by Claude Pelanne at February 22, 2012.

Posts Tagged ‘ work at home ’

Setting up an Online Home Business

Home Business

Ode to Newbies who work at home

Abraham Lincoln was famous for his humorous and pithy remarks. One of them was; “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

In many ways, these words sum up the experience of the new marketer trying to make his or her way in the crazy world of Internet Affiliate Marketing. It is a frustrating, difficult, anxiety inducing and downright anger filled process of making your way through the barrage of information, up sell, cross sell, down sell, sideways sell and any kind of way sell to get to where you want to go. All this while trying to set up a home business.

“You may fool all of the people some of the time”

This is an interesting area of the IM process. The phenomenon is known as buzz marketing. The word goes out to all comers, new and old, experienced and newbies, that a hot new product is about to come out, and if you get in early, you will make the money before the crowd. So you sign up and join the forum for the new product launch and wait for the big deal product that was touted in the presell video. Well, surprise, surprise…it seems it isn’t quite ready yet so instead you can download eight reports and do some reading while you wait. You feel like a chump until you find a thread on the forum where some pros are complaining that they’ve been had. WOW, guys who know all about SEO, siloing, themeing and things you can’t understand have been had just like you. Thank the stars for the 30 day refund policy…hello Clickbank…bye, bye product. Off you go to the next “golden opportunity”. Is that home business up and running yet?

“You can even fool some of the people all of the time”

This is the early stage newbie or new marketer entering the field. If you were like me you started with the simple desire to do data entry. So you pay your entry fee and find out the site isn’t about data entry. It’s an aggregator for all these affiliate sites that will make you a millionaire in three easy clicks…all for another fee of course. Some of these sites have a “system”. So you fork over another fifty bucks and get a sixty page PDF all about Click Bank or Paydotcom or whatever. But no system. OK so you learned a few things you didn’t know but you’re no closer to making a living, not by a long shot. Though you learn fast enough to avoid the pot hole again, the nature of the Web is there are thousands of newcomers right behind you ready to hit that hole just like you did. If they’re lucky they might join a forum and read one of your comments, but more likely than not, they are just going to have to go through the gauntlet just like you did. By the way no home business just yet!

“But you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

If you make it to this stage, that is, if you have the time, money, and determination to hang in there and work the forums and ask a lot of questions, you’ll soon begin to see things more clearly. The scams with lousy graphics, endless sales pages that don’t tell you what they charge, the so called “free” offers that are never free, will soon be more obvious to you. You might even find a system that works for you. If you are into sales, maybe it’s a product marketing system that teaches you to buy resell rights and shows you how to set up your business. Maybe it’s a Web site building system that teaches you to create you own business out of your hobby or passion. Whatever it is, you have now developed the instincts and ability to see through the smoke. You keep your emotions in check and coolly test and cancel promotions based on your well learned lessons of product quality and market knowledge you now possess. You may not be making a fortune and you may even not be earning anything yet; but you are on your way because you can lay out a realistic plan to develop your home business.

In many ways, online business is no different than offline business, except that in the former, you work at your own pace and answer to only one boss…YOU!

So keep up the hard work and may your travels be prosperous.

How to control your impulse in a huckstering market

I’m working on an article that will look at how you can overcome the emotional buzz that your brain sends out when reading a well crafted sales pitch. It appears that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala can respond to these unsettling stimuli in one 12 milliseconds or one 25th the time it takes to blink your eye. I read about this phenomenon in WSJ in Jason Zweig’s column. His article was about panic selling on Wall Street and Main Street. My article will be about panic buying on Digistreet. There are tactics and methods to overcome the hype and gross overselling that passes for business on the WEB. So stay tuned I’ll be posting the article tomorrow.

Want to Suceed Online?

3 Steps you need to take to set up your affiliate business

For anyone starting out for the first time online, the question is where do I start and what are the key steps I need to take to succeed? Well there is no magic formula, but you will need time, determination and some investment dollars to get started. This is a real business that requires an attitude that you run it like a real business. Once you’ve made the decision to research and launch your product/service to your target market, what are some key steps you must make to move forward?

Set Up a Web Site Properly

Whether you design one yourself, get someone to design one for you or use a template provided by your host or blog provider, you need a place to do business. That place will be your Web site and domain you have registered and paid for.

To register a domain name you will need to go to a service that does just that. Names that come to mind are NameCheap, and GoDaddy but there are many more. Once you have a domain name, you need a place to put it and that’s when you go to a hosting site. Names here are Hostgator, Bluehost, again these are only two, but there are many more. Just make sure that you avoid the free sites. They are not as reliable as those that are fee based.

With your domain registered and hosting set, you will need to put up web pages for your product/service offering. One key tactic is to make sure that you use separate and unique web pages to sell and promote each product or service you are offering. That means registering a separate domain name for each item you are selling with a dedicated sales page outlining the details of benefits and solutions to problems for your customers. The reason for this is that you want your potential customer to focus on one thing only, your offering and the decision to buy.

You should always include product reviews and information that will let your customers get a good understanding of how the purchase will solve their problem. Testimonials of satisfied customers go a long way towards demonstrating to your prospects the benefits they will reap when they decide to buy. All of these items, product descriptions, product review and testimonials can be combined on your sales page, followed by a clear call to action.

