Johann Pachelbel, a composer of the Baroque era, died in 1706. In 1706 the world’s entire population was some 600 million people. In 1954, Leo Fender designed the Fender Stratocaster, one of the most popular electric guitars ever made.

Neither of those two would have guessed that in 2007, a Korean guitarist would use Fender’s invention to play an electric guitar version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, his most famous piece of music. Soon playing Canon on an electric guitar became a cult phenomenon, especially by Asian guitar players.

The popularity of Canon, the electric guitar version, soon exploded far beyond cult status. YouTube videos of guitarists doing their renditions of Canon have been viewed by millions world wide. In fact, the aforementioned Korean, known as FunTwO, went on to TV appearances and fame after his YouTube performance of Canon, although he really tried to sidestep the whole thing.

At last count, the most popular video of his Canon performance had been viewed by just shy of 50 million people on YouTube alone. Other videos showing the same performance have received upwards of 5 million views. Other guitarists playing this piece have also been seen by between 1 and 5 million people.

The insane growth in popularity of a simple guitar video demonstrates the amazing power of YouTube, and other so called Web 2.0 sites like Flickr, FaceBook, and  Digg. The power of users to contribute content and have others rate it, share it, and comment on it has created a media tidal wave that’s only beginning.

Pachelbel probably would have never imagined his composition would have been played by a Korean teenager, on a yet to be invented instrument. The mere idea that it would be subsequently viewed by what amounts to 12% of the world’s population when it was written would have probably caused him to collapse.

Pachelbel’s Canon on guitar is just one of the many videos and web sites that has exploded when the right people got a hold of it. If something strike a chord, as this guitar video clearly did, there’s no way of telling where it will go.

The “Canon Explosion” illustrates the potential of Web 2.0. When this amount of traffic is harnessed to a business, the potential is endless. It can be used to drive traffic, build a list, and ultimately deliver huge profits. While YouTube videos with 50 million viewers are obviously a best case scenario, many marketers have done very well with the medium and other 2.0 applications.

A compelling video with only 20,000 – 50,000 viewers can generate huge revenue and profits if that’s the goal. Getting continued views and generating revenue from them requires the same as with any marketing effort; compelling, valuable content. The more value you give the viewer, the more likely they’ll be to visit your site, sign up for your newsletter, and buy your products.

The even more powerful effect of quality content and strong value is the ability of your videos to go viral. Once they start getting passed around, your exposure will grow like those weeds you’re neglecting in your yard as you read this. That’s the real power behind YouTube and web 2.0 marketing in general, The go on and on, reaching far beond the creator’s expectations, just like those notes from FunTwO’s Strat.

One of the most powerful techniques for growing your Internet marketing business is the joint venture, usually abbreviated JV. In a joint venture, you partner with another business or entrepreneur, each partner in the JV contributing something that will dramatically increase the success of the venture. It is such a powerful technique that many Internet marketing careers have relied on it for their success.

One of the most common joint venture techniques used by Internet marketers is to develop a product, typically some form of info product, and then partner with second Internet marketer to sell to the second marketer’s list. In this way the first marketer can sell to a much larger, but still highly targeted audience. As an added bonus, the first marketer also borrows the credibility of the second, and by so doing is able to substantially increase their conversion ratio.

You should know the story of one of the most successful JVs of all time. A small, virtually unknown company led by one man with almost nothing but a vision, silver tongue, and a ton of guts, pulled off a JV with an industry leader that changed the world as we know it. In so doing, they created a whole new product category that pervades every nook and cranny of civilization. The product they created revolutionized almost every aspect of life in one way or another.

In the span of a few short years, the little company catapulted to international prominence and actually overtook its’ JV partner in almost every category, including market capitalization, gross revenue and cash reserves. The man became rich beyond his wildest dreams.

One of the keys to success in any business is building value for the consumer. These companies created incredible value. Another is knowing your customer and what they want. The architect of this JV knew what consumers wanted even better than they, themselves did. You related the importance of being a solution provider. This JV found solutions to problems people didn’t even know they had. They showed consumers and businesses alike a better way, then made them rely on their product so much no one could ever return to the old way of doing things.

The little guy did a spectacular job of leveraging the industry leader’s credibility into his vision of success. The little guy was Bill Gates, the unknown company, Microsoft, and the industry leader, IBM. The PC they created coupled with the marketing genius of Gates truly revolutionized the world. Microsoft made the software and IBM, the PC. Microsoft now has 79,000 employees, has a market cap of over $321 billion, and made a gross profit of over $11 billion last quarter. They get my vote for the best JV of all time.

Here is exactly how to work online from home. You need to follow the following steps, which are, truth be told, much the same as beginning an offline business. There are just certain things you can do when working online that are either far less expensive, much faster to do, or both when you're working online than when you have a traditional business.

How to Work Online from Home – Step 1

Find your target market. The importance of this step cannot be understated. One of the key mistakes made by Internet marketing beginners, and too many business beginners of all types, is that they find a product or service they like and decide to market it. That's great, but if you like mud hut remodeling, your market is going to be small, poor, and without Internet connections. Not a good choice for your online business.

If you want to work online from home and be successful at it, you must first research the market. That means find a market that is hungry, better yet, starving, for something, then feed them exactly what they want. That is the largest secret to success in business, weather online or off. After your preliminary research you want to determine one other thing; how much competition is there in your market? While you can make large amounts of money in any hungry market, choosing an under served market is much better, especially if you're just beginning your work from home journey. Once you've found your target market you can proceed to step 2.

How to Work Online From Home – Step 2

Once you have a hungry target market you can begin step number 2; find something to sell them. You can choose a product or service, physical or virtual. You really have a few key decisions to make in this step.

●      Do you want to market a product or service?

●      The advantages of a product are that once it's created it can be sold by the creator or any one the creator gives selling rights to for as long as the marketing is successful. The disadvantage is that it has to be created, and if physical, stored and distributed.

●      The advantage of a service is that it doesn't have to be created. The vendor (you, the online business owner) can simply begin providing the service to clients. Examples of popular services that people that work on line from home online provide are web development, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing, business and/or marketing consulting, copywriting, and accounting / financial planning.

1. Do you want to develop your own product or market someone else's?

●      Pros of developing your own product -

●      Your own product will give you complete control of every aspect of it, including pricing strategy, advertising and marketing strategy, and the content and function of the product itself.

