Sell Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

Homemade Jewelry – How Do I Sell My Own?

So you have been making your homemade jewelry for a while and you are beginning to wonder if there may be a money making opportunity at your doorstep. Well, there just might be. Everyday people are taking their talents and hobbies and creating their own small businesses. There is no reason why you could not become one of these people. There are just a few things you need to do and consider as you get started.

First of all you need a product. This does not mean you need to just start cranking out inventory but you need to look at the jewelry you have made and decide if it is of good enough quality to sell. If you believe it is then press on and start making more.

Next, you need a business plan. There are some templates for these online. This does not need to be complicated but you do need to do this step. You need to come up with a company name, how much you will charge, what you will sell, who will be involved, and other company rules and norms. If you are doing this on your own your plan does not need to be that detailed but the more people that are involved the more detailed your plan needs to be.

After this you need to consider registering your business at the local tax office. This can give you the benefits of getting tax deductions but also can keep you from getting in trouble with the IRS. I would hate for you to lose all the money you might make because you did not do things on the right way. I will not go over any details here but there are a lot of great resources online that can help you with this part of the process.

Finally, you need to decide through what medium you will sale your homemade jewelry. There are a lot of options out there but I prefer to do it online. There are a lot of user friendly sites that are available to help you build a website. There are also lots resources to help you with getting it to show up on search engines. This form of selling has less overhead and helps you have a much larger customer base.

These are the steps to get you started. You need to start brainstorming and coming up with a plan. Then just do what most people do not when it comes to this, get to work and put your plan into action. If you do you could be a successful seller of your homemade jewelry.

Choosing A Yacht Broker to Sell Your Yacht

How do I select a yacht broker to sell my vessel? How do I come across the best yacht broker to sell my boat? These are questions that you as a yacht owner may ask when it is time to sell your boat. In my transactions with sellers, I find that the majority, if not all of them had no idea when deciding on the brokerage to represent them. Their preference was made arbitrarily it would seem. When you are ready, you need to find a first-class yacht brokerage that you can rely on. Some of the factors that you should think about are honesty, value and competency.

A yacht is a huge expenditure and a lot of people prefer to buy one from a yacht brokerage. A brokerage sells boats to interested people for a commission. Obviously, before you think about which one to go with when selling, you will want to be familiar with the commission fee that they charge; it is a standard 10% in the trade.

Of course, you want to look for honesty in a yacht broker. Nobody cares to trade with a dishonest person in any way, but some people are extremely dishonest without seeming to be. Check out the reputation of the brokerage before making a commitment, and make sure that there are no complaints filed against them. The brokerage should be competent when it comes to pricing your yacht. Your yacht brokerage should have a good knowledge of the market and how much to price your boat.

Always look for skill in a yacht brokerage. They should have been in the trade for some time. The longer, the better, obviously, as this shows they’re able to stay in business. They will not only have the opportunity to sell your yacht at a respectable price, but also manage to obtain the perfect yacht if you are looking to buy another one from a broker.

In order to locate the right yacht brokerage, you must shop around. Talk to some people until you get at ease with one. Ask for and phone references. Never deal with a brokerage that is aggressive or insists that you put your signature on a contract that you do not understand. These legal contracts are binding. If you do not grasp the listing contract, you should check with an attorney. In addition, remember that buying a boat is like buying a house. You will want to investigate the business as you would a home brokerage business.

Here are some questions to pose while looking for the top yacht brokerage. Make use of this list to establish which Broker is best for you.

Will you co-broke with other Brokers who might have a buyer that could purchase my vessel? Am I able to get it in writing? We have it in our listing agreement; we always co-broke with other Brokers. If you cannot get it in writing the broker is more worried about his commission; you could potentially lose out on a sale.

How reachable are you going to be to me, buyers and other Brokers? We make telephone calls often to other Brokers and wait for days to hear back from them. My cell phone and PC are constantly on; you can reach me if you need to; so can buyers!

Does your company sell yachts full-time or is brokerage just a passion? Numerous Brokers do it in their free time like a hobby. If your Broker will not act for you full-time, seven days per week, and holidays if needed, you need to select another company.

