Online Income Avenues

It is common sense that in order to make the most money possible you need to effectively promote and sell your product. We have discussed creating your website in the previous sections along with strategies on how to make your website visible on the Internet.

The next item of business is make sure that your web content is top notch.

In this chapter we will discuss:

• The product hooks to use to attract customers

• How to keep track of customer information

• How to properly format web content

• Additional Advertising Options

• How to work with Affiliate programs

The product hooks to use to attract customers…
Creating products hooks is so important that we need to mention more ways to turn a lead into a sale. We discussed the lucrative results of offering rebates. Remember that the majority of customers will never take you up on your rebate offer.

Another hook is to entice your customers with a free gift. Most people jump at the chance to obtain a free gift. It is human nature to want something for nothing. The awesome thing is that you can offer free gifts and not have to invest any money into the free gifts.

How can you do this? It’s as simple as tracking down free items at Websponsors. You can find free gift cards, books, and much more! The sponsoring companies view this as a benefit to their bottom line because the visibility of their product has increased.

When you give away free items it is imperative that you collect personal information such as a name, email address, and/or phone number. You can submit this information to the sponsoring company so they can advertise to this person in the future. Companies value this kind of information very highly. By supplying this information you may even be able to earn a commission on giving away these free bonus gifts! If you use Websponsors, you'll get paid for every lead.

NOTE OF CAUTION: Do mention in a product disclaimer what you will do or not do with the personal information you collect. This is especially important because the free items often involve signing up for a free trial in order to receive them.

Are you daring? If you are a big risk taker then you can offer a 100% or more money back guarantee. If you do this, be specific about the conditions. Make it difficult for the customer to prove that your product didn’t work. This means that the customer had to have used your product “correctly” as defined by your standards, not theirs. This shouldn’t be a problem if your product works, which it should!

Check out the Public Domain…
Yet another thing you could do to hook a customer into your website is to work with Public Domain material. Public Domain materials are books, articles, recordings and pictures whose copyrights have expired. This expiration puts them in the Public Domain. This means that you can rewrite, publish, or sell these works without seeking permission and/or paying anyone.

NOTE OF CAUTION: Double check with the U.S. Copyright Office website to make sure that the works are actually in the Public Domain.

Another major benefit of using Public Domain material is that it can improve your search engine ranking. You can find Public Domain material from the following two resources:

Project Gutenburg – This website showcases free E-books that were created by volunteers. This extensive collection is home to 17,000 free E-books. Wow! The rule is that are allowed to republish these E-books, but you may NOT resell them. This is a variation from most Public Domain works.

Free e-books – This website offers an online directory of resources regarding Public Domain materials and free content.

How to keep track of customer information…
We have stressed that you should capture personal information including a website visitor’s name, email address, and/or phone number. You need this information so you can continue to advertise products to them in the future.

Personal information can be collected easily by having them sign up for a free e-newsletter on your website. Explain that the free e-newsletter will provide them daily, weekly, or monthly information relevant to your product topic.

How do you keep track of this information? A great program to use is Aweber to collect this information. You can utilize Autoresponder messages to maintain contact with this visitor. Another similar program is Get Response. Both of these programs collect your users information including emails. When you want to send them out, these companies work very well as they can thwart the spam filters. This feature is necessary because with other Autoresponder programs your email may be marked as spam even when it is not.

You can also find out the origin of your website visitors. Do your website visitors come from forums and what keywords are they using to find your website? You can analyze this information by using Web Stat or Site Tracker