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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