There are basically two main ways to make more money on the Internet selling whatever it is you are selling.

You can either:

-Increase the number of visitors to your site (and thus increase sales).

or…

-Make your web site better; better at converting visitors into buyers… so that the same number of site visitors buys more products or buys more often.

For instance, Let’s say that out of every 100 visitors to your site, 1 person buys something…

Now suppose we tweaked your site a little and now out of every 100 site visitors 3 people buy something. Get it?

I call this refining your web site.

As an internet business owner, you need to focus on one of these (or if you’re good at multitasking, focus on them both).

I recommend focusing on only one at a time…focus on one, master it, then focus on the other.

Which should you focus on first? I recommend focusing on the second one first.

There are dozens of very quick and simple things that you can do to your web site that will instantly increase sales.

You should focus on tweaking your site to make it as perfect as possible.

Once your site is top notch, then you focus on increasing your site traffic.

So what are some of the dozens of things that a person can do to their site to increase their sales?

That’s what I’m going to be discussing next week, and for the next few weeks ahead.

For today though, contemplate the two “ways” to increase your in come. Do you already focus on either of them?

Stay tuned for next week’s issue where I really start to dig in and discuss the things you can do to your site immediately to increase sales….

John Skorczewski
(pronounced Score-Chess-Key)
Editor, WebPromotion-Weekly

I told you last week that I’d have a great free gift for you today, and I don’t think I’ll disappoint you!

The first is a brand new, just released today eBook…

Golden Rules of Making Money

and it was written by P.T. Barnum in 1880, Mr. Barnum – you’ll remember – is the famous showman and master marketer often remembers for his Circus.

Edited, updated, and re-released today, this eBook is a textbook for anyone who wants to succeed in this world, no matter what your profession.

There will also be an audio version that you can download and listen to, or burn to a cd and listen to in your car, but the audio version won’t be ready for a day or two.

You can read all about it at the web site: 20GoldenRules.com

The Second Free Gift is a copy of our highly popular Submission-Spider Search Engine Submission Software that I’ll give away to the next 5 people who respond, and ONLY the next 5 who respond.

To be one of the first 5, go here and fill out the online form. If the form is up, there are copies left. If not, then maybe next time!

Click To Claim Your Copy!

I hope you enjoy both these free gifts, I’ll have more next week!!

- John Skorczewski

No matter what kind of business you own or operate, this simple fact will make or break you. I don’t care what you’re selling, in the end it comes down to this one simple business building block. And most people never think of their business in this way!

You are in business to do one thing….buy money.

How cheaply you buy money determines how successful you will be.

I might spend $10 dollars to buy $20 dollars.

I might spend $200 dollars to buy $240 dollars.

I might spend $4,000 dollars to buy $5,000 dollars.

Investors understand this fact easier because it’s not abstract to them. They spend $1,000 dollars on stock in a company, they expect to be able to sell that stock for more than $1,000 dollars in the future. They’re buying money.

As a business owner you should look at everything you do this same way.

How many orders will I generate if I buy this ad space? If I spend $100 on advertising, will that generate more than $100 in income? If so you have a winner…you can then “buy money”.

Let’s say you spend $100 on advertising, and it generates $150 in income (for example). You’ve just bought $150 and it only cost you $100.

Every penny you spend on your business should be spent with one thought in mind…

“How much money/income will spending this penny generate?”

The Internet is great. You can monitor EVERYTHING. I can throw up a web site and buy ad space somewhere. Then I can watch my server logs and see exactly how many site visitors that ad generated, and how many sales those visitors generated.

I can then determine for every X number of people that visit the site, 1 person buys.

I can then determine for every X amount of dollars I spend on advertising, Y number of people will come to my site, resulting in $Z dollars in profit.

At this point I can pretty much buy money! All you do then is focus on spending more and more money on advertising because you know that whatever you spend on advertising, you’re going to make more than that amount of money from sales.

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Welcome to part 5 of the step by step business creation guide. Part 1-4 can be found in our archives.

