Grizzly Marketing Tactics 2.0

Internet Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

A Quick Word About This Report: I wrote this report to give you a basic understanding of how internet marketing works and what it can do for your business. I wrote it to provide you with the knowledge, proven formulas and actionable steps you can put to work right away in order to increase the online exposure of your business and turn your internet presence into a money making, customer retaining, competition stomping machine. According to a recent study, over 80% of local market consumers visit the internet

first to get information, and then they buy locally. Over 50% of all consumers

these days don’t even consult print media at all, but go straight online. And I’ve

seen dozens of studies with similar data.

In this day and age, everybody is connected either through their computer or

their cell phones. Nobody is looking in the Yellow Pages anymore. When

somebody needs something, they look online.

So you’ve got to ask yourself, how is your business being represented on the

internet? What is your website doing to help your business? Is it making you

money? Is it building trust in your business? Is it building a relationship with your

customers? Is it positioning you as an industry leader?

These are some of the questions that this report is going to help you better

understand. Not only that, but it’s going to provide you with actual solutions too.

The problem is that most small businesses don’t have the know-how or the

budget to do this on their own. That’s why I created this special report and that’s

why I created Grizzly. To give you the knowledge you need to put into action

practical internet marketing strategies on your own, and to put at your disposal a

group of professionals you can turn to for cost-effective internet marketing

services for when you really want to kick your online marketing into high gear.

It’s also important to note that every business is going to take a different

approach to internet marketing depending on the products or services they offer.

For example, the online marketing for a business in the service industry is going to

be drastically different from a business selling a product, so I’ve tried my best to

include information in this report that applies to everyone.

This Is Grizzly.

Wishing you the best, Cullen Powell CEO & Founder Grizzly Internet Marketing

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Internet Marketing Chapter 2: Designing A Website That Converts Chapter 3: Getting Your Business Listed Locally Chapter 4: Email Marketing Basics Chapter 5: Choosing The Right Keywords Chapter 6: Pay Per Click Advertising Chapter 7: Search Engine Optimization Strategies Chapter 8: Getting Affiliates to Promote Your Product or Service Chapter 9: Measuring Your Results With Analytics

Chapter 1: Getting started with internet marketing

If you currently own a small business and you aren’t leveraging internet

marketing, then you’re really missing out on a great opportunity to promote your

business and draw in new clients.

Internet Marketing is about a lot more than just getting traffic to your website

and making sales. Just as important, it gives you the ability to build credibility in

your business, position you as the expert in your industry and establish lifetime

relationships with your customers so you can market to them over and over

again.

The three basic steps you’ll want to take in order to achieve internet marketing

success are:

1. Designing a website that converts into sales, builds credibility and promotes

customer retention.

2. Getting your business listed with local directories and social sites such as

Google Maps / Places, Bing, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Angies List, Facebook

3. Driving targeted traffic to your website with online advertising and search

engine optimization.

Proper execution of these basic principles and the strategies outlined in this

report are guaranteed to take your business to great heights and allow you to

dominate your competition in a world where comparison shopping reigns

supreme.

Chapter 2: Designing a website that converts

Anyone can throw a website together these days and establish an online presence

for their business, but what you need is website that is designed to convert.

When I say convert, I’m talking about converting your website visitors into sales,

email leads, phone calls, you name it.

When designing your website, it’s absolutely essential that your customers feel

comfortable doing business with you. If your design looks outdated, or the

information isn’t organized in a visually appealing way with all of the right

elements and psychological triggers in all of the right places, it’ll be hard for

customers to want to take action.

Conversion rates are actually more about psychology than anything else. You can

have all of the campaigns in place to increase traffic to your site, but if the

customer doesn’t like the design, or feel safe doing business with you, they will

split.

The problem with most web design firms is that they only know how to make

your website look good and while a great-looking website may achieve the goal of

shaping and delivering a strong brand - its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell

the products or services you offer.

Think of your website as your “storefront.” You should put as much thought into your virtual storefront as you would to the front window display at a traditional store on Main Street. Your website needs to attract customers and keep them coming back for more. Pull up your website. Pretend you are a new prospect and ask yourself the following questions. Or better yet, find someone who has never seen your site before and ask them to answer these questions: 1. Where do your eyes go first? A visitor to your website typically has an attention span of only a few seconds. That means your website must “hook” them in that amount of time. Make sure the first thing they see/notice is something interesting enough to buy you more time.

