The Quickest Way to Get Started Online If You Feel Overwhelmed – wpshropshire.co.uk
The feeling of being overwhelmed when you’re first starting out online is absolutely understandable. There are marketers pulling at you every which way, business opportunities abound and your inbox is flooded with offers for the next best product to help you make money online. It can be confusing and overwhelming because you’re not sure which to choose since all of these “pitches” seem too good to be true. Unfortunately there are too many pitches for the average newbie to swallow. But if you focus on the most important aspects of your soon-to-be business, you can quickly start reaping the rewards of your efforts.
So, what do you do if you have chosen your niche and have some great ideas along with a wide selection of affiliate products to choose from in your market? How do you take the first step with all of the information being thrown at you? What if you don’t have a mailing list and you’re not a world class copywriter? Is it possible to make it online? Absolutely! You just need to take the first step and that’s what I’m going to help you do today in this article.
What you’ll need first is a domain. You can purchase your domain from Godaddy.com. Next, you’ll need a hosting account. You can purchase this also through Godaddy.com or you can go with another company who I have used when I first started out online which is ThirdSphereHosting.com f95zone. Those two things are the biggest, most important things that you’ll need in order to have a website. But having a website is not enough. You need to capture the names and email addresses of your visitors. But in order to do this you’ll require autoresponder software. I highly recommend iContact.com, AnalyticApproach.com or Aweber.com. You’ll need to choose from one of these to begin building a mailing list of potential customers. Your list will allow you to send email offers to your list so that you can begin to make sales. After all, you want to get into the business of making money online. And having a list to mail to is one of the best ways to do it.
If you’re uncomfortable with making pitches to your list, don’t worry it’s not that difficult. And you don’t have to make hard sells to your list either. You can set up an e-zine (electronic magazine) or giveaway a free report or e-book with your affiliate links embedded in the reports/e-books suggesting products. This technique is very effective because you’re not making a hard sell but you’re offering helpful information through your report and/or ebook godaddy email. Also, your list will respond favorably to this type of offer. Free giveaways with useful information are often never refused – regardless of your market.
So, you’re basically getting people to trade their name and email address for your free newsletter, e-course, e-book or report offer.
One thing that’s essential to know is that when you’re purchasing your domain and if you plan to have a newsletter, you should also purchase a domain for your newsletter as well. So, let’s say you chose to just create a newsletter. It’s essential to purchase the domain name for your newsletter as well as it not only helps brand your website but it also protects your brand.
Taking the time to set up your domain, hosting and autoresponder sequences is fairly simple. Most companies provide step-by-step tutorials to walk you through the process as you’re doing it. Take your time to learn how it’s done so you can duplicate the process again. But if you’re not up to doing it yourself, consider hiring an expert that can and will gladly do it for you. As long as you take action and get started right away, you’ll be one step further ahead and one step closer to your goals.
It seems pretty obvious, with all the talk of “The Money’s In The List” and how you need to build your own list of opt-in subscribers to survive online, but it is amazing to me how many network marketers do not do this? I’ll admit that I did not when I first started out. I was just so excited and desperate to recruit people into my business that I just pitched my company replicated website. And, I didn’t know how to do it. I see too many people doing this. I think they do it partly because they do not know how to do it any other way and partly because they do not want to spend the necessary couple of bucks that are required to minimally set up your business the right way. If you are one of those people who is not building their own list but know that you should, this article will outline the necessary tools.
The March article I wrote covered the impact that 21st Century Technology on a landlord’s ability to stay connected with his or her tenants. This month, I am going to discuss the impact many of these same tools have on my business partners and my L.L.C. As I previously mentioned, almost everywhere we go today there are students and adults ‘wired’ into their phones, digital media players, lap-tops and the like. While this technological revolution is intimidating for some, it is a way of life for others. What my business partners and I have discovered over the past few years is that once we got through some of our individual and collective trepidation with the technology, many of our business processes and day to day communication have become more effective and more efficient. This month, I am going to discuss our use of two tools from the Google suite: Google Documents and Google Calendar.
When our business first began to grow and we split our roles and responsibilities into departments, our communication system became a tangled birds nest of phone calls, emails, face to face conversations, and handwritten notes. Even though we had designated jobs and responsibilities, we were still so interconnected that, needless to say, this lack of a clear system created a chaotic mess of mis-communication. At that time, to keep our individual schedules straight, two of us were using the calendar software associated with the real estate program Top Producer, (which could only be shared by the two people syncing their calendars on their PC’s), one of us was using Apple’s iCal and iPhone to keep a calendar, and the fourth was using the calendar on his Blackberry. Obviously the issue here was that only two of us could actually see when the other was available, and that was only when he took the time to physically sync his phone. We asked ourselves, ‘what do we need?’ We decided the answer was that we needed a shared calendar system that would work with both Macs and PCs, Blackberry’s, iPhones, and Treos, and that would not require physically syncing the information- it would have to happen wirelessly. Our first look was to the online software GoDaddy which, despite us having to enter all of our information twice (one on GoDaddy and once on our own personal calendars), worked for a short time. As we continued to evaluate our systems, we decided to move to the next level: using Google’s online calendar. The difference this has made has been very beneficial. Google, since it is web based and free, is able to work with all of our devices. We have also been able to download applications that allow our iPhones and Blackberries to enter information directly into our personal calendars, which then upload to Google automatically, therefore streamlining the process. We are now able to, without much effort and in real time, see when each other is available for meetings, showings, and the like. This has helped us with a much better use of our time and energy.