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

The ability to target your Adwords adverts to particular websites — ‘Placement Targeting’ was introduced by Google in mid-2007. It’s a revolution in online advertising but no-one talks about it — it’s still too new for most people to have tested thoroughly.

However, experts like Armand Morin and Pay-Per-Click expert Gauher Chaudry — who have so many websites out there that they can test every aspect thoroughly — are finding that they can cut their Adwords advertising costs significantly, while improving conversion rates, with placement targeting.

And it’s all about piggy-backing on other peoples’ success! Why do it the hard way?

This — very simply — is how it works:

1. Do a Google search for your keywords — for example ‘Diet’. The search returns will give you the sites that rank highest on that keyword.

2. Check which sites have Adsense adverts on them (there is even software which will do this for you now, such as Adwords Digger and PPC Web Spy – both free).

3. If a high-ranked site suits your strategies, click on the link in the Adsense area ‘Advertise on this site’ and sign up.

4. If you use a TEXT AD, you’ll have to compete with 3 to 4 other advertisers. But you can use other (more expensive) ad types and dominate the advertising on a site. Few people are using image Ads (‘Widgets’) and video Ads to good advantage yet, so now’s your opportunity!

5. You pay on a cost-per-click or a cost-per-impression basis (CPM = cost per thousand), which is far less expensive.

6. Your advertising is focused on highly targeted sites where visitors are already well ‘qualified’ by selecting to visit that site.

7. So your costs are lower and your ‘conversions’ (ie click-through) are higher.

You can learn more about Placement-Targeted Adwords at:

· www.google.com/ads/sitetargeted.html

· https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=342

Have Fun!

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

Analysis – Ugh! Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website.

Visitor Behaviour. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

I’m A Hit! There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be.

For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The More The Better! The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

The Wrong Visitors? It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your layout or graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Poor Performers. Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Exit This Way! Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page.

In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

Keywords And Phrases. After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your

site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of the wrong type of visitors are being misdirected to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment.

Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

Time To Celebrate! Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your business’ name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.

In addition to the information your Hosting company can provide, one of the most powerful – and free – tools for analysing the behaviour of visitors to your website is Google Analytics – see www.google.com/analytics.

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

There are many very useful resources out there on the Web – and lots of them are free! So why not make full use of them?

Here are some more you can try…

1. Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/

2. iWeb Tools: http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/

3. Way Back Machine: http://www.archive.org/index.php/

4. The Open Directory Project: http://www.dmoz.org/

5. Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/

6. NicheBOT- http://www.nichebot.com/

7. Associate Programs: http://www.associateprograms.com/

8. Web Page Analyzer: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/web-page-analyser.shtml

9. Conversion Ruler: http://www.conversionruler.com/

10. Favorite URL Bookmarking (FURL): http://www.furl.net/

Have fun!

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

Google and other major Search Engines provide a huge range of services of direct value to those who do business online – most of them FREE of charge! In this post, I’m looking at:

The Google Home Page has separate links that allow you to search the Web, Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Mail, Video, Groups, Blogs, Books and many more. You can use all this functionality both to research your markets and to drive traffic to your websites—much of it free!

Google Apps features several web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including Gmail^TM, Google Calendar^TM, Google Talk^TM, Page Creator^TM and Google Docs^TM – all FREE!

Google Apps can provide your day-to-day office systems functionality—particularly if you travel a lot and need to log in from other people’s computers or cybercafés. It can also shorten the amount of time spent on business interactions between companies, by allowing sharing of information, such as negotiating contracts using shared documents and performance reporting.

Gmail and Google Docs have become helpful for communication and collaboration. Gmail can be used to manage marketing campaigns by importing contracts, lists and using tags to create mailing databases. The use of these systems together can help streamline business processes.

These processes save time by eliminating the need for emailing documents back and forth. Using shared spreadsheets, organisations are able to eliminate the need to send hard copy updates.

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

What Can Google Do For You to Build A Lucrative Business?

How many of us realise just how much power we have at our fingertips with the Web and just how much of that power is brought to us by Google?

But just what can Google do for you? Or, in reality, is it a more question of what can’t Google for you?

Well, the answer is that Google can boost your business and make you rich beyond your wildest dreams! But, as ever, there are only 24 hours in a day, and you’ll want to see success pretty quickly if you’re not to get disillusioned, won’t you?

So let’s have a quick look at some of the Google services that we’ll be looking at in future issues…

What Sort Of Money Can You Make Using Google?

But first things first! Before we go much further, you’ll want to know how much you can make using Google!

Well, that’s going to vary on your appetite, your market place and the products that you’re going to offer. Some people will be happy making a couple of hundred bucks a month, while well-run sites in busy market sectors can make well over $1,000,000 a month, just on one site.

When you are looking at market places that have 15,000 or 20,000 searches monthly and you’re in the top areas in Google, there is no reason you cannot make $1,000 to $10,000 a week or more!

What Google Tools Are Most Lucrative?

OK, so Google is not only the largest search engine but it provides search and on-page advertising, office applications (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc), maps, images, email, blogs, video, feeds, groups, forums, news, product search, shopping, payment, etc, etc. Google offers such a huge range of services that it would take a 20-volume encyclopaedia to explain them all - and I doubt if any single person in the Google empire knows all the answers!

