The Complete Guide To Becoming A Successful Internet Entrepreneur

The Complete Guide To Becoming A Successful Internet Entrepreneur

Internet marketing has always been an exciting field. There is the challenge of coming up with new and creative ways to catch the attention of the public, hold that attention long enough to build up enthusiasm for a product line, and then motivate consumers to take that final step and purchase the good or service.

There is a lot of time and effort that goes into developing a solid marketing plan, and then even more resources required to actually get the plan rolling and producing results.

Like most fields, internet marketing follows some basic guidelines, based on what has worked in the past. Unlike some professions, marketing is a fluid type of career. As technologies change and the tastes of a fickle public shift, there is an ever increasing need to be alert to new and exciting ways to get the point across to people who are looking for just what you have to sell them.

Over the last few of decades, the concept of internet marketing has taken on a new prominence in the promoting and selling of goods and services. Originally seen as more or less an adjunct to traditional marketing methods, Internet marketing is now perceived as a legitimate and powerful form of marketing all its own. In many ways, Internet marketing has taken the old rules and rewritten them for a new age.

A great thing about Internet marketing is that you do not have to study the concepts of marketing for several years or obtain a degree in the subject before being ready to step out and begin a marketing career. In fact, it is possible to learn the basics in your home and during your spare hours.

Here are some things you should know about Internet marketing, what you need in order to get started, and some tips on how to find the right types of places in the cyber-world to look for important clues as to what you can effectively market.

Section #1. Developing the Right Mindset of a Successful Internet Marketer

While there are ways to self-teach yourself about how to be an effective Internet marketer, it is important to realize that you must get yourself in the right frame of mind if anything you learn is going to be of any help to your new career choice.

As is true with so many things in life, attitude can be the difference between a happy and successful Internet marketer and someone who adds one more example of failure to a long and growing list.

To that end, one of the first things you should do is develop a mindset that is positive. You will want to apply this approach from the moment you choose to begin learning about the concept of marketing on the Internet.

Telling yourself that there is nothing that you can’t learn to do and do well is the first step in creating the right approach. You will find this level of confidence to be tested from the very start of the process, so the sooner you develop this sort of “can-do” attitude, the better off you will be.

Unless you already have a marketing background, chances are that as you begin your studies, you will come across terminology that you are unfamiliar with.

For people who already doubt their basic ability to learn new things, this can be the obstacle that derails them before they ever get started. However, if you simply remind yourself that there is nothing you can’t learn, this will be nothing more than a small speed bump on your way to success.

Instead of despairing because you don’t understand a word, stop for a moment and use your access to the Internet to look up the meaning. Many search engines allow you to enter a command of “define” followed by a keyword or key phrase. This will allow you to find quick definitions for the word and provide you with links that go into more detail about the concepts and applications that are connected to that word.

Remember that you are not engaged in a competitive race. If you need to spend an hour or so researching marketing terms, then take the time and do it.

Getting comfortable with the lingo will only make it that much easier for you to read and assimilate the information that you use as part of your self-training process. You will thank yourself as you resume your studies and find that technical terms are no longer slowing you down.

Along with learning about Internet marketing, it is a good idea to get acquainted with basic Internet tools as well. There is a world of electronic marketing tools that are available today. Some of them are free, while others cost very little. There are some basic things that any Internet marketer will need to know and learn about using these tools.

Learning before you go out and start assembling the tools will help you keep the right attitude for two reasons. First, you will be able to side step grabbing the first tools you see and holding on to them as if they were the Holy Grail of marketing. While there are a lot of great support tools and software on the market today, there is also a lot of junk. Take a deep breath and step back for a moment.

Remind yourself that you are in an investigative mode. Make note of tools that pique your interest, but don’t leap on them until you have learned more about Internet marketing and how to apply the tools. Then you will be in a better position to evaluate what value a particular tool has in your marketing toolbox.

Second, you do not set yourself up to fail before you even begin. Like the old saying goes, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Engulfing yourself with a bunch of tools in a random fashion will only serve to confuse you and scatter your attention from your goals. Keep focused, keep moving forward. This will prevent you from getting bogged down in details that are not yet essential for you.

Above all, it is necessary that you meet every challenge with questions about how to turn the situation around and make it into an opportunity. Remember every challenge or problem is nothing more than an opportunity in disguise.

There will always be challenges, but an individual who is dedicated to the concept of becoming a top notch Internet marketer will see these situations as stepping stones to success, rather than a brick wall that cannot be climbed.

One thing to realize is that no matter how positive you try to be, there will be days when it seems like nothing you study is making sense. Recognize that you will have those days, but also remind yourself that every successful person from the beginning of time has also had them.

When you feel the frustration level rising to the point that it threatens to undermine your positive mindset to your marketing studies, it is time to take a short break. Push back the chair, turn off the computer, and get out of the house. Go to a movie, take a walk, have coffee with friends. The point is to change your location, the view around you, and the focus of your attention for a short period of time.

Giving yourself this short break will do wonders for your cognitive abilities. Chances are very good that when you return to your computer and pull up your study documents, things will make a great deal more sense.

Remember that you can be whatever you want to be. All you need to do is take the time to equip yourself with the knowledge and skills to reach your goals. This may not happen overnight, but if you keep your chin up, work hard, and assimilate what you need, your confidence in your ability will grow and you will get where you want to go.

Section #2. Fundamental Tools All Internet Marketers Must Have

As your studies will reveal, there are some basic tools that will become essential components in the efforts of any successful Internet marketing plan. Laying this solid foundation means you do not necessarily have to reinvent the wheel with each new campaign, although you should always be prepared to tweak things a bit to fit the needs of the product or service that you want to market.

Here are some things to put in place in order to do a great job with your marketing plans.

First, you need to get a website. Period. No discussions or prevarication allowed. The simple fact of the matter is that people trust entities that they perceive as being “real” businesses. You may be creating your marketing empire from the garage or a spare bedroom, but if you have a real website that people can visit, bookmark, and share with their friends and family, you will have the look and feel of an established business.

Freelance writers are an excellent example of this sort of thing. While some well-paying markets are always looking for new writers, they tend to gravitate toward writers that have a website, complete with writing samples, contact information, and content that indicates that a true business is working there, not just a sideline or a hobby.

The same is true with marketing. Sure, you can post ads all over the place, but if there is nothing that builds up confidence in the permanency of your business, all those efforts will yield little or no return.

The good news is that websites are relatively inexpensive these days, and many vendors will even have online tools that will help you create a nice looking site. They supply the outlines, color schemes, and the basic layout. You supply the content and the images and graphics. It is possible to have your website up and running over a weekend, making it possible to you to use this as a basic part of your marketing plan.

One of the first issues to address in creating a website is your domain name. One of the most common mistakes people make is trying to be quirky or cute with the name. Forget quirky and cute, unless you can combine those qualities with a domain name that is short and easy to remember. Keep in mind that the longer your domain name happens to be, the harder it will be for people to remember it.

Sure, they can always bookmark your domain name in their Favorites, but what good does that do when they are casually talking with a friend about your site? Whether we like to admit it or not, the golden time for word of mouth to occur is during that personal encounter. If the domain name can be rattled off with ease, chances are much better that a new prospect will be directed to your site.

The simple fact is that many people may promise to send a link to someone later, but it gets lost in the shuffle of daily life. Make things easier for you and for people interested in your site. Employ the old Toastmasters counsel of KISS (keep it simple stupid). Life will be better for everyone involved.

Next, give the structure of your domain name a great deal of consideration. Are there ways to incorporate keywords in the domain name that will be easy to remember? For example, if you plan on creating a website that is devoted to the marketing of your own line of greeting cards, try to work in “greeting” or “cards” into the domain name. Keep in mind that the name of your company may or may not be the best choice for the domain name.

While we all like to see our names pop up when we look around the Internet, your focus is on the products you have to market, not on the wonderful name you have chosen for your business. If it seems that creating an easy to remember domain name that calls to attention to your products and services will mean forgoing the use of your company name in the URL, then bite the bullet and go ahead. Keep in mind you can put your company name in all sorts of places on the actual website.

This helps accomplish two things. First, visitors will associate the URL with the types of products you are marketing. This is always a plus, as it makes it much easier for the consumer to remember and pass on your information to other people.

Second, it helps to make it much easier for your target audience to find your website during engine searches. The more pointed and focused your domain name happens to be, the more effective this marketing tool will become in your quest for success.

Another important aspect is making the best use of your title tag on the front page of your website. One fatal mistake that is often made is using this space to do a welcome message for the site.

While it may fit in nicely with greeting people as they come into your home, it is completely unnecessary on your website. The presumption is that anyone who visits the site is welcome, so there is no need to waste space stating the obvious.

Instead, use that space as a means of spelling out in common terms that you have to offer. Keep in mind that we live in a society where people want instant gratification. That means you probably only have five to ten seconds to compel your visitor to stick around and read a little more.

Use that title tag to entice people to your site, and you will probably find that you show up higher on many search engines, as well as make better use of the space on your web pages.

While it is always nice when customers come to you, the fact is you will starve if you take the attitude that your wonderful website is going to have people lining up to order whatever you are marketing. If the right people don’t know your website exists, it will take forever for you to build up a steady clientele. Among the tools that will help you be a success is finding out where to market to your potential customer base.

Over the years, a virtually limitless endless number of new tools and resources have been made available to Internet marketers. One of the most common is the email list. Approach this type of resource with a great deal of caution. The fact is that far too often, these ready to use lists are not qualified.

A qualified email list will only include email addresses that have opted to be a part of the listing, and want to receive emails that have to do with certain products and services.

Far too often, lists are sold that include nothing more than a bunch of email addresses that were harvested off the World Wide Web. Using an unqualified list results in the creation of what is known as spam, or unsolicited emails. No responsible Internet marketer uses unqualified contact lists.

An unqualified list can hurt you in two ways. First, you have to pay good money for that list. If you purchase a list of ten thousand email addresses, and all but a hundred of them come back as undeliverable, you have effectively wasted resources that could have been used to better advantage.

An even more severe consequence of utilization of an unqualified email list is that your emails actually do get through to consumers, who get bent out of shape because they did not want the email in the first place. In a short time, you may find your company name or URL showing up on consumer driven spam reporting websites, which will provide the type of publicity that you do not want to get.

If you must use email as part of your marketing scheme, then make sure the list is qualified. However, don’t expect grand results. That same qualified email list that you just purchased was probably sold to five other people within three seconds of your purchase.

Direct email campaigns can be costly, and the promise of return is going to be small. Approach this tool with caution, and with an eye to whether it will really help your business.

Of course, over time you can build up your own qualified list of email subscribers who want to receive product notices, special offers, and other sorts of marketing information. Adding the ability to opt-in to an email listing that is maintained by you alone is a great way to build up a list that you can rely on.

Make sure people understand that you will not share or sell the list to any third party, and that they have the option of always opting out of the mailing list if they change their minds. This type of courtesy will enhance your reputation as a professional, while also providing you with a targeted direct email audience that wants to see your advertising.

Other online resources are available to market your products and services. Research and find message boards, online yellow pages, business associations, want ads at chamber of commerce websites, and other locations that will welcome the presence of your contact information and an ad about your business.

Many of these are free, although some may have a modest fee. In some cases, you may be able to find a website that has to do with an industry type that would benefit from your product or service and arrange for a permanent ad on the site.

One helpful tool is to get a firm idea of the type of customer that would be interested in what you are marketing. For years, traditional marketing has relied on a tool that is known as profiling. Essentially, you want to create an image of your typical customer, including all sorts of details about their lives, likes and dislikes.

For example, would your product be more attractive to single people or persons in a committed relationship and/or married? Does your product appeal more to persons who are just starting out, perhaps in their twenties?

