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Creating A Profitable Newsletter

10 2007 Wednesday

By Chris Haycock in Webmasters

Do you want to use email to market your business to consumers? It can be difficult designing a plan that will generate interest and additional sales. It can also be hard to determine how often you want to send an email to consumers. Have you thought about creating a business newsletter and emailing it to consumers? This is a great opportunity to keep your business name in their mind. You can also send the newsletter on a regular basis. A monthly newsletter is very common, but some companies choose to send one weekly while others do it only every three months. The choice depends on the type of business you have, the amount of content you have, and the time and money you have to invest in the project.

A great way to get consumers interested in your newsletter is to ask them what they are looking for. Let them know you encourage their questions, suggestions, comments, and feedback. Make sure they know you will address their concerns as well. Make sure you use some of these consumer replies in each newsletter. This shows you care about them and their satisfaction. It is also a wonderful way for your business to know what is working and what you still need to improve on.

An effective newsletter talks about various aspects of the company, upcoming events, sales, promotions, and new products. Try to arrange the information so that it is informative without appearing to be directed at only sales. You want the consumer to look forward to your future newsletters. Keep the information informative for the reader while laying the ground work for future sells. Always remember who your target audience is and write articles that will appeal to them.

Your newsletter should also offer tips. Customers love that. Try safety tips, unique uses for the product, etc. These all serve to keep the reader interested as well as promote your business. Offer a great promotion or discount in each newsletter as well. Make sure such promotions have an expiration date. This will motivate the consumer to make a purchase now rather than in the future.

The layout of your newsletter is important as well. The visual of nothing but a jumble of words isn’t easy on the eyes. Try using a distinct break in the articles or using a two column layout. If your newsletter isn’t visually appealing it doesn’t matter how good the content is because many readers will not take the time to focus on the information. Be realistic about the amount of content you can put into one newsletter. Don’t use the smallest font just to get more material in. Try some basics in the beginning and then expand. You can add features and regular sections as your newsletter evolves. If the newsletter is going to be your main source of marketing, then make sure you have staff dedicated to its development. Too many businesses just expect their employees to take on one more task, leading to a newsletter that is done, but not effective. If you have a team dedicated to the development and strategy behind each newsletter they will be more effective.

Take the time to test your newsletter on the various email service providers because many of them work differently. You don’t want a large percentage of your customers not being able to read the newsletter because they all subscribe to an email service provider who has a system unable to read your material. Test the main email providers out there before you release the newsletter by email to save you the disappointment of finding out later many people couldn’t read it.

Email marketing is very effective if you take the time to use an approach that is informative and builds a relationship with the customer rather than just pushing your products or services. A newsletter is a great way to accomplish this. It also opens the door for you to email information to the customer on a regular basis, depending on how often you want to create a newsletter. There is nothing threatening about a newsletter. Do all you can to make it inviting. Also, don’t forget to express your sincere gratitude to your valued customers in your newsletters as well. We all like to be appreciated. Done in this way the newsletter will become a valuable and profitable tool for you.

Author: Chris Haycock is an information publisher, specialising in helping others set up and run their own profitable internet business. For more information on the above, and to get an absolutely no cost two hour business video, why not go now to http://www.easyebizz.com

Seven Guidelines for Website Usability

10 2007 Tuesday

By Tony D. Baker in Webmasters

Usability, as you hopefully know, is all about making sure that the people who come to your website can find the information or product they want, and ensuring they can find it quickly, efficiently, and with minimal hair-tearing.

Unfortunately, some people just don’t know the guidelines, or just don’t follow them. This can lead to a lot of frustration on the part of the user, and if users are frustrated, then chances are good they won’t be back to your site. Whether you’re building a new site or redesigning an old one, here are a few usability tips you should be keeping in mind.

Consistency Consistency is one of the most important aspects of usability. The page style, text style, colors and navigation should be consistent throughout your entire site. Not only does this help with usability, but it will also help with building your brand online. By using those visual cues throughout your site, people will know exactly where to look for the links they need, and they’ll always know for sure that they’re still in your site.

Navigation

According to Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, a good navigation system should answer three questions for your users:

Where am I?
Where have I been?
Where can I go?

Keep your navigation consistent throughout your site, and this is one case where it’s okay to be redundant. Provide multiple ways for your users to find what they’re looking for, such as text links, graphics links, a clearly marked search function and a site map, just to name a few. Also, cookie crumbs (home > products > Product Name > features) are a good way to let visitors know where they are on your site and how they got there, so it’s easy for them to go back if they need to.

Content

Yes, pretty pages are a plus, but if there’s no meaty content to the pages, there’s no reason for users to come back. Don’t dump big blocks of text on your site. Break it up into smaller paragraphs, and organize your content with headings and subheadings so that people who are skimming the site can quickly find what they’re looking for. Giant text blocks only serve to give people headaches.

Either stick with a light background and dark lettering, or a dark background with light lettering. Contrast is the key here. Use a sans serif font (like Arial) for the regular copy, and don’t make it too small. Don’t make your information difficult to read, unless you really want to drive people away from your site.

And proofread, proofread, proofread. Nothing will damage your credibility quicker than blatant grammar and spelling mistakes.

