Site Traffic Down Like the Dow?
Has your site traffic tanked like the economy in recent weeks? Well, as you can see from the Google Analytics screenshot below, the traffic to one of my sites has dropped from 3569 visits on September 9th to an average of about 700 per day since September 15th. (Note: Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan said this economy is the worst he has ever seen on the 14th and the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 300 points in the first 15 minutes of trading on the 15th.)
That traffic is 20% of normal levels. Not only that, but the bounce rate more than tripled and the average time spent on the site was cut by more than half. UGH!!!!
New Video Reveals Key PPC Strategies
Anik and Amit released the second video for PPC Classroom today and in it, they cover researching niches, finding products, landing page setup and keywords.
Here are just a few of the many questions Amit answers in this video:
- What is your success rate?
- How much does it cost to test a niche?
- How do you research a niche? (REALLY good info here!!!)
- Give an example of a ‘long-tail’ keyword.
- How to get the best affiliate deals.
- How to check affiliate success on Clickbank and CJ.
- How many products do you promote on a landing page?
IMPORTANT NOTE: Pay CLOSE attention at about the 18 minute mark… this is a point that many affiliate marketers never learn or fail to implement!!
To see this video, click here.
If you missed the first PPC Classroom video, click here.
AND… here’s a taste of what I learned when I hit Anik up this morning for a sneak preview of the PPC Classroom 2.0 course contents.
Lastly, here are just a few of the glowing comments that have been posted to the PPC Classroom regarding the content of this latest video.
How to Skyrocket Your PPC Campaign Conversions
Are you targeting the right visitors to your website with your PPC campaign? In other words, do they BUY the products that you promote?
If not, it might be your PPC campaign keywords that are killing your conversion rates.
To skyrocket your sales conversions and learn how to attract more highly qualified buyers with your PPC campaigns, read today’s article, How to Use the Buying Cycle to Choose PPC Campaign Keywords.
Discover the Secrets of a $2.4 Million PPC Affiliate
For those of you who were interested in the Google Adwords coaching mentioned in my last post, here’s an alternative PPC training course that’s going to be considerably LESS expensive — and will cover more than just Google Adwords.
PPC Classroom 2.0 (opening on October 14th) is going to be taught primarily by Amit Mehta, who earned $2.4 million bucks last year as a PPC affiliate. There’s a screenshot on the PPC Classroom homepage that shows that more than $1.3 million of that amount was through selling Clickbank products.
Even if you’re not interested in PPC training, I highly recommend that you watch Amit and Anik Singal’s video interview, in which they both speak openly and honestly about the experiences they had when they were starting out as affiliate marketers. They talk about motivations, the ups and downs, and the concerns that most affiliates have when they start working with PPC campaigns.
About two thirds of the way through the video, Anik asks Amit “How many niches are you in?” and I think you’ll be surprised by his answer. Nearer the end of the video, Amit tells Anik what percentage of his traffic comes from Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN and he makes an important point about why he likes to use those services in addition to Google Adwords.
See the video now — and don’t forget to sign up for the ongoing video series. Amit promises to share his exact PPC strategies in the next video to be released.
Put Your Article Marketing on Steroids
Today’s new article “Put Your Article Marketing on Steroids” is submitted by Kim Roach, an article marketing specialist, who shares 7 different ways to get ten times more reach out of your articles.
Read Kim’s article now and find out how…
How to auto-update your website content
Have you ever noticed how sites that syndicate content from other people’s blogs and newsfeeds seem to get high search engine rankings? Do you want to integrate RSS newsfeeds from one of your own sites (or those published on other websites) into your blog but can’t figure out how it’s done?
Well, I did some research and you’ll be glad to know that the solution is really quite simple.
Facebook: Top 3 Tactics for Making Money
This is the 6th (bonus) post in 5-part series social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric. You may read his other posts here.
I decided to add this post in response to questions about “where’s the money on Facebook?”. Since you have a decent understanding of Facebook now having read my other posts in this series, I’ll tell you about the 3 basic ways I use Facebook to make money.
Although you could use their PPC system which has profitable possibilities. I know people who are making good money using this but since I’ve not personally tested it I’m not qualified to advise you about it so these are ways to use it without spending money in the process.
- Groups
- Events
- Live FB on-site Chat
Groups
You know about groups already. The benefits (and drawbacks) of setting and having your own group have been discussed. However, when you have a group of 200-300 or more you can get good leverage by sending an email to the entire group. Build the community side of it.
Here’s a picture to show you that there are all kinds of groups on Facebook… there’s even one about rodents.
To make this work, you could develop a 3-6 part email series and a schedule of when you are going to send it out. Start by encouraging conversation on the group’s wall and posting interesting threads on the group bulletin board. This gets people active in your group and further bonded to it.
