Archive for July, 2009
It’s time to attract visitors to your Internet business and to build a list of customers. Your customers will be your lifeline and without them, your Internet business cannot survive.
Build Your Foundation – The Email List
In the online world we communicate with our customers via multiple mediums and ultimately we need to collect their email address. Email addresses are used to send orders, updates and more information from your e-commerce website. Building an email list is very important because you will be able to deliver more information and convince your customers to buy more from your website. I strongly recommend you start building an email list at the beginning.
Here is a simple process of how collecting an email address is used to create sales:
- Sign up subscribers to your online newsletter through your website and send updates of new products and promotions
- Build rapport with these people who will be interested in receiving your online newsletter. Be sure you offer great advice and resources they can access.
- They become a customer of your website because they trust you and will recommend friends and family to buy from you.
This is a short process that is quite simple but very powerful. If you can build strong relationships with your customers via email, then imagine what your e-commerce business could achieve.
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The biggest challenge I have found in any Internet business is creating the right systems that will leverage your time and make money while you are not there. Our ultimate goal is establishing upfront a system that allows us to walk away from the business for at least six months and come back with more money in our bank account. This is the power of running a business online. If you can apply these systems that I show you, you will create a business you own rather than a business you run.
Where Do I Start? Let’s Help You Find Your Niche!
Many people who launched their Internet businesses successfully started with leveraging their industry experience or personal interests. You need to look at identifying market niches that are under served within those areas. Ask yourself what expertise have you gained from your life experiences that you can offer to potential clients? Or what personal interests can you look at turning into an Internet business? For me, I started the dragon boat niche business out of frustration that there was no company in Australia that offered the products I needed. As I was involved in the sport at an elite level I started hearing the same questions, “where can I buy dragonboat carbon fibre paddles?†Each time I heard that, I started to see there was a demand and took this opportunity to create an Internet business. For you, the idea would be different, but the search for an untapped niche market is an opportunity for you to create a successful Internet business.
I recommend doing some due diligence and research to find out if your idea is viable, and here are three major questions you need to ask:
- Does your idea exist already?
- Will it be easily identifiable?
- How will I make it marketable and targeted?
A key point I want to make: looking for a profitable niche market is about finding the buyers first. From my experience, most people start off with the wrong idea and look for a product to sell first. Find out what the problems or needs are from people and provide a solution. (As I mentioned in my example, I saw a problem and offered a solution).
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I wrote a post previously on How To Use Press Releases To Gain Exposure For Your Website? If you haven’t read this, please take time to read this first. If you have, let’s move on. Before you release a press release to the market you must spend time preparing and creating the right elements. Spend more time here and I can assure you that you will have greater success when you speak with the media. They want to know that you are knowledgeable in your area of expertise and don’t want to waste time. So let’s begin with preparation…
The Secret Is In Preparation!
The key to dealing with the media is demonstrating your ability to act quickly and to have information ready when people ask for it. Before reaching out to the media, develop the following:
- A good media release (some hints follow)
- A few backup ideas, in case the first one you present is knocked back by the journalist
- A one-page biography of yourself highlighting your experience and capabilities, which shows them you are a credible source
- A list of sample questions for the journalist to ask you (this can be especially helpful when working with radio stations, particularly the smaller or underfunded ones)
- A digital image of yourself, such as professional photos available for download at 300dpi
- Samples of your product (or if you’re providing a service, testimonials from customers who have tried it)
By providing a journalist the information they need, it makes the process of writing a story very easy for them and they will appreciate your efforts.
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If you want to establish credibility and create brand awareness in the shortest amount of time, utilising the media is a more effective approach than paid advertising. The goal is to get the media to write great stories about your Internet business and yourself using press releases. It allows you and your website to reap the benefits of free exposure, which is considered to be three times more valuable than paid advertising. By having a third party such as a journalist write a story about you, your brand message becomes more credible and effective. Their coverage offers an impartial endorsement that tells their readers you are an honest person, and that your services or products provide substantial value.
Understanding How The Media Works
Our society is very time-poor, and this fight for attention includes our journalists and writers. They have to scan through literally thousands of articles, ideas and proposals a day to pick the best ones that will capture the reader’s attention. If we want to stand out among the thousands of articles a journalist will receive daily, we first need to understand what they are looking for.
Most journalists will ask — where’s the angle or the hook to this story? What is going to appeal to my readers that will make a great story? For example, if the heading of a story reads, “Man takes dog for a walk,†then people will not be interested. But if the heading reads “Man takes flying dog for a walk,†that story will grab the reader’s attention.
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Our Step By Step Guide To Article Marketing
In our weekly podcast, we are exploring article marketing. The reason why we wanted to share this with you is to help you understand why article marketing is a crucial traffic generating tool for your Internet business. If you do article marketing correctly, it will help rank your website higher across multiple search engines and also bring in more traffic from many different sources.
Within the podcast we’ll teach you:
- How to create unique content that readers will find interesting and click through to your website.
