IsAWebmaster.com | Webmaster News and Tips

Direct Marketing has to be the most exciting area of marketing. The results of a winning mailing are truly thrilling. Few things can compare with opening your mailbox to find a flood of emails or envelopes filled with orders and checks made out to you! And if you can increase the response to your offer by just a fraction of a percent, you can turn a slight profit into windfall profits.

So one of the key questions marketers have always ask is, “How do I increase the response to my mailings?” In this first part of a two part article, you’ll learn 25 of the 55 excellent techniques for making sure your mailings pull a stronger response.

Not all of these techniques will work for every mailing you create. The key is to review the techniques whenever you’re planning a mailing. Pick the ones that apply to your situation and put them to work. Your bank account will be glad you did!

1. Carefully target your audience.

Sales volume can be directly connected to your ability to accurately identify your most likely customers. If necessary, create different versions of your package tailored to each specifically targeted audience.

2. Solve your customer’s most irritating problems.

Most customers don’t buy products, but they do buy solutions to problems that plague them. If your product solves a critical problem, pull out all stops to let your customers know.

3. Help your customers achieve significant goals.

This is the complement of the prior point. If you can clearly show that your product or service will make your customer’s lives easier or better, your sales volume should shoot straight up.

4. Focus on your customer’s needs, not your product.

Customers have limited interest in your product or company. But they have unlimited interest in their needs, solutions to their problems, and making their lives better. Concentrate on fulfilling their needs through the use of your product or service.

5. ALWAYS stress benefits.

Always concentrate on how your product will benefit your customers-both logically and emotionally. Hit the right hot buttons and your sales will skyrocket.

6. Repeat your key benefits in the beginning, middle, and end of your email, letter or brochure.

Tell your readers once, tell them again, and then tell them one more time. Remember, people buy benefits, not products.

7. Use the “4 to 1″ rule.

Your sales copy should contain four “you’s” to every one “I.” Customers want to hear about their number one priority-themselves. One of the best ways to convey that you understand your customer’s needs is to use plenty of “you” language.

8. Use a stop-them-in-their-tracks headline or first sentence.

Some letters and emails benefit from a headline while others don’t. Either the headline or first sentence must be very powerful in order to convince your prospects that your letter is worth reading.

9. Use sub-headings liberally.

Subheads help break up long blocks of copy. They also act as a “hot point” outline to pull the reader through the key ideas of your email or ad.

10. Seize the reader’s attention immediately.

Don’t waster space building up to your blockbuster points. Start with them. You have only a paragraph or two to convince your prospects to keep reading your letter. Give them what they need to make sure they continue.

11. Flatter your reader.

These days people are much more sophisticated when it comes to advertising. They know that you got their name from a mailing list. You can turn this fact to your advantage by suing this kind of copy.

12. Share some “inside” information.

Direct mail offers a perfect opportunity to appeal to a person’s need to feel special. An ideal way to do this is to share some exclusive information. Make it clear that this offer is being made only to them.

13. Issue a personal letter from the President.

People like to deal with the person in charge. Using this type of personal message builds confidence.

14. Never end a sentence at the bottom of a page in a sales letter.

Always use a broken sentence to carry your reader forward onto the next page of your letter or email.

15. Feature the offer.

Everyone loves a good deal. Your job is to design an irresistible offer and make it a key focal point of your letter or email. A strong offer can often be the extra incentive that will convert your “maybes” to real live orders.

16. Give something away for FREE.

Free samples, trials, demonstrations, consultations, or information are all exceptional ways of getting customers to give your product or service a hands-on try. Sometimes that is all it takes to close the sale.

17. Run a contest.

Give away a free enrollment in your seminar, a free subscription to your newsletter, or anything else that appeals to your buyers.

18. Use a special “before the price increases” offer.

If you plan to raise your prices, make your regular customers a special offer at the old price for a limited time.

19. Repeat your offer.

An irresistible offer can overcome customers reluctance. State it at least twice in your email or letter, and again on your order form.

20. Make a time-limited offer.

Offer a special deal for a limited period of time. And do just that-legally you can’t continue a time-limited offer indefinitely.

21. Base your offer on a limited supply.

A close-out of your inventory can create strong demand. A limited supply offer can be used to designate exclusivity and prestige.

