Why Your Websites are waste of time and money
You just got your website built. You are excited, and waiting for orders to roll in… After 4 hrs… Nothing… after 24 hrs still nothing… You get up next with enthusiasm and again wait for orders to roll in. Yet NOTHING…
WHY?
Did it ever occurred to you that your websites might be waste of time and money? For 98% of websites, I can tell without even looking at the websites, why they are not making any money for you.
But you spent thousands of dollars for that dream design and another thousands of dollars for Search engine optimization and blah blah blah…
1. Designers are nothing but tech nerds.
Now I know I might take flak on this statement but its more than often true. How can I say, well I use to be one of those designers 7 years ago. We were proud of our websites that we built. We were proud of things we could make those websites do. If you asked for a snazzy flash application, you’d get it. If you asked for a unique widget, you’d get it and plus some more.
In the end, it comes down to whether or not your website is making any money. When you want to get a website up, you have one goal. Often that is, either to sell or to generate leads or may be share information.
Let me say, designers are good at what they are doing. Often they are too good. That’s why you often need a full time Designer (as a programmer we hate touching other people’s code no matter how easy to use it is), a SEO expert and marketing & conversion expert to get your websites going and selling.
2. Too good to be TRUE SEO Expert
Though I don’t claim to be SEO expert or even try to pretend it on forums. But one thing I know SEO is one market full of pretenders. Of course when people see how much money is in this market, they instantly become SEO experts.
So beware, if someone is selling you something too good of a offer. There are no guaranteed top ranks. There is no magic software or super secret technique. Its pure effort and sheer marketing that can get you to top.
And trust me it doesn’t come easy or cheap. I only know handful of people who are at that level and I can count them on my hand. After creating & promoting 100’s of sites and blogs SEO comes like a second nature to me, I can say that for sure.
So what options do you have left?
Understand if you are treating website as just a handful of pages on internet or just another medium of promotion, you have to change you attitude. Website is a full time business. It’ll help you to learn the basics of Marketing and promoting your site. It’ll help you to learn the basics of SEO so that you don’t get cheated by SEO pretenders.
In this blog you’ll find many post related to marketing, conversion, design and everything related to promoting your website and business. You can read through it and don’t be shy in dropping me a mail and asking question. I do reply personally and often pretty quick.
How to Double Your prices With No Extra Effort
Ok today’s blog post is going to be all about doubling your prices. It doesn’t matter what field you are in, you can double your prices RIGHT NOW. Don’t worry I’ll tell you how to…but first lets tackle the biggest myths…
Myth : You need Experience to Charge High Prices
When I started with my freelance business about 9 years ago as a programmer… Something my first client that struck with me…
“You can’t charge high prices, nobody will pay you. Heck you have to work for free few months”.
It pissed me to no end when I heard it, moreover I can’t forget the most villainous look in his eye. Everything told me that I shouldn’t work with this guy… YET, I did it… Guess what, he robbed me on my efforts. He got the software without paying any single penny. Do you believe I was robbed off from 3 months of my effort?
Charging high prices is all about confidence. It isn’t about experience. Its just that with experience you feel like “You’ve arrived” that’s why you are start charging high.
Trust me it doesn’t matter much with experience. A 15 year old computer geek will write the same code as any 40 yr old computer geek. Heck there have been more than few occasions when 15 yrs kicked old guys arse.
Remember : Job Rules Doesn’t Apply to Freelancers
When I started with website designing… I adopted to new policy. 75% of payment first and then I’ll write a single line of code, 25% payment the moment you’ll clear the design. If they are worrying about prices, I’d told them how to get low price websites from college kids but you’ll get what you pay for.
Here’s your option, Get paid like a celebrity in 10 years from now or Get paid like celeb right now, what do you chose? There might be some unseen “getting paid” rule book for companies or getting JOB. but there is None for free lancers.