How long does your listing agreement last? Can I cancel if I want to? Our listing agreement is for an initial 6 months. Our rule is that if you are not pleased with our services, we will release you at any time at your request after that initial period. Most brokerage listing agreements contain a notification clause in fine print that claims you are obligated to give them a 90-120 day written notice before you will be released.

How do you market my boat? Marketing and advertising vessels is all related to exposure. It’s a well-known fact that today’s boat buyers shop the Web almost exclusively for their yachts. Here you are! The truth is statistics demonstrate that about ninety-eight percent of all boat sales transpire as a result of world wide web publicity. Ask about the web sites the brokerage uses to market boats and yachts. Having your boat on 10 little known web sites nobody can find is ineffective. Inquire how the brokerage has completed search engine optimization and what percentage of visitors visit their sites every month via search engines. About 63% of our site visitors get through to us by way of a search engine. It has been indexed by all of the most important search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Dogpile, and others.

Ask what terminology the internet site is rated for; our web site can be Googled and located on page 1 for “used trawlers”, “used motor yachts”, “used cruisers”, and scores of other search terms. Perhaps that is how you located us? Can your selected brokerage certify that your yacht will turn up on Google page one? At our brokerage, we do warrant it with each boat listed.

What number of site visitors come to your web site seeking yachts? We often experience over 18,000 visits to our web site monthly, thousands more than the Yachtworld internet website.

Inquire if the brokerage makes use of the Yachtworld website, the international multiple listing service web site. This internet website is the multiple listing website where we share listings with other Brokers. And yes, all of our vessels are on there.

Global marketing is a big issue to us; it produces consumers. Do you realize that we have had site visitors from as many as 78 countries in 2010 from countries such as Australia, Norway, Canada, France, Finland, New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, and Germany on this web site, just to name a couple? We sold about 6 vessels to foreign customers last year. Request how a brokerage markets worldwide.

Does the brokerage employ direct email advertising and marketing? We keep an email marketing list of several thousand boaters, a good number of whom are purchasers. On a bi-monthly basis we email these buyers with a publication about new vessels on the market, price changes, boating headlines and other subjects of marine interest. Your yacht will be marketed here. It sends customers to the website.

Does the brokerage keep up a blog? We maintain a blog to help educate new customers to the boating community; your yacht will be posted there also. It is also indexed by Google daily and produces hundreds of visitors on a daily basis. We post to the blog twice weekly. We additionally maintain a Paradise Yachts existence on Face Book, the social media internet website where we interact with other boaters; a lot of our followers are boat buyers wanting to locate the best boat.

We are one of a few brokerages that make use of You Tube to promote your boat via narrated videos describing her features. Your yacht will be featured here as well. In addition, we also take part in sixty-one other social bookmarking websites with the only intent of bringing the buying public to your yacht.

How will you keep me informed of the progress of your marketing? At Paradise Yachts we frequently hear how other Brokers get a listing and don’t let customers know how things progressing. You will hear from us regularly; about every 6 weeks. I enjoy sending you an email outlining how I understand the universal market, how many boats like yours have sold and at what value, what the prices are with boats like yours on the market, if any boats similar to yours have entered the market and what, if any, recommendations I have to improve our internet marketing.

How many boats do you keep in inventory? I like to maintain from 25-35 vessels in my selling inventory. With this amount, I am able to keep track of each boat’s monthly progress, assess the traffic each yacht gets, examine what other boats like yours are selling for and keep you informed on her progress. More boats and you will turn out to be just another number.

What do you truly comprehend about yachts; have you ever owned one? I have sold more than one vessel because the buyer completed his investigation and found me because he recognized I myself own a trawler. The buyer sought me out as a result of my yacht ownership and know-how. I could talk the talk with him.

And lastly, ask your broker for a list of yachts that have sold in the past year. Has he sold any boats comparable to yours?

In summary, don’t just select the Broker that happens to be down at the local docks. He may spend more time on the golf course than you do. Do some Internet investigation and ask a number of questions to know you are getting the Broker who has your best interest in mind.

How My Vet Helped Me Find Hot New Products to Sell on eBay

Today my vet mentioned the ‘F’ word ….. he’s foreign, Polish I think, and I’m not sure if the ‘F’ word is acceptable in his country ….. but it certainly is not acceptable in mine!

“Fat”, he said, “Your dog is too FAT. He needs to lose weight or he’ll DIE before his time.”