- Why you need to structure your article in a certain way to achieve the best outcome
- Our top tips on how to get your articles marketed quickly and tools to speed up the process
- How to research the market to write about a topic your readers want
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Download the MP3 [ 32 minutes - 22MB ]
The Unstoppable Profits Guy
A local Sydney resident and Australian entrepreneur, Aurelius Tjin is the man behind a lot of successful private label rights products. His created over 60 different products that cater for people needing design and graphics for their Internet marketing websites, content for Internet marketers and also lots of different productivity related content. His truly unstoppable because his able to create content very quickly and get it into the market in a short period of time.
Aurelius also writes a monthly blog post at aureliustjin.com and shares with his readers about the mindset of running your own business and how to increase your productivity. It has a lot of great resources that is available immediately as well. I interview Aurelius to find out how he markets his products using social media such as Twitter to gain over 36,000 followers and how his list of 20,000+ readers helps him spread word about his products quickly.
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In today’s post I would like to share with you an excellent piece of software that I use in my business. I had been struggling in the past to manage multiple projects all at once and when you have 3 staff working for you full time, you need to have good systems in place to manage them. Furthermore, it can be a real disaster when you take on more work without having a project management software in place. You will receive more emails from your clients and programmers and before you know it, you will have forgotten who sent what.
This is why I turned to ActiveCollab. A few weeks ago I did a podcast with Adam Lever from Big Screen Promotions and on the topic of How To Outsource Your Internet Business. In the podcast we discussed about how to outsource your Internet business and also mentioned a few software products that were freely available. One we mentioned was Dot Project and this is an open source software that is quite basic. I personally felt it wasn’t enough to manage the projects and opted to another option.
ActiveCollab – A Project Management Software I Love!
When I found ActiveCollab it was originally open source and was free up until Version 1.0. Then the team decided to charge a license fee starting at $199.00 which I believe is well worth the price. A lot of times I don’t buy software or recommend it unless it either:
- Saves time
- Saves money
- Easy to use
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Download the MP3 [ 45 minutes - 31MB ]
Michael Dunlop – Retire At 21 And Living A Life!
Today’s interview is with Michael Dunlop who is a very successful young entrepreneur, an inspirational blogger and business owner. At the age of 20 his achieved quite a lot where he owns 9 websites that all generate a substantial amount of income every month. He lives a life that most people don’t get to experience until they retire, where he can travel around the world and socialise with top Internet Marketers.
His famous for his blog Retire At 21 which showcases other young entrepreneur’s success stories. This was the reason why I wanted to interview Michael and find out what got him started and what is his secret to success. He mentions to me that his also dyslexic and dropped out of high school before he was 18. It is an inspiration to see that Michael takes action on what he says which has attributed to his success.
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I mentioned a couple of weeks that Yaro and Gideon had released a free report entitled the Become a Blogger Roadmap. The report is the pre-cursor to the premium membership site that is open now. Also I gave everyone a quick guided tour of what to expect inside, so you can get a sneak preview of Become A Blogger Premium. I’m putting together a special package that will allow you to effectively get your first month’s membership for FREE! The catch is that you have only 24 hours to get this offer as of 2pm EST.
What is Become a Blogger?
Any of you who have followed me for any length of time will know that I’m a huge Yaro fan and that I bought into this program about three months ago and worked through it to build this blog to where it is now. After reading through the Roadmap free report I realised how powerful his new idea words and how you could leverage Social Media for your blog! Note if you don’t like to read, you can also get the report in audio format from the same link.
The Roadmap report shows how the new wave of blogging are embracing new technologies such as podcasting and video posts to stand out from the crowd and are promoting their blogs via all manner of social media avenues. They list 13 ‘X-Factor’ strategies for putting social media to use now.
Click here to join Become a Blogger
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After taking a break for a week down the coast I am back and revived and ready to take lots of action! I was away from my computer and had no Internet access, which felt great. I find that just taking a week off with no distractions of emails, client issues and other business related tasks allows me to just sit back and reflect on life. So you might be wondering what did I do for a week? Let me share with you some highlights of my week away.
A Relaxing Trip Down To The South Coast
My partner and I drove 2 hours south into a small town called Gerringong. It was a quaint little town that had a population of around 4,000 people and the neighboring town of Gerroa had about 500 people. (The reason why I knew this, was I could remember a sign that said “Welcome to Gerroa. Population: 500 people”)
I think we were also the only Asian couple in town, so we really stood out when we walked down the street to buy food. From experience I love coming to these quiet towns because the pace of life is much slower and it allows me to wind back. We made sure that we also visited different places and checked out the lovely scenery.
For the first day when we drove down the coast we stopped over at the following places: Fitzroy Falls, Kangaroo Valley and Berry. Overall the whole journey took around 4 hours before we arrived at Gerringong. We took some amazing photos and amongst the cold it was well worth the time to stop over.
The beautiful Fitzroy Falls
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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 