Cash In Online

If you’re doing any sort of business online which involves accepting payments for your goods or services, then you should already have considered the alternatives. Most online marketers use Paypal, as most of our customers can use it to make payments, and we can accept credit cards, e-cheques and straight Paypal transfers without the expense of having our own merchant accounts.

But there are alternatives to Paypal, and choice is a good thing where customers are concerned. For starters Paypal is still not available everywhere in the world, and some people still won’t use it even where it is. Offering an alternative payment option will obviously allow many more of your potential customers to buy from you when Paypal isn’t an option.

So what are the alternative payment choices?

Obviously you could get your own merchant account and process credit and debit cards for yourself, this would involve contacting a bank, and arranging the services with them, as long as your software can integrate with their systems. Another alternative for accepting payments is 2Checkout (http://www.2checkout.com ) they do charge a fee up front to join, but 2checkout is widely supported in shopping cart software. With 2 checkout you can accept cheques, credit and debit cards, and in addition they now offer affiliate facilities so you can sell your products and services through an affiliate network.

Another widely used online payment option is Clickbank, who accept payments from many different sources on your behalf. Again there is a small fee to set up a vendor account at Clickbank, and there are limits on maximum prices (you can request higher maximum limits, and they are quick to respond to requests). Another plus for Clickbank, is that they have lots of affiliates using their system, and if you offer a good quality product many of them may begin promoting it for the commissions you set when you add your product. A negative on Clickbank’s scoresheet, is that you can only sell one product from the account without using a script to redirect to others, although there are scripts available to do this and Clickbank does allow quite a lot of products on an account but only one salespage.

There is another alternative payment option which we just discovered, and which may help you to make more sales with an innovative way of giving everyone a win win deal. It’s called TrialPay and it’s ingenious in the way it works. As a merchant you can now offer your products for free, but still get paid. As a customer, your purchasers now needn’t spend money they don’t want to on your products, but still get them. TrialPay uses a system whereby their partners are offering incentives to gain customers or even visitors to their sites. Trialpay offers to pay you some of that money (up to the value of your products or sometimes even more) when you send your customers to sign up for free offers in return for receiving your products for free.

In simple terms, you get paid, TrialPay get their clients some extra visitors or signups, and your customer gets the product they wanted without paying anything for it. As a payment option TrialPay is truly win win win for everybody. We are currently trying it out at http://www.thediscountebookstore.com on several of our top selling products to see how it works out, see the TrialPay buttons for these products Niche Marketing Profits and Follow-Up Email Creator Pro and try it out to get those products for free from us and TrialPay.

Then checkout if Trial Pay can work for you as a payment option by using the button below to sign up for your free merchant account

Have you ever heard of niche marketing?

If you have, or if you haven’t then there maybe some things you would like to know about niche marketing online as a way of making an income. So without further filler or fluff, here are some basics to hekp you get started with niche marketing.

We’ll start with the question what is a niche, and how do I market it?

A niche is just a small gap. For our purposes this gap is a potential area where we can sell (market) products into. Usually these niches are based around hobbies and passtimes people enjoy. By tailoring products to a small niche group we can usually find an untapped market where we have less competition, especially online where everyone looks to see if there is any information about their favourite hobby.

To make money from a niche market we first have to find one, if you have a hobby and know a bit about it, that could be a starting point for researching a niche. Lets take a hobby like e.g. Golf. Now if you take a look at golf in any search engine, book store or library there are tons of books, dvd’s, etc. aimed at golfers. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t find a niche in the golf market.

Drill down into golfing, and you can find gaps which maybe you could fill with an information product. Maybe you are left handed, and can help left handed golfers perfect their swing. I haven’t looked at it, I know nothing about golfing personally, but there maybe other groups of people with difficulties playing golf.

The golf thing is just an example, any hobby, or passtime could be an open playing field for the right information product to fill a niche in the market, fishing, crochet, cooking etc. All you need to do is find a small market which not many people have looked at and fill a gap with your information product.

You don’t even need to be an expert, some people are just starting out in a new hobby, and there may not be a decent introductory book to help them get started. Kinda like the “… for Dummies”(C)(TM) series of books, that is a perfect example of finding niches and filling the gaps with a marketable product. Those books take a subject and make it understandable for the layman (or dummies) by explaining the jargon.

Now all you need to do is find your own niche (remember if you have a hobby you can start there) and fill any gap you can see with your own product. Information products are easy to create and then sell online. You could even look for a product with resale rights, although then you will be in competition with others who buy the rights.

This short article has hopefully given you an insight into niche marketing online, but if you want to know more then visit our sister site for a great deal on an ebook with more information on niche markets, just follow this link to the ”Niche Marketing Profits” ebook

How would you like to take the 30 Day Challenge, and discover the secrets to affiliate cash in 30 days?

