Articles And Blog Posts

Articles are a great way for building links back to your site. It works by submitting free article content to networks, who then in turn share your content with other webmasters so they can copy and paste it to their website.

With each article you submit you're allowed to provide an author biography. This is your chance to leave a strong call-to-action so anyone reading your article is included to check out your link (cloaked affiliate link).

For great long term results, you should write your own unique article content or hire a professional to do it for you. To get started simply select an article below and submit it to one or several article directories.

Marketing Mistake #1 - Why Failure Sometimes Happens

Marketing Mistake #1 - Why Failure Sometimes Happens

Getting into Internet marketing is like going into business for yourself. What most people fail to realize is that the same types of obstacles and challenges that people have when they go into business offline are the same obstacles and challenges they might face online, except in a different format. If you have difficulty selling items in a regular brick-and-mortar store, don't think that slapping a website up on the World Wide Web is going to transform you into an instant super sales person. It won't. Instead, seek to become a better business person all around, taking your cue from basic business practices, and then transferring those skills online to be successful.

YOUR ATTITUDE IS HALF THE BATTLE

Business is a competition, just like sports. You don't go out to the playing field assuming that your team will lose. You don't let a few setbacks sour you on the entire game. You give it your all until the umpire blows the whistle and the game is over. Then, there is time for regret, but until then, the game can always be turned around at the last minute.

Having a positive attitude when you go into Internet marketing is essential, just like it is when you are competing in sports. If you think you will fail, you will. There is no better self-fulfilling prophecy than someone who half-heartedly goes into business only to make excuses for why the business failed. It didn't fail after they started doing it. It failed the minute that they didn't believe in themselves. If you want the stamina and persistence to get into Internet marketing and to be successful, you have to understand that there will be setbacks, but you have to be able to use everything as a learning experience to finally cross that finish line as a winner.

UNDERSTAND YOUR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
 
Every business is a reflection of the owner who creates it, and Internet marketing is no different. If your strength is in structuring a product lineup and not in sales, then you have to get people on your team who can cover the weakness, while you cover the strength. Sit down right now and carefully assess any businesses you've created in the past. What were you good at? What did you fail at? Learning from failure is the key to success. Those people who fail to learn from their mistakes, as it is said, are doomed to repeat them. Therefore, you already have a fertile history of what types of obstacles you might encounter in this new venture, and can prepare an alternate plan to get you past them even before they occur.

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Marketing Mistake #2 - False Expectations Can Trip You

Marketing Mistake #2 - False Expectations Can Trip You

If you've heard that you can make BIG money on the Internet, it's true. You can. Will you make it immediately? While some people appear to have done so overnight, the truth is that they have gathered those skills over time until, one day, it all came together for them. If you think that all you have to do to make money on the Internet is to put up a website and wait for people to show up, you have a set of false expectations that are completely unrealistic. Here are the three biggest misconceptions to Internet marketing that will only lead to disappointment if they�re not tempered with some common sense.

YOU CAN QUIT YOUR JOB WHEN YOU FIRST START

If you have a job, keep it. Internet marketing is best learned as a side business until it becomes more profitable. Unless you are independently wealthy, you are going to want some steady source of income while you get more real life experience with the Internet and with making money online. Set some monetary goals, but don't make them so outlandish that they demoralize you instead of inspire you. Do you want to make an extra $500/month? If so, do you have a strategy planned to make that income. Once you reach a goal, increase it. At the point you're making what your job offers you, quit! Then, you are at the crux of learning how to zoom way past the small amount of money that your job offers.

DOESN�T TAKE MUCH TIME TO LEARN

Internet marketing is an exciting field to learn, and if you hitch it to your passion, it will seem like fun learning and not like homework. However, if you think that all you have to do is to learn how to put up a blog, that's just the bare minimum. You will have to learn how to get traffic to the blog and then have the right offers to create income from the blog. It's not just the technical aspects of setting up a website that take time to learn. It's the art of marketing online, which is even more important, that will take some time to learn. Expect that there is some work and time involved, and don't be discouraged if at first you don't make a single penny and spend a few weeks simply learning the ropes.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME

This might have been true five years ago, but today, the Internet is flooded with competing sites. Don't expect that you can just put up a blog or site and people will flock to it. More than likely, you'll start off with one or two visitors a day, and then you'll have to take action to attract traffic back to the site. That's where learning the art of marketing starts.