Ok here’s my secret of charging High…
Rule 1 : Stop Selling Yourself short : Throw all the negativity out the window. When you are talking to client, look directly into his eye and give your doubled price. Have confidence, heck don’t mind letting the confidence crossover to arrogance.
Rule 2 : Stop being an Expert in One thing. One of the biggest drawbacks of being the expert in one thing is that you can’t add-on the value. Let me explain… When I was a web designing, I knew about SEO(search engine optimization)… but never gave it a thought… I was an expert designer.
One day one of my client I was working with talked about SEO and grumbled how expensive they are… Well just for the heck I told him, I know how to do basic SEO and I could help him with SEO… Well to end the story short… I ended up being paid for basic SEO too. It literally doubled my income from that client.
Today If somebody ask me to design a website, I’ll end up selling him SEO service, Internet marketing consultant, copywriting services, blog consulting services and whole enchilada.
Rule 3 : Provide Value instead of service : Ok this might be bit of confusing to you. But read it carefully. Listen, anyone can provide service, but only very few can provide value.
let me explain this by a story : Last summer, I had to meet someone at one of the fast food chain(FFC for short). Now if you know about Indian Summer, its freaking hot. I sweat a lot and when I entered I was dripping wet. The person behind the counter greeted me and said “Its freaking hot today isn’t it?” and gave me paper napkin.
Now this is not something about courtesy. It had more about adding value. This guy noticed did few things right.
1. Sympathized with my situation
2. Noticed that I wasn’t carrying the handkerchief
3. Gave me napkins and talked to me…
That’s it… If you learn any lesson from this blog post, then learn this… Provide Value instead of service.
Action Plan :
1. Double your price and be confident.
2. Add more expertise under your belt (even if its borrowed expertise or hired)
3. Provide more value.
Marketing Research and Competitive analysis
3. Market Metrics
Get many Size estimates (current and future) for all of the following:
- Overall market
- Current size as it stands
- Potential size for the future
- Actual penetration of current products/service within the entire market
Individual market segments
- Current size
- Potential size
- Actual penetration of current products/service within the total market
- Usage rates
- Frequency of product purchases
- Growth estimates (current and in the future) for:
- Overall market
- Individual market segments
Competitive Analysis
You must include a Summary of who your Current Competitors are
Listing the competition by market share ranking (by each target market if possible) is a good way to size them up. You can also be more specific by searching for individual points listed below.
Current Competitors – full analysis of top competitors including:
- Products & Services (e.g., description, uniqueness, pricing, etc.)
- Their Market share at current
- Current customers (targeted audience)
- Positioning and promotion strategies
- Partnerships/Alliances/Distributors
- Recent news
SWOT Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats
It is extremely important to focus attention on the SWOT section of this report. While most other information in this report can be gleaned from company and secondary materials, much of what appears in the SWOT section is based on the researcher’s own opinions of the competitor based on the information that is collected.
Consequently, this is often one of the hardest areas of the report to write as well.
Potential Competitors (any competition in the future)
You will need to get an explanation (though it need not be as detailed as Current Competitors) on who they are or maybe and why they are seen as potential competitors
5. Additional
- Extraneous Variables
Discuss factors that may affect this market (e.g., technological, social, governmental, competitive, etc.) - Market Trends and what is expected to happen in the future
If you can follow these basic tips for finding and selecting your target market, you should be ready to search online and check out the competition and their rankings in the search engines.
Online Marketing Research Doesn’t Change
If you are trying to research your market for online business, things doesn’t change much. The marketing metrics, competition, demographics from offline real world doesn’t change much.
In order to be able to conduct a decent targeting and marketing campaign, you must first understand the fundamentals of finding out who they are. They only way to do this is to follow a specific guideline for you to follow. Check out the guideline below.
