First, quiet your mind and focus on How to Boost your Productivity. We need to be more proficient in our work to accomplish more. In many cases, people fail to be productive because they lose focus and let their minds wander, leading to a loss in productivity.
The key is to focus your mind on the task at hand. Block out all other distractions and thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand.
• Failure to put aside thoughts unrelated to the task at hand will only slow you down and lead to a higher probability of mistakes.
• Get a good night’s sleep every night to boost focus and productivity, reduce mistakes.
• Don’t let other issues or problems bother you.
Basic Ingredients Of Productivity
There are three basic ingredients to productivity:
• Time
• Energy
• Attention
Without all three of these ingredients, your productivity will be lower than it can be. And then you won’t achieve the amount of success you are expecting.
How To Measure Your Productivity
Dictionary.com defines productivity as “the quality, state, or fact of being able to generate, create, enhance, or bring forth goods and services.”
• In other words, its the amount of effort and time that the worker puts in and how many units of production he/she produces in that time span.
For Example:
If a worker produces one unit (say, one ebook) an hour and another worker produces two units (say, two ebooks) in one hour, then the second worker is two times more productive than the first worker.
Being more productive means being better able to manage one’s time. Focusing one’s attention on the tasks required. And/or utilize the energy necessary to complete the tasks required in the same time period as another worker.
In order to boost your productivity, you need to be able to produce more of the product. Or provide more of the service you deliver in the same amount of time or less than you have before.
When it comes to businesses, it’s not just your production. It’s the production of your subcontractors who work for you, that account for your total productivity.
Start Laying A Productive Foundation
First, you need to eliminate all distractions from your work area and clear your mind of any doubts and/or worries you may have.
You also need to be totally focused and invested in the working process. This allows you to produce the maximum number of products/content and/or render the most services within a specific time span.
Have A Plan
Have a clear plan of what needs to be done in terms of tasks and projects and how to go about best doing them.
• In regards to subcontractors, have an agenda of tasks and projects to complete. Also, a time table on which you can expect them to complete them.
• Then lay down the ground rules on what needs to be done and how quickly they should be done.
Boost Your Productivity
Implement simple time management techniques. You must manage your time as efficiently as possible in order to be as productive as possible. And, monitor your time very carefully. Ensure that you are working efficiently during the times you are working. This will enable you are utilizing your time to the best of your ability.
• Note how long you think it will take you to complete a project on a piece of paper, in a text file, or in a spreadsheet file.
• Time how long it takes you to complete specific tasks.
• Time how long your work periods are, your breaks are, and how long any distractions are.
Try using the clock on your computer and/or mobile device. Or use an online timer to record the respective time periods. Then compare the time it took you to complete the project versus the time you expected. If you met or beat that time, reward yourself.
If you took longer than expected, review what slowed you down. Was it distractions, lack of focus, the task was more difficult than expected- then make adjustments.
You can make this into a game or challenge to where you challenge yourself to get more done in less time to improve your productivity.
There are online timers that have bells or other sounds that can help you use the Pomodoro Technique. This will allow 15- to 30-minute work periods. It will be followed by 3- to 5 minute rest periods three times. Then after the fourth 15- to 30-minute work period, a 15- to 30-minute rest period.
Removing The Unimportant Tasks
It’s vital that you prepare for work ahead of time so minor/menial and repetitive tasks don’t slow you down.
Consider what tasks are actually important to your business and which aren’t.
• Tasks such as email and social media should be done during break periods, lunch periods, and/or outside-of-work periods, not while the main work is being done.
If you run a business, only do the tasks you are proficient at and enjoy; send all other tasks to subcontractors for maximum productivity and profitability. This will solve a lot of time for you in the long run.
Pursue An All-Around Productive Life
Having an all-around productive life means that you are productive in all facets of it, not just in business.
• Increased productivity can include assembling items, grocery shopping, etc.
