Chapter 2: Making Money Online

In This Chapter

Identifying the components of accepting a sale online

Turning one sale into two or more

Building traffic for free and for a fee

Recruiting and training a virtual sales force

Making money on the Internet is like panning for gold: Your fortune can be made instantly, or you can spend a lifetime chasing the dream. Had a gold panner in the late 1800s known what we know about the Internet today, he would’ve realized that directly panning for gold to feed his family wasn’t his only income opportunity. For example, he could have also rented his spot on the creek, or sold drinking water to other panners, or taught beginners his secrets of gold panning for a small fee. And after he had a proven claim, he could’ve recruited others to pan for him or paid others to sell usage of his claim.

When you think of making money from the Internet, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Selling your own product through your website is probably at the top of the list. Or, maybe you offer a service and want people to pay online so that you can help them. Both of those, of course, are relevant ways to make a sale on the Internet — but several others exist.

This chapter exposes you to a variety of ways to make money online, including the tools and tactics to help you mine online for traffic and revenue.

Discovering the Ways to Make Money on the Internet

The many ways to make money by using the Internet fall into three main categories:

• Promoting affiliate products or services

• Monetizing traffic

• Selling your own product

The following sections take a look at each more closely.

Promoting affiliate products

An affiliate product is an item that someone else produces, delivers, and supports. All you have to do is recommend that others visit that company’s website. When someone makes a purchase through that website as a result of your recommendation, you get paid a sales commission. Affiliate programs don’t usually require you to create a website to promote them. They are also commonly free to join.

A domain name at www.bestdomainplace.com is an example of an affiliate product (see Figure 2-1). Whenever someone buys a domain name or any of the other Internet services offered, you get a small commission on the sale. The product is then delivered and supported by the main company. All you have to do is supply some customizations and the traffic.

This is how an affiliate program works:

1. Find an affiliate product.

Your first step is to find a product that you’re interested in recommending. Your interest can stem from a topic that your customers have shown interest in that you don’t offer, or maybe a trend you recognize in your industry. For example, if you see too many business owners with domain names registered by their web designers — meaning that the business owner didn’t truly own his own domain name — you can refer them to a domain name registrar that you’re affiliated with.

Your first affiliate products of interest will likely come from items you’ve already used and are impressed with, such as a good e-book, a software program, or maybe a CD set. And, affiliate programs can be quite lucrative — offering more than $1,000 per sale — so you don’t have to settle only for small-dollar-value products.

Here are two main ways to find affiliate programs to consider:

• Search on a search engine. To find an affiliate product on a search engine, search for an industry-specific topic or an exact product, followed by the words affiliate program.

• Use an affiliate aggregator, such as ClickBank (www.clickbank.com) or Commission Junction (www.cj.com), where all the money and affiliate payments are handled. Simply create a new account for yourself and search available products to promote.

2. Access your unique affiliate link.

Visit the company’s website and add an affiliate account there. You will be directed to an administration area, where you can find a link to use in your promotions, as shown in Figure 2-2.

When people click your affiliate link and make a purchase, you get credit for sales that originate with your recommendation.

3. Promote your affiliate link or banner.

After you have the link to promote, copy and paste it for use in your e-mails and on your website.

Take the extra step to always register a domain name to forward to your unique affiliate link. That way, you don’t have to remember a long string of numbers and letters every time you want to promote your link to someone. Plus, promoting an affiliate product verbally is a lot easier if you have people visit a domain name that’s tied to the affiliate link. That way, you still get credit for the sale.

Visit the administration area frequently because that’s where you find important statistics related to your affiliate product, such as the number of visitors to your affiliate link, the number of sales per month, the conversion rates, and most importantly, the dollar figure you can expect to receive in your bank account for those referred sales.

Monetizing traffic

If you can attract website visitors, you can turn that traffic into money — monetize — without promoting affiliate products or attempting to sell your own. Here are a few examples of monetizing traffic:

• Google AdSense ads: AdSense is still one of the most popular methods of advertising on the Internet today. Within a few minutes, Google supplies a bit of code that you add to your site, and you begin making money immediately when someone clicks the provided links. Google makes it especially easy for you by instantaneously figuring out what ads to display on your page that have the most potential of being clicked. Get started by adding a Google AdSense account at www.google.com/adsense.

AdSense ads don’t typically produce large revenue for small websites with low visitation. So, to make any real money with AdSense, be prepared to build a site with lots of pages like the example at www.leadership articles.net, where literally hundreds of pages have been optimized for high search engine–results positioning. Notice the Google ads at the top.

The whole intention with AdSense ads is to drive your traffic to other people’s websites. So, it’s usually not a good idea to display AdSense ads on pages where you’re attempting to sell your own product!

