I’ll spare you a rehash of all the gory details — I’m sure you’re WELL aware of them already — but suffice to say that the stock market and economy took a pretty sound thrashing this week.

And MANY people are worried.

I’m seeing it in the emails I’ve been getting from nervous customers… and in the urgent phone calls I’m been receiving… and in the comments on my blog…

There are a whole lot of people out there who are concerned about what the present economic climate will mean to their Internet businesses.

Well, I’m no economist, so I’m not about to make a prediction about the markets or the stability of the economy…

… but I am an Internet marketer, and what I can say — with confidence — is that a downturn in the current economy does NOT have to be a major roadblock for YOUR Internet business!

One key to surviving (even thriving) during this period of uncertainty is to know your customers!

It’s more critical than EVER for you to understand EXACTLY who they are… where they’re coming from… their interests, goals, and desires. This will allow you to create laser-focussed marketing copy that speaks DIRECTLY to them and solves their specific problems, as well as offer products that you know for sure will make a difference in their lives.

You’ll be rewarded with continued customer loyalty, and ongoing sales!

So if you don’t already know all you can about your customers and visitors, NOW is definitely the time to find out…

… and the easiest and fastest way to do that is with a survey.

Here are the SIX STEPS you need to follow to create an effective and informative survey that will help you connect with your customers — and continue to profit — during the current financial turmoil:

Step #1: Plan Your Survey

As with everything else you do with your business, you’ll have the greatest success with your survey if you do some advance planning.

Without a solid idea of what exactly it is you hope to learn from your results, you can easily end up creating a survey consisting of fairly random questions that ultimately don’t lead you anywhere.

So make sure you take the time to sit down and do some brainstorming and list making.

Decide what your goals with the survey are. Are you trying to learn more about specific products you offer? Looking for ways you could give everyone a more positive customer care experience? Trying to gather demographic information so you can segment your list better and send out tailored offers?

Be clear about what you’re hoping to accomplish with the survey, and you’ll be in great shape when it comes time to writing the actual survey questions.

Step #2: Choose Your Weapon

One thing I like about surveys is that they’re super simple for pretty much ANY business owner to administer, no matter how small your budget, or limited your technical knowledge.

That’s because there are lots of web-based services out there that will host your survey for you… for FREE!

You just design the survey using their simple point-and-click interface, enter the text for your questions, and then email a link to the survey to your customers and subscribers.

When your customers show up, the automated survey is online and ready to take!

And best of all, many of these free services offer a reasonable number of reporting features, too, making it easy to interpret your results.

Of course, most of these services offer paid upgrades as well, which allow you to create more complex surveys and get more sophisticated reports, but for a typical small survey, the freebies work just fine.

Here are a couple that I’ve used and like:

• SurveyMonkey
• Survey Pro

Step #3: Design And Write Your Survey

Designing your survey takes a bit of skill, but with a small amount of planning (there’s that word again!), you’ll have no problem putting an effective one together. Just be sure that you’re putting the questions in a logical order, and not exhausting your customers by asking for too much detail.

Here are a few tips to help you design a better survey:

• Start with the good stuff – To ease your customers into the survey, start off with some simple questions they can answer without a lot of thought.

  This can be something as simple as basic demographic information (age, location, etc.), which also happens to be useful information.

  But don’t load up the front end with all of the easy questions. Save a few for the end of the survey. That way, it won’t get increasingly difficult throughout, which can cause some people to bail before they complete it.

• Avoid asking too many questions — 15 minutes is about the maximum length you can reasonably expect somebody to spend answering a survey, so be sure to limit your questions.

  At the same time, be sure to let your respondents know up front how much time will be required to complete it… and be honest! People will begin to drop out if it starts to take longer than you say.

• Give your survey an introduction and ending — It’s a good idea to include an introduction to the survey, to clearly explain what people are required to do.

  At the same time, it’s a nice touch to end the survey with a "thank you" page, just to let people know you appreciate the time they spent taking the survey.

• Respect people’s privacy – You may want to collect personal information like age, income, and occupation. If you do so, make sure to reassure your customers beforehand that you have a strict privacy policy, and remind them that their answers are all confidential.

