Sunday, 3 April 2016

7 Tricks of Online Surveys You Should Know

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An online survey is an excellent tool for sourcing vital information directly from a wide audience, with ease and convenience. Yet, despite how easy surveys appear, there is always room for improvement! The idea is to create and implement a well-rounded survey that is simple, easy to understand and yet, packs the punch for your business needs. Here are some important tips and tools that help you get the best out of your online surveys.
1 Avoid long surveys:
One of the benefits of online surveys is that the response is nearly instant, thereby reducing the time taken to collect responses. Businesses tend to exploit this advantage and stretch the length of their online survey with the assumption that respondents do not mind spending time on their surveys. However, just as you hate waiting in a long queue, a long survey tends to bore your online respondents. They may simply drop out or quit responding half-way, stop responding with interest, or worse, get disgruntled and never take up another survey from your brand. Designing a survey and finding the right respondents is resource-crunching; keep your online surveys crisp and to the point to avoid high respondent drop-out rates. A respondent should take no longer than ten minutes to complete your online survey.
2 Ensure consistency in coded values:
Each survey response or option is assigned a numeric code or value that is useful in computing mean, median, range, variance and other analytical calculation on the data that is collected. To ensure accurate computation, values must be coded following a consistent methodology. Typically, the highest value is assigned to the best or most positive outcome and so on. It is a best practice to keep the direction of the scale and the scale points consistent throughout the survey. Ensure that the coding is done accurately, as online responses get recorded automatically into the survey repository of database.
3 Irrelevant questions are a survey faux-pas!:
Irrelevant questions can frustrate your respondents. Employ question routing and survey logic features available on online survey portals or survey creation websites to redirect respondents to questions that are relevant to them or the responses that they had previously provided.
4 Be flexible with your designs:
Online surveys enable creativity to be incorporated into your questionnaires, as compared to traditional print surveys. You can create complex surveys with ease and conduct them through the internet. Mix various types of response formats - close-ended, open-ended, rating scales and so on - to keep your questionnaire interesting to your respondents and to evoke different types of responses from them.
5 Explore free online survey tools:
There is no dearth of free online survey tools! Explore various options and figure out what works best for you in terms of features, flexibility, number of questions and so on. Some of the popular free online survey tools include Survey Monkey, Qualtrics, Google Forms, Typeform and Survey Planet
6 Test your survey:
There are chances that your survey has not been formatted right, or your question routing and survey logic is not on point. Always do test runs on a small sample of people who are willing to help you out; this way you can identify any areas for improvement and polish your survey so that when your respondents receive it, you are sure that they will provide answers in the right format and to the right questions.
7 Place surveys strategically:
Online is probably the only place where surveys can be placed strategically to target a specific audience. For example, you can serve a survey on all people who exit your website after a download, or after buying a certain category of products or after consuming a particular type of content. This feature can help you keep your survey questions specific to derive a specific buying behaviour.
Online surveys work great if you seek to reach a large respondent base. Remember to keep your survey short, simple and to the point, so that you reduce your drop-out rates and get the most out of your investment in designing and implementing the survey.
I am an early adopter and an expert in Digital Business Analysis. Experienced in Inbound Marketing and skilled in Business Development

Why Email Newsletters Are a Powerful Marketing Strategy?

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A newsletter is the most valuable and cost-effective marketing tool today to build new relationships and market your business. Especially for registered dietitians, nutritionists and fitness experts, sending a nutrition newsletter monthly helps maintain regular contact with their clients.
Developing a newsletter is one of the smartest investments a business can make. For one, it's a great way of promoting the business' name as well as attract and retain existing and potential customers. However, at first glance, one might feel discouraged at the idea of developing a professional newsletter. After all, designing and creating an email nutrition newsletter as a marketing tool takes a lot of time and effort. It involves knowledge of design and most importantly the availability of rich, informative content.
Readymade newsletter templates
The solution lies in ready-made newsletter templates that contain all the components of a newsletter design from layout, color, matching fonts and so on. You do not need to be tech-savvy in order to create a newsletter design. Select a newsletter template and customize it according to your business header, logo and color and you are ready with a great marketing tool in just a matter of few minutes.
Well-written and informative content
The undeniable fact is that nowadays people are bombarded with all types of emails, newsletters and other forms of advertising. Your target audience has a short attention span. On Internet, readers scan for content that interests them rather than read. You need to stand out and grab the attention of your audience within that short span of time with rich, informative content.
Superfluous content will add no value to your email newsletter marketing strategy. In fact, all your efforts will go down the drain, if your newsletter doesn't provide relevant content.
Take help of ready-made newsletter content
The most common challenge most people face is that they simply do not have the time to write the newsletter content. Or they have to struggle with the idea of writing it. The quick solution lies in using customized newsletter content that provides access to prewritten articles which you can integrate directly into your email newsletters.
For instance, a nutritionist or a dietitian can incorporate articles on varied health related topics such as nutrition, yoga, weight management in their nutrition newsletters and send it to their clients right away.
The readily available nutritional information makes it convenient for health experts to regularly send scheduled nutrition newsletter to potential customers without worrying about the content part. You just need to click on the nutritional article you want and your nutrition newsletter is ready to be delivered.
Use email marketing solution
Take advantage of an email marketing program that makes sending newsletters a convenient process. Email marketing services let you manage subscribers list, add new subscribers, send email newsletters, view and track results easily.
Combined with readymade newsletter content, design and email marketing program, you can launch an effective and successful email marketing campaign with just a few clicks. Such ready-made newsletter tools are worth the money for making your email newsletter campaign a successful marketing strategy.
Anne Gill, would love to talk about Customized Nutrition Newsletters, an effective email newsletters tool, specially designed for nutritionists, dietitians, health and wellness experts and companies.

