My Buy Essay

Archive for February, 2009

Google likes to offer all kinds of neat little tips and clues regarding how it views sites. Google PageRank is one such tool, but with questionable value.

The Red Herring that is Google PageRank

Google is a highly secretive beast. If you are trying to optimize your site to obtain high rankings, Google will provide you with little or no information. It even fails to show all of the links it is counting to your site, a negative step that no other engine takes. What Google does provide, however, is the Google PageRank for sites.

In my opinion, Google PageRank is a bit of red herring. I don’t believe it tells you much about how Google views your site. Instead, it is a bit of bait designed to get you to download the Google Toolbar. Yes, you can only see your PageRank if you download a Google program on to your computer. And you thought Microsoft was bad!

Assuming you have downloaded the toolbar, the PageRank is the little bar in the middle that should be partially covered in green. The green represents your PageRank and is out of ten. You can run your cursor across it and the actual PageRank number will appear. Most sites have a PageRank of 3 to start off with. Google gives itself a rank of 10, while Yahoo and MSN each get a 9. If your bar is grey, it means you have been banned by Google for doing something they don’t like in your optimization efforts. If the bar is blank, it either means your site has not been indexed yet, is relatively new or Google is updating its rankings.

So, what does the Google PageRank really mean? Not much. Originally, it was thought to be a measure of value compared to other sites. Google still touts the tool as this, but this claim appears a bit dubious. A site with a PageRank of 5 will not necessarily outrank a site with a PageRank of 3. You can perform a search on Google for practically any keyword and see as much by looking at the top 5 returned listings.

Google PageRank is an interesting tool in a very general sense. It can be used to determine that Google has found your site and how it generally values it compared to others. Just keep in mind that it does not actually mean much of anything when it comes to rankings.

Other than creating your own products in order to join the herds of increasing business online crowd, there are also other easier ways to have an immediate Internet business established.

So what do you need in order to join the Resell Rights business? It is very easy(really mean it..), which is to have a domain name &ndash able to get one easily from Yahoo for $2.99 or namecheap for $8.88, it depends on which you prefer, a hosting, most preferably a paid one &ndash important, and a fully-functional website.

There are tons of hosting out there, and to name a few midPhase(free domain name), lunarpages(free domain name as well), bluehost, or GoDaddy are the better ones.

These are almost the basic requirements of a successful affiliate, but don’t be mistaken – Affiliates and resellers are different.

Affiliates don’t need to have any other startup costs other than the basic requirements above, but resellers &ndash yes. Resellers will need to purchase the rights to a product owned by the other people, but they can resell the products and keep 100% of the profits instead. For affiliates, they only receive a percentage of commissions from their sales. Usually, purchasing the rights to resell a certain product can cost 3, 5 or even 10 times more than its normal price.

The few stages of Resell Rights:

• Basic Resell Rights

You can sell the product, but not your customers.

• Master Resell Rights

When you have a master resell rights product for sale, you can resell it to your customers, and so can they with the same product. This means that when you purchase a Master Resell Right, your customers get to sell the same item as well.

• Private Label Rights

These are really popular. Why is it so? &ndash If you purchase a private label right of a product, you get to change the contents of the product any ways you want, produce it under your name, anything! Basically, you can treat it as though it’s your production.

Prices for a private label right is much higher than any other rights. Of course, everyone knows it(it’s common sense!).

• Give Away Rights

As clear as it sounds, you may give away the product to anyone you want! Instead, you can’t sell or edit the product in any ways.

Usually give away rights works well with viral marketing &ndash people give their work out for publicity.

• Rebranding Rights

This product works almost the same as a product with give away rights, but you are able to edit part of the contents to benefit yourself on publicity as well. Most probably, you can only edit the sponsored names, website URL and affiliate links.

How can you profit from a resell rights business at its peak?

You definitely need your opt-in lists. In fact, the most important thing for an Internet Marketer is his or her lists of subscribers. Some Internet Marketers who own 100,000 to 200,000 subscribers(also called leads) doesn’t even need to actually work anymore. What they do everyday is just providing their subscribers or leads with some useful information, real life news, stories, and build a closer relationship with them.

When they found a good product or item, easily they can send an email out and endorse it, earning commissions through the affiliate links. Well as for a reseller, you do the same, but a little bit different. When there are products that you think is interesting and is worth to be “told” to your subscribers, you purchase the resell rights to it and usually, sell them to your subscribers at a better offer.

Most Internet Marketers will usually purchase much more resell rights to the other products then combine them together, selling all of them at a cheaper price in a bundle. Sometimes the price can even be more expensive for up to ten times if you purchase them separately, that is why tons of people would rather purchase the products from resellers in a bulk.