22. Offer a special deal to the first 100 people who order.

Or the first 25, 50, 250 and so on. But remember, the key here is to keep it to a meaningful limit as an incentive for customers to act quickly.

23. Make a charter offer.

This approach is ideal for new products, subscriptions,and service agreements. If your product isn’t new, consider starting a membership club and offering charter members special benefits.

24. Make a “last chance” offer.

Last chance at this price, inventory close-outs, and last chance before a model change can all be used to successfully win more orders.

25. “Buy 1 get 1 FREE” always outpulls “2 for the price of 1.”

Although the savings are precisely the same, the first format sounds like the customer is getting a better bargain.

As mentioned in the beginning, not all of these techniques will work for every mailing you create. The key is to review the techniques whenever you’re planning a mailing. Pick the ones that apply to your situation and put them to work.

In part two you’ll learn about boosting the pulling power of your mailings.

In the meantime you have plenty of ideas to apply in your marketing. So go to work and try them out!

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Mark Ellis – Always concentrate on how your product will benefit your customers-both logically and emotionally. Hit the right hot buttons and your sales will skyrocket.
http://www.websitemarketingwealth.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

55 Hot Tips For Boosting Your Direct Marketing-Part I

With everyone bombarded by email overload, do you really think your ezine is being read? A Nielsen Norman Group Report revealed that the typical email newsletter gets 51 seconds of your reader’s time. That was three years ago. Today, many say its closer to 26 seconds. And, that’s if your email newsletter is even opened.

You’re Not as Popular as You Think

While you believe YOUR ezines are special and opened like gifts on Christmas morning, remember this: Dozens of emails are routinely wiped out daily in one swoop with the push of the delete key.

Even if the reader recognizes your name, you can be expunged just because they’re having a busy day or your email got caught in a large block of spam.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you stop doing email newsletters. In fact, I advise you to do an email newsletter on a weekly basis. But, I also suggest doing a monthly print newsletter.

Here’s why…

6 Ways Print Newsletters Beat Email Newsletters – And Why They Need to Be Part of Your Marketing Mix

1. Printed mail gets delivered – It’s never blocked or caught in spam filters. Faulty connections, email authentication and webmail service idiosyncrasies are not issues. And, you have no worries about connection speeds.
2. Print newsletters have more perceived value – Think about it: How many companies are willing to do this? Your clients aren’t stupid. They understand the energy, cost and time required to send them a great newsletter every month. It will get their immediate attention.
3. Print newsletters let you use unlimited amount of images – A picture really is worth a thousand words. Print newsletters are not shackled by bandwidth. That means you can use a variety of text, graphics and formatting styles to capture the interest of your clients.
4. Print newsletter are sticky – Print newsletters have great ‘hang-time’. Not only are they likely to be read from start to finish, they usually get passed around. Hand-along readership can be as high as four-to-one. Talk about free marketing!
5. Print newsletters offer convenient and comfortable reading – Printed newsletters are much easier on the eyes. Reading articles of any length on a computer screen is uncomfortable and often inconvenient. Plus, a print newsletter allows you to mark sections you find interesting, take it to work and leave it there to be picked up by workmates.
6. Print newsletters stand out and get noticed – By using color, logos and a familiar return address, a print newsletter is easy to spot. With an inbox filled with subject lines, every message looks the same.

Here’s Your Best Bet

Make no mistake. There is a place for electronic communication with your customers. Websites and email are an important part of any business.

But the hands down best choice for keeping customers and getting more referrals and building relationships is to include print newsletters within your marketing mix

You can even offer your customers a choice. They will see that you really care about what they want, not just what you are willing to provide for them.

And that’s what relationship marketing is all about, isn’t it?