Maybe your product has more of an appeal to people who are in the middle years of life, or to persons who are retired. Will people living in metropolitan areas tend to gravitate toward your offering, or will it have more appeal for persons who live in rural areas?

Asking yourself these important questions about what type of people are most likely to be interested in your product, and why they would be interested, will help you in a couple of ways.

First, you can seek out marketing methods that focus on effectively reaching people who fit the profile you developed. This means you will spend more time getting your product and contact information in front of people who are highly likely to take the time to learn about what you have to offer.

Second, this profile can form the basis for your marketing content. Why waste time talking about the big city when your services are geared toward people who live in a small town? Profiling helps to give your campaign focus, because it opens you up to the possibility of talking points that will grab the attention of the right people.

There is one thing that you should remember about advertising online. What worked very well a few years ago has become commonplace and somewhat stale in some instances. Simply put, there are electronic advertising methods that are not all that effective anymore.

Still, some of these methods may be effective, depending on the customer you are trying to reach. The key thing to remember about online advertising is to not lock yourself into one method and exclude all the others. Investigate your options carefully and always have at least three or four strategies taking place at the same time.

If you can’t identify at least three of these methods that will allow you to reach your target audience, something is wrong. Either you are being too narrow with your basic client profile, or you need to do some more research on available marketing options.

As a last tool in your arsenal, make yourself available. Businesses are not built based on your website and smart advertising alone. Sometimes, people will want to talk with you about what you have to offer. This means you should always make sure you have contact information readily available to customers and prospects.

A branded email, rather than one of those free ones, sends a clear message of being a professional and makes you accessible. Including a phone number if possible is also a good approach. However, make sure it is a business line, and not your home phone. Prospective clients are not likely to appreciate your three-year-old picking up the line. Put in a second phone line and make sure it is always answered with the name of your business.

As a third option, set up a message board as part of your web presence. People can interact with you in that manner as well, plus it allows happy customers to share what they liked about your company, your service, and the products they purchased. Being accessible and responsive to queries by customers and prospects will do a lot to enhance your professional status with the general public.

Section #3. How to Conduct Research and Uncover Profitable Online Niches

Unless you already have a great idea on the table, chances are you will need to spend some time looking into what types of products and services that you can successfully market. In order to accomplish this, you will need to conduct some investigation into what is already being offered in the way of Internet marketing campaigns, and where you might be able to slip in and fill a niche somewhere in that great big business picture.

Here are some tips on where to find information about niche markets that might be desirable for you, as well as how to find places to launch your marketing efforts.

If you are starting fresh and looking for your first idea for an effective marketing campaign, the first place to begin is with yourself.

What do you like? What types of products are important in maintaining your standard of living? What types of services of goods would make life a lot easier for you, if you had access to them? How much are you willing to pay for these goods or services?

Spending some time searching your own wants and needs may yield some interesting concepts for niches that you can investigate online, and see just how much attention is given to those sorts of products.

Another method is to simply sit down with a piece of paper and make a list of ten subject that some to mind without going into any really deep thought processes. The list will probably be somewhat random, although thinking of one subject may immediately draw your mind to a related subject.

Don’t fight the flow or spend any time second-guessing the subjects that come to mind. Write them down and don’t waste time thinking they are silly or inappropriate. There will be plenty of time to evaluate the subjects later.

As a third source of inspiration, go out with friends, but take along a small note-book. As different subjects up in conversation and catch your ear, make a quick note. A one- or two-word phrase should do the trick nicely. The idea here is to get some ideas for markets to explore, based on what types of issues come to mind among people you know.

While none of these methods are particularly scientific, they can yield some interesting topics to research. Don’t reject any of the ideas out of hand, until you spend some time online and see where the subjects lead you.

Concepts that may seem completely off the wall or worth absolutely nothing may turn out to be gold mines. If research indicates that the subject is a dead end, then at least you have eliminated one possibility and saved yourself the trouble of pursuing that option at a future date. On the other hand, you may be surprised with what you find.

Using these lists of words or subjects that you have compiled, take to the Internet and start doing some digging around. The first thing you want to ascertain is how much interest there is associated with that word or phrase. One of the easiest ways to get a handle on this sort of thing is to use word tracking search engines online. There are several well-known ones that are very easy to use.

All you basically do is type in your word or phrase and let the program search the entire web for results. What will happen is that the system will return a list that contains not only incidences of the word or phrase that you entered, but also expanded phrases that include that same word or phrase. You also get an idea of how many sites around the Internet contain text with that word.

This can be a great way to qualify the subjects and see if there is a large amount of interest on a topic/subject. A lot of hits means that you may want to look further into that subject as a possible foundation for a marketing campaign that is related to that word or phrase.

For example, if one of the subjects that came up on your lists happened to be “dog,” and you find that the word returns close to a million hits on its own, and then you may have found a broad subject to explore. Looking down the list, you may find that “dog house” and “dog training” returned a sizable number of hits, as did “dog treats.” With just a little digging, you have uncovered three potential services or products to market.

Moving one step further, you can explore each of these marketing subjects a little deeper by clicking on the word or phrase and canvassing the actual returns. Here, you may begin to see a pattern among the hits that bubble to the surface of the search engines.

This can help you to further refine your idea of what to market. For example, if you notice there are a lot of these that have to do with making a product at home, you may begin to think in terms of marketing home assembly kits related to that subject. Perhaps the home assembly requires the use of certain tools.

You may be able to set up a marketing campaign to sell those tools as a competitive price. Perhaps you happen to have some expertise with building those sorts of home projects. Put your knowledge to work, create some easy to follow plans, and market them to do it yourself types.

Keep in mind that if you see a phrase with relatively few hits, that does not automatically eliminate it from the running. For example, if you notice that the return for “dog houses online” only yielded two hundred hits, take a moment and look at the actual title tags. You may find that people are looking to buy kits for doghouses online, and that becomes the focus of your new marketing campaign.

One important thing to keep in mind is that you need to try this technique on multiple word tracking programs, since the search criteria used by each system may be a little different. For example, some programs will return an average number of hits per day, while others will focus on the average hits per month. Also, the Internet is an ever-growing monster. If you are not quite sure about the potential of a marketing idea, but do not feel comfortable abandoning it completely, stick it back for future reference. A year or two down the road, the results may be very different.

One thing to avoid is trying to repeat the same old tired process that is already being used by hundreds of thousands of other Internet entrepreneurs. Just as with brick and mortar businesses, competition can be fierce on the Internet. What you want is to look for a market that still has some potential to grow, so you are not constantly engaged in exchanging a limited bank of customers with a thousand other marketers.

Choosing to zero in on topics that appear to have some widespread interest on the Internet, but don’t seem to have much in the way of marketing sites that actually address those topics specifically is a very good bet when it comes to establishing yourself in a niche market.

Of course, there are all sorts of E-books and software programs that are supposedly geared toward finding profitable niche markets. While some of them do contain a few good ideas, the fact is that free resources on the Internet can often yield the same ideas, and sometimes approaches that are just as good, if not better.

Before you spend any money on any type of products, check around various websites for free ideas on finding niche markets, as well as visiting the free word tracking websites. Chances are you will find plenty of information that will keep you busy for quite some time, and will likely provide you with at least a half dozen solid leads on potential niche markets to launch your marketing efforts.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as an idea that is too crazy to look into. You may find that going with something that is completely off the wall will lead to some interesting concepts of where you can fill a need and encounter a relatively small amount of competition at first.

Let your mind go wild, then use online resources to qualify those wild ideas. In a short time, you may be well on your way to launching your first successful Internet marketing campaign.

Guide to Setting up Your
First Business Website

Section #1. How to Determine What You Want to Sell

No matter what anyone tells you, the first step you need to take if you want to set up your business’s website is to first determine the goal for what you want to use your website for.

If you already have a brick and mortar business and you are planning on expanding its reach to the internet, then you are off to a good start. On the other hand, if you are starting from scratch, and a business website is going to be your sole moneymaker, then you have a lot of work ahead of you.

Because there are more steps involved for those who are looking to make an online business from scratch, we will start at the beginning. Your first step when creating a business website is to brainstorm what it is exactly that you want your business to provide.

A sales or retail website will look different than a marketing website which will look different than an informational website, and they will all look different than a web application. Your primary concern should be to first determine a genre for your business’s website. Everything else will fall into place once you have the basic ideas laid out for your site.

Each type of business site has its own pros and cons. For example, a sales or retail website will have a lot of pictures, sporadic text that is mostly used to describe each product you are selling in a sentence or two, and a shopping cart.

These sites feature easy navigation and are very user friendly, but they are more difficult to get recognized by search engines and normally do not take advantage of advertising. Affiliate programs can be used, however, for extra traffic.

On the other hand, a marketing website is designed to sell one product and one product only. You’ve probably seen quite a few marketing websites out there attempting to sell you get rich quick schemes, web content, and handy Photoshop plug-ins to make web design easier.

These sites are the easiest to design and build, feature mostly text with a few images interspersed, and contain a simple “Buy now” button. They are designed around one product and one product only, making them optimized for search engines and perfectly positioned to make money through advertising and affiliate programs.

The informational business website is next. These are sites designed to inform about a business, but not necessarily sell anything directly. Think of some of the biggest companies in the world: Sony, Motorola, Canon, Toyota, Chevrolet, etc. While you can buy items on some of their corporate websites, they are primarily designed to inform the consumer.

By informing the consumer about your brand or store, you can help get the word out about your products and increase your sales dramatically. These websites, while they can work for anyone who has a well-defined product to sell, are better for companies and small businesses that have a nationwide presence.

In other words, it is not a good idea to make an informational website for your local business when you will only get a few site visitors a month – if that. Do not confuse these informational websites with Google AdSense sites. The two are distinct.

Finally, if you really want to make a name for yourself on the Internet, you can consider taking a route that few dare to tread. You could create a web-based application that functions like a traditional program but is located on the internet. These programs can often give you a channel to make a significant amount of money, if people find the applications you create useful.

However, they do require a lot of perseverance, a very original idea, and a good team of programmers who want the product to succeed. While a web application-based business is a fantastic way to make a lot of money, it is not recommended for those who are new to the business arena.

Now that you know the four basic types of business websites, it is up to you to choose the one that will most work for your goals. You do not, and should not, decide right now which type of site is the best for you.

Take your time, do some research, and make sure that you talk everything through with your business partners and/or your immediate family members who may be counting on you to make the right decision. When you have a general idea of which type of business website you want to construct, and what product(s) you want to sell, you can move on to step two.

Section #2. Do You Really Need Your Own Business Website?

If you want to sell items using the internet, you may not even need your own business website. There are a variety of ways you can go if you want your products to reach the masses, but you do not want to deal with the time and money expenditures that building a business website will entail.

These different options could save you ample time in getting your business up and running quickly. Then, if you decide that your business has become profitable enough, you can take your sales to your own website and retain all the profits.

The most common third-party company to use when peddling your wares is Ebay. By using the online auction powerhouse, many people have found it fantastically easy to make quite a bit of money. However, selling items on Ebay does not come cheap, as the company does charge quite a bit of money for each completed transaction. Do not despair, as you can still find it incredibly easy to set up your business and sell your products using an Ebay store.

Setting up your Ebay storefront is no more difficult than simply creating an account with the online marketplace. Although it is not good practice, you will have to also give some financial information to Ebay when you sign up, so it is a good idea to dedicate a bank account, a credit card, or a PayPal account to Ebay. Treat your Ebay store like a business and it will be easier to keep track of all your transactions.

You can start selling immediately with Ebay. Just choose an item you want to list and place it on Ebay. Aside from the tools that Ebay gives you just for being a member, there are a number of fancy listing tools available for low prices for all operating systems. Some of them are even free. No matter the cost, if you want your eBay store to look professional, you will want to invest in one of these third-party selling tools.

