holiday in an apartment and go drinking in a hotel, yet in the USA, you live in an apartment and holiday in a hotel!
In the USA you also go on ‘vacation’ rather than on ‘holiday’.

There are many instances where this occurs in English speaking languages, but it can be easily fixed.
Create your website as a local version and then simply set up a sub-directory and name that directory to suit the country. For example www.yourwebsite.com/US or www.yourwebsite/Australia
Then simple duplicate the entire website but change certain terms to suit the local language you want to target, and then on your homepage create a link to the different local directories.

This will not only make it easier for your online visitors, but will help with your international rankings on the search engines.

Author: Chris Bourke from Devision.com.au and WebSEOCoach.com
Visit www.WebSEOCoach.com and download Chris’s free ebook on Twitter Marketing Made Easy

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The real price of a website?

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

When it comes to web development it is always interesting to see the reaction of the potential client when I produce a quote.

Smart business owners who know the importance of a good website usually think I am too cheap, the rest usually choke on the price.

See, most people don’t see past that dollar sign on the quote and understand the real potential and power of the internet, and the fact that there are ‘websites’ and then there are online marketing websites.

Every time I build a website I try to encourage the client to think past using their website as an online poster, but create a website that works as a powerful marketing tool.

Sure adding in value might mean paying a little more, but in the long term, or even as little as a week, you will see the returns pay for themselves.

I’d like to share a recent example…I had a potential client who owns a motorcycle shop ask me for a quote on the rebuild of an existing website. The website looked ‘okay’ at first glance, but it wasn’t working as a marketing tool, it was more like a roadside hoarding online, and probably not directly making him any money.
After a quick review I found at least 20 things that could be improved on the website to most likely double his profits, yet when I presented the quote, (which was less than one of his average motorcycles!) he balked at it.

Now, I’m not giving this chap a hard time…I get this reaction a lot from people that don’t understand the power of the internet.

If I were to put it into simple terms for him it would be easier to compare a website to a motorcycle..
Firstly, the difference between a motorcycle and a website would most likely be that you pay a big price for a motorcycle with maybe around 35% of the total price probably going to the dealer, another 20% going to shipping/export costs, another 5% going to the manufacturers big marketing campaigns, which leaves you with a 40% value, which then depreciates each time you ride it. Then of course you have registration, insurance, fashion accessories, etc. Unless you run a postal or courier service, that motorcycle probably isn’t going to provide a return worth way more than what you purchased it for.
(These figures may be incorrect – I build profitable websites, not sell motorcycles, so I am approximating the breakdown of costs.)

On the other hand, a website designed as a marketing tool will most likely pay for itself within months and then continue to make money for you, in some cases while you sleep, depending on what type of business you have. Keep the website for a few years and I usually see a 800% or more return on investment.

So while a motorcycle is fun to ride, I’d love to have someone get me an 800% return on my purchase after a few years.
I’d jump at the chance to purchase one if that were the case!

Yet, explained so simply, people still don’t get it.

So how do you add value to a website to get an 800% return?

Let’s look at just a few of the basics…

Always make sure your website is well branded.
If you have a logo you use for your business/business cards/stationery/press ads, use the same logo and colour scheme on your website so your brand is strong and consistent. Branding is everything!

Make contact simple.
I see so many websites (including the motorcycle site mentioned) that don’t have a phone number visible, or they have it way down in the footer of a long scrolling page. Thats perfect, if you DON’T want people to call you!
always try and keep the phone number near the top of the website, and reinforce it on every page of your site, in the same location, and even throughout your web content.
Add a contact form on your website so people can contact you outside of business hours, and add clearly defined links in your main text that link to the contact form (eg CLICK HERE TO CONTACT US).
And make sure the links actually click through to the page! It’s amazing how many people forget to add a live click through link or forget to test it.

Create a marketing list of potential clients
It doesn’t take much to set up an automated email marketing system with a simple form on your homepage to entice people to join your mailing list. Adding a mailing list to your website is one of the most important marketing tools a website can have, and you will find on average your potential client database will grow around 400% every week!
Using an email marketing system such as Aweber allows you to easily add a contact form into your website, and the contact details of each person that signs up is saved to a database for future email marketing, which is fully trackable for each campaign.

