The Easiest
Step by Step Guide
to creating your own Online Business
another product from www.durban-property-searcher.co.za
Index of contents
Legal Notice
While all attempts have been made to verify the information in this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein.
This publication is not intended as a source of legal or accounting advice. The publisher wants to stress that the information contained herein may be subject to varying state/local laws or regulations. All users are advised to retain competent legal counsel to determine what state and /or legal laws or regulation may apply to the users’ particular business.
The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Adherence to all applicable laws, local and otherwise, governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising and all other aspects of doing business in South Africa or any other jurisdiction is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader.
The author and publisher assume no responsibility or liability, whatsoever on the behalf of the purchaser or reader of this publication.
Any perceived slights of people or organizations are unintentional.
1. Introduction:
Well, first off, congratulations on downloading this step by step guide to creating and starting your own online business.
In a nutshell, we will explain how to setup your very own business online and also give those of you who simply do not have the time at present to create the business, the easy format of selling this product. We’ve made it easy enough to use in the South African and world marketplace and have provided some copies for free in order to get some of the less fortunate beginners started. In order to protect those who decide to sell this e-book, we may limit or remove this free offer at any stage.
For those who are merely going to sell this e-book to existing clients, we will be submitting it to www.Clickbank.com as an affiliate product for ease of directing your clients. The process will all be explained at a later stage. For the time being, we are going to focus on the actual step by step business model of creating your own product, or building your website around your chosen product, in this e-book. Good luck and have fun.
The most important factor here is that you grasp the entire process before starting to formulate your business plan. In order to get the big picture, please read through this e-book in its entirety before you start clicking the blue linked text so that you don’t get confused by any sites you may choose to visit. For those of you with minimal internet knowledge, it may sound a little overwhelming and confusing at first, which is why we encourage you to read through the e-book a few times if necessary. When you follow the blue link to Bluevoda, you will arrive at the home page and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will find the discussion and assistance section to take you to the free website builder which we will be using in our business. Try to join the help section as soon as possible and watch the tutorials guiding you through the web building process. The help forum is very casual and you will find loads of kind hearted folk eager to help the beginners getting to know the software.
This E Book product is the result of years of research into an ever expanding business known as internet marketing.
In order to make this product successful, it was an essential element to establish the website on which you have found this product.
It was a case of sitting down with all the information that I had gathered and speaking closely with friends, family and business associates about where their frustration lay with the E-commerce industry. Most of them had this in common.
Why should I have to pay Dollars for a product that could potentially be available in the South African market for a fraction of the price?
The solution was the following. I decided to set about creating an online business template that could be applied very easily if one had access to the same information that I had gathered over the years.
In the world of Online Marketing there are literally millions of potential clients each and every day, in the marketplace, who are qualified buyers. Where else, except online, can you find this scenario? This is why I have switched over to an Online business for the flexibility that it offers in terms of home business structure and personal time to do the things that you enjoy doing.
Well let’s get started in setting up our new online business.
You will need:
2. What are we going to be doing :
Step 1. Firstly we will figure out how to build an online central place where all our clients can be directed to in order to purchase our product. This is going to be our virtual storefront. We will do this by using our free website builder Bluevoda (click here to see). Remember that the rental for your store should be reasonable. Try and read the whole book first before clicking.
Step 2. We will need to decide on our product or products. Don’t worry if you have not thought of one yet, because you may change your mind as your business takes shape.
Step 3. We will need to name our business in order to refer to it in our marketing and defining our online links back to the website.
Step 4. We will need to provide marketing for the product to create awareness of its availability. This needs to be cost effective or free in order to get your business going.
Step 5. We will also need to become involved in the networks of people with their ears to the ground in terms of new developments regarding marketing online. This will ensure we keep our product in front of the consumer.
Step 6. We will need to make the purchase for our customer as convenient and easy as possible by automating our website and product system. This will be our product support system.
Our Aim: I will share with you in this e-book the research regarding an online business and any other helpful and relevant topics that you may want to search on your own.
3. Step 1 – Developing a website using a free website builder
Now you may or may not have your product in mind yet, but you will at some stage have to decide on the basic subject matter for your site. Most people will choose something they know in order to have little problem in creating the product review and marketing of the product that follows later. If you decide not to use something you’re familiar with, it is not a problem as the internet is the perfect place to research a topic.
We are going to try and do this though for as little or no cost as possible. It is going to be a great challenge, but it can be done. Read on.
The first thing that you will need to do before you even think of contacting a web-design or web-hosting company is the following:
Take a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and jot down some ideas on the type of items you will like to see on your home page (a.k.a. index page). This will give you some direction on your site map which will enable your customer to navigate their way around your website.
