A lot of blog marketing companies are guilty of focusing solely on generating traffic into your website. While traffic is the lifeblood of any website, the problem that a lot of etailers run into is what to do with that visitor once you have them in your site. Gaudy traffic stats are all well and good, but it is sales that pay the bills. How do you ensure that the visitors you have are converting at as high a rate as possible into revenue for your company? I will put out a series of articles directed at making your landing pages more attractive to buyers. Thanks in advance to Site Pro News for providing the basis for this information.

If your visitor is coming from a search engine or a paid search listing, you need to have the keyword in bold and clearly visible on the page. If I am looking for a specific product or item, the keyword shows me that this page is relevant to my search. Make sure you pay attention to the Golden Triangle on the page. This is the area on the page that starts top left, goes over to the top right and the continues back to the left side of the page. This triangle is always positioned above the fold on the page, ie people don’t have to scroll down. Then make sure you put your value proposition; sale, new product etc, in the middle of the triangle.

It also goes without saying that in order to have a high conversion rate, the page itself needs to be ranked for the keyword or product it focuses on. The best way to do that is with a highly targeted blog linking campaign.

With all the news about the purchase of UTube, there has been increased scrutiny on video spending trends. EMarketer is talking about studies that have not yet been released. They estimate that spending on online video advertising will surpass the $410 million mark. That is an 82% increase from 2005. Video advertising is expected to generate over $3 billion a year by 2010. No doubt big advertisers will cash in on this bonanza and look to snap up video time on well travelled websites. Also expect video advertising on search engines. But how does the smaller company get involved? They use use a company blog, and the power of multiple blogs to distribute their videos and commercials. They tap into the 60 million plus people who read blogs; the blogosphere is where smaller companies will smartly spend their advertising dollars.

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, revenue generated from online advertising in the third quarter was up 2% over the previous three months. It looks like the growth in revenue is slowing from quarter to quarter. This doesn’t surprise me at all. The main focus of internet advertisers is banner advertising and paid search. With rampant click fraud and a general apathy towards banners, these avenues are producing less of a return. I certainly expect the growth to continue to slow over the coming months. One area where clients are seeing extraordinary ROI is in blog marketing. The price point is very low and the return is very high. It reminds me of the heyday of paid search when you could get traffic for 1 cent a click.

The question for retailers is, how long did it take you to jump on the paid search wagon. If you waited, were you disappointed, and will you repeat the same mistake with blog marketing?

What’s the single most wonderful thing you can do during the 06 Holiday season? You can “SHOP” online for all of your gifts instead of mall crowds. I really don’t see why people go to the mall because all of the stores have websites that you can buy from. For all of you holiday shoppers here’s some helpful tips that I found from KVBC.
The Internet is expected to play a bigger role than ever before when it comes to holiday shopping this year. Experts believe shoppers will buy a fourth of their gifts online this year. But while logging on is convenient, there can also be risks if you’re not careful.

Amazon.com and Ebay are frequently visited sites, especially during the holiday season. If you do plan on buying online, here are some tips you should keep in mind.

1. Know who you’re dealing with. If you’re buying gifts on an online auction site that provides a feedback forum, check the track record of the seller before you bid.
2. Look for signs that online purchases are secure. A lock icon will appear on the website telling you the transaction is secure.
3. Pay the safest way. It’s best to use a credit card, especially when you’re buying something that will be delivered later, because under federal law you can dispute the charges if you don’t get what you’re promised.
4. Keep documentation of your order. Print out the confirmation and keep it handy in case you need it later.

You should also make sure to check your credit card and bank statements carefully and call your bank or credit card company if you notice any charges you didn’t make.

The National Retail Federation says shoppers are expected to shell out nearly $800 each this year online.

I was looking at the Overture keyword tool today and as usual it wasn’t working. It seems like the tool is down a lot and when it is working, it does not return particularly good results. A lot of the search phrases don’t make any sense and the numbers don’t add up. A good alternative is the Google tool. It won’t give you a number count, but it does give much better information on popular keyword searches. It provides handy imput on which keywords to focus on with your retail blog marketing. Start with a few high traffic keywords, then go down the list and target some of the long tail terms to achieve a good balance.

I came across an interesting tool the other day on Spyfu.com. It is the best keyword analyzer I have seen to date and gives you a lot of interesting information. You simply enter a keyword in the search bar and it returns; the top paid sites, the top organic results, the average price per click, all the companies currently advertising under that particular keyword, the total amount of clicks per day, cost per day and the total amount of organic search results.

More interestingly, it also gives you related keywords that companies are bidding on, and related keyword terms. In the case of my search there were 1000 related keywords that were also bought by competitors and over 2500 related terms. Handy stuff, but like all of the cool keyword tools or analyzers out there, data is helpful but will not actually help you increase your search traffic. In order to do that, you need links and content. Preferrably from a highly optimized and customized retail blog.

Is there any online retailer out there that has the following situation……I have a retail site and my biggest quarter is Q4. I’m about to ramp up my Pay-Per-Click spending so my margins will drop significantly. What should I do? Pay my SEO firm more money to do things that don’t affect my rankings or should I put some of my ad budget into offline advertising. I may do some local or National Ads on Radio and TV. I know I’ll be spending a ton on advertising but it’s what everybody else in my industry is doing and I need to keep up. Does this sound like you?

Solution: The companies that do well online are well ahead of the curve and they adapt themselves into different marketing programs to do so. If you had a Retail Blog, you’d be able to attack what so many in your industry don’t know about, Like,

1. 57 million readers in the United States

2. Starting the Viral Marketing Process

3. Stabalize your Reputation

4. Exploiting Keyword Niches

5. Video Advertising and Poscasting
Your time is now for a strategic gameplan to get in front of your audience. A business blog is step one.

In a story that appeared on Silicon Republic, Google is claiming that estimates of click fraud involving their paid search services have been overplayed. According to Google, online advertisers are apt to blame any drop in ROI on click fraud. The common held belief is that click fraud runs at betweeen 14 and 20 percent of spend. The Google representative Ghosemajumder estimated the rate to be more in the single digits, and added that Google has real time filters in place to deal with the problem.
I tend to side with the retailers, but I would go a little higher with my estimates. I believe  the real rates to be around 30%. One way to eliminate the problem entirely is to get better positioning in the natural search. The most cost effective way of doing that is with a blog and blog marketing programs. Then you don’t have to worry about your advertising dollars being wasted, as you no longer have to rely on paid search.