Images

Yes, you’ve got that gorgeous flowery picture that you just HAVE to have on the background of every page. But did you ever stop to consider how distracting it could be, or how the color changes in the picture could obscure the text on top of it? Unless you really know what you’re doing, steer clear of background images.

For all images, make sure that you have appropriate ALT and TITLE attributes. This is the text that shows up in an image box before the image loads, or appears when you mouse over the image. Not only will this increase usability, especially for people using text browsers or site readers, but it will also increase your keywords, which makes search engine spiders happy.

Custom error page

It happens to the best of us. Pages get removed from sites. Links get changed. Sections get taken down and updated. People enter file names wrong. No matter the reason, it’s entirely likely that somebody visiting your site will click on a broken link. If you have a custom 404 error page, then you have a chance to let your users know what happened, redirect them to a page that might have what they were looking for, or just take them back to your home page.

Plus, that way you can keep your colors and branding consistent, even on the error page. It’s much more professional than having your site host’s 404 page show up when somebody clicks a broken link.

Contact and feedback

You should have a clearly marked contact page, and there should be more on there than just a form “contact us” box. Let your users know who you are, where you’re located, and give them options other than just email for getting in touch with you. If you do have a form, clearly note what information you require and make sure you don’t require information, like ZIP codes, that international users won’t necessarily have.

Testing

Not everybody using your site will be from North America, have a monitor with 1280 x 800 resolution, and be surfing via Internet Explorer. You’ll have international users, users with older, fullscreen monitors, users on dial-up, users on Macs, users on PCs with Firefox or other browers, blind users with site readers, you name it. That’s always something to keep in mind and a big reason why you need to test. There has to be usability across all platforms, not just the one you use to build your site.

Get real people to test your site so that you can get an idea of how users will experience it, and you can fix any problems before it goes live. Usability testing is the only way to make sure that your site fits both yours and your users’ needs. That way, you can find out what works and what doesn’t, and can adjust your site so that everybody has an enjoyable, pleasant experience browsing your site.

For a few more tips on website usability and optimizing your site, check out these blogs: (http://smbtips.blogspot.com/2007/08/website-usability.html) and (http://www.xeal.com/blog/index.php/2007/08/15/5_ways_to_optimize_your_website_for_univ).

Website usability is a vast, important topic, and it’s nigh impossible to cover all the applicable points in just one article. However, one of the most important things to remember about these guidelines is that they are just that: guidelines. You won’t get in trouble with the Internet Higher Authorities if you don’t slavishly adhere to them. Just keep your users in mind with your site design. The easier it is for them, the better it will be for you.

Author: President and founder of Xeal Inc., Tony D. Baker is Oklahoma’s leading Internet marketing expert with more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience. You can catch Tony on the Xeal Radio Show on Sunday nights on 1170 KFAQ Tulsa. Sign up for a free 25-point website evaluation and pick up crucial tips at Xeal’s free Thursday webinar at http://www.xeal.com/webinar.

7 Secrets To a Profitable Website

10 2007 Monday

By John Abbott in Webmasters

Are you finally ready to start your OWN internet business? Ready to make a second income without a second job? You really can make some serious money and save lots of time and effort by following these 7 secrets of wealthy marketers.

Keep it SIMPLE

Your website should be simple, informative, interesting and produce ACTION on the part of the visitor. There are only TWO things your website should do: produce a sale and/or capture an email address. Fancy graphics and different fonts and colors can be confusing and hard to read. Also, a lot of “bells and whistles” can slow down the loading of your webpage, causing your visitor to LEAVE. Keep it simple, make it fast loading and make the sale or get the email address.

Make use of auto responders

Studies show that MOST of the time, you will NOT make a sale on the first visit to your website. That is why you MUST capture the email address so you can follow-up. But NOT manually-use an auto-responder. An auto responder is a systematic way to send folow-up emails to those who did NOT buy on their first visit to your site. Once an auto-responder system is set-up, it can easily and effortlessly follow up for you. There are many good autoresponderers such as Aweber or Get response. You can Google “autorespnder” to find them. See what successful marketers are using and follow suit.

Use an easy to remember web address

URLs are a Uniform Resource Locator or the words you type in to find a website. Usually the shorter the better. If you are using an affilaite website, you may want to register a separte, simple domain name and then just use an URL redirect to forward visitors to your website.

Make it SIMPLE for your customers to pay

The days are long gone when a customer will get an envelope, address it, put a check in it and mail it to you. Over 90% of all online business is done with e-commerce, using credit cards. You can use Paypal, Google Checkout, Clickbank, etc

Add credibility with testiomonials

If you have satisfied customers, ASK them to send you a testimonial(with a pic if possible.) and then put those on your webpage. If you are NEW in business and do not yet have testiomonials, be creative to get some-GIVE your product or service to some friends or a fellow internet marketer to TEST for you. Ask for their HONEST feedback. If you have a good product or service, you should have no trouble getting 3-5 testiomonials very quickly.

Add a phone number

For many reasons, if you add a phone number to your website, it adds tremendous credibility. You have several choices here-YOU can answer the phone yourself(many times that is the BEST way-at least during business hours) or you can have a recorderd message, or you can HIRE a service to answer the phone for you. But by giving a phone number, you send the message that you are a REAL business and as such, you will be treated as one.

