WordPress Training Expert

Author: WP Training Expert

  • List Profits

    Once you start growing your opt-in list, you’ll want to ensure it is profitable. There are many ways to go about doing this. You want to make sure all your hard work is for a good cause, so you have to find ways to profit from your list. There are literally dozens of different methods you can employ to achieve results, but two seem to work better than all others.

    The top two ways to profit from your list are also the easiest, so let’s look at them:

    1. Build trust and loyalty among your customers. Your customers will not buy from you unless you are able to prove your worthiness. So, you have to spend notable time working to build their trust. You can do this many ways. You can join forums that talk about the products or service industry you have an interest in, and look for experts in your field to offer their advice and recommendations to your subscriber list.

    Also, make sure your website is clear and offers your visitors relevant and important information they will find helpful during their journey. If you are practicing affiliate marketing, and even if you are not, make sure you tested or tried any products you plan to sell so you can provide your subscribers honest reviews of them. This is the #1-way to build trust, and trust always leads to higher profit margins.

    You should also build a user-friendly website, one that has a navigation bar placed in a prominent location. Make sure you provide your customers with a contact us page and always respond to customer or visitor inquiries within 48 hours if this is possible. The sooner you get back with your visitors, the better reputation you will build.

    When responding to customer’s that contact you through your website, make sure that you remind them to sign up for your free newsletter if they haven’t already, which will contain more information on the subject they are looking for. Don’t automatically assume they want to be subscribed to your newsletter just because they asked a question on the topic. Tell them what your newsletter offers, and how they can subscribe.

    When you build trust and loyalty, your customers are also more likely to refer your business to their friends and their family. Some web owners design a page after the order page that allows the customer to input the names and emails of two to three of their friends that might also be interested in your products. This is another simple way to build your list. Make sure you provide them an incentive for checking you out, in the way of a free report, book, checklist or newsletter subscription.

    2. Fulfill your subscriber’s needs. Everyone has needs. The whole point of doing business on the web is to fulfill the needs of people surfing the Internet. If you want to make money selling a product or a service, you first have to find out how that product or service will fill your prospect’s needs. How will they benefit from the product or service you offer? Have other people benefited? If so, how and why? Providing your customers with this information will help you create a profitable opt-in list, one that will transform visitors into paying customers.

    One of the simplest ways to tell your customers how you can fulfill their needs is by listing the ways you do this on your landing page, or on another prominent place on your website. Make sure you bullet each benefit and explain to the prospect exactly how you plan to serve them, and why your product or service is better than that of the competition.

    The more content you provide, the more secure your customer will feel about their purchase. They are also more inclined to believe you are fulfilling a need they have.

    Let us take a moment to look at the first bullet, trust. Many people fear that building trust among strangers will prove difficult. Realistically speaking, anyone can build trust easily. How do you build trust?

    First, run a legitimate business that you know something about. Don’t try selling aromatherapy to someone just because it is a hot trend. You have to know what you are selling to sell it well. Next, if you want to encourage your customers to buy, offer them some form of guarantee. You can for example, offer them a 90-Day money-back guarantee on any products they use on your site, provided they use the products in the time frame appointed and have a legitimate reason for returning them.

    Statistics show that even when customers do not feel satisfied with a product they will often not return it because they either (1) forget about it or (2) are too busy to mess with it. Nonetheless, when you build a guarantee into your sale, you put your customer’s mind at ease, and they consider their purchase less risky.

    Lastly, provide your customer’s helpful hints and guidelines that will help them get the most benefit from your product. This shows your customer you have a vested interest in helping them succeed. This builds trust and loyalty, and converts subscribers to buyers. That is your goal to begin with.

  • Earn More Cash Using Affiliate Marketing

    An attraction of affiliate marketing is the savings that the merchant will gain when he no longer conducts his own advertising and publicity. Some merchants, who already have a well-established affiliate marketing program, no longer bother to conduct any activity that will lead to more sales. Such may not impair the current sales of the online business, but it failed to tap into another avenue of selling that can increase the revenue of the online business.

    Thus, the merchant must still conduct some form of advertising even when he has an effective affiliate marketing program, and even when he has hundreds of affiliates conducting the promotions for him. The merchant must look into making a second or even a third sale to the customers he acquired. Such is called back-end selling. The practice of back-end selling can complement affiliate marketing.

    Here are some ways that a merchant can perform back-end selling:

    Newsletters – Whether through email or sent through snail mail, these publications are perfect avenues to introduce the other products of the merchant. These other products are the back-end products. Therefore, in the merchant’s website, there should be a part where the customer is asked whether he would like to receive free newsletters from the online company. If the customer clicks yes, then this customer will be taken to a page that will ask for his email or mailing address.

    Thank You Letters – Sending a thank you letter for patronizing the merchant’s products is not just a form of courtesy. It is a wise business practice. With the thank you letter, the merchant must mention the back-end product.

    Customer Satisfaction Calls – If the merchant is not comfortable in writing brilliant thank you letters, he may choose to give the customer a phone call. During the phone call, the merchant will check if the customer was happy about the product they already bought. This call shows a concern for the customer. But it is again an avenue for back-end selling. The merchant will attempt to mention the back-end products.

