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12 months ago I took my confidence coaching business - Confidence Club - online, to help a broader distribution of people and to spread the message that ordinary people can achieve enhanced self confidence - and deserve to do so.

So this has been a learning experience for me - an opportunity to find out just how effective Web marketing is, what works and what does not work. I’ve been a little shocked to see so many hucksters operating in this space, and saddened to realise that some of them may be successful.

What follow are some of my observations. Feel free to disagree, or to challenge these. As time passes, they will inevitably lose currency anyway - that’s just the nature of the beast.

1. The Web is incredibly dispersed. Marketeers like to talk about “the long tail”, by which they mean all the products which sell in modest numbers on the Web but would never be stocked by conventional shops because they just aren’t bestsellers. A handful of magnet sites like Amazon, Google or Ebay can attract hundreds of millions of visitors, but there are literally billions of sites out there - more Web pages than people on the planet - and the vast majority of these attract few if any real visitors. The real long tail is this mass of largely unseen websites.

2. Good ideas decay rapidly. For example, there probably was a time when affiliate marketing made sense, and generated good returns. I’m sure some affiliate marketers are making great money even now. But the dispersed nature of the Web makes it very hard to grab a significant proportion of the available viewers. The idea has gone mainstream and lost some of its power. This seems to be a characteristic of Web marketing. (Incidentally, a useful clue to identify any unsuccessful business model on the Web is the volume of spammy sites claiming to sell the secrets of success in that field. It seems that when enough people have failed in a particular business model they become prey for the ‘gurus’ who are willing to sell the secrets of their vast wealth for $12)

3. The powerful handful of magnet sites distort the market, and then have to change their model to accommodate the response from hopeful marketers. Google Adsense is an example of this. Adsense ads pay webmasters a proportion of their advertising revenue, on a pay per click basis. So sites have sprung up with hundreds or thousands of pages of ‘content’ - any old rubbish will do - to try and optimise for Adsense. Of course, some of the content is high quality, but we have seen a glut of megasites recently, fostered in part by changes to Google’s search algorithms which apparently favour sites with 100+ pages (at least for now).

4. Barriers to entry are increasing. There was a time when the Web seemed empty, and every new site had a chance. You could throw together a lovely 5 page site, optimise for search engines, and perhaps you’d have a hit. As the money being poured into the Web from real people increases, so Web service providers are becoming more professional. This growing wave of professionalism, coupled with established, large sites which dominate the userbase, means that lone operators (Mom and Pop sites) are increasingly unlikely to be found by most visitors. This is a great shame - one of the lovely aspects of the Web has always been the way that it favours intellectual capital over money. Good ideas count for something on the Web; as barriers to entry increase, this statement will begin to sound hollow.

5. You won’t become a rock star, Minnie Driver isn’t calling round for tea and you won’t be number 1 on Google. Well, you might, if your chosen search term is your company name, or a meaningless phrase. To gather meaningful traffic from Google and other search engines means spending money on pay per click or other forms of advertising, which in turn makes the Web look more conventional by the day. It also enables the big players to consolidate their positions.

What does all this mean? Of course, fortune will always favour the brave - the early adopter, the inventor, the developer of a new twist or angle. I’m one of 6 children, and the phrase “first up, best dressed” means a lot to me. It’s a principle which still applies in the Web world. The source of this article - EzineArticles.com - is a great example. By no means the only such service available, this one is professional, efficient and understands the needs of contributors. All good stuff.

However, I suspect that the key factor is simply speed to market - they have achieved critical mass early, and have therefore become the biggest kid on their particular block. Good luck to them. (What this service also does is it closes the loop; webmasters want a link to their sites without paying for it (except through some effort), ezine webmasters want free content (so they can have thousands of pages carrying advertising) and EzineArticles.com gets thousands of links, hundreds of thousands of pages of content and that coveted number 1 position. Everybody involved feels like a winner).

What does 2006 hold? I sense that mediated collaboration will become highly significant in the next few years. Small sites already collaborate in a modest way, through link exchanges, but these also suffer from the dispersed nature of the Web - a link to/from a site with hundreds of daily visitors will do very little, on its own. Grow that community of links and the pool of possible visitors grows - but so does the pool of possible destinations for them.