• Traditional banner advertising: When you work directly with an advertising client to display her ads on your website, you’re using traditional banner advertising. Traditional banner ads on your site include

• Cost per click (CPC): When you use this method, it’s up to you to track how many times visitors to your website click an ad’s link. Google Analytics is free statistics-tracking software that allows you to track what are called banner ad exits, appropriately named because visitors will be exiting your website through the banner ad. To get an in-depth explanation of how to use Google Analytics to track banner ad usage, go to

http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55526

Then, you report that number of clicks to your advertising client and charge her accordingly. You decide the amount you charge per click. You can have this type of advertising prepaid; for example, 3 cents per click for an inventory of 10,000 clicks, for a total of $300.

If your advertising client wants to produce her own ad (which is usually the case), you’d better hope that she creates an ad that attracts clicks, or her ad will just be taking up space on your website. Be a coach to your advertising client by offering ideas for how to best promote to your website traffic.

Wondering about the difference between cost per click (CPC) and pay per click (PPC)? Technically, when the money comes from the bank account, there is no difference between PPC and CPC. Your perspective in the transaction may influence how you see things, however. Certainly the easier of the two to understand is “pay” per click, meaning as the business owner, you will “pay” every time someone clicks your ad. On the other hand, “cost” per click is accurate too because, to the one who actually “pays” for the clicks, a higher or lower “cost” per click can be experienced based on how you create your ad, the landing page, and so on.

• Cost per 1,000 page views (CPM): With this method, you don’t rely on the quality of ads for you to get paid. An advertiser simply pays you in advance to showcase his ad on a page of your website for a certain number of times that the web page is accessed by visitors. Typically, CPM rates range between $4 and $10 per 1,000 page views, but prices can easily be higher for niche audiences.

If you intend to sell traditional advertising on your website, be prepared to show advertisers detailed reports of page view visitation and click-through rates. A click-through occurs when a visitor to your website clicks the ad you’re promoting and is brought to another web location. Your advertiser will expect to see proof that he got what he paid for, or he could ask for his money back. See Book III, Chapter 2 for information about how to track traffic volume.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) website at www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/1421/1443/1452 provides a display of the most common banner ad sizes. With IAB media company members being responsible for almost 90 percent of all online advertising in the United States, this resource is certainly the industry standard for banner ad best practices.

• Pay per call and pay per lead: These methods of advertising have been gaining popularity over the past couple of years and are usually managed by third-party companies, such as Ingenio Pay Per Call (http://paypercall.ingenio.com), and might include using banner or text ads to get your visitors to take action with their promotions. The great appeal with a company such as Ingenio is that you don’t pay a dime until you get a phone call from a lead.

• Call per action (CPA): With this method, the advertiser has to pay only when a sale is made. This is the ultimate form of paid advertising because the pressure is really on the promotional agency to close the deal so that its efforts get rewarded. Actually, CPA advertising is a lot like having your own affiliate program because the third party is paid only when you get a sale.

Selling your own products and services

Creating and selling your own products and services online can be a very profitable venture. After all, you get to keep all the money after paying your costs.

With affiliate programs, proven content is normally already provided for you, so ramp-up time is fast and your investment is low. With monetizing traffic, the ads on your pages are commonly already tested and proven to work.

Selling your own products and services can prove to be the most challenging because you have so much work to do before you can begin selling. However, there is no substitute for creating your own product if you want creative control and long-term growth potential.

You don’t even need your own product; you can offer a service. Consider Marriage Counselors Hub (www.marriagecounselorshub.com), as shown in Figure 2-3. It’s a directory that builds and features profiles that give professionals web exposure.

Here are some guidelines to follow when offering your own products and services for sale online:

• Information products are still king. An information product — which can be as simple as a how-to book or an e-book — is still the easiest and least expensive product to produce and deliver. Virtually anyone with a computer can use a word processing program to write a how-to book and then convert it to a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. You can use a free, online PDF converter at www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp.

• Audio is queen. If typing isn’t your forte or style, buy recording equipment and talk into a microphone to create 30- to 40-minute MP3 audio files to sell. For as little as $75, you can buy a digital recording device with a lapel microphone for hands-free recording. Or, make a complete CD set showcasing your knowledge. After you get started with audio, you will quickly realize the unlimited opportunity potential available by producing recorded products and promotional content.

Another great use of audio would be to interview an expert the next time you attend a conference. Host a short ten-minute Q&A, add the sound file to your blog, and send a notice to your opt-in list that you added the recording for their review.

• Video is HOT, HOT, HOT. Every website can enhance the buyer’s experience by offering video, especially when you have a product for sale. Software can be demonstrated, shoes can be modeled, e-books can be featured, and services can be displayed. Video sells online, and video products sell, too. Professional video can now be produced in your own home for a one-time purchase of just a few hundred dollars in software and equipment.

• Webinars continue to be the ultimate education tool. A webinar is an online session in which you walk through a presentation or training session on your computer while an audience views your presentation online and hears your voice from their computer. The best part about webinars is that they can be recorded and offered as a product for sale. Microsoft’s webinar service at www.gotowebinar.com — owned and operated by Citrix — has video and audio recording built in to its webinar tools.