●      Your own product will allow you to retain as much of the profit as you want. You can keep it all or trade some of it away as an incentive for others to market your product. There are many examples of successful marketers giving lucrative commissions if they are selling digital or virtual products. In fact this strategy, affiliate marketing, is one of the proven paths to online marketing success (from either side).

●      You own it in its entirety. This is the most important aspect of creating your own product. All the other advantages flow from this.

●      You build the customer list, potentially one of the most valuable parts of your business, especially if you decide selling is part of your exit strategy.

●      You have the ability to begin with very limited start up costs, but typically there will be some marketing costs.

●      Cons of developing your own product -

●      It takes time to develop your own product

●      You may not have the expertise or writing skill to develop your own product

●      You have to deal with customer support issues, such as customer service calls, returns, and refunds. This can be expensive and time consuming, depending upon the type of product you develop. There are ways to mitigate much of this, such as automating much of the CS process and overdelivering content to minimize returns, but such things can never be completely eliminated.

●      If it's a physical product(s) you have warehousing, inventory, and fulfillment issues to deal with.

●      Some of the disadvantages of developing your own product can be mitigated by outsourcing if the funds for doing so are available. For example, you can outsource the actual product creation if you've found a hungry market but lack the expertise to develop a quality product fill their needs. This will result in a quicker time to market and a high quality product.

●      Pros of marketing someone else's product – Basically the advantages and disadvantages are the reverse of selling your own product / service.

●      You have no support issues because you actually don't sell the product(s) yourself, you simply refer customers to the vendors website and are paid a commission on any sales your referrals generate.

●      You have the ability to begin with very limited start up costs, but as with selling your own product, you can spend significant marketing funds.

●      Cons of marketing someone else's product -

●      You have no control over the product you're marketing. Although there are many advantages to just being able to begin marketing without any product development costs or time, the disadvantage of having no control over the products is a major disadvantage.

Imagine spending weeks or months developing and fine tuning your marketing efforts (You have to develop your website(s), advertising, get backlinks to your site, publicity, and any other supporting content, test everything, test it some more, and get any marketing agreements in place that you may have supporting your efforts) only to have the vendor either change the payout (these rarely change for the better), drop their affiliate program, or drop you as an affiliate. Ask any affiliate marketer. This happens all the time, for a variety of reasons.

How to Work Online From Home – Step 3

After you've made the decision about what you'll be marketing when you wok online from home, you can move on to step 3, how to market your product and / or service. It is essential you make an actual marketing plan. This is rarely done by most beginning marketers, who tend to treat online marketing as a hobby, rather than an actual business. Part of this is due to the fact that few beginners have any formal business training. In addition, many beginning marketers just think they'll use their online business to earn a few extra buck and supplement the income from their day job.

This kind of thinking is a huge mistake. With a bit of planning and some vision, your online business can easily relieve you from the daily commute and limited income of your current job, but that will be much less likely if it's not treated as a real business. So the bottom line is that you need to develop an actual marketing plan. You can alter it as circumstances change and your business develops, but the important thing is tat you make that marketing plan and address the following questions:

●      What will you be marketing?

●      Who will you market it to?

●      How will you market it to them?

●      Will you advertise? If so, how. You have several choices for online advertising. Many people use pay per click (PPC) advertising. It's fast, and has the potential to drive large quantities of qualified prospects to your website in a hurry. You can advertise on many well targeted web sites and you'll only pay when someone clicks on your add and goes to your website (hence the term pay per click). Its is not as easy as it sounds however and many beginning, and in some cases more advanced, marketers have lost their shirts and their advertising budgets in a hurry by stumbling blindly into a PPC campaign.

●      You can also use banner advertising, where an attractive banner is placed on a website with visitors that you'd like to attract. The disadvantage is that many people have become ad blind and you may not get much good traffic from your efforts. The advantage is that is can be relatively inexpensive. If you get no traffic however, it is actually very expensive on a per visitor basis.

●      Will you use an affiliate strategy?

●      This can be the cornerstone of your success. You'll forgo some profit on the front end, but you will have a large and active sales staff out there selling your product for you. It doesn't take much to see how a few strong affiliates can generate significant numbers for you.

One of the major advantages is that even though they send you the customer, the customer buys your product and is actually your customer, so you will have them on your greatest asset, your customer list. Once they're part of your list, you can market to them for years in some cases. In many cases the value of the customer on the back end is far higher than the initial sale.

That’s why so many Online marketers say “The money’s in the list.”, and they’re right. You’ll have the ability to market new products to your existing customers, which, if they loved your first product, should be an easy sale.

How to Work Online From Home – Step 4

This is the most tedious step in developing your online business. It’s no coincidence that “testing” and “tedium” both begin with the letter ‘T’. Although testing can be boring and dreary, it can easily be the difference between your success and failure online. It’s one of the huge advantages that an online business has over a traditional business. You can easily test between two different ad headlines for example, and have meaningful results in a few hours or days. In an offline business that could take weeks or months, and you may still not get the accuracy that you’d get from using online testing methods.

There are so many variables that you need to test it can easily be overwhelming, especially for beginners. You can get significantly different results from headline changes, ad copy changes, colors, web content changes, different product names, pricing, different payment systems that you accept, and so on. Sometimes there can be little difference, but other times a seemingly minor change can make more than a few percentage points difference. Add a few of these “minor” changes up and you can easily see 50% - 100% increases in sales. You can also significantly lower your ad spend and raise ad efficiency by through testing. If you weren’t doing structured testing you’d either not make any positive changes, or not know exactly why you were seeing improved results.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of How to Work Online From Home.

Floundering On the Net??
You just need some help……Check out these.
The sites, blogs, and forums, you need to help you make it big online.

