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Small Business Taxes Gone Wild In California

I estimate that 99% of Californians do not understand the implications of the new small business tax that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law yesterday. This law would mandates online sellers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com to start collecting sales taxes on items shipped to California if they have some sort of relationship with an affiliate. [...]

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You Got the Opt-in, Now What? Here Are Some Top Email Strategies

The first part of email marketing is to get your visitor to opt-in your email list. Once they opt-in, the visitor becomes a prospect. The second part of email marketing is to move the prospect along your marketing funnel towards them becoming a customer. An important element of that is relationship marketing done via trust. [...]

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Linkedin Company Page Follows the Leaders Facebook and Yelp

There was a time when Linkedin was cool. Well, maybe “cool” is too strong of a word for this early social networking site. Let’s just say that Linkedin was *the* place to network as a business professional. You sign up for Linkedin, you make connections with people you work with, you ask for a recommendation, [...]

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A Way to Promote Your Business with Facebook Events

Let’s assume you’ve already set up your own Facebook profile and a separate Facebook Page for your business. Maybe you’ve also created a Facebook Group that relates to a type of product or service that your business provides. What are some ways that you can promote the special events your business sponsors? One way is [...]

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How to Remove Antispyware Soft

Marketing online is fraught with risks. One category is business risk. The other category is technical risk. Business risk is when you try to execute a digital marketing strategy and it fails. Technical risk includes the risk of not implementing your websites and/or scripts correctly. But technical risk also includes the risk from cyber-attacks. One of the most common form is viruses pretending to be a friendly program ... like a trojan horse. This blog is about how to remove Antispyware Soft. … Read More...

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Using a Tracking Pixel to Track Your Conversions

April 9, 2009 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

The secret to making money online is to fail fast. The secret to failing fast is to test quickly. The secret to testing quickly is to have a great tracking system. A critical part of tracking is to track conversions. In other words, is your website traffic taking the action on your site that you want them to take? You need to accurately and quickly determine your call to action conversion rate.

For example, if you are selling a DVD on your website, you would have a sales page, an order page, and a thank-you page. You send traffic to your sales page, a certain percentage of your visitors will click the order button and get sent to your order page, then a number will follow-through with the order and be sent to a thank-you page. Now the question is how many website visitors did you convert into an actual sale?

A common method to track conversions is to install a tracking pixel on your thank-you page. Without getting overly technical, here is what the “tracking pixel” looks like:

tracking pixel example

This example code comes from a free online tracking solution called Tracking202.

Everytime someone makes it from the top of your sales funnel to the bottom of your sales funnel, the tracking pixel will “fire.” At the end of the day or week or month, you now have an idea about your website to sales conversion rate.

DONOTCHANGE

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Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: , , ,

Cost Per Action Advertising Guide

March 28, 2009 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

Cost per action advertising is getting a lot of attention from online marketers lately. Despite the economic downturn, this form of advertising seems to be holding steady. As a brief background, cost per action or CPA is a way for advertisers to get leads.

Let’s say your company sells perfumes online. You open an ecommerce store and hope that the traffic will come. Since hoping doesn’t work, you try writing articles and building links to your website. You get some traffic, but not the avalanche of visitors that you had hoped for. You then try advertising on paid search sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You get visitors but the clicks are costing you a lot of money. Sometimes you break even. Eventually, you figure out what your conversion rates are and your earnings per click and cost per click. Now you have metrics.

At this point, you can scale your traffic acquisition by inserting your product offer into cost per action networks like Hydra or Affiliate.com or Neverblue Ads or many others. The “complete” list of CPA networks is available for free at http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising.

Using cost per action advertising, your offer is available for affiliate marketers to promote. If you have a landing page with high conversions, you will get plenty of “free” traffic from affiliates.

Now let’s look at CPA marketing from the affiliate point of view. Many online marketers start their business by promoting other people’s products. This makes sense because there is no product creation cycle, no customer support hassles, no inventory … just drive traffic to a converting offer and get paid a commission. It’s that easy … or is it?

I’ve been doing CPA marketing for about 2 years following the methods that I learned from Gauher Chaudhry using his Pay-Per-Click-Formula v1.0. The “formula” worked as long as I was diligent in launching and tracking my CPA campaigns. I reached $100 a day in profits within 3 months of trial and error. Yes, you still have to do trial and error in this business. The trick is to fail fast and learn from your mistakes.

Today, much of what Gauher taught in PPCF v1.0 is available for free in his 89 page report, titled, “The Insider’s Guide to CPA Marketing Profits.” Even though I have the original course, which I paid several hundred dollars for, I went through the 89 page report to see if I could pick up some new information. After reading through the report, much of it I already learned. However, there was a method that I tried again that netted me $500 in profit.

Here is what I did. I read page 65 in the report and tried it on a new government regulation regarding analog to digital TV broadcasting conversion. I found a CPA offer that paid $7 per lead from the network on page 86 in the free guide. Then I ran a PPC campaign using a 3rd tier network called Looksmart. I also ran the ad on Ask.com.

I bid around 7 cents per click. Try bidding that low of an amount on Google these days and your ad won’t be shown. I got traffic almost instantly. I ran the ad for 10 days and made about $100 a day gross or about $50 a day net. After 10 days, the cost per action advertiser decided to pull the offer. This was too bad because I was making around $50 a day on autopilot. But these things do happen when you play in the PPC to CPA game.

PPCF v1.0 has been off the market for many, many months. On March 31st, Gauher will launch PPCF v2.0. I suspect that the new course will have many updated and new techniques. It will also not be cheap. However, you can grab his 89 page free CPA guide and get started today. That way you can find out for yourself if this method of making money online suits your fancy.

Here is where you can grab your guide:

http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising

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Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

eCommerce Sales 5-Year Forcast

March 7, 2009 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

$133 billion is the number that you should burn into the marketing side of your brain. $133 billion is the amount of e-commerce sales predicted by eMarketer.com for 2009. Is $133 billion in online retail sales a good number or a bad number? One way to look at this is to compare it to the US GDP. In 2004, the US GDP was $11.75 trillion. So if we take e-commerce sales as a percentage of GDP, we see that it represents about 1%.

From the standpoint of GDP, people are comfortable shopping online. However, if we look at the e-commerce sales number from last year, we see that it is down from $133.6 billion or 0.4%. Keep in mind that we are in a severe recession. Given the down economy, a drop of only 0.4% in e-commerce sales is simply amazing.

What can we expect in the next 4 years? According to eMarketer, we can expect to see double digit increases in online sales until 2012 where this sales channel will mature. Until then, though, people will continue to buy online. “Follow the hungry crowd,” as the late Gary Halbert would say.

My advice is to think creatively about how you can use online marketing to show your target customer your value. Consider forming alliances with complementary businesses and create a bigger offer. This may negate the pricing pressure that you may face because you will offer more value for your customer’s dollar.

Also think about working with your competitors to recycle customers. What I mean is to make a deal with your competitor to place your banner on their exit survey pages. Many times, customers simply want to try something new. If you give your business a chance to be seen as they are leaving one paid site, you will increase your traffic.

Remember that the seeds of great fortunes are planted during economic downturns. The key is to market smarter and to test everything.

DONOTCHANGE

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