It has been a while since I last blogged… was really busy with my offline business and some new product online launches. Now, finally I am back with a new blog post.

If you have bought Perry Marshall (he is the world number 1 Google Adwords guru) book: Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords, you may find the title of this blog post familiar. Recently, I took some time to re-read the book again and true enough, I gained new insights by reading a book for the second time.

“Those who test will fly, those who rely on brute force will die” is a perfect lesson for all of us if we want to make good money online. The reason Perry has this thought is because of the success that Wright brothers achieved in year 1903. Yes, everyone knows that the Wright brothers are the first in flight. But do you know that just weeks before the Wright brothers were to fly the world’s first airplane, there is a man named Samuel Pierpont Langley who was launching an airplane of his own, with the assistance of an entire staff.

Langley thought that by putting a big enough engine on the glide, the plane will fly. He was wrong. The plane crashed immediately after leaving the launching pad, badly damaging the front wing. Langley did tried a second time and the results was the same. The plane crashed almost immediately. After he was ridiculed by the press, he abandoned his vision and 3 years later, Langley died a broken and disappointed man.

Meanwhile, the Wright brothers had a completely different approach to build a plane. They believed that the gliders must be good enough to glide from a hilltop without an engine. Only after the gliders were able to glide from a hilltop with no engine, they would try to put an engine to it. So after years of experimentation, when they saw that the glider is working fine, they went to build the smallest engine and put it on the glider.

And just eight days after Langley’s second failed attempt, the Wright brothers made history whereas few people even know about Langley. So what does this historical story going to do with internet marketing and making money online?

If you have been doing internet marketing for a while, I believe you know that traffic is the most vital element if you want to succeed online. And one of the best places to get traffic is from search engines. The search engine is the motor. Your website is the glider. An engine without a good set of wings will not work. When you place an engine on a glider that can work on its own, you have a plane. Driving traffic to a website that cannot convert will not work. When you feed traffic to a website that can convert, you have a business.

As I ran an online marketing agency offline, I have met countless clients that want all the traffic in the world but completely neglect their websites. If your website is not good enough, no matter how much traffic you drive, you won’t make it. Therefore, it is extremely important to test the various elements of your websites (such as the headline, opt-in form, your offer, etc) and increase the conversion rate of the page.

Start testing small and gain insights about your market and traffic. Make minor improvements step-by-step and one day, you will definitely have a profitable online business. When you have a persuasive website, you have a glider. When you have a glider, you just need to place a small engine on it and you can fly.  Add Google or search engine traffic to a persuasive website, you will have a business that can soar.

That’s all for today. Hope that with this post, you now understand the importance of testing your page and improve the conversion rate of your website.

P.S: Some resources you may find useful:

1) Google Website Optimizer - Free tool to split test your web pages

2) The Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate

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Pay per click advertising is one of the best marketing channels to stretch your marketing dollars. For pay per click advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ads and visits your website - this means that you will only pay for traffic rather than impressions.

Other than stretching your marketing dollars, pay per click advertising also allows you to create a strong branding for your company. If you are providing a professional service such as air-con repair, you will want your advertisement to show up on Google and Yahoo when your target audience search for “Aircon Repair”. If your competitors are showing up on first page of search engines and your company is not, you are losing branding, online traffic and sales to your competitors.

When we create pay per click campaigns for our clients, we always bear the 6 golden rules in mind:

1. Always conduct research and competitor analysis. Before the start of a pay per click campaign, you should conduct a thorough research of your target market. It is important to find out your target consumer’s behavioural and consumption patterns in your industry. You should also find out how your competitors are performing on the search engines. Type in a few keywords on Google that are closely related to your products and services to see who you will be competing with.

2. Always set the campaign objective. Is your pay per click campaign meant to increase enquiry through an online form? Or are you running an e-commerce business that focuses on online sales? You need to determine the campaign objective so that you can create compelling advertisements to get the results that you desire.