 
Web 2.0:
You can use these user generated content and social bookmarking sites to generate a ton of traffic and a presence online.
http://www.technorati.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com

http://digg.com/

http://www.mixx.com/

http://www.propeller.com/

http://www.reddit.com/

http://delicious.com/

http://answers.yahoo.com/

Blogs:
Tons of info about making money online, Internet marketing, search engine optimization, and growing your business.
http://liveanotherday.com/blog/

http://www.problogger.net/

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

http://www.doshdosh.com 

Blog Carnival Index:
http://blogcarnival.com/bc/

Ad Networks (for web publishers):
Host pay per click ads on your site. When people click on the ads, you get paid.
http://www.google.com/adsense

http://chitika.com/index.php

Ad Networks (for advertisers):

Pay per click advertising networks. Drive traffic to your site, you pay only when your ad is clicked on.
http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/

http://adwords.google.com/select/Login

http://chitika.com/index.php

https://adcenter.microsoft.com/

Forums:
You can learn more than you’ll ever need to know about marketing in general, and online specifically, from these forums -
http://www.warriorforum.com/

http://www.bestwarriorthreads.com/

http://www.abestweb.com/

http://www.clickbanksuccessforum.com/

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

http://www.associateprograms.com/discus/index.php

Tools:
Keyword optimization tools and site analytics. Actionable information is one of the keys to success. Here’s how to get it. Remember, testing, testing, testing.
http://www.sitemeter.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

Affiliate Networks:
Sell other company’s stuff, or refer a lead online, and get paid a commission.
http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com

http://www.linkshare.com/

http://www.shareasale.com

http://www.kolimbo.com

http://www.cj.com/

https://www.clickbank.com/index.html

http://www.performics.com/

Article Directories:
Get your articles published – you get links – not just from the directories themselves, but from every sire owner and e-zine publisher who uses one of your articles.
 http://ezinearticles.com/
 http://www.goarticles.com/
 http://www.articledashboard.com/
 http://searchwarp.com/
 http://www.webreference.com/new/submit.html
 http://www.articlesbase.com/
 http://www.buzzle.com/

 http://www.articlealley.com

 http://www.articlesfactory.com/

 http://www.articlecity.com
 

Another Site You Shouldn’t Miss
http://www.webmasterworld.com/

This by no means a compete list. Far from it, but it's sure enough to get started. Here's t your home based business success. 

What if I could tell you how to supercharge your home based business marketing, get more free traffic and increase your business' credibility all at the same time? What if I also told you that none of this, not the increased traffic, the boost in cred, or the new customers banging down your door, would cost you a penny?

Would you be interested? I bet you would, because once you master this skill, the question of how to make money from your home based business will be answered once and for all. Did you know that there are thousands of hard working people whose job it is to help people find your business and learn more about it? Really! That's their job. They come to work, (or work from their home office) every day with the goal of helping you to grow your business.

Well actually that's not what their stated goal is, but it's the effect of what they do. Who is this army of professionals that are standing by, at the ready, waiting to help you succeed in your home based or small business?

They are publishers, reporters, bloggers, and anchors. One thing they need, unfailingly, each and every day, is fresh, new content. They will willingly write about you, your employees, your products, your industry, and your business if you give them a reason to do so. That's right, these people's job is to write about things, and in many cases your business, or something related to it, can be the object of their efforts.

Think of the monumentous job it is to produce fresh, new content for your newspaper, magazine, blog, e-zine, or TV program. It's not easy, and if you can help make their job easier by giving them good stories, than you'll be rewarded; well rewarded. The skill you must master to help these people, and by extension your business, is the skill of publicity.

Publicity is like free advertising, but better, far better. Why? Publicity is seen by the public (your customers) as coming from an unbiased source, the news and media. In other words, publicity has credibility. It has credibility that advertising can never match, not in a million years. With advertising, no matter how compelling the headline, or how good the ad copy, people are well aware they're being sold something. The beauty of publicity is that the sales pitch can be just as strong, yet far fewer people ever raise their “ad blocker” defenses against it. They know that it's news or valuable information, after all, and they should soak it up like a sponge. They do, and your message right along with it.

The other huge advantage of publicity is that, as I alluded to earlier, it's free. That's right you don't have to pay for this wonderous marketing tool. In fact sometimes you can even get paid for it! Really! I've made thousands of dollars over the last few years writing feature articles for consumer magazines about products and services that some of my business offered.

Not only does it increase awareness, interest and understanding of the products and services, but in most cases you get a nice little blurb explaining why you're so qualified to be spouting off about the item in question. You get to put the name and location of your company, the contact information and something about your background. Talk about pure marketing gold!!

Now you're positioned as The authority figure in the minds of the publication's readers. Who do you think they're going to turn to when they have a question, need advice, the services you offer or want to buy the type of products your company offers? That's right, they're going to go to the person who's article they just read. You provided value to them, they will return the favor. It works so well that I've had many people ask “How much did you have to pay for that?” They were amazed to discover that not only did I not have to pay the magazine for featuring the story, the magazine actually paid me to write it (and very nicely, too).

Weather you're spreading the news about a new product, service, opening a new office, hiring a key employee, unveiling your new website, or explaining a new process, there is a magazine, news outlet, special interest publication, or trade journal that is only too happy to help you do it. That is their job, remember? Your job as a business owner is to take advantage of that to help grow your business.

How can you do that? You need to discover the wonders of press releases, articles, and interviews. A well worded and timed press release can be worth far more than a picture or a thousand words, although either of those is nice too. Why do think the book tour was invented. Have you noticed the staple of the afternoon news magazine show in major TV markets is someone who just wrote a book?

There's a great reason for that. From the TV station's perspective, people are interested in what they have to say, so it it helps ratings. From the author's perspective, well you don't have to be no missile scientist to figure out how being on live TV in all the major markets helps the book's author, do you.

Almost anything can be a newsworthy event if it's presented correctly. Did you just promote someone from the community into a management role? Well, you can get that in the business section of your local paper. Are you introducing a new product? Depending upon the type of product, it's uniqueness and your market, that screams magazine article, or at should at least rate a paragraph or two. Are you holding or sponsoring a charity event, supporting local law enforcement, or helping out neighborhood schools? Properly structured, it can be a newsworthy event to someone, somewhere.

The point is that almost anything your business is involved in can be a news event or publicity worthy in some respect. If it's not, you can always create a publicity event around some aspect of your business. One skill you'll need to master is the press release. After all, you need to trumpet the fact to those that can help you the most, and the press release is one of the preferred formats to do just that.

I'll go more into this in a future post, including how to write press releases that will get read, and acted upon, rather than tossed, and who to send them to. Send your press release to the wrong person, at the wrong place, and you just wasted your time.

Stay tuned for more on how you can use this amazing power to increase your traffic, boost your credibility and supercharge your small business marketing. Until next time.....

One of the most important is choosing the right keyword phrase to get ranked for. You want a keyword phrase that targets your desired visitors, but in most cases you’ll want to stay away from the terms that have millions of other sites competing for them. You want to try and dominate the smaller niche terms.

To find the desired terms you’ll need a keyword tool to tell you what people are actually searching for when they use the search engines. It should tell you the phrase and how many searches it gets every month on Google, Yahoo, or MSN Live Search. There are many of these tools out there, both free, subscription based and requiring a 1 time fee.

