Critical Steps to Online Success- How do you actually create "leverage" in an Online Business?

"How can I afford employees? I'm just a One-Woman Show--I just got started."

Doesn't matter! We have to find a way to multiply our
efforts if we're going to succeed big time in any business.
Technology can help us do that. But sometimes we don't see
the potential unless someone points it out to us.

For instance how could "writing an article" multiply our
efforts?

When I first understood this principle I was amazed…it's
such a perfect concept.

We write an article and post it to an Article Directory
and our Blog. Say it takes an hour to get all that done
(less as you get practiced). And that's all we do.

But that one article gets multiplied over and over. Say
only 100 people read your original posting over a two month
time period. A newsletter writers need content for their
letter. They pick up your article and post it on their site
and send it out in their publication to 5000 people on
their list. Now 5100 people are reading your one article.
The posting of your article on the new site gets indexed in
the search engines and you have another presence on the
web. Others pick it up and it grows and grows.

You "ping" your blog. With the click of a mouse you advise
20 to 100 RSS feeders that there's a new posting on your
blog. It hits the "RSS feed readers" of thousands of blog
readers, some of them read your article and either use it
in their publication or pass it on.

One click of the mouse and you've made all that
happen…that's leverage.

So what have we got? You wrote one article and posted it
to one article directory and to your Blog and you "pinged"
your Blog once.

You worked for one hour and now thousands of people from
all around the world are potentially reading your article.
Some of them will click your link and join your email list.

Do you need to do anything yet?

No, just sit back, or continue sleeping or sunbathing or
whatever you need to do. It's all being handled in the
background.

Because we can leverage again by using an autoresponder to
build our list.

Your autoresponder is always on the job waiting for
something to do-the perfect employee. Your autoresponder
will add the new person to your list and label them
correctly. It will send them your sequence of pre-written
emails welcoming them, educating them and eventually
offering them a product for purchase that could be
appropriate for their use.

That's leverage in action!

Learn the "3 Surefire Ways to make Money Online"

http://homebasedbusinessontheweb.com/cap/

Jim Keayes is an expert Internet Marketer. He teaches people
to be successful online.

Critical Steps to Online Success - Launch your First Website-Upload to your FTP site

If this is your first website you'll want to keep it
pretty simple for now…just an "Opt-in Page" and a
"Download Page". You can add more later, but right now
we want to get you on the road.

If you're ready to upload your pages to your site, then by
now you will need to have designed your pages, tested the
links, tested your Opt-in form with your autoresponder,
selected and registered your "Domain Name", chosen and
registered with a Hosting Service Provider (such as GoDaddy
or Host Gator etc), opened your Hosting Account and finally
tested and found that your site is now live and ready to
have pages uploaded.

If you are working with GoDaddy (which I do because that's
where I started and I like it) and you built your webpage
with Dreamweaver or a simple HTML Editor you can simply use
Windows Explorer (the Windows file manager program).

You open your FTP website in MS Internet Explorer (note:
it has to be IE for this to work-you can't use Firefox
here).

Remember to use the "FTP" prefix instead of the usual
"HTTP":

Eg: "ftp://your-own-domain-name-goes-here.com"

All you have to do now is copy and paste your files from
your hard drive to the server directory and you're done.
If you have created your web pages using "Microsoft Front
Page" it's a bit more complex. You need to use some FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) software to upload your files.
It's a quite a bit more hassle to upload (we call it FTP)
your files to your site.

If you can, I recommend finding other web creation
software to work with (that's just my personal
preference…you may love it). Front Page may be easy to
create pages with but I've found it to be much more
annoying when you want to edit your site files and
directories.

This process with Front Page involves quite a bit of
detail so I'll treat it in a later article.

Keep on winning

Regards

Jim

Do you want to learn how you can get off to a quick start
in Internet Marketing? Then read my fast start guide "3
Surefire Ways to Make Money Online".

