According to Keith Hall, tax advisor to the National Association for the Self-Employed www.NASE.org, the most overlooked deduction by small businesses (that would include Internet marketers) is the home office deduction.

Since a business only has to pay taxes on their profits, listing home business expenses can make a huge difference in one’s taxes. Many, but not all, of these deductions are related to the home business space.

Home Business Space

In order to deduct expenses related to your home office, the space you use must meet two criteria: it must be used regularly and exclusively for business, not personal use.

For example, if you have a computer set up in the den that you use for working on your Internet business (whether affiliates, Adsense, networking, sales, etc.), but you also have a television in the den for the children, then your office space wouldn’t meet the “exclusive use” criteria.

Regular use is less clear. Basically a part time business is fine, but you need to use the space regularly not just occasionally for that business.

Now the good news is that your business workspace does not need to be marked off by a permanent partition. For example, a dining room that opens to the living room is fine, provided you only use it for your business and you use it regularly.

Furthermore, your home business space does not need to be the only fixed location where you conduct business. For example, you could have an office in town and also a home office.

You would need to determine the part of your gross income from the business use of your home by considering the time you spend at each location, the business investment in each location, and any other relevant facts and circumstances.

Save Your Travel Receipts

If your home office qualifies as your principal place of business, you can deduct your daily transportation costs between your home and another work location in the same trade or business. By the same token, if you travel on business, say to a conference (or Hawaii to do some research for you travel site!), be sure to save receipts for travel-related deductions such as car expenses, meals, lodging, etc.

Product Inventory

The criteria for home business space used for storing inventory or product samples are a bit different from office space. For example, your home would need to be the only fixed location of your trade or business, but you would also be able to use this space for personal use. For example, if you’re an eBay seller and you store inventory in your basement, you could also do laundry and have a family pool table in the same space.

Figuring the Amount You Can Deduct for Home

If your gross income from the business use of your home equals or exceeds your total business expenses (including depreciation), you can deduct all your business expenses related to the use of your home. Expenses for running your entire home can be partially deducted based on the percent of the home used for your home office.

To find the business percentage, compare the size of the part of your home that you use for business to your whole house. You can use any reasonable method to determine the business percentage. The following is the most common method for figuring the percentage:

Divide the area (length multiplied by the width) used for business by the total area of your home. It may seem bigger is better for your office, but you must keep it within reason or you could set off a red flag at the IRS. The IRS website uses 20% as an example. Go much over this, and you might get audited.  

Some expenses are deductible only if you use your home for business. You can use the business percentage of these expenses to figure your total business use of the home deduction. These expenses include items such as:

- Depreciation of the home
- Home insurance
- Rent
- Repairs (with the exception of repairs that qualify as a permanent improvement, in which case they’d fall under “Depreciating your Home”) 
-  Security System
- Utilities

Business Expenses Not Dependent on Meeting Home Office Criteria

The following are expenses commonly deducted by Internet marketers:
 
- Website Design, Hosting & Maintenance Fees
- Domain name registration fees
- Internet service provider fees 
-  Consulting service fees
- Networking fees
- Independent contractors paid for website content, sales letters, emails, etc.
- Auto-responder service fees 
-  Computers and related equipment
- Phone

As with the home business, the above expenses can only be deducted for the portion used strictly for business. For example if you have only one phone line, you can’t deduct the basic phone bill, but you can deduct long distance business calls.

A note about computers – If you purchased a computer for your business, and you use it more than 50% of the time for your business, you can claim it on what is called a section 179 deductions or an accelerated depreciation deduction. If not, you might be able to depreciate it using the Alternative Depreciation System (ADS). It gets more complicated, but these are some things to bring up with your tax consultant.

Credit Card Interest

If the charges on a credit card are business related, then any interest or finance charges from them will also be a business expense. Having a card that you use only for business makes this easier.

Health Care

If you pay for your own health care, you may be able to deduct this as well. In order to qualify for the deduction, you cannot be eligible to participate in any other subsidized health plan, such as might be offered by another employer. Further, the deduction is limited to the earnings that you have from the business.

On a related note, remember to deduct your retirement plan such as an IRA. Many forget.

Hiring Your Children

Some teens are really good at computer programming, others at computer repairs and maintenance, graphics, writing, and more. Younger children often are eager to help in the office with cleaning, filing, and whatever else they can do to earn money. The standard deduction for children ages 7 to 17 is $5,000, meaning they are exempt from having to pay any taxes on the first $5,000 earned.
 
As long as your business is a sole proprietorship or partnership your kids won’t be subject to Social Security or Medicare taxes either. And you get to claim the wages paid as a business expense. Your kids can earn money for special things and save the rest in an IRA for a nice nest egg or college. It is important to pay your children with checks and to keep good records of the work performed. The pay must be the same as you would pay anyone else to perform the same tasks.

Unless your child earns 50% or more of his own living expenses, you can still claim your child as a dependent and get the child tax credit. If all these expenses exceed the deduction limit, carry the excess over to next year.

You do not have to use a particular method of recordkeeping, but you must keep records that provide the information needed to figure your deductions for the business use of your home. You should print out or store on a backup drive receipts and other evidence of all expenses you paid.

Amending Your Return

If you have filed your taxes and now see that you have missed an expense that will make a significant difference in your deductions, you can file an amended return and include the missing deductions. You would use IRS form  1040X, which you can download at www.irs.gov. See IRS Pub 587 for details.

Preparing for 2011

If you didn’t keep track last year, it’s not too late to start now. Consider the various expenses that you can deduct, and learn more about these and others at www.irs.gov. Then start keeping records and save all your receipts. You should print or store on a backup drive receipts and other evidence of expenses. Other helpful, free to use sites include: Money Central MSN, Nolo’s Small Business Tax Articles (a provider of free legal information), Turbo Tax Breaking News on Stimulus Package Tax Breaks.

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Choosing Your Niche

Before you launch an AdSense website, you need to choose a topic that will generate a lot of traffic. That means conducting keyword research to see how many people are going online to seek out this kind of information.

When you start considering a niche, brainstorm a list of keywords that would be relevant to your subject matter. You want to choose topics with thousands of searches – like 10,000-20,000 per month.

If you can find keywords generating mass amounts of traffic like this, then you can go and find out how many products are being sold within that niche. The reason you want to see if the market has plenty of products is because these advertisers are the ones who will be advertising on your site through AdSense, helping you earn commission from every single click.

Start with a research tool like the one from Google at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal where you enter a keyword or phrase at the top of the page and then get results about search volume and Adwords bids.

Once you find a topic that has a large number of searches and a fair amount of Awords bids, you can start plotting out how you’ll build a mammoth website with all of the content that will appeal to this broad audience.

When you’re creating an information product, narrowing your niche can be beneficial, but you don’t have to do that with AdSense sites. Let’s take look at an example.

You could have a website called AllAboutBaseball.com with numerous sections that each had AdSense pages on them. You could have a Baseball Memorabilia area, a section to discuss the most recent games, a statistics section on players in each division or on every team, and a legends section. You could even have a Baseball 101 section that teaches people what the game is all about.

Expansion is the key to developing a profitable AdSense site. When you do decide to drill down within a niche, just expand it right on the primary domain. For example, the statistics section of your domain of ilovebaseball.com could be housed at stats.ilovebaseball.com. Make your website a one-stop-shop for all of your niche’s needs.

The more pages your viewers have available to sift through, the more likely it is that they’ll click on one of your AdSense ads and help you earn money for your efforts.

Creating Search-Worthy Content

When you sit down to create (or hire someone to create) your content, you need to keep in mind that Google is looking for those who scam the system. Do not try to create an article that sounds like this:

“Baseball is the best game because baseball is played a lot. I play baseball with my kids and they play baseball on baseball teams. Do you like to play baseball? Baseball is a fun sport.”

Not only will Google nix your dreams of getting a high ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but the goal is to get your visitors to keep coming back – to bookmark your site and come again, to generate more revenue for you.

People who feel your site provides value tell their friends about it. They add it to their link list and share it with others. They return often to see what new content you have, so you mustn’t disappoint them.

Search-worthy content does need to be keyword optimized, but don’t overdo it to the point that it’s not interesting to read, like the example above. Here is an example that would benefit your site’s purpose and fulfill the reader’s needs at the same time:

“Baseball is one of America’s bestloved past-times. If you’re in the market to begin collecting baseball memorabilia, then you may want to start by sending away for autographs of today’s big ticket draws to nightly summer baseball games, such as Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees.”

This is very dense with the keyword baseball, and it’s not even necessary to use the word that often. Choose one keyword or phrase for each page within your site. One page can be dedicated to a certain player, another to an article on autographs, and another to tickets.

When you conduct thorough research, you should be able to amass a list of thousands of keywords – and this gives you the ability to put thousands of pages within your website for better AdSense results. Use tools like Micro Niche Finder . When you use Micro Niche Finder, it allows you to continue “digging down deeper” within each keyword, which helps you expand your list of potential article topics.

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3. Make Money With Google Adsense (part 1)

The Good, Bad, and Ugly Side of Marketing Online

You wouldn’t have launched an online business if you didn’t see the positive side to making money online. There’s the unlimited amount of profits, the ability to become self-employed and work less while earning more, but there are also some drawbacks that hinder your goal of achieving brand recognition and customer devotion.

With a decent computer and an Internet connection, you have the ability to create a space where your customers can congregate. That may mean a static website where you convert a sale or a forum where members can interact with others and yourself.

You can contact them, provided you adhere to permission-based contact and don’t violate their trust by flooding their inbox with irrelevant offers just to seize the opportunity to beef up your bank account – which almost always backfires and results in complete loss of credibility and a depleted mailing list.

But you can’t smile and look them in the eye and shake their hands to make them realize you’re a trustworthy person. You can’t speak to them and instantly get their feedback and respond to their objections, questions, or complaints. What’s the solution?

Reaching Out to Deliver a Personalized Experience

What are the primary ways you want to build a connection to your customer? You know you want to build a brand and image. That’s the first course of business. Once you have recognition, it means you’ve positioned yourself as a leader among a sea of competitors.

You can achieve brand recognition through smart marketing tactics. Never abuse your customers’ email addresses, but do contact them whenever you feel you have a truly valuable product or service to give them. Do your best to research the offering, the reputation and/or experience of the person behind it, and study the product or service to be sure it’s worthy of your stamp of approval. Your reputation is at stake – be diligent!

Time your communications and launches so that they’re not back-to-back where they prevent people from buying, but they’re not spread so far apart that the customer forgets who you are in between offers. Better yet, intersperse these offers with emails containing helpful, valuable information pertinent to the reason they’re on your list to begin with. Even if you do a brief, monthly Top Five Tips, your offers will be more readily received and likely to be taken more seriously.

Remind your customers whenever you interact why you’re contacting them in the first place. Tell them what product they purchased in the past and never assume they’ll recall doing it. Some of these purchases or memberships are made in the wee morning hours on the spur of a moment when a friend made a quick recommendation.

The second thing you want to do is provide quality customer service. Whenever anyone accesses your site, they should be able to access you. That doesn’t mean they can call your cell phone at 2 o’clock in the morning. But if they can email you and get a response within 24 hours, you’re providing a doorway into your world that most online consumers will accept and appreciate. 

Every site you launch should have a troubleshooting/FAQ area where the person can find help instantly or contact someone for assistance. This is especially true if a purchase has just been made with the promise of an immediate download, and the customer then finds he or she can’t download the product as promised.

In each email you send out, make sure the recipient has a way to unsubscribe or respond to the communication if they wish. Intruding on someone’s email can be a bothersome thing to many people, even if they agreed to receive information.

The third and last thing you want to do to build a bridge of communication is set your contact system on autopilot. Email Autoresponders allow you to drip information and offers to your clients on a regular basis, setting up systems that go into place depending on which action the customer took.

If they bought one particular eBook from your site, then your system might encourage them to become a member of your other site that complements their original purchase. Or, if they’re members already, your system might promote an information product purchase.

Even your email settings should be set up so that, if you aren’t glued to your inbox all day (which you shouldn’t be), it automatically sends a note out to let the person who emailed you know that you received their communication and you’ll be reviewing it and get back to them at a later time.

There are many options to making the Internet a personal experience. If your customers need a face to the name, then add your photo or an audio or video file that lets them feel close to you in a friendlier environment. Always strive to find ways to humanize and personalize the online businessrelationship experience. Show your customers that you value their business and will work hard toward maintaining a long-term, trusting relationship. This will leave them with a positive impression of you as an entrepreneur and will increase your chances of leveraging the power of communication for your ultimate online success.

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2. Kayako – Quality Customer Service For Your Online Business
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Mind mapping is a way to tap into your brainpower and put it to use rather than slowly pulling ideas from it. You have an opportunity to be more creative – instead of having thoughts pour out in all directions, mind mapping organizes them so that you can easily apply them in your business.

Many people have trouble communicating their thoughts and ideas to an audience, but some even have difficulty conveying their thoughts clearly to themselves when trying to put them on paper or just put them into action.

To map your mind, you need a good software tool like the one at www.mindmapperusa.com that can let you plug in your ideas and manipulate them as you get ready to implement them into your business. This tool has a free trial period for you to test the software and see for yourself how it can improve your business. The Standard Edition is $60 if you choose to purchase.

