For many website owners who provide information more than they promote products, it can feel awkward to keep mentioning products your website visitors can buy. Some even feel as though they’re being somehow dishonest by mentioning products available for purchase. Why is it some website owners feel as though they’re scammers when they recommend products that they’ll get a commission for selling?

You’re Unsure of Yourself

One reason why people feel dishonest when recommending a product is a lack of confidence in themselves. Perhaps you feel that in some way you lack the authority to suggest a product, even if you’ve found it useful personally.

There can also be a guilt for recommending a product for sale when you offer a lot for free. It’s hard to go from offering free information to saying “buy this.”

The key is to remember that when you offer quality for free, people trust you. If you think something is worth paying for, say so. Many of your readers will appreciate it.

You Aren’t Reviewing Products Carefully Before Recommending Them

If you promote just about any product you hear about without really reviewing it, it’s natural to feel awkward about it. Some products are better than others, and you can’t know which ones are good if you haven’t checked them out thoroughly.

This isn’t just an online marketing product thing, although it’s a huge issue for internet marketers. If you subscribe to a lot of internet marketing newsletters, you’ve probably encountered many list owners who promote just about any product that comes out, just using the sales text recommended by the product creator, and little apparent care for quality.

It can happen in other niches too. You can look really bad if you promote any product, whether digital or physical, that turns out to be poor quality. While it’s hard to tell if a new product is going to be as good as the company says it is, a careful look and some consideration before you promote anything.

You don’t have to personally review every product you mention on your site, but do be careful about how you do actual reviews and keep within FTC guidelines.

Someone Has Given You a Hard Time About Promoting Products

I’ve gotten this one myself. Back in the fairly early days of my newsletter for this site, I promoted a product in it. I got a furious email back from one subscriber, demanding to know if I was turning into that kind of newsletter that did nothing but promote products all the time, because if so, she was unsubscribing immediately.

Being rather new to it all, I was apologetic to her, and reassured her that it would be an occasional thing, not a regular thing. I was frankly taken aback by how very offended she was that I dared promote something, anything to my list, and I spent a lot of time wondering if I had gone about it the wrong way.

These days, I wouldn’t be so apologetic. I’d still be polite, but I wouldn’t consider it something I needed to apologize for. It’s my list, I don’t overdo the promotions or promote just any product, and if I want to mention something I find worthwhile, it’s my subscribers’ choice whether they stick with me or unsubscribe, and whether they buy or not. So long as I promote good quality products, there’s really little for them to be offended about.

It took me a while to get to that point, however. It’s easy to take that kind of criticism too much to heart. If you want a healthy business, however, you need people to buy products from you. If you can’t say what you’ve found worthwhile, you’re making it much harder on yourself and your readers will lose out because they aren’t hearing about things they might find useful too.

Most of all, remember that honestly recommending useful products never makes you a scammer. How often you promote products doesn’t matter as much as making sure you promote quality, relevant products rather than junk. Do that while keeping up with the expectations your list has for you, and you should be fine.

The post Does Promoting Products Make You Feel Like a Scammer? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Getting website visitors to really pay attention to what you have to offer is one of the challenges of online marketing. There’s that old rule about it taking about 7 exposures to convince people to buy a product. The challenge becomes getting enough exposures that people decide to buy from you.

Creating a free e-course for your website can be a big help for that.

An e-course may not always be the right answer. If what you’re selling doesn’t need a lot of extra information for people to decide to buy it, they probably won’t want to sign up for any extra information.

But if you know there’s a decision making process involved, your e-course can keep your site on their mind and build trust. Then when they’re ready to buy they are more likely to go through one of your links.

I do this on one of my sites right now, and need to make e-courses for others. The site with the e-course does pretty well with it for the amount of traffic the site gets. Sales come in consistently.

You do not want to ask for much information at all from your subscribers. Name and email address is plenty. Give them a promise that you won’t spam them or sell their email address… and stick to that promise.

What Should Your Course Offer?

The course should be about making whatever decision you feel needs to be made to get sales. If you’re offering to teach people to run a home business, your course should give some solid advice in that area. If it’s about pet care, odds are no one will care much about any home business tips you share. Keep it relevant.

Give good information. You don’t want to give so much that you can’t sell the best stuff, but you want to keep people on your list. If you keep things too simple you’ll just bore them. They want you to be the authority, so stop telling them things they already know.

The first email in an e-course can be on the basics, just make sure you say so. Tell subscribers that it’s to be sure you’re all on the same page.

Repurpose Your Own Content

You don’t need to create all new content for your e-course. Go through your blog postings or anything else you’ve written on the topic. By emailing it to subscribers you’re ensuring that they learn from what you’ve already written.

You can also use articles written by others if you have permission, but then you run the risk that your subscribers will follow their links instead. If it’s not an affiliate link you may not want to take that risk.

Link to Relevant Products for Sale

Just because you’re giving the information away for free doesn’t mean you can’t make product recommendations and earn from them. Be certain that you are choosing the best, most relevant products you can to increase sales. You should probably buy them yourself so that you can give the most informative review possible.

This should naturally include whatever product is your main focus. The information you share should be pointing people toward a purchase. Otherwise, why go through the trouble of maintaining a list? It’s a lot of work if you don’t get any reward.

Tell What’s Coming in the Next Email

An e-course should make sense as a series. Just as when you watch a television series they may tell you what’s coming next week, you should tell subscribers a bit about what’s coming up in the next email.

This helps if for some reason the current email wasn’t too interesting, but your description of the next one sounds interesting. You want to build anticipation.

Make sure you say how many days until it comes. Depending on how you run your e-course this may be anywhere from a day or two to a week, but it helps people to know when to expect it.

