Convert Traffic into Cash with Just 1 Little Change

Last week we covered how people’s instincts may be causing them to fail at making money online with blogs. Now, we’re going to go over another possible cause that you’re struggling to mentise your blog. The inability to convert traffic into buyers. We’ve all opened the door to a door to door salesman, saw the uniform, hears the pitch and preceded to polutkey decline whatever it is that they were selling. In some cases, you may have even bought what they were selling(ahemm, Girl Scout’s we’re looking at you and your irresistable cookies). For the most part, door to door selling is not effective. It is even more ineffective to do it online. Even though its a salesman’s job to try to make you want to buy whatever  they’re selling, but the truth isusually make you irritated , closed off, and unwilingly to even hear their sales pitch enough. This is the same with online sales pages. The cold-call, blind, hard sell of a product is in most cases a lot of time and effort for a very low payoff. When trying to make money online, you want to use your blog to do the work for you. You put the time and expertise into writing the blog and you don’t need to be spending even more time selling at people. Driving traffic to your website or blog is what we’re all striving to do. We’re all guilty of incessantly checking the view numbers each time we publish a new blog to see what kind of new viewership we’re getting. And then we wait. We wait for them to click the embedded links, to navigate around our blogs, sometimes even get them onto a landing sales page for a product and then hopefully we wait for them to make a purchase. If you’re like a large majority of online bloggers out there, this is where you fall short. No purchase is made and you have no more money in your pocket. Converting the traffic you get into motivated purchasers willing to spend money on your product to solve a problem they are having. So how do you convert website traffic into buyers? Educate.  Back to elementary days here, folks. To really promote a product online and make people want to buy it, you have to educate them first. In the online arena you need to add an extra step to convert people into buyers. You need to take the time to build the relationship with the buyer, and let the buyer they have a problem and then how they can fix it. The fix should be related to your product but not entirely your product. Take for example a revolutionary weight-loss product. We’ve all heard a million pitches for the newest weight-loss drug that promises results. Let’s take it a step further. Get specific on who your weight-loss product is for. You don’t want to fall into the cold calling area here and cast too wide of a net or ...

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Are Your Instincts Driving Away Your Business?

You’ve done all the right steps. You’ve made a blog, you update it frequently, established your presence and you’ve offered your product(s) for sale online and yet your wallet remains empty. Where did you go wrong? You, like many other people who are in the online space trying to monetize a blog, have most likely failed in one key fundamental area. Your audience. While there are a few places you could have run askew in your marketing plan, we suggest starting with audience because that’s where all your marketing and sales stem from. If you’re positive you’ve identified the right audience and know everything about them and how to directly reach them, check out our full list of the top reasons people fail to make money at blogging to see where else you may have gone wrong. If you’ve done the head tilt head or given out a big sigh after reading the last couple sentences and think you may need a little more direction in ensuring you have truly identified the right market for your product that is actually motivated to buy, continue reading. As we’ve said before, your audience is the foundation of your marketing. Not knowing how to identify a buying audience is a deal breaker. Even worse is thinking you have identified an audience and assuming you know what they want. We all know what they say about assumptions…. This is more than a misstep — it is a step backwards. Promoting your products based on instinct rather than fact is a surefire way to not make sales and send yourself running in circles. Luckily for you, it’s very easy to avoid this with just a little research. Without verifying your assumptions, you won’t know if there’s a demand for your product online. The two key words in that sentence are demand and online. Demand being, having a buying audience that is actually looking for a product to fix a problem they are having AND so much so that they are actually motivated to buy online, not just look for information and make a purchase elsewhere. Is it very well known that some markets and products do very well online, and others do not. So how do you find out if your product will have what it takes to make the cheese online? Competition is Key! Never underestimate how much you can learn from your competitors. I’ll say it again. Use your competitors as learning tools to improve your own marketing strategies. Now, we’re not suggesting you call up your competitors and asking them point blank what strategies have or haven’t worked for them, but we are suggesting you put in the legwork and find this information out yourself. Go to Amazon and find similar products to what you are going to be selling. See who is selling them, how they have positioned the product and then most importantly see who is buying them. The easiest way to do this is through the reviews. Amazon is ...