    Customers Only – In the website of the merchant, there will be a webpage that can be accessed only by its customers. When a visitor has become a paying customer due to affiliate marketing, this paying customer can go to the webpage that contains more about the product that he has bought. In that same page, there may be ads for the back-end products

    Back-end selling for the merchant becomes easier because the customer has already given his trust after the initial sale brought by affiliate marketing.

  • Are You Better Off Using Paypal Versus Other Online Shopping Carts?

    One of the most often discussed debates when it comes to the world of online business is the method with which owners offer their customers to pay for the services rendered. Everybody has heard the tale about the witless consumer who gave his or her credit card number to some nameless company on the Internet and ended up with thousands of dollars charged to his or her card. There are about a thousand variations on the same horror story, which means that customers have high standards when it comes to giving out access to their financial resources online.

    Namely, your site is going to have to offer your customers a way to conduct transactions with you in a method that is both secure and user-friendly. Not having a payment method listed on your site that is well-respected and trusted will seem unprofessional and send the vast majority of potential customers elsewhere. With the competitiveness of the online market, there’s no reason to lose a customer base due to perceived overtures of unreliability.

    Most online businesses these days conduct their transactions through PayPal or through some form of online shopping cart. The pros and cons of both can be debated for days on end, but here is a quick overview of both.

    PayPal is well known and proven, and has high levels of customer satisfaction. Even more intriguingly, it’s free of monthly fees for the user. The payment for services through PayPal is docked through a service charge, which is taken out of every transaction. There is much debate about at what point PayPal starts to become less cost-effective than a shopping cart, but the overall rule of thumb seems to be that if your business does less than 1000 dollars a month of money exchange, PayPal seems to be the best option. If your revenue level is higher than that, it’s best to have both a PayPal option as well as a shopping cart.

    A shopping cart system requires a monthly maintenance fee, which can seem prohibitive to smaller businesses. However, once your business sees serious growth, it’s a good idea to invest in shopping cart services, if nothing else than for the peace of mind they can bring. Paying the fee means that somebody else deals with the hassle of embedding the software into your site, takes care of all the bugs that pop up, and generally ensures that things are running smoothly. With a PayPal account, the owner has to add this to the list of responsibilities.

    The most important thing to keep in mind is that as a respectable online business owner, you must offer your customers some form of reliable payment method. Otherwise, you can kiss a great deal of potential revenue goodbye when customers seek out your competition for a more secure method of payment.

  • How Do You Set Up a Feedburner Account?

    Video: Brad shows how to set up a feedburner account.

  • Harnessing The Power Of WordPress Widgets

    WordPress offers a lot of advantages when it comes to web publishing. There are a lot of reasons people use WordPress. One of the easiest to use functions of WordPress are widgets. Most WordPress themes come with “widget ready” sidebars. From the back office of WordPress you can drag and drop widgets into your sidebars. Widgets can add such things to your site as:

    Calendar

    Search

    Recent Posts

    Categories

    Text/HTML

    The above list is only touching on the functionality you can add with Widgets. If you want to take it to the next level you can also add widgets that don’t come standard with your WordPress install.

    I will share 3 that I have found very handy. Most of these widgets are added by using plugins.

    1. Video Widget – This plugin will add a video widget that you can add to your sidebar. It will allow you to choose from over 25 video services. You can control video size within the widget. With this widget you only have to add the video ID as well – no embed code. Lastly, this widget will also allow you to add a list of videos that will be randomly chosen for your visitor.

    2. Sexy Bookmarks Sidebar Widget – A quick note first, this plugin works with the original Sexy Bookmarks plugin so you will need that installed for this to work. It is a great and unique social media sharing plugin that you will find handy even if you don’t want this widget. The widget itself will allow you to add Sexy Bookmarks to your sidebar. This widget looks great and should lead to more social media submissions for your site.

    3. Flickr Widget – Flickr is one of the best and easiest ways to both store and share your images. With this plugin you will get a Flickr widget that will display your latest Flickr images in your sidebar. The widget will display up to 10 photos from a Flickr photostream.

    These 3 widgets are a drop in the bucket compared to all of the widgets available out there. If you want to add something to your sidebar and can’t figure it out – check out the WordPress plugins, they may have an add on widget that will give you exactly what you need.

    One last suggestion: Please don’t pack your sidebar so full of widgets it stretches out the screen. it looks sloppy and unprofessional, not to mention people usually don’t scroll beneath your content to see your sidebar so it is wasted.

    When used properly widgets can be a powerful addition to your WordPress site.

  • Getting Your Outsourced Tasks Done

    If you have been following closely until now, there is no reason why you shouldn’t get your job done to your satisfaction. But, there are times when difficulties begin to creep in.

    One thing that you shouldn’t tolerate at all is non-responsiveness. On the Internet, the unsaid rule is that any professional email must be replied to within 24 hours, or sooner if your agreement is to that effect. If you are in the same time zone, there’s no reason to wait for 24 hours either. If you don’t get your reply within that time, you might as well begin looking somewhere else.

