I’ve heard it a hundred times or more…

Learn How to Start Marketing Your Website – Ask Laura (July 2007)

After spending all that money for a custom designed site, or forking over cash for a turnkey website in a hot market, you realize that just because you’ve built it (or had it built), doesn’t mean they’ll come (the customers).

So now you’re taking the next step which is to learn about marketing and advertising your website or online business…

But let’s just back up here for a minute – so you don’t make the same mistake again. A website or online business is not much different than a business you would start up in your home town. And before any business is launched a business plan should have been created, written, and all aspects (such as advertising and marketing) would have been written into such a plan.

So before you launch your first website, or your next website, consider your marketing strategy, your advertising costs, your plan of attack, for gettting your offer in front of your potential customers.

Let’s talk about how to plan and write that strategy then.

It’s dull work if you’ve never thought of marketing before, but once you’ve created a strategy and you see it starting to work and the sales rolling in, you’ll fall in love with marketing strategies.

Begin by writing a list of daily, weekly, monthly and long range promotional action steps. Post it directly above your desk and act on it daily. Many business owners will tell you that you’re not in the “service” or “product” business – you’re in the marketing business when you own your own company. Every day must see some activity to promoting your brand, your website URL, or your offers.

If your marketing, advertising or promotion strategy is netting any results or sales after a few months it’s perfectly acceptable to rework the plan and seek out different avenues for advertising or promotion.

Below you’ll find some of the techniques other webmasters have success with. Each technique should be investigated fully by reading the advice of top internet marketing trainers before proceeding. As an example of why you want to delve deeper into understanding any strategic move is because many ‘gurus’ will tell you to trade links with other webmasters to gain traffic. This is good advice, old advice, but if you don’t do it right it won’t be one-tenth as effective as it could be.

So…let’s get to some of the promotion techniques for website owners:

• Trade links only other webmasters. (Again, you need to learn how to do this correctly.)
• Offer something of value, for free, on your site. (Read more on viral marketing.)
• Employ an affiliate opportunity. (Amazing how this delivers sales and traffic, but again, learn how to do it inexpensively and correctly first.)
• Add useful content, not just product sales on your site.
• Add interaction to your site. (Learn about forums, comments, help desks – relevant to your offering and target market.)
• Give them a reason and a venue to return – or refer their friends. (Learn about bookmarking, email a friend, subscribers.)
• Run limited-time sales on your offers. (Learn about one time offers and back end selling.)

That’s all for today and enough to get you started in your online marketing and advertising campaign.

Laura Childs

The ‘Ask Laura’ series is published solely to assist you with questions and resolutions to making your online business profitable. Names are never disclosed on this website unless approved or requested.

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This is, obviously not for a mini-site (created solely for the purpose of selling an ebook) although I have certainly taken a mini-site and grown it into a larger content site behind the sales letter in the past.

Building Value into Your Website

If you are redesigning your website, or growing it for search engine boost and traffic, don’t just add more content on the same topic. Spin off your topic to something closely related and incredibly useful to your visitor.

A few ideas are:

• Add a directory of free offers and products related to your topic. This still brings a a lot of traffic to niche sites. You can include pay-per-lead offers, or cookie-setting affiliate offers, or take it one step further and request a monthly fee from webmasters wanting to submit their free products to grab some of your traffic. You, of course, want to be very careful with what or who you’re linking to in this regard both for your reputation’s and your search engine rankings sake. Finally, to promote your ‘free offers’ page or directory take a few hours and find other free offer sites to trade links with.
• Add definitions and terms pages. Another traffic-puller. Since so many people are still surfing the web for knowledge and information, if your site has a page explaining in detail the terminology of your niche market you will get traffic. Recent experience shows me that just a few sentences per term is no longer enough. You need a few paragraphs of each to gain search engine traffic from this technique. The best part about this technique however is not the gain in search engine positioning, but the increase of value in your visitor’s mind. Your site is obviously the ‘expert’ site on this topic in their eyes.
• Another very important step when you’re growing your site is to take the time during this phase to check every affiliate link. After redesigning Smartzville last week I did this and found that 50% of my year old links to resources and associated merchants led to new offers (and not always related) or websites that were no longer available. Frustrating, but something you want to watch out for more often than annually when you have a high traffic website.
• While you’re checking your outbound links assess every one, once more. For instance if you’re linking out to an ebook (where you make money as an affiliate) and you realize that you’ve never made one sale of that product, dump it. Take time to test and review a new, related product that may convert better. Don’t waste your out-going links or promotions willy-nilly. Concentrate
  on finding the ones that sell and drop the ones that don’t.
• Add a section to your site that educates and informs your website visitors, priming them for the offer by training them to see the value of the coming offer. Then you can lead your educated prospects to your sales page. As an example, if you were selling investing tips one entire section of your website could be devoted to the subject “How and why to invest…”, that linked to the more advanced member’s area or ebook.
• Assess your navigation and traffic flow. You may want to get a friend to sit in front of your computer and watch how a new visitor experiences and navigates your site. When you are redesigning or adding new sections to your site consider also the ‘nofollow’ tag recently adopted by Google. (If you don’t know about this, run a Google search on it.) You don’t want to be leaking rank onto non-performing pages. Keep your rank on your sales pages and home page.
• Add interaction! Online games, quizzes, and reader polls make your visitor think that your site was created just for them! You can find a lot of these – although not specialized – free online to cut and paste into your web pages. If you don’t have a geek-ish mind you can find programmers who will be happy to create something for you relatively cheaply.