While Ebay is easy to use and a very effective way of getting your products to a marketplace of millions from around the world, there are a few drawbacks. Ebay takes its cut on every sale you make. You will have to pay listing fees and selling fees as well as PayPal fees on purchases people make through the financial service. This can add up over time, so while Ebay is a great place to get your business started, it is not recommended that you stick with Ebay as your sole source of income for longer than a year or two.

If Ebay does not sound like it would be the proper marketplace for your products, you may want to consider teaming up with retail giant Amazon.com. There are two ways to use Amazon to your advantage – selling your used items in an Ebay style manner or creating your own Webstore on Amazon. You should decide which method to use based on your predicted sales volume as well as how much of a reputation you want to establish for yourself.

Selling one product at a time on Amazon can make you some money, but it is not exactly an online business website. If you want to go full bore and make as much profit as you can, then the Amazon Webstore is what you should focus your attention towards. The Amazon Webstore affiliation will allow you to sell your products right alongside of Amazon’s products, allowing you to sell your goods to over sixty million potential customers.

Just like setting up a store with Ebay, an Amazon Webstore is a cakewalk compared to designing your own business website. But there are monetary drawbacks involved as well–drawbacks that may deter you from engaging in a financial partnership with the retail giant.

While you can build your own Amazon Webstore using Amazon’s easy to use storefront designer, it will cost you sixty dollars per month in hosting fees plus seven percent of each sale goes into Amazon’s pocket.

All in all, if you think you can move enough merchandise on Amazon’s site, this is really the business alternative that you should consider. It offers roughly the same exposure as Ebay and slaps you with far less fees so that you can make more profit.

Finally, if you are considering marketing or publishing as an online business, you may want to look at what Lulu.com has to offer. As the leader in online self-publishing and all things print, Lulu is the place to go if you are attempting to make your fortune with art or the written word.

From calendars to books to music, if it is artsy, it’s on Lulu. All you have to do is come up with a creative idea, get Lulu to produce it, and then you get some profits based on what sells on their site. You can even take your published works to an Amazon or Ebay store for even more exposure.

While the market at Lulu is limited, it is the best place to get discovered if you are willing to put in the time and effort to write a book, create some art, or even record a song. Even if you are not into making one of these activities into a full-on business, Lulu provides you with a great way to make some money on your hobbies.

Like photography? Make a calendar. Have an opinion on the presidential candidates? Write a short book and have Lulu publish it. Play in a garage band? Record your songs and Lulu will sell your CD for you.

Although there are plenty of other programs that you can enroll in if you are looking to establish an online business without making your website right away, the above listed companies offer three of the largest resources for you to start selling right away. Their fees are affordable, their web traffic is huge.

They can offer you everything you want about an online store except for your own domain name and full control over your profits. If you want to be completely in charge of your business, you need to create your own business website.

Section #3. Designing Your Business Website

At this point, you should have an idea of what you want your website to be and what you will be selling on your website. Most of you will have chosen to make a sales, retail, or marketing website, so the rest of this article will be dedicated to those who decided to go in that direction.

The rest of you, consider investing in a high quality web designer and an even higher quality web developer – you will need all of the help you can get in making your own web application or informational business website.

Designing a website is actually a very simple process, even if you have never done such a project in the past. You really have two choices at this point, as far as the website design is concerned. Build the site yourself or hire someone else to do the heavy lifting for you.

Obviously, building the site from scratch by yourself is going to be the more cost-effective solution, but if you have no prior experience or you need your website up as soon as possible, hiring a professional may be your better option. No matter which route you take, there are a few tips that you need to consider if you want to make sure that your website looks exactly as you want it to.

Whether you are building your business website yourself or if you have hired someone to do it, you need to make a rough template for how you want your site to look. If design is not your thing, there are plenty of resources out there that can help you get started. Look at websites like CSS Beauty, Design Snack, and Smashing Magazine for all the inspiration that you could ever possibly need. These sites highlight some of the best in web design and are perfect for anyone who is having a difficult time coming up with some ideas.

When you have settled on a basic web design for your business website, you need to come up with a color scheme that would work well with what you’re trying to accomplish. A sales website, for example, will make use of a lot of whitespace and only a basic palette of three or four colors so as not to be too hard on the viewer’s eyes.

On the other hand, a marketing website will use big blocks of text with highlighted words here and there, often making use of brilliant colors like reds, blues, and yellows to attract the reader’s eye to important points. If you are having trouble coming up with colors, check out sites like ColorBlender to help you choose the best colors for your site.

Once the basic template and the color scheme have been decided on, you need to make the decision to build your site yourself or hire someone else to do it. If you hire someone, all you have to do is pay them the appropriate amount and submit your early designs and color choices.

The web designers will do the rest and you’ll pay them the full amount on completion of the project. Go ahead and skip to Step Three if you are planning to take the web designer route. Those of you, who want to go it alone, keep reading.

Section #4. Part II: Designing Your Own Website

Although designing your own website is not the most difficult thing you will ever do, it is fairly time consuming. However, when you have finished with the design, you will have a great feeling about yourself – that you actually created something yourself, something that you can be proud of, something that will hopefully make you a lot of money in the long term.

Since you already have your template sketched out and your color palette chosen, the only prep work that you need before you get started on your site’s design is to download the necessary tools that will help you along the way.

You will need an image editor for creating the pictures for the site, a “What You See Is What You Get” site editor to design the website, and a text editor to modify the code as you see fit. If you’ve got the money, purchase a copy of the Adobe CS3 Web Design package which contains Photoshop, Dreamweaver and a bunch of other useful program.

Otherwise, for image editing, consider using the GIMP or Paint.NET on Linux or Windows, respectively, or Pixelmator on Mac OS X. Use KompoZer as a free WYSIWYG editor on Linux or Windows. Finally, consider using a text editor like Notepad ++ for Windows or TextMate for Mac OS X. Also, download an FTP client like FileZilla so that you can easily upload your site to a server when everything is completed.

Even though the tools will help you quite a bit on your quest to code your own business website, they will not be able to do all the work for you. You still must put in quite a bit of input, and it helps if you have reference material to guide you.

So, your best bet is to look up as much information online as you possibly can. Read tutorials and guides that can help you learn XHTML for coding the site’s framework, CSS for giving the site some style, PHP for some of the site’s functions, and JavaScript for the site’s inner workings and other various functions.

It may take a week, it may take a month, but when your website is finally finished, you should use your FTP client to upload it to a server and make sure that it works perfectly well.

Also, at this time, it is of the utmost importance that you check your website in a variety of web browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer (6 and 7), and Safari. All web browsers display pages differently, so you want to be sure that your site looks just as good in IE as it does in Firefox and Safari.

Section #5. How to Take Advantage of Advertising to Find Traffic and Make Extra Money

Advertising is a great way to make money online. It does have its drawbacks, however. The main problem with advertising, especially if your internet business is merchandise related, is that you end up cheapening your store, making it look untrustworthy and making you look as though you are more interested in making money than selling high quality goods that your customers would want to purchase.

For this reason and this reason alone, it is a good idea to not use ads on retail, sales, or marketing website where you are trying to gain a potential customer’s trust so that they will stay with you long enough to make a purchase. After all, if you have a successful store, you will be able to make more than enough money and advertisements on your site will not be of any real value to you.

However, there is one way that you can take advantage of advertising and turn advertisements to your advantage. Instead of placing ads on your site, you should instead contact advertising sites, blogs, and other informational websites in your chosen niche.

By contacting advertising sites like Google AdWords, for example, you can arrange to have your advertisements displayed on websites around the globe. It can add up to be costly, but it is a very effective way of getting your name out. And any one click could be a sale.

Alternatively, if you contact blogs or other informational websites, you can see if they offer advertising space. Buying advertising space on a site in your chosen niche can bring in a lot of traffic, but it can also be costly depending on who you do business with. For example, an ad on a big name blog may cost thousands of dollars a month while an ad on a smaller, less developed site may only be a few dollars a week.

The best way to take advantage of advertising on other sites to increase your traffic is to set aside a particular budget each month for how much you want to spend for advertising. Keep this budget at a set amount for several months and see how far you can make your money go. If you are not seeing any results with your advertisements, then move on to another advertiser or up the amount you are spending.

The important things to look for are high click through and conversion rates. Are people clicking on your ads? Are those ads converting to sales? Just because thousands of people see your ads does not mean that you are making any money. Find your weakest advertisers and move on to something that will give you more bang for your buck.

If you find that you are uncomfortable in dealing with blog and website owners, you should consider finding advertising space with the big corporations. Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and a variety of other big-name companies all offer advertising in some way or another. You pay their fees in either a pay per click or a pay per impression manner and your ads are hosted on websites across the globe. Advertising with one of these big companies is sure to net you a good amount of traffic, but the conversion rate may be somewhat low at first. Try upping your budget if you’re not noticing any big sales from AdWords, et al, visitors and try as hard as you can to get the best keywords for your niche. Don’t cheap out and you won’t lose out on customers.

But what if you want to design a business website without selling anything? There are millions of people doing just that: selling advertising space instead of any real product. Just look at sites like LifeHacker, TechCrunch, and ICanHasCheezburger. These are sites that are making a fortune on advertising revenue alone. They’re not selling any products, just web space that is viewed by thousands of people every day.

All it takes is a great idea, the desire to work hard to build your advertising site from scratch, and quite a bit of persistence. This is not an overnight type of deal, you really have to work to make a lot of money through advertising, so be sure that you know exactly what you are getting into before you begin the process of making your own ad funded website.

When you are sure that this is the direction that you want your business to go, you need to decide what kind of ad based website you want to make. Blogs, while the most popular, are not the only way to make money through advertising. You could run a news blog or website that provides a service to your users. Those are just two of the hundreds of different options available for someone who is looking to make it rich through advertising.

Making it big through advertisements is not based on just a good idea, though; you have to execute it properly as well. You need a good, easy to read web design. You need to make sure that your ads blend seamlessly with the overall design of your website.

You need to have good server space that will not go down on you during even the slightest load. You need to be dedicated to your project. Eat while working on it, drink while working on it, and dream about it when you sleep. Only then can you hope to play with the big boys and really get your name out there in the advertising world.

To make your site profitable, you will have to bring in tens of thousands of people each day. A daunting task, but if you dedicate yourself to your goal and you work towards it every day, it will eventually happen for you.

Section #6. How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engine Traffic

Search engine optimization is a booming field, and it is easy to see why. As an online business, the bulk of your customers will come from search engines. Therefore, you want your business website to be optimized for search engine traffic.

While most people would suggest that you hire a professional for a task that seems to be rather difficult at first glance, there is nothing to search engine optimization, or SEO, that you cannot do yourself. It is much easier than designing your own website.

Far easier than finding resources to send traffic your way. And certainly, easier than getting each person who visits your site to buy one of your products.

The easiest way to achieve search engine optimization is to make sure that you have informational keywords on every page of your site. From your home page to a product buried deep within your site that very few people outside of search engine spiders will ever view – everything needs to advertise your site to search engines. Sounds like a daunting task? Well, it is time consuming, but with a little practice, you will be well on your way to achieving a search engine optimized site.

Nobody, except for the original designers, knows exactly how search engines work, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There are a few key aspects of search engine optimization, however, those are well documented and can help you get a higher rank in each and every search provider, from Google to Ask to Yahoo! The first step you need to take is to eliminate any duplicate content that you may have on your website.

This means that if you have two products that are exactly the same but differs in color or some other minute characteristic, and then put them on the same page. If you want a search engine optimized site, make sure that there is no duplicate content out there on your site. Having such content appear multiple times on a search engine is a great way to get your page rank lowered and lose quite a bit of natural search engine traffic.

