061 – Getting Paid, Social Leverage and Ecommerce Platforms

James Schramko here with this week’s internet marketing news.

Some of our friends in the SuperFastBusiness community are talking about getting paid. What if you do websites for friends or you do internet marketing services for other people? Look, in the beginning you might not be that confident, and you might want to do jobs upfront and then get paid. The problem with things like web development or paid campaigns is that sometimes the job never finishes and it’s very hard to close out jobs. Especially web jobs. They just seem to stay open. The best technique of course is get paid up front. Get your money first and then deliver the job. In that way if the customer is dragging the chain, if the customer doesn’t supply the logo or the customer doesn’t answer your support ticket with the information you need to do the job, it’s only them that is going to be delayed and you’re not going to be affected. And the great secret about service business is especially if you get paid upfront is that some customers despite themselves won’t complete the job. But that will be their issue and not yours. And you’ll not have to worry about debt collection and following up and chasing the money. All the crappy stuff that comes with running a small business.

How do you get more social in a community in Facebook, YouTube and blogs?
Step #1, use your real name. Use your real name so that people know who you are and put a picture where you get a chance, put a picture so that people associate your name with your picture and if they keep seeing you and your picture and your profile and your Facebook and your Twitter and your YouTube and your blog and your forum posts, they’ll start to know who you are. A good thing to do is to lead people to your page that describes more about you. It could be your Facebook Fan Page for example where you get to put stuff about you and links off to your channels. At least on your blog you can put social widgets to Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and then about page with a story about you and of course a call to action to join your newsletter so that people can stay up to date with what’s going on in your world.

Alright in SuperFastBusiness we’ve got live training coming up and the next topic is “Content Assault.” We’re going to talk about preparing amazing content. What I use to create and author content to get it into different formats like text, PDF, images, video, audio, how I actually prepare it. The thought behind it, the tools that I use because this is step 1 in step 2 which is traffic. So get in that content to put out on your sites to get the traffic is absolutely key. Now as I’m preparing TrafficGrab 2, it’s a great time to be talking about content and content assault. So I hope you can join me for live training inside SuperFastBusiness.

Now talking about videos inside SuperFastBusiness this week and why videos are so important. Well everyone’s watching videos; you’re watching this video or maybe listening to the podcast version of the video. But the point is videos are here to stay and they’re just going to get more and more powerful. Learn more about techniques; learn about the microphone you can use, the lighting you can use, the scenery, the camera, the lens. How does it get a soft furry background back there but I’m sharp in the camera view. That’s all down to technique. What sort of other bits and pieces you can use like remote controls so that you can start and stop and film by yourself. These things are all being discussed inside SuperFastBusiness.

If you want to setup an ecommerce store, I don’t blame you, it’s going to be huge.
The retailers know it’s going to be online so why not beat them to the chase. What sort of platform can you use? There are 3 main platforms that I hear talked about a lot. There’s the WordPress base solution and it seems that WooCommerce gets the thumbs up for WordPress based ecommerce. The next solution is something like BigCommerce and you can have a hosted solution where you can get a pretty pro level commerce solution. And the next one, the big daddy is your own hosted version of Magento and that’s supposedly the ducks nuts, the absolute best you can get but also really expensive and difficult to use compared to the other solutions. But that’s the one you want if you’re going to be doing millions of dollars’ worth of ecommerce. And I hope you are.

e-commerce will be BIG

When you’re doing press releases, what category should you submit it to?
Well you should rotate the categories that you choose so that you get a good spread. Just like anything, too much of a good thing can be dangerous. So get different categories and spread it out. I’m going to show you what a well submitted press release can do. Check it out, here’s 100 twilerts in my email when I woke up today.

That means my press release was syndicated everywhere. And what you want to do is always link to a different page on our site with a different key phrase. Good luck with your press release submissions.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s tips. Catch up with you next week.