27% of Ads are Not Seen At All

According to study results published by CBS News, more than ¼ of banner ads are not getting seen at all.  The main reason for this is because visitors simply do not spend enough time at a website to notice the ads.  Even the ads at the top of the pages are only getting seen about 85-95% of the time!  The reason is because many visitors leave before the ad even has time to load.

Another core reason that ads don’t get viewed is because they are located too far at the bottom of the screen.  An average web page takes about 5-6 scrolls to get to the bottom but there are some pages which take more than 20 scrolls.  Even if visitors scroll to the bottom, they will probably do it very quickly, just scanning the content along the way and missing the ads completely.

Tell Visitors to Click Your Ads

Most internet marketers use the PPC model for monetizing their websites since it pays better.  But high-traffic sites can profit with the PPV model.  Each of these models has its own pros and cons.  In either case, you should make sure to tell your viewers to click on your ads – but only after you have established yourself as a quality website.

• Pay Per Views: If you are getting paid per ad view, then you should have a high-traffic website or it won’t be profitable.  But, by placing ads on your website, you will make your website less attractive and may repel visitors.  If your visitors trust you, then a PPC model could be a better option.  You get to put the ads at a less noticeable location but mention the ads in your articles and tell visitors why they should click them.
• Pay Per Click: Let’s say that your website is getting lots of traffic because of all the efforts you put into writing great articles.  If your traffic clicks on an ad, then your article-writing efforts are going to waste since they left your site (and may not return since they didn’t finish reading your great articles!).  If you don’t have a lot of traffic though, then you will have to really work hard to get high conversion ratings by encouraging all visitors to click on your ads.

How long do visitors spend reading text?

According to a recent study by Nielsen Online, the average time spent on an entire website is 56 seconds!  A different study by Harald Weinreich analyzed nearly 60,000 web pages and broke down the time spent.  On pages with significant amounts of text:

• 17% of pages were viewed for less than 4 seconds
• 4% of pages were viewed for more than 10 minutes

This same study found some interesting patterns in how visitors read pages. When web pages had just a small amount of text, such as 100 words, they read the text from start to finish.  When the pages had longer texts, such as 1000 words, the reading style became very erratic.  The readers jumped around the text.

The longer the text, the less of it gets read. Study results vary, but only about 20% of web text gets read at all.

What do visitors want?

All website visitors want something, which is usually information or entertainment.  What is important to remember is that they want it fast and easy!  How you go about delivering these wants depends on your business model.  Let’s say that you are selling toaster ovens.  Your visitors aren’t likely to stick around to read a 2000 word detailed review of each toaster. But they would like to look at a very organized chart listing the pros and cons of each model.

Let’s face it: most of the text on the web is pretty useless or repetitive.  Web surfers know this, which is why they aren’t willing to spend a lot of time going through the thousands of webpages filled with text about their inquiry. Further, web visitors are in a hurry and they are distracted.  They probably have several other tabs open, so you are competing with a bombardment of information.

What is the goal of writing for the web? To get your message across in an efficient way.  To do that, follow these simple tips for writing for the web:

1. Keep Content Short: The longer your content is, the less of it gets read.  Keep your content short and to the point and you are more likely to get the full message across and keep readers’ attention.

2. Make Content Scannable: All of the key points of your content should be easy to identify at a glance.  Divide content into segments and provide a short, bolded headline for each.  Use:

• Bold text for important ideas/facts
• Bullets
• Numbered lists
• Q & A formats

3. Keep Content on Subject: Don’t veer into another subject on that page.  You can always make a new article about the topic and put a link to it.

Why are you building a website?

If you already have an established small business, you need to think carefully about why you are making a website.  Do you want to use the website to expand your business, such as by taking online orders and delivering?  Or do you want to expand your in-store sales by posting information about sales?  Do you want to increase sales by offering special promotion codes available online only?  Is your goal to increase brand awareness?  Or maybe you simply tired of people calling to ask when you are open and want to post your hours online…

Don’t just build a website for your small business because it is the trendy thing to do.  Make sure your website has a clear purpose which fits your business model and expansion plans.

Know your customers

Big companies like Starbucks or Volkswagen try to appeal to a large demographic. That is, after all, how they became worldwide brands.  If you try to appeal to everyone, then your internet marketing campaign will just get swallowed up by the mega brands.  Instead, you should focus on a small, specific demographic.  To do this successfully, you must know your customers!  For example, let’s say that you own a small coffee shop in Philadelphia where the students from the nearby art school visit frequently.  You will want to play up the coffee shop-art angle as much as possible.

