Work Yourself Up!

Take a Genuine Interest in Your Readers

When you check the stats you are always looking to see how many unique visitors you have to your website. To see those numbers go up every month, you need a method for attracting new readers. This same method will also keep current readers coming back for more. So, what is it?

Who are you?

Every person wants to know that they matter to others. They can matter to their families, friends and even the people they do business with. Why do you think barber shops and hair salons are so popular? The business is based on delivering a finished product AND building a relationship.

As an online business owner, you readers want to know that their presence matters. They have come to you looking for something. Again, what is it?

It would be naive to think that each person that visits your website or blog is there because of you. They may not have known your name before they clicked on your link in the search results. After they leave your site, they many never remember your name again unless you do something to change that.

What do you want?

You have interests. You started your online business because of an interest or a passion for something. Your readers also have passions. The informative content that you supply could be the final link to someone realizing the dream of entrepreneurship, home ownership or even buying a new car. The best way to find out what you readers want is to take an interest in their likes and dislikes.

Now, your website is about the business that you are building, but knowing something about the people who are getting you there can help your business to evolve. For instance, you may provide information about how to stay organized in business and in life, but the majority of your readers are interested is personal coaching. Starting a personal coaching line of products will meet their needs in a new and more focused way because you took the time to find out about their interests.

How do I help you?

Here are a few ways that you can get in touch with your reader's interests:

- Surveys
- Offer contests for guest blogging spots
- Create a "reader spotlight" or a "customer spotlight" on your website
- Send out feedback emails with purchases

Readers have interests too and they are important for you to know. Now that you know who your readers are and how you can help them, use those tools to find out what they want. Then, give it to them! You'll see an increase in readers, customers and sales because you took the time to find out what they needed and provided it to them.

How to Trick Out Your Entire Website Using Stats

Your website is a gold mine. It can take your business from so-so to wow. All you need to do is learn how to use your statistical information to help you get it done.

Website stats tell you a variety of things. You can find out where your products are booming and busting. You can learn what visitors like and dislike about your site. Are your keywords working? That can be explained also.

The sum total of your website is not content. While content is still king when it comes to providing useful information, it is just one aspect that can be optimized on your site. So much has been written about keyword optimization in content that some might wrongly believe it is the only important part of website optimization.

That is what we are really talking about here - website optimization. Start with the content but don't leave it there. Search engines bots will crawl the entire page for keywords not just your content. Let's take a look at other options for tricking out that website and making it sell itself.

1. Anchor Text - Anchor text is the text that is displayed over hyperlinks on your content. If your article refers to information found elsewhere on your site, don't just say "click here" to find more information, use keywords from that page as your anchor text. Not only are you getting credit for the keyword but it links to another page that also is keyword optimized (or it will be once you are done).

2. Picture Text - People love pictures especially on websites and shopping carts. It can be a big mistake to buy sight unseen. Each picture can have a tag associated with it. When someone runs across the picture with their mouse, they can again see relevant keywords for that page. 

3. Links to Other Website Pages - One technique for creating your webpage is to list what services you offer or what your product can do on the homepage. That homepage can be doing more. If you have dedicated a separate page to each unique feature, place those links on the homepage as well. In your list of product features, use keyword-rich anchor text to describe them and have each description link to a different page. Search engines love that.

Are you getting the idea? Your website can be more exciting to the search engine crawlers with just a few changes.

Find out What Your Readers are Thinking with Surveys

Have you ever received one of those surveys in the mail after visiting a store or having a surgical procedure? One of the most prominent questions is "What did you like and what can we improve on?" It is worded differently in each one you receive but the point is that they want to know your opinion of the job they are doing. Use surveys to get in touch with your readers.

Surveys are quite helpful. Anyone can sell a product online and get a few sales, but not everyone can tap into what their readers want to create lifelong customers. This would mean repeat business which is better than one-time hits.

