Posts Tagged ‘Digital Information’

How To Automate Your Online Business

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Automation makes running any online business a total breeze. More importantly, only by automating your whole online business will you achieve the freedom and lifestyle that makes Internet Marketing so attractive to millions of people worldwide.

The Internet is tailor made for automation. It can retrieve, process and transmit data at a lightning speed. It can keep track of billions of pieces of information on a single server. In reality, the whole system is one giant automated machine run by countless servers and an ever decreasing number of wires as the web goes wireless.

And then there is the computer - your main business automation tool. The computer is the perfect automation tool. It can handle incoming data, process files, and dispense information all within the blink of an eye. Computers are the real workhorses of our modern age - they do most of the work for us. They are so important, running any competitive online or off-line business now without a computer would be hard to imagine, not to mention foolhardy.

Combine these two key elements with automated marketing software and running any business on automation will indeed seem like a total breeze. It all comes down to numbers, with the Internet and computers, you can handle, sell and process a million units as easy as you can handle ten units.

Computers and the web make these large numbers possible. They make marketing online not only viable but also very lucrative. Whole automated marketing systems can be put into place, bringing in revenue automatically. Virtual auto income machines can be created.

Lets look closely at some examples and discover what you need in order to put these automated marketing systems to work for you.

Lets say you have a digital information product that you wish to sell online. Your automated marketing system will probably start with the acquisition of a domain name www.widgets-info.com and construction of an online website where customers can purchase and download your product.

Designing your own site and sales letter will take some work and you must know what you’re doing or all the automation in the world will be pointless because if your online site doesn’t convert traffic into sales, it’s game over. Your site or online business MUST convert your visitors into paying customers.

Many marketers hire or get someone else to design their profit generating sites for them. You may have to pay highly for a good professional quality site and high quality sales copy but it is the key to the success of your whole marketing operation.

A well optimized website will pull in free targeted traffic from the different search engines automatically. A high quality sales letter or copy will then convert this traffic into sales and income automatically. To increase sales many marketers buy their traffic from Pay-Per-Click advertising such as those services offered by Google Adwords or Yahoo’s Overture.

Once you have targeted traffic hitting your website… all your marketing procedures can be automated. In most cases, with simple software programs that will run your online business on auto-pilot.

Most professional marketers capture the contact information of their visitors. They follow up with the grand daddy of all automated systems - the autoresponder. Studies have consistently shown, it usually takes from 6 to 7 follow-up emails before a customer buys your product. The autoresponder is one automated tool you must use with your online business.

Many marketers offer ecourses or free newsletters as a way of automatically keeping in touch with customers or potential customers. An autoresponder can draw visitors back to your site and marketing page again and again, to hear your sales pitch. It is the vital element in your automated marketing system.

Automation of your whole checkout system can be done with programs like ClickBank, PayPal or 1ShoppingCart… these automated checkout systems will take your customers through the checkout process and can deliver digital products or software downloads immediately.

Here Are Some Automation Tips:

* Use autoresponders for follow-ups and building contact lists

* Use automated checkout systems like ClickBank or 1ShoppingCart

* Use simple online videos to explain complex tasks or products

* Use Google Sitemaps to automatically index and update your pages

* Use organic SEO tactics like keyword rich articles to get traffic

* Use RSS feeds to automatically syndicate your content and articles

* Use RSS feeds to automatically build content and webpages

* Use datafeeds to automatically update your products or content

* Use audio testimonials to warm up visitors (the net is a cold place)

* Use a well defined Frequently Asked Questions page or pages

* Use Paypal or a similar system for paying your online business bills (hosting, advertising, promotions) and for receiving payments/commissions - this way you can be away from your business for long periods of time and everything will still run smoothly, on auto-pilot

Once all these elements have been put into place: your targeted traffic, your website with sales page and checkout cart, your autoresponders with follow-up messages, your delivery of purchased products, and a payment system to pay your bills/receive your commissions or payments… you will have constructed an automated system that will deliver sales and income 24/7/365. There are countless websites and businesses on the web doing exactly that - automatically running and earning money for their owners.