3. Always build targeted keyword list. Not every keyword is useful to your pay per click campaign. You need to conduct a research and build up a list of targeted keywords. If your business sells products directly online (like cameras, books, etc), do not forget to target product-related keywords. People will usually type in the model number or the product name in search engines when they are in the buying process, so you may want to make sure that when they search, they can see your ads that are relevant to the keyword.

4. Always run tests. Once your campaign is up and running, you need to test the performance of your advertisements. Always split test your advertisements so that you can delete the loser and create a better advertisement to increase click-through-rate.

5. Always track performance of campaign. You should monitor your campaign closely. In pay per click advertising, your competitors will always bid a higher price to outrank your advertisements. So you need to make sure that you are kept in the loop. Also, delete keywords that do not bring you much traffic and add in new powerful keywords to drive more traffic to your website.

6. Always conduct a review after campaign. At the end of a campaign, you should always conduct a review on the performance of the campaign. Find out which area you can improve on and learn from any mistake that you make during the campaign.

When done right, pay per click advertising is definitely a great marketing channel for a business. Stretch your advertising dollars today!

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Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic. Especially when you submit your articles to popular article directories like EzineArticles.com, you’re going to get a huge amount of traffic directly from the site itself. But you can get more out from your articles. The key is to optimize your articles and make them achieve high organic rankings on search engines for important keywords.

Now, let me share with you a few tips to optimize your articles:

1. Place the most important keyword in the Title of your articles. The keyword should appear right at the beginning of the title. You should try mention the keyword at least twice in the title of your article. To avoid spam, you can use different variations of the keyword in your title. If the keyword you want to optimize is search engine optimization, an example will be something like this: “Search Engine Optimization - 8 Search Marketing Tips to Make Your Site Sky-Rocket to the Top”.
2. Mention the keywords in the first and last paragraph of your article. Don’t forget about this.
3. Submit your articles to social bookmarking sites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are very popular social bookmarking sites with high traffic. Once your articles are live, you should bookmark them. Also, remember to send post them on Twitter too.
4. Identify the most popular article and create even more back links to it. After a week, you should be able to see which article performed the best. The next thing you should do is to write even more articles and in the author resource boxes, place a link back to the most popular article.
5. Use other effective methods to create more back links to your articles. Other effective methods to create back links are blog commenting, forum marketing and creating Squidoo lens.

Remember, you should always create back links for the best articles. When you write a lot of articles, there will be hits and misses. Don’t spend time dwelling on the misses. Concentrate your energy and effort on the hits.

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If you are using Google Adwords to promote your website or affiliate products, this blog post will be very useful to you. In Adwords, if you can increase the CTR (click-through-rate) of your campaign, Google will reward you with a better Quality Score.

With better Quality Score, you are going to pay lesser per click for each keyword. This will make your Adwords campaign more profitable.

One effective way to improve CTR and Quality Score is the Peel and Stick Adwords Strategy.

When you run an Adwords campaign, you will usually categorize the keywords into different ad groups. After some time goes by, you will notice that some of your keywords get more clicks than the other. They are performing much better than you expected.

This is the time to apply the Peel and Stick strategy. For the keywords that are getting you more clicks than you expected, you will want to “peel” and “stick” them into their own ad groups. It is something like copy and paste.

By doing so, you can write ads that are very specific to these keywords which will greatly increase your CTR. With higher CTR, Google will reward you with good Quality Score and lower the price you are going to pay per click.

You can apply Peel and Stick within the next few minutes and increase your profit margin right away.

Talk to you soon.

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Have you met the latest affiliate marketing sensation PotPieGirl yet? She is a mum to 4 kids and still found time to build a 6 figure income online.

Who is PotPieGirl? She is a work-from-home mum with 4 kids who made 6 figure income online.

PotPieGirl has a really easy to understand one week marketing course that she will share with you how she stumbled upon the exact steps to make $154,819.96 a year as a super affiliate. Check out PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing here.

The most amazing thing is that she actually found the time to build a 6 figure online empire while taking care of 4 kids.  How did this girl do it?

Whether you are an aspiring affiliate marketer, work-from-home mom, or experienced internet marketer, you should check out PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing Course. She’s not pulling our legs.

Click here –> PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing

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