Nevertheless, it is not always a must to sell all of them together. Many resell rights have the same looks and same sales page and you can change that. By writing your own or hiring a copywriter to craft a much more compelling sales copy for the resell product, you can increase the response a lot more.

As for digital products like e-books or software, you can design a whole new e-book cover or software box instead of using the given one that comes with the resell rights. As the saying goes “in the valley of the blind the one with an eye is the king.” 727 words

Now being a reseller is really sometimes easier than anything. When new resell rights which seems attractive are being sold, people will just need to purchase the rights to them, compile them, and next ready to be sold in a single sales copy. Search for joint venture partners, offer them a higher percentage in commissions, request them to endorse your offer and that’s it.

Being any Internet Marketer, it is always better to take hold of every opportunity you can earn money with. When you successfully sell a product to a customer, try and sell him or her another product right on your Thank You page. Basically the idea is “since you’re my customer and you purchased a product from me, here’s a great offer specially for you at an incredible special price.” It’s a very good way of having a back-end sale.

That’s not all, to urge customers into pulling out their credit cards for the Thank You page item, most Internet Marketers will also make it a one-time offer &ndash this will be shown only one time, you won’t see it again. If the customers are interested they’ll get it, if not, there’s no harm at all.

There are many ideas of earning money as a reseller and you can always apply it for your own. The Internet business market is so huge that you can choose from these varieties of business styles that suits yourself. From starting your own Internet business selling your own product, earning commissions from affiliate programs and being a reseller &ndash make the best decision for yourself and get started!

Since instigating proper SEO techniques I have seen my web site visitors increase by over 1500%. My conversion rates have also gone from a meagre 0.5% to a very healthy 8%. How has this been achieved? By following seven simple guidelines which have not only seen my visitor figures sky rocket but also the web sites position in the major search engines has gradually improved until it sits on page one for all the important search categories and many surprising ones also.

So what are these seven basic rules I have followed?

1. Develop as many pages as is possible all with good and different content on. The content should be different but obviously related. The content should be written for the visitor not for the search engines. It has to be good sales copy because you are trying to sell a product or a service virtually in an instant so it must grab the attention of the visitor..

2. Develop reciprocal links with related sites. They can be in exactly the same field as you if you are providing a service so long as they are situated away from your area and not directly in competition with you. Do not worry about the page rank of these sites as it is more important that they are relevant to yours service. If you have products which are sold worldwide then it is not quite so simple and you will have to link with sites that have some relevance but not a direct one, otherwise you would be linking with your competitors.

3. Place your link in as many directories as is possible. Most are free and do not require a link back but even if they do it is of no consequence. Do it. Some may require a small fee. It is entirely up to you whether you are prepared to pay this fee. Be careful however because you could end up paying out large sums in total if you do not keep a careful check on the monies paid out. Be selective.

4. Do not direct all your links back to the homepage. Spread the links around the relevant pages.

5. Write articles and submit them to the article distributors. This will give you an ever increasing number of backlinks to your website as the articles get picked up and published on weblogs, websites and ezines. You could find a good article ending up in some very surprising places.

6. Develop a weblog alongside and as part of your website. If this is updated daily then you will ensure that the search engines regularly visit your site and pick up all the updates.

7. Add additional content to your website at least once per week. Do not allow any of your web pages to remain static for any length of time. Even minor changes are good.

All of these things enacted together should see your site climbing through the rankings. As the site progresses towards the first page you will see an ever increasing number of visitors arriving at your site. How many of those are converted into customers depends entirely upon the strength of the copy on the pages and whether it is enticing people to become your customers. It is utterly pointless having many hundreds of visitors to your site if they all depart without interacting in some way with your content.

The average web user conducts at least two searches online during each session they use the internet. It is a surprise however that most web users will complain that they never really get what they are looking for when searching. Many will tell you that it takes them forever to find what they need or that they have to visit twenty websites to get to the site they initially wanted to find. These occurrences do not happen because the internet is lacking proper information. They happen because users do not know how to conduct effective searches online. If you want to conduct an effective search online, you need to follow a few general rules. The more practice you put in, the faster you will see your results pour in. After using these rules for a while, you will be able to find anything you want on the web in less than half the time you once did.

One of the easiest tips to follow is one that deals with exact wording. If you are looking for a specific person or item on the web, then you will want to use exact wording. To do this, you will need to use quotation marks with your words. If you are looking for information on John Doe, you would type “John Doe” into the search box. By using quotations in this manner, your search engine will only return sites that list the complete name as you typed it. If you neglect to use the quotations however, you may get results with only the first name in them. This tip can really save you time and works for topics as well as names.

