My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘small business’

With the New Year right around the corner, we often resolve to improve our behavior, health, or personal relationships. Let me tell you, you’re wasting your time. I’m OK, you’re OK. It’s our Web marketing that’s a mess.

We’ve got out-of-shape Web sites, directionless Web marketing, and we’re lost at the search engines. It’s time to stop worrying about self-improvement and start worrying about Web marketing-improvement!

While every business has different goals and needs, please consider these twelve items in creating your own Web marketing plan for next year. Rearrange the order to fit your own schedule in 2006.

January: Set up a Web marketing budget. I know, this is your favorite part: the budget. However, once you’ve decided how much money you plan on spending quarterly or monthly, deciding what to spend your marketing dollar on becomes much easier. You’ll also want to carve out some time for your Web marketing endeavors. After all, a lot of the following to-do’s are more about time than money.

February: Audit your Web site (beginner.) Often we’re surprised or dismayed at the material that’s on our Web site: bios of ex-employees, links to sites that no longer exist, a 2001 pricelist. Spend some time reviewing the content on your Web site and get rid of anything that’s out-of-date or no longer expresses who you are. Nothing turns off prospects faster than a neglected Web site.

March: Audit your Web site (advanced.) Review your traffic reports and decide if your navigation needs to be updated. Maybe certain parts of your site are getting a lot of traffic and should be further promoted on the home page. If other sections or pages are being ignored they may need to be removed…or promoted. Fill out all the Web forms (contact, search, etc.,) and read the “hidden text” that appears on landing pages. Rewrite the copy that seems dated or incorrect.

April: Start reading blogs in your industry. Download a newsreader (I recommend NetNewsWire for Mac users) or set up a free account at Bloglines. To find blogs in your industry you can do searches at Technorati or check out BlogCatalog among others. Make sure you’re reading the blogs of your competition and your clients.

May: Start your own blog. You knew that was coming, right? Blogs are becoming an important, perhaps essential, part of business communications. No matter the size of your organization, a blog can be a great way to connect with your clients…and your clients-to-be.

June: Subscribe to your competitors’ email newsletters. This is a fantastic (usually) free resource of advice that is targeted towards your clients. Shouldn’t you know what your competition is recommending? Maybe they know something you don’t!

You probably know many of your competitors already and can visit their Web site to see if they offer an email newsletter. However, you can Google “your industry + email newsletter” to find some ezines that are new to you. (You should also be reading your clients’ newsletters as well; you can’t know too much about their business.)

July: Start your own email newsletter or jumpstart your subscriber rate. If you’re not publishing an email newsletter you’re missing out on one of the most cost-effective Web marketing tools at your disposal. Use an Email Service Provider (ESP) to manage your subscriber list and publish an ezine regularly.

If you’re already publishing an email newsletter try some new ideas to increase your subscriber base . Offer a free article for new subscribers, raffle off a prize to one subscriber each month, or advertise on a complementary newsletter.

August: Troll discussion boards in your industry. There are discussion boards on every topic under the sun, and certainly a few in your industry (or your target audience’s industry.) By reading posts at these discussion boards you can get an understanding of what prospects are looking for and create products or services that meet their needs.

By posting responses you can quickly establish yourself as an expert and create links that drive traffic to your Web site while improving your site’s ranking at the search engines!

September: Start listening to podcasts. The New Oxford American Dictionary named “podcast” its 2005 word of the year, so maybe you shouldn’t wait until September before you tune in.

Whether podcasting ever becomes a part of your Web marketing, it’s important to understand how podcasting works and how other companies (including your competition) use it. Visit the iTunes Music Store or a podcast directory like Podcast Alley and start sampling some podcasts. Not sure where to start? Adam Curry’s PodFinder show (available at the iTunes Music Store) highlights new podcasts each episode.

October: Consider starting your own podcast. I can’t recommend podcasting for every business, or even most businesses. I still believe there are more effective ways to communicate with prospects and clients. However, some businesses will benefit from offering a podcast. Keep in mind your target audience, and whether they will be downloading audio to their computer or mp3 player.

November: Submit some of your articles to article directories. A great way to increase your “findability” at the search engines is to have a lot of quality incoming links. One proven method to do this is to have articles you’ve written appear on other Web sites that link to yours. To get your articles posted at other Web sites check out article directories such as The Phantom Writers and iSnare.

December: Add share this page functionality to some or all of your Web site. As people suffer from information overload, they rely more heavily on the recommendations of friends and family. Make this word-of-mouth advertising easier by allowing site visitors to quickly “share this page” with a friend or colleague. You can even include your own marketing message embedded in the email that arrives at the friends’ mailbox.

