Ina’s Dollars From Home Blog

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USP has become a very important aspect of Internet marketing. USP means “unique selling propisition” and it is the “something” that makes your products or online business stand apart from the masses. You can develop a strong USP by making use of Internet business marketing mentors for your residual income affiliate business.

The concept was produced by Rosser Reeves, and set out in his book, Reality In Advertising, published back in the early sixties, but still applicable today. In fact USP must present three things to be truly effective.

1. It must provide the prospect a specific benefit. (The proposition.)

2. It must offer something that nobody else offers. (It is unique.)

3. It is strong enough to induce people to buy the product from you. (It sells.)

The USP In Residual Income Affiliate Marketing.

It is the nature of affiliate marketing that the most promising products attract hundreds or even thousands of affiliate marketers. Some of the top Internet marketing programs even have affiliate sales forces numbering in the hundreds of thousands. In the Internet marketing business niche for example competition is notoriously fierce. Simply creating a website with a product sales page will not be enough in this environment.

Many people find that even after actively marketing their business their sales volume may remain disappointingly low. The reason for this may be that the marketer has not done enough to separate themselves from the crowd.

Since most people do not buy the first time they are introduced to an opportunity, it is quite possible that the prospect will first read about a particular product on your website but eventually get around to buying it somewhere else.

That is why you need to find a unique and powerful proposition that will either cause your prospects to buy straight away, or be strong enough to draw people back to your sales page to take advantage of your offer. Another option will be to find Internet business marketing mentors and follow their guidelines.

Let’s look at some areas where you might try to produce a unique selling proposition for your affiliate products.

1. Price: Good luck with this one! In a competitive market it may be difficult to find a unique price-based proposition. Price propositions include discounts, time-limited low price offers, buy-one-get-one-free offers, partial cash refunds and so on.

2. Free gifts and bonuses: Try to find something unique to offer as a free bonus or add-on gift or service that has not been tried before. If you are selling a product, perhaps you could write an instruction manual or guidebook and offer it as a freebie.

3. Customer Care: Many affiliate marketers offer nothing in the way of after sales support. Perhaps you could find a unique opportunity by offering this sort of service. Great customer care is also likely to result in more repeat sales for your business.

4. Referral Rewards: Offer your customers rewards in the form of free products each time they present a new customer to your business. There are many people out there who don’t want to sell, but who would be happy to refer customers in exchange for free goodies.

5. Features and benefits: You are marketing the same products as thousands of other rivals, but what if you were willing to add something extra? For example, if you are selling web hosting, why not offer to set up a basic website for your customers? This would supply your business with an extra specific benefit that is not being offered elsewhere.

6. You Are Your Own USP: on the Internet personal branding is becoming increasingly important. People like to know who they are dealing with and will appreciate personal service that goes the extra mile.

If you are still fighting to find a unique selling proposition for your residual income affiliate marketing product, try working on making yourself your own best unique selling proposition by utilizing the services of Internet marketing mentors or business mentors.

There are many ways to get free internet promotion for your website that can be very rewarding. But getting a free program or Internet marketing tips does not mean that you should not expect it to deliver results.

Here are 10 free Internet marketing tips that can really pay off and also four no-no’s:

My Top 10 Free Internet Marketing Tips

1. Newsletter

Publish a Newsletter that is rich in good quality niche-specific content and use it to build up a loyal following of subscribers.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Optimize your website to achieve a higher ranking on the search engines. Anybody can learn the basic principles of SEO and implement them free of charge.

3. Directory Listing

Many Website directories are still free to list on. There are hundreds of these directories on the Internet. Get into the habit of submitting your website to website directories on a regular basis.

4. Targeted Link Exchanges

Place a link to another related site on your own, and in return, ask them to return the favor. The best way to place a link is to have it occur “naturally” by mentioning the website in an article or on a resource list. “Link popularity, is used by many search engines as a factor affecting your website’s ranking.

