Insider Secrets To Internet Business Success

Sometimes when I hear about results like this, I have to wonder how confident the results really are. Was it really tested? For a while the “internet marketing guru’s” were spouting that your products price should end in a “7”, While real data showed that was more often inaccurate.

I’m guessing that happened in such a way as the old game of “Operator”. where one person whispers a message into another persons ear, then the second person whispers the message into a third person ear. After very few messages are shared, the original message was lost, skewed, and completely bogus.

But this rather new study caught my attention. The following article explains the study of security trustmarks and their ability to convert more visitors into buyers:

Check it out here:

http://newsroom.mcafee.com/article_print.cfm?article_id=3562

Maybe you sales are slow, or you haven’t had any at all? Then you’ll definately want to take a look at this video.

Below is a link to a video that contains some excellent advice on naming (or even renaming) your product or service that could potentially skyrocket your sales.

You may have to sign up to the membership, but it’s completely free to do that.

Here’s the link:

Video – Product Naming

You’ve probably heard that membership websites are all the rage from your favorite marketing “guru”. Membership systems on the other hand are by no means new. Thousands of extremely successful businesses have been using them for many…many years. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons they’re so successful.

But if you can’t keep a member in your system over time then you’re certainly out of luck. Fortunately since there are other highly successful companies using membership systems you have the ability to see how they work and apply some of their successful systems into your own business.

One main strategy I’ve seen is simply adding extra steps to the cancellation process. This increases the likeliness for a member to at some point give up during the process. It’s not something I would do to my own customers, but it does work. When you’re selling an item on a website, you usually want to eliminate any extra steps and distractions in order to make that sale, so it makes sense that you may want to do the opposite to keep a member from leaving your system.

One company I’ve done business with required not only about one hour on hold waiting to get someone to answer the phone, but they also required information that I did not easily have on hand. Sometimes it’s something like a subscription number, sometimes it’s the email address and address information you signed up with. I’m sure they have it, but their policies may require they ask for this information.

A second company I’ve done business with required me to print a cancellation form from their website. Of course, they could probably easily implement an online form and make it a simpler process, but remember, this is a membership and they have to add steps. This suddenly required that I have it printed out. They also didn’t have a fax number, so I couldn’t fax it in. Interestingly enough though, and here’s a neat strategy… on their website they offered to give me the ability to “freeze” my account. This would allow me to keep my membership for $10 per month so if I decided to “unfreeze” my account, I would not have to pay the joining fee again. It was a second option to keep me in the system and it had a benefit.

Though these companies may not have the ultimate cancellation system, you may find the right one for your own business by doing a bit of research. You can often find what a company requires by looking at their Terms of Use. Of course, most new members don’t even bother to look at this text considering it is often small, hard to read text and is often very long. I suppose that could be another strategy.

Growing your internet business is just like building muscle and losing weight. I say that because many new business owners give up too soon because they do not see results quick enough. The first day you begin a workout routine, you don’t see anything happen. In fact, almost nothing happens, visibly. It takes continuous effort and dedication to eventually get to your desired outcome.

Your internet business is the same way. You have a website, you start to build links back to your website, but much of the time you don’t notice anything right away. Your search engine rank will be low until you continue to grow your links and create content. Seeing a large spike in traffic if you’re starting completely from scratch is uncommon. The trick is to not get discouraged!

I recently took a look back when I first started my blog. I had 7 unique visitors my first month. Seven! And one was probably me. Six! AWSTATS shows an average of 0.47 visitors per day that month. Shoot. That was back in April 2006.

The next month I had 209 unique visitors. That’s an average of 16 visitors per day. The only increase in traffic was from posting a “warrior special offer” at the warrior forum. I don’t recommend that forum to anyone, but it was where my first product was advertised. Google also found my website that month but there were no web searches that generated any traffic to my website that month.

Every new websites starts from the bottom, unless of you purchase a website from someone else or buy a used domain with existing traffic, but I won’t constitute that as a new website. To increase that first months traffic from 6 visitors to 209 took two things:

– Submitting quality blog posts every day

– Getting as many links pointing back to your website every day

That makes the process seem pretty simple, doesn’t it? It is. Just commit yourself to continually do both of those tasks. Eventually of course you want to outsource them. Continually outsourcing those will substantially increase your traffic. Don’t give up, stay on track, and reap the rewards.

