“First let’s get traffic to the site to get sales going and then we can worry about our image.”

Is this approach successful? Should you try to ramp up traffic to your web site first, and then worry about the image your copy and design project to prospects?

That’s what the business partner of a friend of mine thought. Rather than designing the site and writing copy to give it a unique identity, keep visitors’ interest and convert them to buyers, she
was solely focused on improving the search engine ranking of the site to get more traffic.

Her logic was that the higher their site ranked on the results page of search engines like Google, the more traffic they’d get and the more money they’d make. This is logically correct, but almost
always wrong.

A top ten ranking in Google can bring more visitors to your site, but in most cases, that doesn’t mean more sales or a dramatic increase in sales. Why not?

Most web sites are like out-of-tune car engines with clogged fuel pumps and dirty spark plugs. They’re barely turning over. With an engine like that, no matter how much gas you pour into the tank, you won’t get far.

Ready to tune up your site so it brings in massive profits? Start here >>

A top search engine ranking and more traffic won’t help you make more money if your site isn’t a lead-generating, selling machine. I regularly hear from people who’ve spent tens of thousands of
dollars on pay-per-click advertising and SEO whose sites still aren’t even breaking even, much less increasing profits.

Don’t waste your time and money driving traffic to a site that doesn’t sell. If you do, I can guarantee you’ll still be struggling 12 months from now.

How do you make your site sell?

Stand Out to Your Target Market!

Discover the fastest way to ramp up your online sales and profits >>

How many sites have you seen that look like cookie cutter versions of other sites? Can you even tell what the company does, or which services they provide? Is it immediately clear what makes them better than the competition or what’s in it for you and why you should bother sticking around?

If your web site looks like everyone else’s, makes the same promises, or is vague or unclear about the benefits you offer your prospects, you’ll lose them in a nano second.

A first-time visitor to your site scans the page they land on and makes a snap judgment about your company. They scan the copy and photos and decide in a matter of seconds whether you are likely to have what they are looking for and whether to leave or stay (at least for a couple of minutes). And obviously they’ve got to stay for you to make a sale or convince them to give you their email so you can market to them.

Discover the fastest way to ramp up your online sales and profits >>

How do you build a site that encourages prospects to stay? You’ve got just four tools to use to make your site jump out and grab your prospects’ attention. Use them or lose them.

1. Your Headlines
The first words that your prospects see when they hit your site, keep them reading or send them away. Make them about your prospects, what they want, not about you. And offer them something
for free that generates a lead.

Recently I added 4 words of text to the homepage of MarketingForSuccess that increased my opt-in rate by 32%. Take a look and see if you know which words made the difference.

2. Your Images
The pictures, or better yet, videos, you use should either directly support your headline or create the image that you think will attract your target market. For most sites, fewer images are
better, they just distract from the words.

One exception to this is sites that sell anything related to lifestyle, whether it’s clothing, jewelry or outdoors gear. For these sites it’s all about image, and that’s what attracts your prospects. Take a look at the sites of Patagonia, Horny Toad or the Sundance Catalogue.

Ready to discover how to use your site to both attract traffic and convert it into profits? Use this proven system >>

3. Use Audio
You can use audio testimonials to build credibility, audio clips to entertain to educate and to tell visitors what you want them to do. And these can increase your conversion rates of visitors to leads and sales by 10-20%.

4. Your Page Design
Your web site houses your online business. When you design it, find the most talented web designer you can. Find someone who knows how to do more than make your site look pretty. Find someone who can create a unique site for you that sells!

The look and feel of your site is all your prospects have to evaluate whether they should do business with you. The design of your site is what brings together your words and images and creates the impression prospects have when they visit it. Make it the right one!

Ready to make your site come to life and start selling? >>

Put these 4 elements together to create a site that makes a strong positive impression, generates leads and sales. Then once your site converts visitors into buyers, it’s time to ramp up traffic with
SEO and pay-per-click advertising.

To your success,
Charlie

P.S. Most websites don’t convert enough leads or make enough sales… and most websites could be making a lot more money.

