SELLING on the INTERNET

Conquer the world in 10 easy steps!

The fastest, simplest, practical guide to use the Internet to make money

by DARIUS MIKOLAJEWSKI
 

INTRODUCTION
 

If someone told you ten years ago that one day you’d be able to start a one-man shop at home and sell to millions of people all over the world, what would you think?

This is the reality today. There are millions of businesspeople making excellent living out of selling their product or service on the Net, reaching millions of customers without leaving home. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true – there are millions of businesspeople losing money while trying to sell on the Net.

What is the difference between those two? The aim of this book is to provide a simple answer to this fascinating question. It will do that by looking at what the successful guys actually do (and how they do it), and then breaking it into a sequence of ten simple steps, easy enough for anyone to follow.

These are the ten steps to conquering the online world:

STEP 1 - Setting objectives
STEP 2 - Designing a website
STEP 3 - Creating the content
STEP 4 - Domain name registration
STEP 5 - Publishing and hosting
STEP 6 - Search engine optimisation
STEP 7 - Advertising on the Net
STEP 8 - Shopping carts and payment gateways
STEP 9 - Converting visitors to buyers
STEP 10- Converting buyers into customers

The following chapters will address each of them in turn.

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STEP ONE – SET OBJECTIVES
 

For any activity to be undertaken in business, it must result in either 1) sales growth, or 2) cost reduction. If the activity doesn’t deliver one of those, it will not be done.

The same applies to internet business. Most businesses start with their first website to reduce marketing costs: when a customer calls with an enquiry, instead of sending out a catalogue or arranging a meeting to present their product, they can simply point out to the information on their website.

In this scenario the website is not designed to bring in more business, in the form of generating prospects and leads for the business; its role is simply to provide credibility and a very cheap way to distribute information about the products and services offered. At the same time the business continues to rely on traditional forms of lead generation, such as advertising.

While this approach does usually deliver significant cost savings, it will not make you rich. The way to make millions on the Net is to use it for what it was meant to be used – to generate new business. This is what I mean by conquering the online world.

Every day hundreds of millions of people log on the Net in search of goods and services. Whatever your business is offering, there will be thousands of qualified prospects looking for it 24 hours every day. There will also be thousands of businesses just like yours trying to sell to them. How do you stay ahead?

Well, the first step is to know what you want, to set your objectives. If all you want is reduction in marketing costs, you’ll be able to skip the steps 6 to 10.

The good news is, by picking up this book you are already a mile ahead of your competitors. Chances are, they don’t even know their internet objectives, not to mention a strategy to achieve them. In the internet age the source of wealth is no longer land and capital; it is information. By reading this book you are acquiring this source right now – congratulations!

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STEP TWO – DESIGN A WEBSITE
 

Designing a website means creating a structure which can then be filled with content. You will need to make a number of decisions:

    How many pages?
    Standard template or customised graphic design?
    Will you do it yourself or pay someone to do it?
    Do you want to be able to make frequent changes?
    What is your budget?

As a general rule, I recommend you stick to what you do best, which is running your business, and let someone else design the website for you. The cost ranges from $500 for a basic 1-page website to $15,000 for a 100-page monster with all the trimmings. As with anything else, it’s wise to shop around.

If you are planning to make frequent changes, consider a website with a content management system (CMS). A CMS is simply a program that translates your typing into html, the language computers use on the Net. Modern CMS’s are just like word processors, you can use them easily if you know how to use Microsoft Word. Depending on how good the program is and how much support the supplier provides, prices will range between one and several thousand dollars. The rule of thumb is, if you think you’ll need to make changes at least four times a year, it will be money well spent. The alternative, which is paying a programmer’s hourly rate every time you want something changed, is much more expensive.

I strongly recommend keeping the design of your website simple. Stay away from animation, fancy video and sound, and complex graphic patterns. Remember that great majority of internet users are still using slow dialup connections; if your site doesn’t load up onto their screen in fifteen seconds or less, they’ll go somewhere else.

Another reason for simplicity is keeping your website search-engine-friendly (see step 6). Most search engines prefer simple sites and penalise elaborate designs with lower rankings. So you could end up paying a lot of money for fancy design that results in your website becoming actually less prominent on the Net!

While you need professional design for credibility, fancy graphics are only a waste of money and time. Visitors will come to your site not to look at the design, but to read the content. Put your focus into the next step.

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STEP THREE – CREATE THE CONTENT
 

This is the crucial step – it is the content of your website that will determine whether your visitors end up actually buying anything from you.

