While you can build your own Amazon Webstore using Amazon’s easy to use storefront designer, it will cost you sixty dollars per month in hosting fees plus seven percent of each sale goes into Amazon’s pocket.
All in all, if you think you can move enough merchandise on Amazon’s site, this is really the business alternative that you should consider. It offers roughly the same exposure as Ebay and slaps you with far less fees so that you can make more profit.
Finally, if you are considering marketing or publishing as an online business, you may want to look at what Lulu.com has to offer. As the leader in online self-publishing and all things print, Lulu is the place to go if you are attempting to make your fortune with art or the written word.
From calendars to books to music, if it is artsy, it’s on Lulu. All you have to do is come up with a creative idea, get Lulu to produce it, and then you get some profits based on what sells on their site. You can even take your published works to an Amazon or Ebay store for even more exposure.
While the market at Lulu is limited, it is the best place to get discovered if you are willing to put in the time and effort to write a book, create some art, or even record a song. Even if you are not into making one of these activities into a full-on business, Lulu provides you with a great way to make some money on your hobbies.
Like photography? Make a calendar. Have an opinion on the presidential candidates? Write a short book and have Lulu publish it. Play in a garage band? Record your songs and Lulu will sell your CD for you.
Although there are plenty of other programs that you can enroll in if you are looking to establish an online business without making your website right away, the above listed companies offer three of the largest resources for you to start selling right away. Their fees are affordable, their web traffic is huge.
They can offer you everything you want about an online store except for your own domain name and full control over your profits. If you want to be completely in charge of your business, you need to create your own business website.
Section #3. Designing Your Business Website
At this point, you should have an idea of what you want your website to be and what you will be selling on your website. Most of you will have chosen to make a sales, retail, or marketing website, so the rest of this article will be dedicated to those who decided to go in that direction.
The rest of you, consider investing in a high quality web designer and an even higher quality web developer – you will need all of the help you can get in making your own web application or informational business website.
Designing a website is actually a very simple process, even if you have never done such a project in the past. You really have two choices at this point, as far as the website design is concerned. Build the site yourself or hire someone else to do the heavy lifting for you.
Obviously, building the site from scratch by yourself is going to be the more cost-effective solution, but if you have no prior experience or you need your website up as soon as possible, hiring a professional may be your better option. No matter which route you take, there are a few tips that you need to consider if you want to make sure that your website looks exactly as you want it to.
Whether you are building your business website yourself or if you have hired someone to do it, you need to make a rough template for how you want your site to look. If design is not your thing, there are plenty of resources out there that can help you get started. Look at websites like CSS Beauty, Design Snack, and Smashing Magazine for all the inspiration that you could ever possibly need. These sites highlight some of the best in web design and are perfect for anyone who is having a difficult time coming up with some ideas.
When you have settled on a basic web design for your business website, you need to come up with a color scheme that would work well with what you’re trying to accomplish. A sales website, for example, will make use of a lot of whitespace and only a basic palette of three or four colors so as not to be too hard on the viewer’s eyes.
On the other hand, a marketing website will use big blocks of text with highlighted words here and there, often making use of brilliant colors like reds, blues, and yellows to attract the reader’s eye to important points. If you are having trouble coming up with colors, check out sites like ColorBlender to help you choose the best colors for your site.
Once the basic template and the color scheme have been decided on, you need to make the decision to build your site yourself or hire someone else to do it. If you hire someone, all you have to do is pay them the appropriate amount and submit your early designs and color choices.
The web designers will do the rest and you’ll pay them the full amount on completion of the project. Go ahead and skip to Step Three if you are planning to take the web designer route. Those of you, who want to go it alone, keep reading.
Section #4. Part II: Designing Your Own Website
Although designing your own website is not the most difficult thing you will ever do, it is fairly time consuming. However, when you have finished with the design, you will have a great feeling about yourself – that you actually created something yourself, something that you can be proud of, something that will hopefully make you a lot of money in the long term.
