Start an online business – how to start an online business

Here are some tips for you if you consider to start an online business.
I am going to share some killer tips on how to start an online business fast.

What I am going to tell you are the very best stuff tought by gurus like:

Eben Pagan
Frank Kern
Steve Clayton
Tim Godfrey
Mike Filsaime
Alex Goad
Don Crowther (Stompernet)

The first thing you need to decide is this:

What kind of online business do you want to run, do you want to dropship /wholesale physical products or do you want to work with digital products or do you want to work as an affiliate, selling other peoples products?

It works perfectly to mix all of the above but when you start out I recommend you turn your focus to a specific area.

Affiliate marketing

I usually recommend affiliate marketing to beginners because the product is already finished and the marketing is in place.

The sales letter and the sales funnel is in place, usually optimized to convert visitors into sales.

I have to tell you though, even though it sounds simple, you are going to need a lot of training before you can leave your day job and work as an affiliate instead.
The problem with affiliate marketing is that the profit margins are not as high as when you have your own product.

E-commerce

This sounds pretty big, but can be done in a simple manner. I would even say that´s it´s easier to start an e-commerce business than it is to start an  online business with your own product.

When I speak of e-commerce I mean selling physical products, and I assume that you are doing this wholesale or as a dropshipper.

You market an e-commerce store the very same way you market any product online.

One good thing with selling physical products is that the perceived value is higher than digital products.

You actually get a physical product shipped to your door. This is a good thing. The bad thing is that your profit margins will be lower with this business model because you have to pay for the product and sometimes keep your own stock at home.

Digital products

This is a HUGE area online where you can get scammed really hard and at the same time find really high quality products delivered digitally, usually, e-books, software, videos and audios.

If you do this correctly you can start a business with the highest profit margins possible. Digital products are easy to deliver online and it´s also easy to automate the process, meaning you will have more time for marketing than taking care of the delivery of your products.

This is a very cool way to start an online business that can run 24/7 and make you money while you sleep. Some of the other models can definitely do that as well, but not with the profit margins having your own product.

There is one small problem though, you need a product, and not just any product. You need a really good product that actually solves you prospects problems, preferably very fast as well.

You can go online and buy the rights for some crappy ebooks. This won´t help you very much though, perhaps you make some money but the refunds are going to be high and your customers are probably not going to build a long term relationship with you.

But…

If you start an online business that focuses on your prospects problems and develop a quality product for that particular problem, you are on to something.
What I realized though, is this:

How do I know where to start when this whole online business world is completely new to me?

Good question, my way to solve this problem was to contact the very best online coaches money can buy and learn from them. If you learn from the best your results will come much faster. Usually this kind of coaching costs $10,000 for a weekend but the content you get is high quality all the way.

Well, I have to admit before I decided to invest in these expensive coaching programs I bought A LOT of junk online.

I bought a lot of “get rich quick programs” and told myself that something would work eventually. One product out of ten actually delivered a quality strategy that was useful enough to grow my online business, but the rest were just a waste of money and time.

Don´t underestimate the value of your time. I won´t go into any details here, but I dare to tell you that a time management program can be the difference between having a successful online business or not.

Start an online business today.

Bottom line:

Decide on what kind of business model you want to run online and then get to know your customers so that you can solve their problems. A good idea is to survey your market before you even enter. Spend $100 on a survey before you start, instead of spending $10,000 on an online business that might fail.

Technorati Tags: how to Start an online business, Start an online business, starting an online business

Marketing on the Internet – easy strategies to implement today

After reading this article you will know how to do marketing on the Internet and what areas you need to focus on. 

Here are some areas that we will cover:

Article marketing
Web 2.0 properties
Video marketing
Forum and blogpost marketing
Yahoo answers

Ok, let us start with article marketing.

You can take a look at a specific and in depth description of an article marketing strategy I use right here: LINK TO ARTICLE  MARKETING STRATEGY

In general you create or outsource articles that are relevant to your business. You publish them on your own blog, website or web 2.0 properties like ezinearticles, squidoo, hubpages or quizilla.

Article marketing is in fact considered to be a part of social media marketing.
Google loves relevant content and websites that consists of more than one page.

For example, if you drive traffic to a page using PPC, pay per click advertising. You will get a much better bid price per click if you drive traffic to a relevant website with lots of relevant content.

On the other hand of you use PPC to drive traffic to a one page “squeeze page” or sales page you might be punished paying a higher price per click.

This can sometimes determine if you are profitable or not driving traffic using PPC.

Articles are also a wonderful tool to drive traffic to a website for free.