Most businesses are happy to spend thousands on fancy graphics, but then delegate the job of creating the content to the receptionist. The result: the website looks great, but it doesn’t make money.

I recommend the opposite approach – don’t worry too much about the graphics, but hire a good marketing consultant to write strong, compelling content for you. At the very least, get a professional to write the content of your home page and the pages that sell your products. As a guide, you shouldn’t pay more than $500 per page.

If you do decide to give the job to the receptionist after all, let me just give some ground rules about selling in print:
    Know exactly who you’re writing to (you target customer)
    What is the most important BENEFIT of your product to them? In what words, or jargon, do they like it described?
    Based on that, create a headline that hits the visitors immediately as they enter your site. A good headline must give them a compelling reason to read on (the best reason is you’re going to give them something they want!)
    Focus the rest of the content on the customer, and the problems you are going to solve for them. Use “you” everywhere, and “I” and “we” nowhere.
    Talk about benefits, not features.
    Build credibility – use testimonials, articles form the press, opinions from respected professionals or celebrities, awards you’d won, pictures of your successful projects…
    Create scarcity – limit the offer to a hundred callers, or until a certain date
    Reduce risk – offer strong guarantees
    Give a reason to act now – provide a bonus for ordering on the first visit, or by the end of today
    Make it easy for the customer to buy – display your number everywhere, have a simple shopping cart system, give the customer a choice of ways to pay, make the shopping experience fast, easy and pleasurable.

Now, these are just the most basic rules that apply in every market. In addition there will be dozens of specific rules for your target market. If you’re starting to think that writing a good content is quite an art, you’re right. On top of that, the person doing it must also understand basic programming and search engines algorithms, as to make sure the content – while compelling for human visitors – is also good enough for the robots that determine your website’s ranking (more about that at step 6).

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STEP FOUR – SELECT AND REGISTER A DOMAIN NAME
 

Domain name is your internet address. For instance Google’s domain name is google.com.

Most businesses use their business name as the domain name, thus making themselves easier to find by their customers. For example, my company name is Allwelt International, and my domain name is allwelt.com.

An alternative approach is to create a keyword-based domain name. You research the keywords your customers use when searching for your type of product, and then incorporate it into the domain name to make your business easy to find for people looking for your product, rather than for your business.

For example, I have several websites selling books about nutrition and weight loss. A keyword search revealed that a lot of people looking for this type of product type in “fast weight loss” or “fast diet”. Based on this information, I created a domain fastweightlossdiet.net.

Once again, you have the option of registering the domain name yourself, or hiring someone to do it. Domain prices range between $25 - $150. Australian domains (.com.au) are most expensive; must be our love of red tape.

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STEP FIVE – PUBLISH YOUR WEBSITE ON THE NET!
 

Finally, the big day has come – you have created a great looking site, with professionally written, compelling marketing content; you have a good domain name, you are ready to put it out live on the Net, for the whole world to see.

To publish a website you need a host, that is someone to hold it on their computer with uninterrupted broadband internet access. The host needs to offer sufficient memory for your site to be comfortable, and enough bandwidth for your prospects to visit. Another variable of course is reliability and service support. Depending on those, hosting prices will range between $100 a year and $100 a month.

Once you have a host, you will get an FTP account. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and it is the system you use to transfer the website you created on your computer onto the hosting site where it can be found under your domain name.

Based on the information supplied by your host, you log into your FTP account and use copy and paste commands to transfer the files. A lot of things can (and do) go wrong during FTP transfers, so if you are not too strong in html and website programming, it might save you a lot of time and stress to get a professional to do it for you.

If you are using a content management system (usually based on your host’s system), there will be a PUBLISH button there somewhere. Once you are ready, you click on it and the software does the rest. There are often glitches there too, but CMS’s come with service support, so there will be someone to fix it for you.

Once your site is out there, it is time to review your objectives. Why are you on the Net? If your objective was only to reduce marketing costs by providing information to your customers cost-free, your job is done. Now just make sure you stay on top of updates so that your information is current. In addition, incorporate your website address into your usual marketing activities, put it on your business cards, brochures, signage, letterhead, company cars…

If your objective was, however, to generate new business (to conquer the online world!), read on. Next we are going to find out how to get prospects to visit your site – how to generate traffic.

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STEP SIX – SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

OK, you published your site, now you just sit by the phone with a notepad as the orders pour in, right? Well, weeks go by and nothing happens. What’s wrong?