Download it free here:
http://homebasedbusinessontheweb.com/cap/

Jim Keayes is an expert Internet Marketer. He coaches
internationally in how to build successful Home Based
Businesses Online.
You can visit his website at:
http://homebasedbusinessontheweb.com/

Critical Steps to Online Success-You have your "Squeeze Page"…Now what? You need a "Download Page"!

Let's quickly recap how your website is going to function
in the early days of your business.

You can get away with just two pages on your website to
start with:

1. A Squeeze Page

2. A Download Page.

Your Squeeze Page is your first brief sales page. It's
often your visitor's first real exposure to you so it
should be welcoming. It contains your headline, some bullet
points and your Opt-in Box for your visitors to accept your
free offer and subscribe to your list.

I'm assuming you have built your squeeze page and uploaded
it to your site and now you're ready to start getting
traffic. When they visit your site your interested visitors
will leave you their contact information and your
autoresponder will send them your "verification notice".
They open their email and confirm their request.

What now?

You now want your autoresponder to send them your
"download page" so they can download your free product or
make payment for a paid product.

So it's now time to design your "Download your Book" web
page.

What exactly is this page all about?

It is usual to offer your visitor a "Free Gift" as a thank
you for joining your "Newsletter or Ezine List". If you are
in the business of Internet Marketing then that gift will
probably be a "How to" book of some kind or a piece of free
software or whatever…something they can easily download.
When your visitor fills out the web form on your opt-in
page they will receive the "verification email" and when
they click the link in their email you want your
autoresponder to immediately send them a webpage from which
they can download their free gift.

So this page is really simple. It contains a link to your
"Free Book".

In it's simplest form it says briefly:
_____________________________________________ Welcome -
this is where you can download your "free gift" Just Click
the link below and download to your PC. Here's the link:
http://www.your-website-domain.com/your-free-book.html
__________________________________________________


So you want to have this page uploaded to your website
into a folder called "download-page" (or whatever you
choose) along with the PDF file for your book.

And that's it…you're ready to go.

Learn how to make it big on the Internet! Read my fast
start guide "3 Surefire Ways to Make Money Online".

Download it free here:
http://homebasedbusinessontheweb.com/cap/


Keep on Winning

Regards

Jim

Critical Steps to Online Success--Generate your List Settings at AWeber

I'm talking about AWeber here because that's my main
Autoresponder.

I think I must be going mental to take on this task of
guiding you through this without the help of diagrams, but
let's see how we go. When I first got started with AWeber I
remember it was a pretty confusing experience.
Actually I find all Autoresponders are lacking in really
clear documentation that a stumbling idiot like myself can
understand.

So open the AWeber website at http://www.aweber.com/
and if you haven't already done so, go to the web form at
the bottom of the page and setup up your free 30 day test
drive. This truly is free and they are really good about
canceling if that's what you choose to do.
But don't do this yet unless you are now ready to get
started and take your squeeze page live. You don't want to
waste your 30 day free trial.

Once you've set up your account you log-in to the member
area.

You will be on the "home" page. Across the top you will
see a blue navigation bar with a yellow navigation bar
directly below it. Left click on the "list settings" tab in
the blue area and then left click on the "Settings" tab at
the far left hand side of the yellow area.

The first thing to do here is to give your list a name. I
tend to operate with just one list and use the "Form Name"
designator to separate out where the leads came from…more
on this later. The name can be anything you like but should
be somewhat meaningful to you. For now you could call it
"mymainlist". You can always change it later.

You then enter a short list description such as "My Web
Business Newsletter". Make the name professional because it
will be viewable on your "unsubscribe page". Now check
"Allow Multiple Unsubscribe", enter your company name and
your main website URL and you're done with this phase of
the setup.

We'll revisit this topic and deal with "Verified Opt-in"
and "Custom Fields in another article.

Learn how to make it big on the Internet! Read my fast
start guide "3 Surefire Ways to Make Money Online".

Download it free here:
http://homebasedbusinessontheweb.com/cap/

Keep on Winning

Regards

Jim

Critical Steps to Online Success- Auto-responders- What's the best one?

