YOU can make money on the Internet.
You might just do it as a sideline to cover the costs of Internet connection such as monthly subscription fees and paying the telephone company.
You might be thinking of making a part time income to pay for extra expenses or those few luxuries.
You might be thinking of producing enough income on a full time basis to cover all your expenses.
You might be thinking of getting rich or making a fortune on the Internet.
Whichever one of the above applies to you, you will have to run your Internet business right or you will not achieve your goals. The Internet is a complicated, constantly changing medium. Therefore nobody will be able to tell you how to do it right. Probably the best you can do, is to base everything you do on your own ideas, learn as much as possible from people who have been successful, and test everything for truthfulness and effectiveness. The important thing is to find programs and tools that work for you and with which you feel comfortable.
Below are a few ideas you can apply to your Internet business. Most of these I have gathered over a long period of time from people with much more experience than myself.
You can reinvent the wheel, but you will find it much more costly in terms of you time and expenses, than to simply gather as much free information as possible and buy it if necessary. You should be subscribed at any given time to at least ten e-zines or electronic newsletters bringing you new ideas on a regular basis. Constantly drop off a few of the less productive ones and subscribe to new ones. Most of these are FREE (advertisers pay for the cost). You can find a good example at the Internet Marketing Centre They also offer one of the most highly thought of training courses on the market. Another FREE e-zine crammed with powerful insight can be found at IM Challenge where you can also join a private site to gain access to information that is not readily available.
Yes you can do it yourself - answer each e-mail individually, post all your promotional material one by one, go to each search engine and check your position. You can do that, but it would be a major blunder, wasting your valuable time on unproductive activities.One of the most important things you can ever do is to automate as much of your day-to-day activities as possible. To succeed online, you will need to spend most of your time advertising and marketing your business.
Follow-up on your prospects
or you will be missing out on the majority of your sales. It's critical
to get the email addresses of your visitors. Failing to create and build
an opt-in "house" mailing list. is a serious blunder! If you do not have
a mailing list to keep in touch with your prospects and customers, you are
literally throwing money down the drain. Build a house list of your customers
e-mail addresses and send them regular announcements about your business.
Start your own email newsletter - you can do this without a website. Your newsletter should contain good, useful information that people can use NOW - don't make it a sales pitch. A newsletter allows you to 'talk' to thousands of people each month - many will become customers.
Place ads for your catalogs, products, etc. There are thousands of places to do this such as classifieds sites, web site malls, newsgroups, e-mail newsletters, and more. (Check out Power Submitter to automate this task for you) On the Internet, it helps to offer something FREE in your ad like a catalog, report or a newsletter to get your prospects attention. Since the Internet is full of free information - users have come to expect freebies. These will generate a host of enquiries to which you will have to respond.
There is software that will automatically filter your email, run your newsletters, import your leads or orders into a database, automatically email your personalized customer database, take care of an unlimited amount of autoresponses, etc. This will allow you to spend your time marketing and promoting your business, not doing the daily tasks! The software can be found at Mailloop.
If you can get your site listed near the top of the major search engines for the various keyword searches connected to your site, your traffic will increase greatly. Below are a few suggestions that will improve your chances to get a listing high up on the search engines.
Before you start - compose your information - your URL (your web address), a title for your page, a summary of the information on your site, your e-mail address, and "key" words
Give your most important information and "key" words first.
Make a list as to where you have registered. Don't lose your list, it may be necessary to go back to these same sites if you ever need to make changes.
Get as many links as your possibly can from other sites to your site.
Put text on your home page that include the keywords that describe your business.
Don't use keywords repeatedly in your text - you could be penalized for this.
Put lots of content and information related to your keywords on your site.
Meta Tags are special codes in the HTML code that help search engines determine what your site contains. Some search engines support these and others don't. However, using them can't hurt your rankings, but they can improve your rankings on some search engines. So, use Meta Tags.
Registering your site with search engines is usually free, if you do it yourself. However, it is very time consuming and requires thought and planning to do it right.. There is software called WebPosition Gold which makes it easy to monitor your search positions and to improve your rankings. You can download a FREE trial of the software to evaluate.
If you have a web site and aren't allowing viewers to order your product online than you may be losing sales! If visitors can order on your site, it is essential to give them as many options as possible to pay. The most difficult, but also the most essential option to give them, is online payment by credit card. If you aren't accepting credit cards, many of your prospects will see your business as a very small time operation. Accepting credit card payments can increase your sales by a huge percentage.
Your visitors will like the convenience and ease of online ordering
Orders can be placed from anywhere in the world 24 hours a day seven days a week.
You can get many sales from impulse buyers.
You need to have merchant status; that is you must to be able to accept major credit cards.
Your service provider must offer you secure online ordering. Secure ordering means that personal and credit card information will be kept confidential. This is possible through special software that encrypts the message where the order information is stored. This prevents the information from being hacked or stolen.
You will need to have the form developed developed for secure ordering. It should include all your products and services, the cost per item, quantity price, shipping costs, estimated delivery time, etc.
If all of this sounds complicated and a long bureaucratic procedure, investigate a company that can set up EVERYTHING for you, so you can start taking credit cards online. All the services are in one neat package - merchant account, secure server, shopping cart, real-time gateway transaction processing.
Free or cheap web hosting is very good for personal and communication web sites. If you want to sell products or services from your site, hosting services such as those provided by BEST HOST will create a much more professional approach with your visitors. You will have more control over your site and can demand excellent service from the hosting company.
Your hosting company will often also provide value added services such as autoresponders, maillists, cgi, secure pages, password protected directories. custom reseller domains, a site builder, store builder and webmail add-ons.
Affiliate (or associate or reseller) programs will increasingly replace sales teams. Although it is better to have you own products to sell, you can also sell products for other companies as their affiliates. Even if you do sell your own products, you could add other companies' products to your range by acting as their reseller.
Is there a good fit between their product and your products or your fields of interest and knowledge?
What do they pay per sale and will the income you can get be worthwhile?
Is it a reputable company on whom you can rely to pay?
Do they have a trustworthy system to track your sales and give you information about your sales?
Do they supply effective supportive marketing materials?
Do they have opportunities to increase your income with the sale of additional products or to earn residual income?
Have you read the affiliate agreement thoroughly and are you satisfied with it?
Affiliate programs such as those of the Internet Marketing Centre, Cash Links, Webposition and IM Challenge are proven reliable income producers.
It is more lucrative to sell your own products or services through an affiliate program of your own, than selling products in someone else's affiliate program.
As an affiliate program owner you will want to keep track
of sales, and from which affiliates the sale originated, and compensate
your affiliates. Pro-TRACK
provides software that can do this and more for you. (You can get more information
and a demo tour
of the software at Pro-TRACK)