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Career Advice for Advancement #1: Understand Profit Margins for Your Business

There have been many times in my career where I found myself saying “if only I knew this sooner – I would be so much better off today!” Surely you have caught yourself saying the same thing in your own career. We all receive information in varying doses, connect dots differently and reach conclusions on our own time. My goal for writing this post and future posts of this nature is to help you gain career knowledge sooner by drawing upon my personal experiences to provide examples and increase understanding. If successful, I will start a series of posts called Career Advice for Advancement and continue sharing knowledge that I wish I knew sooner in my career.While the primary focus of Jeffalytics is tips and tricks in the Digital Marketing and Analytics world, these bits of career advice are much more universal in scope. Please do feel free to share with any friends and colleagues who you feel may benefit from this additional depth of knowledge.When you graduate from college with a tangible, in demand skill and no formal business training you are starting off in the middle. In my case, I started a business at 24 with the understanding that I could make websites and people would pay me for them. Not only that, but they would pay me more than I could make at my job as a government employee. I knew very little else about running a business at the time and by starting in the middle it took several years to learn the lessons that may sound obvious to you already.One of these lessons I learned was the importance of margins for running a business. Several seemingly unconnected experiences helped me realize just how important margins are for the health of a business. When these experiences are looked at upon the same plane, it’s easy to see why strong margins are so important for business success.It all started with the book Good to Great by Jim Collins.  As I was reading through the examples of companies that outperformed the stock market by 3x over a period of 15 years, I noticed that one of the companies mentioned was Nucor steel. This particular company piqued my interest because the steel industry happens to be where my father in law worked throughout his career.Hoping to win over my future father in law while dating his daughter, I started talking to him about Nucor steel to see if he could corroborate the story found in Good to Great. While his opinion as a former competitor to Nucor was not as glowing as that of Jim Collins, he told me something that was just as valuable: They were a highly profitable company because they had great margins.That was it. A two word explanation for a how company became tremendously successful, and a business lesson that affects every decision I make moving forward. Well, not every decision, as we will soon learn.If only I had taken the words of my father in law to heart sooner, I never would have gotten into selling Pool supplies online. It all seemed like such a good idea: I could take over an online e-commerce store selling salt chlorine generators online and literally print money through all of the online sales generated. At least that’s what I thought would happen when I bought the e-commerce store from a family member with connections into the pool and patio industry for $1.On the surface everything looked tremendous: $400,000 in revenue the previous year with a 1,000% ROAS (return on ad spend) for all of the money spent with Google AdWords. All of the metrics pointed to this being my most successful business idea of all time and my ticket to champagne and caviar.But when it came time to balance the checkbook I realized that I needed to put in more money out of pocket in order to keep running the business. That shouldn’t happen with all of that revenue, right? Well, it turns out that we lost money every single time we sold a salt water chlorinator!How on earth can that happen with a 1,000% ROAS through AdWords and similar results with Comparison Shopping Engines?Margins! We had terrible margins.In order to offer the best prices online (and generate sales), we could only mark up the product by 20-30% and we would need to offer free shipping to all customers. Even though we had a favorable drop-ship relationship with the distributor, the shipping cost represented 5-10% of the wholesale price of the product. I also needed to pay a customer service person to help with fulfilling the orders, and this also accounted for around 5% of the purchase price. Add in the AdWords spend of 10% of the product sale price and any revenue from the sale was quickly washed away. And we haven’t even mentioned fixed expenses to this point.Add it all up and it looks something like this (scaled down so I don’t look like a complete idiot):Revenue: $100 Cost of Goods Sold: -$75 Shipping Expense: -$8 AdWords Expense: -$10 Customer Service Expense: -$5 Credit Card Fees: -$3 Fixed Costs: -$5Profit (Loss): (-$6)For the most competitive products in our catalog, we ended up paying money out of pocket for the privilege of selling them to consumers.Talk about a failing business idea.Needless to say, I got out of the Pool business for good after 6 months of losing my shirt and ended up dipping into my savings to pay for a degree from the school of hard knocks.For those of you thinking about getting into the e-commerce business, please understand one thing first:If you don’t have margins, you’ll eventually become a commodityCompeting on price is nearly impossible in a world where Amazon.com exists, because they can survive for a long time losing money on individual purchases and having loss leaders. Your bootstrapped e-commerce business can’t do the same.Do you know what merchandise has the best margins? Products that are truly unique to the marketplace. If you can create something that is not easily reproduced or simply better than others, you will be able to sell it for a large margin. This is the strategy that works so well for Apple.If you ever watch the show Shark Tank you know that investors cringe when they see a margin of less than 50% on the sales of a product. Aim for a minimum margin of 50% before quitting your day job.Another direct example of how margins affect business decisions comes from my years as a principal owner in an advertising agency. An agency is a people based business and salaries are the single largest expense in an agency (more than everything else combined).For an agency margins can be calculated as the difference between what you pay your human capital (employees) and how much revenue you bring in the door. In most cases salaries represent well over 50% of the revenue coming in, which makes it nearly impossible to reach the 50% margin I mentioned above.People based businesses are easy to get started because you can forecast employee headcount needs based on the revenue projections for your business. It’s straight-forward to project booked revenue vs. headcount expenses for the year and you can add or reduce employees in order to achieve your desired margins. This is why we see people based businesses hiring and laying off employees so often.Like any business model, there are benefits and drawbacks to running a people based business. There is usually a low cost of getting started and the businesses carry very little debt. The revenue can also be very stable and the work can be fulfilling for many.One of the main drawbacks with people based businesses is the perceived value of the service being provided and the amount of time required to get work done. Clients want all of your time at below market rates. Your margins are determined by the seniority of the staff your hire, so there is a temptation to hire less senior staff to maintain profit margins. You try to achieve scale with people, which is nearly impossible to accomplish.While I loved my years in the agency business, I eventually found myself chasing the dream of moving on to businesses with larger margins.Software based businesses that achieve scale of users and revenues are about as profitable as they come. Google is an outrageously profitable company by any stretch of the imagination and this allows them to invest in ensuring their margins are protected well into the future. If you look at their financial statements, you can see that Google made just south of $60 Billion in 2013. It cost them less than $26 Billion to do so, which means that they had a 57% margin for the year.What did they do with that margin? Well, they spent nearly $8 Billion in research and development. They spent over $12 Billion in administrative expenses as well (it is not clear what makes up this amount of money, but it likely includes things like employee bonuses and all of the free food). That means they spent nearly $20 Billion dollars above and beyond the amount of money it costs to actually run Google to stay ahead of the game. Even after these investments into the future they had a net income of nearly $13 Billion, which is more money than they likely know what to do with.That is what great margins do for companies; it allows them to invest for the future while still meeting shareholder expectations.This is why Rand Fishkin was brilliant to transform Moz from an agency to a technology startup when he did. He started with a business very similar to example #3 above and then pivoted to change his business to be more like the example of Google.  Check out their sick revenue growth as a result!Summarizing what we have learned above, here are some of the things that get funded as a result of great margins within a company.Margins are used to fund research and development of new productsMargins are used to fund employee bonuses and variable compensation plansMargins are used to fund dividend payments back to shareholdersMargins are used to fund test and learn budgetsMargins are used to fund marketing initiativesMargins are used to fund acquisitions of other companiesTo me there’s no way around it: Margins are everything in business. The sooner you recognize this simple fact, the more quickly you can advance your career.Understanding the profit margins of the company you work for is a key aspect of career advancement. Businesses with high margins are often the most fun places to work, have awesome perks and often come with stock options. If you are looking for a new position, you should absolutely consider the margin structure of the new company before joining. If you are looking to break off as an entrepreneur, pursue an area that allows you to bring a unique product to the marketplace and cannot be easily replicated. This is how you will command strong margins.For those of you comfortable with your current company, work toward advancement. The higher you rise through the food chain at your organization, the more your compensation will be tied to these very same margins! When you help the people above you reach their bonuses, you are more likely to end up on top in the future. Do you know how CEOs at public companies get paid tens of millions of dollars a year? This is all variable compensation based on hitting their profitability targets. For example, if Larry Page were to get paid 1% of gross profit at Google, he’d make $340 Million a year! That’s a lot of money for one person, but it still leaves 99% of the profits to distribute amongst everyone else.When I look at where I should focus my time and efforts in the future, margins are going to play a huge factor in the choices I make. For now I’m dreaming of the day that my father in law explains how I am a billionaire because my company has great margins. <a href="http://www.jeffalytics.com/understanding-profit-margins/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=understanding-profit-margins" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

