Internet Business Guide

For First-Class Progress

Category: Internet Marketing

5 Ways To Market Your Site
A great way to market your Internet business is to please your visitors with excellent content and make them stay & browsing your site.

Duh! Nothing new, right?

Still, up to now some of you may have only been concentrating on pleasing mainly the search engines spiders. If yes, well, then it’s time to adjust your strategy. Why? Because no matter how many search engine spiders visit your site, not one of them is going to buy anything, or click on any of the monetization links on your site.

Don’t neglect spiders, though. You do need both people and spiders finding your site. Yet you’ll want to increase word of mouth and have visitors come back for more over and over again.

The way to attract both is to have great content on your pages. Duh! (again)

So, here are five ways to market your site using content…

1. Include high quality content that’s relevant to your site.

Content is king!

You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? Of course… because it’s true.

The job of search engines is to locate relevant content. They love plain text and videos that are of high quality. They can’t read image or flash files. So add lots of text and videos.

In addition, visitors will only stay if they are interested in what you offer and begin reading and/or watching.

If your site is about business consulting, don’t have content about environment conservation. This only repels visitors, as they get upset that they aren’t getting what they came for, information about business consulting.

Stay focused and on topic.

2. Ensure your content is easy to understand.

To interest visitors, your message must come across in your text and/or video. If in a conversational style, all the better. Just don’t try and use fancy, intellectual terms within your writing if you’re not used to that lingo. How many times have you visited a website and found the content is so difficult to understand that you simply never returned?

Websites are really all about people. You not only want to make a good first impression, but you want to engage visitors, entertain them, and/or enlighten them. You do this with real communication, not just words thrown out there, trying to impress. If you’re not communicating on the level of your audience, it will turn them off.

Your marketing message should come across as believable, convincing, and “you.”

3. Write exciting and creative content that makes visitors want to stay and explore.

If you want to completely turn off all visitors, just add content that is totally boring and dull.

Don’t drone on and on… saying the same thing over and over again. If you can say it in 300 words, say it. Don’t add another 200 words just to meet any questionable “posting guideline.”

Get creative in your copy. Write in an attractive style and stick to your own individual attitude and style. If you write some interesting articles to include on your site — topics that you know would be of interest to your visitors — you’ll find they will stay and browse longer, and will be more likely to purchase or click on those money making links.

And remember, the content must, must, must be original. If it’s copied & pasted from other sites, or you post an idea that’s initially from another person or site and you don’t attribute it in your copy, both search engines and visitors will click the back button in their browser and won’t return.

4. Avoid typos.

Avoid typos and errors in grammar and punctuation as best as you can.

Certainly you’ve visited a site or even received some type of advertisement in the mail that contained spelling errors or was written badly. It can be distracting to your message.

I mean, I myself have typos all the time as English is my second language. Though I think I’ve learned & improved quite a lot over the years. Still, if in doubt, use one of the many spell checking services available online. (Can’t find the one I used to use though.)

5. Ensure keyword phrases flow naturally within the content.

Take whatever extra effort needed to limit the use of keywords in your copy. If tons of keywords are randomly thrown in, it will seem obvious to readers that you are not writing for them but for search engines. As a result, the text usually doesn’t flow or read well.

Make sure all keywords and keyword phrases fit into the text so they are hardly noticeable.

As for keyword density, about 1 to 3 percent should suffice.

If I write content myself, I let my creativity flow and write the whole content up first, all the while dismissing any rules and formalities. When I’m done I go through the text two more times to do my spell check and then my “SEO check” (or vice versa).

Bottom line?

Use exciting and targeted content on your site in plain text and/or video format to attract both humans and search engines.

Stay focused. Be cool. :-)

—Marcus Hochstadt
June 30, 2011
AutoResponder Tracking To Insanity

Do you track Click-Through Rates (CTRs) in your AutoResponder using one of those obscure tracking URLs they generate? They look pretty much like so:

http://clicks.aweber.com/…
http://click.icptrack.com/…

What does that imply in some of your subscribers’ mind?

