This interview was conducted over email with the Founders of Artyii.com, Shannon & Cai Lin, over the past weeks.

The Artyii idea, where did it come from?

It started off in the classrooms of the Singapore Management University where we were previously students at. We share a passion of arts, business and technology, hence marrying the 2 together was really a natural progression. As Asians, we decided to focus on Asian art, creating a sales platform for asian based artists to put up their artworks and paintings for sale for free. We market their artwork as affordable original wall paintings to first time home buyers and corporates. I mean, why get a print at the same price when you can get a gallery grade painting?

How do you get started with Artyii.com?

Once we got the necessary funding from various parties, both of us left our jobs to pursue this passion and as they say, the rest is history.

What are the necessary stuff to prepare when starting a web 2.0 site?

It requires a lot of planning to start a good web 2.0 site. From the site architecture, user-interface, to the placement of action buttons, to optimizing the site for SEO and planning for future modules. Its actually a lot of effort but its rewarding when you see real users interacting with what you’ve built for them.

What are the difficulties you’ve encountered when you are starting the company?

For everyone who’s started a company before, you’d know that everyday is a challenge. You wear different hats everyday – from top level strategising, to managing operations, to being a lawyer, accountant, webmaster and HR manager all at the same time. That being said, the experience you get is truly amazing.

What are the basic cost of starting and running a web 2.0 site? What do you advise a student who has no money to start a web 2.0 site?

Well, it depends on what the objectives of your site will be. Will it be an innovative platform, social site or a simple shopping cart type site? It can range from SGD500 – 15,000.

Consider your hosting cost or ask around if you can host with a friend who already has a server. Use open source frameworks such as Joomla to build your site if you don’t require complicated and customised functions. Chances are, what you’re doing has already been done before and all it takes is finding the template for it.

Keep your costs low, you’ll definitely start spending more once you learn more. Hence, it would do well to work with someone experienced when building your site

How does Artyii differentiate from its competitors?

To our knowledge, its the only sales, information and community driven art sales site in english speaking asia. Artists are able to request an invitation for free and Artyii helps faciliate the sale all the way – logistics, framing, payment, liaising. We have art professionals that provide comments to these emerging artists’ work as well. So, if you’re looking to buy art online, Artyii is the only place in the world where you can get quality, original Asian art at great prices direct from the artist.

What are the directions of Artyii.com and where you want to go from here?

We are continuing our efforts to reach out to artists as well as to buyers in the states and U.K. We are also looking for corporate buyers here in asia that are looking for bulk orders of original art for their hotels and F&B outlets.

What is the most important element to make a web 2.0 site successful?

Everything plays a complementary role – User Interface, SEO, Efficiency, Branding, Content and the value proposition of your core product/service.

To know this takes a good team – hence I would say the people behind the site are still the greatest asset.

Today I’m going to share with you how you can have killer conversion rates for your landing, squeeze page and even your blog using this awesome tool call clicktale. In this example, i’ll be using my salesletter an internetincomecode.com to share with you how you can do that.

Clicktale helps you to know exactly what your visitors are doing on your website itself and by doing that you are able to track whether your squeeze page, salesletter or even your blog are converting or not.

After looking at this tracking and statistics from Clicktale, you would want to head on to your website and improves on these little details and track and test again. With that, you would able to improve your conversions tremendously and maximize your earnings. This is one of the best tools I’m using to track my squeeze page and my salesletter for killer conversion rates!

#1 Easiest Way – Google Adsense is a free program that allows you to put relevant Google ads and earn money. As mentioned in the video, in order to make a lot of money from Google Adsense, you would need a lot of traffic. Only with traffic and people clickthrough, then your advertising revenues would increase over time.

Google just released their report on what the publishers are getting – 68% of the total ad revenues.

#2 Clickbank as an affiliate - a place where you will find tons of digital products. digital products are very profitable because of the high profit margin. You can either sell your own products or sell someone’s else products as an affiliate.

