Category: Online Biz Tips

Your social networking profile is important when it comes to meeting other Internet users. This is because, in most cases, Internet users are looking to chat with someone who has the same goals, views, beliefs, and interests as they do. Without a personal profile, it would be difficult or impossible to tell what your interests are. That is why social networking profiles are not only important, but they are needed.

When it comes to social networking profiles, a lot of focus has been placed on what you should include in your profile or display on your profile page. It has been said that pictures produce the best responses, as well as detailed personal information. Although a picture and detailed personal information may help to increase your page views, you may be getting views that you do not necessarily want. Despite what you may believe, most social networking websites do not have restrictions on who can view your personal profile. In fact, Internet users, even those that do not belong to your online community, can easily see profile.

Since anyone, literally anyone, can see your social networking profile, on most social networking websites, you are advised to be cautious. Essentially, this means that instead of focusing on what you should put in your online profile, you should be focusing on what not to put. This is one the best ways to protect your safety, both on and offline.

Pictures (again!) are often recommended with social networking websites. If you are interested in posting a personal picture of yourself in your online profile you can do so, but you are advised to carefully choose that picture. While you will want to look your best, you are advised against posting a picture that is too revealing or seductive in nature. Most Internet users can look at these types of pictures without feeling a thing, but for others these types of pictures spell danger.

If you make the decision to post a picture of yourself in your social networking website profile, you need to be careful about the rest of the information that you post. Although you may not necessarily think about it, a picture is just a picture, but combined with your name and address, it could be a deadly combination. You are advised to only post your first name in your profile. This will make it more difficult for anyone to try and contact you off of the Internet.

It is also advised that you carefully choose your location. A large number of online social networking sites require that you select a city, as well as a state. If it is allowed, you may only wish to list your state and not the city. If you are required to list the city and the state that you live in, you may want to think about using a nearby city or town, especially if you live in a small town. If an Internet predator wanted to contact you and you lived in a small town, it could be fairly easy for them to find you. That is why it is advised that you carefully select the answer to the location question.

In addition to the above precautionary measures, it is advised that you do not post detailed information on your children, the location of your home, your income, or when you will be leaving for vacation! By keeping these and the above mentioned points in mind, you should be able to enjoy online social networking without having to always look behind your back.

Best things in life are free, as many would say. This especially holds true with efforts in advertising one’s products or services. With free Internet marketing services, one can save a lot. Instead of shelling out for the marketing aspect of your product or services, that chunk of money could be put to other important elements of your business since many information websites now offer knowledge regarding Internet marketing services that comes with no price tag at all.

This is not to tell you that better focus on plain Internet marketing. It still will do your business a lot good if you mix traditional advertisement efforts such as traditional and new marketing media.

Here are few of the free methods that you could employ to make your products and services be in their most visible, thus saleable, form.

1. Promote your business through free search engine submission and optimization.

Submit your website to various search engines monthly. This will make many more people know that your website actually exists. Aiming for the top search engines will help a lot in this endeavor.

2. Improve your articles.

Remember that information on articles with good content as traffic-bringer of websites? This time it’s about making these articles serve your website better by using keyword suggestion tools that are offered for free. Update your web site’s content by regularly checking the standing of your keywords with the current market.

3. Acquire free content.

If you have no time to increase the SEO or search engine optimization-friendliness of your articles, you can look for free content from article directories. All you need to do is retain the resource box of those write-ups.

4. Avail of free comprehensive web traffic analyzers.

These are tools that you can make use of without costing you a cent. Your website’s hits statistics will be produced by this kind of Internet marketing tool for your own analysis.

5. Learn to manipulate web design templates.

You don’t have to be too techie-geeky to be able to design your web site. Oftentimes, web design templates or custom-made layouts are available for the Internet marketer to use.

6. Monitor your website’s visibility.

Tools such as search engine position trackers may be used to see your website’s standing.

These processes are very convenient to use as long as you keep in mind that you use and try to master their use for your own benefit. Just don’t get obsessed with your achievements when you finally learn how to use them and incorporate them in your Internet marketing feat.

Nobody likes a bully… especially small business marketers. If you’ve ever felt like the little guy taking punches from a heavyweight champion, you know what I’m talking about. Big business has donned its gloves, and is waiting to put small business down for the count.

I’ve got good news!

Sometimes the little guy wins. Heck, it isn’t easy and sometimes it’s a close call, but little guys do win and when they do… victory is sweet!

