My Buy Essay

Marketing online has become the preferred method of promotion and advertising for both web and home businesses. Internet marketing gives business owners the opportunity to target their chosen audience, while often receiving instant results. To accomplish your goals in the internet marketing field, you must first familiarize yourself with general promotional and marketing facts. Just a few simple tips can help you build your business into all that you desire.

To produce a significant income from your business, you must first find a way to gain visitors to your web site. Generating traffic is very important in internet marketing. It is a good idea to visit other web sites with a similar audience as yours to aid in the development of your internet marketing plan. Affiliate programs are an ideal source of traffic generation, as well as, web site advertising. As the internet expands, so do the many ways to bring customers to your site.

The word “free” is one of the most powerful internet marketing tools ever. Offering a free trial or sample on your web site is the perfect way to get potential customers excited about your business. As in any marketing plan, creativity is a must. If you are not able to dish out any free goodies, why not create a special offer or discount? It is essential that this offer is only offered at your site; this shows that you are willing to try something different from other business owners. Innovation can be the key to success in the internet marketing game.

Developing an honest and solid reputation in the business community is a necessity. Customers need to feel secure purchasing from you, and not worry about disclosing their personal information through your servers. Most consumers look for a seal of approval such as the Better Business Bureau Online icon. Once customers trust you, your business and internet marketing aspirations can continue to prosper.

Don walked across the street from his house to mine to announce he had finally retired. “But I’m not ready for the golf course,” he said. “I want to make a living on the Internet. What can I sell?”

This is a question many of us struggle with as we see money, freedom, and a bright future for those who manage to find their niche online. You may have tried to sell something from the Internet only to find it is difficult to get visitors to your web site and even harder to get them to buy.

The biggest hurdle is simple: most folks are trying to sell products to consumers. That’s not where the money is. It is a more daunting task than most realize.

Only one percent of retail sales happens on the Internet. Even though selling to consumers should be gargantuan one day, we have a long way to go before the majority of people are placing orders the Internet way.

Instead, sell something to businesses. While consumer sales amounted to many billion last year, business-to-business purchases vaulted to a whopping ten times that much. Clearly, if you want the easiest path to tapping into the landslide of Internet cash, sell a product or service needed by business.

So, you say, I should sell a product to businesses? Not exactly. Most products need to be sold in large volumes by many distributors before they turn a profit. Chances are the product you sell is also being pushed by hundreds or thousands of other affiliates. In the end, many business buyers will simply click to the main corporate site to make their purchase.

Your best bet for starting a small Internet business and earning a living online is to sell a service to businesses. Unlike products, it is hard to mass produce a service. Most service providers find their competition is relatively thin. This is especially true if you provide a very specialized service or do your job in a particular way that is hard to duplicate. Because services require time spent by an experienced expert, rates can be high, especially for business customers.

But I’m not an expert in anything people on the Internet would want to buy, you exclaim. Not true.

Sit down with a pen and jot down all the things bosses have paid you for during your work career. Add to your list things you have done on your own time that friends, neighbors, or co-workers have felt were valuable.

Which of these things could be sold on the Internet? If you kept books for a business with twenty employees, you can sell your bookkeeping service to the vast number of small Internet businesses who don’t have the time or expertise to manage their growing firm.

If you produced your church newsletter for several years, your desktop publishing and editing skills could fill the hot demand for people who can write and publish e-messaging campaigns, web sites, and print newsletters. Best of all, a writer/editor deals in pure information which is easiest and cheapest to deliver over the Internet.

My neighbor Don decided his skills from a career in law enforcement would be hard to sell on the Internet. But he knew lots of things businesses needed and he had a list of town residents who could fill those needs.

If you don’t readily have a service you can sell to business, find someone who does. Many in-demand people don’t know how to market themselves on the Internet or haven’t the time to try. Represent their service online and take a commission for each sale.

Put up your own web site with some articles business customers will find helpful. They can do double duty, showing you know plenty about your line of work.

Post testimonials from satisfied customers or other experts in your industry. To get full impact, be sure to list the person’s full name and the name of their business or city they live in.

Offer to send customers and prospects a monthly update via email. Include brief updates on important developments in the industry. Mix in three line ads promoting your service.

Selling a service to business is your least-expensive way to get started making money online. It is also the quickest way to tap into the huge amounts of money traveling from business to business.

There are thousands and thousands of message boards on the internet. That’s a lot of potential people who may be interested in your products or services. It also serves as a quick and easy way to get a lot of links pointing back at your site and can help get your pages spidered faster by the search engines.

