I am being bombarded with a lot of online marketing experts once again. To be quite honest with you it gives me the heebie jeebies. These guys are crawling all over Craigslist and coming at you with a questionable offer and a MLM power punch. I do not know what to make of these guys. All of a sudden, $5000 dollars a month and $5,000 a week are common increments of online money making.

I would like to believe this all of course if the sites weren’t so dog gone hokey.

It is nerve bending to look at these sites for any length of period. We have been down this awkward path before in the 2000’s. But what I am looking for is real rock solid proof and no nonsense “know how”.

Follow This Simple System For OPT IN
Here is something to keep in mind in the real world. When you want the prospect to hand over their information to you there are some things that will help smooth out the process.

The prospect is being bombarded by a plethora of “experts” on the Internet. That is nothing against you as a entrepreneur that is simply the nature of the beast. Asking for a commitment right off the bat with only two lines of sales copy is crass. Make sure you do something with a little more panache.

Take a good solid look at your search engine optimization on your pages. Make sure that it has enough “bait” on it that would attract search engine spiders. Good solid SEO is critical to get the people there. Once you got your prospects in the right place you need to get them to hand over their contact information. Use a simple two line form that asks for first name and email address.

"Yahoo, Google and MSN Search Engines Are Only 10% Of Your Overall Traffic!"

We have tested out the long form and the short form and the later wins every time. Remember that the consumer is not looking to get into a complicated relationship with you right away. Most likely they are looking to get some sort of freebie off of you. That is fine but remember not to give away the real “meat” of your offering. The idea of offering them a “newsletter” is a really bad one because this has been so overdone. That “incredible offer” has been left on the hot plate too long and has been reduced to a smoldering crisp. You need something better.

If you change the wording you will notice this is a much better offer in the works. I have switched my approach and called my newsletter a “mini course”. Since I did that my response rate really jumped up and I had a following. The other thing I noticed was that I didn’t have to work very hard on this “course”. It was a 3 day offering of teaser material and it had introductory terms and basic information for my new prospects.

It was a great way to work them through my funnel. I was able to convert a lot of these individuals into sales. These prospects didn’t know who I was but they were happy to give me their trust when they saw the following two things:

1. Privacy Notice – A simple message that said, we wouldn’t share their information with any third parties. We wanted them to know we respected their privacy.

2. Price The Mini- Course – I put a $247 dollar price on the offering to show them that my time was valuable. I put a price on the free information that I was offering. By showing them this I was able to establish that I was really going to give them something of value.

These simple tactics helped my conversion rate. I was able to build a small but substantial list of coaching clients. I was able to build up a lot of trust around this simple info capturing device. This can be elevated.

I feel that you have to have bait before you can really sell anything. Remember that people come to the web to first get great free information. They will try to get as much info out of you as possible before they ever commit to buy anything.

The Evaluation
You are on the line when you send out your information to a client. It is at this time the prospect is reviewing your material to figure out whether or not they are going to accept you as a business solution. This means you have to be credible. So if you are offering a newsletter or a mini course or a phone consultation you will need to establish yourself as someone with credibility.

It is not possible to do this in a splashy MLM setting.

I am seeing more and more of these type of sites pop up all over the place. I have a problem with these for one very simple reason. The stock photography is something you can grab off of cheap royalty free image sites like http://www.dreamstime.com .  There is not a lot of heart here and here is one thing in particular that I find very disturbing with these opportunity sites.

They never pre-qualified me as someone who is competent enough to do business online. These sites never even ask me if I can even sell anything. There is nothing on here that is believable. To me earning $5,000 dollars a week is a reality. I can actually do this using techniques like I just laid out. There are many more steps of course that are included in here that are needed to make that pay day a real event.

The other problem I have with these pre-packaged sites is that they are often times optimized very poorly.  In fact, if you look at them a bit deeper they are cookie cutter sites and have no real ability to attract traffic or rank well on the search engines. You are in often times in a deluded fantasy when it comes to making a substantial income. You need something with a little more muscle to it.

Making money online is a discipline and a science. You need to find your comfort level and have to navigate your clients and find a way to create that bridge of trust and earning a profit.

Ted Cantu runs iMobile Media, (http://www.1seomichigan.com )and works out of NYC, Chicago, and Detroit, Michigan. He has the number 12 podcast show on www.podomatic.com you can listen to it  here… http://911copywriter.podomatic.com