• Create a whole product line. For every information product you produce, you can create an entire product line by offering the nearly identical product in e-book form, MP3 audio recording, video, webinars, and in-person seminar training.

The following sections in this chapter focus on the tools needed to accept and promote online sales of your own product. Of course, many of the techniques described here can be applied to promoting affiliate products and monetizing traffic, but the examples shown are more directed toward selling products online.

Assembling an Internet-Based Buying Process That Converts

Sure, you must have a website that’s graphically satisfying to visitors to entice them to become interested in — and find — your offer (as discussed in Chapter 3 of this minibook). Of course, you must have promotional copy that inspires a prospect to take action with your offer (see Chapter 5 of this minibook). Perhaps the most important component of all is the actual buying process you provide. Without a smooth buying process, you could lose not just some sales but all your sales potential. The following sections walk you through the elements of online transactions and offer tips to ensure that customers who buy your products have a positive experience on your site.

These sections focus on marketing. If you’re building a site yourself or need to work directly with a technical team, you likely need to understand at least some technical aspects of web design, site organization, and security as you move from marketing concepts to actually implementing your buying process. For help, check out Building Web Sites All-in-One For Dummies by Doug Sahlin (published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

Defining the components of an online transaction

Every online transaction has three main components: the transaction page, the merchant account, and the payment gateway. The following sections introduce each component and offer tips for getting started.

The transaction page

The transaction page is where buyers enter their contact information and credit card number. For the transaction page, you use a formal shopping cart or a custom form:

• Shopping cart: The most popular way to sell products and services is through an Internet-based ordering system known as a shopping cart. You’re probably familiar with the system through your own online shopping: Just as you use a cart to shop in a grocery store — picking certain items off the shelf, adding them to your shopping cart, and then proceeding through the checkout lane — a website visitor clicks an Add to Cart button for purchasing items online. The difference is that an online shopping cart system allows you to set up your entire store on the Internet, complete with products, services, categories, sale discounts, and of course, a transaction page where visitors see credit card payment types accepted, fields to enter their billing information, shipping, and tax. See the section “Shopping cart setup secrets,” later in this chapter, for tips on working with shopping carts.

• Custom form: Not all transaction models can fit into the mold of a prepackaged shopping cart;, some require a custom form instead. A custom form allows you to have any combination of product purchases on the same page. The downside is that custom forms take a lot more work to create and integrate with the payment gateway.

See www.thunderridgeski.com for a good example where a season-pass purchaser might also buy a pass for his wife and two children, along with a locker. The form allows the transactions to take place all on the same customized, secure page, as shown in Figure 2-4.

Whether you choose to use a third-party shopping cart like Premium Web Cart versus a custom order system will largely be based on cost and turnaround time. When you use a commercial shopping cart, you can be selling your product within just a few hours, provided that you already have an Internet-capable merchant account and gateway. Custom secure ordering systems require more planning and programming. You may even experience time delays waiting for secure server–related items to be ordered like an SSL (Secured Socket Layer) certificate, static IP address, or setup of a dedicated server.

The merchant account

You must have an arrangement with a company to accept credit card information for your online transactions, using an Internet-capable merchant account. This special kind of merchant account is designed to accept and track credit card transactions over the Internet. This Internet-capable merchant account could be PayPal, or you could get your own through a bank.

To set up your own merchant account, check out Lew Kelly with Expedient Financial Services, Inc. Lew has been selling merchant accounts for more than ten years. His phone number is 303-256-7501. He gives a free consultation by phone if you’re out of state, or an in-person visit if you’re within metro Denver and the Front Range of Colorado. For more information about merchant accounts, go to http://herenextyear.com/help-topics/best-merchant-account.php.

Using only PayPal at the beginning for accepting payments online is a good idea while you get your feet wet with online transactions. As soon as possible, though, get your own merchant account. Some website visitors may simply not buy from you if you accept payments only through PayPal. Some might be fearful of being the victim of PayPal’s next hacking, while others will question whether you’re really an established business. To be fair, if you don’t offer a PayPal payment option, some potential customers may not buy from you, either, because they pay for everything online via PayPal.

The payment gateway

A payment gateway is a tool that ties the transaction page with the merchant account. Authorize.Net is an example of a payment gateway and is a great choice for accepting orders through the Internet. Authorize.Net (www.authorize.net) is also the only gateway that allows custom forms.

Shopping cart setup secrets

From a revenue standpoint, it is absolutely critical to set up your shopping cart to sell — and sell well. Table 2-1 outlines actions to take as you set up your shopping cart and explains the benefit of each action.

