One of the things that I like to stress to clients is conversion rates.  This is the fastest way to get more sales out of your website.  In fact you should be constantly tweaking your online sales copy, shopping cart process, and opt-in strategies.

Small changes can have massive effects on your bottom line!

Here's an analogy for you:

Suppose I left San Francisco Bay on a journey across the sea to New Guinea.  On my journey I'm ignorant to the fact that my compass is off by only one degree.  After weeks of sailing I reach another shoreline and to my shock, I end up in Queensland, Australia.  The compass was only off one degree!

This analogy is similar to the conversion process on your website, small changes can reap big rewards!  

Let's look at an example of what a 1% difference would look like in your sales process.

For the sake of argument lets say that you are selling widgets that sell for $1000 apeice.  After running a thousand visitors past your salesletter you convert at 1%.  Here's what your results will look like:

1000 visitors X .01 (conversion rate) = 10 Sales X $1000 dollars = $10K in sales.

Now let's look at the same scenario with a 2% conversion rate:

1000 visitors X .02 (conversion rate) = 20 Sales X $1000 dollars = $20K in sales.

Wow, what a huge increase!

Sometimes running a pay-per-click campaign will break even, or even lose a little money.  At this point you have two options, ditch your campaign for those keywords OR tweak your conversion rates to make your ads profitable.

Many times businesses have no idea how to do this in house, no worries, that's what we're here for **shameless plug :-)** !

Here's a great article about getting your site to convert better, I ran acros this a few days ago and I'm a big fan of the Noble Samurai crew:

 Read the full article here, you will be glad that you did!

There's a reason that the traditional A/B split testing model is popular, it makes life easy for the person testing because you are only testing 2 different factors.  There are other methods of testing (like Taguchi for example) in which you can test a multitude of variables but it's best to stick with basics when testing.

For example:

1. Headline A to Headline B
2. Subheadings
3. Ad copy 

When you try to test too many things on your pay per click campaigns, you are puttting yourself into a position where you can make some drastic, costly errors when interpreting data.

Melissa Mackey makes this point very well in a post over at Search Engine World click here to read the full article!  She then goes on and talks about the pitfalls of trying to use all the latest and greatest bells and whistles in your advertising accounts.

The other day I got a call from a friend of mine asking whether or not he should be using email marketing for his business, he's a recruiter.  I told him heck yes!!

Sending Bulk Email Has a Slimy Feeling to It!

I understand that most people have a negative feeling regarding email, and I get why they feel this way however, when done right you can build a great client base that will keep on returning to your site time after time to read your content.  When you build a list in a way that customers or propects are looking forward to receiving your email, they will love to hear from you!

Additionally, bulding an email list is one of the most profitable things that you can do for your company, think of it as an asset to your company!  The reason that I say this is because that is EXACTLY what it is!

Here's what I told my recruiter friend:

I get an email from Monster.com every week that tells me a list of jobs that are open in my area every week.  Not that I'm looking for new jobs but I read every deatil of it from top to bottom.  Dice.com has a similar feature but they take it one step further, lately I've been getting emails from one of their staff members letting me know that there is a job opening that I'm qualified for along with a link to more about the opening. 

Heck yes you should be creating an electronic email list!

If nothing else he should be sending out an online newsletter to his prospects with some good information on the state of the job market in the region, tips for getting hired, what is a reasonable salary to expect in the market, etc.  Anything that he can do to keep his prospects coming back to their site.

In order to understand this further you have to think like an 'information consumer' would think would think.

Since a persons employment status can have a tendency to change at certain times throughout the course of our life, there's a good chance that one of his prospects doesn't need a new job today, but may need one six months down the road.  If they keep hearing from the company weekly or every other week, who do you think they are going to call when they are in need of a job?

Answer: The one that is on their mind!

Who is on their mind?

Answer: The one that has been communicating with them for the last six months.