Oops, you forgot to submit to search engines. No problem, you go onto Google, Yahoo, MSN, perhaps a couple more, and after some hassle with the usual red tape you get yourself submitted. Surely the orders will pour in now?

Or will they?

Let me illustrate the problem for you with an example.

Let’s say you are considering buying a new home theatre system this year. You want to do a bit of research so that you don’t get ripped off. How would you go about it?

Of course, you’d use a search engine. You might type in “audio visual suppliers melbourne” (assuming you live in Melbourne). Let’s say the search returns 30 thousand results, ten per page.

How many pages will you look at? One, maybe two? In other words, if your business is not within the top 20 in your category, it might as well not exist. So, the big question is, how do you get into the top twenty?

The search engines use complex mathematical formulae (algorithms) to determine the ranking of sites. To make matters worse, the algorithms are different for each engine, and secret. However, in general terms the engines look at only two factors: relevance and popularity.

Relevance means simply how relevant is your website to the search the customer is conducting (ie. To the keywords they typed in). The search engines make money by selling advertising space, and their prices depend on traffic they can generate; the traffic in turn is a direct result of how relevant the search results are for people visiting the engine’s site.

Relevance is influenced by:

    How early the keywords appear on the page, are they in headings, meta tags, titles, picture names? (Keyword prominence)
    How often are the keywords used? (Keyword frequency)
    What’s the proportion of keywords to the page’s word count? (Keyword weight)
    How close are the keywords to each other? (Proximity)

Of course, the ultimate in keyword prominence is when it appears in your domain name (remember fastweightlossdiet.net?).

Now, you probably gathered that it’s next to impossible to optimise a page for more than one sequence of keywords. However, your customers might actually search for you under dozens (if not hundreds) of keywords. How can you possibly hope to capture this traffic?

Well, the solution lies in creating so-called doorway pages. Once you’ve done your research and you have a list of keywords your prospects are using, you need to create a separate page for each keyword, and then optimise it for this particular keyword or keyword sequence. When the prospect clicks on the doorway page’s link it takes them straight to your site.

Now, once you’ve covered relevance, it’s time to consider popularity. It is judged by two factors:

    How many other websites (preferably related) link to yours?
    How long does an average visitor stay on your site before getting out?

There are several strategies you can use to get other sites to link to yours. Start by linking to good-ranking sites in your category, then email them saying you just linked to them and ask politely to link back to you. Visit guestbooks of related sites and sign your entry with your URL (URL is www + your domain name) – this automatically creates a link. Research link farms (free-for-all link areas).

To increase the time an average visitor spends on your site, there is only one effective way: having interesting and compelling content on it!

A word of caution about search engine optimisation – as the Net grows, it takes longer and longer to wait from making changes on your site to seeing your rankings actually go up; currently 3 months seem to be the norm, and you probably need to allow a year to achieve a decent ranking in a popular category. Also, once achieved it needs to be constantly maintained, as the algorithms change all the time and your competitors don’t sleep!

Search engine optimisation is a very significant time commitment that is not realistic for a majority of busy business people. Once again, the only solution is to hire someone to do it for you. Prices range from $500 to $10,000; on-going maintenance $50 - $150 per month. They depend on the number of keywords and doorway pages, and the keywords popularity (it’s harder to get into the top of ten in a keyword category with millions of businesses competing, such as “weight loss”, than it is for a niche category such as “natural diet recipes”).

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STEP 7 – ADVERTISING ON THE NET
 

If you found search engine optimisation a little overwhelming, I have some good news for you – there is an easier way. Unfortunately, it’s also more expensive.

Did you notice that whenever you get a results page from a search engine, there are two columns of results on the page? The main column is the results ranked by relevance and popularity; this is when you end up if you get your optimisation right. The second column, with a smaller print, is pure advertising – you can pay to get there.

How much, you want to ask? Well, it’s kind of complicated. You don’t pay for the display; you pay only when someone actually uses the link and by clicking on it visits your site (that’s why it’s called “pay-per-click advertising”). The prices vary from 10 cents to several dollars per click, depending on the keyword popularity.

The main advantage is that you can get traffic instantly. However, the obvious danger is that the visitors may come and go without buying, and you still have to pay for their visits. This is when the professional marketing content on your site, content that compels prospects to buy, becomes crucial to your success.