About the Author:

Print Newsletter Marketing Expert David Gruttadaurio was tired of wasting money on marketing that didn’t work. So he searched for a marketing tool that would give him more clients for his cleaning business. Then he found newsletter marketing! Through print newsletters he was able to triple his sales. Now, discover how he got and retained more clients with his FREE “Profit Exploding Newsletter Secrets Report” at http://www.NewslettersMadeForYou.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Print Newsletters vs. Email Newsletters — 6 Reasons Why You Should NOT Just Do an Ezine

Normally, although I enjoy writing, I don’t have the time. Yesterday, I made the time and posted 2 entries to this blog. The posts were made a few hours apart. I’d barely finished posting the first when I received a Google Alert that it had been added to the Google index. I chalked that off to coincidental timing – Googlebot just happened to be crawling SPN shortly after the post. A few hours later I made the second post. Within 10 minutes, I received a Google Alert that this entry had been indexed as well.

Impressive. But, the question that comes to mind is this: Does Google crawl certain sites a set number of times per day or does Google monitor sites somehow so that changes to sites trigger a recrawl? Thoughts, anyone?

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Google – Shock & Awe

I’ve been fascinated by Twitter for months although for the life of me I don’t know why. The idea of micro-blogging – limiting posts to 140 characters or less – seems ludicrous on the surface and yet has a certain appeal. Maybe it’s because everyone is busy these days and less is more. Or, maybe I prefer concise communications to long-winded ones. Or, it could be that I believe if I play with Twitter long enough some truly original use for it will manifest itself to justify the time I’ve spent on it.

Anyway I thought launching a Twitter clone for webmasters and site owners might be interesting and possibly even useful for those of you who like the Twitter concept but would like to see a bit more focus in message posts. SPNbabble is the end result – a Twitter clone for webmasters and site owners of every stripe. Coming soon to SiteProNews.com. Watch for it.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

SPNbabble – A Twitter Clone for Webmasters

Free lead generation is a very cost effective way to promote any online business. Social networking sites are some of the best ways to generate free leads. Some of the ways I personally use them to promote my online business is by using Social networking sites and making multiple profiles on them. Then when you have your profile accounts set up you need to pimp them to make them look professional and do not try to sell your products directly on your profiles. Instead make yourself interesting and someone who arouses curiosity so when you start sending friend request people will come to your profile and take a look. This is where you can start to get them to your website because these social networking sites allow you to have links on your profiles.

The art is to make people click to your website to find out more about you and what you are all about. Also someone who has taken the trouble to read your profile is more likely to read your website and take notice what you have to say. This is how to generate free leads using social networking sites. It’s all about personal branding and attraction marketing. You can also put videos on your profile which is a great way to get your personality across .I also join forums where I will observe the conversations for some time then when the time is right and I know enough about the given subject I will join in. Because you have taken your time and got to know what is happening then your comments will be taken notice off more. The result of this is when you leave your signature at the bottom of the page with your all important link on it, people in the forum will click on it and have a look at your chosen website.

The advantage of this is that because you took your time and got to know the people in the forum they will put more credence to your website. The result of these efforts is more leads to your chosen internet business. Another great free lead generator is using the instant messages service on these social networking sites. When you have sent enough friend requests out and started some conversations with these people then you start to build a relationship up with these new found friends.

The great advantage of this is that you can send a broadcast out to all your friends telling them all about your product or business or whatever it is you are trying to be successful with. The people who receive the messages will automatically take more notice off you than they would a stranger. It is just human nature to respond more to a friend than some random email they may receive.

The final method that I use to generate more free leads is using the groups section. If you start your own group on a subject you know about then people will naturally come to your group and join you. This is very powerful because you are setting yourself up as a leader and expert so people will take a lot of notice of what you have to say. This is where you will get lots and lots of free leads for your business. So just like with the forums, people will go to your website and check out what you have got to say. All these methods will generate a abundance of free leads to your online business.

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Alan Stockdale – uses social networking sites like my space and face book for his successful internet business, all these methods plus others to create vast amounts of free traffic to his global resorts network website.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Tips On How To Generate Free Leads Using Social Networking Sites

Sometimes it seems like the hardest thing to do in business is to get things done: so little time, so many obstacles. And when it comes to marketing it gets even worse, after all there are all those administrative details that need to be dealt with, emails, inquiries, suppliers, and on and on. Finding the time to devote to creating a sustained, focused marketing effort seems like it’s near impossible. But the biggest obstacles of all are some of your trusted colleagues and advisors; you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that are a royal pain-in-the-ass. So lets just call them on the proverbial carpet and fire their butts; but first let’s check the files and find out who they are.