#3 Selling your own product - Here’s a product I’m currently selling – Internet Income Code. For beginners, this may be difficult because you need to learn some sales letter writing. You would also need to create your own product which can be a very long and tedious process.

#4 Cost Per Action (CPA) - Basically you provide leads for the advertiser and the advertiser pays you by lead. For example, if your visitor type in their zip code, you’ll gain the commission.

Do you run one or multiple websites for your online business? Chances are you need to constantly update it with fresh content on these websites on a frequent basis.

However, writing the articles yourself takes considerable amounts of time especially if you manage several niches. In addition to that, there are lots of other things that need your attention. There’s the research, maintenance and marketing aspect of your business to keep you hectic.

Doing it all by yourself can be very time consuming and in the field of online marketing, as with any other business, time is the game and those who can manage it well gets a head start in the battle.

One of the tasks you can outsource is articles writing.

Outsourcing them will save you heaps of time and increase your productivity. The time you would have spent in writing articles can be used on other marketing and maintenance efforts. One disadvantage though can either be poor quality or doesn’t meet your expectations. The key to avoid this is to find the right candidate to outsource to.

Look for the Right Person
The first step in outsourcing is by finding the suitable person whom you’ll delegate various tasks. There are many ways to do that. You can either find service providers from sites like  GetAFreelancer or you can post an ad on online classified sites like craigslist.com. These are the 2 favorites I used to hire writers. I used to used elancer.com, rentacoder.com, but the fees for elancer.com is too much such that you need to pay a lot of a writer while for rentacoder.com, they are bias towards the writer’s side.

Below is a sample of the ad I posted to hire

Our company is a network of content publishing websites. And we are hiring excellent writers who have excellent command in language, hardworking in researching for excellent content, and writing in a personal way.

The job requires writers to be consistent as well as sticking to deadlines. The job pays on per article basis and it is based on USD XX for the first 500 words article to test the writer standard. Subsequent articles will be paid according ($XX-$XX per 500 words article ) to the quality of the first article. Bonuses and promotions are given to writers who strives for excellence and produces excellent work over a period of time. This is a long-term job opportunity and writer could easily be bumped to full-time with higher pay if proven a worthy writer.

The articles topics our network need includes health fitness and dieting, making money online, musical instruments, forex and stock market, relationships and dating. Please state which topics you are passionate about or have an interest in. Also please respond to this ad with your resume, your experience online with blogs, article writing, wordpress etc, a writing samples and your opinions on what makes a good article.

Be sure to ask for the resume and samples of previous work of the potential candidate so you’ll be able to get an idea of his/her capability for the job and to meet your standards.

Screening the Applicants
The next step is sorting out the best among the prospective candidates. Basically, after receiving the application, you should send them a sample of work according to what job you are offering. Obviously, you need a writer to supply the content for your site or for article marketing purposes.

Send him/her with a sample article purposely to evaluate if he/she is the right candidate. Make sure you specify that it is a sample article. You may also want to ask him/her a few questions about his/her background, job experience, availability, amount of workload he/she can handle per day/week as well as the compensation expectations. Additionally, you may also give a few more details regarding the job and your outlook. In this way, both parties will establish a fair knowledge on what their responsibilities are as well as what to expect out of the business relationship.

With so many writers sending in their resume and samples of work, you can easily sieve out the good writers from the bad or the average writer. You may want to pay more to hire the good writers.

Who should you hire?

My preferences now are the Filipinos. They have good writing skills and some can even write better Americans or British writers. The Indians are okay writers but I think they would do routine work (seo, link building) much better.

Handing Over Assignments
Great, you found the right person to do the work on your behalf. The only thing left to do is send out the assignments.

