Increase Conversions And Make Money Online - 5 Tips To Optimize Your Business Website

5 Tips To Optimize Your Business Website, Increase Conversions And Make Money Online

 © Sitthiphong Thadakun | EyeEm | Getty Images

As a small business, your website is the single most important resource you have in your marketing arsenal. It’s where all your marketing efforts converge, whether they are in the form of inbound content marketing, ads or direct marketing. Customers will usually check your website for an overview of your products and services before committing themselves to any other action, including a purchase.

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There are pros and cons to this. On one hand, it’s a great opportunity to revamp your website and ensure that it's set up just right to convince visitors to take the next step in the sales journey. On the other hand, if it’s not done properly, you’ll make no gains in the conversions department, and you might even make things worse.

Here are four strategies you can explore to maximize the advantages and boost your conversions rapidly:

1. Track and analyze all your data

If you want to optimize your website, you need to understand how it’s currently performing and which specific areas need tuning. You should already have tracking tools set up on your site, but if not, you can get them quickly. Google Analytics is by far the most common and affordable option -- free -- but you can get others with more advanced feature sets too.

Related: Ways to Make Money Online That Seem Great But Just Aren't Realistic

According to Meyr Aviv, CEO of Moving APT, “It’s important to analyze how visitors get onto your site in the first place, how much time they spend there. Also, use heatmap tools to see which areas hold their attention better and which ones they just breeze through. With that data, you’ll be well-equipped to make the needed changes to your design."

2. Define clear goals

For you to see how well you’re doing over the course of time you spend implementing these strategies, it’s important to establish your end-goal objectives. This should be based on the data you already have and be as specific as possible.

You can also have different goals for different aspects of your conversion strategy. This could range across different products and services and different customer actions such as signing up for something or scheduling a phone call to discuss potential partnerships with your company.

3. Use visual marketing

Text is good, and it’s great for some types of audience and some kinds of information. For most businesses though, your message would be more effective if you put it in the form of pictures, videos, infographics or other forms of visual marketing.

Related: 7 Realistic Ways to Make Money Online

Visual marketing breaks up your text and makes it easier for your audience to actually read through the entire page and get to your call to action. Naturally, the more people who get to your call to action, the more people will likely convert. Images and videos are more shareable too. More people will share a nice, intriguing infographic, and more people will engage with it on social media, which brings in more traffic and conversion prospects.

You can use tools like Canva to make quick, unique designs, and you can also incorporate customer-generated content by using some incentives to increase customer engagement on your Instagram pages.

4. Run segmented tests

When you’re changing an element on your site, it’s important that you test the new design or copy to see the effects on your stats. Regardless of how good you think your website looks, the real test of whether you should keep the changes or revert is if there’s a positive response among your visitors.

The way to go about testing properly is to ensure that you’re testing the right set of people, says Andrew Epprecht, CEO of Phase 5 Analytics. “For instance, you could use software to target the tests by country or by whether the visitor is a new or returning one," Epprechet says. "Implement extensive A/B and multivariate testing to get the results you need to make final decisions on every element. It’s time-consuming, but it’ll definitely be worth it down the line, as opposed to making guesses based on your own design preferences.”

5. Use live testimonials

Testimonials are quickly going the way of ads on the internet. They’re everywhere, but most people are desensitized to them and don’t even notice them anymore. Virtually every site has a slider with a couple of positive quotes.

Related: 9 New Ways to Make Make Online

That doesn’t mean testimonials don’t work though. They do, but to make them more effective, you should ditch the rote testimonials template and incorporate screenshots of actual comments by customers on your social media platforms, email or any other source.

Those testimonials catch the eye better and look more real, thus enabling you to maximize the psychological effect, social proof and increased conversions which come with credible testimonials.

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A YouTube Influencer With 260,000 Subscribers Gives A Crash Course On How To Make Money On The Platform And Shares How Much She Earns

Natalie Barbu is a YouTube creator with 260,000 subscribers who lives in New York City and posts videos twice a week about her day-to-day life experiences. 

In this Business Insider video, Barbu breaks down how she makes money on YouTube and how much she earns.

For this crash course, Barbu covers topics like how to start placing ads in a YouTube video (00:51), her tips on how to make the most money possible on each video (2:19), and how much someone can expect to make from those ads (7:46).

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Natalie Barbu is a recent college graduate who quit her day job to pursue a full-time career as a YouTube influencer and social-media consultant in New York City. 

Barbu runs a YouTube channel with 260,000 subscribers and she posts videos twice a week about her day-to-day life experiences. 