When you map out an idea, you’ll have a central topic with branches. Each time you branch out even more, it creates a new level, so you’ll have level 1 branches, level 2 branches, and so on.

Mind map software allows you to visualize your plan so that it’s not just a theory. Using tools like Fishbone, a feature of the above-listed software, you can create outlines that show you the cause and effect of certain actions. This can prevent many mistakes and eliminate bad business decisions.

You can choose the patterns you want to use, such as a spider web that grows outwardly, a fishbone style of mind map, and other options. It’s dependent on the project you’re creating and your personal preferences.

Traditionally, writers were using mind-mapping software to organize the lives of their characters and see which storylines would create a more believable situation. But now mind mapping has transcended into the business world, and owners and entrepreneurs alike are utilizing these tools to see the direction in which they should take their company.

Using a mind map software tool gives you the ability to make your ideas come to life. It’s a colorful world, with layers you can move and erase, broaden or prune.

Have you ever seen a picture of a family tree online? Mind mapping is similar to a family tree diagram. You can have ideas branch out with sub-topics and it harnesses your random thoughts into organized content. This means you don’t have to think in steps – step one, step two, etc. You can be all over the place and still come out with an organized plan of action. It organizes your chaos!

Mind maps are more popular in Europe than in the United States, but some companies, especially those dealing with engineering, are seeking out mind mapping tools to help them get from A to Z with less hassle and fewer mistakes.

It’s all about tree trunks and branch ideas, however. With some tools, you can include video and audio files within your organization structure. Some people prefer to place icons in their mind map to watch it unfold in images rather than text.

You can also create multiple mind maps – not just one for your overall business. You could have a mind map for product creation (or one for each product), one for advertising and promotion, and another for customer relations.

You can also hyperlink your mind map or various branches, so if you have an advertising mind map, you might have a branch for ezine advertising, one for Pay Per Click, one for article directories, and another for press releases.

Within each branch of those you could have sub-branches where you hyperlink the resources you intend to use, such as: www.EzineArticles.com or www.GoArticles.com under your article directories branch.

This makes it easier when you sit down to submit your articles because all you have to do is open up your mind map for advertising, choose the article directories branch, and link directly to your intended recipient.

You can also hyperlink to files on your computer, so instead of having to connect to a folder within folder, simply open your mind map and have instant access to every file you need to begin work on a new task.

When and if you need to, you can then export the mind map into other software tools, such as Microsoft Word or Excel. And you can share your mind map with others who may be working on a project with you, such as a Joint Venture partner.

It works as a great reminder and organizer for business owners. You can work on a task and, once complete, alter its color so that you know what stage of completion it’s in according to your customized color chart.

Some business owners like to use mind maps as a blueprint. They only have to create a single new mind map and then whenever a repeat project comes along, they choose their blueprint and apply it to the next task on their list.

Others use it to profile their customers or map out pesky problem areas within their business so they can find a shortcut to a solution. It’s good to have a visual indicator of what’s happening within your business so that you can put a microscope on certain areas and improve their functionality.

Mind mapping may not be necessary for everyone who wants to organize their thoughts on paper, but it is a good way to see the correlation between one aspect of your business and another. Sometimes, just “seeing things on paper” helps you to make a better decision.

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Not everyone wants to become an affiliate, simply recommending a product for sale. There are other options you can give them that allow you to charge an even higher amount – selling the rights to your product.

Resale Rights

Resale rights are often created to allow others to sell your product directly and keep 100% of the profits themselves. They pay you a one-time fee for this honor. If you sell resale rights to your customers, then they can sell the product, but not the resale rights, to their customers.

Resale rights can be priced much higher, because it’s a one-time purchase and the buyer is going to gain the ability to profit from your product himself and never have to pay another dime to you. The more successful your product already is, the more you can charge for your resale rights.

Master Resale Rights

On the other hand, when you sell “master resale rights,” you are selling your customers the right to sell the product and the resale rights to their customers. These options are popular with people who don’t want to waste weeks, months, or even years creating a product of their own for the purpose of selling resale rights.

Private Label Rights

When you sell “private label rights,” you’re selling an even bigger opportunity – the chance for your customers to brand the product with their own company name and change it as if they were the person who originally created it.

Private label rights go a long way toward branding your image and company name on the ‘net. In a world where you often find dozens of marketers selling cookie cutter products, it’s nice to be able to customize it for your own use.

Full Private Label Rights

“Full private label rights” allow your customers the same privileges as master resale rights, but they can also sell the private label rights to the product to their customers.

So if I buy an eBook’s full private label rights, I have the option to alter it, brand it, and sell the book and the rights to my customers to do the same thing: customize it and sell it themselves.

It is important to note that, although you are free to define your own parameters as to the extent of customization that comes with your private label rights, the typical changes allowed are pre-determined “fields” you have chosen within the document. You can buy software that allows you to create a document in non-editable format (Adobe PDF format) but then designate certain words or lines that anyone can change by downloading a free software utility.

For example, you would allow changes to all the fields that pertain to authorship or contact information, all affiliate links, and miscellaneous things like testimonials, price, signature tag, etc. But, although there are exceptions, most people do not allow changes to the content that could affect the overall quality of the eBook. Imagine what it could look like after seven generations of sales of private resale rights where changes have been made by anyone with any level of knowledge!

Giveaway Rights

Sometimes letting people give away your product is a good way to make money, believe it or not. If you know how powerful viral marketing can be, then you understand that freebies making the rounds on the ‘net can bring droves of traffic to your site, which can result in increased sales.

Make sure your giveaway product has plenty of hyperlinks to your own products or those for which you are an affiliate, so that you can profit from the free distribution of the item. Also make sure your product is secure so that the person getting giveaway rights can’t go in and alter the hyperlinks to steal your traffic from you.

No Rights

You may also want to choose to give zero rights to your customers. That means they can’t share it, sell it, change it, or anything else for that matter. This might be a good option if your product is highly successful and you’d like to restrict it from being easily accessible by everyone on the ‘net.

Before you give away any rights, make sure you spell out all of the details to the buyers, since sometimes the lines get blurred and someone’s definition of resale rights may not be in line with what you understand it to be.

Always make sure they know whether or not you allow it to be used as web content, to be given away as a free bonus, or be packaged and sold with another item. Clearly state if you allow the product to be broken up and sold in pieces – such as an eBook being sold as separate articles.

Sometimes you might want to throw in some extras, just as an eBook has some freebies. Your bonus could be a customizable sales letter for them to use as a plug-and-play opportunity.

If, for any reason, you discover that someone has violated your terms and is going beyond the boundaries you set in place for them to distribute your product, make sure you send a cease and desist letter right away to inform them of the consequences that were outlined in the resale agreement.

They may have made an honest mistake and not known the difference, or it might have been done intentionally. Either way, having a legal document in place protects you and allows everyone to be on the same page.

Related posts:

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2. Private Label Rights – Pros and Cons.

Virtually every successful Internet Marketer is involved in some sort of JV opportunity at one time or another. Some people like to work solo, while others realize the importance of combining forces to realize even greater success.

But just as you’re sharing in the financial rewards of the partnership, you’re also sharing in the risks. Usually expenses are involved, such as the hiring of a service provider, or the purchase of a domain and hosting, for example.

What Is a Joint Venture?

The name says it all, but in layman’s terms it’s when you ask someone to partner up with you in promoting an offer that can benefit both parties. Each person participating brings something to the table.

For instance, you might be a great marketer but not have a knack with words. You could create a Joint Venture with a writer to have them create the product while you market it – and split the profits between the two of you.

Joint Ventures don’t always have to have a 50/50 split in sharing the profits, either. If the other person is doing significantly less work than you are, then their cut will obviously be less.

However, sometimes the person bringing something to the table opposite from you has the clout and the prestige to make or break your offer, which means they’ll negotiate for a percentage higher than if you partnered with just anybody.

When you’re first starting out, trying to prove your worth, you may have to take the short end of the deal. But as your suggestions take root and profits flow because of your opportunity, you can start to negotiate for your best interest.

Considering Your Joint Venture Opportunities.

Joint Ventures can take many forms. You might each contribute services to a JV opportunity, such as the case of two web designers getting together to create an amazing offer.

Or, maybe one person has a customer or subscriber list and the other partner creates the entire product start to finish. In this case, the JV partner would allow you to market to his list – but you’d still be splitting the profits.

What you have to do first is figure out what it is that you’re lacking that you need to get from someone else. Is it a highly targeted list of eBay enthusiasts? Is it a talent that you don’t have – or have time to learn?

After determining what’s missing from your ability to go it alone, you need to find out which people in the industry have the talent, tools, or contacts to accomplish what you think needs to be done in order to succeed.

There are short-term Joint Ventures and long-term Joint Ventures. A shortterm Joint Venture would be similar to you creating an info product, and a list owner tells you he’ll launch it to his list, where you get to share in the profits for up to certain number of dollars or for sales over a specified timeframe, A long-term Joint Venture can run indefinitely. For instance, when two ‘net marketers come together to merge their attributes and create a domain that they both own and profit from the sales.

Another type of Joint Venture can occur when both partners agree to basically become affiliates for one another. I promote your products to my traffic, and you do the same for me.

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2. Make More Money Using Cross Promotions
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A savvy hacker can go through your backdoor and grab the link and, like a shoplifter on the candy aisle at Wal- Mart, it’s gone. You could just accept that all businesses have losses due to theft and yours is no different.

But there are measures even a brick and mortar business owner takes to discourage this leak in profits. They have “eyes” and take steps to make it less likely that someone could get away with stolen goods.

Now there are ways to take security precautions with your precious ,download links. DownLoad Guard is just such a measure. DLGuard effectively protects your links – making it virtually impossible for expensive thefts to happen.

>>>>>DLGuard v4.5 Now Released!<<<<<

Download thefts happen in one of several ways:

The thief shares his download link with friends. This happens all the time. Someone will buy a product and then proceed to give out the download link to his buddies (and strangers) either on a forum or by email.

DL Guard effectively prevents this by limiting download time and the amount of downloads possible. You can set the time to 48 hours or even 2 hours and then the link goes dead.

You can also allow a maximum number of downloads. This allows the original purchaser to have maybe three tries at downloading your product before the link goes dead rather than an unlimited number.

In the event the original purchaser just couldn’t figure out the process and needs another chance to download, you can reset the time and amount manually. You can see the advantage here.

A second way links are stolen is by hackers just surfing for insecure download pages. If you just stick an unprotected download link on a thank you page, then any persistent hacker can discover these unsecure pages and click the link and save the file.

This isn’t even a remote possibility with DLGuard. In the event that a hacker finds your thank you/download page, DLGuard checks for successful payment before sending the person on to the secure download page. There’s no way that a hacker can get around that one unless they have access to the payment information.

If that was all DLGuard did, that would still be worth the investment, but  creator Sam Stevens built in some other great features like a full service  shopping cart that can be linked to PayPal or 2Checkout. So you can sell a single item or a multiple items through the integrated secure shopping cart.

There’s a way to manage your membership site, too. And if that’s not enough, the software provides a way to grab those emails and names and incorporate them into your autoresponder automatically by virtue of the fact that the customer  purchased your product. No more double optins, ,which is a great help for list builders.

DLGuard and Sam Stephens overdeliver. Sam will help you install DL Guard, too. The customer support is the best in the business.

If you’re concerned with download page security, DLGuard is by far the best value for the money and if by some odd chance you don’t like DL Guard, ClickBank will cheerfully refund you up to 56 days.

You really have nothing to lose – except more pirated documents if you choose not to get this tool!

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The first step in creating sales copy that hits the mark takes place before tapping the first key on your keyboard.

To create effective copy, it’s important to understand your market’s demographics – from values and interests to buying behavior.

Many small businesses and solo Internet marketers overlook this important step, as often do inexperienced copywriters.

If you hire a copywriter, expect to answer questions about your market (usually in the form of a questionnaire) or to pay the copywriter to research it.

A good starting point is to consider what things motivate most of your prospects? This could be recognition from others, money, security, time freedom, children, fun, health issues, etc. Also consider values (family, career, social responsibility, etc.) and interests (travel, entertainment, spiritual pursuits, etc.).

It’s also good to know how your prospects like to shop online. Do they prefer making fast decisions, reading as much as possible about a product or service, feeling a social connection with the business owner? Is a “special offer” or proven quality a deal closer with your market?

If your target market is made up mostly of a specific age group, check on trends for that group. Sales copy is targeted very differently to Generation Xers than to Baby Boomers.

As you may be gathering, the reason so many small business marketers skip the market research is it can take a lot of time.

Look at it this way – just as you wouldn’t expect to snag a bunch of great job interviews from sending the exact same cover letter and resume to potential employers, you can’t expect to pull great conversion rates with generic sales copy. (A good conversion rate is whatever you want it to be; on the average websites convert a 1 to 3 percent, but you can always increase that).

If you’ve done some market research, then you’ve no doubt run across reports that sell for hundreds, often thousands, of dollars. Here are a few ways to gather this information on a small budget:

- Read about trends on industry sites. For example, if you have a travel niche, you’ll find data on the tourism authority sites, such as tourist spending habits, age groups, if they are interested in luxury or eco travel, etc.

