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Top 10 Website Marketing Tips by eTrust Pro

Web Site Marketing Secrets

We are going to share some web site marketing secrets with you that we've learned over the years through our own online tests. It doesn't take a high priced marketing firm to help you increase sales, just a little insight and guidance, which we are about to share with you.

With over 20 years of experience working and selling online and doing our own testing we have learned a lot of little secrets that really do increase your conversion rates and ROI (return on investment).

Some of these changes you will be able to do yourself, others may take your website programmer. Marketing takes time and testing, but it's something you must do if you're trying to sell online.

Tip 1: Layout & Eye-path

Always try to keep the navigation and layout consistant on every page. This seems like a no-brainer but I've seen links and placement of links change on every page. Keep links in the same place on every page so users do not get lost.

Try to think about your site as a new user the next time you look at it and you may find some placement flaws or additional changes you can make. Listen to your users and watch your traffic statistics to see what areas are popular and make those areas easier to find for new users.

You can use the free Google Analytics to view how many visitors you get, where they come from, how they found you, and what they do on your site.

Use Headlines...

... to grab your users attention and draw them into the next step in your sales funnel.

Tip 2 : Search Engine Traffic

I'm sure you know by now that unless you have people finding your web site in search engines you do not have a good chance to sell what you're offering. The best way to optimize your Web site for search engine traffic, I'm talking about FREE organic search engine traffic not paids ads, is to follow these steps...

Let's say you are selling dog collars and have tried paid listings, but they don't convert into sales enough to keep paying. Try these suggestions to get free traffic from search engines (it can take up to 1-3 months for the changes to take effect).

Google Is Your Friend (Most of the time)

Use the Google Keyword tool to find popular keywords based on your company, keywords are the words that customers would use to find your web site. Once you have the most popular keywords you can start optimizing your pages to target those keywords, which will increase your traffic in the long run. You can also review the Google Webmaster guidelines to learn more suggestions.

Optimizing Your Web Site For Organic Listings

Optimizing Your Web Site For Paid Listings

We are not going to foucs on paid search listings here, but when paying for ads on Google such as using AdWords or other search engines you want to have landing pages that are optimized for the keyword you are paying for. If you buy the keyword "dog collars" you should have a customized landing page focused on dog collars, do not send traffic to your home page.

Tip 3: Build Trust

It's harder for new, smaller sites to build trust then it is for larger sites like Amazon.com or Walmart.com. Smaller web businesses can use trust seals to help build the trust they need in order to get the sale.

Tip 4 : Simplify

A lot of times less is more and it holds true for marketing. Clarity trumps persuasion, take some time to study your site and develop a genuine offer with pure clarity.

Tip 5: Button Copy, Size, & Color

This is an area a lot of people just don't think about. Test the copy (wording) you use on your form buttons and your conversions and ROI are sure to increase (or decrease). You want the user to take action, so tell them what they get for taking that action.

Tip 6 : Steps in ordering process

Look at your signup an ordering process. How many steps does it take to complete the process? If you have more then three steps to complete the process you should test using a one, two, or three step process.

A two step sign up process for subscriptions works really well because you can ask for the users email address during the first step and if they do not complete the second step you can email them trying to get them back.

For shopping carts test a 3 step process or even a single page checkout.

The idea is to shorten the process as much as possible to make it faster to complete, which has been proven to increase conversions 99% of the time.

Tip 7 : Colors Can Influence The Mind

colorsColors cheer us up, make us docile, give hope, comfort, feelings of love, they can even motivate and make us eat when we weren't even hungry! If you visit an online florist and view the pre-made floral selections for sympathy, romance/wedding, get well, spring, and birthday bouquets you'll notice that different colors dominate different categories.

Even if you have nothing to sell, you probably have something to say, want to trigger an emotion in your visitors, or hope they'll take a specific action. Whatever your web aspirations the follow guide will show you the colors that can take you there.

For most of us color preferences drive our personal choices and the professionals know that is true. That's why millions, no wait, billions of dollars are paid to advertising and marketing agencies to help corporations find the perfect colors to trigger consumers to buy their products or services.


Tip 8 : Pricing

People do not only buy on pricing alone but it can help give a preceived value in the eyes of your customers. This is another area you want to test and not guess.


Tip 9 : Browser Compatibility

Using Google Analytics you can view what browsers are being used to view your web site and using the browser compatibilty tool here you can test to see how your site looks in different versions of browsers. This is a quick test to make sure you are not losing sales because of a little design flaw making your web site not usable on older browsers.

The main browsers to test with are...


Tip 10 : Testing, Testing, And More Testing

Always test your ideas and never just make changes because you think it will do better. Make a change and view the results, if you get better results keep the change and move on to other areas to test. You could be leaving money on the table for some other company to get.

Useful Web sites to learn more marketing secrets


All this information is only the tip of the iceberg. We didn't cover landing pages, content management systems, search engine friendly URLs, SSL certs, shopping carts, graphics, or payment methods to accept, plus many others. If you have any questions please contact us

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