How To Make Money Online In Nigeria » Internet Marketing For Newbies

Top 5 Things You Must Do Before Firing Your Boss!

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:11:00 +0000

Before you make up your mind to join the bandwagon of internet marketers, there are a few things you need to keep in perspective should in case you’re one of the multitude that thinks making money online is easy. Internet Marketing ain’t easy.

Work From Home Riches is another hot free report from Fabian Tan. In 23 pages, he dishes out on what you need to do as a self-employed work-at-home entrepreneur before you give your boss the pink slip.

Amongst other things, he talks about:

Getting Your Mind In Order
Getting Your Home In Order
Getting Your Life In Order
Going For What You Want
Informing Your Loved Ones of Your Plans.

Right click and Save this free report now! It could save you a lot of heartache later. Work From Home Riches by Fabian Tan.

Continue reading this article @ Top 5 Things You Must Do Before Firing Your Boss!.

Download Sylvie Fortin’s Internet Marketing Sins Free

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:00:46 +0000

Attention all make money online newbies. Get the down low on internet marketing now by downloading Sylvie Fortin’s Internet Marketing Sins free of charge!

There really isn’t much to say about this 3 part report other than it’s ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! Sincerely speaking, I was ready for some useless ranting until I read page 16 of Internet Marketing Sins Part 1.

Here’s what this page reveals with reference to what customer service folks are ordered by internet marketers to do in certain situations.

“If someone asks for a refund, ignore their request and if they write again, pretend you never got the first one. Most people forget they asked and our refund rates will drop accordingly”
“If someone cancels their subscription to our autoresponder, re-subscribe them manually. Don’t worry, they probably won’t even notice”
“We have a telephone number for people to call and cancel their subscription to ___product name___, but don’t worry about it. Ignore those messages. If they really want to cancel, they will send an email, but take your time on those. Most people forget they asked to cancel until at least 3 more months have passed.”
“Don’t process any refunds. We’ll handle it internally” (NOTE, these particular vendors were complete assholes and never processed a single refund internally or otherwise)”
“I know the marketing technique in ___ebook name___ is crap, but who cares? It still makes me over ___$$$___ per day and the truth is, less than 20% of our customers are smart enough to figure it out”

Need I say more? Please head over to Internet Marketing Sins and download your copy NOW!

Continue reading this article @ Download Sylvie Fortin’s Internet Marketing Sins Free.

How To Design A Business Website

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:58:00 +0000

First and foremost allow me to say that I will NOT be giving tips on how to work HTML. For that you can use Google’s search engine or check out The Site Wizard. They seem to have quite a number of tips that could get you going in your quest to learn HTML.

When we discussed What Can I Sell On My Website, we also talked out choosing the RIGHT kind of website for our future online business and now it’s time to design a website that really reflects and speaks for our product(s).

Going the sales, retail, or marketing website way is going be less difficult than the web application and information business way. For the latter, you’d need highly experienced web developers and that could eat deep into your bank account if you’re not financially ready.

There are two ways to go in designing a website: You either do it yourself or get someone else to do it for you (Popularly known in the internet marketing circle as OUTSOURCING). Which ever way you decided to go, you HAVE to make sure two things are taken care of.

First, you have to draw a rough sketch of what you want the layout of your website to look like and what color combinations or palette would be perfect for it. Now layout refers to things like where you want the navigation area to be, where you want to use as ad space, how many columns the site is going to have etc. You can get ideas by browsing various sites you like and picking one or two ideas from them.

I’ve never really understood the whole concept of webs safe colors and color palettes so I basically go with my instinct MOST of the time. I fool around with different color combinations in my mind, put them in my rough sketch and see how they look. If I love the combination, I save it and look it after a week. If I still love it then, IT’S A KEEPER!

The goal here is to keep your viewers enthralled with the layout and color scheme.

With color scheme and layout out of the way, it’s time to design the website for real. If you’re going to do it yourself and know nothing about html, you could get some pre-designed templates from the web or your web host and just add your text and images and you’re done.