Table 2-1 Shopping Cart Setup Secrets

Shopping Cart Setup Action	Benefit
Customize the look of the order page to match the appearance of the rest of your website.	Users aren’t distracted by an abrupt change in look and feel.
Assure that all images are uploaded to a secure directory.	An error message won’t display when visitors click from your sales page to the order page.
Display the item description, quantity being ordered, and price on the order page.	Buyers are assured that they’re paying for only what they want.
Display that either credit cards or PayPal (or both) can be used as the payment source.	You show willingness to accommodate customers’ preferences.
Remove all navigation buttons from the order page.	This prevents tempting the buyer to exit the purchasing process.
Create a custom Thank You page for each individual product sold.	This gives you the possibility for cross-selling.
Create an autoresponder for each product, which is an e-mail or sequence of e-mails automatically sent to a customer upon purchase.	You can add a customer to a specific list to market later with back-end sales offers.

Premium Web Cart (www.premiumwebcart.com) is a good choice for a shopping cart. It’s one of the few shopping cart systems offering free technical support by telephone. Features of Premium Web Cart include

• Ease of use: You can easily add to and maintain product items in the shopping cart without having to pay a designer or programmer.

• Feature-rich: No other package at this price level offers the cart, affiliate program, e-mail broadcasting, membership, customer relation management program, project tracking, and inventory. Start small and grow!

• Premade graphics: The system creates attractive Add to Cart buttons for you: Just copy and paste the code to your website.

• Customizability: The capability to make your order pages look just like the rest of your website.

• Payment options: These enable you to offer payments through PayPal, your merchant account, or both.

• Coupons: Using coupons enables you to run specific promotions and to track their effect on sales.

• Custom Thank You pages: This is one of the rarest features of low-end shopping carts and one of the most important for increasing sale value per customer. When folks make a purchase through your shopping cart, they already have their credit card on the table. This is the best time to get them to buy more. Only through the use of a custom Thank You page can you make that special offer while their credit card is still out of their pocket and you have their undivided attention.

• Built-in affiliate program: You don’t need to find a third-party, affiliate-tracking system to manage your shopping cart. It’s all integrated already. (The section “Promoting affiliate products,” earlier in this chapter, introduces third-party affiliates.)

• Digital download capable: If you have an e-book or MP3 audio files, you can set them up in the system to be downloaded upon purchase instead of hosting the files on your own server.

• Built-in autoresponders and mailing system: An autoresponder is an automated system that sends a message (that you create) to someone that requests information from you. You’ll find a direct correlation between folks receiving automated or routine e-mails from you and their willingness to purchase your products or services.

Any sales trainer will tell you that you need to be in communication with a prospect at least seven times before he is willing to buy from you. On the web, this number is typically even higher because everyone is skeptical online. So, you must prove over time that you are worthy of doing business with. Setting up automated responses gives you the opportunity to gain trust from your prospects so that they will buy from you. A great way to attract your audience to join your autoresponder list is to offer opt-in forms on your website to download free reports. When someone buys your product, he can automatically be moved to a customer list and be removed from the prospect list.

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Compliance: Premium Web Cart satisfies all testing requirements for keeping your transactions secure from hackers. It invests thousands of dollars each year to maintain compliance so you do not have that added expense to pay yourself.

• Free telephone technical support: This is the most important feature, as well as the hardest to find these days. If you choose to sell products online, it’s only a matter of time before you need some help. Never subscribe to a shopping cart system that doesn’t offer support when you need it.

Premium Web Cart is a great solution for all levels of marketers and companies. With the increase of penalties for PCI Compliance violations, you should always use a third-party company to host the online transaction process. Simply buying your own SSL certificate for your shared hosting account at GoDaddy is not enough anymore!

Answering important questions

Before someone takes the final step and uses a credit card to make a purchase through your ordering system, a series of questions go through his mind within a matter of minutes. Many of these questions can and should be addressed in your sales letter or on your product sales page (as described in Chapter 5 of this minibook). But, these questions must also be addressed during the checkout process, or it could kill the sale.

People want to buy from you. After all, your offer is the solution to their problem. All you have to do is not stand in their way. Too often, webmasters put too much effort into graphics instead of paying attention to writing copy that sells, or to the shopping cart itself, which provides a smooth order process. By human nature, your audience consciously or unconsciously looks for reasons to not buy from you. Your job is to minimize those obstacles by providing the information they need to make an informed decision to buy while at the same time providing an easy buying procedure.

Here are just some of the questions your website visitors will be asking themselves before placing an order:

• How do I get what I ordered? Clearly describe your delivery method. Will you offer an immediate digital download link, or will purchasers be required to drive somewhere for pickup?

• How long will it take to get what I ordered? Mention whether you have the items in stock or whether a fulfillment house needs to burn a series of CDs that will be sent in the next three weeks, for example.

• Is this site secure? Make a statement to your prospects that invites them to look for an image of a closed padlock in their browser while on your order page.

• Is this company legitimate, or did it make an outlandish offer it can’t really fulfill? Use testimonials to prove that you can do what you say you can do.

• Did I make the right decision? Assure buyers that their purchasing choice was a good one by offering a follow-up e-mail.

• What will be done with my contact information after the order? Assure your customers that their contact and billing information is held strictly confidential.