YouTube creators like Barbu earn money through YouTube's Partner Program, which allows them to monetize their channels with video ads placed by Google.

In the video above, Barbu breaks down how to start placing ads in a YouTube video, shares tips on how to make the most money possible on each video, and explains how much someone can expect to make from those ads.

Below is an outline of the topics covered in the crash course with time stamps to the video.

How Barbu got her start on YouTube (00:00) 

Barbu has been making YouTube videos since 2011, and her videos range from lifestyle, to fashion and beauty, to personal finance videos — like how to start a business or how to optimize your YouTube channel. 

In order to get a paycheck from YouTube, a creator needs to be a partner. To apply to be a YouTube partner you must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch time hours within 12 months.

Her first paycheck on YouTube was in 2013, two years after she started (00:51)

Barbu didn't start making money on YouTube until two years after launching her channel and in those first two years she didn't think she could make any money. 

What you need to know about AdSense, Google's ad platform (01:18)

AdSense is Google's ad platform and YouTube creators who are approved for monetization receive a check from Google every month.

Google places the type of ads based on the audience that is watching the video.

Barbu likes to extend her videos to over 10 minutes long so that she can place more than one ad break.

How to place ads (01:49) and her ad-placement strategy (2:19)

Creators have the option to manually place their ads in their YouTube studio. Creators can also view new updates in the studio, like recent subscribers.

Barbu is strategic about where she places her ads. She might place an ad right before she says something, like how much money she makes on YouTube, so that her viewers have to watch the ad to see what she is going to say (2:55).

How much YouTube pays Barbu for every 1,000 views (03:48)

How much YouTube pays a creator for every 1,000 views is called the CPM rate, which stands for Cost Per Mil (Latin for "cost per thousand").

The factors that will determine someone's CPM rate (04:30)

The main factors that affect a CPM rate are audience demographic and the overall video content. 

How much her videos earn on average and her yearly YouTube income (07:46)

On average, Barbu's videos earn between $200 and $500, she says. 

Her 2019 yearly YouTube was around $46,000 from AdSense alone. She kept a consistent upload schedule the entire year, and she would post videos either twice a week, or sometimes three times a week, depending on her schedule.

Saving money for taxes (08:24)

YouTube pays Barbu through direct deposit once a month. After she receives the money, she will save a portion for taxes and she has a separate bank account where she keeps her tax money.

Barbu's main sources of income (09:11)

Barbu explains her top sources of income: AdSense, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing.

Her tips for starting a YouTube channel (10:06)

Her top piece of advice for starting a YouTube channel is to create videos that you actually enjoy watching. Start thinking about your audience and ask yourself what videos would they want to watch.

Nomura Is Finally Making Money From Asia Investment Banking

(Bloomberg) --

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Nomura Holdings Inc.’s investment banking business in Asia is set to return to profit this fiscal year after more than a decade of losses since its Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Acquisition, according to its division chief.

Cost cuts and fees from financing will drive the profit rebound in the year ending March 31, said Kenji Teshima, head of investment banking for Asia excluding Japan. Revenue is set to rise by about one third, led by private financing and dealmaking in India and Australia, he said, while warning that some transactions in China may be affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

Japan’s biggest securities firm last year unveiled plans to cut $1 billion of costs at its struggling global wholesale operation, helping to revive profit that’s been under pressure from years of losses abroad. Teshima’s group is benefiting from the firm-wide savings even as he keeps net headcount largely unchanged.

The cost cuts “will indirectly have a positive impact in terms of cost to my business,” he said in an interview in Hong Kong. Coupled with the revenue gains, that means “all of a sudden, it’s a game-changer year.”

Nomura’s 2008 purchase of Lehman assets in Asia swelled costs as it took on bankers. For global firms in the region, it can be harder to make money from investment banking than in Europe and America because of lower fees and high costs of running operations in multiple countries.

Read how Nomura’s profit revival masks incoming CEO’s challenge

Teshima has shifted Nomura’s focus in several nations since taking the role four years ago. In India, he increased the emphasis on financing and the capital markets business rather than mergers advice, because many companies there need access to funds for growth. In Australia, he built a sponsor business from scratch, helping private equity funds execute deals.

While Nomura doesn’t split out regional earnings figures for its investment banking unit, wholesale revenue -- which also includes global markets -- in Asia ex-Japan jumped 53% in the nine months ended Dec. 31. Pretax profit from the region was 23.1 billion yen ($210 million) in the period, compared with a 3.7 billion yen loss a year earlier.