Archive for April, 2009
Most owners who start selling online usually have an existing bricks and mortar business. The reasons why a business owner may go online could be to expand their customer base, increase sales revenue, or just to have an online presence and I am sure there are many other reasons as well. I am starting to see a stronger trend from brick and mortar businesses to move online and use online e-commerce systems to run their business instead. Also, for new business owners coming online for the first time I see them starting a blog as a low cost and easy to set up alternative. Let’s have a look at some of the statistics. According to the 2008 Australian Commonwealth Bank Investment Trends Business Owners Survey, they found 42% of business owners had a website, but only 18% of them allowed consumers to buy online. I was quite interested to read this because it shows there are still more opportunities for business owners to capture their share of the online market.
Why Do Business Online?
There are many benefits in doing business online and I have outlined five most compelling reasons:
- Make money 24 hours, 7 days a week. Imagine waking up and turning on your computer to see that you have made hundreds of sales overnight! In today’s time poor consumer market, we see people shopping online at any time of the day, so having a 24 hour, 7 day a week shop can capture sales you didn’t even know about.
- It is easy for consumers to shop online and no more waiting in lines. One of the secrets to shopping online is no more waiting in lines to get what you want. Make it easier for consumers to buy from you and they won’t even need to leave their home.
- Reduces your overheads. The cost of running an Internet business is quite minimal and once your systems are in place your customers become your most profitable asset. With no customer service staff and no overtime to pay, your Internet business can be very lucrative. I am an example of this, as my dragonboat business is an automated system with only one staff to run it.
- Allows you to focus on a niche market. Some of the most successful small businesses carve out a niche market where they don’t have to compete on price alone. This allows them to expand their customer base globally and dominate their niche market.
- Streamlines your systems and improves your cashflow. It is very easy to automate your systems with an Internet business as technology is so advanced that it can do virtually anything. It allows you to feed information into your back-end systems and allows you to control where money goes. Additionally cashflow will be improved with faster electronic transactions without having to wait to go to a bank to deposit the money.
Getting Started With Your Online Business
Once you have decided that your business is suitable for capturing online sales, you will want to begin planning how to put it together. There are many parts to an Internet business and more in depth knowledge to acquire, though here is a summary of the components you will need:
The Front End:
Another article I wrote discusses about the front end in more detail showing you how to capture leads: Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1: Generating Leads. This will help you understand more about the processes involved.
- Setting up a website. This is the easy part, and also the presence of your business online. First step is to register a domain name, chose a hosting company and build your website.
- The shopping cart. Once your website is setup you can either have an integrated shopping cart with your website or add a shopping cart software. Both with do the same job, the difference is to do with how much you can afford to spend on the website. I’ll explain what is included in a good shopping cart:
- Marketing tools and information including cross selling tools
- Order management tools
- Pricing rules allowing you to offer bulk discounts, special time sensitive pricing promotions and so forth
- Stock management tools
The Back End:
- Payment gateway. This is important for you and the consumer to have. It is a secure connection between your website and the bank or merchant provider that will send private transactional details. A consumer will feel safe when they are purchasing from your website and provide security from fraud.
- Merchant provider. This is the financial institution that will validate credit card details and make the payment into your bank account. It can be either your banking institution or an online provider such as Paypal or eWay. Shop around to see what is suitable for your business that will provide you with the best package possible.
- Accounting system. More and more e-commerce systems have an accounting package module built in and also give you the option to export data into a well-known accounting system such as Quickbooks or MYOB. No matter what accounting software you use, make sure you have this in place as it will save you time and money over the long term.
There are more components that can be added to both the front and back end of an Internet business. I have provided a basic skeleton to get started for any business owner wishing to set up their business online. If you want to find out more about how to create a successful and profitable back end system to add onto these basic components, be sure to read:
Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 2: Profiting From The Back-End
Tyrone Shum
Helping Business Owners Move Online
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Who Is The Freebie Guy?
