If you have a website of any kind, then you probably use it to either sell or promote some of your products. One of your main concerns as a webmaster would be how to make the user experience more enjoyable for your website visitors. Also, you are probably looking for ways that you can use to improve your overall search engine ranking for the keywords that your website is targeting. Both of these things can be achieved by allowing user interaction with your website. This is not something unique or radical, in fact many of the world’s biggest websites such as Amazon and eBay follow these tips, so learn from the successful guys and implement them.

• Allow User Ratings on Your Items

If you sell merchandise, allowing your users to give a rating, usually in terms of stars, can be a very good way to have them interact with your website and give feedback on products and services that you have and that they have used. Unless you deliberately sell junk and don’t really want your customers to come back to your site (well… they might kind of complain and this annoys scammers, you know), then there should be no problem with letting your site visitors rate your products.

• Allow Comments, Reviews and Testimonials From Users and Encourage them to Participate

This is good for SEO, as it creates unique content which is user generated, so you didn’t really need to take any action in order to put it there anyways. So it saves a lot of effort for you. Are you selling some products? Let buyers post some reviews of them. Many big name shopping sites do that, such as Amazon. Did you post a news article, blog post or made a YouTube video for your website visitors? Let them comment about it and encourage them to leave feedback, by using a call to action such as “What Do You Think of This New Service? Let Us Know Below!”. Monitor your comments to delete spam and obvious trolling or stupidity, but also keep an eye out for visitors that have a question or concern. You can then either respond to them in the comments, or ask them to communicate with you in a private way such as by email or by sending a message through your website.

• Include Social Media Buttons

This really isn’t complicated at all. All you need to do is include buttons for social media, such as your Twitter and Facebook profiles, or your YouTube channel. You can incorporate these to your website very easily and many large companies and even government agencies now have them on their sites due to the prevalent use of social networking sites. You also don’t have to use the icons provided by the social networking sites, instead you can use custom ones that would better match the layout of your website. Of course, you could always download the trial edition of Photoshop and design the logos yourself too. Social media buttons will allow your visitors to get social with you on various networks that your business participates in.

One term that is often mentioned when it comes to online business is “passive income”. However, many newcomers to the industry do not really understand what it means or why you should work to create such a source of income for you. While the definitions will vary somewhat, passive income for me would mean income that will come to you without you having to make ongoing efforts to get it. Too many people get discouraged when it comes to operating their own online business for one main reason : it takes too much work. After all, who wants to trade a $15 an hour job to make $15 an hour online, even if you are working for yourself. Furthermore, nobody wants to spend their entire day in front of the computer to run their business.

There are many ways to make money online, some of which require more interaction from you on a regular basis, some less. Let’s explore some of the ways that you can create an online business that will not require you to spend 10 hours a day in front of your computer.

• Creating your own product

Of course, creating an information product and selling it will require a lot of time and effort in the beginning. However, once the product is created and you have sent some traffic to it, the amount of work that you need to devote to it will diminish as well. This is even more so when you have affiliates that are promoting your product. They will be the ones who will work to create advertising campaigns and get some sales for you, while you can simply sit back and spend an hour or so every day checking your stats and making sure that everything is going ok.

• Selling on eBay

While many would say that selling on eBay is not a “passive income” activity, it all comes down to what you sell and how you do things. Let’s say that you have found a product that is very popular and that you can sell for a $50 profit on eBay. If you get just 2 sales a day, that will mean $100 a day of profit. To allow this to happen, all that you need to do is to work with a drop shipper. The buyer pays for the item. You then place an order with the drop shipper and tell them to ship the item to the client. The deal is done. All you would need to do is to place the orders as necessary and also place new listings. All of this would take you less than an hour a day on average and can bring you very nice profits with little effort. For you to make this work, you would just need to spend some time at the beginning finding a product that is in demand and that can be shipped to your buyers by a supplier which does drop shipping.

One of the things that is so essential and that has transferred over from old media is writing great sales copy. Sales copy is the writing and information that you get people to opt-in to your list, to buy your product, or to see you as a professional and authority on a subject. Great sales copy is hard to come by, so many times it is overhyped crap that people use to scam people into purchasing their products. I have fallen for the many “get rich schemes” that people sell online, but no more. Learning to cut through the crap and finding great writing will help you find truly quality products, as well as save you some money.

Here are three areas that you need to make sure your copywriting is great, in order to best maximize your return and user interaction.

Concise And Clear

Your sales copy needs to be both clear, and concise. If you write a lengthy, hard to read sales page, you’ll lose your reader’s attention. Instead, write clear, brief copy. Make sure you hit all of the necessary points you want to make, but don’t overdo it when you’re writing details about each point. Stick to detailing the facts of whatever it is you’re selling, and the benefits to the customer.

Enticing

Your sales page needs to grab the customer’s attention. You need to write your sales page in a way that effectively sells the product. Be sure to use positive, and exciting terminology when describing the product, and it’s features. For example, if you were writing a sales page about a product that would help the reader to learn HTML 5, the sentence “You could learn HTML 5 in just 21 days!” would work much better than the sentence “This guide will give you information and tutorials to help you learn HTML 5 over a fixed period of time.”

Consumable

Make sure your copy is organized well, so that the reader is able to take in all the information easily. Organize your information into short paragraphs, and numbered lists whenever possible. If your information is easy to take in, the reader will be more likely to read the entire page.

So keep your copy concise, enticing, and easy to consume, and you’ll create a strong sales page.

Facebook can be a great platform to market your business or products on if you do it right. The biggest thing to remember is that Facebook is a social network where two way engagement is important. People who spam Facebook with links, and information that looks like spam are going to be classified as such and potentially ignored or even shut down by Facebook.

The problem with Facebook is that you need to have a very engaged audience in order to be profitable through the social media part of it. That is what we are going to talk about today – the social aspect of Facebook, not the advertising platform.

On Facebook you have two real ways of marketing for free to individuals. The most prominent now is through Facebook Pages as they are called. The other is through Facebook Events.

Facebook Pages are the best way to promote and connect with your readers or fans online, except through mailing lists. Facebook pages are a great way to promote your content because you can easily share links to your website, interact with fans and hold contests and more.

It is important to remember that your Facebook page is only a compliment to your site, not your only site. Due to the interaction levels being so high, it can be easy to use Facebook Pages as your only source of interaction and content creation. Spread the love around to other social networks such as Twitter and see your brand grow even more so.

The best way I have found to get my Facebook page numbers up (right now it is around 1,400 for a pretty small community’s website) is to hold a “fan drive.” A fan drive is simply a plea to get people to “like” your pages in order to achieve a goal. My goal was 1,000 fans in one month and I would donate $150 to the local Hospice. Within two weeks my page had over 1,100 fans and I was writing a check.

Those 1,000 fans are worth so much more than $150, and the cost was well worth it.

Depending on your situation, there are other ways to get people to join if you are not working on such a local level. For example, giving away an iPod or something to a random fan is a great way to get people to join, even small things like books and gift cards are a huge motivator.

Be creative when using Facebook to market your product or page, but remember, don’t be a spammer or you will lose fans a lot faster than you gained them.