5. Traffic Exchanges

Join several of these for free and familiarize yourself with how they work. You can get instant traffic to visit your website - or better still, to a squeeze page on your website that encourages the visitor to sign up to your newsletter. You will have to spend some time surfing other TE members’ sites to earn credits, so consider upgrading to pro status whenever you find a TE that works for you, then you will be awarded credits and won’t have to surf so much.

6. Referral Marketing.

Find a customer, go out of your way to make his day, then ask him to circulate the word about your business. People love to do purchase products and services that have been recommended by friends - it makes them feel special. Whenever you sell something, ask for a testimonial.

7. Write And Publish… Write And Publish… Write And Publish… Regularly write and publish articles on your blog, on free article directories, on your website, on other people’s blogs (ask first!!), on Squidoo. Write fun posts on Twitter.com too. Post comments on blogs and Squidoo lenses.

8. Write An E-book

You know you have a book inside you! Since e-books are best when short and to the point it is not like you have to write War And Peace. 30 pages of info on a single topic, with enough white space, will be adequate.

When it is written, offer your e-book as a freebie for new subscribers to your e-newsletter.

9. Make A YouTube Video

Producing and submitting a video costs nothing nowadays although you will have to purchase the equipment. Make a whole series of videos about your business and link back to your website when you post them.

10. JV

Search for someone who runs a business in your niche but who is not a direct competitor and make a joint venture proposal. For example you could feature each other’s business in your individual newsletters. That way neither of you will have to pay for advertising but you will both expand your reach. Also, running features for other businesses in your newsletter will convey the idea to your readers that you are well connected in the IM world.

Then - the four absolute time wasters. Here goes:

Here goes:

Do not waste your time on (1) FFA websites (nobody reads them anyway and even if they do your ad is just one among thousands of competitors); (2) free link and free banner exchanges - total waste of effort; (3) ad exchanges and related traffic networks - very poor quality traffic, resulting in zero conversions most of the time; (4) free newsletter classifieds - scroll over Beethoven! Everybody ignores them.

That’s it! My 10 best free Internet marketing tips on free Internet promotion and the four big time-wasters. Go do it.

Everyone advertising legitimate home based businesses can use all the help they can get and it’s even better if it’s free right? Today I’ll share more information about creating a signature for your emails or a email signature file. This short but powerful message will then be attached to each and every email you send!

Whatever email program you are using, whether you run it from your computer (like Outlook Express) or remotely, on the Internet (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo), you will be able to set up a signature and have it automatically attached to the foot of your emails.

Here’s how to set up a email signature file in Outlook Express:

To add a signature to emails sent out from Outlook Express, first launch the program and then click “Tools”. Choose “Options” and a new window will pop up. Now click the “Signatures” tab and select “New”. Click the radio button next to “Text” and type in your signature file. When you’re done, click “add signatures to all outgoing messages” and click “Apply” to save your changes. Lastly, click “Okay” and you will have created your own signature file.

To verify that it works, send yourself an email. When you open it you will see that your signature at the foot of your e-mail.

Setting up a signature file in Hotmail is very easy too. After logging in, click “Options” in the top right corner of the web page, then “More Options” and you will find a list of choices! Scroll down to “Customize your mail” and click”Personal email signature“. Enter your signature text in the box, click “Save” and you are finished.

The process is even easier for Gmail users. After you have logged into your account, click on the “Settings” link in the top right corner of the browser page. That will take you to the settings page where you will find a “Signature” box. Type your signature into the box, click the radio button next to the text box - NOT the one marked “No Signature” :-). Now click save changes and you have finished.

So now you know how to set up an email signature file, here are a few tips on composing the signature itself.

1. Make it short and sweet. No more than three or four lines of text and a link to the page you wish to advertise.

2. Offer an incentive for the reader to click through to your website, a freebie offer of some sort - an e-book, piece of software, free ticket or voucher and so on.

3. Use complete URLs, starting from http:// so that readers will be able to click the link. If they have to cut and paste, or manually type it into their browser, that is likely not going to happen. So make it easy for your reader to get to your website with a single click.

