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Ok, I Have a Product-Now What?

March 16, 2006

You believed that the whispering dude from the movie Field of Dreams was speaking directly to you. “If you build it, they will come”. You wrote, coded, or designed your own product. You created a killer web site and your “Buy Here” button is just ready to take a beating.

So, now here you are staring at your stats, checking on your PayPal account once every 5 minutes. Nothing. “Just give it a few minutes”, you think to yourself…after all, the whispering dude was speaking to me.

Ok, perhaps I am exaggerating a smidge here…but have you felt something like this before? Have you been in a position where you had a product you thought was going to crush the market and you opened your “doors” to an avalanche of nothing?

No sweat kid. You won’t have been the first. And even if you haven’t been in this position before, if you have a product you want to take to market there are some things you need to do to get traffic and sales. We’re going to discuss a few here.

The first thing you should have done is prepared your opt-in list for the upcoming release weeks in advance. These are already folks that you have a relationship with and by communicating with them over the course of several weeks you will build a “buzz” around your product.

Now don’t go emailing them every time you fix a typo but keep them in the loop on major milestones and points of interest.

When it comes time to flip the switch these good customers will come calling. Even if your list is relatively small by most standards, you can leverage the folks that have already said, “Hey, I trust you and look forward to what you have to say”.

Another critical component is to let other people carry you on their backs a little. Doesn’t sound all that enjoyable for them but when you throw a little money their way it makes a difference. You NEED your own affiliate program. By offering folks a percentage of your profits for selling your product you will increase your chances of success dramatically.

If you’re cringing about parting with a piece of the action think about it like this…”What’s better”? 50% of 100 sales or 100% of zero sales? I think you get the gist. And setting up an affiliate program is so easy these days…not like it used to be. There are scripts and software for those die hard do it yourselfers or you can go the subscription route and pay monthly for a provider to host your program for you.

So we agree that having affiliates is a great way to boost traffic and sales. Now let’s take this affiliate concept up about ten notches. Add Super Affiliates and or JV Partners into your arsenal. Supers/JV’s are going to be folks with decent to gargantuan sized lists. To make this palatable to these folks you’re going to have to dig a little deeper into your pocket by offering a larger percentage of the gate.

If you’re short sighted that may sound unappealing, but if your Super/JV partners have massive lists they can make you more money in days (even after their take) then you could have made alone in months. If you don’t have the confidence to approach the Big Boys for this kind of thing then go after many folks with lists of 10-20 thousand opt-ins. Get 10 of those and you have 100-200 thousand targeted prospects getting an eyeful of your product.

Just an FYI on the Big Boys though. If you have a product that is worthwhile don’t be afraid to contact them and make a proposal. These folks are real people just like anyone else and many of them are extremely open to opportunities. It is amazing what you can accomplish in this arena if you actually ask.

There are certainly more ways to ensure you aren’t experiencing zero salesitis after you released your latest and greatest, but these simple strategies will get you a terrific jumpstart.

Prepare your list with enticing emails before you ever launch, set up an affiliate program, and kick it up even further by enlisting the aid of folks with large lists, and rather than worry about getting sales, you’ll find yourself looking for an accountant to prepare for next year’s tax season.

John Hostler, aka the Internet Renegade, has been marketing successfully both online and off for 6 years. He released his widely anticipated book on the subject of Internet Marketing on 02-01-06. To find out more about John or his newest release check out http://www.internetrenegade.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Hostler

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Starting Your E-Commerce Site

March 16, 2006

So you’ve decided to start an e-commerce web site. Congratulations! There has never been a better time than now to start an e-commerce web site. To the average business person, starting an e-commerce site is a daunting task. The purpose of this article is to point you in the right direction and inform you of some of your options.

The first step in creating your e-commerce site is to decide how to create your site. Since e-commerce has exploded over the last few years, there are more design options. The “easier” option is to use an all in one package from one of the larger hosting companies. Another option is to use an e-commerce system like osCommerce or X-Cart. Finally, another option is you can have a web developer design a custom site for you. Now let’s take a look at these options.

All in One Packages
Are you new to the internet? This could possibly be the best option for you. Hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Yahoo, 1and1, and Homestead have created plans where you can setup e-commerce sites yourself using a sitebuilder. Instead of paying a large price for your site, you pay a monthly cost to cover hosting. For about $10 a month, you can have an e-commerce site.

