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Prune & Water Your Money Tree – How to Make More Money Without Increasing Traffic

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:29:32 +0000

To which you react with horror and suspicion….

How could it be possible to increase my sales without driving more people to my site?

And the answer to that is simple:

convert more of the visitors that are already visiting your site!

Yes. Mr Cow, you say, that would be great. But do you have any actual helpful tips to, maybe, you know, help me do that?

At this point I realize that my imaginary reader is quite sarcastic today, and I might want to lighten up, because it obviously says something about my own issues.

Anyways, fear not, imaginary reader, because I certainly do have advice for you on how to improve your conversion rate without spending money on additional traffic.

The secret is: make simple changes to your website to improve its overall performance. The best part about this is, unlike buying traffic, which is a short-lived benefit (i.e. only for as long as you’re paying for it) the changes you make to optimize your conversion rate is the gift that keeps on giving.

The first thing that you need to do is figure out your list of priorities, and I can’t tell you what these should be. Look at your metrics, and find out if there’s an obvious place to start – i.e. a page where the drop-off rate is drastically higher than anywhere else on the site. If there is, then start with that page. If there isn’t an obvious place to start, then I would start with your checkout process and work out from there.

You need to identify where people abandoned the buying process, and try to figure out why. Go over those pages. Is there something that would turn a buyer off, or lose trust in you as a seller. Are you asking for too much information, or is the buying process not transparent? Look at things from a buyer’s point of view – what do you look for when you’re buying something?

Here’s a list of simple things that are easy to do that could help improve your conversion rate, without much effort on your part:

Make sure your ‘buy now’ button looks like a button
You’d be surprised how many people miss this. Your purchase button should be the most prominent thing on the page, and make sure that it’s obvious that it’s a button.

Give security assurance at the point of purchase
People want to know that they’re buying in a secure place, and that your site is a safe place for them to buy. Don’t assume they’ll see the https://, tell them about it on the page.

Make sure you’re providing what your ad promised
Even if you’re offering the same thing, if you word it differently, people may think that you’re not proving what the ad promised. (Eg. – Ad says buy one, get one half off! Website says buy 2, get 25% off both! It’s the same thing, but it sounds like a different offer.

Be clear about the whole buying process if it includes multiple steps
People don’t like thinking that they’re almost done, only to have to keep filling out page after page. By letting your customer know how long the process will take, and what information they will give and get at every stage, they’ll be less likely to drop out in the middle of the process.

Be clear about shipping charges as soon as possible, if you have any
If you’re shipping out physical product, let people know what the shipping charges are before the final checkout screen. Surprise shipping charges are the cause of a lot of mid-checkout abandonment’s.

If you’ve already done all these things, then great. Start testing other elements to see what else you can do to improve you conversion rate. If you haven’t then start now! The true benefit of these improvements is seen over a longer period of time, so the longer you wait, the less money you’ll be making.

10 Ways to Get Traffic on The Web

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:24:14 +0000

Understand one thing and one thing only…

Without traffic, you will NOT make much money online with anything!

It does not matter if it is your own product, a ClickBank offer or any other CPA (cost-per-action) offer.

I don’t care how much content you have, how great a copywriter you are or how great your latest ebook is….

Without traffic, conversions will NEVER happen!

Here are ten 100% free short and to the point videos to help you get started in ways to generate loads of targeted traffic!

Click Here to Gain Free Instant Access to Videos Now!

Make This Your Most Profitable Year Ever!

Keyword Research – What Are You Basing It On?

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:58:08 +0000

We have a question for you and we want you to really think about this.

What are the most important metrics that you use when doing keyword research?

1. Traffic

2. Competition

3. KEI

4. ___________ (Fill in the blank)

There are lots of fantastic tools online today and each one has their good points and bad points… but one thing that 99% of all these tools have in common is they simply give you a calculated guess using their own custom algorithim, that simply tells you how many competitors there are and how much traffic you can expect. Some make up a fancy term to use, such as KEI, but the bottom line is it is simply a traffic and competition ratio.

Now this seems logical doesn’t it?

Of course we want to know the amount of traffic a keyword could expect and hopefully we can find those hidden golden nuggets that have virtually no competition and lots of traffic.

But why is it then, when we find these keywords, research and create good solid content, build back links and work our asses off to dominate the search engines, are we not making any money?

The traffic is great!

The rankings are fantastic!

The content is stellar!

What could be wrong???

This is where keyword research gets tricky and was our biggest discovery in transforming our affiliate marketing business. The discovery was that there is a gigantic difference between “traffic words” and “buyer words”

You need to understand that just because certain words get lots of traffic, this does not mean at all that the people searching with those terms are even remotely interested in purchasing anything.