Marketing Mistake #3 - Trying To Be Too Perfect

Marketing Mistake #3 - Trying To Be Too Perfect

The first thing you have to remember about the Internet is that you don't have to be perfect to start making progress with Internet marketing. You just have to have a solid niche, an online presence to expose that niche, and traffic that is targeted to your chosen demographic. That means that, as much as a fancy, colorful, and perfect website is nice to have, it's not as important as your marketing. Instead of spending thousands of dollars putting up a very complex site, think in terms of simple, fast sites that you can put up quickly and many at a time if necessary. Until you know which niche is going to be profitable for you, you may want to experiment with several sites at once that are quickly put together, don't cost much to host or maintain, and can easily be dumped should they prove to be losers. The following elements are the basic mistakes beginners make when setting up an online presence.

YOUR NOT-SO-HOT NICHE

Hitch your passion to a profitable niche, and your chances of success increase dramatically. Do a little research before you even pick a domain name to decide what niche you want to target. This way, even before one piece of HTML code is installed onto your website, you have a good idea of how much success to reasonably expect and to avoid the losers before you spend too much time on them. Once you pick a topic or niche of interest to you, you can check out the competition just by entering search terms related to your niche on Google. Look at some of these sites, and then check them out on quantcast.com. It will give you an idea of the demographics of the site and whether they can attract sufficient eyeballs to reasonably market the niche. Pay attention to the types of products and services that appeal to that demographic. Think how you can market to the same niche, while putting your own unique twist to it. Once you have a few possibilities, start to see what domain names are available to the market.

YOUR MANGLED DOMAIN NAME

Pick a descriptive top-level domain name that is easy to remember, flies off the tongue, and isn't easy to misspell. Avoid hyphens and other odd characters if you can, as these are very hard for people to remember. Make it all one word. Go to GoDaddy.com and see if the domain name is available. You may have trouble with getting one- and two-word domains, as these have mostly been sold out. However, a three-word domain is still a pretty good choice and you can get these very cheaply through online domain name registrars. Pick a few good domain names that are representative of your niches and get a package to host your website too.

EXPENSIVE AND FEATURE-LESS HOSTING

There are multiple Web hosts out there that offer packages for a basic website with limited e-commerce, and they step up to include that service too. While you're learning how to do this whole website thing, it is better for you to grab a package that puts up a website pretty quickly without too much of a learning curve on your part. You can do that by setting up a blog, which anyone can do, using Wordpress.org. Hosting sites like Dreamhost.com will give you instant installations of the most popular website packages without having to learn a single line of code. Pay upfront for one year, and you avoid extra charges, including setup fees, in some cases. This way, you won't be billed on a monthly basis, and if the website fails, you can simply let it expire and move on to a more profitable one.

COMPLICATED WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

If you're still stumped about what to do to get a website up and need a little HTML training, why not get someone to show you? There's no reason you have to go it alone for this entire process, and what you don't know, you should hire out. The idea is to get as many of these basic sites up as you can reasonably manage and leave them somewhat basic until you know whether you can drive enough traffic to them to make them profitable. Don't worry if they don't look perfect; just get them up quickly. If you're worried about looks, just check out Twitter. It has got one of the most basic and ugliest interfaces around, yet there are millions of users on this site. You do want your site to look professional, but not so perfect that you spend a fortune getting it there. Keep it simple, put them up quickly, and get it done fast.

NOT UPDATING FREQUENTLY ENOUGH

Once it is up, you need to update the content fairly frequently to keep people coming back to your site. If you only update once a month, people will quickly forget to check back with you, and you will lose traffic instead of gaining it. If you get writer's block and just don't update the content on your site, you risk the chance of letting your site go stale. You can hire ghostwriters to add content to your blogs and websites for a small fee.

NOT USING SEO

Learn what you can about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This way, when you hire someone to write content, it can include SEO techniques to make it search engine friendly by adding keywords that attract visitors to your site and that make you money. This is the very first step to optimizing your site so that it becomes not only popular, but a moneymaker. Without a plan to make money from the site, it will never be a success in Internet marketing.

Marketing Mistake #4 - Not Having A Clue How To Make Money

Marketing Mistake #4 - Not Having A Clue How To Make Money

In a brick-and-mortar store, all a business owner does is set out his/her merchandise, do a little advertising, and if he/she got a good enough location, buyers will come. Taking this approach is deadly online. Not having a solid plan to make money with the site was a main reason for the biggest failures of the dot-com bust, and is still a big mistake for beginners. How do you expect to make money from your website? Internet marketing is about making money, so if you haven't got a plan, you are planning to fail.

PICKING GOOD PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

The first idea that comes to mind for ways that business owners can make money is to offer a product or service. That's great! You should include your products and services on your website, as well as include those affiliate offers that give you commissions for sales of other people's products and services on your site. You have to be a bit selective on the types of products and services that you offer on your site so that they match the demographics of the people visiting you. You can't market very high-end products to low-income people. Always keep your demographics in mind when picking the products and services that you will offer.

