Posts Tagged ‘ecommerce’

How To Write A Sales Letter

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

Have you ever been reading an advertisement and know that you would like to buy the product? Then you step back a bit and wonder why you actually need that thing? Occasionally you come across an advert that is so convincing that you have that credit card in your hand before you know what you are doing. The advert has put you in a trance, in a buying frenzy. Just how did the author do that to you?

Well, advertisement writing or copywriting is a skill for certain, but it can be learned. Most people can compose a decent ad because there are scientific steps that have been identified in a good sales letter, although what goes into those steps is an art.

The first thing to do is work out who you are going to be talking to. We do this each time we speak; we look at the person and make a judgment how to speak to that person. It is harder when writing because you cannot see who you are talking to, but you still have to attempt to do it. Are they surfers, are they mothers, welders, yachtsmen, car-owners, who?

Work out why anyone should buy your product rather than someone else’s. What makes your product so special? This is your key selling point. You have to be persuasive. Most people have heard about all the Net scams are they are very cautious. Who can blame them? So, give all the evidence that you are sincere that you can marshal.

Tell your potential customer |about the benefits of your product. What will your product do for the customer how will it transform his or her life? Think about the target audience, work out their worries and how you can triumph over them.

For instance, mothers are concerned about not hearing their baby crying in the next room. Answer? Your baby alarm is sensitive to the slightest noise and will transmit it to the speaker without fail. A welder is worried that he will develop arc-eye, but your goggles are designed to prevent arc-eye.

Once you have written your sales letter from the point of view of a salesman, re-read it several times, but from the point of view of your target audience. Would your sales letter sell you on the product? If not, amend it and carry on altering it. If your sales letter raises any doubts, it should answer them. Do not give your target audience a chance to vacillate or to say no.

Once you have your prospective customer on your side, you have to persuade them to take the plunge, to act now. You have to to give what is called ‘a call to action’ and you have to give them a reason to act now. So, you tell them to ‘click here now’ and you tell them that if they order today they will get a special bonus of ….

Always give something as a free bonus. People like to think that they have gotten a good deal and if they are given a bonus, then they must have gotten a decent deal. Handle the bonus as you did your foremost product. Tell them how much it is worth and why and then say that it is free with your product if they buy now.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our website at Sales Force Tools

Which Affiliate Programs Should I Choose?

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Of course, the first filter that you ought to apply to any potential affiliate programs is relevance. When thinking about which affiliate programs you should opt for, you have to judge how that affiliate program fits into your web site. The reason for this is that visitors to your web site will expect to see something on the subject matter.

If I Google ‘teddy bears’ and when I get to the site, there are only ads for rocking horses, Forex and winter cruises, I am not going to be best pleased. The first principle is to offer people what they are looking for - stay focused.

Does the supplier charge anything? Some suppliers may try to charge you a ‘joining fee’, a ‘registration fee’ or ‘handling fee’ - simply give them a wide berth. It ought to be free to join an affiliate scheme, you should not have to pay to have the right to sell someone else’s goods.

In a similar vein, what is the minimum payout amount? A lot of firms will not pay out less than $50, some even $100. This is a rip off. It is a factor to help you choose between one supplier and another - a deciding factor. If you are using three or four suppliers on your site, you might have to earn $300-400 before you are paid out!

Do they charge to process your payment as well? They should not actually, does your employer make you pay to receive your wages? It is the same principle. And how often do they pay out, weekly, monthly, quarterly?

Do you like their creatives, that is their banners and other adverts? There is a great deal of proof that the normal, old fashioned banner ad of 468×60 is not very effective any more. Look for variety - boxes and skyscrapers. Otherwise, are you able to create your own?

Do they publish statistics on how effective their creatives are? What is the average conversion rate for each banner? That is, how many views does it take to get a hit and how many hits to make a sale?

Do they permit you to build a downline? That is, if someone visits your site and decides to sell orchids as well, will you be given a part of the pay out on that affiliates sales? You ought to be.

What is the amount of the average sale and how much pay out will you make on that? Actually, you want to be getting at least a few dollars a sale; a few cents is no use, unless you are receiving thousands of visitors a day.

Create a couple of questions and send them to ’support’. Do they give satisfactory solutions? Are they quick to respond? And last but not least, would you by anything from the firm? Does their site look professional? Is the sales page convincing?

There is such a lot of choice when it comes to selecting a supplier that you can afford to have high standards. Take your time, go for the best, and you are less likely to have problems later.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is now involved with the SEO Content. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at PLR Articles

What Makes Affiliate Marketing So Popular?