Watch our video presentation to find out more about this unique 30 day challenge. Then go look at the site and find out if you are up to the challenge.

Blogging: Free Internet Marketing Method

It’s been years since blogging has been practiced. But it’s just recently that it has been considered as one of the addicting fads. Many teenagers have resorted to blogging as an outlet for their emotions, a little online nook where they can blurt out whatever just bugs them or whatever makes them feel elated. Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won’t cost you a cent.

What exactly is blogging? blog is the widely used term that refers to web log. Basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:

1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website’s alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog.

2. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?

3. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.

4. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.

5. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.

6. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favorite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.

So, how do you set up a blog? Here are some of the options you can make use of to take advantage of this fun way to advertise your Internet business.

Either you load a blogging software or let a blogging hosting service do it for you. Host services such as LiveJournal and Blogger.com are the most popular in this field. Those hosts will provide you with easy instructions on how to put up your blog.

From Overture, a keyword suggestion tool, you will see the millions of searches done to a certain keyword. When these keywords are typed on search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. And this is what leads traffic to websites with keyword-rich articles. Yes, the magic word is articles.

Content is king. You can say that again. That is why writing articles is one of the most utilized Internet marketing media today. Internet surfers just can’t get enough of information on various fields. Providing information through these articles is a surefire way to drive hot traffic to your web site.

Why is this so? Here are the benefits that writing articles can give your Internet business.

1. It’s absolutely free.

Too good to be true? Not. Okay, you have to pay for your Internet Service Provider. That’s it. All you need is your thoughts, your computer, and your hands. If you have those, nothing will stop you from typing words that will make you complete that article for your website. On which aspect of that process did you really shell out any cent? Maybe later when your electric bills come.

2. Your website will be noticed in a short period of time.

Submit that article of yours to article directories that get the most web traffic and in no time your web site will be crawled. That is if you don’t forget including your resource box or byline.

3. Obtain back links automatically.

When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your article too. With the copyright terms of your articles, the URL of your website will still be in tact and will subsequently direct more traffic to your website.

4. Improve your reputation.

As an Internet marketer, if you plainly display your products on your website, you will not gain much conversion rate. Conversion is when your traffic converts to sales. You have to show that you are knowledgeable on your field. And what better way to show that than by writing articles that will allow you some bragging rights, right?

Just make your creative juices flow and jot down or key in those ideas quickly to jumpstart your article writing momentum. With those benefits listed above, a writer’s block is the last problem you will ever be able to surmount.

Crap advertising, what the heck is that you may well be wondering. Crap advertising is the kind of marketing all the gurus will tell you to steer clear of. It’s considered, well, crap. The returns on time are less than many of the top marketers would or could boast they get from their methods, and lets face it they want to sell you their information, so anything else will be “crap”.

But is it really that bad, and what are crap advertising methods?

Crap advertising online ranges from FFA (Free For All) link pages, to safelists, and includes things like classified ad sites, forum message boards and traffic and click exchanges. These are all considered to yield little to no returns by the top marketers. In fact you may have actually tried these methods yourself, and spent time posting to FFA sites and looking at 2 websites to get 1 hit for your own site and found you didn’t get anywhere. I know I tried them before and put them aside as crap ways to advertise online.

We are not going to let them die that easily though, because I have discovered a way you can use these methods to advertise your business and products and get results. The results will depend on your own work ethic, and how well you can market to people once you get them to your site, but these crappy advertising methods can bring them to you to start with. And the best part about using crap advertising is that it is low, or in some cases no cost advertising for you.

The trick to making the crap advertising pay is to get the people who do come to your site into your list. Don’t attempt to sell to them, they’ll be too busy to buy today, just offer something free, like a course to opt-in to and if you offer a gift for signing up to as well, you will convert even more of them to opt-in to your own list. Then follow up (an autoresponder is your best friend here, you do have an autoresponder setup with messages to send right?) follow up at least 7 times, but keep the selling to a minimum in the first few emails, just a quick line or two and a link. When they get to know you and trust you because of your free course, then they will buy more from you.

Because you now have the people on your list you have more chances to sell more products to them later. In this way you can convert a crap advertising method into a cheap way to get prospects to you, and because it’s low cost advertising you can do it over and over again.

Follow this link for more information on Profiting From Crap Advertising

Douglas Titchmarsh

In order to locate products that sell online, we need to understand what people already want to buy. Finding a good choice of idea or product is always accompanied by interfacing the demand for the product in the current market and the level of competition or market share that the product will be having in the long run.

