My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘Internet marketing’

I have been in internet marketing for over ten years and have seen marketing techniques come and go. Some are still around and some are new and innovative. Below you will find what I believe to be the best and most effective online marketing techniques.

Article Marketing – Article marketing was and is one of the most powerful online marketing methods available. Not only does it do wonders for you and your business, it is free as well!

Article marketing consists of writing helpful, informative, easy to understand articles that actually help your readers, not try to sell them something. Then you submit them to article banks, directories and ezine publishers. When your article runs in a popular ezine, it can do great things for your business. Writing articles is not as hard as you might think so give it a try. You will be delightfully surprised at how much it can affect your business.

Remember:

Don’t worry about fancy words. People are looking for help, not big words.

Advertise in your resource box, not your article.

Provide real, helpful info and resources, hot hype!

Write from the heart! Let your personality shine through in your articles.

Blogging – Blogging is a newer form of online marketing that just started becoming popular in the late 90′s. Blog is short for weblog and means an online publication in the form of a log or journal. Blogs can increase your customer base, your traffic and your search engine ranking, thus increasing your sales.

Blogging can be done for free through such sites as:

blogger.com

wordpress.com

and livejournal.com

Be sure and update your blog regularly; everyday would be best as people like fresh content, ideas and information.

Ezine Publishing – Ezine publishing has been around much longer than blogging and is far more effective, in my opinion. Your ezine needs to contain helpful resources and information, not just sales pitches. Develop a relationship with your readers. Let them know they can trust you and rely on you when they need your help.

Things to remember when putting together your ezine:

Keep it clean and easy to read.

Limit your advertising and be selective.

Always provide quality content and information.

Add your personality so your readers can get to know you.

Always provide contact info and be accessible.

Be consistent; send your ezine regularly as scheduled.

Be sure and proofread before sending it out.

Online Networking – Online networking, as with offline networking, is very important to your business. This is when you connect with as many people as possible to learn more and share more about your business. Many leads can come from networking. There are several ways to do this online.

Email Discussion Groups: Go to yahoogroups.com and search for appropriate groups.

Message Boards: Be sure and follow the rules for posting and offer your help as much as possible.

Social Sites: Such as MySpace.com, Ryze, Merchant Circle, etc. These can be great ways to make more contacts and get leads.

Joint Ventures – This is when you enter into an agreement with another online marketer that will benefit both sides.

Examples of joint ventures:

Ezine Ad Swaps

eBook Ad Swaps

Subscription Page Ad Swaps

Affiliate Programs

Exchange Advertising for % of Sales

and the list goes on and on. Be creative and come up with new ways you and your associates can help each other.

Podcasting – Podcasting is using digital media files which are distributed all over the internet via syndication feeds. Podcasting is still a fairly new way of online marketing and has great potential. Podcasting can be powerful because it uses voice not written words to get the message across. Offer your articles, do voice interviews, offer a chapter in your ebook via podcast, etc. Again, use your imagination to create new ways to spread the word about your business.

Ezine Advertising – Advertising your business, product, service, etc. in quality ezines can be well worth the money spent. There are a few things you can to to help you choose which ezines to advertise in.

Do a search to find ezines that cater to your target market. For example: if you are advertising kids’ books, you don’t want to advertise in an ezine about cars.

Once you find several targeted ezines, subscribe to them so you can look them over and see if the publisher is reliable in sending them out. You can also look over the other ads and make sure the publisher is selective in their advertising. You can possibly learn what the other readers think of the ezine as well.

Try contacting the publisher to see if they respond to your email. Ask about testimonials from other advertisers. Find out how many ads they run per issue and what the costs are.

You could also ask the publisher to do an ad swap to get an idea of what the response is like. Be selective in your choices and always code your ads so you know which ezines actually deliver.

I hope this article has given you some insight as to how to market your home/online business. I use several of these methods (and should be using the rest) and know from experience that they work!

The possibilities with the internet are endless and we need to keep up with new and innovative ways of marketing ourselves and our business. And we need to keep using tried and true methods as well.

