An Appealing Website Design
August 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The first thing your visitor sees is your website design and if it looks bad, they’re not going to stay around, much less ever return. Your website has to be visually appealing, looks professional, and needs to load fast. It should not be over-loaded with advertisement and other flashy distractions.
Your goal is to make your visitor stay and read your contents. You want them to stick around long enough to sign up for your mailing list or newsletter. Then at least, you will at least have a chance to sell them your products or services.
- First Impressions counts. First impression is everything, no matter what type of website you have. You can have a beautiful website by using templates. You can choose by design, by color or by niche. With the number of awesome templates design available, there is no reason why your website can’t look stunning. Ready-made templates look professional and are readily available for free. Just make sure the design and color you choose is suitable for your niche. Keep it clean and crisp, it will look more attractive to a broad audience.
- Use Your Own Logos & Graphics. Although you can use any available template for your website, it’s a good idea to personalize the header. You can create your own logo using text at www.CoolText.com. You can also add some picture or graphics to make your website even more personalized. You can get your background textures at www.grsites.com. You can use a free graphic program Paint.Net and it even has a plug-in for editing Adobe PSD files. Add your own photo to your website; people like to know the person they are dealing with. Just make sure you optimize all graphics, so they load quickly. You can reduce the file size of your images by using a free online tool at DynamicDrive.com called Image Optimizer.
- Keep in simple. Make the navigation of your site easy for your visitors to use. Most web surfers are looking for information about a topic, so make it easy for them to find it. It can be frustrating to visitors if your webpage layout doesn’t make sense. Update your content regularly.
- Establish Trust. People want to know they are dealing with someone reputable and trustworthy before they will spend money with you. Provide some information about you or your business, and a way to contact you. Be sure to have a way to obtain their contact information on every page, that way you can follow up and build a relationship with them. Have a privacy policy in place and reply to all inquires promptly.
Selling Information
August 21, 2008 | 1 Comment
Remember it’s simple, not easy. I’m talking about your job as an internet marketer.
Internet marketing is about selling information, existing information not stuff you have to create from scratch. You are collecting information, pulling it all together, packaging it up and saving people time. A potential buyer has two choices, he can spend his time looking for free information on the internet, which will involve spending a huge amount of time, or investing some money to save him a lot of time and have that information collated for him.
Providing that information in a useful and easy to use package is really what being an internet marketer is about. The internet marketer typically spends a good amount of money building his system, and at the end of the day, simplifies that formula making it easy for people to follow.
To market his product, the internet marketer needs to build a responsive mailing list of prospects. A mailing list is money on demand. His success comes down to his relationship with his list. People say create a product and build the list afterwards. But if you build your list first, then create your product to sell to your list, that’s instant money. You already have a highly targeted list to market to.
To build his list, the internet marketer has to create value on the front end to convince people to sign up. We are talking about something of real value on the opt-in page, something that is given away free. Basically, the more value you put on the sign up page, the more people will sign up. More people signing up means more people will see your One Time Offer, which means more sales. In the end, the internet marketer gets his list and has made some sales.
Even if the prospects don’t spend money on your One Time Offer, at least they will take away something of value. By being generous up front, you have become a good source of information. The next time they receive an email from you, they will be thinking it might be worth investing in your products.
INTERNET GURU SAYS - Part 1
August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Question #1:
“I’ve got a product, a squeeze page, an auto-responder, and a blog. I am posting on my blog and writing articles. Now what do I do next?”
Internet Guru says:
I recommend that you focus on doing three things:
- Write articles for submission to directories like ezinearticles.com. Target your keywords well in your articles. Use your keywords in each of your article titles, sprinkle it reasonably in your article body, and put it in your resource box link back to your site. Use Google’s keyword tool to find keywords that get decent traffic but isn’t saturated with competition.
- Hold back on the information in your published articles. You want to make the reader visit your site for the rest. Also include the keyword in your title tag for the page you link to from your article.
- Research on your topic to find content. You can use 3 sources for information for each article, and then write your own article by summarizing the key points.
Question #2:
“If you had to start from scratch, and if you only have $100, how would you do it?”
Internet Guru says:
If I had to start from scratch with just $100, I would start by looking for desperate buyers in a given niche market. Who has a problem that they really need an answer to?
You can Google this, type“[your niche] forum” and find active forums with people who are desperate for solutions. There’s no real science to this, it’s more an art. Then I do some online research, in article directories, and relevant theme sites. When I have sufficient information, write a short, simple report, tell them my solution to solving the problem.
When I have written my report, I will buy a domain for that niche market and I’d buy a month of hosting. There are a lot of domain registration and web hosting options available. Then I’d sign up for an auto-responder to build a list, which is where you’ll make most of your money.
Then, I’d set up a squeeze page on my domain.
Next, I would write articles to drive traffic to my site, and submit them to EzineArticles.com. Then I would create a Squidoo lens to help drive traffic to my site. I also would set up a Blogger blog to drive even more traffic to my site.
Let’s see how much I have spent: Domain name - $9, Hosting - $10, auto-responder - $19. I have spent $38, so I still have $62 to spend in case I need to.
