Money Secrets

So you’re looking to earn money working online. You have something to sell, or you’re looking to sign up distributors into your MLM opportunity. Do you show your potential customers a capture page, get their details and build up to the sale over time? Or do you take them immediately to the sales page where you persuade them that they need to act fast or risk missing out big time?

The only reason for having a capture page is to get folks onto your list of prospective customers/partners, so that you can earn money from them. Either you want them to buy your products, sign up for your services, or join you in your Network Marketing opportunity.

You don’t put up a capture page to get more friends. It’s not a friend finder. It’s a sales tool.

But if it’s a sales tool, why not just go straight to the sales pitch and miss out the capture page altogether?

In truth, you should be using both capture and sales pages in your business. But you should always take your prospects through your capture page first.

And here’s why:

Building trust - one of the biggest hurdles to earning money online is the fact that the customer doesn’t know you from Adam. It’s not like they’re popping to their local store, where they know the owner and the owner knows them. Business on the Internet is often faceless. Getting someone to trust you is a big factor in whether they will buy from you.

Timing - people use the Internet to search for stuff all the time. That doesn’t mean they are searching with their credit card beside them just waiting to spend their money. So in order to buy from a sales page, they would need to put down their laptop, or get up from their desktop PC, go get their credit card, and go through the sales process. You can bet they’ve changed their mind before they’ve even got the credit card out! After all, they don’t know you so there’s no trust.

Risk - in this day and age, everyone is keenly aware of the risks involved with identity theft, online scams, etc. Offering something that is related to what they’re looking for, but doesn’t require them to take the risk of inputting their credit card details onto an unknown website is much more likely to get a response.

Relationships - by using a capture page you can build a relationship with potential customers/prospects and in so doing you discover whether what you’re selling is actually right for them. If it isn’t, that doesn’t mean you’ve lost money. If you’ve built up a relationship with them and established trust and credibility in their eyes, there’s every chance they’ll recommed you and/or your product or opportunity to anyone who they think would benefit from it.

Don’t think about whether you should be using a capture page or a sales page. Think of your sales funnel as an article. Your capture page is the introduction, the emails / phone calls that you use are the body, and the sales page is the conclusion.

You’ll sell a whole lot more and sign up a helluva lot more distributors to your business.

The dream is to earn money without doing any work. But, the only way to do that is to set up an automated marketing system. And that will require some work in the beginning.

Whether you like it or not, you have to be willing to take some action to set it up, or you have to shell out a whole bunch of money to pay someone else to do it for you. The problem with the second option is that:

Usually, the reason yo’re looking to earn money online is because you don’t have much to start with.

You don’t know where to go or who to trust to set up the system for you.

Even assuming you can afford to outsource the setup, and you can find someone to actually do it, you’re still left with the problem of not knowing what to do if something goes wrong. And even the most well put together of machines breaks down.

Which leaves you with setting up your system yourself. Now, before you go running off thinking that setting up an automated marketing system is going to be too hard, or take too long, read on.

Depending on your skill level and your access to different resources, you can set up a system in a matter of hours. If you’re as dumb as I was when I first started out, it may take a few days, or even a few weeks. But isn’t it worth sacrificing the initial time required if it means you can then sit back and continue to earn money without doing any work?

Tools Needed

A domain name - if you want to be taken seriously you will need your own domain. I use NameCheap.com. But there are a zillion others you can use if you prefer.

Hosting - somewhere for your domain to ‘live’. A homeless domain isn’t worth much. Again, there are a zillion hosting services available. But be warned. Not all hosting services are created equal. Depending on how much you know about HTML, FTP, PHP, CPanels, Bandwidth,… you may struggle to actually get your site moved in to it’s new address and open for visitors. I speak from experience having uploaded the first site I created to a ‘private’ folder that couldn’t be accessed by anyone! Hopefully, you’re not that dumb. But if you are, check out my hosting provider. Gotta love Bj for his patience with me in the early days.

An autoresponder. Absolutely essential because even the best copywriters and web designers in the world can’t give you a 100% conversion rate. So you need to capture your visitor’s e-mail address in order to follow up with them. My autoresponder of choice is iContact as many of you already know, having subscribed to my Money Secret Tips.

Once you’ve got those sorted it’s time to set it all up. And this is where it starts to involve doing some ‘real’ work. Because you now have to create a website.

Scary isn’t it?

Actually, it’s not that bad. You can use a blogging platform, like B2Evo or Wordpress or Blogger - all of them free and all of them simple to set up and use. Alternatively, download one of the free WYSIWYG editors, check out some free templates, and start playing around.

If all that sounds like too much hard work, check out this free capture page creator that one of my fellow ‘Insiders’ released.

You then need to integrate your capture page with your autoresponder. Be sure that the messages you put in there, which will be going out to your list, are useful and informative - not just a bunch of sales hype.

Most autoresponders allow you to customise the sign up box that you will be putting on your capture page. You should be able to choose what information you want to gather, as well as what colour of font, background, etc.

Once your site is uploaded to its new home on the web, you are ready to start inviting visitors. How you choose to do it is up to you, but usually ‘free’ methods are more automated than paid.

Paid advertising is something that you will have to keep on doing although it’s hardly ‘work’ and isnt going to take up too much of your valuable time.

But free, organic traffic is traffic that just keeps on coming, even after you’ve stopped putting in the effort to get it. And while there a loads of ways you can put this to work by far one of the best is Article Marketing.

Writing and submitting articles to directories such as EzineArticles.com/ means that your site can be visited years from now when someone reads an article you write today. Not only that, but if your articles are picked up by publishers they can be posted on other sites and give you even more traffic from those sites’ visitors.

The end result?

Someone reads one of your articles, clicks the link to your site, submits their details to your signup form, and your messages are delivered direct to their inbox - all while you’re busy sleeping.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it. You need a great capture page, you need to define your target market, you need to know what keywords your potential visitors are likely to be typing ito the search engines, you need to be able to write great sales pulling copy, you need…. but the basics are pretty fundamental. The rest is just icing on the cake.