Native American jewelry - The SouthwestWritten by Tarl Michael
For several years, I have had fortunate opportunity to be a purchasing agent for Bearlanders Native American Indian jewelry & gifts. I have enjoyed Southwest for past 47 years and I would like to bring a part of that experience to you.The American Southwest has some of most unusual and beautiful sites in America. You will find awe in whether worn walls of Grand Canyon, (Arizona) and beautiful red sandstone in Zion (Utah). Since earth’s creation, wind and water have carved beauty in landscape, likes of which no man could duplicate. Valleys so deep, you could fit tallest skyscraper. With just about every color imaginable, blues, reds, greens, browns and purples scattered though sides of cliff walls. You see trees (scrub pine) growing out side of canyon walls, hanging on by only 1/2-inch roots. One could question how or why they exist there. There is water running through many of canyons year round. With paths and trails to be hiked by all ages. For a rock collector, you could fill your pockets until your pants fell down. Or until your back grew so tired from weight of backpack filled with magnificent little treasures. No doubt national park service doesn’t condon filling your pockets or backpack with rocks. But west is vast and there are many little jagged treasures to be found. The Mogillion rim is located roughly half way between Phoenix and Flagstaff and is every bit as inspiring as Grand Canyon. Located near Strawberry (Arizona), overlooking Mogillion, rich, thick forest resembles a beautiful dark green carpet. Using your imagination, you can picture many places a cowboy could hide from hostile Indians. Better yet, picture beauty of vast plateau's and deep gorge's where Indians, Soldiers and Cowboys alike, of 1700, 1800 and early1900's traveled and made camp. When thinking of southwest many only picture desert and scorching heat. Not so in this beautiful high country. No doubt temperature never reaches low 80's. When you hear word Arizona or American southwest, you no longer need to imagine desert, tumble weeds, snakes and unbearable heat. Now picture rich green forests, cool weather and skies at night filled with so many stars it would take a lifetime to count them all. While watching stars, you will still hear howls of coyote calling to night sky. In southwest and Arizona you will still find American Indians, not with bow and arrow in hand, but selling their handcrafted goods at road side rest stops. The American Indians have been crafting jewelry, pottery and carved items for centuries, an art that has been passed down from generation to generation.
| | How One Word Or Even One Letter Can Boost Conversion Rates By Over 400%!Written by Eric Graham
Recently I was reviewing keyword specific conversion rate data of a consulting client of mine. I have been working with this client for a few months now, helping her improve sales conversion rate of her website and we have had very good results, taking average conversion rates at her site from below 1% to just over 4.3%.(Your sales conversion rate is simply number of unique visitors your site receives vs. number of sales you make. If you have 3 sales for every 100 visits your conversion rate is 3%.) Now, one of keys to improving conversion rates is to continually test and measure every detail of your website, marketing and traffic. While reviewing data from one of her Google Adwords campaigns I stumbled across a few hard to explain results that perfectly illustrate very large effect small differences can have on conversion rates. The keyword “piano lessons” had a conversion rate over last 30 days of 5.09%. The keyword “piano lesson” had a conversion rate of only 1.64%. Both of these keywords had exact same Adwords title and description, same average position in search results and exact same landing page on my clients website. The only variable is one letter in keyword… an “s”. Lesson vs. Lessons. That’s it! Yet plural version of keyword (piano lessons) out sold singular version (piano lesson) by over 300%! Another key phrase that had an even larger variation was “how to play piano” vs. “how to play a piano”. Common sense would say that these two phrases would convert almost identically… Wrong. Again, with identical titles, descriptions and landing pages, “How to play piano” converted at 5.92%, while “How to play a piano” only converted at 1.42%. That is a whopping 417% difference between “a” and “the”! Short-term variations and fluctuations in conversion rates of individual keywords or landing pages are common. However, data on both of these keyword pairs was measured over a full 30 days and several thousand clicks for each keyword. I don’t have any easy answers why adding an “s” to a key phrase or changing an “a” to “the” caused such a difference in conversion rates.
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