Online Shopping Guide

10 Internet Business Rules to Grow Your Online Income

Here are 10 simple Internet Marketing Rules to Live by. Print them. Post them to your desk. Use them everyday.

1. Invest Small When Starting Anything New.
Always invest small when starting out. It’s possible any ad you run may lose money. Always keep your risks and investment small whenever you’re starting a new type of advertising. Even if you had that top level copywriter write your ad, not everything they write will be a home run. It may need a few changes to produce the results you want. The market you’re advertising to may not be perfect. There is no such thing as a “Sure Thing.”
2. Test Everthing.
Only one expert is right, and it’s not me. It’s your own personal test results. Test headlines. Test the length of your ad copy. Test audio and video on your sales page. Test a squeeze page before visitors get to the sales site. Constantly run 2 ads on Adwords for every ad group. Test a “try before you buy” offer. Test telephone follow-up. Quit blindly following gurus and test everything!
3. Be Unique.
Don’t ever be a me-too business. Take a look at everyone in your marketplace. What is different about you from them? Here’s a quick exercise. Write down all the benefits someone gets from your product or service. Now cross off all the benefits they can also get from other people’s products and services. What’s left? If nothing is left, you may need to rethink or modify what you offer to provide something unique in your marketplace.
4. Target Your Ads Only to Buyers.
You’ve chosen your niche, but do you write your ads to all your visitors. No. You will never achieve a 100% buying rate. Much more common is 1%…and 10% is extremely high (possible at times with strong follow-up). This means at least 90% of your website visitors are NOT your target audience even though they came to your site. You’re not writing to them. It doesn’t matter if those people like what you write at all. You’re writing only to the BUYERS…that 1 to 10% of your unique visitors who will take action.
5. Develop a Backend From the Beginning.
You should already have a basic idea or outline for your next offer before your first one is done. If your first product is an ebook or CD, what will you offer next? You may start your backend by offering joint venture deals and affiliate offers from others. The money is any business comes from repeat purchases and backend sales. In fact, I’d never want to be in any business where I HAD to make money from one product. It destroys your marketing ability. If your competitor can break even or even lose money on their advertising, how can you compete if you have to make a living off the same offer?
6. Your Network Determines Your Net Worth
First heard that expression from Mark Victor Hansen. Strategic Alliances, social networking, referrals, viral marketing, etc. are the key to building your business online. Going it alone is a recipe for failure. In most businesses, affiliates make up 50% to 75% of sales. Incoming links from other sites is the key to search engine optimization. Find ways to serve the other top players in your niche. Network. Mastermind. Grow together…even with competitors.
7. Don’t Restrict Your Business to Internet Only.
You’re not an Internet business. You’re an Internet based business. Develop your business model with both Internet and offline strategies. Follow-up on customer by phone. Here’s a quick tip - call people who just purchased from you to thank them for their order and also offer them something else at a discount price right now (I’ve seen people increase profits by 40% from that alone). Send direct mail to your customers. Rent a targeted mailing list and send postcards to drive people to sign-up for your list. Use offline publicity and networking to generate leads.
8. Build your Relationship with Your Lists.
Yes, I said “lists,” not “list.” Concentrate on educating your list members…both with good content and about your products/services. Use online follow-up methods such as email and be willing to use direct mail. Send thank you cards to JV partners and customers. Run a teleconference where you meet with your customers or prospects. Create a blog. Put a face on your company and let them get to know you as a person.
9. Focus on Your Gifts.
Focus your time and attention on what you’re best at. There’s dozens of ways to market your site. Concentrate on the ones that most fit with your style and skillset. If you hate writing, then don’t use writing as your primary advertising method. Or hire out the writing. Figure out what skills you have…and focus on those. Outsource the rest to others. If you try to force yourself to be just like “Guru #1,” it’s simply going to be an exercise in frustration. You’re unique. Build a unique business suited to you.
10. Plan for the Long Haul.
I’m sure you’ve been told about instant riches overnight. Quit trying for that. And quit trying to jump on the “new thing.” Pick a business and work on it. Yes, I said work…that dirty four letter word so many people hate. Things might no go right when you first start. You might have to modify a few elements of your presentation. You might have to change your product. To be successful in this business requires you have a backbone and stick to it even when things don’t go your way! Develop at least a one year plan with daily actions to push you to success. You’ll make modifications along the way, but at least you have a basic roadmap of where you’re going.

By Terry Dean

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Online Business Email Marketing Affordable Internet Marketing Technique

Email marketing is labeled as a killer method when it comes to effective low-cost Internet marketing endeavors. This is because it is the most widely-used and has the best reputation in bringing targeted traffic to websites. It is used to stay in touch with your customers or prospective customers, send out invitations, or make special offers.

It’s as easy as writing an e-mail that may be in a form of a newsletter or a plain announcement, and sending that to as many targeted recipients as possible. However, there’s an ideal way of going about it. Email marketing is not just about writing any email that you will be sending to anybody. To clarify that, here are some simple tips in doing email marketing the best way possible.
1. Join the “Can Spam” campaign.
Email marketing is not at any rate tantamount to spamming. You are not supposed to send information that your email list will not have any valuable use for.
2. Make your email list open it.
Your email might get lost together with the hundreds of emails that inbox owners are confronted with everyday. Improve your subject line by using extra white space creatively, adding text symbols, starting each word with a capital letter, asking compelling questions, not making any unbelievable claims, and not using the word FREE.
3. Keep it real.
Not including any too good to be true statements is not only applicable to your subject line. Your email content must never embody any promise your business can’t keep. Make your offer genuinely of value to your recipients.
4. Don’t go too low.
If you inform your customers regarding discounts, minimal discounts are not that effective compared with substantial discounts. But never offer discounts that are lower than your profit. It will defeat the purpose of this email marketing effort.
5. Make it eventful.
It’s not about contradicting the advice that you should keep an email short and sweet. This tip is on including seminars, conferences and other events in your email. Businesses that require training benefit much from this method. With these RSVP-requiring emails, repetition is important. Just make sure that an ample interval is considered before sending out a reminder email.
6. Post news.
Sending newsletters and postcards provides useful information for your subscribers. These are the best forms of reaching out to your customers or prospects. You should keep the information short, simple and direct to the point for this feat to be effective.