Online Brochure
When people are visiting your website looking for a particular product, odds are they are also going to look at your competitors websites as well. If they visit a bunch of competitors sites there is always a good chance they will forget your web address. Add a downloadable PDF flyer of your latest products to your website, so they have something to keep after they leave your website. Ideally kill two birds with one stone and add the downloadable brochure into the Mailing List subscribe form, so you collect their data each time someone wants a copy of your PDF brochure. Your marketing database will grow fast!

If you are marketing a product (such as motorcycles), they look much better when they are moving rather than a static photo. Adding a Youtube clip into your website is quick and easy and adds another dimension to your website, plus it creates additional online marketing for you through Youtube. Youtube videos allow you to create a live link from the videoclip to your website, producing much more potential traffic for your website.

Online Social Networking
‘Tweeting’ new products through Twitter, and adding the Facebook ‘Like’ button to your website allow visitors to share your product marketing with their friends, who usually share similar interests. This creates a great deal of website traffic for you and potentially a lot more new business. Social Network marketing is a must of the modern age of online marketing.

Search Engine Optimisation
We all know the importance of being on the first page of Google, yet a lot of people struggle to get their website up there.
google is not as complex as many people make out, and a few simple steps can see you reach a page one spot on Google, and retain it. Always ask your web developer to include search engine optimisation when they build your website, and ask them to integrate Google Analytics into your website so you can monitor the results of where your visitors are coming from and how they found you online.

Ask for feedback
Unless you ask your website visitors for feedback you won’t really know how you are performing online. Website visitors’ feedback can really help you create a successful online marketing tool and most people are happy to give feedback if you ask. Add a Feedback form on your website in the footer, or simply ask through Twitter occasionally and review the responses. It’s always good to look at your business from the other side of the window!


Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design and Web SEO Coach.

Chris is a graphic designer, web developer, internet marketing and SEO expert based in Australia

Follow Chris on Twitter @webseocoach

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Choosing an Email Marketing System

Friday, July 9th, 2010

When you’re considering email marketing to help your business flourish, you should look into a few important aspects before making a firm decision on which way to go.

Firstly, somethingI have to advise against…DON”T use Outlook or any other email app running directly from your own personal computer!

Why not? Personal computers are for personal emails. If you want to use emails for promotional marketing, you need to be able to track your readers, allow them to unsubscribe, and most importantly subscribe to your email database as well as send the email to a friend.

The best way to do all this is to choose a professional online email marketing solution.
Yes, there is a cost involved to do this, but we are talking as little as around $15 per month. If your email marketing campaign is good you will make this money back without a doubt.

Making sure you choose the right provider for your email marketing needs is a bigger decision than you might think, because if you find you are unhappy with the service once you have started growing your email marketing database it can be a huge setback to change over to another provider. You see, most professional email marketing systems will ensure that each person that subscribes has clicked and given permission to add them to your database list. If you then go and move to another provider, you will them need to ask each person to re-subscribe to your list, which usually leads to a 40% drop in your subscribers. This can take a long time to build up again, equating to the loss of a lot of revenue through email marketing campaigns.

So choose your email marketing provider wisely.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A GOOD EMAIL MARKETING SYSTEM

Firstly, you want a system that is easy to use.
Creating emails needs to be easy, sending and monitoring the success of the emails needs to be even easier.

SETTING UP TEMPLATES FOR YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
Most good email marketing systems provide both these options, and even allow you to create your own Subscribe forms, response forms and auto reply email templates. Aweber allows all this, but even goes the next step and lets you set up timed auto response follow up emails, which is ideal for online marketing. Sending out additional emails for the following weeks can ensure a sale before they forget who you are.