When it comes time to write the actual questions, make sure you write in a relaxed, conversational voice, and avoid things like abbreviations, acronyms, and double negatives. You want to be sure that EVERY person who takes your survey clearly understands all of the questions.

Here are a few tips to help you write compelling and effective survey questions:

• Avoid asking leading questions – Be sure that your questions don’t sway your customers towards answering them in a particular way, or giving an answer that’s not actually true.

  For example, don’t say: "How quickly did we resolve your problem? " This assumes that the problem was indeed resolved.

  The question you should ask is, "Was your problem resolved?"

• Avoid questions that rate more than one thing — Avoid asking questions that require people to rate more than one thing at a time.

  For instance, don’t say: "How fast and accurate did you find our customer service representative?"

  While the service may have been fast, it may not have been accurate (or vice versa) so this question is impossible to answer accurately.

• Focus on asking "close-ended" questions — In a survey, a close-ended question is one that can be answered with a simple yes/no or other specific piece of information, or a selection from multiple choices.

  This makes the survey faster and easier for your customers, and the results more simple for you to manage.

  So instead of a question like "What did you think of your customer service experience?" try something like "Did you enjoy your customer service experience?"

• Be consistent with your questions — If you ask your customers to rate certain things on a numbered scale, make sure to use the same scale each time.

  So if they need to rate something on a scale of 1 to 5 in one question, avoid using a scale of 1 to 10 elsewhere.

• Watch out for long questions — If your questions are too long, your customers will soon get tired of answering them, and abandon the survey. Look for questions that can be broken into two or more parts.
• Don’t test your customers’ memories – Try not to ask your customers to recall a lot of information that happened far in the past. They’ll soon get bogged down trying to recall specific details, and if they’re in a hurry to complete the survey, will often abandon it.

Step #4: Test Your Survey

You all know by now that I’m a HUGE advocate of testing EVERYTHING before you email it, make it live on your site, or expose it to your customers in any way.

So take the time to carefully review the survey, to make sure it has a logical flow, and that it all makes sense.

If you can, it’s a good idea to ask a few people (customers, if possible, or co-workers, friends, or family) to take the survey ahead of time, and actually WATCH them while they do it.

Do they hesitate while answering a question? Backtrack? Skip over a question? It could be a sign that your questions aren’t clear enough, and you’ll need to work on making them more simple.

Once you’re done, ask about the experience. Was there anything you didn’t understand? Were you confused at any point?

You want to make sure the survey is easy to understand and follow BEFORE you make it available. Once it’s actually live — and your customers have started answering it — you DON’T want to have to start tinkering with the questions. That will skew your results.

Step #5: Administer The Survey

Okay, the moment of truth is upon you: It’s time to invite your customers to take the survey.

The easiest way to do this is to email them, and ask them for a few minutes of their time. And make sure you tell them what’s in it for them if they take the survey.

If your goal is to improve a certain product, for instance, tell them that by taking the survey, they’ll actually be helping you to help them, because you’ll use their comments to fine-tune the assistance you can offer them.

And don’t be shy about offering your customers a "bribe" for taking the survey. You’re asking them to do a big favor for you, so it’s not unreasonable to reward them for their time.

Consider sending everyone who responds a gift (like a free ebook that they’ll find valuable), a coupon for discounted products, or enter them in a draw to win some a prize.

Finally, make sure you build some urgency into the email. If you don’t ask people to take the time right away to answer the survey, they’ll often put it aside to answer when they have more time… but then never return to complete it.

Step #6: Interpret Your Results

As you review the results of your survey, remember that, more than anything, you’re looking for trends. Did the majority of respondents answer specific questions the same way? Are they often expressing the same frustrations, etc?

At the same time, look for any surprising answers. Your survey is likely going to tell you things about your audience that you had no idea were true.

By finding out EXACTLY who your audience is, what they like (and dislike), and what their goals and experiences are, you’ll be able to tailor your salescopy, your email marketing efforts, your website, and even your products, to perfectly suit them.

The results should be improved customer loyalty, and ongoing success with your business, even during these turbulent economic times!

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Marketing In A Turbulent Economy

So it’s well worth the time needed to create a compelling headline… establish your credibility… present your offer… and nail down all your salescopy essentials. But after doing all that work, many people overlook one simple, but powerful technique that can make or break a sale at the last critical moment:

Ask for the order! Ask for the order! And then ask for the order again!