Give Website Visitors are Reason to Come Back

Why would anyone want to visit your website?  They probably aren’t going to come just to admire the fantastic web design that you paid an arm and a leg for!  You have to give visitors an incentive to come to your website and then to regularly return.  This should tie into your original reason for launching a website for your existing business as well as your target demographics.  For example, if you have that Philly coffee shop where art students hang out, you can start a bi-weekly online exhibition where you showcase the works of a student.

Focus on Social Networking, Not Search Engine Rankings

With small businesses, a lot of your traffic is probably going to come from people directly looking for your website – not because they happened on your website through a search.  That is why it is so important to promote yourself by word of mouth.  Social networks are the ideal way to do this.  Make a stunning Facebook page and get started on Twitter.  Post information, such as the sales, new products, or just fun news so people will actually want to visit your social network pages and “like” you publically.

How You Build Page Rank

In theory, building up Page Rank is simple.  You want to get as many incoming links as possible.  The higher the Page Rank of the linking page, the more it will boost your Page Rank.  However, Google doesn’t calculate Page Rank literally.  If you get a link from a website which has a Page Rank of 6, then you may only get a measure of 5 from that website.  There are two main reasons why you won’t get the full value of the incoming Page Rank:

• The linking page may link to other web pages, so you have to share the Page Rank measures with the other pages.
• The PR measures flow to your entire website, not just the one page.

PR is Like Public Relations for Your Website

To understand Page Rank, you have to think of your website as a corporation.  The homepage of your website is the corporate headquarters.  Each additional page on your website is like another brand.  For example, think of your homepage as General Mills and each additional page is Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Betty Crocker and so forth.  Any successful corporation is going to have a PR department.  Your PR is Page Rank.

Let’s say that you get a link from a high PR webpage. This is like getting a major public relations boost for your corporation.  If we are going to use the General Mills metaphor, then it is like Cheerios getting recommended by the FDA for being heart healthy.  The PR is going to help Cheerios, but it isn’t going to directly help Lucky Charms.  However, since the PR helps Cheerios, it will help the reputation of General Mills and thus indirectly help the reputation of all their other brands.

Here is the problem with Page Rank in websites with many pages: your Page Rank is shared amongst ALL the pages.  So, if you have a high Page Rank for your home page, your internal pages are likely to have a lesser Page Rank.  As you add new web pages, the PR of your internal pages is going to decline. Also, if you link to another website on your page, some of that page’s PR is going to flow to the linked website. Think of PR like water: it is always flowing.  Luckily, PR is not affected by gravity so it can flow in any direction.  For example, let’s say you have a website with 100 pages.  All of those pages should link back to your homepage, so part of the PR returns to the homepage.  If you link 20 of those pages to a specific page within your website, then that page will likely have a higher PR than the other pages.

How can you increase the Page Rank of ALL of the pages in your website?  There are really only two options for this:

• Work on building high PR links to pages within your website
• Reduce the number of pages your website has.  Note that this is a bad option since content is crucial for SEO – and PR doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to ranking on the SERPs.

Does PR Really Matter?

Page Rank is a way to measure your website’s success in getting links.  However, it isn’t going to directly help you rank higher in the SERPs.  Just take a look at the pages which come up first on the SERPs.  You will find that there is no hierarchy with PR and SERP rankings.

PR does matter when it comes to making your website visible to Google’s crawlers.  Google crawls through websites based on PR.  The higher your PR, the faster Google’s crawlers will find your webpages, the more often they will be crawled, and the faster any changes will be registered.

Traffic to Your Blog

It is a lot easier to drive organic search engine traffic to your blog since it will have more content than a sales page as well as fresh content being regularly added (assuming that you are keeping up with your work!).  Additionally, a blog will immediately have a better reputation than a sales page. People are inherently distrusting of sales pages.  If they just see the sales page with nothing to back it up, then they aren’t likely to complete the action you want of them.  But, if you do a good job of establishing yourself as an expert in the field through your blog posts and then bring the visitors to the sales page, they are more likely to complete the action.

The downside of driving traffic to your blog over the sales page is that you will have to spend time creating unique content which is ideally of a good enough quality that you establish yourself as an expert.  Otherwise, your visitors may not be so trusting of the sales page you lead them to. Further, you have to be very good at converting your blog visitors into PPC successes.  This requires a lot of tact with strong calls for actions, carefully placed links, and strong sales pitches.  If you aren’t a good blogger and salesperson, then a lot of your traffic could go to waste.

Traffic to Your Sales Page

If you want to drive organic search engine traffic directly to your sales page, then you will have to spend a lot of time building up quality backlinks.  This can be much more cumbersome than trying to get a single blog to the top of the SERPs.   It is particularly important that all of the backlinks have very focused anchor text if you want to get results from your efforts. Because of this, you are going to be more limited when it comes to keywords that you rank for.  With a blog, you could easily rank for a lot of longtail keywords whereas the sales page is probably just going to rank for the 1-4 keywords you chose for your anchor texts.

