Web Success Secret #4) Monetization Will Flow When All Steps Have Been Followed.

You may be a bit surprised to learn that monetization is the last of the 4 steps.  Many business owners position monetization as their first goal.  Everything they do from conception of the business is geared towards making money.  After all, that is the point of owning your own web business, right?

When I first learned of the four step approach to making successful web businesses, I was a bit skeptical.  I have never heard of such a risky business idea- think of making money as the last goal.  That sounded absurd to me! In all of my small business education the emphasis was on profit charts and balance sheets and projected annual returns.  Being online does change some things.  One of those things is how you start and run a long term and profitable business.

Following the process of starting a web business often involved very little capital.  The risk is typically much lower and the return on investment arrives in a shorter time span.  Because of this you have a unique advantage to allow the natural progression of your site visitors come into play.

Let’s back up a bit and review.  People search for information, not products, online.  They are not looking to spend money.  They type in their search query at the search engines.  Your site should be on the first page.  You should know how to provide a killer title and description that makes the potential visitor want to click on your site.

Once they are on your site, their objective has not changed.  They still want information.  So give it to them.  As you provide valuable content that satisfies your visitors, you should be developing trust and positioning yourself as the expert.  Make recommendations to your products or services. This is the natural progression of an online visitor.  They want information, they find you, they receive answers from you, they develop trust in you and think of you as an expert.  It is only when those criteria have been met that you gain customers.

Let me repeat that last line because it is the most important line in the entire 4 part series: it is only when the first three steps have been met that you earn income. The goods news is once you finish the first three steps (content, traffic, and pre-selling) you will continue to pull in hot, targeted traffic from the search engines month after month.  All of this traffic is totally free!  No advertising costs! Monetization naturally occurs.

There are a few things you can do to help increase your conversion rates:

- Only recommend 2-3 services or products.  Having more than this makes it difficult for your visitor to decide which is best for them.  It is also very difficult for you to recommend them all.

- Place graphics of your product or service on each page of your content website.  This allows visitors to see your offerings more than once.

- Write a monthly newsletter and provide excellent content.  Also provide a special on one of your services/products.

- Test everything- price points, graphics, sales page, etc.

As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.

Previous parts
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business- Part 1
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business- Part 2
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business- Part 3

Download Here The FREE eBook “Make Your Content PreSell” (139 pages!)… and learn all about how to optimize the content of your web site…

Web Success Secret #2) Without Traffic- What’s the Point?

Part 1 of this series really got down and dirty about content.  Content’s main focus is twofold- make your visitors happy and make search engines happy.  This article is all about making you happy!  Think of this as your starter guide to increasing traffic and building a profitable business.

Traffic can be summed up in 2 words- free and paid.  I consider all PPC (pay-per-click), ezine advertising, offline advertising, and paid directory submissions a form of paying for your traffic.  I also consider any project that takes up your time to be paid advertising.  After all in the business world time is money.  Paid advertising is not bad.  It just means that you are paying to receive traffic.

Free traffic is harder to attract, but it costs you absolutely no money.  Almost all free traffic is the result of surfers finding your site on the search engines.  We talked about using content as your ultimate search engine ranking booster in the last article.

Here are several ways to increase traffic.  Some are paid advertising options and others are totally free.

- Write articles and submit them to several niche websites.  Manually submitting articles to many websites can take a long time.  I use a submission service to do all my hard work.

- Post in forums.  Many forums will not allow you to market your product or services.  That’s totally understandable.  What I recommend doing is finding a really great forum that you can participant in.  When people have questions, provide top notch and comprehensive answers.  No selling.  Almost all forums allow you to post your website in your sig file.  Take advantage of that.

- Submit each page of your website to all major search engines.  Also submit each page to all major search engines whenever you make a change on that page.  Be careful with this one.  Each engine has very specific directions and rules about submission rules.  Be sure you do not spam!  Submit pages according to each engine’s guidelines.  I also use a submission service that does this for me at no additional cost.

- Create joint ventures with non-competing websites.  Work with a company that compliments your product or service.  Also be sure the joint venture is a win-win-win for you, the other company and your customers.  Joint ventures can be a pain to set up and complete, but well worth it if done correctly.

- Look into ezine advertising, web advertising and/or PPC.  Each method takes an initial investment and some time to learn, but can bring back traffic.  Personally I do not prefer this method to increase traffic because it’s “iffy” at best.

- Print your website name on all business correspondences.  This is a simple task, but one that is simple to do.  Add it to your email sig line, forum sig lines, letterhead and business cards.

- Create an atmosphere of amazing customer service.  This always leads to referrals from current clients.  The more referrals the more traffic!

The bottom line is without traffic your site is floating in a sea of doom.  No one is seeing your content or services.  Traffic is the lifeline of any business, and the rule of thumb is more traffic means more income.

This brings me to my last and final point about traffic.  Once you develop a nice flow of visitors you need to know specifics.  Where did those visitors come from?  How did they find you?  What pages are the most popular on your site?  What page did they enter into your site?  What page did they leave your site?  What keywords did they use to find you?  You must know your visitor inside and out!

As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.  Traffic analysis and search engine submissions can be very time consuming, but your hosting company should be providing most of these services to you free of charge. There are a small few that do this, but it is well worth the investigation.

Previous parts:
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business – Part 1

Click Here And Learn The Best Traffic Techniques For Your Web Site…

PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. Open source means that the source code is available to someone with proper access to the site, so that they can easily make changes. When the Internet was first getting started, most of the pages on websites were basic HTML documents. Meaning that when you visited a page (about.html, for example), you downloaded all of the content of the page into your browser.

How Do I Know if I have a PHP Site?

If you are visiting a site, and you see that the page name ends with .html, this means that the page is most likely a plain old HTML page. If the page name ends in .php, then the site is a php based site. Other dynamic programming languages include .jsp (Java Server Pages) or .asp (.NET or Active Server Pages). Occasionally you’ll see sites that end in .html that have dynamic code embedded in them, but this requires some tricks to accomplish on the server.

We have several sites that use static HTML pages and have great results. There are some pages that have dynamic content, but most of the pages are built in straight HTML. It’s great for search engine optimization, as some of those pages have been active for years. However, as the number of pages grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to update menu or navigation items, because it means you have to open each page, one at a time, and modify the contents.

Advantages of using PHP

PHP works a little differently. Instead of downloading the entire page (with the navigation, content and everything in one file), php allows you to embed programming code that isn’t displayed to the end user. This programming code allows you to tell the page, “Insert the top navigation here.” Or, “put the content for the page over there.”

PHP allows you to personalize a page, for example, or automatically detect that a user is coming into the site from a mobile device and display a different version of the site that is optimized for their Blackberry or iPhone. PHP keeps most of the code for the site “behind the scenes” so that the page that is displayed to the end user loads quickly and doesn’t require the browser to do processing work — the work is handled instead by the server.

PHP Is Ideal For Working With Databases

One of the biggest advantages of a programming language like PHP is that it allows you to easily interact with a database. If you’re unfamiliar with databases, think of a database as a souped-up form of an Excel spreadsheet. You have columns (i.e. page name, content, title) and rows. Rows typically would hold information that is organized by column headings.

PHP makes it easy to read information from a database, and then display information onto a web page. So, if you’ve ever used a site where you type in your zip code to find a store location near you, the system likely is taking your zip code, performing a database query (i.e. find all stores within 10 miles of the 80303 zip code) and display the results so that you can find your way. In order to do this, we have a geolocation database that allows us to tell the approximate distance between two zip codes.

You could do the same thing by building out a series of web pages that has each location. And while this is fine for three or four locations, as the number of locations increases, PHP allows you to automate the process.

Keep Content Organized

One of the ways we’ve been able to streamline the process of building websites is that we’ve standardized our process using our PageDirector content management system. There are many, many ways to build websites. Each designer seems to have a slightly different way of putting a site together. We are frequently asked to work on sites that other people have created, and in order to make simple changes to the content or navigation, we often have to dig around in the code to find where things are located. This takes time and isn’t very efficient. The PageDirector system, however, keeps all of the content for the site neatly organized in a database table. So that anyone can easily find the content and make changes quickly and easily. One of our clients said to me in an email to me yesterday, “It’s really efficient and a simple tool to use PageDirector. It makes my life easier being able to update the website fast.”

How Does It Work?

When someone clicks on a link to go to a page, the system pulls the right content from the database, grabs the menu items from another location, and on-the-fly creates the page for a person.

Summary

PHP is a server-based programming language that allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database.

Next, Discover Here More Tips On How To Build Websites

If you can create a profitable online business, you’re almost guaranteed of being able to leave your 9-5 job and work for yourself. Living a lifestyle where you don’t need to get up early in the morning and you have no one to answer to.

Here are 7 steps on how you can create a profitable online business for yourself.

1. Find a niche and do your research.
You need to find a niche which you are interested in selling to and do some research on the type of products that are selling.

Note down improvements you can make to the existing products and imagine how well the market will accept it.

2. Write an eBook
Write an eBook based on a popular topic you have found on your research. Make sure that the best information is given. You want your customers to be more than pleased after reading your eBook.

3. Design a professional web page
To sell an eBook, you need to have a good looking web design so that the prospects will trust you.

Having an unprofessional , awful design will hurt your sales. So outsource your web design if you’re not capable of doing it yourself.

4. A Sales Letter
You need to write a good sales letter which explains the benefit of the product to the customers. A good sales letter is hard to write. If you are not good at writing sales letters, you may consider outsourcing it to a copywriter.

This is the most important factor in marketing your product. It is what persuades the prospects to buy your product.

5. Create a squeeze page
Create a web page with the sole purpose of capturing your prospect’s email address. All your traffic generation methods should be promoting this link.

6. Develop an autoresponder series
Follow up with your subscribers after they sign up to your squeeze page with an autoresponder series.

You should give educate the subscribers with good information and promote the eBook you wrote.

7. Create more products
Create another related product and sell it to the existing customers and subscribers which you have built.

Create another eBook or an audio version of the eBook. The objective is to continue building your list of subscribers and customers so that you can sell more to them.

This is the blueprint to a profitable online business. Many people have managed to earn a consistent 6 figure income doing this by outsourcing it to professionals and taking the profits themselves.

Next, get here a FREE copy of the BLUEPRINT FOR A 6 FIGURE ONLINE BUSINESS! Best of all, I can offer it to you for being a loyal reader of this blog!