What can you do when you’re being threatened by the bully down the street?

1. Take a careful look at the Competition

Every business has its strengths and weaknesses. You need to be aware of both… your competitors strong points, and the places where room for improvement is quite obvious.

2. Be Flexible

Don’t expect your competitor to broadcast his next move so that you can be prepared to block it. You’ve got to think a step ahead, and be ready to outsmart his next maneuver.

3. Use a little Judo

You don’t have to be big and brawny to successfully use Judo. Why? It’s an art that uses your opponent’s momentum to trip him up. So what if you don’t have thousands of dollars to invest in a campaign.

When you’re competition has invested his tens of thousands in one, you’ll be able to make a quick about turn and counteract quickly with a smaller campaign of your own.

He’ll either forfeit his investment or continue through, but loose steam.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret about your competitors that might encourage you. Although big businesses often have a wide variety of products filling their shelves, they often don’t have depth.

Think about it this way.

You may run to your local department store and find everything ranging from make-up to camping equipment. The problem with that? …chances are they don’t have an extremely wide assortment of their products.

This means that if you’re an avid outdoorsman, you probably wouldn’t be satisfied choosing between two cheap brands of tents when there is an amazing variety on the market. An outdoor related store could get one over on the big department store by offering the widest variety of fewer products in a focused field.

Another asset about being the small guy, is that it’s easier to make a quick turn. Hey, how many managers do you have to get okays from to make a quick decision? Think of the weeks it takes for a local department store to send a request from a customer for a certain product to the regional or national management? Yeah, too long!

As a small business, you can have a new product on your shelves within a week. If I were a customer wanting a new tent, I’d prefer to not wait until summer was half over to get it.

There are a lot of benefits to being the small guy. Don’t take bullying lying down. You have what it takes to get the best end of the stick and come out a winner.

Video: Brad talks about when and how to monetize your online business.

It’s not true that everything that has been said has already been written. Since that unfortunate axiom came into use, the whole universe has changed. Technology has changed, ideas have changed, and the mindsets of entire nations have changed.

The fact is that this is the perfect time to write an E-Book. What the publishing industry needs are people who can tap into the world as it is today – innovative thinkers who can make the leap into the new millennium and figure out how to solve old problems in a new way. E-Books are a new and powerful tool for original thinkers with fresh ideas to disseminate information to the millions of people who are struggling to figure out how to do a plethora of different things.

Let’s say you already have a brilliant idea, and the knowledge to back it up that will enable you to write an exceptional E-Book. You may be sitting at your computer staring at a blank screen wondering, “Why? Why should I go through all the trouble of writing my E-Book when it’s so impossible to get anything published these days?”

Well, let me assure you that publishing an E-Book is entirely different than publishing a book in print. Let’s look at the specifics of how the print and cyber publishing industry differ, and the many reasons why you should take the plunge and get your fingers tapping across those keyboards!

Submitting a print book to conventional publishing houses or to agents is similar to wearing a hair shirt 24/7. No matter how good your book actually is, or how many critique services and mentor writers have told you that “you’ve got what it takes,” your submitted manuscript keeps coming back to you as if it is a boomerang instead of a valuable mine of information.

Perhaps, in desperation, you’ve checked out self-publishing and found out just how expensive a venture it can be. Most “vanity presses” require minimal print runs of at least 500 copies, and even that amount will cost you thousands of dollars. Some presses’ minimal run starts at 1,000 to 2,000 copies. And that’s just for the printing and binding. Add in distribution, shipping, and promotional costs and – well, you do the math. Even if you wanted to go this route, you may not have that kind of money to risk.

Let’s say you already have an Internet business with a quality website and a quality product. An E-Book is one of the most powerful ways to promote your business while educating people with the knowledge you already possess as a business owner of a specific product or service.

For example, let’s say that you’ve spent the last twenty-five years growing and training bonsai trees, and now you’re ready to share your knowledge and experience. An E-Book is the perfect way to reach the largest audience of bonsai enthusiasts.

E-Books will not only promote your business – they will help you make a name for yourself and your company, and establish you as an expert in your field. You may even find that you have enough to say to warrant a series of E-Books. Specific businesses are complicated and often require the different aspects to be divided in order for the reader to get the full story.

Perhaps your goals are more finely tuned in terms of the E-Book scene. You may want to build a whole business around writing and publishing E-Books. Essentially, you want to start an e-business. You are thinking of setting up a website to promote and market your E-Books. Maybe you’re even thinking of producing an E-zine.