- Create a survey and offer a reward for completing it (such as a coupon for a discount on a product, good  for 30 days, or valuable eBook). Send the survey link to your email list and make the page readily available to website traffic. Make the survey quick and easy to complete by using formats such as statements followed by “Agree, Sometimes Agree, Disagree, Sometimes Disagree.”

- Look at magazines that serve your niche. Pay attention to the ads. They usually will be targeted well to the readership. Better yet, many magazines make data about their readership available for potential advertisers on their sites or via mail upon request. So if the magazine serves your niche, you can learn a lot about your market this way.

Perhaps you have a cross section of demographics in your market. Unlike large companies, we can’t always find the time or money to create a separate campaign for each demographic. So if this is the case, consider sales copy that primarily targets the largest segment of your market while including elements that will appeal to smaller segments without sending them running back to search. You can’t please everyone, but your goal is to please as many as possible.

Whether you are writing your own copy or outsourcing, be sure you follow the first command of sales copywriting: Know Thy Market!

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But success in entrepreneurship isn’t guaranteed anymore than success is guaranteed in any facet of business or life. Hard work is key, as is a thorough understanding of “how to play the game,” whatever that game is.

Experience and weathering rough seas counts for a lot on the journey to success, as does being willing to learn and adapt. There are some lessons that will help you on your journey to success.

Even if you already consider yourself a bona-fide success story, these lessons are worth reading. You might learn something new for gaining even more rewards in life:

Lesson One – Do work that you feel passionate about. Do work that you enjoy. Find a job, career, or niche that truly fulfills you. When you do this, your work won’t feel like work. It won’t be drudgery and because of that you’ll approach it with relish, not dread.

There’s great value in feeling energized by your work rather than overwhelmed, bored, or frustrated by it. When you wake up in the morning and look forward to your work day, you know you’ve got it figured out. Find something that fits your gifts and talents, and your own personality. This will make a world of difference in your level of success.

Lesson Two – Don’t be afraid of the bumps in the road and the obstacles. Don’t be afraid of the hard work. You’re going to run into problems here and there, and you’re going to have to use a lot of your own muscle to get your business up and running and keep it going. It’s all part of the process and even seasoned entrepreneurial veterans run into roadblocks sometimes. If you’re not willing to work hard and commit to the long haul, then an Internet business is not for you.

When problems crop up, do your best to solve them quickly and efficiently. Don’t hide from them. Problems and mistakes are all about learning and growing. If you have a problem or make a mistake, figure out what went wrong and how you can avoid it next time.

Lesson Three – Keep a positive attitude! Call it what you want – the Law of Attraction, the power of positive thinking, what goes around comes around, reaping what you sow – it’s all basically the same. Your positive attitude will pay off in positive results.

Be positive when things are going well, and don’t forget to have a grateful attitude. When things aren’t going well, rest assured that they will be good again soon. Smile, hold your head up and give yourself permission to work smart and hard and solve any problems that come your way. Share your positive attitude with your customers, target audience and business associates – it’s contagious and you will be remembered for it…in a good way!

Lesson Four – Be a friend. Pay attention to the people you meet online in forums and groups and on social networking sites. Pay attention to the people you meet face-to-face. Make yourself approachable so that others feel that you’re available to them for questions, help, or a quick chat.

Keep in mind that everyone you meet has a personal story as well as a business one. It never hurts to ask how an associate’s child is doing or send a quick “Happy Birthday” email or note. These things are remembered and appreciated.

Lesson Five – Set the right example. For entrepreneurs and Internet marketers, there are many opportunities to set a good or a bad example. One thing you should do is always operate with honesty and integrity.  

Offer products and services with true value, rather than re-hashed old news or outdated tools. Once your reputation is sullied, it’s twice as difficult to clean it up than it is to gain and maintain a good reputation from the onset. Always do the right thing, and expect the same from your customers and fellow entrepreneurs. Treat others with the respect that you want to be treated with.

Lesson Six – Give credit where it’s due. It’s rare that someone single-handedly becomes successful. Other people have lent a hand along the way. Always acknowledge those who have helped you when success comes your way. Give the people who were part of the process strong recognition. This creates a lot of valuable goodwill, as well as many more people happily willing to help you.

Lesson Seven – Share your good fortune. One mark of a truly successful person is that he or she knows they’re successful and wants to share that within their communities – the town where they live, causes and charities, and even online by giving help and guidance to other entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur who is successful is also generous.

This set of valuable lessons will help you find success and then share it with others. Remember that your success hinges on many factors, and none of them are luck! You make your own luck – it doesn’t fall in your lap.

Do something that energizes you – something you love!

Being willing to work hard and put in your time doing the menial tasks as well as the fun stuff is where it all starts. Standing up to your own fear and looking problems in the eye with a willingness to tackle anything that gets in your way is part of the process.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help from those who have been around for awhile, and when you feel discouraged, pick yourself up, hold your head up, and keep going. Be sincere in your friendship and desire to help others succeed. This is part of your overall success formula. Act with integrity and give credit to those who have helped you get where you are.

Give something back. Offer your thoughts, opinions and encouragement in discussion groups and forums. In your own community share your success by volunteering your time and energy to help others.

A positive attitude and a willingness to work hard and help others is the foundation of entrepreneurial success. Without these, you might still find a degree of success, but when you keep all of them in the forefront, you’ll experience an even greater measure of success and fulfillment in your life.

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Or think of this – on rainy days, WalMart has umbrellas right up front where you can see them and realize that it’s raining and you need one – genius! When the big game is coming up, you’ll see team logo merchandise and cakes and cookies decorated with the team logo waiting for you when you walk into the store – after all, you do need to have a team cake for the game, don’t you?

It’s all about marketing the right things at the right time and in the right groups. Marketing an eBook is one thing. Hopefully, you’ve researched the best way to do that and you have all of your programs and tools in place – and hopefully your eBook is getting attention and selling.

That’s great! But, you could have add-on sales to increase your incoming revenue if you have mapped out your product promotion strategy. You can use tools that include affiliate offers, one time only (OTO) offers, and cross promotions. You should be striving to use all of these as a vehicle to make more money online from your ebook sales.

Imagine that you’re selling an eBook on down-home barbecue recipes and how to plan a great barbecue. What you need to do is market that eBook and sell related items with it. How about a BBQ sauce of the month program or a specialty set of grilling accessories?

There are many ways to add serious revenue to your affiliate sales. You can review tangible items that complement your eBook’s topic and hyperlink to items they can buy online, at places such as Amazon.com. You could become an affiliate for sites like OmahaSteaks.com or KansasCitySteaks.com and earn every time one of your customers places an order – they’re interested in grilling, right?

You may also create Joint Venture partnerships for up-selling purposes. Your website is a great place for others to advertise their own wares. You can agree to promote a merchant’s products or services in exchange for a commission from sales that they get as a result of that promotion.

Your Joint Venture partner should be able to set up a system to track the conversion of traffic you send to their site. This will be similar to an affiliate program. They can set up a landing page specifically for your traffic. You can do this with almost any product or service as long as the product owner is willing to provide you with a way to ensure you’re getting your deserved commissions.

Another good way to add onto your eBook sales is to do cross promotions. Cross promotions involve up-selling the customer on a product that will enhance the product they just bought from you.

For example, your customer just purchased an eBook on Pay-Per-Click Marketing. You can up-sell them on other eBooks that teach advertising techniques, such as a Guide to Social Bookmarking.

Cross promotions work beautifully because your customer is already excited about the initial purchase. When they’re immediately offered extra products or services that will further enhance that purchase, you’ll be much more likely to get add-on sales.

One-Time Offers are also an excellent way to add more revenue to your eBook sale. Using the example of a skincare eBook, you could give an OTO offering of an additional special report on skincare secrets for a reduced price, or a one-year membership in an exclusive online community or club devoted to the best skincare innovations and secrets for younger looking skin, at a set price they won’t see again.

The whole point is to see what type of value-added services or products you can offer to your customers that will bring in more more money, while giving them what they need in the process. When you’re offering extras that make sense, piquing their interest, or exciting them, you’ve got another sale on the books.

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In 2009, with the youngest boomers just turning 45 and the oldest 63, we have boomers with young children, others with grandchildren, some with both, still some with an aged parent in need of care. There are boomers retiring, while others are going back to college or changing careers.

Some 50 year olds are empty nesters; other 50 year olds are still providing for their adult Generation X children. The situation is very similar in Europe, Canada and other countries. Boomers number some 450 million worldwide.

This is the only time a generation has been designated by its parents’ fertility rates instead of by the formative experiences that shape it, which is why we now have numerous cultural analysts, advertising agencies, and prominent news sources talking about Generation Jones, the name given to those born between 1954 and 1965 (1953-1968 in some countries), the younger boomers.

The Washington Post sums it up well: “Generation Jones has its own particular experiences, values, attitudes, and voting behaviors.”

Whether the label works or not, recognizing the differences in life stages and cultural references is important. It’s also important to remember that the cutoff dates are not set in stone. Many of those born near a cusp will identify better with the previous or later generation.

Marketing To Baby Boomers

Let’s take a look at some of the differences between the younger and older boomers, Baby Boomers and Generation Jones.

Baby Boomers, Born 1946-1954

Touchstones – In the United States, these include Howdy Doody; Woodstock; the Beatles; Vietnam; the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Star Trek; Motown; political unrest; the first walk on the moon; social and drug experimentation; and the civil rights, environmental, and women’s movements.

Key characteristics – Boomers grew up in a time of dramatic social change and are associated with traits such as free spirited, optimistic, mold breaking, individualistic and social cause oriented. As a group they have been the healthiest and wealthiest generation.

Generation Jones, Born 1955-1964

This younger boomer demographic in the United States is made up of 53 million people, the bulk of the boomer generation (which peaked in 1957). Touchstones- in the United States include Watergate, the oil embargo, inflation, gasoline shortages, the Cold War with its threat of nuclear war, Ronald Reagan (very popular with Gen. Jones), and disco.

Key characteristics- Given huge expectations as children, they were confronted with a different reality as they came of age. Hence the name, which comes from the slang “jonesing” referring to an unrequited yearning. Gen Joneshas some of the 60’s idealism but is less trusting of government and more cynical than its older siblings, but not as cynical as Gen X. This generation pioneered computers and includes Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

In spite of the differences, there are still many things that the younger and older boomers share, and that you can apply to marketing.

Bridging the Gap Between Younger and Older Boomers

Advertising and Marketing: Almost 70 percent find ads increasingly crude and most won’t purchase when the ad is offensive. Only 23% find ads geared towards their age group. Still, they are more likely than younger groups to be motivated to buy based on an Internet ad. Also, boomers like bargains, but only on quality items,and they want to be made to feel special.

Sixty one percent want more product/service information- they want to read about products before purchasing. They think about the choices a product will give them rather than looking for quick fixes. Tell them why they need something and BS detectors go off. Instead, present the product/service, and let them give it the meaning. Make infomercials and other videos real; drop the storyboard and hype.

Boomers identify younger than they are, but not too much younger. Many ad agencies have advertised to boomers the same as they do to 19-25 year olds. Mistakes made in this area have been costly for some very large companies. Boomers say they just want to feel good at how much money they make, which hopefully you figure is about a decade younger.

They’re not brand loyal like their kids. They’re more likely to trust a friend than an unknown marketer. Boomers like things that reinforce the feelings of specialness they grew up with.

Internet Savvy: Seventy percent of adults age 50 to 64 are online today, only 12% less than younger groups. Fewer of them have broadband, but overall usage mirrors other age segments.They’re more likely than GenX’ers to use the web to gather information, nearly as likely to shop online, and they’re avid consumers of business and health related information.

Most have been online for more than 6 years. 82 percent use Internet beyond email. Almost one third are bloggers. More than 60 percent of baby boomers are avid consumers of social media like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, forums, podcasts, and YouTube. Boomers use social media sites to find long lost friends, connect with family, and for professional networking.

Income: Avoid affluent stereotypes. This is the wealthiest generation in history, but only 9% percent are truly affluent ($150,000 annual pre-tax income) and one quarter have no savings or investments.

Strong Desire to Remain Active: Favorite activities include listening to music, attending concerts and sports events, dining out, fitness walking, and camping. An Outdoor Industry Foundation study in 2004 reported 40% of people ages 45 and older say they’re looking for a new outdoor activity, and at the top of the list were backpacking/hiking, road biking, camping and paddle sports. Travel is also very popular with boomers. Adventure travel and exotic locales are of high interest, with comfortable beds, great food, and a nice view.

Well Educated: Over one quarter have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Socially Conscious: This drives buying behavior for many boomers. Seventy percent say they have a responsibility to make the world a better place.

Children: 28 million have kids in the home (children, step children or grandchildren). The boomers’ parental role usually extends beyond the time when a child is a minor. Boomers view financing a child’s college education as a parental responsibility.

Retirement: Top concerns are cost of health care, diminished social security benefits, losing their health, and not having enough money. Eighty percent intend to continue working in some form during their retirement.

Likes Nostalgia: Boomers seek creative ways that show more understanding of the culture than just 60s tie-dye and Woodstock. A good example: Bayer’s commercial where Leonard Nimoy (Dr. Spock of Star Trek), thanks to Aleve, successfully presents his famous “V” gesture painlessly with his arthritic hand.

