Reseller Roundup Blog

Product Sales Report Tips

Jen — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:19:00 GMT

You can find the Product Sales Report in the Reseller Control Center under the My Reports dropdown menu. This report allows you to compare product sales across two periods, if desired, or run detail for recent purchases. Each Product Group includes a drilldown that will show you detail of the line items sold and indicate which sales were new purchases and which were renewals.
You also have several filters you can employ to get even more specific data:

Dates - choose the exact date range you want to report on. If you don’t want to compare two periods, you can leave the Previous Sales Period dates blank and just get one set of data.
Product Type – this allows you to report on every product, just pull out domains, or pick a specific product group such as .NET Transfers or SSL Certificates.
Customer Type – with this filter you can run all customers or separate your list into existing or new customers.
Order Type – use this to get a view of all sales, or filter down to only new purchases, renewals, or refunds.

Here are some examples of useful information you can gather from this report:

Watch your sales trends period over period

Overall Sales – do you see a seasonal slump in your business that you can plan for/around?
Renewal Rates – ideally this number should increase steadily period over period as you acquire new customers and retain the old.
Customer Acquisition Rates – what percentage of your orders are new purchases? This is the measure of the effectiveness of your new advertising
Specific Product Sales – filter your data down to watch the action on a specific group of products you’ve been trying to promote.
Reseller Incentives – determine your past performance allows you to participate in reseller incentives, then watch your progress to see if you qualify for payouts or prize drawings.

Keep an eye on your account

If you launched a new Pay Per Click campaign or ran a banner ad in a partner magazine – use this report to track Specific Product Sales along with the Marketing Source Code report to see what impact the ad had on your account.
Set a weekly or monthly goal and run this report regularly to see if you’re on track to meet your goal.
See an unusual spike in sales? Drill down into the report detail and compare this report to the Customer Sales Report to see what happened…maybe you can determine what happened and replicate it.

Overall Sales – depending on your target customer base, you might see seasonal trends in new sales and renewals. For example, if your target market includes reaching out to college students who are taking web design courses, you would expect to see a spike at the beginning of each school semester. If you reach out to realtors who buy domains for the properties they sell, you’re likely to see a slump around the holidays when fewer houses are listed on the market.

To look for seasonality, run your report in monthly increments for a full year (or more if you’ve been in the reseller program for a while.) Since the report allows you to compare two periods, you can run two months worth of data at a time.
Using spreadsheet software, track each month’s total units, orders, and revenue.
To get a visual of trends, chart each type of data with a line chart or bar chart and look for spikes and dips.
Use your product sales report to dig deeper into the spikes and dips: is it an overall change, or is there a specific product that performs better or worse than usual?

Renewal Rates - one way to make a success of your reseller program is to build on your renewal revenue by keeping customers engaged and renewing their products on a monthly, or better yet, annual basis. Each new customer acquisition, if managed correctly, will result in many years of recurring revenue as they maintain their initial purchases and purchase additional products.

To track your renewal rates, run your report in monthly increments for a full year or more and choose Order Type = “Renewals”. Since the report allows you to compare two periods, you can run two months worth of data at a time.
Using spreadsheet software, track each month’s total units, orders, and revenue.
To get a visual of trends, chart each type of data with a line chart or bar chart – you should see a steadily increasing trend. Note: If you’re in your first year of the reseller program, don’t be disappointed if this trend isn’t clear yet, since many products renew annually, you will start to see activity year after year.
Another important factor with renewal rates is to determine what percentage of your overall sales are renewals. If you compare Renewal Rates/Overall Sales month to month, you want to see a steady to increasing trend here too. Note that the trend of renewal to overall sales will depend on how aggressively you are acquiring new customers and expanding the product suites of existing customers – a negative growth here isn’t an immediate negative, it might just mean your new business growth is exploding.

Customer Acquisition Rates – you can use the reseller report to get a feel for how your overall advertising efforts are working by watching the trend of how many new customers are coming to your store. Is it a nice, steady stream month to month? Or do you see spikes that could be related to a new campaign, a networking event you attended where you passed out many business cards. Is there a dip from last month when you didn’t have time to invest in your reseller plan? Use these indicators to help drive how you invest in your business.

To track your customer acquisition rates, run your report in monthly increments for a full year or more and choose Customer Type = “New Customers”. Since the report allows you to compare two periods, you can run two months worth of data at a time.
Using spreadsheet software, track each month’s total units, orders, and revenue.
To get a visual of trends, chart each type of data with a line chart or bar chart - look for spikes and dips, and see if you can identify what caused them. Then you can try to recreate the event that caused spikes.
You might want to re-run the report in weekly or daily increments to pinpoint the effect of a specific event.

Specific Product Sales – while you have full flexibility in pricing your reseller store products at any level over minimum retail, you will find that some products are more competitive than others with higher prices (and greater commission) and some products perform better with renewals (like hosting accounts). It’s always to your benefit to test promoting your best sellers to see if you can make the most commission possible. To get right to the data you need, use the Product Type option to drill-down to just the data that you need.

To track your specific product sales, set your report to compare the current sale period (whether that’s a day, a week or a month) against a corresponding non-sale period – this Wednesday vs. last Wednesday; this week vs. last week; or this month vs. last month, etc..
If you marketed your sale to existing customers via print, phone calls, or email* – filter Customer Type = “Existing Customers”. If you placed an ad, a link, or ran a PPC campaign trying to get new customers, filter Customer Type = “New Customers”.*
If you placed an ad, a link, or ran a PPC campaign trying to get new customers, filter Order Type = “New Purchases”.*
Now compare the two periods, did you get more sales? Were the sales for the product you intended to get people to buy? Often you’ll find that your advertising will bring people to the store, but they may not buy the product you offered to them. Then it’s time to look at the ad to determine if you can change it to make the product more appealing.

*Don’t forget to tie marketing source codes to your advertising whenever possible to track exactly which purchases were triggered by a specific offer.

Reseller Incentives – we offer many reseller incentives that give resellers the opportunity to make extra cash on commission payouts or qualify for prizes based on account performance. If your reseller plan is eligible for incentives, you’ll find a link to the incentive under “My Settings”, “Incentive Program” in the Reseller Control Center. To determine if you qualify to participate in a reseller incentive, read the “Details” for the specific qualifiers for the incentive, and review the “Official Rules”. Here’s an example of the incentive details from the Q2 2009 Incentive.

Opt in before June 30, 2009 at Midnight Pacific Time.
You must have had a minimum of 25 domains registered and/or transferred to your reseller store in Q1 2009 (January 1- March 31, 2009).
Payouts will be made for 25-unit increments only. An increase of 50 domains = $50 for two sets of 25; 49 domains = $25 for the first lot of 25 only.
Discount shopper purchases do qualify in your domain sales counts.

Requirement 1 is easy – just opt in before the deadline.
Requirement 2 – check to see if you qualify for the minimum requirements. For this incentive it required that you sold at least 25 NEW or TRANSFERRED domains between Jan 1 and March 31.
- Run your product sales report with a Current Sales Period of “1/1/2009” and “3/31/2009”. You can blank out the Previous Sales Period since you don’t need to do a comparison right now.
- Set your Product Type = “All Domains”
- Leave Customer Type as “All Customers”
- Set Order Type = “New Purchases” (this includes transfers).
Is your total at least 25? If so, you would qualify for the incentive. If not, you’d need to sit out until next time.
Based on Requirement 3 you will need to sell as many domains as you did last month, plus 25 more domains for every $25 bonus. Since you have three months to complete the incentive, set a goal you think you can meet. Can you sell 200 additional domains? Or will you shoot for 50?
Check your progress regularly to see how close you are to meeting your goal.
- Run the product sales report with a Current Sales Period range of “4/1/2009” – today’s date and a Previous Sales Period of “1/1/09” and “3/30/09”
- Set your Product Type = “All Domains”
- Leave Customer Type as “All Customers”
- Set Order Type = “New Purchases” (this includes transfers).
If you’re doing well…consider setting a higher goal. If you aren’t on track yet, try a new advertising technique or send an email to your current customers reminding them about how great your domain prices are.

