Six Strategies to Lose Your Viewer

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AppId is over the quota

Written by Trent Brownrigg  · June 9, 2011

A strong web presence is crucial to the success of your business, especially in today’s economic climate. You know it, your marketing team knows it, and, unfortunately, your competition knows it. In other words, if you don’t pay attention to the quality of your website, you’re going to lose business to someone who does. According to a study by leading web traffic controller Akamai Industries, a poorly designed website can lose 30% of its viewers within seconds. They also found that if a site takes more than four seconds to load, 75% of its viewers will not return to the site.

Fortunately, there are simple solutions to the design problems that could be keeping your website from being as effective a tool as possible to bring you additional sales and optimize your search engine rankings. Take a look at the following “how-not-to” list, and then cast a critical eye on your own website. Even a few simple changes could pay big dividends in increased direct business and a more robust web presence.

Six Strategies to Lose Your Viewer: An Overview of What Not to Do and Why

1) Make sure your homepage takes forever to load:

Why Not Do This? To return to Akamai’s findings, you don’t have much time to keep a viewer. Web surfers are an impatient bunch. If they have to sit for five minutes waiting for a page to load, they’re going to look elsewhere. A friend of mine got married recently. When she was looking for a wedding photographer, she found dozens of photographers who wanted to showcase their best (and most high resolution) work on their homepages. The problem for the photographers was that the bride-to-be never got to see those pictures. She got impatient and went on to the next site. She didn’t use their services, she never linked to their sites on her wedding website, and she never raved about their fabulous photos to her friends. I’m sure their homepages looked fantastic once they loaded, but did they achieve their purpose?

2) Make your homepage visually boring

Why Not Do This? This may seem to contradict point number one at first, but a visually unappealing homepage can lose viewers in seconds. Use graphics or photos that catch the eye and draw a viewer in. We can take a lesson from print media here. Newspapers try to place a particularly striking photo “above the fold” on the front page to make their paper look more interesting than the one next to it on the newsstand. You can benefit from this technique as well. Just make sure that your graphics don’t compromise load time.

3) Design your site thinking only of SEO and not an audience of real people

Why Not Do This? In the quest for SEO and those all-important backlinks, businesses often forget a very basic truth. People aren’t coming to your site to help you increase your web presence or your search engine ranking. They want something – to get information, to buy a product, to be entertained. If you don’t provide interesting and original content, they won’t be satisfied. A site with quality content that is updated regularly will keep visitors on your site longer, bring them back again, and prompt them to email a link to friends. This will help you build backlinks naturally. Remember that sites go viral because they’re entertaining or emotionally engaging – not because of their keyword density.

4) Make the purpose of your site unclear:

Why Not Do This? Again, I’m impatient, and I know there are lots of other sites out there that will give me what I want. If I’m looking for grass-fed, certified organic goat cheese, I need to know pretty quickly whether I can find it on your site. If I need to spend more than thirty seconds trying to figure that out, you’ve lost me.

5) Make navigation confusing and difficult:

Why Not Do This? Ok. I can tell from your homepage that you have the cheese I want, but I don’t want to spend all day figuring out how to find a list of your products, prices, and shipping information. Make it clear where the links are that I’ll need to get around your site by placing them in one or two main areas. Don’t bury them all in a lot of text that I may or may not read. If I spend ten minutes on your site, but I never end up buying your product, you’ve won the first battle but lost the war.

6) Jam the homepage with lots and lots of text:

Why Not Do This? Your homepage should draw a viewer in and provide clear links to get to additional information. Use enough text to make the purpose of your site clear and capture the viewer’s attention, but don’t use so much that your viewers get information overload. Think of your own web browsing habits. If you wanted to spend hours reading a lot of words, you’d pick up a copy of War and Peace; you wouldn’t hit the Internet.

The common thread here is that you should always remind yourself that real people are viewing your site. Put yourself in their position. Is my site interesting and fun? Is it easy to get around on? Does it quickly give viewers what they’re looking for? If not, is there really any reason anyone should spend their time there?

