5 Online Business Mistakes
Is your online business not performing?
You could be making one of the these online business mistakes? In this short video, you will discover what are the top 5 online business mistakes and how to avoid it.
Sit back and enjoy!
To Your Success!
- Nathan Onn
P.S. When you’re done, please leave a comment! I’d love to get your feedback.
Plan For Internet Business Success
Two of the scariest words for any new internet marketer to hear are Business and Plan. That one phrase can send many people running for the hills in a cold sweat. A business plan does not have to be nearly as daunting as it may at first seem but it is essential.
In this short video, you will discover how to create your own internet business plan without feeling overwhelmed.
Sit back and enjoy!
To Your Success!
- Nathan Onn
P.S. When you’re done, please leave a comment! I’d love to get your feedback.
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet – Part 5/5
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet Series
>> Click Here For Part 1
>> Click Here For Part 2
>> Click Here For Part 3
>> Click Here For Part 4
Today we will cover the final piece of the puzzle is follow up and its impact on conversion. As I mentioned before, the majority of visitors to a website do not convert into customers on the first visit.
Step Four: Follow Up
This is why most Internet business deploy ‘lead capture’ forms on their sites.
You see, if you can get the visitor to opt-in for more information about your offer, you’ve got a much better chance of getting the sale somewhere down the line. Getting visitors’ names and email addresses allows you to contact them on a regular basis and keep the offer on their mind, or even offer them an alternative product.
If you aren’t convinced of the value of list-building, let me illustrate a sample scenario.
Let’s say that you send visitors to your site, and only 1 out of every 100 of them converts to a sale. This is a 1% conversion rate. It’s better than nothing, but you’re not going to make much money over time unless you’re selling/promoting an expensive item.
Why?
Pretend you’ve gotten your numbers up to 1,000 visitors per month. At a 1% conversion rate, that works out to only 10 sales per month.
On a $50 sale, that would mean your monthly profit is $500. Definitely not enough to quit your day job, and how much did you have to spend in time or money to generate those 1,000 visitors?
Now, let’s say that you decide to start capturing leads. You get more of your visitors onto your opt-in list and start following up with them. Suddenly, your conversion rate goes up to 10%, or 10 out of every 100 visitors on average converting.
You still have 1,000 visitors to your site, but now you have 100 sales of a $50 product instead of 10, so your income jumps to $5,000/mo. Make sense?
Follow up is really one of the most important components of an Internet business, and there will rarely be a time when you’re better off bypassing lead capture and follow up. Still, it is important to note that there are cases where you can do so. If you’re doing affiliate marketing, for example, you can send visitors directly to a merchant’s sales page via your affiliate link, rather than to your own site first.
Again, most affiliates send visitors to their own sites first because this means they can get those visitors onto an opt-in list before the visitor gets to the merchant’s sales page (and onto the merchant’s email list, which likely doesn’t track affiliate referrals!).
The End of Part 5.
That’s almost about it for the whole series. If you like this series, you may consider clicking here to subscribe to my blog to get the latest updates on the future. Last but not least, do remember to tell me your feedback by commenting below. Also, find out what I am doing now by following my Twitter here.
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet – Part 4/5
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet Series
>> Click Here For Part 1
>> Click Here For Part 2
>> Click Here For Part 3
Step Three: Drive Traffic
This step addresses “Where and How” you make sales. Essentially, you’ve got to get your offer in front of your target market somehow, and that means driving traffic to either a landing page or a sales page.
If you’re working as an affiliate, you can choose to drive traffic to a landing page on your own site, where you collect names and email addresses for further follow up. You can also just link people directly to the merchant’s sales page with your affiliate link.
Product owners can also place a landing page in front of their sales page, but most merchants tend to just embed opt-in email capture forms onto their sales pages and/or use pop up windows for collecting leads.
The important thing to note, though, is that visitors don’t usually buy a product on their first visit to a sales page. A majority of visitors either leave the site or hand over their name and email address to get more information about the product.
Now, the question is: where are these visitors going to come from? The goal is drive targeted, market-specific traffic to the offer, right? Therefore, you must have a way of generating that type of traffic.
The way this is done is through various means of both free and paid online advertising
Some Methods of ‘Free’ Advertising
> Articles
> Viral e-books and videos
> Forum signatures
> Email signatures
> Free classifieds
> ‘Tell-a-Friend’ scripts
> Traffic sharing networks
> Press releases
> Social networking
Some Methods of ‘Paid’ Advertising
> Pay-per-click advertising
> Banner advertising
> Buying text links or link swaps
> Affiliate programs
> Advertising on Internet radio or podcasts
> Joint ventures
Keep in mind that the “free methods” aren’t completely free in the strict sense, and the “paid” methods don’t always involve money. The price you pay for ‘free advertising’ is in the time you spend using free tactics. Meanwhile, techniques such as joint ventures typically involve some kind of trade in resources between business owners.
