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Receiving all the traffic in the world isn't going to help you if you don't make sales when the traffic gets to your page.

A mistake that I see people make over and over again is to believe the hype that it is easy to make money online...sign up for several affiliate programs...put up a page...and then place free classified ads.

You cannot just join affiliate programs and try to generate free traffic to them (not in the normal ways at least).

I have been interviewing some successful affiliates lately and have found out an interesting secret...Not a single one of them (not even one that I have found) just joins an affiliate program and puts up links or banners on their web page.

Every one of them does something a little unique. One is a search engine master and spends well over 40 hours a week learning all the intricacies of the search engines. Another is a master publisher who publishes a quality ezine every single day.

Still another model of success is becoming an expert at sending out articles to ezines. You could also create a community atmosphere where people keep coming back to visit through chats, forums, etc. Then, make referrals of affiliate programs.

These types of affiliate techniques work, but what people have been publishing as the easy affiliate opportunity just isn't true.

All of the top affiliates come up with some of their own ideas and lead generation methods...and none of them rely on just placing a few ads here and there. Nor do they just put up another banner on their web page that nobody visits anyway.

If you want to be successful, find someone who is already successful and model them.

HINT: Don't necessarily always do what they say. Find out what they are doing and do that!

1. Some of the successful entrepreneurs are creating products or finding unique products to sell.

Those are the only two ways to be successful on the net. Either sell a product you control (and don't try to sell something people can find at the local Wal-Mart store) or build an audience that you can contact over and over again.

If you created an information, you are one of the unique product sellers. If you publish a growing ezine, you have the audience.

If you got an exclusive on a new golf club, you are a unique product seller. If you run a discussion board that has hundreds of thousands of visits a month, you have an audience.

If you have a product, you just need to find people who have an audience and convince them to become affiliates with you or buy advertising from them.

If you have an audience, you just need to become an affiliate with someone and endorse their products to your audience.

Please Note: Some people do quite well as both having ezines, forums, etc. and also having their own products. They fit in both classes.

It sure is, but I want you to stop and think for a moment. Can you find successful people who don't fit in one of those classes?

You may say, "What about the search engine expert?" The answer is he has an audience. He can generate free leads for ANY product anytime he wants.

If you don't fit into one these groups of online businesses, then you don't have the right vehicle for online success.

You might be the strongest and fastest bicyclist that has ever walked the planet, but no matter how hard you work you don't stand a chance in the Nascar race!

Many of the Internet marketers I meet are just like that bicyclist. They know they can do it if they just work hard enough, but they aren't using the right vehicle for the Internet race.

7 Predictions for 2004

I always take this time of year to regroup and create new plans for my business. Part of this planning phase is to research and decide where the Internet market is going during the year. Below are some of the observations I have made which should help you in decisions you make for your Internet business.

The honeymoon is over. Investors are requiring online corporations to prove they can earn a profit instead of just generate traffic. So, search engines and other free methods of advertising are beginning to have to change their policies.

Yahoo requires ALL business sites to pay $299 to even be reviewed. Looksmart is charging the same fee. Other search engines are partnering with Overture for the top three of their rankings.

If you think these fees are flukes, watch out. You will find that more and more of the free advertising sources online will be changing over to pay-to-play services.

Does this concern me...Nope, not even a little bit. This just means you will have to be smarter with your advertising, test everything, and work more on making sure your web site can produce sales from the traffic it gets. In other words, your business will have to grow up!

Up until now, text has been the only really logical way of communicating to your visitors. It will continue to be the primary Internet medium for years to come, but 2004 will see a lot more uses for audio online.

We are already testing using audio introductions for our web site and have been speaking with companies running online radio stations. Both show extremely promising results coming up throughout 2004.

Video delivery is still a little while away with too many bandwidth problems to make it a really practical selling tool in 2004. Sure, you can use it, but it will still have problems.

You witnessed one major company after another going out of business during the year 2000. All tech stocks took a nosedive right through the floor as people realized just being on the Net was no guarantee of success. You still have to have a solid sound business plan.

On the Internet you need one other thing that these large companies haven't had...You must have an easily targeted niche market. You cannot focus on selling everyone on the net. This is one of the major differences between the Internet and offline retail stores.

You can sell toothbrushes as Wal-mart because everyone needs them. You cannot sell them online because you can't figure out a niche market just waiting to buy your product. You wouldn't be able to tell me where your "toothbrush" customers most often hang out online. So, you won't be able to cost effectively target them.

The Internet is going to become even more "nichey" as it grows. As we grow by hundreds of millions of more web sites next year, you will have to focus on targeting your "best customer" even more.

We haven't seen a lot of involvement online from "old world" stores. This is going to change in 2004. We are going to see smarter uses of the Internet to combine the advantages of the Internet (free email contact, follow-up, research) with the retail world (product delivery, appearance, etc.).

Watch as stores start collecting email addresses in store for "Specials" they send out. Watch more companies combine online shopping with local same-day deliveries. The smartest uses of the Internet may come from some of these older companies.

Small businesses haven't had to worry about big company competition at all. The big companies were too busy trying to sell to everyone without being able to target anyone.

In 2004 we will see the rise of medium size companies which go after targeted niche markets. They have to if they want to have a chance at succeeding online.

What does this mean for small businesses? It means you will have to clearly define your Unique Web Position and never focus on just trying to have the lowest prices. Try to do something in your niche which can't be easily copied.

The coming years will require you to focus more on a "select" group of loyal customers instead of focusing on the whole world. This will give rise to more loyalty based programs.

Discount clubs and frequent flier programs are extremely successful for the companies using them. Tape, CD, DVD, and book clubs have flourished throughout the past.

The Internet is going to take lessons from these types of services and will give birth to many loyalty based programs of it's own. Membership sites, monthly services, and more are going become the norm during the next year as companies learn they must earn some type of residual income from their customers.

So far we have not really seen any reason why ebooks are better than hard copy books. In 2004, they will start showing some of their advantages including being interactive and instantly updateable.

So far ebooks have only focused on straight text just like hard copy books so the only advantage they can give is the speed of delivery. Watch them take another step forward during 2004 and offer many more advantages giving them a real place in the marketplace.

Terry Dean's Brand New Fr-e eBook, "10 Quick and Easy Ways to Increase Profits to ANY Web Site Overnight!" Reveals More Time Tested Proven Internet Marketing Secrets Than 99% of the Paid Products Available...Showing You Step-By-Step How to Increase Your Traffic, Drop Your Expenses, and Drive Your Profits Through the Roof:
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Applying Psychology To Internet Marketing

The best advertising writers are those who have some knowledge of psychology. We are not dealing with "new" people online. We are dealing with the same people who have the same desires they have always had. The same approaches that worked one hundred years ago will also work today. Don't forget that. Advertising mediums change. Effective advertising does not, because effective advertising is based on a knowledge of human nature.

Remember the first principle of advertising. Your prospects are inherently selfish. They will ask one question of everything your web site does, "What's In it for Me?"

That is the first question you have to answer with your web site. It has to tell and show your visitors what's in it for them. What would they get out of ordering from your site that isn't available anywhere else?

Below are four aspects to the human make-up which you can and should use throughout your Internet advertising.

1. Curiosity is a powerful motivation.

Just about every information product you see advertised has the word "Secrets" in the ad somewhere. People are afraid to miss out on something. They are curious to find out just what those secrets may be.

Use this to your advantage. With information products, I love to write the sales letters so that they hit on the curiosity hot button. You can take advantage of this factor of human nature by providing some of the
results which were achieved through your information system, but not actually revealing what the system specifically is. You will notice that I do this a lot in the bullets that I create to go in the sales letter. They will tell you that there are 3 insider secrets to ______, but they won't tell you what the 3 secrets are.

The purpose of this is the pull on the curiosity of the reader...and cause them to order.

2. Extravagance at a bargain price.

People want to keep up with the Jones'. They want the absolute best, but they want to feel like they got it at a bargain price. No one wants to feel that they paid too much for anything. So, you need to give them an impressive value at a bargain price.

In many products and cases, this simply boils down to explaining the exact process it took to create the product. For example, with an information product, it may have taken you 5 years of research and $20,000 in testing to come up with the information in this product. If so, tell them about it.

When your company builds a widget, it might search the country for the best wood available. Half of the wood in the factory is rejected. You have over 60 people who actually work on the wood to create the product you sell (in the ad itself you would tell people what many of them do), and you say have 5 people who put it through a strict 13 step test to assure it's quality.

Even if all of your competitor's go through the exact process you do to create the product, it will still be effective for you to tell the story to your customers. This is called preemptive advertising. The person who first tells the story is the one who garners the trade. Anyone else who seeks to follow them ends up looking only as a copycat, not the originator of the system.

Once the customer understood the value involved in the product, they were glad to be able to purchase it at such a bargain price.

What process does your product go through that will add a value to it in your customer's eyes?

3. Fear of Failure and of Making the Wrong Decision

This is the biggest barrier that we have to overcome throughout the selling process. People are afraid they are going to make a bad decision
in buying your product. They are afraid you are going to rip them off and not provide them with the product they are expecting.

Everything that you say as an advertiser is immediately looked at with a grain of salt. People have been lied to before when it comes to advertising, so they look at your ads wondering if you are any different. Unless you find a way to overcome this fear of "being taken" in
your prospect's eyes, you are not going to close a majority of sales.

There are basically two aspects to overcoming this resistance. The first way is by presenting and adding credibility to your ads. Credibility is
produced through your "proof" and through the testimonials which you provide. It is often said that salespeople without testimonials have skinny
children. It is next to impossible to build the credibility you need in the eyes of your prospects without testimonials.

The second way to overcome this resistance is by giving a risk free guarantee or a better than risk free guarantee. Let your prospects know that they can return the package for any reason. Plus, give them several bonuses in the package which they can keep even if they return the package for a full refund.

An even better method of overcoming this buyer's resistance is by allowing them to try out the package for free, and having them pay for it at the end of the trial period. Which one you rather buy from? Would you rather buy from the person who gives you the horse to try out for a week and allows you to pay later...or the person who requires up-front payment?

Think about ways where you can overcome the buyer's resistance by offering a more risk free proposition than all of our competitors.

4. Exclusivity

People like to get a "special" deal which is made just for them. They like to be told that they are special. They like to have their names mentioned. They like to have their names engraved on the objects that they purchase.

