We are not like the phone calls you get that promise to get you to the top of Google. We are not like the emails you get that promise 1000’s of people to your website. We are not like Web.com or Wix.com that offer you a “Free” website. We are not like local advertising companies that overcharge you for running web ads.
What’s wrong with being “those” companies? They don’t base anything on the actual money you will make. What good is it to drive a 1000 people to your website if none of them do anything? If they charge you $1,000 per month or more to get people to your site that don’t buy, you’re just throwing your money away.
Why not know what percentage of people will buy and how much profit that means before you start throwing money into ads? When I look at the pages that some of the companies that market local advertising puts up and the amount of money they charge, I can’t believe it. I think (maybe) that their intentions are good, but wow, they are certainly misguided.
We are a small company that can give you personal attention. All though we have processes, nothing is cookie cutter. Each company has different needs. Some need more traffic, some need higher conversions, some need a better design, and some need social strategies and more.
We can write the content and use the graphics that will get results. Guaranteed! Check us out!
Use the Power of Inbound Marketing To Unleash A Whole New Animal
As more and more small businesses struggle to gain a competitive edge, it is becoming important to find a unique set of tools that can maximize the potential profit from every advertising dollar you spend. Forget about the old days of having to do direct mailing, expensive radio and television advertising and full-page newspaper ads. These have grown out of fashion. The Internet and its recent revelation of social media have unleashed a whole new animal that has affected small and large businesses alike – it’s called inbound marketing!
When you consider that most direct mail isn’t even opened and the fact that most people skip TV ads to grab their favorite snack, you’ll begin to understand the power of inbound marketing as the marketing strategy for the 21st century.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Why “inbound” you may be asking?
The “inbound” has to do with reeling in customers to your company in comparison to going out and fighting for them. In this way, potential customers are already warmed up to the idea of buying your products and services. No need for hard selling! No need for begging! In other words, they want to hear more about what you have to offer.
That sounds wonderful but how can all this actually be done?
Inbound marketers take advantage of the latest technology of web 2.0 in order to thoroughly engage their audiences on the unique vision that their company offers. This is done with the use of blogs that publish high, quality content about their business or in the form of electronic white paper or webinars that can disseminate a large amount of info in a very short time.
Furthermore, the use of social media in inbound marketing is used to create “buzz” and get people actively engaged, with the hope that they’ll share critical information about your company left and right in a way that it goes viral. Best of all, social media is free and there are now many tools that can allow you to manage all accounts from one location.
Finally, SEO can be used to develop higher rankings for your company’s position in the search engines. This can be as simply as optimizing the tags of photos shared on social media platforms to complex strategies that involve PR outreach and relevant keyword research for your target market.
With so many companies taking advantage of inbound marketing’s recent success, what are you waiting for? There is a wealth of opportunity available out there waiting to be tapped into and designed to maximize your profits, while leveling out the playing field for many small businesses.
What is a bounce? A bounce is someone who goes to your website and leaves after looking at the first page. A good bounce rate depends on several factors, but a rule of thumb is that under 50% should be your first goal. You can find your bounce rate in Google Analytics under Audience Overview.
I see several sites with bounce rates in the 90’s. This is very bad. That means that 9 out of 10 visitors take a look at your landing page and leave without doing anything.
In this session, I am going to show you the first and most effective way to decrease your bounce rate by creating a Value Proposition. Here is how to do it:
Get a Super Graphic – The first part of the value proposition is a great graphic. This graphic should be something that is related to what you are selling, so the visitor gets a clear picture of what the website has to offer.
Create An Attention Grabbing Headline – Make a great headline consisting of 7 to 13 words. Five times as many people will read the headline over the copy.
Answer The Three Questions – Make sure your headline and the following paragraph answer the three questions:
What is it?
Who or What is it about?
What do I get?
These 3 questions should be about what you are offering, not about your company.
Write a 2 or 3 Sentence Paragraph explaining the headline – Once you have their attention, explain the headline in a little more detail.
Have 3 Bullet Points – Make 3 bullet points about the best benefits you can think of for your product or service. For some reason 3 works better than 2 or 4 or more.
Create An Opt In Button – Now that you have made your pitch, create a way for the visitor to continue into the sales funnel if they are interested, with a nice button to click.
By creating a good value proposition, your visitors will get a clear picture of what your website and company are about, and the interested ones will be more likely to contact you or buy your products online.
