Well, it’s taken me all of an hour or two …

… and, I already have a reasonably well-written ’sales letter’ for my e-books.

This is where I was hoping that BeBiz would shine, and I think it has delivered.

Built into the site is a nice ‘wizard’ for developing your own sales letter (you know the kind: just google “rich” and “jerk” if you want to see an example) … it walks you though all of the sections, with examples that you can use and/or modify as you see fit:

1. Headline

Example: Uncover the Breakthrough Secret that Insiders are Using to earn $10,000… $20,000… even $50,000+ Online in Just a Few Hours a Week…

2. Subheadline

Example: … See Results In As Little As 7 Days… Without Drugs, Supplements, Or Even Special Equipment!

3. Salutation

Example: From the desk of John Smith

Example: Dear Friend,

4. Problem

Example: If you’ve tried one diet, you’ve tried them all, right? Almost everyone I meet says they’re sick of getting their expectations up and then not seeing the advertised results. If you’re serious about building a better you, then listen to this exciting news…

5. Credibility

Example: My name is Stuart Strongvoice, and I’ve been teaching Hollywood celebrities how to speak, sing, and carry themselves like stars for over 20 years… and my tips can help you too!

6. Testimonials

Example:

Current Testimonials

Headline	From	Content
“The Information Is Invaluable”	Luis, CA	I have been reading and re-reading the material on your site. I think the information is invaluable.
“I Read It 5 Times!”	Monk, NY	I love it AJC, I read it 5 times last night!
“Can’t Wait To Read The eBook!”	Benjamin, OH	This is what I’ve been looking for, like Kiyosaki will say there’s two kind of proble…
“I wish I had stumbled across your website earlier”	Alex, IL	I wish I had stumbled across your website earlier … I think I have a fairly solid financial int…
“Very Insightful”	Lisa, CA	I do have lofty goals and I believe I can make them happen but “financially getting there&r…

7. Tell a Story

Example: I was standing on the deck of a rusty freighter, strumming my guitar, when I suddenly realized what I’d been doing wrong!

8. Identify with the Reader

Example: I, like many of you, spent years pinching pennies and cutting coupons without getting ahead… until I uncovered the secret of financial gain!

9. Overview of Solution

Example: What you’ll get is a step-by-step guide to making sure your pet never does its business on the carpet again — plus dozens of helpful tips for all different pet personalities!

10. Benefits

Example:

But that’s not all…

… Because this Internet profit resource ALSO answers your every question, doubt, concern, or need about the right way to get started online.

Not only will you discover everything you need to know about getting online and making money as quickly and easily as possible, you’ll learn how to…

• Identify and find the hottest products to sell.
  
• Profit from what you ALREADY know — hobbies, offline businesses, industry expertise, and more! You’ll be amazed, shocked, and astounded at how easy it is to find and pass on important information that others want to know about!
• Avoid the #1 mistake made by 90% of Internet start-ups so you can maximize the success of absolutely ANY online business you start!
• Discover how ANYONE can use FREE and low-cost research tools to find “hungry” markets (often in less than 20 minutes)!
• etc.
• etc.

…. And you’ll also learn the #1 most profitable thing you can sell online!

11. Close

Example: When you think about it, it’ll cost you less than a cup of coffee a day… and it could change your life just like it did mine!

12. Guarantee [BeBiz comes with a variety of 'guarantee images' to choose from]

Example: Take one full year to examine and use this home remodeling course. That’s right. You have 365 days to put this valuable course to work in your own home. Or on any project you want, wherever you want. Once you’ve used these strategies in your own home, I’m confident you’ll NEVER want to send it back!

13. Ask for the Order

Example: Just click HERE to order NOW — risk-free!

14. Signature

Example: To your success, John Smith

15. PS

Example: P.S. Imagine having your parents or brother or sister visit your new, bigger home — taking them into the den… walking them over to the computer on the corner table… clicking on to your first web site and saying, “Here’s one of my businesses. It paid for this house.”

… there you have it: the 15 key sections that make up a sales letter. Now you don’t need BeBiz to help you write one of these … but it certainly seems to help (and, I know how to write sales letters already).