I have learned how to apply this factor to my own sales. I run a subscriber only special to my 30,000 ezine subscribers now once a month...People love it. They are getting something for a special price or with a special bonus that isn't available to the general public. They are getting it just because they are one of my newsletter subscribers.

All successful Joint Ventures are also based on this element of exclusivity. A special deal was created with the list owners partner
ONLY for their customers. No outsider can participate. The list owner cares so much about their list members that they negotiated to get
them this special price or special deal. These endorsed types of mailings have been known to produce sales rates as high as 10% - 20%...which
is completely unheard of in any other venture.

"FREE" without an understanding of the value is actually dangerous.

Along the same lines, the word "FREE" is actually being overdone online. To some people it appears that everything is free online. Using the word "Free" without explaining the actual value involved does not profit you according to final sales figures.

When you are giving away a freebie from your site, it isn't your goal to just attract visitors I hope. You are not after freebie seekers. Your final goal should be to sell more of your products and services to your
visitors. This is not accomplished through just handing out the most freebies.

This is accomplished through explaining the value of your products and services...then offering the freebie. Claude Hopkins recorded that even back in his time you should never offer a sample to anyone unless
you have had the chance to tell them your product story. Unless you have actually had a chance to show them the value of your
offering, it could possibly diminish the value of your actual product.

Tell your prospects the actual value of the freebie. Then, tell them "why" you are offering it free. If you just listed the value at $97, but never told them why it was worth $97 or why you are giving it to them free, then your statement is worthless. You must both explain why the free product is worth $97 and why you are giving it to them for free. Tell them that you know letting them use it for free will get them hooked and
that they will keep coming back for more. Tell them why it is free...or don't offer it at all.

This is why there is so much confusion online concerning giving freebies away at web sites. Some experts recommend giving away freebies. Some recommend that you don't give anything away. It is all a matter of understanding and showing the "VALUE" that you are giving away for free...and if it brings your visitor back to order from you. The ordering process is what you are after.

Remember the marketing statement, "Tell me why, and then I'll buy."

Common Sense Internet Marketing

It's easy.

That's one of my favorite phrases for describing Internet marketing. Most of the things we do online are easy once you understand them.

I tell this to people in my newsletter, in my books, in tapes, and at conferences. Most people's biggest difficulties are being caused by themselves.

They're trying to complicate it all.

All I've done is create a system. I do the same thing for every web site and project. The funniest part is that when I teach someone my system, they immediately start saying that everything I'm telling them is simply common sense.

Yes...I guess it kind of is...but it works.

Here are a few common sense Internet tips:

1. Find a group of people who want to buy something.

Always find the people who want to buy something first. Give them something for free to get them to sign-up for an opt-in email list. Now you can advertise to them for Free until they tell you to stop. Even if you don't want to sell them anything yourself, you could charge other people for advertising to them through you.

2. Give people a great product for a good price.

Don't sell garbage. Make sure everything you sell is extremely useful to your customers. It should be the highest quality product you can find. Money comes and money goes. Your reputation stays forever.

3. Tell them everything they need to know about your product to make a good decision.

The old marketing phrase is the more you tell, the more you sell. People are still debating this thinking visitors won't read long copy online. They will if they are interested in it...and if you give them good reference points (lots of subheads).

4. Offer them other products and services.

Don't try to get rich offering just one product or service. Develop a whole bunch of backend offers to make to your list. You've worked hard to get them on your list. Offer them more high quality products they'll want to buy. That's where your income comes from.

5. Try different methods.

Don't be stuck with just one advertising method. Don't give up if something you heard doesn't work. Keep trying until you find something which works for selling your products and services. Most times when I advertise a new product, it takes at least a few weeks to find the perfect mix of advertising for it.

6. If something's not working, quit doing it.

Track everything. Make sure that every penny you spend is put to good use. Even if you're not spending money, you should still track all your
free advertising. Don't waste time or money on anything that's not working for you.

7. If something works, do as much of it as possible.

If you find ezine advertising is working for your products, then rollout with more. If Pay-Per-Click search engines work for you, then use the other ones.

Add more keywords. If banner ads work for you, then keep doing them.

After teaching this type of information for a while, I know what your mind is saying now. It's saying, "What about..."

For example, your mind might be saying, "What about...web site design?" The answer to that is it's not really important. You can find web site designers willing to do your site at virtually no cost.

It's often as cheap to hire a designer for a simple web page as it is to buy web design software.

Your mind might be saying, "What about...top search engine positioning?" You know what my answer to that is. I do some positioning and actually get pretty good traffic from the search engines. Once I had
the budget though, I prefer to let someone else do it.

Your mind might be saying, "What about..."

All of those "problems" are simply technical details. There are people who thrive on that kind of information. If it's not your cup of tea, then
there are numerous people who can do it for you.

You have something more important to work on.

A friend of mine, Bob Gatchel, always says, "It's the marketing, stupid."

That's where you should be concentrating your time and attention on. Develop the marketing. Find an audience. Build an opt-in email list. Sell them high quality products. Joint venture with other companies for more products.

Most people are too busy worrying about the minor details to ever do any real business online.

The most important aspect is coming up with the marketing campaign. Even generating traffic is EASY if you have the marketing in place to sell
them once they get to your site.

There are thousands of webmasters in every niche market who are dieing for the chance to send you visitors...if you can share the profits with them.

The only question they're asking is if you can make money from the visitors...That's the question you have to answer to succeed online.

There is one Secret in Internet Marketing

Too many people are constantly searching for the "Holy Grail" of Internet advertising. Instead of just getting out there and doing something every single day, they sit back and wait till they find the "Secret" to Internet marketing.

Sure, there are great techniques you could be using. I am sure there are products out there which will teach you how to market better online. You should always be learning. The moment you stop learning, you start stagnating.

You will find that many of the techniques that the top experts teach you may actually disagree with one another. This is because there is only one true judge of what works in the online marketplace...testing and results.

Without testing everything you put to use, you will never know what is or can work for you.

There is one "Secret" of Internet marketing every single successful Internet marketer will agree upon.

If you sit back and do nothing, you will get nothing!

Successful Internet entrepreneurs are doing something. If you sit back on the sidelines and just watch what's going on, you will never win the game.

Start doing something...even if it doesn't work!

You have to "practice" Internet marketing.

Set up a mirror page on your site or some other tracking mechanism and place a classified ad in an ezine. If it doesn't work out the way you wanted, place a different ad in another ezine. If it does work, then keep running and add on more ezines to your advertising campaign.

Use one of the traffic techniques in my free e-book "Unlimited Traffic." If it doesn't create the traffic you want, add another technique. This ebook has 55 techniques Internet marketers are currently using to get traffic. Keep adding on new techniques until you get the traffic you want.

If you want to write better ads for your products, then find some of the best sales letters and start copying them by hand. Then, practice your own letters.

Something that almost no one ever seems to mention in regards to business is that some of the most successful companies expect that only one out of every seven products they create will be a success worth continuing.

Claude Hopkins, considered by many to be one of the greatest marketing minds ever, recorded this in "Scientific Advertising:"

"There are many surprises in advertising. A project you
will laugh at may make a great success. A project you are
sure of may fall down. All because tastes differ so. None
of us know enough peoples desires to get an average viewpoint."

The first site you create might not be that profitable. If you are smart and stay in contact with the right people, you will learn something from it. Your next web site may be the success you are looking for.

The reason you may not be making money right now could be that you have the wrong product or are targeting the wrong market. If you can't explain to me in one paragraph exactly who your targeted market is, then
you aren't ready for success on your site.

Test some different products. Test some different advertising methods. Test some different ads. Only testing can tell you what will or will not work online or offline.

The key is to keep your testing small so that it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg. Test one or two ezine ads. Purchase a 10,000 banner ad campaign.

Set up a small budget of say $50 - $100 every month just for testing (more experienced marketers have a much higher budget for testing).

Never spend any money on advertising where it will put you out of business. It should be as small and risk-free as possible at all times.

If you can't afford to spend or lose any money in advertising, then start trying free traffic techinques.

There are dozens of them that you can use as well. In this area, never spend more time on any advertising technique than you can afford to lose.

Time is money and as you become more and more successful in this business, it is the time that you run out of first.

The Secret to Internet marketing is to "Do Something."

Even if it doesn't work out quite as well as you plan,keep doing it or add in other elements and aspects to your business.

The second Internet marketing secret is much like the first one. It is "Don't give up!"

Who Want to Be a Millionaire

Welcome to our show...

Today we are going to be playing who wants to be an Internet millionaire, except we are not playing for cash. We are playing to see if you have the knowledge you need to be a successful entrepreneur on the web.

Here are your five questions...Let's see how good you do.

Question #1: Which of the following characteristics is a requirement for success online?

a. High IQ
b. College Degree
c. Persistence
d. Money

Question #2: Which of the following products would be considered a niche market product suitable for a small business entrepreneur?

a. Toothbrush
b. eBook on Cooking
c. Big Screen TV
d. eBook on Fly Fishing in Arkansas

Question #3: Which of the below programs is the most popular download of the week?

a. Napster
b. ICQ
c. Internet Explorer
d. RealNetworks Real Player

Question #4: Which one of these problems is the most common reason people don't order online?

a. Web Sites were too confusing
b. Pages took too long to load.
c. The prices were too high.
d. They couldn't find what they wanted.

Question #5: How many sales does the "average" Internet company have to make to a customer before they break even on that customer?

a. One
b. Two
c. Three
d. Four

Some of those questions were pretty difficult. Weren't they?

Let's see how you did...

"C" is the answer to question one.

Persistence is the most important key to succeeding on the web. Despite what you might hear, there aren't any real "gurus" online. The web just isn't that old. Everyone is still learning.

The number one key to succeeding online is testing everything you can possibly imagine. This takes persistence.

High IQ's and college degrees may help in the process (if you have the right information), but they are not the key to success. Money may help as well, but for many large companies this just means wasting tons of money on two million dollar Superbowl ads. Then being nowhere to be seen 6 months later.

Persistence is the key.

"D" is the answer to question two.

An eBook covering fly fishing in Arkansas would be considered a niche market product suitable for a small entrepreneur.

What's the problem with the other products?

The problem with the big screen TV and the toothbrush is that they are available from anywhere. Your prospect would be much more likely to run down to the local Wal-mart and electronics stores than to purchase from you. They don't know who you are.