E-Commerce Systems
Do you have a little experience with designing web sites? Then you can use an e-commerce system for your site. Systems such as osCommerce and X-Cart are full-functioning e-commerce solutions that make doing business easy. All you have to do is buy the hosting, install the software, and personalize the system. Although that is easier said than done, it is still a low cost solution.

Custom Design
If you’re looking for a specific type of e-commerce system or want a truly unique site, you can hire a web development company to design your site. While this is the more expensive option, you get what you pay for. If you choose the right company, you’ll get a designed to order e-commerce system and some search engine optimization. They can also provide information about online marketing and how to make your site successful.

Starting an e-commerce site is by no means an easy task, but it is a great idea. If done correctly, you can take your business to customers in different states, countries, or even continents! The door is in front of you, all you have to do is knock. Good luck with your online venture!

Discuss this article at ecommerceboards.com!
Eric Friese owns custom-ecommerce.com and is President of Tiger Web Solutions. Eric Friese has been in the web development industry for 10 years. Eric can be reached through the Tiger Web Solutions web site.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Eric_Friese

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A-Z Of An Online Business – Professional Methods That Worked For Professionals

March 16, 2006

Ever wondered why some sites make it without using the caveman techniques that are taught so widely on the internet. Its because they know the tried and tested methods of advertising and marketing that can create a hype about your site in its own world — offline and online. I started using the internet before Google was even a recognized search engine. eBay was just a little site not much different then one I can put together in a couple of days, and I watched the internet go from what it was then to what it is today. There have been ups, and there have been downs, but there have been general trends and key things to remember that made the whole experience more profitable and enjoyable, and without further rambling, I’m going to get started.

PERCEPTION

When trying to do business on the internet, the ways people perceive your site and you as a business are key. It can mean the difference between a customer that thinks twice before ordering from you and a customer who impulsively buys, without thinking. Go ask any sales team in the world, and they’ll tell you that a sale today is better then the promise of 10 tomorrow.

Building an online business that people look at in a favorable way is infinitely easier than opening up say a store, or franchise. All you need to do is have a nice looking website, and one person can run the entire operation, as opposed to having to put a huge amount of money into the looks and employment before even making a single sale. The customers don’t need to know that, and if you do what you promise, they won’t care. So because of this you have to understand that if you put an amount of work into your website, which will be your main salesfield, expect that amount of work to be directly reflected in your sales. What I mean is if you put together a website in 2 hours and when its all together you go around telling people to visit yoursite.freesites.biz.com then not many people are going to take you seriously. But if you take some time, maybe map out your website first using the old pen and paper method, and take time in setting up your graphics and content, people will actually come to your website and be impressed, both consciously and non-consciously.

So how much of that didn’t you know already? You probably knew most of it, and if not, this is the first eBook you’ve read! But the fact still remains that even though you’ve heard it over and over, most websites out there are shabbily put together because people are looking to make money quickly, and that doesn’t work.

SET ASIDE TIME, AND DO YOUR WORK SET ASIDE 30 MINUTE BLOCKS OF WORK THROUGHOUT YOUR DAY

Don’t stop during the 30 minutes, I mean, come on, 30 minutes isn’t a long time. But at the same time, even if you feel like you are up to it, don’t spend MORE than 30 minutes at a time on your site.

YOUR WEBSITE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR ONLINE PRESENSE. IF YOU DON’T HAVE A WEBSITE (www.yourdomain.com) THAT YOU HAVE PUT AT LEAST 6 HOURS OF WORK INTO THEN YOU NEED TO DO THAT ASAP.

Go to godaddy.com and register a domain. Use the coupon code ‘saveten’ to get a 10% discount on your order. Now go to dreamhost.com and use the coupon code ‘moesdeals’ to get up to 65$ off your order. Order hosting and get your domain setup, if you don’t have the money to do this, then MAKE THE MONEY. Without your own domain you will have a definite disadvantage in making money.

