If you sell anything through e-commerce, whether it is an intangible offering like an e-book or software or something tangible like a set of golf clubs, you ideally want all of your visitors to buy your product. Goes without saying really, doesn't it?

Of course, that's not likely to happen, yet there are ways to improve your conversion rate. (In case you don't know, the conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to your site that end up taking a desired action, such as purchasing your product. It is not confined to product purchases; sometimes something as simple as an e-zine subscription will suffice.)

You need to optimise your site for doing business. I did this myself using Google's Website Optimiser.

If you have a Google AdWords account, you can access this service. With it, you can develop two or more different sales pages, run them simultaneously, and find out which one gives you more sales per unique viewer. It also tells you when it considers the results to be statistically significant; that is, when enough visitors have accessed your pages to tell which is the better of the two (or more). All you need to do is to add some code to each sales page and the conversion page (the "thank you" page) that Google provides you with.

I'm not going to bore you with all of the details of my "experiments," as they are called, but I am going to talk about one specifically. I designed a new version of a sales page for one of my products that contained video footage shown above the fold (near the top of the page, above the point where people would have to use a scroll bar to find it) that started automatically when the page was loaded. The video is of me using the product; the audio is my voice; and it's basically an infomercial. The original version had a link to a page that provided this content.

The experiment showed that the original version was slightly better, but the specific conversion that I was tracking was sign-ups to one of my mailing lists. The sales page had two desirable actions; a mailing list sign-up for a free edition of the software or a product purchase, and I had set up the experiment to increase sign-ups. However, I noticed that while the experiment was running, actual product sales went through the roof!

This taught me what I now believe to be one of the secrets to successful sales pages. Especially in the internet marketing business, it is quite common to see many long-winded sales pages. I don't know about you, but when I see one of these long pages, it immediately turns me off. I feel like I haven't got a great deal of time to read somebody's long sales pitch, much of which is likely to be bull. However, I will happily sit back and watch a video! It grabs my attention, and it draws me in. Of course, if the video is full of hype, I'll still exit fairly quickly, but if the video shows the product on sale in use and it interests me, I'm far more likely to end up clicking the buy button!

I remember buying a product after seeing an affiliate's video, where he shows how he uses that product. The video was quite a long one; I believe it was quarter of an hour long. Had I just seen the sales page for the product, I doubt that I would have purchased it.

Note that this will only work for some markets. Maybe it won't work very well for golf clubs; I don't know. I believe it will usually work well for software, but as always, your experience may vary. Also note that some experiments will take a long time to run. If the difference between the conversion rates is low, you need more traffic in order to find out which page is best. The time taken to run the experiment will also be inversely proportional to the amount of traffic you get.

If you want to develop some video for your website and you have a software product that you want to video yourself using, I am aware of three alternatives that allow you to do this, two of which are free. The one I have experience of is Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder. You have to validate your copy of Windows to get it. This allows you to produce a WMV file that can be played in Windows Media Player. The disadvantage with this is that it is only likely to be supported by Windows, so anybody who uses a Mac, Linux or anything else non-Windows will not be able to see your video (though using Firefox on Windows is fine).

The other free tool that I am aware of is CamStudio. This is open source, so you can even get your hands on the source code if you need it! I have had a quick play, and if you are showing a typical desktop application then it has a lossless codec and produces better quality output than Windows Media Encoder. Tools are provided to convert the output to SWF (Adobe's Flash format) which is supported by most platforms.

Camtasia Studio is the third offering that I am aware of. It's commercial, and the price is US$299 at the time of writing. I've seen plenty of videos created with Camtasia Studio and they are all good quality. It also has a way of indicating when the mouse button has been clicked, which may be useful where it is not obvious that that has happened! This package supports many different output formats and is likely to be the most flexible. A demo version is available for free. I haven't tried out this package.

You'll need to plan your infomercial, and it's likely that you'll have to do some editing to achieve a good-quality end result; but unless you are used to it, sales pages always seem to take ages anyway. At least, they do for me! My infomercial was about ten minutes long, and it took me about four hours to prepare. I consider that a great investment in time when it won me so much business!

This article © David John Thomas for The Affiliate Marketer.

It's been such a long time since I was last able to find time to write here! I apologise to my regular readers, some of whom have probably lost interest in this site by now.

Today I just wanted to briefly talk about motivation and how it affects the achievement of success in your endeavours. I'm going to be talking about my experiences. The experiences seem to have something in common with writings from some entrepreneurs that I have seen.

