So, you have a new terrific looking Website. You’ve gone to great lengths to make sure it is Search Engine Friendly, you have great content and you are sure that you are what the Search Engines have been waiting for! Your big launch date comes and goes, and nothing. But it takes time to show up on the generic Search Engine results, you might say. So you try an aggressive marketing campaign, and still, your sales are almost non-existent.

What is happening? Your keywords are the fundamental building blocks of your online success. Because the competition is so great, choosing general or broad keywords is almost a guarantee that either you will not show up on the Search Engine results, or if you do, your target audience will not be looking for what you have to offer. Your keywords need to be as specific as possible to get you the results you are looking for. In other words, shoppers ready to buy your product or services are your target and the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword, the less competition you will face.

Choosing the right keywords when your Website is new can be tricky as well as time consuming. There are a few ways to go about it:

1. You might not think objectively. Ask your clients, family members, or friends what they would look for if searching for your product. You might be surprised at what insights they can give you.

2. Get personal with your keywords. Take the obvious general keywords that come to mind, for this example we will use “toys”, and try narrowing it down. Try “toy trucks” or “infant toys” or “water toys”. Now go even deeper in your category and try “infant rattle toys” or “baby teething toys”. You see how you are now targeting exactly what someone might be searching for? 

3. Do a manual search for the keywords you choose, and see who your competition is. Is that your target? Also look on the upper right hand corner of your search results. Typically, Search Engines will display the number of found results. The more specific the keyword, the less results displayed, the better your chances of obtaining results for that keyword.

So now you have all these great keywords, what do you do with them? Knowing what your keywords are is not enough, you need to keep a few critical points in mind:

1. Continually evaluate your keywords, keeping in mind that trends come and go, and what is “HOT” today may not be what people are looking for tomorrow.

2. Keep track of where your visitors found you. If you are doing a paid campaign, this is easy to do, but if you are looking at generic results, you can use a tracking software to show you what your best resulting keyword searches are. Google Analytics is an example of a free service, and one of the best to track your traffic, visitors’ keywords and behavior.

3. Your visitors should never have to find what they are looking for on your Website. This applies mainly to your PPC programs. Point them directly to where they need to be. Whether it is the page where they can purchase your product, fill out a form or subscribe to a service, land them directly to that page. If you simply send them to your home page, you will lose that visitor because they did not immediately find what they were looking for.

4. Lastly, optimize your pages to your keywords. Take time to carefully write your meta-tags. Properly written Titles can make the difference if your generic result is clicked on or not. Edit the individual pages to have a keyword rich description. This does not mean stuff your keywords anywhere you can find space for them. Read it over, and make sure it makes sense to you. Keep in mind that you not only want to score a lot of points with the Search Engines so that they deem you content “valuable” to their users, you also want to make your visitors keep coming back to your Website .

All this may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But to put it bluntly, “what you put in to it, is what you get out of it”. If you put the time and effort into your keywords, you will eventually be rewarded with the results you are seeking.

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A. Get Rich Quickly Syndrome
The major obstacle is the mad rush to get rich quickly without recourse to patience. Whatever business you find yourself requires hard work, capital and patience. No matter the promises made by an Internet venture, one still need to come on board with capital and time you can invest. But most people believe this money is there already to be collected with ease.
This is wrong, Internet Business is something that needs enough time and efforts to set in motion and once it starts nobody can stop it! Rome they say was not built in a day.

B. Inadequate Experience
Another obstacle is that most Internet business men and women do not have the requisite experience to successfully run an Internet business. Experience they say is the best teacher. Your ability to use a computer/laptop and browse the internet do not necessarily make you a guru in internet business.
Regardless of internet business experience you may have possessed before venturing into it, you still need to do alot of research on the business and carry out extensive plan. Above all, you need to be mentored by an expert in internet business to succeed in the business. 

