My Buy Essay

Having created a wonderful website in order to sell your product, you now need the means to entice your visitors to actually buy. For this, you need two vital things. Firstly, you need to capture the names and email addresses of visitors to your website and, secondly, you need to be able to communicate with them. Make sure you have a mechanism in place for this before you start promoting anything online.

Research has shown that it takes 7 visits to your sites, or communications with, a potential customer before they will be tempted to buy something from you. Without the means to do this, you will have missed a golden opportunity to make money. Building up a mailing list is vital to your new business.

The essential tool required is an autoresponder. The autoresponder will capture names and email addresses from your website (the start of your mailing list) and then allow you to send targeted emails out to those people. It manages your database of potential customers. A section on the autoresponder can generate the HTML code for a sign-up form to place on your website, which then directs those visitors’ names and email addresses to a particular campaign in your autoresponder. You can have several campaigns running at the same time if you wish.

But, you may ask, who would just give you their name and email address? By giving away something free and of value on your website, such as a report, eBook, or mini-course, people will be tempted to subscribe. Giving away free information really works.

Within your autoresponder, you can set up pre-programmed messages to send to your potential customer, such as an initial and instant message and a link to a page where they can download their free report or get more information. Then follow up with further email messages with extra and more persuasive information at different intervals, 2 days later perhaps, then 5 days after that, and so on, and all will be dispatched automatically by your autoresponder.

In this way, you can send out emails for a planned marketing campaign to entice them to buy your product. And because your customers have voluntarily signed up, your emails will not be considered as spam, but value their privacy and don’t pass their names and addresses to anyone else.

As you build up your mailing list of names and email addresses from your website visitors, and the number grows, why not send out a broadcast email from your autoresponder when you release a new product? Many of those who bought your first product may well buy from you again. You can sell to your list over and over again, but don’t overdo the frequency, and give enough of an interval between products, otherwise you will turn your customers off!

Alternatively, you may like to send your mailing list a regular newsletter of interesting snippets of information &ndash this is also possible with your autoresponder.

One tip: if you can pay for an autoresponder service, all the better. The free ones tends to place adverts on the messages you send out, which may not look professional to your customer.

So for real and profitable success in your Internet Marketing business, get yourself an autoresponder and subsequently a mailing list. It’s your vital ingredient! Good luck!

Penelope Housden.

If you’re just starting out in internet marketing, you probably feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available. The learning curve is less like a hill and more like a cliff! If you’ve been at this business for a while, you may be frustrated that you’re still not making any money, or not enough money. You may be wondering why no one is reading your ads, or why all those visitors to your site are not buying anything and not returning. Where do you start? How do you convert the casual visitor to a return customer?

Relax and breathe. None of us was born an internet marketer. We all have to start someplace. A great place to start is by looking at something you already DO know, offline business. We all shop somewhere. Pick a store you’re familiar with, maybe the grocery store where you shop at least once a week. Pick a small store to focus on, not a huge supermarket. Now pretend that’s just an empty lot or building, and you’re an aspiring grocer. What do you need to do?

There’s 3 big steps you need to take.

1) First you have to have a crystal clear picture in your mind of exactly what you want to do. What do you want to sell, and what do you want your store to look like? Spend some time dreaming, so you can see everyone who is in your store and what they are buying. Your store needs four walls, a floor, doors and windows, and a roof. You need to decide on size, the first step is to figure out what you want to sell. You think about what people in your town need and buy regularly, the availability of these products in other well established stores, and decide on your niche and your location. Maybe it’s bread, canned goods, cereals, candy, ice cream, soda, milk, and cigarettes on a busy corner near a residential area with no other store in walking distance. Maybe it’s a natural food store in a yuppie neighborhood. Maybe it’s gas and snack foods near a highway.

2) Secondly, you have to understand what you need to have in place to make that dream come true, and how you’re going to do it. What does your store need by way of infrastructure? You need shelves, freezers and refrigerated cases, a counter and a cash register. Probably you need a small office and bathroom as well. You need electricity, lighting, heat, air conditioning, desk, chair, phone, fax, maybe some music, paint, flooring, security cameras and so on.

