Bill McRea

As an Internet entrepreneur you know how crucial it is to the success of your business to build a big email list. When you have built your own list of subscribers, you have an asset that can bolster the success of your online business.

A responsive list of email subscribers means that you have your own targeted audience who has raised their hand to say that they are interested in hearing from you again. You have the opportunity to build a relationship with them, to gain their trust and increase the know and like factor so that they will feel comfortable buying from you again and again.

For those Internet marketers who have more ideas and enthusiasm than they have technical skills, creating squeeze pages or opt-in pages can be challenging. You either have to pay your web designer to do it, or you might try downloading a template and muddling through inserting your copy and fiddling with the HTML codes. Then you realize that you’ve still got to figure out how to add the code from your email auto-responder program.

You know that a squeeze page is a proven, effective way to build your list quickly. It can allow you to offer an “ethical bribe” in the form of a free product in exchange for the subscriber’s contact information. When this product is something of value to them that demonstrates your expertise, and whet’s their appetite for the products that you have available on your website it can be a great way to build a following of loyal subscribers who may one day become valuable customers.

There are several aspects to creating an effective squeeze page, and if you have never created one before you might feel like you are stumbling in the dark a little bit in the beginning.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a selection of proven squeeze page templates to choose from that you  could simply plug your compelling copy into and have a custom squeeze page without paying a designer or barely even breaking a sweat? Well, when you have a WordPress theme like OptimizePress creating squeeze pages is really that simple.

You have 10 squeeze page design templates that you can customize to fit your topic and your branding scheme. These templates have been tested and optimized to provide excellent conversion rates.

Finally there is an easy way to integrate your autoresponder code. Simply copy and paste and you’ll have a working opt-in box. Adding your headline, choosing the font, and adding bullets is simply a matter of ticking the right boxes for the page elements that you would like to include.

Now, in just a matter of a few minutes and with minimal hassle, you can have a custom squeeze page that you built yourself that you can start sending lots of targeted traffic to so that you can start building your list.

If you do any kind of Internet Marketing, and you want to eliminate the need to hire designers to create custom pages for you, and you want to feel a bit more in control of your campaigns, then you should take a look at OptimizePress.  Check it out today at, http://imsafelink.com/OptimizePress-article

Joining the Amazon Associates affiliate program is a great way to start making money online. In this article we’ll review a strategy for getting more exposure for your affiliate links, and boosting the SEO for your blog using the popular social media content sharing website, squidoo.com.
First, in case you have indeed been living under a rock and you have never heard of squidoo, it is both a publishing platform and a community where the members create pages called “lenses” that contain information about a specific topic. Squidoo was founded by Seth Godin and it’s been around for five years now. If you create your lens properly using lots of keyword tags, appropriate images and compelling copy, it can hit the first page of Google in just a few days.
Creating a lens about the products that you are offering on Amazon accomplishes a couple of things. You get more exposure for your affiliate links, and since squidoo lenses often achieve a high rank far more quickly than your blog might, they provide high quality back links to your blog, which means more organic traffic to your blog and a little boost in rankings.
• Create your profile on Squidoo.com
Go to squidoo.com and create your profile. It’s free and easy to do. Once you have verified your email address you can start creating lenses.
• Do keyword research to find best keywords
Keyword tags is how your lens will be found both within squidoo and in the search engines, so don’t skimp on your keyword research. Create a healthy list of keywords and choose the primary keyword to use as the URL for the lens.
There are several free and premium keyword research tools that will help you to choose the best buyer keywords and long tail keywords that will attract the targeted traffic you need for your lens.
• Create quality content focused on your primary keywords
Write thoughtful, informative copy that adds value. Answer the questions that your prospective buyers have about your topic, share news about the industry, or give your unique insight on trends and upcoming events that will affect your visitors.
• Add Amazon modules
If you use one of the available templates, after you have plugged in your content, squidoo will search out all different kinds of options for modules for your lens, which you are free to keep or delete at your discretion.

If you create your lens yourself you have a whole host of widget options to choose from. For our purposes, we will focus on adding the Amazon modules and you can tinker with the other modules to decide which ones you want to try.
When your Amazon module is in place it will be empty, so you will need to give it a title and a description, and then you will pick your product options and the number of products you’d like to display on your lens. You can either let Amazon pick the products or you can select which products get displayed in your module.
When visitors to your lens click on your Amazon links and go to Amazon to make a purchase you will earn advertising fees, but some of your visitors will also click over to your website, which will bring you targeted traffic.
There is so much more to say on this and many other topics related to earning passive income online. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

When a visitor lands on your website they are strangers in a strange land until you find a way to put a human face on your business.  Although e-commerce has been thriving for fifteen years or more, there are still people who get very nervous about buying online.  Just knowing that there is a contact number for support where they can reach an actual human being to ask their questions and get live answers can make their buying experience so much more rewarding.

How do you know when it’s time to let someone else handle customer support?

If you are a clickbank vendor who has published a few successful information products, customers will naturally be looking for support whether general customer support, or technical support. If answering these support emails it taking up a lot of your time and keeping you from being able to produce additional products, it is time to consider getting someone other than yourself to handle customer support for you.

Providing in-house support

You can provide in-house support if you have staff people available who can take customer support calls. You can publish the days and times when live support is available, and the times when if people call they will get a recording prompting them to leave a message.  Having a contact number for support does not mean that you must always have someone available live to answer it. When callers reach a recording, it should direct them to how they can use your online support services on your website so that they don’t feel like their concerns are not going to be addressed until they can speak to a live person. If you provide a help desk ticketing system, your contact number for support can become part of the escalation process.

