AIDA is the secret to writing compelling website copy or improving your existing website copywriting. Copywriting is not a new thing, its been around for years; actually much longer than the website that you are writing it for.

Copywriting was first employed in direct marking campaigns. You remember all those sales letters you used to get in the mailbox? You know before you acquired an email inbox? The same principles apply to your website that would have applied to the direct mail piece that you would have mailed before the internet. But what are the principles?

The first is attention; you have second to capture the attention of your reader. How many seconds? 5-7 seconds is the rule of thumb. Some people are slower to click out of the screen but not alot and they will click out if you don’t grab their attention and grab it quickly. That means that you have to write a headline that will leap off the screen and grab the reader, think about the Sunday paper, you check the headlines and read the stories that have attention grabbing headlines, websites are no different.

The next point is interest, you have to grab that attention and turn it into interest. Why would the reader want to stay on your site? Why are you any different than the other 100 companies that the search engine returned…write in a casual tone, just as if you are across the table.
Desire is the third part of the recipe. Put on the lawyer hat and build the case for your reader. Leave no doubt that they need your product or service. They must have it, no doubt about it.
The last portion is action. Don’t leave your reader with the impression that they can do anything other than click on the button. They have to act now not later. Encouraging visitors to take action works much better when coupled with “the right bait” or incentive.

Writing effective copy is not easy but it is something that you must have. Compelling web copy is what will set your site apart from the multitude that are already out there.

When you want to make money online or off you need a product or service. It’s as simple as that nobody is going to buy from you unless you have something they want, otherwise its donating to the cause of your existence and that simply does not happen often.

So its simple you need something to sell, but what. Well you can think up your own product and design, build and patent it; but that takes time and money. So it may not be a viable option. What is next? Well the alternative is to sell someone else product, but buying it and adding your profit to it may take it out of the affordable market. Enter affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s product without the upfront investment of buying that product. It also eliminates the need for you to stock that product. Affiliate marketing allows you to make a percentage of the sale without stocking or buying the product. Just provide a link for your customers to click on, and when they buy it goes into your account.

Using videos as marketing tools has now become common practice on the web. Creating them to explain your site or services will increase your conversions and overall sign ups. Once produced, viral videos can be embedded into your website or blog when placed on YouTube. Creating a YouTube channel for your business that is focused on your industry can also allow you to gain credibility as an expert in your field. If users enjoy your videos, they will be more inclined to subscribe to your channel which keeps you always in front of them and more able to effectively market whatever your product or service is. With mobile search continuing to grow and phones like iphone hitting the market, video marketing is rising consistently and quickly and most likely will be the number one online marketing technique.

Another benefit to video marketing is that it builds a sense of trust among consumers. Customers are naturally weary and can smell a sales pitch from miles away. By putting your message on video, you are given the opportunity to let possibly interested candidates see your face and honesty (if you’re honest of course!) rather than your company and what you are trying to sell.

To support this growing trend, Google has now included a video option within AdSense where publishers can purchase “InVideo” ads where a video ad appears at the bottom of a video, as well as text overlay ads that place text below that video. These new ads are paid on a CPM basis and the text overlay ads are paid on a CPC basis.

Fortunately, you do not need to be a professional to create these videos. If you have a digital camera with video capabilities, you are good to go! Most PC’s come with a little application called “Windows Movie Maker”. If you take the time out and play around with it or perhaps read up a few tutorials on how to use it, you can find that you can work wonders with it! Not only can you ad text, music, photos and more but it does make your video look a bit more “professional” if you are looking to do that.

Overall, video marketing is the future so get on the bandwagon now!

If you have a great product that you are selling on your e-commerce website, allowing your customers to write reviews can do a tremendous amount of good for your bottom line. In a bricks and mortar business, a certain amount of business is generated or lost by word of mouth. If you run a good business, people will promote you to their friends. If you run a bad business, people will do the same. It has an impact, just as advertising has an impact, but with an e-commerce website there is so much more potential for this to work for you because virtual communications are easier than person-to-person interactions.

What Kind of Person Reads E-Commerce Website Reviews and How Much can They Help a Business?

According to Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today, people that check comments are termed, “social researchers” and depending on the type of business involved, there might be a lot of them.

