Step 11 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 11: Set up an automated ordering process

• Accept credit cards, other payments options (e.g. paypal) and international orders on your site
• Find the shopping cart, that can potentially double your sales
• Decide how to deliver your products
• Automate your escalating customer service as much as possible, yet provide an option to get one-on-one support.

Step 10 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 10: Test and survey regularly

• Increase your sales with testing
• Track your success through statistics
• Survey your customers and subscribers

Step 9 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 9: Convert Traffic

• Use tools to create ‘credibility and trust’
• Be in consistent contact with your newsletter subscribers
• Run promotions, competitions and time limited offers
• Provide more value than money worth
• Write effective e-mail promotions to increase your sales
• Take advantage of the lifetime value of your customers

Step 8 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 8: Analyze Traffic

• Use your All-In-One pack's analysis tools to understand what visitors do on your site, where they enter, purchase and leave
• Use the No. 1 technique to find out what visitors where looking for on your site, even when they leave the site. Send us an email here with "analysis technique" in the subject line if you want to know how this technique can easily be set-up on your site?
• Evaluate what promotions work.

Step 7 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 7: Build Traffic

• Find quick sources of affordable traffic for your site
• Join your All-In-One pack’s links program
• Get free advertising by giving away free content
• Spread the word through viral marketing
• Be an active expert in popular newsgroups
• Get bonus traffic by posting classified ads
• Use press release to capture free media exposure

Step 6 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 6: Deal with search engines and directories

• Know the search engine (SE) giants you need to focus on
• Formulate a linking strategy
• Understand how the search engines rank your business
• Let your All-In-One package professionally submit to search engines
• Submit manually to major directories, decide whether to pay for inclusion
• Monitor your ranking

Step 5 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 5: Prepare to collect your visitors’ e-mail addresses

• Start your own online newsletter
• Collect e-mail addresses from visitors via opt-ins
• Manage your opt-in addresses
• Grow your opt-in database.

Step 4 - Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 4: Create trust and credibility

• Provide a strong guarantee and honor it
• Publish testimonials to show what kind of person you are
• Add a feedback page and act on feedback
• Send a regular newsletter with interesting content
• Publish your Anti-Spam and Privacy Policy
• Know the difference between spam and opt-in email
• Add an About-Us page
• Prevent chargebacks through superior service and content
• Deal with refund requests immediately
• Soothe the nervous buyer

Step 3: Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 3: Prepare your content

• Decide what kind of sales copy you need
• Understand the essential elements of any web site
• Develop a keyword strategy
• Write valuable content
• Get feedback on your content and the site from others

Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Step 2: Design your site and build your online business

• Get a proven All-In-One Online Business Package, that

- has all the necessary technical programs to manage your site,
- is easy to use and provides extensive support o lets you design a great site,
- provides hosting
- has a links program in place


• Research keywords for a domain name

• Choose and purchase a telling domain name

• Choose your web host (better: have it in included in your pack)

• Design your site, so it compels visitors to subscribe, click, and buy

• Decide who is going to build your web site.

The complete Step-by-Step Guide is available free at www.website-traffic-resources.com

Step-By-Step Guide: "How to Build Your Successful Online Business"

Find the exact information you need right now to get your business up and running in record time. You will be guided through each step, allowing you to fastforward your online business.

The step-by-step guide has been laid out to give you a concrete understanding of the major steps involved in starting and growing a profitable Internet business.

If you already have your online business up and running you will be able to skip some steps to fastforward your business.

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Step 1: Decide what you want to sell online

• Find a niche market and identify their “problem”

• Decide what you are going to sell to that market

• Consider combining profit streams to create a bigger income

• Research and monitor your competition

• Write a business plan to guide your success

• Decide how you will brand your site

• Determine whether you will need funding

to be continued ...

A powerful HEADLINE gets them to your Web Site

A powerful headline is 10% what you say and 90% what you prove.

Headlines can simultaneously create curiosity and skepticism. Until proven otherwise, your headline is an empty promise.

If the headline is what gets them there, then it's theproof that keeps them there.

It's important that you fully understand that the tidal wave of lies and deceit online have created a gap between you and your target market.

