E-mail VS The WebWritten by David Bell
What Works Best for Selling Online? Email or Web Pages? Good question right? I always thought so! That is until I went through my little learning curve. I can save you from same lessons if you have a few moments... You see, I do a ton of classified advertising on net. I utilize ezines, AOL, newsgroups (carefully thru my sig), and many web sites. I also use targeted direct email although I'm extremely picky in this area. So why is it that all everyone talks about is banner ads? Click thrus, CPM, page impressions, etc., . How about folks like me that can't afford to slam down a few thousand bucks each month to have my banner pop up on Yahoo every time someone types "Internet Marketing". Now don't get me wrong here, banners are great and I rely on banners to drive traffic to my site too. But fact is, a large part of my marketing campaign revolves around simple effective classifieds and I am not alone. It's cheap and it works. That's why I've decided to pass along results of my "research" as I like to call it. (Learning curve is a little more honest!) My question was this: Should I be using my URL, or my email address when advertising with classifieds and direct email? Before my web site existed it was pretty much a no brainer. I used my email address in my classifieds until I smartened up and got some autoresponders. AR's made much more sense for two simple reasons: They allowed me to do MUCH less work and my prospects received my sales letters almost instantly, which always results in more profits. Then I finally migrated to World Wide Web and had a URL to use in my classifieds. I immediately "upgraded" my ads to allow people to find my new web site. (Maybe I was a little too proud of it!) I figured why bother with autoresponders any longer when I could show them color, sound, and graphics.
| | Increase Sales with Payment Solutions Written by David Bell
Take a second and imagine your shopping on a website, find product you've been looking for, and as you go to order form to purchase it, you find out that company doesn't accept payment online. Instead, you must mail a check. If you were like me, you would probably click off site and search for another company that offers same products and *does* accept payment online, whether it is by credit card or online check. It doesn't take a super, intelligent person to realize that it is inconvenient, time consuming, and adds on lag time till you get your purchase when you must sit down, write out a check, and mail it. That is why it is extremely important that you offer some type of online payment solution for your e-business. Accepting credit cards is most well known way to accept payment on Internet. Almost everyone has a credit card and by accepting his or hers, it makes customers' ordering process much more convenient and time saving, not to mention it encourages them to purchase from you. Accepting credit cards has become a necessity to survival of e-businesses. In order to accept credit cards, you're going to need a merchant account. To obtain one, just do a search on your favorite search engine. You will be provided with a list of many different merchant account providers to choose from. Merchant services contract with several merchant-processing banks that will actually accept and process your business transactions. For each transaction bank processes, you will be charged a discount rate, or percentage, of face value of amount charged, along with a per transaction fee (usually ranging from $0.20 to $0.30). When you perform your transaction, and receive an authorization number, charged amount is immediately wire-transferred out of your customers' credit card account into your merchant account. The merchant bank will then discount, or deduct, percentage rate and per transaction fee, and wire-transfer balance of charge into business checking account of your choice. At end of month, you will receive a statement, for your records, so that you can balance your account. There are three ways to perform transactions: 1. Terminals/Hardware 2. Point of Sale Software 3. Real-Time (Automatic Online Transactions)
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