Essential Website Components

In order to create a professional website, it must contain some essential website components.

Although the Internet has provided a wealth of opportunity for all of us, it has also created a breeding ground for scam artists. Internet users are very reluctant to make purchases online and share their personal information.

For this reason, you must take every opportunity to convey your professionalism. From your website and products to your customer service, each will play a part in your success.

The moment your site loads, your visitors will have an instant reaction — your site will either look professional or it won’t. If your site doesn’t look professional, your visitors may leave your site prematurely and never return.

If you’re not confident in your ability to design a professional website, here are a few options:

1. Hire a professional web designer. This option can be very expensive and take a lot of time.

2. Purchase a premade website template – Template Monster provides website templates you can purchase very reasonably. A website template is a predesigned website you can edit with your own information. You can also hire Template Monster to add your information to the template. They are reasonably priced and can have your new website up quickly.

3. Create your website online – Use a service like Wix to create a professional looking website right online. You can get a free website designed for you with the “Wix Artificial Design Intelligence” or design your own website with the Wix Editor.

So, if you’d like to get a professional website up quickly and don’t want to do all of the work yourself, Template Monster or Wix may be your answer.

In addition to having a professional appearance, a professional website should possess the following essential website components:

Domain Name / Web Hosting

In order to establish credibility, you must be willing to invest in your own domain name and professional web hosting. Hostgator is a quality web hosting company that provides everything you’ll need at a reasonable price.

Professional Logo

A professional looking logo is an absolute must. It will give your site a professional appearance and enable your visitors to recognize your brand.

Your logo should be displayed in the top left corner of each page of your website.

If you’re not confident in your ability to design a logo, you can get a logo designed at Fiverr for a reasonable price.

Theme-based Content

Your website should focus on a specific subject and provide a variety of information that relates to the subject. For example, if your website focuses on dog grooming, your pages might include all of the following:

• Include dog grooming articles
• Publish a dog grooming ezine (newsletter)
• Provide dog grooming tips
• Sell dog grooming accessories
• Provide links to dog grooming resources
• Include dog grooming news links
• Display dog grooming photographs

Content comes in a variety of forms including news, articles, and videos. Fresh, original content is preferable. If you’d rather not create your own content, you can hire people to create the content you need at Fiverr.

Email Capture

Collecting your potential customers’ email addresses is one of the most important essential website components. Whether you publish an ezine, provide website and/or product updates or tips, you must take every opportunity to capture your visitors’ email addresses. This will enable you to stay in touch with your subscribers and sell your products. One of the best and most trusted email services online is AWeber. They will take care of your list for you.

Display a subscription form on every page of your website.

Privacy Policy

Internet users are becoming more and more concerned about their privacy. Creating a “Privacy Policy” page is one of the most important essential website components.

Create a page on your website called “Privacy” and let your visitors know exactly how you will be using the information you collect.

This page should include an explanation of all of the following:

• How do you plan on using their information?
• Is their information sold or shared with a third party?
• Why do you collect their email address and how will it be used?
• Why do you track their IP address?
• Let your visitors know that you’re not responsible for the privacy issues of any outside websites you may be linking to.
• Why do you use order forms and what do you do with the information acquired?
• Do you run contests and what do you do with the information?
• Do you have a discussion forum or message board? Let your visitors know that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and
that they should exercise caution.
• Do you have security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under your control? If so, let your visitors know.
• Let your visitors know how they can opt out of your mailing lists.
• Provide your visitors with your contact information should they have any questions about your privacy statement.

About Page

An “About” page is an essential part of a professional website. Your potential customers want to know exactly who you are.

Create a page to add to your website called “About” and include all of the following:

1. A personal or professional biography
2. A photograph of yourself
3. A complete description of you and/or your company
4. Your website and/or company objectives
5. Your name, address, phone number, and email address

It is very important that you include an “About” page — especially if you’re selling a product or service. You must do everything in your power to put your visitors’ minds at ease.

Testimonials

A great way to build your credibility with your potential customers is to display your customer testimonials. Include your customer’s name, email address and web address with
each unsolicited testimonial to increase believability.

Money Back Guarantee

To further increase your credibility, you must completely remove your potential customers’ risk. Provide them with a solid, no risk, money back guarantee. This will put their mind at ease by building their confidence in you and your product.

Feedback

Many times, potential customers will have questions about your products and services. Instead of displaying an email address on your website, consider using a feedback form.

Create a page on your web site called feedback and place a form on this page to enable your visitors to contact you.

Your personal response to your potential customers can literally determine whether or not you’re going to make a sale.

Secure Server

If you’re processing your customers’ orders online, you must place your order form on a secure server. Not only will a secure server protect your customers’ personal information, but it also provides him/her with added confidence in placing an order with you.

Copyrights

Display your copyright information at the bottom of each page. It’s best to include both the word Copyright and the © symbol, as some countries don’t recognize one or the other.