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.

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.

More and more online businesses and internet marketers are recognizing the tremendous benefits and responsiveness that multimedia generates when used as an advertising medium and marketing strategy.

For those that utilize multimedia effectively, significant increases in buy rates, conversion rates and subscription rates have been experienced and all within a very short period of time. However, many believe that just adding any old media content, such as video and audio onto their website will generate significant increases in visitor responsiveness regardless of content presentation, quality, and other attributes that contribute to a positive experience for the website visitor. Just so that we are clear, this assertion is very wrong and can have potentially negative consequences from a marketing and/or advertising standpoint.

My philosophy is quite simple. Using multimedia to advertise your product or service needs to follow the same basic rules and principles as would apply to any other strategy or medium that can be used to convert prospects into subscribers and buyers. Yes, multimedia does improve conversion rates but it has to be done right and convey professionalism. This is absolutely essential.

When it comes to video and audio content online, what’s often been the case is that those who have tried to add this type of media content to their websites have unfortunately had disastrous results. For example, with video content, many have added videos to their webpages that are of extremely poor quality, small and ugly. The overall experience for the viewer – Poor. One of the biggest problems has been the fact that the videos load very slowly. Visitors are turned off completely by the fact that they have to wait for minutes, even longer sometimes in order for the video or audio file to start playing. This, unfortunately, is a result of these webmasters using cookie-cutter solutions to add video or audio content to their site without really knowing the implications and limitations. As I said, with multimedia…either do it right or don’t do it at all. For those who do their research and take a little time to produce video and audio content that is of good quality, the results have been tremendous.

Bottom Line: If you want to capture the attention of your visitors,you need to use top notch technology to bring your message to that person and provides the viewer with a positive experience.

If you do plan on adding video and audio content to your website, here are a few simple guidelines to follow when determining what the best multimedia solution is for you:

1. Cost Effective: You need a solution that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and leaves you with great video and/or audio content on your website but flat broke.

2. Fast loading Media Content (Video/Audio) that can play almost immediately. Website visitors are fickle and inpatient so its not wise to keep them waiting when trying to view your video advertisement or listen to your audio message.

3. Superior Website Integration: Video and Audio Content that can appear to be seamlessly Integrated into your websites and emails. Viewers don’t have to view video and audio ads with media player’s that annoyingly pop-up on top of their internet browsers and distract them from the rest of your website.

4. Superior Customization: Video and Audio Advertisements that can be customized for your websites and emails based on your specific requirements.

5. The ability to handle a large volume of simultaneous visitors.

6. Large-Scale Playability: Viewing/Listening DOES NOT require the download of additional plug-ins. Don’t make your visitors have to download any special software to view or listen to the video and audio content on your website.

7. The media content needs to be of reasonably good quality and resolution. Don’t worry, you don’t need Lord of the Rings quality to provide your website visitors with a positive experience. They won’t expect perfect quality but you need to make sure that the content is of good quality.

Of course, we can get into specific details about each one of these things but we won’t get into that in this article. These are just high-level, general guidelines that you can follow when shopping around for a good multimedia solution for your business.

Multimedia does have impressive results from a marketing perspective. That’s why the big companies and brand names are utilizing multimedia content to sell their products and services. However, not everyone has the exact same budget and requirements and if you are looking for a multimedia solution you need to spend some time shopping around to find a solution that offers the best bang for the buck.

All web sites are different. MTTs unique software is modified on the fly to suit each web sites products and services to guarantee that thousands of sales are generated. A huge surge of ready to buy targeted search engine traffic is Guaranteed.

It’s FREE to join MTT as an affiliate, clients are queuing to savor the unique pay on results payment model. MTT’s pay on results plane is revolutionizing the way people and businesses make money on the Web. You do nothing, just give them the URLs to your web site, you never have to touch MTT’s software.

Your web site will be deluged by ultra-targeted ready to buy search engine traffic. You site will jump to the top of all the best search engines’ results for the keywords and content the software will feed them including Google. You will sell more and earn far greater profits but only pay service fees subject to the MTT income and performance guarantee ONLY when they generate you $100,000.

If you do not earn $100,000 net profit within 4 months, MTT will give you the remainder of their service for FREE- no charges plus you get to keep what you earn. You can set up as many of your web sites or affiliate programs as you want. This is true Set-It-And-Forget-It technology. Join our FREE affiliate program and try the service before the introductory offer expires.

See You At The Top!

C L Eldridge

Your web site is just like your business, in fact it is an extension of your business in some cases and it IS your business in others. Your advertising campaign must address each of these methods to the best and fullest extent possible given your advertising budget.