    Another thing that is of utmost importance is quality. Even if your outsourcing professional has been providing you good work, do keep checking on it often. Remember that you are not seeing these people. Some of them might pass on their work to cheaper people and work as middlepersons. When that happens, quality definitely goes down.

    If you are outsourcing your work, make it a point to outsource it directly to the person who will execute the job and not to a middleperson.

    Avoid companies unless absolutely necessary. For home businesses, individuals are the best outsourcing professionals. However, if you are a large company and looking for something like a telemarketing agency, then, of course, you need a team of people whom you can outsource your job to.

    The two major problems that can happen even after you have selected your professional carefully are non-responsiveness and deterioration of quality. Do not tolerate these problems, or your business will suffer.

    Earlier we spoke about keeping a friendly rapport with your professionals. This is fine but only till the time they are providing you consistent good work. If the professional aspect of the relationship begins to wither, you need to tighten things a bit. Let the ‘boss’ in you show when that happens.

  • Reality Of Being An Offline Consultant

    If you work with Internet consulting, it’s likely that most of the business you do is online. Most clients who already are web savvy enough to get online and go hunting for the help they need to make their businesses a success won’t necessarily require you to meet in person. In fact, the beauty of working online is that it means that you can expand your clientele to around the world. Even if you live in Texas, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to work with clients in Singapore or South Africa or anywhere in between. The only limit is time zones!

    However, if you’re reading this article, it means that you’re interested in trying to network with a different genre of client, the ones who are not yet on the Internet. Even for people who are offline that would like to make the switch to a virtual marketplace might not necessarily have the skills or the equipment to work with you over the Internet.

    This is all well and good – as a consultant you’ll be able to instruct those who are unsure of how Internet marketing works and help them get the virtual presence that’s all but required of businesses in the modern era. The trouble is that with offline customers, you’ll often have to make the first steps in an offline fashion. Which, essentially, means getting back to basics and wooing clients the old fashioned way.

    If you’re looking to make a dent in the offline consulting world, as yourself an honest question: are you comfortable with meeting clients face to face? With so many methods of communication available through the Internet these days, it’s not surprising that many who work in online marketing never eve see the people that they’re working with. But if you’re looking to recruit clients from a group of people who might not even have personal computers, you’ll have a bit of a hard time doing business with them over the Internet. This means that you’ll need to brush up on your social interviewing skills – as well as your ability to schmooze in person. Remember those networking classes you took in high school and college? Now is the time to put them to work!

    Some of the necessities for those who are looking to work with offline clients include reliable transportation, a good wardrobe, and emergency plans for things like childcare. IF you’re working with clients face to face, you have to be able to carve out time in your schedule to attend only to them. Many who work virtually have forgotten about these basic business tenants – but if you want to transition back to the offline world in order to find clients, your business practices will have to make that transition as well!

  • Definition of Blogging Exposed

    The internet hasn’t been around all that long, but it has quickly become a part of our daily lives. Even if we don’t go online every day, you can bet that the people and businesses we deal with do go online every day. But regardless of who is going online or why, it all comes down to one thing: communication. One of the most popular forms of this is the blog. But what is blogging? That’s a straightforward question, so let’s take a look at the answer.

    The word ‘blog’ derives it name from a combination of the words ‘web log’. When they first started, that’s exactly what they were. Most people would use them as a form of an online journal of their daily lives, and many of them would only share their blogs with family and friends. Then came what are commonly called mommy blogs. These were blogs typically started by stay at home moms to communicate with other moms, but they also added some elements of making money to their blogs. Next were the flat-out money making blogs which tend to be more contrived; with each post being designed to maximize the revenue of the blog.

    So, when someone asks “what is blogging?”, the best answer is “it depends”. That’s because each type of blog requires a different approach. However, there are several similarities between all blogs. Updating your blog on a regular basis, making it look good, and driving traffic to it are a few of the things most blogs have in common.

    One of the best things about blogs is that you can start blogging for free. The WordPress and Blogger platforms are just two of the services that allow you to easily set up a blog and to do so for no cost at all. However, you will have to host your blog on their servers, and your domain name will contain “blogger” or “wordpress” as part of it. If you have a blog that’s meant for family and friends, then this should be okay. However, if you plan on making money with your blog, then you need to buy your own domain name and hosting.

    To get started, figure out what you want your blog to be about. Once that’s done, you can think of a name for your blog. The next step is to go to whichever blogging site you want to try (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) and sign up for an account. If someone else already has used the same name for their blog (when using the free option), you will have to come up with a different name.

    Now you’re ready to start posting to your blog. This is usually done by logging into your blogging account and then clicking on “new post”. Write your post, then click “submit”. There you go! You have just made your first post. Now if some asks you what is blogging, you can say it’s an easy way to have your own site online.

  • The Power of Forum Marketing

    Video: Brad talks about what forum marketing is and why it’s important to get involved in forums.

  • The best way to get traffic to your Youtube Channel

    Video: Brad talks about how to get more traffic from your YouTube channel.