4. Keep it simple by using plain text.

5. Mark of the signature from the email by placing it beneath a simple series of lines, ==== or ~~~~.

You can also add signatures to your autoresponder mail and to your forum posts and your website pop accounts. Get into the habit of setting up an email signature file every time you open a new forum or email account and take advantage of this free and simple way to promote legitimate home based businesses.

Now that you know you need a web hosting company to host your website, the next step will be to find out what services and features they present. Finding a reliable web hosting company is key to ensure steady, trustworthy hosting for your legitimate online business. Going cheap is not the answer but you don’t have to pay and arm and a leg either.

What should you look for in a reliable web hosting company?

1. Up-time: You want your website to be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Actually, no web host can really guarantee 100% up-time. Search for a web host that offers 99.9%.

2. Customer Support: A good web host company will reply quickly to your email requests or telephone calls and deal with any problems you may have in a timely manner.The best companies will offer 24/7 tech support.

3. No Setup Fees: Many web hosts dispense with setup fees. And so they should. Setting up a website account is a quick and straightforward process.

4. Storage Space: Anything between 500 and 1,000 megabytes should be enough for the needs of most business websites. It is better to have too much space than too little, but do not be tricked into buying more space than you will ever use.

5. Bandwidth: For web hosting purposes, this is a measure of how much data is downloaded from the site by your visitors over the course of a month. If you have 25GB of bandwidth for your hosting account, that is how much data you will be able to transfer to visitors’ browsers during any given month. Allow yourself a generous amount of bandwidth, especially if you plan to upload large files such as high quality images to your site.

6. Pop e-mail accounts: You may want to set up extra email accounts in the future, so for a web host that allows you to run 10 or more pop email accounts.

7. CGI-BIN: CGI programs allow you to run interactive programs on your website to enhance your visitors’ experience, things like guest books, message boards, mailing lists and so on. Without CGI-BIN you will not be able to host those programs on your website.

8. PHP and PERL: These programming scripts will allow you easily to set up databases.

9. Run Cron Events: Certain programs require cron events to be set up in order to run properly so make sure this feature is included in your hosting package.

10. FTP Upload: Determine that the web host offers anonymous FTP support via a dedicated FTP server.

11. Site Stats: Does the web host offer you some way of assessing the traffic to your website?

When looking for the best, reliable web hosting company for your legitimate online business, don’t just take the company’s word about its services. Do some research on Google to see if you can find any positive or negative feedback. While not all complaints are valid, a consistently bad company will certainly attract a lot of negative comment and a consistently good one may receive a little praise.

Now that you have a checklist of features you want your web host  to offer, you should be well equipped to find a reliable web hosting company that fits your pocket and demands.

Anybody who wants to have an Internet website will have to make use of web host companies. The company basically “rents” space to you and therefore it is very important to find not only a reliable web hosting company but it is also possible to find inexpensive web hosting.

A web hosting company has a bunch of computers, which are called “servers”. The servers are permanently connected to the Internet. Understand that by “permanent” web hosting companies aim for 99%- 99.9% connectivity.

A web hosting company stores customers’ websites on its servers, where they can be retrieved by any computer that is connected to the Internet and viewed on the web browser of that computer.

Technically speaking, it is possible to run your own server and hook up to the Internet without going through a web hosting company, but the cost of equipment and technical expertise required to do that, to say nothing of the time required for maintenance, means that it is not really a reasonable or desirable option for most people.

So, if you want to start a website you will need to establish an account with a web hosting company according to your requirements. You will be provided with a user name and password so that you can log in and access the web host’s server, up-load and manage your web site via a control panel .

Most people construct their websites on their computers either with website editing and building software or manually, using something as simple as a series of notepad files and basic HTML code before uploading them to the web hosting provider’s server.

You can up-load your files from your computer via an FTP client (such as the free FileZilla FTP client, http://filezilla-project.org/), or by using the up-loading service supplied by your web host host on the server when you log in. Once you have successfully up-loaded your website it will be accessible to anyone surfing the Internet to view on their browser.

