The Silent Avatar Speaks

If you’re someone who has been marketing online you know the lifeblood of an online business is the traffic of a site. The simple equation is this: More visitors = More sales.

However, I would like to share with you some ways that you can tweak your sites to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.

1. The first tweak is to have a good read over your sales page and weave in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody likes risking cold hard cash with a total stranger, but many people will buy on a recommendation from a friend. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be more likely to buy your products. Just remember to speak to an individual in your sales letter - not to your whole audience.

2. The second tweak is to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects will be more inclined to see your testimonials as real. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they’ll have more confidence buying from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and buy too.

3. Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your product offers. Not everyone reads your sales copy from go to woe, but most people will pay attention to images on your website.

4. Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that complement your product, your prospects will feel it's a very good deal and it would be stupid to miss it. Be sure to state the monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more compelled to grab your good bargain.

5. Lastly, Go ahead and ask for the sale! Many website owners entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offer great bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product (e.g. "click the button to buy now!").

By going over your site and implementing these small but dynamic changes, you will give your site every opportunity to secure the sale. J

Tags: Traffic Generation, Web Design by the silent avatar
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Convincing prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, and you certainly don’t need to make it any harder - but have you ever thought that you could be making the process twice as difficult for both parties when your prospects are convinced and want to buy but don't know how to buy from you? In a nutshell, no matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won't buy if they find the process cumbersome.Time to take a good look at your site and view it through the eyes of a purchaser. First, you’ll want to check your order form can be found easily and is hassle-free. Write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost.You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site. Do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via PayPal, others may only want to pay with their credit card, and then there are others who might want to send a cheque.The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' preferred payment method. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won't be able to pay you when they want to.You’ll also want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this.You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing? Do you have a means of a purchaser contacting you without going to the ends of the earth to find your contact details? Additionally, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects' confidence. It all goes towards making them feel safe about buying from you, who in truth is a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet. In finishing this post , it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay.Eliminate any chances of that happening to maximize your profits! Test your site regularly.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Traffic Generation, Web Design by the silent avatar
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It’s easy to forget about those who are on dial up, but the truth is that even though more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a sizeable portion of the web's population is still running on a good ol’ dialup connection, so don’t count them out of the equation when you're designing your website, and one of the major considerations you will need to work with is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection; however the culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly due to large images on the website. It’s very important to strike a delicate balance between using enough images to attract your users, but not so many they bog down the overall loading time of your site.

It’s also a good idea to go a bit further and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. That means you need to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its overall appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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Is your website a freind or a fiend to the search engines?

There’s absolutely no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in, and a major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista and so on. By designing a search engine friendly site, you’ll be able to bolster your website rank in search engines and obtain more visitors :-)

• Search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

• If you want to make your site get indexed easily, avoid using frames on your website. Frames only confuse search engine robots and you could run the risk the ‘bot’ might abandon your site because of using frames. Also, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

• Don’t present important information in Flash movies or in images as search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

• Use Meta tags on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using Meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

• Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

Tags: SEO, Web Design by the silent avatar
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