BUSINESSBUILDER NEWSLETTER


February 28, 2004
Hi, Glenn Gordon here with another BusinessBuilder.
By subscription only! Welcome to this issue of the BusinessBuilder Newsletter, currently being published every other week and now a proud member of the Ezine Publishers Association. Publishers, join free at http://www.EzinePublisher.org

Published by Glenn Gordon
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Disclaimer: I will not knowingly run ads for products or services which are immoral or dishonest. However, I cannot take responsibility for the business practices of others, nor can I support any claims made in any of these ads. I urge you to carefully evaluate any offers you read here, as you would any other offer.

The BusinessBuilder is dedicated to bringing you relevant articles, tips, resources and ideas that will truly help you build your online business. I am always looking for suggestions for other newsletter content that would be more helpful to you. Give me a yell at
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Today's Thought

"What often makes the biggest difference is the accumulation of the littlest things."
-- Anonymous –


Subscriber's Bio

I was born in Alexandria Va, the son of an Alexandria policeman, my mother was a nurse, and I was born in the backseat of my Fathers squad car, a 52 Chevy.
I joined the USMC in 1970 to avenge a very good friend's death. I was in helicopters in the service, and loved flying. After 4 years of active duty, I got out, moved to Boston, Ma, and went to work at the Quincy Shipyards. Then I met "The Girl of My Dreams." I was 36, and it was time to settle down. But it didn't last long, as I landed a job that paid very good, working in all the US Embassies world-wide, and I spent the next 7 years traveling around the world. I got reeled back in by my wife who was just about as burnt out with that job as I was. But once back home I took a job as an ironworker installing, erecting overhead cranes. About 5 years ago, I went in the hole---4 stories, and although I landed on my feet, I collapsed into a slump of broken bones. I have been through a few operations, but am confined to a wheelchair after the fall, or should I say sudden and abrupt stop I encountered. I have contracted a Chronic Pain Nerve Disease so I spend my days at the PC, sending out emails to try and get some more cash coming in, and I take it all ( Life ) with a smile everyday because I should by all rights be dead now. So I feel kind of lucky, and special, as I can see many people that are worse off than me.
So now you know about me!!!!
Regards,
Fred Evans
Owner www.four11pluss.com


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It's your turn!

Submit Your Bio
First, [firstname], is a call for you to submit a short bio on yourself and your online business. How did you get to where you are, regardless of where that may be? I'm not looking just for amazing success stories - just stories about ordinary people like you and me.  I will be selecting interesting submissions for publication in the newsletter. Please don't make it an ad, although it is fine if you include your website name and URL. I can't guarantee whose or how many will be published, but I will try to acknowledge each one with a personal note. Send your bio to
SubBio@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com

Submit Your Site
Second
, if you think your site is great, near great or on the way to becoming great, send me the URL for possible publication in an upcoming Sites of Note section. Send it to
SitesOfNote@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com


Note

You are receiving the BusinessBuilder Newsletter because you subscribed to it. However, if you don't want to receive any more issues, unfathomable as that sounds to me, follow the instructions below and you will be removed immediately.

 

Hello again. Welcome to another issue of the BusinessBuilder. This issue I look at a new trend that I call testracking. If you aren't doing it, chances are your competitors already are. This should help you get up to speed.

In this issue:

- News and Comments
- Testracking - The New Paradigm
- How To Use PopUps With Google Adwords
- Resources

and more.....

News and Comments

How's your swipe file?
Do you keep a swipe file? A place where you put good ideas of various kinds that somebody else thought of, and you liked well enough to keep? Well, if you write ads, this may be the ultimate swipe file.

Update the gibberish
Ever seen that Latin-style text that's written as a placeholder on a template, etc? It's called greeking, or lorem ipsum. It takes up space without really saying anything (remind you of anyone you know?). Now you can update your gibberish with freshly generated random text by going here.

Royalty-free map
The next time you need to add a map to your webpage or newsletter, go here to create your own.

Mastery TV
Have you taken a look yet at the phenomenal resources that are available to you? Not to mention the income potential.
Learn more at 
http://www.masterytv.biz/ggordon

Making Your Websites Personal
A great way to make your website or your email more personal is to use your own voice to talk to your readers or visitors. If you haven't learned what it can do for your business, listen to what I recently added to one of my pages.


To get your own audio messages going, just visit here.

 LifeBuilder thoughts for today.....
The LifeBuilder is on vacation. See the archive here.