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a ‘preview’ section that lets me see the whole letter (yet) … I first need to build the web-site …

… let’s see how good BeBiz is at helping me do that!

Back to work!

Phew … had a bit of a cold (understatement) after a quick trip to New York (to see the Yankees beat the Whitesox before Yankee Stadium is finally torn down), but am back on my feet now.

This is not a BeBiz tutorial – it’s meant to be a site about the e-business that I am creating – but, it is an interesting/new tool so I will comment as I go along.

I have kind’a cheated on the SEO Competition step … this is the step where you review what competition for your intended product/s is out there …

… it boils down to examining the top 20 google search results for each possible keyword phrase that you identified in an earlier stage.

For me that meant looking at thousands of google results entries (and hundreds of google search results pages) … not gonna happen!

So, I cheated and don’t think it will hurt much:

I simply looked at a couple of the major keywords that seemed to have some hits and settled on “get rich” as the key ‘problem statement’ as they call it … especially since I’ve already registered the repeatuntilrich.com domain name (parked .. waiting for me to get the site up) and my eBook is already written under the same name.

From memory, I think that Ken Evoy’s ‘Site Build It!’ had an easier / better way to identify your target niche … but, that’s Ok, because this product has a place in my overall strategy (keep reading to – eventually – find out).

The good news is that after selecting my target keyword set (all based around variations of ‘get rich’) BeBiz moves on to the product stage and that took all of 10 minutes to upload my eBook and create a ‘bonus product’ (which is really just an extra page or two already written into my e-Book … so this is really a bit of ’sales letter’ fluff …

… and, I am almost ready to start writing my sales letter: this is where I expect BeBiz to shine – because that’s the hype that I bought it for …. not for my benefit, but for yours (!) … I write a pretty damn good sales letter already, thank you very much

Be an advertiser, be not an advertisee?

Be an advertiser, be not an advertisee?

Jeff left a couple of great comments on each of the past two day’s posts … I’ll leave you track down those posts and read his comments, but I thought that I shoudl share my general Jeff-inspired musings here:

Jeff suggested that I consider hosting Adsense ads on my site – and, looking for keywords that will atrract ads to my site that will pay ME a lot if people click on them …

… I may end up hosting Adsense ads on my site, but I am skeptical, because in all of my research, you have to be super-high in traffic to generate any real revenue (most blogs, for example, on pull in a few bucks a week … blogging simply does not pay, unless you are JD Roth or John Chow or a literal handful of others).

Regardless, I agree with any strategy that:

1. Pulls volume TO your site (i.e. your site pops up in the top half of the first page in Google’s results list when somebody types in [very popular keywords relating to your product], and

2. Is very cost/effective (i.e. pulls in more PAYING customers than you need to spend on advertising) when people go to OTHER sites and happen to see you Adsense ads.

In other words, I am currently working on the (hopefully, well advised) assumption that it’s a good thing to be a Google Adsense ADVERTISER.

What do you think … am I on the right track? Because this is where BeBiz seems to be leading me ….

Head down … tail up …

Well, I have been quiet here because I am in the middle of a big task that I mentioned the other day:

I have identified some potential keyword sets (e.g. business financing) and am now doing the hard slog of going through EACH of the top two pages of Google search results (that’s 20 web-sites) for EACH keywords set (and, I must have at least 20 keyword sets) … that’s hundreds of web-pages.

Fortunately, I just need to do a quick visual scan of each site that comes up (sometimes just looking at the Google summary that they provide as part of their search result is sufficient to tell me what the site is about) for each keyword/phrase (I call this a ‘keyword set’) and list the number of:

1. Free Offerings that directly compete with what I want to sell (e.g. if I want to sell an e-Book and somebody is giving away a few e-Book – or even an online article or two – on the same subject matter … it’s a bummer, if I come up with too many of these; I pretty much then know that I won’t be able to use that keyword);

2. Direct Competitors (e.g. is somebody else selling something similar to what I’m selling … not as bad, but you are still now competing instead of being in that ideal ‘virgin territory’ where everybody else is trying to sell, say, insurance and you are the only one giving away free useful information!)