On a separate page, you can offer articles that you have written that highlight the benefits and uses that your customers have received as a result of their purchase.

Make sure your copyrighting makes effective use of headlines that attract and entice the readers to want to learn more and continue with the final purchase decision.

Attract Customers: Offer Bonuses and Freebies

Offer bonuses and free reports to your potential customers. Carefully position the offerings where they cannot be missed, usually at the top of the page. You will need to follow up each offer with a well crafted email message from you. You will have received your potential customer’s name and email message from a sign-in form on your Web page. This entire system will be automated on an autoresponder service you have joined as part of your business set up process. Aweber and Getresponse are two that come to mind.

Common wisdom is that you need to contact a lead at least seven times before a buy decision is made. Your messages will be designed to address the need or problem that drove them to your Web page to begin with, so you should make sure the content of the message stays focused on your customer’s need.

Keep the “selling” out of the messages and concentrate on the benefits and satisfying outcome. Make your subject lines reflect how things will get better if they decide to buy. Avoid the use of the word “free,” many spam filters look for that word and push any content with it into the spam trash. Your goal is to make your potential customer anxious to get your product with a sense of urgency.

Quality not Quantity: Qualified Traffic

There is traffic and then there is qualified traffic. You want people who are targeted to really want your product or service because they see you as the solution to their problem. One way to attract targeted traffic is to write articles for publication in ezines or e-reports. You can publish in publications that focus on your target customers and who are more apt to respond to your offerings.

Get on a schedule and write at least 2 articles per week. They should be 300-600 words in length and be easy to read; no jargon or tech talk. If you can attract 100 targeted customers a day as a start, you will begin to build momentum. Over time with the cumulative effect of your articles, you will build to 1000 targeted hits a day. According to accepted practice, if 10% of those leads buy your offering, you will have 10 sales per day. That is a very good result and one that will lead to greater momentum moving forward.

Conclusion

What is outlined here are 3 practical steps that will get your business up and running. What it takes on your part is time, effort and some investment of your hard earned cash. Once you have achieved results for one product line, it simply takes repetition to try it out again with another one. At that point you are off and running.

Try these tips and your chances of success are very good indeed. May your travels be prosperous.

WordPress: How to make sense out of WordPress Options

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

When I first started out and was taking a tutorial on setting up online marketing, the subject of blogs came up. It was suggested that a blog was a very good tool for marketing and making yourself known on the WEB. Theprogram suggested starting with WordPress. I had never heard of WordPress so I went to the WordPress site to find out what it was all about.
Read more »

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: Want to succeed in online affiliate marketing? Build a List!

List Building

Why You Need a List

One of the basic tenets of any internet marketing program is that customers rarely buy on the first visit. As a matter of fact, it is commonly accepted that it takes seven contacts before a prospect turns into a paying customer. What this means is that you need to establish a relationship with your prospects and keep in touch by offering useful information or help as they make their decision to buy.

How do you do that? You do it by putting your prospects on a list and keeping in touch. The customer list or mailing list or whatever you want to call it list, is your ticket to sales and revenue.

Database List

The creation and building of a list is an essential step in building your online affiliate business. Any affiliate online program you choose to join should have your list building in mind by offering you promotional tools and sales products designed to solve a problem or satisfy a need. If you have a list of a few hundred or a few thousand people you can communicate with, imagine the business you can draw if you have what they want.

Build a Relationship

Having a list is not all about constantly pitching a product or service. If there is anything irritating and certain to draw anger, it is the constant barrage of sales promotions many people feel assault them when looking on the web. It is far more important to build a relationship and draw a balance between giving away free information that can help your prospect and offering a paid product or service that meets a real need they may have.

To build a good relationship, a weekly newsletter or email can serve you well. By offering information with no strings attached you will build trust and confidence in your list members that you are a reliable and trustworthy resource. When they buy, they will buy with comfort and reassurance that you have their success in mind. In fact, you have their loyalty. That is the key to success to any affiliate online program.

Useful Information

What kind of information should you provide? How about valuable tips, case studies, interesting testimonials from real people, and stories from you own experience that can help them decide how to move forward? Once you start weaving stories and examples of success that they can relate to, you will have a dedicated pool of believers who will buy from you willingly and with confidence.

How do you build a List?

Begin with what your market research tells you and write a free special report. Design an eCourse or eBook to give away in return for your customer signing up for your newsletter. It will help build a list of names and email addresses. Create a newsletter sign up form on your Web site or Blog to grow your list. Promote the benefits your customers will get from getting the weekly information. Explain clearly what they will derive from the free reports and eBooks you will make available.

Once you have a good idea of what is driving your customer on your list, write articles about the subjects they will want to know about. Distribute those articles to Article Directories and in your author biography, include a back link to your Web site or Blog or to your newsletter sign up page.

You can also try posting in classified sites such as Craigslist or Adpost, to promote your free newsletter or Ebook.

Conclusion

These are some of the ways to build a list. Remember to use discretion and balance when contacting your list. People today are bombarded daily with SPAM and promotions so they are extremely sensitive to being sold and over sold.

If you take the time to get to know your customers, you will build a relationship that will get them to make the buy decision based on trust and confidence they have developed for you. That is the best path to prosperity you can hope to build.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.