Internet Marketing

Applying Niche Marketing Principles To Your Business

2009-03-04T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Mark Nenadic

A single industry of any type is far to large for any individual business to tackle all on its own. Even the largest corporations cannot cover a whole market by themselves. This is where niche marketing becomes a businessperson's best friend for making potential much more manageable. If you develop your own niche marketing strategy, then your business will offer specialized goods and services, and you will be able to target specific niche groups of prospective clients.

But what does niche marketing actually mean for your own unique business? By understanding your own business niche, it means that you gain the capability for mastering your own special corner of the marketplace. Your niche marketing strategy will bring about a better ability for catering to specific customer interest so that you can capitalize upon it. You'll have your own unique niche in the business world in which you will stand out the most.

Think about your business niche carefully before deciding upon it, as you will dedicate yourself to it rather exclusively from that point on. You'll need to make sure that it is a niche marketing strategy that is indeed achievable.

Once you've chosen how you will be niche marketing, you will need to ask yourself certain questions about how you will develop this into a niche marketing strategy. These questions should include:

 How is my business most effective? What are my special skills and strengths? When answering this question, go over both your own abilities, and the abilities of your company as a whole. List your strengths and skills. You may find this process to be quite enlightening. It includes things that you've always known, but may not have actually recognized for their full potential.

 What do you and your other team members enjoy doing? The more you like what you're doing, the more you'll naturally be able to dedicate to its success. If you don't like your business niche, there may not even be profit available, because you'll be held back on a subconscious level. To begin answering this question, one of the best places to look is at your hobbies and the things that you already do for enjoyment. Instead of only working with your dreams which may or not be what they expect them to be in reality look at what you've already tried and already liked. These are the tried, tested, and true activities for you, and are those to which you're most likely to motivate you the most. This passion can only translate to added profit. Not only will this make your company a more enjoyable venture, but it will give you endurance and focus that you may never have known you had. This level of stamina and motivation is vital to starting up a fresh company, or changing a business that already exists.

 What do you need to make this niche work? It's all well and good to choose a niche marketing strategy, but it's another to recognize what is involved to make the theory a reality. You've identified your strengths and what you enjoy, now it's time to assess them with customers in mind. How can you use this information in a way that will make customers buy something? To answer this question, look at your potential customers. What do they already buy, and what are they likely to buy in the future?

Now you're ready to come up with your niche marketing plan. The last step is to make certain that it doesn't interfere or conflict with any business plan that you already have in place. The niche marketing strategy is only valuable if it can be made to function within your own company's potential.

Niche marketing is among the best things you can do to maximize your success potential in a staggeringly large marketplace. Begin today and reap the rewards that are so close to being yours.

Mark Nenadic
Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North http://www.15dn.com, where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

Implementing An Sms Marketing Campaign

2009-03-03T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Kath Pay

SMS Marketing can be used to acquire customers, strengthen existing customer and prospect relationships and provide a service to your customers.

The golden rule "Keep It Simple Stupid" (KISS principle) applies to SMS marketing. The most successful SMS campaigns and services tend to focus on incentives and interactivity as well as relevance to the recipient. As with email marketing, your solution provider pays an integral part to the deliverance process of an SMS campaign, so be sure to choose wisely.

1: Choose Your Campaign

There are four main types of SMS campaigns:

a: Promotional Communication (Pull Campaign). This is the most common form of mobile marketing and is similar to retail promotions. A great example of this is the "Text 'n Win" style campaign, which usually uses a variety of platforms to promote and implement the campaign.

b: CRM. This type of SMS campaign is used to maintain and develop relationships with your existing clients and create loyalty. The type of message sent is usually of an informative nature, such as account balances from banks, or it can be ongoing marketing messages and updates.

c: B2E. Business to employee communication can be used to run staff promotions, such as incentive programs.

d: Outbound (Push Campaign). This is generally the first type of campaign which a promoter thinks of as it is comparable to email marketing. As with email marketing, Spam can be an issue in SMS push campaigns, therefore we have constructed a blueprint for a Spam compliant push campaign.

2: Get Permission For Your Push Campaign

Sending a message to a recipient's mobile phone can be seen as a very intrusive act. So, as long as you have permission to do this, you can be assured that your message/campaign will be read by the recipient, unlike many other mediums.

Unlike pull campaigns, which tend to by-pass privacy problems by using other mediums to drive the promotion, thereby leaving the SMS factor to originate with the client, the most important step in a push campaign is to obtain permission. This generally will involve other types of medium, such as website, email marketing etc. Remember though, just because they've signed up for your e-newsletter, does not mean you have permission to send them an SMS.

Along with obtaining permission, you also need to provide a way for the recipient to readily and easily opt out, therefore making a two-way channel necessary. So check with your service provider to ensure they have this capability.

3: Carefully Plan Your Push Campaign

Plan the details! Most SMS campaigns that fail do so because of lack of planning. As SMS campaigns aren't used for branding purposes (one way correspondence), they can be interactive and involve using a return path so that your recipients can reply/confirm/opt-out/enter. Be prepared for them to use it. Have systems in place, plan and cater for all types of responses, including "thanks" messages, viral marketing (make the most of it!) as well as the typical "You've not won", or "wrong code". You need to plan how you will respond to these and manage them. If you don't, the results can be overwhelming.

4: Be Timely & Add Value

One of mobile marketing's great advantages over other mediums is its timeliness, which can be a benefit on 2 levels. The first is that it means campaigns can be prepared and sent in a matter of minutes, rather than days or even weeks. It also works on the premise of immediacy from the recipient's perspective. Therefore both the content and the timeliness of the message play an important factor in whether it's appropriate. Remember, there must be a good reason to send the message to a mobile, rather than using another medium. For example, a muffin shop sending out an offer for free coffee with any muffin purchase is ideally sent at 10am, rather than in the evening.

SMS marketing should be used primarily as a promotional tool rather than an advertising tool. It needs to add value to the recipient, rather than just containing a branding message.

5: Target Your Message

As we have discussed, SMS marketing should be used to add value to the recipient, whether it be in the form of a promotion such as a competition or providing timely information. It therefore needs to target the relevant audience suited to the promotion/offer/information. The most basic targeting should be based on age and gender and continue adding criteria from there. In targeting your audience, you also need to make sure that you are being relevant. Is your message appropriate to the recipient? You may need to rewrite the message according to the different age brackets of your recipients, or consider a different offer/promotion for the 2 genders or age brackets.

6: Test Your Message

Even though SMS can be more interactive than email marketing, it also shares some of email's positive characteristics, such as real-time response tracking and the ability to segment lists. As SMS is just text, there are no cross platform problems to test, just the message, so test it thoroughly. With SMS your message is limited to 160 characters (even less with the obligatory opt-out option), so test different versions of the message to see the best response. As we mentioned above, check that the time of day (and time zone) is relevant to the message/promotion and that the ideal message is being sent to the relevant age bracket.

Conclusion:

The potential pitfall of a push campaign is that if the message is not appropriate to the recipient, there could well be a backlash against the sender, as it could be regarded as Spam-similar to email marketing, only even more so, because of the personal nature of SMS. Remember, when sending a push campaign, you need to provide an opt-out mechanism, which, depending on who your supplier is, is usually an automated process using a return path.

Kath Pay is Marketing Director of Ezemail, a web-based e-communications tool, which enables you to create, send and track your email marketing and SMS messaging campaigns. For more information please go to http://www.ezemail.com or contact Kath at: kath@ezemail.com.

What Are Resale Rights

2009-03-02T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Roy Miller

The concept of "resale rights" might be new to you (some people say "resell rights" instead). What does it mean?

Generally, resale rights are rights to resell a product. Not rocket science, is it? You usually have to purchase resale rights. The price you pay lets you resell the product to your customers, bundle it with other products to create your own new products, etc.

What "resale rights" means depends on what kind of resale rights you're talking about. Here's a quick overview.

Some rights aren't really of the resale flavor at all. You can acquire "giveaway rights" to a product, which lets you give the product away, but not charge anything for it. But staying focused on resale rights in particular, there are three major varieties:

Resale Rights. This is the basic right to resell a product, usually with no right to change the product's content.
Master Resale Rights. These give you the right to resell the product, but also to resell the right to resell the product. You still (typically) can't change the content of the product.
Private Label Rights. These rights let you change the content of the product. You can edit it as you see fit, and attach your name to it as the author.

You're likely to pay more for master rights than for basic resale rights, and you're likely to pay the highest price for private label rights. But those varieties usually give you greater opportunities to profit. They can be worth the money.

Now that you know what the terms mean, you won't be lost in the weeds when you're shopping for resale rights.

Roy Miller owns http://www.resale-money-machine.com and has just released a new report on jumpstarting your online profits with resale rights. Claim your copy here: Resale Rights Alchemy Report.

What To Look For In An Internet Biz

2009-03-01T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Adrianne Geyer

There are literally thousands of internet businesses out there. How could you possible know which one to choose? A good place to begin is with what you are interested in. Is it health and wellness, sports, online gaming, crafts, gift baskets, etc. Selecting an interest will narrow down your search for an internet business.

COMPENSATION PLAN
Once you know what kind of internet business you would like to promote, you will need to look at how well you will be compensated for you efforts. Most internet businesses require an initial fee to get started, which could range from a low startup to a considerable amount.

Matrix Structure
If you had to establish a downline on your own, it could take a lot of time and effort for the little bit of money you may receive from your members. If your internet business included a forced matrix structure, you would build your downline with the members who came in before you, know as spillover from your upline, and also with the members you directly referred to your internet business. Matrix means that you and your upline are only allowed a certain number of people on each level. This creates an environment that when you and your upline continue referring new people and a level is filled, the new members are pushed down into your group under other people you and your upline have previously referred. The matrix will fill from your efforts as well as from the efforts of your upline, which means your income will grow at a faster pace.

If you work alone you will have built a downline of only the members you personally referred. In a matrix, that number will be much greater due to spillover. At the end of the month, the matrix will compress and fill in all the spaces left by the people that are inactive. This will move people up into a vacant spot.

The potential to build an income using a matrix structure is good; but it's not a quick process; it may take several months to see significant results. There are no qualifying or group volume requirements to start earning money. You will begin earning when the first member joins from your website.

Bonuses
When a visitor joins or makes a purchase from your website, many companies pay you a one time, fast start bonus. The visitor will now become part of your downline, and you will begin earning a monthly residual income from each purchase your downline members make.

TRANING & SUPPORT
Other than the product or service, the training you receive is the most important element to starting your internet business. A good support team will teach you step-by-step, how to go about online & offline marketing, how to increase your sales, and other important elements of running your internet business to be successful. Make sure your questions are answered so you understand what the internet business is about and what you're expected to do.

Also keep in mind that you will need to set aside a budget to market your internet business. Choose a business that has online and offline marketing tools to help you grow your business. Many companies provide online training tools and resources to help you get familiar with the products and/or services you will be marketing. Utilize these tools frequently, and find out who to contact when you need help.

I also suggest that you invest in educating yourself about promoting a business on the internet. Make sure the internet business you choose provide you with an ample supply of educational material. You will also want to stay in touch with your upline. If your sponsor cannot answer your questions, then keep going up the list until you find someone who will be able to help you.

Adrianne Geyer has a degree in Computer Networking and has been a full-time Internet Marketer since July 2000. To learn more about how to build an internet business, download and print a copy of her free ebook at the following link: Free Internet Biz eBook

You Know Youre Too Ethical When

2009-02-28T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Judith Kallos

Yeah, TOO ethical!? Lately, with some of the issues I've had to deal with in my day to day business activities it seems I am one of the rare few who is concerned about proper ethics and naturally is inclined to react with integrity.

The last straw was when faced with a dilemma of one of my client's competitors "cheating" for positioning online by using tactics obviously against the terms of service for most search sites, in this case Google. I explained that they had great listings (only one slot below the cheaters) and that our plan was for long term successes while the other guy's could end at any moment. I then had to listen to this client lecture that I was too ethical when I would not use these same tactics to help gain listings for their site. They then commented "We'll have to work on you!"

Work on making me less ethical? Work on getting me to agree to break the rules? It seems as of late my solid methodology of strong business staples, knowledge acquisition and long term strategizing seems to be making me a real PIA. See, I am not one of those who will say what a potential client wants to hear just to get the call back stating "send us a contract." Nor do I cater to the hype and online schemes of quick results or easy income just to book another billable hour. Silly me.

How about all those online auctions where the item's price is $1.00 only to find out they charge you the balance of the product's cost in "shipping and handling" fees? I sure wish eBay would nip that in the bud! Shipping and handling should be shipping and handling, not a combo of the product's price just so the seller can be listed as the least expensive when in fact they are not.

I contacted one such seller online about this strategy and was typed to as though I was the idiot "do the math" he said. Is everything online turning into the best man wins that figures out how to use deceptive practices or sugar-coat reality to the point of making your teeth ache just to make a buck? On second thought, don't answer that...

I've been doing this long enough to know all the red flags, hype and pitfalls. And some of them do work in the short term - with certain demographics. I also know the right way to do things and that if followed you will succeed - but you may not have the instant results all the fast, cheap and easy noise online claims is possible. When you deviate from the line of what is right, it will always hit you in the back of the head. Yes, sooner or later sometimes later but what comes around always does go around even online.

I may have lost a client to an unscrupulous "black hat" SEO firm using trickery and linking schemes to inflate results for the near term. But for the long term, these issues as well as many others I run into are simply not in my character to cater to when I know what is right and I won't.

You know you're too ethical when:

=> You give your clients the details and real-world view of what is required to achieve online success whether it is what they prefer to hear or not.

=> You do not minimize what is involved in efforts, time or cost to reach their goals.

=> You are clear and realistic about your own skill set and only offer services you excel at.

=> You provide referrals to other juried businesses whose expertise is outside your realm of experience.

=> You charge a fair price for your offerings reflecting the quality of the product/service offered.

=> You point out to clients in detail when their goals are unrealistic and why.

=> You don't hide your product's actual cost in other "fees".

=> You have your terms, policies or modus operandi available online for client review 24/7 and you back them up.

=> You back up your work, offering refunds when necessary and don't charge to remedy oversights or errors on your part.

=> You do not buckle to clients or customers who demand you deviate from what you know is right just to get their business.

=> You don't e-mail anyone without their explicit permission to do so - period!

My business is all about ethics and integrity in an industry of hype and misinformation. I've not signed every potential client that has come my way, but that is O.K. I know that for those who are smarties and hire me that they made the right choice for all the right reasons not because I was willing to compromise my ethics, cut corners or break the rules just so either of us could make a buck. In the long term, we both succeed.

It's so nice to be able to look at my cute little face in the mirror each day when I go home. For those who haven't been able to do that lately, add a dose of integrity to your life you might find honesty refreshing and actually freeing compared to sinister deception for commercial gain.

"Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never. Never -- in anything great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." ~ Winston Churchill

About the Author:
Judith Kallos is an authoritative and good-humored Technology Muse who has been playing @ http://www.TheIStudio.com for over a decade. Check out her popular Technology Cheat Sheets @ http://www.LearnAndThrive.com

Two Steps To An Investmentfree Online Empire

2009-02-27T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Joseph Pattison

If you're like most of us, you're not on a budget that allows you to spend massive amounts of money on advertising for your Internet marketing campaign. With that in mind, let me show you a fairly simple two-step formula for profiting online with little or no investment.

How much does it cost you to write an informative Internet marketing article? The only cost is a little time, but essentially it's free. The key is to write as many articles as possible, not just one or two.

After you've written a number of articles, go ahead and submit these to the top twenty article directories, as well as the top twenty ezine article directories. Be sure to follow their submission guidelines. I recommend you format your sentences at no more than 60 characters per line to meet the requirements of these different directories.

At the end of each of your articles you will include a resource box that entices your readers to click through to, not your website, but your free blog! Remember how I told you this method would be investment-free?

For a general idea of what a resource box looks like, take a look at mine at the end of this article. Offer readers a benefit for clicking through to your blog, and they most assuredly will.

You can create a blog in minutes by going to blogger.com. Then continue to do what you've been doing already; keep writing articles. Devote half of your time to writing articles for submission, and half of your time to creating quality content for your blog.

On the side of your blog, create links to the five to seven best products that offer affiliate programs that you are signed up for. Include them under a heading that is most appropriate for your topic.

Include "sleeper links" to merchant sites that you can earn affiliate commission from. Don't create blog entries that are nothing more than product pitches. Make your blog entries informative, and tie in subtle endorsements to products that help to meet their needs.

For example, read the sentence a couple of paragraphs above where I told you that you could "create a blog in minutes by going to blogger.com". Simple, isn't it? As a general rule, don't include affiliate links in more than 30-40% of your blog entries. If you do, your visitor will feel like you're trying to constantly sell them.

Besides, if your blog entries are information-rich and informative, they will keep reading and eventually run into one or more of your affiliate links anyway! Chances are that they will likely click on one of your affiliate links located on the side of your blog page as well.

While you will eventually want to get your own website, if you are on a shoestring budget, this is the best method that I am aware of for profiting without spending a dime, or selling your own product. By creating quality content on a regular basis, repeat visits are virtual guaranteed, and the more articles you submit, the higher your affiliate commission will be!

**Attn Ezine editors/Site owners** Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site so long as you leave all links in place, do not modify the content and include our resource box as listed below. Feel free to substitute your referral link in place of ours in the resource box. Thanks!

Wanna learn how to generate thousands of highly targeted visitors, absolutely free? => http://www.iwantchoices.com

Do Free Online Classified Sites Really Bring You Customers

2009-02-26T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Dale Calvert

The question isDO FREE CLASSIFIED AD SITES REALLY WORK? The answer is yes and no. I know that is not the answer you wanted to hear, but it is the truth.

Let me try to explain further. All marketing is numbers! The more advertising methods you are using in the market place, ultimately the more website visitors you will have and the more sales you will make.

With that said, a few years ago when we rolled out our web cash leads program (http://www.WebCashLeads.com) we had associates using every method possible to drive traffic to their affiliate sites. There is no question that the best 2 ways to drive traffic to any website is with Pay Per Click Search engines such as Google and Overture along with solo ads in marketing ezines.

However FREE classified ad sites will work, provided that you are promoting a product or service that ADVERTISER can benefit from. Please re-read that statement. You must promote a product or services that A D V E R T I S E R S want!

What I am really saying is that not that many consumers actually visit a lot of the FREE advertising sites on the web, but a TON of Website owners see ads while searching to make sure their personal ad appears on the site. Does that make sense?

So if you can promote a product or service that website owners can use your chances for clicks and sales increase dramatically. I can tell you dozens of success stories from marketers that have used FREE classified sites to market their products and services. I can also share with you dozens of horror stories from associates who have wasted hours posting to FREE Classified Ad sites with little or no results.

So should you use FREE Advertising Sites are not? After all it can be very time consuming to post to these sites? We personally post to FREE advertising sites every week, and we make sales weekly. However we have a secret to our success.

We use a completely automated Classified Ad Blaster that allows us to submit unlimited free ads to over 50,000 classified ads sites with just a couple of clicks of the mouse! That is right we can submit our ad to over FIFTY THOUSAND free classified ad sites in less than 5 minutes!

With those kinds of "numbers" no wonder we get a lot of website traffic and sales weekly from FREE Classified Ad sites. You can work hard, or you can work smart. In all businesses time is money and marketing comes down to numbers. Our submitter allow us to go post on huge numbers of boards in less than 5 minutes, we think it makes much more sense to approach marketing with FREE classified ad sites this way, than trying to submit our ads 1 by 1, what about you? You can get all the details about the classified ad submitter we use, along with several other great promotional products at www.Tunza.TipForSuccess.com

We wish you much success in your Free Classified Ad, advertising efforts.

Dale Calvert is a self-made marketing millionaire who specializes in helping people become successful in their marketing efforts. You can find out more about the products and services he offers at http://www.DaleCalvert.com

Product Endorsement Joint Ventures Short Sweet N Successful Part 2

2009-02-25T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Chonticha Marijne

Once you've found an Internet marketer who is interested in partnering with you, you can give them access to the product for their review and lay out the rest of the plan. The split should be 50-50, after deduction of payment processor fees. Unless you own the product or it can't be found readily elsewhere, you should offer it at a significant discount. The list owner should send out the initial email and any follow up messages. As an experienced marketer, they will know how write an endorsement that is more editorial in style rather than blatant sales copy. The key is to offer the target audience help in solving a genuine problem, rather than trying to sell them a product outright. The people on the mailing list know and trust the list owner, so there are no spam issues to contend with and the JV partner does not have to disclose their valuable list to you. If you agree to offer the product at a reduced price, then it is highly recommended that you set up a separate web page so that you do not lose any orders at the regular price on any existing web pages.

Trust is required between the joint venture partners. To keep things above board, make sure that you provide proof of earnings, for instance by sending your JV partner a screenshot of your sales. If you select PayPal as your payment processor, then you should ensure that you use a separate email address that is unique to your JV to track your earnings. You can also set up a counter on the JV sales page to give your partner a rough idea of the number of visitors and possible earnings and you should also track the clickthroughs to the site with an ad tracking tool. When you've transfered your JV partner their share of the earnings, please make sure that they provide you with a receipt for your income tax return purposes.

If you're not yet convinced of the power of the joint venture, let's take a look at the most obvious benefits:

*A JV can be the start of a long lasting business relationship.

*A JV can increase your credibility if you choose your partner wisely.

*A JV is a low-cost, low-risk method to increase sales.

*A JV can lead to new customers, new leads, new subscribers.

*A JV can net you quick profits within a short time frame.

*A JV can offer you a new distribution channel.

Be sure to treat your joint venture partner as a valued equal and always think long-term. Satisfied partners are more willing to repeat the collaboration in future and good business relationships are invaluable! Provided you do it right, a joint venture will boost your online earnings with a vengeance. Once you realize how profitable and easy it is to set up a joint venture, you will want to replicate the experience over and over again.

Chonticha Marijne enjoys growing her online business from home in Gouda, the Netherlands. Her blog http://www.e-Abundance.com/blog offers articles, tips, tools and freebies for the Internet marketer as well as her popular report "106 Amazing List-Building Tips". This article is copyright © 2006 by Chonticha Marijne and may be reprinted in its entirety as long as both byline and copyright statement are included.

Write Your Heart And Soul If You Want To Sell On The Internet

2009-02-24T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Deanna Mascle

Yes, you are going to have to write to run your ebusiness. There is simply no way around it, but it doesn't have to be painful drudgery and you can do it even if you feel you lack writing skills.

You are going to have to write because one of the best ways to set your web site, blog, newsletter and/or ezine apart from the thousands of others your customers may experience is to get personal. Share your experiences and your life.

You don't need to share every intimate detail but sharing small glimpses into who you are and what makes you tick will help your visitors understand why you selected this niche -- and that will open them up to becoming your customer.

You are also going to have to write because there are some pages of web content that no one else but you can create.

Finally you are going to have to write to help market your ebusiness (more on that later).

However there is help available to you. You can hire writers to create content for your site, blog, or newsletter or you can use free content that is available through content directories such as http://NowLearnMore.com . You don't have to go it alone and even if you feel comfortable writing you might find a good selection of additional material can be a real asset.

I have been working as a professional writer for more than 20 years so obviously writing doesn't scare me, but the writing demanded by electronic media is different than that demanded by more traditional print publications. And these differences make it easier on those who don't feel as comfortable with the written word as I do.

~ The first difference is length. Most of the time you only need to write a few hundred words for a page, post or message.

~ The second difference is formality. Internet writing is more casual and informal so you don't need to worry about grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure as much as you might in other venues. Many readers are scanning so they won't even notice your small errors. You should strive for the cleanest copy possible but don't sweat the small stuff too much.

~ The third difference is personality. As I mentioned above personality matters. Let your heart and your interests dictate what you write about and the readers (and customers) will come. What you way matters a lot more on the internet than how you say it.

If you'd like to know more about "How To Start Your Own Ebusiness On A Shoestring" you can sign up for Deanna Mascle's free tutorial or read her advice about Small Business and Ecommerce.

8 Excellent Ways To Sell Your Backend Products More Successfully

2009-02-23T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by William Johnston

A back-end product is a product that you attempt to sell to your customers after they have recently purchased a related item from your business. Selling back-end products is an extremely effective way of boosting your profits. It is a lot easier to sell products to those who have already bought from you than to seek out new customers. Of course, it is extremely important that you have a steady flow of new customers but it is also important to keep up with older customers and always be looking to lead them to make another purchase. If you make transactions on your website a good experience, older customers are very likely to look to do business with you again. It is your responsibility to persuade them to make that decision. Here are 8 ways to sell your back-end products more successfully:

1. When you ship the first product to your customer be sure to leave a leaflet all about your back-end product. Make the leaflet bright and colourful so that it is not thrown straight in the bin. Promote your back-end product in great detail, telling the reader how it will benefit them.

2. Give your customers a free surprise gift when they buy their first product. The most effective gifts are ebooks because they are very cheap to product and are very easy to distribute. Attach an ad for your back-end product to the free gift. Your customer will be in a positive frame of mind due to the free gift he has just received and so is likely to look at your ad.

3. After your customers purchase, take them to a 'thank you' page. On this page you could promote several back-end products you have. Make your customers feel good about themselves and so keep on congratulating them on making a good purchase. People like being told that they have made a good decision. If they are made to feel this way they might be persuaded to make another purchase.

4. Start your own 'customers' only ezine'. Let anyone who has made a purchase from your site sign up free to this ezine. As well as offering quality content in this ezine you could also promote your back-end product in every issue. This way, customers will see your back-end product offer on a regular basis.

5. If you sell expensive products then a great way to bring a customer to make another sale is by sending them a card on their birthday or on holidays. Put a small advertisement inside the card. Although sending a card sounds ridiculous, your customers will be touched by how you have remembered their birthday.

6. If you sell electronic products, like ebooks, then be sure to include ads promoting your back-end product within. You can be sure the reader will see your ads because they will be trying to extract all the information out of your ebook for the best value for money. If your ebook is well written and interesting, then your customer will be very interested in purchasing again.

7. Create a 'customers' only' area of your site. Fill this area with interesting content and some free downloads to really boost this area's traffic. Then, subtly add ads promoting your back-end products around this area. Be careful not to load this area with ads because otherwise customers will recognise this and will not return.

8. Send your customers a thank you email after their purchase and include your ad for your back-end product. Try to disguise the fact that your email really is an ad. Make it look like you are trying to do your customers a favour by showing them additional back-end products which they might like or might benefit them.

For more information on this subject or about making money online go to http://www.info-ebooks.co.uk

100s of free ebooks and software products are also available at this address. Gain free access to these by sending a blank email to:

infoebooks@freeautobot.com

Thank you for reading

William Johnston
(will@info-ebooks.co.uk)

How A Coaching Niche Focus Leads To Online Marketing Success

2009-02-22T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Kenn Schroder

Many coaches fail to market their practice online.

Here's what happens:

They put up a web site, but don't get much traffic.
Their web site doesn't convince visitors to contact them about becoming a client
They try Google Ads, but fail to generate clients.
They try to get links, but aren't sure where to go, and other sites aren't very interested in linking back.
They try to optimize their site for search engines, but don't get very good rankings.
They try to network in forums and discussions, but those efforts only provide minimal results.

Why do they get minimal results?

There are many reasons, but a major, underlying culprit is due to lack of a focus - not having a niche.

Having a niche focus means providing very specific services for a very specific target audience. This can be done in many ways, including selecting a specific industry to serve, targeting a geographical location, and choosing specific demographics.

For example, Kathy Malone is a career coach for people transitioning from military to civilian life. You can see that her niche is defined by people in the military. She gets even more specific by focusing on those who are transitioning into civilian life.

When you don't have a niche focus, your online marketing efforts suffer in the following ways:

It's tough to know the right keywords to focus on to increase the chances of being found by searchers.
It's hard to find an audience who will be interested in your services.
It will be difficult to get links from other web sites because your general coaching practice isn't as interesting or unique.
You will have a lot more competitors and substitutions (products or services that indirectly compete with you) -especially online where anyone can compete.
When people come across your business online - through articles, postings, or searching - they won't connect with your message.

Taking your practice to the Web is like taking a big fish from a little pond to the ocean.

There is a lot more water you can swim around in, but there are also a lot more big fish.

The good news is you don't have to become a bigger fish. You can find the right pool of water where your business can thrive.

How a niche focus helps you online:

It's easier to find the right keywords which lead to higher rankings on search engines.
Your web site is more attractive and engaging.
Getting links is easier because your web site will appear to be more unique -which is attractive.
You will close more sales that come through your site because you are perceived as a specialist instead of a generalist.
Your case studies & testimonials are stronger because they are more specific and relevant.
If you advertise, like using Google AdWords, you will have more success because your ads will get more attention from qualified prospects and less attention from sub-ideal prospects.

Some Examples of Successful Coaches with A Niche

Juliet Austin of JulietAustin assists "helping and healing" professionals who are struggling to attract clients.

She says, "About 50% of my clients come through search engines. Usually, they begin by signing up for my newsletter and then hire me within 1-24 months. My site comes up on the first page of Google for most of my keywords partly because I have a focused niche. In general, having a niche helps bring qualified prospects to my site, so they are more likely to become clients."

Deborah Brown-Volkman of SurpassYourDreams helps senior executives, vice presidents, and managers who are overworked and are looking for a new job or career.

She tells us, "A focus on career coaching helped me optimize my site so I can get top position for searches in my field. Even though I do use speaking and networking to grow my practice, 65% of new clients come from the Web, 25% from referrals, 10% from talks and people I meet at meetings."

Mentioned earlier, Kathy Malone of FrontLineCoaching helps people who are transitioning from military to civilian life.

She explains, "... my niche focus helped me research and discover good keywords, military transition coaching. I built my site around them and now I have #1 ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN. The inquiries I get from the site are already qualified as my ideal clients, so I enjoy a 100% conversion rate. Because my site is niche focused, people know what I do, what service I offer, and what it costs. I never have the stress of 'selling' anything."

For advice, she says, "... to develop your niche, it's best to start very narrow and deep - you can then expand from there."

While this article doesn't go into how to niche, here are two tips to get you thinking:

Focus on something that you are passionate about. For example if you love working with high school kids who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives, then you may want to focus on them.
Look at your existing clients for some hints. Which ones do you enjoy working with the most? Which ones can you help the most?

Establishing a niche focus is a great way to increase your appeal to prospective clients in your offline marketing, and it's almost essential if you want to make a big splash online.

Kenn Schroder helps coaches who are struggling to attract clients. He helps you use the Web to attract clients, grow passive income, and free up your most valuable asset - your time! Get your FREE report and FREE weekly newsletter on web marketing for coaches at CoachingSitesThatWork!.

