ITM Marketing Blog - Internet Marketing Niches Online

ITM Marketing Blog

3 Ways Your Refund Policy Is Killing Sales

Your website is getting traffic, you have an awesome product or service and it seems like everyone is in love with what your business is doing. Then why aren’t you making any sales?

It’s a question that online business owners are faced with every day, but when you’re looking for answers, are you looking in the right place? After all, the issue may not be with your products or services; it may be with your refund policy.

Is your refund policy killing sales? Most consumers who shop online check out a business’s refund policy before they decide to buy. This is true of any kind of business; whether your company sells products or services. Consumers want to know that if they’re not happy with the services or products that they receive, that they have a way to get their money back.

Let’s take a deeper look into this and discuss 3 ways your refund policy may be killing sales:

1. You have no refund policy

The easiest way that your refund policy can kill your sales is by simply not having one. If you don’t have a refund policy in place, consumers won’t know if they’re going to be able to get their money back or not and that’s a thought that doesn’t sit well with people. Sure, they could email and ask, but most people won’t ever take the time out and make that extra step. On top of that, even if a person does email your company and asks about what the refund policy is, unless it’s placed in public view (on your website), most people won’t feel confident about it. They won’t know for sure if the reply is coming from a person of authority of if it will be honored in the event that there’s a problem. Continue reading →

Posted on May 13th, 2012 by Site Admin in Internet Marketing, Make Money Online, marketing tips, Small Business / Leave a comment

Blogging For Business 101

Blogging for business can be a little tricky from time to time. On one hand, you have to keep your personal thoughts and beliefs out of your blog posts, but on the other hand, if you blog about your business too much, it can come off as though you’re just trying to promote your business without passing along any valuable information. What do you do?

First, don’t completely rule out posting about your own business. A blog on your business website is the perfect place to inform customers and potential customers of what’s going on in your business. Posting about new products, new services or anything that customers need to know is always a good idea. When it comes to posting about your business, the thing to be careful for is making posts that scream “buy me!” or “do business with me!” People don’t like to feel forced into giving a company money and that’s where making blog posts can work against a company.

In regards to personal thoughts and feelings, it’s true that it’s best to keep them out of blog posts unless the thoughts and feelings can be validated in some way. For example, if you think that a certain piece of technology is the best, you can always link to other well known and trusted sources who feel the same way.

Still a little lost on what to post on your business blog? Check out these suggestions:

Promotions and Contests

Your business blog is a great platform to announce promotions and contests that your company may be running. Once you post the information, you can then share it on your social media accounts or even make a video for it and toss it up on YouTube. This way, you have information about the contest or promotion on various channels so that it’s easier for people to find.

Office Photo Days

Internet users like transparency and quite a few companies have seen good reactions from posting photos of what goes on around their office during the course of the day. Continue reading →

Posted on May 10th, 2012 by Site Admin in Blogging, Small Business / Tagged blog, blogging, business blog, videos / Leave a comment

Ebook Writer Software Version 2.0 Is Live!

It’s finally here!

We’ve been working on an update to SaneGen – The Internet Time Machine’s Automatic Niche Product Generator.

If you don’t know what it is, this software program:

1. Takes your keywords and searches the internet for top quality content.

2. Displays that content and allows you to select some (or all) of the content to include in a free report and optin page.

3. It then creates BOTH the free report AND the optin page for you at the click of a button!

It was downloaded 49,643 times in 2011

Existing Members, download it here:

http://www.theinternettimemachine.com/beta/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=63828&sid=4799c891760f42e1d0cf48c71fa4d735

Not a member yet? Sign up here and get SaneGen FREE along with other amazing software!

Sincerely,

The ITM Technology Team

Posted on May 8th, 2012 by Site Admin in Affiliate Marketing, article marketing, Small Business / Tagged ebook, ebook writer / Leave a comment

Using Hidden Text May Hide Your Website For Good

A few days ago, we talked about organic link building; what it means and how it affects your website’s ranking in the search engines. Today we’re going to go over information pertaining to hidden text. Hidden text is one out of the many types of over-optimization and search engine spamming techniques that Google has been cracking down on lately.

What is hidden text?

Hidden text is text placed within website code like normal text would be, only in this case, strategies are used to hide the text from visitors of your website. There are several ways that text can be hidden, such as:

- Using CSS to move it off of the page

- Making the text the same color as the background of the web page

- Making the font size so small that it can’t be seen easily

- Positioning text so that it is behind an image and can’t be seen

There are quite a few more, but the basic idea is hiding text from visitors, but not from the search engines.

Why is hidden text bad?

Hidden text is considered a black-hat SEO technique because it’s deceiving. The purpose of using hidden text most often centers around shoving more keywords on a web page than there’s room for. Rather than filling up a web page with content that’s so stuffed full of keywords that it can’t easily be read, those who take part in this practice will simply hide the text. This way the search engines can see it and pick up on the hidden keyword, but the website will look normal to website visitors.