2. Do you know right away what this website is about? Again, you have limited time to get your message across. If there are too many distractions, a site visitor may not ever know what you are selling. 3. Is the important information “above the fold?” Most site visitors want to know the details without doing a lot of work. If they have to scroll down to find the main idea, they will likely leave earlier than you’d like. Make sure that your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is clearly spelled out. This is a piece of information that says in one sentence or less why someone should do business with you. Make it clear and prominent on your site. 4. Can you easily find the benefits of the product/service? A visitor to your site wants to learn as much as possible about the benefits of your product or service. Features are important too, but the most important thing a visitor can take away is a sense that this product or service will make an impact in their life … for the better. So always remember, talk about the benefits of your product or service, not features. This is what puts people in the “buying mood”. 5. Is there a clear call to action? If customers like what they see, it is important to move them along quickly. There should be a prominent, clear call to action on your website. Your call to action may be to buy now, start a free trial, learn more, or something else. Make sure that you are not sending mixed messages with too many calls to action. Choose the one or two that matter most and make them easy to find. 6. Are the colors and images aesthetically pleasing? If your website is too busy or jarring, you will lose visitors. Take a little time to coordinate colors and to implement high-quality images that add to your message.

7. Is the font easy to read? Make sure your font is easy to read and is not distracting. Don’t get fancy; just stick with a simple, sans-serif font in a color that contrasts with the background. 8. Are there bulky sections of writing anywhere on the page? Long, bulky paragraphs are likely to get skipped. Try breaking up your copy into smaller sections that get the point across quickly. 9. Do the menu items clearly tell you where they will take you? Site design and usability are important considerations that often get overlooked. Think about what information you would want to find if you visited this site and plan your menus accordingly. There should almost always be an “about us” and a “contact us” page. 10. Is there an easy way to contact the business? If your website does its job, you will likely have interested prospects who want to learn more or who simply have a few questions. Make sure they have an easy way to find you. Potential customers also want to know that they will be able to get a hold of you if needed in the future, whether for warranty service or support. 11. Can you find out more about the owner or employees of the company? Visitors often want to know that they are dealing with real people. Having an “about us” page is a great way to show the world why you are the best one to handle the job. Include photos too—everyone likes to associate a face to the business. 12. Do you feel personally connected? Visitors who feel personally connected will be more likely to stick around and/or become a customer. Tell your story and tell them why you are the right choice. You can personally connect with your visitors by being honest, using a

conversational writing style, and including real testimonials from other customers. 13. Is the writing corporate or conversational? Corporate writing is good for … well, big corporations. But a small business shouldn’t pretend to be a big, formal entity that is disconnected from the public. Your ability to relate to your customers is a big reason why they will eventually choose you—start right away with an engaging, conversational tone in your writing. 14. Is there an email opt-in form above the fold? An email opt-in form is really the only way to capture leads from your website visitors. Make sure that it is in a visible place above the fold. The better it looks, the more people will fill it out. 15. Is the offering appealing enough to make you want to give your email address or contact information? Your email form should also offer an incentive piece to spark a visitor’s interest and convince them to give you their information. Make sure that this incentive piece is appealing—offer real tips, actionable advice, or special deals that will immediately help your prospects. 16. Are there links to social media? Social media allows you to communicate with your prospects, and it allows them to communicate with each other. Include links to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. Make it easy for everyone to find you on social media … even if they don’t fill out your webform, they may choose to follow you in some fashion. 17. Does your site include testimonials?

One of the strongest “sales enhancers” you can include on your website are

testimonials of your product or service from your customers. It’s not easy to build

trust and win people over on your own, but community doesn’t lie. Just a few

strong testimonials can increase your sales conversion by up to 400%.

18. Is there a product or service guarantee?

Including a product or service guarantee on your website, ldeally positioned

above or below your call to action(s) is another huge sales enhancer.

19. Separate yourself from the pack

Make sure to include a message to consumers on your website that explains why

you’re better than the competition. Talk about why your product or service is

superior. Make yourself stand out from everyone else. Position yourself as an

industry leader and build consumer confidence in your product or service.