Career Advice for Advancement #1: Understand Profit Margins for Your Business

There have been many times in my career where I found myself saying “if only I knew this sooner – I would be so much better off today!” Sur...

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08.54

A Guide on How To Create a Guide That’ll Drive You 361,494 Visitors

<img alt="guides" src="/blogaudience.png" title="guides">Have you noticed a trend of people creating more detailed guides? You know, ones similar to my guides on <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-seo/">SEO</A>, <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/">growth hacking</A>, <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-content-marketing/">content marketing</A>, or <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/">landing page optimization</A> that I have released on Quick Sprout? Vero just released a guide on <a href="http://blog.getvero.com/email-marketing-guide/">email marketing</A>, and Qualaroo released one on <a href="https://qualaroo.com/beginners-guide-to-cro/">conversion optimization</A>.What you may not know is that although I was the one to <a href="http://sivers.org/dancingguy">make the creation of detailed guides popular</A>, I wasn’t the first one to come up with the concept. I actually borrowed the idea from Moz, who released the <a href="http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo">beginner’s guide to SEO</A> a few years ago.When they released an article talking about the fact that the guide has received over a million visitors to-date, I decided to take that model and streamline it by producing a new guide each month.So far, I’ve created 10 guides:<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-beginners-guide-to-online-marketing/">Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-seo/">Advanced Guide to SEO</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-content-marketing/">Advanced Guide to Content Marketing</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-link-building/">Advanced Guide to Link Building</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-copywriting/">Definitive Guide to Copywriting</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/">Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/">Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/the-complete-guide-to-building-your-blog-audience/">The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/double-your-traffic-in-30-days/">Double Your Traffic in 30 Days</A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/double-your-conversions-in-30-days/">Double Your Conversions in 30 Days</A>When I first started out, some of the guides only received 68,319 visitors, while others received 128,582 visitors, but I quickly learned what to do and what not to do. Since then, all of my guides have been getting at least <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/06/10/how-i-turned-an-advance-guide-into-361494-visitors-and-8421-email-opt-ins/">361,494 visitors</A>.If you want to create guides that generate hundreds of thousand of visitors, here is what you have to do:I noticed that every time I released a guide on a topic that has already been beaten to death or one that is basic, I barely got any visitors. For example, the guide to online marketing for beginners only received 68,319 visitors.On the flip side, my guide on growth hacking has already received over 414,209 visitors.Every time I release a guide on an advanced topic, I receive at least a few hundred thousand visitors.The same trend exists with my blog. Every time I write on an advanced topic and give detailed steps, my traffic goes through the roof. And basic blog posts tend to flop.If you are going to invest the time and energy into writing a detailed guide, make sure you pick advanced topics that are continually growing in popularity. You can check this by using <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/">Google Trends</A>.All you have to do is enter in a keyword or phrase of the topic you are trying to write about such as “growth hacking.”<img alt="google trends" src="/googletrends.png" title="google trends">As long as the graph is going up and to the right at a rapid pace, like the graph above, there is a good chance that if you write on that topic, you’ll get a good amount of traffic.Once you have your advanced topic, you are now ready to find a writer.If you are a natural born writer and you have the time to create a detailed guide, that’s great! If you don’t, then you’ll want to search for a writer.A great place to start finding them is by browsing other blogs in your space. Look for popular writers who get a ton of social shares per post as well as comments. Also look for writers who write in a casual tone as you don’t want a writer who writes as if he or she is drafting an essay.If that doesn’t work, post a job listing on Craigslist, and you should find affordable writers who are good.Once you find a few, you’ll want to interview them before hiring. The easiest way to interview them is to look at their past work and have them create a table of contents for your guide.This will help you determine how knowledgeable they are about the subject matter you chose and how thorough they are with their research.Once you find a writer, you should negotiate pay. You would want to pay them upon completion. Try not to pay them more than $10,000 for a 40,000-word guide. Ideally, you should be paying them around $4,000 to $5,000 for a guide.I’ve written guides that were anywhere from 20,000 to 45,000 words long. The one thing I’ve learned is that guides that are 20,000 to 30,000 words long tend to do as well as the ones that are 45,000 words long from a traffic perspective.So, from a cost perspective, you are probably better off paying for a 20,000-word guide than for a 45,000-word guide.I’ve also learned through testing that the optimal number of chapters per guide is roughly 7. Having 10 or even 14 chapters won’t drive you much more, if any, traffic. And making your guide into one or several long pages, instead of 7 chapters, will typically drive you less search engine traffic in the long run.For example, the guide on doubling your traffic in 30 days and the one on doubling your conversions in 30 days get on average 313% less search engine traffic than the other guides due to the fact that they were formatted as one long page instead of being broken down into multiple chapters.Lastly, from a design perspective, the more chapters you add, the higher your price quotes will be for illustration work. Which is why I recommend you limit your guide to 7 chapters and an introduction page.One of the biggest traffic drivers to these guides is Twitter. I quickly learned from a few of my guides that the easiest way to get more Twitter traffic is to include expert interviews.Including industry experts throughout your guide will give you the reason to email them upon releasing it, and they will be much more open to tweeting and promoting it. You’ll also find that other people within your industry will be more open to promoting it because the guide will be considered reputable due to the fact that industry people are talking about it.My guides that have expert round-ups received at least 3 times more Twitter traffic than the ones that don’t.<img alt="twitter traffic" src="/twittertraffic1.png" title="twitter traffic">If you are going to invest hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into a guide, you would be foolish not to include expert opinions within it.The one thing I learned from others is that you can’t take design for granted. Even before Moz, hundreds, if not thousands, of other websites released detailed guides, but Moz was the first to make a detailed guide look pretty. They spent over $20,000 on design just on the beginner’s guide to SEO.By studying the competition, I quickly saw that the guides that looked pretty tended to get a lot more social shares. <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/02/16/design-is-marketing/">This is why I spend so much on design at Quick Sprout</A>.On sites like <a href="http://dribbble.com/">Dribbble</A>, you can sift through illustrators and find people who can make your guides look beautiful. On average, you are going to spend $10,000 to $20,000 per guide for an exceptionally good designer, and around $2,500 to $5,000 for a decent designer.Once your guide is done, you will have to find someone to code it. You’ll want to create an HTML version that you can place online. This way people can link to it and share it, and your search traffic should increase.In addition to that, I highly recommend that you create a PDF version that is compatible with mobile devices and tablets. I didn’t do this with my first two guides, and I literally got over 300 emails from people asking to either make the guide compatible with their mobile devices or requesting a PDF version.To make things simple, I use <a href="http://www.uberflip.com/">Uberflip</A> as it is an affordable piece of software that ensures that your PDFs will work on mobile and tablet devices such as Kindle or iPad.Before you release your guide, you’ll want to spend a few days hitting up people within your industry, letting them know about it. This is important because you can get them to promote the guide via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.Although it sounds simple, it works well. I just shoot off emails to people within my industry and say:<BLOCKQUOTE readability="19">Hey [insert your contact's first name],Hope things are going well for you and [insert your contact's business name]. I know you are busy, so I’ll keep this email short.I just wanted to let you know that I am releasing a free guide for our industry, and it is going to teach everyone about [insert the topic of the guide]. I’m doing this because I feel the industry could use more education, and I love helping people.I would greatly appreciate it if you can tweet it out or share it. You can find the guide here: [insert URL]Cheers,[insert your name]</BLOCKQUOTE>A lot of people will ignore your email. But typically 5% to 10% of the people you email will promote your guide. This will cause a ripple effect as more people will see it and then promote it as well.If you follow the steps above, you’ll start attracting thousands of more visitors to your site, generate more backlinks and improve the recognition of your brand.Guides are one of my favorite methods to market a business, and it has been extremely effective for me because I follow the tips above.You don’t have to spend tons of time or money creating these guides. You can always write them internally or have your in-house designer make them look pretty.Nonetheless, you should be creating guides on a regular basis. They are so effective that I release one every month.So, what do you think about creating guides? <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/Mo5p1oy5o2Y/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