Exercise 6 - Six-month review of advertising strategy

Jen — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:13:00 GMT

We’d like to start this month’s article off with a mid-year pep talk.

Unlike many industries right now, the outlook for domains and related services is bright. In fact, insiders predict a period of amazing growth – much like the growth that followed the dotcom crash.

Widespread corporate layoffs are driving closet entrepreneurs to the Internet in droves. The ventures just emerging from the ashes now will help lay the foundation for the new economy. And each and every one will need a domain name (and very likely a shopping cart and an SSL certificate. . .) to grow their online business.

So roll up your sleeves and revisit the marketing plan you wrote for your reseller business in January:

Review your test results.
Discontinue the losers and reinvest in the winners – whether they’re ads, emails or offers.
Not enough time to get all the testing done? Air out your schedule – try sending emails every six or eight weeks rather than monthly.

Not enough data to make strategy decisions? Another reason to extend the duration of your test – continue for another month, then check your data again.

If you didn’t get started in the first six months of the year, don’t worry. Read “Exercise 1 - Review Existing Advertising,” and start now. There’s plenty more to come as we head into the second half of 2009.

Next month we’ll be looking at pricing strategy. Remember that lowest isn’t always best and the only way to know for sure is to test. The July article will show you how.

Exercise 5 - Get Social!

Jen — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:56:00 GMT

The term “Social Networking” encompasses a variety of Web-based tools, some of which you might already be using. Most of these tools are free in monetary terms, but may take some time to set up or maintain:

Blogging – Writing, reading and commenting on trends and articles relevant to your readers.
RSS feeds – Use them to push information out to users and bring content in to your blog.
Bookmarking – Use it to gather and publish content to your blog.
Facebook®/LinkedIn®/MySpace® – Establish a following on these popular social networks.
Personalized networks – Build your own network with tools like Ning® and share information.
Forums – Create a discussion space where you interact with people looking for solutions.
Twitter® – Tell followers what’s new at your business in 140 characters or less.
Online classified directories – Post your business information on CraigsList® or Insider Pages.®

Blogging is the gateway to other forms of social marketing, so start here. Read other people’s blogs, make comments, participate in any communities that attract people who might buy your products. Once you have an idea of what the community is talking about, start your own blog with an eye toward providing information of value to these readers.

A few tips on successful socializing:

Keep it relevant. Nobody likes a pushy salesperson butting into their conversations, so make sure your comments fit the topic being discussed. Freely offer your expertise whenever a topic on which you’re an expert comes up; mention your product or service only when it might solve someone’s problem – not every time you comment.

Be timely. Old news is no news in social networking, so you’ll have to make an effort to stay ahead of trends. Let’s say you see an article in USA TODAY about Mexico’s growing interest in retail imports. You might post this “tweet” to Twitter: “Get a .COM.MX and sell your products online in Mexico, one of the fastest-growing retail markets. Now just $X.XX! MyStoreURL.”

Remember, a network is not built in a day. You aren’t going to attract a huge readership, friend list or Twitter following overnight. Networking takes time. Continue to connect through linking, friending and following other people until they start to reciprocate.

We created these banners for you to place on social networking sites – use these or make your own in similar sizes to help drive traffic to your reseller store.

Next month we’ll evaluate the results of the last six months of exercises. We’ll measure effectiveness, drop efforts that aren’t working and plan your next steps.

Resources:

13 Essential Social-Media ‘Listening Tools’, MarketingProfs.com
www.facebook.com
www.linkedin.com
www.ning.com
www.twitter.com
www.craigslist.com
www.insiderpages.com

Exercise 4 – Grow your email list

Jen — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:11:00 GMT

As a reseller, email is one of the most inexpensive marketing tools you have at your disposal. Using Express Email Marketing® (EEM), included free with your reseller account, you can create and send great-looking emails with very little effort.

Email is also one of the most convenient forms of marketing. Customers can read your email at their leisure and from a variety of places – desktops, cell phones, handheld devices. Plus, EEM's automated batch send feature means you won't waste time sending 100 emails one at a time.

To make the most of email marketing, you need to build your email list:

First, use EEM to import your current customer list. EEM complies with the federal CAN-SPAM Act, which makes it illegal to send unsolicited emails to anyone who has not given express permission to be contacted via email. EEM will only import the email addresses of customers who've agreed to be contacted.
Next, place an email sign-up form on all the sites you own using EEM's opt-in magnet (don't forget your blog or any other place it might fit in!). For the sign-up link you could try something like "Sign up for my newsletter." or "Get great domain deals."
Place your opt-in link in unexpected places. Add it to your email signature line, your Twitter® or Facebook® account – even the closing line on your eBay® or Craig's List® entries.
Make it a trade. Offer a white paper, case study or marketing tip you've written. Pass them to a secure page or email the item directly to them once they've provided their email address.
Do you speak publicly? Let listeners know they can learn even more from you if they visit your site and sign up for your newsletter.
Encourage readers to share this communication with friends. Just be sure to include a "Get your own subscription FREE" link in each email or newsletter.
Add an opt-in link to the bottom of your order receipts to grab the attention of any stragglers who haven't signed up. In the RCC pull down "Design & Layout" and select "Receipt Info." Click one of the radio buttons under Receipt Information to add a message or a link.

As your list grows, make sure you're communicating with these customers regularly. (How often is too often?) It's no fun to get an invitation, and then never hear back again. You've already made a good first impression by getting their permission; now follow through with ongoing communications.

A few tips on creating successful emails:

Be creative! Customize one of EEM's 41 pre-built email templates with your own greeting and pricing. Each EEM template features one of our most popular products or RCC promotions.
Test various offers. Divide your mailing list and test two different offers against each other. Or make a different offer every time you send an email to see which one gets the best response. Resend the winning email at least two more times this year.
Track your results. If you use marketing source codes with your offers, you can track which customers open which emails and identify the offers that bring in the most revenue. You can use this information to plan future campaigns.

Exercise 3 - Find your Optimal Product Mix

Jen — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:43:00 GMT

Last month's exercise helped you look at your target market and build an audience profile. This month, we show you how to use the reporting tools in the RCC to create a product mix that will appeal to your target market.

Start by using the Product Sales Report and Microsoft ®Excel® to determine which products have sold best for you over time. You can find the Product Sales Report under the "My Reports" menu in the RCC. You'll want to look at a minimum of three months worth of data, to get a feel for month-to-month trends.

First, run your report using the Order Type filter to isolate ‘New Purchases'. Export this data to your spreadsheet program, and sort highest to lowest UNITS for each month. This tells you what your top volume products are.

Next, sort highest to lowest on COMMISSION to find out which products are bringing you the most income. It might be useful to highlight your top five, so you can find them at a glance. Now answer the following:

What are your top five products for volume as new purchases?
What are your top five products for commission as new purchases?
How much cross-over is there between your top five for volume and commission?
Are your top five always the same or do you see spikes and variations?