The Long Sales Letter Should You Use It In Your Advertising

2009-02-21T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Dina Giolitto

If you're a web marketer and you've done your homework, you've probably come across the Long Sales Letter in your internet travels. Top web marketing experts like Yanik Silver, "The Copy Doctor" Michel Fortin and countless others use it to pitch their comprehensive instructional kits. You may have even made a purchase based on what you read in one of these letters.

Powerfully persuasive, the Long Sales Letter employs carefully targeted copy to draw the reader in, emotionally identify with them, create a need for the product, and incite them to make an immediate purchase. The Long Sales letter, in all its verbosity and sensationalism, gleams with promise. It appears the surefire way to make sales come pouring in.

But is it? Should you fork your hard-earned cash over to a copywriter who will create a hypnotic and riveting sales letter that goes on for pages and pages hyping your product? Should you grab for your credit card and buy one of those comprehensive teaching packets that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about writing a Long Sales Letter yourself?

Answers often come in the form of questions. Here are some questions I typically ask my clients:

What are you selling, and how much does it cost?

Does the product you offer on your website fulfill immediate short-term needs?

Or is it something that might help someone reach a long-term goal?

Items that satisfy immediate yearnings for a low price don't require a rousing speech to attract buyers. What these products do require is visibility. How funny would it be to receive a letter in the mail from the CEO of Bubble Yum, urging you to buy his product! Totally unnecessary; Bubble Yum does a fine job of selling itself on the "impulse buy" rack by the supermarket check-out. Music CDs and clothing are things that don't cost huge amounts of money, and virtually sell themselves. Your customer will know in a matter of seconds whether they want what you have. In such a case, skip the letter. Instead, showcase these items in a high-traffic area where they will be seen.

Who are you marketing to?

I did some work recently for an e-greeting company who had me writing a long and persuasive letter. I posed the question: "How much do we really need to convince people to buy these e-greetings? Either people will like them, or they won't." My client in turn made a good point: the sales letter wasn't needed to toute the actual product on the site. But it would certainly come in handy for potential affiliates and promoters. The sales letter was a handy tool that depicted us an intelligent group of people with a knack for selling - and that could very well be the driving decision for those who might want to represent us. So yes, a sales letter may actually work to your benefit, depending on the audience you plan to address.

Would your product or service be considered 'an investment?'

An investment is a possession acquired for future return or benefit. Items that offer long-term benefits cost more money. They promise a brighter tomorrow; an investment for the future. They also require more convincing to get people to buy them. I recently met a career coach who features a goal achievement system, in the form of an e-book, for purchase on her website. Her e-book is moderately priced for its category, and well-written in my opinion. Would I advise her to use a sales letter to pitch the e-book? Yes, but I'd make the letter an overview of her entire service offering and not just about the e-book.

The trick is to convince people that a career coach will help them reach their personal and professional goals, which in turn will do wonders for their career, bolster their confidence and improve their quality of life. If you can sell them on this broad concept, then they'd likely sign up for career coaching sessions, and at the very least purchase a goal achievement system e-book. With your sales letter, you can build a case for maximum investment, and at the very minumum, make a few supplemental bucks with a supporting product.

How much information can you fill your letter with?

As much as you have to build a solid argument. Start by openly addressing the customer's frustrations and fears. "Are you tired of throwing away money on lukewarm ads that just don't sell?" The reader is hard-pressed to disagree. Next comes the aspirations; the hope for a better tomorrow: "Imagine an ad campaign that can triple your sales at a minimal cost to your business!"

Pose your company as having solution; the secret key, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. "Watch your sales rate explode!" "Discover the secrets that successful marketers know!" They're not really secrets and nothing is literally going to explode, but such language creates a sense of excitement and urgency. Build your credibility with testimonials and success stories. "Bob Luken had this to say about our system:" (list testimonial). "Marla Thompson lost 49 pounds in three months thanks to our weight loss program!"

Finally comes the call to action: "Buy now, and get on the path to a more properous tomorrow!" "Click here to start saving immediately!" A word to the wise: once you make your point, wrap it up. Beware the hypnotic effects of repeated ideas and words, and endless streams of mind-numbing copy. Not everyone succumbs to such trickery! I speak for myself when I say that after four or so paragraphs, the reader is likely losing interest. At this point, one of two things may happen. They will scroll all the way to the end and click BUY NOW, or they will grow disgusted and leave your website.

How strong of a message do you require?

The flashy, all-I-need-now-is-a-megaphone Sales Letter doesn't work for everybody. Take the hospitality industry, for example, which calls for a bit more subtlety and finesse. You don't want to appear frenzied or desperate to make the sale, or you may scare away the customer. Strong language can do just that. Some Lengthy Sales Letters use what I consider marketing brainwashing tactics. The brainwashing comes when you start repeating what you've already said, but in a slightly different way. Or when you follow the formula I've outlined in the previous paragraph, but do it no less than 12 times in the body of your letter. This is a form of "loud" advertising in itself!

If you ask yourself the right questions, you'll get a better idea for whether a Long Sales Letter, or any other type of advertising strategy you might have learned about, is the best approach for your own company. Be honest with yourself during the questioning process. It also helps to "put your feet in the consumer's shoes." In my ten years as an advertiser, one thing rings true as far as I can see: the more aggressively you push your products and the "busier" the ads, the more lowbrow or "low-confidence" consumer you'll attract. As a general rule, when creating ads, less is more. So if you have a good point to make, make it in the best way you can, but don't go to extremes. If your ads are always long-winded, bold and frantic, you'll attract plenty of attention. But it may not be the kind of attention you want.

Liked this article? Have more of the same emailed to your inbox each month. Sign up for the Copywriting and Marketing Ezine from Dina at Wordfeeder.com and learn to write search engine friendly web copy and market your web based business for free.

Three Core Reasons Why Web Site Content Increases Your Web Site Traffic

2009-02-20T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Kenneth Doyle

It is now a well established fact that people primarily use the Internet to search for information on specific topics to solve specific problems. Now (of course) there are other ways the Internet is used too.

However, primarily, the Internet is an information delivery medium. It is NOT a "sell" medium (even though that happens). It's simply a matter of identifying the mediums marketing "logic" to work out how best to use it to sell on it.

In essence people on the Internet are looking for content that is relevant to their purpose, need or problem. They typically are not looking for marketing ploys.

Now, there are a number of ways to increase this content, Including having a search engine optimization company provide you with keyword rich articles. There are three primary reasons why more web site content increases your web site traffic.

The first reason more web site content increases traffic to your web site is that content articles tend to be focused on a specific topic. This focus will naturally lead to the repeated use of a specific keyword or phrase. The natural and repeated use of this phrased leads to higher search engine rankings, naturally.

Search engine rankings are the way findings/ results come back to an Internet user when they search for a 'solution to their problem' via a search engine.

If someone searches for the term dogs they will get many millions of pages of results. The order in which these results are displayed on the screen depends on a number of factors including how frequently the term is mentioned on the site and where it is mentioned on the site, and the exact phrase the user typed into the search field on their favorite Search Engine.

In other words, if you get the SEARCH key phrases right, and you continue to create content focused on that topic, you will ALWAYS be on the top of the search engines for that particular phrase.

The Internet is a content driven medium, thus the web site with the most (focused) content within a specific theme will always win.

It's as simple and as complicated as that.

Of course there are other offsite factors such as back linking and RSS etc, but this is not the focus of this article.

Research continually shows that people tend only to click on the first ten results a search engine offers them. Increasing your web site content will help you become one of these first ten web sites (within specific key phrases). This means more people than you ever thought possible will be clicking on your site in no time simply because of your top ten ranking for a specific keyword or key phrase.

Not only will you be closer to the top of the search engine rankings with more content, you will also be indexed by more search engines. This could mean that something like ninety percent of all Internet users seeing your web site in any one given Internet session for a specific key phrase.

The second reason more web site content increases traffic is more complicated. If you have strong, well written content on your site, you increase your credibility with customers.

Suddenly you are no longer a company selling homemade dog food; you are somebody who can offer knowledgeable advice about anything a responsible dog owner needs to know including house training, leash laws, and sleeping problems.

This increase in credibility not only makes people believe what you have posted to your site, it also makes them want to stay at your site LONGER to read the rest of your content articles on a topic about which they are PASSIONATE and ACTIVELY searching for on the Internet.

The more keyword focused content articles you have on your site the easier they will find you and longer they will stay there.

Keeping people on your site as long as possible is the key to selling your product to them.

You simply have more time in which to pitch them your product or service (in multiple ways) and thus close more sales. Not only will they stay at your site longer when your site has more focused content they are far more likely to return to your site the next time they search the Internet for information that's within your topic.

For example, if you are selling refilled printer ink cartridges, and you have content on your site which relates to all things printers you have a far better chance that someone might stay to look at a few of your other articles on your web site.

However, the next time they need digital photo printing tips, chances are good that they will remember what great content you offered them during their last Internet session, and they will return directly to your site just to read more of your topic focused content.

This means you have their complete, undivided attention for an even longer period of time this time. Moreover, if they are returning to your site on a regular basis, chances are good that they will recommend the site to other users like their friends and relatives which will mean even more traffic to your site.

The final way more web site content increases your web traffic is that it increases the probability that advertisers and reciprocal link exchangers will be attracted to your site. Reciprocal links are exchanged by web sites that have similar interests. The more relevant topics you are able to list, the more chances you have of someone with similar interests attempting to link to your site.

This could greatly increase your web site traffic because not only will people be able to find your site through search engines, they may also be able to find your site through other sites. And, advertisers are looking for sites that encourage customers they want to do business with. More keywords will mean more customers for you, which can mean more advertisers for you, which can mean more profits and visibility for you.

No matter which reason you choose to add more content to your site it will always increase your web site traffic.

This can only mean good things. Continually adding keyword focused content to your web site is one of the best ways to grow your web business. You can have these keyword rich content articles written for you, or you can write them yourself.

Whichever way you choose to go here be sure that your articles are well-written. Badly written articles will do little to increase your web site traffic, and most likely will affect your credibility.

Kenneth Doyle Is A Writer And Internet Marketing Consultant, Find Out About His SEO Article Writing And Submission Service Gets Thousands Of Prospects To Read YOUR Offers, Here... *SEO Article Writing Submission Service*

How To Buy Advertising

2009-02-19T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Jess Huffman

Few things are as uncertain to a new home business owner as where, when and how to buy advertising. If you've started to research your advertising options you are already painfully aware of the costs involved. Costs that can, literally, put you out of business if not controlled. Yet, without some form of regular, effective advertising your business can stagnate and starve to death. How do you know what is right for you? In this article we'll look at some options, and some ways to measure effectiveness, that should keep you in the money and out of trouble.

Will Your Customer's See Your Ad?

Advertising is sold based on its reach. If a newspaper, for instance, has a circulation of 100,000 subscribers, ad space will be considerably more expensive than a newspaper with a circulation of 10,000 subscribers. The first reaches ten times more people. Reach can be confusing, however, and it is more accurately an indicator of selling price to the publisher than anything else. As the buyer you must first consider how closely the demographic profile of the publication's readers matches that of your customer before you worry about the reach.

Demographic profile may seem like a complicated concept. In this case it simply means the "people" (demos=Greek for people) characteristics of that publication's subscribers. Their income, age, gender, and education levels to name a few of the common demographics measured. Most first class publications gather this information and make it available as part of their sales presentation. Smaller, or less professional publications may have incomplete, or even no, data. If you can't get, or determine, the demographics of a publication's readership its probably a good idea to pass on it as an advertising medium for your home business.

Cheap Isn't Necessarily Inexpensive

Often new home business owners see cheap advertising, especially in smaller publications like community newspapers, or association newsletters, and think its a good buy when compared to ad space in larger publications. While the two publications in question may look like apples and oranges, there is a way to convert the apples to oranges and make a reasonable comparison. Simply divide the cost of the advertisement by the total number of projected readers. This will give you a "cost per view" of your ad in each publication.

Here is a simple example of the conversion at work. The Daily - circulation 100,000 -offers you a business card size ad, for one week, at $1000. The Community Weekly - Circulation 5,000 - offers you the same size ad, for one issue, at $50. Which is least expensive?

If you divide the $1000 cost of The Daily's ad by 500,000 (thats 100,000 circulation times the 5 days it will run), you get a projected cost of $.002 per view. If you divide the Community Weekly's cost of $50 by the 5,000 circulation (the ad runs once - its a weekly) you get a cost of $.01 per view. The $50 ad is actually five times more expensive.

This is a hypothetical example, of course. There are many things to consider like the fit of the Community Weekly's demograhic compared to The Daily, and the fact that the Community Weekly will likely have a few more views than the initial 5,000 subscibers. That's because it will sit in a few waiting rooms until the next issue comes out, but this isn't usually enough to make a big change in the cost per view.

Tracking

The most essential tool in your analysis of ad price and effectiveness is tracking. The cost per view, and demographic match are crucial in making your initial decision to try a publication. The acid tests for continued advertising in any medium are cost per call, and cost per sale. Two important measures you can't get without running some test ads and carefully tracking the response rate for each advertisement you run.

There are many ways to track response rate. The ad can request that caller ask for a specific individual by name. When a call comes in for Mr. Bishop, for instance, you know they saw the advertisement in The Daily. You can ask that orders be directed to a specific department. When an order arrives addressed to "department CW100" for instance, you know that order came from your ad in the Community Weekly. A less exotic, but very effective method, is to simply ask each caller, "Where did you hear about us", and then enter the answer in your tracking software.

Once you have your tracking results use the same type of calculation you emplyed in determining the cost per view before you ran the advertisement to arrive at a cost per call and cost per sale. Divide the cost of the advertising by the number of calls it generated to get the cost per call. Divide the number of closed sales that originated with the ad by the cost to arrive at the cost per sale.

In the end, it is cost per sale that matters. No matter what the cost per view, or cost per call work out to be, your best advertising medium will always be the publication, radio staion, or TV station that provides the lowest cost per closed sale. You can't find that out, however, without running a test ad campaign and good tracking.

Jess Huffman is a Business Consultant and Coach working from his home office in Calgary, Alberta. Jess has helped hundreds of people successfully start their own work from home businesses.

http://www.home-business-and-entrepreneur-tools.com

How To Sell More Of Your Products Online

2009-02-18T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Biana Babinsky

If you run an online store selling products, such as tools, jewelry, makeup, gifts, clothing, or any other products, you make more money when you sell more products. Since the objective of any business is to make money, online store owners know that the more products they sell, the more money they can make.

"How can I sell more of my products online?" is one of the most common questions I hear from my clients is. Here are several tips that will help you sell more of your products online and generate more revenue:

- Show off the products in the best possible light. When people buy a product, they want to know what the product looks like. If someone is buying a couch, they want to be able to see if that couch would fit with the rest of their furniture before actually buying it. If someone wants to buy a piece of jewelry, they want to see what the jewelry looks like before buying it.

Therefore, the best way for you to convince your web site visitors that your products are right for them is by showing the products in the best possible light. Have high quality, detailed pictures of your products on your web site so that people are convinced that they need your product as soon as they see it.

- Make your web site easy to use. If someone comes to your web site to purchase your products, make sure they can find exactly what you are looking for. Your web site should have clear and concise navigation that is exactly the same on every page of the web site.

An easy to use navigation ensures that your web site visitors find what they are looking for on your web site and purchase it.

- Optimize web site for search engines. Another good way to drive more customers to your web site and increase your online sales is by optimizing your web site for search engines. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Meta-information includes certain HTML tags (title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags), as well as the internal (links between pages on the same site) and external (links between pages on different sites) link structure of a web site.

Optimizing your web site helps you improve your search engine rankings and drive more targeted traffic to your web site.

- Create a blog to promote your business. A blog is your business diary, in which you share the information about your business, your new products, different ways of using your products and much more. Your blog is an excellent tool to let the world know about your business and your products, to connect with potential customers and promote what you have to offer.

In order to bring the most online traffic and make money with your blog, make sure that your blog consistently and create blog posts that are of interest to your past as well as potential customers. Regular posts that are interesting to read is what will keep your readers coming back and buying from you.

The Internet is a great place to sell your products. When you know how to market your business online, you bring more web site traffic, get more product sales and make more money.

Biana Babinsky is the online business expert and author who has taught hundreds of people how to sell their products and make more money online. Learn all of her online marketing secrets in her Complete Online Marketing Course at http://www.CompleteMarketingCourse.com

Link Popularity Reports

2009-02-17T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Henry James

As link popularity is one of the most important tools you can adopt to raise your search ranking, you need to take apt steps, from time to time, to stand ahead your competitors. And the one way, you can assure the effectiveness of your link popularity, is by getting your link popularity reports made. But how can you get them made? Link popularity reports can be achieved with the help of certain software and services.

Now to understand why you need to develop link popularity reports, you can continue reading this article further.

The link building reports are important as they make you aware about your link popularity for different search engines. There might be a case where you get the highest link popularity for one search engine but the number is not that good with the other search engines. It would certainly be horrendous for you. So, you should always avoid putting you in any such situation. Thus it is paramount for you to be always alert of your link popularity situation among the top search engines. And by getting link popularity reports made, you would certainly get a complete access to the total information of links on your website.

It is equally important for you to understand the various aspects of link building before you hire any services for getting these reports made for you. The link popularity of a website depends on a number of quality links it has. A website can have in-bound, out-bound or reciprocal links. Out of these, inbound links are the most important ones for the effective link popularity. All the major search engines give you good page ranking according to the high number of inbound links.

Similarly, you can also exchange reciprocal links with the various websites related to your business to raise your link popularity and achieve the targeted traffic. Perhaps, the exchange of links is the best internet marketing tool for quick link building. Moreover it is usually free of any cost.

Whatever links you chose for your link building, the key remains that the links added should be the quality ones. They should be optimized well for attaining the top page rankings among the major search engines.

Even after you have optimized your website aptly, you need to get the links reports made. For, these link popularity reports would make you aware of all the types of links you are connected to. You can engage a service provider for this job. The service provider will give you complete details of your links. Time-to-time reports will keep you abreast with the latest developments in the cyber world.

Many times your link is added to some other websites without your permission. You are fortunate to get the information about all the websites linking to your website with the help of link popularity reports software. The software confirms the number and domain names of the websites linking to your site.

The market is loaded with some great link popularity reports software for you. The software can be purchased from a number of software stores. You can order it online as well by submitting the online purchase form. In fact the online purchase will also offer you with good discounts along.

Internet is a huge network. If you do not make persistent efforts on your own, you are likely to be lost in this big cyber world. Link popularity reports provide you a great indication of the internet presence of your websites. So do not lag behind and always keep you well-informed.

About The Author
Henry James Discover advanced link building and link popularity tools and resources as a Member of: http://www.Link-Advantage.com.

Ghost Writer Services How To Guarantee That Your Investment Pays Back When You Hire These Services

2009-02-16T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Christopher Kyalo

Ghost writing services are quite affordable online. Unfortunately this does not guarantee that everybody who hires ghost writer services will end up happy at the end of the day. In fact many webmasters and blog owners usually end up bitterly disappointed at the end of the exercise.

To avoid this disappointment, there are a number of key things one should always look for when hiring ghost writer services.

Ghost Writer Services Must Be Based On Sound SEO Techniques

Just study a number of successful web sites and blogs and you will quickly find that behind the success of most will be sound SEO techniques in the generation of all content at their sites. Ghost writer services that ignore SEO (search engine optimization) techniques like the use of keyword phrases capable of attracting search engine traffic are already greatly handicapped. This by itself is such a great impediment that chances of success become very slim if any.

Ghost Writer Services Must Be Based On A Lively Writing Style

If your writing is not interesting, you will never make an impact online. Hiring ghost writer services from online writers whose writing style is visibly rigid and boring will quickly end up in regret and unfulfilled objectives for you. Even if good keyword phrases are used in all the content, traffic that ends up on your site will quickly reach for the "back" button and click their way out of your site or blog pronto. You will quickly find that any investment you have made in generating traffic like using Adwords, for instance, will not pay back or come anywhere near giving you a decent return on your investment.

Ghost Writer Services Must Incorporate Effective Traffic Generation Techniques

Good ghost writer services will constantly seek to incorporate effective traffic generation techniques. For example some articles will clearly be written with link-baiting objectives in mind. Generating links to a site is a very effective traffic generation strategy that will pay for years and years. Thus guarantying a massive return on every penny you will end up spending on ghost writer services.

Christopher Kyalo Is A leading web content provider who provides all the key traffic generation ingredients in all his work for clients. He is occasionally available to handle new client assignments. Get the details on how you can contact him at his content provider blog. Or learn all the inside secrets of high traffic generating content from his free newsletter. Subscribe now by sending a blank email to articlesrgold-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Having The Right Attitude And Start Becoming A Problem Solver

2009-02-15T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Rich Hamilton, Jr

Do you really want to make money online?

Do you want to develop a business which can make money for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week almost automatically?

Of course you do!

Why else wouldn't you be reading this ebook right now.

Many others have created full-time incomes while only working part-time online. It is within your grasp. Plus, many of them, including myself have started with little or no money!

The down side to this is, many of you will need a change of attitude before you will be able to reach your goals.

Even with the right information and the right foundation, many people have still failed in their online ventures just because they did not develop the right attitude. Your attitude is essential when achieving success and your dreams. Which brings me to an old statement "Your Attitude determines your Altitude," pretty much says it all!

If your psychological mindset is poor, than your outlook in general will always be poor. The negativity will show in everything you do. No matter what you are doing, your results will be poor and your business will do poor.

Having a positive mentality about yourself and about your business is a part of having the right attitude, but that is not what I want to focus on in this section. I want to focus on your reasons and vision for your business.

If your vision for your business is to just make enough money for a little extra income or to just produce a full-time income for yourself. You are severely limiting yourself to the real possibilites. If this is you, you need a change of attitude. Don't limit yourself! On the Internet, "The only limitation is your imagination"!

The most successful people in business are the ones who look for problems and develop solutions to cure their problems. They have a vision which is bigger than just to make a little money. They have a vision to solve problems for others.

You need to learn about powerful internet marketing strategies to expose your product to hungry visitors and learn how to write killer sales copy. Yes, that is what you need to know how, if you want to produce sales. You need to ask yourself a few questions.

What is it that I'm selling?

Are you selling just another product?

Are you selling a solution to people's problems?

Are you just in business to make a little money or do you honestly care about helping other people with their problems?

Now you are probably wondering where a good place to search for problems is. Well there are many places to do your research such as forums, discussion boards, newsgroups, and even eBay.

When you get to these places to do your research, here are just a handful of some of todays problems to give you an idea:

People are frustrated with the amount of traffic on their web site!
People are frustrated with the amount of time they spend with their family or friends!
People are frustrated with learning how to submit to the Search Engines!
People are frustrated with learning how to use certain software!
People are frustrated with not being able to produce affiliate sales!
People are frustrated with not being able to produce sales!
People are frustrated with weight loss!
People are frustrated with health problems!

Look for these types of problems and frustrations and develop or find products which have the answers. In other words, don't just try to think of new ways to make money. Think of ways to solve more problems for more people! Once you've learned the marketing side of the equation, the money will start coming in.

The best part about it is that all you have to do is change your attitude and start being a problem solver. What problems are still out there in your specific market? What problems do people have when they order from your competition? What can you do to make your product or service a better answer to people's needs?

When you ask yourself these types of questions you are often taking the first step to success. Once you have recognized the problem and developed the right attitude, you can start looking for or creating the solution. You have the question, it's time to develop the answers.

About The Author

Rich Hamilton, Jr is the CEO/President of www.ElitesMarketing.com a.k.a. Elites Marketing, Inc and the Author of: "Inside Internet Marketing" www.InsideNetMarketing.com.

Teaching To Build Your Optin List

2009-02-14T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Matthew Coers

If you are in the business of selling online, then you are in the business of building an opt-in list and remarketing. Many website owners find that collecting opt-in subscribers is extremely expensive and involves running advertising or renting e-mail lists.

These methods can be effective especially if you happen to sell high-end products with a very limited market size. But regardless of your organization's size or the cost of your products, finding more cost-effective ways of generating leads is extremely important. For many website owners, providing free information products is an excellent way of improving opt-in subscription ROI.

Teach Them And They Will Come

The single most popular commodity on the Internet is information. People are starving for it. In fact, information is so important to many people that they spend an enormous amount of time educating themselves online so they can stay informed. Many view this form of continuous education as a competitive advantage they have over their peers, and feel that without it, their careers would suffer.

Here's an example: A CEO schedules a meeting with his technical staff to talk about installing a Voice over IP (VoIP) system in the office. Because he likes to do his homework, the CEO spends an hour or so preparing for the meeting by doing some quick research on the Internet. He searches for "VoIP" on Google, and finds a ton of information about the different types of technologies. With this information he can develop a game plan for his meeting.

The company (and website) that does the best job of educating him about VoIP stands a very good chance of getting an opportunity to bid on the project when it gets approved.

In this case, the website doesn't just create a lead for the VoIP company. It actually does something more important it teaches the prospect to value the unique selling points of the company that provided the educational material. And in the case above, it actually influenced how the project was going to be presented to the prospect's management team.

Later that week, when a competing company calls on the prospect to try to get an appointment, the CEO will be prejudiced against their solution because it does not possess the qualities he has learned to value from the first company.

Understanding this dynamic is crucial to building your opt-in list, and it should go a long way in determining your overall online strategy. Effective Methods to Teach Online Depending on your industry, there are a number of ways you can effectively teach online. Following are a few rapid-fire methods we have used in the past that brought great results.

White Papers Inexpensive to produce and with an established distribution system on the Internet, white papers are a great way to get the word out about your organization's products. These types of publications are primarily used in more technical industries such as software, hardware, medical, and engineering. A couple of distribution channels are: www.bitpipe.com and www.knowledgestorm.com, but you can also distribute them on your website.

Video Tutorials An emerging method of teaching, video streaming allows organizations to not only teach a prospect about the industry, but also to demonstrate their products. Currently, video tutorials are a favorite among computer software and hardware manufacturers, but their use is rapidly spreading to other areas such as marketing and healthcare. Video tutorials can be marketed through Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns on search engines as well as a number of new online video search services (Google has recently released a service here: http://video.google.com/).

EBooks Because they are relatively inexpensive to produce, eBooks are a favorite form of lead generation for those website owners who have the talent or resources to write long-form text. Ebooks are generally viewed as more educational than white papers, and so may be viewed as a more valuable resource to some people. Ebooks do not need to be hundreds of pages long. In fact, most eBooks are between 50 and 100 pages, and can be promoted through dozens of online directories and distribution portals.

Web-based Tutorials The most flexible method of delivering online content is on your website itself. Using this method, you create password-protected areas that require surfers to register in order to access your information product. The primary benefit of web-based content delivery is that the content can be easily updated at any time. Web-based tutorials are ideal for industries and topics that change often, or where the product itself is delivered via the website. Web-based tutorials can be promoted on your website, through PPC ads, and via your corporate newsletter.

If you are in the business of selling products or services online, then it could actually be said that you are also in the business of educating your market. When it comes to your industry, you are the expert. Your prospects are the students, and they have a vested interest in understanding as much as they can about how they can use your products and services to improve their businesses.

The companies that build their opt-in lists fastest are usually the ones that do the best job of educating their prospects about their industry. By following this method, you gain a valuable database of leads, and the prospect base learns everything they need to know to be able to purchase your products confidently.

Matthew Coers has 11 years of experience in building profitable websites for customers and clients, and he is the founder and president of ProfitChoice.com. Visit ProfitChoice.com and download the free report, "7 Days to Website Success" to learn seven low-cost strategies that can help you quickly boost your website's performance.

3 Reasons Why I Never Delete Spam Immediately

2009-02-13T04:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Marina Smiley

All of us hate spam and all of us have our own methods of fighting it. Unfortunately, all the methods in the world cannot help us to succeed completely. A long time ago, I heard the expression, "If you can't beat them then embrace them".

Ok, so what has this expression have to do with the spam problem? In my opinion, a lot! I decided to use the spammer's knowledge for my own interests instead of just being frustrated and get upset looking at all my emails full of junk.

Every morning when I open my email, I quickly look through all the spam. Why am I doing this instead of delete them immediately?

Reason 1:

In most cases spammers send their letters trying to promote very profitable niches within the Internet. Actually, these niches are so profitable that spammers are even willing to put themselves at risk. They chances and violate the law because of the profit that they can derive from these niche markets.

So why not pay attention to these areas that are so heavily promoted by them, especially if these people already did all the dirty work for you? They have already done the research and found out the ones that are most profitable.

Reason 2:

I have few web-sites in different business areas of the Internet and always look for nice affiliate programs to enrich my sites. If the subject of the spam letter is related to one of my web-sites in some way, I always try to find the time to check it out. And you know what? These sites often have very interesting products and generous affiliate commissions, that's why they were chosen by spammers! It is not the website owner's fault that they become the target for spammers.

Reason 3:

Spammers know that everybody hates them and that people try to delete their messages immediately, so they have learned how to make their letters and headlines catchy!

Instead of buying loads of e-books on "how to", you can learn these techniques for free just looking thru all the headlines of junk letters.

Am I trying to protect spammers or trying to find positive signs in their activity? Absolutely Not! I am sick and tired from these folks, the same as you, but if I cannot escape from them at least I can use them. Remember what that wise expression said? "If you can't beat them then embrace them".

Marina Smiley is the author of the popular eBook

"Cheap Ticket To Russia" - tips for budget travelers to Russia.

