Online Business Questions Revealed

Archive for January, 2009

Having a good website layout is a must no matter what type of website you are building. Keeping things uniform throughout your website makes it look nice, but more importantly it makes it much easier for your visitors to read and follow through what you want them to do.

There are many dos and don’ts you should follow when deciding on your website layout -

1. Headers - this is the top part of your website. Do Not make this huge and wild looking. Keep the height of this no more than around 100 pixels. This can be a graphic you have designed for you, or just a colored background with words on it.

2. Your Headline - use the h1 tags of html to write your headline, if you don’t know what this is, then ask your designer or learn it. Search engines look for h1 or h2 tags to tell them about the website. Your text should be easy to read, don’t make it fancy looking, keep the color usually to a red, this usually makes peoples’ eyes attract to it.

3. The body of your website - too many times a lot of website designers makes this way too colorful, and this makes it difficult to read. Most people want to know exactly right now what is in it for me, not all the fancy stuff. Keep your text family to one type, do not change this around. The norm for this is Times New Roman or Arial. You do not have to stick to these families but the important rule here is to use the same family for your entire website.

4. Images - please do not plaster your website with graphics! This is so annoying and distracting. An important rule to remember when using images on any website, is the size of the image, if your image is large it will take the site a long time to load and people won’t stick around to wait. Make sure that your images are clear and relative your website theme. Another important fact that most do not use, is the alt tag, this tag is inserted so if your visitor doesn’t have the ability to see images the words will display, also, search engines do not see images, so by using the alt tag within your image will tell the search engines what is there.

5. Buy Buttons - too many times I’ve gone to a website, read through it, liked what I saw and read; now I want to know the price? Scroll to the bottom to find the buy button only to see no price at all! Make sure that your price is clearly seen, the best place to put your price is directly above or below the buy button. Make it clear exactly what the price, no hidden costs! The fastest way to lose a sale is by not telling the purchaser how much they are going to pay.

6. Closing - make sure that your name is clearly at the bottom, people want to know who they are dealing with. Having a professional taken picture of yourself is the best, but if you either do not want to do this or don’t have one, then make sure your name is clearly there. And a way for them to contact you if they have questions. Do Not put your actual email address on your websites!! You can put the words Contact Me and have them linked to an email address. Do not ever put your actual email address on your websites. There are spiders out there that look for this format and will spam you!

7. PS - Always, Always, have a ps or two. Recap what they are getting and restate your price and guarantee. It has been shown that by having a ps increase sales, so use it!

By sticking with these steps you will get a better looking website that will convert much better. It really doesn’t matter what market you are in or what you are selling, by having the a good website layout will make all the difference.

Dr Smiley

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Oh the most asked question online nowadays!

When it comes to getting traffic to any website, it is crucial that you take certain steps first!

There are also a number of different types of traffic you can try to obtain, SEO (or organic traffic), referral traffic, PPC, and much more.

The first type of traffic Dr Smiley recommends you focus on, is SEO traffic. Why? Because it will get you going. When you put your web pages together you should always use -

1. Good keyword Title for your page.
2. You should give a good description of what your page is about.
3. You should use your keywords for your website in your meta tag keywords area. Now some say this isn’t important any more, but it still is. Search engines do look at this, but it isn’t as important as your Title tag and your page description.
4. Use your keyword throughout your web page, but DO NOT stuff it, make it look and read naturally. Keep your webpage to one keyword or keyword phrase, don’t try to rank for several keywords on one webpage.

Let’s discuss the ways to get traffic to any website, either free or low cost.

Still used by almost all marketers today, is Article Marketing.

This is the cheapest and easiest way to start generating traffic to any website you have. Pick a keyword that is popular with your market, do a bit of research on that keyword and find out some problems people are facing with it.

Write up a short article around 400 words, use your keyword especially at the beginning of your article and at the end. Write a short 2 or 3 line resource box, this box is to encourage others that read your article, to learn more about you or your product/service to click through to your website. This will definitely get you traffic! Just submit your article to no more than 2 or 3 article directories, you do not need to blast it out there.

When someone goes to one of these directories and likes your article, they have the option to copy it and paste it on to their website or blog, when they do this they Must include your resource box with your link. This makes your article(s) go viral very quickly. You can also take your article(s) and put them on your own blog, especially if your blog and website have 2 different domain names, this is not duplicate content.

Another good way to start generating traffic is to use social bookmarketing places like, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. It’s not recommended you start with all of them, pick just one to start out with and get use to it, then once you have it down, you can add another one. Social Networking is very hot right now and it works!

If you have your own product or service you are trying to promote, you might consider using places like ClickBank and/or PayDotCom.com. Put your product up on their site and let others promote it for you. Read through these places carefully and make sure you understand their Terms of Service. If done properly you can definitely get a lot of traffic to your website in little time.

There is also PPC (Pay Per Click) such as Google Adwords and Kontari. Both are very good and will bring you traffic, but be warned right Now! This is a dangerous area to tread if you do not know what you are doing. You can easily lose a lot of money in the learning process. Read everything you can about this, and do it slowly. The big key to this being successful is your keyword research, so make sure you do it. Start out pricing your clicks low, see how it goes, if you are getting traffic then you can increase it slightly. Do not try to get greedy here, this one method takes time and effort but if done properly you can really get a lot of traffic rather quickly.

Okay you have now learned a few different ways to go out there and start generating traffic to any website. Another important factor here is, consistency. Whatever method you chose to use, you must do it everyday. Getting traffic to any website takes time and some money, but if you are serious about this, you will do the work. Just keep in mind things don’t happen without some work involved by you.

Dr Smiley

Dr Smiley recently received a question on pricing products.

How do I know what is a good selling price for my products?

Here is the dr’s response to this question:

When it comes to figuring out what the right price is for your specific product or service, the best thing to do is research. Find out what your competition price range is.

Doing your research to see what others are pricing their products at is time consuming but it is time well spent for any business owner, as the return will be well worth it.

Besides doing your research of your competition you should also put into account your profit margin for your product. As a business owner you always want to be making a profit from your sales, so do consider your pricing range to include your profit.

As an online marketer, it’s important to see what is selling and for how much, do a quick search on your favorite search engine for your product name or something similar and see what it sells for. consider pricing your product around the same amount.

If you are new to this market, consider pricing yours a bit lower, as you have not yet established yourself as an expert with this product. Test this out for 30 days or so and see how you do, you can then adjust your price to match your audience better.

Remember, you won’t always be able to get the prices right. You will likely lose money in the beginning due to pricing your products too low or too high. Do your best to stay on top of the market and how consumers are reacting.

Dr Smiley hopes this has answered your question.

Thank You
Dr Smiley