Does your business have a Web site Have you missed the idea that it can be your 24/7 virtual marketing machine Do you wonder how it could bring you minions more customers and clients to your brick and mortar location
The biggest mistake local businesses make is not using the Internet to let potential customers and clients know who they are, who they can be by offering valuable content to attract them back again and again, and why they are the first choice over their competition.
Did you know that many of your local potential customers will Google your Web name or your name to see what you offer and how you may be their choice over others Today people are much more Internet savvy. You need to speak to them.
Building traffic to your Web site to market it needs you to install proper content and sales messages on it as well as other tried and true Online promotion methods such as submitting articles and creating a blog.
FACT: You have only 10 seconds to attract your potential customers and get him to stay long enough to show them your business is his best choice.
Hows your Web Site Doing
Take the Check and Correct Quiz below to see if your Web site measures up. After your input what you dont know will be clearer. If you want your Web site to be more effective, stay open and learn how they can put more money in your checking account each month.
Answer these questions to see if you are on track or need a professional partner to help you get the necessary marketing language and content on your site to bring targeted traffic. Realize the spiders of the search engines comb sites daily looking for good key word, free information, and power writing sales content.
Did You Know Your Web site Needs...
_____1. A sales letter (short or long) for each product or service you offer. You need to give your visitors a reason to buy from you.
_____2. Benefit driven headlines on your home page to attract people to your sales messages. Drop your announcements because they bore. Make your visitors mouths water, their skin tingle, and their eyes receive a positive picture of how they will be after they use you. Make your headlines on your home page and in your sales letters sizzle and seduce to get them to call you and come to your office.
_____3. Testimonials from former clients and customers
_____4. Less bio and credentials on the home page because your customer wants to know whats in it for me Put this information on your Contact or About Me page.
_____5. Less telling and more engaging the visitor to stay (they leave immediately if they dont see benefits and valuable content that answers their concerns). Forget the brochure-style home page.
_____6. A preplan naming the top two to three focuses you want to attract customers to, who your target market is, and your Web sites contacts and money goals.
_____7. Much more You centered information such as benefits or short tips and articles
_____8. Acknowledgement and answers for your visitors concerns, problems or challenges. These hook your Web visitor to pick up the phone to call you.
_____9. Proven strategies that get people to your site to include writing and submitting short articles to other Web sites and ezines, exchanging links, a blog page for your customer to interact with you and get questions answered, and many more.
____10. A willingness to take the time and spend the money to make your Web site work. Without this, your site will languish with inactivity.
When you dont know what you dont know, your site just sits there with no one to play with. Your brick and mortar business sits there too. Now that you do know more than you did, take a leap of faith and know that you too can learn how to make your Web site shine and bring people right to your business address. Find yourself a good professional Internet marketing person, read books on the topic or take a teleclass or seminar to boost your skills. Partner with a professional who can make your journey so much shorter, with fewer mistakes, and help you enjoy your business more.
Judy Cullins 2005 All Rights Reserved.
Judy Cullins, 20-year Book and Internet Marketing Coach works with small business people who want to make a difference in peoples lives, build their credibility and clients, and make a consistent life-long income. Judy is author of 10 eBooks including Write your eBook or Other Short Book Fast, Ten Non-Techie Ways to Market Your Book Online, The Fast and Cheap Way to Explode Your Targeted Web Traffic, and Power Writing for Web Sites That Sell. She offers free help through her 2 monthly ezines, The BookCoach Says..., Business Tip of the Month, blog Q & A at and over 170 free articles.
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Email her at .Phone: 619/466-0622 -- Orders: 866/200-9743
You wont be involved in Internet marketing long before you see the term Joint Venture. Perhaps you are familiar with the term from its application in the business world but dont see how it would apply to Internet marketing.
Actually, it is one of the most exciting ways to generate targeted web traffic that you will find.
For purposes of definition, you could say that a joint venture is an operation involving two or more Internet marketers, each contributing unique resources for their mutual benefit. That may sound a little stuffy, so look at it this way. Say you and your neighbor both need to plant trees in your respective backyards. He only has a wheelbarrow and you only have a shovel. Neither of you can do the job effectively by yourself, but together you can accomplish the job for both of you. Thats a joint venture (backyard variety!).