How to Email Market Your Business, and How Not to Market Your Business

In this case I would send out a weekly online newsletter to my list that had a few different things in it.

First and foremost I would include in that email a list of jobs that I am trying to fill for my customers like "10 Hot Jobs" or something similar, with links to the positions on my site.

Secondly, I would use some snippets of posts that I put on my blog as content for the newsletter (you do have a blog don't you?  Hint: you're reading this on my blog).  Just put in the title and maybe 50-100 words of text from the article that you are linking to.  Link the title of the snippet to the actual URL of the post on your blog.  You should have enough relevant content that you have generated over the week on your blog already.  Repeat the process with 2 or 3 snippets from your blog to bulk it up a bit and then send it off to your prospects.

It doesn't take that much time to do, and it keeps your prospects connected to the news in your market.

If you are going to send out offer after offer with nothing of substance other than 'buy this' 'buy that' you might as well not start this process because all that you will do is piss off your list.

I subscribe and unsubscribe to lists all of the time, the ones that I kick to the curb on a regular basis are the ones that do nothing but send me offers.  I don't mind buying things, trust me on that, but what motivated me to join a list in the first place was to receive information!  This kind of marketing is what makes people feel dirty, avoid it at all costs!

Using the tips above you will be well on your way to connecting with the people that you want to be in front of the most!

BY THE WAY:  You can subscribe to our friendly, warm and fuzzy, newsletter over there in the sidebar >>>> :-)

"Can't we all just get along?" -Rodney King

I wrote about the new Schema.org guidelines here, in an article that I referenced from SearchEngineWatch.

Overall I love the idea of using microdata so that search engines can more easily tell what your content is about.  Using the correct tags to identify information on your web pages creates a more robust search experience for the end user of the search engine.  Frankly, this is long overdue, just try to find relevant data on your average search query, it's sometimes a garbled mess.  Bing's television commercials accurately represent runaway querys.

With this in mind I coded a few simple things on our homepage to be Schema.org friendly.  I figured that a simple thing like inserting address, postal code and phone number microdata would be a great place to start.

Overall it was relatively easy to do but in the future I hope that somone creates a Joomla! (and Wordpress) plugin that will make our lives easier.

After correctly formatting and inserting the code I figured that I would do a quick test using the HTML validator over at W3C.

Listen, I get that NOT EVERYONE is as anal with W3C compliance as I am, but the thing that struck me (after finding 5 errors on the page) was the errors on the page are directly attributed to the microdata that Schema.org is asking for.

Here's one of the errors that I'm getting:

"itemscope" is not a member of a group specified for any attribute

This represents a problem in the webmaster community, often folks come up with great ideas and they don't take time to address the appropriate people regarding compliance issues.

Being W3C compliant is not really a badge of honor, it's just something that I believe in so that screen readers and visually impaired folks can easily read or listen to what we put online.  Sometimes it's a hassle but overall if I can make someones live better, why not make the effort and do the extra work?

Sometimes it's like herding cats when you try to get things done...

If you are into seo, pay-per-click, or internet marketing I want to encourage you to add SearchEngineWatch.com to your daily reading routine.  They have great articles that will truly benefit your online business if you take time to listen to what the authors of the articles are saying, consider how you can create a plan of action for your own sites, and then take action.  

It's like the New York Times for nerds. :-)

I ran across a great article by Eric Enge that gives a case study on how cleaning up the coding of an existing webstie helped one of his customers increase the traffic to their site by 40%.  It's a great example of simple things that you can do to your website that have huge results.

Over time, websites decay, links get broken, images get moved, reference links no longer work, it's just the way it goes over time.  After awhile your site starts to look like a house that has been weathered and a neglected.  In order to keep your 'virtual real estate' looking like a million dollars, it's a good habit to analyze it once in awile to ensure that your links aren't busted and your content is still relevant.

I could yammer on for hours about this but in my opinion, results speak louder than words:

Check out the full article by clicking here.