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About MarkFlavinBlog.com

MarkFlavinBlog.com is a place to come and learn about website traffic, social media, affiliate marketing, blogging, internet marketing, viral marketing & lots more awesome topics!

I'm a technology geek, a drummer & a Libertarian so don't be surprised if those topics pop up as well!

Hope you enjoy the blog & be sure to leave your comments on the posts you read.

Archive for January, 2007

5 Steps To Sky-Rocket Your Conversion Rates

Do you actually know that your sales can be multiplied by two, three or even ten times than it is currently? There are many ways to “beautify” you sales copy for higher conversions. Sometimes, one minor change can inflict a significant impact while other times, multiple changes will only bear little or even no results.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to tell until you run a test for your conversions personally. Before you apply various changes, it’s best that you carefully review each of these 7 steps and most importantly, apply them.

1. Make your site pleasing to the eyes.
As website design gets better and better, people focus on giving the website more flashy looks, have all sorts of multimedia and colors all over the website. Well if that is a community website it might work, and even bring in tons and tons of people to visit the site frequently.

Nevertheless, what you have is a sales copy. The best direct sales copy is to have only one page. Don’t question why, but a sales copy with 1 page does 10 times better than the one with more, it’s that big of a difference. Keep the background white so people focus on your words. It’s all about the words that you define if the sales copy pulls in 5 sales, 50 sales, or 500 sales.

2. Have your sales copy attractive and enticing.
You can boost your sales copy along the way with tons and tons of copywriting strategies. But the basic ones: always mention the benefits heavily. Pile the benefits, one after another, giving the visitors no chance to have their eyes lifted of.

That’s the most important secret of copywriting, to have your visitors glued to what you have to say, right to the end until the order button. If they sense that they have been glued to what you have to say, it must be something worthy to buy, that’s all.

There are several other strategies, to name some: have your most ultimate benefits on the front of your copy, reveal your benefits in priority – get it to your headline, write a good story, and get the visitors excited to read another sentence, over and over again, much, much more.

3. Give your offer a boost.
Basically, you want to give an offer that represents terrific value for your target audience. Instead of dropping your price, you should raise the value of it. Add many more attractive and targeted offers that goes along with your main product, that gives people the feel of, “wow, I don’t need to go further for this stuff because someone even prepared it for me Free,” and it solves the worry of doing more work.

People are born naturally with laziness – we want to do everything as quick as possible and would even pay more money to get something solved. Use these little affections in life in your sales copy – it’s how a great sales copy is put together.

4. Have your sales copy easy to be read, digested, and understood.
Did you notice that when you see sales copy that are long and bundled up, you leave it because you’re not interested to continue reading further? It somehow links together with human’s nature of laziness, people just don’t want to read long passages. In short, modify lengthy sentences into small segments, and break them up into small paragraphs.

You can forget the correct use of grammar. As long as you spell words correctly and keep them personalized, it’ll be good. Bold, underline, and italicize, or highlight your sales copy, make certain benefits stand out, powering up everything you can.

5. Put yourself in your visitors’ shoe
If you’re not carried away with your own sales copy, your visitors’ wouldn’t be as well. Load your web pages, see what catches your eyes, see what doesn’t, and improve more and more.

Make sure your web page loads fast, people are usually impatient and will not be satisfied if they need to wait for a long time.

So check out your sales copy today, and apply these strategies down. If done correctly, voila, you’ve got increased conversion in sales, and that means more money rushing into the bank!

Till next time.
Mark Flavin


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RSS is widely becoming a very powerful marketing tool on the Internet. It is being picked up by Internet marketers around the world every day who knows about its usefulness.

Nevertheless, there are still a majority of people on the Internet who haven’t used RSS to syndicate their content.
This new technology can change the way you keep in touch with your subscribers or readers permanently in a lot of ways.

For people who still don’t know what the RSS is, here’s a definition – RSS is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, and the XML extension is the format used for distributing your NEWS Headlines via the Web, which is known as Syndication.