A 2007 study by the Kelsey Group found that 24% of searchers for several types of offline services, such as hotels, checked online reviews. 87% of hotel seekers who checked reviews said that the reviews strongly influenced their purchases. Gift basket e-retailer DelightfulDeliveries.com added customer reviews and within two months reported a 20% increase in conversion rates for items rated with four or five stars.

It gives you something to think about, doesn’t it? Customer reviews are a great source of information for something like a hotel or bed and breakfast, but they are just as important for a retail based e-commerce website. If you have reviews of the products that you are selling, it provides your potential customers with a range of user experiences that can help to influence their decision. It might also help them to buy a more expensive product from your line.

What if Someone Writes a Bad Review of my E-Commerce Website?

One could reasonably argue that this does not matter. Wilson goes as far as saying that it “adds credibility.”

They (online shoppers) expect reviews rating merchant customer service on Amazon and eBay. They’ve browsed reviews dozens of times. They know that there is always going to be someone who has a bad experience. But if the strong majority of the reviews are positive, a bad review doesn’t hurt. On the contrary, it adds credibility to the other reviews. If a series of reviews are uniformly positive, many shoppers will discount them as rigged.

If all of the reviews on your e-commerce website are bad then you might have a problem, but if you focus on providing great customer service and good products and or services, your customers should for the most part be happy. The odd bad review is not going to put people off your e-commerce website.

Scripts to Implement Customer Reviews on an E-Commerce Website

If you are using a content management system, you might be able to arrange a free commenting system. This will depend largely on the CMS that you are using for your e-commerce website. Alternatively, there are some commercial scripts that are widely used.. Wilson recommends any of the following: Bazaarvoice, PowerReviews, iNods, and Reevoo as suitable solutions. You could also outsource the coding of your commenting system and get something that is a true fit for your e-commerce website.

If you are new to running shopping comparison sites then you should be aware that you are in a very, very crowded market. Shopping comparison sites are springing up all over the place and it can be quite difficult to get your site noticed in the crowd. The shopping comparison sites at the top of the search pile are very good at what they do, but that does not mean that you should not try. There are still opportunities for shopping comparison sites owners and there will be for many years to come.

The trouble with big shopping comparison sites is that they get so big that they lose focus. Most of their material is compiled by robots and there is very little of the human touch involved. They are very good at promoting, but their shopping sites are simply too large to properly monitor the finer details. The best opportunities for new shopping comparison sites owners these days is with niche markets. If you find yourself a niche you will benefit in a number of ways.

• By marketing to a niche, you will have a massive advantage in your search relevance.
• You will have a lot less keyword rich content to produce.
• You can focus on areas that have not been thoroughly exploited by bigger shopping comparison sites
• You can closely monitor the information on your site to ensure its accuracy.
• Smaller shopping comparison sites can much more easily be promoted through social networks than larger shopping comparison sites as people are less resistant to them.

If you are thinking about opening up one or more shopping comparison sites, our advice would be go ahead. Despite what people tell you it is never too late. Google was not the first search engine and look at where they are now. With a little hard work and a good marketing strategy your shopping comparison sites can get noticed and you can make money off a crowded market.

Social networking, in particular social bookmarking is a great way to boost your web position. While most of us realize what can be accomplished through social networking, few realize just how much work can go into it. I well connected social marketer can literally grab thousands of links from a recommendation on any one of the major social networks. Novices, however, will struggle to get their message out. Site Pro News provides some interesting thoughts on the matter:

The problem for most people when thinking about social marketing, after getting a taste of all the hundreds of sites there are to interact with, is becoming overwhelmed and paralyzed into inaction.

They assume established social marketers gained their “social authority” in a short period of time. This is simply not true. Although the opportunities for driving serious traffic and rankings from hundreds of social sites exists, it is an embarrassment of riches.

And it cannot be conquered over night. It is a gradual process you manage with all your other responsibilities and grow as time allows.

What I encourage my clients to do is set aside enough time each day to get one more link, participate in one more conversation, or sign up for one more account on a social site.

