7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

General rules:

• Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
• Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
• Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
• Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
• Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
• Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in direct mail sales success and the same goes for the web.

Special Web Rules:

• Break up copy that's more than about 500-700 words long into seperate pages
• Always try to close the prospect at the end of each page as well as having a "more" link to the next page
• Try to include a close or buy link above the "waterline" (ie before they have to scroll to read the next paragraph or sentence)
• Try to inject as much "personality" into your copy as possible. A web page can be a particularly "cold" place - so add as much human warmth as possible. Remember, people buy from pe
  Feeling FICA
  What does FICA stand for?FICA stands for the Federal Insurance Contributions Act. The history of the act reverts back to the year 1935, when the government implemented the social security program. A provision to include social security taxes was included in this act. However, due to concerns over the constitutionality of the 1935 act, there were amendments made and the provision for collecting social security taxes was moved to the Internal Revenue Code in 1939. At this time it was renamed the Federal Insurance Contributions Act.What is FICA exactly?The Federal Insurance Contributions Act authorizes the IRS to collect taxes for the benefit of the social security program. Intuitively, we might think of these taxes as social security taxes, but more commonly they are referred to as FICA taxes. These FICA taxes serve as deposits into the federal social insurance program we think of today as Social Security.According to FICA, you must contribute 12.4 percent of your earned income up to the predetermined limit of contributions, and another 2.9 percent must be contributed to Medicare. It is important to note that there is no earnings limit on the Medicare portion of the tax, and thus in practice one is taxed 2.9 percent of all earned income, regardless of your total income level.For those working for hourly wages the tax levels are different. Hourly employees contribute 6.2 percent for Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare. Hopefully you noticed that this is just half of the standard rates. There is good reason for this as your employer is required to pay the other half of the rate for Social Security and Medicare contributions. In other words, for those working at hourly wages, the employer must match the employee contributions.How would you spend your FICA?Let’s imagine we live in a perfect world, and we don’t have to pay taxes. That means no more contributions to FICA. Now, after the excitement settles down we must decide what to do with our extra income. Let’s pretend we work a part time job, because we are still studying to get our degree in economics. Fortunately, we have a decent job paying $11 bucks an hour assisting an up and coming lawyer. Typically, we put in a 25 hour work week, meaning we make about $275 a week. That is exactly $1100 dollars every month. If we made $1100 every month, the FICA taxes we would normally contribute would break down like this:Social Security
  What makes one e-commerce web site a raging success, while another similar one barely gets a visitor much less sells anything? Ask any small business owner and you're likely to get a range of answers from "Cool technology" to "A really sexy web site", and more likely than not: "Being Number One on the Search Engines".

  Important some of these things may be, they're not actually the core elements for success! And it's for this reason that most people go wrong when they go online. In fact, the main factors, or decisions, that make a web site successful or not, take place long before a line of code is written, or a graphic designed or anyone puts finger to keyboard to write any copy. We list below, in order of importance, the ten things you should concentrate on if you want your e-commerce web site to be a rip-roaring success:

  1. Do Your Research The first thing that you must remember (and this is the bit that everyone seemed to forget in Internet "Gold Rush" of 1999) is that the same business principles apply to your internet business as any other. You must: a) Have a product/service with a solid perceived need; b) you must be able to sell it at a price that is profitable and provides good value to the purchaser and; c) you must be able to reach a sufficient number of potential purchasers (and convince them to buy) to generate enough revenue to make your business viable. And to find out that, you need to research your market. Thoroughly.

  The first and most obvious thing you need to find out is the "need" factor. Note I said "perceived" need, perhaps better described as a "want". We buy lots of things we don't need, because mainly we think we need them. So, will people benefit from your product or service? Do you genuinely believe you can convince people they need it? To find that out, you have to ask them! But we're not there yet: it's one thing having a product that people do actually need, but if there are already lots of people supplying it, then you might have a problem with part b. You are only going to be able to sell your product/service at a profit AND and a price people think represents good value if 1) Not many other people provide it or 2) yours is better (and/or cheaper - but for reasons explained later, this is not usually a good route to take). Again, you must do your research and find out before you do anything else. And finally, can you reach this market cost-efficiently and find enough people to buy from you? This is the one great strength of the Internet and e-commerce: it's much cheaper, it's faster and has a much wider reach that any other communications channel so far invented! But it still costs time and money, and you have to be realistic, so you need to research your market and work out if you have the time and money to reach it.

