If so, then this is the place to be.  We are all about growing your small business, marketing your small business and most of all, seeing your business make money!

If you are looking for a way to grow your small business, then I first want you to stop and think about something…

When your customer leaves your place of business, how are you making money off of them?

You see, your customer has value to your when they are in your store or office but they also have value to you afterwards.

The trick here is to collect their contact information.  Did you do that?  Most businesses don't.  Why not?

The secret here is in the follow-up.  If your customer or client is a happy one, then why not sell them something again?  Send them an offer next week, next month, on their birthday, at Christmas, see, whenever you can.  And, best of all, the offer doesn't even have to be for your own business, you might partner with another company that serves the same market and do a joint venture or cross promotion!  A lot of companies don't think of this.

Ok, so let's say you offer a service, you are a massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, etc.  How often should someone use your services?   Once a month?  Once a week?  So, if someone hasn't been there for 3 months, why haven't you followed up with them?  Send them a cupon or a special offer to get them back in your door.

Let's say you offer a seasonal service to homeowners.  You offer a lawn cutting service.  Partner up with someone who offers snowplowing services and take a 10% commission for referring the business to them.

Auto shop?  Well, when someone comes in for service you are already writing down their name and address along with the information about their car, why not send them a reminder when their engine is due for a oil change or when their tires should be rotated?  Even better, let's say the customer was in last week and got some work done.  You noticed that their brakes were getting down but should be good for another 5,000 miles, great, make a note and send them a reminder in 2 months to come in and get their brakes fixed.  Send them a letter like "tired of your brakes squeaking?  Come in for a check-up".  The guy's wife probably came home the night before and said, "honey, I think the car is making a funny sound".  What a chance for a sale.

All you have to do here is go an extra little step and remind the customer to come in and use your service. They will even thank you for it!

Tags: internet marketing tips, niche marketing, affiliate marketing, article marketing, internet marketing

As far as I know, there are only 4 ways to make more money form your website.

You can do one of these things:

1. Get more traffic

2. Increase conversions - make more sales per number of visitors

3. Increase the size of the sale - charge more for the product
4. Ad more back end sales
The problem is that most people only focus on step number 1.  Now don't get me wrong, traffic is great and at the end of the day there is almost no problem that your website has that can't be solved with more traffic.  If your sales letter sucks but you can get 1,000,000 people to view it, you will still sell something.  The problem is that traffic is hard to get and it is expensive if you have to pay for it.

The trick in all of this is to focus on the other 3 points.  Because they don't cost you anything to tweak.  You can change your headline to get more attention, you can tweak your site (change the bullets, add bonuses, check your guarantee, etc) and these things don't cost you anything to improve.  Try changing your price - and, believe it or not, a lower price does not always mean more sales.  The problem is that you can have a great sales letter, build up your product so that it seems like it is the best thing in the world and then you actually devalue it by selling it for $7.  If it is so great then why on earth are you giving it away.  You will make a lot more money if you would build up the product and add a few bonuses and sell it out for $97.  And you may be able to do this without a significant loss in conversion rates.  BUT you won't know until you test it.

Another way to increase the size of the sale is to upsell the customer at the point of purchase.  Is there something else that your customer needs or something else that will compliment the product they are buying?  Sell it to them right away - when they are already making their purchase.  Right in between the period of time after they decide to purchase and before they enter their credit card number.
And don't forget your back-end!  After someone buys something from you, MAKE SURE you collect their contact info into your autoresponder and make another offer next week.  If you aren't doing this, it is like watching money walking out of your store.  Here is someone who just came to you and purchased something, there is a pretty good chance they will spend money with you again.  Try it.

NOW, once you have all this in place and you have a good idea of what the life-time value of your customer is, you will have no problem buying more traffic because you know what you can spend and still make money.

Go over your website, increase the value of every click that comes to your site and then, after that, you can get more traffic.

Tags: internet marketing tips, internet marketing, website optimization, Jonathan Hook, article marketing

I think that the more important question than how to get traffic is "What are you going to do with that traffic once they come?".

And, strangely enough, more people wonder how to get more traffic and worry about all kind of different tricks and gimmicks than worry about servicing that traffic once it gets here.

What is the purpose of your website?  What is your conversion rate from viewer to opt-in to sale to backend sale?  Did you know that if you could tweak each of those steps just a bit, you could double the amount of money that you make with the same traffic you are already getting?  It's true.  If you could push your visitor to opt-in conversion rate from 40% to 50% and your opt-in to sale conversion rate from 25% to 35% then for every 100 visitors you go from (100 x 40% x 25% = 10) 10% visitor to sale conversion to (100 x 50% x 35% =  17.5%) 17.5% visitor to sale conversion.  You just increased your sales by 75%.

The more steps in your sales process, the bigger difference this will have to your final result.  If you would just leave your conversions alone, you would have to increase your traffic by 75% in order to increase your sales by 75% and that can get expensive.  First, work on your conversions and aim to increase each step of the sales process just a little bit.  It adds up very quickly and soon you will find yourself making more money with the same amount of traffic instead of worrying about getting more traffic.  Once you have this streamlined, then go out and get more traffic.  You will be rewarded many times over!

