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4 Tips for Choosing a Domain Name

By: Brian Horn on: January 26th, 2011 8 Comments

Choosing the perfect domain name is essential if you want people to remember your business (or product) and keep coming back. Choosing the right domain name is important for many aspects of Internet marketing and there are some important considerations that you will need to understand before committing yourself to a certain web address.

Following are some important tips to help you arrive at the best decision, whichever host you go for.

1 – Integrate Keywords into the Address

If practical, which it often is, integrate an important keyword relating to your business in the domain name. For example, if you are running a travel-related website, try to integrate the word ‘travel’ or another relevant keyword into the address. This will be beneficial for Internet marketing and it will also help people to remember the name of your website.

2 – Choose the TLD Carefully

TLD stands for Top Level Domain. This refers to the last part of your web address (.com, .com.au, .co.uk, .org etc). For a website which is relevant to people all over the world, a .com address is normally the best one to go for. If your website content is primarily or only relevant to people in your country, then you will usually be best off using your country’s TLD (.co.uk, .ca, .com.au etc.).

Using your country’s TLD immediately tells your visitors that you are a local business. This may be exactly what you want to achieve. .org addresses were always intended to be used for non-commercial entities though this is not so much the case any more. .net is another of the original TLDs and is suitable for Internet-related services such as web hosts. Other TLDs are only available to certain organizations or business such as .aero for airlines and .mobi for mobile phone-related sites etc.

Some countries have also made their TLDs available to the rest of the world. In some cases, these TLDs may be more suitable for your website as they can make for a catchier and more memorable name. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has the TLD of .tv, for example. Micronesia uses .fm. Both TLDs are open to registration around the world, so if your site is related to television or online video, .tv might be a better TLD to choose from. Likewise .fm is ideal for music and radio sites. Other popular TLDs include .me (Montenegro) and .info.

3 – Avoid Using a Similar Address to a Competitor

Always make sure that people are not likely to mistype your web address and end up on another similar site, especially that of a competitor.

Be careful to choose a website that is sufficiently unique. Some businesses even register domains which are typed incorrectly. For example, if you type in amazonn.com, you will be taken to amazon.com because the company has registered both domain names.

4 – Multilingual Domain Names

Internationalized domain names are gradually starting to appear. However, people have been used to using plain ASCII web addresses since the Internet first existed. It will take a great deal of time for this to change, if indeed it ever does. In the meantime, it is generally not a good idea to register a multilingual domain name unless you also already have an ASCII version of your web address.

Lead Capture: 3 Secrets to Creating a Landing Page Which Converts Like Crazy!

By: Brian Horn on: January 19th, 2011 5 Comments

Imagine you are deep in a Google-goggle session looking for something online, and you finally hit a page which causes you to fill out a form and hit submit. What made you do that? Whatever that was, chances are good it is what will make your landing page capture leads for you. Take a few minutes to consider the following landing page secrets, apply them to your landing page design, and you’ll soon be pulling your hair out trying to figure out what to do with so many darn leads!

1. KISS

Yes, keep it simple smarty. There are four basic personality types in all of us. If you’re reading this chances are good you have a good chunk of the analytical personality in you. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when it comes to landing page design, small print with a lot of details will not capture leads. Fun, easy-breezy and to the point will win the day every time. For example, the form itself will work well if it looks casual or non-threatening, like a note pad.
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SEO Rapper: Design Coding

By: Brian Horn on: January 12th, 2011 3 Comments

Remember this guy from my “Be On Page 1 of Google Rap” video last year?

Here is the first one he did that now has over 700,000 views (WOW!!!) on YouTube.

Good lessons and a fun delivery. Enjoy it!

12 New Year Resolutions for Websites

By: Brian Horn on: January 5th, 2011 5 Comments

Here are twelve New Year website resolutions that will improve your marketing skills and the overall performance of your web site.

Resolution One
Take the time to learn how to use social networking sites to increase website marketing potential.

Resolution Two
Start a blog and link it to your site.

Resolution Three
Learn how to use RSS feeds to market your site.

Resolution Four
Take a serious look at your website’s appearance and make changes where needed.

Resolution Five
Make your website user friendly with easy to use navigation.

Resolution Six
Take advantage of the “description” meta tag to let searchers know what your site has to offer.

Resolution Seven
Create a sitemap for your website.

Resolution Eight
Remove animations, flash and huge graphic files that are slowing your website’s load time.

Resolution Nine
Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead of tables.

Resolution Ten
Repair any broken links.

Resolution Eleven
Install a mailing list script.

Resolution Twelve
View your website in all the major browsers for compatibility issues. Fix any you find.

Tackle one resolution at a time and complete it. Before you know it you will have completed each one and your site will be performing well and achieving better results.

Why Page Rank Isn’t Enough: Five Reasons Why They Hit the Back Button

By: Brian Horn on: December 22nd, 2010 2 Comments

Unless you’re new to internet marketing, you’ve already heard that improving your rank in Google search results is the best way to build traffic and generate leads for your online business.

