Category Archives: Monetization

Reviews are massively important for online sales. A buyer on Amazon, for instance, may not even click on a product with less than four stars, much less read the reviews to find out if they seem legitimate. The fact that the product got some negative reviews is enough to push them into looking elsewhere. Meanwhile, someone who sees a product with five stars may buy it without doing much research. They trust that the other users have already done the research and reported on using the product, so they don't have to. That's not to say that reviews and stars are the only ways to sell your products, but you can't ignore how much of a difference they make.

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You started using social media before you even owned a business, as a simple way to keep in touch with your friends. Now that you run your own company, though, it's impossible to deny the potential that it gives you. You can connect with customers and consumers, post ads, use text, images and videos, and find an audience that is already interested in your products -- no matter where you are physically located. It's a tool that business owners from previous generations would have absolutely loved. However, that doesn't make it impossible to fail. You still need to know what steps to take and what mistakes to avoid so that you get the most out of your social media profile.

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You have a stunning website. It showcases your products, it answers some of the questions people have, it includes a call-to-action to create sales and it helps establish your brand’s identity. You’re about ready to launch the site. There’s just one thing left to do: create a contact page. If customers -- or prospective customers -- want to get in touch with you, it needs to be easy for them to do so. Any level of confusion can push them away. But, some forms of communication may be better than others. So, is it better to use email or a phone number on that contact page?

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For many online marketing divisions, the click-through rate (CTR) may be the most important measure of success. Getting that search result in front of people is just the first step. Once you get your link onto the first page of the search results -- after all, most users never even get to the second page, much less results that are even further down -- you still need to get people to actually click that link and visit your site. Then the game shifts to trying to increase dwell times and keep them on the site, giving you a chance to make a sale. Your conversion rate is calculated by looking at what percentage of visitors make a purchase.

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It's easy to get pulled into the trap of thinking of search engines like Google as nothing more than computer systems that you need to appease with your content. You start thinking exclusively about statistics and numbers: how many keywords to use, how to break them up, what the ideal word count looks like, where you should put your links, etc. And let's be clear: All of this does matter. It's all an important part of SEO, and it's a complex process to get it right. But don't think that these details are all that matter, as if you can write any content you want and rank well as long as you check off the right boxes. The quality of your content still matters.

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