Identifies With: Boomers associate with people like themselves, not the “gray haired, stodgy people over there.” Most don’t want to be called “seniors,” “aging hippies,” or “cougars.” Boomers consider the selves middle-aged, and “old” doesn’t come till 75. “Experienced” or “educated” is better.

Open to New Ideas: This generation broke the mold during every stage of life; this stage is no different. They’re open to a wide range of new home business ideas and experiences.

As you may have noticed, there are several things that make the baby boomer generation a good demographic for an online business or niche marketing.The key is understanding that this is a generation that won’t be herded, rushed, or won over by hype.

Respect the baby boomers’ desire for freedom of choice. In that freedom, they are redefining what it means to be old for the next  generation – active, adventuresome but thoughtful, contributors to society.

If you found this information useful consider joining my free membership with over $500 worth of bonuses inside.

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But they do have some drawbacks that discourage many users. For one thing, they are also considered the most expensive PPC network. Since they have more traffic, they also have a lot more competition. This drives prices way up. AdWords also has  more rules than most of the other networks.

Because of things like intense competition, high prices, and rules that many believe to be a bit excessive, more and more marketers are looking for other options.

One of the best alternatives is MSN AdCenter. MSN/Bing is one of the most popular search engines, and they do have a decent level of traffic. It’s obviously nowhere near the level of Google, but they do have enough traffic to make using them worthwhile. Their prices are generally cheaper than AdWords, making them an attractive option.

Yahoo Search Marketing  is also popular. Yahoo has been a leader in the search engine marketplace for many years, and they provide a decent level of traffic. Their prices are reasonable, too.

Kanoodle  has been popular for several years. They boast pretty good traffic and competitive prices. Although they don’t have the level of traffic that one of the big three could provide, they still have enough to provide a steady flow to some of the bigger search terms.

AdBrite  is a network that pays webmasters to put their ads on their sites. Because they have a relatively large number of Non-AdWords Options for Pay Per Click Marketing advertisers, they can provide a fair number of visitors. Since they have to pay their advertisers, their prices aren’t quite as low as they could be, but they are still generally far less than AdWords. Personally I haven’t had much success with them.

One of the networks that many webmasters recommend staying away from is GoClick. This network is notorious for providing high volumes of very low-quality traffic. Their clicks are generally very inexpensive, and they can provide very high traffic volumes, but most webmasters claim the quality of the traffic is so poor that it’s practically impossible to even break even, much less make a profit.

There are several other networks that might have potential for some website owners. Some of them have decent traffic levels and good prices. It’s best to put a few dollars into several networks and test the traffic before you make a decision on which ones to use in a bigger way.

Some others you may want to try include: 7 Search, Miva, LookSmart, Ask.com, Search 123, Search Feed, ABC Search, Findology, Local.com, and Pulse 360.

Although Google Adwords should be your first choice do try several of these PPC networks to see which one works best for your niche.

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For less than $30 per month, this one software program gives you everything you need to provide your customers with quality care. It boasts a number of features to suit all of your needs.

The software enables you to provide support through email and webbased customer interaction. Tickets can be submitted 24/7 by anyone, including customers, prospects, etc., allowing you to provide necessary solutions by email or optional live chat, with a customer interface that is as intuitive as a live operator answering phones.

Their Ajax-based interface provides you with the best possible support with downloads and articles to help you when responding to the support tickets. Each ticket can easily be tracked and solutions provided in a quick and easy manner, keeping your customers satisfied with your service and loyal to your brand.

You will have a knowledge-base section that enables you to easily provide fixes and answers to even the most complicated problems and questions. Other features include screen sharing, real time spell-check, daily and weekly views, and even a section for entering notes.

Everything can be accessed from the main support page, helping you find what you need to solve support problems efficiently. The support suite also offers a template for multilingual situations where you can translate the support ticket so it can be handled efficiently. With an unlimited satellite helpdesk, you can reach customers all over the world.

This helpdesk software program gives you a hand in organization as well. You can organize everything from the support tickets that are still open to ones that have been resolved. You can get detailed reports to track how well the customer support program is going for you. These reports can help you determine where you need to improve to keep your customers satisfied.

Kayako is not just for email support. You can also get the benefit of live support as well (there are three software options; two include the live support feature). With this feature, you can monitor the visitor’s actions while on your site to help you in responding to their questions or problems in a timely manner.

The screen-sharing feature can be a lifesaver in the help desk field. When needed, this software can rise to the occasion by sharing what’s on your desktop to the consumer’s computer without the use of other more complicated and time-consuming software applications.

Show your customers that they matter by providing them with topnotch support. Give them a personal touch with the look and feel of a quality corporate help desk. This support suite will give you everything you need for less money than you spend on Internet access each month.

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The average person has about a 60% comprehension rate, reading at approximately 200 words per minute. Top speed readers may reach 800-1000 words per minute with an 85% comprehension rate!

Why Learn Speed Reading?

If you could read four to five times faster and comprehend and retain more of what you read, how do you think that would help you? You could do research for your reports, articles and eBooks four times faster. You could absorb information from trade journals in record speed.

You could learn more in less time than ever before. So many entrepreneurs get bogged down in paperwork and research. They spend countless hours each week trying to figure out how to get through (or avoid!) the mountain of work on their desks while still accomplishing their goals for the week. It’s tough!

There are all sorts of books and DVDs available that can teach you speed reading skills, and you can also find classes on this subject at many schools around the world. Learning speed reading is generally best accomplished using computer software, because it allows you to be interactive. It’s a lot harder to judge your ability when you have to use a stopwatch to time your reading, and it can be even more difficult to gauge your accuracy and retention.

There are many skills an entrepreneur needs to reach peak productivity. Speed reading is just one more invaluable tool in an arsenal that can bring an average entrepreneur into a whole new world by maximizing productivity and efficiency.

Useful links:
Speed reading program

Speed reading software

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Pretty much everyone wants more money. If you were to ask someone on the street what they’d wish for if they had just one wish, I can guarantee the majority of wishes would involve money: a million dollars, a higher paying job, a substantial retirement account.

It’s fine to want more money, there’s nothing wrong with it, but the truth is that more money alone doesn’t do anything for anybody. It’s not really about the money when it comes right down to it. People don’t want more money just so they can stare at a huge bank balance all day.

If I were to ask you, “Why do you want more money?” what would you say? It probably wouldn’t be so you could spend your days counting stacks of dollar bills. It would probably be because of something that money would allow you to do or have.

People want more money because they have specific desires for what money can provide. They want to be free of debt. They want to spend three weeks exploring Tuscany. They want to pay for their kids to go to college. They want a brand new, fuel efficient car. They want to be able to retire early and know they have enough savings to pay the bills for the rest of their lives.

How To Attract Money

One of the keys to getting more money is to examine and change how you feel about money. Remember, like attracts like. So, when you think of money and having more of it and the lifestyle having money brings, how does it make you feel? Anxious? Hopeless? Stressed out? Desperate? Excited? Jumping up and down? Wealthy beyond belief?

How you feel about money can actually be keeping it (and the lifestyle you want) away from you. Even excitement about money can push it away. Yes, you read that right. Excitement about money can actually deflect money rather than attract it.

When you are able to live most ays in the mindset that being wealthy and living the lifestyle you want is a normal, ordinary thing, your life will begin to reflect your belief for and view of it. Likewise, if you think having a lifestyle where you work part time and bring in a million dollars a year is an exciting, random occurrence like winning the lottery, and that living paycheck to paycheck is normal for you, the Law of Attraction continues to bring that same old paycheck to your doorstep.

That’s what you’re projecting is normal and anything else feels like a fluke – an exciting, one-time stroke of luck. Instead of thinking, feeling, and living in abundance, you’ll be pushing away that lifestyle because it doesn’t “fit” you.

People who have an extra $50,000 per month to spend think of that as normal. It’s expected and wildly appreciated. This is the kind of mentality you need to create, that always having more than enough is normal. That going on vacation to Hawaii every year is normal. That being financially independent is normal.

You need to be in an emotional vibration that attracts and accepts money rather than repels and rejects it. That means feeling and believing with confidence that living in abundance is normal and factual, not exciting or scary.

If you want financial independence, you have to get comfortable with the idea of living a lifestyle that might not be such a comfortable fit right now. Once you feel comfortable with abundance, it will begin to flow to you.

Many people who teach the Law of Attraction say that you need to figure out how much money you want to live your dream lifestyle and then ask the Universe for that specific amount of money. What works for me, is that I always have more than enough for all of my wants, needs, and desires; more than enough to help others; and more than enough to save for future wants, needs, and desires. I never put a dollar amount on it because I know that whatever figure I come up with is putting limitations on unlimited possibilities, so why put a cap on it?
 
Refocusing your intent from “I want more money” to “this is what I want to be/do/feel/have” will also free up the Universe to respond to you in ways that don’t necessarily involve money – ways you can’t begin to imagine right now!

When you’re focused only on the $10,000 you need for a dream vacation in Italy, you close your eyes to the possibility that you may not actually need money to do what you want. Maybe you’ll win the vacation in a sweepstakes or you’ll receive the gift of plane tickets for a special occasion. Change your focus and you may be surprised at the ways you attract the lifestyle you desire with much less emphasis on money than you thought possible!

The major component to attracting what you want is gratitude. Be grateful for what you have right now, as well as  giving thanks for the money and lifestyle that you are creating. Gratitude and appreciation are the keys that open the door for an avalanche of good to come into your life. Use them often.

Money, in and of itself, is meaningless; it is simply a tool we can use to finance the life we wish to create for ourselves. When we focus on what we want to create and use the Law of Attraction to manifest this, amazing things happen! Always leave yourself open, available to more and you’ll soon learn how to attract money. 

To learn how to make money online check out 10 Ways To Make Money on The Internet 

If you found this information useful consider joining my free membership with over $500 worth of bonuses inside.

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Narrowing your focus to just a few sites and then building from there is the best way to approach social networking, especially if you want to make money. A strategic plan will help you build traffic in a measurable way without scattering your time and energy in many different directions.

At the core of your social networking plan is your “launch pad,” the site to which you will drive all of your online traffic. This can be a blog, a website, or a squeeze page. For the purposes of this plan, we’re going to make it a blog.

There are several reasons why using a blog for your launch pad is a good idea. Blogs have a higher level of interactivity with the audience. The content on a blog is constantly changing, so it always stays fresh and therefore ranks higher in search engine results. A blog will help you build a relationship with your niche and become a more trusted advisor.

You should use either Blogger or Wordpress to set up your blog. Do some keyword research in your niche and find a blog title that incorporates a popular keyword. This way you will get some automatic traffic from the title of the blog itself.

In fact, you should develop a short list of keywords that you will use to tag your content later on in the other social networking sites. When you focus your keyword choices around a short list, you will be able to rise in the rankings for those keywords pretty quickly.

When you start your blog, you will need to focus on creating interesting, compelling content. Map out five to ten blog posts and add them before you start promoting your blog through social networking sites.

For example, let’s say you are in the wedding niche. You have an affiliate relationship with a company that sells wedding favors. You decide that you want to develop a social networking plan to promote this particular company’s products.

Looking at some keyword results, there are many different types of wedding favors to choose from and many are the focus of lots of searches each day. You could use a URL that is general like www.weddingfavorinfo.com and then offer information on the many different types of wedding favors. On your blog, you can use banner ads or small graphic ads to link back to the affiliate site. You can also provide text links within your blog posts for visitors to click on as they read your suggestions.

Once you have your blog up and running, then it is time to create some Squidoo lenses (www.squidoo.com) and Hubpages (www.hubpages.com). To start, you should create three lenses and three Hubpages on similar keywords, all pointing back to your blog. With our wedding favor example, you could start with the three most popular types of favors and build pages around them (golf wedding favors, cheap wedding favors, unique wedding favors).

After you have built your lenses and pages, you can network within each site with people who are interested in what you have to offer. You can post comments on other people’s lenses or pages, and link to their sites. Look for people who have similar sites and network with them.

You can add your blog’s RSS feed to your lenses and pages. This way they will be constantly updated with the fresh content from your blog. In addition to the links back to your blog, you can also have links to the affiliate program within your lenses and pages.

Over a period of time, you can begin to add to the network of lenses and pages until you have criss-crossed all of your major keywords. Stumble Upon is a terrific tool for adding more power to your blog, lenses, and pages. When you sign up for Stumble Upon and download the toolbar, you will be able to check “I like it” as you visit your own sites and sites that are within your niche. Over time, you develop a list of your favorite sites which becomes a catalog of popular sites within your niche.

It is important, as you use Stumble Upon, that you not limit yourself to just

bookmarking your own sites. Your Stumble Upon profile will have much more impact and draw if it covers a wide breadth of sites within your niche. What makes Stumble Upon a great social networking tool (better than many social bookmarking tools out there), is that you can find users who have similar interests. On the main site, you can search the community for keywords and then make contact with people interested in your niche.

When you add someone as a friend on Stumble Upon, they will very likely look over your list of sites and bookmark them. Then your links will spread throughout the community, bring you traffic and make you more money.

