I had an interesting email this week from a reader who asked me about website design fees. This is not my area of expertise. But this reader is a very smart guy. Why? Because he knows from my ezines, blogs and web site that I’ve been online for a few years and making a decent living from it.

He’s a rabbi who has many years experience counseling people, and in particular older people. He now has made a wise decision to start offering coaching services to people, and wants to leverage the internet to find clients, sell ebooks and other programs.

He has many questions about what to do first, where to invest his marketing dollars, and how to get set up so that everything works seamlessly and automatically. Smart guy.

While I don’t profess to have all the answers to his particular questions, I want to emphasize what’s important here. He is asking questions!

Many people just go with their gut or common sense. It goes something like this:

"I need a way to find people online. Ergo, I need a web site. Who can do a web site for me, that doesn’t cost too much? Oh, you can? Only $1000. Okay, that seems reasonable. Do it."

It’s only later on down the road when they want to start an ezine, or a blog, or sell an ebook that they realize they need more than just a web site. That’s when the web designer kicks in hourly fees.

Read More→

James Roche, the Info Products Guy, spoke with our listeners Wednesday on our Conversations with Experts Teleseminar series, about creating informational products for earning passive income and for marketing your services.

He advocates audio recording teleclasses and seminars, having them transcribed and then rewriting them to turn them into stand alone products your readers can buy.

Or, if you aren’t doing classes, take one of your main services or processes that you go through with your clients and outline it to form an ebook or special report.

Whether you give it away for free as a way to get people to understand your work better, or whether you sell it for a small price, you are growing your database. You can then announce bigger ticket items to these people (the product funnel metaphor).

Here are his four simple questions to get started on an info product:

1. Why? The benefits and motivation
2. What? Just the facts, m’am
3. How? The steps in bullet points
4. What if? How to apply questions and concerns

Actually, these four steps are a good exercise when writing an article or copy for a sales letter. Benefits first, features next, list the main points or steps, and then conclude with repeating the application’s benefits and answering any other questions.

People ask me the best way to choose what to write about. I use the principle of NOW.

Ask yourself, "What am I doing NOW in my business week that would be valuable to share with my readers?" Because if you’re like me, what occupies my mind and gets my energy flowing is probably something that my clients and readers would want to know something about.

Secondly, if you write about what’s going on right NOW, you will write with energy and passion. After all, if a task or a situation is worthy of your energy and attention, you will write about it with gusto.

This week, since it is a Holiday week, there is a little bit of slowing down. Not as much as I’d like, but for the most part, I have some extra time. So I went in and rewrote a couple of my web pages, (the prices were redone, and the newsletter format options) and while there, took a look at my products and autoresponders in my Shopping Cart system.

Behold! I saw that some of my autoresponders had huge numbers of sign ups, and others hardly any. That got me to thinking, this is a good time of year to clean out the Cart. It will help me with my end of year clearance sale on articles and ebooks.

Most importantly, I can see what products and topics people are interested in, and use this info in my planning for 2006.

Presto, my next Newsletter Nuggets is all about Taking Stock of Your Stats before the end of the year. Stay tuned…I’ll write this article in a short nugget form with lots of bulleted points for all you scanners, and publish it for next Tuesday’s emailing.

If you haven’t signed up yet for Newsletter Nuggets, I suggest you do so now. Go to the home page and use the sign up form. Of, if you send a blank email to dr.patsi-45475@autocontactor.com, you will be subscribed also, but don’t forget to confirm by email request.

Dave Taylor (http://www.askdavetaylor.com/ knows a thing or two about doing business on the Internet. He has been working with computers since the 80’s. He’s written 14 books, the latest is Growing Your Business through Google (http://www.findability.info/). 

Here’s what he shared on  last Wednesday’s Conversations with Experts teleseminar:

1. Businesses can and must increase their “findability” on the Web.

2. Small businesses and independent professionals can compete with the big guys by using these tools.

3. Use keywords repeatedly, especially in headlines and first paragraph. Search engines judge the quality of a site by how many times keywords are used.

4. Blogs are a content management tool that provides quality keyword rich content. Websites need to have frequent content updates.

5. Recommended frequency of blog posts: 2-3 times a week, minimum of 250 words.

6. On the days you aren’t posting on your blog, research other blogs in your field, and leave comments.

7. RSS feed readers or aggregators is an easy way to keep current on web and blog content you like to read frequently.

8.  Find out what keywords people use to find your site through your referrer log. Use www.wordtracker.com to find which words are searched more frequently.

9. When writing, make sure your main point is repeated a couple of times.

10. Findability + readability = good business sense.

You can learn a lot from Dave Taylor, just visit some of his websites and blogs: www.askdavetaylor.com, http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

Create a Consistent Structure for Your Newsletter

A Web Copywriting Tip by Nick Usborne

Most newsletters contain a number of separate elements of content.

Maybe a few announcements, an article or review, a product or service introduction. The content varies from newsletter to newsletter.

Chances are that very few subscribers will want to read every word of each issue. And some will watch out for particular features – like the article or product announcements.

Because people will look for different elements in each issue, it is important that you help them by creating a consistent structure for each issue. Put each element in the same sequence each time. It also helps if you have a short “contents list” at the beginning of each issue.

This way people can quickly scan the complete list and click or scroll directly to the content they want to read first.

Over time, a growing familiarity with your newsletter structure will help build the loyalty of your readers, because each of them will know where to go first in order to find the information they find most useful and valuable.

For other valuable articles about writing online from Nick Usbourne, visit http://excessvoice.com/index.htm and his blog at http://nickusborne.typepad.com/.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author and speaker. You can access all his newsletter articles on writing for the web at his www.ExcessVoice.com site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at www.FreelanceWritingSuccess.com.