Saturday, April 29, 2006

Innovators, Looking For Some Online Resources ?

Small businesses, independent innovators, authors, and artists often find it difficult to locate useful sources of information and services pertaining to intellectual property industry. A number of online forums, including Patentcafe.com, NewIdeaTrade.com, and Inventioncity.com now provide innovators a wide range of free tools and resources.

At http://www.newideatrade.com/inventions.htm innovators can find detailed information on how to obtain a patent and a list of patent/copyright offices and intellectual property associations around the world. They can also review a sample non-disclosure agreement that can be used when someone with an unpatented idea or invention wants to show it to another party, and wants that party to not disclose any of the information. The forum also lists several free tools and resources that help innovators promote their websites.

At http://www.patentcafe.com, innovators can find information on invention evaluation, patent licensing, product development, patent search, and patent software. It also publishes useful articles on various aspects of the intellectual property industry. Innovators can also register their websites on its directory.

InventionCity (http://www.inventioncity.com) offers a host of tools and information including innovation market research, manufacturing, financing, and marketing resources. It also allows innovators to post their intellectual property on its database. In addition, it offers a list of helpful books and articles ranging from mastering the dynamics of innovation to anatomy of a business plan.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Thinking Of Turning Any Product Into Residual Income?

The concept of this is for you to offer a subscription type product as an upsell or backend product. For example, if you're selling an ebook for $35 offer a subscription to a related e-zine for $8.85 a month. Instead of an e-zine, it could be monthly updated information for the ebook.

It's not just for e-books, you can make it work for any product or service you sell. Some subscriptions that might work for your product could be:

  • e-mail/telephone consulting

  • a private or members only web site

  • print newsletters/magazines

  • product updates

  • subscription warrantees

  • product insurance

  • e-zine/webzines

  • the ideas are endless.....

The subscription product should be related to the product or service you're selling. You could charge a weekly, monthly, or yearly subscription for the upsell product. You could sell your main product and upsell product as a total subscription package deal. You wouldn't charge the one-time price for your main product; you would just charge the basic subscription price of the upsell product.

The major benefits are that you don't have to keep creating new upsell and back end products. Once you get enough subscribers you won't have to sell anymore, you just keep generating income from your current subscribers. You would only have to sell again if you lost a lot of subscribers.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Promotion Tools For Online Businesses

Promotion... also known as selling. Not an easy task in today's market, but with the right tools you can succeed. What I know is what I have learned in promoting a.k.a. selling my web site, spiritwhole.com, and trust me, I could write volumes by now. But, to make it short and sweet, here are some tips that you can use to get your business purring like a kitten that actually work:

  • Your friends and family. Yes, they love you, and most of them are more than happy to help you out. What I did was design a killer flyer and asked them to distribute them to their co-workers and the like. Now that's cheap labor.

  • I wrote a few articles that interested me and tied them in with my business then, approached various sites that I thought would be genuinely interested. Most of them that I approached were interested and, guess what, people are reading my articles with my business name tagged at the end.

  • Donate a percentage of your profits to a good cause that interests you. This generates tons of interest in your business by word of mouth and by association with the company that you are donating to. And hey, you'll have better karma too.

  • Send small inserts with your bill payments. Yes, with your bills. Traffic to my site doubled after I began doing this. The people that you pay money to are opening the envelope and depositing the checks that you sent to them. Why not add a small insert with your payment....they promote like crazy with inserts when they send you the bill. You're just returning the favor.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Small Businesses Survival In A Crazy Economy

Contrary to popular belief, small businesses can survive a crazy
economy by taking some proactive steps.

1. Provide spectacular customer service -- every time. Have a friend
or colleague visit your business and provide feedback from a
customer's perspective. This person should be unknown by your staff
and willing to provide a candid assessment.

2. Make sure your front and back office work like a well-oiled
machine. Are the front line and the back office telling your customers
the same thing?

3. Manage your customer relationships -- return customers take the
least amount of effort -- use that to your advantage. Keep in touch
often.

4. Review your strategic plan monthly (weekly is even better). Make
sure you're doing the things that will get you where you want to go.

5. Adjust your strategic plan as necessary. Your "smallness" makes you
more flexible.

6. Communicate, communicate, communicate -- with your employees and
your customers. Nurture those relationships. Ask for feedback often.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Fear Free Advertising :-)

Is fear of failure an issue when you commit valuable money in advertising?

Well how about if I showed you a way to remove this fear and you know that you would be able to spend money advertising KNOWING you would get a return?

Is that a valuable lesson? Of course it is!

So, how do you do it?
The answer is testing!

It's simple really.. Instead of sending out 1000 sales letters for example. Send out 500. In these 500 have 5 different headlines so 5 x 100 = 500

Why? Well what we are trying to establish here is what headline or sales offer pulls best. Once we know which one works then we do a mass mailing, but not before then!

You see I have seen so many companies waste hundreds even thousands of pounds on non result direct mail... all because they didn't test! So save yourself time and money by testing EVERTHING you do.

If it's an advert in the local press, sign up for 5 small inserts over 5 weeks rather than 1 big page as a one off. This will be cheaper but will also allow you to test different offers.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Using Banner Ads Effectively

It's no big secret that banner ads have become less effective than text links over the years. This phenomenon is called "banner blindness". Banners were so ubiquitous in the early years of the Internet that users simply began to ignore them.

So what did many advertisers do to combat banner blindness? They made their banners harder to ignore by causing them to flash, rotate, jump around, and all sorts of other annoying tricks.

This of course led most users to like banners even less! Does this mean that banner ads are useless? No, not at all!

There are several things that you can do to make your banner campaigns more effective. First of all, ensure that each of your banners is pleasant to look at and blends in well with the web page it's displayed on. Match up the design and color scheme with those of the site.

This means you'll need to create a customized banner for each and every site you advertise on, but the results will most definitely make the extra effort and expense well worth it!

You also need to place your banners on relevant pages (not just relevant sites). For example, a banner ad for a logo design service will convert much better on an article page about web design than on a page about dog grooming.

Another technique that works extremely well is making your banners look just like regular text links. Here's how to do it:

  1. Create a normal text link for your offer that is designed to fill up the space used by a regular 468x60 banner.
  2. Upload a blank page with the text link on it to your website and view it in your web browser.
  3. Press the "Print Screen" button (Prt Scr).
  4. Load the Windows Paint application and click "Edit", and then "Paste". You'll see a screenshot of your new web page with nothing on it except for the text link.
  5. Click "File", and then "Save As". Save the image as a JPEG.
  6. Load the saved JPEG image into any photo editing program, then crop it to 468x60 pixels. You now have a standard 468x60 banner that looks just like a normal text link

Monday, April 10, 2006

Finding Good Keywords?

Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you find them.

Wordtracker
The best tool out there, Wordtracker is one of the most essential SEO tools. To use Wordtracker:

  • Go to the Wordtracker website (http://www.wordtracker.com)
  • Enter a keyword phrase you're thinking about targeting
  • Wordtracker will suggest hundreds of related phrases - click on the ones you like
  • Once you've clicked on all the phrases you like, run them through the program
  • Wordtracker will compile a score for each phrase, based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it
  • The higher the score, the better the keyword phrase!
  • Wordtracker also offers a free service which works in the same way but only uses results generated from MSN.

Overture
Also useful, Overture's search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ ), is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works in much the same way as Wordtracker but doesn't tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.

Google
Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox) tell you which keyword phrases are being targeted by other websites.

Guidebeam
Guidebeam (http://www.guidebeam.com) is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers provided for each phrase are Guidebeam's estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Do Link Exchanges Really Work?

Should link exchanges be used? What are link exchanges? Do they really work? These are just a few questions that most webmasters come across at a link exchange. Link exchanges are sites that help webmasters find link partners for the benefit of traffic. Link exchanges are one of those that help you get link partners for traffic. They are used by some to get more link popularity to increase their ranking in the search engines like Yahoo! or Google, which both use to calculate web pages ranking in the search engine results.

Over the years link exchanges have been criticized by both webmasters and search engines, even have been targeted by search engines. They have been called link farms and link scams. The truth is that they are not link farms, link farms are network of sites that each link to the other site for the benefit of high ranking on the search engines and most link exchanges are not so called link scams. How can you tell the difference between non-link scams and link scams? There are a few things that you should look at closely at link exchanges.

  1. Do you have to upload a web page or file to your site?
  2. Are they in the search engines?
  3. Are most member's sites spamming?
  4. Does the link exchange look professional?

If any of these are truth about the link exchange you should not join and leave fast as you came. It is important to look at this very careful because you are investing in your site and this could crush your site's future.

Link exchanges have proved to be successful both for getting you good ranking and getting more traffic to your web site. Link exchanges are one of the most powerful tools you can have by your companies side, but like all things they have a down side because they can be abused and used the wrong way.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Psychological Desires Your Ads Must Have

1. Most people like surprises because it's a change of pace from their routine. Tell your prospects that they'll get a surprise free bonus for ordering.

2. Most people want life to be easier. Give your prospects easy ordering instructions, easy product instructions, etc.

3. Most people want to feel secure and safe. Tell your prospects that you have secure ordering and a privacy policy.

4. Most people want to receive compliments for their achievements. Give your prospects plenty of compliments for them considering your product.

5. Most people are curious about things that could affect their current lifestyle. You could use words like "Secret" or "Confidential" in your ad.

6. Most people want to invest in their future. Tell your prospects to "invest in your product" instead of "buy our product".

7. Most people want the latest and newest things in life. Use words and phrases in your ad copy like "New", "Just Released", etc.

8. Most people want to solve their problems. Tell your prospects what problems they have and how your product can solve them.

9. Most people want to make the people around them happy. Tell your prospects how happy their friends or family will be if they buy your product.

10. Most people want to get over obstacles so they can achieve their goals. Tell your prospects which goals they'll achieve by ordering your product.