Information Is The Hottest Product On The Market

2009-02-12T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Hans Hasselfors

If you have been researching or involved in online business for very long, you have no doubt seen a multitude of offers for "eBooks", books, reports and training course on every subject imaginable.
Why? Because information is the hottest product on the market! (At the foundational level, it's actually the Only product, but that's another article.) Information cuts straight to the root of all selling, which is answering the customer's question: "What will this product do for me?"
There's another reason, though. Pure information is a product that doesn't require a huge financial overhead to produce, (other than the hard knocks you got in gaining the experience and information), and is easy and relatively low cost to deliver to the customer. That is what makes it such a great product for us, as entrepreneurs, to offer.
Everyone has life experience, training, and skills that others don't have. Everyone knows something that others want to know, or can do something that others want to learn. That's how I know you have an InfoProduct inside you, everyone does. Your first assignment is to decide which of your many gifts you are going to offer to the world!
Does that mean you have to be able to write a book? No. Not necessarily. I'm talking about what is known as USP...Unique Selling Position. Your USP might be that you have detailed knowledge about someone else's product that you are selling as an affiliate. It could be that humorous way you present the information you have collected on some subject of interest, or the fact that you offer the best customer service available for the service you offer. You may offer the same products that others are also selling, but find your own unique market for them.
But whatever you decide to use for your information product, your USP, you need to find one. If you were to research the online marketers who are honestly making the money they claim to be earning online, you would discover that they all have a USP. Your USP IS your product, however you package and deliver it.
If you are working a Multi-level Marketing program or one of the BIBs (Business in a Box), you are not left out of this concept, but you may have to work harder to figure out how to be unique. You can still go for the niche marketing idea. Find a group of people who aren't usually reached by these kinds of businesses, or aim your advertising at people in the countries that are just now going online.
You may, of course, actually write a book, eBook, or training course and sell it. Many are making good money doing just that. The list of helpful software and online publishers is growing every day. But even if you write your own product or design your own software, you will still need a well-thought-out USP to stand out in the crowd. It's like your business plan -- you need a firm foundation before you can build your future online success.
This Article Was Published By Hans Hasselfors, from SubmitYourNewArticle.com. Get the net working for you. Join a community of like-minded authors and publishers and make your living online. Become a member of our article directory: http://www.SubmitYourNewArticle.com

Internet Marketing Give Me Immediate Gratification

2009-02-11T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Virginia Bola, PsyD

When we buy physical items on line, there is obviously the need to wait for delivery. Make it as fast as possible, surely no problem in a world where things have to "absolutely, positively, get there overnight."
And forget those shipping charges and express delivery upgrades. Are you aware that the biggest discouragement to online buying is shipping costs? Increase the price of every item by a dollar and make shipping and handling free. I'm not going to not order something because it's a dollar or so higher in price and the lack of hassle on shipping will make me purr with satisfaction.
Even on an item that must be shipped, give me something immediate. Not just an e-mail that my order has been received but some information about what I'm getting, how smart was my decision to order, and where I can get additional information about related items that might interest me.
If I'm buying a product that doesn't need to be shipped, such as a report or book, give it to me now. As soon as I've paid, or taken you up on a free offer, I want to right click, download, and read. I don't want to have to go into my inbox and click to activate something.
If I receive a zip file that opens up to show a bewildering array of mysteriously labeled icons, I want clearly labeled instructions so I can go there first and learn what all the other stuff is. If it's "so easy to use a child could do it" software, don't make me feel stupid because I can't figure out what to do next and the instructions are vague or non-existent.
If it's a marketing report, I want to be able to read it first and decide whether I like it, not be immediately confronted with a page urging me to brand the book so I can resell it - how do I know I want to be associated with it before I've completely read it?
If you're giving me a mini-course over a period of days, make sure each lesson is totally self-contained or indulge my impatience by allowing me to click onto the next chapter. If I'm interested, I want to read it now. By tomorrow morning, I may have forgotten that I ordered it, no matter being able to recall what was in part one.
There is real joy in reading something and feeling an immediate internal reaction: "I like that." Those are the books we print out and pore over with our yellow highlighter. We take notes and write between the paragraphs, interacting with the material and thereby making it our own.
Give me something so engrossing that I can't stop until I've devoured all of it. If I get to page 3 and decide to exit thinking that "I'll read it later when I have the time," you've already lost me. I may occasionally open it up again but if I couldn't get into it at first read, I doubt that I ever will.
Mark it up to experience but it leaves a bad taste about the author who probably shouldn't count on my continued patronage.
Dr. Bola, a clinical psychologist, sometime marketer, and consistent consumer is offering complimentary copies of her book "Seven Super Simple Tips: I Am Your Customer" from which this article is taken. Feel free to download at: http://www.dietwithanattitude.com/SuperSimpleTipsCustomer.html

Dont Baffle Me Talk To Me

2009-02-10T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Andrew Eklund

Congratulations, all you Internet marketing people you. You now command a whopping 3% of total advertising and marketing budget. Hey, it's better than, well...2%. And the number is trending higher. That's good too.
But what if I told you that people spend nearly as much time on the web as they do in front of the television?
Did you know that TV commands almost 40% of all ad spending, while the web gets only 3%? How about newspapers? Businesses spend almost as much on newspaper ads as television, but guess what? Consumers spend less than 10% of their time reading newspapers.
Clearly, if you judge just by the numbers, the web is underfunded. Why?
I have a theory: to most business decision-makers, the people who sell the web channel are geeks. They talk in web jargon and acronyms. For example, if I was a business owner (which I am) and had an inkling that email marketing might be successful for my business (which I do) and called an Internet marketing consultant to meet with me, here's what I might hear:
"Thank you for calling me in. What we provide is an ASP email solution that has easy-to-use WYSIWYG tools which, in addition to providing you outstanding content management, tracks click-throughs, white list status, and user conversions in real-time."
As a business decision-maker, I think: What did that geek just say to me?
Or let's take search marketing: "Sir, I'd like to talk to you about how we can dynamically measure your keyword PPC programs within the Google AdWords or Overture network to, again, track real-time user conversions using state-of-the-art web analytics systems, which, by the way, are an ASP model so your IT guys don't have to get involved. Isn't that great!?!?!"
Yeah. Not so great, pal, because YOU'RE NOT TALKING TO ME!
And we wonder why web marketing might be underfunded? The fledgling field is so proud of itself for its snazzy lingo and sizzling software that it's forgotten that this is just marketing -- only possibly a whole lot better in many ways than traditional marketing.
To get decision-makers fired up about investing in the Internet marketing channel, strip out the jargon and the acronyms and get down to business. If you do so, then you've finally got what everyone wants to buy: better marketing. Instead of selling "conversions" and "ASPs" -- which have no language connections to traditional advertising and marketing -- talk in real business language. A conversion is a sale or a lead. A user is a customer. Keywords are just words and language. Every Internet t erm has a seasoned business equivalent. Use them.
If we want to justify more than a 3% budget allocation for our web marketing efforts (which we can and should), then we need to talk about business in language that decision-makers use everyday. And whatever you do, if you say "it's just marketing" then don't make it sound like IT.
Until next month,
About The Author
Andrew determines Cicerons strategic direction and leads the team in its ongoing quest for client success on the Internet. His 10 years of experience in Internet marketing provides a perspective that combines visionary creativity with common business sense.
Under Eklunds spirited leadership, Ciceron provides web marketing services to a diverse client roster that includes Best Buy, Jostens, US Bank, Hazelden Bookplace, Minnesota Environmental Partnership, Trend Enterprises, and Coldwell Banker Burnett.
http://ciceron.com
andrew@ciceron.com

Stop Committing These 10 Common Viral Marketing Mistakes

2009-02-09T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Portia David

Unsuspecting computer users consider themselves to be doing favors for their friends with whom they are sending these referrals, but they are not the only ones jubilant with their discovery. They do not exactly feel it, but they are part and parcel of the mechanism which makes viral marketing promote and increase website visits like luscious pancakes.
Viral marketing is currently being used by most online business people because it works. Who would pass up the opportunity to have a website endorsed exponentially by all its users and viewers? However, not all viral marketing ploys work. Before you concoct your own viral marketing portal, here are a few basic things you need to avoid.
1. General Unhappy Perspective-- One cannot do viral marketing without having a good dose of confidence that it will actually WORK. Even if you don't communicate that directly to your marketing ploys, a disbelief for whatever you have set out to do has already started to sabotage your attempts.
2. Not-So-Viral Marketing-- You need to be very competent or at par with other websites in viral marketing. Study other existing excellent viral marketers online and see what makes them secure the top spot. Timing is essential. Your viral marketing can backfire if you do it without researching first on your target groups and executing your moves in an unproper time. Conditioning is just as essential as the actual marketing itself.
3. The WIIFM (What's in it for Me) Factor is Missing-- Most people are encouraged to refer to friends only if they have something to get out of it. Some viral marketers forget this very important thing. Giving out rewards or incentives can boost or motivate every visitor to pull more people in. Watch out for the extremes of giving too many rewards, though. It must boost and not take the limelight off the main concept.
4. Marketing without Asking-- Some websites employing viral marketing techniques forget to let the customers interact. Javascripts are useful tools.
5. Giving up the first time-- Some users tend to get irritated the first time they receive recommendations from friends. People behind viral marketing fail to anticipate this and end up giving up on what could have been a most promising buyer.
6. Too Many Details--This is a common and often commited mistake! No one would want to hang around that long just for one offer. There are other websites which would be less concise and yet drive the point home with pizzazz that yields a lasting impression. Time is not just gold in viral marketing. It is everything. The fact that a person is surfing the Internet for information already communicates that he or she is already trying to save time by retrieving information in the fastest possible way. If websites offer good products but takes forever to load or for one reader to get to the bottom of the page, it still would not be worth his time or looking effort, for that matter.
7. Hoops and Hurdles in Transactions-- Related to the mistake above is the transaction hurdle itself. Given that you have already convinced or gotten a buying signal from a customer, if the whole process is tedious and hard to follow, it will most likely dropped by the customer. No one would want to buy or refer something which is too intricate or complicated.
8. Lack of Uniqueness and Follow-up-- Viral marketing needs to be continuous and not just a one-time big-time shot, and it must not merely duplicate what is already available with other competitors. There must be something unique about the offer, and at the same time, you must have a line of products prepared after the first purchase, in order to experience the long-range effects of viral marketing.
9. Forgettable By Clicks-- Some viral marketing websites do not make use of javascripts. A user or viewer may easily be distracted by other links within the page and click it in the middle of his or her evaluation of your offer. It may be an affiliate website or an outside link, but it totally diverts the attention off your product and may lead him away from your page.
10. Lack of Assurance in Privacy-- Privacy concerns are also important for every person who wants to take part in the process of viral marketing. Asking for referrals without making any assurance that the personal information to be given will be kept confidential and not forwarded to other websites makes a person think twice before typing up those email addresses.
After learning the abovementioned viral marketing boo-boos it will be definitely easier to work out your viral marketing campaigns.
Note: This article may be freely reproduced as long as the AUTHOR'S resource box at the bottom of this article is included and all links must be Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.
For more SEO know-hows please go to http://alfamercado.com/blog

7 Simple Steps To Web Wealth

2009-02-08T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Sopan Greene

A lot of people and companies have websites. They also have products and services they want people to know about. Unfortunately, most of these people and companies waste most of their time on things that don't help them to make money. Here are 7 areas to focus on that will help you make more money:
1. Remember that marketing is more important than what your product is. If you have the greatest product ever and no one knows about it you won't make any money.
Direct response marketing online is very similar to direct response marketing offline. 90% of your time should be invested in marketing because nothing else will make you money. Don't waste time figuring out how to do it right. Study the people who have already spent time and money on learning what does and doesn't work. Then you can spend more of your time on collecting cash.
2. You must have a back end product to make good money. The way to make the most money is to first offer FREE information that is valuable. This will begin your relationship with a customer. Then have a product that is under $50 for a front end. Make sure the front end product is somehow connected to the back end product. For example, if you sell a $10 book on shaving points off your golf score, you want to have a back end product like a $300 course on the best proven techniques for the most effective golf swing ever.
3. Your product needs to be valuable to your customers. They need to believe that what they receive is worth a lot more than what they paid for it. That will make them a life-long customer. Sell them something worthless and they will be unhappy and they will be gone forever. Sell products you believe in or don't sell anything.
4. Give your customers FREE bonuses and more than you promised. Under promise and over deliver. Make your customers say "Wow!" when they receive your products. Don't just make them happy, blow their minds with how much value they get from you.
There are thousands of low cost bonus products you can throw in as a thank you. Even better, these low cost bonuses can make your customers a lot of money and they will appreciate you more. Besides, it's more ethical and fun and creative to build in great extras and bonuses for people. The bottom line is the more you give the more you get.
5. Get opt-in e-mail addresses. This is like gold for you. The only real purpose for a consumer website is to capture leads and to sell products. By leads I mean e-mail addresses. You want to build up a customer list and then you want to work it repeatedly. Send out a monthly e-zine that offers FREE valuable information and mentions similar products they may be interested in. They may see something that a friend of theirs will want to buy from you.
The key here is that these people ask to be on your list, you give them FREE information that has value, and they can unsubscribe at any time.
6. Build a relationship. It is much easier to sell someone who has had a good experience with you than someone who has never heard of you. Most companies ignore this fact and spend thousands of dollars each month trying to bring in new customers while they ignore people who already bought from them. Pretty stupid, but that's how most businesses operate.
7. Never stop learning. The best and richest marketers in the business spend the most amount of money buying books, tapes and courses that keep them on the cutting edge. Why? Because no one knows it all and new and better ways to market are discovered every day.
There is a lot of valuable FREE information available online that is easy to find and can make you a lot of money. One good idea can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars in future sales for you. So invest in yourself and your future.
These 7 simple steps can mean the difference between struggling to stay in business and struggling to keep up with all the orders coming in. Which struggle would you prefer?
About The Author
Sopan Greene M.A.
http://www.NetMarketingMastery.com
Grab Your 2 FREE eBooks & a FREE report: "Million Dollar Emails" "How To Start Your Own Traffic Virus" & "The 13 Deadly Internet Marketing Mistakes Almost Every Business Is Making..." mail to: webmaster87-5956@autocontactor.com

Some Tips About Creating An Infoproduct

2009-02-07T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Patric Chan

We all have problems right?
Products and services are there to help us solve those problems. Your products created are the solutions to problems. So when there's a problem, there's an opportunity for you to make money online.
But sometimes, when you've found a problem, there's already products created to solve it. This does not means that you no longer have the opportunity to tap into this problem. Make the product better, faster, cleaner, more reliable, more cost effective, better presented, you get the idea.
If you look at the bright side, it means that there are a lot of people who are willing to pay to get their problems solved.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not telling you to go out, buy peoples stuff, and just clone it and give it a fancy new name and change the layout a bit and sell it on. Aside from probably getting you into trouble with copyright laws and such, it's just not practical or ethical. What I am showing you though is that you can take basic ideas, and you can make them a better solution to a specific problem from the ground up.
Be innovative.
You'll probably find these products in Clickbank.com's Marketplace. There are plenty of info-products for you to look through there.
No matter how weird or crazy your product creation idea seems, no matter why you think it won't work, don't give it up. Never calls it quit before you give a deep consideration about how it can BE SUCCESSFUL. You'll never know whether that idea could be your big money-maker one day.
Open your mind a little, and don't start dismissing things on a whim because they seem impractical or even impossible at first glance. Sometimes, it has a lot to do with your self-confidence.
Some ideas you got there, when you wrote them, they look impractical. It seems like there was no market for them or couldn't afford to create them.
Keep an open mind and don't start placing these limits on yourself before you start. Once we remove those limits, the ideas will start flowing. Start recording them. One of them may well be the next big thing in your field of expertise. Sort out the good from the not so good ideas later.
Then, evaluate your ideas.
It's hard to start creating an info-product, but once you settle into this idea of bringing new concepts to the front of your mind and exploring them, you'll see that things will become possible and you'll never run out of ideas for new products.
There are 4 types of formats you can use to create an info-product. Four of them are ebook, software, audio and video types of info-products. The easiest and fastest way is to record an audio product. Then, transcript it and you'll have the ebook version product immediately.
If you can't create an audio product by yourself, interview an expert in your niche market. I'm sure many people would want to learn from him.
How can you convince him to be interviewed?
Do a tele-conference call to promote his product as an affiliate to your mailing list and record it. He won't be able to resist that.
Software and video info-products are slightly more complex to create. The reason why these 2 info-products are being created by marketers very often lately is because of the high-perceived value that they can sell it for.
"Is there a market for my product?"
And can you reach them?
An important question indeed, because incidentally, if there's no market for your product, or you have no way to reach them, then no ones going to find out about your product, and you simply won't sell any.
It's easy enough to head over to google.com and do a search for your product, or a different version of it.
Also, when running your search, if there are other products out there offering either the same as you, but in a different way, you can bet your life that there's a market out there. Specifics and how's aren't really important right now, as long as you know not to go launching a product that's going to be impossible for you to reach the people that want to buy it, or even worse; there aren't any people who want to buy it.
Copyright 2006 Patric Chan
Patric Chan is an internet infopreneur, international speaker and author. Subscribe to the Chan Do Internet Success System Newsletter for free to get first-hand and the latest internet marketing tips at http://www.automateinternetmarketing.com.

King Kong Size Link Building Tips

2009-02-06T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Mark Walters

After recent changes in search engines ranking mechanisms, relevant link building has become one of the most important ways of Search Engine Optimization. Now it is almost as important as having a web site loaded with good content.
Why do you need link building?
It's simple: the more relevant links to your website the more important your site appears to search engines and that should lead to better your page ranking. Search engine spiders are restlessly traveling through the Internet, constantly evaluating existing web pages - the keywords they use and the number of relevant links to your website. Because now relevant links are deemed more important than keyword density, some one way and relevant link building strategy is necessary if you hope to get to the top 10 or at least top 100 of web pages in your category.
While you have to create your own link building strategy that will fit into your situation, there are a few general tips. If you follow them, you will avoid many common link building mistakes and you can hope for greatly improving your website ratings in just a few weeks.
1. Use short URLs
When you submit your link to other sites that have a theme relevant to yours, make sure that offer a short URL. You can speed up the link building process by almost 50% if only you would use shorter URLs. Most webmasters will agree on adding a axbxcxex.com link, but won't accept a link that will look like axbxcxexg.com/articles/general/index.php/id=brnd. Even if your link building strategy relies on submitting deep links, they need to be as short as possible.
2. Be careful with redirect links
No site owner likes redirects. If you want to make your link building easy and fast, you should avoid them every time it is possible. They are often used to avoid long URLs, but it's often a deadly mistake. Instead of redirects, you may consider simplifying your website map and making the URLs shorter. While it may be easier for your web site builder to have long addresses, every sophisticated link building strategy calls for making them as short as possible.
3. Keep the same URL over time
Don't change your URL unless you have really good reason to do that. If you do change, you will have to do all that link building again from the beginning. Even if you redirect from your old web address to the new one, you have to consider the possibility that many webmasters delete redirect links from their websites. As a result, you can expect that you will lose about 25% links just because you've changed your website URL.
Just what are the searching engines looking for in the way of relevant links? No one knows for sure, but common sense tells us that links from a gardening site to a dirt bike site are not complementary.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for gardening information on the internet. They come to your gardening site and feel they've found helpful information. Oh look, they think, there's a link there by pansy graphic. I'll just click that and get more good information. Yeow, what does a girl in a bikini sitting on a dirt bike have to do with gardening? And there goes your credibility with your viewer and the search engines.
It appears that the value of links is swinging to a reasonable number if good quality links rather than a thundering heard of indiscriminant links from anywhere.
Mark Walters offers everything you need to build a powerful linking strategy at http://www.LinkingUniverse.com

Viral Marketing At Its Best

2009-02-05T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Sorna Devadas

You may have heard of this before and for those that haven't, it's where you give away something for free that someone can also give away for free. If successful, your piece of information can spread like a virus, enticing thousands to buy from you.
So what's the secret. You need to release something valuable that can compare to another course selling for at least $100, for free. It really has to be exceptional for people to pass it on to their friends. Quality not quantity, the report needs to be excellent and if it's long, that's a bonus. Ellaborate as much as you can. It's the awesome principle, "you have to give before you get", in action.
You can start with a free report or develop a complete course. Keep your competitors in mind and write your material for them. If they can send one of your articles out to their database and put their affiliate links alongside it, their chances of making a sale are increased. In the same token, if the reader likes your article and clicks on your link, you have a chance of signing them up to your mailing list.
Work alongside your competitors and see them as partners rather than competitors. They have abetter chance to earn money by promoting your products and receiving a share rather than their own product all the time. Lift up your competitors and customise your material so that it adds value to what they're doing. By keeping in mind how you can promote them, your potential partners will be more excited about partnering with you. Make sure their product adds value to your customers and vice versa. You'll make a lot more money by working alongside partners in the same industry than you will alone. Think of all competitors as potential partners, find out how to add value to them, work on your free material and watch your profits soar!
To find out more about how to do Joint Ventures and for more powerful concepts, visit http://www.internetprofitmentor.com. Here I found a wealth of useful and free information with over 12 hours of video and a 120 page e-book. There's also a comprehensive free course, that explains all about building your own profitable websites.

Chasing New Business

2009-02-04T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Aaron Snider

As well you should. New business is what makes the world go round. Your business relies on new business to survive. To get new business you must constantly change your marketing efforts. But what about old business? Have you made a business crippling mistake? Have you forgotten your previous customers while looking for new ones?
There are many ways to advertise your business. What kind of response do you get from e-zines, safelists, startpages, etc? Email is a great way to advertise your business, you can email so many people its hard to not get a response. E-zines are nice, better response cause you can target your promotion a little more than normal email. Start pages are good for Alexa ratings, but not much more. What kind of response do you really see though? 0.2%, 0.5%, 1%, 2%? If you get even 1% response you are the most fantastic copy writer and have the best product in the world. For the rest of us we are ecstatic when we get a 0.2% response or any at all.
Well what about the people that do buy from you? Do you even email them anymore? After you send your thank you for purchasing whatever they purchased from you, do you ever email them again? Well you should.
Lets take one person as an example. He/she buys an ebook about making minisites from you for $19.95. What can we tell about this person from their purchase? Well if they want to make mini web sites, they must have a webhost. Maybe your an affiliate for a webhosting company. Maybe they need products to sell on their minisite. Maybe they need an ebook about copywriting for their new minisites. Whatever else they need, they will buy it from somebody. They have already bought from you once, why not buy from you again?
When you make sales, make sure you have other products available to make the one they bought perform better or easier to use. If you sell one product to 100 people, then you sold a second product (that made the first product easier to use) to 50 of those people, you just sold 50% more products. You also just made 50% more profit, and didn't spend any more on advertising as you did before.
The point is, don't forget your previous customers. You will make more sales on a monthly basis with 1-2 simple emails to your previous customer base, and will significantly build your current business. Your previous customers trust you, like you, have money, and will buy from you again.
What the heck, let's all make a million.
About The Author
Aaron Snider
Support@something-big.com
http://www.thecustomermanager.com
Aaron wrote the Customer Manager Program

Internet Marketing 101

2009-02-03T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Greg Cesar

Starting an online business does not have to be difficult. Mostly, it is a matter of knowing where to go to get the information needed to get started. Internet Marketing is the term used for marketing your business effectively on the Internet.
Many online businesses fail not due to lack of knowledge or resources, but because they aren't marketed properly. The Internet does not respond to traditional marketing methods the way a brick and mortar business would. The bottom line is, if you don't know Internet Marketing, then you need to hire someone that does. This is true because it's better to start your Internet Marketing campaign off right in the first place than to try to go back and correct it once you already have a viable web presence. This can be both costly and time consuming, and, as is the case with most Internet Marketers, you are probably short on both time and money. To start your online business, you must do the following:
* Decide what products or services you want to offer
* Get a reliable, knowledgeable web hosting company
* Design and build your website
* Develop an Internet Marketing Plan
* Implement the Internet Marketing Plan
Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it is if you have someone to do all that work for you, and the money to pay them. However, if you are short on money, you will need to do some of the work yourself. The fact is that a majority of Internet Marketers do most of the work for their sites themselves, unless it is too technical and out of their realm. Below are some of the steps involved in basic Internet Marketing:
* Optimizing your Website
* Getting Reciprocal Links from other, relevant sites
* Organizing an article/press release campaign (for one-way links)
You will probably be surprised to know that it is possible to get at least some of the above services all in one place. For example, having a knowledgeable web hosting company is one key to effective Internet Marketing. Your web hosting company may also offer web design services , and be able to help you design and build a viable website. Ideally, the company you choose for web hosting should also have Internet Marketing expertise. This is especially important if you are new to the world of Internet Marketing.
Deciding to start an online business can be a daunting task. By enlisting the right professionals to help you, your Internet Marketing campaign will have everything it needs to make your business successful right from the start.
Greg Cesar knows Internet Marketing! Find out how hundreds of Internet business owners benefit from Greg's internet marketing advice by visiting his Internet Marketing website.
Greg Cesar is a successful Internet marketer with over 10 years' experience. He specializes in providing innovative internet marketing services that help business owners make more money online. To improve your online business immediately and work with someone who understands what it takes to make real money online, visit: http://www.hostpartnerplus.com

Avoid Marketing Stagnation Using 3 Basic Methods

2009-02-02T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by John Magruder

You joined an online marketing program, placed some ads, and then thought, now what? The majority of new marketers pause at this point, and many never come back.
Some years ago, I attended a "bump school" ski lesson in Breckenridge, Colorado. My instructor emphasized keeping the weight down hill on the skis, leaning forward. He said if you fall, better to fall forward, not backward or sideways, but FORWARD. The forward weight, and even the forward fall, indicates advancement. With the earnest determination needed to ski bump runs, stay forward, stay alive in your marketing efforts! Will your business stagnate at this critical time? No! Now commit to sustained focus in your marketing education. Commit to sustained action that becomes second nature. Lock your ON switch in place! Often finding myself in this dynamic, my web business excites me, seeming more like play.
What simple, powerful tools can you use to maintain the forward dynamic?
Start a newsletter. When you first hear that statement, you might think, "Well that's fine for experienced marketing professionals. I would not know where to begin to create a newsletter or get a list of people to send it to." I understand. But do not let these thoughts deter you. You CAN start or obtain a newsletter! With a little searching and reading, learn how. An ongoing email series that you offer as a "marketing tips" newsletter, for example, attracts interested subscribers. Cliché by now, the fortune in the follow up rings true. Your prospects need inspirational, repetitive exposure. Time and time again I see responses from prospects after several contacts.
Get your own website. Most affiliate marketing programs provide referral pages to receive responses from advertising. Your own website enables you to compete with successful internet business owners. It gives you the ability to develop a mailing list, the core of your marketing success. Developing link popularity, many website owners use link exchange or partner directories, linking to similar websites. This not only increases traffic through the added links, but also improves search engine ranking.
Add content to your website. Content consists of useful information that people want to find on your website, often in the form of articles. Web marketers constantly publish informative articles they would love placed on your website. This provides a win-win situation because their articles attract visitors to your website, and bring more people back to the authors' websites as the articles include their links. Ideally, publish your own articles and develop credibility and popularity in your service.
You now have a complete package. These tools provide the basics to manifest your marketing goals. A website with valuable content attracts visitors interested in your offers, and brings newsletter subscribers. Increased sales give you more time and money to enhance your website content. Improving website content and popularity again feeds back to more sales and a larger subscriber base. This way, successful internet marketers grow their businesses! With patient focus, implement and build with these tools. Maintain persistence and attain your goals!
John Magruder is a successful SFI Team Leader and a Member of the Wealth Online Website system.
Home Based Business Opportunities
http://www.Discover-Your-Business.ws

How Sneaky Links Increase Your Clickthroughs

2009-02-01T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Ron Hutton

If you find that your site visitors have developed a high level of resistance to clicking through your affiliate links, you're not alone. What is it that makes affiliate links suspicious to people? They're certainly not meant to be offensive.
I believe that it's the same kind of thing that automatically activates your defenses when you walk onto a used car lot and are promptly accosted by a guy wearing a green and orange plaid sports coat, pink neck tie and white patent leather lowtops that zip up the side.
Do you hate the feeling that someone is "selling you"? I really think that it's the same thing when visitors see what's obviously an affiliate link (or a poorly disguised affiliate link) and start looking for a way to buy "straight from the source" thinking that they're going to get a better deal!
If your website sells affiliate products, here's a simple "Sneaky Link" tactic that will help you with affiliatephobes.
Note: This article has a free corresponding step-by-step video tutorial that demonstrates the exact steps to creating your own "Sneaky Links"...
http://www.gothrive.com/sneaky-link-video.htm
Street-smart webmasters and marketers understand the importance of taking every possible step to get visitors to let down their guard. We seek information but we resist being sold.
So, the following sample source code can be used on any web page to create "sneaky links" that don't have the appearance of affiliate links. You're not running a non-profit organization are you? No? Well, let's just let someone else believe that you are.
Here's an example of source code that will bare your soul to the world. Note: the tags are altered with a period that needs to be removed if you intend to edit and use this source code in your web pages.
No mysteries here:
<.a href="http://www.pluginprofittoolbox.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=100">Plug-In-Profit-Toolbox.com<./a>
Now, let's get sneaky. ;~)
<.a href="http://www.pluginprofittoolbox.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=100" onMouseOver="window.status='http://www.pluginprofittoolbox.com/'; return true;" onMouseOut="window.status=''; return true;">http://www.pluginprofittoolbox.com/<./a>
To assist in understanding how the "sneaky link" works, let's do a little link anatomy study. Here are the pieces and parts of our link:
Part 1, Beginning anchor tag: <.a
Part 2, Target URL (affiliate link): href="http://www.pluginprofittoolbox.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=100"
Part 3, "MouseOver" attribute: onMouseOver="window.status='http://www.pluginprofittoolbox.com/'; return true;" onMouseOut="window.status=''; return true;"
Part 4, Link Text: http://www.pluginprofittoolbox.com/
Part 5, Ending anchor tag: <./a>
So, what's the trick? It's in part 3, the mouseover attribute. This nifty little piece of source code tells the web browser what to display in the status bar (very bottom of the browser window), and if the "window.status" is the same as the link text, it appears as though there's no trickery going on. But, we know better.
Is it possible that this link could be found out, discovered and revealed for what it really is? Sure. If someone were to apply a single right-click to the link, the web browser will reveal the actual target URL. However, the average user won't know this so the "sneaky link" tactic can be very effective in getting people to let their guard down.
End result... your click-through rate goes up, you make more sales and we all live happily ever after. Go forth and create some "sneaky links" now.
To view this article's free corresponding step-by-step video tutorial that demonstrates the exact steps to creating your own "Sneaky Links"...
http://www.gothrive.com/sneaky-link-video.htm
There's a zip file available for you to download (no cost, of course) with the exact source code that's shown in the video.
Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton
Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThrive Online", for Free Video Tutorials for Internet Marketing and big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. Free Video Tutorial Archives Here: http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-tutorials.htm

Pixel Advertisements Redefine Internet Marketing To Provide Free Traffic

2009-01-31T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Jayadeep Rath

26th August 2005 witnessed the dawn of a new era in internet marketing. Alex Tew came up with an idea which would rewrite the nuances of internet advertising and increase traffic like never before.... and thus was born "Pixel Advertising". Alex Tew put up a website with one million pixels of advertising space for $1 a pixel and use that money to pay for his education. His goal - a million dollars. This so called "silly idea" turned out to be a "brilliant idea" and as I write this article...the search for brilliant idea in google displays the website of Alex Tew within the first three results. Pixel Advertisements have arrived with a bang and has given a new meaning to "Micro Advertisements" in particular and internet marketing in general.
Alex Tew launched his inspiration in August 2005 after dreaming it up at his home in U.K. His objective was to make a million dollars through the million pixels. His site has a grid of 10,000 boxes made up of 100 pixels giving an area of approximately 4mm x 4mm each. The idea is that people can buy a 1 or more block/s of pixels, place an image on it and link the image to their site. The cost at his website is $1 per pixel with a minimum of a 100 pixel order.
Pixel sites are internet websites that people have formed to sell pixel advertising space to help market other websites or blogs. The pixels are usually available in 100-pixel 'blocks' (each measuring 10x10 pixels). You will see most homepages divided into 10,000 of these 100-pixel blocks (hence there are 1,000,000 pixels in total). Internet Marketers have dabbled with traffic exchanges, banner exchanges, link exchanges and to add to the internet marketing arsenal we now have a new baby in a pixel advertisements.
Since Alex Tew.... (the originator of "Pixel Advertisements"), several websites have come into existence....and some are still cropping up. Some pixel websites are just playing "me-to" to the original idea of Alex Tew while there are others who have brought about innovative changes in the whole concept. There are websites which are asking buyers to click on a particular number of images and visit other websites on the pixel page before their purchase order is processed. This of course...reminds you of traffic exchanges which still provide free traffic with little effort. Then we have pixel websites taking the concept of link exchanges and asking visitors to put up a link to their pixel website in exchange for a limited number of free pixels. There are pixel websites which are giving away free pixels with the hope that they will get free traffic in the process. However, it goes without saying that there are some pixel advertising websites which are selling pixels ranging from 1 cent a pixel to $ 1 a pixel ....and some of them are making money.
The pixel advertising industry will continue to evolve with more and more pixel websites coming up with innovative ideas enticing visitors to part with their money to buy a pixel or two. The outcome of this "Pixel Advertising phenomenon" is difficult to predict. Perhaps...any of these three things can happen....
1) People will come up with several interesting and innovative ideas based on pixel advertising to keep the pixel advertising industry going
2) People will run out of new innovative ideas and the industry will stagnate but advertisers will continue to use pixel advertisements as a part of their internet marketing strategy
3) The initial euphoria gathered by the pixel advertising industry will slow down and a few years from now....pixel advertising will be dead and no one will remember the concept of pixel advertising in internet marketing
All said and done...the decision has to be taken by the advertiser as to whether the return on investment on pixel advertisement is sufficient enough to warrant such an investment...and even if the advertiser decides that pixel advertisements will be the future, the more difficult decision is to identify the pixel website which will give the maximum ROI.
Check out whether you can be a part of internet history by checking a list of pixel websites providing pixel advertising at http://www.eatsleeptraffic.com/pixelsites.htm and you can also have a glimpse of how Alex Tew is doing right now.
Jayadeep Rath is the founder of a manual traffic exchange - http://www.eatsleeptraffic.com and believes strongly in the power of manual traffic exchanges to make your internet marketing strategy go places. He has a newsletter for sharing internet marketing ideas, innovations, strategies,opportunities and resources with EatSleepTraffic.com community members. EatSleepTraffic.com is a free to join community.
(This article can be published on any newsletter, website, blog or ezine only if the entire article along with live links are placed as it is and no changes are made to the resource box. This article cannot be posted in any site or publication that contains any inappropriate content and this article has to always remain a free article.)