It’s bad because the search engines really frown upon websites that try and gain an upper hand in the search engine rankings by using deception. It’s deceiving to place hidden text on a website or web page just for the sake of trying to gain search engine rankings. Continue reading →

Posted on May 7th, 2012 by Site Admin in Search Engines, SEO / Tagged google, hidden text, keywords, penalized, search engines, seo, website / Leave a comment

What Exactly Is An Organic Link?

With all of the talk lately surrounding Google’s new algorithm update (known as “Penguin”), it’s important for website owners and Internet marketers to understand the meanings of certain search engine ranking terms. Today we’re going to cover organic links since link spam is at the forefront of websites getting penalized in Google’s search engine results and in their pagerank system. In our next post, we’re going to cover hidden text and hidden links to further expand the subject matter.

What exactly is an organic link?

Definitions will vary, but simply stated:

- An organic link is a link from another website that links back to your website

- For the link to be truly organic, the site that linked to your site opted to link to your site because they want to

An organic link is NOT

- A link that was purchased by you

- A link that was placed due to some other type of incentive between you and the other website owner

- A link that was made by you on another website pointing back to your own website (more on this below)

- Links obtained by participating in link farms

It gets a little complicated when it comes to link building via commenting systems because it’s often assumed that the website being commented on is being moderated. Therefore, if the website owner approves the comment with the link in it, it’s pretty close to being organic. The problem however is that since so many websites are set up to where visitors can leave comments, links that are contained within comments aren’t weighed as heavily as links that are in the body of the website (main content areas).

More on organic links…

If there’s any confusion regarding why organic links matter, it’s best said that organic links count as votes towards your website’s importance and popularity. The more people that view your content and website as important, the more trusting the search engines are of it.

Mistakes Made

Website owners are quickly starting to realize that Google is picky with links. It wants your site to have links but it prefers those links to be organic. Also, since the algorithm keeps changing and being updated, links that used to be ok to have are now considered middle of the road or even bad links and due to this, website owners see their pagerank decrease with updates even if they’re not doing anything differently than they have in the past. Continue reading →

Posted on May 4th, 2012 by Site Admin in link building / Tagged backlinks, getting links, inbound links, link building, links, seo, website links / Leave a comment

Google Creates A Zoo? Meet Panda’s New Friend Penguin

Are You Digging Your Way Out From The Penguin Update?

A little over a month ago, we relayed that Google was cracking down on websites that were a little too rambunctious with their SEO. Since then, more information has been released about this algorithm; specifically the name of it and more about what Google’s thoughts were behind the update. The algorithm update has been dubbed “Penguin” which lends credence to the fact that Google has a habit of naming their algorithm updates after zoo animals. That information aside, what’s important about Penguin and how will it affect your website? (If it already hasn’t.)

First, the important thing to realize is that Google isn’t going after all websites that perform white hat (ethical) SEO. The algorithm update is meant to reduce the amount of spam in the search engine and it’s intended for websites who keyword stuff, build an immense amount of backlinks and take part in other strategies in an attempt to manipulate their search engine rankings. To put it simply, websites that have been affected by Penguin or will be affected by Penguin don’t follow Google’s quality guidelines. Continue reading →

Posted on May 2nd, 2012 by Site Admin in Internet Marketing, marketing mistakes, marketing tips, Search Engines, SEO, Small Business / Tagged algorithm, google, Penguin, search engines, seo, spam, updates / Leave a comment

When To Start An Email Campaign

There’s the old saying that “timing is everything” and the statement rings true when it comes to email marketing campaigns. There are a lot of influences on whether or not an email marketing campaign is successful, but timing is a very important influence. If the timing of the campaign is wrong, it can be doomed from the start.

Why Is Timing So Important?

The obvious reason why it’s important is because you don’t want to be marketing products or services that are out of season. For example, you wouldn’t want to start an email marketing campaign on snow removal services if it’s summer. If consumers don’t have a current need for the products or services being marketed in the email campaign at that moment in time, it’s a wasted effort.

Another reason that timing is important is because your targeted audience reads their emails at certain times of the day. It’s a bit tricky to figure out, but think about the demographic of people that you’re sending emails to. Are they business people who are going to be checking their email first thing in the morning Monday through Friday or are they college students who are going to be checking their email during the evenings after class and on the weekends? If you can figure out when the demographic of people that you want to reach checks their email, you can make sure that your email campaign is started at the right time of day.

Now that you know why timing is so important, let’s take a look at when to start an email campaign. The timing of when the emails are sent is important but so is the timing of the overall campaign. Here are a few times when you should consider starting your campaign:

1. During pre-product release (sending out emails in advance informs people of what’s coming up)

2. Once a product has been released (follow up from the pre-release email)

3. When you offer a new service

4. When you’re offering a promotion

5. When there’s something exciting happening at your company

One mistake that online marketers tend to make when they start an email campaign or when they send out emails as part of their campaign is that the emails don’t contain any substance or enough substance. Don’t simply send out emails for the sake of sending out emails. A quick way to get people to unsubscribe is to send them emails full of information that they don’t need or don’t want. Continue reading →

Posted on April 10th, 2012 by Site Admin in Email Marketing / Tagged campaign, emails, internet marketing, marketing online / Leave a comment

Google Analytics In Real Time: How Can It Help You?