The other search engine optimization technique that will yield you a much higher page rank is to make sure that everything on your site is maximized for your keyword selection. You should take full advantage of using Meta tags in your HTML such as the keyword tag and the description tag on every one of your pages. You can add in a huge number of keywords, so make sure that you get everyone that corresponds to your business website.

Also, take advantage of the description and other tags associated with the images on your website; they are valuable places to introduce your keywords. And simply because you are focusing on the underlying aspects of your website that are only seen by search engines, don’t forget to place keywords inside of as much viewable text as you can. Doing so will really boost your search engine placement.

Finally, to rank higher in search engines, you need a variety of backlinks to your website. These are other sites that are linking to your website. Google and other search engines use this information to help determine the significance of a website, so go out there and see if you can entice some people to add a link to your site somewhere on their own. Keeping with this suggestion for search engine optimization, keep reading onto step five.

Section #7. Finding Traffic in Unlikely Places

So you’ve now learned how to dig up traffic by advertising and through search engine optimization – but there are still two other ways which you can use to bring more people to your website. While they are a bit more unorthodox, they do work and can help you gain popularity in your chosen niche.

No matter what product you are selling, what program you are marketing, or how you are planning on making your money in the long term, these two methods can easily be used to drum up the traffic and the conversion rates that your website needs to survive.

The first way to find traffic in unlikely places is to contact webmasters of other sites and see if they are interested in sharing links with you. This will help you gain credibility with the search engines and acts as a “free” advertisement.

First, don’t even bother asking a site that is far more popular than yours to trade links with you. They won’t do it, so don’t even ask. If you are unsure of whether a site is more popular than yours, simply check the Alexa data for all websites or the Technorati data if you are exchanging links with a blog.

Second, mind your manners when you are asking to trade links with another webmaster. Think of this as a business deal and act accordingly. Do not use slang in your email to him or her, and use proper etiquette.

Also, explain what you are selling, why you want to exchange links with the webmaster you are corresponding with, and how you think it could benefit both of your sites. A clear and concise letter is often what can help seal the deal in a partnership such as this.

Another great, and mostly unused, way to drive traffic to your site is to offer an affiliate program. Affiliate programs are perfect for those of you with sales, retail, or marketing websites. You should fully take advantage of creating an affiliate program if your business website warrants it.

For those of you who are unaware, an affiliate program is simply a program that you run as a webmaster which allows other websites to link back to products on your website. If a person purchases a product from your website by using an affiliate’s link, the affiliate gets a small percentage of the purchase.

This type of program makes you happy because you got the money from the sale. It makes your affiliate happy because he or she got money for doing practically nothing aside from placing a link on his site. And it makes the customers happy because they ended up with the item they wanted.

While these are just two different ways to drive traffic to your business website, there are many more techniques which you should consider using. A quick search on your favorite search engine can turn up countless resources for information for those of you looking to establish your own online business.

Furthermore, it may be in your interest to check out some books relating to online businesses, search engine optimization, and some of the other topics discussed in this article. Good luck with your business.

How to Use Words that Sell

Introduction

One of the most powerful tools in your sales arsenal is the informed and judicious use of words and terminology. Words have the ability to entice a prospect, hold the attention of the potential buyer, and ultimately result in the establishment of a relationship that not only results in a sale today, but helps to create other sales activity in the future.

At the same time, words have the power to turn away potential clients, make people feel unappreciated, and ultimately lead to not only the loss of a sale today, but also the loss of sales opportunities in the future.

The effective salesperson knows the importance of choosing the right verbiage to present both the seller and the product. Whether in verbal communications or in the creation of written documents such as sales brochures, letters and emails, or any other type of promotional materials, using the right words in the right places is key to being successful at the task of sales.

Here are some ideas that will help you hone your sales vocabulary, and enhance your ability to utilize words that ultimately lead to productive client relationships.

Section #1. How to Write Words that Sell in Your Copy

Using verbiage that will result in sales opportunities is important in any environment. This is especially true when composing sales copy for a website, an online press release, or an electronic advertisement. There are several factors to keep in mind when writing the text for your web copy. Here are some of the most important things to keep in mind.

First, it is imperative to keep your target audience in mind when composing the web copy. This will often mean making sure that the text is sprinkled with terminology that will be immediately recognizable to the reader. Adding in terms that are familiar to the consumer helps to accomplish two things.

First, they serve as markers that help the reader know that he or she is at a site that has relevance to their needs and interests. Second, the use of familiar terms creates the impression that the author of the website possesses a competent knowledge about the subject matter.

Both of these factors help to hold the interest of the reader long enough for the web copy to present all the reasons why life would be so much easier with the acquisition of the advertised good or service.

Technical terms may be fine in some instances, while their use may actually be a deterrent in other situations. For example, even though your product offering may have to do with conference room telephones, you may want to refrain from using a lot of telephony terms.

This would be true if you are looking to promote your products to administrative assistants and busy executives. Instead of technical terminology, the focus should be on the features included with the unit, as well as emphasizing how easy the unit is to use.

Of course, if the focus is on promoting the telephone equipment to Information Technology managers, then the inclusion of technical terms and specifications would be a must. Knowing what type of verbiage will connect with your target audience will go a long way in making the copy of your web text interesting and attractive to your audience.

Another thing to keep in mind about your web copy is that you want to get the highest ranking as possible in various Internet search engines. The easiest way to accomplish this is to make sure there are keywords sprinkled throughout the copy. Keywords are simply words that are easily picked up as being relevant to the subject matter, and which are likely to be used by anyone doing research online related to that particular subject.

For example, if an assistant is charged with the task of finding good buys on a speakerphone for the conference room, there are several key words that he or she is likely to use as part of the search criteria.

Words such as speakerphone, conference, conference room, meeting, business, and telephone are some examples of words that may be used as part of the search. Having all those words included in the text of your sales web copy will help to ensure your website is included as part of the search results that are returned by the search engine.

One way to get an idea of what types of keywords to include in your web copy is to conduct a search of your own. Check out competitor sites and make note of some of the words that seem to occur two to four times in their copy. Chances are repetition at that level is done in order to maximize the chances of getting a high ranking on an engine search.

Keeping in mind that you do not necessarily want to replicate the keywords that are used by your competitors, think of other terms that are similar in meaning and that you think would be likely words or phrases to use for a search. Try out your theory by doing a few searches using your own set of keywords. You may find that the results are very positive, and could lead to greatly increasing your chances of a high ranking on all the major search engines.

Section #2. Using Words Effectively in Email Marketing Campaigns

Just as you want to attract attention with the web copy on your website, there is also the need to structure promotional emails so that they will catch the attention of consumers, and help to generate interest in the goods or services that you have for sale. There are a couple of key factors to keep in mind when you put together a promotional email.

First, the subject line for your targeted email needs to include elements that will grab the attention of the reader. There are several schools of thought on how to best accomplish this.

One approach is to employ a question in the subject line. The idea behind the question is that people tend to not overlook a question, while a statement may not make much of an impression.

Because the question will result in more people at least stopping to consider the email, the chances that the promotion will be opened and read increases. This at least gets the promotional email past the first obstacle, which is being junked by a consumer without being read.

Another approach is to build on the relationship that you already have with the consumer. If the email campaign is directed at people who have done business with you in the past, you may want to include an identifying mark in the subject line, such as the name of your company, or the name of the product/service that was previously purchased.

Using a familiar term helps to create instant recognition. If the consumer had a favorable experience with your company in the past, there is an excellent chance that he or she will open the email and take a few moments to read through your epistle.

Of course, once you have gotten through the minefield associated with getting the consumer to open the email, it is imperative to entice the prospect to keep reading after the first couple of sentences. Most people today are not interested in long winded emails that seem to have no end in sight. This means you want to do several things with the text to keep them reading.

First, use short paragraphs. When the email is opened, the eye will quickly note how many solid lines of text occur before there is a break of some sort. The brain immediately sends out a signal that reading this email is going to be a tiring process, and there is a good chance the email will be scanned at best, then abandoned. This impression can be avoided by using shorter paragraphs that focus on one aspect of the subject.

Breaks in the text make it easier to digest the whole email in manageable pieces. The result is that you have the chance to build your sales pitch point by point as the reader moves through the text of the email.

Using bullets in the body of an email can also be effective. However, it is important to keep the bullets focused and short. Using a bunch of words to create what amounts to a bulleted paragraph will quickly cause the reader to lose interest.

A bullet should contain no more than seven to ten words and focus on one complete thought that the consumer can easily relate to and digest. Remember, the purpose of the bullet is to present an idea, not expound on it. You can always do that on your web copy. Don’t try to accomplish that with any email, and certainly not in a bullet contained in the body of the email.

Another good thing to keep in mind about the wording in an email is to not get complicated. Employing the old business adage of KISS is ideal for crafting email text. The need to keep the wording simple and easy to read is essential.

You may have only a few seconds to attract the attention of the reader, and that is accomplished by using words that do not cause the consumer to pause and think about what the word may mean. Technical wording should be kept to a minimum.

The main factor to keep in mind with the use of words in promotional emails is that the text needs to be easily read, does not seem to be overwhelming, and is focused enough to increase interest in going to the website for more details.

Section #3. Using Sales Copy Effectively

Using the sales copy you have created for the web and as part of email promotional campaigns can also be used in other ways to create interest in your products and services. The great thing is that you don’t always have to come up with more original copy to create other pieces that will help to spread the word.

Here are some examples of how you can use that web copy and email text to create more promotional documents that will help you to generate additional sales.

Even if you operate mainly as a web business, it pays to participate in trade shows and conventions. Of course, this means you need to set up an exhibit that will attract the attention of attendees as they walk by.

At the very least, you will want some graphics that will catch the eye that can be mounted on tables or on the back panels for an exhibit booth. Along with images, you may want to include a few snippets from the text that you use on your website or email promotions.

Remember those crisp and concise bullets that you used as part of the email campaign? They now translate into some wonderful visual slogans to catch the eyes of conference attendees. Create some storyboards that splash those bullets across the facades in colors that will attract attention.

By using your words to entice people to come over to your exhibit, you have the chance to engage them in conversations that will help lead to the collection of leads that you can follow up on after the show closes.

Along with using your web text as graphics for the booth, consider reorganizing some of the information into a slide presentation. This will allow you to set up a computer screen and have the presentation continually running on a loop. Movement helps to attract the eye.

People will come over and check out your presentation, even if you are currently busy with other visitors. This gives you the chance to make a connection even if you are not free to engage the person in dialogue at that very moment. Because you are using words that are part of your website, the visitors will feel a sense of familiarity when they visit your online business in the future.

You will also need some printed materials that interested parties can take along with them. This will most likely be in the form of sales brochures. Use text from your email campaign to create one easy to read bi-fold brochure, then the text from your website to create at least a couple of other brochures that are different in size and format.

This adds an element of visual interest to your printed matter, so odds are the visitor will take one of each. Three brochures taken would mean three opportunities to capture the interest of the reader. Chances are you will need to do little to no editing in order to adapt your web text for hard copy publications.

Keep in mind that when the trade show is over, you also can use those same brochures as part of a direct mail campaign. This sort of application, while not necessarily a big money maker, is usually worth the investment.

Going with printed mail campaigns opens up one more means of getting steady customers. Using your existing copy to accomplish the task is all the better for your bottom line.

Section #4. Using Psychological Triggers

Psychological triggers are simply words, images, and sounds that can be used to promote a particular response. When it comes to the use of these triggers in your sales effort, two of your post powerful tools will be words and the way you choose to present them.

Here are some things to keep in mind that will help you make the most of psychological triggers in the sales copy you compose, as well as some visual approaches to help those triggers do the job.

To a degree, the use of keywords sprinkled throughout your copy is an example of using psychological triggers. Keywords provide the basis for rapport between the reader and your copy. Chances are that the consumer is already looking for something in particular.