Guest post written by Tim Eyre. He helps residential and business customers who use self storage when they don’t have enough storage space on their own property. Tim’s company has locations from coast to coast, including Las Vegas self storage.

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Review of Bring the Fresh

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AppId is over the quota

Written by Trent Brownrigg  · March 30, 2011

If you read any of my blogs or subscribe to my newsletters then you will know that I don’t do many reviews. In fact, I am almost certain that this is the first review I have ever done on this blog since I became an author of it a long time ago. However, something called “Bring the Fresh” was recently recommended to me by a close friend of mine who also happens to be a high level internet marketer. He’s one of the few people I truly trust online and when he speaks, I listen.

Plus I recognized both the names of the owners, Kelly Felix (of “The Rich Jerk” fame) and Mike Long. Both are very well known in the internet marketing world. And Kelly actually contacted me shortly afterward, almost as if he somehow knew I had just been told about his site, but there’s no way he could have actually known. It must have been fate. So I decided I probably should give it a look and see what it’s all about.

I told Kelly Felix that I would write a review of bring the fresh if he wanted to set me up with an account. I made it very clear to him that I would give my honest opinion of it and tell the truth about what I thought. I do not write positive reviews just because I was given a free copy of something or because the owner is a well known internet marketer, or for any other reason unless they truly deserve it. If it sucks I am going to flat out say it does. He still set me up with a full disclosure membership after hearing that so he must have been confident in his work. I’ll give him a plus for that.

Of course, I still didn’t have high expectations being the skeptic that I am. And having been an internet marketer for many years seeing all the new crap coming out all the time has made me even more cautious and pessimistic. But I tried to go in with as much of an open mind as I could.

The first thing I noticed is that their sales page isn’t full of hype and outrageous promises like you see far too often on most “how to make money online” type of products. It basically just gives you an overview of what’s inside and what’s not inside along with some videos, testimonials, and a bit of other information. They get another plus right off the bat for that.

But the sales page isn’t really what matters; it’s just a small part of the equation. It’s what’s inside that you pay for and ultimately the only thing that counts. So I dug in expecting to get through it all in an hour or two and be done. Ha! The joke was on me. This thing is packed.

BTF isn’t some ebook or report like you see so often with products in the make money online niche. Instead, this is a full blown membership site complete with videos, guides, interviews, recommended products, forums, bonuses, and so much more. I didn’t count up every minute but my rough estimate is that there has to be somewhere around 40 hours of video plus everything else.

Some of the lessons taught and resources include; market selection, product creation, website success, link building and SEO for high rankings, marketing, conversions, templates, etc… Heck they even give you their personal cell phone numbers so you can call them if you have questions. That is virtually unheard of. It really is loaded!

I’ve been an internet marketer making a great living from my online business since 2003, so at the time of writing this I have 8 years experience. Even still BTF taught me several things I didn’t know, gave me a few more twists on some things I did know, and refreshed me on some things I already knew. I definitely didn’t think it would have much of anything new that I didn’t already know, but I was wrong. It truly is real and useful information for making money online.

Here’s a quick list of the positives:

It works – I know that the stuff they are teaching actually does work. That’s really all that matters and the #1 reason why I recommend it.Several hours of video – Everything is shown to you so it is much easier to understand and implement.Solid advice and training – Not a bunch of fluff and filler. It’s packed full of truly useful stuff.Easy to follow – You aren’t left more confused than when you started as tends to happen with other internet marketing products.Great value at a low price – They massively over-deliver.Up to date – They continually update as needed.Active forum – Lots of discussion going on in there about all sorts of different internet marketing and money making topics.Amazing support – You can contact them via email, Skype, forum, phone numbers, Facebook, and Twitter. What more could you ask for?

And a couple negative things I found:

Design – I know this doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things but it’s not a pretty site by any means. I think it certainly could have been designed much better. That doesn’t take away any of the excellent content but it does make the membership seem less professional.It could use more ebooks to follow – The videos are great and you can watch them over and over again as needed, but sometimes I like to have ebooks to read and reference if needed. That would have been the icing on the cake.