Some of the information on the web may be full of spelling errors. That is why it is sometimes necessary to try alternate spellings of words when conducting a search. This is especially true if you are searching for a name that may be spelled in different ways (ex. Shawn, Sean, Shaun). Try one of the spellings and if it does not yield what you need, try another. Many people give up after the first failed attempt, but trying other spellings is worth the extra time if you really need the information. Misspellings occur with words that are not names as well. Therefore, you may need to try alternate spellings of simple words to get what you need as well.

Using synonyms of the words you are searching for is also a great idea. For example, if you are looking for articles on dogs, you may also want to search for canines or pets. This will help you get a broader array of information on the subject you need. Some articles may refer to the animals as dogs, but others might always call them canines, so it is helpful to include both in your search. You may also want to do separate searches for each synonym to get more results. This is great for slang words as well. If there are more than one acceptable word for something you are searching for, by all means, use everything you can to get the most information possible. Similar to synonym use, to get good results you might also have to use related words in your search. For instance, if you are searching for vases, you might need to include the word “flower” in your search. This will likely target a few sites that don’t have vases, but most of the results will be appropriate for what you need.

The more specific you can be with your search, the faster you will get where you want to go. Try to be as specific as you possibly can. If you want to know what temperature it is in London, England, don’t do a search for “weather” or “weather in Europe”. Instead type in “what is the temperature in London, England?” to get the best and fastest answer to your question. If you can be specific, you will weed out all of the results that don’t offer what you need. This will make your search time much more pleasant because you won’t have to trek through pages of unneeded information to get to the real results. Use these tips by themselves or together to make an effective search online.

If you are wrong everyone will have forgotten what you said by the time it happens anyway. Having gotten that major disclaimer out of the way, let’s take a look at the industry and try to make some sense out of it.

The industry really got started almost thirty years ago in the United States. Many real estate developers lured by the vision of being able to sell a $100,000 condo for $500,000 jumped in. Not realizing they were in the marketing business in which they were inexperienced rather than the development business they didn’t do all that well and many went under. The few who really understood what they were doing did very well. Some built sizable timeshare empires.

Then the industry started to mature. The major hotel chains such as Marriott, Hilton, etc. decided they were losing way too many of the vacation lodging customers to timesharing. They also had a perfect vehicle to insure the brand loyalty they had been spending so much to achieve. With their huge resources they effectively drove all but a few of the smaller developers out of the business. The largest independent developers are still doing very well in spite of this. Now where does the industry go from here?

Prediction #1: The chains and the largest developers will continue to grow and to offer more widely appealing products such as points systems and multiple locations. Their pricing levels will be in the $12,000 to $25,000 range per yearly timeshare week. The biennial sales (every other year) will still enable them to also gain the lower end of this market.

In the meantime, the developers overlooked a simple, logical by-product of their millions of sold timeshares. That is the resale market. Some of these original timeshares were sold twenty-five years ago to people who were in their seventies at the time. They simply cannot use the product any more. Further, since it was/is a real estate product which theoretically never dies, there are many good reasons to have to sell and move on.

General real estate brokers took a look at this timeshare resale market where the whole resale price is about a third of a selling broker’s three- percent commission on a house and simply ignored it. Owners wishing to resell then had nowhere to turn. There was no marketing system. As a result, prices plummeted. People who had not really paid too much to the developer (after all they didn’t really make a killing) could now sell for only a fraction of what they had paid.

Enter the scammer. These folks who seem to always be the first into any new arena promised the timeshare sellers anything they wanted to hear in return for an advance fee of from $300 to $5,000. If you went for one of these deals don’t feel too bad. So did I and I should know better. I sent $350 to a company in Florida who put an ad in the Orlando shopping news for $9. That was the whole shake of the dice. It was also when I decided to provide viable solution to the resale problem…namely to provide a straight-ahead resale brokerage which would get paid when the timeshare was sold. Fortunately there were others around the country that thought the same way.

The resale business is now developing along these lines. As more honest brokers get into the resale business, they will become a group who will drive out the bad apples. They may even get something like a Resale Multiple Listing Service together. There are already some indications of this on the Internet.

Prediction #2: The good guys will drive out the bad guys.

Years ago, condominiums were in about the same place as timeshares are today. Eastern lenders wouldn’t finance condos and many brokers wouldn’t sell them. After all, how could you sell or finance part of a building? Now the same argument is heard in relation to time in part of a building. It too will pass and the time will come when it is completely normal. Further, the price of resale timeshares, which is now at ridiculously low levels, will increase as they become more accepted. The gap between the pricing of new timeshares and used timeshares will narrow.

There are already cases where timeshares which were bought for investment have worked out well for the owners. Just don’t buy that argument if you are currently looking at new timeshare product.

