Level Two Tutorials

First Tutorial

We will be adding to this as your questions come in. Please feel free to email tom@netaim.info and if your question has common appeal to intermediate members, it will appear in this section, however, your questions will still be answered personally for the next 5 days even if they don’t appear in this section.

I have booklets that I would like to sell on the web.  Do I need any tool, other than adobe acrobat to turn it into a sellable file?
To create ebooks we use Microsoft Word and then Adobe Acrobat to create the pdf file. We don't use any fancy ebook programs because many of them finish the book off in .exe format. People will be afraid of this kind of file because of viruses and they beginners will most likely  mess up the download.

 I want you to create quality ebooks as opposed to the junk you see all over the Internet. This won't take any more software to do a nice job.

 Listen to my free audio training session at http://www.Public-Speaking.org/holidaygift.htm

Tom, I have a web site running but am at a loss on how to promote it.  I am in the process of developing courses on CD that can be ordered from the site, but I'll still have the same problem.  How do I promote my site?
Before I promoted it at all, I would fix some of the obvious mistakes on the site. What's the use of driving traffic if you send them to a place that does a poor job of converting them to buyers?  I made these mistakes when I first started so don't feel bad.

I suggest the book "The Non Designers Web Book" by Robin Williams (not the comedian) also you might consider the famous book "Web Pages that Suck"

Here are just a few of the things you are doing that are not considered professional.

1. Forcing people to look at your page in certain screen resolutions.  . . . Yes, I know you see this on all kinds of sites. That doesn't mean they knew what they were doing.

2. Scrolling text. This adds a lot of junky code to your page and is hard to read.

3. Fancy, non-standard navigation system.  . . . Again this adds lots of junk to your code and confuses people. Simple is always better than fancy when it comes to selling.

4. Misalignment of elements on the page . . . this gives the site an amateurish look

5. Page loaded rather slowly on my high speed cable  . . . this is probably because of the background and other graphic elements that may not have been optimized for fast loading.

I would say get someone who knows what they are doing to help you fix these elements and then get back to me or refer back to this site for help in promoting the site.

Keywords? Tips for using them, more specifically, the does & the don'ts.
Don'ts: Make them the same color as the background of your page in an effort to hide them. Use the same word over and over again, use too many or too few, and bother with keywords that nobody is searching for just because you coined a term you like.

Do's: Use tools like keyword density analyzers and Web Position Gold to tell you how many times you should put keywords in different parts of your page. Make many pages with varying numbers of keywords on the page.

We publish many (currently about 130) short, low cost ($7.95) e-books on a wide range of topics. Is it better to sell them from a central site with a shopping cart and short product descriptions, from individual sites with long sales letters and a simple (PayPal) payment system, from a central site with short sales letters on subdomains for each product ... or something else?
Best is from individual sites. The more specific you can be the better and having keywords that apply to your subject in the domain name will make it even better.

Second would be from a central site with sales letters on subdomains or simple folders with sales letters.

Worst would be all the books lumped together with short descriptions.

Your decision to use paypal as your main merchant account is a week link for reasons discussed elsewhere in our tutorials.

I want to set up a subscription service that I want to charge $36 a year for. I want to do this with kickstart’s recurring billing feature.
What is the best way to sell this to the customer? Which method would most likely keep them onboard and not cancel their subscription?
Bill once a year at $36? Bill once a quarter at $9? Or Bill once a month at $3?

I’m worried that if I do a once a month billing for $3 then the customer
Would more likely cancel their subscription because they would see this charge on their credit card bill and ask themselves “do I really need this?”

I’d prefer to do once a year at $36, but I’m not sure if kickstart and authorze.net can hold the credit card info that long and bill on a yearly basis

Which of the methods above (or any other methods you have)do you think is the best way to charge the customer a subscription service?
You are limited by how long your merchant account will allow you to do it. Most limit six months at the max. A year is out totally for most new businesses. Major entitites like big associations get away with long memberships, but they don't usually have an automatic recurring billing and they have more pull because of large volume. You are required to put the number in again at the end of the year.

Is there any benefit to having extra domain names? For example, I have ******.com, and work with ******. Would it help to set up a domain *********Sub. And have it linked with my site along with The original?
Yes, multiple domains can really help you, but they must be hosted separately. You cannot simply "point" the domains at each other and expect it to help you in the search engines.

I’m looking to get a low cost statistics package for my websites so that I can better see how many visitors I’m getting and where they are coming from.  Do you have one that you recommend?
You can try http://www.ExtremeTracking.com They have both a free and paid version.

Where can I find directories and announcement Ezines to list my newsletter ezine?
Visit http://www.EzineUniversity.com

I am interested in strategies for building a mailing list for an e-zine. What is the best way to get it out there without spamming? Is there someplace to post it, and how do you reach the intended audience?
Put good signup on every important page of your site. Give good incentives to sign up. Put a good privacy policy on the site. Use terminology like "We hate spam as much as you do." Publicize your ezine offline Use a program like http://www.ListPartners.com to encourage other people to sign people up for you. Use co-registration to legitimately buy subscribers.

For a Newsletter Ezine, what is good content and what is bad?
Good content is content that addresses the needs of your readers, keeps them as subscribers and gets them excited about your products and services.

Bad content does the opposite.

Good content for you may be bad content for me because good ezines should be targeted toward a specific group. For instance, my ezine is about Public Speaking. Your's might be about new mothers and taking care of infants. Yes, there would be a few people on my ezine who are new mothers, but any thing that would go in your ezine about new mothers would be bad content for my ezine about public speaking and vice versa.

My web host has a terrible stats package. What is a stats package/software/service you would recommend that is inexpensive with a low learning curve?
You could try http://www.Extremetracking.com for free and see if that suits your needs. Drawback is that your stats are viewable by anyone.

They have a paid version which has additional features and results are hidden from the public

Regarding microphones - I've done a couple of recordings to CD and I'm not happy with the quality of the recording - I sound a little scratchy, and my breathing picks up in the sound as well. Can you suggest a few decent-quality microphones? Are they normally free-standing, or can one attached to headphones work as well?
With microphones, you really do get better quality when you spend more. I suggest going to a music store (one that supplies rock bands) and going into their listening room and testing out different microphones. They come in all shapes and sizes including headset mics.

With regard to the breathing. The better the mic is the more of that you'll hear. That is a function of you not the mic. You need to practice diaphragmatic breathing (letting your tummy poke out). You may need some coaching and practice to learn to do this.

I would also suggest buying a "pop screen" which helps reduce the air puff that hits the mic and sounds bad when you say something with the "P" sound in it.