Will you make a purchase from a stand-alone Landing Page that you’re visiting for the first time?

To elaborate, lets take a sample scenario. You’re surfing around, looking for some particular service vendor (products are much easier to sell online, I believe). You click on a sponsored result, and come to a page – a stand-alone landing page that lists their package offerings, with a call-to-action to buy. Lets assume that the page is of decent quality, and you are kind of inclining towards these guys.

Signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form – a typical visitor would probably do that. But would you actually spend money and buy something from this page? What would impress you enough to go “wow” and immediately start subscribing to their services?

Here is my answer.

1. The identity of the seller must be clear, preferably verifiable, and there must be a way to communicate with him/her offline
2. There must be conditions under which I can get my money back and a clear method of doing that. If a third party is involved (like Clickbank or PayPal), that’s even better, because I will feel protected
3. It must be absolutely clear what I am buying through the content, the images, any videos, testimonials and so on. For some things, the only thing that will make me buy is a demo, but screen captures come pretty close in most cases
4. The testimonials must appear to be from real people, who have gotten actual value out of the product/service and who describe their personal experience in sufficient detail to inspire my trust. Any website link and the testimonial is disqualified as biased. People who have just finished a workshop have not done anything with their new knowledge, so they are heavily discounted. Real, personal, raw life experience = trust
5. The way things are laid out and the style/tone of the text give me a feeling. If the writer is confident, I will buy. If the writer tries to sell too hard, I will not buy. Good things are easy to sell, because their value is readily apparent. If the seller is not convinced he/she can sell without an effort, there must be something wrong with their offer
6. I HATE pop-ups. If anything pops up, that’s the end for me

The more real value you provide, the easier it will be to present it. Your feelings about your product, your service, your company and yourself as a person shine through your website pages and you can’t fake them.

As a life coach, I believe deeply that the world is our reflection and that by working on our inner peace will give us better results than trying to manipulate anybody or anything else. It’s the same when trying to sell something online. Love your product with all your heart. Truly feel you would buy it yourself and the sales will follow.

This is why I am an ethical Internet marketer.

Happy online business,
Gal

Most of my clients have an offline marketing mindset when they venture online for the first time. Offline marketing is all about branding and creating an image for your company, or so they think, because they’ve seen all those TV ads for “big money” companies.

By Internet marketing is very different.

According to the world population clock, there are 6,860,146,847 people in the world today. Let’s say that only 10% of them have Internet access. That’s 686,014,685 potential customers.

Can you ever hope to service them all? Nope.

Could you keep in touch with all of them, even if you have a large team? Not likely.

Is it possible that out of these people, 1 in 1,000 will love what you offer and want to buy it? Yep.

That leaves us a nice group of 686,014 people. For a small operator, even that’s a big undertaking and it’s probably best if they don’t all take out their wallet or sign up on the same day.

So why not be yourself? Why pretend and work so hard to create a false image? After all, once people actually come to your business, they will quickly find out what you are really like and, if it’s not as advertised, they might just go away.

The main purpose of having a website is to have yourself represented online 24×7 and for as many prospects as possible to find out more about you, learn to trust you, buy from you and then tell all your friends about how wonderful you are, so that they too come and visit your website, except they will jump straight to the buying step.

This is why I always tell my clients to find ways of being present on their website – through the text style, through the images, through audio strips and video clips – so that website visitors will quickly discover who you really are and get excited from your personality. Attracting lots of traffic with promises you can’t fulfill is pointless. Attracting a continuous stream of visitors who will feel at home with you, buy and refer others is very much to the point and will create an endless online business for you.

So be yourself online, because you’re worth it!

Gal

How long does it take to get your site listed?

One of my clients recently found out that, with my help, it can take as little as 6 hours!

I met this young man at a networking function and he told me his website had been launched 4 months before, yet there was no trace of it in Google Search results. In fact, if anyone typed the full site URL into the Google Search box, Google would tell them it didn’t know about the site.

When you try to offer your products or services to people and you tell them you have a website, one of the first things they do to check you out is search for your website. This man had given business cards, sent out emails and used various other ways to let people know about his site and he was embarrassed it was not indexed by Google.

“Leave it to me”, I said to him, “I’m going to do some thing real quick and your site should get picked up by the crawlers a lot faster than it would otherwise”.

I didn’t want to commit to a timeframe, because nobody controls ol’ Googlebot, but I had a good feeling about it.

So I went back home and spent about an hour creating some inbound links to my client’s website. No big deal, right? But by putting those links in places frequented by Googlebot, including social media sites, some magic soon took place.

After 24 hours, I searched for my client’s site and saw 6 results listed. “Not bad”, I thought, “Not bad at all”.

When I rang him to let him know, he said, “Are you kidding? I got up and checked first thing in the morning and already saw 3 results then. This is such a relief, man! Thanks”.

But actually, one of these search results had been labeled “18 hours ago”, which means it was picked up only about 6 hours after I did my work.

At the time of posting, there are 23 search results for my client’s site, including some PDFs.

Is you site not getting listed? Contact me

You see, when you put your email address on your website, it’s very simple to read it, add it to a list and then bombard it with unsolicited email. It’s annoying, but it’s easy to fix in two steps.

