My website is called M.K. Ettington Books (http://mkettingtonbooks.com) and is designed to showcase Spiritually related books and related products.
I decided to start write my own books on spiritual and metaphysics titles.
The first one I wrote was titled "Immortality: A History and How to Guide".
Since it was a self published in both printed and digital forms I decided to setup a webpage for this book and bought a domain name for it (http://immortality.us.com).
In the months that followed I decided to add more related books on subjects like prophecy, happiness, enlightenment, and the paranormal usage of the scientific method.
As I wrote each book I also added a new webpage and domain name for each book then tied them all together.
This approach started to give me some related content on the same website so that if a visitor was interested in one topic they could see the other related pages and might buy those too.
I started selling a few books but the volume was still pretty low.
After a few months of writing and adding individual webpages I realized that I had an interesting theme and should start adding other related content.
At this point I started adding a series of categories in a left margin menu and populating those categories with products and services.
The categories included Immortaltiy, Prophecy, Happiness, and other related areas such as meditation, metaphysics, personal favorites and lots more.
The addition of these categories took my theme to a new level so that spiritual seekers could find multiple offerings related to the original core of books I was selling.
I got the additional products for these new categories by signing up as an affiliate for Amazon.com and Clickbank. Both these organizations offer thousands of products that you can resell and makes commissions up to 75% per sale.
I also bought some digital product packages like the IProfit Ebooks which gave me more products with full resale rights to offer on my site.
After that website expansion I realized I needed to spend more time on marketing my products and services.
(I was also reading a lot of websites and ebooks on how to improve and market websites at that time also.)
The new marketing work included publishing free ebooks, writing ezine articles, and the best one--setting up my own opt in mailing lists.
These lists have evolved into both email lists with lots of information and freebies, and ecourses on specific interests.
Although ECourses take some time to put together, they are very good to have.
In addition to providing useful free information and downloads to persons taking the ecourses, they also explain to those students why the product the ecourse is focused on have good value and they should consider purchasing.
I also started looking for good pay per click traffic generation sites. After trying several I found a really good low cost traffic generation program at 7Search.
Traffic increased on my site but I was still only getting sporadic sales.
Finally, I found that rewriting my webpages with a stronger orientation towards what readers interests and issues are was a key to generating stronger conversions of clicks to sales. This made my site profitable.
I also added additionalcontent such as links to many sites on Ebooks related to spirituality, and Paranormal Groups which lists many groups available on these subjects to let users build an online community in their interest areas.
In the process of educating myself I had developed a lot of interests in internet business and affiliate money generation tools, but these tools didn't fit with my original website theme of "Paranormal Books and related areas".
This was when I decided to launch a new website titled http://makingmoney.us.com
This new site is dedicated to internet money making opportunities and related products and services.
I also wrote an extensive ecourse on this site to help students learn how to start and build their own internet businesses. (This ECourse is available at http://makingmoney.us.com/index_files/ecoursebus.htm)
Although I still have a lot of work to do in building sales and profitability I've learned several useful lessons:
1) It helps a lot to have your own products which you are excited about. This excitement comes through in your webpages to get prospective customers excited too.
2) Building a website theme around your core interests helps to build traffic which will also cross sell related products.
3) Opt in email lists are critical for building lists of subscribers who are interested in what you have and want to learn more. Most studies say you need to touch up people seven or more times before they will consider buying your products and services.
4) ECourses are wonderful value for both the students who signup and to make them aware of the benefits of your products and services.
5) A strong theme on your website which you can build the business around is a good idea. Think about this carefully before you start your website.
Good luck on starting your own profitable internet businesses.
Best Regards,
Marty Ettington
mkebooks@ecsassoc.com
http://mkettingtonbooks.com
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