Work At Home Based Business Blog

Archive for June, 2008

This article is directed more to those who are already having some success online, though it easily applies to those who haven’t made a dime yet. These tips will work for anybody and should be taken very seriously. Today, you’re going to discover a few simple ways to get the most out of your business.

First on the list is your sales page. You’re converting at a nice 1% and you’re as happy as a pig in mud. Well, you could be happier. How? Did you ever think of split testing your sales page against another version of it? You don’t have to change much. You could start with just using a different headline and see if that makes any difference. You’d be surprised the difference just one change can make. Then, take the better performing headline and test that against another one. Eventually that 1% will be 2% before you know it.

Another thing you can do is split test you list mailings. Don’t have a list? Well, that’s the first thing you can do to really get the most out of your business. If I didn’t build a list, I wouldn’t be making nearly as much as I am today. Yeah, I know…you’ve heard it a zillion times. The money is in the list. Well, it’s true. I am living proof of that. Anyway, build a list and split test your emails. Keep the ones that perform the best.

Finally, how many hours are you putting into your business? Whatever they are, add an hour a day. You’ll be surprised what that does at the end of a week. By doing this, I have been able to create and extra three or four products every year. Can you imagine how much extra income that gives me? Trust me, every second your put into your business counts.

There are other things you can do, such as outsourcing a lot of things that you’re not very good at. But we’ll leave that for another time. Just do the few things I’ve mentioned above and you’ll be well on your way to getting the most out of YOUR business.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
4 Steps To Building A Success Business

Well, you went and did it. You hired the big gun copywriter that you always wanted to get. You spent thousands of dollars on this top notch copy. Your product was converting at a lowly 1% with your old copy. You roll out this new gem and conversions go up to a stunning…1.1%. Huh? What happened? Why didn’t this big name copywriter have your product selling through the roof? Well, I’m going to tell you why but you may not like the answers. See, some things are out of the copywriter’s control. I’m going to cover them here.

The first thing is your price. I don’t know how some marketers come up with the prices that they do, but a price that is either too low or too high isn’t going to convert as well as a price that is just right. And this requires testing. However, the point is, your copywriter can only work with the price that you give him to work with. If you’re determined to sell your widget for $47 when everybody else is selling theirs for $27, you’re probably not going to make as many sales.

After price, there is your guarantee. Now I realize that if you’re selling your product through Clickbank that you’re stuck with their 60 day guarantee. However, if you can, by increasing your guarantee length, you can, in many cases, increase your conversions. I sometimes offer 6 month or even 1 year guarantees on my products. This is another thing that is beyond the copywriter’s control. He can only work with the guarantee that you give him.

Then of course there are your bonuses, or lack thereof. Like it or not, most people expect to get bonuses when they buy something. That’s just the nature of the beast. So if you don’t offer any, that’s going to hurt your conversions. But you can’t just offer any old bonuses. You have to offer bonuses that are really worth something. Again, this is something that is out of the control of your copywriter.

Finally, there are your testimonials. Some people just don’t know how to give them. They’ll send you something that is so lame, it’s not even worth putting in print. Well, guess what? Your copywriter can’t do anything about these. You can’t fudge testimonials. You have to print them just as you get them.

So before you start throwing stones at your copywriter, take a good look at these four items. They may be the REAL reason why your conversions are in the toilet.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Want to save $2,500 to $15,000 in copywriting costs? Want to write copy yourself that can command that kind of payday? Visit my site at http://www.bcipe.com/ and discover killer copywriting tips that have allowed me to write my own copy for years and earn myself a 6 figure a year income selling my own products.

Welcome to the blogging world! Before you jump in, familiarize yourself with these 15 common blogging terminology.

1. Blog - Short for weblog. It’s similar to an online journal. You may use it for personal or business. The blog entries are in chronological order.

2. Blogosphere - A blogging community

3. Blog Carnival - A blog article containing links of other articles on a specific topic

4. Blog Roll - A list of blogs you recommend to visit. Also called link exchange

5. Captcha - Squiggly random letters, words or numbers used to block bots.

6. Categories - Organizing blog topics by grouping related topics together to make it easier to find

7. Comment Moderation - Allows the blog owner to pre-approve or reject comments made by visitors

8. Comment Spam - Comment spam is the act of posting random comments on blogs, which are unrelated to the topic or promoting URL links leading to sites containing adult content, pharmaceutical drugs etc.

9. Link Love - Posting a link on your blog or other blogs you think may be of interest to others

10. No Follow - Is found on blog platforms to prevent search engines from following a link in a comment reply. This was used to deter spammers. To remove “no follow” visit http://randaclay.com/blog/i-follow/ for instructions

11. Ping - Letting blog search engines know you have updated your blog. You can use a ping service such as Autopinger.com to ping multiple search engines at once

12. RSS Feed - Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication is a format for delivering regularly changing web content

13. Splog - Blogs that are just spam. Usually splogs contain scraped (stolen) content from other blogs

14. Trackback - Is a notification from blogger A to blogger B by sending a ping to say I have written something related to your blog post on my blog. The first person receives the trackback in form of an excerpt with a link to the post of blogger B

15. Vlog - A video blog

Now you’re ready! Go ahead, enjoy your blogging experience!

–
S McIntyre owns Work At Home Space http://www.workathomespace.com a free work at home resource focusing on telecommuting companies, daily telecommute job leads, articles, business resources and other work at home related topics. You can also visit her blog Healthy Perspectives http://healthyperspectives.blogspot.com featuring an array of health topics, nutrition, recipes and fitness for maintaining a healthy and well-balanced lifestyle.