Step 1: Convert your address into an image

To do this, visit http://services.nexodyne.com/email/ if you use a web-based service (like Gmail) or http://services.nexodyne.com/email/index_custom.php if you email  account is in your own domain.

Pick colors for text, background and border, choose a font and click Generate. Then, save the generated image to your computer. When you do, use a file name that nobody would link with email addresses, such as nospam.png.

Finally, upload the image to your website. I will use images/nospam.png as an example.

Alternatively, run any image editor, type your email address in as text, (crop, re-size and make any other modifications until you’re happy with what you get) and save the image.

Step 2: Cloak your email address image

In your contact page code, include the following snippet of JavaScript code, which opens up a new message window on the site visitor’s, to be sent to your email address.

Note that in the code below, I have not used terms like “send”, “email” or “address” and I am breaking various items up (like the parts of the email address or the word “subject”) to make it as difficult as possible for bots to guess what’s going on. It’s not bullet proof, but every counter measure reduces more spam.

Replace “[your email ID]” with your real email ID and “[your email domain]” with your real email domain. Your email address is email-id@email-domain, e.g. example@microsoft.com.

<script type="text/javascript">
function useImage(){
var part1 = "[your real email ID]";
var part2 = "[your real email domain]";
var title = "Website inquiry";
var everything = 'm'+'ailt'+'o:'+part1+'@'+part2+'?s'+'ubject='+title;
win = window.open(everything,'anotherWindow');
if (win && win.open &&!win.closed) win.close();
}
</script>

To use your image, all you have to do now is include the code below:

<a onclick="useImage();" href="#">
 <img src="images/nospam.png" border="0"
  alt="I hate spam" align="absmiddle" />
</a>

This will look like a valid email address to a human being, but complete gibberish to an automatic robot.

Final note: bots are getting smarter all the time, so you may choose to do some more editing to your image or use another image generating site to make the image harder to decipher.

That’s it! You’re protected, but your clients can contact you by email.

Gal

Well, businesses that offer custom-made products can derive great benefits from using the Internet. You see, the Internet makes communication a whole lot easier than any other alternative, and a whole lot cheaper.

Say your company offers a product with many options: color, finish, size, embossed logo, etc. You could employ an army of specialized sales people, who could walk each new customer through the decision-making process in person or over the phone, or you could build a web site, which includes pictures, descriptive text, videos and even interactively-generated visual product images, which allow your prospects to try a few options, work out what’s best for them and then order or request a quotation without employing a single person on an ongoing basis.

Couple this with the ability to keep in touch with your clients via rich emails and informing them whenever you start offering more colors, bigger sizes and so on, and you will see that the Internet can give your business a huge boost in productivity and profitability.

It is true that sometimes, human interaction is required, because the client may need some expert advice in order to get it just right, but your website will screen those who would not buy, and would just waste your time and money, because they will quickly (and at no cost to you) find out what you cannot do for them. Those who choose to contact you can now receive your full attention, because by the time you contact them, you will already have a very good idea of what they need.

To summarize, if your business can benefit from getting complex custom-order inquiries, screening those who are unlikely to buy and saving a lot of time in your selling process, which you can translate to a much smaller sales team, look seriously into your online options and contact an Internet marketer as soon as you can.

First, it may be that you are selling something very unique or that you are offering it in a special way, perhaps at a special price. If your item can be sent by post or international courier service (like FedEx or UPS), you should be able to expand your business significantly by selling to other parts of the world.

Second, getting business on the Internet is so much cheaper than offline, because it doesn’t require any showroom space or sales people. This means that your profit margin is larger, and you can afford to “throw in” the cost of shipping or any “deal sweetener” you can think of that will help you get sales.

Third, your online store is open 24 hours a day, every day, in every timezone, which means you can get 2-3 times the amount of business you would get from an offline store, while catering for every possible type of Internet buyer anywhere in the world.

To summarize, if your business can benefit from selling online by increasing profit margins, reaching large new markets and virtually operating around the clock. Look seriously into your online options and contact an Internet marketer as soon as you can.

The Internet is probably by far the fastest, cheapest and richest way to deliver information. With the ability to rotate images, display animated images and show video, the Internet can deliver any type of content quicker and cheaper than any other medium. If you need to communicate information to your clients or potential buyers, the Internet can offer you some great tools.

If you have an information product, you have probably gone through the phase of creating a digital version of it, which might have been printed later. On the Internet, your digital product can be sold as a separate, possibly lower cost item, at lightening speed, to an unlimited number of customers in a completely separate market to offline buyers. Furthermore, the Internet offers armies of promotion experts, called “Affiliates”, who will gladly help you sell your information product, in return for a share of your income.

Note that the type of information best suited for the Internet is one that has global appeal. The language you use may be the only limitation, but as the Internet crosses all borders, your information can be carried to wherever there’s a need for it via this great medium.

To summarize, if your business can benefit from the delivery of paid or unpaid information to a wide, targeted market, the Internet is the place for you. Look seriously into your online options and contact an Internet marketer as soon as you can.