Related Tag Articles: products

Is your website a sales system or just a brochure?

21 May 2012

In building websites to sell products online, there’s a huge misconception out there about products selling themselves. Perhaps if you have the brand recognition of Apple or Coca-Cola you may find that products sell relatively easily, but once you examine the “why” behind it, you quickly realize that these huge companies have spent millions of dollars—if not billions—creating and maintaining that brand.

The truth of the matter is that online entrepreneurs have been getting bad information for well over a decade, and the end result is that their websites are set up to function much more like brochures rather than legitimate, sustainable, self-functioning sales systems.

Think about a grocery store circular or tourist information in a new city you visit. It’s somewhat appealing. It’s certainly new and therefore momentarily intriguing. It’s helpful, if only because you wanted to know about the subject before you picked up the brochure. But it’s not exciting; it doesn’t grab your attention and identify a solution to a problem. Unfortunately, this is the common website out there: Insipid, unclear and uninspiring. It’s a brochure, not a sales system.

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A History on the Affiliate Marketing Model

17 December 2010

The model of affiliate marketing is pretty straightforward and simple to understand. In essence, if you make it your business to promote someone else's business, then you'll receive a percentage of everything you help that business sell. Offline, this model has certainly been used before. Online, its still in its infancy and has dozens of different stories about how it came to be.

No matter which story you read, the characters and time line and even certain aspects of the model are going to be different. However, the exact specifics of affiliate marketing's history do not matter nearly as much as knowing relatively where and how it started and how quickly it took off to become a billion-dollar industry.

The most accurate summation of affiliate marketing details: In the mid 1990s, as the Internet was first introduced to the mainstream market, cdnow.com, a music site, decided to try a new venture to increase their sales. If other websites would place links to cdnow.com, then that site would receive a portion of the proceeds for every album sold.

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Creating Services and Products that are Packaged for Easy Decision Making

15 December 2010

In business, your product or service might truly be beneficial to a customer, but that doesn't necessarily mean your product or service will be selected by customers. If you haven't learned already, markets are fickle and customers are hard to pick up their decisions need to be made easy and, in order to succeed in business, you'll have to help them in the process.

If you've ever heard the saying, You eat with your eyes, then you already have an idea about what goes through a customers head when they're viewing your product/service. They're checking out the packaging.

In this instance, were not only speaking about product packaging, like the colorful box you see on store shelves, but more about the all-around packaging of your product/service; i.e. how its being marketed and viewed by potential customers.

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Make Your Website a Strategic Marketing Vehicle

03 December 2010

When working in any type of business online, its important that you always take appearances into considering. If you're too persistent or too sloppy with your advertising, you'll quickly be known as a spammer. If you don't put enough focus into your product pitch, you'll be thought of as a quick money hustler, looking to turn a dime with no real sales persona.

Worst of all, if your site isn't professional and customer-friendly, you'll be revealed as just another in long line of amateur marketers looking to turn a quick dollar after reading some tips and tricks on Web 2.0.

It's important that you transform your website into a strategic marketing vehicle. By doing this, you're branding your business as legitimate, and your business is able to stand on its own and entice customers to purchase your products and/or use your services.

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Whatever Happened to Amway?

22 October 2010

It wasn't long ago that Amway was one of the bigger names around, with nearly everyone at least knowing of the company's name even if they didn't know exactly what they were about. Well, if you haven't heard the name in a while, that's probably due to the fact Amway now goes primarily by Quixtar one of three sister companies launched under Alticor.

Amway is the largest direct-selling company in the world by far. The reason for their immense popularity in this generation is that they use network marketing to sell a wide range of products, including: health and beauty, home care, electronics, jewelry, water/air purifiers, insurance, dietary supplements, and much more.

Forbes ranks Amway as one of the worlds largest and most successful companies. They pull in around 8.2 billion USD annually, setting Amway leaps and bounds above other similar network-marketing companies.

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