• Who do I contact if I have a problem with my order? Provide a phone number or an e-mail address where people can get in touch with you if they have any questions. Respond promptly to these communications.

• Where do I go to get a refund? Mention this in your guarantee. (See Chapter 4 of this minibook.)

• Did I get everything I was supposed to? Provide a checklist of all items that are to be received so that your customer can cross-check what arrived.

• Should I expect more communication from the seller? If your product offer includes more communication from you — such as weekly coaching, a bonus e-course, or ongoing support, for example — be sure to state what to expect in the offer.

• When will my credit card be charged? It has become more common to have a statement in the header of the shopping cart that requires people to agree to payment terms such as “I understand and authorize that upon purchase, my credit card will be charged $975 payable to HereNextYear, Inc.”

• Am I ordering the right product? Reassure the buyer that this product is right for him. A popular way to do this is in the postscript statements at the bottom of the page. For example

P.S. Remember, if your company has experienced more than a 2% turnover in the past six months, this team-building program is tailor-made for you!

• Am I getting the best price possible for this purchase? Another element of effective copywriting (as discussed in Chapter 5 of this minibook) is to tell your readers that you have scoured the web and have found that no one has what you’re selling, for the price you’re offering.

• Have I completed the sales process yet, or do I have something more to do? If three steps are involved in the buying process, mention that to your customer. When the final step is complete, display on-screen that the visitor has completed the process.

• Is it really worth the price? Reassure the buyer that your product is worth not only the price you’re charging but also a whole lot more as well. Back up that statement with real reasons to increase the value of the purchase. Assemble your product offers so that the buyer gets at least 15 times the price in value.

Doubling or Tripling Your New Customer Revenue

Doubling or tripling the initial sale amount for new customer purchases begins with having more products to offer. These can be your own products or affiliate items. Make a list of all the products you could possibly promote, and you’re on your way to maximizing every new customer sale.

The next step is to think about your range of products and their cost. Every business should have products for sale with multiple price levels, known as price points. A consultant, for example, could feature products ranging from free to several thousand dollars, as shown in Table 2-2.

Table 2-2 A Consultant’s Possible Price Points

Product Type	Price Point
Industry report	Free
E-book	$27
2-hour seminar	$50
3-CD set with training manual	$97
Silver-level coaching program	$149 per month
1-day boot camp workshop	$250
5-week live webinar training course	$497
Gold-level coaching program	$300 per month
Platinum-level coaching program	$997 per month
One-on-one consulting on-site	$4,500 per day

With your product range and price points in place, you can upsell, cross-sell, and back-end sell your products to existing customers. Although it’s no secret that the easiest people to sell to are your existing customers, a point often overlooked is that people always want more. They will pay for an initial problem to be fixed and then pay more for related issues to be addressed. Your task is to simply inform them that “more” is available and give them an incentive to take advantage of it. That’s where upselling, cross-selling, and back-end selling come into play, as you discover in the following sections.

Upselling

Upselling is nothing more than convincing someone to buy a more expensive version of what he already decided to buy. You’ve likely been asked, “Would you like cheese on that? Fries with that?” Or, if you’ve ever ordered a gin and tonic, you were probably asked whether you preferred a name-brand gin versus the house stuff. Sure, the bartender was trying to be a good host, but he was also trying to make a better sale. Using the earlier example of selling an e-book, an upsell opportunity is when someone buying the e-book for $27 gets to the order page and is made a special offer to purchase a 3-CD set with training manual instead, for $97.

Cross-selling

Cross-selling is most easily defined as promoting accessories during the purchase process. Say that someone buys an e-book for $27. Then, the Thank You page features a special offer that the purchaser can add the 2-hour seminar CD set to her purchase. That’s cross-selling.

Cross-selling can occur before or after the initial sale is made — and sometimes in both instances! You really have to know your audience, though, when trying to cross-sell. If you offer too many accessories before the point of purchase, the buyer may get distracted, confused, or just plain annoyed by feeling pushed to buy more. Overzealousness can kill a sale.

Always go after the initial sale, and then offer additional options immediately after that first purchase is complete. The promotion is made on a custom Thank You page. If you’ve ever bought something on the Internet, you eventually get to a page that reads Thank you for your order. Please print this page for your records. This is the page that you want to customize to maximize your potential for increasing your initial purchases from one dollar value to the next.

Figure 2-5 shows a Thank You page, where the reader is given an incentive to buy two training manuals at one, low cost. By the time the customer gets to this Thank You page, he has already spent $27. By inspiring him to take immediate action and spend another $70, the total transaction becomes $97.

Back-end selling

When people become associated with your business, whether as customers or even just as newsletter subscribers, you have the opportunity to offer solutions to them. Back-end selling is promoting products on the “back end” of an action they took with you. You can find so many giveaways of information and tangible items on the Internet today that could otherwise be sold for money because of this simple reason: More value is often found in the back-end sale.

