Put-Up-A-Site.com

What technology tools do successful websites use? Remember that a website is a store front; it’s your customer service rep, delivery guy and your marketing department rolled up into one.

“We are open”
People don’t enter stores that have a closed sign at the door. (Well some do, but… you know, we talking about the law abiding kind here.) Nothing says ‘Closed” louder on a website than old content: old date references and postings. So one of the best things you can do is to get a script that keeps the current date front and center for your visitors. You don’t have to update it everyday – it does it all by itself.

Now that people think you are home, and open for business, they may inquire about your product. You must have a customer service desk. This can take the form of a form where they fill out their name and email. It can be to simply subscribe to your newsletter or they may have a specific question.

If you want to have a ‘stress-free’ site, try post an FAQ section – Frequently Asked Questions. Then one of the important things you will want to have is an autoresponder.

An autoresponder will keep your site in the mind space of your potential clients who have signed up for your newsletter or requested more information. It will send out preformatted emails at defined intervals automatically.

Did you know that after 5 emails, the likelihood of making a sale increases steadily? It may seem like you are being intrusive, but they will be able to unsubscribe if they wish.

Urgency Sells: When you offer limited time offers, you cause people to make decisions. You need a script that keeps a deadline up to date on your website. It would generate a line that looks like this: This offer expires on XX/XX/XX, so act quick!

The Popup Generator - Pop up windows that appear on your web site when a visitor enters or leaves your web site have been shown to dynamically boost subscriber rates and sales. Even if you don’t have any programming knowledge, you’ll be able to add a popup to your site with a single click

Tell A Friend Generator - No matter what promotional tools you use on your site, no tool is a match for the power of viral marketing. Use this generator to create a quick, one-step button that you can add to your web site that will let your visitors tell their friends about your site with just one click! Add this to your site and watch a whole new flood of targeted traffic come in!

All these types of scripts are available for free or for a small fee online. I suggest that in addition to these sites, that you visit lots of sites you would like to emulate and see what they do well, what strategies are particularly effective and find ways to incorporate them.

Anyone with a Website who wants to communicate with their potential and existing customers to increase sales conversions, knows that most of his workload can be taken care of by an Autoresponder. Autoresponders should not be under estimated as they are a vital tool for selling online, they automate the follow-up sales process, sending information at preset intervals and can be programmed up to 10 years ahead. With the Autoresponder set to do its job you really can make money while you sleep.

People don’t normally buy on their first visit to a web site, they like to window shop searching for the right product at the right price. Having an Autoresponder is like a having a very cheap salesman working 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year.

A website offering a free ebook or download will require the potential customer to leave his or her email address for delivery. It is then the Autoresponder comes alive. Preset with instructions, an Autoresponder will send at a preset time a number of messages informing the customer of the product they looked at on your site, just like a salesperson it will let them know all about the product, what it does, why its better than your competitors, what it will do for them, and keep them up to date with the latest news and offers by text voice or video.

Professionally done follow ups will be etching the name and product into the customer’s brain, gaining their trust to buy from the site again and again.

Having a website these days is just not enough, there are millions of websites and hundreds of sites offering the same sort of products. An edge is required over competitors to entice shoppers to a site and buy. The Autoresponder alone will not give the website the edge, but I doubt the edge will be obtained without an Autoresponder.

Should you Pay Per Click?

Commonly refered to as PPC among the savy internet marketers. If you have been marketing online for any length of time you have probably seen PPC eat up your advertising dollars with little or no results.

You research and choose the hottest keywords, then burn through your daily budget in an hour with no sales. The myth that mega traffic produces mega profits is just that. A myth.

Traffic is great. Traffic improves your search engine ranking. It increases word of mouth advertising. Traffic gets you more traffic, but when you are paying a pretty penny for each and every click you want sales.

You may remember the class action law suit against Google. A group of businesses sued Google claiming the company didn’t do enough to prevent click fraud so they lost money in their PPC campaigns.

