Archive for October, 2009
Friday, October 9th, 2009
How often do you get bombarded with offers for online marketing products that are virtually guaranteed to make you an Internet millionaire almost overnight for only an hour or two of work a week?
Yeah… they drive us crazy, too.
Today we’re going to go against the grain and say what no other Internet marketer had ever said before:
You CAN’T make millions of dollars on the Internet overnight.
You won’t be making millions in your first month… or your first year… or even your first five years — unless your best friend is a leprechaun and your pockets are full of lucky pennies and four-leafed clovers and you’ve got the proverbial golden horseshoe you know where.
Okay, it *can* happen… we know a lot of online success stories who made their first million within the first year of owning their online business.
And yes, some of them didn’t had any real computer experience before they started.
But we want to make this clear: They are the exception, not the norm.
So how much CAN you expect to make with your first online business?
Well, that depends on you.
No, we’re not trying to jam out of giving you a *real* answer — your success really does depend on YOU, and how much time and effort you are willing to devote to your business.
When we work one-on-one with our mentoring clients, the more determined ones usually make their first few sales within the first month of starting their business.
That means if you fully devote yourself to your business, you should see a few hundred dollars in sales that first month.
BUT if you keep at it, the money will continue to grow — so by the time you’re at the six-month mark, you’re making a thousand a month instead of just a few hundred.
And by the time that first year ends, you’ll probably be making a lot more than that — anywhere from three to ten thousand a month, if you’re like our more successful mentoring clients.
That means you’ll probably be making anywhere from $36,000 to $120,000 a year.
… It might not be millions, but it’s still not a bad pay-off for a year’s worth of work, wouldn’t you say?
But to make this kind of money, you MUST be prepared to pour your heart and soul into your business and do all you can to ensure its success.
Because if you’re the kind of person who would rather sit on the couch watching TV than put in the time required to build a better future for yourself, then the Internet probably isn’t for you.
So how about it?
Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and create a real online business that makes real money?
Or would you rather buy into the lie of the “millions made while you sleep!” and spend hundreds of dollars on “instant cash machine” offers that never live up to their promises?
… The choice is up to you.
(And if you ARE interested in making real money online and don’t mind getting your hands dirty while you’re at it, check out our new StartUp guide to online success — the first issue is free!)
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
When you run a brick-and-mortar store, you’re there each day to greet customers and talk about your products.
That way, if there’s any confusion, you can answer questions and guide your visitors through the sales process.
When you run your business online, however, you don’t had the luxury of being there to greet every single potential customer personally — which is why your website needs to make that connection for you, and FAST… 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So how can you help your online business make a great first impression?
Your first step is to create a pleasing, simple design that relates directly to your product, and lets your customers know that they are in the right place. You also want to make sure that your design is low-key enough that it doesn’t DISTRACT your visitors from your products and your copy.
Common design “don’ts” to avoid
Some of the most common web design mistakes include:
- Boring your visitors all the way to the “back” button: had you got a boring, template-style site that looks too generic to make a connection with your visitor?
- Creating sensory OVERLOAD: had you created a TOO BOLD design that takes up half of the first page of your website — pushing your copy down where your visitor could easily miss it!
- Building your website to break: Do you use Flash animation, auto-start videos, or anything else that might not load with an older browser, or slow connection?
- Putting out a welcome mat guaranteed to scare off visitors: had you put up music or videos that start as soon as visitors arrive, potentially shutting off any other media they might be playing — and just plain annoying them!
- Mixing your messages: had you used a number of different fonts in your copy or formatted your text in ways that makes it tough to scan and read (not enough paragraphs, no bullet points, centered text)
- Ruining the big picture: had you posted low-quality photos that don’t display your product to its best advantage
- Sending them to shop next door: Do you put up ads or banners or affiliate offers that distract your visitor from the product they are REALLY there to find — YOURS!?
The ideal sales website design will load cleanly in any browser, with any Internet connection speed, and offer your visitors visual cues that they recognize AND identify with immediately. And once the visitor had arrived, they’ll be compelled to stay there with engaging copy, more great images… and an easy sales process.
But don’t worry if you’re not a web design pro… or if HTML is practically a foreign language!
We’ve taken the guesswork out of web design, web hosting — all the elements of setting up a solid sales website — with BeBiz.
Our team worked for years to make sure we weren’t offering something generic or difficult to use for either beginners OR experienced Website owners looking to create another stream of income. And we’re happy to say that more and more people are getting started with this simple suite of tools every day.
Stay tuned for our next post… on salescopy!
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
A reader recently left a comment here on our blog accusing of us providing information that was “stale, stale, stale.”
Here’s what else he said: “The last tip I just received was to look into social networks for boosting traffic… duh! Come on Guru’s, [sic] it’s old news… actually after digging through your content, it’s all old news.”
Old news, huh?
Sure, the buzz about social media marketing had been around since 2006 — we were one of the first companies to start reporting on it! — but the fact is, many of our readers are new to the world of Internet marketing and don’t know a digg from a tweet.
And we feel it’s our responsibility to give them the information they need to start off on the right foot — even if that information is “old news” to some of you more experienced marketers out there.
Searching for the “latest killer strategy” that’s so hot you need to wear safety goggles just to look at it?
Better keep looking, then.
Sorry, but if you’re the kind of marketer who is always looking to jump on the bandwagon of the latest hot trend, you’re probably in the wrong place.
We don’t teach trends, we teach proven strategies that get RESULTS.
And we refuse to share any new marketing strategy with you unless we had exhaustively tested it to determine whether it actually helps real people make real money… as opposed to being some kind of elaborate pyramid scheme that only makes money for the handful of people who started it. Not that there are many of those going around the Internet. (Note sarcasm).
