Mistakes To Avoid When Using Web Templates

Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.





The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.





To whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you're done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you're creating a unique graphic, you're defying the very purpose of using a web template -- saving time and effort.





However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site's theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don't redesign the whole template.





In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.

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Using An Ad tracker Is Key To The Affiliate Marketer

There’s a lot of money in affiliate marketing. This is true, however, only to those are seriously and zealously working on his affiliate program. Success in affiliate marketing varies in every individual affiliate and for the most part, it depends on his will and perseverance. No matter how good an affiliate program is, it will not prosper if the affiliate marketer does not pay the price of hard work. One must exert extra effort especially on the aspect of promotion. Nothing will happen if the links or banners would just lie idle in a web page, an affiliate must be able to convince the visitor to click it and proceed to the business site to buy the products. No click-throughs means no income for an affiliate marketer.

You can actually generate a full-time income by means of affiliate marketing and you can do it at home, and yes, even while you sleep. You must have a good web site to begin with. It must have good promotional and informative contents, pleasing design, inviting banner ads and all other important elements in an affiliate marketer’s web site. It would be great if you have exhausted other means of advertising such as newsletters, email marketing, message boards and ad listings such as Google AdWords. You just have to go online once in a while to check your site and update it and to watch over the development of your marketing program. Does this sound so easy?

It can be this easy if you have planned your affiliate program well and have taken all the steps towards success carefully and diligently. Now, there’s a tool you can use to help you go through the program with ease and confidence, the Ad Tracker. For many experienced and successful affiliate marketers, the Ad Tracker is a key to a successful affiliate marketing program.

What precisely is an ad tracker? It is a marketing tracking software or program that allows you to trace and take note of every click-through made by visitors of your site and by other customers who got your referral link. There are ad tracking service providers as well, so you will just have to pay them to do the tracking for you. With the ad tracker, you can keep an eye on the progress of your marketing campaigns even offline. This tool or program is especially helpful if you are engaged in several affiliate and pay-per-click programs and have placed ads in emails, pop-ups and pop-unders, message boards, auto responders, Ezines, forums, several web sites, surveys and various ad service providers.

Of course, you don’t want all your efforts to be put to waste so you want to make sure you are getting paid for your hard work. Likewise, you want to make sure every dollar or cent you disburse in your advertising campaigns is wisely spent. With the help of the ad tracker, you will know accurately how many and which of your links where clicked on, how many clicked on your links, how many of your emails were opened and how many of those who opened your email clicked through the business site and purchased a product, how many products were purchased, which of your banner ads or links brought the most leads and sales and many other pertinent facts and figures you need.

Sales records and all data stated are necessary in any business as this could determine if your affiliate program is still worth continuing. This would also help you determine which of your marketing strategies is most effective and which is most beneficial for each product or service you are promoting.

Every decision and plan you make must be well grounded on facts. That decision or plan of action may not be the best, but it is something not to regret about when you had valid reasons for coming up with such decision or plan. You cannot just decide to terminate your affiliate program, just because you don’t earn big in an instant.

If you are serious with affiliate marketing, again and again, keep in mind that your success lies mainly on promotion and your hard work. If you don’t seem lucky enough to convince many of your site users to buy the products, don’t be disheartened and jump into a conclusion that your affiliate program is a failure. If it works for others, it could work for you, too. Know whether your advertising techniques are effective or not, which works best for your program and which doesn’t. Get an ad tracker to help you know all these and you’d surely be on the right track towards success!

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How to Drive Laser-Targeted Traffic Using Overture

In online marketing business like affiliate marketing, no traffic means no sales. That’s the reason why most affiliates or webmasters easily shell out even big bucks just to get top rankings on the search engines. Once you are promoting a product or service in you web page, you need to have more visitors that can be potential consumers to your products and services. This is one of the fundamental rules to succeed in online marketing business. Here, you just need to start and get it right and you can do some things wrong but still manage to succeed. Don’t ever try to get it wrong because no matter how hard you work, you can never find yourself on the way to success.

I guess everyone will agree if I said that obtaining enough highly targeted traffic is the key to success in affiliate marketing business. This method is proven to be effective if you’re promoting or reselling product or service online. One of the best and most secured marketing strategies that affiliate marketers can employ is the strategy of paying for performance. This means that your investments are used only on results such as additional sales and incomes.

Let’s take a practical example. Paying for performance could mean giving a commission to a sales person only when new sale is made. This strategy assures you real profit because you can already compute the amount money you have to spend for every new sale made. Also, you can avoid spending any marketing bucks because every cent you use up has either come from sale or will generate a sale in the future.

And one of the proven and most efficient ways of acquiring sales in affiliate marketing business is by drawing laser-targeted traffic towards your web site and converting them to sales by means of “Pay-Per-Click” Search Engines (PPCSEs).

Overture claims to be the Internet’s best pay-per-click search engine. It is the world’s leading resource of Pay-For-Performance search on the web. And what’s more enticing about Overture? When you advertise in Overture Premium Listings, your site will absolutely appear in the leading U.S. search engines like Yahoo, InfoSpace, MSN, Netscape, AltaVista, Lycos and more. Plus, you can get the benefit of reaching more than 80% of active Internet users.

