I attended this before, why attend again?

As Sean Roach mentioned in his seminar, each of his seminars is unique and changes every time. So there are also some repeat students that attend his class just to learn something new. Although he said that, I did not attend his classes again since I am also a bit experienced in the business that I feel I can catch up with the latest trends without attending once more.

But I noticed in The Learning Annex catalog, the same seminar was given, the same title, Internet business in less than 48 hours. But this time, I notice the speaker was someone else, it was Adam Urbanski. So I decided to attend the seminar again. Just to check the Adam Urbanski out, I did a quick Google on his name Adam Urbanski. And Adam Urbanski seemed to really be an authority in his craft of Internet Marketing. So I decided to give it shot again and will probably get more new insights.

Getting started in Internet marketing

I have been making websites since 1996 and making money from making websites. But for this long period of time, I was not making money from a website. I know how to make them, but marketing them and making money from a website was not really my specialty.

In my part company, I had a partnerhip with a marketing and sales person, Terence Teves, a marketing major from Colegio de San Juan de Letran who has had some training also under seminars by Josiah Go at Mansmith and Fielders, Specialist in Marketing and Sales training. Me being a marketing newbie, Terence Teves has given my my initial insights on marketing and into sales as well. During our partnership company in 1999 to 2003, Terence has invested his time into Internet marketing and I could say he was pretty successful with it. As SEO was still not a buzz word that time, he was already mentioning it to me based on his research where he always praised the authors of the book Net Results: Web Marketing that Works made by US Web Corporation. That was a good book but a bit outdated as many innovative and successful Internet marketers has emerged just like Adam Urbanski.

In my past company up to today, I have interacted with a wide variety of business owners whom many of them had their own special marketing skills for their own business. And that alone was teaching me already how their marketing skills can be incorporated on the Internet as a new medium of marketing. But all i have focused on that time on how a website makes money is by selling a product.

Other ways to make money online

After attending the first seminar I had about Internet marketing by Sean Roach, I can say that me main lessons I have picked up were:

• Concentrating on a niche market. Be very specific as the broad and general market was over populated.
• You can also earn in Affiliate marketing and many companies offer this.
• Info products are great money makers especially those that solve a problem.
• Ad publishing also makes a good amount of money if done well. Since he was also part of the company Metawebs, he was also trying to sell this product as well as it works like an ad publishing, income generating machine.

Adam Urbanski’s Internet marketing seminar had the same message, but there were still a few more things I picked up that I believe I haven’t picked up in Sean Roach’s previous seminar. Although I believe Sean Roach still showed the same lessons as Adam Urbanski, they differed in what they stressed out. Sean Roach stressed on targetting specific markets, target a very specific niche market. And how it does so well in SEO as well and very specific niche markets tend to convert better.

What I saw in Adam Urbanski’s seminar

Adam Urbanski said early in the seminar that SEO is the least of his worries. This is the last thing Adam Urbanski works on. And me being an SEO addict that I even join SEO contest like the Isulong SEOph SEO contest, I was a bit surprised how much Adam Urbanski makes and what were his priority marketing strategies. Adam Urbanski always looked for promotional partners, he is a fan of the “list”, building the database of potential clients. An opt-in box was always a part of this websites, and looks for partners with a similar system and deals with them to be promotional partners. And it looks like it has been very effective. He mentioned the four main businesses he has and how his branding website does not make much money and his sales websites make more money. But when he showed is branding website sales report for the past 6 months, it has already made $95,000+. And he said that same site does not make much money.?!?! LOLz

Other methods of promotion without using SEO

Here are a few ways I have learned through experience, seminars and groups like SEOPhilippines where all seem to be effective ways of marketing your products.

• Buying Ads - Google, Yahoo and MSN offer it. Although I like Google since it’s Google Adwords seem to have a large reach targets the right people with excellent contextual ads.
• Buying Links - Text Link Ads, Backlinks.com, TextLinkBrokers and others. Although I have also heard good feedback about the others, I have been using actively Text Link Ads only and so far they have served me well in both buying text links and selling text links.
• Buying Traffic - There are many out there. But some just give you crazy traffic from click machines and are very expensive. Quality Traffic Supply seems to be able to perform better. A good price, and a large number of traffic from unique IP addresses that even just converting 10% may already mean a lot to your business. They do deliever quality traffic.

