Archive for March, 2012

success failure e1297705159198 The 3 Biggest Mistakes Online Business Owners Should Avoid MakingI’ve been online long enough to observe 2 groups of people who are doing some form of business online.

1. those who are struggling and

2. those who are going from success to success

What’s the difference between the two groups? Is it that one group has more talent or intelligence than the other? No. I’ve observed that the struggling group is making one to three deadly mistakes that the successful group isn’t making. Those 3 mistakes are:

1. Not investing in the right source of information

2. Not investing in the right people

3. Not investing in the right technology

Of course there aren’t only three mistakes, but these are the most deadly and the ones that will stop you from moving forward with your online business. The good thing is, they are easy to correct. Mistakes are just experience. Once you recognise those mistakes and learn from them, you can put them behind you.

No matter what, don’t beat yourself up about mistakes, or time or money lost, that’s in the past and it’s all part of the journey to success

Biggest Mistake No. 1: Not investing in the right source of information

When you get started online, if you haven’t already, you’ll soon realize that the Internet is immense and everybody online is screaming, ”read me”, ”watch me”, ”listen to me”, ”go to my webinar”’, “open my email”, etc.

And because the information is “free” and you are somewhat interested or believe that maybe the information offered will be useful to you, you will subscribe, download, read, watch, or listen – afraid to miss that crucial bit of information that is going to change your world. But just one hour or one week later, you have to ask yourself “did that information change anything for me?”

My guess is, probably not. If that’s true for you then you have to stop and think about it – WHY , after spending all those hours of downloading, reading, watching and attending webinars, you still did not make any progress.

To accomplish anything online and keep making progress, you don’t need all the information that exists out there; you need the right information at the right time. You need it in the right order so you can actually implement them. The key words here are at the right time, in the right order and implementation. You know you can’t make progress if you can’t implement the information you get.

The number 1 mistake people make online is that they think the Internet is a source of free information – every single piece of information.

Is it really?

The Internet actually is a source of un-ordered, random and incomplete information. That’s why often you’ll find it very hard or next to impossible for you to implement what you think you know. That’s because on the Internet information is being directed at you at the wrong time and not necessarily in the right order. And if you are not careful with it, you’ll experience information overload and be totally paralyse by an excessive amount of information and ideas.

Also, you need to realise, there are a lot of information marketers online, and it’s their business to sell information. So even if they give you some free information, they will deliberately leave out key details that are only available if you buy their ”enhanced”, ”premium”, ”membership” information product, service, course or training. Even if you attend a free seminar at a fine hotel, you must ask yourself, who is paying the rent, the travel and refreshments. There is basically no free lunch in the world of internet marketing.

I hope you realise by now how dangerous it is to try to conduct an online business based only on the freely available information you find on the Internet. It’s like trying to bake a cake with the instruction in random order and missing ingredients while no one tells you what an egg is.

Now I’m not advocating you go and buy every and any information product out there, you still need to do your due diligence to find out what’s the right information for you, and if the information is presented to you in a logical and orderly way according to your preferred mode of learning.

It may not be widely known that often the same information that an Internet marketing guru is offering to you “…not at $1997 nor $997 but at the ridiculous low price of $297″, you could buy in a book for $15 or $20 on Amazon. Check for yourself the price of books I personally recommend on Amazon, just click on the Amazon books carousel on the right of this post. I like books for this main reason – the information is presented in an incremental and ordered manner.

So are you trying to conduct an online business on free information only?

You may have spent enough time on information-gathering and even have bought an information product or two and now you are wondering why you are still spinning your wheels.  This could be because you are committing deadly mistake number 2.

Biggest Mistake No. 2: Not investing in the right people

The 2nd deadly mistake I see new online business owners make is they are trying to do everything themselves – often through trying to learn to do everything themselves from free or information products they’ve bought. They think they will save themselves some money by not having to pay anyone.

If you haven’t, you’ll soon realise that there are a lot of elements involved in making a website successful.

Let me just name a few to start off.

1. You need to write the content of your website in a certain way so that your web page will rank well with the search engines (that’s call SEO),

2. then you need to get involved with the social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

3. Then you need to get started with social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

4. Then you need to create videos for YouTube, submit your website to web directories, write articles for article directories, make regular comments on other people’s blogs, build a community around yourself, be part of other communities, and build respect and friendships, write email autoresponder follow-up sequences, etc. The list is endless.

As you try each one of the above, soon you will realise that you enjoy doing some of them, be almost clueless on others and absolutely hate to do the rest. And it takes a lot of time to learn and master any and all of those skills.