Similarly, in Internet marketing, each of you contributes something that the other lacks, so that you both benefit by gaining more sales, site visitors and subscribers. In the majority of cases, this involves a product and a list. You may have created an explosive eBook (like this one!) but since you have been in marketing only a short time you dont have a very big list of people that might be interested in your eBook. But you have a friend who is also marketing online, and he has an opt-in list of 5000 subscribers that have already expressed interest in the topic of your eBook. In a simple joint venture, he emails his list about your eBook and keeps a commission on any sales. You make a percentage on every sale and get a large number of targeted traffic to your site. The traffic may turn out in the long term to be more valuable than your immediate eBook sales. Thats because, if you have an attractive site set up to entice visitors to leave their email address, a good portion of your friends list becomes your list!
Joint ventures often are more complex than the simple one described above. You will see many joint ventures involving several marketers, perhaps a dozen or more. Sometimes a product isnt even sold the main purpose is to get traffic to the web sites of the marketers and build their opt-in lists. In this kind of joint venture, each marketer contributes some product they sell or own. Then the JV may proceed any number of ways. The marketer (or marketers) with the list(s) may set up a contest, where the winner or winners gets all the products. Another way is to offer the participants the choice of one or more of the products if they visit all the web sites involved and sign up for all the opt-in lists of the marketers.
You could also do ad or article swaps (assuming you and your JV partner both have an ezine or newsletter). You could offer an eBook you have written to another marketer to be given away on his or her site. You have your name and affiliate links inside, and may give the eBook both more value and a viral quality by allowing the recipient to change some of the links to their own so they will want to pass it on. Your JV partner, in turn, has something of value to offer to his or her site visitors or subscribers. These are just a few possibilities; the options are limited only by your imagination. To summarize, here are some general types of JVs for you to think about.
Cross promotion promote each others product or service, such as ezine ads in each others ezine.
Co-development work together with another marketer to create a product such as a book, which you both can sell.
Product endorsement pay a percentage of profits to your partner who endorses your product to his list.
Cooperative list building similar to cross promotion, but concentrates on building the opt-in lists of each.
Regardless of the details, all the participants get a large number of visitors to their sites and the opportunity for their op-in lists to grow dramatically.
Are you ready to start a joint venture
There are several things to consider before you rush into your first JV. First you need to select the right JV partner. A wrong choice can spell disaster for your project. Its best to start with people and businesses you already know and trust. If you have already decided all the parameters of your joint venture, it will be easier to choose the partner it is someone that can complement what you already have.
Using a simple example, if you have the hot eBook, you need a partner who has a list, not another hot eBook. But if you have bigger plans for your first JV, you may want to partner with another eBook owner and together seek out additional JV partners with complementary resources. To help you get ideas and pick up additional JV partners, talk to your marketing friends about your JV idea and see what suggestions they might have.
If you cant find the JV partner you need from among your friends or business acquaintances, you may need to seek them out other ways. If you subscribe to several ezines (and you should!), their publishers may be good candidates since you presumably are subscribing to ezines that target your area of interest. If you dont know of any good ezines that target your market, look at http://www.directoryofezines.com/.
What about the details of your JV That will vary greatly depending on the type of venture you have in mind, but here are some general guidelines. If you will be offering a commission on sales, be aware that the average is about 50%. This may seem high, but, to restate the old adage, would you rather have 50% of the profit from 100 sales or 100% of none You are unlikely to attract any serious JV partners if you are only offering a commission of 15 or 20%. Also, you are unlikely to attract many quality JV partners if their commission is less than $25-30. So a $10 eBook simply isnt a good JV attraction. And when you talk to someone about a JV, if you will be proposing to provide a product, offer it free so they can properly evaluate it dont expect them to pay for it.
When you get ready to contact site or ezine owners you dont know, you need to create a good JV proposal letter. Remember they are busy just like you and wont read a long letter, so keep it short. Since the recipient probably regularly receives JV offers, you need to make yours stand out.
Following is a sample JV proposal you can learn from. It will of course need to be modified to fit the details of your proposed JV. In addition to an email (or instead of one), try faxing a copy to your potential partner; it is more likely to get their attention.
Dear ________,
My name is ______ and I visited your web site at http://www.________.com today and was extremely impressed with the quality and content of your Internet marketing articles. The article on _________________ was especially helpful to me. I run the _______________ site at http://www._____________.com and would like to offer you a free copy of my package. I would also like to discuss the possibility of a joint venture between our companies which could significantly increase the profits from your web site. Please call me at ____________ or email me at __________________ at your earliest convenience.
Thank you, ____________ ________@___________.com http://www.___________.com
Darryl DeLong is an established Internet Marketer and Ezine Publisher. Learn how to build up your opt-in list, increase site visitors and sales with my brand new ebook entitled Viral Internet Marketing Strategies get a free copy here: