SME Sales & Marketing

Marketing tools

Special info for Facts About AdSense.com subscribers

Recently Google made it quite clear that the amount it was going to pay out per ad would depend on where the ad was.

If it was on a highly relevant website it would pay out well.

If the ad was on a less well-targeted site, the payout would be lower.

Google's intention was to deliver better value for the AdWords advertiser and as a side effect, encourage people to write more content rich pages on their site.

You can exploit this fact.

Here's how.

If your website is fairly general and doesn't focus in depth on any subject, you could find that ads are not generating the maximum amount of money that they could.

However, if you take your visitors to pages on more specifically targeted websites and host ads on those pages, you could find that the amount you earn per click is higher.

To get this to work, you need to place links on your main site to the more focused sites you run so that instead of getting clicks from several ads on your main site, you get clicks from ads on several different highly focused sites.

Warning

I can't prove this works yet but the initial evidence is pretty strong.

I will be writing an article about this as soon as I have conclusive data.

If you have signed up for the Facts About AdSense course I'll drop you a quick note when it's ready.

Website Design in Swindon

Does your website talk?

It doesn't have to of course but adding audio to your website can really drive up the length of time people spend with you and dramatically boost your sales conversion rate. One internet marketer reports a 200% increase in sales conversion ratios when he added audio. He performed a test using two identical pages, one without audio and one with. The one with the audio was twice as good at converting visitors into customers. Consider these questions:

How many salesmen do you know who don't talk?
Do you want your website to sell for you?

The easiest and quickest way of adding audio to your own web page is to use one of the utilities that are available commercially. The alternative is to use your in-house technology skills (if you have them) and develop your own system.

We've recently researched the "audio on the web" market extensively by reviewing countless websites, interviewing people who develop the technology and trying things out for ourselves. As of October 2003, there are two good options.

1. SonicMemo

SonicMemo (dreadful name but there you go!) is a simple tool that realistically takes about 45 minutes to implement although they cite 10 minutes. Once you have practiced the process of recording one or two messages and placing them on your site you will be able to add further ones in a few minutes.

SonicMemo works by creating HTML code that you need to insert into your web page to generate the control buttons like those that you see on this page. These buttons are linked to an audio file that is recorded in MP3 format and stored on your web site. You need to be able to record MP3 files to get SonicMemo to work for you and this will require a microphone and a sound card on your PC. You also need to upload a few other files that are supplied with the package.

The major advantage SonicMemo has is that it can be purchased for a one-off payment of around £60 (it is priced in dollars and can be bought online with a credit card using the PayPal system that is operated by eBay.com). This is a figure that most people will think twice about before deciding to buy but it is good value if it increases your sales conversion rate even slightly.

2. InstantAudio / AudioGenerator

InstantAudio / AudioGenerator (this is the same product sold under different names) is more sophisticated than SonicMemo and it provides additional facilities including a very neat system enabling you to record your messages using your telephone. It also works by hosting your audio files which is good and bad: it means that the sound is delivered from their web servers rather than yours and so your bandwidth costs are controlled, but it does mean that you don't control things completely and are potentially vulnerable to a system failure. If they were to go out of business you would also lose your service.

InstantAudio / AudioGenerator costs around £20 a month and if this is within your budget you may find the flexibility of being able to record audio via the phone worth paying for. However, you would need to be certain of exploiting the extra facilities to justify the higher and on-going cost price.

Our advice: Buy SonicMemo

Click on the image below for further information about InstantAudio / AudioGenerator and prepare to be impressed by their free demo!