What you think would save you $30 by doing it yourself, would actually take you weeks to first learn and then do. So, by trying to learn to do everything things by yourself you are just delaying your success.

So how do you overcome that?

Either outsource those difficult tasks to others

or

team up with people who have the skills you are lacking.

For synergy in business you need to find the right partners. If you are trying to do some online business you could fast track your success by teaming up with the right people.

You need to choose your partners wisely, I would say the most essential thing you need to consider when you are looking for a business partner is whether you share the same values. Your business partnership will not work if you don’t share the same values.

If you are just starting your online business make sure you find an experienced partner who can mentor you. Teaming up with only other equally inexperience newbie won’t benefit your team much. A mentor will have the experience to guide you to the right information and put it to you in the right order and help you with the implementation of your business plan.

Biggest mistake No 3:  Not investing in the right technology

The 3rd fatal mistake I see people make online is not investing in the right Internet technologies and software. I’ll be brief on this one.

A number of people try to conduct an online business solely on a free platform such as blogger blog, Facebook, Twitter alone and not invest in a website powered by WordPress. To do this is fraught with danger. When you use free platforms you don’t own any of it and you risk the danger of your business being shut down at any time, even if you do nothing wrong.

Now, those who know me know that my specialty is migrating websites from (static/HTML/free) sites to self hosted WordPress websites or creating completely new websites on the WordPress platform.

Why do I choose to go with WordPress? Because I know WordPress is a very powerful platform. I believe that to be successful online you need to be using the WordPress platform. I’ve looked at the on-line market, the trends, the tools, the people who are successful and this is my bottom-line advice:

If you aren’t using WordPress yet, you are not positioning yourself for the best results.

The main search engines value WordPress websites above other sites, and it is easy for you the site owner to make amendments, blog, add plug-ins and generally keep abreast of new technology, this is just impossible to implement if you use plain html.

If your website isn’t a self-hosted WordPress site, what are you waiting for to switch?

Conclusion and Solutions to the above

I have presented here the 3 biggest mistakes that I believe will prevent online business owners from being successful.  Do you recognise yourself making any if not all of them? Are you going to move from this post and one month later find you still haven’t made much progress with your website? Or if you realise you are making those mistakes, how would you stop making them?

If you need to understand more about the benefits of WordPress and what makes it different to an ordinary static website, please CONTACT ME for a detailed explanation.

I can assist you with implementation and I can also be your mentor or outsource SEO specialist.

If you have skills that I lack, we could team up. There are many ways we can proceed from here. All you have to do is ASK.

You can ask for as much or as little information as you need. Just remember, my business is to provide you the technical help your need to implement your vision for your website and maximise your opportunity to show your website to as many people as possible. I am happy to quote for any services and provide testimonials from satisfied clients.

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How to Keep Your First Time Website Visitors?

first time visitors 300x199 How to Keep Your First Time Website Visitors?This is a post on how to improve your website.

The main challenges for any website are to get traffic to your website, then to get your first time visitors to stay and to come back again.

Now how do you design of your website correctly so your first time visitors will stick around?

To answer that you need to know how and why a visitor will come to your website for the first time.

Common ways someone will come on your website for the first time

There could be a number of ways why someone will come to your website for the first time. Let me name a few.

A lot of people will find your website from a search engine search result because they are looking for something.

Other visitors will come to your website because they are following a link on another webpage and they are interested to read more about the subject of the link.

Some people will come to your website because someone has recommended your website in an email or from the social media,

Some visitors will visit your website because you left a comment on some blog, and reader of your comment want to check out about you. Remember when you leave a blog comment your name is usually a ling to your website.

Many would visit your website because you’ve given them your business card, or you have your website address in your email signature, or from some brochure from the offline world.

Why are  people coming to your website anyway?

To answer the above question you need think as your visitors would. What’s bringing visitors to your website in the first place?

Whatever the means someone is coming to your website for the first time, there are some reasons as to why they are doing so.  They may want to find out what your website is about, what it looks like, but I think the most important reason someone has landed on your website is because they want to find out whether your website has that thing (usually information, but it could be a product, image, audio or video, file, software, etc) which they are looking for.

So what does a first time visitor to your website do immediately upon landing on your site?

I would say, they will be immediately looking for signs to determine what your website is about and if it’s going to have what they are looking for. For most people this would be by looking at the general appearance of your website and looking at the header of your website – your blog title and tag line, and if your website is a blog the heading of your post. Your visitors are going to decide within the next 10 seconds based on the content of your header (or what is above the fold) if they are going to stay or leave your website.