For example you will need to have a “contact us” section, a newsletter or articles section, other sites of interest, space for your heading and site name. Look at the site www.durban-property-searcher.co.za or that of your competitors to give you an idea of possible layout. Whilst researching on the internet you will get some great ideas from other websites in terms of interesting click options in the menu bar on the left hand side or top of the page. Type in your intended product and do a search in the search engine. See what the top 10 “page 1” ranked websites are using in their index (home) page.
By now you are probably on your second sheet of paper and have started to get a vision of what you are trying to create. Make as many notes as possible and keep the names of the sites handy that you think are similar to what you want your website to look like. This is going to give you a better understanding of your concept as you design your websites pages.
Remember to allocate a section of each page to Google advertising and possibly some advertising space in the top right corner for the companies whose products you are offering or some supplementary products to your main product. For example, if your hobby is to make moulds of tin soldiers, you may wish to have paint supplies, brushes, holders for the finished product, magnifying glasses, tweezers etc. as your additional products. You will be amazed at how many suppliers will be interested to be a part of your product marketing campaign.
If you have a site with good content to visitors, the amount of traffic you are generating through your site will be of particular interest to companies who offer products that are complimentary in nature to the products you are selling. This in itself is a revenue stream for you. You can now offer advertising space. Once you have read through the Google Analytics section explained later, you will understand how the search engines will monitor the type of traffic through your site and offer their clients advertising space in the Google Adverts section of your website pages.
This is now your second revenue stream from your website. The first source being your actual product you intend to sell. It is now clear how important it is to plan your site on paper before you go through the cost of employing the service of a web design company if you have chosen to go the more expensive route. You will however need to consider maintaining the relationship with a reputable web company as and when you need to add extra functions to your site. This may include your payment section for your products. One piece of advice that was given to me by a site analyst, was to try not to make the site look like a flea market by implementing all sorts of advertising as it may detract from the effect and reputation you desire from your customers. We have all been zapped suddenly by some sort of advert for an online casino or similar site which changes the whole experience of a site. You are able to prevent these adverts by notifying Google of the types of adverts you wish to exclude from being allowed to display on your website. This step is done when inserting the code into the website for the Google Adsense facility.
There are many free web-builder sites on the internet that will allow you to download a free program, to use to design your new website. We have chosen BlueVoda due to its offering of the free programs needed for this business as opposed to using other web builders which need you to purchase the add-ons separately. Not everybody may wish to use this method. However, the object of this business model is to do it on a budget. Remember how it was mentioned that your start up costs and virtual storefront rental will be determined by the web-hosting company you have decided to use for your business.
Using Bluevoda as your free Website Builder
Should you wish to jump directly to this step to get started, you can go to the BlueVoda site which was used to design the site on which you found this e-book. Their system is a pleasure to work with for the following reasons;
Even though the monthly charge is in Dollars, the conversion still works out much cheaper than South Africa and is irrelevant as the technical support is always via internet anyway, as well as there being no charge for the CMS or Control Management System which you will need to upload new content to your website and also administer any changes you may wish to make to your site. Most South African web hosting companies will not provide this and it is costly to acquire locally. On BlueVoda it is free.
They also send regular emails notifying you of functions you may wish to add to your site.
Last but not least are the video tutorials which give you free step by step video tutorial instruction throughout the site building process which is also free.
An in depth amount of researching was carried out in order to source the easiest method for anyone to do this with little or no knowledge of computers and we hope you have fun in testing different options.
Spend some time gong through their templates until you find one that works well for your intended product or design one from scratch. Please remember to make your site as easy to navigate as possible and get an unbiased opinion from a friend or family member if your colour choices are easy on the eyes to read. This could be the make or break of your site. Blue is always an easy colour on the eyes to read. Just see how your toolbar looks above.
4. Step 2 – Choosing your Product :
The Right Product will have the following Characteristics
The greatest thing about back end products is that you always have a greater profit margin. It happens that as mentioned above, your customers are now more confident in your delivery that your back end products are more successful than your front end product.
So now you have a potential product and a website in progress. A helpful time saver is to copy your heading and menu bars and paste it to each new page you design as you go along so that you only need to do your home page and then when complete you are pasting with all the page-links and characteristics already intact. I learnt the hard way.
5. Step 3 - Giving your business a name
Securing a domain name
There are many websites which enable you to reserve and purchase domain names. Some consideration will need to be put to the type of domain name that you choose as some domains are specific to certain types of industries similar to the need for a government website to end in a .gov.za. or an organization to end in a .org.za …..etc.
