IMTC: What Are Merchant Accounts?
By · CommentsTo make money at this Internet game you have to have some way to take credit cards. You must have a way to capture a sale immediately when you create the impulse to buy in your customer.
You don’t even want your prospect to have to get up from their computer. Anything that distracts them could translate into a lost sale.
One of the most important ways to grab the sale NOW is to have your own Visa/MasterCard/AMEX merchant account tied to your shopping system. It used to be really tough to get a merchant account, especially if you work out of your home.
Now, you can’t turn on your computer without 200 ads hitting you in the face from companies wanting to give you merchant account status. . . .Well “give” is not exactly the right word. . . It’s going to cost you.
You can visit http://www.HowToUseAShoppingCart.com to find the one we recommend.
You’ll run into all kinds of deals where people will want to lease you card swiping equipment . . .unless you do a ton of live sales at trade shows or flea markets, you will never see a actual credit card when doing business online. All the sales are either via Internet or telephone.
Sometimes a fax will come in. You simply don’t need a card machine. You can even take an order over your cell phone while on a plane before it takes off!
Get firm numbers on upfront fees, monthly fees, credit card percentages, and per transaction costs. While you’re at it, find out exactly what a transaction is? Does calling for an “authorization only” constitute a transaction? Does doing a return equal a transaction? All these fees add up, but you’ll consider them chump change when you start doing lots of business.
Five Major Parts
For an online store to work there are five major parts that must all work together.
• Your website where your products and services are described
• Your Shopping Cart: that’s the interface the customer uses to shop and put in their credit card information
• Online Gateway: that’s the mechanism that connects the shopping cart to the merchant account and keeps the credit card information encrypted and safe as it travels between the shopping cart and the merchant account.
• The Merchant Account: that’s the company that actually runs the credit card charges.
• Your bank that receives the money from the merchant account
Learn more about setting up a merchant account for your online business.
Making Money With Membership Sites
By · CommentsAttracting and Keeping Members
A membership site without members will not make any money. Finding the right target of customers is critical to a membership site’s success. A well constructed site will be about delivering niche information to those who need it.
Your market for members are already in places that you may know about: discussion forums, social media sites, professional organizations and Internet groups. People also search for information with keywords that will pull up articles, videos and blogs where you can advertise your membership site.
Elements of a membership site that people will find attractive will be the amount of material they can access, how often it is updated, whether the site has guest interviews, insider information from the experts and material that they can’t find anywhere else.
Other incentives can be discussion forums, networking possibilities, freebies, invitations to member exclusive events, discounted products and labels and logos that you can display on your website.
When advertising your membership site, include the fact that there is a webmaster or someone in charge of the site. Too many lazy membership site owners put the access on ‘automatic’, with no one to interact with or too little updating of new material.
The real money in membership sites is made from recurring income, when the member pays every month to stay in the site. If material runs dry and is not updated frequently enough, there is no reason for members to keep paying.
Interaction is a big benefit to belonging to a membership site. Members want to feel they are a part of a family or belong to an exclusive club. The discussion forum plays a big part in this. Knowing that members can ask questions of other experts that they would ordinarily not have access to is a huge value.
How can membership sites create large amounts of passive, everyday income?
How Can You Make Money From Home?
By · CommentsHow can you make money from home? The Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia is an Internet marketing school designed to teach you everything you would need to know about selling your products online. No only can you sell your products and services, you can also get hired by companies looking for the same thing. Check out http://www.imtcva.org for more information.
What is Keyword Density?
By · CommentsKeyword density, also called keyword weight, is the ratio of a certian keyword on a webpage compared to all of the other text on the same page. How does this work? Let’s say that you have 100 words on your homepage and 5 of them are keywords. Therefore, you have a 5 to 100 ratio or a 5 percent keyword density.
The importance of keyword density is that the search engines look for a certain density to determine a webpage’s importance. If Google is looking for a 3 percent keyword density, a webpage with less than 3 percent density will look like it’s not significant enough on that particular keyword and anything over 3 percent looks as though it’s spamming the search engine.
Having just the right amount of keywords on a page compared to the other text is critical in search engine placement. But to keep webmasters from figuring the exact percentage out and manipulating the search results, search engines constantly change the ratio to keep it from being abused.
