Business Corner

I often wondered how people were extremely successful marketing information products on the internet. I honestly thought the web was for the younger generation and the computer savvy ‘Gurus’. Boy was I wrong. My previous purchases and studies have educated me on that.

I am a self publisher of a few books and ‘a wanna be’ bestselling author. So I decided to seek out self published bestselling author’s websites to see what they were doing to earn their stripes. How come they had best sellers? What were they doing that I wasn’t doing. I read books just as good as theirs, and in some cases better on authonomy.com, where authors upload their manuscripts in the hopes of a publisher or agent discovering them.

I wanted to find out how they structured their websites so I could do the same and hopefully sell a few books via the internet without going library to library and bookstore to bookstore.

I purposely followed a trail of information websites and took relentless notes. My investigations took me deeper. Why were these writers on the best seller list? You probably already know this, but I certainly didn’t, I discovered that all kinds of people, both young and baby boomer era, from all walks of life, were creating wealthy lifestyles from a simple information ebook.

With a little insight into the internet and understanding how the web weaves, it is easy to see how the savvy internet marketers accomplish great successes. Basically, if a person can write well and use a computer they can take advantage of the world-wide-web, jump on board the digital era and make money with ebooks in a relatively short period of time.  Read more... (413 words, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)

I’m sure there has been a time where you launched an advertising campaign and didn’t get the results you wanted. To the extent where you swore off direct mailers or ads completely, unfortunately, just like most endeavors, there is a right and wrong way. Understanding the proven fundamentals of what makes a great campaign will help you boost your advertising successes.

The most critical two steps, preceding the actual copy or design of the ad, the two steps that is often neglected, is establishing the specific goal of the ad and picking the media that fits your message. For instance, there’s a difference in the result of having increases in customer traffic to your retail locations and having people call you to schedule appointments. There’s a difference between asking for an RSVP to a special event and asking people to leave their contact information for further follow up.

Does that make sense? Again, what is the end result of your advertising? Are you selecting that newspaper, magazine, or web ad placement because your competition is doing it? Or did you select that medium because it’s the most likely place for the eyeballs of your most likely customer, target audience, to be? Always remember what it is that you are trying to accomplish and why.

Once you understand your goals and media, best suited, to communicate to your target audience, it’s time to get to work on the third step….

The third step is the headline. A helpful trial when deciding on a headline is whether it answers one or all of these four questions:  Read more... (1291 words, estimated 5:10 mins reading time)

• Who Cares?
• What’s In It For ME?
• Why Are You Bothering ME?
• So What?