Your copyright might look like this:

Copyright © Year Company Name

By taking the time to ensure your site possesses these essential website components, you will increase your chances of success considerably.Article Source

7 Fatal Sins of Online Marketing... Plus Secrets to Boost Website Traffic, Sales Conversion and ROI

If set up well, online marketing can help you generate a consistent passive income. There are many stories of how first-time entrepreneurs have made lots of money selling their products and services through online marketing. But there are hundreds if not thousands of times more stories of how folks failed bad. Investing their money and losing it or recovering little.

In its simplistic model, online marketing has three phases. In phase one, you get traffic to opt-in to your system. In phase two, you convert your opt-in leads into customers. Then in phase three, you retain these customers by getting them to buy from you again.

Yet each of these stages have inherent risks. And if you were to commit just one sin of online marketing, it could kill your entire business.

Here are 7 fatal sins of online marketing. Why you should avoid them. Plus, what you should do instead to be more successful.

Fatal Marketing Sin #1: Sending Traffic to Your Homepage

The money you invest in traffic is a sunk cost. The only way to get a return on your investment is by selling products and services. So if you were to get someone to click on your advertisement, you would want the best opportunity to sell them.

Yet 92 percent of consumers that visit a brand's website for the first time are NOT there to buy. And only 32 percent of those who visited the site with the intention to buy rarely or never make the purchase. This per a study of 1,112 consumers in the United States by Episerver.

That's why it's vital you first get your prospect to opt-in and give you permission to send them email messages. Then you can establish a relationship with them. Plus, nurture them with educational information to establish trust and credibility. All which can lead to sales conversion.

The best place to send traffic is to a landing page solely focused on getting visitors to opt-in. But a homepage is the wrong place to send traffic. That's because most home pages have a menu and too much information to distract visitors from opting in, even if you include an opt-in form.

Fatal Marketing Sin #2: Sending Cold Traffic to Your Sales Page

Sending cold traffic to your sales page before they opt in can be worse than sending them to your home page. Less than one-third of prospects who otherwise would buy from you, buy on their first visit.

By sending traffic to your sales page, you risk losing them forever by revealing your price, without first establishing a relationship with them. If they leave without buying, you have no way to follow-up. So you waste your advertising investment.

Fatal Marketing Sin #3: Investing in Traffic Before Investing in Your Sales Funnel

Why spend on website traffic you cannot convert into sales. Don't put the cart before the horse, because you may not get where you want to go.

The key to making sales is to have a good sales funnel. So you can generate sales conversion. A good sales funnel includes a series of email letters with links to content to establish trust and credibility. Plus one or more landing pages with persuasive content and strong offer. And an order page confirming the offer with a fast and easy way for buyers to complete and submit it.

Fatal Marketing Sin #4: Not Knowing Your Target Market

All too often marketers make the sin of having too broad of a target audience. Yet targeting a broad audience will not only cost you more, it will also lead to lower sales conversion.

The best first step before you invest in traffic, is to conduct market research. An in-depth survey to help you find the demographic, psychographic and buying behavior characteristics of your true target market. The results can help you identify the most appropriate marketing messaging.

Fatal Marketing Sin #5: Not Segmenting Your Contacts

The era of one message fits all is dead. The advantage of online marketing is you can segment your contacts and give each a personalized experience.

Two common ways to segment your contacts is through custom fields and tags. Then you can group your contacts according to those who have a certain tag or custom field data. And you can personalize the marketing message based on this criterion. That can lead to both increased sales conversion and greater customer satisfaction.

Fatal Marketing Sin #6: Not Split Testing Your Campaigns

Split testing enables you to compare results between 2 and 4 versions of your landing pages. So you can improve your results. For either higher opt-in rates. Or greater sales conversion.

The key to split testing is to focus on just one variable at a time. This variable can be to compare headlines, pricing, offer, or even design of the landing page. You simply designate the current version as the control and send a certain percent of contacts in your funnel to the "test page(s)". When one "test page" results beat out the control, then it becomes the new control.

Fatal Marketing Sin #7: Not Investing in a Downsell Campaign

As much as 67% or more may abandon their shopping cart. Yet you can recapture over one-fourth of these lost sales with a downsell campaign.

A downsell campaign involves a series of messages to contacts who abandon the shopping cart. Each message contains a persuasive message with a link to a dedicated landing page with a special offer. What once was sales-lost, now becomes increased sales conversion.

In summary, executing any one of the above online marketing sins can kill your business. But when instead, you execute the strategies suggested, you can help your business grow. To help you achieve higher opt-in rates, increased sales conversion and greater ROI.

Marketing services by Jeff Traister can help you increase your sales conversion through automation and persuasive copywriting. He is a certified Internet marketing automation consultant and direct response copywriter.

To learn more and get tips on how you can increase your sales conversion of leads and get customers to buy more from you, go to Your Digital-Marketing-Automation-Superhero

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10069565

To find about other ways of earning a passive income, go to Passive Income Mastery Blog

7 Landing Page Hacks That'll Double Your Sales | AWasia 2017

Email Marketing Best Practices

Putting these email marketing best practices to use in your business will help your email campaigns produce more sales and customers.

