An old adage in sales is that “the customer is always right.” Over the years as retailer grew large,

profit margins faded and experienced salespeople grew scarce, there seemed to be less interest in

the customer.

People grudgingly accepted the lack of customer service as the price they paid for cheap

products. They complained, but they bought anyway because that’s just the way it was. Online

shopping, while distant, is more customer centered than many local retailers.

To develop a rapport with customers in a virtual environment, online marketers had to establish

trust and they did it with money back guarantees plus fast delivery. This customer-centered

approach not only created trust as planned, but also caused a surprising number of customers to

ignore the local stores and shop at major retailers’ online sites.

As a developing Internet marketer, you can learn from this brief history. You want to position

your product as user friendly and open for refund. Granted, this is easier with downloads and

information products than with shipped products.

But even shipped products that offer guaranteed, no questions asked refunds actually have fewer

refunds because the consumer feels free to try to return it if they’re not satisfied. Before the sale,

you want to provide ample information about the product – including several photo views if

appropriate.

Think about the questions a buyer might ask and have the answers ready before the question

arrives. An easy way to provide this information is with an expanded FAQ (frequently asked

questions) page. Make sure there’s a link to the FAQ page from each product page.

If your product requires assembly after delivery, post an extra copy of how to assemble it. Even

better is to post a video showing and telling how to do the assembly. Another great idea is to

post videos showing alternative ways to use the product. This gives buyers options that they

might not have considered.

To be consumer-centered means that you can be reached easily. Post your email (or that of your

customer service center) and a phone number or SKPYE name. If you are the “Customer service

center,” send those emails to a designated email box and answer them promptly.

If you can’t, at least set up an autoresponder saying that you received the customer’s email and

are working on the solution. The more ways you can be contacted, the more the customer feels at

ease that you aren’t hiding in some unreachable corner of cyberspace. You can’t shake hands

with your online customer, but you can create an ongoing buying relationship by demonstrating

that you’re a customer-centered online marketer.

Smart online marketers know that asking the right questions is the most important aspect of

establishing your expertise in a successful niche. Let’s say your niche is “how to avoid

foreclosure on your home.”

The tendency is to jump ahead of your prospects and give them information on loan

consolidation or credit protection. Those are major issues, but not the only issues. If you aren’t

sure what kind of questions people facing foreclosure ask, get into forums on that topic and pay

attention to what solutions they need.

Talk to anyone you know who’s facing this problem. Then ask yourself these basics (regardless

of the niche topic):

* Are the immediate concerns personal or financial?

* What are the emotional issues?

* What happens next?

* What are creative, non-traditional ways to approach the problem?

* What products or services does a person in this situation need or want?

Notice how these “personal impact” questions take your thinking processes beyond the usual

information “how to” ideas. That’s because each of these questions represents a potential

information product, video “how to” and affiliate product that takes a different twist than the

generic options.

You can also use the contrary approach. Information products tend to show what happens when

the buyer follows the advice. Some viewers will read your sales letter and dismiss it saying, “So

what if I don’t follow that advice?”

Show them what happens by preparing an information product that explains the worst-case

scenario or the less than ideal situation. Then wrap up the final pages by pitching how to change

this for the better with the positive spin version.

Other questions that you can use as idea starters for product development are:

* At what point is the buyer likely to get stuck or frustrated implementing the system?

* What skills need to be improved to use this knowledge to move to higher level of profits?

* What are the biggest obstacles to success for a newcomer to this system?

* How to you want the buyer to feel after using (implementing, reading) this product?

And the final, critically important question is: What do you want buyers to say in recommending

your product? If you want them to say, it’s simple, concise, sophisticated or worthwhile then

make sure you build those features into the product and highlight them in your sales copy.

Learn about affiliate network for the healthcare industry. Find out what a health affiliate network is all about, difference between marketing OTC and prescription drugs and benefits of a healthcare affiliate network.

This is a beginner’s tutorial to using Cpanel to manage your web hosting account. We can’t cover

every single thing that Cpanel can do, because it’s just too complex. It’s so complex that many

people are afraid to even use it.