Hold on to that data. Now do the same exercise with the Product Sales Report, only this time set the Order Type filter to ‘Renewals'. Again, compare your monthly data and answer the four questions:

What are your top five products for volume as new purchases?
What are your top five products for commission as new purchases?
How much cross-over is there between your top five for volume and commission?
Are your top five always the same or do you see spikes and variations?

Compare new sales to renewals

If you see that your top five productsfor new sales and renewals match pretty closely, that tells you which products appeal to your audience overall. These are the products you should lead with in your advertising.

To increase your income, approach this group with natural add-on products. For example, if one of your top five best-sellers is Hosting, but not Traffic Blazer®, offer them Traffic Blazer via an email you send through Express Email Marketing®. You'll find a template for this product and many more ready to go in the Reseller Templates category.

If you see that renewals are drastically lower than new sales for your top five, look closely at your advertising (banner ads, home page messaging, etc). If customers are failing to renew annual products, they may feel misled about how a product works or how it meets their needs.

To find out exactly why customers are not renewing, send out a customer survey via Express Email Marketing® . Then adjust your strategy accordingly. Remember, renewals are the best way to build your income as a Reseller!

If your top five or 10 products for new purchases show a much wider range of products than renewal numbers, but your renewal numbers are also growing steadily, you have found the sweet spot! This means your customers are adding to their product portfolios and your renewal base.

Look for patterns you can use
Drill deeper to see if you can find any patterns. You can use this information as a starting point for new marketing efforts.

First, run the Product Sales report with the Customer Type filter set to ‘Existing Customers' and Order Type filter set to ‘New Purchases'. This will show you which products you should be promoting to your current customers.

Then run the report again with the Customer Type filter set to ‘New Customers' and Order Type filter set to ‘New Orders'. This will show you which products you should be promoting to new customers via ads and home page messaging.

The big payoff

Now that you've created a tracking system for your product mix, take a few minutes every month to run Product Sales reports and compare your month-to-month trends. Checking this regularly will ensure you're aware of any shifts in your product mix, so you can either take advantage of the shifts or make an effort to correct them, as appropriate.

Exercise 2 - Focus on Target Market

Jen — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:50:00 GMT

This month’s Marketing Tip will help you analyze who you’re selling to and how effectively you’re doing it.

The key goal of marketing is to address your best customers in ways that appeal to them. The more specifically you can tailor your offers to their needs and interests, the better the response. This kind of “targeting” leads to more repeat purchases, bigger orders, and a larger customer base.

Who are you selling to?
To speak to your target market(s), you first have to figure out who they are. How do they use the Web? Are they tech-savvy or novices? Why did they choose to buy from you rather than someone else?

To find out who your current customers are, start by looking at the advertising you did last year that worked (for tips on reviewing your advertising, see last month’s Marketing Tip). If your most successful ads appeared, say, on an industry blog about real estate, you know your customers are realtors looking for ways to promote their realty businesses.
Use the Site Analytics tool that came free with your Reseller Account to find out which key words people are using to find you on the Web (look under “My Settings” in the RCC). If “Cheap Web sites” is a big search term for you, you know price is important to your customers.

What do they want?
Let’s say your research leads you to the following conclusion:

“My target customer is a realtor who uses the Internet for business.”

The most reliable way to find out what your customer wants from you is to ask him. Use the Express Email Marketing™ program included with your Reseller Account to create and send a simple survey to your customers. Some tips:

Keep it short, since shorter surveys get more responses.
Include a few demographic questions such as gender, profession, employment status, etc.
Find out which of your products the reader currently owns (domains, hosting, etc.) and what they use them for (business, hobby, family, etc)

BONUS: Offer an order-level discount to the first ## customers who return surveys. Email the promotional code (found in the RCC) to respondents with an invitation to shop your store. Be sure to set a minimum order quantity.

The results of your survey should help you fill out your target market description still further:

“My target customer is a male realtor who uses the Internet to promote his business. He’s self-employed, so customer support and price are prime issues.”

Tailor your product mix
Now that you know who you’re selling to, the next step is to decide if you’re offering the right products and services. Check back here next month to learn how to create an optimal product mix using tools available to you in the Reseller Control Center.

Exercise 1 - Review Your Existing Advertising

Jen — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:18:00 GMT

This month’s Marketing Tip focuses on advertising. If you haven’t kept a formal list of your advertising efforts, now’s the time to start. Knowing what works, what doesn’t, and when you last tried it will help you avoid making the same mistake twice. It can also help you decide when it’s time to re-test something that didn’t go so well the first time.

1. Evaluate your history
Let’s start with an inventory of everything you’ve tried to date to market your reseller business. (Just getting started with advertising? Jump down to the next section of this article.) Record any action you’ve taken in the following categories, jotting down all the information you have regarding that activity (cost, time invested, dates, duration of advertisement, etc.):

Online advertising – Pay-Per-Click advertising, banner ads, text ads on partner sites
Print advertising – Newspaper or magazine ads, business cards, direct mail postcards, brochures or fliers
Social networking – Writing your own blog, responding to or submitting articles or features to other people’s blogs, Chamber of Commerce listings, setting up RSS feeds, or listing with social search (Craig’s List, Insider Pages), social bookmarks (Delicious, etc.) or social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
Live networking – Handing out business cards, membership in professional organizations, public speaking
Email Marketing – Communications with your house list (using your free Express Email Marketing® or another tool), electronic newsletters, adding subscription tools to your site to grow your email list
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Creating custom content to attract traffic to your site “organically.”
Cold-calling/emailing – Reaching out to businesses that don’t have a Web presence via email or in person.

Now, think about each of these efforts and be honest about what’s not working. Is it because you haven’t been able to dedicate enough time to it? Is it too costly? Or is it just truly not working for your audience? Be ruthless and drop anything that’s not yielding a return – especially if it’s costing you money. You can always try it again later.

2. Set your strategy
Now that you’ve shortened your list to just the things that are working, pick one or two to expand through June of 2009. Decide how much time you’re going to dedicate to this activity each week, and if there’s a cost associated with it, budget what that will be. Make your goals as aggressive as you like, but make them do-able. Here are a few examples:

Increase Awareness with Business Cards
Cost: $25 to print custom business cards (you can do this for less at home or with a service like VistaPrint.com)
Time Commitment: 10 min – 2 hours per week
Strategy: Carry business cards with you at all times. Share them with anyone you meet who shows an interest in your business, whether you’re at a client meeting, your Rotary Club, or a party where the topic of what you do for a living comes up in conversation. Give each person multiple cards, one for them and another one or two to share with someone they know who might also be interested in your services.

Place Banner Ads
Cost: $200/month (costs will vary from $0 to thousands, depending on site)
Time Commitment: 2 hours per week
Strategy: This project involves several phases. 1) First you’ll need to identify potential sites that might refer sales-worthy traffic, determine their pricing/trade policies, and decide how much you’re willing to pay and for how long. 2) If you don’t find a banner ad you like in the “Marketing Tools” section of the Reseller Control Center, you can create your own or pay a graphic designer to create one for you. 3) Once you’ve posted your banner, watch the results like a hawk – you want to know how much traffic the site gets, how many clicks your banner receives, and how many sales or new customers you got as a result. 4) Use these numbers to determine the return on your ad investment (Total cost of banner advertising ÷ number of new customers gained = Cost Per Acquisition).

