If you have a WordPress site then read on to find out about the power you have in your hand.

What is a link shortening service?

Many links to your website, your articles might be very long. Not that suitable for advertising, or for use in Twitter or Facebook either. A link shortening service is used to reduce the length of the link, but still when someone clicks on it, it goes to the same place you orginally wanted.

The trouble is the search engines rank the short link and the user who's going to click on the link doesn't really know where it's going to go.

How to improve this situation?

Why not have a short link service that uses your own domain name. Now admittedly this isn't going to work so well if you have a long domain name, but if you have short one, it's a great opportunity for you to keep your website address visible to everyone including the search engines. While some sites like Twitter have the “nofollow” attribute set on links, at least your domain name will appear in the search engine rankings, but also in the eyes of the tweeps = twitter followers. This is a great bonus. I have been using this technique on a number of websites and it's showing great results.

To manage this service you just need to install the pretty link plugin. Configure it, there are plenty of tutorials on this, then use it.

This plugin has a free and paid for version, but for this simple task, the free version is enough.

If you would like assistance in setting this up then contact me!

For your site to be successful, selling things or capturing the details of prospects you have to do more than get visitors (traffic) you have to get them to take action. You turn a visitor into a buyer from a tyre kicker. After all the internet is not different to other business, it’s a numbers game. So converting them is easy…right?

It can be easy when you do the right things. Here are twelve tips on how to convert traffic. You don’t have to be an expert to do this. Just follow the tips.

1. Know your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and really know why your service or product is different from your competition.  In what way is it special, special enough, different enough that it’s purchased? When you get this you know your USP and define it into a couple of sentences.
2. Remember you are building a relationship so put your message across in an appropriate way .  There’s no need for a pushy sales pitch. Treat your potential clients like you would like to be treated, telling a story about it. High pressure selling is a thing of the past.  
3. If you need assistance from your market, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Create a survey about what you currently do or about an area you would like to expand into. This will help develop the relationship and deepen loyalty towards both your company and the product or service.
4. Make the offer simple.  If you are selling four different products, advertise them on four websites.  Do not use one website to offer all products as this will be confusing for the consumer.  Whilst this might work for the bigger retailers they are already established in the marketplace.  
5. Make your page clear and easy to read.  Use wide margins and don’t feel you have to fill every inch of the page with copy.  If you leave white space it allows the reader to focus on reading the copy rather than being bombarded with too much information.  
6. Do brag about your product especially if it has received good endorsements and ratings from your satisfied customers.  Let them do the bragging for you. Testimonials are great and whatever you do – don’t make them up.
7. Writing good sales copy is an art. Give your audience plenty of reasons as to why to buy your product or service.  Use a sales letter and squeeze page that contains lots of valuable offers and repeat this over and over again.  It is much better to have too many offers, as long as they are valuable and reasonable, than too few and leaves your audience in no doubt as to what your offer is and its value.  
8. Look for problems and solve them.  Once you have completed your sales page, have a good think about any other issues your product could help to solve.  Asking buyers for more information might help as they might have found ways of using the product that you never considered.
9. Use moderate highlights in your copy.  These highlights help to attract the reader’s attention.  Don’t use too many though as too much colour or highlighting can just annoy and confuse your readers.  
10. Package deals are very popular.  Once you have presented your USP, offer a special package that includes a free bonus/gift when customers choose to ‘Buy Now’.  If you advertise the offer is available for a limited time this creates an air of urgency and entices the buyer to act immediately. Don’t just say it, believe it.  
11. Request an order.  One of the oldest principles of generating sales is never to ignore orders.  Ask for an order and keep asking.  You can never ask too many times. In Internet Marketing terms this is referred to as a call to action. Use them liberally throughout your sales letter.  
12. Be polite and say “Thank You” to your customers.  This is most important and good manners will get you a long way even on the Internet. Remember we are building a relationship. Your buyers will feel appreciated and will be more likely to come back to you. 

Here’s a bonus tip:

- Be genuine, offer a meaningful guarantee about your product or service, something you can stand behind. Make it something that you know you can do.

Selling online, whether the sale is for money or a persons contact details, remember it’s about building a relationship. Think not just about this sale but also abou the ones that follow and know the lifetime value of the customer.

It's normally sold for $397 and I am offering it to the first 10 who totally and honestly complete the survey for $297.

Just complete the survey after you signup below and I will get back to you with the report.

The report will cover:

• structure of your website
• effectiveness of your site with the search engines
• major omissions and problems of your current site
• ideas for how you could improve your online presence

This is more than an SEO report, it's about fine tuning your online presence with the rest of your business.

One of my mentors James Schramko is consistently achieving double digit success with his online sales techniques. He is a recognised leader in the internet business community in this area.

