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Friday 19 December 2008

Bloggers Gold

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

  • The best blogging techniques.
  • How to get traffic to your blog.
  • How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

Saturday 13 December 2008

Buying And Selling Websites For Profit

As many people say, selling is the oldest form of trade. This can be proven by history itself because since time immemorial, people would sell and buy everything that is worth something. And now, even until this modern age, people are still at it, selling clothes, food, used items, and with the emergence of the Internet, even buying and selling websites.

That’s right, website trading. There are some people nowadays that make money off of trading new websites, old websites and even abandoned websites. Just like a hot item in the market people are biting off a big chunk in this new industry. But why do people buy websites and not just make them. One reason is convenience. Sometimes people don’t want to go through all the hassles of making a website that they just look around for a person selling his change things here and there and voila, new website.

The buying and selling business is attractive but given the towering costs of making the acquisition it is fairly tricky to start, particularly as a young capitalist. If you set out erroneous you may possibly end up loosing a bundle of money, so you in actuality desire to be in no doubt of your skills and ability prior to investing.

The Internet is newish and the entire online business industry is presently establishing advertising practices that work. Quite frankly, the majority of the people running businesses online have dreadfully poor websites. A lot of communities running well liked sites are not taking advantage of their traffic by monetizing it, this could be by preference or lack of knowledge or possibly an e-commerce site might use a quantity of free search engine advertising or some alteration to an AdWords movement may do the trick, or better still, monetize, optimize, associate and upsell. For utmost gain, make use of all the advertising tricks at your disposal.

If people do some sampling of the web industry, search engine optimization techniques, would be understood by webmasters and implemented well by even smaller number. Search engine optimization is fetching mainstream success and no uncertainty as the web continues to establish additional people will learn, experiment and construct better websites, but it’s absolutely still early days.

What this tells us is “business opportunity”. For people with the knowledge on how to buy and sell websites, the energy to employ and a tad bit of funds to procure the sites there are huge gains to be made. What makes it even more tempting, particularly for youthful or fresh entrepreneurs, is the price - we are talking about a lot less finances than it would take to put in stocks, buy assets or acquire a bricks and mortar business. Websites with prospective go for as low as a few hundred dollars, can you imagine that?

The big advantage of buying and selling websites is one doesn’t have to establish an audience and wait for the site to be indexed within search engines. Most webmasters, even those that don’t know their SEO from their XML, will understand the benefit of link exchanges. Even the most poorly managed sites should have some form of backlink network developed and return a result in the major search engines. It may not be a top ten search result but it will be a result ready for you to optimize and improve.

Jim

Thursday 11 December 2008

Buying A Website For Selling

If you are into the buying and selling website business, it is a must that you are an avid fan of the Internet itself. Spending hours surfing some websites and looking for prospect can give you an idea about the trend of buying and selling websites today.

Indeed, the search for a website to purchase almost always starts with a visit to a web site. Sometimes the prospective buyer has a very definite idea of the type of website wanted. But, often the website buyer is a first time buyer and is still in the formative or exploratory phase of the search. Many first time buyers wonder what kind of website is best for them to purchase. That’s a tough question to answer without some idea of the buyer’s resources, skills and needs.

If you are buying a website for selling, it is a must for you to determine the best website for that may work for you personally. If you are about to buy an existing website, here the some of the things that you should keep in mind:

- The number of days per week do you want to work because it will give you an approximate idea how much time you will be spending on the site;

- The need to have enough set of employees to know if you can handle the website and if you can maintain it according to general acceptance; and

- The ability to spend time on the website because this will determine if you can give enough time in maintaining, updating and supplying enough information as needed.

These are just some of the major questions that you can answer to initially have an idea in purchasing a website. Successful people in this field agree that open and honest answers will allow you to quickly narrow your search and save you much time and aggravation. Many websites offer buyer registration wherein there is a questionnaire which can help you narrow down your search and can help you find the website that you have been dreaming about or the types of websites that you think you can easily sell.