Promote Your Business with Email
Cost: $0 if you use your free Express Email Marketing® Tool
Time Commitment: 1-5 hours per month
Strategy: Use one of more than 50 reseller templates in Express Email Marketing to reach out to your current customers with proven marketing messages. Or create your own electronic newsletter that speaks to your target audience and shows them how your products can help them. Email once a week or once a month – whatever fits into your schedule and makes your audience happy.

Once you’re done with your advertising review, celebrate! You’ve completed a task that all successful business owners do routinely to keep their businesses on track. Next month we’ll take a look at your target market.

2009 Reseller Marketing Planner

Jen — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:04:00 GMT

A Marketing Plan is a key tool that smart business owners use to grow their businesses. Since writing your own plan can be a little overwhelming, we’ve decided to break it down for you in a series of monthly articles. Each installment will feature step-by-step instructions on one activity, including tips, resources and suggestions for using the activity to expand your business.

You can commit as many hours as you like to these monthly exercises, but plan to give each one at least two hours of undivided attention. Don’t be surprised if you’re bursting with ideas and have to rein yourself in to narrow down your list of choices to pursue. And don’t forget to keep notes so you can revisit the rejected ideas later.

Exercise 1 - Review Existing Advertising Take a good, hard look at what you’ve been doing and how it’s working (be honest!). Pick one area to focus on in the next few months.

Exercise 2 - Focus on Target Market This month you’ll analyze who you’re selling to, and how effectively you’re doing it. You’ll also set a strategy for increasing your share of this market.

Exercise 3 – Determine Optimal Product Mix Using your sales report, you’ll identify which products are most popular and which are yielding the best profit. You’ll tailor your advertising to increase sales of those products.

Exercise 4– Grow Email Marketing List Grow Email Marketing List Who makes up your email marketing list right now? Employ strategies to increase that list and expand your reach.

Exercise 5 – Focus on Social Networking Strategies Already using social networking as a marketing strategy? Evaluate what’s working and where you need to expand, or choose one or two methods to start testing now.

Exercise 6 – Six-month Review of Advertising Strategy Revisit the plan you set in January, keeping the best and losing the rest. Choose a new idea to try in the 3rd and 4th quarters. (And yes, we’ll do this again in January 2010.)

Exercise 7 – Evaluate Pricing Strategy Selling low isn’t always the best strategy. Sometimes it’s possible to increase your prices and commissions, while keeping your sales steady. Find your optimal price point.

Exercise 8 – Generating Traffic with Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Examine the content of your custom Web page or any external sites you use to drive traffic to your store. Don’t have a custom site? Now’s the time to create one.

Exercise 9 – Analyze Results of Email Strategy Email marketing is one of the easiest, most effective, and most cost-efficient tools in your arsenal. Time to look at your current strategy and set up a six-month plan.

Exercise 10 – Revisit Optimal Product Mix Time to review your product mix to make sure the activities of the past six months haven’t changed your customer base or product mix. Check for new commission leaders.

Exercise 11 – Year-to-date Cost/Benefit Analysis Determine your Return on Investment (ROI) for every cash outlay, deciding which to keep and which to drop. This will pay off in December, when you plan your 2010 budget.

Exercise 12 – Develop 2010 Marketing Plan Go back and look at what you’ve done throughout 2009. Take what helped you and make your own custom Marketing Plan for 2010, including deadlines, goals and costs.

Brand your company for higher profits

Jen — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:26:00 GMT

Branding is one of those words that’s often thrown around and just as often misunderstood. Although the process involves several steps, the idea is really quite simple.

Branding is what Coca-Cola®* has – the minute you catch sight of that curly red “C,” you know beyond a shadow of a doubt what you’re dealing with. Your mouth may even water at the thought of that cool, refreshing liquid pouring down your throat. And all it took was a single letter!

To do what Coca-Cola did, you’ll need to create a brand for your company. How? Simple. Present an image and message that appeals to your target audience over and over again until your customers begin to associate that image and message with your company and yours alone.

The branding process usually begins with the creation of a logo and a tagline.

A logo may be made up of words (your company name), an illustration and/or graphics.
A tagline should sum up what you offer to customers that they can’t get anywhere else.

You sell domain names and related products to [fill in the blank with your niche]. Who else does that? What do you offer that your competitors don’t? A broader selection of products? Then your tagline might be “Your one-stop shop for all things Internet.” Or maybe your biggest sellers are domains and hosting and your biggest customers are extreme athletes. If so, a good tagline would be “Xtreme domains & hosting” or “Domains & hosting for those who live on the edge.”

Unless you’re a graphic designer, creating your own logo can be tricky – it needs to work in a variety of mediums and that kind of flexibility takes some skill. Regardless of whether you do it yourself or hire someone else to create your logo and tagline, be sure to run them past people who represent your target market (not your couch-potato uncle if your company caters to women runners) before putting them to use.

Once you have a logo, use it everywhere – on every page of your storefront, in newsletters, on receipts, on stationery, signage and business cards. You can even incorporate it into your Express Email Marketing® emails with a little HTML know-how.

If it’s short enough, your tagline can appear with your logo except in cases where the logo is too small to make the tagline readable. Your tagline should also appear on every page of your Web site. For bonus points, make your tagline clickable and link it to a page that describes your key promises and how your company delivers on them.

Over the long haul, branding pays off. It not only increases customer loyalty, ensuring that your customers continue to buy from you for years to come, but allows you to charge more than your non-branded competitors. How sweet it is!

DOs
>Test. Get feedback on your logo and tagline from people who represent your target market.
>Follow up. Your long-term success depends on how well you deliver on your promises.
>Stick with it. Coca-Cola’s been doing it for decades; that’s why their brand is so powerful.

DON’Ts
>Alter the individual elements of a logo once it’s been created and approved. You want the viewer to take one look at that logo and think of you, so don’t confuse them. Use it consistently.

RESOURCES
Don’t feel comfortable creating your own logo? Ask our Dream Design Team to create one for you.

*Coca-Cola® is a registered trademark of The Coca-Cola Company.

Add value with Tutorials

Jen — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:15:00 GMT

Looking for a way to add value to your products and services and generate keyword-rich content for your site? Offer how-to articles.

Offering free advice is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in the marketer's book. It not only sets you up as an expert with advice to give, it makes your customers feel indebted to you. People value good information, and they appreciate it all the more when it's given away for free.

You don't have to be a professional writer to produce useful articles, either. A quick Internet search [Break and link if needed] on any topic -- how to market your business, write your own HTML snippets, optimize your site for the best search engine listings -- will yield an abundance of information. Once you've found a handful of really good nuggets, think about how those tactics or tools mesh with your niche market. Use concrete examples to explain them.

If your article is a marketing how-to, create a Sample Company and give concrete examples of how Sample Company would build its Web site content. Don't be afraid to explain why Sample Company chose the Deluxe Hosting Plan based on their organization's size, pairing it with Group Outlook® with Mobile for maximum flexibility as the company grows. Maybe Sample Company didn't have a logo yet and used the Dream Design Team to design a new logo, along with letterhead and business cards.
Or do you have a real customer who would be the perfect example for your concept? Contact them and ask if they'll let you use them as a case study with a link back to their new Web site -- don't forget to get a testimonial if they're willing.
If you're pulling together an article on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- include a sample meta tag with keywords relevant to your target customer. (Do a couple of quick searches yourself to determine good keyword sets -- you can even view the source code of great sites you find and take examples from their keyword lists.)