Brian Campbell, best selling author and successful internet marketer taught me the first commandment of internet marketing, “You cannot promote anything online without first capturing the email address of your website visitors.” Otherwise, your most valuable asset (visitors, traffic) passes right on by, without you even knowing who they were and giving you no way to follow up with them to get them back to your website.

Most people visiting a new site have no intention of buying anything. They are usually casually surfing for information and happen to find your site. Unless they are totally impulsive, they will leave your site without buying anything. You see your site visitor counter increase everyday, but wonder why your sales are not increasing at the same rate. Here’s the answer. On average, it takes seven exposures to one product or new idea before a person will buy in. So you need to have a way to systematically follow up with your website visitors and at the same time build your most valuable asset, an email list that you can market to over and over again.

How would you like an automated salesperson working for your site 24 hours a day seven days a week? This salesperson never gets sick, is always available to greet your customers and does not take a “no” personally. They continue to follow up with your prospects just as you instructed them until the prospect opts out, but continually adds new prospects to your database without any trouble. The magic tool to accomplish this is called an autoresponder.

An autoresponder is an account that you subscribe to that captures and manages an email database collected from the traffic of your website. When you log into your autoresponder account, you can generate a sign-up form that will capture the name and email address and any other pertinent information you want to collect from your website visitors. You can then set up a campaign, a predetermined set of emails that you create and design with the purpose of getting the visitors back to your website and to buy your products or services.

Autoresponders can be used for other valuable and important purposes too. You can offer a free newsletter or a mini course promoting different aspects to your site. By offering something of value and at no cost, more people are willing to give you their email address. Once you have developed an email list, you can send a broadcast message to the entire list at the same time with a special promotion from your website or a joint venture with another internet marketer. Thousands have been made over one weekend with this kind of special promotion. The possibilities are endless, but have to have the system in place for it to work.

Where can you get an autoresponder program? There are scripts available that you can upload to your site but I would stay away from these. It is best to use an online service with a third party service. Where can you find one? A quick autoresponder Google search will provide you with many options. Most autoresponder sites will charge you a monthly fee and will allow you to run multiple campaigns and websites. The fees can range from free to as much as you are willing to pay for, depending on the services you need. However, I have found a very reliable autoresponder that you can test drive for free. You can try it out and learn how to work it with the basics you need to run a successful campaign. As your needs grow, they do have upgrade options you can subscribe to for a reasonable monthly fee to expand your service options. You can find this service at Getresponse.com.

If you are currently not using an autoresponder on your website, you are potentially missing out on thousands of dollars in potential sales. Don’t miss out on any more sales! I strongly urge you to get an autoresponder set up today.

To Your Success!

Steve Scoresby

Hello, I’m over here

Getting noticed on the web

Getting noticed on the web is the holy grail of most webmasters and rightfully so. Not only can you turn visitors into dollars, if done properly, but it also gives a feeling of accomplishment. In all honesty getting people to your sight is really not that difficult. There is probably 1000 things that you can do to attract visitors. The real trick is making use of all of them. The mistake that a lot of people make is believing that there is one magical way, some mystical ritual that will invoke the visitor magnet spell. Ok, so I’m being facetious but the reality is it does take work and diligence to make things happen. This is by no means a complete list, for a beginning webmaster or someone who is interested in becoming a webmaster, to follow. I am going to assume that an idea for a web site has already been decided upon.

1. The web site itself. This is a very important aspect of web marketing but I am focusing primarily on external web marketing. There are, however a few things that I want to cover here because I believe they are very important.

CONVENIENCE This is a big one. People today are accustomed to getting things fast from drive thru pharmacies to high speed internet. Instant gratification has become the rule of the day. With this in mind, web pages should load quickly. Believe it or not a 4 second load time for a page is extremely slow today. When the page is loaded potential customers expect to find what they are looking for immediately. Your site should be very well laid out and everything should be easily and quickly navigated. The brick and mortar days of putting the most popular items in the back so customers have to walk through the whole store are not effective for online businesses. This strategy should be avoided at all costs. Some studies have shown that if customers do not find what they are looking for in the first 15 seconds they will move on.

2. The first steps in getting the word out. Visit the popular business directories. dir.yahoo.com/, sbd.bcentral.com/, yellowpages.aol.com/#,. There are hundreds more.

