Donna Knight’s Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews

By Donna Knight

Unless you’re new to the internet, you already know that eBay is the most popular online auction site. Here’s how it works: Sellers get potential buyers to bid on an item, with the highest bidder buying the product for the price he or she offered.

Like all successful sites, eBay started out as a simple site created by Pierre Omidyar for his girlfriend Pam (who is now his wife) to help her find other Pez dispenser collectors in the Bay area. Now this site is a billion dollar industry.

Why should you care about Pierre’s success? Because Pierre is not the first or the last person who will become a success with eBay. Many people have quit their jobs by selling on eBay. Likewise many businesses have found untold riches on eBay.

First thing you need to do is open a seller’s account in eBay. You will be asked for verifiable personal information so eBay can make sure you are not a criminal trying to scam people. This information will allow them to catch you if you are. Let’s assume you’re not a scammer though.

Next step is to choose what payment methods you will accept from buyers. Most important is choosing what item you want to sell and how much you want to sell it for. Once you’ve chosen what item you want to sell, get your camera and take a picture of it. Upload the picture to the site and decide on the starting bid. Then sit back and relax. Let the bidding begin. If you’ve chosen your product wisely, people will be fighting to bid on it.

Many people have found financial freedom on eBay. I’ve personally spoken to people who left high-paying jobs because their eBay business become so successful that they couldn’t do both. And why would they want to, when their eBay sales were more profitable? If you could choose to be your own boss, work your own hours from the comfort of your own home, wouldn’t you?

One thing you must know is that these people hit the jackpot with eBay because they are trustworthy sellers, and that is essential in making buyers come back for more.

Another ingredient for a successful eBay business, which I’ve already mentioned, is choosing the right product to sell. You don’t have to be the first to sell it, but you do have to sell an item that has few enough sellers to keep the demand high and keep it profitable.

Some sellers set up online stores on eBay so that they can offer buyers a variety of products to choose from. There are almost no limitations on what you can sell on eBay, as long as it’s something that’s legal to sell. You can sell items like wedding dresses and all kinds of clothing, furniture, books, jewelry, and electronics, and lots more. Many items you might have difficulty selling offline do just fine on eBay, such as antiques and eccentric items.

In fact, eBay has a ‘Weird Stuff” category in its items-for-sale directory and that category is subdivided into ‘Slightly Unusual,’ ‘Real Weird,’ and ‘Totally Bizarre.’ You can’t imagine just how eccentric and unusual the items being sold under these categories are. You should take a look for yourself. You won’t believe it.

Let’s say you don’t want to sell weird items but still can’t think of an item to sell. Take a look around your home and see what you can get rid of. eBay is the ultimate proof that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. You probably won’t get thousands of dollars from your trash, but then again you never know. You’ll certainly get more than you would by throwing it away if it’s any good. Sometimes even broken items can be sold for the parts.

There once was a seller who thought no one would bid for his broken transistor radio, but he decided to put it up for auction anyways. He was shocked when an engineering student bought it. When the seller asked the student why he bought it, the student said he wanted to learn about repairing electronic gadgets.

Here’s another crazy story: Jay Leno from The Tonight Show confirmed that someone actually paid for a Doritos chip shaped like a Pope’s hat for a thousand dollars. That’s not the first or the last time food shaped like a religious symbol has commanded seemingly ridiculous amounts of money.

Now that you know how to get started and understand that you can sell almost anything, there’s no reason not to. Whether you’re an individual who wants to make some extra money or a business owner who is already selling a product offline, there is literally money waiting to be made on eBay. All you have to do is get started today. =============================================
Donna Knight is a Computer Trainer and Website Promotion Specialist. She has built over 200 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time when marketing online, visit her Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com
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Copyright (C) 2005 Donna Knight. All Rights Reserved. Permission granted to post this article in newsletters, free ebooks or websites as long as the article and resource box remain intact.

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By Donna Knight

If you want to expose as many people as possible to your products or services, you need traffic. But sometimes traffic alone is not enough. A visitor may not choose to buy from you today. Once a visitor leaves your site, however, chances are they’ll be gone for good. End of story. But wait…what if you could get them to purchase your goods or hire your services tomorrow?

That is exactly why you need an opt-in list. An opt-in list is a way to capture leads so that you can follow up with visitors who otherwise would never come back. If you follow up enough times, some of those who opt in will buy from you eventually.

