What it takes to succeed in business.
Depending on whose figures you’re looking at, in the USA, 90% of all new small businesses will fail in their first 5 to 10 years. My personal experience with folks who are trying to “make it” online is that the failure rate is higher and faster. Why? Because when things don’t go as planned many just give up and decide that they are unable to succeed on their own.
Is there a true key to success in running a business online? Yes, there is, and it’s largely psychological.
My wife and I were browsing a local mall recently, as we occasionally do to get out of the house and do something fun. I’m not a shopper — I hate shopping — but I love bookstores, so I always make it a point to stop at the Borders bookstore when we go. My wife calls me a dork for doing it, but after checking for any new John Grisham novels I always head to the Science section.
This last time I found a fascinating book called The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. I love numbers, though I’m no mathematician, and this book is quite readable even if you cringe in fear when you hear the words “algebra” or “calculus.”
The book discusses, in part, how the laws of randomness are at the heart of many successes that are often attributed to one person’s abilities. To quote Mlodinow, “We all understand that genius doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s seductive to assume that success must come from genius.”
Well if genius doesn’t guarantee success, then what does?
Citing a 2005 Psychology Today article, Mlodinow later states that “psychologists have found that the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is at least as important a factor in success as talent.”
Persistence is incredibly important when you’re working for yourself. When you have a job, if there’s a problem, you go to a manager or boss to help you solve the problem. When you’re working for yourself, you have to take the initiative to fix the problem on your own. When you have a job, you earn a steady paycheck that you don’t have to create. When you’re working for yourself, it’s up to you to ensure that you have enough work in the pipeline to keep the bills paid. There is a lot more stress and headache involved in being your own boss, especially in the formative years of your business.
Even if you’re a super genius gifted with incredible talent, you’re going to run into a lot of problems running a business. If you don’t have the ability to persist in the face of those obstacles, you’re going to fail, no matter how bright or talented you are.
This is particularly true in the online world. Many seem to believe that running a business online should be easy — but it’s not. Doing business online typically does provide a greater level of flexibility and freedom, but it still requires a whole lot of good ol’ fashioned (dare I say the four letter word?) work. This unexpected realization coupled with a lack of tenacity can quickly result in disillusionment and despondency.
Do people really believe that running a business online is easy? If you want evidence of this fallacious belief just look at all of the get rich quick schemes available online. Look at the top sellers in the ClickBank marketplace (especially the top Business to Business products). People promising riches for doing easy work like filling out surveys. “Common” sense should tell you that if it was that easy everyone would already be doing it, and yet these products continue to rake in money from countless people trying to chase the dream of self-employment.
The flip side of this psychological coin is that, even if you’re just an “average Joe (or Jane)”, with persistence and dedication you can succeed. Whether you’ve got a unique new idea of you’re own or you’re just replicating a successful method you’ve learned from some brilliant person, it’s the persistence that’s going to pay off for you.
Personally, it has taken me a few years of solid dedication, hard work, dozens of failures, sleepless nights, endless worry and loads of stress to get me to where I am now. And where is that? I’m now at the point where I can spend 50-60 hours a month doing what really matters in life: volunteer work. Yes, I still work a lot (it’s in my nature), but I can take my daughter to the arcade mid-morning on a weekday when we practically have the whole place to ourselves, and I can take several trips a year with my family without constantly worrying about my business because I have a fantastic support staff, and when my son is born in late July I won’t have to ask anybody for time off to get to know him. It is a dream, and it’s one worth working hard for.
I’ll close with a statement from Mlodinow’s book that I particularly enjoyed:
“It might seem daunting to think that effort and chance, as much as innate talent, are what counts. But I find it encouraging because, while our genetic makeup is out of our control, our degree of effort is up to us. And the effects of chance, too, can be controlled to the extent that by committing ourselves to repeated attempts, we can increase our odds of success.”
Please post your thoughts in a comment below.
