Part 14:  Beware the Newbie Trap.

In the old TV cop series, Hill Street Blues, the briefing sargent started each shift by telling everyone: “Let’s be careful out there.” I sometimes think that newbies to Internet marketing should have the same message flash up on their screens every day because it is so easy to fall for the hype and part with huge chunks of cash.

The most-often heard plea for help I hear is from people who have spent out big money for some kind of instant site building scheme, or ready-made niche site package. Sometimes it may be for one of the many ‘store front’ type of sites that look so appealing.

They say to me – I spent [insert however many thousands of dollars you are uncomfortable with here] on xyz site builder – or on so-and-so’s site templates, or the latest instant niche store product – but I don’t know what to do with it. Have I been conned?

The answer is usually no – these types of Internet marketing products aren’t really a con or a scam. They are legitimate products that usually have great potential in the right hands. But newbies are rarely the right hands. They simply don’t know the questions to ask themselves before they rush to flash their credit cards.  The products are hyped, for sure, and make wild promises that reality usually falls short of, but they are not completely dishonest. What they ARE is sold to the wrong people.

Unfortunately for newbies, they are usually the easiest people to sell stuff to because they’re keen, filled with enthusiasm and are desperate to break free of whatever it is that they see Internet marketing as the answer to.

Newbies are ripe pickings. And they fall into the newbie trap every single day.

What, then, is the problem? If the products are only guilty of a bit of hype and are not, strictly speaking, telling lies about their profit potential, why do almost all newbies who buy them fail?

The answer is simple – and yet, one of the most complex things that you’ll have to learn as your Internet marketing business grows – if it will grow.

It is that however good your niche website is, however packed with saleable products your storefront is, however many other people are claiming thousands of dollars in sales, nothing will happen for YOU unless you can master the art of bringing traffic to your site.

That’s the problem. I can sell you the best looking storefront right now and fill it with dozens of hot, in-demand products. All you’d have to do is sign up and upload it to your computer. Easy. A child of five could do it. But unless you can get a steady stream of people to visit your site – and more, a steady stream of people who are pre-motivated to buy whatever it is you’re selling – then you’re wasting your time. You’ve been sold a pup.

Think of it like this… Look at any High Street. Some shops there will succeed and some will fail. But if someone were to open a store in a narrow side street, a couple of blocks away from the main shopping area, how long do you think they’d survive? Not long – unless they can find some way to make people know they are there and want what they are selling enough to make the detour.

That is the newbie trap: the promise of potential returns from a usually large initial investment (and often an ongoing monthly fee) that can only be realized by people with enough experience to understand how to generate hot, hungry traffic. And that’s something 99% of newbies just don’t know yet.

There is, of course, a degree of caveat emptor (buyer beware) in all these things. But the excitement of the promise and the hype of the sales letter often manage to turn the most conservative of spenders into rabid, mouth-frothing hopefuls. ‘This one MUST work for me!’

Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you read and understand what I’m saying here, you’ll save a lot of money. More importantly, I hope you’ll stay in the game long enough to learn the skills you need to make such investments worthwhile.

I see too many people crash and burn – disillusioned because their thousand dollar investment doesn’t work for them.  Getting traffic can be complicated when you are starting out and getting buyers to visit your sites is doubly so. But once you’ve learned the principles you’ll have a skill that will ensure you’ll never starve.

We’ll look at some basic traffic-generation principles next time.

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Part 13: A Sense of Belonging.

There are two words that anyone who teaches Internet marketing tends to over use (me included!): ‘simply’ and ‘just’.

Yes, both words apply when the person you are teaching has a little experience, but for someone who has never built a web page, never sold anything online and is totally new to this often arcane world of contra-intuitive processes and seemingly meaningless technobabble, ‘simply’ ‘just’ doesn’t hack it.

So in today’s installment I’ll try to avoid both words.

This part is called ‘a sense of belonging’ because when you first start out in Internet marketing, there are a surprising number of things you need to join. Things that the more experienced of us take for granted.

Note that there is a big difference between someone who has a blog and someone who makes money online. A regular blogger is not a marketer. He or she is a diarist of sorts, a journal keeper, a writer. For many, ‘being online’ is an end in itself. Making money from the endeavour is not required.

But as soon as you want to start making money from your blog (or website) – you have to start joining things.

For example, the fastest way to make a few cents here and there is by putting AdSense on your site. But that entails opening an account with Google.

Want to track your site’s visitors? Google again – this time their Analytics program.

GadgetSpots, the new viral classified ad network that I’ve been using, promoting and profiting from recently is another thing that you may want to sign up for.