Make it PERSONAL

The internet can make business seem very COLD and impersonal. But YOU can change that by adding a bit of YOUR personality to your website. Add YOUR picture to your website. share some of YOUR passions, etc. People want to do business with a PERSON not a COMPANY. You are looking to create a relationship with your customers, so let them get to know YOU!

There you have it, By following these 7 secrets, you are on your way to becoming a wealthy marketer!

Author: John Abbott - Starting a successful internet business is easy if you follow these secrets. For more info visit: Wealthy Marketer

How To Guarantee Your Product’s Success Before Your Even Start!

10 2007 Monday

By Willie Crawford in Webmasters

Today, I’d like to teach you an easy method of researching a product or project idea BEFORE you invest a lot of time and other resources in it.

Over the past 11 years I’ve been shown over 100 products that “seemed like a great idea,” but when they were offered to the market, the customers weren’t interested. In a few cases the “marketing” was just bad, but in more cases, the product was simply something that the market didn’t want.

There are, of course, more research tools available than you could ever learn to use. So, today, I’m actually going to focus your attention on just two… and they’ll both be free.

First, I’d like to introduce you to Google Alerts! You’ll find this handy, free service offered by Google.com at: http://www.google.com/alerts

Note that Google does own the trademarks to all of the terms mentioned in this article that uses their name

Google Alerts allow you to subscribe to free notifications of when Google discovers new occurrences of a target phrase anywhere on the Internet. You can specify what types of databases Google provides you with updates from. As you’ll see when visiting the site, it’s fairly self-explanatory.

I have dozens of these set up. I have it set up so that… once a day, I get an email summary of new alerts for:

Target keyword phrases
Target URLs
Target product titles
Discussion forums on a topic
My name and my company name
My key competitors
Unique phrases that I created for various purpose

You get the idea.

The second free tool that I use is online forums specific to my topic of interest. These are forums where people discuss your topic or niche. There are hundreds of thousands of them scattered across the Internet, and you CAN find one on almost any topic.

When that brilliant product idea comes to you, the first thing that you want to ask is, “Is this something that the market really wants?”

You also want to know, “Is this something that already exists, and if it does, can I still market something similar?”

The final question you want to answer if you’re contemplating getting rich with your idea is, “Is this something that the market is willing to pay for?”

The first objection many people will offer when reading this article is that they don’t know where to find discussion forums in their niche. To them, I say… “Google Alerts!”

Simply set up some alerts for phrases that include the terms:

“online forums” + your keywords
“discussion boards” + your keywords
“forum” + your keywords
“online community” + your keywords

In a day or two, Google will be so kind as to start EMAILING YOU links to some of these forums. What could be easier. Just go over, register for the forums if required, and then listen to the discussion.

You’re listening to see if your product idea will solve a problem that this group of people PAINFULLY want to solve.

You’re listening to see if there is a glaringly obvious problem, other than the one your were already thinking about, that you can offer the perfect solution to.

If you don’t see discussion that answers your question, then consider posting the question. Explain that you are doing research for a possible product. Perhaps even ask them to visit your site and take a survey.

A living example of how I recently did this AND the resulting product follows. Study my example, and you’ll see that you really can confirm that your product is badly wanted by the marketplace before you write the first word of an ebook, or the first line of code for a program.

I’ll give you an example from Internet marketing since that is the niche that many readers of this article will be from.

I began by visiting the very popular Internet Marketing Warriors discussion forum. I had an idea that the market was growing tired of products that promised a fortune overnight but that offered techniques many people found daunting.

I suspected that many people in the “Internet marketing niche” were having very little success, and would be completely ecstatic if they could earn even $100 per day.

So I posted the rhetorical question, “Would You Be ‘Happy’ With $100 Per Day?” That thread generate over 4700 views, and over 170 responses. The responses overwhelmingly confirmed my suspicions. It confirmed that most people would not only be thrilled with $100 per day ($3000 per month) but that they were anxious for instructions on HOW to accomplish this seemingly-daunting task.

You can read that thread, and feel the strong emotion here: http://warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=184530

I mention the strong emotion because if you understand sales, you know that people buy on emotion, and then justify with logic. So, you do need to provide a solution to a problem that people really REALIZE that they have on a deep emotional level… if you want a best-seller.

After verifying that people wanted this product, and even letting them tell me what the product should feel like, I then felt confident in creating and marketing such a product. I knew beyond any doubt that if I offered this product in the right way, that it WOULD sell.

I have used the technique above in numerous niches. I’m currently working on a similar “exercise” in the very competitive cooking niche. I’m doing it by addressing one of the biggest challenges faced by marketers in that niche. More on that in another article though

After I had verified the demand for the product in my example above… the product on “How To Make $100 Per Day Online”… I then had to determine the best method for creating this product.

Realizing that there are literally dozens of easy, viable methods of earning that amount, working just one or two hour per day, I also realized that writing something based upon just my own experiences would be too limiting. I AM involved in a lot of online niches, and do far more things than I probably should be doing.

However, to get a wider variety of experiences, I turned to the best “brain-pool” that I could think of. I went to the members of my inner circle private memberships site at: http://TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com

I posted the suggestion on our private forum that this was an idea with proven demand, and suggested that we write this ebook as a group.

