Here is the second part of my ?internet business success formula? from my two day boot camp workshop. The whole series, ?Internet Business Mastery? is available at Maximum Success University. I hope you?ve got your pen and paper handy and are ready to take notes. I?m not a passive trainer. When I record these videos I EXPECT you to be listening and taking notes. Once we?re done I EXPECT you to put into action your notes and start getting RESULTS.
I EXPECT my thoughts to inspire yours, to help take you to bigger, better and brighter things.
Like I said in the first post. This video is for up and coming big dogs 
Enjoy!
Transcript.
..what people want. Not only do you have to find out what people want, you also have to ask them, you have to survey them. Then you have to research your competition. This is important. Research your competition. Have a look and see.
Let?s say that you do pass a success formula. You find out what people want, and what they want you can actually give them. That?s a good way to start, don?t you think? What do you do then? Well you know what they want on your website. They know that they don?t want all the flashing bells and whistles, they don?t want big graphics that download. They don?t want this. They don?t want that. What they do want is good solid information. Some how-
to information perhaps. Some training on how to get better use out of the products they?ve purchased from you. Information on new products. Updates, specials, perhaps a forum for frequently asked questions, answers. You need to find out what they want. Then the next thing you do is you go and research your competition. How do you do that?
Just go to any search engine and type in what someone else, you?ve seen the results from Wordtracker or other tool of what someone is looking for and pick the top ten websites. Have a quick glance at them yourself. Have a good look over them and find out what they?re offering. Then what you do, let?s say you have a customer database. You go and find the customers that you love and they love you. You want to get at least ten, minimum half a dozen people who are your customers who are not going to go to your competition. No matter how good the competition is they?re going to stay with you, and you ask them to review the competition websites for you. Here?s a rule. Don?t ask your friends, don?t ask your family, you want the truth. Remember that. I know. You want the truth. You want people to be hard if necessary.
Get them to check out the competition to tell you what they love and what they hate. Just jot all these down. Keep a little stash file, what I call a SWAT file. All this information together. This is part of the research. It only takes a couple of days. It doesn?t have to take long. This isn?t a 1-month, 30-day, 60-day, 6-month project. Forget about that. This is quick. If you?re doing it yourself you can do the entire thing in half an hour, but ask folks to research your competition for you. Once they?ve done that they come back to you with what they love and what they hate. Take it into account. Remember, you want to listen to them, not to you, to them. They are your customers. Number three of the three step formula is to create your product or your website that meets the needs of your customers. I cannot iterate that more strongly. It meets the needs of your customers. Not your needs, not your husband?s or wife?s needs, not your staff?s needs, not your suppliers, but your customers.
You?ll know this now because of the research you?ve done on what they want and what your competition does and what they love and hate about. Create the product in a way so that it meets the needs of your customers. When you?re dealing with a website designer or a web design company often they will ask you what you want. I?ve got to tell you and I don?t know how else to say this, I don?t care what you want when it comes to a website, I want to know what your customers want. Do you get the point? That?s how important it is. Do you want your website to succeed beyond your expectations or to crawl along? You?ve got to know what people want. Create your product or create your website so that it meets the needs, the wants, desires of your customers. Based on all of the research that you?ve done. Do that and you will be miles ahead of everyone.
A question just came to mind, someone asked me this in a recent workshop. They said, how about the logo? Have you ever come across a website before where they?ve got these really big logos? Do you know that ones that I mean? These huge logos and they open up and the whole main page is nothing but a logo. Well if your customers want that, fine. Let me say it to you this way. It?s one of my pet hates. If you want that you?d better ask your customers. Chances are I think you?ll find that none of them want it, not one single person. The logo makes you feels good, it makes your graphic designer feel good. Hey, check out my logo. No. Do it for your customers.
Step four of the three step formula. I couldn?t fit it into three steps, it had to be four steps. Step four, Market it to a Database. Once your website is up, once it?s running, you want to market it to a database. How do you do that? What database? Take a moment now, just jot down three different databases that you could possibly market it to. Let me give you some help. Number one is your existing customer database. They know you?re working on this project anyway don?t they? Of course. Your existing customer database, there?s one. How about another one? Your perspective customer database. Your prospects. You have one of those I hope. A list of people who want to buy from you, but just haven?t yet because they?re not quite sure, not yet confident. So there?s another database for you. How about this? Let?s say you have a product or service that my customers might like, but it?s not something that I personally sell, how about my customer database? What do you think of that?
