Increase your sales

1. Nail Your Niche

I’m sure that you already know what a niche is and that it’s important in your business, so I won’t belabor the point here. Design your web site to be a targeted resource center for your niche market. You’ll gain repeat visitors that are interested in that topic and increase your sales overall.

2. Fabricate REAL Freebies

Freebies are a great way to give people a taste of what you have to offer, gain traffic, and increase subscribers, but it must truly be free to work.  Otherwise it destroys your credibility and will actually reduce the number of sales you get.

Worse still is when people offer freebies that are total garbage full of affiliate links.  Make your offer genuine and you’ll improve your bottom line.

3.  Lasso Leads

Websites prove to be excellent lead generation tools and you’re missing a lot of sales if you aren’t working to capture leads for your business.  Appropriately marketing your products and services to your permission based leads can increase your sales tremendously.

4.  Track Your Traffic

Visitor analysis and complete website tracking is extremely important for any online venture.  It’s the only way to track what’s working and what isn’t for your business.

5.  Elevate Emotions

When creating sales pages and promotional materials for your products and services, be sure to engage the reader’s emotions.  Triggering your reader’s emotions will always increase your sales.

6.  Design For Dollars

When it comes to generating revenue with a website, you’ve got to design your site to make money.  It should be compatible with all the popular browsers, engage your target audience, and lead visitors by the hand to make a purchase.  Your website design should have one goal and one goal only — make the sale.

7.  Pen A Plan

Sit down and write a plan for how your website will generate revenue and gain targeted traffic.  It doesn’t have to be anything formal, but a marketing plan is a must to increase your sales.  You must plan to profit.

There are tons of other strategies that will help you increase your sales, but this basic list is a great place to get started.

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Here are eight public domain use ideas to get you thinking:

1. Use public domain to increase your organic search engine traffic.

As I said in the idea above, you can cut up public domain content into separate articles and distribute them, but you can also slice it up to create articles for your own website. Make these articles keyword rich and submit them to search engines to gain a high search engine ranking for your keywords. The number one reason people go online is for information research. By setting up keyword and content rich webpages, the search engines will rank you higher and more of those targeted visitors will find you.

2. Use public domain products to upsell your own products.

Upselling is a really powerful strategy for increasing your revenues, if you have additional products to offer. Public domain can give you the opportunity to offer an ‘upgrade’ to your customers. Simply use a public domain product as it is or modify it slightly and you have a product to use in your upsell.

3. Create a digital information product.

This is probably the easiest and most often used method for taking advantage of public domain. You can easily compile the material as is (or with a few slight edits) and turn it into an ebook. Then you can sell the ebook, give it away to subscribers, offer it as a backend, etc.

4. Use public domain as a bonus to your own products.

Just like we talked about using it to upsell your products, you can also use it to create really great bonuses for your products. People love bonuses. Sometimes people will buy a product just for the bonus if it’s something that they view as unique.

5. Use public domain on your website as content and partner with Google AdSense to generate revenue.

Use the material you gather from public domain to create an information rich website. Then place Google AdSense ads within the site. Every time someone clicks on the AdSense ads, you earn a percentage of that advertising revenue. If done right this can add up very quickly.

6. Create a physical information product.

Just as you can create a digital information product out of public domain material, you can also create a physically delivered product and ship it to customers. The real advantage to creating a physical product is that it may work better for your niche audience (especially if they aren’t very sophisticated) and physically delivered products can generally command a higher price.

Some options for a physical product could be to read public domain material into a a microphone and then record that onto a CD, divide the material into sections and turn that into a home study course, or simply repackage the information into a booklet.

7. Create articles or mini courses out of the public domain content.

People and online businesses are starving for great content. You can literally slice up the material you get into smaller articles and distribute them online to gain traffic to your website. This is called article marketing, and it’s a great way to gain targeted visitors to your site, especially when the content actually comes from public domain works.

8. Create s product based on a public domain work.

Some people call these types of products derivative works. All it really means that you use the public domain material as the basis to create something completely different like a video, software, Cd, etc.

There are tons and tons of other ways that you can utilize this freely available material and make money with it. Hopefully this will give you some idea of the possibilities and give you a good jumping off spot for using public domain in your own online business.

Want to know more about public domain?  Get your Free Copy of 10 Days to Smokin’ Traffic Now!

Click the link to learn more about
Public Domain Riches

Or learn more about the
Public Domain Treasure Hunter’s Kit

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You probably never really thought about all the pre-selling tools that are available to today’s online entrepreneur, but technology makes it possible to connect with your potential customers in tons of new ways!

I’ve written about what pre-selling is before, so I won’t go into the details again.  Here’s a short definition to make sure we’re all on the same sheet of music:

In the online world, pre-selling is the art of warming up your visitors, building trust, and putting them in the frame of mind that they want to do business with you.