What’s the secret to making massive online profits with your website?

It’s simply a matter of putting the horse in front of the cart to get your web site working so you can maximize your online profits. Discover how >>

Click here to listen to a podcast of this article online >>

You’ve been working hard to get people to your site so you can generate sales. Are you frustrated yet?

Most website owners have spent more time and money on their sites than they want to admit — and they hardly generate any sales. Despite hours spent writing copy, getting the site built and struggling with SEO (search engine optimization), you’re still waiting for your site to kick online sales into gear.

Want to know the secret to making your website sell like crazy?

Traffic alone isn’t the answer.

I hear regularly from small business owners who’ve spent a fortune on SEO or pay-per-click ads and still aren’t making money from their sites. If you’re one of these, you know how annoying it can be. You want to be making money online, not losing it, and you want a good return on the time and money you’ve poured into your website.

What’s the secret to online success?
Get the answer >>

Your website needs to do four things to make money for you and your company. It needs to convert visitors to prospects; convert prospects into buyers; and to deliver the product or service and follow-up to get the next sale.

The first four steps to making your web site a money-making engine are to set up your:

1. Lead generation system
2. Conversion system
3. Fulfillment system
4. Follow-up marketing system

Is that all you need to do?

You’re almost there but you not only need an online engine; you need one that generates more money than it uses.

Which of the following scenarios describes your site?

A. Your site gets a hundred or more visitors a week but hardly generates any leads or sales.

B. Your site gets a modest amount of traffic, say, a hundred visitors a week, but at least 10% of site visitors sign up for your free offer (you do have one, don’t you?) and they give you their contact information so you can go to work helping them become buyers.

In example A. you’re probably spending more than you’re making. In B. you should be happily making money.

Ready to discover the secrets to turning your website into a money-making machine? Get started >>

What’s The Difference Between Sites That Make Money and Those That Don’t?

Every website that wants to make money has all 4 of the above elements but why then is it that some do a better job of making money than others?

In our family we own both a 1998 Subaru Outback and a 2005 Audi Allroad. Both have seats, engine and wheels. Both burn the same amount of gas. What’s the difference?

The Audi has an engine and turbo charger that converts gas into at least twice as much power. It accelerates beautifully, while the Subaru, chugs slowly up to speed. Now don’t get me wrong the Subaru is a great car but it’s slow.

Which would you want? The slow website that chugs along or the one that converts leads to sales at blinding speed?

Interested in turbocharging your website’s performance to increase sales? Find out how >>

The fifth step to making money online is maximizing your conversion rate. Many small business websites convert only a couple of visitors a week into prospects and sales. You want to convert at least several each day, if not each hour.

How much money in sales is your site bringing in each week? How much would your site bring in if you increased your conversion rate by a factor of ten? Or twenty? That’s how much money you could and should be making.

You can improve your conversion rates and convert more visitors to prospects and prospects to clients. Here’s how to do it:

1. Measure Your Conversion
Google provides a free, easy-to-use tool called the Website Optimizer. you’ll find in your Adwords account. With this you can set up simple trials to measure the conversion rates of key pages and compare them to variations on that page.

2. Change Your Web Page Copy and Layout
Once you’ve analyzed your existing pages, you can go to work on making changes to get a better response and generate more sales.

Small changes in copy, type size, and the location of these on a site page can make a big difference in the number of people who respond to your offers and to your conversion rates. I’m still amazed at how significant apparently minor changes can be.

After ten years of online success, I’ve found many ways to boost my conversion rates at every point in the sales process.

Want to discover how much more you could be making with your website? >>

To your success,

Charlie
MarketingForSuccess

P.S. Use these web marketing strategies to dramatically increase your conversions and your web site revenue. I did. Take action today and start closing all those online sales you’ve been missing.

Interested in doubling or tripling your web sales? Take action today >>

MarketingforSuccess is on the internet marketing winners list this week moving up the internet marketing index

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing That Works

“My web site is just breaking even. Despite getting an average of a thousand visitors a week, I’m just making enough sales to cover the cost of my pay-per-click ads. How can I increase my conversion rate?”
- Marla, online business owner

Are you struggling to get more visitors to your site to become buyers? Do you want to move beyond sluggish sales and transform your site into a real money-maker?

