Category: Online Biz Tips

CPC (Cost Per Click Advertisers) – These sites let you place ads on your site that when simply clicked earn you money:

Google Adsense

Adbrite

Chitika

Kontera

Clicksor

CPA (Cost Per Action Advertisers) – With these sites your web traffic must click an ad and then follow an action (usually a purchase):

ClickBank

Commission Junction

Linkshare

ShareASale

Max Bounty

Amazon

CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions) – With these companies you will earn a set amount of money for every 1000 displays of an ad. Note – most of these sites require a certain high amount of traffic per month before they will approve your site.

Burst Media

ValueClick

Tribal Fusion

If you want to start monetizing your current website, or build a website that is monetized from the start – check out the options above and you are sure to find some sort of offer that you can use to make some money.

You’ve written and compiled an E-Book. Now you have to decide how much to charge for it. Finding the right price is essential to the success of your product. If you charge too little, people will think it’s of little value, and they won’t purchase it, or even it they do buy your book, you will have to sell thousands of copies to get to the point where you can begin to see a profit. If you price it too high when compared with your competition, you will find yourself steadily lowering the price, which will cause you all kinds of new problems in the future. For example, if you sell your E-Book at first for $39.99, and later reduce it to $24.95, don’t you think the people who bought it for $39.99 are going to be PISSED?

Choosing the right price for your E-Book is one of the most critical parts of the marketing process. The first rule of pricing E-Books is to never underprice. Determine the highest price your audience can afford, and then if you find your book isn’t selling, you can always reduce the price. Before you take that step, make sure you are promoting your book like crazy on the Internet and on websites. The price should be aimed at bringing in profits, but you should never forget that price is one of the factors that people use in judging the value of your E-Book ? before they buy it. So always start with the highest price, and then launch a mega-marketing campaign.

Pricing an E-Book is particularly difficult because E-Books are a fairly new commodity. Since they are digital, the value of an E-Book is as confusing as the understanding of what digital actually is to the average layperson. This means that we must look at E-Books in a different light in order to determine their actual worth in this brave, new cyber world.

Let’s look at the difference between a book in print and an E-Book. A printed book is an object you can hold in your hand, store on your bookshelf, even hand down to the next generation. It is priced on factors such as paper stock, design and production costs, and marketing.

But the fact that unites E-Books and print books is that they are composed of ideas. It is the ideas in these books that have the ability to change, or possibly transform, people’s lives.

What do you think an idea is worth when evaluated against the cost of paper and ink?

It is the IDEAS that are valuable! That is how you determine the cost of your E-Book.

What should I charge for my ideas?

There are all different formulas and methods for determining the correct price for your E-Book. Let’s begin with honing in on your ultimate goals.

Decide if your goal is to get wide distribution and maximum exposure. This goal is aimed at drawing customers to your business or service, or to establishing the credibility of your reputation. If this is your main goal, you should aim to keep your price on the low side. Some authors have even priced their E-Books at a profit loss to draw a high number of new customers. The key is to find a price that maximizes your profits and the number of books you sell.

This is an excellent pricing strategy if you are looking to acquire long-term customers. Long-term customers are extremely likely to buy from you again and again as long as the first E-Book they buy is of exceptional quality and beneficial to the customer.

However, if your book contains valuable and more importantly NEW information, references, or techniques then you should aim to price it on the high end.

After you figure out your goal, you must figure out what your audience’s need is for your E-Book. For example, does your book solve a particular problem? If it does, and solves it in a way that hasn’t been written about in one hundred other E-Books, you will be able to achieve high sales at a high price. If your book solves a problem or answers questions in a new and unique way, you should price your book as high as you can go. You will achieve larger profits this way, but bring in fewer customers. Just make sure the question or problem that your book solves is one that is important and relevant to the majority of your market audience. If your ideas are not common knowledge, or you are presenting a brand new technique, you will be able to sell books at a high price. Just be prepared for your competition to undercut you on price as soon as they hear about your book.

Keep in mind that the above pricing strategy is temporary. Eventually, you will cease to sell books at this high price. So figure out in advance how long you plan to offer your E-Book at this high price, and when that time is up, change your pricing strategy.

If you want to see large profits over customer draw, aim for an audience that is looking for easy solutions to their problems at a low price. If your book is aimed at solving one particular problem rather than general advice, then you can charge more. Start at the highest price the market will bear to bring in the largest profits, and plan to discount the book a number of times throughout the year.