 For years Google has had a fairly nice keyword tool. It gave you graphs that ranked the number of searches from 1 through 5. The problem has been that the Google tool doesn’t really tell you how many searches were done, just the comparative ranking against other keywords. That’s just not enough information if you’re trying to do some search engine optimization.

Proper optimization requires you to optimize on-page factors such as the title. The page title can make all the difference in the world, as I explained in my post on How to Choose a Title to Increase Targeted Traffic that I posted a few months ago. You want to actually write a post or create a web page that addresses the exact question people are asking, in the exact way that they asked it.

In order to do that, you either need to ask everyone that’s ever searched for things related to your site or blog, or you can use a keyword tool, such as I mentioned above. As I indicated Google’s free keyword tool had a major limitation in that it merely gave an idea of the relative amount of searches performed, not the actual number.

That has all changed now. Yesterday Google revised their free keyword tool (see it here) to include not only the actual number of searches performed for a specific keyword or phrase, but the average number performed over the past year, a graphical trend meter for the previous year, how much relative advertiser competition there is for the terms or keywords, and which month actually had the largest number of searches for the keywords. It does all this in addition to doing the same keyword suggestion functions as it did in the past. The best part is that this powerful bit of keyword and search engine marketing help is all free (not that Google really needs the money).

First, determine which phrases have the highest number of searches. Then you can find an idea of the amount of competition that you’ll face when you try to get high search engine rankings for the terms with the following simple technique. Just enter the phrase you want to rank for in quotes into the Google search box. The number of results you get from the Google search gives you a good idea of how many competitors you’ll face when trying to get ranked for a particular search term.

Typically you’ll face stiff competition when trying to get ranked for general terms with large numbers of searches. The key is to choose terms with a smaller number of searches, but very low competition.

As an example, the term ‘cars’ has 83 million searches a month in Google. While it would be nice to get even a small piece of that 83 million, you’ll have some problems. One is that the term is very broad. If you ranked well for the term cars, you’ll get people looking for cars, car sales, car insurance, used cars, new cars, car mechanics, car parts, car magazines, etc. You would probably do better to focus on exactly what you’re selling that’s car related, and concentrate on getting good rankings for terms related to that.

If you wanted to be a portal, you may get a good amount of traffic at some point with a term as broad as ‘cars’, but a number of well established sites already rank well for that. They have several advantages; they are well aged, have many good content pages, and tons of backlinks from other well regarded sites (Google reports cars.com has 195,000 backlinks, and they typically under-report backlinks). Currently, the number 1 rank for the term ‘cars’ is cars.com. There are 861 million other web sites besides cars.com that already rank in some manner for the term ‘cars’. You’d be number 861 million and 1.

Instead of directly taking all of them on directly, you would do better to focus on something which still had a fair amount of traffic, but still related to what you’re selling. The closer you can target the keyword to the interest of your visitors, (and more importantly buyers, not info seekers) the more money you’ll make with your marketing efforts.

For example, if you have a home based business brokering used sports cars, you’d want to target the specific types of used cars you have an interest in selling. If you have an affiliate website that deals in car insurance for high risk drivers, you’d want to target terms relating to those drivers that were actively seeking insurance.

For the first example, the term ‘used sports cars for sale’ has only 544 competitor sites. Now that’s more like it! If you do some things well, you should be able to rank well for that term fairly easily. It gets a much lower number of searches, only 590 per month, but those people are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Other very closely related terms, such as ‘used sports car for sale’ (170 / month), and can bring additional traffic. Brokering specific cars can be very lucrative, so you can make good money from such narrowly targeted traffic.

In the other example, auto insurance is still too broad, even though it has 20 million searches a month. Ditto car insurance (9 million). Think more niche oriented. The term ‘high risk auto insurance’ is much better, with only 170,000 competing returns, but that’s still pretty tough for a new site.  You’ll face even more competition with the term ‘high risk car insurance’ (265,000 sites, with only 2,400 searches for the term).

‘High point car insurance’ fares better, with 4,400 searches and 81,000 sites to beat.  ‘Auto insurance for high risk drivers’ shows only 2,280 returns, but has 110 searches per month. The good news is that you’d probably get ranked for closely related terms such as ‘auto insurance for high risk’ (320 searches). Eventually you could get good traffic from other related terms as well.

There are two strategies; niche domination, and large market skimming. You’re either trying to be the largest, highest converting fish in a small pond, or a smaller (but hopefully still fairly high converting) fish in a massive pond. You can work wonders with either approach, and Google has just made you job a bit easier, especially if you have a small budget.

Until next time, may you experience home based business success! Have a great weekend!

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 7 – Analyze

One of the keys in any business is to determine where your business is coming from, how you can be more effective at marketing to this group of consumers, and what other markets you can tap in order to grow your business. In order to do these things, you'll need to do the next step in the plan; analyze the results of your marketing. There are several key metrics used by most Internet marketers for analytical purposes.

Unique Visitors –
The number of unique visitors to your web site. Not to be confused with hits or page views.

Page Views –
The number of times a page was accessed (not the same thing as 'hits', which is the number of times files were accessed. A single web page can be made up of dozens of different files)

Referral -
The last page looked at by a visitor before they came to your site. Now we're getting somewhere. This is the kind of information you need to go over with a fine toothed comb in order to maximize your marketing efforts. Are there new traffic sources that you were unaware of? Are your current marketing efforts bearing any fruit?

Conversion Rate -
Conversion is the percentage of visitors to one of your websites or web pages that took the desired action. That can be buying something, signing up for your news letter, filling out a lead form, or any other thing that you want them to do. If you'd like them to stand on their head in front of the mirror, and you have such a great sales page that they actually do it, count that as a conversion. The conversion for your site(s) and every sales page, product, or offer within it will be different. In addition, the conversion rate will be usually be different depending on the traffic source. The more information you have regarding the conversion rate for every page, offer, and product on your site, the better you can calculate CPM.

CPM - Cost per 1,000 visitors.
Obviously this is one of the most important metrics when you're analyzing your traffic. If you know the amount of revenue generated by a visitor to your site, you'll know how much you can pay to acquire a new one and still generate a profit. The thing to be aware of is that traffic from different sources will usually generate different CPM figures.

For example, traffic to your sales page from your forum may generate more or less revenue than traffic from PPC advertising, article marketing, or blog posts. This is because different traffic will have different conversion figures and different acquisition costs. The more granularity you can get when determining your CPM, the better, so make sure you know not only where your traffic is coming from.