C. Inadequate Working Materials
No reasonable person goes to the farm without the needed working tools like cutlas, hoe, shovel etc to work when you get there. This is one of the obstacles to achieving success in internet business because alot of people enter into the business without the necessary tools. A would be internet business man or woman needs to equip himself or herself with a very good computer/laptop, internet connection and electricity supply. In the case of developing countries like Nigeria where the supply of electricity is epileptic, you need a good electricity generating set as a back-up in case of power failure. So these working tools are very critical to achieving success in internet business.

D. Information Overload
The Internet is the cheapest source of information and because of this, people send different kind of information to your mail bordering on internet business. The volume of information sent is so much that you may become confused and frusstrated even to the point of abandoning genuine ones that would have been of help to you. The best way to get quality information that would be relevant to you is to search reputable and well tested Forums relevant to your line of business instead of going through heaps of irrelevant information.

E. Prevalence of Fraudulent Internet People
The Internet is a breeding ground for Internet Fraudsters of different sizes and shapes. These set of people have succeeded in duping alot of people of their hard earned living thereby frusrating them out of internet business. The best approach to solving this problem is to stop believing everything you are told in the internet. Infact, skeptism should be your watchword. Seek expert advise from mentors on internet issues and above all run away from people that promised to make you become multi-millionaire overnight, they are fraudulent people.

So as stated on the opening paragraph, alot had already been said and written about this topic and that this one is additional five obstacles to achieving success in internet business that have not been said or written before.

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The first step in designing or redesigning your web site is to clarify the goals you want the web site to achieve. What is the purpose of your web site? What do you want your web site to do?

One of the goals of your web site should be to attract the attention of your target market. Most small business web sites fail to do this. Typically, these web sites are filled with information on the firm’s services, products and credentials.

These types of web sites do little to attract new customers, simply because they are “me” oriented. In other words, they don’t offer what the customer is looking for.

Most users of the Web are searching for information and solutions to problems. If your web site doesn’t provide easily found solutions the customer will quickly leave for other options.

Is your target market searching for the content you have on your web site?

Many small businesses have web sites in order to establish credibility. The mere presence of a web site is not going to convince prospects you can help them. To establish trust you need to demonstrate your expertise and qualifications.

One method for establishing credibility is by featuring testimonials. Comments from others are perceived with greater credibility than descriptions of your features and benefits. This will help differentiate your business from the competition.

What are you doing to differentiate your web site and build credibility?

Generating leads is one of the most important objectives for a small business web site. If people come to your web site for solutions, you want as many of them as possible to contact you.

It is also desirable for your web site to differentiate people who are not ready to buy from people who are ready to make a purchase.

Visitors to you web site need to be given direction and incentives.

Does your web site prompt people to supply contact information and contact you? Is there motivation for them to give you their contact information? 

Of course the most important goal of your web site should be to help make you money. If you sell services and products it should be easy for prospects to find them, along with comprehensive information about each product.

Ideally, you will want individual sell pages for each product or service. Again, you will want the content to discuss solutions to customers’ problems.

Is your web site helping you sell more of your products and services?

It is your customers’ problems that maintains your business. You need both customer problems and solutions to keep your business operating.

Customer problems are the fuel that provides the power to your marketing engine. Fueling your marketing engine requires a constant focus on customer problems. The better you can address customer problems the more powerful your marketing engine.

What are the concerns of your target market? What problems do they have that you can solve? What problems do they want solved?

Prospects want to see themselves and their concerns clearly identified in order to feel confident that you understand their needs. Don’t start talking about features and benefits until you have identified the problems that the prospects want to solved.

Switch to using your prospects problems as the core to your marketing message and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your marketing will accelerate your business.

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In direct response Internet marketing, you must be able to move your reader to take action (often it is to buy your product) simply by communicating through the written word. Doing that successfully takes a very specific set of skills. You must be a master at writing eyeball-grabbing sales copy.

Here are three elements of great sales copy.