Marketing Strategies

The key that unlocks the sales potential of your E-Book is to find a single sentence that becomes your selling handle. This sentence states what question or problem your book answers and the benefits your E-Book can provide. Then be sure to use that sentence in every piece of sales and promotional material, and every time anyone asks you about your E-Book.

Besides promoting your books assiduously online, there are several other strategies that can help you sell more books.

One is to give something away for free with your book, such as a valuable bonus item. Or bundle several E-Books under one price, which lowers the price for each E-Book if they were sold separately.

An effective technique for figuring out a price is to send out a survey to your current customers. If these customers have already bought an E-Book from you, ask for their opinion in terms of price. Do this by creating a sales page for the new book, but don’t include a price on that page. Instead, add a number of links to survey questions that ask pointed questions to aid you in assigning a price to your E-Book.

Another strategy is to test out prices by creating a number of duplicate sales pages with different prices on each page. Make sure your sales copy is exactly the same on every page, and includes your selling-handle sentence. Then figure out for each page the conversion ratio between visitors to your site and sales of your book. This will tell you what your optimum price is.

Ultimately, if you’ve written a book that solves a problem or presents a new technique, your book will bring in both traffic and profits. So be sure to write that selling-handle sentence that sums up what problem your book solves and what the benefits of your book will be to the customers who purchase it. And then watch your market come to you!

Social Bookmarking could be one of the best things that ever happened to websites and blogs.

Basically Social Bookmarketing sites allow users to create a set of content bookmarks. These bookmarks are organized by tags, which are (usually) arbitrary words or phrases the user can assign to content. This gives the user a way to classify, rank and organize content using tags. The most popular Social Bookmarking Site is del.ici.ous, which has millions of users.

Social Bookmarking sites have an intrinsic advantage over search engines and other bots — people choose what to bookmark rather than relying on a program to categorize and qualify content. There is an implied quality in something that someone has taken the time to select.

Social Bookmarkers read other people’s bookmarks and add them to their own if they like them. There are also RSS feeds so people can see what others are tagging, which I think is really cool, and a textbook example of viral marketing.

About 4% of my referrers this month are del.icio.us related, including .8% off the home page, meaning that people click on my link when they see it pop up in their RSS feed. I get a goodly amount of traffic from technorati as well, but I would call that site a business bookmarking site, so I’m not going to mention it here.

I only provide a facility on AffiliateBlog for del.icio.us tagging. There is a terrific WordPress plugin called Sociable that allows direct tagging for tons of Social Bookmarking sites. If you don’t have it as part of your blog you should get it and install it today. This blog is being redesigned and should be done in a few weeks. The new design will incorporate Sociable.

So…what can YOU do to get the social bookmarking virus ramped up? I see two basic considerations:

1. Write good content. Darren Rouse had an interesting observation about del.icio.us items that make it to the top of the site. You can take a look, but basically he observes that lists, how-tos, technical articles and humor get to the top faster.

2. Give people the tools to bookmark easily. If you have a blog, use Sociable. It’s terrific. If you have a site, there are plenty of interesting tools that will help you make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your content. AddtoBookmarks.com is a good one.

There are Social Bookmarking sites popping up all over the place. Here are the Top 10. Where did I find them? In someone’s bookmark list on Listable, of course.

Del.icio.us

Listible

Digg

StumbleUpon

BlinkList

Spurl

Magnolia

Furl

BlogMarks

Reddit

Whenever a particular interest group, home-related business associations, or any other group set up seminars, they usually go out of their way in order to get sponsorship and the like. While it may seem unlikely that you will get anything out of sponsoring a seminar, think again! Moreover, you can get the most out of a seminar without even sponsoring the event yourself.

Let’s talk of sponsorships in events first. By giving the organizers a required amount of money, you will be given advertising mileage and marketed as the company who made the seminar possible. This makes your real estate venture very attractive not only for potential customers, but even for people who are impressed and may refer you to one of their friends. Sponsorship also gives you the benefit of setting up a booth within the vicinity of the seminar, where guests can approach and find out more about what you offer before and after the seminar, or in-between seminar breaks. With a booth set up, you have a clear avenue for which leads can come up to you and ask questions. In return, you have the opportunity of giving a winning sales pitch to convince them of your real estate venture’s merit, or simply ask for their information should they want additional informative materials on your company. Because people are currently experiencing great fatigue from being sent padded and impersonal brochures through postal and electronic mail, you’ll be surprised at how responsive they would be to an interactive and personal sales talk that you can give through this seminar side.

