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Web marketing resources I use and recommend
Tutorial on how to build a website - for people who haven't done it before If you are a beginner and want to learn HTML or website design techniques, this site is an excellent interactive tutorial.
Wordtracker.com - Get high rankings in the Search engines Wordtracker finds targeted keywords that real people are searching for now, and use them to build targeted web pages that search engines love, so you get a high listing on the search results page and get free traffic to your website. Your aim is to discover frequently used keywords with little or no competition from other websites. Use them to generate traffic to your website. WordTracker will search all the search engines in the world, live, to find what words people are typing into the search engines. I love this service! It gives you secret info that other business owners simply don't have, or even know about! For example, if you own a massage business, wouldn't it be good to know whether people were searching for...
WordTracker provides you with the exact numbers of people looking for specific words or groups of words. So you can tailor your website to match those words that have the largest numbers of people with the lowest number of competing websites. It has a FREE trial so you can test it out and get started. But to do anything serious you need to pay... Go to...
Video course on how to build a web business from scratch without the headaches or loss of money Duration: 30 minutes. This is actually a really good overview on the secrets to creating a successful web business from scratch. It's part of a sales pitch from the Site Build It crowd, but they give away heaps of secrets during the presentation that most online business owners simply don't know about... ... like... what to do when setting your website up to get free advertising from the search engines. Concentrate on the process of building a business website more than the sales pitch for their software, and you'll get a lot out of it. (Although, if you are a beginner at website marketing, you would do well to join their program). The video clearly illustrates how this step-by-step system can turn anyone into a long-term, high-earning website owner. Grab a drink, relax and take the free Video Tour . The next 30 minutes could change your life...
Quality web hosting: I use IXwebhosting.com to host this site plus my education project website at the same time. They cost about $5 a month. Most local companies will charge you much more (eg, $30 or $60 per month is common) for much less.
They have other even more full-on plans for seriously heavy or tech users.
Find website partners to send free traffic to your website... and recommend your product so visitors arrive in a warm, pre-sold state of mind!
I use this software a lot.
To see how it works, follow the steps in this demonstration:
So LinkCapture can quickly build a large list of suitable business partners to contact about getting them to link to your website, send you traffic, pre-sell your services to their customers, and basically help you make money. Cost: US$499 (they have a free trial, but it is not as powerful as the full version) Go to...
Mailloop - automate your email marketing so it is 'hands-free'
It saves so many hours of work that it is a god-send. And it makes me money by handling my professional email roll-outs for every online marketing campaign that I do. I'm on my 3rd upgrade of this program now, and I'll continue to use it. Cost: US$379
Processing credit cards online
If you already have a merchant account that allows online credit-card processing, talk to your bank about setting up internet orders and importantly recurring or subscription billing. It's important to get recurring billing option because you can then offer big-ticket items worth say $500, but charge the customer only $50 per month for 10 months. You can only do that if you internet merchant account allows internet billing.
If you don't have a friendly bank manager who will give you an internet merchant account, these are the options I used to get started taking online sales without my own merchant account.
Paypal This is the company that process all of Ebay's auction sales. They'll let you get set up taking credit card orders on your website in about 2 minutes. They have both once-off payments and recurring billing features. There is no set up fee - but you need a credit card of your own for them to put a temporary charge on it (which they then remove), so they can prove to themselves that you have a legitimate identity. I've never had any problems using these guys.
Protect and distribute your online products
I used this software to create products called "e-books" - electronic books... There are other ebook software programs out there, but they have one major flaw - you can't control what your customers do with your ebook - they can send it on to millions of people if they want, post it to a forum or a pirate website for people to copy... All your hard work goes down the drain when one user sends one email to a massive list, who send it on to their lists, and so on... Even if you put a password on the book, all the customers do is forward the password with the ebook, so everyone can use it to open the book. It's pointless. With this program however, every customer gets an individual and different password, which is tracked electronically. What happens is every time a customer opens the ebook, the ebook checks whether their individual password is still valid. If you want, you can turn their password off - for example, if you find the password posted on a website or something, and heaps of people are using it without paying for it. No other ebook program I've found offers this level of protection for your work.
Also, with other programs, users can print out the ebook and photocopy it for someone else, or for multiple people. With ebookPro, you decide whether they can print it or not.
Products that can be delivered electronically over the Internet have a tremendous advantage over anything else that you might decide to market online. Problems like expensive delivery charges, wrong addresses, stocking and packaging delays, snail mail slow downs, etc. are entirely eliminated - with eBook Pro. eBook Pro is not only a superior (and user friendly) software for packaging information, it also gives you far more security and control than other programs or packaging options. There's no longer any reason for you to be taking dangerous risks with your business. They've also upgraded the software since I first bought it... It gives you an easy-to-use ebook creator so you just point-and-click with your mouse to create a professional-looking ebook containing your information - words, pictures, sound, videos... Now your computer can deliver your products instantly and automatically (with zero cost) over the Internet. eBook Pro can even:
With eBook Pro, your eBooks are easy to produce , they're cost-effective , and they have the potential to generate insane amounts of profit with relatively little effort on you part! For example, the ebook I created with ebookPro sold for US$97. It cost me $80 to make (I paid a programming student to make some simple picture animations for me). Then each individual password cost me just 10c. So if you forget about the $80 start-up creation cost, each ebook cost me only 10c. I sold it for US$97, so the mark up was something like 100,000% And it sold well ! I remember chilling out at a cafe, and pulling out a wad of $100 bills that was spending money from my ebook profits... and having my mates going... "ooooh" I even set up CD ROM versions of the ebook, and still used ebookPro to password-protect the CD ROM version for total security and peace of mind. If you are going to create....