Bridge that gap with TRUST!

- Build trust by quickly and immediately proving your headline.
- Proof creates trust.
- Trust eliminates skepticism.
- Trust transforms the curious visitor into a customer for life.

The ultimate headline that can make you rich is the compelling headline supported by jury convicting undeniable proof that YOU yourself did what the headline promises.

This proof can eliminate all reasonable doubt.
Draw your visitors in with your headline, blow their socks off with the proof.
Prove the headline to be actual, factual and true and watch your cash flow explode into a magnificent mushroom cloud of profits.

Slick words do not build trust, they fuel skepticism.

- Proof makes your website read differently.
- Same words, but a different frame of mind.

Instead of a fast talking slick internet pitchman, PROOF transforms your website and words into a copywriting masterpiece where the visitor feels that you know what you are talking about.

That feeling can more quickly and easily move customers to your order page resulting in higher sales for you and a satisfying purchase for your visitors.
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originally from Stephen Pierce

Obstacles

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. - Henry Ford

Google's click-to-play video advertisements go on sale today

The click-to-play video advertisements go on sale beginning today, and will be available to advertisers in the US, Canada, and Japan at launch.

Visitors to sites in Google's network of AdWords publishers will have complete control over the video ad experience Google's AdWords team announced in its blog.

Only a static image will be loaded upon reaching a page containing a video ad. Once started, users can advance the video, pause it, and adjust the volume of the playback. As with other Google ad formats, users can click through it to the advertiser's website.

Google sees the product as one that can be used by smaller advertisers as well as powerful brand names. "This feature makes video ads much more accessible to all advertisers," the post said.

The dos and don’ts of Joint Venture marketing.

There is of course a second way of doing Joint Ventures which is to market your own product to other people’s customer lists and if you’re really clever you can help people sell their own products to their own list in return for a share of the extra profits that you help them make!

So, if you have a good list of loyal customers you should approach (email is fine) people with good products that you think your list will buy. Write a persuasive but short email that explains what’s in it for the person you’re writing to and why it will sell. Do all you can to make it easy for them to do the deal i.e. you need to offer to do all the work!

I would strongly recommend that you offer them at least 50% of the profits as most people will assume that to be fair, but will be mildly insulted by a lesser offer.


Similarly if you have a great product (that your proposed partner does not already have access to themselves) then email them with a suggestion to market it to their list and why this will work. Again 50/50 is the norm.

I would not try the idea of helping somebody to sell their own product to their own list until you have a lot of success and credibility to point to!

Normally it takes very little thinking on the part of the person you are suggesting a JV to realise that a proposal is good but often you will still not get an answer because it looks like it will take a lot of time to organise.

You can overcome some of this issue by demonstrating how much of the work is already done, include links to a sample website and sample sales letters to show you are serious and easy to deal with.

Lastly, since you need to build trust with your partner, unless it’s just too stupid to contemplate, go with whatever money collecting and order processing suggestions your partner wants as this can often make or break the deal.

------------------------------------------------------
The posts on JVs come courtesy of Tim Lowe.

How to manage win-win-win situations using Joint Ventures.

There are many people who have made a great deal of money by selling other people’s products on a Joint Venture basis.

At first glance this can seem like an odd arrangement, the inevitable question that people ask is "why would the owner of a product let you sell that product and keep half the profits?" Why not simply sell it themselves and keep all of the money?

There are two good reasons why product owners do this:

1) If you are already so busy that you cannot find the time to sell anything else yourself you must employ somebody to help you, which costs money and leaves you with the burden of managing that employee and also the headache of what to do with them should sales tail off. Conversely JV partners cost nothing to run if there are no sales and are an awful lot more motivated to get sales than an employee is likely to be.

2) A Joint Venture partner often has access to techniques that the owner may not or a special relationship with his customers that will result in more sales than the product owner could otherwise achieve.

Just looking at point 2 in a bit more depth – imagine that I am going to try and sell a new product to new customers (say that I’ve already sold all that I can to my own customers). Supposing that I decided to rent the mailing lists of other people and send those potential customers a letter (usually referred to as a ‘mail shot’), I might reasonably get between 1% and 2% of those people to buy from me.

