Diary of an Online Business

Step five—Build your website with a process to collect the money

You can now change your survey site to a full sales site. The pages you’ll have are:

• Your home page. This has your sales letter on it, and buttons people can click on to buy. It also has buttons to get to the other pages.
• A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page. You should start with some basic questions, such as:
  • Can I buy the book if I live outside the United States?
  • I don’t have a credit card – how else can I pay for the book?
  • Can I get the book in hard copy, or only as an e-book?
  • How do I know that what you’re saying is true?
  • How secure is Clickbank?

You can then add other questions as people email you queries.

• A “contact us” page, with a form they can submit with boxes for their email address, name, and question or comment.

Here are the steps to building the website:

• Create each of your pages in MS Word. Once you are happy with the content, do a “save as”, and save them as webpages.
• Edit the look of your webpages. The software we use for this is Dreamweaver, from www.adobe.com
• Upload the finished page to the web via ftp.

You can make your website look really professional by doing the following:

• Have a good template and graphics, such as an ebook cover. www.youreasywebsolutions.com is really good value for doing this, and we always find that sales go up when we change the look of our sites to being more professional.
• Add audio or video for real impact. Instant audio / video generator is the software we use for this. You can get it at www.instantvideogenerator.com

Throughout your sales letter you give people the opportunity (and the encouragement) to buy your e-book, and include a link which says something like “Click here to purchase”.

It’s easiest to sell your e-book through Clickbank (www.clickbank.com). Clickbank is the internet’s largest on-line distribution centre for electronic products. When someone clicks on the “Click here to purchase” button on your website, they are immediately taken to Clickbank’s secure server. Clickbank take their credit card details and do all the payment processing. They are then sent to a page on your site from which they can download the e-book.

Using Clickbank does two things:

• It makes people feel more comfortable buying your book on the internet, as Clickbank is well-known and trusted. Clickbank also honours the guarantee, making the purchase risk-free for the buyer.
• It also stops people ripping you off by giving you false credit card details.

Every fortnight, Clickbank then posts you a cheque (in US dollars) which you can deposit into your bank account.

It costs about $60 to set up a Clickbank account. You can register as many products as you like on one Clickbank account.

The other useful thing about Clickbank is that they have an “affiliate” program. This means that other people can see that you are selling your book on line, and can promote your book on their site. They get a percentage of any sale they make (and you can nominate the percentage), but it costs you nothing to advertise on their site.

The process for registering your product on Clickbank is a bit complicated.

You need to fill out a list of information about your product:

• Brief description of your product
• The retail price ClickBank should charge for this product.
• Are you the creator of this product?
• If not, from whom did you obtain a license to sell it?
• Do your product promotions match all of our guidelines (above)?
• Did you make a $0.00 test purchase yet? (ie did you test that the links all work?)
• How is this product digitally delivered? (web page, email, etc)
• How fast is this product delivered? (5 seconds, 5 minutes, etc)
• The address of your sales page.
• The address of your Thank You Page.
• Comments.

You then need to wait until Clickbank has approved your book (1-3 days) before you can start to sell it.
Once your product has been approved by Clickbank, you need to double check that the links to, from and between your web pages are all working. You also need to ensure the down-load process for your e-book is working, so that once someone has paid for your book, they can get it easily and instantaneously

If you hadn’t had a look at Clickban yet, I would also strongly suggest that you do. Besides using it to sell your own product, you can choose to sell other people’s products.

To find out more about the Grant’s ebook and membership business just follow the link below or the banner on the right

http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/2009/lookinside/opt2.html

Until next time

Julie

Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, internet businesses, online business Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, online business; internet business; success; learning;

The Grants speak of step 4 as probably being the most difficult part of the whole process and from my own experience I agree. It is really worth learning about copy writing and Brett McFall’s book “How To Make Money While You Sleep” is really worth a look. Who knows, you may be a budding sales copy writer. Personally, I have found this is not one of my strengths and for me it has become essential to at least have my sales copy edited by a professional.

Step four—Write the sales letter

This is probably the trickiest bit. However, you do have a couple of options:

Your first option is to learn the skill of copywriting and write it yourself. Most sales letters follow the formula:

• Problem—what are the buyer’s biggest fears, frustrations and needs?
• Aggravate—how does the problem get worse if they don’t do anything about it?
• Solve—what can you do to help?
• Prove—substantiate your claim with testimonials, research, etc, and give a money back guarantee
• Call to action—ask them to buy and make a special offer.

There are plenty of examples around that follow this formula. Look at any of our sites mentioned above to see how this works.

