Make Money Online in a Recession? Bank on it!

Online Shopping and E-Commerce:  Customers Get Out of Line to Get Online

Retail stores are really feeling the squeeze of the current economic conditions.  More and more shoppers are avoiding driving to malls and stores because of the incredibly high gas prices, instead turning to online shopping to order what they want and need and have it delivered right to their doorstep. 

Online shopping is a way that countless consumers are battling the difficult shopping conditions these days.  Simply traveling to the stores takes up all of the shopping money!  Consumers are welcoming the ever-expanding web-based shopping opportunities, and turning to online shopping to get nearly everything they need.  Just about anything that you would need to purchase can be found online and delivered right to your door.  (Even groceries!)

Effective Marketing Helps Compete With the Big Guns

If you run an online business, you may start to realize that there are some increasing opportunities for profit, if you can market yourself effectively.  If you have been thinking about starting your own online business, then there’s no time like the present, with the economy basically handing you increasing amounts of online business.

Tip:  Grab this book to learn about making real money online.

Recent surveys of customers indicated that 64% of shoppers are staying closer to home to save on gas.  Even stores that have a physical retail location, such as Old Navy or JC Penney are bringing in more business through their websites than ever before.  JC Penney in particular reported a 7% drop in retail sales for mall stores and an 9% increase in their online sales.  Online shoppers have cited not only convenience, but gas money savings when asked why they made their online purchases.  Few respondents claim they can actually find better prices online.

If you are worried that the economy is going to hurt your business, fear not—if that business happens to be online.  Online businesses continue to flourish, despite lagging retail sales numbers in other locations.  Consumers who skip car trips to the malls have more money to spend on your products and services.  Online commerce is a welcome option for those consumers not willing to put all of their money into the gas tank.

Many Advantages for Online Shoppers

Gas prices are not the only issue driving e-commerce these days, the amazing availability of just about anything you could want or need, the ease of shipping items directly to your home or place of business, the increased security measures for Internet shopping, and the time saving component and ability to shop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from the comfort of your own home all have made online shopping extremely attractive to the average person. 

With no waiting in line, either at the gas pump or the cash register, why wouldn’t consumers explore the online shopping options?

Starting an online business has never been a better opportunity than it is today.   The economic slowdown and “poor economic climate” that many businesses fear is merely a shift in how consumers are spending their money.  If you are able to offer the goods and services that people are looking for, then they are much more likely to make their purchases online, and your business will benefit.  E-commerce is growing explosively and it’s time to get in on the action!

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Tags: home business, make money online, making money online, online business, recession proof business

How to turn tiny sales into huge commissions…

We’ve just upgraded the Content Desk affiliate program where all my products and services are now sold under one roof.

It was a massive undertaking, but it is finally done.  All the products in our line are integrated now and affiliates can earn a heck of a lot more with commissions on single product purchases rolling up into continuity programs all the way to a package that earns affiliates $500 commissions.

It is all integrated so whatever you want to promote puts our entire product line in front of prospects you send us so that you can receive multiple commission notifications from just one prospect at the same time!

You can literally turn an easy $47 software sale into almost $700 in commissions for a certain percentage of the people you send us.  (Not to mention over $150 per month in residual commissions!)

If your current affiliate programs are doing that for you, stick with them.  If not, join ours and profit all the way to the top of our funnel instead of getting cut out of the backends!

Watch My Video of the New Content Desk Affiliate Program

Tags: affiliate programs, content desk, make money online

Outsourcing Truly Changes The Game

A lot of people have asked me how I do “all this.”  I sure couldn’t pull off two large membership sites, this blog, consulting, training, and marketing without a solid team.

The “4 Hour Work Week” might be a pipe dream for you at this moment, but how is that 60+ hour work week working for you right now?

Do you want to know the secret to getting the job of 15 people done?  Have a team of 15 people.  (Were you expecting magic?)

The biggest issue readers talk about to me is time.  Social marketing eats up hours like a swarm of locusts in a corn field.  All the other things you have to do to market and service your customers also blaze through your precious minutes each day until you are left wondering how guys like me do all this stuff.

