Andy Recommends These Essentials for Internet Business

Just got off the phone with a friend of mine. Our converstation got me dreaming of what I would do if I could start from scratch with oodles of money to spend.

Then I decided to put it all on a single web page...complete with links to the stuff I think is worth the money. But be forewarned. Not everything here will cost you. It's not my nature to spend money just because I have it.

So here's how I'd start from scratch:

Right off I'd incorporate.

My personal preference is a Nevada Corporation because of the exstensive protection offered to owners. From what I understand now, my Nevada corp would then start a corporation in the state I reside in. This could be a c corp or a LLC, depending on state restrictions and my needs.

Wayne Davies wrote an excellent book on this subject, along with a bunch of dandy ways to avoid taxes. Mind you I said avoid not evade! There's a huge difference. Avoiding taxes is legal and honorable - it means you only pay the tax you owe and not once cent more. Tax evasion is illegal and otherwise frowned upon. If anyone ever suggests you try to evade taxes - RUN! Got that? Good.

Davies book is  "The Ultimate Small Business Tax Reduction Guide" 

Check with your tax consultant to see if the cost of the book is deductable :-)

 Now that I'm a company, I can start aquiring assets and train my most valued employee - me.

First I'd invest in X-site Pro. I'm using this right now to build this page. I'll say one thing about X-site Pro - okay two things - working with this software has NOT been a bed of roses! I've had problems and it's not perfect BUT it does work and work very well and I've never had better customer support. And I don't care how good a product is - it's the quality of the customer support that really shows the backbone of the company. X-Site's is so good, on one occasion, I insisted the support person (Matt) forward my comments to Paul Smithson and warned Matt if I didn't hear from Paul I'd contact him myself. Paul did email me saying Matt forwarded him my email. I did this because excellent customer support often goes unheralded and this is a shame. Matt not only deserved a good word but he deserved that good word to be passed on to those in charge.

P.S. Mel - another X-site CS person also provided excellent support. I suppose I should've done the same there but I didn't. Wait a minute. Okay - I fixed that and sent a note commending Mel. Let's move on...shall we?

Another excellent program is Trellian Web Page Builder. Trellian has a slew of stuff. I haven't tried everything but if it's as good as their free products they are hard to beat. To make life easier all around I'll just list everything (this is used by permission).

Purchase

Internet Studio The Internet Studio suite is comprised of some of Trellian's best long running, proven and award winning software. It includes a range of tools for web authoring, ecommerce, search and Internet. The Internet Studio Includes: Code Pad Trellian Code Pad is a FREE drop-in replacement for Windows NotePad. Site Mapper Site Mapper will analyze the contents of a web site, and create a detailed map with an indexed listing of all resources by page and category. Site Spider Trellian Site Spider is a powerful, yet simple to use program which is loaded with sophisticated search, web crawling and site mapping functions. Site Load Trellian Site Load is a state of the art web site and Mirror management application. It is the smart way to upload and maintain your web site. Trellian FTP Trellian FTP is a file transfer client that allows you to transfer files between your PC and any FTP server on the Internet. Trellian WebPage Trellian WebPage allows you to create your own web pages without having to learn complex scripting languages. Web Safe Trellian Web Safe provides a welcome solution for the protection of your valuable and hard work! Web Tidy WebTidy allows you to take a page from your website and the program will carefully analyze all of your code and begin correcting all errors, line-by-line. Button Factory Trellian Button Factory allows you to take predefined button styles and tailor them to your own needs. Image Mapper Trellian Image Mapper is the quickest way to create image mapped images for your website. eComm Store eComm Store is an affordable eCommerce solution, designed to put your business online. Spell Checker Trellian Spell Check is an extremely efficient spell checking utility that allows you to thoroughly check documents from the outside - in. Trellian Traceroute Trellian Traceroute allows you to see how many servers your website is passing through before it gets to your computer, informing you if there are any problem/slow servers and even gives a ping time for each server in the path. Meta Editor The Trellian Meta Editor will help you create the appropriate Meta Tags, and can be used to insert the HTML code into your web page. ROI Calculators Trellian Toolbar comes with three useful ROI calculators. CPC (Cost Per Click) Calculator, CPM (Cost Per Thousand) Calculator and the ROI (Return on Investment) Calculator. Trellian Toolbar Trellian Toolbar is the most feature packed toolbar available online. While offering an endless array of functionality, tools and services, Trellian Toolbars unique intuitive tab menu and search functions are a pleasure to use.

I use Trellian's Web Page Builder a lot.

You'll notice they also have an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) program. It might be very good and well worth the money but for SEO there's really one program that really shines SEO Elite. SEO Elite is actually an intelligence gathering program. It finds the high ranking sites in your niche and analyzes them to determine what they are doing right. And it points out their weaknesses too. Like X-site and other programs, this is NOT automatic. There's a learning curve and you'll actually have to put this stuff into action, but it does work.

I will point out that X-Site has SEO built in to the program. it will tell you exactly where you fall short and how to fix it.

Now I got into all that because you need to be able to build web pages and sites for your online business. You have to be able to at least modify web pages.