NOT PUTTING UP SUFFICIENT OFFERS
 
If you only offer one or two products, once your audience buys these, what happens next? Make sure you have many products and services in your lineup so that no matter how much your audience buys, there's always something new to consider purchasing. Having too few offers is one of the many ways in which you can fail to achieve significant income with your site.

OFFERING THINGS YOU HAVE NO EXPERIENCE WITH

Be very careful when you start listing affiliate offers in your lineup of products and services. Your reputation is on the line, even if you're not the one providing the product and are just the salesperson making the offer. The best offers to put up on your site are those that you have some experience with or have a good deal of confidence in the person selling them. You don't want to put up offers that end up resulting in fraudulent claims and/or that make your customers unhappy. You will be the one that ends up with the blame, not the unknown product creator or provider. Your site is representative of your good name. Take pains to keep your reputation as clean as possible and listen closely to customer feedback on affiliate offers. Remove any that fail to live up to their rhetoric.

Marketing Mistake #5 - Not Expanding Money Options

Marketing Mistake #5 - Not Expanding Money Options

Selling products and services is just one way to make money online. You may even find that it's not the biggest portion of your income if your site gets very popular. Try to expand your moneymaking capabilities so that you aren't limiting yourself to a brick-and-mortar model of selling only a product or a service. People make money online in many different ways. It's important to understand these models and to implement them to expand the ways to increase your income potential.

TWO TYPES OF AFFILIATE MARKETING

When first getting into affiliate marketing, you will see many pay-per-click or pay-per-sale models available to choose from within your affiliate network, the most popular being the Google AdSense PPC program. These offers depend on people coming to your site and clicking on the links you set up. A pay-per-click (PPC) offer will pay you at most a few dollars for the click, and usually a few cents for each time a person clicks a link. A pay-per-sale will pay a percentage commission that depends on the affiliate offer, but is much harder to generate due to the action requested, completing a sale. Along with PPC offers, there are cost-per-action (CPA) affiliate offerings that can generate income from your site. These offers pay out much better than PPC and only ask that a specific action be taken by the visitor, which can be to fill out a survey, add their email to a registration form, or opt-into a newsletter.  The action can also be a sale, but there are many CPA offers that are looking just for sales leads, not for actual sales. These are far easier to market on your site and lead to more income because a visitor isn't being asked to purchase anything, but just to complete some action that will eventually put money in your pocket, even though it's not directly obvious to the visitor.

NOT EXPLORING OTHER WAYS TO MAKE MONEY

You can make money via advertising space on your website. If the site becomes very popular, advertisers will line up to put their ad or banner on your page and give you a monthly stipend for that exposure. This can happen with traditional websites and with blogs too. That's just another way that you can exploit the website you have to create income without doing much additional work.

You can make money by putting up search engines that pay for every time that someone searches your site. You can also set up a membership area where special content is given to members for a monthly fee. You can offer discount coupons on your site to your offline businesses and reduce the cost of printing offline, thus creating more money in your retail budget. There are many ways to make money online that are different than what you currently

Marketing Mistake #6 - Having No Sales Pipeline Outlined

Marketing Mistake #6 - Having No Sales Pipeline Outlined

Even with all of these offers lined up, if you don't have a plan for what to present first, it can get rather confusing, for both you and for the prospective customer. Online, you need to plan out a sales pipeline and always keep some offer in front of your prospective client. You should know what they've seen before and what they're going to see next. You should plan out and understand how demographics will affect your pipeline too. Once you have an email list with people's names on it who have agreed to be marketed to, it's up to you to make sure that they hear about you and your business on a regular basis. It's not like a regular retail store where they might take the chance to go to your site to buy some particular item. Instead, they will be hopping all over the Web, and unless you repeatedly pull them back to your site, they will soon forget all about you. The sales pipeline thus serves two purposes: it's informational and it's for sales.

SEVERAL DIFFERENT CONTACT LISTS

For all of your sites, you might have one master contact list that sends out information emails about where you are and where your business is headed. It can discuss business interruptions and other procedural things that have nothing to do with sales. They can be entertaining, but are generally used for the purpose of relaying vital information that everyone on all of your lists needs to know.

After that, each site should have its own contact lists, and they should be categorized based on demographics. If you have a three-tiered group of products and services, low-income, middle-income, and high-income brackets, then you should separate people's email addresses based on that information and market different products from those categories to the right group. If you don't know what demographic they belong to, just stick them in the low-income bracket until they actually buy a product and give you a better idea. Every now and then, offer them a product from the next grouping to see if they bite. Then, if they do bite, move them to the new list and market those products to them regularly.