Outsourcing support

If your in-house operation is more lean and you don’t have any staff available to answer phones, you can always outsource customer support.  You can hire a virtual assistant and have your support calls routed to her number, or you can hire a customer support outsourcing company that has a professional call center with operators on the line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Outsource support companies can provide a rangel of services such as:

FAQ support (frequently asked questions)

Troubleshooting issues

Resetting passwords

Technical support for software or hardware

It really depends on what the volume of your customer support needs are, and what kind of support you need to provide.

If you plan to scale your company, then customer support is a huge issue that absolutely cannot be ignored. Your customers are responsible for your success. How you treat them will play a huge role in your standing in the marketplace and the ultimate success or failure of your brand.

Internet marketers are often looking for ways that they can make money quickly by leveraging their time, but they should never lose sight of the importance of providing excellent support for the customers they have now so that they will continue to attract more customers in the future.

Internet marketers can find lots more information about selling information products online when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come and discover how you can make money online while saving time and effort by using proven systems and productivity tools.

It can be said without exaggeration that tracking your website’s conversion rate is one of the most important components in your online business. Let’s say that you have a product and you came up with a price that you thought made sense, set up the sales page and started sending traffic to that page. When you started making sales you figured that was pretty cool and then moved on to the next project. But then you are hanging out with a fellow Internet marketer who is sharing an embarrassing story about how he never split tested his product’s price or the landing page until recently, and when he analyzed the results of the test and changed the price, sales increased by 120%!

Yes, you can make a simple change to you landing page, even to the color of a button and see drastic changes to your site’s conversion rate, but how do you track your current conversions so that you know what’s working and what needs tweaking? Well, fortunately for you, Google Analytics can do all of this and more for free. Let’s look at how you can use GA to track your website’s conversions:

After you have signed up for your Google Analytics account you will get a tracking code that you will need to install on your website. If you are running a WordPress blog, there is a handy Google Analytics for WordPress plugin that you can install that makes adding the tracking code quite simple to install.

Using Google Analytics to track conversion rates

Step 1: Create a ‘Thank You’ page for the product that you are testing conversions for and copy and paste the URL for that new page into a Notepad file because you’re going to need it soon.

Step 2: Using the Goal Tracking feature in Google Analytics

From within your website’s profile in GA, click on the ‘edit’ button to the right of the link for your website.

You will be brought to the ‘Profile Settings,’ page for your website, and if you scroll down just a little bit you will see a section called, ‘Goals.’ Google Analytics allows you to create up to 20 conversion goals for each website profile.

Click on the ‘Add goal,’ link.

Give your goal a name, such as the name of the product, and then under ‘Goal Type,’ choose ‘URL Destination,’

Here is where you will put the link to the Thank you page that you created earlier. If the enter URL to that page is, http://mycoolblog.com/thank-you, then you would paste “/thank you/” as your goal URL.

It’s as simple as that. Now you just have to wait a few days before you start seeing results because Google Analytics does not work in real time.

Now that you know how to set up basic goals using Google Analytics, you can set up goals to track newsletter subscriptions and other actions that visitors might be taking when they land on your website.

For more information about conversion tracking with Google Analytics and other topics related to Internet Marketing, you should visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, and subscribe to our RSS feed. You’ll get a ton of information that you can use to make more money in less time and maybe even have some fun doing it.

Anyone with more than a passing interest in Internet Marketing quickly becomes familiar with the acronym, CPC, which means cost per click. CPC and CPM are the prevalent revenue models for media buying online, and EPC is related to the realm of Affiliate Marketing. For those who are new to these revenue models, we’ll take a basic look at each one describing what they mean and what the differences are between them within the online Marketing space.

What is CPC?

CPC means cost per click, and this revenue model is used to price many of the PPC or pay per click advertising models such as Google’s AdWords or Bing and Yahoo!’s Microsoft Ad Network. As the name implies, advertisers place ads in search engine results pages, or within a content network, but they only pay when a visitor actually clicks on the ad.

When tracking and testing mechanisms are put into place, CPC marketing can yield lots of data that can help marketers choose the most effective keywords,  and landing pages.

What is CPM?

CPM means cost per thousand (mille) impressions, which are page loads of an online advertisement. The CPM model is more advantageous when you are dealing with high traffic sites because you are banking on the fact that a certain number of people per thousand will click on your ad. On the right website with a steady flow of targeted traffic the CPM model can be quite effective.

What is EPC?

EPC which is short for average Earnings per 100 clicks, is a term used within the realm of affiliate marketing. It is used to measure the average earnings within a 7 day period that an affiliate can expect to earn for every 100 clicks that they are able to generate. This calculation can be helpful to affiliates when they are seeking out new products to promote.

Commission Junction, which is a popular affiliate network says the following about EPC: “EPC is an exclusive metric of the CJ Marketplace given for publishers, advertisers, and individual ads, and is a relative rating that illustrates the ability to convert clicks into commissions.”

CPC is the most effective pricing model for smaller advertisers looking to buy guaranteed traffic for their websites. EPC is a different kind of metric, that is actually limited to the world of online affiliate marketing .

At the end of the day, the most important metric in all of this is your website’s conversion rate, which can be expressed as its ability to convert visitors into customers, or getting visitors who land on your site to take a desired action such as subscribe to your email list or RSS feed. So the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the action that you want them to take on your website.

When you are first starting out it is important to arm yourself with enough knowledge to get started taking forward action. Don’t wait until you feel like you know enough because that day will most likely never come due to the constantly changing nature of online marketing.

When you are ready to learn more about CPC, CPM, EPC and those other confusing acronyms  related to Internet marketing, you should visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, and subscribe to our RSS feed. You’ll get a ton of information that you can use to make more money in less time and maybe even have some fun doing it.