There is nothing more frustrating than checking your website’s analytics and realizing that, although a visitor has just spent over 10 minutes reading through a single webpage, they have not made a purchase. Sometimes it can be almost heartbreaking, because no matter how hard you try to increase sales, turning a prospect into a customer can appear to be a near impossible task.

Sometimes the key to turning a prospect into a customer is not a change in your website content, but rather a change to your purchase page:

• Is it easy to find?
• Is it easy to use?
• Can your visitors trust you with their credit card information?

Read the rest of this entry

How to make $1000 a month online from scratch – Part 7 of 8

Over the last 6 weeks, we’ve covered a lot of material. Most of it directly relates to attracting free targeted traffic to your new website. At some point, we need to turn the traffic into dollars.

In Part 2, I outlined the strategy for making this happen. As part of this strategy, I discussed a 3 prong attack for monetization. Those three prongs were:

1. Contextual Advertising
2. Affiliate Promotions
3. Own Product Sales

Read the rest of this entry

We get so caught up in making money online that we many times forget that collecting the money owed to us doesn’t come without a price, and sometimes a very steep price. Unless we have our customers send us payments via check or money order, which many people will be reluctant to do and slows up the process anyway, there is an expense associated with taking payments online, and not all payment processors are the same, regardless of what you might think. This article is going to cover some basic tips you’ll need in order to select a payment processor that’s best for you. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on the payment processor that you ultimately choose to work with.

The first thing you need to know about any payment processor is what its fees are. They are not all the same. For example, if you were to register your product with Clickbank, they take 7.5% right off the top of each purchase plus $1. If you make a sale outside of the United States, there is an additional cost because of the exchange rate. So you need to be aware of this as well. With some payment processors, you can be losing close to 10% on each sale if you’re not careful. So make sure you research their fee schedule carefully before you sign up with them.

The next thing you have to research with your payment processor is what countries they service. Not all payment processors service every country. The reason for this is the amount of fraud that is prevalent in many countries. That is why, as an example, Clickbank does not service countries like Nigeria where fraud is rampant. So if you’re planning on doing business with certain countries in particular, you better make sure that the country in question is supported by the processor you decide to use.

Read the rest of this entry