First, let’s discuss what an opt-in list is. It is the online equivalent of a mailing list. It is a database of names and email addresses of website visitors who have chosen or opted to subscribe to your list so that they may receive emails from you, the mailing list owner.

To grow a sizeable opt-in list, you need to entice people to sign up by offering them something they want or need. Examples of what you can offer include: • A highly informative ezine or newsletter that you publish regularly, for example, weekly, biweekly or monthly. • A free downloadable digital product like an eBook, a special report, templates, or a software program. • A free service such as email accounts, web hosting or an email reminder service.

Among these free offers, an ezine is by far the most popular among subscribers, and the most effective for the business owner. With an ezine, the business owner can continuously do follow-ups offering educational content mixed with sales messages. Your newsletter can have ads that you sell other advertisers, ads for your own products or affiliate links to products that you earn commissions for.

Permission from the subscriber is essential for an opt-in list. This ensures that the subscriber won’t delete your emails immediately as spam.

Here are some steps to help you build an opt-in list in the shortest amount of time:

• Choose your target market and know what they want like the back of your hand. Opt-in lists are vehicles mostly for follow-ups. Following up won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to connect with your prospects so that you can address their problems in a way that’s most profitable for them and ultimately you. Remember, the ultimate goal is to sell them something. You can’t continuously sell prospects if you know nothing about them and what they want.

• Send personalized emails. Referring to your subscribers by their name goes a long way in building their trust.

• Build traffic to your website. You can’t get subscribers if you have no visitors. The traffic must be a sufficient volume since not every visitor will become a subscriber.

Here are some ways to get more visitors which will lead to more subscribers:

1. Using search engine optimization tactics like selecting keywords corresponding to what your prospects are searching for, incorporating these keywords into your website, frequently updating your website code, and, if necessary, using Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine campaigns.

2. Article marketing, by writing some articles relevant to the subject of your business, submitting them to free articles directories on the web, and including a resource box that contains a link to your site.

3. Link exchanges and ad exchanges

4. Advertising methods often overlooked, including forum marketing, buying ads in other ezines, and even offline advertising.

• Make your opt-in offer irresistible. It’s hard to be objective, but when crafting your offer, ask yourself, is this something I would sign up for as a consumer. Look at newsletters you’ve joined and figure what made you want to sign up.

• Co-opt lists. There are services that let you exchange leads with other webmasters. The result is an increase in subscribers to all newsletters involved.

• Build relationships. Though follow-ups are usually done through pre-set autoresponder email messages, you should send some individualized emails occasionally. This will make subscribers feel special because it gives them the impression that you’re sincere in your desire to cater to their needs.

If you ask many successful online businesses what contributed the most to their success, most will tell you their opt-in list. Therefore, if you want your business to be sustainable online, you must have an opt-in list. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling your own product or services, or making money with resale rights or affiliate programs; an opt-in list will boost your business. Now that you’ve read this article, you know exactly what you need to do to get started. =============================================
Donna Knight is a Computer Trainer and Website Promotion Specialist. She has built over 200 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time when marketing online, visit her Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com
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Copyright (C) 2005 Donna Knight. All Rights Reserved. Permission granted to post this article in newsletters, free ebooks or websites as long as the article and resource box remain intact.

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By Donna Knight

The disadvantage of an offline business compared to an online business is the limited marketplace. There are multiple factors that need to be perfect to guarantee your business success. One factor is the limited geographic area that will be the potential audience for your goods or services. Another factor is the limited number of places to advertise. In addition, to give your products or service the exposure they need usually requires a sizeable financial investment.

In the past decade, all this has changed. On the internet, the whole world can be your market. Marketing and promotion can be done at the speed of electrons at little or no cost. All this has changed with the advent of the Internet. When you do pay to advertise, your advertising dollars can stretch a lot further with online marketing

It’s no secret that the Internet has become a breeding place for unknown millionaires. These are the people who have established new online businesses that became wildly successful empires. Despite their success, you won’t see them on T.V., doing the rounds on The Tonight Show or David Letterman. These entrepreneurs are perfectly happy to keep their success to themselves while enjoying a life of abundance beyond their wildest dreams.