• Productivity means doing any task in the most efficient manner possible. This will help you maximize the value of every minute and every second so that you get the most out of them as possible.
SEO for your Website – Part 2 and it’s all about how you can use the power of your relationships with other business owners. Yes, another reason why you need to build strong relationships with other people.
Here’s how to make this happen:
Get Affiliates to Promote YOU and Improve Your Search Visibility
Yup, this is another arrow in the quiver. Get others to advertise for you or make more revenue advertising for businesses with similar products.
Let’s talk about becoming an affiliate partner. There are several affiliate programs on the Internet, but all are not created equal. Before choosing an affiliate program to enhance your marketing be sure that it is worth your while.
Some criteria to consider are payment schedule, pay rate, the credibility of the product and business philosophy. If you can’t believe in the product, there is no reason to advertise for it.
Popular affiliate programs are the ones that offer incentives and training to their affiliate partners. Training can come in the way of newsletters and informative articles that address aspects of Search Engine Marketing to help you increase your business. Sharing wealth begins with sharing information. The company gets a loyal affiliate who knows their stuff and you get help streamlining your business marketing strategy.
So, SEO for your Website – Part 2 is all about Affiliate Marketing and it has been around forever – well almost!
Some affiliates set up websites just for affiliate marketing. The website employs unique SEO content that increases sales for both of you. Now, you might wonder what affiliate marketing is, but that’s a topic for another post.
But I’m not going to leave you hanging, so here’s the definition: it’s a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Simple right?
Search Engine Advertising:
Pay per Click (PPC)
Pay per click is an advertising formula that gives free upfront advertising (in most cases) and you only have to pay when your ads are clicked or some action is taken. The strategy here is to have your ads placed in key areas where they will get seen by a large number of people. Search engine advertising needs to include this little gem for an all-around approach to growing your business.
Pay per click has several different applications. It can be used in affiliate marketing campaigns for you and your partners, paid searches and bidding on search engine advertising. Pay per click is a broad term but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get paid on every click. We’ll explain.
Pay per Click (PPC) programs based on keywords
Search engines like Google and Yahoo have pay per click programs where you can gain exposure on search engine result pages (SERPs). With these programs, you use relevant keywords for your website products to create short concise ads that gain the attention of searchers.
Pay per click programs is a way to test out your keywords before mounting a major SEO campaign. Different types of keywords can be used in ads and the response gauged. Beginning with broad keywords allows you to get an idea of what types of keywords searchers are using. You will get clicks but because it is such a broad keyword, all of the clicking visitors may not be the right kind of traffic that goes from sales lead to a buying customer.
Pay per click ads are short and there is a word or character limit depending on the program.
Check out these programs:
Google AdWords
Yahoo Advertising
Bing Ads
Each ad has a line for a title, a description, and a URL link. You don’t have much space to make a terrific first impression. One must is to use your targeted keywords in the title and the description. Be sure to add action verbs like “click, try, and open” to let searchers know an action on their part is required.
The URL link will direct searchers to your landing page. We alluded to landing pages earlier but here is where you get the explanation. As an Internet surfer, you know how frustrating it can be to go through several links just to find where you want to go. Links in ads that lead to a homepage lose potential sales leads and customers because the process becomes laborious.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a website page where the product or service will appear and be explained to visitors. If you are selling flower bulbs, the landing page for those bulbs will contain pictures of the bulbs you have for sale. Your landing page can be from your virtual store providing per unit price and a “buy now” button for a hopefully easy sale. Direct links are best to interest the searcher.
Within these programs, you will choose your keywords, complete your ads, and then bid on those keywords. The price you quote represents the most you will pay for the ad using those keywords to be shown on the search results page. Still, you don’t pay for your advertising until the ads are clicked on the page.
Use a mixture of popular keywords and keyword phrases to gain targeted traffic. Longer phrases narrow the searchers to those who are definitely interested in the product or service you have to offer. The traffic rate may not increase significantly but your sales can. And that is what having a business is all about right? Making money, having great relationships with people and providing value to the people in your world.
