Critical Steps to Online Success--Step 3--You need a Product to sell

Before you gear up for an online campaign to market
something on the web, it's a good idea to have a specific
product in mind.

There are many factors you will need to make decisions
about before you get started. First you will want to find a
supplier for your product or create a product of your own.
Then you will need to package it attractively, market it
effectively, attract potential customers to view and decide
to purchase your product, transact the sale online and
finally collect payment before you deliver it to your
customers.

To achieve this online you will need to have your own e-
commerce website with shopping cart capability so you can
complete your transactions on-line.

Here are some ideas to get you started!

If you are marketing a physical product then you will have
to source it, store it, package it and ship it--or arrange
for someone else to do that for you. And don't forget that
a lot of your transaction price goes toward the actual
manufacture, purchase and shipping of the product you wish
to sell.

The cost of supplying a physical product will cut quite
deeply into your profit margins. Let's say your list is
comfortable buying a $20 product from you. If you mark your
product up too high you become uncompetitive. For a
physical product your cost might be $12 (or 40%) say and
your profit is $8 per sale.

With a digital product your cost is usually very close to
zero so your profit on the transaction is $20 (or 100%)…you
make much more this way

If you have an extraordinarily unique physical product and
you know that you can sell it easily then that is the way
for you to go.

Otherwise I would suggest you either buy or create a
digital product. Digital products are usually easier to
work with, are low cost if you create them yourself and can
be delivered over the web. Digital products can be books,
courses, services (like a dating service) or "how-to"
websites, videos, audio recordings etc. that are delivered
in digital format over the web. They are also sold in the
form of CD's, DVD's etc and can be quite profitable in this
format but you have the issues around manufacture, storage
and delivery that we discussed earlier.

A "how-to" product such as a book or online learning
program would seem to have the best market these days for
someone starting out. You either write it yourself or find
free product on the net that has passed out of copyright.

People are hungry for knowledge and if they think you can
provide it for them they will buy your product.

You can remove a lot of the hassle of shipping and
handling and payment by getting involved with a popular
product as an affiliate marketer. This is probably the
easiest way to get your feet wet. It's low cost and most of
the promo work has already been done. I've covered this
quite extensively in a couple of earlier articles…you can
find them if you just google Jim Keayes Affiliate Products.
You might find something there that will be useful.

For now can start by visiting the web sites for Commission
Junction (CJ) and Clickbank, joining their sites (it's
free) and browsing the merchant offerings.

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--How to get Maximum Response from your List

If you are focused and consistent with your article
writing you will quite quickly (within a couple of months)
start getting a lot of visitors to your site who accept
your free offer and are added to your list.

It starts painfully slowly but then the momentum just
builds and a great stream of new leads floods in every day.

When they opt-in and accept your free gift your
autoresponder will begin to send them the timed series of
emails you wrote a while back so you would be ready for
this.

You started by writing 5 emails but now you need to expand
that to 20. Pretty much just 4 cycles of the first 5 emails.

You remember what they were?

1. Welcome to my Newsletter
2. Here's some content
3. Here's another free gift
4. Here's some more content
5. Here's an eBook you can purchase

Send emails to your list on a regular basis and continue
to offer affiliate products and products you have created
yourself…but don't overburden them with offers.

Give value via information and giveaways. A link to your
latest article can be a good giveaway.

You rise above the crowd if you continue to contribute
valuable teaching content in your Newsletter. Most
marketers only write when they want to sell you something.

And don't forget to keep on writing those articles.

As you write your articles…especially if you create a
series of articles to deal with a specific topic…you can
combine them into an eBook which you can offer for sale.

You see the beauty of the system?

The articles become the eBooks; you post your articles on
your Blog; you turn your teaching emails into articles; you
turn your articles into emails.

You write the content once but you get to use it over and
over again.

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--Decide What you Want to Sell--by Shopping Cart or Affiliate?

Before you gear up for an online campaign to market
something on the web, it's a good idea to have a specific
product in mind.

There are many factors you will need to make decisions
about before you get started. First you will want to find a
supplier for your product or create a product of your own.
Then you will need to package it attractively, market it
effectively, attract potential customers to view and decide
to purchase your product, transact the sale online and
finally collect payment before you deliver it to your
customers.

To achieve this online you will need to have your own e-
commerce website with shopping cart capability so you can
complete your transactions on-line.

Here are some ideas to get you started!

If you are marketing a physical product then you will have
to source it, store it, package it and ship it--or arrange
for someone else to do that for you. And don't forget that
a lot of your transaction price goes toward the actual
manufacture, purchase and shipping of the product you wish
to sell.

The cost of supplying a physical product will cut quite
deeply into your profit margins. Let's say your list is
comfortable buying a $20 product from you. If you mark your
product up too high you become uncompetitive. For a
physical product your cost might be $12 (or 40%) say and
your profit is $8 per sale.

With a digital product your cost is usually very close to
zero so your profit on the transaction is $20 (or 100%)…you
make much more this way

If you have an extraordinarily unique physical product and
you know that you can sell it easily then that is the way
for you to go.

Otherwise I would suggest you either buy or create a
digital product. Digital products are usually easier to
work with, are low cost if you create them yourself and can
be delivered over the web. Digital products can be books,
courses, services (like a dating service) or "how-to"
websites, videos, audio recordings etc. that are delivered
in digital format over the web. They are also sold in the
form of CD's, DVD's etc and can be quite profitable in this
format but you have the issues around manufacture, storage
and delivery that we discussed earlier.