File One: Mr. Inertia
Everybody knows this guy. He’s the one who hasn’t had a new idea in five years. This is the fellow who thinks everything is just fine the way it is, so let’s not rock-the-boat, everything is just hunky-dory, thank you very much.

You have to treat your business like it’s a shark: no standing still, if you don’t keep moving forward, you won’t survive. It’s a competitive world out there, and in the Web-centric marketing environment, you’re not only competing with the shop down the street, you’re competing with the whole world, so standing still is not an option. Mr. Inertia, you’re fired!

File Two: Mr. Know-It-All
I love this guy, he knows everything, he’s done everything, and if you ask him he’ll tell you he invented it. It doesn’t matter what it is or even if it relates to your business, he’s done it all and seen it all, or so he says. This is Mr. Know-It-All; he stopped learning, stopped improving, and stopped listening years ago.

Despite all his self-proclaimed knowledge and insight, this guy hasn’t contributed anything meaningful to the marketing effort since a Blackberry was something you ate. Mr. Know-It-All, you’re fired!

File Three: Mr. My-Business-Is-Unique
We all like to feel that we have created something unique, something different, something that no one else does. The fact is business is business; it’s very dangerous to think that your company is so unusual that it’s irreplaceable, so different that you don’t need to market, so special that branding isn’t required, and so singular that positioning is a waste of time.

Don’t be fooled, finding your ‘mark of differentiation’ is just as much an exercise in marketing as it is an exercise in product development. Mr. My-Business-Is-Unique, you’re fired!

File Four: Mr. We-Always-Do-It-This-Way
At one point in my career I ran a company that manufactured photo albums. We had a large competitor who always undercut our price no matter what we sold our product for. In an effort to find out how they were gaining this advantage, we cut open one of their new albums and found that they were using cheap corrugated cardboard as a stiffener instead of the more expensive traditional 80-point board everybody in the industry used.

Our sales manager made an appointment with a major photo chain known for only buying quality. He made a dramatic presentation by cutting open our competition’s product illustrating the superior nature of our product and demonstrating how they were being duped into buying the inferior junk our competitor was selling them. The buyer, who was also one of the owners looked at the products on his desk, uttered an expletive-deleted and laughed, “Yea,” he said, “but they are cheaper.”

Just because things were done the same way forever, doesn’t mean that you can keep doing it that way. Keep innovating, experimenting, challenging the status quo. Mr. We-Always-Do-It-This Way, you’re fired.

File Five: Mr. Everybody-Is-Stupid (But Me)
This clown’s a real buzz-kill. In brainstorming sessions this is the guy who shoots down every idea that comes up without offering any alternatives. If some idea is actually adopted he immediately begins to try and change it. You’ll usually find him with a coffee in one hand and a donut in the other, standing over someone who is actually trying to work, telling them to move it a pixel to the right or add a little blue or saying stuff like, “I think it needs a pony, ya add a pony.” This jerk is like a dog going from hydrant to fencepost depositing his mark without any purpose or validity other than leaving his scent. Not only is this guy unproductive, he makes everybody around him less productive. Mr. Everybody-Is-Stupid (But Me), your fired!

File Six: Mr. I-Know-All-The-Customers-Worth-Knowing
Hard to believe but this guy does exist. I once called on a potential client who told me he didn’t need a website because he knew all the customers worth knowing, all six of them. He was a manufacturer and he did sell to the six largest retail buyers of his merchandise but one thing I’ve learned over the years, you never have enough customers, and as soon as you think you’ve got them all sewed up, watch out, because every competitor is out to take them away from you. And as good as you are or as good as you think you are clients will eventually be pursued by a competitor offering something better or cheaper. Never stop prospecting, never stop looking for new business, and never be satisfied. Mr. I-Know-All-The-Customers-Worth-Knowing, you’re fired.

File Seven: Mr. I-Know-All-The-Benefits
We all could be guilty of this marketing sin if we’re not careful. Thinking you know everything that people do with your product or service is a risky mindset and speaks to a lack of vision. This guy goes to the appropriate conventions, listens to all his industry’s experts and reads only stuff about his own established market. If it’s about something else, he’s just not interested, and he doesn’t see or understand the relevance.