Once you get traffic to your sales page, you still have the problem of getting them to complete the action.  Make sure that your sales text is incredibly strong and targeted. You will need to do some research about your demographics and carefully analyze your conversion rates to see where you can improve.

Look at Your Website Analytics

The best way to find new keyword terms to target is by looking at your website analytics.  In a quality website, the bulk of your traffic should actually be generated by longtail phrase which are NOT your targeted keyword terms.  It is always interesting to find out which terms people used to find your site as this can give you a completely new perspective about your website’s theme.  For example, let’s say you have a website about weight loss.  You target several weight loss terms and come up on page 1 of the SERPs for these terms.  But you come up on page 3 for terms like “detox cleanse” – terms which you didn’t even think about targeting at the launch of your website.

Make a Category for the New Terms

Once you find out what search terms are getting you unexpected traffic, you should work on incorporating them into your website in a much more visible manner.  One of the easiest ways to do this is by adding a category to your website which is titled with that term or a variation of it.  For example, the new category could be called “ways to detox the body before dieting.”

If you don’t want to dedicate a full category to that term but still want to generate traffic from it, then you must make sure that content with the term remains fresh.  In a weight-loss blog, for example, let’s say that you have one good article which is ranking for “detox cleanse.”  When the content becomes old and stops generating backlinks, then it will likely fall off the SERPs.  So, you should put a link to that article on your homepage, such as in a “most popular articles” section.  Make sure you use appropriate anchor text for the internal links.

Build Backlinks with New Search Terms

If you are already getting traffic from an untargeted keyword, then it probably won’t take too much effort to drastically increase your traffic.  A backlink building campaign can be a lot of effort if you are starting from scratch but, since you are already doing pretty good for a term without any SEO efforts for it, a few quality backlinks for the new term can do wonders.  By using this route, then you don’t necessarily have to put internal links to the article which features the new term or make a special category for it.  But combining  the backlinks with on-site SEO for the new term will of course get you much better results.

While I cannot answer this question 100% for sure, I highly doubt that Google would punish you for having links that are too optimized – and I also doubt that this would ever really occur with a site that is worth getting ranked anyway.  Firstly, Google doesn’t punish website owners for getting links from disreputable websites.  For example, if a black hat website puts a link to you, you aren’t going to get punished because you can’t control who links to you.  In the same way, we can assume that Google isn’t going to punish you for having overly optimized anchor text.  It is possible (though I doubt this is the case) that Google may void your backlinks if it detects that they are overly optimized and thus fraudulent.

If you are really worried that your incoming links have overly optimized anchor text, then you have a problem.  Ideally, most of your links should come naturally and not be generated by link-building programs or campaigns.  If you aren’t getting natural backlinks, then your website probably doesn’t have any valuable content and doesn’t deserve to be in the SERPs in the first place.  Instead of worrying about backlinks, you should instead be focusing on getting quality content on the web so you get natural backlinks.

The issue of backlinks is a bit of a catch 22 though.  If you don’t work on backlink building, you probably aren’t going to rank in the SERPs.  Without ranking, then visitors won’t be able to find your website and give you natural backlinks. So, a smart webmaster is going to have to work on at least some methods of getting backlinks to trigger the flow of natural backlinks.

Since it is highly unlikely that Google will penalize you for having overly optimized anchor text and we know that anchor text matters, then you should make all of your backlinks have optimized anchor text. You could just use the same anchor text for all of your backlinks, but this is a bit shortsighted.  If you aren’t expanding your anchor text to include other keywords in your niche, then you are limiting yourself and are likely to get lost amongst the competition.  Since you are already taking the time to build up backlinks, you might as well put in the extra effort to make each anchor text link correspond to the individual page it corresponds to rather than just defaulting on your top keyword list.

The authorship markup program was launched on June 7^th, 2011 and is just now starting to take off amongst content creators online.  The idea behind the program is simple but revolutionary in terms of getting quality content to the top of the SERPs: content authors put a link to their Google+ “About Me” profile.  Then, they put a link to the website from the profile, thus closing the link and letting Google know that you are the author of that content.  When your post shows up in the search results, it will appear with a small thumbnail picture of you from your Google+ profile.

You can find out more about how to get your profile picture in the search results at the Google help center for authorship.

Why would you want to bother taking time to link your content to your profile (other than feeling like a celeb when your picture shows up in the searches, of course!)?  Because the “rel=me” authorship markup program is a ranking factor.  Google immediately assumes that your content must be reputable if you are willing to claim authorship of it publically.  Further, Google has incorporated a system of expertness into the program.  While the details are still not fully explored, we do know this: if you have numerous content posts in one niche, Google will assume that you are an expert in that niche and your content will jump on the SERPs.  This immediately will cut down on your competition.  Instead of having to make tons of blogs just to build up backlinks and post massive amounts of text with targeted keywords to even appear on the SERPs, you can just write a series of articles in your niche and link them to your Google profile.