In the selection process, the most important thing to remember is familiarizing yourself about the “Opportunity Profile”. This is some sort of a report that will give information about the website that you’re interested in. Here, all the pieces of information that you need in helping you decide which site is the best for you can be found.

The common “Opportunity Profile” usually contains a brief description of the website you have in mind, a summed up information on the financial data in the span of its existence, and some of the additional facts like the size of employment and such. These pieces of information are needed to ensure that the buyer can have almost everything that he or she needs to know before buying a website.

Once you have reviewed the “Opportunity Profile,” there is a greater chance of you having a better understanding of the website—especially its business operations. You can access as many “opportunity profiles” as you want to in order to find the best one that would work for your own business. By accessing different “opportunity profiles,” you can review financial data and can even ask questions and other queries to the owner. Once you have listed all your questions, you can communicate with owner and can start the negotiations this early.

Communicating with the website owner can give you various benefits. For one, he or she can answer almost everything that you have in mind when it comes to the website. Aside from that, you can also get tips from him or her in buying and selling websites.

Hope you find the article useful,

Jim

Sunday 12 October 2008

Taking Your Site To The Next Level

Sometimes starting your online business and getting it going is easier than it looks, but sometimes it also becomes harder when you want to take yourself to the next level. So are you itching to get to the next level? Well you might need to be in on a few trade secrets to get yourself there.

It’s all about traffic. Much like real estate is about location; your success in the online world is all about traffic, traffic, traffic! If you are having issues with getting more traffic to your site you should investigate such things as search engine optimization, making sure you are up on Google’s ranks and getting some links with other sites that your potential clients may very well be visiting.

Like when you are setting up your site and when you are trying to take your site to the next level, you need to do a little research. We know that doing research is a little hard for the go getter entrepreneur types, but these things just have to be done. The world of online is ever changing and won’t be the same one day to the next. You might need to re-profile your customers, think about extra target markets or even try and reach a group you didn’t think were interested in your services.

Always keep on top of your field. Always know what the buzz is and stay ahead.
You should also be making sure that you site is as fresh as the internet itself.

People won’t continue re-visiting your site if you don’t update it... really what would the point be? If you feel like the information on your site can’t really change, then think about what kind of other content you could be adding to your site. Maybe you could start a blog? Perhaps newsletter would give your clients some thing else to see. You don’t want to bombard readers with useless information, but you do want to keep them interested. So be picky, but make sure you keep things fresh and updated.

You got into the online business world so you would never have to work again, right? Well sadly this is very rarely the case. This doesn’t mean that you have to spend all day every day on your computer, but you do need to be consistent. So if you work 5 hours a week make sure you do that every week. Don’t go between working a lot one week and never the week after.

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask other people for help. Internet Marketing is a huge field and there are plenty of forums dedicated to online business and IM, so take advantage. Most of the users of these kinds of forums are always happy to help and you might even find answers in a post that is already online.


Jim

Thursday 9 October 2008

Information Overload: How to Beat it

If you are new to Internet Marketing you will eventually come across the phrase Information Overload. Good chance it will also effect you! So below are some guidelines to help you cope.

In business you have to make choices and decisions. Some will be calculated careful decisions and some will be quick-thinking decisions. How to get started online though is a near impossible task with many newcomers suffering from a crippling case of information overload. There are so many ways of making money online, and so many different ways of approaching each strategy it becomes almost impossible for the discerning newcomer to work out just exactly what they are meant to do.

You can use adsense, or you can advertise with adwords, you can use Clickbank, or you can sell your own products. You can sell websites or make a ton of niche websites, you can blog, or do some article marketing or use a mixture of the two and you can sell video or audio courses, or maybe just ebooks. You can do any of the above and a whole lot more. Every newcomer can waste hours of their time reading forums and books telling them how “Guru A” made a fortune with “tactic A”. The average newcomer hears the stories of easy income and wants to get started on all the methods at the same time.