The man behind The Freebie Guy is Leslie. Not only is Leslie working full time as a school teacher, he is able to earn a part time income from his Internet business and teaches individuals how to make money as a Freebie trader. His story is very interesting and if you want to find out more about how to make money giving away freebies you should listen to the podcast.
How To Make Money With The Freebie Guy?
In this interview I did with Leslie, you will learn…..
- How Leslie started his Internet business making $70 in the FIRST DAY
- How to make money from Freebie trading
- Leslie’s top 3 tips on how to make money from an Internet business
- What you should do to start your Internet business
Read Full Post »
Recently, one of my readers commented and asked me to write an article about backlinks. Rather than just give you a definition of what backlinks are, I wanted to share with you how to use backlinks to promote your Internet business and how it will benefit you over the long-term. Additionally backlinking is another SEO strategy you can add to your list of activities and it does require consistent effort. If you can outsource this to someone, I would recommend it and you can focus on the dollar productive activities.
What Are Backlinks?
Wikipedia defines backlinks as:
“Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.”
Simply it is a link from another website linking back to your website with a keyword.
How Does Backlinking Help Your Internet Business?
Backlinking and SEO go hand in hand when it comes to promoting your Internet business. The more backlinks you have to your website, the higher chances your website will be displayed on the first page of a search engine (such as Google). An important thing to note is how you go about getting quality backlinks. It is possible to get a lot of backlinks to your website, but if it is not relevant then your efforts are being wasted. Therefore, when getting a quality backlink to your website, make sure the word or phrase is relevant to the link. Let me give you an example, if you have a website based on nutrition and you write an article on women’s health, make sure that your linking keywords are “women’s health” and not nutrition. Google awards you for relevant phrases linked to relevant websites by ranking you higher.
Where Can I Find Out How Many Backlinks My Site Has?
All search engines offer a backlink look-up tool that you use to find out how many backlinks your website has. All you have to do is type in link:www.yourdomain.com into the search form. Just replace yourdomain with the URL of your website or webpage.
How Do You Get MORE Backlinks To Your Internet Business?
There are many ways to get more backlinks and it comes down to how much time and effort you are willing to put in to building them. I would allocate no more than an hour each day on these activities as it is a long-term process and will not happen immediately. These are just some of the methods I currently use build backlinks to Internet Business Path:
- Submitting your link/site to article and blog directories
- Do link exchanges with other sites and blogs
- Comment on blogs related to your topic or industry (Remember to contribute to the conversation and not just one line comments that will SPAM the blog)
- Sending a press release with your website link into publicity channels
- Post in forums (make sure to include your signature with a link to your website)
- Write guest articles or reviews for people and include your website link
- Build more websites and link them altogether
If you consistently apply all the methods above, you will build up a huge network of backlinks. Remember to contribute your thoughts and not to simply post a one line comment with a website link. You will not only build your reputation but also link to lots of new people online.
Tyrone Shum
Hunting for more backlinks
Over the Easter Long Weekend I spent time with family and had a very relaxing time pursuing my hobby. I also was in the mood to write, so I added another 12 email newsletters for the Dragonboat email list which has about 400 subscribers. I have set them to be sent out monthly using an automatic followup service, and each newsletter will provide my subscribers valuable information about Dragonboating techniques, nutrition, fitness and upcoming Dragonboat events happening across the world. So why have I told you this and what is so important about having an email list?
The Importance Of Having An Email List?
This list that I have built and maintained for over three years generates over $100,000 in revenue alone and I simply write one email a month to provide valuable information to my subscribers. Furthermore, this list is not huge compared to other lists I have built in the past where I have had thousands of subscribers. This least has about 400 subscribers and if you do the calculations, each subscriber spends on average around $250. I don’t tell you this to brag about my email list, but it should tell you how important it is to have and maintain an email list.