What Are You Doing with Subscribers After the E-Course?

The time will come when your e-course is complete for a subscriber. What are you going to do with that email address?

In some cases, leaving it alone or even removing it from the list may make sense. A big list doesn’t do anything for you if you aren’t going to try to sell to it further. And in some areas there may be only limited utility to doing so.

More often, you’re going to want to send a regular newsletter to subscribers. You’ve got them on a list. With any luck they’ve bought from you. Be nice if they would do so again.

Any free e-course is going to get a lot of freebie seekers who will never buy from you. That’s just how it goes. But there will also be people who will buy from you. There will be people who originally signed up just for the freebie because they didn’t have the money to buy better information, but finally have enough that they can buy.

Staying in touch can be a very good idea.

Whether or not you can manage this depends on your schedule. It’s not always easy to keep in contact. You only have so much time in a day.

You have to decide if keeping up regular mailings is worthwhile. This is something you can test by creating a newsletter and running it. If you aren’t getting the results you want, it’s probably not worth your time.

Don’t suddenly start a newsletter after letting a list built by an e-course sit for months or years. People have short memories for this kind of thing and you don’t want to get too many spam complaints. If you’re going to do it, plan to do it from the start.

How Do You Handle List Management?

The best thing to do to manage your list is to pay for an outside service to do so. Aweber and GetResponse are good choices. They take care of things like spam complaints for you, which could otherwise impact your hosting. It’s an additional expense for your business, but one I find very much worthwhile.

Even with a list management service you will sometimes get people asking you to unsubscribe them. Do this promptly! Just because some people can’t seem to see the unsubscribe link that the services put on each and every email sent doesn’t mean you can ignore their request.

Never, ever buy a list. Reputable services won’t let you import a bought list, and too many are nothing more than email addresses that were collected without permission. You don’t want to get into that kind of a mess.

If you run your e-course well, over time it can really help you to get more sales of whatever products or services you offer. It can be an incredibly powerful tool for building an online business.

The post Should You Promote Your Products with a Free E-Course? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

I’m really focusing this year on building my business, and most especially my income. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean I’ll start hyping whatever the latest big guru launch product is without even checking it out. That’s just not me.

But I will try to be more conscious of products I could be promoting.

I don’t mean just here. This isn’t all I do, you know. I have a couple of new sites that I’m working on that will be more about income. While still providing the kind of information that draws people in, of course. I’m just looking more at areas where people should be actively shopping with these ones.

And no you can’t know the niches. Mine! Find your own and get to work! If we happen to match, so be it but I’m not giving all my plans away. And I will be promoting things here too, of course, as appropriate.

For those of you also starting new websites, I’d like to offer some tips to get you started in this new year.

If You Want Some Help Getting Things Started

Creating your own website from scratch isn’t for everyone. As a matter of fact, even if you know the basics it may not be your smartest move.

That’s where a program such as SBI! can be such a big help. They take you through the steps, from picking your niche and domain name to developing content to monetization. It’s a bit more than basic hosting when you add it all up, but the tools you get compensate quite well, costing less than you would pay for all of it separately.

With their 2.0 version they’ve really increased your ability to take advantage of more of the web has to offer. That is, the ability to have users create content on your site for yo. That can be powerful.

There’s a risk to that too, and you have to monitor what people try to put on your site. That’s really not a hard thing to do. Just pay attention and you’ll be fine.

If You Want a Lot of Help Getting Things Started

SBI! sounding good but you want more help than that? You might want to consider their eLearning program. They’ll take you through the process of getting your site and business started in a 12 week online education course.

The course isn’t all prerecorded stuff. You’ll have weekly live sessions to guide you through the process that SBI users go through to build their sites.
It will cost you more, of course, but if you need help getting things going or just need that push to ensure you keep working at it, this could be a very worthwhile investment.

If You Don’t Need Your Hand Held or Just Want to Go Your Own Way

I’ll admit it. This is my way. I got my start online before hearing about SBI and while it’s a great system (my dad uses it), I enjoy creating sites on my own, in my own way.

In that case, please be sure you pay for hosting. Don’t go the free route if you’re serious about your business. You will come to need the freedom to control your site that comes only from owning it and paying for hosting and a domain name.

I like Host Gator. They’ve been good to me. Their $7.95/month plan gives you quite a bit.

Depending on your skills you can create your own site, hire a designer, start a WordPress blog… there are many options.

I lean mostly toward WordPress blogs. There are advantages and disadvantages, but for me the advantages are sufficient that I only do a little work with static pages these days. You can run WordPress like a blog or like a website with some of the advantages of a blog.

One disadvantage can be finding a good theme. It can be a bit tedious and I often spend hours adapting themes to my own preferences. You can buy themes if you like, and I’ll get into the free vs. paid themes another day.

On the plus side, WordPress is free and there are many plugins, both free and paid that can really increase its flexibility. That’s a topic that really takes some time to write about! Choosing plugins takes a good bit of time.

Some Ways, It Doesn’t Matter Which Way You Go

No matter how you go about building an online business, you’d better expect to work. Your average “overnight” success probably worked years to have that sudden burst of success. It almost never comes easy.

Choose how you get things started based on what you need. There’s nothing wrong with needing a little more guidance to get started. There’s nothing wrong with needing a big push to get started. There’s nothing wrong with winging it if that’s the way you work best.

Just remember that even the best marketers flop sometimes. Success is more likely to come if you keep trying, experimenting and working. If you start a site and give up when you don’t have visitors in a month you’ll never get anywhere.

The post It’s a New Year. Let’s Get This Business Started! appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.