That’s my time for today! I do hope this brief article lends a few ideas to your marketing while you grow your website, increase search engine traffic and build a valuable resource for your visitors.

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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One issue that comes to mind when I first started out was the number of people who were promoting ebook formating software progams, ranging in price from $20-$200. I sat with my book written, formated and ready to go for 3 days while I surfed around for the best deal and reading every review on these programs…

Learn Why You Don’t Need An Ebook Software Program – Ask Laura (May 2007)

An email came in to one of my sites today asking about these formating programs which tells me that marketing trainers and affiliate promotions experts are still pushing these programs on unsuspecting newpreneurs.

“Enough!,” I say.

This is a blantant waste of money and a blatant mis-use of a newpreneur’s trust in a mentor. Formating your content into an ebook does not take any extra software – it can be done, for free, online.

*******************
My reader writes:

(Laura)…thank you for being available!

I have written a book & I am trying to get it wrapped up so I can do an e-book & also a hard bound book. the snags I have are:

1. in the resizing of photos to intersperse in the pages,
2. finding a software program that will format the book both in e-book format & also ready for hardbound format
3. how to make the links for affiliates live at the end of the book (yours would be a good one to include)
4. formatting a cover
5. also to get an affiliate link do I have to have a website or can I get an affiliate link if I just have an e-book? and how would I go about getting the affiliate link to include?

I liked your e-book & wondered if you had a specific software that you used to format or if you did that yourself.

Also when you added the photos, did you do the resizing yourself to fit in the appropriate location or did you have a software program that did the resizing for you?

My problem has been that I go off on 20 different tangents & never end up completing one. So I have decided to complete the book first & then get the website up & running to accommodate the selling of the book as well as other products.

…those are a few of my immediate problems.

Thanks for listening!

Karen

**********************

Dear Karen:

Thanks for your note. I’m a little pressed for time for the next week, but wanted to get a quick note out to you today….

My old ebook “Back Road Riches” was one of my first. I bought software to format it as a little piece of software containing the book’s content. I would not suggest following this route. People are wary of downloading software these days. Ebooks are acceptable in PDF format as it has less chance of containing viruses. Plus PDF format allows for easy printing for your end reader.

There’s lots of free software available to create PDF files from your Word document. Actually adobe.com (makers of the PDF format) allows 5 free conversions per email address.

So my modern day advice is write your ebook in Word or WordPerfect, etc. which will also format your photos to fit, convert it to pdf and distribute it as such.

As for hardcover format, you’ll need to follow your publisher’s direction on that as each varies. Generally they would edit then typeset it to their own specs anyway.

If you’re not a graphical person I’d suggest paying someone over at elance.com $20-40 to create a cover for you. Books are certainly judged by their covers. Again, your publisher for hardcover will have their own version of a cover created in-house (generally without your say or control).

As for affiliate links every network is different. You’ll have to check with network of products you want to promote (i.e. http://www.smartzville.com/clickbank.htm). To make them active in Word you just type the url in.

As for your last trouble – going off on tangents and never completing anything – I want you to know we all have this problem. The good thing is that you are aware of it! Now that you know how you ‘operate’ you can force yourself to stay on track and complete one task at a time. Believe me saying it is easier than actually doing it!

Have a great day, write anytime….

Laura Childs

The ‘Ask Laura’ series is published solely to assist you with questions and resolutions to making your online business profitable. Names are never disclosed on this website unless approved or requested. Proof of all email communication between Laura Childs and her contacts can be provided upon request.

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For the next few weeks I’ll be talking about website traffic; getting qualified and targeted visitors to your online business and a few tricks to website promotion.

You know, whether you’re building your site for advertising revenue (you create content and your advertisers pay space to be ’seen’ on your content), you’re building your site for affiliate revenue (you promote other people’s products or services for a commission), or you’re building your site to make sales of your products directly, this same statement applies equally:

The greater number of targeted visitors, the greater your income.

With that said I won’t ever talk about getting any old traffic and I hope you never go down that route! Far too many people sign up for automated hits or traffic exchanges, pay for clicks to and on their website and find that even though their bandwidth went up, their incomes didn’t change one bit!