Duplicate Content Isnt The End Of The World

2009-01-30T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Liz Tomey

So many people are running out buying this software and that software to make private label content unique. Well, it's time to put your credit card away and listen up. You don't have to buy any software or membership. There are just a few things you need to do to protect pages that you place articles or private label content on.
The first thing you should do is always design your own site layouts. Don't use templates that have been used by 100's of other people. This way it ensures that your layout is original, and the search engines wont see it as duplicate content. You'll also need to make sure that the meta tags for each page are different. Have a different title for each page is very important.
Now that you know what to do with the actual pages of your sites, let's talk about making the content unique to your site.
If you're using an article you only have reprint rights to, you can't change the article, but you can: 1. Add your own introduction to the article. If you need more keyword density than the article has put those keywords into the introduction you write for that article.
2. Put text advertising in the middle of your article. Design it so that there is a box around the advertising. By doing this it makes the advertising stick out from the article so there is no doubt it's NOT part of the article to your visitors.
3. Add a comments box under the article where visitors can comment on the article. This allows your visitors to build your unique content for you. Their comments will become part of the pages content.
4. Add your own conclusion to the article. Again, this is another great place to add your targeted keywords to.
If you are using content that you have private label rights to on your sites, you still need to do the same changes that we just talked about to it also. It's easier to change private label content because you can edit it however you would like.
Using already created content is great, but to really succeed with it, you need to take the time to make it unique to your site. Yes, it does take time, but it will pay off for years to come. It will give your sites staying power and those that don't follow the advice here will continue to struggle as their sites get dropped from the search engines.
Liz Tomey is the owner of http://www.AdsenseGirl.com where she reveals several adsense secrets that hundreds of people are using every day to make their sites profitable with Google Adsense ads. Visit her site for the free report!

Consumer Crusader Asks Can Netflix Save America A Lot Of Gas Each Year

2009-01-29T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Dr. Gary S. Goodman

With gas prices soaring, reports about global warming increasing in number and foreboding, I'm asking myself how I can save some energy, if only for my own piece of mind?
In a separate article, I mentioned that yesterday was Car-less Tuesday. I gave my ride a day off and did my business by phone and by mail. Today, I carpooled and together, we got our errands done very efficiently.
But there are other ways we can do it.
One of them is by renting our videos through sources such as the Internet company, Netflix.
I don't own an interest in this company and I'm not on their payroll. I am a subscriber to their service and I like it for several reasons:
(1) The cost per video rental is about a buck each;
(2) There are no traditional late fees; and
(3) I'm saving time and fuel by not schlepping to and from my video store.
Let's discuss the last item.
Typically, I'd visit my video store about six times per week; a minimum of three round trips. The store is about 4 miles away, so that means I'd put on 24 city miles per week, burning at least two gallons of premium gas, at a cost of $7, more or less.
Of course, you have to add the time I wasted in driving and in searching the shelves for suitable titles to rent, and that consumed another three hours of my time. Plus, rushing back to return a rental isn't fun or convenient.
The store charges $3.75 per video rental, and half-price on Tuesdays.
Netflix will charge me about $27 a month for the privilege of checking out 4 titles at a time from their collection of 60,000 DVDs. All I have to do is open my mail to receive titles and either leave them for my letter carrier to pick up, or I can drop them in any mailbox, when it suits me. Then, upon receipt of my prior rentals, Netflix will send me four more.
So, for the price of my gas alone, I'm able to rent roughly from 16-24 videos per month, from Netflix.
I love their business model because it's a win/win situation for them and for consumers.
Already, I understand they are one of the largest U.S. Postal Service customers.
If more of us used services such as theirs, can you imagine how much money and gas we could save each year?
Dr. Gary S. Goodman is the best-selling author of 12 books, over 600 articles, and the creator of numerous audio and video training programs, including "The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable," published by Nightingale-Conant-a favorite among salespeople and entrepreneurs. For information about booking Gary to speak at your next sales, customer service or management meeting, conference or convention, please address your inquiry to: gary@customersatisfaction.com

Keyword Tracking

2009-01-28T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Halstatt Pires

Keyword tracking allows a site owner to know what keyword searches are resulting in sales. Search term information can be logged into a database and presented to web site owners in a meaningful format. This data can be used to see which keywords are producing the most sales per search and to determine where to focus web marketing.
What Search Engine or Web Site
Knowing what search engine a sale has originated from allows site owners and marketers to know where their efforts are paying off the most. Good tracking and analysis software will also show what web site referred visitors. Knowing what sites are sending the most visitors allows site owners to give special attention to ensuring this traffic continues and increases. Knowing what referrers are generating the most sales further allows a site owner to hone his or her marketing efforts toward site referrals that result in the most sales.
What Keyword Was Searched For
Knowing what keyword searches are resulting in sales on a site allows the owner to focus more on those words. Perhaps you are marketing your site for two main keywords, "air hook widgets" and "air hooks." Using keyword tracking that traces keywords down to the sale ensures that you will know if searches for "air hook widgets" convert into sales more often than visits resulting from searches for "air hooks."
Sales Conversion Ratio of Keywords and Return on Investment
Tracking keyword searches through to sales allows site owners to determine the return on investment. If a web master spends $100.00 on the pay-per-click keyword "air hook widgets" and sells $1000 worth of product, his or her return on investment is likely very good. If the same web site owner spends $100.00 on the keyword "air hooks" and sells $200 worth of product, it is likely that the return on investment was not as great. Of course, if the markup or profit on one product is greater than on another, this must be taken into account.
Cost of Keyword
If a web marketer is using pay-per-click engines, knowing exactly what has been spent on a keyword, and what the return was, allows money to be put where it will do the most. Keyword searches, unlike many advertising mediums, are targeted by the viewer. For this reason, in addition to the accurate return on investment feedback, keyword marketing can be very worth the cost.
Added Benefit of Branding
Marketing your site by keyword in pay-per-click engines means that you will only be charged if a person clicks through your ad to your site. Pay-per-click ads and organic search listings have the often overlooked added value of showing the ad or listing many times over in addition to the clicks the ad or listing receives. Only a small percentage of people are likely to click on a keyword ad or search result listing, yet your ad or listing will be visible time and time again to people searching for terms you have bid on or marketed, increasing your site branding. Nonetheless, care should be taken to generate a compelling key word ad or page description, since in most cases you will want to receive as many clicks as possible.
Conclusion
In conclusion, if you are spending money on search engine marketing, it is often well worth the effort to track your keywords through to sales. Without tracking your keywords, you will not know where your efforts are paying off. By tracking your keywords, you are able to put your efforts where they are paying off the most.
Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through http://www.businesscreatorpro.com

How To Increase Your Google Adsense Income Overnight

2009-01-27T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Jennifer Carter

Did you know that the standard Google Adsense advert is not the best and most effective one?
If you've been using Google Adsense already, you'll know that there are different advert formats that you can try on your website.
The most important thing that you can do to improve your Google Adsense income is to increase the click-through rate or CTR
For example,

1000 pages visits, with a 1% CTR, is 10 clicks

1000 page visits, with a 10% CTR, is 100 clicks
Which would you rather have?
Google Adsense does not allow detailed discussions of actual CTR's but implementing the following hints and tips improved my Adsense income, literally overnight.
If you are using the Leaderboard, Banner or Skyscraper adverts, then you are not using the most effective advert, in terms of CTR.
By using the 336 x 280 Large Rectangle and 250 x 250 Square, you will instantly improve your CTR.
Changing the colours of the text and background of your Google adsense advert can also improve CTR. You can do this by visiting colour palettes on the "Adsense for Content" page.
The standard colour for the Linked Title is a royal blue and the advertiser-url is a green. By changing the Linked Title to a dark blue and the Advertiser URL to a light grey, you will also improve your CTR and hence your income.
If your page background is coloured, then changing the background colour of your advert to match, making the advert blend in on the page, once again improves your CTR.
For further hints and tips on improving your Google adsense income, visit Google Adsense Secrets
This article was submitted by Jennifer Carter, author of How to become an Internet Millionaire

Free Content I Think Not

2009-01-26T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Russ Egan

A lot of websites use ads to make it worth their while to continue, but I have noticed that more and more are starting to rely on donations from their readers. This confused me some-what, because I have always thought of a donation as giving money to a charity (eg. Cure Cancer, Flying Doctors, and Hospitals), and it seems that someone else agrees with me: The Oxford Dictionary. It states that a donation is:
Something that is given to a charity, especially a sum of money.
A charity, not a website that tries to convince people to take their personality test! This made me think that maybe my perspective of a charity is wrong, and that blogs whos entire existence is dedicated to people showing pictures of their children is a charity. So I looked up the definition of charity:
An organization set up to provide help and raise money for those in need.
So unless the owners of these sites are homeless, or have some crippeling condition, the word donation is misleading. By giving money to one of these sites you are not 'donating' anything at all. If you have some great desire to hand over your cash to a complete stranger, then give it to something worthwhile, like the Red Cross.
If anybody is any good at web design and scripting, and is willing to create a button to try and promote the ban (not legally, but socially) of phony donations, then I would be happy to support them.
Russ Egan http://s-bend.blogspot.com

Search Engine Marketing Optimising Your Website For Msn

2009-01-25T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by MarkD McCormack

SE optimisation is a hot topic in internet marketing, so we have written a series of primers on the important factors in getting high search engine rankings. Each search engine is different and different search marketing techniques need to be used to get good rankings on them all.
MSN is the easiest of the search engines to get a competitive listing on. The important factors that need to be considered for MSN are as follows.
On Page
MSN reads and uses meta tags when ranking sites, so proper keywords at an appropriate density should be included. Title and descriptions should also include the keywords prominently and in the exact phrase that you want to rank on.
MSN also looks for keywords in the text and measures the same factors of prominence, density and close to links that Yahoo does.
Off Page
MSN has a high tolerance for reciprocal links and does not seem to apply any ageing or stability criteria to them.
When Microsoft finally decide that they are in the search engine business, things may change. But for the moment the fact is that you can put together a new site, add a few low quality reciprocal links and get a high ranking on MSN relatively easily. That is not always a bad thing. In fact, it is healthy to give new site some traffic and some exposure, to avoid an internet where the rich get richer, in search engine terms.
However the pitfall that I have seen is where sites get a good MSN ranking and then feel that the good Yahoo and the good Google ranking are only a matter of time. Each search engine places importance on different criteria and it measures them in different ways. Some links that get picked up by MSN will never be added by Google. So, celebrate your MSN ranking, but persevere with the search for top quality backlinks. Remember, this is a long term program and it will produce results in the long term.
Mark McCormack is a twenty year veteran of B2B marketing with extensive experience of internet marketing. His business, Markmedia, offers interim managment and consultancy advice in the UK. Their website is http://www.markmedia.org.uk and Mark can be contacted at mark@markmedia.org.uk.

Why Not Using Viral Marketing Could Kill Your Business

2009-01-24T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Maxine Hough

Creativity is the one virtue a site must possess to win the race in internet based business competition. With so much competition, many methods of marketing must be employed to stay in the race and win. It doesn't matter if you have a killer product or a web site with awesome web design, if people don't know you exist, you're "dead in the water."
While there are many methods used by e-commerce sites today, one method that's come into its own is called viral marketing which has helped many a site gain an extra boost in popularity ratings. Though the term viral depicts virus in the worse possible way, it isn't what you may think. You do not use a computer virus to spread your business.
Viral Marketing also known as viral advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public's awareness of your product, company, or web site. Many forms of the media are used to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product. The premise is to use methods that are somewhat addictive in nature to get people "hooked" and obligated or amused enough to actually "pass it on" along with the product, company, or web site advertisement.
Basically, marketers ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media enough, they will "pass it on" to their friends, family, prospects, or customers. They sponsor the particular media such as cool flash games, funny videos, amusing stories, or informational reports, which are passed on with the company brand, logo, product description, or any other content to help promote the company or its product.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of marketing and advertising because of the relatively low cost. To avoid being labeled as "spam mail", viral marketing counts on the eagerness of people to pass on the product. If the person sees the name of the person they're familiar with as the sender, they won't block it but, open it instead.
Many companies offer incentives such as rebates and discounts when prospects or customers help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients viral marketing gets from one person, in determining the amount of incentive they can be attributed with.
The foremost advantage of viral marketing is the publicity and public awareness your site or company receives. You get to generate a traffic flow of potential customers. With a little imagination, some incentives, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.
Many web sites are now aware of the effectiveness of viral marketing. Along with other promotional methods such as search engine optimization, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the ratings game. Consider the benefits, increased traffic flow, customers, and revenue increase that could incur from this one marketing resource alone!
As mentioned earlier, viral marketing is a great way to make people aware of your online presence as you get them to pass your advertisement along, like a virus. Many affiliate programs and webmasters offer reports and ebooks centered around their product and in many cases, they offer free branding rights which permit you to "brand" your website and affiliate link into the report or ebook. As you pass these on to your customers, prospects, you increase awareness of your online presence and hopefully increase sales and revenue in the process. As you can see the potential can be phenomenal!
Consider this, many big companies have used viral marketing successfully. A classic example is Hotmail. They were the first known company to employ viral marketing and the rest, as they say, is history. Why not incorporate viral marketing into your marketing and advertising arsenal, imagine the wonders it could do for your web site traffic and revenue!
Copyright 2006
Looking for effective internet marketing tools that work? Maxine Hough has created the ultimate web site of "cutting edge" internet marketing tools designed to increase your site's traffic flow and revenue significantly! => http://www.the-internet-marketing-tool-site.com

The Easy Way Of Getting Free One Way Links

2009-01-23T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Rich MacKenzie

Fact: One way links push your site up the rankings in Google as well as many other leading search engines. Reciprocal linking are by no means 'dead', however when it comes down to using your time effectively, then you will find that you will get many more rewards with greater results in the serps with one way linking.
So now you know that it's going to help, I want to show you a few ways that you can get a head start.
Articles: This is one of the best ways to get inbound links as it also helps to build you a solid and well formed reputation. You can submit articles on a whole range of topics on thousands of article directories all over the internet. For each article that you post you can place at least one inbound link in it that points towards your site. This link can be palace in your 'Author Bio'. Any articles that you submit will want to be 'keyword enriched', which means that it will have to mention several times a term that you think people will use to search for you site. Once you have your article you will need to submit it to some online directories. For this, quantity is just as good as quality. For a better distribution that is done automatically for you I suggest that you use http://www.isnare.com
Directory Submissions: Directories can be found all over the net and they certainly should not be ignored as they are a very important part of any linking strategy. Just like article directories there are thousands out there. I suggest that if you can't be bothered submitting yourself than you can use http://www.best-web-directories.com
One thing to remember is that each link that you get, helps to push you up the Google ranks. Don't go over the top and sit there for days at a time as this will only lead to burnout and you will not get anywhere. Set yourself a goal of submitting to say 10-20 directories and in no time you will have thousands completed.
Richard MacKenzie is an online marketer with a twist. His abilties have been shown in the marketering of his two great sites, one on Hypnotherapy and one on Hypnosis Downloads

The Amazing Power Of Articles To Drive Traffic To Websites

2009-01-22T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Jim Green

Most experienced marketers are in awe of the amazing power of articles.
Distributed in a consistent and structured submission pattern, they provide a force to drive insane amounts of traffic to any website.
And yet some online enthusiasts shy away from article submission in the mistaken belief that the process is tedious and time consuming whereas nothing could be further from the truth.
Certainly there is something of a learning curve to be negotiated in the matter of creative writing but with the amount of assistance available online nowadays, that is not a problem for anyone requiring tuition.
A sound practice for beginners is to examine how knowledgeable writers tackle the procedure.
1. How they craft compelling headlines
2. How they relate the story seamlessly from the start to the finish
3. How they interlace the text with core keywords
4. How they break up forbidding blocks of copy with bullet points and numbers
5. How they use short chunky paragraphs for ease of reading
6. How they couch the all-important resource box
Studying the output of experienced practitioners opens the gateway to the prime source of creative writing in its application to article composition.
Twenty six funny looking little characters that come together to provide 1984 pages of The Chambers Dictionary with 300,000 word definitions and 215,000 references; they are the fodder for countless millions of letters, books, poems, plays, and articles down the ages and in perpetuity.
They are the colors in the virtual paint box that can be mixed and matched to produce hundreds of thousands of words to communicate and illuminate thousands of online articles.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
No one can steal a march on beginners when they use these characters creatively and wisely; no one can cheat by adding to or subtracting from the list. And no one can staunch their creativity when beginners capitalize on the amazing power of words to compose articles.
There is no gain without some pain but here is what is in store for beginners who take the trouble to master article composition and distribution:
- Articles establish writers as experts in their particular areas of skill
- Articles help increase sales
- Articles generate floods of website traffic
- Articles increase Google Page Rank
- Articles to boost Alexa ratings
Of equal significance to the aspiring article writer is the choice of submission software; choose the right one and success in attracting traffic is all but guaranteed; chose the wrong one and the result could labelling as an amateur or worse still, a spammer.
Jim Green is an online enthusiast and bestselling author with an ever-growing string of niche non-fiction hard copy titles to his credit. He has thousands of articles circulating in cyberspace. http://articlesubmitter.howtoproducts-xl.com
Jim Green is an online enthusiast and bestselling author with an ever-growing string of niche non-fiction hard copy titles to his credit. http://articlesubmitter.howtoproducts-xl.com

Its Evolution Baby

2009-01-21T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Tim Whiston

There are those people who come to the web with a solid business plan, a large amount of investment capitol, and a precise strategy for how they are going to leverage the internet and exploit the incredible revenue potential of the cyber-age. Then there are the rest of us.
Millions of people have arrived on the www. with the notion of making their fortunes, and millions more will arrive in the next two years. These hopeful masses hail from the full spectrum of financial status, from six figure earners to minimum wage employees. Likewise, the newbie-networker can be an individual with an extensive background in traditional business, or a high school graduate with no clue about the dynamics of commerce and marketing.
I've observed an interesting progression among those net-marketers who came onto the scene without a road map, and with little idea of how the micro cosmos of internet marketing worked. Or maybe I've just watched my own journey, and it makes me feel better to assume others have shared my experience.
Either way. Indulge me a few more paragraphs, if you will, as I lay out what I like to think of as the evolution of a net-marketer.
Stage One: Easy Money... Not!
Right out of the gate, most people seem to think the internet "levels the playing field", or allows anyone with fingers and a keyboard to generate staggering riches with just a few hours of busy work each week. It usually takes a couple of months for this bubble to pop, but when it finally does, the majority of newbies don't survive the event.
However, when that dark day of realization comes, and it looms evident that one must actually work this business if he/she hopes to see any results, the strong of the networking gene pool sprout their working legs and move beyond the fog of delusion. Supremely confident in the knowledge they have surpassed those lazy sluggards who squeeled and fled at the suggestion of buckling down and putting some hard work in, the survivors of Stage One move onward and upward, where surely they will be rewarded for their tenacity.
Stage Two: Hard Work Doesn't Pay the Server Fees
In Stage Two, our post primordial networkers are laboring tirelessly through the deep thickets of website-construction, traffic-generation, email-list-building, and all manner of grueling and structured tedium. Their behinds sore from being glued to a worn out office chair, and their eyes bloodshot and bleary from the all night clicking sessions, they push on day after day, certain of their forthcoming vindication.
But they still aren't making any freakin' money. And what's more, they are starting to see past the free web hosts, free classified ads, and free trial memberships. All the good stuff seems to cost money, but our Stage Twoers had hoped to put off any kind of monetary investment until they could create at least some kind of income to offset such expenditures.
And so another enormous batch of inferior networkers dies out. The thought of putting some cash into their web-business was more than their fragile little hearts could bear.
But, as always, those more suited to the challenge live on. With a deep breath, and a good look at their monthly budgets, the survivors of Stage Two determine they will invest as much money as needed to keep their operations afloat until they are able to become self-funding marketers.
Stage Three: Throwing Money at it Doesn't Work Either
Enter the golden age of upgrades and paid memberships. Five bucks a month for this. Ten bucks a month for that. Anything with a Paypal button is fair game.
No longer clueless newbies who think this can be done for free, our marketers are in full stride. Buying every ebook that comes down the pipe, upgrading in programs they login to once a month, and hitting every buy now button they can find, they cruise through cyberspace on a mission to buy their way right to the top. "I'm not afraid to spend money on *my* business." they tout.
Lots and lots of money goes out. Considerably less revenue comes back in.
Inevitably, the moment arrives when those who have made it to Stage Three see the folly of their current direction. Maybe it's when the credit card bill comes, or perhaps it happens when they are balancing the checkbook.
Once again, the brutal process of selection strikes down those without the heart for further trials. Uncountable numbers of washed-up, would-be internet marketers sink beneath the sludge of this stage.
And once again, that fraction of the whole with the guts and gumption to keep going grow stronger than ever before. More than a regimen of hard work and the willingness to invest money is needed here, they resolve. On the verge of a real breakthrough (they can feel it in their bones now), those who have thus far refused to fall decide a well devised plan for all future endeavors is in order.
Stage Four: Plan to Fail, Fail to Plan, and All that Other Crap
Plans are drawn up to cover every possible aspect of the game from here on out. A strict but healthy budget is imposed. Daily tasking is fine tuned for maximum effectiveness. Projections are made prior to each ad campaign, and results are measured afterwards. Tracking, testing, brain-storming, and constant attention to the hows and what-ifs become paramount.
This carries on for some time. Until another moment of clarity is reached.
A question is posed...
"Is all of this work really worth the small amount of money I am generating?"
Or, more often...
"How is it that I'm still not making any @#$%! money?!"
This stage progresses rapidly into the next. Many specimens are lost in the transition, but due to the great speed with which Stage Four becomes Stage Five, a surprising number of marketers actually make the jump.
Stage Five: "What the Hell am I Doing Here?"
Here's where it gets ugly. Stage Five is more of a bitter quagmire than part of the evolutionary journey.
Typical phenomenon exhibited by specimens at this stage include verbal outbursts like:
"Lousy bunch of @#$%! stinkin' #$@%!!! I can't <***bleep***> believe I've wasted three @#$#*& years of my @#$%$# life with this <***bleep***> bunch of @!!#$% silly @#$%#@!!!, and still don't have @#$%## <***bleeeeep***> to show for it!"
As you might readily imagine, droves and droves of networkers die out over the course of this stage.
But those who are able to survive this particularly crucial stretch of development will find the arduous journey has paid off. For in the breathless, weary aftermath of their well earned tantrums, an epiphany is born.
Stage Six: The Cold Hard Facts
For the love of cheese fries, this is a business like any other. Hard work, monetary investment,and sound planning are required, but all of these combined are not enough to put you into profit.
You have to know what works, and you have to understand to some extent why it works. Real Knowledge of the market, the methods, and the meaning behind the apparent madness is what makes the difference between a person who works their butt off for nothing, and a person who makes a big, sweaty fortune with the same or less effort.
Nobody cares how much money we invest, or how many hours we spend each day in front of our computer. Competition is fierce, expectations are high, and the only thing that matters is whether or not we can penetrate, deliver, and get the sale.
This is a pretty far cry from what most of us want to hear. But lessons that are worth learning usually have a bitter taste.
Seek out people who are successful in this field, and find out what they are doing. Watch them. Ask them questions. Take notes. Absorb as much knowledge as you can, then put that knowledge into practice.
Tim Whiston is a full-time entrepreneur and internet marketer. He publishes a monthly ezine, and is the author of a popular e-book entitled From Zero to Profit.