Let’s take a look at how you can use these different advertising methods to your best advantage:

Using Articles to market your web site

Short articles are a great way to generate traffic to your website. Articles can be used to keep the material fresh on the site so that your customers keep coming back, they can also be used to ‘advertise’ your site on web sites owned by others. Placing your article on article submission sites allows others to download it and use your article in their newsletters and on their web sites. Of course there are links in the article that point to your site for more information or other reviews etc. These links are great as they help increase your standings in the search engines.

The articles can be about any topic and you will find there are hundreds of article submission sites available to place your articles on. Most are free as they need fresh information so that their customers keep coming back as well. Iwantabusiness.biz is a new article submission site that I have started to give you an idea of what one is like. Feel free to post your articles on this site if they pertain to small business or home based businesses.

Using Affiliates to market your web site

Affiliate programs can add thousands of independent sales people to help market your products and services.

Over the years I have been involved with many businesses, and one of the things I remember from my Amway days was that as an individual, I could only do so much. I have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year in which I can work. I will hit a maximum point of sales that I can handle by myself. After that I’m done. The only way to do more is to automate and have others duplicate what I do. The same is true on the web. We need to automate and duplicate what we do so we can have others expand our sales for us. The first part of this equation is duplication. We can have others follow what we do and sell our products and services for us and pay them a portion of the profits. This is different than having employees. Employees have no requirement to sell. They are overhead that must be paid regardless of sales. That is NOT what you want for a new business. Keep your hard earned cash for other things. What we need is someone that is willing to do the work for part of the profits. This is where affiliate programs come in to our formula for success. Affiliates are basically a partnership between web sites to advertise and promote products, services, or information for a share of the profits. When someone they refer to you buys, you pay them a percentage of the sales. Result? More traffic, more sales and less time required by you to find the customers as someone else does it for you.

What else can a good affiliate program do for you?

• How about driving more traffic to your site!

• Build brand awareness as more people visit your site from the hundreds or thousands of affiliates that are advertising for you.

• Obtaining qualified leads that you can follow-up on to increase or up sell to.

• Increasing the links to your site which will increase the ranking of your site on the search engines resulting in more traffic and more sales.

There are all kinds of affiliate programs. Some programs charge to be a member and some do not. Some are web based and some are software programs that you load on your computer to set up and track the sales and affiliate yourself. Which one you use is up to you. Here are a few that I have found.

Affiliate Net – This is one of the more affordable server side affiliate programs. With this software there are no monthly fees only a one time software charge. At the time of this writing this package sold from $49.95 to $99.95. Referral Software – This package is also server side although more expensive, it has many more features and is worth while to consider if you are serious about earning a lot of money with your Internet business. At the time of this writing this package sold for $299.00.

Click Bank – This is a web based affiliate program. By signing up on their web site you have access to over 100,000 affiliates. There are monthly and set up fees.

clixGalore Affiliate Networks – This is a web based affiliate program. There are monthly and set up fees.

I highly recommend affiliate programs. For the reasons listed above. Remember they will help drive traffic to your site, which means more sales and you can use the affiliate programs to offer others services and make the commission once you are done with the client. This could be a good business all by its self.

Using Auctions to market your web site

Ok, you have a product or service you want to sell; you need to let people know about that product or service and you don’t have much money to spend. Imagine a place that gets over 3 million customers that are ready, able, willing and looking to buy everyday. It is a Super Mall!

Ask any business person what they would pay to be in a mall that got 3 million visitors a day. You can see the dollar signs light up in their eyes… both in terms of cost and sales potential. Remember my goal from earlier in the course when we talked about business planning? I need to have 4200 visitors a month come to my web site in order to sell 420 copies according to my business plan. Well E-Bay gets 3 million visitors a day! Do you think that might be a place that I would want to advertise my books or my web site? You bet! In fact I have sold quite a few of my other books on E-Bay as well as bottles, baseball cards, clothing, computers, software, training, video and much more. So can you.

Let’s take my Weekend Chef’s guides and see how I can sell them on E-Bay, Yahoo Auctions, or MSN Auctions. First I need an account. This is simple, but does vary based on who you are signing up with. Follow the instructions (at the end of this page is an excellent course on how to really make money on auctions, but this will get you started). Once you have an account, we now need to place something for sale. Think of the auction site as your web site As such we need to create a web page that offers you product/service for sale. I use a software package call Auction Wizard 2000. They have an excellent program that allows you to try it for 60 days before you have to register. It is so easy to use as well. Using Auction Wizard, I can create an auction page and automatically post it and repost as needed to any of the supported auctions. No special knowledge of html is required. Simple fill in the blanks and add any pictures or graphics and I’m done. It also will track the sales, send emails to successful bidders, track inventory and so much more. If you are thinking of doing auctions, this is one piece of software to take a hard look at.