If you have an offline business, right now you may be thinking, “that’s good for them but how will it benefit me?” The good news is that the internet can provide the same benefits for offline businesses. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll position yourself on the internet now before your competition does and leaves you eating their dust.

Here are some things you need to know to start marketing your offline business online: 1. You need a website. A website will be like an online version of your shop where you can display your products or announce your services. You can also choose to perform transactions or make sales on your website. You can accept orders and pre-orders by using forms and online payment processors.

1. You need a secure payment method to accept payments online. 63% of consumers worldwide are still hesitant to use their credit card or checks online. Your payment pages can be secure by using Secure Sockets Layers (SSL), which protects data transmissions over the web by encrypting or encoding the data so that it can’t be read if intercepted by a hacker.

2. You also need to learn how to drive traffic to your site. This is not that difficult though. Traffic refers to the number of people who visit your website. The more people who see your site, the more exposure your products or services receive. Therefore, making more sales may require getting more people to come to your site. Making sales is always a numbers game, both online and offline. Here are some proven ways to increase traffic to your site:

A. Optimize your site for the search engines. A good 80% of traffic comes from search engines queries. If your website gets a high position in the search engine results, you will get more visitors. Search engine optimization tactics include keyword research and integration, content creation, and submission of your site to as many high-traffic search engines as possible.

B. Exchange links with other similar but non-competing sites, but also try to get one-way links to your site. One-way links are links where they link to you, but you don’t link back. Search engines frown on obviously intentional reciprocal linking. If you get links from completely unrelated sites, these may be poor quality links.

C. Advertise on other sites by using banners.

D. Try pay-per-click advertising, such as Overture or Google AdWords.

1. You also have to establish a way to keep past visitors. This can be done using a good autoresponder service or by regularly sending out an Ezine. Ezines are electronic newsletters that provide valuable information for your subscribers. By offering them something worth their time, you will gain trust, which could result in future sales.

2. Consider viral marketing, which is the online equivalent of word of mouth advertising. Here’s how it works: distribute a useful and desirable product for free. This is usually in the form of an eBook or a special report on a subject of interest and importance to your target market. Add links to your product or website to this Ebook. Allow your readers to freely distribute it to their friends and family by giving them giveaway rights. An advanced technique is to give them resale rights to this viral product, allowing them to keep 100% of the profits for any sales. This would guarantee an exponential spread of the viral product, resulting in a similar exponential growth of your site’s traffic.

These days putting your offline business online is so cheap, that you have nothing to lose by trying it. You don’t need a major investment, and the risks are usually negligible. The key is to start now, and you will find that there are endless possibilities for your business online. =============================================
Donna Knight is a Computer Trainer and Website Promotion Specialist. She has built over 200 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time when marketing online, visit her Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com
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Copyright (C) 2005 Donna Knight. All Rights Reserved. Permission granted to post this article in newsletters, free ebooks or websites as long as the article and resource box remain intact.

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Here’s an interesting article from Jim Edwards about the start of the convergence of the internet and television. If this is really going to happen, it’s definitely in very early stages, but it’s always a good idea for online marketers to be on the lookout for new marketing media.

-Donna Knight

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Create Your Own Online Marketing “TV” Station

• by Jim Edwards

© Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved http://www.thenetreporter.com
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It will happen! TV and the Internet will eventually merge into one giant multi-media “melting pot” that includes everything from live footage and old reruns to garage videos posted by your next door neighbor’s kid. Just like cable TV fractured network TV, the Internet will enable everyone with a voice, a video camera, and something to say to fracture cable TV even more. But the real TV revolution on the Internet will only happen when marketers stop trying to copy TV, with its commercials and outdated modes of revenue generation, and start copying the “pay-per-view” and “infomercial” models.

One company at TVexe.com has started offering television broadcasts from around the world via Internet streaming. The free software (with optional one-time $25 upgrade) allows you to stream TV feeds from around the world to your desktop through a broadband connection. The picture rates a “C+” on the quality side, but, just like Internet telephony 6 years ago, you can expect the quality to improve quickly. If they can keep costs down long enough to figure out how to make money, this company will likely succeed because they provide programming that’s virtually impossible to get anywhere else.