Instantly, I had lots of people who were actually earning that much, or more, coming forward and offering to do a chapter. Others, who didn’t feel qualified to write a chapter, offered to do things such as proofreading, or helping with graphics or programming.

The community at The Internet Marketing Inner Circle WROTE the ebook, producing what many are already calling “The Internet Marketing Product Of The Year!” One even called it, “The Internet Marketing Product Of The Decade.” That may be a stretch, but it clearly filled a very real need. It solved a glaring problem.

You can see the result of my research and our teamwork at: http://TheInternetCouncil.org

I’ll close by revealing one other BIG secret. One of several reasons why I was willing to suggest my idea as a group project was that I knew that having more people involved would create a sense of ownership. I knew that getting more people involved in creating the product all but eliminated any risk in creating the product.

We could even say that the thread on the Warrior Forum reduced the risk by 95%. By saying on the forum that they would be happy with $100 per day, and that they were looking for a plan to accomplish this, created a deep psychological connection between those posters, and the success of the project. Since the product filled a need that they publicly stated that they wanted SOLVED, they would be inconsistent if they didn’t accept the solution when offered.

I don’t need to pack too many lessons into this article. I think that I have demonstrated, with a living example, that you can guarantee the success of your product before you even start! Now you just need to do it!

Author: Willie Crawford has been teaching others uncomplicated methods of building successful online businesses since 1996. Today, he does most of his teaching inside an exclusive membership site filled with other experts dedicated to uncovering the truth about how to succeed online. Join Willie and dozens of other “old-timers” at: http://TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com

12 Reasons Your Website Is Failing

10 2007 Tuesday

By Willie Crawford in Webmasters

Most Saturdays, I conduct a free networking and brainstorming call, where we critique and give makeovers to 2-3 websites. On the weeks that we don’t review websites, the calls are generally “open discussion” of Internet marketing issues.

These calls are just another tool in my very effective marketing arsenal, and you can join them by registering at: http://WillieCrawford.com/free-brainstorming-calls.html

During most weeks, I get dozens of joint venture proposals, and several potential new clients who want me to evaluate the potential of a project that they’re working on.

Many of the joint ventures that I turn down, and many of the clients that I reject, are for the same reason. Their websites are so poorly written that I know that the websites won’t convert. I rarely do outside copywriting, but I often suggest revamping their websites before they move forward.

With the sites reviewed on my calls, and with the sites I look at for other reasons, I notice many of the same mistakes. Here are 12 of the most common:

1) The Site Has No Focus.
A website should be designed with its primary purpose in mind. You should have ONE thing that you’d really like most visitors to your page to do. Almost everything on that page should lead the visitors toward deciding to take that primary action. Nothing on the page should distract them and “lead them off down other trails.”

Common primary actions that you’ll want your visitor to take are to join your list, buy your product, download a free trial version, or join an online community. Make sure that you know what you want your visitors to focus on, and get rid of the other distractions. It’s been proven that if you give your visitors too many choices, or confuse them, they will simply choose to leave!

2) The Site Has No Email Capture Mechanism.
Most honest copywriters will tell you that in most Internet marketing type niches, a 1-2% response rate to a sales letter is VERY respectable. You’ve worked very hard to get visitors to your site, and if you completely ignore the 98% who don’t buy you’re not going to be in business very long.

Incorporate a form into your website that gets them into an autoresponder so that you can follow-up with them. Offer them a free report, access to an MP3 on the topic, or access to an exclusive community. Get them to opt-in, and then you can follow up with them on their topic of interest.

Your opt-in form can be set up “in-line” as a part of the webpage, and even take them back to the point on the webpage where they were reading before they stopped to opt-in. You can also have an exit popup, or pop- under, that offers them a freebie as they’re leaving your site. Once they’ve decided to leave, you’ll probably NEVER see them again unless you have a way to invite them back. An autoresponder is the perfect way to do this automatically.

3) The Owner is “Hiding Behind the Website.”
Web surfers are skeptical and distrusting. You need to let them know that there is a real person behind the site. Give them contact information, show them your photo, and even let them hear you. You can easily add audio or video to your website, and allow it to “touch” your visitor on such a deeper level. When people hear your voice or see you talking, and get to watch your body language, you communicate so much more effectively than just the written word.

To add audio to your website, all you need is a microphone plugged into your computer. To add video to your website, all you really need is a webcam plugged into your computer. There are services that will take this audio or video, allow you to edit it with a few clicks of your mouse, and then stream it from their servers or upload it to your server.

A totally amazing service that I use is called Audio Acrobat. I use it to have customers, subscribers, etc., call in and leave testimonials. I use it to record some teleseminars, interviews, product recommendations, and for dozens of other purpose. I do record video from my webcam to this service too. You can also upload video recorded on a regular video camera to this service, and then stream it from their website.

As I said, I LOVE Audio Acrobat. If you want to check it out, you can get a free 30-day trial from here: http://williec.audioacrobat.com/ It’s where I have dozens of testimonial lines, dozens of audios, and a few videos. It’s also how I save on my web hosting bandwidth

4) The Owner of the Site Offers No Credentials.
The very first question I ask when reading a magazine article, watching a television show, or reading a web page, is “What makes this person qualified to teach ME this topic.” Most web surfers don’t trust you, and believe that most Internet sites are out to rip them off. You need to show them that your experience and training makes you qualified to teach them the topic. In addition to formal credentials a professional looking website also shows that you are a serious business person. Don’t skimp on your website’s design!