Many business seminars I have attended talks about the importance of having a list and how each person or client on your list is where money can be made. A coach and mentor I have learned business strategies from is Brendan Nichols, also known as “Australia’s laziest entrepreneur”. Brendan is an Australian entrepreneur and business coach who was trained by Robert Kiyosaki from Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I personally know Brendan and he is definitely the real deal who practises what he preaches. I highly admire Brendan for what he teaches turning difficult business principles into simple action steps for anyone to apply. This where I learned how to build a profitable email list.
Brendan taught me how to maximise profits from each client and to create a client priority list from my email subscribers.
“The principle of maximisation is to increase the amount of purchases from clients you already have.”
If you want to learn how to build a list please read Generating Leads where I show you some methods on how to capture leads onto an email database. Also a great case study to read is at Yaro Starak’s blog: Building An Email List
How Will A Targeted Email List Make A Difference To Your Internet Business?
Before you can maximise profits from each client your email list needs to have targeted customers or have customers who want your product or service. There is no point in having thousands of subscribers on a database who are not interested in what you have to offer, it is a of waste resources. Therefore your goal right from the beginning when asking people to subscribe to your list is to offer them something they want. In my case, people subscribe to my database to receive information about dragonboating and they receive a free eBook about dragonboat paddling techniques and equipment when they join my email list. Obviously not everyone will subscribe to this list unless they are involved in the sport or are looking to purchase dragonboat equipment.
When you create a targeted email list, it is becomes an excellent tool for building stronger relationships with your subscribers. I consider a person who opts-in to my email list a high quality prospect who will ultimately purchase a product or use our services in the future. This is why promoting to a targeted email list allows you to focus on narrower topics and reuse content over and over again as each new subscriber moves through your sequence of emails. As a result of this, you have structure and a refined system that requires less work and produces more income.
Maximising Profits From Each Client
Whilst you are building a targeted list of email subscribers you will constantly look at ways to maximise profits from each customer providing them with valuable content and offering your products and services in conjunction. Here are three hot profit maximisation tips to help you increase your income:
- Look for add-ons products or services to upsell or use additional promotions
- Develop an upselling script e.g McDonalds: would you like fries with that or a soft drink?
- Create a special priority client list to offer them special offers and pre-launch events. e.g. If a sale starts on the 1st Decemeber, they can take up that special on the 25th November as a VIP client and get in before the rush.
The key to successfully maximising profit from each client is to ask the question, “what can we do for our clients that they can’t do for themselves?”. Essentially we are creating value and offering them a service to save them time and resources.
The true power of building an Internet business with a targeted email list is to leverage the website as the traffic creator and relationship starter, and then finish the process with email marketing to generate your income.
There’s a lot of subtleties to this system but I guarantee you the results will speak for themselves.
Tyrone Shum
Building Targeted Email Lists
Building links to your Internet business is a crucial aspect of your marketing campaign. It helps improve your search engine ranking and increases traffic to your website. If you are interested in other traffic generating strategies, I suggest reading my series on: Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic.
The main focus of this article is to provide you with a list of DoFollow forums that you can participate and share information with. If you spend two to three hours a day browsing through DoFollow forums, write at least 10-15 posts in at least two DoFollow forums, you will start to see more traffic flow to your website. Here are the top three reasons why you should implement this:
- It will generate FREE traffic to your website. If forum members see value in your information, they will click on your link to find out more.
- Helps create a backlink to your website, which will increase your search engine ranking and site popularity much quicker.
- You contribute to others and learn from experts within your industry.
Let me address what DoFollow means. Otherwise if you already understand the concept, scroll down to the list below and take action today by contributing your resources to others that will drive more traffic to your website.
What Is DoFollow?
The easiest way to understand what DoFollow is, I will explain what NoFollow is first. NoFollow was an attribute created in 2005 to help bloggers and webmasters manage comments and control the number of inserted links. It was to stop spammers placing unwanted links on blog posts. By adding the Nofollow attribute automatically to your links it tells search engines to not follow them, thus stopping spam.
