Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money

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Slide 2: DOTCOMOLOGY BY: STONE EVANS, THE HOME BIZ GUY Click Here To Discover 3 Easy Steps To Make Money Online! INTRODUCTION ................................................................. 9 EMPTY YOUR CUP! ................................................................ 13 DON’T LISTEN TO THE “SO-CALLED” EXPERTS…............................... 14 DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE AN E-ENTREPRENEUR? ................. 16 THE INTERNET — YOUR BUSINESS TOOL...................................... 17 THE RIGHT PRODUCT SELLS ITSELF............................................ 18 THE ETERNAL, CHANGING BUSINESS PLAN ................................... 20 1. GETTING STARTED ....................................................... 23 1.1 MAKING YOUR WEBSITE ATTRACTIVE, INTERESTING, ENGAGING AND INTERACTIVE ............................................................................ 23 1.2 NAVIGATION ................................................................. 26 1.3 DEFINING A USABLE SITE.................................................. 31 1.3.1 Good Content is Critical ......................................... 31 1.3.2 Ease of Access to Information................................. 32 1.3.3 Quick Access to Information ................................... 32 1.3.4 Cleanly Designed Pages ......................................... 33 1.3.5 Download Status .................................................. 33 1.3.6 Usability Problems ................................................ 34 1.4 BUILDING INTERACTIVITY AND PERSONALIZATION ...................... 35 1.5 GRAPHICS.................................................................... 37 1.6 WEB COPY ................................................................... 37 1.7 CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME............................................... 41 1.7.1 Using Expired Domains to Skyrocket Your Traffic ....... 44 1.8 THE HOST ................................................................... 45 -2- Slide 3: 1.9 TESTING AND PERFORMANCE .............................................. 47 1.9.1 Monitoring and Tracking ........................................ 49 1.9.2 Tracking Your Sales............................................... 54 1.10 BUILDING CREDIBILITY AND MAINTAINING IT .......................... 55 2. INTERNET BUSINESS IDEAS ........................................ 58 2.1 LEVERAGE THE ADVANTAGES OF THE NET ................................ 58 2.2 WHAT BUSINESSES ARE SUCCEEDING ON THE NET? ................... 59 2.3 SHOULD YOU BE SELLING A PRODUCT OR A SERVICE? ................... 61 2.4 IMPORTANCE OF BACK-END SELLING ..................................... 63 2.5 CROSS-SELLING ............................................................ 65 3. SECRETS OF WINNING TRAFFIC THROUGH SEARCH ENGINES ................................................................................ 67 3.1 HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK ............................................ 69 3.2 TOP SEARCH ENGINES ..................................................... 72 3.3 SEARCH ENGINE PAGE-RANKING ALGORITHMS.......................... 76 3.4 KEYWORDS — OPTIMIZING YOUR SITE TO GET TOP BILLING AT SEARCH ENGINES ................................................................................. 82 3.5 WEB COPY FOR SEO ....................................................... 86 3.6 SUBMITTING TO SEARCH ENGINES ........................................ 87 3.7 SEARCH DIRECTORIES – THE BENEFITS OF BROWSING ................ 88 3.7.1 Submitting to Search Directories ............................. 89 3.8 PAY-PER-CLICK — BUYING STATUS ...................................... 89 3.8.1 Show Me the Money! ............................................. 91 3.8.2 Submitting to Pay-Per-Clicks .................................. 92 3.8.3 Google AdWords ................................................... 93 3.9 LINK POPULARITY AND LINK ANALYSIS ................................... 95 3.9.1 Reciprocal Links and Partner Sites ........................... 97 3.9.2 Picking Your Partner .............................................. 98 -3- Slide 4: 3.9.3 Inward Link Analysis ........................................... 100 3.10 OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE ........................................... 101 3.11 MONITORING YOUR PROGRESS ........................................ 103 3.12 THREE WORDS ABOUT SPAM .......................................... 105 4. BUYING ADVERTISING AND KEEPING CUSTOMERS!.. 107 4.1 BANNERS................................................................... 107 4.1.1 Banner Glossary ................................................. 108 4.1.2 Banner Economics............................................... 110 4.2 TEXT LINKS ................................................................ 112 4.3 CLASSIFIED ADS .......................................................... 114 4.4 CULTIVATING NEW CUSTOMERS......................................... 115 4.5 CREATING EFFECTIVE ADS ............................................... 117 4.6 ADVANCED AD TRACKING ................................................ 120 5. GETTING RICH FROM AFFILIATE PROGRAMS ............. 126 5.1 JOINING AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM ....................................... 127 5.2 LAUNCHING YOUR OWN AFFILIATE PROGRAM ......................... 130 5.3 COOKING OFF THE SPAM................................................. 132 5.4 MANAGING AND TRACKING YOUR AFFILIATE PROGRAMS ............. 133 5.5 EVALUATING YOUR WEBSITE’S PERFORMANCE ........................ 138 5.6 HOW TO ATTRACT AFFILIATES ........................................... 140 5.6.1 Classifying Affiliates for Better Management ........... 141 5.6.2 A Few Avoidable Errors ........................................ 146 5.7 LINKSHARE – AFFILIATE NETWORK THAT WORKS..................... 149 5.8 THE LEADING DIGITAL PRODUCTS AFFILIATE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM – CLICKBANK............................................................................ 150 6. EXPLODING YOUR PROFITS THROUGH EMAIL MARKETING.......................................................................... 152 6.1 COLLECTING OPT-IN EMAIL ADDRESSES ............................... 152 -4- Slide 5: 6.2 DOUBLE OPT-IN........................................................... 154 6.3 INTELLIGENT TARGETING THROUGH TAILOR MADE RESEARCH....... 156 6.4 RENTING OR BUYING LISTS .............................................. 158 6.5 CREATING UNBLOCKABLE DHTML POP-UPS .......................... 161 6.6 EMAIL MARKETING TACTICS ............................................. 164 6.6.1 Writing Headlines That Grab Your Customers and Sell Your Goods!...................................................................... 165 6.6.2 Tips for Building Your Email Lists........................... 172 6.6.3 Email Content – Text vs. HTML ............................. 176 6.7 MANAGING EMAIL CAMPAIGNS........................................... 178 6.7.1 Personalization in Email Marketing......................... 178 6.7.2 Creative Segmentation ........................................ 181 6.7.3 How Often And When to Mail?............................... 182 6.7.4 Refrain from Spamming ....................................... 185 6.8 ANALYSIS OF EMAIL CAMPAIGNS ........................................ 187 6.8.1 Tracking Performance - Measuring Useful Metrics .... 187 6.8.2 Enhancing Email Response ................................... 191 6.8.3 Should the message trick the reader or be honest?.. 194 6.9 AUTORESPONDERS ........................................................ 195 6.10 CALL TO ACTION — CLOSING THE DEAL.............................. 200 6.11 SAMPLE MARKETING EMAIL ............................................ 204 7. CREATING NEWSLETTERS THAT SELL AS WELL AS INFORM ................................................................................ 208 7.1 ADVANTAGES OF NEWSLETTERS AS A MARKETING TOOL ............. 210 7.2 CREATING AN EFFECTIVE NEWSLETTER ................................. 212 7.3 STEPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL NEWSLETTER CAMPAIGN .................. 218 7.4 GETTING SUBSCRIBERS FOR YOUR NEWSLETTER...................... 221 7.5 ADVERTISING IN NEWSLETTERS ......................................... 224 7.6 PROMOTING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS THROUGH NEWSLETTERS ........ 225 -5- Slide 6: 7.7 BLOGS...................................................................... 227 7.8 PLANNING YOUR CONTENT............................................... 232 7.9 EZINE JOINT VENTURES .................................................. 233 7.10 MANAGING YOUR LIST.................................................. 234 8. JOINT VENTURES — PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS ....... 236 8.1 CHOOSE YOUR PARTNERS................................................ 236 8.2 JOINT SUBSCRIPTIONS ................................................... 238 8.3 EXIT POP-UPS ............................................................. 239 8.4 PLUG YOUR PALS.......................................................... 239 8.5 STRENGTHENING YOUR JOINT VENTURES .............................. 240 8.6 TRACK YOUR JOINT VENTURES .......................................... 241 8.7 KEEPING YOUR CUSTOMERS ............................................. 242 9. SELLING INFORMATION PRODUCTS ONLINE ............ 245 9.1 FINDING A WRITER ....................................................... 246 9.2 WHAT CAN YOU WRITE ABOUT? ........................................ 248 9.2.1 Pleasure Books ................................................... 248 9.2.2 Inspirational Books ............................................. 248 9.2.3 Study Books....................................................... 248 9.2.4 How-To Books .................................................... 249 9.2.5 Choosing the Right Topic ..................................... 251 10. CREATING A HOT SOFTWARE PRODUCT WITH NO PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE ............................................... 257 10.1 BUILDING AN OUTLINE ................................................. 258 10.1.1 Feature List ...................................................... 258 10.1.2 User Stories ..................................................... 259 10.1.3 Data Directory .................................................. 260 10.2 STUDY COMPETITION ................................................... 260 10.3 DETERMINE PRICING.................................................... 261 -6- Slide 7: 10.4 CHOOSING A PROGRAMMER ............................................ 263 10.5 DEVELOPING FUNCTIONALITY .......................................... 266 10.6 CREATING A WORK AGREEMENT....................................... 267 10.7 PACKAGING YOUR PRODUCT ........................................... 269 10.8 CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT ................................... 270 11. PRESS RELEASES ..................................................... 274 11.1 WRITING AN EFFECTIVE PRESS RELEASE OR NEWS ARTICLE......... 275 11.2 PRESS RELEASE DISTRIBUTION........................................ 280 11.3 WHEN SHOULD YOU DISTRIBUTE PRESS RELEASES? ................. 282 12. VIRAL MARKETING .................................................. 284 12.1 VIRAL MARKETING THROUGH EBOOKS................................ 285 12.2 VIRAL MARKETING THROUGH EMAILS ................................. 292 12.3 VIRAL MARKETING WITH AFFILIATE PROGRAMS...................... 296 12.4 VIRAL MARKETING ON THE WEB....................................... 300 12.5 WORD-OF-MOUTH VIRAL MARKETING ................................ 302 12.6 MEASURING VIRAL EFFECT AND PERFORMANCE...................... 303 13. MANAGING YOUR LIFE WHEN YOU WORK FROM HOME ............................................................................................. 305 13.1 BALANCING YOUR BUSINESS AND FAMILY ............................ 307 13.2 KNOW HOW TO SAY “NO” ............................................. 307 13.3 TAKE A DAY OFF FROM WORK AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH........... 308 13.4 LEARN HOW TO COMPROMISE ......................................... 308 13.5 MAINTAINING A POSITIVE ATTITUDE IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS .... 309 CONCLUSION: ALL YOU NEED TO SKYROCKET YOUR WEB PROFITS ............................................................................... 312 SOME WARNINGS .............................................................. 314 A PERSONAL INVITATION FROM STONE EVANS ............................. 317 -7- Slide 8: 30+ FREE TOOLS AND SOFTWARE PROGRAMS TO HELP YOU SUCCEED . 320 Instead of only reading about making money online, why don’t you actually start doing it right away? I’ve created a simple system that you can use to get your own money making website set up within the next 24 hours. It’s not just a website though… It’s actually a complete turn-key home based business system that gives you everything you need to start pulling in profits on the Internet. Click here to learn more about it and sign up today! -8- Slide 9: Introduction Hello, my name is Stone Evans. A few years ago, I was a restaurant owner. Actually, you could say the restaurant owned me. I worked long hours being what is popularly called the chief cook and bottle washer — that just means I did everything from paying the bills to washing the dishes. At the end of the day, I earned barely enough money to get by and I never had the opportunity to take a vacation. The fact is, my financial life was pretty difficult at that time. However, I was optimistic and always searching for ways to achieve true financial freedom. One day, I picked up a book called “Multiple Streams of Income” by best selling author, Robert Allen… and I didn’t put it down until I was finished reading it cover to cover. That book changed my life. It taught me, in very simple terms, that having money is a good thing and that not having money is a bad thing. It illustrated the point that it is essential to develop multiple streams of income. One job is not enough, one investment is not enough, one business is not enough. If you are only relying on one stream of income, you are setting yourself up to be broke one day and the fact is that 85% of the -9- Slide 10: world’s population grows old and dies financially broke. That’s because most people do not have multiple streams of income. Knowing that one stream of income is not enough, I got busy finding ways to make more money through avenues other than my “day job”. In the “Multiple Streams of Income” book, Robert Allen discusses different “Money Mountains” including the “Real Estate Money Mountain”, the “Investment Money Mountain” and the “Marketing Money Mountain”. The one that appealed to me most was marketing — specifically Internet marketing. In the book, Robert went on to explain that ordinary people were getting on the Internet and starting small businesses that made big money from the comfort of their own homes using nothing more than a personal computer and an Internet connection. I was intrigued by this idea. Just the thought of being able to make a living using nothing more than a laptop computer and the Internet sent chills down my spine. I got started immediately. After work and after my family went to sleep at night, I’d brew a big pot of coffee and get online for a few hours (usually between midnight and 3 AM) trying to learn how to make money online. I knew other people were doing it. I just had to figure out how to do it myself. I’ll be honest… It wasn’t easy. - 10 - Slide 11: Everywhere I turned, somebody was promising to make me rich if I joined their business opportunity or membership site or bought their latest ebook. Before long, I had racked up thousands of dollars in credit card debt and cluttered my computer with various ebooks, membership site passwords, affiliate program welcome letters and Internet marketing guru newsletters. My head was spinning with ideas and information, but the only people making any money that I saw were the people whose stuff I was buying — or so it seemed. However, with time things began to make more sense. I started making a little bit of money using some of the online marketing strategies I was experimenting with and gradually that little bit of money I was making grew into a full-time income. My dream of making a living from home has come true. The purpose of this book, “Dotcomology – The Science of Making Money Online”, is to share the information that has helped me create a successful online business so that other people who are hopeful of making money online will have a fighting chance for success. See, you have to be careful when you get online with hopes of making money because there are literally thousands of scams and scam artists waiting behind the veil with sophisticated and highly tuned strategies for ripping you off. One of the reasons I give this - 11 - Slide 12: huge 300+ page content-rich ebook away for free, is because I want to help as many people as possible avoid the scams and learn the truth about what it actually takes to make money online. With the facts in hand, you can decide for yourself whether or not you’ve got what it takes to succeed in the Internet marketing industry. TIP: If you want to get started quickly, I can help you get your first website set up within 24 hours, so that you can start applying what you learn in this book to the real world. I believe that my service is the fastest and easiest way to start making money on the Internet. Click here to learn more about it. - 12 - Slide 13: Empty your cup! There’s an old Zen story that goes like this: A young man had read all the books he could find about Zen. He heard about a great Zen master and requested and appointment with him to ask for teachings. When they were seated, the young man proceeded to tell the master everything he had understood from his reading, saying that Zen is about this and Zen is about that, on and on… After some time, the master suggested that they have tea. He performed the traditional tea ceremony while the student sat at attention, bowing when served, saying nothing. The master began to pour tea into the student’s cup. He poured until it was full, and kept pouring. The tea ran over the edge of the cup and onto the table. The master kept pouring as the tea ran off the table and onto the floor. Finally, the student couldn’t contain himself any longer. He shouted, “Stop! Stop pouring! The cup is full — no more will go in!” The master stopped pouring and said, “Just like this cup, your mind is full of your own opinions and preconceptions. How can you learn anything unless you first empty your cup?” And so it is with you now — if you’re going to benefit from this book and all of the knowledge I reveal within the pages ahead, you must first empty your mind so that you can actually learn something. - 13 - Slide 14: Don’t listen to the “so-called” experts… In this book, I’m not going to give you some airy-fairy theory about what should work if everything clicks the way I think it should. That’s the kind of rubbish you can read in any one of a thousand marketing books sitting on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. The fact is, most of those authors have never sold anything online except copies of their book on Amazon. Here’s my first piece of advice: don’t listen to advice from someone who hasn’t been there and done it themselves! This is absolutely crucial. If you look around the web or in your local bookstore you’re going to find a ton of hype about how you can become a millionaire with nothing more than a keyboard and a mouse. There are people out there who will say you can get rich with no effort, no work and no investment. There are even some who will try to sell you pyramid schemes, get-rich-quick plans and every other kind of scam you can imagine. And people actually buy them. At the first sign of a chance to pick up fast cash, people whip out their wallets and give away their life savings. You’re smarter than that, right? But it’s not just the straightforward frauds you have to watch out for. The Internet changes almost every day. Unless someone is actually earning their living online day in and day out, by the time - 14 - Slide 15: they’ve finished explaining how to make money on the Internet, chances are, their advice is out of date. Like I said, it wasn’t easy when I was first getting started. But like any successful businessman, I ditched what didn’t work and did more of what did. If I saw something that I thought would bring in extra cash, I gave it a try. The fact that it’s so easy to create an online business was what really did it for me. If I wanted to take advantage of an opportunity, it cost me next to nothing to try and I lost little if it failed. It wasn’t long before I knew exactly how to find the right products and bring them to the right customers. That’s what I’m going to show you in this book. I’m not going to give you any strange theories or fancy ideas. I’m just going to tell you exactly what I did — and what I’m still doing! — so that you can do the exact same thing yourself if you want to. Of course, I can’t guarantee that you’ll have the exact same results as me. Heck, I bet if I were starting from scratch today I’d have different results too. I might even have better results. All I can do is reveal the information and tools that work for me. Once you have this, I’m confident that you can make this business work for you too. - 15 - Slide 16: Do you have what it takes to