EMAIL RESPONSE TRACKING
Tracking the response of each campaign can help you determine who is reading your emails, which products they clicked on in your email, who they forwarded the email to, and even how long and how many times they read it. This sort of marketing information is very important. My 3 favourite email marketing systems, Aweber, iContact and Constant Contact all provide these type of services, though I find Aweber the easiest to read. They provide simple graphs that you can review quickly.


iContact.com - Email Marketing Service

iContact is a close second, though a big plus for iContact that Aweber is yet to develop is the free iContact iPhone App, which allows you to check your campaign success anytime, anywhere from your iphone! Brilliant for the busy marketer, especially when you are running multiple campaigns at the same time.

Constant Contact and MailChimp also offers iPhone Apps, though being a graphic/web designer I just tend to like the iContact App and website much better. It’s fresh, simple and both the website and iPhone App are easy to learn and use.

MANAGING AND IMPORTING CONTACTS
whatever system you use, make sure you have the ability to be able to easily add or download your mailing list database of clients. You don’t want to sign up and then find you have to individually add one person at a time! Make sure you can quickly and easily upload a CSV or EXCEL file so you can get started on your emailing success faster

SETTING UP FORMS ON YOUR WEBSITE
This is usually where the systems let me down the most…setting up a Subscribe form on your website.
Mailchimp seems a little awkward if you aren’t too web-savvy, and I haven’t had too much luck with getting the contact form layout just right when I have used Constant Contact.

Icontact and Aweber are both fairly straight forward and easy to do, even for a novice, allowing you to fully customize your Subscribe form as well as providing you some great templates to get you up and running quickly, though I did have a few issues with Aweber not totally liking the fact that I was doing it from a Mac, though it runs fine on a PC.

PRICING
The pricing to use an online email marketing package various a little from business to business. Most start at $15 a month for around 500 subscribers and then allow you to send 3000 emails a month. Aweber lets you sign up for the first month for just a single $1! So you get a good try out of their system and if you don’t like it you can change before you get too attached to it. Aweber works out a couple of dollars more expensive than some of the other leading packages such as iContact, but in the long run the tools they provide for professional email marketing will probably provide a higher return to your campaigns, which is why most email marketers usually choose Aweber.

But have a look at them all, try them all out for a test run and see what you think yourself before making a decision.

Article by Chris Bourke of Web SEO Coach and Devision Design Australia
Chris is a full time web designer and developer as well as an internet affiliate marketer.

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5 Survival Tactics for Affiliate Marketing

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

When it comes to online affiliate marketing, there is no secret formula to ensure huge profits, just good marketing practices.

Through my own trial and error over the past few years, these next 5 marketing tactics I’ll share with you have proven to increase my sales dramatically against the tough online competition in the world of affiliate marketing.

Give these following techniques a try yourself and you should also see amazing results:


1. Uniquely design your websites for each product you promote.
Some marketers tend to bundle all their different products together onto one site to lessen the cost of web hosting, but this cheap-ass technique usually doesn’t pay off as the domain name will confuse the customer, and also confuse the search engines if you are marketing products that don’t relate to the domain name.
It’s always best to put up one site for a specific product.
And it won’t actually cost you that much extra; A $10 domain name from Godaddy.com and if you are with a good web hosting service such as Web Crowd, you can split your hosting account into multiple accounts for free, so your hosting is still free but you have a unique domain name for that product you are marketing

2. Create articles and pages that will highlight the product and present it in a way that people would actually want to read the entire article. Keep it interesting, light hearted and give it personality.
Emphasize how their daily life could change if they were using your product.
Bullet-point the compelling points. People love bullet-points!
Ask your customers to provide a testimonial about the product that you can then add to your product’s squeeze page.

3 Offering the free reports mentioned always works well to get subscribers.
People always love something that is free!
Include only the necessary information and specific points on why they should purchase your product.

4. Place a box or button for subscribers to request free reports.
This helps build your marketing database. The best position for this is the topmost side of your page.

You can set up a mailing list and autoresponder system with iContact that will instantly add those people to your mailing list, and send them back an autoresponder thanking them for signing up, with a link to the download.
If possible, prevent using the word ‘FREE’ in your autoresponder message, as there are spam filters that may perceive this as junk mail, and your email may never reach it’s target.