We want an auto-responder to deliver our emails
automatically in the sequence we design and to subscribe
the respondents at our web page to a list we designate on
the auto-responders database.

So the first thing we want to be sure of is that our auto-
responder company is stable enough to be around for
awhile…it pays to stick with the big ones if you don't want
your business to be dislocated.

From my experience and everything I read AWeber is the
most popular of the Auto-responder services and is highly
endorsed by many users.

But all auto-responders are not born equal so first let's
examine some of the things an auto-responder can do for us
and what makes one better than the other.

This is a good cross-section of popular auto-responders on
the web at the moment:

AWeber http://aweber.com/

EmailAces http://emailaces.com/

GetResponse http://getresponse.com/

IntelliContact http://icontact.com/

RobotReply http://robotreply.us/

Before subscribing to any of these you'll want to know a
few things about them.

How well do they deliver your emails?

Independent testing suggests that the first 4 all deliver
above 80% of your emails but Robot Reply seems to fall way
behind at 50-60% delivery of your emails.
In these days of spam where AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. have
such vicious spam filters I would think that these numbers
are bit high.

How do their Features compare?

Aweber, GetResponse and IntelliContact all have great
features so there's not a lot between them in this area.
Email Aces has OK features and Robot Reply trails the field.

How quickly do they respond to your email queries?

Get Response and AWeber are reported to respond to
"Trouble Tickets" in 4 to 6 hours while the rest take 20
hours and over.

How much do they cost?

Pricing is an important consideration and for some people
over-rides every thing else.

The following prices are not totally current so you should
check for yourself. Pricing is time sensitive but this will
give you a ball park idea of what to expect.

GetResponse: $17.95 per month ($17.95/mo for 10,000
subscribers + $4.50/mo for extra 5,000)

Aweber: $19.95 per month ($19.95/mo for 10,000
subscribers, plus $9.95/mo for extra 10,000)

RobotReply: $34.95 per month

EmailAces: $37.90 the month you sign up, then $29.95 per
month thereafter.

IntelliContact: $109.00 per month. Ouch! (but it does
allow up to 15,000 subscribers)

Pretty obvious here…GetResponse is the lowest cost
followed closely by AWeber while IntelliContact is way more
expensive.

It would seem to me that AWeber and GetResponse come out
ahead of the field.

I personally use AWeber most of the time and find them
very good.

Sometimes when I want to upload a purchased list in bulk I
will rely on other services. AWeber is totally restrictive
as far as double opt-in is concerned and insists on the
verification email. This protects both them and you, but if
you have purchased a double opt-in list it can be a pain.

The way I handle this is to upload my bulk list to another
service and have my "web-form" send the respondents to
AWeber for my long term list needs.

Keep on Winning

Regards

Jim

Critical Steps to Online Success-How to put your business on Auto-pilot

You must have an Auto-responder! This is Critical.

Why?

What will an Auto-responder do for you and why do you need one for your online business?

Here's why you need one!

You need to duplicate your efforts. You won't have time to do all of the work yourself!

How much will it cost?

All good questions and I asked them all myself. It seems that getting started in this business we are continually dipping into our pockets. And as we expand it gets more and more.

But look at this…where else can you start a business with nothing down except an idea, a computer and an internet connection? which most of us already have anyway.

When James Watt invented the steam engine he began a movement that was (in my opinion) the prime mover in the abolition of slavery. For centuries people in civilized countries were appalled at the whole institution of slavery but such is the greed and self interest of the race of man that we weren't willing to give it up until we had replaced the function with something that works better. In America's South it took a Civil War. And it was all about economics. Not much of an endorsement of the true nature of man. The steam engine allowed us to multiple our efforts. The machines could be working while we were sleeping and they were much faster and more accurate than manual input.

And that's exactly what an auto-responder will do for you.

It will be there taking care of business while you are
sleeping, working at something else or off having fun. When
someone accepts your offer and subscribes to your list the
auto-responder will take care of them.

You absolutely must have one!