3. Search engine submittal. A lot of web sites offer this service for a fee. I personally have never found it worth it. I recommend doing this yourself. It is easy and does not take that long to do if you submit it to the top search engines.

4. Forums. Get to know your market. There really is no better research than visiting forums related to your market and reading. Find out what your customers concerns are. Keep reading until you feel comfortable enough to post. Don’t spam the forums and be sure to read the rules for posting. A lot of forums will allow you to leave a link and some will not. Either way make sure you respect the guidelines for posting. I did come across a trick for getting recognized by search engines. Most forums allow you an avatar. That is a picture that appears when you post. You can usually set that up in your preferences when you sign up at most any forums. Typically it is a link to offsite where the picture is hosted. Make sure it is hosted from your web site and named after it. I made a bunch of avatars for a lot of friends and hosted them from my web site. To my surprise, it definitely caught the attention of the search engines. You goal here is to help not only advertise. After long enough you might just be the person everyone has questions for.

By starting with these four marketing strategies you can lay the foundation for a strong presence on the web. It will not happen over night but it will increase the popularity of your web site. Remember, web marketing is a cumulative proposition. The more marketing strategies you use the better.

Outsourcing is the latest buzz word to hit internet marketing circles, teleseminars, and niche websites. It is certainly not a new concept to outsource work, but like so much else in our lives, the Internet has given rise to a new dimension of this popular technique. Because of this, there are a number of issues to keep in mind when looking at outsourcing as a viable alternative to doing it yourself.

For good reason, outsourcing is a concept that internet marketing professionals and newbies alike should acquaint themselves with. Because a large number of internet marketers are running the show by themselves or with a limited pool of additional assistance, there are just too many tasks to complete alone. In addition to the time factor, it is simply not possible for any one individual to possess all the technical skills necessary to accomplish all aspects running an internet marketing business.

With time and skill level being the two primary factors that lead internet marketers to outsource, it is important to understand which of these two needs you are fulfilling when you proceed to outsource.

When analyzing your outsourcing needs on the basis of time constraints, it is advisable to have a good understanding of what an hour of your time is worth relative to the task at hand.

For example, let’s say it takes you six hours to accomplish a redundant task and it would take about 15 minutes for you to teach someone else to do it for you. Then look at what you may be able to accomplish in that same six hour period. Would you be able to use that time to finish an ebook that could be resold for untold profits, or write thousands of lines of code to package and resell? If so, then any modest fee that is paid to outsource that redundant task could be worth its weight in gold.

Outsourcing on the basis of skill level becomes a little trickier and this is where most internet marketers who are new to outsourcing can get themselves in trouble. It is imperative to keep in mind that even though you may be outsourcing an activity that you are not capable of doing yourself, you still need to be in control.

This is your business and your image and income depends on it. Failure to have a firm grasp on what you are outsourcing will almost always mean that the end result will not live up to your expectations. And this is not productive for you or the individual you have contracted with.

Communication is the key component when outsourcing a task that you are not readily able to do yourself. For example, let’s say you are not the greatest artist in the world and you contract with a designer to develop header and ebook cover graphics for your sales page. Telling the designer nothing more than the title of your ebook and expecting the graphics of your dreams to result is just not going to happen.

The more detailed you can be about your likes, dislikes and expectations, the greater the chance that you will be thrilled with the end result. Remember, just because the designer has skills that you don’t, one of those skills probably isn’t reading minds! If you don’t like the color green, there is no way someone is going to know this unless you tell them.

Another area where internet marketers get into trouble is when the outsourcing project involves technical skills or programming. This can be particularly difficult if both sides are not communicating properly.

A non-programmer often sees a project as being far less complex due to a lack of knowledge about the mechanics involved in the programming process. End users are used to just clicking buttons and having things work; they never have to deal or think about what goes on with the coding behind the scenes.

This can have both an impact on the perceived value of the outsourcing bid as well as the time frame and ultimate functionality of the programming project. Misunderstandings with all of these things can be greatly reduced by taking time to clearly and concisely define the project parameters ahead of time. Again, the importance of communication here cannot be stressed enough.