For the Cooking eBook, it is too broad of a subject. No one wants just a cooking eBook when there are so many nicebeautiful books at the local store. This may be a potential project though if you can come up with a more specific topic such as cooking in France or cooking with red wine from the French.

The key to being noticed as a small business is to come out with something a little more unique and highly specific.

If You Chose "B" for number three, you are correct.

ICQ is the most downloaded program this week as reported by
http://www.download.com

All three of the other programs are top downloads, but ICQ is downloaded 10 times more than the closest competitor. It has been the most popular download for years.

ICQ is a program that allows you to chat and instant message your online contacts. One of the most popular activities of online users is that of chat and message boards.

People want to feel like they belong. They are looking for online communities which they can belong to.

What does this mean to your online business? It means that you need to find a way to create a community at your site using discussion boards, chat, and other types of interaction with your visitors.

Question Four is a close race, but the answer is "B"

According to a survey taken by Boston Consulting Group, the most likely reason people didn't purchase from a site is because the pages took too long to load.

The full article and results of this survey are available at: http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?R249_CNN

Forty-eight percent of people asked cited slow loading pages as the culprit in their shopping experience.

A close second is that of the sites being too confusing which rang in at forty-five percent.

Both of these show that a major key to sales on the Internet is keeping it simple and easy for your users. They are impatient and they are quickly confused by any extra technology you decide to use.

You need to create an easy to use, quick loading buying experience for your visitor. For now, cut out any fancy technology and "cool" stuff that may hinder those two items.

If you chose "C" for number five, you are correct.

This was a very difficult question. The correct answer as provided by Yahoo news is that the average Internet retailer must make three sales to a customer before they break even on the cost of obtaining that customer.

This Yahoo article can be seen at: http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?R249_YAH

I don't recommend you spend as much to obtain a new customer as large online retailers do. You can't afford to. You don't have their large advertising budgets to burn through.

You can concentrate on your current customers. You have to "Wow" them and keep them buying from you instead of your competitors.

Every single market will be competitive in the future of the
Internet. The companies that are going to be the most successful are those who learn how to retain their customers through better customer service, frequent buyers programs, and finding them the best deals possible.

You must develop a loyal customer base and sell to it over and over again.

One shot sales aren't going to make it in the future of the Internet.

And that's my final answer...

Turn the Internet Into Your Own Monopoly Game

Everyday I receive at least half a dozen emails asking me how to get more traffic to web sites and where good places to advertise are.

Although I am always glad to help, the problem is that 95% of Internet marketers have put the cart before the horse. They try to learn the techniques or generating traffic to a site or how to make sales, but they never spent any time developing a good business strategy.

Without an overall business strategy, any marketing technique that you use will only be one tenth as it could have been. Having the right marketing strategy is the key to developing a long-term profitable Internet business. When your strategy is developed you will find that the right traffic building techniques will just fall into place.

I am going to give you a very basic outline of the strategy you should be using below. Anyone can turn the Internet into a real life monopoly game, but you have to follow these three simple steps.

Although there are a lot of different models of Internet success out there, you will find that every one of them will include all 3 of these steps. You could consider them the 3 simple "Insider Secrets" to Internet Success. Every successful Internet model is applying them in one way or another. Start following and putting these 3 simple techniques to work in your business and you will quickly find yourself moving towards Internet monopoly.

STEP ONE: Choose a Market and Ultimate Benefit.

Which came first...the product or the prospect?

All successful businesses know that the prospect must come first. You will find that unsuccessful businesses choose a product first and then tried to find customers to buy it.

You will find that the Internet marketing road is extremely difficult if you are just trying to sell "Your" product. People don't care about your product.

They care about solutions that they need for their problems. Look for frustrations that people are experiencing. Look for a market of people who love something. Then, find out what it is that they want. Some of the most successful web sites out there were created to cater to a specific market before they ever even thought of a product to offer. Finding products that meet people's needs isn't that difficult. Finding a site that generates thousands of hits daily in a targeted market is difficult.

Internet marketers often do not stop and look at the big picture. If you can create a site that becomes a virtual hub, starting point, or meeting place in a certain market, making money will be a snap. So, instead of thinking of a product first, think of how to get the traffic first.

Then, find products or services that those people WANT.

A simple truth of marketing is that people do NOT buy products or services. They buy benefits and solutions. Think of it in the term of an "Ultimate Benefit."

What is an ever abiding "WANT" or "GOAL" that these specific people are continually seeking after. This "Ultimate Benefit" will be the theme of your web site and your entire business strategy.

Things such as more money, weight loss, being sexually attractive, self-defense, more time, etc. are ultimate benefits. People want them and they don't care what products or services are used to get them there.

For example, for weight loss, there are thousands of potential products which can help them reach the "Ultimate Benefit" such as exercise, weights, aerobics, infomercial exercise machines, nutritional supplements, nutrition programs, information products, etc.

Once you have defined an "Ultimate Benefit" that will be the source for any and all of the products or services you offer. Using it, you can find multiple products and services which will help your prospects reach the goals they are seeking after.

You could choose any potential "Ultimate Benefit" to be the theme and strategy for your web site. You may want to offer a home business, health, or wealth building web site. You could choose to focus on a specific market of people and their hobbies such as: RC cars, gardening, art, outdoor recreation, children, etc.

Think of a specific topic where you can easily identify where to find your specific prospects. A good rule of thumb is to go down to your local magazine rack and check out all of the potential topics there which have a large enough following to support a business (the market is large enough for your web site if a magazine has stayed in business for years).

Then, what you will want to do is build a center, hub, starting point, or site that caters to those people and provides them with what they want out of the web. Take the frustration out of searching the web and give them what they want at your site...and you will find your web site traffic and profits soaring.

Another rule of thumb in making the right choice is to choose something you love yourself. Don't choose a gardening web site if you love pets. Don't choose an Internet marketing site just because everyone else is doing it. Find something that you love to study and research. Find something that you are glad to sit down and discuss all day long.

Choose a specific market of people along with an Ultimate benefit before you ever even think of a product.

STEP TWO: Develop Updated Content, a Newsletter and/or a Discussion Group. The web sites with the highest hits and profits are those who provide constantly updated information or materials. Constantly updated content keeps people coming back.

You could provide new reports or new free resources every month at your site. The problem is that home and small businesses just don't have the kind of resources and manpower to keep in competition with the major sites such as the Yahoos, AOLs, and other superpowers out there.

To even the odds, we can use technology to do much of the work for us. One of my favorite sites to visit is http://www.cgi-resources.com where you can find thousands of CGI programs which can help your site become as interactive and useful to its visitors as any site out there.

For example, you could have a tip of the day program installed on your site and write all 30 tips for the next month into your system. Then, each day your web site will show that day's tips to its visitors. It will give your site the look that it is being edited by you every single day.

You could also install an awards program for your site. Then, people can submit your site for a "Best of the Web" award in your specific market and you could choose the best sites for the award. Then, every time your visitors return to your site they can find more links to high quality sites. If you keep a high standard for the winning sites, your visitors will keep coming back.

There are dozens of programs you will be able to find at the above site which will help you provide this updated and interactive content.

Another technique that works extremely well is to create your own newsletter which you email out every week or every month. The key to Internet profits for me has been to build a list of loyal subscribers. Then, each week I stay in contact with them providing them with high quality content. When I check out my daily web site traffic logs, the day I send out my newsletter produces more than twice the traffic of every other day at my site. It keeps me in the minds of my prospects, and it keeps them coming back to my site.

The people who have the most profitable Internet businesses are those who concentrate their efforts to building a list of subscribers. The number one goal of my web site is to produce new subscribers to my weekly ezine because of the success my newsletter produces for me. You will find that thousands of other marketers are finding out this same principle.

The #1 Goal of your web site should be to build a list!

Then, you can sell ads that go in your newsletter. You can send out your own product offers. You can send out offers that Joint Venture on and share the profits 50/50 with the product owner. Once you own your own targeted list of subscribers, your monthly profits are practically guaranteed. If I had to make a choice between choosing the hottest
Internet product or the biggest targeted subscriber list, I would choose the list. Either one will produce millions of dollars for your business, but the list gives you dozens of multiple streams of income for you to choose from. If a better product comes out tomorrow and your "Hot" Internet product stops selling, you could quickly find yourself in trouble.

If a better product comes out tomorrow and you own the list, you can just make a deal with the new product developer. If you have spent time and built a relationship with hundreds of thousands of individuals, no one can take that away from you. The "List" is the key to Internet wealth. How can you build a list of loyal visitors and have other people provide the content for your site at the same time?

A very successful technique that is producing 500,000 hits or more a month for many web sites involves creating your own discussion group. By leveraging off of the experiences of hundreds of different people, you can create the virtual coffeehouse or meeting place for tens of thousands of daily visitors.

At a discussion group, you pick a topic and then anyone is allowed to post questions, answers, comments, etc. You keep it all in check and on topic by being the moderator and deleting unwanted or irrelevant posts. When you offer emailed support for your visitors, you have to be the one who answers all of the questions. When you run your own discussion group you may quickly find that most questions will be responded to be dozens of different people giving good advice, other points of view, and more.

It can be extremely exciting to watch this kind of content added to your site by dozens of individuals. It is something that you could never do on your own. As the moderator, you just make sure to check all of the posts and delete any that are inappropriate for your board. You make the rules and watch to make sure they are enforced.

This type of program can be a godsend to you if you want to build your own loyal group of visitors but can't stand to write your own newsletter. And yes, I do personally know of a site that generates 500,000 hits a month without spending a single penny on advertising using this exact method. You can find out more about this individual and how you can follow in his footsteps by going to this web site now - http://www.bizpromo.com/discussions.htm

STEP THREE: Create a Lead Product and dozens of similar related products or Joint Venture deals.

You can create your own Internet monopoly game by providing dozens of Solutions and Answers to your prospect's problems and desires. Multiple streams of income equal constant profits for any high traffic web site.

You DO generally want to have a lead product. You DO NOT want to focus on all of your products to each new visitor to your site. Too many choices will confuse the average prospect. Give them one main choice that you focus on continually throughout your site and all of your materials.

I have tested both methods...offering one product mainly and having a web site which resembles a catalog approach. The one product approach actually outsold the catalog approach by about 2 to 1 (and I am changing all of my sites following this test).

Focus on one main product which most meets the "Ultimate Benefit" that your visitors are seeking after. Then, use your other products as backends for multiple streams of income.

The principle of the backend sale and multiple streams of income is so neglected by most businesses that many people don't even realize how powerful understanding it can be.

If you develop a good set of backend products which many of your first time customers go on to purchase, you almost have an unlimited money machine for your business.

For example:
Let's say you are in an information business selling a low cost audio tape set and a larger video package. The first product you have sells for $50.00 (and costs $25.00 for drop shipping from the owner) while your second package sells for $300.00 (and costs $150.00 drop shipping from the owner). If the first product you sell to customers sells for $50.00 and costs you $25.00 to fulfill, you have $25.00 potential earnings from it where you have to pay advertising expenses from. If it costs you on average $20.00 advertising expense for each new
customer, you would only be earning a $5.00 profit on every new customer.

What would happen if you included a sales letter for your $300.00 course in every $50.00 package people bought?

If 1 out of every 5 customers you brought in on the first product would also buy your second product for $300.00, you would be earning an extra $150.00 off of every 5 customers. Your front end profits would have been $25.00 for these 5 customers and your backend profits would have been $150.00 without spending more than a couple of cents
extra for the sales letter included in the packages.

The money is in the backend sales.

Let's take this example one step further. You could actually spend $30.00 advertising for each new customer and lose $5.00 per sale...and then make money just from the backend sales of your larger package. Note: What I am about to reveal to you can give you a Serious Unfair Advantage Over All of Your Competitors if you apply it to your business.

By putting this one marketing concept to work for you in your business, you can actually afford to lose money buying customers. If you and your competitors all sell a weight loss manual for $30.00 and you know that 25% of the people who buy that manual will also continue to buy nutritional supplements from you for the next 12 months, what can you
do to take advantage of this principle and beat the competition?

First of all, you could potentially spend much more on advertising. Your competitors might have to make a $15.00 profit before paying for the manual off of every manual they sell so they can only put $15.00 into advertising for every new customer. Since you know you will be making money for the next 12 months off of many of your customers, you can potentially spend the whole $30.00 in advertising for every new customer...possibly even more. Now, combine this knowledge of backend sales with dozens of different income streams. It will almost put you into shock!

You will be able to advertise in more places...expand more quickly...and basically take over the market through your additional knowledge and backend profits.

This practice is also termed "Knowing the Lifetime Value of a customer." Many businesses which actually start out with a $20 or $30 sale to their customers have computed out and realized that the average customer brings in $1,000 or more throughout the time they do business with them. Once a company realizes something like this, they can start "buying" new customers even at a loss because they know how much the customer is worth to them over the next few years.

Having a strong backend product and understanding the lifetime value of a customer can often be the major key that will separate you from all of your competition and enable you to absolutely run circles around every one of them.

It can cause you to be able to advertise more, sell at a lower price, and provide extra bonuses no one else can afford.

Each stream of income just needs to be focused on meeting the "Ultimate Benefit" you have chosen to focus on. Don't spread yourself thin by trying to focus on dozens of different markets. Focus on one set of prospects and customers and continually provide them with more products and services which help them reach their Ultimate Goals.

You will find that your web site quickly turns into a Virtual Monopoly game where you and your visitors always come out the winners together...and your competition doesn't stand a chance!

10 Quick Traffic Building Tips For Any Web Site

The question most often asked on the Internet is, "How do I get more traffic to my site?"

You would think that an answer for this question would be extremely simple, but it really isn't. It isn't that it is so hard to get traffic to web sites. The problem is that there are so many different avenues of traffic generation you can choose from for any site.

In this short report, we are going to cover 10 different low or no cost ways you can get traffic to any web site. This isn't even an extensive list. I could easily name off 5 - 10 more ways you could be getting traffic to your site, but I don't want to overwhelm you with too many options.

The reason that most people don't get traffic is that they "Try" something, and then they give up. The key to any marketing is testing and then improving. If a method doesn't work for you on your first try, second try, or even your twelfth try, it doesn't matter. Keep going anyway.

Read everything you can about that subject and keep trying different things. If you have chosen to use classified ads for your products and services, try different ezines. Use AOL classifieds. Try Yahoo's classifieds. Create new headlines for your ads. Create new sales letters to follow-up.

Classified ads can work if you figure out how to work them for your product or service.

The same aspects are true of many different types of Internet advertising. They work, but only if you are willing to keep on going even if you fail a dozen times trying. You keep learning and you keep testing.

So, without further ado, here are your ten killer Internet Traffic Building Techniques:

1. Search Engine Submissions

Almost everyone starts right here. They know that search engines bring 84% of the traffic to most web sites, so they know they have to submit to them.

To achieve the top rankings in the search engines will take some serious work. You have millions of competitors, but you have an advantage. You are willing to learn and do what it takes to get to the top.

To achieve the top traffic building positions, you will need to study everything you can on search engine positioning and meta tags. Then, you will have to test. Use a tool such as Web Position to check your rankings, examine your competitors who are beating you, and then edit your pages.

If you are willing to keep going through this process and learning each step along the rise of your rankings, you too could soon be generating 100s of hits daily from top search engine positions.

2. Classifieds in Ezines

The biggest bang for your marketing buck will come from ezine advertising. For $10 - $50 per classified ad, you can reach thousands of potential customers in your targeted market.

With thousands of different ezines available, you can expand into hundreds of them once you find a classified ad and follow-up system that works for your product or service.

By testing your little classified ads and expanding into more and more ezines every week, you could quickly start reaching millions of people weekly and earning an income to match.

3. AOL Classifieds

AOL currently has over 15 million members. If I could only place one classified ad for any web site or product, it would probably be here. For $12.50, you can have your ad placed in view of people on a service where the ads are actually read.

I know several people earn a couple of hundred dollars weekly by placing little classified ads just using AOL's system. The key on AOL is to create a killer headline for your ad so it stands out above the hundreds of other ads in every category.

4. Yahoo Classifieds

There are very few free classified ad sites that actually work. Yahoo is one of the shining lights that stands out above the crowd of mediocre free ad sites. Yahoo has more traffic than any other Internet site and it definitely shows when you place your ads here.

On Yahoo, you are allowed to place 10 ads at a time, so do so. A little key to creating effective ads here is to delete your ads every few days and replace them. Then, you will be able to keep your ads towards the top of the list and receive more free readers.

5. Trade Links

If you develop a strong content oriented site you can persuade thousands of other webmasters to link to you or to trade links with you. There are even a few consultants online who have developed linking campaigns and have achieved a million hits a month or more for their customers within 90 days by linking with the right sites.

You can do this yourself. The key is to develop content people want to link to and then get out there and make the contacts by visiting people's sites, sending out personalized emails to webmasters you have visited, and networking in discussion groups.

6. Participate in Leveraged Banner Exchanges

Regular banner exchanges don't work that well. Although they can produce a few extra hits a month for your site, they never seem to give you the kind of traffic building leverage you need to grow to hundreds of thousands of hits a month.

A new wave of banner exchanges is growing though at unprecedented rates. What they do that separates them apart is that they will give you a 5% to 20% credit of banner impressions of anyone's site that you refer. If you refer a site which gets a million hits a month, you would get 200,000 free impressions a month extra.

7. Start Your Own Mailing List

If you want to make money online, start your own mailing list. It is the best way to keep contact with your prospects and your customers. It is also the best way to build the credibility you need to make sales to your targeted market.

A little less talked about advantage to having your own mailing list is that you can use it to trade ads with other ezines out there. If you trade ads with 10 other ezines out there, you could easily be saving yourself $100 - $500 in advertising expense every week!

8. Banner Ads on Individual Sites

When people think of banner ads they almost always think of the major search engines or major sites online. Well, I have been advertising lately with banners, and I can tell you something.

Making money using banner ads on these high traffic high cost sites is extremely difficult and risky.

These sites will charge you $20 per 1,000 impressions to general audiences and $50 per 1,000 impressions to targeted markets.

By seeking out individual sites who get high traffic (50,000 hits to 1,000,000 hits a month), you can actually get rates of $1 - $10 per 1,000 impressions of your banner ads. By finding 10 - 20 of these sites, you can quickly build yourself an overwhelming river of traffic to your site for a much lower cost than the major search engines.

9. Advertise on Goto.com

Goto has come up with a great advertising plan for businesses. You can actually go to http://www.goto.com/ and bid on traffic for your site. You pick keywords for your site and then place a bid of whatever price you are willing to pay for traffic from that keyword...generally you would bid .01 to .10 per keyword.

Then, Goto will only charge you for the actual hits you receive from them. If you bid one penny for the keyword and you receive 10 hits from it today, you only owe 10 cents for the day. This low cost traffic building method cannot be beat anywhere.

The key to making it work for you is to come up with hundreds of possible keywords for your site and then bid low amounts such as a few cents on each. Then, check your stats continually and find out what kind of traffic you are getting.

10. Free Stuff

The KING of traffic is free stuff. If you want to get real traffic to your site, provide the kind of free content and services that your market is hunting desperately for.

Provide free articles to other web sites. Provide free downloads. Give away free CGI programs. Provide hundreds of links to needed tools. Provide links to downloadable software. Give your visitors what they want and they will keep coming back and referring their friends.

10 Tips For Designing Killer Banner Ads

People who constantly ask me how they can design their own effective banners.

To help them out, I have found 3 free automatic Internet banner creation programs and have put together these 10 killer banner design techniques.

If you want to take the easiest route to design a banner, you can use one of these three free sites:

http://www.animationonline.com/
http://www.zyris.com/
http://www.quickbanner.com/

To design my own banners, I use Paint Shop Pro which has a free fully working demo available for download at http://www.jasc.com/. It is probably the easiest to use graphics software available online today. It even comes with a full animation shop program that makes animating banners easy.

Just having the right software doesn't mean that you will create a good banner though. To give you some ideas on your banner design, try putting these 10 banner design techniques to the test.

1. Use the words "Click Here" or "Enter" every time you design a banner.

You may think that these two words are overused online, but tests have proven that these words are able to increase the effectiveness of a banner ad by 20-30% without changing anything else in the banner. They inspire the reader to click on the ad if the headline of the banner interests them.

2. Animate Your Banners.

An animated banner will increase your banner ads effectiveness by 30-40%. The key in using animation in your banner is keeping it small. The reason that you don’t want big pictures or images that look like live video in your banners is the fact that the banner will load too slowly on people’s pages. The visitors just won't see it.

