Variety is the Spice of More than Just Life

Ah, the variety of options we have in our modern world is truly a miracle. Take food for example. In any major city, there are so many different choices for food it nearly boggles the mind. And that’s just to try and pick the ethnicity of your dinner! After that, the choices of restaurants seem nearly endless. Being new in the city, you decide to ask a local culinary expert for advice on where to eat. If someone had a reputation as being a patron of the kitchen arts, but only ate Mongolian fare and nothing else, people would quickly wonder just what sort of culinary expert this person really was.

The same sort of thing happens with search engines and in-bound links. Now don’t get me wrong. In-bound links are fabulous things to have. The more you have the definitely better things are. The problem is when a site only has one type of link. How much of an expert can they be?

For example, you have decided to go with the organic method of developing traffic and Google list rankings. You begin to develop articles at a one-a-day clip. Good stuff! After a month of doing this, you have perhaps twenty articles out there, all pointing back to their home on your site. You continue with this work and soon have a fabulous list of articles across a number of leading article publishing sites, all pointing back to your site.

At this point, a Google spider comes crawling along and decides it’s time to re-evaluate your site. Your site has nice content, and you’ve done a good job with on-page SEO as well. Now it checks your in-bound links to determine how much of an authority your site is. It determines that you’ve written over a hundred articles on your topic. But, there are no other kinds of links pointing to your site. How much of an authority are you if no one but you points to it?

There are some easy ways to fix this:

• Create accounts with the major forums in your niche and begin to discuss topics and answer questions. Of course, you need to have created a signature block that points back to your site.
• Purchase banners and ads. Although there’s a cost attached to this one, this gets your links out onto other sites as well.
• Share links with others. While these two-way links aren’t worth as much as a one-way link, they still do count for something.
• Participate in committees or development groups.
• Have others write reviews of your work. It’s been discovered that even poor reviews help to generate links and traffic… and sales
• Record some videos. At the time of writing, Google LOVES video content. Make one video. Make a series. The more the better.
• Get creative! Any bit of code, product, eBook, graphic out there that people use can / should be branded to you and therefore becomes another kind of link.

Lots of links from lots of sources tells Google that you’re site is one that people ought to see when they are looking for the kinds of things you do. That means you will be on the first page and rising to number one in no time.

The Importance of Selling

Not so long ago, when the computer was first mass-produced for selling to the public, a lot of industry experts predicted that nobody will want a box that does nothing besides handling data and hogging up the entire garage. They were obviously wrong – nearly every household will have at least one computer in the US, and most even have two or three desktops!

This little bit of history tells us that no matter how good your product is, you cannot earn even a penny from it if you have a lousy salesperson. Likewise, no matter how good your product is, you cannot sell even one copy of it with a weak salesletter. Hence, it is vital to have a compelling salesletter that will pull the prospect right into it and see clearly the benefits that are presented against the very reasonable price you are charging.

A good salesletter will first catch the attention of the reader by resonating with the reader's needs and desires. That's why you often see headlines such as “Have you ever felt...” or “Does ... sound familiar”? They work because they empathize with the reader's needs, problems or desires. The Internet is like a very busy freeway and everyone's in a rush. Only a strong headline like that in big, bold letters will stop your target audience dead in their tracks to read through your salesletter.

Once you've obtained your reader's attention, you want to spend the first few paragraphs on telling your story – how you have gone through what your reader probably has, the agony of the whole experience, etc. Once you get your reader thinking “he's one of us”, you would be perceived as an understanding individual offering a solution and not an anonymous marketer looking to sell his product.

Next, you have to elaborate on the benefits of the product you are selling. List them all on a piece of scrap paper until you have quite a long list; then write your salesletter from there. In your salesletter, highlight the benefits in point form and elaborate on each benefit. Be sure to point out how your product helps the reader instead of pointing out the features of the product. For example, instead of saying “this gizmo cures headaches”, say “this gizmo can relieve your headaches”. Make it relevant to the reader.

