Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

As a consumer, we love choices. Nobody wants to walk into a store and have only one choice of a product. What if we don’t like that one? What then? So choices are important. However, at what point do choices become so overwhelming that we end up confused and ultimately end up without making a purchase. So, how many choices are too many? How many are not enough? Well, it kind of depends on what the situation is. This article is going to give a few examples so you can see that there isn’t a right or wrong here.

Let’s start off with a simple sales page that’s selling one product. On the surface, it would seem that this leaves the prospect only one choice. Well, actually, that’s not true. A sales page, at minimum, leaves the prospect with two choices…buy or don’t buy. The reason I say “at minimum” is because a sales page can be setup to offer the prospect several choices.

For example, you could sell a product that teaches the prospect how to take advantage of a certain marketing niche as one choice AND…as another choice…offer them a membership that actually gives them information on a daily basis that will show them what niches they should target each day. This is actually the purpose of one of my products on Google Trends. So in this case, the prospect has three choices, one of course being not to purchase.

But what about getting into multiple choices? An example of this would be the review site. This is a site where we review several products that cater so solving one problem. Each product is rated on some kind of scale, say from 1-5, and then, the prospect can read each review and decide which product they want to purchase…or none of them at all. I’ve seen some review sites that have had dozens of products for one particular problem.

Okay, so the question is…how effective or ineffective is this approach? Well, the only way you’re going to find out is to test it. Put a site up with multiple reviews and see what your overall conversion percentage is. For example, if you get 100 visitors and get one sale from product 1, two sales from product 2 and one sale from product 3, that’s an overall 5% conversion for the three products. If you add more products and your conversion goes up, then keep adding products until conversion drops.

It isn’t an exact science. But eventually, each person is going to reach a point where they are presented with too many choices and end up leaving your site without making a purchase. When you reach the point where your conversion drops to zero, that’s when you know you’ve gone beyond the bounds of what the average person would consider acceptable.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of spinning your wheels trying to get your marketing off the ground? Haven’t got a clue what you’re doing and sick of being dead broke? Why not get some solid mentoring from somebody who has been EXACTLY where you are today? Check out my mentoring program at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/mentoring/mentoring.html and finally get yourself the one on one education that can FINALLY give you the success that you’ve been looking for.

Okay, I’m going to tell you right off the bat…this is a trick question. Don’t you just love those? I do. And the answer to this one is going to surprise quite a few people unless they have experienced this for themselves. But okay, let me give you the answer to the question. The answer is…none. Not as in NO visitors, but as in there IS no answer. Confused? Well, don’t be. This isn’t an episode of Soap, but it’s going to be a lot more informative.

So why do I say there is no answer? Well, the answer to that has to do with a little something we call targeting to start with. No, it’s not the whole ball of wax, but it’s where it all begins.

Sure, you could throw a whole bunch of fish into a huge barrel and start taking shots at them and you might hit a few. The law of averages says that somebody is going to be interested in what you have to offer if you toss enough traffic at the problem. After all, even people who are interested in video games might have osteoporosis…though not too likely.

But imagine you target your ads to women over the age of 62. Do you think that maybe the traffic that you get from those ads is going to convert a lot better than just a general ad campaign that’s reaching men and women of all ages? I would like to think so.

Point is, it’s not how much traffic you get but how much TARGETED traffic you get that matters. But targeting is just the beginning. Even if your traffic is well targeted to your offer, once they get to your site, they have to feel that what they are looking for specifically is going to be available there. In order for this to happen, you have to make it crystal clear what it is you ARE offering as soon as they get there.

Too many sites are all over the place. You arrive there and there are a dozen menu options, paid banner ads all over the place, AdSense, CPA and who knows what else. It’s like walking through a maze. Do you really think you’re going to get the prospect that arrives there to take the action that THEY want you to take? So even with a ton of targeted traffic, if they don’t know what it is they’re supposed to do there WHEN they get there, that traffic is going to go away and NEVER come back.

