When someone gets on the internet for the very first time, and they want to earn money in their spare time, they have a lot of questions they will want to ask.

I will seek to answer those questions here, as well as to provide a Day Planner to enable the new online entrepreneur to navigate the maze of building a successful online business.

When I find great advice by other writers, I will include that information as well. --- Clinton Douglas IV, Founder of Vasrue.com

Friday, December 14, 2007

How To Explode Your Affiliate Sales In 2008

Article Presented by:
Dan Lok


Many consider affiliate marketing as the easiest and fastest way to earn money online. But don't be fooled if you think there's no work involved. You CAN earn a 6 figure income through affiliate marketing. But you need to be smart, take action, and most of all you need to make your business unique.

Today I'll point you in the right direction for being smarter and more unique. You're the one who has to take action!

You must have your own website or multiple sites that are yours. I'd recommend you avoid the cookie cutter sites that hundreds of others get for free. Sure... they're easy to implement and convenient. But you'll be shooting your self in the foot. NOT unique.

Quite often your market will need repeated exposure to your marketing message. And you can do that with your own memorable domain name and unique site. Imagine what a potential customer thinks if they have already seen many sites similar to yours? Then it doesn't matter really who they buy from.

Your marketing message gets diluted and you'll only be hurting your own business.

People get bombarded every day by hundreds of ads everywhere they go. So create your own unique ads, banners, whatever you plan to use. It's the same idea behind having your own website.

You NEED to be unique in every way.

In time, or sooner if possible, create one or two of your own products to market to your affiliate list. ( You ARE capturing names and emails and creating your list... right?) If you have difficulties with product creation, you can try getting master rights or resell rights only if you can find something good and NOT old. And then try to make it your own as much as possible. Be creative and you'll see what you can do!

Build a strong relationship with your list. These are current and potential customers.

You'll get lots of questions from potential customers about your affiliate products. So the ideal is to buy the product, or products, you're promoting so you can speak from authority. That's best!

People love experts and those in the know. You'll be marketing from a position of strength when you know all about the product. And that fact will come through in your marketing communications.

When you've bought and used the product your support will be better. You can even create stand alone tutorials you can use as bonuses. Be creative.

Also, you may buy a product and discover it's horrible and worthless. And that will save you. It's much, much more difficult to rebuild your credibility than it is to create it.

As much as some marketers will have you believe... your list is NOT an ATM machine. Although when you've done your work sometimes it can seem like it when everything is working as it should.

So don't try to market everything you come across to your list. Be selective. Be smart. Think about the number of times you email your list on a monthly basis. Then use that number to determine how many times you'll promote something to it. And please...

Only provide good, high quality information to your list. When you do, you'll find them much more receptive and responsive to your offers.

Remember... the customer decides what to buy and not you. You, the affiliate marketer, simply offers, or produces, products catering to the needs and wants of your target market. It's about them, not you.


About the Author:
A former college dropout, Dan "The Man" Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to an internet multi-millionaire. Discover how you can maximize your website profits in minimum time. For a limited time, you can test- drive Dan's Insiders Club for 30-days Risk-Free and get $1,165 dollars worth of bonus gifts. Rush cover to: http://www.websiteconversionexpert.com/testdrive.html


Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Essential Elements of Developing Copy that Generates Real Traffic

Article Presented by:
Bill Platt


When you finally decided to start your own business, and you built your website for the purpose of developing your business, your goal was clear. You wanted to make lots of money and to be in business for a very long time.

Who can blame you? The thought of going to a job everyday for the rest of my life kills me too.

The Basic Challenges Of Internet Marketing

Links, links and more links.

Whether we are talking search engine results, ezines, articles, classified advertising, or other types of advertising, the link is the method used to bring your targeted customer on the Internet to your website. They click the link and visit your website to learn more.

Placing the link is often the simple part of the equation. The eyes seeing your link and the mouse clicking your link is the real challenge in this Internet promotion game.

See, it is possible through FFA link sites and the such to get your link posted on hundreds or thousands of pages on the Internet. But, just because your link appears on these pages does not mean that anyone will actually see your link.

The same applies to search engines. Your site might be listed in Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, ExactSeek, MSN or dozens of other search engines. But just because your site is listed in their database, does not mean that the searcher will use the right keyword combination or click through the results deep enough to actually see your links.