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Source: online business
Getting Traffic For Affiliate Programs
One of the easiest ways to make money online especially for “newbies” or new internet marketers is by selling other people’s products; since it’s much easier than creating you own product. There are many outlets that host different programs that can fit into whatever niche your website is in. But the two most used to find affiliate programs is ClickBank and Commission Junction.
There are many people that make their living online just by promoting affiliate products, but some will still struggle with selling anything. But what separates the huge money earners from the “strugglers”? The answer is simply one word…….TRAFFIC. You need to get as much potentials buyers in front of your offer in order to make any sales. Where most people stumble is not in the time and effort they put into their promotional efforts but in how they choose to promote the product.
Before we look at some ways to get traffic to something you’re promoting, we have to look at the important concept of preselling. The concept is simple, if you just show somebody something once and say buy this, they are less likely to even consider the offer than if you have had some prior relationship with them. Building that gap between you “the affiliate” and them “the buyer” is like building a friendship, one based on trust and honesty.
Having An E-mail List
The best way to create that trust in buyers is by establishing an email list where you give them useful information on a regular basis. Many affiliates miss this important step in creating that trust in buyers and preselling. You must also only recommend products which you feel will be useful to others. Don’t just sell something because you know it will make you money. And you must be honest with people. Give your honest opinions about the products and don’t overhype or hard sell.
Organic Listings
One way to introduce a product to somebody is by having relevant content on a website or blog and placing links to the product within the body of the page. This not only aids in the preselling approach but the person is more likely to click if they find the information/offer might be useful.Now to boost the effectiveness of this page would be to try and show up in the organic listings in the search engines. The organic listings are search results that show up in the search engine after you type in a word. They are more heavily clicked on by surfers than sponsored links and ads. To show up in the listings you have to do some search engine optimization (SEO) techniques on the page. To find out more about about SEO, take our free seo course.
Pay-Per-Click
If you have a little money in your budget for marketing, utilizing pay-per-click search engines can be beneficial to getting traffic for your affiliate program. This type of advertising is most popularly done on Google or Yahoo! Search Marketing (once referred to as Overture). You can use it to either drive visitors to an email list (where you slowly build them up to your affiliate offer) or send them directly to your affiliate link. Try as much as possible to do the former.
If you do the later try to cloak the affiliate link which might look like this www.product.com/aff?123 to something looking more professional. You can buy a domain with a similar name to the affiliate offer and then redirect the page to your affiliate page. You can do this using the options for the Cpanel of your webhost or by including a bit of code. You can also make the redirect from a site you already own from a page like this www.mysite.com/recommends/product
To get codes for redirecting urls CLICK HERE.
Article Marketing
A short cut to getting listed in the search engines is by writing articles. If the keywords you write about are not highly competitive and the article site has a high pagerank you can generate a listing in the search engines from posting your article in their directory. Make the article related to the affiliate offer and include a link to your affiliate page in your author signature box. Some article sites frown on placing affiliate links in your articles, so you might have to have links to another page you own that has the affiliate offer listed.
Social Bookmarking
Utilizing social bookmarking (SBM) sites or establishing a Web 2.0 strategy is an easy and cheap way of getting traffic to your affiliate page. There are many sites now on the internet that allow you to bookmark pages that you like for free for future reference. But don’t just bookmark your affiliate page alone. That won’t work. Try and get some content related to your affiliate offer like articles and blog posts, have a link in it to the affiliate offer and then bookmark that page. Utilize sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Spurl, Twitter and many others. (At the end of each of my posts there is a link to a bookmarking tag. Click on it and see a list of sites I’m talking about.)
But don’t just stop there! If the program is popular utilize Squidoo and HubPages to write reviews about it. People sometimes search for the terms “productx review” or “buy productx” and if you write about it on one of these sites you can score high in the search engines for those keywords. You can also search for less competitive keywords related to the product and create pages on the two sites mentioned before related to them. And of course include a link on the page to the affiliate program you promote.
But don’t just stop there!! Further bookmark the mini-pages you’ve created on Squidoo and Hubpages on the SBM sites. And even more, link to each content you create about the product to another page about it. Say for example you wrote an article, have a product review on Squidoo and have a content page on HubPages.com, link from the HubPage to the Squidoo page to the article. In that way you provide relevance to each site and by interlinking you have a better chance of ranking well with more than one page.
