Providing a set of guidelines about how to go about building an online business from scratch can provide you with some insight about what actually is involved.  If you are a beginning marketer, here are some lessons for you to absorb. You may be excited about launching your lifelong product or invention to the millions of online users but have not given much thought to the mechanics of setting up an online presence.

If you are starting an online business from scratch, before you set up the mechanical infrastructure for your business, first utilize the critical thinking part of your brain by doing some research. On the other hand, don’t spend months and months researching this point.

Is your product or service something people need or want and not just you? Be very careful here. Just because you think Star Trek is the coolest sci-fi series ever conceived, does not mean you will sell millions and millions of “Mr. Spock” T-shirts and coffee mugs online.

Your idea or concept should be tested first by setting up a test website. You are testing to see how many people are out there who may be interested in your product or service.  Before you build a website that has lots of time and effort involved, build a simple one page website that is designed only to capture someone’s name and email.  This is known as a capture page or landing page.

In order to set up any website, whether it’s a permanent functional website with your products and other content or just a test site, you will need the following:

1)      Purchase a domain name.

2)      Hosting account where your domain name is hosted

3)      A website that is designed to capture your prospects name and email address tied to your domain name

4)      An autoresponder system (so that you can set up automatic deliver y of pre-written messages to prospects). Some hosting accounts have auto responder systems, but not all. You will need to find one that you can insert a lead capture form into your website so that the form captures names and stores them on the autoresponder system server.

Once you have these 4 components, you can test your product or concept by driving traffic to the website. First, you must get them to visit your website. Once there, they must find it compelling enough to give you their name and email. This is called a conversion. The point of the landing page is to get their name and email, no more, no less. Once you have their name, you can then begin your sales process which is set up via your autoresponder messages.

Getting visitors to your site AND submitting their email and names is the hardest part of the process.  Because you are starting your online business from scratch, you must market the existence of your site by using either free traffic sources such as article writing, video marketing, forums, Facebook, etc. or by paid traffic sources like PPC or Pay Per Click via Google Adwords, Yahoo or Microsoft advertising channels.

Paying for clicks by writing small ads targeting your audience and providing keywords that compel the searcher to click on your ad is how you can start to test your concept/product. Place a few test ads and monitor them over a period of days or at least to the point where you get 1000 clicks.

You can set a daily budget for your ads so that you control costs. Sometimes your ad will be so ineffective that you must raise your cost per click in order for the ad to show up enough to get clicks. A very low budget will take more time to reach 1000 clicks, but you can see how effective your ads perform this way.

Once you get at least 1000 clicks, how many submitted their name and email? You ideally want to expect a 1% – 5% conversion.  If you got a 10% conversion, just think how many names you could collect if your marketing yielded 1000 clicks per day or page views (coming from organic or natural search results). Paying for those clicks from an ad can add up and be costly to maintain over time, but if people ended up buying your product and your Return on Investment was good, you would probably maintain paying for traffic.

If nobody clicks on your ad, or enters their name on your website, you must look at the wording of the ad, the website design, layout and copy and of course, the product you are promoting. You could have professionally written copy boasting about the product, have slick graphics and all, but very few people interested. Your product may appeal only to a very small audience and just not enough to make the whole process worthwhile. This is what you must evaluate.

Tip: Don’t try to come up with the next “Pet Rock”, give people what they are already buying. Find something you know people want and need, or find a product that is already popular, but put your unique twist on it, and then test it. Once you do this once, you won’t be starting from scratch, you will have gained some insight and lessons to use in your next test.

Principles of Video Marketing Using YouTube

Leveraging the popularity of video marketing is a must if you’re an internet marketer or network marketer. Its also a no cost method of content marketing and can drive targeted traffic to your website and generate leads. Video marketing is available on a number of sites, but You Tube is clearly the leader.

Here are 7 principles of video marketing that will help you drive traffic to your website and generate more leads:

1) Plan your video content – Target keywords to use and then make a video around those keywords. Decide on the type of video you will create. It could be a training video, showing how to do something, how it works for you, a review of a product or service, or just sharing information about yourself so people can get to know you.

Review videos are popular – Provide reviews of programs, systems, software, tools, resources that your target market would find useful. Give people sincere, objective information and they will appreciate. Avoid being overly favorable if you are an affiliate marketer. People will pick up on your thinly veiled sales pitch and get turned off.

2) Provide valuable and useful content – Do not just promote your business opportunity in your videos. One or two would be appropriate among a dozen other videos, but don’t make commercials. Give the viewer something useful or interesting or entertaining and always follow up with your website links which is the whole point in making these videos.

3) Keep them professional – Videos don’t have to be professionally edited and flashy, but keep the fundamentals in mind.  People like action, energy and enthusiasm. So think about your content and how to integrate these elements. Of course, if you are doing a screen capture training video, its fairly straightforward, but you can dress it up a bit by using video editing special effects to stand out from the crowd.

4) Be creative and unique if possible – Keep them short and stay on a single topic. Break up a more complex subject into several videos. Go outside if possible and have a scenic background or walk as you narrate the video. Have someone hold the camera as you walk along like a field reporter on the scene of a story. Think of other ways to make the shots interesting if you don’t need a specific backdrop, a white board or the computer screen to create your video.

5) Optimize your video posting with unique content in your video description. – YouTube allows you to write generous descriptions of your video. Create descriptions with your main keywords that you are targeting. Make sure to include your main keywords in your title, description and tags. The description field should start off with your full URL link to your targeted website.