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

There are more and more people attempting to earn money on the Internet every day. Lots of them are from the West, but even more are from developing countries. Some people from the West are scared of the economic decline and are looking for a backup to their current job and others dream of the millions that the the media likes to say that teenagers are making on the web.

People from Third World countries can triple their wages by working on line. After all, if the family is earning $1 a day, they should be able to earn three more on line, they think. That is just one affiliate sale a week in lots of cases at the regular rate of 10% of sale price.

Affiliate marketing is the most common means of attempting to make money on line for a number of reasons. The first reason is because it is the easiest way to get started and the second is that many people are worried about composing - particularly in English, if English is not their first tongue. Creating a web site is not a problem to many surfers who use the Net a lot.

Beginners to the Net imagine that making money on line is as easy as copying a couple of affiliate links on to a web page and spamming the world with their URL. This tactic does not work, but it is the reason for so much of the junk email in your inbox every day.

There are professional spammers and even criminals on line for sure, but there are also hundreds of millions of optimistic teenagers sending out emails from cyber cafes all around the world.

The problems for these young affiliate marketing hopefuls is in essence twofold. The problem of not being able to write a convincing page of prose in English, more on which later and a lack of cash and especially an International credit card.

These aspects are problems, practically insurmountable concerns because being able to write is indispensable to the best kind of marketing and being able to pay by credit card is indispensable to the other best methods of advertising.

The number one all time best method of making affiliate sales is to write a personal recommendation on a product based on personal experience with that product. So, if you cannot buy the product and you cannot compose, you have big difficulties indeed. It is a mistake that most affiliate marketers make, to think that they have to compose a sales page.

No, no and no, you do not. In most cases the firm you are selling for has spent hundreds if not thousands on persuasive sales pages written by copywriters. You would have to be very hot to beat their efforts. Your work as an affiliate is to pre-sell by writing on your experience with the item and providing a forward link to the sales page.

If you cannot do that, you can try the next best ways: PPC (pay per click) - you pay for each click on your advertisement whether that leads to a sale or not. Adsense is the number one proponent here. PPI (pay per impression) - you pay each time your ad appears on the publisher’s network, whether it leads to a sale or not. In both cases, you need a credit card.

This is why there is so much spam, there are millions of hopefuls who cannot write adequately in English and/or who do not have a credit card to use the other methods.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our website at Sales Force Tools

Increase Your Business Sales By Blogging

Friday, June 17th, 2011

A business blog, in the right hands, is a very powerful marketing tool. It is flexible, it can be used to express any views you like, it can reach a worldwide audience and it can help you compile a mailing list of people who are interested in your business and its products - all for the sake of composing a couple of articles a week or a month.

The difficulty with any web site, and a blog is merely a specialized kind of website, is marketing it. It should not be a problem for any business to come up with pieces and information related to the business and its products. We will come back to advertising your business blog later in this article.

As the number of visitors reading your blog grows, you will have to become aware of what form of information you give them. It is better to be more than less open. You should use your blog to produce customer loyalty and this is most easily gained if people think that they can trust you. You ought to be honest to gain peoples’ trust.

Ask for feedback on your products and your service. This a great free manner of learning your shortcomings, otherwise you would have to commission a survey. Ask your readers to leave comments and delegate someone to read and reply to each comment

Think of your blog as your firm’s booth at the biggest and longest lasting exposition that it will ever feature in. Strive to create each piece helpful to the reader by supplying some little known details or facts on your products or related things.

For instance, if your firm makes crampons for climbing, write about the latest mountaineering expeditions. If you sell tropical fish, write about which fish can happily live together.

You will need to tell people that you have a blog. There are several good ways to advertise a web site or a blog. One of the best ways is … composing articles. So, you could compose articles about composing articles like I am doing now, or probably better still, publish the articles that you compose for your blog as independent, stand-alone articles in article directories with your blog URL at the bottom of the article.

These articles will get picked up by web site authors if they are interesting enough. This will give you back links to your website, the number of which Google uses to determine how popular your website is and this determines your rank in their search engine. Because Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world, it is crucial to rank highly in Google.

Add an RSS button to your blog and then people can have your posts sent to their inbox without having to check whether you have updated your blog. This is useful for the blog because no post will be missed by those who have picked up your RSS feed.

You can learn how to make a business blog by visiting web sites that teach the subject. They are usually free so you do not have much to lose.

If you are keen on trying Business Blogging, just visit our web site on Blogging For Beginners.

Some Different Forms Of Affiliate Marketing

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

There are quite a few different forms of affiliate marketing. Some of them have become archaic and others have never been so well-liked. In this article we will be taking a look at some of the better forms of affiliate promoting.