It can certainly be a bit scary for anyone who hasn’t used it before. Technical people pick it up

pretty quickly, but non-technical people usually stick to using only the most basic features to

avoid confusing themselves.

Let’s go over some of the most common things you may need to use it for. First, you can add a

domain to your hosting account. After you log into Cpanel, click “Addon Domains.” Where it

says “New Domain Name,” enter your domain name with the format yourdomainname.com.

Then add the name of the subdirectory and username you want to use as your FTP login. This

will be the directory where your website is stored on the server, and also your FTP username.

Use something easy to remember, but not “yourdomainname.”

You don’t want to make it easy for hackers to find out your username. Then simply enter the

password you wish to use for FTP and click the button that says “Add Domain!” Now you’ll be

able to log in to the FTP account using the username and password you just set up.

Just remember, the domain name won’t resolve until you change the name servers in your domain

account to point to the correct name servers. You’ll have to do that by logging in wherever you

purchased the domain and finding the name server section for that domain.

The next thing you need to learn how to do is set up a MySQL database. From within Cpanel,

click on the button that reads “MySQL Databases.” Enter the name of the database you want to

create. If you’re creating a database for WordPress on a domain called LittleBlueCookie.com,

you might call it “wplbc.” Then click on the button that reads, “Add Db.”

After the database is created, you have to set up the username and password. It will

automatically take you back to the page where you can do this, so enter a username and

password in the fields and submit it. Do NOT name your username the same thing as your

database. That’s just making it easier for hackers to get into your database.

Make sure to add the user to the database. So many people forget to do this, and then they

wonder why their scripts don’t work. You MUST add the user to the database. Use the

dropdown boxes to select the username, then the database name. Tick the box to add all

privileges for the user. Then click the button that says, “Add User to Db.”

Finally, you’ll probably want to set up an email address for your domain. To do this, click

“Mail.” Then click the small link at the bottom that says, “Add Account.” Enter the name you

wish to use, and then use the dropdown menu to select the domain you wish that email address

to be set up for.

If you want the email address johndoe@yourdomainnname.com, enter johndoe in the name area,

and select the proper domain. Next, enter a password that’s hard to guess, but make sure you

write it down.

Leave the quota blank if you want the amount of space the email can take up to be limited only

by your web space. That’s it! Your new email is ready to use. As you get comfortable with one

feature of cpanel, see what the others have to offer.

There are many exciting elements, like being able to add a blog, add a forum, and check your

web page statistics, to name a few. None of them are difficult to manage once you know the

step-by-step details to follow.

You have certainly dreamed of having your own business. It is great to have matters in your own hands and make good money.

If you are doing affiliate marketing and looking for a good product to market, you should consider information products because there is a lot of demand by people. Here are 4 tips you can use to help you sell your information products quite easily.

CPALead two major ways to create revenue. The first could be the so-called active follow-up survey, which presented the mere display of your list of every one of the surveys readily available contained in the system. This is not very widely used, owing to the lack of incentive for readers to comprehensive the study, nonetheless, should you find 1 as well as other suggests, and that is a device employed in anyway.

If you launch your Internet marketing business as an affiliate marketer, then you’ll

want to know how to merge your offers to play off of one another. On eBay, it’s called

cross-promotion.

You go to an eBay auction for an iPod and find cross-promotions of all sorts of

accessories, battery packs, and bling they can add onto their order. You can do the same

with an affiliate business.

Let’s say you want to promote work at home opportunities – like Internet

marketing to stay at home moms. First, you start with an eBook promotion about affiliate

marketing.

It’s broad, it fits a large demographic – and it converts well. What else could the

stay at home mom – soon to be entrepreneur need that you can sell? Think of her

personal situation.

She has kids running around the house, she may have limited space, and she’s in

need of a home office. You could promote affiliate items through Amazon that cater to

her home office needs, such as:

* An ergonomic chair

* A space-saving desk that will fit in a corner

* A laptop computer to take work on-the-go

But there’s more she’s going to need. If she’s learning the ropes of affiliate

marketing, she’ll need to understand tactics and tools that are available to make her work

easier and increase her profit potential.