But, for the rest of us “mortals” who want to stream our images, video, and audio across the Web, trying to provide “live TV” broadcasts spells the kiss of death in both time and money. For the vast majority of companies doing business online, it will prove virtually impossible to get a meaningful number of people to show up to a website at “8:00 P.M. Eastern” for tonight’s live “TV” broadcast. But what will work online is adopting the “pay-per-view” model found in hotels where you watch the program you want, when you want. Offering website visitors video content they can download, start, stop, play, pause, and view on their own schedule holds the key to online “TV” success. I hate to make this overly simplistic, but bottom line: an effective online “TV Station” only needs a basic website and the ability to allow “viewers” to download or stream video files.

All of us get two basic options when it comes to creating content to deliver from our “TV Station” website. First, you can do “screen capture” video, which combines video of the action taking place on your computer screen with your voice as narration, to create excellent instructional content. You then allow viewers to download this “TV program” from your website either free or for a free. Two programs enable you to do this quickly and easily: “Screen Cam Generator” from http://www.ScreenCamSoftware.com and “Camtasia” from http://www.TechSmith.com.

Your second option involves using full-motion video, either from a web-cam or a camcorder. The content most easily gets published online either as a WMV file (Windows Media Video) played with Microsoft’s Media Player, or FLV file (Flash Video) played with the free Flash “plug-in” found in most Web browsers.

Regardless of which option you choose, remember: unlike traditional TV, successful models of “TV-style” content online will empower the viewer to watch when and where they choose.

– Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the creator of an amazing course that will teach you step-by- step and click-by-click how to finally create your own money-making mini-sites…
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“Finally! A Quick and Easy Way For YOU to Painlessly Set Up Your OWN Moneymaking ‘Mini’ Websites… Without Being a Computer Geek, Buying Expensive Software, or Paying Outrageous Fees To A Webmaster!”

Click Here => http://www.MiniSiteCreator.com

Automatic Social Bookmarking

Clickbank has lowered it’s refund time from 12 weeks to 6 weeks. In addition, the customer requesting a refund must give a reason. This is in contrast to Paypal’s refund policy time limit which is 60 days.

There are two ways to look at this. Marketing experts will say that increasing your money-back guarantee time limit will increase your sales. Therefore lowering your refund time limit could actually decrease your sales. However, most sellers will welcome a lower refund deadline because in their minds giving people less time to think about asking for a refund means less refunds.

Requiring customers to give a refund makes perfect sense and should help cut down on fraudulent or frivolous refund requests.

Automatic Social Bookmarking

by Mike Chen

No matter what industry you’re in, it’s absolute vital that youeither sell software or offer free software to your customers.

By the time you are done reading this article, you willunderstand why.

1. “It’s the Product, Stupid”

No amount of marketing “how to” is going to make up for not having a killer product.People are sick of being told how to do it. They want somethingthat will “do it” for them.Software does just that … It does things for people.Stop trying to sell “how to” and start selling instant solutions.That’s where the real money is.

1. Downloadable Viral Marketing Tools

OK, so you don’t want to sell software. Fair enough.You’re crazy if you don’t use software as a viral marketing tool.Many of the largest lists o­n the Internet were built using freesoftware downloads as an enticement for subscribing.You can easily add viral twists to these tools and beforeyou know it hundreds or even thousands of sites could beoffering your free software - becoming virtual newslettersubscriber magnets.What if you created just o­ne new tool like that a week?How big would your list be inside of 6 months?

1. Create Value-Added Customer Helper Apps

What if you were to create applications that simply added value to your existing products and services? How much higher would your customer satisfaction be if you created various software tools to teach, train, support, or otherwise help your customers? How many more sales would that added customer satisfaction generate for you without any additional effort year after year?

1. Upsell Products

As you probably know, selling new products to existing customers is the easiest way in the world to make money.It’s 5 times easier to sell to an existing customer than it is toacquire a new o­ne.Why not create new products using “Make Your Own Software” and sell them to your existing customer base?Instant profits.

1. Highest Profit Margins in the World

Electrons are free. If you’re selling an instantly downloadable product, your product fulfillment costs are virtually nil. Plus, in the software industry there is no inventory to manage,so it’s probably the easiest business in the world to manage aswell.

Mike Chen was o­ne of the pioneers of the software security industry and is a widely respected Internet Marketing expert. Mike’s newest product, “Make Your Own Software,” allows even those who don’t know a single line of code to create software programs instantly.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Make Your Own Software” has my highest rating. http://www.makeyourownsoftware.com/main.art

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