₦airaland Forum

I believe that The best thing that can happen to someone in need is to aid THEM FREEEEEEEE!, So am willing to let you have some of my ebooks on Mysql and php free. if you want, just send me an email yemonite@yahoo.co.uk With Subject PHP

[size=8pt]If you include all these elements on your site, you'll be well on your way to creating a site that attracts the sales you need![/size]


Whenever business dies down a bit or you find yourself with some time on your hands, take advantage of the lull by going through your site with a fine-toothed comb. The simpler and more user-friendly your site is, the more sales it will generate. It's as simple as that. So you should always be thinking about how you can remove any unnecessary clutter, confusing links or visual eyesores to let your sales copy stand out.

In order to figure out what works and what doesn't, below you'll find a list of the 10 critical elements your site should include:

Essential Element #1: An Attention-Grabbing Headline. The first thing people see when they visit your site should be a compelling headline that describes the most important benefit your product or service offers. The headline is the key element of your site. It's what will persuade visitors to stick around and check out what you have to offer.

Your headline should be well-written: It should be clear, concise and to the point. It should also be enticing-you want to pique your visitors' interest and make them eager to learn more about what you're selling. You can do this by emphasizing what your product or service can do for them.

Once you've crafted a compelling headline, format it so that it stands out from the rest of the text. It should be the first thing that catches your visitors' attention. Use a large font size, bolding, italics, a different color-whatever suits the style of your site.

Essential Element #2: User-Friendly Navigation. Nothing will drive customers away faster than confusing or complicated navigation! Your customers should be able to know where they are on your site at all times, and should easily be able to find pages they've already visited.

Make sure your navigation bar or menu is clearly accessible and easy to understand. It should be exactly the same on every page of your site, and be located in exactly the same place. Your customers shouldn't have to hunt for it.
Remember: When it comes to navigation, consistency is the key!

Essential Element #3: Effective Salescopy. The words you use to describe your product and its benefits are the key to the success of your business. Your salescopy is the only contact you'll have with the vast majority of your visitors. That's why you have to make the most of it!

Your salescopy should:

* Immediately draw the reader in with exciting benefits and enticing copy so you can lead them toward the sale.
* Establish your credibility-nobody will buy from you if they don't feel they can trust you.
* Describe the benefits of your product or service and explain why your visitors need it.

Essential Element #4: A Clear "Call to Action." If you want people to buy your products or services, you have to tell them how to do it. Don't leave them guessing. You have to explain exactly what you want them to do, and you have to make it easy for them to do it.

If you want them to buy a product, present them with a call to action like this:
"CLICK HERE NOW to order your six-month supply of Product X."

Provide your customers with clear, easy-to-understand instructions on how to make a purchase, and let them know what they can expect when they click on the link that leads them to the order page.

Essential Element #5: Well-Chosen Images. Images can really help people visualize your products or services and their benefits. Be sure to include photos of every product you sell. Attractive product shots can really boost your sales.

If you have a lot of products for sale, use "thumbnails" that link to larger images. This will make your pages load more quickly. If you're selling electronically delivered products such as ebooks or software, you may want to create simulated product shots to represent them. This makes your product more tangible to your visitors.

Essential Element #6: A Strong Opt-In Offer. Most first-time visitors don't make a purchase. However, the fact that they've come to your site in the first place means they're at least curious about what you have to offer.

In order to pursue a relationship with these potential customers, you should collect their e-mail addresses by encouraging them to subscribe to a free newsletter or a free download. This will give you the chance to send them updates and information, develop relationships with them, and enable them to trust you enough to buy from you.

Opt-in offers like this are a great way to turn visitors into customers and really maximize your sales. Your opt-in offer should be clearly linked to each page of your site or, if possible, actually included on each page. One less click means losing fewer potential subscribers.

Essential Element #7: Testimonials. The best way to establish credibility is to provide evidence that your product or service really works. And the best way to do that is to include testimonials from satisfied customers that explain how your product or service has helped improve their lives.

Be sure to include the names of your satisfied customers as well as where they live. You should also post a small picture of them beside their testimonials. This will personalize their messages, add credibility to their statements and demonstrate that they're real people who've enjoyed real benefits from your product.