The key to getting the most out of sponsoring a seminar is identifying which seminars are worth sponsoring. First, you may want to sponsor something that is at least remotely related to real estate. This way, you will have people flocking to an event who are already personally interested in real estate. This will make it much easier to convince leads to provide you their information or become a potential client in the future.

Choose seminars that invite people who are within your financial target market. It’s difficult to convince a buyer of a service he or she cannot afford. Also, try to be part of an event that is going to be attended by a large sum of people.

If you are simply attending a seminar, sit alongside people who have slight inclinations towards real estate. This way, it will not be difficult to get their attention. Always bring with you a brochure and your card to give away to the person sitting next to you just in case he or she may be interested in your service.

Video: Brad explains what PLR is and how you can use it in your online business.

Promote your blog? Why would you want to do that? Honestly, if you have to ask yourself that question you probably shouldn’t even have one. The whole purpose of a blog is to document your thoughts, views, and opinions on a particular topic, issue, or subject.

In addition to sharing your thoughts with the rest of the world, did you know that you could also make money from your blog?

You can signup for affiliate programs or other programs like Google Adsense. If you are using your blog to make money then you will defiantly want to promote it.

When it comes to promoting blogs, there are many blog owners who decide to let the search engine do the work for them. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN use special techniques that reads the content on your website. That content is then used to rank your website with particular keywords. This means that you run a blog on graduating from high school in New York, there is a good chance that your blog will appear in searches done on New York high schools. Although many blogs are successfully ranked in search engines, not all are. That is why you are advised against relying solely on search engines, when it comes to promoting your blog.

As previously mentioned, if you love meeting with or talking to people online, there is a good chance that you belong to a social networking website or community. The individuals that you talk to and that are in your community are likely the individuals that you wish to target. Since most social networking websites work to connect Internet users who have the same goals and common interests, there is a good chance that your online friends will enjoy reading your blog. But, before they can read your blog, you have to let them know that it exists.

When it comes to promoting your blog on social networking websites, you have a number of different options. Your first option is to include a link to your blog in your community profile or profile page. This will allow other community members to checkout your blog, only if they wish to do so. The other way is to inform your online friends of your blog through private messages. Once you join a social networking website and create or join a network of friends, you should easily be able to communicate with those friends. Sending each of your friends a private message with information and a link to your blog tends to be more effective than just placing a link in your profile or on your profile page.

Although there is a good chance that you are already a member of a popular social networking website, you may not be. If you are not already a member, but would like to become one, you will need to find a social networking website to join. This can easily be done with a standard Internet search. In your search, you will likely find a number of popular network sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, FriendFinder, Yahoo! 360, and Orkut. Before becoming a community member at one of these networking sites, you may want to first examine the website to ensure that it is everything that you want it to be.

As you can easily see, there are a number of different ways that you can go about promoting your blog on online social networking websites. You never known, but, in addition to promoting your blog, you may also make new friends along the way.

If you’ve looked at the prices of autoresponders that are available online, you may have decided to search for and use a free autoresponder for your marketing needs. Using free autoresponders is acceptable in certain situations, and in the world of Internet marketing, any autoresponder is better than not using an autoresponder at all!

Your first option for a free autoresponder should be the one that comes with your webhosting account – if you have a webhosting account. These autoresponders can easily be set up through the control panel of your website, and they do not contain advertisements from the autoresponder company or webhosting service. If you do not have a hosting account, or your hosting account does not include autoresponders, there are other options that you can pursue.

There are many free autoresponder services to choose from. These services are free, because the company makes their money by placing a small advertisement in each message that your autoresponder sends out. These advertisements may appear at the top of your auto responses, or at the bottom, depending on which company you use.

Many paid autoresponder services offer a free version as well. These free versions may or may not include advertisements in the outgoing messages. These lighter versions of the paid autoresponders typically do not include many of the powerful features of the paid versions. But if you don’t need the more advanced features, this is a great choice.

Most free autoresponders have a limit on the number of subscribers you can have. Many people start out with the limited free versions, and then upgrade to the paid versions once their lists are large enough to exceed those limits. Many marketers don’t feel that the expense of the autoresponder is warranted until the list that they are building is turning a profit. From a business standpoint, this makes sense.

As the owner of a business, you are the only one who can decide whether you need a paid autoresponder service, or if a free one will do the job. If your list is small, a free autoresponder should do everything that you need it to do, but as your list grows, you should definitely consider upgrading. However, having the small advertisements that the free services place in the outgoing messages may present a problem if the ads compete with what you are trying to sell. They may even pose a problem if they do not directly compete with your product or business. Again, this depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your autoresponder.

Don’t turn your search for the perfect name or tag line into a popularity contest! Two instances of this have crossed my path recently.

First, someone I know asked people to vote on the best title for a forthcoming book.

That’s unwise, because what people say they like in a book title:

* Doesn’t necessarily distinguish the book from others

* Isn’t necessarily clear, sellable and free of negative connotations

* Doesn’t mean those who are the best audience for the book will “get it”

* Isn’t always easy to remember and repeat

* May not perform well in search engines

Second, according to The New York Times, the state of New Jersey put its prospective new tourism slogan to a vote years ago. The winning entry, “New Jersey: Come See for Yourself” received just a few more votes than “New Jersey: The Best Kept Secret.”

Both the winning and the runner-up New Jersey slogans flunk an elementary test for the effectiveness of a tag line or slogan: It should distinguish the company, or in this case the state, from most or all others.

Try this out yourself by plugging in names of other states besides New Jersey – most of the time, the slogan becomes no more and no less applicable. This means the slogan cannot make a strong case for the Garden State. More bluntly, it’s mainly hot air.

The New Jersey contest had another serious flaw. To be eligible to vote on the best slogan, you had to be a New Jersey resident. While residents do have the greatest stake in improving the reputation of their state, they by definition don’t belong to the target market of the tourism slogan. To understand what would appeal most to non-New Jerseyans, don’t look to New Jerseyans en masse.

Many will be clueless about this and get it upside-down. Outsiders are the ones who need to understand the slogan and respond.

I’ll never forget an ad for a Great Plains software company that obviously assumed that a photo of a flat-to-the-horizon landscape without trees was an appealing image. For me, a die-hard New Englander accustomed to heavily wooded hills, this picture had the opposite effect – it filled me with horror.

Of course, someone who lives in New Jersey or North Dakota may be perfectly capable of portraying their region appealingly to outsiders. Instead of asking any group to vote on a winning name or tag line, set up your contest so that people can submit suggestions. Then have either one person or a committee cull the entries according to a list of criteria drawn up beforehand.

By selecting and judging rather than mass voting, you’re most likely to end up with a name or slogan that wins over your audience.

Video: Brad briefly talks about the best ways to get traffic to your website.

No single course will give you all you need to make a full-time living online.

When was the last time you picked up a course, devoured it and went on to make tons of money without reading from any other source.

I’d reckon never because there is so much information to take in online that you can never just learn from one source.

I recently went on vacation and made more money while on vacation than most people make a whole month at their regular 9 to 5 jobs.

Should I write a course on how I do it? No

If I were to write a course it would just be a compilation of all the products which I’ve purchased.

If you want to make money online you need to figure out a few things about yourself before you invest any money in any course.

First and foremost is to figure out if you have the motivation to leave your job and work for yourself?

At your job, you are given orders. By working for yourself, you’ll need to be organized, disciplined and focused. Do you have those traits? If not, it might be easier just to continue working for others until you discipline yourself.

If you spend tons of money on courses and don’t have the discipline or focus to work, then no course will be valuable to you.

If you have the discipline and the focus, you can start earning money by using the free resources available online. Just take a look at the free article directories. There’s tons of useful information to help you get started.

There is no ‘one’ secret to making tons of money online. There are certain insiders tips and tactics to help you succeed with topics such as writing articles, submitting press releases, improving search engine placement etc, but none of those tactics will be useful to you unless you master the ability to be disciplined, focused and consistent.

Master those and I guarantee you’ll have more success.

If you don’t have those traits, you’ll just continue to purchase courses, software and programs to build a collection of digital waste.

To tell you the truth, when I started off, I wasn’t sure if I had what it takes to work for myself.

I overcame my limitations because I focused on the end result and not the process of working.

For me it was a do or die kind of mentality which made me have success in my business.

So stop searching for the perfect course. Someone else’s perfect course may not be what you like to do. Get specific in what you’re looking for and evaluate yourself to see if you’d actually take the necessary steps to follow through what the course teaches.