The way it works is, you go into one of the many search engines offering this service (there is a comprehensive list on www.payperclicksearchengines.com), you research the keywords relevant to your product, and you check out the prices and decide where to bid. You will see how much it costs to be the first, and then, depending on your budget, you can outbid to go first, or bid less and satisfy yourself with a lower ranking on the page.

To set a budget for pay-per-click advertising you need to estimate your conversion rate, that is the percentage of visitors who are going to buy from you. Most sites average between 1 and 2%, that is out of every hundred visitors between one to two actually spend money on the site. We will discuss techniques to boost your conversion rate at Step Nine; for now let’s assume 2%, ie. One in every fifty visitors will buy from you.

Let’s say your average customer spends $25 with you. As you work on a 50% profit margin, your profit on one transaction is $12.50. Since you need fifty visitors to get one sale, you can say that fifty visits are worth up to $12.50 to you. Anything less than $12.50 to pay for those fifty visits will leave you in the black, anything more in the red. This equates to 25 cents per visitor at the break even point; so you would probably set 20 cents as the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click. This is your budget.

In addition to that, it might also be a good idea to set daily limits on your spending, at least initially, until you have enough data to be able to determine your conversion rate exactly rather than work with assumptions. You can set eg. $100 as the max amount you spend on any given day; once you reach this, the engine will drop you off until tomorrow.

Pay-per-click advertising is a fascinating area of internet marketing, unfortunately it is quite time consuming and very difficult to outsource, as you can’t really delegate money-spending decisions to people outside your company. If you can afford to employ a marketer dedicated to this area of marketing your business, the results might be beneficial; however the risks are rather high.

The smartest way seems to be to do some research and try it out yourself until you have enough reliable statistics to be able to set exactly how much a click is worth to you in any given keyword category. Once you have this information, you can outsource the actual job of daily bidding to an internet marketing company, or perhaps even to a smart student from a local Uni.

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STEP EIGHT – SHOPPING CARTS AND PAYMENT GATEWAYS

OK, you have the traffic, you have the conversion, people are eager to buy from you. How do you actually get your hands on the cash?

If you sell more than one product, you need a shopping cart facility, so that your customers can easily select the range of products they wish to buy and proceed to the checkout. Shopping cart facility is just an inexpensive software program, usually given away for free either by your website host or by your gateway service provider. Installation can sometimes be troublesome though, so I’d recommend you get a professional to fix it up for you.

Now to the main question – how do you get your hands on the money? The system is called payment gateway, and this is how it works. When the customer clicks on the buy button, they are taken to the site of your gateway service provider. Here they can pay by whatever means your service provider accepts, usually major credit cards. The transaction is immediately validated with the issuing bank, and the customer taken back to your thank-you page.

The service provider carries the risk of fraudulent transactions and the cost of dealing with the banks. For all that they charge you a commission, somewhere between 2 and 5%. Sometimes there is also a fixed transaction fee, like a dollar per transaction. After deducting all that, they pay you the rest. Depending on your arrangement, they might send you a check or transfer it directly into your bank account. The timing also varies from a few days to a few weeks.

There is often an additional, one-off cost of establishing a gateway account; it can range from as little as $50 to thousands of dollars; you might want to shop around or get professional advice.

If you are using a good, modern content management system, most of them come with a shopping cart facility included, where you can easily upload your products, run promotions, offer discounts, calculate postage and handling etc. Some of them even calculate GST when the purchase is made by Australian residents! Also the more expensive ones will have a gateway account either included in their price already or at least have a discount deal for their customers.

Since the gateway service providers usually accept only major credit cards, I strongly recommend you offer your customers other options of buying from you, such as downloading an order form and mailing it to you with a cheque.

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STEP NINE – CONVERTING VISITORS TO BUYERS

Now as you have as much traffic as you like (or as you can afford), and the cash register is ringing, it is time to start fine-tuning the profitability of your site.

In order to do this you need reliable information. Most hosting packages will offer you basic site statistics: the number of unique visits (as distinct from the same visitor jumping pages), source of visits, pages of entry and exit, and of course the number and amount of sales.

Your starting point is the conversion rate: the number of sales divided by the number of visits. For example, if for every hundred unique visitors to your site you get two sales, your conversion rate is 2%.

How do you get it up?

Your conversion depends predominantly on two factors: 1) the underlying demand for your product or service, and 2) the quality of your site’s marketing content.

As far as the demand is concerned, check that the visitors you are getting are really interested in what you are selling. The easiest way to check that is to experiment attracting traffic from another source (eg. by pay-per-click advertising under a different keyword), to see if it makes a difference to your conversion.