I invite you to send in your most thorny question or problem to be answered in the new section called Answers to your Questions. Send them to
Questions@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com


Sites of Note

Subscriber Fred Evans invites you to his site at www.four11pluss.com


Testracking - The New Paradigm
By Glenn Gordon
(c) Glenn Gordon All Rights Reserved

As you undoubtedly know, the process of learning all you need to know to start an online business can seem overwhelming at times. And, if you haven't come to the same conclusion by now I will let you in on a little secret - it's even worse than you thought. By that I mean that the volume of things you need to know is so big, you should feel fortunate that you were blissfully aware of most of it in the beginning, or you would have given up before you started. But being willing to learn from the school of hard knocks can carry you through the toughest part. I am reminded of Henry Ford's comment, "The school of hard knocks is the best school there is, but its graduates are too old to work!" Fortunately a hard knocks school degree isn't required to succeed online, just continued enrollment and the hard work that goes with it. But the bar keeps ratcheting upward because of what others are willing to do to succeed. One area that seems to be receiving more and more attention by sharp businesspeople is - to coin a new word - testracking. I don't know of an existing word that will really describe what it means, so let me explain.

Two questions
More than likely, you just threw your first web page up to see what would happen. For a few of you, it was instant success. For most however, you could almost hear the collective yawn from your site visitors, or perhaps the echo of their mouse click as they went elsewhere. Then you asked yourself one or both of the 2 critical questions that determined whether you succeeded or failed. The first is, "What do I need to do to improve my sales?" To answer that, untold numbers of sites offered you strategies, formulas and fool-proof methods to improve your site, your sales page, your product-creation methods, ad nauseum. And you undoubtedly spent some (or a lot of) money and time exploring these promises. How wisely you chose the "experts" whose advice you took had a big influence on the results. But at some point, as some success gave you a thirst for more, you may have faced the second big question, which is "How can I measure what parts of my total advertising and sales process are working and which aren't?" The answer to this question is the crux of what I am calling testracking.

The importance of measurement
There is a phrase in quality control circles that says "You can't control or improve what you can't measure." And it's true not only in product manufacturing, but also in your sales process. Unfortunately, your visitors don't take the time to leave you notes that say, I didn't order because your order process was too hard, or, Your sales letter was boring, etc. They just leave without purchasing and you never know why. You have only one measure of success - sales - but you have no idea what changes in what areas will bring you the biggest improvement.

Ad tracking - the first step
Of course, where there is a need, someone will produce a product or service to fill it. You are undoubtedly aware of, and probably use, some kind of ad tracking service. It tells you, at a minimum, which ads brought you how many visitors. It may also track to the point of sale, telling you which ads produced the most sales. So far, so good. For pay-per-click ads, ad tracking has been around for a while, but Google recently took it to another level. Instead of just telling you which ads and keywords brought you visitors, Google now provides - free!- a superior ad tracking service the call Conversion Tracking. You utilize it by adding a small bit of code on a page reached only after a desired outcome (a sale, in most cases) has been made. The result is a detailed understanding of exactly which ads and keywords produced how many sales - think of the possibilities for tweaking and testing to optimize your sales dollars! You can also take advantage of an enhanced version of the service (still free) that allows you to specify the conversion type - sales, leads, sign-ups or page views. You can also assign your own unique revenue values to the results obtained. If you are using Google AdWords or are thinking about PPC advertising, this is definitely the way to go. And if you are advertising in other venues such as ezines, there are various tracking solutions available at a reasonable cost, many of which track through to the sale.

Going beyond - to testracking
But what about tracking affiliate programs? And if there is a spot on your sales page that is so boring or unbelievable that lots of visitors simply leave, how would you know? How can you run "what if" analyses and find how they would affect your conversion rate? How can you track the entire path a customer takes with a single tracking URL? The answer to these and a host of similar questions are wrapped up in the new level of sophisticated sales process tracking and testing - testracking - that is becoming available. Like any other new tool, it only helps those who use it, and penalizes those who don't. Even good sales-producing web pages grow stale over time, and the best can still be improved. But if you don't have a smart testracking tool in place, the number of variables involved will make change a guessing game, with your wallet at stake!

