Earning money online can involve various methods, such as freelancing, online businesses, or passive income streams. Consider your skills and interests to find a suitable avenue. Freelancing platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, creating and selling digital products, or starting a blog or YouTube channel are some options. Explore what aligns with your strengths and goals.
There are several ways to monetize your YouTube channel:
1. **Ad Revenue:** Enable AdSense on your channel to earn money from ads displayed on your videos.
2. **Channel Memberships:** Offer channel memberships to your subscribers for exclusive perks in exchange for a monthly fee.
3. **Merchandise Shelf:** Sell your own merchandise by integrating a merch shelf on your channel.
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4. **Affiliate Marketing:** Promote products or services in your videos and include affiliate links to earn a commission for each sale.
5. **Sponsorships:** Partner with brands for sponsored content or product placements in your videos.
6. **Super Chat and Super Stickers:** Enable these features during live streams to allow viewers to make direct monetary contributions.
7. **YouTube Premium Revenue:** Earn a share of the revenue generated from YouTube Premium subscribers watching your content.
Remember to comply with YouTube's policies and guidelines when implementing monetization strat
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
<title>YouTube Thumbnail Downloader</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<h1>YouTube Thumbnail Downloader</h1>
<label for="videoUrl">Enter YouTube Video URL:</label>
<input type="text" id="videoUrl" placeholder="Paste YouTube video URL...">
<button onclick="downloadThumbnail()">Download Thumbnail</button>
<div id="thumbnailContainer">
<!-- Display the downloaded thumbnail here -->
</div>
</div>
<script src</script>
</body>
</html>
body {
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
background-color: #f4f4f4;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
display: flex;
align-items: center;
justify-content: center;
height: 100vh;
}
.container {
text-align: center;
background-color: #fff;
padding: 20px;
border-radius: 8px;
box-shadow: 0 4px 8px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
}
h1 {
color: #333;
}
label {
display: block;
margin: 10px 0;
}
input {
width: 100%;
padding: 8px;
margin-bottom: 15px;
box-sizing: border-box;
}
button {
background-color: #4caf50;
color: #fff;
padding: 10px 20px;
border: none;
border-radius: 4px;
cursor: pointer;
}
button:hover {
background-color: #45a049;
}
function downloadThumbnail() {
// Implement the logic to download the YouTube thumbnail
// Use YouTube API or any server-side scripting to fetch the thumbnail URL
// Display the thumbnail in the #thumbnailContainer div
const videoUrl = document.getElementById('videoUrl').value;
// Implement your logic to fetch the thumbnail URL and update the #thumbnailContainer
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DIRECT RESPONSE SITE DESIGN
SOFTWARE PIRACY AND FIGHTING IT
If your product isn't physical in nature--a new font, a piece of digital art, or a
software suite, for example--then shipping issues don't enter into the equation.
What does enter into the equation, however, is the problem of piracy.
The great virtue of an information economy is that its products require very little
in the way of production costs to distribute--all you have to do is pay the
bandwidth costs necessary to send the file to your customers. But the great vice
of an information economy is exactly the same thing: files on a computer can be
produced so easily that stealing your product is as simple as finding a way to
download it without your knowledge. (As anyone involved in the music industry
already knows.) This is a problem under any circumstances, of course, but it
becomes an exponentially greater problem with time. If one person downloads
your product without your knowledge, that isn't a serious issue. If that person
then posts your product on a public file server or peer-to-peer network, however,
then hundreds of people can download it--which is a very, very serious issue for
you.
So you'll need to take measures to prevent piracy. A full discussion of that is
outside the scope of this book, of course, but here are a few ideas:
Never provide a direct download link for your product--meaning never link to
the product's file on any server. Use redirect techniques to keep people from
knowing exactly where your product is on the Internet--and from then
disseminating that information. A good coder can help you with this. Only
make your product available in an encrypted form, and require customers to
enter a code in order to unlock the content. Customers can then download the
product freely--you'd just be selling the code to unlock the freely-downloadable
file. Require customers to register your product, and digitally "mark" their file
once they register it with you. This is basically the same technique used to
combat physical theft: putting unique serial numbers on the product. This way,
if you start seeing pirated copies of your content on the Internet, you can
check the pirated copy against your records, determine who distributed the full
version of your product, and take whatever measures are necessary.
TO REINVEST OR NOT TO REINVEST?
The answer to the question of "to reinvest or not to reinvest" is simple: reinvest!
That is, reinvest as much as you can to keep the business profitable for yourself:
if your online business is your sole source of income, reinvesting all of your
money is not a good idea. But if you're starting your online business in addition
to a day job, definitely reinvest as much of the profits as you can into improving
your business.
The logic behind this is simple: the more money you put into your business, the
faster it can start to grow. If you improve your website server or pay for a new
commerce system or redesign, you can improve your customer's experience at
your site, which makes them more likely to buy your product and improve your
business. If you refine the product itself, then you make it more attractive to
customers and boost sales even more. (It may even lead to a new idea or an
expanded product line down the road.) Taking the profits for yourself beyond
your basic expenses is an attractive option, of course--and usually the reason we
go into business in the first place. But putting the money you make back into
your business allows you to make more money eventually, to increase your
overall profits, and to keep your customers coming back, extending the life of
your business significantly and keeping the revenue stream steady. A central
tenet of modern capitalism is that if your business isn't growing, it's failing: make
sure that your business grows by putting as much money back into it as you c
Above all, put money into promotion for your site and your product--a topic which
we'll cover in more detail in the next chapter.
DIRECT RESPONSE SITE DESIGN
7
THE SALES LETTER
The sales letter is at the heart of any good direct response website. As we
touched on in the chapter about basic site design, your website always needs a
good front page--and your sales letter should always be the bulk of that front
page. Without a good, prominent sales letter, you may have the best website on
the Internet--and if you follow our advice in the previous chapters, you'll certainly
have a good shot at making that claim--but you won't be able to effectively
convert website traffic into actual customers. And that fails the basic purpose of
direct response site design: selling the product. So, make sure that your sales
letter is prominent--and using the techniques and theories in this chapter, make
sure that it's good.
SALES LETTER FORMAT
Think about what a sales letter does. Your sales letter is responsible for three
things:
Introducing the customer to your product.
Arguing persuasively about the merits of that product.
Inspiring the customer to purchase the product.
This seems like a simple structure, but it requires you to use three distinct modes
of writing throughout, and to seamlessly transition from one into the other. It
also requires you to do this in a fairly brief span of time (about which we'll talk
more in just a moment.)