Another benefit is that if you publish your articles in places like Squidoo, your article will benefit from Squidoo being a trustworthy place in the eyes of Google.

You see if you publish something on a relatively new domain, Google will not look upon that domain as trustworthy until you have been around for a year or more and delivered consistent relevant quality content throughout that time.

Now let us move on to the next proven strategy for marketing on the Internet.

Marketing on the Internet using web 2.0 properties

Video marketing

This is a marketing strategy that is very exciting because it has viral potential and creates trust at the same time.

Video is great to create trust because people can hear your voice and sometimes see your face. It is like talking one on one. But, same rule applies here as in article marketing, you need to deliver good quality content and try to keep your video less than three minutes long.

There is a service I use that post videos to all the big video sites out there but all you have to do is post your video once. This service then does all the hard work for you of encoding and posting to 20 different sites with keyword, links and descriptions that fit each video site.

Marketing on the Internet using video is a really big thing these days but I still don´t see to many people doing it. This is probably because video is something that looks expensive, you need an expensive camera and video programs to edit and a sound system…this is not really true. What you need to start is a “flipcam” for $100 and an account at this place to submit your videos to the Internet: LINK TO TRAFFIC GEYSER

If you want to do screen cams with a voiceover, I recommend Camtasia for PC users and Screenflow for Mac users.

These programs will record everything you do on your computer screen including audio. So buy a microphone or a headset that you can plug straight into your computer using an USB port. Then create a powerpoint presentation, record your voice and the screen at the same time. Then save the Camtasia or screenflow video, export it and upload it right here, to distribute it all over the Internet: LINK TO TRAFFIC GEYSER

Let´s move on to the next marketing on the Internet strategy.

Posting comments on forums and blogs, this is a powerful web 2.0 marketing strategy that will generate a ton of targeted traffic for you.

You need to do some research in Google, search for forum and your niche. Take a look at these forums weather they look relevant to your target audience. Make a list of all the forums you come across that looks relevant. I don´t care weather forums use no-follow links or follow links, I care more about the forum being relevant to my niche.

If you don´t know what no-follow and follow links are, no need to worry about that.

Anyway, continue by setting aside some time each day to create small amounts of forum presence. I want you to think about this as a daily routine like brushing your teeth.

Ok, when you have your mindset ready, you go and create accounts on all those forums you have listed. When that is done, you continue to create small amounts of value to your prospects by posting to all these forums daily. Try to use relevant keywords in your forum titles if you can ,and don´t forget to create a forum signature that points back to your website.

Your forum posts will be indexed in Google and create free targeted traffic for you.

Don´t forget to take a look at Yahoo answers, search for your niche and see if you find questions that you can answer there.

You can create a similar list of blogs that are relevant to your business and post comments on those blogs regularly. Don´t forget to give something of value more than saying; Great post!

I can promise you this; If you implement all or just one of the strategies above you are going to see a substantial increase in targeted traffic to your website.

I am sure you realize that targeted traffic that already trusts you plus a converting website/webpage equals sales and profit.

When your marketing on the Internet strategy includes free traffic your return on investment is going to be great.

Take care out there

Technorati Tags: internet marketing strategy, marketing articles, Marketing on the Internet, yahoo answers

Marketing an online business - proven strategy marketing an online business

Let me give you a couple of quick and effective tips on marketing an online business. There are many ways you can market your online business. You can use both short term and long term marketing strategies.

In this article I am going to focus on one of the most powerful strategies available to create lots of free traffic. If you market your online business like this you will create both short and long term benefits for your business.

I am going to focus on a proven strategy , tested by many successful marketers and by myself as well. If you implement this strategy I promise you success.

There is nothing as effective as free traffic generating sales for you. If you have a digital product of some kind, your profit margin is close to 100% with this strategy.

I have had many coaches and gurus to teach me online marketing, some of those are:

Eben Pagan
Frank Kern
Mike Filsaime
Amit Mehta
Chris Carpenter
Alex Goad
Don Crowther (Stompernet)

Writing articles to grow your business is NO joke !

Article marketing is a single strategy that you need to know no matter what kind of product or service you like to market. But there are several ways to do this, and some of them are more effective than others.

You need articles for your website, for blogs and you need to publish articles on web 2.0 properties like:

Ezinearticle
Hubpages
Squidoo
Quizilla

Not just any articles but articles that make sense for your online business and its specific keywords. Give your readers the best content you have. Don´t try to trick them by giving them half a strategy and then try to sell them the whole story.

Use the opportunity to create a relationship with prospects that read your articles. Give your readers value and they will thank you by trusting you.