Here are some things to keep in mind when using this “rel=me” program:

• You must have an updated profile with a good quality photo.
• If you are writing for a wide range of niches, you may want to make multiple Google profiles for each niche.  Otherwise, Google may not consider you an expert if you have lots of articles in unrelated fields, such as cars, gaming and diet.
• Make sure you read through the Google instructions carefully if you want to make this register.

• Boost on the search engines
• Increased traffic, particularly from repeat visitors
• Instant reputability
• Brand name recognition

There is plenty of advice for picking a good domain name online.  Unfortunately, a lot of this advice isn’t practical in the real world.  For example, unless you are willing to spend a million or more for a one-word domain name, then you probably aren’t going to get your top pick.  You probably aren’t even going to get the multi-word phrases which are associated with your niche.  However, there are still limitless possibilities for great domain names, so long as you are creative.

Brainstorming Domain Name Ideas

If you already have a business model in mind (as opposed to first looking for a cheap available domain and building a business around it), then you will have to spend a lot of time brainstorming name ideas and checking their availability.  Ask your friends to give their suggestions.  Make a contest on Facebook where people can submit their ideas and vote on the best options.  While there are many components of a good domain name, such as the psychological impact and niche-specificity, there are two key aspects which you MUST have:

• Memorability: your domain should be short enough to remember and use common language terms that visitors will remember
• Fulfills expectations: When a person reads your domain name for the first time, that person should instantly know what your website is about and get an idea about its content.  Think about CareerBuilder.com.  It didn’t require any branding whereas a domain like Amazon.com required a lot of branding efforts.

Give yourself plenty of time to find the right domain name.  If you rush, you will likely end up with a domain name which doesn’t accurately encompass your website and will ultimately hurt your business.

Setting a Domain Name Budget

Most of the people looking for domain names have low budgets of no more than $100.  For this money, you aren’t going to get anything like Scuba.com or WeightlossTips.com.  But there are still plenty of great domain names available which cost less than $100.  If you are willing to up your budget to about $500, then you will really have a lot of options open up to you.

I repeat: you should take your time when looking for domain names.  Make sure you brainstorm a lot of possibilities and ask for people’s opinions of them.  Then shop around many different domain name marketplaces and auctions. The most popular are BuyDomains, Sedo, and GoDaddy.  But you may also want to check out Aftermarket, BrandBucket, NameDrive, NameJet, Pool, and SnapNames.   Only use a domain broker if you are dead set on a domain and it is already owned by someone else.

Cheap Labor is Often a Headache

When online marketers first start outsourcing work, they usually look for the cheapest provider.  These providers are usually located in parts of Asia or Eastern Europe – especially if you are looking for website designers.  Anyone who has experience with outsourcing will tell you hiring cheap labor is a costly mistake – and often a big headache too.  Here are some of the problems which usually occur:

• Language barriers cause miscommunication problems
• The work is completed late
• The work is faulty

You are outsourcing work to save yourself time, right?  But if you have to spend a lot of time writing emails, waiting for responses, and fixing faulty work, then you will end up wasting more time than if you had just done the task yourself. After having a bad experience with one outsourced internet marketing provider, you will then have to seek another provider.  Hiring takes a lot of time and this too will cut into your profits.

Experience – and the references to prove it!

Regardless of what sort of help you need with internet marketing, make sure that your provider has experience. If you are hiring a SEO writer, for example, you must ask for work samples AND take the time to read them.  If you are hiring a website designer, ask for samples of websites and also information about how long it took to create each and the price for each.  This will give you a rough idea of what you can expect for your budget.

Even if you are hiring online marketing help for a menial job, such as “forum poster”, you should still hire someone with experience.  Many of the job seekers on freelance websites have no experience with these jobs and don’t realize how much work is entailed.  When they realize that the price they agreed on isn’t worth it for them, then you are left with an unfinished job and will have to start looking for another worker.

Use Reputable Sites and Escrow Only

There are hundreds of job boards where you can find “professionals” in the field of internet marketing, including occasional help and steady employees.  You should only use the specialized job boards or the very reputable freelancer sites which require a fee or have an admissions process.  This will weed out any internet marketing specialists who aren’t really serious about their work.

Questions to Ask Prospective IM Employees

• What experience do you have?  How many years, references, education…
• What other jobs are you currently working?
• Will my internet marketing job be your priority?
• Are you available to do urgent jobs?
• What is your turnaround time?
• What are your niche specialties (for SEO writers)?
• When are you available?
• How many hours per week do you work?
• Why do you want this job?