Finally, it is never a good idea to outsource anything you don’t understand or cannot measure. This isn’t to say that you need to understand the mechanics behind the process, but you definitely need to understand the result.

For example, it is not unusual to see bid requests on popular outsourcing sites requesting 200+ inbound links from PR7 or greater sites to be completed within 24 hours. While this may or may not be an exaggeration, the point is, if you are asking for this and adamant that you want to get your money’s worth, you better be prepared to have a means in place with which to judge someone’s performance in completing this task. Otherwise, it is just a recipe for disaster.

Simply put, if you want something done to your satisfaction, you need to be prepared ahead of time to know when that point is reached.

Remember, outsourcing in many ways is just the virtual version of an employee or subcontractor. If you have ever been an employer who created a job description, along with it you most likely implemented a means of gauging the employee’s performance. And as an employee, you knew exactly what was expected of you and the consequences of failure.

Today’s outsourcing concepts are based upon the same time honored principles used in business throughout the ages and understanding this will greatly increase your odds of success.

When people place orders through your website, it is always a good idea to immediately acknowledge the purchase. One way to do this is with the use of an autoresponder that can be integrated with your shopping cart. In fact, many shopping carts that are available today have their own autoresponders built into the system.

When you set up your autoresponder to send a message to someone that has placed an order, there are several things that should be included in the message. This is an opportunity to ‘speak’ to your customer, and to let them know about other deals that you have or special items that you have available. You should not miss this opportunity.

Do not try to get your ‘thank you’ sales message on the same autoresponder as the customers email receipt. Putting the sales message on an email that is automatically sent to grant the customer access to their purchase is also a bad idea &ndash that would go better with the receipt. Make sure your ‘thank you’ sales message is a message that is sent out all by itself, so your customer can focus solely on that!

Thank the customer for their recent purchase. Tell them how much their purchase will help them, and then tell them about other available products that work well with the one that they just purchased, or that are similar to the one that they just purchased in some way. For instance hair conditioner works with hair shampoo. Vacuum cleaner bags or carpet powder works well with vacuum cleaners. Just let them know about the various products that you offer that will compliment their purchase in some way.

The important thing is to not let your customer get away without further contact! Think about being in a brick and mortar store. When you go up to the counter to pay, there are many items there for sale. These items are meant to be picked up as last minute purchases, or impulsive purchases. Your ‘thank you’ sales letter serves the same purpose.

Don’t make the mistake of bombarding your customer! You can usually send them periodic information about your specials after they have made a purchase through you, but emailing them on a daily basis with your offers is not good business! Use your autoresponder responsibly! Make sure that your autoresponder is set up to handle automatic remove requests, and make sure that the information that you are sending your customers is of value to them.

What if you could send out all the information that your potential customers have requested without checking your email or answering a phone? While this

may seem impossible, it is becoming more and more popular among the most successful Internet marketing gurus. This is all due to what is called an autoresponder. An autoresponder is an automatic method of responding to emails sent by existing or potential customers and is an must for any Internet

business. Time is money and answering emails personally take a lot of valuable time for both you and the customer. Not only do autorespnders allow you

to spend the time elsewhere in your business, but it gives the customer access to the information almost immediately.

Since there are so many different uses for autoresponders, they can be of value to virtually any type of business. Some choose to use the autoresponders to answer frequently asked questions about a product or service. Others use them to provide information about pricing or product information. Autoresponders are also a nice way to welcome new members to a website or group as well as thank them after a visit.

One might ask what would be the advantage of using autoresponders as opposed to simply listing the information on the site. An important feature of

autoresponders is that they send you an email notification each time a response is sent out. This allows you to track the success of your promotions as well as have the email addresses of potential customers at your fingertips so that you can easily send out updated and new information to them.

It is of the utmost importance to choose an effective autoresponder. An autoresponder should be as personal as possible and send out follow-ups to

potential customers since it has been proven that persistence pays off. It could take up to seven contacts before a final sale is conducted. Generally speaking an advertisement should be short and to the point. However, in this case, the customer has asked to see this specific information and therefore an effective autoresponder should allow you to place as much text on the page as you desire. The autoresponder that you choose should provide automatic updates to customers free of charge.