  2. Work on your Strategy OK, so now you know, hopefully, that there is a need for your product or service, that not many people offer it at the price/profit/value level that you can, and you know that thousands of people who use the internet a lot and who you know from your research can and do buy online, will want to buy it from you. So now you work on your strategy. This is key. You cannot simply say "Hey, we've got a great product and a big market, let's slap up a web site and we'll get rich!" You need to sit down and carefully work on how you're going to do all of this. You need to know what your goals are. If your goal is to "sell lots" you'll sell nothing! I Guarantee it. You need to work out where your want to be in 1, 3 and 5 years time at a minimum and then work back from there. If you start with that and work back, then a lot of the pieces will fall into place. Your strategy should apply to all your business, and your web site or Internet bits will only be a part of it (a big part, perhaps...). For example, if you have a product with a big ticket price, and you only sell 5 a year, then you don't want to start planning in a shopping basket system and credit card payments! Selling on that scale will need lots of relationship building and face-to-face interaction, so you need to work out how your Internet/e-commerce strategy will enhance and benefit that. A good web site to that will impress people who pay ?50,000 for your product? A newsletter system to help keep in touch during the long sales cycle? It's a completely different approach to selling ?20 watches....

  3. Concentrate on Existing Customers If your business is already up-and-running and you're simply adding an Internet presence or improving on it, then your existing customers should be treated like Gold. They can actually help you bring your business online. Test the waters with them, ask them what they think at each stage, build the system around them and their needs and you'll end up with a template that will help you expand online in the sure knowledge that it will attract and help keep new customers. And, of course, if you do it right, you can start making extra money online right away, without a single new customer, by using your web presence to save money and improve relationships with your existing customers so they buy more from you.

  4. Make Service a Priority While the Internet can help you cut costs and make your business run more slickly, you've got to remember that it can also be very impersonal. One of the most valuable things I've ever learnt is that people buy from people they like. And they don't like to be let down. The media is littered with stories of people who managed to click and pay for something online only to wait weeks for it never to turn up. Emails don't get replied to, phones don't get answered (if the web site even publishes the number!), and they get constantly fobbed off. Yet the Internet is an ideal tool for delivering better customer communication! But many businesses use a flash web site to hide behind... That's another quirk of the Internet - it's possible to gain customers more quickly than traditional methods, but you can lose them like lightening if you provide a poor service. News travels fast on the internet - even faster if it's bad news...

  5. Work out your Communication and and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) policies and procedures As I mentioned before, the Internet provides excellent tools and opportunities to build relationships with customers and clients. By this stage of your planning, you're chomping at the bit to "get something up and start selling" but winning a customer is a bit like wooing a woman (please forgive the sexist nature of this analogy!). You don't run up to a woman you like a scream in her face "I want to have babies with you, NOW!" So why do people do this online? You need to build into your plan ways and means of starting and growing relationships with your customers and clients. You need work out ways of opening a dialogue, finding out about them, and helping them find out about you. Did you know that research shows that people generally visit a web site seven times before they feel confortable enough to buy anything? So what are you going to do that makes your web site interesting enough for people to visit seven times just to look at it? And when they do, what then? Is it like a one night stand? Or do you send them emails asking if they are happy with the product/service? Can you send them a regular newsletter that they find interesting? And do you have a system in place to manage all of this - for example, can you track how many times a customer has been contacted, by what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

  6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

  • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
  • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
  • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
  • Use Sig files on ALL emails
  • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
  • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
  • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
  • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

  7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

  General rules:

  • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
  • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
  • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
  • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
  • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
  • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in direct mail sales success and the same goes for the web.

