Here’s your invitation to a Tele-Interview I’m doing on July 8th with Thomas Power, Chairman of Ecademy, on how to find buyers and network using Facebook and Twitter…

“Can you afford to not to be in a market with 300 million Prospective Buyers?”

That’s the question that THOMAS POWER, Chairman of ECADEMY, asked us at the first #Twalk Twitter workshop recently hosted by Ecademy.

And that’s the question he’s going to answer in a Tele-Interview on Wednesday 8^th July…

Twitter and Facebook are the two KEY markets that are HOT right now and dwarf all the other Social Media sites as the place to win new prospects and build sales.

As Thomas says: “Twitter is growing beyond exponentially, with 1000% growth in the past year and 100% in the past couple of months alone! Projected use should reach 100 million by Christmas and it’s set to explode in the next year, once the school-age generation really catches on.”

And, with 200 million users, Thomas says “Facebook is a huge and active marketplace. So any serious entrepreneur is missing out badly if you’re not using it!

“You need to get into Twitter and Facebook NOW.”

As on-the-pulse entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki says: “Twitter and Facebook are the best way to market your product today – and both are free”.

Only 200 lines are available and are likely to be snapped up fast, so REGISTER NOW at www.ThePowerNetworker.com if you don’t want to be left behind…! It’s FREE!

Talk with you then!

With annual purchases on the Internet well in excess of $100 Billion, I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a lot of money to be made online.

There are people out there right now raking in millions from Web businesses and Internet Marketing – which should be a major source of motivation for anyone who wants to be successful with an online business!

However, while it’s nice to dream, in reality, success really only comes with hard work.  And you’ll also have to address these 4 crucial success keys…

Goals: The first key for succeeding with any business – Internet or otherwise – is to set goals – both long-term and short-term goals – and then work up a plan to implement them.

Think of your long-term goals in terms of your vision as to what you want out of your business and what it will give you – lifestyle, freedom, whatever. Don’t just say ‘I want to be rich’ – who of us knows what we mean by that? Be specific: how much income a month will give you the lifestyle you want?

Your short term goals or objectives can be cumulative and should all build to you accomplishing your long term goals. If you set your goals and then make sure you work hard to reach those goals then you will be well on your way to being successful.

To make sure you achieve your goals, you need to have a Business Plan that forms an outline of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.

Setting your goals should be a major part of your plan. And your plan will need adjustment from time to time – but I always find that thinking through the business in order to formulate a workable plan is some of the most productive time you can spend on your business!

Belief: Life and business for few of us is a ‘bed of roses’, and you’re going to have to weather the storms that you’ll inevitably face. So you need to ‘keep the faith’ – in yourself and in what you’re doing. You need to have an unshakable belief that you’ll make it and always believe that your plan will produce for you. If you don’t believe in yourself and what you’re doing then without a doubt you’ll fail. No one has ever been successful without believing in themselves. Your belief will help you to work hard, since you know your work will ultimately pay dividends.

Focus. As Humans, we’re pre-programmed to look for the next thing and we love to believe it’s going to be better, even though in reality it rarely is! But that’s how evolution works, after all. Every language I know has a similar phrase to ‘the grass is greener on the other side’. And I’ve seen so many people flit from one idea to another for their business, often abandoning good ideas for awful ones – and I’m the first to raise my own hand and shout ‘guilty’! We all do it, don’t we?

Look – there’s nothing new under the sun! So there’s plenty of experience out there of what works and what doesn’t. Don’t think that your bright idea is going to be any different.

Most successful businesses do the same thing that others are doing but do it better, cheaper or with a different spin on the marketing. And they only succeed by focusing on one thing at a time. Yes, Richard Branson has lots of different businesses in his Virgin empire – but he built them one by one from the ground up, by focusing on one thing at a time!

So it’s absolutely critical that you don’t allow yourself to get distracted by the latest and supposedly greatest ways to make money. Stick with what works and let it work for you. Focus, focus, focus!

And the last key to being successful with Internet Marketing is to always stay the course. Choose how you want to run your business – preferably using a proven method for how you will make your business successful. Then tweak that method as you move forward – but try to stick with the same basic philosophy.

Plan, focus on what you’re trying to achieve, stick to your plan and believe it’s going to work – and you’re 90% of the way there!