“That guy/garl is observing whether or not I clicked on that link.”

Do you agree that there are people who don’t want to be tracked or observed? Do you further agree that, if you constantly convert standard links to “trackable links,” some of your subscribers will deliberately avoid clicking on links in your AutoResponder messages?

If you agree to both, why then do you still track?

Oh I see… you want to know the percentage of those who did click through. Sounds obvious and reasonable.

Well, knowing what I just said above, what about a smarter and more effective approach? :-)

Track only once every now and then rather than each and every time.

When you track, say, every other month your subscribers are accustomed to standard links in your messages and likely won’t notice when you do decide to track click-throughs in one message. Thus your CTRs are more accurate and representative.

—Marcus

June 18, 2011
Why The Video Boss Is Important For Your Internet Business

Are you running an Internet business? Well, I think so since you’re reading my blog. ;-)

Whether you’re running a sole Internet business or are about to bring your brick-and-mortar business online, you will definitely benefit if you do some marketing for it. How else can you grab the attention of several people and make them your customers? Doh!

One way is through video marketing. This involves video production or creating a certain video clip that can help promote your online presence, but you have to conceptualize it first. You don’t just come up with any video without thinking it through, because all your efforts will be useless if the video you created isn’t really effective in promoting your precious Internet business.

More often than not, you will also have to make use of video sharing sites (YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc) one way or the other.

How Video Marketing Works

Some folks refer to it as video promotion, but the simple concept of this particular means of marketing is that you make use of videos to spread the word about your business, services or products and to develop your brand along the way. You need to think of video clips that can showcase your online business in a fun and interesting way.

Video marketing is somehow like article marketing. Though, instead of letting your current and potential clients read text, you allow them to watch videos that are related to and are promoting your Internet business. This concept works because we humans are very visual creatures.

After you’re done creating those promotional video clips of yours, you just have to upload them to a number of video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo so that people can see those videos marketing your business. Alternatively, upload them to TubeMogul to spread them across a number of video sharing sites all at once.

The Importance Of Video Marketing

Any marketing method is significant since it helps put the business involved on the map. However, video marketing is more important especially in these modern times wherein both the public and the search engines have developed a certain love for videos and are always hungry for video content.

Come to think of it… Video promotion or marketing helps decrease a website’s bounce rate. It also helps your site rank higher in search engines. Plus, your video clips themselves will rank high as well.

That’s quite a double treat, don’t you think? It can also aid in image branding and increasing credibility as well as professionalism of your Internet business.

Check Out The Video Boss Of Andy Jenkins

While many have already understood the importance of video marketing and how it can help their online businesses, several folks, Internet marketers and business owners are still skeptical. This is because they think video production is too technical and out of their league.

Good thing we have The Video Boss of my friend Andy Jenkins. What’s The Video Boss anyway? This is a training course and coaching program that can help the average individual make cutting-edge, high quality and, most importantly, profitable videos all on his/her own — using simple tools that might already be installed on your computer.

You should check out the free video tutorials inside The Video Boss and learn from his strategies and techniques. Apply them to your Internet business and video marketing efforts and increase YOUR bottom line (as I did). :-)

—Marcus Hochstadt

Update: The Video Boss has been shut down and taken off the market. So I removed the links from this blog post.

June 2, 2011
Autoresponder Open Rates, So What?
If you’re using an autoresponder — and since you’re reading my blog you certainly are — you’re eventually concerned about the Open Rate of your list. If not, or if you’re still sending your newsletters in plain text format only (which I used to do until just recently), then you can dismiss this post for the time being. Bookmark and come back to it once you do.