As you continue to develop your website it will grow and take up more disc space on the web host’s server. Disk space is measured in Megabytes or Gigabytes. One Gigabyte equals 1000 megabytes or 10^9 (1,000,000,000) bytes of information. A web hosting contract will include information about how many Megabytes or Gigabytes of web space you can use to store your website.

Also, as more and more people view your website, the amount of data being channeled across the net will increase. This is called network transfer (or bandwidth) and is also measured in Megabytes or Gigabytes.

So, when choosing from hundreds of web host companies, you will need to consider how large your website is going to be and how much traffic you are hoping to generate. If you concentrate simply on getting the cheapest deal you may end up with a contract that does not give your website room to grow - or one in which you are charged for going over the stipulated web space and bandwidth limits. Make sure that you get a reliable web hosting company and yes it is possible to find inexpensive and reliable web hosting!

So now you know what web hosting is, in our next article we will look at some of the features you will want your web host company to offer.

Trading in domain names has grown into a big market online since everyone with a website needs to choose a domain name. Great domain names can be bought on auction sites for very little money or it can be very expensive. The price will be determined by the keyword value or branding of the name. Choosing domain names for legitimate online businesses can be quite a headache.

However, if you can choose a domain name for your website that has never been used before you will be able to register it for less than $20 per year without having to purchase it at all.

How To Choose A Domain Name

There are two approaches to choosing suitable domain names for your websites: (1) Branding, and (2) keywords.

1. Branding - Use your own name or company name as the domain name of your website.

If you want to raise the profile of your company and turn it into brand in its own right, using it as your domain name is a great idea.

Take a company like Amazon.com for example. There is nothing in the domain name amazon.com to suggest that Amazon sells books, yet when you hear the name Amazon you will probably think either of a big river in South America, or a big bookstore on the Internet, and in many cases it will be the latter that is thought of first!

This proves how powerful branding has become.

Certain people prefer to turn their own name into a brand name. Entrepreneurs, politicians and artists will often ensure their own name as their brand name. The most celebrated new example of this is now living in the White House. You can check out his website at barackobama.com.

So, branding yourself via your domain name can be a very brilliant strike.

Nonetheless, if you are just starting out, you might want to consider utilizing applicable keywords in your domain name to raise the visibility of your website. This is an outstanding idea if you are promoting a popular niche market.

2. Keywords - Choose a domain name that reflects the type of business you are in.

There are a couple of rewards to be had with a keyword rich domain. Firstly, it broadcasts a distinct message to anybody searching for the products you are selling that your website is the place to find them. Secondly, the keywords in your domain will help your website’s search engine ranking for those particular words.

Choosing Keyword Rich Domain Names

Produce a list of keywords that are connected to the main theme or chief content of your website. Aim to get a domain name with one or two of your keywords in it; a short domain name is better but you will probably need to use more than one keyword to find a domain name that is available.

The easiest way to choose a great domain name is to use a free domain search website such as http://instantdomainsearch.com/ and type your thoughts straight into the search browser to instantly discover whether or not they are available. If your first search is not productive, play around with the keywords and try to find a good combination that (a) makes some kind of sense, (b) is a fair reflection of what your business is about and (c) is available.

Also, if you are planning on beginning a business site, make sure that you get the.com extension. Generally speaking, domains that end in .com are easier to remember and look more professional. However, if your business is concentrated on a single country then you might want to use .co.uk, co.jp, etc.

If your chosen domain name is not available and is one that you have set your heart upon, you may be able to purchase it from the owner. As I mentioned, many people buy and sell domain names as a business. Be warned, though. A domain name with a couple of high ranking keywords in it is likely to be expensive.

Whereas you can choose and register an available domain name for a few dollars, choosing a domain name for your legitimate online business may mean that you’ll have to spend several thousand dollars to secure a great domain name on the open market.

We don’t get a lot for free anymore and if you’ve been considering obtaining a domain name to start a legitimate online business, you may be wondering why you should buy one if you can get it for free right? The reason is that by using a service that provides free web domain names, the URL you get is basically just a modification of their own domain name. You don’t own it although you get to use space on their servers.