Chapter 3: Getting your business listed locally

If you were only going to do one thing as a small business to improve your online presence and generate more customers, that one thing without a doubt would be claiming or registering your business with local directories like Google Places, Bing Business Portal, or Yelp. The glory days of the Yellow Pages are all but over. More and more people are now turning to places like Google when they need to look up a phone number or address for a local business or service. When someone searches for a local product or service, results from local search directories usually appear at the top of the page. Over 75% of all searches are related to local products and services. So when someone uses Google to find a plumber in Memphis, the very first results that are shown on the page are Google Places listings of plumbers that are located in or near Memphis.

Google usually lists six to eight businesses from Google Places as the top results on a page. But it doesn’t really matter which search engine you use, because they all use local search directories in one way or another. You simply can’t afford to overlook local directories as a way to market your business online. Not only is it really important, it’s also free, and it’s easy – you don’t need a webmaster or any special skills. You should register with as many local directories as you can. When completing your business profiles, include as much information as possible. The more your profile is complete with hours of operation, payment types, photos, videos, selection of appropriate categories, and other additional details, the better chance you will have to rank high in these directories. Below are the instructions for claiming or registering a Google Places page. Most of the other directories will follow the same format, so it is a good general guide to follow. Your business may already be listed with some of the directories, so if that’s the case, simply claim your business listing and begin enhancing it with your business information. Remember to include as much information as possible about your business in these directories.

Steps to getting your business listing in Google Places: 1. Claim or list your business in Google Places – This is one of the basic steps - if your business is already listed in Google Places, claim it. If it’s not listed, then list it. 2. Use complete address and phone numbers – Make sure you always use a complete address in Google Places. Local numbers are always better than a toll-free number. 3. Description – Add a description that best describe your business. Be sure not to

add repetitive keywords, as this may result in your listing being penalized. It’s always good to list the services you offer. 4. Choose categories that best suit your niche – This is one of the most important steps that may play a vital role in rankings. Google Places gives suggestions, and it’s best to choose suggested categories whenever possible. You may choose your own categories as well, but be sure to select at least two categories suggested by Google. 5. List your primary or main website – Some businesses have more than one Website. In that case, list your main website in Google Places. 6. Add photos and videos – Try to improve user experience - it may help a lot when your prospective clients visit your Google Places page. Photos and videos of your business can go a long way here and even help you with your rankings. 7. Add additional details to your listing – Add custom details in your business listings. 8. Coupons – Give special discounts to potential customers if possible. This will also help you stand out from the competition. 9. Reviews – Encourage users to post reviews on your business listing. 10. List your business in yahoo maps, bing maps and other local business directories

Top Local Directories Listed below are some of the top directories that you should register with. If for some reason you think you may not want to register with all of them, I would definitely make a point to register with Google Places, Bing, and Yahoo. Although you can get started on this right away if you really want to, I would recommend looking at the chapter below on keywords and keyword research

before you dive into registering your business with the local directories.

Chapter 4: Email marketing basics

Email marketing with an email autoresponder system is an extremely powerful

tool for closing more sales and increasing customer retention. Here’s how it

works: You offer your website visitors an incentive such as a coupon, free tips, or

even run a contest with a free giveaway in exchange for them giving you their

email address.

Once you have their email address, they’re entered into the email autoresponder

system which sends them a fully automated series of emails that are sent to their

inbox at predetermined times.

When writing your email autoresponder messages, it’s important to focus on

building trust and providing value in your business and not bombard your

subscribers with a bunch of sales pitches…

So for the first few days, focus on providing them content and information they’ll

really enjoy and find useful - and it’s ok to inconspicuously include small note on

how they can buy…but the keyword here is inconspicuous. The main goal of your

first two or 3 emails should always be to build a trust relationship with the

consumer and it’s the perfect opportunity to position yourself as the expert in

your industry.

After that, it’s time to send them an offer to buy. Explain the benefits of your

product or service, tell them a little about your company, and tell them why

you’re better than the competition. Then ask them for their business.

Finally, you’ll want to send them another series of emails, spread out over a larger

amount of time (like a few months to a year or more) that gives them even more

quality content and information they’ll enjoy and find helpful.

This will continue to build your relationship and keep you in their mind, and

ensure they turn to you for future product or service instead of one of your

competitors. It’s also ok to mix in a few sales pitches here and there throughout

this sequence if you have another product or service that you think your

subscribers would be interested in.

