Business Articles For Online Businesses

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Ever wonder how a “guru” earns $3,546 or more just by pressing a button?

The first thing a newbie learns when landing on the Internet is that it is full of hype. Hype this. Hype that. But when you cut through the hype, there is one simple truth. If you want to make real money on the Internet, you have to build an opt-in list.

This is the simple truth the gurus understand. They are, after all, gurus. They are not wizards, nor magicians. They know that making money on the Internet is a very simple mathematical equation. A small opt-in list equals candlelight dinners in the basement rec room, savouring macaroni and cheese in front of the TV. A big, bulging opt-in list equals candlelight dinners at Chez Ritz, enjoying baked brie and filet mignon while overlooking the lake.

That’s why the gurus earn so much money.

But just what is an opt-in list? Simply put, it is a list of email addresses belonging to people who have given you permission to send them messages. Anything else is spam. Make sure your list is opt-in.

What kind of lists do people opt-in to? All kinds and all topics - from grasshopper recipes to hotwiring space shuttles. But if you really want to make it work, you need to create a newsletter (probably on a topic with wider appeal than hotwiring space shuttles!).

Why? Consider Madam B. (not her real name, by the way) She sells beauty and cosmetics, and she was frustrated because so few people were signing up to receive “updates on new products”. Would you sign up? Only if you have already purchased from her a few times, making you one of her few extremely loyal customers.

On the other hand, suppose you were offered the chance to sign up for a “free weekly beauty tip”, which is what we advised her to do. Now she has the chance to pick up prospects who have never bought from her, who will read her weekly beauty tip, and - this is the juicy part - they will buy many of the “featured products of the week” highlighted with the weekly beauty tip.

There is a second reason you want your opt-in list to be a newsletter, not just a product announcement. The newsletter builds trust and is read. If all your subscribers see are sales pitches, their level of trust sink lower than the lost city of Atlantis. And we all buy from people we trust, not from underwater snake oil vendors.

In fact, if your emails are just sales pitches, why would anybody bother opening them? You have to build a strong relationship with your subscribers, so put as much of your own personality into it and write your text so that you speak directly to them.

If you have good quality content in your newsletter, your subscribers will open your emails, they will read them, they will buy and you will make money. Notice I said “quality”, not “quantity”. In the example above, it need only be a one-paragraph beauty tip. You don’t have to spend all weekend composing an article as long as this. Same applies for investing tips, auto care tips, nutrition tips, evil magician tips, or whatever. Quality keeps them reading and ready to buy.

Of course, you must have a related product to promote to the list. Don’t try selling motor oil to your beauty tips subscribers. They won’t buy. And if they do, imagine the mess they’ll expect you to clean up! Remember, the goal is to make money, not mess. The opt-in list gives you the prospects, your trust turns them into clients, and your relevant and related products turn them into paying customers.

Who can have such a list? Everybody. Your brother can. Your tenth grade teacher can. The cashier at the grocery store can. Your pet goldfish probably cannot, but YOU can.

Is it easy to build a list? You bet! Is it effortless? No. It does take time, effort, or money - or some combination of the three. For most people, it takes a lot of time and a medium amount of effort. But it can be done without breaking into a sweat.

You can cut down on both the time and money if you use paid methods to build your list. “Paid methods” generally means buying lists of names. Be VERY careful not to buy a spammy list. Do not buy lists from people who spam you with an offer of cheap email addresses, no matter how hard they swear the list is quadruple opt-in and fully targeted. That’s like buying a Rolex in a dark ally from an unshaven man in a trench coat.

Oh yes. It also helps to have some knowledge and some creativity. The knowledge is something you can find at websites like affila.com” target=”_new affila.com . The creativity you just have to develop yourself. But it is amazing how creative most people become when armed with a little good knowledge, a big dream and a fresh cup of caffeine.