3. Indirect Competitors (e.g. somebody else offering services related to your product e.g. you are selling an e-Book on sewing, but somebody else is selling a class on sewing, or a ’sewing made easy’ kit).

Clearly, you will be leaning towards the keywords that have SOME traffic and LITTLE TO NO competition …

… we’ll see how this pans out in a few days.

THEN, I have another trick (that comes from starting with a blog, as I recommended) for you

It’s working again …

The BeBiz video tutorial that I needed to watch is working again, so I can push on …

Once you have identified some candidate keywords, it’s a great idea to see:

a) How much it will cost to purchase each of those potential keywords on Google Adwords (the little ads that you see on the side of the screen when you do a Google search and/or on many other sites, as well).

b) How much competition that you have for each keyword search term.

While BeBiz has some neat built in tools for each of these, it’s quite easy to try each of these on your own:

Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool (I mentioned this yesterday) is free and very useful!

There are four great options that you should try with this tool:

1. Limit the maximum CPC (‘cost per click’ i.e. how much Google would charge you to place an ad … they charge each time somebody ‘clicks’ on the ad regardless of what they do after that) to $0.25 unless you are selling something VERY expensive!

2. If you haven’t yet thought of any good keywords, this ‘trick’ is brilliant: select the option that allows you to put in the URL of your content website (if a blog, it may only come up with blog oriented keywords) … if that doesn’t work, then do what I did … I cut/pasted most of the text from some of my posts (actually, I cut/pasted almost ALL of the text from my e-book into the convenient text box) into the text box.

The online tool will then search through your text, probably finding a ton of potential keywords/phrases (it doesn’t seem to pick up everything) and price those for you. To make sense of this information, I suggest that you:

3. Hide and/or Add columns on the onscreen report so that you now display (feel free to add more, if they will fit onscreen):

- Estimated Ad Position

- Estimated Avg. CPC

- Advertiser Competition

- Approx Avg. Search Volume

4. Now, here’s the best part: you can export to a .csv file (the one that’s readable by Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet) and play around with it offline (i.e. see which keywords are in your budget range, have reasonable search volume yet your ad will still place fairly high) … remember: the top one/two/ or three positions MIGHT get you to the sponsored links right on top of the google searches for that keyword/phrase!

Next, I recommend that you type those same keywords into Google itself and check out the first two pages of listings (approx. the Top 20 search results) that come up for each keyword/phrase to see how much direct and indirect competition that you would find for your product/s … and, more  importantly, who is offering something similar to what you are offering, but for free!

With Information Products, you might be competing with the online magazine, and article sites; they offer lots of free info that people searching (using the search terms that you are hoping will attract them to your site via your ad) for might perceive to be as useful as what you are charging for … clearly the fewer ‘free’ or even ‘direct’ (somebody else selling Information Products) competitors that you have, the better …

… ultimately, I expect that we will be looking to ‘pitch’ our site at keywords with: low CPC; few direct (and fewer ‘free’) competitors, where we might rank high in the search results and/or ad placement rankings.

But, that comes later …

Right now, I’m digging through google to check out the Top 20 search results (in exactly the manner that I described above) for about 20 or 30 keyword sets … this could take a while, but at least we are making progress!

Finding your niche ….

It may be that you don’t have a product to sell – yet!

Remember, though, I am recommending an Information Product, but who am I to say? You could sell anything you like! The process is similar to what I am slowly describing-by-doing here.

But, you may have no idea what you want to sell yet … or even know where to start …

… well, BeBiz recommends that you start by identifying some areas of interest that you have (e.g. dogs; sewing; mountain bikes) and then narrowing down to one.

I chose money-related topics (money, finance, wealth, millionaire) … you might choose ’sewing’; it’s whatever turns you on … really!

You need to be passionate about what you write (hopefully, my passion for teaching about how to make money comes through in my blogs and will come through in the test sales site that I’m creating in front of your very eyes).

If you don’t want to use a tool like BeBiz to help you with this (it costs $49.00 per month – other web-building products can cost a tenth of that!) then the stock investing book [really!] Rule # 1 Investing, by Phil Town, has a great process in the early chapters that it recommends that you use to select types of stocks that you would want to buy …

… a process that I would recommend that you can also use to find your online niche!

But, I’m using BeBiz …

It then asks you to do all sorts of cool things in order to come up with a keyword list – see an example above [AJC: what the hell is 'venal'?!]

You could probably do much of this with the various ‘free’ tools out there – for example Google’s free keyword generating tool – some of which you can access through setting up a Google Adwords account (so don’t feel obligated to buy a ‘convenience tool’ like BeBiz if you have more sense than money … unlike me!).

So, after a surprisingly short period of time (I did all of the above in an hour or two) … I am at the stage of pricing my keywords (not sure why yet … the BeBiz tutorial video on that subject refused to load) ….

Exciting, huh?

Problem Solved!

Well, I’m glad I gave BeBiz support one more try … this follow-up e-mail to the company’s ceo, Derek Gehl, summarizes the apparent problem/solution:

Hi Derek,

It seems that I am not receiving any e-mails from you as my e-mail is hosted by XXXXX.

Anyhow, I finally managed to get through to one of your support guys who has solved my problem over the phone. Please let him know how much I appreciated his great attitude!

Now, I should be off and running! I guess I need to update this post on my new blog with some good news on how great BeBiz is (well, I’m VERY optimistic about it!):

http://findoutifyoucanmakemoneyonline.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/things-are-quiet/

BTW: there is no BeBiz support option on your ‘phone tree’ yet …

Thanks & Regards,

Adrian.

Miracles do happen!

I’ll let you know what I think of BeBiz now that I can (finally) log in …

Things are quiet …

… a little too quiet

I have my first Information Product. but as yet no idea how or where I’m going to sell it, or how much I’m going to sell it for.

I have hit a ‘brick wall’ with BeBiz, the new web-building tool from the Internet Marketing Center that I was tempted to try out – in fact, have already forked over my first month’s ‘rent’ fo $49 for.

Only problem is they haven’t sent me my username or password (even though they think they have – twice!) and:

1. I can’t get through to their support line

2. They haven’t responded to my Support Ticket

3. They haven’t responded to my e-mails, including this e-mail to Derek Gehl, their ceo:

Hi Derek,

I’m creating a new web-site and have decided to (a) use your BeBiz product and (b) write a blog about my experiences as a non-internet marketer (I already have two other well-regarded blogs on Personal Finance).

Unfortunately, I cannot seems to get e-mail help to login (I did not receive the two e-mails that were supposed to contain my login id and password for BeBiz).

Also, you phone tree directs these types of enquiries back to e-mail (that’s a circular argument!) and when I call your regular support number, the agents are too busy to take my call and your voice-mail box is full!

Hardly the way to inspire confidence, is it?

Anyway, hoping that this feedback is useful and (more importantly) hoping that someone can send my Bebiz login ID + password manually to THIS e-mail address!?

Thanks,

Adrian.

Very disappointing …

… I’ll try one more time, then resort to Plan B [ hold that thought! ]

A lot can happen in 5 days …

In following this blog, there’s probably three things that you will realize about me … probably great clues if you want to be successful in your online business (hell, any business!):

1. I’m fast – because I already had the ‘raw material’ for this blog. Interestingly, I could have written this a couple of months ago, because I found all the material that I needed for this eBook in the first 3 or 4 dozen posts on my blog.

2. It only took me about 4 or 5 hours of ‘work’ (mostly playing around with the Word template and cleaning up the articles that I cut/pasted together) to create one whole (pretty small, but quite pretty don’t you think?) Information Product

… and, the most important of all:

3. I take ACTION!

Again, unlike anything else that I do (including my blogs), I am writing this in ‘real time’ – warts and all – so that you get a sense of speed, and what is planned/unplanned …

…. remember, it was only a couple of days ago that it hit me, yet here we are:

- I use the term “repeat until rich” in my blog, a lot … it seems to signify a ’system’ …. systems are ‘good’

- It would make a great domain name and wacko presto it was available and I Go-Daddy’ed it 48 hours later for a whole $10 a year

- It would make a great name for a book … or, series of books / Information Products

- Hey, I have enough content in my blog to write at least ONE eBook, so why don’t I do one NOW?

- Wow, I talk about e-businesses a lot, why shouldn’t I try and create one … AND blog about it … in REAL TIME

… as I just said: here we are just a couple of days later!

Since I have my 1st product, now I get to …. [AJC: hold that thought for today]

But, before I disappear back into couch-potato-world (for the rest of today) let me remind you that you can get started today:

i) What is it that you are always talking about?

ii) Hop onto WordPress.com (or one that accepts advertising, if that’s the direction that you want to go …. just Google – “how to create a blog” and see where that takes you)

iii) Start Writing

… in a couple of months, pick up back here (well yesterday’s post) because you, too, will have enough useful content for your own Information Product!

iv) Don’t think about it … just do it!

This is a ‘no lose’ situation and writing a blog (worst case) keeps you off the streets, doesn’t it?!

Here it is …

repeat-until-rich [CLICK THIS]

Well, here it is!

A lot can happen in 4 days (and 3 posts … if you this is your first visit, start here!) …

I’ve posted here – for FREE to readers of this blog – the first draft of my eBook – just click on the above underscored link to download it. It’s posted here FREE (don’t you just love that word?) for a couple of reasons:

a) If you read my blogs, then there’s no new material here (but a very nice and easy ‘repackaging’) so why should you have to pay for it?

But, it wouldn’t be very nice if you distributed the book because there is a commercial point to this exercise … I need to sell the damn things (to people who otherwise may not read my blogs) to prove the online business concept to you!

[AJC: be warned, though, by downloading this eBook you agree to abide by all the copyrights, terms of use, and disclaimers contained in the book! Yadayada .. etc. .... etc.]

b) You’ve read my blogs (that’s probably how you got here) – or, at least this one – so you deserve a ‘free gift’ for all the pain I’m putting you through

c) You get to proof-read it for me … for free! Thanks

There’s probably three things that you will realize about me … probably great clues if you want to be successful in your online business (hell, any business!):

1. I’m fast – because I already had the ‘raw material’ for this blog. Interestingly, I could have written this a couple of months ago, because I found all the material that I needed for this eBook in the first 3 or 4 dozen posts on my blog.

2. It only took me about 4 or 5 hours of ‘work’ (mostly playing around with the Word template and cleaning up the articles that I cut/pasted together) to create one whole (pretty small, but quite pretty don’t you think?) Information Product

… and, the most important of all:

3. I take ACTION!

Again, unlike anything else that I do (including my blogs), I am writing this in ‘real time’ – warts and all – so that you get a sense of speed, and what is planned/unplanned …

…. remember, it was only a couple of days ago that it hit me, yet here we are:

- I use the term “repeat until rich” in my blog, a lot … it seems to signify a ’system’ …. systems are ‘good’

- It would make a great domain name and wacko presto it was available and I Go-Daddy’ed it 48 hours later for a whole $10 a year

- It would make a great name for a book … or, series of books / Information Products

- Hey, I have enough content in my blog to write at least ONE eBook, so why don’t I do one NOW?

- Wow, I talk about e-businesses a lot, why shouldn’t I try and create one … AND blog about it … in REAL TIME

… as I just said: here we are just a couple of days later!

Since I have my 1st product, now I get to …. [AJC: hold that thought for today]

But, before I disappear back into couch-potato-world (for the rest of today) let me remind you that you can get started today:

i) What is it that you are always talking about?

ii) Hop onto WordPress.com (or one that accepts advertising, if that’s the direction that you want to go …. just Google – “how to create a blog” and see where that takes you)

iii) Start Writing

… in a couple of months, pick up back here (well yesterday’s post) because you, too, will have enough useful content for your own Information Product!

iv) Don’t think about it … just do it!

This is a ‘no lose’ situation and writing a blog (worst case) keeps you off the streets, doesn’t it?!