The most effective sites on the web have tons of repeat visitors and a high conversion rate. If the site is just a brochure where you pitch your products, you will have a high bounce rate and few repeat visitors. Through the proper use of video and a well crafted message, you can fix this problem rather quickly.

One way to optimize your website for repeat visitors is to consider the struggle that someone within your target market is currently dealing with. You can offer some valuable information on how to solve this dilemma. This is generally most effective through the use of video. Video that is engaging and useful will keep visitors on your site longer. This is also a metric Google loves to use.

Many online videos are very short with the content being similar to a television commercial. This is the worst type of video content and is a form of spam. Visitors will click away quickly. Instead, you should implement something that is engaging and will keep your audience watching. If done well, the prospect will be more inclined to purchase your products and services.

Bear in mind, your goal is not to create a Hollywood quality film. That being said, the video should have good sound quality and you should spend considerable time crafting your message. If the video is of the how-to type, the quality should be good enough so that your demonstration is easy to follow.

Background noise is generally a problem with cheap cameras and camcorders. Therefore, you should either find a camera that has a microphone jack. Or, you can record the sound separately with a digital voice recorder. Any good video editing software will enable you to match up the sound with the flow of the video including the movement of your lips.

Don’t let the background noise problem regarding cheap cameras scare you. You can still create a quality video with an inexpensive camera. Just make sure your do your homework. Read the reviews on Amazon and other websites before you buy. Decent cameras start at around $250 which offers more functionality than what professionals were paying thousands of dollars for not too long ago.

Finally, adding a video to your website is really easy. Since a good video has quality content and isn’t spam, you should upload it to YouTube. This does a couple of things. First, the video is stored outside of your website. This will reduce your need for storage and bandwidth. Second, you can include links from your YouTube pages back to your website. This will help you rank higher on search engines. Google and Bing still use links as being the backbone of ranking websites. After the video is uploaded on YouTube, just click the ‘embed’ button on the video page. Then copy and paste the embed code into your website.

QR Codes have recently grown in popularity. Simply put, they are a 2-dimensional bar code. Bar scanners are now accessible for users because most smartphones have access to free apps. They are also free for marketers to generate. You can include them on all of your marketing materials which range from putting them on the back of a business card to placing them on signs and banners. Everything in between, including brochures and post cards, can be used to leverage your marketing efforts.

QR codes can be used to connect a device automatically to a mobile web page. Once the user scans the code, the web browser on their smartphone will load a webpage in which you choose to direct them to. This is an effective way to offer promotions and give valuable information. Click the following link to read more: QR Code Blueprint.

The Internet gives you numerous free resources to evaluate competitors, keywords, and much more. This can be priceless for those who have an idea of creating a new product or maybe looking at offering a new service. In this blog post, I will show how easy it really is to determine if the demand for it exists presently.

We will begin by examining a Google search. Understanding how a query works is crucial for web marketing success. Within a Google search results page, there’s 2 principal segments: sponsored results for paid ads and organic search results. Studies have shown that the best results are organizations where their websites display two times within the first page of Google. That is within the organic and sponsored listings.

Within the paid results section, the top ranking paid listings appear at the top in the center column. These results usually are mildly shaded. The main search results follow the paid results having a white background. In a lot of queries, informative web pages appear first. This is typically the case for simple and one word searches. Wikipedia, quite often having information related to the user’s query, is almost always at the top of a search result.

A lot of searches offer a localized section that’s baked into the organic search results. If you are a local business, this can be of great advantage to you. Search engines also may have sections for graphic and video results if they’re popular in regards to your search. Given that we understand the different sections of a search engine results page, we’ll concentrate on where visitors are most likely to glance on a page.

Experiments working with eye tracking heat maps show that the top left area of the main content area will get the greatest attention. Google will search as you type. So, it is useful to just become aware of what Google is expecting. They are an accurate reflection of searcher sentiment.

Google’s Keyword Tool is a wonderful and zero cost service in which you can examine and discover keywords and also the volume for each. You may choose by category or just enter a keyword phrase and a results page will get displayed. The listings page will list the following: a competition level, worldwide per month searches, local monthly searches, and local search trends. A lot of comparable search terms will also be displayed which is sorted by global per month searches.