These simple steps will create a broad network of backlinks and some

great Web 2.0 traffic. It will help you establish your site as an authority in

your niche market, and bring you targeted, interested traffic. The type of traffic that makes you money online!

If you found this information useful consider joining my free membership with over $500 worth of bonuses inside.

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There are several ways you can use cross promotions to increase your income. They’re handy for introducing new products or services.

For instance, when a customer chooses to purchase an information product for you, such as an eBook on Making Money on eBay, you can cross promote something that complements it – such as a software tool that lets them track their listings and inventory.

They also let you expand the scope of already established products. If a product you sell, such as a membership to your site, has items that would benefit your customers, you can cross promote them whenever the customer initially signs up.

Cross promotions are also good for helping your affiliates build their markets for you. You can offer items for your affiliates to cross promote, or they can use your product as their cross-promotion items they offer with their own existing products.

Cross promotions are great incentives for enticing joint venture partners. You can have a partnership with another business to cross promote their products and they do the same for you. Your customer benefits from the added value and opportunity.

When you embark in a cross-promotion campaign with a joint venture
partner, you are sharing advertising and promotion costs. Instead of buying ad space on someone’s site, they’re giving it to you.

It also reaps valuable referrals to your business. When you cross promote an item with someone else, you may retain that customer longer than just for one purchase – they may become a lifetime loyal  client of yours that brings more money into your bank account.

If you found this information useful consider joining my free membership with over $500 worth of bonuses inside.

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Let’s take what may appear as the easy way out of answering this, and say  Both!” Whether or not you firmly believe in taking inspired action, it’s also important to take practical measures.

This means creating web content about subjects that interest you, but not before checking out the niches first. The Internet is brimming over with quality content in some niches where the competition is just too fierce, especially if you’re on a tight budget, and the content just may not be worth your time.

So here’s the progression I recommend:

1. Make a list of your interests.

2. Starting with something that interests you the most, research the market and the online competition until you decide whether to use it “as is,” narrow it, or scratch it.

3. Create the first pages of a site around this niche and its sub-niches, monetize them, then go on to the next interest and do the same. Continue growing the sites you started.

If you’re not sure what really interests you, ask yourself some or all of the following questions, and quickly jot down your answers, without judgment Some of these may seem silly, but they are the type of questions asked on many career interest tests. You don’t need to go through all of these, but keep in mind the objective is to have a list of at least 10 things that pique your interest:

- What do you really love to do?
- When you’re in a bookstore, what section do you feel drawn to?
- When you go to the mall, what stores are most fun for you to visit?
- What were your favorite things to do when you were a kid?
- What hobbies do you have now that you enjoy?
- What memories make you smile the most?
- If you didn’t have to work, how would you spend your time?
- Do you have or would you like to have any pets?
- If you could take any classes you wanted, tuition free and just for personal interest or fun, what would you sign up for?
- If you won a free vacation to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
- What do you enjoy watching on TV?
- What are your favorite holidays and why?
- Is there an aspect of parenting or childhood that fascinates you?
- Are there any causes that you feel passionate about?
- If you won the lottery today, other than investing, how would you spend the money?
- If you were to teach a class on any subject (to any age group) what would you teach?
- If money were no option, how would you spend your time?

The idea of these questions is to help you break through any limitations you may have. When you don’t limit yourself, you can discover true passions you’d  forgotten about in the hustle and bustle of life. The idea again is to focus on what truly interests you rather than what you think should interest you or where you think you’ll make money.

Don’t forget. Many people of great wealth made their money by following their bliss – from Walt Disney to Bill Gates.

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“Do I tackle the sales letter today, find an expert to interview for my podcast, or create the new website content?”

The question of the day will be…“Mommmm/Daaaad, what’s there to do?”

OK. Maybe it’s not quite that bad. There’s even a good side of no homework hassles for three months. No morning rush. No school-driven schedules.

“But I’m losing my childcare, my quiet time for work,” you say.

This is true. And you have reason for concern, but take heart. As many a home-schooling work-at-home parent knows, giving your attention to both work and the children and keeping your sanity while doing this can be quite a challenge – but it is doable!

Whether you have one child or four, there’s sure to be a few tips here that will help you make this a great summer – for your family and your online business.

Alternatives to Day Care Centers

Let’s face it, too much togetherness even for non-working parents and kids can get stressful. Since you’re working on your business at home, it’s even more important to make use of some childcare alternatives.

For school age children, this might be some form of day camp. Check local publications, community online forums, the Yellow Pages, etc., for summer offerings such as these:

- YMCA Day Camp
- Church Day Camp
- Interest-Specific Day Camps (e.g. theatre, horseback
riding, baseball)
- Boys and Girls Club
- Parks & Recreation Summer Programs
- College Hosted Summer Youth Programs
- Community Pool Supervised Swims
- Kids’ Gyms
- 4-H
- Overnight Camps (Scouts, etc.)

Some of these may be free or charge only a nominal fee. If tuition is an issue, ask about scholarships or bartering deals.

Other alternatives may include help from a family member or friend, or a taking turns with a trusted neighbor a couple mornings or afternoons a  week.

Schedule work that requires the most uninterrupted quiet for when your children are out with others or asleep. If you don’t have a co-parent to help out, also schedule in some time for yourself, whether to have lunch with a friend or simply relax.

Most kids cherish the freedom of summer days, but they also thrive on routines. The living is easier in summer when everyone can count on routines. For example: activities for the kids while you work for two hours each morning, followed by lunch together, and then off to the day camp, while you go back to work, etc. You and your children’s mileage will vary!

Here are some tips other work-at-home parents have shared:

Schedule “just for fun” play time with child and parent into each day.

While there is the school’s summer reading list, also encourage reading for fun and personal interest. Librarians are wonderful at helping find just the right books to suit a child’s likes and dislikes. This can bring you quite a bit of interruption-free time, and you will be doing your kids a big favor.

Pack an activity box with favorite DVDs, arts and crafts, games and toys. Then bring the box out only as needed, such as during a tight deadline. From time to time, add new items. Keep it scarce so it will be a special treat that holds their interest.

No matter how eager you are to start your workday, spending some quality time with your kids first can ward off frequent interruptions later. For example, playing Candyland with a 5-year-old for ten minutes can satisfy the need for attention and the child is more likely to play alone for the next hour or two.

Give them part-time summer jobs in your business (it’s tax deductible) or around the house. While you focus on your work, they can be happily working towards earning money for a special toy or activity.

Children need down time when tired or cranky. Don’t feel bad about turning on the TV if it’s a quality program or DVD.

Signal work time by placing a sign on your office door. If you’re stationed in a family area, put it on your desk.

Often kids can get creative with coming up with things to do, but sometimes a short brainstorming session with you can help. Keep a list of activities on hand.

Plan for a special family day each week.

If you have or can get a second computer, let the children explore new computer skills through kid-friendly tutorials that teach everything from blogging to creating websites. These can be CDs or downloaded software that don’t require Internet access to run, minimizing supervision.

Plan ahead

Don’t wait till the kids have been home a week and you’re pulling out your hair, feeling frustrated and guilty. Start planning now.

You can also pave the way with your attitude. Respect yourself for the work you are doing, for the lifestyle you are creating for you and your family. Communicate this expectation of respect from the children, and remember to set an example in showing them respect.

Finally, remember to take some time to enjoy some of that summer vacation!

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Many SEO tools measure competition, but they fall short with their methods, often only providing the ratio of keyword popularity to number of Web pages returned in a search for that keyword.

However, Micro Niche Finder uses several variables to determine the SOC(competition) rating, most importantly:

- Page Reputation
- Website Authority
- Incoming Links
- Relevance of Content
- Google PageRank
- Search Volume/Keyword Popularity

More than 200 variables based on Google data factor into the SOC rating. This rating is provided in the form of a green, yellow, or red light, indicating “Go for it!” “Caution” and “Close to Impossible.” Additionally you get a numerical value.

To help you evaluate the commercial value of a niche or keyword, Micro Niche Finder provides a feature based on pulls them all together. On the other hand if the topic of miniature collies is of high interest to you, then this could be the niche. You could have a forum and blog devoted to the niche, product reviews, information products you create and so forth.the Microsoft OCI (Online Commercial Intent) index that estimates the likelihood of a searcher making a purchase based on the search phrase he entered. There’s also a tool that finds the most profitable Affiliate programs for your niche market keyword phrases.

If you’re looking for keywords that have been overlooked by other marketers, Micro Niche Finder streamlines this process. The software’s keyword research tools provide you with related terms, making it easier to find profitable niches or keywords that you may not have thought of yet. MNF accomplishes this process by using synonyms to check related keyword phrases, Google Trends, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and more.

Once locating these keywords, you can use the Narrow Dig feature to zoom in on a keyword phrase and find related keywords that have even better profit potential. Best of all, this is all taken directly from the Google database.

Other features include organization tools, an Ezine Articles module that checks on competing articles, and more.

You can research your niches and markets effectively by using Google and a basic keyword tool. However, if you want to streamline the process, Micro Niche Finder is a good choice.

Click here for more information

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But not everyone has an endless stream of ready-to-publish photos at their fingertips. That’s why good stock photo sites are so popular. If you’re thinking about expanding your horizons, this might be an appealing option to explore.

With a decent digital camera, an eye for the interesting, and a knack for lighting and composition, you could find yourself with a successful new business. So, how do you go about building a stock photo business? What are the legal issues be you might face?

First, there are some legal issues that you’ll want to be aware of if you decide to get into the stock photography business. The biggest question is who has the rights to the photos or the images and what exactly can you photograph and sell without having to get permission?

It’s best to do your own research on the legalities of photographing the particular subject(s) that you’re interested. But, there’s some basic information that can set you on the right path.

Nature – If you’re photographing the trees, flowers, clouds, bugs, and birds that you see while on a walk through the park, you’re probably safe from facing copyright issues.

Photos shot on public property – If you’re shooting photos on public property, you may need to seek the permission of the governing authority that oversees that property, especially if there are security reasons. But, if you’re simply taking garden-variety photos, such as the nature photos mentioned above, it’s probably not necessary.

Private property – Don’t shoot photos on private property without permission of the property owner.

Buildings – You can photograph buildings that are in a public place or visible from a public place.

Works of Art – Often, works of art such as paintings, sculptures, statues, etc. are off limits if you’re planning to photograph them for a profit, unless you have permission from the copyright owner, which is usually the artist, not the owner of the piece of art.

Public Domain – Subjects that are public domain are those created before January 1, 1922. Copyright laws do not protect them.

People – If you’re planning on using a photo of a celebrity on your own site or to sell a photo that you took of a celebrity, you’ll need to have that person sign a release. People who aren’t celebrities are also protected from having a photo of them sold or used without their express permission. Be cognizant of the ramifications if you’re planning to include pictures of people in your stock photo site.

While using your own photography skills is an excellent way to create another stream of income, you’ll want to do thorough research before posting and selling your photos.

You should explore which photo categories you’ll want to sell. Studying established sites such as istockphoto.com, shutterstock.com, corbis.com, etc., will help you learn the ropes.

Pay close attention because you’ll need to have procedures and clear, strongly-stated terms of service established for your customers. You’ll need to build up a very large stock of digital photos to offer. Then, build your website and optimize it so that you start bringing in traffic.

Don’t forget to start a buzz about your new site by participating in discussions and forums, and submitting some good quality articles to directories on how to use photos to add impact to a website, sales page, or blog.

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But, while the Internet has its ethics problems, it also contains marketers who make tons of money, but do so with the utmost ethical values and attempt to help others along the way. In other words, making money online and greed can be mutually exclusive. If we wait long enough, we can tell the difference  between the two.

Those who use Internet marketing out of greed will eventually slip away. We may have to deal with them again under another name, but they’ll probably return with the same old greedy morals. Those of us who practice honesty and high ethics will remain as an example of all that integrity can accomplish.

Just as there are shady Internet marketers – there are also toxic Internet customers. These are a type of predator who wants something for nothing. They’ll purchase your product and then almost immediately call you a “scammer” and demand a refund. Don’t be swayed by these individuals – especially if you’ve offered a good product at a reasonable price.

Take the high ground — refund their money and continue down the road of Internet success. And remember, for each one of these negative moochers, there will be ten customers who will praise your work and inspire you to move on and create more.

Many Internet marketing ethics problems may arise because there are so few set limits (or regulations) about what you can and can’t get away with on the Internet. Those without integrity assume that if there’s no rule against something, then there are no holds barred. This affects all of us who attempt to run an Internet business with high values and honesty.

As the Internet grows in popularity and usability, it’s important that we develop some rules and guidelines that will serve us just as law enforcement serves our communities.Think about the enormous amount of information that we post on the Internet every day. Besides verbiage, there are archives of video, films and even audio that can be stored into infinity. This information can even be accessed from a cell phone, raising new questions of privacy and security.

Illegal and scamming Internet marketing is rampant and it will become increasingly difficult to decipher an honest marketer from one who is attempting to produce a shoddy product and then take your money and run. Now is the time when ethics and morals on the Internet should be carefully considered – especially for the future.

As you’re reading this article, thousands of new marketers are launching a business on the Internet, with no idea of the rules and their responsibility to uphold the integrity and honesty of their business. There are codes of ethics, such as the AMA (American Marketing Association) have posted on the Internet, but newbies aren’t required to read them, and there are no laws that uphold the ethical and professional conduct that the AMA advocates. (You can read the AMA Code of Ethics here ).