However if the person who owns that mailing list has looked after those customers and kept in touch with them, and THEY write to their customers and recommend me then I might sell to as many as 7% or 8% of those same people.

With a $50 product that can amount to $4,000 worth of sales per 1,000 customers shared equally, whereas the list rental would have gained the owner maybe $150.

I should mention that the product has to be good otherwise everybody’s reputation is tarnished.

But with that said, everybody wins, the customer gets a good product, the customer list owner makes an awful lot more money than he would otherwise have made and the product owner can easily make twice as much as he would do by renting the mailing list instead.

Of course the best thing to do is not only to find people with suitable customer lists to do Joint Ventures with, but to actively encourage and assist people in building those customer lists, sort of a win-win-win-win situation!

Knowledge

"Knowledge has to be improved, challenged and increased constantly or it vanishes."

Peter Drucker

Keyword Analysis - The Cumulative Effect Of Ignored Keywords

Getting traffïc from the search engines for competitive keywords is a tough battle. And it's getting tougher.

Find The Keywords Others Are Ignoring

Let's say you want to rank in the top three slots in Google for the keyword "chiropractor." (We're not even going to touch on how unlikely it is for a general keyword like that to convert!)

Do a Google search for "chiropractor."

At the time of this writing, there are 8,910,000 results. That number is NOT a real indicator of TRUE keyword competitiveness, but it's a start in the right direction. (We're gonna talk about how to do TRUE keyword competitiveness analysis in the next few lessons in this series.)
The first ten slots in the SERPs are very well-entrenched. They've been there awhile and they have high-quality link equity pointing at them.

Beating those folks in the top ten slots will be tough. A little too tough in my book. That is, it will require too much time, effort and monëy to knock them off their perch for the ROI I can expect from ranking for "chiropractor."

It's one of those high-voltage keywords that everyone in that market focuses on.
So, let's dig deeper for some less-competitive, undiscovered treasure.

Let's search Google for "california chiropractor" (use the quotes). Whoa, what a big difference. Now, we get 9,880 results. MUCH better! But, if I wanted to get into the top three, this keyword is still a little too competitive for my tastes.

With a bit of work, I can likely knock the 2nd and 3rd guys off their purchases. It'll take some effort, but I can do it. As for the guy ranked first... not a chance. He's entrenched.
So, let's dig deeper. Maybe there's some unexplored territory out there.

Search Google for "north orange county chiropractor" (again, use the quotes). Look at that! At the time of this writing, there are 0 (zip, nadda, zilcho) results.

Now, how easy would it be for you to rank well for THAT keyword?

Are people using this keyword in Google? Well, it may not jump out at you in Wordtracker, but think about this...

There are a LOT of people in Orange County, California. A lot of them look for chiropractors People are refining their search these days to get more relevant results from Google. Often, they're refining their searches by geography.

And not only will you easily scoop up folks looking for "north orange county chiropractor" but you should also rank well for "orange county chiropractor" (only 326 results at the time of this writing).

Cumulative Effect Of Ignored Keywords

Let's face it. Ranking well for "north orange county chiropractor" is not going to bring a flood of traffïc like ranking well for simply "chiropractor."

But, it doesn't need to.

First, "north orange county chiropractor" is much more targeted. If someone is searching for "north orange county chiropractor" it's a good bet that he's having problems with his back and wants to fix it fast.

If you're collecting and selling leads (we'll talk about how to do this in an upcoming series, so stay tuned) to a chiropractor in Orange County, you can unload 'em for a lot more cäsh than leads collected from people searching Google for "chiropractor."

Second, you're gonna have a bunch of these tiny keyword sweet spots sending search engine traffïc to you.

For example, you're not going to simply create one page for "north orange county chiropractor," call it a day and head for the beach. You want to create pages for...

"south orange county chiropractor" "laguna beach chiropractor" "anaheim hills chiropractor" "yorba linda chiropractor" ... and so on. You want to have lots of these pages scooping up people who are searching for these largely-ignored keywords. If you want to dig even deeper for keyword treasure, tack on the word "certified" or "board certified" to each keyword above.
The possibilities are endless. And cumulatively, these small traffic flows add up to a flood of highly-targeted traffïc to your site.