  Special Web Rules:

  • Break up copy that's more than about 500-700 words long into seperate pages
  • Always try to close the prospect at the end of each page as well as having a "more" link to the next page
  • Try to include a close or buy link above the "waterline" (ie before they have to scroll to read the next paragraph or sentence)
  • Try to inject as much "personality" into your copy as possible. A web page can be a particularly "cold" place - so add as much human warmth as possible. Remember, people buy from peo
    Inside Affiliate Marketing For Rookies
    One of the best ways to promote web businesses online is through affiliate internet marketing. Affiliate marketing programs are a new age phenomenon that incorporates getting referrals and generating commission money online. Its the electronic way of introducing potential clients to a business, online of offline. With affiliate marketing, businesses pay affiliates bonuses for bringing up leads, click-throughs, or sales to its products and services.Affiliate internet marketing has an innumerable amount of benefits to its merchants and participants. For starters, anyone could join. You can become an affiliate for a top selling perfume website without paying a cent. You don't need to buy the product either. In addition, affiliate marketing programs promote entrepreneurship and do not require any employees. Its the ultimate work at home job that lets you work at your own pace. Inside affiliate marketing, there is no customer service on the affiliates behalf. All of that is controlled by merchants who take care of shipping, handling, distributing literature, and overhead. Affiliate marketers can sidestep overhead expenses like credit card processing, and you could spend 5 hours a week or 15 hours a week promoting your product.Before typing best affiliate marketing sites to join into a Google search, there are 5 tips you need to know before starting out. One of the most important is to claim a niche market for your affiliate program. Promoting salt shakers on Tuesday and ecommerce e-books on Thursday will not work. Once you've narrowed it down, effective affiliate internet marketing will require you to find a niche market. After conducting niche market research and searching through Clickbank.com and other sites for viewers, you will want to find affiliate partners that have already built traffic streams. It is a learning experience onto itself that every serious affiliate marketer can benefit from. Affiliates can search for partners by listing in directories or contacting them personally.Any affiliate marketing resource will tell you that creative advertising is the key to steady profits. By creating e-books, working with PLR articles, or developing new promotional material you can market your products or services as best as possible. One of the most common ways of starting to earn commissions off affiliate marketing programs is to build a website that explains the product at hand. Many affiliate marketers start out this way to much success
    far invented! But it still costs time and money, and you have to be realistic, so you need to research your market and work out if you have the time and money to reach it.

    2. Work on your Strategy OK, so now you know, hopefully, that there is a need for your product or service, that not many people offer it at the price/profit/value level that you can, and you know that thousands of people who use the internet a lot and who you know from your research can and do buy online, will want to buy it from you. So now you work on your strategy. This is key. You cannot simply say "Hey, we've got a great product and a big market, let's slap up a web site and we'll get rich!" You need to sit down and carefully work on how you're going to do all of this. You need to know what your goals are. If your goal is to "sell lots" you'll sell nothing! I Guarantee it. You need to work out where your want to be in 1, 3 and 5 years time at a minimum and then work back from there. If you start with that and work back, then a lot of the pieces will fall into place. Your strategy should apply to all your business, and your web site or Internet bits will only be a part of it (a big part, perhaps...). For example, if you have a product with a big ticket price, and you only sell 5 a year, then you don't want to start planning in a shopping basket system and credit card payments! Selling on that scale will need lots of relationship building and face-to-face interaction, so you need to work out how your Internet/e-commerce strategy will enhance and benefit that. A good web site to that will impress people who pay ?50,000 for your product? A newsletter system to help keep in touch during the long sales cycle? It's a completely different approach to selling ?20 watches....

    3. Concentrate on Existing Customers If your business is already up-and-running and you're simply adding an Internet presence or improving on it, then your existing customers should be treated like Gold. They can actually help you bring your business online. Test the waters with them, ask them what they think at each stage, build the system around them and their needs and you'll end up with a template that will help you expand online in the sure knowledge that it will attract and help keep new customers. And, of course, if you do it right, you can start making extra money online right away, without a single new customer, by using your web presence to save money and improve relationships with your existing customers so they buy more from you.