PERSONALLY, due to my mild obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, I tend to prefer designing my site on my own. I NEVER OUTSOURCE. I sit down and tweak things till I’m completely satisfied with the results. I’m NEVER satisfied when I get people to do certain things for me. I believe in, if you want ultimate satisfaction, you got to do it yourself. But then again when I mess something up on my site, I get all worked up until it’s fixed again. LOL

To design your website yourself, you are going to need the following tools

An Image Editor for creating and editing images like navigation buttons, banners etc: I use Macromedia Fireworks but a free solution is GIMP 2.64
A “What You See Is What You Get” site editor to design the website: I use Macromedia Dreamweaver. A free solution that I also use is NVU
A text editor might be necessary in tweaking and editing the html code but I find that I really don’t need it. A popular FREE text editor would be Notepad that comes free with Windows
Four – Five different Web browsers: You need to check out what your site would look like on different browsers. Presently I’ve got Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera & Avant on my computer

NOTE: Strive to keep your web design at nothing more then 640 pixels X 480 Pixels horizontally. This is because not everybody has a 21 inch monitor (1024 x 768 resolution). Some are still having 12 inch monitors and if this is the case of visitors to your site, they might end up having to scroll across the page to read every message on your site and that could be very annoying.

I personally prefer 700 pixels by 600 pixels as it gives me more space to work with though I could be losing a number of traffic.

With the above tools you are good to go, though somewhere along the line you’d have to 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.

Do please feel free to comment if I left something out. Thanks.

P.S: This post was supposed to come before Search Engine Optimization Tips. I guess I missed things up somewhere along the way. Do accept my apologies.

Continue reading this article @ How To Design A Business Website.

Who Is My Target Audience?

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:17:00 +0000

Coming up with a marketing plan can be tedious if you know not how to go about it. Depending on what product or services you’re peddling around the web, you need to target your advertising at a particular group of people.

Be prepared to answer questions like:

What age group, gender or ethnic group am I concerned about?
Where do your prospective consumers live?
What level of education do they have?
Are they married, single, divorced or dating?
What are their hobbies?

The questions are endless but what they all do is to help you narrow down to whom specifically your promotion and advertising would be targeted at.

For example if your product is targeted at women in general, you ought to make them know that shopping at your site is cost effective and time saving because that’s what women in general look for when shopping. There’s need for your site to be family oriented as most women are all about that. Then again that varies because single women and some married ones don’t really care much about that as they’re all about the latest beauty fad and tabloid gossip.

With most of the guys, it’s all about women, the latest electronic gadgets e.g X-Box, Plasma TV, beer, football, working out. politics, male grooming amongst others. A good example of this are men magazines like GQ and Men’s Health that have an online presence as well.

It all comes down to: Target your audience and give them EXACTLY what they’re looking for.

NOTE: Untargeted traffic helps increase your ranking in the search engines but targeted traffic is what accounts for sales so focus more on which ever one you deem important to your business now.

Continue reading this article @ Who Is My Target Audience?.

What Can I Sell On My Website?

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:19:00 +0000

Once you’ve managed to uncover a profitable niche, you have to start thinking about setting up a website but before you do that, there’s need to define what unique product or service you’ll be selling or offering in your niche and what kind of website would best fit your purposes.

This is similar to setting the goals of your online marketing.

What do you intend to achieve by creating yourself an online presence?

For those of you who already have an offline business, this is a walk in the park because in most cases you’re only trying to garner mass attention for your already existing business/product. Newbies are the ones who might be stressed out at this junction.

TIP: Investigate your niche very well and find out if there are any problems yet to be solved there. You can get ideas from forums with people posting about needing solutions to this problem and that problem.

Selling something which everybody in your niche is already selling wouldn’t do much good in the long run. It’ll only increase competition in the market as you and other marketers fight to sell the “same” products to the same buyers.

The time to make a big decision has come. You have to create a website based on what goods and services you intend to sell to your customers.