A Guide on How To Create a Guide That’ll Drive You 361,494 Visitors

Have you noticed a trend of people creating more detailed guides? You know, ones similar to my guides on SEO , growth hacking , content ...

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21.58

The Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization

<img alt="landing page optimization" src="/landingpageoptimization.png" title="landing page optimization">Have you ever created a landing page? If so, have you ever modified or optimized it? If not, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.Before we get into how you can <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/">optimize your landing page</A>, however, let’s go over why you should create one in the first place. The main reason is that all traffic sources are not equal. In order to boost your conversion rate from different traffic sources, you need to create different web pages that are targeted to those different types of audiences.To help you with your landing page initiatives, I’ve created a <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/">30,000-word guide</A> that will teach you everything you need to know about landing page optimization.Here’s what you will learn from <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/">The Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization</A>:<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-1/">Chapter 1: How landing pages fit within your marketing arsenal</A> – this chapter will teach you the purpose of landing pages and when to use them.<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-2/">Chapter 2: How to read your audience’s mind</A> – understanding the thought process of your visitors is important. If you know what they are thinking, you will be able to convert more of them. That’s what you’ll learn in this chapter.<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-3/">Chapter 3: Optimizing traffic for higher conversions</A> – a landing page without visitors is useless. You’ll not only learn how to drive traffic to your landing page, but you will also learn how to drive “qualified” traffic.<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-4/">Chapter 4: What makes a visitor convert</A> – there is an art and science portion to conversion optimization. You’ll learn the common mistakes to avoid to make sure you can convert visitors into customers.<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-5/">Chapter 5: Putting your skills to the test</A> – A lot of guides that talk about testing tell you what you should be testing, but they don’t teach you the why or how part. We’ll walk you through everything you need to know about testing.<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-6/">Chapter 6: Read, review, react</A> – some tests will go really well, and others will not. Based on the results, the actions you need to take will vary. We’ll walk you through all of the major scenarios you need to be familiar with, and we’ll give you solutions to each of those situations.<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-7/">Chapter 7: Tools of the trade</A> – landing page optimization doesn’t have to be hard or even complicated. With the use of the tools in this section, landing page optimization will be a breeze for you.Click here to read <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/">The Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization</A>.I hope you enjoy the Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization. If you follow the steps we laid out, you should be able to generate more traffic and sales to your business. I promise, it’s not hard, and you can do it without committing a lot of time to the task.Feel free to leave a comment if you find any errors within the guide or if you just want to share what you think about it.P.S. Don’t forget to <a href="https://twitter.com/share/?url=http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/&text=The%20Definitive%20Guide%20to%20Landing%20Page%20Optimization%3A">tweet about The Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization</A>.P.P.S. You would be doing me a HUGE FAVOR by reading <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/">The Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization</A>, sharing it via Twitter and Facebook, and leaving me a comment to let me know what you think. <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/XaRIKTeETXU/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

The Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization

Have you ever created a landing page? If so, have you ever modified or optimized it? If not, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Be...

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23.19

How Reducing Options Can Increase Your Conversions

More is better, right? Not in the world of conversion optimization.Just think of it this way…When you take a kid to a candy store, what happens? They don’t know what to buy, right? The reason is that they have too many options to choose from and they are not sure which one is the best choice.The same goes for the web. Giving people too many options or asking them for too much information can quickly reduce your conversions. For example, by reducing the number of options in your form fields from 6 to 3, you can increase your conversion rate, on average, by 66%.To show you how you can reduce the number of options on your site, I decided to create an infographic that breaks down different strategies that will help you increase your conversion rate.Click on the image below to see a larger view:<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/24/how-reducing-options-can-increase-your-conversions/?display=wide"><img alt="How Reducing Options Can Increase Your Conversions" src="/reduceoptionsincreaseconversions.png" title="How Reducing Options Can Increase Your Conversions" width="480"></A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/24/how-reducing-options-can-increase-your-conversions/?display=wide">Click here to view an enlarged version of this infographic</A>.The jam case study in the infographic was eye-opening to me as I didn’t expect that reducing the number of flavors offered in a free sample would cause more people to actually purchase the product.If you aren’t sure how many options to give your visitors, always go with the lower number. If you want to add more options in the future, you can always do so, but my recommendation is to <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/05/02/7-ab-testing-blunders-that-even-experts-make/">A/B test it</A>.So, what do you think about limiting options on your website?Embed This Image On Your Site (copy code below): <div style="clear:both"><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/24/how-reducing-options-can-increase-your-conversions/"><img alt="How Reducing Options Can Increase Your Conversions" border="0" src="/reduceoptionsincreaseconversions.png" title="How Reducing Options Can Increase Your Conversions" /></a></div><div>Courtesy of: <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/24/how-reducing-options-can-increase-your-conversions/">Quick Sprout</a></div> <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/OSW3BX4fApo/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

How Reducing Options Can Increase Your Conversions

More is better, right? Not in the world of conversion optimization. Just think of it this way…When you take a kid to a candy store, what h...