The first section of the sales letter is your introduction. Within the introduction,
you want to state clearly exactly what your product is. This is not the place to
get persuasive about your product: this is simply the place to describe its
essential nature so that any customer knows, right up front, what it is that you're
selling. A new type of corkscrew should be described, right up front, as a new
type of corkscrew. A new online fantasy novel should be described, right up
front, as a new online fantasy novel.
Our third basic principle of direct response site design holds true here: keep it
simple, stupid. Online customers have millions of other websites that they could
be visiting, and if your sales letter starts off too fancily, obscurely, or densely,
they're going to leave your site for one of those other millions. So, don't try to
dazzle your readers by going into the long history of woodcarving in order to
promote your handcrafted wind chimes, and don't sermonize about the history of
art and information in order to promote your web design software package. Your
first line should always read something like this: "Foo is a new type of Widget
from the brilliant designers at Acme"--where Foo is the product, Widget is its
description, and Acme is your company's name. Immediately your customer
knows what you're selling, how that product might fit into their life, and who's
doing the selling. You've laid your cards on the table--and with this level of
simplicity, your customers will be much more willing to pick them up and play.
The second part of your sales letter--the argument--is where you can start
getting fancy, introducing some dazzle into your presentation of your product.
Your customers know what you're selling: now they're waiting for you to sell it to
them. Use whatever tools are appropriate to your product. For a mechanical
gadget or appliance, you might talk about how your product's specifications
outperform many of the leading brands in your market.
For a piece of art, you might talk about the high level of training and
craftsmanship on the part of the artist, or about the prestige and delight that a
piece of well-made art can give. For a piece of software, you might discuss the
benefits your product gives in terms of compatibility, efficiency, and usefulness--
all while emphasizing your cutting-edge technology and your company's history
of innovation in software marketing. Anything goes, as long as it's persuasive--
and as long as you don't get too long-winded at any point. You want to convince
your readers, not to lecture them-and you certainly don't want to bore them into
leaving your site.
Once you've said your piece, it's time to move smoothly into the third and final
part of your sales letter: the conclusion, which turns your reader from a passive
admirer of your product into an active consumer of that product. Like the first
part of your letter, don't get fancy with this. A simple call to action will do:
"Don't wait. Try Foo today by clicking here." Should you use the imperative
voice: instead of telling your customer that "You can click here to try
Foo", command them to "click here in order to download/order/whatever."
That switch from the descriptive to the imperative--from telling to commanding--
is often all that's necessary to decide the issue in the mind of an undecided
customer. You can--and should--dress it up a bit, of course: you might close
with a pithy line, reiterate your product's slogan or motto, or simply fall back on a
standard closer like "Try it today!" If you don't bore your reader or spend too
much time distracting them from the business of clicking on your "purchase" link,
anything goes. (You might also direct them to the other sections of your website
in order to learn more, if it's appropriate to your product--if you followed our
earlier advice and made it simple to order the product from any point on your
site, of course.)
Sound simple? It is, and it isn't. As long as your sales letter takes into account
these three basic points, it'll be somewhat effective-but if you can not only give
your customers persuasive arguments but interesting expressions, if you can
seamlessly transition from one section of your sales letter to the next without
alerting your customers, and if you can use your language to activate your
reader's emotions without making them aware of it, then you'll delight and
persuade your readers still more--and they'll respond by clicking on your
"purchase" link more. So, it's worth taking some time to make your sales letter
all it can be--or it's worth spending some money on a good marketing copywriter
who can do the same. Your sales letter is the heart of your site, after all--make
sure it beats.
FORMATTING ISSUES FOR WEBSITES
A general rule of sales letters is to keep them as short as you can. But of course,
we aren't dealing with general sales letters--we're dealing with a very specific
type of sales letter, one designed to be viewed and read online. And that brings
with it some additional rules in order to ensure that your sales letter not only
works at converting readers into customers, but that it functions within your
website while considering all of the possibilities available on the Internet that
traditional sales letters aren't capable of.
One of these advantages is the ability to delegate parts of your content to
different parts of your site. In traditional commerce, your sales letter is your one
chance to tell potential customers everything they might need to know about
your product. One of the advantages of the Internet, however, is that you have
an entire website's worth of space to convince people of the merits of your
product by whatever means necessary. (Bearing in mind the limits we imposed
in the chapter on basic site design, of course.) But that greater freedom imposes
a greater responsibility on you to decide what you should include in your sales
letter and what you should leave out. A lengthy testimonial from a satisfied
customer might make a crucial difference in making the sale, of course--but do
you really want to make all of your customers read through a 600-word product
testimonial in order to get to your final call to action? Conversely, you might be
able to write several pages' worth of information about the new compression
technology in your new digital video playback software--but shouldn't at least
some of that go into your sales letter?
A simple rule you can use to resolve these problems is this: make sure that any
lengthy (but persuasive) section of your sales argument gets a page to itself. But
at the same time, you should at least touch on that information in the sales letter
in as brief and as persuasive a manner as possible. For example: one of the
selling points of your graphics software package might be its intuitive, attractive
user interface. You should show off that interface by including a detailed gallery
of screenshots or videos, allowing your customers to see for themselves what
your product has to offer. But you should also include in your sales letter a
mention of this interface: "What's more, Foo contains one of the most intuitive
user interfaces currently on the market: in just sixty seconds, you can learn all
you need to know about how it works, giving you the edge you need to create
dynamic graphics."
This rule holds true for any product: if you're selling art, mention some of its
most prominent admirers in addition to linking to their testimonials. If you're
selling soap, give your customers a picture of it in action and mention its
lathering power in your letter. This not only reinforces the selling points that you
want to make, but it ensures that if your readers just proceed directly from the
sales letter to the purchasing decision without taking advantage of the rest of
your site, you haven't left out any of the arguments that allow them to make that
decision in your favor.
One more practical formatting issue brings back the question of building and
coding your website. A long sales letter can bore your readers, yes, but it can
also make your carefully designed site look terrible on any browser by spilling the
text over your images or out of your frames.
This is going to be a problem that you and your coder will have to work out as
part of the overall design and coding process, so make sure to get your first
useful draft of your sales letter to your coder early--and make sure that you know
how to cut it down, rearrange it, or otherwise allow it to fit comfortably into your
site design if the need arises. (And one minor technical point: if you write your
sales letter in a word processing program like Word or OpenOffice, you'll have
access to formatting options like bold text, italics, different fonts, or even colors.