If you use Google Analytics to monitor your website and traffic statistics, then you’ve seen all of the changes that Google has made to the service over the last few months. One of the changes that they made is integrating real time reporting. With real time reporting, website owners can see how many people are on their website at that given time. Website owners can also see where the visitors are from, how long they’re staying on the website and how they’re navigating the website. In addition, website owners can also view how the user got their website (the traffic source).

All of the data provided in real time reporting in Google Analytics is the same type of information that you can find under your regular reports, so why is real time reporting such a big deal? Think about it this way: If you operated a physical store location selling products or you operate a professional firm that provides services, you can tally information at the end of the day. You can see how many customers you had, where they came from, how much money they spent and other vital data that you need. However, it’s not as easy to track specific data patterns hours or even days later.

Using real time analytics allows you to analyze each user or set of users as they enter and leave your website. Do you get traffic from a partner site during the morning but not any other time of day? Do your website visitors find your website through your PPC ads in the evening, but afternoon traffic seems to come from organic results? Seeing this information unfold right before your eyes can give you a better look into your website’s users so that you can make changes and adjustments to your strategy if necessary. For example, if every Monday of the week, your website’s traffic is the highest between 9 and 10 in the morning, you know that if you have content to add, it’d be a good idea to add it before then. Continue reading →

Posted on April 6th, 2012 by Site Admin in Analytics, Internet Marketing, marketing tips, Search Engines, Small Business / Tagged analytics, google, marketing, marketing help, reporting, tips, website data / Leave a comment

Don’t Make Assumptions In Internet Marketing

During a casual conversation with a business owner the other day, the subject matter of SEO came up. It’s pretty common for everyone to have their own opinion over search engine optimization, but in this instance, I walked away feeling a little puzzled. In regards to SEO, it was conveyed to me that this business owner didn’t care about being on page one of the search engine results because they didn’t feel as though their demographic of customer used the Internet to find their services. It was also conveyed that in the number of years that they were in business and had an online presence that they had not once been contacted by someone who claimed they found them online.

Before tackling the first statement, let’s go over the second statement for a moment. There’s a good chance that the reason why no one was ever mentioning to the company that they found them online was because there was no way to find them online. Sure, the company has a website, but they’ve admitted to completely disregarding SEO. Their website isn’t listed on page one in the search engines and they do no marketing. Essentially, they put their website up and then forgot about it. Then they figured that having a website simply doesn’t work since no one was calling them and telling them that they found their information on the Internet.

What if the situation was different? What if the company paid attention to SEO from the start? If they had, I am sure that the conversation would have also been different. This is the number one mistake that businesses make when it comes to marketing online; they toss up a website and then become frustrated when new customers don’t instantly appear. Think about it this way: If you have a box of business cards sitting on your desk, no one is ever going to call you if they stay on your desk and you never hand them out. It works the same way when you have a website and when you try to use the Internet to market. It’s not going to help you unless people have your business’s information in their hands- and the only way to get it into their hands is to be found on the first page of the search results (organically or through PPC ads). Continue reading →

Posted on April 4th, 2012 by Site Admin in Internet Marketing, marketing mistakes, Search Engines, SEO, Small Business / Tagged business, front page, Internet, marketing, online, results, search engines / Leave a comment

Top Internet Marketing Blogs: 2012 Edition

Here at The Internet Time Machine, our goal is to provide our readers with up to date and useful information on Internet marketing, social media marketing, PPC Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and SEO. However, there is a world of awesome information regarding Internet marketing and related subject matters out there that shouldn’t be missed. For that reason, we’ve developed our list of the top Internet marketing blogs: 2012 edition. If you tuned into 2010′s list, you may see some familiar faces or blogs that didn’t make the cut a couple of years ago.

In no particular order, here are the top Internet marketing blogs: 2012 edition.

Copyblogger: Copyblogger has been a huge name in the online marketing and blogging industry for several years and with good reason. Not only do they provide excellent information, but they cover several areas of Internet marketing, including content marketing, SEO, email marketing, keyword research and copywriting. Internet marketing doesn’t simply consist of one fact and Copyblogger understands that and covers all facets quite well.

Search Engine Land: Search Engine Land takes on all things search; search engine marketing and search engine issues. Also tossed in there is information and tips pertaining to social media. It’s a comprehensive blog and a must read if you want to find out the latest search engine news, want to know how to improve SEO or want to know the best way of going about marketing in the search engines. Continue reading →

Posted on April 2nd, 2012 by Site Admin in Blogging, Internet Marketing, marketing tips, Small Business / Tagged 2012, blogs, internet marketing, marketing blogs, online marketing / Leave a comment