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Learn How To Build A Theme Based Content Website That Sucks In Visitors Like A Vacuum Cleaner On Steroids
When you build a Theme Based Content Website for your Local Business correctly, you can slash your marketing budget forever...By Rocky Tapscott If you want to make more money faster and easier than you ever thought possible from your existing Business, this may be the most important article you will ever read. Here's why... Most Local Business owners don't think they need a website - they feel that because they sell only to customers in their local area, it would be of no benefit to them, so why bother? This article will show you how to create a multiple streams of income from your existing Business using the power of the Internet. Let me ask you some questions -
In this article we will discuss how you can achieve all of these things faster than you ever thought possible. Interested? OK, so lets begin... Just a quick note before we get started - we are going to cover a lot of ground here, so you might feel a little overwhelmed at first. Please don't worry - you ca do this if you really want to... Building a high traffic website offers you the highest leverage, lowest cost marketing you will ever do for your Business. Your website is like a giant Yellow Pages ad that sucks in interested buyers and compels them to visit your store, contact you for an appointment or buy directly online straight away. If you set it up correctly, visitors will come from all over the world as well as locally to buy your products and services. And you can access this visitor traffic for FREE if you just set your site up in the right manner. True, it takes time before you start to build free traffic from the search engines, but once it starts, it builds and builds, as so many sites that are set up correctly are finding. First, you get a few visitors, then 50 a day, then 100, then, who knows...many sites that are based on profitable niches or areas of great interest to many people get thousands of highly targeted, willing to buy visitors each day. The owners of these websites make wads of money every day, and every night, while they sleep! In a few months, that could be you... And in the meantime, while your Free traffic is building, you can use the strategies outlined in our previous article on Setting up a Sales Website to bring visitors pouring in to your website for a few dollars a week until the free visitors start coming in droves. Doesn't this beat what you are currently doing with your marketing?
The Internet is the most powerful marketing medium ever invented. It allows small Business owners to compete with multi-national corporations and take their share of the consumers dollar without spending a fortune on marketing. You Can Become THE Expert In Your Field And the Internet is still relatively new - the opportunities are endless for those who get on board now. In a few years, every man and his dog will be out there with a website (most will still fail to make any money, but there will be a LOT more competition) - but at the moment, the field is wide open, allowing you to get the jump on everyone else and get yourself established as THE expert in your field. You can grab all the customers you can handle now before your competitors wake up, and by consistently giving those customers great service and quality information through your regular newsletter or ezine (see below for details on how to do this), you won't give them a reason to go anywhere else. So when some existing or new competitor offers your customers a few dollars off a product that you sell trying to lure them away, they will remember the relationship that you have built with them and ignore the attempt to steal their Business from you. A website and email marketing can turn your customers into raving fans - people who won't leave you no matter what, and who recommend you to all of their friends - and studies have shown that word of mouth marketing is the most powerful way to find new customers. Wouldn't that be nice? OK, lets outline the step by step plan you need to make this happen. A high traffic, profitable website is within your reach... But first, from the beginning, what is a Theme Based Content Site? A Theme Based Content Site is a website that offers visitors information that is tightly focused around a topic or area of interest that appeals to a certain group of people. For example, sport is a niche, but it is too general to be used as the basis of a website on it's own. Lacrosse would be a great example of a niche that has many devoted players who surf the Internet looking for information and products related to their sport. It is an niche that could have significant possibilities for building a profitable website. There are thousands of niches all around us - your Theme Based Content Website needs to focus on one of these that is related to your Business and provide interesting, relevant content to the people who are looking for it. When your web pages are submitted to the search engines, the engines crawl through them looking for key-words and an overall theme. The pages are then listed in the indexes of the search engines, and when someone searches for say 'lacrosse equipment', your page by the same name (something like www.localwebsolutions.com/lacrosse-equipment.html) will be returned in the results that the searcher sees. The key is getting your pages to the top of the search engines. Some topics have millions of search results returned - you have to be in the top 20 to have any chance of being seen by anyone. That is your goal, so you have to be sure that you choose a niche that doesn't have an overwhelming amount of competition and also offers you the potential of making a good profit - in other words, it has to contain people who have money to buy the products or services you are selling. It is no use focusing on a niche that has many people with no money or people who don't use computers or technology - they will not be in a position to find out about your website... So, lets start at the beginning and go through the process of creating a Theme Based Content Website and you will understand what is involved. Ken Evoy, one of my Mentors and the President of Sitesell.com, has devised a system that, when followed, always results in success. He calls it C-T-P-M...