Location - Where is your traffic coming from?
This is very important, and more important with some types of sites than others. If you have a geographically oriented site such as a local real estate information website, is most of your traffic coming from the area that you're targeting? If not you may have a large number of visitors but relatively few conversions. That can lead you in one of two directions; you can refine your marketing to bring more traffic from the area that you're trying to target, or you can change the scope of your offerings to more effectively convert the traffic you're getting.

Browser / resolution - While this may seem techy and unimportant to many marketers, it's actually very important. You need to be sure that your site is properly displaying in all the browsers that your visitors use, and especially the more popular ones. The same is true with screen resolution. You want your page to be optimized for the more popular resolutions used by your visitors. If you originally made your page to appeal to visitors running 800 x 600 monitors, you're probably losing sales to those running 1,440 x 900, or 1280 x 1024 monitors because some of site's features just won't be displayed correctly. Going forward, keep in mind that most of the new monitors are wide screen in either 1280 x 800, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050, or 1920 x 1200 resolutions. Make sure your site displays well in these resolutions so it's ready for the future.

Duration - How long are visitors staying on your site? If you have a site with a 4-page sales letter and the average duration is 30 seconds, the reason your site isn't converting well is that no one's reading your sales letter. You better hire a copywriter and revise the thing, because it's most likely crap. It's the same with any type of site. You can tell an awful lot about how well your site is holding a visitor's interest by how long they stick around.

Average Views - This also called depth, and it's the number of pages a visitor to your site views, or how deep into your site they go, when they are there. If you have a 1 page sales letter site, well, that number is always going to be 1, but it lets you know if visitors are just hitting the page they entered on, then clicking away, or are they seeing more of your content.

There are more analytics, which I'll get to in a future post, but the upshot is that you absolutely need to know as much information about your visitors and customers as possible in order to maximize your marketing effectiveness. There are many packages you can use but I like Sitemeter and Google analytics, both of which are free or have free versions that are very good. Other well regarded analytics used by marketers include Quantcast, Weblog Expert, and Compete. Most web hosting companies also have analytics of some sort you can use. Whichever package you choose, make sure you analyze, so you maximize your site's profits and minimize your efforts.

Here are the next steps you’ll need to take on your journey toward Internet business success.

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 5 – In the previous step you found a niche to market to. In this step you’ll determine exactly what you’ll be marketing to your (if you did your research right) hungry niche. You have a few choices. You can either:

A - Find products you can market as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing for those of you that are just looking into the whole Internet business thing, is when a company will pay you money when someone takes a specific action based upon your referral. They can buy a company’s product or sign up for their service by going through a link in your ad or from your website. You can also generate affiliate revenue by referring qualified leads to a company. How you make affiliate revenue is determined by what the company that pays you is looking for; sales or leads.

B -Develop your own product. For most people in the beginning that means writing software, a script, or an e-book that you can sell via download. As you progress you can also create info products that also incorporate physical media, such as books, pamphlets, CDs, or DVDs. In most cases you’ll be rewarded for the extra effort and expense it takes to create, package and distribute the physical products by being able to command much higher prices for them. The hard costs are not that high, so you will make much higher profits. Be advised that if you create crap, you will quickly get a (well deserved) reputation for creating crap and your customer list will dry up.

C - A 3^rd option to profit from your niche is selling products that are drop shipped. If your research indicates that products in your niche are able to be sold for a nice profit, you may want to fid what’s known as a drop shipper. A drop shipper will take an order from you and ship the product directly to your customer. Many drop shippers will even include a packing list from your company, complete with your logo and address, so as far as your customer’s concerned, their order came from you. The obvious benefit is that you’ll not need to stock or fulfill any product. Keep in mind that you will still need to handle returns.
 
One way you can mitigate that risk is to choose products that are unlikely to break and come in few varieties. This will minimize the chance that a customer gets the wrong item. Items such as consumer electronics definitely break or cause customer confusion. I was in a warehouse a few years back and one of my vendors had taken back pallets of TiVOs because the customers either couldn’t hook them up correctly or weren’t properly informed that the device required a monthly service fee. Trust me, you don’t want to be in this position, it gets expensive in a hurry.

D - A 4^th way you can market to your niche is to just create your website, make it full of good, quality content, and put Adsense or some other contextual ads on it. When people click on these ads you’ll be paid a small amount. Typically this is used as more of an icing on the cake than primary revenue stream, though. You’ll have to generate substantial traffic in the right niche before you can make very much money from this business model. If you are getting that much traffic, you can usually more effectively monetize it through other means, such as affiliate marketing or selling visitors you own product(s).
 

No matter what you determine will be your marketing method of choice for your online business, or if you do as many marketers do and sue a combination of methods, you’ll eventually have to move on to:

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 6 - Driving traffic
This is obviously a supremely important step, because nothing else matters if no one shows up. You’ve got 2 main choices, pay for your traffic or get it free. Most marketers try to excel in both choices.

Getting traffic free is a combination of getting good search engine results and getting linked to by other sites, e-zines and blogs. The links to your site, known as backlinks, are doubly important because not only do the links drive traffic to your site, but they are one of the most important factors used by search engines (especially Google) when ranking your pages. You can get links through a number of strategies including article marketing, asking, joint ventures (JVs) with other marketers, guest posting on other blogs, blog carnivals, commenting on blogs, forum post signature links (these are “nofollow”ed so they give you traffic, but are not used in calculating your search engine rankings), and of course ‘Web 2.0’. The web 2.0 methods are using social sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Digg, del.icious, propeller, Mixx, Yahoo answers, StumbleUpon, reddit, and flikr.

I’m sure I missed some, but you get the point. These are extremely effective at getting you brand exposure and driving traffic. In some niches, the traffic from site as Stumble Upon and Digg doesn’t convert as well into sales as with other sources of traffic, but in some cases there’s so much of it, it doesn’t matter.

The other way of getting free traffic is to get good results in the search engines when people search for words or terms relevant to what you’re selling or offering. As I mentioned you’ll need links in to your site to help get good rankings. The more authoritative the site the link comes from and the farther up the page the link is placed (all else being equal) the more it is worth in terms of search engine ranking. You also want to carefully optimize your keywords and their use throughout your web pages and blog posts, especially the titles, title tags, meta tags and page / post content. I’ve done several posts on getting targeted traffic.

Your other traffic generation strategy is to pay for your traffic. You can do this in several ways, but the most common are to use pay per click advertising (PPC) such as Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or Google Adwords, or to pay for your links to be placed on sites that would drive the kind of targeted traffic you’re looking for. You can use either paid text links or banner ads.