Maybe you want to sell a special report that you’ve written from your blog pages? Then you will need to have a way to take the money when people buy. Another signup – this time to PayPal, perhaps.

Do you think other people might be interested in offering your book for sale to their readers? Then you need to sign up for an affiliate program. ClickBank or PayDotCom are the ones that most Internet marketers use, but there are other choices if you look around.

If you are serious about learning the ropes of Internet marketing, you will certainly benefit from joining a few online forums, like the Warriors Forum, for example.

Perhaps you know of a great ebook by someone else that would appeal to your blog’s audience and would like to offer it to them for a cut of the price? That’s called affiliate marketing and yes, you’ll have to sign up to the vendor’s affiliate program. That may well be ClickBank or PayDotCom, but it is increasingly likely to be an in-house private affiliate management system.

Once you’ve done these things for yourself, you know that they are no big deal. None of them is hard and most only need to be done once. But if you’ve never done them before, it really doesn’t matter how many times people like me tell you that they are easy, they still loom in front of you like icebergs in the fog.

I know people with great ideas to offer, who have written superb ebooks, but who never get past first base because the idea of opening an account at PayPal or ClickBank is too hard for them to endure. But note I said the ‘idea’ is too hard. The blockage is often in their own fear of officialdom, and not based on any reality of procedural complexity.

As a well-known sporting goods manufacturer is fond of saying, ‘Just do it!’ (Darn, I used the ‘J’ word!)

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Part 12: Monetization.

Monetization is a big word (and one that I’m sure has only recently been made up) that describes and almost infinitely big subject.

There are just so many ways to make money online that it is impossible for me to list them all here – even if I knew them all myself! But today I’ll try to outline some of the major methods of turning a few pages of text and code into money-making machines that will pump cash into your bank account day after day – even while you sleep!

(Did you like that hype-talk? I was just having fun – I’ll try to keep both feet on the ground from here on in.)

* Active product selling

Perhaps the most obvious way to generate an income from a website is to sell a product that you have personally own the rights to. It could be something like an ebook or report that you’ve created yourself, or it could be something that you’ve bought the rights to because you think the product is good. It could even be something that you’ve paid someone else to create for you (there will be more on outsourcing later in the course).

However you’ve come by the item you have for sale, the chances are that your website will take the form of a sales letter.

The format of sales letters haven’t changed much in over a hundred years and the online versions – now often called sales pages – are just a continuation of a long tradition of tried and tested copywriting techniques.

There is no great mystery – you capture the reader’s attention with a catchy and intriguing headline, stimulate their interest in the product by talking about the problems it can solve and showing how other people have loved it, fan the flames of their desire to own the product by going into detail about the benefits owning it will bring to them, and finally, give them a reason to take action and buy it now. (I’ll talk about copywriting in more detail in a later installment of this course and explain a neat 7-step process that I use when writing sales copy.)

Selling your own products is one of the more profitable ways of marketing online and one that I highly recommend. However, not everyone is comfortable writing ebooks or even special reports – and certainly not everyone can write programs.

Which brings me to the next method:

* Affiliate selling

Affiliate selling means the process of selling other people’s products. With this method, you are not so much ‘selling’ as ‘encouraging people to learn more; your job is not to close the sale, but to stimulate interest in the reader so that he or she will go to the product owner’s real sales page.

And every time you do succeed in sending someone to a sales page where they buy a product or service, you will be paid a commission by the product owner.

The process is also ‘passive’ because it tends to work best when you don’t appear to be selling at all – merely reviewing and recommending.

Almost any web page can include some kind of affiliate sales process. there are products and services in virtually any niche you can think of that will suit your page’s content. All you need to do is go find them. Affiliate networks like ClickBank, Commission Junction, LinkShare and PayDotCom are great places to start.

* Advertisements

An easy way to make anything from a small trickle of income to a flood is to allow advertisers to place their ads on your pages. If you are lucky enough to have a lot of traffic, you can make a good income this way.

Perhaps the most obvious way to display third-party ads is through the Google AdSense system.

In case you are unaware of AdSense, it is a service run by Google that you sign up to join (at no cost). Once accepted as a member, Google will give you a snippet of code to place in your web pages. That code allows Google to ‘read’ your web page and determine what it is about. they will then place small classified-style ads on your page that are relevant to your page’s subject.

The process is called ‘contextual advertising’.

Every time one of your visitors clicks on one of the AdSense ads they are charged a small amount by Google (the advertisers bid to be displayed, and so the actual amount that each click costs varies hugely. Depending on the popularity of the keyword that your page displays for, the cost-per-click could be anything from a few cents to several dollars. Google then pay you, the site owner, a percentage of the click cost.

