Free-Reprint Article Written by: Kim Roach See Terms of Reprint Below.
***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** We have moved our TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Be certain to read our TERMS OF REPRINT and honor our TERMS OF REPRINT when you use this article. Thank you. This article has been distributed by: http://Article-Distribution.com Helpful Link: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Overview http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Title: ============== Smart Webmasters are Wasting Online Real Estate Article Description: ==================== Many webmasters are not using their websites' traffic to full potential. The Web is full of wasted advertising space. Chances are that even your website has some virtual wasteland. These are areas that often go unnoticed by even the most experienced marketers, resulting in the loss of thousands of dollars of potential revenue. Additional Article Information: =============================== 1307 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2006-11-24 10:48:00 Written By: Kim Roach Copyright: 2006, All Rights Reserved Contact Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Kim Roach's Picture URL: http://blog.sitepronews.com/uploads/kimr.gif For more free-reprint articles by Kim Roach, please visit: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/d/index.shtml#Kim_Roach ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= If you use this article on your website or in your ezine, We Want To Know About It. Use the following URL to let us know where you have used this article, and we will include a link to your website on thePhantomWriters.com: http://thephantomwriters.com/notify.php?id=3954&p=load HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/r/webmasters-wasting-real-estate.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Smart Webmasters are Wasting Online Real Estate Copyright (c) 2006 Kim Roach, All Rights Reserved SEO-News http://www.seo-news.com Many webmasters are not using their websites' traffic to full potential. The Web is full of wasted advertising space. Chances are that even your website has some virtual wasteland. These are areas that often go unnoticed by even the most experienced marketers, resulting in the loss of thousands of dollars of potential revenue. Below, four of the most underused online real estate spots are discussed as well as how you can reclaim these areas while maximizing your profits. 1. 404 Error Pages The dreaded 404 page is something that almost everyone has encountered in their online journeys. The most common reasons for landing on a 404 page include: * a mis-typed URL * an out-of-date bookmark * a search engine link that is out-of-date * an internal broken link that the webmaster hasn't noticed Surveys suggest that approximately 40% of users who run into a 404 Page Not Found error will leave your site, never to return. However, as a webmaster, these pages should be customized in order to help the user find their way back to your website. To create your own customized 404 page, keep the following guidelines in mind. * Provide an explanation of what went wrong. A nice way to apologize would be to offer them a free report. By using this technique, your visitors will not only be impressed by your creativity, but you can also collect their name and email adress at the same time. * Provide a link to the site map. By redirecting them to your sitemap, they should be able to quickly and easily find what they are looking for. * Provide a search box for users to target in on exactly what they originally came for. * Use minimal navigation. This is not the place to put your entire site navigation. You simply want to pull them back into your website so that you are not losing any of your potential customers. Some Good Examples of 404 error pages can be found at: * http://www.lockergnome.com/404 * http://www.fool.com/error 2. Exit Strategies Did you know that on average only 1 - 2% of your visitors will actually buy your product. This means that approximately 98% of your visitors are leaving your website without buying. Most of them will never return. Fortunately, there is a way to tweak your website in order to take advantage of this lost traffic. You can salvage much of this traffic through the use of exit pop-ups. Now, you may feel that these are outdated and annoying, but testing has shown that they work. So, the next time that your visitor clicks on the back button, present them with a pop-up that will offer them a free report. By implementing this technique, you will be able to capture the name and email of many of your website visitors, allowing you to contact them in the future with additional information and product offers. You can also use an exit pop-up to survey your visitors. Find out exactly why they didn't buy or what type of information would have made them more interested. This priceless information can help you to improve your marketing techniques and increase your conversion rate. 3. Thank You Pages Did you know that the "Thank You" page (the page you display after someone subscribes to your newsletter or buys your product) is one of the most responsive pages on your website? The Thank You page provides a prime opportunity for promoting some of your other products and/or services. You can use this space to easily increase your online profits. For example, why not use the following message on your thank you page after someone has subscribed to your newsletter. "Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. Remember to check your inbox for your first issue. In the meantime, I would like to introduce you to a product that I highly recommend for increasing your website traffic at ...." This is an easy way to send traffic to an affiliate link so you can earn some additional revenue from what is often unused advertising space. You can use this same technique for your order form confirmation pages. Thank the customer for their order and recommend they check out a related product. You could also offer an upsell to a higher-end version of the same product. Don't take this space for granted. Order confirmation pages are some of the most highly responsive real estate on your site because the customer already has their credit card in hand. Another great technique is exchanging thank-you pages with other web sites. For example, if you have a website about fitness and you know of another website that caters to a similar audience, you can partner up and exchange advertising. To do this, you would promote the other person's service or product on your own thank you page. By partnering together, you can both attract many more clients and/or additional sales. 4. Email Messages If you are not regularly sending out an email newsletter, then you are failing to capitalize on existing traffic. Delivering your own ezine allows you to make additional profit from the traffic you are already receiving. Simply place an opt-in box on your website and start collecting the names and addresses of your website visitors. Of course, you will also need to offer them some valuable info in exchange for their name and email. A free report often works extremely well for this. However, starting your own newsletter is just the beginning. You must also use this priceless space to optimize your revenue streams. To produce additional profit from your email campaigns, simply place a small text box in each of your outgoing emails promoting one of your products or an affiliate product. This is very similar to advertising, except you are placing your own internal ads instead of advertising for others. This is an extremely simple technique that many people miss out on. This one change can instantly produce additional sales, increased affiliate commissions, and more opt-ins for other lists you want to promote. A small ad can be placed in a number of spots, including: Order Confirmation Emails: Anytime someone orders from you, they should be receiving an email receipt to confirm their purchase. This is also the perfect time to promote a related product or service. People are much more likely to order when they are in the buying mood and already have their credit card out. This is why upsells and thank you page offers are so powerful. "Thank you" emails: Whenever you send out a confirmation email to people who subscribe to your ezine, you should also be including some sort of promotion or ad within the email. This is also the perfect time to offer them some "recommended reading" (i.e. affiliate links) If they have subscribed to your ezine, then they are obviously looking for additional information about a particular topic, so why not offer them some additional resources to help them in their quest for knowledge. These recommendations can be ebooks, membership sites, or even another newsletter that you operate. Remember, your prospects are looking for products to fill their needs. If they don't buy from you they will simply buy from someone else. Unsubscribe emails: Do you send an email to confirm that someone has been unsubscribed after their request? If not, you should. This is a great opportunity to make one last offer. Or, if you simply want to find out more about your departing subscribers, you could set up a survey to find out why they unsubscribed and how you can make the newsletter better. Take a close look at your own web site and marketing process and start finding places that are not optimized to their fullest potential. Almost every website online has wasted space that could be optimized for promoting additional products. Take action now so that your space no longer goes to waste. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews (http://www.sitepronews.com) & SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com) newsletters. You can also find additional tips and news on webmaster and SEO topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog (http://blog.sitepronews.com/). Kim's email is: kim @ seo-news.com This article may be freely distributed without modification and provided that the copyright notice and author information remain intact. --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/r/webmasters-wasting-real-estate.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Kim Roach can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Stillwater, Oklahoma USA. The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Kim Roach http://www.seo-news.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ---------------------------------------------------------------------