A few years ago paid text links were all the rage because of their positive effect on search engine rankings in addition to the traffic they generated, but they don’t seem to be as popular for this purpose now, as the search engines seem to have revised their algorithms. In any case, paid text links are definitely not my area of expertise.

If you choose to do PPC advertising I strongly advise you to learn as much as possible about what you’re doing because while this can be one of the most powerful wealth generating strategies on the Internet, and you can turn it on and off at will, you can also lose more money that you can possibly imagine, in record time, if you’re not careful. Get some good books on the subject, such as Perry Marshal’s Google Adwords, and definitely go to the AdWordsExcellence site.

One of the most important changes to have come down the pike with regard to Adwords in recent years is that Google looks at the quality of your landing page. It need to give a good user experience and relate exactly to the keyword in your ad otherwise your quality score will suffer, and your cost per click will go through the roof. The other thing is make sure your ad is relevant and your headline is extremely compelling because one of the other key things that Google uses to determine how much you’ll be charges is the click through rate. The better the click through rate the less you’ll pay per click.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series on the steps to starting an Internet business.

How to Make Money Doing What You Love - Issue #4

Blog to Earn - Friday Edition

Internet Business Blog Carnival #14

Featured my post Free Blog Traffic - How to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

Carnival of Business and Entrepreneurship 23 

Carnival of Sales and Management Success - May 31st Ed 

Internet Business Blog Carnival - 16th Edition 

Featured my post  Creating a Customer Loyalty Strategy – How to Reach Your Business Profitability Goal

Working at Home Blog Carnival #84 

Making Money Online Business Ideas - May 7th Ed 

Featured my post Increase Targeted Web Site Traffic – It’s All in a Name 

 Thanks to all of them - There are some great posts in these carnivals. Give them a visit. You never know what you'll discover; you may find the next idea to explode your business!

Instead of merely working harder, you need to work  smart. The smartest thing you can do in an Internet or any other business is to leverage other people's resources to make money. It's the same weather you're in business online or you have a traditional bricks and mortar (nice old phrase from the '90's) business.

With that in mind, here are the steps you'll need to take in order to start your Internet business and make it a success.

Step 1 to Starting an Internet Business -  Set specific, quantifiable goals. It's not enough to say “I want to make alot of money” or “I want to make enough to quit my current job” Although you may, in fact, want to do both of those things, you'll need to be far more specific when taking this step.  Something on the order of “I want to make $12,000 a month in gross, monthly, revenue by the end of 2008” is more appropriate. The next thing you'll have to do as part of this step is actually write your goals down. It works well for many people to post them in a prominent place, so you'll have a constant reminder of where you're going in your business.

Step 2 to Starting an Internet Business- Resolve to take action. This is important, but in many cases it never gets done. You have to make a resolution to yourself that you will achieve the goals you've set for yourself and your business.

Step 3 to Starting an Internet Business- Determine what action you're going to take -  This is actually an action in an of itself. You will have to actually show some initiative and take action just to determine what action you'll be taking as you begin to move your business forward. Set a time limit on this, lest you suffer from "analysis paralysis". This is a very common problem, as many people get overwhelmed and never actually do anything.

To combat this tendency, break up your requirements into a series of small tasks you'll have little trouble completing. Focus on only one of these at a time. Make sure it is complete before moving on the next. When this step is complete, you'll have a plan of attack that you can follow. Again, make sure you write this down. This plan will actually become the marketing plan component of your overall business plan.

Step 4 to Starting an Internet Business – Take action. This is the most important step. The vast majority of people out there watching game Wheel of Fortune and playing the Lottery, while letting thoughts of wealth run through their minds will be doomed to eternal failure for the single reason that they never actually took any action. They just plain never showed initiative and actually did anything, besides wish for success. Unfortunately for these people wishing won't drive people to your website, yank the credit card from their pocket and fill your Pay Pal account with cash. You actually need to market a product or service to make that happen.

If you just decide what action you're going to take and actually take it, you'll be ahead of 95% of the population that sits on the sidelines thinking rich people are lucky. Well, to a great extent you make your own luck. A moron that does everything wrong, but actually does something stands a far greater chance of becoming a success in their Internet business, than a genius that does nothing.

Step 4a to Starting an Internet Business - Research a niche. In fact you'll probably research many niches before you find the one that you'll start with. How do you research a niche? That's been the subject of more than a few reports books, and special bonus offers, but you use the tools at your disposal on line. For example, there's a little website you may have been to on occasion called Google that's worth it's weight in Gold when you're doing research. They have a tools section with many resources for just such an occasion. In time you'll begin to use more advanced tools for niche and keyword research, such as Wordtracker and Keywordspy to determine exactly which keywords are profitable, but for now you won't need to go to this level of sophistication. That's for a later step in the process.

When researching niches you'll want to look at a number of things. Does the niche receive traffic? If people aren't looking for a solution or showing interest in the niche, your chances of making money in it are severely limited. The key is to find people that are looking for a solution and are willing to pay for it. If you market correctly, they'll pay you for it, or you'll be paid for it by those actually selling the product, but more on that later.

How do you determine how much traffic a prospective niche gets? You can use Google's webmaster tools, such as Google trends and "Top Search Queries" reports, to determine the relative amount of traffic the niche receives. Trends is great because it tells you weather no not the traffic is trending up or down. Other great tools to use for help in this area include eBay Pulse and Technorati.

The next question that you'll answer is weather or not the traffic in this niche is looking for a solution you can provide or help to provide. If people are looking for solutions that include products that can be sold over the Internet or information that you can provide to them over the Internet, than the niche has possibilities.

The next step is to determine weather you can profitably provide the products or services from the Internet. If the people are looking for information, but are unwilling to pay for it, then the niche is probably not worth your time, unless you can find a new angle that people are willing to pay for. The same holds true for products. While many products are successfully sold over the Internet there are some that are not as successful. Niches that concentrate on products with successful track records of Internet sales are the ones you want to concentrate on.

Again, Google can be a help here. Use Adwords tools to find out how much people are bidding for keywords within a niche. Chances are if other business owners are willing to pay a large amount of money to bid on particular keywords, there's a reason for it. They are either completely misguided, or the keywords are making them money. The expensive keywords can point the way to profitable niches, but don't rely on them exclusively because they can't find all the good, profitable niches, they're just  one tool to use for help in this area.