This "squeaky wheel" of salescopy is also called a call to action… and adding one to your existing sales pages (or email promotions or PPC ads or opt-in offers), can have a HUGE affect on your conversions.

In fact, marketing gurus have proven time and time again that you will increase your sales by at least 80% simply by asking for the order.

(Click here to see how IMC mentor Cijaye used one to improve conversions 100%.)

There are a number of ways to ask for the order… and if you’ve been following our proven salescopy formula, then you’ve already accomplished some of them. Transferring ownership is part of it. Creating urgency is part of it.

But at the very end of your salescopy, it is extremely important that you flat-out ASK your potential customers to buy from you, and tell them how.

Here are a few examples of simple, but direct, ways of asking for the order:

• "Just click HERE to order NOW - Risk-free!"

• "To order your copy today, along with your 5 FREE bonuses, click here now!"

• "Click here now to take advantage of this limited time offer!"

In the moment of the "hard sell," you will want to restate the strongest benefits and main selling points of your product or service. Then clearly direct your reader to your order form.

Without this direct approach to asking your customers for the order… they won’t be given that final nudge they need to pull out their credit card and start purchasing!

So speak up! Ask for the order… and watch your conversions multiply!

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Conversion Tip: The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Sale

The Republican and Democratic national conventions have just wrapped up, both parties have selected their candidates, and the 2008 U.S. election campaign switched into high gear.

Wait… don’t leave! I promise I’m NOT going to talk politics!

Well, not directly, anyway…

See, as an Internet marketer, what REALLY interests me about this year’s election is the role the Internet is playing in helping to shape its outcome.

Well, not the Internet, exactly. That’s been changing elections for a few years now, as dramatically as the introduction of television did back in the early 60s.

No, what I’m really talking about is how much social networking on the Internet is changing politics.

Seems that social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr — which were started as ways for people to keep in touch with their friends and family, share their latest holiday photos, and post their favorite cute animal videos — have become pretty powerful tools for candidates.

Leaders of all political stripes have started using them aggressively to get their ideas across, unite their supporters, and create communities of like-minded individuals who effectively campaign for them.

And then there’s the whole fundraising thing…

Thanks to social networking sites, the candidates have been raising RECORD amounts of money for their campaigns!

I’d say there’s a lesson to be learned here for all of us online marketers, wouldn’t you?

I mean, on Facebook alone, Barack Obama and John McCain have a combined 2 MILLION supporters (or "friends," in Facebook-speak) and growing DAILY!

Sheesh! Imagine the amount of traffic you’d get to your website if YOU had even a tiny fraction of this number of people talking about YOU and YOUR business… every DAY! And that should be your real goal as an Internet marketer: to get people talking.

Despite what many would have you believe, the value of using Facebook and MySpace is NOT so you can make tons of money in sales directly off of these sites. Instead, it’s about developing a presence online, raising awareness of your product, and building a community of people whose interests reflect your business.

That can translate to a LOT of excitement, more visitors to your site, and increased sales. And the great thing about social networking is that it’s really easy to get started, and usually FREE! You can have an account and profile for your first site set up in the next few minutes!

So if you haven’t jumped on the social networking bandwagon yet, here are the FIVE simple steps you need to follow to get started:

Step #1: Create a user profile for your business

The first step in getting started with social networking is to create user profiles for your business on the major networking sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr.

The most important thing to remember? Do NOT fill your business profile with all kinds of salescopy and other "hype." That’s the FASTEST way to turn people OFF on social networking sites.

Your profile should strictly be an introduction to your business, and a BRIEF overview of what it does, and who it’s for. And make sure your profile is detailed and descriptive, and has a lot of your keywords and phrases in the title and descriptions, so that when people search on those terms, your profile is sure to come up.

Step #2: Research groups related to your industry

Once your profile is set up, it’s time to start looking for people to connect with, so you can begin to build a broad network of online supporters.

Your goal is to locate other individuals and businesses who have interests related to your business. The best way to do this is to simply start typing keywords related to your business into the site’s search box, and see who turns up.

Step #3: Start "mingling," and getting to know people

Once you’ve identified individuals and businesses you’d like to start building relationships with, it’s time to get involved.