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How to Use the WOW Factor to Gain Authority

In such a crowded online space I frequently get asked how someone can stand apart, be noticed and in turn increase their online branding and authority with their followers. There are 3 magic words everyone looking to make money online blogging needs to know to stand out from the crowded online space. The WOW factor. Stopping people in their tracks and giving them a reason to respect you. When one WOW is nice, many WOWs are awesome. The more you can get your audience to have the WOW factor over and over and over, the more authority you will have. When you get people to say WOW it gets people to recognize you and you become an authority voice. In fact, one of the reasons many people fail to make money blogging is because they are lacking the WOW factor. We have compiled a list of the top 10 reasons people fail at making money blogging. With so much of the internet being generic information there is plenty of room to differentiate yourself with original unique content. To start, you have to do your research. Understand what type of information your audience is looking for. This is very different than just thinking you know what your audience wants. Find out what they need to know and don’t be afraid to ask about what types of information they ACTUALLY want. Second, you need to find out what information is already out here. What has been published and what holes exist in that that you can fill. Your report shouldn’t be identical to those. As before, it should give your readers something new. So to get the WOW factor and stand out from the crowded online space, you should use 3 methods. Empathy: I’ve talked about this before to build trust with your followers online and it works similarly here. Identify the pain points and identity what your audience is feeling on the inside. Describe exactly how that feeling is so they know you feel their pain. Frustration, or helplessness, will create a WOW factor. Showing them that you know exactly how they feel will build trust and authority. Information: Give your audience facts that they need to know. Statistics and data figures that are relevant to them are always a good idea and make great content. Do some research here and find the information that your audience can use to educate themselves. Giving them pieces of information as “water cooler” talk is something all people will thank you for and return to your blog to get more of. Solutions: This may seem like a no-brainier but it can frequently be overlooked. Providing solutions that are different attract people’s attention. Skirting around a solution or just bombarding people with information that is not actionable or feasible for them is everywhere on the internet and does not make your blog more attractive or profitable. Now that we have identified the 3 methods of getting the WOW factor, we need to identify the 6 different ...

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PART 2: Optimized Facebook Advertising for REAL Sales Conversions

In follow-up to last week’s post on initiating a highly targeted and optimized Facebook advertising campaign for sales conversions, we are going to take the information we received from the test campaign and scale up to a larger audience to get more sales conversions and make you more money online. Analyzing your test ad and audience After submitting your ad there will be a small amount of time when your ad won’t run until Facebook approves it. This is usually a matter of hours. Once approved, the testing period will be for the duration you set but should be between 4 and 6 days. In this time you can see how your ad is performing in real time. We do not recommend making any changes during this test period but instead waiting until the test is complete and tweaking from there. The Facebook advertising platform will give you lots of information but the most important information we want to look at is the reach, impressions, how many clicks, cost per click, number of conversions, and cost per conversion. Since you are using these ads to increase your sales or get people to opt-in to something such as a newsletter, you want to know sales conversions and the opt-in conversion rate. This is not page conversions. Be sure to look at this info for all 3 ad campaigns you created to see if desktop, mobile or right-hand side column ads are more effective. Assuming you see good results here, you are ready to move on. If you are seeing low conversion numbers, you need to revisit the targeted groups you identified and also the ad itself to see what element is not working and makes changes to increase conversions before proceeding. Scaling up your Facebook advertising With all the work you put into the test campaign, it’s now time to use those results to get even better results to increase sales or opt-in conversions from your ad budget. We’re going to start by increasing the audience size. To do so we will now use the remainder of the relevant Facebook pages you identified earlier through your keyword research. Using another new tool called Facebook Graph Search, we’ll analyze the pages of the first 10k-20k people you targeted and the left over relevant pages. By putting the page names you identified earlier into Facebook Graph Search, you will get the related fan pages that your audience likes. Given the nature of this, you will get mixed results (very popular pages such as NFL will most likely not be relevant even if your audience likes them) and you’ll have to do some manual due diligence here to filter through which pages are relevant to your niche. Use Facebook Graph Search to identify what people liked a particular page AND also if they bought a particular product or joined similar groups. As before, using Facebook Audience Insights, we can also see what people are actively clicking on ads from this new larger audience group to determine ...

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