Can you now see why there is no answer to the question, “How much traffic is enough to be profitable?” Add to this the cost of your ads, the conversion rate of your offer and how much it earns and you have even more variables added to the mix.

So do yourself a favor. Forget about how much traffic you’re going to get. Concentrate on getting the right kind of traffic and directing them to a site that is actually going to give them exactly what they’re looking for.

THAT is how you become profitable.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim.

Tired of spinning your wheels trying to get your marketing off the ground? Haven’t got a clue what you’re doing and sick of being dead broke? Why not get some solid mentoring from somebody who has been EXACTLY where you are today? Check out my mentoring program at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/mentoring/mentoring.html and finally get yourself the one on one education that can FINALLY give you the success that you’ve been looking for

One thing I have learned from my many years as an Internet marketer is that you have to learn how to separate your personal feelings from the actual information you receive. If you let feelings get in the way, they could result in you missing out on a number of lost opportunities. This article is going to share a true story to illustrate exactly what I mean. No names will be mentioned as I don’t want to make any waves in this article.

Recently, I got into an argument with another Internet marketer because of some things that they did that I didn’t approve of. Well, things got heated and we both said things that weren’t very pretty. Needless to say, neither of us is going to be sending the other any Christmas cards this December. Okay, so personally things aren’t good between us.

However, just recently, this person started a thread at the Warrior Forum that had some killer information in it. In fact, I thought the information was so good that I shared it with my list. Well, one of the members of my list, who just happened to know about the words I had with this person, wrote to me and asked how I could promote a thread started by somebody who I had all these problems with. They couldn’t understand it and actually demanded an explanation. LOL.

Well, one thing I have learned in my many years of marketing online is that you can’t let your personal feelings get in the way of knowledge. The person in question shared some information that, had I not shared it with my list, I would have been doing them a big disservice. I wasn’t going to let that happen. So I put my personal feelings aside and sent them a link to the thread. Other marketers might have not been so accommodating.

And that’s why so many people fail in this business. They’ll have a personal problem with somebody and because of that, won’t subscribe to their newsletter or won’t read any of their articles or whatever. In the process, they could be cutting themselves off from some very valuable information. I don’t judge where I get my info from based on what I think about the person. I look at it objectively and decide for myself if I think it can help me with my marketing…regardless of what I think of the person.

So before you cut off your nose to spite your face, you might want to take a second look at that marketer’s material.

You know…the guy you wouldn’t let date your worst enemy.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to know what the 7 Deadly Sins of Internet Marketing are? Get my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/7deadlysins/7deadlysins.html and save your business from going down the tubes before it even has a chance.

You’re probably wondering why I’m writing an article titled “The Best Of The Warrior Forum.” Well, the answer is obvious. That place is a gold mine. There is more info there on how to market online than in any ebook you could possibly buy. The problem is, how do you find the good stuff? Well, this article is going to provide you some tips on how to find the gems that are posted there.

For starters, and there is really no way around this, you need to get to know who the most respected members are. How do you do this? Well, there are several criteria that you might want to look at including how long the person has been there, how many posts they’ve made, but more importantly, how many thank you’s they’ve gotten for their posts. Lots of people like to gab a lot but don’t really contribute anything.

After you’ve gotten a decent list of who the most respected members are, what you want to do is go to any thread where you can find them a part of and click on their name and then click on “Find All Threads” by that person. If they’ve started a number of them, there is a good chance that many contain valuable information related to Internet marketing. By simply browsing through the thread titles, you can pretty much figure out which ones are going to share information that will help you.

Another thing you want to do is look for threads that have ratings attached to them. The members can rate the threads up to 5 stars. If you find any 5 star threads, there is a good chance that the information in these threads is going to be of some use. Personally, I’ve seen some 5 star threads that were better than any ebook I’ve ever purchased. There is some real gold in those hills.

Finally, you want to look for threads where the poster received a lot of thank you’s and the thread itself received a lot of replies. Now granted, not all popular threads are great. Some are just flame wars because somebody said something controversial. But for the most part, where there is smoke there is fire. If you find a popular thread, there is a good chance that it contains something useful.

