Confessions Of A Ten Year Internet Marketer

A few tips to jumpstart your online business

If you want to be successful, you need to take some action. Here is a three step action plan you can use to begin your online marketing journey:

Find a good niche

This is an amazing place to find hot niches:. http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

These are the most popular searches being done on Google. Can you say gold mine!. From a baby doll stroller to the season’s hottest camping table, to baby onesies

Buy a domain name and get it hosted

Don’t skimp here. Register your domain name and be sure to use a reputable hosting company.

Start a WordPress blog

Help is always available at the WordPress forums, if you run into some problems.

Next, create some useful content or hire a freelance writer to do it for you.

Now stay the course and slowly promote your blog. Many times it can take a year or more to see any real traffic.

Are you making these excuses?

Marketing online takes hard work and dedication. People who fail in our industry love to use excuses such as:

My life is just too busy to start an online business!

I started my home business part time, while working a full time job AND going to school. There is always time, it just means making sacrifices - like not watching TV for two hours a night or spending your weekends working on your business instead of going out.

If you are willing to make sacrifices now, you will reap the rewards well into the future. Would you rather carry a backpack with wheels or a regular suitcase? Which is easier?

On line marketing costs way too much money!

Technology today has made starting a home business extremely easy. You can have a Website with your own domain setup and running for under $100 a year.

The risks to starting a new business online are so minimal that any nonsense you tell yourself about not having any start up money is just one big fat excuse.

I’m not an expert!

You don’t have to be a jack of all trades or a multimaster tool to get started There is so much information online, you could become an expert on just about anything imaginable. If you wanted to, you could become the leading expert on boy shoes, if you deemed it suitable.

I have heard almost every excuse in the book why people have told me “I can’t start my home business right now”! Yet, for every excuse they make, I can always come up with a reason why they are full of crap. That is just self doubt telling you that it can’t be done.

Are you the next online marketing success story?

Do you ever sit back and marvel at how far online marketing has come in the last 5 years? How about the last 10, 15?

Today people are starting blogs on such things as a skinning knife site, that made money, and one based around such things as building an art easel and how to create a hanging lamp

In 20 years we will look back on the early days of Internet marketing and some of the people who helped make it such a huge success, as pioneers. In fact, some people just getting started today could be the next pioneer.

Perhaps you will become one of them?

Product creation isn’t so difficult

One of the best ways to profit online is to create your own product. I’m sure you have heard this before, but are unsure of how to go about it, simply because you can’t think of any good ideas.

Perhaps you want to develop something around your passion for interior design and would love to develop your own line of pillow inserts and couch pillows. Or perhaps you love crystal lamp design.

Jot down some of your ideas and then expand on them. Do research online and free you mind to think of a solution to your problem. You must train yourself to brainstorm ideas. For many people this is quite difficult, but anyone can do it over time.

Don’t let fear hold you back from your goals. Confront your fears and move forward. This is what all winners do!

Are your customers satisfied?

Companies that produce a cat tower or organic shampoo and even online companies that sell digital products all rely on one thing; customers. There isn’t a business in the world that would survive without them. Yet some companies treat their customers like dirt.

Which is why you can gain a big edge on your competition by having outstanding customer service. It has been proven over and over again that the companies who treat their customers well, almost always do well.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that any successful business relies on repeat sales to grow. If you have unhappy customers, the chances they ever give you their business again is almost nil. This is why the way you treat your customers should be by far, the biggest goal for your business.

By communicating more effectively with your customers, you will create bond of trust. To sell anything online it takes trust. Be it a ceiling fans with lights or software, a customer won’t buy if they don’t trust you. Period.

This is why building trust thought outstanding customer service is a must for any online business. Never ignore your customers and treat them well. I guarantee they will return the favor.

The biggest SEO mistake…

If you are new to online marketing, you may have come across url canonicalization. This seems to be very confusing to many new and even some seasoned marketers. So let me help explain what it is and how it can affect you, in as simple a way as possible.

A few years back, most of the major search engines companies started to use url canonicalization to help them decide the proper link structure for your site. So small sites built around a coin purse, and large heavy traffic sites were all affected.

Below you will see a few of the most common ways webmasters link to their sites:

www.yoursite.com
yoursite.com
yoursite.com/index.html

If you are guilty of using all three urls to link to your site, it’s ok. While this practice can hurt your SEO rankings, it can be fixed quite easily.

As an example, if you just created a newkoi pond site, and you wanted to advertise it using the proper SEO linking methods, what would you do? It really is quite simple. Choose one url structure and stick with it every time you create a link to your site. That’s it!