I hope you found this an interesting concept and an additional way to increase your SEO.
Did you remember to pick up your SEO Check List from SEO for your Website – Part 1? If not here it is again, just click on the link, it will open to a new page – SEO List
SEO for your website…” that doesn’t explain anything to me ” you say. Well, follow along below while I explain it to you and pay attention, please!
The SEO Checklist
Free search engine traffic (SEO) is an amazing thing. It can grow your targeted traffic, bring you new subscribers and, best of all, increase your sales. SEO for your website is critical for your business. But the thing is, you have to work at it. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, keep the following checklist handy to steadily growing traffic. (Click the FREEBIE LINK below to get your copy)
For Your Off-Page SEO
These are things that will affect your search engine rankings from outside of your web page. These are very important for growing the overall popularity of your site and make it easier for you to rank well for your chosen keyword phrases.
1- Create excellent content because it affects the following:
How much your content is shared on social media…this provides important clues to search engines about the quality of your content.
How long a search engine user stays on your site. If searches on a search engine and finds your site but clicks back right away, it will tell the search engine that you may not be very relevant for that phrase.
How often your content is linked to. If you have good stuff, people will link to it…but beware, search engines can detect quality links, so old self-linking practices are dead.
Make sure you have a social media presence and you readily encourage your visitors to share your content on social media. It’s important that you’re being seen all over the web, if you want Google to give you favor.
SEO for your website is so important, especially to Google!
2- Ways to ensure you’ve got quality engaging content that attracts users and search engines:
Each page should be on one unique topic.
Your navigation is clear and all your content is easily found by humans and search engines.
Use attention-getting headlines to grab your visitors’ attention and so they know they’re in the right place.
Make your content easy to read by using short sentences and paragraphs. Keep your words simple.
Break up your copy with subheads and bullet points, so viewers can scan it easily…instead of having them click away.
Use images to draw the eye in and tell a story with your content. Humans are visual creatures and photos and other images can help retain their attention.
Don’t forget to connect with other website owners in your niche. Friends tend to share the content of others, so this is just a win-win for all of you.
For Your On-Page SEO
In addition to the big overall picture of creating great content that makes its way around the web, there are things you can do on each page you post to your website. Here is a list of quite a few things that can affect your rankings, but remember…don’t overdo it.
Keep your optimization natural and make sure it makes sense. Otherwise, you might alienate your visitors, and search engines can sniff out attempts to game the system.
Make sure your content is at least 300 words long. This is not a hard and fast rule, but certainly a good guideline. Search engines want to see there is some meat to your content.
Conduct keyword research to find a highly targeted phrase that gets decent traffic, but doesn’t have too much competition. Try a tool like WordTracker.com.
Use your keyword phrase in the title of your post and in the title tag, but make sure it will be appealing to website visitors.
Use your keyword phrase in the description tag for your post. Make sure the description not only includes the keyword phrase but is interesting enough to make people want to click.
Incorporate the keyword phrase into the URL of your page. For example, fun-family-vacations.html
Add the keyword phrase and other useful descriptions to your images with the use of ALT tags.
Employ the use of H2 and H3 tags. They make your content easier to scan and are also a good place to include your keyword phrase and variations of it.
Include the keyword phrase and variations of it in a few places in the body of your content. Try to include it in the first paragraph as well.
Show you are a hub of useful information and link out to a related page on another website.
See, I told you that SEO for your website is important!
Keep track of your rankings and tweak things as you go along. Just remember, it can take a bit of time before search engines update their listings, so give your changes time to come into effect.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of SEO for your website next week!
Get the above information as a downloadable checklist. Just click here for access.
Let me know if I can help you with your business. Just fill out the form below and I’ll be in touch.