First, start requesting that people add you as their contacts or "friends" (or whatever the particular site calls these relationships), and then check out the conversations and discussions your new friends are having. Get to know their likes and dislikes, and the kinds of issues that concern them, so you’ll be ready to add value to the conversation.

One word of warning when you’re adding contacts: It pays to be a bit choosy about who you invite to be your friends. Your list of friends reflects your interests, and sometimes even your character, so restrict your invites to those who really do have something in common with you.

Step #4: Join in!

When you’re ready to join the conversation, make sure you focus on providing USEFUL information, and contributing your expertise to further the discussion.

Remember, your goal with social networking isn’t to make a ton of sales directly from these sites, but to get your name on to the Web, and build relationships with your potential market (and other business owners). So keep the sales pitch to a minimum!

And finally, be sure to keep it professional. You don’t want to start buying virtual drinks for your new friends, or "poking" them on Facebook!

Step #5: Is it worth it? Here’s how to find out…

It’s easy to get swept up in the fun and excitement of social networking, and find yourself spending HOURS communicating with your new friends (and barely doing any other work)!

So be sure to ask yourself this: Do the number of hours I spend on social networking sites yield enough results to make sense financially?

That may sound like a tough one to figure out, but fortunately, you can do it automatically with this free calculator.

You just put in a few simple figures (like the number of hours you or your staff spend on social networking sites, the number of friends you have, etc.,) and it will tell you if you’ll potentially earn more through your social networking strategy than you’ll spend on it.

Social networking is definitely a hot Internet marketing strategy, and NOT just for presidential candidates…

As long as you respect the rules of the social networking sites, and avoid blatant self-promotion and sales pitches, you should easily start making new customers left, right, and center!

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Socialize Your Way To Online Success

Your site’s layout, web copy, and navigation structure has a much bigger impact on your sales. And in the early days of running your online business, you’ll want to retain full control over these elements so you can find the best combination.

So save yourself some time and money, and use one of these three ways to build your own highly profitable business website:

1. Learn HTML using free resource sites like Davesite.com. HTML is actually very straightforward and there are some great tutorials that can help you break it down. Many sites even offer free sample pages or templates you can add your own design elements to.

2. Use programs that do the coding for you. Software programs such as Dreamweaver or KompoZer let you design a site in a word-processing type interface, and automatically change it into HTML speak.

3. Use an "all-in-one" business builder. If you’d rather eat slugs than try your hand at anything technical, you may want to consider using a complete web-building package like BeBiz. These programs allow you to create your own design using point-and-click wizards and templates — with no need to know HTML at all. This is probably the fastest way to build a business website that’s professional and functional.

These are all great ways to build a website yourself. The option that’s best for you depends on how much time and energy you’re able to put into it, as well as the complexity of the site you need.

Being able to control the design and sales elements of your business site is well worth any extra effort… so you always have full control over your conversions and profits.

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On a Budget? 3 Ways to Build Your Business Website Yourself

In fact, the headline is the most important element of your salesletter because it’s key to grabbing your readers’ attention — and keeping it! And you only have a matter of seconds to do this. If you don’t instantly excite, inspire and intrigue your audience, they’re unlikely to read on. So a headline can have a HUGE impact on sales.

But here’s a professional copywriting tip to help you grab your readers: Certain "power" words and phrases consistently outshine other words, and you can tailor these to the needs of your target audience — and have them scrambling to find out more!

When you sit down to write your next sales letter, try incorporating the following power words…