That’s a solid start. Writing articles, Squidoo and Blogging are free ways to generate traffic to my site. There are no guarantees, but it has worked for plenty of people and the odds look good.
It is about picking a good niche, and focusing on desperate buyers only.
Question #3:
“I have a new website, and I need to start generating traffic. What is the first thing I should do to get traffic? Write some articles? Create Squidoo lenses? Do Link exchange?”
Internet Guru says:
Before you start on PPC ads, such as AdWords, start with proven methods that are free and can work well.
Article marketing is a great place to start; you don’t have to write great content, solid and helpful content will do the trick. I have shown you how already and Google loves Squidoo. Give these a shot and see what happens. You can also try some forum marketing in your niche; some forums allow your forum signature to link back to your site.
Question #4:
“What are the common mistakes people make when starting out on the internet?”
Internet Guru says:
These are three mistakes that everybody needs to avoid, and I had to learn this the hard way.
- Not focusing on a market with an urgent need, a market where the person has an urgent need for a solution to a known problem. This is MARKETING, so you need to focus on your target market first, not your product. If you pick the right market, they’ll buy the product you offer them.
- Not building a list. Get started on building your list right away. That’s what will build your income stream. Front-end sales are great, but your sales on the back-end are generally more profitable over time.
- Making things too complicated, or getting too focused on the technical details. It doesn’t matter if your site looks the best. Just get it up and start selling!
So that’s three mistakes for you. I’m sure somebody else can come up with others that are equally important.
Question #5:
“How does a beginner like me find a profitable niche?”
Internet Guru says:
Finding a profitable niche is really more an art than a science. The main idea is finding a product to match with the market. You want to find a topic which you have knowledge of or a passion for. You can try doing it like this:
- Use a site like EzineArticles.com to get some ideas. You can see what the popular topics or niches are.
- Make a list of possible keywords and use Google’s free keyword tool to get even more suggestions and to see how much traffic they get. Look at long tail keywords and see if you can decrease your competition.
Question #6:
“My question is, does it matter that there is a lot of competition in the market I want to enter? What if I have had 15 years of experience in that market segment?”
Internet Guru says:
Let’s say that your market is the fat loss and muscle building market. This market is saturated because it is such a profitable market. To make a move into this market, you need to have a unique selling proposition. You can target a sub-niche, such as older man/woman, people recovering from illness or maybe someone for whom being over-weight is an immediate health concern. With your experience, you can get great testimonials from your clients; create a great product that covers a desperate need people have.
That’s the key, your USP, a sub-niche, a desperate market, and a great product.
Question #7:
“How can I build a big list fast? What kind of offers should I give to get people interested in opting-in to my list?”
Internet Guru says:
Everybody wants fast, but that’s really the wrong focus. The right focus is SIMPLE. How can you start building and selling to a list in the simplest way? Don’t make things complicated.
You want to get your offer in front of as many people as possible, and offer something compelling for FREE. It’s that simple. Adwords is fast, but it also can cost you a lot of money if you have not used adwords before. I suggest that you use free methods until you get some sales and you know what converts.
Your offer can be something like products which you have resale rights to. You can buy these in a lot of places; just make sure you get the resale rights with it. It could be an e-course, a free report, a subscription to your newsletter, or a product update.
What you really need to figure out is what you can offer people as an enticement to sign up. Before somebody will give you his email, he wants to know what’s in it for him.
Question #8:
“What makes a good squeeze page?”
Internet Guru says:
Your squeeze page offer can be anything you want, as long as you are offer a solution to solve their problem.
Your squeeze page must have a killer headline with your key benefit or solved problem in it. You can include bullets to highlight the benefits of your content. That doesn’t mean features. An ebook with 100 pages isn’t a benefit, that’s a feature. You have to translate them to how it can benefit the reader. Include your call to action by using a sign-up form.
Question #9:
“I have a question about home pages for affiliate marketing sites. Essentially I built a content site targeting different keywords with PLR articles but always wonder what I should do with the home page. Do I just put another article on it like the other pages or do you have a special technique for the home page?”
Internet Guru says:
Here are 2 ways you can do this:
- If you are marketing one affiliate product, you can put a review of the product on your home page and ask for an email address before you send them to the affiliate sales page.
- If you are promoting multiple affiliate products, you can either:
- Promote a single good seller there.
- Treat your home page as sort of an online store. Create little teaser blurbs for your various products. Then, link each of the products to the review article that links to the affiliate sales page.
Question #10:
“What’s the core set of skills critical for becoming successful online?”
Internet Guru says:
Here are the core skills, and they’re really ALWAYS the core skills:
- Copywriting. Good copy sells. Period. You have only words to sell stuff online.
- Marketing. Doing all the things, including advertising, that will attract people to your offers.
- Come up with creative ideas. This is where you find your angle, how you develop a unique selling proposition.
- Test everything. Be it your keywords, ad copy, or sales letter. If they work, scale up.
- Finding markets that are not too competitive. Market analysis is a skill you need to develop.
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