When I looked at Marla’s site I saw the problem right away. It wasn’t the products she was selling. Marla’s site was only getting a trickle of sales because she was…

Breaking the Rules!

No, Marla wasn’t doing anything illegal but she was violating the key marketing rules that anyone needs to follow to make money with their website.

Are you breaking the rules with your web site too?

Web marketing is just like any sport you play. Whether it’s golf, tennis, bowling or online marketing, to even be considered a player you need to know the rules of the game. Wouldn’t you agree?

Below I’m going to give you some of the most important web marketing rules to follow. In upcoming emails I’ll detail how to keep score and which techniques to use to become a master player so you can be a consistent winner and put yourself on the podium. It’s all about helping you become a winner - at marketing online.

Want to win with your web site? Start by discovering all the rules of marketing online. Use this link >>

To win online (and offline) you need to know the rules of marketing your business.

Imagine playing golf without knowing which direction to hit the ball, or not knowing when or where to file your taxes. When you don’t know the rules, not only can you lose, you can get into a heap of trouble. Discover which simple rules to follow instead and you’ll come out on top.

Web Marketing Rules
(I’ve included three below to help you get started.)

1. Lead With the Solution
One of my clients sells specialized skin care products. At the top of her home page she listed “Pimples - Scars - Blemishes - etc” Below this headline she had “before” pictures of some the worst cases she had treated. If you scrolled down the page, you’d get to both the “before” and “after” photos and the stories of her successful treatments, but the top of her page was literally scaring people away.

Clearly state the primary solution you provide at the top of your home page and you’ll attract a lot more clients.

2. Start Conversations
It’s rare that a first time visitor to your site will pull out their credit card and buy from you right away. After all, why should they? They just met your online business and they don’t know you or trust you yet.

Successful small business owners tell me that once they have a conversation going with a prospect, they can convert more than 50% to buyers. Think of your site as the beginning of a conversation.

You may not be able to convert 50% of visitors to buyers, but your site should prompt at least 7% to 25% to contact you and so continue the conversation. Start more conversation with prospects and you’ll convert more into paying clients.

3. Build Relationships to Build Profits
Unless you’re Amazon.com or Apple or some other large corporation, your competitive advantage lies in the quality of the relationship you have with your prospects. In most cases the brand your selling is you.

People buy from people. Continue to engage their attention, educate them and give them the solutions they need, and your sales will continue to grow.

Want to build your online profits. Use this link >>

Knowing how to play any game and how to play well are two different things. I know the basic rules of golf, but give me a golf club and you’d have to clear the course of anyone who wanted to avoid injury and give me couple of days to actually finish a full round of 18 holes.

You may know the basic rules of marketing online, but do you know what you need to truly succeed?

The good news is few if any of your competitors know or apply the basic rules to web marketing. They may understand the importance of getting traffic to the site and converting visitors to buyers, but few know how to do it well.

When you discover what to do and start to follow the rules with your web marketing, you’ll instantly put your online business far ahead of your competition. Winning online isn’t automatic but it’s a heck of lot easier when you know the rules of the game.

Want to win online with your website marketing?. Use this link >>

Charlie
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Work

I’m big on making lists and then using them to guide what I do so I can make the most with the least amount of effort. I’m not lazy, it’s just that I want to get my work done so I can move on to the next project or get out the office door at 5:30 and get in some exercise before dinner.

When I built my first web site back in the late ’90s I had a short Internet marketing list. It included:

* Launch web site
* Get traffic
* Make money.

Look familiar?

I love short lists but if you’ve tried doing the above three things you discovered that there is more to successful web marketing. You can’t just launch your web site and expect to flood your site with traffic. And even if you have a flood of traffic it doesn’t mean your site will generate more than a trickle of sales. Right?

When I launched my first site I knew that traffic was one of the keys to making money but the trickle of visitors my site initially received was painful to watch. So what’d I do?