There are also plenty of training programs or materials that can help you with your copywriting technique. Some of them come with vouchers which enable you to get feedback on what you’ve written. The training programs that we think are the best are:

• Mal Emery’s Gold Pack from www.malemery.com
• Yanik Silver’s Copywriting Pack, the Ultimate “at-Home” Internet Copywriting Workshop from www.surefiremarketing.com
• Brett McFall’s AdPack from www.brettmcfall.com

The other thing you need is a good headline. Headline generator is software that is an easy, automated way to generate hundreds of headlines in just 5-10 minutes. You can get it from www.headline-creator-pro.com

Alternatively you can pay someone else to write the sales letter. This can be a bit expensive in the short term (up to $10,000 per letter), but a good copywriter will more than pay for themselves in the long run. The copywriter we use is Pete Godfrey. You can contact him at petergodfrey@iprimus.com.au and please mention our names!

Don’t forget if you want to learn more about the Grant’s internet business just follow this link or the banner on the right hand side:

http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?w=4dayws197&p=jspain

Until next time

Julie

Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, internet businesses, online business Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, online business, success; secrets to success; motivation; online business; internet business

Hello everyone

Sorry to have taken so long but here is what you have been waiting for – step three in how to build an ebook website:

Step three—Develop the product

If the topic looks like a “goer”, you need to develop the product. If it is an ebook, you can either write it yourself, or get someone else to write it.

If the topic is something you know a lot about, it will be cheaper to write it yourself. Do this in MS Word, and turn it into a PDF file once it’s finished.

If the topic is not something you know much about, you can get someone else to write it. We use www.rentacoder.com to find people to write books for us.

To get someone at rentacoder to write your book, you will need to register as a buyer, and post a job. Go to www.rentacoder.com and follow the prompts. You will have people from all around the world offering to write your book for you. Once you have chosen one you are happy with, you will need to put “funds in escrow”. This means that rentacoder charges your credit card, but doesn’t release the funds to the writer until the work is finished and you are happy with it. This way, you get what you wanted, and the writer knows they will be paid for it. A book could cost you anything up to $500, depending on the content and how hard it is to write.

The book on www.skin-cancer-advice.com “Melanoma can be beaten—7 survivors tell their stories” was written using www.rentacoder.com for about $500. You can get books written for less than this, but the quality can be a bit variable. We generally look for a writer with English as their first language. Rentacoder has a rating system, based on work each writer’s done in the past, so it’s worth checking our their track record first. You can either request a specific coder, or put the job out for anyone to bid on.

Click here to get a copy of the specs we prepared to get a book written for $150.

Other ways we have developed products is by interviewing an expert (either face to face or over the phone), recording the interview, and then having it transcribed, again by someone from rentacoder. The software we use is TRX Recorder, from www.nch.com.au. This software allows you to record a phone conversation directly onto your hard drive. From there you can burn it to a disc, and you have an instant product!

Once the book is written you will need to edit it and turn it into a pdf file.

Until next time

Julie

Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, internet businesses, online business Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, online business; internet business; success; learning;

This transcript was recently sent to me by a friend and although the formating is a little rough I felt that it was such an important message that I wanted to share it with you.

“Rick Warren is the author of a publishing phenomena – “The Purpose Driven Life” His work has been instumental in my life as well as my husband’s.

He has helped millions of people worldwide and as far as I know that includes Rupert Murdoch and some of his executive team.

If ever there was an example of how to live life in tough times, I think that the interview below is it.

Enjoy the read – you may need a few tissues:

This is a interview with Rick Warren. He wrote the Purpose Driven Life.

Read it through to the end…………
You will enjoy the new insights that Rick Warren has, with his wife now
having cancer and him having ‘wealth’ from the book sales. This is an
 absolutely incredible short interview with Rick Warren, ‘Purpose Driven
Life ‘ author and pastor of Saddleback Church in California

 In the interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, Rick said:

People ask me, What is the purpose of life?
And I respond: In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were
not made to last forever, and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven.

 One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body–
 but not the end of me.

 I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions
of
 years in eternity. This is the warm-up act – the dress rehearsal. God
wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity.

 We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life
isn’t going to make sense.
 Life is a series of problems: Either you are in one now, you’re just
 coming out of one, or you’re getting ready to go into another one.

 The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character 
than
your comfort; God is more interested in making your life holy than He is
in making your life happy.
 We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that’s not the goal of 
life. The goal is to grow in character, in Christ likeness.
This past year has been the greatest year of my life but also the
toughest, with my wife, Kay, getting cancer.

 I used to think that life was hills and valleys – you go through a dark
time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don’t believe 
that anymore.

Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it’s kind of
like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something 
good and something bad in your life.
No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something 
bad that needs to be worked on.

 And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something
 good you can thank God for..

