Online Business Questions Revealed

Archive for January, 2009

Having a good website layout is a must no matter what type of website you are building. Keeping things uniform throughout your website makes it look nice, but more importantly it makes it much easier for your visitors to read and follow through what you want them to do.

There are many dos and don’ts you should follow when deciding on your website layout -

1. Headers – this is the top part of your website. Do Not make this huge and wild looking. Keep the height of this no more than around 100 pixels. This can be a graphic you have designed for you, or just a colored background with words on it.

2. Your Headline – use the h1 tags of html to write your headline, if you don’t know what this is, then ask your designer or learn it. Search engines look for h1 or h2 tags to tell them about the website. Your text should be easy to read, don’t make it fancy looking, keep the color usually to a red, this usually makes peoples’ eyes attract to it.

3. The body of your website – too many times a lot of website designers makes this way too colorful, and this makes it difficult to read. Most people want to know exactly right now what is in it for me, not all the fancy stuff. Keep your text family to one type, do not change this around. The norm for this is Times New Roman or Arial. You do not have to stick to these families but the important rule here is to use the same family for your entire website.

4. Images – please do not plaster your website with graphics! This is so annoying and distracting. An important rule to remember when using images on any website, is the size of the image, if your image is large it will take the site a long time to load and people won’t stick around to wait. Make sure that your images are clear and relative your website theme. Another important fact that most do not use, is the alt tag, this tag is inserted so if your visitor doesn’t have the ability to see images the words will display, also, search engines do not see images, so by using the alt tag within your image will tell the search engines what is there.

5. Buy Buttons – too many times I’ve gone to a website, read through it, liked what I saw and read; now I want to know the price? Scroll to the bottom to find the buy button only to see no price at all! Make sure that your price is clearly seen, the best place to put your price is directly above or below the buy button. Make it clear exactly what the price, no hidden costs! The fastest way to lose a sale is by not telling the purchaser how much they are going to pay.

6. Closing – make sure that your name is clearly at the bottom, people want to know who they are dealing with. Having a professional taken picture of yourself is the best, but if you either do not want to do this or don’t have one, then make sure your name is clearly there. And a way for them to contact you if they have questions. Do Not put your actual email address on your websites!! You can put the words Contact Me and have them linked to an email address. Do not ever put your actual email address on your websites. There are spiders out there that look for this format and will spam you!

7. PS – Always, Always, have a ps or two. Recap what they are getting and restate your price and guarantee. It has been shown that by having a ps increase sales, so use it!

By sticking with these steps you will get a better looking website that will convert much better. It really doesn’t matter what market you are in or what you are selling, by having the a good website layout will make all the difference.

Dr Smiley

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Oh the most asked question online nowadays!

When it comes to getting traffic to any website, it is crucial that you take certain steps first!

There are also a number of different types of traffic you can try to obtain, SEO (or organic traffic), referral traffic, PPC, and much more.

The first type of traffic Dr Smiley recommends you focus on, is SEO traffic. Why? Because it will get you going. When you put your web pages together you should always use -

1. Good keyword Title for your page.
2. You should give a good description of what your page is about.
3. You should use your keywords for your website in your meta tag keywords area. Now some say this isn’t important any more, but it still is. Search engines do look at this, but it isn’t as important as your Title tag and your page description.
4. Use your keyword throughout your web page, but DO NOT stuff it, make it look and read naturally. Keep your webpage to one keyword or keyword phrase, don’t try to rank for several keywords on one webpage.

Let’s discuss the ways to get traffic to any website, either free or low cost.

Still used by almost all marketers today, is Article Marketing.

This is the cheapest and easiest way to start generating traffic to any website you have. Pick a keyword that is popular with your market, do a bit of research on that keyword and find out some problems people are facing with it.

Write up a short article around 400 words, use your keyword especially at the beginning of your article and at the end. Write a short 2 or 3 line resource box, this box is to encourage others that read your article, to learn more about you or your product/service to click through to your website. This will definitely get you traffic! Just submit your article to no more than 2 or 3 article directories, you do not need to blast it out there.

When someone goes to one of these directories and likes your article, they have the option to copy it and paste it on to their website or blog, when they do this they Must include your resource box with your link. This makes your article(s) go viral very quickly. You can also take your article(s) and put them on your own blog, especially if your blog and website have 2 different domain names, this is not duplicate content.