Well, it's fairly obvious that you need motivation to succeed in any business endeavour, whether it be online or offline. If you are not motivated, you will run up against problems.

When I started getting into running my own business, it was some years ago, and it was a purely offline pursuit (except that the internet was used for communication purposes such as email). I was already a software engineer and had built up a base of contacts through working as an employee in various places. I did not stop being an employee; I simply completed some projects for people who needed software or embedded firmware written, and the income raised was treated as an adjunct to my regular income.

I accepted voluntary redundancy from my position as an employee in April 2005. Towards the end of my employment, I was given tasks to complete to which I was unsuited and lacking in the required skills, and training opportunities were not provided to me for these specific tasks. This situation had gone on for some months, and I had had enough, so when the opportunity to accept voluntary redundancy came up, I decided to go for it. I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to try next, but I thought I wanted a break from engineering.

Later last year, I tried various different ways of making money on the net. I came across the idea of affiliate marketing and buying traffic through AdSense, and it seemed like an easy way to raise money, until I tried it! I did achieve a small amount of success, but in the end I decided that that particular venture was not what I wanted to do. I know some people make a great deal of money with this approach, but there was not enough in it to interest me; I found it quite boring.

Along the way, I did find out about other ways of making money on the net. I started web publishing, using Google AdSense to make money. I achieved modest success with this approach, and I still do make money from it. I enjoy some aspects of web publishing, but not all of it. In particular, I don't enjoy link building, which is a required step for anybody who wants to achieve high rankings for popular phrases in the search engines.

The next thing I tried came about through pure chance. Somebody made a throwaway comment about a possible Windows application that would benefit people using Google AdWords. I thought that it would be quite easy for me to design the application, and I realised that I could sell copies of it! I designed Keyword Transformer from that, and I started making money as a trader. It was a welcome opportunity to get back into the kind of software engineering that I do enjoy!

I knew that others could easily sell the product for me, so I spent some time setting up a third-party affiliate tracking system, and in that way I was able to make far more money than I could have done alone. It meant that I was making money for other people as well as myself, so I was not just helping myself; I was helping others to make money as well. Part of motivation is seeing that your endeavours are producing fruit, and I made more money in a short space of time with that product than I ever did with AdWords and AdSense.

I then went on to design another product, a limited time offer script, which was a development of a system that I put in place to help market Keyword Transformer. This went on to produce sales and money as well, and being somewhat of a unique niche, I have generated more interest with that product through affiliate marketing than Keyword Transformer.

There are certain things that I am better at, and as I become more successful, I can see that I will be outsourcing some things that I really do not enjoy, such as book-keeping. By setting up an affiliate marketing system, I have already begun to outsource sales. I really like the affiliate marketing model; the amount of money you make is directly proportional to your level of success, and I have even had people that I do not know, and did not contact beforehand, achieve success marketing the limited-time offer script.

If I become a successful entrepreneur, I can see that I will end up just doing the things that I enjoy, and putting out everything else. I will be more motivated because I will be doing what I want to do, and that will lead to greater success.

I certainly get a buzz from days that I make more than I ever would making money as an employee! I haven't had many of those at this stage, but the feeling is great, and it helps a lot with motivation. At present I have a number of subcontract jobs on the go, but I do have plans to design and sell more products; I can make a lot of money doing that, and also increase the prosperity of others.

My advice boils down to the following two things:

1. Once you have achieved a small amount of success in a field that you enjoy, you have probably found a field that you would be well advised to concentrate on, whether it be affiliate marketing, web publishing and advertising, product design, or any other field of endeavour.

2. You can't do it while you are starting out because you don't have the capital or turnover necessary, but once you have started getting a reasonable amount of money through the door, start outsourcing everything that you don't enjoy and/or you're not good at.

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a complicated subject. It's made all the more difficult by the fact that the search engines do not release details of their algorithms. Anyway, I thought I'd write down a list of SEO tips that I know, and hopefully my readers will contribute theirs in the comments. Where techniques are dodgy and might get your site removed from search engine indices, I'll indicate that this is the case.