Better yet, since you have personal experience with the products you sell, write about them. Tell your customers what you've learned about keyword advertising, or about time-saving shortcuts in Quick Shopping Cart®. Tell them how you increased your inbound links by swapping links with other sites. By making your experiences available to your customers, you shorten their learning curve. And cement their loyalty in the process.

EXPERT's tips
> Provide useful information that is directly relevant to your customers' everyday lives.
> Quote reliable and widely recognized experts, setting their words off with quotation marks.
> Break information down into numbered steps.
> Double-check to make sure your instructions are accurate.

RESOURCES
>MarketingProfs.com
>MarketingExperiments.com
>MarketingSherpa.com

Placing Banner Ads on Partner Sites

Jen — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:16:00 GMT

There are currently several dozen great-looking banner ads in the Marketing Tools section of the Reseller Control Center under "Banner Downloads." We've created these ads for you to use in promoting the products you sell.

So how do you get people to see your ads?

The idea is simple, really. You place one of these ads on a Web site that attracts customers who may be interested in what you sell - this can be another site within your own network of ventures, or you can find external partners. Customers who see your ad and are interested in your product can click on the ad to be taken directly to your Web site. Every time someone clicks on a paid partner ad, you pay a small fee to the host site. On your own sites, or sites that offer trades, there will be no cost to you.

When you're looking for sites to advertise on, look for businesses that don't compete directly with yours. For instance, let's say your Web site sells domain names and related services to golfers. You might place a banner ad on a Web site that sells golf equipment. While your site and the site hosting your banner ad have customers in common, you don't sell the same products so you're not competing directly against one another.

There are a number of ways to find likely sites on which to place your banner ad. If there are trade journals in your niche market, read them and look to see who's advertising there. Visit those companies' Web sites and look for a page on advertising rates. Be sure to get answers to the following questions:

What are your rates and how many visitors do you attract each month? Rates are typically either flat (5 or 10 U.S. cents per click) or based on Cost Per Thousands (CPM) views. Expect to pay $10-$15 CPM depending on how much traffic the Web site attracts.
Do you have a banner exchange program? Programs like these don't cost you a thing - you exchange ad space on your site for ad space on theirs. Be picky about where they place your ad, though. Make sure it gets placed on the top half of a relevant page.
My ads have already been created - do you offer an agency discount? This can be as much as 15% or more, so be sure to ask.

Choose one or two sites and place an ad for a month. Be sure to check the click-through ratio once a week-this is the number of times your ad appears on a page compared to the number of times a viewer clicks on it. (An average click-thru ratio is between 0.5% to 2.0%.) If the host site doesn't provide this information, you can just check your access logs to see how many visitors you're getting from the ad. (Using Marketing Source Codes appended to the end of your link as ‘?isc=MYCODE' makes tracking easy - see our Blog article "Setting Up Marketing Source Codes" to learn how.)

At the end of the month, if you're not making more money that you're spending on the ad, try another site. If it's working, stay with it until performance drops off, then try another ad or another site. Remember, constant measurement is the key to knowing when to try something new - be sure to schedule time for this activity whenever you initiate an advertising campaign.

Increase Profits with Regular Customer Contact

Jen — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:49:00 GMT

If you have a list of customer names and contact info but aren't doing anything with it, you're missing a golden chance to increase sales and build your business. A key tool in maintaining your relationships and increasing recurring revenue is to simply stay in regular touch with the customers you currently have.

Why contact. Your purpose in setting up a customer contact plan should be to help your customers, whether it's with free advice, breaking news or money-saving solutions. Express a genuine interest in their needs and concerns and your customers will reward you with repeat business.

How often. Opinions on how often to contact customers vary widely. One consultant advises once every 2-5 days, another suggests once every 1-2 weeks and a third says 1-2 times a month. The real answer is, as often as is useful to your customers. Start with once every 2 weeks, testing various frequencies to find the one that gets the best response.

Messages. Offer free advice to your customers or send a regular newsletter with brief text highlighting a couple of different products each time. Email them with product updates or new discounts.You can even tuck a come-back offer into your order confirmation emails. This puts you ahead of the curve, planting the seed of the next sale even as you thank them for their most recent purchase.

Mediums. Email is the easiest and least expensive means of contacting your customers - check out your free version of Express Email Marketing. But don't overlook print, as you can now order high-quality printing online for very little. One really successful approach is to send a direct mail piece first - say, a letter or postcard - followed by an email scheduled to arrive three days after the postal piece arrives.

Tracking your results. The easiest way to track the effectiveness of an offer is through a source code*. By requiring customers to enter a source code in their shopping cart when responding to a promotion, you can see exactly how many people respond to each offer, running the most successful ones again. Express Email Marketing will also track open and click-through rates to help you gauge reader interest.

Dos and Don'ts

Give them a little text and a small selection of products in every communication.

Test frequency to see what works (sells) best. Contacting them too often annoys people; too seldom allows them to forget you. Find the sweet spot -- just often enough.

ALWAYS give them the option to stop receiving your communications. If they ask to be taken off your list, do it. Send them an email confirming the change.

*Don't miss our blog article "Setting Up Marketing Source Codes" to learn how to use this tracking tool in the Reseller Control Center.

Setting Up Marketing Source Codes

Jen — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:56:00 GMT

Marketing Source Codes are a tool you can use to track your advertising campaigns right from the Reseller Control Center. These codes allow you to track incoming traffic to your website and see which offers lead to a sale. You can use marketing source codes with email campaigns, banner ads, traded links with other sites, custom landing pages, and more.

Here’s how to create marketing source codes. There's no limit to the number of marketing source codes you can set up, so be sure to take advantage of the opportunity to create unique identifiers for each of your marketing efforts. You'll find the "Marketing Source Code" set-up under "Marketing Tools" in the RCC.

For example, let's say you have a trade with Widgets.com where they agree to run three banners for you on different pages of their site. You'll want to know exactly which pages generate hits back to your site, so you'll need to create a different Marketing Source Code for each banner. You might set up your codes something like this:

Advertising Vendor: Widgets.com
Advertising Campaign: 2008 Banner Series 1
Advertising Codes: WIDGET01, WIDGET02, WIDGET03
Description: Email Banner offer from Widgets.com home page

Include Marketing Source Codes in the links tied to your advertising. To identify incoming traffic using marketing source codes you'll need to embed the code in the links that come back to your storefront. You can either direct traffic back to your home page, or better yet, send customers to a specific landing page that repeats your offer or describes product details. Embed the code by adding isc=WIDGET01 to the variable string on your link - the ‘?' after the page name indicates the start of the variable string, and multiple variables are separated with an ‘&'. Your link might look like:

http://www.myresellerstore.com?isc=WIDGET01
or
https://www.securepaynet.net/gdshop/email.asp?prog_id=YourStore&isc=WIDGET01

That’s all it takes. Once you’ve started getting your marketing source codes out there, you can check on your responses using the Marketing Source Codes Report under My Reports in the Reseller Control Center. To go a step further and learn even more about customer behavior, pair Marketing Source Codes with your free Traffic Facts application – see our article Using Traffic Facts to Measure the Success of Marketing Campaigns.

Using Traffic Facts to Measure the Success of Marketing Campaigns

Jen — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:33:00 GMT

Using Traffic Facts to measure the success of marketing campaigns

To track the success of your external marketing efforts, try using marketing source codes with Traffic Facts (free with Pro or Basic reseller plans). By tying a marketing source code to each and every external advertising campaign -- whether it's a banner ad on your blog, a link trade on a partner's Web site, or a pay-per-click advertising campaign -- you can use Traffic Facts to tell you what's working and what isn't.