PLAN THE SALES PIPELINE ALL YEAR

You should now have a good idea of when you are sending out emails, to whom you are sending out emails, and what products and services are being offered in your email campaigns and online. You should know when a holiday promotion is in order and what you plan to do about that to generate income. It seems like a lot of work, but it will make the operation of your website smoother and more profitable in the end.

Marketing Mistake #7 - Not Promoting Your Site

Marketing Mistake #7 - Not Promoting Your Site

We talked about the false expectation that if you build it, they will come. Putting out several money buckets to monetize the site for when visitors arrive is just the first step. You also have to heavily promote the site to get visitors to show up. As a single person online, you don't have the same resources to advertise a massive campaign on television, radio, and in newsprint. Instead, your choices are going to be limited to what you can do online. Prime the pump by starting to toot your own horn as quickly as the sites go up. Have a marketing campaign set up to go with content to distribute; then when the site goes live, you can start the promotion. Here are some simple methods that you can use to promote your site online.

SET UP EMAIL SIGNATURES

Set up different email addresses for each website and add an automatic signature that promotes the site or a recently featured product or service, CPA offer, or anything else that can make money for you. Now, when people email the site and you respond, the signature is inserted and automatically promotes something of value to you and to your customer.

SEND OUT PRESS RELEASES

Write up press releases for all new products and services that you are offering and make sure to go online and add them to press release sites. You can buy a service that will take one press release and post it to multiple sites. As long as you have your Web address and what you are offering, it's a great way to promote across the Web and to gain more traffic to your site.

WRITE INFORMATIVE ARTICLES

You can also submit informative articles to article directories for free. If you write up a great article and it gets lots of attention, it can bring loads of traffic to your site. In the resource box included with these articles, you are allowed to post two links. Choose what you advertise there carefully and be sure to stay within the terms of agreement of the site for those links.

UPDATE YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKS

Use an automatic service like Ping.fm to send out status updates on new offerings to all of your social networks. This way, you centralize those functions, but still get the word out to everyone.

Marketing Mistake #8 - Not Tracking Results

Marketing Mistake #8 - Not Tracking Results

After all this work, you probably will have some idea on whether your strategies are working on not by tracking the bottom line. That's just the very basic way of tracking your Internet marketing success. The three main things you want to track to tweak further for better results are traffic, conversions, and marketing effectiveness.

TRAFFIC

Your website will track traffic by way of the unique visitors and hits to the site, along with other statistics. While that's a good way to know how popular your site is, it tells you very little about where your main streams of traffic are coming from. Taking a further look, you see what countries give you the most hits and which sites as well. If you're testing a specific promotion, however, it doesn't really show up unless you take the time to use a URL shortener that will track how many specific hits to that link showed up on different days. Include techniques to view traffic and analyze it in as many ways as possible.

CONVERSIONS

Conversions typically refer to converting a visitor into a customer. However, if you are using CPA offers, you may just be converting them into someone who completes an action that delivers money to your pocket. You may want a free area where people subscribe and convert from an anonymous visitor to someone with an email account. There are numerous conversions that can show you how well your site is doing and where it needs more work.

MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS

When you do email campaigns, wouldn't it be nice to know how many people opened your emails and clicked your offers? Using a system like Aweber.com, you can automate your sales pipeline and also track the effectiveness of your email campaigns, down to the emails and links that got the most attention. This helps you to start to recognize what works with your audience and what doesn't.

Split testing is another way to test the marketing effectiveness of different sales pages. This can be done with email marketing too, but it's often used with Web pages. The idea is to set up two different versions of a sales offer and send half of the traffic to one Web page and the other half to the other Web page. The one that has a better conversion rate is the better advertisement, even if all that was changed was a title or the position of a �Buy Now!� button.

Marketing Mistake #9 - Going It Alone

Marketing Mistake #9 - Going It Alone

The worst thing a budding Internet marketer can do is to go it alone. Whether it's trying to do everything manually and not using tools to make the process more efficient, a lack of networking, or a failure to listen to the experts who went before him/her, going it alone is a sure recipe for distress and high disappointment. There is a steep learning curve, but there are so many tools, forums, and experts out there to help lend a helping hand that it's really sad when someone tries to do things the hard way.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ONLINE TOOLS

We've discussed a number of tools as we went through this short report. There are many others just waiting to help you out with the job of automating important everyday tasks. Once set in place, they free up time that you can spend elsewhere, raising your productivity. It may take a bit of time to learn how to implement the tools, but the sooner you learn and implement them, the less time you will waste doing things manually from then on.

NETWORK ALL THE TIME

The Internet has facilitated the ease of meeting new people online. You will want to frequent Internet marketing forums, like the Warrior Forum at www.warriorforum.com, and contribute to the group. You can read some of the same issues that you are having and how people are resolving them. You can post your own questions and get answers from experts online.

