Author: Mike Turner

Well I thought I’d do a few articles about setting up websites and online businesses as well as online marketing, as support for my business and marketing guides. Online marketing and online business, isn’t what this website is about specifically, but I do believe it should be covered, as it is becoming increasingly more important to have an online presence, even if your business is predominantly carried out off-line.

Getting Started

So you’re a small business owner looking to move your business online or start a new business from scratch, but not sure where to start. You’ve heard of SEO and PPC, optimisation and opt-in forms but don’t really know what they mean and how to use them to make your business an online success.

You can search Google or Youtube using terms like “make money online” and see what you get, but be warned you will spend hours, weeks, even months wading through the marketing spam and hype to find any nuggets of gold. The information’s out there you just have to know where to find it.

This websites a pretty good place to start as I’ve got a lot of information on the subject, having built up a vast resource over the years, as part of my own research. I am also tapped in to a great network of online experts who provide great insight, as well as keeping abreast of the latest developments, without the BS you usually get. I will digest the best bits and present them for your benefit, as part of my contribution towards marketing and business content for this website. I would also suggest checking out my business and marketing guides for more insight.

Well first off I would suggest you get yourself a website. I use WordPress for my businesses, because it’s free, and easy to use, being a content management system (CMS), which means you don’t need any coding skills to update the content, as you build it up. It’s supported by a large community of designers and coders, so is always improving and evolving, becoming better each year. You can download it here, and all you will need to do is upload it to a server of your choice. I have used a couple of different hosting platforms in the past:

• Bluehost
• Lfchosting

but there are a lot of others available, along with reviews.

If you don’t know, or can’t be bothered to learn it yourself, I will be glad to do it for you with my “done for you service”. Email me if you want more information about that. It’s not that difficult to do for yourself though to be honest. It’s a good idea to get yourself a business Facebook page set up, if you haven’t already done so, and again this is free and really easy to do. If you intend to create videos, a business Youtube channel is also a good idea, you can always embed the videos you create, in your webpages.

Word of Warning

Now, if you have yourself a Facebook page or Youtube channel you might not bother about getting yourself a website, instead using Facebook or Youtube as your internet home, but be wary about building your business based on a third party platform, because you are relying on them either not going away or changing the rules and taking your business from under your feet. Having your own website gives you control and makes you look more serious in the eyes of visitors, but they will cost that little bit more, in terms of hosting fees and domain name registration etc.

Primary Strategy

Now there are 2 major considerations at this point

• Getting visitors to you website – otherwise known as getting TRAFFIC
• Getting visitors to buy from you – converting visitors

Getting TRAFFIC

Your site is not much good to anyone, if nobody can find it. So getting visitors, or traffic as it’s better known, is key to your success and you have three main options:

SEO – (search engine optimisation) is a number of activities you can undertake to get your site listed on the major search engines like Google and Bing. The idea is to optimise your site so it gets indexed and ranked, hopefully on the first page of these major search engines. If you’re only listed on page 10 of search results, its very unlikely that anyone will search through 10 pages to find your site. So if you’re not on the first page you are going to get limited traffic volumes to your site. It’s free but takes time to get ranked, even with a well optimised site, it can still take a few months, if not more.

PPC – (pay per click advertising ). This is where you pay to have your website advertised on search engines advertising sections. Paying for traffic is faster than the free options, in fact you can have a presence on the first page of Google within 10 minutes of starting a campaign, which means you can be found by searchers almost immediately, but you are paying for this privaledge, so is costlier than free methods obviously. Costs per click can range from 20p to £10 and more depending on your niche or market, but generally speaking a click cost of £10 infers that there is more money to be made in such a niche, after all advertisers wouldn’t be prepared to pay so much if they weren’t making money out of it.

Social Media Channels – Using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Linkedin, to bring people to your website is the third major option open to you. It does mean learning the best practices for doing so, which is beyond the scope of this article, we will however cover it in more detail in future posts.

Converting visitors

Converting visitors refers to converting them from being just visitors to customers, who are going to buy your product/service. I would recommend you get your site search engine friendly first then work on conversions as soon as possible. Simply because if your site converts visitors well you don’t need as much traffic for it to make money. Here’s an example to illustrate the point

• If you get 100 visitors and make one sale at £100 that’s a 1% conversion rate
• However if your site converts at 10% you would only need 10 people to make the same about of money.

Now I’m not saying you will ever get a 10% conversion rate, (in fact if you do please tell me how you did it) I am just using these figures as an easy-to-see illustration of the power of increasing your conversion rates.

Tools needed to get the job done

Now, how do we increase conversions? Well first, you need to have a focused squeeze landing page that is designed to get people to opt-in to your email list. The strategy here is based on the fact that it’s easier to get a person to give you their email address than it is to get them to buy from you, without them having heard of your brand before. It is often referred to as “selling the click”.