Another option to increase demand is to add to your product line. You would of course endeavour to offer additional products or services that are interesting for the type of visitor you are getting. Alternatively, you can also test creating a more expensive (deluxe) version of your product, for instance by offering to personalise it for the customer.

As far as your marketing content is concerned, we covered the basics at step 3; this is the time to audit the content to see if you’ve got the basics covered.

Then have a look at the exit statistics: where (which page) do the majority of your visitors exit without buying? Check out this page, is there anything you can do to make its content more appealing? Perhaps there is some kind of little difficulty or delay there; even a few seconds delay is enough to get most people to click on the back button and go away.

If you find that quite a few visitors exit from the ordering page, perhaps you are not offering enough ordering and payment options? If the only payment option is a major credit card, is there a significant percentage of people in your target market who do not have it, or who do not feel comfortable using it on the Net?

You can create a survey form that pops up when a visitor leaves the site without buying; or even a simple link saying: “click here if you decided not to buy”. Then ask them why they are not buying, and offer some incentive (usually a free e-book, or a chance to go into a draw) for answering.

Visit the sites of your successful competitors. Check out their content, the layout of the site, the selling process they lead their customers through, the options for ordering and payment they are offering. Pick ideas, test them and see if they make a difference to your conversion.

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STEP TEN – CONVERTING BUYERS INTO CUSTOMERS

When a person searches for your product on the Net, she is a prospect. When she clicks on the link to your site, she becomes a visitor. As you lead her through your compelling selling process to the payment page, you turn her into a buyer.

What do you want her to do now?

You guessed it, you want her to come back to your site and buy more, again and again. You want her to become a customer.

How do you do that?

The first step is to capture as much data as possible. At the very least you should capture her name and email address as part of the ordering and payment process. Depending on relevance to your particular market, try to get some demographic data if you can: region of residence, age, gender, income bracket. You can create a simple survey and give some incentive for doing it, eg. going into a draw to win something.

To comply with anti-spam laws, add a tick-box to the survey for a free subscription to your newsletter. The beauty of email is that there is no cost: once you create your newsletter, there is no cost to mail it out, whether to hundreds or millions of customers.

In the newsletter you put some good info about the areas of interest of your target market, but do it in a way that drags people back to your website. For instance you can publish interesting articles on your site, and have the first (captivating) paragraph in the newsletter, finishing off with a link “read more…” that takes them to the website. The sole purpose of the newsletter is to get them back to your website, where you can present them with compelling offers, new products, on-going service options etc.

A good website package will offer you a newsletter system that automatically stores customer’s data in a database and sends out your newsletter to all of those who don’t opt out, personalised with the use of their first name.

A more advanced strategy is to have several versions of the newsletter, created especially for various categories of your customers – this is where your collection of demographic data comes in useful. A simple example would be to customise newsletters for different geographic regions, adding a piece of relevant news applicable to their country, or an article in their own language. In addition, you would of course use the demographic data you collect to better target your prospects, improve the selling content of your site, target your advertising etc.

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CONCLUSION

Once you’ve completed the ten steps to internet success, you would have created a system. The system, to be of any use to you, needs to have two characteristics: 1) be profitable, and 2) be replicable.

Don’t despair if it takes several attempts and a few failures before you hit the right mix. Once you’ve got it, it will be worth all the effort and trouble.

It doesn’t matter whether your system produces profit in the order of hundreds of dollars or hundreds of millions, as long as it is in profit.

Why not?

Because the best about the Net is, there is no restriction how many sites you can have. Once you have a system that makes money, you just copy it into tens (or hundreds) of websites, until you get the level of income that supports the lifestyle you would like to have.

And this is exactly what I want you to do. Because the only way for me to become successful as an author is for you, my reader, to use my book to build the business and the lifestyle of your dreams. Please do that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 

Darius Mikolajewski is Director of Allwelt International (www.allwelt.com), a Melbourne-based marketing company. He consults to a variety of businesses on all aspect of internet marketing, with his particular specialty being marketing content of websites.

In addition, Darius is also a writer of popular books about diets and healthy eating, and owns a number of websites selling them in a variety of forms.

Darius is a well-known public speaker in the business world of Australia. He is frequently invited by industry bodies and government organisations to talk about internet marketing, as well as effective marketing strategies in general.

For more information visit www.lowcostwebdesign.com.au.