3. Create quick loading banners.

Keep most banners under 10-12 KB. This will be very difficult to accomplish when you are using animation in your ads, but it needs to be done. Most animated banners are 15-20 KB, but that is way too large to load quickly. Keep them small. As a matter of fact,
try to keep your banner under 10 KB to have good results from a banner exchange.

The way to do this when using animation it to keep it simple, maybe only one or two movements. Then, use Paint Shop Pro to decrease the number of colors. A banner that may have been 15 KB can often be decreased down to 3 or 4 KB when you decrease the colors to 16 or 256. You need a nicely designed banner that is high quality but loads quickly.

4. Use an awesome headline in your banner.

Don’t think that just having a good looking banner will make people click through. The key to effective banner advertising is having a good headline. A good technique to use is to keep the same headline on your banner ad that you have on your entry page. Then when they click through the banner, they will come to see the same headline that sparked an interest in them in the first place.

5. The best word to use in your banner headline is "FREE."

This doesn’t mean that you just need to put the word "FREE" on your banner without any other text. Tell them exactly what they will be getting for FREE. Using the word "FREE" in virtually any headline will make your response rate increase dramatically.

6. Blue underlined text will often increase your response rate.

When Internet users see blue underlined text, they know they are links. By placing your headline in this type of format more people will realize that it is a link to another site. It will achieve a higher click through ratio.

7. A blue border will give you a better response rate then any other color border for your banner.

Use blue as the border color for your banner and it will influence more people to click onto the entire banner. These little things may not seem like much, but they can increase your response rates.

8. It is often a good idea to use your web site address or some type of company logo in the banner.

Don't focus your banner on your logo or web site address, but do include it in many cases. Your main benefit headline should be the focus of your banner. Your use of a web address or company logo in a small section of the banner just helps to produce a branding effect on people’s minds giving you a few extra hits.

9. Use trick banners.

Make your banner look like something in windows that people can click on. For example, a lot of effective banners I’ve seen use what looks like a windows slider. People create trick banners that look like sliders, buttons, checkboxes, and drop-down menus. These types of tricks will bring out the curiosity in people. They want to see more of the text and will click on the banner.

10. Change your banner ads frequently.

Studies have proven that most banner ads start losing effectiveness after the third time a person has seen it. If they haven’t clicked on it by then, they probably never will. If you are spending a lot of money on advertising and purchasing hundreds of thousands of banner impressions, you will need to come up with a lot of different banners.

5 Insider Secrets to Writing Million Dollar Sales Letters

One of the most important skills you could ever learn is how to write million dollar sales letters. The difference between a killer sales letter and a mediocre one is often the difference between a successful site that earns thousands of dollars weekly and one that can't break even.

It doesn't matter if you drive tens of thousands of people to your site every day if you can't convince them to buy from you once they are there. Your site will never be profitable if it isn't full of benefit driven client centered ad copy.

The good news is that anyone can fill their site with good ad copy. If you don't want to write it yourself, you can find numerous good ad writers who are willing to do it for around $1,000 to $15,000 per sales letter. If that cost is too much for you to bear, I have even better news for you.

Anyone can learn how to write million dollar ad copy. Don't start letting your mind come up with all of the reasons why that may be true for other people but not for you. Let me rephrase that sentence. YOU can write million dollar ad copy.

The best copywriters in the world did not have the best writing skills when they started out. Many of them, in fact, don't even have high school diplomas. Just because you have never even written a free report doesn't mean you can't write a killer sales letter. As a matter of fact, I am going to give you the best insider secrets available in the world to help you write the best ad copy you possibly could.

There are thousands of resources online that will teach you how to write better ads. Below are just a few of the books or manuals that will help you learn how to write good ad copy:

Advertising Magic by Brian Keith Voiles
Maximum Profit Copywriting Clinic by Bob Serling
Magic Words that Bring You Riches by Ted Nicholas
Cash Copy by Jeffrey Lant
These types of books and manuals will teach you the in's and out's of the inner workings of good ad copy. They will teach you the important pieces you need such as creating great headlines, listing benefits, finding testimonials, and using a P.S. Any of these courses will improve your sales letter writing ability.

What I want to give you today through this article is a turn-key plan that you can use for FREE to start writing killer ads. Follow my simple 5 step system below and you will start writing killer sales letters within the next few months.

I know you may want to have a quicker way of doing things, but anything that is worth doing is worth doing good. Going to college and getting the skills it takes to do a job takes a minimum of 2 to 4 years and often quite a bit longer. If you follow my techniques below, you will become a killer sales letter writer within 2 to 6 months and have the skills to be an entrepreneur for the rest of your life.

Don't quit after 6 months though. Keep doing these techniques for years and you will keep those creative juices flowing and building in you for the rest of your life.

So, without further ado, here are the 5 Insider Secrets to Writing Million Dollar Sales Letters.

1. Spend one to two hours a day copying by hand some of the greatest sales letters of all time.

The easiest way I could ever tell you to become a good ad writer guaranteed is to copy and study good ads until they become a part of you. Study each paragraph. Look and contemplate why they said this or that.

Figure out what they were trying to do in each paragraph. Go out and pick up some of the sales letters by the best ad writers of all time, such as Ted Nicholas, Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham, Brian Keith Voiles, and others. You could also go around the Internet and print out the ads for top selling products and services you know of online.

Then, pick out an ad that you admire greatly that you know produces tons of sales for it's owner. Start copying it by hand. Write the entire sales letter out in your own hand writing. Write it out 5 to 30 times over the next week or month.

I told you this would take some time, but it will be worth it. Once you have written this sales letter over and over again, you will begin to almost memorize the way the writer worded different things. Next time you sit down to write a letter, their wording and even part of the mentality that they sat down to write with will have become a part of you.

After you have copied the first sales letter so many times that you are actually sick of the thing, it is time to go onto the next letter. Pick out another sales letter you admire and copy it by hand. Copy it 5 to 30 times until you begin to know it by heart as well.

Keep doing this with more and more of the winning sales letters and you will find some interesting things happening when you go to write a sales letter. You will sit down and some of their phrasing and ways of doing things will come to your mind. Once you have copied dozens of these sales letters you will find that it is becoming much easier to just sit down and begin flowing right into a million dollar sales piece.

By doing your assigned homework you will begin to learn how to write the headlines, benefits, and the P.S. You will actually start doing the things that Ad Writing courses teach you how to do naturally.

As you continue doing this for the next year you will find yourself getting better and better at writing ads every single month. By following this one technique, anyone reading this report can make a decision to start writing better ads next week.

Even if you are only writing ads for your own business, doesn't it stand to reason that you owe it to yourself to write the most profitable ads possible. Isn't it worth the time you have to dedicate to it?

2. Create a Swipe File.

You should also collect all of the good sales letters you find and create a notebook out of them. Then, when you are sitting down to write a sales letter, you can thumb through your notebook of sales letters to generate ideas for your project.

Many copywriters call this their swipe file. They use it as an idea generator for their headlines, body copy, bullets, etc. If they are stuck on creating a good guarantee, they can look through other guarantees people have used. If they are trying to think of how to do a P.S., they can look through other ones. They can get their letter writing going through taking ideas from other winning sales materials.

Never Use Ideas Word For Word From Your Swipe File. This would be plagiarism. Use it to generate general ideas. You don't want to copy their sentences word for word. You want to flip through some different sales letters until an idea forms in your head about what to write for your project.

This swipe file will help you keep on track and produce winning sales materials every time and it costs you nothing to create. Just collect or print out winning sales letters you find and put them in a notebook or series of notebooks you keep handy when writing your letters.

Remember the cardinal rule when using your swipe file. NEVER copy the ideas word for word!

3. Always research your client's customers until you know them like your own best friend.

Many times you will see reports on how to write killer sales materials that cover many of the basics, but they forget the most important part. The major key to writing million dollar sales letters is to know your customers like you do your own best friend.

You need to know what their needs and desires are. You need to know what fears they are experiencing. You need to know what their Hot Buttons are. What is it that they respond to? What is it that would offend them?

If you don't know your prospects, then you can never write an effective sales letter to them. I don't care if you are best writer in the world. If you don't know them, you won't be able to make sales to them.

Good copywriters take polls of the customers. They look at sales letters their customers have already responded to. They go out and ask questions of their potential customers. They do everything they possibly can to know who their biggest potential prospect is.

If you can't tell me everything about your potential prospects, then you aren't ready to start writing yet. You should know their general age, their hot button, their dreams, their fears, and everything that relates somehow to your product.

The key to a good sales letter is being able to describe the benefits of your product to this individual prospect or customer. It needs to be personalized to them individually.

4. Relax.

Learn how to relax. If you are in a rush to do your sales letter, it will be obvious to the readers. Be willing to take your time and do an extremely good job. Let things stew inside your brain between each of the important elements.

After you research your prospects and get to know them, take some time to relax. Think on them and their desires for a while. Take some time to relax after you write your headlines and choose the best one for your letter. Think about how to create that flow throughout your letter, starting with your headline.

Take some time to relax after you write your rough draft. Sit it down and come back to it the next day. Then, you will be refreshed and ready to edit it. After you have done your editing, put it away again for a little while. Come back to it refreshed and read over it again. See if there is anything else you would like to change about it.

Don't rush through the writing process. Learn how to let your mind go to work by working on it, then relaxing a bit. Go back to work and then let your mind stew over it again. Keep this process throughout the entire letter.

5. Test and Edit.

There is only one way you can ever determine if a sales letter will be successful or not. It has to be put to the test. It has to be sent out to some of the potential prospects.

Send it out and find out if it makes a profit or not. If it is winning letter right up front, great! If not, then it is back to the drawing board. Whether it makes money or not, you will still need to test it.

For example, you should take the letter that made money and try a different headline for it. Compare the results to the original. Test a different price. Test the offer worded slightly different. Keep the sales letter that is producing the best results after each test. This is the control that you will determine your results from.

Winning marketers are always testing their materials to find out which one is producing the best results. The killer sales materials that you see being used year after year and decade after decade became that way through this type of testing. Rarely is the first letter written the absolute best letter it could ever be. You need to keep improving it through testing until you have the letter that consistently out-pulls everything else.

As you can see, copywriting isn't all about being born with huge amounts of writing talents. It is about making a decision to become the best. It is about deciding to do the work you need to succeed in your business. Good copywriters are never lazy, and anyone can be a good copywriter. What about you?