For example, if the free web host provider’s domain name is stingy.com, you may end up with a free URL that reads like this:

http://www.mycheapwebbiz.stingyhosting.com or http://www.stingy.com/mycheapwebbiz .

Here are some of the reasons why it is essential to invest some money in a genuine domain name for your website when you set up your legitimate online business.

1. Having your own domain name is a great way to brand your Internet business. It is true that a free web host provider will give you a web address, but that is merely an extension of the free web host provider’s domain name. In effect you will be promoting your web host provider’s business instead of your own.

2. Once you have purchased a domain name it is yours to keep. With your own domain name, you can easily move your site to another web host provider if you are not happy with the service you are receiving. Your website visitors will not even know that you have changed web host provider. With a free domain name you will not be able to do that.

Having your own domain name gives you much more control over your website. What happens if your free web host provider’s business crashes? You will have no website and no domain name. So even if you quickly set up a new website, the domain name will have to be different and your existing customers will likely not be able to find you.

3. You may have to put up with many advertisements on your site. Some of which will be totally inappropriate to your site content. You may be required to place a banner at the top or bottom of your pages. Now do you really want to advertise a company that you might not support? Your free service is making money off of your attempts and you’re supplying good customers without seeing one penny of those profits.

4. A free domain name does not look professional. Even if you spend a lot of time perfecting your website, you will lose credibility from your URL alone. The message you are sending is that you are not willing to spend money on a business that you expect your customers to invest in. Would you buy from a business like that? A free website URL makes you look both cheap and unskilled.

5. As your website grows and attracts more traffic, you will need more space than a free web service can provide.

Therefore if you are serious about starting a legitimate online business, or want to build a hobby site that gets substantial traffic, you will be doing yourself a much better service by buying the best possible domain name for your website. Getting a name from a free web domain name service can prove to be expensive.

We’ve become an impatient generation and most people will not be happy with pages that take longer than twenty seconds to load. One would think that image data compression may not be as important anymore with most Internet users having switched to broadband, but if you want visitors to come back and keep coming back to sites for legitimate home based businesses, you will have to learn some image compression techniques.

So, image compression for quicker page load times should be considered as one aspect of website optimization, as well as techniques to increase traffic, get leads, improve navigability, hold prospects and close more sales.

The single biggest cause of slow-loading websites is image files that are too big and too many. Whenever you want to add an image to one of your web pages, use an image compressor to reduce the size of the image file.

If you have Photoshop, you can use JPEG image compression to reduce the size of a JPEG file by downgrading the quality of the image without significantly compromising the appearance of the photo on your web page. If you do not have Photoshop you can use a free online image compressor such as http://Jpegwizard.com, which allows you to reduce the size of your image file quickly and easily without having to download any software.

If your web page carries a lot of banner ads which you host on your own site, you can use your preferred image compressor to cut the size of those files as well.

If you have a lot of goods that you want to display, use thumbnail images instead of full-sized ones. When visitors to your website want to view a larger image they can simply click on the thumbnail.

It is easy to produce thumbnail versions of your photos nowadays. For example, FrontPage includes a thumbnail option, and Jpegwizard.com always includes a thumbnail when it compacts JPEG files.

The biggest problem with compressing JPEG files is that if you compress them too much they suffer a noticeable deterioration in quality. Another way to reduce image size is to change your image files to PNG format. PNG delivers good quality images with a much smaller file size than JPEG can manage.

PNG represents an improvement over the highly-compressible GIF images, but if you want to feature some simple animations on your website you would need to use GIF. GIF images can be turned into simple animations in a GIF editor.

However, you should be cautious about whether an animation would really add anything of value to your web page that would justify a slower download time.

You can check the download time of your web pages before and after image compression on this website: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Since the process of image data compressing is quick and easy to do, there is really no excuse for using large image files just because Internet download speeds are so much faster than they used to be. You should utilize these image compressions techniques to make websites for legitimate home based businesses attractive, to support your text with one or two photos or images, but also to get your page onto your visitor’s browser as quickly as possible, and definitely in less than twenty seconds.

The easiest way to do that is to use jpeg image compression on your image files.