“What should I sell? What products are hot selling? These are the questions most people are trying to find an answer in order for them to make the definite decision. And if we really want to know the answer to this question, our only choice is to do some research. There are all kinds of twists along the road that may lead you to think you have a high-demand idea. We must be able to understand and satisfy the need, wants and expectations of our customers on a certain product that they’re trying to buy. This three are called the basic needs or minimum requirements in a purchase. Needs are the basic reasons or the minimum requirements consumers are looking for in a product or service. They are called the qualifying or “gatekeeper” dimensions in a purchase. Wants are the determining dimensions among many choices. Expectations, on the other hand, are values or intangibles associated with a product or service. Expectations are actually part of “wants” but they become extremely important when products or services are not differentiated.

For example, in reading a logic book, university students look for the following: Relevant logic concepts use of simple language, easy to understand and affordable prices. These similar ideas can be applied to Internet Sales as well. After all, the Internet is just another place to sell products. The basic concept of demand is the same there as it is anywhere else, and has been all the time.

Now, the second thing that must be considered in finding “hot” products to sell are the level of competition or the market shares do your product will have. Market share or level of competition means the ratio of your brand sales versus the total market sales. While companies would naturally define its target competitors, it is actually the consumers who ultimately decide the competitive frame, or the list related products or services that consumers consider when exercising their purchasing power. We must therefore choose the market segment where we can have a potential leadership or at least a strong challenger role. Because the overriding objective of getting into this business is not just to satisfy the needs and wants of our customers but to do so profitably better than his competition. Otherwise, our competition will end up satisfying the customers better than our own interest.

Third factor to be considered in finding hot selling products is finding out the general interest level about the product. General interest in a product helps us to gauge where our demand and competition numbers fall into the big picture. Simply saying, if there isn’t much demand for the product, and there isn’t much competition, it would seem that it might not be good a good put up for sale. But the research doesn’t stop here; there is one last thing to be considered to exactly find the hot selling products that you’ve been looking for. We must also learn how others are advertising those products. If there are a good number of them doing so, it may mean that it’s a good product to get into. Coming to the last phase of the process is analyzing and evaluating all the information that has been collected. We have to look at all of the data we have collected on demand, competition, and advertising, and make decision as how they all balance out.

And here are several factors or aspects that must be measured: (a) not enough demand means not enough people are going to buy (b) too much competition means not enough of a profit to go around (c) too much advertising drives up the price of pay per click ads, and competition as well (d) not enough general interest, combined with low demand, means there may not be a good market even if there is competition trying to make the sales.

If you haven’t heard of affiliate link cloaking software, here’s a brief description. You can feed in your affiliate link, and it will output a file, or link which will be used to cloak your link. In the case of desktop link cloaking software you will get a file to upload to a website. In online scripts, it will already be online and no further work will be needed.

So why would you need to cloak your affiliate links?

There are several reasons to cloak an affiliate link, which we will outline for you so you can make a decision whether to cloak or not.

1. Your hard won customers can cut off part of the link and stop you getting your affiliate commissions. Sometimes it will be because they think they can pay less (usually incorrect) if they don’t pay your comissions on the product. Sometimes they will cut of your affiliate id and put their own in and get a discount when they get their comissions they just took from you.
2. Emails can chop off long links. As you send out a newsletter, or any other email with a link in, sometimes the longer links will be forced over two lines, meaning the affiliate link gets broken. The link either doesn’t work at all, so no sales or just your affiliate id gets lopped off and you don’t get the comissions on sales you make from your emailing.
3. Long affiliate links look unprofessional and puts people off buying. When they see a link full of letters and numbers, people are put off clicking it. Look at a lot of affiliate urls and they are very long and full of question marks and other characters. They just look suspicious and stop people from following the link.

So now you know what an affiliate link cloaker is, do you need one? More to the point which one should you get. There are plenty of choices of link cloaker and the choice is yours of course. I can recommend two here for you right now. One is a desktop based program which I used for a long time, but it means you have to upload a file to webserver after you have made the cloaked link. The other is a script which sits on your website in a folder and redirects to your affiliate link when someone follows the cloaked link, and it also tracks the links so you can see if your advertising ois working.

The first of the affiliate link cloakers I mentioned above can be downloaded for free from us along with some other great useful software. It’s called “Affiliate Diamond” and you can find out more about the free package and download it from this link. You will need a website, but it is very simple to use with few bells and whistles. You can always track your links from your server logs if you want to track them.

The second cloaker is a website based script called “Redirection Rocket”. This software has to be installed with a mysql database but has lots of useful features for tracking your links and where your traffic comes from. You can create campaigns for each link to track the traffic. This is currently offered for under $10 at http://www.thediscountebookstore.com/ . If you need installation of a script, we can help with that, just contact us.