Since you already have your template sketched out and your color palette chosen, the only prep work that you need before you get started on your site’s design is to download the necessary tools that will help you along the way.
You will need an image editor for creating the pictures for the site, a “What You See Is What You Get” site editor to design the website, and a text editor to modify the code as you see fit. If you’ve got the money, purchase a copy of the Adobe CS3 Web Design package which contains Photoshop, Dreamweaver and a bunch of other useful program.
Otherwise, for image editing, consider using the GIMP or Paint.NET on Linux or Windows, respectively, or Pixelmator on Mac OS X. Use KompoZer as a free WYSIWYG editor on Linux or Windows. Finally, consider using a text editor like Notepad ++ for Windows or TextMate for Mac OS X. Also, download an FTP client like FileZilla so that you can easily upload your site to a server when everything is completed.
Even though the tools will help you quite a bit on your quest to code your own business website, they will not be able to do all the work for you. You still must put in quite a bit of input, and it helps if you have reference material to guide you.
So, your best bet is to look up as much information online as you possibly can. Read tutorials and guides that can help you learn XHTML for coding the site’s framework, CSS for giving the site some style, PHP for some of the site’s functions, and JavaScript for the site’s inner workings and other various functions.
It may take a week, it may take a month, but when your website is finally finished, you should use your FTP client to upload it to a server and make sure that it works perfectly well.
Also, at this time, it is of the utmost importance that you check your website in a variety of web browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer (6 and 7), and Safari. All web browsers display pages differently, so you want to be sure that your site looks just as good in IE as it does in Firefox and Safari.
Section #5. How to Take Advantage of Advertising to Find Traffic and Make Extra Money
Advertising is a great way to make money online. It does have its drawbacks, however. The main problem with advertising, especially if your internet business is merchandise related, is that you end up cheapening your store, making it look untrustworthy and making you look as though you are more interested in making money than selling high quality goods that your customers would want to purchase.
For this reason and this reason alone, it is a good idea to not use ads on retail, sales, or marketing website where you are trying to gain a potential customer’s trust so that they will stay with you long enough to make a purchase. After all, if you have a successful store, you will be able to make more than enough money and advertisements on your site will not be of any real value to you.
However, there is one way that you can take advantage of advertising and turn advertisements to your advantage. Instead of placing ads on your site, you should instead contact advertising sites, blogs, and other informational websites in your chosen niche.
By contacting advertising sites like Google AdWords, for example, you can arrange to have your advertisements displayed on websites around the globe. It can add up to be costly, but it is a very effective way of getting your name out. And any one click could be a sale.
Alternatively, if you contact blogs or other informational websites, you can see if they offer advertising space. Buying advertising space on a site in your chosen niche can bring in a lot of traffic, but it can also be costly depending on who you do business with. For example, an ad on a big name blog may cost thousands of dollars a month while an ad on a smaller, less developed site may only be a few dollars a week.
The best way to take advantage of advertising on other sites to increase your traffic is to set aside a particular budget each month for how much you want to spend for advertising. Keep this budget at a set amount for several months and see how far you can make your money go. If you are not seeing any results with your advertisements, then move on to another advertiser or up the amount you are spending.
The important things to look for are high click through and conversion rates. Are people clicking on your ads? Are those ads converting to sales? Just because thousands of people see your ads does not mean that you are making any money. Find your weakest advertisers and move on to something that will give you more bang for your buck.
If you find that you are uncomfortable in dealing with blog and website owners, you should consider finding advertising space with the big corporations. Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and a variety of other big-name companies all offer advertising in some way or another. You pay their fees in either a pay per click or a pay per impression manner and your ads are hosted on websites across the globe. Advertising with one of these big companies is sure to net you a good amount of traffic, but the conversion rate may be somewhat low at first. Try upping your budget if you’re not noticing any big sales from AdWords, et al, visitors and try as hard as you can to get the best keywords for your niche. Don’t cheap out and you won’t lose out on customers.
But what if you want to design a business website without selling anything? There are millions of people doing just that: selling advertising space instead of any real product. Just look at sites like LifeHacker, TechCrunch, and ICanHasCheezburger. These are sites that are making a fortune on advertising revenue alone. They’re not selling any products, just web space that is viewed by thousands of people every day.
All it takes is a great idea, the desire to work hard to build your advertising site from scratch, and quite a bit of persistence. This is not an overnight type of deal, you really have to work to make a lot of money through advertising, so be sure that you know exactly what you are getting into before you begin the process of making your own ad funded website.
When you are sure that this is the direction that you want your business to go, you need to decide what kind of ad based website you want to make. Blogs, while the most popular, are not the only way to make money through advertising. You could run a news blog or website that provides a service to your users. Those are just two of the hundreds of different options available for someone who is looking to make it rich through advertising.
Making it big through advertisements is not based on just a good idea, though; you have to execute it properly as well. You need a good, easy to read web design. You need to make sure that your ads blend seamlessly with the overall design of your website.
You need to have good server space that will not go down on you during even the slightest load. You need to be dedicated to your project. Eat while working on it, drink while working on it, and dream about it when you sleep. Only then can you hope to play with the big boys and really get your name out there in the advertising world.
To make your site profitable, you will have to bring in tens of thousands of people each day. A daunting task, but if you dedicate yourself to your goal and you work towards it every day, it will eventually happen for you.
Section #6. How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engine Traffic
Search engine optimization is a booming field, and it is easy to see why. As an online business, the bulk of your customers will come from search engines. Therefore, you want your business website to be optimized for search engine traffic.
While most people would suggest that you hire a professional for a task that seems to be rather difficult at first glance, there is nothing to search engine optimization, or SEO, that you cannot do yourself. It is much easier than designing your own website.
Far easier than finding resources to send traffic your way. And certainly, easier than getting each person who visits your site to buy one of your products.
The easiest way to achieve search engine optimization is to make sure that you have informational keywords on every page of your site. From your home page to a product buried deep within your site that very few people outside of search engine spiders will ever view – everything needs to advertise your site to search engines. Sounds like a daunting task? Well, it is time consuming, but with a little practice, you will be well on your way to achieving a search engine optimized site.
Nobody, except for the original designers, knows exactly how search engines work, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There are a few key aspects of search engine optimization, however, those are well documented and can help you get a higher rank in each and every search provider, from Google to Ask to Yahoo! The first step you need to take is to eliminate any duplicate content that you may have on your website.
This means that if you have two products that are exactly the same but differs in color or some other minute characteristic, and then put them on the same page. If you want a search engine optimized site, make sure that there is no duplicate content out there on your site. Having such content appear multiple times on a search engine is a great way to get your page rank lowered and lose quite a bit of natural search engine traffic.
The other search engine optimization technique that will yield you a much higher page rank is to make sure that everything on your site is maximized for your keyword selection. You should take full advantage of using Meta tags in your HTML such as the keyword tag and the description tag on every one of your pages. You can add in a huge number of keywords, so make sure that you get everyone that corresponds to your business website.
Also, take advantage of the description and other tags associated with the images on your website; they are valuable places to introduce your keywords. And simply because you are focusing on the underlying aspects of your website that are only seen by search engines, don’t forget to place keywords inside of as much viewable text as you can. Doing so will really boost your search engine placement.
Finally, to rank higher in search engines, you need a variety of backlinks to your website. These are other sites that are linking to your website. Google and other search engines use this information to help determine the significance of a website, so go out there and see if you can entice some people to add a link to your site somewhere on their own. Keeping with this suggestion for search engine optimization, keep reading onto step five.
