How can you tell whether your terrific new brain-child idea is a killer or a dog?

Well, as any seasoned marketer will tell you, there are no sure-fire ways. There are NO right and wrong answers in marketing – there is not a single expert who can tell you whether your new product will fly or sink!

As an example, a very seasoned marketer and copywriter I know admitted to me recently that he launched a new product last year that he was convinced would sell like hot cakes…

Did it? No – it bombed!

So not even the experienced marketers get it right all the time!

But yes, there is a way of making absolutely certain-sure that you have developed a winning product…

As web entrepreneur Nick James explains, it’s quite simple:

You allow the punters to tell you whether or not they want your product….

And he’s deadly serious when he says that the only certain way to be sure is to test your product in a suitable, email broadcast, newspaper ad or direct mail campaign…

The punters will pretty soon tell you whether or not they want to buy or not…. Either you will get lots of orders, or you will just about break-even, or you will hardly get any orders at all. You just wont know until you test!

Now, do you want to know the single most powerful piece of information in the product development and/or direct marketing business?

This information is worth more than everything I have previously told you, put together. It’s this:

Believe the punters - not yourself.

There. I really don’t like to tell anyone not to believe in themselves…

But in this particular instance, you must put all your faith in the punters.

It doesn’t matter how much of a ‘pet’ your product is. It doesn’t matter how much your old mum and your friends tell you it’s a GREAT product. It is wholly irrelevant that you have seen scores of adverts for similar products at a higher price. - If the punters don’t respond to your advert, then you must drop that product and move straight on to the next one.

The only exception to this is if you have a modest response, and you think you made a slight mistake… (say by advertising in completely the wrong place, or too expensive, etc.).

In this case, it might be worth testing again. If this second attempt also fails, then drop the product immediately.

Don’t try and second-guess the punters.

Don’t worry too much about how or why the punters didn’t buy your product. You will probably never work this out… I never can!

The greatest mail-order gurus in the world often find themselves scratching their heads in disbelief at what works, and what fails. They are continually amazed that their ‘dead-cert’ product flops completely, and their rank outsider, no-hoper product which they whacked-in for a quick test, results in bulging mail-sacks.

There is often no rhyme or reason to this. Who knows why the punters will go for a product, or leave it alone? It could be one word in the copy, a ‘feel’, the picture, the price, their perception of your ability to deliver…. ANYTHING. You’ll never find out.

Now the big difference between a winner, and a loser is that the winner will listen to the punters no matter what he thinks. If the punters tell him that his red-hot favorite product is a lame dog, then he’ll drop it immediately. Losers will back their hunches right down the line until they go broke.

They just know that this product is a winner…. If the marketing fails, then they attribute it to the media, or the day of the week, or the price, or the delivery time. They don’t believe that the punters could ever reject such a super product.

So they promote it again, and again and again until they have lost a very great deal of money. Then they believe. But even after all this, they still harbor a sneaking suspicion that if they’d just altered the coupon shape, or increased the money-back guarantee to 30 days, or…

You get the idea….

To become a direct-response winner, you MUST believe the punters…

The punters KNOW – you only BELIEVE.

This principle can be summarised in this vital concept:

MILK YOUR WINNING PRODUCTS, DROP YOUR LOSERS.

Source: http://www.ebizhelpers.com/article~cat~ecommerce-general~articleid~4047.htm © Nick James.

John Thornely

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Seasoned Marketer Larry Dotson offers these ideas for increasing your Web sales:

1. When you make your first sale, follow-up with a “thank you” email and include an advertisement for other products you sell. Follow-up every few weeks or months.

2. Upsell to your customers. When they’re at your order page, tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale. They could just add it to their original order.

3. Tell your customers if they refer four customers to your web site, they will receive a full rebate of their purchase price. This will turn one sale into three sales.

4. When you sell a product, give your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product. This will multiply the sale you just made.

5. Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products. You could include an ad on or with the product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights and sales on the back end product.

6. Cross promote your product with other businesses’ products in a package deal. You can include an ad or flyer for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you. You can do this very effectively on your ‘Thank You’ page.