A good example of the is the “dirt bike” industry. There are loads of traffic to be gained from this market but the demographics of this market tend to be generally teenagers who really cant afford to be spending a lot of money. Their searches are for interest… because they are fans of the market but few are spenders.

Does this mean there is no money to be made in this market?

Not saying that at all. There may be potential profits from AdSense and other revenue streams but not (in our experience anyway) a lot in the affiliate side of things. Now there are probably some of you out there making a killing in this industry online and if so.. good on ya! We are not debating whether a profit can be made but pointing out that depending on the revenue model you are going for, traffic and revenue do not always go hand to hand.

For those of you that have experience in PPC, you see this a lot. You can have two words that are almost identical yet one converts into sales like crazy and the other does next to nothing.

Why is this?

There are lots of guesses and theories as to why but honestly we don’t know all the reasons. What we do know however is that it is a fact that there are certain words that are more often used by money spenders then just general interest surfers. The challenge however is how do you uncover these keywords?

Well there are two ways this can be done.

1. Slow and Painful

Build lots of pages focused on lots of keywords, get lots of backlinks, record and track everything and wait months to figure out what is working.

2. Fast and Furious

Find out what is working for others and use that information to get your research time reduced to only days instead of months.

Come on now… you can’t be serious cow?!

Oh but we are!

Traditional keyword research is great. There are loads of tools to use and they tell us some fantastic information but the problem is they are only using “traffic” and “competition” to tell you what to focus on.

What about “Sales”, “Revenue”… PROFITS

Would you not rather focus on a keyword that only gets 20 visitors a day but converts 2% then 100 visitors an day that converts 0.01%?

But how now John Cow?

There are no keyword tools that know what kind of profits people are making, they don’t know what words are making sales and what ones are not… do they?

Yes and we are going to prove it to you over the next few days. We are going to walk you through step by step, the exact process we use to uncover “Killer” keywords, that not only have good traffic and little competition, but are also already proven by others to be fantastic money makers.

If your interested in learning more, then subscribe to our RSS Feed and follow along as we lay out this step by step process with the exact tools and techniques we use.

Keyword Lesson Series:

Bite Me for more traffic

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:42:13 +0000

Okay, so we know we need backlinks and we need to be commenting on other blogs. We know it is not all about the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore… by the way who the heck searches with MSN anyway… seriously?

Whoaaa… Hold on Cow, what do you mean it is not about the search engines anymore?

Good, we had hoped you would ask that question.

Take a look at the social communities from Alexa’s top 500 sites (yes, we know that Alexa stats are debatable but they still give you an idea). There are sites such as: Facebook, YouTube, Friendster, Flicker, hi5, Myspace and more… just to name a few. These sites are all getting traffic that is very comparable to Google and the wonderful thing is these sites are begging you to give them content. The other thing is there are hundreds of these type sites being added daily and many of them get stampedes of traffic very quickly.

You see, we can spend hours of our days, banging our horns against our keyboards, or in some cases throwing them across the room to do everything we can to keep that traffic coming into our sites but the fact (or at least we think it is a fact) is that we are at times our own worse enemy when it comes to this. We read something or hear that something works and so we do it, but the problem is…

That Is ALL We Do!

We get excited and see that it works and so we stick to that only and do the the same thing over and over again… and at first it works but then it plateau’s and eventually starts to droop like a saggy utter.

Think about any new traffic tool that comes out. People will often slam them right out of the gate, saying…

“we are NOT using that, we are sticking to what we know works”

…but the problem is they are not seeing the big picture. These tools are never intended to be the end all be all of traffic and neither should any one source be the end all be all of your traffic. If it is, then you run a huge risk that if they change something, it could destroy your existence on the web. We should all be constantly looking for different ways to increase our grazing areas. When these new tools come out, test them out, see how they fit into your business. If they work, then use them, if not then drop them.

This is true for relying on any one source of traffic such as Google, Stumbleupon or any other one site. The trick is that you need to be as diversified as possible and always look for new opportunities. Yes of course you want to provide excellent content and reasons for your readers to return but what about grabbing new readers? Are you constantly looking out for new opportunities of places to get more readers… more traffic… more mooney?

Do You Like Sloppy Seconds?

Over here we are not totally keen on the idea of getting sloppy seconds. And waiting until everyone is using or recommending something is just like that. You get in after the spammers have ruined it for you. The fantastic thing is there are 1000’s of these type sites popping up all the time. Some of them are new and some have been around a while but the spammers have not exploited them yet.

A great example of a site we started using not too long ago is feedbite.com (hence the title of this post). Now we are not telling you this site sends a flood of traffic, but it does send some, and the effort to set it up was literally minutes, so the return on time investment is worth it. Now by sharing this site, it will probably start to get abused… but who cares, we will find others to use.

