Starting An Online Business

Starting an online business can be fun and exciting. It can also be scary and confusing. The first step is to decide on a business – and this may be the hardest part, since there are so many to choose from.

Here are just a few ideas:

Service Based Business – With a service based business, you’ll provide services for other business owners, such as virtual assistance, graphic design, blog set-up, write blog posts, social media marketing, and more. You can choose to specialize in a service or do a general assortment of tasks.

Writing A Blog – Did you know that your entire business can be your blog? You can earn money via ad revenue, coaching, consulting, and more.

Affiliate Marketing – You can add to the income you earn through a blog with affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you’ll earn a commission on the products and services you promote on your blog.

Information Products – You don’t have to stop at promoting other people’s products and services, you can create your own information products. These could be ebooks, online classes, audio recordings, and more.

Product Based Business – You can also create and sell your own products online. Thanks to sites such as Etsy.com, there has been a rapid growth in the number of people selling handmade goods online.

If you don’t make anything yourself, you could sign up with a Direct Selling Company and sell their products online. An example would be Tupperware. These products are traditionally sold via a home party, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try selling them online. Beware that not all direct sales companies allow you to sell their products online, so do your research first.

Also know that it may not be as easy to sell these types of products online as it is in person, plus your upline may not be able to help you much if they sell face-to-face.The party plan model has been in place for a very long time and the training these companies provide is geared toward that business model.

Who Is Your Target Market?

No matter which business you choose, you’ll need to find your niche. Your niche is the people you will serve. For example, someone who chooses to start a virtual assistant business will be working with other business owners, but there are many types to choose from.

She may choose to work with stay-at-home moms who have started their own online business. Or maybe she will choose to work with brick and mortar business owners that are local to her. Maybe she will want to work with authors or real estate agents. The choices are limitless. The choice she makes will be her niche.

It Makes Sense To Be Specific

You may think that you should search far and wide for potential customers, but that isn’t true. If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one.

For example, let’s say you start a blog and one day you write a post about healthy eating and the next day you write a blog post about motorcycles and the next day you write a post about business.

Are the people who read the article about motorcycles going to be interested in reading about healthy eating or business? Some of them may be, but the majority want to keep reading blog posts about motorcycles.

Start out by thinking about who your ideal customer is. Who do you want to do business with? Write out a list of everything you can think about them. Are they male or female? How old are they? Do they live in the city, suburbs, or country? Do they have children? What are their hobbies? What are they passionate about? What problems do they have? How can you help them solve those problems?

Keep being very specific! Once you’re done, take a look at your list. You’ll have a very good idea of who your target market is!

Make Your Site Sticky

Many online business owners have no trouble getting visitors. The problem is usually keeping them on the site or having them come back.

What’s the solution?

Here are some strategies to make your site more “sticky”:

This is the WORST thing you can be in business. There are a million other “me too” sites out there… if you want to make money then you have to be different.

How do you stand out?

By having exceptionally interesting content — even controversial. Your goal is to get people talking about you.

This will not only keep your current visitors but generate word of mouth advertising as well. Sure it’s hard to stand out of from the crowd but if you find a way then you have a HUGE leg up on your competitors. 50% of the battle in marketing is being interesting but if you master this you will have a huge advantage.

Get a unique selling proposition (USP). This will also help you stand out from the crowd. Making a guarantee no other business is making will set you apart and drive business to you faster than you can handle.

An example would be Dominos’ guarantee of delivery in 15 minutes or less. At the time this was unheard of, and why they became as large and profitable as they did.

Be FOCUSED

Lack of clarity is one of the biggest problems marketers have. A sure-fire way to get your visitors to leave is to confuse them. Each of your websites should be centered around selling no more than 1 product.

Giving people too many options on one page can be confusing and overwhelming in some cases.

Emphasize The Benefits To Your Visitors

Focus on what your product can for them NOT how long you’ve been in business and how awesome you are. Of course, this means you have to have a solid message to market match. You must Know EXACTLY who your ideal customer is.

Be specific. This means identifying their age, gender, where they live, average income, interests, etc. This will help you write specifically to them and know which benefits to emphasize.

Keep Updating Your Site

This is especially important if you have a blog. There’s nothing that drives people away more than a stagnant site. And the search engines love constantly updated sites as well, which gives you another bonus.