However true this is, the time and money you spend attracting people to your site won’t be worth a handful of common keywords if your landing page practically forces them to click away.

Buyers in competitive markets understand the options they have, so your site needs to make its case in minutes or seconds.  Making the prospect spend that time trying to figure out what you do or how to stop an assault on his senses directly affects your conversion to sales and discourages visitors from exploring resources on your site.

From overly technical language to incoherent design, searchers report a variety of reasons for clicking away.

Don’t miss an opportunity to get bookmarked today or to have your page sent by visitor who likes what she sees.  Instead, use a casual visit to establish your credibility because today’s lurkers may become tomorrow’s sales.

Your Landing Page Makes a Secret of What You Do

Some internet marketers get so focused on educating visitors that the services your online business provides get lost in the clutter.  Ads that make it impossible to tell what product is being promoted may work for selling perfume, but your site shouldn’t make a secret of your product or service, no matter how exclusive your client list.  Don’t make your readers work to find a list of services to learn if your online business offers anything they need.

You Offer the Same Information as the Number Nine Ranked Site

Believe it or not, some searchers actually skip the top results because they often present the same information in slightly different forms.  If your strategy involves educating readers, you’ll need to tell them something they don’t already know.

Incorporating data from an independent study that supports your product’s use or an article on new developments in your field builds your credibility and shows you’re keeping up with changes in your service area and industry.

You Add Rather Than Evaluate or Group Resources

How often you introduce new resources to your page will depend on the focus of your online business.  Although new links and resources are essential if you want return visits or comments on your site, racking up novel offerings without assessing their value or integrating them with your original design leads to a confusing and disorganized page that will make your visitors click away.

Group new resources in a logical way in tabs or drop-down menus so that visitors and loyal followers of your site can find and use the resources you introduce.

Your Language Use Reflects on Your Online Business

Bricks and mortar operations can communicate with customers in a store, but you only have the written word.  Visitors to your site will pick up on spelling errors, dead links and unnecessarily technical language.

While your language use and housekeeping may leave readers wondering if you take any more care with the services you provide, less obvious issues in the copy on your site can drive new readers to click away.

Visitors should be able to glide across your page without having to stop to read the writer’s mind.

Primary Colors Are for Primary School

Blinking ads and animations might be perfect for a children’s site, but they don’t always work for promoting financial services.  Leave the moving ads and banners that block text to competitors who don’t mind looking desperate.  Unless your online business has something to do with distracting people when they read, don’t start a Las Vegas light show on your site.

Top ranked sites garner traffic but don’t necessarily convert it to sales, or even build their businesses over time.  Today’s top ten results may fall to page four without the revenue to purchase competitive keywords.  Making the best impression on visitors to your site is as important as getting them there.  You can build your online business one click at a time as long as those clicks are moving in the right direction.

Seven Tips to Use a Resource Page to Make Extra Revenue from Your Business Website

By: Brian Horn on: December 15th, 2010 3 Comments

A resource page is a page on your blog or website containing a list of products and services that are likely to be useful to your audience. It is a great way to help your blog readership by informing them about products that you have found helpful and are likely to be helpful to them too. Best of all, you can set up a resource page without any additional cost.

The greatest hidden benefit of a resource page is that it can increase your blog income significantly. How? Become an affiliate marketer of the products listed in your resource page and convert all the items in your list of resources into affiliate links.

This ensures that each time one of your readers buys a product after clicking on the link in your resource page, you earn a commission.

Here are seven tips to create and optimize the resource page of your blog or website:
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Remembering Your Childhood Dreams

By: Brian Horn on: December 2nd, 2010 15 Comments

I want to take a break from my usual internet marketing post, and share something I learned on a trip to Australia this week (was down there speaking at a event for small business owners).

On the flight over, I read the book “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pauch. I had seen the video a few years back when it became one of the most watched YouTube videos ever, but never read the book.

Anyway, I brought up the book when I was talking to several of the other speakers and organizers.  To my surprise, I was the only one that had ever even heard of it (it has over 12 MILLION views, so I erroneously thought everyone had seen it).

So here it is for all of you that missed this for some reason.

Be warned, it is a long video (70 minutes) and there is no way you will be able to make it to the end without tearing up.  But it is a great story about living out your dreams.  As entrepreneurs we have an even stronger  core desire to do what it takes to live our dreams than most people…so I felt it was especially appropriate for Dan’s blog.

Enjoy it, and give you family extra hugs this holiday season.

On a side note…one of my childhood dreams was to travel across Australia.  Now it looks like I will be going on a multiple city tour all over Australia this spring speaking to entrepreneurs.  Childhood dreams do come true.

Who Is Your Customer?

By: Brian Horn on: November 26th, 2010 3 Comments

I am a big fan of Trump’s show The Apprentice and one episode stands out.

The night The Apprentice teams had to create TV commercials for a new Dove body wash product, Trump should have canned everybody, gone out on the street and picked 16 new candidates at random. He couldn’t possibly have wound up with a more pathetic bunch of dunderheads. Still, some of the mistakes that led to these truly horrid TV commercials DO get made a lot, by smart people too.