The autoresponder is one Internet marketing tool that will not cost you an arm and a leg. You can get free autoresponders online from several sources. The

automatic responses will be a welcome addition to your marketing strategy and will help to automatically increase traffic to your site all while you do nothing. Be sure that the one you choose includes all the extras that will send you site to the top and your profits through the roof.

Top web sites are site lists focused around a common topic, for example clip art, pets, music etc.

Sites on these lists are ranked in order of “votes” – the site that gets voted most gets the top place, the site that gets the 2nd biggest amount of votes gets the second place and so on. The voting system is simple; each top web site member places a link back to the top web site on his site and for each visitor that clicks the link, the site gets one vote.

WHAT ARE TOP WEB SITES?

It’s a links site, that ranks member’s sites by the amount of traffic they send in. They usually rank a list of the top 10 – 100 sites focused around a common topic, for example health, business, music etc.

The sites on these lists are ranked in order of “votes” – or referrers. The top referrers get one banner of theirs listed free of charge, in the top web sites section.

The top web sites have three common areas:

* The Index: that’s the actual list of sites ordered by hits in

* The Sign up and Login page, where webmasters add their sites, modify setting and view stats

* The Enter page. Some top web sites have gateway pages in order to protect themselves from cheating.

In order to generate votes, each top web site’s member places a link back to the top web site on his web site, and every time one of his visitors clicks over that link, he gets one vote. The more votes he gets, the better his position will be on the top web sites list.

The site that gets voted most gets the top place, the site that gets the 2nd biggest amount of votes gets the second place and so on.

Obviously, most of the traffic that goes to the top web sites pages, go to the high ranking sites, although some of the lower-ranking ones can also get a reasonable share. And the top web sites pages get traffic through the voting system, so everybody gets more traffic.

Top web site lists are then very similar to the reciprocal links exchanges; but with an important difference, at the top web sites lists, there is a “middleman” and you can’t really tell with which sites you’re exchanging traffic with.

The main system utilized for requesting the “votes” to the top web site is usually a picture, and this could be a real problem. If the link picture is too big or you put in a too prominent place, your site might look unprofessional. If you use a small link picture, then you might not get the votes you need to rise on the list because people might miss it.

Top web site lists allow you to automate the link exchange and distribute traffic between participating sites according to the traffic they send in. And they increase the traffic to your web site for free.

But as always the big question is: Do top web sites work?

Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t, it all depends on the quality of the top web site in question.

HOW SHOULD YOU CHOSE A TOP WEB SITE?

* Look for one that doesn’t have any pop-up windows

* It must have a lot of sites closely related to the subject of your site

* It must have it’s own domain

* Monitor the traffic you’re sending to the list and the traffic you’re getting from it. If you send more than you receive, resign and find another topsite or other promotion method. On “How to Sell on The Web” you can find dozens of ways to get traffic to your web site.

HOW TO FIND YOUR TOP WEB SITE

Look for sites dealing with the same subject as you. They might even already be a member of a related top site

Look for “top site” “top web site” or “topsite” at the Search engines

Browse the topsite list directory: dot topsitelists dot com/directory/

Once you chose the top web site that you like, just fill out the form and your site will be ready to be visited. Then you will have to ad to your place the HTML script that the top web site will give you. This script is the one that will allow your visitors to vote from your site.

ARE TOP WEB SITES GOOD FOR EVERYBODY?

No, they aren’t…

If you have a content web site, who’s objective is to provide resources to your visitors, then including your site in a a top web site’s list could be a good idea.

If you have created an awesome site to sell products or services, and give the people the opportunity to vote for your site; they might get so enthusiastic with the good content of your site, that they decide to vote for you, so they click on the voting button and…! They jump to the top web sites page, and your sale is lost!

WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM A TOP WEB SITE?

To have a high ranking in a very visited top web site list can be very good for you, because it will increase your site’s traffic, and traffic means sales, and the opportunity to sell advertising space.

If you chose well your top web site’s lists, picking up the ones with good traffic, and create a professionally designed site like “How to Sell on The Web” teaches you to build, you will get thousands of visitors to your site, and that will give you many sales.

Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi

Are you marketing in just one language? If so, you are missing out on 64.8% of your marketing potential. This is because 64.8% of the world is surfing the internet in a language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in 35 different languages.

One of the best ways to attract worldwide traffic is to translate your site and register it with both English and foreign-language search engines and directories. Not to mention, the competition in foreign search engines is much less competitive than the search engines of the United States.

Foreign language markets online are currently growing at a much faster rate than English speaking markets. You have the opportunity to tap into this market while it is in an exponential growth phase.

Below is a complete plan to getting your web site translated and into the foreign search engines and directories.

First, you must make a list of all of your keywords in English. These are the phrases that people use to find you in the search engines. You can extract these keywords by going to your web site’s statistics program.

To optimize your web site for foreign search engines, you must identify equivalent and related terms in that language. Many of the English keywords may have multiple translations in another language. For example, if you are optimizing your web page around the keyword “socks”. You will most likely end up with twice as many search terms in French because there are two common words for socks in the French language: “bas” and “chaussettes”.

After you create a list of targeted keywords, you will need to find out which of these search terms are worth pursuing. You can do this by doing some research with Overture and Miva. Both of these pay-per-click search engines offer search suggestion tools in a variety of languages.

Finally, you will need to group the search terms together into similar terms and assign each group to a specific page on your web site.

Step two is to place these translated keywords on your site. There are two ways of doing this.

You can translate each page into a specific language. Once you have all of these pages translated, you will then need to link them all together from your home page. Each of these pages will need to be optimized for your targeted keywords. You do this the same way that you would for an English site. Place your keywords in the title tag, meta keywords tag, and the meta description tag. You’ll also want to plug these translated phrases into the body of the text and headlines of your pages, especially the first 200 words.

However, the best way to translate your site is by creating a completely new site for each translation.

Doing this offers a variety of benefit, one of these being the ability to register a country-specific domain for each of your web site translations.

For example, if you currently own .companyname.com and you are translating into French, it would be appropriate to use .companyname.fr. This country-specific domain lets the search engines know that you are a French web site.

By setting up a new web site for each language, you will also be entitled to additional directory listings in the country specific Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and other high&ndashprofile web site directories in that language.

Creating multiple sites is also beneficial for your linking campaign. People will be more likely to link to you if your web site is entirely in their language. Because link popularity is such a crucial ranking factor, creating separate web sites would be best for your business.

Step three in our multilingual strategy is to submit your newly translated site to the foreign search engines. Many of the major search engines have regional versions of their web site so that they appeal to visitors in various countries of the world. They include AOL Search, Alta Vista, Excite, FAST Search, Go/Infoseek, Google, HotBot, Lycos, MSN Search, Northern Light, Open Directory, Snap, WebCrawler, and Yahoo.

You can find a complete list of the top foreign language search engines at .allsearchengines.com/foreign.html

Another opportunity that has been opened up by multilingual markets is that of pay-per click search engines.

Using pay-per-click search engines is one of the fastest ways to start funneling targeted traffic to your website. While most of the pay-per-click engines in the United States have been flooded with competition, many of the foreign pay-per-click search engines have untapped opportunities.

English language search terms can often be five-times the cost of Spanish language bids. For example, the keyword phrase “internet marketing” cost $2.09 for the number one position in the English version of Overture. However, if you place an ad in the Spanish version, it would only cost you 50 cents for the very same position.

Keep in mind that when you translate your web site into a different language, you must be able to offer customer support in that language. If you are not fluent in the language yourself, this will be something you need to outsource.

Many web surfers located in countries other than the United States and Canada do not trust web sites as much as Americans and Canadians do. This is largely because the internet was first introduced in English.

Because of this, visitors from other countries will want your online business to have a personal touch. You can do this by providing local contact information and an address in the footer of each of your pages. Your visitors need to know that you are a real person that can be trusted.

If you decide to translate your web site, do not take this task lightly. There are many considerations that must be taken into account. It is important to steer clear from automated tools to translate your site. Instead, use local translators who fully understand how business works in their country and make sure you have local sales staff to support each of your customers.

Your online presence is just as important as that of an offline business. You need a customer support staff that will be available to your customers at all times. You are not just translating your business, you are establishing an online business in that language and a local presence in the country you are targeting.