By following this proven process, your website cannot fail to produce results. With this system in mind, let's get started... It All Starts With Content On the web, content is king. Millions of searches are done every day by people looking for information. Just one search engine, Google, handles up to 3000 searches per second! (source, Australian Financial Review, Saturday May 1, 2004) People all over the world, and just around the corner, are looking for information on all sorts of things. The trouble is, most websites are nothing more than a few pages of rubbish cobbled together, filled with banner ads and flashing objects and text that are an affront to your senses, or sales letters trying to flog you something. Or another type of site will be just pages stacked with keywords whose only function is to re-direct anyone who happens to click on the listing to some other page, that is itself just a sales letter trying to sell some piece of overpriced junk. This frustrates the search engine companies, whose main goal is to provide relevant search results to their customers. When you build a website that has high quality content, it enhances the search engines standing and makes them look good for including your web pages in it's listings. Your high quality pages gradually push their way to the top of the search engine rankings, where more and more people find you, which in turn means more visitors to your site. So, decide on a theme related to your Business, then simply build a website around that theme Create pages of relevant content that give your readers information about topics related to that theme. The more pages the better. Each page needs to tie in with all of the others to a common theme so that the entire site follows logically along the same path. The search engine spiders will find the site, read through each page, and decide on the overall theme.
If all of the pages and articles are grouped around the same theme, your pages will be considered highly relevant to search queries made by web surfers looking for information on that topic. The more relevant content you have, the higher your site will rank in the search engines. Eventually, you will start to receive some traffic from the major search engines. It can take several months to see your first visitors, so while they are on their way, keep building more and more content pages. If you aren't a great writer, that's no problem. You can find great articles FREE on the web that people have written and made available for you to use on your website. Again, Directory of Ezines can help here with free content, but there are many other places you can find Free articles - just type 'free website content *your topic*' or 'free ezine articles *your topic*' into a search engine like Google and you will find hundreds or thousands of matches. Then, simply write an introduction to the article, insert the article below it, then write a couple of paragraphs at the end showing how the article ties in with your Business or theme, and offering a product or service that is related to the article. Simple...but be careful not to use articles that direct your visitors away to websites of your direct competitors - always use articles that offer great content but aren't promoting products or services that will take sales away from your Business. Pretty soon, your visitor traffic snowballs until you reach the second stage - Visitors Arriving By The Hundreds...Then Thousands Per Day As traffic builds, you continue creating more and more quality pages tightly focused around the same theme. Visitor numbers grow and many of them, when they read your great, informative content, will continue to tell their friends about your site. Over a period of several months, your traffic numbers should continue growing if you have done all the right things when building your website - optimised your pages, submitted them correctly to the search engines, kept building pages of quality content. (If all of this sound like too much work, see below for the simple solution). Once your traffic is flowing and your visitors are reading your information and returning regularly to see what's new, it's time for the next stage... Pre-selling - Giving Your Visitor The Information They Are Seeking Pre-selling means forcing yourself NOT to sell products or services to your website visitors. Think about it - people come to your website from a search engine looking for information. If they find a sales pitch, they will usually just click away. Pre-selling means giving them the relevant information that they are looking for, and then making a friendly recommendation on a product or service that might be just what they are after. Pre-selling means writing informative articles that explain step by step how your visitors can solve a problem or find a solution to something that's bugging them. Your articles should contain between 500 and 1000 words (although shorter or longer is OK, too, depending on what you have today) and give your visitors information that is relevant to the topic that they searched for at the search engine. You must be careful not to come across as trying to sell them anything or you will lose them in double quick time - the object of your article should be to educate and inform. Once your prospects know what they need to do to solve their problem, you have earned the right make some recommendations for products or services that can help them do just that. These recommendations of course are to buy your product or service (if it does indeed help them, of course) or to some other product that you are affiliated with. Side Note - this really belongs of the next section - Monetization - but for a comprehensive discussion on what affiliate programs are, how they work and how you can profit from this profitable new marketing phenomenon, The Affiliate Masters Course is a wonderful Book that is seriously worth taking the time to read. It explains in detail everything you need to know to be successful online as an affiliate - and it's FREE to download! Affiliate income can add 1, 5 or many more small, individual streams of cash flow to your offline Business - it makes sense to tap into this powerful marketing medium while it's still in it's infancy. Take the time to read The Affiliate Masters Course and you will be well on your way to developing Multiple Streams of Income from YOUR Business. So, back to the article... Remember, the sales website does the selling - your content website merely offers a recommendation. If you try to sell on your content site, your visitors guard will be up and they will resist your offers. If they do then click through your sales site or that of your Affiliate Merchant's, they will feel doubly pitched to - and your chances of closing a sale are extremely limited - don't sell - Pre-Sell. And Finally - Monetization - The Reward For All Of This Work Content is building, Traffic is flowing, you are Pre-selling your visitors and informing them about how to solve their problems; now it's time to turn on the cash flow taps of your website. If you provide good, valuable information about topics that interest your visitors, they will be receptive to your recommendations when you ask them to visit another site, call for an appointment or promote a product or service to them via an affiliate link. So, now it's time to launch your ezine or online magazine. Your ezine will be your most powerful marketing tool - email marketing is the 'killer application' of the Internet. It will help you create a relationship with your readers and place you right at the top of the pile as a knowledgeable 'expert' on the topic that they are interested in.