Online Business Success Its All Within Your Grasp

2009-01-20T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Jack Humphrey

Despite any failures or slow starts you may be experiencing or rebounding from right now, don't focus too much on the people you listened to who may have contributed to your current state.
We all rely on "experts" to get ahead. Problem is you never know for SURE if the expert you just listened to is right until what she told you pans out in hard results.
Case studies are nice, but results in your bank account would be better. So there is always a leap of faith when deciding on a plan of action for your online business based upon the input from an "expert."
Many times you fall flat on your face. Whether it is a marketing test, new sales copy, or a new product or service, you can do everything that was recommended to the best of your ability, and sometimes it still doesn't work out.
I will tell you a secret that most experts won't admit: everyone, even the "experts," go through the same exact thing from time to time! We are all in the same boat when it comes to trying and failing. Or trying and succeeding.
Here's what is important when you hit the bottom of a fall from grace: that you dust yourself off and realize that a recent failure has nothing to do with whether or not "it was meant to be" or "this online business thing will never work for ME" or "it's all the "expert's" fault I failed!"
None of the statements above do a thing for your future success. What you need to succeed is out there. All the knowledge you need. All the tools and tactics. All the ideas you need to turn your business 180 degrees and get it back on track for eventual success.
Whether or not you should have listened to the last "expert" is immaterial. What matters is that you learn from what happened and take steps to avoid the same mistake in the future.
The answers or ideas you are seeking are very close. They can be one search away. One "chance" meeting with someone who will be crucial to your business success. Most people get stuck on failure or setbacks and miss the opportunity that was created by that failure.
They take no notice of the opportunity in front of them because of the fog of blame and shame, or the feelings of doubt about whether or not you should even be trying this online business "thing" at all.
Believe me, it is hard to stick to your dreams when everyone around you thinks you are nuts for even trying. It takes a real steadfast resolve to stick it out in the face of failure.
But the people who do, come out on top. Take that to the bank because when failure strikes, and it always does, most people run right back to the security of a paycheck without a backward glance.
These are the bitter folks who stick around the forums and write about how big a "pie-in-the-sky" all this online business success stuff is.
Yeah, tell that to the hundreds of people I work with who are singing an entirely different tune. I work around content site publishers and have associates who are making $20,000.00+ per month without serving a single customer or having to man their business with support people around the clock.
They don't ship products and thus have no inventory headaches. They simply provide a network of information sites and make money with the advertising space on those sites. Good money. Very good money.
Publishing content on a multi-site network scale is something sort of new out there on the net, in internet time. Certainly in real-world time! It is constantly evolving and is still truly in its infancy for potential growth. Growth in billions of dollars, not millions.
The point is this: There are not only the standard, regular opportunities for successful online business models that are still making millionaires right and left. There are also constant developments on the cutting-edge of internet business models.
The opportunity bubble in online businesses of all kinds is expanding at an amazing rate of speed. Like the Big Bang, opportunity is spreading in all directions, across hundreds of online industries.
We all sometimes need to be reminded of this fact in order to get past failures and keep working hard to find our niche. I can assure you that if you work, learn, and stay involved in your online business interests, whatever they may be, that big day will come when certain things fall into place which will change your life dramatically.
Everything you need to succeed is within a few clicks of where you are right now. You just haven't found the RIGHT links yet. But you will if you keep your eyes open for the opportunity when it presents itself.
Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey
Jack Humphrey is managing partner at Content Desk, Inc. and an online information network publisher. For more information on the new trends in the information publishing industry, check out http://www.contentdesk.com/mardigras

5 Powerful Tips To Beat The Biggest Problem All Marketers Face

2009-01-19T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Charles Kangethe

I bet you can't tell me... the single biggest problem facing Every Direct Marketer, new and old.
It's not generating traffic, nor building an O'pt-In list, nor is it finding products to market and it's not a lack of Cash.
You can buy traffic, you can buy O'pt-In list members, you can make or buy products and you can even borrow Cash.
The biggest single problem for any Direct Marketer is How To Earn Your Prospect's Trust.
Learn how to earn AND keep trust and you open up huge new Marketing possibilities.
Too many salespeople of doubtful credentials, and too many adverts promising so much and delivering so little have hardened consumers, they no longer trust Marketers and Marketing claims without a great deal of convincing.
So how exactly do you turn a skeptic into a believer ?
Tip #1 - Make Your First Contact Count
Your initial point of contact with prospects is typically
* An advert, in a PPC, a banner exchange, a classified or solo campaign
* An entry in a Search Engine directory,
* Or an article you have written.
Unfortunate as it may be, people do judge others by first contact. If your initial impression of someone is poor, chances are that you will not give them a second look, be it in business or your personal affairs.
Make sure your initial point of contact with all prospects is to your advantage.
This does NOT mean expensive, glitzy or superficial.
It means make your initial contact Sincere.
Keep that one word in mind as you design all your sales and marketing strategies and your Initial Contacts will always be positive.
Tip #2 - Products, Pricing, Promises and Personality
Sincerity in your contacts with prospects comes from applying the (modified) 4 p's of marketing.
* Products
Market the best products you can and never settle for second best. Add value and benefit to your prospect with quality merchandise. Resist the temptation to market "Cost Cutting" alternatives that are in fact more expensive due to their poorer real value.
* Pricing
Price your merchandise at a fair value for the producer, the consumer and the marketer. Over pricing your products is a self defeating tactic because prospects learn to avoid your pitch and with over high pricing you invite competition to under cut your cost and price base.
* Promises
Your sales literature and copy must be accurate and reflect the true benefits of your products and services. This does not mean you should be unduly modest, by all means make big claims, but make sure you can prove and demonstrate anything you promise.
Remember, in this context, any guarantee you give must be more solid than any Banks Vaults and worth as much as the contents of Fort Knox
* Personality
Inject your personality into your contact with prospects.
People love to do business with people they know. Avoid doing things you feel uncomfortable with, but do tell people about yourself, your failures, your wins, your hopes and your fears. Be the human face of you business and build a sincere relationship with prospects.
Tip #3 - Communication
When you get past the initial contact, the next hurdle in building trust is communication with your prospects.
There are several ways to do this
* A sequential autoresponder with relevant messages sent to your O'pt-In prospects at regular AND frequent intervals.
* An e-zine sent out to subscribers with useful information and not just an excuse for another advert.
* Articles showing your prospects how YOU manage your business and personal tasks, tactics and strategies.
Communication is two way traffic. Ask your prospects for input into your professional relationship and how they think you can improve it. Listen to your prospects.
Tip #4 - Credibility
Prospects always seek comfort that they are doing the right thing.
It pays to use "borrowed" credibility if you are not a world recognised expert in your field. This is where testimonials enter the picture.
Here are a few ways in which you can obtain testimonials and build credibility with a new product or service :
* Give a few samples away to a test group in return for the testimonial
* Use functionally disabled or time barred samples as demo versions which you can give away to prospects
* Develop fully functional modules with less features than the standard product and give those away to prospects.
* Develop e-courses and other training programs showing prospects the benefits and training them in how to use and consume your products and services.
Tip #5 - Service
Your prospect's Trust is very hard earned. But this is as nothing when compared to retaining their Trust.
Once a prospect becomes a customer, too many marketers make the fatal mistake of taking that customer for granted.
Post sales service is a crunch time for cementing the Trust you have managed to win with such effort.
Make sure you stay in touch with your new customer. Offer them advice and help in the use of their new product or service. Make sure any potential issues are dealt with before they escalate.
Be available and within easy contact for your customers and prospects.
Relevant Resources
http://www.simplyeasier.com/me.html
Conclusion
As a direct marketer you can buy traffic, you can buy O'pt-In list members, you can make or buy products and you can even borrow Cash.
You cannot manufacture or in any way manipulate trust - Trust is the one thing in your business that must be earned the Hard Way.
Be sincere, do the right things as shown here and build trust with your prospects.
(c) 2004 Charles Kangethe
About The Author
Charles Kangethe of http://www.simplyeasier.com is a leading new wave Netpreneur and a published author from England. The "Simply Easier" brand name is your guarantee of high value, quality Marketing Products, Services and Resources.
charles@simplyeasier.com

Internet Advertising What Is More Effective Expensive Ads Or Cheap Ones

2009-01-18T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Sami Fab

People opt for internet advertising methods because practically half of the world's population knows HTML. If you have your own business, you have to decide on what internet advertising method works for you. Ask yourself what are you going to avail of: the expensive internet advertising methods or the cheap ones? Others will pipe in "expensive!" immediately, but they don't know cheap internet advertising method attracts great benefits as well.
Here's the lowdown and a comparative look on the cheap and expensive internet advertising methods:
The Expensive:
1. Pop-ups. Not only is this expensive, but also outright annoying that visitors close pop-up windows without even bothering to know what they're all about. This is an internet advertising method that you can do without.
Fly ads are derivatives of pop-ups which are also equally irking to the visitors.
2. 1. Pop-ups. Not only is this expensive, but also outright annoying that visitors close pop-up windows without even bothering to know what they're all about. This is an internet advertising method that you can do without.
Fly ads are derivatives of pop-ups which are also equally irking to the visitors.
2. Pod casts.
Broadcast is to TV as pod cast is to internet. It's one sophisticated internet advertising method that can somehow hamper your budget. But if you're thinking results, pod casting is worth the money.
3. Paying the search engines.
How does this one work? When someone types in a keyword related to your site, your URL is automatically included in the first page of the top results. Fixed payment for the search engine allows just that. Expensive, yes, but if we're talking about Google and Yahoo search engines here, then don't give it a second thought.
This is associated with another internet advertising method: the pay-per-click system.
The Cheap:
1. Blogging.
Go along the bandwagon and blog about your website. This is an internet advertising method that is popular as of the moment, so you never have to worry that this will never spur outcome. All you have to do is sign up for a blogging account, post and voila! You don't even need to pay!
2. Submit to not-so-big search engines.
This is cheap and dependable. If you submit your site to smaller search engines, you have bigger chances to get bigger results. Remember that the search engine giants can dwarf and overlook your site easily, so this internet advertising method might just be the right one for you.
3. Text links.
This is not just cheap...this is virtually free! Let someone text link your site and return the favor.
Cheap versus expensive, that's always the question that hounds on whenever we're trying to get something. In the field of internet advertising, just be wise enough to figure out what will suit your needs. Go for what you want as long as there are visible results.
Dr Sami Fab is the founder of OnDemand Ltd dedicated to creating time-saving solutions for the home based, small and medium sized businesses.
You can obtain a valuable series of training emails, completely free of charge, on how to market any home based, small and medium business at: http://www.Autopilot-Business.com

Planning For Success A Positive Approach

2009-01-17T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Bob Evans

Are you a good or bad planner? Do you cringe at the very mention of the word 'plan'? If you do then you are not alone. Thousands of online (and offline) marketers find themselves in the same position.
A good many of these people may well have never considered a plan of action as part of their daily marketing activities. Others may think they are too busy to spare any time for planning. Still others may feel they do need to plan, can see the benefits to be gained from planning, but don't think their skills or personality are suited to this task.
It seems perfectly clear to me that without planning, the long term success of any business,large or small, is unlikely to be realised!
A plan need not be elaborate. It need not be detailed, but you should at least commit something to paper.
Start off by taking a positive view of planning. Don't just look at it as 'another boring chore I've got to do'. Say to yourself 'This is my plan for success.'
Also consider the following benefits to be gained from good planning:
* you can meet deadlines
* you can meet or even exceed your targets
* you can create a feeling of achievement for each step you fulfill
* you can monitor and control your marketing activities to greater effect
* you can initiate improvements
* you can achieve personal growth and success
Once you have accepted that planning for success is a positive thing, it is then time to think about your goals. And just what do you want to achieve? Why are you marketing this or that product in the first place? Do you know what your short term and long term aims are?
Answering these questions accurately will enable you to take a big step forward to achieving whatever goals you ultimately set yourself. So what are your goals? And how do you plan to achieve them?
The great thing about targets is they give you a way to measure your performance and give you a sense of direction - you are going somewhere. It is important also to consider that in order for your goals to have substance and meaning they should satisfy the following criteria:
* they should be achievable
* they should be measurable
* they should be challenging though NOT impossible
Here are THREE achievable, measurable and challenging goals that Bill, an Ezine owner, has set himself:
* to get 200 subscribers within the first three months following launch * to ensure that AT LEAST 70% of subscribers are still in place after 6 months * to increase the number of subscribers by 800 in the year following the initial 6 month target
What three goals relating to your business can you think of that meet the above criteria? Write them down.
Now let's look more in depth at each of Bill's goals to see how he can evolve an Action Plan that will enable him to meet each goal in a systematic, cost-effective way.
In order to work out the Action Plan he should consider a set of specific questions he should ask. These questions are:
When should this happen? How is it going to be carried out? Who is going to do it? How much is it going to cost?
GOAL ONE: To bring in 30 subscribers
WHEN: Within the first 30 days
HOW: By advertising in Ezines, on PPC Search Engines, via opt-in email lists, and via other media such as Classified Ad sites and also offline via magazines and periodicals
WHO: In the first instance Bill himself and then by others as the subscriber base grows
HOW MUCH: The budget is under $50 a month
Bill's next step is to start to put together the Action Plan in more detail. This is a very important stage of the overall plan because it focuses on specifics:
* how many hours is he going to devote?
* which specific advertising media is he going to use and how often?
* which advertisements is he going to use?
When getting down to the nitty gritty of executing his plan, Bill will try to keep in mind:
* his daily advertising routine (stick to it)
* whether he is keeping to the budget
* his target
When considering your own marketing campaign always think to yourself that EVERY day you follow your Action Plan is a step closer to the achievement of your goal!
Copyright 2005 Robert Evans
Bob Evans has been doing business online since October 2000. He utilises a powerful marketing action plan of his own to generate targeted traffic to any website: http://www.market4profit.net/marketing-action-plan.php

10 Highly Effective Strategies To Grow Your Online Business

2009-01-16T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Nihkie Mhlanga

You came up with excellent online business ideas, and you have now executed them, launching your online business. It has been your goal for a long time to have your own home based part time business. Now that you have it, it is time to make it grow. The best way to make your home-based online business grow is through a strategy that will enable you to know your customers and market, and gradually build on that to expand your business.
If you chose the option of selling products as your business, or promote other people's products there are several important issues to consider.
1) During the early days of your online business, do not overwhelm yourself trying market too many products/services. Try to focus on a single product or two to sell, or at least a niche of related products. It may me tempting to take huge steps at first, but try the less risky approach first just in case you want to change your plan. You will profit and benefit better if you implement your overall business plan in small gradual steps. By starting in a small and concentrated way, you are able to have a good idea of the real market potential, the specific targeted customers, and thus identify ways to grow the business, based on what you have tried and tested.
2) Once you have a product that is a big hit with your customers and the market potential looks favorable, begin to expand on this product. Offer items that give diversity to your product line, or offer similar items that are targeted for a different but related customer group.
3) When you expand your product line, try to keep your existing customers, as well as consistently getting new ones. Your existing customers already know what to expect from you. If you keep on offering products that still appeal to them, this will help your online business. It is also equally important to constantly build a long list of potential customers, as these are critical for your business' future success. You can do these through various means, for example, having a newsletter on your website to which potential customers can subscribe to.
4) Do not hesitate to ask someone for help in operating your online business or getting some specific aspects of your business organized. They can be an employee of yours, an intern, an online business expert, an independent contractor, or even your children. This will help free up some of your time to concentrate on other aspects of your business. This gives you an opportunity to begin looking into online network marketing.
5) Your web site must effectively promote and advertise your home based online business. The internet has many different avenues to advertising, and you will need to choose which marketing strategy is best for you.
6) Join forces with affiliate programs. Affiliate programs are simple. Sellers offer a basic percentage of the sale, or a flat fee, to people who refer a customer to them. You will receive an affiliate ID so you know where the referral resource came from and receive appropriate remuneration as stated in the affiliate agreement.
7) Target other markets. If you market mostly to teenagers, begin to market to college students. Or you can begin to sell your items wholesale and in bulk. Even though the price of the items will be lower, you will be able to sell more products.
8) Try various online and offline strategies to market your business. You may want to try e-mail newsletters or doing guest speaking functions.
9) Consider transforming your business into a franchise or a business opportunity for other people to join you. If your business is one that can be converted into a business format that someone else could operate, you may want to consider it being a franchise. If it is one that you only have standardized products or services that someone else could resell multiple times, then it may be a business opportunity.
10) 'Get the word out' about your business or website as much as you can. Advertise, participate in related forums or write some articles in order to create links to your business' website.
By following these simple measures, you can see a growth in your business.
Copyright 2006 Nikki Mhlanga
To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit: http://www.Smart-HomeBiz.com

The High Cost Of Not Having An Online Marketing Strategy

2009-01-15T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Lawrence Johnson

B2B and industrial companies are slow to embrace online marketing. It's a curious reluctance given that online marketing is performance-driven, pays for itself, and consistently delivers new, qualified business that can mean dramatic increases in sales and growth.

So, why are some companies sometimes reticent about using online marketing when the benefits in terms of exposure and revenue are so substantial? We thought we'd seek out those with the answers.

Direct From the Source

We talked to CEOs and Marketing Managers of companies that have embraced online marketing. These industry leaders are quick to confirm that Internet marketing more than pays for itself. In addition, in a short period of time online marketing has become a critical, indispensable channel for generating customer awareness and sales directly enhancing the bottom line.

The message from industry insiders clear: The risk involved with online marketing is small. The rewards are infinite.

We asked a number of your B2B colleagues what it would have cost them to delay embracing the power of online marketing. This is what they had to say.

Lost Business

Experts agree that online search has become the primary source of information for those making B2B buying decisions. Most business consumers first turn to a search engine during the investigation phase of their buying process, and just about all of them will use the Internet at some point during the decision-making process. That's right. Nearly all of them.

That's a staggering fact, and those who have taken advantage of online marketing know this trend is some of the best news in decades for companies willing to exploit the new ways businesses do business.

The reliance on search in the buying process means your company has never had a better opportunity to reach and capture new business. But it also means that every day you wait means business lost to your competitors.

Online Marketing Pays for Itself

Industry pros understand the bottom line and the need for measurable returns on any investment, especially when it comes to spends for advertising and marketing. They also understand that online marketing is one of the few methods guaranteed to pay for itself.

Online marketing, specifically paid placement and search engine optimization, have a proven track record in giving companies the highest returns of any vehicle in their marketing mix.

In addition, online marketing is a low-risk proposition because it's based on performance. You pay only if a potential customer clicks on your ad. Utilizing that system, the cost of acquiring a customer is dramatically reduced.

Those in the know insist online marketing generates 20-50% of the qualified sales leads in industries that have traditionally relied on sales prospecting, word-of-mouth and trade shows.

The numbers don't lie. What is your company waiting for?

Competition

Everyone wants a competitive advantage, but even tried and tested methods can't keep pace with the monumental strides being made with online marketing.

With online marketing, you can fend off your competitors and dominate niche markets. The Internet creates a level playing field where businesses of all sizes can compete. Anyone can stake a position as a leader. What would it be worth to your company to be in that position?

And here's another insight we heard from B2B pros. One of the unique benefits of the Internet is that is affords smaller businesses the chance to appear bigger than they are. Online, a three-person operation can look slicker than an international conglomerate. You can turn this to your advantage with a minimal investment of time and money. Indextree can show you the way.

So, why is it important to dive into the world of online marketing now? The hard fact we hear from B2Bs is that once a company entrenches itself in a certain arena online, it's hard to dislodge it. At the moment, in most industries, search rankings and market dominance aren't set yet. They will be, and it will cost you more down the road to accomplish what you can accomplish now with far fewer resources.

As in most areas of business, in the realm of online marketing, it pays to act decisively..

Online Buyers are Ready to Buy

Those who have reaped the rewards of online marketing will attest to the fact that customers who research and compare products and services online are much more predisposed to buying. It's just the nature of the medium. Much of your job of selling is done by the time someone reaches your Web site.

In the world of online marketing, your customer is already looking for your product. They're actively looking to do business with someone. That someone should be you.

New competitors

It's not something you like to think about, but they're out there, and they're after your business. New players are entering your market every day, and they're capturing your market share.

The tools we're talking about are a double-edged sword. If you don't capitalize on the benefits of online marketing, do you think your competitors will hesitate to do so? Aggressive, upstart companies are pulling out all the stops, exploiting economies of scale and using online marketing to extend their reach.

Don't just wait and watch while these companies erode the fiscal health of your company. Can you really afford to have these competitors encroach on what you've fought so hard to build? It's time to reclaim what's yours, and online marketing is the answer.

Commoditization

Trust us, we don't just throw around big words because it makes us feel smart. The Internet has given customers an unprecedented ability to shop and compare, often reducing the buying decision to price alone. But this "commoditization" of products doesn't do your company justice, and your bottom line may already be suffering because of it.

What's the answer to the problem of commoditization? How do you distinguish yourself? How do you communicate your differentiating qualities to potential customers?

Online marketing provides an excellent vehicle for branding and also allows you to capture potential customers earlier in the buying process.

Quality business interactions are more than just a price point. Be heard. Stand out. Reap the windfall.

Build Buyer Awareness and Drive Traffic

Here's the ugly truth. Many manufacturers and distributors don't do a great job with their Web sites. We hear this time and time again not only from the CEOs and Marketing Managers, but also from consumers.

Site visitors are often frustrated by poor online marketing practices. In fact, studies show two-thirds of B2B site visitors complain they don't find what they are looking for, and almost half never return to the site as a result. Now, we're not saying yours is one of those sites. But are you sure you're turning Web site traffic into sales consistently? What impression are you giving potential customers when they visit your site? Are your customers telling other potential customers how professional and easy-to-use your site is?

Online marketing has a lot more to do than simply having a visually appealing Web site. It's more than simply buying keywords and hoping they'll bring you more business. Buying unqualified leads from unknown sources is often like putting your money into a kiln.

Effective online marketing requires knowledge, strategy, implementation, monitoring, and follow-through. Those are the skills and qualities we pride ourselves on at Indextree.

The High Cost of Waiting on the Sidelines

As you read this, there's a good chance your competitors are working on their online marketing strategies. It's even possible they're making inroads into capturing key customer segments you may never be able to recapture.

Is business good right now? Sure. Is it great? Could be better. With an effective online marketing strategy, it could be great.

So, what's it costing you to wait?

Take it from those who have seen the benefits of online marketing firsthand. Standing on the sidelines has never been so costly.
By Lawrence Johnson, the CEO of Indextree, Inc.

Indextree helps manufacturers and distributors dominate their markets by designing and implementing winning lead management, online marketing, search engine optimization and pay per click strategies. Call 1.800.670.9950 to speak to an Indextree Online Marketing Expert.

The Benefits Of Internet Press Release Distribution

2009-01-14T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Tracy Falbe

Press releases have always been a great way to get your name in front of media professionals. With the internet, however, your press releases can be exposed to even more readers. Entire websites are devoted to press release distribution and these services provide an affordable, even free, method of injecting your information into the internet.
Realistically, many press releases do not generate big front page articles or become the latest buzz on the internet, but the internet remains an important outlet for press releases. A great aspect of issuing a press release on the internet is that even if it does not prompt a reporter to write an article, the information will get published at various websites and be read by hundreds or perhaps thousands of people. This certainly is an awesome improvement upon simply sending a press release to a newsroom where it might be read by an editor or reporter before being forgotten.
Major benefits of distributing press releases online are enhancement of your chances of being picked up by search engines, other websites and bloggers will publish your press release, and the best part is that your press release will contain your website address. Spreading links to your website is important to grabbing the attention of search engines. It will even generate additional traffic to your website as readers click on the link.
Companies that offer online press release distribution can be located by doing internet searches for press release distribution or news release distribution. The cost of using these services ranges from an option to submit a press release for free up to paying hundreds of dollars. Examples of such companies are www.free-press-release.com and www.prleap.com.
Having some type of news to announce is essential before issuing a press release, but any business should have something new and important happening at some point. Otherwise, business is pretty bleak. Examples of news items that a business can announce are release of new products, good sales growth, landmark anniversaries, hiring of new talent, winning of awards, and expansion or redirection of business activities. Or, maybe you just have some good timely information to offer.
Press releases provide good content to add to your website as well, and with a little care, they can even be keyword rich for search terms you are trying to capture. Press releases also make your organization look important and exciting. And your news always has the potential to catch the eye of a journalist and generate additional publicity.
Tracy Falbe is the author of both fiction and non-fiction books and ebooks on a variety of topics. Her latest ebook Creating Publicity with Free Online Press Release Distribution explains how to write press releases, how to integrate them in a marketing plan, and the ebook identifies companies that offer free and low cost distribution. http://www.falbepublishing.com

The Relation Between Internet Marketing Education And Profits

2009-01-13T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Joel Teo

Many people join internet business opportunities online blindly. By this I mean they join everything that promises them fast bucks and then one to two years later are dejected and unhappy at their dismal returns online with regards to their capital outlay in terms of time and money. Thus the most important thing you need to do today is to get a proper education in internet marketing. The co-relation is clear the internet is all about information and by learning how to package information online you will make more profits from your internet business no matter what you are promoting.
Now before you start running of to purchase a course online from any of the internet marketing gurus you need to know what kind of knowledge you need to pick up. Ask an internet marketer and many answers will come out. This article will highlight some of the more important skills that you can start reading up on. Always figure out first what area of marketing you want to do and focus on that area. Learn how to succeed in one area then proceed to another area to diversify your internet income.
Copywriting
The art of direct response marketing online as taught by the Gurus like Dan Kennedy are actually adopted from Direct Response Marketing offline. Before you go and purchase a product from some of the best internet marketing gurus online. A simple solution to this would be to head down to your library and read up all you can on this subject offline. Once you gain a good appreciation of the underlying concepts behind the "headline, the body, the Call to action" then you would be able to appreciate online salesletters much better.
That said, if you have no product that you are promoting at the moment, then copywriting will have no relevance for you. Promoting Affiliate products with sales letters may not be that good as Ken Evoy says if your visitor reads two salesletters in a row, your sales clickthroughs will plummet.
Search Engine Optimization ("SEO")
Once you have a website that has good ad copy, you want to learn how to drive good quality and targeted website traffic to your website. A good website that any aspiring internet marketer can spend time learning and reading from is http://www.seochat.com. A good grasp of SEO can boost your online profits many fold.
Spend time learning the difference between single links and reciprocal links. It may be actually worthwhile sometimes to pay for someone from India to do SEO work for you so that you can spend your time doing other things. Someone recently gave me a quote for US$400 per month to do link exchanges for several websites at a time. This SEO actually could do 500 links in day as he heads a team of workers who live and breathe SEO work in India. Outsourcing can reduce your bills and give you better value if you find the right SEO to work for you.
Niche Adsense Portal Building
Some people conclude that they do not want to molly cuddle downlines and do not want to write sales letters. They then start purchasing software which allows you to build keyword specific websites. Satya's program like Niche Portal Builder and Arnand Morin's directory Generator are such programs. Google and the other search engines started delisting these websites after a while because of repetitive content. So the solution is to mix rss feeds with these websites. All this is very high level marketing and the best way to figure all of these things out is to go to the various internet marketing forums to read all you can and ask questions.
Internet Business Opportunity
The reason why I put this here in the list of things you would want to learn about is that internet business opportunities like internet mlms are good in that they provide you with the sales letters and followup systems. Your focus in these programs to make money therefore is to work on generating good amounts of website traffic to the company given websites. Such income is residual so that is why internet marketers like Stone Evans promotes his website so that he gets more and more money each month from his online business. Total automation is what you are looking for and website promotion is what you have to learn.
In conclusion, internet marketing is a very wide area, by spending one weekend per topic mention above, you will be able to get a good overview of what area of internet marketing you want to venture into and start making money from that particular area. No one is a generalist, always be a specialist in one area and you will see your internet marketing income skyrocket.
Joel Teo is the successful owner of several successful internet business ventures.Click here to learn how you can start your own successful internet business today. http://www.massive-profits-online.com
Copyright © 2005-2006 Joel Teo the Coolest Guy On The Planet

Web Site Incentives And Visitor Optin Your Vital Followup Opportunity

2009-01-12T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Tim Genster

Carve this in stone.
Stamp it on your forehead.
Repeat after me...
"My primary marketing goal for my web site is to provide visitors with a strong reason to opt-into my email list."
Yes, you'll have additional goals and objectives, but this one is first. Always.
Why? It's simple. No matter how well your site is designed. No matter how well it is written. No matter how long or short is it. No matter how good your products or services are... visitors RARELY buy on their first visit.
They also don't remember your website for very long.
Sorry, but that's the nature of an environment where it is so simple to 'move on' to something else in a matter of seconds.
Think about it. How many times have you found yourself on a web site, and you had no idea how you got there. Now, add to that, what do you remember about the 6 or 8 or 10 web sites you visited in the previous 30 minutes? Not much probably.
Geez... that sounds rather hopeless doesn't it?
It can be, IF you don't have:
* A clear priority objective (getting them to opt-in)
* A compelling headline/copy to STOP prospects from clicking away
* A strong offer in order to earn their email address for follow-up
Even if they only stay for 30 seconds (and that's good), IF you get an email address, you have been successful. Now you can follow-up with them, invite them back to the site with an offer, and simply have a way to stay in touch.
9 times out of 10 this is how visitors become customers - by building a relationship sharing valuable information via email.
Now before there's any confusion, this isn't unsolicited email or SPAM, as it's commonly referred to. Remember, they gave you permission by opting-in. There is a MAJOR difference. In fact, it is THE difference.
On top of that, you will always provide in your follow-up email an option to 'opt-out' if they want. In this way, you not only play by the rules, you let your email list recipients know that you respect their privacy.
Tim Genster is a 20-year marketing communications professional, Certified 'Guerrilla Marketing' Coach and Certified Master Web Copywriter, based in Connecticut. Get his FREE, Proprietary, 34-Point Evaluation of your current website's 'selling power' at: http://www.local2global.biz

Accelerate Online Sales

2009-01-11T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Rosemary Brisco

Many companies believe that the process of optimizing your website by adding keywords to the content, title, and meta tags is the silver bullet to generating sales leads.

That isn't an optimized site.

Driving prospects to a website is only the first step in a successful search-engine-optimization program. Unfortunately, 90 percent of businesses only focus on this first step, while a successful online campaign actually has three critical components:

Drive prospects to your website.

Keep them there by creating a compelling benefit-based message.

Generate sales leads, ensuring the site turns visitors into customers.

Search engines provide an opportunity to increase sales leads by 25%-50% in the first months provided your website follows site optimization and web usability best practices as outlined below
Assess your audience and identify what actions lead to sales.

Success lies in understanding your customers. Who are you trying to attract? What content would attract each of these key audiences? How can you encourage website visitors to interact with your company?
Talk to sales. Identify the best type of lead for the sales team. Take into account how the salespeople describe your products and services to prospects, and the objections they receive.
Evaluate customer buying cycles and potential "call-to-action" items that could be incorporated onto the site to engage prospects. Do you have relevant content for prospects that are in the early research stages? Do you also have relevant content for those ready to engage with your sales team?

Assess your site.
Evaluate the content on your website based on the needs of your audience. Do you have content for all audiences? What types of content will keep prospects on your website?

Research the competition. Review the websites of your top competitors and assess how well they rank in the search engines for your top search phrases. Identify competitors that you may not even know about by using the "similar sites" feature in Google. Search engines know what sites are similar based on the site's content and the links pointing to a site.

Assess your website traffic activity. Where is the traffic coming from? How many visitors leave after viewing the home page? How long do visitors stay on your site? What are the top search phrases used to find you? What is the most visited content?

Identify the right keyword phrases.

Identify the most valuable keywords for your company based on relevance and popularity. Being found for unpopular search phrases is of little value.
Think like your prospects. Understand how they would conduct searches for your products and services. There are several ways to identify the right keyword phrases:
Brainstorm with existing customers.
Analyze website statistical data.
Review site search results.
Research keywords with special tools and search engines.
Explore competitors' websites.
Test with a Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign.