5 Lessons Every Internet Marketer Needs to Learn From Direct Mail Experts

I am an avid information "glutton." I have read most of the marketing courses out there, and have gotten ideas from almost every one of them.

Too many Internet marketers are limited in their viewpoint. They only want to read and see information which has been produced especially for the Internet. Well, I have news for you. I have learned more about Internet marketing through mail order and direct mail courses than I have through 90% of the Internet marketing products out there.

Mail Order has prospered for decades and it still continues to prosper even during the Internet revolution. You still receive sales letters in the mail. You still see ads through magazines you are reading. If you will open your eyes you will see that the "Death" of mail order has been greatly exaggerated. It is still alive and well on planet earth.

Mail order has withstood the test of time and can teach you how to create a profitable Internet business...if you let it.

Mail Order Lesson #1: Everything isn't profitable to sell by mail.

You will see many people online who are trying to sell products that could have never made it through a mail order approach. The sales letter is too poor and the concept behind the product just won't fly. Plus, many of them are trying to sell products which can be picked up at any local store such as Wal-Mart.

These types of web sites would never have stood a chance if they tried mail order. The expenses that went along with it would absolutely destroy their business - the postage, the ad costs, the fulfillment, the order lines, etc. They have chosen a hard road to travel.

The reason they have never realized that they have picked such a hard product to sell is the fact that they have never compared it to a mail order approach. Through the Internet and the free advertising available online, they are able to make money from even the most difficult products and the worst sales letters.

Even though they are making some sales through free advertising online, what they don't realize is that their time could be used much more productively by selling the "right" product to the "right" market. They could be making 10 to 100 times as
much money by putting forth the exact same amount of effort if they had applied a few mail order ideas to their Internet business.

How does a mail order business choose the right product? The first test they put it through is that it must not be available reliably locally. It shouldn't be something people can run down to the store and pick up. It should be something unique or something that can presented in a unique way (if it is available locally).

The second test they put it through is that it must be easy to target the best potential prospects and buyers. People do not start mail order businesses and try to sell to everyone. They would go broke. The product needs to be something that appeals to a specific niche market (such as gardeners, model train owners, mothers, etc.).

Mail Order Lesson #2: Target Your Specific Market.

Successful mail order and direct mail businesses target their market like a laser. They don't just go through the phone book and try to send a letter to everyone listed. They
seek mailing list managers who can help them find specific lists of people who:

Have Money.
Bought a Similar Product by mail.
Spent The Same Amount or More.
Did all of the above recently.
They go after buyers of similar products. In other words, most successful mail order companies don't create a product and try to find people to buy it. They find people who WANT to buy something. Then, they create something to sell them.

Most Internet marketers have the process backwards. Creating a product and then trying to find people to buy it is the HARD way. Finding people who are ready to buy and then selling them what they want is the EASY way. You may be able to make money the HARD way, but why should you when you could be making so much more money the EASY way.

Mail Order Lesson #3: Use a Proven Sales Process.

Too many people have jumped on the Internet bandwagon and have led us to believe that anything goes online. "You never know what will work," they will tell you. The way some "experts" talk you would never be able to figure out what creates successful Internet businesses.

Well, I have news for you. People have been selling products and services by mail for decades now, and every single one of them has something to teach you about creating a successful sales process. Some will teach you what to do. Some will teach you what not to do.

The same rules which have applied to mail order advertising still apply to Internet advertising. For example:

1. Mail Order advertisers have told us for years, "The more you tell, the more you sell." Yet, Internet advertisers have tried to tell us differently. They have said people won't read long copy online. They have said people are too educated to be convinced by a sales letter. They have said that you don't even want to use a sales letter on your site. Guess what? THEY are wrong.

The mail order advertisers had it right...after decades of testing their hypothesis again and again. People will read long copy. People just won't read boring copy. If your sales letter educates the customer and tells them more than the competition, then you will make sales online. Good effective ad copy still works today just as it always has.

2. Mail order advertisers have told us to use a headline on every sales letter. Yet, Internet "experts" have forgotten to tell us to use headlines on all of our web pages. No mail order marketer would even consider sending out a letter without a headline. So, why would you even consider having a single web page without a headline?

Mail order advertisers have also taught us an easy method of increasing our response rates by an immediate 27%. All you have to do is put quotation marks around your headline and your response rate will immediately go up, because people believe the quotation marks show that you are saying something extremely important.

3. Mail order advertisers have told us to write our sales letters like we are writing them to our best friends. Internet "experts" have told us to present a more professional appearance. Sales Letters which have been proven to work time and time again are those which are written in a friendly tone. They use underlining to emphasize key points, shorts words, short sentences, and a personal signature in blue coloring at the bottom.

This same process of writing winning sales letters still works online. You don't want your visitors to think of you as a big corporation. You want them to get to know you personally and to bond with you. Then, once they know you, they will buy from you.

Mail Order Lesson #4: Keep Detailed Records Of Everything.

A successful mail order business is always testing everything that they do. Nothing is set in stone until it has been proven in the marketplace. They track how much they spend for ads, how many people respond, and how many of the responders actually purchase their products or services.

Every new ad will be tracked in the exact same way. If they don't keep the records and haven't done their math, they won't be in business for long. Just because much of Internet advertising is currently free does not give you any excuse for not tracking even more specifically.

Mail Order Lesson #5: Develop a Control and Keep Testing It.

When you hear mail order advertisers talk, they always speak of a control piece. This is a scientific word which refers to the sales piece which has already been proven to sell. The goal of every mail order business is to continually test this control document and try to outsell it with another piece. Then, once they find a piece which has been proven to outsell the first one, they will replace it as the new control. Then, the process of competition between the pieces begins again.

Do you have a control web site for your product? Have you tested a web site again and again to prove whether it is effective at selling your products or services? If not, then as soon as you are finished reading this manual the first time, start testing your piece.

Once you have a site that is making sales, then it is time to create a mirror page where you make some minor changes such as a new headline, a different picture, a different price, etc. Then, test that new page in the same type of medium as the first page. Compare the results. Then, test some other sites.

You should never be completely finished in testing your selling process. There is almost always a way to make it sell a little bit better. Think about the difference in profits if you find out that a certain product sells better with a $10 higher price. What if you sell twice as many by dropping the price 10%?

The marketers who are usually talked about as "Geniuses" are not any such thing. They are just people who have tested every possible method until they eliminated everything that didn't work. All they are left with is the BEST way to sell their products or services.

#1 Reason Internet Marketers Fail

I am always amazed when I discuss marketing techniques online with other internet marketers that MOST of them are missing the key ingredient I find in my own online success.

They usually are well focused on producing internet traffic or on writing good ad copy (which are both key ingredients to success), but then they leave out what I consider to be the most important tool of all online...Follow-up.

Almost every one of them without fail tells me when follow-up comes up, "I have autoresponders" or "I answer all of my email." Well, good for you. That isn't follow-up though.

Making the sale will usually take you 5 to 10 contacts with a prospect. The recognized number we all quote is 7 contacts. So, if it takes at least 7 contacts with a prospect to make the maximum number of sales of your product or services, what are doing to make sure you reach that number with EVERY prospect?

You cannot take a passive approach to marketing and hope that if someone is a real prospect, they will come back to your website later to check it out again. That is financial suicide! All of your marketing has to be active...In other words, YOU are the one who has to make sure you reach at least 7 contacts. Don't even consider leaving it up to your prospects!

We have the most powerful tool in the entire marketing world only available to us online...yet only a small portion of us are taking advantage of it. That tool is Email. Is there any other tool where you can follow-up consistently with dozens or even hundreds of prospects EVERY day of the week and not spend a single cent extra.

If you followed a daily follow-up system in direct mail, you would quickly mail yourself right into the poorhouse. The same thing would occur with telemarketing. With email though, I can send hundreds of follow-ups for FREE as often as I like. If you are not following up on all of your prospects online, don't make excuses. Change it or admit that you are too lazy to care about the success of your business.

Make a commitment that today you will follow-up. I am asking for that commitment to be made to me and to yourself. Plus, I am going to help you. Below I am going to detail the three most important steps for getting started in email follow-up so that you will have a base to build upon.

1) You have to capture the email address.

This is the very beginning of your marketing process and I make it a chief priority in all of my website's designs. Take a look at my website at http://www.bizpromo.com/ and notice how I give you a chance to subscribe to my newsletters, hit my autoresponders, fill out forms with your email address, etc.

Everywhere you try to go on my website, I am giving you another opportunity to give me your email address. This is all because I know that real internet marketing begins when you give me your email address!

(NOTE: Throughout this whole report I am referring to only following up on prospects who first contacted you and gave you their email addresses willingly. I don't believe in using SPAM to promote your business, because you will offend people, lose your ISPs, and lose your reputation online if you start sending unsolicited bulk email)

2) Buy & Learn How to Use High Quality Email Software

Although you may start off with low or no cost email software which is included with your browser or with your computer. I recommend changing it to professional email software. I personally use Eudora Pro version and can recommend it to you. That is not the only one out there, but it is a great one to get started with.

The key element of using this type of software is that you will be able to manage hundreds of email addresses, sort mailboxes, and assign address books for follow-up. You will be able to add all incoming requests for info into special address books so that you can follow-up on dozens or even hundreds of prospects all at one time.

I don't want to get into a complete study of the software programs here, so I recommend that you actually pick up and read the email software's manual. It will take some time, but you will find that your email software's features can quickly become your biggest time saving feature in your online business.

3) Learn the skill of making offers

Here is a simple technique for getting you started in email follow-up correctly and consistently. Have your first offer or sales letter prepared on an autoresponder or as a automated reply in your email software. Collect every request for that information into an address book for follow-up.

Then, begin mailing out to that address book your follow-up offer daily. The simplest way of doing this is by sending the same sales letter (We don't want to confuse your prospects), but attach a new paragraph to the top of each outgoing message everyday.

On this paragraph, you could do a scarcity offer or an email probe. A scarcity offer at the top of the email would look like this:

"ONLY 5 MORE LEFT IN STOCK...The first five who turn in their orders today will receive a...."

Then, go on to describe exactly what your prospects get if they order today. Then, the next day you could do the same thing, but list "ONLY 3 MORE LEFT..." and continue through with scarcity.