    4. Make Service a Priority While the Internet can help you cut costs and make your business run more slickly, you've got to remember that it can also be very impersonal. One of the most valuable things I've ever learnt is that people buy from people they like. And they don't like to be let down. The media is littered with stories of people who managed to click and pay for something online only to wait weeks for it never to turn up. Emails don't get replied to, phones don't get answered (if the web site even publishes the number!), and they get constantly fobbed off. Yet the Internet is an ideal tool for delivering better customer communication! But many businesses use a flash web site to hide behind... That's another quirk of the Internet - it's possible to gain customers more quickly than traditional methods, but you can lose them like lightening if you provide a poor service. News travels fast on the internet - even faster if it's bad news...

    5. Work out your Communication and and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) policies and procedures As I mentioned before, the Internet provides excellent tools and opportunities to build relationships with customers and clients. By this stage of your planning, you're chomping at the bit to "get something up and start selling" but winning a customer is a bit like wooing a woman (please forgive the sexist nature of this analogy!). You don't run up to a woman you like a scream in her face "I want to have babies with you, NOW!" So why do people do this online? You need to build into your plan ways and means of starting and growing relationships with your customers and clients. You need work out ways of opening a dialogue, finding out about them, and helping them find out about you. Did you know that research shows that people generally visit a web site seven times before they feel confortable enough to buy anything? So what are you going to do that makes your web site interesting enough for people to visit seven times just to look at it? And when they do, what then? Is it like a one night stand? Or do you send them emails asking if they are happy with the product/service? Can you send them a regular newsletter that they find interesting? And do you have a system in place to manage all of this - for example, can you track how many times a customer has been contacted, by what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

    6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

    • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
    • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
    • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
    • Use Sig files on ALL emails
    • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
    • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
    • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
    • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

    7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

    General rules:

    • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
    • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
    • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
    • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
    • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
    • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in direct mail sales success and the same goes for the web.

    Special Web Rules:

    • Break up copy that's more than about 500-700 words long into seperate pages
    • Always try to close the prospect at the end of each page as well as having a "more" link to the next page
    • Try to include a close or buy link above the "waterline" (ie before they have to scroll to read the next paragraph or sentence)
    • Try to inject as much "personality" into your copy as possible. A web page can be a particularly "cold" place - so add as much human warmth as possible. Remember, people buy from pe
      How To Make Money From Selling On Ebay
      Are you the type of person who is always rummaging around looking for a bargain, whether it is in a sale, yard sale or at antiques or flea market? It may be that until now the only things you have purchased this way have been for your family and friends, yet did you know that your love of bargain hunting could help you to make some real money. I would not lie, and it’s all thanks to Ebay, the world’s biggest internet market place.Many of those bargains that you have found could be placed on Ebay and sold for a lot more than what you originally paid for them. For example, one person who managed to buy some books by the best selling author Sandra Brown for paid on $2.00 for the 20 books and sold them for $36.00. Then another time some one bought a Belleek porcelain butter dish for $1.49, they put it on Ebay and could $21.95. So as you can see a killing can be made, it’s just finding the right items to sell.Just imagine what it would be like if you were able to find items like this each week. It is definitely possible, especially if you live in an area where there are always lots of yard sales and flea markets going on as well as having some thrift shops close by. Other people are selling items on Ebay as they are simply decluttering their homes, and these types are usually not interested in putting each item individually onto Ebay and they just might what to get rid of the stuff as quickly as possible. So it is a good idea to keep your eyes peeled for items like this when searching Ebay for new stock.But how do you go about deciding what is good to buy and what you should leave well alone. Certainly any items you see that come with their original packaging, best selling books which are in good condition as well as vintage and antique books (especially copies which are first editions). Also consider ceramics, crystal, pottery and porcelain are a safe way of making some money on Ebay, especially look for depression era glass (also known as carnival glass) as this can usually provide you with a suitable profit. If looking at clothing to sell then choose pieces that are in new or like new condition and especially those with a recognized brand or designer name on them. Finally, it may be worth considering looking at vintage toys, again those which either come with their original packaging or are in a like new condition.Remember when listing any items for sale, always aim for your auction to start and end on a Sunday evening a
      s run more slickly, you've got to remember that it can also be very impersonal. One of the most valuable things I've ever learnt is that people buy from people they like. And they don't like to be let down. The media is littered with stories of people who managed to click and pay for something online only to wait weeks for it never to turn up. Emails don't get replied to, phones don't get answered (if the web site even publishes the number!), and they get constantly fobbed off. Yet the Internet is an ideal tool for delivering better customer communication! But many businesses use a flash web site to hide behind... That's another quirk of the Internet - it's possible to gain customers more quickly than traditional methods, but you can lose them like lightening if you provide a poor service. News travels fast on the internet - even faster if it's bad news...