1. Do You Struggle With…
2. Discover…
3. The Untold Secrets to Making…
4. Who Else Wants to…
5. 10 Ways to…
6. Learn Exactly How…
7. 7 Amazing Strategies to…
8. Boost Your…
9. A Guide to…
10. Why Aren’t You…?
11. If You Had Just One Opportunity to…
12. If You Want to Learn How to…
13. 7 Sure-Fire Tips For…
14. How to Attract More…
15. Uncover…
16. How a "Regular Guy" from (Place)…
17. Want to…?
18. READ THIS: If You Are Truly Serious About…
19. Do You Wish There Was An Easier Way to…
20. Tips on…
21. 8 Deadly (Insert Topic) Sins…
22. Learn How to Start…
23. How to Make Your…
24. Are You At Risk of…?
25. 3 Direct Reasons Why You’ll Be Kicking Yourself if You Don’t…
26. Double Your…
27. More Tips to Improve…
28. Exposed for the First Time Ever…
29. Learn the Secrets to Becoming…
30. How to…
31. Instant Strategies Anyone Can Use to…
32. How to Find…
33. 5 Big Reasons to…
34. 10 Steps to…
35. Tired of…
36. Techniques That Enable You to…
37. Watch This "Shocking" Play-By-Play Underground Video…
38. 5 Action Ideas to Get…
39. Discover the "Insider" Strategies That…
40. How to Make a Life-Changing…
41. (Insert Topic): 3 Things You Must Know…
42. The 7 Secrets of…
43. Skyrocket Your…
44. The 5 Ugly Lies About…
45. Finally Revealed!
46. Uncover…
47. Get an Instant 20-50% Increase in…
48. Discover How We…
49. Proof That…
50. The Truth About…
51. How This Surprising Little Secret…
52. 10 Simple Steps to Catapult Your…
53. Discover How YOU Can…
54. How I (Insert Accomplishment) in Record Time…
55. Learn How to EXPLODE…
56. Three Quick-Start Tips to…
57. Discover the *Secret Formula*…

If you can attract the attention of your market with your headline, you give them a reason to keep reading the rest of your sales letter… all the way to the sale. But don’t take my word for it. Try them out for yourself, then test your response.

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Power Headlines To Increase Conversion

Search Engine Synchronization Key Phrases

The slide Kevin references in this video:

For more search help, check out our Search Marketing Lab

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SEO Whiteboard Series

You can make money online by…

1. Selling and shipping products while someone else does all the work.
   In the Internet world, this is known as drop shipping. And it’s a great
   way to sell physical products without having to stock, ship, or fulfill
   orders. Instead, you hire a drop-shipping company to do that for you,
   so you can concentrate on marketing your website.

   The
   downside is that you have to pay a percentage of your profits to the
   drop-shipping company. But if you have your heart set on selling a
   physical product, or don’t have the time or money to develop your own,
   this is a good option.

2. Recommending products.
   When you become an affiliate for someone else’s company, you can start
   earning commissions very quickly just for referring visitors to their
   website. Again, there’s no need to stock products or fulfill orders.

   You will have to be prepared to do some pretty hefty promoting if you
   want to create a money-making business primarily as an affiliate. But
   it’s definitely the fastest way to start earning an Internet income.

3. Getting the right to sell other people’s products. A third way to make money online in record time without developing your
   own product is to buy the reprint or resell rights to someone else’s product.
   When you purchase the rights to an established product, you get (depending on
   the kind of rights you purchase) permission to sell someone else’s product for
   them and keep a percentage of the sale. Or the right to buy someone’s product
   outright and resell it, keeping the entire proceeds of the sale. And in the best-case
   scenario, you can even purchase the right to sell the purchasing rights to other
   people!

   You can find out how to get the rights for products like eBooks by
   approaching authors directly, or using a search engine to find out
   which rights would be best for you. This can be a very profitable way
   to make money online, but it does require an up-front investment.

These are all great ways to start your own money-making business
on the Net… and you can even mix and match them to create an even
bigger Internet income. Just keep in mind there are other Internet
profit models that will allow you to keep even more of your profits if
you’re willing to put in the time and effort.

Try out BeBiz - our easy website builder that guides you through each step of building a profitable website.

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The 3 Fastest Ways to Make Money Online

On Monday morning, hurricane Gustav blasted across Louisiana and surrounding states, leaving behind a trail of destruction estimated to be in the billions of dollars

But despite the extensive damage, the one thing people feared MOST never happened…

New Orleans was spared.

Gustav made landfall 100 miles to the south, and the city avoided a repeat of the devastation that Katrina brought three years ago.

But it’s not like the city wasn’t ready for the worst!

In the days leading up to Gustav’s arrival, over a million people were evacuated, and massive emergency shelters were set up in surrounding areas.

Drawing on everything they learned from Katrina, New Orleans planned for the worst… hoped for the best… and were rewarded with the best possible outcome.

Now, without minimizing in any way the human and financial costs of Gustav, it’s a lesson we can ALL take away for our own businesses.