be an e-entrepreneur? Before you even turn on your computer, the first question you have to ask yourself is whether you’re cut out for this kind of work. The fact is, building a home-based business isn’t for everyone. Some people like the commute. They really do enjoy having a boss who tells them what to do, and they like the routine of working nineto-five for an ordinary salary that can barely pay the mortgage. Personally, I think they’re nuts. More reasonably, there are people who are concerned about the risk of starting up their own business. They’re not sure it’s worth the investment of time and money, and they’re scared of the responsibility that comes with running their own company. They wonder if there is another way to escape the rat race. I’m sure there is. You could win the lottery or wait for your Aunt Sue to keel over and leave you her condo. Or maybe you could sit down with a pen and paper and draw the blueprint for The Next Big Thing. Anything can happen… For me, what happened was creating a successful, self-running Internet marketing system. It didn’t happen without effort. It didn’t happen without at least some initial investment of both time and - 16 - Slide 17: money. Of course, it doesn’t happen now without me making sure that the taxes are filed and the paperwork is done. But it happened. I’m my own boss. I work from home according to my own schedule and I get to pocket all the cash my business makes. If you’re prepared to give an e-business the time, the work and the money it needs to get started and get growing, it can happen for you too. The Internet — Your Business Tool In effect, my system for making money online is built on three foundations: the Internet, marketing and the product. In this book, we are going to look closely at each one of those. In particular, we’ll spend a lot of time talking about marketing because that is really how you make money online. Let’s begin by taking a quick glance at why the Internet is the greatest business opportunity since the railroad. The Internet actually started in 1969 as the ARPANET, a Defense Department system designed to let survivors share files after a nuclear attack. From a handful of top secret computers, it’s grown to fill more than 10 million hosts and millions of domain names. And it’s still growing. According to a recent survey, the volume of Internet traffic is expected to double annually over the next five years. - 17 - Slide 18: Consumers are expected to account for 60 percent of all Internet traffic over that period with the rest of the market made up of business users. What does that mean for you? It means customers — millions of them. No other business tool can put the products you sell to so many people so easily. Nothing even comes close. We’re talking about a potential market of hundreds of millions of people around the world who can buy your products 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you opened a store in your city, how many people would walk past your window each month? If you live in Manhattan, maybe a few thousand. If you live in Los Olivos, California, maybe a few hundred. On the Internet, there’s virtually no limit to the number of people you can bring through your store front wherever you live. That’s the power of the Internet. That’s why my online business is bringing in thousands of dollars every day. I attract a lot of customers for my service and I sell a lot of goods. The Right Product Sells Itself In fact, for some of my websites, my customers are my goods. When you join an affiliate program, you buy traffic from other sites - 18 - Slide 19: and pass them onto your partners for a profit. In this book you’ll learn all about affiliate programs. I’ll show you how to build them, how to select your partners and how to turn your traffic into cash. But traffic is just one kind of product on the web. Information products are some of the greatest money-makers currently churning up dollars on the Net. And anyone can create an information product. Imagine you know how to build a bookcase from scratch. That already makes you a lot more knowledgeable than me. The only thing I know about wood is that it looks great in my fireplace! Maybe one person in a thousand will want to know how to build the kind of bookcase you know how to build. If you’re not a well-known carpenter, no publishing company is going to touch you. It’s just not worth the effort. On the Internet, one person in a thousand gives you a potential market of approximately 340,000 customers (and that number is growing all the time). If you write a book and sell it online for just $10 per copy you could make as much as $3,400,000. All you have to do is tell people what you know and tell them it’s out there. And that costs next to nothing. Information sells like crazy online. In fact, I sell a $47 ebook all day long. The profits from that single ebook could provide a comfortable living for me and my family all by itself. But who wants to stop at one profit stream when you can create multiple streams of - 19 - Slide 20: automated income on the Internet? Not me. Click here to discover the system I use to earn multiple streams of income on the Internet. The Eternal, Changing Business Plan Of course, it’s communication that’s the key. The more people you can bring to your websites the more money you’re going to make. You can have the greatest products in the world sold on the most beautifully designed website online, but if no-one knows where it is, you’re just going to be wasting the twenty bucks or so that you’re spending each month for your website hosting service. There are a dozen different ways to bring people to your website. This book will discuss the ones that are most effective. I’m sure there are other ways too. I’m sure you’ll find people who will tell you that this site is great or that method gave them results. Maybe they’re right, and you’re welcome to try them. What I can tell you is that I’ve tried a lot of different marketing techniques and this book will reveal all the ones that work best for me and should work for you too. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will work for you. If there’s one piece of advice regarding online marketing that you learn from this book, it’s that marketing has to be flexible. Like I said, I tried dozens of different methods. If I hadn’t kept a constant watch on how - 20 - Slide 21: those methods were working, if I hadn’t dropped those that weren’t worth the effort and repeated my success with those that brought in cash, I’d still be making sandwiches and washing dishes for a living. I’ll tell you about the methods that I found consistently effective. If they don’t work for your product, give it a little time then switch the methods around. Remember, flexibility is the key. In the first chapter of this book, I’m going to explain exactly what you have to do to build a website from selecting a host to creating the design. Once you’ve got your site up, you have to bring traffic, and that’s what we’ll discuss next. I’ll reveal the secrets of successful search engine optimization, how to buy advertising that pays, and how to make the most of the millions of affiliate programs that will pay real dollars for your website visitors you’ve never met and never will. I’ll also examine the various kinds of products you can create and sell online, and finally, I’ll show you how to put everything together to create a truly integrated business system that brings in real cash, hour after hour, day after day! Making a fortune online is easy if you know what you’re doing. Read this book and apply the information within. I know it can work for you because it works for me. Whether you choose to succeed or not using the information revealed in this book, is entirely up to you. - 21 - Slide 22: NOTE: If you like “short-cuts”, click here to learn about my Plug-In Profit Site service which will give you everything you need to start earning multiple streams of income within the next 24 hours. A few recent comments about the Plug-In Profit Site: "It's the simplest, auto-pilot money making system I've seen!" -Marty Foley "This is a super quick way to get some checks coming in now." -Allen Says Click Here to Sign Up and Start Making Money Today! - 22 - Slide 23: 1. Getting Started The first step towards creating an online business is building a website. Now, that isn’t as complicated as it sounds. When I built my first website, I thought Java was a type of coffee and HTML the name of a robot in Star Wars. That’s why I didn’t do it. I paid someone else to do it for me. It cost me just a few hundred bucks, but I earned it back soon enough. This chapter discusses how to begin the process of creating your first website, and where you can find someone to build your site if you don’t want to do it yourself. 1.1 Making Your Website Attractive, Interesting, Engaging and Interactive To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling your own product/service or are selling for other merchants as an affiliate), you need a website created just for that - a simple, focused site. Your website should be easy to build, maintenance-free, low cost, credible, and a powerful traffic-builder and customer-converter. Having the right tool and the right product alone won’t ensure the success of your website. There are many factors to be considered while designing a site. Unfortunately, most of these are often ignored by Internet business owners. - 23 - Slide 24: Build It for Speed - It's a fact of modern life - people are in a hurry. This means that you have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your potential customer's attention. To minimize your load time, keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Use flashy technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video, animation) sparingly and only if it is important to your presentation. Target your Market - Know who your market is and make certain that your site caters to their needs. It is critical that your site reflect the values of your potential customers. Is your market mostly business professionals? If so, the site must be clean and professional. Is your product aimed mostly a teenagers and young adults? Then your site could be more informal and relaxed. The key here is to know your market and build the site to their preferences. Focus the Site - Make certain your website is focused on a primary goal: selling your product or service. A site offering many unrelated products is not necessarily unfocused, but this is often the case. If your business does offer many products, dedicate a unique page for each instead of trying to sell them all from one page. - 24 - Slide 25: Credibility Is Crucial - The most professionally designed website won't sell if your customers don't believe in you. A clear privacy statement is one way to build your credibility. Provide a prominent link to your privacy statement from every page on the site as well as from any location that you are asking your visitors for personal information. Provide legitimate contact information online. Navigation should be simple - Make site navigation easy and intuitive. Simple and smooth navigation adds to the convenience of the visitors. Add powerful search and catalog features. Visitors usually don’t have the patience to navigate through the whole website to find what they are looking for. Consistency is the key - Make sure the site is consistent in look, feel and design. Nothing is more jarring and disturbing to a customer than feeling as if they have just gone to another site. Keep colors and themes constant throughout your website. Make your website interactive and personalized – Add feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your - 25 - Slide 26: website is another key element that can build your visitor’s trust and increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is buying online. It would give you an idea of what products to cross-sell and up-sell. For example, when a person buys a CD player, a disc cleaner can also be offered. Content is King - Good content sells a product. Ask yourself the following questions. Does your copy convey the message you wish to get across to your visitors? Is it compelling? Does it lead your visitor through the sales process? Have others review, critique and edit your copy to insure it is delivering the intended message. Always double check your spelling and grammar. 1.2 Navigation The aim of a website's navigation is simply to allow users to get to the content they require. For sites that have a large number of sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of these) the navigation plan has to be properly researched and designed. You have to consider different types of visitors and simulate the most common steps they would take to find what they want on your site, - 26 - Slide 27: and the navigation plan has to optimize this movement. For example, the steps required from searching a catalog of items, selecting from the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart, proceeding to check out, to entering the payment particulars is a specific sequence that should be facilitated by the navigation system. If the sequence is haphazard, it could lead to frustration or the user may miss an important step and you would have an aborted sale. To find their way about, users need to know two things: - Where they are now - How to go elsewhere Navigation does not exist in isolation; good site organization is a prerequisite for a coherent navigation system. Objectives of a Navigation System Navigation can be broken into two primary types: Location Indicators and Navigation Controls. Location Indicators Location indicators let users know where they are in the site at the moment. You need to keep in mind that users coming from outside - 27 - Slide 28: your site can enter at any page, not necessarily on a main page. They need to be able to orientate themselves quickly. Equally, it is important that users navigating around your site have a clear idea of where they are both in absolute terms and in relation to other content. Location information should appear on every page of the site, in the same place and in the same style. Location indicators should tell the user precisely where they are and this should be clear even to a user who has entered the site at an internal page. The location indicator should be identifiable for what it is and make sense in the context of other navigation. In simple sites a page banner - text or graphic - naming the page will be sufficient. For this to work the page name should also appear in the main navigation so that it is relevant within the overall structure of the site. Color can be used. For example a different color background, contrast color or sidebar in each part of the site. To be really effective the color change should be reflected in the navigation. Using “breadcrumbs” on every page is a good idea. Breadcrumbs show you a series of hierarchical links that you have used to go from - 28 - Slide 29: page to page within a section. Using breadcrumbs is like leaving a trail of the path you have followed. The breadcrumbs appear at the top of the content section, just below the main navigation template. Each element in the breadcrumb is a link to that section or subsection. This helps in avoiding a series of back buttons allowing the user to directly go back to the main section page or another sub section. More importantly, it always shows the context of the page that is being viewed and how it belongs to a section or sub-section. Navigation Controls Navigation controls are the main navigation links; they allow users to move around the site. Whether they comprise images or text they should be predictably located in the same place, and with the same appearance, on each page. These have several purposes To allow users to move about within the site To tell users what information is available at the link To work with location indicators to orientate users A good navigation control: Is clear: it looks like navigation - 29 - Slide 30: Leads to obvious content - users have a good idea what they will find if they click Is consistent with other navigation controls Is predictable in its style and location on the page There is no mystery to usability. It simply involves creating a site, which is accessible to the majority of people, is easy to use and get around and delivers on its promises. You can have a site that meets the most important standards of usability by planning it well and always keeping the end user in mind. Remember that websites should not be designed for their owners - they should be designed for their users. Problems with usability could be said to stem from just two sources: the site itself and the user. In fact, the site is always at fault if a visitor (however experienced or inexperienced) has problems navigating, getting information or understanding the site. While websites have become far more complex, web users have become less experienced because more and more new people go online every day. It is a mistake to think that the majority of users will be web or even computer savvy and will understand subtle clues about content. Many won’t, so make your site as easy to use as possible. - 30 - Slide 31: 1.3 Defining a Usable Site A usable site will: Help users achieve a goal, usually to find something, such as information, or obtain something, such as a book. Make it easy for them to achieve that goal Make it possible to achieve the goal quickly Make achieving that goal a pleasant experience A site will be generally usable if: The content is good and relevant The content is easy to find The content can be found quickly The page is pleasant to look at and cleanly designed 1.3.1 Good Content is Critical A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one that provides products or information that is useful or beneficial to users. A good usable site will make it clear what information or content is available and at what price AND what is not available. A good usable site should define clearly all subscription packages offered. - 31 - Slide 32: 1.3.2 Ease of Access to Information Good navigation, precise location indicators, secondary navigation, clear linked text and a well-organized structure all contribute to making information easy to find for a wide range of different users. Bearing in mind that many users are inexperienced, it may be necessary to include explanations of things you consider selfexplanatory. For example, an inexperienced user may need an explanation of how to use a drop down menu. Remember, make it as easy as possible for people to use your website. 1.3.3 Quick Access to Information This is the aim of the majority of web users. It can be broken into two important aspects: Speed of Page Loading This requires, in particular, attention to images to ensure they are properly optimized and do not excessively delay load time. It may also mean breaking up long articles and ensuring that important content is at the top of the page where it will load first. - 32 - Slide 33: Speed of Access to Content This is where the 3-click rule comes in - no important content should be more than 3 clicks from the home page. Some standards even say that it should be no more than two clicks. One helpful way to speed access to content is to consider each type of user, select the content that they are most likely to be interested in and create links from the home page to one piece of content for each group. This will get them quickly to the appropriate part of the site. 1.3.4 Cleanly Designed Pages Cleanly designed pages are pleasant to look at and easy to read. It is almost impossible to make a site with an image shown as a tiled background usable - the whole thing is too distracting and confusing. It takes no great design skills to create clean pages; it just requires thought and adherence to the principle that when it comes to design, less usually is more. 1.3.5 Download Status Most paid membership websites are limited to online access and information download rather than selling products. There should be clear download instructions provided. Your website should also state - 33 - Slide 34: the size of the file in kilobytes and the estimated time of download for a user having a 56K modem, DSL, Cable and so on. 1.3.6 Usability Problems While for large commercial sites investment in full-scale usability studies may be essential, few small sites can afford such luxuries. However, identifying problems with usability for your site need be no more complicated than asking a few (honest) friends to act as guinea pigs on your site and, if possible, watching them silently as they do this. Watching users try to find information at your site can be both instructive and quite surprising. Remember that if at any stage you feel the urge to intervene and explain, then you have identified a usability problem. List of the Most Common Usability Problems The site does not state its purpose clearly Java applets, huge images, banner ads or flashy elements slow down loading; 10 seconds is about as long as the average user will wait for a page. - 34 - Slide 35: The site requires specific software to be used. Have you ever actually changed browsers or downloaded a piece of software just to see a site? Poor navigation, too little navigation, too much navigation and, not uncommonly, no navigation at all Bad design leading to poor readability Discomfort due to ugly design or inconsistent design. Almost always because a designer overestimated their skills. Irrelevance of content - for example the business site that includes biographies and photos of each of the board members. Happy egos on the board; bored website visitors! Complexity or excessive originality of design, which requires users to learn how it works in order to use it. Inaccessibility because the site cannot be used by browsers for people with disabilities. 