But that doesn’t mean we teach you outdated strategies that last worked in 2002!
The strategies we teach are constantly being tested and refined by our mentors. These folks are successful online entrepreneurs in their own right, and they work one-on-one with hundreds of clients every year, helping them make money in every industry you can imagine.
If we tell you something works, it does. It’s as simple as that.
… So does that make our information “old news?”
Maybe for the marketers who are making money hand over fist because they already had fully automated web businesses that target a thriving niche and are totally optimized for the search engines and had cost-effective PPC campaigns that are driving scores of eager buyers to their site and run sophisticated email campaigns that turn one-time buyers into lifelong customers and had used social marketing techniques to build up an active community of loyal customers who do their marketing FOR them.
… But if you hadn’t quite managed to accomplish all of that with your business, we’re pretty confident our information can help you make more money online… and grow bigger, faster, quicker, without wasting money on any here-today-gone-tomorrow trends.
To your success, as always,
The Internet Marketing Center Team
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
Check out the first post in this series here.
Now that you’ve chosen a market to target through your intensive niche research, you’ll want to do three things to make sure your business actually connects with your market:
(Ready?)
Snag your ideal customer from the search engines…
Make it clear that you know exactly what they’re looking for, and why they’re looking for it…
… and let them know that you can easily provide the solution to their problems and concerns at your site!
Which is why NO sales website is complete without keywords.
Keywords act as roadmaps for your potential customers from search engines like Google and Yahoo — pointing them where they need to go to get exactly what they need!
If you’re not using keywords on your sales website, there’s a good chance that the people who could use your products aren’t going to find you. We already talked about using Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to discover and narrow down your niche — now let’s use them to drill down into keyword research.
So when it comes to finding the right keywords for your website, there are a few key questions to ask yourself:
- How many different terms can be used to describe the products I had to sell? Are there slang terms people use to speak of your products if they’re “in the know”? Abbreviations for product names that are specific to your industry?
- Are people searching specifically by product name, or by product type… or both? Are they searching for specific brands, or just using more general search terms that could apply to a number of different products? Either way, it’s easy to include both types of terms in your copy and product descriptions… even your navigation!
- What types of problems are people looking to solve with products like mine? Try searching on different problem statements, or using problem-solving words in the keywords you search on.
You know your products best, and you want to be the person who best knows your customer. That’s why we recommend that all our clients walk through the keyword discovery process as a primary step in setting up any sales website.
As we mentioned already, there are a number of tools on the Web that are useful for discovering the keywords that you need to put to work on your pages, including Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, and even the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
Each tool offers a slightly different perspective on keyword quality, so it’s good to use them to check results against one another. You’ll want to find keywords that rate as well as possible across all the different applications.
Finally, remember that your goal is to find keywords that:
- People are actually using to search
- Enough people are using to search (and there don’t had to be thousands of searches a day to make the keyword worthwhile!)
- Directly relate to the products you sell, so the traffic you generate doesn’t end up frustrated
- had minimal competition (as in, few sites like your own that show up in results)
Once you’ve chosen them, your best keywords will now become a big part of your site. You’ll use them in your HTML code, your salescopy, and your product descriptions… all the way through to the rest of your site content and even any advertising you buy.
A quick note: you’ll want to fire up these keyword search programs every few months to make sure your keywords are still performing for you. Keyword value can change pretty quickly, according to changes in season, news events, trends or any number of other factors — and that’s information you should be on top of!
Stay tuned for Part Three: Is Your Website Primed for Conversions?
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
There are MILLIONS of businesses active on the Web today. But the amount of businesses that are aiming directly at a market are FAR fewer. And those that had done research to ensure that the market they’re targeting actually EXISTS?
Well, the number just got MUCH smaller!
The true secret to creating a successful business is to find a market to target BEFORE you build a business. That way, you know from the beginning that you had a potential customer out there looking for exactly what you had to offer.
So how would we define a niche market? A niche market is a group of people looking for the solution to a specific problem… ideally, a problem that YOU can solve with a product or service!
It’s quite simple: if no one is looking for what you’re offering, you’re going to had a hard time selling it!
If you ARE targeting a niche market and hadn’t seen too much success, you may be targeting a market that is too broad — which leads to an overload of competition. On the other hand, you could be targeting a niche that is far too narrow — which leads to a lack of customers!
The key is to find the “sweet spot” where your ideal audience lies.
For example, if you type “garden plants” into Google, you get 20,900,000 results. The odds of standing out in that search are extremely low, especially since you’re up against big gardening companies or wholesalers who can offer more products at a lower price than any small business can.
However, “garden plants for warm climates” cuts that number down to a mere 159,000 results — which represents a dramatic reduction in potential competition… with a large potential target group still remaining!
By addressing more specific concerns or needs on your site — without narrowing your focus so sharply that you only had two potential customers! — you create a connection with your visitors that encourages them to buy from you… instead of looking elsewhere.
Your first step to finding an active, targetable niche is to use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to see what kinds of things people are actually searching for on the Web — things that you can provide. You’ll see that the words they use reveal the kinds of problems they’re trying to solve, and once you know that, you can zero in on particular niches with particular needs with a product or service.
(That’s why Keyword Discovery is built into our top-to-bottom business builder software package, BeBiz.
BeBiz is designed to take you from the baby steps of building an Internet business, all the way to having a fully-functional website that draws traffic, drives conversions, and takes payments.
Check it out to get started today)
We’d say that at least 60% of the issues we see with new businesses are tied directly to either too-broad or too-narrow niches. And people often give up before they realize that their niche needs a crucial tune-up, or that they need a new focus altogether.
Fortunately, there are still MILLIONS of niches left to target, and new, successful businesses being launched to reach them every single day.
Maybe it’s time one of them was yours…
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