What’s a website header for?

Therefore a good website needs to tell its visitors immediately what it’s about right there in the header. The header must answer questions like: what content are they likely to find on your website, what products or services you have on offer and remember to mention how they are going to benefit from your website. Do that by improving your header, be very clear upfront about what your website is about by having  your slogan or Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in the header and be very specific about what you offer.

The next thing that will entice your visitor to stay is a compelling headline or blog post title that ignite your visitor’s desire to read on. That about writing more intelligent blog post title – but we are entering the domain of copywriting… and I’ll leave that for later.

Finally, if your header isn’t sufficient to communicate everything your website is about, then it is a very good idea to have an about box right in your sidebar there above the fold the explain what your website is about is more details than the header can. And remember to put in there some strong call to action if you can.

So, if you don’t have a well thought out header that precisely answers your first time visitor’s need to know what your website is about or has that which they are looking for, you are going to lose the right people who come to your website because you didn’t communicate with them correctly right from the start.

Action

If you’ve got a website or blog: go back to it and check your header, your tag line or slogan. Does it clearly describe what your website is about and what you are offering? If not, put some minutes aside to think about it and then modify your headline if there is need for it.

Questions you may answer in your comment

  1. How did you decide on your blog title?
  2. Have you considered targeting specific keywords in your blog title
  3. Why did you choose the colour you did for your blog?
  4. Would you change your blog title or tagline after reading this post?

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Beginner Marketing Mistakes

Most significant Error Starting Online marketers Make with Internet Affiliate Marketing

Internet affiliate marketing is popular as an online cash flow creator for both newcomers as well as skilled marketers at the same time. It is relatively simple to get started with, and also it need not cost much, if any money to make it happen. A success in many ways. However, it is not foolproof. Quite a few newbie online marketers start out having visions of loads of cash, and grand hopes and dreams merely to throw in the towel in discouragement. The issue is not with affiliate marketing online but with the techniques used to handle it. There’s one particular fatal error in judgment a lot of beginners make, they can get scattered.

A number of new affiliate marketers become scattered out of desperation, other folks simply because they cannot decide on only one product to back.

The Matter connected with Desperation

The worried beginning internet marketers show up in 2 different ways. The 1st set gets going thinking that they need to start many affiliate program promotions to get the maximum visibility. The idea appears to be to publish numerous varied advertising campaigns and pray 1 hits big, or perhaps a number of them show a little bit of income to create a single huge profit.

The 2nd set of distressed newbie web marketers do start out with just one product or service, and these people work it diligently for a couple of months and assume it will explode and make thousands of dollars a month right away. Maybe that they have used the glamorous tips of a number of the gurus guaranteeing easy and fast riches through affiliate marketing. Truth be told, there are riches, however it is work. If this was not work, everyone would do it, and it also probably would not pay well. When these people don’t start seeing instant revenue in the sums they’ve imagined, they become frantic and start searching for the item that will do that for them, and soon they’re working much like the scatter online marketer from the first set of frantic marketers.

The Choice Predicament

One other type of internet entrepreneur that becomes swept up in the scatter method of affiliate marketing online is the one who finds many fantastic products which they really have faith in, that they cannot choose. There are plenty of fantastic products. Many of those items have verified affiliate track records. It really is difficult to choose, however, you have to.

Steering clear of the Scatter

The true secret to steering clear of the scatter as a result of frustration is to be reasonable about how quickly your online profits will build up. Offline business take time to develop and so do internet versions. The reality is that it actually is quicker online, and the cost to do business is almost zero makes the web business much more stable, but it still takes a lot of hard work as well as time for it to get it to where it is actually making a profit. When you are anxious for money, try doing work part time, or perhaps keeping your current day employment when you have 1 while you grow your business online.

The best way to Pick the Best Product to market

For those who plainly are unable to select the ideal product or service, and really feel obligated to promote each and every great idea around, stop and breathe deeply. For starters, the entire notion of focusing on one, or perhaps at the most two items to start with does not imply you can’t ever advertise another product. This means that you ought to center all of your current energy and time upon each one separately till they surge in value before including more.

Decide on your niche market 1st. Select things you are excited about for your theme. If it is weight reduction, health, baking, fishing or basket weaving, it is best that you select something you are able to identify with so you can market the linked item with that identical enthusiasm and also authority. Of course, you don’t have to enjoy it, but many sales people, whether they operate online or offline, will confirm that the best sales people have faith in the goods they are marketing.

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