One of the reasons for the continued popularity of affiliate marketing is that it is inexpensive to set up a website that could make money. Not merely that, but it is possible to make a couple of dollars a day without much work and individuals have to labour twelve hours a day at a hard job for that much. The Net can double their wages on a set-and-forget basis.

Merchants are also enthusiastic about affiliate marketing because the means for implementing affiliate marketing are beneficial to the seller, because the seller only has to pay a fee on every sale - there is no recognition for fruitless hard work.

Having said that, there are ways for the affiliate advertising hopeful to make money, but it necessitates self-discipline. There is a tendency for affiliate marketers to pack as many selling tools - that is, banners - on to every page as possible in the hope that something will please someone.

This is, in fact, the worst tactic possible. A web page should be targeted. If the campaign is attempting to sell goldfish, that ought to be the only advertisement on the page. As soon as the page begins making money, then you can add adverts for goldfish bowls and goldfish food, but not before.

And definitely do not strive to sell ‘pet food’ in the hope of acquiring at least one sale! There is time for all that later. In the beginning, focus is the watchword. Decide on your niche carefully and then have the courage of your convictions to stay with it.

Nowadays there are basically just two forms of affiliate marketing. They are PPC (pay-per-click) and PPP (pay-per-performance). PPC is very easy to set up and PPP a little more harder, but it can produce higher earnings per click.

PPC is Google’s preferred method of marketing, but there are several other companies that support PPC as well. Google’s Adsense is the biggest network of PPC advertisers. It is very easy to set up because it is automatic.

If you want to earn money from PPC, you have to build a web site that is heavy on content - that is, there are useful pieces on subjects that individuals would like to find out about. As the web master, you then insert a small section of code which Google (or one of the other PPC merchants) gives you, and adverts will appear in that location.

Not any old adverts though. The software will scan the surrounding text for keywords and then match them up to keywords that advertisers have purchased. The result is that a web site that has enabled PPC will have adverts that are relevant to its content and, hopefully, its visitors. If you have a web site on tropical fish, then the adverts will be about tropical fish and accessories.

PPP or pay-per-performance is more difficult to set up just because the web master has to go and find advertisers in the same niche; then ask for an account and then claim their rewards. Having said that, a web master can earn more for one PPP click than a whole days worth of PPC clicks.

PPP can include several kinds of actions - the ‘performance’ part though generally equals a sale. Procuring a sale is much harder than procuring someone to check out an offer (PPC). Another benefit of PPP is that you can form a downline.

Are you interested in Modern Affiliate Marketing? If so, you have to publish articles, so you should read about automated publishing on this site Internet Marketing

Auction Sales

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Auction sales are helpful for all kinds of goods, but there is a requirement for caution, because you will not have sight of the item itself. This does not have to become a problem if you are buying something like bedding or dog’s food, but it can be vital if you are purchasing collectibles where condition is of prime importance.

For example, the condition of stamps and coins governs the item’s value within the constraints of the year’s or issue’s minimum and maximum catalogue values. However, you just see a picture and it could be of another coin or stamp - what you receive in the post may be a different kettle of fish.

In this piece we will look at the most serious pros and cons of auction sales. First, the advantages:

Auction sales can be traced from the opening auction bid to the end and you can decide how much you are prepared to pay for a pretty long period of time - days or weeks rather than minutes at an off line auction. You still have details at hand like minimum sale price. This gives you plenty of time to weigh up alternative sales options.

There is a chance that you can buy items at well under market value. For example, many items do not have a reserve price, so if the item is not in demand among many people, you may buy it really cheaply. Also, if the minimum price is not met, it is worth getting in touch with the vendor and offering a little more for a private sale.

If you go through a reputable on line auction site, you will be covered against fraud. If the device you receive is below par for the description of it on the website, you have a excellent opportunity of receiving your money back either from the dealer, the auction site or your credit card company - three layers of protection.

However, there are disadvantages too. These are the ones that most people think are the most serious:

You are buying sight-unseen, so there is a greater chance of fraud, but as we said above, the auction site and your credit card firm do have a degree of liability, so please check what that is before you go bidding (or even shopping) on line.

Check the postage and packing fees. This is a favourite way of bumping up the minimum charge for an item. For example, a set of batteries may not have a reserve and you may be happy to purchase them for a dollar, but if the postage is ten dollars, you have been had.

Another favourite rip-off is selling copies. You might think that you are bidding for genuine Gucci sunglasses, but for sure the chances are that they will be cheap Chinese copies worth a tenth of what you paid. Would you really know the difference? Honestly?