As mentioned previously, where we prefer to keep the services of an overseas hosting facility as they are able to offer better packages to suit your website function and have larger servers, the opposite is applicable to your domain name.
Although some web-hosting companies do offer a free domain name, it is a lot easier to renew your web domain annually from a local domain registrar and to receive post locally. The complications arrive if and when you may decide to change hosting companies, as it is difficult to show ownership of the domain name when all the important information is held by an overseas company and you need to retrieve hard copies of important documents when it is a few years down the line. For this reason, it also makes decisions easier when you don’t leave the entire control in the hands of an overseas supplier of services. Most local domain registrars will try and convince you to host with them, but they just cannot compete with the offering of the overseas servers’ bandwidth. Maybe in the future this will change for South Africans.
It may be of consideration at this point to remember that a name that has multiple words should be split using a hyphen as it is often unreadable to a user who does not already know your product. For example, the name “durbanpropertysearcher” seems like a bit of gobbledy-gook. However when read as “Durban-property-searcher”, it is more easily read. This will help the search engines allocate merit to your website title as well us the individual words when being searched by a user.
6. Step 4 – Marketing your Product
The 3 General Types of Online Marketing:
You are not limited in terms of how you would like to market your product or products, however, I would recommend that you choose one and try to master it in order to exhaust all the potential opportunities that each type of marketing has and then implement them into your marketing campaign.
The benefit of trying each as an individual concept will enable you to see which methods are working most effectively in your marketing campaign and to decide where your efforts should be focused.
The type of product you have chosen may determine which method would be of more value in its ability to send your prospective clients to your website. You may have different tactics for each product, but remember that the end result is the customer arriving at the place your product is available.
Remember that once you have isolated a winning formula it will become easier to implement each campaign collectively and let your business run on auto-pilot. This is our aim here. We want each product to maintain itself so that you can then duplicate the result with another product. You may learn something on your next product that will increase the potential of your first product. Go back and implement it.
We want to know that each business idea is only the cost of the hosting each month which should not cost more than R 100.00 plus Vat as we can design our sites now for free. Sure the domain name may cost a few rand, but it is owned by you now and can be sold later if not used.
Internet Marketing
I want you to keep foremost in your thoughts that this type of marketing is invaluable because of the nature of the World Wide Web. The internet is a priceless form of marketing in that anybody can offer their products to a world market. For now though, we want to stay local whilst we set up. Fortunately, the effort that is put into your marketing invariably will remain there until such time as you decide to delete it. What I mean here is that your product may be found by a customer on the internet in 5 years from now and if you have created your business to accept them as a client indefinitely, they will still be able to generate a profit margin for you. This example is to show you what type of potential your business has and to enable you to decide about the level of effort you can put into it. You may decide to work flat out for 6 months and take a break if you are happy with your cash-flow statement, or even retire after 5 years of establishing your campaigns and let the business run itself. This is the joy of having a virtual business in that it is accessible from anywhere, at any time of the day and it allows flexibility of time management.
Direct reponse Marketing
Once your have generated interest with your customer, they will need to be able to correspond with you or provide you with a means to contact them. This is a request for more information on your product. You may now include the option to purchase your product at the end of your information presentation of the product. Most websites will have a page that allows a customer to opt in to a mailing list for future contact. This request from the customer will usually stem from a blog which we will be discussing or possibly a post on a bulletin board or other advert that you have used in your campaign. This will be the foundation of your business as you will need to be able to offer future products to these potential customers. You may have a newsletter that you wish to send out to your mailing list with your latest products. Remember that it will become integral to establish an automated system eventually to take care of this scenario. As your business grows, you will need to surround yourself with the right systems to take care of your business when you cannot. These are potentially lost sales.
Direct Mail Marketing
South Africa seems to have forgotten the effectiveness of a well written postcard. Direct mail marketing could be the only method that you decide to use in your campaign if you need to market directly within your neighborhood. Your product may be such that you have a well established network already and just need to direct these potential clients to your new website. Do you remember the days when you got back to your car at a shopping centre and it was covered in flyers. Do you find that you will more likely take a flyer from somebody at a traffic intersection if they are wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the product that they are promoting. By the time you arrive at the person who is handing out the flyer, you already know that it may be of interest to you and you gladly request more information by taking a flyer. This shows willingness to buy. By capturing the market and directing them to your website, they are able to consider their purchase in comfort and obtain the important aspects of the product. Remember that marketing is really a teaser in essence and the first step in the sales process. Most consumers rarely buy on first inspection unless they already know the product. Try not to sell within your marketing campaign. Traffic to your website is the key to its success.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a mutli-billion Rand industry worldwide and has been the saving grace for many an internet savvy person. We are going to attempt to provide a broad understanding of this subject in order for you to decide if this avenue is something that you would like to try as an additional or alternative means to generate a passive and/or secondary income.