You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems:
If you focus on your problems, you’re going into self-centeredness, 
which is my problem, my issues, my pain.’ But one of the easiest ways to 
get
rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others.

We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of
 thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for
 her- It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened 
her
character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a
 testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.
You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life.

Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For
 instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million
copies, it made me instantly very wealthy.
 It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with
 before. I don’t think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego
or for you to live a life of ease..
 So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety 
and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide
what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72.
First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our
 lifestyle one bit.. We made no major purchases.
 Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from 
the church.

 Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace 
Plan
to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, 
and
educate the next generation.
Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since 
I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be 
able
 to serve God for free.
 We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? 
Popularity?

Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or
 am I going to be driven by God’s purposes (for my life)?

When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, God, 
if I don’t get anything else done today, I want to know You more and
love You better. God didn’t put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do 
list. He’s more interested in what I am than what I do.
 That’s why we’re called human beings, not human doings.
Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.

 Difficult moments, SEEK GOD.

 Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.

 Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every moment, THANK GOD.
 If you do not pass it on, nothing will happen. But it will just be nice 
to pass it on to a friend….just like I have done.
 God’s Blessings”

I hope you were inspired by this as much as I was.

In the near future, I will be letting you know about my new membership site which is along these lines of finding your purpose and living your best life now.

Until next time

Julie

Rick Warren - The Purpose Driven Life, motivation, success Add new tag, Rick Warren - The Purpose Driven Life, success; secrets to success; motivation; online business; internet business

How did you go with Step one of Andrew and Daryl Grants how to build an ebook website?

They have used these steps to be very successful online and these are the same steps I have followed.

Step Two—Test the idea to see if it will be profitable

We generally find that we test about 10 ideas to find one that is profitable. Here are the steps to do that testing:

• Find a good domain name. You can do this at www.godaddy.com You are looking for a name which is descriptive, eg www.skin-cancer-advice.com . Always get a “.com” domain name if you are selling an information product world-wide. You then need to buy the domain name using a credit card or Paypal account. Domain names cost about $10.
• You can also get Godaddy to host your site, for a cost of about US$4 per month. Initially it’s a good idea to only buy one month of hosting, since you don’t yet know if the topic is going to be a goer. You can extend or change the hosting later.
• The other company we use for hosting is HostGator . Their “Baby” option costs US$9.95 to host an unlimited number of sites per month. If you are setting up a lot of sites, this one is the best value that we’ve found. You only need to pay for one month initially. It takes about 24 hours for a new site to start up.
• Build a “survey” site like the one we had for Practical Report Writing. You will need a data gathering tool such as the one at www.aweber.com to be able to gather people’s email address and feedback. If you need help building this site, you can go to www.youreasywebsolutions.com.
• Set up a Google ad campaign. To do this you will need to register for Google adwords at www.google.com.au/ads/. This costs about $7. Google AdWords allows you to advertise on a “Pay Per Click” basis, in other words, you place your ad for free on Google, and you only pay if someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website.

When you register with Google Adwords you will also need to give them a credit card number that they can charge advertising costs to. Just follow the prompts to put in the details of your campaign. Things you need to add are:

• Key words—get these from the search you did on keyworddiscovery.
• Advertisement—think of a good catchy headline and content. You can have up to 25 characters in the headline, and 35 in each line of text. You can have as many ads as you like. Three is good to start with.
• Price per click—you can experiment with different prices in the set up. The more you pay, the higher up the list of ads you’ll be. You really want to be in the top 4 or 5. We aim to get into the top 5 for around 10c per click.
• Daily budget—this tells Google when to stop running the ad. Usually $10 or $20 a day is enough to start with, but you need to monitor it to see if it “maxes out” during the day. If it does, you will need to increase it.

 Watch it run for 3 days. You are looking for two things:

• Number of clicks. You want at least 100 clicks a day to start with. Ideally you want 500 a day.
• Number of responses. People will answer the survey question about what they want to see on the site. The more responses the better. Ten or more over three days is good. Ideally you want a 5% response rate or higher.

Pause the ad campaign. This means that, although your website is still there, it is not being advertised, so it is unlikely that anyone will get to see it. This means that you’re not paying advertising costs while you continue to develop your product and sales letter. You can easily reactivate your ad campaign at any time.

Put the results into the Excel spreadsheet to see how profitable it will be. If you have tested 10 ideas, pick the one with the highest results.

Don’t forget to check out their membership site at:

http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?p=jspain&w=mp09-4

and their 4 day workshop which is the best course I have ever done at:

http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?w=4dayws197&p=jspain

Until next time

Julie

Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, internet businesses, online business Andrew and Daryl Grant, ebooks, online business, success; secrets to success; motivation; online business; internet business