5. Create traffic to your site that directly related to your product.
One of the best ways to do this is create your website in WordPress blog software. WordPress is not only easy to add new articles to, but also the search engines love it, and you can set it to ping a bunch of other blogs, sites and online services each time you post a new article, driving huge amounts of targeted traffic.
Write new articles regularly to keep existing readers interested, and new readers (and potential customers) coming in.
You can make life easier by adding free pre-written articles for your particular subject matter from EzineArticles, or ArticleCity.com

When you keep these articles coming it is pretty easy to get around 100 new targeted readers each day. As this number builds you will see your product selling like hotcakes!

You can also drive additional traffic to your site or product pages using Traffic generation lists such as ts25.com.
Sign up for a free account and either surf for credits or pay a small fee and reach thousands of customers every day.

About the Author:
Chris Bourke of WebSEOCoach.com and Devision Design Australia
Chris Bourke is an online marketer, professional web development and graphic designer, and all round nice guy who enjoys showing people how to make money online.

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Building Your Business Using Twitter

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Popularity of the Twitter social network is growing tremendously on a daily basis. It’s the perfect place for people and businesses to share their thoughts and suggestions for personal and business benefit. Businesses can profit from the use of Twitter, and building your business with Twitter is possible if you have the knowledge.

Enjoy the benefits of Twitter business marketing

There are many benefits to using the Twitter social marketing program. Some of the most important benefits include the following:

News related to your niche, and technologies related to it are available online when and where needed. The latest enhancements to make your job and marketing endeavour easier can be found. Also many people are willing to share their experiences and ideas with others who need the information and assistance.

Using Twitter is an excellent method for traffic generation. More visitors to your website and online presence will help to increase sales, and perhaps more importantly potential sales.

The social database is a very good source for building a contact list, finding potential employees for your business and more sales will be generated from your marketing efforts. Many professional marketers have built their contact lists in this manner.

To find more potential customers the easy way without having to manually do the hard work yourself, download a copy of Tweet Adder.
Tweetadder is a brilliant software package that pretty much manages your Twitter account for you.
You can pre-set tweets to send on a regular basis so there is no need to remind yourself to post new messages. You can literally be on holidays and Twitter will be working for you!

Prove to the community you are an expert in your niche. The more beneficial information you can provide, the better the impression that you leave.

Another benefit is that using the network marketing method is free. The only investment is your effort, time and determination.

Not only is this enterprise used for building your business, it can also be fun to keep in touch with your family friends and colleagues. Share an entry or two to let people know what you have been doing. Let your true self shine through when posting comments

Easy and valuable tips for successfully building your business with Twitter:

1.Twitter is a place where people share information about themselves and other aspects of their lives and their specific niche. Because of this, it is important not to spam. If, in error, you are banned the possibility of building your business with Twitter will be exhausted.

2.You should follow people and not only have followers. The more people you follow and the more followers you have, and the higher your exposure will be.

3.Post information and share comments as often as possible. Posting may be time consuming but worth the time and efforts when you reap the benefits. Commenting or reply to other member posts is also recommended.

4.As the saying goes, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ Post information followers can benefit from.

5.Build your collection of followers. You may be intimidated by knowing this but the task is not as difficult as you think. Links to your Twitter ID can be placed on your own website and also in the signature in forums and message boards used for promotion of your website.

6.Follow as many people as possible. Try to balance the number of people following you to the number of people you are following.

7. Once you get a good flow of followers going look into using tools to manage your Marketing, such as Easy Tweets.
Easy Tweets is so easy to manage through it’s simple user-friendly interface. While it may sound like an advanced piece of TWitter software, it is so easy to learn, even for beginners. In fact, they will even give you a 30 day money back guarantee if you can’t use it!

If you are really serious about using Twitter for business, check out Twitter Rockstar. Twitter Rockstar provides you with all the professional tools to really power your Twitter marketing and to use Twitter to generate income online. Brilliant.

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5 Must Have Twitter Tools for Success

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

Twitter has become one of the best ways for businesses to actively promote themselves and their services or products to the online community.