1.4 Building Interactivity and Personalization Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of - 35 - Slide 36: your website is another key element that can build a visitor’s trust and increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is buying online. Personalization tries to restore to the online business the magic of personalized attention which is one of the chief reasons why many people still prefer in-store purchase. You can use personalization to match your customer with the right products through either rulesbased or customer analytics-based processing. Thus as your software stores customer information and preferences, it can help categorize them into groups. At the same time, observations over time can suggest products to cross-sell and up-sell. Thus when a person buys a subscription to a fitness site, exercise equipment is also offered. Amazon pioneered personalization on the net – when you a buy a book, it shows you other books in the similar genre saying “people who bought this book also bought these”, inducing you to buy more. A consumer survey from the Personalization Consortium found that 56 percent of respondents say they are more likely to purchase from a site that allows personalization, and 63 percent are more likely to register at a site that allows it. - 36 - Slide 37: 1.5 Graphics Your site has to be aesthetically attractive with visually appealing organization and enticing images. Fashions change fast on the Internet, so when you come to choose a designer, make sure you take a good look at their portfolio. You want the user to just glance at your homepage and understand immediately who you are and what you can do for them. 1.6 Web Copy Your website content should convince visitors that your service is either unique or superior to that of your competitors in terms of quality, and is competitively priced. It should show your potential clients that you can provide the solution they are seeking. Your product or service will solve their problems, answer a dream, enrich their lives, and/or improve their businesses. You are the dependable expert that they want and need! Your website copy plays a major role in establishing and growing your customer base. Website copy creates the “voice” of a company, just as the look and feel of a site put a “face” on the company and on otherwise intangible products and services. On an ecommerce site, the copy plays a key role in closing sales as well as in up-selling and crossselling products and services. Good website copy delights first-time - 37 - Slide 38: visitors, encourages return visits and propels both customer acquisition and retention. People read a web page differently than they do a brochure or a newspaper. They scan, scroll, click, hit the back button, and hit the forward button. “Reading” is about moving around and being in control. You have one chance to make a first impression – to quickly convey the benefit of staying on your website. I can’t overstate the importance of first impressions, which in web-time are measured in milliseconds. The layout, functionality, message and overall look and feel of your web page determine who stays – and who clicks away. Your story should be clear and to the point. The goal of any web page should be to get the visitor to DO something: to move on to the next step in a purchase sequence or to click for more information about a product or service. Without readable, compelling copy and clearly organized hypertext links, visitors are much less likely to complete a transaction – and return to your site again. Writing for your web page should always start from your visitor’s perspective. What is your website visitor looking for? Why is she here? How can you make her visit as quick and efficient and positive as possible? You should take the time to clarify the goal of each page before starting to write. If the page is part of a transaction sequence, - 38 - Slide 39: identify what may be hindering the buying process. Be sure instructions are clear and easy to read. If you are selling a service on your website, your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is your service’s most powerful benefit, in combination with a strong, unique feature of your business. It answers that most difficult question: Why should someone do business with you? Tell your customers what service you are selling and explain what your service provides. What is the key benefit(s) to your customers? What pain does it cure, what solution does it provide? Compare your service with that of your competitors and highlight what makes you stand out from the competition? Keep working on this until you can clearly separate yourself from the field. As stated earlier there must be a convincing reason for doing business with you, instead of your competitor. Summarize the above into one tight, powerful, motivating phrase that will persuade your customer to do business with you and to trade their money for the benefits delivered by your service. As you start to work through the above four steps, you may find this to be a lot harder than it looks. Don’t blow it off and give up! You - 39 - Slide 40: must have a USP. If it was easy, everyone would have a great USP! Come up with a tight, sharp USP that sells your service to your customer. Write tight, get right to the point, be keenly aware of the audience for the page, and don’t use a three-syllable word when a one or two-syllable word will do. Use call-to-action language and be interesting. The page should be so clearly organized that, in seconds, visitors can understand and get convinced to buy your product and be able to anticipate where a hypertext link – or a “Continue” button – will take them. Studies show that “ease of use” is the winning factor on an ecommerce site. If you’re going to promote your service and expand your customer base using your website, potential clients have to be able to trust you. Their confidence in you and your products has to be boosted. Endorsements on your website from a valued friend or colleague, or a referral from a strategic partner are the types of “leads” that boost your credibility. You and your service must be perceived as being trust-worthy before your visitor will be confident enough to contact you or even buy your product. Show prospects that you have their best interests at heart and that you can adapt or customize your service to meet their individual - 40 - Slide 41: needs. Foster an ongoing relationship that steadily increases their trust levels and cements a view that you are an “authority” in your field. Another important aspect of convincing prospective customers is to keep abreast of recent developments in your field. Check on what your competitors are writing about, and watch for new trends. This will keep your website current, razor-sharp and unique. By keeping your eyes open, you will be able to grab an angle or niche that hasn’t been well covered yet by your competitors. Portray this angle or niche on your website. Finally, be wary of broadening the theme of your site too much. Try not to dilute your product or service’s targeted niche simply to expand your base of merchant partners. Remember; focus on your selling your service. That’s where the “meat and potatoes” of your business will come from. 1.7 Choosing a Domain Name In the physical world, you can distinguish a business because of its structure, window displays, or signs. You can tell that a bank is a bank, or a clothing store is indeed a clothing store. In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story altogether. Your domain name is the only clue to your online business. - 41 - Slide 42: You do not have visual clues: no location, no look, and no store design. Instead, users have to type in a word or a set of words to reach your site. Your prospective visitor has no way of knowing what your site is all about until she finds it and reads its contents. Who can ever tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that Excite is a search engine? Your domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A good domain name is the best asset you can ever have. It can make your business stand out in the crowd, or just float aimlessly in space. The need to provide immediate clues to an online business led to the prevalence of generic domain names. Generic names instantly provide the user with an idea of what a business is all about, what to expect and look for in a site. For instance, Etoys.com is a toy store. The temptation of the generic name has been so powerful; that some companies even paid ridiculously high prices to get the name they want. The domains Loans.com and Wines.com were both bought for $3 million each. Telephone.com was acquired for $1.75 million, while Bingo.com sold for $1.1 million. However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz” that you’d like surrounding your website. Branding has always been about proper names: McDonald's did not name their store Hamburger. Hertz - 42 - Slide 43: is not called Car Rental. FedEx is not Mail Carrier. Kodak is not Photographs. Google is not Search Engine. Microsoft is not Computer Software. For better branding results, your domain name should stand out and be easy to remember. Consider the following tips when creating a domain name: The domain name should be short The domain name should be simple It should be suggestive of your business category It should be unique It should be easy to interpret and pronounce It should be personalized It should not be difficult to spell It should not be difficult to remember Domain names can be registered through many different companies (known as "registrars") - a listing of these companies is available at ICANN.org. You can register for domain names from 1 to 10 years in advance and prices can vary anywhere from $8 to $30 per - 43 - Slide 44: year for each registered domain. Most website hosting companies, as explained later, will handle the registration process for you, but make sure that you are properly listed as the owner of the domain when it is registered. If you have registered a domain name for a specific period, make sure you renew it in time. You’d be surprised at the number of cases, where website owners have lost their domain name to a competitor by not renewing it in time. 1.7.1 Using Expired Domains to Skyrocket Your Traffic Domain names provide a great opportunity to make easy money. I’m not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up good names and sell them on for a profit. If you didn’t get positioned in that market early on, you can forget about it. The bottom’s fallen out of the market and the best domains are long gone. I’m talking about expiring domains. Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to promote their site and build up traffic. Many of them then lose interest and move on, leaving their site active. That means that although they still own the domain, they’re not actively promoting it. But they don’t need to. All the automatic marketing systems they’ve put in place are still bringing in traffic. The site runs itself. - 44 - Slide 45: Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going to expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back onto the market, you’ve got a pre-built stream of customers. You can either rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to your domain. It’s that easy. In fact, websites like DeletedDomains.com actually do all the legwork and let you reap all the rewards. Do be careful when using other sites though. There are some swindlers out there that will sell you subscriptions, provide you with outdated lists, take your money and keep the good domains for themselves. It happens, and there’s little point in taking a risk with other companies when DeletedDomains.com does such a great job. 1.8 The Host Let’s start where the Internet starts: with a host. A host is a server that provides a home for your website on the World Wide Web. Just as your computer contains all your files, so a host contains all the files needed to run your website. Why can’t you just keep all those files on your own computer? Because that would mean visitors would have to connect directly to your computer to see your website and that’s not a good idea. It wouldn’t be secure and it would make your machine run like a tired snail. With a host, you can simply upload everything you need to the server and your users can then connect - 45 - Slide 46: there to see your site. It lets the site run faster and allows it to have all the security and extras it needs. Selecting a host is the first important step towards building your Internet business. Hosting services and companies vary from totally free, shared servers to large-scale dedicated machines. You’ll have to decide which is right for you and your business. Your choice of server will depend on how much money you have available at the beginning and how much you plan to grow in the future. In my opinion, for commercial sites, free hosting is a waste of time. Your users are going to get blasted with annoying pop-ups every time they surf to your page, it’s going to be impossible to get a decent position in a search engine, and you don’t even get a real business URL. No one’s going to remember your web address if they have to type: FreeWebsiteHosting.com/my_site. However, it is possible to choose a cheaper host at the beginning and move up as your business begins to bring in money. NOTE: One of the most important factors in choosing a website host is the customer service you receive once you’ve signed up. There are many technical issues that can come up once you have your own website, and if you don’t have a truly dedicated hosting company - 46 - Slide 47: to support you and help you resolve these issues when necessary, you could, quite simply, lose your business. Trust me, I’ve seen many thriving online businesses fall apart because they chose the wrong hosting company. When hosting is cheap, there is a reason for it. With website hosting, you get exactly what you pay for and you should never compromise when it comes to who to host your website with. Click here to learn about my service and the website hosting company I highly recommend to everyone who does business online. 1.9 Testing and Performance You have designed a very usable website, you have hosted it using a very reliable web hosting company, and you have integrated a safe and trusted payment processing system with your website. However, all these can prove to be useless until you know your site is actually working and accessible. If you want to create an accessible website, you will need to test, test and test again. A recent Forrester Research report reported that failure to ensure website quality will cost the average small or mid-size company thousands of dollars in wasted expenditures on website redesigns, forfeited revenue, and lost customers. Testing a website is a long and tedious task, but it's perhaps the most important task of all. There are - 47 - Slide 48: numerous stages to testing, all of which are very important. Ranging from browser testing to content testing, none should be excluded. Visual Acceptance Testing Visual Acceptance Testing is the first port-of-call for all webmasters. This type of testing generally ensures that the site looks as it is intended to. This includes checking the graphic integration, and simply confirming that the site looks good. In this stage you should assess every page carefully to ensure that each looks the same. The site should be tested under different screen resolutions and color depths. Functionality Testing Functionality testing is perhaps the most vital area of testing, and one which should never be missed. Functionality testing involves an assessment of every aspect of the site where scripting or code is involved, from searching for dead links, to testing forms and scripts. You should also test your payment processing system completely and thoroughly. After all, you wouldn’t want a potential customer to get stuck at the last stage and eventually leave the site just because there is something wrong with payment processing. - 48 - Slide 49: Content Proofing This stage of testing removes any errors in your content, and ensures that your site has a professional appearance. In this phase, you should reread each page on your site, and check for spelling and grammatical errors. System and Browser Compatibility Testing This test phase is completed in order to ensure that your website renders correctly on a user's screen. To begin with, you should test several pages from your site on different browsers such as Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6, Netscape 4 and 6, and Opera. This can be extremely important - if your site does not work properly with the Netscape browser, Netscape users will end up annoyed, and they'll go elsewhere. 1.9.1 Monitoring and Tracking Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information, not to mention interesting. If a large majority of your visitors who proceed to purchase a product leave the site when they get to a specific page in the order process, you need to know about it. It could be that the page in question is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales exponentially. In fact, it is not uncommon - 49 - Slide 50: for small website changes in headlines and order processes to result in a 200%-300% increase in sales. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors. Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can study. If you're not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing progress. If you don't have access to website statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that just shows how many visitors you've had. You'll be missing out on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site. A good website hosting service would offer traffic logs that provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a web site from various sources such as search engines, directories and other links. Unfortunately, traffic tracking provided by web hosting services is often in the form of raw traffic log files or other hard-to-comprehend, cryptic formats. These log files are basically text files that describe actions on the site. It is literally impossible to use the raw log files to understand what your visitors are doing. If you do not have the patience to go through these huge traffic logs, opting for a trafficlogging package would be a good idea. - 50 - Slide 51: Basically two options are available to you and these are: using a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted trafficlogging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service may be easy to use and is generally the cheaper option of the two. In fact, you can get a powerful free tracking tool at: StatCounter.com. Other reliable tracking programs include WebTrends.com and HitsLink.com. These services do not use your log files. Typically a small section of code is placed on any page you want to track. When the page is viewed, information is stored on the remote server and available in real time to view in charts and tables form. A good traffic logging service provides detailed statistics pertaining to the following: How many people visit your site? Where are they from? How are visitors finding your site? What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other sites, and other sources? What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site? - 51 - Slide 52: What pages are frequented the most - what information are visitors most interested in? How do visitors navigate within your web site? Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your website investment. The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your website is analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking software. The three main statistics that will show your overall progress are hits, visitors and page views. Hits are tracked when any picture or page loads from your server on to a visitor’s browser. Hits, however, can be very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic for your website. The statistic that is probably the most important for a website is Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of two things. First, how many people are coming to your site, and secondly how long are they staying on your site. If you have 250 visitors and 300 page views you can figure that most visitors view one page on your site and then leave. Generally, if you're not getting 2 page views per visitor then you should consider upgrading your site's content so your visitors will stay around longer. - 52 - Slide 53: If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as the number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the good work! Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of how your site design is going and if your marketing campaigns are taking hold. Also, a good stat to look for is unique visitors. Once a person visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors category if they visit again. This is a good way to track new visitors to your website. Page views are a good indication of how "sticky" your website is. A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number of Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site for a long time and surfing. Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn't be. While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be used for more in-depth web traffic analysis, the above areas alone can provide invaluable information on your visitors and your website performance. Remember, this data is available for a reason. It's up to you to use it. - 53 - Slide 54: 1.9.2 Tracking Your Sales Like any business, it is absolutely vital to track and maintain your sales records. You should have a clear understanding of your income and expenditures. There are many ways to keep track of your sales. Using orthodox methods such as keeping a paper journal is time consuming. Simple spreadsheet programs as well as basic accounting software are available at minimum or no cost. However, it is advisable to install advanced accounting software such as QuickBooks, Quicken, or Microsoft Money to keep track of your accounting. Such advanced programs save you time by sorting your register transactions by date, transaction amount, document number (e.g. check number), order entered, or cleared status. The tracking feature included in such software tracks, by user, changes made to each transaction. Daily, weekly, monthly as well as yearly sales reports can be generated with a few clicks. These reports help you analyze the sales of each and every product. Logs and reports can be generated to keep track of all your customers. NOTE: Affiliate marketing solves many of the aforementioned tracking problems for you automatically. When you become an affiliate and resell other company’s products for a profit, the company you are - 54 - Slide 55: affiliated with keeps track of your traffic and sales automatically and presents all this information to you in easy to read charts and graphs. Click here to learn about a turn-key affiliate marketing system that you can use to earn multiple streams of income on the Internet. 1.10 Building Credibility and Maintaining it Finally, make sure that you build trust and credibility for your business. We discussed earlier the importance of credibility. Credibility is a key ingredient for any successful business venture. Building and enhancing the credibility of the products and services you offer is an ongoing and full-time effort. Why not make sure the website you use works as hard as you do to establish credibility? Let's look at elements that can be built into a well-designed website to enhance credibility in the eyes of your potential customers. Offer a Guarantee Nothing beats a solid, believable guarantee for building credibility online. It may be hard to believe, but buying via the Internet is still unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory for many people. It is up to you, the business owner, to put their minds at ease. One way to do this would be to offer an unconditional, 100% money back guarantee. - 55 - Slide 56: By assuming all of the risk, you will earn instant credibility points with most potential customers. Provide Contact Information Even the best guarantee won't help establish credibility if the potential customer cannot contact you. Post accurate contact information on your website and make it easy to find. Provide as many methods of contact as possible; do not simply post a link to an email address. For maximum credibility, post the complete mailing address, phone number (preferably a toll free number), and email addresses for customers to use if they feel the need to contact you. Provide a Brief Bio Familiarity is one of the most effective tools for building credibility on the Internet. How do you establish familiarity in a faceless, impersonal medium like the Internet? Simple, tell people about yourself. Post a page that provides a thumbnail sketch that describes who you are. Be sure to include personal data as well as professional credentials. Place your photo on the page so people can put a face with your name. Creating familiarity will impart another level of credibility for you and, by extension, for the product you represent. In this chapter, we looked at how to build your website and explained many of the elements your website must contain to be effective. We discussed web hosting and domain names and even - 56 - Slide 57: talked about how to use expiring domain names to get free traffic flowing to your website. And we’re only getting started! In the next chapter, we’re going to look more closely at some of the more popular and successful Internet business ideas. NOTE: Would you like an easy way to start making money online? I’ve created a simple, turn-key, 3-step system that you can use to launch your very own money-making website on the Internet within the next 24 hours. Click here to learn more about it and enroll today. - 57 - Slide 58: 2. Internet Business Ideas 2.1 Leverage the Advantages of the Net The Internet is a vehicle that has been used to enable higher levels of communication between people, companies and countries throughout the world. It means your online business does not just have to concentrate on local markets – and almost no place is out of reach! If your business has a website, this in itself means it is accessible by the global market, and it is vital that your business take advantage of this. Internet selling is on the rise. There are many research studies and statistics that support this statement. A study conducted by the Ipsos Reid market research firm in February 2003 concludes that in the year 1999 only 28% of worldwide Internet users purchased a product or service online, whereas this figure rose to 62% in the year 2002 and about 70% in the year 2005. And these numbers continue to climb. Nielsen/NetRatings supports this finding with its own research. The Internet is a huge marketplace that has attracted businesses with its potential for big-time revenues. Dizzying success stories of ventures started in a basement that grew to become stock market darlings are constantly celebrated in the media. Small businesses - 58 - Slide 59: came to the Internet, tentative at first, and then in droves - eager to sell everything from fake jewelry to handcrafted tapestries. You can sell just about anything from soup to nuts, as long as you have a product that has a market. 2.2 What Businesses Are Succeeding on the Net? After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially, a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet. Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful place. In breakthroughs that show the promise of ecommerce wasn't all smoke and mirrors, many dot-coms including eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc., E-Trade Group Inc., Google Inc. and others have successfully re-defined the landscape of Wall Street. There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay for valuable content along with quality products and services offered online. Hundreds of paid content and product-oriented websites have already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer values her time and is willing to pay for access to quality information and the convenience of purchasing products and services online. - 59 - Slide 60: However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some products may be better suited for online sales than others; others simply will not work online. According to an Ernst and Young study, the most popular online purchases are computer related products (40%), books (20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music (6%), subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%). Businesses offering paid services have also prospered enormously. The top three categories (Business Content/Investment, Entertainment/Lifestyles and Personals/Dating) consistently account for 62% of all paid content revenue. One statistic indicates that 85% of all money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to the top 50 sites in most categories. In terms of “stickiness” of different categories, Business sites especially finance and investment rank the highest. In other words, users are more likely to spend more time surfing through a business website compared to other categories as illustrated below. Time per person Audience (hr:min:sec) Business – Finance and Investment 0:21:33 51,586 General News 0:15:47 64,822 Entertainment 0:14:32 45,922 Source: Nielsen/NetRatings Category - 60 - Slide 61: According to the above figures a person spends about 22 minutes on a finance website on average. Do statistics bore you? Click here to start using a proven Internet money making system that has already been “figured out”. No thinking… Just follow the 3 steps and launch your e-business today. 2.3 Should you be selling a product or a service? The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain, educate and research. It is thus no wonder that nonperishable, informationintensive products - including computers and software, books, travel, consumer electronics, magazine subscriptions - are the most popular online products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based sites to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range of topics, have been sprouting up all over the Internet. Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and investments have successfully transitioned themselves to the Internet. Unique services such as online driving schools have been prospering too. In fact, many states in the US have already set up online payment sites for Government services. Residents can now get online to pay most of their bills and other expenses including parking tickets to local courts. - 61 - Slide 62: However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give lots of preliminary information that's useful in setting the scene for the closing. But the actual closing takes place offline - i.e., not on the Internet. Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best on the Internet are those that take advantage of the convenience of the Net. Remember that convenience is the primary reason consumers flock to the Internet in the first place. People can shop at any hour of the day at most sites. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales clerks, and even avoid pickpockets. Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract online attention and sell strongly. You would generally not try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus, few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even diamonds, can and do sell well on the Internet. Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products that can be shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping costs diminish the price - 62 - Slide 63: competitiveness of online products and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages some people from buying online more than any other given reason. An Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with credit card information being stolen. As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages as well as disadvantages of selling either products or services online. If you choose to sell a product or service online, you must evaluate your offering to ensure that the total costs of the product or service including shipping are not much higher than what is offered elsewhere. 2.4 Importance of Back-end Selling Considerable effort is required to get customers for your products. You might design stunning web pages, work hard for high search engine rankings (or pay for them), submit classified ads, etc. but still not manage to sell enough to make the kind of profits you desire. This is where the concept of back-end sales is useful. Most marketers are successful because they apply back-end selling into their marketing efforts. Back-end selling is when you sell - 63 - Slide 64: other products or services to your existing customers after they have purchased an initial product. It is always easier to sell products or services to your existing customers because you have developed a relationship with them when you sold your first product or service to them. You will find it less expensive to sell to old customers as compared to selling to new customers. Your conversion ratio will be dramatically higher with existing customers. In fact, to increase your online profits dramatically, you should continually locate or create new back-end products and services to recommend (sell) to your existing customers. Many businesses sell their front-end products (initial products) at almost zero profit in order to generate back-end profits. These businesses do not care even if they lose money on the front-end products or services; they want the back-end profits. How do you make backend sales? There are several ways. When you order a product from a mail-order company, they'll send you a catalog along with your order, or put you on a mailing list and send you new catalogs from time to time. They might also send you a sales letter for another product. This may be related to the first product in some way. Many companies implement such a strategy. - 64 - Slide 65: To implement this technique online, you can put the sales pitch for your backend item in the email to the customer that confirms their order. If you have an online catalog, you could include a link to it, or even include a coupon or special offer "for all valued customers". For a faster response, you should put the backend offer on the "Thank You" page that is generated by a credit-card sale. The customer just bought something from you and has a credit card in his or her hot little hand! Why not ask for another purchase while they are in the mood to buy. In case you do not sell more than one product or service, affiliate programs might come in handy. Back-end selling can also be integrated with “Up-Selling” wherein you introduce more expensive products or services to your existing customers in similar ways as those mentioned above. This will almost instantly raise your sales and profits. TIP: With the Plug-In Profit Site service, you get an automated back-end sales campaign built directly into the website I build for you. Click here to learn all about it and start earning back-end sales today. 2.5 Cross-Selling Another successful strategy similar to the ones discussed above is cross-selling. One of the best examples of cross-selling via the web is - 65 - Slide 66: on Amazon.com. If you search for a book on the Amazon site, a message will appear on the same page, saying “Customers who bought this book also bought…” and will list half-dozen other books for your consideration. This is an excellent way to cross-sell additional services or content to your members. You can also direct visitors to other parts of the site to consider products and services that they hadn't previously considered. Successful cross-selling is the result of recognizing a customer need and meeting that need with a useful product or service. Customers benefit from needs-based cross-selling efforts because they receive the services they need and want. Cross-selling can help your business realize its objectives: providing useful services, retaining customers, attracting new customers, and staying competitive with other websites. In conclusion, you can offer a range of products and services on the Internet. The key is proper research and a great marketing plan. We’ll be talking about marketing strategies for your product or service in the upcoming chapters. In fact, in the next chapter, we will discuss one of the most important Internet marketing strategies – search engine optimization. - 66 - Slide 67: 3. Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines It doesn’t matter how great your website is, if no one sees it, you’re not going to make a penny. You can spend days producing the perfect design, weeks tweaking the copy, and months writing the code and uploading the pages, but if no one knows where you are, how are they going to know they should buy from you? When I first started selling online, the first major problem I ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads on other sites, organized reciprocal links and joined web rings. Those methods all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me, what turned my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber, was figuring out how to use search engines. Sure, I’d submitted my sites to the major search engines as soon as I’d finished building them, but I didn’t really pay them much attention. After all, I figured search engines are just for people who are looking for information; they’re not really good for commercial sites. Boy, was I wrong! - 67 - Slide 68: One day, I sat down and checked out which sites were popping up first in the categories that suited my businesses. I found that all the top-ranked sites were my biggest competitors. And when I say biggest, I mean these guys were in a whole other league. They had incomes that were ten or twenty times the size of mine. No wonder they had top billing at Yahoo! and Google! And then it clicked. Search engines don’t list sites by size, they list them by relevance. These sites weren’t listed first because they were big; they were big because they were listed first! That was when I began to optimize my pages and think about meta-tags and keywords. As my sites rose through the listings, my traffic went through the roof. And not just any old traffic! The people that came to my sites from search engines hadn’t just clicked on a banner by accident or followed a link from curiosity, they’d actually been looking for a site like mine. My sales ratio went up like a rocket. I’d created my own big break. In this chapter, we are going to discuss all proven strategies of search engine optimization. We will discuss how to optimize your site, submit your pages and pick up the targeted traffic you need to make cash. This chapter is one of the most important chapters in the whole book. It’s crucial that you read it carefully. - 68 - Slide 69: Let’s start with search engines. 3.1 How Search Engines Work Internet search engines are special sites on the Internet that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks: They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet - based on important words. They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them. They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index. Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day. Spidering Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of web - 69 - Slide 70: pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on websites. When a spider is building its lists, the process is called crawling. In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its travels over the web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the web. Indexing Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on web pages, the search engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users: The information stored with the data The method by which the information is indexed - 70 - Slide 71: In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results. To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders. An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In - 71 - Slide 72: hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word. The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's effectiveness. The Search Engine Program The search engine software or program is the final part. When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first. 3.2 Top Search Engines I’ve studied how search engines work. An integral part of any Internet marketing or search engine optimization campaign is to know exactly which search engines to target. This section discusses some of the top search engines today. Google Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years. They went from beta testing to becoming the Internet's largest index of web pages in a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named - 72 - Slide 73: "Googlebot", crawls the web and provides updates to Google's index about once a month. Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in returned searches. Yahoo! Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the Internet today, and the site went live in August of 1994. Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as far as web directories and search engines go. Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your site. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get listed. Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a Yahoo! editor and, if approved, it will appear in the next index update. AltaVista Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named “scooter” accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista's - 73 - Slide 74: robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your entire site. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it can take a long time to index your entire site, depending on how large your site is. Inktomi Inktomi's popularity grew years ago as they powered the secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions of Slurp crawls the web many different times throughout the month, as Inktomi powers many sites’ search results. There isn't much more to Inktomi than that. Slurp puts heavy weight on title and description tags, and will rarely deep-crawl a site. Slurp usually only spiders pages that are submitted to its index. Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these are America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more. Lycos Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet today, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named "T-Rex", crawls the - 74 - Slide 75: web and provides updates to the Lycos index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results for Lycos in addition to its own database. The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags too heavily. Instead, it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages returned in results. The URL, META title, text headings, and word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content. However, any page that isn't at least 75 words in content is not indexed. Excite Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to be a fairly popular search engine, until companies such as Google started dominating the search engine market. As of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL's, and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite search results, you need to be either listed with Yahoo! or Inktomi. - 75 - Slide 76: Looksmart Getting listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart's results appear in many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others. Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site is generally non-business related, you can submit your site to Zeal (Looksmart's sister site), or if you are a business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Either method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner sites if you are approved. Once your site is submitted and approved, it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and its partner sites. 3.3 Search Engine Page-Ranking Algorithms A search engine's main job is to provide results which most satisfy a user's query. If they present a result that the user visits and doesn't agree that the document is about their query, there is a very good chance that the user may not use that search engine again. Most search engines pay no attention at all to the Meta description tags. Meta description and keyword tags are hidden attributes that you can add to the front of your document which are supposed to annotate and describe the document. Since the users will never see this information, - 76 - Slide 77: they will be disappointed if you stick in invalid keywords or fail to keep the description in line with the document's contents which usually is the case. Most Search Engine page-ranking algorithms rank pages based on the following aspects: Content of the website Representation of content, keywords, and links on websites Location and number of inward and outward links on websites Relevancy of search terms as compared to the websites Given below is a brief description of the page-ranking algorithms of some of the most popular search engines. Google You can submit your website to Google at the following URL: www.google.com/addurl.html. Submitting your site will only make Google aware that your page exists; it is quite possible that your pages may get crawled even if you have not submitted. It is advisable to submit the home page and some inside pages. Inside pages are added to the submission, just in case the home page is found too slow - 77 - Slide 78: to load or crawl. The pages that are submitted should link to the rest of the pages. Google indexes the full text that is visible on any page that it crawls. It generally does not index the metatags – keywords or descriptions. When Google lists your page in the search results, the description that is displayed is the extract of text that is around the first line where the search word appears on the page. It may thus be a good idea to write a good description of the page and build it around the most likely search term(s) and place that near the top of your page. You should remember that one sure way of getting your site listed and indexed is if there are several links that point to your site and such links appear on web pages that in turn have several other links pointing to them. The term “link popularity” is used for this. It analyzes links of the pages that it has visited and this “link analysis” helps to determine the ranking of the page. Google uses a proprietary PageRank algorithm for determining relevance and ranking of pages in the search results. Location and frequency of the search term on your web page are no doubt factors in ranking; however, off-the-page factors such as link analysis are more important. Generally, Google provides search results based on relevancy, meaning that it returns a list of pages ranked by the - 78 - Slide 79: number of other web pages linking to each page, as well as other mathematical algorithms Yahoo! Yahoo! offers a human-powered directory and offers its results to visitors. The directory is supplemented by a web page index created by crawling. The directory is an important channel in the area of search engine marketing. It is popular and is used extensively by people to locate sources of information. Moreover, the directory is a valuable boost to your site for crawling and ranking in other search engines, as the directory provides a high-quality link to your website. When a visitor is looking for information on relevant sites, she could either browse through the hierarchy of directories and subdirectories or search for an appropriate directory through a search interface. As your site can be listed in just one category, generally, the choice of category is an important step. Choose the top category that your target visitor who is making a search may select out of the different categories offered to him/her. Select your target keywords and find out which categories relate to those keywords. For submission of non-commercial sites, the Yahoo! Express submission is recommended rather than the Standard submission option. - 79 - Slide 80: The results page in your chosen category will list your site in two possible sections (for most categories). One section is called "Most Popular Sites" and this is on top, while the second section contains the remaining listings in Alphabetical order. Yahoo! does not reveal how it includes certain sites in the “Most Popular Sites” list. However, link analysis and click-throughs are likely to be factors. You cannot pay to be included in this section. Certain sites with sunglasses shown next to their name or an “@” symbol shown at the end of the name reflect that Yahoo! considers those sites to be excellent. Inktomi (MSN Search, AOL Search, Hotbot) Inktomi is a search engine that does not offer its search services through its own site, but through Partner sites – prominent ones being MSN Search, AOL Search, HotBot and others. Inktomi, through its crawler, creates three different indexes. “Best of the Web” index has around 110 million pages that it indexes on the web and considers high in link analysis. The next set of around 390 million pages is indexed as “Rest of the Web”, considered as lower in link analysis. The third index is of paid inclusion. It also offers specialized regional indexes as well as targeted news, multimedia and directory indexes. It avoids duplication of the same page in more than - 80 - Slide 81: one index. Link crawling and paid inclusion are the two most effective ways to get covered by crawling. For bulk submissions to its paid program, it offers IndexConnect (for 1000 or more pages). Again, there is a cost-per-click basis with a monthly minimum. Ranking at Inktomi is determined by a combination of factors including HTML links, keywords and description tags near the top of the page or in the title tag. If the search string matches with what is found at these places on the page, the ranking is higher. Link analysis and analysis of clickthroughs are other important criteria that it adopts. AltaVista AltaVista will accept free listings through its “addurl” link, but it also has paid inclusion features. Generally, their crawler may visit every four weeks. Paid inclusion may be desirable if you have a new website or web pages or if you alter your web pages frequently, and you do not wish to wait until the next cycle of crawling. There is an “Express Paid” inclusion service of self-service type for up to 500 pages at a time. This service will enable weekly crawling. Their bulk program called “Trusted Feed” will enable the pages to be directly linked to their index. Pricing for “Trusted Feed” is on a cost-per-click model with a monthly minimum. In this program you can submit the - 81 - Slide 82: Meta data, descriptions and keywords directly to the index. Nevertheless, the engine will check whether the destination page has the same Meta data or not and could levy a penalty for spam. AltaVista’s ranking policies are a combination of various factors. The frequency and positioning of keywords and descriptions is important, as are title tags or words that appear near the top of the page. AltaVista applies link analysis to determine relevancy and page ranking. It levies penalty on spamming and does not recognize invisible or tiny text, keyword stuffing, identical pages, mirror sites, or quick meta refresh tags. 3.4 Keywords — Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines When a user enters a search term, also known as a “keyword”, into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions of pages in the database and awards each one a “relevancy score”. The higher your score, the higher your listing. If your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites. There are three ways to figure out your keywords: - 82 - Slide 83: Ask Your Competitors This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has downloaded, click on “View” in your browser, and then “Source”. That will reveal all the HTML used to build the web page, including all the keywords that have been specially inserted. Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site. Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed, such as “vitamins” for example. You can repeat the process on other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty long list. Ask the Pay-Per-Clicks Pay-per-click sites actually let you see how popular a keyword is. They’re not being kind; they’re trying to make money. The more webmasters bid on those keywords, the higher the bids are going to rise — and the more money the pay-per-clicks are going to make. FindWhat, for example, has a Keyword Center. Other pay-per-click sites offer similar features. One of the most popular key word discovery tools, however, was provided by former PPC giant Overture. - 83 - Slide 84: You can play around with this free keyword selector tool at: www.inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Use a Specialized Tool Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped up to supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best of these is WordTracker.com. They’re not bargain basement, but you get what you pay for. They’ll give you all the keywords you need and in my experience, they’re a sound investment. GoogleFight.com is another useful tool to see whether one keyword is more popular than another. The site compares two keywords and tells you which is more popular. It’s free and has a limited use, but it’s fun to play with. As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it’s also worth looking at key phrases. It’s quite possible that a user looking to buy flowers online might search for “red roses” or “cheap bouquets” as well as just “flowers”. Key phrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting a high placement with the right combination. Don’t worry too much about the competition though. Some people will tell you that you’re better off trying to find keywords that no one - 84 - Slide 85: else has thought of and others will tell you to throw in keywords that are only slightly relevant to your businesses. In my experience, that’s a waste of time. If your competitors are using certain keywords, it’s because they know they work. And if any of your visitors found your site using irrelevant keywords, you're not going to sell them anything. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure out the most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put on your site. Whichever of these methods you use — and I tend to use more than one — you should end up with a pretty comprehensive list of keywords that you can stick into your website. The next question then, is how do you use them? When a search engine assigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in a number of specific areas. Title Tag The title tag is written in the <HEAD> section of the web page and after the <TITLE> tags. It’s usually the line listed in the search results as well. For example, the New York Times’ title tag at the time of this writing is “The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia”. Of course, they will change this tag from time to time. - 85 - Slide 86: The title tag is usually between 50 and 80 characters including spaces. Different search engines have different limits so you want to make sure that your most important words are near the beginning of the title. The rest of the title is made up of keywords and phrases but in fact, you don’t want to put in too many keywords here. Just place one keyword as the second or third word in the title. Too many, and your site could be seen as spamming. You can also list more keywords in the <META Keywords> and <META description> sections of the <HEAD> area, but because these areas have been so abused in the past, a number of search engines today will skip right past the title tag and go straight to the web copy. 3.5 Web Copy for SEO The search engines will scan the text on a web page to see if your site is relevant to the search term. That means that in effect, your web copy is going to have to do two things: persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engine it’s relevant. When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, but throw in 4-8 keywords. You’ll have to try to balance a smooth text flow against getting in all the keywords you need to be listed. - 86 - Slide 87: You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create opportunities for link exchanges. So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position of your site in a search engine. More important than where you put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s not really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to have done the job for you. Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’t mean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google. One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve been online, so success on the search engines won’t come overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the sooner you can start to rise. 3.6 Submitting to Search Engines Submitting sites to search engines is much easier than submitting them to directories or pay-per-clicks. In fact, you only have to submit the home page. The search engine’s “spider” (a neat little software program) will then follow all the links from the home page and include your other pages. Spidering actually increases your relevancy score more than hand-submitting your internal pages yourself. - 87 - Slide 88: The disadvantage of spidering is that it can be slow. Google has the best spider but even they can take up to a month to index all your pages. For other search engines you can wait three times as long. Say What?! Is all of this search engine talk confusing to you? Do you want to make money online, but don’t want to figure it all out by yourself? You’re not alone. Click here for a turn-key money-making system that you can start earning from within the next 24 hours. 3.7 Search Directories – The Benefits of Browsing Search directories differ from search engines by providing a range of categories for users to browse. Rather than enter a keyword into a search box, users click through categories and sub-categories narrowing down their options. You could say that search engines are like going straight up to the sales assistant and asking what they have in evening wear; search directories are like browsing through the store and seeing what catches the eye. How you make your site catch the eye in a directory is actually pretty similar to standing out in a search engine. It’s all about relevancy — a mixture of keywords and links. - 88 - Slide 89: 3.7.1 Submitting to Search Directories Submitting your site to a search directory is a little tougher than submitting to a search engine. Directories don’t have spiders. They rely on humans. When you submit your site to Yahoo! or any of the other directories, you’ll have to complete a form that will include your “URL”, “Page Title”, “Keywords” and a “Page Description”. Your keywords and title will play some role in your ranking, but for the description, it’s much better to put a hard sell that will attract users. There’s no point having a link at the top of a category if no one wants to click on it. Bear in mind that because each submission to a directory is checked by a human editor, it can take quite a while for your site to be approved and listed. Some sites do have express services but these are pretty pricey (Yahoo! wants $299 and $600 for adult sites!), and if they decide your site isn’t suitable for a category, you don’t get your money back. It’s usually worth the wait. 3.8 Pay-Per-Click — Buying Status Pay-per-click programs (PPC’s) allow you to buy a prime position in a search engine by selecting the price you wish to pay for each visitor you receive. This can place you exactly where you want to be in - 89 - Slide 90: the listing, or let you decide precisely how much you want to spend on advertising. The big advantage of PPC’s is that you don’t have to worry about messing with keywords or links or any of that. You can just figure out how much you want to pay for a keyword and buy your position. In addition, you only pay for people who actually click on your link (for banner ads, you often have to pay when someone sees it.) And you can also get cheap visitors. Bids usually start at around five cents per click. The top three bids though are often promoted across a network of sites so there can be big bonuses for bidding high. This is how most pay-per-click programs work: You create your page title, description and link as you want it to appear in the search results. You enter the keywords and phrases that will prompt your listing to appear. You enter your keyword bid (the amount you are willing to pay for each click to your site). Your keyword bid is compared to that of other bidders for the same keyword. The results are returned to the user with the highest bid appearing first. - 90 - Slide 91: 3.8.1 Show Me the Money! With PPC’s, the name of the game is profit. You need to be careful not to get carried away with the ranking so that your promotion doesn’t cut into your revenues. This is essential! There’s no point in being top if you’re out of business in a month. You have to figure out what you can afford and keep to it. Base your decision on your visitor-to-sales-ratio (the number of visitors on average that it takes to generate a sale) and your net profit per sale. So for example, if you get a sale from every tenth visitor, and you net a profit of $20 from each sale, then you can’t pay more than $2 for each click without operating at a loss (unless you have an effective back-end sales campaign setup as discussed earlier). In practice, you might make one sale for every 100 or so clicks and pay perhaps 15 or 20 cents for each visitor, depending on your market. It’s absolutely crucial for you to know your visitor-to-sales-ratio. It’s also important to keep that ratio as high as possible, and that means only bidding on relevant keywords. If you pay for visitors who are looking for something completely different than the services you’re offering, you’re just throwing your money away. They aren’t going to buy, and even at five cents a shot, those wasted nickels soon add up. - 91 - Slide 92: On the other hand, because you can pay so little, it is worth bidding on as many relevant keywords as possible. The key is to balance high payments for top keywords with low payments that bring in less traffic. You should also consider the quality of visitors the site will send you. The more targeted a directory, the better your visitor to sale ratio will be and that might make it worth increasing your bid price. 3.8.2 Submitting to Pay-Per-Clicks Submitting your site to a PPC is certainly a lot faster than submitting to a search engine or a directory. You must, however, make sure you consider the following: The maximum amount you can bid (I can’t stress that enough!) The keywords you wish to bid on. The titles and descriptions of the site. That last point is very important for making the most of PPC’s. Just because you don’t have to worry about putting keywords in your title and descriptions to please the search engines, that doesn’t mean relevance isn’t important. On the contrary, relevance still matters. You need to let the user know that your site is exactly what they’re looking - 92 - Slide 93: for. That means putting the keyword in the title and having a catchy, informative description. Remember, the more good clicks you get, the more money you are likely to make. 3.8.3 Google AdWords If you do a search at Google, you’ll notice that not only do you get a list of all the sites that return your keyword, you also get a list of other relevant ads on the right of the page and at the top of the listing. These are part of Google’s AdWords program. Advertising like this can certainly be an important part of your marketing plan. Well developed ads with clever wording can prompt an immediate response from the reader to visit your site. Google makes a lot of money with this kind of advertising, and if they’re making money, you can be sure their advertisers are too. You can learn more about Google’s AdWords program here: www.adwords.google.com/select/ Buying AdWords advertising on Google is a relatively simple and cost-effective way to promote your website. In effect, Google has combined the Pay-per-Click system with their own relevancy calculations. To get started, you’ll need to select a keyword and write a short description. You will also have to choose how much you wish to pay for each click, but that won’t guarantee your position. - 93 - Slide 94: Google advertisers enter a maximum bid per click and this is multiplied by the click-through rate (the percentage of users who click on the ad). That’s the score Google uses to allocate position. So for example, if you were prepared to pay a dollar per click, and one user in a hundred who saw your ad clicked on it, you would get a rank number of ($)1 x 1% = 0.01. Let’s say that gives you top position. You might then get even more users and a higher click-through rate of 2%. That higher rate would reduce your price to 50 cents (0.01 divided by 2%). All very nice, and it’s always fun to pay less than you’ve said you can afford, but how it works is less important than the fact that it does work. All you have to do is figure out how much you’re prepared to pay for each click, how much you can afford to pay each month, and write a great description. And once again, it’s the description that’s key. Like the PPC’s, your description has to persuade users that you’re relevant; it doesn’t have to play to the search engine’s software. By all means repeat the keyword, but also make sure you have good, call-toaction copy like “Grab a great deal on DVD’s today!” or “Buy now, while stocks last!” Remember, the more clicks you get, the more sales you’ll make and the less you’ll pay. - 94 - Slide 95: Always place your AdWords ad in the most appropriate category and track the responses you receive from it. Be proactive in redefining your strategy if you receive minimal response. You will probably need to experiment with the wording of your ads and your keyword selection for a while until you get the results you want. TIP: The Plug-In Profit Site service provides you with pre-written Google AdWords ads to promote your website and start making money online in as little as 24 hours. Click here to learn more about it today. 