HYPE-FREE Internet Home Business Success Tips

It looks like Keith has upset quite a lot of people!

http://www.peterbuick.com/keith-wellman/keith-wellman-autopilotfx-review-part-8 (Here’s a list of other posts related to this debacle: Keith Wellman.)

Keith Wellman Autopilot FX - Review.

Bizopsuk’s encounter with Keith Wellman.

Make sure you do your due diligence before you give this guy your money.

If you’ve been marketing online, you’ll know that membership sites are a great method of making money.

• You build a huge list of prospects with similar interests.
• You can contact them at any time to promote other products or services.
• You create a community of people who are fans of your website and content.

and on…

All these things mean you have great potential for revenue generation - making money!

A cool looking script I came across this morning on my coffee break is one which runs a fantasy soccer league (if you’re in the UK like me, it’s a fantasy football league). Fantasy football leagues are massive in the UK, the football fans love them.

In the right hands this is could be an extremely powerful script - I don’t think the developer realises the full potential.

You can learn more about it here: Fantasy Soccer Script

If you still don’t quite ‘get’ affiliate marketing, I found a nice site that does a good job of explaining it and putting it into context. It has a range of articles on the topic, some free reports and other goodies.

Worth adding to your bookmarks, check it out here - computercashsecrets.com

We have all heard that “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”. Well, the same applies to website content. In this article we will discuss the importance of web copy and how to turn your visitors into customers.

Your website content should convince visitors that your service is either unique or superior to that of your competitors in terms of quality or is competitively priced. It should show your potential clients that you can provide the solution that they are seeking. Your product or service will solve their problems, answer a dream, enrich their lives, and/or improve their businesses. You are the dependable expert that they want and need!

Keep reading →

Some times it pays to work with others. In this article we will discuss how to make money with affiliate programs.Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes. You recommend a site to your users and pick up a percentage of any sales those users generate. You benefit from the commission and the site benefits from sales it wouldn’t otherwise have made. If you’ve ever gone to a website and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliate links.

You can run an affiliate program from a site you’ve already set up, or create a site specially to promote a product or service. As long as it brings in more cash than you spend on building it and buying traffic, you’re laughing.

Affiliate ads work two ways: you can join them to make money, or you can run one to attract users.

Joining An Affiliate Program
As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in the selection of an affiliate program. The benefit of an affiliate program is that it gives you another way to make money from your users. Instead of selling them a product yourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut.

On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take the place of a different ad that you could have put in that same spot. You have to make sure that each advertising position on your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. If you’re not getting the most from your site, you’re tossing money away.

The key to success is to choose the right program, right from the beginning.

Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs. That’s because they know that they only have to pay a commission if a sale is actually made; it’s a proven way to generate revenue without risk. What that means for you is that when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you’re going to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boils down to though is product and price.

While it might be tempting to go for the program that pays the highest commissions, the program won’t pay you a penny if your users won’t go there or won’t buy once they get there. You have to be certain that the service you’re promoting is of genuine interest to the kind of users you buy, whether you’re buying them from search engines or anywhere else.

Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-paying affiliate program and create a small site to send users to it, but do you know where to buy users for a program like that? You’re going to have to research the field, check out the most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns and link exchanges.

That’s fine if you want to invest the time and the effort. But it’s much easier to find an affiliate program operating in a field you’re familiar with, and use that program to earn extra cash.

For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You might make bit of money selling subscriptions, but you might make even more by joining Match.com’s affiliate program and selling them your users. Unless you’re planning to be the Internet’s biggest dating site, you’re not going to be able to compete directly and beat them, but you can join them—and earn money.

Or rather than sell your users directly to a ‘competitor’, you can look for services that complement your own. Visitors to your dating site, for example, might be interested in buying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singles cruises. Instead of selling just one product—membership subscriptions—you’d be selling a whole range of different goods to the same people, and increasing the sources of your income.

Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that is lucrative and right for you:

• Don’t accept less than 25% commission (on info products). You can find affiliate programs with great payment structures and high percentages of the purchase price in just about every field.

• Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the number of click-throughs, sales and earnings so you can see how you’re doing. The information should be broken down by month.

• Look for programs that offer a wide variety of promotional tools to put on your Web page, including text links, banners and graphics.

• Find out how often you will be paid and make sure that the payment schedule meets your expectations. Some programs pay monthly, others quarterly; which is best for you?

Look for examples of marketing methods that successful affiliates are using to get the best results.

Make sure that top level support is given. If they can’t answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you don’t want to work with them.

Affiliate programs offer a viable solution to competing against larger competitors and still make money. As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, joint them!

Three of the biggest affiliate program networks which you should/must join are Commission Junction, ShareaSale and ClickBank (info products only). Each have thousands of advertisers whose products you can promote, covering virtually any market you can think of.

A Blog (also known as Weblog) is traditionally a webpage where pre-surfer or a blogger “logs” all pages he/she finds interesting. In other words, it is a Web page that contains brief, chronologically arranged items of information. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.Weblogs provide a series of annotated links to items such as news stories, and often include personal rants. They are maintained by one person, most commonly someone who is involved in Web design or some other tech-related field.