The important thing to note here is that all of these methods can be executed in such a way as to generate targeted traffic.
In the case of articles or press releases, for example, you write your content so that it is optimized on market-specific keywords/keyphrases. The goal with this is to have your content get some rank in the search engines for the terms your market is searching on.
Content methods are among the time-tested and proven traffic generating tactics, but there are also super-effective tactics you can employ by taking advantage of social networking and viral media.
For example, let’s say you create a video that is branded with a link to your website. You can upload it to sites like YouTube, Revver and iFilm as well as the video-sharing sections of sites like Myspace.
Your video, along with your website URL, will potentially be seen by thousands of people.
It is a little harder to achieve precision market targeting with that method. However, if your video generates enough interest, you’ll grab some relevant traffic just due sheer numbers.
You’re probably wondering by now just how much traffic you need and how easy it will be to make sales? In order to answer this question, we need to look at follow up and conversion.
The End of Part 4.
Tomorrow we will cover the final piece of the puzzle is follow up and its impact on conversion. Do remember to let me know your feedback about this article by commenting below.
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet – Part 3/5
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet Series
>> Click Here For Part 1
>> Click Here For Part 2
Today we will answer the question: “What Can I sell?“. Creating an offer can be as simple as promoting someone else’s product as an affiliate, or as involved as creating your own product for the market.
Step Two: Create An Offer
Let’s look at affiliate marketing first. If you’re doing market research on Clickbank, for example, you could choose to promote one of the top-selling products right away.
However, it is always a good idea to dig in a little deeper than that.
For one thing, the market might already be saturated with affiliates for that product. Also, you need to determine which segment of the market the product owner has targeted.
What keywords is he using in his pay-per-click advertising? How does the product compare to similar products within the market, and what makes it unique?
A similar process applies if you decide you want to create a competing product of your own. You can outright swipe product ideas from others – not copy them, of course, but look at what they did to create a winning product, and then put together your own version.
For example, let’s say you’ve found a site selling two e-books that teach people how to do magic tricks, and they’ve split the information up into two volumes (e.g. “beginner” and “advanced”) which are sold separately.
If you wanted to, you could run with that idea and create a similar two-volume ‘magic tricks’ course, but put your own spin on it. For example, you could narrow the focus down just to magic card tricks.
Getting the product created wouldn’t be very hard, either. You could hire a freelancer to do it. Or, you could find information in the public domain or at the library and just compile it. Instant product!
The most important thing to keep in mind about “the offer”, though, is that it will have much more to do with people’s desires, needs and emotions than it will with the product itself.
People don’t buy ‘products’ so much as they buy ‘solutions‘.
Creating a powerful offer means identifying your market’s most powerful and fundamental motivations. Taking a close look at motivation will take you a long way in determining whether a particular product is really going to convert or not.
Think for a moment about why someone might buy an e-book called “Cure Anxiety Naturally in 24 Hours Or Less!” What’s their motivation?
Right away, you can bet that their motivation is NOT to impress their friends or learn about various psychologists’ theories about the root causes of anxiety. Neither of those options actually solves the problem of the physical and mental pain of being in an anxious state.
Instead, that type of customer is motivated by:
> The desire to feel better ASAP
> Get relief without prescription drugs
> Enjoy their life and feel ‘normal’ again
In other words, they’re buying ‘hope‘. That means that what you want to write in your own sales copy (or see in the merchant’s sales copy) is hope and a strong emphasis on “natural” and “quick” as benefits.
And if the sales copy didn’t stress those points? Drop that offer and find one that does or you’ll just be wasting your time when you hit Step Three.
The End of Part 3
In the next part of the series, I will be talking more “Where and How” you make sales. Please do comment below if you had picked up some good tips today.
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet – Part 2/5
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet Series
>> Click Here For Part 1
Yesterday We’ve covered all the introduction so far. Now, we can take a closer look at the ‘real world’ of home-based Internet business:
> What can you sell?
> Who can you sell to?
> Where and how do you make sales?
> How easy is it to make sales?
> What is the income potential?
I believe you are going to get very excited about Internet business once you see the real world possibilities in action! I’ve been in my own business for a while now, and some of this stuff still blows my mind. It’s almost too easy sometimes, but that’s a good thing….especially if you’re lazy 
So, let’s get the ball rolling here with some ‘Marketing 101′. We need to talk about the formula underlying ALL successful business activities:
Market <–> Offer <–> Traffic + Follow Up
In layman’s terms, here’s what our equation is saying: target a niche market, create an offer targeted for that market, send ‘market traffic’ to your offer, follow up on the offer.
