Cross Selling

Another successful strategy similar to the ones discussed
above is Cross Selling. One of the best examples of cross
selling via the web is on Amazon.com. If you search for a
book on the Amazon site, a message will appear on the same
page, saying 'Customers who bought this book also bought…'
and will list half a dozen other books for your
consideration. This is an excellent way to cross sell
additional services or content to your members.

You can also direct visitors to other parts of the site, to
consider products and services that they hadn't previously
considered. Successful cross selling is the result of
recognizing a customer need and meeting that need with a
useful product or service. Customers benefit from
needs-based cross selling efforts because they receive the
services they need and want.

Cross selling can help your business realize its objectives:
providing useful services, retaining customers, attracting
new customers, and staying competitive with other websites.

In conclusion, you can offer a range of products and
services on the Internet. The key is proper research and a
great marketing plan.

Second Tier Marketing

In this article we will review the principles of second tier
marketing or selling to your existing customers. We will
also discuss how to cross-market and find potential
customers that you may not have been aware of.

Importance of Back-end Selling

Considerable effort is required to get customers for your
products. You design killer web pages, work hard for high
search engine rankings (or pay for them), submit classified
ads, etc. but still do not manage to sell enough. This is
where the concept of back-end sales is useful.

Most marketers are successful because they apply back-end
selling into their marketing efforts. Back-end selling is
when you sell other products or services to your existing
customers after they have purchased an initial product.

It is always easier to sell products or services to your
existing customers because you have developed a relationship
with them when you sold your first product or service to
them. You will find it less expensive to sell to old
customers as compared to selling to new customers.

Your conversion ratio will be dramatically higher with
existing customers. Every time you continue selling back-end
products or services to existing customers, you will be
building a life-long relationship. You should continually
bring out new back-end products or services to sell to
existing customers.

Many businesses sell their front-end products (initial
products) at almost zero profit in order to generate
back-end profits. These businesses do not care even if they
lose money on the front-end products or services; they want
the back-end profits.

How do you make backend sales? There are several ways. When
you order a product from a mail-order company, they'll send
you a catalog along with your order, or put you on a mailing
list and send you new catalogs from time to time. They might
also send you a sales letter for another product. This may
be related to the first product in some way. Many companies
implement such a strategy.

To implement this technique on the web, you can put the
sales pitch for your backend item in the email to the
customer to confirm their order. If you have an online
catalog, you could include a link to it, or even include a
coupon or special offer "for all valued customers".

For a faster response, you should put the backend offer on
the "Thank You" page that is generated by a credit-card
sale. The customer just bought something from you and has a
credit card in his or her hot little hand! Why not ask for
another purchase while they are in the mood to buy. In case
you do not sell more than one product or service, affiliate
programs might come in handy. This way you can back sell
products promoted by your affiliate programs as well.

Back-end selling can also be integrated with “Up-Selling”
wherein you introduce more expensive products or services to
your existing customers in similar ways as those mentioned
above. This will almost instantly raise your sales and
profits.

Web Copy for SEO

The search engines will scan the text on a Web page to see
if your site is relevant to the search term. That means that
in effect, your Web copy is going to have to do two things:
to persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engine
it’s relevant.

When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, but
throw in between four and eight keywords. You’ll have to try
to balance a smooth text flow with getting in all the
keywords you need to be listed.

You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to
articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some
keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create
opportunities for link exchanges.

So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position of
your site in a search engine. More important than where you
put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s not
really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to
have done the job for you.

Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’t
mean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google.
One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve been
online, so success on the search engines won’t come
overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the
sooner you can start to rise.

Use a specialized tool

Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped up
to supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best of
these is WordTracker.com. They’re not bargain basement, but
you get what you pay for. They’ll give you all the keywords
you need and in my experience, they’re a sound investment.

Googlefight.com is another useful tool to see whether one
keyword is more popular than another. The site compares two
keywords and tells you which is more popular. It’s free and
has a limited use, but it’s fun to play with.

As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it’s
also worth looking at key phrases. It’s quite possible that
a user looking to buy flowers online might search for ‘red
roses’ or ‘cheap bouquets’ as well as just ‘flowers.’ Key
phrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you’ve got a
pretty good chance of getting a high placement with the
right combination.

Don’t worry too much about the competition though. Some
people will tell you that you’re better off trying to find
keywords that no one else has thought of—as if there were
any!—and others will tell you to throw in keywords that are
only slightly relevant to your businesses.

