SoftwareProjects, the industry’s leading full-service Internet Marketing & Web Development firm, announced today the launch of a new Merchant Account and Credit Card Processing service, code named: Merchant Highway.

MerchantHighway.com offers businesses the best rates for processing Credit Cards, Debit Cards and Checks online.

The service is a partnership between First Data Independent Sales (FDIS), the world's largest payment processing company, and Software Projects Inc, the nation's leading full-service Internet Marketing & Web Development firm.



Although Software Projects have been offering Online Merchant Accounts since early 2000, MerchantHighway symbolizes a stronger partnership with First Data, allowing us to benefit from First Data buying power, passing huge discounts to our customers.

To learn more, please visit http://www.MerchantHighway.com

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One of our clients from Switzerland recently hired us to take their online shopping website to the next level.

The site was getting a healty 8,000+ unique visitors per day, but online sales were far from satisfactory.

Before diving into the 81 online marketing channels we use to help businesses make more money online, we asked the client to forward their WebTrends and Google Analytics reports.

Here are some of the numbers we were provided with:






If you're looking to increase your website's conversions, the first thing you absolutely have to do is understand where you are losing potential customers.

It doesn't matter whether the purpose of your website is to generate RSS subscribers, sell magazine subscriptions or collect mortgage applications. You have to analyze every single step your potential customers go through until they fulfill your goal.

You don't need a super expensive web analytics package to do that. All you need is some basic numbers and a sales funnel.

A sales funnel is an upside-down cone, describing the process your website visitors go through from the moment they visit the site until they fulfill your goal. Every section of the funnel describes a step they go through. And by definition, every step holds a lower number of users because some drop-off and don't continue to the next step.

In order to improve conversions, all you have to do is focus on one section at a time and take the necessary action to increase the number of users who follow-through to the next step.

A tiny increase in the number of users who proceed from step #2 to step #3 for example, is going to lead to a huge increase in conversions.

Website Sales Funnel

A sales-funnel allows you to clearly visualize the numbers, identify your top leaking points and focus on improving them one by one.

You can easily create a sales-funnel using the data obtained from Google Analytics or any other analytics tool. You can even do it by hand if your analytics tool doesn't support this feature.

Simply define a few goals (i.e. "First Sale from a new customer", "New RSS subscriber", "Repeat Sale" etc), then go through your data for the last 12 months and build 12 sales funnels to display the data for each month.

It is important that you go through all the steps required to fulfill each goal. For example, if your goal is "new RSS subscriber", count the minimum time it would take for a visitor to your site to get to the RSS subscription page, identify the page-name and then look for data pertaining to that page.

Here's the sales funnel we built based on the data provided by our client:

Monthly Website Sales Funnel - 2007



On a typical month, our client is scoring 240K+ visitors to their site.

According to our study, it takes a minimum of 2 minutes for a visitor to the site to place a new order.

* Our of 240K visitors to the site every month, only 39K (16%) spend enough time on the site to place a new order.

Action Item: To increase the amount of time visitors spend on the site, we need to focus on more personalized, up-to-date and engaging content. Coupons, Seasonal items, User reviews and one-time-offers (OTO) are some of the things we should experiment with.

* Those visitors who stick around long enough to place an order, don't always end up on the product page (You have to view a product page before you can place an order). Some of them just wonder around the site for a few minutes until they leave.

Action Item: To increase the number of visitors who end up on product pages, we need every page of the site to link to products. "Hot Products", "Best Selling Products", "Clearance Products" and "Product of the day" work very well with similar sites.

* On average, only 1.2% of the total visitors to the site end up placing an order. Industry standard for this industry is 3%, which would be three times the company's online sales volume.

Action Item: Simplify checkout process (switch to one page checkout), Collect email-address before the checkout process starts (to follow-up with customer if they abandon their cart), Experiment with exit popups.

* Less than 1% of the users who placed an order, came back to the site. Since one of the goals our customer had was to increase repeat business, it was very important for us to monitor how many visitors end up coming back to the site. It is a known fact that selling to an existing customer is 7 times easier (cheaper) than generating a new one.

Action Item: Design an ongoing autoresponder Email campaign to entice customers to come back and place another order in exchange for a one time coupon that expires 60 days from the day of the first purchase.

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Other things we found during our research -

* The client's existing PPC campaigns contain mostly "generic keywords", not differentiating between online searcher's three mind sets: browsing, comparing and ready-to-buy.

Action Item: Stay away from "generic keywords" that appeal to users who are mostly browsing, or at least significantly reduce the bids for those competitive items. Build specific campaigns to address users who are in the "comparing" and "ready-to-buy" modes. Design better more relevant landing pages with stronger calls to action.

* Product pages are mostly low on content.