So what we’re after is highly qualified and targeted traffic. Real visitors who are truly interested in your content, recommendations, or products.

How effective you are at attracting that traffic will have a direct impact on the bottom line of your income.

I remember when I first started out designing website for a handful of corporate clients. Back then if you ran a search on yahoo.com there was a strong chance only 20-80 listings would even show up for your search term. Getting traffic was much easier – online surfers were happy to find a site that was at least close to their interests and it wasn’t hard getting and keeping top positions in the search engines.

Please remember, if you’re new to online business that just because you’ve built or bought a website, does not mean that the traffic will naturally flow to your pages and offers.

As any offline business, you can’t start something online, never promote the business and expect to earn an income.

No, website promotion needs to be conducted on many levels and I’ll be discussing each in turn over the coming weeks. Some article titles will be about using a blog to create traffic, using an RSS Feed to create traffic, marketing with articles to…you get the idea…

See you in a few days,

Laura

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Of course it was also a lot more expensive to get started back then as well. Domain names were $35/year and hosting costs were out of this world. Back then I traded my website designer hours in exchange for hosting fees. Today however you can start your online business for less than $13! An $8 domain name and a $5/month hosting account and you’re set to go, get some content up and start selling!

But with the lower cost comes stronger competition and a lot more of it!

It barely matters what your interest, target market, or niche is – there are hundreds of sites, owners, and products clamoring for your attention. And your wallet.

The answers to making it online are no longer a petty mix of having a product to sell, getting traffic to a website, a little search engine optimization, and building a list.

No. The secrets to success online (and I mean real success, not just $1000 a month success), are now buried underneath a higher learning curve, powerful alliances, resonating with your market, letting your personality shine through, and staying on top of the newest and hottest techniques in online marketing, promotion. You’ve got to have your hand on the pulse at all times – in fact, you have to be the pulse in your marketplace!

This site has been designed to help you through all that. I’m still in ‘build’ mode, so the high end knowledge is not here yet, but it is coming. First we must get the basics out of the way and that is what the Ask Laura section aims to do. Real questions, from real people, with real answers. If you don’t ‘get it’ then leave a comment on the post or article that doesn’t make sense to you and I’ll reply shortly.

If you already have the basics down, it is time to head into the online learning tutorials. The very first has begun at profiting from the public domain. More will be following shortly.

As always if you need me, use the contact form – linked from every page in either the top bar or the extreme right sidebar.

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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Learn to Market and Promote in 40 Pages or Less – Ask Laura (July 20/06)

“Ha!,” I say!

Internet marketing, website promotion, online business building is indeed very easy – to those that know the game or have already established a presence. But to the un-initiated, the un-taught, and sadly the opportunists who believe it can happen overnight – well, that’s a different story.

Just yesterday I received an email from a very smart and university educated friend of mine. He’s been relying, for the past two months, on someone else to create, maintain, and manage his new dream business for him and it’s not going as quickly as planned.

(Odd about that.)

But my friend has integrity and strengths and he’s wondering how he can learn what he needs to know so that he can step in and help out. The only trouble is, he thinks that one product, ebook, or training series is going to give him the online marketing education required…

Here we go. Laura, again, bursting bubbles of belief.

*******************

Dear Laura:

Do you or anyone you can recommend sell any reports or ebooks on the A to Z of internet marketing – particularly with a product and service (editor note: hardcover book and professional consultation service) such as what I have?

The reason I’m asking is that *edited* has been quite busy lately and, frankly, we thought it would be helpful for him if we had a better over all understanding of what he needs to do and how we should be assisting him from our end. The *url deleted* website project we will be developing is large and we’d like to help him as much as possible. We have a general idea but would like to get more specifics on what needs to be done from day to day…

********

My recommendation is, and likely always would be, if you’re going to run a business online then run it.

Know what it takes, make the decisions, learn how to manage it, promote it, repair it, brand it, sell it. You can’t have a business – without any knowledge of the business – and just farm out all the tasks.

Let’s be clear: You can own a business and not work it personally, hiring others to do all the grunt work. But you must know first what is involved so that you can choose and hire the best, as well as provide direction to, staff or associates performing that grunt work.

Plus, learning the business isn’t going to happen in any A to Z – I know, I’ve read a pile of them. Internet business management, promotion and techniques are in nuggets and on bread crumb trails scattered all around the web. And, what works for one business may not work for another. Each online business needs a leader at the helm that has a marketing strategy in mind.

At any rate, here’s my reply…

**********

A little pressed for time but wanted to send you a quick note…

Any A-Z won’t help you, only confuse and slow you down in your efforts.

Online business is a series of steps.

Create the site, get the traffic, brand your business/self, monetize the traffic, grow a subscriber list so that you can lather/rinse/repeat the process.

You are in site creation stage. *Name edited* is a traffic master (among other things).