I have a confession to make. I’d hoped to be able to tell you that I had started promoting the site and sales were pouring in…but the fact of the matter is I didn’t have time to do a single thing with the project this last week.

I didn’t even get a chance to finish writing the backend follow-up letters or open our overture.com or google adwords accounts.

I do apologize for the lapse, I just had too much other work to take care of. It was a busy week. :-)

I did decide to re-write the copy of the web page yet again (I still just don’t quite like the copy that I’ve already written). And I’ve already pounded most of it out in my head, I just need to put it to paper and then upload it to the site.

I think it will be pretty good.

So this week I would like to talk about setting up the overture.com account. As you probably know, Overture.com is the worlds leading pay per click search engine.

That means you can buy targeted “clicks” or visitors to your site. You bid against other people for any specific keyword or phrase that you think best targets your web site.

Overture can be tricky. You don’t want to bid too much for a keyword. You need to really calculate how much each visitor to your site is worth.

To do that you have to calculate your visitor to sales ratio.

This is basically a number that says “For every X number of people that visit my site, 1 person buys my product”.

So if 1 person out of 100 site visitors buys your product, your visitor to sales ration is 100 to 1 (100:1).

Next we would calculate how much those 100 visitors are worth.

Let’s say you sell a $20 product. If 1 out of every 100 people that visits your site buys your $20 product, then each visitor is worth about .20 cents.

Or to put it another way, you should be willing to pay up to .20 cents per visitor. Why? Because if you pay .20 cents per visitor for 100 visitors that equals $20 (.20 times 100).

You pay $20 for the visitors, 1 out of 100 of them buys your product for $20, you have just broke even.

The trick then, is simply to find a way to pay less than .20 cents per visitors. If you can do this, you make a profit (not even taking into consideration back-end sales of course!).

For our project, we don’t know what each visitor is worth yet because we have no site traffic yet, and no sales. So it’s going to be a little tricky at first determining how much to spend at overture.com

I’ll try to spend as little as possible at first until we get a steady stream of site visitors and sales so that I can determine our visitor to sales ratio.

Determining your visitor to sales ratio is not only useful for using overture.com, but for any advertising you
do.

If you don’t know your own ratio, I highly urge you to calculate it. You’ll need to watch your server logs to analyze your site traffic (or use some type of counter to count the number of visitors that come to your site).

Spend a few weeks watching your site traffic and corresponding orders to get as accurate a visitor to sales ratio as possible.

Your ratio will always fluctuate. It won’t always stay exactly the same. If your rate is 250:1 there’s no absolute guarantee that for EVERY SINGLE 250 people that come to your site, one will buy. Sometimes it might be 300:1 sometimes 205:1 sometimes 244:1 but you’ll get a good idea of what the number is generally.

Knowing this ratio number is not just useful for buying advertising. It’s always essential for testing the site itself.

You should always test your site to see if you can tweak it to pull more sales. You might change the headline of your site. Did the change result in more sales? How would you know that if you didn’t know your visitor to sales ratio?

A good business person always tests everything. So knowing this number is one of the most necessary steps of running an online business of any sort.

On another note… I’ve decided to go ahead with selling distributor licenses based on the response I received when I mentioned it last week. There are still 2 licenses left and they’re selling for $1,000 if you’re interested email me at (email removed) before they get snapped up.

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Welcome to part 4 of the step by step business creation guide. Part 1, 2, and 3 can be found in our archives.

It’s been another busy week for the project, and we’re just about ready to start promoting it and making some money.

First off, the web site is done and you can take a look at it here:
http://www.MakeMoneyOnline-Now.com

I’ve also finished writing the first letter of the automated backend follow-up system, which you can read here:

http://www.MakeMoneyOnline-Now.com/backend.txt

I wanted to finish writing all the backend follow-up letters last week, but I just didn’t get the time. I’ve decided there will be three letters initially (one sent per week starting a few days after a person initially orders), and then after that one letter every 3-4 weeks or so.

These letters will pitch various backend products to people who buy the eBook from the site and you will be able to read them all to see how I do it as soon as they are completed.