Once you decide on the layout of the store, you will know what size of a building you need to build, buy or rent. How are you going to finance this, and how will you afford to stock your store, from savings or from a loan?

3) Assuming that you now have a fully-stocked and operational store, how will you get people to shop there? You could advertise in newspapers, radio and tv; put up signs; offer door prizes and/or sales; offer free advice and information (recipes, menus, shopping lists, health and nutrition information, diet information); sponsor events (a booksigning by a famous cookbook author, co-sponsor a food related festival); build familiarity and trust by joining social, charity or business clubs, or volunteering at local events.

Fine and good, you say, but I still don’t know how to make money online. Let’s take the example we just developed and convert it to online business.

Gazing Into Your Crystal Ball

1) First the concept. What do YOU want to do? What do the people that frequent the internet want? First and foremost, right behind email, people online are looking for information. There are places online you can go to research hot topics, such as Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool. Here you can see how many times a word or phrase was searched in the last month. You can do a Google search for these terms to see how many websites are already available sharing that information. As you keep narrowing down your focus, balance between your passion, what other people want, and what’s already available. A very small niche with very little competition with targeted promotions can become a very lucrative business.

Your Shopping List

2) Now the infrastructure, the Short List:

a) internet real estate = a website. This can be an affiliate site or your own. You can get a free website with no outside advertising here: .finitesite.com

b) products: No matter what your interests, there’s an affiliate program with products that fit; you may want to sell related ebooks, Amazon.com books, etc. Clickbank is a good place to find electronic information products.

c) tools: you will need a tracking system (known as a link tracker); an autoresponder; a link rotator.

d) knowledge: you will need a splash page program and/or some basic html and advertising knowledge. A free html tutorial: .pagetutor.com

e) an expense budget, no matter how small at first.

You Need More Than Two Cans and a String

3) Promotion: people enter your world (the internet) via a browser. Since “the internet” is intangible, many people confuse the vehicle (AOL or Yahoo!, for example) with the destination itself, the internet. So let’s be gentle with our potential visitors and make their journey from landing pad to your neighborhood as effortless, pleasant and convenient as possible.

If they are interested in buying widgets online, they will soon realize that there are a million widget salesmen out there. So they start narrowing down their search, and they comparison shop. First and foremost, they are information gatherers. Where do they go first? Probably to a search engine. Then they start exploring. They visit a site; if it fits their needs, they may bookmark it before they move on. When they move on, they may return to their Google or Yahoo! search results, or they may follow a link off of the page they visited.

So getting yourself listed in the search engines is important. This does not require your own domain name, although it’s the best route to go, but a website where you can control your page content is essential. A search engine will not list a replicated affiliate website, such as any-old-program.com/aff_id=102109 but it will gladly list your-domain.com/any-old-program. Search engines want new, original information, so write something original on your website about every program you join. Link your articles, etc. to your web page, then link that page to your affiliate program.

Your own domain name, carefully chosen, will help to brand either your name or your website name, such as wallywalton.com wallyswidgets.com widgetworld.com etc. If you get a free website with finitesite.com, your url will be finitesite.com/wallywalton or something like that. It might be finitesite.com/member/wallywalton — I forget, it’s been a while since I had a site with them With some work, you can get a site with a url like this into the search engines. It’s a great way to start if you can’t afford domain name, hosting etc.

Sooner or later, your site visitor will be ready for a purchase. Maybe they will drive off to the nearest hardware store armed with all their new information and buy a widget there. If they found your site in the search engine, visited and bookmarked it, maybe they’ll return and buy from you. Maybe they’ll buy from the site they went to after your site. But 9 times out of 10, once they’ve left your site, they’re gone forever.