There are two schools of thought on finding a marketing niche for your business. School number one on niches says that you want to find a small, under served niche that you can dominate. The theory here is that if you narrow your focus enough there will be a group of hungry customers that just aren't getting what they need. Since there is little competition for this small, but hungry group of buyers, you can swoop in and fill their needs, while making a healthy profit at the same time.

School two, on the other hand takes the opposite tack. The followers of this school of thought opine that you'll find more success by targeting a huge, proven niche with millions of customers, and just grab a small, yet profitable piece of the pie. Who's right? Well they both are. There are many successful marketers following each strategy. In fact many marketers follow both strategies and market to different niches. Basically, you'll choose between being a big fish in a small pond and a small fish in a large huge lake.

In my next post I'll look at the next series of steps to starting an Internet business. Stay Tuned.

In many cases contractors will be required to be bonded to get a license to ply their trade, but this is not the same as insurance. Such a bond, called a surety bond, merely insures that in the event you fail to complete a contract, the contractee can recover damages from the bond. The bond does not protect you as a business owner, it protects your customer.

If you have a substantial amount of office equipment in your home office, you should at least ask your homeowner’s insurance company to give you a home office rider to protect the contents of your office. In many standard homeowners policies, the contents of you home office will not be included.

Small business liability insurance is very important for most types of small business these days, even if you have a home based business. Should you say the wrong thing you risk a defamation lawsuit, you could be sued for a product you’ve sold, or a customer could be injured on your property. All of these events could be devastating should you be uninsured. Liability insurance will protect you and your business against such a problem. There are many situations where a liability problem could arise that your insurance would kick in to protect you.

If you are a consultant, you could give advice that causes a problem. This could precipitate a lawsuit. One of your employees could damage someone else’s property in the course of business and you would be liable for the damage.

If you run any type of business out of you home that requires you or any employees to drive company owned vehicles during the normal course of business, such as process serving, delivery, contracting or landscaping, you’ll want to get business vehicle insurance. Before you hire a new employee, be sure to have their driving record checked to make sure that they are insurable or that they will not raise your rates too much. This can also protect you against any liability incurred while you or an employee are driving the vehicles. Your standard auto insurance will not cover for business related use in most cases.

If you do contracting work for some companies, they’ll require you to name them as an additional insured on your insurance policy, thereby indemnifying them against damages to the limit of the policy. That way they can be more protected against problems because they are protected by your policy. In that case you better have insurance, because you’ll need to show them a certificate naming them as an additional insured; you can’t just bluff your way through it.

The most important thing for your business is liability insurance. It only takes one slip up by an employee on someone’s property, or an incorrect consulting opinion to cost your business plenty. Typically the most cost effective option is to check with an insurance broker that represents multiple lines and specializes in small business insurance. You’ll get some piece of mind and it probably won’t cost as much as you think.

There's a saying in the so-called Internet marketing industry; “The money is in the list.” Leaving aside for a minute that the term “Internet marketing” describes a communication medium applied to marketing, not an actual industry, that's true not only for those of you selling online, but to any other type of business as well. A large part of the intrinsic value of your company is in your customer list. If selling your company is part of your exit strategy, having a long list of existing customers is going to be a large component of the value others see in your business. Simply put, you'll be able to sell your business for a much high price if you have a long list of satisfied customers.

When considering ongoing operations, having a list of loyal customers makes reaching your business profitability goals so much easier. Instead of focusing your marketing efforts on creating new customers within your target market, you can aim at a list of proven buyers. You're much more likely to generate another sale from a customer who you have an ongoing relationship with, and who has bought from you in the past, than one who knows little about your business, products, or services.

Think about it, would you rather have a list of 500 prospects, or a list of 500 accounts? I thought so. Weather you have a contracting business, accounting firm, or consulting company, having an ongoing business relationship means the customer will call you first when they need something, rather than seeking out someone new. People generally take the path of least resistance when trying to get something done. It's just human behavior, and marketing is nothing if not the study of human behavior. Calling your business when they need what you provide should be that path for your existing customers.

If your business exists in the online space, the ability to mine a list of existing customers for new sales is of incalculable value. Weather you're an Internet marketing newbie or a “Guru” building a list is of primary importance. One of the first thing that any new Internet marketer is told is “capture that email” so they can begin an email marketing campaign. While that is definitely an important part of generating sales and profits, a list of actual customers, not just prospects, is of much greater importance.

When someone gives you their email address in exchange for a report, e-book, or newsletter, all you know is that they have some level of interest in what you do. You really know little else about them. How qualified a prospect they are you'll not know until you begin your email marketing campaign. A list of actual customers, those who have already purchased from you is infinitely more valuable. You absolutely know they are a qualified lead because they have demonstrated such by handing over their hard earned money to your business in the past.

The reality is that if you have no customer loyalty, your business is just creating a marketing and promotional campaign, not a viable, long term business. Eventually you'll exhaust the supply of new customers in your market, or the ROI of your marketing efforts will be too high to sustain your operations.

Given the importance of customer loyalty, it's amazing that so few businesses create a formal customer loyalty strategy. Sure, many businesses have a rough idea about creating customer loyalty, but few formalize the strategy. Business owners will talk about good customer service, selling quality products, delivering them on time, exceeding customer expectations, and making sure they attend to the details that keep customers coming back. While all that is certainly important, it's not a formal strategy that can be refined over time to maximize performance.

To have a formal customer loyalty strategy, you need metrics that can be measured to determine the effectiveness of your efforts. That way you can see if your strategy is effective, and make changes in an effort to improve it. You'll know weather or not your changes are working or not and be able to create an actionable strategy. It points to discovering as much as possible about your customers, what motivates them to buy from you, and why they return. You'll want to measure their overall customer experience, and if possible, improve upon it. Your business depends upon it. A 1997 study by Patterson, Johnson, and Spreng found 78% of the decision to repurchase something from a business was based on customer satisfaction.

How can you measure and increase customer satisfaction and use it create a customer loyalty strategy? It depends on the metrics you use to define your customer's experience, but some of the more effective ones are delivery time, product selection, relative price, ease of use of your website, call back time, ease of contact, and satisfaction with the product / service as delivered . Some things, such as time can be directly measured and assigned a value. Others must be measured on a scale with multiple points. In many cases a 5 or 7 point scale is used to define such variables, with responses ranging from extremely unsatisfied to extremely satisfied or some variation thereof. You get the point.

To make your measurements even more effective, the different attributes should be weighted. This will help in defining which components have the greatest impact in the overall level of customer satisfaction. For example, satisfaction with the product or service may have more weight than delivery time. That will depend upon your customer base and the type of business you're operating.