      5. Work out your Communication and and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) policies and procedures As I mentioned before, the Internet provides excellent tools and opportunities to build relationships with customers and clients. By this stage of your planning, you're chomping at the bit to "get something up and start selling" but winning a customer is a bit like wooing a woman (please forgive the sexist nature of this analogy!). You don't run up to a woman you like a scream in her face "I want to have babies with you, NOW!" So why do people do this online? You need to build into your plan ways and means of starting and growing relationships with your customers and clients. You need work out ways of opening a dialogue, finding out about them, and helping them find out about you. Did you know that research shows that people generally visit a web site seven times before they feel confortable enough to buy anything? So what are you going to do that makes your web site interesting enough for people to visit seven times just to look at it? And when they do, what then? Is it like a one night stand? Or do you send them emails asking if they are happy with the product/service? Can you send them a regular newsletter that they find interesting? And do you have a system in place to manage all of this - for example, can you track how many times a customer has been contacted, by what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

      6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

      • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
      • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
      • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
      • Use Sig files on ALL emails
      • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
      • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
      • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
      • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

      7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

      General rules:

      • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
      • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
      • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
      • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
      • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
      • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in direct mail sales success and the same goes for the web.

      Special Web Rules:

      • Break up copy that's more than about 500-700 words long into seperate pages
      • Always try to close the prospect at the end of each page as well as having a "more" link to the next page
      • Try to include a close or buy link above the "waterline" (ie before they have to scroll to read the next paragraph or sentence)
      • Try to inject as much "personality" into your copy as possible. A web page can be a particularly "cold" place - so add as much human warmth as possible. Remember, people buy from pe
        What Every Pet-Care Business Owner Should Have in their PR Tool Chest
        Any type of public relations or promotion depends on a full arsenal of tools that you will use to get the job done. Any time you start out to build something you use tools. When my husband and I built our deck we used lots of tools – from electric saws to hammers! The same is true for your personal promotion plan.Your tools work with your natural charisma and charm to make it painless for you to continue your self-promotion success plan. By having tools at your fingertips you’re creating fail-proof ways to keep your PR machine moving without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time you work on a new promotion. Your tools will be handy and easy to get to whenever you need them. Back to when we built our deck – it wouldn’t have been too efficient if we had to run to the store to buy a new hammer every time we needed do drive a nail.Here’s a sampling of tools to include in your PR tool-chest (for a comprehensive list and lots of help building the tool-chest, watch out of the “Ultimate Pet-Care Business Home Study System” to be released this fall):1. Your personal story. What makes you unique and ‘newsworthy’? Spend a few hours or an afternoon and write out your life story. Yep. The whole thing. Think about what it is about you and pets that makes you unique. What are the reasons you had for starting your business? What other ‘stuff’ do you know ? What makes you different (in a neat and fun way)? Are you a world Scrabble© Champion? Do you do crossword puzzles every month? Maybe you ride a Harley?2. What you KNOW and LOVE. Write a list of all the topics you’re uniquely qualified to speak or write about. Maybe you’ve created a disaster-preparedness program for your clients – do you think that could help other pet-owners? Why not write an article about it!Remember, even if you only serve a small geographic area, being perceived as an expert across the country is still a GREAT thing! Your clients and potential clients are more likely to read about you when they are reading articles of interest – and they are going to be really psyched to see that you are in their neighborhood!3. Professional photo. You’ve got to have one. In this day and age there’s no excuse for not having a picture as part of your tool-kit. You can likely get away with a ‘candid’ shot for some of the sections of your website, but you want to make sure you look like a professional for your
        perts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:
        • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
        • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
        • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
        • Use Sig files on ALL emails
        • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
        • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
        • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
        • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

        7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

        General rules:

        • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
        • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
        • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
        • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
        • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
        • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in direct mail sales success and the same goes for the web.