The other technique is to actually put a paragraph on top of the email saying that your surprised that you haven't heard from them yet and you wanted to know if they had any questions, etc.

Follow-up can be just that simple. Include the same sales letter, but change the top paragraph in every letter you send out. Then, keep it up with each of your prospects until they buy or they tell you to stop. If someone asks you to quit following up, simply remove that address from your address books and continue with the rest of your prospects.

Learn and follow this technique in your online business and your sales will double or triple in the upcoming weeks!

13 Breakthroughs For Immediate Profits...

Too often businesses and individuals only think of profits in a linear fashion. They think of adding 10% more customers this month or this year. They think of growing in small little steps.

You must break out of this mold. The Internet has leveled the playing field. Businesses you have never heard of before have become household names in only a few short years. Think about it. Have you ever heard of Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, or Napster a few years ago? Now, they are front page news on every newspaper every single day.

Fortunes are being made and lost in a single year online. As a matter of fact, there have been more millionaires created in the past 2 years than in the last 200 combined. This new market is still wide open and it is up for grabs to those with the ambition, guts, and speed to take control of it.

The Internet is wide open to you and your business. While the major corporations throw millions of dollars at billboards and TV ads trying to gain the eyeballs of the average population, you can quickly and easily corner a very specialized niche market of your own.

Here are a few ways you can produce immediate breakthroughs at your web sites. Below are thirteen strategies that can and will produce an immediate increase in profits in your web business.

If you are just getting started in your own business, then take the following as an introduction to a profitable web business. Take notes and give yourself ideas you will be able to add into your web site later on in the growth process.

1. Design a High Quality Web Site

The biggest mistake that I see 95% of small business webmasters making is in the area of designing their web site. There are two primary mistakes that I see made over and over again.

The first mistake is to focus so much on the web site design and graphics that they overwhelm the actual product itself. A gorgeous web site is created using Flash, Real Audio, Real Video, etc. but it is never tested to be effective or not. In my own tests, I have found that a simple professional looking site produces the best results...without all the bells and whistles.

The second major mistake that webmasters make is to use the wrong tools to design their site in the first place...and they end up with a very unprofessional looking site. The real idea of the web site design process is to produce something that looks professional, but that doesn’t draw away from the text. The key to your web site is have all images and graphics focus your visitors back to your advertising message.

2. Automate Your Email Follow-Up

The key to selling online or selling anywhere for that matter is to follow up with your prospects at least 7 times. You cannot rely on just one visit to your web site to cut the mustard. The biggest profit producing strategy I ever came up with was to start working on getting people to subscribe or opt-in to an email follow-up list by giving them a free training series on my subject.

The easiest tool to use for email follow-up is from Postmaster Online which you can go to from http://www.postmasteronline.com/home/10683/

They give you 50 autoresponders which automatically follow-up, a complete database system to track all of your prospects and customers, a contact system, and more. It is the best tool I have found to help you increase your Internet response rates immediately.

3. Start an Opt-In Email List

Even with all of my advertising, web site traffic, and promotions, over 50% of my income still comes in through my opt-in email list which I send out almost every week. Starting your own opt-in list is the key to long-term Internet profits. Just like in direct mail, the profit is in the list. Build your list.

The best strategy to handle your email list is to use the Postmaster Online system from above. It can give you a personalized ezine (if you are collecting names with your email addresses) and can handle all of the removes, unsubscribes, and undeliverables for you.

If you can't afford the Postmaster system (even though it is a low monthly cost), then you could get started with the free service from Listbot at http://www.listbot.com/

4. Place a Sponsor or Solo Ad in Ezines

People are always asking me the quickest way to build traffic to their sites. Search Engines usually take a while, banner ads are expensive, and offline advertising takes months. The quickest, lowest cost, and most effective form of online advertising is placing sponsorships and solo ads in ezines and online newsletters.

Nothing else will even come close to the results which you can produce through this method. You can purchase sponsorships and solo ads for $100 to $1000 and often produce results of three to ten times the ad costs if you have an effective ad for the appropriate audience. There isn’t anywhere else in the world that you can get this kind of bang for your buck when it comes to spending money on your marketing.

5. Use a Pay-Per-Click Search Engine

Regular search engines take months to get positions in and start bringing the traffic (although you can pay Yahoo’s special fee of $199 to get in there quicker). The way to get traffic immediately from the search engines is to start dealing with the pay-per-click search engines such as Goto.com.

Goto.com allows you to set up an account and then you only pay a set fee (almost in an auction model) for each visitor to your site. If you bid one penny per visitor, then you only have to pay a single penny for every visitor to your site. If you bid ten cents, you pay ten cents. If you have tested and can bid a dollar per visitor, then that is what you will pay. How much you pay for traffic is up to you.

There are now several hundred search engines following this model. Most of them don’t produce nearly as much traffic as Goto.com, but some of them can be used once you have proven the effectiveness of your keywords at Goto.com first.

You can find thirty of them at: http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/

6. Participate in Online Schmoozing

Beginning marketers online are always looking for the best free advertising methods, but as the years go by, more and more of these methods are disappearing. The quickest free advertising method available to start participating in online newsgroups, mailing lists, and forums.

You don’t directly advertise in any of these groups. You participate in the discussions and allow your small signature file to appear at the bottom of the messages you post. If you post good comments and participate in the discussions, then you will quickly build a good reputation and will generate traffic and sales at your web site.

Newsgroups: http://www.dejanews.com/
Forums: http://www.forumone.com/
Mailing Lists: http://www.liszt.com/

7. Make a Special Offer

If you have built up an opt-in email list (as in number two above), then you can run a special members only sale or special offer. Only current members will get these discount prices or an added bonus that you can create or purchase wholesale.

You could also do a customer’s only sale. Send out an email to everyone who has purchased something from you in the past offering them a new special product at a discount price or other bonuses added to current products you sell. Nothing will produce
income faster for a business than to contact their previous customers with a special offer.

8. Create a Point-Of-Sale Upsell

This technique can usually increase your web site profits by 10% to 20% immediately the moment you put it in place. It is also very simple to put in place. Once someone orders a product from you, have the thank you page on your web site which comes up show several other products or services that you have available for immediate purchase at a special discounted price.

You will find that often 10% to 25% of your customers will immediately take this opportunity to purchase the other product at the special price (maybe 10% off or something similar).

Stores use this idea all the time. Look at all the small items like magazines, candy, etc. that they pack at the checkout counters. How often do you pick up something else you didn’t need just because it was there and you were already in a buying mood?

9. Set Up an Affiliate Program

The king of affiliate programs is Amazon with their group of over 300,000 affiliates. While you don’t want or need this large of a number to be successful, think about what it would be like to have 1,000 to 5,000 people eagerly selling your products and services for you with a small share of the profits.

If you don't want to have to deal with any CGI script of any software to run the affiliate program, then you can have it outsourced. Companies such as Clickbank not only take orders for electronic products, but they will also run your affiliate program for you. Many of the other online processing services are now following their example.

You should be able to sign up 300 to 500 new affiliates for a good paying program in less than a month by using the Affiliate Announce program at
http://www.affiliate-announce.com/

10. Spread a Virus

If you haven’t heard of viral marketing yet, then you must have been hiding in a cave somewhere. For many, it is considered the ultimate online marketing technique. How else would a company such as Hotmail.com grow to over 40 million users while spending next to nothing in ad costs? ICQ quickly spread itself around the Internet without having an ad budget.

Viral marketing basically entails created something for free that others will pass around for you. It could be as simple as a free report or a free ebook, or as complicated as creating a unique software program to be passed around.

11. Send an Online Press Release

The quickest way to generate ten thousand hits or more immediately to your web site at very little cost is to send out an online press release. All it takes is one mention in a newspaper, magazine, radio program, or TV show to drive more traffic to your site in the next 24 hours than you will through all of your other promotions for the next month.

Successful entrepreneurs make it a habit to regularly send out press releases about any new benefits that they offer to their customers. This used to be cost prohibitive through the cost of postal mail and long distance faxing. Now, you can send out the press releases by email or pay only $200 or so to have them sent out for you. Two hundred dollars could never buy you a write-up in a magazine, but a press release could potentially give you dozens.

Personally, I have found Paul Hartunian's system to be the easiest system in the world to follow to get more publicity than you can handle. It is a little pricey, but it is worth every penny: http://www.instantpublicity.com/

12. Send Out Articles to Ezines

Here is another zero cost strategy for selling your products or services. Write up a good article with valuable information in it (you could even use our simple article writing strategy) and submit it to the ezines in your niche market. If your article is well done, you will find that much of the time it will be the featured article in many of them.

This is better than having a featured ad in an ezine (and you know how I feel about those)!

13. Start an eBay Auction

This idea won’t work for every business, but it could be a significant source of income and traffic for your web site. Over 40,000 powersellers currently sell $2,000 or more per month on eBay (all the way up to $500,000 a month for a few of them). All you have to do is go over to eBay and find out what products are HOT sellers...If yours is one of the hot topics, then you could have a built in money and traffic generator for your site at almost no cost whatsoever...

5 Tips For Bringing Traffic To Your Site For Free Using the Major Search Engines

When advertising on the Internet, you will want to use as many low cost or NO cost advertising sources as possible...That is the big advantage of the internet over traditional methods of advertising. Sending out follow-up letters to interested people is FREE...There are thousands of sites where you can place FREE classified ads.

Many service providers have a section for Free ads...Placing a Signature File on the bottom of all of your emails and message boards is Free. Best of all though, Search Engine Advertising is Free.

Search Engines are misunderstood in a major way...It is possible to get 100 of 1,000 people a day visiting your site through the major search engines, but it ISN'T EASY. You CANNOT just go through and submit your site to 350 search engines using automated software...It doesn't work that well. You will notice little or no added traffic from such methods.

In all honestly, there really are only 8 search engines which people really get traffic from. The other ones are much smaller and if you go to their sites you may see 1,000,000 hits, but when you do a search you only see 300 or so hits. This means that everyone has submitted their sites there, BUT almost no one is using them to do any searches for anything.