Now, DoFollow is the opposite of NoFollow, isn’t that simple? The main difference is, DoFollow is only available on limited websites restricting comments and links that are relevant to the topic. This stops spamming and is beneficial to websites who are actually contributing to the community. By submitting comments on DoFollow blogs or websites you get free quality backlinks.
“DoFollow links are links which help you improve your search engine ranking results.”
List of DoFollow Forums
- 5Star Affiliate Forum – An affiliate marketing forum
- Abestweb – An affiliate marketing forum for both beginner and experienced affiliates
- Abundance – A forum that allows you to post advertisements for free
- Blogger Talk – A forum for bloggers
- Blog Mastermind Forum – An excellent forum with like minded bloggers who share strategies on how to make money with blogs
- Business Forum – Business related topics discussed in this forum
- Capital Theory – An online money making forum
- Clickbank Success – A forum dedicated to people making money from Clickbank
- Clicks Forum – Internet marketing business forum
- Digitalppoint – A large forum about internet marketing and search engine (over 10 million members)
- Dreamteam Money Forum – One of the hottest money making forums
- Entrepreneur Forum – A forum started up by Evan Carmichael about entrepreneurship
- Ewealth.com – Internet marketing and webmaster forum
- Free Advertising Forum – Unlimited advertising posting
- Internet Marketing for Business – Internet marketing and business forum
- SEOForum – Dedicated for SEO discussions
- Small Business Forum – A business forum for small entrepreneurs and online moneymakers
- Startups – A business start-up and innovation forum
- Warrior Forum – One of the most helpful and highly recommended forum to discuss business on. People are always ready to help and assist with your enquiries
- Work-at-Home Moms – An Internet marketing message boards for mums
Please comment below about any of the forums you have tried and let me know how helpful they have been for you.
Tyrone Shum
Forum DoFollower
Social bookmarking is a very powerful strategy to help drive free traffic to your website, particularly when your Internet business is brand new or has been laying dormant for quite sometime. Combine this strategy with other traffic generation tactic discussed about at Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic and this will definitely boost your website on search engines.
What Is Social Bookmarking?
Rather than redefine this term, here is a definition taken directly from Wikipedia:
“Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.
These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service’s features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.”
How You Can Use Social Bookmarking To Get More Free Traffic?
For your website to rank top positions on search engines you need a high amount of incoming links with the combination of keywords. Social bookmarking can help you achieve more incoming links very easily. When you submit to multiple social bookmarking sites it will automatically create incoming links to your website. This give you more results of your website on search engines.
Let’s take for example, I submit the following post Farming Your Crop Of Clients to 20 social bookmarking sites. This post can show up as 20 “unique†results on the search engines. Therefore, instead ranking only once on a search engine, it can be ranked 20 times. As you can see, it is 20 times more effective and gives you a higher chance for your website to be found.
I previously mentioned for social bookmarking to work properly, the combination of incoming links and keywords are needed. It boils down to selecting the proper keywords that are targeted to your article or product. The more targeted your keyword phrases are the higher chances that your website will be ranked higher. For example, if you have a highly competitive product like the “Apple iPod”, then you will need choose more specific keywords including model numbers and specifications like the “iPod Nano 4GB Black”. This way it will help you capture those keywords and help you rank higher.
Use SocialMarker.com To Leverage Your Social Bookmarking Promotions
So how do submit to 20+ social bookmarking sites as I mentioned above? It’s easier than you think, and you won’t have to sit there clicking through hundreds of social bookmarking sites as well. There is a website called SocialMarker.com which will help you submit to over 20 social bookmarking sites. When you visit this site, you will see a list of the top Social Bookmarking sites available such as propeller.com, technorati.com, twitter.com, and so forth.