Firstly, your copy must have an attention-grabbing and captivating headline. It must stop the reader in his tracks so that he reads nothing else except your copy. There are two ways of doing that. Firstly, you write the main benefit of your product into your headline. Notice it’s benefit, not feature that you must highlight. Suppose you are selling an automated blog post making software. Writing, “Introducing the World’s Best Software that Makes Blog Posts to Your Blog Automatically” is writing about the feature. But writing, “Discover How You Can Update Your Blog on Autopilot and Never Have to Look at it again for One Entire Year”, is writing about benefit.

Features of your product are important, but not in the headline. The second way to make a captivating headline is by writing something in your headline that puts a question into the mind or your reader. This makes him think that the answer must be in the body of your copy and he will continue reading. If you read the headline above, your most natural question would be ‘How is this accomplished?’ and you will likely read on. Once you get your reader thinking like that, then your headline has done its job. Now comes the body of your copy.

The body of your sales copy must be riveting and engaging. Every word must be written for the sole purpose of getting your reader to read the next sentence. Here’s one simple technique to accomplish that.

Think about the old bucket system of dousing a fire. Each person in the line passes a bucket of water to the next person until it reaches the end of the line and the water is poured onto the fire. That is exactly what your sales copy must do. It must move the reader to read the next line and subsequently the next paragraph until he comes to the end.

To do that, your each sentence must lead on to something in the next sentence that your reader wants to know. And the last sentence of each paragraph must leave the reader with some missing piece of the puzzle such that he is compelled to read the next paragraph. Look at the last line of each paragraph of this article. They were designed to lead you to the next paragraph. Can you see how it is done?

Simple, by using certain words like ‘if’ or ‘…you must be a master at…’ (as in the first two paragraphs), you covertly challenge the reader to find out something he does not yet know. Another way is by stipulating a certain number of points beforehand (as in the fourth paragraph) then your paragraph does not cover all the points you said you would bring up. The reader then concludes there are more points in the following paragraph and reads on.

Another way to write like a ‘bucket system’ is by using the last line of a paragraph to ‘introduce’ what’s in the next paragraph (as in the 5th and 6th paragraphs). Yet another way is to pose a question in the last sentence (as in paragraph 8).

Finally, great sales copy must have a clear call to action at the end. Your call to action must be convincing and compelling enough for your reader to take the action you want of him (usually it is to buy your product). Your call to action can be made more convincing by answering your reader’s objection, favorably comparing the price of your product with another similar product or challenging him to make a change by buying your product instead of remaining the way he is.

A clear call to action is a big topic by itself which can be written about in another article (can you see the ‘bucket system’ at work here?).

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This online business is not limited to flipping just websites. The business model can include selling blogs, Squidoo Lens and Hubpages. The upside of building a Squidoo Lens, Hubpage or say a Blogger Blog, is that the site can be built and sold with just the investment of time, with no cash out of pocket.

If the business model was to use WordPress.org as the site building tool, the cost can be kept to a minimum. The benefit is that the site can be built on a specific domain name and on hosting that you control. A site built for the price of a ten dollar domain name and a faction of a monthly hosting fee, then sold for $50, puts nearly 40 bucks in your pocket or Paypal account. 

Building your own site and selling it is only one way online marketers use flipping as one of their multiple streams of income. Another method can be compared to the real estate investing strategy of “rehabbing” properties. In this case, the investor buys an existing site that has some established profit making history. After that the site is tweaked or rehabbed so it gets more traffic and/or converts sales better. Once a the statistics reflect the better profit performance, the site can be sold again for a profit, hopefully a large profit!

One of the trickiest things with flipping websites is determining the value of a site before you buy it or sell it. As with the flipping of domain names, there are services online that will provide you an estimated value report on the website. If expense is an issue, checkout a free service like www.dnscoop.com to help you determine a price for your site.

