Before you can hope to be successful in any business, you have to understand that business and know how to peak the interest of your potential customers. Whether you are offering a product or a service, people have to understand what it is, why they need it and why they should get it from you.

Online marketing has changed the way people do business and unless you can embrace the knowledge needed to meet these changes, your success will be limited to those customers willing to deal with you in the same old way. Internet marketing takes a completely different approach because people who conduct business online, search for companies with which to do business online, and you need to be found.

After attending the University of Texas, Arlington, Texas Matt Morris saw the future in the internet and worked diligently to become fully knowledgeable in internet marketing. His determination led to not only, financial success, but also to being somewhat of an expert in marketing on the internet. As a Marine Corps Sergeant, he understood the need to lead others and to provide the proper training to help make his fellow Marines a success. Combining his knowledge of internet marketing and his passion for helping other succeed led him to establish Success University.

He understood that without the proper training, no one could move above mediocrity. While he enjoyed personal growth at two network marketing companies, he believed he could help other attain their personal goals by sharing what he had learned. Joining with other leaders in the market, sales and technical field, Success University provides the training essential for just about anyone to achieve success.

However, signing up for the course is not going to make you an instant success that is why it is called Success University. You have to actually read and learn the materials and put them to practical application. After reviewing the course materials and all the extras you can receive as a student, you can then judge how everything you can learn can help make your business grow into the business you have always known it could be. While you can make money introducing others to Success University, by practicing what you learn you can make a positive impact from your own business.

Distance learning has grown exponentially over the past few years, with major accredited colleges and universities understanding many people want to improve their knowledge but do not have the time to attend traditional classes. Additionally, some educational resources are not appropriate in a classroom setting since people learn at a different rate and not everyone needs to learn or know everything that is being taught in each lesson.

The online learning experience at Success University teaches what you need to know about running an online business and what better venue in which to learn but online. Your business is online, great training opportunities are available online and your future success is online. There us no better combination to help you achieve financial security than attending distance learning classes at Success University online.

Regardless of what business you're in, you have competition, or other businesses who are clamoring for the same consumer dollars as you. The competition may or may not be in the same industry, e.g. if you own a movie theatre, your competition will be all venues providing entertainment, such as bowling alleys, theme parks, skating rinks, miniature golf courses, in addition to other movie theatres. Take a moment to determine what business you're in and determine if your type of business might also attract consumers from other industries.

As an online business owner, your competition may not be as easy to gauge, especially if you don't have a retail location for your business, or if you have a global virtual company where you can work with clients regardless of location, as many coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, graphic designers, speakers, and website designers do. How do you begin to assess your competition when your business has no geographic limits? It's very similar to the steps that a traditional business might take, but it's all done online.

Here are the ten steps I use to research my competition online:

1. Brainstorm all known competitors. If you've been in business for any length of time, you probably already have a good sense of which other companies offer what you offer. Look up their websites and make a note of the website addresses. You'll be using this information later.

2. Compile a list of keywords your customer would use to find a business like yours online. How would your target market find you online? Create a list of all keywords that they might use. If you have a business that serves a particular geographic region, you'll want to create a geographic keyword listing as well, like "cleaning business" + "Beaumont, Texas" or "cleaning business" + "Southeast Texas".

3. Conduct a keyword search on the major search engines. The major players in the search engine game today seem to be Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It is the results from these search engine queries that will be the ones most commonly found by your target market. You should try your search with and without quotation marks, like "cleaning business" and cleaning business and conduct a search by location, as well, if that applies to your business. Make a note of the top 10 listings from each search engine query and those will comprise your top competition, along with other local competitors that you know about.

4 Visit your competitors' websites and analyze their offerings. Create a summary of each competitor's services and/or products. Determine the strength and weaknesses of your competition from the perspective of your target market. Assess how your offerings are better/worse/different from that of the competition. Are your prices higher or lower than theirs? Why? What makes you unique? How can you capitalize on that uniqueness and set yourself apart from the competition? By following these steps, you'll discover your competitive advantage, or the reason(s) your target market does business with you instead of your competition.

Everyone has a hobby of some kind - most people have several. There are people who collect stamps; people who make scrapbooks or create graphic designs with their digital photos; people who love horseback riding, hiking or bicycling.

Maybe you do something that you don't even know is considered a "hobby". Technically, anything that you engage in for fun that is outside of your occupational activities is considered a hobby- so chances are you have lots of hobbies.

Have you ever considered turning one of your hobbies into a business? You may be surprised at how virtually any hobby can be converted to profits, and without tremendous overhead or ridiculously high start up costs.

What's even better, you aren't required to have a specific product to sell! In fact, you can make your knowledge your product to sell.

If you participate regularly in some sort of hobby, you are bound to know quite a bit about it. If you make scrapbooks of your family and friends, then you probably have extensive knowledge about where to get the best deals on your scrapbooking supplies, and how to create special effects on your photo album pages.

Maybe you have magazines and websites that you refer to all the time for inspiration. You have the personal knowledge of what it took to get started in the hobby. For example, scrapbooking requires that you have access to supplies like paper, stickers, glue, photo albums and scrapbooking tools.

Someone who has just learned about scrapbooking and thinks they want to start the hobby will need to figure out what they need to get started. You could offer this knowledge as your product to sell. Think people won't buy it? Think again.

If you've ever used a search engine to look up information, you know that it's time consuming to sort through all the data to find exactly what you're looking for. Often, you're given tons of information that doesn't seem all that reliable, and you have to determine what you can use and what you need to avoid.

When you make your personal knowledge of a hobby your product to sell- you're helping everyone who wants to find that information without spending hours searching for it.

You do not need to have a physical product to sell in order to make a profit. In fact, having an inventory or having to create physical items from materials offers a lower profit margin than selling information.

Information products are among the top items to sell for a variety of reasons. They offer a low cost to get started, meaning you start earning a profit after just a couple sales. Informational products include eBooks, online courses or email courses, software, audio files, web sites- basically anything that can be downloaded from the internet.

You aren't required to have an inventory and you can set up your business model to allow you to earn money by the work other people do for you.

So now, maybe you're thinking that this is all well and good- but you still don't have a product to sell! You haven't written an eBook, and maybe your writing skills leave little to be desired. Creating online or email courses are time consuming, and to create software you need special training. You can still sell your knowledge. Create a "package" of items that someone would need in order to get started in a particular hobby, and promote it as the "everything you need to know" about starting the hobby.

Many clients have come to me wondering why their products or programs don't sell. They know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they have a great product. So why aren't people buying it?

One of the reasons may be that you are introducing a product that is out of your buyer's financial target. People buy from people they know, like and trust. If they have never heard of you before, and therefore don't have an established trust for you, do you think they will be eager to part with hundreds of dollars? Would you?

The best way to generate sales is to create relationships with people. Not only can you create direct relationships, like the ones you would create at a networking event, but you can also create relationships through your online communications, and such vehicles as emails, notes, blogs and eZines. So rather than go directly for the jugular, try creating a little rapport first. As an example, I never try to outright "sell" my premium products.

This is where the idea of a product funnel enters. Let me explain. If you picture a funnel, you know it's wide and open at the top and tiny and narrow at the bottom. At the top of the funnel is where you want to get as many prospects in as possible. At the bottom of the funnel is your highest price service or product. And in the middle are in-between levels of services/products and prices. The objective is to keep people flowing down from the top to the bottom.

You get people into the funnel through Marketing & Sales Activities like: Free Teleclasses, Joint Ventures, Public Relations, Speaking, Writing Articles, Book Distribution, eZine and Direct Sales. You keep them there by consistently providing value.

Here is an example of a product funnel I created for one of my clients:

Tier 4: FREE offering

eZine Free Special Report Free Monthly Teleclass Complimentary Strategy Session

Tier 3: Offering

e-book – TeleSeminar with MP3 and PDF

Tier 2: Offering

Tele-Course 4 Weeks, Home Study Course - 2 Day Retreat

Tier 1: Offering

3 Day Retreat – Private Mentoring. This process works! I can't tell you how many people have read my eZine Arrive! and then called me up a few months later and told me they loved my energy and ended up being a private client.

I had a client come to me earlier this year not understanding why it was so hard to fill her seminars. I took a peek at her funnel and realized that she was trying to go from zero to $400 in her first communication. We quickly introduced a new product funnel and almost immediately she saw her revenue shoot up. Why? Because now people had a natural progression through the buying process that allowed them to "try" her out. Once they got a taste of one of her products or programs, they regularly came back to buy more products because she is fabulous!

At her most recent seminar, which was $400, she was able to create an up-sell opportunity to her private coaching for $1,000 per month. Several people bought her coaching package and she left the seminar with thousands of extra dollars in revenue she would have otherwise not had!

So take a look at your product funnel and see where the gaps in pricing are. Once you create a more natural flow of pricing you will see the results!