One of the most prevalent reasons people read E-Books is to find information about how to turn their Internet businesses into a profit-making machine. And these people are looking to the writers of E-Books to provide them with new ideas and strategies because writers of E-Books are usually people who understand the new cyberspace world we now live in. E-Book writers are experts in Internet marketing campaigns and the strategies of promoting and distributing E-Books. The cyberspace community needs its E-Books to be successful so that more and more E-Books will be written.

You may want to create affiliate programs that will also market your E-Book. Affiliates can be people or businesses worldwide that will all be working to sell your E-Books. Think about this. Do you see a formula for success here?

Figure out what your subject matter is, and then narrow it down. Your goal is to aim for specificity. Research what’s out there already, and try to find a void that your E-Book might fill.

What about an E-Book about a wedding cake business? Or an E-Book about caring for elderly pets? How about the fine points of collecting ancient pottery?

You don’t have to have three masters degrees to write about your subject. People need advice that is easy to read and easily understood. Parents need advice for dealing with their teenagers. College students need to learn good study skills – quickly. The possibilities are endless.

After you’ve written your E-book…

Getting your E-Book out is going to be your focus once you’ve finished writing it, just as it is with print books. People will hesitate to buy any book from an author they’ve never heard of. Wouldn’t you?

The answer is simple: give it away! You will see profits in the form of promoting your own business and getting your name out. You will find affiliates who will ask you to place their links within your E-Book, and these affiliates will in turn go out and make your name known. Almost every single famous E-Book author has started out this way.

This doesn’t mean you should stop here. Eventually, you will move into where most of the wealth mountains are – selling them, and then maybe their Resell Rights and Private Label licenses!

Another powerful tool to attract people to your E-Book is to make it interactive. Invent something for them to do within the book rather than just producing pages that contain static text. Let your readers fill out questionnaires, forms, even crossword puzzles geared to testing their knowledge on a particular subject. Have your readers hit a link that will allow them to recommend your book to their friends and associates. Or include an actual order form so at the end of their reading journey, they can eagerly buy your product.

When people interact with books, they become a part of the world of that book. The fact is just as true for books in print as it is for E-Books.

That’s why E-Books are so essential. Not only do they provide a forum for people to learn and make sense of their own thoughts, but they can also serve to promote your business at the same time.

Now as far as turning your list into joint ventures goes, this is a pretty easy but also open ended and rather variable in results until you actually see what these people are capable of further down the line. Similar to previously, when we talked about gaining feedback from your list you can in the same way, gain joint ventures from your list, again, as in the above example with the affiliates, this is often far more widely used, and for good reason.

I urge you once again, not to relegate your joint venture prospects to those who visit your website, and the individuals you pick out through the top performing affiliates, but to actively seek them through your list. The reason we’re doing this is simply because there’s a good chance someone will be out there that won’t progress down your line of resources otherwise. If they’re experienced, have a big list of their own, or the ability to get in touch with your target market, you’re going to miss out if you’re not telling them that you want their services.

For example, an experienced marketer that subscribes to a selection of lists to keep up with what’s going on around them, happens to subscribe to your list where you’re selling an info product such as this. He or she won’t buy your how to product, because they’ve got their system set up already and it just so happens, that they only promote their own stuff to their own lists, unless it’s a joint venture (this is very common among the big guys by the way), they won’t buy your big product for the same reason, and they won’t be joining your affiliate program for the above reason. He or she is a heavy hitter with a big list, but you’re missing out. These are the people you’re aiming to cater for here. It’s not good if you’re leaving massive holes like this, because you’re missing out on some massive profit potential. In fact, as we speak the majority of marketers out there are very obviously leaving these types of holes.

The problem with joint venturing through a list at this stage is it becomes kind of a lottery if you’re not careful. You can’t just send out a mailing asking for anyone with a list over ten thousand people to contact you for higher commissions, because then everyone else feels cheated and you may alienate some potential affiliates. In general terms joint ventures should be a private thing, the deal will also vary from person to person, depending on your product, their list size, what they want in return and what you can grant in return. The best way to go about this is to keep it that way. Don’t do a mass mailing just requesting joint ventures for the reasons above, we can’t do that for this particular resource.