Without a doubt, by simply browsing through the Warrior Forum, you can get yourself a six figure education thanks to the many generous people there who are willing to share what they know with others.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

One of the biggest problems marketers have is coming up with a profitable niche and a site that has a chance of bringing in some money. Well, one of the easiest ways to do this is by a little reverse engineering. If you’re not sure how to go about doing this, the article you’re about to read will give you a little insight into this subject. After reading this, you should be able to reverse engineer just about any niche out there.

First thing you have to do is come up with a niche itself. That’s the hard part, not so much because there aren’t plenty of things that make money, but because there are plenty of things that don’t make money. It’s just as easy to pick something that won’t make you a dime as it is to pick something that is a winner. The biggest mistake people make in this area is looking at the number of monthly searches for keyword phrases and nothing else.

Just because a keyword phrase gets one million monthly searches doesn’t mean squat, especially if that phrase starts with or contains the word “free”. People looking for free information are not likely to spend money on it. So certain keyword phrases should be avoided at all costs. Other keyword phrases that contain words like “buy”, on the other hand, are probably excellent choices because these people are actually looking to spend money.

Once you’ve zeroed in on your niche and keyword phrases, head on over to Google and check on a few things. One of them is how many paid ads there are for these phrases. If there are a lot of paid ads, most likely, people are spending money on products.

After checking the paid ads, the next thing you want to do is check the backlinks for the top sites. You want to see where they are coming from. Why? Because these are the sites you want to get to link to YOUR site. If they’re blogs, where the backlinks are coming from comments, then you want to go to these blogs yourself and post your own comments. This is part of the reverse engineering process.

Finally, you want to check out the top sites themselves. What do they look like? What are they selling? What keyword phrases are they optimized for? Essentially, your site has to be as good if not better than the top sites. There is no secret here. What they are, how they look, what they sell…it’s all out in the open. All you have to do is emulate these sites in appearance and content and then simply add more to YOUR site to make it better. Again, all part of the reverse engineering process.

The downside of being the top dog is that everybody can see who you are and thus, can easily copy what you do in order to knock you off your pedestal. That’s why Internet marketing is so competitive. Everybody is a target. So, you MUST learn how to reverse engineer a campaign, which also includes spying on how they advertise (PPC, squeeze pages, etc.) or you’re never going to be able to get the upper hand.

To YOUR Success

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Increasing conversions is always the best way to make more money. You don’t have to worry about things like getting more traffic (sometimes hard to do) or promoting a more expensive product to increase your income. By increasing conversion percentage, everything else can stay the same and you can still make more money. Okay, so how do we do this? This article is going to provide some answers.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, which is what most marketers are, it’s tough to increase conversions because you have no control over the sales page. Whatever the product creator has out there, that’s what you have to work with. So if his page converts at a paltry half a percent, there isn’t a lot you can do to change that. But there is something you CAN do.

Many times, an affiliate marketer can close a sale that might not have been closed simply by offering a bonus in addition to whatever the product creator is offering. Many times I’ll offer one of my own products, if it’s a fit to the product being sold or, if that’s not the case, I’ll offer my time to support that product. Many times, this will land me a sale that I would not have normally gotten.

Another way to increase conversions is to offer a free report or a newsletter to the prospect instead of sending them straight to the sales page. This way you get a chance to followup with them, which can always lead to more sales IF it’s done right. Crafting an autoresponder series with content that compliments the product is one way to do this.

But what if you’re promoting your own product? Well, the best way to increase conversions is simply to keep working on your sales page. Make changes and split test the changes against the original. Whichever version performs better, keep that one, can the other one, and then repeat the process with different changes. Keep doing this until you reach a conversion percentage that you’re happy with. Of course some people are never happy and do this forever, which is fine.

Point is, there are lots of ways to make more money without having to get more traffic or promoting a more expensive product. Sometimes, little changes can increase conversion percentage and make all the difference in the world.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of spinning your wheels trying to get your marketing off the ground? Haven’t got a clue what you’re doing and sick of being dead broke? Why not get some solid mentoring from somebody who has been EXACTLY where you are today? Check out my mentoring program at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/mentoring/mentoring.html and finally get yourself the one on one education that can FINALLY give you the success that you’ve been looking for.

One of the banes of Internet marketing is the file sharing site. Quite honestly, I don’t know how these are allowed to remain online, but that’s not my decision to make. Point is, these sites freely share our hard work. Question is, what can we do about it AND…more importantly…is it worth spending our time trying to fight this pestilence? This article will attempt to provide some concrete answers.

At the top of the list is to try to protect your work as best as possible. That means, at the very least, not having any static download links that can easily be indexed by the search engines. That’s just an open invitation to people stealing your work. Get something like DLGuard or some download manager program or service. This way, there isn’t one download page link for people to access.

Another thing you probably want to do is password protect your work. For software, this is easy enough to do with registration keys where you can disable any software that isn’t properly registered. For ebooks, you can consider EXE ebooks. PDF protection is weak at best and not something you really want to bother with.

Okay, but what about what happens once your product ends up on one of these sites? Well, here is the reality, as much as most people won’t want to hear it. Most of these sites are hosted in countries outside of the US and where, quite honestly, the hosting companies themselves don’t give a rat’s behind that our work has been pirated. So complaining to them will fall on deaf ears. Going to the FTC, if they can even be bothered with such a small matter, won’t help either. Most of these sites are outside their jurisdiction.

And even if you DO manage to get your file removed from one of these sites, there is a very good chance that it will end up on another site, if it already hasn’t. In fact, if you check, you will find that most products that are pirated end up on many sites. Just do a search for the product name itself and you’ll see.

Ultimately, the time you spend tracking down pirates and trying to put them out of business is your decision. For US sites, you want to send a DCMA to the hosting company with all the information that you have to prove that the work is yours and that this site has no right to sell it or give it away. If there are a number of sites, you might want to outsource this task.

Most people who download products from file sharing sites would have probably never purchased them anyway. It is the mentality of those looking for something for nothing. So you’re not really losing any money. In other words, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.

Do what you can…but don’t kill yourself.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim.

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One of the biggest complaints I get from Internet marketers is that a lot of the products that they purchase, especially the ones from the big name gurus, are crap. Well, instead of just complaining about it, there are a couple of things you can actively do about this increasingly annoying problem. This article is going to cover your options. Hopefully, you will find something here that appeals to you that you can carry out in your attempt to do away with all the garbage. Keep reading to find out more.

At the top of the list is something obvious and simple and yet, so many people don’t do it. Stop buying stuff. I mean for crying out loud…you buy one product from Joe Guru, find out it stinks and then you go out and buy yet another one? How many times do you have to get hit over the head before you finally figure out that it’s going to hurt. Just stop buying the stuff.

In addition to that, you don’t want to let the bad purchase just go at that. You want to ask for a refund to start with. If enough people refund all the crappy products out there, maybe these people will get a clue and start creating good products…especially if they don’t want to see their income sink into the ground. But don’t stop there.

Write reviews of these crappy products. Let others know what you think. You can post these reviews on your own blog, or better yet, if any of these product creators have their own blogs, post a review there as a comment to their latest offering. Sure, they might not approve it, but you never know. Point is, let yourself be heard.

Aside from not buying and letting others know about these crappy products, you could create your own product that actually DOES have some value. If you find a product that is lacking, sit down and think about what you would do to make it better and DO IT!

What’s that you say? You bought the product because it’s something you don’t know a lot about and wanted to learn…thus not knowing enough ABOUT the product TO make a better one? Then find an expert in the field. Interview the expert. Create the product based on what the expert tells you. You can even make that the selling point of the product itself…”Expert Reveals…” Take a look at all the products that have been created using this approach.

Point is, if you buy a crappy product, you don’t have to just take it. There ARE things you can do about it. I’ve just given you a couple.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of creating products that nobody wants and don’t sell? Check out my Complete Guide To Product Creation at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/productcreation.html and create products that actually sell.