Saturday, 2 April 2016

Some Tips To Keep In Mind While Registering Your Domain Name

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Expert Author Shweta Singh
Here are a few tips and considerations for you to keep in mind when it comes to domain name registration. Remember, once you settle on a domain name, it is going to be very expensive and difficult to change it.
Keyword or business name?
There are advantages and disadvantages of going with both these choices.
A keyword will rank better with search engines since it is relevant to the product or service you are offering. A visitor will most probably click on domain names which describe what they're looking for as opposed to a brand which they may or may not have heard about. Keyword domains are great for websites which are dedicated to a particular theme or product. The only problem with keyword domains is that they are going to be very hard to register since most of the good ones are already taken. Also, they aren't ideal if you are selling multiple products or are looking at enhancing your business further in the future which would make the keyword irrelevant.
When you register your domain name as a business, it means that you can choose to offer additional products or services or change what you are already offering. It's easier to find a memorable name too which will help a lot with your brand's recognition.
Keeping it simple
No matter what you choose to go with, remember to always keep it as simple as possible. If you decide to make your domain name too confusing, visitors might not be able to relate with it and that is never good for business.
Stay away from numbers
When you use a number in your domain name, people will not be able to figure out whether you're using the actual number of are spelling it out. This certainly isn't simple. So try and stay away from numbers in your domain name.
Location
If you're running a business that is in a specific geographical location, try and include the location in the domain name too. But do not include it if it is going to make it too complicated.
Trademarks
When selecting a domain name it is important for you to first check and confirm that the name hasn't been trademarked by someone else already. This'll save you from a lot of unnecessary trouble down the line.
Some final tips:
• Do not use hyphens in your domain name as they can be forgotten easily and do not rank very well as far as search engines are concerned.
• Stick to.com domains since people remember these ones quicker than anything else.
• Keep your domain name as concise and short as you can. The longer the name, the harder it is to remember and the more than chances of it being spelt incorrectly.
• Don't just register the domain name you want. Register a number of variations of the name as well. This will prevent others from registering names that are similar to yours. It doesn't cost too much. And you can re-direct all of them so that they land on your website.
Shweta Singh has been buying and selling websites for the better part of 10 years. She has sold hundreds of websites during this time andregistered countless domains.

Friday, 1 April 2016

Banner Ads Tips And Tricks

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Expert Author Juan A Rademacher
Banner ads are also known as image ads and display ads. These are nothing more than image advertisements that you can't help but run into all over the internet. Banners are cost-effective and a great way to get your business image out there for the masses to see.
Banners have been used since the start of the World Wide Web. It used to be easy to create an attention grabbing banner ad and get easy clicks. However, the internet is much more competitive now, and people want to interact with banners that do more than just grab their attention.
A good banner ad should:
* Be relevant to your web site. Let your customers know just what it is you are marketing, especially if you are looking to gain customers from your marketing niche.
* Be professional. Pictures can say a thousand words: make your graphics and colors pop. Remember, you are running a business, so keep it neat and professional.
Before you start creating your banner ads you need to consider a few options available to you:
Size
Most websites have their own requirements about the size of banner ads. These ads are usually just the regular standard sizes that have been around forever. Just be sure you know what each website requires. You can use a graphic software program like Adobe Flash or Adobe Photoshop to find the correct ad size.
Plan to use two-thirds of your banner for your image (which is your value proposition), and the other third for your call to action.
Create A Strong Title
Your title, or heading, should be an immediate attention grabber. Create a captivating and short heading that reaches out to your niche market. Vary the colors and font sizes of your headings, and make it a valuable part of your ad.
Using Banner Ads Effectively
It makes sense to place banner ads on websites that already generate a lot of traffic. It makes even more sense to place these ads on websites that actually cater to your targeted market.
One nice thing about using banners is that you can easily measure the CTR (click-through rate). If your banner ad has a click-through rate of 7%, then out of a hundred impressions (times the ad was shown), 7 people actually clicked on your link. The higher your percentage, the more clicks you are getting, the more effective your banner ad is. It really is this easy.
Buying Ad Space
Now that you have created the perfect ad banner, it is time to put it to use advertising your website or blog. You could contact individual website and blog owners to discuss prices and terms, but this whole process is really a time-consuming and stressful part of advertising. Most website owners decide to hire an advertising network that helps them with the distribution of these banners.
Find an advertising network that you like. AOL Advertising, BuyAds.com, Google AdWords, and Right Media are just a few of the available networks. Discuss ad sizes with each network to see if your ads are in compliance.
If not, you may want to change them if you choose a company you like that wants something different from what you already have. Making necessary changes before advertising makes the whole process flow smoothly.
Banner ads can be affordable and cost-effective. However, large advertisers can easily spend in the range of $2,000 to $6,000 and higher. The cost of these ads is the main reason you need to create a banner ad that will appeal to a lot of people.
The more clicks you get, the more money you will make. A good banner ad campaign will see you recoup your investment money in no time at all, and hopefully leave you a handsome profit.
My name is Juan Rademacher. I have a keen interest in traffic generation because I find it's one of the greatest stumbling blocks newbies run into. Without traffic you DON'T HAVE an online business. Banner advertising is just one of the traffic options available to you.
To read more about how to generate traffic to your website visit: http://jarwinsmarketing.com/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-website-fast/