That sounds good so far, but let’s break it down into even clearer detail.
Step 1: Target a Market
The process of market targeting is always your first step. This is really where you get the answer to “Who Can I Sell To?”
Proper market targeting is important to all business, but it is especially important in Internet business. What you strive for is a very clear definition of your niche. The more precise your definition is, the better your targeting, and this is vitally important when it comes time to construct your offer and drive traffic to your offer.
This is common sense once you get used to the process, but the concept of targeting is often ‘fuzzy’ for beginners who aren’t used to breaking down markets into ‘sub-markets’.
Here’s an example to illustrate that point –
Let’s say you want to target customers in the ‘weight loss’ market. This is a good market, but still too broad. You have to perform additional market research to narrow it down into subsets of weight loss approaches that the market is interested in, like: ‘exercise’, ‘nutrition’, ‘carb counting’, and so on.
The reason for this is that markets are not homogeneous. The situation is more like clusters of related interests under a common ‘umbrella’, somewhat like musical taste. Lots of people are interested in music, but that doesn’t mean they all enjoy every style of it.
So, how do you go about targeting a market for your business?
One of the easiest ways is to look at the products that are already hot sellers. In other words, pick your area of interest (e.g. computers, sports, health, relationships) and start visiting sites like Clickbank and Amazon to study the most popular titles in your market category.
Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean you have to sell books or information products, but knowing what information your market is looking for is the key to determining their needs and interests! Now, once you have a general market area in mind, you need to verify it by doing some keyword research.
Keyword research is intended to do 3 things:
1. Give you an idea of how much market traffic is available
2. Give you a list of targeted phrases to use in traffic generation.
3. Help you spot potential sub-markets.
So, let’s pretend that you want to target in the ‘health/exercise’ market, and you’re specifically looking for people who are into ‘weight lifting’ and ‘build muscle’ as you’ve found a relvant product offer.
Your next step would be to go to keyword research tools, such as WordTracker’s Free Keywords Suggestion Tool and enter in the broad terms that describe your market (‘weight lifting’ and ‘build muscle’).
Let’s look at the results for weight lifting:
The screenshot above shows just a portion of the results, but you can get the general idea just by looking at the top 10 results.
Keep in mind that the numbers you see are averages compiled by sampling reported search volumes from the search engines that actually make that information public. The actual number of searches on any given phrase may be much higher.
Just looking at this list, though, you can spot a couple of potential sub-markets. How about ”weight lifting for baseball”. That’s something you could actually create a new product around.
Or how about “weight lifting gloves“? If there’s a market for gloves, what other accessories related to weight lifting do people purchase online? Now, let’s look at build muscle:
This is interesting! You see, now, that you have two related concepts ”weight lifting” and “build muscle”, but the “build muscle” phrase connects to additional potential markets.
The reason why can be seen in this search phrase: “build muscle without weights”. People can build muscle by lifting weights, but not everyone wants to lift weights in order to build muscle. And the good thing is..they don’t have to. You can build muscle by doing pilates, or riding a bike or working around the house.
Now, look at the phrase “build muscle tone”. Again, we see another aspect of a potential market. Some people just want good muscle tone, and not the bulging biceps associated with hard-core weight lifting. As you can see, this keyword research phase is highly beneficial. We started out with idea of targeting health fanatics who might be interested in weight lifting and muscle building, but discovered several other related sub-markets in the process.
What this allows you to do is move with clarity into Step Two. Now, you can decide exactly who target and what type of offer you need to put in front of them. If you’d put a weight lifting product in front of people who just wanted to build muscle tone ‘naturally’, your conversion rate would likely be much lower.
The End Of Part 2.
In the next part, I will talks about how to find and create an irresistible offer for you to ‘sell’ it online. If you have gain some tips from this article do comment below.
How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet – Part 1/5
What is a home-based internet business?
At the most basic level, a home-based Internet business is something you should be able to create using only your computer and your Internet connection. In other words, all of the most important tasks associated with running the business take place online, such as:
> Attracting potential customers
> Presenting your offer
> Closing the sale
> Processing payments
> Delivering the product
> Following up
Again, all of this can be done on the Internet and the majority of it can be totally automated. The only relevant exception to this comes with product delivery. If you were to start your own handmade soap business, for example, and wanted to sell the soap online, you would have to pack and ship the products yourself. This is not ideal unless you are truly passionate about putting in that extra level of work.
I’m going to assume that you want your online business to be as easy, profitable and hands-off as possible, so from here on out we’re going to bypass any discussion of businesses that require you to handle inventory.
Fair enough?