This is by no means a miracle cure to financial freedom and does take an intense amount of research and writing in order to remain in the top 10% of internet affiliate marketers.
The basic principle of affiliate marketing is such that a company or individual provides their product to a marketplace whereby affiliate marketers are able to offer such product to consumers in exchange for a percentage of the sales price received by the company/individual selling the product. In essence an affiliate marketer will carry the risk in terms of advertising costs and use various internet marketing strategies to channel potential buyers to where the product is offered.
In South Africa there are currently only two companies that I would recommend as having properly entered the market in terms of offering local South African internet affiliate marketers a Rand based product that they could sell. I encourage you to look at the potential offered on www.trafficsynergy.co.za and www.offerforge.co.za.
We are going to be setting up your business to cater for the local market and as such would like to stay away from the overseas based Dollar and Pound markets for now. We will briefly discuss Clickbank as an overseas marketplace to source products, purely for information purposes. If you choose to attempt to enter this market, I wish you only the best of luck but have noticed a lack of activity in our local market and am confident that we are still in the beginning stages of this trend in our country. Finally a market we can get into at ground level.
Some of the products mentioned on Offerforge and TrafficSynergy, you may recognise from www.durban-property-searcher.co.za. It is a good idea to decide for yourself which of the advertisers you wish to exclude from your website as some of them may not be relevant to your product offering and may discourage your customers if they feel that the adverts are confusing to your site content. As the site that I have developed is a business site and is reliant on a specific provincial marketplace, it is suitable to offer air flights and accommodation advertisements on the website. This is a recurring income for as long as the site is active and the company is an affiliate advertising partner.
Due to a recession type of attitude in the corporate environment at present, it is a great way for companies with budget restraints to use affiliate marketers as they will only need to pay on successfully concluded sales and as such is a win-win for everybody. As this is still in its infant stages in South Africa, I believe that it is only a matter of time before the majority of larger corporate advertisers follow suit and the SME business firms realise that this is a strong mode of advertising within a reasonable budget. It means that those wishing to begin changing the way in which we approach a work from home opportunity and online income, will be able to establish themselves now for the new trend taking off in South Africa.
So let’s recap on your income stream. You have paid advertising space being assigned on your website by Google through your Adsense campaign. We have an allocated space for permanent advertisers on each webpage in your website who may be in the same or a similar field to that in which your chosen product is located. You have the actual product sales themselves which have increased by using your various advertising campaigns. We have also covered a means to build a client base for continual sales of additional products by using the auto-responder.
You can find the program for your auto responder in your Bluevoda Cpanel (control panel). Hopefully by now you have designed your fist page and are reading this e-book for the second or third time making new notes as you go along.
7. Generating Traffic To Your Website
Foundational Business Building
This type of traffic is meant to establish your foundation and solidify your spot on the internet. Foundational Traffic is more time consuming to do, but is extremely effective at delivering really qualified traffic to your business. The more you stick to doing it, the more stable your business will become for the long term.
Here are some basic methods of Foundational Traffic.
Articles:
Article marketing is a way of marketing yourself as an authority online. When you are promoting your business products using internet based marketing techniques, you are able to redirect traffic online to your business website where you then make sales. Always remember to try and use an information capture sheet on your website to enable you to record the details of the visitors to your website. This is extremely valuable to add to your mailing list so that you are able to introduce secondary products to your visitors at a later date. Just keep building your list of prospective clients.
Try some of these ideas to start with. You will be provided with some websites later on to help you get started.
This is one of the most easiest things to write about because it is highlighting your core products and the business that you offer people. What can you do for them? Remember your aim is to add value and content.
People like to read articles of interest from like minded people. There are many forums and discussion groups out there that rely on regular support to expand and maintain their reader base. It is often found that these discussions lead to business support and backlinks are created to and from each others websites. Remember its all about traffic to your website.
It is always wise to choose a product that relates to your passion easily. This will enable you to speak passionately in your articles and discussion groups from the heart. It will also enable you to link with other websites that interest you.
There are many reasons for which you should create articles as a direct marketing technique, but the most common is probably for a boost in site traffic. You may not yet realise how much good this type of direct marketing can do, but if you focus on a couple of hours a day and get some great articles going, then you are well on your way to creating a great traffic driving machine, just from articles.
Remember that if you are already writing them for discussion groups, you may as well not duplicate the work, but save them to a section of your website called “other topics of interest” or the likes.