The competition level shows what amount competition is being bid on each and every key phrase pertaining to the volume of queries. The greater the levels of competition, the higher the cost for pay per click users.

There are other ways to locating search terms than just typing a search and utilizing the keyword tools. Try paying extra attention to common questions that your prospects typically ask. You should also check out other websites to see which keywords they are using. These are some of the methods you can apply to your company to conduct research for zero cost.

The ‘first moment of truth’ has long been what marketers referred to as the first impression of a product. Traditionally, you would get the first impression of a product through an advertisement. Or, by seeing the item on the store shelf. This was a hurdle that every product had to leap over before it got sold.

Enter the ‘zero moment of truth’ (ZMOT). This is where you see the product’s package or one of its advertisements. Then you look for reviews and prices online before you decided to buy. This is especially important because consumers will look at your competitors’ products also.  About 70% of consumers in the US look at product reviews before making a purchase. In addition, no product is too small or too cheap to bypass ZMOT.

This is because it’s much easier than in the past. Before smartphones and the internet, consumers would only research big ticket items such as cars and expensive electronics. Now, it’s quick and easy to search reviews online using a smartphone while shopping.  This pre-shopping can cause your business to lose a sale and one of your competitors to gain a sale. Having a bar code app makes this very easy.

Word of mouth is back and more powerful than ever. In fact, it has gone from 1-to-1 to 1-to-1 million. Consumers have overwhelming power. With technology changing at an accelerating pace, consumers will continue to gain power. The future of search regarding search engines will be based more on what consumers think. Google’s entrance into social media and its ‘+1’ button are examples of this. In the near future, “likes” and “+1’s” will matter greatly in organic search. See the example below:

Some Interesting Statistics from ZMOT

• Worldwide average for a product review is 4.3 out of 5
• Latest 80/20 rule:

80% of reviews on the site of a given retailer are written by the top 20% of their customers by lifetime value.

• 20% of Google searches are local; jumps to 40% for mobile users
• Average shopper uses more than  10 different sources for information to make a decision
• 25% of the global population is online (up from 2% 10 years ago)
• 2/3 of the world’s population has mobile phones

Ways to Take Advantage of ZMOT

It’s critical to make ZMOT a priority. There are many ways to capitalize on this. First, studying your product/services on Google Trends will give you insight into what your customers are looking for. Second, you should research your products, services, and brand using the Google Keyword Tool. This will uncover many of the problems in which your customers are trying to solve.

One of my favorite research methods that wasn’t mentioned in the Zero Moment of Truth book is reading through forums. This is where your customers will clearly outline and discuss their issues that your product/service is meant to solve. If you don’t know of any good forums in your niche, try using Omgili which is a forum search engine. As an example, let’s say you have a product in the weight loss industry. Simply typing in “weight loss” as a search will reveal many of the obstacles you face when marketing your product.

In the image below, you can clearly see that people are concerned with losing muscle mass and the side effects of low carb diets. Of course, the low carb diet topic could be someone trying to sell their own product since it screams “READ THIS FIRST”. But, it’s still likely to be a concern among dieters if there is another marketer addressing it.

Knowing what your potential customers are skeptical about is critical to knowing how to market your product. For example, if you were selling a diet supplement, you would have to convince your audience that your product was safe and would have good results.

ZMOT affects all products. There is no product that is too small for ZMOT to matter – not even Post-It notes. 3M has over 3,000 comments just for scotch tape.

If you get some negative reviews, there is no need to worry. In fact, some negative reviews are beneficial because they make your products look realistic. If every review is 5-stars, shoppers will believe that your reviews were fabricated. This is, in fact, true at times. Look at books on Amazon that were just released. You’ll find a bunch of 5-star reviews on or before the release date. For these to be real, the consumer would have had to buy the book and was so inspired that they read it in one sitting. Then, immediately went on Amazon to review it. Highly unlikely.

Finally, your happiest customers have the power to help you with ZMOT. Blogs, video, and social media all help in this regard. Look at how many people are reviewing Apple’s products on YouTube.  Betty Crocker benefits every time someone makes a video of a recipe that uses one of their products. Every business should have a YouTube strategy. Not for direct selling. Rather, offering something that searchers will find helpful. YouTube is also the second most-used search engine.

You can download Zero Moment of Truth at: www.zeromomentoftruth.com