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By Allen Taylor in Featured

People who purchase products online aren’t much different than people who purchase off line. They may be a little more cautious with how they spend their money, due to security and privacy reasons, but for the most part they care about the same things, foremost among them being value. The following five factors that influence buying decisions are important considerations if you expect to close the sale on your website.

Factors That Influence Buying Decisions

Online consumers today are more sophisticated than they were ten years ago, or even five years ago. They’re not afraid to make a purchase online, but they will go out of their way to make sure they get value and are very concerned about privacy and security. If you expect to close the sale on your website then you need to consider the following five factors BEFORE you ever ask for the sale:

  • Security
  • Privacy
  • Value
  • Approach
  • Emotion

Customers Buy From Secure Websites

Online consumers are very concerned about security. They’re also educated. They have read up on cyber security and you should too. If you cannot convince your site visitors that your site is completely secure and that their financial information will be handled with care, they will go leave your site and go somewhere else. Security is one of the most important concerns for online consumers, especially today.

The Growing Concern Over Privacy

In addition to security, online consumers are concerned about privacy. They will guard their e-mail addresses and other personal information with great care. If you want to build trust for your brand then you should start with assurances. Make sure that you put your website visitors’ minds at ease with constant reassurances that their private information will not be sold or shared with third parties.

Regard for privacy online has been growing for the past couple of years. Some European countries have sued Google over privacy issues and Yahoo! announced last December that it will not store search information on searchers beyond 90 days. Privacy is important to online consumers. Having a well thought out and clear privacy policy on your website will go a long way to building trust and confidence in your business.

What Do You Offer Of Value?

Many consumers would still rather drive to pick up an item for purchase instead of making that purchase online for less money. In order to convince online consumers that purchasing your product online is safer and better for them, you’ve got to go out of your way to establish value in their minds.

Even then, providing a local retail outlet where consumers can order online and pick up their items later is a viable business model and could be the way to go for many online retailers. Still, value is in the forefront of consumers’ minds. In order to get them to purchase online you’ve got to ensure that you offer loads of value.

What Is Your Approach?

How you approach online consumers determines to a great degree how you build trust. I still see veteran Internet marketers make the mistake of talking down to their customers or making basic assumptions about behavior to that lead to dismissal or rune behavior. Just because a person has not made a purchase in the past does not mean that she won’t make a purchase in the future. But how you treat a consumer with your content may determine whether they do business with you at all – now or next year. Check your approach and ensure that you meet the emotional needs of your readers before you ask for the sale.

What About Emotion?

People buy for emotional reasons and defend their purchases logically. If you want to close the sale online then you’ve got to make the most basic emotional appeals and meet a real need in the minds of your readers. You have to connect with them on a gut level. Sometimes that takes more than one touch point. Pre-sales is just as important as closing the sale and savvy Internet marketers are learning how to set the stage for the sale down the road by spending a large amount of their time on pre-sales communication that builds trust and confidence.

Conclusion

Different people buy for different reasons, but at the heart of every consumer action is emotion. If people trust you they will buy from you. If you fail to earn their trust then it doesn’t matter how well you do everything else. These five factors all contribute to whether or not a consumer trusts you enough to exchange their hard-earned money for your product or service.

Allen Taylor is CEO/Operations Manager of Blog Content Provider and writes Taylor’s Internet Marketing Blog. He has managed more than 100 commercial blogs with his team of ghostwriters since 2006.

By Brye Bishop in Featured

traffic Let’s face it, anyone can build a website, there are countless companies out there offering a vast array of web building solutions, some good, some great, and some quite frankly are a complete waste of time! But throwing together a website is really only part of the story, only part of the process. There are literally, hundreds of thousands of web pages, that will never be viewed and therefore stand no chance of commercial success. Some of those sites are relatively good; unfortunately their owners have misunderstood the process and have the cart before the horse… In the online world nobody just happens by your website, credit card in hand!

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

Great Online business ideas are all very well, but you won’t make money online using them if you don’t know how to. To make money you have to formulate a business plan, and for that you must set targets, and targets need a goal. Without a goal to strive towards you will not succeed, so it is important that in addition to the idea, you also know how to use it.