You may also want to add your websites’ hyperlink to the bottom of each article and submit them to e-zines websites for other website owners to use them as content. This will create valuable links back to your website giving you excellent search engine optimization by moving your pages up in rank to the first few pages for keyword searches by online users.
www.Ezinearticle.com
www.Goarticles.com
www.Articledashboard.com
www.Searchwarp.com
www.Articlebase.com
www.Isnare.com
www.Selfgrowth.com
www.Buzzle.com
www.Articlecity.com
www.Ideamarketers.com
www.Articlealley.com
www.Web-source.net
www.Selfseo.com
www.Amazines.com
www.Articletrader.com
www.Searchguild.com
www.Webworldindex.com
www.Articlesphere.com
www.Businessknowhow.com
www.Promotionworld.com
www.Articlesfactory.com
www.Excellentguide.com/article
www.Contentdesk.com
www.Articlecube.com
www.Articlebiz.com
Blogs and other means of Social Networking
Blog is a shortened word for web log. A blog is a form of an online journal wherein you get to write whatever you feel like writing about at that moment. If you have a blog that is both interesting and informative, you will find that a regular reader base will start to emerge as readers enjoy your writing.
The reason why a blog is such a great means to market your products and services is that you are able to reach a wider audience, build a community of loyal readers, interact with them, create market awareness and even enter into a bit of pre-launch hype for your products.
This clearly shows that a Blog is more than an online diary. Blogs work as a marketing tool because they are interactive. They allow you to share information with your visitors on a regular and personal basis. This method is also extremely beneficial for feedback as your visitors are able to leave a comment on your Blog. This communication process turns the Blog into a forum and discussion platform which allows you to showcase your expertise in a certain field and discuss your products and your business.
BlueVoda has included a free blogging platform or choice of Bulletin Board style called phpbb which you can incorporate into your new website. You will find this in your CPanel (Control Panel). Use this Blog as a forum for introducing experts in the field that your product is sold or traded. This adds substance to your content and is looked upon by the search engines as beneficial to readers. Your Page ranking on the internet search engines will improve and you will be able to ensure that you stay in the top ten on the first page so that your customers will be able to find your site effortlessly.
As with your articles, you may wish to submit your blog entries for reference to the search engines which may generate traffic as people read your blog posts on other sites. Some webmasters may choose to use your articles as content. Make sure to include your signature in the form of your website or page address in the section provided at the bottom of a blogpost or article. This signature will send highly qualified and interested clients to your products and website.
Try out,
www.Squidoo.com
www.Hubpages.com
www.Wetpaint.com
www.Bumpzee.com
www.Quizilla.com
www.Experienceproject.com
www.Clipmarks.com
www.Blogowogo.com
www.Weebly.com
www.Tumblr.com
www.Terapad.com
www.Pownce.com
www.Jaiku.com
www.Usfreeads.com
www.Scribd.com
www.Slideshare.net
as a means to create extra signatures referring traffic back to your products. The search engines will credit your website with better page ranking as they find more and more sites with your website name on it as it shows qualification in your content written.
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is the internet term given to word of mouth type of marketing by those who have found interest in your articles or products and is by far the best method to increase exposure of your product. It stands to reason that a product you believe in is always the first one that you would recommend to friends and family. If you are writing sincere product reviews for your products in your blogging and article campaigns, you will most definitely have others on the internet placing great value on what you have written and thus receive many links to your page and indirectly boost your page ranking in the search engines for your product.
Free advertising websites and Bulletin Boards
There are too many sites to mention and it would be easier to find those in your home town or area of your target market by just typing free classifieds into the search engine and adding your town name thereafter.
Backlinks from other sites
There are various companies who offer an exchange link system or often called reciprocal links which you can obtain to increase the number of links pointing back to your website. This is a means of search engine optimization and does help to a certain degree in increasing your page ranking in the search engine for certain keyword searches which will put you in the top 10.
See which back links your opposition have on their website and approach the same or similar companies for their assistance in linking to your site. They are not in competition and would wish to sell their own products and thus the more the merrier. You never know unless you try.
RSS Feeds and RSS Feed Aggregators
One often overlooked tactic is the use of a blog RSS Feed syndication. Simply put, every time you update your blog, a subscriber is notified by your registering the blog with a RSS Feed Aggregator.
There are many RSS Feed Aggregators online for you to choose from. The easiest blog or discussion template to use is probably the one that comes free with the BlueVoda Webbuilder package which is a wordpress blog platform. The platform has numerous plug in products available for free in cyberspace and a simple search will reveal these plug-ins which allow customization of the function and appearance thereof.
