If you take a quick look at Mr. Furey’s website you will see that on his site, he sells multiple information products, as well as promoting his business coaching services and seminars. I would describe Mr. Furey’s main niche as fitness products marketed to those interested in combat sports.

By most accounts, MattFurey.com is an enormously successful online business. According to direct marketing guru Dan Kennedy, in his book No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs, Matt Furey’s online businesses generate “millions of dollars a year”.

I would argue that the success of the website MattFurey.com has been largely based on a single product, and that product would be Mr. Furey’s book, Combat Conditioning. For years Matt Furey has run full page ads in the back of magazines related to his niche, to promote this particular book.

Many of these full page sales letters would offer prospects the opportunity to purchase Combat Conditioning directly or to visit one of Mr. Furey’s websites. In the same book on wealth attraction, mentioned above, author Dan Kennedy explains that Combat Conditioning “has sold hundreds of thousands of copies”.

We have all herd of “gateway drugs”, where use of drugs such as marijuana are considered to increase the chances that person will move on to using other, less main stream substances. Well it seems that in Mr. Furey’s business model, Combat Conditioning has been a gateway product.

By that I mean that some of Mr. Furey’s first time customers came to know of him and his line of products through a magazine ad for Combat Conditioning and then based on the strength of that one product, a percentage of those customers became “converts” to the Furey’s line of products.

Having a successful line of information products definitely helps to promote a seminar business, and a seminar business is a great platform from which to promote your information products. And of course success in online business and seminars provide excellent credentials for promoting your business coaching services.

Often when I talk to people about their online businesses, I get asked questions about various tactics that people are thinking of using to make money online. Some people ask if they should sell on Craigslist or eBay. Others considering the benefits of placing AdSense ads on their site’s vs. ads from ValueClick.

All of these are questions about online business tactics. While asking such questions can be helpful, I think there are some more important questions that should be asked.

Tactics are individual actions or decisions designed to produce a specific reaction. Strategies on the other hand are plans for stringing together a series of tactics, in a specific order, depending on various conditions.

The problem with tactics is that no matter which one you pick, your competitors can follow you by using the exact same tactic. If your business is all tactics and no strategy then you will be engaged in perfect competition with those using the same tactics. The problem with perfect competition, as we have described in The eBay Myth, is that “…with identical products and perfect competition, profits tend towards zero.”

The only way to avoid perfect competition is by building barriers to entry into your business strategy. A barrier to entry is any feature built into your business that makes it difficult for people to compete with you directly.

Examples of barriers to entry in an online business might include a sizable email list, tons of SEO traffic coming to your site month after month, a large number of social-networking contacts, a reputation as an expert in a particular niche, or even a system for producing article marketing articles, faster then your competitors.

What other barriers to entry can you think of, we would love to hear from you in the form of comment to this post.

The following is a technique that I have seen put into place before by some SEO experts who have decided to use their skills to promote an e-commerce site of their own creation.

The idea behind the technique is to design an e-commerce site, from the ground up, with SEO in mind. The page would then be optimized, using both on-page and off-page factors to rank at or near the top of the search results for a competitive keyword, preferably one that is generating significant amounts of traffic.

The magic of this technique comes when the major search engines do their periodic algorithm update. These updates happen fairly often, and when they do, they tend to shift search engine rankings. The expert’s strategy here, is to create another version of her site in order to stay on top of the rankings.

This next version of the site will usually be quite similar to the original, with some subtle changes thrown in, so as to prevent the technique from being obvious. For instance the company name will most likely be changed, as might the logo, color scheme, and of course the domain.

In employing such a technique our expert is leveraging two things. First, she is leveraging her highly specialized knowledge of the SEO industry to stay one step ahead of the competition. Secondly she is leveraging all the systems she has developed to run her first business, such as inventory, fulfillment, shipping, site design, etc, on each of her clone businesses.

In terms of the “trust” issue that often comes into play when customers make e-commerce decisions, the expert has several cards she can play to make her site more trust worthy. First, she can split test different design layouts to see which produces the most favorable bounce rate. If the user leaves the site as soon as they land, because they think the site design is shoddy, that of course, is not likely to help business.

Second, she can sign up for different  online security services such as VeriSign, Hacker Safe and split test the effect on conversion rate of adding “badges” for some of these sites. Third, she could split test offering different customer service options and once again check the effect these options have on the site’s conversion rate.

As for the decision making process involved in e-commerce decisions, the expert in this case has some factors working in their favor. First off, the traffic to such sites would most likely be highly targeted. Since the visitor searched for a particular term and then landed on the expert’s site, they are most likely interested in whatever niche the site is associated with, even if not all of them are interested in buying anything at the moment.

Secondly even if such a page did not have the benefit of being able to follow up with customers through an RSS feed or an  email list, they can still make up for relatively low conversion rates if the traffic from whatever keyword they are targeting his large enough.