It’s no longer “just another FB group I’m a part of”. It becomes something they remember and the sense of community is stronger.
Then start asking them questions. Ask them about their concerns and how you can help. The more you engage your members the better.
Finally, you can send out an email inviting them to join you on your webinar/teleseminar or even your ustream.tv channel. The benefit of the ustream is they can see you making the presentation, your body language and gestures. It is almost like being live and face-to-face which is the most powerful communication.
This bonds them to you even further.
You’ll want to use a webinar if you’re doing a highly technical subject where you are going to walk them through how to do it on your computer so they can watch step-by-step what you are doing.
You could compile some of the biggest questions they asked and just do a Q&A call. That’s the easiest way to get your content for the call and it’s most VALUABLE TO YOUR MEMBERS.
This gives you a good running start.
Events
Events can be handled in similar fashion. In fact, I recommend that you combine Events with the Groups strategy. After you’ve finished the mailing series to your group, you invite them to the Events page that you have setup with the details of your call.
The really cool thing about events is that you can invite all your friends. It’s the ONE AND ONLY safe way to invite all your friends without being caught in the facebook spam filters.
Once you have sent out the invites to the friends who’d be interested (or all of them) you have the ability through your events page to follow-up with them. It separates into “attending”, “maybe”, and “not attending”. You can send different messages to each category of friends.
You can see from this image how someone raises their hand to confirm that they’re attending your event. Be sure to send a reminder and bonus info to the “attendees” to further pique their interest and increase your attendance rate.
Include additional reasons explaining why the “maybes” should attend. Make it so desirable that they want to cancel whatever else they had planned because the content of the call will be of such MASSIVE benefit they’d have to be complete fools to miss it. 
When you can make it more important than their wedding anniversary you know you have a winner. Okay I’m young so have never been married, and this level may be unattainable but making it really desirable for them is the goal.
To the “not attending” you can send a “hate for you to miss out on this valuable advice, but here’s some bonus info now and maybe I’ll make the recorded version available to you” message. This gets some of them to want your info.
Live Facebook on-site Chat
The chat bar “floats” down below. It’s a standard php bar you’ve seen.
Although I haven’t experimented with this much yet I see the widest potential of this for 1-on-1 client acquisition. For someone like me that does copywriting at $100/hr I can get on here and talk with Facebook friends whom I know are looking for a copywriter. I can see what they are needing done, what they’re looking for, and how I can create a valuable sales piece that will pull high response and ultimately make them more money.
You could be a plumber and contact local people you know are having plumbing issues (no double entendre here). You’d be surprised what people post to twitter and their Facebook status updates.
Also, if you’re an article writer, web designer, seo underground guru, graphic designer, publicist, business coach, or a host of other remote-ready consultant/service based provider the possibilities for this type of 1-on-1 communication on-site are endless.
One piece of advice…make any potential client jump through a few hoops before getting involved in a long-winded conversation with them. This will save you time and eliminate the proverbial “tire-kickers” and “looky lous”.
Nothing fancy just send a couple emails back and forth. Have them send some info to you about what they need from you, and some kind of qualifier that lets you know they’re in a financial position to pay your reasonable fee.
This saves you headache, frustration and ultimately makes you more money because you’re more efficient.
What are you still doing here? Get out there, expand your business and make more money right now!
Special thanks to Ros for her caring commitment and making this series possible. Get more social media facebook tactics here.
Twitter more with these software apps & services
You’re probably already posting tweets to Twitter directly on the Twitter web site.
However, did you know that there are an increasing number of different applications which are designed to let you post to Twitter directly from your desktop or from specific devices, including your iPhone, Mac and Blackberry?
Here’s a list of software applications and services that will make your Twitter experience simpler and more enjoyable.
Nailing the Facebook News Feed
This is the fifth in a 5-part series about social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric. You may read his other posts here.
The news feed is quite probably the most powerful part of Facebook.
The screen capture show here to the left is the news feed that appears on the Facebook home page when you first login. As you can see, some of the activities showing up in the news feed are things your friends have done. In this instance Richard created a group and had added videos to his group, and 41 of my friends are now friends with Sean.
Other items that show up in the news feed include: Read more
How to Get More Traffic from Twitter
Although I don’t post to my blogs every day and barely tweet at all, (OK, I went nuts one day and updated almost 30 times, but that was a BIG exception) I’m getting much more traffic from Twitter by using a special service.
Best of all, it’s free, only takes 2 minutes to set up and after that there’s no extra effort required on your part.
To learn more about this service, read “How to Get More Traffic from Twitter“.