‘D’ along with the ‘F’ word made me sit up and take notice. “Lose the weight”, he said, “and he’ll be with you much longer.”

Enough said, immediately I got home I searched eBay, and ClickBank, for a report about helping your dog lose weight fast. I searched for ‘dog weight’ and ‘dog fat’ and I found ….. tons of huge bags of low calorie dog food and biscuits which I never give my dogs anyway, and absolutely ZILCH in the way of information to help me downsize my dog.

So I ended up searching Google for information about helping my mutt look more macho when the idea suddenly struck me – why don’t I turn all of this information from Google into a low cost information product to sell on eBay and ClickBank? Why not also promote my new infoproduct through eBay Classified Ads and grow a mailing list for products I can recommend later?

Oops, I forgot to say, I wasn’t the only person in the surgery to get a rollicking today, there were three of us with overweight mutts lined up for the exact same treatment …. which set me thinking ….. if three out of three people sitting in the surgery today need help of the kind proposed for my new product, just how many other people might also need it?

So I reckon I’ve found a fabulous new market, one that will help my dog, help other people’s dogs, and could possibly make a fortune for me!

The idea is to write a report and offer it for just a few dollars, and in the back of the report I’ll include affiliate links for other items to interest dog lovers, such as medicines, food and biscuits, holiday kennels, and so on. Think about it, if I sell just one eBook every day at $2 pure profit, that’s $600 plus per year, and that’s before we even start thinking about affiliate commissions.

What does this have to do with you? Well I just wanted to prove how easy it is to find a niche market with countless eager buyers and not one person providing for their needs, no one that I could find anyway!

The moral is to keep your eyes and ears open no matter where you are because ideas are all around you and just one idea is all it really takes to start a profitable business.

Apart from waiting for my vet to throw ideas at me, these are other methods I often use to locate some new niche market for my eBay business and other online ventures:

* Visit forums related to your chosen marketplace, such as dogs, but also including child care, marital problems, expatriate living, debt, and millions more. Find forums by searching Google for “xxx + forum” where xxx represents your chosen market or subject. So for forums frequented by chess players you might search for “chess + forum”.

Google usually returns the biggest and most active forums first on their listings, so note down the address of the first ten or so. Visit them in Google order and study postings by members and definitely, I don’t say maybe, I said definitely, you will encounter problems shared by many members. Study these problems and then look for free or low cost information products to help solve those problems. Look on eBay, look on ClickBank, other places too but those are enough to start with. If you find few or no suitable information products then you should consider writing your own or cobble one together from PLR and public domain text. If along with no suitable information products, you find physical products aplenty, these are the kind of products to promote as an affiliate inside your low-cost, no-cost reports.

* Study niche market publications on newsagents’ shelves, such as baby magazines and investment newspapers. Study various same subject publications that normally sit side by side on the newsagents’ shelves making studying them very easy indeed. Look at the headlines, notice if two or more publications feature one problem or theme which might be construed as applying to the entire niche marketplace. This indicates a problem or theme that you can profit from. So if, for example, you see two or more collectibles magazines focussing on one specific collectible, this could be the perfect product for you to sell on eBay. If two or more publications aimed at guitar players feature a new and revolutionary kind of guitar accessory, then this could be another perfect product for you.

* Watch the telly, listen to the radio, keep your eyes and ears open for problems and trends you might capitalise upon. Think about obesity and the belief that soon the majority of children will be morbidly FAT (that word again), then look for products to help parents reverse the trend.

Think about pension funds going belly up in line with firms going out of business and leaving lifelong employees facing a miserable old age. Now go to eBay, go to ClickBank, is there anything suitable for them to read to help grow their pension pot without outside help? No! Then that’s a perfect infoproduct for you to create, one with mountains of affiliate opportunities to promote on the back end. You could write a short report about alternative investments, for instance, or running a small business on eBay, suggesting both as a means of growing retirement income free from banks and employers. Just be sure to pack the product with links to Amazon books about making money on eBay and growing an affiliate investment portfolio and …..

….. oh I could go on for hours dreaming up new products to sell which would leave me with no time at all to actually promote those products. So I’ll leave you now to do your own research and to find products no one else is providing, all it takes is a few minutes but the rewards can last a lifetime!