At this point two things, “analysis paralysis” or lack of focus hits them. Both of these ailments are online business career killers. Wasting too much time analysing likely outcomes and strategies leads to no action being taken whatsoever, and the business never gets off the ground. The guy behind the business never puts in the effort and never takes action. One excuse after another is rolled out until the wannabe Internet marketer goes broke or gets a job. (Getting or keeping a job maybe not so bad an idea by the way.)

Lack of focus is just as deadly. Taking action on several things at once, flitting from project to project and never seeing anything through is just as deadly to your online business. Someone who takes action, but sporadic unplanned poorly executed action is just as likely to fail. A lot of people in the forums love to say, “to succeed you just need to take action”. They couldn’t be any further away from being right.

The cure to the above diseases is focussed, well thought out action coupled with a healthy dose of analysis and improvements. Taking action and knowing what you are doing is the big cure in all of this. Choose one thing that you think you might enjoy or be good at. It might be building a list; it might be making money off adsense. Make a choice, and stick with it. Learn everything you can about what you are about to embark on and plan every step before you do it, and only after you have done that, take some action. It never stops there though, always evaluate the success of the action you have taken and constantly seek to improve it. This is the first step in building your online business successfully.


Jim

Tuesday 7 October 2008

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing happens to be a way of promotion that you use the internet for in order to advertise other businesses, as well as, your own business. You will get commission for a base amount for each time that you successfully advertise for another.

You will find that this is a form of revenue much like commission. You will be able to get a small profit for every time you get a customer interested in the goods and then make a sale for the goods. You will find that this is one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise.

Basically, you will pay practically nothing for simple advertising and promotion. You will find that the trend to use this type of marketing has become more popular since the late 1990’s. You will want to keep in mind that there are many major companies and corporations that use affiliate marketing.

Jim

More to follow........

Monday 6 October 2008

Getting Back To Basics

Getting Back To Basics

There is a pile of people that want to make money online. Why is it so appealing? Well earning money online seems to be easier, more passive and doesn’t involve the grind of the 9 to 5. The thing is that many of us get moving so quickly that we forget to plan. If you have been finding that you are not getting what you think you should be out of you online business, perhaps you need to get back to basics and make sure that you covered everything when you started up. Alternatively perhaps you are thinking about starting up and are not quite sure how to get going. Regardless you need to make sure that you have a plan and you try hard to stick to it.

The first thing you need is to choose your industry and then a niche. There simply is not much point selling a product or a service online, if someone already, and perhaps at a better price has done it. Think about a niche market that you can satisfy. Do some research and find out what people need and what you would be comfortable selling. Brain storm, and hopefully you end up with a product or a service that other people will use and want.

Once you have chosen what you are going to sell you need to get an idea of who you are selling to. Get to know your prospects and future clients. What kind of people will you be selling to? Is there anything that would make their purchasing easier for them? You need to identify their needs, demands, questions and problems, their buying power, online behavior and preferences. You can do this through research and trial and error. But try not to do too much trialing and have too many errors, because if your market is very niche, then you need make sure you don’t scare all your prospects off.


At this point you should build your website. If you want potential customers to trust your service and your online store and you are going to get that trust you will need to make sure your site looks professional. Security is of the utmost importance and so is displaying your knowledge in the particular field.

At this point you may find that you are getting a lot of visitors and aren’t spending much time processing orders :) . This is probably because people want to make sure your site is the real thing before they commit to buying from you. To make sure that you stay in touch with these customers / potential customers, you need to make sure that you have an optin form to collect their email addresses. Just doing this means you can communicate with them and also start building your customer base. Remember-the profit is in the list.

Then you also make sure that you advertise your products and have the backing of secondary sites talking about your products. You can try PPC advertising, article marketing, banner ads and paid links.

Jim

Thursday 2 October 2008

Four Free Traffic Sources

Traffic is a constant struggle for any online business person or marketer. I have constantly been looking for fast ways for getting consistent traffic. One of the big problems in getting traffic is that if you’re not careful you could run up a tab for thousands of dollars for some pretty poor advertising that gets you no where. When you are getting traffic, it had better be targeted. With that said, and that in mind, here are four free effective strategies I have been using to pull in the traffic.