Another good way to start generating traffic is to use social bookmarketing places like, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. It’s not recommended you start with all of them, pick just one to start out with and get use to it, then once you have it down, you can add another one. Social Networking is very hot right now and it works!

If you have your own product or service you are trying to promote, you might consider using places like ClickBank and/or PayDotCom.com. Put your product up on their site and let others promote it for you. Read through these places carefully and make sure you understand their Terms of Service. If done properly you can definitely get a lot of traffic to your website in little time.

There is also PPC (Pay Per Click) such as Google Adwords and Kontari. Both are very good and will bring you traffic, but be warned right Now! This is a dangerous area to tread if you do not know what you are doing. You can easily lose a lot of money in the learning process. Read everything you can about this, and do it slowly. The big key to this being successful is your keyword research, so make sure you do it. Start out pricing your clicks low, see how it goes, if you are getting traffic then you can increase it slightly. Do not try to get greedy here, this one method takes time and effort but if done properly you can really get a lot of traffic rather quickly.

Okay you have now learned a few different ways to go out there and start generating traffic to any website. Another important factor here is, consistency. Whatever method you chose to use, you must do it everyday. Getting traffic to any website takes time and some money, but if you are serious about this, you will do the work. Just keep in mind things don’t happen without some work involved by you.

Dr Smiley

Dr Smiley recently received a question on pricing products.

How do I know what is a good selling price for my products?

Here is the dr’s response to this question:

When it comes to figuring out what the right price is for your specific product or service, the best thing to do is research. Find out what your competition price range is.

Doing your research to see what others are pricing their products at is time consuming but it is time well spent for any business owner, as the return will be well worth it.

Besides doing your research of your competition you should also put into account your profit margin for your product. As a business owner you always want to be making a profit from your sales, so do consider your pricing range to include your profit.

As an online marketer, it’s important to see what is selling and for how much, do a quick search on your favorite search engine for your product name or something similar and see what it sells for. consider pricing your product around the same amount.

If you are new to this market, consider pricing yours a bit lower, as you have not yet established yourself as an expert with this product. Test this out for 30 days or so and see how you do, you can then adjust your price to match your audience better.

Remember, you won’t always be able to get the prices right. You will likely lose money in the beginning due to pricing your products too low or too high. Do your best to stay on top of the market and how consumers are reacting.

Dr Smiley hopes this has answered your question.

Thank You
Dr Smiley

When it comes to building a website there is a lot to think about. Not just the technical stuff, but the purpose of your website and what you want from it.

Depending on what the purpose of your website is going to be will depend a lot on what you need to know how to do.

I won’t be going into a lot of detail here on domain registration or hosting, that is another topic all in itself.

What I want to discuss today is the development of a website.

There are tools you are going to have to have to do this, you will need a way to create or edit HTML code, you will need a way to upload these files to your hosting account, and you will need some way to capture a visitors information, and you might even need some way to accept payments online from your website.

None of these are hard to do once you understand their process, but it’s that learning curve most do not take the time to learn properly. They want to have a website up right now and that is possible with some of the software out there today and templates. But one thing I definitely learned, the hard way, sooner or later knowing just the basics to HTML coding and how a website works, is a life saver.

Okay you have your domain name registered and you have your hosting setup, now what?

Get yourself a way to edit or create HTML coding, an HTML editor, such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver or a free editor. There are hundreds out there, so do a search on your favorite search engine and see what is out there. Play around with some of the free ones to get a feel for them to see which one you are most comfortable with.

Now you are going to need a way to sending what you create in your editor to your host, this is called File Transfer Protocol or FTP. There are tons out there so do a search with your favorite search engine, most of these are free to use. Get to understand it and how it works before you begin. This shouldn’t take you very long, most are pretty easy to understand and have tutorials to help you get started.

The first thing you need to decide right now is whether or not you are going to put graphics on your website. This is an ongoing battle of whether graphics help or not, you will need to decide this for yourself and determine if your market is accepting with this. Testing is the best policy here. If you do decide you want graphics then, consider outsourcing this to a professional.

