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When people click on a link to your website you want them to stick around. You want them to read your content, see your offers, and then finally take the next step to answer your calls to action. But, many people do bounce off the site.

Bouncing means they visited but left quickly. You can view your bounce rate in Google Analytics. So, how can you reduce your bounce rates?

Increase Speed

When you can increase the loading speed of your website, you’re going to automatically have fewer bouncing visitors. People are impatient and do not like to wait around for something to load.

Don’t Burn Out People’s Retinas

Certain colors, like blue and gold, do not translate well to online reading. In addition, you need to space out your paragraphs differently than you would for print. It’s okay to separate your text into more paragraphs for online reading.

Improve Your SEO

Search engine optimization is important for your website. If you have a lot of bounces you may be using the wrong type of content to attract your ideal audience. Or, worse, your content is boring. Improve the content and the SEO, and you’ll have fewer bounces.

Study Your Target Audience Better

Another factor in bounce rates is poor understanding of your target audience. If your advertisements, blog posts and content marketing (and any marketing for that matter) is not well-targeted to your audience, then you need to improve your targeting.

Create Natural Navigation

The best navigation is not very noticeable but naturally leads your visitors to where they want to go. Don’t be clever with link and button names. Instead, be direct about where the link is going to send your visitor, and use less navigation on the front page. Having fewer choices will avoid confusion.

Know the Reason for Your Website

If you don’t know the purpose of your website then no one else will know either. Ensure that you have mapped out the website before building it so that you know and your visitors know that the website is clear about its message.

Bounced traffic has a variety of causes that you need to research. You can use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to help you discover ways to reduce your bounce rate. But, one of the most important things is to ensure that your website speaks to your target audience so that you attract the right people in the first place.

For any business, getting the most leads is one of the most important goals. Due to the stiff competition, it may be difficult for you to choose a method that can give you the best results. Given below are 5 digital marketing strategies that can help you with your lead generation. Read on to find out more.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the primary ways to get access to your target audience. These techniques allow you to improve the rankings of your site for your desired keywords and phrases. Plus, it helps your target audience look for your site when they enter relevant keywords in the search engine.

According to statistics, 75% of online searchers don’t go to the second page of search results, such as Google. Therefore, it’s important that you get your website ranked to show up on the first page of search results. Given below are three important areas that you need to focus on when it comes to search engine optimization.

• Link building
• On-page and off-page optimization
• Keyword selection

2. Pay-per-click advertising

PPC is short for Pay Per Click advertising. It’s another effective way of generating leads. These paid advertisements show up at the top of a search engine’s search results page for given phrases and keywords.

Basically, PPC makes use of keywords, such as SEO in order to help you determine the keywords that you should target to make your campaign effective.

3. Content marketing

This is another effective strategy that can help you with your lead generation. It attracts credible leads and allows you to improve your visibility on the web. As far as content marketing is concerned, you may have heard the terms online guides, infographics, videos, articles, and so on.

The idea is to offer valuable information through your website. Make sure that the content you post is in-depth and helpful.

4. Email marketing

With email marketing, you can earn $44 against each dollar you spend. In other words, your ROI will be up to 4400%. While email marketing is decades old, it is still one of the most effective ways of generating leads. It allows you to reach more people and generate lots of leads.

First of all, you need to put together a subscription list. This can be done by adding simple signup forms to your website pages, such as pop-ups, footer, and header. Make sure you don’t buy email lists as most of the users won’t show interest in the products and services you offer.

5. Social Media

You should create your presence on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. On these pages, you can post updates about your products and services. Plus, you can post articles and blog posts as well.

Debated over whether it is fact, fiction, marketing or all of the above, “Smart Beta” had been a growing point of contention in the asset management industry recently. Our view, based more on the math than the marketing, is that these strategies are deserving of the attention and assets they are garnering, and advisers would be well served to consider them.

The term “Smart Beta” refers to the gray area that strategies which aren’t quite active management, but aren’t quite indexing, occupy. Smart beta strategies could just as easily be called quantitative strategies, if the word Quant hadn’t already scared everyone to death in August of 2007. The majority of these strategies use the following approach: 1. Start with a widely-held index. 2. Determine via multiple-regression and factor analysis which aspects of the securities in the index tend to identify outperformance. 3. Systematically allocate to the securities with the highest concentration of the good factors and the lowest concentration of the bad factors.