        Special Web Rules:

        • Break up copy that's more than about 500-700 words long into seperate pages
        • Always try to close the prospect at the end of each page as well as having a "more" link to the next page
        • Try to include a close or buy link above the "waterline" (ie before they have to scroll to read the next paragraph or sentence)
        • Try to inject as much "personality" into your copy as possible. A web page can be a particularly "cold" place - so add as much human warmth as possible. Remember, people buy from pe
          Successful Telecommuting Mom Story Number 2
          Melody Spier started looking at telecommuting as an option back in 2000 but felt at the time that she could not financially quit her job.Tired of working long hours and coming home so exhausted at the end of each day that she could hardly enjoy our family time, Melody felt like her husband, neighbors and friends were raising her children while she worked.After two years of working up the courage, she dropped her day job and became a full-time stay at home mom in 2002. From there she connected with a website that provided legitimate telecommuting information and a community of people who shared their knowledge and resources willingly.Melody landed her first telecommuting job less than 90 days later. As is common, Melody found that it is a challenge to find one company that will give you full time hours. She started working for multiple companies. By developing a schedule that worked for her family, she was able to build up to a full time income. It didn’t happen right away and there were times when the workload was considerably smaller but keeping active with multiple companies meant she could pick up hours at one place when things slowed down at another.Melody’s biggest initial challenge was getting her family to understand that even though she was home full time now, she still had a job to do. It took two or three months of constant reminders for everyone to adjust to her work at home status. Another challenge she faces was learning to stay positive and hopeful when things were looking grim during the job search.Melody’s advice to moms who would like to find a telecommuting job is to: “Plan to work for multiple companies and work 30-40 hours a week; it usually takes that to earn a full time wage. Don’t give up! Yes, it’s tedious and discouraging to submit hundreds of resumes and not get a reply but remember you are competing with 1000’s of other applicants for a handful of jobs.Make sure you have an outstanding resume and cover letter; this was something I learned the hard way. Enjoy your time at home. The whole point to working from home is to have less stress, be with your family and to enjoy yourself.”
          ild an email list
        • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

        7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

        General rules:

        • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
        • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
        • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
        • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
        • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
        • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in direct mail sales success and the same goes for the web.

        Special Web Rules:

        • Break up copy that's more than about 500-700 words long into seperate pages
        • Always try to close the prospect at the end of each page as well as having a "more" link to the next page
        • Try to include a close or buy link above the "waterline" (ie before they have to scroll to read the next paragraph or sentence)
        • Try to inject as much "personality" into your copy as possible. A web page can be a particularly "cold" place - so add as much human warmth as possible. Remember, people buy from people they like.

        8. Make Sure your Navigation is Easy, and that your Web Site Design and Backend Technology are all focused on a Great Customer Experience Only now should you be thinking about the build of your web site and its technology. It's at this point, you can finally consider your web site's design and how it will look. Remember, web design (any design) is subjective. No matter how much time or money you spend on it, or how proud you are of it, a certain proportion of your visitors will still think it's crap. But guess what? They don't care, and if you get everything right it has almost no bearing at all on sales. But there are three important elements to web site design:

        1. Ease of navigation comes FIRST. Make sure your fancy page design doesn't confuse and frustrate your customers. Keep it simple. And bearing in mind that no matter how good the site looks, lots of people will hate it, so make sure the design is not overbearing. Make sure that, whether your customer likes your site or not , it's not an issue!