It’s vitally important that we all become participants in following this code of ethics to uphold the dignity of the Internet marketing profession. If we band together and live by what we know are rules of ethical conduct, we’ll better serve our customers. Some general rules in the AMA’s Code of Ethics include:

Follow rules and regulations that ensure that your customers receive an honest and fair-value product for their money.

Represent yourself and your product accurately.

Never present the work of others (in whole or in part) as your own work and benefit from it by compensation of any sort.

Respect the privacy of others in regard to accounts, passwords or any other private information.

Internet marketers who are merely out to make a buck consider the Internet as set apart from a society that must adhere to laws. As ethical internet  marketers, we should make it perfectly clear to others (especially newbies) that the internet is fast becoming a component of society and we owe it to ourselves and others to shape its control and content by setting high values. If not, it will surely come back to haunt us.

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He made a list of “regrets” and then set out on a journey to relive them. One of Kita’s regrets was that he wasn’t already “filthy rich.” He hired a butler to serve him for a week for $1,000 and began to experience how it would feel to live the life of a wealthy person.

By the end of the week, Kita learned that he didn’t really enjoy having another person in his house. He discovered that he could feel like a wealthy man by creating his own luxuries – the ones that made him feel like a million dollars.

One by one, Kita attempted to relive his regrets and at the end of his journey he came away with a new understanding of what life is all about – and a blueprint on how to live the remainder of his life with absolutely no regrets.

Kita learned valuable lessons throughout the venture, and he eventually developed the motto, “Take an opportunity to be the driver in your life instead of the passenger.”

Are you the driver in your life – or are you simply being driven without your consent or, worse, against your will, in directions you don’t want to go? Whether or not you live your life filled with regrets depends on how you take charge and handle the present moments and how you go about mapping your future.

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

Short term goals are steps to achieve what you want your lifetime accomplishments to be. But don’t get mired down in setting goals and forget the big picture.

If one of your lifetime accomplishments is to write a novel, you’ll have to set short term goals that might involve finished a chapter per month – or attending writing seminars that may help you achieve your goal.

No matter how old you are or where you are in your life, you can choose to live the rest of your life with no regrets by seizing the life you have and making it the best it can be.

Some people have trouble identifying what their life goals should be. Here are some tips you might use to help recognize what you want your life’s accomplishments to be and how to reach them with no regrets:

Take charge – If you’re not living your life in a manner that you specifically choose, make a conscious decision to change.

Are people or circumstances keeping you from living the life you desire? If you feel that you have no control over daily hassles in your life, it’s probably true that you’re the passenger – not the driver in your life.

Taking charge of your life might upset the proverbial apple cart for awhile, but to know that the decisions you make are yours and no one else’s can be the first step to living your life with no regrets.

Develop a mission statement – If you don’t already have a mission statement for your business and personal life, make it a point to create one as soon as possible.

A mission statement will help identify your life’s desires and set your goals. You should create one for your business as well as your personal life. The statement should be one or two sentences and filled with lots of verbs – action words.

From the initial mission statement, you’ll be able to plot short-term goals that will help you reach the mission you’ve identified. There are many websites available that can guide you in creating a mission statement that truly reflects your life’s wishes.

Don’t tolerate undesirable conditions in your life – If something is bothering you about your life and preventing you from living it to the fullest – address it, fix it, and go on.

By all means, don’t ignore the problem(s) and attempt to push it under the rug or, worse, dwell on it and stress over it every day without finding a solution. Either of those strategies will make the problem bigger. It won’t go away by itself and you don’t want it to develop into a major regret of your life.

Take a different path – If you aren’t happy with the way your life is progressing now, try something else. Take some courses on subjects you’ve always enjoyed, but have never pursued.

For example, if you’re a television news junkie and read the Wall Street Journal from cover to cover, you may want to take a course in “Current Affairs.” A new way of looking at and thinking about things may point you in an entirely different direction in your life.

View past mistakes as learning experiences – Don’t spend time fussing about bad choices you’ve made in the past – that just makes them worse and wastes time.

All of your choices, even your mistakes, have made you what you are. If you keep making the same bad choice over and over, analyze it and attempt to figure out why you keep doing it.

After you’ve identified the reasons for the bad choices, take steps to repair the situation. If you allow bad choices or past mistakes to worsen, they will eventually become part of your life’s regrets rather than stepping stones to a life that you’re excited about and proud to live.

Sometimes, regrets in your past will raise up to slap you in the face and give you a wake up call to change. You may suddenly realize that your child is growing up and you’ve been oblivious to some of it due to stresses in your own life.

You can’t go back in time and relive the moments you’ve missed with your child, but you can make it a priority to take full advantage of the time you have left before he or she leaves the nest.

You may regret that you didn’t spend more time taking your business in a different direction than the one you chose. Use this revelation as a catalyst to spur you on to trying another path that you know will be a positive move for your business.

George Eliot once wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Take time to reevaluate past lessons and put them to work for you rather than regretting them for the rest of your life. Live the remainder of your life with passion and the knowledge.

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Here are five tips you can use to create a better resource box :

Tip #1: Offer something for free.

Readers can’t resist getting something for nothing. So instead of your usual “Jane Doe is the owner of XYZSite.com,” write something like, “To download a free report about (the same subject matter the article was about), visit www.Domain.com.”

Tip #2: Offer part two of the article through your link.

Just because you write an article doesn’t mean it’s the end of the topic. You can carry it on to part two and entice the reader to click through on your link using a statement like this: “To read part two of [article title], and find out [an interesting fact starting with who, what, why, how, when, or where], click here.”

You want to piqué their interest and not just say, “for part two, click here.” By using an interesting fact or piquing their curiosity, it makes them want to know the end of the story.

(This technique is not allowed on Ezinearticles.com)

Tip #3: Concentrate more on what you’re offering rather than your name.

As a writer, maybe your goal would be to get a byline in various publications.But as a marketer, it’s more important to get the reader to click through on your link, if traffic is your primary goal. The only time you’d want to emphasize your name in the resource box is if you’re writing and distributing articles in an effort to brand your name and position yourself as the go-to expert in your field or niche.

Tip #4: Give a call to action.

Don’t just list your link and assume they’ll click on it. You have to state your call to action in clear details, such as, “Click on the link and download your FREE 30-day trial of XYZ software right now!”

Tip #5: Test and tweak your resource boxes.

Each time you submit a new article, you should have a slightly different resource box. Track the results to see how many click-throughs you get for each one. Then tweak it until you’ve maximized the resource box.

Remember – your signature file within your resource box is just as important as the title and content of the article itself. Don’t shortchange yourself by failing to execute it so that it benefits your business.

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How to build a membership site (go)
How to select a niche for your membership site (go)
How to promote a membership site (go)
The best membership site software (go)
Is a membership site right for you?

Membership sites can provide just the renewal income you are looking for. Instead of trying to continually capture new customers, you are catering to the needs of a loyal community who pay you a monthly fee to provide ongoing products or services – sometimes in the form of active participation by you.

Membership sites have been around a long time, but not everyone has jumped onboard. Some people view it as more of a hassle than a prospective goldmine of profits. You have to know the ins and outs of what it means to take on this responsibility and then continue it over the course of the year. It is not something you want to take on unless you can devote ample time to do it right.

If you fail to meet the needs of your members or subscribers, not only will your income dwindle as people begin to drop out, but the branding and reputation that you worked hard to build will crumble. The last thing you can afford to lose is your reputation.

Millions of people have subscribed to a membership site at least once, especially in the realm of learning the ropes about online marketing.But not all membership sites are built around the Internet marketing industry. Today’s trend is to build membership sites for specific niches, ranging from gardening enthusiasts to parenting to stock market traders.

The only part you have to consider is whether or not the niche has ongoing needs to be met and whether customers are willing to pay a recurring fee for that information. Not all membership fees have to be small. You might have a low membership cost for subscribers of a broad forum where you know you will be offering a lot of general advice to the masses, such as brides-to-be.

But if you choose a niche with limited appeal (such as stock market trading tips) where the information has to be highly targeted and updated, then you have the ability to charge much more. Some stock market forums have charged over $1,000 a month for their memberships, but the return on the investment was worth the cost.

Make sure you choose an evergreen topic where there is always an influx of new consumers. Your members can belong to a community with many perks, which are password-protected so that others cannot gain access to this privileged information. The members log in whenever they want to, or you alert them to the addition of new information, which should be on a consistent schedule.

The membership can be promoted the same way you would advertise any online venture. Draw traffic to the site, give them a taste of what you have to offer in the way of freebies, and then invite them to join for full access.

It may sound inviting to charge 100 members $20 a month for an additional $2,000 monthly income, but you have to make sure you can manage the upkeep of a membership site. You don’t have to limit the membership base, but some marketers do to enhance the exclusivity of what they have to offer.

You might also want to develop an affiliate program for your membership site. Many affiliates prefer to promote these types of sitesbecause it offers them a residual income, too. As long as the person they referred to you remains a paying customer, they get paid, too.

As you build a membership base, remember that you have ample upsell opportunities. Aside from the space within the site that can be used for banner and text links to affiliate programs and other offers you have, you can also use email marketing techniques with your subscribers.

Before you launch your site, have about six month’s worth of content ready – unless you are offering something solely based on a timely trend that has to be generated fresh each month. Having multiple months ready will alleviate the stress you feel of managing a large membership site and will give you ahead start on monetizing your latest venture.

You might want to outsource your content creation. If you choose a freelancer who has experience in the niche, then they may be able to help you plan for future content that will benefit your members.You want information that is worthy of a subscription payment.Don’t piece together data they can find for free online. Try to develop a unique slant or have so much information compiled in one place that they will be glad they committed to your site.

There are some ways you can launch a free membership site, such as creating your own private social network on Ning.com. But it’s better to host the membership site on your own domain and utilize a script that helps you manage the site’s administrative tasks.

Here are a few of the very best membership software you should consider when planning your launch strategy:

1. Rapid Action Profits Membership Package
2. aMember
3. VisonGate

Don’t let the thought of launching a membership site intimidate you. As long as you ensure the niche is viable and you are confident in your ability to run the site, you should be able to pull in a residual monthly income that sets the stage for more prominent backend earnings over the years to come.

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Flock seems to have zeroed in on a faster and friendlier way of connecting people and frequently accessed topics. Social networkers no longer have to go from browser to browser to connect with friends and associates or to access the information needed on a daily basis. For those of us who make our living from communication, it’s easy to get “browser fatigue” – but Flock makes sure that we don’t miss out on anything by providing a Media Bar to notify us of new videos, photos, and more.

The Flock web browser uses Mozilla’s powerful Firefox architecture to provide an obstacle-free path to a myriad of sites, such as Digg, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter – letting us share information and network with others who share our same interests, all in one browser window.

Those of us who find it difficult to juggle home, family and business will discover that Flock is another way we can simplify our lives and reduce the frantic online searches to gather information and keep in touch with others. The Internet has become so indispensable in our lives that most of us use it on a daily basis. However, so much information and ways to access it has been added to the Internet that it makes sense to have a browser like Flock to uncomplicate our online needs.

Some other features of Flock that online marketers might enjoy are its blogging platform support – it even has a builtin spell checker; built in search engines; supports all Firefox extensions and others – and its advanced technology fraud protection.

Of the users who have downloaded Flock, over 70% say that they use it as their primary browser. Many Flock users say that one of the best features is how the interface is designed. The buttons are placed very intuitively and there’s a “star” button that adds favorite sites with merely a point and click. Flock can also upload up to 1,000 photos at once  to Photobucket and Flickr. Those are pretty neat features for those of us with little time to spare!

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Actually, you only need to worry about three things to procure your own website:

1. Design and content of the site – If you want to have a handsoff approach to web design, then you can go to a site like www.Elance.com and get freelancers to bid on the work. That way you’ll already have all of the bells and whistles in place.But, you can save money by doing some of the work yourself. There are free, high quality templates available on the Internet that make it easy to launch your own site.

2. Hosting your website – There are dozens of free or very low-cost website hosting services available on the Internet. The type of service varies from the amount of space you can use to the number of free enhancements, such as a guestbook and message board.

3. Acquiring a domain name – You must have a unique domain name and it must be registered. You can take care of this yourself by taking advantage of Internet help sites such as www.godaddy.com. It will guide you through each step of securing a domain.

Don’t stress out about planning a website for your business. With all the help that the Internet offers, you can easily do the work yourself and find ways to get what you need for a minimal cost. They key is to keep moving forward with your goal in mind.

Be Your Own Writer

You know your product or service better than anyone, and with the help of spell-check and grammar-check you can easily write your own sales copy and product descriptions.

Software is also available at a nominal cost that will provide templates for some of your writing needs. See what might work for you by taking a look at some advertisements and sales copy that you admire, and then pattern your own with what you’ve learned. However, NEVER plagiarize, or steal someone else’s words or design. Aside from the fact that it’s unethical and will ruin your reputation before you even have a chance to get started, it could result in serious financial consequences for you.

Do take note of the words that were used to make a dynamic statement about the service or product and use those words in your own writing style. Have a trusted friend or colleague look it over to make sure you got the point across.