How to Buy and Sell Domain Names Profitably

I have been asked time and time again by my readers of how best to buy and sell domain names profitably and without stress. In my no-holds-barred research approach and attitude, I earnestly went to work on that assignment. My findings have been serialized in this article for the benefit of all.

What is a Domain Name?

Domain name is an online unique identity that distinguishes one web site from another. It could be your personal name, your offline business name or any other name that has not been registered by somebody else online with domain registrars.

Buying and selling domain name is a serious and big business. The good tiding is that you can start with as little as $8.00 and rake in profit of say, $1,992.00 within a month. That is the naked truth! All you need to excel in this domain name business is a bit of your creativity and ingenuity. Your creativity can out perform any known robot or software so far developed. This is because as you check for domain name availability on the Internet, other names naturally come up as you are told the one you want to register has been taken up. In my experience, I have found out that premium and generic names sell fastest and highest on the internet. This is so because business people are desirous of either protecting their brand names or want a name that will easily ring a bell to any internet user. Therefore, they can go to any length to ensure that they repurchase their names if it has been registered before they do. This is where the money juice lies! It becomes a matter of bidding. As the saying goes: “The highest bidder wins the deal.”

If you are low in capital to jump-start your dream business, the cheapest and easiest place to start and earn a reasonable seed capital is in Domain Name Business. Also if you ask me for an excellent resource/e-book that succinctly outlined the basics of domain name selling in easy steps please email me for recommendation for your financial freedom.

Heard of Domain Parking?

Do you know you can register a domain name and be earning money without hosting it? To this end, you won’t be tied to any monthly fee whatsoever. You earn revenue from one-time investment of buying a domain name throughout the year. It is as sweet as that! The simple thing to do is just to park that registered domain name with a parking company and voila, you start earning cool bucks.

Domain parking means registering a domain name and pointing it to a “parking company” (at no cost of course) so that your site will show a page with adverts when any internet user searches key words or key phrases that relate to your site adverts. When someone clicks on those adverts you earn money. That is domain parking, pure and simple! It is akin to putting Google AdSense adverts on your site. However, parking is simpler since you do not need to worry about designing a website nor pay monthly web site hosting fees. Truly, online business ideas are limitless. Domain parking is really domain “monetization” business.

Marketing and Profiting from Domain Name

If you are in the camp of “buying and selling domain names”, what you should do is buy popular, premium, generic or key words or key phrases that will be easy to remember and market. People are always enthralled with unique names. There are whole gamuts of a combination of key words that have not been registered. Market them and profit from it. It is your business! But beware: You cannot run this business and excel with naivety. That is why I am recommending a great resource that I can cross my heart for to you when you reach me on email as a quick start.

Take action, become a domainer and add it to one of your income streams. It is a win-win deal!

You will excel!

Affiliate Marketing – Using Pay Per Click to Sell Products

Cost Per Action (CPA) online internet businesses sign up affiliates to promote products for other businesses. Some CPA network businesses are Affiliate.com, RevenueLoop.com, Clickbooth.com, and ClickBank.com. The CPA affiliate networks are paid by a publisher who in return pays the CPA network. Then affiliates are paid by the CPA networks for selling these products to consumers. Affiliates promote business offers by using pay per click (PPC) advertising search engines such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search, Microsoft Adcenter, Miva and etc.

Affiliates join PPC search engines and write ads to promote CPA affiliate network offers. Ad formats vary by PPC businesses but each always contains a headline.

The headline is used to attract the attention of potential customers. It is important for the headline to immediately grab the attention of potential internet customers. The headline needs to be relevant to the product or service you are promoting. Also, it is important that the first letter of each word is capitalized because this makes the headline easier to read.

Keywords are used to attract potential customers. Affiliates bid on keywords to attract potential customers. This is accomplished by affiliates paying PPC businesses to put ads on their networks. Relevant ads are displayed on the computer based on data entered in search engine by internet users. When someone clicks on these ads, the sales page is displayed and the customer has the opportunity to comply with the offer requirements.

Generally, the higher the keyword bid amount, the higher the page rank and page position will be. The page rank is the page number on which the ad appears. Page one is the coveted ad position because this is the first page displayed in a Google search. The page position is the position the ad appears on the page. The affiliate pays the PPC business the bid amount or a lesser amount each time someone clicks on the affiliate’s ad.