This model has seemed to have worked for some in the past, which of course is no guarantee that it will work in the future. I share it because it is an example of an unorthodox strategy for gaining an edge in online business and I hope it inspires others with some good ideas they can apply to their own online businesses.

This post will cover the topic of using Squidoo lenses for affiliate marketing. Most affiliate marketing campaigns act as a funnel towards a single product or service. The reason for this is that classical sales letter theory claims that most humans have poor decision making abilities.

Due to this lack of faith in the decision making ability of their average customer, marketers from this school of thought tend to only give their prospect one choice, preferably from between only two options, at a single time.

Examples of such simple choices are as follows: “opt-in or don’t opt-in to my email list”, “follow the link from my email broadcast to my sales-letter landing-page or don’t”,  “click Buy Now or don’t”, “select the upgrade option or don’t”. I admit sometimes even classical sales letter advocates will get fancy and offer you two or more upgrade options, but I digress.

When we compare the above outlined funnel model to an affiliate link from a Squidoo page strait to a product landing page, we see some sharp contrasts. First, the average Squidoo page has several links going off in many directions. It may have Google AdSense Ads, links to eBay Auctions, Amazon Affiliate Links, among other possible outbound links.

In terms of your overall business strategy, these outbound links may have value, however in terms of helping your customer make the decision to purchase whatever affiliate product you are promoting, I would argue that extra outbound links serve as a distraction.

Another factor to consider is whether you really want to send your Squidoo traffic strait to a sales letter style landing page without first asking them to opt-in for an email list.

This is an area where trust starts to come into play. If a visitor is to buy a product after reading your Squidoo page and a sales letter written by the product creator, then you are asking them to take your word the quality of the product producer and asking the to take the product producer’s word on the quality of the product.

I think this somewhat violates the way that most sales happen in a person-to-person setting. Low ticket items can be sold on the first meeting, however the higher the ticket price becomes the greater the chance that several meetings will be required to land the sale.

Having a series of follow up emails helps both the build trust between you and the reader, as well as to nurture their “decision to buy”.

The classical sales letter method outlined above, is of course, not the only way to be successful in e-commerce. We will explore some of these alternative methods in our upcoming e-commerce case studies.

As an intro to our series on e-commerce case studies, we wanted to address what seems to be the hot topic on everyone’s minds, which is how to “trigger the sale”. Being able to trigger the sale usually amounts to developing a better conversion rate.

We have already discussed things like the importance of split testing, and the connection between conversion rate and price, as they relate to improving conversion rate. So for this post we would like to bump it up a level and take a more macro look at the question of how improve conversion rate.

“Triggering the Sale” on an e-commerce site is dependent on two factors which are closely tied together, and the first of these factors is trust.

There are lots of potential trust issues involved in an e-commerce transaction. The most basic doubt in the minds of potential first time customers may be the possibility of fraud.

If I am considering purchasing from a website I have no experience with, then the following thoughts may run through my mind: “what are the chances that I will pay for this product and never receive it”, “what if there are problems with my order, will I have any recourse”, “do they have any customer service”, and “how safe is my credit card information once I hit submit”.

Trust can also extend beyond fraud into doubts about the quality of the product, service, or alleged credentials of the company you are about to do business with.

After trust based obstacles have been successfully overcome we move to the issue of decision. Your customer as arrived at the “decision to buy”  when they com to the point, either through a process of emotion and / or logic where they believe the benefits of your offering (real or imaginary) justify the item’s cost . As we will see in our case studies “trust based concerns” and the “decision to buy” are very closely related.

The price that you pick for your site’s offerings will be intimately tied to your sites conversion rate. If the price you pick is too high, then even with excellent presentation, your conversion rate will begin to drop. On the other hand, if you price your offering too low people will assume your product is not of much value, and your conversion rate will also suffer.

The exception to the two guidelines mentioned above is websites that run as discount operations. These kinds of sites can be successful, however this is very difficult model for those just starting their first business. One reason for this is because these kinds of sites usually require the business owner to maintain his own inventory.

If you are drop shipping, and acting as a middle man, then chances are that it will be just about impossible for you to undercut your competitors and still make a profit. The problem with keeping an inventory when starting out is that it requires storage space, and that it comes with the risk of taking a loss if you are not able to move your inventory.

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So as we touched on in our last post, all things that relate to monetization in the online business world start with Traffic. It is the river flowing towards your online business. Feel free to let me know if I am getting too metaphysical sounding.

Anywho, once we have this traffic flowing towards us, it is our job to funnel it through some sort of conversion piece. The purpose of this conversion piece is to catch a certain percentage of the traffic flowing towards us and to convert them into some actionable event, such as a sale.

If you are sending traffic from an email list to a specific landing page on one of your e-commerce sites that sells a single product, or a single product with multiple variations, then in theory your conversion rate could get as high as 5%

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