Selling products or services is the basis of any serious online business and when you set out to start one, you soon face a big obstacle: what should you use, to handle all the technical stuff? Things like collecting payments, delivering your digital products, managing customers and members, etc. What you need is a product delivery solution. But which one is right for your business? In this article (warning: it’s loooong), I go into detail about product delivery, talk about ...
Email is a powerful marketing tool and a mailing list is easily an online business' most valuable asset.It makes sense, then, to ask yourself which one of the many email marketing tools available is "the best". Unfortunately, this question is difficult to answer. Email marketing tools tend to be highly complex and packed with features. Testing even one of them is time consuming and it's impossible to cover all possible business cases.In this post, we'll use an 80/20 approach to ...
If you've got a WordPress website, I'm willing to bet online advertisements from generic hosting services like BlueHost and HostGator have targeted you before.How do I know?These companies have massive advertising budgets and capture large swaths of uninformed and unsuspecting customers as a result. To ensure you won't be one of them, I'm not going to waste your time reviewing such big name brands and their dollar store hosting plans.UPDATE: Because I received so many requests to review SiteGround in ...
“114,585 leads in less than 30 days!”“We collected over 100,000 new subscribers in our first month!”“We gathered 20,000 leads in 14 days!”These are the kinds of claims used to advertise viral giveaway or contest apps. When you read such statements, it’s easy to think that launching a viral contest might be all you need to boost your mailing list to the next level. Well, in true ActiveGrowth fashion, we hosted our own viral giveaway to find out how effective this ...
Check out any article on any website or blog online and you're almost guaranteed to find some colorful social sharing buttons alongside it. Content creators want to get their content spread far and wide and it stands to reason that prominent buttons help with this.There are countless WordPress plugins to add social sharing buttons to your posts, but how do you decide which one to use?In this post, you'll find the answer to that question.How to Tell Good From BadThe ...
So you finally managed to finish your first eBook? That’s great…congratulations! After all those months of struggling to turn your first writing idea into an info-product reality, it’s done and you’re ready to start reaping the benefits of your hard work with some online sales. Now you just have to find a way to accept money from your audience and you’ll literally be in business. The problem is that online payment systems can be complex and tough to integrate smoothly ...
If you want to make money, you gotta sell something. And that means creating a product of your own. We call this creating a value based business and it's a simple proposition. However, the suggestion to create your own product probably causes a feeling of resistance inside you."Isn't creating your own product too difficult?" "What if I'm not good enough to teach something in an info product or offer a service?" "And stuff like payment processing and memberships and all ...
Shane’s Recommended Online Marketing ToolsI love technology and gadgets, so tools for creating, running and growing an online business have long been an obsession of mine. Below, you'll find my recommended stacks for various purposes and stages of your business. What is a stack? It's a set of tools that you need, all for the same purpose and all chosen to work well with each other.Basic Website StackThis is everything you need to even be admitted to the game of ...
I have written about many different aspects of creating and successfully selling products, the foundation of any value based business. As announced in an earlier video, my goal is to provide you with all the information you need to create your own value based business successfully. So far, I’ve done so in many separate parts (and I’ll reference many of them throughout this post). In this post, I want to provide the big picture. I want to show you the ...
OptimizePress is a very popular theme that transforms a WordPress website into something like a Swiss army knife for marketers. With it, you can easily create sales-pages, launch-pages and lead capture pages. However, it is not the only theme of this kind and neither is it the newest. Is OptimizePress 2.0 the best option, or is there an alternative that’s better suited to your business? Read this review to find out which of the following solutions takes the crown: 10 ...