The Point of Surveys

The point of a survey is to gauge the reader's opinion of something. The information is useful for creating things like:

- Better customer service protocols
- New products
- New programs
- New services
- Improve sales

But, you must do something with them for all of this to happen. Don't just let those metrics go to waste. Some sites use survey companies to distribute and tally website surveys and polls. It makes the job easier for you and they will also give you a breakdown of what they discovered with the surveys.

Now the rest is up to you. Start by creating a spreadsheet that includes all of the responses given. It would be best to use a survey that has lettered choice instead of just write-in boxes. Now, rank the responses. Use this as a framework for coming up with ways to try and make changes in answer to what your readers would like to see.

Reader Response

You may have to do a few surveys to get readers to take them seriously. As an online customer you know that sometimes surveys are simply for show. The companies who ask for your input never do anything about the suggestions that you give. But, all of them are not like that.

This is where the relationship building begins with your readers on this front. Try to change one thing at a time. If you can, bring attention to it so that readers know you took them seriously. In the future more people will take the surveys and help you to make your business a success.

Give it a try. Your readers are as ready to help you as you are to help them. After all, you can't always read their mind and if you can give them what they want they'll be more apt to stick with you for the long haul instead of finding someone else who can.

What Site Stats Can Tell You

Why do some websites do well and others just crest for a while and then sink under the surf? It could be the big picture view. Website statistics can teach you a lot about how your online business is doing. Take a minute and look at those stats.

Getting Set Up

When you roll out your website, it is going to be important to monitor your progress. You can't visit the site every day. You may want to but there are other tasks to tend to. Besides, if you automate most everything, your site will be able to run itself with very little interference from you except for site upkeep and adding new content and products.

This will require a well thought out plan on your part. Basic to that plan is a way to measure what goes on during the course of a day on your site. People visit, read articles, click on ads, view products and use the shopping cart. Each of these activities will help you to determine how your business will proceed in the months and years ahead.

You can add files to your web page yourself to capture certain stats. An easier step would be to get involved with a website stats program to do the work for you. Choose something like Google Analytics. If you already use other Google services to help promote your business then you are already familiar with the variety of tools they can offer you.

Google Analytics lets you analyze several things:

- Traffic
- Marketing strategies (ads)
- Keywords
- Conversion rates

This is only a sampling. You sign up and the program will walk you through the rest of what you need to get be ready for business.

Making Changes

Now that you have a way to track changes on your website, it's time to see how they can help you over not using anything at all.

- Improve Keyword Optimization - The keywords that you decided to use may all not perform well. Using stats on page views and visitors, you can tell which of your keywords is bringing in the most traffic. For the ones that are not, consider exchanging keywords on that web page and see how that might improve sales.

- Improve your Content Offerings - The low number of page views for a specific page could signify that people aren't finding your content on the first page of search engine results. Take another look at your content. Is your keyword density within the right range? Are you using too many? Search engines don't look kindly to keyword stuffing and will not rank your work favorably. With content, provide useful information using only as many words as you need to get your point across.

What are your site stats telling you? Remember to change one parameter at a time to find the right mix that will help your website succeed.

Follow the Problem

A well known catch phrase from a popular movie is “follow the money.” For Internet marketing, the best advice is “follow the problem.”  The most effective online products are those that address problems.

How to break into Internet marketing. How to lose weight.  How to avoid foreclosure in a down market. These are problems that drive people to search engines desperately looking for answers.  How do you know what people want and need to know?

You have to research and listen into the online conversations in your niche. Start with keyword research for your topic.  Check in with Google Labs and find out what the trend of online interest is based on up to the minute searches.  Over days or weeks, you can see when the trend shifts and a new hot topic rises.

Another expanded Google tool, the Google Talk Labs, lets you get involved in conversations about trend topics. You have a chance to interact and possibly influence the conversation. At the same time, you want to drop into several discussion forums that focus on your niche.

Don’t be a lurker, be involved. You can use a different name - just make sure that you contribute to the conversation. Nothing will get you barred from a forum faster than showing up with a sales pitch instead of being a participant.

