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…

You can’t start a profitable affiliate marketing business until you find out exactly who you are marketing to. Finding a niche is the first in several steps that will allow you to start a reliable stream of online income.

If you’re stuck at the starting gate when it comes to find a niche, here are three ways to find the right niche – including the pros and cons of each.

Method # 1- Picking a niche that you already know a lot about.

When you select a niche that you are already closely familiar with, you will be able to identify immediately what type of content you need to create, how you need to approach the marketing and where you need to do further research.

This can save you a lot of time when you are searching for affiliate products. You’ll know instantly what type of information that your market is likely to want and you narrow down your affiliate product choices without spending a lot of time on niche research.

Additionally, if you decide to create your own product to pre-sell the affiliate marketing product, you’ll instantly know how to create it. On the downside, the topics that you may be familiar with might not be profitable or in demand.

Method #2 – Pick a niche that you are passionate about.

If you go with the passion method of picking a niche, you’ll enjoy the process of marketing to this niche. A topic you are passionate about it one that you may or may not already be knowledgeable about.

You may just have a passion for learning about it. With a niche you are passionate about, you’ll be more motivated to work on your affiliate business.
Consistent work is the key to success, so enjoying your work is important to keeping consistency. It will also be easier to write passionately about the topic if you are passionate about learning about it.

You’ll be excited to do the work involved in creating a promotional pre-selling product or a website. However, just like with a topic you know about, you may find that the product that you are promoting due to your passion is not very profitable.

Method #3 – Pick a niche that is high in demand

Finding a market that already has a high demand is a smart way to get into affiliate marketing. If the topic already has a great deal of interest and demand, you’ll be more likely to make sales and have profitable affiliate marketing promotions.

The main drawback is that high in demand topics have a lot of competition, but don’t let this discourage you. You’ll be able to make an impact in the market if you keep at it.

There is a hidden fourth method for choosing a niche – finding a niche that is a combination of all three. When you select a product that is something you know about, something you’re passionate about and something that is already high in demand you’ll get the benefits of all of these methods.

Next, Discover Here More Ways To Find Niches For Your Online Business… And Then Watch This FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO Course

I hear many people talking about marketing and promotion in the same breath as being the same thing. I don’t believe them, because in my experience they are very different, but they are linked by a common theme… your business.

In a nutshell, marketing can be described as everything you do to attract clients into your business but a promotion is a specific event and time based activity to get people to buy your products or services. To understand this difference, I am going to show you what is involved in running a promotion.

These are the six key elements you need to consider and how you can include them in your business, or your next promotion.

1 The Reason Why:

Canadian advertising man John E. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term ‘Reason Why Advertising’ as far back as 1905 and every promotion you run should have a strong reason for why you are doing it. Events are the usual ‘reason’ such as product launches and significant anniversaries. More unusually, I’ve seen marketers use the birth of a new baby for a sale and even “I need to pay my taxes” to run a promotion. Yes, it is cheesy, but it works.

So not all reasons are good, BUT they are still reasons and they work far better than the “I’m running a promotion this week because I can or should” angle. You have to get their attention and one of the best ways of doing that is to make the story hook them in because the more interesting you make it then then the bigger the impact it will have. Your customers will respond to a promotion with lots of BANG and that means it will grab their ATTENTION much faster.

2 Give Them A Discount Or Special Price:

People are interested in your product and that’s great, but nothing will happen unless you prompt them with a good reason to buy it right now. You have plenty of options here: you can offer a reduced price, a bundled special deal on your products, or a one on one consult with you.

3 Put An End Date On Your Promotion

Some businesses seem to be in permanent sale mode, so there’s no urgency for the customer to buy. Customers are not stupid; they see the advertising and know that this company ALWAYS has a sale on. That’s why it’s important you create a deadline for your promotion. If you then you lose credibility. Having a definitive end date creates urgency and a reason for your potential customer to act now or lose out.

4 Give Something Extra Successful:

Online marketers have mastered the art of giving bonuses and any good promotion should contain a bonus item for ordering now. First you need to look at how relevant the bonus you are offering is to the productyou are selling, and see if it can stand alone in its own value.

Ask yourself whether your bonus item could be sold on its own and does it add value to the promotion you are running?

5 TELL People The Value They Are Getting:

The first time I ‘got’ this I saw my sales increase, and although you may think your bonus is valuable, it won’t always be obvious to the customer so you must make it clear to them.

