Adam Beazley’s Traffic & Promotion Blog

One of the most common questions I am asked is “What do I sell on the internet?”  Well, the answer depends a lot on your personality and HOW you want to sell. In other words, the first question should not be “what sells well on the internet”, but “what method of selling am I most comfortable with?”

One of the most common questions I am asked is “What do I sell on the internet?”

Well, the answer depends a lot on your personality and HOW you want to sell. In other words, the first question should not be “what sells well on the internet”, but “what method of selling am I most comfortable with?”

There are essentially three ways to sell products on the internet. Let’s look at each method and the see the advantages and disadvantages of each.

First Method: Buy Wholesale and Sell Retail

This method is as old as human history. Find a product your niche wants, locate a wholesale source for that product, set up your online home business, advertise the product on your web site and ship the product to your customer.

Advantages:

1. You maintain complete control over the sales and delivery process.

You decide how much to mark up the wholesale price, not someone else. You also have control over when the item is shipped to your customer, not someone else halfway across the country!

2. You can shop around for the best wholesale price.

3. You can recommend your other products when someone purchases your product.

Disadvantages:

1. You will end up shipping packages everyday.

2. You will have to pay upfront for inventory and have a place to store it in your home.

3. Since others will be selling the same thing you are, you must be able to out-market your competition.

Second Method: Recommend Products for a Commission

This is also called affiliate marketing. You recommend someone else’s product using a special hyper-link called an affiliate link. When your visitor clicks on that link, the visitor is taken to the other person’s product page, but a cookie tracks the link to you. If a sale results, you get a commission. There is a lot of affiliate marketing information online.

Commissions can range from 5% of an order for camping gear to 50% of an information product priced at $1500! Affiliate marketing works for physical products, services, ebooks and anything else under the sun.

The key is finding product owners that see the value in sharing a percentage of the sale with those willing to be volunteer sales people for their product. Product owners that see the value of residual income with an online business.

Advantages:

1. You do not have to ship the product - the owner of the product takes care of that. In fact, the owner of the product creates the sales page, collects the money, ships the product and handles the questions and refunds.

2. You do not have to keep the product in inventory

3. Some commissions can be VERY generous.

Disadvantages:

1. If the product owner has an affiliate program, other people will be selling the exact same product. You must out-market other people and even the owner to make significant sales. You can not merely put up a link and forget about it if you want to make sales!

2. You have no control over the price of the product, the effectiveness of the sales page or the delivery of the product.

3. Although most product owners are honest and want to keep their affiliates happy, you have no leverage when it comes to getting paid. You do not control the money.

Third Method: Create your own product.

This is my favorite way to make money every day online! Once you learn to start an online business, creating your own products is a great way to follow your passion AND sell products that no one else is selling!

Advantages:

1. You have complete control over the sales and delivery process. You determine the price for your own product and you can even cut out the delivery costs be creating a downloadable product.

2. You will gain a huge sense of satisfaction, not to mention instant expert status!

3. You can find a need and then meet it. Creating your own product allows you to be very flexible and meet a targeted need in a very specialized niche.

4. There is no competition for your particular product. You are the ONLY ONE selling your products, unless you allow others to sell it for you, but you have complete control.

Disadvantages:

1. You can waste a lot of time and money if you have not researched your niche properly.

2. You must find a daily source of new customers.

3. You must find others to help promote your product.

So there you have it - the three basic methods of selling products on the internet. Hopefully, you can look at the advantages and disadvantages of each and determine which method is right for you. But don’t stop with just one. Incorporate all three methods into your online business and you will have a strong, diverse business that whether any economic storm!

Stephen Beck, President of FamilyEbiz.com, is an expert on teaching non-techies to start a business on the internet. For a FREE 75 min. interview on the fastest way to start a family internet business visit: Latest Home Based Business Ideas

Adam Beazley
Internet Marketing Consultant
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

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Axandra’s Internet Business Promotion tool known as IBP is a multi-award winning business promotion tool, which help you get traffic to your website. The company touts that their software can get into the top 10 ranking in most search engines like Google and Yahoo. With the vast majority of online users using these search engines the results of such a claim would without a doubt help your business.

I must say that I am very impressed with this software. It really is a full service business promotion tool. I not only includes the business promotion tool, but it also come with Arelis which helps increase and automate your linking campaign.

So what does IBP do? Well let me take you through the steps I used to help my ranking. First you setup a website in the program and allow IBP to go and grab all of the keywords, content and Meta descriptions. Then you can do a variety of things to see how your site stands.

First off you can make IBP generate a report about your website which is a very detailed account of every SEO aspect of your website. It will outline exactly what steps to take to make each page better in the search engines eyes. You can generate a report for each and every search engine you are trying to rank on, from Google and Yahoo to the lesser known engines.

I was surprised at how detailed the report was, it actually told me to ad certain words and increase the frequency of other words to optimize those pages for my particular keyword phrases. For instance, I was trying to optimize a page for the keyword phrase “make money online” and IBP let me know that I needed to use the word “make” three more times throughout the content in order to maximize the page for that keyword phrase.

Internet Business Promoter also analysis tags (heading tags, bold, strong, etc…) and reports to you how you can use tags better to make your website more search engine friendly.

IBP does all of this by not only using its built in knowledge base, but it actually studies the current top ten ranking websites and uses their stats and frequencies to dictate how your website should be setup. I believe this is a great idea, because the search engine algorithms are constantly changing so why not just keep studying the ones at the top to see what is really working.

Arelis is an additional program that comes bundled with IBP and it basically analysis the inbound links of the top ten sites for your particular keywords. It then sets up a semi automated screen where you can submit your website to the same sites as your competitors who are ranking in the top ten. This gets you strong inbound links relevant to your content which further strengthens your ranking.