You would simply access, you won?t get access to my database, but hey, if I like your product, if I?ve had a look at it, tested it and tried it out, smelled it and stayed in it if it?s an accommodation house, driven it if it?s a car, picked it up if it?s a pen, used it whatever it is, eaten there if it?s a restaurant. Let?s say that I?ve done that and I really, really like it and I can refer my customers to you. It?s called a joint venture. There?s an entire section in these discs on joint venture marketing, but I?ve got to tell you it?s beautiful. Marketing to a database will eventually become 95% of what you do and it will cost you nothing, well next to nothing. A little bit of time, perhaps a little bit of money. If you want to do it offline, and you can do it offline and perhaps if you?re just getting started you just might have to do it offline, but believe me there are some wonderful databases online that you can access through joint venture marketing. It may cost you a little bit if you do it offline, but it doesn?t have to.
The point is this. The rules with database marketing. This is looking at email marketing here and again there?s an entire section on that here, but never market to a database unless they?ve asked to be on it and they expect to receive things. Opt-in email marketing. Never, ever market to a database, an email database or any database for that matter, unless the people who are receiving the stuff have asked to be on it and expect to be receiving the stuff. Does that make sense to you? Because you?re hit and run and what we?ve got here is for conversion rates that are good, we don?t want a 0.003% conversion rate, we want a 3%, a 5%. I?ve even had as high as, and this will crack you up, as high as 85%, 84.7% it was with one campaign I did to my own database.
I?d like to get those kinds of numbers again, it was just a freak of nature. No it wasn?t. I followed the formula. These are some of the things that you need to consider. So let me ask you this, how do you measure your website?s success? How do you do that? Is it the traffic to your website?
If you get 100,000 people to your site next month is that good? Does that make your website successful? How about search engines? How about if you get top position on half a dozen different phrases? Number one, two or three position they?re all good enough, doesn?t have to be number one. One, two or three is fine, first page good. Does that measure your success? What about the bandwidth? The bandwidth is of course the amount of files that get downloaded through your website. I have just through the paulbarrs.com website I must have 7 or 8 gigabytes of bandwidth every month. That?s massive.
That?s because of all the audio work that I do. Remember I cast it up on the website, it could come through there. How about the newsletter subscribers? How many newsletter subscribers do you have? Do you have 500, 1000, 50,000, 500,000? Are they all 100% opted in? How do you measure your websites success? Click over to the next slide and I?ll tell you exactly how. There are and I?m going to read this for you. I want you to see, I want you to understand. You?ve read it already. There are only two ways to measure your websites success, it?s profits or it?s leads. If you have a lead generation website like we covered earlier on and you get 30 high quality leads in a month that you can convert 15-20, 50% sales with your real estate business for example, that?s how you can measure your success.
If it?s an E-commerce site and your physically taking the order online and it?s cost you $50,000 to set up, but you?re only make $2000-3000 in sales every month, that?s not successful, but if it costs you $1500 to set up and you make $20,000 in the first weekend, that?s successful. How do you measure it? Only two ways. I don?t care how much traffic you get and you shouldn?t care either. Traffic is not the measure of success. It is simply a number that will drop down through the funnel. OK? It?s measured by numbers. The numbers tell the whole story. The numbers are the profit that you make. I might only get 5000 visitors to a site in any given month, but still might make $10,000-20,000 from that site. To me that is successful because it doesn?t cost me anything to run the silly thing now that it?s up and running. I made a profit in the first weekend. Yeehaw, what more do you want? That?s success.
I want to just quickly go through some of the different points that are worthwhile considering. These are the things that you can ask in terms of what should or should not be on your website. The logo, I think I?ve covered that. One of my pet things, especially if you?re on a slow Internet connection, please folks if you?re going to have a logo keep it small. Don?t make it the whole page when people arrive. There?s no other way to explain it. The design. The design is the look, the layout, the feel, the structure of the page, the colors that are used and so on. Simple rule of thumb, and these are just simple points, you can jot them down in notes yourself there. The design, whatever it looks like on that front page please keep the design the same throughout. OK? Keep it the same throughout, not a hard thing to do. Don?t let it be different all the way along.
Link structure. The link structure again is part of the design, but again it?s very important. You have to build or have your website built to the lowest common denominator. That meaning the person who has no clue about how to use the Internet. So if your links are on that left-hand side on the front page, then you want to make sure they?re on the left-hand side on the second, third, fifth, fiftieth, one hundredth page. Keep all the links in the same place. Keep all the links in the same place and keep in mind if you?re going to be using those wonderful what are called JavaScript links, which are little drop-down buttons and menus and the little trees and the folders and they open up and all this kind of thing, this is really good, it?s OK. We can pretty well all read that online now with our updated web browsers, but the search engine robots that go through your site will not read them, they will not index them, they will not spider them and if they do the chances of you happening to get found are pretty few and far between.
