Website Business Tips

If you write a blog or articles for your website, you’ve likely had some writer’s block at some point.

Coming up with new ideas or topics to write about can be hard sometimes. I however, have a little trick that I’ll share with you. I do this almost everyday and I’m never stuck on ideas (I typically have 30 things I want to write about each day, which is the opposite problem!)

The first thing I do, is I figure out what my reader wants. It doesn’t matter what I want to write. I write for people like you, so the only thing that matters is what the reader wants to learn.

To find out what your readers want, these are my top secret tips…

1. Go to forums in your niche market and look for common questions that get asked by the users. If you see people asking questions like “where can I find a 10 speed huffy bike with purple stripes?”, all you have to do is search google for whatever the readers are looking for. Then, you can write an article or blog post called “Top 3 places to find a 10 speed huffy with purple stripes”. Your readers will be amazed that you can read their minds, and you’ll have a follower for life!
2. Go to other blogs in your market and read the comments left by their readers. Often times readers will leave specific questions in comments to blog posts, and you can use these questions to come up with new topics for your website (as explained above).
3. Tie major events into an article or blog post. If the Super Bowl is on tv next week, then you can always weave that into something to write about. Maybe you saw the quarterback of one of the teams riding a 10 speed huffy bike with purple stripes? Maybe not that extreme, but you get the point…
4. Contact experts in your market and ask them to chat for a few minutes. This is something you should try to do anyway, but having these conversations with people in your market will bring up topics you never thought about. Maybe there is some new technology coming out or a new product that will help your market, etc.

When you find a couple of good topics to write about, just start writing. Don’t stop until you get all of your thoughts out of your head and on paper (or computer screen). You will notice while you are writing about a certain topic, other topics will pop into your head like magic. Jot those ideas down on a notepad so you can use them the next time you need ideas.

If you are still stumped, you’re probably making it harder than it is. Take a short break and come back to it later…

A very common question, especially from people new to internet marketing is “what business should I start” or “what niche market should I get into” or my favorite “what is the most profitable business topic”.

My answer…

There are NO bad markets! I know, that’s different from what most people will say, but hear me out…

It doesn’t matter if you want to start a business selling shoes online, become a freelance writer, or even give tattoo advice (yes, I made money online doing just that!).

Whatever you want to do, you CAN do it online and you CAN make money doing it. There are however, a few “guidelines” I follow when picking a business topic or niche market.

1. The bigger the market, the more money can be made. This is pretty obvious, but many people overlook the concept. Obviously there are more people who want to lose weight than there are people who want to teach their cat to do back flips. Don’t be scared of getting into big markets though. Just because that’s where the “big boys” (or girls) play doesn’t mean there isn’t room for you to come in and get a piece of the pie. In fact, I prefer large markets over small niche markets any day (for reasons you’ll learn about below)…
2. The group of people you are targeting have to be willing to spend money (or at least do something for you that earns you money - ie click your ads). Again, the more money people have to spend, the more you can make. BUT, just because you want to get into a market that doesn’t have much money, it doesn’t mean you can’t make money from that business idea. Look at all those celebrity gossip blogs and websites. Those site owners have readers who rarely buy products from them, but they are earning millions of dollars by displaying ads to the hundreds of thousands of visitors they who are reading their websites each day.
3. Pick a topic that is interesting to you. If you are not interested in the business, you will not be motivated to work on the business. I fell in that trap a couple times, and the most money I’ve ever made online was with businesses that I was passionate about. It doesn’t feel like work when you do something you love doing.
4. Pick a topic that other companies would be interested in. Like I always say, your business exit strategy should ALWAYS be to sell your website at some point. When I start a business online, one of my first steps is to find a company that I would like to get acquired by one day. I build the business to compliment nicely with this other business right from the start. I try to target their same customer demographic, offer similar but non-competing products, maybe join their affiliate program to begin building a business relationship with that company, etc. Then when I want to sell the business, it’s practically sold before I even list it for sale because it’s such a perfect match for them. Big businesses grow by acquiring smaller businesses like yours, get used to the idea and you might get rich in the process…
   (even if you don’t end up selling your website to this company, there will likely be others like them that will want to buy your business, such as their competitors!)
5. Try to stay away from trends or fads. Things like “specialized diets” (ie Atkins) that fade away a few months after they are released are not good business models. Yes, you can make money from trends and fads, but it’s not a very good long term plan.

It really depends on your goals and how much money you want to make. If you are happy with earning an extra $300 per month from your web business, then you can start almost any kind of website to make that much money. If you want to make at least $75,000 per month, then you need to focus on the bigger markets and be prepared to work a little harder.

I know most of these tips you’ve never heard before, but I guarantee it’s the most valuable advice you’re going to find online.

Until next time…

I’m sure you’ve seen those little text boxes on websites that ask for your name and email address, right? If not, look up and to the right of this page

Well, that’s called an “opt in email form” or simply put, a way for a website owner to collect contact information from their visitors.

When you submit your details on these forms, the information you entered is sent over the internet to be stored in a database.

Most of the time, your contact details are sent to an “Autoresponder” to store your information.

So, in it’s simplest form, an autoresponder is a piece of software that allows a website owner to store contact details of people who request to be on their mailing lists.

When you want to email the people on your mailing list, you simply login to your autoresponder service provider (there are a bunch of companies out there which I will go over shortly). Once you are logged in, you can type an email that you want to send to everyone, then select which subscribers you want the email sent to.

This is no different than a typical newsletter software service.

Where the “Auto” part of autoresponder comes in is this…

You can pre-write a bunch of emails and store them in an autoresponder service. You can then schedule these emails to be sent out to people on your mailing list at certain intervals. You can have anywhere from 1 to hundreds of pre-written emails stored in your autoresponder at any time.

For example, let’s say you want to follow up with a customer after they buy something from you. Well, it’s a pain to go through each of your customers and hand write each of them a thank you message. So, all you do is send your customers to an autoresponder optin email form after they buy something, and they enter their name and email address into your autoresponder system.

In this example, let’s say you also wrote 5 emails to go out to this new customer. The first one will be emailed immediately when the customer fills out the contact form. This email might say something like “Thank you for your purchase of xxxxxx. We really appreciate your business and if you have any questions about your order, please feel free to contact us at xxx-xxx-xxxx”. (You can be more elaborate than this if you want).

Then, you decide you want to continue writing to this customer to build up a relationship with them, which will make them more likely to buy from you again in the future.

So, you have your autoresponder service send out the second of your 5 pre-written emails four days after the customer signs up. This email can say something like “Hi Bob, I hope you are enjoying your new xxxxxxxx. We’ve been getting lots of great feedback on it from other customers who bought it as well. Again, if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.”

There are two additional great things about autoresponders:

1) They can appear as if you sat down to write the email to the customer directly (even though that same message could have been sent to 100’s of people the same day). You can insert items in your emails like the customer’s name, which gives the appearance that you took the time to follow up with them directly.

2) It takes NO EFFORT to follow up with people once the original emails are written. The “system” automatically sends out the emails when you schedule them to go out, it keeps track of people who wish to unsubscribe to your mailings, and it can handle sending out thousands of emails a day if you want. Autoresponders are a huge time-saver in business, and really help you keep in touch with your mailing list and customers with little effort.

Like I mentioned before, there are lots of companies that can manage your autoresponders for you. The company we use is called Aweber and they do a pretty good job.We’ve also tried IContact as well which was good too, but they were a bit expensive compared to Aweber.

Regardless of what your business is, it’s always a good idea to use an Autoresponder to keep in touch with prospects and customers. Building that relationship is critical to your success…