What is the purpose of your website? Are you going to just be collecting names and email addresses to build that list? Are you selling your own product or an affiliate product? These questions need to be answered so you know what type of website you are creating.

If you want to do both, then you will need 2 different websites. This doesn’t mean you need to register 2 different domain names, just 2 different sites. If you are collecting names and email addresses, do not put anything else on this page! If you are selling a product that is all you want there, do not attempt to get them to opt into something also!

Let’s build a website.

Since there are a variety of different types of websites, from squeeze pages, salespages, and information websites, I can’t possible walk you through each one here. But here are the main components of a basic website you should always have in place.

1. Your title of your website – use the code <Title> where you would replace the word Title with your website title. Should be keywords or keyword phrases
2. Your description – use the code <meta descriptionimg>description </meta description> again try to use keywords and keyword phrases
3. Your keywords – use the code <meta keywords>keywords separated with commas</meta> list your keywords using commas, do not stuff this with lots of keywords, keep to only 5 or so keywords.
4. The main body of your website – use the code <body>insert your copy here with any graphics you are going to use using code to define each part</body>
5. For any images you are using use the code <img src=”location of image”>
6. To define your text use the code <font> you can add words after font to define size, color, and family style. Make sure to always close your codes </>
7. To make words or a word clickable by your visitors, use the code <a href=”URL Link”>This is a clickable link</a> now the words This is a clickable link can be clicked by your visitors.
8. Want your text or image to be centered on the page use the code <center></center>
9. For headlines on a page you want to use the code <h1></h1> there are different numbers to place after the h depending on how big or small you want the text to be. The most commonly used numbers are 1 and 2.
10. To make a one line break in between lines use the code </br>
11. To make a new paragraph use the code <p>

These are just some of the basic HTML codes used in a basic website, there are hundreds more that can be used. Learning these will definitely get you started at understanding how a website is built and why it does things.

If you have been online any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard the term Affiliate. So just what does this mean and what does it mean to you?

An Affiliate is someone who helps promote a product or service for someone else. The affiliate will earn a share of the monies acquired when someone takes action.

When you sign up as an affiliate you will be given a website to send others too, in return for part of money earned. The amount you earn is totally up to the owner of the website.

To sign up is easy and costs you nothing. The idea behind being an affiliate is to make money, so you want to drive as much traffic as you to your affiliate ID, without crossing the lines of Spamming and/or other ways that are found to be unfavorable by the general internet community.

Being an affiliate is a great way to start out online and learn your way around marketing. You don’t need to have your own website or product. By using someone elses website to sell their product or service, you can get started faster.

Now what does this have to do with you? A lot!

Just like affiliates merchants enjoy having affiliates promote their products or services, as this is a win-win situation. A merchant will pay the affiliate after a sale is made, so this will entice the affiliate to make more sales to earn more commissions.

You can generate more sales by putting your links on your own website/blog, using what the merchant has supplied for you. You can capture a visitors information for yourself to build your list for future use. By you doing a little research and finding the right keywords for a given product or service and targeting that keyword, you can do very well in being an affiliate.

Make sure to use specific keywords that relate to what you’re advertising. Generally you want to stay focused within a niche or interest group to increase your sales potential. In other words, you don’t want to have many different affiliate links to variety of completely different markets on your website.

There are a lot of places today that offer affiliate programs for their products and/or services, you can find many of them by typing in your keyword+affiliate into any search engine. You can also find services that will assist you at finding products both for online and offline, by checking out places like Clickbank.com and PayDot.com and CJ.com (known as Commission Junction)

The best thing you can do right now is find some affiliate programs within your market or niche and see what is available, and get started!

The word blog comes from the term weblog, web and log. It is a place anyone can post their comments, articles, videos, and just about anything at all.

The idea behind blogs has been around for a very long time, better known as CMS (Content Management System) but these systems were very difficult for most folks to use and set up. They took a big learning curve and most didn’t want to go through this.

Blogs are chronological diaries; starting with the newest post of the day showing first. Many bloggers post at least once a day and some post multiple times a day. Each post usually has a “permalink” (a URL which always links to the post), but the blog itself has a constant URL, and the content of that URL is always changing.

