Tables were skewed, pictures half covered up, the drop down navigation didn’t work, etc.

I actually thought this guy was playing a trick on me — no one would EVER take this site seriously.

When I commented to the client that his little joke was “very funny,” I quickly found out that this was no joke.  That was his REAL site.

After talking to him a few minutes and pulling the site up in other browsers, it didn’t take too long to figure out that he was having some serious browser compatibility problems.  He had built the site for Internet Explorer, and it was a work of art in that browser platform, but it was all messed up on nearly every other browser I tried.

Despite all the advances of internet technology, all browsers are still not created equal when it comes to how your site is viewed.  Browser incompatibility represents a huge challenge for anyone building a website.  Browser compatibility issues can affect your images, JavaScript functions, style sheets, links, navigation, and page layout.

AND it can totally kill your website profits and subscription rates!

Internet explorer, for example, tries to figure out what you meant to put in your code and fills in the blanks.  In other words, if you’ve used incorrect HTML code in your webpage, Explorer will try to make the corrections or fill in the blanks resulting in a page layout that may not be what you intended.

So obviously, you’ve got to address this issue with your website — Which can be a total pain in the rear.

Your first stop should be to check your website in a variety of browsers.  There’s three ways you can go about checking browser compatibility:

1.  Download and install all those browsers onto your computer and view your website in each browser.  This would be a total pain in the neck and totally unnecessary.

2.  Purchase browser compatibility software or a service.  There are lots of great services out there to choose from if you Google it.  I wouldn’t suggest this option unless you have a lot of websites or your build websites for your clients.

3.  Use a free service online like www.browsershots.org.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you don’t really need to check your website in every browser in existence on the planet — that would be ridiculous!

The last time I checked, 99.2% of internet users only used seven browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6- 14.9%
• Internet Exploere 7 – 18.7%
• Internet Exploere 8 – 7.1%
• Firefox – 47.3%
• Google Chrome – 6%
• Safari – 3.1%
• Opera – 2.1%

Of course, these numbers change as new browsers come on the market, but it’s a pretty good place to start.

So I guess that I’m suggesting that even though technology continues to improve, browser compatibility STILL matters and you should definitely check your websites for compatibility!

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Increase your sales

1. Nail Your Niche

I’m sure that you already know what a niche is and that it’s important in your business, so I won’t belabor the point here. Design your web site to be a targeted resource center for your niche market. You’ll gain repeat visitors that are interested in that topic and increase your sales overall.

2. Fabricate REAL Freebies

Freebies are a great way to give people a taste of what you have to offer, gain traffic, and increase subscribers, but it must truly be free to work.  Otherwise it destroys your credibility and will actually reduce the number of sales you get.

Worse still is when people offer freebies that are total garbage full of affiliate links.  Make your offer genuine and you’ll improve your bottom line.

3.  Lasso Leads

Websites prove to be excellent lead generation tools and you’re missing a lot of sales if you aren’t working to capture leads for your business.  Appropriately marketing your products and services to your permission based leads can increase your sales tremendously.

4.  Track Your Traffic

Visitor analysis and complete website tracking is extremely important for any online venture.  It’s the only way to track what’s working and what isn’t for your business.

5.  Elevate Emotions

When creating sales pages and promotional materials for your products and services, be sure to engage the reader’s emotions.  Triggering your reader’s emotions will always increase your sales.

6.  Design For Dollars

When it comes to generating revenue with a website, you’ve got to design your site to make money.  It should be compatible with all the popular browsers, engage your target audience, and lead visitors by the hand to make a purchase.  Your website design should have one goal and one goal only — make the sale.

7.  Pen A Plan

Sit down and write a plan for how your website will generate revenue and gain targeted traffic.  It doesn’t have to be anything formal, but a marketing plan is a must to increase your sales.  You must plan to profit.

There are tons of other strategies that will help you increase your sales, but this basic list is a great place to get started.

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As an affiliate, it looked like a good deal.

Just send targeted visitors to the sales page and make one sale for every sixteen or so visitors you send them.