3.9 Link Popularity and Link Analysis The majority of the major search engines use link popularity as an important factor in ranking relevancy. As search engines have become more sophisticated, so too has link popularity. Link popularity simply is the number of links from other websites that point to your website. This strategy has gained immense success due to the crawling nature of most search engines. Spiders crawl from link to link and store pages into their database. Link popularity is generally gained through reciprocal linking. Other websites would usually link to your website only if you have a link to their website from yours first. Years ago, the number of websites linking to your site gauged link popularity; little emphasis was placed on the "content relevancy" of the linking site. In an effort to gain more link popularity, "link farms" - 95 - Slide 96: began sprouting up across the web. For a nominal fee, a website owner could join link farms and enjoy increased link popularity overnight. Search engines caught onto this tactic and created better tools for detecting legitimate links. Websites that have links from websites with "similar" or "relevant" content score higher, thus earn better placement in search engines. This being said, you should avoid joining "link farms" because most search engines consider them a form of spam. Many engines will actually penalize sites for maintaining an abundance of links from nonrelated websites. It is more important than ever to develop a solid "link-popularity" strategy. One excellent, although time consuming, method is to simply contact complimentary websites via email or telephone requesting a link exchange with the webmaster. Link analysis is somewhat different than measuring link popularity. While link popularity is generally used to measure the number of pages that link to a particular site, link analysis will go beyond this and analyze the popularity of the pages that link to your pages. In a way, link analysis is a chain analysis system that accords weighting to every page that links to the target site, with weights determined by the popularity of those pages. Search engines use link - 96 - Slide 97: analysis in their page-ranking algorithm. Search engines also try to determine the context of those links, in other words, how closely those links relate to the search string. For example if the search string was “toys”, and if there were links from other sites that either had the word toys within the link or in close proximity of the link, the ranking algorithm determines that this is a higher priority link and ranks the page, that this is linked to, higher. 3.9.1 Reciprocal Links and Partner Sites Keywords and AdWords aren’t the only way that search engines score relevancy; links to other similar sites are another important factor. Keywords have been so abused by some webmasters that links are winning much more relevancy points. Google is said to love them. It might sound strange to suggest that your users should check out your competitors, but they probably know about them anyway. If your competitors have a higher ranking than you, linking to them can often give you a higher relevancy score with the search engines and the subsequent increase in traffic will make it worth your while. Alternatively, you can link to your own site by creating a subdirectory. This is like building another web page, but the URL will include your keyword. So if you were selling stuffed toys, the new URL would be YourDomain.com/stuffed-toys/stuffed-toys.html. You - 97 - Slide 98: could then write a short paragraph on the home page, describing the new page and including a link. You’ll get big relevancy points for this! Reciprocal Links Reciprocal linking means forming partnerships with other sites who place a link from their web pages to yours. You give them a similar link in return. When you look for people to swap links with, make sure that you don’t reduce the quality or content of your own site. You don’t want users to click straight through without reading your content; you want them to buy first. One way to stop them from running away too quickly is to create a “Resources Page” and link to that page from your homepage. This doesn’t take away from the content on your homepage and the links are just one click away rather than being buried deep within the site, giving value to your partners. In any case, you want to be sure that your site is more than just a page full of links. If your site contains more links than content, it will not be attractive to webmasters, search engines or users. 3.9.2 Picking Your Partner Your link partners should be sites your target market will visit. Think about your product and its subject area and brainstorm to - 98 - Slide 99: determine where people interested in your product might be looking online. For example, if you’re trying to sell a book about blackjack strategy, it makes sense that the people visiting online casinos would make great customers. Online casinos then could be good partners. Identify top-ranked, high quality casino sites and find the email address of their webmasters. You can also identify your competitors, see where they trade links and then follow suit. Tips for Talking to Webmasters Before you contact webmasters, place a link to their site on your home page or resource page to assure them that you will actually provide a high quality link. Create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather than deleting it. You don’t want them to think you’re message is spam. (Something about their site or product is sure to capture their attention; they will probably open and read it, thinking that you’re a potential customer.) Begin your message by talking about your visit to their site and what you found interesting about it. Detail your product or service in one line and ask them to exchange links with you. - 99 - Slide 100: Tell them in detail where you have placed their link and emphasize that it is only one click away from your homepage. Tell them that if you don’t hear back from them within 2 weeks, you will consider that to be a negative response and that you will remove their link from your site. 3.9.3 Inward Link Analysis Like reciprocal linking, inward links to your website can be an effective strategy to increase your website’s visibility. Inward links are links pointing to your websites from other websites without providing a reciprocal link from your website. There are many techniques to improve inward linking. Many of these have enjoyed success. The most proven technique for inward linking is writing and distributing free reprint articles. You simply write (or hire a ghostwriter) a few 500-700 word articles related to the theme of your website. You also include an “About the Author” resource box at the end of your article that includes a link back to your website. Then you visit article directories (websites that accept article submissions) and submit your article giving full permission for other websites to reprint your article on their site as long as they include your resource box and a link back to your website along with the article. This is a win-win scenario. Webmasters get needed content to - 100 - Slide 101: make their sites “sticky” and useful to visitors and you get free inward links pointing back to your website. Other techniques include posting free ebooks, newsletters, news stories and press releases at other websites, particularly industry specific and general portals. All of these would contain a free link pointing to your website, thus, promoting your website. 3.10 Optimizing Your Website To get listed correctly in the search engines each page of your site that you want listed needs to be optimized to the best of your ability. Since the keywords that you decide to target will be used throughout the optimization process, choosing the right keywords is essential. If you choose the wrong keywords you will not be found in the search engines. Since the keywords you choose to optimize your pages with are so important I’ve put together a few tips to help you make sure that you make the right choices. You should utilize these tips when selecting keywords for each page that you want listed in the search engines. Think "specific keyword phrases" not "keywords". Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines. You stand a far better chance to - 101 - Slide 102: rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition. The resulting traffic, since it is more highly targeted, should also be much higher quality too. You should try to come up with as many keyword phrases as you can think of that relate to the page you are optimizing. Try asking a few friends and family what they would search for when searching for a site like yours. Check out your competition for ideas. Do a search using keywords that you already know you want to target and click through on the top sites that come up. Once on the site, view the source HTML code and view the keywords they have in their Meta tags. Searching competitive sites’ Meta tags will give you many more ideas. Make sure to only use keywords that relate to YOUR site or page. To view the HTML code, simply click the “View” at the top of your web browser then select “Source”, or “Page Source”. You should develop a list of keyword phrases, using these tips, for each page that you optimize for the search engines. Apart from these, there are certain aspects that should be avoided. These are: Dead Links - As search engines index your entire site by crawling through hypertext links, you must make sure you check for dead links before submitting. - 102 - Slide 103: Graphics and Image Maps - Search engines cannot read images; be sure to include Alternative Text tags. Frames - Many Search engines aren't frames compatible. Meta tags and the <no frames> tags are important in this instance. Spamming - Avoid resubmitting your pages repeatedly to search engines if your site does not get listed in the first few weeks. Allow at least 6 weeks before resubmission. Continual resubmission (such as those caused by automatic submission software) can cause your site to be penalized. 3.11 Monitoring Your Progress Okay, so you’ve decided on your keywords, inserted your links and submitted your sites. Now all you have to do is wait for the cash to start pouring in, right? Well, not quite. You might get lucky with your first shot, but it has never happened to me that way. Once you’ve submitted all your links, you need to keep a close eye on them, and see which need improving and which can be dropped. - 103 - Slide 104: The crucial factor here is to keep track of your Search Engine Statistics. These will tell you how many people have come from the various search engines and how many of those become customers. But it’s not enough to know how much traffic you’re receiving. You also want to know how you’re doing in the rankings. There are two ways to do that: Manual Searches Dead easy, simply log on and look. First enter your URL to make sure your site has been approved and listed. That can take a little while. Once you can see that you’re online though, you want to see how you’re ranked in each keyword. To do that, you can simply enter each keyword into the search engine and browse the pages until you find your listing. This works, but it takes a while. Computerized Searches It’s been a long time since I did a manual search. If you’ve got ten sites and you want to check ten keywords for each once a week, you’re going to lose at least a day’s work a month. That’s too much for me. To automate this task, I suggest using a software program found at WebPositionGold.com. You tell the software all the keywords you want checked and it gives you an automated report. - 104 - Slide 105: When you look at your statistics, pay attention to which keywords are bringing in the most traffic. In general, the higher you are, the more traffic you’ll receive and the more sales you’ll make. But that isn’t always true. It might pay more to be fifteenth on a keyword that gets a million searches a month than first on a keyword that gets just a thousand. And if you’re fifteenth, you’ve still got room for improvement. It’s the improvement that’s the key. If you see that your link is stuck at the bottom of a list somewhere, try adding more links, putting that keyword in more pages or adding keyword-rich content. 3.12 Three Words About Spam Don’t do it. You can spam search engines by stuffing your site with keywords, submitting them numerous times or filling your pages with links. And they’ll just get you blacklisted. Don’t do it. It’s just not worth it. It used be accepted practice to create doorway pages (duplicates of a home page filled with different keywords) but search engines won’t accept these anymore. - 105 - Slide 106: They will accept smart pages though. If you want to use more keywords than you can fit on your site, create a second page that is totally different from your homepage but which is still based upon your product or service. Here, you can expand upon a topic you merely touched on in your homepage. A great example of a smart page is to write articles on the benefits of your services using a different set of keywords to those on your home page. You can do that. To sum it up, this chapter gave you a detailed view of many of the proven and effective search engine optimization techniques. SEO is one of the most important traffic generating mechanisms, and when done correctly it can do wonders for your website and your profits. Click here to make money online with the Plug-In Profit Site. - 106 - Slide 107: 4. Buying Advertising and Keeping Customers! In my experience, search engines and directories are the easiest and probably the most effective methods to bring users to a site. But it’s never a good idea to use one tactic exclusively. In this chapter we’re going to look at three other methods: banners, text links and classified ads. 4.1 Banners When the Internet first started, banners were all the rage. Today, they’re pretty much passé. They’re no longer a novelty and unless they’re super-clever, users pretty much ignore them. Conversion rates have dropped through the floor and many advertisers have found other ways to promote their products. And yet, every website still contains a whopping great banner ad splashed along the top or running up the side. In part, that’s because they’ve become more sophisticated with better targeting and improved graphics. But in practice, banner ads tend to be used for one of two reasons: to attract traffic to one’s website; or as a way of visually branding your business in the mind of the public. - 107 - Slide 108: The key with banner advertising is always to make sure the economics make sense. We’ll look closely at the math in this chapter, but before we go on to talk about the math of banner ads and how to tell whether your banner campaign is worthwhile, let’s just take a look at the terms involved. You’re going to see these words whenever you join an affiliate program or take part in any other kind of online marketing plan. You should definitely be familiar with them. 4.1.1 Banner Glossary Banner Ad — A graphic ad linked to an advertiser’s website. These usually run across the top of the page but can also run up the page (“skyscrapers”). Banners are usually limited by size. Banner Views — The number of times a banner is seen by users. This is usually the same as "page views", but counts the number of times the banner is actually downloaded rather than the number of times the page is downloaded. Some users click away before the banner finishes loading. Clicks/Click Throughs — Banners are operated by clicking the cursor over them. Not too surprisingly these responses are called “clicks” or “click throughs”. - 108 - Slide 109: Click Through Rate (CTR) — The percentage of users who see the banner and click on it. Conversion Rate — The percentage of people who visit your site and actually give you money. The higher the better! Cookies — Small files placed on a user’s computer. They’re used for all sorts of reasons and by all sorts of sites. Banner ads use them to make sure the user hasn’t seen the banner recently, which banner brought them to the advertiser’s site, and even which ads they’ve seen recently. CPM — "Cost Per 1000 Impressions" The amount you pay for every thousand times a banner is shown. This is the most common way of charging for banners. Hits — The number of times a server receives a request for a web page or an image. Not a great way to measure interest. One page can have lots of images and get lots of hits, even if it’s only seen once. Often, people will say "hits" when they really mean "page views" or "impressions". Page Impressions or Page Views — The number of times a web page has been requested by the server. Much more - 109 - Slide 110: accurate than hits: each view is a potential customer looking at a page of your site, but not necessarily a different customer. Unique Users — The people who download a web page, counted by IP address. You want to bring lots of users to your site so that you can create a broad customer base. The same user clicking on a banner a dozen times could cost you money without increasing your sales. Most reputable sites will check the IP address of the person clicking on a link and only count it once in a 24-hour period. If a site doesn’t do this, don’t advertise with them. 4.1.2 Banner Economics Business online, like business offline, always boils down to math: the difference between cost and revenue. If your banner campaign is costing more than it’s earning, you won’t be in business for very long. To figure out how your campaign is doing, you’re going to need to know your CPM, your Click Through Rate and your Conversion Rate. These are your basic tools. If you don’t know them, find out! Let’s say your CPM is $20, your CTR is 1%, and your Conversion Rate is 4%. (So you’re paying $20 every 1,000 times your banner is shown, it brings you 10 new visitors, and you make one sale for every - 110 - Slide 111: 25 visitors the ad brings). The question you need to ask yourself is how much are you wasting on the 24 users who don’t buy. Cost per visitor = $20 / 10 = $2 So each visitor costs you $2, but you need 25 visitors to make one sale, so... Cost per sale = $2 * 25 = $50 less ...if your product is worth than $50, you’re losing money. That’s pretty simple, and as you can see, there’s not a lot of room to maneuver here. Margins are tight on banner advertising, and that applies to both the site selling the advertising space and the webmaster buying it. Of course, hard cash isn’t the only way to measure the success of a banner ad, and one reason they’re still popular is that they’re a pretty effective branding tool. After all, advertisers spend millions on billboards without expecting motorists to drive straight through them and make a purchase! On the Internet, those advertisers can even be reasonably sure that the people who see their ads will be interested in them. But branding costs money — lots of it — with no guarantee of results. It’s usually best left to the big boys. - 111 - Slide 112: The banner ads on my sites usually send users to my affiliate partners, and the banner ads I place on other people’s sites usually come from my affiliate programs. They don’t cost me anything and as long I’m making the sales to pay my affiliate partners, everybody’s happy. If you do decide to purchase banner advertisements though, and if you have a very specific market in mind, make sure they are strategically placed on sites where the traffic will most definitely be interested in your product or service. Find a site that suits exactly your specific product and you’re going to be appealing directly to your target market. 