The ad also contains a description. The purpose of the description is to show a benefit and have a call to action that results in converting the ad to a sale. The description benefit could be something like Discover Weight Loss Secrets. Get Your Free Weight Loss Sample Here would be an effective call to action for this example.

It is important to capitalize the first letter of each word in the headline and description. Capitalizing the first letter of each word in a sentence helps to grab the attention of the reader.

Attention grabbing headlines are important. Some internet gurus suggest that the headline should contain a relevant keyword to improve the page rank and page position. Others believe that relevant content in the headline is more important.

You can find more relevant keywords by using free tools available on the internet. Perform a Google search on “Free Keyword Tools” and use them to obtain more relevant keywords to promote CPA network offers. Then promote merchant products and services by purchasing keywords on CPA networks.

CAUTION: When bidding on keywords be sure to set a daily or monthly dollar limit. This is important to limit potential losses. Individuals not familiar with how the PPC businesses work risk having substantial PPC costs. This can happen when keywords that are not relevant to the product being promoted have numerous hits but no sales conversions.

Determine which keywords are converting, then write different ad headlines using these keywords. Try limiting headlines and the sales message to contain one keyword.

It is possible to promote CPA network offers by only using search PPC provided by Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter, Miva, etc. However, most internet gurus believe that an individual really needs a web site to effectively promote CPA affiliate network offers. This allows your site to display the offer landing page, provides the opportunity to pre-sell the offer, and this potentially makes the customer more prone to act on the offer.

Landing pages also allow the opportunity to have a squeeze page that provides the customer an opportunity to look at another offer. Squeeze pages are also used to get subscribers to newsletters, other offers, etc. Additional offers can be sent by email to persons who subscribe to your newsletter. However, be sure that you comply with the laws pertaining to unsolicited emails.

Another reason for having your own web site is that you can use landing page ad rotators to promote several offers at one time. Offers are rotated sequentially as customers visit your web site. This is a good way to determine which offers have the best conversion rates and then you can concentrate on promoting offers with the highest conversion rate.

Affiliate marketing can be effectively implemented using PPC search engines to attract internet users to CPA offers. Advertising ads placed on search engines can either be directed to the CPA network offer or directed to your web site and then subsequently being redirected to the CPA network offer.

How to Sell Your Product or Service When It’s NOT the Cheapest

It just makes sense that you’ll get more business when your product or service is the cheapest, right? But what happens when you’re significantly higher than your competitors. Are you going to get shut out of the market?

Often these days there is someone who is selling a product or service just like yours, but at a ridiculously low price. Maybe you’re offering a service people at Fiverr are offering for $5 (that’s $4 after Fiverr takes their $1 fee!) Right now I’m charging $99 to write your press release, which is the lowest price I’ve offered since 1999. But there are others who are writing press releases for $10, $7, even $5.

Chances are YOUR business is experiencing the same problem. Even though your product is priced as low as you can without going broke, any customer can Google the product and find somebody selling the same product below invoice. That could be because the business is giving away the product to bring more customers in or they’re a BIG firm who buys the product by the millions and gets a huge discount from the manufacturer.

Whatever the case — there IS a way to convince customers YOU have the best VALUE, even if your price isn’t the lowest.

One example of how it’s done is a friend who designs web sites for $70 per hour. A client was about to hire him when they heard of a teenager working part-time charging $10 per hour. My friend explained that when the $10-hour designer made a mess out of their website, the client would have to pay all over again to have a pro fix and design their site the right way.

The client realized paying $70 per hour would be their best VALUE:

* Fewer headaches. Their site would be done right.

* Faster results. The experienced designer would have the site up sooner and ready to do business.

* Better site would mean bigger sales, probably paying for the designer’s fee right away

The client thought why should I mess around taking a chance on saving a little money in the design. What I really need is a good site, done right and quickly, and get on with running my business and increasing sales.

This story is a good example of how you can convince customers your higher price is the best deal:

* Customers can TRUST you to do the job right

* Your better SERVICE will make the price worth it

* You are EASIER to work with

* The customer will get RESULTS

Come to think of it. I think I’ll have one of those guys who writes a sales letter for $7 do their best. Then I’ll post MY sales letter next to theirs. Next to that I’ll feature testimonials from customers who rave about how they trust me, love my service, and find it easy to get results.

