Internet Business

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    Are Amazon Business Mentoring and Training Programs Really Worth It? Are Amazon Business Mentoring and Training Programs Really Worth It?

    Are Amazon Business Mentoring and Training Programs Really Worth It?

Are Amazon Business Mentoring and Training Programs Really Worth It?

Amazon is one of the largest online marketplaces for selling products to consumers. In 2014 over 40% of the 5 billion items that Amazon sold were from 3rd party sellers.  A 3rd party seller is a merchant that sets up a seller account on Amazon and uses Amazon’s platform to promote and sell their products and services.  It is fairly easy to set up a seller account and is only $39.99/month to maintain a seller account on Amazon.  While it is a relatively simple process to set up a seller account, there are many things that can affect your ability to make a lot of sales, or will make you more vulnerable to other sellers hijacking you listings.

As a seller, you become more experienced, and begin to learn the tips and tricks that will improve your sales or increase your profits, mostly through trial and error.  However, during this learning period, you will be leaving potentially thousands of dollars if income on the table while you figure out what increases sales and what doesn’t.  This difference can be even more noticeable in markets that are more competitive because it takes that much longer to get your product noticed and rise in the ranks until your product is on the 1st page of the Amazon search results for your keyword. It takes even more time to eventually land in the #1 position for your main keyword.   In many cases, timing can be an issue… especially during the high selling season, so learning the success tips as you battle for position can cost you even more income.

With many of these potential […]

Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Use Live Chat

With all of the tools and tricks available on websites today, the ones that many website owners tend to overlook are the ones that don’t seem like they have an immediate affect on the bottom line. Live chat can seem like it would be used mainly as a customer service tool, however it has huge benefits in adding to the bottom line of what a business brings in as well. Using live chat addresses several of the things that stand in the way of a 1st time visitor purchasing anything or taking any other action on your website.

1. Strengthens your connection with your visitors

Live chat allows visitors to feel more comfortable with your web site and your offering because with a real person on the website, they can get their questions answered immediately. Any objections or hesitations can be dealt with in a very personal manner in a way the best written sales letter can’t do. Live chat adds a personalization feeling to each person that engages in it. This kind of service also can assist the visitor with navigating the website, or assisting with filling out the order forms.

2. Allows instant phone to phone connection between the website visitor and the website owner

Some chat programs allow the chat person to connect the website visitor to a sales representative. This is a powerful feature, especially for lead generating sites that allows the business to funnel their website visitors to their higher closing sales reps. THe way this works is the chat person asks the visitor for their phone number and through the software, connects their phone number with the pre-programmed number of the business. The software rings both phone numbers and when each party […]

5 Things You Can Do To Increase The Local Traffic To Your Website

I get questions all the time related to getting more traffic to your website.  However, the key isn’t getting more traffic, it’s getting the RIGHT kind of traffic.  For businesses who depend on local traffic, online marketing is still effective if done correctly.  A business owner must have a unified online strategy to be able to take advantage of all the different marketing venues from social media to strategic blogging and everything in between.  So what are some things that you can do that will increase the traffic to your website as well as allow each marketing activity to build upon the other?

All of the methods I mention below will assume and take into account that you have already done appropriate keyword research and know how your target market uses the search engines to find you and your products/services.

Here are 5 things you can do that will increase the local traffic to your website:

1) Submit your website to the Google Places.

Google places is a feature of the Google platform that allows local businesses to place themselves on the maps that you see presented in the search engine results that show you where the local business are.  This service is free and just requires you to enter the information.  Make sure that when you do enter the information, all of your information is current and you are using the researched keywords in your places title (the one that makes the most sense to use in relating to your business) and fill out as much of the information as makes sense on the form.  On a side note, put a picture on your website of your business and in the alt tag of the picture, put […]

3 Ways for Business Consultants to Generate Additional Revenue From Their Website

Business consultants have a powerful means of creating additional revenue streams for their business….  Why?  Because their main asset is their knowledge and experience, and they can use their main asset to take advantage of the information age.

Information is in high demand and service professionals and consultants are positioned very powerfully to benefit in this new age.  Many of these professionals already have most of the basic foundation set up and it is just a matter of a few tweaks and minor additions to their business processes and online strategies and they can create additional revenue streams.

1) Create webinars for income or lead generation.

The first way of generating revenue is to create attendee funded webinars and replay them.  Webinars are easy to create now with the current technology and easy to record.  The necessary steps required to create this revenue stream includes developing a landing page to sell webinar seats, collect payments, perform the webinar registration and manage the mailing list signup.  This can be done in a one step with a customized script.  Once this process has been set up, it is easy enough to reuse it for future webinars.

Once you have recorded your webinar, you can easily use a webinar replay service that allows you to schedule automatic replays of your recorded webinar in a webinar format.  This type of revenue and lead generation is best used with somewhat evergreen topics so you don’t have to redo your webinar constantly.  Webinar  content that is based on the latest news is obviously not a good candidate for this particular strategy.  In that case, you would need to plan to give regular live webinars.

2) Sell ebooks and/or DVD courses

Your information can easily be transferred […]

2 Website Marketing Techniques That You Should Automate

There are many kinds of website marketing techniques that are being recommended today, and some of them don’t

require much of your time while others require quite a bit of your time.  However first thing is first… don’t confuse marketing techniques with a marketing strategy.  A properly designed online marketing strategy incorporates a number of techniques which work together to reach an overall goal.  The reason I want to emphasize this point is that some people take one technique like Social Media Marketing and think that it is their marketing strategy.  No, Social Media Marketing is just one technique that should fit into an overall plan that is designed to bring an overall goal into fruition, such as an increase in the number of leads you get from your web presence.

Now that you know that your social media activity is only a part of your entire online strategy and that it doesn’t replace you online marketing strategy, how can you add another marketing component to your Internet business strategy without getting overwhelmed? The answer is simple.  Using appropriate automation techniques will allow you to do more with less effort.

Below are some marketing automation techniques that will save you a lot of time in your marketing efforts.

1) Automated Blog & Social Media (SM) Integration

One technique that does bring more traffic to your website is to publish your blog postings to all of your social media sites.  This can obviously be done automatically by the typical cut and paste […]

Are You Building Your Website to Be An Online Asset?

Your web presence, especially your web site, is in reality an online asset.    What is an asset?  In the definition of Robert Kiyosaki’s  terminology, an asset

is something that generates income for you.  In his meaning, it is usually on a residual basis, however it doesn’t have to be.

In any case, your website can easily be an asset where it is generating residual revenue for your business.  Residual revenue can mean, receiving convertible leads for your company, or actually selling product/service from your website on a consistent basis.  The problem is that most business owners use their website as a online brochure.  Their online strategy doesn’t build upon their website and continue to add value to allow the website to powerfully add an additional revenue stream to their business. They don’t have a long term plan that would consistently build value to their website that they can capitalize upon.

The question is, did you originally set up your web site to be an online asset or an online brochure?  If you in reality have an online brochure and would like to transition your web site into being an online asset that generates residual revenue, there are some things that you will need to focus on in order to make that happen.

What are the factors that determine how well a web site generates ongoing revenue?

1) Targeted  Traffic:

Targeted traffic is the lifeblood to a website.  The more targeted the traffic is, the easier it is to connect with the visitors who come to the website and the easier it is to stand out from other websites […]