You could cross-promote offers such as:

* Article marketing software and guides

* Pay per click eBooks

* Social marketing tutorials

* PLR (Private Label Rights) memberships

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When you first scout out your affiliate product

promotions, think of all the ways you can merge other offers into the mix so that they

complement the original product and still suit the needs of your prospect perfectly.

ClickBank is definitely a leading connection between product developers and affiliate marketers.

It’s also a place that buyer can go directly to purchase information products. Plus ClickBank has

a positive reputation for its ease of use.

With all that going for it, just upload your information products and you’re good to go, right?

Not exactly. You might make a few sales, but if you want to make ClickBank a centerpiece of

your marketing, then you have to do more than just upload, post a link and wait.

Set up targeted minisite. Create catchy sales copy to accompany it. You can also add a video

demonstration or an audio that expands on the product. Offer a “bribe” or freebie when the

viewer clicks that Buy Now button.

If you have strong testimonials, add them on the sales page or with video clips that are scattered

inside the sales copy. Post product reviews. Write short reviews or ask a colleague to review

your product.

If you’re looking for reviewers, offer the product free to a limited number of potential reviewers.

This is a popular technique on marketing forums to get testimonials. You can also get reviews

from people who are significant contributors to forums in your niche. Then get those reviews

posted on as many sites, forums and discussion boards as possible.

Trade mailing lists. Contact sites with comparable niche interests and tell them about your

ClickBank product. Offer an affiliate sales opportunity. You can also agree to trade mailings –

your offer to their lists, and then a few weeks later send their offer to your list.

Since any sale makes an affiliate commission for the seller, everyone wins. If you find that your

product doesn’t get picked up by affiliates, reduce your cut and increase the profit for affiliate

sales. Information marketing is about volume, so remember that 40% of 1,000 sales is worth more

than 60% of 100 sales.

Keep it fresh. Like produce, eBooks have a certain shelf life. Even if the information is still

good, add a new twist or update at least twice annually. Unless you’ve written a true classic,

then you’ll begin to see a downturn in sales.

That’s the time to tweak it. You can make a slight title change or a major change. Just give the

buyer a reason to find this interesting. If you’re doing a tweak, contact your best affiliate sellers

to let them know that there’s new information or updates worth sending to the their list again.

Have you just discovered internet marketing? I’m sure you are very excited! Sounds like easy money, doesn’t it? I’m sure by now you’ve realized that there is much more to it than meets the eye. If you’re interested in being a successful internet marketer and quitting your day job, then get yourself a cold drink and a comfortable seat, because you’re going to want to read this article right away!

Making money on MySpace isn’t as easy as it once was. It used to be incredibly easy to make

money on the site. A marketer could create a fake profile, add thousands of friends using an

automated program, and then simply send bulletins out to all of those thousands of people.

Then people started complaining about the ridiculous amount of spam messages they were

getting from marketers. Some people would receive dozens of daily spam offerings for

everything from Viagra to ringtones to payday loans, and everything in between.

Those people started to complain to MySpace, so to salvage their reputation, they got a lot

stricter about enforcing their rules. One of the first things they did was put a limit on the number

of friends you could add daily. This seriously hampered a lot of people, who were used to

adding hundreds or even thousands of people per day to their spam lists using those automated

programs.

Then they started cracking down on bulletin spam, banning some users who abused the privilege.

Users would find themselves banned within hours of sending out their first bulletin, which cause

many marketers to simply give up trying to make money on MySpace.

But smart marketers found out you could still use MySpace to make a great deal of money if you

used it properly. Gone were the days of sending out bulletin spam, spamming affiliate links on

guestbooks, and spamming the MySpace forums. But you could still promote your offerings

tactfully on MySpace.

You should offer MySpace users real value in return for being your friend. If they’re just on

your list for marketing purposes, make sure you provide them with plenty of free incentives to

get them to stay.

Once you’ve made friends with people, you can direct them to your own websites outside of

MySpace. You could ask them to join your forum, sign up to your newsletter, or visit your blog.