Be very, very careful about using these, because they often don't translate well
from your word processor to your website's HTML file and can in some cases even
create additional charges as your coder tries frantically to incorporate your
formatting decisions into your site's actual code. Changing the formatting is
often a crutch: weak writers change the style of their fonts or text in order to
achieve effects that their words alone can't achieve. Save yourself some trouble:
keep your text simple and free of formatting tricks. Your coder will thank you--
and your sales letter will be better as a result.)
MUST A SALES LETTER BE BORING?
To return to the TV analogy: when many of us think of infomercials, we think of
the same basic structure: a desk, a host, a product demonstration, a few
arguments in favor of the product, and then ordering information. We tend to
think along these lines because most of the infomercials we see never reach
beyond this basic, safe format. And when we think of typical sales letters, we
tend to think of basic, safe letters: letters that get the job done without
necessarily entertaining the reader.
But there have been other infomercials on the airwaves. For example, a popular
"adult" infomercial in the 1990s tried to sell a male enhancement cream to
customers not by offering a product demonstration--a dicey proposition on any
channel or network, considering the product--but by making their infomercial into
something entertaining. The infomercial producers hired adult film stars, built
sets, and turned what could have been a boring (yet salacious) infomercial into a
quiz show, complete with innuendo, double engenders, and genuinely engaging
content. The result was a memorable infomercial--which meant a memorable
product and increased sales.
Your sales letter can aspire to the same level. If you keep to the three basic
parts of any good sales letter--inform, persuade, convert readers into customers-
-you have infinite freedom in terms of content. You might present your sales
letter in comic strip form, for example, or you might write your sales letter in
engaging verse. You might write your sales letter in dialogue form, or you might
write about a new piece of software as if it had come through a time portal from
a technologically advanced future.
Don't bore the reader, of course, by getting too cute with your sales letter--but
don't bore them by keeping your sales letter bland, either. What your readers
think of your sales letter will be, if you do your job right, what they think of your
product. So, if you can pull off a unique, entertaining sales letter--or if you're
willing to pay for the services of someone who can--do it. A simple sales letter
will get the job done, yes--but an entertaining sales letter will get the same job
done better.
Once you have your sales letter, your website, and of course your product, your
work is almost done. It's time to take a look at the last (and from the point of
view of selling products, the most important) component of your successful direct
response website: your commerce system and managing the overall revenue and
costs of your site both online and offline
8
MANAGING COMMERCE
Up to this point, we've always talked mostly about the design and presentation
issues of direct response website building--with an eye kept on the bottom line
of converting viewers into customers, of course. But now, it's important to
remember one vital fact: the business of direct response website design isn't
ultimately design, but business. In this chapter, we'll talk about the money side
of that business: how to integrate and manage your website's commerce system,
how to keep your account books in the black, and most importantly, how to
bridge the gap between the online portion of your business and the offline
portion--how to translate web sales into a healthy revenue stream, and hopefully
healthy profits to go with it.
ONLINE COMMERCE AND OFFLINE BANKING
The basic premise behind online commerce systems is simple. You sign up for
the service and the service creates an account for you, much like a bank. You
can then add funds to your account by any number of methods: transferring
money from your account, charging a credit card, or selling products and
receiving payments. In order to get your money offline, you can either use a
debit card linked directly to your account on the commerce system, or you can
link your online account to an offline bank account, allowing you to transfer
money freely between the two accounts--with a necessary time delay, of course.
(This model of commerce won't be followed in exactly this way by every
commerce system, of course--check the policies of your commerce system to get
specific information for you. If you coded your own commerce system, it'll be a
matter between you and your bank, of course.)
The basic premise is simple, yes--but in terms of actual implementation, there
are some complicated details. Being aware of and working around these details
is going to be the key to success for any good online commerce operation--and
as we've said, if you're going to sell products online you need a good online
commerce operation.
One important issue is the time delay in transferring your money from your online
account to your offline account--not a major issue much of the time (the actual
delay is anywhere from one to four business days), but at certain critical
moments--if you need your money close to the end of the month in order to pay
rent on office space or to pay bandwidth costs, for example--it can become a
problem. So, make sure that you take into account the time delay when you're
scheduling payments or purchases according to your business plan--or make sure
that you have a debit card or other payment option from your commerce system,
eliminating the time delay altogether.
Another issue (that hopefully won't be an issue in the future) is the problem of
online security. We talked about this in terms of your website earlier in the book.
But it's also vital to think about it in terms of your commerce system bank
account--and your bank account in general. Again, we talked earlier about how
commerce systems that you design yourself need to be secure enough to protect
you and your customers from hackers, which not only give your business a bad
name, but could wipe out your entire balance in minutes. Commerce systems
that you design yourself don't have as much of a problem in this regard--usually
a large staff of people exists to protect the integrity of online accounts.
Depending on your protection policy, however, this can create new problems that
you'll need to be aware of.
Certain online commerce systems take extremely harsh measures when dealing
with compromised accounts: not only is your account locked and all the balance
within it seized, but the balance of any bank account linked to your online
account is seized as well. This makes some amount of sense--if hackers can
access your online account, they can just as easily access any linked offline
accounts through bank transfers. And if you follow up with your commerce
system on any identity theft or hacking issues, you can often get the balances
returned to you. But following up takes some time, and in some cases--serious
identity theft cases--you may not be able to get the money back at all.
So, you'll need to integrate your bank account and your online account in such a
way as to protect yourself from disaster--a rare event, of course, but one that
can wipe out your business if you aren't careful. The simplest measure is this:
set up two offline bank accounts for any online commerce system you're using.
Link only one of those bank accounts to your online account. Whenever you
receive payment online, transfer it to your linked offline account immediately--
and then transfer it from your linked offline account to your other account, which
has no direct link to the online part of your business. Even if your account is
compromised and your accounts locked or seized, you can keep your money safe
so that it can keep your business running. (Better yet--check out your online
commerce system and its account integrity policies thoroughly before you sign up
and commit your business to it.)
SHIPPING ISSUES
One of the problems that online businesses face is the problem of product
shipping. (If your business doesn't deal with physical products, skip to the next
section.) It's one thing to sell a product in a store, of course--the customer sees
it, looks it over, buys it, and takes it with him. But selling products online
introduces a whole new range of concerns: how can you make sure that the
product remains undamaged from your warehouse to your customer's door? How
will you handle shipping costs? And how will you communicate with your
shipping employees (if you have some) whenever you get a new sale to minimize
the amount of time between the customer's order and the receipt of the product?