If you can decrease your bounce rate from 90% to 60% that means you will get 4 times more people interested in your products or services.
This is an article that will help business owners look at Google Analytics to determine how well their website is accomplishing the desired results.
In this article you will discover how to analyze the most basic but important information about your website visitors and how it affects your business.
You will learn which information you should look at, and how the results can determine your new website strategy.
1. Open Google Analytics. If you have Google Analytics on your website, just go to www.google.com/analytics. Make sure you are signed into your Google account. In the header you will see a button to “Access Google Analytics”. Press that.
You should see your company or website name as a link. Click the link. There will be a menu on the left for viewing several different statistics about your website visitors.
The time period covered is usually the last 30 or 31 days. If you would like to change the time period just click on the dates in the upper right hand header and you can adjust them however you like.
2. Check Audience Overview. This is the first area you should see. If not, click on the “Audience Button” to expand the view.
This area gives you the basic information about how your website is doing.
Sessions – This tells you how many times your website was visited in the time period selected.
Users – This gives you the number of Unique Visitors that went to your website. I like to divide the number of unique visitors by the number of days in the selected period to determine how many visitors per day you are getting. This information is valuable once the value per visitor is determined. For instructions on determining the value of one website visitor – click here.
Bounce Rate – This is a very important percentage. A bounce is someone who comes to your site and leaves without going to any other page or interacting with your site in any way. A high bounce rate (50% or more) means that your Home Page needs to relay better information about what the visitors are looking for.
To Reduce Your Bounce Rate – Make Sure Your Home Page Answers These 3 Questions:
What is it?
What or Who is it about?
What do I get?
If these question cannot be answered immediately, you will lose a high percentage of people.
Mobile Overview – This area is important because it tells you how many people are looking at your website from a mobile device. Make sure your website is mobile friendly to keep these visitors from bouncing, thereby helping your website convert at a higher percentage.
3. Check Acquisition Overview – This area will tell you where your visitors are coming from.
The most common areas visitors come from are:
Organic Search
Direct
Paid Search
Referral
Organic Search – These are people who find you using keywords or phrases from the search engines. The more of these the better – it’s like free advertising.
Direct – These people went directly to your site, usually by putting your URL directly into the browser. That means they already knew where you were. A lot of these are returning visitors.
Paid Search – These are people that are finding your site via paid online ads like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads. Before running any ads, you should know how much each visitor is worth to your company.
Referral – These visitors are coming from other websites that have a link to yours. This is another great source of free visits.
By studying the ways your website gets visitors, you can determine ways to increase traffic to your website.
4. Check the Behavior Section – This section will tell you what visitors are doing when then are on your website and what areas they are going to the most. Under the Site Content tab, click on All Pages
This will list the pages in order of popularity. Usually the Home Page is first and is designated by a backslash “/”. The following pages are usually listed with a backslash then the name of the page, e.g. “/contact”. If you don’t recognize the page you will see a little double box with an arrow next to the page name.
If you click on the double box, it will show you what the page looks like.
There is another section in behavior that I use a lot. It is a little advanced. It’s called “In-Page Analytics”. Here you can check where visitors click once they are on your page. Very useful information to see what your visitors are interested in.
5. Check the Conversions. This section might not have anything in it, but it is the most important section of all.
If you click on Conversions/Goals/Overview, you will see if any conversion goals have been set up. Here are a few common conversion goals:
Phone Call
Contact Form Use
Buying a product online
Signing up for a newsletter
Becoming a member of your site
If you do not have any conversion goals setup, you will see something like this:
To learn how to set up goals, hit the “learn more” link.
If you have goals set up, you will see something like this:
The Goal Conversion Rate in this example is 10.07%. This is the number you will want to watch and how changes in the website affect the conversion number.
For example if you changed the wording on a quote form from “Get Quote” to “Request Pricing” studies have shown that the “Request Pricing” does 20% to 50% better in getting click thru’s.
Each goal should have a value assigned to it. If you don’t know the goal value, make a good guess, then adjust the value by keeping track of conversions and what you get from each kind.
In Conclusion – Your website can be a viable part of your organization and should help contribute to the bottom line. By utilizing Google Analytics, you can make sure you are maximizing the possibilities.
How to Figure What Each Website Visitor Is Worth To Your Company
By Randy Kauffman, Super Cool Sites, Inc.