4.2 Text Links Text links are much simpler than banner ads. They’re also less eye-catching and less sexy. There’s no funky animation, no neat Flash, just a few well chosen words often stuck at the side of a web page. But that doesn’t mean they’re not effective. In fact, to some extent, text links are the unsung heroes of online marketing. They don’t get half the attention they deserve, but they can do an excellent job bringing visitors to a site. - 112 - Slide 113: The first point to bear in mind about text links is that they’re tough to write. You might have just 50 characters to make your sales pitch. That’s about the length of that sentence, so you’re going to have to be pretty creative in what you say. That’s the downer. On the plus side though, text links are amongst the most popular form of promotion amongst Internet users. They don’t get in the way like popups, and they’re often mistaken for content so they’re actually read. And because they’re written into the site’s HTML, you know that each page view means a real exposure. They’re also cheap. You might have to pay a flat-fee or a costper-click, but there’s much less risk than with banner ads. If you know how much traffic the site’s getting, you can figure out in advance if it’s worth your while. Best of all though, you can sometimes arrange for free links with partners in return for a similar placement on your own site. That doesn’t just give you free advertising… It also helps your search engine placements. I use a lot of text links to promote my sites, but I wouldn’t rely completely on them alone. But, in terms of effectiveness and cost, text links are very powerful. - 113 - Slide 114: 4.3 Classified Ads Offline, classified ads are relatively cheap little ads that appear at the back of newspapers or magazines. They work well if you’re trying to sell your old Ford Escort or you’re looking for a new home for your old sofa. Offline classified ads can even work well promoting a variety of online products and services. Online, things are a little different. But not hugely different. I post ads on classified sites online, but I don’t expect to make a lot of money from them. What I do expect though is an opportunity to test my headlines and ad copy before I start spending hard cash on AdWords, other PPC’s and text links. That’s why I don’t bother with the dollar ads. If I’m going to spend marketing money, I’d rather give it to a search engine than a classified ad site. You’ll typically get a much better return with PPC advertising and you know exactly what you are paying for each visitor. But there are places where you can place free ads online, and you can actually do this on some of the really big sites like AOL and Yahoo. Even if I don’t make many sales, the fact that I’m getting my product in front of so many people for free certainly doesn’t do me any harm. - 114 - Slide 115: 4.4 Cultivating New Customers Search engines, banner ads, text links and classified ads are all ways to attract clients and build a customer base. It should also be noted that some of the old traditional methods like word-of-mouth referrals still work just as well online. In fact, word of mouth advertising brings me a lot of new business every month. In addition to the aforementioned techniques, here are some tips to help you grab as many customers as you can while you’re setting up your business and getting your online marketing programs in place. Know Your Market Whatever your line of business, you’ve got to know your market. You have to know who your clients are, what they want and what makes them buy. Do the market research, check out your competitors, create a formal marketing plan and be sure to take the effort to put yourself in the shoes of your buyers. Otherwise you won’t get any! Bring Out Your Benefits You might think you know what your product’s sales points are. You might even be very proud of them. But, the fact is, your buyers don’t care about all the wonderful gizmos you’ve packed into your - 115 - Slide 116: product. They just want you to answer one question: what’s it going to do for me? That’s what all your marketing has to be about: explaining to your buyers how you’re going to improve their life. Update Your Site Frequently It can take a lot of effort and time to create a website that works. But you can’t stop there. You’re going to have to keep updating it, checking it and making sure all the links and addresses work. That’s the first place to look when you notice your sales starting to drop, and it’s crucial to keep them coming in. Be Alert for New Marketing Opportunities You must always be alert for opportunities to make new business contacts and not allow yourself to be caught off guard when opportunities arise. It doesn’t matter if you’re out shopping or at a Chamber of Commerce meeting; make sure that you have professional business cards, brochures, etc. on hand and pass them out. Don’t Keep Your Business a Secret Tell everyone about your business and your product. You might even consider sending out a mass mailing to everyone you know, telling them what you’re doing. Chances are, someone knows someone - 116 - Slide 117: who wants what you’ve got, and friendly referrals usually bring the best business! Find Repeat Customers When it comes to building customers, there are clients who buy once, and clients who buy lots of times. It’s the latter that you want to pack into your customer list; they’re worth their weight in gold. Big companies are good places to prospect for repeat business (they have big demands and budgets) but always treat your repeat customers well. That might mean giving occasional discounts and freebies, but the extra business and customer loyalty you gain will make up for it. 4.5 Creating Effective Ads Online advertising leaves a lot to be desired. There are ads that emulate Windows-warning boxes, pop-ups and pop-unders and a whole variety of “interruption” style ads. All of these ad mediums are developed with the intent to make people notice them. However, most of them only end up irritating people. Advertisers, especially those with small budgets, can't afford to waste money on ineffective advertising. In order to optimize your advertising purchases, consider the following steps: - 117 - Slide 118: Step 1: Define your target market and specify clear goals of your advertising campaign. The most important aspect of any advertising campaign is to have a clear objective in mind. You need to know what group of people you are targeting with your ad campaign and what specific results you want to achieve from your advertising. Do you want to make 1 sale per day or 100? It may seem silly, but defining your outcome in advance will make a dramatic impact on what you actually achieve. Step 2: Identify the most effective sites for reaching your target market. Sites that are most relevant to your product or service will, more than likely, be your best bet, but also consider larger sites or networks that can target the audience you're trying to reach. They can be very cost-effective. If you have multiple products or services that appeal to various target markets, you'll have to consider sites that reach all those various segments. Step 3: Craft your message to fit the needs of the audience you're targeting. This comes down to understanding the audience of the sites you're advertising on. The message you use on a technology site to - 118 - Slide 119: appeal to technologically savvy customers won't have the same appeal for visitors on a small-business site. Focus your campaign accordingly. Step 4: Develop the content of your ad. Pay particular attention to the content of the ad. The content should be such that it clearly distinguishes your product or service from your competitor’s. Have a catchy headline. The headline is probably the most important part of the ad – It is the attention getter. Step 5: Formulate the specific promotional messages that correspond to your goals. The promotional messages should concentrate on the major selling points of your product or service and have a strong call-toaction. Example: “Lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks and add years to your life by taking the new breakthrough Healthy Life Vitamin. Click here to get your free bottle today while supplies last!” Step 6: Make the desired action clearly visible. This certainly doesn't mean the desired action should necessarily blink, bounce or do flips, but it should be visible within an accepted format for the media you're using. In the case of the Internet, underlined text links, "click here" text entry boxes, and pull-down menus are all ways you can make the desired action clearly visible. - 119 - Slide 120: Step 7: Design the ad so it looks like it belongs on the sites where you're advertising. For instance, you may want to use the site's font faces in your text, color schemes in your background, font color choices overall, and emulate images where appropriate. Try to conform to the environment you’re in so potential customers feel at home when they see your ad. Step 8: Produce multiple versions of each ad. Create three or four versions of each ad, changing the promotional message, call-to-action, font faces and color schemes. This is especially important if you're doing price testing or gauging reaction to specific promotions. By splitting your advertising buy among the various versions of your ad, you can then start to optimize your results based on the message that works best. 4.6 Advanced Ad Tracking The Need for an Ad Tracking Program There are two main factors that make an ad effective – Content of the ad and the sites where it is advertised. Most experts would agree that constant testing and experimenting is the only way to ensure that you get the right combination. However, the question arises – How do you test your ads? An integral part of any advertising campaign is - 120 - Slide 121: knowing which ads bring you the most visitors. After all, you may have banner ads, newsgroups ads, ads in newsletters and articles, ads in autoresponders, or a simple classified ad on a website. Every marketer needs to know: which of the ads received the best response whether free classified sites are worth the effort which newsletters are the most profitable how a sponsored newsletter ad compares to the standard one whether animated banners are better than static ones how effective email ads are whether an ad at the beginning of a newsletter or article outperforms the one at the end Ad tracking programs would answer all of these questions. They can help you analyze the effectiveness of every single ad, and hence they should be an integral part of every marketing campaign. At the basic level, an ad tracking program records when your URL has been clicked. It can detect where your visitor came from (the referring URL), the browser and operating system used and the exact time the - 121 - Slide 122: visitor arrived. It can also record total hits and unique hits (i.e. where one visitor may click several times). This data is kept in the system so you can then pull reports on any ad campaign over any period, e.g. by month, day or even by hour. Types of Ad Tracking Tools There are two types of Ad Tracking programs. However, the operation of both these types is the same. CGI Script You purchase these programs outright and it is installed on your site. If you have some technical knowledge, you should be able to install it yourself; otherwise the supplier will charge an installation fee. There are certain minimum software requirements for programs which run on your site, including access to the cgi-bin. Hence, most free sites would not allow you to install CGI scripts. With CGI scripts, your tracking URLs will carry your own domain name. Online Services These programs operate completely independently from your site - no software installation or use of your system resources (such as disk space) is required. However, such programs run at the supplier site. You pay a rental (monthly or yearly) for the program. Thus, you are dependent on the supplier’s website for your ad tracking. With an - 122 - Slide 123: online tracking service, your tracking URLs usually carry the online service’s domain name. The main difference between these types of ad tracking tools is the installation. For some businesses, running CGI scripts may be more advantageous, whereas for others, online services would be more useful and easier to manage. There are many ad tracking tools available at reasonable rates. Two of the most popular tools are discussed below: AdMinder.com This is an online ad tracking tool. AdMinder provides an ad tracking service that can be used with multiple websites. It provides the capability to track clicks, actions and sales. AdMinder provides reporting as well as the ability to export your data in CSV format, which you can use in MS Excel for additional analysis. Some of its key features are: Browser-based-service, so no installation required Works with all major web browsers Provides key financial stats Allow for grouped reports - 123 - Slide 124: Unlimited campaigns ProAnalyzer.com ProAnalyzer Ad Tracking System is a CGI program that installs on your website's cgi-bin directory and tracks your ad click-throughs and sales without paying a monthly fee. When a visitor enters your website from an ad URL, a cookie is placed on his web browser and a clickthrough is recorded. If the visitor purchases a product, that cookie is read on the Thank You page with the purchase total, and the sale is recorded for the ad that generated it. You can track sales or results either by the campaign name, the revenue generated by a sale, or the action accomplished (lead generated, etc.). The Administration Area allows you to monitor each of your campaigns showing hits, sales, and the conversion rate for each. You can configure how the program calculates the conversion rate (by raw hits or unique hits) and how results are sorted. There are lots of different ways to bring customers to your site. So far we’ve discussed search engines, banner ads, text links, classified ads and some “old-fashioned” offline marketing strategies. - 124 - Slide 125: As you learn these methods and begin to put them in practice, it’s important to remember that no single method has all the answers. The best marketing campaigns are a combination of them all. In the next chapter, we’re going to look at another exclusively online method of building a customer base and making money: affiliate programs. Of course, the best way to learn about affiliate programs is simply to sign up for a few of them yourself and do some marketing. The Plug-In Profit Site makes it very easy to get started in the exciting and profitable world of affiliate marketing. Click here to launch your own automated affiliate marketing system today. - 125 - Slide 126: 5. Getting Rich from Affiliate Programs Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based income opportunities. With an affiliate program, you get paid for sending customers to other company’s websites. Affiliate programs are widely believed to be the easiest way to start making money online. Here’s how it works: When you sign up to become an affiliate for a company, you receive a special link with your own unique affiliate ID embedded into it to promote that company’s product(s). Example: AffiliateCompanyWebsite.com/YOUR-AFFILIATE-ID. Next, you simply add your new affiliate link to your website, newsletter or anywhere else. Then when people use your link to get to the other company’s website and subsequently buy a product from them, YOU earn a commission. You benefit from the commission earned and the affiliate company benefits from sales it would NOT have otherwise made without your promotional efforts. For example, if you’ve ever gone to a website and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliate links. If you click those links - 126 - Slide 127: and end up buying the product on the next page, the webmaster whose website you originated at will earn a commission from Amazon. 5.1 Joining an Affiliate Program As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in the selection of an affiliate program. The benefit of an affiliate program is that it gives you another way to make money from your website visitors. Instead of selling them a product yourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut. On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take the place of a different ad that you could have put in that same spot. You have to make sure that each advertising position on your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. If you’re not getting the most from your site, you’re throwing money away. The key to success is to choose the right program, right from the beginning. Click here to learn about 5 affiliate programs I belong to who pay out big commissions every month to myself and many others. Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs. That’s because they know that they only have to pay a commission if a sale is actually made; it’s a proven way to generate revenue without risk. What that means for you is that when it comes to choosing an affiliate - 127 - Slide 128: program, you’re going to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boils down to though is product and price. While it might be tempting to go for the program that pays the highest commissions, the program won’t pay you a penny if your visitors won’t go there or won’t buy once they get there. You have to be certain that the service you’re promoting is of genuine interest to the kind of visitors you get to your website, whether you’re buying them from search engines or anywhere else. Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-paying affiliate program and create a small site to send users to it, but do you know where to buy traffic for a program like that? You’re going to have to research the field, check out the most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns and link exchanges. That’s fine if you want to invest the time and the effort. But it’s much easier to find an affiliate program operating in a field you’re familiar with, and use that program to earn extra cash. For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You might make some money selling subscriptions, but you might make even more by joining Match.com’s affiliate program and referring your visitors to them. Unless you’re planning to be the Internet’s biggest - 128 - Slide 129: dating site, you’re not going to be able to compete directly and beat them, but you can help them — and make money doing it. Or rather than sell your users directly to a competitor, you can look for services that complement your own. Visitors to your dating site, for example, might be interested in buying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singles cruises. Instead of selling just one product such as membership subscriptions, you’d be selling a whole range of different goods to the same people and increasing the sources of your income. Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that is lucrative and right for you: Don’t accept less than 25% commission. You can find affiliate programs with great payment structures and high percentages of the purchase price in just about every field. In fact, many affiliate programs pay out 50%-75% depending on the type of product. Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the number of click-throughs, sales and earnings so you can see how you’re doing. The information should be broken down by month. - 129 - Slide 130: Look for programs that offer a wide variety of promotional tools to put on your web page, including text links, banners, articles, brandable ebooks, etc. Find out how often you will be paid and make sure that the payment schedule meets your expectations. Some programs pay biweekly, many pay monthly, others quarterly; which is best for you? Look for examples of marketing methods that successful affiliates are using to get the best results. Make sure that top level support is given. If they can’t answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you don’t want to work with them. 5.2 Launching Your Own Affiliate Program Joining an affiliate program and promoting it on your site is an easy way to make extra money from the traffic you get to your site. But just as you can join someone else’s affiliate program, so you can also set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up as long as you have YOUR OWN product to sell. What would that bring you? The same as what you bring your affiliate partners: sales. Every time someone sends you a visitor who - 130 - Slide 131: buys your product or service, you give a portion of that money to your affiliate. It’s an easy way to generate free traffic and earn extra cash. And you don’t need to be a programming genius to set up an affiliate program. There are a whole bunch of companies out there that offer entire affiliate kits right off the shelf. AssocTRAC.com lets you run a fully featured affiliate program from your website. It integrates with virtually every payment method, awards down-line commissions, and can handle high-traffic websites. You can edit the sign-up form to match the "look and feel” of your site as well as delete some of the optional fields. The administration area allows you to edit affiliates and commissions, create printable reports of money due, export the data to a text file, view the traffic through your affiliate program, and much more. Your affiliates can log in at any time and see their traffic and commission statistics as well as change their information and get links banner codes and all other promotional materials you provide. Once the program is set up you'll only need to log in once a month to print out a list of the affiliates, their addresses, and the money owed. You can do this quarterly if you wish. You can export the payments owed to a text file in PayPal's "mass pay" format and then just upload it to your PayPal account to pay everyone automatically. - 131 - Slide 132: Or, you can simply write your own checks. If you have to pay a lot of commissions, there is a check printing service called Qchex.com that works well. Simply upload the file and they’ll print and mail your checks for a relatively small fee. Alternatively, you can run your affiliate program without installing any software on your own server using powerful server-based affiliate tracking systems like 1ShoppingCart.com or ClickBank.com. 5.3 Cooking Off the Spam Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on sending you visitors to make money, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blast the web with unwanted garbage. When this happens you need to be ready to take action. Otherwise, it will cost you! Your website hosting company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning. I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate’s account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list immediately. - 132 - Slide 133: If you only get one or two complaints, it’s probably not spam. The complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL. The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that has spammed. 