But which of these will make you money? The answer is that you can make money out of virtually every aspect of Google’s services, although it depends on your interests and level of expertise .

Making Sense Of Adwords and Adsense

So let’s start by focusing on the linked services of Google Adwords and Google Adsense – these are the two principle tools that it’s simplest for most of us to start with.

Adwords and Adsense are part of the huge industry of Paid Search – usually known as ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC).

AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers PPC advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads and, more recently, image Ads (‘Widgets’) and video Ads. The AdWords program permits local, national, and international targeting.

Adwords text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines and a website link. Image ads can be in several different sizes and videos are generally in the YouTube format (www.YouTube.com – Google bought YouTube in late 2006).

Adwords ads are shown either when someone searches for a trigger keyword on Google’s search engine on www.google.com (a ‘search’ ad) or can be displayed as an Adsense ad on a site published by someone unrelated to Google that has related context (a ‘contextual’ ad).

And the really easy thing about Adwords and Adsense is that you can set up your accounts for both in just a few minutes and absolutely FREE – and you can learn how to use them very cheaply!

But, used to good effect, they can be very lucrative.

How Do I Get Started?

It couldn’t be simpler, really! You don’t even need a website or a product to get started making money with Adwords!

You can set up an Adwords campaign and send traffic to an Affiliate site or a merchant site such as Amazon.com (although Google may not allow Ads from multiple affiliates pointing at the same website).

And, if you’ve not done this before, you’d be surprised at just how easy all this is! Please do me a favour – go and try it out!

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

The Secret Of Web Success…

Getting Traffic to your website is the secret to any successful on-line business, in just the same way as footfall is vital to a high-street business.

But traffic is no use unless your website converts them from ‘Suspects’ to ‘Prospects’ or from ‘Prostects’ to ‘Customers’. We’re talking Conversion here – it’s no good getting traffic to your website if it’s not visitor-friendly and doesn’t convert well!

For starters, your ‘landing page’ should immediately make clear to the arriving visitor the purpose of the site and what benefit the reader will get by looking through it.

One… Two… Three… You have 3 seconds to convince them. So put on your ‘Prospect’ hat and look at your website objectively!

Think of this: If you were expecting company at your home, there are certain things you might do in advance. You would make sure your home was clean, that there was fresh soap and clean hand towels in the bathroom, and you might prepare some snacks, or even an entire meal.

Preparing your website follows the same concept. You want to make sure that things are neat and tidy. Make sure that your navigation follows a logical sequence. Make sure that you have plenty of good content, and that everything is spelled correctly.

All Join In, Please!

You also want your visitors to be able to participate in your site – to take action. Look at each page, and determine what type of action your visitors can take. Do you have a forum or blog? Do you conduct polls or surveys? Do you have a subscribe box for your opt-in list on every page of your site?

Make absolutely sure that your website is ready for company! Also make sure that your pages lead your visitors to take the action that you want them to take, no matter what that may be.

That is the first and most essential step of traffic generation. If your site isn’t pleasing and welcoming, any traffic generation activities you do from this point on are wasted! Take the time, and put forth the effort to make your site as good as possible – and learn to look at it from your visitor’s point of view!

Your Invitation…

Once your website is ready for company, you are ready to start inviting that company. You do not need any special tools for traffic generation. What you need is your computer, an Internet connection, your mind, a willingness to do the work, and knowledge. That’s all it takes.

Action List

Make absolutely sure that your website is ready to receive traffic.

• Do you have an opt-in page?
  
• Do you have a subscribe box on every page of your site?
  
• Look at each page, and determine whether there is enough content, and if there is an action for your visitors to take on each page.
  
• Make sure that your site is optimized for the search engines.

SEO Tip

Make sure that you are using all of the best known Search Engine Optimization techniques, such as making sure that you have clean HTML code, that you’ve used your keyword effectively, that you have keyword rich text links and alt tags, and that the title of your website, in your HTML code, has your main keyword or phrase as well. Take some time to explore SEO techniques, so that you can draw natural search traffic as well.

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

1. Search engines ‘like’ your website if it has good content. If it looks like spam, the search engines are smart enough to treat it like spam.

2. Don’t use duplicate content – all good search engines are smart enough to recognize this – but you can successfully use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and other automatic feeds to build your website content – and yes, Armand Morin does this to build his 9,000 blogs!

3. Get quality websites to link to you. The search engines like this and take notice. Don’t bother using link exchanges or just sign other blogs with your links. While this won’t penalize you, it doesn’t help you at all.

4. Use the keywords you are targeting strategically on your pages in the headlines, sub-headers and body text. The search engines give weighting accordingly.

5. Use the keywords you are targeting within the < TITLE > tags, as the search engines give this a lot of weight.

6. On both external links to your website and any internal links, use ‘anchor text’ with keywords you are targeting in the links.

7. Similarly, if you have images that click to pages, include your targeted keywords in the ALT parameter within the < IMG > tag.

8. Generally, use common sense and stay away from trying to trick search engines (cloaking tricks for example). It can get your site penalized or even banned from the search engines.

9. If you don’t know how, or don’t want to spend your time doing search engine optimization, just search Google for SEO – there are many excellent resources out there.

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