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04.34

How to increase targeted website traffic

You don’t only want to increase your website’s traffic but in reality what you want is to get more targeted visitors coming to your website. The reasons are a lot and the ways to do it even more and this is what I will explain in this blog post.The difference between targeted visitors and normal visitors (non-targeted) is that targeted visitors have a specific goal in mind while normal visitors are browsing the web without having a particular objective.Targeted visitors are looking for a solution to their problem and they are visiting your website because they believe they can find the answer to their question, the product or service they want. In other words targeted traffic are those people that visit a website with the intention of performing an action.Let me give you a couple of examples to understand the difference between the two:People who visit amazon.com searching for “buy filter coffee machine” are more likely to convert (i.e. make a purchase) than people who enter amazon because they want to view the latest offers.Likewise, from my experience in this website, people searching for “<a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/seo-packages/">seo packages for small business</A>” are more likely to complete the order form than people who come to the site reading the blog posts.Increase conversions: From the examples above it should be obvious that what you need is targeted traffic because that will increase your conversion rates but also it will <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-increase-adsense-earnings-almost-instantly-case-studies/">increase your Adsense earnings</A> (if you are running ads) since targeted visitors are more likely to click an ad for a product they are interested in.Increase readers and email subscribers: If you can manage to keep targeted visitors happy though your content and website experience then most probably they will visit again and also subscribe to your email list.Increase social media shares: Targeted visitors will share something on their Facebook or twitter if they like it. I don’t have any statistics to back this assumption but it makes sense to LIKE something if it solves your problem (in case you are looking for answers) or satisfies a need (in case your are looking for products).There are many ways to increase your targeted visitors besides the traditional channels i.e. <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/top-10-search-engines-in-the-world/">search engines</A> and social media networks but first let’s see how these 2 channels generate targeted visitors for a website.Search engine TrafficSearch engine traffic, whether it is <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/what-is-the-difference-between-seo-and-ppc/">paid or organic</A> is highly targeted because people use search engines for a purpose. Depending on the keywords they use to search, you can tell if they are targeted or not. As in the examples above, people who search for “weight loss” are more likely into finding general information about losing weight while people searching for “best diet plan to lose weight” want something more specific.The best way to increase your targeted traffic from search engines is to concentrate on the long tail keywords since people using more than 2-3 words in their search query are looking for something very specific. You can also read my previous article <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/long-tail-seo-benefits-for-website-owners/">long tail seo benefits for website owners</A> which explains how to find those long tail keywords that convert.Social Media NetworksUntil very recently traffic from social media was considered as non-targeted and while this is not completely wrong, things have changed dramatically the last couple of years. All major social networks (think Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+) are improving their algorithms to make social networking more targeted.For example Pinterest has recently introduced a feature that shows you pins related to what you have ‘liked’ and ‘pinned’ in the past and this increases the chances of interacting with these pins since they are closer to your likes.In addition to that when searching for new people on Twitter for example, you can use various tools to refine your search and find those people that meet certain demographic characteristics and other criteria.  In other words there are ways to discover from the huge mass of twitter users those users that are considered targeted for your website or business.Also when it comes to advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter you can target your ads to a very specific set of people and make your campaigns targeted.Mobile TrafficWhile this is pretty much the same as search engine traffic explained above, it is worth noting that if you are after targeted traffic from mobile visitors you need to have a mobile friendly website otherwise you will not be able to reach users on mobile.Google is very serious about mobile search and if your website is not optimized for mobile it will not be included in the Google search results or to be more precise it won’t have any chances of achieving high rankings on mobile search.Even better what you actually need to reach more targeted users on ‘mobile devices’ is a responsive website and many businesses have started to realise that <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/advantages-of-responsive-design-for-online-businesses/">responsive design is important</A> for their marketing efforts.Mobile Native AppsFor many this may be a surprise but native mobile apps can drive targeted visits to a website and let me explain why.A native mobile app (either for Android, iPhone or Windows) is uploaded to the mobile markets and in order to download it users have to perform certain actions (search for it on the desktop version of the stores or through their mobile phones).The fact that users are searching for something specific makes them targeted and if you can manage to satisfy their needs you can win customers (if you are selling something) or new readers (if you are a content publisher).How can you drive targeted traffic to a website through a mobile native app? In practice this is a bit more complicated than creating an app and uploading the app to the mobile markets. You have to think what type of app to create, how to promote your app so that it is not lost in the millions of apps already available in those markets and most importantly how to make mobile app users visit your website and take an action.I will try to explain all the above with a real example. <a href="http://www.caloriesecrets.net/">CalorieSecrets.net</A> is one of the websites we manage (you can read “<a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-build-a-successful-blog-with-more-than-250000-unique-visits-per-month-case-study/">How