In this article you will learn the most important thing about your business website, how much each visitor is actually worth to your business. This is extremely important. Knowing the value can determine all future marketing decisions.
Also, you will learn how to use a simple calculator to determine these values. Let’s get started.
Every Visitor Has A Value!
No matter how many visitors you have, each one has a specific value that can be determined.
In order for your business to make money, it must be selling a product or a service. Each product or service generates revenue for your company.
All company revenues should have a profit margin built in.
Here is What to Do
1. Put Google Analytics On Your Website
If you don’t have Google Analytics on your site, put it there. You will be able to get all of the information you need to determine each visitors’ worth.
Once you have analytics set up, look to see how many visitors you had last month. By using conversion goals, you can tell how many goals were achieved. The goals might be any of the following:
Phone Call
Contact Form Filled In
Pricing Request
Newsletter Sign Up
Product Purchase
And a few more
2. Determine Value
The easiest way to do this is by first determining the actual revenue received. If you sold a product for $300, you got $300 in revenue. If you sold a service for $80 per month for one year, you got $960.
Once we know the revenue value, you should know the profit you make for each product or service. Divide the profit by the revenue to get a percentage. Product Price $300, Profit $100 100/300 = 33.33% profit
3. Closing Ratio
Out of the contacts that you get on-line, how many do you actually sell? If you’re selling a product online, it’s easy; you get 100% minus any returns. If you selling a service and you got a price request, you should know what percentage you actually close.
It might be something like 50%.
4. Formula
Here is a simple formula:
Sold a service for $200 per month for one year: 200 x 12 = $2400.
You sell 50% of the requests. Your profit margin is 50%.
So your profit for each request is: 2400 x 50% x 50% = $600
5. Conversion Rate
For the first part of the value, you need to know the conversion rate. Let’s say 100 visitors went to your website and 2 requested pricing information. Your conversion rate is 2%.
6. Now we can determine the simple value of each visitor
100 visitors = 2 requests = 1 sale of $2400 = $1200 profit
1200 / 100 = $12.00 value per visitor
7. But Wait There Is More – Referral Value – Lifetime Value
Each customer has more value than a one-time sale. If they like the product or service, they will tell their friends. A percentage of friends will buy. This figure might be anywhere from 15% to 30%.
Each customer also has a lifetime value. If someone bought from you once, they are more likely to buy from you again. The lifetime value of a client might be double the original sale.
But let’s be conservative. Keeping the original scenario, let’s determine the actual value of a visitor.
8. Actual Value
Now let’s determine the full value of each visitor.
Average Conversion Revenue $2,400 x 50% profit = $1200. $1200 x 50% closing rate = $600.00
Referral Value 15% x 600 = $90.00
Lifetime Value $4,000 x 50% profit = $2,000
The total conversion value is $2,690.00 in profit. This means that each visitor is now worth $53.80 instead of $12.00. This makes a huge difference in determining future marketing.
9. Advertising
Now that you know how much each visitor is worth, you can determine how much you can spend to get people to your website. Using the above scenario, If we spend $8 to get a visitor to the site, you would make a $4 profit for the first year and $45.80 lifetime profit. As you can see it might be advisable to advertise for a first year loss to make long term gains. If you spend $15 for each visit, you would lose $3 for the first year, but make $38.80 per visit for the long term.
This is why you see and hear radio and television ads telling you to go to abc-company.com. They have already determined the value of each visitor and they know how many visitors they will get for each commercial. Very Powerful Information!
Conversion Calculator
If you would like an easy way to determine these rates and play around with them, I made a calculator that you can play around with. Click Here
This is a question asked by many businesses. Some have spent thousands of dollars on their site but nothing is really happening. Everyone knows that 89% of people look to the web for whatever they need. That means thousands and thousands of people are searching for what you have.
If everyone knew what you had, you couldn’t possible fill all the orders. So how do you get to them? How do you get them to buy from you? These are questions asked by many internet marketers.
If the answer was simple, everyone would be doing it. But there is an answer. What you actually need is an all-inclusive website solution. That sounds like a lot and it is. The all-inclusive website solution will do everything you need in order to get your website producing sales and leads around the clock and answer the question of “How Can I Get My Website to Sell”.
The solution will include all three areas that are necessary for optimal results.
World Class Website Design
Search Engine Optimization for the major search engines
Conversion Optimization to convert a high percentage of visitors into sales or clients
If you are missing any of the three “Musts” your website cannot produce to it’s full potential.