If you don't even know what I am talking about, don't worry, I'll explain…

If you do know what article marketing is, then you are likely already using this technique to generate traffic and links to your site.

Basically, in a nutshell, article marketing is where you utilize the power of article directories to generate links to your site. What you do is simply write articles about the niche that your products or services are in. You might write some "how to" articles, you might write some articles about "why" certain ideas or products are better than others. Once you start thinking about it, the information that you already possess about your given niche or topic can fill a lot of articles. You only need to write articles that are about 500 - 600 words long.

How do these articles help you?

Well, quite simply, if you could get other websites, newsletters or e-zines to publish your written work, you could become an "expert" in your field or niche, couldn't you? Isn't that what makes an "expert" an "expert" - other people listen to and quote what they say.

If you write interesting and informative articles, then more people are apt to read them and in turn, use your articles as content. See, the thing that I haven't told you yet is the bonus… any time you submit an article to a directory, they allow you to have what is called a "resource box". This is a paragraph at the bottom of the article where you, quite simply, tell a bit about yourself - or your company, product or service. Most often, they will allow you to have a link in your resource box that directs back to your own website. So now, as publishers pick up and use your article, you are getting all of these links back to your website. Better still, the links are on the same page as the topic of your niche and very relevant to the content in your website. Now you should start to see the power of this activity.

You publish an article relevant to your niche, people read it, use it and you get a link back to your website.

So, that is great, how do I publish my articles?

Well, one option is to go to some of the article directories and submit your articles by hand one at a time. Certainly this can be done but it is very time consuming, wasting time that could be better spent writing more articles. What I would recommend is to use an article submission service and let them submit your article all over the web. They have lists of article directories that would take you a very long time to even come up with, forget submitting to each of them.

Better yet, read through this free little book called "The 4 Ridiculously Simple Keys to Online Success" that will bring you up to speed.

Visitors like to do things on websites, if your website allows your visitors to do something interesting or useful, there is a good chance they will bookmark your site and come back.

What you offer them to do is going to depend a bit on the type of site you have and the type of visitors you attract.

There are a number of website scripts you can get if you want to build something interesting.  There is a good resource for website scripts at www.easy-scripts.net

They offer a variety of website scripts from a unique memorial script to a yahoo answers style question and answer script to a fun joke script and a guess the stars script.  So you can get the type of script that will fit well with your site.  They are all very reasonably priced.

A good one for marketers is at www.searchengine-submission-script.com where you can purchase a script that will allow your website visitors to submit their websites to search engines for indexing.  That is the kind of thing people will come back to your site for.

Tags: article marketing, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, internet marketing tips, niche marketing

There is a funny mindset amongst some internet entrepreneurs and marketers that things online should be free. And this affects their businesses. Many people are drawn to the notion of free traffic to your website. Now, there are a few ways of get "organic" or "search" traffic and certainly it is nice when it happens but how does this come into play in a business model?

There are a few built-in downsides to the idea of free traffic. One is that it normally takes some time to build up. SEO or Search Engine Optimization can take months to produce results. First you have to put up your site, make changes, wait for results and repeat. Sounds easy enough but the search engines take time to produce the results and this whole process could take 3-6 months. Now depending on the purpose of your website, this might be acceptable, but if you are running a real business, you are sitting there loosing potential revenue as you wait around for your "free" traffic.

Let's compare that to paid traffic. Now understand that there are a number of sources of paid traffic available. You could buy advertising through Google Adwords on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis, you can buy advertising on blogs or a lot of sites that get a good volume of traffic. Often these are based on the number of visitors such a site receives. You can buy advertising in online newsletters or ezines and so on. But, there are some distinct advantages to paid advertising.

First, you are in control of it. You can turn it on and off at will. Flip the switch (start paying for ads) and traffic comes in. Turn off the switch (pull the ads) and traffic stops. When you are ready to handle more sales, you turn up the volume of ads going out. No problem. When you are relying on free traffic, it can be unpredictable and not the best business model.

Secondly, with paid advertising, you can track your ads very easily. You know which ad or publication someone come to you from, you can get a good idea of what they searched for and what is going to interest them. This knowledge can help you build a better product or service because you can learn to target your customer better. When you are running a proper business, this information is very valuable to you because the better you can tailor your product or service to your customer, the more effectively you can market it.

I guess the biggest problem that people have is that they don't have a good plan or do proper testing before they get started. See, if you have a product or service that sells for X dollars, you need to know how much money you can spend to acquire a sale for it. Then you need to look over your conversion rates and how to improve them. See, a lot of people think that more traffic can solve their problem and boost sales. Well it can. But a more compelling offer and a better converting site can do it faster and cheaper. If you start at the beginning of the sales process and increase the conversions from surfers to clickers, from ad views to sales letter reads, from sales letter reads to sales, if each of these steps is slightly improved, then you start to see an exponential growth in sales for the same amount of traffic or the same number of visitors.

Once your site or sales letter converts traffic to dollars like a well-oiled machine, then turn up the traffic. Now you can go and pay for ads to get the word out. And when people find you online through an organic search, that is a bonus. But don't waste your time sitting there waiting for it.