1. Your Objective to the Research
Explain in one paragraph why the research is being done, what you hope to learn and for what purpose the information that you attain may be used
2. Description of the Market
This should be general like one paragraph
Who is your Target Market(s)
- Why you chose this particular market
- Get a complete profile of your market (e.g., demographics, psychographics, behaviors)
- What benefits does your market seek (i.e., what points-of-pain or problems are being solved)
- What factors can affect their decision to purchase or use your product/service
- What attitudes do they have about the products/services that are currently not on the market
- How is the product used
- Products and Services that appeal to the target market
- In general terms, what is currently so appealing to this market
- If there are no current providers, what types of products/services may appeal to this market in the future (i.e., what is used now to solve the problem).
How to make money online
Start Making Money at Home in your Free time.
If you have been following on my quick & easy way to make money series, then you should be making some serious cash by now. My believe is handling your money problems with some quick part time job like this can be really helpful for work at home moms, students.
In today’s series on making money on the side, we’ll deal with some internet opportunity. Now you can all take this lightly or another scam or you can work on this serious. The choice is yours. The only thing that’ll be holding you back is your fear. Your fear of rejection (calling or contacting all the business owners, its scary thought, I know I went through this)
Ok enough of rants. Here’s the todays formula. It deals with Skype, Your local business owners and some of your charm. Don’t worry if you are not a poster boy/girl. I’ll give you enough tips to get through this idea.
Well, to start off, you need a list of business owners. You can get it either from your Local Yellow pages or walk around 5 miles radius from your place and talk to each and every single business there.
You are going to tell them that you can help generate more leads and loyal customers without spending any money on the advertisement. If they are interested, then you can give your idea.
Of course, any business owner who doesn’t want more loyal customers is insane. So they’ll ask for your bright idea.
You’ll explain how educating their customer about their business will help them grow.
You’ll explain how relating and talking with their customers will create relationship, increase trust in their business.
You’ll explain how this will make them as an Instant expert in their customers eyes for their market.
and so on… Again. You need to prepare a complete speech for this. Think of all the benefits you can if business owners interact with prospects.
Now, you’ll introduce yourself as a Expert Interviewer whose job is to interview important people in the market. You’ll tell them how you can use Skype and create a series of questions which you’ll ask them with a live audience and then this teleseminar will be like a live sales pitch going out to hundreds of prospects.
You’ll have to tell them, how he/she can differentiate their business on live teleseminar like this and generate more loyal customers.
The Only DrawBack: is when the business man is not into speaking. In these cases just tell them, you’ll be interviewing them on phone and there’s going to be no pressure on them to perform or You can ask his/her best salesman and help promote their business.
How much you can charge? You can charge anywhere from $600 – $1000 per interview. You can include a copywriting job for classifieds in this price. And rest is your efforts in interviewing them.
Now if you don’t know how to use skype to set up teleseminars, then Try out my Skype Secrets and Teleseminar Basics package.
To prepare for the interview. You should write out all the questions and give them to the business owners. Tell them to prepare on these questions. Give them direction that it’ll be more or less these questions paraphrased by you in interview. That’s it.
This is a technique that you can use it starting right now to make some serious cash.
How to Make Money Fast and Easy
How to Make Money Fast and Easy?
Well if you are If you are a freelancer and want to start make some cash fast & easy, then this article might suit you. What I am going to show is not theory or just something I just made up while I was trying to write this post. I am going to give you 2 ways by which people have already implemented successfully.
I am going to give you to the point methods to generate fast cash. You’ll love these ideas if you work on it. If you don’t, well, I can’t help it then…
1. Making Money With Yellow Pages Fast and Easy. This is one technique I know quite a few copywriters implemented when they were short on cash (and experience). Here’s what you should be doing…
Open up your Yellow Pages: Check out any business that you’d like to work with (or know about). Now notice their ads. If you know copywriting 101, then you can recognize good ads from bad ones. If you want some basic Copywriting 101 then check out my earlier post on Advertising 102: How to sell more from your classified ads.
Chances are most ads are in pretty bad shape. This is your gold mine.
