Web Marketing Strategy Update

It’s little touches that can make all the difference for an online merchant’s bottom line. For example, consider an online retailer who gets 20,000 hits per month, and has an average order value of $75 – that is to say, customers are spending $75 on average per order.

If that store’s conversion rate – the percentage of customers who become buyers – is one-percent, then that store can expect to make about $15,000 that month from about 200 orders. With a two-percent conversion rate, profits double as well to $30,000. Likewise, profits plunge when the conversion rate does.

Increasing conversion rates should be a primary goal of any online retailer. Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula; no easy, guaranteed way to do it. Some marketers with a narrow focus on a particular niche market might enjoy conversion rates as high as ten percent, while others, who employ identical marketing strategies, might struggle to see even a tenth of a percent. Thus, boosting conversion rates is a bit more like an art than a fine-tuned science or mathematical discipline.
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There’s a serious flaw in many people’s approach to SEM (Search Engine Marketing). It’s simply that they tend to change their tactics too often – sometimes even replacing tactics that work with ones that don’t.

Search engine marketing focuses on the monetization of an online business or website. As long as making money is the goal, the business should survive. However, if the goal becomes getting or having the newest and latest gadgets on your website or blog, the likelihood of success diminishes…significantly.

Let’s take a look at what you should be doing…

Refine, don’t Replace

This is why it is imperative for you to find tactics that work and then refine them to perform even better. By using metrics on your traffic and sales, you can tweak your tactics until you see more and more of both.
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If you run a website or otherwise operate online, then keeping a watchful eye on Google is highly advisable. After all, Google is the most popular search engine of all with a massive global market share of around 80%. For that reason alone it has the ability to ensure that your website is either a big success, or conversely that it is not seen by anyone.

If Google makes a change to its algorithms or policies and you should happen to miss that this happened, then you might find your site suddenly penalized and your traffic halved or worse.

And Google does make changes to the way it operates – a lot actually. Furthermore, this is truer now than it has ever been before and of those changes made recently there are several that have already had a big impact on the rankings of sites. Here we will look at just some of the many big changes that have happened in the last year or so.
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One of the most important ways to increase awareness of your brand is to create a buzz around your products or services.

As someone once said ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ and getting people talking about your website and brand can really give your sales a big boost.

Aiming For Viral Buzz

I run a small website and don’t have a big media budget to work with. However I have found some great ways to create a buzz online for my product that does not involve spending lots of cash.

• Ideally I am looking to ‘go viral’ with my little promotional campaigns.
• This basically means getting people to spread my message themselves to others through blogs, forums, chat rooms etc.

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