Once you get your friends to start networking with you outside MySpace, you’re free to market

to them however you choose.

MySpace won’t interfere with your marketing efforts off their site, even if someone reports you

for trying to sell them something after they joined your email list from your own private website.

Just keep in mind that there’s always a chance you could be banned from MySpace for using any

kind of marketing there.

Although you can greatly minimize your chances, due to their terms of service that prohibit

blatant marketing, there’s still that small risk that you should keep in mind. The financial rewards

generally makes it worth the risk.

Are the ads for making money on the Internet legitimate? Is it realistic to believe that a computer home based business can replace the income from your job? What are the secrets to Internet Affiliate Marketing? How much is hype and what is really possible?

AdSense can be a fantastic moneymaker. There are many people who make thousands of dollars

per month through AdSense alone. Hearing this may get you excited, and you may already have

dollar signs in your eyes. But don’t get your hopes up just yet.

Although you’ve probably heard about people who bring in five or six figures per month with

AdSense, you need to keep one very important thing in mind. In order to make that kind of

money with AdSense, you need to have a ton of traffic.

In fact, most people who make more than $100 per month with AdSense either have a very large

website with thousands of visitors per day, or they have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of

smaller websites.

For most people, AdSense may not be worth the effort to create sites only for promoting it.

AdSense only pays a few cents for each click, depending on the keyword you target (some pay a

lot more) and those few cents are a lot smaller than they were just a few years ago.

A few years ago, some people were getting several dollars per click for many keywords. These

days, $1 clicks are relatively rare in most niches. Most clicks seem to be under $0.50 now, and

smaller niches may experience clicks of only around $0.10 (or even less.)

In order to make $10 per day, at $0.10 per click you would need 100 clicks. If your click

through ratio were 5%, you would need 2,000 visitors to your site every single day just to earn

$10 per day.

For sites with very little traffic, you would have to have a really fantastic click through ratio in

order to earn decent money with AdSense – or, choose highly competitive keywords that pay a

lot, but are harder to rank high for in the search engines.

Some sites just naturally have traffic that doesn’t buy much as far as paid information, but they

like to click through links to access free information. Webmasters who have sites that target the

freebie seeking demographic should test AdSense links to see which type performs best.

If you’re running a site that has an extremely general audience, AdSense might also be a good

alternative. AdSense is usually pretty good at delivering targeted ads. You can create thousands

of content pages with AdSense links, place the code in your blogs, and watch your monthly

earnings rise as you create more fodder for your readers.

If your only goal is to make money without becoming a product owner, then create a content-

laden site that weaves affiliate links into the text and provides ample opportunities for clicks to

AdSense links so that you can profit from the information you’re delivering.

Techniques for traffic conversion are well known in the Internet marketing community, but most

that are used are basic. They work well, but not spectacularly. What you need is to find a new

twist on traffic conversion.

Perhaps what you need isn’t something different, but a different approach. You might find that

taking an unexpected route is just what your site needs to increase buyer response.

Replace “want” with “fear.” Sure it’s great that a viewer wants your product, but desire isn’t as

strong as fear. Make your sales copy emphasize the scarcity of the product and how terrible it

would be to miss out.

“You can spend hours trying to make those purchased templates look like a custom website but

you’re stuck with a few colors and choices. Meanwhile, marketers with XYZ Web Page Super

Package are up and running in an hour with the look of expensive graphics.”

Now the reader pictures the competition making money while he’s still fighting with fonts.

That’s fear – fear of being left out.

Long sales copy works only if it’s not boring. In an effort to create the typical long sales letter,

inexperienced writers just repeat the same information with little variation. This isn’t the time to

“do it yourself.”

Professional writers know how to get that same information across in fresh ways so that each

section of the sales letter is familiar, yet not repetitious. If you don’t have the skill do to that,

then hire a professional copywriter. What you pay for a good sales letter is a direct investment in

traffic conversion. Consider it a one-time expense for endless traffic conversion opportunities.

Raise the price. But wait, if sales are falling, why would charging more be better? You may have

under-priced your product, which gives it a lower value in the viewer’s perspective. Add another

section or package with a second information product.