For example, not considering WHO the customer is. I cannot beat this up enough: the WHO is far, far important than the WHAT, WHEN or HOW in marketing. Yet I often catch people far along with developing products, ads, sales letters, etc., who I can completely stump with my first three WHO questions.

No one on these teams even considered WHO is the primary, most likely buyer of this product. The team that made the pornographic cucumber/gay commercial had the woman lose the guy to another guy; the men went off arm in arm to presumably enjoy the body wash together, leaving her with the cucumber. Obviously the entire commercial was ill-conceived, but if you were going to do this, you’d have to assume the buyers are women, not men, so you’d reverse it all, and have the women go off together, leaving the guy behind.

For example, finding a PRODUCT BENEFIT to talk about. Gee, that seems really obvious. But I often critique sales letters with no benefit in the first four pages. Teleseminar scripts with no benefits in the opening. And neither of those TV commercials advanced a benefit. But – how many Super Bowl commercials can you recall now, and correctly ID both the advertiser and the Chief Benefit for buying its product?

You usually have to decide on one to no more than three Chief Benefits to fixate on, emphasize, redundantly emphasize over and over and over again throughout a pitch. It takes a lot of effort to hammer a Chief Benefit into the distracted, mushy-thinking skull of today’s prospect. Hard to do if you don’t know what it is.

Decide on A THEME. (Oh, and just for the record, when you deliver what you believe is the right pitch to a valid group of prospects and they don’t respond, you are wrong about the chief benefits they want – regardless of how much you think you know about the prospects. They are not dumb or cheapskates or lazy or whatever. Their lack of response is your fault not theirs.

Why Your Visitors Don’t Turn Into Customers and What You Can Do About It

By: Brian Horn on: November 24th, 2010 5 Comments

Successful Internet businesses know the value of actual conversions versus total hits received. Too often, online businesses are obsessed with the amount of hits they generate rather than the hit to sale conversion rate. This focus is misguided because it ignores the issue of abandonment.

“Abandonment” is a term with a unique meaning for Internet marketers. It refers to reasons why users abandon a website before fulfilling the action the website owner desires–most often buying a product or making an enquiry.

There are many gorgeous sites on the web with one of a kind innovations. Unfortunately, many of these websites fail to turn a profit or unknowingly limit their profit-earning potential. Website owners should focus on one fundamental thing when constructing a website: turning visitors into customers. To prevent abandonment, focus on the following:

  1. Your website must load quickly to accommodate customers still utilizing 56k dialup modems.
  2. Design your website with ease of use in mind. Don’t opt for aesthetic appearances at the expense of usability.
  3. Advertisements should click directly through to the specific items the visitor is searching for and not to the website homepage.
  4. Keep each website page relatively short to improve load times.
  5. Eliminate information not germane to the service or product.
  6. Remove atmospheric elements like music and flash animation to hasten load times.
  7. Ease the newsletter signup process, or visitors will not participate.
  8. Require customers to input minimum information to make their purchase.
  9. Issue newsletters in HTML and text, as many email systems don’t accept HTML.
  10. Compress images for faster loading.
  11. Include AOL friendly equivalents for all links and emails.
  12. Incorporate automatic text wraps at 60 spaces for all emails to prevent the recipient from receiving disjointed text or codes.
  13. Respond to email communications within 24 hours.
  14. Respond to after hour email communications first thing in the morning.
  15. Issue automated emails to customers the moment an order is shipped.

Incorporate these 15 fundamental points into your website and view site construction and advertising from the customer’s point of view. Always ask yourself, “How can I make this experience easier for the customer?” By emphasizing this approach, you will stop wasting your advertising dollars.

Have You Heard of a Link Wheel?

By: Brian Horn on: November 17th, 2010 5 Comments

Link wheel is one of the most talked about SEO strategies that have come out in a long time. A huge number of internet marketers are now implementing this and see better results in search rankings as it increases the site traffic on your website.

Link wheels are designed by creating new backlinks to your site’s main page, which give your site a higher search engine ranking and more visitors. If you are interested in usiong this tactic, here are some of tips to structuring a link wheel:

A link wheel is the process of creating 12 or so (or sometimes up to 116) new blogs/microsites on a particular topic. On each of those sites, you write 200 words of unique content, and include 1 link to your targeted site, and 1 link to one of your other blogs/microsites.

You can also register a bunch of web 2.0 websites and create articles on them which link back to your own actual site.

Moreover, you can build multiple link wheels that link to your site’s homepage and to different pages of your site, each wheel works on improving your rankings for various keywords. And after creating your link wheels, you can now drive traffic to those as well which will eventually create a snowball effect back to your actual site.

Be careful though, it has been proven that if you create all your web entries on the same date, publish blogs and create links all on the same date, and use the same name to register all your accounts, Google may not give you credit for all the backlinks that you have created because it is not natural.

See you on page 1!

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