...you should use this software to protect the electronic version that you will create for web delivery. Cost: US$199
It covers all aspects of how to set up a successful website business.
The recently-revised and updated 2006 version of this course has over 1300+ pages of the most up-to-date Internet marketing strategies and tactics your customers and subscribers can apply to their businesses today! It will take you a few days to get through all the stuff. It contains two 8" x 11" full-color three ring binders containing 9 steps, broken down into 70 lessons with step-by-step instructions included for every promotion and strategy. And it also comes with five resource CDs (with 471 pages of additional lessons) and one audio CD (39 minutes ), packaged in a special folder that holds all 6 CDs -- plus two DVDs that contain video of Derek speaking "live" in Los Angeles, additional lessons, examples, audio interviews, and articles, as well as timesaving software and invaluable resource files. This course is specifically designed to teach you how to effectively market your business on the Internet, whether you are starting from scratch, or whether you already have your website up and running and making you profit... So if you are just getting started , you'll learn how to turn your hobbies and passions into lucrative online businesses you can grow from scratch! And if you already have an Internet business , the advanced sections of this system will show you how you can increase your sales by 400%... 700%... even as much as 1,000%! Here's a tiny sample of what you will learn:
... And MUCH more!
Cost: US$197
If you don't know what you are doing with web design and web marketing, and you are NOT going to get me on your team and use my services, then I strongly recommend you use the Site Build It system. Please be aware, I have not used this system myself. But I have had a lot of heartache and wasted a bit of money that could have been avoided if I had found Site Build It way back at the start. I really believe beginners should use this system if you don't have an expert to do it for you. It is the most complete system for beginners to market their products and services online that I have ever seen. It's not cheap, but it is quality, and it will save you money in the long run. Once you get grounded in the techniques and have a bit of success in web marketing in the method presented in Site Build It, you can move on to other online marketing methods like affiliate marketing, viral marketing, and so on... Go to their main site...
This software makes it easy to get high rankings in the search engine results. And high rankings means more free traffic. This is priceless software if you intend to get any traffic from search engines, because without it, you simply won't be listed at the top of the search results. The software tracks how the different search engines want the web pages displayed to get at the top of the listings. How many words on the page, number of repetitions of certain words, number of headlines on the page... and so on... ...each search engine has a different formula that it uses to decide which web pages get at the top of the listings, and which go at the bottom and are never seen. You need this software if you are going to do any search engine marketing. Note: if you are a beginner and took my advice to buy the SiteBuildit software, it has a similar program built into it. So if you are buying SiteBuildit you won't need this WebPosition4 program when you start out. If you are a seasoned webmaster, this program is gold.
Cost: US$149 But they have a free 30 day trial as well.
Affiliate (online-partnership) marketing If you are going to set up an online partnership network (and I strongly suggest you do), then you are going to need software to track which website sent you the customer who bought some of your stuff. In other words, you need to know who to pay the commission to. If you aren't tracking all your customers and where they came from, how can you possibly know which partner to pay? That's where this kind of tracking software comes in. It trackes each individual customer, and records which partner sent that customer to your website. When the customer buys something from you, the system records the sale and awards the commission to the correct partner. At the end of the month, you simply click a button and look at a report to see which partners you need to pay. Then you write out the cheques and mail them, or some systems allow you to simply send out a mass e-payment over the internet, sending the correct funds to the correct person with a simple click of the mouse button. Here are 2 programs I have used and highly recommend...
This is a totally awesome solution. Their package easily handles large numbers of linking partners. You can email all of them with a few clicks of a button. They have a built-in function so you can simply download a list of all the partners you need to pay each month - saves time and hassle of working out each one for yourself! It also integrates with your credit card processor, and provides a nice "look-and-feel" to your order page so it all looks professional. I used these guys for years.
Another solution if you are doing heavy-duty online marketing, particularly if you are building a network of other websites who refer customers to you and you want to pay them a commission on any sales they generate (this is called affiliate marketing). I used these guys for a while, and they ARE very good. But I changed over to QuickPayPro after a while, because of some tech issues with my particular merchant account provider, where they couldn't handle automatic subscription billing of customers' credit cards every month. QuickPayPro integrated better with my order taking process so I could put customers on recurring billing. But that was just an issue with my particular merchant account provider - many other merchant providers can handle the automatic subscription with 1ShoppingCart.com And there are thousands of very pleased merchants using 1ShoppingCart, and this may be the solution for you too.
Charge your customers access to restricted areas of your site. They also have a feature where you can set up subscription based access to a password-protected area of your website. For example, if you create a special course for online delivery, you can lock off the part of your website that has the course, and charge customers $25 per month for access. If they course takes 6 months to complete, you make $150 per customer. Go to...
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I have used this program for 4 years now, for many different projects, and it really is the best.
This is the course I took in web marketing.