There are 4 main types of websites

Sales-Retail Websites: A good example would be Amazon.com. This is a site that comprises mainly of lots of pictures, a little text to describe the product and a shopping cart. The drawback with this kind of site is that they are not search engine friendly due to their design layout. But then again they are user friendly and easy to navigate.
Marketing Websites: These kind of websites are what internet marketers fondly call mini-sites. They are designed to promote ONLY one product. Examples are sites like AtomicBlogging.com and LegitOnlineJobs.com.
These sites are the simplest to build as they’re made up of just a captivating header and footer image that brands the site, a few images here and there to illustrate what’s on sale, a wonderful, often OVER HYPED sales letter and finally one button that says it all. ORDER NOW!
They are easily optimized for search engines and money is easily generated through advertising (Google Adwords) & affiliate programs (Click Bank & PayDotCom)
Informational Business Websites: These sites are all about providing information about certain goods and services. Have you ever browsed one of the Sony websites and not found a single price tag on the products on display? Well that’s because they are just there you give you kind of a heads up of what’s new in the market and what amazing features these products have to offer. In most cases they leave you a link to another of their sites where you can actually order the product.
These sites work for people who have a well-defined product to sell, but are better left for companies and small businesses that have a nationwide presence
Web Application Based Business Websites: This is a territory where most people fear to tread because they require a lot of perseverance, a very original idea, and a good team of programmers who want the product to succeed. In this scenario you are offering an application that functions like a traditional program except that it’s web based. A good example would be Skype Telephony, BetamaxSMS & Clickatell which handle internet phone calls and text messaging. So long as web surfers need these services (which are often cheaper by the way) the owners of this applications will keep making money.
NOTE: If you are new to online marketing this ain’t for you at all. Look for something within your league then grow from there.

Take time out to research your niche, to choose what you want to sell online and what kind of website to help you achieve that goal before you start any web site construction.

Before I sign off, let me touch a question that many newbies still ask day in day out.

Is Owning A Business Website Necessary?

Like I’ve said when I was discussing Web Resources, yes it is necessary but then over the past weeks since that post I’ve come to realize that if you are handicapped when it comes to knowing how to create a website or if you’re on a shoe string budget or don’t want to face the stress of managing a business website, there are various options you could explore.

This is where EBay, Amazon Webstore and Lulu come in. In summary Lulu.com is for self online-publishing. If you’ve written a book, created something artsy or recorded music you can these here. EBay is kind of an auction site where people sell various things and bidders place bids till they either clinch or lose the product. From what I hear Amazon Store is the best of them all with the drawback that they charge you a whooping $60 a month for hosting your shop and 7% of every sale you make.

If you want to learn more about EBay get the following free reports from the Members Area now. They are Secrets To A Full-Time Income Online With eBay! and The Expert Guide to Cashing in on eBay.

Do have a lovely day and in the next post we shall be discussing How To Design A Business Website.

Continue reading this article @ What Can I Sell On My Website?.

How to Uncover Profitable Online Niches

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:15:00 +0000

Hey I’m kind of busy with work so I’m going to leave you guys these PDFs on how to uncover profitable online niches. Hopefully, in about 3 days time, I’ll be delivering my next series of post on how to go about setting up a business website.

Download How to Uncover Profitable Online Niches & Google Adwords Made Easy from the Free Members Area. The latter has a section that broadens your knowledge with respect to finding profitable keywords and niches to explore.

I must say this free e-book really set the ball rolling for me when I ventured into making money online via affiliate marketing with Google Adwords. It’s FREE. So get it NOW!

Take care

Continue reading this article @ How to Uncover Profitable Online Niches.

What Tools Do Internet Marketers Need?

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:14:00 +0000

Any successful internet marketing plan must have certain basic tools which later on become essential components without which the business risks collapse.

A Domain Name & Website: No discussions or prevarication are allowed on this one like I’ve said before when I discussed web resources. It doesn’t matter where you’re running your business from , people tend to trust companies that they perceive as being real businesses. Your website is your sales pitch. Make sure your design corresponds to the what your target audience would love to look at. The last thing you need is selling a product targeted at kids with a theme/design for adults.
A Domain Name & Blog: In some cases when you aren’t selling your own products or services and you’re on a shoe string budget, blogs are the way to go. With thousands of blogging themes out there and blogging softwares like TypePad, WordPress and Google to mention but a few, you could be up and running in minutes.Blogs are cheaper than websites and it’s a lot easier to drive traffic to a website because search engines are more blog friendly and there are so many social bookmarking sites that could help you in traffic generation. For those who have a loyal number of subscribers to their blogs, owning a website would give them an added advantage as their followers would definitely want to see what they have to offer and will most times buy from them because of trust that has been established.
E-mail List: Always provide a way for your customers to leave their email addresses before leaving your sites. It could be through subscribing for updates, free downloads, newsletters etc. These email addresses constitute your mailing list and can be very crucial to the success of your business. Under no circumstance whatsoever should you buy an email list. Most of your emails to addresses on the list will not be welcome and you risk being labeled a spammer and that in turn will HURT the credibility of your business entity. You might end up seeing your URL on sites that seek to alert web surfers on web sites/online businesses that spam the life out of email addresses.