At first you will just send your subscribers quality, free information, but in the months that follow this little ezine will turn into a money tree...as a rule of thumb, for every subscriber on your ezine database, you can expect to earn between 10 cents and one dollar or more per month! That's a pretty good case for building up a large ezine list as quickly as possible, wouldn't you agree? Tell all your offline customers, friends and suppliers about your website and mention that there are always 'web-only specials' available there. Offer everyone you meet a gift Voucher or special discount coupon in exchange for giving you their email address. As you build more pages that complement the theme of your website, more visitors will find you via search engines and tell their friends about your website. Your customers will also continue to check out your 'web specials' because you are going to talk about them in your ezine. Include Coupons for Special Offers in Each Ezine You have to make it super easy for people to join your Newsletter list, plus you should offer your visitors something for Free to encourage them to give you their email address. It doesn't have to be an expensive item - a Free Report that you write yourself that provides additional quality information that isn't available anywhere else is a great incentive, a Discount Coupon or a Free Service of some type will encourage people to give you their email address - and once you have their permission to send them messages via email, you can market your products and services, along with those of other Businesses you represent through Affiliate Programs, indefinitely, FOR FREE! Did you get that? You can send your email list messages targeted to their specific needs forever, FOR NO COST! Then each fortnight or month when you send out your newsletter, write an article about one aspect of your Business, giving your readers good, solid information, with a text link at the end to a page selling a product or service related to the content of the article. You can also include a special, limited time Coupon offering them something related to the article that has can be retrieved either online or in person at your store. This 'in context' text link (like the ones in this article) doesn't look and feel to your readers like a typical ad, it's more like a recommendation from a trusted friend (you), so your readers natural buying resistance is reduced and they are typically very receptive to your offers, especially if you have given them good information and have built up trust with them - your readers will feel like they know you and will take your recommendations easily without resistance. You're not selling them something - you are simply making a recommendation. You can promote many different products and services to your list of readers each time you publish your ezine, and every time you send it out to your list a small percentage of them will buy whatever it is that you offer them. Once your theme based content website is at this stage and you are receiving some traffic and publishing your ezine, it pays to join some related Affiliate Programs as I mentioned above. These are programs set up by merchants who will pay you a commission on sales of their products and services made by you which are tracked through your personalised tracker link. Please Click Here to read another great article that explains some excellent, additional strategies you can use to profit from Affiliate Programs. Next, apply to Google for inclusion in their Adsense program. Adsense ads are those little boxes you might have seen on other websites that say 'Ads by Google' next to them. Google pays you to have these ads on your website! The registration process is simple and straight forward, as is putting the ads on your website. Adsense ads can bring anything from a few dollars to several thousands depending on your website traffic - it all depends on traffic. The more you have, the more money you make... For a full explanation of what the Adsense program is and how to profit from it, Click Here. From here, there are many additional ways you can make money from your Local Business from your Theme Based Content Website. This well written article by Ken Evoy will guide you through the process once more from a different perspective. It will give you many more ideas, tips and techniques that will help you profit from your local Business website. So what is the next step you should take? As I mentioned in the previous article, the easiest way to build a website that requires no knowledge of HTML, FTP, SEO, JavaScript, CGI (in other words, all the technical stuff that doesn't make you any money!) is to use Solo Build It! It's instantly accessible on the 'net so you don't have to wait to get started, comes complete with everything you need to build a website that works, requires no knowledge of anything remotely technical and is remarkably inexpensive. The manual that comes as part of the Solo Build It! package takes you through the process of building a high traffic website step by step in easy, bite size chunks. You simply go through the process one step at a time and in a few days or weeks, depending on your available time, your website will be completed, ready to bring you Free, targeted traffic. Visitors who are hungry for the information and products you have for sale. And finally, let's go through the points I mentioned at the start of this article one at a time to recap what we have discussed and make sure I covered everything -
The Solo Build It! process and suite of tools virtually forces you to create search engine and human visitor friendly web pages if you follow the guidelines in the Manual. By building your website right the first time, soon hundreds, then thousands of visitors will be reading your web pages every day, telling their friends about your website and acting on your recommendations.
