Internet Profit System

Archive for February, 2010

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So, you have a new terrific looking Website. You’ve gone to great lengths to make sure it is Search Engine Friendly, you have great content and you are sure that you are what the Search Engines have been waiting for! Your big launch date comes and goes, and nothing. But it takes time to show up on the generic Search Engine results, you might say. So you try an aggressive marketing campaign, and still, your sales are almost non-existent.

What is happening? Your keywords are the fundamental building blocks of your online success. Because the competition is so great, choosing general or broad keywords is almost a guarantee that either you will not show up on the Search Engine results, or if you do, your target audience will not be looking for what you have to offer. Your keywords need to be as specific as possible to get you the results you are looking for. In other words, shoppers ready to buy your product or services are your target and the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword, the less competition you will face.

Choosing the right keywords when your Website is new can be tricky as well as time consuming. There are a few ways to go about it:

1. You might not think objectively. Ask your clients, family members, or friends what they would look for if searching for your product. You might be surprised at what insights they can give you.

2. Get personal with your keywords. Take the obvious general keywords that come to mind, for this example we will use “toys”, and try narrowing it down. Try “toy trucks” or “infant toys” or “water toys”. Now go even deeper in your category and try “infant rattle toys” or “baby teething toys”. You see how you are now targeting exactly what someone might be searching for?

3. Do a manual search for the keywords you choose, and see who your competition is. Is that your target? Also look on the upper right hand corner of your search results. Typically, Search Engines will display the number of found results. The more specific the keyword, the less results displayed, the better your chances of obtaining results for that keyword.

So now you have all these great keywords, what do you do with them? Knowing what your keywords are is not enough, you need to keep a few critical points in mind:

1. Continually evaluate your keywords, keeping in mind that trends come and go, and what is “HOT” today may not be what people are looking for tomorrow.

2. Keep track of where your visitors found you. If you are doing a paid campaign, this is easy to do, but if you are looking at generic results, you can use a tracking software to show you what your best resulting keyword searches are. Google Analytics is an example of a free service, and one of the best to track your traffic, visitors’ keywords and behavior.

3. Your visitors should never have to find what they are looking for on your Website. This applies mainly to your PPC programs. Point them directly to where they need to be. Whether it is the page where they can purchase your product, fill out a form or subscribe to a service, land them directly to that page. If you simply send them to your home page, you will lose that visitor because they did not immediately find what they were looking for.

4. Lastly, optimize your pages to your keywords. Take time to carefully write your meta-tags. Properly written Titles can make the difference if your generic result is clicked on or not. Edit the individual pages to have a keyword rich description. This does not mean stuff your keywords anywhere you can find space for them. Read it over, and make sure it makes sense to you. Keep in mind that you not only want to score a lot of points with the Search Engines so that they deem you content “valuable” to their users, you also want to make your visitors keep coming back to your Website .

All this may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But to put it bluntly, “what you put in to it, is what you get out of it”. If you put the time and effort into your keywords, you will eventually be rewarded with the results you are seeking.

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Your online business, large or small, relies heavily on the use of email. Almost immediately, the volume of emails that must be responded to will become overwhelming and take up a huge percentage of your time. At some point you begin to realize that investing in an autoresponder has become a necessary business expense.

With the aid of an autoresponder, keeping up with emails becomes much less of a chore. Once it’s installed and a few scripts have been written, your business begins to run on autopilot, freeing you from an onerous task and allowing you to spend your time more productively, creating products, researching money-making opportunities, building partnerships, or cultivating the connections you’ve already made. The efficiency of an autoresponder not only gives your business an edge, and allows you to maximize your time to better effect, but also makes your customers feel as if they’re being treated with consideration.

Visitors to a website expect an immediate response when they send you a business related email. If you delay or procrastinate in replying, the visitor you’re hoping to convert into a paying customer may conclude that you’re too busy, too uninterested, or too unprofessional to give them the courtesy of a swift response, and will turn their attention elsewhere. With an autoresponder, they will get the instant acknowledgment they want, as there is no lag time between their request and the automated email reply.

When you are ready to purchase an autoresponder service, bear in mind that they aren’t all built the same. They will differ in terms of exactly what they offer, and you need to shop around, keeping your personal situation in mind as you review the features in each individual program. Of course, price is a consideration as well. But there are many different programs you can compare and contrast, and finding one that meets your unique needs and budget is no problem. Take the time and do your research into what’s out there; it will pay off in the end if you do your homework first.

This is your business – your livelihood. You don’t want to cut corners when it comes to customer service. Email is the best way to communicate with customers and visitors to your website. While there are certainly impulse buyers who feel no need to contact you before buying, there are many who are reluctant to part with their cash until the questions that will help them in their decision making process are answered. Your providing them with a prompt acknowledgment of their request for assistance will go a long way toward impressing them and persuading them to give you their custom.

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For an Internet marketer, the biggest reason for setting up a paid membership site can be summed up very easily – recurring income. A small amount paid monthly by every member can quickly add up to either valuable extra income or even a full-time income if you have several membership sites and if you have a higher priced membership fee, you can quickly earn a very substantial annual income.

People will buy information that they could probably find on the Internet themselves if they had time and knew where to look, but often there is a higher perceived value when they have paid for it.