to build a successful blog</A>” and <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/google-seo-best-practices-how-to-keep-google-happy/">Google SEO best practices</A> for more details about the website, history, etc) and for this website we have also developed a native Android app that is available through the Google Play Store.The Application is ‘<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.droidbd.howtoloseweight" target="_blank">how to lose weight</A>’ (read below why it is not named Calorie Secrets) and has more than 250,000 downloads. The benefits for the website are a lot and in particular:More targeted readers – people who download the application on their mobile phones or tablets are doing it because they are interested in fitness / weight loss topics.More social followers – people like to use social media from their mobiles and they are sharing content from the app with their social networksMore advertising revenue – The application is running admob ads and this creates an additional monthly revenue by utilizing the existing website content.More visits to the mobile and desktop websites – From the website traffic details it is shown that a number of visits come from the android app.Based on this example read the answers to the above questions that explain why it works.What type of app to create? The application should offer useful and valuable information to users so that there is an incentive for them to download.  Depending on the type of website the application can either take full advantage of the device capabilities and offer users a different experience or give them an alternative way to access the website content on their mobile devices.In this case the application resembles the website’s content in a user friendly format that makes it easier for android users (phone and tablet) to read the articles.How to promote the app?In Store SEO: Mobile markets have a search function that allows you to search thought their store and find applications to download. One of the ways to increase visibility in their search results is to follow basic SEO guidelines such as providing for titles and descriptions of the app that include keywords used by people when they search for apps.You may have already noticed that the name of the application is ‘How to lose weight’ and not Calorie Secrets. This was done in purpose and the reason is that nobody will search for ‘Calorie Secrets’ in the play store but there are a number of people who search for ‘how to lose weight’.So, one way to promote the app is by giving it a meaningful name that includes keywords people are searching.Another way is to spread the word about your app through your website (by writing a blog post about it) and by adding download buttons in your sidebar, header and footer.If you keep an email list then you can also create a newsletter and inform your subscribers.Finally, social media is perhaps the fastest way to let other people know about the existence of your app and a targeted Facebook campaign is among the best solutions.How to get more visits from the app? Whenever a new article is published on the website our android users get notified through the android notification system and a small icon appears on their phones or tablets.This is very efficient because they cannot missed it (don’t forget that the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2449632/How-check-phone-The-average-person-does-110-times-DAY-6-seconds-evening.html" target="_blank">average person check their phones 110 days per day</A>!) and it is a ‘push’ type notification – meaning that it will find you even if you are not asking for it.So, we know for sure that someone has the application installed on their phones because they are interested in our content and when someone clicks on the notification to read or interact with an article (i.e share on social media), we know that this user is a targeted visitor because they have performed specific actions that indicate their intentions.Once they get into the app, you can either give them incentives through a pop up message to visit your mobile friendly website or try to make them convert by subscribing to your newsletter or becoming a fun in social media.We are convinced about the importance of mobile native apps (especially android) as a good way to increase targeted visits (besides search engine traffic and social networking), that’s why we created a platform for transforming your website into beautiful native apps ready to be published on the market.You can visit our <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/android-application-development/">android application development</A> page for more examples and pricing details.Why most business native apps fail? From experience people try to make native apps for their businesses and they get very few downloads because:They don’t use ‘good’ names for their apps  – Don’t expect people to search for your business name in the stores (unless you are a big brand name of course) but try to give your native apps names that people search for.They don’t promote their apps – Creating an app is one thing, promoting it correctly is a totally different concept. Native apps need a good promotion strategy to produce a return.Their apps are not designed correctly – Sometimes developers try to create many functions and they make the apps difficult to use, slow and non-functional. The design and functionality of the app should be depends on what you want to achieve from the app.Content marketingLast but not least, content marketing is the most effective way to gain targeted visitors. Actually without a proper content marketing strategy you cannot achieve anything with the above techniques.Content marketing is what will drive search engine traffic from desktop and mobile, create more interaction in social media and convince mobile users to download the native apps on their devices.You can read <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/10-content-marketing-tips-for-beginners/">content marketing tips for beginners</A> and <a href="http://www.reliablesoft.net/why-every-business-needs-a-blog/">why every business needs a blog</A> for more information on how to create efficient content marketing campaigns for your business or website.Targeted visitors are very important for a website or online business as they have more chances of performing an action (becoming customers, subscribing to a newsletter, sharing on social media) than ‘normal’ visitors.Search engines and social networks (both for desktop and mobile) are among the obvious ways to get targeted visitors but besides those, another great way is through mobile native apps. When a native app is designed and promoted correctly it can become a great source of high targeted visits. <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Reliablesoftnet/~3/YXwwuD5517o/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