Once you make several posts and join the conversation, then you earn the to right to offer suggestions or recommendations. That’s another reason why you want to use a name other than your own name so that you aren’t obviously recommending your own site.

When you get a hint of a problem from comments in the forum, be bold and ask, “Does anybody have a good resource for how to . . . ” If no one has a suggestion, there’s a product waiting for you to develop.

You can also get a feel for problems by scanning major blogs like Technorati and Boing Boing. Subscribe to blogs that are popular with followers of your niche interest. Chances are they will comment on those blogs.

If you find that there’s a product to address the problem, take a look at it. What can you do to improve, simplify, expand or add a new twist to that answer? Is it a high priced product? Then you need to develop something at a slightly lower price point.

Is it too cheap and vague? That’s your cue to add more substance, get endorsements from reviewers and position your product as the premium solution. Millions are made online by solving simple problems where the public is using the ‘net to find a solution.

Get Green Online

The renewed interest in green living opens enormous opportunities for online marketers. With a constant stream of news about global warming, damage to the rain forests and escalating oil prices more people are searching on line to find “green” answers that make life easier and better without damaging the environment.

Cater to this green living revolution and you’ll have a wealth of product possibilities. Start by searching ClickBank and PLR article sites for “Green living” topics. Whether you find eBooks or a set of articles that can be combined into eBooks, you want to provide information on how the average person can go green. 

You can also take some of the ideas and create videos or podcasts to explain the methods. Many people live in housing built without green living in mind. Show them how to adapt their current home with simple and cost effective means.

Search for products that are “green friendly” and low to moderately priced to go with your low cost green theme information products.  Become an affiliate marketer for these products. Some excellent green products come from entrepreneurs who may not know about affiliate online marketing. 

Explain to them how you can help each other. Offer to add some free articles or an eBook to their website. You’ll open up new markets where both of you benefit financially. Create a “green” website.

You can even find web providers who claim to use mostly green equipment. Thinkhost.com uses wind and solar energy to power of its server capacity, recycles, sets up commuting plans for employees and donates generously to environmental causes. 

You can brag about this hosting service and make money as an affiliate marketer. While you’re at it, borrow from their concept about giving back. Designate a featured product on your site and pledge to donate 15% of each purchase to a nationally or internationally known environmental protection organization.

Use your information to create a “Green Home” mini course. Offer the 5 lessons as an eBook or on video. Each lesson is a chance to promote your other products. Connect with as many environmental product sites as you can get to add your free course.

Do the keyword research on various environmentally friendly products. You’ll find so many options - from hybrid cars to bamboo fiber clothing (which is soft and luxurious to wear). There are big ticket items such as home sized windmills, solar panels, solar water heaters, low flow showers or toilets and building products. 

Increase volume sales potential with eco-chic clothing, sustainable gardening, reviews of energy conserving appliances, low VOC paints and other practical ways to live “green.” This is one evergreen niche that you can feel good promoting!

Go for the Online Gold

Sports have a universal appeal.  Whether you play football with feet or hands, there are crazed fans who eat, sleep and breathe the sport.  Sports minded online marketers can cash in during the season for their favorite sports.

To score big in this market, you need winning plays and excellent timing. In the United States, football season captures a huge fan base from the college teams and bowl games to the pro teams culminating in the massive appeal of the Super Bowl.

In Europe and South America, soccer matches and the World Cup have similar appeal. Months before the “big game,” you have almost seven months to market sports memorabilia, fan gear and snacks for game watching.

Speaking of watching, those die-hard sports fans want the latest electronics. You can market reviews of new plasma TVs, DLPs and projectors. You can also sell information products that explain how to install your own wall mounted TV or satellite system.