Remember, the backend is where you make the real money in any online business if you’re smart, that is!

So now, the only thing left to do is start promoting the web site and driving in some traffic, and hopefully sales.

I’d like to talk briefly this week about the whole promotion process.

First off, when promoting any web site I start out by submitting it to all the major search engines. I only bother with the main 15 or so search engines because any others simply don’t bring you any traffic. I mean not a single person.

So we need to submit our new site to the search engines and for this I will use my trusty Submission-Spider software (http://www.submission-Spider.com) I know I’m biased because I own the company that develops that software (in fact I’m the lead programmer that designed it), but it really is the best tool out there in my opinion.

I could write a whole course on using that software to drive in traffic, actually I already have and if you haven’t picked up your free copy of it do so today at:

Drive SEO traffic

So using it is the first step to promoting our site.

But it’ll take a few weeks to get good and listed at the search engines because that’s just how long it takes to get a site listed these days.

We’ll be taking a more direct role in the site’s promotion. So the next major thing we need to do is draw up a budget and start allocating funds.

For this product I’ve decided to start out with around $300 bucks for promotion, advertising, etc. Normally I would probably start out with more, but I want to show how it can be done with less – for anyone who doesn’t have a large startup budget.

Plus $300 is a small amount to risk in case this product is a complete failure! We only have to sell 15 of the eBooks at $19.99 each to break even.

To compensate for the small advertising startup budget, for the first couple of months ALL the profits we make will be reinvested back in and spent on additional advertising and promotion. Then once we’re well established and making good money, a percentage off all profit will be reinvested and used for ongoing advertising and promotion, forever.

That way we’ll keep earning money forever as opposed to earning a bunch of money at first then nothing in the future.

That’s the thing about Internet business, it’s direct marketing. If you stop spending money on advertising, you stop making sales…immediately. The trick is to make sure each sale you make costs less in advertising than the profit you make.

Or to put it another way, for each dollar you spend on advertising, you should make at least $1.01 in sales. If you make more in sales then you spend on advertising, you succeed.

There are cases where you can spend more on advertising than you earn in sales and still succeed. For instance, if I spend $1 dollar on advertising and that directly results in .50 cents worth of sales all is not necessarily lost. Remember, we’ll make a lot of money on the backend selling to those customers over and over again in the future.

But that’s getting a little advanced for this project. For now we’ll focus only on making a profit on the front end :)

So how should we spend our $300? I think we should split it between conventional ezine advertising and pay per click search engines like overture as well as the pay per click google ad words program (which I’ve haven’t used yet but am anxious to test out).

I’d say 50/50 between the ezine advertising and the pay per click search engines. For $150 we should be able to buy 3, maybe 4 small advertisements in several decent sized ezines.

I’ll spend the rest of the week creating ads and picking which ezines to advertise in, and setting up our pay per click accounts. Next week I’ll discuss this all in more detail, show exactly where we spend our money and show you the ads we’ll be running. Hopefully I can also show you the results of our pay per click campaign.

I’ve been thinking about selling 6 or 7 distributor licenses for this product and wonder what you think about that. The licenses would give a person complete rights to sell this product themselves and keep all the profit. I don’t want to sell many of these licenses because I don’t want to flood the market like most reseller programs do..

Since I’ll be showing you exactly how I sell this product, it would seem that a distributor would be able to use the same techniques and rake in a fortune.

Like I said, I’d restrict it to only 6 or 7 individuals, and the license would cost at least a thousand dollars (I’d accept monthly payments of $99 per month for 10 months). To earn back the cost of the license a person would only have to sell 50 copies of the eBook (less than 2 per day for one month!).

And I’d offer to help the distributors sell at least that many. I’m just not sure if I want to go this route with the project. Email me if you are interested in purchasing a distributor license and if the demand is there I will consider doing it.

I think it’d be really neat to end this ezine article series with a couple of issues about how well those 6 or 7 distributors did too! So email me if you’re interested but email me quickly because I’m only going to offer 6 or 7 licenses (if I offer any at all!) and they’ll go to those who email me first. First come first serve.