To learn more about becoming a better affiliate read the FREE report Affiliate XFactor. Where a super-affiliate goes through some techniques he used to generate a $40,000 Clickbank affiliate pay check in 72 hours selling a $77 ebook. Find out more here http://www.addtrafficnow.com/recommends/xfactor.html
Summary
In summary, utilizing some of the more effective traffic generation methods can help in making affiliate sales. An important concept to remember is that the buyer must be presold to the offer to maximize conversion rates. Apart from the more popular website promotion methods utilizing a Web 2.0 strategy can be influential in gaining more traffic for affiliate programs.
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Enter SEO Contests and Sharpen Your Skills
One way to learn more about SEO and sharpen your skills to use later in your online promotions is by entering SEO contests. This is usually hosted by experts in the field to create buzz about a topic or website or for analytical purposes. Besides generating attention it can be a great learning tool for beginners (newbies) and also be done for fun and to get great prizes.
The folks over at SEONoobs.com recently launched a contest about 3 weeks ago for SEO newbies to rank best for the phrase “Yicrosoft Directory”. It’s a 30 day SEO Challenge to see who can come out as the #1 organic listing for the keyphrase “Yicrosoft Directory”. The contest ends March 4th so it might be too late to enter and win but by just looking at the listings for “Yicrosoft Directory” in the search engines you can get an idea of the methods that people are using for their SEO campaign.
In case you wonder why they used that keyphrase; Microsoft recently put in an offer to Yahoo! to buy out their company and merge it with Microsoft for a cool $44.6 Billion. Seems the main reason they did it was to try and compete with Google in the search engine arena. Yahoo! looks to have rejected the offer so far. Of course all this has created a buzz around the internet with different websites and videos. People have been even created mock logos as to what the company might become. Maybe MicroYahoo or Microhoo? Who’s to tell? In case you missed this bit of news here’s a report of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDrDITVJMls&NR=1
Typing in the contest’s keyphrase in Google returns some 52,000 normal results and 21,100 results in anchor (meaning the phrase was put in quotation marks ie “yicrosoft directory”). But whichever way you look at it the contestant who leads (as of this posting), owns the site Yicrosoftdirectory.net. The next two rounding out the top three are Garrysoft.com and Yicrosoft-directory-online.com. Doing a quick check in Yahoo! tells me what I knew would be the main reason for these people leading the list. And the answer is one word folks….LINKS.
Breakdown of Top Five Contestants
SITE PAGES INLINKS
Yicrosoftdirectory.net 21 677
Garrysoft.com 11 2,470
Yicrosoft-directory-online.com 10 252
Yicrosoftdirectorygirl.com 25 1,330
Gh-yicrosoft.info 14 271
But why are the second placed and fourth placed listings not listed better? A quick look shows that the number one site has a lot more content (21 pages) than the 2nd placed. Ok…I hear you ask….So why does it still beat out the fourth placed site. Simple. The content that is on Yicrosftdirectory.net is a lot more optimized for the phrases “yicrosoft”, “directory” and “yicrosoft directory”. In fact it lists itself as a directory (probably gaining more reciprocal links from this method) accompanied with great content that repeatedly has “yicrosoft directory” in title tags and headers. It also is getting links from a more diverse set of sites (not just one site, like some of the others). And I didn’t check this but more than likely the links they received from sites have better authority and page rank according to Google
Why not check out this for yourself?…….Go to Yahoo! and in their search bar type in link:www.thesite.com (replace “thesite” with whatever site’s name is listed) and analyse the listings you see. It will give you an idea as to what to do for your own SEO promotion. Go ahead…….have some fun with this SEO thing
P.S. The reason I used Yahoo! to check the links is because they usually show a more accurate look of backlinks for most sites, once they’ve been indexed.
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Are You Asking Google to Penalize Your Website?