A "how-to" product such as a book or online learning
program would seem to have the best market these days for
someone starting out. You either write it yourself or find
free product on the net that has passed out of copyright.

People are hungry for knowledge and if they think you can
provide it for them they will buy your product.

You can remove a lot of the hassle of shipping and
handling and payment by getting involved with a popular
product as an affiliate marketer. This is probably the
easiest way to get your feet wet. It's low cost and most of
the promo work has already been done. I've covered this
quite extensively in a couple of earlier articles…you can
find them if you just google Jim Keayes Affiliate Products.
You might find something there that will be useful.

For now can start by visiting the web sites for Commission
Junction (CJ) and Clickbank, joining their sites (it's
free) and browsing the merchant offerings.

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 - The Secret Magic of Article Writing to Grow your List.

You must Write and Publish Every Day…there…I've said it!
Publish or perish…that's the motto in academia and it's
the same with article marketing.

If you're not pushing out articles every day then you lose
momentum and your list will stop growing. The search
engines favor sites with a continual flow of fresh content
and readers are always looking for fresh material,
particularly if they have found your articles and come to
rely on your input-so don't let them down or they'll
gravitate to someone else.

Later on when the money starts to flow that won't be such
a damaging event because you'll be able to afford to pay
for advertising to plug the gap. But in the early days of
your business your articles are your life blood…you must
keep them coming…one a day at the very least.

Why all this focus on article writing you might be asking
yourself?

Pretty simple…articles will always bring you the top
caliber prospects…just like yourself. The people who read
your articles are searching for a solution to growing their
online business faster and stronger. They type a search
phrase into a search engine and bingo, here they are,
reading your article.

How could the whole process of co-operation work any
better than that.

The reader has a need and you have the information they
are seeking. It's quite possible that with your mentoring
their businesses could take off. That's a pretty nice
feeling isn't it?

I love writing articles because I've got all of this
accumulated information inside that's been bursting to come
out for years. I drive my friends and family nuts because
I'm always boring them stupid with all this stuff I want to
tell them.

I can't help it…I love learning new stuff. My greatest
wish is that you find it of value and it moves your
business forward too.

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- 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.

You hear it all the time: "You've gotta have Leverage. You can only do so much yourself."

Critical Steps to Online Success-How do you create "leverage" Online in a "One-man-Show"?

But how do you create leverage in a one man or one woman
show?

Well three ways really:

1. You start as a one man show and you recruit some people
to operate as independent contractors (not employees) to
help you.

You want "contractors" not "employees" to avoid all of the
benefits and reporting and fixed payroll risk that goes
with having employees. You support and train them and you
earn an override on the efforts of each. Say you recruit 10
contractors. You work an hour and they each work an hour
and there are 11 hours being expended in your business.
They keep most of the money from their efforts but a small
percentage flows back to you. That's how a Real Estate
Agency etc. works and it's how "Network Marketing" works to
create leverage.

2. You harness technology to multiply your efforts.

The introduction of the Windmill and the Water Wheel
allowed one person to harness technology and create the
output of many.

3. You do both!

How does technology create leverage in our business?

Technology will do the work we don't have time to do
ourselves, much cheaper and much more accurately and
efficiently than we humans can do it.

A simple photocopier (which we all take so much for
granted now) replaces the efforts of thousands of copyists
and does it all with the click of a button. Email is so
much less time consuming than snail mail. Sending email to
a list sends out hundreds of emails at a time; and it only
takes one mouse click.

We are employing technology to leverage our efforts in
everyday life all the time; and we don't even think about it.

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--What is this "Leverage" thing everyone is talking about?

We hear this all the time in business:

"It's not how hard you work, rather its how much leverage
you create. In the end, leverage is what makes the
difference. You can only do so much yourself."

But what exactly is "Leverage"?

It comes from the word "lever".

You put a wrench on a nut and the length of the handle
multiplies your strength.
Double the length of the handle by putting a length of pipe
over it and you double the turning force at the nut.

It works the same in business!

Let's look at a car dealership service shop as an example:

These are just fictitious numbers (I guessed at them), but
they'll serve to illustrate the point.

You take your car in and they charge you $125 an hour for
4 hours-your bill is $500 (plus taxes of course…let's not
forget our benevolent government).

Say your mechanic gets paid $30 per hour plus benefits-
maybe $45 total cost to the dealer. Then there's rent of
the premises, construction of the shop bays, tools and
equipment, leases and maintenance, cleaning, utilities,
interest charges, insurance, back office support
(accounting, management etc.) and lots more. I'll make a
wild un-researched guess and say all of that (the cost to
the owner of operating the shop) adds up to $55 per hour
for each service bay. So the mechanic who actually fixed
your car plus the cost of running the shop costs the owner
(in this example) a total of $100 per hour.

You pay the shop $125 per hour and the owner gets to keep
the balance-a net profit of $25 per hour.

If this is a very successful auto dealership they probably
have 10 bays working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. At a
$25 per hour profit margin that works out to $780,000 per
year for the dealer.

If the owner works in the business then she (or he) works
one hour pushing paper and earns $250 per hour from the
efforts of others-a 10 times multiplier on their efforts.

That's leverage in action.

In real life the owner is probably retired and living in
the Caymans or Hawaii. The owner is lying in the sun and
making $250 per hour (or maybe golfing) while we sweat to
earn the money to get our car serviced.

So if you're smart, you work hard on creating leverage
now, so you can lay back eventually in the place of your
dreams.

That's the path of the true leader . . .

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.