Where it exists, the outperformance comes from the homework of the quantitative analysts before the trades are implemented. Once the securities are selected, they are often bought and held until the next quarter/year, when the same algorithms are run again to select the securities which now rank highest in the factor analysis.

Passive strategists have argued that smart beta strategies can’t work, because if everyone is doing it, there won’t be any outperformance available. While this statement is absolutely true, it is also irrelevant, because everyone isn’t going to implement these strategies. The same rule applies for why an increase in the number of indexing investors causes an increase in the amount of available alpha for the active management world. Market inefficiencies are finite and the more people sharing in them, the less there is for each individual participant.

ABOUT THE NAME

Was it Smart Beta when the Fama-French Three-Factor-Model described a stock’s returns being comprised of its beta, but also of its market capitalization (bias toward small caps) and price-to-book ratio (bias toward value)? Was it Smart Beta when Cliff Asness showed consistent outperformance by stocks that had demonstrated price momentum?

These well documented (University of Chicago) investment analyses, along with many other Smart Beta strategies, are producing higher returns than their given index, without a proportionate increase in volatility. Statistically, those excess returns are referred to as alpha, not smart beta. Jack Bogle is probably right that the term is more marketing than definitional, but for an industry that has been inundated with conflicting messages about the efficacy of active management, new nomenclature that provides a fresh start to outperforming a “buy everything” approach is welcomed in our view.

NOT PASSIVE

While these strategies can come with a lower price tag than many traditional actively managed funds, the potential alpha they can generate, and the processes they use, are comparable. Many asset managers pride themselves on a repeatable process in their fundamental analysis – Smart Beta simply takes the repeatable aspect to the next level. Signals and factors that aided bottom-up portfolio managers decades ago can now easily be codified and tested against the universe of investable assets, with an incredible savings in time and manpower, which is largely being passed on to the investor.

As Smart Beta products proliferate, the opportunities to implement strategies that harness quantitative descriptions of well documented market inefficiencies become cheaper and more prevalent – all of which constitute a huge positive for investors.

In his excellent “Market Wizards” book series, Jack Schwager said, “There are a million ways to make money in the markets. The irony is that they are all very difficult to find.”

That’s true. If it wasn’t, we traders would all be multi-gazillionaires, wouldn’t we? Finding a trading edge is a lot of work, so it’s important to have an overall plan. In this first article of my series on finding an edge, we’ll look at an overview of the process. Future articles will delve into the details and different techniques that you can use in the search for your next profitable trading strategy.

Currently I’m primarily a Forex trader, but I’ve traded stocks, bonds and options as well. The procedure that I outline here can be useful to any trader, no matter the market.

What is an edge?

Before getting into our 3-step course of action, let’s first define what a trading edge is. We need to start with some basic trading math. This is a whole subject in its own right, so I’ll discuss trading math more fully in future articles. For now, let’s just concentrate on the ideas of risk, reward, and expectancy.

If I buy XYZ stock at 35 with a stop loss at 30, then my risk is 5 points. Let’s say I decide to sell if it reaches 50. Then my goal is a reward of 15 points. Of course I might not set a specific profit goal, waiting instead to see what the market gives me. If the stock rises to 44, and then stalls, I might sell there for a reward of 9 points. In the first example, my reward to risk ratio was 15 to 5, or 3:1, while in the second example it was 9:5.

Some newer traders naively think that they’ll automatically make money on average if they always set their profit targets higher than their risk. What actually happens is that they just get stopped out more often. This is because it’s more likely that the price will hit the stop before it reaches the target. So out of four trades, they may lose 5 points on three and earn 15 on the fourth, for a total “expectancy” of exactly zero (minus commissions and spreads).

The formula for expectancy is:

(Win Rate)(Average Win Amount) – (1-Win Rate)(Average Loss Amount)

Suppose I do 100 trades using some specific strategy, and that my win rate is 40%. My loss rate (or 1-WR) is 60%. If I have an average win of 8 points and an average loss of 5 points, then my historical expectancy for this strategy is:

(0.40)(8) – (0.60)(5) = 3.2 – 3 = 0.2 points/trade

The “edge” is the expectancy expressed as a percentage of my risk per trade, which in this case is 5 points. So the edge is just 0.2 points per trade divided by the 5 points I risk per trade, or 4% of amount risked. So for every $100 I risk with this method, I expect to gain $4. We say that my strategy has a 4% edge.