5) Not Offering Proof of Statements.
It’s natural for you to say how great you and your product are. That means nothing to potential customers. Get others to share how your product improved their lives. Use media interviews, and statements by officials in professional organizations, to provide third-party validation.

Testimonials with photos, audio, or video, are very powerful. Testimonials with just a set of initials, or with just a first name, have NO credibility.

6) Offering the Wrong Payment Options.
The majority of Internet users prefer to pay via credit card. If your product allows you to do it, and still make a satisfactory profit, consider taking orders through an answering service or call center, via fax, via snail mail, and through third party processors such as Paypal as well. Evaluate each of these options and decide which of these make sense for you. As an aside, I once considered even offering my customers the option to order C.O.D (cash on delivery). My local postmaster strongly suggested that I NOT do that and also pointed out that it’s almost never done these days. He convinced me that it was more trouble than it was worth.

7) Using the Wrong or Too Many Fonts.
When you use different sizes and colors of letters on your webpage you need to have a real reason. When you highlight or underline text on your webpage you need to have a logical reason.

As your site visitor reads your webpage, he will subconsciously ask himself why you emphasized a certain word or sentence on the page. If you had no logical reason, you pull him out of your message as his mind “wrestles with the why.”

Your page should be structured such that a “skimmer” could just read the headlines and sub headlines and get the message. He should be able to read just the highlighted text and get the gist of your webpage. He should be able to just go to the bottom of the page, read the “P.S.” where you’ve restated your offer, and order without being forced to read the rest of the page… if he’s in a hurry.

Using Header Graphics that Distract from the Message.
Your header graphic should spell out or emphasize the main benefit of your product. It should be simple enough that the visitor is not forced to waste time trying to decipher its meaning.

Sometimes, it’s better not to even have a header graphic. This is something you should test. You want to get your visitor reading the text on your page and discovering how your product can help him, as soon as practical. This is what will sell him… not cute or fancy graphics.

9) Not Focusing on Benefits Rather than Features.
Don’t tell your visitor how great the product is, tell him how it will improve his life. Your testimonials should also provide concrete, and very specific, examples of how it improved someone else’s life.

10) Focusing on “I” Rather than “You!”
Look at your webpage and make sure that it talks about the customer and his problem more than it talks about you, your company, and your products. Your customers don’t really care about you. They care about how you can help them! Read through your copy and make sure that it answers that question. Make sure that you’re not talking about yourself too much, and that when you do talk about yourself, it’s answering the question of how you can help the reader.

11) Not Emphasizing the Guarantee.
When a customer purchases with a credit card, or through certain third-party processors, the guarantee is implied anyway. So, why not make your guarantee a selling point? If a customer goes to Visa or MasterCard and states that they are unhappy with their purchase from you, they will get their money back in most cases… and you’ll pay an extra fee for the “chargeback.” If a customer goes to Clickbank or Paypal with a complaint, they will end up issuing a refund in many cases.

Make it easy on yourself by offering and honoring a guarantee. It will increase your conversion rate, and unless your product is total JUNK, it won’t increase your refund rate.

12) Not Using a P.S.
Many busy surfers will jump right to the end of your webpage and read the P.S.(s). If they were somewhat pre-sold before they arrived at your page, many will go ahead and purchase at that time. Use the P.S.(s) to restate your offer, emphasize the guarantee, showcase your bonuses, and to emphasize any scarcity factor in the offer.

The bottom line is that, if your sales page is horrific, it’s pointless to drive traffic to the site. Fix the page before you do anything else, or you’re just wasting time and frustrating yourself.

A well-written webpage is so pivotal to the sales process that many professional copywriters will often rewrite bad sales letters. When they discover great products that they KNOW would sell if the products’ owners just had better copy, they will often rewrite bad sales letters, pre-sell the products, and then send the “ready-to-buy” customers directly to the order form.

My friend and colleague, Dr. Mike Woo-Ming, recognized the value in revamping bad sales letters so much that he went as far as to set up a membership site, offering members rewritten sales letters for Clickbank products in hot niches. You can check out what Dr. Mike has done, and join his site, if he hasn’t already closed memberships, at: http://FixingTerribleWebpages.com Tell him that I sent you.

Fix the 12 common errors covered above and your website will be more effective than 99% of direct sales websites out there. Don’t fix these mistakes, and your sales won’t increase, but at-least now you will understand why.

Author: Willie Crawford has been teaching Internet marketing for over 9 years. Take advantage of his uncanny insights and unusual candor by subscribing to his free, information- packed newsletter. Also visit his top-rated blog. Do both at: http://WillieCrawford.com/ezine.html

Three Simple Ways to Create Value on your Business Website

10 2007 Friday

By Scott Oliver in Webmasters

Whenever you go to a website, you’re looking for one of two things: to buy something you’ve bought before or something new that you will buy. When you visit a website for the first time, you want to see that there is value in coming to that website over the others that are on the internet. So, knowing this, as an online business website, how can you offer this value to your next website visitor? Here are three ways to make their visit worth their while.