An email autoresponder system also gives you the ability to email your entire list

whenever you want. So for example, if your business is having a special offer or

promotion, you can send them a sales email describing it. It’s the perfect way to

let your customers know about your promotions and it’s usually included with the

email service so it won’t cost you anything extra.

Chapter 5: Choosing the right keywords

When it comes to attracting customers to your website, everything starts and ends with good keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that someone types into a search engine like Google to find information about something. Knowing the specific keywords that your potential customers use when looking for information about your product or service is critical to your success online. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, search engines may never find you, and worse yet – your potential customers won’t either. The time you invest into doing keyword research will pay huge dividends because once you determine the proper keywords to use, you will use them over and over in your online marketing so more people will find you, and more people will buy your products and services.

Keyword Research Keyword research is the process of finding and selecting the appropriate keywords to use in your web pages and any other types of communications such as directories, articles or blog posts that will end up online. You should select keyword phrases that not only describe your product or service, but also phrases that people use when searching for information about what you do. Keywords are

how people are going to find your business online. You find out what those phrases are by doing keyword research. A great free tool to use for keyword research is Google's Keyword Tool. To use it, simply enter a few words into the box below “Word or phrase”, type in the bolded characters (for security purposes) and click Search. You can also get the keywords used in any website by entering the website address in the box below “Website.” This can give you an idea of what keywords your competitors are targeting. To start your keyword research, you should create a list of words and phrases that you think your customers might use to find you. Try to think like a customer, and brainstorm to come up with as many as you can. Let’s say you own a plumbing company in Memphis, TN. What words will people type into search engines to find companies that do what you do? For starters, the words “plumber” and “plumbing company” and “Memphis plumber” would be pretty obvious choices, so for this example I’ll start with those phrases and enter them into the Google keyword tool and click “Search.

Chapter 6: Pay per click advertising

If you want traffic right away, you’re going to need advertisements that bring visitors to your website. The best way to get quick results is with a Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine like Google or Bing. If you haven’t figured it out yet, PPC means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It’s an advertising system that makes sure the only money you spend goes toward getting visitors on your site. PPC search engines are a great way to advertise because they let you commit a fixed amount of money to a campaign. It can be $100 or $100,000—it doesn’t matter. Then, you choose how much you want to spend every time someone clicks on your ad when they are searching for a particular keyword.

If you’re selling legal services, then the cost per click (CPC) might be about 2 bucks. If 20 of those clicks turns into a $2000 sale, then it’s obviously worth it. If you’re an electrician, your cost per click might be 10 cents. Every industry is different in terms of competitiveness on the PPC search engines. Many of the PPC search engines have interfaces that let you plug in your keywords and see an estimate of how much it will probably cost to run your advertisement for certain keywords. PPC campaigns can get kind of pricey. You could end up spending thousands a day

just on advertising. But, you can always set a daily limit on the amount you’re

willing to spend, that way you won’t get burnt.

Go for terms that are less obvious. Some keywords are less expensive, or less searched—some of these can even have higher conversion rates than the bigger keywords. The great part about PPC search engines is that you can totally turn around your campaign on a day to day basis. If certain terms aren’t converting, or are costing too much, then the words can be thrown out and replaced with an entirely new set of words that work better. The best places to go for PPC advertising are: 1. Google AdWords 2. Bing Ads You can’t start making money until you get traffic to your website, and one of the best ways I’ve found to get traffic is by advertising your website through Google Adwords. This is the biggest PPC (pay per click) program on the web. You can create a Google AdWords account at adwords.google.com. There are a few things you have to know about Adwords, because using this program is nothing like putting up a banner. First, there are no images. Only text. You get a small amount of space to write your advertisement. Typically it’s the one headline followed by two more lines and then below that is your website’s URL. That’s it. Your ads will show up on search engine results pages, when people type in keywords that relate to your ad. (These are the “sponsored listings” that you can

find listed on the right hand side of search engine results pages and also at the top). This is why AdWords advertisers are so successful: you only get seen by people who are already looking for information on your product or service. Google claims that its AdWords program reaches out to 80% of Internet users—I don’t doubt it. These guys are all over the place. But that doesn’t mean you have to be. If you don’t want your ads to show up everywhere in the Google network, you can opt out of any partner sites, Gmail or whatever. If people keep coming to a certain site and clicking on your ads, but they’re not buying anything, then you don’t want to show your ads there. Why would you want to keep paying money if you’re not getting anything back for it? So keep an eye on your AdWords conversion rates.