Gather and explore the data

The first step in finding a trading edge is to gather and explore historical price data. A simple internet search should yield several sources for this, ranging from tick by tick data to daily, weekly, or even monthly bars. In any case, you’ll want to get this data into a spreadsheet. Some data sources provide you with a quick way to do this, while others may require some copying and pasting.

If you’re not familiar with spreadsheets, then now is the time to learn. Using the powerful tools in MS Excel or Open Office, you can answer just about any quantifiable question you have about the data. What’s the frequency of inside bars vs. outside bars? If a bar breaks the previous bar’s high, what’s the probability that the next bar will do the same? And so on. If your creativity needs an initial kick-start, check out my blog site. It has oodles of free archived research notes, filled with examples of data explorations.

This is the stage that statisticians call “Exploratory Data Analysis” or EDA. You’ll want to look at overall features of the data such as bullish or bearish biases, the average price move per bar, and so on. This provides you with realistic profit expectations, and can lead you to further ideas for exploration.

Develop a trading idea

Great. So now you’ve got thousands of price bars in a spreadsheet, and you’re slicing and dicing the data to uncover its secrets. At this point, you’re bound to have a few “aha! moments.”

As an example, just a week or so before writing this, I was examining hourly bar data for the EUR/JPY currency pair, concentrating on just the 4-hour period during the London and New York session overlap. “Aha!” I said. I had just found that 72% of the time, the high or low for that overlap period occurred during the first hour, as opposed to the other three hours. Could I exploit this knowledge to create an edge? Well, I’m still working on that one, so you’ll have to stay tuned.

So the second step is to use what you’ve found in the exploratory stage to develop a specific trading idea. When developing your trading idea, be careful that you’re not just “data mining” and concentrating on some meaningless statistical artifact.

As a non-trading example of this, suppose I gathered data on the amount of rainfall in Boston over the past year, and organized it by the day of the week. It’s extremely improbable that any two days would have exactly the same average rainfall, so I could rank the amount of rain by day of the week. There’s clearly going to be a day, say Tuesday, that had the highest rainfall, and another day, say Friday, that had the lowest. But is this meaningful? Should I plan to have picnics only on Fridays, but never on Tuesdays? Of course not. The storm clouds don’t know what day it is. This is what I mean by a statistical artifact found through data mining. There’s an old saying in statistics that if you torture the data long enough, it’s bound to tell you something.

So when you develop your trading idea, it’s important to have some theory or model, grounded in the real world, which explains why the idea should work.

For example, if you notice that price often makes big moves when it crosses the 50-bar moving average as opposed to other moving averages, what could be causing this? Could it be that this MA is often a favorite among speculators? If so, then this isn’t just a statistical artifact, it’s the result of prevailing trader psychology.

If you notice that currencies often make large moves after three consecutive positive trade balance reports, is this just a statistical artifact? Probably not, as there is a clear fundamental connection between a country’s trade balance and the demand for its currency. Maybe some big bank out there has a strategy of accumulating currencies with good trade numbers. This is a model grounded in reality, and supported by your data.

Test it rigorously

Now that you’ve developed a trading idea supported by your data and a logical model grounded in reality, it’s time to test it. This last stage can often be disappointing, and consequently is sometimes ignored by traders, to the peril of their account balances.

During this stage, you’ll be using basic concepts from probability and statistics, so it’s a good idea to brush up on those subjects. You’ll want to be familiar with such ideas as statistical power and significance, sensitivity and selectivity, type-1 and type-2 errors, and a few others. Again, I’ll explore many of these tools in future articles.

Not only do we want to know how often a signal correctly predicts some behavior, we also want to know how often the signal fails, and how often the lack of a signal correctly or incorrectly predicts absence of the behavior. It’s these latter three statistics that traders often overlook.

In the case of a purely mechanical method with a well defined signal, traders will usually back-test the signal with historical data. In this case, it’s often a good idea to do “out of sample” testing. This avoids the self-fulfilling practice of confirming your hypothesis using the same data you used to come up with it.