So small sites need to collaborate more intelligently to gather some of the advantages of megasites. In particular, sites which pay good money to attract visitors don’t want to lose those visitors blindly to every other Web site out there. The “least bad” scenario may be that a visitor clicks off your site onto a partner site, and stays within a network or family of non-competitive but complementary sites for a reasonable period of time. This makes particular sense if all of the sites in the network are paying to attract visitors - through Google Adwords, for example. There are many possible variations on this theme, and my prediction for 2006 is that “mediated collaboration” services - to make this possible and efficient for small website owners - will spring up to enable the small guys to band together and be seen. I certainly hope that somebody will develop a mechanism which favours high quality sites over the mass of voluminous garbage we’ve seen spring up in the past year.

Whatever your views, I would love to hear them. You can contact me via the Confidence Club website - details below.

Jim Sullivan is a hypnotherapist and confidence coach. He may be contacted via the Confidence Club website =>http://www.confidenceclub.net

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What if you could double your sales overnight by applying just one Internet marketing secret?

One of the greatest secrets of direct marketing is that it is scientific. With many forms of advertising, you cannot tell which ad or marketing campaign produced the results. But smart direct marketers know exactly which ad or sales letter produced what results because the results are tracked and measured.

Direct marketers have a secret they have been using to double their income - or more - for a hundred years. And when this marketing secret is combined with the power and speed of Internet marketing, the results can be phenomenal. It is not an exaggeration to say that you could potentially double your sales overnight with this one Internet marketing secret.

What’s the secret? Split testing. This is done by using a “key” to associate a sale with the ad or sales letter that produced the sale so that you can measure the results. In a print ad, you might provide a phone number with an extension. The extension is actually the key. You would have two ads or sales letters, each with a different key, and would then track the results using their respective keys. Internet marketers typically use tracking software to associate a key with the resulting sales, although it can be done as simply as having two sales pages and tracking the sales from each.

For accurate results, you need a test that is big enough that you can rely on your statistics. For example, with a direct mail sales letter this is generally considered to be a mailing of at least 1000. Internet marketers can substitute 1000 page views. Either way, once you know what results you can consistently expect from an ad or sales letter, it becomes what direct marketers call your “control.” You always need to have one control that produces known results. Then you can test other versions against the control to see if you can consistently beat the results of the control.

Suppose that you have a Web sales letter that consistently produces an average of 10 sales for every 1000 times the page is viewed. This is a 1% response, a figure that is often cited as average for a direct response sales letter.

Now you need to test one variable at a time to see if you can increase the percentage of sales. For example, you may want to test the sales letter with a different headline, a different graphic, a different price, different bonuses, different text, etc. But always only test one variable at a time. Generally, the headline is considered to be the most important element to test first.

What you want to determine is whether any change in a single variable will consistently produce a higher response. The payoff can be quite significant. Imagine if a different headline was determined to produce a 2% response. That doesn’t sound like much of a change - only 1% more. But this would double your sales! Instead of making 10 sales out of a thousand, you would be making 20 sales.

This is a very realistic scenario, so you always want to test against your control. The better your control, the more tests will fail to beat it. But once you find a sales letter that consistently beats the control, then you make it the new control and continue with testing another variation of the headline or a different variable. Perhaps you might next test whether the color of the headline makes a difference. Suppose that changing the color of the headline resulted in another 1% increase in sales to a 3% response rate. This would be another 50% increase in sales and would be triple the number of sales averaged from the original sales letter!

It is very easy to be complacent with a working sales letter and not test further, but this can be a costly mistake. Any change in a variable could result in higher profits. For example, suppose that you determined that you consistently had a 1% response rate when selling your product for $97 but a 2% response rate when selling the product for $67. For every 1000 page views, you would make $970 at $97 per sale but $1340 at $67 per sale.

Always track your response rate, always keep split testing against your control looking for a new control, and always consider the bottom line - your net profit. Many tests will fail - they will not beat your control. But once you have a successful test that consistently beats your control, you will likely have significantly increased your income. Without split testing, you will never know how much money you are losing. But with this Internet marketing secret, you can potentially double your sales overnight.