So, I started working on my affiliate marketing campaign for the product.  In this case, I decided to use pay per click(PPC) to promote it.  Here’s why I started with PPC:

Read the rest of this post at www.The-Affiliate-Directory.com (one of my other blogs)

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Running up a pretty substantial bill with poor results isn’t hard to do… but most newbies don’t do it on this scale:

“I am very new to this google adsense and posting ads. Last night I wanted to do a “TEST RUN ONLY” for Google to monitor before I could run any ad for my blogger.com. This morning 04/27/2009 I see a cost bill of almost $30,000.00?  Oh my GOD, how could this happen?  PLEASE HELP!  This is a mistake!  Please fix this problem and remove this cost of almost $30,000.00 from my account.  I don’t have that kind of money.  I’m a single mom and I’m not even working.  Please help.  I look forward to your response to my request.”

The quote above came from a Google AdWords Help thread and illustrates just how easy it is to get in trouble with PPC.

That’s why newbies should do their homework before they dive into the deep end of the pool!

Don’t get me wrong, I am sympathetic.  I think it’s really sad that this poor woman probably saw some kind of rhetoric online about how easy it was to make money with Google Adwords and jumped right in.

You can make money with Adwords, if you:

• Promote the right product
• Use the right keywords
• Learn to write great ads
• Pre-qualify people before they click
• Test and track everything you do

At the very least, learn how to set campaign limits in your account so you don’t rack up the bucks like this!!!

PPC is not for the faint of heart or those who don’t know what they’re doing.  You’ll lose your shirt if you don’t get a little basic education first.

If you seriously want to learn more about how to run a profitable Google Adwards program, then I highly recommend The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall.  I own it and thinks it’s absolutely excellent!

However, I’m also a realist and know that most of the people who need the information in Perry’s book won’t actually go out and get the book.

My Free Gift To Subscribers

That’s why I’m also offering my subscribers a free gift:

Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click Basics

This is a six part video series that explains all the basics of setting up an AdWords campaign so that you don’t get taken to the cleaners like the poor woman we talked about earlier.

This video course currently sells on other sites for $27, but I’m giving it away free to my subscribers.

One Warning: These aren’t my videos.  I didn’t produce them.  I have watched them, however, and they do provide a good basic foundation for PPC… although they are a bit dry!

In addition, these videos are no substitute to a solid education in PPC and all the tips and tricks to really make money using it.  For a solid education, I still recommend The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords.

If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll receive the download link in you inbox sometime today.  If you’re a new subscriber, send me a direct message on Twitter or through my contact form and I’ll make sure you get the link to the file!

The bottom line… don’t make a $30,000 PPC mistake like this.  Learn the ropes before you jump into AdWords or any other PPC.

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You might be surprised, if you knew.

I found a really great website that will allow you to get a really interesting view of your targeted traffic, how much money they make, what kinds of things your audience is interesting in, other sites that they visit, etc., and all that information is provided for free.

The site is called Quantcast.  Check it out, you might find it a real eye-opener!

What’s even better is that you can also use their tools to check out the targeted audience of your competition!  It’s awesome!

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My purpose was to determine if I’m send out my email messages at the best times for each of my niches. To figure this out, I decided to start by taking a look at my website logs to see what time of day the most people actually visited my website from day to day.

As I started pouring over the statistics for each of my niches, I noticed an interesting and surprising trend…

The highest percentage of visitors to ALL my websites comes at the 1600 hour!

What really surprised me was that the 1600 hour (4:00 in the afternoon) was most popular in both business and non-business niches.

What does this mean?

Initially I was thinking that a 1600 high point made sense because a lot of people are winding down for the day at 4:00 in the afternoon before they head home for the day.  It’s a good time to catch up on email, do a little free surfing, etc.

But then it dawned on me that I’ve got website visitors coming in from all over the world and different time zones.

I even get visitors from Russia and Iran!

They obviously wouldn’t all be winding down their days at 1600 EST.

So that caused me to take a look at what countries my visitors are coming from… and not surprisingly the vast majority of my visitors in all my niches come from the US and Canada (followed closely by UK and Australia) which operate in my time zones.

Bingo!

Now I know the perfect time to send my email messages to my visitors in order to get the maximum click through rate!  It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure it out, just a little statistic sleuthing.

But here’s the really surprising part…

The magic hour for all my niches is 1600.

I don’t really get that because I have websites for stay at home moms, hobby enthusiasts, online business owners, parents, home schoolers, brick and mortar business owners, entrepreneurs, etc., yet the magic hour is still 1600 for all my niches!

What’s even more weird is that when I compare the statistics for different niches, they are nearly identical… usually within a few percentage points of each other.  In other words when I compare the times when people hit my site across different niches, they are nearly identical.