How do you know what’s being searched for a different times of the year, or in past years?

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

How do you know what digital products are selling?

How can you tell how many affiliates are promoting a product?

How do you see how much digital products are selling for?

http://www.clickbank.com/advancedMarketplaceSearch.htm

How much should I sell my site for?

What are other websites selling for?

How fast do websites sell?

What should I look for in a website I want to buy?

Where could I go to get a website to flip?

How can you see another websites traffic and detailed statistics?

http://flippa.com/

How can I tell what products are selling?

How can I find top sellers?

Where can I see trends of items being sold?

How can I see what products are hot?

http://www.terapeak.com/features/

Where can I find entrepreneurial ideas?

Where can I find new inventions?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/springwise/

How can I tell what people are searching for on Google?

What keywords are people using to search for something?

What keywords do people use when they buy?

What keywords do people use when they’re looking for free information?

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

How can I get an idea of how much traffic a website gets?

How do I get demographic data for a certain website?

How can I tell how much income visitors have?

How can I tell which users are mail or female?

http://www.quantcast.com/

http://www.alexa.com/

http://compete.com/

How can I tell what adwords ads are more likely to be profitable?

How do you find profitable ads?

How can I tell how much someone is spending on PPC?

http://spyfu.com/

http://www.keywordspy.com/

Know more places for conducting market research? You can simply post a comment below!

I recently joined the “internet business box”. since my wordpress blog hadn’t recently been posted to, and that blog (and other blogs of mine) had been hacked into several times, I thought I’d make the change.

So far the experience has been pleasant. I like the idea behind it… being programmed to increase profitability by morphing over time by showing different, more profitable variable versions. The software was originally Muvar, and I believe a later improvement was inspired by me when I thought I’d test multiple variables in an optin form all within an iframe on my blog. So the software was improved to put an entire website within an iframe to test. It looks like it has been improved substantially since its first versions.

I have also been impressed with the manual for the IBB. It was helpful and I was left with no questions. Everything that one needs to know about the IBB is in there. If there’s something missing in there, I’m sure it will magically show up in a later version. Considering it recommends more profitable places to buy domain names and more profitable web hosting accounts, I’d say it’s extremely handy, even if you aren’t an IBB owner.

If you’re interested in an Internet Business Box too, there’s a link at the bottom of this page next to the “Powered By” text. Click on that and you can order from that page using PayPal.

Today I’m going to mention a free way to get traffic to your blog, sales page, or wherever you’d like it. It isn’t a brand new technique, so don’t be disappointed if you’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere.

The source of the traffic comes from a site called StumbleUpon. If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon before, just download the toolbar at www.stumbleupon.com and check it out for yourself.

Once you’ve downloaded the toolbar, you can either click the stumble button which will cause your internet browser to be sent to a random website in the StumbleUpon directory.

Users with the toolbar can rate any site by hitting a thumbs down or thumbs up button. Doing so will cause StumbleUpon to match the websites you like with similar websites.

On the other hand, it can be great wastes of your time if you decide to have a toolbar choose where you should be going on the internet.

Let’s talk about the traffic. If you want free traffic you can stumble and rate your own websites. But that is cheating the system. Of course you like your own site. The real strategy is to get others to “stumble” your website for you.

The best way to get this free traffic is to get other people to rate your website. All you need to do is to include a “stumble” button at the end of your blog entry or on another type of web page. You can even provide instructions for a visitor to “rate” your page by telling them to click on the stumble button if they like what they’ve read.

I’m sure on some websites you’ve seen a button or link that has asked “Was this review helpful?”. Those links usually automatically moderate submitted reviews from visitors. But those don’t create traffic. However, a user clicking on the Stumbleupon button DOES generate traffic, so why not use it? The user is essentially saying that what they’ve read was so helpful that this page should be shared with others. Are you using a stumble button yet?

