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4 Step Checklist For Online Marketing Success
by Bill Platt
Business Skills Articles
Published on this site: November 2nd, 2010 - See
more articles from this month
Many online business owners want to make the process of
developing a successful online business harder than it needs to
be...
The truth is that a simple 4-step checklist can lead anyone to
online profits:
- Create or Tweak your Offers;
- Get Traffic -- Attract Targeted Visitors;
- Analyze Results; and
- Repeat Steps 1-3.
- Create Or Tweak Your Offers:
There are literally hundreds of business models that you can use
in this step...
The four business models undertaken by the majority of online
marketers are:
- Service Creation and Marketing;
- Affiliate Marketing;
- Buying Wholesale and Selling Retail;
- Product Creation and Marketing.
The first two are the easiest for the new online marketer to get
started...
- Service Creation and Marketing:
I got my start by creating services and selling services... I
started out as an article ghost writer, and over the years, I
have ghost written for some very famous people...
Eventually, I got involved in Article Syndication to make my
ghost writing more attractive, and eventually, Article
Syndication became my primary business...
- Affiliate Marketing:
With Affiliate Marketing, there are several affiliate networks
that bring together product vendors with affiliate sellers. Those
networks include: ClickBank.com, CJ.com (Commission Junction),
PayDotCom.com, RapBank.com, ShareASale.com and Amazon.com
As an affiliate marketer, it is your job to sell products and
services from other companies, for a commission on the sale...
- Buying Wholesale and Selling Retail:
When it comes to Buying Wholesale and Selling Retail, most people
go to sites like WorldWideBrands.com or Doba.com... However, I
lost interest in those services when a lot of the companies I
contacted could not sell the products I wanted -- at prices
better than Wal-Mart...
Forgive me if my thinking is backwards on this, but if I can get
products cheaper at Wal-Mart than I can get them for at the
wholesale distributors, then I find it hard to believe that they
were offering me wholesale prices...
However, I met a fellow online who deals in real wholesale
buying, and he recently made his knowledge available in a report
called the Holiday Goldmine. I have read his report -- it is very
good at sharing details I was not able to find elsewhere. You can
buy his report here: HolidayGoldMine.com
- Product Creation and Marketing:
When you can start creating your own information products, you
can pretty much build a solid future, selling yourself and your
knowledge...
When you find that you possess a solid selling product, then you
can explore becoming a product vendor on any of the Affiliate
Network sites... Solid products can make a lot of money, when
other marketers want to help you sell them...
Kevin Riley teaches people how to create and sell their own
products at his website here: ProductCreationLabs.com
- Get Traffic -- Attract Targeted Visitors:
I used to get so mad when people told me that getting traffic is
the easy part...
I just wanted to reach through the computer and strangle them
when they said that...
Why?
If it was so darn easy to get traffic, why did I have to work so
darn hard to get it?
Of course, after a decade of learning about how to get traffic, I
can agree that getting traffic is the easy part... DON'T try to
reach through your computer to try to strangle me!!
Hear me out...
There are dozens of methods to bring traffic to your website,
through free and paid methods, and there are hundreds of
thousands of websites from which you can derive that traffic!
When you begin to understand the methods and the strategies used
by professional online marketers to deliver traffic to their
websites, then you are on the road to being able to deliver as
much traffic as you want to your website as well...
If you want to learn more on this subject, consider my report
shown at the end of this article that outlines 35 Proven Traffic
Generation Strategies... The report has received tremendous
reviews and is titled, "Multiple Traffic Streams: The Magic of
Attracting Buyers"...
It also teaches how to better target your Traffic Generation
activities to ensure that you are spending your resources only on
strongly-targeted visitors -- the people who are most likely to
buy what you are selling...
- Analyze Results:
I am constantly amazed at the number of new online marketers who
have yet to understand that THEY can analyze their results as
easily as the professional marketers can...
Your Traffic Statistics are perhaps the most important business
intelliegence that you have in your possession...
If your website has a cPanel login, as is common at most of the
major web hosting companies, then you will also have access to AW
Stats... In the absense of everything else, AW Stats is a pretty
good program for determining the quality and sources of your
websites' traffic...
If you have the money to invest, a better website analysis
software is the one found at HTTP-Analyze.org
While HTTP-Analyze is perhaps the best, most professional
webmasters rely heavily on Google Analytics to track their
results and conversion rates on specific sources of traffic...
www.google.com/analytics/
What you want to learn from this process is: where your traffic
comes from, how the traffic was derived from those locations (if
you don't already know), how much traffic came to your website
from that source, and how many people bought from you and came
from a specific traffic source...
Once you understand how many people came from one traffic source
and how many of those people bought from you, then you can
calculate your conversion rate for each traffic source... This
information will assist you in making good decisions about where
to invest your advertising resources in the future...
- Repeat Steps 1-3:
With your analytics in hand, you can make intelligent decisions
about how to tweak your offer to get better results on the next
pass...
At a certain point, you will want to introduce split testing, so
that you can take a proper measure of two sales pages or squeeze
pages side-by-side to see which one will produce better
conversion rates for you...
All great success stories were founded upon minor improvements
made over and over...
It is said that Howard Hughes helped his dad's company go from a
small disitributor of canning for the food industry to one of the
top canning companies in his day, by making one simple change to
the processes they used...
Howard Hughes is said to have made one minor change to the way
that his company closed the cans used to package food, and that
change reduced the cost of cans by 2/3rds of one penny. Hughes
gave 1/3rd of the savings to his customers and kept the other
1/3rd of a penny for himself...
This one minor adjustment in his processes helped make Howard
Hughes the richest man on the planet during his lifetime -- 1/3rd
of one penny at a time...
Closing Thoughts:
The simple concepts outlined in this article will help anyone,
who has the ambition to do so, to become successful selling
products or services online...
The 4-step method defined in this article will very literally
work with any business model used online...
Too many people get lost in methodologies, and this only serves
to short-circuit their success...
For example, I am an article marketer, but article marketing
isn't the only thing I do to promote my online businesses...
I am also pretty good at SEO, but I would never invest all of my
resources into Google or any other third-party website... When
your business model relies only upon Google, you will find
yourself only one algorithm change away from bankruptcy...
In my Multiple Traffic Streams report, I define 35 Time-Tested
Strategies for Traffic Generation, and of those, I use 12 of them
regularly... My top-performing website gets one-quarter million
unique visitors and 1.25 million page views per year...
The point in this article is to show you know how you can
accomplish the same or better results, if only you have the
ambition to do so...
Bill Platt: Get your copy of the "Multiple Traffic Streams: The
Magic of Attracting Buyers" Traffic Strategies Report at:
http://thephantomwriters.com/multiple-traffic-streams/,
written by Bill Platt, owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com/.
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