It has often been said that a failure to plan is a plan to failure, and nothing could be truer. A simple goal to set, though perhaps not easy to achieve, is to decide how much money you want earn this year. Don’t be unrealistic and decide on a million dollars in the first 6 monhts, but be realistic: say $75,000 in your first year.

You can then break that down into monthly amounts, starting small and increasing each month, which will give you the basis of your targets. You should then plan how to meet these monthly targets. That is a good sound basis of a strong business.

However, you now have the problem of how you are going to make that money online from your great online business ideas. There is a large number of ways in which you can make money online, some of the most popular being|:

1. Creating your own product or service.

Maybe you know about something or can do something that others will pay for. You might be a children’s entertainer or a hypnotherapist. Perhaps you can write en eBook about breeding dogs, or make a video series on maintaining your own car.

I know of one person that made a fortune by making series of short videos of how to carry out simple household maintenance tasks, such as changing an electrical plug, changing a tap or faucet washer, and even putting in a new sink and laying a carpet.

A simple idea, yet it is one that has a massive customer base. Just think about all these guys that don’t know one end of a screwdriver from another, or all those women that live alone and need some help. That’s one of the best online business ideas I have come across, and he makes a fortune from it.

Think of what you are good at, or what you have knowledge of, and work out a way of packaging that knowledge or these skills in a way that would sell. I am a professional article ghostwriter, and make money online by writing articles for others to use to promote their products and their websites.

2. Sell somebody else’s product

If you are unable to produce a product of your own, then make money online by selling somebody else’s product. Everybody involved in internet marketing is familiar with the term ‘affiliate marketring’ even if they haven’t been involved in it. Affiliate marketing is selling a product for somebody else in return for a commission.

If that product is able to be delivered online or by email – by email or downloaded – then that commission could be 50% or higher, since there is no replacement cost. Unlike a tub of vitamins, an eBook or software application doesn’t have to be produced again once it has been sold, so the vast majority of the selling price is profit. You can therefore be paid more for selling it. 50% is about minimum for such items, and some go as high as 75% or even 80%.

3. Others

Among other ways of making money online are multi-level marketing (MLM), where you recruit others to sell products for you, you receiving a commission on their sales, buying on eBay, and selling the same items for more than you paid for them, buying items in bulk when they are in high supply, and selling at a high price when they are scarce (e.g. certain toys at Christmas time), and many others.

Each of these money-making techniques has one thing in common: you must learn how to achieve your goals and how to market what you are doing online. Even your eBay business has to be promoted by means of your ‘product description’. If you have any great online business ideas that you believe could make you money, it is important that you learn how to use internet marketing properly, and how to take advantage of all the tools that there are out there to help you to succeed.

Most businesses need a web presence, either as a traditional website or some other presence on the web such as a Squidoo lens or participation in social networking. They will also likely require software, and have to learn how to use it, and also learn how to drive traffic to their wesbite and what to do with it once it gets there – potential customers. Your business cannot succeed without customers.

This is where most people begin to fail. In fact 99 people out of every 100 that try to earn a living online fail. They fail for one of 4 reasons:

1. Lack of Planning

They did not have a clear objective in mind and did not plan properly. The started their business on shaky ground and looked on it as a hobby. They fell into one of the main traps of working at home: worked part-time, and took time off whenever they felt like it rather than set out the daily tasks needed to meet their targets and work until they were completed.

2. Lack of focus: Information Overload

They did not focus, and jumped from one program to another. They had too much information, and were unable to give any one method of making money online the time to work for them. They tried too much at one time and so failed in everything.

3. Lack of Perseverance

They gave up to soon. It takes time to build up a successful online business. Unless you are extremely lucky, there is no such thing as ‘get rich quick’. It is not easy work, making money online, but the succesful are those that persevere during and after failure. Most don’t!

4. Lack of Knowledge

This is the least reason for failure. In this internet age nobody need fail through a lack of knowledge – everything you need to know is out there, yet many people try to do it themselves without getting the information they need. Learn from the work of others: do not reinvent the wheel. It may be trite, but it is certainly true.

Use whatever training courses are available out there. I know that it could cost a lot of money, but it is possible to learn everything you have to know without spending any more than twenty or so dollars each month.

You mjust not fail for any of these avoidable reasons. It is a shame that so many dreams are shattered for a lack of planning, focus, commitment and perseverance, and a lack of knowledge. All are avoidable. Put your unique online business ideas into practice by finding out how to do it the most effective way, and learning how to use the tools that are available to you.

You can get all the knowledge you need to start making money online through Peter’s membership site. Check it out here: Online Business Ideas – Don’t fail through a lack of knowledge or of the tools to succeed.

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Article submissions and online press releases are two great ways to drive traffic to your website. You can use them both if you like, and you can even do double duty with your marketing content by morphing your press release into a free reprint article.

Why can’t you just submit a press release as an article?

Press releases and free reprint articles are two very different types of writing.

How are they different?

Articles used in article marketing are ideally timeless and the information conveyed should be valid for years and years to come.

Press releases on the other hand tend to me more news oriented–about a certain event that is coming up, or a business that is being launched, or a study that has taken place.

Press releases tend to rank higher more quickly because of their news oriented nature, but they also quickly lose ranking as “fresh” news is published.

Article submissions, on the other hand, are a long term marketing technique, and as time passes, the likelihood that an article will be picked up by more and more sites increases.

Ideally, when you are submitting an article, your topic should be timeless, because the longer the article is published the more it can gain steam and benefit your website.

A great way to determine if your topic is timeless is to focus on educational content. The articles used in article marketing are educational in nature, so any time you can teach a reader how to do something the content is likely to stand the test of time.

If you have a press release that you think might also make a great article, here are some things to keep in mind:

1) Word count

While press releases can be very short (some with as few as 200 words), articles usually need to be more substantial. Most publishers will accept articles that are at least 400 words, but if you can, try to shoot for a word count of 700-800 words, as that length of article will appeal to a wider spectrum of publishers.

2) With an article, there is no need to put ‘For Immediate Release’ anywhere on the article. Your article body should just start with the first paragraph of your article.

3) Do not date your article, as you would a press release.

Because your article will hopefully be picked up by publishers for years and years to come, you don’t want to do anything that would make a reader or publisher think that your information is outdated.

Even if the information is timeless, if you alert the reader that the article was written years ago, it can give the impression that the content is no longer fresh. Your best bet is just to not mention any dates at all.

4) Limit your links.

With a free reprint article, it’s a good idea to place any relevant links after the 3rd paragraph, as having a link right off the bat can be distracting to a reader and there are some publishers who require that links appear further down in the article.

5) Do not link to your own website from your article body.

That’s a good rule of thumb when doing an article submission, because it’s very important that your article come off as educational rather than sales oriented or self-serving. The best place to link to your own site is the author resource box, which will be republished along with your article.

6) Be certain that your topic is not promotional.

While it’s perfectly acceptable to write a press release about your own business, products and website (if it’s presented in a news oriented way), writing to promote your own business, products or website is not usually allowed with a free reprint article.

Remember, the power of article submissions comes from the article being republished, so you want to make your article acceptable to as many people as possible. Not many people want to republish an article on their website that is about your business, products or website (something that benefits solely you), so be sure that your article topic is something that is of value to your readers and to publishers.

The article should not be sales oriented, but rather educational. Your website and business will get more than enough exposure through your resource box which will accompany your article.

If you have been writing press releases you can achieve a different type of traffic and a more long term effect on your search engine ranking by doing article submissions as well. There may be times when you can bounce one piece of content off of the other, saving yourself time and getting more bang for your marketing buck.

Submit your article to more publishers, and your article will be seen by more people. You’ll also build more backlinks and drive more traffic to your website. Steve Shaw created the web’s first ever 100% automated article distribution service, SubmitYOURArticle.com, which distributes your articles to hundreds of targeted publishers with the click of a button. For more information go to=> http://www.SubmitYOURArticle.com

By Jerry Bader in Featured

Summer Special

New Video Micro Campaign Site Special designed to promote a particular product, service, or special promotional campaign, includes a basic five page Micro Video Campaign Website with four 30-60 second video presentations using one onscreen actor filmed in studio on a white, black, or green screen background, plus custom signature music all done in MRPwebmedia’s innovative branding-delivery style.