1. Set up Traffic Facts. If you haven't already done so, enable Traffic Facts in the Reseller Control Center under the "My Settings" menu. You'll need to create a login, then check the box to enable Traffic Facts. If you're using your free WebSite Tonight® account or other hosting for a custom storefront, see exactly where traffic enters your site. Use the custom JavaScript to add tracking to all your custom pages.

2. Create marketing source codes. There's no limit to the number of marketing source codes you can set up, so be sure to take advantage of the opportunity to create unique identifiers for each of your marketing efforts. You'll find the "Marketing Source Code" set-up under "Marketing Tools" in the RCC.

Advertising Vendor: Widgets.com

Advertising Campaign: 2008 Banner Series 1

Advertising Codes: WIDGET01, WIDGET02, WIDGET03

Description: Email Banner offer from Widgets.com home page

3. Include Marketing Source Codes in Links. To identify incoming traffic using marketing source codes you'll need to embed the code in the links that come back to your storefront. You can either direct traffic back to your home page, or better yet, send customers to a specific landing page that repeats your offer or describes product details. Embed the code by adding isc=WIDGET01 to the variable string on your link - the ‘?' after the page name indicates the start of the variable string, and multiple variables are separated with an ‘&'. Your link might look like:

http://www.myresellerstore.com?isc=WIDGET01
or
https://www.securepaynet.net/gdshop/email.asp?prog_id=YourStore&isc=WIDGET01

4. Check your Results. Once your links are out in the world and live for a few days, you'll want to see if you're getting any results. You now have two sources of incoming data - you can check the Marketing Source Codes Report in the RCC under "My Reports" for a quick update on how many hits, customers, and orders your marketing campaign has bought in.

Once you have that snapshot - it's time to use Traffic Facts to learn more about ad performance. Launch your Traffic Facts account from the RCC and use it to check on the following:

Which referring sites are performing the best? If you're running multiple campaigns that enter your site on the same landing page, you'll want to know who's driving the most traffic. You can use the Referring Domains report to measure this activity, identifying the campaign by checking the marketing source code embedded in the link.

If your advertising campaign spans several pages on one site, as in our example with Widgets.com, you can use the Referring URLs report to drill down and see which pages in particular are bringing in the most traffic. This can help you evaluate whether a particular site or page within a partner site is a good fit for you. Before deciding to cancel an agreement, think about tweaking or overhauling your ad or link text to appeal to that site's audience.

Are you using the right landing page? If your Marketing Source Code report is showing a good number of hits but no conversions, consider whether you're driving your traffic to the right page of your site. You can use the Entry Page report to evaluate how often specific pages on your site are the first page incoming visitors see. Use this information to gauge traffic generated by your advertising efforts - this is particularly telling if you are using an internal page to your site as a landing page or if you've created a custom landing page using WebSite Tonight or a custom-hosted solution. When your campaign is running, a marked increase in landing page traffic indicates your campaign is effective.

Once you've identified the entry pages to your site, you can use the Visitor Path report to learn more about your visitors' experience on your site. After they've entered your site on the correct page, does it keep their interest and result in a sale? Or do they lose focus and wander to other pages and eventually away from your site? If they do purchase, are they purchasing the product you originally advertised? You can figure this out by seeing which page(s) lead to the cart, and by checking the sales volume via your Product Sales report in the RCC. If the answer is consistently no, that's an indicator you should consider changing your offer/landing page and cater to what shoppers are looking for.

5. Tweak, measure, evaluate - Now that you have a snapshot of your visitors' behavior, use that information to tweak your campaigns and test variations of your advertising. The more you work to understand your customers and their actions, the more you'll sell!

IDN: Around the World with a Click!

Jen — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:18:00 GMT

Reach out to customers in the international community. Now’s a perfect time to see if an Internationalized Domain Name is a right fit for them.

Many non-English languages use characters containing diacritics or non-Latin scripts. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) contain these non-ASCII characters. Characters range from a few special characters found in Italian and French to entire character sets found in Arabic and Chinese. IDNs let users register and use domain names consisting of their native language instead of relying solely on the standard ASCII format.

Examples of IDNs:

English: http:// idn.icann.org
Arabic: مثال.إختبار
Russian: пример.испытание

Viewing an IDN is possible in both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 browsers. And while most languages are preloaded into these browsers, there are instances when an additional download is required to view a specific language.

Please note that just because someone owns a domain name’s English version, they do not own its non-English counterpart. If you or your customers do business in other countries, it may be wise to register the equivalent domain(s) in native languages for those countries, making it easier for international customers to reach their business Web sites.

Top languages for IDN domain sales include Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew and Spanish. Even your Western Language-based customers may be looking ahead to expanding their international business opportunities and would benefit from early registration of an Internationalized Domain Name.

Ready to get started? IDN lookups, where customers specify the language for conversion, are found under the Domain Names dropdown menu of your turnkey storefront.

Use Cross Sells to Make Attachment Rates Work for You

Jen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:41:00 GMT

Attachment rate is the measure of how often you sell one product in tandem with another product. The key to understanding attachment rates is to analyze your product line and order sales to see what products are commonly sold on the same order. With this valuable information you will see patterns for complementary products and you can use that to put together a custom shopping cart Check-Out Specials that will maximize your attachment rates…and your profit!

Here’s how the Check-Out Specials work
When you opt in to Check out Specials, your customer will be shown one of the products from your ordered list based on the purchase(s) they already have in their cart.

This is where your research comes in
The Check-Out Specials allow you to choose the top 4 products that you would like to feature. Let’s say that your research shows that a customer who purchases a domain name also purchases hosting 35% of the time; purchases WebSite Tonight® 25% of the time; and occasionally adds on a SSL Certificate or Private Registration. When you set up your shopping cart Cross Selling Tool you would want hosting to be the number one product offered with a domain purchase, Website Tonight as the number two product, and so on up to four product choices. This tool will encourage customers to purchase the complementary items that go along with the products they already have in their cart.

Don’t forget to test this tool over time to see what combinations work best for your customers and their needs. So, do your research, select your check-out special products, and start seeing your sales increase today! To locate this new tool, simply go to the product offerings page in the product section. (If you prefer not to take part in this offer, opt out and the check out special will not be incorporated into your check-out process.)

For more information on attachment rates, check out the Reseller Roundup Blog article: Attachment Rates

Ready-to-use email templates make marketing easy!

Jen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:13:00 GMT

Every reseller account comes with Express Email Marketing® to help you keep the conversation going with your customers. Contacting your customers by email keeps them up-to-date on your current sales. It also keeps you top-of-mind so they know where to go when they need new products and services for their Web presence.

Express Email Marketing is tied to your reseller customer records, so it’s a snap to import the contact information of customers who have opted-in to receive your communications. And since it's CAN-SPAM compliant, you know you’re reaching ONLY those people who want to hear from you.