How to increase targeted website traffic

You don’t only want to increase your website’s traffic but in reality what you want is to get more targeted visitors coming to your website...

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04.10

How Google Works

Have you ever wondered how Google works? Sure, it has a complex algorithm that looks at <a href="http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors">hundreds of variables</A>, but in simple terms…do you know how Google works?To help you get a better understanding of Google’s algorithm as well as to show you how some of Google’s features work, I’ve created an animated infographic to explain the whole process.Click on the image below to see a larger view:<a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/21/how-google-works/?display=wide"><img alt="How Google Works" src="/howgoogleworks.gif" title="How Google Works" width="480"></A><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/21/how-google-works/?display=wide">Click here to view an enlarged version of this infographic</A>.What makes Google so beautiful as a search engine is that although a lot of complex processes are taking place in the background, from a user perspective, it’s simple and easy to use.As a searcher, any time you type something, you get relevant results related to your query. And you get it all in 1/8th of a second.If you are going to learn something from this infographic, it should be two things:How Google works.No matter how complicated your product may be on the back end, you need to make sure it’s simple and easy to use from a user perspective. Companies that make things complicated will have a much harder time marketing their products than those who make their ideas simple.So, what do you think about Google? As a marketer, I love it but mainly because it drives a lot of traffic and revenue to my businesses.Embed This Image On Your Site (copy code below): <div style="clear:both"><a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/21/how-google-works/"><img alt="How Google Works" border="0" src="/howgoogleworks.gif" title="How Google Works" /></a></div><div>Courtesy of: <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/21/how-google-works/">Quick Sprout</a></div> <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/W4Znl2x4ogY/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

How Google Works

Have you ever wondered how Google works? Sure, it has a complex algorithm that looks at hundreds of variables , but in simple terms…do you ...