In short, I don’t do all this stuff myself.  I have a team.  A damn good one.

If you aren’t outsourcing you are only going to get so far with internet marketing.  Every major player online has help.  Lots of it.  There simply isn’t any other way to become a player on today’s web after a certain point.

Whether you set yourself up for a literal “4 Hour Work Week” or not, saving yourself the stress of being designer, copywriter, promoter, networker, accountant, fulfillment manager, and content producer for your online business is worth everything.

Jeff Mills has a killer course on outsourcing that is the most complete I’ve ever seen.  Whether you grab it or not, you need to look at outsourcing and understand how you can ramp up to a full team of helpers from modest beginnings.   I can’t tell you just how it has affected my life.

And don’t cop out with the “I can’t afford outsourcers” excuse.  Want to know how many people could afford hiring help when they were just starting out?  Exactly NONE of them.  Yet they all found a way.  I did and so have tens of thousands of others.

I still work hard, but on the things I am good at and on the the tasks I should be performing, that only I can perform, for my business.

Outsourcing changes the whole game.  It’s the difference between a part-time hobby and a major, multi-million dollar potential business.  Ask any of your favorite experts.  Every single one uses outsourcing to pull off some very big business.

More outsourcing resources…

Outsourcing Web Design for Better Results

No tag for this post.

A New Money Making Widget Hits the Web

Niche Widget is the newest in a long line of attempts to draw more profits out of website traffic. And it looks like it just might have the profit formula down pat.

What I like about it is it covers a lot of different niches (has hundreds of products tied to it) and not just bloggers or marketers. This makes it worthy of a test on blogs and sites of all kinds in major to minor markets.

The Niche Widget is free. Test it on your site today!

Tags: advertising widget, blog monetization, Make Money, niche widget

Michel Fortin: A Low-Tech Way To Boost Response

Guest Post By Michel Fortin

Some people have asked me to give a few tips and tricks they can start using right away to apply some of the strategies I wrote about in my “Death of the Salesletter” report, without resorting to audio or video.

Aside from the various technology you can start applying to make your sales experience more dynamic, there are some very simple things you can do to your salesletter, right now, to improve its readership. And ultimately, its response.

It’s easy, it’s fast, and it’s proven to increase results.

It’s adding pictures, photos, clipart, and content-relevant graphics to your salesletters. Particularly, one near the top, around the headline.

Headlines are critical. In fact, it’s part of the most important element of any salesletter: the “A” in the AIDA formula, which is to grab people’s attention, and to get them to start reading.

If you don’t get people to start reading your copy, it doesn’t matter how good your copy is. They just won’t buy.

Better headlines have been proven to increase readership and response by as much as 700% in my own split-tests. But adding photos and graphics near the headline have equally boosted response as well, sometimes even more.

And I’m not talking about graphic headers. I’m talking about pictures and graphics within the body copy.

My friend Brent Turner, branded as the Design Frog has an amazing package. Check out Graphics Frog. Brent also designs ebook covers, websites and software packages. (Check out his portfolio.)

Not that Brent’s package is less professional, but if you prefer a more toned-down and subdued graphics package, Hrvoje Livnjak, a young Croatian member of my Copywriters Board, offers his own package — and I recently bought it without batting an eyelash.

You can check out his special offer for copywriters at eCovers Lab Special Graphics Package he posted on my board.

It includes arrows, callouts, stars, frames and so forth. He offers various formats, including the Photoshop native .psd format, so for those amateur designers, you can change them to your liking, if you wanted to.

Mr. Subtle (aka JayKay), a brilliant graphic designer and direct marketer offers a brilliant solution and alternative to his highly hated “mega-headlines” by simply turning them into short animated ones.

For copywriters who still wish to retain their wordy headlines (although I would still try to edit them down to be as pithy as possible), Subtle recommends using animated headlines like a slideshow of sorts, where portions of the headline transition from one to another in seconds.

This way, if you wish to retain your bulky 80-word headline for example, you can break it down to 3-4 shorter, less wordy headlines that transition from one to another.