You need a world class design to look professional and up to date. You need Search Engine Optimization in order to get ranked highly in the search engines for the best keywords for your business. You need conversion optimization to get a lot of your visitors to either buy your products online or contact you about your services.
Having the “All Inclusive Website Solution” will give you peace of mind and finally answer that gnawing question of “How Can I Get My Website To Sell?”
Conversion rate optimization is the art of increasing the number of website visitors that buy your product, sign up for a giveaway, ask for information, call you or use your contact forms.
Most businesses use their website as a business card and expect nothing out of it. This philosophy will get you nowhere.
So, What have I learned? I have learned that your website should be another marketing part of your business. By optimizing your website to increase conversions and assigning a monetary value for each conversion, you can see how much revenue is generated each month for your company.
We have been working on websites for over 10 years. I have been in sales for over 40 years. Once I got in the website design business, I quickly realized that it doesn’t do any good to have a nice looking website if no one is going to it. The next thing I realized was that even if you had a large number of people going to the site, it doesn’t matter if you are not getting any leads or sales from them.
One of the coolest things I have learned is all of the different kinds of conversion techniques. There is a lot of information available on tests that other companies have done, what kind of results they got, and they are willing to share their information through blogs and case studies. Two of the companies that have loads of information are Conversion Rate Experts and ConversionXL.com.
Conversion Rate Experts have helped companies like Sony, Google, Facebook Apple and more. They have several reports and case studies listed on their website about how they have helped these companies make hundreds of millions of dollars.
One of my favorite case studies is the Million Dollar Landing Page they did for seomoz.org. They give a detailed 11 page report on all aspects of conversion techniques. This is available for viewing on their website at http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/
Another thing that I have learned is that you can’t just put a page and expect people to buy; you need to do a total sales presentation in order to increase your sales. You need to establish trust, handle objections, build value and then close the sale. You wouldn’t have someone buy from you in person in just a few minutes and the sales presentation on your website should take the necessary amount of time to convince someone they have made the right decision.
Conversion Rate Experts also have a study for Crazy Egg that increased their conversion rate by 363%. http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/crazy-egg-case-study/. This is a very in-depth report that encompasses many aspects of conversions from the original home page to the checkout process and everything in between. I learned that you can keep improving your site by going over each individual area and working on improving the conversion rate for each. Let’s say you are working on 5 different areas and you can improve each by 5%. Then you can increase your online sales by 25% for the year. This is substantial.
One of Crazy Eggs founders is Neil Patel. He wrote a blog about what he learned from spending $252,000 on conversion optimization.
On the crazy egg study the redesigned page is about 20 times longer than the control page. Again they are doing the total sales presentation on one page.
In this article Neil also mentions Digital Telepathy as one of the companies he used. I have checked out their site, they had a case study of what they did for Crazy Eggs design. http://www.dtelepathy.com/case-studies/crazyegg. They were focused more on the design and how the design could improve conversion rates.
They trumpeted a 21% conversion rate improvement for Crazy Egg. Their service starts at $20,000 per month which can be a little pricy for smaller businesses.
The other website that I like is Conversion XL. Peep Laja is a blogging master. He comes up with article after article of valuable information that can be used by experts and novices alike. If you are selling products online, he wrote “The Ultimate Guide To Increasing Ecommerce Conversion Rates.” The information in this post is fantastic. If you are working on increasing your online sales, you can work from the post and the accompanying links for months.
Some topics that Peep covers are:
Quality Product Images
Great Product Copy
Product Videos
Customization Creates Ownership
Charging for Shipping
Specials Section
Shopping Cart Abandonment
Live Chat
Increase Trust
Payment Options
Communicate Value
And Much More
There are many other posts about all different aspects of how your business can make more money through conversion optimization. Peep is a data person, as all good business people should be. Never assume something is going to work better without testing it.
Another favorite post ConversionXL does is the post about a good value proposition. This is about what so many websites are missing. A Great value proposition should be the first thing on your website for most businesses and it should do what Eben Page recommends, Answer three questions about your site.
What is it?
Who is it about or What is it about?
What do I get?
If you can answer those three questions and put together a value proposition, you’re on your way to higher sales. A good value proposition consists of:
An Attention Grabbing headline
A paragraph explaining the headline
3 bullet points
A graphic
Peep also has a great report that you can download by signing up for his newsletter called “13 Ways to Increase Your conversion Rate Right now”.