Syndication is what makes RSS so powerful – you can unleash your message across the web instantly to your subscribers and readers through RSS. So what are the 8 most powerful reasons you should be using RSS? Read below:

1. Readers can opt-into feeds.

Like autoresponders, RSS allows your prospects to opt-into the feeds they are interested in and also be able to opt-out when they want to through their RSS feeds reader. It is almost similar to building a list of subscribers! (just like on the menu on the right)

2. You don’t have to maintain an RSS feed.

This is a “burden-take-off” for savvy and busy Internet marketers as RSS is free to use and it doesn’t require that much effort as building a list. Of course, everything has its pros and cons. When you don’t need to spend time for your opt-ins, you won’t have a closer relationship with them and it makes promoting your product much harder.

3. You have the ability to Syndicate your content.

This is the true power of RSS. It gives you the ability to Syndicate your content – and e-mail your subscribers instantly letting your them know about your content right away.

4. Promotions and sales.
Again, similar to an autoresponder RSS lets you broadcast your promotions to your subscribers. This way, you can earn money through your RSS feeds as well.

5. No filter problems.
Every RSS feed passes through e-mail filters. You won’t have to worry about your message being filtered anymore while syndicating an article. All your messages are delivered 100% to your subscribers.

6. No spam complaints.
People who want to subscribe for your RSS feeds will need to do it with their RSS reader. They will need to abide by the Privacy Policy that you are allowed to send them your syndication anytime without being called spamming. Another great feature!

7. Many ways to read feeds.
RSS is very versatile because it lets you read feeds in many different media platforms. Some of the examples are browser readers while others use software to read their feeds. Other than that, people can view feeds on different operating systems like Microsoft Windows or Mac.

8. Free traffic and promotion.

RSS is one of the greatest ways to get free traffic to your website without needing to spend a single penny on advertising. This alone can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising a year to advertise your online business.

If you don’t have time to set-up your own webpage with RSS feeds it is recommended that you set-up an account with Blogger.com and head over to FeedBurner.com to set-up an account. FeedBurner will generate you a RSS subscription page automatically with any RSS feed URL you favor and inserted.

To learn more about blogs & RSS visit Rob Benwell’s Blogging to The Bank


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7 Steps To Raise Your Internet Business Profits

There are many ways to bring your income to the next level, and it all relies on just a little work that you can take anytime. So what do you need to take action on for your online business venture?

Here are a few ways you can create a greater stream of income through your own Internet Marketing:

1. Publish an e-zine
Have you started publishing your own e-zines yet? E-zines are newsletters that you send out every few days for your subscribers so that they can read and gain information from.

E-zines can also help you improve the relationship between you and your subscribers, sell your products, and promote any affiliated programs. As many gurus have mentioned, “the gold’s in the list”.

2. Publish testimonials
Testimonials can greatly increase your sales as it works like a proof – that the products you sell works. No one wants to buy junk, people are skeptical with anything that includes money.

So clear off the doubt in your visitors and show them the proof, testimonials from your customers, and that will greatly increase trust which eventually leads to profit.

3. Write articles
When is the last time you have written articles to be published in article directories? These articles you’ve written and submitted will be seen by thousands and thousands of people, and sometimes if your articles are good they’ll be used and published on websites.

This way, you can drive tons and tons of traffic to your site without cost at all, and every visitor are potential buyers.

4. Tracking your advertising

It is important that you track your advertising. If you have involved in Pay-Per-Click advertising like Google Adwords or Overture, you can clear off the ineffective keywords, and only bid on more profitable keywords that brings you profit.

5. Offering a guarantee
This is extremely important. 70% of people who sees no guarantee will leave the sales page just because they’re not convinced! If your product delivers well, why won’t you offer a guarantee?

You must earn your visitor’s trust, only then will they be comfortable in investing their money for your product.

6. Promote your own affiliate program

Whenever you have the chance to do so, execute the plan. Many times people will not have the urge to take action until they are asked to do so. Try to emphasize the benefits over and over again about affiliating your product, provide sufficient tools, and you’ll be receiving a whole lot more in your profits.

7. Publish an affiliate newsletter
Once you have gotten your affiliates, you can’t let them do it all by themselves. Provide them an affiliate newsletter, share affiliate tips and strategies with them so that they can successfully promote your product.

If you haven’t included these steps in your online business venture, make sure you’ll grab hold of it right now and execute them right away to multiply your revenues.