If you need a more in depth explaination, check out the article, “What is Pre-Selling?”

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s start talking about the actual tools you can use to pre-sell your visitors and turn them into customers.

Of course you already know that basic written content is one of the best pre-sellers.  In fact, you probably already write and distribute articles, load your website up with relevant content, and send your content out in a newsletter.  That’s kind of the “standard internet marketing” that everyone does.

So let’s think out of the box a bit and take a look at some of the pre-selling tools that you may not be fully utilizing…

Pre-Selling Tools

1.  Blogs

Well-done blogs go beyond the basic website and take pre-selling a little more seriously.  Generally speaking, blogs show a little more of the personality of the owner than websites do because they’re less formal, more spontaneous, and friendlier.

When you visit some blogs, you feel like you’ve entered the inner sanctum of the writer… this can be a great pre-seller when it’s done correctly!  A great blog that welcomes visitors with a smile can go a long way toward turning visitors into customers.

2. Reviews

It surprises me how few people take advantage of the great pre-selling power of writing reviews.  Keep in mind that I’m not talking about the kind of candy-coated reviews that claim every product is excellent and worth buying or the bogus reviews pre-written by merchants for affiliates.

I’m talking about buying a product and writing a genuine review of what you liked and didn’t like about the product.  Believe it or not, I often sell more of a product when I write a less than stellar review!

People appreciate and reward honesty.

3.  Commenting

I kind of lumped this one all together to mean several different things so this article wouldn’t be soooo long.

Any time you leave a comment on someone’s blog, on a forum, in a message board, at YouTube, etc., you are pre-selling youreself.  It pays to make your comments useful and timely because visitors will often follow the links in those comments to learn more about you.

It’s kind of like pre-selling them on YOU, inviting them to your little part of the world (your website), and then using other pre-selling tools at your disposal to pre-sell them on products that you promote.

4.  Newsletters and Ezines

Newsletters and ezines are a really great pre-selling tool because they give you the opportunity to build rapport with potential customers over the long term.  This long-term relationship with your subscribers allows you to pre-sell them on a wide variety of products and services over the lifetime of the relationship.

5.  Freebies

There are soooo many freebies that you can put together to pre-sell whatever you want to recommend to your visitors.  You can create ebooks, audios, videos, reports, ecourses, or just about any other freebie that you can think of.  Each free product that you create helps to establish a relationship with potential customers and increases your pre-selling potential.

6.  Podcasts

Podcasts are a great way to instantly build rapport with potential customers and establish an immediate relationship.  There’s just something about hearing another human voice, no matter what they’re saying, that establishes an immediate connection.  All you need to do to use this great pre-selling tool is to provide great information.

Just remember, it’s not a radio commercial!

7.  Videos

Just like podcasts, videos are also a great pre-selling tool.  Not only can visitors hear your voice as you’re helping them solve a problem (that ultimately leads to a product available for purchase), but they can also see either you or your visual props in the video to help solidify the message in their minds.

In addition, well-done videos go a long way toward promoting you as a professional who is credible… all worthy goals when you’re pre-selling!

8.  Social Networks

This is probably the most important pre-selling tool in your toolbox because of the very nature of a social network.  Pre-selling and social networks fit together like hand and glove.

In a social network like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or Twitter you’re building a social relationship with others online… the very definition of pre-selling.  In other words, you become friends with others through these social networks, pre-sell them your products, and your “friends” buy the products that you’re pre-selling because you have an established relationship with them.

And that’s my short list of the best pre-selling tools available to online entrepreneurs.  If you aren’t taking advantage of these options, you really owe it to yourself to start taking a look at how you can integrate some of these pre-selling opportunities into your business… especially social networks.

If I’ve missed a really great pre-selling tool here, I hope you’ll let me know!

I can virtually guarantee your pre-selling success
with this one tool… read more.

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“How do you make an ebook from your own PC?”

I figured a video was worth a thousand words… so I created the video below to show you how it works step-by-step:

The Steps…

In the video I assumed that you would want to create an ebook that was in PDF format… which I highly recommend. PDF files can be read on any kind of computer, the reader is free and usually already installed on most computers, and it’s a format that most people are used to using.

Here are the steps that I lay out in the video for those who don’t want to actually watch it:

1. Create your ebook in Microsoft Word.
2. Print your document to Cute PDF Writer.  This is the program I use and I love it.
3. Open up Cute PDF and add your links and other enhancements.
4. Save your changes to the PDF file.
5. Open you ebook up in Adobe Reader and make sure it looks the way you want it to.
6. If you want to make changes, go back to Cute PDF and make the changes.
7. Get your ebook out there!

The whole process is surprisingly quick and easy.

If you have a program that you think is better than Cute PDF, please let me know.  I’m always interested in new and better products that make my life easier!