That is why some pages will rank high for certain keywords one month, then drop a few positions the next. This is normal and to be expected. The average keyword density however, is somewhere between 1 to 5 percent. Each search engine has different densities that they favor for positioning.
One way to get around the fluctuating density percentage is to create modern day sidedoors for your website. Side doors are article pages added to your website that will have varying percentages of density. One article on your website may have a density of 2 percent and another may have a density of 4 percent.
As each search engine changes it’s ratio of what it is looking for, one or more pages of your website will meet the right criteria for keyword density. Having many articles, even on the same topic, with varying densities will give the search engines an bigger target to hit, increasing your chances for good placement in the results.
eLearning at IMTC
By · Comments
Learning online is the future of education. It’s easy, affordable and convenient. Learn how you can discover the hottest and most in demand jobs available today. At the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, you can get a dedicated certificate in as little as six months and be on your way to a great job. Visit the site to download your free career guide.
A proud member of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Ebooks and Formats
By · CommentsGoogle Editions
Google opened an ebook store in the Fall of 2010 using a universal format that can be read in any web browser. Google eBooks (formerly Google Editions) is an e-book program run by Google. It offers universal access and non-restrictive copying. The store is headed by Dan Clancy, who also directs Google Books. Google eBooks purchased at the Google eBookstore (Google eBooks’ online store front) or other retailers are stored online and linked to the customer’s Google account.
They can then be read online, or downloaded to a cache for offline reading. Holding purchased books on Google’s server theoretically allows Google to serve books to users under a variety of formats, including new formats that might not be available at the time of purchase.
From within your Google Books Partner Program account, you can submit settings to make Google eBooks of all your books available for purchase, or specify individual books that you wish to sell.
Simple steps to take part in Google eBooks
1.Sign in to your account and agree to the Terms addendum
2.Specify your default settings for Google eBooks
3.Adjust individual book settings and prices
Fancy Ebooks
Despite warnings about customer service issues, some of you are going to try to make fancy ebooks. The problem with fancy ebooks in the past was that they were primarily .exe files which only worked on PCs and scared people because .exe files frequently contain viruses.
In part this is still true. Corey Rudl’s old organization had an ebook program that would allow you to turn off an ebook from working even after the customer had purchased it. It also didn’t allow people to pass their ebook around to others. This program delivered the ebook in .exe format. It wouldn’t work at all on Macs and as stated above, people are afraid of .exe files because of viruses.
Also, the ebooks required a viewer to see them. You’ll see tons of great reviews about this software on the Internet because Corey’s organization were masters at giving affiliates ammo to sell stuff to people quite carefully hiding the flaws.
Learn more about ebooks and how to sell them!
Useful Blogging Techniques
By · CommentsBlog to Book:
The content of your posts can build up very quickly if you post a couple of times a week. This can all be assembled together to create an informational book. Even guest posts or interviews with other experts can be used to make a book very quickly. It’s like hitting two birds with one stone. Not only that, all of your written content can be read by you and recorded as a CD or MP3 product.
Audio blogging is a great way to deliver content to people who want to get their information auditorily. Audioblogging is essentially like podcasting. This is another great way to deliver your content. You can podcast your entire book so it’s like an audiobook that you can get at:
Selling audio files creates a loyalty and can attract and different kind of crowd, expanding your customer base.
Flipped the other way, all of your regular podcasts or audio blog posts can be transcribed by someone you can find on Elance.com
Doing interviews for a book, especially for a nonfiction book, is a great idea. Not only can you generate instant content from interviewing famous or semi-famous people, but most people who are in your book are going to get the book and talk about it to their people.
While you’re at it you can use a service like: http://www.AudioBlog.com that you can actually call in postings from your cell phone, and they post automatically to your blog, saving you writing time.
Using Fonts on your (WordPress) Website
By · CommentsTypography is the art and technique of making language visible. Most people don’t think twice about typography, yet it’s everywhere. Anytime you are reading, someone has carefully chosen the way words appear to the reader. The size, the spacing, the very forms of the letters.
It’s obviously not a very cut and dried subject. Certain fonts can elicit feelings or emotions from the majority of readers, certain fonts don’t read easily but can sure catch someone’s attention.