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23.32

How to Steal Your Competitor’s Facebook Fans

<img alt="steal facebook fans" src="/stealcompetitor.jpg" title="steal facebook fans">Facebook isn’t just one of the most popular sites on the web. It’s also a great place to gain new customers. But when you are starting from scratch, it can be difficult to grow your Facebook audience.So, the question is: where do you start? The easiest way to start is by stealing your competitor’s fans. If they are interested in your competitor’s products or services, why won’t they be interested in yours as well?Here’s how you can steal your competitor’s Facebook fans:Just because your competition may have thousands of fans doesn’t mean all of those fans are engaging with the page. Facebook has an algorithm called <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/forum/topic/facebook/">Edgerank</A>, which determines what content is shown in users’ News Feeds. The higher the percentage of engaged users you have – fans who comment, share, or like your wall posts, the more Facebook will show your content to other people.Due to this, you only want fans that are active. To find out who is active on your competitor’s Fan Page, you can use <a href="http://www.socialleadfreak.com/">Social Lead Freak</A>. Plug in your competitor’s Fan Page, and it will pull the Facebook user IDs of all of its active members.From there, you can set up an advertising campaign that only targets those users. This way, when you are stealing your competitor’s fans, you are only taking their active ones, which will help you gain even more Facebook traffic.If you want to see Social Lead Freak in action, check out the video below. It will show you how it works for Facebook (as well as <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/14/how-to-increase-your-google-engagement-by-281/">Google+</A>).In addition to using Social Lead Freak to see who your competitor’s fans are, you’ll want to analyze your competition’s Facebook activities. Let’s say, for the sake of this blog post, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/hubspot">Hubspot</A> was a competitor of Quick Sprout, and I was trying to attract its fans.The first thing I would do is run its Facebook fan page URL through <a href="http://www.fanpagekarma.com/">Fanpage Karma</A>.<img alt="fan page overview" src="/fanpagekarmaoverview.png" title="fan page overview">As you can see from the image above, the first thing you will be shown by this free tool is the basic stats of your competition’s fan page. The data covers everything from the number of fans Hubspot has to their engagement ratio.What you have to do is start digging a bit deeper to get an understanding of the kinds of posts that are attracting these fans as well as generating their engagement. You can do this by first looking at the engagement per daytime graph.<img alt="fan page engagement" src="/engagementperhour.png" title="fan page engagement">As you can see from the image above, Hubspot’s most engaging day to post is Thursday. Which means if you are going after their fans, you would also want to post heavily on Thursday as it should generate more likes, shares, comments and new fans.You’ll also want to look at what types of posts produce the most engagement. Hubspot posts both images and links. But their image posts don’t seem to do well.<img alt="fan page post type" src="/posttype.png" title="fan page post type">This should tell you to avoid posting images, assuming you are trying to attract Hubspot’s fans.Through the post history report, you can also see what types of posts have done well.<img alt="fan page post history" src="/posthistory.png" title="fan page post history">From the image above, you can see the specific posts that did well and the ones that didn’t gain any traction. If you are after Hubspot’s fans, you would want to post on topics related to the ones that received high engagement. And you would want to avoid posting on topics that receive low engagement.Similar to Social Lead Freak is Fanpage Karma. You can use it to find out who the top influencers are.<img alt="fan page top users" src="/topusers.png" title="fan page top users">The cool part about the list Fanpage Karma provides is that with one click you can see the number of likes, shares and comments each influencer produced. From there, you can see pages with the same active fans, which will help find more fans to steal.<img alt="fan page more fans" src="/morefans.png" title="fan page more fans">Stealing your competitor’s Facebook fans is much different than <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/17/how-to-steal-your-competitors-twitter-followers/">stealing their Twitter followers</A>. The reason is that it is harder to do so on Facebook than on Twitter without spending a bit of money on Facebook ads. It doesn’t have to be much, but spending a few hundred dollars goes a long way as it gets the momentum rolling. Just make sure your ads only target Facebook user IDs that you pull from Social Lead Freak or Fanpage Karma.Nonetheless, whether you have money to spend or not, you should be able to effectively steal your competitor’s fans if you follow the steps above. Just don’t focus on a pure number as more fans isn’t necessarily better. Instead, you should try to get as many engaging fans as possible since the higher their percentage, the better off you are.So, how else can you steal your competitor’s fans? <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/EdCSzr8e4i8/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

How to Steal Your Competitor’s Facebook Fans

Facebook isn’t just one of the most popular sites on the web. It’s also a great place to gain new customers. But when you are starting from...

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17.09