Section #7. Finding Traffic in Unlikely Places
So you’ve now learned how to dig up traffic by advertising and through search engine optimization – but there are still two other ways which you can use to bring more people to your website. While they are a bit more unorthodox, they do work and can help you gain popularity in your chosen niche.
No matter what product you are selling, what program you are marketing, or how you are planning on making your money in the long term, these two methods can easily be used to drum up the traffic and the conversion rates that your website needs to survive.
The first way to find traffic in unlikely places is to contact webmasters of other sites and see if they are interested in sharing links with you. This will help you gain credibility with the search engines and acts as a “free” advertisement.
First, don’t even bother asking a site that is far more popular than yours to trade links with you. They won’t do it, so don’t even ask. If you are unsure of whether a site is more popular than yours, simply check the Alexa data for all websites or the Technorati data if you are exchanging links with a blog.
Second, mind your manners when you are asking to trade links with another webmaster. Think of this as a business deal and act accordingly. Do not use slang in your email to him or her, and use proper etiquette.
Also, explain what you are selling, why you want to exchange links with the webmaster you are corresponding with, and how you think it could benefit both of your sites. A clear and concise letter is often what can help seal the deal in a partnership such as this.
Another great, and mostly unused, way to drive traffic to your site is to offer an affiliate program. Affiliate programs are perfect for those of you with sales, retail, or marketing websites. You should fully take advantage of creating an affiliate program if your business website warrants it.
For those of you who are unaware, an affiliate program is simply a program that you run as a webmaster which allows other websites to link back to products on your website. If a person purchases a product from your website by using an affiliate’s link, the affiliate gets a small percentage of the purchase.
This type of program makes you happy because you got the money from the sale. It makes your affiliate happy because he or she got money for doing practically nothing aside from placing a link on his site. And it makes the customers happy because they ended up with the item they wanted.
While these are just two different ways to drive traffic to your business website, there are many more techniques which you should consider using. A quick search on your favorite search engine can turn up countless resources for information for those of you looking to establish your own online business.
Furthermore, it may be in your interest to check out some books relating to online businesses, search engine optimization, and some of the other topics discussed in this article. Good luck with your business.
How to Use Words that Sell
Introduction
One of the most powerful tools in your sales arsenal is the informed and judicious use of words and terminology. Words have the ability to entice a prospect, hold the attention of the potential buyer, and ultimately result in the establishment of a relationship that not only results in a sale today, but helps to create other sales activity in the future.
At the same time, words have the power to turn away potential clients, make people feel unappreciated, and ultimately lead to not only the loss of a sale today, but also the loss of sales opportunities in the future.
The effective salesperson knows the importance of choosing the right verbiage to present both the seller and the product. Whether in verbal communications or in the creation of written documents such as sales brochures, letters and emails, or any other type of promotional materials, using the right words in the right places is key to being successful at the task of sales.
Here are some ideas that will help you hone your sales vocabulary, and enhance your ability to utilize words that ultimately lead to productive client relationships.
Section #1. How to Write Words that Sell in Your Copy
Using verbiage that will result in sales opportunities is important in any environment. This is especially true when composing sales copy for a website, an online press release, or an electronic advertisement. There are several factors to keep in mind when writing the text for your web copy. Here are some of the most important things to keep in mind.
First, it is imperative to keep your target audience in mind when composing the web copy. This will often mean making sure that the text is sprinkled with terminology that will be immediately recognizable to the reader. Adding in terms that are familiar to the consumer helps to accomplish two things.
First, they serve as markers that help the reader know that he or she is at a site that has relevance to their needs and interests. Second, the use of familiar terms creates the impression that the author of the website possesses a competent knowledge about the subject matter.
Both of these factors help to hold the interest of the reader long enough for the web copy to present all the reasons why life would be so much easier with the acquisition of the advertised good or service.
Technical terms may be fine in some instances, while their use may actually be a deterrent in other situations. For example, even though your product offering may have to do with conference room telephones, you may want to refrain from using a lot of telephony terms.