Image source: iStock.com

Experts predict that there will be 4.2 billion email users by 2022. Hence, business owners who don’t take advantage of email marketing are missing out on a valuable opportunity to grow their organizations. Email marketing is the practice of using email to promote your products. However, email also enables you to keep in touch with current and prospective customers, provide brand information, and highlight sales and specials. Widely regarded as one of the most effective digital marketing strategies, email marketing has a 4000 percent ROI in the right hands.

So, how do you ensure your marketing emails achieve optimal results? The key to success is to follow these email marketing best practices:

Get Permission to Email

Don’t waste time sending promotional messages to customers who aren’t interested in your company.Sending unwanted messages is one of the biggest email marketing mistakes you can make. Before marketing your services to clients, it’s best to make sure they want to hear from you. Current estimates reveal that spam accounts for 45 percent of all emails sent, and marketers need to take steps to ensure they aren’t contributing to the problem. For best results, only send email correspondence to subscribers who have opted in to receive your emails and refrain from using paid marketing lists. Every few months, you should remove inactive contacts who haven’t clicked on your links or purchased your goods; keeping these subscribers around impacts engagement metrics and can lead to spam complaints. Additionally, companies should ensure all their emails have an easy-to-spot Unsubscribe link at the bottom. That way, customers who would rather not receive your messages can quickly opt out. 

Offer Incentives

If you want to succeed in the email marketing game, you need to increase the size of your subscriber list. Achieve this goal by giving people good reasons to sign up for your content. For example, you could offer a free shipping promo or 10 percent off discount to customers who sign up for your newsletter. Additionally, you can incentivize subscribers by providing them with free content like white papers and ebooks. Just make sure the content you’re offering is desirable enough that subscribers want to stick around and receive more messages in the weeks to come.

Learn How to Build and Grow an Email List Quickly & Efficiently

Getting people to give you their email address so you can stay in touch and market your business to them isn't as easy as it once was. This FREE report contains nearly three dozen strategies for getting new customers and prospects to sign up for your email list. Download it for free when you sign up for the free Business Know-How newsletter.

Be Relevant

If you want to keep your subscribers engaged, you need to provide them with relevant, engaging content on a regular basis. Fortunately, email reporting makes it simple to see what content appeals to your client base. Not only can you see which messages and newsletters have the highest open rates, but you can also determine which content generates the most clicks and conversions. 

Be Personal

Get personal to give your subscribers a reason to open your email instead of the one from your competition. It sounds simple, but using the recipient’s name in the subject line can go a long way toward convincing them to open your email. Just make sure you have the correct name and spelling, as you don’t want to risk alienating the customers you’re hoping to impress. Additionally, marketers should ensure that the content of their messages appeals to customers’ unique needs and wants. Consider segmenting your mailing list based on previous purchases or clicks. You can even offer discounts and deals to appeal to specific clients.

Practice What You Promise

One of the top reasons customers unsubscribe from email lists is that their expectations aren’t being met with regard to message frequency or substance. Maybe they’re receiving daily messages when they only wanted to hear from a company once a week. Or perhaps the content is irrelevant, uninteresting, or otherwise lacking in value. Give yourself the best shot at email marketing success by telling customers what to expect in the initial follow-up message. Considered one of the most effective forms of email marketing, welcome messages attract 320 percent more revenue than the content that follows. For best results, send this message immediately after signup and let customers know how often they should expect to hear from you. The idea is to follow through on your promise so clients know they can rely on you.

Go Mobile

With a large number of customers checking their email on smartphones and other devices, companies need to ensure their marketing messages are mobile friendly. Fortunately, many of the mailing services now offer mobile-friendly email marketing templates that businesses can use when creating content. Additionally, marketers should make sure their subject lines are short and to the point. Longer lines get cut off on mobile screens, making them difficult to read and understand. Finally, you should consider limiting the use of images, as these often fail to display properly on mobile devices. Instead, use text to convey a message that’s persuasive and concise.

Utilize Calls-to-Action

You can’t expect your email marketing campaign to generate the desired results if you don’t decide what success means to you. Including a clear call-to-action is the best way to ensure subscribers know what step you want them to take. For example, you may want customers to click through to your website, make a purchase, sign up for a special event, or start a free trial. Be sure your CTA is easy to find, so readers don’t have to hunt for tiny text on their mobile phones. You may even want to include urgent language to prompt customers to action. Rather than asking them to buy a new product, invite them to buy today and earn 20 percent off.

Check Metrics

Companies that want to make the most of their email marketing efforts should pay close attention to metrics. While open and click-through rates are generally regarded as the most useful pieces of information, companies should also look at the number of bounces and unsubscribes they’re receiving. If a large percentage of your client base is opting out, then there’s a good chance you aren’t providing valuable content. Moreover, marketers can gain valuable information from the metrics surrounding website and foot traffic, coupon redemptions, and event signups.Article Source

Editor's note: Not using email marketing yet? Or not happy with your provider? BusinessknowHow.com uses and recommends Constant Contact. Try it free today.

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