Almost everyone who owns a computer has a little bit of knowledge about fonts/typography. A font is basically a style of letters and it’s spacing. All computers come installed with some fonts that are packaged with the operating system such as Windows or OSX.
It’s possible to acquire more fonts, through packages or software bonuses. The point I am leading up to is that, just because you have a font on your computer, doesn’t mean any one else will be able to see it. If you were to print it directly from your computer, the paper would be in that font. If you made an image with the font, the type would be in that font.
If you tried to use that font on the web, it wouldn’t work. The web is a different animal. Unless the person had the font on their computer, the font would default. Considering the font was chosen for a particular reason, that information the font was trying to convey just disappears.
Enter Google, center stage.
Google does some very interesting work in the world. From driving cars to a shared repository of fonts. Yes, Google has created “Web Fonts” that people can use. For us WordPress folks that aren’t afraid to use CSS, it’s as simple as installing a plugin and selecting one of the over 500 available Google Fonts.
Now that we have the possibility, let’s talk about whether or not you SHOULD.
For years we’ve had the ability to “define” a font. And like I said, if it was on the computer it would show up. This gave us some limitations, but also gave us a little control over how information displayed. The fast and hard rules were you used a sans serif (without flags) since it was easier to read and “serif” type worked well as a large headline or with printed material. These rules still apply. If you want something that reads well, you stick with the basic sans serifs: Helvetica, Arial. I would really only recommend “fancy” fonts/typography for headlines. And then, I would also say to use them sparingly. For every font you enable through your plugin, there is a “call” to the Google repository. Some people have said that this slows their site down (since this call goes out before the page displays, and the page won’t load until it gets the information it asks for.)
When you are thinking about fonts:
Size matters. The large the font, the easier it will be to read, and more likely it is to catch the eye. Unless of course it’s all the same size, then obviously, that doesn’t work.
Weight Matters. A bold font will draw more attention than a regular weight font. It’s thicker and has more “mass” to it. Unless of course all the type on the page is bold.
Italics should be avoided. Italics don’t display well at smaller sizes and become hard to read. If you must use italics, use them at larger sizes.
Decorative fonts will all have “emotive” information to them. Scary, cheap, professional, funny, zany, etc. Use these infrequently and never as the “body” or main part of the content. When it’s small it will be difficult to read and a lot of it will lose it’s impact.
So that it’s! Some tips and advice about fonts on your WordPress Site. Just remember the tips above and use your favorite “Google Fonts” plugin. Of course you can also use Google Fonts on regular websites, you just have a few other hoops to jump through.
Adding Affiliate Links to Your Ebooks = Big $$
By · CommentsSigning Up
The first thing to do is to sign up for all the affiliate programs you like. Signing up for an affiliate program is usually easy. The affiliate program you sign up for will email you your user ID and Password and give you instructions on how to use their program. They will also issue you their affiliate links. Some will put in your specific ID into the link and some will show you where your ID number goes.
It is imperative that you get the link thing correct so you can get your commissions. Also, don’t think you can lump tons of affiliate links all together and make lots of money. The most successful affiliates promote only one product at a time and they endorse the product too. This means they say something nice about the product and they build interest in the product by showing the potential buyer the need for having the product or service.
If you can’t find a link to join the affiliate program, it doesn’t mean they don’t have one. Some companies don’t really want everyone signing up for their program. A large percentage of the people that sign up never even put their links up. Companies just don’t want to mess with these people that don’t know what they are doing, so they’ll make their program “by request only.” If you find a company you really like, email them to see if they have an affiliate program.
In your ebook, this means that your recommendations should be worked into the text of the book in a natural way. Yes, you can have lots of affiliate links in a book, but just don’t make a big list of them.
Putting the Links in the Book:
There are two ways to put affiliate links in your book.
1. Simply put the entire link in the Word document before you convert it to Adobe PDF or
2. Make a separate page in your website for each affiliate product like
http://www.greatinternetmarketing.com/rudl.htm
On this page you will say more about the affiliate product and, if you wish, you can put the long affiliate link under a “click here” for more info button that would take the visitor to the affiliate site.
Method 2 is more work, but actually better because if you find a better affiliate, you can switch the links on your site easier than redoing the links in your book. Diligently put affiliate links in your ebooks and watch your overall profits soar.
Learn to make more money with your home-based business.