Now this is what you are going to do…
You are going to write a letter to these business owners. Write 3-5 tips on how they can improve their yellow pages ad and get more leads for their business. You are going to introduce yourself as a yellow pages copywriter.
Tell them how they are spending money on pretty graphics and color.
Tell them how they are wasting their ad space with nothing but big white spaces. You can write a yellow page ad which address the problem of their clients and generate more leads from their yellow pages ads.
Tell them how if they differentiate themselves from others will increase their chances of getting more calls.
All you need to do is write 10 letters to these business owners daily. In a week, you’ll be dealing with few of those. Then all you need to do is talk about how their ads can improve.
Here’s a Secret TIP: Never Ever Talk about yourself. Talk about them, their business, their clients etc… Sell them on themselves.
Another Power tip To increase cashflow for you: Do you know yellow pages publishing schedule is different for different states? Now this can be problem for you. But worry not, as I am here.
Here’s what you do, you just find business owners from other states and contact them. With internet everything is possible. Contact is dirt cheap. Use skype to contact them for free. But that’s not what I want to tell you in this tip.
You see, tell these business owners about classified ads. How you can help improve their calls just from classified ads. Basic copywriting 101 still works. If you can’t get yellow pages, try out classified ads job. I know its hard sell. but You don’t have much of a choice, Do you?
How much you should charge to generate cash fast? If you ask me, charge somewhere between $500 – $800 per yellow page ads. and about $400 for a small classified ads. If you get 1 job per week, you are set. Isn’t that right?
I’ll add second technique on how to making fast and easy money on the internet in another post. Take my suggestion and try this advice. It’s not that hard.
Frugal marketing for entrepreneurs
Frugal Marketing for Entrepreneurs
How do you market when chips are low? You think smarter than other guys. Here are few ideas to get your brains in gear.
Referrals : This is what you call “Words of Mouth” Marketing. People talk about you and you get business. But How do you get people talking about you? Isn’t that pain to think about it?
Yesterday I was doing an extensive consultation with a client. His Jaw dropped when I explained Referral Strategy for his business. There was nothing new about it (at least not to me). This strategy was very simple. Contact Existing clients and give them reason (incentive) to talk about his services.
I had him create 3 different lists of his clients/ New clients and prospects. Now you have to approach all of them with a different message to provide him referral.
For example here’s what I do, when someone consults me, I give them 2 Free Critiques Coupon of their advertisements (that’s $700 worth). They can use their first critique without any obligation. But If they need a second one, They’d have to provide this free coupon to their friends/colleagues or business partner, Only then their 2nd coupon will be valid.
Now after consulting with me and critique, often business owners want to get that free critique as its not just sham, the critique is real deal. It’s helping me generate business.
Email Signature: This is so simple that even experts miss them. How many e-mail messages do you send everyday? You’re probable missing out on a simple, inexpensive marketing tool. Seize the opportunity to promote your business to a highly targeted market without spending a dime by utilizing your e-mail signature line.
If your email signature line only contains your name and contact information, you’re missing out on advertising to e-mail recipients that have opted for communications from you.
These people are key members of your unofficial marketing network. They are your prospects, clients, press contacts and colleagues and your signature line is the perfect, unobtrusive space for a unique promotional pitch.
Try these tactics to turn your “sign-offs” into sales:
? Highlight what your company offers.
? Offer an incentive for recipients taken a specified action.
? Use the associated web address for the incentive, if it’s also on your site.
? Give better visual positioning to the promotion rather than contact info.
? Play with eye-catching fonts and colors.
? Use less than 64 characters/line so that words don’t wrap to a new line.
? Write a “signature” for different categories of recipients.
? Change your signature copy frequently.
? Never miss a chance to get your product or company noticed.
White Paper Writing: This one is so underused and misunderstood technique, its unbelievable. Now Another thing you can do is create a white paper on some important topic in your niche.
You can always highlight the Obvious problems in your industry. You can always talk about changing trend in the industry. Again the Idea is to have a reason why people should ask for this document.