And Now the Quiz, Purely Common Sense

How do you get them to come back? Here’s a pop quiz for you, choose the best answer (it’s a no-brainer):

a) offering so much valuable information, they bookmark your site and return on their own;

b) building so much trust and familiarity that, when they think of widgets, or of asking for an opinion, or for buying anything widget-like, they think of you (that’s called branding your name);

c) promoting your website so much that, when they think of widgets, they automatically think of your website (that’s also branding, the name of your site in this case)

d) have a mailing list they can subscribe to (this might be the online equivalent of a guest book in a store) and receive updates on information on your website;

e) have contests on your site;

f) endorse other people’s sites and products, with an appropriate byline including your own url;

g) give away things;

h) hang out in places online that your potential visitors frequent (forums, bulletin boards, chat rooms, conferences, seminars) and make friends, give away free information and helpful links and tools, include your url in your signature where allowed;

i) blogging and using RSS feeds to keep people thinking of you and your widgets;

j) being a part of the search engine revolution and exploring the world of tagging, or social bookmarks (creating your own search engine with other like-minded anarchists

k) all of the above.

Each of these concept, infrastructure, and promotion ideas could be an article in its own right; but this is your basic outline for building your online business. The ultimate power of the internet is to level the playing field for both major corporations, little ol’ you, and everyone in between. A business that fully utilizes the internet can throw away the purchased leads list, because cold calling and cold emailing is a thing of the past. Using the internet to its fullest business potential means putting your message where your potential customers can find it, and letting them come emailing, looking and calling for you.

Be sure to take advantage of the unique power of the internet, and keep the “internet” in your
internet marketing.

When you are looking for different places where you can use your Internet marketing skills, then you may want to check out some social networking sites. However, before you start using these kinds of sites, you may first want to know, what is a social networking site and how can it helps you? Well, a social networking site is a place where tons of people go to hang out online. This is a place where people will spend tons of time with friends just chatting the day away. Now that you know what social networking is, you should be able to see how this could help an online business. Think of it like this. If your business was not online, you would want to place your ads in areas that had a lot of people. Think of a social networking site as being like a mall. If you just place your ad in a gas station, then only a few people would see it. However, if you have an ad in the mall, then the people that are working there, the people that are shopping there, and the people that are hanging out there are all going to see your ad. This means that social networking sites are kind of like the “mall” on the Internet.

If people are going to be online at these sites all the time, then you might as well make the most out of it. The best way to do that is to advertise on these sites. However, there is a right way and a wrong way. Just like a lot of other online sites, people do not like you to go around advertising your business online at their sites. Take MySpace for example. They do not want you to start a profile that is called “Jack’s Online Meat Shop” and try to get people to go to your site by spending a lot of time on MySpace and advertising your business. This would be the wrong way to go about advertising. However, if you have an ad that you want to place on MySpace, then all you need to do is talk to the people that run the site. Tell them that you would like to place some ads on their site, and you would like to know how much that would cost you. Then you can find out how many ads you can place on their site and how much it’s going to cost you.

There are tons of place where you can advertise online, but if you are going to spend money to advertise, then you might as well do it in a place that is going to make you a lot of money. There is no reason to spend money putting ads all over the Internet if it’s not going to help you. If your site does not get a lot of traffic, then people are not going to want to place ads on your site. So the next time you are thinking about different places you would like to advertise, remember that the more people that are hanging out at that site, the better. This means that you are going to have to spend your money on the sites you know are going to make you a ton of money.

Many people blog. In fact, there are more bloggers out there now than ever before. What seems to fascinate many about blogging is that it can actually become a career, believe it or not. However, just sitting down at your computer and typing is not going to make you rich. So how do you make a living blogging? There are a number of things you can do that will help. Here, though, are a few tips that will get you started and show you how to turn blogging into a successful career.

First of all, you have to have a blog in order to make money from a blog. There are a number of sites out there that will set you up with a blog for either a fee or a portion of your advertising proceeds. If you are truly serious about making blogging your career, then you need to consider not using these services. If you are going to try to make money in blogging, then it would make sense to share the money with as few people or services as possible. Instead, start your own website and keep the money. You will pay a monthly hosting fee, but if you are serious about blogging you know that this money will be considered a business expense as if you were to rent a storefront for a clothing store or something similar. So your first step in turning blogging into a successful career must include starting a blog and doing so on your own website.

