Saturday, January 3, 2015

Researching my Competitor Keywords

With any business, its a good idea to see what the competition is up to. Before spending money and wasting time driving traffic and hoping for good results, try seeing what you competition is doing.

One of the best and easiest ways to what your competition is up to is by looking them up on the search engines. Use the keywords you came up with in your brainstorming session and see what comes up in Google, Yahoo and bing. Google will bold your search terms on the results, but these words are less important than the words that surround them.

Sometimes Google will give you a "Did you mean ___?" phrase to help refine your search. These phrases can help you find the better keywords to use.

Make sure to notice the highest listings and look at the words surrounding your keywords. These phrases and words can make all the difference when attempting to get your page ranked.

Once you have a good idea of some keywords your competition is using, then its time to checkout their websites. Because search engines look at content and keywords together, you will want to find ways to improve on what they are already doing. This is important if you're looking to take that industries traffic and build back-links to your pages. Checking out a sites metadata is also a great way to find the keywords they're using.


To check out your competitors keywords in the metadata right click on the screen and inspect element. In Chrome this is especially easy and worth it. The keywords will be found in the <head></head> section of the code near the top.


Friday, January 2, 2015

How to find Keywords that match my website theme

Figuring out the purpose of your website is easy and direct. But this is the step that people often overlook when building a new website. Don't miss out on all the traffic you can generate by find the core purpose and them of your website and sticking to it.

[Airline Pilot Demand] is a great keyword phrase. 
If this step is something you missed, you can correct the problem by finding the theme of your existing website now. To do this you must find out Exactly what your site is about and what kinds of visitors you need.

If you are a website that focuses on selling home-built airplanes, you need to find exactly what that means, narrowing down the kinds of airplanes you consider to be home-built is mission critical. You may also consider the direction you wish to take the website in the future. Think about if you only want to show home-built airplanes or if sometime in the future you might consider expanding your website with classic aircraft that aren't exactly home-built.

You also should spend some time thinking about your service area. Are you a local business, or would you consider working on a global market. The more specific you get the better your keywords will match up with the right people.

After taking some time to write down what your website is about and all the things you are NOT about you might have a list that looks something like this:

  • We work on only airplanes that are built between the years 1950 and 1970
  • The airplanes we work on are American-made; not foreign
  • We install only radios that existed in the 1950's on all our airplanes
  • We are a local business, but do except clients from all over the Country
  • We help sell Non-Home-Built Airplanes 
Now that you've figured out your theme, we need to develop keywords that best represent our theme. Remember that at this point there are NO bad keywords. You need to think of a big list of possibilities. Here are some tips to help you develop this big list.
  • Natural Language: What would I search for to find products like mine?
  • Other Perspectives: What would someone else call what I do? (try asking your mom to define what you do)
  • Customer Mindset: How do "normal" people speak of products you offer?
  • Industry Jargon: What do the "experts" say when searching for your product?

How to Organize my List of Keywords

create a list of keywords that best work with my websiteWhile you are compiling all the keywords for your website you should think about them in broad and narrow ideas. You will want to build a small chart with broad keywords on the left and more specific keywords on the right. This will help you find the great keywords later. Do something like this:




Keyword list guide

home-built airplanes
home-built airplanes 1950 - 1970
Classic Airplanes America
Classic Airplanes Cessna
     Classic Airplanes Cessna 172
          Classic Airplanes Cessna 172rg
          Classic Airplanes Cessna 172 not flyable
Home-built Airplane RV4
     Home-built Airplane RV4 red paint
     
Now that you have your list built, lets take a hard and long look to see which ones go best with your theme. A good trick to use is to put your list in word, right click on each work and look for synonyms. Any keyword that has a similar meaning is a good keyword.

You can also use the search engines to find good keyword synonyms by using ~ before the word you want synonyms for. for example: [~classic aircrafts] returns searches that also contain the word [Vintage]. 
how to find keywords that work with my website for more traffic



What are Keywords for Search Engines

Picking and choosing keywords for any site is important. Some people might even say without a good keyword strategy you might consider a day job instead of starting an online business.

Search Engine Spiders (a program used to categorize the internet) are looking for keywords that match or nearly match related search terms and queries.

A keyword is a specific word or phrase a search engine looks for in its index. For example, airplane is a keyword. An Index is a giant list of websites found on the internet. For example, http://www.trade-a-plane.com/ is a website with many keywords in it's pages.

Does that seem easy enough? Just build a website and pick some great phrases and away you go, right? Wrong! Out of the millions of websites their are millions of websites without any traffic. Let's say you have a website about airplanes. But the site doesn't have any traffic.