For instant credibility, it's a good idea to have a few of your best testimonials featured right on your homepage. However, you should also have a separate testimonials page as well. The more satisfied customers you can show to reluctant shoppers, the better.

Essential Element #8: An "About Us" page. People are often hesitant to buy things online because they miss the personal interaction of doing business face to face. The best way to overcome their reluctance is to include an "About Us" page that provides information about you, your staff and your business. Be sure to include pictures of yourself and your staff members. This shows your customers they're doing business with real people and will help ease any worries they might have.

Essential Element #9: An FAQ Page. It's a good idea to include a "Frequently Asked Questions" page on your site. This is where you'll list the questions most commonly asked by your customers and provide answers to them. It allows your visitors immediate access to the answers they need before they'll consider buying your product or service.

Essential Element #10: Your Contact Info. In order to close sales and establish your credibility, you have to provide full contact information on your site. This includes your mailing address as well as fax and phone numbers. Businesses that only post e-mail addresses on their sites come across as unprofessional and possibly even disreputable.

And make sure your contact information is clearly visible on every page of your site. This will make it easy for customers to know how to reach you if they want to get more information or buy a product.
Final Thoughts

To keep your site in top form, it helps to review your site every now and then and create a list of "must do" actions you can take to optimize its performance. Figure out where you can get rid of nonessential clutter and simplify the sales process. Don't forget, streamlined sites generate more sales.

Also take the time to browse through other sites (including those of your competitors) to see how your site compares and get ideas for improvement. What do you like about these other sites? What do you find annoying about them? These visits will help you get an idea of what to include and what to avoid on your own site.

After you've made some improvements to your site, ask some friends to go through it. How hard is it for them to get from page to page? Can they easily find their way back to pages they've already visited? Are they confused by any aspect of your sales process? Do they find your site appealing? Remember: You can never do too much testing.


BE INFORMED, STAY INFORMED, RULE YOUR WORLD

[size=8pt]How to Attract Visitors to Your Site[/size]

Go from having zero visitors to attracting thousands of qualified buyers with these 8 easy steps for creating a knockout traffic-generating campaign.


I see it time and time again: The number-one challenge faced by brand-new internet business owners is a lack of traffic. Obviously, if your website isn't getting any traffic, you're not generating any sales. And what's worse is that without traffic, you can't test the key components of your sales process. And if you roll out a large traffic campaign before you've tested your site to make sure it converts maximum visitors into buyers, you risk losing sales and looking unprofessional to potential business partners and affiliates.

So you're caught in a vicious cycle: Before ramping up a big traffic campaign, you need to test your sales process, but without any traffic, testing is difficult--if not impossible!

In this Shot Lesson, I'm going to give you an eight-step action plan that will show you:

* How to get cheap, instant traffic to your website so you can test key components of your sales process--your sales copy, order form, navigation and opt-in offer--before rolling out a large-scale traffic campaign;
* How to ensure that every element of your sales process is optimized to convert maximum traffic into maximum sales;
* The most effective strategies for attracting thousands of highly qualified potential buyers to your site right away; and
* The secret to putting your entire traffic campaign on autopilot.

So even if your site is getting no traffic right now, you can be testing the key elements of your sales process tomorrow--and as soon as two weeks from now, you can be rolling out your traffic campaign in full.

Sound good? Let's get you started off on the right foot!

Step 1: Get the traffic you need to test your website fast! When I talk about testing with new internet business owners, I hear the same two questions all the time:

* How do I test my site?
* What do I test on my site?

As you may already know, there are an infinite number of things you can test on your site to help you increase sales. From layout to copy to design, there are limitless combinations of changes that may improve your visitor-to-sale conversion rate. But what's "enough" when you're just starting out? What elements should you focus on testing before rolling out your traffic campaign?

My advice is to stick to the basics. Focus on testing your:

* Salescopy, especially your headline, benefits, guarantee and call to action
* Order process, which needs to be simple enough for a novice web user to place an order
* Opt-in offer, so you can determine if you're successfully capturing your visitors' contact information
* Site navigation, so you can figure out how many clicks it takes to buy. Ideally it should take less than three.