What a website needs to sell products/services online and collect payments

1. An Order Form or a Shopping Cart.
2. A Payment Gateway
3. A Merchant Account

The Ordering Process

An order form is usually used for businesses just selling a few products or a single product. If there are a few products on the order form, a simple checklist can be placed like on the website of Charlie’s Pritchon. Although they do not accept payments online, their form is an example of just a simple list, and they added in a quantity box where buyers can enter their desired quantity to order.

A shopping cart is a system where you can browse various products in a categorized manner, arranged in certain orders where you see a preview of the items with short descriptions, thumbnail pictures, and has the option to view more detailes on any chosen specific product that will then show a full description and bigger picture. A shopping cart has a virtual container, where you add, change quantities, or remove items you wish to buy with a running total of all items. When ready to pay, the buyer simply does a checkout an will forward to the payment process.

There are many shopping carts out there, some expensive, some cheap. Custom shopping carts are usually more expensive and I know many people that may charge $5,000 to $10,000 for a site to be done with a custom shopping cart. Although a custom shopping cart may not always be the best solution. Other options are using carts like osCommerce and ZenCart. osCommerce and Zen Cart are both free, but these are not easy to install on a web hosting account for the average user. They would be even hard to integrate into an existing web design for the average user. But you can have them done and that might be the best way to get your site online right away and start selling. In my company, we charge about something in the range of $3,000 to $5,000 for making a shopping cart website. If you already have an existing website and just want to add a shopping cart feature and you are not that meticulous with the design and the template cart, my company can even charge $1,500 to integrate a shopping cart in to your existing website. If you would like someone to work on your shopping cart website, feel free to contact us, just visit www.ydswebsolution.com.

The Payment Process

Once an order goes for checkout, and the buyer is ready to pay for the items purchased, this should go through a Payment Gateway and Merchant Account. The Payment Gateway is basically the service responsible for securely getting the credit card or debit card information and passing it on to the proper authentication channels and sending this information to the Merchant Account. The Merchant Account is a payment accepting account of the seller where this facility is offered usually by banks and checks the authenticity and validity of the payment and moves the credit to the sellers’ bank account.

But today, as the Internet has continuously evolved, the payment gateway companies, are also the merchant account companies. Thus the Payment Gateway and Merchant Account are already one entity and are synonymous already. I am going to talk about 3 payment processing companies that I personally like and use myself, and what are the advantages of each.

Paypal

One of the best ways to start out is with Paypal. Why? Because it is free, if you use it for personal selling. You are just charged about 4.01% per transaction paid to you which is cheap compared to other online payment processors that have no monthly fees. Any online payment can be traced and it is your responsibility to report your own taxes. For this reason, some people have businesses in the form of LLCs or Corporations for tax benefits. And if you need to sign up on Paypal for the business Paypal service, they will even have a better per trasaction fee but will now include a $20 monthly fee.

For me this is the best way to start out. But you should not stop here. Some people do not buy things that often online. And since every customer of Paypal needs their own login and password and must join Paypal, sometimes a new buyer gets turned off by the idea of joining on the sign up process of Paypal, since these types of buyers do not buy things often online, all they want to do is pay. Having Paypal will target the often online buyer since they are probably a member of paypal already, so having it is still good and you can start out for free. But as your sales increases, or has more money to use to invest in another system, start considering adding a payment processor that does not need to sign up into an account.

Is your business is outside the United States, check with Paypal if their service is available for that country since Paypal is like a link to your bank account, the bank must support the Paypal system. If your business is in a country that supports Paypal, but your target market is in another country that does not support it, your buyers will also not be able to sign up. If the sellers country or the target market country does not offer Paypal, I suggest do not use Paypal, but if you have a way to have a bank account in the United States, still have Paypal for potential buyers from the United States.