There are several ways to get traffic from search engines. Did you know YouTube is the largest VIDEO search engine? It is, and it has lots of traffic.

There are two main ways to get traffic from YouTube. They are from an authors video page.

The first method is to get a link in the beginning of a videos description text. The second way is to get your websites link in the video itself. But how do we do this?

First, we want to find the right video that your market is viewing and has lots of traffic. I’ve made it extremely easy for you to follow this by making this into a step-by-step process. Here it is:

1. Go to YouTube.com

2. Search for a keyword related to your market. For example, if your market is “internet business” then you would search for “creating a website”, “create a video product”, “building an email list”, etc.

3. Click on “search options” and sort the videos by relevance > View count. This will sort the videos by the hight amounts of traffic.

4. View some of the videos. While you’re watching the video, ask yourself “Would my market be watching this video?” If you think the answer is yes, then…

5. Click on the video authors account name. This is the first link in the box to the right of the video.

6. On the next page, below the video look for the text “Send Message” and click on that.

7. You will be asked to log in to your Google account if you aren’t already. If you don’t have one you can create one quickly.

8. The next page is the “Compose” screen. Just like most webmail, this will allow you to write a subject and a message to the video author.

Now, it’s up to you what you want to write. You know what you want to ask for. You ideally would like to have your website link at the beginning of their videos description text. But most video authors won’t do it without a benefit to them. At this point the question is:

What you can offer the author?

It could be any of the following:

– Money

– commission

– A trade

– A free report on how to _______

– Or something else you can think of.

Try each of these. Find out what makes them say “yes” to your offer. After that, duplicate the results by findnig more video authors. Eventually once you fine-tune your process, remember to outsource it to others to do this for you. Hire a contractor and give them the 8 steps above, then provide them with your magic formula that has made other YouTube authors accept your offer.

That’s it! Get to work!

I wanted to write about “nothing” here. I’m talking about increasing your conversion rate using a variable that slips through the cracks during conversion experiments sometimes.

You see, when I run multivariable tests, I include a number of variable versions. In those tests, I also include a version called “nothing”. Because, after all, how do you know that “something” is more profitable?

The “nothing” version is intentionally left blank. There’s always the possibility that leaving out a certain variable whether it be a headline, a description, testimonial etc. could make your sales page (or whatever it is that you’re testing) more profitable.

I recently found out that an opt-in form on my blog doesn’t perform as well with a headline. At least, not the headlines I used.

Recent data showed me the following:

Version: 1 – Subscribe Now!

Conversion Ratio: 0.82 %

Version: 2 – Nothing

Conversion Ratio: 1.64 %

Version: 3 – Subscribe!

Conversion Ratio: 0.57 %

The opt-in form which showed versions 1 and 3 had less opt-ins than “nothing” did. “Nothing” actually had 4 times more opt-ins than the other two!

So next time you run a conversion experiment, make sure you don’t forget about the all mighty “nothing” variable version. It’s easily forgotten, and can sometimes make all the difference.

There is a process in an internet business which I haven’t mentioned in a blog entry before. It doesn’t have to apply

to information products. It can actually apply to most types of products.

Sometimes putting your own steps into a

owchart will make your own business easier to understand. Spot-

ting unnecessary steps and eliminating unproductive parts can save time, as well as money in some cases.

Here’s the business process.

I’ve added descriptions for each process. If you’d like to use this for improving your own business, feel free to do so.

New Product Development

Engineering

The first part is engineering. In my business, it is not drawing a blueprint, nor is it using some special soft-

ware, or hiring some specialist to do any work for me. Engineering in the product creation process is getting an idea.

Using my own brain and thinking about what I know. If there’s an idea I think of which I want to pursue, but need

additional information for a product, I will use content sites, blogs, books, and friends for additional research.

Production

Once you’ve researched your idea of a product in the engineering step and have decided to pursue it, you will

now need to produce it. In my internet business, producing a product has a process within itself. For videos, it starts

with recording using screen capture software. They are then compiled into a compatible format for best viewing

experience. Audio, or text, and software may also be used instead of video.

Now, the videos I compiled are ready to be burned to a CD or DVD. I use data CD’s if my product will fit

on them.