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…

Figuring out what to tweet about on Twitter requires considering your overall Internet marketing plan.

For example, if you are trying to increase the traffic to your blog about books, you may decide to focus on tweeting links to news items related to book publishing and book marketing along with the links to your own blog posts. In this way you are establishing yourself as an expert in the book field by both the links you share and the original content you write.

Now let’s take this example a little further. You may decide to sell an ebook on publishing off your website on which your blog also resides. You may begin to add into your tweet mix occasional announcements about this ebook.

There’s a range of opinions as to how many of your tweets should be what’s called “self-serving” – promoting your own products or services – and how many should be informational or conversational or whatever.

Let’s say, though, that you do not yet have a blog or a website or a business of any kind that you want to promote.

What to tweet about in this case? Do you have any hobbies or interests?

Perhaps you are a green environment advocate. Then you could tweet information that you want to share about going green, such as links to books, news articles, and blog posts. You can add your opinions about the articles you are linking to in order to personalize your tweets.

You are establishing a brand for yourself even though you made never use that brand in connection with business. Still, you have a starting point from which to morph into a new brand if that’s what you decide to do.

Even before you get on Twitter you should decide what to tweet about. Will you be emphasizing your business views or your gardening interests?

Once you have made this decision, you can use Twitter’s own search capabilities or a third-party application such as tweetbeep.com to alert you when there are tweets connected to the topics on which you tweet. Then you can jump into the conversation and reply to people who are tweeting about these topics.

You can also follow Twitter lists that are on subjects of interest to you in order to easily track tweets connected to your topics.

As you participate more and more on Twitter, you will begin to follow people whose tweets you find especially valuable. You can study their tweets in order to decide which tweets you think are most effective in attracting followers. Then you can emulate the patterns you uncover.

Warning: Whatever you do, do NOT tweet in anger or use swear words or viciously attack someone. This is not proper etiquette and can quickly lose many of the followers you worked so hard to get – if not getting you kicked off Twitter.

Learn Here More About Twitter And How To Make Money With Twitter

One of the most frustrating aspects to business is when you have all the marketing tools your business needs, perhaps even some your business does not need and yet you still see no results. You may even be spending time and effort marketing your business and yet conversion ratios and traffic remain constant or even drop. The reasons why marketing plans fail are numerous however; one of the primary reasons is that it was not the right marketing plan.

Every business is different and that includes businesses that sell the same products and services. Every business has something that is unique, the group of people they are targeting, the area they are working in, the options they have available to them. These different aspects mean that the same marketing plan is not going to work on every business.

When a marketing plan fails, it is important to find out exactly why it failed first. The reason or reasons are is essential. It may be that there is only one aspect of a marketing plan that failed, it may be multiple items or it may be the entire plan.

Research

Research is an essential aspect of marketing and inadequate research is one of the biggest pitfalls that can affect a marketing plan. Research provides a wealth of information that is vital to the success of a marketing plan. Generally, research is done on the target market. If a target market is not known, research is done to determine what market is going to be the most likely to benefit from the product or service provided by your business.

This is the group of individuals you will want to target and in some areas there may be multiple groups. While it may be possible to market to all these groups it is, in most situations better to market to a single group or groups which contain a large percentage of similar traits. This makes it easier to consolidate a marketing plan as well as eliminates a significant amount of research, time and effort.

The second aspect which needs to be researched for a marketing plan to be successful and is also one of the reasons why marketing fails to produce appropriate results involves research competition. Researching competition is not just about researching the prices of a competitor. It includes noting things such as lay out, finding out what marketing techniques the competitor is using and how often these tools are used for example.

Many business owners and beginning internet marketers fail to note anything more than price and perhaps general layout. As a result, they are missing vital information that can save time, money and effort when it comes to setting up their own marketing plans. It is also important to keep in mind that you want your business to be unique from your competition.

Get a good idea of the types of deals, offers, discounts and promotions that your competition uses and offer something different to help your business stand out. Many people simply do what their competition does. In doing so, they often lower their marketability and their marketing plan can ultimately fail in this area.

Marketing Tools

Having enough research to create your marketing plan is only the first step in solving the problems that often cause marketing plans to fail. The next step is to take the time to pick out the right tools. Having the right tools for the job is essential to ensuring you get the most out of your marketing strategies.

Marketing tools have diversified over the years. Tools are not limited strictly to email and promotional options. Video, social networking, SMS texting, in addition to email and promotional marketing tools are also available. The increase in available options means that there is a greater spectrum to work with. It also means that picking the right tools is more important than ever.

Pick tools that are going to be easy for you to use, require minimal maintenance but provide you with maximum potential results. This will help to prevent your marketing plan from joining the ranks of those that have failed. Knowing the right tools to use can often be a trial and error process. The important thing is to avoid one of the reasons why marketing plans fail. In this case the reason involves putting too much into a single marketing tool.

Action, Action, Action

One of the biggest reasons why marketing plans end up failing is the lack of action. Marketing is an active part of your business, it is not a set and forget aspect of you business. In order to ensure that a marketing plan succeeds you must be actively engaged in working that plan. This means that email marketing messages should be updated and redesigned regularly.

SMS messages should be rewritten after very send. These messages should be short, contain only the minimum necessary information. It is important to remember that SMS marketing is relatively new and involves sending messages to mobile devices that often indicate repeat messages.

Videos should be produced, edited and updated to as high a level as possible. Computers and technology can turn just about any computer into a production studio with the right software. Keep videos interesting, engaging and relevant. The videos should be related to the company, the products or the services offered.

It is important to set up a marketing schedule and find out how much time, generally through trial and error that you need each day, week or month to handle all your marketing tasks and keep everything up to date.

The reasons why a marketing plan might fail are numerous. Some of these reasons include, failing to do the proper research into the market, the competition as well as the tools available. Other reasons can be failing to have enough tools, having too many tools or not using the tools you have effectively. Taking the time to make sure that you have the information you need as well as putting in the effort to ensure your success can go a long way to eliminating these reasons.

Next, Discover here how to outsmart your competitor, ethically dominate the search engines,and legally siphon off tons of cash in hand buyers from your website!

Here’s part two of “The Five Stages Of The Buying Cycle” series. In the previous part we gave an introduction to what this is all about. Today we go deeper in the “Get Attention” section.

There will always be visitors to your site (or readers of your blog, zine, etc.) who do not know about your product. Even affiliates who have been promoting your product since its inception “talk to” brand new prospective customers every day who have never heard of your product.

Create articles that get attention. If you are a web site owner, tell your story. If you have a site that reviews web hosting, announce your product as the perfect, success-focused solution.

If you reach newbies, emphasize the concept of online marketing and earning income by building a real business from home. Tell them your product really does change lives.

It’s important to connect emotionally with your visitors at this stage. Talk about how an online business, through your product, can give them financial freedom, satisfaction, enjoyment, and the opportunity to quit their day jobs. This connects and creates the motivation to investigate your product more deeply (the next stages).

The key to getting attention is to employ unusually strong and/or emotion-provoking landing pages…

Create your landing pages with especially effective attention-getters. “Where else have you seen videos (or a family bulletin board) like these?” And speaking of videos…

Use video to embed the perfect-fit video into your attention-getting web page, article, or post. The Video Ads and “I Love my product” Videos fit well at this stage.

This discussion focuses on the buying cycle and landing pages, not on the actual creation of content. Suffice it to say here that your content (ex., a review, personal experience, announcements, etc.) may focus on one specific stage, or it may cover some or even all of them. For example, tell your personal success story using a few well- selected text links, one to each stage.

Previous parts:
1. Introduction

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