If you are using a wordpress blog, your feed address is simply;
www.yoursite.co.za/blogdirectory/feed
Where “yoursite” is the name of your website and “blogdirectory” is the name of the directory where your blog is located on your website. For page naming, there is a wonderful tutorial in the BlueVoda webbuilder.
This is a list of some of the more preferred RSS Feed Aggregators and they are all free to submit to. You will only need to submit your blog to them once and they will update automatically every time you add content to your blog.
Search engines
Please remember that whilst Google has over 200 million users on any given day, this is not the only search engine which is being used throughout South Africa and the rest of the world.
For this reason it is wise to submit your website to as many search engines as possible in order to increase your traffic analytics to your site. Think Yahoo, MSN and so forth. The list is endless. Just Google Search engines and see what comes up. But remember that there are more pages than the first 10 results and you may want to go through them at your own pace. This is an ongoing process and you cannot be expected to do everything in one day. After all, this e-book took three months to put together.
Newspaper publications and other means of advertising
Gumtree. What can I say? Most South Africans have heard of Gumtree and Junkmail. If you have not heard of the free advertising newspaper publication or classifieds website, you are missing out on a load of free advertising. A recent advertisement that was placed on Gumtree netted a response of 250 people in the first hour. These were the replies by email, nevermind how many times the advert was viewed.
As South Africans we are fortunate to have so many diverse cultural backgrounds that the number of ideas we can imagine are boundless. Each and every community uses some form of publication that is extremely cost effective to run an advertising campaign. The fortunate fact is that in the past it was necessary to utilize full colour advertisements in an advertising campaign, whereas now we are able to utilize our websites for the glossy supplements and merely direct the consumers to our websites. You don’t need to be extravagant with your advertising budget to generate interest in your products.
I am honestly amazed at how few cars have their website address across their rear window or rear bumper in a world that’s crying recession. We are going to think out of the box in this business plan.
Clickbank
Clickbank was possibly one of the first and most popular marketplaces for affiliate marketers to use on a regular basis to obtain products for their Google Ads campaigns. It was found however, that during the compilation of this e-book, the majority if not all of the products offered on Clickbank are for the overseas market. By this statement we mean that as mentioned earlier, it is extremely difficult as a South African to attempt to sell a product on a local website that is paid for in Dollars. We strongly recommended Offerforge and TrafficSynergy for this reason and hope that in the immediate future more local product members join up and understand the concept of utilizing affiliate marketers in this country. We also believe that Cape Town based company Adgator is helpful in being able to monetize your blog. Perhaps the introduction of an undersea cable system due to improve bandwidth and internet accessibility in South Africa in July 2009 is the key to this.
If you have decided to use a .com website address as opposed to a .co.za website address, then Clickbank might appeal to you as you are able to use a .com address a lot easier in the international marketplace. The product you have chosen may be easily accepted by international consumers and as such it may make no difference if your secondary products are sold in Dollars.
If you are interested in the affiliate type of marketing, then a simple entry of your desired product followed by the words “affiliate program” or “associate program” will reveal companies that offer affiliate marketers the opportunity to market their products.
Some additional information on using Google Adwords for Affiliate marketing
Google Adwords are the short 4 line advertisements as mentioned earlier which you may wish to allow Google to display on your website for an additional revenue stream. Some of these adverts are placed by internet affiliate marketers attempting to direct traffic to a site where a product is sold. The affiliate marketer is paid a commission for each sale that the owner of the product makes. This is the other side of the coin to Google Adsense.
As this is a paid service which is offered by Google, there may be a profit margin in it if the affiliate marketer is able to sell a product for more than it costs to display the advert somewhere on the internet.
In the same way that a searcher uses keywords to find the relevant pages for their search in the search engine, the affiliate marketer will pay a certain amount to have their advert displayed on the side of the page for that particular set of keywords or a website allowing Google Adsense.
This method is sometimes enough to generate a substantial income, but does carry some risk in that a sale is not always guaranteed every time somebody clicks on your advert and the costs of running multiple advertising campaigns can quickly add up.
The Google Adwords service works on a bidding system whereby the affiliate marketer will bid a certain number of cents and sometimes Rands for highly successful keywords, for each time that someone clicks on their advert.
If this method is of interest, then we would suggest investigation into the following;
Keyword search tools such as
www.overture.com
www.wordtracker.com
www.googlekeyword.com
www.keyworddiscovery.com and
www.keywordelite.com
You can also use www.adwordanalyzer.com to determine the number of keywords bid on for a specific topic and use this to find a landing page that you can copy for your product.