Once you have their email address, via your landing page, you need to send them a number of emails, providing useful information related to your product/business offering, such as tips and tricks, insight or a free sample for instance. This is aimed at building your prospects trust in you, without which, you’re unlikely to get them to buy anything.  At the end of the process, you will eventually pitch them an offer, which should be aimed at helping them in some way. Gary Vaynerchuk calls this process “jab jab jab, right hook”, meaning provide value (jab), provide value (jab), provide value (jab), then ask for a sale (right hook).

At the end of the email sequence a second landing page, a sales landing page should be used so that the prospect is encouraged to purchase your product.

There are a number of landing page software providers who offer WordPress plugins, which add functionality to your WordPress website. I have used Thrive Landing page plugin for many campaigns I have run in the past, simply because it does everything I needed to do. With a simple drag and drop interface, you don’t need any coding skills to build effective layouts. It was less than $49 to buy, with no on going subscription charges, and also came with lots of educational videos to help you succeed, so is well worth the investment.

There are a number of email providers available, MailChimp offer a free service for smaller mailing lists and leads onto paid services as your list increases. It’s a great service, from my experience. Also check out Mailpoet, which is a free WordPress plugin, and works well.

I use Paypal to take payments over the internet and this is relatively easy to set up and insert the code within landing pages.

Summary

I’ve tried to outline the steps needed to get your website presence up and running, shying away from going in-depth too much and scaring you into thinking it’s just too hard.

If you want any specific questions answering please put them in the comments below and/or sign up for my newsletter.

I do provide a “Done for you service” which involves setting up an hosting account and getting WordPress installed, I’ll also add the necessary plugins mentioned above. Alternatively, have a go yourself if you’ve got the time and patience to learn.

Good luck with the new venture and hope I can provide lots of great, actionable information for you over the coming months.

• The yellow writing highlights the traffic sources
• The pink writing highlights the content
• The light blue writing highlights the monetisation methods

The model above, highlights the ways of providing useful free content to your audience while also paying the bills. Having run a number of businesses off-line where you can’t afford to give things away, getting used to this online business model took some adjustment.

In a nut shell the idea is you provide information people want to read, listen to or watch, which genuinely helps them to solve some problem they have, or help them achieve something they want or need. You monetise on the back of this content with advertising banners, PPC adverts or affiliate links, so that when someone clicks through or buys the product, you get paid a commission as a reward for bringing in the traffic.

Getting Traffic

The better the content you provide the more people will want to share your content or talk about it on forums etc and the more people will come to your website. Increased traffic should mean you get more clicks on ads and links and enable you to make more money, at least in principle anyway.

Content considerations

The best method seems to be providing content such as “How to…” information and then having links to tools that help your audience get things done faster or with less hassle. Pat Flynn over at smartpassiveincome.com makes thousands of dollars per month by offering advice on how to make money online and then having an affiliate link to Bluehost so visitors can get a website hosted straight away. He then gets a commission from Bluehost for referring clients, get the idea?

PPC and Adwords

The easiest way to make money online is to get Google Adwords set up on your site and let them manage the ad delivery side of things by showing relevant ads to match your on-page content. Although this is the easiest method to set up you will need a lot of clicks to make any decent amount of money using it.

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links can provide a lucrative income if you can find a product that is relevant to your content. Many website owners build their entire site around a product or range of products with the sole purpose of making money off the affiliate links. Generally the visitor has to buy the product(s) after following the links for you to make any money, but with commissions often as high as 75% of the sale price you can quickly rack up some income if you have the right traffic, content and affiliate product alignment. Check out Clickbank for affiliate products you can sell as an affiliate. I have a number of affiliate accounts set up for products I believe will help my audience to get things done faster, with less hassle, or that will help them make more money.

Develop your own products

Probably the best method of making money is to sell your own products, so you make more, in terms of margin. However you do have to spend more time creating the products in the first place. Products could include digital information products such as Ebooks, and Video Educational systems, or you could hide content behind a pay gate as with membership sites and charge monthly subscriptions for access. If you have the know-how you could provide software solutions, or physical products via Ecommerce and drop shipping sites.

Getting traffic and converting

One of the hardest parts of any business is getting customers to buy from you, with websites it’s about getting as much of the “right” kind of traffic to your site and then getting them to either buy your product or click on the ad links or affiliate links. Paid methods of driving traffic to your site include PPC such as Google Adsense, which is the marketer’s side of the Adwords platform. You can even use affiliates to drive traffic to your site, or paid social media advertising. Free methods include SEO, blog networks, links from article sites, and link wheels although algorithmic changes by Google are rendering some of these methods ineffective or even damaging to your sites search engine ranking so do plenty of research before using any of them.

