Online Business Questions Revealed

Hear this a lot, especially from beginners, first timers getting on the Internet. This is definitely a problem with soo much information out there. The information below was able to help this individual get focused and start moving forward, hope it will help you too.

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I’m a newbie to internet marketing. It seems that all the places I try to start with make it so difficult that I can’t understand . They make it so confusing by sending so many emails and trying to get you to look at something else. I’m so distracted right now I don’t know where to start.

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Dr Smiley’s answer
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This is a common problem amonest beginners…getting overwhelmed and unfocused.

Putting everything on hold, clean the slate, and stop reading the emails!!!

Start with what you want to do, what do you enjoy doing the most, focus there, and then just start without with a simple blog on that topic. The importance about starting out online is to have fun too, so why not do what you enjoy!

Even if you aren’t sure just what that is right now, it’s somewhere to focus your time. Ask yourself these questions, do you like health and fitness, do you enjoy animals, helping others, knitting, painting, or whatever, there is money in any of these niches and more.

You can even do a Google search for your favorite hobby or past time, just go to Google and type in affiliate “your hobby” and do a search, see what others are doing within your niche, then see how you might be able to improve on it or help others.

There is a resource that will help you get started on finding a niche, http://laurasbasicstowebdesign.com/nichemarketingstrategies
now don’t think I’m sending you off, it’s just a resource to help you get started.

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Individuals response to this answer:
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Thanks for your quick reply and I guess, “stop reading the emails” is probably the most important part. I have become totally unfocused, trying to read everything, feeling I’m going to miss out on something. I love dogs, have had 3 English Springer Spaniels in my life and find them fascinating. I never thought that might be interesting to someone – what do you think?
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Dr Smiley’s response:
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That sounds great to start out in. Do some research and see if others are also interested in them or have something out there already.

Go to http://freekeywordtools.wordtracker.com
type in some common words or phrase to match English Springer Spaniels and see what people are searching for and why. Recommend you look into http://laurasbasicstowebdesign.com/nichemarketingstrategies get the interview and really listen to it, and the resources, they should help you get focused and started.

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Hope you got something good out of that and start to implement it. Make yourself stand out from your competition will get you noticed and more clients.

Like these, then do sign up for our RSS feed and/or leave a comment. If you have a question then please ask it, use the form on the right hand side and the Dr. will get right back to you.

Have a great day
Dr Smiley

Do you have a question you need answered?
Just fill out the form at the right to get your question answered today!. Thanks for visiting!

Received this good question, and it is something that all marketers should think about no matter what niche/market you are currently in. It’s vital that you make sure you can stand out amongst the others within your market/nice.

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What is the best way to differentiate yourself from the competition, besides having a good product? I am asking this question from the perspective of marketing competing products to in some cases over-populated markets. Any thoughts on how to separate yourself from others?
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Dr Smiley’s answer
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Let’s break this down your first question – What is the best way to differentiate yourself from the competition? -

The best way is to get yourself out there and known. One good way to differentiate yourself is to check out your competition and see what they are doing you could be doing better or differently

The second part – Perspective of marketing competing products to in some cases over-populated markets. It’s never easy to get into a competitive market that is already saturated with stuff. Consider narrowing our market down see if there is a smaller market within your market that you could go after.
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Hope you got something good out of that and start to implement it. Make yourself stand out from your competition will get you noticed and more clients.

Like these, then do sign up for our RSS feed and/or leave a comment. If you have a question then please ask it, use the form on the right hand side and the Dr. will get right back to you.

Have a great day
Dr Smiley

Below is a question Dr Smiley received and answered. Hope it helps you!
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Is blogging and article marketing the only way to get traffic to my website? What do you think about those companies that charge you (x$ for xclicks) to send people to your site?

There are lots of different ways to get traffic to your website, and blogging and article marketing are just some. Make sure you are optimizing your website for the search engines as well so you can get indexed with the search engines. Make sure you are leaving valuable and helpful comments on forums, and other blogs that are related to your market.

Paying anyone to send visitors to your website is not good! You don’t know for sure the quality of visitors they are sending or whether they are targeted to your market. It is always best to stay away from companies like this, get your traffic yourself.

Some other ways to get traffic is by social media, using places like Twitter, Squidoo, and Facebook these are just a few places to get started.

There is one good place to learn more about how to get traffic to any website – The Faster Traffic Master

When new folks come to the Internet to start a new online business, this seems to be the first question they have.

So just how does someone start an online business?