Give Good Information for Free

If you create a website that offers only the basic amount of information, you’re going to have visitors that are confused. While they can get to your products and to your contact pages, they’re wondering what else you can offer them for free. The truth is that website visitors want to get as much as their can from a website before they even spend a cent in most cases. For example, when you visit a news website, you look at all the stories before you would even consider signing up for a subscription to their forums or up to date news, right? This is the same situation for any website.

To help encourage your visitors to do more with your website, you need to create the sense that they are getting something for free – just for stopping by. Here are some ideas:

Newsletter signups – If you can offer your visitors a good newsletter on a regular basis (either via email or on your site), you will help to create a connection between your customers and your business. This will work well to keep your customers in the know, while also helping to give them something for free. The only thing to keep in mind is that this information needs to be relevant and not just a bunch of sales jargon. Free articles – By having regular free articles on your site that other websites or visitors can use, you will help to spread the word about your site (be sure to include your web address on the articles) as well as give good information to your site visitors.

Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse

Too often, websites will only give out special offers to customers that are buying something or who have already bought something. Do something different by offering freebies without any other strings attached. These might be free samples, free eBooks, or anything else that you can give away that is related to your products.

Of course, you can also offer discounts on purchases and create subsequent discounts for future purchases as well. This will show that you value customer loyalty and that you are eager for them to come back.

Acknowledge Your Competition

While it might be tempting to criticize your competition, a better strategy is to offer discounts that match their prices – when you’re both selling the same items. This will help your customers see that you are aware that you might not always offer the best price, but that you are willing to do whatever it takes for a customer to come to you instead of ‘the other guy.’

You might also want to create a clear listing of the differences between your competition and your own website to help customers make the right decision for their purchases, without looking disparaging.

When you want to create value on your website, you need to remember what the customer considers valuable – discounts, freebies, and information. The more you can offer in these categories, the better you will look to your new customers.

Author: Scott Oliver offers free video coaching to help you build a profitable home business FAST. Get an hour of “Website Traffic Secrets” and “Minisite Creation Tactics” for FREE — immediate access here: http://www.InstantWebsiteBusiness.com

Tags & Folksonomy: Latest Internet Trend

10 2007 Thursday

By Sandra Stammberger in Webmasters

There is a new branch of the Web growing like a well organized storm cloud. This recent trend on the Web can be used to strengthen your presence with major search engines and reach an active audience that is highly interested in your content. Welcome to the world of “folksonomy” and “tagging.”

What is Folksonomy and Tagging?

Folksonomy is a combination of the words folks and taxonomy meaning “people classification management.” This allows users some level of control over how the web is organized. One of the most popular tools of the folksonomy concept is tags. Tagging, in the context of this article, is the process of labeling a piece data with metadata.

Using Tagging & Folksonomy to Advertise

Three of the most effective sites currently using tags and/or folksonomy are: Del.icio.us, digg.com, and technorati. Each of these sites is a major player in the folksonomy world.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web application that is growing very fast in popularity. With a free account, del.icio.us users can submit and access all of their bookmarks from any computer with Internet access. By submitting and tagging your own web pages, you instantly give access to thousands of other users with interests in the same tags. Encouraging site visitors to submit your selected webpages to their own del.icio.us bookmark page is a very good way to get more exposure to del.icio.us users. Submitting to del.icio.us is instant and it creates meaningful relevant links important to the major search engines.

Digg.com is mostly a technical news site. If you are familiar with the Web phenomenon Slashdot, then digg will remind you of that geek culture. The difference is that ALL of digg’s content is created, submitted, and judged by its audience. If your page, blog or online article is good enough to be “dug” by digg users, you could receive literally hundreds of unique visitors immediately. Virtually any participation (comments, submissions, links in your profile) can get your site traffic from digg. The beauty of digg is that it is so popular that many submissions to digg can instantly dominate some keywords on search engines such as google.com.

Technorati.com is a power house in the world of tagging. If you have a blog, Technorati should become one of your favorite search engines on the World Live Web. Many Technorati Tags are beginning to dominate the Web by having constantly updated, fresh blog content on highly focused subjects. The beauty of Technorati is that blog application such as blogware and others are completely integrated with it allowing blog categories to be instantly tagged and syndicated into the blog search engine. Any blog can be manually added as well to technorati’s very open tagging system. Like digg, even if you only happen to get a trickle of traffic from technorati itself many times the link value alone will sky rocket the speed in which your site rank in the search engines.

There are many other folksonomy sites that can help you with tag syndication. With its encouragement to get users to submit their own RSS feeds as content, My Yahoo! is a great way to increase traffic and links. Web applications like TagCloud integrates RSS and tagging while wikipedia.org is a method of allowing social webpage and content development. All these methods and many more have two great things in common:

they are free (as of this writing)
they give the power to reshape and categorize the Web to the people.

If content is King then content management is the kingdom.