Here are some simple examples of back-end selling:

• An e-mail newsletter promoting a new product release offered only to current customers

• A follow-up phone call or in-person meeting with a customer two weeks after the product has been received

• A personalized letter sent by postal mail addressed specifically to the person who purchased your product

If you have enough affiliate products in your arsenal, you can pick the perfect moment to suggest a recommendation for purchasing.

Generating Traffic

Generating traffic to your website requires spending your own time to attract visitors, paying for visitors directly, or hiring helpers to do the work required to get the visitors. Getting a top spot on Google isn’t free — even your time has value.

Having said that, here are seven core categories to generate traffic to your website:

• Free search: With all the hype suggesting how much time people spend tweeting on Twitter or posting on Facebook, just about everyone who uses the Internet still searches for something on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing every day. Creating new content for your website weekly or even daily needs to be a primary focus of your traffic-building plan.

Although time and effort have a cost, many search engines and directories don’t require you to pay a fee to get listed. Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and dmoz are good examples. Simply find out what phrases people are searching for, and then add content to your website to address those issues. Search engines will find your pages of content through automated processes developed by the search engine companies.

By getting new pages of your website visible on the preceding search engines alone, you have the potential of being in front of more than 80 percent of all search engine traffic. Optimizing your site content can help you appear higher in search engine results, as Book II explains.

• Using other people’s traffic: After you’ve had some experience creating content for your own website and getting some search engine positioning for those pages or blog posts, you’re ready to make use of one of the hottest ways to build targeted traffic to your website: Write a guest blog for a business that complements yours, but doesn’t compete with it (see Figure 2-6). See Book VI for the ins and outs of blogging.

Always include a link to your own website as part of the blog post and follow up with comments.

One of the hot traffic generators of today is to take guest blog posting to a higher level by conducting a blog tour. Line up 10, 15, or 50 blog dates so that readers can sequentially follow you from blog to blog. The blog owners all benefit from the shared traffic from other blogs and your own promotions.

• Paid search: With the growth in development of measurement tools (such as Google Analytics, for example), paid search has become an essential form of promotion for nearly every product or service. A few of these methods are discussed earlier in this chapter in the “Monetizing traffic” section — CPC, CPM, PPC (call, not click), PPL, and CPA. Each applies to how you can pay to receive targeted traffic as well.

• Social networking: Participating in discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn are proven website traffic-generating processes. Remember to always link to your website. Figure 2-7 shows this process in action on Facebook. Internet users will always search for and exchange content. You just have to find out what they’re searching for and supply them with unique content. More on this topic can be found in Chapter 5 of this minibook.

• Face-to-face networking: Some people still enjoy meeting face to face for their networking. Meetup (www.meetup.com) helps with the organizing, scheduling, and promoting of such groups. So, you can easily find many niche or industry-targeted networking groups to attend that meet regularly in person.

Consider starting your own Meetup group! It’s a great way to network with potential customers.

• Other offline efforts: Don’t overlook your opportunities to use offline resources to promote your website. Radio talk shows are always looking for guest experts. Offer a giveaway to listeners every time you’re on the radio. Networking events, associations, leads groups, and schools and churches are always looking for interesting speakers to deliver short, 30-minute messages to their audience. Deliver content-rich information and suggest a visit to your website for a free download or for more information about your company. And, always provide the opportunity for people to be added to your e-mail list.

Joe Sabah has appeared on more than 650 radio talk shows around the country, most by never even leaving his home. He produces a handy contact list and program at www.sabahradioshows.com for getting on radio talk shows.

• Referrals: Of course, no one is a higher-quality visitor than a personal referral. Referrals will spend more time on your website and are much more likely to buy from you because they have reached a certain level of trust in you because of the referral.

Whether referrals come from offline or online, always strive to increase visitors who are referred by someone else. One of the great ways to do just that is to start your own affiliate program, which is discussed in the next section.

Creating Your Own Affiliate Program

Not long after you gather some experience as an affiliate promoting other people’s products you start to imagine how you would benefit from having others promote your products and services. Plus, you will discover things they’re doing right as well as what needs improvement when it comes to helping you sell their products. Use these experiences and incentives to create your own affiliate program so that others can sell your products and services for you. Even a moderately successful affiliate program can quickly propel your business to a new level that would’ve been impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to attain on your own.

Setting up affiliate tracking

All web-based affiliate programs require three essential components:

• An affiliate center: This is where affiliates can add an account for themselves, check their sales, and get links, ads, and scripts to promote.

• A reliable, integrated connection to the product being sold: Don’t allow an affiliate to promote your products with links that don’t work! Best case, you’ll be embarrassed. Worst case, your affiliate will likely never promote your products again.

• A payment-tracking system: To stay on an affiliate’s good side, you need a mechanized way to determine when and how much you need to pay each affiliate.

Fortunately, Premium Web Cart offers all these features rolled into one, which is why it’s a good choice to use as an affiliate program. See the section “Shopping cart setup secrets,” earlier in this chapter, for details on Premium Web Cart.