In my less than humble opinion, click fraud was not the culprit. For those who don’t know, click fraud is when someone who publishes Google Adsense ads clicks on ads on their own site to make money with no intention of purchasing the product advertised.

As I said, in my opinion click fraud was not the culprit. It was badly chosen keyword phrases. Instructions on how to choose and bid on keyword phrases are available on the PPC sites so I won’t go into the mechanics of bidding.

The important thing is, if you chose the most popular keyword your ad will show up in hundreds maybe even thousands of searches an hour. This means you will recieve hundreds maybe even thousands of clicks a day.

Mega traffic right? For instance. If you are selling hand painted porceliain piggy banks and you bid on the keyword “bank”. Who will see your ad and possibly click on it? People looking for online banking, people looking for a rock band called “Bank”, kids writing a report for school on the bankiong industry. In other words, people who don’t want what you are selling.

They will click on your ad without reading the whole thing and go “This isn’t what I want.” and hit the back button. Remember, it cost you money for them to click. It costs them nothing, so people aren’t careful about what they click on.

Choose your phrase carefully. You want clicks from visitors who are looking to buy what you are selling. Target your phrase. Bid on “porceliain hand painted piggy banks” if that is what you are selling. People who do broad searches are just looking. People who target their searches are looking to buy.

Will you get less traffic? Yes. Will you make more sales? Maybe, depending on your product, how easy your site is to navigate, your prices, etc, etc…

The point is, with PPC, looky loos cost you money. Save the most popular keywords for your free traffic sources. Target your PPC so that only credit card in hand buyers click your ads.

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. It is part of the XML family that is used for syndicating information. Put simply RSS allows one web site to share information with another web site.

As a web site publisher, RSS offers a way for them to publish their information on many web sites, which in turns increases their reach on the Internet and the amount of traffic they receive to their web site. They also receive more one way links back to their web site. These benefits result in an increase in their search engine ranking.

As a web site owner, RSS allows them to receive up to date links to information on a regular basis that runs on auto pilot. When the publishing site is updated, their web site is also updated.

The result of this is that their web site is updated more regularly which also increases their search engine ranking.

The other benefit the web site owner receives from using RSS is that their information remains “fresh” which encourages their visitors to return on a regular basis.

However, the web site owner does not receive the complete articles, instead, they receive a feed that contains a title, a brief description and a link to the article that resides on the publishers web site.

The main disadvantage to the web site owner is that they trade off traffic for content, as their visitors need to visit the publishers web site to read the complete article.

But, this is a minor disadvantage considering all the benefits that RSS offers the web site owner.

The web site owner will need to install some software in order for them to receive RSS Feeds.

This software ranges from commercial packages the web site owner can purchase all the way down to freeware. Before purchasing any software you should research the different software packages that are available to ensure you get the software that is most suited to your requirements.

Fortunately, setting up an RSS feed is relatively straightforward and should only take a couple of hours at the most, and, once RSS is set up their is very little maintenance (if any) required.

If you are a web site owner, you should consider the power of RSS and what it can offer you and your web site.

We’ve all heard it… “Content IS King” and for good reason because it IS as far as the Internet is concerned.

And when it comes to web surfers, they come online for two reasons, One is to check there email and reason number Two is to search the web for “Information”.

How do you think the Internet received the reputation as the “Information Super-Highway”?

Because thats what its primary purpose was before they decided to commercialize it to what it is today.

And… what do ‘Articles’ contain?

The answer is quite simple… “Information”.

So, what does this have to do with you?

Be the one who supplies it.

It’s that simple.

Now, for the rest of this article I’m going to give you 10 POWERFUL reasons WHY you should and/or need to get started using ‘Articles’ as one of your online marketing strategies so you too can reap the benefits.

With that said, lets move on to reason #1.

Reason #1. Search Engines LOVE them.

It’s no secret that Search Engines LOVE content, so if you supply it on a regular basis your giving them a great reason to stop on by to take a look around.