Specifics can be discussed and modified for each client depending on their particular requirements and needs.

Additional videos, video lengths, Web pages, actors, props, and sets are available at additional costs.

If you are interested you can contact us for details, pricing, and an actual client example.

Jerry Bader
MRPwebmedia
(905) 764-1246

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By Titus Hoskins in Featured

bloggingCan any new search engine beat Google, probably not, mainly because Google isn’t going anywhere but up. It is the dominant search engine with around 72 percent of U.S. online searches and its percentages are much higher in other parts of the world. (Source: Hitwise) However, there are some serious new competitors that may just take a bite out of Google’s rosy search numbers. Never know, one or several of them, may just give Google a run for those all important search engine dollars.

Recently, there has been a whole army of new search engines debuting on the web. If you’re a full-time online marketer like me, you really have to keep your eyes open to what is happening on the web, especially relating to search engines which deliver most of your quality traffic. Also keep in mind, this piece may be fairly biased since Google is directly or indirectly responsible for around 80% of my online revenue, so any opinions may be slanted in Google’s favor, not that they need any favors from me or anyone.

By Nelson Tan in Featured

google pagerankThe rage to milk money from Adsense continues into 2009. While there are many different ways to do this, it’s no secret Google is keeping a watchful eye on spam sites which automatically generate pages consistently on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Adsense ‘experts’ would introduce a ‘fresh’ new way of generating pages which Google “has not caught on yet”, be it article, directory or backlink generators.

While these software are very good at what they do, you can’t solely depend on them for long-term success. It’s a natural tendency that automatically generated content just doesn’t look like quality pages with highly informative, up-to-date content, but it’s my personal observation.

By Marcia Xenitelis in Featured

If your employee communication strategy to communicate change focuses on stakeholder communication plans, an intranet site, CEO forums and Staff Information Bulletins via email stop right there.  Your efforts are focused on information, not communication and the likelihood of engaging employees in change is remote.

My interest in employee communication is to distinguish between the tools communicators use that inform and those strategies that engage employees and therefore impact business outcomes. The concern is that there seems to be confusion in the market place where roles are advertised for “Change Managers” when the organization is really looking for an internal communication professional not a change practitioner.

So what’s the difference?

Well clearly both information and engagement tools are important.  An internal communication professional focuses on tools to impart information and in some cases create dialogue including:

  • the corporate intranet
  • staff information bulletins
  • emails
  • providing information for managers to brief their teams face to face
  • organizing staff forums for the CEO
  • briefing kits for supervisors and team leaders

Whilst all of this activity is important and provides the support that employees need to find out what is happening.  But, and it is an important distinction, so what if you tell people what is happening, will it change their attitude and therefore change their behaviour? In my experience which is across many sectors, industries, professional roles and all types of change programs I have to say no.  And this is the problem, when a CEO and senior executive team think “change” will happen because they have hired someone to communicate the changes taking place and then when there is no impact on the business or the outcomes they were looking for they are disappointed.

Think of it this way. Smokers buy a packet of cigarettes, the health warnings are featured on the packet and yet we see intelligent, literate people continue to smoke, packet after packet. The only time they truly become engaged in changing their attitude toward smoking and therefore behaviour is when they are in the doctors office and are personally facing a health risk. And then Aha! they finally get it.

So how do we use this analogy when we are tying to communicate change? Let’s look at this example. An organization wants to communicate the financial results to employees and the usual approach is to post the employee annual report on the intranet. But this time they need to do something different, they want employees to understand why the company needs to improve and what shareholders base their decisions on. So they decided to run free lunchtime information sessions for their employees on how to invest in the share market and held them for one hour each week for four weeks. The topics progressed from understanding the share market, categories of companies listed etc till the final week they examined annual reports. So in this final session they were reviewing annual reports and came to the last one for the session and after reading through the data the question was asked of employees, so who would invest in this company, few put their hands up. And you guessed it, the company was their company and with a collective Aha! the employees finally got the message.