By: Tim Yu

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Online Business Top Search Engines

We studied how search engines work. An integral part of any Internet Marketing or Search Engine Optimization campaign is to know exactly which search engines to target. This section discusses some of the top search engines today.

Google
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the Internet’s largest index of web pages in a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named “Googlebot”, crawls the web and provides updates to Google’s index about once a month.
Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in returned searches.

Yahoo
Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the Internet today, and the site went live in August of 1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited directory, and provides secondary search results using Google.
Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as far as web directories and search engines go. Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your site. Even if you pay it doesn’t guarantee you will get listed.
Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is “reviewed” by a Yahoo! editor, and if approved will appear in the next index update.

AltaVista
Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named ’scooter’ accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista’s robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever spider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest search engines on the net today, next to Google.
It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your entire site, although the past few months scooter hasn’t been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good amount of time to index your site depending on how large your site is.
AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index, however they do pull the top 5 results of each search from Overture (formerly Goto).

Inktomi
Inktomi’s popularity grew several years ago as they powered the secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Since then, Yahoo as switched to using Google as their secondary search and backend database, however Inktomi is just as popular now, as they were several years ago, if not more so. Their spiders are named “Slurp”, and different versions of Slurp crawls the web many different times throughout the month, as Inktomi powers many sites search results. There isn’t much more to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy weight on Title and description tags, and will rarely deep crawl a site. Slurp usually only spider’s pages that are submitted to its index.
Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these are America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.

Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet today, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named “T-Rex”, crawls the web and provides updates to the Lycos index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results for Lycos in addition to its own database.
The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags to heavily, instead it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages returned in results. The URL, META title, text headings, and word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content. However, any page that isn’t at least 75 words in content is not indexed.

Excite
Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to be a fairly popular search engine, until companies such as Google seemed to have dominated the search engine market. As of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL’s, and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite search results, you need to be either listed with Overture or Inktomi.

Looksmart
Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart’s results appear in many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others.
Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site is generally non-business related, you can submit your site to Zeal (Looksmart’s sister site ), or if you are a business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Either method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner sites if you are approved.
Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved for listing it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and its partner sites.

AOL Search
America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web search results and accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending relationships with pay-for-performance service Overture Services and Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider of nearly three years.

By: Tim Yu

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Online Business - Classified Ads

Offline, classified ads are cheap little adverts that appear at the back of newspapers or magazines. They work well if you’re trying to sell your old Ford Escort or you’re looking for a new home for your tatty sofa, but they’re not too profitable for businesses aiming to keep repeat sales coming in.

That’s offline. Online, things are a little different. But not hugely different.
I post adverts on classified columns, but I don’t expect to make a lot of money from them. What I do expect though is an opportunity to test my headlines and ad copy before I start spending hard cash on AdWords, text links and sales letters.
That’s why I don’t bother with the dollar ads. If I’m going to spend marketing money, I’d rather give it to a search engine than a classified ads column. The return on sales just doesn’t justify it.
But there are places where you can place free ads, and you can actually do this on some of the really big sites like AOL and Yahoo. Even if I don’t make many sales, the fact that I’m getting my product in front of so many people certainly won’t do me any harm. Occasionally, I’ll post an ad on one of these and monitor how many replies I get. Normally people will send an email to you and ask “what is the product you selling, how good is it? and Is it real?

By: Tim Yu

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Online Business Banner Glossary

* Banner Ad — A graphic ad linked to an advertiser’s website. These usually run across the top of the page but can also run up the page (”skyscrapers”). Banners are usually limited by size.
* Banner Views –The number of times a banner is seen by users. This is usually the same as “page views,” but counts the number of times the banner is actually downloaded rather than the number of times the page is downloaded. Some users click away before the banner finishes loading.
* Clicks/ Click Throughs — Banners are operated by clicking the cursor over them. Not too surprisingly these responses are called “clicks” or “click throughs.”
* Click Through Rate (CTR) — The percentage of users who see the banner and click on it.
* Conversion Rate –The percentage of people who visit your site and actually give you money. The higher the better!
* Cookies — Small files placed on a user’s computer. They’re used for all sorts of reasons and by all sorts of sites. Banner ads use them to make sure the user hasn’t seen the banner recently, which banner brought them to the advertiser’s site, and even which adverts they’ve seen recently.
* CPM — “Cost Per Mille.” The amount you pay for every thousand times a banner is shown–the usual way of charging for banners.
* Hits — The number of times a server receives a request for a Web page or an image. Not a great way to measure interest. One page can have lots of images and get lots of hits, even if it’s only seen once. Often, people will say “hits” when they really mean “page views” or “impressions.”
* Page Impressions or Page Views –The number of times a Web page has been requested by the server. Much more accurate than hits: each view is a potential customer looking at a page of your site. But not necessarily a different customer…
* Unique Users — The people who download a Web page, counted by IP address. You want to bring lots of users to your site so that you can create a broad customer base. The same user clicking on a banner a dozen times could cost you money without increasing your sales. Most reputable sites will check the IP address of the person clicking on a link and only count it once in a 24-hour period. If a site doesn’t do this, don’t advertise with them.

By: Tim Yu

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