4) Building Your Sales Funnel
Now that you've got your site set up its time to think about how people are going to get from viewing your content to buying the product(s) that you're offering. Here's an example:Let's say we want to sell book reviews as the product we're promoting, but we're not quite sure how to package it yet. We could do a review of the top 10 best selling books about weight loss or we could sell individual book reviews at $9 each (or both depending what would make more sense).
Now let's say you decide on selling individual book reviews because:
1) You want to keep the sales price low in case someone doesn't like your review and asks for their money back. If they can buy one for $9 then its much easier to refund them if they don't like it than having to refund all of them if you offered a bulk discount.
2) It's an established offer already so there will be less work involved on your end since people are familiar with buying individual products online rather than in bulk.
Here's a couple of ways you could promote it:
1) The first thing people will see when they enter your website is your content which should have targeted keywords that you've researched to bring relevant traffic. This would be the perfect place to offer book reviews since it's relevant and there are alot of opportunities to get a high conversion rate here...You might even want to make a specific page for this called "Book Reviews" or something similar so its easier for people to find once they land on your site via one of the other methods listed above.
2) You could also use articles directories such as ezine articles, article base, go articles ect. These directories allow you to create an article about whatever topic you want and submit it for free. Once the article is approved by their staff you can then submit a link to your website at the end of the article which will be hyperlinked back to you (it shows up as a resource box below each article).
3) You could make a forum posting or comment on someone else's blog who might find your content interesting. Allowing other users to bookmark, share ect... with their friends via e-mail & social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter & MySpace makes them more likely to visit that page because it shows up in their friends news feeds. Its also an excellent way to build backlinks from authority websites which search engines love!
As you see there are many different ways you can promote your product(s) and its all up to you to find out which one will be most cost effective. Once they land on your site the next step would be to try and get them opt in for your e-zine/newsletter so you can inform them of when new products are available (if you don't want to sell it anymore then you could always just send them helpful information via email).
5) Optimizing Your Site For Higher Rankings
Now that our site is pretty much done with the only thing left is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is basically getting your website ranked higher in google than other sites which in turn gets you more traffic. The following steps I'm going to go over in this article are a huge part of SEO and if you follow them correctly you should be able to see your site ranking on the first page in no time!
The Most Important Things To Remember About Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines:
1) Use your keywords as often as possible throughout the text without sounding too redundant. Think about how people speak and write it down so it sounds natural, but also includes your keywords at least one or two times per paragraph.
2) Make sure that when typing out a title for any content & images used on your website either uses all targeted keywords or a variation of them (this makes it easier for search engines to figure out what each post is all about).
3) Include links from other sites to yours when possible. These are called "backlinks" and its how google can tell which web pages are linking back to you or your competitors. Having more backlinks means you'll have a higher authority in the eyes of search engines...The best way I've found for getting these is submitting articles that link back to your website, joining webmaster related forums & social media groups that allow outgoing links (such as digg or stumbleupon).
4) Do not over-optimize your webpage! This only makes it look spammy and will get people visiting your site banned from google which in turn decreases your rankings. You want to have almost everything on your website set at 100% so google picks up all the content, images, links ect... but you want to make sure that for your title & one or two sentences directly under the title are what you really want people to see. This is exactly how mine looks for this article:
How To Make Money With Amazon Affiliates – Step By Step
Now the important part about the above image is that my keyword (in this case "how to make money") has been used twice and it doesn't look out of place. If I were trying to over-optimize and stuffed as many keywords as possible into those first few lines it would stick out like a sore thumb and probably get me banned from google.
5) Be consistent with all content posted on your website! You don't want to have your title, description & keywords changing for every single post you make. If you're just starting out with a new website I'd advise not to change any of the above things until at least 20-30 articles are created so search engines can pick up on it and you get the benefits faster!
I Think You've Had Enough Of My Babbling - So Go Check Out Some Of The Goodies Below!!!