Last Thoughts

Avoid the high-voltage, ultra-competitive keywords in your space. The time, monëy and effort you need to spend to rank well for them will probably give you a rotten ROI (most folks don't have a business model that can yield a great ROI from these shark-infested waters).

Instead, go for the largely-ignored keywords!

They're much easier to rank for. And the traffïc they drive is more targeted and easier to convert.

The traffïc that only one of these sweet spots drives may not seem like a big deal. But, rank well for a LOT of them and the targeted traffïc can pile up quickly.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------©Copyright / About The Author: Article by Damon G. Zahariades; Abstract only {article shortened}.

How to get great sales letters written for you!

One of the questions that I get asked most often is "How do you get your sales letters written?" or "Who writes your letters?".

Well, I write the shorter stuff myself and get a copywriter to do the longer letters. If you are tempted to use a copywriter be careful here because good copywriters can charge anything from a few hundred to many thousands of dollars.

I have found it best to always write the basics of the letter myself and then give it to a copywriter to turn into something magical.

Some have tried just giving a copywriter some tapes or DVDs to watch and then to write a letter but it has never been a success. Copywriters don’t have the same depth of knowledge or enthusiasm as the person who is going to make their living from that product.

So, how do you get that letter written without hiring a copywriter?

The solution is to try some of the software that does it for you. There are several good ones, The Internet Marketing Centre, Armand Morin and Marlon Sanders do ones. And you can find them easily by searching in Google for their names and ‘copywriting software’.

Don’t slavishly take the results of the software’s efforts but instead use it as a means of creating the right sort of structure and a workable draft. You will need to tone down some wordings and remove some of the "hypey" style but it will certainly give you something that will almost certainly be better than you could do on your own.

Good luck with training your copywriting skills!

P.S. Let me see some of your 'sales copy' examples.

Most important Keyword Campain Terms

Keyword Terms to your success

I have put a brief description here of the most important terms used in keyword research that you must understand to set up a successful keyword campaign for your site (for a longer version of this article, please see the end of this abstract).

Vertical Keyword Research

The term Vertical Keyword Research is fairly straight forward and describes the variations that can occur on one speficif keyword or keyword phrase.

Lateral Keyword Research

Lateral Keyword Research is the process of finding the keywords or phrases that are similar to your original keyword, but do not necessarily contain that word or words exactly.

Often you'll need to do this kind of lateral thinking yourself or hire someone who can do it for you, but many tools are smart enough to offer really useful suggestions.

Lateral Keyword Research also relates to building your list with a variety of keyword combinations or misspellings.

The more creative both your mind and the Keyword Research tools are, the better your outcome. SEO people and Niche Miners may find words they hadn’t thought of that are popular but have little competition.

In a similar way, PPC advertisers may generate a huge list of keywords that are overlooked and consequently inexpensive to advertise on. Lateral Keyword Research really is powerful in the right hands.

Keyword Density

This is one of the most talked-about subjects, when it comes to copywriting for search engine optimization.

Since keywords (or keyphrases) play such an important role in copywriting for search engines, it would make sense to have certain rules and regulations or formulas that should be followed. However, the latest take on SEO experts is that there are no unquestioned keyword density formulas.

But there are very successful online marketing companies who follow some keyword density formulas and text structures like using your keywords and -phrases in an hour glass like shape on a page. This means you would start with more density in the beginning of the text, whereas the middle part would have less keywords and the end would have more keywords again.

Digging

Digging is often automated or partly automated. It involves processing large lists of keywords to reveal the keywords that have the characteristics of terms that are going to make money! Often digging is done by keyword research software and will often involve both Vertical and Lateral Keyword Research.

It is kind of like having a big bucket full of coins and having someone sort through all the nickels to find the quarters. When digging is done right it can save you lots of time and make you lots of money.

Keyword Popularity

Keyword Popularity one of the easiest to understand yet most misunderstood concept's in Keyword Research. Simply it's the number of searches performed during a certain period - per day, per week, or per month. That's the easy part to understand.