Then get an affiliate connection with a cable system, satellite service or electronics company to make money off products you review or recommend. But that’s not all - make a list of other major sports events that attract huge attention such as the World Series (baseball), Wimbledon (tennis), Master’s and British Open (golf), NASCAR (racing) and Grand Prix (formula one racing), Boston Marathon (running), Ironman (tri-athlete) and Tour de France (bicycling) just to name a few.

Each of these major events is preceded by qualifying events, which extend the online marketing opportunities for months before the major event. For each sport, use drill down niche research to find specific marketing options, products and affiliate markets.

Then there’s the world wide interest grabber – the Olympics. As soon as the next Olympic site and marketing theme is announced by the host city, you swing into action with online marketing offers.

You can easily get the jump on host city marketing by a year or more if you work fast. Be careful with logos and trademarks for the Olympics and other major sports events, but you can work around that or connect with authorized affiliate products.

After the flag goes down, the trophy is awarded and medals earned, be ready to flaunt the winners to the fans and console the losing fans.  Have some products with the winners’ names ready to launch within minutes of learning the outcome.

If you have Super Bowl winning theme products, you need a set for each team and a set of “maybe next year” for both teams. Don’t wait a day or two to get these ready or you’ll miss the first wave of buying while fans are riding high or crying loud.

How to Create a Best Selling Infomation Product

Just about anyone who has spent some time in the internet marketing field understands how fantastically profitable information products can be. However, creating an information product and actually making money with that information product are two totally different things.

Creating a profitable and successful information product can be quite a challenge to the average internet marketer. To actually be successful you need to find a topic with a lot of demand, research and write the material, craft a convincing sales letter, create eye catching graphics, and finally develop a marketing strategy for your finished product. All of this can be a little daunting to say the least.

By far the most common mistake that info marketers make is picking a topic that is of interest to them personally. Unfortunately, just because you are passionate about something doesn’t many that many other people share your same passion. Being knowledgeable and passionate about a given subject is certainly helpful but it is not as important as the demand for that topic.

For your info product to sell it needs to be about a subject that people will happily pay money for. Basically, most people will gladly hand over money for information that promises to solve some kind of vexing problem. The more serious the problem is that your info product addresses, the more money people will ultimately be willing to pay.

Actually researching the topic of your info product is probably the easiest part of creating an info product. This is the information superhighway after all and you can find information on just about every conceivable topic. You should start your research by looking at information products that are similar to the one you are working on. In many cases your information product will end up being an improved version of an existing information product.

This is done in the business world all of the time and is a much more effective strategy than developing a product out of thin air. If a particular information product is already doing well, you should have no problems marketing an improved version of that same product.

Once your info product is finished you need to convince people that your product is actually worth buying. The way to do this is by crafting a dynamite sales letter and throwing in some high quality graphics. It takes years of experience to be able to write and effective sales letter and unless you happen to be a seasoned copy writer, it’s best to hire a professional to write your sales letter for you.

The same goes for your graphics as well. You should not attempt these things unless you happen to have the proper experience. You can find affordable copy writers and graphic designers by looking at elance.com, guru.com, and even the warriorforum.com.

Your marketing strategy is how you actually plan on getting the word out about your info product. The easiest way to get the word out about your info product is seek out joint ventures with other internet marketers who happen to have access to the kind of buyers your info product appeals to.

The Warrior Forum, for example, actually has a section devoted purely to those are seeking out joint ventures. In order to engage in a joint venture you will need to create an affiliate program for your info product. This is how your JV partner will make money off of the deal. Don’t be discouraged if your first few info products are a flop. If you stick to it there’s a good chance you will eventually create a best selling info product.

Finding Products to Sell on Ebay

I have been a member of the Ebay community since 1998. In that time I have bought and sold hundreds of different items in just about every conceivable category. In fact, at one time I  actually sold comedy CDs because I had got a great deal on a bulk shipment. I’m firmly convinced that Ebay is the single best place to sell a product online.

The problem confronted by many would be sellers, is trying to find a product they can actually sell on Ebay. There may be an outrageous amount number of hungry buyers lurking on Ebay but you have to find the right product with enough demand in order to make a killing.