Chapter 7: Search engine optimization strategies (SEO)

If you don’t have any traffic, you’re not making any money. Now, there are two main ways to get traffic coming to your website: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO can be a lot more cost effective than PPC, although it may take a little bit longer to show up in organic (non-sponsored) search results. Just like its name suggests, SEO is a process of optimizing a website so that it ranks high in search engines. A well optimized site should show up in the first 10 results for popular keyword searches that are relevant to the content of your website. Ideally, you’ll want to be in the first, second or third position because these get the majority of traffic. Good engines to rank in are Google, Bing and Yahoo. Search engines want to provide their users with a valuable service—results that are relevant to the search. With billions of websites on the Internet, they automate the process by using highly sophisticated algorithms to determine which sites get placed above others after a user searches for a certain keyword term. These algorithms are kept secret and search engines like Google change

them all the time so that website optimizers have a harder time manipulating the results, or “gaming” the search engine. No matter what changes are made, however, the algorithms continue to rely on

the following two components of a website: links and content. It’s common

knowledge that the most important part of SEO is getting links. The search engine

algorithms give major points to websites with a lot of inbound links as well as links

from large, respected websites. The rationale behind this is that quality websites

gain popularity naturally, and if other users believe the site is worth linking to,

then the search engines should rank it high too. However, it’s easy to manipulate

links so that they give your website a better ranking in search engines.

When it comes to content on your website, keywords are crucial for SEO because

they are what users are essentially looking for. If you know thousands of people

are searching for “Motorola cell phones,” then you’d better make sure your cell

phone website has an article that mentions “Motorola cell phones.”

Incoming Links Link building is a must. Links from authority pages, government pages and edu pages make a huge impact in your rankings. If you can get some to directly link to you, great. If not, find a site that has edu, government or authority links going to it, and get them to link to you. What you can do is locate non-profit charity sites (501c websites), and negotiate with them for a link. Make a donation to their charity or whatever it takes. Charity sites are commonly linked to by government sites. You can check to see where other sites get their incoming links from by going to Google and typing into the search area,“link:www.nameofwebsite.com”. It’s also important to get incoming links from high PR sites that are in industries

related to yours. If you have a site about finance, it wouldn’t be good if you only

had incoming links from real estate sites. Get it?

As far as anchor text, you used to be able to get away with using the same anchor

text for each incoming link to your site. But now it’s important to switch it up.

Anchor text is the actual text in the link to your website, such as <a

href=www.yoursite.com>anchor text here</a>. It’s easy for Google’s robots to

spot a site that is gaming the system if all of your incoming links use the same

text. If your main keyphrase is “memphis hobby shop”, you would want to have

links pointing to you with varying anchor text like “memphis hobby shop, hobby

shop in memphis, etc.”

If a page linking to you has more than 10-15 outgoing links, you won’t get much

benefit from the link, as the PR will be spread out over many links. It’s also

important to note that if a site has more than 100 outgoing links, you may even

get punished by Google for associating with link “farms”.

Another strong suggestion to get quality incoming links and PR is to run press

releases about your site once per month. You can do so on sites like

www.prweb.com for $40-$80. Even if you don’t have anything newsworthy to say,

the important thing is that search engines will pick up the press releases and they

will generate good PR incoming links for your website. Just create a simple press

release on how wonderful your business is. Spending $80 guarantees your release

will be picked up by Google News and Yahoo News.

On-Page SEO

Of course, incoming links aren’t the only thing that is important to SEO. Proper

use of page title, H1-H3 tags, meta tags, description, keyword density, and

content are all key to your success as well. I recommend only using one H1 tag per

page, and including your main keyword or phrase in it. I also like to use a style

sheet to manipulate the size and color of an H1 tag, so it fits in better with the site

theme. H1 is the main heading for a page’s text. H2 is for sub-categories, and H3

is even smaller. I don’t even bother with H4-H6.

It’s important that you keep your content updated and make a few changes every

couple of weeks. That way Google knows to come back to your site every few

weeks to spider your site again. You are basically training Google’s robots to think

your site is important because you change and update your content often. If you

don’t know enough about a subject to write a few new paragraphs about it every

couple of weeks, or if you are too lazy like me, but you still want to target the

subject because the keywords are high paying, you can always put articles on your

site written by other people. Odesk.com is a decent place to get article writers

from for as little as $5.00/hr. They’ll write articles on any subject you give them.