Research the popularity of your search terms and the competition for those same words. Good tools for this are Wordtracker and Overture.
Optimize your site.
Create keyword-rich title and meta description tags.
Optimize each web page for two to three keywords, using your keyword phrases in a natural way.
Dispense with marketing fluff and jargon.
Include keywords in internal anchor text links.
Include an extensive site map and link to it from the homepage.
Track performance and re-evaluate.
Your company will spend considerable resources creating its online lead-generation program.
Tracking is the key to defining the effectiveness of this program.
There are multiple ways to evaluate effectiveness including the:
Number of unique or new visitors
Increase in the rankings of your site for top keyword phrases
Opt-in email sign-ups
Information requests by phone or email enquiries
Visitors taking online product tours or signing up for webinars.
Getting a prospect to click on your listing in a search engine is only the first step in an effective online lead generation program. What happens after they arrive on your website is just as important as how they get there.
Rosemary Brisco of ToTheWeb, LLC creates customer-oriented websites designed to attract qualified sales prospects from the search engines. Their clients include venture capital firms such as Mohr Davidow Ventures, Selby Ventures and Mayfield Fund, as well as organizations such as Stanford University, Adobe, Kodak and numerous Silicon Valley start-ups.
Written by Rosemary Brisco © 2005

Why Would I Want To Market On The Internet

2009-01-10T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Bryon Zirker

When starting a business or looking into an area to market to it is essential to investigate that market. You are saying ya ya I have heard this over and over. So why the internet?
From the reading that I have done to date (2005) regarding the internet and the number of businesses and users who use it, I must say it is nothing short of incredible.
The internet boasts some 55 million web sites on line. That number is supposed to hit the 600 million mark by the year 2010 and beyond. Incredible. And the actual user/buyer base will be well beyond 600 million. Do you understand what this means. That kind of market is astounding. The potential of accessing it and marketing to it is very great.
With some decent regulation and policing which is needed to protect businesses and indivduals from fraud, the sky is the limit you might say. So why would you want to market on the internet. Aside from what I stated above which are very good reasons, here are some very powerful reasons that are to be considered as well.
A biggy here is the cost to get started. You can put together a very small budget to start with and if you stick to it and stay consistant you will see results. One of the best ways to get started and get your feet wet is to become an affiliate and market an affiliate business or product. This way you can learn alot of the things you need to know and do in order to be successful online. Once you have mastered some strategies and you have gotten to know your way around you can apply what you have learned to other project businesses of your own creation.
Another very good reason is the amount of people that can be targeted with your advertising. You would be hard pressed to get hundreds thousands or even millions into your hardware store in a month or your candy store or pet store. But an online store could have millions visit it in one month.
And then there is the selling factor or face to face networking with potential customers. Alot of people will not take the step into owning thier own business because they can not or do not do well marketing or selling to other people. So the internet is a great place to build a presence that does not rely totally on ones selling abilities alone. In fact some people might build a presence that reflects a personality that they could otherwise never pulloff face to face with a customer.
One of the best reasons which goes along with the small budget aspect is that you can test your ideas quickly and inexpensively on the internet. This is key because you do not sink alot of your money in until you see that it will work.
So the point is that the internet is a very large (and getting larger every day) arena for business. It is dynamic and fun. It takes work like any thing else worth doing and the potential for success is huge and not just monetarily either. It is a great place to share information and ideas too.
To Learn More Home Business Tactics Visit:
http://home-business-tactics.blogspot.com
About The Author:
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Copyright © Bryon Zirker Bryon Zirker is an Entreprenuer who is interested in
starting internet businesses. Bryon has owned offline
and online businesses for over ten years.
http://home-business-tactics.blogspot.com
http://www.easyworkathomebiznow.com
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Sending A Joint Venture Proposal

2009-01-09T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by John Kovacs

When forming a joint venture with another business, your most important step is the approach you use when contacting your potential business partner.
Participating in a joint venture with another prominent business can be extremely beneficial to ones business. The biggest reason why most webmasters do not get a reply back when sending a proposal, is the approach they use.
I cannot begin to tell you how many proposals I personally have received that get deleted almost instantly. There are some that address the proposal with "Dear Webmaster" or as simple as just "Hi". Some do not tell me anything about themselves or their business (I guess I'm suppose to guess at this one). While others may be run-on, have misspellings, or just plainly unprofessional.
A joint venture is not as simple as lets say a link exchange. It requires a little more research and commitment by both parties.
Although you can send a joint venture through standard mail, consider sending your proposal by email in your first approach. If they have provided their phone number in their contact information, let them know that after a few days, you would like to follow up with a personal phone call to go over the details. Stipulate a time frame that you would like to call and asking them to reply back if the time frame is inappropriate.
Here are some guidelines when sending a proposal by email:
Be precise and clear with your proposal.
Make sure to personalize your email by using their name.
Write an email that shows professionalism and trust.
Complement the positive points you found on their website.
Include information about yourself, your website, your customer base and the services and products you offer.
Point out how you feel your customer base would have an interest in his/her products or services, as well as their customers having an interest in yours.
Highlight how both of you can benefit financially from this joint venture as well as gain added exposure.
Be sure that all spelling and grammar is correct.
When contacting a potential business owner on a joint venture, the key is to highlight the financial benefit to both parties.
If you are approaching a joint venture whereas the other party is just an endorser of your products, (such as an ezine publisher) a larger percentage of each sale should go to the publisher. In this case you have to keep in mind that they are doing all the work while endorsing your product to his/her established customer base.
Once you have found a party that is willing to form a joint venture with you, you may want to consider putting an agreement in writing and getting it signed by your new business partner. Just make sure you outline each of the terms in the agreement, such as precisely what you both agree to, terms, commission, time frame of the venture, how each of you are to get paid, etc.
John Kovacs is the CEO and founder of "A Home Business Opportunity". His website mainly focuses on supplying free marketing tips, resources and support for home startup businesses and Internet marketing. To get a step-by-step guide in building an online business, visit http://www.ahomebusinessopportunity.net

4 Reasons Why You Need Testimonials To Sell More

2009-01-08T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Neil Sagebiel

The other day I was writing a sales brochure for a West Coast manufacturer. As I got to what I'll call the "proof" section of the brochure, I was rummaging around for testimonials. The company already had a full-blown Web site and a solid PowerPoint presentation. So I was hopeful that I'd find some ready made testimonials or at least some material I could use to create some.
As it turned out, they had one case study with a couple of customer quotes. I pieced together the material to create one measly testimonial. It was less than adequate.
Well, maybe it's no big deal. After all, I wrote strong copy. Why even bother with testimonials? I'll give you four good reasons.
1. Credibility
Testimonials give your company, product, or service credibility. Everyone is bombarded with advertising messages every day. It's a brutal marketplace. If you want to sell something to somebody, you stand a much better chance if you can convince them that you're credible. Testimonials are like references on a resume. They're the people who vouch for you.
2. Identification
Your prospects identify with your customers who are providing the testimonials. They have similar concerns, problems, hopes and desires. They commiserate. This is good. You want this in your marketing. (Sorry, but your prospects don't identify with you. Not really. You're trying to sell them something!)
3. Proof
Proof, alone, is reason enough to gather and use testimonials. This is where your customers say, in effect, "They're right, Mr. or Ms. Prospect. They can save you 50% ... or make you feel 18 again ... or make you enough money to retire at 50. They did it for me and I'm thrilled!" Testimonials notarize your marketing speak.
4. Closure
Testimonials help close the sale. Sure, they can be used throughout a marketing piece. But they definitely come in handy toward the end. You've introduced the problem or need, your product or service, the features and benefits, and more. Then you line up your testimonials, all the customers whose heads are nodding and saying, "Yep, it worked for me." Soon after, you ask for the order.
For many reasons, testimonials give your prospects the confidence they need to buy from you for the first time. And once your prospects turn into new customers, the door to repeat sales swings wide open.
(c) 2005 Neil Sagebiel
Neil Sagebiel is a veteran copywriter who has served clients such as Microsoft, The Seattle Times, Lucent Technologies, March of Dimes, Airborne Express and Unisys. To sign up for his FREE expert tips to help you write better and sell more, visit http://www.neilsagebiel.com

10 Rarely Used Bonuses That Can Triple Sales

2009-01-07T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Rojo Sunsen

1. Announcement Alerts - Give customers e-mail alerts about critical information or product releases before your non customers find out about it.
2. Discounts - Allow your customers to get lower prices on your products and other related products other businesses sell.
3. Expert Call Ins - Set up a date and time when your customers can call up and talk directly with experts that are related to your industry.
4. Private Invitations - Give your customers private invitations to customer events that non customers cannot attend.
5. Online Rolodex - Compile a list of web sites or online contacts that are related to the product. You could publish it on CD-ROM or on the web.
6. Archived Information - Bundle together some older information that's no longer available. It could be e-zine back issues, articles, transcripts, etc.
7. Mentor Program - Give your customers unlimited consulting with their purchase. Allow them to contact you by e-mail, phone, fax, in person, etc.
8. Audio/Video E-zine - Give customers an upgraded version of your e-zine in online audio or video format. Non-paying customers could only get it in e-mail.
9. Freebie Announce Board - Offer your customers a message board were they can announce freebies they offer from their web site.
10. Barter Discussion List - Offer your customers the option of joining a barter email discussion list. They can barter goods and services with others.
About the author:
Rojo Sunsen is a specialized bounty hunter who prefers to work quietly/confidentially for the benefit of her clients.

Show And Tell Your Visitors

2009-01-05T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Kevin Gee

Often site owners ask the question and wonder how they can increase the conversion of their website visitors to sales and/or leads. The answer is pretty simple in most cases.
Call to action elements on your site in the right places can help tremendously.
Website visitors are similar to traditional consumers, they want a quick fix and they want to find things easily.
If you've ever been to the grocery store and noticed that the "hot" items or impulse items are strategically placed at the end of the aisles and near the checkout counter you are probably getting the idea of where this is going.
Those items are placed prominently and in specific locations of the store for a reason. They are seen! And more times than not, they are sold. This is the exact same principle that should apply to your website.
Placing a "Buy Now" button or similar at the top and bottom of your pages is good. Placing "Click Here" links within the text of the pages is also helpful. You see, it is these call to action elements that entice visitors into becoming sales and/or leads. Just like the placement of the impulse items in a grocery store. Show and tell your visitors where and what you want them to do.
For optimal opportunity at turning your website visitors into sales and/or leads, I recommend placing these call to action items on your site. Make it easy for your visitors to find the "Buy Now" button. Place these items high and low on the page and within the text of the page as well. Doing so will allow you to capture your website visitors eyes no matter where they are looking on the page. You might just convert a few more visitors too!
About The Author: Kevin Gee is a certified SEO specialist through Coastal Carolina University and has been performing SEO strategies since 1998. He is currently employed as Internet Marketing Manager at JUMP Internet Marketing.

Internet Marketers And Twoyearolds Just Toddling Around Asking Lots Of Questions

2009-01-04T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Dina Giolitto

I recently noticed that my friend's two-year-old, Conor, is getting to be quite the big boy. For one thing, he has suddenly morphed from a pudgy baby into a mini version of her husband. For another, he's becoming increasingly curious. The last time I saw him he must have asked me at least 20 times, "What's that?"
To be more accurate, he says it like this: "Whussat?"
He toddles around the yard pointing things out, asking over and over: "Whussat? Whussat?"
When wee little Conor looks up at me with his wondering eyes and asks, "Whussat?" do I answer him? Why, of course I do.
"Whussat?"
"That's a big truck."
"Whussat?"
"That's a flower..."
Turns out that my little buddy and I have more in common than I ever would have guessed. I, too, am toddling around... exploring the ever-evolving world of internet business. Each time I come upon an unfamiliar term, that same question pops into my head.
What's THAT?
If you've been doing the internet marketing thing for a while, you might consider that, like me, your audience of readers has just as many questions as a curious two-year-old.
Affiliate Marketing: what's that?
(It's a way to make a commission on someone else's product.)
SEO: what's that?
(It stands for Search Engine Optimization.)
So when you feel like dazzling your audience with some advanced terminology... don't forget the very basic and necessary questions that, if answered, will garner you a generous crop of loyal fans who can't thank you enough for the much-needed information.
Don't forget the Number One Question:
What's That?
Easy enough, right? As you write your web article, throw out a term. Ask the question, and then explain what it is. The reader always appreciates it when you take a few moments to explain. This is what separates you from all of the other marketers out there. YOU have the answers.
Should you dedicate a whole crop of articles to answering the question, What's That?
Why, of course you should!
By captivating an audience of "toddler" marketers, you can secure yourself as the be-all-end-all of experts. And once they hitch their wagons to your internet marketing star, you can carry them along on your neverending quest for more web knowledge. Now THAT's how to build a following!
Suppose you'd like to teach new marketers about website hosting. Define everything within your article. "Domain name." What's that? "Web hosting package." What's that?
Too often we forget that not everyone knows what we know, and the fact that we know it is by far the strongest indicator of our credibility in the first place!
So: next time you see a newbie marketer toddling around, asking "What's that!" over and over... be extra helpful and answer his questions. Then, think about all of his little marketer friends... and be proactive in answering ten more questions before they're even asked. Write your answers in the form of a very basic and totally informative web article.
After you've primed your crop of new marketing students, will you then be able to kick back and relax?
Heck no! Instead, you can be sure that they'll be ready with the next question:
"But why??"
"Offer the customer some free information."
"But why??"
"Don't forget to optimize your website."
"But why??"
Ahh, don't you just love internet marketing, boys and girls? I sure do.
Now go toddle over to your big-boy bed, read a few more pages of your storybook about Multiple Residual Income Streams, and then take a nice little nappy.
:)
Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.
Liked this article? Have more of the same emailed to your inbox each month. Sign up for the Copywriting and Marketing Ezine from Dina at Wordfeeder.com and learn to write search engine friendly web copy and market your web based business for free.

Where Do I Find Niche Products To Resell

2009-01-03T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Joseph Then

When starting out, you generally have three options.
First, you could hire a writer to put together an original ebook for you to resell. A well-researched ebook will cost upwards of $600. If you want to have your name appear as the author of the ebook, you'll have to pay an additional fee for a "ghost writer."
Second, you could search the Internet for ebooks that are already available for resalealso known as "resale rights." Prices vary depending on the ebook quality, length, and exclusivity. Most ebooks available for resale are available for anyone to purchase, which means you could face stiff competition selling the same product many other people are. Even with resale rights, most ebooks retain the name of the original author and even their website addressnot yours.
The best option for someone starting out selling niche products is a niche product program, like EasyNicheProduct.com. Top programs only allow a limited number of members, so competition is low. They offer members a selection of niche products to resell, all of which are original to the programyou won't find the same product on hundreds of other resale sites. By using an established niche product site, you also benefit from automatically "themed" ebooks that relate to one another, practically guaranteeing future sales from current customers. Best of all, top niche product programs allow you to list yourself as author of the ebook, so you don't end up promoting someone else at your expense.
Joseph operates a Niche Product website that offers Niche, THEMED product line that users can upsell. You can check out his website at: http://www.easynicheproduct.com

How To Find Your Target Market Online

2009-01-02T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Donna Gunter

Are you fishing where the fish are? This may seem to be a question with an obvious answer, but I'm constantly amazed at how many business owners are looking for their target market in all the wrong places. Worse yet is the business owner whose target market is "everybody". Do you know how tough it is to market to everybody? The reality is that not everyone needs your product and service, nor is it a good match for every single person on this earth.
The first issue to resolve is determining who comprises your target market. Are they male or female? What age group? What industry? What socio-economic group? Until you narrow your focus and select a smaller niche market, much of your marketing effort will be in vain.
Once you've got a target market in mind, you need to know more about them. Here are the questions that I ask clients about their target market: Where do they hang out on- and off-line? What do they read? To what groups and associations (real and virtual, personal and professional) do they belong? How much money do they make? Can they easily afford your product or service?
There are some great research tools available online for you to research your target market. Here are 7 that I recommend:
1. Professional associations: American Society of Association Executives, http://www.asaenet.org, is a great place to start, as most of the executives of the reputable associations belong to this organization. To do your search, go the Gateway of Associations, currently found here: http://www.asaecenter.org/Directories/AssociationSearch.cfm?navItemNumber=16581 Once you're in the Gateway, you can look up associations by keyword or by location. Once you've found the appropriate association(s), check out the association website and see if you should belong, and determine if the group has a local chapter that might meet in your area. If your initial search in this directory leads you to a local chapter, you should be able to backtrack and find the website of the national office.
A second place to locate associations is Gale's Encyclopedia of Associations. This multi-volume encyclopedia is present in the reference section of all major libraries, and due to the expense, you will probably want to pay a visit to your local library to use this resource. Some libraries subscribe to GaleNet, the online database, http://www.galenet.com and can issue you a username and password so that you can use it as well.
A third option is to do an online search for "industry" (you fill in your target industry here) + "professional association". Using quotation marks will result in the best search.
2. Trade and consumer publications: Once you've found the appropriate association to which your target market belongs, each association will probably have a professional membership publication and/or newsletter. You might be able to subscribe to the publication without joining the association.
Gebbie Press (http://www.gebbieinc.com) publishes a media directory in which you can obtain a newspaper and trade and consumer magazine directory. Bacon's (http://www.bacons.com) also publishes a number of media directories, including Newspaper/Magazine Directory and Radio/TV/Cable Directory, among others. As with the Gale's Directory, you'll probably have to pay a visit to your local library to use this resource, as it's rather expensive to purchase.
3. Online discussion forums/lists: I've had a number of clients tell me that they have gotten subscribers to their newsletter and signed up clients based on their participation in online discussion lists or forums. Scott Stratten maintains a great list of good business-oriented discussion forums at http://www.un-marketing.com/index.php?p=u. Many professional associations run their own discussion lists and forums. And, there's always the Yahoo Groups Directory, http://groups.yahoo.com, Google Groups, http://groups.google.com/, Forum Haven, http://forumhaven.com, and another comprehensive list at QuintCareers.com, http://www.quintcareers.com/Internet_networking_sources.html.
4. Online networking: Some virtual groups exist for the sole purpose of networking. A number of ones that are better known, like Friendster and MySpace, are primarily social in nature. The business-oriented ones often have "networks", as Ryze calls them, that bring people together centered around a common goal or interest. In many cases, you can create your own network. Scott Allen has a comprehensive listing of online networking groups http://thevirtualhandshake.com/directory.html and has co-written a great book on the subject with David Teten, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.
5. Blogs: Not only is creating your own blog a great way to market your business, but commenting on other blogs read by your target market is also a smart move. With so many blogs online, it might be tough to find the ones that are the ones read by your target market or are on a topic of interest to your target market. You can start with Google Blog Search, http://blogsearch.google.com/ , Feedster, http://www.feedster, and a directory of blog submission sites published by Robin Goode at http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/, which will be helpful as well in your blog search.
6. Ezines: Reading (and submitting articles to) ezines read by your target market will give you a great overview of typical issues and problems faced by your target market. Here's a listing of the most popular directories, http://ezines.nettop20.com/.
7. Income: Knowing how much money your target market makes will aid you in determining how to price your product or service. For help, consult Salary.com, http://www.salary.com where you can get pay ranges for specific geographic locations. More detailed reports are available for a fee.
Doing your target market research ahead of time will save you a great deal of grief and headache. Targeting your market and marketing your plan will help you get more clients online.
Copyright 2006 Donna Gunter
Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service professionals learn how to get more clients online at http://www.OnlineBizCoachingCompany.com To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.GetMoreClientsOnline.com Read about running an online biz at our blog, http://onlinebizcoachingcompany.typepad.com/online_business_coaching_/

Creating Content

2009-01-01T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Ted Lewis

(This is the second in an ongoing series of articles excerpted from our Internet Information Marketing Course)
It's official. You've finally decided to jump into Internet Marketing, and you've decided that you'll be marketing information products. This is a great move for all the reasons we've covered before:
· Low Overhead · No products to manufacture or distribute · Great Return On Investment · Bigger Profit Margins
But now you're stuck, and for whatever reason can't get an information product developed. Maybe you just aren't creative (or at least you don't see yourself that way yet). Or maybe you want to write about a certain topic, but you just don't feel qualified or feel like you have enough experience to write about it. Or maybe you do have the experience, but you can't write worth a darn, and you know it - and what's worseother people know it too!
Relax, none of these problems are show-stoppers. They are problems, and they must be dealt with, but there's a solution for each of these scenarios. Is there a quick fix that can get you going faster? The answer issort of. I know what you're thinking, "I hate it when they give me an ambiguous answer like that!" Let's tackle each problem one at a time.
If you are absolutely, truly stuck for content and you know it will be months before you have any good quality sellable stuff, but you are anxious as all get-out to set started, you can sign up for some affiliate programs and at least get going on your marketing ideas. We'll cover affiliate programs in detail later, but basically affiliate marketing is where you sign up to promote other people products and services in return for a commission on each sale. Honestly it's possible to make a great income just by affiliate marketing alone, but it does take effort, and I believe that you're better off in the long run creating your own stuff and keeping more of the profits. Eventually, you might even find yourself creating an affiliate program and letting other people do your marketing for you!
To get started with affiliate marketing just type "affiliate marketing" or "affiliate program" into your favorite Internet search engine. I googled it and got something like 77,000,000 hits. You could easily spend several days looking at all the different affiliate programs out there, but you want to narrow the field by looking at programs that offer you 40% or more commission. There are even people making a great living selling ebooks teaching you how to get started with affiliate marketing. And they probably have affiliate programs to help sell their books on affiliate programs! You see, the possibilities are simply endless when it comes to selling money-making information online.
In our next excerpt we'll cover the importance of having ORIGINAL content in your information marketing business. You won't want to miss that. Learn all about what that little copyright symbol really means!
Till next timeSuccess to YOU!
-Ted
Ted is part of an Internet information marketing group that makes its home at:
http://www.InternetProfitMentor.com
Check it out for some up-to-the-minute info on marketing YOUR information online!

How To Tap Into Massive Sources Of Traffic With Virtually No Competition

2008-12-31T04:00:00.000-08:00
Writen by Jack Humphrey

Things haven't been this perfect for a long time. In fact, not since one of the big engines really started to take off, when those who were lucky enough to be already seated firmly in the Top 10 for their keywords, has there been such a plethora of new traffic opportunities.
The internet marketing world has become multi-dimensional in ways that are surprising to most people who are still hooked on search engine marketing as their sole website promotion strategy.
Here are the new avenues of traffic that most people are NOT taking advantage of outside of the big companies and a handful of savvy marketers:
1. Podcasting
While it was "the word of the year" for 2005, most people still have no idea what Podcasting is really about outside of being able to download music at iTunes.com.
And, frankly, it's because the people who "get it" are, for the first time ever, keeping quiet about it! Or at least keeping the information of how they are profiting wildly with Podcasting behind closed doors and in small groups.
And I am not going to get too far into it here for the same reason as the others: I don't want the competition that will be here by the end of 2006 to come any earlier because I blabbed about how it is done in public!
Sorry, but you will have to pay something to become a millionaire using this information!
But I will give you a clue. Go to iTunes.com and download the free software that allows you to, yes, download music. But ignore that part for a minute.
With the iTunes software you can grab Podcasts from major news organizations and tiny garage websites mostly focusing on short comic bits.
Pay attention to what you are NOT seeing. One thing is there isn't a lot of video Podcasts - period. Not even comedy! And there are no how-to podcasts save a couple from the people I talked about above.
The savvy marketers are already in the game and getting traffic from a source all other marketers seem to be totally discounting right now. To the tune of 6 million or so pairs of eyeballs dying to see and hear more content, especially video content, at iTunes.com alone!
Last year you could see the word "Podcasting" uttered thousands of times by marketers trying to gauge the buzz worthiness of it among their customer lists.
Well, without showing people how marketing with Podcasts is done, and with article marketing doing a great job of bringing people traffic in ways they COULD understand, not too many marketers really got into it.
We were lucky recently to have a guest speaker from none other than the Hawaiian Tropics site come in and talk to our clients about how easy it has been to blow away the likes of Playboy and other major competitors by offering their content through Podcasts.
We got to see the inner workings of a successful marketing campaign on a very very high level. And we gained valuable insight into how marketing with Podcasts can be done on the guerilla marketing level.
You watch. By the end of this year you will wish you started caring about including Podcasting in your marketing a year ago!
2. Audio and Video Syndication
Article syndication is not dead. It actually has yet to see its true "boom" period. I say that because until the content people syndicate gets MUCH better overall, we are basically using sophisticated software and networks to distribute garbage.
But as the article syndication industry slowly comes around to the fact that demanding good content is not going to hurt business, quite the opposite, there are new networks developing that will have us creating, syndicating and streaming much more audio and video around the web to promote our sites.
All-text content is wearing thin on the patience of surfers and possible customers. As the bigger sites lead the way (they almost always do when it comes to new web technology) we are seeing that our own customers, formerly content to read 15 page sales letters, are leaving for something more exciting.
As we all get used to the internet everyone promised us would be here long ago, we see that as we buy stuff and entertain ourselves on the web, we also expect small websites to measure up to the speed, excitement, movement and sound we see on many other sites today.
Less text. Much more multi-media. And as many different ways to access and consume content as we can possibly dream up. That is what's on the menu and the source of traffic is MASSIVE!
Think of all those people who left your all-text site in the last month without buying or clicking on a thing. Where exactly to you think they were headed? That's right. To sites with motion and sound to feed their brains without ruining their eyesight trying to read 10 point font at high resolution for 15 pages!
You have probably bought a product from a choice between a few different dealers just because the site was more engaging than the others. I know I have. And usually I buy from sites that look like they are really in business.
Any monkey can get a merchant account and slap up some text to sell a drop shipped product. I want to buy from people who take the time to take their business (and my credit card information) seriously! That means people who are into displaying information in formats other than all-text.
Audio and video editing and syndication tools have come a long long way in the last year. Anyone can get into the game and dominate in areas where the traffic is theirs for the taking because no one is competing with them for it yet!
So, after you are done writing your next article, while you are syndicating it around the web, make sure you remember that you are not done until you figure out ways to convert that article into an audio for your site or for a Podcast. Or a video script to power a how-to video for the same purpose.
Articles, audio, and video should become synonymous with syndication and traffic generation when thinking about your marketing campaign. Leaving any of them out of your marketing is going to cost you big time in 2006 and beyond!
Copyright 2006 Tale Chaser Publishing, Inc.
Jack Humphrey (http://www.jackhumphrey.com ) is the managing partner at Content Propulsion Lab. To learn more about how to propel your content around the web at the speed of sound, visit Content Propulsion Lab at http://www.contentpropulsionlab.com

Your Personal Fortune Is In Your Words

2008-12-30T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Ron Pioneer

What is the most important skill you can possess as an Internet Marketer?
Your words!
The words you choose to use in your ad copy, in your sales letters and on your website will determine your success in sales!
Improve your "word" skills daily. Read the ads that come to your mailbox (spam) and learn what words others are using to SELL their product. More important read your competitors ads. What words do they use to SELL their product?
Carl Jung did a study and has determined people fall into one of 4 groups:
1. Thinkers
2. Feelers
3. Sensors
4. Intuitors
Thinkers are detailed oriented, logical and their fear is criticism. They will check and recheck facts. Targeting this group you will need to use factual numbers, precise words outlining benefits of saving money and value for money spent. Be professional and conservative giving the thinker facts and space to make their decision.
Feelers are risk takers and highly competitive. Entrepreneurs and investors fall into this category. They are assertive and confident and do not have time to waste time. To target this group you will need to use "strength" words, saving time, money and appeal to health related issues. Be quick and confident with your words to attract a "feeler".
Sensors are idea people, advertising, writers...anything creative. People of this group are prone to buy "status". Use words that will make them feel important, well liked, and recognized. The sensors are into things that will help them become more organized, they like software and books. Approach this group with friendship, show you are not "all business".
The Intuitors are excellent listeners and patient. They are slow in making decisions. They are "comfort" people and if they are comfortable with you, will purchase from you. They are turned off by fast talking salespeople so you will need to make friends with them first, selling yourself and finding a common ground between you and them. Use comfort words.
Look at your product. Think about the above groups and write down words you feel would attract each group. Go to http://www.dictionary.com and http://www.thesaurus.com, expand on the words you have written down. Avoid hype but find some words that will spice up your adcopy.
Do not try to sell your product in your ad. You are only writing to your target group to get them to take the next step. Use your email address or set up an autoresponder so you can capture the email address of your prospect, and to send them a more details of your offer. Use words that will appeal to each target group.
Create a picture in the readers mind. It's like telling a story, you have a beginning, a middle and an end. Your ad is a 'teaser' to get them to WANT to read your story. (know more about your product)
Finally, please follow "truth in advertising". Educate yourself on the FTC guidelines. http://www.ftc.gov Your product must be legal and you must be ethical and honest promoting your product. No amount of words can fix that!
The words you choose WILL sell your product...choose them well!
About The Author
Ron Pioneer
Learn more secrets in my website..
http://www.affila.com/
contact@affila.com

Why Your Internet Marketing Business Will Explode When You Use Audio As A Selling Tool

2008-12-29T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Michael Senoff

As someone who uses audio to sell with more than any other Internet media I always get people asking me why I don't use video. That video is the "wave of the future" for Internet marketing and why don't I use it?
It's a good question. And truth is I do use video for certain products. But if you are using audio to sell, and do it in a way where it is not so much a "sales pitch", but is more of a free report that gives good, solid information people can really use, then there is no need to mess around with other media.
Because with audio, you can reach those people who are in their cars a lot, who move around a lot. People who have time to maybe burn audio to a CD but don't have time to sit there and watch a video on their computer screen.
With audio, people are hearing your message, and being sold on your product (again, if you do it right, and make it a "disguised" sales pitch) when they are jogging, taking a shower, picking their kids up at school or riding their bike.
And, because audio is so convenient and easy, there is a much better chance of the person listening to your pitch multiple times. Unlike a video or book which time permits maybe one or two exposures -- max.
So the message is clear: audio is a great selling tool. And if you do it in a way where it is more information than "sales pitch" -- where people can learn and be educated on what you sell and feel like they are getting real value from it -- it can multiply the chances of you making the sale.
From what I can tell, you just don't get that from video or a book.
Michael Senoff is a sought-after Internet marketer, interviewer and business coach with more than 50,000 students on four continents. For a limited time he is giving away free over 120 hours of in-depth audio interviews with some of the richest and most successful marketers, copywriters and business experts in the world at his famous website http://hardtofindseminars.com

Effective Time Management Earns You More Money

2008-12-28T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Simon Weaver

In this article, "product" means any tangible product, digital products (ebooks and software) and services such as membership sites, web design and development, hosting, "print on demand" for ebooks, fulfillment for orders and so on.
By necessity you will spend time in each of these stages. Each stage will involve a learning phase and an action phase. It's important to identify clearly what stage of development you are currently working on and to focus on completing that stage.
1. Getting your product (acquisition).
Choose between your own product and an affiliate product.
This will involve identifying a demand using for example surveys or the popularity of search terms.
Key Point: Once you have your product you can stop spending time looking at other product possibilities for the time being.
2. Developing your product presentation.
Once you have chosen your product you will need to develop a presentation.
This will include your website primarily and can also include autoresponder sequences and a newsletter.
Key Points: Once your website and presentation process is completed you can move on to the promotion. You can always improve the presentation but once your presentation is "presentable" you should move on to promotion. Don't get caught up trying to make things perfect. Good, yes; perfect, no. The reality is things can always be changes. It does not matter if you have the best product in your niche and the best presentation if nobody knows about it. Give your presentation your best shot and then start promoting.
3. Promoting the product.
No matter now good your product and presentation are, you must get your presentation in front of your intended audience or nothing happens.
"We have to become better at promoting what we do than doing what we do."
This is where it is also important to be clear about what stage you are in. Remember, time is limited, so if you have already chosen your product and developed your presentation it is not productive to keep looking for products or spending a great deal of time "tweaking" your presentation.
Time can always be spent tweaking sales copy, images, layout, web presentation, upgrading or trying new software, investigating new product opportunities (before the current one is complete), improving design skills, keeping up with the changing web "standards"... The list can seem endless.
Key Point: Time is better spent developing a clear promotional strategy and putting it into action. Only when you are seeing results from your promotional activities should you consider altering your presentation (such as modifying headlines and sales copy) to assess how that affects conversion of prospects to customers.
Here are some examples:
- Write two newsletters each month
- Run a solo ad each week
- Purchase 500 double-optin subscribers each month
- Conduct a Pay Per Click campaign with $x budget each week/mont
- Make three new blog entries each week
- Create ten new web pages each week
Here are a few tips to keep you on track:
1. Name your project
You may name your project as a final name of the product or you may just give it a code name that means something to you.
2. Understand what part of the three step process you are in: Acquisition, presentation or promotion.
Here is a simple question to ask yourself to check if you are on track with your time budget, "What is this activity designed to do?" or perhaps, "What is the outcome of this activity?"
This will help you to identify if you are spending time in the wrong area at the wrong time.
3. Set up check lists to make sure everything is covered. Focus on completion.
4. Promotion: Clearly define your action steps.
5. Track the results or your promotional campaign in terms of traffic, click through rates, subscribers and purchasers. Include costs of conducting your campaign and compare that to your sales to determine your return on investment. It is only by tracking the results of the promotion that you will know how to effectively change the presentation for further testing.
A spreadsheet is an invaluable tool as a template for specifying your promotional campaign and also for tracking results, costs and return on investment. Adding in columns for each day of the week allows you to allocate your time so that all your promotions are covered in a time effective manner. This becomes your business gauge by which you assess the effectiveness of your promotional campaign.
Understanding the three stages of the business process and the stage you are in, using checklists and tracking your results using business gauges are the proven ways to maximize your time, your effectiveness and your profits.
Simon Weaver can help YOU start your own profitable business on the Internet within the next 24 hours! To learn more, visit: http://www.YourOwnFreeBusiness.com/pips.html