A prospect of yours may sign up for your newsletter or follow you on twitter or leave a comment for you. You build a relationship that eventually might lead to a sale.

Make a list of some key things related to your business and niche.
If you haven´t already you also need to do some keyword research related to your niche and market, so you know what people search for and what problems they want fixed.

Next step is VERY important, create high quality articles on topic related to your keyword research. Use your main keyword as part of the article title.

Now create several articles for several of your keywords. If you can find keywords that are related somehow, it´s even better.

Dog training
Dog training tips
Dog training coach
No barking dog training
Stop barking dog training
Puppy dog training

As you can see the root keyword is “dog training”. If you find keywords like this in your niche you can create your own hub. Google love hubs of content structured like this, in fact, you should try to do your SEO and structure of your main website like this.

Dog training – this is the top level, might even be the name for your URL.
Then you create a sub level of “categories” related to your top level.

Category 1 - Dog training tips
Category 2 - Puppy dog training
Category 3 - Stop barking
Category 4 - Dog obedience

If you run a Wordpress blog, the keywords above are going to be your categories.
Then you fill each category with additional content like this

Category 1 - Dog training tips

Article 1
Dog training tips Arizona
Article 2
Dog training tips florida
Article 3
Dog training tips young
Artilce 4
Stop barking dog training tips

Category 2 - Puppy dog training

Article 1
Puppy dog training NY
Article 2
Puppy dog training online
Article 3
Dog training puppy
Category 3 - Stop barking

SAME AS ABOVE – Online marketing using related articles and content

Category 4 - Dog obedience

SAME AS ABOVE – Online marketing using related articles and content

No here´s an important step you need to take next when you implement this strategy and marketing an online business.

How do you link these properties together?

In this marketing strategy you use something that´s also called tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3.

Tier one is your URL or your main article. This is what everything else is linking to.

Then you have your tier 2 structure, your categories. When linking categories use a mix between cross-linking and linking to your top level, your tier 1 article or main URL.

We are creating a hierarchy here, so do NOT link a category page to anything else than another category page or your top level article or domain.

Then we have the workers at the bottom of the food chain, tier 3.

This is going to be the place were you actually publish most of your content.

If you look at the structure above you see that each category has several tier 3 articles that are “connected” to its parents, the categories.

A tier 3 page always links to either its OWN category, the top level or to another tier 3 article created within the very same category.

So each category become its own specialized island of relevant content which also create POWER to your top level or tier 1 article.

You see Google measure the web according to this; How many pages links INTO a page. If a page has lots of links pointing to it, Google realizes that this page has to be valuable.

Therefore Google will read this page very carefully and give it a good position in the search index, at least if it´s relevant and you have your keyword to occur a couple of times on that page.

The most important places to have your keyword are in the title, the first paragraph and at the end of the article.

The strategy I am giving you here works perfectly for both internal pages on your own website, but also for creating structures of pages pointing at your domain. You can build a network of pages that links together the way I describe above in places like squidoo and hubpages and other web 2.0 properties where they allow you to publish content with links.

Use one or two links max per article to create your internal structure and then you can use one link that goes to some kind of “money page” or lead generation page in each article as well.

You are welcome with any questions you might have and please let me know if you implement this strategy and your level of success.

Marketing an online business and Internet online marketing is fun and very rewarding when it comes to profit and time invested. You just need to make sure you stay focused and build your business piece by piece.

Take care out there

Technorati Tags: article marketing, Marketing an online business, marketing your online business

Internet marketing for online business – your success blueprint

Are you running an online business and want to know how to create your online marketing strategy. This article about Internet marketing for online business is going to give you some key strategies to grow your business online, increase traffic and sales.

I am only going to discuss proven strategies that many successful marketers have used before including myself.

If you have any doubt about the content, I have been a former student to several, well known Internet marketing gurus like:

Eben Pagan
Frank Kern
Mike Filsaime
Don Crowther (Stompernet)
Ryan Deiss
Alex Goad

These guys use these strategies all day long to generate targeted traffic and increase sales.

Here are a couple of things that I am going to describe to you in this article about Internet marketing for online business:

The “almost” hidden upsell

How to use the word FREE without losing money

Lead generation for life

Generate traffic in a nutshell

Building JVs

One thing that Mike Filsaime is really good at, is implementing offline strategies into an online business. This works surprisingly well, especially if we look at one of his favourites; Would you like a Coke with that ?

I am sure you have visited some kind of fastfood restaurant and ordered a burger or something. If you think about it I am also sure that someone also asked you if you wanted a Coke with that burger or some fries, or a dip sauce or maybe a pair of pants…:-)

In the offline world upsells have been a natural part of doing business. We have had them online for a while as well but not really as sophisticated as Mike implemented this strategy.