Keywords are evidence that he or she is at the right place to find that which is desired or needed. Thus, having important keywords in the text is one way of causing the triggering of a reaction that ensures the consumer will keep reading through the website, assured there is something of value there.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to use phrases and words that speak to the mindset of the reader. For example, including words that describe applications with special meaning to your target audience will help to elicit the desired response.

Someone who is looking for financial software for a faith-based organization is likely to respond very positively to such words as stewardship, accountability, and trust. Triggers of this type resonate with some of the reasons why the individual may be searching for a good deal on financial software and will easily help to draw in interested persons.

Triggers can also be used to invoke the emotions of the reader as well. Invoking a sense of fun into the search, while still being professional, is often enough to get people to take a few moments and check out what you have to offer. Humor may not be right for all products and services, but in many cases, the strategy works.

If you market office products and cater to busy administrative assistants trying to keep the boss happy, you may want to try a tag line with a trigger that speaks to the frustration that can come with the job. Something along the lines of “tired of searching the Internet to keep your boss from popping a vein?

Get everything you need here!” can help to soothe frayed nerves and at the same time creates the impression that there is no need to look anywhere else.

Guilt is also being a trigger that can be used to good advantage. Using verbiage that conveys a sense that failure to purchase your good or service is something akin to a dereliction of duty. Of course, this tends to work better when the intimation is somewhat understated, since that does not insult the intelligence of the consumer.

Something along the lines of “a day without software is a day with a lot of wasted time” hints at the advantage of buying your product and impressing the boss with a high level of productivity. At the same time, the intimation is that without the software, the reader will not be as productive and thus will not be able to do the best job possible.

Preying on the sense of responsibility, then trigger motivates the consumer to read further and learn what your product can do to make the day a successful one.

Motivation through the written word is another example of a great psychological trigger. Most people want to do a good job with everything they do. However, they also want to accomplish that good job in as little time and with as little effort as possible.

Using triggers in your sales copy like “easy to use”, “cuts hours off your workload” and “increase your free time” will play to the desire for more success with less investment. Using these types of triggers in headlines throughout the text is one way of getting noticed, but don’t forget to work a few of these motivational style motivators into the main text as well.

Section #5. Writing Solo Ads

As part of your sales campaign, there will be opportunities to compose solo ads that can be used in several situations. In some cases, these may be general ads that are designed as part of the materials for a marketing campaign aimed at a new target group of consumers.

At other times, you may want to develop a solo ad that is aimed at appearing in a one-time publication, such as an annual chamber of commerce directory. There are also situations where it may be advantageous to develop a series of solo ads that spotlight several of your high-profile products or services. Here are a few tips to help you come up with solo ads that will work.

When planning an ad, it is a good idea to think about the amount of space you can afford. Obviously, you want to target print publications that will reach the types of consumers that you want to connect with.

Keep in mind that a quarter page ad in the right publication is a much better investment than a page ad in a publication that does not include a readership that would have an interest in what you have to offer.

Spend your money on ads that are geared toward the right people, and make sure the text of the ad makes that clear. Knowing where to place ads is your first step in deciding what type of copy to include in the customized solo ad.

Generally, an online ad will also redirect visitors to your website, so make sure that the tag or trigger you use with the ad is relevant to what the prospect will see when he or she arrives at the site.

Keep in mind that solo ads are not meant to be detailed repetitions of the information on your website. Instead, they are meant to call attention to some aspect of your business and build enough interest that people will want to learn more. Don’t try to accomplish too many things with one solo ad. If the purpose for the ad is to promote a sale, then make sure the verbiage proclaims how good the sale is.

Perhaps you want to tout a new and improved product. Under those circumstances, focus on one or two new features of the enhanced offering. That is enough to act as a teaser without spilling all the details about what is so good about the new version of the product.

One easy way to create a series of solo ads is to come up with one basic format that can easily be adapted for different venues. Once the basic elements are in place, it is relatively easy to use the master ad as the template.

From that vantage point, it is easy to make some changes that will personalize each ad placement to target the specific print publication or set up websites where the solo ads will appear. This approach also provides a sense of continuity.

Consumers who see two or more of your solo ads will easily recognize all of them as associated with the same products, based on the choice of graphics and the layout of the content.

Section #6. Writing Classified Ads

Both in print and around the Internet, there are opportunities to write classified ads to spread the word about your business. In some cases, the classified ad may be only a sentence or two. In other cases, you may be able to manage something longer and still make it profitable.

Writing copy for classified ads is a little different from larger advertisements, in that no matter how generous the room for a classified ad, it is still a small space. Your challenge is to use that little bit of space to make a big impact.

The nature of a classified ad is to say a lot in just a few words. This means you will need to be as exacting in your choice of words as possible. Fortunately, a classified ad does not have to rely on proper sentence structure.

This makes it possible for you to make use of phrases to get your point across, if they are appropriate. Quick blurbs that are well crafted will get the point across and allow you to convey your intent in just a few words.

Another way to pack in more detail in just a few words is to employ the use of abbreviations. Depending on the publication where the classified ad will appear, you may be able to get by with using certain abbreviations that will be easily understood by the readers.

For example, if the classified ad is appearing in the back of a magazine dedicated to Information Systems professionals, then there is no need to spell out those words in the ad. Use the abbreviation “IS” and you save a lot of space that can be used to squeeze in another possible point of interest.

Along with industry related abbreviations there are generally accepted abbreviations that work both in print media and online. One such abbreviation would be “ISO” which is commonly used as the abbreviation for “in search of”. You may be surprised at how many abbreviations you can use without damaging the flow or integrity of the ad text.

Still, it is a good idea to balance the shortcuts with at least a couple of terms that are spelled out. If you are unsure of what types of abbreviations would be acceptable, check out some of the other ads for ideas.

One component that you should always include in the ad is contact information. Make sure that the type of contact detail you provide is completely reliable. If there is not a good chance of returning a phone call in a timely manner, then opt for an email address. Better yet, include the URL for your website, so that the reader can go right to the source.

Usually, directing readers to the main page of your site is the proper procedure. However, if you are running a sale or want to feature one of your products or services, you may want to redirect the reader directly to a page that focuses on the particular item.

Section #7. How to Use Sales Language

Sales language is simply the use of accepted terms and verbal techniques that are understood to be helpful in the process of identifying qualified leads, talking to interested prospects, and closing a sale. While the verbiage may tend to vary slightly from one sales setting to another, there are a number of rules that seem to apply across the board.

Here are some examples of effective sales language and how these approaches may be helpful.

One of the first things that any successful salesperson learns is that proper sales language employs the basic principle of conveying confidence. That confidence has to do with the belief that all the goods and services on the table are of the best quality.

Sales language is all about accentuating the positive. Helping people to realize the value of what you have to offer involves conveying that what you have will make any task easier to accomplish. Along with making the task easier, your product will also speed up the process so there is more time to devote to other matters. Best of all, it will also pay for itself in a very short period.

This means understanding what types of approaches will make an immediate impact with a customer. For example, if you open with something along the lines of “how would you like to leave a half hour early every day and still get all your work done?” you are certain to grab the attention of just about anyone.

You are using sales language to offer something of value to the individual and chances are you will get the chance to explain just what you mean.

Another part of employing sales language is learning when to ask clarifying questions. One you have engaged a prospect and you begin to get feedback, it is important that you check now and then to make sure the two of you are on the same page. Clarifying questions is one of the verbal tools you can use to keep on track.

A clarifying question is simply when you take a moment to ask a question that helps to ensure you understand something that the prospect has told you. Often, these types of questions are phrased to allow a simple yes or no response.

For example, if the client has mentioned the use of word processing software applications, you may want to take the matter one step further, and ask of in addition to word processing, would spreadsheet capability at no extra cost be something that would help out in the workplace.

This allows you to add more value to a need that is already expressed, and provide the prospect with one more reason to keep talking to you.

Along with the clarifying question, another verbal tool in your arsenal is the perception check. Here you are making sure that you assimilated information provided by the prospect. Often, a perception check will begin with a phrase like “if I understand you correctly” or “from what you have told me, I understand that you need.”

The point of the perception check is to allow the seller the chance to present in his or her own words what the buyer has indicated is a want or need. In turn, the buyer has the chance to affirm that the seller has indeed grasped the need, or has the chance to correct the perception of the seller if the connection did not quite capture everything.

It is important to frame the perception check so that any miscommunication is owned by the seller, and does not reflect on the buyer.

In fact, sales language should always place the burden of providing services on the seller. This leaves the buyer as seeming to be in complete control of the conversation, and without any sense that the buyer is being unclear or imprecise. This approach also conveys the sense that the seller is genuinely interested in meeting the needs and desires of the buyer.

Sales language is employed in online communications with prospects in several ways. First, email correspondence should always convey the desire to meet the needs of the buyer. Second, sales language that is positive, leads to discussions about what the products can do, and anticipates questions will go a long way in keeping the web copy for your site fresh, interesting, and entertaining.

Conclusion

Using words to sell is something that every successful sales person must learn to do. This is true when talking live with any prospective client.

Along with live discussions, using the right words can make all the difference in the ability of a website to attract visitors, and hold their attention long enough to make a sale.

Ads, both electronic and print types also depend heavily on choosing the right words for the right situation. Knowing what to say and when to say it will help keep a sales career fresh and exciting, not to mention lucrative.

How to Develop Your Hot Selling Product

Section #1. Do you have what it takes to create Your Own Product?

One profitable way of succeeding as an Internet marketer is to create your own basic information products and then couple them with existing goods or services that help to enhance the reputation and effectiveness of your own brain child. This, of course, means that you will need to create your own basic product that will serve as the foundation for your efforts.

This is not something that just anyone can do, and do well. In order to create your own products, there are several characteristics that will prove to be absolutely essential, if you really want to make an impact on a public that by and large are already jaded by all the products and services that are found online today.

One of the first things you have to ask yourself is just how creative are you? For some people, creativity comes about by taking elements that are already in hand and finding new and exciting ways to employ those elements.

For example, a growing trend in decorating these days is the redesign. Rather than scrapping existing furnishings, interior re-designers come into the space and reorganize the items that are already owned by the occupants.

Persons with the ability to look at existing elements and see new and exciting ways to make use of those same elements definitely have what it takes to create a product that may contain a lot of the usual stuff, but is put together in a way that brings a whole new dimension to the concept.

Other people are much better at starting with nothing and creating something brand new. This ground up approach is usually the province of people who love the blank canvass, seeing it as a space that can be molded and shifted in any way they choose.

There are no boundaries, no preconceived expectations, and nothing to prevent making anything that they want. People who have exhibited the ability to take nothing and turn it into something certainly have what it takes to create a successful online product.

Then, there are people who express creativity by taking something that are tried and true and giving it a fresh and new looks. People with this type of ability often see all the good points of a product or service that has a proven track record.

Still, they feel it can be enhanced or improved in a number of small ways that will not only help to retain the interest of long term users, but also attract others who may have overlooked the product in the past, because it was such a common thing.

People with the ability to take a good thing and make it a little better, a little more user friendly, a little easier to understand, definitely have what it takes to come up with a product or service that can be effectively marketed online.

So where does your creativity level exhibit itself to best advantage? Let that direction lead you into the next step of the process, which is learning how to create products that will be marketable online.

Section #2. How to Create Your Own Information Products and Sell Them

One of the first tasks you will face when it comes to creating informational products for sale on the Internet is deciding what the subject matter for the product will involve. There are several ways that you can come up with ideas that will allow you to form the basis for your product.

As is true with any type of informational writing, it is a good idea to start with that you know. The basis for your informational product may be the result of just about any type of experience that has been part of your life.