Register for your own affiliate program so that you can identify areas of the sign-up process that need improvement.

Attracting affiliates

After your affiliate center is complete, announce to your clients that you’re looking for people to recommend your products and services to others and that you pay referral fees. The easiest people to recruit for promoting your products to others are those who have used your products and services. Your customers often become your best salespeople.

Send a letter to your client lists announcing any products that are part of your affiliate program for them to market.

Training affiliates

Having a small network of affiliates will bring in some additional sales, but the general rule is that you will need 20 affiliates for everyone who produces any measurable sales. That means to have 50 producers, you would need to have more than 1,000 registered affiliates. This ratio can be greatly reduced through continuous opportunities for training. Here are some ways you can train your affiliates:

• Conduct a weekly conference call. Keep this call short, say, no more than 40 minutes. And always have someone on the call who is being interviewed — maybe an industry expert or a sales trainer. Conference calls where one person talks the whole time are boring and are usually long-winded and disorganized. Create an agenda for what will be covered on the call and follow it. Always start on time and end on time.

Try Free Audio Conferencing (www.freeaudioconferencing.com) for your conference calls. It allows you to have as many as 85 people on a call.

• Record the conference calls. Most conferencing systems provide a means for recording your calls at the press of a button. Send an e-mail to your affiliate list with a link to the recorded call immediately after the call is complete so that any affiliate can listen to it again and share it with others. And, if some folks missed the call, you can give a little promotion in the e-mail about what was covered and why they should listen.

• Provide one-on-one assistance. Until your affiliate group gets too large to manage by phone, provide some individual coaching to each new affiliate beginning right after a member signs up.

• Provide the tools to use in their promotions. Most of your affiliates won’t want to write their own sales copy and pay a designer to create banner ads for your products. So be willing to provide the sales copy, images, promotions, audio, and even potentially video for your affiliates to use in their efforts to promote your products.

Joint Venturing for Exponential Sales Growth

Joint ventures are different from affiliates: They’re more involved, yet often far more lucrative. You must follow certain rules, though, and a protocol.

For example, if you are a motivational speaker, you can set up your own workshop and have your affiliates sell your workshop. That’s an affiliate. Or, you can partner with another expert to set up the workshop and sell it to his customers. He provides the customers; you provide the expertise. That’s a joint venture.

The following sections explain how to pursue a joint-venture relationship to potentially double or triple your business in size, stature, and sales volume within a matter of a few months.

Getting your facts straight

Compared with affiliates, which are quick to promote products to their lists and to people they know, joint-venture hosts are very selective. Notice that emphasis on host instead of partner. That’s because a joint-venture host is more like the master of ceremonies at a seminar than a true business partner. Joint-venture hosts don’t care about looking at your accounting books or having an influence on who you hire as employees. They just want to sell your product in mass quantities and get a big check in the mail from you! It’s the host’s job to give you a raving recommendation to his multitudes of followers, and your task is to provide the goods to the host’s followers. Before you approach a potential host for a joint venture, you must have all your ducks in a row, including

• Sales: Documented proof of your success selling your own products and services.

• Visitation and conversion rates: Documentation of how many people visit your website per month and also how many of those visitors convert to customers resulting from your website, sales copy, and shopping cart. If your host drives 50,000 visitors to your sales page tomorrow, what kind of sales could be expected? In Book III, you can read all about using web analytics tools to capture these numbers.

• Affiliate performance: How many affiliates you have. And, how many sales your affiliates have produced for you so far as well as your affiliates’ conversion rates.

Affiliates will typically get better conversion rates than even you (as the website owner) because the visitors are coming as a result of a personal referral. Conversion rates from a joint-venture host can be even higher because the receiving audience knows that the host’s high-profile recommendation is at stake. If they’re recommending it, it must be good!

• Fulfillment: How many orders you could fill in a week’s time. For example, imagine if Mark Victor Hansen (of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame) were to send a recommendation out to his entire list (more than 1 million people!) and had 50,000 orders to fill in 24 hours. How many mailers could you stuff in a week’s time? Know your delivery capabilities before you even start talking to a joint-venture host.

Finding a joint-venture host

One of the problems with joint venturing is that it’s not new anymore. Internet-based joint ventures started as far back as 1995. Today, anyone with a substantial list and a visible profile probably has 50 to 100 people per month or more clamoring after him to do a joint venture. Even if you can get in the door to talk to the golden goose of your industry, you’ll probably be met with a response like, “Who the heck are you, and why should I be listening to you?”

Start with smaller joint ventures. Follow these simple guidelines to locate joint-venture partners, and you will have plenty of opportunities to go after the big guys after you build a track record:

• Attend networking events, seminars, and association meetings. You need to meet people and let them know you’re looking for joint-venture hosts to help take your product to new levels. Create a 20-second elevator pitch that announces what your product is, the conversion rates you’re getting from your website, and how much a potential joint-venture host might make with a list of 10,000 or more subscribers that you both would be promoting, too. Numbers talk, and joint-venture hosts listen to numbers.

