Increase Your Revenue with Secret Military Intelligence
Long before laptops went wireless, before Dell could sell
powerful PC's for less than $500 and before success was measured
by Google rankings, programmers were developing highly
sophisticated, secret software applications to bolster the
defense of our nation. These developers created complex
techniques to train a very select number of our military forces.
This technology can help increase the effectiveness of your
site. In this month's article we will discuss how secret military
technology can direct you where to place your highest
revenue-producing content, what matadors and bulls have to do
with your web site visitors and how to determine if your images
or content are being used without your permission.
Is Your Site "Top Gun"? Many of the military training software programs that were
designed in the late 90's ultimately became the video software
games of today. Programs that cost hundreds of thousands for the
military now can be bought for $50 at your local computer store.
Even more amazing is that the games of today are better than the
earlier programs developed for the military. One of the other technological advancements developed by the
military used eye tracking sensors to monitor the eye movements
by our Top Gun fighter pilots. This was done initially to
optimize the instrument lay out in the jets, and later to
possibly allow eye movements or blinking to initiate various
aviation functions, such as firing weapons or evading radar. This technology has now been used by several companies to
monitor the eye movements of visitors to web sites. The web site
visitors wear headsets and the software tracks their
eye-movement to quantify what they read, what they don't read,
what they glance at, what they skip, and what they never even
see. One company, Enquiro, tracked visitor eye movements at Google.
They found that the most frequently viewed components were the
sponsored ads at the top of Google's results pages. The study
also found that the natural results were viewed for
approximately 3 seconds and sponsored ads (Pay Per Click - PPC)
at the top of the Google page received about 1.5 seconds of
attention. The sponsored ads on the right side of the page,
which are also PPC, were looked at for just over one second. When the results were illustrated via an image, they indicated
the "hot spot" was the top left corner of the web page. It
received the majority of initial and subsequent eye attention.
So, What Does This Mean To Your Mortgage Web Site? You should put your most important information in the top left
of your web page. Sites with large, non-revenue producing space
at the top of their sites or using drop down boxes or
non-standard navigation designs could be negatively impacting
the visitor's convenience and thus resulting in fewer sales. |
Ole' Marketing? When matadors engage bulls in the ring they use a bright red
cape to attract the bull. Obviously each matador stands to the
side of the cape, and when the bull charges the cape has nothing
behind it. The crowd in attendance shout, "Ole'" with their
approval. Quite a few mortgage web site owners use this same Ole'
Marketing technique with their PPC keyword campaigns. For
example, a mortgage company may offer VA loans and FHA loans in
addition to refinances and new home loans. Not surprisingly the
company buys clicks for all of these keywords. The problem
occurs when the company directs all of its keyword buys to the
home page of the mortgage web site, even though the information
about a VA loan is actually contained within the site. This
causes an "Ole' moment," where the charging visitor arrives
expecting to find full information on VA loans, only to be
surprised, and dismayed, that he has to search the page for a
link to the page that has VA loan info.
Are Your Competitors Stealing Your Site? Successful sites -- typically costing thousand of dollars in
time and expense -- may fall prey to individuals who simply copy
the design or wording to a competitor site. Most mortgage web
site owners don't even know it is occurring. A few years ago, we
had a mortgage site with a built-in mortgage calculator. We
noticed a substantial amount of traffic on that page and upon
inspecting our logs, we found that someone had copied our code
to their site. The only problem was that our code wouldn't work
because it was PHP enabled, so they actually used the full URL
to our site. It turned out to be a bonus for us because when
visitors to that site used the calculator, they were redirected
to our site when results were displayed. A very simple way to test if your images or content is being
"borrowed" is to take a unique phrasing of words from your site,
maybe four to six words total, and place that phrase in quote
marks while doing a search. For example I took the phrase "these
customers are entrusting your company" from our
MortgagePromote.com site and searched at Google. The only page
that came up was ours. If you have unique names for your images you can also do a
search for the image to see if anyone is using it. Assume that
you have an you may need to be a bit more creative by searching
for two images top.jpg +left.jpg, or searching for the image
plus a related keyword like top.jpg +"mortgage loan." In short, you can use previously secret military intelligence,
which cost millions of dollars to develop, and apply those
findings to make your site a "Top Gun." Furthermore, you can
protect your own "site intelligence" by using search engines to
check for competitor infringements.
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