Have you ever wondered just how much control you have over the website visitor?

Well in 2007 there was a test done online with a tent company. Basically they wanted to see what the biggest influence was on someone when choosing one tent over another one. Other words, why would you choose tent B over tent A was it because of the waterproofing, look, feel, color what was it that made you pick one tent over another one?

What they found was that the first tent was chosen 200 times while others combined were only chosen 60 times. The number one biggest influence on what people purchased was not the color of the tent, the amount of waterproofing, texture or anything else, but surprisingly was the location of the tent on that page.

Other words, if people did a search for a four man tent they would twice as likely to purchase the first tent on the page regardless of the other features. I talked to a guy the other day about redesigning his site. His problem was that he had some stock he needed to get rid of and it just wasn’t selling. I got a list of his bestselling items and started looking through the site to find them. Everyone was the first item on the page.

I explained all we had to do was move the items he wanted to get rid of to the top of the page and he would get the results he was looking for.

So…I’ll ask the question again, “As webmasters, how much control do you think we have over the actions that the website visitor takes while he is on our websites”?

Shopping Carts

If the customer is prevented from navigating away from the checkout page, by isolating the checkout process, navigation through the checkout process is nearly always in one direction: towards order confirmation. The exception is when someone wants to go back one or more steps to check or to change what they’ve entered. This often proves the downfall of badly designed or inadequately tested checkout processes.

Customers may want to retrace their steps to:

Change the product they’re buying (I’ll go for the more expensive/cheaper version)

Use a different email address (I’ll use my personal email address rather than my work email)

Use a different delivery address (I’ll get it delivered to my neighbor)

Use a different payment method (Not sure if there is enough money in that account)

Check the details previously entered (Which address/card/delivery service did I specify?)

However, something to keep in mind is trying to limit the need for the customer to click back and forth in the checkout process. This is best achieved through a persistent checkout summary – carrying forward a summary of the information entered in previous steps of the checkout. This persistent checkout summary can also facilitate navigation back and forth within the checkout.

The main recommendation for navigation in checkout, however, is to make sure the browser back button works in the way the customer expects it to. Checkouts can get this wrong in two different ways:

A) Warning messages
B) not taking customer to where they think they will be taken.

I purchase a lot of stuff online so I see a lot of warning messages, like – the previous page, which the customer is asking to be reloaded, has data to the server during the initial page-load process. In some cases, the technically savvy user will want to re-POST the data and in other circumstances they won’t – hence you warn them what is happening and ask what they want to do.

To the average e-commerce customer, a warning is only a cause for concern, possibly to the extent of abandoning their purchase. They don’t understand the warning, they can’t decide what to do, in case they get it wrong… and most importantly of all, this sort of warning is irrelevant in an e-commerce checkout.

Every time checkout data is submitted by pressing the continue button this data will be saved in the database. Resending POST data doesn’t matter because it is all saved anyway. So, what do we do to avoid such warnings?

There are a variety of solutions involving page redirects and, if necessary, the use of GET or session variables in place of POST variables.

A different problem that arises when customers use the browser back button is that it sometimes doesn’t take the customer where they expect to go. This is mostly a problem when AJAX is used to step customers through a checkout process without moving from one web page to the next.

Using the back button will take customers to the last page they had looked at, which in an AJAX-driven checkout is likely to be the shopping cart page – very annoying if you were on the fourth step of a five-step checkout and wanted to go back to step three!

There are many different technical work-around to this problem.

Taking customers to unexpected places is not just a problem with the browser back button – navigation buttons/links on the page must also be checked for incorrect or legacy URLs. This also applies to those sites that allow navigation via the progress bar. It should go without saying that allowing customers to navigate around the checkout should be possible without the loss of previously entered information.

I’ve been making my living online since the end of 2002 and have enjoyed every second of it, well…almost every second.

I guess one of the neatest things about making a living online is the people you meet and the willingness to share. So I thought I would share a little as well.

Lately we’ve been doing very well and it is due to the following:

• WordPress Blogs
• Social Media Sites
• Blogger Blogs
• Squidoo Lens

Making money online is about finding hungry buyers and convincing them that your product will make their life better, easier, more productive, happier and more profitable if they owned what it is you’re selling.

It’s a combination of the right website design and the right traffic.

I am going to focus on affiliate sales but the methods will work with anything. Affiliate marketing allows me to focus on marketing and not on:

o Products
o Custom Support
o Merchant Accounts
o Accepting Payments
o Shopping Carts
o Email Systems

This system is amazingly simple yet incredibly powerful.