A year or so ago, people got rich by building sites expressly for the purpose of attracting high value AdSense ads, but as with many things, the bubble burst and Google cracked down on what they perceived as ‘made-for-AdSense’ sites. Accordingly, the income from AdSense fell to a fraction of its former glory. Many people reported a drop in their income of 90-95%.

But, even though getting rich with AdSense is now a lot harder than it used to be, it is still a good way to generate small sums from your sites with no real effort.

There are many other contextual advertising services, but until very recently, Google has banned you from displaying them on any web page that also displayed AdSense ads. That ban now seems to have been lifted, so it appears you can now mix and match contextual services.

Of course, contextual advertising such as AdSense isn’t the only way to put ads on pages. You can, if you like, sell banner ads (an umbrella term for all kinds of shapes and sizes of ads) on your site. As an example, take a look at the very popular blog http://www.copyblogger.com/ where you’ll see a block of six ads on the right-hand side. They cost $1500 each per month. Build up your traffic and you could find advertisers willing to buy ads from you too.

* Donations

It is even possible to just ask for money.

Many sites nowadays have ‘buy me a beer’ buttons or links and hope that visitors will value the content of the pages or blog posts sufficiently to want to show their appreciation.

I suspect that this method doesn’t bring in much money, but it certainly brings some – and with no more work on your part than placing the link there in the first place.

* Drive customers to offline businesses

Anther frequently seen method of profiting from your website is to use it as a shop window for your offline business – and to drive customers there. My friend David’s site at www.dmwoodworx.com is a great example. it is a high content site that is focused on showcasing his offline joinery business. He can send potential customers and clients there by way of his business cards, email sig lines and letter headings and the search engines will send him fresh traffic because there is a lot of real content for people to see. Both ways, he puts his offline business in front of interested viewers and generates plenty of new contracts as a result.
This short introduction can only scratch the surface of the many ways to monetize your websites and blogs. In future we will look at them in more detail, and at other great systems and methods that you can consider.

Meanwhile, before you can make money from your site, remember that you have to have people coming to view it – and that is what we’ll look at next time.

#~#~#

A Warning about AdSense – and reading the small print!

Although I have AdSense on several of my sites, and bank a nice check from Google each month as a result, I don’t obsess over my stats and rarely visit my AdSense account online.

Yesterday I did visit it and was greeted by a new terms and conditions agreement that I had to agree to in order to keep my AdSense account.

Of course, I did agree – without bothering to read any of the interminable legalese.

Then I got to thinking. I wondered what changes they had made that required a new ToS agreement. A few minutes Googling and I quickly found the answer – and it is something that everyone who has AdSense on any of their websites NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT.

Very soon (25th May) you will now have to display a Privacy Policy on any website (or property as Google now call such things) that clearly informs visitors that third party cookies and tracking beacons will be placed on their computers if the ads are clicked on.

The actual wording in the new AdSense ToS is:

“You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.”

Failure to accept the new terms, and presumably to be compliant with them, by May 25th 2008 will put you at risk of losing your AdSense account.

Not a happy thought.

I’d guess that most people who make a few bucks here and there from AdSense have no idea about the need to put up a privacy policy page – or have much of a clue as to how to put one up anyway.

Well don’t panic! It may be a bit of a fuss and bother, but it isn’t hard.

You don’t need to put the privacy statement on each page – just a link to it.

People who have sites containing hundreds or thousands of pages may have a problem if they don’t have their navigation sections in external files. Sites built with older-style site building programs (the old made-for-AdSense site builders, for example) will struggle. But modern, well-constructed websites that pull in navigation from external files, or most blogs, will be very easy to change.

If you have a big website that displays AdSense and have no clue how to put a link to a privacy policy on all your pages, get yourself a copy of a program called HTML Search & Replace. You can find it at http://www.alentum.com/htmlsr/ (not an affiliate link) where there is a 30-day free trial.

For well constructed sites, adding the link will be just a matter of changing one file, or in a blog, making a link in your blogroll.

What to put in the privacy policy?

I’m no lawyer, so can’t offer suggestions in the appropriate language, but there is a very informative blog called JenSense, by Jennifer Slegg, which offers a boilerplate privacy policy that appears to do the job very nicely. You can copy and paste her text and just change your site’s name and URL details – all with her blessing.

http://www.jensense.com/2008/03/05/adsense-friendly-privacy-policy-sample-for-adsense-publishers-to-use/

This is something that is all too easy to overlook or forget, but come May 25th you may come to regret not taking action. I plan to add the privacy policy to all my sites – whether they display AdSense or not – just to be on the safe side.

Better to get into the habit now than forget about it later.

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