Your website is open all hours, giving people the information they need. You can sell products or services 24 hours a day without you having to be there to take the money. Solo Build It! easily integrates with several third party providers of payment services, and the new E-Goods module is coming soon. You can also correspond with your ezine subscribers any time, telling them about special promotions and offers in addition to giving them great information that educates them on why they should give their Business to you.
By building a relationship with your customers through your ezine, your competitors won't be able to touch you. Plus, when your customers tell their friends about the great service, specials and personal service you offer them, your competitors simply won't be able to compete with you.
As I mentioned above, by continually following up with your customers, Use your ezine to survey them to find out what they want, and then give it to them. They will recommend you to all of their friends because you continually offer them products or services they need and you stay in touch - most Businesses simply do not do this - and it costs them dearly. Word of mouth marketing is a far more powerful way of attracting new customers than anything you can say to them.
By having an online presence, you can still make sales through your affiliate links and joint venture partners while you are on holidays or taking time off from your Business. The cash is automatically banked and all you have to do is spend it...
I can't think of any Business that couldn't use more cash flow. Your website will be the hub for multiple streams of income to flow into your life. Google AdSense, affiliate programs, joint ventures with other, non competing Business, as well as the sale of your own products or services has the potential to multiply your income.
What would it be like to hand your kids a license to print money when you eventually decide to retire? It would certainly take the pressure off your family finances, wouldn't it. Many of these multiple streams of income are Residual - they flow no matter what you do. Set up correctly, the money will flow for years!
How much more would your Business be worth if it earned three times as much net profit? Probably a lot more I'd guess. If you can show potential buyers a proven marketing plan, consistently increasing profits and how your Business is earning income from many sources (diversified income streams), they will be happy to pay you well. And when you are ready to sell, use this headline that I showed you in the previous article on How to Build a Sales Website to start your advertisement - Why Am I Selling My Business For $30,000 Below Market Value? Local Agents have told me that my Dry Cleaning Business is worth $330,000, but I don't want that much. I am prepared to sell to the first genuine person with $300,000 cash this weekend! No matter what your Business is, (just substitute 'Dry Cleaning Business' for your type of Business) this headline will attract attention and make your telephone ring with calls from willing buyers. Remember, when people call for an appointment to inspect your Business, arrange for every potential buyer to arrive at the same time and watch the feeding frenzy happen - the result will astound you!! So now we have covered everything I promised in the introduction. I hope you can see why you do need a website for your Local Business. It truly offers you the highest leverage you can get when marketing your Business and increasing your income. Now I know we have covered a lot of ground here, and you might be thinking that it's all too hard. But I promise you, if you really want to succeed in your Business, you can do it! Plus, the Internet is still young - the opportunities are spectacular - just read the quotes above and below from these respected authors and Forbes Business Magazine -
The time to do this is NOW...and I will help you do it right! If you are still unsure whether you really need a website for your Business, please feel free to email me by using the Contact Form or call me within Australia on 07 55432004 or International 61755432004 and I will be happy to answer any questions you have Warmly,
Former SBI Certified Webmaster
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