Tip 1. Forums.

Find a forum in your niche and get posting some high value pure quality content that is going to entice your fellow forum members to get to know you and what you do. Don’t spam and never overly self-promote, just offer up some solid content on your niche, earn respect, and leave a link back to your website in your signature box. I find the greater the content (in quality and quantity) the greater number of visitors pouring into my site. The best bit about all of this, is that it can actually be good fun.

Tip 2. Videos

There are well over 200 video sharing websites out there that you can submit your video too, totally for free. Again, the trick is providing some upfront solid content that is going to lead your viewers into wanting to know more about what you are doing. Leave a link in the description box and let the traffic flow from there. There is nothing wrong in flashing your link up during the video either.

Tip 3. Articles

Article directories are excellent places for grabbing some good traffic. Informative, well written flowing articles can often lead to some high click-through rates of 50% and beyond. It is targeted traffic as well, with most people on article directories there for research purposes.

Tip 4. Twitter

Twitter has become incredibly powerful lately in terms of traffic, with some people making nine sales from a contact list of around sixty people. That conversion rate is excellent, considering not all sixty of those people would be clicking on the link. Social networking sites like this are awesome for generating some nice and easy traffic for free, and they are also a good place to meet people and make connections in your area or niche.

Do the above right, and provide some awesome content and you could easily get hundreds and thousands of visits to your site in a month or maybe a week. It is all about delivering great content, and setting yourself apart from your competitors. Free traffic does not have to be hard traffic, and free traffic is often the “buying traffic” provided you laser target your campaigns to your niche. Consistent, actionable, solid content is the key.

Jim

Wednesday 17 September 2008

How to Be an Affiliate Marketing Rockstar?

Have you been living the rat race life for quite a while and now you've grown weary of your manager breathing down your neck and the exhausting office politics? Or maybe you simply need an extra source of income? Whatever your reason may be, if you want some good decent income going your bank account's way, doing affiliate marketing can be a very viable path to follow.

What exactly is affiliate marketing? It is a technique posing as a business opportunity that lets those with entrepreneurial spirit explore the world of passive income through marketing products for other businesses. You can earn through commissions.

So if you think you'd like to give affiliate marketing a try, how do you ensure your success in this field? Here are some very important tips you should follow:

Choose your niche well

One of the most important factors to consider when doing affiliate marketing is choosing the best affiliate company or products to market. It can make or break your earnings. If you have a certain field that you're most interested in, the easier you can go through the process of deciding what affiliate program to join. So start making a list of your interests and see what affiliate programs come up from that list. This is very important!

Create a website that gets followed

One of the best ways to make the most bucks in affiliate marketing is through the creation of well-designed websites. Make sure that your site is easy to navigate and compels targeted visitors to complete an action; either to sign up under you as referrals or to purchase the products you are marketing. A quality landing page that has a call to action for your targeted visitors, to do what you need them to do, has excellent content, that can either be texts that reviews the product, a video tutorial that lets visitors learn how to benefit and use the product well and a very conspicuous opt-in form.

Use the power of gifts/freebies

Useful content is what you can use in making the word free mean money to you. When you offer free content, like say, free reports, when the right people get hold of this report, it can translate to more referrals or purchases.

Learn how to get targeted traffic to your site

You can't benefit from your well-designed website, no matter how good your content and freebies are if you don't have the right visitors. So how do you drive targeted visitors to your site? You can do off-page search engine optimization, also known as link building. Whether you use blogging, social networking and/or word of mouth/viral, to get the attention of the right people.

There are different ways on how you can successfully make people go to your site through this means - article marketing or the use of written content and submitting it to directories for publishers to pick it up and drive people to your site. You can set up and maintain social network accounts and let people know about your affiliate sites, or you can tap on your contacts - especially the new media savvy ones like popular bloggers and or community managers to spread the word about your sites.

If you follow all of the above mentioned advice, it will be hard for you to fail as an affiliate marketer.