One thing you should be doing on your website is capturing email addresses using an opt-in form such as the one in the sidebar of this website and at the bottom of the post. This will help you to build a relationship with your visitors and further help them in their search for a solution to their problem. You can find out what they need, what problems they are trying to solve and tailor your products to achieve an effective result for them.

I like to go one further with regards to emails, I like to provide exclusive tailored content via emails, in such a manner that best serves subscribers. I can find out specific needs and add maximum value. Websites are great for general information, but people tend to struggle most when applying acquired knowledge to specific circumstances.

Only by solving problems and providing genuine solutions will you be able to build a sustainable, value-added business. There are many people on the internet looking to make a quick buck and game the system, avoid this and make the internet a better place.

If you would like to keep up-to-date when I publish new content please subscribe to my newsletter below or like my Facebook page (in the sidebar) and thanks for taking the time to read my content.

Check out my Business guide and marketing guide for more information.

If you are looking to make money online you need to be aware of this very simple equation

The internet equation: Traffic plus Conversions equals Online Success

There are only 2 ways to make more money from your website :-

#1- Get more traffic onto your site, which involves promoting on other websites, search engines and social media, which can add cost if you need it to be effective and in a timely manner.

#2 – Improve the number of conversions on your website, which doesn’t involve any more cost. It is best practice, to improve your conversion rate before getting more traffic, so that you make the most of any traffic and don’t waste resources increasing leads only to waste them. Think of it like pouring water into a bucket, which has a big hole in it.

The success pyramid, illustrated below, shows the likely success rate of website visitor’s either providing their email address or buying from you. Starting from the bottom of the pyramid, X amount of traffic comes to the site, a small percentage of which will convert (give their email address) with a smaller amount actually progressing onto buying something from you. So out of 1000 visitors, you might get one paying customer at the end of the process. If you can increase your conversions to 2 for every 1000 visitor’s you have doubled your sales from the same amount of traffic. Focus on improving sales with existing traffic volume for best results. Don’t focus initially on getting more traffic to start, as this will increase acquisition costs

The conversion system I’m going to recommend works in the following way:

• Generate traffic via PPC or SEO (subject of another post)
• Traffic arrives on focused landing page (known as a squeeze landing page because it’s designed to squeeze the email address from the visitor)
• Traffic is incentivised to provide their email address
• Auto-response email sequence is sent to build relationship with prospect by providing more info, adding value and building trust. Prospect is warmed up to allow sales pitch to be more readily accepted and acted upon
• Sale pitch (via email and taking to a sales landing page) is aimed to help prospect speed things up, save time and money, or make things easier etc.

Let me add just one thing at this point, it is vitally important to add value to your vistor’s/prospect’s lives by providing a product/service that will genuinely help them achieve something, or save something. Don’t get into online marketing just to make money, do it to help visitors in a business-like manner, so that you can sustain your help and provide even more value going forward.

To improve website conversions there are a number of things you need to have in place.

• A focused squeeze landing page and sales landing page,
• An email capture form and
• A system to allow visitors to pay you over the internet such as Paypal.

There are a number of tools available to you, in your quest for online success, some of which cost money and some of which don’t. The system I use for my businesses cost me less than £100 for all of them as one-off lifetime payments, with no monthly recurring subscriptions. I will be happy to provide links to such resources if you subscribe to my email list.

Reduce fear and build trust

Having a squeeze page is one thing, but you still have to make that page effective in capturing visitor’s email addresses. Before a visitor is likely to provide their email address, you will need to prove to them that you are trustworthy. Visitors don’t like to give their email address because they are worried that you will send lots of unsolicited emails, or sell their email addresses onto third parties, who will then go on to spam them with no value offers. So make sure you assure them that this is not the case, to help reduce this fear. Use statements such as:

• We hate spam just as much as you
• We will never share your email address with any 3rd parties
• We will never spam you
• 100% privacy guaranteed

next to your opt-in form to help reassure the visitor. But make sure you keep your promise.

note – There is some evidence to show that the subconscious mind is unable to differentiate between negatively framed words and positively framed words. For example using the word “spam”, even if you’re using it in the context of “We will never spam you“, causes a negative association and can lead to lower opt-in rates than if you were to use a generally more positive phrase such as “100% privacy guarantee“. The best way to determine if this is true, is to run your own test to see what works for you and your audience.

Get the email address and build a relationship

A squeeze landing page should be constructed around one idea or offering. Give your visitor something in return for their email address. Providing valuable free information is one way to do this, in the form of a white paper, e-book, diagram, a free tool, list of handy resources, a cheat sheet, recipe, or video lesson etc. The strategy behind this approach, of giving them valuable information in exchange for their email address, is so that you can build a relationship with them via email, and over time hopefully convert them to paying customers, once they know and trust your brand. It is much easier to sell to someone who you have already had some dealings with, than if they are a complete stranger.