7. When you ship out or deliver your product, include in the package/web page a coupon for other related products you sell. This will attract them to buy more products from you.

8. Send your customers a catalog of add-on products for the original product they purchased. This could be upgrades, special services, attachments, etc. If they enjoy your product they will buy the extra add-ons.

9. Offer gift certificates for your products. You’ll not only make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate, but when the recipient cashes it in they may buy other items from your web site.

10. Send your customers free products with their product package. The freebies should have your ads embedded in/printed on them. If you’re giving physical products, such as bumper stickers, baseball caps, t-shirts etc, the ads printed on them will allow other people to see your ad and order.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Have you spent any time recently looking at Google Books?

It’s amazing what you can find there… Anything from Shakespeare to the day’s ‘Random

Category’ - be it Steam Engines, Confucianism, Housekeeping, Self-development, Political Psychology or Arboriculture!

And there are plenty of classics — from Francis Bacon to Napoleon Hill.

Sadly, they don’t yet have a category of ‘Internet Marketing’ or ‘Web Business’ - or even just ‘Business’ for that matter!

But you can search the millions of books already available — try searching for ‘copywriting‘ - there are some useful resources!

But there is a wealth of material and you can often pick up a lot of valuable information at no cost.

Not surprisingly, the whole site is geared to getting you to buy the books you look at—which you can do through a range of bookstores.

So, all in all, it has similarities to Amazon and some other online Bookstores that increasingly allow you to ‘see inside’ the books on offer.

Google Books does, however, allow you to look at much more of the material inside a book than other sources—and there are some where you can read quite a few chapters—even if the deliberate policy of missing alternate pages (or whole sections) in some chapters can spoil your fun a bit!

So go over and have a look at http://books.google.com/books

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Go to the Google Research Tool at www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en and type a single letter into the box.

As you type, Google shows you the most searched-for terms beginning with that letter!

Continue typing letters into the box and it shows you the most searched-for terms beginning with those letters.

AND it shows you how many results it found – giving you a measure of the competition for the keyword phrases shown!

Talk about presented on a plate! This is a brilliant tool for Keyword and Niche research!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

“My website looks very nice — but I don’t get any enquiries or sales from it”.

How many times have you heard that?

My first website — a property site — cost me far more than it should have, because I didn’t really know anything about selling on the web. I put the site before the customer.

I hunted around until I found someone who seemed to offer the kind of site I was looking for. She produced a nice-looking website (she was a graphic designer!) — but one that was subsequently described to me by a copywriter as being ‘typically corporate in approach’ — all about ‘us’, with no great appeal to a visitor, no single focus and no convincing call to action.

A bit of a put-down, heh?

And — more importantly — no great traffic as a result! Even though the site eventually reached a Google page ranking of 3 (by reason of the large amount of information I put up on it), it didn’t bring in the punters.

Was this the web designer’s fault or mine?

The answer is — both! It was a case of ‘the blind leading the blind’. I hadn’t really worked out who my targets were and how to win them over, and she didn’t understand enough about commercial marketing to make me do this before even starting out on formulating the website. She ‘did’ corporate brochures!

All About Us – Not You!

The typical website out there is ‘all about us’ and little or nothing about the visitor or what they actually want. Never forget that someone only visits your website because they are looking for information or to solve a problem or need. Think about it — what are you looking for when you browse the Web?

This is why the standard ‘corporate style brochure’ on a web page really doesn’t work. Your website needs to capture your visitor, entice him/her to stay and browse further — no matter what business you’re in!

You can actually do this very easily: create a site which is full of information — full of ‘nuggets’ the visitor gets an immediate benefit from — and where they’ll want to return.

Mouthwatering Detail

Develop a site that describes, in mouthwatering detail, how your product or service

creates the exact results they’re looking for.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in — whether you are directly selling a product, building a list of prospects or a public service website — you still need to fulfill your visitors’ needs and involve them, if you want them to return to your site and find it valuable.