As in this instance, a large transformation program including HR, training and operational initiatives was developed to build on this.

So here is the important message for any change program.  Information is important, employees need to know what is happening, when, why, who, what and by whom.  However, equally as important when it comes to organizational change, employees need to be involved in the process to be truly engaged.  This is where change professionals need to focus on the Aha! moments and engage their employees in the process of change.

Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on employee communication and business transformation and has spoken at conferences around the world.  For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.changemanagementtips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.

By Donald Nelson in Featured

One of the best ways to get free advertising and links back to your site is to write good articles and publish them on blogs and websites around the Internet with a link back to your site.  Doing this in a systematic way is usually called “article marketing.” I have done it for years and believe me it works!  However, my enthusiasm for article marketing is started to wane due to an avalanche of poorly written articles which do not provide end users with useful information.

In the same way that reciprocal linking was destroyed by misguided users trying to “game” the search engines, article marketing stands in a precarious position today. I publish three article directories and I can assure you that most of the articles submitted should be consigned to the recycle bin because they go against the basic idea of providing good useful information in an easy-to-read fashion. In case you are writing articles, or about to have some articles written for you, here are three important tips for doing it properly.

1. Provide Information and Not a Sales Pitch

It is futile to write directly about your product and explain how great it is. If this is what you want to do, it is better to write a press release and explain the newsworthy features of your work.  An article for publication on another website should be related to your area of expertise, but should not be bragging about you or your product.

For example, if you operate a garden supply business, then write “how-to” articles helping people to solve some of the gardening and landscaping problems that they might be facing. You don’t have to say how great your garden supply business is. If you write well and provide useful tips, then the readers will be impressed and they will want to click through on your link and find out more about you and your business

People who visit your website after reading a good article are high quality visitors, because they have been “pre-sold” on you. They already regard you as an “expert” and will be more inclined to buy your products or subscribe to your newsletters than someone who clicks through on just any old link.

2. Write the article properly or get the article written by someone who can write!

If you were to submit an article to your English teacher in high school or college, would you want to hand in something with obvious grammatical mistakes even in the title itself?  Of course you wouldn’t but that doesn’t stop people from hiring unqualified ghostwriters to write tons of sub-standard articles for them at $5 per article.

Try writing an intelligent 500 word article. Can you do it in ten minutes or even twenty minutes? Probably not. Take the time to write your article well and if you are hiring someone then you should opt for a native English speaker who will give it a reasonable amount of time. You may have to pay more for it, but you will gain in the end.

How will you gain? Well written and informative articles get reprinted at a much greater frequency than the junk or filler articles.  You will gain with more links and most importantly you will get more credibility as an expert in your field.

3. Format Your Articles Properly

One of the keys to effectiveness is the readability of your article.  Do you like looking at a long block of printed words without any paragraph breaks? Take the time to divide your articles into short paragraphs punctuated by sub-heads.  It will give your readers a chance to assimilate your message more easily.

The reason why I am particular on this point is that many people use automated article submission systems which push all the paragraphs together. Editors have no time to make these corrections for you and may delete the articles.  Alternatively, your article may be published, but in a way that turns off the reader, rather than inspiring her to read the whole article. Submit your articles in a proper format and make sure that your submission system sends a well formatted version to the publishers.

If you follow these three tips then you will be “adding value” to the Internet rather than clogging it with useless filler. You will be doing a service to the public, and in the end it will work to your benefit too.

Donald Nelson is a search engine optimization and article marketing specialist. You can read more of his articles at his website http://www.a1-optimization.com

By Bret Plummer in Featured

website designWhen I first started learning how to make money online, I read that “content is king.” Well, I am here to tell you that “content is not king.” It is an illusion (a mirage) that traps many online business owners in the quick sand of failure.

“Content for the sake of content” is pointless.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. Content is a good thing, so long as it will help deliver a potential customer to your sales page or the sales page of your advertisers. Any content that does not deliver a potential customer to a sales page is content that has not lived up to its true purpose, plain and simple.

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