One of the most important findings in the 1997 study was that meeting or exceeding customer expectations was the prime factor in reported customer satisfaction. It makes perfect sense, but if your business meets or exceeds customer expectations, they'll give little thought to using your services again, fail to do so and you create a disconnect in their minds that soon extends to their wallets. Basically you'll not get them to extract that Visa from their wallet again if they weren't happy the first time.

On the flip side, studies indicate that customers give little or no thought to using your business again if you exceeded their expectations. That's the best thing you can have, a loyal, repeat customer that automatically buys from you. Your strategy to create customer loyalty at that level should focus first on customer satisfaction and the customer experience, and second on ensuring that you are staying at the forefront of offerings in your field. As trends emerge, you need to be at the front of them in order to give your customers no reason to turn elsewhere to satisfy their future needs. They'll be your loyal customers untill the end, and that's the real key to reaching your buisness profitibility goal.

Have a great weekend, and here's to your home based business success!

The question faced by most marketers is “how to get more traffic to your blog?”. After all many niches are extremely competitive these days and without good, targeted traffic, your blog may as well be notes in your journal.

There are some things to consider before you initiate your free traffic generating plan. You could always pay for your traffic, through paid links and PPC ads, but this is about the kind of traffic you get fo’ nuttin’. If you’re starting out inour business with a minimal budget, that's the kind of traffic you need.

Where is your free traffic going to come from? You’ll have 2 main free sources; links from other websites, directories, and blogs, and SERPs. You want to get balanced traffic and not be too dependent on the search engines, who are notoriously fickle. You can be getting great traffic numbers from them one day, and way down in the results the next.

Links are great for two reasons. You’ll get visitors from the link itself, and you’ll get a vaunted backlink, one of the most important things in the algorithms most search engines use to rank web pages. To get targeted links in to your blog there is one tool that I’ve found to be extremely effective; the blog carnival.

Blog carnivals are themed blog events that are hosted by bloggers. In such an event other bloggers are invited to submit their postings to the host blogger, who then posts links to the submitted posts in a post of their own called a carnival. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the potential of such an event, especially for a business owner with a new blog, and relatively few inbound links.

Some carnivals will include any post that’s submitted, while others are extremely picky and only include the best 5 or 10 posts they receive. The great thing about carnivals is that they themselves tend to get ranked fairly highly by the search engines, and you can get traffic from them.

Where they shine however, is that they generate inbound links, and some bloggers have removed the “nofollow” tags from their blogs, meaning that you’ll get the full benefit of said links from the search engines to help increase your search engine rankings. In addition, you can choose the anchor text of the links, allowing you to build search engine rankings for your selected keywords and phrases.

Some of the carnivals have fairly high readership and you can get significant traffic from them if you have compelling post titles. You should also include a brief description of your post, both to assist the host, (although sometimes they’ll not use it, due to the theme of the carnival) and to provide exactly the content you want around your link. You’ll also get to showcase your writing talent and post content, which can help you get regular readership and subscribers, a real boon to your marketing efforts.

The other thing that you must do to ensure high rankings in the search engines is to optimize your posts, including the post titles. I wrote about this in a previous post with regard to search engine optimization. It is key that you title your posts so they read exactly as the keyword phrases people are searching for. There is a more in depth discussion of keyword optimization in a previous post on how to increase targeted web site traffic. The same thing applies to blog post titles as the titles for web pages.

These things should help you get more free traffic to your blog. Good luck and Good Business! 

As a business owner, weather you exist primarily in the online or off line space, you absolutely must appeal to all your potential customers in order to maximize sales, profit, and efficiency. Yet many business owners, especially in formerly male dominated industries, completely or substantially ignore women in their marketing efforts.

This mistake can have devastating results to your bottom line. Think about this for a second. 80% of all checks signed in the U.S. are now signed by women. Women also purchase 80% of all consumer goods and own half of all U.S. businesses. They are the most rapidly growing segment of new business owners. That doesn’t sound like a market you’d want to turn your back on.

You may think because you sell auto accessories, consumer electronics or sporting goods you can ignore women as customers. Don’t; that would be a stupid and possibly fatal mistake for your business, because women actually buy, or are key decision makers in the majority of such purchases.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, since 2003 women have bought more consumer electronics products than have men, so that worm turned a long time ago. In 2005 women purchased $65 billion wroth of consumer electronics, and influenced billions more. According to a survey in Sporting Goods Business, women influence 95% of all sporting goods purchases.

That means that if you have a home business that sells things, and there’s any chance that women are among your customers, you need to be making every effort to cater to their needs and wants, even if you feel that your business is more focused towards men.

How do you make sure your business is meeting the needs of your female customers? Women and men shop differently. They tend to process information differently than do men. When women are making purchasing decisions, they are more likely to ask questions until they feel they have a good grasp on a product, it’s features and benefits (you are selling features and benefits, aren’t you?). Men, on the other hand shop more like they drive. They won’t ask for nearly as much help as they may need to find what they’re really after.

Be sure you design your web site to give your women customers the answers they’re looking for. They’ll reward you by buying something from you. Women tend to be more brand loyal than men, a great thing for your business if you cater to their needs. Women have less tolerance for websites that are difficult to navigate and aren’t well designed and laid out than do men. If they can’t get their questions answered easily, they’ll shop at your competitor’s web site.

You should also tailor your product mix to be sure that your women customers can find what they may be looking for. Do a bit of research if you must, check with you vendors, offer surveys to your visitors and sift through your site logs to determine what products were the most popular to browse and buy.

If you sell aftermarket auto and truck parts, you may think that your business is the last place you’d find women shopping, but aghain, you’d be wrong. A woman is just as likely to be shopping for a Greddy turbo kit or a Dana 60 front axle with an ARB air locker as are men. Well maybe not quite as much, but you get the point.

In fact women buy quite a bit of aftermarket auto parts and accessories. According to the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association (SEMA), the industry association concerned with making sure every kid with a Honda also has a muffler the size of a coffee can, nice rims, and a pair of 12” subwoofers, women actually buy less hard core performance parts. What they do buy is alarm systems, floor mats, fog lights, window tinting, audio / video systems. 21% of women in a survey done by trade journal Aftermarket Business reported that they installed all their own aftermarket parts.

The point is that you not only have to meet the needs of your women customers if you’re selling weight loss products, cosmetics, and designer clothes. You have to make the same effort to meet their needs if you’re selling fishing supplies, basket ball shoes, aftermarket automotive accessories, and home theater gear. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.