Today's Special Report: Results of our Internet Marketing Survey

Question:  "What do you believe is your biggest obstacle in creating a successful internet home business?"

Results Of Poll:

We recently asked 50,000 people who stated they were interested in creating a successful internet home business what it was that they believed was holding them back from getting started. They were given five choices - The results were very interesting and are given below, along with some "quick-fix" suggestions and resources to help solve those perceived problems and challenges.

Note that those polled were for the most part start-up entrepreneurs and biz-op participants, not corporate entities or established business owners.

Below are the percentage results of the poll question, "What Do You Believe Is Your Biggest Obstacle In Creating A Successful Internet Home Business", and related suggestions/resources.

Keep in mind, the percentages above reflect their biggest perceived challenge, which in reality may or may not be their actual biggest challenge. For example, 51% stated "Lack of money" as their main challenge. 

I don't believe that's the reality of the situation, because if you had a killer ad for a "hot" product, had the skills to create a website and set up order processing and knew the fundamentals of marketing on the internet, lack of money would be of little concern! (Because relatively speaking, you can set up shop online for next-to-nothing... The perception is that money can solve most problems, but the scores of "big league" dot-com's that have blown through hundreds of millions in funding only to go bankrupt tell a different tale.  ;-)

However, from a marketing perspective, your potential customer's perception is reality - So if you are engaged in selling to this target group, in your sales letter you must take great care to focus on their perception that money is their main obstacle, in order to alleviate their concerns about moving forward. 

Here is more commentary about the survey results:

6% Can't Write Killer Ad To Sell Something

Although most people didn't focus on a great sales letter being their main obstacle, having an effective sales letter is crucial - Without it, nothing else will help. You can have a fantastic product, millions of visitors. but if your sales letter is no good, nothing else will help. 

14% Not Having A "Hot" Product To Sell

There are a lot of people selling junk on the internet, absolute junk. And they're surprised why no one is buying. The good news is that there are lots of ways to acquire in-demand products to sell on the internet! More on that in a minute.

14% Not Having The Skills To Create A Website & Process Orders

The learning curve to learn "everything" about selling on the internet is enormous. In fact, you'll never learn everything. The good news is that you don't have to, and that there are simpler ways than you probably think to be able to set up websites and take orders.

15% Don't Know The "Internet Marketing Secrets" To Success

I'm glad (and surprised) that more people didn't choose this option. There's a recurring theme among the "internet experts" selling their how-to-make-money-online information that they somehow have a magic key, a "secret formula" that will make you successful if you buy their products. The truth is that hardly ANYTHING is really "secret" on the internet. It's all about sifting through the available information to make the right decisions for YOU.

51% Lack Of Money To Get Started

Wow, 51% said their problems are due to lack of money. As your business grows, there are definitely costs involved. However, to get started - to try out your idea - to just get your toes in the water and test out your idea, you can do it for next to nothing!

Sure, with more money you can grow your business faster, cut some corners, and accomplish more faster - but if you're flat broke and have the time, you can truly develop a winning internet success strategy in your spare time for virtually nothing - You just have to make smart choices and focus on the right things. ;-)

 

 

Problem: " Can't Write Killer Ad To Sell Something"

There are two solutions to this:

a) Learn how to write better ads

Get a free 30-day subscription to our online resource site for creating instant products and profitable ads. It's a "no-brainer", great top-shelf help on making you a sales letter-writing expert, and you can preview it for 30 days free.

Writing sales letters is as much art as it is science. The best thing to do is to study your competitors' ads, build "swipe files" of appropriate slogans, phrases, and word groupings to use as your own private resource to draw from in writing your own ads (without plagiarizing), and actively practice by regularly writing sales letters. You will improve with time!

b) Use pre-written ads

You can start selling products with ready-made, proven effective, "killer" advertisements. Either purchase the resell rights to an existing sales letter and product, or join an "associate program" for the products you'd like to promote. Most associate programs don't cost you a penny to sign up for, and they can pay you up to 50% or more of profits for every sale made from your efforts. 