Back to selling my guides and building my business. Within the auction listing, I can place a link to my site, offer a free download of some chapters of the book, of course, I will need your email before you can download. Remember, I need to keep you coming back. Be careful here, E-Bay does not like you selling outside of their auction so make sure the visitor is not allowed to buy from your site at that link. Well, now we have given something away for free (a chapter of the book), we have the visitors email address, and we hopefully will get a bid on the product/service. If not, we have the email to follow up. What has it cost us? Each item up for auction on E-Bay cost …. are you ready for this 30 cents to list it plus a small percentage of the selling cost. If I list my Weekend Chef’s Guide to Sushi on E-Bay with a starting price of say $1 it will cost me a total of about 30 cents for the week. 30 cents to reach millions of potential customers a day. If I sell the book, I will have recovered my 30 cents and started building my customer email list as well.

Now I could write a whole web site on using auctions, but this page is just how to use auctions to market your business. You can sell items and make a profit or you can just list items and build a customer database to market to later. Either way Auctions make a great way to market your business.

I have on my website a couple more tips on using auctions as well at rd-webhosting.com or visit my eBay store for other eBooks that are available from time to time.

Using Auto responders to market your web site

Depending on the products, services or information you are selling auto responders may be able to automate a good portion of your web site business. An auto responder is a piece of software that checks email for certain words or phrases and responds according to your wishes. For example, you may have received a newsletter by sending an email to me with Subscribe as the subject. My auto responder sees that email come in and has a set of actions defined that when the subject has subscribe in it that it will email back to you our newsletter. Another thing that the auto responders can do is following up with your customers at predetermined times with a predetermined letter. This is good for driving traffic to your site after they have visited and left their email address such as to subscribe to a newsletter or download a free chapter of an e-book or other information you have made available. For my training business I send up to 4 different emails to each person that request my guide to increase their income. Each email introduces them to other benefits and services that are available. Some of the emails will offer a discount or free training class as an incentive to sign up for a class. All of it done without me having to get involved.

Auto responders can be installed on your computer or used via the Internet. Some are free and others you have to pay either by the email address or based on the number of responses you want to program it to respond to. Here are some links to auto responders on the web as well as a software package with a trial version you can use yourself.

Promasoft: This is the one we use with our servers. I highly recommend. They have a trial version that is a full version. It places a header in the outgoing email, so you will want to register once you have it up and running. I think it is a great program.

GetResponse: This is also a great program, although, this one is a subscription service. It can be a less expensive way to try out an auto responder. They do offer a free account as well.

This is part one of a multi-part series of Marketing you web site. In the next section we will cover marketing you web site using banner ads and classified ads .

Tax deductions for business expenses aren’t just for large corporations. As an Internet marketer or online entrepreneur it is important to know what you can and cannot deduct to save money on your taxes.

People new to business taxes tend to fall into one of two groups. The first group are those people who simply don’t believe they can be eligible for tax deductions. The second group are those who believe anything they touch while conducting business can be written off as a business expense. Both ideas will cost you money; the former in lost tax money, the latter in IRS fines.

In general, the kinds of things that can be deducted deal with the ongoing operation of your business: rental costs, utility expenses, and travel expenses. Not, for example, a new car. Items that add permanent value to your business (i.e. assets) are capitalized, not deducted. Interests on mortgages or repair of computer equipment (which maintain rather than appreciate your businesses value) are deductible expenses.

If you use your personal vehicle for your small business you may be able to deduct repair expenses. If you have a room in your home used strictly as a home office you can deduct certain expenses. There are numerous ways to plug the money leaks streaming out of your business.

Luckily, the IRS has listed in detail what you can deduct in its free publication entitled, shockingly, “Business Expenses.” (.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p535.pdf) At fifty-eight pages it is not a casual read, but it has a good index you can use to find the parts relevant to your business.

The IRS Small Business site (.irs.gov/businesses/small/index.html) contains a lot of useful information and, as government websites go, is well put together and easy to navigate. From this site you can access practically every form needed in your relations with the IRS and even find out how to electronically file for free. Our tax system isn’t simple, but at least they publish the rules.

Without a doubt, if you asked me, Shane if there was only 1 marketing strategy that you could use on the Internet, what would it be? Without hesitation I would say joint Ventures. Joint Ventures are easily the most lucrative Marketing Strategy ever invented and if you learn to do it right, will likely be the ONLY marketing strategy you will ever need to use.