5.4 Managing and Tracking Your Affiliate Programs The key to any business is to promote your products and services to people who need them. Your affiliate business is no different. In order to earn commissions you must put your products in front of the people who need them. The beauty of marketing affiliate programs is that it is anybody’s ball game. This is the one place you can burrow deep into your own niche and stick it to the so-called “big wigs”. Staying Organized There are many affiliate networks that provide multiple affiliate programs and merchants. Keeping track of all affiliate programs in a single network is easy. You would generally be given one username and password as well as a single interface that controls all the programs. However, if you have many of your own affiliate programs - 133 - Slide 134: or you promote several stand-alone affiliate programs from your website, the task of staying organized becomes a bit more complex. There are many software programs available on the Internet that organize and keep track of all data associated with affiliate programs. These programs maintain databases pertaining to information about all your affiliate programs such as: Program Name Date joined or created Contact Name URL Email Address ID Password 1st Tier Percent 1st Tier Sale 2nd Tier Percent 2nd Tier Sale - 134 - Slide 135: Total Income Additional comments Once the program information has been entered, you can add information about individual sales made and checks received. The program then keeps track of sales to date, amount collected and receivables. Some of the advanced software programs also provide analysis and comparison tools for all affiliate programs. If you take the time to input collected data about clicks, sales, page views, impressions, emails sent, etc. from your various campaigns and enter all of it into the program, it will show you: Click-to-Sale Ratios Impression to Sale Ratios Amount Earned Per Impression Amount Earned Per Click Of course, the best affiliate programs will provide these kind of detailed statistics for you at no extra charge. Here’s a few additional tips for managing your affiliate programs: Always ensure that your website is up and running. On a daily basis type your URL into your browser's address bar, refresh the page - 135 - Slide 136: and find out. The danger in not knowing that your site is down comes when you are running a pay-per-click advertising campaign. The click costs add up whether your site is functional or not. If your site is down, you are paying for advertising, but no one is buying. Check your statistics daily, maybe even twice a day. This will give you a better idea of your income trends and highlight affiliate programs that bring your business. Visit the statistics interface for each network and individual affiliate partner and input your total revenues into any accounting software. Using such software frequently will also keep you informed about any overdue checks. Be prompt in answering any queries from affiliate partners or customers, especially when these are about your products or services. This probably means that the customer trusts your site and is thinking of buying your product. One of the main benefits of many affiliate programs is residual income. You've got to make the most of each and every customer you receive. The best way to do this is by promoting affiliate programs that offer residual commission. Residual income affiliate programs pay you repeatedly for a sale you make one time. For example, if a visitor arrives at your site and purchases auto responder services, - 136 newsletter subscriptions, Slide 137: ISP/hosting services, you will collect a portion of the monthly fees for as long as they remain a paying customer. Membership sites are a good way to collect residual commissions and are steadily growing in popularity. There are many affiliate programs that offer residual commission. Click here to learn about the top residual income affiliate programs that I personally belong to and highly recommend to others. Finally, track all your affiliate links. The best way to accomplish this is by setting up tracking software for your affiliate links. There are a number of scripts that will do the job. Most tracking programs typically allow you to setup tracking links for any product you promote, telling you how many hits each product has received, and where the hits are coming from. A more detailed view of tracking and analysis is given in the section below. If you have your own affiliate program, it is not enough to provide just a few banners and classified ads for your affiliates. You must provide as much help as possible for your affiliates if you want them to be successful. You should offer tested and proven endorsements, testimonials, signature files, ezine ads, and other unique tools and techniques including individualized training for your affiliates. You must also make yourself available, either through email, phone or a - 137 - Slide 138: member’s support forum, to help your affiliates implement these tools and to answer any questions they might have. Whether you run your own or participate in an affiliate program, you must be able to determine what methods work best in a particular medium. For instance, which ezine ads work best and in what ezine, which banner ads produce the greatest click-throughs and from which sites or banner exchanges, and the most effective spot on your website to include a testimonial are all important factors to address. Some affiliate programs have implemented unique payment procedures to get affiliates their commission checks on a timely basis. Some of these procedures include: online electronic payment services, direct bank deposits and checks by fax. If you can solidify your payment procedures from the start you will save yourself an administrative headache, and more importantly, keep your affiliates happy and working to promote your program. 5.5 Evaluating Your Website’s Performance Website statistics and affiliate sales figures are essential for evaluating the effectiveness of your affiliate programs. Before you start recording and analyzing data, it's worthwhile to know what statistics you're trying to calculate - and why. Following are some of - 138 - Slide 139: the key questions that need to be answered periodically to ensure the success of affiliate programs. What percentage of the website visitors become customers through affiliate programs? What percentages of sales are new or renewals? What is the average revenue per visitor? What is the average revenue per sale? The most important figure you need to keep track of is the visitorto-customer conversion. It tells you exactly how well you convince your visitors to buy your affiliate products. Average conversion ratios for affiliate programs range between .5 and 1.5 percent. Anything above 1.5% is really good. This figure, however, indicates the total conversion for all the affiliate programs. If you promote more than one affiliate program you need to also calculate the conversion rate for each of the programs. Knowing how conversion rates compare between programs is useful when deciding how to direct your promotional efforts. For example, if you discover that Program A converts at 1% and Program B converts at 2%, it might be time to spend more time and effort promoting Program B. Most tracking software would give you detailed - 139 - Slide 140: information about each of the affiliate programs promoted on your website. All affiliate programs that have a low conversion rate should be dropped. While this may seem like a lot of work to go through to track your site's performance, it really is a worthwhile endeavor. Once your tracking mechanism is set, and you've done the inputs a few times, you'll be surprised at how simple it becomes. In fact, you may find that eventually you look forward to adding things up at the end of the month to get a clear picture of where your affiliate business stands. 5.6 How to Attract Affiliates One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates is not very difficult. Given below are some tips that will help in attracting new affiliates. Find complimentary sites - "Complementary" sites are sites that sell products or services that compliment your offerings. If you sell "gardening tools", a site that sells books on "gardening tips" would be a perfect affiliate. If you sell software, try looking for sites that sell computers or computer parts. Finding sites that already attract your - 140 - Slide 141: target market and can benefit from recommending your product or service to their visitors is the goal. Find content sites – There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are mainly content-oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates. Finally, there are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate programs. Get your program listed in these directories. 5.6.1 Classifying Affiliates for Better Management The hardest part of administrating an affiliate program is deciding what your affiliates need to help make the sale. But by carefully categorizing your affiliates, you can easily determine what their needs are and how to accurately meet them. The plan given below helps in categorizing affiliates in order to manage your affiliate program better. The first step is to pick at least three types of affiliates. Take a look at your affiliates and try to determine one outstanding characteristic that can easily be compared across the board. Here are some examples: Level of Sales - You may find that your affiliates are so completely different that it's hard to find something to classify them by. Try - 141 - Slide 142: classifying them by the level of sales they've reached with you. You'll most likely find that you have a few forerunners that lead the pack with a number of sales, quite a few affiliates that have sporadically made a sale or two and some that have yet to make a sale. This will help you classify them based on sales. Products - If you sell a wide variety of products for specific interests/needs you may be able to classify your affiliates by product. For instance, a financial site could classify types like Personal Finance, Small Business Finance, and Corporate Finance. Industry - If you market commodities like office supplies, health and beauty products, house-wares and so on, you may find that your affiliates come from a wide variety of industries. You can most likely classify your affiliates according to their industry. The second step is to determine the needs of each type. Each of your affiliate types will have different needs; some of their needs will overlap, but you should find a distinct difference in many of their needs. If you find that all of them have the same needs, go back to step one and re-think your types. Here are some basic things to look for: - 142 - Slide 143: Linking Methods - Different types of affiliates will need different linking methods. Let's use the example above where we had different groups based on sales. Your low-sales group may be satisfied with a banner or two to place on their site. Your medium-sales type may be interested in an article or two for added content on their site. Your high-sales group will probably pass up banners for articles, email ads and signature files. Capturing visitors is what you want. In order to do so -- you have to know what they want. Visit your affiliates' sites to see what visitors are looking at and looking for. Ask yourself, "How does my product relate to what I am seeing?" Different types of affiliates may expect different commissions. You'll have some affiliates that have joined your program "on the side" and others that plan on earning a substantial income from the program. Determine what effort they are putting into advertising, how much other programs in your industry are paying, and the amount of time they devote to your program. The third step involves the process of creating and compiling linking methods for each group of affiliates. Based on the needs you identified in Step Two, create and compile linking methods for each type. Here are a few linking methods to think about: - 143 - Slide 144: Banners - Though they aren't as effective as other linking methods, banners are still widely used and expected. Make banners in a variety of sizes to fit tops of pages, bottoms, toolbars, sidebars and other miscellaneous areas. Articles - These are great for affiliates that need content for their websites and newsletters. Be sure that your articles are articles and not ads. Email Ads - Your active affiliates may be interested in placing ads in e-zines or their own newsletters. Try writing a few ads in different lengths. Signature Files - Dedicated affiliates may even add your tag to their signature line. Give them a few witty lines to choose from. Guestbooks: - Let your affiliates help you build your opt-in email lists with guestbooks. Offer them a commission for each email address they send you, or each resulting sale from the subscribers they send you. Product Images - Give your affiliates images that show and link directly to specific products. They'll be able to choose - 144 - Slide 145: an image specific to their site, or choose several images to display. Review each affiliate type and match them up with your new linking methods. You may have some linking methods that overlap types -- this is okay. Just be sure you are concentrating on the affiliates' needs. The fourth step is to decide commission levels. Your first decision will be to determine whether you want to pay a flat rate or percentage of each sale. Based on the needs you identified above for each of the affiliate types, decide on a commission amount for each type. If you have a two-tier program, consider the possibility of different second tier rates as well. The fifth step is to devise promotions for affiliate groups. Give them special incentives to sell more during a certain time frame, move seasonal products, or increase business during your slow months. Offer them additional commissions or even bonuses for reaching a specific amount of sales. My affiliate program gives you all the marketing tools you’ll need to make money online. Click here to learn more and sign up today. - 145 - Slide 146: 5.6.2 A Few Avoidable Errors Many affiliate marketers make a huge mistake of posting their ads on forums. Forums can be used to promote your affiliate programs and your website but in a proper manner like using your forum sig file for advertising your wares and making valuable contributions to forum discussions in progress. Posting blatant ads in most forums is considered spamming and will easily upset the forum administrators and possibly get you banned. Always do your research before promoting your affiliate program to a potential customer. Do not offer affiliate programs to visitors who are not at all interested in the products associated with the program. This is a futile endeavor. If you promote affiliate programs offered by other merchants, try developing some of your own advertising copy. Many websites commit a common mistake of using the same advertising copy as used by the merchant themselves. You will usually experience greater success recommending other company’s products in your own voice rather than the voice of the company whose products you are promoting. Avoid copyright infringement in all cases. Always use original content or ask permission to use graphic images or text found on other websites. - 146 - Slide 147: Avoid using ALL CAPS on your web page or email ad. Using caps is symbolic to shouting, which will turn off many potential customers. A few words may be written in capital text to give them additional emphasis. However, such practice should be limited. Always respond to all queries sent by visitors as soon as possible. A slight delay in your response could easily result in losing the sale. Do not host your website on a free server or use free email accounts. This gives a negative impression to visitors. Using free hosts and email accounts looks cheesy and loses sales. Many websites do not have an opt-in list. Create an opt-in and opt-out list for your visitors. Without these, there is no way of following-up with potential customers. Visitors should be allowed to opt-in at any time as well as opt-out at any time. Most sites have a poor tracking mechanism. It is essential that you track all business activities. Accurate record keeping is crucial. There are several software tools discussed earlier in this chapter that can automate your record-keeping process with minimal error. A “mall” site is best used as a central hub to send visitors to your other domains. As a main or only site, unfocused mall sites don't get - 147 - Slide 148: traffic from the engines, and they don't convert well to sales. Highly focused theme sites attract traffic and sales. Offline advertising may not be effective. A lot of money and effort should not be wasted on offline advertising. Most people rarely check websites that are advertised in local magazines or newspapers. Of course, this depends on your product. If you are promoting a direct response sales website, there are times that offline advertising will work very well. The key, of course, is to test and track your ads. Avoid focus on animated banner ads. These simply use up bandwidth, thus making web pages load slower. When advertising, do not degrade other competitors. It is recommended that you highlight your products’ uniqueness and superiority but never mortify other products. Banners or text links that expire are guaranteed to eventually send your visitor to a broken link or show a broken graphic on your page. Time-sensitive advertising is best used only in email campaigns. Be cautious about putting affiliate links prominently on your home page. Instead, give your visitors a chance to browse first, sign up for your newsletter and decide that they'd like to come back to your website before introducing them to your affiliates. - 148 - Slide 149: Technology changes with amazing speed. To keep up with this rapidly evolving industry, you must invest time and money in research. Remember, the investment is a tax write-off, and will pay you back many times over in additional revenue. Finally, persist with your plan. It might take you time to get established even if you have a solid marketing plan. Persistence is the single most important factor in determining success online or off. Click here to make money with affiliate programs even if you have no previous experience. It’s the easiest way to get started now. 5.7 LinkShare – Affiliate Network that Works LinkShare.com offers affiliates a choice of hundreds of merchant programs. On the site, affiliates can join new programs, get links to put on their sites, and then see reports about how their links are performing and how much they have earned. When a visitor from an affiliate's site clicks on a link and goes to a merchant's site, LinkShare keeps track of all of the transactions that the visitor makes. If that visitor buys something on the merchant's site, you get a commission. In some cases, affiliates are compensated even if the visitor doesn't buy anything, just for having driven traffic to the merchant's site. - 149 - Slide 150: LinkShare also provides affiliates with customer service, notifies affiliates about new programs and opportunities, and offers resources for affiliates to learn about how to get the most out of their programs. 5.8 The Leading Digital Products Affiliate Management System – ClickBank ClickBank.com is the premier affiliate management solution for selling digital products online. You can sell your own digitally downloadable products through ClickBank or promote products from thousands of other ClickBank merchants from one easy affiliate administration panel. Best of all, there is no need to install any expensive scripts on your website and you can start receiving payments and signing up affiliates for your own product or promoting other people’s products within hours of opening an account. The beauty of ClickBank is that it integrates the affiliate management program with an in-built payment gateway. ClickBank is one of the most popular and easiest services to use for payment processing online. Sign-up is quick and you get approved and running, usually within one business day. The ClickBank Control Panel is easy to use. You can get familiar with the whole system in no time. It costs $49 to open a ClickBank account to sell your own products. This is pretty cheap when compared - 150 -