Even if you do put a value next to the items you are selling, don’t assume your prospect or customer has worked it out for themselves. If the total value is £250 tell them it is £250 because if you leave them to add it up for themselves they generally won’t do it.

6 Finally…Tell People What To Do Next All the above points are meaningless unless you follow through with this one. Tell them what you want them to do. For example; fill in this form, go to this website, click this link.

Never, ever leave it up to the customer to find out how to order your products. If it is not clear then they won’t make the effort, so just let them know what you want them to do.

For example: “To order this Internet Marketing Guide and take advantage of the special price with all of your bonuses worth $350 click on this button now.” No mistakes, no confusion…just sales.

Follow these six steps and you are on your way to your most successful promotion ever.

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Online Business Coach and Internet Marketing Strategist Gabor Olah helps baby boomers create profitable online businesses that they love. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, $1K A Day Formula, at ==> $1Kadayformula.com

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Don’t think email marketing is now too hard as more autoresponders insist on double opt in. You can still market effectively to your customers only you hve to be a bir more creative.

Personally, I welcome email marketing becoming harder because the more effort that has to be put in will make those ‘lazy’ or wannabes simply drop out. Into that gap the inventive professional approach to email marketing will thrive.

I want to show you the impact of the new rules and how to deal with them and let’s start with the double opt in.

If you use any of the major shopping cart providers like 1shoppingcart (ISC), they now have, mandatory double opt in and they did this because of being blacklisted by SPAMHaus organisation. This was caused by one selfish, unethical person using ISC’s ‘Tell a Friend’ script to send out thousands of Spam messages. The consequence was that email sent via 1SC servers was being classified as Spam by many ISP’s. 1SC agreed to make all email sign ups double opt in so as overcome this problem. What does this mean to you?

Double opt in means that anyone joining your list is sent an email asking them to confirm that it really was them that signed up and they want to join. This method produces a better and more responsive list BUT reduces the numbers. Take your pick because there are a few different reasons for this, including forgetting to confirm, changing their mind, or not really understanding what they are being asked to do. What can you do?

I am a firm believer in telling your customers and prospects EXACTLY what to do. On my website I have a video of me telling people exactly how to confirm that they want to subscribe to our lists. The video allows me to actually show them what to do, and how to do it and anyone signing up to my list is directed to a web page where I show them the exact email they’ll receive and how to click on the link.

This is simple…but very powerful and by using it on several of my lists I have achieved a confirmation rate of over 90% – and that’s virtually unheard of.

5 key tactics to use now Your aim is to get your email through and read by your customers and prospects. Yes it may be getting harder, but these tactics will help you win out over your competitors:

1) Brand your emails so they stand out from the crowd Give your emails a brand name or title so as soon as people see that name they know who it’s from and what to expect.

For example, one list I have with my partner Neil Travers is the Junior Soccer Coach Newsletter ‘Tip of the Week’. Now that doesn’t really have impact so we went to ‘Junior Soccer Coach – Inside Tactics’ and further refined it to ‘Inside Tactics’ and that is now our ‘brand’ name for the free tip of the week.

2) Send out a reminder for all of your emails. Your first email is your regular email and you must follow up with another one that briefly reminds them of what you have just sent or to direct them to read a copy online or on your Blog.

That second email must give them a REASON to go and find/read your earlier email. How? Give them a teaser of the information your newsletter contained, maybe a free gift or how it can help them…use the biggest benefit.

3) Always, always, run your messages through a SPAM checker It’s essential because it will tell you if your email is likely to be classified as spam or not. If it is spam, then you will know which words you need to change.

4) Your subscribers need to be kept in touch with regularly. I receive better responses to my promotions when I am regularly emailing people in that niche.

Coincidence? No, because more contact with your list means you are building a relationship with them, and so they are much more likely to buy from you.

5) Build smaller targeted lists Smaller, targeted, lists are by far more responsive to you and your offers. I would rather have 250 highly focused names on a specific topic than 5000 names on a generic one.

I want people who are positively interested in my specific niche. Your first sub list should be of buyers, people who have already bought from you, and then people who have bought from you more than once. Build sub lists of topics within your particular niche, as your next step.

For example; in our football newsletter we might ask subscribers to email us for more information about a specific topic such as under 7’s or girls football. We would add these people to a sub list with its own autoresponder series. Then target these prospects with specific offers relating to their enquiry.

Use these 5 tips to help you make your email marketing more effective, and to ensure it gets through to your customers and prospects.