The same is true with social networks. You can attract people who are in your niche and see what they're doing to build their online businesses. Befriend or follow as many Internet marketers as you can, watch how they promote themselves online, and then just copy them. Often, by viewing what they're doing, you'll get some great ideas to implement on your own sites.

LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS

Go where the experts are and listen carefully. Don't just listen, but also do. Go out and implement some of what they're promoting and see if it really works or not. Some things will work for you and others won't, but don't blame it on the tools or the experts. It could just be your audience or niche is far different than what those methods were used on before. Always customize everything you hear to your own sites and niches. Take into account that everything you hear has value, but you will be the one to decide exactly how it can work with your Internet marketing practices and sites. By carefully discriminating between what works and what doesn't for you personally, you keep tight control over the information out there and learn to sift the gold out of the sand very quickly. If you can find someone who truly excites you and understands your niche, see if they offer a mentoring or coaching program. These types of programs can be expensive, but they can literally catapult you into action and help you achieve in one year what it might take a few years otherwise. Just be careful to choose reputable coaches and to always keep your eye on the results.

Marketing Mistake #10 - Unrealistic Expectations

Marketing Mistake #10 - Unrealistic Expectations

Internet Marketing (IM) won't make you an instant millionaire. Many people get into Internet marketing with unrealistic expectations that they'd never consider entertaining if it were in some other field. Just because you don't need to go to school for years to get a degree in Internet marketing for you to be able to open an online business doesn't mean that it won't take hard work and commitment to succeed within this arena. Like other business endeavors, it's going to take money and time to get started and the results won't be instantaneous.

Let's take a look at some of the misconceptions that people have about Internet marketing and place them in a more realistic context. Some of these unrealistic expectations include the following:

Little To No Work Involved � This may come about from the idea that there is little physical labor or that you are working in a virtual environment using the power of the Internet. However, as any business owner will tell you, running your own business always takes a lot of work to start and much more work to maintain. If you are getting into IM to make money, consider it a full-time job to start.

It's Easy Money � Making money on the Internet is easier than doing manual labor. However, the number of hours you have to devote to learn the ins and outs is not limited to a 40-hour work week. Can you make easy money? Yes, but often this takes years of steady progress before you realize that dream.

Anyone Can Do It � Anyone can hop online and build a blog, but it's not as simple as writing and attracting an audience. You will want to take the role of learner in this endeavor and seek to upgrade your skills and knowledge to exploit the power of the Internet. It's not a birthright that everyone has just waiting to be put to use. You have to make a conscious decision to work at it and to keep learning.

You Can Make Tons Of Money In One Shot � It may come as a surprise to many people that the �tons of money� actually comes from a number of diverse online ventures. You probably won't make tons of money on just one blog, although that does occasionally happen. Instead, if you concentrate on building multiple income streams from a variety of websites, products, and services, you'll have a much better chance of striking it rich later on.

Marketing Mistake #11 - Not Enough Research Before Starting

Marketing Mistake #11 - Not Enough Research Before Starting

If people fall prey to any of the unrealistic expectations we've discussed, the outcome is that they don't spend enough time researching and planning their online activities to make them a success. Instead, they'll think it's just a matter of slapping a website up and putting a shopping cart on it to get orders. That couldn't be the furthest thing from the truth. You have to start by knowing what niches are hot online and how you plan on attracting people to your site. Even if you managed to get a huge traffic stream, do you know enough to convert those visitors into leads or customers? This is where people fail miserably when they could have improved the chances of success simply by taking some extra time upfront to research and learn how to implement a successful online business.

What Is Your Hot Niche?

Typically, people can get carried away with a specific, personal passion that they instantly focus all their energies on marketing it, thinking that customers will be equally enthralled with this topic. That's a poor way to establish a business online, especially with so much information online about what people are actually buying, searching for, or talking about. Why not market something that everyone already has an interest in and that don't need to be convinced to buy?

One thing to remember when working out what niche you want to target is that they can be dependent on world events. Right now, the recession has made some niches more important than others. Finance is always a hot niche, but the influence of the recession means that there is less interest in the stock market and housing and more interest in debt management and consolidation. Or, you might find a sub-niche like �gold mining stocks,� which weren't very popular before the recession, but that now have numerous investors flocking to them.

Research Using Online Tools

Use online tools like Google Keyword Analyzer to find out what keywords, and thus niches, are being searched currently. Go to places like Digg.com or Technorati.com to find out what topic is tops on everyone's mind right now. Go to eBay.com or Amazon.com and look through their top sellers. This will give you great ideas on what is hot and easily marketable, even before you take the time to develop a website or open a blog, saving you tons of time and heartache down the road.