Something that makes Twitter unique is that it is so current. It is both relevant and interesting and allows us to share bits of information about our everyday lives with friends, family and associates. It is like a mini blog to keep up to date with what’s happening to people you know. In other words a social networking service. This blog will tell you more about Twitter and you can even regard it as a Twitter guide for legitimate online businesses.

The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity. The sign-up procedure is very simple. Go to Twitter.com, click the green “Get Started - Join!” button, then fill in a short form and you are good to go. You can produce a brief Profile about yourself, add a link to your website and upload a photo. If you like you can change the background of your Twitter homepage.

So, what is Twitter about and what is it used for? Use this guide to help you get going.

At the top of your Twitter homepage there is a question which asks, “What are you doing?”. Below the question there is a field in which you can type your answer in no more than 140 characters. You can type anything you wish into the field. If you are commenting on something you have seen on another website you can include a link back to the website, which is one of the reasons why Twitter can be used for legitimate online businesses.

Once you have composed your update and clicked on the “Update” button, your message will appear at the top of your home page and on the pages of your followers.

So how do you get followers and build your network? One way to do that is to click the “Find People” link at the top of your Twitter homepage. You will then be presented with different choices for acquiring and selecting people who you would like to follow. For example, you can import you email contacts and start following anybody who already has a Twitter account.

In many cases, when you begin to follow somebody on Twitter they will reciprocate and so your network will begin to grow.

Another great way to find people on Twitter is by using Twellow.com. You can use keyword searches on Twellow to find and follow people on Twitter whose interests are related to yours.

Once you start following people you will be able to check out who they are following and who they are being followed by. If you want to keep on expanding your network you can start following those people too.

Every time somebody you are following post an update, you can send them a reply that will be seen by all your followers. Sending answers is a good way of fortifying your network so do not neglect of this feature of twitter. If you want to keep your reply private, click the message link in the right-hand column.

Internet Marketers have been quick to realize that Twitter offers a strong way of promoting their Internet Marketing businesses that is different from other social networking sites. However, the rules of other social networking sites also apply to Twitter. Do not bombard your followers with spam.

Make sure that your updates offers something of value, even if it is “only” entertainment value! By all means include your own links from time to time, particularly when you post an article to your website or blog, but at all times keep the accent on providing something of value to your network.

Twitter is an attractive tool for Internet marketers because it is fun to use, fast and efficient. So if you are serious about building an legitimate online business, don’t waste any more time asking about Twitter. Instead use this Twitter guide for your online business.

In the previous blog post we touched on the importance of video promotion as a viral marketing tool. The following points will help you realise that this is the way to go to stay one step ahead of your competition.

2. Don’t Beat About The Bush: Utilize Repetition To Good Effect.

Do not go round in circles or keep duplicating what you have just said ad infinitum.

Stay in control of your information. Let people know that you will share something important later on to keep them watching by all means, but do not string out your presentation just to keep them dangling. On the Internet, people do not dangle - unless you hook them in fast, they disappear!

So, save the repetitions for your rundown in the last 30-60 seconds of the video. Use the summing up section to repeat the important points distinctly and briefly. By all means repeat website and email addresses at the end of your presentation.

3. Take advantage of the viral potential of video promotion.

The beauty of using videos to promote your business on the Internet is their potential as one of the great viral marketing tools. Videos can be easily embedded into blogs, websites, and social networking sites. Links to videos can also be sent by e-mail or posted as syndicated web content on RSS feeds. If your video clip packs a punch you may well find it spreading your message across the Internet like a virtual virus.

4. SEO Your Video!

Make sure you optimize your video clip for the search engines. When you upload a video to video sharing sites like YouTube.com you can add some text information such as the title of your video, a compact description of the video content, and some meta tags. Make sure to include some keywords in those fields so as to get your video shown on text-based search engines.

If possible include your keywords in the URL for the video to help the video search engines find it.

Much more could be said on the subject, but if you follow these four easy steps you will be well on your way to becoming an expert in utilizing the full potential of video promotion as one of the best viral marketing tools.