Now whenever a prospect calls, you can give this white paper away for free to educate them about your services and industry. This is good way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
How much time it takes to write a White Paper? Well, not much actually. You don’t need to write a complete bible on the topic. All you need is good 4-6 pages of content and you are set. I can crank out 6 pages in about an hour. It’ll take couple of days, if you are really bad. 
So what I am saying is You can always market your business when chips are down. If you are not doing it, you are just playing games.
Ebook Writing : Can You Do it?
If you are looking to start working part time, then here’s your chance. Read on How you can do it while sitting at your home.
If you are a savvy writer with great English grammar skills, you should consider writing eBooks. It pays very well and you can do it in the comfort of your own home.It is very simple to write up an eBook.
All you need to do is have Microsoft word and the internet.
Here are few important points for you.
1. Research : Do some research first on the topic.Know everything you can know about it, read up on it and save some quotes in your favorites area. You may want to stop by the local library to pick up some books on the topic too. That will help you when writing up your eBook.
You have many places where you can look into existing content like public domain websites, albiris.org, forums in your niche market. You just have to open up google.com and start researching.
2. Layout or Outline : Next step is to create an outline for your book. You’ll decide what topics or sub topics you’ll add. Create a rough layout for starting, when you are finished with first draft, you can add or delete from your layouts.
3. Start Writing : Now all you need to do is write, write and write. That’s it. Don’t edit something you just wrote. Editing is not important right now. Just write. When you are finished, add few finishing touches (adding more sub topics etc) and then just take a rest
4. Editing : Now after a good rest, become the ruthless editor you can be… Edit out every single spelling, grammar mistake you can find. Also, give your ebook for some you know with good English to do some editing.
5. Selling it : Now You have two options, Either sell the ebook yourself or sell the exclusive rights to other marketers. You can sell rights to other marketers at marketing forums like warrior forum or sitepoint forums. There are tons of places where you can sell your product.
6. Need More Work : You can go and check out, guru.com, elance.com scriptlance.com for more ebook writing work. This is an auction site (like ebay) where people will tell you what they need and you bid on their projects.
Again, Like I said, if you want to work freelance, there is no worries to find more work for you. Just get going.
Cheat Sheet for Web Design Consultation
Ok guys, here is a cheat sheet that you can use for your web design consultation. Well I used it years ago (like in 2001-02), It was in very primitive form. Today for my main consultations like (Seo Consultation or Blog & Conversion Consultation), I use improved and modified form of cheat sheet.
What’s exactly a cheat sheet?
Well, its nothing but a simple questionnaire that you’ll ask your clients and write down answers. Depending on how you are asking, it looks more professional.
Why I call is my Cheat sheet?
My basic idea behind building a questionnaire was to help me understand my client and her needs. If I can do that and show that I am trying to understand her market and customers. I noticed the trust factor (X factor for your business) always went up.
Please remember one important thing, You always need to build a rapport with your clients so that you can not only help them provide good services but also maintain long term relationships with them.
Here were my goals while creating a cheat sheet….
1. Understanding the Market of client.
2. Understanding the mindset of client’s customer.
3. Providing solution to the needs in a way that actually helps your client’s customer.
I am uploading my cheat sheet as in PDF format so all the Windows or Mac users can use this file. All you need is adobe acrobat reader to open them… Ok. From my experience you can use this kind of cheat sheet for any business you may have. Its easily transferable.
Freelancing: Your first few steps
9 years ago, I decided I would rather struggle and starve than find a normal 9-5 hr (is there such this as 9-5? I wonder) JOB. I was just a greenhorn right out of high school at ripe age of 17. I had my shares of ups and downs. And boy, do I have few horror stories to share?
Today after putting together a successful business, I often wonder if I’d do things differently if I have to start again. Of course there are tons of things but I am going to highlight most important ones here. I know these are going to help you a lot.