And, as Winston Churchill said, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE UP!

PS: If you want to see belief in action, check out Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

PPS: Watch out for your free Business Plan Template an upcoming post on Planning Your Way To Business Success!

Happy Planning!

John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Urmil and I had a another very interesting 2-on-1 consultancy call with one of the Mastermind Program Members recently, which covered a lot of great insights into how to get high rankings for a website!

And I thought you’d also like to share some of the ‘insider’ tips on linking strategies that emerged – so here goes…

As I mentioned in my recent blog post Linking Tips To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking, you can’t just put up a single website and expect customers to find it amongst all the other billions of websites out there! You need to build you own little net of interlinked websites to catch the traffic you seek – and with billions of searches a day there’s lots of traffic out there to catch!

The linked Hub and satellite Mini-Sites model is about catching free highly motivated and targeted search traffic from Google and the other search engines and driving it to niche product mini-sites and then channelling this traffic through affiliate links on your Hub sites to merchants such as Amazon, collecting a commission on all purchases.

Bear in mind also that there are two types of buyer that you’re looking to capture:
•    Those that know exactly the product they want to buy (eg a Samsung Digital Media Centre – YPK-5JZB)
•    Those that are still looking generically for a ‘Media Centre’

So you’re trying to get the first group to click through the links on your Mini-Site dedicated to a specific product and shepherd the latter group to your Hub Site, where they can compare various models and make a buying decision.

Now, your Hub Site is going to be positioned in a fairly competitive market – I looked at Google search and competition criteria for your Mini-Sites in an earlier Blog Post – Niche Product Strategies For Your Hub And Mini-Sites.

So your ‘web’ of Mini-Sites is there to trawl for traffic from lower-competition keyword searches and send this to your Hub-Site, as well as creating a ‘net’ of inbound links to your Hub sites to improve their ranking.

The major purpose of your Mini-Sites is thus to get high ranking in Google as ‘content-rich’ traffic-catching web pages. Each Mini-Site should thus focus on one product and each Mini-Site page should be focussed on, and optimised for, one keyword (or ‘long-tail’ keyword string) relating to that product.

The primary links on your Mini-Site pages should be contextual (keyword-based) and should link to the relevant product page on your Hub Site, providing in-bound links to your Hub site.

You should also include links on the bottom of your Mini-site pages to other Mini-sites, to spread your ‘web’ and get Google ranking ‘credit’. But make sure your links aren’t ‘reciprocal’ – site A should link to Site B, B to C, and C to A, etc – no two sites should just ‘swap’ links back to each other, as Google discounts these.

Your Hub Site is the portal to your suppliers, so the primary links on your individual Hub Site pages should link to your suppliers, through your affiliate links. Your Hub sites can also carry page-bottom links to other Hub sites, but should not link back to your Mini-Sites.

Other linking strategies you should use include:
•    your internal links between pages – you should particularly make sure that your ‘Site Map’ is properly set up and all the links work properly, so that the spiders can crawl through every page of your site and onward to your other sites using the links discussed above.
•    Your Useful Links page can be used to boost your search engine ranking by linking to other, unrelated websites. Again, the Useful Links on your Mini-site should link to other Mini-sites; those on your Hub-site should link to other Hub-sites. The linked sites need not be on related topics – your ‘media centre’ site can link to your ‘freezer’ site, etc – all you’re seeking to do is provide the conduit for the spiders to find each of your sites and to improve your search engine score by providing in-bound links. Again, no two sites should link reciprocally to each other – always link A to B to C, etc.

This can all get to sound a bit complicated but the underlying principle is Keep It Simple – think like your prospects when writing the text and setting up the purchasing process and think like a search engine when setting up the linking strategy.

Happy linking!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

To be successful on-line, as in any business, you need to build three things with your customers – CTR: Credibility, Trust and your Relationship. And there are two further words which should be central to your whole web business approach… but we’ll come to those in a moment!

Credibility: When your prospect reads your ad or your website sales page, you want to make sure he believes any claims you make about your product or service. Because, if there’s any doubt in his mind, he won’t bite, no matter how sweet the deal. In fact, the “too good to be true” mentality will virtually guarantee a lost sale…even if it is all true.

Building credibility is all about showing that you – or your product – have a proven track record. There are many ways of building credibility and this requires you to give ‘social proof’ of the reliability and benefits that you and your product provide.