For example, you may find that some of the formal educational experiences of years past have given you some insights that can form the basis for an informational product. Work experience is another fertile field for coming up with numerous topics and approaches for constructing products that convey a great deal of information.

Religious backgrounds are another example of mining past experiences that may help to produce marketable information products that will have an appeal to one or more niche markets. In like manner, hobbies can also yield a wealth of ideas for information products that would attract the interest of a credible section of consumers.

Along with mining your own past experiences, there is also the need to determine the direction of your pitch in the informational products. Do you want to adopt an approach that helps to inform people of how to perform a task associated with a specific subject? Perhaps your emphasis is not going to be so much on how to do something, but what not to do.

With this approach, your direction is more along the lines of presenting information that will help people avoid pitfalls associated with a particular action or task. The idea is to create a credible and thought provoking information product that prevents people from wasting time and resources by pursuing ideas or procedures that have proven all too often to be nothing more than dead ends.

Cautionary information products are certainly a viable option, since they often attract the attention of people who do not want to be slowed down on the road to success.

If for some reason you do not want to mine your own past life experience, there are still other ways to come up with ideas that are likely to be ideal for creating information products to market and sell.

One method is to take a long hard look at the people around you. What types of interests do they have? Are there life experiences of theirs that you can learn from and thus utilize to create a product that would be attractive to a wider public? Spending some time with family and friends and just allowing them to talk about whatever comes to mind may yield some interesting topics that you can explore as subject matter for your information product or products.

Regional or national issues may also be a source of ideas. Events that seem to have a significant impact on the ideas and attitudes of a large group of people can often provide the seed of an idea for an information product.

For example, persons who work in industries that are going through a period of downsizing may be very interested in an informational product that has to do with making lateral moves into new industries, as well as products that have to do with starting a whole new career.

Natural disasters may be the impetus behind the creation of informational products that speak to the development of skills and practices that help to keep people going when waters rise, the power is off, and weather conditions are not comfortable. Looking around you and connecting with what is going on in the world right now can often lead to several intriguing ideas for information products.

Once you have your basic idea for your information product, start putting it together. If your mind is a jumble of ideas and thoughts, sort them out by making a simple outline. This will provide a basis for how you want to present the information and will help you organize the data in a flow that is logical and easy to grasp. The outline will also help you to not forget a point of interest that strikes you as being particularly relevant to the subject matter.

As helpful as the outline will be to the process of drafting the content of your information product, don’t feel as if you are a slave to the outline. As you progress with the work, you will no doubt encounter other ideas or thoughts that you want to include. Feel free to see the outline as a work in progress, and add, revise, and delete as you see fit.

One of the truly great attributes of the computer age is the fact that a word processing program is a lot easier to use than a typewriter. It is very easy to go back and insert additional text when a burst of inspiration strikes.

No doubt, as you go along, there will be details that come to you that may be relevant to a section of the product that you have already completed. Simply go back and find a way to insert the new thought in the right place, so the integrity of the product is maintained.

Along with finding the inspiration for your information products, there is also the need to find ways to market and sell the products. One thing to understand is that there is no one mode of advertising that is going to be the only solid avenue to generating sales. One of the quickest ways to kill the chances for making money with a product is to assume that engaging in one mode of advertising will take care of everything. Before you ever begin the first stages of working on your information product, make up your mind to be open to multiple options for marketing your work.

This will often include establishing your own website, which will provide a connection to your product. You may also look for ways to establish ads on other websites, providing links back to advertising copy and ordering instructions for your product.

Don’t forget to look into print media options as well. You may be planning on going after a big audience via the Internet, but the fact is that many people still look for information in magazines, newspapers, and community publications. You may be surprised how much attention you can get from a simple well-placed ad in a well-regarded print publication that caters to your target audience.

Section #3. Where and How to Find Physical Products to Sell Online

If you are interested in pairing your informational product with one or more physical products, chances are you will need to find products that can be easily ordered over the Internet, and also have a clear and concise connection to your information product. For example, if your information product has to do with conducting business meetings, you would want to partner with vendors who provided services that had something to do with the meeting process.

For example, you may want to consider becoming an independent agent for an audio conference call bureau. Along with marketing your own informational product, you could also pick up teleconferencing clients who visit your site, like your product and find they would like to try holding meetings via an audio conference. Many conference call bureaus offer agents a customized URL that will take prospects to a sign-up page that is associated with the agent. Thus, the client gets to set up their own account with the conference bureau, but you as the agent get credit for the sale and any resulting commissions from their activity.

At the same time, you may also find that an alliance with a vendor who supplies conference room tables and supplies might be a good fit. Once again, creating a branded link from your advertising website over to the vendor’s online store will help generate traffic for them, and you will get credit for the sale.

Another potential vendor alliance would be with companies that produce conference room audio equipment. Many of these vendors also make good use of vendors and can easily create customized links that can be dropped on your website.

People read your information, order it, and then notice that they can also be redirected to a site to look at speakerphones for a conference room. You may money with the sale of your information product and realize a return off the sale of a speakerphone via the branded link.

Finding all these wonderful vendors who want to set up a marketing strategy with you will take some careful investigation. First, you need to be able to establish the legitimacy of the vendor. What type of track record does the vendor have with processing orders in a timely manner? Does the vendor sell quality products? What can you find out about delivery methods? How does the vendor provide quality customer support to people who purchase products from them?

Keep in mind that your reputation and your credibility will be tied back to that of any link that is found on your website and associated in some manner with your information product. Shoddy products, poor customer service, and limited shipping options will all reflect not only on the vendor, but also on you. For this reason, you want to find out everything you can about the vendor before you ever begin to promote any type of relationship between you and the supplier.

Of course, there are also private branding opportunities to be found on the Internet as well. You may find that you want to gear your information products toward a certain sector of the retail consumer market, such as in the case of health foods or herbal supplements. Along with your written products, you may want to offer the convenience of a privately branded online health food store.

There are a lot of vendors out there who offer this type of arrangement. With most of them, you are able to take a generic store front that is already stocked with products, use the owner control features that are granted to you as part of the total package, and set your own retail rates for the items included in the store. Orders placed online are routed to a central fulfillment house, which handles the preparation and shipment of the order, as well as processing the payment.

In return for marketing the online store through your website and other means, you get the difference between the retail price you set for the item and the wholesale price that is charged by your vendor. Generally, companies who offer this type of private branded online store also provide the reseller with online access, so it is easy to monitor the number of orders and get an idea of what items are selling well.

One of the easiest ways to begin your search for these types of opportunities is to conduct a keyword search using phrases such as “online store,” “agent,” “reseller,” and a keyword that is closely associated with the subject matter of your information product. This can help you find opportunities that will be worth investigating.

As part of the process of your evaluation, make sure to look for online consumer reports about the parent company that handles the order fulfillment and stocks the shelves of your online store. Just as with agent opportunities, you need to be concerned about how the standard operating practices of your retail vendor partner will reflect on you and your efforts to build a viable business.

Look for companies that appear to have a high level of customer satisfaction, are not the frequent subjects of complaints, and appear to provide features that will allow you to easily develop a marketing campaign to promote the store.

It is important that you take your time in researching these opportunities. Don’t be lured in by gimmicks that offer you some extra incentive if you sign up today. In the long run, that can be costly to both your reputation and your finances. Instead, do your homework and create a list of potential vendor partners whose products you can represent and offer with full confidence.

Then, do some market testing. Begin with a simple effort, such as having friends or family check over the product offerings and get their opinions about the pricing, sizes, and range of products that are offered. What you are looking for is not only positive feedback, but also constructive criticism. Chances are that if your friends spot some liabilities associated with the product offerings, others will feel the same way.

This may be enough to convince you to look for other opportunities. However, if you feel strongly about the chances of succeeding with that vendor product line, you at least will have the chance to address those concerns in any information products you create that speak directly or indirectly to the product line.

Before launching an official and public relationship, you may also want to place a few orders yourself and see how things go. This will help you get familiar with the ordering process, so that in the event you are contacted by someone who is interested in how to place an order, you can respond based on your experience.

Second, this will allow you to inspect a few of the products first hand, and thus be assured of the general quality of the goods that are sold. Last, you will have the opportunity to test drive the vendor partner online tools, make sure you understand how they work, and can interact with their customer support team on any questions you have.

If you find that the responses you get are either both canned and ineffectual, or that there seems to be an unacceptable lag in how long it takes to get a response to any of your queries, this is a sure sign that you need to sever the relationship and look elsewhere. You can rest assured that if the vendor takes a casual approach to communicating with a partner, there is not much chance of them being in a big hurry to interact with anyone who purchased goods from the online store.

The main rule of thumb about locating potential vendor partners for online sales to support your information product is to keep your focus. Make sure that whatever arrangements you make with a vendor; their offerings have a clear and supportive connection to your product.

Also, make sure you select a vendor partner that knows how to deliver both the goods and high quality customer care. If you manage to find all these qualities, then there is an excellent chance of consistent and continual success for both you and your partner.

Section #4. Defining the Essential Steps in the Product Creation Process

Getting back to your own product, it is a cinch that you will need to follow some important guidelines in order to come up with a product that will be enticing, informative, and affordable to your target audience. Here are some tips to help you get into the swing of developing the idea for such a product, following through with the creation of the product, and getting everything in order so you can effectively market the product.

It is important to always start at the beginning. When it comes to product development, there is no other place to get your start. Assuming that you have performed due diligence and settled on the subject matter for your product, it is time to get into the design aspect of the product.

For the purposes of this section, we will focus on the creation of a line of informational E-books that will anchor a website that also includes access to an online store that sells products related to the subject matter of the electronic books.

The thing to remember about informational E-books is that they have one main purpose or function. That function is to educate and promote further investigation into a specific subject. For example, if you plan on combining electronic books with an online herbal supplement business, then you will want to make sure the subject matter of the E-books is accurate, timely, and relevant to the products that are sold in the store. This will mean doing a great deal of research before you begin to write the first word.

You will want to explore the origins of the use of herbs in various schools of medicine and healing. Find what you can about the effectiveness of herbal remedies at various times and places. Locate research into the claims made for various herbs regarding the treatment of bodily ailments and provide solid information about your source documents. In short, before you can hope to educate anyone else, you will need to spend some time educating yourself.

Once you have amassed enough knowledge and documentation to write effectively on the subject matter, you will need to begin the process of organizing your data. Hopefully, your research will have provided you with plenty of information that can serve as the basis for several E-books. Carefully divide your information into sub-categories and organize the information in any format that will make it easy for you to retrieve the data. This may mean resorting to traditional methods, such as the use of index cards. You may be able to create a series of electronic files and save them to your hard drive or on a CDR. The form of the organizational method is not as important as making sure that however you choose to organize the data, it will make it easy for you to locate what you need when you need it. It does not matter if you use a system that makes no sense to anyone else. The system only has to work for you.

Next, use the collected data as the inspiration for an outline of your E-book. Not only will this help to lay the groundwork for your table of contents, but the task will also create a resource that will help prevent you from wandering too far off the main topic. The purpose of an outline it to help create a logical and cohesive flow to the information that is being presented in the document.

Just as with any type of book, you want the thought processes presented in the material to follow a sensible chain of presentation, with each section or chapter logically leading into the following section. Thinking through this process in advance, rather than arbitrarily creating a collection of disjointed sections, will mean a lot less editing on the back end.

At the same time, it is important to not be so married to your first draft of the outline that you fail to include vital information or don’t provide enough attention to any one point within the document. Keep in mind that the outline is a guide, not a sacred document that once handed down — it can never be changed. Treat it with respect, but do not revere the outline to the point that you refuse to change it in any way. Feel free to revise, improve, rework, and in general adapt the outline as you move forward with the project.

