Converting your traffic into customers

Traffic? Customers? What’s the difference?

A lot, actually. Erroneously, some people think that traffic = customers which is not always the case. Take for example, Site A. Site A has about a hundred visitor everyday, but no one is buying. So what makes you think that having two hundred or three hundred visitors will bring in the cash flow? In reality, even if you bring in a thousand visitors, if no one converts then there will be no sales.

With that aside, let’s now find out: Does your traffic convert to customers? If you answer barely or no, and that your site is just like Site A above, then its time for some serious re-evaluation. So how do we convert traffic to customers?

1) Relevance
That traffic that you are seeing might just be a result of poor choice of keyword. If you’re into gardening tools and decided to include in your choice of keywords “real estate” and “flower arrangement” then you are in trouble. You must always take into consideration that the keywords that you use should reflect directly what you are into. So instead of real estate, perhaps add the keyword “gardening spades” or “hoes.” The choice is up to you. Just remember that the keyword should be relevant to what you are selling. Not only do you save bandwidth due to wrong traffic, you get more chances of selling your products.

2)Uniqueness
So you sell gardening tools. So does Site B and Site C. Why should I buy from you instead of buying from them? Why should I choose you over the other 2 sites? These questions should be answered in your site in order to create the sense of uniqueness. How are you different from B and C? Once you push the idea that you have more to offer than them, you are getting closer to closing out the deal.

3)Presentation
Make your site easy to navigate and not too cluttered. Also, no one wants a site with broken links, especially if the link happens to be one of the products I am interested in buying. It is important that you continuously check for broken links. Make sure that the product descriptions are perfect and up-to-date. Present data in a simple way. No one wants to read a lot of jargons.

4) Security and Trust
We all know the saying “in the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.” It just goes to show how very little security and trust goes around in the Internet. In order to convert, you must be able to win your audience’s trust. Assure and reassure them about security in your site. One way to do it is by using a merchant credit card processing company that can be quite familiar to your customers. That way, the familiarity with the processing company can increase your customer’s trust.

These are just some of the things you can do in order to transform your visitors to customers. Always remember that your site should facilitate easier transactions and make sure that little or no barrier is present when it comes to product purchasing. Once you have created a site that offers uniqueness, security, presented in a user-friendly way, and caters to the needs of your visitors, they you are on the road towards a successful online business.

How about you? How much of your traffic actually converts into visitors?

Easy Screen Scraping in PHP with the Simple HTML DOM Library

Client-side developers always had it easy - libraries such as jQuery and Prototype make finding elements on the page reliable and efficient. In PHP, regular expressions tend to get rather messy, DOM calls can be confusing and verbose, and often the string functions just aren’t enough. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the middle ground - the open source PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser library, which provides jQuery-grade awesomeness for easy screen scraping without messy regular expressions.

The Simple HTML DOM Parser is implemented as a simple PHP class and a few helper functions. It supports CSS selector style screen scraping (such as in jQuery), can handle invalid HTML, and even provides a familiar interface to manipulate a DOM.

Here’s a sample of simplehtmldom in action:

$html = file_get_dom('http://www.google.com/');   foreach($html->find('a') as $element)     echo $element->href;

This snippet is fairly self explanatory - file_get_dom() is a simple helper function in the library that fetches the page and constructs a new simplehtmldom object around it. Once the object is available, we can easily use simple CSS selectors to find our elements - in this case, anchors - and iterate over them just as we would with PHP 5’s standard DOM classes. (The equivalent code with the standard DOM classes is twice as long.)

But the library doesn’t stop there - as well as traversing the DOM and extracting information, you can also alter it. Consider this snippet:

$html = str_get_html(' 
Hello
 
World
   ');   $html->find('div', 1)->class = 'bar';   $html->find('div[id=hello]', 0)->innertext = 'foo';

The library supports many DOM-style approaches for manipulation, from exposing real attributes as shown here, to a few helper methods. It also includes other methods to traverse the current node -children(), parent(), first_child() and so on.

Real scraping? Easy. Here’s their Slashdot sample:

$html = file_get_html('http://slashdot.org/');   foreach($html->find('div.article') as $article) {     $item['title']     = $article->find('div.title', 0)->plaintext;     $item['intro']    = $article->find('div.intro', 0)->plaintext;     $item['details'] = $article->find('div.details', 0)->plaintext;     $articles[] = $item; }   print_r($articles);

And finally, there’s always a simple save mechanism:

$html->save('altered-dom.html');

Ready to get started? Head over to the project website, online documentation or the project page on SourceForge.

Styling Disabled Buttons / Disabled Text Boxes in CSS

As your forms grow in complexity, you’ll probably find a need to temporarily disable an input - either a button, a text box, or some other element. This is quite easy in HTML - the disabled attribute comes to the rescue. But just how do you style those fields, and convey that they are temporarily disabled?