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Welcome to part 3 of the step by step business creation guide. Part 1 and 2 can be found in our archives.

The project is moving right along and by next week’s issue I hope to begin openly promoting the site and making some money.

I wanted to be able to show you the completed web site today but I haven’t finished the sales copy for the site. I wrote the sales letter and posted it on the site but it’s just not quite right so I’m re-writing it. You can take a look at the site without the copy though if you want to at least get an idea of what it looks like. I’ll give you the URL below.

This was a busy week for the project. I picked the domain name of our site (which I’ll explain below) and picked the price that I will be selling the book for, I also created a “bump” (otherwise known as an upsell – see webpromotion-weekly.com past issues to learn more about bumps) and I picked the freebies that I will be giving away with the book.

I also created the affiliate program for the site and did the programming that goes along with it. I also tweaked the site graphics a bit and picked the headline from my brainstormed list.

I’m going to talk about most of those things this week. It’s going to be a little longer than usual, I hope you don’t mind!

First I’ll talk about picking the domain name. Now initially I was just going to post the site on a sub directory of a domain name I already own, like http://www.Market-Tek.com/neweBook.html

But then I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and register a new domain name and set it up as a whole new web site.

I rent an entire web server, and my web host charges around $10 to register the domain name for one year. There are no additional monthly costs for any of this.

So we’re looking at $10 bucks total. That’s not much and we’ll get a lot of benefits from having a new domain name. For one thing, it will be easier to get the site listed at the search engines if it has it’s own domain name. And then there’s the intrinsic value of creating a brand…but we won’t get that theoretical!

So what domain name should I pick? The domain name is very important, it should be selected with care. It should be as short as possible but as descriptive as possible. The obvious MakeALivingOnline.com was taken, of course! So here’s a few of the names I came up with (that weren’t already registered).

- AnInternetLiving.com
- ALivingOnline.com
- AnOnlineIncome.com
- EarnOnlineIncome.com
- CreateALivingOnline.com

I wanted the domain name to start with a letter towards the beginning of the alphabet like a – b – c – d – e because I wanted to test a theory that those show up better on search engines because some search engines use alphabetical order (just a theory, not proven maybe not true but what the heck, I thought I’d test it out!)

Then I pulled out my copy of the Submission-Spider software http://www.Submission-Spider.com and started using the keyword analysis tool that comes with it. This tool makes it REAL easy to pick a domain name. You just start searching for keywords…I was leaning towards EarnOnlineIncome.com so I plugged in the keyword phrase ‘earn online income’ into
the keyword tool to see how many people searched for that phrase each month at the engines…111 searches last month (OUCH!) then I typed in ‘make money online’…57,874 searches last month. (you can see how extremely valuable this tool is!)

57,874 now THAT’s more like it. Of course, makemoneyonline.com was already taken as was make-money-online.com, but makemoneyonline-Now.com wasn’t

True, it’s a little long and it’s not catchy. But I ran a search at google for the phrase “Make Money Online” and of all the sites listed on the first page, only like one or two actually had the phrase ‘make money online’ in their domain name. So that means it’s going to be pretty easy for me to get my site listed there under that phrase. And if I can get even a tenth of those 57,874 searchers each month that’s nearly 6,000 targeted visitors to my site each month for free…imagine if I got HALF of them! With the lineup shown when I typed in that phrase, I think it shouldn’t be too hard.

Next I want to talk about price for the ebook, and how I arrived at it. Choosing the correct price to sell your product is very important. Too high and people won’t want to buy it, too low and people think it’s cheap and worthless. Setting the correct price can make or break a project.

I usually sell anything for either $49.00 or $99.00 or higher. Over the years those prices have tested well in a full range of products that are similar to this one.

This time, however, I decided to sell the eBook for just $19.99 Why? Because of two reasons.