Affiliate marketers have been around for quite some time now. The business model continues to adapt and change as the industry and consumers change. However, it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down as a business model. It is still quite a viable and potentially profitable way to make money.

Affiliate marketing is an internet marketing business model where a person earns a commission based on sales or website visits they have a direct influence on. Different businesses offer different affiliate programs. Some pay a commission for each sale a person sends them while others pay for click throughs to their website. Generally, most pay based on sales.

However, an affiliate marketer isn’t a ‘salesperson’. Their job is to promote products and/or services, not to sell them.

An affiliate may promote products in a number of different ways. Generally an affiliate marketer will have a website devoted to a niche topic – say, for example, coffee mugs. They’ll write content on coffee mugs, review coffee mugs, review stores that sell coffee mugs and discuss the finer details about coffee mugs.

The content they write or produce will link to websites that sell coffee mugs. The affiliate marketer has presumably signed up for their affiliate program and each time someone reads their content, clicks on the link and buys a coffee mug, the marketer earns a commission.

It’s a great business model because just about every product or service under the big yellow sun has an affiliate program or two available. This means you can earn money writing and talking about a niche you’re passionate about. Love yoga? There are affiliate products you can promote. Enjoy working on cars? There are affiliate programs for you too.

The first decision to make is what niche topic you’re going to focus on. Find a topic you can write or talk about every single day. Find a topic that gets you excited and out of bed and keeps you up late at night.

The second step is to then take your passion and do some research. What affiliate programs fit your niche? You can search affiliate directories and there are a few good ones to join. You can also search for quality companies that you enjoy and would be delighted to represent and if they don’t have an affiliate program, tell them you’re interested in promoting them and see what happens. Most businesses have a link on their website if they have any type of partner or affiliate program.

Finally, look into how you want to structure your business website. Do you want to host a blog or a content based website? What type of content do you want to provide, audio, video, written? It’s up to you and your strengths and preferences.

Read up on your audience and your industry and start creating content. Social networking is a great way to promote an affiliate business because it enables you to interact with other people who are interested in your topic.

Affiliate marketing is a wonderful business model for both part time and full time entrepreneurs. It gives you the unique opportunity to make money talking about something you enjoy.

Information marketing is a business model established around the sale of information. It is one of the easiest forms of internet marketing and has turned into a booming business. As ebooks and digital publishing technology have taken off, so too has information marketing.

Information marketing works in much the same way an affiliate marketing business works. Business owners choose a niche to specialize in. They build a website supporting their niche and they publish an abundance of content to market and promote their website.

Information marketers make their money selling information products like ebooks, reports, online courses, teleseminars, and workshops and so on. Though they likely give away articles, reports and smaller packages of content much like an affiliate marketer would to build their list.

Affiliate marketers make their money by promoting the products of others and earning a commission. Where an affiliate marketer can really profit is by writing information products or having them created and using the product to simultaneously promote their affiliate products and/or services. This promotion is generally accomplished by including relevant affiliate links in the information product itself.

As an affiliate marketer you can sell your information products for a profit or you can give them away. It largely depends on your goals and how you integrate the two business models. It should also be noted that you’re not limited to simply creating reports and ebooks as information products.

While reports and ebooks are both easy to create and market, you can use other information products if they better suit your audience’s preferences and/or your skills and personality.

You can create:

* Videos

* Online courses

* Teleseminars

* Software

* Podcasts

* Even blueprints and tip sheets can be useful.

However, you choose to share your information with your audience, combining these two business models packs a powerful and profitable punch.

Publishing content like an ebook or a report helps boost your credibility as an authority in your industry. It positions you as an expert in your field and it provides a valuable resource for your audience. Sprinkle a bit of your personality in your information products through stories and anecdotes and you have tapped into most of the triggers for making a buying decision.

Couple the purchasing triggers with the fact that content is the perfect platform to presell the need for and benefit of various products and services and you have a winning combination.

Information marketing and affiliate product sales go hand in hand quite nicely. Take a look at your content plan and see where you can capitalize on the combination business model of information and affiliate marketing.

Building an email list can be the difference between making just enough to get by on and earning 6 to 7 figures a year.