Secondly, you have to figure out how you are going to derive revenue from your blog. There are a number of ways to do just that. The easiest and perhaps most popular way is to use some sort of advertising. Many of the search engines and other services on the web will place ads on your blog site and then pay you for every time someone clicks on one of the ads. Another way to do it is to sell something from your site and use the blog to bring in customers. Or, in a similar strategy, advertise someone else’s product on your site and then get some sort of commission from that person. No matter which strategy you use, or even if it is another strategy you come up with on your own, you need to find a source of revenue if you are going to make blogging into a successful career.

Third, once you have a way to make money off the blog, you need to get people to the blog. The key to most anything that happens on the internet is to drive traffic to your site. No matter what, whether you are using an ad service or selling a product, internet money is a game of percentages. You want to draw as many people as possible to your website. The larger the overall number of hits your site gets is the lower percentage of those clicks that have to be profitable you need. So how do you draw traffic? They key is, to turn a phrase, keywords. You need content on your site that is going to bring traffic from search engines to you as much as possible. There are a number of ways to do this: through software programs designed to find the best keywords, websites that perform a similar service, or just coming up with them on your own and crossing your fingers. No matter how you choose to do it, though, just bare in mind that you cannot turn blogging into a successful career without getting people to your website.

Blogging can certainly be fun, but what if you want to turn that fun into a profit? There are hundreds of people out there who have turned blogging into a successful career. It is a great way to make money from home doing what you want, when you want. However, there are some things you need to consider before diving into a blogging career. First of all, you have to get yourself a blog, obviously. Next, decide how you are going to generate revenue from that blog. Then, finally, work hard to drive traffic to your website. Remember, the internet is a game of numbers and percentages so promote and update your blog as often as possible.

Most bloggers love when their traffic is high and they have a great deal of fans. Getting to that popular point can be a little difficult however. If you want to have a successful blog, you will need to make sure all of the components are there. One of the most important components to have within your blog is scan-ability. This really means that your blog is scannable, or easy to go through quickly while still capturing the main points of your posts. Use these seven tips to make sure your blog is scannable and you will see an increase in traffic to your site.

Keep It Short

The number one mistake bloggers make when posting is creating extremely long posts. You should always be honest about your views and post accurate information. However, you should also be concise with your posts. Web surfers don’t have the time or the desire to sit around for hours reading your blog. They are looking for a quick satisfying post to quickly fill them up. They want something that is full on content, but not lengthy. If you tend to be wordy with your posts, try cutting them down a bit to see if your traffic increases.

Create Interesting Headlines

The way you set up your posts has a lot to do with them being scannable. Your posts should always have an interesting headline. It should be catchy and attention grabbing with its wording. It should also be done using different style elements such as bold print, colored print, and italics. The more attention you can get to the headline, the easier it will be for a reader to go through your posts and read the ones that interest them most. When you make it easy for the readers, they will read more.

Break Up Your Posts

Breaking up your posts is not only about headlines, it is also about endings. Create a signature way of signing off on a post. You can “sign” your name or your can always end with an interesting quote. You can also choose to end with a question to try to get readers involved. No matter what your signature ending is, it will be easier for people to shift their focus from one post to the next when they see it. It will become familiar to regular readers and will be a comforting sign that you have nothing else to say on that topic at that time.

Cut Out the Big Words

You should never feel the need to use enormous words that very few people understand or can even pronounce. The best thing you can do is keep the grammar very simple on your blog. By doing so, you are making your blog easier to scan and to read. Most people will only look through the blog for phrases and headings, so these big words can really be distracting. With less than 20% of blog readers going over word for word, you should not waste your time trying to impress. Instead, write in the manner that you would talk to a friend. Making it casual is a great way to gain a lot of interest.

Don’t Use It as Story Site

When someone uses their blog as a place to post lengthy stories about life, they are making a mistake. Blogs are indeed personal journals and if you want to do that, you are entitled. However, if you want your blog to be popular, you should not post stories. Instead, to make your blog more scannable, you should post lists. Lists are very effective ways to make your blog scannable and readers will love you for it.