Search Engine Marketing – What is it? Well, it’s one of the many buzzwords that has been created to define what companies do on the Internet to get noticed. You hear about search engine optimization, pay per click, click through rate and other terms that seem to be related to the same thing, but what is really going on? Do I need it on my website?
Search Engine Marketing has been around for a few years but is always improving upon itself to bring in more profit for small and large companies. SEM, as it is abbreviated, is not a magic bullet or a genie in a bottle. It takes some knowledge and a good brain to decipher the ins and outs of the process.
In this post, you will learn how to optimize your website using Search Engine Marketing techniques. There are several tools that encompass the topic of Search Engine Marketing and their uses will be discussed here.
History of the Search Engines
For many years after the Internet became popular all anyone talked about was searching the Web. It was a place to play and see what was going on in other parts of the world. Mathematicians and techies devised a way for people to find information faster with search engines. Results could be grouped together according to search parameters.
Only the technical guys new the algorithms that produced the results but we only wanted to get at the information they promised to give us. A search box allowed us to enter words or phrases that became known as keywords to find a vast amount of information. The entire Internet was at our fingertips.
Algorithms have changed over time which makes them unpredictable. But, marketers discovered a way to use those search results to help searchers find their particular website or web page. This development was great for businesses and search engine engineers were glad to help but they needed a way to bring in revenue to pay for the free searches they offer to everyone.
The search engines came up with the idea to help businesses that wanted to appear on the search results page to do so regardless of how their search engine optimization was going. They could pay to advertise on the more popular search engines. That included Google and Yahoo. These are the sponsored links or sponsored ads that appear at the top and bottom of the search page.
Their experiment was a success. It was a cash cow. Now, these search engines offer marketing programs where businesses can bid on ad placement in the search engine results pages and create compelling ads from their list of keywords.
Search Engine Optimization
Optimizing your website for free rankings in the search is something you want to do right off the bat, but understand, the results may take time to come. After you’ve optimized your website and you’re waiting for the traffic to come, paid search can bring you immediate results in the meantime.
Over the past decade or so, the way search engines rank websites has changed a great deal. The basics of optimization are the same, but there is more focus on “off page” factors rather than “on page” factors, which we’ll explain in a bit. Add to that, social media is playing a large role in establishing rankings and that is something that should not be ignored.
But let’s start with the very basics and it all starts with what people search for…
Keywords
The key to unlocking business on the Internet begins with words. Words are all around us and how we use them makes a huge difference especially in business. The million dollar question is what words you use to get the results that you want.
Everyone knows about keywords or at least they have heard of them. Keywords are entered into the search box and results are spat out. If you know what words they may use that is a start. But, all words are not used as frequently as others. Choosing the wrong words means very little traffic to your site. Programs can analyze keywords for you but the only way to know for sure is to test market them.
As a business owner, you have an advantage. You know your product or service better than anyone. The keywords you want to begin with are the ones that pertain to your website. These will get the ball rolling.
Now, there are other words. Everyone won’t know what they are looking for. Let’s say that you sell flower bulbs. A searcher may want to establish a garden but they aren’t sure what flowers to plant or even which ones work best in their area. To attract them, you’ll have to think of general keywords they might use in a search.
Additional Information
You can also find useful keywords on competitor sites. If competitors are using some of the same keywords, what are they doing differently than you? Paying attention to your competition can yield valuable information in your keyword search.
You should also employ the use of powerful keyword research tools like this one to help you find the best keywords for your market and products.
Your list of keywords can stretch into the hundreds and probably thousands. This is good because you have many to choose from. Don’t just stick to a single keyword. Long tail marketing is a popular technique. Combine keywords to create unique phrases to gain higher search engine rankings.
Here’s an example of that. Let’s go back to the flower bulbs. “Flower bulbs” is a popular search entry but “flower bulbs sellers in DeKalb County” narrows your search to a select group of people who are serious about finding flower bulbs and buying them.