Let’s consider this standard input field:

Pretty standard stuff. Your web browser will automatically style it a little, but mostly just prevent the user from editing without any real visual hints. But let’s add some basic CSS to convey the state of the input, and to standardise it across our site and on most platforms. If we add the following CSS:

input[disabled] {  border: 1px solid #999;  background-color: #ddd; }

But wait - our demo uses inline styles, but your browser might not have just styled that properly if we used a full CSS declaration. We don’t set a value for the disabled attribute - it’s a minimizedattribute. To get IE to play nicely with it (and for XHTML), we’ll have to set the value to “disabled”:

If possible, just for total compatibility, we can also add a “disabled” class that IE6 will respect and apply styles for correctly.

We can then change the CSS selector we’re using:

input[disabled="disabled"], input.disabled

And we’re done! This works across every major browser - IE6+ and FF1.0+ tested, and Safari 3 / Opera 9.5 should be fine as well. The Sitepoint CSS reference has further information on compatibility, available here.

Finally, if you want to see how Firefox styles disabled fields by default, load up your resource://gre/res/forms.css file (you’ll have to copy and paste it to your address bar). There are a number of lengthy selectors with just a few rules, but here’s the big one, way down the bottom:

button[disabled]:active, button[disabled], input[type="reset"][disabled]:active, input[type="reset"][disabled], input[type="button"][disabled]:active, input[type="button"][disabled], select[disabled] > input[type="button"], select[disabled] > input[type="button"]:active, input[type="submit"][disabled]:active, input[type="submit"][disabled] {   padding: 0px 6px 0px 6px;   border: 2px outset ButtonFace;   color: GrayText;   cursor: inherit; }

GrayText is actually a system color - it’s defined by the CSS 2.1 specification and supported on and off in various browsers. These “special” color keywords are supposed to match the local system styles - on a Windows machine, for instance, Firefox would use the color: GrayText rule to style text in disabled fields with the same color that the local Windows system uses. A list of options is available on the CSS reference as well.

4 Things that can hurt your SEO campaign

Just as there are some things that can bolster the life of your SEO campaign, there are also sure-fire ways on that you could hurt them. Ranging from poor research to misinterpretations, here are 4 things that will surely cause the downfall of your campaign.

1) Have the mentality that SEO is “get-it-running-and-forget-about-it.” No matter how GREAT your SEO campaign is when you started, if you can’t keep up with the trends or competition in your niche, your SEO campaign will crumble eventually. Be alert on what’s currently hot, what keeps the experts talking, and what people are searching for. Remember, what’s great today is history by tomorrow -so be on your toes always.

2) Keywords schmeewords! My first picks are the best! Sure, it may be the best back then. But have you tried doing a key word search nowadays? You may be missing out on great keyword opportunities, or worse, you could be seriously crippling your campaign by leaving your keywords as is.

3) I love images, Flash movies and other multimedia and I’m peppering my site with lots of them! Sure, they look great, but have you given thought about search engines? Spiders sent by search engines can’t crawl graphics, Flash movies, and multimedia. And what spiders can’t read, they can’t index. Think about this when designing your site and make sure you have the right balance.

4) My site is all about everything! No, SEO is not about who has the most number of pages or products in their site, nor is it about who covers more ground. You must find your target niche and work on it. It will save you all the trouble of stuffing your site with almost anything you can get your hands on - relevant or not.

7 Surefire Ways to Earn Respect in the Blogosphere

Respect should be the rock on which your every online relationship should stand. Everyone starts with a small pebble and builds it up to a boulder. Here are some 7 ways on how to gain respect of your peers.

Project a positive attitude.
The way you deal with your readers, clients and your peers will be reflected on your blog. When you write about positive things, people will see that you believe in yourself and your abilities. Manifesting positive attitude will inspire and motivate others. In return, you’ll gain their respect.

Be honest.
Never mislead your readers. Be transparent with everything you write. Remember that writing about the truth is the easiest topic to tackle. Trust and respect always go hand in hand. You must gain their trust first before you earn their respect.

Make your readers feel appreciated.
Be courteous when you correspond with your readers. You should make them feel at home while they’re reading your blog. At anytime, you must not ignore their queries or suggestions. When they praise you for something, a simple thank you will mean a lot to them. That gesture will be embedded in their minds and hearts forever.

Give them the royal treatment.
As stated above, never ignore your readers. Listen to what they have to say. Good or bad, their opinions do matter. If they ask for something, do anything in your powers to give it to them. Exemptions to this rule would be the sun, the stars and your job.

Be available.
Sometimes, your readers will ask email you about certain concerns or they might ask for your business number. Make yourself available for requests like these. Reply as soon as you can. Your clients will respect you when you’re there when they need you.

Your site is your mirror.
Your web site must look professional and businesslike. Maintain a website that is easy to navigate as well. Your web site will reflect your business’ image. This will be what your readers will see you as.