Mike Adams has been marketing on the Internet since the early 1990’s. His latest project is Gigantic Resale Rights.com. As part of the launch of Gigantic Resale Rights.com, Mike is offering our readers several free Master Resale Rights Packages.

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A long time ago you decided that working all the hours God sends every week and being away from your family just has to be wrong. You know what? It is. There is a way to right this wrong and it has to do with the Internet. But you knew that already. So what is the next step?

You have been looking online in the search engines and maybe in the newsgroups and you have seen plenty of opportunities. Most of the hype you read sounds much too good to be true and most of it is. However, there are some real opportunities out there. You just have to know where to look. Don’t follow the other sheep, work it out for yourself.

Where do you look? Who holds the keys to this bountiful virtual treasure chest? Do you have a chance at success?

From here on in we’ll confirm some truths and dispel some lies which you’ll find all over the place online.

Lie: I can earn amazing sums of money online really quick. I can quit the 9-5 within weeks!

Truth: Pure hype reigns supreme on the Internet. The claims of huge downlines, 6 figure incomes overnight and massive mailing lists with no effort are complete drivel. Nothing is easy to make a go of and online it’s no different. It’s possibly even harder to make your fortune online since the rules are always changing. Staying on top of and driving these changes is where your success will come from.

Lie: Working your online business is easier than working the 9-5.

Truth: Making a true success of your online business is, more often than not, a whole lot harder. You are directly responsible for the amount of money you put in the bank at the end of the month. You will need excellent time management skills and organizational skills. Possibly the hardest thing is the motivation. To get up every day and motivate yourself to switch the computer on, knowing you have to get down to some hard work can be very tough some days.

Lie: My time is my own. I can work whenever.

Truth: Your time is your most precious commodity. There are daily demands on your time from your family and the business of everyday living. Real life carries on regardless of whether you have a spreadsheet to prepare or not. Managing your time actually becomes a delicate balancing act. You cannot ignore your family if you’re working at home - and anyway, one of the reasons you wanted to work at home was to spend more time with the family, right?

Lie: My children will enjoy the extra time I can spend with them.

Truth: Still with this time thing. Yes your kids will be happier to see you more around the place but they will also become confused as to why you can’t play with them more and may even come to resent this. The delicate balancing act is indeed a thin tight-rope walk and you’ve got to be a masterful acrobat to pull it off. It can be done however and this shouldn’t put you off.

Lie: Build it and they will come.

Truth: Whilst this may have been true in the very early days of the Internet with the most basic of search engines driving traffic, these days nothing could be further from the truth. Building your website and getting it online puts you on the first rung of the ladder. Getting enough traffic to make your website profitable is your next goal. There are many places online which claim to be able to do this for you, only 2-3% of these places will be worth your time.

Lie: The Internet is just one big playground for scammers.

Truth: The Internet, with it’s anonymity, is indeed a fertile breeding ground for the more unscrupulous among us. While scammers get all the press there are plenty of real people like you making some nice piles of coin from the Internet perfectly legally. The information revolution is upon us and you better get onboard.

Lie: All my friends and family will want to join me.

Truth: Your friends and family will think you’re completely mad. While you may find one or two people who’re open to your dreams and visions, most will simply ridicule you so be ready for that. They may not talk about you openly but they will think you’re wasting your time. Ignore them and prove them wrong. You can do it. Success is sweet.

At the final analysis, if you want to work at home on the Internet, become truly financially and spiritually free then the odds are not stacked in your favour. This being said, with the fire of determination burning inside you, with the strong desire to enjoy a life of no money worries and more quality time with your family then you will succeed. It takes time, effort and hard choices but you can do it.

Just do one thing every day to improve your position and that’s all it takes.

Here’s to your ultimate success!

Riley.

Riley McBride has been online since the early days
and is a very successful Internet marketer who, up
until now, has kept his secrets to himself. After
having amassed a small fortune using the Internet
alone he has decided to break his silence and
spill the beans. Check it out:
Online Home Business Essentials

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