One other thing you need to understand about the writing process as it relates to the production of an effective E-book. At some point, the text will begin to take on a life all its own. Do not be surprised if you find that the flow of the book demands that you state information in ways that would not normally occur to you. In fact, you may find that some of the themes of the E-book are so important to the integrity of the contents that you find yourself repeating those themes in several chapters. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that approach, if there is a valid reason for doing so.

To keep the content fresh, make sure that even if you are presenting a point for the third time, keep the verbiage you use different from the other instances. This will help the flow of the document in two ways.

First, it helps to reinforce key concepts when you present them in slightly different settings throughout the work. Second, it provides the reader with the chance to evaluate the theme or concept in a different light each time that you bring up the point. If the first attempt to educate with the theme did not quite click with the reader, there is every chance that by the third attempt, a connection will have taken place.

When creating the text for the E-book it is important to apply a certain amount of self-discipline. The fact is that you may not feel much like writing on a given day. However, one of the secrets of writing is that you engage in the task even if you are not in the mood.

All the fairy tales about muses who come to sit on you should and provide you with pearls of wisdom that appear as if by magic are just that – fairy tales. Writing is work, and often happens to be hard work.

If you are having a little trouble getting started, stop thinking about the five thousand words you planned on writing today. Instead, focus on creating one good paragraph. Once that is done, it will be a little easier to convince yourself to write just one more. In a short time, you will find that the entire page is filled, and you just got some great ideas on how to expand on the subject matter on hand.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that creativity comes and goes. It is always present. But sometimes it is necessary to drag creativity to the surface, kick and screaming. Don’t be afraid to do just that.

Once you have the first draft of the content for your E-book, set it aside for a day or two. This will allow you to refresh your mind and be able to go back and edit the draft with eyes that are fresh and capable of being balanced in the way you read the document. There is an excellent chance that you will find sections you want to rework slightly, or perhaps change a word here or there to make the section a little more cohesive or clear in its meaning.

By all means feel free to do so. Just as the outline was not to be considered above reproach and change, your manuscript, though a work of art, is also subject to revision and improvement. Make one round of edits and put the manuscript away for another day or two. Then try a second round of edits. You may find very little to correct the second time, which is a sound clue that you are just about ready to begin the formatting process.

After the text for your E-book has gone through editing, the time has come to begin formatting the material from a manuscript into a workable E-book format. Fortunately, there are plenty of excellent software packages that can take a basic word processing document and easily format it for use in an electronic book format. Most will allow you to set the page sizes, arrange major headings, create a Table of Contents, and then import the text of the manuscript into the program.

You can also use the tools included with the software to create a cover, just as if you were publishing a hard copy of the work. In fact, that is the look and feel you want to set as your goal. The only difference between your electronic book and a “real” book should be that one is a collection of images on a screen, and the other is a tangible paper document.

Don’t hesitate to experiment with different formats for your E-book. There is nothing that says you have to pick the first format and stick with it. If you find have images that are original and belong to you will enhance the text, then include them. Should flow charts or diagrams that you have created be helpful in illustrating points, then work them into the body of the ebook.

Keep in mind that at the end of the process, you want to have a product that is high quality, and everything that you wanted it to be. If you are not proud of what you have created, it will make it much harder to interest anyone else in purchasing your product.

Before you post the ebook for sale, you may want to provide one or two trusted individuals with an electronic copy and get their feedback. You are looking for not only comments about the text. You also want to get their impressions about the organization of the material, the effectiveness of any images or charts you chose to include in the information, and the general look of the E-book.

This type of feedback may be very helpful in getting some idea of the reaction you can expect from your target audience. Little things, such as noting that the cover or images take too long to load on a dial-up connection may be important, if you plan on marketing the E-book to an audience that is more likely to still be using that technology.

This will give you one last chance to make some changes in format that will make the E-book more user friendly, and increase the chances that people who actually buy the book will recommend it to their friends and acquaintances.

Conclusion

Developing your own information product can be an exciting challenge. There is a lot of ground to cover before you ever begin the actual process of creating the product.

During those early stages, it may seem as if there is simply too much to do. Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed with the details and don’t set up some sort of deadline for completion that is not reasonable.

If you are creating the product in your spare time, realize that chances are you will need to devote the equivalent of several days or a week to the effort at the very least. Unless you are working with information that you have a strong relationship with, you will not be able to research and write content for an informational product over the weekend. This means you will need to focus on turning out high quality work and realize that it will take as long as it takes.

At the same time, do not use the process as a reason to put off until tomorrow what you can do today. While you may reach a point where you feel frustrated or intimidated, don’t let a day go by that some sort of progress is not made with the project. Even if it means only doing a little work, get as much done as you can, when you can.

Above all, be realistic and don’t expect to create a finished product in one simple round. Edits are your friend and will only serve to make the informational product more useful. By exercising patience, an ample amount of discipline, and being open to correction and improvement, you will soon have an information product that you can market with full confidence.

Online Traffic Generation Methods

Introduction

Setting up your online business presence is a major accomplishment. However, it is only the beginning. Contrary to popular opinion, people will not come just because you built it. Part of the reason for that set of circumstances is that no one is likely to visit a website that they do not know exists.

So, after you have put together the most spectacular, intuitive, and fun to browse website, the time has come to get busy and find ways to generate the traffic to your little corner of the Internet.

The good news is that there are many options when it comes to the task of driving traffic to your site. While many of the strategies involve online methods, there are also some offline effective procedures that will also lead to more hits and thus increase the chances of making a sale.

Here are some tips on creating a comprehensive battle plan to publicize your site and generate interest that will result in making your online presence a successful venture.

Section #1. Pay per Click Advertising

One of the easiest methods to employ in your plan to drive traffic to your site is pay per click advertising. This advertising model has been around since the late 1990’s and has been a means of generating hits for many different businesses with an online presence.

Pay per click advertising is an excellent way to get the word about your company to a wide audience. The process involves spotting an ad on various websites that will forward an interested party back to your website.

Part of the attraction of pay per click advertising is that the ad owner only pays when someone clicks on the ad and actually follows through to the website.

When it comes to PPC advertising, never forget the importance of keywords. Essentially, keywords are words and phrases that are common modes of searching the Internet to find desired content.

As an advertiser, your job is to come up with keywords that you believe are likely to take you to websites that are relevant to the type of business site you currently operate. The rationale is that persons who visit those sites would most likely be interested in the content of your site.

If you manage to find the right websites for your ads, then the chances of generating clicks to your site are much greater.

While the keyword mode of pay per click advertising is very common, there is also a second method. Known as content match PPC, the principle is still the same.

The main difference is that rather than basing the search on keywords, the results are based on the content of the site. As an example, if you run a site that is dedicated to gardening supplies, then it would be a natural for you to want to place ads on sites dedicated to gardening.

Content matching can be used right along with keywords to create a well-rounded pay per click component in your overall publicity campaign.

Finding online resources to help you with the process of placing pay per click ads is relatively easy. One of the most popular approaches is to make use of the Google AdWords program. You can get started by identifying a list of relevant keywords. You can also get help in designing the appearance of your ad, using online tools.

AdWords also includes several online tools, so you can keep track of how many hits get to your website through those hits. This allows you to stay on top of how much pay per click is advertising is costing you each month. By comparing the sales that result from the hits with the cost of your pay per click campaign, you can determine if the program is making money for you.

Another target for your pay per click campaign is online comparison-shopping engines. These types of engines often are willing to provide feeds through the placement of ads on their searches.

Just as with the ads on informational websites, persons can click through to your website and see what you have to offer. Some of these sites provide you with the ability to see the number of hits, while others do not. Payment for placing the ad on the shopping comparison site may be in the form of a fixed monthly amount or based on a fixed rate per click.

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as exclusionary pay per click arrangement. This means you can sign up with as many keyword and shopping ad services as you like. In fact, you may do very well to try out several different services, to see which ones seem to provide you with the best matches and coverage.

If funds for advertising are limited, go with a well-known service, and then add more services as your revenue stream builds to the point you can afford to do so. Remember that your goal is to build a solid foundation for your website, so it may take some time before you begin to see results.

Disregard stories about overnight success. Chances are you will go about six months to a year before you see significant traffic that results in sales.

Pay per click advertising is often an affordable way to launch your advertising campaign. The cost per click is often a fraction of a cent, so it certainly will not cost a great deal, unless you happen to get a huge number of visitors clicking through to your site.

The law of averages would dictate that of that huge number, enough sales would result to make your investment in the pay per click program well worth your time and the expense.

Section #2. Search Engine Optimization

While you are running ads through one or more pay per click programs, it is important to not underestimate the effectiveness of the content of your own site. In fact, paying close attention to your own web content will help your website to show up higher on search engines. The magic way this happens has to do with search engine optimization.

Here is how the process works, and why it is so important to make the best use of this value method of publicizing your website.

When people think of search engine optimization, the first thing they think about is keywords scattered through the content that is found on the site. Keywords help people who are interested in what you have to offer find your site.

Generally, persons entering one of those important keywords into one of the several search engines will be directed to sites that are directly of interest. A judicious use of keywords on your part will help improve the chances that you will appear in those listings.

Along with keywords that are in the text of your web content, you also want to register your website with each of the various search engines. As part of that registration, you can include all sorts of keywords that will add your site to a search command.

You can use terms that have a direct relationship to the content and purpose of your site, as well as keywords that have some indirect relationship to your content. For example, if your website has to do with pet supplies, a direct keyword would be “pet.” An indirect keyword might be something like house, bed, or snacks.

Registration on all the search engines does not cost anything, if you choose to take the time to do the work yourself. However, there are services that will create a profile for you and register your website on a huge number of sites on your behalf.

Many of these services do an excellent job but be prepared to pay for what you get. Most of these registration services offer different size packages, with each package including a select number of search engines.

While some of the packages will include the more popular search engines, it is always a good idea to verify which of the engines are included. This will help you to determine if the price tag is worth it.

If you choose to go with a registration service for the search engine optimization, make sure you provide them with an exhaustive list of keywords. Once the task is done, you cannot go back and update the list at will.

Don’t rush into this project. Instead, take a few days and add more keywords to the list as you think of them. After several days, you will probably have a list of keywords that is broad enough to make a real impact.

One other benefit of using a registration service is that some of them will guarantee that your site will make it to the top of the search engine results. Be prepared to pay extra for this option.

However, it may be worth the extra cost if there is a lot of competition in your line of work. You can gauge the effectiveness of the venture by the number of hits you receive, plus the resulting value of the sales you make.

Of course, you can also handle the registration site on your own. This will involve going to each search engine individually and setting up the search engine criteria. A good rule of thumb is to come up with your list of keywords and key phrases before you jump into the task.

Have the list in an electronic format, so you can cut and paste them into the registration form. This will save you a lot of time with the data entry and allow you to move much more quickly in completing each registration.

Another tip is to begin with the well-known search engines first. Generally, it takes somewhere between twenty-four to forty-eight hours to deploy information about a website into the search engine files.

By taking care of major search engines first, such as Yahoo, Google, AOL, and MSN, you will have an Internet presence very quickly. Once these are taken care of, you can move on to some of the smaller search engines.

Don’t dismiss the smaller search engines as part of your search engine project. While the major engines will cover just about all the Internet, you never know when one of the minor engines will yield some results. Since it costs nothing to register with the engine–all which is required is a bit of your time. And after all, one sale is more than a make up for your investment.

Most search engines provide information about registration that will provide you with some tips on how to create the registration profile. In some cases, the process is very quick, provided you have all the details and keywords handy.

Try one or two of the search engines first, just to get a feel for how much time and effort is involved. Then, you will be able to decide if registration is something that you want to do on your own or farm out to a service.

Section #3. Blogging

Chances are you have seen at least one blog. Blogging is an ideal way to get your thoughts broadcast into cyber space. A blog can be about anything you choose. In fact, your blog could even be all about your business.