Then, write a paragraph or two on how the reader's life could be changed if the problem he is facing can be totally solved with your product. It is important to use very descriptive words so that the reader can fall into the imagination more easily.

Last of all, make a strong call for action! Your final objective is to make your readers buy your product, so it is important to make a final, strong call for action, be it “click the Buy button”, “whip out your credit card” and so on. Do not make the mistake of forgetting such an important step after coaxing your reader through the lengthy paragraphs.

Outsourcing Your Business

An online business consists of many essential components: website design, product creation, payment processing, salesletter, affiliate programs and so on. How about coupling that with sales and advert tracking?

When a lot of Internet marketers start out with their small home based businesses, they have totally no idea that their businesses could grow into "something that huge". One-man eBay stores grow into full-fledged online shops run by a team of dedicated salespersons, logistics and customer support personnel. At the end, you can never manage every little aspect of your business when it grows to a certain extent, and that is when outsourcing comes in handy.

However, care must be taken to choose the right people to outsource your tasks and equal detail must be paid attention to to provide the best working environment for greatest productivity. The tasks you should outsource to people are those mundane and repetitive jobs like answering emails, keeping track of stocks and sales figures and so on. This ensures that while you hand some of your responsibilities to other people, they have the least chances of screwing up because the jobs they are handed are easy and straightforward. In contrast, never let others make decisions that will greatly affect your business if you do not want to risk losing your business overnight.

While you have to hire people on wages for some jobs such as book keeping, some jobs can also be accomplished by outsourcing to freelancers. For examples, you can get ghostwriters to write good content for your website and you can get freelance designers to spice up your merchant site. You do not need to hire these people on a regular wage because once their job is done, they do not have much follow up work to do for your business. A good resource for freelancers would be www.elance.com and www.rentacoder.com, where freelancers and buyers have transactions on a per job basis.

When your business reaches a certain extent, you will start to find it hard to keep track of everything and this means time to outsource. Think of it this way: you may lose a little money to hire other people to do some of your daily tasks, but you earn more money from the increased productivity.

Benefits of Joint Ventures

Let's imagine a situation where we have two Internet marketers who know each other. One has a great product that will sell very well but he has no mailing list, no affiliates, nothing. The other is a great marketer with tens of thousands of subscribers in his mailing list, but the problem is he has nothing to sell to them. The very obvious solution here is to give the product to the great marketer with lots of contacts, and split the profits between them. This, my friend, is the very essence of Joint Ventures.

As more and more people start their own home based businesses online, the market is going to get more and more saturated and the competition will grow fiercer by the minute. The fastest, most effective and easiest way to build your own online business empire is through joint ventures. That is, join forces with other marketers to sell your product.

When you joint venture with another marketer, you can ask him (or her) to send an endorsement of your product to his existing mailing list, so you do not need to worry about collecting subscribers from scratch. You already have an easily accessible target market. The trick is to find the right marketer whose subscribers will be interested in your product. Once you achieve that, you won't even have to worry about generating traffic to your salesletter or finding affiliates to promote your product. All of that is already done for you.

When you joint venture with a solid player in the field, your perceived value and reputation will instantly increase because if this well-known person in the field is willing to work with you as a team, you must have some substance! Hence, when you manage to hook up a joint venture with someone who's a “regular player” in your niche market, your status will instantly change from “total newbie” to “guru status” overnight!

Last but definitely not least, you will get a chance to build a lasting relationship with a big figure in your niche market, and that alone will worth more than the profits you pull in over that single Joint Venture. When you have a dominant figure in the market as your friend, you will gain a lot of privileges and perks that no newbie like you could ever get their hands on – for example new insights into interesting product ideas and marketing strategies. You can't even buy that for hard cash!

So, start looking up a potential Joint Venture partner and try your best to convince him or her to strike up a deal with you!