Like so many other aspects of web marketing, social networking requires a concentrated effort over an extended period of time. You are not going to grab the links that boost your web position over night. It is going to take some effort. You will need to get in there, make friends, talk to people, share your ideas, listen to their ideas and be an active member of the social network in order to make it work for you. Simply going in there and recommending a site won’t do your web position any good unless you have a network to back you up.

If you are really interested in boosting your web position through social networking, try this. Pick out five or six social networks that you would like to concentrate your effort on. Start making friends at the rate of about five or six in each one per day. Attempt to build at least one link on a different site per day and rate some other people’s things as well. If you set aside about twenty minutes of your day to improve your social network, by the end of the month you should have some healthy network growth. You will get faster at it and in time, your web position will start to show the fruits of your labor.

If you ask a group of webmasters what they would most like to improve about their website, you would not be surprised that many of them would reply, “Web position.” Web position can help you generate a lot more search traffic, but to build and improve your Web position can take a lot of time, work and a little bit of luck. Today, we are going to look at some simple and not so simple methods of improving a Web position to gain advantage of all of those wonderful traffic benefits that it imparts.

Improve your Web Position Organically
What do we mean by, “improve your web position organically?” Organic improvements are those that you do not pay for directly. Incorporating keyword rich content is the most common way of doing this. If you find a great little niche, it can be relatively easy to accomplish. More common keywords will be harder to achieve results in, but give yourself time and it is possible.

Keyword rich content can be produced in-house, but it is becoming increasingly popular to outsource it. Outsourcing keyword rich content makes sense if you need a lot of content fast. As soon as that content is on your website, it can start to earn you results.

Link bait articles can also achieve great results. If you really want to make a lasting impact on your web position, you will need to be able to consistently produce link bait. Some people are able to do it on a fairly regular basis. If you can, go for it, it is a great way to build links that will help you to improve your web position.

Black Hat Methods to Improve Web Position
You ought to be very careful employing techniques that are frowned upon by search engines. Duplicate content will see you downgraded very quickly and is not worth having on your site at all. Link buying or renting, however, can be. If you are buying links, look around the site very carefully and make sure that the site that you are buying them on has no reference to links being bought or sold. Try to find sites that connect to your site in some way, be it in theme or content. Search engines are getting very good at detecting these types of manipulations, but if you are careful about link buying, they probably won’t find out. Buy at your own risk.

Web position is something that must be worked on constantly. It can go up and down depending on the amount of work that your competitors are doing. If you get tired or lazy and stop producing fresh material, you might see your web position drop off. The most important thing is consistency. If you keep working on your site, chances are that you will be rewarded with a strong web position.

Here is a great web marketing video from Web Marketing Today featuring Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim. It is about a very important aspect of web marketing, monitoring your competitors. Andy Beal talks about some great ways to monitor your web marketing competitors including Technorati and Google News and how to make the most of the information that you learn there.

Another thing point that is made in the video relates to “making your competitors weaknesses your strengths.” If you catch a product recall or a problem with your web marketing competitors you can use the problems to promote your own products. One point that he does make is that you should learn from your competitors without getting too negative. Your competitors will take care of themselves in this regard, it is best not to get too dirty or the favor just might be returned sometime.

It is a very interesting web marketing related video and well worth the five minutes of your time that it takes to play, enjoy.

Today we are going to take a look at some simple website improvements that anyone can make which can easily be done in house. These website improvements are designed to improve the aesthetics, performance and search engine optimization of a website. They are true website improvements, but are relatively easy to put into place.

Add Some Fresh Content
Adding a little fresh content or rewriting some of your site text is one of the simplest website improvements that you can make. It does not take a great deal of time or effort to accomplish. Go through your site, pick out the weakest text sections that you can find and rewrite them. You will feel better afterwards and you might be giving your website a little search engine optimization boost.

Optimize your Images
Compress your images to the point that any further will make them look grainy. You want your images to look clear, but you don’t want them to cause slow load times on low bandwidth networks. If you want to include large product shots, you can turn each picture into a link which will take your visitor to a high resolution shot that is off the page. While you are optimizing your images, you might as well take the time to tag them all, this will help your website with image searches. There are not too many website improvements that can have a marked effect on site performance, but this will do it and your site will handle heavy traffic better too.