Blogs are also a type of social interaction, with comments being left and a group of readers springing up around them. This can make marketing efforts far more personal and accessible to potential customers.

With blogs it is much easier and faster to get set up and going and anyone can do this.

Blogs can and are being used for many different things today. Teenagers are even getting in on this concept since it is so easy to set up and start using immediately.

Today marketers online have found that having a blog helps them with their promotions and building a following of loyal followers. Their income increases and they build respect within their market.

As a marketer should you have a blog? YES!!

If you are just starting out and building a list, I would highly recommend that you start out with a simple blog with an op-in form on it. You do not have to start out with a website and the hassles and costs of building a website.

Another good reason why a marketer should use a blog is for search engines. Search engines such as Google love blogs as they are updated frequently with good content. But don’t get carried away and update your blog all day long, Google will slap you for that. Making one post a day is enough to get your blog noticed and ranked by Google.

Bogs may also use a “TrackBack” system that allows the visitor to see who has written the original post and any other entry concerning it.

I would not recommend your blog be your main focus, unless you totally understand how they work and how to add plug ins and other resources into them. The use of blogs for online marketing is best used as a tool to bring in visitors and give them good quality content so they will return often and check out other posts and click on some of your links.

Making money online seems to be everyone’s’ dreams today. They are tired of the old 9 to 5 jobs, the commuting back and forth, and never getting ahead financially or emotionally.

When it comes to making money online there are a few things you must consider.

1. Is it something you can do
2. What type of business do you want to start
3. Have you done your research for your market place
4. Do you have the skills needed
5. Will you have to pay a lot of money to get help

One thing to remember as you venture out online, is time is money, and money is time. You have to be willing to give up one or the other and sometimes both. Don’t just decide this is what I want to do and not have a laid out plan of attack.

The first and most important place for you to start is with training. Find yourself a good mentor, someone you can follow and relate to.

There are certain steps all online businesses take, and the first step is to build a good responsive list of clientele. You can do this without a product or service set up. Setup a simple squeeze page to bring in visitors to sign up to your list by offering them something of value for free.

Build trust with this list as time goes by, by providing good quality information and products that will help them solve a problem they are having. This will build your relationship with them and they will begin to look at you as an expert within your market.

Starting out it is strongly recommended that you use affiliate products, this is simply selling other people’s products for a cut of the cost, known as a commission. This can get you up and earning an income right a way, without the hassle of having your own products or website yet.

By starting out with affiliate products/programs you will get a feel of how the system works without having to spend tons of cash up front and the headaches that go along with it.

Education is the key to a successful marketer. Learn all you can learn as you go along, but do not get overwhelmed with all this information. Make a list of what you know how to do, build a website, find affiliate products, and writing copy that sells.

If you have issues with any of these, consider finding people who have these skills and either stick up a deal with them or pay them to do it for you.

Making money online isn’t as hard as most people think it is, but it does take time and a learning curve.

Dr Smiley
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Today starting out as an affiliate has become more and more popular. Using services such as ClickBank, PayDotCom, and others is a great way to start earning an income.

Using ClickBank is one of the first places anyone should start out with. They are free to get started and very easy to set up and starting making a commission.

The steps you need to take to get started are easy enough:

1. Go to ClickBank and sign up as an affiliate – free and takes less than 5 minutes
2. Go to their marketplace and find a good quality product to promote.
3. Get your affiliate link for the product and just start promoting it.

Easy enough eh? But there are some things to keep in mind when you do this.

Do your research!!

Make sure this is a product people are looking for and willing to pay for. Learn how ClickBank works and how it pays out commissions.

One of the reasons most marketers like to use ClickBank is because they don’t need their own website to get started. The owner of the product/service has this already set up for you; you just need to promote the link.

But keep in mind you are building the owners list and not yours. Something to consider if you are going to use any affiliate product/program is to set up your own simple website with an op-in form. Once they op-in for more information, you can send them to your affiliate website now. This method does 2 things for you, it builds your list and you are earning a commission at the same time.

Another good aspect of ClickBank is if you already have your own product/service you can sign up with them as have others promoting your stuff. This frees you up to worrying about having to build websites for affiliates and paying them, ClickBank does this for you. All you need to do is sign up as a publisher and start selling your products/services, there is a one time setup fee of $50 to get set up. But when you look at the income it will bring you it is well worth the investment.