Our Goal Is To Convert As Many Visitors into Buyers as Possible

We will do this by focusing on a small percent of Google searches that take place each and every day in massive quantities.

So here’s how it works;

I come with a product to sell and build a website around that product. The top part of the website has a call to action, and is set up just like any other website that would be selling that product.

Under the call to action is my WordPress blog.

I add a couple plug-ins like;

akismet
all-in-one-seo-pack
auto-social
easygravatars
global-translator
google-sitemap-generator
no-ping-wait
page-link-manager
pingcrawl
privacy-policy
seo-automatic-links
seo-image
sociable
statpress-reloaded
twitter-feed
twitter-tools
wp-auto-tagger
wp-smilies
yet-another-related-posts-plugin

Okay, now the idea is to create profiles on social media sites that will link back to my main site and I also interlink those profiles back and forth to one another. Along with those I also have a number of social bookmarking sites that I bookmark to.

I try and build enough back links to the site that there is no doubt Google knows about the website, at the same time that is going on I hire someone to add content to the blog.

We come up with a list of keywords and then we add keywords to those that we feel someone that was about to buy the product would add to those keywords.

For example;

Special Offers
Cheap
Discount
Order
Promotions
Free Shipping
Store
How Much
Quality
Best
Acquiring
Best Buy
Good Buys
Deal

We have an extremely long list of these types of words that we use.

The idea is to make about 20 posts per day.

And so far this has worked great for us and the neat thing is that it’s easy to set up and you can duplicate it over and over again.

Making money online is about finding hungry buyers and convincing them that your product will make their life better, easier, more productive, happier and more profitable if they owned what it is you’re selling.

It’s really not that hard to do yet 95% of all websites online struggle to make any amount of real money.

I am going to cut through the BS and show you step by step how to make money with any product online. However, you will have to do your part, nothing comes without effort and in the online world it takes lots and lots of work. Yes, I said work, this isn’t one of those you don’t have to do anything and you’ll make millions websites.

I use the methods I am about to teach to make everyday online with a number of different websites in different niches.

The idea is to learn several different methods and then use them all together when launching your own site. As with anything, the key is to take action.

I am going to focus on affiliate sales but the methods will work with anything. Affiliates allow us to focus on marketing and not to have to worry with having our own

• Products
• Custom Support
• Merchant Accounts
• Accepting Payments
• Shopping Carts
• Email Systems

We will focus on marketing, design and SEO, as well as WordPress and other issues.

This system is amazingly simple yet incredibly powerful.

Our Goal – To Convert As Many Visitors into Buyers as Possible

We will do this by focusing on a small percent of Google searches that take place each and every day in massive quantities.

Understanding Google
Approximately 350,000,000 people search the web daily.

About 60% of those use Google for a total of 210,000,000 individuals;

30% use Yahoo for a total of 105,000,000,

9% use MSN (now Called Bing) for a total of 31,500,000 and the remaining 1% use other, smaller and less known search engines.

At this time Google is the largest and most powerful search engine to-date and sets the tone for online search with more than 210 million daily searches taking place.

It’s important to understand how people are using Google as well as what type of searches are being done. This will allow us to target the most lucrative daily searches.

A) Most people are searching for information and have no intention of making a purchase online. I’d guess the numbers around about 70% are these types of people.

B) The second largest group we’ll put at 30% and these are people that will most likely purchase in the future but are not looking to purchase anything at the moment.

C) The smallest group which is around about 2% is people that understand what they are looking for and are ready to make a purchase. Their searches will be more perfect and will contain model numbers, company names and search terms like free shipping.

Everyday millions and millions of transactions take place online and our goal is to get between the buyer and the merchant.

Dallas Marketing Firm

The neat thing about the internet is, it doesn’t matter where you live, you can do business anywhere in the world. I can start a marketing firm ranking business in Dallas

Texas while living in a totally different part of the world.

And there lies the problem.

People from all over the world have started search engine optimization and web marketing firms, in hopes of making some fast money online.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indexes.

The problem is that most people who are selling SEO or marketing as a service have never made money another way. Another words, they have no idea how to set your site up to convert the traffic it’s currently getting or to take advantage of all the techniques available online.

It’s not difficult to build a web page and target a term like Dallas Marketing Firm however, it’s a lot harder to build a site and target a term that’s less exciting and a lot more boring to write about.

And we also need to keep in mind that Dallas Marketing Firm is not a competitive keyword.

I guess I am saying Don’t believe anything you read on the Internet, or, for that matter, anything you hear from friends or people trying to sell you a service, unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or unless you have taken the time to research the matter to prove its accuracy to your satisfaction. This is known as “doing your homework.”