When I first started my online business, life was tough.

I had a demanding job in the IT industry which required working over-time, regularly.

I have wife and kids to attend to when I got home and barely 2 hours to work on my business.

Through close self monitoring and talking with different mentors, I realized that I had in fact, a lot more time that I realized to grow my business.

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It goes without saying that word of mouth is extremely important for an online business or offline business. But getting customers to tell others about your company when the right time comes, is very hard.

This is why internet businesses are easier. You can pay commissions for people to refer sales to you. Needless to say, they will be telling others about your products to everyone they know so that they can get a nice income.

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It’s the year 2011 and it’s time to start planning for this year if you haven’t already done so.

Ask yourself a quick question…”Why are you making resolutions for yourself and setting goals for your business at the beginning of the year?”

It is because you want to improve your current situation and want to use the new year as a motivator to kick you into gear.

For there is no reason why you set goals in the new year and not throughout the months when you need it.

If you want to have 2,000 visitors to your website daily as a goal, then there’s no reason not to set this goal earlier on when you thought about it.

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No matter if you’re in the online business selling ebooks, audio/video tutorials, software or in the servicing business, you will get emails or phone calls with questions from prospects.

Pay attention, because in today’s video, I talk about the biggest mistake business owners make when they answer their prospects’ questions. A lot of sales are lost because the prospect was not served the way the wanted.

I made this same mistake with my own ghostwriting business. I realized that after understanding this mistake I made and changed how I treated my prospects, I got a lot more sales.

Watch the video and see if you’re doing this mistake in your business.

You can increase your profits almost instantly and it doesn’t involve spending more on marketing. Your online business has profit leaks in it which is making you lose a lot of money. Get these leaks fixed and you could gain thousands of dollars quickly. Here are 10 ways how you can increase your online profits almost instantly.

1. Squeeze page

Have you tested your squeeze page to see if the conversion can be improved? A 5% increase in conversion rates mean an extra 500 leads added to your list per 10,000 visitors. 500 more people who you can regularly market to on your list.

2. Build your list virally

When people sign up to your list, give them a free offer if they refer 3 or more friends to your list. This will multiply the size of your list and give you more prospects to sell to.

3. Following up with customers on testimonials

Collect testimonials automatically by following up with your customers with your autoresponder. Place the testimonials on your website to increase the visitors’ confidence and sales.

4. Recruiting affiliates

Continue to follow up with customers after asking them for a testimonial. Ask them to be an affiliate of your products and services. Automate this process to build your army of affiliates and increase sales.

5. Changing headline on sales page

Change and test your headlines on your sales page. See if you can improve the number of buyers with your new headline. If you manage to get a 2% increase in conversion rates, that’s an extra 20 sales with every 1000 visitors you send to your website.

6. Leveraging your thank you page

Customers will arrive on your ‘Thank You’ page after they bought your product. Use this ‘Thank You’ page by telling them about your other services, or other products which you’re an affiliate of. Since the customer is focused on reading your ‘Thank You’ page, don’t waste the opportunity.

7. Using your confirmed opt in page

Do the same with the webpage confirming that your prospects are signed up to your list. Sell them your other services while they are on your website reading your confirmed opt-in message. You have their attention so start selling to them.

8. Survey your list

With your list of subscribers, send them a survey asking for their opinion. Ask them what they think of your products and services and what they would like to buy. With the feedback, see if there are any new products you need to create or changes to be made to your existing business.

9. Monitoring your marketing

Make sure you monitor your marketing results. Know which adverts are effective and which are not. Focus on doing the type of marketing that is bringing you results and removing the ones which are not. You could be currently using a marketing channel which is not getting you any results.

10. Increasing your price

It is very possible that you can increase the price of your products and services and have no effect on the number of sales. Try it and see. Gradually increase your price until it decreases your profits. Look for the sweet spot where you have the most expensive price possible.

These 10 techniques won’t take up a lot of your time but they will give you almost instant results. Improving your online business internally is one of the best ways to increase profits before you consider spending more on your marketing.

Any internet marketer who’s been running an online business will tell you that there are a lot of tasks to do. This means that multi-tasking is necessary. Entrepreneurs regularly perform several tasks because they have so much to do.

But multi-tasking is bad. It delays your progress and quality. Instead of completing one task before the next one, internet marketers will try to complete 3 tasks at the same time.

Firstly, none of the tasks are done properly because not one of them is being focused on.

Secondly, concentrating on doing one task first, will actually increase the progress. Try it if you don’t believe it to be true.

So why is it that we are in the habit of doing many things at the same time with our online business?

The reason is because:

- we think we can do it
- we think that everything is important
- we get distracted by other tasks

For example, if you want to create a squeeze page to build a list, you would:

- create a free offer first
- build the squeeze page
- set up the autoresponder messages
- drive traffic to it

The average internet marketer will do all 3 of these tasks at the same time. The only reason for you to do several tasks at the same time is if you are outsourcing.

eg. hire a ghostwriter to create your report, hire a graphic designer to create your squeeze page while you write the autoresponder mesages.

If you are not outsourcing, then focus on completing one task first. Oh yes and ignore all the latest offers or other distractions which don’t help your particular task which you’re doing.

Using the above list of tasks, do them in order. You’ll find that:

- you’ll complete the tasks quicker
- the tasks are complete with few mistakes
- and your squeeze page will convert better (due to the time you spent on describing the benefits why people should sign up to your list).

Remember, outsource your online business tasks if you want to multi-task, take it one step at a time if you’re doing everything by yourself.

Building an email list is the primary task of any business. One of the biggest mistakes I made when I started my online business was neglecting my list building task.

For some stupid reason,  I thought that list building was not suitable for my business. Well I was wrong. Building a list is “a-must” for any business you’re in. If you disagree, tell me your example of a business by commenting below.

What a lot of people don’t understand is a lot of visitors don’t buy with their first visit to their website. They may like your product and prefer to shop around to find a better offer. After a while, they will forget about you.

If you have them on your email list, you can regularly send them useful information and keep reminding them that they can purchase aproducts or services from you.

You need to continuously remind your prospects that you exist and that they can buy from you when the time is right for them.

Here’s a video I made on 5 places you can build a list from for your online business. Don’t say they are obvious if you haven’t implemented them in your business.

Enjoy the video.

Here’s an article which I wrote a few weeks ago and is on the Ezine Articles as the one of the most viewed in the last 90 days.

You can check out the link here ==> Create A Profitable Business Using Ghostwriters

Below is the actual article I wrote.

How to Create a Profitable Business Using Ghostwriters
By Alan Cheng, Elite Ghostwriters

Create information products to solve people’s problems is one of the most profitable and easiest online business to be in. It’s much cheaper than setting up a traditional brick and mortar business. A digital information product doesn’t need you to keep an inventory and you profit the full 100% for every product you sell. Here’s a business plan of how to start this business.

1. What Information Products To Sell?

The best type of information products to sell is ebooks, where the content is delivered in a PDF format. However, instead of creating information products to sell in different niches, you need to focus on one niche. Make this decision on what niche you want to focus on before proceeding further.

For example, in the self-help niche, you can create information products on public speaking, self confidence, anxiety, anger control, build better relationships etc…

2. Getting Ideas

Since this is a business you’re running, you need to be serious. You need to study the niche and become an expert. Go to fourms and understand what problems people have. Read magazines and see what topics are related to your niche. Read newspapers and see what relates to your business.

If you do this, you will should have no problem coming up with ideas on what information products to create. Make a list of ideas regularly and choose the best one to start working on when it’s time to create a new information product.

3. Create The Information Product

Your next step is to create your information product. If you haven’t written an ebook before, go and buy an ebook from your competitors and see how they layout the ebook and the content that’s inside.

Do some research online and write your own information product. Make it something you’re proud to sell. Start off by writing your own information product first. You can hire a ghostwriter to do this task for you later on when you see how the business works.

Alternatively, hire a ghostwriter right away if you absolutely hate writing or you don’t have the time for it.

4. Packaging

This is what makes your information product sell. People will want to buy your product if the packaging is good. This means the design of the website needs to look professional and your sales copy needs to be convincing.

If you have no experience in writing sales copy and if you are not good at creating graphics, get them outsourced. This is a must!

As I said, it is the packaging that will make prospects buy from you. Some ghostwriters are experienced in creating information products online. Try to find one that will deliver a complete service including the sales letter and website design as well as ghostwriting the ebook.

5. Getting Traffic

Once your product is ready, it is time to drive traffic to it. Here are 3 ways how you can drive traffic to your website to test the response.

1. Write articles

Write about 10 good articles on your niche that is related to your information product. Again, if you don’t like writing, you can outsource this to your ghostwriter. Submit these articles to article directories and ezines.

The articles will get you backlinks to rank your website higher in the search engines and get visitor to your website. Articles are excellent in increasing your exposure.

2. Blog and Forum Commenting

Make a list of blogs and forums which have good traffic and are related to your niche. Take time to comment on them regularly with a link to your website.

Offer valuable advice and don’t advertise your information product otherwise people will think you’re a spammer. Just have a link to your website. This will enable you to “steal” some of the traffic from other websites.

3. Pay Per Click

Use pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN. Create some ads and drive traffic to your website. Monitor how well your information product sells.

6. Create an Affiliate Program

Create an affiliate program for your information product either by submitting it to Clickbank or use PayDotCom. Let people know they can promote your information product for commissions of 50% or more.

7. Collect Your Contacts

Always collect email addresses with everyone who comes in contact with you – Your visitors, your affiliates and your customers.

8. Repeat

Now you can just repeat the whole process with a new information product that focuses on the same niche.

However, once you’ve created the information product, you can email to the list which you have. The prospects and customers may buy this product from you if the previous one was good. Affiliates will want to promote your new product since they will earn more commissions.

The more information products you create, the bigger your 3 lists will get. After several information products you may have several thousand people on your list. Sending an email to them about your new product could produce thousands of dollars without doing any promotion of your own.

Following the business model above, if you sold an information product for $37 and 1,000 members of your list bought from you, that’s $37,000 in sales instantly. Don’t forget that your product will continue to sell as long as your website is there. The critical success factor is the professional ghostwriter you hired to create your information products.

About the author
Download the report How To Build Your Own Information Products Business at create information products. If you want to outsource your information product creation, visit hire a ghostwriter – Alan Cheng, CEO of Elite Ghostwriters