(And you can also apply the element of curiosity, by adding half-finished sentences or ideas that force readers to watch the remainder of the headline, or, better still, to get them to start reading the salesletter.)

I don’t believe we should resort to this, however the use of animation is a cool aspect of making the web page a little more dynamic, other than video, which you can test with your salesletters. (I am testing this, too, right now.)

But headlines and graphics aside, an important element you can add to your salesletter, particularly near the headline, is of a photo or picture. I have found that some pictures do increase response, particularly if the picture represents:

The author of the letter.
The product being offered.
The major problem suffered without the product.
Something that represents the main benefit.
Before and after pictures showing the results.
As for #4 and #5, I have found that they work best with pre-targeted or pre-qualified markets. Similar to the fact that newsworthy headlines seem to out-pull benefit-laden ones, graphics that show a benefit can be counterproductive with generic, unqualified audiences.

Nevertheless, here are some examples.

For #1, the picture is a simple picture of the person who authored the letter. It’s the same as some newspaper or magazine articles, in the article’s byline, where the picture of the author is shown.

Better yet, if you can add a picture of the author in action, particularly if the person is speaking to an audience, speaking on stage, writing on a whiteboard, delivering the product or service, or working with a client, such as in consultation, they seem to outpull traditional studio photos.

(My guess is that they offer social proof. Take, for instance, the picture of John Reese being bombarded by questions from attendees at a seminar, at the top of the Traffic Secrets letter, which I wrote.)

For #2, this is a photo of the product itself. The best ones I’ve found are photos of the product in its entirety. They boost credibility because they show that the offer, the author and the product are real.

When I write salesletters for information products, I often ask the business owner to send me a copy. What I often do is display the product on a white bedsheet or kitchen table, then take a photo of the entire package and add it to the salesletter.

(Some of my top-marketing friends have even added pictures of them pulling out the product from the box when they receive it in the mail. It’s a great proof-generator, since it shows exactly what people are getting and how they are getting it.)

For #3, an example is when I wrote the salesletter for an anti-spam software, where I added a picture of a person pulling out his hair staring at his computer screen, which donned a picture of a can of Spam (i.e., the sandwich meat one).

An example of #4 is, when I wrote a “dating guide” salesletter, I put up a picture of a loving couple in warm embrace. We see this style of photo when we see those “get rich” salesletters, where the author of the letter is posed with his Porsche, mansion or yacht, or holding up money.

Although I’m not particularly fond of the latter, any picture that represents the ultimate benefit or result of the offer is good. There are many creative ways to do this, if you put your mind to it. Think of how you want the reader to visualize themselves after applying or using your product.

For #5, it’s almost a combination of #3 and #4. And it’s probably the most powerful of them all.

Before and after pictures represent comparisons between before using the product and after doing so. (You often see these with weightloss products, muscle-building products or makeup products, for example.)

But they are not limited to cosmetics or beauty. We did this with a salesetter I wrote for a company selling special daylight-mimicking “lightbulbs” that created warmer, richer lighting, using less energy than most bulbs.

What did we do? We took a picture of a room with regular 60-watt lightbulbs. We then took another of the same room but with this company’s bulbs.

The before and after pictures, set side by side in a single graphic placed at the top, increased response. (You can see the obvious difference the lighting made in the room.)

The pictures were taken at the exact same angle and were untouched, and a caption below the pictures indicated so. In fact, that’s another important and powerful tip: add captions to your photos.

Captions are almost always read. It’s not only a great opportunity to describe the photo but also one to add some interesting fact, tidbit or benefit related to the picture. (Add something you definitely want readers to remember or appreciate about your product or service.)

If you don’t have any pictures, you can certainly use stock photography. I do, for example, when I add post icons at the upper-left corner of my blog posts.

Some stock photo websites include iStockPhoto.com, BoxedArt.com, and Photos.com.

Cyrell Price, a wonderful graphic designer — and she’s the person who does a lot of my salesletter formatting for me and my clients — offers some interesting resources on where to get stock photos.