Once there they’ll spider and index your website which is just what you want.

Reason #2. Website and Newsletter owners always need them.

I touched base on this earlier about why web surfers come online.

Website owners need fresh content to keep there visitors and/or subscribers coming back, where as newsletter publishers also need fresh content for there “email” newsletters that they publish and send to there subscriber base.

Remember the two reasons I discussed earlier about WHY web surfers come online. BINGO!

Reason #3. They generate Life Long residual Traffic.

Articles produce Life Long residual traffic because website owners, newsletter publishers and article directories archive them for there visitors to read and search through.

And since you have a ‘Resource Box’ located at the end of every article you produce with your website info and URL you’ll receive traffic.

Reason #4. Great way to get One-Way HIGH PR links.

This is probably one of the best reasons because when you offer your free information with ‘Reprint Rights’ and the website owner decides to archive your article within there article directory and their website happens to have a High PR(popularity ranking) ranking, guess what?

You’ll be able to ‘Piggy Back’ off there PR giving your website a PR boost because at the end of every article you produce your able to leave your ‘Resource Box’ with all your websites info and most important of all, your URL.

Reason #5. They’re VIRAL.

This is yet another great reason to start using articles as one of your online marketing strategies simple because your going to offer ‘Reprint Rights’ with all the articles you produce giving Website and Newsletter owners permission to publish them causing a VIRAL explosion and Traffic surge to your website.

Reason #6. You can syndicate them via RSS.

If your up to speed on the latest marketing technology called RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and you write ‘Articles’ on a regular basis you can set-up an RSS feed that web surfers and/or website owners can ‘Opt-In’ to and syndicate your ‘Articles’ via RSS to them, plus, you can also submit your RSS feed(s) to RSS search engines and directories.

Depending on how many ‘Opt-In’ this is yet another great reason to get started with ‘Articles’ and another way to generate LOTS of Free targeted traffic.

Reason #7. Bloggers with BLOGS need “Information” to.

Bloggers with BLOGS or Web-Logs need information to.

If you provide quality information related to a specific Blog that blog owner just might post your article on his/her blog for their audiences/readership to read giving you again more FREE exposure for your business.

It gets better. Blogs also use RSS(Real Simple Syndication) to syndicate there content to various search engines, RSS search engines and directories giving you again more FREE exposure through there feed.

Reason #8. Info-Product developers need it to.

Ever receive a free ebook of some sort in your Inbox with related articles inside it from other authors?

When you offer your articles with ‘Reprint Rights’ and someone decides to include your article in there ebook for a Viral marketing campaign they’re working on, guess what?

More FREE targeted traffic for YOU as that particular ebook circulates across the Internet.

Reason #9. Post them to related Forums and Newsgroups.

Remember, the Internet is all about numbers and Forums and Newsgroups contain numbers to and are yet another avenue for you to gain some extra exposure for FREE for your online business through your articles.

Just make sure you read there ‘Terms’ before you start posting because you don’t want to receive any ‘Flames’ in your Inbox.(They can be Nasty.)

Reason #10. You gain INSTANT credibility as an Expert.

The best way to gain the trust of your potential customers online is to supply them with quality “Information”.

By doing this your stepping up and telling them that you know what your talking about within the industry your in giving them a reason to look into what you have to offer further by following the link you provided within your ‘Resource Box’ at the end of your article.

WoW! Are those 10 POWERFUL reasons to get started with ‘Articles’ or what?

You get all those benefits by just producing ONE article.

The more you produce the more you’ll benefit.

Do you see how powerful ‘Articles’ are now and how they can take your online business to the next level?

I certainly hope so.

In conclusion: “Content IS King” online and will remain King for as long as the Internet exists.

It’s now up to you to step up to the plate and decide whether or not You want to tap into this ‘Proven Internet Marketing Strategy’ yourself and reap all the benefits I just finished explaining above.