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best.

You’re probably already planning for success, right? We all spend a LOT of time projecting our future sales and revenue, figuring out how to improve our business processes, and generally making sure we continue to profit.

And obviously, that’s good! Hoping for the best is what makes us successful as entrepreneurs.

But how much time do you spend preparing for unexpected surprises?

Do you have a plan in place for things that could go wrong? When the market you’ve been successfully selling to suddenly dries up? Or there’s another major change in the search engines and your traffic DIES?

Here are FIVE things you can do to make sure YOUR business is prepared for the worst… and sails through nearly any crisis:

1. Pursue Multiple Markets Using Small Niche Websites

Say you own a website, and with it, you’ve pretty much cornered the market for your single product. Sales are excellent, and the money is rolling in day and night, without you barely needing to lift a finger.

You’re in the perfect position, right?

Well, assuming that nothing EVER changes, then yes, you’ll be fine…

… but what if there’s a sudden shift in the market, and the product you’re selling, which was HOT just a few months ago, is suddenly something you can barely GIVE away? (Think it can’t happen? Just ask anyone who sells large SUVs for a living!)

So how do you prepare for the worst?

I always tell people that the BEST way to protect yourself against fickle markets is to have MULTIPLE small niche sites up and running.

Get one started, and once it’s converting, use everything you learned from that process to start another. And another.

Before you know it, you’ll have multiple sources of income, so if one of your products goes out of fashion, or falls out of favor, you won’t take a BIG hit to your revenue.

But remember: slow and steady wins the race. Don’t try to put together five different websites for five different niches all at the same time.

Work on one, get it converting, put it on "auto pilot," and then move on to site number two.

2. Target Multiple Markets Within Your Niche, Using Custom Landing Pages

Just as it’s a good idea to have multiple niche websites in place, it’s ALSO a good idea to make sure each individual website is targeting many different keyphrases using custom landing pages.

Don’t just create a single landing page for your best keyphrase, then call it a day!

You may get good traffic initially, but some day, that particular keyword or phrase is no longer going to be popular, or competitors will move in and start targeting that same keyword… and your sales will be LOST.

But if you do your research, and understand ALL of the main keyphrases your visitors are using to find you, you can create custom landing pages for each of the main phrases.

That way, if one of the keyphrases stops being productive, you’re still getting plenty of traffic to the other pages.

So to prepare for the worst, stay on top of your keywords — they often change over time — and make sure you’re always targeting as many as possible.

3. Make Sure Your Traffic Is Coming To Your Site From Many Different Sources

Are you getting most of your traffic (and sales) thanks to one or two #1 rankings on the search engines?

There’s NOTHING like free traffic from the search engines, right?

But have you considered what would happen if Google (or one of the other big search engines) suddenly decided to make significant changes to their algorithms (the formulas they use to rank websites), and, without warning, you found yourself on page 37 in the search results?

It would literally be the END of your traffic!

And if you think that will never happen, it already has! Not that long ago, Google made some significant changes to the way they rank sites, and there were a LOT of websites that literally fell off the radar!

So if you’re depending solely on the search engines to drive an endless stream of traffic to your doorstep, right NOW is the time to diversify.

Of course, you can always turn to pay-per-click advertising if there’s a sudden change in your free traffic, but that can be costly, and to be honest, you won’t get as many visitors with a paid listing as you would from a top ranking in the natural search rankings.

So make sure you’re always thinking about other ways to drive FREE traffic (both online AND offline).

Submit your site to as many relevant web directories as you can… participate in online forums (and make sure there’s a link back to your site in your signature line)… give away LOTS of free content (again, with links back to your site)… issue press releases… and so on.

What’s really cool about all of these strategies is that, not only will they help you get traffic from other sources, they’ll actually help you in the natural search rankings, too, so now you have TWO good reasons to do it!

4. Actively Recruit Multiple Affiliates

Got a super-keen affiliate who is responsible for a BIG chunk of your sales?

That’s great, but what happens if that affiliate decides to retire, or try her hand promoting someone else’s product.

You could see your sales dry up literally overnight, and it can often take a LONG time to find another affiliate with the necessary skills (and customers) to replace the lost income.

Don’t wait until you NEED another good affiliate to find one!