So always keep some good old fashion html, good old fashion text links on your website. These are points for you to consider. So when someone is building your website you know what they?re doing and you know when they?re about to use, to use the phrase, screw you, because when someone else builds your website they?re looking for the fastest possible option to get that job in and out instead of what you want to do is make sure they do the right thing by you, not just by them. The sales copy on the website, please make sure you do have sales copy. Make sure you?ve got sales copy. These are the words, the phrases throughout the page. The information page is the sales pages that create emotion and entice people to either buy or contact you via either E-commerce sales website or lead generation. Words create emotion. Unless you?re in the adult industry, images will not sell better than words and people will tell you differently.
Images can enhance the words, nice multimedia slideshow presentations or the rotating 3D images of a property being sold, an accommodation or a holiday location, they can enhance the words, but on their own they?re not going to do the job. You need to make sure that you have good solid sales copy on your information pages. More points to consider. Your multi-database methods. In multi-database, I refer to this in the email marketing section, have more than one list. It doesn?t matter whether there are only 20 people in one contact database. If you have 7 or 8 of them and they?re all high quality prospects in a dozen or more different databases, that?s fine. Target your people with your followup information. Target them.
Don?t just send stuff willy nilly, always be sure to send exactly what people want when they want it, when they?re expecting it, what they?ve asked for. You can do this easier with multi-databasing rather than just having one massive, big contact email list for everybody. Let?s look at location once for example. Here in Australia you could have one state-by-state. Heck, you could do it anywhere. Actually I just do it, one state-by-state. The privacy policy. That?s a good one. A privacy policy, you need to have a privacy policy on your website. If you?re collecting people?s information and you?re going to be sending them stuff you want to let them know what you?re going to do with their information and who else are you going to share it with. Hopefully nobody. You want to keep it to yourself, tight and secure. Let them know that.
Let them know that they can unsubscribe from your mailings at any time should they choose. Make some fun out of it. Tell them, look I hope you won?t unsubscribe but if you do here?s how you do it. Let them know they can contact you without fear that their email address being sold. Let them know that you?re using a secure server for your processing of orders, that their credit card details are safe. All part of your privacy policy. Product images. Now in this particular case I?m referring to a graphical representation of your image. Let?s take the E-Business Mastery for an example. When you get this thing in this little box, in this package when it arrives to you it looks different to what it does on the web. The web is just a product image that?s a graphical representation.
I?m going to suggest that you do that for almost everything that you?ve got because images as I?ve said can enhance the sales copy, but what you need to decide is are you going to have a photograph of the item or are you going to have a graphical representation? It?s just a question you need to ask. How do you find out what you need? You ask your customers. You survey people way back in the beginning, what do they want? The FAQ. The FAQ are always very important. I think every website should have a FAQ, however I would strongly suggest that you don?t put down FAQ because some people don?t know what a FAQ is. Instead, spell it out, frequently asked questions and you will get frequently asked questions and if you don?t get these things onto your website you?re going to get a dozen or more people every day emailing you the same questions. Instead, if you have these questions on your website and of course the answers, that?s kind of important, you?ll save yourself a lot of time, effort and your customers will appreciate it. Let?s look at the contact details. This is a beautiful one. So many people, I don?t know why?
Continued in part three -
Transcript Services provided by http://www.speechpad.com
Source: http://www.paulbarrs.com/internet-business-success-formula2
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I very much enjoyed reading this weekend about the marriage of two of my favourite TV celebrities David Mitchell to Victoria Coren. I loved the photos and thought her dress was gorgeous. Equally well-known brother Giles Coren, who writes amusingly in The Times of his own marriage and newly arrived child with another on the way, gave her away. ?David Mitchell tweeted his followers (of which I am one) about how blissfully happy he is. So I had a wry smile, when in the same newspaper yesterday I read a thunderous warning about the perils of emulating celebrity marriage, from a High Court Judge.
Happy weekend pet lovers! It?s finally Saturday, and that means it?s time for our Weekend Pets Photo Contest! The theme for this week?s contest is ?Mutts!? Share photos of your unique and special mutt on our?Facebook wall?and you could win some cool TAILS prizes and be featured on our site! Are you a Twitter fanatic? You can also Tweet us your Weekend Pets photos using the hashtag #weekendpets.
Image(s) retrieved from NOAA on May 23rd, 2012 