Another challenge in flipping websites is finding someone to buy it from you. Just starting out in this business model, the best and easiest way to both create interest and market your sites is on eBay. Once you have a value estimate for your site, set up an eBay auction with a minimum bid that assures profit and then see what happens. Once you establish a reputation for marketing quality sites, your auctions will be an ongoing source of revenue for your online business.

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Most of the work is done up front, and then you just add to it every little while. If you’re getting alot of traffic and/or sales, then you need to put all of your focus on that site to get what you can out of it.

Niche websites are little sites that you can setup using wordpress. Normally about 5-7 pages and promoting one product. They can bring you in a consistent income, sometimes for years! It all depends on how you tend to them through fresh incoming links and updated material. Some do nothing. Others do well. Your hope is that one (or more) does great!

Also, you need to “ping” after every post to your blogs, niche website, or even within your squidoo account. Pinging let’s search engines know that you have fresh content on the net. The spiders then come to crawl your site.

Google “ping” to find out more.

Using the free WordPress.org site means that you will need a host for your sites. There are a ton of hosts out there, but the host you want will support “Fantastico”. This enables you to upload your wordpress software at the click of a button. 

A host will cost you about $10 a month. Your other expense will be for domain names. For one whole campaign, you’re looking at purchasing two domain names, one for your wordpress site and the other for your products affiliate link. This will cost you about $20 a year.

Before you read any further, let’s just find out if creating niche websites is for you!

Can you see yourself focusing on one subject for a week or two and then switching gears and throwing all your attention into a new subject?

If you think you can, then maybe this is for you. Alot of people can’t do this. They need something that they are passionate about and that’s it. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that and actually I would advise you to search for topics that do interest you. Of course, you need to dig down deep into the subject to see if there actually is a market there.

Okay, let me give you a quick rundown on how creating niche websites work!

It’s as easy as going to Clickbank, (which is a place where you can promote other people’s products and get a percentage of the sale), searching and choosing a product to promote and then grabbing your hoplink(affiliate link). This link is one that you’ll want to purchase a domain name for. Once you get that domain name, you forward that hoplink to it, you can do this at the site where you purchase your domain name. Hoplinks are generally pretty long and ugly. You want to look professional, so make them nice and neat.

When choosing your product, stay away from fad products and don’t choose a product who’s gravity is sky high! Yes, it’s nice to know that affiliates are making some money off of the product, but that also means that the competion will be stiff.

We want to, kind of, fly under the radar. Also, before you grab your hoplink from the product your going to promote, go to google and type in “google keyword tool”.

Click on it, it’s free. Check to see if you can find some good longtail keywords for the product you’re looking to promote. We want keyword phrases that are RELEVANT to what you will be promoting. VERY RELEVANT!

Enter a broad keyword. look for keyword phrases that have about 1,000 to 1,500 monthly searches and low competition. Dig down deep, try to find about 5 or 6 really good longtail keywords.

Think about what you want your site to look like, as far as the pages go and what you’d like each to say. I say that because you’re site will be about 5 or 6 pages and each page will be optimized with one of those keywords. Title, first sentence of the first paragraph, the “about” page, and maybe 2 or 3 sprinkled throughout the rest of the page.

Now go grab your hoplink.

You’re going to be sending people to that hoplink(which has been forwarded to the purchased domain name, which, by the way, should also be relevant to your topic, having the keyword phrase in the name would be ideal) from your niche website.

You’re going to be sending people to your niche website from Squidoo via another domain name, this one being your niche website domain name. So, on Squidoo, you’re going to send people to the niche website using that domain. But, on your main website, you’re going to send people to the product sales page using the hoplink domain. Kapeesh? Did I even spell that right? Haha!

Google loves WordPress and Squidoo. This is why most ALL of your links will go straight to your Squidoo lenses first.

Do the same thing with your Squidoo campaign as you did with your niche website; create a lens for each longtail keyword.