Electronics are one of the biggest categories listed on Ebay and at any one time there are literally hundreds of thousands of different electronics items listed for sale. Electronics include things like mp3 players, cell phones, and computers. Just about any adult who lives in an advanced industrial society has some interest in electronics. Therefore, the demand for electronics is huge and shows no signs of decreasing any time soon. Selling electronics can be very profitable if you are able to buy items in bulk. Believe it or not the best place to purchase bulk electronics is Ebay.

Many sellers on Ebay will list electronic items in bulk quantities like 10, 20, or 30. With a $10 subscription fee to Ebay’s market research tool you can easily determine the average sold price for each individual unit. When buying in bulk you are ideally hoping to make a profit of 20%-30% per unit. What’s nice about buying in bulk on Ebay is that you don’t have to worry about getting scammed and losing your money so long as the seller’s feedback is top notch.

When buying in bulk from other online vendors, particularly vendors located in Asia, the chance of getting scammed is very high. You can find wholesale lots in just about any category by clicking on the category on the main page and then clicking on “wholesale lots” within each subsection.

Baby clothes are yet another hot selling item on Ebay. The baby clothing category has an unusually high Sell Thru Rate (STR) which means that the number of auctions which are completed successfully versus the number that don’t is above average. Take a look at the completed listings and see for yourself.

As with electronics, baby clothing can be purchased in bulk right on Ebay. You can also purchase used baby clothing by visiting your local thrift stores and discount chains. What’s really nice about selling baby clothing is that you can create an entire business model based on selling nothing but baby and children’s items.

Think about it. If you sell baby clothing it is a certainty that your customers will need more clothing in the future because babies and young children grow. By building a targeted mailing list of your customers based on their purchase history you can send out emails when you have new items that may be of interest to them. If someone needs baby clothes they will eventually need toddler clothes and so on. By building a list you can supply all of your customers needs and make a small fortune in the process.                   

How to Use YouTube for Market Research

Online video has grown in recent years to become one of the most popular methods of self expression and business promotion online. The result has been that a huge network of video sharing sites has emerged where users can create and share videos with one another. By far the most popular of these sites is Youtube which was purchased by Google back in October of 2006 for a whopping $1.65 billion.

Internet marketers have recognized the popularity of videos and regularly use video as a means of promoting their business and capturing more sales. What many Internet marketers don’t know is that video sharing sites like YouTube are a very good way to perform market research.

The search function on YouTube is very similar to the search function contained within a normal search engine. However, the search feature used by YouTube is much less sophisticated than the complex algorithms used by the search engines. This is really great news for video marketers because it means you can easily dominate the Youtube search results.

Before you submit your video you’ll need to do a little keyword research like you would if you were optimizing a page for the search engines. Once you have selected some keywords that you would like to target add some of the keywords to your video’s tags and title.

If you have done everything right, your video should be able to pull in some really nice traffic to you website. But the feedback you get from channel viewers can actually be just as important as getting traffic. Market feedback is a classic direct marketing technique that is achieved in real life by using costly things like polls and surveys.

Your videos actually give you the chance to pull in tons of market feedback without spending a dime on polls or surveys. Market feedback allows to get a more precise glimpse of exactly what is that your target market wants and how much they are willing to pay for it. This information is priceless.

You will frequently receive video comments that tell you whether or not your video was interesting or helpful. Many times you will receive negative comments that will tell what you did wrong. Except for the comment spam that you will inevitable receive, almost all of the comments you receive will be useful to you.

The most ideal comments are those that request additional videos. These comments are your target market telling you exactly what they want! Offline businesses pay a small fortune for this kind of information. YouTube users readily offer up this kind of information to Internet marketers at no charge.

Online videos are a truly fantastic way to promote your business and get more traffic without spending a great deal of money. But remember that your video submissions can actually help you improve your existing marketing strategy and develop new product ideas.