Graphics Work

Graphics were once things that bloggers thought got in the way of their content. Today however the opposite is true. When done appropriately, graphics can really add to your content and make your readers more interested. You can make your site scannable by adding a few graphics to your blog. Try adding graphics that go along with your posts for an efficient approach.

Be Clear

When you have something to say on your blog, just go ahead and say it. Some bloggers tend to let their opinions or main points drift in and out of their posts subtly. The most effective way to get your point across in a blog is to come out with blazing guns. You should keep your main point close to the beginning. This is a great way to know readers understand what you want to say.

Internet Marketing

The advent of the Internet has made this world an almost borderless world. In the context of enterprise, the Internet is becoming more and more important to many companies and organizations around the globe. It has greatly expanded the market and enhanced the market reach of businesses, be they small businesses or multinational corporations, to the extent that whatever market segments they can’t reach previously, they can now do so to a large extent.

In the context of Internet Marketing, my central message to business owners is that in order for you to have the competitive advantage, you’ll need to effectively identify and attempt to satisfy the genuine needs and wants of specifically defined target markets, and that you’ll have to do so more effectively than your competitors.

Your ability to do so will have a positive profound impact on your business.

What Is An Internet Market?

There’re many definitions of the term “market”; it all depends on the context in which it is used. The way I look at “market” is that it consists of people and/or organizations that have needs to be satisfied, have the purchasing power or money, and are willing to spend the money on whatever you have to offer. It generally implies a demand for a product or service, whatever context in which it is used.

From the marketing standpoint, a market consists of your existing customers as well as potential customers.

Why Internet Market-Orientation?

You should realise, as a business owner, that in order to effectively relate your product and/or service offerings to the needs of the marketplace, you should be market-oriented as opposed to product-oriented. What I mean by market-orientation is that you look at the marketplace through the media of marketing research and sales forecasting.

Market-orientation therefore makes it impossible, with the exception of a few special circumstances, to treat the market as a mass of homogeneous potential customers, as the overall market consists of many diverse sub-markets and groups, each with sufficient similarities to be treated as separate markets by themselves.

Furthermore, within each of these sub-markets or groups, there’re further divisions or sectors. For a product category (e.g., computers), your focus should be on those sectors within the sub-markets or groups which are most commercially attractive to you for a given product form (e.g., the desktop market or the laptop market), rather than be concerned with the whole population of potential customers for that product category.

This is common sense as you’re in business to make profits.

Identifying these sub-markets or groups would allow you to more effectively position your product and/or service offerings, your internet marketing communications, your pricing policy, and the rest of the 7 marketing mix elements.

The result is more satisfied customers and increased profits.

Over the last few months there has been an incredible number of new “guru’s” appear in the world of internet marketing. Amazingly this has coincided with a whole host of very poorly though out products that offer very little or no value to purchaser. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

It could be that you are already an internet marketing Guru and you don’t even know it yet. Just to help you out here is a list of 10 things that will help you work out if you are in fact an Internet Marketing “Guru”

10. Every family event, Birth, Wedding, Christening or Funeral is seen as a potential source of sales and the Ideal opportunity for an impromptu Seminar.

9. You approach the local paperboy and offer him 50% of sales to your new product in return for use of his “list”

8. You start to use words and expressions like “skyrocket” and “Explode your Income” in day to day conversations

7. You write your wife a note to tell her you’ve taken the dog for a walk and it stretches to 8 pages

6. You phone your local Wal-Mart and ask If you can get your shopping “even if it’s 2am”

5. You and your friends’ idea of fun is seeing who can get a poorly written book to no1. in Amazon

4. You get embarrassed in the showers when you find your friend has a bigger list than you.

3. You decide to sell your car but won’t tell anyone the price until they are in the bank and ready to pay

2. You take your youngest kid to a new school and then try to up sell to your oldest kid and tell the headmaster that he will never see this offer again

1. You can’t see the irony in the last 9 reasons

What do you do If any of the above apply to you? If you recognise that more than 1 of the 10 are applicable then I am afraid you are probably beyond saving.