Prediction #3: The future looks bright for resort timesharing. As time goes on and inflation continues (which it always does) timeshares will become more valuable just as primary housing has proven to be in the long run. If you are not yet on board, you couldn’t pick a better time. If you already are, it might be a good time to consider adding to your vacation happiness. Anyone joining in now will have a hard time going wrong.

Just the other day I was very pleasantly surprised when an old friend of mine from whom I haven’t heard since over a year called me. After the usual “how’s the weather over there?” talking I quickly found myself engaged in an excited discussion about web design. After half an hour of conversation where we were talking about a lot of technical stuff I remembered how we started this conversation and BANG, it hit me. Why?

My friend actually started this conversation by asking me about my work as an ecommerce and web marketing consultant! So how did we end up talking about web design and programming? Well, when I answered him he only picked out what he found important and what he could understand. And unfortunately the only thing he finds important is web design and programming!

Like myself my friend is a trained web designer and network administrator and we both worked already for a bunch of people and companies creating websites and like me he recently started his own web design company. The only difference between us is that he still belongs to the 90 percent of people who have no success on the web while I belong to the 10 percent who are earning big money. So how does it come that some people are so incredible successful, while others are not even earning enough to pay their web host?

It’s all about the mindset.

Ask 90 percent of all so called web professionals what you have to do to build a successful web business and they will tell you all the same: It’s all about Web programming, web design and web programming again. Their eyes start sparkling when all this funny words start flushing out of their mouths and they tell you for hours all about the things you can do with java and javascript, php, flash animations, perl, cgi and whatsoever.

To be true. I can understand their enthusiasm about all this fancy technical stuff because I really love it myself, but hey, I did not ask about technical possibilities. No one answered my question yet. They just got excited by all that technical stuff. What I asked was:

How can I build a successful web business?

And the shocking truth is: The answer is so simple that 90 percent of all the people don’t get it. It’s just one simple sentence:

Do not tell your customers what they need. Ask them.

That’s a simple formula. It’s easy and logical and everyone can try it. You will be amazed about the results.

Of course, in order to practically apply this formula it would need much deeper exploration, but that’s not necessary at the moment. Before we go into details we have to understand the basics and the basic point here is that this mindset and ONLY this mindset is the key to a successful net marketing business.

If you don’t develop this mindset of putting your customers first you can be a complete laymen or the most sophisticated search engine optimisation expert, but you will NEVER succeed. If you want a successful marketing business you need happy customers and the only way to make them happy is by first understanding and then fulfilling their needs.

Like my friend, most of nowadays “web experts” focus on technical issues, programming and web design because THEY like it. But they don’t understand what their customers are looking for. Their customers aren’t looking for java, flash animations, changing images etc. They are looking for high quality information! I repeat: For…

…first class high quality information.

Therefore: Like in every other part of economy find out what people need. Do a great market research discover a suitable niche for yourself and focus on delivering high quality information to your interested visitors. And once they see that you understand their needs, they will build confidence in you and will be happy to buy your products, cause they know that your products are as great as the information you provide.

We all have the same possibilities. You have the same possibilities as I have and I have the same possibilities as my friend, but although the internet contains the same success potential for everyone not everyone uses it.

It’s your choice. You can choose, if you want to use it and be part of the 10 percent successful people or if you want to ignore it and stay in the gulch of failure.

You decide.

If you have spent more than a few minutes studying search engine optimization and web traffic building then you know that text links are important — most especially one-way links from quality sites.

So many people interested in building traffic to their sites spend a lot of time, effort, and money building text links to their sites. They purchase links in link directories, buy links from brokers and site owners, and even swap links. Others try different methods like forum posting, blog commenting, and article writing.

But most of these people overlook one very easy and inexpensive way to achieve one-way, often permanent, text links from quality sites. What is this method of text linking? It is usually called Ezine Advertising!

That’s right, just like pork is the other white meat, ezine advertising is the other way to text link.

There are many advantages of ezine advertising when it comes to text link building:

1. You get the added bonus of email marketing benefits

2. Text link surrounded by relevant content, your ad copy, that you wrote specifically for that purpose

3. Limited outbound links competing with yours. Ezines only sell a few ads per issue (many only sell one or two) so your text link will be only one of a few.

4. When the issue is archived on the web (which is how you achieve your permanent text link) the page is usually text-heavy with the content that search engines love

5. The site where your permanent text link resides (the ezine archives) is regularly updated and in turn regularly visited by search engines

All these advantages roll into one additional bonus for you. The text links appear to have developed organically and naturally — not as so many traditional text links do — which makes them even more powerful and effective in terms of traffic building and search engine optimization.

And unlike so many text links which are purchased monthly or for a limited time, an ezine ad is purchased for a particular issue and will remain alive for the months or years that the issue is archived. If you aren’t sure how long an ezine archives then check their web site. Many ezines and newsletters archive for years.