Arelis will also generate a link page with your current website template which will hold the links of all websites which require reciprocating links. This is a huge time saver as I personally know how long it takes to continually ad reciprocating links to a links page.

Conclusion:

All in All IBP is a fantastic program. The price is high and will probably turn off most small business owners as it seems that this program is geared towards corporations. However, the small business owners who do take advantage of this powerful tool will not regret it.

Adam Beazley
Internet Marketing Consultant
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

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When designing a website to rank high in the search engines it is important that you take into consideration a few different factors. Below are a few of the most common and easily fixed mistakes that I see other marketers making when trying to optimize thier websites.

Use The Correct Tags
Use proper tags for headings, bold text, italic text, and lists – HTML has heading tags, bold tags, italic tags, and ordered and unordered lists for a reason and you should use them. Using CSS you can practically style them however you like, but actually using a heading tag for your headings, and bold tags for important text, will help allow search engines understand what text on a page is a heading or what is more important than the surrounding text. Simply applying a CSS style that makes text larger or bold doesn’t do that.

Put CSS and JavaScript in external files
Nearly every site nowadays uses CSS and JavaScript for something. While both are great for enhancing user experience, neither will help your search engine ranking if left on your page. One of the factors that search engines consider when ranking your site is the percentage of code relevant to the search term. CSS and JavaScript can take up hundreds of lines of code, minimizing the importance of your text and in turn hurting your ranking. By putting them in separate files and simply including them in your page by reference, you can reduce hundreds of lines down to one and increase the amount of code in the file that is relevant content.

Optimize your images
Search engine spiders can’t read text within an image. Adding ALT text to your image tag helps, but ideally you should remove all wording from the image and style it using CSS, adding the remaining portion of the image as a background image to the text. Here is a side-by-side comparison of two images that look the same in your browser, but much different to a search engine spider.

Minimize the use of tables in layouts
The debate about whether or not tables should be used in site design has been going on for years and there’s no end in site. I fall somewhere in the middle – there are certain circumstances (like organizing tabular data) where I think tables still make the most sense, but I also appreciate the SEO benefits of using CSS layouts. CSS layouts drastically reduce the amount of code in your site that isn’t content that the user sees. Just like moving CSS and JavaScript to an external file, the less on-page code that isn’t content, the better. Check out search engine friendly layouts for some free example layouts.

Validate your site
A site doesn’t have to be perfectly coded to rank high in the search engines (there are many, many other factors), but valid HTML will help ensure that search engines and browsers alike will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator or install this handy Firefox extension. Validating generally identifies areas of code that are redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

Conclusion
There are many factors that go into search engine optimization (aka. SEO), however they all start at the same place and that is the basic design and setup of the website. Of course the content on each page is the most important element of SEO but don’t let small web design mistakes ruin your good content.

Adam Beazley
Internet Marketing Consultant
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

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Success Learning Systems Inc., otherwise known as Success University is a multi-million dollar internet marketing company that has exploded it that past two and a half years.

Success University was created by Matt Morris as a collaboration of works from 50 of the worlds top speakers, authors and educators in the field of personal development. The companies mission is to create an international learning environment that teaches the time-tested laws of success.

The classes are available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, anywhere in the world. Success University uses a variety of technologies such as virtual conferencing classrooms, interactive settings, automated e-mail, streaming audio and video and many more.

At first glance I honestly thought this was just another pyramid scheme, however, after taking the 14 day trial membership and really taking a look at the classes and information offered, I realized my first instinct was wrong. The classes and information totally justify the monthly tuition, in fact the monthly tuition is quite reasonable for this magnitude of information. After spending thousands on my own education and my wife’s education, Success University is very reasonable.

The classes and videos mainly focus on the types of disciplines that are not taught in schools, such as self confidence, self esteem, leadership, confidence, and how to be successful.
Some of the subjects include:

• Sales and Marketing
• Spiritual Growth
• Financial Abundance
• Heath and Well Being
• Relationships
• Charisma
• Public Speaking

The way I see it, these personal development courses are worth much more than what Success University is asking. I mean if you give up your morning Late’ at the Starbucks your tuition is basically paid for.

Success University is setup as a multi-tiered internet business and the compensation plan is one of the best I have seen so far. Now this is not a get rich quick program, it is a legitimate internet business, and just like any business online or offline, it does take time to build some momentum and create clients. Success University is the only internet home business that I know of that actually pays for sales made in your organization infinite levels deep.

Success university also has an automated follow-up e-mail system in place which does most of the work for you in terms of making sales. I am getting a regular influx of leads on a daily basis so I am confident that the marketplace is very hungry for this type of learning system. I do have one criticism however, the opt-in follow-up system is a “double opt-in” autoresponder as opposed to a “single opt-in” which is good and bad. I prefer single opt in because it does not force the prospect to click a confirmation link in their email. On the flip side, this does keep spam complaints to a minimum and it weeds out invalid and unresponsive email accounts.

Anyway, I will conclude this little review by saying that I do recommend Success University as a legitimate internet home business. I believe the classes and videos are worth every penny and I believe the compensation plan is one of the best in the industry. I also believe that to make it in any business you need to have self confidence, leadership skills and self esteem, all of which are taught in the Success University. I know many people have taught themselves or already possess these things, so maybe Success University isn’t for you. However there are plenty of people out there who do not have these traits and are wondering why their businesses are failing, and these are the people who really NEED this education and training.

Yours in Success,

Adam Beazley
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com/recommends/successuniversity

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