Let me give you a tip:

Think about what kind of website you really want and what kind of keywords you're using to describing content in your website. If your website is about airplanes and you're using general keywords like [aircraft] and [aviation]. How many people actually search for [classic aircraft] when searching the internet? Not many. Most people would search for words like [old fight jet] or [world war 2 airplane] when they want to know something about classic aircrafts. These small details can make a world of difference in keyword strategies and the volume of visitors to your site.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Guide to More Sales - Etsy Shops

Hello Everyone and Welcome to My Online Etsy Marketing Course.

You are probably here because you saw my post in the Etsy Facebook Group. I was trying to think of the best way to go about helping people make the most out of their Etsy Shop Experience and thought I would give you some tips, tricks and helps.

Why you ask?

Because, I believe in paying it forward. I'm also sick and tired of seeing so many Etsy Shop Owners Fail to have the kind of success they could have if people just knew about their products. Not to mention if the Etsy Owners knew more about online marketing.

Summary of what you will learn

In this Course I will Show You:
  1. How to create a landing page. (a one page website meant to capture someone's email address)
  2. How to use an Auto-Email System. (set up an email system that will automatically send out your pre-writen emails to people after they give you an email address from your landing page)
  3. How to direct your views to purchase on your Etsy Shopping Cart
Step 1.  Sign up for Automation Hero. 
In order for you to get a free account visit Free Account Access

Confirm Your Account.
Check your spam folder for the confirmation email. Click that and you're in.

Step 2. Dashboard Walk Through
After you log into your account this is your dashboard. Kind of like your new office. Here you will find everything you need to help promote your business.

University
The University is a place where you can find "how to" videos, Marketing Strategy Discussions and Inspirational interviews.

Campaigns
Campaigns is where you build your sales funnels. I know these phrases sound like they came from another planet, but that is what internet marketing people say. Let me define some of the terms for you.
  • Campaign: Place where you build a landing page, Email Follow-ups
  • Sales Funnel: Is the process of walking potential customers from interested to sold.
  • Landing Page: Is a one page website with one distinct purpose and advertisement.
    • purpose: capture some interested persons email or name or phone number.
    • advertisement: If I sell bracelets and headbands for kids I would only showcase one of those products on the landing page. Remember, each product you promote needs its own landing page and sales funnel. That way you can know that the emails that came by way of the bracelet landing page are interested in bracelets and the emails interested in headbands are interested in headbands. That way you can send each person emails about what they are interested.
Practical Application:
If I own an etsy store where I sell homemade headbands, bracelets and other crafts. I would build a landing page with the purpose of getting visitors information like their email. 


Contacts
As people visit your landing page and fill out their emails, these people will show up as contacts. You can find a list of everyone here in the contacts section.

Emails
The emails section is where you store all of your pre-written emails. You can have as many emails as you would like and store them here.

For example: When someone comes to your landing page promoting headbands and how great they are, They can sign up to learn more by imputing their email into the page. When they do that you can have a couple pre-written emails that are automatically sent to that person talking them through the benefits of headbands or How to make their own headbands. The purpose of these emails is to build some kind of relationship of trust with your audience without having to write every single person their own personalized email. If you had to do that you would work all day writing emails and never get the chance to do anything else with your time.

Social Hero
By Clicking on Social Hero you can quickly and easily connect to facebook, linkedin and twitter. Social Hero is a large scale posting tool. This is the place where you can schedule social posts promoting your sales funnels and landing pages. This is how you get free traffic to your Etsy Shop.

Side Menu
Notice how you can navigate the site by clicking on the menu to the left.

Step 3. Lets build a Campaign 
First click on "Campaigns"


This is your Campaign Dashboard

Notice how you still have your menu on the left.

Click New to build a new campaign.

You have discovered the many different possibilities you can choose. These are all pre-built landing page templates that you can tweak without knowing any programming.

In this example we are choosing the the landing page with the cup of honey. Don't worry, you can change any image and the text on any page.

Go ahead and click "choose" on the Template you want to use.

Now that you have selected the Template you want you are taken to the campaign page for that template.

This is your landing page.

By clicking edit you will enter Design Hero. This is where you can change the pictures and text on the web page.

or you can click "Preview" to view the page in your browser.

You landing page is live as soon as you created it. The link you will eventually send visitors to is this one. Click it to see the link or copy and paste the link into your browser.

The "Follow Up" tab located above your campaign is where you connect your pre-written emails to send to those people who input their emails on your page.



Traffic is another place that shares with you how to get free internet traffic to your page.

Step 4. Landing Page Design
Lets go ahead and click edit on the Landing Page


Now you are in the Design Editor known as Design Hero.