SEARCH ENGINES After you have your domain and your hosting, you can start thinking about content, and search engine optimization. Now, a lot of people rush into this stage of things thinking they’ll just fill up their site with so much stuff that people coming to the site won’t be able to leave because they’ll never be able to finish reading everything. This is the WRONG way to look at things, at least in 2006. In earlier years, this kind of info stuffing would have got you a high ranking on search engines, and you wouldn’t have had any problems with getting people to your site. But now with all the annoyances of pop-ups and banners and flashing ads, people like to go to a site and see what they want to see – the site. Your logo should stand out and be done in a light soft shade. Except for some exceptions, use soft colors like a dull yellow, a light grey and dull orange. Colors like these will make people associate your website with feelings of happiness, success and bliss in their head and they will find it easier on their eyes to spend more time browsing your site. Notice the popularity of Google as a search engine came just as all the search engines on the internet started filling their pages up with advertising? Google came out with a site that was and still is as simple as ever. A logo at the top with the search bar in the middle, and although it wasn’t a very pretty site, it gave people the most functionality from the site because they came to search and it was easy to do so. So they came back. If Google started off their site as a small search bar among a sea of ads like the other search engines were doing, then it would be in no better of a position then HotBot.com, askjeeves.com and Altavista.com are. Sure these are good websites, but they aren’t the ones who had a stock quadruple in its first year. So the point here is that use colors that do not jump from the page, and make sure that the intent of your site is clear and centered. Use pictures as much as you can, and use small slogans and small sentences more on your homepage then long paragraphs and the like. There are other pages on your site for that kind of mumbo jumbo, this isn’t it.

OPTIMIZATION

So now you have a website set up, its looking good with nothing sticking off the page and your main intent VERY clear. Now what? Now you want to go and find yourself a meta-tag generator, or use the one at Exactseek.com, and set up the part of your site that people don’t see. The meta-tags are one of the most important parts of your websites marketing because it’s these meta-tags that search engines read to get a description of your site and match it to keywords. Its easy to make these meta-tags and you’ll find tons of tools on the internet that will help you make them. But theres always two ways to do things, and almost always the harder way gets you better results. What you need to do is optimize your keyword on your site. In 2005 the key to making a good website was a website with lots of articles that are updated everyday with fresh content about your site. Now you can go to any site and see all the articles written by random people, and don’t think that Google hasn’t taken notice of this new effort to thwart their efforts and site crawling algorithms. So now we come to 2006, and a whole new approach must be taken to get the same results that just placing a bunch of random articles could have had in 2005 or earlier years. The name of the game for 2006 is short, precise, and no lies. If you want a site, then Google is making it more and more of a must that you put work into it for it to be rated as one of the top sites in their search engine listing. The old stuffing your sites with your keywords in your content approach doesn’t work anymore.

So how are you going to get listed near the top of search engines? Be realistic first off, don’t expect your site that you just made to be listed at the top of Google for your exact keyword. For example, if you start a site that sells wholesale information, then don’t expect when someone types in wholesale they are going to be able to find you at all, because they won’t there are bigger companies then yours! However, making several different pages and submitting them all separately will help you. How? Because what you’re going to do is use specific keywords for your search engine listing. Selling wholesale information about cameras? Then you need to have ‘wholesale Kodak cameras information’ as your keyword(s). If you’re too worried about someone never typing in that search, don’t be. They might not type it in as often, but at least if they do, they know your site is the first one there, and they know that its EXACTLY what they’re looking for. Would you rather have a keyword that is search 500,000 times a day and you not get a single hit or a keyword that is searched 50 times a day and you get them ALL. My point exactly.

If you hunt around enough you can even find search engine submission software that will submit your sites for free. I really recommend getting one of these, because the next tip I’m going to give you is to submit each page of your site independent of one another with different keywords and different meta-tags. You want your site to be out on these search engines as much as possible, and more sites for them to spider will mean a better chance of you being seen. Again, this part takes a bit of time, and its boring making 50 different meta-tags, but the fact of the matter is, it’s a crucial part of the business and doing it will reward you times ten in the future. Another thing that is important is to use a ‘revist after’ tag in your meta-tags and set it to 14 days so that every 14 days the spider will check for updates on your site. But this also means you should update your site at least once every 14 days so that the spider doesn’t somehow filter you out. I wish I could say more than that but only Google knows those kind of limits and I’d suppose with the numbers of sites on the internet they filter out quite a bit.