Add a Video
It doesn’t matter if you have to shoot your video with a webcam. All commercial websites should have at least one video. You can host your videos on YouTube. This is perhaps the easiest of the three website improvements that we have included today.

There is some debate as to whether or not it makes sense to create all-in-one e-commerce websites. By all-in-one e-commerce websites, I am of course referring to websites that bundle everything into one package. Some e-commerce websites come with a forum, a blog and product pages integrated together to form a single package. Some webmasters will tell you this is great for the brand, others will tell you it can hurt your sales. Who is right? Depending on the situation, they both might be.

Everything on e-commerce websites should be about driving sales or promoting your brand. Where some people go wrong on all-in-one e-commerce websites is that they lose focus of this fact. Blogs can be great marketing tools for e-commerce websites, but a blog can quite often take on a life of its own. If you are selling information services, you can quite easily bamboozle your readers. The last thing that you want to do is to make them feel like they are getting in over their heads. At the same time, toning down your blog work might be selling yourself short to other customers. In these cases, you would do better to keep your blog elsewhere and display some of your best work on your site. All-in-one content management systems are great for e-commerce websites, and it is worth remembering that they are easy to configure and that components can be readily removed or transferred to a different location.

I am not a fan of forums in e-commerce websites. They are prone to spamming and require a great deal of maintenance. There are circumstances in which they can work, but you need to be prepared for a great deal of work. Forums require constant attention.

If you are going to include optional components in your e-commerce websites, just be sure that they are helping and not hurting your efforts. The idea behind all of these extra components is to drive traffic your way, if they are not driving traffic to your e-commerce websites then they are not fulfilling their purpose. Giving blogs and forums a “home of their own,” can be good for e-commerce websites in such situations.

This is pure speculation on my part, but if you look at what is happening with the eBay vs. Amazon competition, you cannot help but be a little hopeful that things are going to get cheaper with PayPal. Google Checkout is the first real competition that we have seen for PayPal in a long time. There are plenty of other online payment processors, but they have effectively had their hands tied in the United States and that has allowed PayPal to have a near monopoly status for a very long time.

Other online payment processors have chosen gambling dollars over U.S. operations as anti-gaming laws have taken effect. PayPal has always had a much broader client-base and with the absence of any alternative, that is what people have used, for better or worse. This was great for PayPal, but bad for business. Without a stable competitor, PayPal has been able to charge what they want, to a certain extent. People have just had to bear the PayPal charges.

If Google Checkout is able to build up to the stage that it is really an international player (just operating in the U.S. and U.K. does not really count), they might find themselves in a position that they are able to threaten PayPal’s bottom line. That is when we are going to start seeing some real changes to PayPal’s fee structure.

eBay has taken something of a hammering in the online world of late, due largely to a set of changes that they were planning to introduce to their fee structure. While there were plans to provide discounts to bulk sellers, small-volume sellers were largely overlooked. In an article featured today on Mashable, author Kristen Nicole sheds some light on the issue:

According to a recent announcement by Lorrie Norrington, the new President of eBay Global Marketplace Operations, eBay is actually accelerating its plan to phase in category-specific pricing for media. This particular fee cut will coincide with the other price changes announced by the company in the past couple of weeks. The media pricing is being applied to Books, Music, Movies and Video Game categories, and will be offered as follows:

$0.01 - 0.99 (auction-style only)
Original Categories Insertion Fee: $ .20
New Media fee: $ .10

$1.00 - 9.99 (auction-style and fixed price)
Original Categories Insertion Fee: $ .40
New Media fee: $ .25

$10.00 - 24.99 (auction-style and fixed price)
Original Categories Insertion Fee: $ .60
New Media fee: $ .35

We are seeing the online auction marketplace get cheaper all the time. It is a competitive industry and Amazon’s marketplace is providing them with some very stiff competition. eBay wins on every sale they make on their site, whether or not there are fees involved because they own PayPal. eBay can probably sustain more of a hit on fees because they have those payment processor fees to fall back on.

There are essentially three ways that you can go about setting up your own eCommerce website, they vary dramatically in cost and in the amount of time that is required to set them up. Today, we are going to take a brief look at the three different options and give our thoughts on each of these options and give you a few pointers that might help you if you choose either one of them.

