Even if you may generate tons of visitors per day to your website, if you fail to convert them into successful sales, your efforts will be useless.  Here are five basic tactics you can use to dramatically increase your web conversion rate.

1.    Catchy headlines.  Internet users have grown impatient in this day and age.  It’s very easy for them to visit another website whenever they find something even remotely boring in your own web page.  The trick is in winning their attention fast.  Such can be done with well-written headlines.  Headlines, as far as we can tell, are the first things that your readers will be greeted with when they firsr arrive at your page.  If they’ll like what they’ll see, they’ll hang around.  If not, they’ll quit just as quickly as they came.

2.    Easy-to-scan copy.  You’d think that with the growing popularity of the web, more and more users will be inclined to read.  The contrary, however, is what is prevalent.  Web users easily get fatigued while reading, what with the thousands of materials they are exposed to with each and every session of online browsing.  The trick is in simplifying things for them to read your sales copy.  Use numberings and bullets as much as possible.  Guarantee your copy easy to scan.  Prepare your sales copy for an impatient audience and you’ll be rewarded greatly.

3.    Benefit-oriented selling.  Your prospects will buy based on emotions and provide reasons for their purchases leaning on logic.  Don’t forcefully advertise the specifications of your product for your audience to see.  Instead, inform them of the advantages they can get from what you’re selling.  Share with them what they stand to gain.  This is a much better way of piquing their desire to purchase your product.  Share the features later on, as your clients will need such info to justify the purchase they will be planning to make.

4.    Urgency marketing.  Push your readers to buy from you ASAP.  Don’t make them to second guess their decision, as you might lose some sales.  Utilize one time offers, special offers, and several possible time-sensitive tactics to bait them into purchasing your product immediately.

5.    Use involvement devices in your sales copy.  Your sales copy doesn’t have to be a linear, simple staement of your offer.  You can include interactive options that will force your visitors to pledge an emotional investment on your business.  Ask for their thoughts.  Better yet, supply them with multiple options for possible answers.  Add calculator scripts that they can manipulate.  Instill in their minds that they are a part of the sales page.

Tampa Web Design by Big U Media can help you to convert more visitors into sales.

Advertising, General, Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Development, search engine optimization | No Comments »

What is a Favicon

Favicon is short for “Favorites Icon”.   The name is derived from the bookmark list for Microsoft Internet Explorer which is called Favorites. When you add a site to your Favorites list, Internet Explorer (version 5 and above) asks the server if it has a file called favicon.ico. If present, this file will be used to provide an icon that is displayed next to the bookmark text.

Other browsers such as Mozilla have also added support for favicons. Depending on the browser, the favicon can appear in a variety of places, not just in the bookmarks list (in fact, it may not even appear in the bookmark list at all). It may be shown in the address bar or the title of a browser tab, for instance.

How to create a Favicon

To create a favicon.ico simply create a 16×16 .PNG file and convert it to an icon resource with png2ico. If you want, you can add more images to the same icon resource to provide alternative resolutions. Most browsers only use a 16×16 image but in a different context (e.g. when you drag a URL from the address bar onto your desktop) a larger icon may be shown. If the icon resource only contains a 16×16 image, this will be scaled to the appropriate size, so technically there is never a need to add alternative resolutions. However, doing so can increase the quality of the displayed icon.

Keep in mind that for a user with a slow modem a favicon.ico may increase the page loading time by a few seconds if it is too large, so don’t overdo it. Adding a 32×32 alternative should be enough to make sure the image will look good even in contexts with larger icons. Adding even more and larger alternatives is unnecessary bloat. Try to keep the number of colors below 16 and create a 16-color icon using the --colors 16 switch of png2ico (or even create a b/w icon with the --colors 2 switch). This will result in a smaller file that loads faster.

When you create the images to include in your favicon.ico, don’t forget that the icon may be composed against various background colors so you should use transparency rather than a solid background if you want to avoid that your icon appears inside a box. Note, that icon resources only support binary transparency, i.e. a pixel may be visible or invisible but not something like 30% translucent.

Installing your Favicon

To add your new favicon.ico to a web page put it on the server into the same directory as the web page it is for (e.g. www.example.com/foo/favicon.ico for www.example.com/foo/index.html). That is the first place a browser will search. If it doesn’t find an icon there, it checks the top-level directory of the server (www.example.com/favicon.ico for the www.example.com server), so by putting it there you can have a default favicon for all the pages in your domain. Depending on browser and configuration, the favicon.ico is not always rendered, even if it is in one of the above locations, unless the web page explicitly declares its presence. To declare that your web page has an icon, you add the following 2 lines into the <head> section of your page:

<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

Thats all there is to it.

Web Development, search engine optimization | No Comments »

Blogs have been around long enough to become standard elements of the web landscape. They’re easy to construct and manage, they create fresh, user-generated content and, if done well, blogs draw crowds and the attention of search engines.

Whether starting out with a new domain name, or a domain that’s been around for a decade, you can rank your blog on Google if you just do what Google tells you to do. So here are some tips to get your blog ranked by the world’s biggest search engine.

1. Build a Wordpress blog. Wordpress is a blog platform that’s open source (free), robust, extensible and easy to use. Add Feedburner, which equips site owners to broadcast RSS feeds and develop user metrics. Next, synch up Google Analytics and a sitemap plug-in to simplify populating the blog and developing useful, actionable metrics. Also, make sure your blog is pinging www.technoratti.com and other social-ranking sites like www.digg.com.

2. Don’t worry about page rank. PR is highly over-rated as a yardstick of online success. It has less and less importance to ranking as the days go by. Connectivity within a web community and expansion through content syndication and guest blogging are more critical to building site credibility than page rank.

3. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground. Unique meaningful content is crucial.

4. Use a conversational tone. Dry, boring academic writing is strictly for the textbooks. Write words that people “hear” instead of read. Personality is good.

5. Provide a “Tell Your Friends” link on your blog. Birds of a feather do, indeed, flock together. So, if one of your regulars shares an interest in philately, chances are s/he has other friends with an interest in stamp collecting.

6. Study the competition. They’re studying you. Check out spyfu.com to do a little undercover work on search analytics employed by competitor sites and their visitors. You can’t touch the content ,however, you can copy an idea, so pick up some new paths of thought from others in your site’s arena.

7. Remember SEO basics. Use provocative, keyword-rich title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and only link to high-quality sites. Never over do it. Keep your posts relevant, natural, accurate and, above all, current.

8. Don’t stuff blog post titles with keywords. It’s a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be 40% keywords, 60% non-keywords.

9. Submit your URL to blog directories. There are “best of the web,” and paid directories, like Yahoo, and free directories like the Open Directory project at www.dmoz.org. Every directory listing is another link to your site and another way visitors can find you. Just google them to find more.

10. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a “site hosting” or “site design” blog.

11. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don’t forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year’s “next big thing” is this year’s hackneyed cliché.

12. Vary topics, content length, relevancy and posting times. However, be consistent, as well. Keep blogging. It can take time for a blog to catch the notice of a search engine spider.

If you apply these 12 steps to your blog it will help you get your blog noticed. Big U Media specializes in search engine ranking and getting your site in front of the people that need to see it. Big U Media specializes in optimized Web Design. Tampa, Florida based Big U Media will work with you to help you establish your site goals and targets. Once this has been accomplished your site or blog can be marketed to its fullest potential.

Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Development, search engine optimization | 1 Comment »

Welcome to Big U Media A full service Advertising & Marketing Company. Audio Visual and Web Development.

Advertising, Audio Visual, General, Internet Marketing, Video Conferencing, Video Production, Web Development, search engine optimization | No Comments »