• Participate in online forums. You probably won’t find T. Harv Ecker or Anthony Robbins participating in online forums much, but you’d be surprised how many multimillionaires do spend an hour or more daily offering advice online (anonymously, of course). Add a signature line (as shown in Figure 2-8) in your forum bio stating that you’re seeking joint-venture hosts, add a link to your website, and start participating in forum discussions.

• Ask your affiliates and clients for referrals. Your affiliates and clients likely know someone who could be a possible joint-venture host for you. Ask them what vendors they use who might be able to roll out your product or service as a value-added offer to their customers.

Finding joint-venture hosts isn’t really difficult. You’ll discover that just by using the three preceding resources alone. The trick is to convince the right hosts to do business with you and make things happen. You need to have a plan and present it well.

Presenting your plan

Depending on the size of the host’s company, you might be expected to conduct a formal presentation to a group of staff with your plan. If you start small, however, many joint ventures can be assembled over a cup of coffee at your local coffeehouse or sometimes even via a phone call. Use your instincts to read how formal the meeting should be. But be assured that the more professional, organized, and successful you appear, the more seriously your project will be considered. The following sections help you put together your materials and make your pitch to a potential host.

Gather your presentation materials

The first step is putting together a nice iPad or PowerPoint presentation (or binder with printed pages) with materials that your host will likely want to see. Be sure to include the following:

• Printout of the sales volume you’re experiencing

• One-page report of your affiliates and how much they make by selling your product

• Visitation statistics report showing how many people visit your website on a monthly basis and where those visitors are coming from

• Full copy of your sales letter or product sales page

• List of testimonials from happy customers

• Report of returns and refund requests

• Photos of you with high-profile experts in the industry (if you have them)

• Sample joint venture host agreement, which typically includes

• The terms of the revenue sharing: What percentage of the sale are you willing to offer your host, and how long after the promotion occurs are you willing to pay commissions for sales generated? For example, if you get a phone call from someone a year from now who saw a promotion run by your host offering a special price, will you accept the sale? Will you pay your host the due commission for that sale?

You have to promise a high-enough percentage to attract the attention of a good host in the first place: 50, 60, and sometimes even 100 percent of the revenue is given to the host for his support of your product.

• The expectations for each involved: Because you know your products, offer to write sales copy. Add a sentence in the agreement that the host will “use my promotions as written or slightly modified to meet her natural speaking tone,” for example.

• Any limitations: Most likely, you will sell the same product outside your hosting agreement using your own promotion efforts, affiliates, or other joint ventures. Your agreement needs to claim your right to ownership of your product and the right to continue to sell it in any way you choose. And it should state that your host will not be receiving commissions for sales generated from alternate promotions.

• Commission payments and returns: What date of the month will you be reconciling orders and making a payment to your host? And, how will you account for returns? Make your payment at the end of each month following the date a sale is made. This gives you enough time to process any returns and deduct those orders from the amount of commission due your host. This procedure should be included in your agreement.

• Disputes: Decide how a formal dispute will be handled.

• Intellectual property rights: Remember that this is your product you’re offering to your host’s followers. Be sure to include in your agreement that you still own all rights to your products.

• Confidentiality: During the course of a joint-venture project, you will likely be exposed to insider information as to how your host conducts business, such as access to the host’s online shopping cart to set up your product promotion on his website. Now that’s trust. You will wind up revealing some secrets of your own as well. It will be comforting to your host that you hold his practices in high regard and will not share any of his personal or business information with others.

Explain your value

Joint-venture hosts have a substantial public following. They got to where they are because they (more often than not) genuinely care about people. When you arrive at your meeting with your potential joint-venture host, be ready to promote a joint-venture opportunity with the host’s audience in mind:

• How will his followers benefit from your product?

• What can they expect as a result of using what you produce?

• Why are you the best person to make this offer to his list?

A host is always pressed for time, so you need to present how easy your joint-venture process will be. Be prepared to do all the work and even bend over backward for your host. You must present that your host will

• Make a ton of money without spending a boatload of time.

• Be at the top of your priority list.

• Get special treatment. You might even decide to make a completely separate website just for your host to promote your product.

• Benefit from your sales ability. You will surely need to prepare customized sales copy for e-mails to be sent to your host’s list, for example.

• Be involved in the process.

• Have a new team player at his side. You might well be invited as a guest speaker for a teleconference or even brought up on stage for a few minutes at an event in front of hundreds of people!

When it comes to joint ventures, think bigger than your normal day-to-day online sales strategies that trickle in from your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and Google AdWords campaigns. Sure, those are all important. But they are most important to generate numbers that you will eventually use to present your offer to future joint-venture hosts. A huge growth opportunity awaits your company. Following the Internet marketing process from A to Z is what will get you there.

One last point: Dress well. Joint-venture hosts might wear jeans and a T-shirt to a meeting, but they appreciate it when you honor their stature by dressing professionally.