The first concern is more a function of the shipping method you choose than
anything else. Choose a reputable carrier and be willing to pay any necessary
money for secure shipping if your project is in any way fragile--furniture or hand-
blown glassware, for example, need an extra level of security that something like
a CD or a new hammer doesn't. Whatever the fragility of your product, you'll
always want to pay whatever it takes in order to track your shipments as they
make their way to your customers.
The key to online commerce is trust: trust that your product is valuable to
customers, and the customers' trust that you'll give them value for their money--
and that you'll get the product to them in a timely, secure fashion. It's inevitable
that problems with shipping will happen from time to time, and the more
successful your business gets--the more products you ship--the more likely it
becomes that you'll fall victim to one of these shipping problems. So, pay to
track your shipments--make sure that if the worst happens, you can find the
product, get it back on track, and maintain that level of trust with your satisfied
customer.
Handling shipping costs is another important matter. Many online commerce
systems give you the option to automatically add shipping costs onto any order,
either by adding a flat fee onto the purchase price of any product or by adding a
percentage of the total price of the product. The better option is almost always
the first one: that way, you can figure out exactly how much it typically costs to
ship a product (with tracking paid for) and charge customers only that amount.
This protects you from charges of "hidden costs", makes sure that you're not
losing money on product shipments, and simplifies your ultimate accounting
procedures--instead of having to determine what percentage of each transaction
is devoted to shipping, you can simply deduct the shipping fee from all products
when you enter net revenue into your accounting system. (For overseas
make sure that you deal directly with customers on a caseby-case basis--
overseas shipping is wildly expensive, and there's simply no way to program even
the most complicated commerce system to take into account variable rates to
every country on Earth. Make sure that overseas customers know to deal with
you directly by mentioning it on your main page before the customer even clicks
the purchase link--don't waste their time by making them start the transaction
and then cancel it once they realize the prohibitive overseas shipping costs.)
The problem of communicating each new sale to your shipping department is
obviously easy if you're the shipping department. If your business is large
enough that you have an actual warehouse or shipping employee, however, you'll
need to make sure that they're notified as quickly as possible of each new sale as
it gets processed.
One solution is to set up an automatic message forwarding system to send all
order receipts from your commerce system to your shipping department as soon
as they come into your mailbox--or simply to make all order receipts go directly
to the shipping department, who are then responsible for forwarding them back
to you so that you can do the accounting. There are other methods, and the one
you choose will depend on what works best for your specific business
organization--but it's crucial to have some method for communicating orders to
the right people as soon as they happen. It improves the overall efficiency of
your business, makes customers happier, and in the long run allows your
business to grow.
DIRECT RESPONSE SITE DESIGN
5. FINDING A CODER
In the last chapter, we gave you a great deal of information about the basics of
HTML coding: browser theory, tag management, browser interoperability, and the
more advanced coding world of CSS. In fact, we gave you so much information
that some of you may have decided, on the strength of the last chapter alone, to
give up on coding and look for an outside coder instead. That's perfectly fine--
and even those of you who have substantial HTML/CSS experience might be
interested in finding a coder in order to save time, or to give a website a certain
look or feel of which you aren't yet technically capable. So, let's get started on
learning how to find the perfect coder for you.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
The most important quality to look for in a coder is experience. This is true of
almost any job, yes, but it holds especially true for any job that involves
producing goods, rather than simply providing services--and websites are actual
goods. And as valuable as experience is for, say, a carpenter, the value of
experience is at least doubled for programmers--if a carpenter builds a bookcase
incorrectly, the potential damage is limited to your books falling over, while if
your website coder builds the website incorrectly, you stand to lose massive
business, compromise the security of your commerce system, or even exposure
your web server--and thousands of computers besides--to nasty viruses or
worse. If you look for a coder based on credentials alone--a degree from a
design institute, for example, or a certification course--then you ensure that you
have someone who at least knows about all the concepts that website design and
coding requires--but you can't be sure that your coder will know what to do in a
real-world situation, where things can and do go wrong as often as possible. So,
if at all possible, get someone who's done HTML work before and save yourself
some problems down the road.
It's also important to choose your coder based on the kind of experience they
have. You don't necessarily have to choose a coder who's done direct response
site work before--if you followed our instructions in chapter three, your site map
should be good enough to communicate to your coder exactly what your site
needs to maximize your conversion rate--but it can be helpful, especially if your
coder has resolved some direct response site problems before and can help your
site avoid similar problems. What you do need is a coder with substantial HTML
experience, especially experience with sites that involve integrated commerce
systems. Buyers will forgive a few lapses in the composition of your page but
lapses in your commerce system interfere with the simplicity of the buying
process, potentially compromise buyer security (and the security of your own
accounts), and give your site an extremely bad name--and thus a low conversion
rate.
Depending on how you've designed your site and site map, you may want to hire
a coder based on CSS, Flash, or Java experience as well. If your site design calls
for effects that only these types of coding can provide (see the previous chapter
for a quick discussion of what CSS can do that HTML can't), you'll certainly want
a coder who can bring those skills to your project. Even if your site doesn't
explicitly call for these skills, consider hiring a designer with experience in this
area anyway--you don't know how you might choose to revise your page in the
future, and if you do decide to incorporate some advanced styling or effects in a
later iteration of your page, you'll want to use the same coder in order to ensure
a greater familiarity with the material and an idea about the specific problems
that may arise from implementing more complicated layers of coding.
What's more, a good CSS/Flash/Java coder can suggest ideas for improving your
website that you may not yourself have thought of. For example, you might be
using a proprietary commerce system in order to handle your online orders--until
you meet a coder who can create a more secure, easier-to-use commerce system
with no service charges and that goes with your overall site design. A good CSS
coder can also overhaul the look of your page with comparatively little effort,
bringing in more paying customers and usually giving them a better experience of
your page.
Whatever qualifications your coder has, it's always a good idea to check out all of
the sites they've worked on, as well as any HTML examples they include in their
portfolio. Look at the kind of work your prospective coder does: are there any
special layout tricks that they tend to use over and over? Any stylistic choices
that you just don't like? Does the site work well, or is it confusing to navigate or
use?
Don't overthink this part of the hiring process: if you navigate your potential
coder's portfolio on instinct, you can get a closer approximation of how your
eventual customers will use sites designed by that coder. And unless the site is
simply a mess (either functionally, stylistically, or in terms of navigation), don't
necessarily take the coder out of consideration: what you might perceive to be a
personal lack of taste or foresight could easily be a result of bad decisions taken
on the part of this coder's former clients. As long as you're providing the basic
site map and stylistic ideas--and as long as the coder obviously knows what he or
she is doing on some level--you can avoid the pitfalls your competitors might
have made and ensure that your site will be successful and striking.