O.K. So, let’s look at the alternative of the completely automated, digital business. What do I mean by this? A completely automated and ‘digital’ business is one that frees from ALL of the following:
> Inventory
> Packaging
> Shipping
> Returns/Refunds
How is this possible? Quite simply,
this ‘hands-free’ business model is made possible by a method known as affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a method by which you can sell other people’s products, and you never have to touch the products or deal with the big customer service issues at all. You just pocket a percentage of the sale for leading the customer to the product. If you are unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, here is hypothetical scenario that will help you understand the basic principle behind it. Let’s say a friend of yours is selling off his guitar collection.
He asks for your help in finding people who might be interested in buying his guitars, and tells you that he’ll give you 20% of his take for every guitar sold if the buyer mentions your name. In essence, your friend is paying you for the referral. This is affiliate marketing, which is also sometimes known as referral marketing, in a nutshell. As an affiliate marketer, you can earn ‘commissions’ by referring others to all sorts of products and services.
There may even be an affiliate program out there for ‘used guitars’.
Affiliate marketing encompasses far more, however, than the sale of physical goods.
You can also promote intangible items, like e-books, video or music downloads, software, memberships and online services. What’s great about this is that the products are downloadable. The customer you refer receives his product right after the sale. A focus on this type of ‘digital’ product is often referred to as information marketing, because it is information that is most often sold in these formats.
If we were being picky about our terms and definitions, we could also call it ‘entertainment marketing’ in some cases.
The important thing, though, is that people are motivated to purchase these types of products in order to fill one very important need: to find a solution to a problem. When you think about it, even music or other types of entertainment solve a problem, the problem of ‘boredom.’
Now, you can start any kind of online business you like, but my recommendation is that you start an affiliate information marketing business. This model is proven to be the easiest, most cost-effective and most profitable for home business newbies to master.
If you still aren’t convinced, have a look at this site called Clickbank.
Look at the top of your screen for the blue tabs, and click on the one that says ’Buy Products.’ Now, click on any link in the list from the List of Categories table near the bottom. What you’ll see on the next screen is a list of link to products in that category being sold through Clickbank.
The Top 10 products in the ‘Health and Fitness’ category, for example, include product ‘solutions’ for things like fat loss, anxiety and panic and even hypnosis. These are hot topics and you can be that there are people online in search of this information.
You might wonder why someone would pay for this information when plenty of web sites offer information on these same subjects for free?
The truth is that not much of the free information online today is truly premium information. Not only that, but you have to spend quite a few hours compiling information from different sites just to get a big picture, and even then you may not discover the solution to your problem.
Most people don’t want to pour through medical journal articles to find a ‘drug-free’ solution to their anxiety problem. They just want to feel better NOW.
Products such as the ones found on Clickbank promise to deliver that premium information quickly and easily. Purchase the product online, download it, and you’ve got your solution in minutes instead of hours.
Now, imagine yourself marketing those types of solutions. You can build an entire business around marketing those kinds of solutions! Every product in the Clickbank marketplace has an affiliate program associated with it, which means you can earn money promoting them.
Sounds pretty good, right?
End Of Part 1
That’s all for Part 1, I hope you like it. Please let me know your feedback by commenting below and do remember to check out part 2 tomorrow.
Why Is It Important To Start A Internet Business?
There are many reasons why one would like to start a internet business but it can all boil down to three simple factors:
- More Money
- More Time
- Less Effort
Let’s talk about the money aspect. When people work in a 9-5 job, they don’t do it for free – you have to see what your time is worth and not just squander away your youthful years in a cubicle. A internet business allows someone to work and make lots and lots of money. It’s good because you don’t have to spend a lot on gas, parking coupons and fancy suits (or for the women, makeup and expensive shoes).
Which brings us to the time factor. When you don’t have to drive to work, you can save a lot of time and leverage on tools on the Internet! There are many tools designed to automate your work such as autoresponders, websites, sales letters, digital products and even YouTube! Running your own internet business gives you the flexibility to leverage on time freeing sources and generate you not one or two but multiple streams of passive income all without sucking up your time.
The best thing about a internet business is that you can spend less time doing a lot of things and you can even outsource your work to others. Outsourcing your online business tasks like traffic generation, graphics design (for your website) and many more are just some of the things you can do to make your life a whole lot easier. After all, one of the success principles of any business is “buy low, sell high”.
At the end of the day, starting a internet business is always a feasible option. With information available freely on the Internet, you can find virtually anything you need – especially the resources for starting a internet business right away.
If you like this post, you may consider clicking here to subscribe to my blog to get the latest updates Please do remember to comment below If you have any further comment. Also, find out what I am doing now by following my Twitter here.