I don’t know why you are starting out? may be you don’t like your boss or may be you think it’s better to work yourself and make all the money. Regardless of your reasons, you’ll find this list help.
1. Have More confidence in Your Skill : No matter who you meet, be it an expert businessman or an authority figure in your niche. Have more confidence. I cannot stress this enough. If you have worked hard to learn a skill then I can bet, there are only a few people better than you.
I was a programmer and I understood this unknowingly to the extent I was arrogant about it. I have met many highly paid programmers and knew their skills weren’t at my level. If I start again, I’d not mind crossing the arrogance line once again.
Why? If you are confident in your skill, that’ll come across in your communication and will help you land a client or two regardless of your experience. I had more than few HR managers of big firms looking to hire me.
2. No More Free Work : I’d do no work which doesn’t get me paid right now. Nope, never. I did this mistake to “build my portfolio”. And trust me not many people trust your skills if you are working for free.
If you like doing charity work, then I can show you tons of guys who’ll squeeze every drop of blood out of you before you say “Hi”.
3. Give discounts or Free for promise of more work: Now my first client was like “If you work for me, I’ll get you this guy, that guy and that guy’s account and more over you guys aren’t even experienced, nobody will pay you a single dime”.
If that happens to you. Find a better client. Trust me… This client was big pain in the arse. I had a bad hunch, but my partner told me to go ahead. He’d change his requirements of this project every day and then later cut down the deadline from 90 days to 50 days.
If you have been in programming, then you know it’s not easy at all. From coding, to testing and debugging. We worked our asses off for this… and what we got? Nothing, Nada, zippo.
Well the only good thing we got out of this client was understanding how to deal with people like him. That’s it. Never got paid for this project. My finger tips still hurt after working for him day in day out. I might talk more about dealing with guys like him in another post.
4. Learn to Sell Yourself: if you are anything of geek like I was 9 years ago. selling, negotiating and marketing might sound like an alien words. But trust me, if you learn how to sell yourself, you’ll make 10 times of money you are making right now… Again, I can’t give justice to a topic like this in small list so I’ll write another post on it.
So far Here’s my advice to you. Go to google and search for “Scientific advertising” by Claude Hopkins. Download this book(it’s free) and read it from cover to cover at least 10 times. It’s an old book, but it’s philosophy still applies.
5. Network with like minded people: I so regret not trying networking when I was starting out. Find people who are freelancers in your niche. Get to know them and ask them if you could help them.
There’s good chance of someone giving you small projects from their own.
6 No Work is Small: Don’t mind doing small work like “assembling someone’s computer or speeding up computers performances”. Its better than sitting and doing nothing.
7. Think Obvious: Now too many people try to think out of the box. Trying to think different. Its not bad thinking different. But also think about the obvious. Lets say you are a computer geek and want some work.. What’s the most obvious thing to do?
You know what? Find people who have computer and solve their problems.
What’s the next obvious thing to do? Find people who own a small business running on computers and solve their computer problems.
If you don’t get people like these what’s the next obvious thing to do? Well, leave your card with all the people you found above & giving them assurance of fixing their computer even if its 2 am.
Are you still trying to be different? You better not.
7. Be frugal : If you are just starting out as a freelancer. The only money you need to spend is on your business card. Everything else like office space, fax, copier etc etc are just expense you don’t need right now.
Don’t make the same mistakes I did. If you don’t mind doing some grunt work, you might see yourself working on good projects in no time. Now print this list out and paste with your mirror. So that you slam these points in your mind.
Varun Pratap
Strategic Internet Marketing- Article Writing – Turn Articles Into Ebooks and get paid
- Why You should Ignore Search Engines?
- Affiliate Marketers – Can You reduce Your Time/Money expenditure by 70%?
- How Not To Suck at making Money?
- Internet Marketing Strategy – Why Do Some Affiliate Marketers Fail?
- My Secret Behind High Speed Writing.
- Market Positioning – 4 Tips to Position Yourself As an Expert in Any Market
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