You can also use this sales copy landing page to build your list for backend sales. This topic has a large amount of detail and is an entire e-book on its own. We will not go too in-depth into this at the moment as this topic is discussed in more detail on the discussion forum which we encourage you to join for help with creating your online business. Log in at www.durban-property-searcher.co.za/online-marketing-discussion-forum.html
8. Step 5 - Keeping up to date on New Trends and Product Improvement
Below are a couple of forums which you my wish to investigate as they are updated regularly and also follow trends in the industry as far as search engine optimization go.
www.maketingterms.com- Online Marketing terms and useful links
www.seochat.com – SEO forum and seo tools
www.searchenginewatch.com – search engine optimisation
www.alltop.com – a site focusing on current world buying trends http//:tools.seobook.com – a site on keyword analysis for your marketing campaigns
www.blogger.com – a free blogging platform
www.iblog.co.za – a free south African blogging platform
www.blogspot.com – a free blogging platform
www.twitter.com – the latest in social blogging media
Some more great ideas for promoting your products
Create a review page for the products you are selling so that you can write a bit about each product. This product review behaves like multiple sales pages all rolled into one on a single review page. Your customers could be able to rate or rank your choices of a selection of products. The interesting thing is that all the products sell, just some better than others. It’s all good for your business. This allows you to sell similar products without being biased to your customers. If they wish to obtain a certain brand name, they can. They key is that they obtain their products from you and your business.
If you are using affiliate programs for your secondary products, make sure to carry out your research on the products home pages or even purchase and test them before hand to enable you to write honestly about them.
If you set up one review page on your website a week and of the 7-10 products on that review page even one of the products is effective and sells, you get a passive income of let’s say R500 per month and you do this for a year, by the end of year 1 you will have 52 review pages on your website with say an average of R500 per month from each review page, you now have a passive income of R26 000 from 52 review pages per month and climbing. Once you have the formula, you merely plug in and play the products.
You will recall that it is not merely the number of products you have though, but the act of creating the marketing support for those review pages by talking about them in your articles.
Search engine optimization
There are many schools of thought on what makes for good search engine optimization. This term has and still is much debated in various forums and Blogs on the internet. Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it is more commonly known, refers to the ability for the search engines to find your website and provide it in the first page of a search for your clients to be able to find you easily if their keyword search describes your product.
Search engines allocate a page rank to your website as and how it determines the relevance of your content and products to be for those specific keywords. This means that for a specific set of keywords, your website may appear on page 1 and for a different set of keywords, your website may be found on page 100. This has given rise to a culture of trying to ensure that your website is optimized to appear at the top or on page 1 of all search keywords relating to your product or content.
Once you have read the section on Google Analytics you will have an understanding of page ranking with search engines. The one school of thought relating to optimization is to flood your site with backlinks to other websites in order to boost the amount of content that you are able to offer or link to in order to assume huge amounts of traffic through your site.
I feel that this is flawed in that it detracts from the impression you will be creating for you customer base as a website. The customer wants to know that it is easy to navigate and find the suitable subject related content for which they might be searching without being directed to another site where your product can be found. The traffic is not the only criteria by which a website is ranked and much importance is placed on the subject content.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the means by which Google is able to monitor the amount and type of traffic which reaches your website. Originally it was an internet company which offered this service for a small fee to website owners in order to ascertain where their customer base was originating from and what type of customers they were. This tool was eventually bought by Google and is now offered as a free service in order to improve their offering as a search engine.
Once your website is place on the World Wide Web, it is imperative that you sign up for this free service as it is able to provide you with a tremendous amount of helpful and useful information regarding your customer base and visitors to your site. This is the basis for analysis which gives you your page ranking and inadvertently your profit margins.
The system works by a code which Google provides to you on signup which is implemented into each page on your website. This is an invisible code which is used on a daily basis by the Spiders and Searchbots ( Googles’ analysis programs) which invariably identify any changes in your website. This may be the IP addresses of your visitors computers needed to determine what type of Adsense to use for their geographical location. It may also determine what pages are most visited which is useful for your marketing strategy improvement. You will also want the Search engine to know immediately of any new content which you have placed on your website. Imagine if at the same time a search engine user is typing in their keywords, you have just uploaded a new product catalogue which has the product which they are searching for, you would want them to know about it. It’s genius. I love it and it’s free to all website owners.
Google adwords
If you were to search for an item or subject matter on Google for example, you will notice a shaded area at the top of the search results. There are usually only three websites listed for each page of search results. These website owners are making use of a tool offered by Google which provides a bidding system for each of the keyword (search words) that you have typed into the search bar in order to arrive at the resultant website list. The tool is called Google Adwords and is available to anybody who wishes to pay per word that users may use to find their product. Over time this can build awareness for your website, but can be a costly exercise if no sales are made to counteract the cost of Adwords advertising campaigns. The entry level is a minimum of a R500 budget allocation upfront and R50 activation cost.