When you make a sale you have probably worked hard to get that particular person inside your funnel, even if you make a very small sale. You have a customer at your door trusting you with his credit card.

Your customer is in a mental state of buying, you can use this and offer another relevant product that your prospect actually wants. You see people hate being sold, but love buying. It is just a question of offering another relevant solution to one of your prospects problems.

This is why I call it an “almost” hidden upsell. Your prospects aren´t going to feel sold to because you offer them a relevant product when they already are in the mood of buying.

If you want to become an expert in this area I recommend you take a look at this: LINK TO LAUNCHTREE

How can you use the word free without losing money?
Here are some interesting thoughts on Internet marketing for an online business.

Free is a power-word, it is used in copywriting all the time because this small word makes people take action.

I attended a seminar with Eben Pagan in Los Angeles and he wanted people to come on the stage and talk to him. When he saw that people hesitated, he turned around and grabbed something behind a chair.

He raised a new iPod touch in the air and told everyone that the best tip, as voted by the group, would get this Ipod touch…people ran to the stage, ready to give away million dollar advice for “free”.

The very same thing happens on the Internet if you offer something for free, people love free especially if it is “quality free”.

Take your most valuable technique, strategy or whatever and create a free pdf where you reveal everything, you do NOT leave anything out. Give your best stuff away for free. Make sure you place a link inside that PDF that goes to your website or lead generation page.

You see, some people are afraid of giving really good stuff away for free, the thing is. People will start to trust you if you give them value and they will think something like this; If this guy give me this for free, his paid content have to be awesome.

All you need to do is to make sure that your paid content is very good and actually solves their problems. If you can do that you should never hesitate to give away your best technique for free.

Use your free content as a lead generation tool to create a list of people that trust you and want to learn more from you.

As long as you have people on your list you can make a sale later on. I have been on several lists for years and eventually I buy something. Sometimes you have to wait a week, sometimes a month and sometimes several years.
But know this, if you offer value to your list and treat them nicely you can never go wrong. Your list is probably going to be one of your online business most valuable assests.

Internet marketing for online business, the basic idea of traffic.
We all need traffic to our websites to survive. I am not going to take you through an in depth traffic formula here. I am just going to make sure that you know the path of traffic.

Here are three main areas you need to focus your attention to.

SEO, search engine optimization

PPC, pay per click

Social Media, like video marketing, article marketing, forum postings, twitter, facebook

JVs, create joint ventures with people in related businesses

If you already are inside all of the above, good for you, If not, I would recommend you start out with a combination of SEO and PPC. When you have a decent website up with content, create a couple of Google Adwords campaigns for it.

When you see results from both SEO and PPC, start to implement a couple of social media strategies into your business as well.

I also recommend that you try to build up a list of people that are interested in doing JVs with you. A JV can take place in a lot of forms, just make sure you offer value and give them a really good deal, don´t be cheap.

A single JV partnership can give you access to a very big email-list that you can pre-sell your product to. Such a partnership can easily be worth $100,000 in a week.

When you contact a potential JV partner I recommend you call them personally or Fedex them a really cool package. People always open a Fedex.

In some niches you might get good feedback by leaving some money in the package, how much is up to you and the partner you ship to.

Some people might get offended and some people will probably think you are a cool dude.

If I open a package and the first thing I see is a 20 dollar bill and some text that says: Would you like to make 20 of these a day just by making me a call?

Now, take action and implement these strategies as part of your Internet online marketing, keep your feet steady, on solid ground before you try to fly…like Karate Kid…and Internet marketing for online business will be very rewarding for you.

Take care out there

Technorati Tags: business Internet marketing online, Internet marketing for online business, Internet Marketing Tips

Business Internet marketing online – increase traffic and sales

Do you want to grow your business and use the power of the Internet to increase traffic and sales? Business Internet marketing online is a quick way to generate targeted leads and increase the overall sales volume for your business.

I am going to share a couple of proven and effective Internet online marketing strategies that you quickly can implement and benefit from.
Let´s start with the art of conversion.

1.

When you create a website online you need to realize that a visitor may come to your site once and you have about 5 seconds to convince that visitor that your site is relevant, helpful and most importantly solves the problem he is looking to solve.

2.

Use a strong headline that is impossible to miss when you land on the page. Keep the headline benefit driven and also try to touch on your prospects worst fears or frustrations right there. Never speak about yourself in the headline, speak to your prospect, and use power words like:

You
Your
New
Free
Proven
today
easy

Example:
“Is your dog aggressive?
You can put an end to your dog being aggressive in less than 4 hours.
You can stop worrying about being sued for millions today…”

3.