A Good Internet Joint Venture is your shortcut to success. It can send you more qualified internet traffic rushing to your site in the shortest amount of time than anything I’ve ever seen! And it can mean bringing your product to market without spending one single penny of your own money!

In it’s simplest form, Joint Ventures have to do with 2 businesses (or more) joining forces to leverage off of each others success, assets and/or expertise. There are hundreds of different variations but let me just give you one simple example:

One variation of a simple type of joint venture partnership used most frequently would be where one business provides a product for sale, the sales message and the product delivery while the other business provides the recommendation for that product to their own list of subscribers/prospects and receiving a commission based on the sales generated through that recommendation.

The benefits are great. You can build your subscriber list, leverage off of your partners infrastructure like using their existing servers, software etc where you don’t have to pay a dime. If you pick the right JV partner, you can acquire instant credibility and reputation with their customers and lists. Credibility sells. Let me give you an example, if you created a book on “how to acquire real estate”, you could certainly make MANY more sales if you JV’d with Donald Trump and put his name on the book as the co-author, building your reputation and increasing your credibility at the same time. Are you starting to see the incredible power of this strategy?

Now I know that some people may think that Joint Ventures are difficult to do,but if they are telling you this, then I wouldn’t take anything they tell you at face value because they’re either lying to you or don’t understand it themselves.

Let me show you how easy it is. Here’s typically what I do when rolling out a new product. In this example, let’s pretend that I just completed a new ebook on Penny Stock Trading and have setup a web site with an affiliate program. I would go to google, do a search on keywords like “penny stock”, “penny stock trading”, “stock market strategies” etc..you get the picture. The top sites on the first page are typically your target partners because since they appear on the first page you can bet they have lots of business, traffic, subscribers and customers. I would visit each site to make sure that they are right for my product and then I would first send them a very brief email asking them if they would be interested in marketing my product in exchange for a high commission as an incentive.

Typically in this email you should briefly introduce yourself and your product. Describe your product and the benefits it would offer to their Newsletter subscribers, customers and/or web site visitors. Ask them politely if they wouldn’t mind responding to you asap and provide your contact information if they are interested in marketing your product. Also very important, you need to give them access to this product FOR FREE!..so that they can review the product and feel comfortable about endorsing it. These site owners have spent years building their business, lists and cultivating their lists to be very responsive. Any endorsement they do to their huge lists could mean thousands of dollars in your pocket for very little effort.

then, go thru the same process for all the other appropriate sites under that keyword and send JV proposal letters over and over again. Then repeat that process for other relevant keywords until you’re finished.

Understandably, this can be a very time consuming task which is why I developed a piece of software that will automate this whole process for me at .jvmining.com. I can now get all of this done in a matter of minutes!

Remember if just a few of these super affiliates decides to market your product you’re golden. Once they contact you all you need to do is setup their affiliate account and commission. This will ensure that their commission will be calculated properly when they endorse your product to their list. If you send these offers to just 10 sites per day, Within a week you’ll be on your way to making thousands of dollars per month, all for 5 hours worth of work and at NO COST to you. Isn’t that easy?

That’s all there is to it.

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.

The following are 10 simple yet very powerful ways to increase your sales significantly:

1. When you make your first sale, follow-up with the customer. You could follow-up with a “thank you” email and include an advertisement for other products you sell. You could follow-up with them regularly. The goal is to begin building a relationship with your customers so you need to keep in constant contact with them.

2. You could upsell to your customers. When they’re at your order page, tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale. They could just add it to their original order.

3. Tell your customers if they refer four customers to your web site, they will receive a full rebate of their purchase price. This will turn one sale into three sales.

4. When you sell a product, give your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product. This will multiply the sale you just made.

5. Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products. You could include an ad on or with the product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights and sales on the back end product.

6. You could cross promote your product with other businesses’ products in a package deal. You can include an ad or flyer for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you.

7. When you ship out or deliver your product, include a coupon for other related products you sell in the package. This will attract them to buy more products from you.

8. Send your customers a catalog of add-on products for the original product they purchased. This could be upgrades, special services, attachments, etc. If they enjoy your product they will buy the extra add-ons.

9. Sell gift certificates for your products. You’ll make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate, when the recipient cashes it in. They could also buy other items from your web site.

10. Send your customers free products with their product package. The freebies should have your ad printed on them. It could be bumper stickers, ball caps, t-shirts etc. This will allow other people to see your ad and order.

There you go. The great thing about these powerful strategies is that you can implement them immediately. As I said, they are easy to start using but the outcome could be a substantial increase in your conversion and/or buy rate which is the ultimate goal. It is extremely important to make your customer and/or prospect feel special and to provide them with additional value-added items that will keep them coming back.