AWeber is the most popular of the Auto-responder services
and is highly endorsed by all the pros…so why fight city
hall.

To find out exactly how to do it, see my articles:

Critical Steps to Online Success- Auto-responders- What’s the best one?

Critical Steps to Online Success-Auto-responders-How to
Subscribe to AWeber!

By Jim Keayes

Just copy and paste the URL into Google and you'll find it
no problem.

Keep on Winning

Regards

Jim

Critical Steps to Online Success-Your first "For Sale" item will most likely be an affiliate product

It's easiest to start your online campaign with an
affiliate product.

You just sign up, put the link in an email and everything
else is taken care of for you--particularly if you work
through an Affiliate Directory. You don't need to create
the product, make it professional, get it on your website,
set up a "shopping cart" to collect payments etc. etc.

To find out "Step by Step" how to get set up as an
affiliate, see my article:

"Critical Steps to Online Success--Step by Step Plan--How
to Find and Register for Affiliate Programs By Jim Keayes"

Just Google the title and you'll find it no problem.

When you first start online you will be confused if you're
anything like I was. All that new terminology: SEO ranking,
webpage optimization, click through rate, conversion ratio
and on and on. So you have a lot of planning to do.

Finding an affiliate program to market will get you
started faster.

Here's a real life example. You can market this program too.

In the interests of total disclosure I want you to know
upfront that I am an affiliate for this product, but that's
what this is all about after all. Have a look…it will give
you an idea of how this affiliate thing all works.

Your offering email might go like this:
________________________________________________

Here's a superb "How To" manual on Affiliate Marketing:

Rosalind Gardner's "Super Affiliate Handbook"

http://www.super-affiliate-plan.com

Just copy and paste the link above into your browser and
it will take you to the Super Affiliate Information Page.
_______________________________________________________

As you can see, setting up to market a product as an
affiliate is really pretty simple.

Keep on Winning

Regards

Jim

Critical Steps to Online Success - Here's an action plan to Monetize your list!

You need to write an Email Series for your Auto-responder.

What's the point of this step?

You can't make money without subscribers!

You have to be ready for your visitors when they show up
at your webpage. You've promised them a "Free eBook" and a
free subscription to your Newsletter and now you have to
deliver. The best way to do this is via an email series at
your auto-responder that automatically sends the same
series of emails to every respondent.

But unless you are a 100% philanthropist, you want to make
some money from this venture. The best way to do this is
with integrity. You need to provide value as well as make a
sale. So make sure you are giving a lot of free relevant
content in your emails between your sales messages.

Here's a series of emails that works well:
______________________________________________

Email #1: Day 1

This email simply says: "Thank you for requesting my free
book - if you have trouble downloading please send me an
email to your-name@your-email.com. I have another free gift
for you which I'll be forwarding very soon"

Email #2: Day 3-give them a chance to absorb the first book

Send another free eBook or gift to generate good will -
maybe some free website building software.

This can be a simple email that just says: "Hi John,
here's a free gift for you."

Email #3: Day 5-give them time to absorb the second gift

Send Content - an article you have written is good if it's
relevant.

Email #4: Day 6

Make your first sales offer. At this stage you probably
won't have a product you have created yourself so your
first product will probably be an affiliate product you
have registered for.

Briefly describe your Affiliate Product and provide a link
to the sales page. You might also include a free gift or
content as a bonus.

Email #5: Day 8

Provide some more free content or another free gift and
make your sales offer again.
When people buy from you will need to send an email
acknowledging this
_______________________________________________

That's the end of the first series of emails for now.
Remember this series goes out to everyone who joins your
list, so everyone is receiving the same set of gifts and
offers.

You can extend this to a 20 email series if you wish by
repeating emails 2 through 5 with varying content and
products. Choose a length that works for you.

After that you can begin sending individual emails to your
entire list following the same format. These are not on
auto-pilot. You time the release and content of these each
time you send.

If you have your own "first product" finished then this is
a good time for you to begin to market that.

Keep on Winning
Regards

Jim