Another popular online business model uses affiliate programs and advertising such as Google Adsense as their main sources of income, instead of offering products for sale.

These automated marketing systems are set up in the same way. Only no actually selling is done on the site… these sites pre-sell by giving away valuable information, product reviews, or comparison shopping tips to their visitors. Then and only then are potential customers sent to affiliate sites to make their purchases. With the affiliate (site owner) getting a percentage of the selling price for having referred the customer or client. Some great third party affiliate programs are Commission Junction, LinkShare, Shareasale, and Amazon.

This automated affiliate/advertising website business offers the most freedom and the least headaches. It is an ideal automated business system that if done right can be extremely lucrative for those who put these automated marketing systems into place.

It can be pure perfection where automation meets the Internet, computers and the marketing process. It can be a marvel to behold and a complete joy to experience in action. For those savvy marketers who have perfected this system it spells only one thing - freedom. And a whole lot of it!

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Here’s What I Use To Help My EBay Selling

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I get many requests about the systems I use in running my own eBay and internet business.

To give you the answer in one place, here is the software which I use daily in my own business.

I should point out that much of my own activity is now to do with selling digital information via eBay and from websites i.e. ebooks and software, which is why some of the software programs I use are concerned with this activity.

General productivity

Shortkeys
This is lovely utility which saves me hours of time each week. It is perfect for those occasions when you are required to key in information to websites. For example, how often do you key in your name and address, or a username and password, or an email address?

With Shortkeys, you associate 3 or 4 unique keystrokes with a string of frequently used information. Let’s suppose I want to have a shortkey for my email address, and I set this as ##z1 in Shortkeys. Whenever I am required to key in my email address, in Outlook, on web forms, in Word documents etc, I just type in ##z1 and Shortkeys instantly replaces that with my email address.

There is an uncharged version called Shortkeys Lite which has a limit of 30 items. The full version of Shortkeys allows you an unlimited number of items.

You can get it here: http://www.workwinners.com/nlrshortkeys.htm

Download Accelerator

If you regularly download ebooks or software, and it seems to take forever, you will find Download Accelerator is a useful addition to your portfolio. Download Accelerator increases download speeds by up to 300%, regardless of the speed of your internet connection. I don’t know how it does it, but I guess 89 million users can’t be wrong!

You can get Download Accelerator on 14 day test here: http://www.workwinners.com/nlraccelerator.htm

Ebook Production

Acrobat Adobe
I create all my ebooks in pdf format as this file can be read by anyone with Acrobat Reader, and this includes Mac users too. The way I create an ebook is to write it in Microsoft Word first. Once I’m happy that the Word version is exactly how I want it, I use an integrated converter which takes the Word file and converts it automatically into a pdf file. This conversion preserves everything which appeared in the Word document, including headers/footers, page numbers and web links.

You can read all about Adobe Acrobat here: http://www.workwinners.com/nlracrobat.htm

If you are considering developing your own ebooks using Acrobat, the most cost effective way of purchasing it is to buy online from Adobe’s US site, and select the download option. To buy the download version this is the place to start: http://www.workwinners.com/nlracrobat_dl.htm

At 167 Mb, Acrobat is quite a large software product. If you would therefore prefer to buy the boxed CD version, the cheapest way in the UK is to get it from Amazon. http://www.workwinners.com/nlramacrobat.htm

ebook Covers
It is a fact that showing your ebook in 3D form so it looks like a book really helps to boost sales. Compact Draw is the software I use to create my ebook covers. You can try it for 30 days here: http://www.workwinners.com/nlrcompact.htm

Website creation and maintenance

Website design
I use Macromedia’s Dreamweaver to design websites, and indeed to create eBay auction description pages. Dreamweaver is a premium web design product, and unless you’re going to do serious website design I wouldn’t advise you to acquire it.