Express Email Marketing includes a number of handy tools:

Reseller-specific templates – Just for resellers we’ve built a series of ready-to-go templates that pull pricing and product information directly from your storefront settings for a truly custom email – without the work! Look for Reseller Announcements in the Campaign Type when you create an email campaign.
Announcement templates – Pick your favorite template from this series to build your own email announcements. This is great for product sales you set within your storefront using the sale pricing option in the Products & Pricing section. Don’t forget to create a Marketing Source Code and tie it to your campaign for tracking.
Newsletter templates – Are you marketing to a niche you’re passionate about? Include tips, tricks, stories -- even excerpts from your blog -- along with your store offers and deals in a regular newsletter. Contact your customers quarterly, monthly or even weekly with this type of communication.
Custom HTML – Ready to take it to the next level and show off your design skills? Use the custom html option to upload your own layouts and artwork. Just be sure to create a text version of your email as well for those folks who have email programs that won’t accept graphics (Express Email Marketing has a tool and prompt for this, too.)

Text Only – Prefer to keep it simple? Choose the text-only option.

To activate your Express Email Marketing account:

Log in to the My Account of the account you used to buy your reseller plan.
Choose Express Email Marketing from the My Products menu.
Find the listing for ‘New Account’ with ‘prod id: [Your Store]’ next to it. Click “Open Express Email Marketing” for the account.
Click “Getting Started” to establish your account settings and create a subscriber list. Get your list started by importing your customer list from your storefront - to stay current, be sure to set it to update nightly.

That’s it, you’re ready to go! Go ahead and set up an email campaign. (TIP: Be sure to do a test run by sending the email to yourself to make sure it looks the way you expect it to. You can do this at any time under the Options drop-down at the top of the design screen.)

For more information on how you can use Express Email Marketing to communicate with your customers, read “Promoting Your Business and Nurturing Your Customers with Express Email Marketing.”

Building a Custom Landing Page

Jen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:39:00 GMT

You know how important it is to have custom landing pages for your pay-per-click campaigns, email campaigns, and any other marketing efforts that drive potential customers to your Web site. But if the thought of creating a custom page scares you, don’t worry. The trick isn’t to write it from scratch, but to recycle the content you already have. Here’s how:

First, determine the messaging for your marketing piece and landing page. For this example, let’s say we’re sending an email to your current customers telling them about a week-long sale on Traffic Blazer®. (You would set the sale in the Reseller Control Center on the Product Pricing page.)

For the content of the email, we’re going to include the following elements:

Introduction appealing to customer’s desire to draw more visitors to their site, thereby increasing sales
Product description cut and pasted from the Traffic Blazer page in your turnkey storefront
Sale price of $19.99/yr (min. retail) versus the regular price of $24.99
Sale Dates – “You must hurry, because this offer expires on [DATE].”
Call-to-action – “Act now to increase your site traffic and SAVE 20%.”

For the landing page we’ll incorporate the elements from the email, plus add more details to show the user how this product will benefit them:

Insert the plan features from the product page with a "Buy Now" link
Call out sale price and dates of sale (make this easy to change out with standard price after the sale is over)
Emphasize how easy it is to get started, pull the ‘4 Steps to Success’ from the overview tab on the product page with a "Buy Now" link.
Call-to-action – “Act now and SAVE 20% on Traffic Blazer, the surefire way to increase visitors to your site.”

Now that you know where to find all the elements, the writing doesn’t seem so bad, does it? Here’s some sample copy – remember you would want to make the tone of both the landing page and the email match the tone you’ve chosen for the rest of your site.

Email

Subject: [Customer Name], Increase Site Traffic and Save 20%

Dear [Customer Name],

Is your Web site attracting the attention it deserves? If not, Traffic Blazer® is for you!

Most Web site traffic and online purchases come from search engines like Google®, Yahoo!® and MSN®. Make sure your site appears in top Search rankings with Traffic Blazer®. Promote your business online, increase your visibility, and make money on the Internet...in a few simple steps. NO technical expertise is necessary. If you can type and click, you can use Traffic Blazer.

Traffic Blazer is a great deal at our standard price of $24.99/year, but now through [DATE] we’re offering it for just $19.99/year!

Act now, this price won’t be around for long - increase your site traffic and sales at [MyResellerStore].

Landing Page

Increase Your Site Traffic and SAVE

Most Web site traffic and online purchases come from search engines like Google®, Yahoo!® and MSN®. Make sure your site appears in top search rankings with Traffic Blazer®.

Get your site listed in major search engine rankings
Bring more traffic to your Web site
Increase customers
Just $24.99/yr

Special Offer: $19.99/yr for a limited time only, offer expires [DATE]. Order Now

Traffic Blazer makes it a snap to promote your business online, increase your visibility and make money on the Internet...in four simple steps. NO technical expertise is necessary. If you can type and click, you can use Traffic Blazer. It even works with Safari, so Mac users can enjoy the benefits, too. Still not sure? We’ll even include the comprehensive Traffic Blazer Help System, offering tips, guidance, and detailed tutorials on search engine optimization and the search engine industry.

4 Steps to More Traffic

1. Search Engine Optimization - Position your Web site for the highest possible ranking with leading search engines. Traffic Blazer's keyword and site optimization tools show you the words and phrases search engine users enter most often (powered by Yahoo! Sponsored Search).

2. Web Site Analysis - Traffic Blazer's robust analysis (including keyword usage, spiderability, and files and Robots Meta tags) of your site's strengths and potential weaknesses helps you secure crucial search engine success.

3. Submission - Easily submit your Web page(s) to leading search engines. Around the world or region-specific, it's up to you. Traffic Blazer helps you submit your site to more than 200 search engines and directories in all!

NEW! Target your local audience. Submit your site to local search engine programs like Google® Local, Yahoo!® Local, Live Search (MSN) and Local.com™. * For brick-and-mortar businesses only; not available to online-only businesses. Or use Traffic Blazer to submit your blog to more than 75 blog search engines and directories.

4. Reporting - No more wondering about what works and what doesn’t. Traffic Blazer is loaded with reports that give you answers.

Link Popularity report gives you the number of inbound links to your Web site;
List Checking verifies that your Web site is listed with the Internet's leading search engines and directories;
Alexa®/Google® Rank assesses your site's online performance;
Competitor Rank compare your site's search engine ranking to that of your competitors;
Keyword Ranking reveals your current ranking on AltaVista®, HotBot®, Lycos®, and MSN®.

Traffic Blazer makes increasing your site visibility a snap. Get started today!

*Traffic Blazer supports submission to AlltheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, A9, Dogpile, Netscape, Excite, and Hotbot by enabling submission to search engines Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live, which provide the search results for these search engines and portals. All search engine names are registered trademarks of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

That’s all there is to it! You have the building blocks for custom landing pages within each of the product pages in your reseller storefront. Just take a moment to read through the content and decide which pieces work with the message you want to share with your customers. Then craft your call-to-action and use it to tie your marketing email and landing page together. Be sure to include more details on the landing page to close the sale.

Quick List of Small Business Tax Resources

Jen — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:24:00 GMT

You may have already completed your 2007 taxes, but if you’re dreading the task or tackling your Internet-based business’s taxes for the first time, here are some resources that may help:

The Small Business and Self-Employed One-Stop Resource from the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS is doing their part to help make filing easier, pulling forms and FAQs into one location. This Web site includes a quick A-Z index if you need a specific form; answers to qualifying business expense questions; tax-related guidelines for employers; how to get an Employer ID Number if you don’t have one; and more.

New Tax Law Changes for Your 2008 Federal Income Taxes from American Consumer News. This article offers a short summary of tax law changes for 2008, giving you a good heads-up on areas where you might want to pay special attention when filing this year, including new business mileage rates and new rules for charitable giving deductions.