These are the four critical aspects of your sales process that need to be tested before you start driving traffic. Later on, once you've generated sales and have some steady traffic, you can move on to testing other parts of your site.

Of course, all this talk of testing your new site raises one big question: How can you test without traffic? Because if you're just getting started, chances are good that your website doesn't get much traffic yet.

The solution is simple: Buy traffic through PPC search engines. Pay-per-click search engines are a lot like auctions--they allow you to bid for top-ranking positions under keywords of your choice. For each visitor who searches the keyword(s) you bid on and then clicks through to your site, you pay whatever you bid. Prices typically range from five cents to a few dollars per click-through for popular keywords.

There are a ton of PPC search engines out there, but the two best ones to get started with are:

* Yahoo Search Marketing and
* MIVA

With PPC search engines, you get cheap, instant, qualified traffic--provided you bid on targeted keywords. Not only that, but bidding on traffic in the PPC search engines can help your site get ranked in the free search engines, too!

Here are a few tips to help you start bidding for traffic without breaking the bank:

In Yahoo Search Marketing, bid to appear in the top three listings whenever possible, since these results are also "pushed" to appear in the search results for MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista, InfoSpace, AlltheWeb and NetZero--reaching 80 percent of all internet users.

Bid on targeted, descriptive keywords. So don't just bid on "sock;" bid on "red wool sock." Not only are targeted keywords and phrases usually cheaper to bid on--they'll also attract more qualified potential buyers. Use a keyword selection tool like Google's AdWords Keyword Tool to research targeted keywords that attract maximum traffic for minimal cost-per-click.

After you've tested and tweaked your site with a limited amount of purchased traffic, it's time to start generating qualified traffic for your site on a larger scale. But how do you go from some traffic to a ton of traffic?

Step 2: Get cheap traffic quickly with PPC advertising. Once you've tested your site with limited PPC traffic, the fastest way to ramp up traffic to your site is to roll out a PPC campaign on a larger scale. Obviously, you should start with Yahoo Search Marketing and Findwhat, as mentioned above. But here are some more PPC engines to consider bidding with as you increase your investment:

* Kanoodle
* Enhance Interactive
* LookSmart

This is also a great time to get started with Google AdWords --Google's own PPC contender. With Google AdWords, you get instant traffic with no waiting. Because as soon as you put the money down on your keywords, your ad goes up and starts working for you.

Step 3: Get free traffic from search engines like Google. Now that you've bid on keywords for a strong showing in the PPC search engines, it's time to tackle the organic search engines and directories. Search engines like Google and directories like Yahoo! can still be a great source of free traffic for your website. The trick is getting a competitive ranking for your best keywords.

The first step in getting a top ranking in the search engines is to submit or suggest your site to them. In other words, you have to provide them with details about your site. You want to make sure that the "spiders"--automated programs that crawl the web indexing sites for the search engines--find your site and include it in the search results.

While the spiders do index sites and pages that haven't been submitted, you certainly don't want to leave this to chance. A spider might find your website and index it next week--or it might be two years before that finally happens. So take the time to submit your site to be sure you're included. Once your site's been submitted, expect it to take two to six weeks for your listing to appear.

Every engine has a slightly different process for site submission, and it pays to follow their guidelines. For example, there's a fee to list your site in the directory at Yahoo!, but Google doesn't charge for their submission process. Here's a tip: If you submit your site exactly as they ask, you stand a better chance of getting a good listing on the first page of search results.

To submit or suggest your site to the major engines, follow the simple instructions they provide on these pages:

* For Google, go to www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
* For Yahoo Directory, go to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
* For Yahoo! Search, go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com
* For MSN, go to http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
* For AOL, submit your site to the Open Directory Project, which uses ODP data. Here's the link: http://dmoz.org/add.html

And don't bother with companies that offer to submit your site to the search engines. Since each search engine uses a different set of criteria to rank your site, free submission services can actually end up doing you more harm than good, since they submit the same information in the same way to all the engines.

End of Part one

watch for part two

Exchange ideas online, and make money. Information is power!

http://www.cure4poverty.com

tell what you think