As you can see, it really isn’t that difficult to keep your rankings from folding like a futon bed, if you follow the proper methods.

Why price changes can boost sales

I want to issue a challenge to you today. To have the courage to take a risk with your online business and change the prices on a few of your products. Let me explain why this could help to boost your online profits like never before.

I own a great old muscle car that has almost tripled in value since I bought it 15 years ago. Now most people perceive my car to have more value now simply because the bluebook price is higher. I haven’t done anything to improve the car since I bought it. The reason it carries more value is because the asking price is much higher than 15 years ago, obviously.

Once something carries a high price tag, people naturally assume it is more valuable. Which is why retailers raise prices on such things as a double din car stereo or a bamboo cutting board,, trying to find that magical pricing point that will skyrocket sales and put more money into their pockets.

Raising the price on something won’t always boost sales; sometimes a lower price will. This is why you need to always keep testing. When you find the pricing point that your product sells best at, you should see a dramatic improvement in your profits.

Sales Letter Tips

Small changes do make a big difference. In life and in business. Such as a toy guitar giving to a young child could influence his career? Small changes to your sales letter can do the exact same thing.

However, this doesn’t mean that you ever stop testing. Many times these tests can multiply your profits to heights you never imagined, all without any extra advertising or an increase in sales page visitors.

Every sales letter is unique in the message it seeks to get across to the reader. However, your fashion tip blog dedicated to the straightening iron or discontinued perfume, may not convert in the same way as a blog dedicated to investments. Of course, there are three universal rules that work for every sales letter.

Use white backgrounds

I have tried colored backgrounds and ones filled with fancy graphics on all of my sales pages, but a plain old white background has always out pulled those backgrounds by a wide margin.

Always use a credit card graphic with your order buttons

This is a psychological trigger that compels people to buy. It also makes your order button easy to find and tends to set your customers apprehensions about buying from you at ease.

Use “investment” instead of “buy”

This is another psychological trigger. Don’t tell your prospects they are buying a product from you. Instill in them the confidence that they are making an investment in themselves when they own your product.

A simple way to use this is: “Buy it today for only $79.99!” to “Your investment today is $79.99!”

Do you now see the power in this? You are using one word that people associate with a negative emotion (buy), to one that has a positive emotion (investment).

Using these changes in your sales letters is a great way to increase your conversions and ultimately, your profits.

How To Cash In With Special Offers

My friend had not had a bath in over three days, there where pizza boxes littered across his apartment, and a funky odor filled the room. As I walked into his apartment, I quickly became disorientated and started to feel myself losing consciousness. I felt my eyes starting to roll back into my head, and staggered to the window to get a breath of fresh air.

“Kevin, what are you doing, man?”, I exclaimed to this usual neat freak.

My buddy then got a twinkle in his eye as he lead me over to the TV, where he was watching one of those home shopping channels. In the course of three days, he had become a shopping zombie.

My normal, levelheaded friend had become hypnotized by one of marketing’s most powerful techniques: Time sensitive offers. If he didn’t order “Peppi the singing fish” within the next 15 minutes, the offer would be gone forever.

The Yoda phone that exclaimed, “May the force be with you” when it rang would disappear into a galaxy far far away if he didn’t act now. They only had 100 left in stock. As I sat there watching my zombified friend order useless items he would never use, I decided I would apply this same technique to my own business.

I believe it is vital to be honest with your customers, so I wanted to be sure of two things:

- My offers would only be for useful products and services.

- The offers had to truly be time sensitive.

The results where astounding.

The first time sensitive offer I brought to my customers almost tripled my sales. I was immediately hooked.

Now I never make an offer unless it is time sensitive.

For my offers I use a customized script that keeps track of my orders or counts down the time left until the offer expires. When my product is sold out, or the offer has expired, the script then removes the order page. I rarely make exceptions and extend the offer, unless someone had a problem ordering the product.

So how can you implement this strategy into your business?

To have a successful offer you should generally follow these two simple rules:

- Make the offer truly special (give a discount, extra bonuses, etc.)

- Make sure the offer is pulled when you say it will be.

The best offers I have tested usually last around 2-3 days.

These kinds of offers usually pull much better than if I limit the offer to 20-30 packages. However, each list is different. So don’t be afraid to test various offers until you find the right formula for maximum sales.

The kiss of death, and quickest way to lose credibility with your customers, is to make an offer that insults their intelligence. Don’t make a 48-hour offer, then run it for a week, just to make extra sales. Your customers will quickly catch on to this, and you will see your response rates fall drastically. Treat your customers with respect, and they will return the favor by making your bank account balloon to new levels.