Create Your Very Own Wellspring Of Profitable Ideas For Internet Marketing

2008-12-27T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Carrie McLain

Are you like me and you're beginning to see that creating income online through internet marketing is a golden opportunity? Something that we're at the forefront of, as it will just continue to grow as more and more people come online. And are you seeing that information is endless, and that people already consume huge amounts of information in the form of newspapers, magazines, books, professional journals, business journals, and on. People will never stop wanting information and if you can create information products (which is actually fairly easy to do once you learn how) to satisfy their information hunger in new ways they will gladly pay you for it.
One of the most fruitful areas of internet marketing is found in niche marketing. This is where it really gets fun! There are endless niches and as you beging doing some research you'll see what I mean.
There are many aspects to creating a successful online business, of which good ideas are just one; but please don't underestimate the power of having lots of good ideas that you can get excited about.
There are several great ways to generate a rich flow of ideas for niche marketing. One of the most important things to do is to keep a journal (it can be as simple as a notebook) handy to jot down your ideas as they occur to you. You can also use your computer. Just be sure to have one or the other handy so you don't miss any of your ideas. Your ideas may seem at first to just trickle in, but as you make some of the following idea generators habit, you'll be opening the flow.
You can generate ideas from time spent both online and off, and you'll want to do both to be most effective.
To stimulate ideas away from your computer, heighten your everyday awareness as you go about your life. Pay attention to advertisements you encounter. Who are they selling to? What are they selling? What angles are they using to sell it?
Another excellent thing to do is spend some time studying the magazine racks at a big bookstore like Borders or Barnes & Noble. Or at the grocery store or library. Generally, the larger the selection the more ideas you can come away with. Look for 3 or 4 magazines on the same subject. If you've found 3 or 4 on the same subject you're now aware of a trend. Read the magazines, look at the ads. You can see who the audience is and what they're interested in. You can see what is being advertised to them. Keep looking for trends of information wherever you are looking.
As for online research, there are many resources available. There are information product banks where they have articles, reports, and e-books available for resale. Browsing for an hour or so will give you lots of great ideas about what is selling well. Once again, look for trends. Clickbank.com is a great place to start. You can also check out cbmall.com which in effect makes Clickbank searchable. Look at categories you have an interest in. Look at best-selling categories. Look for ways you could combine information into a new product of your own. Look for missing information that you could provide.
Also spend some time on Amazon.com, browsing their best-seller lists, seeing what's selling most in subjects of interest to you.
Another excellent resource available to you are online discussion groups. Many such groups exist and you can usually join them for free. Lots of times in these groups there are people with problems they're trying to solve. Listen in and see if you can come up with something to help them solve their problem.
You can also find some great ideas by going to web directories. These are like phone books or catalogs of the web. My favorite so far is dmoz.com which is catalogued by humans and kept up to date. No dead links or stale web pages! Browse here and spend some time at it.
Once you get some ideas from the outside in, you'll begin to get more ideas from the inside out. Keep that notebook handy!
These are some of the ideas I've been utilizing lately. I hope you find them as helpful as I have. Let's tap the abundance of the unique internet marketplace!
Wishing you abundance in all matters,
Carrie McLain
For many more ideas and to learn the complete nuts and bolts of successful online marketing get your free course at http://www.internetprofitmentor.com

Why Internet Marketing Sucks

2008-12-26T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Ben Settle

Do you think you know who your biggest, baddest and most sinister competitor is online? Believe it or not, it's not other marketers. It's not spam filters either. Nor is it the bad customers, sleazy business partners or time-suckers who try their hardest to control your life.
No, your biggest competitor is much worse -- much more dangerous and powerful -- than all those combined. In fact, all the above put together is like a kiss from your grandma compared to the sheer power and ruthlessness of the real competitor we all face when we do business online today.
Who is this vicious Internet "nemesis"?
The answer is simple: It's the endless amount of government red tape and bureaucratic meddling - all the way from your local city ordinances to international law. It's true. The more government sticks its fingers in the piethe more out of control the laws will get, the harder it will be for the smaller businesses to make money, and the more dangerous it will be to even try.
If you don't think it can happen to the Internet, think again. It's already happening. It's happened to every cheap media ever invented. From infomercialsto 900 numbersto broadcast FAXand now - after the draconian "do not call" list here in the U.S. - even the telephone. It's only a matter of time before some major roadblocks are thrown up for Internet marketers. Roadblocks that are going to put a serious damper on your ability to milk money from the Web.
Which is why I really believe people should work hard at mastering direct response marketing and copywriting first, and the Internet-specific stuff second. Just ask yourself, "what exactly would I dohow would my business surviveif the Internet was taken away from me tomorrow?" If you can't answer that question, then you need to study less Internet-specific tactics and more direct response marketing and copywriting tactics. Because if you have your head on straight about how direct response marketing works, then it won't matter what media you use.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't use the Internet to make a ton of money. And I'm not saying people shouldn't keep up on the Internet tactics at the same time. That'd be foolish. Just don't rely on it exclusively. Recognize the Web for what it is: just one of many tools to sell and build a list of customers with.
In that respect, it's no different than running a small classified ad or dropping a letter in the mail. Sure, it's extremely fast and cheap. Sure you can literally make money online in less than five minutes if you know what you're doing. And sure you can instantly access tens of millions of peoplefor mere pocket changeyou might never have been able to access before.
But to rely on the Internet exclusively could be very dangerous to you, your business and your income. Just ask all the people who were making millions of dollars per year using nothing but broadcast FAX or telemarketing. One day they were raking the money in hand over fist. The next they were out of business, living with their parents and parking cars for a living.
Ben Settle is an expert copywriter and direct marketer. If you liked this article then check out Ben's website at http://bensettle.com -- where you'll find over 500 pages of advertising ideas, strategies and tactics just like this one -- as well as rare swipe file ads and hot marketing information not easily found anywhere else.

The Correct Approach To Online Marketing

2008-12-25T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by David Bell

At the risk of sounding sensational, if you understand the concepts introduced in this article it could literally mean the difference between miserable failure and insane online profits for your business. I'm not talking about a magical formula that will guarantee success, but it's something that all online marketers need to understand...
If you spend $50 on advertising and it generates more than $50 in net profits, that's a good investment.
Simple right? Well, through the use of proper testing and a "scientific" approach to advertising, there's no reason you can't turn your original $50 ad into millions of dollars in profits. It's just a matter of developing a system that creates a profit, and then reinvesting your initial profits back into your business in order to further expand your advertising.
Assume that through proper tracking of your website traffic you're able to determine that 1 out of every 100 visitors to your site buys "Product X". Let's also assume that on the sale of every Product X you make a $50 profit. Do you see that any ad you buy which delivers more than 100 visitors to your site per $50 spent is a profitable investment? Promoting a site should be approached with this type of a scientific or mathematical attitude. Any advertising you do is either profitable or not, and you need to know which it is so you don't waste time and money.
Here's a somewhat simplistic strategy that you could use to get started:
1. Use a combination of free or low-cost strategies to promote your web site, generating initial traffic which will serve as a starting point.
2. Through proper tracking of your site, determine the exact "value" of a visitor in terms of dollars and sense. This is absolutely critical.
3. Utilize paid advertising that proves to be profitable according to step 2, based on the value of a visitor and the number of visitors generated.
4. Through ongoing testing, tracking, and tweaking, try to increase the value of a web site visitor as well as response to your advertising.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 as necessary - or forever. The power of this scientific or mathematical approach to web site promotion is that once you have completed the steps you will have an almost automated advertising campaign that can literally send you all the traffic you need. Rather than spending hours and hours each day promoting your site, you simply buy more advertising.
The bottom line is that there are only 24 hours in a day and there's only so much you can do during that time. Free advertising strategies can be effective, but normally, anything that's "free" is going to "cost" you time.
On the other hand, if you could spend $1,000 a day on advertising to make $1,000 a day in profits, without spending hours doing it, why wouldn't you just do that? It's not hard at all. Consider Overture.com for example, where you can buy clickthroughs for as little as 1-25 cents.
That fits the formula quite nicely. Overture alone won't send you enough traffic to make you rich, but it's a good example of effectively promoting your site without spending much time doing it. And that's just one example of many! Give this 5-step scientific approach a try. If you find you just can't seem to make the formula work, there can only be a few reasons for it; either you're not advertising in the right places, your web site isn't doing its job, your profit margins are too low, or your product or service itself is the problem. Figure out which it is and you can't fail.
I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.
David Bell
Advertising research and development center
# 1 Internet Marketing Agency -Online Advertising Agency

Helpful Hints For The Internet Marketing Beginner

2008-12-24T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Scott Oliver

If you are not familiar with the world of internet marketing, it can seem very overwhelming. Promoting a business and web site is not easy for anyone, especially a beginner. However, learning a few common hints and tricks of the internet marketing world can ease the fear that every novice faces. In time, this newbie just may become an internet marketing guru. A basic internet marketing plan usually requires the business owner to discover the likes and dislikes of his target audience. What better way to find out how your customer feels about your website, than by using a survey! Surveys are the ideal internet marketing tool used to discover your customer's attitude towards your business and web site. Suggestions can be extremely helpful in determining what visitors think your lacks, what it needs, and what can be improved. Are you worried that visitors will not take the time to fill out a survey? Here is another excellent internet marketing tool; persuade your guests to fill out the questionnaire in exchange for free goodies. The word free can entice surfers to do anything!
Building a mailing list is a great internet marketing technique. Have a space of your web site where visitors have the option of signing up for your mailing list and newsletter. Creating and mailing out newsletters is another marketing method that is sure to generate many customers. By developing this newsletter, you are establishing and maintaining a relationship with your customers. This newsletter does not need to be elaborate and long. Short and simple works best with most internet marketing techniques.
Adding a guestbook to your web site is an excellent internet marketing method used to assure your customers that you care about their comments and opinions. It also gives visitors a chance to view praises about your site from other surfers. While you may occasionally receive a rude comment, you cannot let a few individuals ruin your hard work. Many guestbooks give owners the option to preview comments before they are posted. If you receive a comment that could do damage to your reputation and business, this feature should definitely be used.
Scott has his own website to help you find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home at http://www.Pennies4You.com

Ring In The New Year With Successful Marketing For Your Online Business

2008-12-23T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Mark Kenny

Are you an eBay seller who wants to gain recognition for your business? Perhaps you are a casino affiliate looking to gain the attention of new customers? Or, maybe you are just starting out with a dropshipping company and are hoping to get your new business off the ground? Well, there's no better time to start anew like a brand new year. Anything is possible, but you have to make it happen.
Promoting a new business can be a daunting, and expensive, task. But, it's not impossible with a successful marketing approach. If you are an eBay seller who also has a website, offer a contest or promotion by giving away a product from your inventory. Allow new visitors to enter your contest and draw one winner at a specified time. Announce this competition anywhere and everywhere possible, including newspapers, your website's mailing list, co-workers, friends, etc. You can promote your website with internet search engines and free-for-all link pages, along with link exchanges among other websites. The contest concept will work with either stocked inventory or dropshipping. Just have the winner's product sent directly to them.
If you operate as a casino affiliate, promote your new website among search engines, newsletters and through the original casino owner. Affiliate websites, as part of the price package, often receive promotion for their new business. Basically, it's free advertising so enjoy it. An affiliate website is often listed in a directory on the main homepage of the company, which is a terrific way to draw attention to a new start-up business.
If your business, product or approach are unique, write up a one-page press release and send it to every magazine, newspaper and television network that you can find. The worst that will happen is the information will not be used, but imagine the benefits if it is used. Having a press release published in any publication is basically free advertising. Anyone who picks up the newspaper, or magazine, is going to read through it looking for a story that grabs their attention. Therefore, make your press release interesting and give it a title that will draw the reader in. Everyone likes to hear success stories of budding entrepreneurs and, with the popularity of the world wide web, that's just another reason to promote your enthusiasm. If you have a sample product, send it with your press release. Of course, if you don't want to spend the money to mail the press release, there's always e-mail. This is a terrific way to provide news to a variety of media outlets at no cost and immediate delivery. If your story is unique, it will grab the editor's attention.
In conclusion, consider these top 10 ways to ensure a successful marketing campaign:
1. Contests & Giveaways
2. Discounts to first-time or repeat customers
3. Referral rewards
4. Link exchanges
5. Press release submission
6. Free product samples
7. Conduct interviews with the press about your new online business
8. Distribute a electronic newsletter to website viewers who sign up to receive your latest news
9. Write a daily article and post on your website relating to your company, product or news
10. Place a permanent signature in your e-mail, which identifies the URL of your website, to be sent with each outgoing letter.
Mark Kenny is an eBay expert who specialises in launching eBay related online businesses. You can see his selection of Turnkey websites at: http://www.Trading-Web-Solutions.com or read his blog via http://www.Trading-Web-Solutions.com/blog

Marketing All About Focus

2008-12-22T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Dave Collins

Marketing would appear to be the great buzz word of the decade. Every self-respecting business team talks about it, yet many of us aren't even sure what it is, and even more are uncertain of how they should be doing it.
In Marketing -the next level we looked at some of the most important definitions, and pointed out that marketing is simply about bridging the gap between the producer and the consumer. It's not about what you're trying to sell, it's about who you're trying to sell it to, what they want from you, and how to give it them. It really is that simple.
This is all very good in theory, but one of the main problems with marketing is that while it makes complete sense when reading about it, applying it to the real world can often prove to be a different matter. One of the simplest and most effective ways to do so is to focus on the consumer.
How to attract new customers to your product and website is the constant quandary of many businesses, small or large. But the fact is that no matter what method you use to do so, it's a hard, slow and often expensive process. Logically, we can therefore assume that we should, and indeed must, apply some of our energies to retaining existing customers.
The question is why we lose so many potential customers before they've even had a chance to reach for their wallets. There could be many reasons for this. Some may no longer require what you're selling, some may simply forget about you, and inevitably, some may feel (rightly or wrongly) that you don't provide what they need or want.
While there is little that you can do if they genuinely have no need for the product or service you're selling, everything else is completely under your control.
Why Are You Losing Customers?
If, for example, a customer did use your product in the past, but no longer has any need for it, then something must have changed. Is it perhaps new technology that you're not keeping up with, a gap in your product, or incompatibility with other software? Identify what's changed, and if possible, address those needs.
If the reason is a competing product, then go after the product's features with a vengeance, and build on them. Don't constrain yourself by only providing the bare basics of what the consumer wants. Give them what they could use, and show them features that they've never even thought of before. While no-one in their right mind goes shopping for a new car based on the stereo and seat linings, the fact is that sometimes these add-ins may prove to be the make-or-break features in choosing their purchase. Throw them in.
On the other hand, if the potential customer doesn't even realise what you're offering, then you're doing something very wrong. Have you ever come across a site with the make-or-break fact that persuades you to buy the product, hidden away four clicks into the web site? I certainly have, and it's far from rare.
Realistically, chances are that a large number of your website visitors won't go beyond the front page, so don't hide the juicy details buried in the depths of your site. The most important sales facts should be plain to see from the moment your main page loads. A book may not be judged by its cover, but a website certainly is. Catch their attention the moment they arrive, entice them in with tasty titbits, and you've got them.
Sell The Benefits, Not Just The Features
I've said it many times before, and I'll say it many times yet. You have to sell the benefits of your software, and not just it's features. A long feature list looks great to the person who's thinking about buying the software, but until they realise that they need or want it in the first place, it'll barely even register.
Take an imaginary graphics file viewer as an example. If the front page for the product is one long feature list, with an impressive 60+ supported formats on display, that's all very well and good. But will the three-second-a-site visitor be interested? Probably not. They're not looking for what the software is capable of, they're looking for what the software can do for them.
If however you sell the fact that the file viewer can SAVE TIME AND MONEY, ALLOW YOU TO ACCESS YOUR COLLEAGUES FILES and VIEW ALL YOUR EMAIL ATTACHMENTS, then you're far more likely to grab their attention.
Feature lists are for shareware sites and magazine reviews. People want benefits and solutions. Again, it goes back to the consumer.
Once you know what they're looking for, spoon feed it to them in just the right way, with all the information and details they need, and a little bit of icing never goes amiss either.
As for the people who click on the features list, chances are that they don't need convincing that they may have a use for the software, they're looking for more reasons to buy it. They're looking for as many facts as possible to satisfy their wallet, boss, spouse or conscience. Give them what they want.
And remember not to go for too blatant a sales pitch. People are strange, and although the average person loves to buy things, they hate being sold to! The difference? Make them want what you're selling, don't just shout BUY at them! Satisfy their needs, meet their requirements and show them that you're the answer they're looking for.
Never forget that you're not selling to objects. You're selling to people. In order to reach them, you have to start thinking like one of them!
Spend time finding out how your existing customers use your software, what made them choose your product, and why they continue to use or enjoy it. See if any patterns emerge, and use this information to focus on your strengths and also your opportunities. Then apply what you've learnt to your product literature, your banner ads, your email signature, your advertising campaigns and above all your website. Be seen, be sold.
Copyright 2005 SharewarePromotions Ltd
Dave Collins is the CEO of SharewarePromotions Ltd., a well established UK-based software and shareware marketing company. Are your software sales slow? Find out how to promote your software across the web and multiply your sales level at http://www.sharewarepromotions.com

Five Common Misconceptions To Achieving Success With Your Online Business

2008-12-21T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Robin Nobles

How successful is your online business? Are you achieving the monetary rewards that you'd hoped to achieve when you set up your Web site?
If not, you may have fallen prey to one of five common misconceptions to achieving success with an online business.
Misconception #1: If you put up a Web site, people will come. Regretfully, this is far from the truth. Competition is fierce on the Internet, and you must learn how to compete in order to have a successful online business. Putting up a Web site is the first step, but doing nothing more will ensure your site's failure.
Misconception #2: Amateur promotion will render professional results. Many people believe that they can purchase a handy dandy software program that will submit their sites to 999 search engines and directories, and their promotion efforts are over. The truth of the matter is, the majority of the traffic to most Web sites comes from the major search engines and directories, so submitting to 990 other ones is simply a waste of time and won't bring you any success.
Misconception #3: Submitting your site to the major search engines and directories is all you need to do. Wrong. Think of it this way: there are 10 search results per page for most of the engines. Most people won't go through any more than three pages of search results before giving up and trying another search. So, only the top 30 rankings really matter. If your site is #3,429 out of two million results, how much traffic do you think you'll get?
Misconception #4: META tags are the key to success with the search engines. Truthfully, very few of the major engines even look at META tags any more. So, sticking META tags on your pages won't bring you traffic and sales.
Misconception #5: The key to success on the Web is achieving top 10 rankings for keywords that are important to your business. This way of thinking is outdated. Instead, the key to success on the Web is bringing in extremely targeted traffic that converts to sales. You can have all the #1 rankings in the world, but if the rankings don't convert to traffic that ultimately converts to sales, your Web site will never be a success.
If you're ready to activate your Web site for success, why not take advantage of simple but powerful insiders' strategies that mean genuine business. The good news is that you can learn these strategies through step-by-step, personal instruction at the Ultimate SEO Mastery Workshop being held in New Orleans on September 9-11 at the Royal Orleans Hotel. For more information, or to learn of future workshops, visit http://www.searchengineworkshops.com or contact Robin Nobles at robin@searchengineworkshops.com.
Copyright 2002 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved.
About The Author
Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists, has trained several thousand people in her online search engine marketing (http://www.academywebspecialists.com) training programs. Visit the Academy's training site to learn more (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com). She also teaches 3-day hands-on search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).
robin@searchengineworkshops.com

What You Wont Learn In Business School

2008-12-20T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Erwin Tjong

What You Won't Learn in Business School
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We all know the traditional road to the financial freedom of retirement. You go to work, 40, 50 or even 60 or more hours every week for 30 or 40 years. You scrimp and save every penny you can, giving up some of the good things in life while, telling yourself that you are saving for a better day and that you will one day have financial freedom and the time to do what you really want. Then you just hope and pray that your nest egg will be big enough to feather your retirement and help you finally achieve financial freedom.
There is a better way. Let us show you how to retire early like next year, next month or even next week! We can teach you how to best manage the two most important aspects of financial freedom your time and your money. Unfortunately, these vital concepts are not taught in any school. Even the most expensive private high schools and the best business schools in the world do not teach their students how to achieve financial freedom through the generation of consistent passive income.
After all, most schools see their function as preparing students for the world of work. Unfortunately for you, that means working for someone else. Working for someone else, whether it is the smallest startup company or the biggest Fortune 500 company, is not the road to financial freedom.
Working for someone else keeps you dependent, and keeps you from achieving the financial freedom you deserve and raking in the passive income you can achieve on your own. Passive income is truly the key to financial freedom. The awesome power of passive income may not be taught in business schools, but you have found the absolute best starting point for learning how to harness passive income to achieve financial freedom for you and your family.
Erwin Tjong is an Internet Marketer and a member of Elite Team which a Marketing System that specifically to provide SUPPORT and TRAINING for everyone who joined the Financial Freedom Society Inc.) To learn more about his business please visit : http://www.EliteTeamOz.com

Web Coach Tip 3 Quick Amp Easy Ways To Identify Your Target Market

2008-12-19T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Donna Payne

#1 ~Look at your past customers~
Notice trends in the type of clients you attract and pay particular attention to the ones who provoke you to be our best. How do you feel when you get off a call with a client who's "got it together"...Great, right? What about the client who's a real downer? The phone rings and you glance at the caller id. Ugh! Not her AGAIN! I'd rather stick my hand thru the paper shredder than answer the phone. (LOL, we've all been there!) Remember the tolerations from unpleasant encounters and be sure not to allow them into your newly formed target market.
#2 ~Think about ideal future prospects~
Make up an imaginary customer. For example: mine is "Caroline Everson". She's a 35 year old coach/therapist, married, lives in LA and works out of her home office. She's been in practice for 3 years and has two daughters10 and 6. Caroline's website is so stagnant it stinks because it hasn't been updated for over a year. She wants to revive her online presence, and attract a full roster of clients from all over the country in the next 6 months.
Focusing on one person allows you to really get to the "pain" your prospect is having. What keeps her up at night? Where is she stuck? How is she feeling? This will give you the "emotional" element in your web copy to hook the prospect. Your ideal goal is to connect with the reader so they will take action and contact you without hesitation. The tighter your niche, the better!
Also remember that your niche can have sub-niche's and can change at any minute. This is a processdo not obsess... it may take 1 week, 6 months or even a year to figure out exactly who is your ideal client.
#3 ~People we DON'T want as customers~
The message we craft is to attract the folks we WANT to do business with. If our message is CLEAR, we will weed out the wrong types of prospects by allowing them to self-qualify and not bother contacting you.
Sometimes I'm asked by people who haven't visited my website if I can create their e-commerce site, or other commercial site. By simply stating who my niche or market is (therapists & coaches) it gets me off the hook easily and prevents me from getting involved with a project that's not in my area of expertise.
So, ask yourself... who's your Caroline Everson?
Donna Payne is the Chief Web Goddess of The Web Coach.net and is known as the gal to call when you're feeling overwhelmed by the internet. To spend some more time with Donna and to experience Web technology, Development and Marketing in the most SIMPLIFED way possible go to http://thewebcoach.net

The Power Of Cross Promoting

2008-12-18T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Edmund Loh

Cross promotion is, without doubt, a powerful technique used by many people to increase the exposure of their products or services when they start their Online Business.
When you start your Online Business, decide what type of promotional exchange methods you would be interested in practicing and contact other fellow Online Business owners to discuss an exchange for mutual benefits.
Here are some frequently-used and time-tested cross promoting techniques you can use to promote your Online Business:
[1] Link Exchanges
Exchanging links with web sites similar to yours should be one of the first things you should do on the first day your Online Business is open. By exchanging links with similar web sites, you will not only increase your Search Engine ranking, but you will also increase your web site traffic and Google page ranking.
[2] E-zine Ad Swaps
E-zine advertising is one of the best forms of advertising on the Internet. By swapping ads with other E-zine publishers, you can run your ad in other publications free of charge.
[3] Have Ebook Exchanges
You can cooperate with other Internet Marketers or Internet Business Owners in creating free E-books to freely distribute. The free E-book will mutually benefit and promote both of you while providing valuable information for your visitors as long the E-book is viral in nature.
[4] Give Free Bonuses
Free bonuses are often used as an incentive to increase sales. Provide and exchange bonuses with other Online Business owners. This technique will not only increase your sales, but will also promote your products and services.
[5] Establishing Joint Ventures
This is by far one of the most powerful forms of cross-promotion technique practiced by top Online Business persons. You and another Online Business person will partner together in a marketing effort that will result in mutual benefits and profits.
As you might have noticed by now, the techniques presented above do not require any investment from you in monetary terms, just some hard and smart effort on your part!
Copyright © Edmund Loh
About the Author:
Edmund Loh is the author of the E-Biz Wiz Blog and Starting An Internet Business Special Report. Visit E-Biz Wiz Blog for proven ideas, tips and information on starting your own Internet Business and subscribe to the 12 Day Internet Marketing Success Course at http://ebizmodelsyoucancopy.blogspot.com

Finding Your Niche Market By Solving Other Peoples Problems

2008-12-17T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Guy Reichard

"It is seldom inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that builds fortunes... there are seven characteristics held in common by most millionaires... one of the seven is: being adept at identifying target market opportunities." Stanley/Danko
Once you have a good idea of what you're passionate about, it's time to start looking for markets that are related in some way.
If your passion is playing the guitar or practicing yoga or traveling or learning languages, I'm sure there's a market online that could benefit from your passion. This article will show you how to find it. After we've found the market, we're going to research it and find out what some of their biggest unsolved problems are.
What's this about problems?
Two of the biggest drivers of marketing (what makes people buy) are pleasure and pain.
People are either interested in things that bring them pleasure or things that stop their pain. If you come up with a solution for a particular problem, you're not only stopping the pain, you're providing pleasure as well.
If you have a headache, don't you look for a solution to that problem? If your headache goes away, don't you find it easier to do things that bring you pleasure?
Every market has its problems and every market needs those problems solved. In today's world and economy, people are looking for faster and more efficient ways to solve their problems and they're ready to pay handsomely for it. If you can show them how to solve their problems and enjoy the benefits of living without their problems, you have just become their angel in disguise.
How can you find your niche market who's just waiting for you to help them?
Start by doing research on your wider target market.
* Go to Google and do a search on your general field of interest first.
* If you're interested in baking cookies, for example, do a search on baking cookies and then drill down by digging into specifics.
* Check out informational sites and product sites.
* Find e-zines (online magazines) related to your interest and read them thoroughly.
* Then, look for websites already selling something within your market. What kind of approach do they take? Do they appear like professionals or amateurs?
Keep your mind open to all the possibilities. You're not trying to find a product to sell yet, you're still narrowing in on your niche market by finding like-minded communities of people online.
By finding your ideal niche market, you're going to save yourself from wasting countless hours and dollars on a business idea that may never succeed.
Just picking a field of interest is not enough - that's way too wide and won't provide you with positive, lasting results that lead to success. You need to be very specific and you need to start looking for a problem that people are actively trying to solve.
To help you narrow in on your niche try this exercise:
** My niche market is people who are (action) + (your area of interest)
For example:
- My niche market is people who are (learning how to bake) (cookies) or
- My niche market is people who are (trying to build) (a gazebo) or
- My niche market is people who are (wanting to learn) (spanish) or
- My niche market is people who are (attempting to sell) (saunas)
By narrowing your wider market into a niche market you gain so many advantages;
* You've narrowed down the competition - you're not competing against everyone in your field of interest
* Smaller markets are easier to dominate
* Niche markets are often close groups of people who share information with each other and can more easily spread worth of mouth to their friends who share the same interests
* It's cheaper to advertise to smaller, less competitive markets even if it means less traffic - at least you know you won't be wasting your dollars on people who aren't interested in your specific area
* People searching for your solution are savvy and will usually search for specific solutions and ignore wide search terms (they're drilling and digging to)
* It's easier to gain the loyalty of customers if you provide them with "the good stuff" - they will keep coming back for more of your solutions because you satisfied their needs and increased their level of trust.
Believe it or not, you've just learned some very important information about internet marketing that most other people don't know. Thousands upon thousands of people have ignored these principles and have wasted countless hours and dollars trying either to sell to the masses or trying to find a product before they've found a market.
If you're one of those people, don't despair (I've done it too) and it's not the end of the world.
If you already have a product, do some more research on your niche market (it'll be easier to find now) and listen to what people are saying in discussion boards, chat rooms, news sites and e-zines. They will enlighten you as to what problems they've been having and you can find a way to put a spin on what you have that will appeal to their needs.
For all the rest, once you've found your niche market and a common problem among that market - you've hit gold. You can now find a product or develop one of your own that solves all or at least one of their major problems and you're ahead of the game without losing your shirt.
Once you've come up with a solution for your niche market, there's a phenomenal, fast, inexpensive way to test the market to see if it will bring you riches or rags.
But you'll have to wait for my next article to read about that or visit my website for more information.
Wishing you happiness and good fortune,
Guy Reichard, BA Psych, MBA Strategy/Entrepreneurship
Internet Marketing Specialist
Guy Reichard is an internet marketing specialist who combines coaching, enlightenment & marketing into every project he tackles. Providing clients with motivational support to help his them reach their personal and business goals. You can learn more about him and his services at his websites. http://www.eXante.ca and http://www.EnlightenedInternetMarketing.com.