PPCSEs like Overture can bring impressive sales because they permit you to pay for performance by means of attracting precisely targeted traffic to your niche. And this means people or site visitors who are actively searching for what precisely you are offering or selling. Overture’s secret is to drive laser-targeted traffic to your website by proposing or bidding on keywords that are related to the product or services that you are offering. And this strategy works this way: the more exact the keyword is, the better results you’ll receive and the less you’ll have to spend for each new sale.

Overture drives targeted traffic by keeping you away from the general keywords that are very common and usually come expensive and by casting a wide net of laser-focused keywords that are more targeted, not so expensive, and with high conversion rate. I’ll tell you, attracting laser-targeted traffic through Overture is nothing but a “Win-Win” Situation.

Overture’s strategy also allows your visitors to respond. And what’s important once you get your visitors to respond? Well, you are given a chance to develop lifetime customers that will patronize your product and will buy from you over an over again. Bear in mind that one-time sales can’t be a key in creating a highly-profitable business especially online. You can only achieve this through PPCSEs like Overture, which gets your site visitors to respond. And once it happens, you can constantly market and sell your products to them.

Another tactic that Overture uses in order to gain laser-targeted traffic is to have a “Back-Up Response” for those who “almost bought” your product on the first visit. To successfully realize this, you need to market and advertise to them over and over again until you make them a new customer. Offer them an incentive so that they’ll allow you to advertise to them over a certain time span by means of e-mail or post mail. Here are some of the back-up responses which you can use: send a free e-mail newsletter, give a free catalog and offer a promo or sweepstakes which gives them the chance to win free merchandise.

Other things that will surely attract lifetime customers to your site are offering valued customer discounts, giving seasonal and special offers especially to your repeat customers and any other incentives to purchase. Don’t get me wrong with this; the abovementioned strategies can surely develop a trusted relationship between you and your customers. Aside from patronizing your products over their lifetime, they may even refer others to you or to your site.

To sum up, one of the most effective and secured marketing strategies that any businessman can utilize particularly those who are involved in online marketing is the approach of only paying for performance. And one of the most helpful online strategies to create more sales is by pulling laser targeted traffic towards your website and converting them to sales by means of Pay-Per-Click Search Engines like Overture.

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Using Google Adwords to Drive Traffic to your Website

Highly targeted traffic is one of the most important entities in the internet universe. Any website owner or administrator recognizes the importance of driving traffic to a website. The success of any website does not rely entirely on the site itself. You may have a terrific idea for a website, offer an excellent product or service, or have an exceptionally designed site with superb content, but if you do not use the right strategies to advertise, your site would not attract the high traffic you need. Attracting targeted traffic is a task that should be taken seriously for any site to succeed or make a profit. Fortunately, there are internet-marketing tools that help the website marketer to drive traffic to his website. One of the most significant, and effective, of these tools is Google's Adwords. Adwords is one of Google's advertising services.

How does Google Adwords work? Google is the largest search engine on the web receiving over 200 million queries each day through its various services. As Google is the most popular search engine today, webmasters are keen on having their websites achieve a higher ranking in the search engine results it provides. A high ranking can mean high traffic for that website. The search engine results page is also a great venue for advertisers to promote a product or service through ads and links. Consequently, Google launched its Adwords service, as a way for businesses to advertise products and services to a targeted audience. Google Adwords can guarantee instant traffic. In this service, Google displays relevant text based ads within its search engine results page termed as "Sponsored Links". Whenever a particular keyword is searched on, these relevant links appear in a separate section giving excellent exposure to the sites listed.

How do you use Google Adwords? First, you have to open an account with the Google Adwords Service. Then, you should indicate your target language and country. This is important because you would not want your products advertised in countries where your product or service cannot be sold. Afterwards, you should now create an ad group. This involves designing the ad, selecting keywords and determining maximum cost per click that you are willing to spend and defining bid amounts. The most important step in creating a successful Adwords campaign is selecting an effective title tag that will catch the attention of your target audience. The title tag, generally a short phrase, is the most important part of your Adwords campaign so make sure that it is attractive and catchy. You should describe the website clearly and accurately. The most effective advertising conveys a clear message to the target audience. With a clear message, you will be attracting qualified leads, which can eventually convert to sale. Thus, the importance of selecting the right keywords cannot be overemphasized.

There are keyword variations you can adapt to reach more prospects. Using these varieties, misspellings and derivatives can help increase the chance of your ads being served. Broad match is targeting keywords in a loosely defined manner. Here, the ads appear based on the keywords that have been queried by other users as opposed to exact match, which calls for the keyword to match the query exactly. Meanwhile, a keyword phrase set to phrase match will only appear when the exact phrase is searched on. A negative keyword is helpful in filtering unrelated pages.

After you have decided on what title tag to use in your ad, you must now define a budget in order to maximize exposure. Google Adwords recommend a daily budget for each campaign. However, you should determine a budget that is suitable and affordable. You should also determine the maximum cost per click. Google will offer a recommended cost per click, but you do not have to stick with this. Usually, a number one position is not ideal as it can also attract unwanted traffic and useless clicks. A number two position is more preferred as it can filter useless clicks and provide traffic with a higher conversion rate.

To conclude, Google Adwords is an excellent strategy and tool in giving your site maximum exposure. Nevertheless, Google Adwords should not be your sole advertising campaign. It will definitely help you find the all-important, highly targeted traffic you need.

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