Marketing Mistake #12 - Fuzzy Branding

Marketing Mistake #12 - Fuzzy Branding

Fuzzy branding can apply to multiple aspects of your online business. It can be as obvious as a bad domain name or it can even be how poorly you've designed the site. It's any fault in your site that is an Internet faux pas that makes it difficult for your visitors to associate your name with the brand of product or service you're offering. Instead, they're left scratching their heads trying to figure out what your site is all about.
Domain Names Are Very Important

After you have your niche in mind, it's time to start getting the elements of your website together. You will have to register a domain name and start to think about the organization and branding of your site. If you are selling fishhooks online, you want to try to include that in your domain name somehow.  A good domain name is short, descriptive, and tells the customer in a few words what your business is all about. Obviously, many domain names have already been bought, leaving you less choice on what to name your site. If you must pay someone else for a name, be sure it is a very well branded name that is going to stick with your business for a while. 
Is Your Home Page Clear And Concise?

Most people will log into your top-level domain first, meaning the home page. If this is cluttered with bright fonts, a disorganized menu, a bizarre or confusing design, and copy that doesn't equate to your business, you are going to have a number of people leaving as quickly as they showed up. The idea is to get people interested in your site enough to browse it some more. Make your home page as clear, concise, and descriptive as possible.

The look and feel of the website should also reflect the brand or image you are trying to associate with your business. An office supply website will look more professional, with muted colors in blue, gray, or black, and be highly organized. A website for web scooters might try to attract a younger, funnier crowd by providing colorful snapshots of scooters and a fun domain name.
Pay Attention To Content

Next comes content. In order for people to find your site, your content should be optimized for major search engines, using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. It should also be written with an eye for headlines, white space, lists, and other sales copy techniques that make it easy for someone visiting to briefly scan your copy and to pick up the most salient points about your products and services.

Marketing Mistake #13 - Poor Traffic Streams

Marketing Mistake #13 - Poor Traffic Streams

The site is now up and you've done your research to optimize it for success, but you've noticed that it isn't getting enough traffic. Why is that? Many Internet marketers think that putting up a fantastic website is all that you have to do to attract traffic. There are millions of people on the Internet, so it seems a fair assessment that getting a thousand eyeballs a month is not a big deal. Actually, the most successful Internet marketers adopt promotional strategies to maximize their traffic streams and to make their websites a success.

The main way to increase traffic is to find sites that already have a large audience and to siphon off some of those people back to your site. There may be rules about what types of links you can post and how to do this, but it's basically the same process.
Some Strategies To Increase Traffic

Here are a few such strategies that you can implement to promote your website and to increase your traffic month after month:

Article Marketing � Create free articles and submit them to article directories. They allow you to add a resource box with a couple of links back to your website. Try to keep the articles to topics within your niche to only attract people who might have an interest in buying your products.

Commenting On Blogs � Another great way to bring streams of traffic back is to find some very popular blogs and comment on related topics to your niche. Add a link back to your site, and people who may find your comment useful will surely click on the link back to your site to find out more about you.

Joining Forums And Groups � There are numerous groups online with large audiences, like Yahoo! or Google Groups. Look through the different categories and find some relevant to your market niche, then join them. Participate in the ongoing online discussions and add a signature to your postings with a link back to your site.

Social Networking � Social networks like Twitter.com, Facebook.com, or LinkedIn offer numerous opportunites to meet new people and add status updates about your online activities. Include a link and make it interesting so that you can create relationships that will increase your bottom line.

Marketing Mistake #14 - Inability To Convert Traffic To Customers

Marketing Mistake #14 - Inability To Convert Traffic To Customers

Even if you manage to attract gobs of traffic, the real goal of any Internet marketer is to sell or make money. You have to monetize that traffic in order to achieve your dreams of success. If you aren't aware of the strategies to convert traffic to customers, you will let many valuable opportunities pass you by. Worse, you will feel as if you are working your tail off for few rewards. Always keep in mind that it isn't enough just to have a popular site; that site has to produce income, one way or another.

Some of the fault may lie in poor website design, like poor advertisement placement or inefficient payment processors. However, there are other ways that people fail to plan to convert traffic to customers. They don't plan ways to make money with the site and assume that only putting out a few products will create income. This is one way to make money, but not the only way.

Features To Monetize Your Traffic Stream

Copy That Sells � When you advertise a product or service, add in features in the copy that make the deal hard to pass up. By that, it's important to get into the mind of the customer. Try to create a sense that they might lose out if they don't take you up on your offer right away. You can do this offering for a limited time or in limited quantities of a particular product.

Incentives - Can you persuade them to sign up by offering a free ebook in exchange for subscribing to a free trial membership? Once the trial is over, you�ll bill their credit card. Will you get a better conversion rate if you give new subscribers coupons off of your products and services?