Although it's often overlooked, there's one factor you should take into account
when choosing a coder: his or her personality. This isn't as much of a
consideration for a short-term website project (like the average direct response
website) --but depending on your business plan, a coder with a good personality
can be an asset in the long run. As we'll talk about in a later chapter, you're
likely at some point to want to do some revision on your site--whether to add
new products, resolve some functionality issues, or just to give the site a nice
graphical overhaul. And it's far easier to make these kinds of changes if you
know and trust your coder already--easier on you, since you don't have to go to
the trouble of searching out and hiring a new coder, and easier on the coder,
since they already know your basic business plan, site needs, and preferences--
and they also know their own code well enough to start working on your revisions
immediately without having to spend a great deal of time familiarizing themselves
with someone else's work.
WHERE TO FIND CODERS
So now you know what to look for in a coder--but a much greater problem for
many people is the problem of where to find the perfect coder for your project. It
isn't simply a matter of posting an advertisement in a local classified section and
waiting for responses--that might get you some potential candidates, but it
removes one of your best tools for assessing the suitability of a coder: the
portfolio.
One useful method is to post your project on freelancing programming sites, one
of the most prominent of which is rentacoder.com. Rentacoder.com allows
software buyers--such as yourself--to post details of your project on their
directory of projects, along with some idea as to the rate you're willing to offer.
Coders can then bid on your project, giving you portfolio examples, any
certifications they may have, and their ideal rate for the work. Once you've
checked out what they can do, you can approve their bid, place your payment in
escrow, and just wait for the coding work to be done. As soon as the coder sends
you the work (and as soon as you approve it), the money is released to the
coder, and you can both go on your ways--your coder with his cash and
experience, and you with your functioning direct response website.
There are a number of advantages to this method. Most importantly, there's the
wide talent pool from which to choose--just as putting your business on the
Internet gives your product a much wider potential audience than you could
achieve through traditional channels, looking for contract employees (like coders)
over the Internet gives you a much wider selection and a much greater chance of
finding someone with the perfect skills for your job. Additionally, services like
rentacoder.com greatly simplify the process of interviewing potential coders and
determining prices: most of the things that you need to know about a coder
(namely, their skills and their price) is available at the rental site, just waiting for
you to sort through the options and make your decision.
But it's important to keep in mind some of the disadvantages to services like
rentacoder.com as well. For one, it's very difficult to get a good sense about a
potential coder's personality from their rentacoder.com profile or even their skills
set. Again, this isn't a problem for short-term work, but as we've discussed, the
ideal relationship with a coder is a long-term relationship. Not only does
rentacoder.com make it more difficult to create such a relationship by masking
coder personalities, but it also makes it more complicated to hire a coder on an
ongoing basis. Rentacoder.com only allows you to bid on a coder for a single
project--e.g. a single website--with no simple provision for providing ongoing
work.
Fortunately, these obstacles aren't insurmountable--it just requires more work on
your part in order to build and nurture a relationship with your coder.
Rentacoder.com automatically releases personal details like phone number and
email address for all projects above $500, allowing you to contact your coder
directly--once the project is in motion, unfortunately. Before the hiring process--
or if your design work costs less than $500, which it shouldn't (see below)-you
can post messages to your coder on the rentacoder.com message boards or chat
rooms, which is the ideal way to contact them--and there's nothing that says you
can't ask for a phone number or email address in such communications to help
you make the informed decision before renting a coder.
Are there other options? Of course--there's always classified advertising (on or
offline), there are personal references from other business contacts, there's the
possibility of emailing the designers of high-profile sites that you've seen and
liked, and there's the ubiquitous Craigslist posting. But if you're willing to put in
the effort to build a personal relationship with your coder (and to assess their
personality and skills before hiring), sites like rentacoder.com simply offer too
much variety and too much talent to ignore altogether.
WHAT TO SPEND
Web design isn't a cheap proposition. Although it's certainly possible to find
someone to design your entire site for around $150, the adage in this case holds
true--you get what you pay for-and you're unlikely to get a high level of
commitment or talent for those rates. Alternatively, it's certainly possible to find
someone to design your entire site for around $3,000--but again, although you're
nearly assured a high-quality site, it's difficult for many start-up businesses--or
even established businesses--to drop that kind of money on a single project.
Expect to pay anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 for a good direct response site--
the more features you want on your site, the higher the price. If you want a
good commerce system programmed to order, expect to pay at least $2,000 or
higher--one strong argument for using a proprietary system. This may seem
high but consider what you're getting for the money. Web designers with enough
experience to be valuable to you make their entire living from their designs, as a
rule. If you underpay them, then they're forced to take on other work in order to
make a basic living--which means time taken away from your site and a lack of
willingness to work with you in the future. This undermines many of the basic
objectives of your business and can easily lead to your spending much more
money down the line to fix any problems that are created by underpaying your
programmers. So, do it right the first time and pay for the level of quality you
want to get (within reason, of course, and within your budget.)
Once you have a coder, you've made a huge step toward getting your site ready
to go live. In order to go the rest of the way, keep reading as we talk about the
next phase of the process--working with your coder in order to ensure the best
site possible.
DIRECT RESPONSE SITE DESIGN
SITE DESIGN AND THE THREE CLICKS RULE
Before you finalize your site map, let's think in more detail about how a good
direct response website should be organized.
Our first rule forbids the use of external links. Therefore, you can eliminate any
links pages, sidebars with site affiliates, advertising banners, or such things from
your site map. Although selling advertising space on your website may seem like
a good idea for building revenue, it distracts your viewers from your central goal:
selling the product. So, keep it simple, and leave the advertising off.
Our second rule dictates that content on your site should be limited to only that
which is essential for persuading people to buy your product. The policy that
goes along with this rule is to consolidate most of your site's information onto as
few pages as possible. This reduces the chance that viewers will come to your
page, click a link that takes them to another page on your site about your
product's features, and then forget to come back to your main page to actually
buy the product. Of course, there are situations where you'll want to divide your
content among several smaller web pages on your site as opposed to putting
everything in one massive index page--if you have a wide variety of technical
data about your product, as well as photos and testimonials, you run the risk of
boring your viewer long before he gets to the crucial "Buy" link.