When delegating the tasks to your newly hired worker, it is best to give a very detailed explanation of the assignment. Specify precisely how you want it done and the results you want. If you are clear about this, you are able to maintain the quality of work you want and it minimizes the chance of having it done incorrectly or with lots of flaws. The last thing you wanted is to take more of your time than it takes to actually do the work yourself. In the long run, it will save you loads of time supervising and correcting the finished work.

To ensure the quality of the article, for the start you may want to put the writer under probation until the writer gain your trust and produce consistent works.

Conclusion
Outsourcing tasks within your business is a good strategy in keeping ahead of your game and by implementing it smartly, provided with the right resources and people, you are sure to make the most out of your valuable time and make it work for you instead of you working for it.

You have a great and well-researched content. You know your article will draw a lot of readers because it’s valuable. In fact, you have written about a topic in your niche that hasn’t been talked about yet.

You post it on the article directories. Then you sit back and relax as you wait for a large number of traffic pouring in on from that article.

Nothing.

There is a few at least. Actually disdainfully few for the amount of work you’ve done compiling that article. You wonder what it is that you’re doing wrong.

You’re probably missing on one important thing: the title. The number of views an article gets depend on how well the title is written and you may haven’t thought much about that part.

It doesn’t matter how great your content is. If your title is boring and doesn’t capture attention, all your efforts in writing the article will be such a waste.

With all the massive amount of articles that make up the Internet in virtually every subject you can think of, people only choose to read whatever captures their interest. That is why you should work for that. Craft the title well and you can expect a decent share of views to your content.

But how do you know your title is effective in capturing interest? What makes a good title?

Here are two strategies I keep in mind whenever writing article titles:

The Title is Benefit and Result Driven

Who wouldn’t be interested in finding out a solution to their problem? The goal here is to find out what your reader’s problem is and provide a benefit. Then, take note of what they would achieve from that benefit. And be very specific with it.

For example, if your topic is about weight loss, it’s not enough to simply say:

‘Lose Weight Fast with these Diet Tips’.

You could improve its power by saying

‘The 10 Healthiest Diet Tips To Lose 20 Pounds in 8 Days’.

Notice how the rewarding result follows after the benefit. Avoid writing titles too generally or broad and narrow down your benefit to at least one result as demonstrated in the example above.

Use Curiosity

Sort through the newspapers and you’ll get an idea of what I mean. The headlines in the newspapers are classic examples of attention-grabbing titles that shout ‘Read me’ and are almost impossible to resist on reading that piece.

In writing your articles on the Internet, it’s not always that you have the biggest headline on your topic. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use curiosity to grab the attention of your readers.

One best example is the best-selling ebook by Chris Gibson ‘Acne-Free in 3 Days’. The whole ‘treat acne’ market and other people as well were curious in finding out how it’s possible to get rid of acne in just 3 days. If the title of his ebook had only been ‘Acne Free in 30 days, do you think it would have gained that much attention from readers? Probably not that much.

Now I’m not saying you should come up with a similar title in your topic when it doesn’t actually guarantee that result. The idea here is to look on an angle that will peak the curiosity of your readers. Brainstorm ideas on ways your topic provides curiosity and use it to craft the suitable title.

Keeping A Swipe File

One way of coming out with good compelling titles is to keep a swipe file of all the effective titles. You can easily do so by going to ezinearticles.com and take down some of the most viewed articles to get a feel of excellent titles.

A visit to the most viewed ezinearticles.com and you will see some of the excellent titles like

“Make Money on the Internet? Don’t Even Try Until You Read This Article Or You Will Fail For Sure”

“The Real Key To Success in Making Money Online – Most People Miss it And They Obviously Fail”

“Top 10 Ways to Make Money in 2010″

Keeping a swipe file like this will help you in coming out with excellent titles at the tip of your finger.

Last Words

These two are powerful strategies in composing the title for your article. Notice that it involves a little work to do that; which is reasonable because as said, the views of an article depend on how well the title is written. Remember these tips and you shall find a noticeable result on your traffic in no time.