With an authentic email list, you could promote future additions to your catalogue of products or special offers and even get them to forward promos to their friends who might be interested. When these friends land at your site, they could also sign on to your newsletter if they like what they see.

Make sure to include a privacy policy on your site stating how these email addresses will be put to use. Since most web surfers don’t read such things as terms of service or privacy policy, it will be wise to leave a small note beneath the sign up form that states that their information WILL NOT be shared with third parties and that they can leave the list anytime they want by just clicking on the unsubscribe link in every email you send to them. Protecting your customers is one big way of gaining their trust.

NOTE: Don’t go crazy sending out emails to your subscribers every 2 days as most of them will end up tagging you a nuisance to their inbox thus leading to their clicking the unsubscribe link. Always strive to reduce the amount of unsubscribers by not bugging.

P.S: Do let me know if this post has been helpful by leaving your comments below

Continue reading this article @ What Tools Do Internet Marketers Need?.

What Is Internet Marketing All About?

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:10:00 +0000

This is the first installation of a series of posts which I have mapped out to show the newbies to internet marketing a few things they ought to know about internet marketing and how they can go into it without getting burnt (money wise)

I very much hope, it serves it’s purpose.

The Internet as we know it is a perfect spot to launch a marketing campaign. Advertising through the internet is very powerful and saves one a lot of money as it reaches out to a large audience irrespective of the location of one’s business. Successful online marketers have mastered the act of thinking out of the box thus allowing them to compete very well with their online rivals.

One important fact to note is that unlike normal marketing, you don’t need a degree in internet marketing before setting up an online marketing career.

Hopefully with these series of post the newbie to internet marketing will get a peek at what it entails to make money online through internet marketing.

Internet marketing as we know it, is simply creating an online presence for your business or products, thereby placing it in front of millions of everyday internet users and hopefully maximizing your daily sales.

A few points to consider before plunging into internet marketing are:

Communication: You must master the art of replying emails promptly and efficiently. It’s hard to generate traffic online and for every visitor that stops by your site, you need to give them the deserved attention that could lead to your making a sale. The tone of your email counts very much as to whether someone who’s just making inquiries is finally going to turn into a potential customer.
Some internet marketers are so in the habit of not responding emails at all and when you finally decide to call them, the manner in which they talk to you makes you feel like a huge nuisance to them. This is a sure fire way of losing customers and believe me you, once word gets out of your lack of professionalism, your internet marketing endeavor could be brought to a screeching halt. Example if you take more than 48 – 72 hrs to reply an email, prepare to lose that customer as he/she might have been in buying mode at the time of that email and your delay could have made him/her look elsewhere for his/her needs. If Hostgator hadn’t shown a lot of patience with my insistent inquiries, I wouldn’t be with them today. Most customers will have doubts about buying from you and it’s in your best interest to calm their worries.
Human Resources: Depending on how huge your online marketing business/strategies are, you ought to look into hiring extra helping hands or outsourcing. Imagine, Amazon or Yahoo Shopping being run as a one man business. They will definitely not have made it today. If you can’t attend to your customers one on one, you need to hire people who can and not just ordinary people but folks you understand your business and the fact that the customer is the key to a successful business.
In Demand Products: There’s nothing as foolish as selling something people don’t want to buy online. Make sure your product has a good amount of people typing away at search engines like Google looking for your products. You also need to ask yourself if your services or products are worth buying online or in the nearby convenience store/off license. More about this when we talk about How to Uncover Profitable Online Niches

Finally, if you intend subscribing to my future posts on Internet Marketing For Newbies, I need you to read Dave Lovelace’s Making Money Online From Home: The Ugly Truth Exposed. If after reading it you still decide to go into internet marketing/making money online then I wish you all the best. With hope, perseverance & a lot of study/ground work, you’ll definitely make it!

Continue reading this article @ What Is Internet Marketing All About?.