Just lately I’ve been busy with a part of my online business that is not just probably the most important part, but also the most tedious and boring.  You see, I have many websites, blogs , Squidoo lenses, Hub Pages and lord-knows-what-else pages out there in cyberspace all with their own reason for existing and all with a need that must be fulfilled if any of them want to see any decent traffic.

I am, of course talking about getting links.

Specifically, high octane, lazer targeted, keyword anchored, one-way backlinks from sources that have lots of authority. And it’s not an easy task, nor a straightforward one.

The major problem with getting links to your site has always been one of time. Having the time to seek out the best places to obtain those links from and going aout getting them any way you can. Now we probably all know the usual suspects when it comes to getting links, so I won’t bore you with those details. You’ll find them in a truckload of articles submitted to every article directory on the planet by people trying to get links from those very articles. Ok that’s one way I said I wasn’t going to mention!

The holy grail of backlinks is finding a good, Google-friendly source that has lots of keyword authority for the niche in which your site occupies, that is to be the recipient of the links. High PR sites in your niche are tough to crack as they don’t want you as competition! Sites with the same PR as yours will also be reluctant to give you links in case you overtake them and steal off with their traffic. The good part about that is that your immediate competition can’t get the backlinks that are eluding you either. So stalemate?

No. There is a way.

Here is one way right here. Writing articles in someone else’s blog that has authority in your niche. That’s fine if you want to bang your head against the MMO brickwall along with all the other marketers, but even this can be manipulated just enough to make it stretch into a related niche where there is not so much competition. The only problem with a blog post is that the link is only good for the tine your post stays on the front page. After that it sinks into the PR-less abyss with all the other archived posts. You can bolster your own post and give it’s page more authority by sending links to it from some of your own sites. That keep’s the link juice strong and authority rich.

Other ways of getting links that most people don’t write about so much is of course from your own sites. You just have to own lots of them and they have to be related in some way niche-wise and you have to make sure you don’t cross-link, as you are after one-way links with the most juice.

Then you might try creating a load of Squidoo lenses and Hub Pages to send links to your mainn sites. Did I mention at the start of this article that I have… mmm, lots of Squidoo lenses and hub pages…

That’s all well and good if you have 36 hours a day to work on them all, because they don’t create themselves and they don’t populate themselves with good unique content. Guess who has to do all that? Blogs are even worse because they constantly deman fresh content. So ok, I personally now have a rather large menagerie of sites of all descriptions and they do provide links for each other, but I struggle to keep up with them all.

So how else do you get links without paying for them, spamming them, or spending your every waking hour building ever more sites to keep your main sites sufficiently gassed up?

Taks another look at Squidoo. Not your own lenses, but other people’s.

There are now over 550,000 squidoo lenses covering just about every niche imaginable. If there is a product for sale, there are probably a dozen or more lenses promoting it. Here’s what you can do.

Pick a niche that you want to work. Select your keywords and build your own main money making site. Build free blogs and lenses etc to back that site up with links. Then go to Squidoo and do a search on your keywords. you’ll probably find many lenses on the subject. Well, go visit each of them and loot at their guestbooks if they have them. Look at the comments closely.

What are you looking for? Links!

With Squidoo guestbooks, the lensmaster has the option to either leave comments HTML set to ON (the default) or switch it OFF. Now most lensmasters are not aware of this so they leave the HTML set to ON, which means you can leave a comment containing a keyword anchored link back to either your free blogs or lenses supporting your money site, in order to boost their authority and the authority of the links they’ll give your main site, or direct to your main site if the lens is legit and has authority itself.

And the way to tell if a lensmaster has left HTML ON is by looking to see if someone else has left a link in their comment. If not, simply move on to the next lens and don’t waste time commenting in a lens that may not allow your link.

This is a fast way of getting links and some of those lenses will have PR…

Aren’t you glad some of us still write in other people’s blogs to procure backlinks?

Terry Didcott
Author of The Honest Way

Well, a rant is coming…a big one. So if you’re not in the mood to listen to me bitch and complain, you probably don’t want to read this article. I can assure you that it will be less than pleasant. Having said that, I will now begin my rant for the day…pure laziness.

Just recently, I released a product that I sold with PLR rights. That means that the person can sell the product as his own…make any changes and essentially do anything he wants with it. PLR products are an easy way to make money online. The work is essentially done for you. All you have to do is make some changes and you’ve got your own product.

Well, today, I got a solo ezine email and it just happened to be for my PLR product. I figured, great. Let me see how this guy is promoting it and what changes he made.

I started reading the ad and I recognized it immediately. It was the same ad that I used to sell the darn thing…word for word. I couldn’t believe it. The guy didn’t even bother to change one word of the ad. I then looked at the sales page. Again, it was just as I provided it. Not one change, oh except for the price…which was a total joke.

Okay, let me make this as clear as I possibly can. If you are going to buy PLR products to sell as your own, you MUST make some changes…any changes. If you just sell the product as is, you are nothing more than a glorified affiliate. The product isn’t your own. It’s the same product that most of the other people are going to be selling. Why?

Because people are lazy…plain and simple. This is the norm. This is what you will find with anything in life, let alone Internet marketing. People will put in the least amount of effort that they can to get something done. I have my theories as to why, but I’ll leave those for another time.

It doesn’t even surprise me anymore when I see stuff like this. What WOULD surprise me is finding somebody actually putting some effort into their business. That would shock the hell out of me. See, the few who do put in an effort are the ones who really get somewhere. I work 14 hours a day at times. I do it because I want to be better than everybody else.

I’m wondering how many more of these ads I’m going to find with the same wording, with the same sales page, with, most likely, the same product without one word being changed.

The only thing different is the price.

And some of those aren’t even worth mentioning.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Free Report Explains Why You Can’t Make Money Online