It’s important to optimize your pages so that they have “normal” addresses, without id’s and/or strings attached. You’d want yoursite.com/product.html rather than yoursite.com/product123.php?117765 It’s important to be consistent with your site’s interior links. In other words, if you link to your pages like this <a href=”http://yoursite.com/file.html”>, then dont link in other spots like this <a href=”file.html”>. Pick one and stick with it. Also use a simple sitemap page that links to all of your pages. If you aren’t familiar with some of these terms, a simple Google search should bring you up to speed.

Chapter 8: Getting affiliates to promote your product

Affiliate programs are an opportunity for you to get hundreds, even thousands of

web sites all driving traffic to your site and making sales for you...

And the best part is you don't pay until AFTER they make the sale!

Let me give you a little background first and then we'll go into specifics of using

this powerful strategy.

Amazon.com was one of the first companies to build an affiliate program and

right now they've got approximately 150,000 affiliates working for them, just

sending them visitors and customers. Their affiliates get paid every time someone

clicks on their link and buys a book.

There are two ways you can start your own affiliate program. The first way is to

have a service bureau take care of nearly everything for you. They'll handle

recruiting (to an extent) and administrative functions like sending out checks,

tracking, reporting, etc. But normally, you'll pay a much higher percentage than if

you did it yourself (which is the second way) - in fact, a very healthy percentage in

many cases. If you don't think you can handle some of the administrative tasks of

running a program in house then you should consider outsourcing to a company

who can do it for you.

The second way is buy your own software and run it in-house.

Affiliate Software For In-House Management

http://www.directtrack.com

http://www.1shoppingcart.com

http://www.linktrust.com

How To Build A Successful Affiliate Program From Scratch

1. Good Product - This goes almost without saying but I'll mention it again -

you've got to have a good product that delivers on your promises. This is

especially true if you want to attract 'Super Affiliates' (the top of the top

affiliates).

2. Web Site With A High Closing Rate - This is the #1 mistake I see most people

making when trying to set up their affiliate program. They open it up before they

know if their site even sells. Wrong! You need a web site that sells! Unless you

have numbers that prove your site sells you shouldn't move into marketing your

affiliate program yet because you'll simply succeed in getting top affiliates upset

at you.

3. High Commissions Bottom line - the name of the game for most affiliates is

how much money they can make. It's a simple notion of opportunity cost. For top

affiliates there is only a limited amount of space on their sites, endorsements,

emails they can send out - if another program brings them $1.50 for email and

yours is only making 25 cents - guess which one they'll pick? No contest!

I suggest you give as much commission as you can to your affiliates to help

motivate them. It's much easier to do that for a digital product than a physical

product. 40% is a good starting point.

4. Tools - Try to provide your affiliates with all the tools and assistance they need

to be successful. This is absolutely critical. Most affiliate programs only give their

affiliates a couple of banners. That doesn't help.

Remember people are lazy, so you've got to give them everything that they need.

You should create an "Affiliate Tool Box" for your affiliates to provide them with

all the tools they needed to promote the program and do really well. Provide your

affiliates with text links, sample emails to promote your product, banners,

articles, etc. etc.

Once your site is making sales and your affiliate program is set up - it's time to

announce it and really put everything into overdrive with Super Affiliates.

Announcing Your Affiliate Program

You should start with your existing customer base. Simply send out an email

announcing your program and providing the link where they can sign up.

Next, you can announce your affiliate program to the different directories of

affiliate programs on the Web. Announce your program to as many of these

directories as you can.

Below is a list of Affiliate Program directories you should submit your information

to:

www.associateprograms.com

www.clickquick.com/

www.sitecash.com/

www.affiliatesdirectory.com

www.referralincome.com/

www.atlnetwork.com/

Also, if you don't want to announce your program to all these sites (plus others)

there is a service called Affiliate Announce (www.affiliateannounce.com) that will

do it all for you.

Your announcement's listing needs to stress the benefits to affiliates for signing

up. Good benefit-driven copy is important.

What you want to create with your affiliate program is a set of raving fans or

'evangelists'. You'll be surprised at how much affiliates talk about their best

programs or what they're promoting now.

There is one way to make your program and profits grow even quicker...