Partnering to Cut Costs

On the ‘net, everyone is looking to link up in a way that benefits both parties. If you have a skill, such as writing, but you lack in another area, such as marketing, you may be able to barter your services or provide one half of the equation while your partner provides the other much needed input.

You can also go to www.sba.gov and work out a viable business plan and try to secure funding through more traditional means. Just because your business is in the virtual realm doesn’t mean it can’t secure a small business loan, especially if the plan is well thought out.

The great thing about launching an online business is that slow growth is rewarded. You can register your domain and start out slowly building momentum while consistently investing spare time as you continue working in the “real world.”

Then, whenever you’re ready, you can dedicate yourself fulltime to your online efforts and leave the comfort of a full-time career outside of the home. It may seem scary at first, but as you start seeing results, you’ll find the payoff is worth the careful planning that you put in.

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There are pros and cons to using a PLR product, so let’s cover what could benefit and hurt your business by using them. When you go seeking PLR content, you’ll find dozens of broad and nichebased membership sites catering to your needs.

What PLR Membership Sites Have to Offer

PLR sites have skyrocketed in number. With the motto Content Is King emblazoned all over the World Wide Web, it’s virtually impossible for a site owner and marketer to keep up with the insatiable desire for new information without a little bit of help.

Traditionally, marketers would go to a site like Elance or Guru and find reputable ghostwriters to create 100% original content. If you wanted to find a worthy writer, you’d be shelling out $20 per page or more.

With PLR membership sites, you pay a one-time monthly fee and then gain access to a whole host of niche articles. Each site differs in what they have to offer. Some offer PLR articles, with limits on how many members have access to each group. Others offer PLR eBooks, which you can brand and market as your own.

Some site produce weekly content, while others create articles and eBooks on a monthly basis. You may want to determine what your needs are and go with a site that can keep up with your demands.

The only thing you can’t do with the articles is sell (or give away) the private label rights to someone else. But why would you want to add to your own competition in the first place?

The Drawbacks to PLR Syndication

Originality is of course the primary issue. If all you do with your PLR membership is download articles and send them out virally, you’ll find they won’t be as effective until you brand them as your own.

Besides consumers being disappointed that you’re spamming the Internet with duplicate content, Google doesn’t like it, either. They penalize sites with duplicate content – so if you and 199 other people all have the exact same article that’s on your website, you could have your PageRank diminished.

It’s easy to brand your PLR content. First, add an opening paragraph to the content. Even if it already has an intro, tweak it to introduce your own voice and change it enough to convince the search engine spiders that it’s not duplicated from another site.

Second, tweak the ending the same way. Your conclusion should stand out among the other identical sites using the same articles. If you want to go one step further, switch out the keywords or change a sentence here and there.

The more you alter it, the more it helps to brand your name online, which is an important issue when marketing online and positioning yourself as an expert. You may be thinking, “If I have to change it, why not just write it myself?”

You can, if you have the time. Changing a keyword here and there using the “find/replace” option in Word allows you to quickly alter the content. And many of you can write an intro and conclusion to content that’s already established, but have trouble fleshing out topics on your own.

There’s Still A Lot Of Good in Securing Private Label Rights

With PLR access, you don’t have to wait for (or pay for) a ghostwriter to create your content – as soon as you sign up and log in, you can download what you need and put it to use as soon as you do some customization.

If you can find a niche that’s not heavily saturated, then PLR content will work even better for you because there will be fewer people using the same articles and eBooks.

You can put your PLR content to use in several different ways:

• Use them to fill up eZine or newsletter space.
• Take the eBooks apart and submit them to article directories in short, easy-to-digest chunks.
• Use them as free bonuses for your existing offers of membership sites or information products.
• Use them as autoresponder series emails to market to your list.
• Change the PLR eBooks so that they’re unique enough to brand them as your own information product.

There’s really no end to how you can use PLR content. Any way you’d use original content – blogs, viral articles, social networking site content like the modules on Squidoo or the pages within MySpace – you can use PLR material.

Where You Can Find PLR Membership Sites

I’m unaware of PLR membership sites that will give you more PLR content then PLRWholesaler. And it’s completely free! This is not the typical trash you often see online – this has serious value. It’s a lifetime membership to an excellent private label rights site. Here is what you’ll receive:

• Exclusive, Unique Software Available Nowhere Else!
• More Than 50 eBooks w/Private Label Rights!
• More Than 2000 Articles w/Private Label Rights!
• Video Courses w/Private Label Rights!
• Audio Articles w/Private Label Rights!
• And, really, much more…

=> http://www.plrwholesaler.com/download/clk.php?pid=2&a=24625

I guarantee you, no other collection of PLR products will do more for your business.

Or, search on Google to find PLR membership sites (just Google the phrase, “PLR membership” or “PLR articles”. Look for sites that have limited memberships available – or those who promise to create new batches of information should the membership exceed the allotted available spaces per batch.

For instance, look for sites that say only 200 people have access to the 400 articles on Parenting this month, or something similar to this. Too many members waters down the effectiveness of your content.

It’s okay to rely on PLR content for viral marketing and branding your business, since it is crucial to have massive amounts of content-driven pages, but don’t get lazy and fail to customize it to maximize its full potential.

Also, make sure that before you join a PLR membership site, you evaluate sample articles they offer for review. Is the author a native English speaker, or can you tell it was outsourced to another country for a cheap price?

Join for a short-term until you see the results of your marketing efforts using the PLR content and then sign up for a longer period of time, or upgrade to a membership with more perks if you feel it would serve you well.

Related posts:

1. Drive Traffic to your Site with Private Label Rights
2. Selling The Rights to Your Product – 6 Options

You might want to launch five mini sites with information products – each with their own domain name. Although web hosting is relatively inexpensive in most cases, it adds up and multiple accounts are often unnecessary.

For instance, if you register a domain name at Godaddy and buy web hosting services for it, you don’t have to buy hosting the second, third, fourth, etc. times you register a domain. The only time you need to pay for more hosting is if you exceed your allotted bandwidth (caused by an excess of traffic) or storage space (the amount of data stored in your account).

Check to see how much bandwidth and space is available in your original hosting account. If you’re running out of either, check to see if your hosting company offers upgrades or add-ons to your account. That’s usually less expensive than a second hosting account.

If there’s room to spare, then you might want to use a parked domain, subdomain, or add-on domain. A subdomain is part of a larger domain, delineated by a dot, such asnewsletter.yourdomain.com, or a forward slash, such as yourdomain.com/newsletter. In this example, “newsletter” is the sub-domain, where yourdomain.com is the primary domain.

If your online empire has a steady growth, then you may want to employ  subdomains to separate the elements of your product line. Let’s say you own www.WebDesign.com. A sub-domain of that primary domain name might be www.Hosting.WebDesign.com or www.Graphics.WebDesign.com. You’re just dividing the primary domain name up into different categories.

You can also create it this way: www.WebDesign.com/Hosting – it doesn’t matter if the sub-directory comes before or after the primary domain name. You’ve probably seen this all the time and didn’t think anything of it. Yahoo uses it for separating their categories, like music.yahoo.com or news.yahoo.com.

You may have a primary domain with subdirectories to house your online courses, newsletters, and articles. You could register a domain for the newsletter and park it so that it points to the directory within your site. For example, if you owned the domain mynetbusiness.com and you bought mynetnewsletters.com, you could park the mynetnewsletters.com domain and point it to the sub-domain of ,newsletters.mynetbusiness.com.When someone visits mynetnewsletters.com they are immediately taken to newsletters.mynetbusiness.com.

That way, your newsletter gets branded with its own domain name, but it still shares hosting with the original site. Many affiliate marketers use this strategy to cloak their hyperlinks to other affiliate websites to avoid having their commissions stolen. Some consumers are turned off buying from affiliates, so sending them to a unique domain is helpful so they don’t bypass your link.

For example, using the domains above, if you are promoting a company’s web hosting as an affiliate, you might set up a sub-domain on your site of hosting.mynetbusiness.com and have it point to your affiliate URL with the hosting company.

A parked domain means that you buy all the versions of your most popular domains to keep others from stealing traffic that’s rightfully yours. For instance, let’s say you go to GoDaddy.com and register Site123.com.

You also register Site123.net, Site123.biz, and Site123.org so that nobody else can buy these domains and capitalize on a consumer’s error in typing the wrong domain extension. You don’t need to actually put a website on those extra  domains. Just “park” them on your existing hosting account and just have them redirect (or “point”) to your primary site at the dot com address.

An add-on domain is a new domain name that you set up to point to a sub-directory of your primary domain. If you own www.MySite123.com and you also own www.My-Site123.com, then you can make the second one an addon to your original domain.

When a web user types in the My- Site.com address, they’ll be redirected without them knowing it, to a web folder on MySite.com, but their browser won’t display the new address. When you set up an add-on domain, you get the advantage of a cgi-bin and the statistics you need to evaluate traffic to that domain.

Always remember to ask your current host if any of these options are available to help you reduce the cost of doing business online. Some companies will charge a one-time fee to set up your addon domains. Some charge nothing, and others charge a monthly fee. Steer clear of those charging you on an on-going basis when you could get a better deal elsewhere.

Just remember that once you have a hosting account, you can maximize its use before you either upgrade to a larger server with more bandwidth or buy another hosting account. Don’t get sucked into the notion that for every domain you register, separate hosting is a requirement.

If you’re shopping for Ecommerce web hosting services make sure to check out VodaHost. They probably have the best offer available today. On top of the quality hosting they offer you also get an award winning website builder(this one’s realy amazing) and the recently introduced Soholaunch eCommerce Builder.

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Golfers have several strategies they have to put into play during a single round of 18 holes. They have their tee shots, fairway strategies, decisions to make around the green, and a way to sink the putt once they are close. Regardless of where they are on a hole, golfers know one thing has to remain constant – they have to follow through with the shot.

As an Internet marketer, you know how distracting this business can be. There are always new “secret ways to make money” popping up on the ‘net. It’s hard to stay focused on following through with what you’re doing because you’re anxious to make money, and if a buzz is circulating about something you’re not doing, you instinctively want to abandon your efforts and jump on the bandwagon.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

Golfers keep their head down and their eyes on the ball. They can’t be concerned about where Ted’s ball landed or if the people watching the game are admiring them or laughing at their stance.

You have to stay focused on your tasks as well. Don’t get tied down to trends and who’s doing what – all of that will be history tomorrow. You’re building your own business from the ground floor up, so you have to do it one brick at a time.

Create a detailed strategy for your business and then have a spreadsheet of tasks you need to do each day. For instance, you might have a column for your blog, one for your PPC efforts, and another for product development. Each column should be broken down into daily tasks, such as “conduct keyword research with GoodKeywords tool,” or “Split test headline on PPC campaign #1.”

If it helps, assign an amount of time and a timeframe for each task. As you finish a task, delete it from or cross it out on your to-do list and you’ll feel great about making progress toward your goals. If you don’t think this is how most of the gurus have made their mark on the Internet, then you haven’t done your research.

Imagine Your Success

When a golfer approaches a ball, takes a stance, and gets ready to swing, he’s not thinking about what’s going to happen if he flubs it. He has to think of where the shot is about to land – on the green or in the middle of the fairway.He pictures his swing as smooth-flowing, not one where he accidentally hits the ground two inches behind the ball and ruins a shot.

How do you imagine your own success? Are you waking up each morning to consider how much you have to do – overwhelming yourself from the minute your feet hit the floor, or are you looking into the future (even later in the day) to imagine how good it will be to accomplish everything you need to get done?

As you sit down at your desk to work, imagine the finished product you’re working on – the completed eBook, the 10,000+ membership site, or the #1 spot on the Search Engine Results Pages. Seeing it will help it come to fruition.

Don’t Let Fears Interrupt Your Follow-Through

Even professional golfers sometimes let certain things creep into their consciousness that cause their swing to falter. If they’re faced with an obstacle like a water hazard and are unsure of the club they should choose, it can make them swing differently, overcompensating for the mistake they knew they made when they picked the club.

Have confidence in your choices. If you make a mistake, stop and correct it instead of continuing in the wrong direction. You’ll know something’s wrong because your inner voice will be trying to get your attention and turn your focus toward a better choice.

Listen to that inner voice. As you move through your day, make sure you follow through on the tasks you have listed, the plans you have developed, and the success you are seeking.

Once you gain the confidence you need to make decisions you are comfortable with, you will start to notice that your success is becoming more streamlined and easier to achieve than when you were drowning in self-doubt.

Related posts:

1. 8 Ways to Motivate Yourself and Succeed
2. Using Mind Map Software – A Shortcut To Success?

The lion, not ravenous for food at the time, was amused at the idea, so he let the mouse go, not giving it a second thought. Some time later, the mouse was scurrying around the jungle floor when he caught sight of the lion – trapped in the net of a hunter.

The mouse approached the lion and as promised, saved his life by gnawing through the ropes and freeing the king of the jungle, proving that sometimes, little friends can serve big purposes.

Don’t Be Afraid of Your Competitors – Help Them

The story of the lion and the mouse can be applied to many of life’s situations. But in business, and especially on the Internet, it’s a fable to take to heart when developing the right kinds of relationships.