The idea is to submit an article or blog post you wish to rank high in the search engines to as many of the social bookmarking sites as possible. If you want your whole website to rank well then you will need to submit as many articles or posts to the social bookmarking sites.
Social Bookmarking “How To Tips”
Search engines are very intelligent to pick up on automated promotions and we need to make our social bookmarking promotions seem natural. Here are some handy tips to help you:
- Run your social bookmarking promotions slowly over time. Send a few today, a few next week and a few next month.
- Register multiple accounts for each of the social bookmarking sites. Start out with at least 10 unique accounts
- use different usernames within one social bookmarking site
- use free email accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, MSN to open up your accounts
- repeat the process with the 20+ social bookmarking sites (should take no more than 15 minutes for each registration)
- use roboform.com to remember all your passwords.
- Rotate the accounts you use with social bookmarking sites for each post you submit.
- Add new social bookmarking accounts to your promotions on a regular basis.
- Include other people’s articles and post within your social bookmarking promotion. This shows randomness within your promotions.
- Do not social bookmark every single post you write as it will be considered spam, so please social bookmark wisely.
Just like any type of traffic generation strategy, you will need to allocate time to work the process. Focus on a few strategies, test them and monitor the process. Give it at least a month to see the results and continue the process if it works for you. Remember don’t spend all day on this one process as social bookmarking should only be used to help “jumpstart” your traffic from search engines.
Tyrone Shum
Social Bookmarker
For your Internet business to run successfully and smoothly you need to use great web hosting companies. I have used numerous hosting services over the years in running online businesses and the key is to find the companies that offer reliable hosting and good support. I can tell you it is not a good feeling to see your website go down for a product launch due to high traffic usage.
I would like to share my favourite web hosting companies that I currently use or have done research on that offer great service and value. Hopefully it will save you some of the hassles I have been through with unreliable services. One thing to note though, no hosting company is perfect and there are definitely some that are better than others.
Web Hosting Companies Tyrone Recommends
Hostmonster is one of the web hosting companies I have been using since the very beginning. I haven’t had any issues with their web hosting and they have great customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I also use this service for my client websites as well.
Lunar Pages offers unlimited bandwidth and currently has a Spring special starting at $4.95 for 12/24 month hosting packages. It’s a great offer and this service is extremely reliable.
Hostgator offers unlimited domains for under $10. A very popular hosting service that has a 45 day money back guarantee and can help you build your website choosing from over 4,500 templates.
Bluehost is a highly regarded web hosting company in the industry. It’s very reliable and I highly recommend this service.
Superb Hosting offers dedicated hosting services for as low as $59 per month. This web hosting service is highly recommended for Internet businesses with serious traffic.
If you have any feedback on these services and would like to share your experiences about these hosting companies, please comment below.
Tyrone Shum
Recommending Great Web Hosting
Over the weekend, my partner and I celebrated our anniversary at the Sheraton and Hilton Hotels in Sydney. We are very fortunate to have time and share special moments together during the week. I woke up this morning looking out the window over George Street and saw how busy the streets were with people rushing off to work, whilst we lay in bed watching TV. (This is what an Internet business allows you to do).
For our anniversary yesterday, we treated ourselves staying the night at the Hilton hotel. Then for dinner we had a delicious buffet at Sheraton On The Park. Being only five minutes walk from the Hilton hotel we strolled up the street to the Sheraton to take our 7pm booking. We enjoyed a huge selection of fresh seafood: lots of prawns and oysters, hot food including Barramundi, roast pork and turkey, a selection of cheeses, and the most scrumptious desserts.
After dinner we went back to the Hilton hotel to enjoy a bottle of champagne that was given to us complimentary from the staff at the Hilton. Before we knew it, after having a relaxing shower and rolling down the electric blinds, we fell asleep on the comfortable King size bed and slept like babies.