Super Affiliates

The most difficult and elusive affiliate to recruit into your program is called a

'Super Affiliate'. And these are the top 1% of 1% of all affiliates who can instantly

shoot your profits through the roof. These super affiliates are people who control

the search engines or Ezine owners with thousands upon thousands of

subscribers, or a webmaster who gets mega traffic to their site, or marketers who

own a huge customer list.

One good way to recruit these people is to do a search under your search terms in

the main search engines and then contact the web site owners who come up in

the top 10.

You should have some banners created for your site, and put them on your affiliate page so your affiliates can use them to send people your way. You can get banners created for pennies on the dollar at sites like elance.com.

Chapter 9: Measuring your results with analytics

If I could recommend one skill to business owners with a website it would be a solid understanding of their site analytics and how they are affected. So many people treat their website as something they need to have “just because.” If you

build a site for services you offer or products you sell, what people see and how they interact is directly related to how much money your site pulls in.

Knowing what pages are the most popular, what keywords people are using to find you, and where people are going paint a picture about your customers, one that you might not be aware of. You probably want people on your product or service pages and your sign-up sheets, right? How do you know they’re getting there? How do you know they don’t get there and leave? How many leads are you missing?

This post outlines the very basics of Google Analytics and what it can tell you about your website.

Visits

Visits are the number of sessions that occur on your website. A visit is, as close as possible, one person who views one or more pages on the site. If the same person comes back, that’s two visits.

More visits to a site equates, basically, to more “traffic” and, potentially, more people in general seeing the site. A visit count increasing means more sessions on the site which could indicate 1) more people returning to the site or 2) more new people on the site. Combining the change in visits with the change in percentage of new visits can give you an idea which of these scenarios is contributing the most. Month to month, you typically want this number to increase.

Pageviews

Pageviews are the number of pages on your site that were viewed. Generally, each link you click takes you to a new page. If, in one month, 1,000 people went to the homepage, clicked on an article, clicked on another article, and then went elsewhere, that month would have 3,000 page views.

Like visits, this is also a number that generally should be increasing month-to-month. An increasing pageview count means that more content is being seen across the whole site. Two things could happen to increase the pageviews: more visitors could be coming to the site or visitors could be viewing more pages per visit. Combining the change in pageviews with the change in pages per visit will show which of these scenarios is occurring.

Pages/visit

Dividing total page views by total visits gives the average number of pages that are viewed per visit.

An increasing pages/visit number shows that visitors are clicking on more pages on the site per visit. This is always a beneficial thing but on a content site such as ours, diminishing returns kicks in past 2 pages per visit. Content published, content displayed, and inbound links all contribute to pages/visit.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of people who see one page and leave the site (essentially “bouncing” off of a page). Visitors who bounce have a page/visit number of 1.

A decreasing bounce rate is always a good thing. A decreasing bounce rate means that people found what they wanted and more. Bounce rate is affected by the same things that the pages/visit number is: site design, reader engagement, availability of related content, etc.

Average time on site

This number is the average amount of time that each visit lasts. This figure is tough to report accurately by any analytics programs.

Not a lot of good conclusions can be made from this number by itself. An increasing time, however, could be an indication of reader engagement and attention span. This number can be used in conjunction with bounce rate and pages/visit to get a sense of how involved the readers are and whether this is improving or declining.

% New Visits

This is the percentage of the total visits that came from new visitors. A new visitor is simply someone without our site’s cookie present in their browser. As such, this figure has a fairly high margin of error.

Though potentially inaccurate, this is another number whose trends are useful to watch. An increase in % new visits could be an indication of extended online reach or influence while a decrease could mean improved reader engagement. This percentage should show in increase during periods of strong promotion.

Goals and Funnels

Goals and Funnels are a versatile way to measure how well your site fulfills your target objectives. You can set up individual Goals to track discrete actions, like transactions or email opt-ins or the amount of time spent on a page. A Funnel lets you specify a path you expect traffic to take to reach a Goal. Combing Goals and Funnels helps you analyze how well your site directs people towards your target.

Each time a user completes a Goal, a conversion is logged in your Google Analytics account. If you set a monetary value for a Goal, you can also see the value of conversions. You can see the Goal conversions rates (i.e., the Goal completion rates) in the Goal Reports. You can also analyze Goals conversions in in other reports, including the Visitor Report, Traffic Reports, Site Search Reports, and the Events Reports.

Taking it all a step further

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