Remember that if you offer good content and promote related saleable products, you will earn money from your list. So paying for targeted subscribers can be a worthwhile deal, especially if you can sell a product with recurring commissions (a magazine subscription; a product requiring refills, such as skin cream or motor oil; a membership website; a monthly service such as webhosting; etc.) or multiple products that complement one another (making repeat customers out of your subscribers).

You will find there are many more benefits to having an opt-in list, but you have to start building it now. It does take time to build, and the longer you delay your list-building, the longer you delay your dream.

So what is that magic button a guru just presses to earn $3,546 or more? Is it his shirt button? Is it his belly button? No, it’s the “send” button.

About The Author

Ron Pioneer

Learn the Secrets to Having Your Own Magic “Send” Button with our FR*EE Course: affila.com” target=”_new affila.com.

mailto:contact@affila.com contact@affila.com

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While its increasingly difficult to get one way quality links that don’t employ nofollow stategies, you don’t have to waste cyberspace and fingertips with pointless efforts.

Birds of a feather sleep together.
Few people are bereft of bias, and likewise for search engine algorythms. Indeed, that is what they are and must evolve towards. How else is an emotionally stupid piece of software to draw any sort of reasonable conclusion?
Select your bedfellows and the search engines may assess that you belong within that assortment of keywords.

Diminishing returns.
There is a point after which the number of low relevance links which may point to your site, are useless. Sure, you may get a limited amount of traffic, but is it out of worthless curiousity or anything practical? If you run a bed and breakfast business in Ireland, how much quality traffic would you expect to get from a website in India which promotes domain names or ringtones? A travel directory in India, however, may be a bit better if it has a category with more than a few listings related to Ireland.

Descriptions and one-liners.
Getting your url listed is one thing but consider also any extra value that may come from an expanded description as opposed to one sentence. A one-liner belongs in a comedy club and an opportunity to put your best foot forward is lost.
Consider the human browser who seeks a difference between a number of listings. Would you opt for the site which has its title rehashed into a description, or a site with a proper description of its services or offerings?
If it is worth spending two minutes in the first place, then it should be worth spending two and a half minutes. You’re getting a contextual ad. after all.

Company Branding and titles.
In a limited number of cases only, is it worth using your company name in the title, if hyperlinked. Yes there is the contextual advantage, but the full benefits of anchor text are lost.
Who is going to type in your company name, when searching for a product or service, but yourself and a limited number of people who know you? This brand recognition will come anyway as the search engine should find it in either case, but incoming keywords pointing to your site is reduced, confused and an incorrect strategy. Remember the emotionally challenged, or logically designed software, which must decide your place in the world?

Physical Addresses.
To maximise any potential, use these fields if they exist as they also place you within a geographical region. Instead of Boutique on the web, you may increase your chances of traffic for Boutique in Boise, if that is where you reside, and so on.

Competition jealously.
Some will worry about a directory being higher in the Serps for a particular set of keywords which a client might desire. So what. As they don’t sell your product and still point to you, who ultimately wins? Not withstanding any page or web rank implications.
In most cases where you site is reasonably constructed, you will get the credit. The logically designed software can usually figure out the probablities, and its just a matter of time while the mathematical formulae are thrashed out.

Focus.
More or less back to context, bedfellows and algorythmic assessment, but another reason why some directories will insist of you finding the most relevant category to submit your site to. Granted, it may also be to preserve their own logical structures, but they are much the same thing.
The object is to align yourself with bunches of similar keywords.

Regional prediction.
As the S.E.’s seek to return more accurate results, you may well find that the world is too big as it is and countermeasures will ensue. The most logical way to go is to provide both an overview and a regional view. You can see that they’ve started doing so in the last few years, and will likely attempt to perfect this. There are too many bidding for the same top page or two and any compartmentalising will achieve this end.
Searching would already be by town, except for the fact that it would be a little too cumbersome for the end user to trawl down through the logical containers. Remember that the software has the advantage in this respect and must wait for the people to find a workaround or alternative solution.

Gearoid Fahy helps out at

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