Building your own eCommerce Website
Building your own eCommerce website can be an extremely time consuming process. Unless you are a professional web designer, or have a great deal of experience designing and building websites, you should know that it is a lot of work. Still, some people do an outstanding job of this and if you think that you have what it takes, go for it. A good DIY eCommerce website should be a balance of form and functionality. Don’t get too carried away with the design aspect, you want it looking simple and professional. Check out a few of your competitor’s sites for ideas.

Using a Template or Script for your eCommerce Website
This is actually two options, but I am combining them as one because they are, in effect, very similar. Using a template will give you a standard website with limited or no interactivity. Chances are that you will need to pay a little bit of money for your template. The good news is, it is possible to buy single use or limited use templates, this limits the chance of your customers encountering your website elsewhere. Whether you are using a script with a template or a website from a template, there will be a little tweaking involved. The work requirement will be substantially reduced, but you will lose some of the uniqueness that comes from doing a ground up eCommerce website design.

Custom Built Websites and Script Templates
Outsourcing these tasks generally gives the best results, but it can be expensive. On the plus side, you will get an eCommerce website that has been designed by a professional and probably looks better than you would be able to manage. You are probably going to get your website a lot faster than if you attempted to go it alone, professional web designers build websites for a living and they can move quickly. The downside is always going to be that there may be differences in vision between you and your designer. Make sure that you are very clear in regard to the specifications of your eCommerce website and you should be fine.

Web marketing and snail mail marketing campaigns could not seem to be further removed from each other, however, there are a few companies that make use of this technology. There are a few rules that you should be aware of if you want to use direct mail for web marketing. You want your communications to be appreciated and not seem like an intrusion.

Using Direct Mail for Web Marketing

• The first thing that you need to remember relating to direct mail is that letters from places that customers do business with are not always appreciated. You need to inform your customers that you intend to run a direct mail campaign and make it an opt-in service.
• Be discrete, it does not matter what product you are selling, you do not need to advertise on the envelope; some tasteful branding is enough.
• Make it worthwhile. A direct mail campaign can cost a great deal of money. You want to make sure that you have something to offer your customers that they cannot get in your regular web marketing emails.
• Invest in stationery. Just as you would brand a website for web marketing, you should brand your direct mail communications.
• Ration your communications. A direct mail once per quarter ought to be enough for a web marketing enterprise. There are other ways to get your message across.

Direct mail can strengthen your web marketing campaign and when used correctly can be a very effective marketing tool in its own right. If you are not using direct mail as part of your web marketing strategy, perhaps it is worth considering. Not every web marketing enterprise can benefit from direct mail, but if you are profitable enough and you want to extend your approach it could be for you.


Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Does E-book publishing make money? It makes a great deal of money. If you are thinking about getting into e-book publishing, then you are going to have to ensure that you have the right tools for the job.

Use the Right Tools for the Job
The default format for most people in e-book publishing and marketing is PDF. PDF has become the default because it is possible to control file distribution and to prevent unauthorized editing of the document. There are a few different options for authoring PDFs, but by far the most popular and certainly the most professional solution is Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat is the backbone of most e-book publishing efforts, but there are a few other programs that help to get the job done.

Word processing for e-book publishers can be done in any word processing program. MS Word plays very nicely with Adobe Acrobat and is the program of choice for many people. While some e-book publishers will choose to work exclusively with an MS Word and Adobe Acrobat combination, the more design conscious tend to opt for a desktop publishing package.

Desktop publishing programs range widely in price and performance. At the top of the range there is Quark Express, but Adobe does do a pretty good job with InDesign. Due to the exorbitant prices of desktop publishing programs, it is usually possible to get a trial version. Desktop publishing programs allow for a great deal more layout flexibility. You can really get creative with how you display text and images on a page. Not all types of e-books need this, but if your work has a visual aspect to it, you might wish to consider the purchase.

If you are serious about making the jump into e-book publishing sector, there are a few expenses. Fortunately, the programs that you are using are well designed, upgradeable and are supported by a range of literature. Before getting into e-book publishing you can always give the more expensive programs a try.