This would be true if you are looking to promote your products to administrative assistants and busy executives. Instead of technical terminology, the focus should be on the features included with the unit, as well as emphasizing how easy the unit is to use.
Of course, if the focus is on promoting the telephone equipment to Information Technology managers, then the inclusion of technical terms and specifications would be a must. Knowing what type of verbiage will connect with your target audience will go a long way in making the copy of your web text interesting and attractive to your audience.
Another thing to keep in mind about your web copy is that you want to get the highest ranking as possible in various Internet search engines. The easiest way to accomplish this is to make sure there are keywords sprinkled throughout the copy. Keywords are simply words that are easily picked up as being relevant to the subject matter, and which are likely to be used by anyone doing research online related to that particular subject.
For example, if an assistant is charged with the task of finding good buys on a speakerphone for the conference room, there are several key words that he or she is likely to use as part of the search criteria.
Words such as speakerphone, conference, conference room, meeting, business, and telephone are some examples of words that may be used as part of the search. Having all those words included in the text of your sales web copy will help to ensure your website is included as part of the search results that are returned by the search engine.
One way to get an idea of what types of keywords to include in your web copy is to conduct a search of your own. Check out competitor sites and make note of some of the words that seem to occur two to four times in their copy. Chances are repetition at that level is done in order to maximize the chances of getting a high ranking on an engine search.
Keeping in mind that you do not necessarily want to replicate the keywords that are used by your competitors, think of other terms that are similar in meaning and that you think would be likely words or phrases to use for a search. Try out your theory by doing a few searches using your own set of keywords. You may find that the results are very positive, and could lead to greatly increasing your chances of a high ranking on all the major search engines.
Section #2. Using Words Effectively in Email Marketing Campaigns
Just as you want to attract attention with the web copy on your website, there is also the need to structure promotional emails so that they will catch the attention of consumers, and help to generate interest in the goods or services that you have for sale. There are a couple of key factors to keep in mind when you put together a promotional email.
First, the subject line for your targeted email needs to include elements that will grab the attention of the reader. There are several schools of thought on how to best accomplish this.
One approach is to employ a question in the subject line. The idea behind the question is that people tend to not overlook a question, while a statement may not make much of an impression.
Because the question will result in more people at least stopping to consider the email, the chances that the promotion will be opened and read increases. This at least gets the promotional email past the first obstacle, which is being junked by a consumer without being read.
Another approach is to build on the relationship that you already have with the consumer. If the email campaign is directed at people who have done business with you in the past, you may want to include an identifying mark in the subject line, such as the name of your company, or the name of the product/service that was previously purchased.
Using a familiar term helps to create instant recognition. If the consumer had a favorable experience with your company in the past, there is an excellent chance that he or she will open the email and take a few moments to read through your epistle.
Of course, once you have gotten through the minefield associated with getting the consumer to open the email, it is imperative to entice the prospect to keep reading after the first couple of sentences. Most people today are not interested in long winded emails that seem to have no end in sight. This means you want to do several things with the text to keep them reading.
First, use short paragraphs. When the email is opened, the eye will quickly note how many solid lines of text occur before there is a break of some sort. The brain immediately sends out a signal that reading this email is going to be a tiring process, and there is a good chance the email will be scanned at best, then abandoned. This impression can be avoided by using shorter paragraphs that focus on one aspect of the subject.
Breaks in the text make it easier to digest the whole email in manageable pieces. The result is that you have the chance to build your sales pitch point by point as the reader moves through the text of the email.
Using bullets in the body of an email can also be effective. However, it is important to keep the bullets focused and short. Using a bunch of words to create what amounts to a bulleted paragraph will quickly cause the reader to lose interest.
A bullet should contain no more than seven to ten words and focus on one complete thought that the consumer can easily relate to and digest. Remember, the purpose of the bullet is to present an idea, not expound on it. You can always do that on your web copy. Don’t try to accomplish that with any email, and certainly not in a bullet contained in the body of the email.