Having something to sell

If you haven’t got something to sell at the end of it, then you’re not going to make any money and you won’t be able to continue provide a great resource for your visitor’s, unless of course you’re just doing it in your spare time for fun, which means you have limited time to devote to helping your audience.

It’s best to start from the sale and work backwards. For instance if the product you’re selling is a cookery coaching program, you can give lots of cooking tips and tricks away for free and have a buying guide for equipment as your opt-in incentive. Alternatively if your product is a photography course, you can give lots of tips and tricks to improve photography for free and have a photography equipment buyers guide as an opt-in incentive.

The difference between a Sales Landing Page and a Squeeze Landing Page

A sale page is the same as a squeeze page but instead of trying to solicit an email address from the visitor, it allows the visitor to buy your product/service.

Anatomy of a landing page

Both squeeze pages and sales pages should contain the following elements:

Headline

An eye catching relevant headline – This should be linked to the source of the visitor, for instance, if they came from a Pay Per Click (PPC) advert, then the headline on your sales pay should be the same as the text used in the original advert they clicked on. They should know they are on the right page once they arrive on your landing page based on what they saw on the previous page.

The headline should address a need or want. It should promise a clear benefit or offer. The headline must encourage the visitor to read on. If it’s not engaging enough the visitor will leave without taking action. If you have used PPC to get the visitor onto your landing page this is a wasted click and has incurred a cost to you, so make sure you test your headlines to get the best chance of conversion.

Call to Action

Have a clear call to action, with action oriented text, “click here to get…“. The whole purpose of the landing page is to get the visitor to take one action. This is the call to action. The one call to action on a squeeze page should be aimed at getting the visitor to give you their email address, or on a sales page it is to buy now. If you don’t get it from them, the landing/sales page has failed, pure and simple.

With just the headline and call to action in place the full bare bones of the offer should be completely evident. Everything else on the page should just support these two elements.

Support elements

Supporting text to expand on the headline promise and provide more detail and also address any possible objections. You will most likely need more supporting text on a sales page than a squeeze page simply because people will give their email address away more easily than money.

An image relevant to the offering

Bullet points of exactly what you are offering in exchange for their email. The greater the value you are providing the better the chance to get that email address or a purchase.

Trust elements – such as testimonials, case studies, customer logos, press mentions, number of followers, customers, subscribers

Risk reducers – such as money back guarantees, free trials, free samples etc.

Tell them who you are. Tell them exactly what you want to do with their email, what offers you will be sending them, and that they are relevant to the offer you are currently providing etc. You will still need to reinforce this on a sales page, even though they should already know you from the squeeze page and your email sequence.

Email sequence

There are a number of email options you can use, some for free, while others have a monthly fee. You can set up auto-responder emails which will send out pre-written emails at set intervals once someone has opted-in.

This can be set to deliver your valuable information directly to their inbox and of course, your sales message and link to the sales page. Growing an active email subscriber base is a key element to online success, because it gives you access to the people who are likely to want your products and services and who already know you.

The old adage “The money is in the list” could not be more true. The key to keeping subscribers on your list is keep providing them with great useful, relevant information, insight and value. If you want to convert them into paying customers you must have something of value, which they’re willing to pay for and that adds more value to their lives than it costs them.

Summary

Converting visitors into customers is key to online success. The elements on a landing page, while crucially necessary can be varied in their construction. For instance there is no one great headline that will work for all products and services. The only way to know what’s best for your particular niche is to test, test and test again. Testing different, headlines, different calls to action, different landing page copy, and different images is crucial to improving your landing page performance.

You can use products like Google Analytics to measure your landing page performance. It is vital not to overlook such a great feedback opportunity. If you don’t know what your audience is doing or not doing, you are left to guess and hope for the best. Of course ultimately your bank account will tell you whether your efforts are providing a return on investment or not in the end, but knowing where your efforts are failing within your sales funnel, will help focus your attention. Are you getting lots of clicks on your PPC adverts but no one is opting-in to your email sequence? Are you getting lots of opt-ins but no one is converting on the sales page?

This is what it takes to become an online success. Having a strategy, working the strategy, testing the variables, measuring and reading the feedback data, testing again, improving all the while in an ever improving cycle.

I will be adding more information about each of the elements of a landing page in more detail in future posts, such as killer headlines, and call to action best practices, so please subscribe to my email list so that I can keep in touch.

Check out our internet resource page, you’ll find lots of handy, tips, tools and resources.

For more marketing insight, check out our Marketing guide.