The other day I received a “last newsletter issue” from a spiritual business person in which he expressed the concern of apparently low open rates. He grieved that only 25% would actually open the issues questioning why he should continue sending the advice if 75% would not even bother reading it (my own MyGermanCity.com’s stats exemplify the opposite, BTW).

This made me realize that even high profile Internet business people are still concerned about open rates? I was under the impression that dignitaries would be aware of the idiosyncrasies of open rates and that we have to take them with a grain of salt — especially those who use AWeber‘s main package (like I do).

Are you aware that a portion of your audience has set their e-mail client to block the display of images in e-mails received? And are you aware that AWeber tracks the open rates by slyly including a reference to a tiny image from within e-mail campaigns? So those who block the display of images in e-mails would read your message but the autoresponder stats would imply that they have not opened it.

On the other hand, and this is another oddity, if your subscribers open an individual message more than once, they’re being counted as often as they accept the display of images each time they open that issue. In other words, let’s say Joe opens the message today and then next week again, it will be counted as if two subscribers opened your newsletter. Yup.

This may count especially heavily for e-zines with a ton of high quality content where subscribers will likely read it again and again.

Solution?

Well, I welcome further elaboration on this matter. Besides, I’m aware of extended subscriptions in which one can activate tools which resolve this issue.

Still, what about those who are not willing to pay double price and still, to some extend, trust the current stats? How can you improve its accuracy?

Let me list a couple of solutions on how to get more valid open rates in your e-mail campaigns…
- Include a distinctive header image without which the issue looks somewhat incomplete.
- Include a unique image for each individual newsletter issue that will make your audience want to display pictures so they can see what interesting graphic or pic you show them this time.
- Have your newsletter inundated with images so that it can’t be read without accepting the whole enchilada. This is a personal choice, and it’s not my favorite, but it may be highly effective for select audiences. The downside is that the open rate could ridiculously shoot to the roof since folks will likely open individual issues more than once and thus need to unblock images each and every time or else they cannot read a single word of it.
What do you do or use to refine the accuracy of your open rates? Or do you still send your issues in plain text and thus don’t really care about them?

—Marcus Hochstadt
February 10, 2010
Content Vs. Design

I will offer some opinions here, and you can take them or leave them. However, due to my experience (and actual tests run), I hope you will take what I have to say to heart! :-)

What is it that gets visitors to your Web site to stay there, browsing, looking and buying? Is it the design? Is it the layout? No, it’s the CONTENT. The written content keeps your visitors on your site and viewing your pages.

What causes your visitors to purchase from you? The content. They read, they read some more, they find good points that creates enough interest for them to purchase.

Let’s imagine you go to a Web site and the design is wonderful. Fancy, creative graphics. It really wows you. But the content is boring, or hard to understand, or it simply doesn’t capture your interest. Will you be encouraged to buy from them?

Another important question: Will you come back? It’s extremely doubtful. Maybe you’ll go back to get that wow effect from the design again, but not because of the content. Right?

On the other hand, if you go to a site that provides excellent content (like articles or informational text) you will likely bookmark that page. You will probably share that site with others.

Maybe this page with fantastic content has just a basic design, or an ugly default WordPress template. But you still bookmark and share it. You are likely to return for a visit. And this is because there is content that is more than interesting to read and that holds your attention.

Finding a template for a Web page should be a fast and painless process. Google doesn’t care about your design, they only care about the written content and the human behavior based on that content.

My opinion is that folks spend too much time on the design of their site, modifying the template, etc… way too much time. They miss the boat in this regard. What they should concentrate on is having great content that captures interest and encourages people to return.

High quality content goes a long way to getting your visitors to come and stay. You will attract many more visitors through the search engines. You will SELL your product because of that.

Obviously, the above wouldn’t necessarily apply to those selling templates or promoting design services… ;-)

And I can’t say I am completely innocent when it’s come to getting carried away sometimes with the design. But I am ridding myself of that compulsion step by step!