I use a free tool, Board Tracker (.boardtracker.com/), to help monitor posts on over 25,000 forums.

You can set up a free account there and then set up alerts. You can set it to alert you to any posts containing any keyword or phrases you like. Some examples would be, your board nicknames, your domain names, affiliate programs you work with, or whatever else you’re interested in..

When someone makes a post and one of your alert keywords is found, you are emailed a link to the thread which you can follow and make a post. So as not to be a blatant board spammer, it is recommended that you register and make an introduction post on that board before responding to the thread. When responding, you should make your post helpful to the person in regards to answering any question they had without spamming your site/program, you are relying on your signature file here to draw their attention.

To make this task easier, I suggest utilizing Roboform (.roboform.com/). Roboform makes it easy to handle all of your registering and logins.

Now, let’s find some forums in which we can participate. Everyone has some knowledge or interest in something. Perhaps it is cars, interior design or something else. Whatever it is, you can be certain there are forums for that particular niche.

You can use your favorite search engine and search for…

forums

“message board”

or specifically for…

car message boards

interior design message boards

or search by the different types of forum software like…

“powered by PHPBB”

“powered by vbulletin”

Before registering with any message boards I would suggest that you setup a yahoo or gmail account just for this purpose. It would also be a good idea to use this email for your boardtracker alerts as well.

Now you are ready to begin registering. I have created a new identity in Roboform to handle the registration for me. This includes my signature file as well. Before posting, make sure that you read the board rules so you are able to comply with those.

Once registered, make your introduction post. Basically you are just announcing your arrival and maybe saying a little something about yourself (roboform can do that too!), be sure to set your introduction thread to notify you of new posts so that you are able to respond as others welcome you.

Some things to keep in mind…

Who is your target audience and where will you find them? Are stay home moms likely to be found in Family & Parenting forums? Who is most likely to be participating at a car forum? A pet owners forum? etc..

Once you’ve located your target audience, target your signature to meet the needs of that audience. For example, if you were involved in a Family & Parenting forum, a signature aimed towards the mom who would like to earn money while being home for her children may be in order. If it were a Car or Electronics forum, maybe a signature promoting Free Satellite Dishes (these pay $50-$100 per install btw) would be more appropriate. The idea is to determine what the needs of any particular audience would be and finding a way to appeal to that.

Also, notice that the majority of forums offer a place for people to place advertising, usually under a category labeled something like, “opportunities”, “recommendations”, “spam allowed”, etc.. Look for these and make use of those as well. Each of those is a free targeted link to your site or product.

Make sure that you are paying attention to your anchor text. Anchor text, in case you don’t know, is the actual text that is linked. Choose good keywords for your anchor text that you would like to do well for in the search engines. Never link text such as “click here”.

The most important thing is to make this a part of your daily schedule. Do it each and every day and shortly you will have thousands of free advertising links all over the internet!

Disclaimer: I am in no way endorsing blatant spamming! The method I’ve outlined above is more of a suggestion for yet another avenue of free marketing that should be used in a responsible and productive manner which will benefit the board owners, other board members as well as yourself.

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!

Keywords and Ad Words aren’t the only way that search engines score relevancy; links to other similar sites are another important factor. Keywords have been so abused by some webmasters that links are winning much more relevancy points. Google is said to love them. It might sound strange to suggest that your users should check out your competitors, but they probably know about them anyway.

If your competitors have a higher ranking than you, linking to them can often give you a higher relevancy score with the search engines and the subsequent increase in traffic will make it worth your while.

Alternatively, you can link to your own site by creating a subdirectory. This is like building another web page, but the URL will include your keyword. So if you were selling stuffed toys, the new URL would be YourDomain.com/stuffed-toys/stuffed-toys.html.

You could then write a short paragraph on the home page, describing the new page and including a link. You’ll get big relevancy points for this!

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking means forming partnerships with other sites who place a link from their web pages to yours. You give them a similar link in return.

When you look for people to swap links with, make sure that you don’t reduce the quality or content of your own site. You don’t want users to click straight through without reading your content; you want them to buy first. One way to stop them from running away too quickly is to create a “Resources Page” and link to that page from your homepage. This doesn’t take away from the content on your homepage and the links are just one click away rather than being buried deep within the site, giving value to your partners.

In any case, you want to be sure that your site is more than just a page full of links. If your site contains more links than content, it will not be attractive to webmasters, search engines or users.