Action Item: Write a minimum of three paragraph keyword-rich description about every single product. Include technical specification if applicable and link to the vendor website (trust factor)

* Content not fresh. Google's bot visits site only once every two weeks.

Action Item: Embed customer reviews, product-of-the-month and even product-of-the-day on the home page of the site. The more fresh your content is, the higher importance Search Engines are going to assign to your pages.

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In summary - know your sales funnel. Define your goals then break them down to steps, focus on improving one step at a time - Divide & Conquer.

As you go through this process, take advantage of competitive intelligence information - study what your competitor's are doing and analyze what's working best for them.

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When launching a new blog, forum or web site, one of the main goals that internet marketers have is converting visitors (traffic from PPC, referring sources, search engines, etc) into users. You may think that forums are the only place that have users, but in my opinion, a user is any individual that regularly returns to your blog or web site (and possibly contributes content such as comments, reviews, etc).

Although users are vital to the success of a web site, they do present one downside: they quickly become ad blind. In case you are not familiar with the term ad blind, it refers to regular users who do not click ads because they are so used to seeing them. Although you may have high volumes of traffic, if the majority of this traffic are users, your ad revenue is not going to be as high as you would like it to be.

For many blogs, forums and web sites, the best way to counteract this issue is by using variety. Since the majority of new web sites use Google AdSense as their primary form of monetization, there is a new free tool that makes it simple to rotate the color scheme of your AdSense units. As an example, here are some of the colors schemes that DigitalPoint rotates between to help increase their AdSense CTR:





Although DigitalPoint uses their own system to rotate through AdSense color schemes, if you are looking for a free, simpler solution, then AdSense Juggler is the answer for you. As you can see from the screen shot below, AdSense Juggler is extremely easy to setup and implement:



So, if you are struggling to increase your AdSense CTR, give AdSense Juggler a try and leave a comment once you've seen the results from it.

Today, Chad from CDF Networks made a post on his blog which is titled "The 13 Pay Per Click Network Challenge." The basis of the post is that Chad ran one affiliate offer during the month of August across thirteen different PPC networks. After ten long days of compiling data, Chad has some interesting results to share:



As you can see from the chart above, Chad rated each engine on three different factors: traffic rate, conversion rate and click pricing. The traffic rate and conversion rate categories ranged from one (being the worst) to ten, while the click pricing category could be scored from one to five (which makes a total of 25 possible points).

As the chart shows, Chad found that Yahoo was the best overall PPC engine. He states:


As he acknowledges in his post, many people may be surprised to see that Yahoo and MSN have higher conversion rates than AdWords. Although Google sends much more traffic, he states that the conversion rate has always been lower for the majority of niches that he has tested.

Although we all know that Google, Yahoo and MSN are the top three PPC engines, Chad found that while Looksmart did not send nearly the amount of traffic that the other networks did, the traffic that was sent converted well.

Of Chad's six recommended networks, the one that surprised me was Ask. Although it placed fifth in this test, you may want to read Amit's (of Super Affiliate Mindset) awful experience with Ask. Here's an excerpt of what he had to say:

As some of you may already know, SEOmoz launched a landing page competition two months ago. The purpose of this competition was to create a new landing page for the SEOmoz Premium Membership. Although the original landing page converted well for regular readers of SEOmoz, the conversion rate for visitors that were not familiar with the SEOmoz brand was only 0.05%.



After two months of testing out the entries, SEOmoz finally announced the winner yesterday. Although they had been planning to end the contest after a month of collecting data, due to the close competition between the first and second placed entries, they extended the competition for an additional month.

So, what landing page converted the best? To my surprise (and the surprise of many others), it was the traditional, endless scrolling sales pitch (which converted at 2.55%).


(The full page can be viewed here)

The landing page that gave the winner the closest run was much different (which converted at 2.41%), as shown below:



Although you can learn a lot from these results, I think there is still more testing that should be done. Why do I say this? Although it can't be said without data to back it up, I strongly believe that the second place entry will convert better for "warm" prospects than the winner. Additionally, as the post mentions:

As many bloggers have discussed, monetizing a blog with Google AdSense can be a challenge. However, this does not mean that it is impossible to use AdSense to generate a solid revenue stream from a blog. If you are using a WordPress powered blog, there is a new plug-in that can help you maximize your AdSense revenue.

At first glance, the Shylock AdSense plugin may look like the dozen or so other AdSense plugins that are available for WordPress. However, this plugin has some great features that set it apart from the others. As Shylock explains:


I think this is a great way to strike a balance between taking advantage of search engine traffic without turning off your loyal readers.



If you haven't tried out this plugin yet, I highly recommend giving it a try on your blog (and feel free to share your results in the comment section).

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