Striving to get a foothold in search engine rankings is every webmasters goal. In order to get the traffic they need for their website’s survival one must rank highly for some keyphrases in the major search engines, mainly Google. That is why it is critical that webmasters don’t get involved in what Google would consider to be wrong and become penalized for it.
One thing that is considered a definite no-no is the act of keyword spamming. This practice was once used by persons to attempt to increase their keyword density
(a factor used in ranking of web pages) for a specific phrase. Keyword density being
the relative importance of a specific word or phrase to the entire text within a webpage. The more times a word is repeated, the more keyword dense is the webpage for that particular word.
The trick was to place phrases repeatedly within the html code of the page which weren’t seen by people normally browsing that webpage. Of course, the algorithms of the major search engines have adapted now to this attempt at manipulation and anybody trying it will see their webpages penalized for Google page rank and possibly deindexed.
This webmaster is repeating the keyword balloons
The advice here is to not overdo it. Keep the pages of your website relevant by repeating your key phrases but don’t stuff them in irrelevant areas or try to hide them in bits of html code.
Another bad tactic is to become involved with what Google considers to be “bad
neighbourhoods”. In their webmaster guidelines they say
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”
According to them webspammers help to devalue the integrity of their index and adversely affected accurate search results. Link farms are considered by Google to be another no-no because persons are using a method to manipulate how many link partners they have. And the goal here is to rapidly increase your link popularity by connecting to numerous persons within a link scheme.
One other thing that has become a sore point among many persons is the common use of paid links services to increase inbound links to one’s site. According to the above statement from Google’s guidelines, this is considered a link scheme and if found out your page rank will be reduced to zero.
Why it has become a major argument is that many high PR web pages were using their status to sell links on their website. Many people see this as a corporate model for their own website and offer links on their site as a service. How could Google look down on others for trying to get links for their site anyway possible? Isn’t it basically a type of paid advertisement?
My thoughts on the issue are that website owners and corporations should always be allowed to monetize their websites anyway they want, once it’s legal. But if a major penalization will result from the use of any of these paid linking systems then stay as far away from them as possible. You might not agree with something, but if it might hurt you in the long run, why continue doing it?
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Creating Fresh Content for Websites
Adding quality content to a website is essential in keeping a website “sticky” for search engines. It keeps visitors coming back for more information and it will ensure that others will link to your site. Your target audience will keep coming back as the website doesn’t remain the same but changes constantly with updates and knowledge they require.
There are some very essential ways that can be used to foster more content on your page. One method which many webmasters use is to write articles or new pages of interest that will keep visitors interested to return. Forums and blogs also add more content and if the author writes regularly he/she can have unique visitors to the website daily.
Most websites place a frequently asked question (FAQ) page on their site for whatever product or service they offer. Information for this can come from questions viewers ask about the website services. It is essential that the sites keep a comments page or support email open for queries from visitors.
Another good method is to interview experts in your field or target market about common issues/problems and include their answers as part of your main page. This will enhance the honesty and popularity factor of the site as the known expert may be seen to be endorsing your website content, product or services. Some people might write an e-book for their target audience and then include the interview as part of the content of the book. Both ways tend to work and adds a creative edge to the information you are giving.
A relatively easy method of keeping content fresh is to include rss feeds on your website. Rssfeeds are basically links for updated content from some reputed website. RSS Equalizer is a tool that can be used to include quality rss feeds on your site. Many links from other reputed sources on your site will also enhance its integrity in the eyes of many search engines.
Many websites offer a monthly newsletter which gives tips, information, promotions and products related to the specified field from their site. This is a good way to keep customers and visitors informed about news updates in your field and offer promotions and services on the back-end.
On the main page of your website you can include regular updated advice or tips on matters pertaining to your field. If you have products selling or services offering, you can apply this to them as well. People love to see new information and titbits pertaining to services that companies offer.
Of late, information provided via the visual format is a hit. It is so much easier for people to understand a quick video tutorial concerning some product or service you offer than just giving written instructions. Videos don’t have to be used as promotions for services alone; they can be used to give how-to guides and practical tutorials.
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