SiteSell Blog

How to Make Your Goals Accountable

E-business Tips

It's not enough to just think about e-business goals. Setting it all down in writing casts your goals in concrete. That gives you something to look back at every 1-3 months, assess how you are doing, and adjust accordingly.

Setting it all down here makes it public, which introduces some element of accountability.

Keeping your goals in your head achieves neither. The memory of your goals will float away.

Most people, of course, never establish goals for the year ahead.

Both of these latter two approaches to goals result in unprioritized work. Not a good way to build long-term online business success.

Do you have a clear idea about what you want to accomplish online? Write down your thoughts and make yourself accountable for your e-business goals and actions.

Do You Give Your Visitors What They Want?

E-business Tips

SiteSell follows its own CTPM formula. The SiteSell AdSense site is a content site that provides useful information about AdSense.

What are you doing to provide what people want online (information!)? And how are you leveraging that?

Create Targeted Sales Copy For Each Niche

E-business Tips

Do you reach many different niches? You can't be all things to all people. Create targeted sales sites for each important segment. If you have an affiliate program, provide your affiliates with as many targeted tools as possible.

What are you doing to target your sales copy?

Use High-Value Freebies To Drive Sales

E-business Tips

Free ebooks are powerful ways to drive CTPM. Provide your prospective customers with valuable, free information now -- monetize later.

Better still, if you have an affiliate program, enable them to earn income by sending their audiences to your site for the free products. If your freebie is high-quality, you leverage your sales. Happy affiliates!

Are you providing high-quality freebies to your prospective customers and affiliates? Why not? It works!

Produce Credible Sales Videos

E-business Tips

You do not need to be Quentin Tarentino to produce a high-quality, credible video. And the results are worth the effort.

Final point... enable your affiliates to send those whom they reach directly to your sales video. They'll thank you!

Could you be communicating more clearly in video? Do it!

Study Your Customers

E-business Tips

Everything moves fast on the Web, including the nature of your customers. Without really trying, we've seen a great growth in travel sites. Time to emphasize what was already happening naturally!

Have you looked at the nature of your customers lately? What are they doing with your product? You just may find some pleasant, exploitable surprises!

Repeat Exposure With Free Tools

E-Business Tips

Create a free tool for your audience, one that provides genuine utility and value.

Repeat exposure is key to building trust and top-of-mind. What free tool would your PRE-customers love you for?

Create Buzz With Special Occasions

Business Tips

Special occasions occur year-round. Use them to "break even" but create buzz and increase sales.

Every new customer has a lifetime value. If you have a great product, you'll more than make up the temporary price reduction through word-of-mouth, renewals, and other spin-off income.

Target Niche Markets - Avoid the "One Size Fits All" Approach

Business Tips

If your product is like SBI!, with a target market of "everyone," you have a dangerous situation. You can't market via "one size fits all." Trying to please everyone, pleases no one.

Create targeted sites that talk specifically to the circumstances and needs of specific sub-target markets. For more examples... see these business-specific sites.

Never Trick the Search Engines

Business Tips

Building an e-business is not a game. It is not about creating tons of little splogs, based on the content of others, that you care nothing about.

It is not about tricking Google by creating elaborate fake link networks to try to make money online by pushing enough of those splogs into rankings that will earn you a few bucks for a while until Google clamps down. (Case in point... see how Google shut down a splogging gang's "site build it scam" scheme recently.)

It is not about any trick designed to fool Google.

NO manipulation designed to cause engines to rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked has ever survived.

NEVER take advice that involves tricking the Search Engines. You can't afford to waste your valuable time on tricks, nor your hard-earned dollars on tools that promote destined-to-fail strategies. Work with Search Engines. http://bit.ly/9W0R4l