Dr Smiley
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When it comes to building your online business, on of the most important things all business owners do is build their list. This is the core of any business owners business is their list.

If you ask any online entrepreneur today, if they had to start all over where would they start? They would all tell you that they would start out with building their list of prospect.

The money IS IN the list!

Building your list is easy if you know the proper steps to take and then understand the process.

Process of building your list:

1. Create a 2 page website known as a squeeze page. One is your main site where visitors will sign up; the other page is your thank you page.
2. Get a way to keep these visitors information in a safe place. An auto responder service is the best to use.
3. Create a few messages in your auto responder thanking them for joining your list. Always offer valuable information and products to them
4. Write to your list regularly. It is said that a prospect needs to see the same offer at least 7 times before they will purchase anything. Keep this in mind when you are writing your messages.
5. Do Not hard sell your prospects. Keep your messages to the point and at the end of some of your messages add in a little note if they liked this information, then they should get this.

It’s really this easy to do; there isn’t much effort here to start building a list of reliable prospects once you understand the process. The problem most beginners find is that some of the steps are difficult for them. Such as building the 2 page website, they struggle here when there is no reason for it. There are lots of places online today that offer to show you how to build a simple website with a form on it.

Don’t let technical things get in your way to building your list. Find someone who can build the sites, set up the auto responders, and write good copy for you, if these are some of your stumbling blocks.

Some of these places can cost you a lot of money if you don’t research what is out there. If you are on a tight budget, then consider doing an exchange with someone.

List building is the number one place everyone needs to start when it comes to building an online business. Take what is said here and take action today!!

Dr Smiley

Does your website stand out from the others in your market?

There was time when fancy animation and flash were real big and everyone went out and put that on their websites, hoping to stand out from the crowd.

Things have definitely changed since then. Even the color of your text and your background make a big impact on how people see your website.

It’s important to understand these concepts Before you set out to build your website. Plan it carefully.

Here are some basic things you should keep in mind:

1. Do Not put flash and animation on your website! This has become to annoy visitors! Most nowadays won’t even stay at a website that has flash on it. And unless you know how to do it properly flash and animation take a very long time load. People today are in a hurry and won’t wait around for it to load

2. I’ve seen websites with all kinds of backgrounds and some are nice and fit the market the owner is with. But there have been some that are just plain ugly and make me leave. Be sure to keep your background image or color to what your market will appreciate

3. The text area is another big issue with some websites. You do not want to have a black background and then red or yellow text colors. This makes it very hard on the eyes and you need to consider who is visiting your site, do they have difficulties reading, are they older? The best combination so far is to keep your text area white with black text, this is the easiest to read through for most people. For important information you want to make sure some sees, make that text a bit bigger than the rest. Also, you should always have the size of your text set to 12 this will also make things easier to read.

4. Images, I have seen some pretty badly placed images, and some images that just don’t have anything at all to do with the market. Make sure you are using images properly. Do not make them very big, remember the size of most computer screens is 1024 with 32 bit settings. So keep you images within size, like around 800pixels this makes things easier for your visitor. Be sure that your visitors don’t have to move left to right to see your pages.

5. With videos there is a right and wrong way to go about putting videos on your website. Most do not want to go to a website and get blared out by the audio or video immediately. If you must have your video or audio start as soon as someone lands on your website, make sure that you have a pause or stop button in plain site and easy to find so they can turn it off if they choose. Keep your audio and videos down to about 2 minutes, so they can also read your website without spending a lot of time there.

6. If you are planning on selling products on your website, make sure that you place the buy buttons in easy to find plain site so there is no mistake as to what you want them to do and why. Also tell them exactly what to expect and when, so there is no confusion on what will happen once they purchase something from you. Place a call to action link in several places on your website also, this will entice them to purchase.

7. If your website is just for list building, make sure that is all that is on your website. Do not put anything else on there but an opt in form. If there is more than one action, your visitor might get confused and just leave even though they might of wanted your report or ebook or whatever you were offering.

These are just a few of the things you need to keep in mind when planning your website. If you do then your visitors will have a pleasant time visiting and will remember you and possibly tell their friends about your website and come back again.