So, follow this guideline: if your viewers don't have to scroll down more than one
or two times in order to read all of your product information, put everything on a
single index page. If you have to scroll down too often to read all of your site
content, then split the content into separate pages--but make use of pop-up
windows in order to keep your main page open, or make sure that there's a link
to your actual "Buy" page in a prominent place on every one of your sub-pages.
Above all, remember our third rule: keep it simple, stupid. One easy guideline for
doing this is to follow the three-clicks rule:
• Upon arriving at your site, your viewers should never have to click more than
three links in order to buy your product.
One way to implement the three-clicks rule might be this: your viewers start at
an index page that describes the product information. They then click a "next"
link to take them to a page about prices and ordering information. They then
click a link to start ordering the product. That's two clicks in total. Another way
to implement the three-clicks rule: your viewers start at an index page that talks
in general terms about the product. They click on one of your subpages
(features, testimonials, pricing, etc.-whatever best suits your specific product) to
learn more about the product. They then click on a "Buy Now" button to learn
about pricing, and then they click on a button to begin ordering the product.
Three clicks. There are any number of other possible configurations--experiment
with your site map until you come up with something that gets across all your
information while maintaining this same simplicity. Your customers will thank
you-and you'll thank yourself when you see the sales figures.
COMMERCE SYSTEM
The one site feature that you're unlikely to be able to provide on your own is a
working system for buying products, sending shipping orders, and transferring
customer's payments to your account. Systems like this are extremely
complicated to code, difficult to integrate into a page, and above all risky in terms
of security. You don't want to take a chance on building your own commerce
system from scratch, starting to take customer orders, and then finding out that
someone has hacked your system and reduced your business bank account to
zero.
You have two options for getting around this problem: hiring a very, very good
coder with experience in this area (which we'll talk about more in the next
chapter) or going with a proprietary coding system. The former option--hiring an
experienced coder and building your system from scratch--is riskier and costlier
up front but has some advantages in terms of site design and simplifying your
accounting operations. The latter option--using a proprietary system--is safer in
terms of site security and more familiar to many users (who tend to use systems
like PayPal or Bit Pass for several different types of online purchase), but also
comes with a price: hefty transaction fees and possible content restrictions.
Which you choose is up to you, but if you think you have an excellent coder and a
good system for taking in revenue, go with the former option: you'll lose some
money up front, but you'll tend to gain more in the long-term in saved
transaction fees.
BELLS AND WHISTLES
Once you have your basic site design, you have a skeleton--and a skeleton is
nothing without flesh. We'll talk more about developing your text content in a
later chapter, but at this point we'll think in terms of the basic look and feel of
your page: images, sounds, and Flash effects that you may want to use in order
to enhance the look of your page and build your business's personal identity.
Here are some good rules to follow:
• Use graphics that you already use in promoting your business as a basic
template for your site design. This builds a brand identity for you, which
can be invaluable in attracting customers and building sales.
• Don't get too complicated. Too many beginning web designers feel the
need to show off their skills, drag every HTML/CSS trick they know out in
order to make a flashy, impressive page, and end up with an inconsistent
mess that drives customers away. Choose a simple look for your page
with a few colors and a general feel, and either communicate this to your
coder or build it yourself.
• Avoid music on your page (unless you're selling CDs, instruments, or audio
equipment.) Music is often irritating to web surfers, makes your page load
more slowly, and doesn't add much to your online image.
• Keep load times on your page low. Any images you use should be
optimized for web use (a good Photoshop tutorial or an experienced web
designer/coder can tell you how to do this), background images should be
avoided whenever possible, and complicated scripts running on your page
(counters, message boards, or Java effects) should be kept to a minimum
or eliminated entirely. Every second your viewers spend waiting for a page
to load is a second in which they can easily decide that your product isn't
worth the effort--avoid this at all costs.
So now you've mapped out your site with an eye to the rules of direct response
design, you've decided on the images your page will use and the basic look of
your site, and you've made some preliminary steps to deciding on what
commerce system you'll use.
At this point, it's time to start laying bricks, as the builders say. And even if you
plan to hire a coder to build your site for you--as many people choose to--it's a
good idea to know a little bit about what materials your page will depend on. In
the next chapter, we'll learn just that.
4
DIY SITE CODING
For some of you, this will be the best chapter in this book. For others of you, this
will be a temporary detour into an interesting world, but not one that you'll need
to know everything about in order to be successful with direct response websites.
For both groups, much of this information will be helpful. If you know something
about how web pages work, then you'll know what to ask for--and what not to
ask for--when it comes to hiring a coder to build your website. If you want
something from your page that standard HTML can't deliver, you may find
yourself facing extra charges for CSS or even Flash design--or you may find
yourself striving to build a page that simply can't be built with current
technology. And if you're not familiar with exactly how computers interpret and
display website code, then you may run into costly revisions down the road when
customers complain that your website doesn't work with their browser--as well as
lost sales.
So, if you're interested in building your direct response site yourself, this is the
place to start. If you're more interested in saving yourself some effort and hiring
a coder, familiarize yourself with a few of these terms before moving on to the
next chapter, where we talk in detail about how to find, retain, and communicate
with your coder in order to build the best page possible.
HOW WEB PAGES WORK
All web pages and websites on the Internet exist fundamentally as text files
saved with the HTML extension. Web browsers read these text files, decided
based on them (and based on HTML defaults) which formatting choices to use on
a page, generate all content from the text file and link to all images, and
ultimately display the page.
Of course, it's impossible to talk to a web browser in natural language: saying in
plain language to "make the margins one inch on all sides" is easy to understand
for a human layout editor, but impossible for a computer. Which is why--as we
touched on in the first chapter--standard protocols for online systems were a
necessary condition for the growth of the Internet. For two computers to talk to
one another--and in order to ensure that they're talking in the way that the user
intends--it's necessary to speak a common language, which is essentially what
HTML and other internet protocols are.
HTML (or "Hypertext Markup Language") is the most successful online formatting
protocol yet devised and should be the basis for any good website. It's also a
simple language to learn (as opposed to object-oriented languages like Java or
C#, which require a much greater working knowledge of computers and a much
greater willingness to spend time organizing a program.) HTML is essentially a
formatting guideline rather than a true programming language, which explains
some of its versatility and ease of use.
So, in order to learn DIY coding (or to learn how to talk intelligently to your web
designer), we first have to learn some key features of HTML.
KEY HTML TAGS
When you view an HTML file in a web browser, the computer follows this logic to
interpret your file:
Files are read in order from beginning to end.
If the file contains a tag, change the formatting rules to reflect that tag until the
tag is closed.
If the file doesn't contain a tag, format the text according to HTML standards and
browser options (most commonly twelve-point Times
New Roman.)