Mr. Subtle also gave a remarkable tip: stock cartoons.

Cartoons are fabulous because they are great attention grabbers, give a bit of humor, and communicate problems and solutions in themselves in a direct and poignant way. In fact, he recommends Ron Leishman who draws and sells CDs filled with cartoons and clipart you can easily add to your salesletters.

If you have a chance, read that whole thread. Mr. Subtle shows a “live” example of getting the cartoonist to draw a customized cartoon, which is a great benefit for direct marketers, such as one that represents the benefit of the product or service in question (or in this case, the problem without it).

Anyway, hope this helps. What other suggestions do you have to add more “eye gravity,” proof and credibility to your copy? I welcome your feedback.

About Michel Fortin

Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter, marketing strategy consultant, and instrumental in some of the most lucrative online businesses and wildly successful marketing campaigns to ever hit the web. For more articles like this one, please visit his blog and subscribe to his RSS feed.
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See: Copywriting Videos

Tags: boosting conversion, Copywriting, michel fortin, sales copy tips

Reality Check from ProBlogger

This is a great piece by Darren at ProBlogger.

Just had to share!

A Reality Check About Blogging For Money

Tags: Darren Rowse, make money blogging, making money online, problogger articles

Make Money With Video

The web is going video in a big way now.  There’s no denying that there is massive demand for video content, and that it will continue to soar.  Especially when Google and others figure out how to convert video to text on the fly and rank videos just like regular text pages.   (It’s not as far off as you might think!  See EveryZing.com)

There is also growing demand for video syndication as more and more video sites pop up every month.  Like article syndication, video syndication services save massive amounts of time by allowing you to upload once and let them upload to all the directories for you.

People are making money with video by syndicating their video content to all the video hubs and acquiring backlinks for direct traffic and search engine love.

But there are tons of other ways to make money with video…

IstockVideo:  Upload video footage of all kinds on all topics and get paid for the rights to use your content by others.   All you need is a camera and an internet connection and you’re in business.

Revver:  Upload your videos to Revver and take advantage of the backlinks, branding, and their revenue sharing model which pays you for the ads they tack onto your videos.

YouTube:  Log into your YouTube.com account and find a far more exciting use for Adsense on your site.  They now have a player that you can use to compile videos in your niche from YouTube that also earns you Adsense revenue.  Bye Bye all-but-invisible Adsense text ads!

Creating Video for the Web

Along with millions of tutorials at YouTube on how to shoot video, picking the right video equipment, doing screen capture tutorials, lighting, green screen, and everything else you can imagine, there is a great course on everything you need to know about shooting, editing, and final production and syndication of video for the web called Video Profits Workshop.

The course was done by Mark Braunstein and Mike Stewart, the biggest web video geeks I know.   It’s not cheap, but neither is your time.  Going through and picking up valuable tutorials in YouTube is time consuming and you have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff.  And you still might be left wondering exactly what you need to do to launch your own video campaign.

Video Profits Workshop was designed to get you up to speed methodically from beginning to end.  It’s great for beginners and pros alike and comes highly recommended by past customers and marketing pros.

“Video is Hard!”  -Good! 

The reason people are seeing such success with video marketing is that it is definitely not as convenient as writing a post.  You have to learn some video skills to pull off a good video marketing campaign and make money with video.

But as a proponent of going where the competition isn’t, I can’t recommend video marketing enough to my readers and clients!  Because there is a learning curve involved you don’t see as many competitors on video sites as you do everywhere else on the web.

Don’t get me wrong though.  Doing screen capture video tutorials or even slide shows is far easier than people think.  If more people only knew how easy it really was there would be far more doing it.

The bottom line is that a lot of content can be done in video that is currently competing as text with thousands or millions of other pages.  Put a topic together on video and syndicate it and you can see far better results in links, rankings, and direct traffic from places you currently aren’t showing up.

Tags: make money with video, making videos, Video Marketing, video production, video syndication

Social Marketing Genius Finally Sells Something

Dean Hunt. Social Marketer. Crazy man with killer bunnies video on his site.

You’ve heard the name here before and if you are in Social Power Linking, you’ve even read his excellent report “Web Traffic Orgasm” where he outlines just how to master Digg and social marketing sites like it.

He’s famous for just giving information away, but people are fed up. They want to know what’s up and why he refuses to sell stuff. They are suspicious. It’s not natural.

So in a fairly recent post, Dean politely asks his readers before he releases a product, if they’d be interested in more intensive training in social marketing, creating products, researching niches, and making money online.

He’s so damn polite about it!

My recommendation, which isn’t an affiliate link (I don’t think Dean knows how to do affiliate programs. He’s too busy being on the Digg front page all the time), is to go check out what Dean’s up to and help him decide if he should help you or not.

Tags: dean hunt, internet marketing, make money online, social marketing

Pay Per Play: Make Money on Page Loads?

Have you ever wished you could just skip all the clicking-to-get-paid monetization schemes and just get paid a decent amount for every visitor who simply lands on your site?

A new ad network seeks to give webmasters this opportunity soon.  It’s called Pay Per Play and many bloggers have been buzzing about whether or not it will fly.  From all the reviews I’ve read, it seems people are generally excited about it.

What happens (or will happen when they launch the service) is you load some code on your site and, when a visitor hits any page of your site, a 5 second audio advertisement plays.

What if the visitor’s speakers are not turned up?

That was my initial reaction as well.  Apparently PPP is factoring in a percentage of surfers without sound and pricing the advertising accordingly.  In a way it’s much like banner advertising.  Anyone can easily install ad blocker software that hides advertising on every site they visit, so advertisers already have to take this small percentage of people into account.

That people can do this doesn’t mean anywhere near a significant amount of people have installed software to block ads.  So speakers being turned down while surfing, on an ever louder web, should comprise a smaller group of surfers.

Will Pay Per Play Work?

Until it launches and early results are in, no one knows.  PPP is hopeful they are onto something big, as are their affiliates.  They pay commissions in a couple of different ways and if the network takes off, early affiliates will experience a windfall of commissions.

I feel it’s better to be in for the ride and see how it goes than possibly watch the thing take off from the outside.  I hate when that happens!

Tags: audio ads, Make Money, pay per play, ppp, site monetization

Make More Money From Your Domain Collection

There’s a Better Way to Make Money From Your Unused Domains

If you are like me, you probably have a lot of domains you’ve collected. Everyone gets the bug sooner or later. You wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering if the domain you just thought of is available.

You throw out the sash and… whoops that’s another story.

You run to your computer and check to see if your killer domain is available. It usually isn’t, but something close is. You buy it and smile, thinking of all the money you will make from the idea behind the domain. That is, once you get the time to develop it.

After awhile you can rack up scores of these great idea domains that are still parked somewhere earning nothing or next to nothing if you are revenue sharing with your registrar. Otherwise your registrar is making ALL the money from your domains by putting their advertising on them.

Registrars offer parking services which allow you to make money with them, usually 50/50, with type-in traffic and any traffic coming from old links from the previous registrant’s efforts to promote the domain before you nabbed it. I can tell you, there’s no money in this model, except for the registrars who do this with tens of thousands of domains and those pennies add up for them - not for you.

An Alternative to Domain Parking

There is a new service out called “Why Park” which allows you to put content on your unused domains and actually build traffic to them. You simply give them some keywords your domain is about and Why Park puts optimized pages of content on them with a few different revenue streams on them, including the obligatory Adsense ads.

Why Park keeps its hand out of your pocket. There is no revenue sharing in this model. You just pay a one time fee to use their hosting for your domains, load all your unused domains into their system, give them your ad codes from the different ad services they build the pages for, and you’re done.

This is a far better deal than letter your registrar make money off your unused domains. Even better is you keep all the money made from each domain rather than splitting it with someone else.

There are case studies and profit examples on the Why Park site to show what your network of domains might return in profits with proper monetization.

There’s nothing like making your unused domains work for you rather than pay for them year after year hoping you’ll have the time someday to develop them.

Tags: domain parking, domain parking service, domainers, unused domains

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