-I’m offering a very good bump product for $18.72 and I think many people will upgrade their order to include the bump thus adding $18.72 to the $19.99 to get a total of $38.71

-The backend products that I will be selling to buyers after they buy this ebook are especially strong. These products that I will try to sell are higher priced products (like our submission-spider software and other books I have written). And they are all highly complimentary to this eBook so I believe I will be able to convert a high percentage of customers into ongoing customers.

So really by offering this low $19.99 price initially, I believe it will make me more money in the long run. Long term goals are always my number one priority. Building a large past customer list that you can continue to sell things to for years to come is what this business is all about. Plus remember, I can always raise the price from $19.99 to $49.00 later on if it doesn’t sell well at the lower price. More than a few times, raising the price has turned a dud product into a stellar seller for me…keep that in mind.

Next lets talk about the bump I chose. Recently I had to increase the price of my Marketer’s In A Box membership site to $99 per month. I did this because I only want a limited number of subscribers to it since I spend so much time helping them succeed with their businesses.

For the bump in this project, I’m offering 3 months membership in my Marketers-In-A-Box.com for only $18.72 I think this is a tremendous deal and I believe a lot of people will take advantage of it.

I also hope that after 3 months of my expert advice at their fingertips and access to my support staff 24 hours a day to help them in any way (via web design help, copy writing help, web programming help, advertising help etc etc) that they will go on to purchase full time membership for the regular price of $99 per month. Of course, not all will do this, but if only 5% of them do, I’ll make a lot of dough.

This bump fits in perfectly with the eBook. The eBook teaches you how to make a living online, Marketers-In-A-Box.com gives you “face to face” (well email to email!) personal one on one help doing it. Two products couldn’t compliment themselves more!

Next I want to talk briefly about backend sales.

I have yet to program the backend automated follow-up system that will automatically email customers after a certain amount of time to pitch them new products. But I have decided on what products I will pitch them. It’s always important to have a backend sales system and products in place when selling anything on the Internet because the backend is where you make most of the money in any project.

For this project I will be pitching my Submission-Spider software and a couple of my other books on the backend. Both those products compliment this eBook well.

I’ll talk more about the backend system next week when I’ve finished creating it.

Last I want to talk about the affiliate program. I’ve finished building it. I write the code for my own affiliate programs though most people would just go out and buy an affiliate program code or use a free one from any of the free programming sites out there. Or if you didn’t want to even do that, you could sign up for clickbank.com and let them take care of your affiliate program themselves (at a very reasonable fee).

But as I said, I write the computer code to create my affiliate programs myself. Actually I use the same code for all my affiliate programs, so creating it is only a matter of changing a few lines of code and uploading it to the new domain which takes about 2 minutes.

That’s not really important though. What is important is the fact that I’ve decided to only offer the affiliate program membership to people who have bought the eBook.

I know, that will decrease the potential number of people out there selling my product for me, but I’ve always felt that a person should own a product themselves before recommending it to someone else. That’s just the way my ethics fall.

But on the other side, I’ve put a price on the affiliate program ‘membership’ of $49.00 So it costs $49 to become an affiliate for this project and have the ability to earn 50% commission for recommending this product to others.

But I’m going to give away that $49.00 ‘affiliate membership’ for free with the purchase of the eBook. So if you buy the eBook, I’ll wave the $49.00 affiliate fee. This way I kill 3 birds with one stone.

-I only allow people to recommend this product who have purchased it themselves (thus upholding my strange ethics)

-I’ve created out of thin air a $49 free gift to give away to people who buy the eBook.

-I only get people promoting my product who are serious about it and really want to make some money.

Maybe I’m too clever for my own good…but then again maybe I’m not nearly as clever as I think I am! :-)

I was going to talk about the other freebies I will be giving away to entice people to buy this book, but this article is getting too long and you can always go to the site in a few days when I finally finish the sales letter and see them for yourself. I shouldn’t have to tell you that offering high quality freebies can increase sales like nothing else in the world!

I’m having a lot of fun with this project and sharing the process with you. I hope you are enjoying it as well and hopefully we can get on to the really fun stuff next week, which is showing you how to drum up customers and sales!

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski