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!

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If
sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honoured to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & White listing

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific white listing programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Forums are a great way of marketing alongside articles, email and blogging – there is no real way to compare all of these, they are just a different way of communicating. The big difference however with forums is that many many more people will see you and get to know you which builds trust as you interact with the community.

Forums have been around in many forms since the dawn of the internet, they provide a means of conversation with like-minded people in a community-driven atmosphere of helping one another with problems. If you don’t know how they work, let me just tell you a bit about them.

First off, you have to find your forum in your niche, the best way to do this is type in subject forums as the keywords (replacing subject with your topic) into a search engine. Once you have found one in the topic you’re interested in, with a nice community going on, registration is the next step.

Registration is pretty simple, its just a case of filling your details in and perhaps entering a captcha (one of those funny sets of digits and numbers that tell the site that you are not an automated spammer!) You may have to click a link in your email to register the fact that you own the email address you registered with.

There usually is many sub-forums, i would reccomend finding one that usually reads something like “introduce yourself” and post a brief overview of what you are about and say hello. I would advise against just registering and posting “buy my product now” or “come to my website” etc. type comments as you’ll end up with a flame war – if you dont know what that is please do a search on it as its not a nice thing to happen to you!

Get involved in the forum, post replies to people’s problems to help with any questions that you can – its a community-type feeling that you will enjoy. Forums which are busy have the advantage of many more people in the nich you are targeting, so you can find out about some really exciting new widget thing in your niche that is very important to you, and also reply and ask more.

Some forums have a specific buy, sell or trade section where you can sell your products, this is the place to be if you want to directly pitch your product. Another way of pitching your product is to enter links to your website in your signature, this is shown directly under each post that you make and is updated automatically – be careful however, some forums dont like this and will ask you to remove them. Some have rules on the size of images or links allowed, please read these before adding it.

Some of the more advanced forums that run vbulletin have private messaging which can be great to directly carry out business to people privately on the forum, i’ve bought many websites and domain names using this – some sites like digital point have itrader which is also a way of showing how trustworthy the user is in terms of buying and selling, similar to the ebay feedback system.

One last thing to remember, forums are a great place to communicate rather than a place to pitch-fest – if you want to advertise on a forum, but you cant find any other method other than the ones i’ve outlined, contact the owners of the site and ask for banner rates, this is a great way of getting in front of these people, then you have the right to freely talk about your product or service which is a huge bonus compared to advertising on a static site!