Internet Marketing Commerce

As the year 2008 comes to an end the Internet Marketing Commerce team would like to thank all of our clients, customers and readers for allowing us to help you make money online. Due to our result producing knowledge, information and outstanding customer service we are continually growing. We thank all of our clients and customers for making this possible and for referring us to others who want to have the same opportunity. Our business model of “if you provide your customers with products and services that do what they say they do and more the business side naturally falls into place” is proving to be successful more and more each day. We look forward to an even better year in 2009 and wish everyone a Happy New Year.

There are many incentives you can use in e-commerce but which ones work the best? Some of the incentives you can use are dollar discounts, % discounts, free shipping, free gift with purchase, no tax, buy one get one free and so on. Some people would say that the worst incentive you can use is a dollar discount. The truth is there really isn’t a specific answer for every website. Your answer will depend on your niche, customers and economic conditions.

To figure out what works the best you must test every method with your store and your existing customer list. You can test these methods several different ways. You can apply each of them to your store one at a time and see which method receives a better conversion rate. You could also take your existing customer list and divide it up equally with the amount of incentives you are testing and send each one out to the specific groups in your list. You should send these offers out by both email and direct mail. Then which ever group has the best conversion rate will be the most successful incentive for your niche and customers.

A website’s title, meta description and meta keywords are some of the most important things when it comes to what keywords your website will rank for. You must make sure that every page on your website has a title, meta description and meta keywords that relate to what the pages content is about. For instance, if your website is about shoes you need to make sure that the homepages title, meta description and meta keywords all have the word shoes in them somewhere. Then if you have a sub page about Nike shoes you need to make sure you have Nike shoes in each one of them. Your title is what will come up in the search engine to click on, your description will be right below that telling possible visitors what that page has to offer and your keywords will only be seen by the search engines but are still important. Obviously this is not the only thing that you need to do in order to optimize your website for specific keywords but it is one of the bricks you need to build the wall.

Email marketing uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. The term is usually referred to sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business. Email marketing has become so popular due to the fact that a mailing list provides the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective internet marketing strategy. Any website that is not using email marketing is allowing traffic and customers to slip through their fingers.

Picking the right keywords to target is one of the first and most important steps to any website. There are a lot of websites out there that don’t directly target keywords but a majority of their content receives traffic from keywords typed into search engines. No matter what the website is they are targeting keywords and keyword phrases in some way. The best way to get consist organic targeted traffic is to create a website that is specifically targeted towards certain keywords or keyword phrases. This is part of targeting a specific niche. The best tool to use for figuring out which keywords you want to target is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool will let you know the approximately how many times a month your keywords or keyword phrases are being searched for. It’s suggested that you pick keywords that you are familiar with so it will make it easier to build a website around them. Once this is completed you are on your way to a successful website.

Residual income is income that continues to be generated after the initial effort. Most people focus on what’s called linear income which is a one time compensation or payment. While both are obviously good residual income is by far the way to go if you can. Most affiliate programs out there are not residual however there are quite a few that do pay residual income. These are the programs you want to try and aim for. Most residual affiliate programs are products or services that require a customer to pay a weekly, monthly or yearly fee. Affiliate programs like hosting, software and subscription websites are all good examples of residual affiliate programs. If you make 1,000 sales through a normal affiliate program and you make $5.00 a sale you make $5,000. If you make 1,000 sales through a residual affiliate program and you make $5.00 a sale you make $5,000 a month which is $60,000 a year instead of just $5,000. Five years later you would have $300,000 and still $5,000 with the normal affiliate program. As you can see residual affiliate programs can make all difference with the income you make from your leads. So if you aren’t promoting some type of residual affiliate program I suggest you start today.

1. Manners and Expertise – Yes it is important that your customer service representatives are polite and have a positive attitude but that is worth nothing if they have no expertise in your product or service. You must make sure that your representatives are properly trained and can answer inquiries in a timely and effective manner.

2. Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep – If you promise a customer something you better make sure you deliver it. If you don’t deliver they will most likely want a refund and never return to make a purchase again. Not to mention they might go out and tell all their friends how poor your customer service is.

3. Let Your Customers Know You Value Them – Always thank your customers for their orders. Give them a follow up phone call or email after their purchase thanking them for their order. Possibly give them something free that they weren’t expecting showing that your company takes an extra step and cares about their satisfaction.

4. Reward Repeat Customers – If you don’t reward repeat customers you are totally missing the boat. Repeat customers can be the biggest part of your business if you do it right. Make sure you are rewarding them for making repeat purchases. Do things like offer them free shipping for being a regular customer. Give them something extra in their shipments that they weren’t expecting. For instance give them a product related to the one they ordered as a gift.

All in all, customer service is one of the most important aspects of any business but especially an Internet business. These examples of customer service are just a few of the things you should do but they will give you a great start to the right path.

There are many ways to make money online but eBooks are one of the easiest. To start you will need to find a niche market you want to create an eBook for. It is best to start with a niche that you are familiar with. This will make it the easiest and still allow you to create a quality eBook.

Once you choose your niche market it’s time to start putting it together. You will need to start by creating an outline. This will basically sum up how many chapters you want to have and what you want them to be about.

Then you will need to create or have graphics created for the cover of your eBook. This will help increase your sales and give your customers an idea of what it’s about by looking at it.

The final step is a website to sell it on. Most eBooks are sold on one page websites with a sales letter describing it and why someone would want to buy it. This is fairly easy to do for simple eBooks but once you receive enough sales it’s always best to have a professional write a sales letter for you.

As you can see eBook creation is a fairly simple process but a good way to start making money online.

Starting a paid membership site can be a great way to make money online but you must make sure you do it right. There are many right ways to start a membership site and there are many wrong ways. Are there going to be enough people interested in this idea to make it profitable? Chances are that if you would join the site yourself others will like it. Don’t let a few people that tell you they don’t like the idea ruin it for you, you won’t be able to please everyone. You need to make sure that your idea is unique and not just a knock off of another successful site. If you can accomplish these tasks you are on your way to running a successful membership site.

Another way you could approach it is to offer a free membership to your site in the beginning. Your source of income would be from advertisements and or affiliate programs. Then once you feel your user database is large enough you can offer the option for a paid membership and give the paying users more benefits. For instance if it’s a photo sharing website you could offer paying users more space and increase the amount of photos they are allowed to upload in a day. Along with this option you could add in that they will not see any advertisements or affiliate offers with a paid membership.

There are several different ways you can approach a membership site but the main importance is to make sure the user is benefiting from it. Without satisfying the user you are left with nothing more than a failing site. So always remember, provide your users or customers will quality and the rest will fall into place.

Craigslist is without a doubt, a website you want to use as part of your Internet marketing. The majority of advertising on Craigslist is free and the amount of visitors it receives is in the millions. If there’s a website that’s free to advertise on and receives millions of visitors what do you have to lose? Only a limited number of jobs and brokerage advertisements are charged a fee. The approximate traffic they receive is 10 million unique visitors a month and four billion pages views! Even if you receive one sale it was worth your time because it’s free for almost every niche. However, you must make sure that you place your ads in sections on the website which are targeted towards your niche. You must also be careful not to place too many ads or else Craigslist will delete them because they will see them as spam.