Now start sending traffic to each lens. Take each keyword phrase and write articles around it, send the links to your Squidoo lens page and to your niche website page. create a blog or two and link to your lens page and your niche website page. Go to Wetpaint and set up a page, you probably can guess where I’m going to tell you to link to, haha!

The bottom line is this; pick some ways to generate traffic and let that become your routine. Soon, you’ll start pumping out these sites. Like I said before, some will stick and some won’t. Don’t fret over it. Just keep creating more and more.

Also, remember this; when one starts getting some good traffic or sales, stop everything else, go to that site and expand it. Do more articles, make more posts, post in more bookmarking sites, create some videos.

Oh and by the way, once you do start generating some steady cash flow; you can purchase some software and/or outsourcing to get these sites up even faster!

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Have fun with this!

A meeting can be over a conference line or it can also be a netmeeting online. Whichever feels most comfortable to your participants would be ideal. 

The objective of the session is to not become too long, say maybe two hours and have the participants brainstorm the product. It is very desirable that the participants do not know that you are the owner of the product so that they feel free to give ideas and opinions without any retribution.

The moderator should be able to get people to feel uninhibited by asking questions of the group. What hot buttons are there that can be investigated? Questions regarding the product’s method of use or lack of creativity can spur direct comments from the participants that will become very valuable.

The idea is not for the participants to be negative or destructive, but to try to build on or improve the product being presented.

The ideal time to have this brainstorming session is when the product is new and not fully developed. The session might present new ideas that can be incorporated and used which will only help the marketing and sale of the product.

The brainstorming group participants will surely feel their comments and suggestions are welcome and that they have a good feel for what the product is trying to present. Maybe advising them that they will get a free product when the item is finished, will make them want to provide clear and purposeful ideas. Anything that makes the new product more useful and more direct on the subject matter, will be welcomed.

Any ideas from potential users must be considered so that the new product will be totally successful. Have fun with your brainstorming group and do not become discouraged if some comments do not seem to be helpful. Taking the participant’s comments and improving the product or service is the goal.

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Probably the purest form of flipping domain names, is the purchase of a specific domain name as an investment. This is referred to as “Domaining” and it involves buying and holding a domain name because of a perception about future value. This often involves a short, targeted domain in the .com category. Who hasn’t wished that they had been the first to see the value of a domain like hotels.com or flowers.com? 

The reported sale of Chinese.com in 2007 for more than $1 million, is no urban legend. It is one of the successes at the heart of the GeoDomaining niche where domains specific to an identifiable geographic location, nation or culture, are bought and sold.

Domaining is a very tricky business. It is important to keep in mind that in domaining, the value rests solely on the domain name itself. The investor has no intent to develop the domain name so there are no statistics about rank, traffic or revenue, as there may be when flipping a Website. At the heart of the investment strategy is how the domain name is monetized or has a value assigned to it.

As a result of this need to determine the value of the domain names that a “domainer” has pulled into their “portfolio,” an entire business niche for “domain appraisal” has sprung up. Put this term into a search engine, with the quotes, and the search will provide pages and pages of search results. Some of the sites will provide a few free appraisals before a fee is required but, depending on the domain, appraisal fees can range from around $15 to as much as $100 or more.

It should also be noted, for those interested in getting a domain appraised, that the service may need to be viewed as more of an art than a science. Think about home appraisals which are based on the home being compared to homes which recently sold in the area around the home. Domain appraisal is an attempt to compare the domain to ones that have sold within the business, niche, or category that might cover the domain.

An article at sitepoint.com reports that a researcher submitted the same domain to a number of domain appraisal services. The domain name was associated with a term used in the business of stock market trading. When completed, the several appraisals provided a range of values that ran from $200 to $160,000! This example serves to illustrate the speculative nature of flipping domain names and why it can be so very tricky to determine the value of your portfolio.