Another good thing to keep in mind about the wording in an email is to not get complicated. Employing the old business adage of KISS is ideal for crafting email text. The need to keep the wording simple and easy to read is essential.
You may have only a few seconds to attract the attention of the reader, and that is accomplished by using words that do not cause the consumer to pause and think about what the word may mean. Technical wording should be kept to a minimum.
The main factor to keep in mind with the use of words in promotional emails is that the text needs to be easily read, does not seem to be overwhelming, and is focused enough to increase interest in going to the website for more details.
Section #3. Using Sales Copy Effectively
Using the sales copy you have created for the web and as part of email promotional campaigns can also be used in other ways to create interest in your products and services. The great thing is that you don’t always have to come up with more original copy to create other pieces that will help to spread the word.
Here are some examples of how you can use that web copy and email text to create more promotional documents that will help you to generate additional sales.
Even if you operate mainly as a web business, it pays to participate in trade shows and conventions. Of course, this means you need to set up an exhibit that will attract the attention of attendees as they walk by.
At the very least, you will want some graphics that will catch the eye that can be mounted on tables or on the back panels for an exhibit booth. Along with images, you may want to include a few snippets from the text that you use on your website or email promotions.
Remember those crisp and concise bullets that you used as part of the email campaign? They now translate into some wonderful visual slogans to catch the eyes of conference attendees. Create some storyboards that splash those bullets across the facades in colors that will attract attention.
By using your words to entice people to come over to your exhibit, you have the chance to engage them in conversations that will help lead to the collection of leads that you can follow up on after the show closes.
Along with using your web text as graphics for the booth, consider reorganizing some of the information into a slide presentation. This will allow you to set up a computer screen and have the presentation continually running on a loop. Movement helps to attract the eye.
People will come over and check out your presentation, even if you are currently busy with other visitors. This gives you the chance to make a connection even if you are not free to engage the person in dialogue at that very moment. Because you are using words that are part of your website, the visitors will feel a sense of familiarity when they visit your online business in the future.
You will also need some printed materials that interested parties can take along with them. This will most likely be in the form of sales brochures. Use text from your email campaign to create one easy to read bi-fold brochure, then the text from your website to create at least a couple of other brochures that are different in size and format.
This adds an element of visual interest to your printed matter, so odds are the visitor will take one of each. Three brochures taken would mean three opportunities to capture the interest of the reader. Chances are you will need to do little to no editing in order to adapt your web text for hard copy publications.
Keep in mind that when the trade show is over, you also can use those same brochures as part of a direct mail campaign. This sort of application, while not necessarily a big money maker, is usually worth the investment.
Going with printed mail campaigns opens up one more means of getting steady customers. Using your existing copy to accomplish the task is all the better for your bottom line.
Section #4. Using Psychological Triggers
Psychological triggers are simply words, images, and sounds that can be used to promote a particular response. When it comes to the use of these triggers in your sales effort, two of your post powerful tools will be words and the way you choose to present them.
Here are some things to keep in mind that will help you make the most of psychological triggers in the sales copy you compose, as well as some visual approaches to help those triggers do the job.
To a degree, the use of keywords sprinkled throughout your copy is an example of using psychological triggers. Keywords provide the basis for rapport between the reader and your copy. Chances are that the consumer is already looking for something in particular.
Keywords are evidence that he or she is at the right place to find that which is desired or needed. Thus, having important keywords in the text is one way of causing the triggering of a reaction that ensures the consumer will keep reading through the website, assured there is something of value there.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to use phrases and words that speak to the mindset of the reader. For example, including words that describe applications with special meaning to your target audience will help to elicit the desired response.
Someone who is looking for financial software for a faith-based organization is likely to respond very positively to such words as stewardship, accountability, and trust. Triggers of this type resonate with some of the reasons why the individual may be searching for a good deal on financial software and will easily help to draw in interested persons.