What we really like about this site is that it uses your rss feed and so once you set it up, you are done. It is not like Stumbleupon and Digg, were you have to have the content submitted each time manually, of course it does not get the traffic those send either.

The links do not have a nofollow tag.. which is a bonus and people can vote up or down you content so it gets on the front page. Google Also seems to respond good to it.

So breaking it down, feedbite.com may not roll in the traffic like crazy, but it does bring in traffic and any extra traffic is great… especially when it is so easy so easy to set up.

Now back up for a second. Our point here is not to promote feedbite, this is not a paid review or anything like that. Instead it is simply a process for you to consider implementing, a process that expands your pastures and also grows your backlinks to your blog. Lets call it the…

Cow Traffic Diversification Process

…and it goes like this…

Once a week go to http://www.go2web20.net/ and look at the tags “Bookmarking”, “Blogging”, and “RSS” (need to do that separately)
Check out some of the new “Web 2.0″ sites and look for ones that you can post public accessible content on.
Submit your rss feed (if allowed), content, pictures, videos or whatever else they allow BUT (and a big one at that) make sure that if you are adding content such as a post, that you add a link back to your blog with a call to action (read the post “Using Content to get Traffic” for more on that).
Check your stats in a week…. Look to see if that site sent traffic to your site. If it sends traffic, keep it and expand your use of it… if it doesn’t then drop it and move on.

This is powerful because it helps expand your reach and the side benefit is Google loves the variety in backlinks to your blog. You also do not have to update the content here regularly like your own blog…. Unless of course you see loads of traffic from it then you will want to take advantage of that (we would anyway).

Go try it out and let us know how it goes.

Creating a GOOD advertising page

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:56:36 +0000

Guest Post by Lincoln Adams. Visit his blog at The Habitation of Justice.

Face it, most of the advertising pages you see on blogs today (if there even is one) sucks mighty moose balls.

I believe there are two crucial things advertisers want to know about your site: how much traffic you get, and what your reader demographics are. When I revamped my own advertising page, I took these two things into consideration and developed what I hope is now a much more informative (and attractive looking) landing page that will give advertisers everything they need to know about my site.

For the former, I realized in spite of their inaccuracies, it still pays to list your Alexa, PageRank, Compete and Technorati rankings. Rather than do it by hand though, I used MyRankings.Net to help me display my current rankings in real time, that way I don’t have to keep hand editing them whenever a ranking changes.

I then listed the actual organic traffic figures I get per month. Right now they are, *ahem*, shall we say… a bit modest, but then again my prices are dirt cheap as well, so it all balances out in the end.

As to the latter, it’s especially hard to describe your reader demographics and what they’re interested in when you don’t have a definitive niche (like yours truly), and since advertisers want more than anything to market their goods and services to a targeted audience, this might present a problem.

However, there’s an effective way to way to determine the makeup and interests of your audience, partly by analyzing the search engine keywords that brought them to your site.

Personally, I found the easiest way to do this was via HitTail, a free service that analyzes your search engine related traffic and helps you find optimal keywords to improve your rankings and traffic numbers. They also provide an easy to scan list of all the keywords that have been used to direct visitors to your site since it began tracking, and I believe the data can also be exported into a spreadsheet format as well.

Using HitTail then, I went back almost a year and scanned all the keywords that led people to my site. I tried to understand what most of the visitors were looking for, and what their search efforts told me about them, and also what keywords drew the most traffic. If someone found my site via the search phrase “natural cures for shingles” for example, that told me they were interested in alternative and herbal medicine. If another one was looking for “privacy software,” that told me that they were interested in… uh… privacy software.

After I finished that, my next step was to analyze the interests of my repeat visitors. Some of them were friends, so I already knew what their passions were. For other visitors, more often than not they tended to have blogs of their own, so in those cases I would visit their sites to see what they liked to write about. Was it literature, politics, gadgets or romance? What fueled their passions the most? What was on their wish list, if they had one? And so on.

From all this I was able to develop and list several categories that I believe accurately reflected the interests of my audience. If an advertiser had a product to sell that easily fit the description of one or more of these categories, he or she would know right off the bat that their ads will likely draw healthy attention and attract a higher clickthrough rate, which of course would hopefully lead to a higher conversion rate as well.

Finally, in order to encourage advertisers to book a campaign on my site, I offered a significant discount guaranteeing a certain clickthrough rate for their ads, or they would receive a partial but generous refund. Am I a swell guy or what?

Hopefully my experience will help some of you develop a more effective landing page for your advertisers. And if not, well then, feel free to send them my way.