A blog is often a mixture of what is happening on a particular website and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people. Blogs can be used to introduce products to potential customers.

People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated published systems, most notably Blogger at blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify and accelerate the publishing process.

Blog as a marketing tool:

Blogs offer huge marketing potential. They are highly strategic tools that can strengthen relationships, share knowledge, increase collaboration, and improve branding. Besides, blogs can represent the real voice of the website.

A weblog can take the form of a diary, a news service (or summaries of and links to current news items on a topic), a collection of links to other Web sites, a series of book reviews or products, reports of activity on a project, the journal of an expedition, and much more. Businesses can use this tool to effectively advertise their products or services.

One of the most interesting ways to use a weblog is by allowing it to function as a discussion forum for customers of your products or services. In this case, the webmaster can give posting rights to other people – visitors and customers, and their posts may or may not be reviewed before they are published to the Web page. Customers, in such a way can post favorable comments about the websites offerings. Some weblogs are set up in such a way that only the owner or the owner and certain other people have posting rights, but anyone else can add comments to the posts.

Weblogs when used with newsletters present immense marketing opportunities:

• Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog, extending life and creating a massive conversation.

• You can offer a bidirectional forum to customers to get true, personal opinions on your products and services.

• Company experts can start a blog and become industry experts, helping your company edge out competition and, through this interactive forum, draw customers into another exchange of information and thoughts.

The beauty of this interplay is you can layer your blog with editorial controls.

How to create a Weblog?

The majority of weblogs are now created using software or services designed specifically for this purpose. Some of the software is free - and some of the organizations that provide weblog software will also provide free server space to house a weblog so that it is publicly accessible on the Internet.

There are also commercial versions of some of the free software; these commercial versions often provide more features. Some weblog software is available only as commercial software. Alternatively, bloggers can create and maintain their weblog using free software or a free weblog service, but use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to load the resulting weblog to their own Website.

There are many blogging softwares available easily on the Internet. One of the most popular weblogger is “Blogger” which can be used for free at http://www.blogger.com. Most webloggers simplify the process of Website creation. However, they do require basic knowledge of FTP, Website structures and a few technical terms. Besides, creating an advanced weblog requires knowledge of HTML.

This website uses the Wordpress Blogging Sofware (Free) and is really easy to use and is a great way to build your first website (a blog can be a website if you want it to). If you use Hostgator you can install it in a few minutes. The thing I like about Wordpress (apart from the easy install with Hostgator) is the ease with which you can customise it however you like, add extra functions and features to make it unique.

So get out there and start your own Blog…it’s free, easy and can work seamlessly with the rest of your website or newsletter. Until next time…

In this addition we will discuss the importance web site tracking and explain to you why it is so important to pay attention your current web traffic.Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information, not to mention interesting. If your visitors proceed to purchase a product but then a large majority leave the site when they get to a specific page in the order process then you need to know about it. It could be that this page is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors.

Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can study. If you’re not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing progress. If you don’t have access to website statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that just shows how many visitors you’ve had. You’ll be missing out on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site. Keep reading →

This week we will address the most basic question any Internet business owner will have to answer at one point or another…”what should I sell?”.

After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially, a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet. Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful place.  In breakthroughs that show the promise of e-commerce wasn’t all smoke and mirrors, four dot-coms recently reported their first quarterly profits. The list of the Internet’s publicly held moneymakers includes eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Overture Services Inc., Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc. and E-Trade Group Inc.  Several privately owned dot-coms, including search engines Google and DealTime, say they have been making money, too. Keep reading →

Finding your website is one thing, but knowing what to do once you get there is quite another. In this article we will discuss the importance of website navigation and how it can make or break your site.

The aim of a web site’s navigation is simply to allow users to get to the content they require. For sites that have a large number of sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of these) the navigation plan has to be properly researched and designed. You have to consider different types of visitors and simulate the most common steps they would take to find what they want on your site and the navigation plan has to optimize this movement. For example the steps required from searching a catalog of items, selecting from the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart, proceeding to check out, to entering the payment particulars is a specific sequence that should be facilitated by the navigation system. If the sequence is haphazard, it could lead to frustration or the user may miss an important step and you would have an aborted sale.

To find their way about, users need to know two things: Keep reading →

This instalment will deal with finding the right host for your site; from the free to the very expensive, we will discuss what your options are so that you can find your “perfect host”.

A host is a server which provides a home for your website on the World Wide Web. Just as your computer contains all your files, so a host contains all the files needed to run your website. Why can’t you just keep all those files on your own computer? Because that would mean users would have to connect directly to your computer to see your website. Not a good idea—it wouldn’t be secure and it would make your machine run like a tired snail. With a host, you can simply upload everything you need to the server and your users can then connect there to see your site. It lets the site run faster and allows it to have all the security and extras it needs.

Selecting a host is the first important step towards building your Internet business.

Keep reading →