There are other redirection, and affiliate cloaking scripts available, but we can’t comment on them as we haven’t used them. Do you know of any others, why not comment below…

If you’re trying to sell anything, online or offline, you need some surefire tactics in your sales literature or salespage to grab your readers attention, and push the “buy it” hot button. These strategies are already in use by your competition, it’s your turn to take the lead again and implement these quick and easy tactics to increase your sales.

1. The “Fast Use” Tactic

The “the best part is (topic or product) takes minutes to implement…” sales tactic tells your prospects that your product won’t take long to use or work. In these modern fast paced times, People are busy and want things to as work quickly as possible, let the prospect know how quickly your product does what they need.

2. The “No Skills” Tactic

The “how anyone with no (topic) skills can…” marketing ploy tells your prospects that even they can use your product to gain their desired benefits. It also tells them that they don’t need any special training or skills. Putting your prospects mind at ease that once they buy your product or service they won’t need to spend their valuable time learning to use it, or get it working is a sure way to lower their resistance to buying.

3. The “Don’t Share” Tactic

The “(no.)% of all (topic) experts won’t ever share this with you…” strategy tells your prospects that they are missing out on an important piece of information. They will want to buy your product in order to find out about it. Letting your customer know you hold a secret that they won’t get easily elsewhere will pique their curiosity and drag their wallet or credit card out into the open.

4. The “Repetition” Tactic

The “here’s exactly what you get when you purchase…” strategy reiterates to your prospects a brief, persuasive summary of everything you told them they would get early in your ad copy. Repeating the major benefits of your product package can increase your sales. Add the repeated summary of benefits near the buy button and watch the sales increase.

5. The “Price Cutting” Tactic

The “the price of (product) isn’t even $(no.) Or $(no.). Or even $(no.). It’s only $(no.)…” strategy tells your prospects how reasonable the original price is for your product but you just keep lowering it. People get excited when the price just keeps going down and down. See this in action on a lot of web salespages with a strikethrough through the higher prices, and the lowest price standing out, it works plain and simple.

6. The “Can I?” Tactic

The “can you really (your product’s benefit)? the answer is yes…” strategy tells your prospects a question they would likely have asked themselves or other people before. Once you tell them “yes,” back it up with unquestionable proof that your product works.

7. The “Uncomfortable” Tactic

The “you may not be completely comfortable using my product…” strategy tells your prospects that your product is so effective that it will give them an unfair advantage. You could tell them that other people and their competitors will be angry, envious and jealous. It’s human nature to want to be envied and admired by others, this useful “human flaw” is another hot trigger for closing the deal.

8. The “First Place” Tactic

The “fast action bonus, the next (no.) people that order get…” strategy tells your prospects if they are one of the first to order, they will get a bonus. It creates urgency and a fun competition for being one of the first. Nobody likes to be second, and who wouldn’t feel a bit peeved if they missed out on something just for waiting a little while and getting in too late? This one tactic can be used in many different ways to make sales. Either a bonus or a lower discounted price can be the prize for fast action i.e. buying right now.

9. The “Keep In Mind” Tactic

The “while reading this sales letter, please remember to…” strategy tells your prospects what to actually think about when reading and viewing your sales letter. You want to remind them to think about the benefits of your product or how it will improve their life. See tactic 4 “Repetition” above in addition to this tactic, both used together can reinforce your potential benefit to your customer.

10. The “No, No, No” Tactic

The “no hidden fees, no monthly fees, no set up fees and nothing else you ever have to buy…” strategy tells your prospects that they will only have to pay a one-time fee for your product. People hate spending money on fees that they think businesses add on for no real reason. Reassure your potential customers that there are no hidden extras to buy and you will soon have them on your side and ready to buy.

Now you know these Quick And Easy Tactics, look out for them as you visit salespages. They are sometimes dressed up to look different, but underneath these same tactics are employed in all good sales literature and salespages online. Now you know the secrets, and you can put them to work for you to increase your sales.

I was just going through my emails, and reading the ones which interest me. One which I often read is Robert Plank’s which always links to his latest blog post. This time he is opening a discussion about putting your picture on your salespages and websites.

Why would you want to put your picture out there so prominently?
Why not, it’s a form of branding for your business and helps to gain your customers trust. As Robert pointed out in “Is Your Photo On Every Salespage?” he recognised a few top marketers from their online images on their salespages and websites at a recent seminar. So did many others. This strategy brought their customers and potential customers to them in person at the seminar too, so why aren’t we all doing it?

I just started by putting my own face on the widget in the sidebar >>>> and on some of my other sites as part of my signature at the end of the salesletter. It’s just another of the great ideas I get regularly from Robert Plank