Author: Sandra Stammberger is the owner of Insider Scripts. At Insider Script’s programmers are working around the clock to develop affordable, powerful money making scripts that will help you drive traffic to your business. http://www.insider-scripts.com

6 Benefits of Email Automatic Responders For Hands-Off Business Management

10 2007 Thursday

By Rika Susan in Webmasters

Cash and leads are king if you have an internet business. You may be familiar with the concept of an email automatic responder. You can use these versatile autoresponder systems to generate both cash and leads. Even if your website is geared towards advertising, you need to work on aspects such as list building. Gathering names and email addresses can create a cash machine that will pay handsome dividends in the long run. With an email automatic responder it will be simple to contact your target group from time to time to entice them into another affiliate purchase or a visit to your website.

If you are new to the web-based model, you will soon discover that an autoresponder is a crucial part of the package. What you have here is an email address that has been set up to respond automatically to a message it receives.

For example, your subscription to the service provides you with an opt-in form that you can utilize on your website. A visitor to your site sees this form and completes it. Immediately the details go through to the email autoresponder service. The service then replies automatically with a message you have prepared in advance. The most important aspect is that all the details of the new subscriber are captured and stored in a database, and thus your treasured leads list begins to take form. Other options in the functions also enable the response service to comply with specific requests, such as redirecting a new client to a particular web page.

Virtually every kind of internet business needs an email automatic responder. If you are working with an SEO consultant, this should be one of the first steps you are advised to take. It is as important as on-page search engine optimization tactics. You can use such a service for an MLM work at home business opportunity, an affiliate business or advertising website. Even if you are trying to make some money for college, this type of system can come in handy in a variety of ways. Lead generation is a vital part of every business and these services make it something that happens while you sleep!

Six Benefits Of An Email Automatic Responder

1. Create Automatic Communication Channels

Imagine how hands-off your business can become if you create an automatic communication channel with all your visitors and leads. This can continue twenty four hours a day, without you lifting as much as a finger. Simply make sure that you have a few messages or newsletters ready, and the service does the rest for you. You can concentrate on all the other facets of your business, or go on holiday for that matter. This is super-delegating! Your family will love your for it, as it gives you more time with them.

2. Gather Data Day-Long

An email automatic responder service is on call 24/7, ready to compile lists of prospects. As your leads give their permission for this gathering of details, it is a win-win situation. You are slowly building an absolutely targeted prospect list that will give you exponential growth in your virtual real estate’s value.

3. Counting The Clicks

With every discount or special offer, you can include a link in the message. This enables the email automatic responder service to track the clicks. You can therefore keep a close eye on your stats, without becoming involved in the process. You will be able to form a picture of what is effective, and what should be skipped next time. The accuracy with which you can keep track of the results will help you to have your finger firmly on the pulse of your business.

4. Market Without Making A Move

As soon as you have set up a series of messages or newsletters, the service takes over. The messages are dispatched at regular intervals without your input. All those follow-ups can be used for marketing, even though you are out of the equation. You have no tracking and no paper work. The autoresponder marketing machine kicks into action, bringing in new leads and transforming them into loyal clientele. Best of all, you can make sure that each client is addressed personally. This doesn’t have to be mass-mailing.

5. Natty Newsletters

This is your chance to put on your designing hat and play editor. The service has facilities you can use to come up with tempting looking material. Your clients won’t be able to resist the deals and will have to take a peek at what you offer. Every lead in the database will receive his or her special message at a specified date. Imagine what a time-saver this professional service can be.

6. Energize Existing Lists

Even if you have your own, existing list of leads, this is no problem. Your new system will easily and seamlessly incorporate these prospects into your new list. If you want to give a section of the leads list special treatment, your wish is their command. The email automatic responder service will send out what you want, when you want it, to whom you want.

Author: WebAdjust.com - Also read 14 Secrets Behind Aweber Email AutoResponder’s Unlimited Lead Generation Success. Also: Don’t miss the How-To Guide To Ebook Publishing. Copyright: Rika Susan

Tips for Getting Your Website Up and Running Smoothly

10 2007 Monday

By Tony D. Baker in Webmasters

Getting a website set up is one of the most basic things any business has to do. You might think that it’s as easy as buying a domain and hiring a tech guy to throw something up there, but that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. With today’s digital society, your website may very well be people’s first introduction to your business, and you don’t want to give them the wrong impression.

Here are a few tips making a smooth entrance online, rather than throwing a page up online for all the world to see.

Look at the competition
You probably looked at the competition in your area before you set up your business. It’s important to see what the market has to offer and understand what sets you apart. Now, it’s time to check out what they’re doing online for the same reasons. See what you like and don’t like about their pages. Compile a list of things you can adapt or do differently for your own site.

Get examples together
They say when you’re decorating a house, you should go through magazines and rip out pictures that you like. It helps you find your style, and gives you something to go from when you’re actually shopping. That’s the same idea with websites. Find sites that have a setup you like, or find examples of designs that you feel would go well with a visual image for your company. Make a portfolio of ideas to show to your web designer, so that they’ll know generally what you’re looking for.

Finding a designer
Chances are you know how to use the Internet, but you’re a little fuzzy on the details about actually putting a web page together and getting it up and running. That’s where a designer comes in. When you’re looking for a web designer, ask for a portfolio or examples of previous work and make sure they mesh with your company image. If you want a mature look for your site, don’t hire somebody who primarily has a cartoony feel in their previous work.