The eight major search engines will produce 95% or more of your search engine traffic...They are:

Alta Vista ---- http://www.altavista.com/

Excite -------- http://www.excite.com/

HotBot -------- http://www.hotbot.com/

Info Seek ----- http://www.infoseek.com/

Lycos --------- http://www.lycos.com/

Open Text ----- http://www.opentext.com/

Web Crawler --- http://www.webcrawler.com/

Yahoo --------- http://www.yahoo.com/

The problem is that if you are not listed in the top 20 of a specific search engine under a certain keyword, you have little or no chance of ever actually being found. There are
millions of people submitting their sites to these search engines and if you are coming up in the 125,021 place, NO ONE will ever come to your site through that search engine.

Learning how to submit your site to the search engines and getting top positions isn't always easy...Think about it...You have 1,000,000 people trying to make sure they get ahead of you in line. You have to learn a lot of how to get high listings on the search engines and just what to do to take advantage of them.

Think about it though...500 hits a day are possible from search engines...How much would you have to pay to get that kind of traffic from banner advertising.

The cheapest place I have seen for targeted advertising lately for banners cost $250 for 40,000 banner viewings. If you had a banner with a click through ratio of 5% (Which is high) you would get 2,000 hits for your $250.

So with 500 hits a day or 3500 hits a week, that would be equal to $437.50 a week in FREE advertising you could get just for getting extremely high listings on the search engines. Is an extra $400 profit a week worth taking the time to learn how to get high listings on search engines? It is to me!

Here are a couple of Quick Tips on Getting High Listings on Search Engines:

1) Write down every keyword you can think of which applies to your site that you want to bring targeted traffic in from.

2) Become a Digital Detective. Step two is to go to some of the major search engines and do a search for your competition. Use some of the keywords you would use to look for your site.

Visit these sites and write down other keywords you might not have thought about. Also save some of the pages so you will be able to look at them later to see what they are doing to get into the top 10 on a certain keyword.

3) Investigate these pages thoroughly...Start trying to notice what is similar among them. Whatever it is that is similar is probably what is getting them up on the tops of the search engines.

NOTE: All the Search Engines have different requirements!

How many times is the keyword being mentioned in each page? To get high placement you will probably have to create a version of your site that is different for EVERY ONE of the search engines separately. This is time consuming, but well worth the cost.

4) Examine the Meta Tags

If you have an html editor, when you look at the html of the page, you will be able to see it's Meta Tags. They will look something like this at the top of the page.

I am NOT telling you to copy theirs...I am telling you to look and see if they use a keyword 5 times, then you probably should do that too. See what is similar between each of the top ten pages in a category. You can learn ALOT this way on how each search engine works.

5) Begin preparing and submitting your pages after following the rules that you found out about your keywords. The first search engine you should start with is Infoseek usually. When you submit to them you will find they will index your page within minutes so it is GOOD way to test your pages for rankings.

To help everyone with their submissions, I have created a Traffic Building e-book which contains the submission forms for ALL 8 of the major search engines. So, instead of having to go to eight different places and hunt for the "add url" sections, you can do it all from:

http://www.bizpromo.com/traffic.exe

Seven Ways to Add 100 or More Subscribers To Your Ezine Daily

The best way to make money on the Internet is to build your own opt-in list. This way you can build a relationship with thousands of potential customers all over the world without spending more than a couple hundred dollars a year for the Internet access and the list management tools you use.

Once you have built a list, you can make money through it by selling advertising, doing Joint Venture deals, listing your affiliate programs, etc. There are dozens of ways to make money from your opt-in list, once you learn how to build it.

We have spent the years of our Internet life coming up with the best ways to build opt-in lists, and I am going to show you 7 ways to build your list quickly and easily.

1. Post It Prominently On Every Page Of Your Site.

This one should go without saying, but many opt-in list owners still aren't doing it. You need to give people the opportunity to subscribe to your list on every page of your site. The more people you expose to your message, the more that will respond.

2. Add an Ebook Bonus for Subscribing

We first tested this over a year ago and it doubled our daily subscribe rates from our site. It was proven years ago that your sales rates will increase if you add a bonus to a product or service you are selling.

Well, we have proven that more people will sign up for a free newsletter if you also include a free bonus with that as well. There are hundreds of free ebooks floating around the net which you can use for free bonuses. Find one that relates to your site and use it to increase to your number of subscribers.

3. Create a Signature File With Your Ezine

You should have your email software set to include a signature file on every email message you send out. Your signature file should include an ad for your opt-in list along with your free bonus ebook for subscribers.

You will find it is easier to use an ad to get people to subscribe to your ezine than it is to get them to purchase a product. Then, once they are on your list, you build a relationship with them and sell them your products.

4. Submit it to all of the Listings.

Continually find places to list your newsletter. For example, pick out some of the main subscribe pages of your competitors and find all of the sites linking to them. This can be done using the link finder at http://www.siteowner.com/

Then, go through and submit your site to the same directories. Marty Foley also has a listing of some of the best places to submit your ad at http://profitinfo.com/ezine-pr.htm

5. Trade Ads with other Newsletters.

Once you have built up a list of at least a few hundred subscribers, you can start trading ads with other publishers. Create a recommended ezine section (instead of classifieds) and start trading with ezine publishers in every single issue. You publish their ad in your ezine and they publish your ad in their ezine.

If you consistently do this with every issue, your newsletter is going to start growing exponentially. There are several lists of ezines willing to trade ads out there, and we have one you can use at http://www.bizpromo.com/ezinetrades.htm

6. Do a Newsletter Joint Venture.

Joint Ventures are one of the best ways to build an Internet business and opt-in list building is no exception. Find three to five other ezine publishers who would like to trade with you and do this.

After someone subscribes to your ezine, have another page there which asks them if they would like to subscribe to your partner's ezines (give the names and a short description of each). Then, have your JV partners follow the same strategy in return. If you were receiving 20 subscribers a day from your site, five publishers teamed up together could be doing 50 to 100 new subscribers a day.

7. Use a Pop-Up Ad for Collecting the List Members

I know a lot of people don't like popup boxes, but I have found they will triple your subscription rates. Basically you can pick up a Java script that will run a popup box on your site from the BigNoseBird site for free.

You can see it working at http://www.bizpromo.com/

What, you don't see it? That's because you must have been to my site before. This script has a special advantage. It doesn't keep bothering your visitor. It only works and pops up to the visitor the first time they visit the site.

You can pick it up at:
http://bignosebird.com/js/h45.shtm

Picking The Right Web Host May Be a Life Or Death Experience

When I discuss with people how to make money online and how to build a long-term business online, I am often shocked in how they are trying to build a long-term business online WITHOUT owning their own web domain...

Whenever I started training someone how to make money online, the VERY first thing we do is start with their websites. A website should be considered a home base so to speak. It is your online store location and the base of operations for everything else that you do online.

Let's think about the different online advertising methods...Search Engines, Banner Advertising, Ezine Advertising, Newsgroup/Mailing List participation, and Classified advertising. I know that doesn't cover everything, BUT It is the major source of advertising online. Think about each of those advertising methods.

Search Engines are the #1 traffic generator on the web right now and they absolutely REQUIRE that you have a website. Many online experts estimate 95% of your traffic could come from search engines. YOU are leaving out 95% of your business by not being able to take advantage of search engines...

You may think that just getting a free server such as FreeYellow or Angelfire might take care of this problem, BUT it doesn't. Through helping other people advertise their websites I came to an alarming discovery. Both of the above mentioned web hosts are being BLOCKED out of some of the search engines such as Infoseek. You can still place them on most of the search engines, BUT registering web pages from them is becoming extremely difficult.

With banner advertising, You obviously have to have a website...Both for Free Banner Exchanges and For Paid Banner Advertising.

With Ezine Advertising, You can use an autoresponder, BUT your response rate goes UP when you include BOTH an autoresponder and a website in the classified ad. The same rules go for classified advertising. You should have both an email address and website in your ads for MAXIMUM effectiveness.

When participating in online discussion, the best form of advertising (Accepted in every online group) is the signature file. This gives you space for a short 4 - 5 line ad for yourself. The best approach is to tell them your name, phone, email, and website address along with a basic idea of what you do. Your website address needs to be there so that they can go somewhere to find out more information immediately.

In all of these advertising forms, a website or domain is absolutely essential to your success. I personally favor a domain for many reasons...

Name Recognition - It is much easier for people to remember a name like http://www.bizpromo.com than http://www.freeyellow.com/members2/bizpromo/

Stability - Having your own domain gives an image of more stability to people when they see it. It appears that you will be around for a while.

Secure Ordering - In most cases you cannot get orders online through a website because there are no secure ordering options. Currently, 80% or more of our orders come in through our secure ordering pages!

Growth - It will be much easier to grow when you own your own domain...If you have just a website and you run out of space or you start having trouble with your host, you are stuck. If you leave, all of the traffic you built will be going to FreeYellow not your new domain...If you own your own domain, if you move everything comes with you to your new host.

Selling Multiple Products - This hooks up with the above, but it needs to be mentioned again...A Domain is perfect for adding more products to and selling more items. You spend money and/or time to get traffic to your site. You need to make sure you are taking advantage of it as much as possible by offering multiple products and/or services.

All of these benefits are EXTREMELY important to making your online marketing a success. I honestly think everyone should purchase a domain upfront in their marketing avenue and then start driving traffic to it immediately. Instead of wasting their time and money by losing their traffic they worked SO hard for and upgrading later.

Now, the next problem I ran into was that some of my clients were operating on an extremely small budget - around $100 or so.

The domains I had been recommending cost AT LEAST $400 to get setup...So I had to go in search of a web host which was both HIGH quality and low cost to get setup and running.

What I found was a company named Virtualis which fit the bill perfectly...It has all of the options...They sell smaller domains at a size of 15 MB with 5 different types all the way up to your own server...Plus, there are NO upgrade fees when you expand from one domain to another.

To get a domain started there only costs $36 instead of the $400 I had been recommending. I highly suggest that you go there now to check out all of the options available: http://www.virtualisys.com/vr/tdean2/

Now, a person on a low budget will be able to get a website and start producing traffic to it (And with good design - Sales) for under $100...

For those of you who would like to offer this same type of service to your customers, they also have a free reseller option which you can take a look at by clicking on reseller at the bottom right hand of the above page. I was more than happy to find a company that offered good quality service at low prices, and it also would pay me to refer them to my clients. I am not against earning extra money while recommending the best options to all of my members.

All in all, the very first thing you should do when marketing online is to setup your own domain...Your home base. Now, there is a low cost option for doing so that everyone can take this opportunity to develop an effective online marketing campaign instead of throwing time and money down a blackhole of marketing without a home base.

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