The Big Myth

And here’s a BIG MYTH. Most businesses’ websites will not make a sale on a prospect’s first visit — unless you make them an ‘irresistible offer’ so compelling that your visitor just can’t go without buying (which many single-page sites can do, with good copywriting).

Typical ‘conversion rates’ that the experts achieve are only in the range 1 to 5% of visitors — so 95 to 99 of every 100 visitors to your site are likely to leave without buying.

So your website should focus on starting a relationship with your prospect, so that you can convert perhaps another 20 – 30% of your visitors over time. You need to engage with your visitor and make it worthwhile for them to do two things:

· Opt in to your ‘free offer’ and

· Return to your site later to buy.

If you succeed in getting your visitor to opt in, you can build your relationship — and this is primarily about building his/her trust in you — and encourage him/her to return to your website, for instance using a series of emails sent out by autoresponder. Tests typically show that it may take anything from 5 to 10 contacts with a prospect before they trust you enough to buy.

Clear Site

One of the most successful commercial website styles is one that looks like a letter. It can be a single site or multiple-page site (each ‘page’ can be hundreds or thousands of words long).

Each page should look like a letter and each should aim to promote a single product or service — gently but inexorably leading your visitor through to a specific action, whether it be to opt-in, download a free report that contains more information or to purchase.

Unless your site is purely for information, it should not have numerous links and buttons at the top or down the side of the page, which can distract the reader and lead them away from your site.

The exception to this (for example, see the diabetes site mentioned above), is where the whole of a multi-page site acts as a carefully crafted sales machine, focused on getting the visitor to opt-in and return again.

Lead Your Prospect

Interwoven into the text (‘copy’) on your site, you should have links to request your free report or whatever is being offered. These links, scattered throughout the letter, lead to a form for the visitor to complete, so you capture (as a minimum) their first name and email address, with permission to stay in touch.

Getting this permission (hence ‘permission marketing’) is absolutely necessary if your visitor is located in a country that has ‘data protection’ or privacy policies, such as the UK.

And don’t worry about what to give as a ’free report’. This can be distilled sections of a few chapters of your information product (if that’s what you’re offering) — some marketers simply adapt sections of the sales letter on their web page!

You can use this direct response website approach to identify your target audience — visitors literally ‘hold up their hand’ by requesting your free report (although there are quite a few ‘freebie seekers’ out there, too).

Once you have your visitor’s contact details, you can nurture a relationship with informative emails until he/she is ready to purchase from you.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

If you want to succeed online, you have to have a strategy (or theme, a purpose, or community) for your website, with a central focus on a specific WANT that your prospects have. Then, you find products which follow along the theme.

So, the three keys to creating income from ANY web site and ANY theme, according to Terry Dean, are:

1. Have a lead product that people WANT.

2. Have freebies at your site that follow the theme.

3. Have multiple backend or supporting products for the theme.

You can’t develop a business around a single product. Even if you are promoting a single product upfront, it is not the product that people want.

They want the BENEFITS they receive out of the product.

When designing your site, think about that ever abiding “WANT” or “GOALS” that your prospects have with them continually.

Things such as: more money, weight loss, online success, being sexually attractive, self-defense, etc.

These ultimate benefits are what your prospects are really seeking.

So, don’t base your business just on products.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Here’s how to do quick research on a market… and cutting your losses.

Set up ten different Affiliate campaigns in ten different markets:

· Sign up as an affiliate for suitable products at ClickBank.com or Amazon.

· They give you your affiliate link

· Use Google Adwords to drive traffic to your Link

· Check daily how you’re doing.

If you’re making sales and covering your ad costs—stick with it…

… and get out of the ones that don’t pay as soon as you’ve got some results.

Try it!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Using Google to find HOT Niches!

Want to dominate the Web — but Stuck for ideas for niches?

Would you believe that Google will actually show you how you can make money on the Web? Sounds too good to be true?

Well, here are three ways that Google will show you exactly what’s hot just now — and what products sell on a seasonal basis!

What’s Hot Just Now, Mr Google?