You can find a bargain on an auction website, but keep in mind that there are a great deal of hungry individuals out there who are prepared to lie to earn a few dollars and that does not even include the professional cheats and thieves.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our web site at Sales Force Tools

How Much Of A Boost Can Sitemaps Give A Website?

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

If you want to sell anything on line or even merely make money from Adsense, you will have to make certain that your website is in the top five or six websites listed in a search using the keywords that you are specializing in.

For example, if your website is involved with dog carts, you will want to be in the top six websites of the search results if anyone keys ‘dog carts’ into Google.

The method of attaining this aim includes SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. There are many of these, in fact, there are hundreds or even thousands of books on the subject, so in this short piece, I merely want to look at one method that a great deal of newbies overlook.

Sitemaps. Do you use sitemaps to help promote your website? If you are not then you are probably not earning much money on line. At a very rough guess, I should think that well over 75% of websites are not using sitemaps at all and half of the rest are not using sitemaps to their full potential.

Let’s only talk about Google here, because it is the most used search engine by far and most of the others operate in the same manner anyway. Google uses robots, ‘bots or spiders to go out onto the web and track links automatically.

So, a spider (robots, bots and spiders are only different names for the same thing) goes out onto the Internet and hits a website. It crawls that website until it hits a link and then it records the link with Google and follows it. If that link is to another page on your website it remains on your website. If, however the link is to an external page (web site), it will go over there.

Now, as a website owner, you want your web site crawled as soon and as thoroughly as possible, so that when someone searches on your keywords, Google knows that you have a relevant website. If the spiders keep walking off your site to go somewhere else, they will have to come back very, very frequently to crawl all your site.

This is bad news. You would like to keep a spider, once you have been lucky enough to catch one, for as long as possible. Think of money spiders, because that is what they are.

So, in order to keep the spider crawling around your website, give it links to follow. I give my arachnoid visitors at least two sitemaps to follow and no external links, unless it is to another of my own websites.

I draw up an alphabetical sitemap and a sitemap based on the nav bar and then I submit my site to Google Analytics so that Google sends a spider straight to my site, which means that I do not have to wait for a money spider to happen upon my website.

Always, always put a sitemap on your nav bar. It is not there for human visitors, it is there for the spiders to crawl down through making sure that your site is indexed more quickly.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a number of subjects, but is now concerned with the SEO Content. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at PLR Articles

SEO And How To Get More Backlinks Part One

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

If you are at all serious about earning money on line, then you should be concentrating a lot of your effort on SEO and getting more backlinks. SEO is ’search engine optimization’, but for those who are not certain what backlinks are, here is an explanation.

Backlinks are links from other websites back to your website. Google and other search engines use the number of backlinks it can find to a website to judge how well-liked (and therefore how decent or and helpful) it is. The most well-liked web sites drift to the top of the search engine rankings.

However, there are two kinds of backlinks: reciprocated and unreciprocated backlinks. Reciprocated backlinks are those where Google finds a link from your website back to the other website, which it perceives as a one for one swap.

These links are deemed to be of less worth. Unreciprocated backlinks are perceived to be of high value because, Google reasons, you have to be so good that people will link to you for nothing.

I am sure that you appreciate that it is very useful to get to the front page of Google’s search results for the keyword phrase that you want to rank for, but perhaps you do not realize quite how important it is.

On average, over 85% of surfers arrive at the website that they would like by looking for it on a search engine and most people use Google. Not just that, but most people do not look further than the first page of results and most of those do not even scroll down to check the others that they cannot see on the first page (below the fold).

It could be that the numbers 1-5 in the search results get 10 times more clicks than the numbers 6-10 (assuming 10 results per page) and 100 times more than anybody on page two. After page two, you can forget it really.

Not just will your website get more clicks up on the top of the search results, but the people who click through to your site will be searching for what you have to sell, which results in more targeted visitors. If the product sells, the top three do very well indeed.

I will return to getting more backlinks later, because there are a few other little tweaks that you can check on to improve your search engine ranking (SEO). Firstly, make sure that the title of your website is relevant to what you are using the site for.

For example, if you are selling T-shirts, it is better to call the site “Mike’s T-shirts” than “Mike’s Clothing”. There are other methods of linking websites, if you make a decision later to sell collared shirts or jumpers. Stay focused. Begin making money by selling T-shirts and then move on.

If you have a number of pages, be sure that the titles of each page are relevant too. Check the source code for every page as well and be sure that the META tags are relevant: that is, put at least six keywords in the keyword meta tag and put a relevant description in the description meta tag - again keep them targeted but do not repeat a keyword over three times per page.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of subjects, but is now concerned with the SEO Content. If you want to know more, please go to our website at PLR pieces

A Beginner’s Guide To The Internet.