        2. Get it done professionally. Good, professional design inspires confidence in your customers, and on the web that's a precious commodity. They may not always like it, but they'll appreciate that it's been done professionally, and that therefore infers that your are a professional company.

        3. Make sure that the site is clean and uncluttered, and avoid too many flashy animations, whizzy bits, and Flash downloads that will slow your site down and annoy your customers, no matter how "cool" you think they are. And whatever you do avoid "front Door", "click here to enter our site" intro-type pages AT ALL COSTS! Especially Flash ones. They are utterly pointless and delay your customer from getting to what they're after, which is information about your company/products/services.

        And finally, the technology - especially the "Shopping cart". So long as it works properly, doesn't mix up customers' baskets, can cope with demand, and deliver orders reliably, then your choice of "cart" technology will have no bearing whatsoever on sales success. Other than that, your technology and the complexity of your system will be dictated by what it is you actually need to achieve. We've mentioned newsletters, CRM, customer support & service and so on - all your technology choices MUST be made to make these things easy for you to manage and to enhance them. And most of all, your technology must ALWAYS be geared towards a great customer experience.

        9. Get Pricing in Perspective and Think about your Market Positioning and your Value Proposition There's one final myth about the internet (and business in general) that I'd like to explode and it's this: People buy on price. The myth that you must be cheap, even cheapest, on the internet has grown exponentially, especially with the advent of shopping price comparison engines. Combine this with the widely held (and largely correct) belief that using the Internet to sell reduces cost, most people think that price is the only issue, and that you must be cheaper than everyone else to succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth!

        A buying decision is a bit like an iceberg, of which the price element is the highly visible tip. The bulk of the decision reasoning takes place hidden away from view, and many in business ignore it at their peril. When a customer says to you that you're too expensive, they are not actually saying that your price is too high. What they're really saying is that they are not convinced that the benefit your are offering exceeds the investment they have to make. They don't like your Value Proposition. The problem is usually that you haven't convinced them enough about the benefits, not that you're charging too much. On the internet, this brings us back, actually, to point/step seven where I explained the massive importance of your sales copy. If your web site is simply a catalogue of products and prices and a shopping cart, what else has any site visitor to go on when making a judgment other than price? So you've cornered yourself immediately. You have no option other than to go cheaper than your competition to make the sale. If, however, you make a big deal in your web copy about the benefits of buying from you (like prompt delivery, great service, reliability, money-back guarantee, free insurance or whatever you can think of) then suddenly, price is not an issue. People will pay your higher price for peace-of-mind, great service and extra benefits than taking a risk with the cheap, nasty web site that might let them down. And when you feel under pressure to drop your price, say for a special offer, why not try adding a free extra benefit instead? It's much more effective and more profitable! Instead of knocking 10% off, offer 10% more!

        Another issue that you need to look carefully at, especially on the Internet where credibility is hard to achieve, is your Market Positioning. Your prices say a lot more about your company than you think. Although people like to say they love a bargain, every single one will make the assumption that cheap = nasty. If your prices are too low, people will assume there's a catch or you're cutting corners. If you want to position your business as the best in its class, then people will only feel good about you if your prices are at the top end of the range. Too low, and suddenly they lose faith in you because "something doesn't ring true". If your prices are "unbelievable!", then so are you!

        10 Tackle Fraud & Security Internet fraud is a big, big issue and you can't ignore it. Most online customer will admit to being extremely wary of handing out credit card details online, especially to new web sites that they have never come across before. So, you need to have security and fraud policies in place and (here we go again about copy!) make sure you tell your customers that you have these and you will take great care of their personal information.

        At the very minimum you need:

        • A secure server and SSL certificate for your order pages
        • A privacy policy that clearly informs your customers that you pass their details onto nobody and that you keep them safe.
        One of the best solutions is to use a Payment Service Provider (PSP) to process your credit cards for you. The better known and respected ones such as WorldPay are best, because the general public are aware of them and know that they have strong security measures in place. And from your own perspective, you gain some protection against law suits and some relief from the risk and responsibility of looking after customers' valuable credit card information.