The first challenge is to get your link seen. The second challenge is to get your link clicked.

You know as well as I do that not every link provides the proper enticement to get you to click the link. Why should you believe that everyone else is different from you? You shouldn't. The challenge for you is to properly entice your potential visitors to click your link and visit your website.

Second Challenge, First --- The Lure

Getting people to click your link is as simple as writing good copy.

Depending on the placement location of your actual ad copy, you may have only ten words, seventy words, or one thousand words to seduce people to visit your website.

Let me make one point very clear. Even if you have one thousand words to make your plea, the first ten words are always the most important words you will write.

Press releases should always have the information top-loaded --- you must place your most important information in the first couple of paragraphs.

With straight advertising copy, you should expend a great deal of time and thought to your first ten words. Those ten words are the ones that will draw people into your actual copy. Unless you can lure people into reading your copy, the value of the copy itself serves no useful purpose.

Just as it was with this article, you were drawn into the actual copy by the first ten words of the article, aka. the title of the article.

Note that I have used the words "entice", "seduce" and "lure" in this article. These words are essential to writing good copy. You must be able to touch on the desires of the reader, to peak their interest, and then you must leave them wanting more. In order to get more of what they want, the reader must visit your website. Master this paragraph, and you will master the art of writing good copy.

First Challenge, Second --- Getting Seen

One of the most common deceptions on the web is the promise to have your site submitted to thousands of search engines. Most of these so-called search engines are actually FFA sites! Yahoo! only lists 262 search engines. At one time, I had read on About.com that there were fewer than 500 search engines. Beware the fox in sheep's clothing.

Many people utilize Search Engine Optimization for use with the real search engines. But, keep in mind, the search companies are always changing and tweaking the algorithms used to produce their results. You might use SEO now and get a top 10 ranking, but there is no assurance that your top listing will stand the long-term. I have often impressed upon people to do the basics well, and the results will fall into place just fine.

Sponsor ads on websites do very well when the site caters specifically to people in your target market.

Ezine publishing and advertising has always been touted as the best way of drawing traffic and sales to your website. There is a lot of truth in this statement.

Important Notes About Ezine Publishing And Advertising

As a publisher, the road is a long and hard one. It takes a lot of time, effort and hard work, in addition to a certain amount of effective advertising to build the ezine list. Of course, when it is done well, the rewards of ezine publishing can be phenomenal in the long-term.

As an advertiser, you can employ the publisher who has already done the hard work, to help you to promote your business.

For the creative marketer, writing free-reprint articles and getting them into the hands of ezine publishers can be an exceptional method of developing more long-term traffic and sales for their website. Publishers and webmasters are always looking for good, informative content to share with their readers. Some of these ezines are archived on the Internet giving rise to the long-term effectiveness of the articles that have been published.

For the creative marketer who is using free-reprint articles to promote their business, the resource box which appears at the end of every article, is the ad copy and link that will take the reader directly to the writer's site. The article itself often serves as the greatest lure to bring the reader to the writer's website. The article creates the desire to learn more about the writer, and the resource box tells the reader what to expect when they get there.

The neat thing about free-reprint articles is that between archived ezines and websites who publish your articles, it becomes fairly easy to get your copy and links on hundreds of websites, and those links will likely remain there for years to come.

In Conclusion...

If you are paying for link placement, you need to track your click through's (CTR's) from those links. If the links are not generating traffic for you, examine the reasons why. Maybe the reason is your copy and maybe it is the link location. Make the changes necessary to permit the link to pay for itself or get rid of it.

If you are writing articles for reprint, track those links also and look at their total success rate over the long-haul. Figure out which articles provided you the best results, and make a determination as to why. Once you know why a particular article or ad is successful, then you can make good decisions about how to get the best results from your future efforts.


About the Author:
Since 2001, Bill Platt has been providing article distribution services to his clients who write their own articles, and he has been creating unique articles to be distributed for the promotion of other clients. Ezine advertising has long been recognized as one of the most effective methods of advertising online. Bill developed his distribution system around a desire to get articles with their resource boxes, in newsletters with tens of thousands of subscribers. Learn more at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com