Remember the Golden Rule.
If you’re respectful towards your fellow bloggers, they’ll treat you with the same respect as well. Respect everyone even your competitors. A healthy competition is better than slugging it out with them.

With this simple guide, hopefully you’ll earn enough respect in the blogosphere. So don’t you just sit there, rock out your blog today.

How to sell SEO to the Web Challenged

ABOUT SEO.

1) Dispel the wrong notions of SEO outright.
Believe it or not, there are still those who believe that SEO “will generate sure sales of their products” as soon as you get the site back up and running. Now the problem here is that when they don’t get an increase in sales immediately, the least they can do is to call you a thief or something to that effect. So dispel them right away.

2) Tell your clients what they are buying…. Slowly.
Tell them what SEO is and what it is not. Don’t spew out jargon while explaining. Remember, these are people who don’t know SEO. So don’t go all out and start talking about Result Pages, redirects, keyword density. The idea here is to get the client understand what you are offering him by slowly getting into the details one by one.

a. Explain the Search Engine – So you start with search engines. Don’t even try to attempt to explain what algorithms are, as you would probably met with dazed looks. The best way to go about explaining search engines is by making it clear what they really are and how they arrive with such results, including the ranking. Once you’ve gotten past that hurdle, then it’s time to explain that each search engine is different from one another and that they return different search results.

b. Moving on to Links – “Aren’t these the ones you click on to get to another page?” Well, yeah, but when it comes to SEO, you also have to explain that these links are a factor when it comes to ranking your site on search engines. Now since you will be doing all the SEO work, you don’t have to go through all the topics regarding links. Once you have briefly explained in simple terms why links are important, then you can move on to the next topic which is…

c. Keywords – Quite a simple topic to discuss. Just explain the rudimentary principles behind keywords and how they work hand in hand with search engines. Also, put in the importance of keyword research just to give them an idea about another part of your job if ever they avail of your services.

3) Expect comparisons with traditional advertising
“So why should we avail of SEO services when we have ______ advertising? What would this increase in traffic do to us?” Now here is where it gets tricky. When we asked you earlier to dispel the wrong notions about SEO, it’s because SEO isn’t really an exact science. No SEO expert can really predict the increase in sales being on the top of search engines bring. So how is SEO different from the traditional advertising? With traditional advertising, the potential for generating revenue lasts only as long as the advertising does. In SEO, the effect on revenues goes on and on.

4) Know your audience
Your audience may not be knowledgeable about SEO, but they may be an expert on another field. The key here is to understand that SEO may be filled with jargons and terms, but at its core, it relies on tried and tested principles, the same principles used by traditional marketing. So research and find out what language they use. Try to find out how you can explain SEO using their language and before long, you’d be seeing them bobbing their heads, understanding the things you are talking about. And once they do understand what you are talking about, you are now ready to start talking about the services that you offer.

5) Provide Additional Resources
Create an SEO 101 primer that you’ll give out to new clients. It could be an ebook, video, or printed pamphlet. Make sure to include the following: what the clients should expect, a simplified overview of the working process, as well as additional services you provide. It also helps to provide the client with progress reports throughout the course of the SEO work as this lets them know how far the project has come. When presenting information, try to use easy-to-understand visuals rather than numbers. If you can, present case studies of previous work so that the client has a better idea of what to expect.

How to get private advertisers for your site

Choose Targets Wisely
Before you can start rattling packages that you offer for advertising, you must find your potential advertiser first. Do some research using other blogs or sites that cover the same niche. See who advertises there and add those as potential customers. However, choose wisely. Sure, you deal with computers in your blog, but that doesn’t mean you set your sights to Dell, Hewlett-Packard or IBM as advertisers to your site immediately. For the big fish, you have to build up your reputation. Try to get small companies as your advertisers and once traffic builds up, then you can start moving up the ladder.

It’s time to crunch in some numbers
Once you have your target, it’s time for some number crunching. Private advertisers love to see numbers. One of these numbers is the traffic your site is getting. After all, any self-respecting businessman would want to reach the largest amount of audience as possible with their ads. So show them your traffic numbers in graphs or tables. If you feel you don’t have enough traffic yet, then try to build it up.

Another kind of number that advertisers would want to see would be statistics of your audience, or the demographics. Who accesses your site? Would it be viable for the advertiser to reach your audience? Would their product sell with your audience? Expect these questions and prepare an answer. And most of all, don’t forget the statistics of your site.

Be transparent with what they are getting
The way advertisers think goes very much like “so what do we get in return?” It’s important that you make clear what they get when they sign up as an advertiser. If you can, compile all the necessary data, numbers and if you have specific advertising packages, throw it in for convenience as well.

Once you have established your site’s reputation as a great place to advertise in, advertisers will be knocking on your doorstep regularly. Happy hunting!