Should You Let Affiliate Marketers Sell Your Products?

If you have created great products that you are looking to sell online, you may have thought about using affiliate marketers to sell your products. Using this marketing method certainly has its appeal. You don’t have to write tomes of content to market your products. You don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on pay per click marketing. You don’t have to figure out how to drive traffic to your sales pages.

Before you commit to making your products available through affiliate marketers, though, there are a few things that you should think about. This article will help you determine if selling your products through affiliate marketers is right for you and your business.

First, you should realize that you will be giving up a significant portion of your profits to the affiliate marketers that are driving traffic to your sales pages. The percentage of revenues that you will need to pay to affiliate marketers differs depending upon the types of products you are selling, and the caliber of affiliate marketers you want to attract.

If you are selling tangible products, such as books, cookware, yoga mats, or ceremonial swords, you will usually need to pay a commission of 10 to 20% of sales to your affiliates. These commissions can represent a significant portion of your total revenues, especially when you consider that you still have to pay for manufacturing, shipping, and product returns.

If you are selling electronic products, such as software, ebooks, or website subscriptions, you won’t have to worry about paying for manufacturing or shipping, because there are virtually no shipping costs, and no production costs beyond the initial development of the products.

However, affiliate marketers are accustomed to receiving commissions of 40%, 50%, or even 75% for promoting and selling these products. So if you are selling a $40 ebook, you may only realize a profit of $10 after your affiliate commissions have been paid, not counting the minimal costs associated with maintaining your sales website.

Second, you should think about how widely you want to spread your advertising. Once you make your product available to affiliate marketers, you have very limited control over where and how your products are marketed. Some larger companies have means of checking up on affiliate marketers to find out how there products are being marketed, but even the most sophisticated methods are only moderately effective.

If you have a high end product that creates a sense of luxury for your buyers, affiliate marketing may not be the best way of promoting your products. You don’t want your product to be advertised on just any website – certainly, there are certain types of websites that would not cast your products in a favorable light. Even on the internet, you have to maintain your business’s image, and this is more easily done if you keep your advertising in house.

On the other hand, if you have inexpensive products that you would like to make readily available to a wide base of internet consumers, affiliate marketing can work quite well for generating a high volume of sales.

Third, you should evaluate how much time and money you want to spend tracking affiliate sales and writing out commission checks. If you only plan on accepting a handful of affiliate marketers to promote your products, this may not be a big deal. A simple software program can help you keep affiliate IDs straight, so you can determine which affiliate marketer should be credited for each sale. If you plan on using hundreds of affiliates to sell your products, though, this can quickly become a very burdensome task.

If you do want to accept a high number of affiliate marketers, you might want to use a site such as Clickbank to handle tracking and payment functions for you. Clickbank charges you a flat free per product, but in the long run, it can be well worth this fee to have someone else handling these tasks.

Finally, you should consider how much time you have to spend evaluating and accepting affiliate marketers to promote your products. Essentially, you have two options when recruiting affiliate marketers. You can either accept every affiliate marketer that applies for your program, or you can conduct a thorough review of every applicant to make sure that they are a good fit for your program.

If you accept every marketer that applies for your program, you won’t have to spend much (if any) time reviewing your affiliate marketers’ websites and selling history. However, you will likely find that only 2 or 3 percent of the people who apply to your program have the motivation and skills necessary to effectively market your products. Most people that apply for your program will never get around to setting up dedicated websites, writing pay per click ads, or crafting the content necessary to generate interest for your products and drive traffic to your sales pages.

If you conduct a thorough review of every applicant, you will spend significantly more time on your affiliate marketing efforts, but you will likely find more qualified marketers to sell your products. This is especially true if you make this known to potential internet marketers up front. If you ask affiliate marketers for website addresses, verifiable sales figures, and professional references on your affiliate application page, you will immediately weed out those people who are not really serious about marketing your products. Of course, you’ll want to make sure you have the time to review websites and verify sales numbers, or you will quickly generate a backlog of work while your own sales figures suffer.

So before you start signing up affiliate marketers to promote your products, take the time to evaluate whether an affiliate model is truly right for you and your business.