There are a number of tools that attempt to bring this issue under control, but only one that I know of that really succeeds. It produces 8 powerful reports covering traffic evaluation (where they are from, how much of each page they covered, etc), visitor footprints (follows their actions and the effects each section has on them), traffic flow analysis (follows your visitors through to their last action), web page statistics (which section performed well and which needs replacement), ad and search engine reports (which ads, which search engines and which keywords produced sales), and much more.  And you can customize the reports to show what you want - you set up the filters to tell you exactly what you want to know. Perhaps the greatest value to you is the ability (impossible until now) to track activity on a website you promote but don't own - affiliate sites. Find out how many sales, as well as actions, resulted from your promotions, not just how much traffic. Discover which affiliate program is really producing for you, and which of your affiliate ad campaigns work and which don't.

It's time to narrow the gap between the information that is available and what you are now using in your online business.

You can check out this tool for free at http://www.BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com/CA

Glenn Gordon
Building Success Online at
http://www.ur-in-business.com
The Ultimate Autoresponder Guide at
http://www.allaboutautoresponders.info

BusinessBuilder Newsletter at
http://www.businessbuildernewsletter.com

This article contains 1146 words and may be freely reproduced as long as the resource information above is included.

If you found the above article helpful or it has triggered some additional thoughts or suggestions, send them to me at Feedback@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com


Your Invitation

I would like to invite you to join our All About Autoresponders affiliate team. You earn 50% commission on all sales, and there's nothing like it on the net. For details, go to http://www.allaboutautoresponders.info/Affiliate/


How To Use PopUps With Google Adwords
Copyright 2004 Steve Shaw

One of the common issues that marketers face when using
Google Adwords, is that the use of popups on the target
page for their ad is not permitted. Many Adwords
advertisers just completely remove popups from their web
site, which can not only significantly damage the
profitability that results from other traffic sources, but,
as we shall see, it is also not entirely necessary. This
article looks at alternative solutions, which when
implemented can virtually double the ROI (Return On
Investment) for Adwords ads.

It is well recognized that by capturing the visitor's email
address, and then following up with them via an effective
auto-responder campaign, marketers can more than double
their chances of clinching the sale. Popups can be a very
effective way of doing this, often helping to convert 50%
of more of visitors to subscribers.

With Google Adwords however, because popups are not
permitted, you need to look for other ways in which you can
maximize the visitor-to-subscriber conversion ratio, and
thereby also maximize the value you get out of each
click-through to your web site.

Here are three main ways in which you can do this:

1. Set your target page for your ad as a so-called 'name
squeeze' page - this means the whole page you direct them
to is focussed on one thing, to get their name and email
address, following which you can always redirect them to
your normal sales page to try and 'make the sale'. You
still need to make sure of course that your ad accurately
reflects your target page.

As an example of how to do this, let's say you sell cheap
widgets, and your ad is displayed for the keywords 'cheap
widgets'. Write a report or an ebook on 'How To Choose The
Best Cheap Widget' and offer it for free on your name
squeeze page, in return for their email address.

2. Use a special type of popup that doesn't actually
display in a new browser window, but 'hovers' over your
existing web page - this type of popup is not detected by
Google (nor for that matter can they be prevented by popup
blocker technology), and works in a similar way to dynamic
menus, which of course are perfectly permissable. I have
been using this type of popup very successfully for many
months in conjunction with Adwords.

You can get a free copy of the software I use by sending a
blank mailto:optinover@takanomi.par32.com.

3. Put popups on other pages - Google does not stipulate
that you should no popups on your web site, only on the
target page for your ad. This means that if your target
page encourages visitors to click through to other areas of
your web site, you can add put popups on these other pages
to help capture your visitors email address.

For example, if you have a long sales letter, try splitting
it up onto two or more pages. Your popup(s) can be placed
on any of the other pages. I use PopUpMaster Pro to ensure
that the popup does not appear if certain links are pressed
- this means that you don't show the popup to visitors who
click through to read other pages of the sales letter or to
order, but otherwise (if they leave your web site) you show
them an exit popup to try and grab their email address
before they are 'lost forever'.


Use one of the above methods, and you should find that you
capture the details of many more visitors who click through
from your Google Adwords ad - and by doing this, together
with an effective autoresponder campaign, your return on
your ad could greatly increase too.


----------------------------------------------------
Steve Shaw creates systems and software for effective
e-marketing. For the technical edge on e-marketing, and to
claim some valuable bonuses, you can subscribe to his
popular newsletter at http://takanomi.com/newsletter.
 


A Final Note

Thanks for joining us. Let me know what you think,  positive or negative, what you would like to see an article about, a gripe you have, or whatever, to
Feedback@BusinessBuilderNewsletter.com

Glenn Gordon

 

Copyright (c) 2004 Glenn Gordon
Owner, You're In Business