To research what associate programs would be best for you and your tastes, go to www.associateprograms.com and search through their current listings of thousands of ready-made sales letters and products that you can promote. As an associate, you're not responsible for processing orders, customer support, or any of the "work", you just get a healthy profit for each sale that results in your efforts. Complete information can be found at www.associateprograms.com

Problem: Not Having A "Hot" Product To Sell

The solution to this problem is similar to the solution of where to find a good ad; You can get the resell rights to a variety of ready-made, proven products that you can re-sell, or you can join associate programs without spending a penny and promote THEIR ready-made products without even having to process orders.

a) To research resell rights of existing products, sell the products yourself and keep 100% of the profit, do a search in your favorite search engine under "resell rights" and a topic name (if you want to narrow down the results search)

b) Create your own product. You probably don't have the time or inclination to create your own product from scratch, but it's widely known among marketers that selling information has great potential. Whether it's selling a book, manual, newsletter, etc., there are many attractive pluses, including: Cheap (or free) to produce and distribute, high markup value, high perceived value, and lots of interest by consumers. (Take a look at your local bookstore - The fact that they have that many books for sale means there's a tremendous market for information.)

Here's a quick and easy solution for creating your own information (or other) product from scratch: Pay a ghostwriter to do it for you. Take a look at www.elance.com, and you'll see hundreds of "service providers" bidding on each other to do work. Whether you need a professional writer, web designer, technical person, ad writer, etc., you can get them here - And at phenomenal prices, because they'll all be trying to under-bid the others.

c) Sell products through others' associate programs. Again, associate programs are a great way to have the ability to sell other people's ready-made products with their proven sales letters. It's the quickest way to get started, because you don't have to actually process orders, etc., everything is taken care of for you. Go to www.associateprograms.com for more details.

 

Problem: "Not Having The Skills To Create A Website & Process Orders"

The good news overall is that while there are a lot of things you could know about the technical side of making websites, you don't NEED to know everything to have a money-making website. Sure, there are some fantastic, advanced websites that use "Flash" technology to and special "plug-ins" that create animation, motion, and "cool" special effects, but they are not needed to have a successful website.

In fact, all of the "cutting-edge technology" that is used on websites can actually hurt the effectiveness of your website, because it can be both distracting and also make your website pages take too long to load. You'll notice that some of the most important money-making websites on the net realize this and take a scaled-down approach. Take a look at www.amazon.com or www.yahoo.com ... There's nothing tricky about these websites, no "special effects", they just provide the information that visitors go there for.

The same goes for YOUR website. All you need are simple pages, nothing fancy. The most important thing is what you say, and how you communicate, not how flashy the graphics are. You have several options for the actual HTML creation of a web page, and none of them cost much:

* Create simple pages yourself using html text editors. You can purchase Frontpage from Microsoft, which is an easy HTML creation software, or there are many free or low-cost alternatives, like Netscape Composer, which is a free website creation tool that comes with the Netscape browser software, or Microsoft Express, a free "lite" version of Frontpage, which you may be able to find available to download online.

* Use existing website "templates" to easily paste in your information and have a professional looking website. Here are just a couple of starting points:

DollarTemplates.com -- From e-commerce scenes to portal schemes, you won't believe the selection! The low cost templates are ready-to-use, customizable, and royalty-free. Download one or more, and use it as often as you'd like.

HotHomepages.com- Free website templates.  Perfect for... personal, family, pets, resumes, clubs, fans, organizations and business.  Includes personal calendar, instant messenger, custom themes, easy web page builder and more!

Processing Orders w/3rd Party Processors

Now, good news about processing orders! 3rd-Party processors are making it easier and easier to process sales without the time, expense, and hassle of getting your own merchant account. If you're making over $1,000 a month in sales, you may want to consider getting your own merchant account. But unless you're doing a high volume of business, there are 3rd-party processing companies that will process your orders, handle refunds and the accounting side, and they are very reasonably priced.

2Checkout - This company has the most competitive 3rd-party order processing rates I've seen. They have a 1-time setup fee of $49, then they only charge you 5.5% of every sale you make plus .45 cents. This is an excellent deal, and they also provide automated recurring billing for online subscriptions..   Click Here for more information

Clickbank - Clickbank is one of the largest 3rd-party processors, and they specialize in "non-tangible" sales. (Products you don't physically deliver, like downloadable ebooks, scripts, subscriptions, etc.) They have about a $49 setup charge, and charge more than 2Checkout does per sale, BUT they have a built-in affiliate program, so you can get others to promote your products and Clickbank will pay them for each sale they make, all automatically. Again, it's hands-free for you.