You'll also need hosting. I went through a lot of hosting options before I got smart. I finally did the research and found a handful of companies who come highly recommend. Then I signed on with the one I felt was best. I was looking for serveral qualifications:

Customer service and support ranks high on my list. Reliablilty, price and features all play a part also. I wanted a host that offered C-panel (it's the interface you use to manage your hosting) I also wanted to put up unlimited domains and subdomains. I wanted Fantasico (let's you easily install many popular open source scripts) and a few other goodies. I found all of that at Hostgator.

Once you're done there you'll need to be able to take money. Hey! You are in business, aren't you?

There are lots of ways to do this.

1ShoppingCart provides shopping cart autoresponders affiliate programs

You can accept payments with PayPal

Stormpay is another widely available option but I haven't used it. I've also heard many people have had problems with them so I'll decline to provide a link to them.

With either Paypal or Stormpay you can offer goods through Paydotcom.com

You can take credit cards through a number of online providers. One very popular service because it's easy to use and affordable is 2Checkout

Does all this sound confusing? Don't let it. Here's the lowdown:

If you have a product to sell and just want to accept credit cards online simple sign up with 1ShoppingCart and 2Checkout.

1 ShoppingCart lets you put up an online "catalog" (even if you're only selling one item) and does all the necessary "legwork" like calculate shipping and so forth so you can collect the money.

2 Checkout processes the credit card payment.

1 ShoppingCart now also provides credit card processing too.

One word about these online companies - they are generally higher priced than your local bank. However many banks cringe at offering "online only" payment processing. But this landscape is changing fast so it doesn't hurt to check. The other thing is banks don't always know the "ins and outs" of online business. It sometimes helps to understand how things work in your world.

One other Resource to consider is Ken Evoy and his SiteBuildIt! Seriously Ken gives away better stuff than many people sell! Click on Free Downloads to see for yourself. I had a very nice site with Ken for quite a while - the big drawback with SiteBuildIt! is having to renew a full year at a time. You can build your whole site online with SiteBuildIt! - his premier hosting service. It's a little awkward but he offers a ton of great extras like a built-in autoresponder service and so much more. You can also buy some excellent "how books" from him. Are they worth it? Again, check out Evoy's Free Downloads then ask yourself - if he gives away stuff like this, what kind of value does he charge for? I'll give you a hint...Ken oozes "underpromise and overdeliver". He's one of the best guys on the 'net.

Okay, you've got everything you need to put your business on the net...right? Well...almost.

You still need your own domain - that is you need to register a name for your web presence. I recommend NameCheap. They are dependable and low priced. You might be able to find someone who will register you for less, but I don't think it's worth the effort. At $8.88 a year - how much money are you really going to save? (Tip here: word is, registering a domain for more than one year makes the search engines take you seriously faster. If possible, register for 5 years. You could register for more, but I don't think it would make a difference beyond that.)

You also need an autoresponder service. An autoresponder is let's you send emails automatically to a list of customers and prospects. I've tried a bunch, including programs you set up on your server. My conclusion? Spend the 20 bucks a month (more or less) and get a good service. It's worth it. There are a few good ones, Aweber consistantly comes on top for offering great value and service at a reasonable price. Fill out the form below to get a free test drive.

I'm assuming you've got a product to sell. If not that's a subject beyond the scope of this page. For now I'd download Ken Evoy's "Affiliate Masters Course" and work from there.

It's one thing to have a nice web site. But once there you suddenly realize having a web site is a means to an end. What's the end? Sales, of course. When it comes to sales (whether you want someone to actually buy a product, sign up for your newsletter or something else) there are two factors you need to consider above all else. I call them the "Ying and Yang" of sales because you'll realize the most success when these two are in perfect balance.

The "Ying" is your conversion rate or CR. What's CR? It's simply the number of sales (or optins, or clicks, whatever) per 100 visitors. A 1% CR means out of every 100 people who visit your site, you make one sale. However a 1% CR is not as easy as it sounds.

Conversion is both an art and a science. Learning what induces people to buy under what circumstances takes time and effort. If you've ever sold anything at all, you have some idea of what it takes. The good news is, while this is an extensive subject, learining the basics is not all that hard. From there it's a matter of "tweaking" techniques to maximize sales. Direct Response Lab is a member site dedicated to improving conversion rates by scientifically applying time-tested techniques to Internet marketing. Sign up for their free 7-part ecourse to get started with market testing.

The "Yang" of sales is traffic. What good is a 15% conversion rate if it takes a year to generate 100 visitors? On the other hand, driving thousands of visitors to your site is worthless if nobody buys. The fact is you've got to have both CR and traffic to be successful. However it's a heck of a lot easier to test your CR if you have a steady stream of traffic coming to your site.

The hands-down best ways to drive tons of traffic to your sites can b learned from John Reese's Traffic Secrets course. John is a master at generating traffic and he lay's it all out here. Now mind you, this course ain't cheap at nearly a thousand bucks, but then again you're getting a crash course on exactly how to keep a steady stream of targeted prospects running through your doors. How valuable is that?

For those of you who just can spend the big bucks for John's course, what not try List and Traffic by Jimmy D. Brown? It's only $10 bucks a month. It only took me 2 minutes to realize it's well worth the investment. 

As you may have guessed, these concepts apply offline as well as online. A great salesperson is worthless in an empty room. Same goes for an incompetent fool in a roomfull of hot prospects. However, it's been said that you can tie an order book to a dog's tail and eventually even he will come back with a sale.

Thanks for now,

Andy Havens

Netrazine.com