Affiliate Programs � Affiliate programs work like incentives to allow others to sell your products and make a commission on them. This will help you by getting other people to do some marketing work for you while you create a fatter paycheck.

Advertising � There are all sorts of advertisements that you can implement to increase the chances of creating income with your website copy. They can be in text advertising, links to other people's affiliate offers, or even Google AdWords campaigns. Partner with other people who might be looking for a larger audience in exchange for paying for advertising on your site.

Marketing Mistake #15 - Not Planning Ahead For Sales

Marketing Mistake #15 - Not Planning Ahead For Sales

The whole point of Internet marketing is to sell online. It may come as a surprise then to find out that many Internet marketers fail to plan their sales funnel ahead of time. Doing things by the seat of your pants may work to make a few sales here and there, but to really exploit the power of the Internet and make a living doing Internet marketing, you must plan ahead for sales using a carefully thought out sales funnel.

The Mouth Of Your Sales Funnel

Your sales plan should include different ways to harvest an email address from your visitors. This puts them into the mouth of your sales funnel where you can market to them again later on. Without this initial contact information, later plans won't generate sufficient sales. Always start by getting the contact information and permission to contact that person online.

A Whirlwind Of Sales Activity Down Your Funnel

A well-planned sales campaign keeps track of people visiting and what they are buying. It has several email campaigns going at the same time, depending on what group a customer happens to land in demographically. One email list may be marketing to people who have yet to buy anything, while another may be marketing to people who are your top buyers. Whatever your approach, you should have definite categories or demographics of visitors and planned sales campaigns directed at just that group.

One way to do this is to put customers into groups based on the amount of money they tend to spend. Small spenders might be marketed with low cost product lines, while big spenders are marketed with bigger packages and items. If someone starts out small and suddenly buys a large package from you, you will want to have a system in place that shifts them from the small spenders� campaign to the big spenders� campaign immediately. That way, you don't lose the opportunity to market to people or to send them two offers, one from a big spenders� list and another from a small spenders� list.

Automate Email Campaigns Carefully

Take advantage of multiple online tools and services to keep track of your email sales campaign. A good service that many Internet marketers use is AWeber.com. This allows a third party to manage your email sales campaigns, giving you the opportunity to spend more time planning roll-outs and to feature promotions.

Marketing Mistake #16 - Lack Of Automation Tools And Services

Marketing Mistake #16 - Lack Of Automation Tools And Services

At first, the temptation for most Internet marketers is to do everything manually to save money. This will quickly become unmanageable as your lists get bigger and your product line becomes more varied. Add a few extra sites to manage multiple income streams, and you can quickly become confused or overburdened with the multiple minute details of operating several Internet commerce sites. The solution is to start automating things before your business gets too unwieldy and you lose customers.

Tools Versus Services

Automation can be done via tools or services. The AWeber.com site offers a service to manage multiple email campaigns. This is done by a third party, and there are some advantages to this approach. You don't have to install any special tools on your site, and everything is managed by someone else. The disadvantage is that you pay for the service monthly and you are subject to their terms and conditions. If that is still cheaper than installing your own tools, then there's no reason not to use a service versus a tool. However, typically, installing the tools on your own site will give you far more control and be less expensive in the long run.

Things You Want To Automate

The email campaigns are definitely an example of an online business activity that you want to automate. Other types of functions might be helpdesk activity, where the first line of response could be an FAQ or a search box that is specifically set up to look through help content to aid a person in figuring out their own problems.

Don't forget that other tools exist to centralize your entire business activities, regardless of how many sites you own. This can help you to keep track of what is selling or not across multiple sites. It will also help with affiliate programs that might be available on different sites too.

Speaking of affiliate programs, that's a perfect example of scripts and software programs that you can install on your website versus using a service. You can go to third-party sites like ClickBank.com or CJ.com and just use their programs to add an affiliate site. The cost though can be very high for someone starting up. If you plan on making an affiliate program an integral part of your sales strategy online, the sooner you get that functionality up and running on your sites, the more you will save money.

Marketing Mistake #17 - Failure To Track And Test Results

Marketing Mistake #17 - Failure To Track And Test Results

After a failure to plan ahead for sales, one of the biggest faults that young Internet marketers tend to fall into is a failure of tracking and testing results. They may not even be aware that there are techniques, like split testing, that can help them to define why one sales campaign works better than another. It might even be due to something simple, like a different headline in the sales copy that can generate 50% more sales, but having done no split testing, they will never figure that out. It's very important to continually track and test the results of different sales campaigns and strategies to see which ones work for you and which ones yield poor results.