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Let’s look at how you can increase your chances of meeting the tweeple. (This is just one of those new terms mentioned. It is so new that spelling checkers still think it is a mistake). Tweeple are simply people using Twitter. Why would you want to meet people using Twitter? The reason is that there is a potential to reach a huge audience very quickly. Unlike spam email the people reading your messages (or tweets) have opted in to do so by becoming your ‘followers’. This raises the possibility for Twitter marketing. 

It is not a good idea to blatantly advertise in twitter – even though many do. Apart from the fact that people may stop following you, they are also a lot less likely to click on any of your links. A better method is to tell a story. For example, you could send a tweet that said something like ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me at the shops today – find out the full story [link]’. This would arouse curiosity. The link would send readers to your blog or website where you could include an interesting pre-sell story. Not only would you get more clicks, you are likely to get higher conversions.

Of course, none of this is going to happen if you don’t have followers. There are some simple steps you can take to increase the likelihood of others following you. The simplest is to make good use of your twitter profile. You should include a picture of yourself in order to appear personal and approachable. If you have a website then you should include the URL in the profile. Twitter allows you to add up to 160 characters for your bio. This is an area you should put some thought into. As well as introducing yourself you should add something about the niche you are targeting.

An advanced tip is to change the profile background. Most people couldn’t be bothered doing this so this one small change can help you stand out from the crowd. Not only can you change the background color, you can also add a picture. This could be a picture of yourself, your product or one that just sets a theme.

If you set up your profile well and provide useful tweets that add value you are likely to build an army of followers as well as make some extra sales and get increased traffic to your website along the way.

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If you consider yourself Internet savvy, then you probably already have a pretty good idea what social networking is. Whether you are that savvy or just getting introduced to the Internet, social networking web sites are increasing and doing quite well for the network creators as well as those who join them. So what exactly is social networking and what’s it all about? Read on as we explore this phenomenon.

A basic definition of social networking is paramount to understand what it’s all about. A broad definition is the gathering of people in an online community for the purpose of sharing interests and activities together. This leaves a world of possibilities when it comes to what social networking is all about.

SOCIALIZING
This may speak for itself on the surface but actually socializing is one of the primary ways that we communicate with each other. And thanks to the Internet, it is now possible to socialize on virtually whatever level you desire with people from all walks of life. Networks exist for every interest; from the simply frivolous to the absolute essentials. And because the Internet affords a level of anonymity that many people appreciate, this electronic form of socializing can be intimate, therapeutic, confidential and just plain fun. 

NETWORKING
This normally brings to mind the idea of people gathering together to create a group of people with a common goal such as finding jobs or raising funds for a charity. Today the Internet connects people from around the world into social networks for sharing pictures, blogs, live chats, instant messaging, emailing and virtually any other social idea you can come up with.

AFFILIATE MARKETING
Here are opportunities to promote products and services through exposure that comes with belonging to a social network. You’ve probably seen the advertisements that are placed on the pages of social network members. Additionally, when you have the necessary coding, you can place their notices on the pages of other members. It has become one of the greatest ways to get affiliate sales by marketing your business on every available social network.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Many website owners are turning to social networks to gain added SEO with general information about a particular subject. These articles can be placed as blog comments or stand alone pieces that must be placed in the applicable forums. With the proper use of certain key words placed as back links in the articles, an article can create a wonderful search engine placement benefits for those working to generate new customers and increase profits.

FUN
It may be overstated but with so many pressing situations being broadcast in the media, the opportunity to connect with others in a social setting such as the ones that social networks provide is fun. After a hard day at work or searching for work, there is plenty of pleasure to be derived from sitting down in front of the computer and finding several messages from friends in your social network. Whether it is games such as role playing or sharing such as how-to features, the fun aspect of social networking can relieve stress and provide hours of enjoyable time online.

So if you have not joined a social network yet, go to your favorite search engine, and search for some social networks related to your interest. Find one that you are comfortable with, one that looks active, and join the crowd!

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