Till next time
Mark Flavin

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All About On Page SEO

When it comes to doing business online, you will soon discover that it’s all about the traffic. Traffic, or the number of internet users you’d be able to generate for your website, is and will always be the lifeblood of any online venture. After all, what good is a website when there’s no one there to see its pages? How successful will your digital products be if no one would be able to know about them? Who will avail of your services when no one will get exposed to their existence?

Contrary to what many people believe, generating traffic for your website does not start once you pages are published and have gone live. Traffic generation strategies start at the very moment you are conceptualizing an idea for the website itself.

This is what on page search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. It is concerned with techniques that you could implement on your web pages themselves to ensure a good volume of traffic for your website. 80% of your traffic would come from the many search engines in the World Wide Web. If each and every web page you have is optimized for these search engines, then your website would be in a good position to have a high rank for the results of every relevant query.

* Keyword selection. Choosing the right keywords is essential for the success of your website. Keywords are the popular search terms that people use to gather information from the search engines. If your web pages are populated by the right density of the correct keywords, then you’ll have better chances of winning the attention of the search engine spiders. To determine the appropriate keywords for the subject that your website will be servicing, use the free tools that can be found at www.nichebot.com .

* Keyword placement in content. Content is the king of the internet. But even royalty needs support. Populate your content with the proper amount of keywords. A density level of at least 2% should be sought. This means that the right keywords should be mentioned at least twice for every 100 words of text.

* META tags. META tags are HTML codes that do not have a bearing on the physical appearance of your web pages, but they do inform the search engine spiders that such web pages are appropriate for a particular query. Always include the following META tags on the top portion of your source code. You could copy-paste them from the list below, but do change the indicated fields. Also, make sure that you include your keywords as much as you could on your META tags.

* ALT tags. ALT tags refer to the text that would appear every time the mouse cursor would pass through an image. Your ALT tags should include your keywords.

* Page titles. Page titles are the captions that appear at the very top of your web page. Make sure that each web page in your website would have a different title that will include the appropriate keywords.

* Focus. Remember, search engines will crawl through your website per page. Each page is a different project altogether. Focus is the key. Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase. If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made. Also, it would greatly help if you would name the page file in a manner that would include the keyword or key phrase it is focused on. For example, www.thisisyourwebsite.com/thisisyourkeyword.html is a good page filename that would help boost your SEO efforts.

Following these guidelines would help you a lot in securing a favorable position in search engine results pages. This in turn would guarantee for you a sustainable and sufficient volume of traffic that would make your website a genuine success.

For more information on search engine optimization visit: SEO A to Z

Till next time.
Mark Flavin

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How To Find A Profitable Niche Market

The common mistake committed by most newbies or beginners online is coming up with a product without determining a hungry market. Why is this dangerous? Because the product might not cater to a certain demand. Without demand, no one would buy the said product, and such would surely be disastrous for any business.

So the first lesson in any internet marketing course should be about finding profitable markets.

Now, despite how intimidating this subject may sound, it’s actually quite easy to pull off. All you need is an idea. Yes, like one of those eureka moments. This idea can come to you at any time… while watching a movie, for example. Or while reading the morning papers. Or while viewing the billboards by the road your way to drop off the kids at school. This idea may also be inspired by your current or previous profession, or a passion you nurtured when you were still enrolled as a student (just like me right now!!).

It is always advisable to carry a small notebook with you, so that whenever these ideas pop up, you could write them down so that they won’t have to fade from memory. If you have a personal digital assistant (PDA), the better it would be for you.

So how would you know if the idea that enters your mind is the right one to build a business for?

This wouldn’t be difficult to figure out. Surely, an idea would entail thoughts of various possibilities you do with the same. An idea about dog grooming can make you think of a dog grooming service, for example. Or an idea about pest control can make you think of a do-it-yourself pest control eBook.

Once you have an idea, it’s time to determine its profitability. For this, you would have to use the tools found at:

www.wordtracker.com

Or…

www.nichebot.com

Simply type in the idea you have in mind, and press the submit button. You will then be presented with a list of keywords and key phrases that are related to the subject you have entered. Each keyword or key phrase would have an indication of the number of searches that they have gathered from internet users. The number of searches made for a particular keyword or key phrase is a good barometer of the demand for the same.

Naturally, you would want a keyword or key phrase that has gathered many searches, right?