What I’d suggest you do instead, which you should be doing with your list anyway, is carry on as your normally do, sending out your un-intrusive surveys to help with your research and find out as much info as you can about the people on your list, for something in return. For example a short valuable report that you’ve written on your area of expertise. In exchange you’re getting vital info that not only allows you to tailor your ads to your list providing a better response rate, but at the same time you’re building up a picture of who the good joint venture prospects are. Once you’ve done that, you can go through the results you’ve collected, and pick the top performers, the knowledgeable, and the people with the most resources, and contact them individually.

Video: Brad answers the question “How much time do I have to spend on my online business?”

Video: Brad talks about how brick and mortar businesses can take advantage of mobile marketing.

Many people will tell you that to get your web site noticed you need to ‘optimize’ your site for the search engines. You are then led up a path where you have to keep changing your web site as the search engines change their ways of listing things. As fast as you ‘optimize’ your site, Google and the others have moved the goalposts, meaning you have to keep optimizing over and over again.

Now consider some facts. Most people in the world are not users of the Internet. Let’s repeat that. The vast majority of people who you want to reach don’t use the Internet. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your web site, they simply will never find it.

Here’s another fact. Some of the best Internet marketers make most of their sales ‘offline’. They sell their books, CD-ROMs and so on at seminars, workshops and conferences. Indeed, for many ‘Internet marketers’ these ‘offline’ sales represent the bulk of their income.

So what do these facts tell us? They show us that ‘offline’ promotion is more important than online promotion. You may be able to optimize your web site to get high rankings in a search engine. But that doesn’t mean you’ll reach the vast majority of people who could buy your product or use your information.

This was confirmed recently by one study that showed most people go to an Internet address (URL) after having read it in a newspaper or magazine, been given it by a friend or colleague, or having heard it being mentioned by someone speaking at a meeting or on TV. In other words, it seems that significant numbers of people who get to your web site will do so having heard the URL somewhere outside the Internet.

You can get many people visiting your web site, even if you are not ranked highly by the search engines. You can do this in two main ways:

1. Write articles for use in regular publications – newspapers, magazines and so on. Always include your URL in the article and you’ll get millions of people to notice your web site address.

2. Speak at every opportunity. Make presentations to business clubs, chambers of commerce, local societies – you name it, you should speak at it. Every time you speak, announce or your web site address.

Although these are the two principal ways of gaining offline publicity for your web site, don’t neglect your business stationery, posters, car stickers and so on. The more your web site address is visible outside the web, the more visitors you will get regardless of how kind the search engines are to you.

Most people starting a business forget about the most important part. They spend loads of time picking just the right product or service to sell. They’ll carefully weigh the best kinds of office equipment to buy. They’ll even fuss endlessly over their workplace decor.

But none of that holds a candle to what is most assuredly the core of any new business: you can’t succeed until you master prospecting and selling!

“But I’m really good at what I do. Won’t word just get out and people will find me and want to buy?” you say.

Don’t bet on it. We live in a busy, crowded world where thousands of businesses are shouting their marketing messages. If you don’t get in there and promote — and promote WELL — your customer base will resemble a trickle more than an avalanche.

Here are several proven methods for finding lots of new prospects and turning them into customers. Then I’ll show you an exceptionally EASY way to do all this on a shoestring.

1) Get a web site, get it listed on search engines, and let your site grab prospects 24/7. By now you’ve surely seen scads of small businesses doing this. For those who do it right, the Net can pull in lots of new customers with very little effort. But remember, it’s not as easy as some make it look. Your site has to be good, your copy has to be right, and you must be visible in search engines to make the magic happen.

2) Sell over the telephone. I love email, and face-to-face meetings will always have their place, but good ol’ telephone conversations are a top-notch selling strategy. Prospects feel like they’ve made a personal connection with you when you give them information over the phone.

3) Finally, method number 3 is the one to use if you don’t want to or don’t know how to build your own professional web site, or can’t bear the idea of talking to hundreds of strangers on the phone.

Frankly, this 3rd method has become the only method I truly recommend to small businesses and individuals: OUTSOURCING. These days, you can OUTSOURCE all your online promotion and selling to companies that specialize in doing the work for you.

In the past, that would have meant spending tens of thousands per month to hire an outside selling team. Today, with online and telephone automation reaching new heights, you can have all the advertising, phone calls, and closing done for you by the pros for about what it costs to get a decent home office computer set-up.

Don’t hesitate, do it! Getting a really good marketing, prospecting, and selling machine working for you is essential to your success!