The first thing you will notice is "the walk through". This will teach you how to change up the images and text on the page.

You must save your work by clicking save. Especially before you click the back button.

After you have taken the tour click "End Tour" and save your work.

To change text simply click on the text you wish to change.



Write your new text in the editor

Click Save

Notice How I changed the text to Say "Learn about Headbands"

Click Save when you like what you see.

 Next, we need to change the images to match our them of headbands.

Click on the Image you wish to change.

  Click on the Image Icon.

Notice how a new menu appears on the left.

Click Browse

Select an Image from your computer

Click Upload Image

 Now click on the Image.

The image is now on your page. You can adjust the width and height of the image before you click save.

When you're done adjusting the image click "Save".

Now the image is on the page and the menu is gone until you click on another image.

 Do the same thing to all the other images you wan to change.

Here is what my page looks like after I changed the images.


Don't forget to change images and text on the bottom of the page.

 Click Save

Click Back to go back to the Campaign Menu.

Now we are back at the campaign dashboard.

Lets click on the link to see how the finished product looks before you start sending traffic.


 Now go back the the Campaign Dashboard

Step 5. Email Follow Ups
Lets add some follow up emails for those who give us their emails. Click "Follow Ups".

Welcome to the Follow-Up Dashboard.

Notice how we haven't created any emails for this Sales Funnel.

Click New Follow Up

This is where you attach emails to your campaign.

Trigger
A trigger is like an if then scenerio. This is the "if" that causes something to happen. For example: "If" a contact is created then...


Action
This is the "then" part of the scenerio. For example: If a contact is created "then" send them an welcome email.

These are the "then" options. Add tag, Remove tag, Email.

We are going to use the send email option.


We have yet to create an email for this campaign so click "Add New Email"

 You can Change the From Name on the Email.

You can change the from email address to your business email.

You can write the subject of the email.

What are you going to name this email? This is for your records when you have a ton of emails in the system.

If you know HTML then you can write your email using HTML

But if you don't know HTML then you can click "Text Version"

 This is the body of your email. Go ahead a write your heart out. Remember, people who sign up to learn about headbands want to hear about headbands. Think twice before talking about family vacations instead.

Done with my email. I wrote a short welcome email with a link to buy headbands at my etsy shop.

Here is the link to my etsy shop.

Click "Create Email" when finished.

 You can preview your email here.

You can click edit on the right to change it until its perfect. Or you can destroy it "delete".

After You finished Click "Campaigns".

Notice your campaign you build earlier in in the list.

Step 6. Change Up Your Campaign
Link to your Page
The name and link to the webpage.

Change Your Campaign Name
We still need to name our campaign so we can remember it.

To rename your campaign click the edit icon.

 You can edit the name here.

I changed my name to "Red Headbands" to help me remember what the Sales Funnel is about. 

If you don't like our default link to your page you can connect your own domain by clicking "Add Domain"

Click "Update Campaign"

 You can go back to the campaign dashboard by clicking "back" or "Campaigns".

 You've successfully changed the Name of your Campaign. Click on the Name of your Campaign.

Step 7. Connect Follow Up Emails
Click "Follow Ups"

Click "New Follow Up"

 Select the Email message you wish to connect. Click "Create Sequence"

Notice that the number of followups appears on the Follow Ups tab

Feel Free to change up the "Thanks Page". This page is where the visitor goes after they sign up for your email list. You want to thank those people who sign up. That's why most campaigns have a thank you page.

Step 8 - Getting Free Traffic
You're Finished with building your first campaign. Now its time to get some traffic. Remember the link to your finished campaign.

Click on Social Hero

You first must connect your social accounts to schedule social posts. The reason Social Hero is so important is because it allows you to schedule posts containing the link to your sales funnels any where on these social networks. This way you can connect with the people most interested in your types of products.

Start by connecting Facebook.

Say Okay

Now I'm logged in.



Click "Add Post"


Change the Date you wish to post your message.

Select a Time you want your message to go out.

Write a Message that you want to post. Remember to post your message with the link to your campaign we just built in order to get the visitors you need.

Select the groups you want to post your message to and click "Schedule".

After you click "Schedule" then appears your calendar. This is where you can view all the posts you have scheduled. Pretty useful when you need to keep track of your post.

This is the post we just made. You can click it to delete it.

When you are ready to schedule another post click "New Post"

When you are all finished you can click on the home icon to return to your Dashboard.

Step 9. Contacts
Welcome back to your dashboard.

To view the people as they fill out their emails click "Contacts"

If you already have an email list of customers then go ahead and import them into your contact list.

by click "Import"