It comes in boxed form, and Macromedia will channel any UK purchasers to a UK based reseller. The cheapest way in the UK is to get it from Amazon. http://www.workwinners.com/nlramdream.htm

Image Manipulation & Optimising
I use Paint Shop Pro for picture manipulation and for optimising. This is important for auction pictures, as eBay have a size limit of 50KB on any pictures which you want to upload to their Picture Service.

The authors, JASC, have just released Version 9 of this software. I find Version 8 is perfectly acceptable for everything I want to do, and it’s cheaper than Version 9.

You can’t now buy Version 8 from the author’s USA site, which is unfortunate as this was the cheapest way of buying the product before Version 9 came out.

The good news is that Version 8 is currently half price at the author’s UK site, as you can see here: http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpsp.htm

It’s available for trial at the UK site, and I recommend you test it to see if you can work with it.

Website upload
Cute FTP is probably the best known FTP software. I have used it for several years and have been very satisfied with the software. http://www.workwinners.com/nlrcute.htm

Website hosting
ProWebSpace are excellent and reasonable web hosts which I have now been using for over a year. I transferred to them from another host with whom I was having lots of problems. Now, I have a better service, and it’s at one third the price! Of course, you can get web space for nothing from a variety of ISPs. Take a look at http://www.freeisp.com

You only need companies like ProWebSpace if you intend to “go commercial” in your internet activities. If you do, it’s important to have a paid service as this gives you the right to kick b**t if ever you experience hosting problems. If you would like to know the hosting company who I moved from, email me. If you think you need professional hosting, this is definitely where I would start. http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpws.htm

Newsletter and other Mailings

As my newsletter has grown, I’ve tried various ways of managing my mailing lists. I currently use Press-Manager, and have found their service to be very easy to set-up and to use. It’s a web based service, and all mailings are performed from their site. This means there’s no software to be installed, I can manage my mailings from any PC and my ISP no longer bears the mailing load. http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpm.htm

Autoresponding

You may know that the use of autoresponders is one of the keys to marketing on the internet. I use Promasoft, and have found it can easily handle everything I want. http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpsoft.htm

I hope this glimpse into the systems and services I use has been helpful.

Good luck in your own internet business developments and in your eBay selling.

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Ten Ideas To Create More Income

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Almost everyone one of us knows somebody who needs to make more income right now. It might even be the person staring back at you in the mirror! If you need to make more money here are 10 thoughts you can use to do that.

1. Start a home party business. These have been around for many years but they really continue to thrive. They are a lot of fun to do and you can generate more income around your own schedule. Party ideas today include companies such as Tupperware, Amway, and so on.

2. Join an Internet network marketing business. This is a method to make more money from the comfort of your own home and build a worldwide business.

Internet-based products work very well for network marketing because there is no shipping involved. For example global domains are one of the largest network marketing businesses that offer an Internet based product.

3. Go to Tjobs.com and look for things you might be able to do. There are companies looking for people to work from the comfort of their own home.

Many of these will pay you an hourly rate and incorporate benefits as well. You can research the jobs for free, but you do have to pay a $15 yearly membership to apply for them.

4. Sell information products online. The number one reason people go online is to look for for information.

This offers you an excellent way to make more income selling information that resolve problems they have. Clickbank.com is the main digital information provider in the world and they have a free affiliate program you can join.

5. Start a craft business and sell your crafts online. If you’re handy this can be a great method to turn a hobby into a part-time income. You can sell your crafts in various ways including county fairs, or even starting your own website or blog.

6. Do affiliate marketing and get paid to sell other people’s products. This is one of the most popular ways people are earning more money right now. Affiliate marketing gives you the benefit of not needing your own products or website as the merchant will offer those for you for free.

7. Start your own blog and sell advertising on it. Initially you may not be able to charge much for people to advertise on your blog, but as your traffic increases so can your advertising rates. One way to get paid early doing this is to join the Google Adsense program.

8. Start a service business in your community. Offer a wide range of services including lawn mowing, tree trimming, delivering groceries, dog walking and so on. Become known as the jack of all trades!

You are only restricted by your creativity when you want to create more income. These are just a few thoughts to help you get the juices flowing.