Picking Your Partner

Your link partners should be sites your target market will visit. Think about your product and its subject area and brainstorm to determine where people interested in your product might be looking online. For example, if you’re trying to sell a book about blackjack strategy, it makes sense that the people visiting online casinos would make great customers. Online casinos then could be good partners.

Identify top-ranked, high quality casino sites and find the email address of their webmasters. You can also identify your competitors, see where they trade links and then follow suit.

Tips for Talking to Webmasters

Before you contact webmasters, place a link to their site on your home page or resource page to assure them that you will actually provide a high quality link. Create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather than deleting it. You don’t want them to think you’re message is Spam. (Something about their site or product is sure to capture their attention; they will probably open and read it, thinking that you’re a potential customer.)

Begin your message by talking about your visit to their site and what you found interesting about it. Detail your product or service in one line and ask them to exchange links with you.

Tell them in detail where you have placed their link and emphasize that it is only one click away from your homepage. Tell them that if you don’t hear back from them within 2 weeks, you will consider that to be a negative response and that you will remove their link from your site.

If you are in a sales position where you are soliciting a product or service, there is some advice that might be helpful when speaking to other businesses. There are times during a year that are good times and other times that might not be so good. As I always state in any advice I give, every market is different, so this is more of a generalized theory than anything else.

Rather than get wordy and lengthy in my explanation and reasoning, I’ll give best and worst times:

Best Times for B2B selling:

* The months of January and February. (First of year numbers start over)

* Between the dates of the 10th through 25th of any month except December. (Meat of month less bills)

* Between the 5th and 20th of December. (moves up a bit due to holidays)

* The last week in December. (Some companies like to dump excess funds to escape taxes)

* First of January, April, July & October (Typically first of each quarter for quarterly companies)

Worst Times for B2B selling:

* Any holiday period. (companies may be closed)

* The week leading up to the tax deadlines. (business owners stressed and sometimes facing big bills)

* The last week in December. (This is either hit or miss. While it can be the best, it can also be the worst)

* The end of March, June, September & December. (End of quarter for quarterly companies)

* Weekends. (This one is obvious, but Saturday and Sunday are probably the worst)

Again, these are generalized timeframes for business to business selling. If it’s business to customer, it’s a completely different ballgame because weekends are great for customers, along with holidays. You should always try to sell 365 days a year in some fashion, but put more emphasis towards the prime, or best selling times.

Marketing for the internet is an entirely different field when compared to marketing in the real world. Although, just like marketing for corporations in the real world, many of the same theories apply.

At the start of every business, you should have a business plan. This will undoubtedly be different for different companies and different types of industries. In some cases, you don’t have as much planning to do, but in others you’ll end up with a 200 page document.

Now, when starting an online business, or even when just branching off and creating a website for your business, you’ll have lots to plan. For starters, what type of website works best? Many internet marketers will tell you that first and foremost, you need to have a blog based on your industry. If you’re running a company that sells candy, start a blog on how candy is made. This is becoming more and more essential because it turns your website into a living, breathing thing. People will be able to leave comments and you’ll be able to receive feedback on your product.

Blogging is a great way to start an online business because not only can people leave comments and feedback, but you can write about other people and others can write about you. This is the basics of linkbuilding. Essentially, the more that other people talk about you, the more popular your website will become, most notably in search engine rankings.

One of the biggest mistakes that online businesses make is to put up advertising on their site. This is fine once you’re established, but is absolutely never okay when just starting out. It generally takes well over a year for any business to start making money through the internet. It will be worse for your company to try and force it than to try and make money right away. In fact, using ads can actually hurt your reputation as a legitimate company in the eyes of many online communities.

Once you have everything running smoothly, you should start using social media marketing. Submit your blog entries to StumbleUpon and Digg and Reddit. Get friends to help rate your blog posts and you’ll start to see a huge increase in traffic. A good estimate of what you should aim for is 2000 hits per day.

The use of search engines in locating information has become so central to our daily lives that it is hard to imagine a world where one cannot simply “google” driving directions just before heading out to the car. This availability of information, unprecedented in human history, is still a new concept, yet it has revolutionized the way we live, even in our humdrum, day-to-day activities. Need a new recipe in time for dinner? Conduct a search (and forward it to meConductSearch.com!). Forgot your anniversary and need a gift by tomorrow morning? Piece of cake. It’s become second nature to not only snatch instantaneous solutions from the Internet, but to trust that they will be there.

Just because we’ve so readily accepted search doesn’t mean anyone thinks it’s fully developed. I offer only your typical financial headlines: Google does this, Yahoo does that, Exxon searches for oil &ndash everybody searches! Tech advances beget tech advances and search is still a work in progress, a particularly interesting work in progress.

