WebSoul Designs donates web site to Parkinson's Cause

WebSoul Designs, Inc. donates 90% of the cost to develop a web site for Jesus Caparo. Jesus Caparo is a Cuban American 47 year old man diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
The objective of the web site is to obtain donations for his medical expenses. The operation is about 65k dollars. Visit the web site JesusCaparo.com and donate.

LePetBoutique.com launches successful E-Commerce Pet Web Site

LePetBoutique.com, owned by Mr. Raul Cabral, launches a successful E-Commerce Web Site. LePetBoutique.com sells unique products for pets: from accesories such as dog tags to vitamins, you can find all your pet needs at LePetBoutique.com.

WebSoul Designs, Inc. configured an osCommerce platform for LePetBoutique.com.

Tracking and Monitoring Web Marketing Efforts

If you think that your Web Marketing Campaign does not need tweaking, you are wrong. Every Web Marketing Campaign needs to be closely monitored and adjusted constantly as trends change in matter of minutes. You need to be able to track your efforts but more important you need to know what to track!

WHAT TO TRACK

When running web marketing campaigns, you need to track the following:

• web sites your visitors come from
• the pages they land on
• the pages they exit from
• keywords used to get to your web site
• time spent on site
• total amount of pages visited
• Call to actions executed

These are just to name a few, the more data you have, the more knowledgeable on how you are attracting visitors and what they do once they are in your web site. Once you master that data, you can then make changes to your web marketing campaign to either invest more on what works and/or modify it to change strategies.

TRACKING TECHNIQUES

There are several tracking techniques that you can use to better monitor your web marketing campaign. You can create custom Landing Pages or even custom Landing Web Sites. You can also implement questionnaires on how they heard about your web site, products or services. Web site redirects can also be used to know where your visitors come from.

Convert web users into clients

Now that you have made a good impression, your web site is usable and offers unique and attractive content, now it is time to persuade them to take action. In order to do that, we need to make sure users trust your web site and that strong call to actions are very well placed through out your web site.
Converting web users into clients or leads is where the magic happens. If your web site is unable to convert anyone, then you are in trouble.
Means to converting a web user are endless, these are some:

• Purchase a product
• Filling out a Sales form
• Downloading some free material, etc.

TRUST

A web site needs to look trust worthy. The use of excessive banner ads will dramatically reduce the chances of someone trusting you with their credit card. People are terrified of Identity Theft, having a strong secure checkout or password protection can help put their minds at ease.

• No Pop-ups
• No excesive banners
• Security above all

CALL TO ACTION

This is where the magic happens. Your web site needs to have strong call to actions in key areas of your web site. Users need to find it easy to understand what to do next:

• Request more information
• Purchase now, etc

But these call to actions need to be reinforced with additional incentives such as:

• Purchase now and receive 10% off
• Chat with one of our Specialists and receive a free gift
• Register for our newsletters and receive free tickets to a movie

Use a clear and strong "call to action" at the end of every page on your web site or where you think it's best suitable. Build trust and a professional image through your web site, but do not lose track of your main objective which is make your visitor do exactly what you want them to do.

How to keep users in your web site

Generating traffic to your web site is one thing, keeping users from leaving your web site is another. But, as much as we want to keep users from not leaving, they will.
Web users tend to jump from web site to web site looking for the best looking, more organized and more reliable source and even if you meet all of those, most of them will leave. The problem to solve is to make them come back and keep them in the site.

WEB DESIGN

A web site needs to have a good look & feel. It needs to appeal to your audience. It needs a good navigation structure; Users need to be able to find their way around fast and easy.

• Eye Candy
• User friendly

CONTENT

If users are interested on what you are offering, they will return again and again, but if they realize that the web site does not change, they will stop coming back. Many web sites are never updated, therefore never re-visited. And, who would want to visit a web site that never changes, there is no point in that. Keeping your web site up-to-date lets your visitors know that you are serious about your business. But do not get carried away, there are billions of web sites and users have less patience in finding out what your message is all about, keep it simple, keep it light, keep it fun! 30 seconds is a looooonnnnng time.

• Regular updates
• Fun

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

An understanding of the needs and goals of your visitors is the best way to ensure your efforts are effective. Keyword reports will allow you to better understand the interests of your visitors. Are they finding what they want? What are the pages that they leave mostly. From what pages are they registering from? What pages are your users relating to more? In order to truly know your audience, all of these questions need to be answered.

• Visitor's Statistics

INTERACTION

Web to User interaction is a great way to increase user's retention. Create a Message Board and allow users to discuss about topics related to your field, to praise about your products or services or even handle complaints. Newsletters registrations are also a great way of interacting with the web site. Having a chat solution for inmediate assistance is also a great feature to have. This increases trust and defenetly increases chances of users staying on the web site.