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

There is such a huge assortment of choice when it comes to the Net that it can be quite bewildering. The purpose of this guide is to make the process of setting yourself up online easier.

I have been on the Internet since 1988 (with a 2Kb modem in those days) and have used dial-up telephone line connections, high-speed broadband and satellite links.

At whatever point you are thinking about entering the Internet market, you will need an Internet Service Provider (ISP). You may just want to surf the Internet and swap emails or you may want your own website as well. Let us talk about these in turn.

The most common kind of UK internet access at the moment is high-speed broadband, whether it comes from a cable provider or a telephone line, normally offered by BT. If you are still using a dial-up 56 Kb connection, you have a wonderful experience in store for you.

If you are thinking about going online for the first time, don’t give dial-up a second thought - it is painfully slow, when you have experienced high-speed broadband.

If you have a cable TV provider, you will probably find it simpler to get your connection from your existing supplier, otherwise I suggest going with BT Broadband.

BT has lots of experience, a long-standing good record and are very reasonable too these days. You can read an piece on broadband Internet access by clicking through to BT’s web site.

Most ISP’s will allow you a couple of email addresses and a limited amount of their disk space to host a personal website. This may be sufficient for some people, but nowadays, with lower prices and higher individuality required, I think that most people would rather a more personal website and the personal email addresses that go with it.

For instance: would you rather ‘be referred to as’ (ie have an email address of): owen1954-8@ntlworld.com and a site address of http://ntlworld.com/owen1954-8/index.html or owen@amiabledragon.com and an address of http://amiabledragon.com ?

(These are real examples: I was with NTL before, but have left them and the Amiable Dragon is one of my websites). In this instance, amiabledragon.com is my domain name, so I can put anything I choose before it to create an email address.

It is far more personal AND it can be utilized for business, if I like, whereas lots of ISP’s ban the use of their websites for business use. If you decide on having your own domain, then you will need to host it somewhere (ie someone will have to keep it on their computer for you).

Finally, you might like to enhance your Internet experience by upgrading some of your accessories; for example: buying an optical or radio mouse, a wireless router, a better chair or desk et cetera.

Are you interested in Internet Marketing Secrets? If so, you have to publish articles, so you need to read about automated publishing on this site Internet Business

Are you interested in how to get customers to your website? If so, please go to our website called Internet Business

How To Use Facebook To Boost Your Sales

Sunday, May 15th, 2011

Internet marketing is big. Not only big in that marketing and advertising is all pervasive on the Net, but it can also produce big returns if you know how to use it. However, because the Net is still a new medium and because it is the most flexible marketing medium ever invented, new ways of promoting on the Internet are being invented each month or two.

One of these new methods of Internet advertising is known as Facebook. In fact, it is a very subtle advertising machine, because most of the individuals who use Facebook are aware just of the benefits of using Facebook and think that the promoting is incidental or even useful.

This is a tribute to the organizers of Facebook and the flexibility of the Net. They have managed to imitate a quality newspaper, where the reader is not bothered by the adverts, because they are unobtrusive and the information delivered is well-worth the money.

For those unacquainted with Facebook, it does not deliver global news, rather it allows users, friends and family to stay in touch and spread their micro-news. Facebook is what is known as a social networking website and has a global membership surpassing most countries and even a continent. Any advertiser would be crazy to ignore the advertising opportunities that Facebook offers

Facebook permits a couple of kinds of marketing. You can put an object up for sale and visitors to your web site can choose to look in your ’shop’ if they desperately would like to spend money, but needless to say this approach does not produce results. The other kind of marketing is pay-per-click or PPC. This is equivalent to Google’s Adsense, but it only takes place on the Facebook website.

However, the Facebook PPC advertising set up can be a great deal better targeted than Google’s Adsense. This is because Facebook has so many more personal details about the users who sign up for a free web page. For example, an advertiser can choose whose web pages his adverts go on. In fact, the advertiser has no end of flexibility.

An advertiser can choose: male or female; adult or child; gay or straight; from any continent or any country; any degree of education; any earnings bracket; marital status; home owner or not and so on and so on. This equals that I could target an ad on central heating to just those Facebook members who, for example are: married with children; more than forty; home owners; earning a salary of more than $50,000 and are living in the USA or not.

That would be precisely the group of people who would require a functioning central heating system and could afford to pay for it. And you pay merely for the click throughs that are done on your ads. If they are ostracized, then there is no charge.

There are also several other tools that can help you advertise your website on Facebook such as the in-built links to other social networking sites like Stumble Upon, Digg and many more.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our website at Sales Force Tools