Another thing is don’t expect to see your listing in the search engine listing be at the top instantly, and for sure don’t expect to be at the very top ever, depending on what you’re selling, it may or may not be worth but you can buy ads at the side, but more about that later.

If you want the rest of this eBook, then visit ebooks.moesdeals.com!

Moe Loubani has been working on the internet in all fields of ecommerce since 1999, and has developed over 50 different websites. His most recent project, TrulyTurnkey.com, offers complete at home businesses for people, with hardware, custom made software, web design, graphic design and a complete advertising package that includes forum posters that will post on your new forum to make it used and official press releases to officially let the world know about your new service! Another project he currently is working on is the promotion of moesdeals.com, the best place to find USB Gadgets on the net!

If you want the rest of this eBook, then visit http://www.ebooks.moesdeals.com/

Moe Loubani has been working on the internet in all fields of ecommerce since 1999, and has developed over 50 different websites. His most recent project, TrulyTurnkey.com, offers complete at home businesses for people, with hardware, custom made software, web design, graphic design and a complete advertising package that includes forum posters that will post on your new forum to make it used and official press releases to officially let the world know about your new service! Another project he currently is working on is the promotion of moesdeals.com, the best place to find USB Gadgets on the net!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Moe_Loubani

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Finding Drop Shippers is no Secret

March 16, 2006

Some people who sell items online use drop shippers. Drop shippers are people who have a product to sell and allow you to sell it for them. They often offer the product to you at a lower price so that you can make some profit off of the sale as well. They will ask you to either email, fax, phone in or order the product from their site. Then they will ship the product to your customer for you. Most of the time the drop shipper will send the package with your information instead of their own as a courtesy to you so that their customers don’t know that the product was drop shipped and also so that the customer has your information for returns and other customer service issues.

Finding drop shippers is really no secret. There’s no need to purchase an e-book or other “list” just to find a drop shipper. Here’s how I found products to sell…

1. I “Googled” for the product that I was looking for and added “wholesale” to the search. For example, you would search for “widgets wholesale”.

2. When I found the widgets that I thought would sell really well I looked for drop shipping policies on the website. They can usually be found under “wholesale” if they don’t have a link of their own. If they were listed, great! If not, a quick simple email to the site owner was all that was necessary.

Here is a sample letter that you can use.

Hello.

I am very interested in widget xyz. Do you offer drop shipping? If so, can you inform me of your drop shipping policies?

Thank you,

Me

It’s REALLY that easy! There are some things that you need to be aware of when using drop shippers. They more often than not, charge you a fee. This could be higher shipping or just an extra amount added to each order. Check to make sure you can still profit with this fee included. Ask for references! Just because they say they are a drop shipper doesn’t mean that they will actually ship the product and offer you the customer service that you and YOUR customer deserve. Be sure to find out everything you can about the drop shipper that you would like to use and read any fine print.

About the author: Barbara Stubblefield is a WAHM and owner of http://www.WAHMCrafter.com , Where Crafters Unite!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Barbara_Stubblefield

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How to Accept Online Payments – the Easy Way

March 16, 2006

If you’re selling anything online, you’ll need to be able to accept online payments.

There are many ways you can do this, but let’s simplify it down to the hard way and the easy way.

The hard way requires you set up a merchant bank account and then sign up, at quite some considerable expense, to accept online payments on your account. Not only will you have to pay a percentage of each payment you receive, but there is often a monthly charge for running the account too. If you start getting into big figures, you may even find that the bank holds back a sum of money due to you for chargebacks.

A chargeback is where a buyer asks for their money back – either due to fraud or because they are unhappy with the product you have supplied. There are stories of some companies holding back large sums of money to cover the cost of chargebacks.

That’s the hard way!

Now for the easy way.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past five years, you’ll have heard of Paypal. It’s easy to set up and account to take payment for goods, downloadable Ebooks and subscriptions without the need to set up a merchant account.

This online payment system is the quickest and easiest way to accept payment online with cards such as Visa, Mastercard and Maestro on your site. It’s easy to open a Paypal account and start accepting payment online immediately.

This article was submitted by Jennifer Carter. Start your own Internet Businesses.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jennifer_Carter