The fact is all your customers are people who have lives outside of business; they all have problems, insecurities, hobbies, and interests that have nothing to do with business. And they may have a totally different point-of-view as to what you offer and how they can use it. You must pay attention to what’s going on in the world and how people think and react to events and situations. The market is an emotional and psychological minefield and you must pay attention to outside forces because if you don’t you’re limiting your potential. Mr. I-Know-All-The-Benefits, I’m sorry but you’re fired!

File Eight: Mr. Everything-Is-Bulls@%t
This employee is not just useless, he’s downright destructive; no matter what marketing plan you’re considering implementing this guy thinks it’s bull. He doesn’t believe in branding, positioning, or any form of sophisticated marketing. He doesn’t believe that psychology or emotion plays any part in the sales process and is probably the master of wining and dining clients resulting in the biggest expense account in the company but not much else. His clients were customers before he arrived and will probably be there after he leaves unless he pisses them off. This guy still doesn’t see the benefit of a website and keeps repeating, ‘it’s just an electronic brochure.’ His answer to a dip in sales is always the same, to cut prices. Mr. Everything-Is-Bulls@%t, you’re fired!

File Nine: Mr. I’ll-Get-Around-To-It
Nobody really knows what this guy does. He is pleasant, tells good jokes, and he most likely is the guy who brings coffee and cookies to the office for everybody once a week. His desk is always piled high with papers, files, and binders, and when you ask him for something he invariably starts to rummage through this heap of junk ultimately telling you that he’ll bring it along as soon as he finds it, he’s just been ’sooo’ busy. It takes him three days to answer an email, a week to return a phone call, and at least two weeks to respond to a request for a quotation. This guy just has to go. Mr. I’ll-Get-Around-To-It, you’re fired!

File Ten: Mr. Automatic Pilot
This chap believes that the great benefit of having a Web-based business is that he doesn’t have to work. This guy spent a considerable sum of money having a bunch of programmers, probably from one of those offshore sweatshops, develop a website system that automatically answers emails, fills orders, and processes inquiries. The only problem is that it doesn’t matter if a customer has a question or complaint they all get the same email-response that says they can order even more stuff they can’t figure out how to use. Mr. Automatic Pilot, you’re fired!

File Eleven: Mr. I-Don’t-Need-No-Stinking-Creativity
This guy doesn’t believe in any kind of creativity, he thinks everything is based on rational dollar-and-cents decision-making. His website lists as many features and benefits in 48 point red Times Roman as he can think of; he highlights each point in yellow and underlines them in green with a big purple checkmark beside each one. He adds several royalty-free photographs of fake customers with quotations he made-up while sitting on the john. And just to enhance his special offer page, he tacks-on a bunch of extra bonus gifts like a useless free e-book. This guy’s idea of marketing got stuck in the fifties; so Mr. I-Don’t-Need-No-Stinking-Creativity, you’re fired.

File Twelve: Mr. Get-Me-the-Coast
You run across these types every now and again. I once went to a meeting with this guy who was the Vice President of Whatever Mega Corporation. At first glance, he was very impressive, handsome and tall with a big office and lots of hair, and a voice made for AM radio. He talked faster than anyone I ever met. As we made our presentation, he slammed his hand down on the intercom and bellowed to his secretary to “Get me Johnny on the coast!” Before I knew what hit me, he’s talking to his guy in California who’s on his way to his dry cleaner to pick up his laundry. He asked him a couple of questions as fast as I ever heard without much reference to anything we were discussing and slammed down the phone with a thud. I had no idea what we were talking about or if this guy heard a single word we said. This guy was the master of taking meetings and impressing people, but with what I am still not sure. Mr. Get-Me-the-Coast, your fired!

A Final Thought
The single most important thing about managing good staff or contractors is that they will only be as good as you let them. So now that you’ve laid-waste to a staff of deadweight, what’s next? You need to hire or outsource the right people; people who are creative, innovative, and talented; people who are interested in getting things done, whether it’s filing or creating your next marketing campaign.
About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit MRPwebmedia.com, 136Words.com and SonicPersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

The Campaign Killers: 12 People You Need To Fire

A Search Engine Land post yesterday (Dec. 8/08) by Barry Schwartz entitled “Yahoo BOSS Now Serving 100 Queries Per Second” cited that the BOSS initiative was serving 10 million search queries per day, a figure that was close to rivaling Ask.com’s search volume.