In cases where the trading method is a bit more qualitative and difficult to define for back-testing, you may want to forward-test the method in a live account. It’s best to use either a demo account or a small amount of money at first. In this way, you can gather actual expectancy data before committing more funds.

Conclusion

So now you’ve seen the 80,000 foot overview of the 3-step process for finding a trading edge. Gather and explore your data. Develop a trading idea. And finally, test it rigorously. If, during this last step, you find that your brilliant trading idea turns out to be a dud, don’t get discouraged. And above all, don’t ignore your results and trade the idea anyway! That’s a sure path to emptying out your trading account. Instead, go back to your data and keep looking for ideas.

Remember, there are a million ways to make money in the markets. The trick is finding them. And now you’re on your way to knowing how to do that. Good luck, and keep pipping up!

Learning about mobile marketing can be very overwhelming, but just like anything else, it can also be very easily researched, learned, and applied. Now that you have found this list of tips, hopefully, you can come out a little more informed, so that you can refine your plan and become a great marketer.

Enhance your text messages with other forms of communication. Make use of multi-channel marketing. One form communication isn’t enough for today’s audience. Each style of communication has its own set of pros and cons. This is why it is best to use more than one. Try sending direct mail, e-mail and a text right before something important happens.

Only add telephone numbers from customers choosing to receive messages to build your database carefully. If you add telephone numbers of customers who have not elected to receive marketing messages, you are likely to see a high volume of complaints and requests to be removed from your list.

Understand that mobile marketing is necessary for your business. You need to have a direct method of communication with your customers, and this is an immediate way to do it. This is also a great way to truly understand what your customers are interested in, and how to cater to that.

Shop around for different companies. Mobile marketing companies all differ in their styles and methods. Finding the one that is best for your business and your customers can be as simple as visiting their websites. Never settle for the first one you find without checking out what the other companies may have to offer.

Be sure that you understand that a mobile site is not just a scaled-down version of your business, but it’s actually a summarized version. Many mobile marketers make the mistake of attempting to scale down their entire business and ultimately end up losing customers. You do not need to create two separate businesses here.

There’s no reason in the world why older media cannot make its way into your new marketing campaign. You’ll just have to rethink how this material is being presented to your customers. You’ll definitely have to think about streamlining it and making it shorter and a lot more poignant.

Because users will be viewing them on small screens, mobile advertising messages need to be brief, clear and express urgency. Every ad should focus on a call to action that tells the market to do something. Forgetting to include a call to action in your mobile advertising messages is a common mistake that beginners often make.

Make sure that any mobile apps your company releases deliver a service your customers want. If your app is something dumb or just duplicate information that could be found on your website, it’s just going to languish on the app store, unloved.

Like any other subject, the world of mobile marketing is vast and has a wealth of information available on it. Sometimes, you just need a little hint as to where to begin, so that you can get started. Hopefully, you have received that from the above tips.

1. Stop Sending So Many Emails

Sometimes it’s much better to handle something in person or over the phone than using email. You should learn how to recognize such situations otherwise you may find yourself buried under replies to your emails. Generally, email is great for communicating well-formulated messages that require, at most, a simple confirmation. It’s much less suitable for extended group conversations where multiple participants share their thoughts with others.

2. Start Reading Your Emails Regularly

We know that the last thing you want to do before or after work is read work-related emails, but that’s how things have to be if you want to become an efficient email organizer. Depending on how many emails you receive every day, it may take just a couple of days or even hours for your inbox to start overflowing with new, unread emails. By reading your emails regularly, you ensure that the situation never gets too out of hand.

3. Start Checking Your Emails Throughout the Day

There’s no excuse for not owning a smartphone these days. Regardless of which email service you use, there’s a way how to make it work on all major mobile operating systems. Having your email on the phone allows you to easily read new emails throughout the day, which can drastically reduce the length of your scheduled email-reading sessions, the importance of which we’ve described in the previous chapter.

4. Start Using an Email Client

Web-based email services are great because you can conveniently access them from anywhere, even when far away from your own personal computer. But even the best web-based user interface can’t rival the features and convenience of dedicated email clients such as Outlook or Mailbird. Email clients are faster, can display emails from multiple email services in a single window, support keyboard shortcuts, come with powerful spellchecking capabilities, and are available for all operating systems and devices.