A "tag" is just a formatting instruction to your computer. All tags look like this:
<tag> </tag>
Where <tag> tells the computer to start formatting according to the tag, and
</tag> tells it to stop formatting according to the tag. There's a little bit more to
it, of course (and a good HTML tutorial can help you with some of the finer points
of this), but essentially this is all that tags are: formatting instructions. Think of
an HTML document as a document in a foreign language, with your browser as
the translator.
The most important tag in any HTML file is the <html> tag. The first line of any
.html file is always <html>, and the last line is always </html>. This tells the
computer that any information between these tags should be interpreted
according to the standard HTML rules, as coded into the web browser.
The second most important tag in any HTML file is the <body> tag. Any
information within the <body> tag will be displayed within the browser window
when the web page is loaded. The critical tag that complements the <body> tag
is the <head> tag, which determines information that the browser should know
about the content of the page--most commonly the <title> tag to determine the
information to be displayed in the title bar of the browser window, and the
<meta> tag to give information on the page's content to search engines. (A full
discussion of the <meta> tag is well beyond the scope of this book but will be
dealt with in a bit more detail in the marketing chapter.)
The most commonly seen tag in most HTML files is the <p> tag (which appears
only in the <body> section of the file, as will all the tags below.) The <p> tag
tells the browser to start a new paragraph of text, including a full line break
between paragraphs. Within the <p> tag, it's possible to place other formatting
tags, including <b>, <i>, and <u>--which declare bold text, italic text, and
underlined text, respectively. (If you're not doing your own coding, just know
that you can use tags to modify the appearance of text in order to emphasize
certain key words in your sales letter or other content--often a useful marketing
tactic.)
The <image> tag is used to place an image into a document. The <image> tag
contains within it the web address of the image to be placed (for example,
http://yourbusiness.com/yourgraphic.jpg), as well as optional rules for resizing
the image to whatever height and weight you want (allowing you to include even
large images like photographs on your main page.)
The <a> tag is placed around an element on the page--usually either text or an
image--to turn that element into a hyperlink to another section of the page. This
is most commonly used to connect pages to one another or to allow you to view
larger photos at their full size--you might resize a 1200 x 900-pixel photo to 120
x 90 pixels on your main page, but at the same time turn that picture into a link.
Customers can then click on the picture, which will allow them to view the picture
at full size in a new window.
The <table> tag is used for displaying text or other page elements in tables on
your page. A common use of the <table> tag is also to control the layout of your
page: if the table borders are set to zero (consult an HTML reference to find out
how to do this, if you're going the DIY route), you can create the illusion of small
text "fields" throughout your page--think of a newspaper with various columns,
photos, and advertisements laid out on a single page
(with the <table> trick) versus a single page of a book (without the
<table> trick.)
And finally--but perhaps most importantly, if you're building your own commerce
system or if you're trying to include user feedback and testimonials on your site--
there's the <form> tag. This allows users to input text on your page, click on
buttons, or select items from a dropdown list--an ideal way to keep your page
simple while still giving your customers the maximum possible options. (The
<form> tag can be extremely tricky for HTML novices and can also create some
security problems on your page if used improperly--be sure to consult a good
reference and to experiment before you start using this tag on your main page.)
TAGS IN DIFFERENT BROWSERS
To return to the "translator" metaphor: not all translators are equally good at
what they do. Any fan of world literature knows that the same basic text can
come out in wildly different ways when translated by different people--and the
same is just as true for browsers.
A few tags in particular can create problems if your site is designed for one
browser but viewed by a potential customer in another browser altogether. The
<table> tag is notorious for these kinds of problems, and while the <form> tag
will usually behave in the same way across different browsers, it may have a
radically different appearance for different users--and not always one that you
like.
There are two solutions to this problem. One is simply to test your page in as
many browsers, screen resolutions, and operating systems as you possibly can,
and tinkering with your basic HTML code to the point where it looks acceptable
(and works in the way you intend) for most of these. The other solution is to
choose one or two popular browsers to focus on, optimize your website for these
browsers, and then include a prominent disclaimer on all the pages on your site:
"Optimized for Browsers X and Y, versions a and b." This might cost you some
traffic, but it isn't likely to be a significant drain on your potential revenue.
CSS
A recent development in the field of web design is the popularity of CSS
formatting. CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets” and can be thought of as a
series of rules for the browser to follow when interpreting HTML.
For example: the basic HTML tag <a> always formats hyperlinks in the same
way--blue underlined Times New Roman text. You can manually change the font,
color, and size of this text every time you use the <a> tag in your files, yes, but
this gets timeconsuming and is limited in its possible effects. CSS files, by
contrast, can change the definition of the <a> tag for your browser. For
example, you might write a CSS sheet that defines the <a> tag as invariably
green, Arial, bold, and without the standard underline. With a little bit more
effort, you might even define rules for the <a> tag that allow it to change color
or become highlighted whenever the user's mouse moves over the hyperlink-a
cool little feature that, if done well, can add to the look and feel of your page
without costing you any effort or violating any of our three basic rules.
CSS programming isn't as difficult as hard-core programming languages like Java,
true, but it's still substantially less forgiving than HTML, and thus requires a much
greater investment of time to learn and use effectively. If you want to
experiment with CSS, be sure to give yourself some time to learn the syntax of
the language, work out your page implementation, and be sure that you don't go
overboard and make your design either confusing or unattractive. You might also
do some web searches for CSS layouts--there are plenty of CSS formatting
packages available for free online, including professional suites by design studios
(released for promotional purposes)--and of course you can always look at other
people's CSS files and get some ideas about how to implement your own, as long
as you don't directly steal someone's hard coding work.
PLAIN TEXT HTML VS. AUTHORING TOOLS
Building a web page from the raw HTML file up can be deeply rewarding as an
intellectual challenge, is certainly the most costeffective solution, and gives you
total control over the look and feel of your page. But it can also be extremely
time-consuming--not only to build, but to maintain. If you want to radically
revise your product information at some point, you'll have to go back in and
change lots of very specific HTML formatting in your raw text files-not the most
effective option, certainly.
An alternative to text authoring is to invest in an actual HTML authoring tool like
Dreamweaver or Frontpage. These have significant drawbacks, of course, not
least of which are the very high price and the lack of total control over your
website. But they do allow you to change your text through copying and pasting
without changing the basic formatting or underlying HTML code for every single
HTML file you use, and they simplify some of the more complex layout coding
that you might choose to use to make your page look more stylish and unique.
