Category
Blog and Website Must Haves
The first step to sales and inquiries when potential clients or customers visit your site is that they see the services or products they were originally looking for. Unfortunately search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The potential client or customer having visited your site, must be interested in your products or services in order to stay and browse. Motivate them to purchase the service or product by providing clear and unambiguous information. If you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this. Consider having numerous pages which have a singular focus for each of your services or products. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.
Understand Your Target Market
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your potential clients are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely that anyone will choose to work with you. Online business is an extension or replacement for a standard brick and mortar storefront. If you’re just not sure about your target market what can you do? Start by sending an email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey. You could even direct your potential clients and customers to an online survey on your website. Ask them about their choices:
Why do they like your services or products?
Do you offer retainer discounts or discounts/coupons codes for products?
Do you practice excellent customer service and respond faster to client questions?
Are your product descriptions better?
Don’t be afraid to ask.
Be generous with your contact information.
When you sell online your customers can buy your products 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers can be across town or across the globe. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. Nothing turns off potential clients and customers faster than lack of contact information. In an impersonal, online world, your customers want to know where you are and how they can contact you if need be. Don’t disappoint. Strive to be as credible as possible when operating online.
About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy Companies has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.
Pay Per Click Bid Management Pt. 2
Bid gaps occur when there is a significant price increase to move up one spot in the PPC rankings. It is best if you take advantage of the bid gaps by filling them in so you can save up your cents for other bidding opportunities. Often there are keywords worthy of lesser bids to get the appropriate ranking on the list and produce a good number of clicks and higher conversion rate rather than bidding higher but having a poor conversion rate. You have to keep in mind that overbidding too is not good but rather the best position for the most effective bid.
Using pay per click bid management in promoting your website will only be successful if you take time building many lists across many engines and studying the performance of every listing. In this way, you can make the most value from what you spend in the bidding process. The key is to take the necessary precautions to stay ahead of the competition.
Bid Management Tools
To insure the best results, you may want to use bid management tools. There are many accepted and approved management tools that will help you in your bidding. They are categorized into two different types:
• Web based (services by monthly subscription)
• PC based (a purchased software)
Monitoring tools too may help in the tracking down of your keywords/phrases and search engines. This will help you determine which generate the most sales overall and in relation to your cost per click. This is what you call return of investment (ROI) monitoring.
These bid management tools may include additional functions that you may not get from online marketing tools that are readily available. Other tools can monitor competitor’s bids, produce reports for different parties and offer the ability to interface with multiple PPC engines. This is particularly helpful to those who manage more than a hundred keywords across several PPC engines to boost productivity and save time.
Pay per click bid management is ideal for the effective promotion of your business online. It is now possible to market your goods and services quickly to many.
About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.
Pay Per Click Bid Management Pt. 1
Pay per click (PPC) is a means to advertise business through the use of keywords/phrases in the search engines. The advertiser is required to only pay for each click that sends a visitor to his website. Search engines such as Google Adwords and Yahoo are just some examples of search engines. They offer top positions among the sponsored listings for particular keywords/phrases you choose. The idea for bidding is you have to buy/bid on keywords/phrases relevant to your business. The highest bidder gets to be on the top of the search result listing and the second highest bidder, of course, gets the next top listing and so on. Every time a visitor clicks on your website, you will have to pay the same amount that you bid on that particular keyword.
PPC can be very costly and time consuming. But if you know how to go about the step by step procedures, PPC can be a welcome change to traditional advertising.
If you do your searches for products, articles and auctions on the net, you usually type in a keyword or a keyword phrase to guide you in your search. Either you use Google or Yahoo depending on where you are most comfortable and where you usually get the best results. As soon as you key in the search button, immediately a long list of keywords or phrase will be displayed containing the keywords you key in. The first or the top link that you saw is most likely the one who bids the highest for that keyword you type. In this way, businessmen will produce the desired results; they get to be advertised, at the same time, saving and spending only for the clicks they need that might translate to potential sales.
The way to start PPC bid management is to identify first the maximum cost per click (CPC) you are willing to pay for a given keyword or phrase. CPC varies from time and even search engine to search engine too. Maximum CPC can be measured by averaging the current costs of bids. The average of these bids is to be used as the maximum CPC to begin with. As your ad campaign progresses, the actual conversion rate (visitors turning to potential buyers/sales) will be determined and you may have to adjust your CPC (bidding rate) accordingly.
When you start to bid, see to it that you adopt different bidding strategies for various search engines. Search engines have their own PPC systems that require different approaches. It is also worthy to identify different bids for the same keyword phrases in various search engines.
Another thing, it is wiser not to bid for the top spot for two reasons: 1) It is usually very expensive and impractical and 2) Surfers usually try different search queries in various search engines before they settle on the right one that fits to what they are looking for. This hardly results in conversion. Try to bid for the fourth or fifth spot instead and work your way up.
About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.
kO′ch VA adj. 1. a highly specialized and niched virtual
assistant who is in tune with their coaching clients and customizes solutions based upon their individual needs and goals 2. differs from a general virtual assistant as they only partner with members of the coaching industry [syn: 