I’m not sure if BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) was Jerry Yang’s idea, but if it was, it could prove to be Yahoo’s road back to competing with Google. BOSS opens up the Yahoo index to developers and companies, allowing:

- Re-ranking and blending of search results
- Total flexibility on presentation
- Mashup of BOSS search results with other public data sources
- Web, news and image search
- Unlimited queries

Someone in the Yahoo hierarchy grasped the fact that there were hundreds, if not thousands of companies, ready to put their own spin on search through mashups and verticalization. The major drawback to innovation in this area has been resources. The Yahoo Blog summarizes the problem nicely:

“As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure — from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that.”

The future for BOSS looks bright but the real question is how easy will Yahoo make it for smaller cos. to utilize their program. Right now, not so easy. The BOSS API is available to anyone, but the anyone needs to be knowlegeable in search with better than average developer and programming skills. And, BOSS Custom is an invite-only program.

The search stats cited by Schwartz and in Yahoo’s own Blog aren’t bad for a 5 month old program that doesn’t seem to have Yahoo’s full attention. Making BOSS easy to implement for Joe Average site owner/webmaster could put BOSS in the search industry driver’s seat in the next 12 – 24 months. BOSS has tremendous potential for revolutionizing and democratizing search, but Yahoo needs to put more than a token effort into promoting the program. There is a certain feel to really good ideas and BOSS has that feel.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Yahoo BOSS – An Open Strategy to Search Dominance?

David Berkowitz made an interesting blog post today about Google entitled “So Over Google” where he cites some of the frustrations people have with Google. Their gripes reflected some of my own and I suspect will strike a chord with many Google users, especially marketers and webmasters. As Google continues to move from search domination to search monopoly, the company is likely to experience the same sort of underlying resentment that Microsoft has endured with its monopoly of operating systems.

Ask yourself if any of the following Google gripes cited in the Berkowitz post reflect your own feelings:

1. Google’s results pages change too frequently.

2. Google’s personalized search results are restrictive rather than helpful.

3. Google’s SearchWiki is an experiment searchers can live without.

4. Ying and Yang: Google is so good that trying other engines is a waste of time or just not good enough so other engines need to be used which is a waste of time.

Post your feedback and any of your own Google gripes here or over at David’s blog.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Enough Google Tweaking Already!

Real Beginners starting out on their Internet Marketing career are overwhelmed with information on various marketing techniques, and their brains will be buzzing and overloaded with different ideas.

One of the marketing techniques that has become increasingly popular is Article Marketing, and it is, without a doubt, one of the best FREE ways to bring your product or website to the attention of the search engines, and to make sure you receive quality TARGETED traffic. You can be sure that anyone making big money on the Internet will most certainly be using Article Marketing as a major part of any marketing campaign. By regularly writing and submitting articles to the article directories, they are ensuring that their content is reproduced throughout the Internet world, and they can maintain a high profile in their chosen niche market.

The basic idea is simple. You write a good keyword rich article that provides useful information for your reader, submit it to the article directories, repeat, repeat and repeat! This is the way to keep a steady flow of traffic to your website. There is no doubt it can be time consuming and takes a bit of effort, but the results have been proven to be worthwhile. Before you get started there are a few points to consider.

• You will already have a good knowledge of your own particular niche, so share that knowledge with your reader by writing good, informative content for your article. The ideal article is informative AND entertaining.
• Decide on your article title. Remember that when publishers search the article directories for content, they will pick on articles with the right keywords for their requirements.
• Choose your keywords carefully. This may sound obvious, but make sure keywords are related to your site. There are many services on the internet that provide tools for researching keywords and keyword phrases. Beginners in particular should always make good use of these facilities.
• Find your OWN voice, and “speak” to your target audience. Don’t try to copy someone else’s style of writing. Decide exactly who you are writing for, and keep them I mind as you form the structure of your article.
• Keep your article short and to the point, without long sentences or complex language. Most people have a short attention span, so you must grab your readers, and make sure they can quickly absorb what you are telling them.
• Decide what sort of article you are going to write. Long essay style articles are completely unnecessary. “Hints” and “Tips” articles are always popular, and are a good place for the newbie writer to start.
• Proof- read your article carefully. You may have great expertise in your chosen subject, but will quickly lose credibility if there are basic grammatical errors in any part of your article. A good proof-reading tip that I know is used by experienced authors, is to read your work out loud. This will give you a whole new perspective and pick up areas which can be improved.