Email Results Tracking

This can be especially true for Internet marketers that choose to go it alone and not automate with tools and services that provide some sort of feedback on the efficacy of a campaign. For email services, you want someone who can give you open rates and click-through rates on the email campaigns that you send out. If you have low open rates, you will know that the hooks and headlines are potentially uninteresting. If you have low click-through rates, you can concentrate on increasing the immediacy of the promotion to add a sense of urgency to your sales promotions. There are a number of different things that can be tracked to give you feedback on how you are doing, even before you make a sale.

Tracking Across Multiple Sites

Other types of functionality that need to be tracked are the results of your affiliate campaigns and sales promotions. If you are putting up multiple sites (as you should be), this type of tracking can be difficult to compare across websites. Try to centralize the operations of your sites so that you can get a good view of what techniques are more effective than others, regardless of the site you are on.

Do More Of What Works

It may seem to get boring, but a general rule is not to change a sales campaign until sales start to drop off. If a campaign is creating a lot of buzz and excitement amongst your visitors, it's only going to lose you money to cut it short before demand peaks out. On the other hand, you can increase demand by putting up short one-time offers and limited quantity offers. If you find that these types of offers work best, have these types of offers more often to bring in more money.

Marketing Mistake #18 - Failure To Meet And Exceed Customer Expectations

Marketing Mistake #18 - Failure To Meet And Exceed Customer Expectations

It's not enough to just give people a good deal these days. It has to be a great deal that is perceived to be of such great value that it would be a shame if they lost out on the opportunity to buy. One of the ways to create value packages like this is to understand your customer's needs and then exceed their expectations on what they think they can get for their money. This is a strategy that is becoming necessary as the recession wears away people's discretionary income and people are buying based on perceived value.

The Value Package

If your customer expects to get one ebook for a set price on some topic of interest to them, and instead you offer them an ebook, an online video tutorial, and some short reports, all for just a little more, you will have created the perception of a high value package. That's because you not only understood what your customer wanted, but you met and exceeded their expectations on what they thought they could get for their money.

Other Ways To Create High Value

Your product line isn't the only place where you can project an image of high value. Your business processes and customer service will also be important to meet and exceed customer expectations. If you have someone who buys a piece of software from you and then can't get it installed, no matter what deal they got, they won't be happy if they can't get someone to help them trouble-shoot the installation. Keep in mind that you are going to have to add some services and business processes that keeps the customer in contact with you when they need you so that you can continue to have a great online business reputation.

Solicit Feedback And Act On It

There's no way you can think of everything that a customer might need or demand. That's why you want to add some functionality to your site that allows customers to submit feedback about their experience buying from your site. You should also have a system in place that categorizes and responds to these issues, whether good or bad, so that the customer doesn't feel like they're being ignored. If you listen carefully to what your customers tell you, you can generate ideas for future products or business improvements that help you to keep exceeding customer expectations.

Marketing Mistake #19 - Poor Backup Systems

Marketing Mistake #19 - Poor Backup Systems

If your site goes down, do you have a mirror site or backup strategy to get back up as quickly as possible? If the answer is no, then as Murphy's Law suggests, this will happen at the worst possible time � mostly when you are rolling out one of your hottest, time-sensitive campaigns for the entire year. The impact will be immediately felt in lost sales. If you continue to have problems like this, you will also lose customers who will judge your online business based on the fact that you offer spotty service.

Always Back Things Up

It sounds clich�, but this advice is often ignored at the peril of the online business owner. How many Internet marketers have busted their butts to put up large amounts of keyword rich content, sales promotions, and image-laden pages only to have the entire site crash afterwards? If the site is not backed up online, they will have lost months of work, lots of sales, and a few customers too. Always back things up.

Have Redundant Systems

Content and sites are the only systems that need to be redundant. Payment processors are a typical example where an online business only offers one payment gateway, like PayPal, only to have it experience some problem that makes a sale unable to be closed out. If you offer multiple payment processors, if one goes down, another may be able to step in and handle the transaction.

The same is true of your affiliate offers. Every offer is not going to be around forever. If you are using affiliate offers and marketing them on your site or within the content of your infoproducts, it's important to plan a redundant offer in case the other offer disappears. The way to do this is to have a library of offers in an Excel spreadsheet or some other digital document. When you link to an offer, link to a redirect page that takes the person to the actual affiliate offer. If an offer changes, is exposed as fradulent, or expires, you don't have to go back and change links in any content on your site or within your infoproducts. Instead, you will change the redirect page to a new affiliate offer and log that information into your spreadsheet. This way, you don't lose money from bad links and you keep your customers happy. They won't even notice that an old link is broken since the entire process is automated behind the scenes.

That's basically what you're hoping to achieve with redundant systems: a flawless execution of business processes, no matter what mishap might happen.

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