CCNow is another 3rd party processing company with reasonable fees. They specialize in "tangible" sales - Products that you physically mail to your customers.

 www.ibill.com - Another popular credit card processing solution

For complete credit card processing, order taking, autoresponders, ad tracking, popups, and virtually everything else you need to run a successful e-commerce business, I highly recommend WebsiteAutopilot.com.

Website Hosting

You can actually have your website hosted for free, although when you're getting a free service, you can't expect to get customer support when you need it. Most free website offers show banner ads on your site. Here's one that doesn't:

Free Web Hosting - Sign up now for 100% free web hosting

$8.25 Web Hosting - Full featured, with "secure" order pages. For only $8.25 a month, you get 24-hour phone customer support as well as email support. These guys are one of the largest website hosting companies on the net, and they're dependable. At that price, you can afford to put up a website!

 

Problem: " Don't Know The 'Internet Marketing Secrets' To Success"

Here's the thing: There AREN'T many "Internet Marketing Secrets To Success". Successfully making money on the internet isn't much different from selling something by mail order or anywhere else. You need a:

1. Product that people want/need (Free 30-day trial)
2. Good sales letter that gets people to buy (Free 30-day trial)
3. System to get people to visit your website

The first two points have already been covered earlier in this article, so let's focus on #3, getting people to your website. There are several ways to do this, some of them free, some of them through paid advertising.

Here are free and no-risk ways to get visitors to your website:

• Get listed with search engines so people find you when searching for your topic
• Exchange links with other website owners so you can get cross-traffic
• Provide enough interesting/informative/helpful content that other websites link to you on their own.  (This is a fantastic way to get traffic, become a valuable resource!)
• Write articles about your topic and email them to related online newsletter publishers, allowing them to print your article for free as long as there is a link back to your website
• Send out press releases about your company/website.
• Create a "refer a friend" system on your website to encourage your visitors to tell others about you.
• Create an affiliate program, where people only get paid AFTER they've sent you traffic and you've made a sale. If you use ClickBank.com or RevEcom.com, they'll handle the tracking and commission paying automatically, leaving you free to do other things.
  
  WebsiteAutopilot.com gives you a complete affiliate program that you can completely customize (and it does everything else for you as well: Take/process orders, instant download delivery of products, newsletter subscriptions, autoresponders, ad trackers, shopping cart, and much more)

Additionally, there are ways to pay for traffic. 

You can pay for search engine listings in "pay" search engines like www.overture.com for as little as five cents a clickthrough. That's a very inexpensive way to get targeted visitors to your website.

Pay for classified ads in online newsletters that are focused on your targeted topic. For instance, one of the most inexpensive newsletters to advertise in that is focused on internet businesses is DEMC, which costs something like $45 for a classified ad in their subscription of 150,000 people. 

These two methods of paid advertising are what I recommend for getting started. If you can't make money or break even with low-cost pay-per-clicks or newsletter classifieds, other more expensive forms of advertising won't work for you either.

If you're losing money with your paid advertising, you need to go back and analyze the product you're selling and your sales letter, to see how you can improve your offer and get more people to respond.

 

Problem: " Lack Of Money To Get Started"

In a nutshell, all of the resources, ideas, and methods I've suggested to you here help solve the problem of "lack of money to get started". Here's the thing: It's going to cost you, whether it's in money or in time. If you have the money to pay others to help you get started, help you create a website and obtain products, help you advertise, etc., you'll be able to get up and running faster, and that's great.

However, if you don't have much money and you DO have time to learn, you can build an internet business from scratch on a shoestring budget... There has never been an opportunity and a vehicle like the internet to allow anyone, no matter what their background or where they're from, to start with an idea and develop it into a thriving business that you can make a full-time living from.

I hope these pointers have helped solve some of what you feel your biggest challenges are in getting started on the internet, and that you've found these poll results and resources useful.

To your success, Timothy Gross - Executive Director, Educated Media, LLC

                  

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