Instead, start recruiting a stable of affiliates, so you’ll always have a few solid earners, no matter WHAT happens.

And while it can be tempting to open your affiliate program to anyone who’s interested, you may find that you’ll have more success hand-picking specific candidates.

That’s because a wide-open affiliate program can often draw a LOT of people who don’t really have experience selling online.

So to make sure you always have TOP affiliates working for you, start with a web search of sites that cater to your target market.

Focus on the sites that appear right at the top (or near the top) of the results. These are the savvy marketers, and chances are, they’ll have what it takes to sell for YOU, too.

From there, it’s just a matter of contacting them personally to discuss the possibility of promoting your product.

5. Find Multiple Suppliers For Your Product

What would you do if you discovered one day that the drop shipper or wholesaler who supplied you with your top-selling product could no longer get it? Or they’d gone out of business altogether?

If you haven’t been planning for the worst, chances are you’ll sit there in disbelief, as your revenue drops to zero within DAYS!

But if you had been preparing for the worst, you’d be fine…

… because you’d have backup suppliers for these same (or similar) products. so that the transition from your old to new supplier would be seamless.

Your customers will never know the difference, and your revenue will continue to flow uninterrupted.

Hoping for the best AND preparing for the worst is actually something POSITIVE you can do for yourself and your business. It’s the BEST way to prevent surprises, stay calm when potential disasters hit, and react to income-threatening situations quickly!

To your success,

Derek Gehl

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Plan For The Worst… Hope For The Best!

By rewriting your title tag, you can.

(Read the results of testing by our in-house SEO expert Nicole E. here.)

Your title tag is simply the piece of HTML code that tells the search engines what your page is about… and it’s a piece of prime SEO real estate!

Not only do the search engines use it to assign relevance to your website, they also display it in the search results as your hyperlink…

… And it’s what visitors see at the top of their browser while they’re on your site.

So make sure you use this SEO heavyweight to your advantage, and write a title tag the search engines — and your visitors! — will love.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Make sure you include one!

Some people don’t even bother to include a title tag at all. This is a HUGE mistake!

If you leave your title tag blank, the search engines will show an unsightly “untitled document” in the search results and at the top of your pages. This makes you look careless and unprofessional. Besides, who searches for untitled documents? You’re squandering an opportunity for better SEO and you’re missing out on sales.

Don’t make this mistake!

Step 2: Avoid using your URL as your title

In the attempt to stay organized and keep track of many different web pages, some site owners have been known to use the URLs of individual pages as the titles.

A title tag like “Sally’s Beauty Shop/Cosmetics/product123.html” does contain the business name, the product category, and the product name itself, but it’s not very helpful to your rankings.

If you have a catalog site, you have to watch that your shopping cart software doesn’t automatically generate something like this for your title tag. If it does, find out how you can change the settings so you can title your pages yourself.

Step 3: Say goodbye friendly greeting, hello keywords

There’s nothing wrong with a friendly greeting… in person. But your title tag is the wrong place to say hello to your audience.

A friendly greeting like “Welcome to my web page!” doesn’t tell you what the page is about. And again, who searches for welcome messages?

Step 4: Arrange your top two keyword phrases so they make sense

The best title tags use a combination of words and phrases that all get searched regularly. Then arrange them in a way so they make sense.

On our Search Marketing Lab website for example, we use a combination of words and phrases that all get searched regularly — SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Marketing Tips, and Search Marketing.

But we’ve arranged them to make sense as well as pull traffic from several different keyword searches:

“SEO and Search Engine Marketing Tips & Advice: Search Marketing Lab”

If you were looking for advice on search marketing, you’d know you were in the right place after seeing that title.

That’s it!

Your title tag is easy to find and easy to change in your HTML code. On most web pages, your title tag (and meta tags) are right at the top, below your “head” tag:

<head>

<title>Internet Marketing Course - Proven Internet Business Strategies</title>

When writing your title tag, keep it under 70 characters. Put your best keywords at or near the beginning of your title tag. With the limited number of characters you’re permitted, your keywords at the end of the tag could get cut off and visitors won’t see them.

Your title tag is prime real estate, and a few minutes (or less!) work here can make a HUGE difference to your overall search rankings, traffic, and business.

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