I will list the 13 items he mentions. He gives details in the report on exactly what to do with each item.
Do A/B Testing
Create a compelling and clear value proposition
Set Up a Sales Funnel
Cut the Jargon
Address Objections
Increase Trust
Make it Easy to Buy from You
Communicate Value
Offer Proof
Remove Distraction
Compare with the Competition Before they do
Reduce or remove risk
Add Incentives to take action right away
This is another report that you can spend months on implementing.
In summary, there is a lot of great information out there on how you can help your business with conversion optimization. Make sure you have a good way of monitoring the results with an analytics program. Good Luck and Good Optimizing!
I have been working with several companies on conversion ratios and by knowing what theirs are, they are able to effectively advertise to increase their profits.
While doing this I found that some companies were literally throwing money out of the window. In one case they were paying $1500 per month to direct traffic to specific pages and only converting 2 out of 1000. Since their conversion was worth $75, they were paying $1 per click and therefore paying $1000 to make $150. Not Good.
The proper way to advertise is to know EXACTLY what your conversion ratio is and what a conversion is worth to your company.
I used to send out flyers with ValuePak back when I was in the insurance business. We could send out thousands and the return was always a steady ½%. It cost us about $2000 to send out 25,000. With the ½% return we would get back around 125. Out of these we would sell 70% with an average commission of $300. 70% of 125 is 87.5 X $300 = $26,250. A good return for money spent.
We also advertised in the Yellow Pages. We had an ad that was $2500 per month. We received about 8 or 9 phone calls a day from the ad and sold about 40% of them. This made sense until the Internet came along and people quit using the Yellow Pages.
Advertising on the Internet is so much nicer than the Yellow Pages. You can track everything and fine tune it daily if you want. You know how many people are clicking on your ad, how many people buy and how much the ad costs. It’s only simple math to determine whether you are making a profit or not. Once you get the right formula, increase your advertising.
Affiliates look for this golden number constantly. Once they find a program that converts at a profit they advertise up to $50,000 daily.
To find your golden ticket, you need to know 4 things.
How many clicks you get per day?
What is your conversion ratio? (how many people buy or contact you)
How much are you paying to get people to your website?
I have run across this problem this year and last, so I though a post would be nice, since I could not find help anywhere in QuickBooks support. Also I was on hold with QuickBooks for 46 minutes to get an answer.
The problem was that the Federal Unemployment is withheld for each quarter, but the payment is only due once per year. I wanted to combine those payments into one, but there was another problem. My state has borrowed money from the federal government in order to pay their unemployment. So when I printed out my annual 940 form there was an adjustment for “credit reduction”.
That sounded like a good thing to me, a Credit Reduction. But in fact it is an additional charge.
So I go into QuickBooks to print the check for the year, except it only lets me print the four checks one at a time, and the total amount does not reflect the “credit reduction”.
So after waiting 46 minutes on hold, I got the answer. First I need to make the adjustment for my state being fiscally irresponsible, and borrowing money it hasn’t repaid. (By the way, I asked the IRS if I would get this money back, once the state repaid the loan. They said no.) Big surprise.
So to make the adjustment do these steps.
Click on employees, payroll taxes and liabilities, adjust payroll liabilities
Put in the date for 12/31/__
This will be a company adjustment and the item name will be “federal unemployment”
Enter the amount for the credit reduction
In the memo field, enter “credit reduction”
Click “Ok”
That takes care of step number one. Now we need to combine the payments into one check. This is how you do that:
Now click on “related payment activities” in the employee payroll center.
Then click on “create custom liability payments”
Make sure the dates are from January 1st to December 31st of the reporting year
Then Click “Ok”
Put a check mark on “federal unemployment”
Now you should be able to print and create one check for the proper amount.
Thanks QuickBooks and the IRS for this information. It only took 2 hours to get.
I hope this helps at least one person. Good Luck!!
Did you know that one cup of cooked spinach has more protein than Meatloaf? It’s almost twice as much. And according to Dr. Fuhrman, the author of “Eat To Live”, broccoli has twice as much protein as steak, per 100 calories . If you want to lose weight forever, eat only high nutrient foods. You can eat all you want and maintain a healthy weight. With most diets you are hungry all the time. By eating high nutrient foods, you will eat a much higher volume of food, thereby curbing your hunger.