You guessed it. I made a list. I made a list of the most effective ways to generate traffic. Then item-by-item I went through the list and tested each idea until my site was getting hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.

Want to know how to the same for your site, get hundreds of thousand of visitors each month? Use this link and I’ll show you my web marketing secrets >>

Online traffic is money and I sold my second site within 18 months of launching it for four times the cost of the average home or close to a million.

That was over seven years ago and ever since I’ve been identifying the most effective ways to get traffic to your site and to convert it into cold hard cash. Here’s what’s on my current web marketing list:

1. Give people the products and information they want to market their business online and offline so they become even more successful. I’m not into trying to sell people, but I do like helping people.

2. Build long-term win-win relationships with clients. I don’t want to just sell a customer a one-time solution but to be your long-time marketing go to guru.

3. Use my website to build a massive list of qualified prospects. When I add 20% more people to my list that directly translates into 20% more income or more money I can spend on my family or on ski trips.

4. Stay-in-touch with prospects and clients. I get tons of great feedback from my readers, but what would happen if I stopped emailing you? My sales would fall like a stone.

5. Continue to increase the conversion rates at every step in the web marketing process. Whether you’re a math wiz or not you know that if you add 10% here, 20% there and 15% elsewhere in the process it has a cumulative effect. Multiply these and you can easily increase your sales 50% or more. (One client - tactic by tactic - increased sales by 1500%.)

That’s my short list of web marketing goals.

What’s on your web marketing list?

If you have a list of web marketing goals that’s a start, but goals alone won’t pay for your new car or vacation home. The next step is to move from goals to action and to results. Want to know how to do that online?

To get results online you need to know which traffic and sales generating tactics work and how to apply them. Use this link to find out how which web site marketing tactics work >>

What’s the information you want to grow your online sales?

The questions I get from people fall into the following five groupings. See if these are the ones you’ve been asking yourself.

1. How do I make money with my website?
2. What’s the best way to get tons of traffic to my site?
3. How do I grow my list of qualified prospects like crazy?
4. How can I use email to skyrocket my sales?
5. Once I get people to my site how do I convert prospects to buyers?
6. Who can I trust to help me grow my online sales?

If you’ve been asking yourself one or more of these Use the following link to get the answers to your website marketing >>

Whether you’re a list maker or not, it makes sense to find out what works to grow your business online. When you know which tactics to use you’ll attract more prospects, more buyers and more sales.

Charlie
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Get Results

Many companies have jumped on board with internet and email marketing and now they’re discovering the mistake they made. Take NetFlix, one of the fastest growing companies in the DVD rental niche. Like their competitors they used to provide support solely by email. Now they’ve switched to phone support instead.

Email customer support is quick, cheap and can easily be outsourced offshore. The perfect solution?

Not if you want to do the one thing your marketing should do, build strong relationships with your prospects and customers. Think about it, which is going to keep your U.S. customers coming back and build loyalty better -

- email answers to your questions from someone in India with less than perfect english
or
- a live person on the phone from the U.S. who you can have a conversation with.

Email is a great tool but it tends to be impersonal at best. It’s one of the ways to keep in communication with customers but if you want to stand out from the competition with your marketing phone support is essential.

The ultimate goal of your marketing is to build a strong relationship with your prospects and clients so they start or keep doing business with you. Don’t assume that email is the only tool to use. The phone can be of your best marketing tools too.

- Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Work

Most small business owners have the keys to their office even if a secretary is there and opens the door before them. It makes sense, you pay the rent, it’s your company, you should have a set of keys to the building. Right?

The same is true of your businesss website. You paid to have it built, you pay to run it and you own it.

Do you have the login information for your site? Your web site login information is like the keys to your office or your car.

Do you have a backup of your site on your computer in case something happens to your web site hosting company?

Recently I’ve gotten a number of calls from small business website owners who wanted help revising their under performing sites but in far too many cases they didn’t have the login information so they couldn’t access their own sites. That’s a big problem and makes it impossible to fix your site.