In March 2010 James is running one of his limited seminars for you and a partner (not necessarily your spouse) here in Sydney. If you are interstate or overseas, it's well worth the visit. If you can't make it then one alternative is to join his online forum, where I am also a member and have been for sometime, and engage with the community there.

If you want to know how to achieve significant success online this is the right place to start.

The thing that sold me on James in the first place is that's he's genuine. Not trying to sell you something all the time. He gives and gives and gives and then gives some more. The workshop is a great environment for people who currently aren't familiar with internet marketing techniques through to more experience marketers looking for a boost. I'll let James talk to you more about this. Just click on the picture above and he can tell you in his own words.

Making links that work isn't just about text, links can be using images as well. RightLinker 1.3 now supports the creation of links with the image code included in it.

Visit RightLinker to view the latest help video and register to download your copy today. 

RightLinker has an updated user interface to incorporate the new functionality.

Registered users can download their copy from their registration email link.

For FAQ/Support questions please visit the RightLinker Support page.

How can I use Twitter for my business? What makes it special? There's so much written about the use of twitter already but "what does it all mean?".

Twitter offers a completely different method of communication.  It mixes social networking with instant messaging.  Posts are a very brief 140 characters each allowing you to answer that burning question, “What are you up to right now?”  

In order to answer this question you must make every word count.  You need to grab your readers’ attention quickly with each “tweet” (how a post is referred to on Twitter).  Twitter allows you to sign up and send messages to your subscribers and friends.  You can update your audience as frequently as you wish and they can respond to you quickly and easily.  

The way it works is that people follow your “tweets”, so the more followers you have the more you are likely to get as their friends see your details on the profile pages on others and choose to follow you too.  Each time you post an updated tweet, it will be transmitted to your group of followers immediately to their computers and cell phones if they have chosen that way of communication.  

If you send out regular tweets you will start to gather a faithful group of followers.  Make each tweet count and add value.  If you write reviews on computer games or create accessories for Avatars, then you can tell your followers when you have been working on something new or have something new to tell them.  

It is possible to grow a fanatical following who are so interested in what you are doing and offering that they look out for every new tweet from you.  For information marketers such intensity can quickly develop into a faithful band of buyers who react to any new offerings you put their way. 

Friends that want to arrange a meeting can tweet everyone to let them know the time and location of the meeting.  You can also send tweets that give notice of a latest update to your blog or lens update.  Remember to work your tweet carefully so you have enough room to include the link to your site. 

This is essential if you want to create interest in your website and branding yourself successfully.  Even a very brief post can give you an identity in such a way that followers are attracted to your particular niche.  Some people love Twitter and others just do not understand it.  

To understand how it works you really need to use Twitter every day.  Look at what other Twitterers are up to and how they use tweets to market their brand, build an identity, display their expertise and generate website traffic.  

Twitter is addictive and this is mainly down to instant gratification.  It is easy to use and allows you to get your message across to lots of people quickly.  Once you have chosen to use Twitter for your niche, hobby, profession, business, or sport, you will start to see how it is a great way of dispensing huge amounts of information quickly, one tweet at a time. 

It's more than just this though, you can use some of the social bookmarking tools mentioned in a previous post, that will make the tweet for you automatically, for example when you update your blog, or publish a new article. From a business perspective you can send information instantly and also get it back just as quickly. Remember though it's instant gratification and so you need to act fast if a customer contacts you. It's great for support issues, combine Twitter with your support desk and you can have a very effective result for your customers problem resolution and they will be thinking great customer service.

Firstly, what is social bookmarking?

To be successful on the internet, people, customers, prospects, have to be able to find you. To find you they often use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the "thing" they are interested in. To be found on the first page of a search engine is vitally important as most people, actually more than 95% of people never look at more than the first 3 pages of results. Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. 

How is this relevant to social bookmarking?

Well, in short if you have provided items of value, like an article, a book, a video and put it on the internet then the more references there are to that piece of content the better. The social book marking sites, and there's more than 150 of them, create a link back to your article. The search engines love to see this link, they give you credit for having all these links to your content, and presto you climb up the list of results in the search engines. We want our business to be as high up on this list of results as possible, preferably the first page. This isn't an article about search engines or SEO but it is very relevant.

Lets look at this in a bit more detail.

Social bookmarking is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs online.  You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t generate the traffic you’ve just got a nice website on your hands with no customers.  Even if you have a loyal mailing list you will still need to constantly update this by attracting new online visitors.  

There are many options for making connections on social bookmarking sites.  To find the best you need to take your time and surf around.  Once you have researched the best start to set up some social bookmarking accounts that you can use regularly.  