If you’ve been in business for a number of years, you can point to this and your hundreds or thousands of satisfied customers, providing testimonials from customers to whom your product has brought specific benefits or success.

But even if you’re just starting out and don’t have a ‘track record’ yourself, you can use a variety of ways to build credibility and increase the perception of believability – because, after all, it’s the perception you need to address up front!

Here are some tried and tested methods that will help boost credibility:

• Avoid baseless ‘hype’ – make sure your copy is accurate and truthful.
• For existing customers, who already know you deliver as promised, emphasize that trust.
• Include testimonials of satisfied customers – include full names and locations, if possible.
• Use 3^rd party testimonials (endorsements of the product type or solution by industry experts) or “lift notes” (brief notes or letters from a person of authority, possibly a celebrity).
• Pepper your copy with facts and research findings to support your claims (credit all sources).
• If you can swing it, adding a celebrity endorsement will always help to establish credibility.
• Give your own credentials or background (and photo) – or those of an expert if you’re using her/his real or ‘implied’ expertise (relating to your product or service, of course).
• Cite any awards or third-party reviews the product or service has received.
• Tell them a lot of your widgets have already been sold – “10 million people can’t be wrong”.
• Include a GREAT Guarantee or return policy and stand by it! You may give more refunds, but if you sell three times as many widgets as before, it may be worth it – crunch the numbers!
• Reveal a ‘flaw’ about your product (that’s minor or isn’t really a flaw). This helps alleviate the “too good to be true” syndrome and builds trust and your reader will start to subconsciously believe that you are revealing all of the flaws…
• If you advertise a deadline, don’t keep changing your deadline – you’ll reduce credibility.

Trust: There are two simple words which should be absolutely central to your whole approach to marketing on the Internet: Underpromise and Overdeliver.

Just tell people you will give them one thing and then give them what you promised plus a little bit more. The results of adopting this simple philosophy and incorporating it into your Internet business can be truly remarkable.

What makes this concept so incredibly powerful for Internet Marketers is that it doesn’t really take a whole lot of additional effort to give people more than what they expect. The huge value we deliver on our training courses and to the Internet Tycoons Mastermind Group are examples of this.

But by spending just a little bit of extra time giving you a few things you did not expect we established ourselves as someone who not only delivers what we promise but gives you even more. Ultimately this translates into a rock solid reputation and long term customers (you) who will buy from me over and over again. All of which equals more value for you and more profits for us!

Basically, you need to be kind and generous – and to do this genuinely. But in this business being consistently generous results in more than just a personal feeling of satisfaction, it results in huge profits. The benefits of practicing the underpromise and overdeliver philosophy far outweigh the extra effort and expenses on your part.

Kindness really does pay – and on the Internet it pays in a big way!

Relationship: The third pillar of your internet business is your relationship with your prospects and customers.

You’ve probably heard it said many a time that ‘the money is in the list’. Well, this isn’t the way of the world. People buy from people – people they Know, Like and Trust. So just think ‘KLT’.

So the key is to build an excellent relationship with your customers – and ‘the money is in the relationship’ is a rather more appropriate approach to your business.

How to do this? Well, there is plenty of free advice on the web about building your relationship with your customers. But the crucial thing is to get in touch – and keep in touch at least once or twice a month – with your customers and prospects.

Make them know you value both them and their business – but do this in a genuine way, without hype and fluff. Give them value!

It’s amazing that less than 10% of businesses actually follow up with their customers! When was the last time you had an email from your local shops, dentist or hairdresser?

Web technology provides a wonderful platform from which to develop your relationship with your customers.

You can set up your own web log, or Blog (see ‘Blogging For Profit’ on page 14) and you can personalise email very effectively using autoresponders to stay in touch with your customers (more on autoresponders in an upcoming issue of ‘Web Biz Insider’).

But you need to make it personal in order to build your relationship – there are any number of companies that send you their standard brochures and expect you to be ecstatic, aren’t there (perhaps your bank comes to mind)?

Two of the easiest ways to generate greater profit in your business are to get your customers to buy from you more often and to increase the average value of each purchase!

And, if your customers appreciate your relationship with them, they are much more likely to do both!

So, get inside your customers’ minds and think how you can build your relationship and boost your profits!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

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