Some HTML authoring tools actually give you the best of both worlds--
Dreamweaver, for example, lets you edit the basic HTML coding of a page at the
same time as you edit the page text, images, and layout directly (withou
manually changing HTML tags), which can satisfy both the desire to work quickly
and efficiently and the desire to have total control over a page's layout. Any tool,
however, is only as good as the person who uses it, so just use the tools that you
prefer and that work the best for your coding style.
If this sounds complicated, it's because DIY coding is complicated. There are
definite benefits to it, of course--but for many business owners, those benefits
aren't worth the time invested in learning the language. And even if you know
HTML and CSS backwards and forwards, you might believe that your basic design
skills can't give you exactly what you want for your company's website. If this
describes you, then move directly along to our next chapter, where we talk in
detail about just how to find, evaluate, and hire a coder or designer who can help
your website--and your product along with it--stand out from all the rest.
DIRECT RESPONSE SITE DESIGN
SO WHY THE INTERNET?
If you're reading this book at all, it's likely that you've already decided to use the
Internet as a major distribution tool for your product (if not the exclusive
distribution tool for your product.) But for anyone who hasn't yet made that
decision--or for anyone who wants to know just why the Internet is so ideal for
business purposes--we'll talk briefly about why the Internet is a perfect vehicle
for virtually any good or service you might want to sell.
As of 2007, over one billion people worldwide use the Internet. However good
the offline marketing for your product is, that's too large of a potential market to
ignore. More than that: if you promote your product by traditional means, the
number of people you can reach is limited by the amount of money you can
spend and the number of media outlets you can reasonably contact-meaning,
most usually, the media in your city alone. But by using the Internet, you can
not only reach people around the world directly--but by making use of business
referrals from satisfied online customers, you can reach people outside of your
geographic range who'd never even think of using a computer.
Additionally, traditional advertising only affords you a limited amount of space to
talk about exactly what your product is and why people should buy it from you.
But with the Internet--and specifically with direct response marketing--you have
unlimited space to discuss your product in detail, to give yourself and your
business a distinct identity, and to convince people more effectively to buy your
product.
And finally--as we'll talk about in more detail in a later chapter-online business
radically simplifies some of the major costs of running a business in the first
place. If you want to start a traditional business, you'll need to apply for a
license, you'll need to acquire a storefront or office space, and you'll need to
devote huge amounts of time to the tedious process of filing tax documents,
managing a payroll, and balancing your accounting books.
With online commerce, you may still need the business license (research business
law in your area to find out if this is the case), but you're no longer required to
find business premises (beyond registering a domain and buying some web
space), and with online payment services and software, most of your accounting
takes care of itself. All you need to do is develop a great product or service, set
up your basic website and payment options, write a killer sales letter--and watch
your product start to sell itself.
Sounds appealing? Then let's learn a little bit more about one of the most
effective ways of promoting products in the modern Internet age--direct response
website marketing.
DIRECT RESPONSE SITE DESIGN
- A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET .............................................................. 5
- THE HISTORY OF THE COMMERCIAL INTERNET ................................................ 6
- BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DIRECT RESPONSE..................................................... 13
- Basic Rule #1: No External Links............................................................... 14
- Basic Rule #2: Small User Base, High Conversion Rate ................................. 15
- Basic Rule #3: KISS................................................................................ 16
- THE FIRST STEP: SITE MAP AND DESIGN...................................................... 17
- SITE DESIGN AND THE THREE CLICKS RULE.................................................. 20
- COMMERCE SYSTEM .................................................................................. 21
- BELLS AND WHISTLES ............................................................................... 22
- HOW WEB PAGES WORK ............................................................................ 24
- KEY HTML TAGS........................................................................................ 25
- TAGS IN DIFFERENT BROWSERS.................................................................. 28
- CSS ........................................................................................................ 29
- PLAIN TEXT HTML VS. AUTHORING TOOLS .................................................... 30
- WHAT TO LOOK FOR .................................................................................. 32
- WHERE TO FIND CODERS ........................................................................... 35
- WHAT TO SPEND....................................................................................... 37
- CODER COLLABORATIONS .......................................................................... 38
- THE BASICS OF COLLABORATION ............................................................. 38
- Additional CHARGES: HOW TO HANDLE THEM ............................................. 42
- SALES LETTER FORMAT ........................................................................... 46
- FORMATTING ISSUES FOR WEBSITES........................................................ 49
- MANAGING COMMERCE .............................................................................. 53
Transcription Services: Turn Audio into Online Income”
Transcription Services: Turn Audio into Online Income”
Transcription services involve converting spoken words from audio files into written text. It can be a valuable online income source, especially with the increasing demand for accurate transcriptions in various industries. Many platforms connect freelancers with transcription opportunities, allowing you to monetize your listening and typing skills.
The phrase "Transcription Services: Turn Audio into Online Income" emphasizes the potential to generate online earnings by converting audio content into written text. This niche skill is in demand, and various platforms offer opportunities for freelancers to capitalize on their transcription abilities.
"Transcription Services: Turn Audio into Online Income" suggests exploring opportunities to convert audio content into written text for online earnings. This can be a viable option for those with strong listening and typing skills, as the demand for accurate transcriptions continues to grow across different industries. Platforms connecting freelancers with transcription gigs provide a pathway to monetize this skill set.
Top Online Money-Making Strategies
1. **Freelancing:** Offer your skills on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr.
2. **Affiliate Marketing:** Promote products and earn commissions through affiliate programs.
3. **Online Courses:** Create and sell courses on platforms like Udemy or Teachable.
4. **E-commerce:** Start a dropshipping or print-on-demand business.
5. **Stock Photography:** Sell your photos to stock photo websites.
6. **Content Creation:** Monetize YouTube, blogs, or podcasts through ads and sponsorships.
7. **Remote Consulting:** Offer expertise through virtual consulting services.
8. **Virtual Assistance:** Provide administrative support to businesses or entrepreneurs.
9. **Cryptocurrency Trading:** Invest and trade cryptocurrencies
10. **App Development.** Creat and sell mobile apps or offer development services
GAME CHANGER SALE SOLUTION
How to make money from Facebook
Getting Started
Now before anything else I am not going to bore you with a long winded
introduction on Facebook
and how it started. I am sure you will be familiar with
Facebook and its owner Mark Zuckerberg (the former high school nerd) who is a
billionaire, who created the site in 2004.
Now most people you know will be on Facebook. The amount of traffic and
the level of publicity Facebook receives is
astonishing. This is why there is a lot