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Okay, I know what you’re thinking… why in the world would I want to save a silly YouTube video?

For your Swipe File of course!

There are all kind of really good videos people put together that you can use as the inspiration for your own videos.  And the best part is that putting YouTube videos in your own personal swipe file is sooo easy.  Here’s the post that shows you how:

Save YouTube Videos

Quick and easy… just the way I like it!

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If you’ve been watching the news, you probably heard the news that a HUGE snow/sleet/ice storm blew through my neck of the woods last week.  We lost power at our house on Tuesday night and spent two days in below zero conditions.  (luckily, our house held the heat pretty well the first two days and it didn’t dip below zero until the second day!)

As we were about to pack up the kids and move to a hotel to wait out the power (it was just too cold to stay here), my husband lucked into finding a generator (a long story… but he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.  I think it was divine intervention!).

We hooked up the heat and waited it out until the power went back on Saturday night.  Boy did we have a lot of laundry to do!!!

Anyway, let’s just say that I have a new appreciation for all our modern conveniences… especially electricity!

I can’t believe how much I missed my work on the internet too! Cable was out.  Dish was out.  Cell towers were out.  Even landline phone lines were missing in action.

What did we do in the old days (you know when we were kids) and didn’t have access to all that technology 24 hours a day?  It was kind of like stepping back into “Little House on the Prairie.”

Enough about my cold week…

SMM FAQ

Let me ask you a question… How much do you know about SMM?

I have to admit, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an area of interent marketing that I’m still learning about, so I’ve been doing a fair amount of research into the subject.

To that end, I came across a Social Media Marketing FAQ put together by Steven Snell that comprehensively answers a lot of commonly asked questions about SMM.

It’s really well put together… just in case you’re looking for a few answers of your own!

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If you want to get the rest of the story, you’ll have to subscribe to Answers eMagazine and read the January 2009 Edition.

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I came across an article written by Steve Hodson over at The Inquisitr called Is Twitter the next affiliate link hunting ground? In the article Steve talks about someone who placed an Amazon affiliate link in one of his Twitter posts using one of the “tiny link” services.

Apparently, it kind of ticked him off.

His argument against putting an affiliate link in the Twitter post is that:

“Affiliate sales are one of the largest money makers on the web but typically users visiting a site or blog will be able to tell that the links are indeed affiliate links; whether it by by disclaimers by the author or other means.  Sure there are the unscrupulous ones who do everything they can to hide them but in general most bloggers are up front about this sort of thing.”

What?!?

Since when do you need to put a big sign on every one of your affiliate links to let every visitor know that the link goes to a product that they might be interested in, but it’s not yours?

Obviously you have to have terms of service, legal, and privacy statements on your blog, which Twitter has too, but this guy is a bit over the top!

After all, no one is holding a gun to anybody’s head to make them click on those links!

On Twitter, if anyone was putting too much junk out there, no one would follow them and they would eventually lose out on any marketing momentum they gained from using Twitter in the first place.

“With Twitter though there is no room for disclaimers or notices about affiliate links regardless of how honourable the person posting might be – or might not be. how are we going to know that the link we just clicked isn’t going to take us to some marketing page that we never wanted to go to.”

I’m not sure you ever know, with absolute certainty, where any link is going to lead you.  It’s just part of internet life.

Since Twitter is built on a social system where no one gets noticed (followed, indexed, etc.) unless others are following them, spammers will never really make any headway there.  Twitter has been around since April 2007, so if the spammers were going to really sink their teeth into it, they would have already.

I think the idea of putting affiliate links on Twitter is kind of rude, but it doesn’t really bother me when it only happens once in a while…  What do you think?

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So this Twitter newbie went on over to Twitter.com and opened an account. I even went so far as to customize my page so it looks nice.

But so far I’m one of those people who just don’t get it… But I have to admit that it’s a little addicting.

I find it kind of interesting to find out what others are posting… much of it very personal… but I’m still having trouble understanding how this is going to help me get more traffic, make more sales, or increase my online revenue.

Here’s how I look at the time I spend on my business… I try to spend as much time as possible doing productive activities that directly lead to income. That means that I might be working on a promotional article, creating an email marketing campaign, writing an ebook, etc. for the majority of my “work time.”

I try to limit the non-revenue generating activities as much as possible by paying others to do it whenever possible… like accounting and taxes for example. However, there are still some tasks that I prefer to do myself like answering email. It doesn’t directly contribute to my revenue, but I think it’s an important business function that I prefer to do myself.

As far as I can tell, as a complete Twitter newbie, Twitter really doesn’t seem to be a revenue generating activity. At this point it just seems to be sucking up my time surfing through other people’s twitters and posting occasional comments. In addition, now I have to spend time doing my own twitters too!

But… I’m committed to trying this out for awhile. I’m going to stick it out for a couple of months and see if I can *get it* too!

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