Change the cover design. Add new delivery options so that a buyer can choose eBook, CD or

MP3 audio product formats. These small changes give you a reason to bump up the price. And

don’t get chicken by going from $9.95 to $12.95. Take the price up to $17 or $27 and hype the

promotion. You can do a limited time discount – “Order now to get the product for $12.95

because in 48 hours, the price goes to $17!”

Make a Limited Time Offer. Create urgency by offering a one time purchase to a limited

number of buyers for a short time. This plays to fear (“what if I miss it”) and scarcity (“I want it

before someone else gets it”).

Then take it off the market at the end of the offer. Nothing discredits you more than repeated

“limited time” runs. Remove the product, make a few changes or updates and add something else

to the package. Then – and only then – can you bring back the product without losing face and

buyers.

Did you ever dream about one day owning your own business, about becoming your own boss and working the hours you want to work? Maybe even one day passing it onto a son or daughter.

One attraction for an online business that sells information is that your car can still fit into the

garage. If you were selling tangibles on a site like eBay, your car would be out in the rain because

the garage would be filled with inventory.

That’s both costly and inconvenient. With online marketing of information, your “inventory” of

products can fit on the thumb drive in your pocket. Even if you sell actual deliverable products,

you can have those sent from a reseller and have plenty of room at home.

Since your products don’t take up space, it’s easy to forget just how many “assets” your business

owns. You need to keep an ongoing list of the “assets” for your Internet marketing efforts. Not

only do these have an economic value, but you want to know what’s available and have it

organized for your convenience.

It’s too easy for files to get lost on the hard drive and linger instead of getting revised and back

on the market. Keep everything in separate folders or files and then make a back-up on a regular

basis. It only takes on computer meltdown to lose your entire business in a flash.

Here are a few prompts to use in listing your online marketing assets so that you stay well

organized:

* EBooks – custom written, original product or collaboration.

* PLR Products – articles, eBooks or courses that you own rights to resell

* Articles and reviews related to your niche

* Video or audio products that are marketed separately or with eBooks

* Customer list of buyers

* Prospect list of people who ask for more information

* Product reviews and testimonials from satisfied buyers

* Recommendations from influential people in your niche market

* Sales letters, squeeze page copy and ad copy from successful campaigns

* Graphics and logos identifiable as the “brand” for your site

* Opt-in pages and forms from successful campaigns

These “assets” have a monetary value, but they’re nothing until you “monetize” them for online

marketing. By keeping track of your marketing assets, you discover what’s most profitable in

your niche and what isn’t. Make the most of your assets and you’ll get more income with fewer

useless files (the electronic equivalent of the packed garage!).

Social bookmarking is extremely popular with marketers in every niche. Social bookmarking sites

such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati allow users to add links to sites they like and other

visitors can grab those links and add it to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.

Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains. You can

bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links and in some cases vote

your entries up, like Digg users will do.

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that

bookmarking site. A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day. But because of the

very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking

sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy – not just

your sales pitch page.

Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance – let’s say

you’re in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may

not get shared a lot.

But let’s say you read an article about a the discovery by a group of scientists that says people

who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, then you’d have a

pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share

your links with others.

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn’t worry about how

many people vote for a story or share your links. Just concentrate on using the social

bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to

bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear spammy – remember to

bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don’t necessarily own yourself.

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting

information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site

offers it, start building a “friends” list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day. You shouldn’t go crazy and add 100 links

the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site. Keep it to ten or less per day and you should

be fine.

After you’ve been a user for several weeks, you might be able to get away with up to 50 per day.

Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that

made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at FoxNews.com every once in a while, or a funny

YouTube video. This helps make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the

community.

My Home Wealth System is an Internet business opportunity based in the affiliate industry. The system is touted on it’s site to help give you the ability to make “vast amounts of money online.” So is this a legitimate business opportunity and can you truly make a vast amount of money?

Split testing is the process of testing conversion rates by sending traffic to multiple versions of a

sales page or squeeze page. This can be done manually, or it can be automated with software.

The important thing is to have a very good tracking system in place.