Google adsense
Using the same example as used in the Google Adwords search, you will note that some advertisements appear in the right hand side of your screen. These are Google Adsense campaigns and work on a similar bidding system for the keywords that someone may use to search for a product or subject matter. These advertisements are however only billed to the advertiser on a pay per click system which means that only once someone clicks on the relevant four line advert which directs the searcher to their website, will Google bill the advertiser for that searcher to click through. This method requires constant monitoring in order to maintain the advert on the first page by ensuring bids for each keyword is in the top four bids. Some advertisers will purposefully try to be the forth or fifth advertiser as this is a persons natural line of site to be searching in the middle of the page.
9. Step 6: Support systems
In order to be successful in business, it is imperative that as you grow your business, you start to implement systems which will improve, if not maintain, your levels of service and quality to your customers. This will lead to automation of your website activities and client correspondence by using an auto-responder which allows you to pre-write your email responses to an action that takes place, e.g. an order for your product.
If for example you are spending time in a banking hall queue unnecessarily, you may decide to implement internet banking in order to carry out your business at home. It is also critical to understand that if your product is downloadable, it is a benefit to a customer who wants it now. This reason is why many online sales are focused on internet based products or product delivery handled by a third party.
The idea is that you continuously research and find better methods for running your business and also try to establish contacts who think similarly to you in terms of business. I am not saying that you need to reveal your secrets, but it often occurs that the best ideas are generated by like minded individuals discussing strategies and new products they have found to be successful or even unsuccessful.
Opt in pages and Lead Capture Pages
The basic idea of the opt in page is to build your data base of clients and their email addresses to enable you to keep them updated on any new product offerings that you have, any new ideas or even as a support mechanism for the products they have purchased from you. In the autoresponder section you will be able to add an email that you would like to send to your database of clients all at once. Now if you have thousands of clients in your database, you can not possibly spend the time keeping them individually informed.
So the Opt in page and lead capture is designed to capture your new clients information at your first point of contact.
We will need to create a page for this using a page creator asking for their name and primary email address.
In order to get your clients to give this information freely as some people are scared of receiving large amounts of spam, you may want to provide some information in exchange for this, maybe a free report, a software program, a discount coupon for your products etc.
Use www.instantsqueezepagegenerator.com to build squeeze pages and use one of their free offers to get the opt ins or use www.resalerocket.com for free giveaways.
You may also try to use re-brandable e-books and products so that you can insert your own affiliate links to have multiple potential sales portals around cyberspace as you build your own business. Get tips on how to design your squeeze page for maximum use by visiting some of the Google Adsense adverts in your product field. Try to identify the call to action and see if they have used a nice picture of the product etc.
If you would like to use the traditional opt-in page, go to your BlueVoda control panel and use the email section to set up the email capturer and plug in a message to your auto responder to reply to the sender of their email, in very much the same way that you downloaded this e-book.
Building your list
You may want to use this e-book as your free download or be able to help friends and family get started once you are happy that you are well on your way to creating your own business.
You may wish to set up a means where people can ask you how you made money eg. a blog and then monetize it using Adgator.
Thank you pages
Make sure you send all your new subscribers a welcome or thank you email and stay in contact once a week if you can. You may decide to send your mail out on a Friday so that customers can view your products in the comfort of their own home on a weekend without the pressures of their work. Statistics show that most sales occur from personal home computers as opposed to during office hours.
You may even decide to create a learning forum for new-comers as a follow-up to the downloaded purchase. This can be plugged in to the auto-responder as a link to a forum or blog on your website
Let your new clients know you have an open door policy by providing a personal email address or help line for your products.
The Sales page
Your products should never be sold in your marketing campaigns. Always try to have a sales page on your website incorporating the information regarding the purchase process of your product.
The sales page is your call to action for your client. They are on your sales page because they have shown an interest in your articles or content. They are now here to buy. Give them the facts and the instructions necessary to purchase your product. Once they have purchased, you can now direct them to your thank you page. Keep it simple.
10. Tips for your email autoresponder
After your first email, you need to try and gauge at what stage your subscribers or customers will be in your product offering. This will be helpful to them when they open their most recent email to find some more useful information.
Try to never include more than one product in your email as it becomes confusing to find the link to the information that you are suggesting. It also starts to take on a spam feel and may irritate your customers. Keep your system consistent in your offerings.
Rather send a secondary email. Make sure that your customers look forward to receiving you email.
If they get u