Articles By Alicia Forest

A question I often ask my target market is, "what's your biggest challenge with building your business online?" And one answer I get frequently is this: How do I make my website earn money?

If you're following the marketing & product funnel business model that I teach, you're likely getting good sales from every offer you're making to your market.

When I first went into business for myself six years ago as a marketing and public relations consultant, I struggled with setting my fees.

Have things slowed down for your business now that the warmer months are upon us and people are on vacation or otherwise taking a break from their usual routines?

The following article is a true story and a true lesson in how to get more clients for your service-based business the easy way - by making it easy for your clients to sign up!

Basically, there are two things that must be in place before any of your offerings can be successful (read: profitable). One is that it must be designed for a niche and the other is that is must solve a problem that your niche wants solved. Though I may be stating the obvious, many times we create what we think our niche NEEDS instead of what it WANTS.

As humans, we tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The same holds true in your marketing. If you can touch upon your target market's pain, address what it is that they are most struggling with, and offer the solution to them - well, it's a winning formula every time.

After you've worked hard to put your product or program together, and spent the time and effort to write a compelling sales page for it, you don't want to lose your potential customer or client right at the moment they are sitting there with credit card in hand - at the order link or order form. Here's a checklist of 6 ways to make sure that doesn't happen:

One of the most effective ways of getting people to discover and try your products or services is by offering a Free Taste - which is just that, a taste of what it is that you offer.

There are a two main reasons why I think small business owners like you and I need to learn how to write our own effective copy. One is because it's one of the most expensive tasks to outsource and the other is that no one knows your business better than you.

On two different teleseminars this week, the same question was asked: "Where do I start? With an ezine, a website, a blog, or what?" The answer is - it depends. It depends on where you are at in your business building efforts. But after hearing this question asked often enough, I think there's something else going on ~ a request for a simple way to understand how all the pieces fit together. So, here goes:

Unfortunately, when it comes to your website, the "if you build it, they will come" strategy just doesn't work. Fortunately, there are many ways to drive high-quality traffic to your website for little to no cost. The following 5 strategies will show you how:

Ever sit down to write an article for your ezine and be at a loss as to what to say? It happens to the best of us, so I thought I'd share some of the ways that I get unstuck when that happens to me.

If you're reading this ezine, it's likely that you've participated in a teleseminar, whether it be mine or one of my colleagues. You've probably been on some that have been very good, where you got tons of really valuable information. And you may have found yourself on a few that were nothing but pitch-fests for the host's lastest product.

You may be afraid to choose a niche for fear that you may limiting your business if you narrow your niche down too much, but that simply isn't true. You are not going to cut yourself off from other opportunities, or limit your success by only focusing on a small segment of the population. The opposite is actually true.

One of the biggest shifts that came for me in building my own successful business was learning about - and implementing - what I call my Marketing & Product Funnel.

Writing valuable content-rich articles for your target market and submitting them to article directories and other publishers is one of the best ways to market your business, become known as an expert in your field, and add subscribers to your list.

If you're running an online business, you know that your list is your most important asset. And regardless of whether you're just starting out or not, if you lose a chunk of your subscribers because even just one of your emails gets flagged as spam, it's going to hurt your business.

Measuring the results of your business activities is critical to your success, and anyone can do it (it's really one of those "if I can, anyone can" kind of things). I really want to encourage you to take a look at where you've been over the past 6-12 months, analyze that data, and make some strategic decisions about where you want to focus your efforts going forward to get where you want to be.

I have a question for you: When someone signs up to receive your ezine or other Free Taste of what it is that you're offering, where do they end up?

Did you take some time this past week to think about and perhaps even write down your resolutions for 2007? To be honest, I'm not exactly a fan of resolutions - really, what's so different about December 31 than January 1 that's going to make a dramatic difference in whether or not you keep your resolutions?

Do you know that one of the best ways to build a successful online business quickly is through joint ventures? I know this concept can bit a bit hard to grasp to those of us who like being a lone ranger (kind of one of the common traits of being an entrepreneur, right?). But I hope you'll join me as I more fully embrace the "no one reaches success alone" philosophy myself.