Jim

Sunday 14 September 2008

5 Ways to Create Killer Info Products

5 Ways to Create Killer Info Products: Part 2

In “part 1” of this mini-two-part article series we looked at three really quick and easy ways to develop information products on a budget. The methods were fast and cheap, and capable of delivering high returns.

The next two methods take these techniques to the next level. Use these two methods below if you literally want to step your game up in your information product empire.

Method 4.

Membership websites.

People are always buying magazines, paying some times large subscriptions to receive a magazine in the post every month, brimming with new and interesting content. This same business model can be applied to the Internet and often is.

Imagine having a thousand people paying you twenty dollars a month. If you take a second to do the maths, that’s twenty thousand dollars a month and one-hundred and forty thousand dollars a year. Just from one membership site product! It is incredible. You can upload reports, videos, audio and edited, updated PLR content every month.

You can also add a forum in the member’s area so people are able to chat and talk about industry news etc. They are providing free content all the time they are chatting and using your forum! It is an incredible and simply powerful way of generating money from information products.

This business model draws on all the other methods described in these articles to really ramp up your income levels.

Method 5.

This is less of a way of creating an info product, and more of a way to profit from the info products you already have in your possession. If you think about it, all the above methods could pull you some serious cash in a matter of months. You could make a serious living by combining all the methods.

But if you are looking to get a big payday in the very near future, or you just need or want a windfall of cash now, then this method will help you profit wildly using all of the above techniques.

The secret is to build an empire of information products with the tactics and methods discussed in these two articles. Build yourself a mini-empire and then sell it on. Sell it even in pieces, or sell it all together.

In truth, you may find selling a membership site like the one described may earn you more money from a sale. Selling parts of your business off successfully could see your bank account loaded with cash in a very short amount of time. It is all about profiting from the work you have already done. Work smarter, never harder.

Jim

Saturday 13 September 2008

5 Ways to Create Killer Info Products

Here we go.........................


5 Ways to Create Killer Info Products: Part 1


This two part article series is going to get into the nuts and bolts of creating your own niche information products quickly and for nearly zero money down. If you are looking to make hands off passive income online, then creating your own information products is going to be a necessary skill.

We can’t all afford Ghostwriters to make our products for us, and sometimes, some of us can’t even write too well. This article has the solution to all those problems.

Method 1.

If you struggle to find inspiration when it comes to writing one of the quickest ways to find that inspiration and to structure a product is to a “private label rights” product and edit it. When doing this, make sure the rights you buy a long with the product allow to alter the product, and put your own name and brand on the front cover and website. Make sure you don’t copy any part of it word for word, and instead simply follow the structure of the product and write it in your own words. After a little time and research, you might find you have something new to add to the product as well. If you do all the better, add it and improve on it. I know many marketers who find PLR products very useful when it comes to finding templates for structuring a successful information product.

Method 2.

Again, this involves using PLR to help you structure a product. It is usually better if it is in the form of an ebook, with designated chapters and sections. All you do then is to create a video for each section. It can either be a screen capture video, or a video of you demonstrating something. For example if it is a product in the health and fitness niche, you might give a demonstration of the exercises described in the ebook, or you might show people how to make some of the meals from the diet plan in the product.

Alternatively, you may just create PowerPoint slideshows, and then capture them with a program such as Camtasia. I have even seen people reading out ebooks and information products and offering it as bonus audio or as an up sell after the product has been sold. It can really be that simple.

Method 3.

Find experts in your industry and interview them for an audio product or subscription podcast. You may some times have to pay them, or a commission for this, and you should always be upfront about what you are doing. Interviewing a few experts in your market or industry can create a killer info product, or a really enticing bonus. People absolutely love listening to this kind of stuff on their ipods, Mp3 players and other gadgets. Tap into that gadget culture and produce some killer audio!

The next two methods are absolutely killer ways of creating information products, and are not always obvious to a lot of marketers. You can learn all about them in part 2 of this article.

Jim

Saturday 21 June 2008

In The Beginning

There was marketing.

Now we have Internet Marketing.

Put on your seat belts and enjoy the ride.

Coming soon!!!!!

Jim