The hero picture

You can benefit from using a picture, close to your headline, to emphasize the message you want to deliver.

In the case with our example headline you can put a picture of an aggressive dog and a calm cuddly dog to emphasize the two extremes.

4.

You can also use a subhead that push another benefit or two and also lead the reader into your first paragraph.

Example

“Is your dog aggressive?
You can put an end to your dog being aggressive in less than 4 hours.
You can stop worrying being sued for millions today…”

(Your own children and your neighbor children will be safe from the day you decide to take control. The silly thing is, it is so simple that anyone can do it. Let me show you how…)

5.

Question:

How do you know what benefits, fears and frustrations to push in your headline and in your marketing copywriting?

Good question , you need to know your prospects. Survey your prospects, talk to them every day if you can. Try to figure out their worst fears and frustrations by asking them directly. Try to register the exact words they use because you can use their exact phrasing in your copywriting.

Wyatt Woodsmall says it like this:

“Camp out in your prospects worst nightmares.”

In your marketing you need to know your prospects worst fears, push the hot buttons of fears and frustrations in combination with benefits and problems you can solve.

Try to be as specific as possible, try to be measurable like this:

“Do you want an obedient dog?
Our easy step-by-step instructions take no more than 15 minutes a day, for 3 days. ”

6.

Be careful mixing to many colors and fonts. You actually don´t need to be very fancy, the most important part is that you know how to communicate with your prospects. Talk to them as you were in the same room. Speak to only one person at a time.

7.

The steps above describe the scenario when a visitor come to your website and how you can increase conversion. By conversion I mean the action that transforms a visitor into a lead or a buying customer.

Now let´s talk about traffic. If you have a high converting webpage that your visitors see, all you need is a lot of targeted traffic and  your business will grow accordingly.

Every niche has a certain amount of searches per month. This sets the bar for how much you can grow your online business and internet marketing online.
A general rule is that if you try to go compete for keywords with a lot of traffic and a lot of competition.

You will have to work hard before your business takes off, but when it does you can look at large volumes of sales.
If you compete for keywords that are in less competitive areas and less searches your business will take off quicker but you will also hit the roof quicker.

There will be a point when you can´t grow much more, but nothing wrong with that. You can just automate the business you have and go into a new one.

This is a good thing to be aware of before you enter a niche. The search volumes and the competition will tell you how much work you need to do before you would see results in your online business.

8.

I am a strong believer in article marketing because you get a great opportunity to deliver great content, pre-sell and build trust.
Trust is the single most important thing you can build online. People who trust you are much more likely to buy from you. With articles you have the opportunity to build your range of influence by delivering quality content that actually make a difference to your readers.

Write a lot of articles that are relevant to your business or outsource the work to someone who can deliver quality on the topic.

When you have 10 – 15 articles written. I recommend you set everything up in a certain way to make Google happy .

You can read more about this specific article strategy right here: LINK TO ARTICLE STRATEGY

9.

Social media marketing – business internet marketing online
Sometimes we call this web 2.0. It includes online properties that involves user feedback and interaction between publisher and consumer.
Youtube has a comment system, forums is a way for people to talk to each other directly and interchange ideas, social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook is social media where you can make friends in your industry and meet people that live on the other side of the globe.

Social media connects people and often make it easy to use video or audio to communicate.

I strongly advice you to use video and audio in your marketing because it is easier for you to build trust with a video than with writing.
Besides the benefit of building trust video is a great traffic strategy if you use it correctly.

Here is something you can try for a month or two and see if it works for you.
I assume you have done some keyword research related to your online business and have a list of at least 10 – 15 keywords you can use.
Choose one keyword that you would like to target. Write a headline with the keyword included.

Create a short video, less than three minutes long. You can make a screencam video with a voice over if you like or a video with you in the center talking.
Try to deliver something of value in the video, a technique a strategy or whatever might be valuable in your niche, keep it short and focused.

A very effective way to spread a video across the Internet fast is this service: LINK TO TRAFFIC GEYSER
With this service you can distribute your video to all the big video sites on the Internet in one go.

All you have to do is include your keyword rich headline, description with a link to your website and keywords. The service will then do the hard work for you. You will save an entire day of work submitting just one video. The really cool thing is that Google will pick up your video in the search index and show it for the keyword you included in your headline.
This is business Internet marketing online as the big guys do it, at least the smart ones.

Now go out there and do these things and keep me posted on your progress. You are welcome with any questions you might have.

Take care out there

Technorati Tags: business Internet marketing online, Internet marketing online