This shouldn’t be the case. Demand is just half the battle. You would also need to determine the amount of competition you would have for that particular market. To do this, you just have to run a search in Google using the particular keyword or key phrase you have selected. Look at the number of web pages catering to the said subject. If this number is less than the number of searches made for the same, then you have a profitable idea indeed!

Let’s illustrate.

Your idea is about dog grooming. So you use the tools mentioned above, and type in the phrase “dog grooming.”

You’d immediately get some keywords or key phrases like “shih tzu dog grooming” or “dog grooming cases.” The searches for these terms are greater in number than the web pages catering to them. As such, you could consider them as highly profitable markets. These markets are what many people call as niches. Finding a niche is the first integral step in making money online.

Once a niche is determined, focus on it. If you’re not familiar with the subject, do some research. Build a website that would provide accurate and educational information about the topic. Employ marketing strategies to give it the exposure it deserves.

It all starts with finding a niche. The sooner you discover one, the sooner you will realize the many promises that the online world can offer.

You can learn more about Niche Marketing by visiting How To Win In The Niche

Have a great day.
Mark Flavin

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Article marketing is most probably the most effective link building strategy in existence. Picture it this way. Article directories allow you to include a resource box for every article you will submit. Inside this resource box, you could include a link to your website. If you will submit just one article to 100 article directories, you will in time receive 100 back links to your website (in theory, sometimes not all of them are picked up by the search engines). There are thousands of article directories in the World Wide Web!

Now, if you will submit, say, 5 articles to a hundred directories, you’ll get close to 500 back lines over time.
The best part about this strategy is that quite a number of article directories have high page ranks. We’re talking about PR4, PR5, and on occasion, PR7 websites! Having a link to your own website in a website which has a high page rank would give a significant boost to your own pages’ search engine standing!

All seems rosy with article marketing, but as with everything else, there are doubts as to its real nature.

Let’s have a no hold barred, truly in depth discussion about the matter, by asking the questions you always had in your mind but had no opportunity to set loose. Let’s begin.

1. If I submit the same article to many article directories, won’t it violate a search engine’s policy against duplicate content?

No, it won’t. Since we’re dealing with high ranking websites, the search engines would assume that the submitted content is their original work. This is the reason why a lot of article directories are pretty confident about the articles they display. The problem that they encounter, really, is with regards to the credibility of their services. They don’t want to be known as a repository of junk content, that’s why they have outlawed the posting of PLR articles as well as articles imbued with affiliate links.

2. Does this mean that I could submit articles which I have already posted in my own web pages?

No! Since the search engines would assume that the higher ranking websites are the originators of the content, your web pages would be distinguished as duplicates, and this could possibly lead to the de-indexing of your website. You wouldn’t want this to happen. (Please see comments below for more debate on this point)

3. Could I submit as many articles as I could to as many article directories as possible?

Yes, you could! In fact, this is very much advised, to build up your link popularity and secure for your website a great page rank.

However, please bear in mind that search engines, and Google in particular, become quite wary about a website that suddenly experiences a great increase in the number of its back links. It is advised that before you submit another article to the article directories, you have to wait for at least 3 weeks after your last submission.

4. My page views are quite low. Does article marketing really work?

Yes, article marketing does work! If your article’s page views remain in low levels, ask yourself the following:

a. Is the subject of your article interesting enough? Does it cater to a wide audience?
b. Is your title enticing enough to merit a reading of your entire work?
c. Is your article informative enough to merit recommendation?
d. Is your article readable enough to give your audience an easy time in digesting the information you want to share?
e. Does your resource box/autor bio compel the reader to click on your link

These are the factors that contribute to low page views. Doing some necessary editing to correct these problems can dramatically increase the number of times your article would be viewed. Additionally, some article directories really attract a few visitors. But the popular ones like www.ezinearticles.com , www.goarticles.com and www.isnare.com should give you hundreds of readers in a month’s time.

5. How sure am I that my article would be kept intact by people who would use it in their own websites or eZines?

You can never be sure. This is why you have to run your own check from time to time. Search for unique phrases in your article, and click on the results. Determine if the webmaster honored your resource box. If he did not, you could ask him to include the same, or you could file a complaint with the article directory so that they themselves could act on the matter. Vigilance is the key.

Have a great day.

Regards,
Mark Flavin

P.S Please leave your questions, comments, tips & recommendations below. Just click on the comments tab.

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