It’s critical not only for making the first product sale but most importantly for the backend. This is what you sell to your customer after the first sale. This is an area that many marketers completely overlook.

The backend can make all the difference to your business success.

First of all, the average customer will only buy from you after you make contact with them 5-7 times. Very rarely will somebody buy on the first “touch.”

If you don’t get their contact information the first time they visit, you’ve almost certainly lost them forever. However, if you get their email address you can continue marketing to them, and you can very often turn a prospect into a customer.

But that’s not even the most important part of a list.

Very often you will do nothing more than break even on the front end. The KEY is having a powerful backend that makes up for it. This could be either in the form of up-sells or cross-sells, and could be your own product or someone else’s from a joint venture.

I would strongly recommend you segment your list - the first with those who haven’t bought from you and the second with those who have. This helps you make offers specifically for them. When done right, well over 50% of your profits may be coming from the backend.

Aim for quality over quantity. In other words, don’t just go for a list of 1000s of people. A responsive list is the most important factor.

Wouldn’t you rather have a list of 200 hungry prospects than 30,000 unresponsive prospects? I thought so. Getting targeted prospects to your list is key to your success.

So how do you achieve that? First you have to know who your prospect is. This will determine who you go after.

Make sure you know the age, gender, where they live, average income, interests, etc. If you don’t know exactly who your prospects are, you won’t be able to craft your sales letter and emails exactly to their needs.

I would strongly recommend you have an email opt-in form on every page of your site. Especially on your homepage.

How do you increase the percentage of signups for your newsletter?

You need to give them a compelling reason to join. Consider testing an opt-in page. This will weed out the “tire kickers” from the serious prospects.

Some profitable marketers have two or three opt-ins before they even let people see the sales letter. This ensure that they have the email address of every single hot prospect, whereas just putting it in the sales letter might let a few slip through the cracks.

Remember, your main goal is to get your visitor on your email list not to make the sale the first time they visit. Again, this is because it takes most people at least 5-7 contacts before they will buy.

Therefore I would recommend testing having an opt in page versus a regular sales letter to see which converts the most visitors into subscribers.

How do you test this?

Split test this first in Adwords. Once you’ve come up with a winner, then focus on getting the better performing one ranked. Hopefully this has enlightened you on how to make money with list building.

Social Networking 101

Does social networking really work? This is one of the most hyped areas of online marketing today.

But while many are jumping into the arena, few are actually making money from it.

So it’s not worth it?

Actually it does work but only when you stay focused. Lose your focus and you can end up wasting the entire day browsing Twitter or Facebook without getting any real work done.

What’s the key to profiting with social marketing?

Developing relationships – and one of the best strategies for this is through blogging. This is a very effective way to stay connected with your potential customers.

How do you make money blogging?

There are 2 rules. Post often and get involved with other people’s blogs. You can’t expect to get interaction on your blog unless you get entrenched in the “blogosphere.”

In other words, get involved in discussions on other people’s sites. This will help you get to know other bloggers and get your name out there.

Assuming you give useful answers to people’s questions, you can establish yourself as an authority on the topic you are discussing. This will get them to trust you, then visit your blog and ultimately buy your products.

And search engines LOVE blogs

Why? Because they are constantly getting updated. And I’m not just talking about posts. If you have a highly trafficked site that gets a lot of discussion, the comments add to the relevancy as well.

What about Twitter?

No discussion on social marketing could be complete without this popular site.

Don’t get carried away with it

View it for what it is — just another method of getting your offer in front of people. It’s not the marketing “utopia” many view it as. In fact for most it’s an enormous waste of time.

How do you use it effectively?

First I would recommend tweeting at least once a day. Also follow others. Many will reciprocate and follow you back.

Linking to Twitter from your site can help you stay in touch with your prospects, much like having an email list. But make sure you aren’t constantly promoting yourself.

Obviously you don’t want every tweet to be a product offer. This will just turn people off. Every 5-7 messages you can offer a product but any more and people will just view you as a “spammer.”

Remember the key to making money from social marketing is to have a plan and stay focused. If you aren’t careful, you can find yourself spending the entire day browsing blogs or Twitter. This can hurt more than help.