Structuring your blog is a matter of personal preference. It is possible to organize your own private soapbox in any manner that you like. This means you can make your blog into a site where you write articles that have to do with subjects connected to your business.

You may toss in something that is involved with more general topics as well, such as business ethics, customer service techniques, and anything else that you think may drive the right people to your website.

You can even use the main section of the blog to publish articles that spotlight features of various products and services that are sold on your website. The possibilities for your article section are only limited by your imagination.

Along with the main article section, you can also use the blog to allow customers to ask questions or make comments on either the articles or your product line. These types of features can help to bring people back to visit your blog regularly, since a question and answer or comments section is fairly likely to include something new to read every few days, if not every day.

In fact, you may get some great ideas for new articles from these sorts of activity, which will also go a long way in keeping your blog fresh. Plus, if you base articles on reader response, that is one more reason for people to come back and see what you have done lately.

Of course, you want to be sure to include links over to your website that is easy to find. They may be imbedded in your articles or featured in handy sidebar on the main page of your blog. Making sure that your readers always have easy access to your business site is an ideal way to tempt folks to click over and make a purchase.

Don’t underestimate the impact of colors and images when it comes to your blog. Making your own little corner of the Internet visually appealing will only make visitors want to return from time to time.

However, be careful of using too much animation or large images that slow down the loading of the pages. This is especially important if your target audience is likely to be among the millions of people who still rely on dial up connections for Internet access.

The longer it takes your pages to load, the less chance that someone will wait around to see what is going on at your blog. Quick loading means people will start reading sooner and will be more likely to find something that catches their interest.

There are a ton of resources online for setting up your own blog. In some cases, you may be able to become an expert on a how-to site. This is an excellent opportunity, since some of these sites will pay a monthly stipend based on the amount of traffic you generate.

In exchange, you agree to keep the content of the site fresh and informative. This usually will require no more than a few hours per week, and the opportunity for generated revenue will be worth the time and effort.

If you are not able to piggyback on an information site, check with the service provider who provides you with bandwidth for your website. Chances are they can also provide you with space and resources to create your own stand along blog.

While this approach does not allow you to generate revenue from the space provider, it does allow you the opportunity to promote your own business, and also sign up with an adword service to allow ads that have some relevance to be placed on your blog. You will at least make a little money from the ads, and you can redirect people to your own site.

Before you jump into setting up your blog, take some time and check out several blogs that are already online. Make note of the page layouts, the arrangement of the content, the types of graphics and images, and the space that is set aside for ads.

This will give you some ideas on what you can do with your space that will result in driving traffic to your business, as well as making a few pennies by hosting ads for related websites.

Section #4. Getting the Most from Banner Ads

Employing a banner ad strategy may also be one of the elements you want to incorporate into your overall publicity campaign. Banner ads are an approach that will cost a fair amount of money, but if they are placed in the right spots around the Internet, they can provide a huge return on the investment.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to putting together a successful banner ad.

One of the first things to remember is that a banner ad is meant to accomplish one central function. The banner ad is to grab the attention of the reader long enough to entice the individual to click on the ad to learn more about what you have to offer. As such, you need to be very careful about how you put together the ad.

A very common mistake that people make with banner ads is to try to cram too much information into a very small space. Keep in mind that the ad is not supposed to provide a lot of fine reading. Nor do you necessarily want to make it a point to include your company name or logo in the ad.

What you do want to do is use a short and sweet slogan that acts as the ideal teaser. Keep the amount of words as few as you possibly can. Don’t think that you need to make use of full sentences. You are selling an idea at this point.

Using the right words to convey that idea is far more important than correct grammar. If you find that two words will create a slogan or catch phrase that carries a lot of power, then go for it.

While a company name or a logo can be helpful, chances are you will do much better without cluttering up the banner ad with that information. Logos on the ads are only helpful when the company name and image are well known to the public, and popular to boot.

While all of us hear that good business means getting the company name out there, the fact is that the Internet has altered that philosophy somewhat.

Keep in mind that keeping the look of the ad simple and effective will create the opportunity for people to visit your site and look around. Your company name and logo will be on every page of your site, so the customer will certainly get familiar with your name in no time.

Thinking about the fonts and colors that you use with your ad is also important. This can be somewhat tricky, as you want the banner ad to stand out as it pops up on the screen. The ad should be different enough from the web pages that signal the banner ad to show up, but you also want it to make a point very quickly.

People tend to give a banner ad very little time to make an impression. That means the colors and the fonts can play a big role in providing those critical extra seconds to establish an interest. Bright colors for the background with a contrasting color for the fonts will often make a good impression and entice the visitor to click through to your website.

Don’t be afraid of getting too bold with the choice of colors but do be aware of the type of image you want to cultivate. For example, if you sell natural health products, you may want to make good use of greens in your banner ad. They will help set the tone for your website.

On the other hand, if you are offering high tech products, electric blues and reds may prove to be fun and winning combination.

Finding the right locations for your banner ads is also important. There is one school of thought that dictates that you worry less about the type of website and focus more on the amount of traffic that the site generates. Of course, this does not mean that you want your ad associated with content that is completely inappropriate for your products and services.

For example, if you sell faith-based products, you would probably not want your banner ad to show up on an adult dating site. Still, you would want to define a broad range of sites that would be right for your ad, check into the average daily and monthly traffic that is generated by the site, and then make some decisions about placing your ad.

Keep in mind that depending on how you go about arranging for the creation and placement of banner ads, the cost may be minimal or it may be significant. Weigh this information against your budget and determine just how much of your advertising funds can be allocated to the use of banner ads, without hurting the other components in your program.

If you find that banner ads really work well for you, there is always the chance to expand your use of these ads once there is a larger revenue stream to work with.

Section #5. Offline Traffic Generation

Even if your business is Internet based and has no physical store or office, you can still make excellent use of offline advertising to promote your business. Some of these methods will be free of charge, while others will cost very little in the way of financial resources.

Here are just a few of the ways you can create new customer opportunities with the use offline advertising.

One of the easiest ways to kick off your offline traffic program is with the use of a flier. With the quality software that is on the market these days, you can easily design fliers that help to advertise your business.

The real question will be where to place the fliers, so they are not an irritant and can be placed legally. For this, you will need input from the local authorities.

Contact your city or town government and find out what the local laws and regulations are when it comes to passing out fliers for a business. In many cases you will find that there is some restriction when it comes to municipal parking lots.

It may be possible to obtain a permit that will allow you to place fliers at a specific event that the city is sponsoring. Also, the city will often know which shopping centers around town allow fliers to be placed on cars in their parking lots,

Along with the local government, check with the local chamber of commerce. You may find that they will have events coming up where you will be free to pass out fliers to persons entering or leaving the event.

You may find the chamber especially receptive to this idea if you sponsor or co-sponsor an event, which is another way of saying you agree to pay for part of the cost of putting on the event. While you may not want to do a lot of this sort of thing, it may very well help you to try it out once or twice.

Along with the flier, you will also get a lot of mileage with a business card. Of all the forms of advertising, a business card is one of the easiest ways to cultivate sales opportunities. Any conversation is a chance to leave a card with your web address in the hands of a potential client.

You can place a business card in a fish bowl at the local eateries, post them on bulletin boards, and give some to friends to pass on to interested parties. You may also try some unorthodox methods, such as “accidentally” leaving one or two of your cards at the table or booth when you go out to eat, or even leaving a couple on the sink in a public restroom.

Believe it or not, this can actually lead to some sales.

Contrary to popular opinion, business cards do not have to be unusual in order to be effective. A plain card that sports simple fonts may be just what you need in some businesses. Have some fun with the color scheme on the card, but make sure the information is easy to read.

More important, make sure the card works well with card scanning equipment. Many people who are interested in your products will run the card through a card scanner as a quick way to put your information in their address book. If the card has fancy fonts the scanner software does not recognize, or the text fades into the background, the scan may fail and your chances of being added diminish.

At the same time, there is no rule that says you can’t have some fun with your business card. Try making it a little thicker, so the card stands out in a pile. Consider putting text on both sides of the card for some added interest. Also, you could try a circular card rather than a rectangular card. Just make sure the circle will run through a card scanner without jamming it.

Just as you can leave a flier or a business card in your wake, there is also the matter of leaving behind a brochure. Home printing software allows you to create some excellent trifold brochures that are ideal for use around town.

They also are great for use at business shows, conventions, and trade shows. As an added bonus, a trifold brochure fits nicely into a standard business envelope, which makes the piece ideal for use in direct mail campaigns.

If you design your own brochures and save the templates, it is very easy to customize the brochure for special occasions or for a campaign. Keep in mind you will need to get paper that is the proper weight for a brochure, if you really want to create a slick and professional look.

Along with brochures, think about the use of post cards as a means of promoting your business. This excellent direct mail option works very well, since research indicates people are more likely to take a moment to check both sides of a post card before discarding.

That is one side more than most people check when it comes to envelopes. This second chance may be just what you need to create interest and get the recipient to check out your website.

Post cards can be created at home using software, or you can use an online printer for the job. Doing the cards yourself is very cost effective, but a postcard that makes good use of the stock formats and images of an online printing service may not be as expensive as you may think.

In fact, you may find that the savings on time and supplies may be enough to make the use of the service well worth the effort. Just make sure the spelling, punctuation, and layout of the post card is exactly what you want before signing off on the print job.

Classified ads in magazines, newsletters, and the local newspaper may be worth looking into. Normally contracted on a fixed rate per word or characters, take a long hard look at the circulation figures for the publication. Also, keep in mind the sector of the public that reads the paper or magazine.

For example, if you sell vegetarian foods, there is not much point in placing your ad with a publication that caters to people who love to eat meat. On the other hand, a newspaper may be ideal if your products or services are attractive to a wide variety of people.

With any type of offline advertising, make sure that you understand what opportunities are right for your business, and learn all you can about that medium before committing to any sort of advertising arrangement. This will help to ensure that you get an equitable return on your investment.

Section #6. Posting on Forums

Posting on various forums around the Internet has become a quick way to get the word out about your website. There are a number of sites that are set up to allow businesses to create a short post about what they offer. In most cases, there is no charge for the posting, which certainly makes the price right.

Of course, there are a few things to keep in mind before posting your ad on a forum. First, get to know the forum.

This means reading some of the other ads, picking up some tips about what is and is not allowed on the forum, and what types of responses you see posted to the business postings. If there seems to be a lot of spam postings on the site, then look elsewhere. You do not want to be associated with that sort of thing.

Also, if there appears to be some sort of regulations that you do not feel comfortable with, move on. There are so many business forums out there that allow advertising posts that you do not have to put yourself in a bad position.

Another thing to do in anticipation of posting an ad on forum is to create a standard ad and then cut and paste it into the forum template. This will save you a lot of time, as you do not have to reinvent the wheel each time you create a new advertisement.

Keep in mind that is the forum allows replies, you will have the chance to post responses to the replies, and those do need to specifically address the questions or comments of the replies.

Conclusion

Generating traffic that will result in sales for your business is an important part of your success. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to create some buzz and excitement about what you have to offer.

Combining online with offline advertising strategies can help you broaden the reach of your campaign so that everyone has the chance to learn who you are, what you do, and how to make the best use of the services or products you offer.

Look into all your options with advertising, and pursue those that seem to be the best fit for your business model.

“Dream about it. Make real plans. Take the necessary actions. Live the life of your dreams. It is possible. Believe in yourself!” Michael “MJ The Terrible” Johnson – Founder & Owner – Masters of Money, LLC.

The Ultimate Persuasion Technique by Michael “MJ The Terrible” Johnson – https://www.therealmjtheterrible.com/the-ultimate-persuasion-technique-by-michael-mj-the-terrible-johnson/

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