Also, listen to designers when they make suggestions regarding the website. They’re familiar with what looks good and what will register well with customers, so lend an ear to their input.

Keep your feel consistent
All your marketing materials, from your website and blog to your ads and business cards, should have a similar feel. You don’t want to send mixed messages with your company, so keep a consistent design in mind when you’re developing your materials.

Developing content
You can’t have a website without something to put on it, right? The content you put up can include pictures, audio, video and keyword-rich copy. A mission statement and “about us” page are always good ideas, as well as a searchable list of products you offer, or a detailed list of services.

Make sure somebody goes over your written copy with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that the spelling, punctuation and grammar rules that you haven’t thought about since grade school are followed.

This is just a brief overview of things you need to consider before you start designing your website, but they’re all important. You want to give the right first impression with your site, so take the time to make sure it’s top-notch.

The Art of Website Maintenance

09 2007 Friday

By Erin Ferree in Webmasters

Now that you’ve designed and launched your website, you have a powerful marketing tool for your business. But, your website is only as useful as the content is current. The process of keeping the content on your site current is called website maintenance, and it’s important to keep both visitors and search engines supplied with new information. Just like regular maintenance on your car, you have to make changes on your website every few months to make sure that things run smoothly.

If you update the content on your website on a regular basis, potential clients will be drawn back to your site to find out “what’s new”. The search engines pay visits to websites in their queue regularly. The catch is that you’ll stay in the queue only if you update your site regularly. If the search engines visit your site several times in a row, and don’t find anything new, they may decide not to come back-which can be a blow to your search engine rankings.

So, when is it appropriate to update your website? You don’t want to waste time and money nitpicking at your site if you don’t have updates of real value to add. You should update your site if you’ve:

Grown your skills. Have you gotten a new accreditation? New licensing? Improved your skills? Any change in your skill set is a great reason to update your website-and your potential clients-with your new capabilities.
Expanded your products or services. Do you have a new offering? Add it to your website and start making new sales in that area.
Completed a successful project. If you’ve just finished a project, include it on your website. Create an online portfolio, add a case study-build a section on your website to use as a place to show the world your success.
Gotten more testimonials, or added to your client list. Including more feedback on your offering helps to build your credibility. Be sure to get a testimonial from each of your successful client projects. Updating your testimonials regularly will also show clients who have visited your site a few times that your offerings are “up to snuff”.
Written an article. Writing articles is a great way to keep your website up-to-date and to put more content on your site. Search engines love content-rich sites, and visitors will love to see the new information. So, if you write articles to educate your clients and promote your business, be sure to place them on your website as well. They’re likely to be full of keywords related to your area of specialty, which will help your ranking in the search engines.
Press releases. You should post all press releases and other information you publish about your company to your website. You never know who may be visiting, and you may get written up for your accomplishments.
Changes in your business. Have you hired someone? Changed your business structure, and you’re now required to notify the public of that? If so, you should probably review your website and evaluate how you can add that information.
Yearly check-ups. You should do a basic check on your site at least once a year, to make sure that the content is current. Some things to check on include:
Your copyright statements should be updated yearly
Test and validate your links, to ensure that they still work
Your time references should be changed. If your “About” page says how many years you’ve been in business, this is the time to change that!
Your pricing and offerings-do you have new products or services? Have your prices increased over the past year?

Spotlight any major updates on your home page as well, so that people will learn of those updates as soon as they enter your site. The search engines will also discover the new update as soon as they enter your home page if you leave a bit of information, with a link to the full story, on the home page. That will act as a breadcrumb for the engine to follow-the engines will follow your link to learn more about it.

Any of these reasons, and dozens of others, are great reasons to make changes to your site. If you make keeping your website current a priority, it will pay off with better search engine rankings and increased sales and leads through your website.

Once you’ve decided to make your changes, the next choice is how to go about doing that. There are two steps involved in maintaining your site:

First, decide whether you prefer to edit your content on paper or online. This can be done in a couple of ways. You can start by printing the pages that have outdated information and then updating that information on paper first. Or, you can copy and paste the outdated content from your website into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word and then edit that file on your computer.
After you have updated your text content you can choose either to make the changes yourself or to hire a web designer to make the changes. There are several tools that you can use to make changes to your site yourself. We recommend an easy-to-use tool called Macromedia Contribute. It’s fairly inexpensive, its simple to set up and learn, and it allows you to back up to older versions of your site if you make mistakes.

We suggest that you use this tool to make only simple text changes. More complicated changes-for example, to the overall design or navigation-are more difficult to make, and having a professional make those changes will save you energy and frustration.

If you are comfortable with a more complicated software program, then we recommend a professional-grade tool such as Dreamweaver. With a better software package, you’ll be able to make some of the more complicated changes yourself.

By building more-and more current-information into your website, you will also begin to build trust with your potential clients, since they will have a snapshot of what’s currently happening in your business and available to them. Your website can go a long way towards making sure that your online prospects know, like, and trust you-which can lead to more sales from your website.

Author: Erin Ferree is a brand identity and marketing design strategist who creates big visibility for small businesses. Through her customized marketing and brand identity packages, Erin helps her clients design effective websites that help them extend their brands, bring in new clients and make sales. http://www.elf-design.com

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