Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » business

The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money

Loren Woirhaye — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:39:16 +0000

The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes

If you’re new to online marketing and you are getting ready to launch your first real website, you need to know the following, very timely information about “web hosting”

In the next few minutes you’ll learn :

how to choose a sensible web-hosting plan and what to avoid
how to host multiple sites on one account
how to know the right time to upgrade to so-called reseller hosting
the best hosting control panel for internet marketers (in my opinion)
why a blogging platform may be your best way to get started and which platform to use

My first website was really lame and I had no clue what I was doing. I blundered through the process, wasting a lot of time but learning a bit in the process. Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about webmastering. For me, web hosting and webmastering is a means to an end, not a career. Knowing how to manage my own web-hosting empowers me to try new things as a marketer and adapt rapidly to changes in the marketplace. I also save lots of money because I don’t have to pay someone to work on any of my sites. I am the one in control, and so will you when you manage your own websites.

These days it’s a lot easier to be your own “webmaster” than it was only a few years ago. The whole process of setting up and managing websites is much more user friendly today. With a little patience you can learn to put up eye-popping websites in record time. You’ll have the ability to get an idea for a new site and have it up and getting traffic within one hour. No kidding.

Control Panels Matter (especially if you’re a beginner)

One of the things that baffled me most of all was web-hosting. I was on a Plesk host when I first started. To this day I want nothing to do with Plesk. I found it dreadfully confusing.

When I discovered C-Panel hosting things got a LOT easier. C-panel has improved since I started using it too. Now it has tutorials embedded inside it that help you as you go along. I’ll recommend a reliable C-Panel host (the one I rely on) at the end of this lesson. You can save a few bucks by using non-c-panel hosts, but I don’t recommend cutting corners. When you choose a C-panel host you’re choosing a standard that has earned a preferred position of preeminence among internet marketers.

Basic Hosting

“Starting a Website” means different things to different people. If you work for a billion dollar company, your budget may be in the millions and there will be a small army of developers, writers, strategists and coders involved in the project (plus some management types there to take credit/shift blame and basically pee on the projcet to mark their territory).

But if you’re like “Joe Average who wants to make some money on the internet”, you can launch a website for less that the price of a night out - $20 or so.

To start your internet empire with just one website or blog (which is fine) you don’t need to invest much in hosting. Less than $10 per month gets a nice plan for one website.

Dedicated Hosting is probably more than you need. If you’re starting a site with heavy bandwidth requirements, dedicated hosting may be necessary, but often shared hosting, which is very cheap, is adequate and works fine. As your needs grow you might go from basic hosting to reseller hosting to dedicated hosting. If you think you need dedicated hosting or a private server for your websites, you’ll want to get some specific education that goes way beyond the scope of this article

Multi-Site Hosting

You can usually run more than one site on any hosting plan, but there’s an awkwardness to running more than one site on a basic hosting account. Basically, you would have to set up each site as a sub-domain. Thus you would have http://site1.yourdomain.com and “site2″ and so forth. You can also do it like this: http://yourdomain.com/site1, which is making your site a subfolder of your top-level domain.

I use domain sub-folders all the time, creating a sub-folder for each product I sell on a site, for example. It’s not a bad practice at all but things can get out confusing to manage once you have more than a few sites running as sub-domains or sub–folders.

As your empire-building progresses you’ll acquire numerous URLs, which are registered domain names you own. They generally cost about $10 a year so you can afford to have a few and owning more than one has advantages I’ll explain later.

When To Choose Reseller Hosting

The next step above basic hosting is to get a so-called “reseller” account. It’s called that because you can resell hosting space to anybody you like and set them up with their own control panel. Doing this is a cool way to make some money or cover your hosting costs, but unless you really want to get into the webmaster and support business (which isn’t a bad thing but could suck your energy away from a business you’d prefer) be selective about who you sell hosting space to.

If you do sell hosting space on a small-time basis you’ll want clients with minimal support needs who just need a site that’s reliable – this way you get paid every month and don’t have to do much to earn it. You could also sell the hosting/support plan for top dollar with the value to the customer being in the support.

If you’re doing web-design or some sort of web-consulting work you might want to include hosting in the packages you offer to clients. Doing so may help clients put-off discontinuing your services because if they do they’ll have to cope with moving their hosting, which is no big deal but your clients won’t know that. Little “hooks” like this is good business strategy because they help you keep your customers in a buying cycle with you.

The Best Reason To Choose Reseller Hosting

Many website owners use reseller hosting for their own websites but don’t resell space at all.