What should you split test? Almost everything should be tested! You should test at least two

versions of your headline all times, at least two different price points, and at least two different

calls to action.

You might also test multiple versions of your sales copy, different graphics on your sales page,

and even different product names. Why should you split test? Split testing is a way to tweak a

page for the best possible conversions.

Very few people achieve maximum conversion rates for the first version of their sales letter. And

minor changes can have a huge impact on your conversions! A 1% change in conversation may

not sound significant, but it’s not so small if you think of it in terms of dollars instead of

percentages.

If you have a 1% conversion rate and you make a total if $3,000 off of 10,000 visitors, that

seems pretty decent, right? But what if you doubled your conversion rate to 2%? Then you

would have made $6,000 off of the same 10,000 visitors!

I don’t know about you, but an increase from $3,000 to $6,000 seems like a pretty decent

change! Some people do their split testing manually. In this case, you simply have at least two

different versions of your sales letter, and you send the same amount of traffic to each version.

Ideally, the traffic will come from the same source, because different sources of traffic can have

wildly different conversion rates. For example, traffic from Google AdWords might perform

better or worse than traffic from Microsoft adCenter.

You will then look at your conversion rate for the two versions to decide which one performed

better. It’s important to send a decent amount of traffic to each version before deciding which

version is the true winner.

One hundred hits will probably not be enough to provide statistically valid data. You should

probably send at least 1,000 hits to each version before you make your decision. This is one

reason why people feel they don’t need to split test their sales letters.

It can be costly to drive traffic during the testing phase. If you send 1,000 hits to each version at

a cost of $0.50 per click, that is $500 per version, for a total of $1,000. That might seem like a

lot, but you should make some money off of that testing if either of your sales pages is any good.

Even a 0.5% increase could mean an additional $1,500 in your pocket in the earlier example, so it

really pays to test. Remember to track very carefully. Use an analytics program like Google

Analytics if you can.

This way you can track where your traffic is coming from, where it goes, and how well it

performs on your site. Analytics is free, and it can help you track a lot of very important

information, so you can test conversions more easily than ever before.

Some split testing tools do all of this work for you, automatically rotating your files and tracking

the conversions for you. You simply log in, tweak something new, and sit back to see how much

better (or worse) it affects sales.

Grabbing the attention of an online surfer is challenging enough, so you want to turn as

many viewers as possible into actual buyers. And you want to entice buyers to become

repeat buyers.

Once you’ve told the product story, how do you get them to push that “buy button”

again? Here are some traffic conversion hot buttons to add to your site today:

1. Expose your competition’s warts. You can expect popular products to attract

competitors. Study the competition and find the weaknesses or differences that you

can exploit. Do you deliver faster or offer discount shipping, give choice of

downloads or CDs, gift wrap, ship internationally? Let buyers know what sets you

apart from your competitors.

2. Go ahead – name drop! Find a celebrity to endorse your product. Not necessarily a

movie star, just people who are known and respected in your niche market. Send your

product out to niche superstars and ask for their honest review as well as permission

to use the comments on your website. You benefit for the star power of the endorsers.

3. Prove it! Find research that advances your product in the marketplace. Even a basic

study that shows “7 out of 10 people who regularly exercise are less likely to get

prickly heat,” might be linked loosely to your product. Make the connection

reasonable. If there isn’t any research, make your own by using results from an online

survey or poll.

4. Test yourself. Create three different pitches that play on your main product. Use each

page for 10 days. At the end of the month, compare results. The pitch that captures

the most buyers isn’t always the one you like the most. Remember, it’s about what

clicks with the buyer – even if it isn’t your favorite.

5. Befriend to win. Make sure that your sales copy creates a connection with your buyer.

You can make money with straight sales copy but you’ll make more money when you

build a relationship with buyers.

Let them into your life enough that they care about you and they will be more willing

to invest in your products. You can set up a forum to discuss your niche interest or

add short reviews from your buyers.

Feature a buyer with a photo and candid interview. When you give buyers reasons to

drop by regularly, then you are developing a relationship. Needless to say, your

“special offer” email gets read when others are sent to the trash folder.