As part of the package included in our stay, the Hilton included a complimentary breakfast buffet on level 2. I felt like a king when one of the waiters gave us his full attention and provided excellent service. Thank you Gordon! I could not have asked for more this morning enjoying a gourmet cooked breakfast of ham and mushroom omelette, hash browns, pork sausages, Belgian waffles and grilled tomatoes. It was the most memorable breakfast dining experience I have ever had.
I would love to hear your comments below of excellent places you have been to dine at.
Tyrone Shum
Living Like A King
I have been working from home for just over three months now, in the beginning I found it hard to focus and my productivity dropped, especially in the summer months when the sun was shining and beckoning me to go out. Today I’m going to share a few tips that I have put in to practise…
- Write down special goals – If you work from home, you have to do this – There are just too many distractions and no boss watching over your back every minute of the day. On my table I have a small card that I write down 2 mission critical tasks for the day. That way I focus on the most important tasks and outsource the rest.
- Wake up at the same time everyday – Set a time to get up each day and stick to it. I get up at 7.30am to exercise, then have my breakfast and start work around 10am. I stick to 4 hours of work a day.
- Turn off phone and instant email notifications – Having constant interrupts makes it harder to stay focus. I make sure there are no interruptions when I am writing a blog post because my readers want the best from me. Don’t you?
- Exercise – I find doing exercise in the morning gives me so much more energy and motivation for the day, if you don’t regularly do exercise, try it for one week and see how you feel. Your mind will be clearer for the day and you might shed a few kilos along the way!
- Tidy office – Keep your office clean by filing away piles of paper. If you have notes written down, transfer them to your computer and put a reminder to complete them. That way you will have less clutter and paper lying around.
- Music – Not for everyone but I find music really helps me work during the day. Put something light and soothing on in the background.
- Daily schedule – Even though you are working from home and don’t have to follow the usual office rules, try and set out a daily plan for yourself – start at the same time, have lunch at a set time etc – I find it helps to have a daily routine.
- Just do it – If you are like me you have certain jobs that you try and put off because they’re dull or take ages, make sure it gets done first thing in the morning when you are fresh and motivated.
- Outsource – Even though you can do a job doesn’t always mean you should do it – why not outsource that boring coding job which will leave you free to concentrate on more important jobs or jobs that you enjoy doing more.
- Close your door – If there are distractions at home, like people calling round or noisy kids, make it a rule to not be disturbed when your door is shut.
All of these are pretty obvious things to do but if you don’t do any of them, give it a go and see if your productivity improves.
Tyrone Shum
Increasing Blogging Productivity
For the month of April, Tyrone Shum dot com will be giving away a customised blog design website with web hosting and a domain name. This package is valued at $1,500 and it will be given away to one lucky reader.
What Do You Get?
- A unique design, crafted to meet your individual needs and the unique nature of your blog.
- Free installation of a blogging platform (WordPress)
- Free hosting service for 12 months
- A Search Engine Optimised (SEO) blog
- Installation of up to 10 widgets
- Includes up to 10 email addresses
If you are interested in starting your own blog, want to transfer your existing blog from another website, or would like to have your blog redesigned, then you need to enter this contest!
How To Enter To Win?
The great thing about this contest is how easy it is to enter. You earn one entry by simply filling the form below and opting into our newsletter. It’s easy, right? But there’s more! You can earn five more entries if you blog about this contest and link to this post using the following keywords:
- Blog Design
- Customised Blog
- Profitable Blog Design
Have your post send a trackback and you’re in! If the trackback doesn’t work, then enter the URL in the comments.
COMPETITION IS CLOSED…
We will be accepting entries between now and midnight April 30th. The winner will be drawn the following Thursday at 12pm (AEST) and announced on this site. Good luck and enter now!
Tyrone Shum
Wishing Everyone Good Luck!
My name is Tyrone Shum and I'm on a journey to outsource and automate my business to allow me to work only 12 hours a week. On this website I share with you my outsourcing strategies to achieve this goal and I have a passion to teach others about what I do. Read more 