—Marcus Hochstadt

July 18, 2008
Finding Your Profitable Market

When in search for a product or service to sell online (or off, for that matter), you must take some steps to get the perfect market (or some call it niche) that will have a high desirability in today’s marketplace. The public must want it! :-)

Normally, you’d research the supply and demand of a market first, then locate the product that market is demanding specifically. But let’s take a look at starting with the product first.

So how do you find that perfect thing to sell in your Internet business endeavors? There are many workshops that offer advice and recommendations, but it’s really you that has to come up with an answer. It’s crucial to find something that will give you a good chance at success.

First, get a list of products or services that are potential items you would like to market. Each thing on your list should be something you have some knowledge about… Don’t try and sell ski boots when you have never been skiing or have even looked at a ski boot. Of course, if you absolutely LOVE ski boots, you can always learn all about them! :-)

That brings up the other point… and one brought up by almost every seminar ever given on the subject—find something you love! When you are going to be spending hours and hours of your days (and sometimes nights) setting up your Internet business, working on building traffic and getting things moving, and this for the next 3-5 years, you better enjoy what you are doing.

So… the items you put on your list should be products or services that reflect specific skills or aptitude you have, hobbies you are interested in, or things you know a lot about. You can add items that you have a high interest in learning, too. Just don’t make the runway for takeoff too long by needing to devote a lot of study to the subject first.

The idea is to leverage and improve your strengths, not your weaknesses.

Break down your list into three sections. First, list all the things you enjoy doing, such as baking, drawing, traveling, etc. Then list all the things you are good at doing… which could also overlap the first list. Now list your unique skills, perhaps playing the piano, computer programming or the like. And finally, list all the things that you have a lot of knowledge about.

Work out for each thing on your list what could be a product or service entailing the action involved with each one. This will at least give you some ideas—maybe really interesting and unique ideas at that!

Let’s say you came up with a product to sell such as fishing equipment. Some folks feel more comfortable to narrow the product/market down to something less competitive and more specific than “fishing equipment.” Perhaps you could just sell reels, lines or rods. Now you will need to find out if there is a market for this product. You instinctively know that there is, but research it anyway.

Find out how many out there will be your competition (or possible future partners). How much demand is there for the product? And is that demand high enough to sustain a business? Is it just too low, go back up a step or two until the demand number gets exciting. And ask yourself how you could create something unique—something that could be a Unique Selling Proposition that would make you stand out from the competitive crowd?

Turning your product or content rich Web site into a profitable Internet business venture is really doable if you are doing something you love, you are selling a product that is in high demand, and you stand out from the crowd in what you offer. You’ll have fun running your business every day, and will know how to handle customers’ questions effectively.

What an adventure!

—Marcus Hochstadt

July 10, 2008
Competition Vs. Joint Venture

Here’s a new look at your future Internet business endeavors. Think in terms of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Rather than compete with other similar Internet businesses, you can join them as partners, escalating your business more than you ever imagined. :-)

In other words, Internet business doesn’t have to be about being “better than the competition” but can be about doing some business together and therefore growing together.

As an Internet business owner, you are likely searching out ways to increase your reach within your market, breaking down barriers and rocketing your revenues. And of course, you want to do this in a short amount of time!

In recent years, so many Internet businesses have united to augment their survival odds. It becomes necessary, I suppose, with many small businesses failing (or quitting) within the first five years.

So you hear more and more through various means that work-at-home parents and entrepreneurs have been looking into the possibility of working together with those who were competitors, thus becoming more successful in their endeavors.

Yes, many marketplaces these days are highly competitive. Of that there is no doubt. But when you look long and hard, you can find ways of overcoming. That’s why I wanted to include this topic for you to read about Competition Versus Joint Venture. It’s something to consider in your Internet business.

Taking part in a joint venture is basically teaming up with others (one person, a group or a business entity) in order to expand your business influence and to create a powerful market presence. It’s important, if you are going to do this, to do it soon… because otherwise your competitors may beat you to it!