Here’s a little trick using Google Products (formerly ‘Froogle^TM’), a focused search engine that allows you to search for products for sale on the internet.

But you can also use it to see what’s hot today and what people want right now!

Go to www.google.com/products and look at the list of products below the search box. They are stuff that people are searching for right now!

Now, press ‘refresh’ and you’ll see a new list come up — these are live searches on Google, so you can see the kind of things that people are currently searching for.

Look for the products that come up most frequently and find ways to turn them into

niche products you can offer!

Trendy Niches!

You can use Google Trends in a similar way, but it also lets you see seasonal trends and even compare different search topics on the same page — a very powerful research tool.

Go to www.google.com/trends and you’ll see two lists. The one just below the search box shows you what people are searching for just now. The numbered list below that shows you Today’s Hot Trends.

You can also see an expanded list of hot trends at www.google.com/trends/hottrends.

These are things that thousands of people are searching for now, so use some of the ideas on www.Internet-Tycoons.com to see how you can provide what they want!

‘Tis The Season!

You can even compare searches by entering several topics in the Trends search bar, separated by commas! Try looking at the seasonal trends for searches on Fishing, Cricket and Baseball.

Not surprisingly there are spikes around special events, such as the World Cup and so on.

Target Your City!

But there’s another very powerful tool to aid your Web domination strategy hidden away in Google Trends!

Below the trend graphs, you’ll see a list of the Countries and the Cities where the terms were searched for most often. You’ll also see the Languages that were used most frequently to search for the terms.

This is very powerful information — you can target particular countries where topics are particularly hot. And—just think about this— you can even target particular cities with your Adwords campaigns, to maximise their effectiveness and minimise your Awords costs by making your keywords location-specific!

You can even target Google searches in particular languages, where you’ll probably

find that there is little or no competition for very valuable keywords and dominate the market!

Where’s Your Zeitgeist?

Google Zeitgeist is a treasure trove of research and information for your Web Biz!

Anything from Google Trends, what’s behind the stories, and the most popular searches last year and by month.

You can actually do this for each country in the world. Try ‘Bodyboard’ in Brazil, ‘Rabbits’ in Canada or ‘Jack Russel’ (dogs) in Norway!

And Zeitgeist will also show you the headline gainers and losers this month, guiding you as to what’s hot and what’s not!

Go to www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html, open your mind and explore!

So, with this enormous research arsenal at your fingertips, what’s holding you back?

Get out there and get HOT!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Ever spent a lot of money developing products and ideas that nobody wanted to buy? What a horrendous waste - there are so many ideas that people will spend money on!

With Google AdWords, you should never need to invest more than a few hundred dollars - or in the worst case a few thousand dollars - pursuing an idea that won’t work.

Let’s say you’ve got a product idea. The product itself costs $5,000 to develop, and you’re sure it’s a good idea because it solves a really thorny problem.

So here’s what to do: You write a report, ebook or white paper about how to solve that problem. You create an opt-in page where people can get your report in exchange for their contact information.

Then you ‘buy’ keywords, send people to that page and see how many people you can get to opt in. That’ll give you a gauge of interest.

If you absolutely cannot get anybody to opt-in to your report - or if you can’t find keywords that anyone is searching for - then that’s a good sign you should abandon the project before you throw any more money at it.

When people do opt in, you can send them an email (or even call them on the phone) and ask them what they’re really looking for. If your report is any good, they’ll be happy to talk to you, and you’ll get LOTS of input about the kinds of problems they’re trying to solve.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Before you spend a lot of money setting up in your chosen niche, you’ll want to research it thoroughly and test it out, to see what traffic you get and the quality of this traffic – are they ‘hot buyers’ or just browsers?

Hot Tip: One of the ways that you test a niche, before you get started, is to send some traffic to an affiliate site (you sign up as an Affiliate to sell someone else’s product – they’ll generally set up a website for you). If you are getting sales as an affiliate, then you could make sales with your own product.

Hot Tip: Another way to test your niche is to sign up as an affiliate to Amazon and send people to your Amazon affiliate site, using Google Adwords.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com