When you choose reseller hosting you benefit because it simplifies the running of more than a couple of websites enormously. Because with reseller hosting you can create a new control panel for as many hosting accounts as you want, you’ll be able to put every domain you own on a separate account.

The first benefit is this makes site-management a cleaner process with fewer files on each hosting account, which saves time.

You’ve probably already know your time is your most precious resource in building an internet business. There are time-thieves everywhere trying to suck it away from you. Even if you are disciplined about not doing obvious time-wasters like watching a lot of YouTube videos of stupid pet tricks, your own working methods can be time-inefficient and when they are your progress will be slower.

The main reason I recommend using reseller hosting for a serious internet business is the separation of sites into invidual control panels… mostly because it saves lots of time.

If you’ve ever spent an hour combing your hard drive looking for a misplaced file, you know how frustrating it can be. Just as being organized with the files on your hard drive saves you time, using separate control panels for each domain you own does as well.

Other benefits become more obvious as you learn a little more about webmastering. Some php “scripts”, which are programs that run on a hosting account, can conflict with each other if they are on the same account but if put on separate control panels they don’t.

A Blog May Be Your Best Choice For Website #1 (and why it’s also the easiest)

When I got started I didn’t even know what a blog was. My first websites were very ugly things coded in plain HTML. Real ugly — and labor-intensive as well.

These days WordPress is perhaps the best platform to start most websites with for the serious beginner. In relation to it’s power and flexibility, WordPress is easy to learn.

With most C-panel hosting you get a feature called Fantastico which can be used to create a WordPress site in about two minutes. Fantastico won’t install the very latest version of WordPress, but since WordPress has an auto-upgrade feature you can install it from your C-panel using Fantastico and then login to your WordPress site as an administrator and just click the upgrade link to upgrade to the latest version. As of today the latest version of WordPress is 3.0.1 – version 3.0 was a watershed upgrade to WordPress that marked it’s real maturity and that’s part of why I’ve gone from being skeptical of WordPress to recommending it wholeheartedly.

WordPress is robust, flexible, and easy-to-learn. It isn’t the right system for every website, but it’s a powerful, widely used, amply supported tool that can grow with you.

Enhancing Your Site’s Core Functions

The WordPress core script is a blogging program. By adding other features, called “plugins”, you can modify it to do a huge variety of tricks. I am currently running about 20 plugins on the WordPress site I experiment with the most, and I’ve tried probably 40 or 60 and researched dozens more. In subsequent articles I’ll tell you about every single plugin I recommend and why, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’re ready to get started with WordPress, you’ll need to get a hosting account and a domain name. Domains registrars are all pretty similar (I use Godaddy mostly), but the hosting service I recommend you use is Hostgator. I’ve used them for years and the features are excellent, support is stellar and the value you get is superb.

SAVE on HOSTING: If you want to save some money on hosting you can use this coupon code to get a discount: JUSTINTIME

(of course I’ll be compensated if you sign up today through the link above)

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Earn Easy Affiliate Commissions With The Weird Paypal Merchant Bonus Referral Program

Loren Woirhaye — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:03:41 +0000

Earn Easy Affiliate Commissions With The Weird Paypal Merchant Bonus Referral Program is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

It’s hard to believe everybody doesn’t have a PayPal account, but some people don’t, and many with good reasons. Many people starting online businesses may have been buying stuff for years online without having a PayPal account. Since PayPal allows purchasing through it with a credit card but without an account login, many people will just do that when presented with PayPal as the only payment option.

I can relate, because I am account-creation averse myself and for a time had a running dispute with PayPal that prevented me from using my account but did not prevent me from buying stuff with PayPal by paying without an account login.

You can earn commissions when people sign-up for merchant accounts through your referral link. The commission has limits, but it’s probably worth setting it up if you market, as I do, to people who want to start or grow online businesses.

PayPal has a referral program that pays commissions but they make it really hard to find your link.

I had a PayPal account with a referral link a while back, but I closed it and stopped using it and opened another… I had forgotten about the referrer program and I recently stumbled on an opportunity to earn from it so I thought, “well, I’ll just get a referral link for my present account”

First - I think you need to have a business or merchant account and it probably needs to be verified. Business accounts are free and verification is free, but you’ll have to jump through a few hoops and getting it done may take a couple of days.

Second - Paypal’s instructions for getting the referral link, if you can locate the instructions at all, are wildly inaccurate. At their clearest they tell you you can find your referrer link at the bottom of ANY Paypal page. This is a lie, because as soon as you login to your PayPal account, you’ll find the referrer menu item at the bottom disappears. This is a catch-22 because the only way PayPal could give you a referrer link is if you were logged-in.

I suspect PayPal has made this hard to figure-out in order to discourage people from using it to earn commissions, or maybe it’s just a symptom of the Peter Principle at work or something.

Here’s a work-around. I have not seen this described anywhere online. Every blog or resource I found was either out of date or just dumbly parroted what PayPal says in pages pertaining to the referrer program.

Here is a workable method (as of August 2010) for getting your PayPal referral link:

Step 1. Login to your Paypal verified business account.
Step 2. Type “referrals” (without quotes) into the search box at the top and press enter.
Step 3. Completing step 2 takes you to a search results page with one results for “Login – Paypal”. Click that link and it takes you to a business account page that looks a little different from the usual page you’re used to seeing.
Step 4. Repeat step 2 (really – you have to do it again) Type “referrals” (without quotes) into the search box at the top and press enter.
Step 5. This should take you to a search results page. All the search results are pretty useless for getting your link, but if you scroll to the bottom you will find a little menu item for “referrals” and if you click on that you’ll be taken to a page that gives you a custom referrer link.

…

Oh – and here’s my link if you don’t have a PayPal account: Click HERE to sign-up for a Paypal business account

Cafepress – An Example How To Get Other People To Build A Business For You and Then Screw Them Over

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:26:16 +0000

Cafepress – An Example How To Get Other People To Build A Business For You and Then Screw Them Over is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

Here’s something interesting… and sad for the people affected by it.

When you choose to build a “business” around somebody else’s rules you put yourself in a vulnerable position.

If the company which controls the infrastructure you depend on to make your money changes the rules (usually to favor itself, not you) you could see your income drop by 50% or more.

This is apparently what has happened to “shopkeepers” at CafePress.com.

I’ve never paid much attention to Cafepress – so I had to go look at the website to jog my memory it’s about to have some context.

Cafepress has established a middleman-business, similar in some ways to what eBay does. It’s not an auction site though. What CafePress does is make prints, coffee mugs and T-shirts. Artists design these things according to their talents, set the designs up in CafePress, and split the proceeds with CafePress.

CafePress Helps Artists. Or Does It?

The benefits to the artist are many: lots of traffic because CafePress has a real marketing budget, little or no money tied-up in stock or storage space. Pretty cool deal for the talented artist/designer who doesn’t want the responsibilities of running a screen-printing operation or marketing his or her own products too much.

CafePress designs number in the 1000s. They are extremely “niched” and most I looked at were clever, funny, snarky, sarcastic, or provocative. There’s one with the Republican elephant humping the Democrat donkey, for example. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be pro-Republican or anti-right-wing. The humor is ambiguous.

In any case, there’s a clever T-shirt or coffee mug for just about everybody. Presumably racist hate speech and really offensive stuff is screened-out, but I saw a few T-shirt designs with the F-word on them, so it’s not really targeted at kids.

What’s cool about CafePress is the wide selection of cool gifts for all sorts of personalities. When you buy from it you get to support independent artists and humorists. That’s kind of cool.

Apparently for the last several years CafePress has been paying-out generous bonuses to “shopkeepers” who manage to do some good monthly volume. Nothing motivates people like more money, so shopkeepers who wanted bigger and bigger bonuses worked hard at coming up with catchy designs that sold well (great for both designer and CafePress) and also at promoting and driving traffic to their individual “shops” – sort of a CafePress boutique where each artist shows off his or her quirky vision.

As a result of rewarding the artists so nicely CafePress has built a stable of steady designers who make their full-time incomes designing for CafePress distribution and promoting their shops.

But…

A storm cloud was on the horizon.

CafePress now has a lot of clever designs that sell well and make a lot of money.

Now CafePress has decided, from what I’ve read, to pretty much whisk away a lucrative bonus structure some of their best designers were depending on for their incomes.

Cruel? or just business?

One CafePress watcher wrote on June 6th, 2009:

“Losing the volume bonus was just one example of Cafepress putting the squeeze on shopkeepers. As of June 1st 2009, the corporation just ripped 60-90% of the profits away from the very designers and artists who made them so big. There’s a mass exodus going on over there of people who have been with them for years all up and leaving. Either the corporate heads are amazingly stupid, or they are up to something devious with this short term cash grab. I speculate that they are looking to buy another company, or are about to be bought themselves. Can’t see why they’d be raiding the cash drawer in such plain view otherwise.”
SOURCE -

http://cafepressshopkeepers.blogspot.com

Copywriting – Simple words sell – how to inject action and drama into your copy

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:09:23 +0000

Copywriting – Simple words sell – how to inject action and drama into your copy is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

I don’t know about you, but in school I got by pretty well churning out reports and written tests using big words and self-important academic grammar.

For writing about ideas those stuff can be appropriate – and in the University environment readers are accustomed to such puffery. Ideas are abstract, which is why when we write about ideas in school papers the language gets complicated.

For advertising copy, chuck the write-to-impress model and get down with the common words we all use every day. If people don’t understand the word you use, you will lose them.

Write short sentences. Break up long sentences into shorter ones. Sometime this is easy. Sometimes it is not, but simplicity in communication is worth reaching for.

Try to write in concrete terms. Not abstract terms. Objects and people are concrete. Rudolph Flesch discovered that comprehension of written text increased when people were the subject matter and when their names were used.

For example: “John drove to Mary’s house and met Mary’s parents.”

The John and Mary story is boring but you know instantly what it means. Comprehension is easy because the words are common and short. Four of the words are about people, and you picture them in your mind. The verbs, “”drove” and “met” are direct an uncolorful. But watch what happens when I use one in a new sentence.

“John spurred his horse and drove the cattle towards the slaughterhouse”

Instantly vivid images spring to mind. See how that works? When you have a story to tell your choice of verbs either causes the reader to visualize the story with a flat, faceless picture when the words are un-colorful and unspecific as in the first story. The second story springs to life because of the implied motion and action in the verb “spurred” and when we read the subject of the verb, the object affected by it, a vivid picture forms in anyone who has watched more than a couple of westerns.

As an exercise try writing short, one or two-sentence stories about people, animals and things capable of movement. Try to write simply and directly, using verbs which, in the context of your stories, imply dramatic action.

Example: “John leaped into the driver’s seat and raced over to Mary’s house to meet her parents for the first time.”

Do you see how drama and hidden motives are implied? Even though the story is still generalized and dull, the use of energetic verbs of people doing things engages your interest in ways abstract ideas do not. You may be different, but immediately on reading the story as it is I invent a back-story for John’s motives, and wonder about the character of Mary’s parents – because when we say he “raced over” there is evidence of a strong motive there. When John merely “drove to Mary’s house” we know nothing of his mood and the whole story comes off as dull.

Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com

Copywriting – How To Start Making Money Right Away

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:57:25 +0000

Copywriting – How To Start Making Money Right Away is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Despite having only recently hung-out my own shingle as a writer-for-hire, I’ve been writing copy for my own business ventures, and learning a thing or two, since at least 1999. Even though my businesses until 2005 or were mostly local concerns (aside from selling old tools on Ebay), I still used copy in ads and promotional materials.

I also learned some hard lessons about how many balls you need to juggle to make it in the hard goods business. Finally I threw in the towel and went into marketing and selling stuff only instead of what I had done before, which was design, customize, manufacture, maintain machinery, pick-up all manner of heavy and awkward materials, advertise, kiss clients’ butts, install stuff, work long hours for low pay, market, write copy, try to sell, network, and generally run myself ragged trying to do it all by myself.

Did someone call me a fool?

Actually I learned a lot. I learned that owning a small business is a lot more complicated than doing the same thing just for pleasure, especially if your business involves working with clients AND physical labor.

Call me stupid. Somehow I thought that despite the hard work, cabinetmaking was somehow an honorable profession and a desirable career because OTHER people told me how much they envied what I was doing… people who made WAY more money than I did and lived in big, beautiful homes told me how grand it was for me to be an artisan, how they wished they could do such a thing themselves.

Hogwash.

Being in business for yourself is way too much work to do it without the intention of creating wealth for yourself. In this day and age, if you have the capacity, desire and mental focus to run a business you can get rich doing it.

Why not aim high?

Don’t get me wrong: I value my experiences and skills as an artisan. I just found out it wasn’t a BUSINESS I wanted to be in anymore – even though I still have a soft-spot for helping artists market and sell their work more effectively.

The one overwhelming benefit of having transformative sales copy working for your business is the way it works for you like a 1000 little salesmen – each person who reads your copy is getting a one-on-one sales presentation. This is an awesome advantage because once you have the right copy figured-out to sell a particular product you can “scale-up” your advertising and rake in the cash until you’ve exhausted the market for the time being or taken on as much business as you want according to your capacity to serve your customers.

However, unlike a lot of self-styled copywriting pundits out there I won’t tell you that the ability to write persuasive copy is a license to print money. It is only as powerful as your ability to make the kind of offers people want in the REAL marketplace, and back-up those offers with real value.

That is… if you want a real business with long-term customers and not a lot of trouble with the law. Copywriting skill CAN be used to mislead and bamboozle people. The roll it plays in a legitimate direct-marketing business is powerful and essential, but it is NOT, I believe, essential unless you are in the business of actually writing copy for clients yourself – ie. The copywriting is both the method and the product AND the customer service your provide.

Now if you are, or want to be, a freelance copywriter this is good news because it means that pretty much the whole show resides inside your head. No bulky equipment, warehouses, shuffling materials around, all the stuff that goes with the hard-goods industry.

Currently a lot of copywriting material in the current “make money in your bathrobe” frenzy goes awry telling you it’s all about writing to sell ebooks and information products.

Nothing could be further from the truth; because unless you are an information-product junkie the majority of the purchases you and most people make are for hard-goods and sales copy is actually a persuasive force which is working on you, often subconsciously, on a daily basis to affect your preference for one brand of stuff over another.

Internet marketers are supremely guilty of navel-gazing myopia – because there is a huge world of opportunity to adapt whatever marketing and copywriting skills you have into selling all sorts of hard-goods – by which I mean stuff people can hold, enjoy, touch or put stuff in without any requirement of literacy, like purebred cats, dressers, automobiles, pianos… you get the idea.

In fact, by making a study of the way all these sorts of things are sold with copy, every day, you open-up a whole new world of awareness for yourself… and writing persuasively is all about awareness – seeing and drawing attention to things most people don’t notice or think about.

If you’ve been writing copy for information products, especially in the “make money” niche, you are up against the twin forces of skepticism and very, very real competition to sell people stuff they might WANT but do not in fact believe they NEED.

In reality we don’t “need” a lot, but in a skeptical marketplace you will find it takes considerably more persuasive skill to sell “wants” like another ebook than it is to sell tangible goods. Selling intangibles can be extremely lucrative – as information products are… just don’t overlook your own opportunities to turn, for example, that old junk in your garage into hard cash by applying your writing skills to something as mundane as writing a Craigslist ad to sell your old lawnmower – you might be surprised at how writing to sell tangible stuff gets the juices flowing.

Give it a try.

Selling With Values – the secret ingredient to supercharge your business success

Loren Woirhaye — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:16:57 +0000

Selling With Values – the secret ingredient to supercharge your business success is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I am an advocate of being aggressive in your marketing – relentless.

I am also a champion of being sincere, selling with your values, following your heart.

For most people the words “selling” and “sincerity” are not ones they associate readily.

This is the fault of society, TV, your family and friends who have talked to you from both sides of the mouth your whole life.

If you listen to what a lot of people say about sales and salespeople and marketer you might think we are nothing but liars and thieves.

…and it is true that we’ve all been burned by salespeople who were not straight-up with us – and that can contribute greatly to the notion that salespeople are unethical shysters.

However – carrying such attitudes with you will do more to prevent your happiness, acquisition of wealth, and success in your own business than any other factor.

Yes, the mind can be a terrible things – especially when it is running on a program that is telling us everyday that we are doing something bad. Like trying to sell stuff to make money.

Wait!

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

After all, we all need to make money to pay our way through life, and if we make more than we need we can share it with others.

If you step back and look at it differently having more money than you need gives you the ability to bring more joy and happiness into the lives of others.

Not such a bad thing after all.

And when you think about it you realize that we all have to sell the advantages of ourselves to others… all the time. We work to impress others to get dates, put our best foot forward in social situations, and certainly a job interview is a time when you MUST sell yourself.

So selling is just part of life. It’s part of the social structure we live in.

The origin of the word “sell” has to do with “helping” or “serving” – so the ancients saw things with a little more clarity than we have today.

We all like to buy things…. yet we hate to be sold.

And we resent the people who do the selling for a living – even while we may envy the wealth
and confidence of successful salespeople somehow most of us carry around the mental refrain, endlessly cycling through your brain “I’m just no good at sales”

Believe me, friend, you need to break that pattern once and for all if you want to get ahead in the new economy.

To help you do it I am going to share some insights with you here.

I call it “Selling With Values”

To my way of thinking you really need to get straight on why it it you want to be in business for yourself.

Time freedom?
More money?
Work from home?
More time with family?

There are a lot of reasons. Some people just want to get rich and they don’t care who they hurt to get to that point. I hope you aren’t one of those people because it really isn’t necessary to lie or cheat to get ahead in sales.

In fact the liars and cheats usually suffer ultimately. It’s not good for business because word will get around you aren’t to be trusted.

It’s usually better to be on the up-and-up, admit the flaws of your product, and sell to people with contained enthusiasm but also an attitude of respect.

When you start to look at sales through a softer lens you can see it as a natural part of the human experience, and one which you can reap great rewards from yourself.