Triggers can also be used to invoke the emotions of the reader as well. Invoking a sense of fun into the search, while still being professional, is often enough to get people to take a few moments and check out what you have to offer. Humor may not be right for all products and services, but in many cases, the strategy works.
If you market office products and cater to busy administrative assistants trying to keep the boss happy, you may want to try a tag line with a trigger that speaks to the frustration that can come with the job. Something along the lines of “tired of searching the Internet to keep your boss from popping a vein?
Get everything you need here!” can help to soothe frayed nerves and at the same time creates the impression that there is no need to look anywhere else.
Guilt is also being a trigger that can be used to good advantage. Using verbiage that conveys a sense that failure to purchase your good or service is something akin to a dereliction of duty. Of course, this tends to work better when the intimation is somewhat understated, since that does not insult the intelligence of the consumer.
Something along the lines of “a day without software is a day with a lot of wasted time” hints at the advantage of buying your product and impressing the boss with a high level of productivity. At the same time, the intimation is that without the software, the reader will not be as productive and thus will not be able to do the best job possible.
Preying on the sense of responsibility, then trigger motivates the consumer to read further and learn what your product can do to make the day a successful one.
Motivation through the written word is another example of a great psychological trigger. Most people want to do a good job with everything they do. However, they also want to accomplish that good job in as little time and with as little effort as possible.
Using triggers in your sales copy like “easy to use”, “cuts hours off your workload” and “increase your free time” will play to the desire for more success with less investment. Using these types of triggers in headlines throughout the text is one way of getting noticed, but don’t forget to work a few of these motivational style motivators into the main text as well.
Section #5. Writing Solo Ads
As part of your sales campaign, there will be opportunities to compose solo ads that can be used in several situations. In some cases, these may be general ads that are designed as part of the materials for a marketing campaign aimed at a new target group of consumers.
At other times, you may want to develop a solo ad that is aimed at appearing in a one-time publication, such as an annual chamber of commerce directory. There are also situations where it may be advantageous to develop a series of solo ads that spotlight several of your high-profile products or services. Here are a few tips to help you come up with solo ads that will work.
When planning an ad, it is a good idea to think about the amount of space you can afford. Obviously, you want to target print publications that will reach the types of consumers that you want to connect with.
Keep in mind that a quarter page ad in the right publication is a much better investment than a page ad in a publication that does not include a readership that would have an interest in what you have to offer.
Spend your money on ads that are geared toward the right people, and make sure the text of the ad makes that clear. Knowing where to place ads is your first step in deciding what type of copy to include in the customized solo ad.
Generally, an online ad will also redirect visitors to your website, so make sure that the tag or trigger you use with the ad is relevant to what the prospect will see when he or she arrives at the site.
Keep in mind that solo ads are not meant to be detailed repetitions of the information on your website. Instead, they are meant to call attention to some aspect of your business and build enough interest that people will want to learn more. Don’t try to accomplish too many things with one solo ad. If the purpose for the ad is to promote a sale, then make sure the verbiage proclaims how good the sale is.
Perhaps you want to tout a new and improved product. Under those circumstances, focus on one or two new features of the enhanced offering. That is enough to act as a teaser without spilling all the details about what is so good about the new version of the product.
One easy way to create a series of solo ads is to come up with one basic format that can easily be adapted for different venues. Once the basic elements are in place, it is relatively easy to use the master ad as the template.
From that vantage point, it is easy to make some changes that will personalize each ad placement to target the specific print publication or set up websites where the solo ads will appear. This approach also provides a sense of continuity.
Consumers who see two or more of your solo ads will easily recognize all of them as associated with the same products, based on the choice of graphics and the layout of the content.
The Complete Guide To Becoming A Successful Internet Entrepreneur (3 of 4) – https://www.mastersofmoneyllc.com/the-complete-guide-to-becoming-a-successful-internet-entrepreneur-3-of-4/