Take a look at the two graphs below taken from two completely different niches.

I’m not sure I understand why, but I can definitely make use of the information.

So, I’m curious… Are you finding that your website has the same magic hour as mine?

Is this just a quirk in my business or does everyone in the English-speaking market have the same magic hour for their websites?

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I wanted to test out the magazine style layout because I liked the idea of a blog looking more like a traditional high-end website, while still being able to use the traditional wordpress content management. WordPress makes it sooo easy to manage your content… I love that!

Before I get into the test results, I want to make it clear that I hadn’t really planned to test this because it didn’t occur to me that using either of these blog layouts would make THAT much difference. After all, both types were professionally designed and looked pretty good.

In fact, I didn’t expect there to be any difference at all… then I started comparing the site stats for each layout type over several different niches.

The bounce rates were significantly different!

The magazine style blog layout averaged a bounce rate of 76.06%

The traditional blog layout average a bounce rate of 11.51% (This blog currently has a 11.42% bounce rate)

Just to give you some background… experts indicate that non-blog websites should aim for a bounce rate of under 30% and blogs for a bounce rate under 50%.

Also keep in mind that I only compared different blogs in the same niche with roughly the same traffic so that the comparison would be as accurate as possible.

According to my results, the traditional style blog layout with a series of blog posts in chronological order is far more sticky and encourages blog visitor to visit many more pages of the website than the magazine style layouts do.

As you might imagine, I’m now furiously working to convert all my magazine layouts to traditional blogs… but before you start doing the same you should run some of your own tests to see if your results are similar.

My results could be a fluke, especially since I didn’t really plan to test them for bounce rates in the first place!

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In this month’s issue the Cover Story is about landing pages, what they are, how to use targeted landing pages, and how to write really great landing pages. I’m also running a Special Feature about putting website counters on websites… should you have a counter on your homepage?

In addition, we’ll talk about the difference between reporting and being an expert on your blog, continue our series on tips to increase your conversion rates, and discuss why you should be gearing up for the holidays now.

All in all, it’s a pretty full issue, so I hope you’ll take the time to subscribe to receive your copy now at:

http://imarketingwatch.com/answers/

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The general idea here is that you may be able to turn more of your website visitors into subscribers if you can prove to them that many other website visitors have made the same choice. Marc Kline puts it like this:

Just because someone else does something, doesn’t mean you should, does it? Maybe not, but from infancy all the way through adulthood, we take cues from others on what is worth our attention.

To test the theory, Aweber makes it possible to display a chicklet that shows your website visitors how many others are benefiting from your email newsletter… in other words, the chicklet shows your current subscriber count under your subscription form.

It’s a nice little setup because all you have to do is insert the code and Aweber keeps track and maintains your subscriber count for you. No fuss, no hassle.

So I decided to test out the whole social proof theory with a couple of my niche websites that offer newsletters.

To my complete surprise, displaying the subscriber count under the subscription form appears to have increased my subscription rate by 33%!

In fairness, I’ve only been running the chicklet for a month and most of my niches are somewhat cyclical, so it just could be a coincidence… I haven’t suspended the test yet to make sure that the increases are due to the subscriber count display and not to some other factor such as the time of year or other promotions that may increase my subscription rate, but I don’t think this is the case because of the way I tested it.

My results are based on a split test (page A without chicklet and page B with chicklet) and appear to be sound. I don’t think the cyclical nature of the niches in the test really has anything to do with the results and I find the results encouraging so far. Encouraging enough that I’m expanding the test to include more of my niches.

So, why would displaying the subscriber count make more people subscribe themselves?

It really comes down to the whole idea that people prefer to commit to things that others have already committed to and found success. It’s kind of the same idea as putting testimonials on sales pages to show prospects that others have found success with the product and you will too.

Your newsletter or ezine is one of your products, so if you can essentially provide testimony or proof that others have subscribed, it makes sense that it would increase your subscription rate. I agree with Marc Kline when he says:

This social proof might not make everyone want to jump on the bandwagon, but when subscribers are considering why they would want to give up some more time and inbox space to get your email, things like links to a privacy policy and subscriber counts may prove to be the tipping point. Showing your subscriber can help you to boost conversions on your sign up forms.

Anyway you look at it, it’s something worth testing for your own business and it’s another reason why I love Aweber… they are always helping me to be more effective and successful in my email marketing!

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