#Choosing the Right #Product

When you first start your online business, the first and most obvious question you will ask yourself is…what am I going to sell? Points to consider when deciding the answer to that question are:

Is it light and easy to ship?

Is it a digital good that is downloaded (e-book or software)?

Is it perishable or fragile?

Does it have to be seen and held (designer fabrics, perhaps?)

Is there enough demand to make your venture profitable?

Does it have little competition from large online companies (niche products?)

The last two characteristics are the ones that can be hard to pin down. Here is a generally accepted method of arriving at an idea of how heavy the demand and competition is for a product.

If you have a special interest in some products that meet the above criteria, great, but don't limit your investigation just to items you like. You are looking for a niche product with relatively good demand (enough to make it profitable), but without heavy competition.

One way to see what the demand is for products you are interested in is to look at search engines to see how frequently people search for the product you are considering.

The result of all this research should be that one or more products will fit into a niche market - products with some demand, and relatively little supply. For the best results, focus on one niche product category, and offer a wide selection. That way, you can become the best online source for that particular category. For example, instead of offering general craft supplies, offer the widest possible selection of needlepoint kits. This strategy will also allow you to rank higher in search engines because you can optimize your pages for fewer, more specific, keywords.

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Be Prosperous,

Deon Christie

Who Is Your #Audience?

Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.

What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well-educated university graduate will find that site interesting.

Take your audience's emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.

When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site's general theme.

Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.

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Deon Christie

What an #eBook Can Do for You for Your #Viral #Marketing

An E-book that includes your marketing message and a link to your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your message by willing participants. This is the basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends advertised the free email site.

Using viral E-books as a marketing method is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s even quicker if you use rebrand able E-books that have been written by others. Just use your favorite search engine and do webs search. You will find many rebrand able E-books that are available on whatever subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business. One method of distributing the E-book is to offer it to visitors in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to their friends and family it will promote your business for you.

E-books are capable of reaching a large audience and are limited only by the enthusiasm of the participants. E-books are fairly easy to create. It’s possible to produce your own E-books by combining articles that you have written or have gotten from public domain sources, such as directories.

A common approach is to use material that has Private Label Rights, including articles and reports that have been written specifically for that purpose, for that niche. Using a portion of a larger work that you have prepared such as the first three chapters of a large E-book could also be used as a viral E-book.

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Deon Christie

Weakness Theory in #Safe #List

How would you like to send your commercial emails to people you do not know, but are expecting to receive such mail from you? Wait a minute. That does not sound right. How can this be? It is simple, if you know what is really going on. Everybody who is on these lists, also known as safe lists, knows that they will be receiving emails from other members. 

This is possible because that is one of the conditions of their “safe list” membership. And those who join these lists are willing to agree to this condition because they themselves would want to send out their own commercial emails to the others on the list.

The result - everyone is sending emails to each other but no one is reading them! It gets worse when some savvy members sign up for the membership using a free or less-frequently-used account to store the useless emails they will never bother to open and read.

Having said that, it is always wiser to start your own mailing list and build it with opt-in subscribers, no matter how tempting safe lists can be or how many members there are in a safe list.

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Deon Christie

The kind of #Advertising That Generate #Sales

What is your reaction to advertising? Well, do not tell me that it annoys or irritates you. I know that. The same goes for me. I’d like to know how you act after reading some advertising piece. For example, sometimes it makes me just rush to the nearest store and buy the advertised item. Sometimes the name of the product may linger in my mind for a long time despite my resistance and desire to stop thinking about it. There are also cases when on the contrary I cannot remember the name of the advertised product. Occasionally I do like advertising, when it conveys something useful and helpful to me.

As you see it has different or even quite opposite effects. Why, because the effect of the advertising depends on the type of the advertising text, and relative content. There are four of them. Persuading texts emphasize the advantages of the product. Urging texts aims at making the customer memorize the name of the product so they repeat it for many times. Informational texts provide us with the information about the product, they are clear and short. Reminding texts are very brief.

Though the four types have their own peculiarities, all of them comprise five essential components: title, subtitle, the main text, caption and comments and slogan. The title should capture the attention of the audience. It is the pivot of advertising and the most powerful appeal to the potential buyer. If the title fails to attract the readers’ attention, they won’t read on your message and won’t become your clients. The subtitle connects the body of the advertising with the headline. It is another opportunity to make the reader buy from you. So, do not miss it. Usually the headlines sound like promises or bargains. 

In the body you should explain how you are going to fulfill them.  Body is the essence of the advertising message. Emotional words and phrases are especially effective in creating the image of the product. They appeal to people and convince them to buy. Make explanations to your audience in simple sentences using clear words.

There is no necessity to stuff your text with specific terms no one except you knows.  If people do not understand something about your product, they won’t buy it. You should strive at providing more information with fewer words. All the additional information about the sales is presented in the caption. Comments usually describe some particular feature of the product or dwell on the included pictures, photos. You can find a great variety of literature sources devoted to successful advertising, so I will not attempt to reveal advertising secrets in a small article.

It is impossible.  Personally I will always associate good advertising with making people buy without urging: “Buy me”.

Learn to Leverage Viral Marketing to Your Advantage

Be Prosperous,

Deon Christie