Creating Website Content – 5 Secrets to Create Website Content and Make Your Site Sell

The most important key you need is…

Having an understanding to why people use the internet -is the key to success…in starting your internet business.

People search the internet for one thing… relevant information -to solve their problems.

This is why the mantra “content is king” is an axiom you cannot ignore-when it comes to building your website.

When you understand this…that information is the lifeblood of the internet…you set yourself apart from your competition. Your success online is guaranteed.

When provide value for your website visitors. Your visitors will love you and trust you because you add value to their lives. The result is you become wealthy and successful because you add value to your market.

There are insider secrets to every business and these 5 secrets are very important to creating website content that makes your site sell.

Here are the five secrets you need to know….

Secret #1 Have a clear purpose for setting up your website and focus on a niche.

When you have a clear purpose for your business, creating content for your website is easy. Identifying your purpose helps you to clarify the overall content and website type-you want to build for your business. This can also be a time for setting your objectives.

Here are some common objectives for setting up website businesses… see if you can identify your own objective

Reputation…you may want to establish your reputation
Lead generation… to build a customer base
Product information to bring awareness to you market of your product
Entertainment if your business is of the entertainment type
Communication if you want to have an online community or membership site
Distribution if your website has free downloads
Revenue or advertising if you plan to build a legacy site and generate revenue from cost per click advertising
Revenue from products if you are going to sell digital products

Whatever your objectives you are better off -clarifying your purpose- before you start creating content for your website.

I call this back-to-future planning. Stephen Covey bestselling author, “seven habits of highly effective people” calls this” beginning with the end in mind”.

Secret#2 Make Your content entertaining and interactive.

When you make your content entertaining and interactive, you make your website stick.

Stick-ability is the key to having a quality website. Studies have shown that the average website visitor spends no more than 2 minutes. And visitors “stick” or stay longer when the content of a website is compelling enough to solve their problems.

Bob Bly, bestselling author and copywriter talks about the bar stool test as a yardstick- to producing engaging content- for your website.

The bar stool test is measured by comparing your content to having a conversation with a friend in a bar.

If your written content will not engage a friend or visitor in a bar or informally, then the possibility of having an engaging content is low.

Another way to see if your content is engaging is to read your written content aloud. See if your written word sounds right in your ears or to a second person. If your content does not sound right to you then you need to revise your content.

Bottom-line you provide valuable content when the content you provide is entertaining, holds the attention of your website visitors. And they come back to read more content on your website

Secret# 3. Provide informative, current, and up-to-date content about what is happening in your niche.

There is a saying amongst stock market traders, “the trend is your friend”. Trends refer to changes in the market place. Political economic or cultural issues could change market behavior.

Your business must be aware of the trends in your target market so you can tailor your website to cater for your customers. By keeping yourself up to date on happenings in your market…you can constantly update your website content to provide solutions and adjust your product offering to your market place.

You also communicate to your customer you care about them.

Secret#4. Give free valuable information in exchange for relationship with your prospects.

The commonest mistake internet entrepreneurs and even well-established companies make is…to think of only making sales to the customer.

This is counter intuitive to how the internet works.Most contact on the internet starts with web surfers looking for information.

You build your credibility when you give visitors valuable information free. Now there should be a distinction between what is free and what you want them to pay for.

Nevertheless, you are going to rate better as being helpful because you gave your customers free valuable information… and they will come back to you again. When you create an opportunity for ongoing contact with your prospect, you increase your chances of selling to the customer

Secret# 5. Seek to build relationship with your content

When your website provides-valuable content. You create opportunity to build relationship with your prospects. You can convert prospects to paying customers.

The key to building relationship with your market is to get them interacting with your content.

The best way to do this is to create a space on your website for comments, feedback. You could set up a forum or online community. One of the best ways to grow your business online is to use the apple model-get your customer to become advocates for your business.

You can only achieve this status when you become the go-to-business to solve the problems in your niche.

The bottom line……

The internet is going to keep on growing and the competition is going to be fierce, customers are going to get more sophisticated.

The good news is you can still tap into the rich opportunities in the coming years.

You can achieve this by providing valuable content that is entertaining, interactive and uplifts your customers. And this still bores down to the axiom-content is king!