Formally speaking, in a joint venture, an entity is formed between two parties (or more) to take part in economic activity together. They both contribute equity and share in the expenses and in the control of the business. It can be for only one project or be a continuing relationship.

So much to the formal stuff… ;-)

In a joint venture, you won’t be transferring ownership in any way. It’s not a merger, just a sharing. So what do you share with a partner?

You can share markets, assets, or knowledge, and of course, you can share (higher) profits!

For example, a large company may decide to start a joint venture with a small company to get some intellectual property not available to them otherwise, or to obtain hard-to-come-by resources.

Or a small business person with a Web site and hundreds or thousands of visitors per day shares the traffic with another webmaster who is in the same market but with eventually a slightly different audience (not necessary though!). Both have excellent products or services and share their excitement by recommending each others products. As a result, each of their audiences get more of what they want and improve their lives, so it’s a true win-win-win situation.

The advantages are great! It’s possible to expand into foreign markets, lower production costs, increase sales, etc. Collaborating with others definitely has pluses.

Bottom line, rather than invest large amounts of resources to enter into new areas of the marketplace, you can join forces with others who have identical products or services. And you will possibly find yourself able to compete (together with your partner) against some of your larger competitors—or even joint venture with THEM later, too!

So, before talking about “that competitor” again, why not shift your mindset from Competition to Joint Venture?

—Marcus Hochstadt

July 7, 2008
Why I Do Not Use FeedBurner

Ever heard of FeedBurner? Stupid question, huh…

It seems as if the majority of bloggers use FeedBurner to distribute and track the use of their RSS feeds.

Every day I come across blogs showing off the neat little counter proudly displaying how many subscribers they have, just like so…

Here is the thing I have with Feedburner.

Feedburner feeds are, per default, in a format that looks like this…

https://feeds.feedburner.com/KeywordPhrase

And more strangely, when you view a blog post in a feed reader their URLs look like this…

https://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/KeywordPhrase/~3/279888022/

Isn’t this a bit strange? How do you know to which site or post you’re subscribed to or what that post is about?

Another thing is word-of-mouth. Imagine you send the FeedBurner URL of a particular blog post to a friend. You eventually provide a short description to entice him/her to click trough. Yet still, it is fairly hard to imagine what one will find when clicking on such a ghost link.

Whereas, when one sends an RSS feed link of one of my blog posts to someone it is clearer what you will find when you click on it since it serves as a “URL headline.”

Do not underestimate word-of-mouth! I get lots of visitors from mail services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Live Mail. Many of them enter my blog on individual pages. (My blog announcement list mentions the home page only.) It is likely some of them picked up the post’s URL from my RSS feed and sent it via e-mail to a friend.

How often did you hear that the headline is the most important part of a message? With a great headline you can pull a reader to your site to read all the rest. You can entice him, brag him and encourage him, but with a Feedburner feed… where is that “URL headline?”

Let’s compare the following two RSS feed links. Assuming both lead to the same location, which one would make you click?

https://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/InternetBusinessGuide/~3/279888022/

AWeber Secret

See?

This is my main reason why I’m not a FeedBurner.

Another thing is that FeeBurner owns your feed when you use their services. Theoretically, they could do whatever they wish with it. They could even terminate your account. In such a case, you would instantly lose all of your subscribers. Think that won’t happen?

Recently, there was a guy using myspace.com as platform to social network with others and promote his upcoming first music CD. He built a large following in a fairly short time period. He had lots of friends and even established connections to popular names in the music industry. What happened?

Myspace.com terminated his account two days before his CD came out, without providing any reason.

BANG!

What was supposed to become a hit became a flop.

Bottom line, if, after reading the above, you still think it is advantageously to use FeedBurner, I at least strongly encourage you to remove the counter (unless it shows thousands of subscribers.)

—Marcus Hochstadt

April 30, 2008