Before you start, read through a number of articles in the article directories to get a “feel” about different styles of writing and content. See what other people in you niche are writing about. When you find yourself thinking “I can do better than that”, that is the time to venture into Article Marketing!

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Ron Woodham retired at 65 and set up his own Internet Business. He spent 9 months teaching himself how to create and build websites from scratch, and now shares his knowledge through his Building Blocks for Beginners. Visit his website http://www.newbieplace.co.uk for the full story.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Article Marketing – Myth or Miracle?

As an internet marketer and a webmaster for internet marketers, I get frustrated when I visit a website and end up flipping through pages of content that doesn’t lead to anything. Most people’s website content doesn’t tell me what the next steps are. And, they don’t tell me what actions I should take. So how can they expect to convert their website traffic into more customers and sales?

Every page on your website – regardless of its purpose or content – needs to guide your visitor to the next step.

Obviously, your sales page leads visitors to click to the secure shopping cart order form so they can buy from you.

Your special report download page guides visitors to enter their name and e-mail address and hit “Submit” so they can be added to your mailing list.

But what about your “About Us” page (which contains your bio), your “Media” page (which lists all the major outlets in which you’ve been featured), and your “Contact Us” page?

Here Are 3 Easy “Calls to Action” to Convert More Website Traffic into Sales on the About Us, Media and Contact Us Pages
1. On the “About Us” page, after your bio, add a powerful client testimonial praising your expertise and your measurable and specific impact on the client’s bottom line. Then add the line “Ready for these kinds of results in your organization? Click here to get started now!” (This links to the contact page).

This call to action, in fact, can be used for any page that does not have an obvious “next step.” Just make sure the testimonial ties in to the page content. If the page is a list of your keynote speaking topics, have the testimonial be about how your keynote set an awesome tone for the entire conference, not about how helpful your sales department is to your customers.

2. Your “Media” page should not just be a collage of logos. It should contain short videos of your TV appearances, audio clips of your radio interviews or featured-expert interviews on teleseminars. It should also include links to the articles where you were quoted or links to your articles that got published on the top websites. Let the world see what a sought-after, in-demand expert you really are.

With that being said, a simple, but effective call to action would be, “Sarah B. Marketer looks forward to being the featured expert on your next program. To schedule her
appearance right now click here.” (This links to the Contact page.)

3. The Contact page, by definition, is a call to action. It needs to take your visitor by the hand and lead them through the next step.

It should not just be a page that displays your mailing address, phone number, and main corporate e-mail. Rather, it should lead with a paragraph that congratulates the reader for their decision to take action. Then, it should explain the process for getting in touch with you. It should also describe what someone should expect once they contact you.

Next, guide them through a simple web form that asks specific questions. This way you can do your homework and present prospects with a specific response and action plan. Make sure to keep this form as brief as possible, and only ask questions that directly inform how you and your visitor would do business together in the near future.

Having a web form, rather than just a link to your e-mail address, guides your visitor to take a specific action. This raises their level of commitment to you and increases your chances that they will buy from you.

Bottom line: Make sure that every page on your website provides a roadmap for your visitor with a specific call to action. This is the only way your prospects will reach the destination that you prepared for them. And, it’s the only way you will increase your website sales conversions.
Need some help? Get a live website review now and have us examine your website sales funnel. Go to http://www.livewebsitereviews.com

About the Author:

The Website Surgeon, Adam Hommey, increases website sales conversions for entrepreneurs, small business owners and Internet marketers just like you who want to make more sales now. To see where you’re actually losing money on
your website, get a live website review at http://www.livewebsitereviews.com

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How to Convert More Website Traffic into More Customers & Sales by Inviting Prospects to Take Action