If you want to learn the things that will help him in his efforts to help you, then you need to learn about getting your own content (so that the site is created), and the ways to get traffic to your site (#1 way is to have content for the search engines).

Now, since *name edited* is at the helm, your questions are better posed to him and his recommendations followed. His methods and strategy for your site may differ from the methods and strategy I use. You don’t want to follow my recommendations in case it clashes with the current marketing method and strategy he has planned for your site.

At this stage, it’s all about focus, taking one step at a time, and a targeted approach. Too many cooks…

So drop *edited* a note. Ask him what you could and should be doing.

If it was my ‘place’ to offer a suggestion I’d tell you to save your money on marketing products and ebooks right now. Invest in a satellite hookup or high speed connection (ed. n.b.: my friend is currently surfing at 28.8) and make the effort to learn site creation as *edited* teaches it. You could easily spend $1,000 in marketing products or ebooks (the extensive ones anyway) or $1,000 on a satellite system which would serve you well to gain the knowledge required; as well as moving quicker online after the learning process.

Laura Childs

The ‘Ask Laura’ series is published solely to assist you with questions and resolutions to making your online business profitable. Names are never disclosed on this website unless approved or requested. Proof of all email communication between Laura Childs and her contacts can be provided upon request.

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Nasty Emails in Your Inbox – Ask Laura ( October 11/04)

Now there are a lot of people who have ‘issues’ with internet marketers. They think the all the gurus are scam artists and money grubbers. I’m not about to tell you that those types of gurus don’t exist (there are a number of them I keep at arm’s length), but I will promise you that Joe Vitale does not fit into that category.

In the last 4 years I have listened to, taken the advice of, worked on promotions, and co-written two books with Joe. I can completely vouch for his products, tools, methods of teaching, and writing. My current income and following is a testament to what I’ve learned from Joe and a handful of other marketers with integrity.

But, back to the web rage issue.

Repeatedly over the years I have received angry, frustrated, nasty, mean emails from complete strangers who aren’t even my customers! Usually I try to respond to them on a personal level – help them sort out where their frustration with their online business stems from and how to remedy the situation – as in the case below.

On other days I just can’t do it. I just can’t play the punching bag game and take the abuse. On those days I just delete the offending email, unsubscribe the person if they’re on my list – and yes, I’ve been known to send a nasty quip or two back – of course never quite as personal and cutting as the one I received.

Through the years in this business I’ve discovered one thing. Those nasty emails only come from the entrepreneur crowd. The ones struggling to make a living online and not having much success. People who buy my country living ebooks and products never send me nasty emails – as a matter of fact one customer sent me a gorgeous bouquet of flowers! Others have sent thank you cards, paypal donations, and even a few amazon gift certificates.

So what’s going on with the entrepreneur sect?

It’s frustration. It’s jealousy. It’s mis-directed anger.

Mad at themselves for their own inadequacies, poor buying decisions, time wasted chasing foolish dreams or creating businesses on sand. If you ever get into the internet marketing business publicly you’re going to get messages like the one below, some a lot meaner…

Nasty Email #1

Nothing I have tried has worked. I’m tired of being ripped-off. These so-called Internet Gurus are the only one getting rich, and on my hard earned money. I don’t trust the internet or the people who market in this bad neighborhood!

Greg

************

Greg:

Usually I don’t respond to this type of negativity, but something in your email (perhaps your frustration) cries out for help.

I am not an Internet Marketing guru so I feel I can respond to your message without you mistrusting me.

Just FYI, I have followed many of the gurus advice and most of it has worked. I find it odd that it hasn’t worked for you. I wonder what element of marketing you are missing and if there is something I can do to help.

True, there are a lot of scams out there (read email and make money!, etc.) but hard work and perseverance and an ethical business will earn you a sizeable income. If you’re looking for the easy way out, an unethical or immoral way to make money – you’re sunk.

Listen if I can make enough money to pay my bills selling an ebook on raising chickens, then anyone can make money online.

You’re just giving up too quickly. Don’t blame others, or bash marketers for it, that’s no way to success.

Life is a state of mind. Operate in a state of distrust, frustration, anxiety, anger and blame and that’s what you’ll get back. It’s not up to ‘them’ – it’s up to you.

Laura Childs

p.s. If you have a website and you want me to look at it and help you, I’ll do what I can to help you, but I ask that you first place yourself in a kinder mindset.

**********

Greg actually wrote back, which was very much appreciated:

Laura,

Thank you for writing back. I apologize to you for my rude comments. I won’t detail or justify my frustration and anger. I am very sorry.

Greg

************

This email sequence is a mild version of some of the emails I’ve seen from complete strangers over the years. Please just remember that each one of us, whether we’re in the public eye or not, you or I, we all have feelings. And no one, absolutely no one deserves to be attacked by another. Besides, sugar goes much further than salt.

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