• Message Boards
• Newsletters registrations
• Online Support/Chat Support

Drive traffic to your site

There are many ways to drive traffic to your web site. Some will be for free, and some will cost you money. Below you'll find legitimate ways to boost the number of visitors to your website.

Web Design

Although looks are very important, your web site does not need to be eye candy for the user but eye candy for search engines. That is done by having a well structured web design.

• HTML Structure: Pass all HTML, CSS validations

Content

Content is one of the most important components on attracting visitors to your web site. When writing content, focus on Keywords. Make sure the keywords you choose flow smoothly within your content. Also, do not copy and paste from other web sites, be original, that's what visitors look for, originality. Keep your content alive, do not write a few pages and then forget about your web site, keep it fresh. Making sure that your web site has the right content and that it continuously grows will increase your page ranking on Search Engines.
Make sure the content is:

• Keyword Oriented
• Original
• Fresh and in Constant Growth

Search Engine Submission

And how important is Search Engine Submission? of utmost importance!!! Traffic is generated mainly by Search Engines, if your web site is not listed in them, no one will know your web site exists. For a list of the Most Popular Search Engines, please visit http://searchenginewatch.com/2156221

Link Exchange

Find partners on a similar niche and exchange links. Exchanging links with high ranking web sites will help your own ranking but be careful who you link to, bad sites can also hurt you. Don't over do it!

Backlinks

Backlinks are vital to the success of a Web Marketing campaign. Search Engines, such as Google, increase the relevance of your web site by the amount of backlinks to your web site. Make sure you understand how to create a backlink, do not just create links to your web site, do them right. Creating backlinks is a tedious task but it must be done. Do not get discouraged if they do not work right away, be patient. Below are some places where you can place backlinks:

• On Blogs/Forums web sites
• Classfied ad web sites
• Article web sites
• Message Boards
• Online Communities

Paid Advertisement

Paid Advertisement is an easy way of generating traffic to your web site. You can open an account with Google Adwords and start seeing results right away, just be sure you don't over do it, this can be costly.

• Pay Per Click
• Directory listings

cost per acquisition

Cost per acquisition is where you pay for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement. This is a great way to drive traffic to specific products or services. You only pay when the action you need is performed.

Web Marketing

Web Marketing, also referred to as Internet Marketing, i-marketing, online marketing, or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the web.

Businesses and organizations have different goals and purposes but most would like to achieve the following:

• Increase online visibility/exposure
• Drive traffic to their web sites
• Convert traffic into qualified prospects/leads

These days, a company's web site is the hub of any marketing campaign. Mostly every Ad on any medium has a URL on it.

Components

In order to run a successful Web Marketing Campaign, it is necessary to cover four major components:

• Attraction: Drive traffic to your site
• Retention: Keep users in your site
• Conversion: Convert users into clients or qualified prospects/leads
• Measurement: Monitor campaigns successes/failures for further improvement

There are several techniques and tools to achieve any or all of the Web Marketing Components above.

Advantages

• Cost: when compared to the ratio of cost against the reach of the target audience, Web Marketing is relatively inexpensive.
• Informatative: The nature of the medium allows consumers to research and purchase products and services at their own convenience.
• Measurement: Web Marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively.
• Accountability: Web Marketing can offer a greater sense of accountability for advertisers.

Limitations

• New Technoloy: Web Marketing requires customers to use newer technologies rather than traditional media.
• Internet Speed: Low-speed Internet connections are another barrier.
• Experience: From the buyer's perspective, the inability of shoppers to touch, smell, taste or "try on" tangible goods before making an online purchase can be limiting.

In Summary, Web Marketing is the general term for a cost effective way of generating web exposure of products & services by providing extensive informational resources to web users and converting them to clients/prospects while monitoring the campaigns in real time to quickly change directions, if needed.

How to Create Backlinks

A simple text backlink:

<a href="http://www.google.com">Best Search Engine</a>

which translates to:

Best Search Engine

A text backlink in a paragraph:

Last year I was asked to do a little bit of research on which search engines were the most popular and which one was the <a href="http://www.google.com">Best Search Engine</a>. I found out that Google was the best.

which translates to:

Last year I was asked to do a little bit of research on which search engines were the most popular and which one was the Best Search Engine. I found out that Google was the best.


A simple image backlink:

<a href="http://www.google.com"><img src="http://www.searchviews.com/wp-content/themes/clean-copy-full-3-column-1/images/google-logo.jpg" width="200" border="0" alt="Best Search Engine" title="Best Search Engine"/></a>

which translates to:



If you hover over the image above, you will see that it displays a text over the image.