For more information on Paypal, click here.

2Checkout

2Checkout can handle credit card payments without requiring the buyer to sign into an account. It accepts nearly everykind of credit card like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners, JCB and Discover. It is more flexible in having clients buyers outside the United States, and is actually also better for the seller if the business is outside the United States. My business started in the Philippines and Paypal is not available there. Paypal has a direct link to a bank account that transferring funds anytime is quite faster than other payment processors, but not all countries have a standard banking protocol like the routing number banks use in the United States. 2Checkout seems to be able to send funds to any bank account worldwide but you may get deducted with from Electronic Fund Transfer (eFT) fees that vary from one bank to another.

Another strenght of 2Checkout is there are no monthly fees. The per transaction charge may be higher than others, but if you are just starting an online business, sometimes you may have some zero sales days while you are still promoting your own business. 2Checkout might be the most economical solution where when there are no sales, there are no charges. If you have sold items using 2Checkout, 2Checkout deducts 5.5% and $0.45 for every transaction. And to sign up it is a one-time sign up fee of only $49. If you just plan to sell something online but does not have a website yet, you can already sign up with them. Since you have no monthly fees anyway, and if you sign up early, you can study their system well so you can integrate it with our own website. So it is actually advantageous signing up early since there are no monthly fees for no sales. Some things not mentioned right away in their website, but can be found in their FAQs and other pages is payments are deposited to your account every 1st and 16th of the month. But if you have a large volume of sales, you start receiving payments weekly transferred to your bank account. Another thing is some percent is held, like about 10% to 15% and is given to you at a later time, something like 4 to 6 months. I haven’t read their policies for some time and I am just basing all of these with my current account with them. If you need to verify any payment, you can easily view all previous payments and all the details that go with in when you login to your own 2Checkout.

More information on 2Checkout can be found here.

Charge.com

When your business grows, and your sales increases, there comes a point when paying a fix monthly price and a smaller fee per transaction would be better. But if you are not selling that much yet, Paypal and 2Checkout would be better since you will not be paying monthly fees, only per transaction fees.

At Charge.com, per transaction fees are 2.38% + $0.25, very near a half-the-price value of 2Checkout. But you also pay monthly $39.95. But once you have Charge.com, you can also accept phone, mail and face-to-face payments aside from online payments.

Charge.com may not be a wise decision to take if you are running a small business and is just starting out with a minimal capital. But it is definitely something to look into once your business starts growing.

More information about them here.

Is SSL needed?

SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is an encryption protocol that makes information sent over the Internet in a secure, encypted manner to avoid possible hacking by sniffing so the credit card information is protected. To have a secure sockets layer, a digital certificate is needed. All of this cost some amounf of money, but this is not really needed on your own hosting account. Because when using Paypal, 2Checkout or Charge.com, your site forwards to them and you use their site to process payments. The only information that you will receive is the orders but the payment information go straight to the bank through these payment gateway companies using their SSL. When the payment is approved, the information you will get is if the payment was approved or not. But you do not receive the payment information itself, like the credit card number and other details.

SSL is definitely needed, but not needed on your own hosting account since the payment processors can handle that part for you. Unless you want to secure very well some other information that is passed on to you directly, that is the only time you might want to get a digital certificate to be able to use SSL.

To sum it up…

• Paypal

  - It’s free for individuals
  - Low per transaction fees
  - Not accepted in all countries
  - Requires account sign up
  - About 4.01% per transaction

• 2Checkout

  - No monthly fees
  - Low per transaction fees compared to other payment processor with no monthly payments
  - Accepted almost anywhere
  - Does not require account sign up
  - $45 one-time payment
  - 5.5% + $0.45 per transaction
  - No monthly fee

• Charge.com

  - A low monthly fee
  - Low per transaction fee
  - Can handle mail, phone and face-to-face payments also
  - 2.39% + $0.25 per transaction
  - $39.95 monthly
  - No sign up fee.