Over the past few days, the Warrior Forum has been on display with a real knock down drag out about automation. In particular, automation when it comes to blog commenting. Well, it’s been one real heated debate to say the least, with neither side willing to give in. So, this article is going to give this author’s view on the subject of automation. I have no doubt that those who support it will find what they are about to read quite infuriating. And that’s just the way I intended it.

Let me start off by saying that not all automation is evil. Unfortunately, a lot of it can be used for creating more chaos than the good that could possibly come out of it. In this article, I want to focus primarily on blog commenting software. The concept is simple. You load up the software with your comment and then set it to run posting that comment on a number of blogs, hopefully relevant to the comment being posted.

Those who support this practice say that the blog owner has the ability to accept or reject the comment if they choose, so no harm done. Those who are against the practice, such as myself, say that the blog owner shouldn’t have to moderate comments that weren’t made by a real person who didn’t actually read the blog post. Blogs are made for human beings…not for software.

There you have it. There is my argument and nobody is going to tell me I’m wrong. But there is a bigger issue here than just blog commenting. Again, read the title of this article in case it has escaped you. It asks a simple question. Is automation killing Internet marketing? Sadly, it’s hurting it more than it’s helping it and here is why.

A lot of the automation has been put into place because of the way Google recognizes authority sites, or, in plain English, the sites that it puts at the top of the SERPs. Their main criteria seems to be two things. How many links people have pointing to your site and the content of the site itself. Sadly, the latter seems to be less important than the former. And thus, the backlinking wars were created.

But getting backlinks is a time consuming process. So, some genius decided to make a way to automate this process. The end result is that a lot of VRE ends up getting littered with crap. If you think I am kidding, ask the blog owners who have to clean out 10,000 worthless comments each day.

One day, Google is going to realize that their criteria for ranking sites is terribly flawed and will go to what it should really be…the content that’s on the site and how relevant it is to the problem it’s trying to solve.

Until then, automation is going to seriously hurt this industry.

To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

Everybody thinks they know they’re market. And then, after doing some testing (if they even bother testing at all) they discover that they really don’t know their market at all. And yes, this applies to me as well. Just when I thought I knew my market…bam. I’m hit with a dose of reality that came as quite a surprise to me. I’m going to share a true story and then give you some tips on zeroing in on YOUR market in order to understand their wants and needs.

In one market I cater to, I offered a product line where I sold 100 units of that product. Yes, this was a limited release for each product in the line. And while sales were good, only a few of the products actually sold out. So I thought, “What if I limit the next release to 50 and raise the price a little?” Well, I figured that with the increased scarcity, the product would sell out for certain. While sales just started a day ago, it appears this isn’t the case. It appears price is more an issue than number of units sold.

So what did I learn from this little experiment? I learned that I might as well just sell 100 units, even though I’d personally jump at the 50 unit deal myself, and ultimately make more money anyway. Boy…did I read my market all wrong. But that’s how you find out things like this. You have to test. You have to see where the sweet spot is.

Okay, so here are my tips. For starters, you need to gather as much data about your market as you can in regard to price, conversion, sales and so on. Then, when you make a change, note the change in the stats. Did sales go up or down? Did you get more or fewer complaints than usual? Was there no real change at all? You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.

Another thing you want to do is mix things up. Don’t be predictable. If your market knows what’s coming, they’re likely to say to themselves, “I can wait on this because I know that in X number of weeks, this thing will still be selling at this price.” If you mix things up and pull some surprises on them, they can’t sit back and relax. They’ll always wonder “what if?”

Sales is a game. Make no mistake about it. That’s why you see big retail stores coming up with these sales out of nowhere in addition to the usual days you’d expect, like Thanksgiving. If they were predictable, people would know just when to go and not go.

Keep your market guessing but understand what’s important to them, whether it’s price, quantity being sold or whatever.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to know what the 7 Deadly Sins of Internet Marketing are? Get my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/7deadlysins/7deadlysins.html and save your business from going down the tubes before it even has a chance.