Content and Search Engines
Search engine optimization should permeate every character on your website. Search engines like Google, crawl unique web pages. Using those keywords in your titles, headlines, content, links and other elements can help you rank well, but long-term ranking requires more than that. By consistently producing plenty of fresh content, you’re showing yourself as relevant to search engines and you’re more likely to enjoy a sweet place in the rankings for your many keywords.
Content has many benefits in a Search Engine Marketing campaign that utilizes SEO as a tool.
Think about what you would like to offer to your search traffic.
Your content can fill a need by:
Demonstrating your expertise in a particular area with informational articles for customers
How-to articles that will address the needs of those uncertain visitors and convince them to use your product
Provide product reviews and testimonials that solidify your product credibility
Appearing in article directories for greater exposure across the Internet
Continually update your content to keep the website fresh. Content is crawled on your website and ranked in search engines. It takes a few months or longer to see if optimized content is working so it’s a good thing that that is not the only marketing tool you will employ in the name of Search Engine Marketing.
Search Engine MarketingWrap Up
Search Engine Marketing is a catch-all term that comprises several Internet marketing tools for drawing traffic and making sales with your business. There is not one specific tool that will bring success. In fact, if you put all of your eggs in one basket, you can end up with a gooey mess, right?
It takes a combination of search engine optimization, link building, pay per click programs, affiliate marketing, and keyword research to bring about the overall results you are looking for with this type of marketing campaign. Search engines have upped the ante for advertising since just about everyone will use a search engine to find what they are looking for instead of just aimlessly surfing.
Use what you have learned here to devise a Search Engine Marketing plan to get you started. Nothing is set in stone, however. It is always best to review your plan on a regular basis and tweak as needed to keep your products or services in demand.
Come back to read the next post about “How to Optimize your Website”. It’s coming up next in this short series in Search Engine Marketing.
Now that you have your website up and running with traffic, how do you increase the conversions on your landing page so that you end up making the sales that you want?
First of all, what is a landing page and why do I need one?
Well, according to the dictionary it’s used for a specific reason. Read the facts below:
Definitiion
land·ing page -noun: the section of a website accessed by clicking a hyperlink on another web page, typically the website’s home page.
Follow these ideas I’ve listed below:
1. Use segmented landing pages for your keywords
One thing you need to know is that if you use the same landing page for every keyword that you bid on, you will definitely miss out on getting more conversions. By segmenting your landing pages, you will be doing a better job at targeting your traffic and this will lead to more subscribers and more leads.
2. Focus on testing more than one version of your landing page.
Most people make the mistake of not testing various versions of their landing pages and so end up not getting a lot of conversions. Sometimes, to experience a massive increase in response, all that is needed are a few changes here and there. Do some split testing to figure out what those changes might be.
You might just realize that changing the background color of one of your landing pages actually doubles your conversion rate. Who would have thought it could be that simple. Goals!!
3. Look through your landing pages
Your landing pages should relate directly to the content the visitor wants to see. Moreover, they should not be so busy that the visitor is at a loss on what you want them to do.
4. Check your calls to action
They are crucial in leading visitors back to your site. Are they accompanied by big, bold buttons that look attractive enough to click on? Test with different fonts, colors, and sizes. In addition, ensure that your calls to action offer value that is worth clicking on.
5. Then, go through your site to check how credible you look
Do your claims seem believable and do you have a few testimonials on your page?
As an online marketer, what you want is your visitor to do just one goal of the page without getting distracted. The above tips are sure ways of increasing your conversions on your landing pages.
Now, how can I help you accomplish this? Contact me below so I can make additional suggestions to you.
Search engine optimization should permeate every character on your website. Search engines like Google, crawl unique web pages. Using those keywords in your titles, headlines, content, links and other elements can help you rank well, but long-term ranking requires more than that. By consistently producing plenty of fresh content, you’re showing yourself as relevant to search engines and you’re more likely to enjoy a sweet place in the rankings for your many keywords.