Both individuals and corporate companies alike have learnt how to harness the effectiveness of Twitter to capture a global, yet targeted audience, enabling them to quickly push new services, specials, or just use Twitter to learn more about their audience and to promote their brand awareness.

There are individuals such as single mothers achieving 6 figure yearly incomes from simply ‘tweeting’ about products by linking to affiliate networks such as Clickbank, Sharesale, or Website.ws, and other similar online affiliates. When they make a sale they get paid as much as 70% per sale! At these rates it isn’t impossible to make a standard average weeks wage in just handful of sales.

But like selling any product, the key ingredient is attracting the audience first.
If you can successfully promote your products to thousands of people every single time you tweet, then you will find success and profit!

There are a number of great Twitter Apps and tools to help get the followers you need, instantly.
Within weeks you can literally have thousands of new followers, that can turn into potential customers, and help your earnings rise dramatically directly from Twitter.

Here are our Top 5 Twitter must-have tools…..

TWEET ADDER

Tweetadder is a brilliant software package that pretty much manages your Twitter account for you.
You can pre-set tweets to send on a regular basis so there is no need to remind yourself to post new messages. You can literally be on holidays and Twitter will be working for you!
Tweetadder also allows you to auto follow profiles and also find targeted Twitter followers by setting up the particular keywords or tags you want to attract. As you connect with followers Tweetadder will send out an automated message to new followers, which can be set as a marketing message to new customers.
Plus you also have the access to every other Twitter tool imagineable, such as adding photos to your Tweets.

Available foe both Mac and Windows, Tweetadder is one Twitter Promotion tool for every user, new or experienced!

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS AND TO DOWNLOAD A FREE WORKING TRIAL VERSION OF TWEET ADDER

MARKET ME TWEET
Market Me Tweet is an all in one Marketing and Management app for twitter.
What makes Market Me Tweet different from other Twitter Apps, or even just using TWitter itself to post messages is that it allows you to uniquely brand every tweet with your web address or business address, and as we all know, the strength of a brand is the success of any business.

But Market Me Twitter is more than just a twitter branding tool…it also includes location targeting, so you can target particular clients in your hotspot through Twitter, plus it also does all the other tools you need, such as scheduled tweets, secure tweets and twitter management for automated tweets, etc

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MARKET ME TWEET – CLICK HERE

EASY TWEETS
The name pretty much says it all, but Easy Tweets really does make twittering a piece of cake!
From the basics such as managing multiple accounts all at once, and scheduling messages, to the high tech elements of TWitter marketing, such as SMS and email alerts when someone mentions your Brand, and monitoring Trends in Twitter conversations to keep ahead of the competitors. You can literally track anything that is happening on Twitter.

Easy Tweets is so easy to manage through it’s simple user-friendly interface. While it may sound like an advanced piece of TWitter software, it is so easy to learn, even for beginners. In fact, they will even give you a 30 day money back guarantee if you can’t use it!

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EAST TWEETS – CLICK HERE

HOOTSUITE
If you are a serious user of Twitter, then Hootsuite is for you!. Hootsuite allos you to add multiple networks, including Twitter and Facebook accounts, and can be set up to be managed by team workflow, so more than one person can manage the account at the same time (ef, Admin, Editor, etc). Hootsuit lets you set up scheduled tweets so you can set it and then let it send out your messages when you want. Hootsuite does similar features to the other Twitter applications I mentioned above, including manage followers, create Twitter lists and more, however where it lets you down is it does not find new followers automatically for you which is a bit of a let down. A good tool though when combined it with Tweet adder.

LEARN MORE ABOUT HOOT SUITE – CLICK HERE

VALUE TWEETS

Valuetweets allows you to quickly create, manage, and track your Twitter accounts and social media marketing campaigns on autopilot. It takes only a few minutes to sign up and start seeing real results.

Value Tweets is truly an all in one platform, with complete automation. Just set the system to autopilot and you will quickly gain new targeted followers fast. Then use the targeted marketing campaign tools to really generate fast income through Twitter.
If you want to make serious money with Twitter than Value Tweets is the tool you need.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS ON VALUE TWEETS

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