The Right Approach

2008-12-16T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by John Hostler

If I told you I would give you a part time job where you would be able to set your own hours, work from the comfort of your home, and earn a few hundred dollars a month after the first couple of months, you might think that was pretty cool.
If I then went on to tell you that with that same part time job you could replace your current income within a year and then massively exceed that income within a couple you'd probably think that was incredible.
Would you take me up on it? I bet you would.
So, then why is it that when people venture into Internet Marketing they waste so much time and money by immediately going for the "holy grail"? Is it because they're gullible, or lazy, or a combination of both?
For some that is the caseand for others I just think they have bought into the wild pack of lies that gets bandied about the Internetthey buy into one pipe dream after another.
What's the answer? One answer is to take the "Right Approach". You certainly need focus and a plan, but there is a mentality that's required that goes way above and beyond those general concepts.
When people are looking to earn extra income it is typically about increasing their monthly cash flow. Since a substantial number of folks today are living check to check, the idea of adding more money into the hopper every month is extremely appealing. It is the main reason people get a second job.
So, how about likening your new Internet Marketing career to a part time/second job? A second job that will afford you some extra money every month and which could replace your main source of income in the long run.
Since we live in a short term, gotta have it now society, why not attack your Internet Marketing business with short term goals? I knowI know. Not very flashybut if you want to be successful then forget the idea of being rich in 30 days, and get with the idea of building your business one small step at a time.
Here is an effective strategy for doing just that; by keeping the right mindset and taking the Right Approach
When you get started, pick one monthly bill that aggravates the heck out of you. For me it was all of them but the one that most annoyed me was the telephone bill. I hated getting that thing in the mail every month and decided that it was the first one to go.
I applied the techniques I had learned about being an affiliate marketer and began focusing on earning enough a month to pay that with my online earnings. It was only a short while before I had that handled. So, now my phone bill was covered and gave me an extra $100 or so bucks in free cash each month.
Now that I had taken care of those annoying phone bills I picked the next most hated bill which was my water bill. I could barely stomach the sight of those things. Again, in a short while I was earning enough to pay my water bill in addition to my phone bill. 2 down and even more extra cash in my pocket.
As time passed I became more adept at marketing online and earned more money each month. I continued to apply the same strategy and continued to pick off various bills until I got to the point where I was making more online then I was working my day job and was able to afford my normal bills and still have plenty of fun money.
Was this quick? Not by most people's definition, but in 14 months I was able to make the decision that I would no longer work for anyone but me and had the ability to support myself and have a few of the nicer things in life by Internet Marketing alone.
And guess what? There were thousands of people that began their marketing careers the same time I did and most of them are in the exact same boat they were at day 1.
They didn't take the right approach and they only thought about making it big and making it fast. Although that can happen from time to time and some folks do it better and faster than others, that is the exception and not the rule.
So, how about that part time job now? Are you willing to go the distance? If you are then set short term goals and take the Right Approach. That "holy grail" is out there but it takes patience, work, and focus to get it.
John Hostler, aka the Internet Renegade, has been marketing successfully both online and off for 6 years. He released his widely anticipated book on the subject of Internet Marketing on 02-01-06. To find out more about John or his newest release check out http://www.internetrenegade.com

How Do You Live The Internet Dream Automate Automate Automate

2008-12-15T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Diane Hughes

There's no doubt that one of the things that excited you about operating your online business was the thought of making money while you sleep. Having free time to spend with your family while - at the same time - generating an income is something almost every person on earth wants. But as you've moved further and further into the Internet business realm, you've most likely discovered that this is hard work!
Are all those so-called marketing gurus lying? Do they really generate enough money to live on when only working 10 to 20 hours per week? And what's more... can you?!
Some may be lying, but I'm living proof that you can have it all. What's the secret? Automation!
Automate what? Everything you possibly can. Why automate? Because the less time you actually have to spend at your business the more time you can spend doing the things you love. Also, the more "hands-off" your business is the more profitable it becomes.
Most of the people who have made it big online have their own products that they deliver electronically. However, if you sell affiliate products, physical products, or even services, there are an unlimited number of ways to automate your daily routine.
Let's take a few moments to review some ways you can find to automate as much as possible about your business so you can be free to enjoy your life.
ACTION STEP 1
Make a list of those routine chores you do every day. (Answer email, check search engine positioning, review pay-per-click ads, calculate payments, etc., etc.) Everything!
ACTION STEP 2
Next, place a checkmark beside each item on your list that is repetitive. These are items where your actions are exactly the same (or practically the same) each time you do the action.
These are the items in your routine that can most likely be automated.
ACTION STEP 3
Visit some of the free (or cheap) software and script sites to see which ones offer helpful products you can use to automate your day. You can find free software at http://www.download.com. For free java scripts, check out http://javascript.internet.com/. You can also search your favorite search engine for free CGI scripts, DHTML scripts, and more.
ACTION STEP 4
Read your user's manuals. I know... what a horrible thought! Most of the software user's manuals now are included on your hard drive. You can actually search the table of contents for topics of interest. You'll find tons of ways to automate workflow in your user's manuals.
For instance, did you know you could automatically create a table of contents (TOC) using Word? If you've finished writing an ebook or report and need to add a TOC, Word can scan your document - no matter how long it is - and layout the TOC for you. There are also tons of macros you can set up that will automate your workflow. And Word is not the only program that does these neat tricks. You'd be surprised at what you can learn by snooping around in your user's manuals.
The more you're able to take your hands off your business, the more time you'll have to enjoy your life. You'll find your schedule is freer and your profitability is stronger. It may take some time to initially set everything up so that it works the way you need it to, but just a few short-term sacrifices can make for some pretty powerful long-term gains.
Copyright 2005 Diane Hughes
Diane C. Hughes * ProBizTips.com
FREE Report: Amazingly Simple (Yet Super Powerful) Ways To Skyrocket Your Sales And Build Your Business Into A Tower of Profits! ==>> http://madmarketer.com/diane

Make Quick Money On The Internet

2008-12-14T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Jack Silver

In this article I will give you two ways to make quick money on the internet. Both methods are simple to execute, but will require the elbow grease to put them into action. By executing both plans, you will see money in your account within a week.
Method 1: Get a pen and paper. Go to every room in your house and make a list of everything which you do not need or use. Be neat, and organise all objects into relative categories, such as books or CD's.
Once you have done this, take a photo of each of the items on your list using a digital camera. Ensure that the object has been cleaned and looks presentable. As you photograph each object, check off the name on the list.
The final step is to list all of the items on eBay. Take your time to write good, lucid descriptions, and ensure you use proper English. Start all your items off at a very small price. This is a very laborious process (and so is the packaging), but it is well worth it. When I did this last year, I raised $2000 for a week's work. Not bad. Suck it up and get it done. You'll have extra cash in your pocket, a fat eBay profile with lots of positive feedback, and your home will be newly streamlined. This is undoubtedly one of the best ways to make quick money on the internet.
Method 2: This is perhaps my favourite method to make quick money on the internet. Go to Clickbank and sign up as an affiliate - it is free.
Now start thinking about a niche you're knowledgeable about. This step is very important. Maybe you are interested in poker, or maybe tropical fish, or even real estate. Just ensure that you pick a niche that you know something about.
Once you've identified your niche, run a search on Clickbank for related search terms. For example, if you've picked angling as a niche you know a thing or two about, then run a search for 'fishing'. You will get a results list with lots of fishing-related products. Check out the sales page of each product and pick one that you like the look of.
Get your affiliate link for the product by clicking on the 'Earn X%' button by the product name. Copy and paste that affiliate code into your notepad. This is the first step completed.
Your next step is to sign up to as many forums related to your niche as you can, preferably at least five. In each forum, ensure that you put your affiliate link in the signature option in your profile - this means that every time you make a post on the forum, your affiliate link will be visible.
Finally, post on each forum five times a day, making a total of at least 25 posts per day. Ensure that you provide useful information rather than just spamming the forum. Build your gravitas and credibility. This will add up to around 750 posts a month, which will give your affiliate link remarkable exposure. Every time someone clicks on your link and purchases the product, you will be entitled to 50% or more of the sale. If your commission is $20, then a hundred sales through your lead will make you an easy $2000. And don't forget - the posts will always be archived, so you will have a passive income stream for months and years to come.
These two methods will make quick money on the internet for you, but only scratch the surface of internet marketing. A bit of innovation allowed me to do more than make quick money - I was able to quit my job thanks to the internet. Always remember that the possibilities are endless, and if you take the time to master any internet marketing method, then you will soon be able to make money overnight.
Jack Silver started making money online in 2006 and recently quit his job to become a full-time internet marketer. You can read how Jack managed to replace his income at (http://www.moneyinpyjamas.wordpress.com)

Boost Online Marketing With A Ghost And A Blue Ball

2008-12-13T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Siriol Jameson

What does online marketing have to do with a ghost? Plenty. Read this and you will see why. The memory still unsettles me whenever I think back to that night.
The experience taught me that to write about a product, you have to see it at work. You will see how this can help you, also. But first, here is what happened that night.
It was November - almost 3 years ago. My friend and client, Guido, asked me to write a sales letter and a couple of ads for him. He ran a ghost busting business.
It struck me as hard to make m0ney chasing ghosts out of people's houses but he made a good living. Guido convinced me that I had to get a feel for his business. So, he asked me to accompany him on a job.
I agreed and found myself the following Thursday night with him and his girlfriend, Erin, in the home of an art gallery owner. The owner and his family were away and the place smelled of stale smoke and chrysanthemums. We were alone or almost alone.
The ghost, Guido explained, was a child who had died in the house 60 years before. He would come back looking for toys. Guido led us to the dining room where he set up his equipment. The only toy I saw was a blue ball under the sideboard that belonged to the owner's young son.
Guido half opened the door leading to the cellar and turned out the lights. We sat on the floor in the dark wearing night-vision goggles and waited.
It happened a little after 1 a.m. The blue ball hurtled from under the sideboard, hit the table leg and bounced back. I heard a click from Guido's equipment and the ball stopped short. After a few minutes of stillness, the ball darted forth again. This time, it zigzagged along the wall.
Erin and I exchanged a quick glance and I strained to see what was causing the ball to move. I could only imagine some unseen little feet kicking it and scurrying after it. Again, Guido's equipment clicked and kept on clicking. The ball rolled out the cellar door and bounced down the steps.
It was over.
Guido didn't explain how he did it, but assured us the little ghost would not be back - ever. I ran my hand over the bare floor where the ball had been. I was feeling for wires or string, suspecting that Guido had rigged the whole thing. But I found nothing.
I didn't go to bed when I got home. Instead, I wrote an account of the ghost. I also wrote the sales letter and ads for Guido. The words rolled off my fingertips like raindrops. I set the scene of what it was like to be in the same room with a ghost.
In writing about Guido's service, I tried to make the readers feel the same things I had. I brought all my senses into it touch, smell, hearing, sight and taste.
I learned another lesson from that experience that may help you. The lesson is this: write the sales letter for your online marketing right after you see the product at work. That makes your words fresh and urgent.
Oh, and about the little ghost: Guido told me he didn't stay in the cellar. He disappeared and Guido knows in his heart that some loving arms welcomed him back into that "in-between world" that ghosts call home.
Siriol Jameson helps you make money from the comfort of your own home. Choose from over 40 guaranteed profitable businesses and make m.oney forever. Visit: http://www.easy-home-businesses/work-from-home-businesses.html Get insider tips by subscribing to Siriol's free newsletter: http://www.easy-home-businesses.com/newsletter.html

Put Some Lipstick On That Pig Domain Name Forwarding

2008-12-12T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Anthoney Hanks

Have you heard this phrase before, "Put some lipstick on that pig, and prettier her up." Well, have you got an URL that is long and ugly. Maybe you have an affiliate link or maybe you have multiple URLs that you want to point to the same place. In this article, I am going to step you through the process of getting the URL and forwarding the domain name.
First, for the sake of this article, we will be using GoDaddy.com to handle the forwarding. Buy your URL(s). During the buying process, if you do not already an account with them, you will set one up.
Next, login to your account. In your main screen, there will be a list of your URLs. Put a check in the checkbox of the URL you want to forward. There will be a button that says "Forward Domain Names". Click the button.
You will be taken to the forwarding domain names page. To the right, there will be a textbox asking for the URL that you want forwarded by the "prettier URL". The next option is to mask the original URL. The purpose of this is to hide the original link from the user. The next option is to enter a masked title. This masked title will show at the top of the browser. The next option is the Masked Description Meta-Tag. This option is to enter a different description of the site. And lastly, there is an option for Masked Keyword Meta-Tag. Here you can enter in some new keywords. After you have entered in the information, click the "Save Changes"
After you have saved your changes, allow up to 24 hours for the change to take effect. Usually it happens within a couple of hours. When completed, your user will click the "prettier" URL and they will be forwarded to the original site. Example:
http://www.myprettylink.com
|
->http://username.myaffiliatesite.com/somefolder/anotherfolder/home?c=12345
Maybe you want to sell a product from ClickBank. You will get an affiliate link. Now you want to track how much traffic you are getting for a particular ad. What you can do is use a tracking site to keep a count of the traffic. Go to the tracking site and setup the tracking link. Then take the tracking link and have it forward by a "prettier" URL which will forward it to the original link. Example:
http://www.myprettylink.com
|
->http://www.trackersite.com/track?username=1234&ad=4321
|
->http://username.myaffiliatesite.com/somefolder/anotherfolder/home?c=12345
If you want to a more visually appealing and easier to remember URL for your long and cryptic URLs, then domain name forwarding is the trick you need. Domain name forwarding is a great Internet marketing technique. It allows you uniqueness when displaying an affiliate links or referral links. When the user sees the link, it will be less ominous than a longer link. Check out my resource box. Both links are forwarded to another site.
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About The Author
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Anthoney Hanks is an avid student of personal development, Internet marketing and network marketing. Profit from my spillover, visit: http://www.at-home-incomes.net. Also visit my blog: http://www.qualitylifeatsu.net
Article is available for reprint if interested.
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A 7 Step Webmarketing Plan

2008-12-11T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Jerry Bader

Step 1.
What to do: Attract more Web-visitors. How to do it: Decide what niche to fill by defining what your audience really wants.
The number one priority of any website marketing initiative is to attract more website visitors that in-turn creates more sales leads and ultimately more sales. In order to attract these visitors you need focus on a niche audience that will find your website material relevant enough to either pickup the phone and call you, or at least send you an email inquiry. Most websites try to do too much and say too much and as a result visitors loose interest. Design your website so that it focuses on the key information that propels your visitors to make the next move - contacting you.
Steo 2.
What to do: Have Web-visitors stay longer. How to do it: Make your website more compelling by utilizing storytelling techniques.
We know from recent studies that the amount of time visitors stay in a sales environment is the most important factor in determining how much they will purchase (Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, 'Why We Buy'). To get visitors to stay longer you have to offer them something more the usual sales hype. Sales presentations that revolve around stories and anecdotes are one of the best ways to capture people's attention and keep their interest.
Step 3.
What to do: Have Web-visitors retain more of your marketing message. How to do it: Treat your customers as an audience and speak to them with Web- audio and Web-video presentations.
The longer people stay at your website the more likely they are to remember your marketing message, but the way you present your marketing message is the critical factor in penetrating their consciousness and implanting your message in their heads. Visitors can spend a lot of time at your website getting frustrated because they can't find what they need or can't understand what you are offering. Treat your customers like a real visitor to your office or showroom and speak to them with Web-audio and Web-video presentations.
Step 4.
What to do: Get Web-visitors to respond to your call to action. How to do it: Make it worth their while: to get something, you have to give something.
Now that you've got people to come to your site, you want them to respond to some call to action. Many websites just present the material but never ask their visitors to actually do anything. Ask your visitors to telephone, email, fill in a survey, or do something that will start the beginning of a commercial relationship. And since web-visitors are so jaded, make sure you make it worth their while by giving them something in return: a free newsletter, special report, or a complementary analysis of their needs.
Step 5.
What to do: Get Web-visitors to pass on the information to friends and colleague. How to do it: Make your information viral and provide more than just a sales pitch.
The power of the Web as a sales and marketing tool is its ability to connect you to a network of people connected to your web-visitors. If the information on your website is informative and instructive and if the presentation is creative and entertaining then people will pass it along too their network of friends and colleagues. With the click of a button web-visitors can send a email to everyone they know suggesting they visit your website, but only if your site is worth the visit.
Step 6.
What to do: Implement your corporate personality. How to do it: Deliver a definitive image and attitude using multimedia techniques, especially cost-effective Web-audio.
So many websites are just plain boring. Having a website just because everybody else has a website is not a very good reason for the expenditure and effort involved. So if you're going have a website, make sure it's a good one that displays your corporate personality. Make a statement with your presentation and one of the best ways to make a statement and connect with your audience is with cost-effective Web-audio.
Step 7.
What to do: Garner a positive reaction. How to do it: Make sure Web-visitors find what they're looking for by utilizing appropriate information architectures.
When web-visitors leave, your site you want them to leave with a positive reaction to your company. Having an under-performing website that ignores the human element and doesn't delivery the information people need in a way they can understand, is a sure-fire way of creating a negative reaction or no reaction at all. Make sure Web-visitors find what they're looking for by utilizing appropriate information architectures.
Jerry Bader is a principal partner of Ontario-based MRPwebmedia (http:// http://www.136words.com, http://www.mrpwebmedia.com and http://www.sonicpersonality.com).He can be reached at info@mrpwebmedia.com, Telephone: 905.764.1246.

Can You Really Make Money While You Sleep

2008-12-10T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Kathleen Gage

If you've been utilizing the Internet for any length of time it's likely you have been bombarded with junk mail claiming you can make money "while you sleep." Most sensible people are bound to ignore such claims of easy money. But is it true? Can you really make money while you sleep?
The answer is an absolute YES! However, don't assume my answer in any way implies that it is a get rich quick while you sleep proposition.
I know it is possible to make money via the Internet while one sleeps as I have been doing it for a little over a month. Actually, I have been utilizing the Internet to market my business and events for several years with a great deal of success, but it is only in the last month that I began aggressively selling products via my website.
Over the last few weeks, between e-products and my latest book, 101 Ways to Get Your Foot in the Door, I have sold a substantial amount of product. Within an hour of launching my products I was making money. From day one, each morning when I turn on my computer I am greeted with sales.
What I most like about doing this is the profit margin. With my e-products the profit is close to 100%. With my books there are shipping and handling costs and yet, the profit is still very nice.
To the casual observer this may seem fantastic. Truth be told, it is. And yet, I didn't simply put products on my website and the sales miraculously happened.
As is true for anyone who successfully sells on the Internet, I have worked on the backend of launching my products for quite some time. Before I made my products available for sale from my website I had to make sure my systems were in place.
The process began with a great deal of research into how to successfully launch products on the web. I read virtually everything I could get my hands on by folks who are making money on the web. I listened in on teleconferences, went to seminars, bought other people's products, and spent countless hours becoming very familiar with how the process works.
It is important to state I didn't necessarily believe claims from someone just because they said they were making money. Plenty of people are claiming to make massive amounts of money on the Internet when in fact, they aren't. However, there are others who are making incredible revenues from web-based product sales.
Before I would accept what someone was saying, I checked them out. I talked to other people either through email or via the phone to find out what they knew about some of the more "well known" experts. I had the opportunity to talk real-time to some of the experts as a result of taking the initiative to contact them with valid inquiries about their products and businesses.
With each conversation, book, seminar, e-book and teleconference I added to my own arsenal of information. Over a period of about a year and a half, I had acquired quite a storehouse of knowledge.
Knowledge alone wouldn't lend itself to being successful in this new branch of my business. As with other products and services I have made available at various times to my market, I had to make sure that the products I would be introducing would sell. It's all very nice to have something you think is great, but will there be people who will actually pay for what you are selling?
I also had to make sure most of the kinks would be worked out prior to launching the products. This took a considerable amount of time meeting with my webmaster. Together we worked on the vision and how everything would link together.
Many people are very skeptical about informational products being sold on the Internet.
They have every right to be as there is a lot of garbage out there. There are people claiming to be experts when in fact, they aren't.
I also know we live in a "try before you buy" world. People have to feel comfortable with the purchases they make. Communication is key. Before, during and after.
Offering something at no cost prior to asking for a sale is an incredible way to build trust. It is also important to offer multiple choices in products and prices. Some people are more comfortable making a smaller purchase before they make a larger purchase.
For this reason, I have multiple free information products as well as a very cost effective e-book for only $8.95. As you will see when you visit my site and products page, I have several choices I offer.
As with a brick and mortar business, it is easier to sell to existing customers rather than selling to a stranger. This definitely proved to be true with the products I introduced. I have thousands of people in my database. I treat my database like gold because it is. I keep in touch with people in my database.
This is an area that I often see people lose substantial amounts of revenue. They fail to constantly mine their database or keep their name fresh in people's minds. As a result they are not able to fully realize the profits that come with a well groomed database and name recognition.
As with any type of business, my continued success with this stream of revenues will be determined by whether or not I keep in touch with people, how I market my products and how valuable my information is.
Yes, you can make money "while you sleep." And yes, it can be very profitable. However, your level of success will be directly proportionate to your level of commitment and professionalism in this avenue of your business as with any avenue of your business.
Copyright © 2004 by Kathleen Gage
Publishing Guidelines: You may publish my article in your newsletter, on your website or in your print publication provided you include the resource box at the end. Notification would be appreciated but is not required.
About The Author
Kathleen Gage is a business advisor, keynote speaker, and trainer that helps others gain dominance and visibility within their market. Get Gage's FR*EE report "Learn How One Salt Lake City Based Consultant Made Over 100k with One Idea" by visiting www.kathleengage.com.
kathleen@turningpointpresents.com

Why Call Centers Are Quickly Becoming A Network Marketers Dream Come True

2008-12-09T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Kent Thompson

Call Centers have been around for a while, but haven't been widely deployed in the network marketing community. This is beginning to change. The results of those groups who use call centers have been stagering. Let me explain how call centers can help your network marketing efforts.
Home-based businesses involving network marketing have some major problems. The main one is that often times prospects who join have no idea how much work it takes to build a large group of people under them.
This is a major problem because when people join, they might try it out for a few months and then quickly become overwhelmed and then quit when they don't see the results they were hoping for. This means that all the time that the network marketer spent in getting that person to join has now been wasted.
Let me explain what a call center is, and I'll use the Coastal Call Center as an example. The coastal call center is filled with professionally-trained sales staff, who do 95% of the work for the network marketer. The coastal call center staff will answer the phone, present the business plan to prospects calling in, do all the follow-up, and eventually close the sale.
With the coastal call center model, a network marketer's main responsibility is simply to advertise, and get people to call the coastal call center phone number, with a tracking code that identifies which network marketer referred the prospect.
From the surface it may seem like the only person this benefits from the call center model is the network marketer, since they no longer have to do the grunt work of answering phones, presenting the plan and following up.
However, there is another often overlooked benefit to this. It actually helps sales tremendously because prospects are now told that they don't have to do anything except advertise. Now, advertising and marketing may not be the most appealing idea to the prospect, but it certainly beats having to do everything else along with advertising!
If your network marketing organization is not using call centers, you may want to consider opening a call center. Your group will quickly embrace the idea that they no longer have to do all the work themselves, and you will see increased sales as a result!
Copyright 2005 Kent Thompson
Author Kent Thompson is a member of the coastal call center. Find out how you can make $1000 per sale in a home business where the coastal call center does 95% of the work for you, and all you have to do is advertise. Visit http://RunAdsForCash.com

What Is The Sure Fire Way To Success

2008-12-08T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Jim Mack

Can the average person make money online? I am asked that all the time. My answer is a definitive yes. However, you have to have the knowledge to do so. The shot gun approach will fail miserably.
There is a time tested method to making money that is successful over and over and over again. It is when a teacher takes an apprentice under his wing and becomes a mentor. First you tell them how to do it, then you show them how to do it, then you make them do it.
This method is the only proven way to make money at real estate investing, online marketing, offline marketing, and sales, really whatever you are doing. It could be tidily winks for goodness sakes.
I have made a great living being a mentor to people. I have been a successful sales manager, business leader and public speaker. I am willing and want to show YOU how to make a great living right from your home. And the best part is, my system shows you how to get OTHER people to do your work for you. I have a completely automated system running that all I do is place an ad and people respond to my website and other people do the selling and closing for me.
I began to study long ago the art of using NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It is the art of speaking using embedded commands, voice inflection, and reading your prospect. When you master the art of using NLP, you will master the art of selling and get VERY FEW objections. I have studied under the masters of using NLP. Tony Robbins, yes that Tony Robbins, was my first introduction to NLP. I have studied, Marshall Sylver, a hypnotist and success trainer that uses what he calls "Hypnotic Selling", Duane Lakin, PhD, a master at NLP training for management, salespeople and telemarketing, and Bill Twyford, a real estate investor that is an expert at writing scripts and using embedded commands. These people have taken me to a new level of sales and sales training.
I studied under master sales trainers, entrepreneurial trainers and internet marketing trainers such as Matt Bacak, Charlie Golick, John Childers, Armand Morin, Tracy Childers, Katarina Chase, Paulie Sabol, Donna Fox, Jeff Mills, Larry Goins and many more. These people are my mastermind team. Check out these names and tell me I have not been mentored by the best of the best! Do an internet search and see if these people aren't top notch
I am originally from the Kansas City Metro area; I have lived there my whole life. I love baseball, martial arts, footbalï, basically I am a sports junkie. I am a business trainer, motivator and mentor Visit me at http://www.passivecashcow.com
http://www.whoisjimmack.com
http://www.coldcallingstinks.com

Who Are You Learning From Or What Really Makes Me Mad

2008-12-07T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Alexandria K. Brown

You know what really makes me MAD? When I see someone acting like a bigshot with no substance behind them, asking you to pay them handsomely to teach you something that they themselves have NEVER done.
Let me explain...
Today I got an email announcing a very expensive workshop that claims to teach you how to develop information products and programs and sell them online to create wealth. (That part is fine.)
Here's the part that gets my goat...
The person teaching this workshop has absolutely NO experience creating and selling information products SUCCESSFULLY!
It just makes me sick.
There are many of these self proclaimed "gurus" out there. True, some have indeed created information products. (That's not hard to do.) And they may be selling them online. (That's not hard to do either.) But how much do they sell? How well do they REALLY do? How much money are they making? And are they working their tail off, or have they really created a great lifestyle for themselves?
Now, I know it's hard to tell sometimes who to trust and follow. Some of these 'gurus' talk a great talk using excellent copywriting, stories, and persuasion tactics. How do you know who is the REAL deal, and who's "full of it"?
Asking a few questions will help you. Here are five questions you should ask before investing heavily in anyone's products, programs, coaching, or workshops:
1. Have they DONE what they are teaching?
There are some people out there who are good "reporters" - that is, who collect information and share it - who you can learn from. These folks are good if you're doing baseline research on the topic. But if you are really looking to learn the systems and strategies that can change your life and business, and how to apply them successfully and quickly, and make a ton of money from them, you absolutely want to make sure you learn from someone who has done exactly that! This guarantees a much higher success rate on your end.
2. Are they STILL DOING what they're teaching?
It's no secret that anyone can make a lot more money TEACHING what they know than just doing what they know. Many "gurus" enjoyed one success and have been riding its coat-tails for years, teaching how they did it over and over. Just because someone had success selling one product or program online at one time doesn't mean they know the best and easiest way to do that TODAY. It's crucial you learn from someone who is still "in the trenches", continually learning and keeping up to date with the fastest and easiest ways to do what you want to learn.
3. Are they doing it SUCCESSFULLY?
This may seem like a given, but it amazes me how many people invest money in learning from people who aren't that successful in what they do. Make sure to sniff around and truly make sure that this person not only does what they say they can teach you, but that they are outrageously good at it.
4. Will they show you PROOF that what they teach actually works?
If your prospective mentor won't share numbers with you, or claims it's not your business, move on. It's likely they are not walking their talk. I'm open with my numbers because I want people to know I'm the real deal!
For example, I share an actual screen shot of my 2005 ONLINE SALES REPORT (www.ezinequeen.com/blueprintworkshop0306.htm) on the information page for my Online Success Blueprint Workshop. Why? I feel anyone who is about to invest several thousand dollars to learn from me deserves to see proof that what I'm teaching actually WORKS.
5. Are they doing it in a MANNER that suits what you want for you and your business?
This isn't talked about often, but you want to learn from a mentor who also works in a manner that is fits your business vision. For example, one client shared that she chose to learn from me instead of another internet marketing "mentor" solely because he admittedly works 16-hour days and hasn't taken a vacation in years. (Apparently my relaxed and fun lifestyle was a lot more appealing to her.)
Another example: I'm sure you've seen some "gurus" out there whose marketing methods are questionable and/or simply obnoxious, and that may not fit your style. If you want your business to be ethical, easy, and fun, then look for a mentor who is running his/her business that exact same way.
Once You Find Your Mentor, Stick With 'Em!
Once you choose the mentor and business model that's right for you, STOP paying attention to anyone else for awhile! Why? The #1 enemy of any entrepreneur is DISTRACTION. It's easy to jump around and get excited about the next big thing every few weeks, but your easiest road to success is to choose ONE mentor and model and commit to follow them for at least six months. I guarantee you'll move ahead a lot faster and more easily!
Online entrepreneur Alexandria K. Brown, "The E-zine Queen," publishes the award-winning 'Straight Shooter Marketing' weekly ezine with 20,000+ subscribers. If you're ready to jump-start your marketing, make more money, and have more fun in your small business, get your FREE tips now at http://www.EzineQueen.com

Take The Guesswork Out Of Niche Marketing

2008-12-06T04:00:00.001-08:00
Writen by Swaminathan Viramani

Many of us learn from the Gurus that we should identify a niche and dominate it, so we can make money online. They give us brief glimpses about what is to be done, like identifying a niche market by browsing magazines and hanging around in forums and discussion groups to see if we can be hit by an idea brainwave.
Oh how I wish it was that easy. My first attempts at finding a niche made me feel like I've gone deeper into quicksand, and the niche with a great demand had an awful lot of competition. Not one to be outdone, I went and bought software and books to learn what mistakes I made and try to recover from the mistakes. I learnt all about demand, and how "wordtracker" is the best service to use to assess demand for keywords and how to assess and estimate supply from "Google" manually. I saw lots of products offering to teach me how I should target the market, research the keywords, analyse the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index, which tells you the relative profitability of the keyword you select based on demand,supply and competition), and signed up for a lot of courses to learn more about niche marketing.
To cut the process short, this is what I learned:
a. You must have a niche (this is easy, you don't want to try to compete with the biggies)
b. You must assess the demand - i.e. find buyers in this market with money to spend.
c. You must see who you are pitted against - your supply estimate to see the competition.
d. Having found the demand and supply, and with a fair idea of the competition, you must find the profitability of your niche business idea.
e. Once you feel it is profitable, get into product development around this niche.
f. Promote the product and pocket the cash ...
What you end up learning the hard way is that all these people who write about earning money with google adwords ads don't tell you how much they spent on the ads, and if it is really that profitable..see, it is a numbers game, as I will show you below:
Assume you will have a decent 1% conversion rate for your product. That means for every 100 clicks you will make a sale. At a minimum bid of 5 cents, you will surely turn a profit for every $5 spend you do. But then, real life is not that easy. You have people competing against you, and your 5 cent bid doesnt attract clicks, leave alone buyers. So you either lose this small amount every day, or hike your bid to get some good clicks. Say you hike your bid to $0.25. At this rate, you would spend $25 to make a sale... get the trend of my thinking?
Unless you are lucky and able to find cheap keywords with high demand to bid on, the google adwords will remain a losing proposition. Or else you have to find the words people use when they look to buy something on the internet, and bid high on those keywords, to increase your conversion rate. This was the situation I found myself in..until I found a good software which did everything the sales page said it would do.
With this software, I was able to assess demand, supply and profitability scores on my idea, and come with lots of keywords with these demand/supply/competition data plus the top 3 PPC bids. I knew clearly what I needed to spend, before I went into product creation or promotion. How I wish I found this software before I sunk in money in internet marketing! But then, as they say, better late than never.
Well, now you know the rub... find a good software which does a great job. It takes the guesswork out of niche marketing.
Swaminathan Viramani
http://www.bestebooks.org