How to get started

First off, some points about money. People pay money, a valuable, in exchange for a product or service you provide – another valuable. It’s really barter, with a commodity called money. People buy things which will improve their lives, which gives them some benefit they feel they need. You aren’t really in it for the money, but to provide better service to people so that they can improve their lives. That’s a perfect fit – they want to spend money to improve their lives and you are more than happy to accept money to enable them to do so – with your product and services.

Money is really just an indicator of how much you provide real service to others – and how valuable they think that service is. We’ve gone over how you can increase your income by giving it away, as well.

Now, down to the brass tacks of what to do when and why.

Before we start -

Don’t quit your day job. Rome wasn’t built in a day, God took seven to create this world – so don’t figure you are going to become a millionaire overnight. I’ve heard some talented people got rich in 90 days, but we’ll take the conservative approach here.

Until your Internet activities start bringing income to you, that day job will be providing the seed money for your online business.

Consider all your online activites a second job. This is much better than going to get a second job at some company. Then you are spending 60 hours a week just working for a fixed wage – away from your family and giving a large proportion of it to the government and insurance companies with very little return.

So your online business is your second job. Set it up with a specific workplace and a schedule. Treat it like a business, not a hobby. Show up on time and ready to work – not late and hung over or taking constant breaks for food – or having the TV running so you can “catch the game”. Arrange for your spouse and kids to keep the noise down – or set up your garage so it is comfortable all year round and you can easily work there with no distractions. (Remember, setting this up as an actual business means you can deduct these expenses from your “day job” income tax.)

Work out your finances. See if you can get by on only 80% of what you currently earn in income from your day job. Means you are going to have to set up a budget and find out what you are spending your money on. Or – you could simply have your check deposited directly, 80% going into your checking account and 20% going into your savings account (preferably) or another account.

What you do with that 20% is to set half away for savings – never touch this for anything except, perhaps, a real emergency. The other half (10% of your income after taxes) goes to investment. This is what you are allowed to spend on your online business. But the idea again is that you are investing in your own business – not just blowing it on nice stuff for your home office.

Once you have your home business set up, you are then – an only then – ready to really start in on Internet Marketing, Sales, and Delivery.

A few weeks ago I was watching my 7 year old Grandson Joel as he was drawing a picture of a strawberry patch.

As he drew, it began to look more and more like a Christmas wreath than a strawberry patch. I told him that it looked pretty good, but suggested to him that “maybe you could put a few strawberries here, and here and here” as I pointed to the big white area in the middle of his drawing.

He looked at me in all seriousness and said…

“Grandpa, it doesn’t matter what YOU think, it’s what the artist thinks!”

It was funny at the time, but I have been thinking about this quite a bit.

You know what? He is right!

There is a great lesson to be learned here. The lesson applies very well to Internet marketing. Actually it applies well to ANY kind of marketing, it doesn’t necessarily have to be on the internet.

We have a tendancy to come up with an idea that we think is the greatest thing since sliced bread. We’re absolutely convinced that everybody will beat a path to our door to buy our product. We spend lots of money to develop a sales campaign, build a website, buy advertising and so on, and spend a lot of time and effort to draw people to our website, get good search engine positioning, and then more often than not we’re disappointed because very few people buy our products.

Could it be that the marketplace doesn’t care about our opinion?

Does that hurt your ego? It shouldn’t. It should open your eyes to this very simple, but wildly profound truth.

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU THINK, IT’S WHAT THE MARKETPLACE THINKS THAT IS IMPORTANT!

Big companies spend millions of dollars on market research, testing and surveys before they ever spend any money in developing a product or marketing a product. Doesn’t it make sense that before we ever spend a dime on any kind of product development, website development or whatever that we should spend some time first to find out what people are buying, when do they buy, and how do they buy?

By doing proper research in advance, you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort, and you’ll be rewarded many times over by successful, money making websites. Finding profitable “niches” is not a difficult process, but it can make all the difference in the world as to whether or not your website will be a huge success or a dismal failure.

As you consider what kind of websites you’ll be building, keep in mind the lesson learned from a 7 year old.