There are two factors that you can control, and one, on-page factors, is easier than the other, off-page factors. Here are on-page factors that I am aware of:

1. Writing at random doesn't cut it. You need to try to make sure that what you write includes the phrases that you wish to optimise for. For example, in the case of this article, the phrase that I am targeting is "list of SEO tips."
2. Include the phrases that you wish to optimise in the filename of the web page, the title, and as the contents of a <h1> element near the top of the page.
3. Only try to optimise for a small number of phrases.
4. Try to target phrases with limited competition, especially if you do not have a high number of links pointing to your site.
5. Emphasising the phrase within your article helps. For example, putting the phrase in bold, as in list of SEO tips, or in italics may help.
6. Adding relevant images to your page will also help. You need to include the keywords in the alt attribute. To avoid having the page removed from the indices, when doing this, you must make sure that the alt attribute contains an accurate description of the image contents.
7. Linking to other relevant webpages helps, whether these are internal to your site or external site links. For example, this page lists Wordpress SEO tips, and this site lists SEO tips for bloggers. I found these by searching Google for the target phrase. Make sure the pages that you link to are listed in the search engines, and the links will probably be more effective if the pages you link to have some pagerank.
8. When you do all the above, make sure that what you write is primarily intended for human consumption. If you write sentences such as "This article is about SEO tips. We researched many SEO tips to produce it," as you see quite often on various sites, you may rank well in the search engines but that will only be the case for a limited time. As soon as a human reviewer discovers what you have done, your page as a minimum, and possibly your whole site will face a penalty in the relevant search engine.
9. Do not link to "bad neighbourhoods." To identify a site that belongs to a bad neighbourhood, look in the search engines and see if it is listed. For example, to check whether The Affiliate Marketer is listed, you could enter "site:theaffiliatemarketer.net" as your search in Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you allow people to link from your site in any comments that they post, it's wise to include a rel="nofollow" attribute in the link code.
10. It's probably best to make sure that the URL is not nested deeply within your site. Search engines are reputed to partly rank the importance of a page partly by the level it occupies in the hierarchy of your website. If you have a flat hierarchy, you will probably attain higher rankings. For example, /list-of-seo-tips/ is probably better than /2006/08/23/list-of-seo-tips/ would be. You can use .htaccess to redirect accesses to a specific file if you wish to arrange this; that's how Wordpress works.
11. It is known that what the search engines think of as "dynamic" pages are given a lower level of importance in Google than "static" pages. The search engines identify dynamic pages as pages that contain query parameters within the URL, for example, ?articleid=12345. You can use .htaccess to rewrite static URLs to appear as dynamic URLs, and this is one of the things that Wordpress does for you. Any page that contains the query parameter id will not be included in Google's index.
12. "Doorway" pages, i.e. pages that contain content written to rank well in the search engines for specific phrases but redirect human visitors to a different page by the use of Javascript, may get listed, but your site will probably be removed from the search engine indices as soon as somebody finds out about it.
13. Include a tag of the form <meta name="description" content="Whatever the page is about" /> within the <head> element of your page, and try to include the keywords in it. Sometimes the search engines will display this snippet with your page listing, so it is also worth making sure that the description is extremely relevant, and something that is likely to attract a click from the user.
14. Content that changes on a regular basis, while remaining relevant to the search term, will tend to boost your rankings.
15. Try to make sure your page is short, and mainly includes content rather than code. Any styling you have should ideally be placed in a separate cascading style sheet (CSS) file that is linked from your site by the use of an element such as <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/style.css" /> in the head section. I've heard that it will improve your rankings, although I have no direct evidence that this is the case. It will certainly help you save on bandwidth costs, if nothing else!

Off-page factors include the following:

1. Links to your site! One-way links, i.e. links to sites with which you have not reciprocated, are more valuable than reciprocal links for this purpose. The more you have, the higher in the search engine results will be your
2. Links to the specific page you want to rank.
3. The anchor text, i.e. the text contained within the <a> element that links to your site, should be similar to the phrase for which you would like to rank.
4. Links to your site are generally only useful if they are links directly specified as <a> elements within the source code. If they are constructed by Javascript, they probably won't help your rankings.
5. Make sure that whatever techniques you use to "entice" people to link to your site, such as article marketing or reciprocal linking, that you do not just use the same keyword for all links pointing to your site. The search engines are trying to use links as natural "votes" for your site; if you are artificially causing all links to contain the same anchor text then that can cause the page to be penalised, and it's something that can be checked for by the search engines automatically.

One other tip that I have is to regularly read resources such as Matt Cutts' blog "Gadgets, Google, and SEO", and Dr Andy Williams' ez SEO Blog. The search engine world changes every now and again, and you need to keep abreast of the changes if you are using SEO to generate visitors and revenue (and why else would you be using SEO).

That's it for now; brain dump over. Please add to the list of SEO tips in the comments!

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer