Family dollar application online
Tired of paying the up-front, thirty-five dollar “administration” fees for information on grants charged by so many websites? Sick of running into scam after scam while looking for free government grant applications online? With access to 1,000 grant programs (totaling over $500 billion annually), Grants.gov is an ideal place to begin searching for free government grant applications online. Take note though, while finding information on the site is simple, to apply for a grant you must register with Grants.gov. For an individual, this process can take up to one business day. Grants.gov also provides applicant resources, including the ability to track grant applications online.
Credit Federal hosts a multitude of free resources for government grant applicants including access to the online federal grants catalog. Additionally, free government grant application forms and instructions are posted online, most in either Microsoft Word or PDF format. Funds net Services Online contains a plethora of government funding resources including direct links to state and federal funders. Additionally, most of the linked websites include grant eligibility requirements, free government grant applications, and funder contacts.
Prefer software for your home computer over online searches? Government Grant Solutions will send a free grant software kit directly to your door. As anyone who has glanced at grant information online knows, navigating through different grant programs and eligibility rules can be tough. Finding a free resource, whether a website or home software, to assist in the process is imperative to success. Free access to government grants and free government grant applications do exist.
The Easiest
Step by Step Guide
To creating your own Online Business
Another product from www.durban-property-searcher.co.za
Index of contents
Introduction
- The Step by Step Process
Step 1: Developing a website using a Free Website Builder
Designing your first page – The Index or Home Page
Step 2: Choosing your Product
Designing your product
Step 3: Giving your business a name
Securing a domain name for your website
Step 4: Marketing your product and generating traffic to your website
The general types of Online and other Marketing
Internet Marketing
Direct Response Marketing
Direct Mail Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Generating Traffic to your Website and Products
Foundational Business Building
Articles
Viral Marketing
Free advertising sites and Bulletin Boards
Back links from other sites
RSS Feeds and RSS Feed Aggregators
Search Engines
Click bank
Some additional Information on using Google Ad words for Affiliate Marketing
Step 5: Keeping up to date with New Trends and Product Improvement
Some more great ideas for promoting your products
Search Engine Optimization
Google Analytics
Google Ad words
Google Ad sense
Step 6: Support Systems for your Product
Opting pages and lead capture pages
Building your list of clients
Thank you pages
The Sales Page
E-books in general
Creating your own e-book
Some tips and hints in your marketing campaigns
This product
Copyrighting your product
Legal Notice
Adherence to all applicable laws, local and otherwise, governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising and all other aspects of doing business in South Africa or any other jurisdiction is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader.
Well, first off, congratulations on downloading this step by step guide to creating and starting your own online business.
In a nutshell, we will explain how to setup your very own business online and also give those of you who simply do not have the time at present to create the business, the easy format of selling this product. For the time being, we are going to focus on the actual step by step business model of creating your own product, or building your website around your chosen product, in this e-book. When you follow the blue link to Bluevoda, you will arrive at the home page and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will find the discussion and assistance section to take you to the free website builder which we will be using in our business. This E Book product is the result of years of research into an ever expanding business known as internet marketing.
In order to make this product successful, it was an essential element to establish the website on which you have found this product.
Why should I have to pay Dollars for a product that could potentially be available in the South African market for a fraction of the price?
I decided to set about creating an online business template that could be applied very easily if one had access to the same information that I had gathered over the years.
Well let’s get started in setting up our new online business.
An internet connection
Step 1. Firstly we will figure out how to build an online central place where all our clients can be directed to in order to purchase our product. We will do this by using our free website builder Bluevoda (click here to see). Try and read the whole book first before clicking.
Step 2. We will need to decide on our product or products. Don’t worry if you have not thought of one yet, because you may change your mind as your business takes shape.
Step 3. We will need to name our business in order to refer to it in our marketing and defining our online links back to the website.
Step 4. We will need to provide marketing for the product to create awareness of its availability. This needs to be cost effective or free in order to get your business going.
Step 5. Step 6. We will need to make the purchase for our customer as convenient and easy as possible by automating our website and product system. This will be our product support system.
3. Step 1 – Developing a website using a free website builder
Most people will choose something they know in order to have little problem in creating the product review and marketing of the product that follows later. Read on.
For example you will need to have a “contact us” section, a newsletter or articles section, other sites of interest, space for your heading and site name. Whilst researching on the internet you will get some great ideas from other websites in terms of interesting click options in the menu bar on the left hand side or top of the page. Type in your intended product and do a search in the search engine. See what the top 10 “page 1” ranked websites are using in their index (home) page.
Remember to allocate a section of each page to Google advertising and possibly some advertising space in the top right corner for the companies whose products you are offering or some supplementary products to your main product. For example, if your hobby is to make moulds of tin soldiers, you may wish to have paint supplies, brushes, holders for the finished product, magnifying glasses, and tweezers etc. as your additional products. You will be amazed at how many suppliers will be interested to be a part of your product marketing campaign.
If you have a site with good content to visitors, the amount of traffic you are generating through your site will be of particular interest to companies who offer products that are complimentary in nature to the products you are selling. You can now offer advertising space. Once you have read through the Google Analytics section explained later, you will understand how the search engines will monitor the type of traffic through your site and offer their clients advertising space in the Google Adverts section of your website pages.
This is now your second revenue stream from your website. The first source being your actual product you intend to sell. We have all been zapped suddenly by some sort of advert for an online casino or similar site which changes the whole experience of a site. You are able to prevent these adverts by notifying Google of the types of adverts you wish to exclude from being allowed to display on your website. This step is done when inserting the code into the website for the Google Ad sense facility.
There are many free web-builder sites on the internet that will allow you to download a free program, to use to design your new website. We have chosen BlueVoda due to its offering of the free programs needed for this business as opposed to using other web builders which need you to purchase the add-ons separately. Using Bluevoda as your free Website Builder
The software needed is free to download.
You can register a South African domain name locally and then utilize an overseas company for your web-hosting. We believe this to be the best method as the overseas companies have larger servers than South Africa and can offer unlimited uploading and downloading for your website.
The web-hosting facility does not have a limit on the bandwidth that can be uploaded to their server, thus not restricting the number of pages on your site as most South African hosting companies do. BlueVoda allows your customers to download or display as many pages as they wish without it costing you any difference in your monthly subscription.
Most South African web hosting companies will not provide this and it is costly to acquire locally. On BlueVoda it is free.
They also send regular emails notifying you of functions you may wish to add to your site.
Spend some time going through their templates until you find one that works well for your intended product or design one from scratch. Please remember to make your site as easy to navigate as possible and get an unbiased opinion from a friend or family member if your color choices are easy on the eyes to read. 4. Step 2 – Choosing your Product:
The Right Product will have the following Characteristics
Potential customers want the product so badly, they will respond to almost any advertisement that offers it. Simple free or low cost advertising will suffice.)
(Customers value the product so highly; they are happy and eager to pay your price.
The product appeals to people who have money and who want to spend it right now. The product itself should require no support from you and should be very self sufficient for the customer. You can easily double or triple your profit margins this way as you introduce additional products to your offering.)
It happens that as mentioned above, your customers are now more confident in your delivery that your back end products are more successful than your front end product.
So now you have a potential product and a website in progress. 5. Step 3 - Giving your business a name
Securing a domain name
There are many websites which enable you to reserve and purchase domain names. Although some web-hosting companies do offer a free domain name, it is a lot easier to renew your web domain annually from a local domain registrar and to receive post locally. 6. Step 4 – Marketing your Product
The 3 General Types of Online Marketing:
You are not limited in terms of how you would like to market your product or products, however, I would recommend that you choose one and try to master it in order to exhaust all the potential opportunities that each type of marketing has and then implement them into your marketing campaign.
The type of product you have chosen may determine which method would be of more value in its ability to send your prospective clients to your website. You may have different tactics for each product, but remember that the end result is the customer arriving at the place your product is available.
Remember that once you have isolated a winning formula it will become easier to implement each campaign collectively and let your business run on auto-pilot. We want each product to maintain itself so that you can then duplicate the result with another product. You may learn something on your next product that will increase the potential of your first product. We want to know that each business idea is only the cost of the hosting each month which should not cost more than R 100.00 plus Vat as we can design our sites now for free. Internet Marketing
The internet is a priceless form of marketing in that anybody can offer their products to a world market. What I mean here is that your product may be found by a customer on the internet in 5 years from now and if you have created your business to accept them as a client indefinitely, they will still be able to generate a profit margin for you. Direct response Marketing
You may now include the option to purchase your product at the end of your information presentation of the product. Most websites will have a page that allows a customer to opt in to a mailing list for future contact. You may have a newsletter that you wish to send out to your mailing list with your latest products. As your business grows, you will need to surround yourself with the right systems to take care of your business when you cannot. Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail marketing could be the only method that you decide to use in your campaign if you need to market directly within your neighborhood. Your product may be such that you have a well established network already and just need to direct these potential clients to your new website. By capturing the market and directing them to your website, they are able to consider their purchase in comfort and obtain the important aspects of the product. Most consumers rarely buy on first inspection unless they already know the product. Try not to sell within your marketing campaign. Traffic to your website is the key to its success.
Affiliate marketing
The basic principle of affiliate marketing is such that a company or individual provides their product to a marketplace whereby affiliate marketers are able to offer such product to consumers in exchange for a percentage of the sales price received by the company/individual selling the product. In essence an affiliate marketer will carry the risk in terms of advertising costs and use various internet marketing strategies to channel potential buyers to where the product is offered.
In South Africa there are currently only two companies that I would recommend as having properly entered the market in terms of offering local South African internet affiliate marketers a Rand based product that they could sell. We will briefly discuss Click bank as an overseas marketplace to source products, purely for information purposes. Some of the products mentioned on Offer forge and Traffic Synergy, you may recognize from www.durban-property-searcher.co.za. It is a good idea to decide for yourself which of the advertisers you wish to exclude from your website as some of them may not be relevant to your product offering and may discourage your customers if they feel that the adverts are confusing to your site content. As the site that I have developed is a business site and is reliant on a specific provincial marketplace, it is suitable to offer air flights and accommodation advertisements on the website. You have paid advertising space being assigned on your website by Google through your Ad sense campaign. You have the actual product sales themselves which have increased by using your various advertising campaigns. We have also covered a means to build a client base for continual sales of additional products by using the auto-responder.
7. Generating Traffic to Your Website
Foundational Business Building
Foundational Traffic is more time consuming to do, but is extremely effective at delivering really qualified traffic to your business. Articles:
Article marketing is a way of marketing yourself as an authority online. When you are promoting your business products using internet based marketing techniques, you are able to redirect traffic online to your business website where you then make sales. Always remember to try and use an information capture sheet on your website to enable you to record the details of the visitors to your website. What is your business about?
This is one of the easiest things to write about because it is highlighting your core products and the business that you offer people. People like to read articles of interest from likeminded people. It is always wise to choose a product that relates to your passion easily. There are many reasons for which you should create articles as a direct marketing technique, but the most common is probably for a boost in site traffic. Remember that if you are already writing them for discussion groups, you may as well not duplicate the work, but save them to a section of your website called “other topics of interest” or the likes.
When writing your article it is sufficient to include your keywords in your article title in order to promote the ranking of your article in the search engines. The idea is not to spam the search engine with multiple keywords, but merely show validity of your article and the search engines will do the rest to promote your article to those searching for your keywords. Try and include the page reference of your article in your website or your blog. www.Ezinearticle.com
www.Goarticles.com
www.Articledashboard.com
www.Searchwarp.com
www.Articlebase.com
www.Isnare.com
www.Selfgrowth.com
www.Buzzle.com
www.Articlecity.com
www.Ideamarketers.com
www.Articlealley.com
www.Web-source.net
www.Selfseo.com
www.Amazines.com
www.Articletrader.com
www.Searchguild.com
www.Webworldindex.com
www.Articlesphere.com
www.Businessknowhow.com
www.Promotionworld.com
www.Articlesfactory.com
www.Excellentguide.com/article
www.Contentdesk.com
www.Articlecube.com
www.Articlebiz.com
Blog is a shortened word for web log. The reason why a blog is such a great means to market your products and services is that you are able to reach a wider audience, build a community of loyal readers, interact with them, create market awareness and even enter into a bit of pre-launch hype for your products.
This clearly shows that a Blog is more than an online diary. Blogs work as a marketing tool because they are interactive. This communication process turns the Blog into a forum and discussion platform which allows you to showcase your expertise in a certain field and discuss your products and your business.
Your Page ranking on the internet search engines will improve and you will be able to ensure that you stay in the top ten on the first page so that your customers will be able to find your site effortlessly.
As with your articles, you may wish to submit your blog entries for reference to the search engines which may generate traffic as people read your blog posts on other sites. Some webmasters may choose to use your articles as content. This signature will send highly qualified and interested clients to your products and website.
www.Squidoo.com
www.Hubpages.com
www.Wetpaint.com
www.Bumpzee.com
www.Quizilla.com
www.Experienceproject.com
www.Clipmarks.com
www.Blogowogo.com
www.Weebly.com
www.Tumblr.com
www.Terapad.com
www.Pownce.com
www.Jaiku.com
www.Usfreeads.com
www.Scribd.com
www.Slideshare.net
As a means to create extra signatures referring traffic back to your products. The search engines will credit your website with better page ranking as they find more and more sites with your website name on it as it shows qualification in your content written.
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is the internet term given to word of mouth type of marketing by those who have found interest in your articles or products and is by far the best method to increase exposure of your product. If you are writing sincere product reviews for your products in your blogging and article campaigns, you will most definitely have others on the internet placing great value on what you have written and thus receive many links to your page and indirectly boost your page ranking in the search engines for your product.
Free advertising websites and Bulletin Boards
There are too many sites to mention and it would be easier to find those in your home town or area of your target market by just typing free classifieds into the search engine and adding your town name thereafter.
Back links from other sites
There are various companies who offer an exchange link system or often called reciprocal links which you can obtain to increase the number of links pointing back to your website. This is a means of search engine optimization and does help to a certain degree in increasing your page ranking in the search engine for certain keyword searches which will put you in the top 10.
See which back links your opposition have on their website and approach the same or similar companies for their assistance in linking to your site. RSS Feeds and RSS Feed Aggregators
The easiest blog or discussion template to use is probably the one that comes free with the BlueVoda Web builder package which is a word press blog platform. The platform has numerous plugs in products available for free in cyberspace and a simple search will reveal this plug-ins which allows customization of the function and appearance thereof.
If you are using a word press blog, your feed address is simply;
www.yoursite.co.za/blogdirectory/feed
Where “your site” is the name of your website and “blog directory” is the name of the directory where your blog is located on your website. For page naming, there is a wonderful tutorial in the BlueVoda web builder.
Search engines
Just Google Search engines and sees what comes up. Gum tree. If you have not heard of the free advertising newspaper publication or classifieds website, you are missing out on a load of free advertising. You don’t need to be extravagant with your advertising budget to generate interest in your products.
Click bank
Click bank was possibly one of the first and most popular marketplaces for affiliate marketers to use on a regular basis to obtain products for their Google Ads campaigns. It was found however, that during the compilation of this e-book, the majority if not all of the products offered on Click bank are for the overseas market. By this statement we mean that as mentioned earlier, it is extremely difficult as a South African to attempt to sell a product on a local website that is paid for in Dollars. If you have decided to use a .com website address as opposed to a .co.za website address, then Click bank might appeal to you as you are able to use a .com address a lot easier in the international marketplace. The product you have chosen may be easily accepted by international consumers and as such it may make no difference if your secondary products are sold in Dollars.
If you are interested in the affiliate type of marketing, then a simple entry of your desired product followed by the words “affiliate program” or “associate program” will reveal companies that offer affiliate marketers the opportunity to market their products.
Some additional information on using Google Ad words for Affiliate marketing
Google Ad words are the short 4 line advertisements as mentioned earlier which you may wish to allow Google to display on your website for an additional revenue stream. Some of these adverts are placed by internet affiliate marketers attempting to direct traffic to a site where a product is sold. The affiliate marketer is paid a commission for each sale that the owner of the product makes. In the same way that a searcher uses keywords to find the relevant pages for their search in the search engine, the affiliate marketer will pay a certain amount to have their advert displayed on the side of the page for that particular set of keywords or a website allowing Google Ad sense.
The Google Ad words service works on a bidding system whereby the affiliate marketer will bid a certain number of cents and sometimes Rends for highly successful keywords, for each time that someone clicks on their advert.
Keyword search tools such as
www.overture.com
www.wordtracker.com
www.googlekeyword.com
www.keyworddiscovery.com and
www.keywordelite.com
You can also use this sales copy landing page to build your list for backend sales. Log in at www.durban-property-searcher.co.za/online-marketing-discussion-forum.html
8. Step 5 - Keeping up to date on New Trends and Product Improvement
www.maketingterms.com- Online Marketing terms and useful links
www.seochat.com – SEO forum and see tools
www.searchenginewatch.com – search engine optimization
www.alltop.com – a site focusing on current world buying trends http//:tools.seobook.com – a site on keyword analysis for your marketing campaigns
www.blogger.com – a free blogging platform
www.iblog.co.za – a free South African blogging platform
www.blogspot.com – a free blogging platform
Some more great ideas for promoting your products
Create a review page for the products you are selling so that you can write a bit about each product. This product review behaves like multiple sales pages all rolled into one on a single review page. Your customers could be able to rate or rank your choices of a selection of products. The interesting thing is that all the products sell, just some better than others. It’s all good for your business. This allows you to sell similar products without being biased to your customers. If you are using affiliate programs for your secondary products, make sure to carry out your research on the products home pages or even purchase and test them before hand to enable you to write honestly about them.
If you set up one review page on your website a week and of the 7-10 products on that review page even one of the products is effective and sells, you get a passive income of let’s say R500 per month and you do this for a year, by the end of year 1 you will have 52 review pages on your website with say an average of R500 per month from each review page, you now have a passive income of R26 000 from 52 review pages per month and climbing. Once you have the formula, you merely plug in and play the products.
You will recall that it is not merely the number of products you have though, but the act of creating the marketing support for those review pages by talking about them in your articles.
Search engine optimization
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is more commonly known, refers to the ability for the search engines to find your website and provide it in the first page of a search for your clients to be able to find you easily if their keyword search describes your product.
Search engines allocate a page rank to your website as and how it determines the relevance of your content and products to be for those specific keywords. This means that for a specific set of keywords, your website may appear on page 1 and for a different set of keywords; your website may be found on page 100. This has given rise to a culture of trying to ensure that your website is optimized to appear at the top or on page 1 of all search keywords relating to your product or content.
Once you have read the section on Google Analytics you will have an understanding of page ranking with search engines. The customer wants to know that it is easy to navigate and find the suitable subject related content for which they might be searching without being directed to another site where your product can be found. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the means by which Google is able to monitor the amount and type of traffic which reaches your website. Originally it was an internet company which offered this service for a small fee to website owners in order to ascertain where their customer base was originating from and what type of customers they were. This tool was eventually bought by Google and is now offered as a free service in order to improve their offering as a search engine.
Once your website is place on the World Wide Web, it is imperative that you sign up for this free service as it is able to provide you with a tremendous amount of helpful and useful information regarding your customer base and visitors to your site. The system works by a code which Google provides to you on signup which is implemented into each page on your website. You will also want the Search engine to know immediately of any new content which you have placed on your website. Imagine if at the same time a search engine user is typing in their keywords, you have just uploaded a new product catalogue which has the product which they are searching for; you would want them to know about it. I love it and it’s free to all website owners.
Google ad words
If you were to search for an item or subject matter on Google for example, you will notice a shaded area at the top of the search results. There are usually only three websites listed for each page of search results. These website owners are making use of a tool offered by Google which provides a bidding system for each of the keyword (search words) that you have typed into the search bar in order to arrive at the resultant website list. The tool is called Google Ad words and is available to anybody who wishes to pay per word that users may use to find their product. Over time this can build awareness for your website, but can be a costly exercise if no sales are made to counteract the cost of Ad words advertising campaigns. Google ad sense
9. Step 6: Support systems
In order to be successful in business, it is imperative that as you grow your business, you start to implement systems which will improve, if not maintain, your levels of service and quality to your customers. If for example you are spending time in a banking hall queue unnecessarily, you may decide to implement internet banking in order to carry out your business at home. It is also critical to understand that if your product is downloadable, it is a benefit to a customer who wants it now. This reason is why many online sales are focused on internet based products or product delivery handled by a third party.
The idea is that you continuously research and find better methods for running your business and also try to establish contacts who think similarly to you in terms of business. You don’t have to have had prior business experience to recognize a good idea or a potential product.
Opt in pages and Lead Capture Pages
The basic idea of the opt in page is to build your data base of clients and their email addresses to enable you to keep them updated on any new product offerings that you have, any new ideas or even as a support mechanism for the products they have purchased from you. We will need to create a page for this using a page creator asking for their name and primary email address.
Use www.instantsqueezepagegenerator.com to build squeeze pages and use one of their free offers to get the opt INS or use www.resalerocket.com for free giveaways.
You may also try to use re-brand able e-books and products so that you can insert your own affiliate links to have multiple potential sales portals around cyberspace as you build your own business. Get tips on how to design your squeeze page for maximum use by visiting some of the Google Ad sense adverts in your product field. Try to identify the call to action and see if they have used a nice picture of the product etc.
Building your list
Thank you pages
Let your new clients know you have an open door policy by providing a personal email address or help line for your products.
The Sales page
Your products should never be sold in your marketing campaigns. Always try to have a sales page on your website incorporating the information regarding the purchase process of your product.
The sales page is your call to action for your client. They are on your sales page because they have shown an interest in your articles or content. Give them the facts and the instructions necessary to purchase your product. 10. Tips for your email auto responder
After your first email, you need to try and gauge at what stage your subscribers or customers will be in your product offering.