One thing I want to make very clear about Bring the Fresh is that it is NOT a scam or rip-off or fraud in any sense of those words! It’s also not one of those stupid “get rich quick” schemes. I’ve seen a few bring the fresh scam reviews and I have no idea how or why they would say that because it definitely isn’t. I have many years of internet marketing experience so I have seen a lot of scams, ripoffs, schemes, misleading information, and everything else under the sun. This is one site that certainly doesn’t deserve the negative reviews, in my opinion. It is the real deal.

It’s rare for me to fully recommend a product but in this case I do. I see no reason why BTF should be avoided or not recommended. It is legitimate and if you follow the things they teach and take action on them, you will make money online. There’s not much else to say so that is the end of my honest bring the fresh review.

Hopefully this has helped you make an informed decision about BTF. Here is my link for it again if you want to check it out: Bring the Fresh

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The True Importance of Building a List

Written by Trent Brownrigg  · June 1, 2011
We have heard the saying “Money is in the list” many times before, but for some reason a lot of affiliates and marketers still don’t realize how important building a list actually is.
I am not sure why affiliate marketers forget this crucial business building step, but list building should be your highest priority if you sell anything online. I don’t care if you are promoting a “how to build an igloo” ebook. Build that list of subscribers, or your business will not last very long.
For example, Google banned thousands of affiliates a while back from their Adwords program and those who weren’t capturing names and email addresses got left out in the cold. Their income dropped almost instantly and there was nothing they could do about it.
The fact is that it should be your highest priority to build a list of raving fans that read your emails. Sure you can make money online by simply driving traffic straight to an offer, but as soon as your traffic source stops producing clicks or your ads get disapproved, you are finished.
Let me give you some of the biggest key benefits of owning a highly responsive list of subscribers.
1. Traffic on Tap – Anytime you want to test out an offer or make some quick cash, you can simply load up your auto-responder with a promo email and click “send”. When that email hits people’s inboxes they click on your link and go to the offer. If you did a great job at preselling, they are going to buy whatever it is you recommended. What’s really important is that you no longer depend on other traffic sources for income. You basically own a traffic source that you can always count on without paying a dime for clicks it generates.
2. Joint Ventures – This is a huge benefit that most affiliate marketers forget about. If you have a highly responsive list, you can leverage it to sell your own products and services. When you promote someone else’s product and do a decent volume of sales for them, 98% of the time they will offer a reciprocal mailing for you. There is a reason why marketers with big lists make most of the money in the internet marketing niche.
3. Knowing What Your Market Wants – Use your list to find out what they want and sell it to them. You can use a service like SurveyMonkey.com and create a simple survey to send out to your subscribers. Ask them what they want or what they need help with. Then create a product or service based on the data you collected. Why guess what they want, when you can simply ask them and remove the risk of poor conversions completely from the picture?
4. Leverage – Don’t ever underestimate people on your list. Some of them might have successful businesses and could become your super affiliates. Imagine announcing your affiliate program to thousands of people with a single click of a button. You could literally overnight get your site flooded with traffic by leveraging your subscribers’ efforts. 1000 affiliates driving 100 clicks per day is better than one joint venture partner, who can send a limited number of clicks.
5. Be Viewed As An Expert – When you have a big audience, your opinion and message, which you send out matters. You could have a big impact on your niche market if you have the power to reach thousands of people with a click of a button. A lot of marketers do not know how to position themselves as experts. Build a list and eventually you won’t have to worry about that because of the instant social proof you can generate.
I think the above 5 key benefits make things very clear and why it’s absolutely crucial to put 100% of your effort into growing your subscriber base. I hope you now realize how powerful this actually is, and how it can take your business to a new level very quickly.
Your ultimate goal is to capture the attention of your market and have it at your disposal any time you want them to take your desired action.
This is a guest post written by Pawel Reszka, the founder of Affhelper.com, a blog dedicated to making money online and internet marketing. Check out his blog is for some cool super affiliate tips.


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