There are a lot of different ways to get started online, but the one thing I have seen and learned, is you Must find out what you are passionate about. This is the best place to start. So let’s start there – your passion.

What is your passion, it can be anything you enjoy doing in your spare time, special knowledge you have that others would love to know, and/or what you do currently in your job or what you did previously in your job. Your love for your pets, knitting, boating, cars, motorcycles, jewelry, health care products, weight loss products. Keep this in mind while you are finding your passionate, you DO NOT NEED or Have to start with Internet Marketing and/or make money online markets. In fact, it’s best if you do not get started there. This is a very saturated market and not easy to get in to.

Decide what it is you want your business model to be, this can be a simple website that sells products, either your own or affiliate products; you can set up a membership site where you can share your expertise with others, and/or put a blog up that you can post your articles up, put anything up related to your market.

Some simple steps to take when you are considering to start an online business:

1. Decide what your passion is, this will help you decide on what type of business you want to start.

2. Find out if this market is profitable. Do some Google searches and see what others are doing within this market and ask yourself, How can I improve on that, is there something missing I can fulfill, what type of questions and/or problems is this market having I might be able to solve.

3. Decide what type of business model you want to run. This can be a blog, a website, and/or a membership business. Depending on what your market is will depend on this model. If you are brand new to this online marketing stuff, suggest you start out with a simple blog, put up a few posts/articles and see how it goes; from there you can always expand.

4. Build a list of prospects that are interested in this market. This is probably the one thing most overlook, do not do that, build that list now. It doesn’t matter if the market you have chosen is profitable or not, get a list started! You can do this a few different ways, put a form on your blog, if this is the model you follow, or put a web page up that asks for their information in exchange for a free report or e-book or a sneak peak at you product. Just get that list started.

5. Find something you can sell. This does not have to be your own product or service when you get started, in fact it is better to Not start that way. Find an affiliate product or service you can get started with, this way you can begin earning while you are learning the market. Test the waters with an affiliate product/service to see what the market is willing to spend money on. You can always develop your own product after you know the market is profitable and willing to spend money to get the information.

6. Once you have the above decided on, it’s time to let others know about your website/blog. This can be done many different ways, the best way to start getting traffic is to submit some articles, now these don’t have to be difficult to do, if you are passionate about your market then you should know something you can write about. These articles don’t have to be long, about 350 words is good enough. Use your resource box to send traffic back to your website/blog. You can find other blogs and forums within your market and post valuable information, answer questions for others, use your signature area to promote your new blog/website. Don’t get overwhelmed here, just pick one or two things you can do, then focus on those only until you are good at it and you are getting traffic using them, then and only then, should you look for other
ways to drive traffic to your website.

Okay there you have some steps you need to take to get started with your own online business. The number one key to success or failure is focus and action. Without these two key elements you will fail. You must take action, be willing to do some work, if you don’t know how to do something, seek the people that do know how and partner with them, exchange your time or money with them to get you started.

Take Action today!

Many are realizing that article marketing is a great way to not only get visitors to their websites, but it also will provide you with a backlink. This is important if you are into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) stuff.

So how does it all work?

It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Write up a small article about your niche/market. This doesn’t have to be real long, usually most directories will take an article that is around 400 words, and if you are passionate about your niche then it shouldn’t be difficult to do.

The problem most seem to experience is what to write about, this can be a stumbling block. Suggest that you do some research on your niche, discover some problems within that niche you can fix through writing an article. If your niche is a bit broad or big, drill down, find a niche within your niche to write about.

You don’t have to stick with your main niche, you might be surprised how many sub niches there are to a niche.

The power of article marketing doesn’t always come in just writing the article, of course you need to be unique, it needs to be your writing, but the real power is within your resource box. You are allowed, in most cases, to add your website link within your resource box. This will give people a chance to visit your website after they read your article.

If you link a specific keyword to your website then you get added benefit within the search engines. When you link your keywords, and then someone types that keyword into their browser, the chances of your article coming up is high, and once they click on your article, they then can click through to your website, a win-win situation for any marketer.

You don’t have to write thousands of articles, just set yourself a goal when starting out to around 2 articles a week.

Once you are comfortable with this, you can increase how many articles you write.

The other good thing with article marketing, is others are usually allowed to copy your work and use it on their website/blog, but they have to leave the article as is with your resource box intact. Another link for your website!

There is no limit on how many people can copy your article, so just think of the power behind this!

The best way to get started is to just do it. Take a keyword that is around your niche and start writing, you might be surprised just how much you actually do know.

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

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!