Ted was one of those who called. He had a real estate site that was getting lots of traffic, a couple hundred visitors each day, but wasn’t generating any leads. He’d called me and wanted to know what changes to make to convert all the visitors he was getting into leads and sales but he didn’t have the login information for his site.

His previous web designers had the login information and Ted felt awkward getting it from them. They insisted they had done a create job for him even though the site wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do, bring him qualified leads. It was like having a new car in the driveway that he didn’t have keys to and couldn’t drive anywhere.

Do you have a website that’s been built for you but not helping you move your business forward? If you do, why aren’t you doing something about it? It’s just a matter of getting the keys and discovering how to convert visitors to buyers >>

If you own a web site you are entitled to the login information and to set and change the password any time you want. That way if you’re unhappy with the results of your site and want someone else to take over, you have the keys to the site.

If you haven’t done so already:

1. Get and keep a copy of the login information for your site.
2. Track the performance of your site, the number of weekly visitors and leads generated.
3. If you’re not getting results - take the keys away from the firm that is wasting you money and losing you business.
4. Find someone who can help you improve your web marketing strategy and work with them to turn your site into a gold mine.

In case you don’t have it already get the Insider Secrets to Creating Web Sites That Sell >>

- Charlie
Web Marketing Ideas You Can Bank On

“Do you do web site critiques?” - Mimi

Want a review of your website and pointers on how to improve your search engine placements and web onversion rates so you can increase your sales? Yes - I do help people one-on-one with their internet marketing strategy.

A. You can buy a copy of the Insider Creating Web Sites That Sell and get a one hour personal internet marketing strategy consulation included with this link >> Yes I want to improve my web marketing!

B. I’m running a trial offer for the next 4 days at $2.95 today for the Insider Creating Web Sites That Sell. When you order you get to keep the manual for 30 days and then if you like it, you pay for it in two monthly installments >> trial offer (web review included after 1st 30 days)

C. Don’t want to read? Not everybody wants to sift through the ideas in a internet marketing course, no matter how good it is. They just want answers and help so they can build or fix their web site right away. If this sounds like you - use this link to contact me and get one-on-one help if you qualify for my web marketing mentoring program >> Yes I want one-on-one help growing my online sales!

- Charlie Cook
Internet Marketing Strategies That Work

What’s the secret to being found online? Start by submitting your site to every search engine and directory you can. To make it easy for you I’ve included a short list of the most important places to submit your site or you can use SEOCompany’s comprehensive and somewhat overwhelming lists of search engines.

- Charlie Cook
Web Marketing Ideas You Can Profit From

Do Google Adwords work?

The answer is yes and no. Google’s elegant adwords system makes it easy to set up and test ads but most web site owners never make a profit from their ads. For most people Google Adwords are the number one website marketing money waster.

Why?

Once a prospect clicks on your Google Adwords ad, they’re linked to your site. Then what happens? In most cases a whole lot of nothing. They visit your site or your landing page and then they leave. They leave without buying anything or even leaving you their contact information.

The result of your Google Adwords campaign? For most people, it’s another advertising black hole. A whole lot of money goes into it and it doesn’t generate much in the way of business. That’s not to say it can’t work.

I have one web site marketing client that relies primarily on Google Adwords to generate leads and sales. And their business is booming. But it costs them plenty, more than most people realize to generate a lead. When I first started working with them their per lead cost was over $75 dollars.

That’s right they were paying for more than $75 worth of Google Ads just to get one person to fill in their opt-in form on their site. Now, they’re absolutely delighted that I’ve helped them reduce it to less than $25 per lead. Why does this work for them? Google Adwords works for them because they close enough of their leads to make a huge profit.

Will Google Adwords work for you? To make them work you need to determine your per lead costs, conversion rates and the value of a new client. If it’s less then you’re paying for your Google Ads, then you need to either stop or discover how to increase your conversion rates so a higher percent of visitors to your site or landing page become buyers.

Don’t be hoodwinked by this website marketing hoax. Don’t assume Google Ads will automatically start bringing in businesss. They won’t - unless you know how to convert site visitors into highly profitable clients.

- Charlie Cook
Web Site Marketing That Gets Results