Article marketing is awesome as both a traffic building strategy and a way to get ranked in the search engines.

This is one of the most effective link building methods because it’s one of the few ways that you can get a significant amount of traffic along with the SEO benefits. An interesting article targeting a highly searched keyword can sometimes bring in 5 to 10 visitors or more a day to your site.

So how can you maximize your articles effectiveness?

First you want to make sure you submit them to the correct place. There’s no point in writing the best article in the world if you submit them to irrelevant directories. EzineArticles.com is a great place to start. Once you feel comfortable using that directory, you can branch out. Ask your business friends for suggestions on where they submit articles.

So how do you get people to read your articles?

If you’ll notice, the most successful sales letters always include a lot of bullet points and transition effects. This makes it easier for the skimmer to get the gist as well. Catering to both reading styles is CRUCIAL.

What about the resource box?

Focus on the benefits to the reader. There are so many resource boxes that say something like “John Smith is a successful webmaster and you can visit his site at….”

Your readers don’t really care about you. They care what you can do for them. Also make sure the benefits are as specific as possible.

For instance, if the article is about weight loss, you might say something like “learn how to lose 20 pounds in 10 days or less by visiting…”

Article Title. This is the most important part of the article. You can be as interesting as possible with your body and resource box, but if you have a boring title, it will never get read.

Again, include specific benefits in the title. For instance, don’t say “learn how to lose weight fast.” Instead, say something like “3 strategies to lose 20 pounds in 15 days or less” – this is much more effective.

Getting others to pick up your article is KEY

This will not only give you more SEO benefits, but if it’s a popular site this can give you a serious influx in traffic. But again, the main strategy to make this happen is to not be boring — this is the key to article marketing.

SEO gets a ton of hype today, and for good reason. Probably no other free source of advertising in the world today can get as many eyeballs in front of your offer.

Why?

You can get 1000s of visitors to your offer everyday without paying a dime. Of course, that’s not to say it’s free — time is money after all. And, SEO will take time.

This is because the SEs show this under your title in the search results and having an interesting and compelling description of your page can determine whether someone clicks through to your page or not.

Have LOTS of pages. This is important for two reasons: One - the more pages you have, the more page rank and two - the search engines like constantly updating websites.

There’s nothing that turns the SEs away more than stagnant sites, so making sure to continually keep your site updated is very important.

Target “long tail” keywords. I know it gets said all the time, but long tail keywords are both easier to rank for and more profitable. Getting ranked for 20 different 30 searched terms a day is far easier than going after a single 600 searched term and generally more profitable.

In most instances the most highly searched terms are very general and extremely hard to make money with. How do you know what to sell to somebody searching for “make money?”

But there are plenty of products that can be sold for “make money using Google Adwords.”

And finally, void black hat methods. They worked back in the day but are no longer effective. Hopefully these SEO crash course has helped your understanding of this broad topic.

Back links to your site are important for two reasons: One - they drive traffic to your website and two - they get you ranked higher in the search engines.

The second is by far the most important one.

Getting ranked in the search engines is the MAIN goal of back links. On-page optimization will only get you so far.

Why are back links so important?

Because Google sees each one as a “vote” for your site and obviously the more incoming links you have, the higher perceived value of your site. But don’t just get as many as possible, quality always beats quantity of links.

What are the best quality links?

One way links - reciprocal and 3 way linking are no longer very effective. Reciprocal linking used to be all the rage, but Google has cracked down on it and it’s no longer effective.

Think about it, the best votes are from people who just link to you because of your great content not because you are linking back to them. Saying “I’ll vote for you if you’ll vote for me” is not going to get you far.

But not all one way links are created equal.

Which links are the best? Links from websites that just link to you because of your great content.

So how do you get people to link to you? First you have to get people talking and for this you must have interesting content. Saying the same things as everyone else obviously won’t get people talking.

Be controversial. That’s the best way to generation attention. It’s not easy to stand out, but if you put the time and effort into it, you will be very happy with your results in generating a massive amount of quality links.

But let’s face it at some point you will have to do a link building campaign yourself. You can’t just rely on other sites linking to you.

What are the best “self promotion” methods?

There are plenty that work. Some are press releases, article marketing, blog commenting, forum posting, directory submissions, and paid links.