Glossary of Tax Terms from Entrepreneur.com. Whether you’re working on your taxes or using your tax accountant, you’re probably running into terms that are over your head. Here’s an alphabetical resource to help explain those terms and bring them closer to everyday vocabulary.

Top Tax Deductions for Your Small Business by Attorney Stephen Fishman (Nolo). This article is about small business in general and is not specific to your reseller business. But once you get to the end of the article, there is a handy section on “Advertising and Promotion” and a list of “Easily Overlooked Business Expenses.”

Going forward – Here are some strategies for going forward with your 2008 taxes.

Six Tax Tips for 2008 from the Small Business Resource Center – This article has a variety of practical (and one or two iffy) suggestions, but the strongest message you’ll get is to be organized in 2008 and keep track of everything related to your small business for 2009.

Estimated Quarterly taxes are confusing, but it will be worth your while to figure out if you should be paying them before you get penalized on a future tax return. This TaxMama article is a couple years old, but gives a clear idea of when you’re required to go this route. Estimated Payments. Hate Them? But Pay Them!

Express Email Marketing® Opt-In Magnet – In depth

Jen — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:06:00 GMT

Email marketing is a great tool for getting out the news about your reseller business – the Express Email Marketing® account you received with your reseller plan can automatically import customers who have opted in to receive emails from your company.

But current customers aren’t your only market – building up a mailing list offers you even greater reach. Plus, if you can segment your audience based on their interests, you can make your messages even more relevant and valuable to the recipient. Express Email Marketing gives you all the tools necessary to build your lists and create these segments via Interest Groups.

Step 1: Build a Sign-Up Form

To start building a sign-up form, look under the ‘Opt-In Magnet’ menu. You’ll see options for adding a logo and changing fonts and colors. Be sure and use these to make your sign-up form friendly and approachable. Find the logo and color scheme that goes with your site and you’ll keep your branding strong and ensure visitors that they’re in the right place.

You may also wish to change the section heading copy to set the tone for the form. Stick with the standard “Please tell us a little about yourself” or lighten the tone to “What’s the 411 on our favorite customer?” Then carry that tone through to the custom questions – think of these as an introductory survey. Ask how they heard about you; how they’d rate your pricing; ask them for their Web site url so you can learn more about their business, etc. These questions do not determine your email segments; they should be considered additional user information – you will be able to view the responses when you look up an individual subscriber profile.

Interest Groups allow you to create custom demographic segments. In the form builder, set up your Section Heading now. Then we’ll talk about what you might want to add for Interest Groups in the next step.

The Subscription Confirmation Message is the perfect spot to customize your message and remind users of a current special, and then drive them back to a product page or custom landing page to make a purchase. If you use this page for offers, you’ll need to keep the completion page up to date, or choose an offer that doesn’t expire.

Step 2: Manage Interest Groups

There are two types of Interest Groups available in your Express Email Marketing account. The first, Public Interest Groups, is where you let your customers decide to opt in to lists via the sign-up form and their individual profile. The second, Private Interest Groups, is where you build your own segment that users won’t have access to – it’s managed via the List Database Manager. Here are suggestions on how to use each type:

Public Interest Groups – Use these to define the demographics that let you customize your offers. For example, you might want to call out entrepreneurs versus web hobbyists. Is the person who buys your eCommerce product running their own online store, or are they working with a charity and taking donations online? Think of creative ways to ask for this info that make it fun for respondents to tell you more about themselves.

Example:
I consider myself an Internet…
[] newbie – I’m just getting started self-publishing
[] self-starter – I’m building my Internet presence from scratch
[] entrepreneur – I’m taking my brick-and-mortar business online
[] veteran – the ‘Net is my home ground
[] junkie – the Web is where I live

How could you use these demographics?

Be sure to let the newbies and self-starters know about Website Tonight®, Online Photo Filer, Online File Folder, Traffic Blazer® and Traffic Facts – newbies might need more help getting up and running, and the self-starters just need to know you have these things available.
For the entrepreneurs, focus on the importance of owning domain variations for their business and give them examples of how they can use each: .com for main site; .net for private employee login; .org if they have a tie to a non-profit or just want to protect their interests; .info as a landing page for business listings; .jobs to post their careers page, etc. You can also focus on the eCommerce tools, Express Email Marketing, Traffic Facts and Online File Folder as essential business tools.
The veteran and junkie are going to want to do everything themselves – let them know about the features of the virtual dedicated and dedicated servers. They may also be candidates for Express Email Marketing and Quick Blogcast to share their knowledge with their Internet contacts.

When coming up with your Interest Groups, think about how you want to tie your reseller business to your target market (or your other existing businesses).

Private Interest Groups – If you want to A/B test subject lines or email content, use Private Interest Groups to segment your audience. Create a group for each – you’ll have to opt in half of your audience (tedious if you have a large subscriber list). A quick way to do it: Once your Interest Groups are built, go into the List Database Manager and do an Advanced Search in ‘View Subscribers.’ Use the wildcard symbol, *, to search alphabetically, assigning every other letter of the alphabet to your ‘A’ list segment, and the other half to your ‘B’ segment. Here’s how you build the search string:

Condition: [Email Address] [is] [a*]

You can add multiple search strings, so go ahead and build it a-z for the group you want to add to the ‘A’ list and run the search. At the bottom of the page you’ll see a count in ‘Displaying results 1-100 of NNN.’ Check to see if NNN is roughly half of your overall subscribers. If not, you might want to add or remove a few letters of the alphabet until it is. When the number is good, use the dropdown boxes at the top of the list to ‘Assign to Interest Group.’ Then pick your new Private Interest Group.

The ‘B’ half is even easier. Run your search for Interest Groups ‘Not in an Interest Group’ and pick your ‘A’ list. Next, assign the results to your ‘B’ list and your A/B test lists are ready to go. By assigning everyone to one list or the other, it will be easier to update new subscribers – just run a periodic search on anyone not in either ‘A’ or ‘B’ and assign half of them to each list.

Another use for Private Interest Groups is to identify groups that have meaning to you, but that you don’t want your users to use to self-identify, such as:

A monthly renewal list – Build a monthly list of people up for product renewal. Send them a custom announcement in addition to standard renewal notices.
Bulk domain buyers – Do you have an audience segment that buys domains in bulk? To make sure they’re aware of the reduced pricing, identify these people to get special emails each time a new domain sale starts.
Online Photo Filer customers – Time communications to this crowd around each holiday. Remind them of holiday-themed templates they can use to customize their albums, as well as the low pricing to get pictures printed directly from their photo albums.
Your best customers – Repay their loyalty by dropping pricing for a 24- or 36-hour period. Make sure these people know it’s a sale just for them.

Step 3: Add Subscriber Link

This is one of the tools you’re going to use to build your list. Put the invitation to join your mailing list everywhere you can think of – include it on your storefront and include it in your order confirmation emails (as an invitation to receive exclusive email updates). If you have an email newsletter, be sure to invite people to subscribe on your site, in blog posts, and in your email signature. If you do banner advertising, use a banner that invites people to subscribe to special offers and drive them to your sign-up form.

Step 4: Edit Email Notices

Here’s another opportunity to include your own branding, a conversational tone, and/or refer subscribers to a special offer. For example, set it up as “This Week’s Customer Special” and send them to one landing page – just be sure to keep the offer on that landing page up to date.

It doesn’t hurt to part with kind words either – if someone chooses to unsubscribe, you can create your own message to let them know you’re sorry to see them go, and invite them to come back and rejoin the mailing list if their needs change in the future.