At the conclusion of your video, ask viewers to rate and comment on your video and subscribe to your YouTube channel to keep getting your videos. Making a compelling offer why they should do so. YouTube scores videos with more comments and ratings higher on their ranking and will therefore get higher positioning in search results.

6) Social Bookmark the videos – set up automated submittals to your favorite social media sites with which you have accounts. You can also post in those sites referring back to the video you just made on YouTube. Use sites like Tube Mogul and Traffic Geyser to automatically distribute your video to other video sharing sites.

7) Couple your video posting with article marketing – making a video right after you have written an article is a great way to create a synergistic marketing impact tying your keywords together and linking both article and video. The article allows you to convey your message in a written format and the video in a visual format. Both can complement one another if you create each as a dual strategy. What can you convey better on video than you can in writing and vice versa.

Post your videos on your blog as well and combine the “article” you write as a blog post with the video attached as a 1-2 punch.

Do this every other day for 30 days and you will develop a routine that allows you to create videos and write articles much more streamlined and efficient.

Bonus Tip #1: YouTube has a feature called Insight on your account page that allows you to see statistical viewings of your videos. Use this information to hone your video marketing and beef up what gets views and learn from the others that are not as effective.

Bonus Tip #2: If you have an image that is more suited to doing “radio” than television or video, or are otherwise just not coming across as you would like, try screen capture videos, power point type graphical presentations or flash animations. However, if you are in a field where branding yourself is important, work on your presentation skills or at least narrates your power point videos.

Speaking of YouTube, check out my latest videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/manifesting247365

Marketing online is different than offline because you typically do not have the situation in which you strike up a one on one conversation with someone with the ability to engage them and ask them open ended questions which may give you a reason to bring up either your opportunity, your product or both.

Online marketing must be targeted based on what the person you ultimately intend to recruit is searching for over the internet. Of course, you may run into them through social media sites, forums, etc., but for the most part, they are going to find you and what you have put out over the internet first.

The other way to direct market is to create email campaigns. But you must first have a list over wise you may be spamming. You could buy lists of “opportunity seekers” and call them up, but this has very low conversion and the leads are questionable.

Your online presence is centered around your landing page where you capture leads. Your job is to get traffic to come to your site, opt in because of something compelling you say or offer on the site and hopefully convert them into a prospect or sell them something to get them into your sales funnel.

Before you put out marketing strategies over the web, first review these 10 factors so you can narrow your focus to various targeted niches, otherwise your approach will be too broad, too scattered with little results.

1-Decide if you are marketing to the users of the product.

If your product has great name recognition or is desired by millions of people, is low cost, then leverage these benefits and market the product to attract them to your landing page

2-Develop a marketing plan to target people who may be interested in being a distributor or preferred customer, but not have to recruit people and form a downline.

Many people object to the term MLM or want nothing to do with having to recruit people. In other words, something they see as out of their box. These people can still be approached, but on a more low-key manner in which you offer part-time opportunity or distributor, franchise owner, reseller type positions. If they see value in the product, they will see a way for them to resell it without having to sign up as a full blown member of your downline.

3-Develop a plan to target people looking for a business opportunity.

This targeted group is the one most often targeted by all MLM marketers. Promises of thousands of dollars per month for doing virtually little work form their headlines. The lure is the amount of money potentially earned and not the product or you as a brand or respected leader who has something they could learn. However, this approach must be fine tuned into a more targeted niches.

4-Break down your targeted group in step 3 into groups such as home based, MLM or residual income.

Basically, you are talking about the same thing, but you are using different keywords with slightly different angles to color your marketing messages. Home based is centered around the lifestyle of working at home. MLM is for those that are comfortable with and believe in the MLM model. Residual income speaks to those who believe in the power of compounded effort and of long term wealth accumulation.

5- If your marketing is targeted to other MLM people, you must create a campaign to brand YOU as an individual separate from your MLM (people need to get to know you before they join you).

6-Contine branding yourself by marketing online about how knowledgeable you are as a leader, a trainer, an MLM expert, by writing articles and doing videos that show your potential downline how valuable you are to them

7-As you brand yourself to create value as a leader, leverage the value of your products to convince them that your MLM is the one to join.

At some point along the way, your prospects with have reached the point that you are likeable, knowledgeable and perhaps a good leader so they will naturally want to find out what exactly is your primary business opportunity that you have yet to reveal. At this point, you can reveal your product and company and convince them why your are dedicated to it and that they should join forces to get in on the opportunity.

8-Target business opportunity seekers who are either with another competitor, people who are looking to start an online business or people who are struggling with their current MLM.

Position yourself as someone who has the tools and the training that they have been missing. In other words, get into their mind and understand the feelings they are going through, know what they need beyond the broad niche of another opprotuntiy seeker.

9-Use the attraction marketing model and stick to it.

Market yourself in a totally giving manner without ever mentioning your primary opportunity – target other MLM people or home based business opportunity seekers.

In this way, you avoid all the confusion and the face-offs between two people who are pitching their MLM opportunities to each other without the slightest interest in the other person or what their opportunity is.

10-Target people already in the product niche (such as “people looking to lose weight”) and present them with an opportunity to make money and lose weight together to provide an source of residual income.

If someone is already using a similar product and understand the market potential of which that product is situated, they have never realize how much of a financial opportunity there may be getting involved in the distribution and reselling of the product, let alone starting their own downline.