The concept of search need not even be limited to alphabetical means. Microsoft is firing imaginations with image search…for more imagery. Somewhere in Washington State (I think) teams of cyber savants have been taking steps toward incorporating this imagery hunt functionality into the search engine. The goal is to allow users to input an image file as the search parameter in order to return associated image results.

While the technical process admittedly remains mysterious to those of us not actually working on it, its aim of a searchable database free from the ambiguity of language is a beautiful notion, even if it’s not the end all of search itself.

Let’s say that you were interested in researching a fancy home furnishing company called “Hammer and Co.”. You’d open up your web browser and enter the name in the search bar on Google, right? Your Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) will show hundreds of results…M.C. Hammer, tools, and the like. There will be some, if not lots of, sifting to do. But, were you able to input an image of Hammer & Son’s distinctive purple tulip logo in the search field, you

may get a glimpse of Hammer’s lovely wormwood designs. Heavenly.

Engines utilizing “image search” will distinguish content, spatial qualities, pixel dimensions and placement, the size of images, and various other factors in its comparison. While the technology is not quite ready to be unveiled for general use, Microsoft’s purchase of Vexcel, a specialist in imagery, remote sensing and “photogrammetry” does bolster support for the theory that we are not far off from being able to take a photo of a stranger with a camera-phone and running an internet-wide search for that person instantly.

It seems the internet cannot be further leveraged to the end of radical technological advancement and social change, it is. Web 2.0 expands infinitely outward into a world of possibilities that need only be imagined to become true.

Damian Verutes

Marketing Analyst

MarketingConductSearch.com

ConductSearch.com

So you’ve tried direct mail, advertising, you’ve got a web site, maybe you’ve even tried networking as a marketing strategy. These and many other marketing strategies are all good and if performed properly will most likely bring you favorable results. A word to the wise here though, some of them can run you a fortune in marketing costs. And in my experience, cost has a lot less bearing on effectiveness than one would like to believe. Now being a fan of Jay Conrad Levinson and his concept of “Guerrilla Marketing”, I am always on the lookout for innovative and inexpensive ways to market. And what I have for you here certainly fits that bill.

I believe Napoleon Hill in his 1930’s classic book “Think and Grow Rich” was the first person to coin the phrase “Master Mind” and he defined it as: “Coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.”

Hmmm… So basically it’s building a team that leverages their collective brains and brawn to help one another get what they want.

So let’s not beat around the bush here. Are you ready for the secret marketing strategy? Well here goes… It’s quite simple really… there is strength in numbers. Two minds are exponentially more capable than one mind alone. In this equation, one plus one does not equal two, it more closely resembles eleven. We’re talking about leverage here. The secret is simply to gain leverage by creating your own mastermind. Not just any mastermind though; One that specifically focuses on marketing &ndash a “Marketing Mastermind” so to speak.

So my proposal to you is to take that exact concept of a mastermind as Napoleon Hill defined it, and niche it to focus primarily on marketing.

So real quick what should this mastermind look like? My suggestion would be 4 to 8 members from different, non-competing industries, meeting weekly to discuss how they can help each other market their respective businesses &ndash Plain and simple.

Now it’s not my intention here to educate you in any detail on how to set up and effectively participate in a mastermind group, as there are plenty of resources out there already that can do that for you, it is simply to share with you what’s possible by leveraging this concept to support your marketing efforts.

Personally, I see this strategy as a phenomenal way for organizations, especially smaller ones with little spending money for marketing, to use the power of leverage to broaden their capability and effectiveness.

While the benefits of doing this could be endless, let me just share with you five of my favorites:

1. Plain and simple, it keeps you in the conversation of marketing.
2. It can provide you with unbiased feedback, brainstorming, and marketing advice based on experiences of what has worked, or hasn’t worked for your mastermind teammates.
3. You will significantly expand your reach and go beyond who you know and tap into who your teammates know. Now depending on what the group agrees to, you may gain access to the client list and/or mailing list of the other members. Additionally, you can explore the possibilities of joint marketing initiatives and joint venture arrangements where multiple parties share in the results.
4. You’ll be held accountable to get done what you say you will get done. This alone inspires people into action and action ultimately leads to results.
   
5. The list can go on and on and on however, best of all, masterminding is free!

So need I say more? I sincerely hope you’ll take this strategy on and try it on for a while. What do you got to lose? &ndash It’s free. Remember, there’s power in numbers so build your “Marketing Mastermind” and reap the rewards today!