The challenge then is to find customers and then provide them with such good value that they will retain their membership month after month and hopefully also recommend your site to others because you pay them a generous affiliate fee.

There are four main criteria you need to consider to achieve this and they are:

1. Your site must be in an established membership type market.

2. You must provide excellent value content or service

3. You need to use software that will password-protect your site so that non-paying members cannot get the content for free.

4. A marketing system to attract new subscribers and retain them once they sign up.

Criteria 1 – Your Membership-Site Market

In assessing your potential membership-site market, consider both online and off-line habits. Ask yourself whether people with an interest in this subject would buy monthly magazines, belong to a club or organization about it and perhaps whether there are books on the subject on Amazon’s best popular seller lists. Online, check if there are eBooks that sell well, blogs, forums or other on-line communities about this subject.

The topic must be popular enough to have many potential subscribers or you will be wasting your time. It is worth offering some free material, perhaps an ebook on your subject to see how many people have an interest it it. Another strategy to test your market is to set up a simple survey, asking what issues people have. You can offer free membership to your new site as an incentive for people to reply; the answers you receive will guide you as to what kind of concerns people have on this subject.

The information most in demand on-line is that which solves someone’s immediate problem, so it is worth considering whether your content or service solves just a one-time problem or whether there could be an ongoing or related issues that you can address.

An example of a one-off problem would perhaps be a remedy for snoring and for an ongoing problem, think of new parents, who have many worries and sleepless nights when their baby cries, perhaps in the middle of the night and there is no-one they can ask for advice. A membership site that contains suggested solutions for the numerous problems new parents face would be a valuable resource for them.

Criteria 2 – Quality Content

The four main types of content are: written, audio, video and web-based software solutions. Naturally, the media type you use will depend on your site topic as some will be more relevant that others. Most sites will include a significant percentage of written material as this is still the primary method of sharing information on the Internet, but audio recordings are increasing popular because people can download them and listen when they are walking, driving, exercising or away from their computer for any other reason.

Video content is preferred when the information you are providing is instructional; “how-to” in pictures or a video can make a process very easy to understand compared with following a written list of instructions.

Another situation where pictures are helpful is showing symptoms of something. For example, for the new parent site mentioned above, there could be photos of the types of spots or rashes a small child might have on their body if they have caught any of the various common childhood complaints such as measles, chickenpox or have been bitten by an insect.

There are many sources of good content apart from writing your own if you are qualified to do so. Your own material is obviously the cheapest, but will take the longest to prepare and you need to know enough about your topic to keep providing fresh material on a regular basis.

Use other people’s material by utilizing royalty free articles from article directories such as ezinearticles.com and free content sites, free to use videos from YouTube, metacafe.com or ehow.com or good quality PLR (private label rights).

Outsourcing is another option that will be less time-consuming although you will have costs for the ghost-writer or freelancer you contract to produce your work. Apart from the well-known elance.com & rentacoder.com, there are hundreds of other sources as a simple web search on “outsourcing” will reveal. If you plan to outsource on a regular basis, it is worth the time and effort to find a freelancer and develop a relationship with them, rather than going through a ghost-writing service provider.

Interviews with experts are something you can do yourself with basic equipment. Prepare a list of open-ended questions before the interview and send a copy to the person you will be interviewing two or three days beforehand. Any sooner and they might forget about it and any later doesn’t give them time to prepare.

The following are some suggestions for interview questions that will give an expert the opportunity to give you excellent material for your membership site:
1. What is so good about ………?
2. How did you get involved in ………?
3. What do you consider the top 3 things someone should know about ……?
4. What would you suggest would be the best way to get started?
5. How long would it take to be proficient at ……….?

An hour is a good length for a value interview but you may want to go longer and edit the script later. This is easily done even with a free audio editor such as audacity.

Criteria 3 – membership site software to protect your subscriber’s investment and save you time

If you can, invest in a specialized memberships-site software package or script. There are quite a number of good choices of varying prices, for example Membergate, Memberspeed, & Wordpress plugins like Wordpress Wishlist, Digital Access Pass (DAP), YourMember & aMember. The advantages of using one of these is that so many of the member functions are done automatically, for example:

1. Membership levels
2. Membership types
3. RSS Feed encryption so that non-paying members cannot access your content through the RSS feed
4. Sequential delivery so that someone cannot sign up and download all the material & then unsubscribe – the longer a person is a member, the more content they have access to
5. Payment gateways – preferably more than just Paypal
6. Training and Support
7. A good strong guarantee

Criteria 4 – Strategies for Recruiting & retaining members

1. Instead of focusing on trying to sell memberships, focus on how how one particular article of your content can solve a specific problem a person might have so that you are providing a solution to that problem and also giving one month’s membership to the site for free.

2. Use free advertising by writing & submitting articles & reports, posting on blogs & forums, make squidoo lenses, hubs & other web pages.

3. Buy Pay per Click advertising and banner ads etc

4. List your membership site on Clickbank, Paydotcom etc

5. Email your list & if you don’t have one, form a joint venture partnership with someone who does & pay them a generous affiliate commission.

There are many other marketing tactics that have been written about at great length and can be found in a web search.

In summary, if you can address the four main criteria of using an established membership type market, providing premium value content, using appropriate membership software and attracting subscribers, a paid membership site can become a very profitable business model.