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular of the social bookmarking sites which is both powerful and easy to use. First you need to create an account and then create a toolbar interface.  All that’s left to do is click on the Thumbs Up icon (which is found on your browser after you install the StumbleUpon tool) in order to recommend a website.  This can be done for any websites you own and you can also ask your friends to give you the Thumbs Up.  In addition to these ratings you can also add comments about your website.  

Can you Digg it?  Sounds like a line from a 70s song, but it is actually a very popular social bookmarking site. Digg works very much like StumbleUpon in that users are allowed to push up the ratings for a particular site so that it reaches the front page.  If you can make it to the front page you will be presenting yourself to thousands of potential visitors and more and more people will start hitting your site to see what you are all about.  

To assist you in publishing your information out onto the web there are a number of services available to you. There are both free and paid services and those listed here are the free services. They require a bit of effort from your business to maintain but the effort pays off over time. You will need to register yourself or your business to each of the social sites you want to be profiled on. This can take a little time at the beginning, though once done you don't have to worry about again.

• Clipmarks markets itself as “scissors for web pages.”  This site lets you submit items that are transmitted to the Internet – including to an iPhone and to Facebook.  It provides a one stop shop and can save a lot of time.
• You can sign up with services like OnlyWire to get similiar capability to Clipmarks. OnlyWire has a free and a paid option. 
• Another option is to use a site called Socialmarker. Using your social site accounts it steps your through the creation process of entries in each of these sites. You would repeat this process for each new piece of information that you want to promote out onto the internet.  
• Alternatively you can use ping.fm to connect to all your social media accounts. 

Some of these services provide a small application for your browser. Just install one or more of these plugins for your browser. These "plugins" allow you to carry out a multitude of functions such as clicking once to submit your item to many sites in one go.  In order for this to work, you will need to join any social bookmarking sites you want to use.  

You will need to ensure that visitors to your site know how they can rate your site.  It is not possible to bribe or reward them for bookmarking your site.  This is the social bookmarking equivalent to stuffing the ballot box.  

You can publish links to bookmarking sites as a gentle and polite reminder to your visitors.  Don’t be coy about submitting any updated information to these networks yourself.  You will just need to ensure that you do it in such a way that it doesn’t appear as spam.  If you tell people what you have got and where they can find it there is a good chance they will pass this information on to others.

In the spirit of this article there's a button just below that says "Share / Save". Go on, click and and social bookmark this article and see how it works.

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send them any further information?

If you are like most business owners, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

Never put a link into an electronic document that isn’t accurate or correctly formatted. It loses you all the benefits of prospective clients and interested readers from finding the information you intended for them. It will cost you sales.

Build it, Test it, Deploy it! RightLinker from The KIX Group provides you this capability, whether on a PC or a Mac, or any platform supported by Adobe Air.

It’s simple to use:

1. Enter the web address (URL) where you want your readers to end up.
2. Next, put in the text your readers will see in your document / article or post.
3. Click the “Make The Link” and the correctly formatted link is created. The link is displayed along with a test link shown in blue.
4. To put the generated code on the Clipboard, click the “Copy To Clipboard” button.
5. To test the link click on the blue link below the formatted code.
6. To clear the form to start fresh click the “Start Again” button.

It’s done! No more hassles or mistakes.

Oh did I mention it’s yours FREE – register NOW!

PS. Many Internet Marketers and casual users have already started using this simple tool. Why not you too?

There are so many approaches to your business web site. Many business have spent a lot of money developing a wonderful looking site. For anyone finding it – the WOW effect is going to get them. If your objective was to get the WOW happening then great…your achieved your goal. There aren’t many business with such a clear goal achieved on he net.

For the remaining businesses not falling into this category, there has to be an alternate approach.

Some questions to ponder:

• If my web site is going to do more for my business…then what do I want it to do?
• What are the different types of web sites?
  • an electronic version of my current product and company information
  • an existing customer support area, which operates 24*7
  • a way to interest potential new customers to learn about the products, services and solutions I offer and be able to get their information so I can follow them up
  • be able to take orders and potentially have the solution delivered with as little handling, overhead as possible.

There’s no reason you can’t do all those actions…is there? Apart from time and cost!

No matter what your selection(s) above, you, the manager  / business owner has to be sure of one fundamental thing. “Is what I am doing going to dovetail with my over all business strategy”. Your site is just another arm of your business and has to live just as any other part, like sales or support. It’s going to take time, effort and investment. Done correctly it can make money, save money, or just make it a better to deal with you and your organization.

Now that you have made the decision to proceed with the project to develop something appropriate for your business, there are just 10000 more questions (kidding – only 9000) to go.

It’s time to take action – we can work this process through with you as we have done with others before you.

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All your channels to market are a mechanism for you to communicate with the world. We will help you facilitate this communication appropriately.