What many people don’t understand is that this is only a relative indicator. If one tool says that there are 1000 searches a month for a particular keyword, that doesn’t mean this is an exact figure. You cannot then say with any sort of accuracy that during the past month throughout the whole Internet there were 1000 searches for that keyword.

What this figure means is that in the chunk or sample of data that was taken from this particular search engine during this month that keyword was found 1000 times. Sometimes this really is all of the searches that were done on this search engine, other times this is just a portion of all the search queries. The only time we could ever be sure that there were 1000 searches done a month would be if the sample data were taken from every single search engine on the Internet. No tool does this - not even close.

Keyword Research tools use only samples of data. This means that you cannot assume that your list is 100% correct. It’s really just a best guess based on the amount of data your specific tools looks at.

Firstly, you can get a rough indication of the search volume and fairly safely conclude that the actual search volume is going to be greater when you consider traffic across all search engines.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, you can get a relative indicator. By relative indicator I mean it allows you to be able to compare one keyword with other keywords in the same group of data (except if you were using the Overture suggestion tool due to the way it combines phrases).

Even though the actual volume isn't exactly correct, by being able to compare relatively you can still get some amazingly powerful information.

Keyword Competition

Another important concept in Keyword Research is keyword competition. This information can help you assess how well you will be able to do in a particular market, from both a search engine ranking perspective, as well as a business competition perspective.

There are a two common methods that Keyword Research tools use to give an indicator of competition. The first one is called the R/S ratio, which shows the ratio of searches (demand) to web pages containing that keyword or keyword phrase (supply).

Basically the tool compares how many times something is searched for against how many pages are found in the search engine with that keyword or phrase included in the page.

The second common indicator is KEI, which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. This is very similar to R/S.

However, it's weighted so the higher the keyword volume, the more tolerance it has to lots of competing pages. So keywords or phrases with lots of searches will have a higher KEI compared with ones that have fewer searches, even though their R/S ratio may be exactly the same.

In most experts opinion, both concepts are fundamentally flawed because they assume that the number of pages on the Internet for a given keyword is a reliable measure of competition.

This is not neccessarily true.

In reality, it doesn’t matter how many competing pages you are up against. All that matters is how good are the websites that appear on the first (and maybe second) page that a search engine returns for a query.

What really matters is how good the top 10 results on a search page are!

- Are they well optimized?

- Are they already popular, high traffic sites?

- Do these sites have lots of links pointing to them?

If you want to get a real competitive analysis, you should include factors such as Incoming Links, Keyword Density, PageRank, Alexa Rank and PPC competition data to name just a few. These provide a better way of assessing competition in real terms.

Also, consider other factors in the equation that a tool cannot tell you directly. For example, think about the conversion potential of the keyword area. If you’re niche mining, how easy is it to get your hands on a product to sell? Or is there a suitable affiliate product to promote? There's no point having lots of traffic going to a site that has no way to turn that traffic into dollars.

Keyword Case Studies

The best book on how to apply keyword research, with useful examples of ways to use your own mind as a keyword research tool was published recently by Wordtracker. It's called Keyword Research Guide and it's free.

Although the e-book appears to be aimed at beginners, it is full of insights, tips, and techniques on keyword research that you can apply to your own website, whether you're using Wordtracker or some other tool. For anyone serious about making the most out of keywords it is a must!

The book features contributions from some very knowledgable 'keyword gurus', like:

• Bryan Eisenberg - Convert more traffic using Wordtracker.
• B. L. Ochman - Understand your customers' real motivations.
• Kevin Lee - Combine thousands of phrases for an effective PPC campaign.
• Stephen Mahaney - Use Wordtracker to find the size of the market.
• Ken McGaffin - Discover the most important sites in your marketplace.
• John Alexander - Find inspiration in Wordtracker's Top 1,000 Words report.
• Neil Davidson - Learn how an ad agency uses keyword research to position a client.
• Robin Good - Use Wordtracker to identify niche opportunities.
• Nick Usborne - Incorporate keywords into your content and copy.

Related links: You can download Keyword Research Guide here.

For more information: Get in touch.
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by Jay Stockwell [article shortened and changed, please see full version at website-traffic-resources].