We’ve already mentioned Outlook and Mailbird, which are arguably the most popular email clients for Windows, but there’s also Airmail, an email client for iPhone and macOS by Italian company Bloop SRL, Postbox, a desktop email client and feed reader for Windows and macOS written and sold by Postbox, Inc., or Mozilla Thunderbird, a free and open-source cross-platform email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation, just to name a few available options.

5. Stop Subscribing to Newsletters

Websites and companies love email newsletters because they allow them to maintain engagement and sell products with minimal effort. While some newsletters are clearly valuable, most, sooner or later, end up being ignored. You may think that it’s no big deal to subscribe to a newsletter-after all, you can always unsubscribe later-but experience tells us that things tend to become unmanageable much quicker than it initially seems. We recommend you stop subscribing to all newsletters as a rule of thumb and use other communication channels instead to receive information from websites and companies, such as social media networks or RSS.

6. Start Using Multiple Mailboxes

Why have just one mailbox for everything when you can have several and use a different one for each of the things you do. You can start, for example, with one mailbox for work-related emails and one mailbox for personal emails. Some people like to take things further and use a privacy-oriented email service such as ProtonMail for potentially sensitive personal communication and a free and convenient email service such as Gmail for web services and online shopping. Another advantage of this approach comes in the form of better security. Having some degree of separation between various activities minimizes the impact of an email breach and gives malicious hackers less information to work with.

We know for a fact that spam accounts for 45 percent of all emails sent. We also know that about 14.5 billion spam emails are sent every single day, many being some form of advertising. To say that spam emails lead to a productivity loss would be an understatement.

Why is eye care important? The words of Jesus in Matthew 13:16 states, “Blessed are your eyes, because they see.”. Blessed! It is good fortune to possess eyes that are healthy and free from any eye condition like age-related macular degeneration (AMD)

AMD is a popular eye disease that affects the central part of the retina resulting in the distortion or loss of vision. Smokers, people with high blood pressure and those in their golden years are at risk in developing this condition. So it’s best to start your eye care now by having a healthy balanced diet.

In Genesis 1:29, God said, “Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food.” and verse 31 reads, “God looked at what he had done. All of it was very good!”

The Scripture, whether you believe it or not, informs that fresh fruits and vegetables are good for one’s health. Vitamins A, C and E found in fresh fruits and green leafy vegetables are essentials for eye nutrition. Vitamin A is good for the cornea, Vitamin C helps the capillaries in the retina to be healthy and Vitamin E helps protect eye cells from damages caused by free radicals.

Copper and zinc are essentials for eye nutrition too. Copper-rich foods like whole wheat cereals and oysters are necessary for the development of proper eye structure. While consumption of seafood, eggs and tofu give off zinc which helps in absorbing nutrients, and eliminating the wastes.

Omega-3 fatty acids from salmon and tuna are also good for the eyes. It helps in reducing the risk of developing macular degeneration and blocks other eye diseases like the dry eye syndrome.

Eye nutrition is also about what not to eat. Some foods you should not eat for eye care purposes are processed meat and ready-to-eat foods because of their high-sodium content which contributes to hypertension that may lead to macular degeneration. Fried foods, especially those fried in trans fat, raise the level of bad cholesterol in the body which may cause different eye diseases.

Note that you need to hydrate yourself, but beverages like sugary drinks, alcohol and caffeine are not eye nutrition essentials. Avoid any of these if you can, or at least drink in moderation. Remember that the best way to hydrate yourself is by drinking water.

Aside from a healthy diet, there is regular exercise, adequate rest, a healthy body weight, quitting smoking, using appropriate eye wear and having your eyes checked by a doctor. All these are part of proper eye care.

When you eat healthy, exercise regularly, and are properly rested, you are most likely to achieve a healthy body weight. This results in a controlled blood pressure, controlled cholesterol level, and low risk of getting diabetes which translates to low risk of acquiring vision problems.

Eye care also involves making sure your hands are clean when handling your contact lenses. Wear eyeglasses when exposed to the sun and use appropriate protective eyewear to prevent getting eye injuries.

It’s important to have your eyes checked by an eye specialist at least once a year. In the event you find out you have any eye condition, learn about the risk factors and possible treatment. Some eye diseases can not be cured once you have it, no matter how strict you follow a diet for eye nutrition, the condition may be irreversible.