In my experience, that’s a waste of time. If your
competitors are using certain keywords, it’s because they
know they work. And if you pick up any users using
irrelevant keywords, you’re not going to sell them anything.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure out
the most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put on
your site.

Whichever of these methods you use—and I tend to use more
than one—you should end up with a pretty comprehensive list
of keywords that you can stick into your website. The next
question then, is how do you use them? When a search engine
assigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in a
number of specific areas.

Ask the pay-per-clicks

Pay-per-click sites actually let you see how popular a
keyword is. They’re not being kind; they’re trying to make
money. The more webmasters bid on those keywords, the higher
the bids are going to rise—and the more money the
pay-per-clicks are going to make. FindWhat, for example, has
a Keyword Center, and Overture a Keyword Suggestion Tool.
Both are very handy, but they also require you to open an
account. That can cost a few bucks, but when you have a lot
of sites covering a lot of different areas, it’s usually
worth the expense.

Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines

This week we will discuss the key to improving your sites
listing in the top Internet search engines.

When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’
into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions
of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy
score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If
your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher,
the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your
first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are
most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

Ask your competitors

This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important
keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is
good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites
like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has
downloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then
‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build the
Web page, including all the keywords that have been
specially inserted.

For example, let’s say one of your websites sold nutritional
supplements. You could carry out a search for ‘vitamins’ in
Google. The top site there is called DrugEmporium.com, and
the keywords they list are "The Katz group, Snyders, Drug
Emporium, Drug, Drug Store, pharmacy, stores."

Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site.
Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots
of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed—like
‘vitamins’ for example. But you can repeat the process on
other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty
long list.

Navigation Controls

Navigation controls are the main navigation links; they
allow users to move around the site. Whether they comprise
images or text they should be predictably located in the
same place, and with the same appearance, on each page.

These have several purposes

* To allow users to move about within the site
* To tell users what information is available at the link
* To work with location indicators to orientate users

A good navigation control:

* Is clear: it looks like navigation
* Leads to obvious content - users have a good idea what
they will find if they click
* Is consistent with other navigation controls
* Is predictable in its style and location on the page

There is no mystery to usability. It simply involves
creating a site, which is accessible to the majority of
people, is easy to use and get around and delivers on its
promises. You can have a site that meets the most important
standards of usability by planning it well and always
keeping the end user in mind. Remember that web sites should
not be designed for their owners - they should be designed
for their users.

Problems with usability could be said to stem from just two
sources: the site itself and the user. In fact the site is
always at fault; if a user, however experienced or
inexperienced, has problems navigating, getting information
or understanding the site.

While websites have become far more complex, web users have
become less rather than more experienced as more and more
people go online. It is a mistake to think that the majority
of users will be web or even computer savvy and will
understand subtle clues about content. Most will not.

So take these words of advice and review/plan your
navigation links accordingly. Just remember - if the
customer gets lost, so will your sale.

Objectives of a Navigation System

Navigation can be broken into two primary types, Location
Indicators and Navigation Controls

Location Indicators

Location indicators let users know where they are in the
site at the moment. It needs to be borne in mind that users
coming from outside your site can enter at any page, not
necessarily on a 'main' page. They need to be able to
orientate themselves.

Equally it is important that users navigating around your
site have a clear idea of where they are both in absolute
terms and in relation to other content.

Location information should appear on every page of the
site, in the same place and in the same style. Location
indicators should tell the user precisely where they are and
this should be clear even to a user who has entered the site
at an internal page. The location indicator should be
identifiable for what it is and make sense in the context of
other navigation.

In simple sites a page banner - text or graphic - naming the
page will be sufficient. For this to work the page name
should also appear in the main navigation so that it is
relevant within the overall structure of the site.

Color can be used. For example a different color background,
contrast color or sidebar in each part of the site. To be
really effective the color change should be reflected in the
navigation.

Using ‘breadcrumbs’ on every page is a good idea.
Breadcrumbs show you a series of hierarchical links that you
have used to go from page to page within a section. Using
breadcrumbs is like leaving a trail of the path you have
followed. The breadcrumbs appear at the top of the content
section, just below the main navigation template. Each
element in the breadcrumb is a link to that section or
subsection. This helps in avoiding a series of back buttons
allowing the user to directly go back to the main section
page or another sub section. More importantly, it always
shows the context of the page that is being viewed and how
it belongs to a section or sub-section.