It doesn’t matter how new to the scene you are or how green you may be at building websites or generating an impressive amount of traffic. What matters is that you have something to give back to the community, which can serve to help you when you need it most.

Money can be a great obstacle to those starting out in Internet marketing. Most people are trying to do it on a shoestring budget, so you must have something to barter with and build friendships upon.

Maybe you’re trying to launch a graphic design service site but have no  testimonials or sample customer applications to show in your portfolio. Approach someone who is recognized as a powerful influence and offer to design a free eBook cover in exchange for a link and a testimonial.

If someone emails you and is very helpful without you having to ask, do something kind in return to show your appreciation. Maybe they helped walk you through the setup of your blog. Thank them by writing an article they can distribute to article directories to drive traffic to their site.

Sometimes these networking opportunities can help you develop a Joint Venture relationship at a later date. If you prove your worth as a newcomer, then people will be more willing to give you a chance at leveraging their list or their expertise than if you came on board and tried to jump into the fray without paying your dues.

Calling in a Favor When You Need It

After you’ve had a chance or two to show that your opinion is worthy, that you are serious about ‘net marketing, and that you want to develop good  relationships, you’ll be able to call upon those who you once helped out when the time comes that you need assistance.

Don’t be afraid to ask others whenever you need their help to get ahead. Despite what you might believe, in the Internet marketing industry, competitors do more to help each other out than they do to destroy their competition. Most people understand that there is enough potential business to go around…many, many times.

Make sure you don’t continuously take without giving back. This can cause you to burn many bridges, which could have paved the path to your ultimate financial security one day.

Whether you’re a mighty lion in your niche or are feeling like a mouse among giants, take time to reach out and offer help and value to the online community, and your reputation will serve as a viral marketing tool for you.

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Setting Up Your Google AdSense Account

When you go to google.com/adsense, you’ll have to apply for an account and get it approved before you can start earning money with other people’s ads. First, they’ll ask for your website’s URL and language. Then they ask you to fill in your contact information so that they know where to send the money.

Here’s what you can’t do: You can’t entice or instruct people to click on your ads. You can’t click on the ads yourself.And you can’t place ads on an adult content site. People have lost thousands of dollars by violating Google’s rules and having their account shut down without notice so read the AdSense program policies carefully.

After you submit your request for approval, you should hear back from Google as to whether or not your site qualifies to run AdSense ads and Google search boxes. If you’re not approved, find out why and remedy the situation.

Placing the Ads on Your Site

Once your account is approved, log in and click on AdSense set-up. You can then create ad blocks that you’ll place within the HTML of your website – this is where the ads that are served from the Google servers will physically be placed on your website. You don’t have to be tech-savvy to do this.

You can open your web page in FrontPage (or any free HTML editor) and using the “Normal” view, choose where you want your ads to be placed and click on that spot. Then click on the HTML tab and wherever the mouse is currently at, ,paste it into the HTML code and click Save.

When you do a preview, you may not see the ads running right way.Usually there’s a 10 to 20 minutes lag between the time you submit it and the time it takes Googlebots to crawl your site and figure out what kinds of ads to show based on your subject matter.

They automatically know if your site is about baseball, to show baseball ads. If it’s about Internet marketing, then those kinds of ads will show up. Have you ever opened an email in Gmail (Google mail) and noticed the ads match something about your email?

For instance, if your email is from your “mom” then mother’s day ads might show up. If you sent an email to someone about your family tree or genealogy, then ads for those topics would be at the top of your Gmail account – it’s all a part of how Google defines relevancy and caters to the needs of your traffic.

If you choose AdSense for content,you’ll determine what size ad you want,the color scheme, and whether you want a block ad space or text links. After formatting them to look how you want,you can place the ads on channels.

Channels allow you to track and test your ads. You can see which colors perform best, whether placement at the top left corner of your site or on the right sidebar delivers more click-throughs, and which formats (links or ad blocks) visitors are attracted to more than others. When you select all of the specifics, you then see a box of HTML code, which you simply cut and paste into your website wherever you want it to be.

You also have the opportunity to use AdSense for search. If you choose to put a search box on your site, you can customize it so that it only lets them search Google, or search up to three other sites. You can also choose what kinds of results show up according to your site’s theme and track the performance of various search boxes by using channels again.

When you’re setting up your Adsense account, you can use a competitive ad filter that blocks your competitors from showing up within your ad blocks or search engine boxes. You don’t have to block the whole domain, but you can block one page if you wish.

As you continue building your website or blog, you’ll want to periodically run reports to see how your ads are performing. Then, to help you earn the most money from your content, test and tweak them on additional pages to determine which methods your visitors prefer.

Related posts:

1. Niche Market Research with Google Experiments
2. Make Money With Google Adsense (Part 2)

The headlines are the most important parts of any sales copy. Yes, the reader also wants bullet points of benefits, testimonials, and a rock-solid guarantee, but they often skim the content to read the headlines and see if your offer is worth the investment of their time to read in full.

You should take ample time to craft your headlines – especially the very first one a visitor will see on your website. If they don’t get a great first impression, they’ll click out and never return to your website.

As you scour the ‘net on a regular basis, start adding to your swipe file (a file you should be collecting of effective ads and copywriting you’ve come across that provide you inspiration when writing your own ads) to keep track of headlinesm you really liked. You won’t want to copy them word for word, but you can emulate that success and possibly use the same approach for your own target audience.

Headlines are all about gut reaction. How will the words you use affect your consumer? Will it make them panic for a solution? Nod their head in agreement with you? Get angry and want to read more?

Since the consumer is seeking a solution to a problem, you want to show them that you understand their problem and know exactly how they can solve it. Some headlines are over-the-top hype, and in many instances – it works!

But you don’t have to use excessive hype to sell a product or service. Let’s look at seven ways you can compel your audience to buy whatever you’re selling:

1. Zap your reader with a shocking fact or possibility!

If you’re a business owner, then you want to protect your share of the market that you already have. You’re always on the lookout for ways to improve your profitability. If you clicked on an ad for an autoresponder tool and saw this headline, how would you react?

“While You Were Sleeping, Your Competitor Stole $7,348 ,Worth of Sales from Your Site!”

That would probably irk you. It would make you feel as if they stole something right out of your pocket! Now you’d want to learn how it happened and how you can prevent it from happening again.

2. Be rude – but only to get them riled up and reading more!

Sometimes a marketer will use a rude headline, insulting the visitor – so that they’ll continue reading more. The Rich Jerk is famous for using this tactic, and in some cases it works. You have to realize that not all visitors will think it’s funny – many will click out, truly insulted.

3. Use the words of another person!

A quote can go a long way in making an impression because it’s a firsthand account. You can use a famous quote, but it’s better if it’s coming from someone the reader can relate to. For instance, if your product is about improving your golf game, then you might use a quote from a golfer that says…

 “It Took Me 3 Days and 2 Bags of Balls to Break 80!”

The headline is incredulous – who could break 80 in a weekend? But what you’ll explain is that they were on the verge of breaking 80, but couldn’t do it until they spent a weekend at the driving range using what they learned in your “How to Break 80 eBook.”

4. Make bold promises!

If you offer a strong guarantee, then you may want to make a bold promise that provides the reader with exactly what they’re wanting. You could use a headline like this:

“In 10 Days, Your List is Going to Grow to Over 10,000 People -Guaranteed!”

If your product provides a way they can reasonably do this, then a bold promise can hook the reader and virtually convert the sale on that very first line of text. Just don’t make promises ,you can’t keep because then you’ll be facing a hefty refund rate.

5. Get personal with your audience!

Sometimes reaching out to your audience on a personal level really draws them into your message because they feel you can relate.A sample, personalized headline might read,

“When My Boss Dropped the Pink Slip on My Desk, Humiliating Me in Front of  Everyone, I Vowed That I Would Never Work for Someone Else Again!”

6. Use news to make your point!

Start reading the newspaper and/or industry magazines to soak up (and use) any current events stories that will help boost your sales.  If you’re promoting a product on flipping real estate, and the homeowner’s market is desperate like right now, use a headline from the news and make it your own, like this:

“Pre-Owned Home Sales Worst in History – But Turning Into a Boon for Investors!”

Then you could go on to explain how cheap it is to buy the homes and how you can turn a profit from them.

Every target audience is different. What works for one may not work for another. A level-headed parent looking for a solution to a problem may not respond to a rude headline, but a ‘net savvy entrepreneur could be intrigued. This is why testing and tweaking is so vital to your online success. You might  find out that a teaser headline results in an increase in conversions, while a personal approach drops sales significantly.

Start browsing other sites to see what headlines have a positive impact on you and then try to mimic that style with your own site’s sales copy. Make sure you keep records of what works and what doesn’t, so that you don’t return to a way of marketing that wasn’t making you money.

Related posts:

1. How to Write an Effective Adwords Ad
2. 5 Tips to Write a Better Resource Box

As marketers, we use multiple traffic generating strategies to get the most out of our online efforts. One method you want to start using is Private Label  Rights (PLR). PLR content is content that is created by one person and sold to many marketers to use as their own.

For instance, a ghostwriter may write a batch of articles on How to Make Money at Home. Then the articles are sold to a certain number of marketers, who then have the opportunity to tweak and alter them or use them as-is, inserting their own hyperlinks to funnel traffic to their sites.

While some marketers mistakenly use the articles without any alterations, your best bet is to take the PLR package and make a few changes – just enough to differentiate them in the eyes of Google spiders and other search engines.

You can change the title, add a short introduction or conclusion, or switch the text around, sprinkling in a few sentences of your own here and there. This way your site isn’t penalized for duplicate content.

PLR packs are much cheaper than buying unique content from a ghostwriter. The ghostwriter benefits because multiple buyers grab their products, and the customer gets discounted pricing. After you get it and alter it, you’re ready to post it on the web to generate traffic to your domain.

Where to Use PLR Content

If you have targeted your niche on social sites like Squidoo or MySpace, then you can take your PLR articles and post them as blog entries to your social pages. For instance, take your PLR article pack and create different lenses on  Squidoo focusing on whatever the article talks about.

If you have two articles about dog care, and one is on grooming while another is about fleas, you could have two lenses focusing on different dog care topics, with both sending traffic to your domain or affiliate product.

Do you already use article directories to send traffic to your sites? If not, you can sign up for free at www.EzineArticles.com and www.GoArticles.com and submit viral articles that other publishers can pick up and use as long as they maintain the hyperlinks you place within the article and in your bio box.

Make sure you alter the PLR content enough so that it appears unique at first glance. You can also use Private Label Rights content on your own website. The thing you want to be careful about here is that Google scans your site to see if it has content that’s duplicated from another site.

You don’t want to knock your domain into the Google Sandbox just because you didn’t take the time to switch up the text to satisfy the search engine spiders.

PLR content makes it easy to get quick text for your site, but it’s not meant as a plug-in product. Some marketers are even using Private Label Rights articles as posts in forums. You don’t want to cut and paste the entire article, but you can use a PLR article and take a snippet from it while asking the rest of the forum for their opinion on it.

For example, maybe the article on dog care tells pet owners to take their dog to the vet as soon as they notice any scratching of the ears. You can post a comment in a dog care forum (where your signature file directs people to your domain) that sparks a discussion about how soon pet owners should react to unusual health concerns.

Where Do You Find Private Label Rights Content?

Private Label Rights are sold in many different ways. Some sites have memberships where you join and anywhere from 250 to 1,500 members all use the same content.

Some sites don’t tell you what niche content you’ll get for the coming month, so one month you might get dog care but the next month it’s diabetes. You can find sites that deliver just articles and those that create entire PLR packs for you – with eBooks, autoresponders, and graphics.

There are also no-membership sites where you can buy packs of five articles at a time for $5 and if you don’t see what topic you want, you submit a request form. Sites like these have no limit on the  number of people who can buy the packs, but you can see how many have purchased before you.

You can also find deals on PLR packs by going to Internet marketing forums where PLR writers gather.Private Label Rights sites are all over the place, so you can Google your niche keyword plus PLR and see if someone has created a PLR site just for your target audience.

Your best bet is to either find a PLR site catering to your niche, so that you know what topics you’ll be getting, or find one where you can custom-order your batches without having to sign up for a membership where you’re not sure if deliveries in the coming month will be worth your on-going investment.

Related posts:

1. Private Label Rights – Pros and Cons.
2. PPC – Drive Traffic With These PPC Networks
3. Selling The Rights to Your Product – 6 Options

In fact, this concept is so widespread that it’s become abused and misunderstood by newcomers who think becoming an online success means logging on in a single day, launching five new businesses and waking up to a bank account full of money.

The Myth of Multiple Streams of Income

We all know there are a million different ways to make money online. You can launch your own products, become an affiliate salesperson, be a service provider, launch a membership site, or take a dozen other different routes to passive profits.

The problem comes about when an entrepreneur fails to monetize a single stream before trying to build the next one.They get too many plates spinning in the air and all at once, they come crashing down until the person finally gives up in despair, believing all Internet marketing concepts are just a scam.

It is true that you can and probably should develop multiple streams of income. It’s the most natural way to create backend opportunities for your initial product line. For instance, let’s say you begin by building an AdSense site on a niche topic – like gambling.

You start seeing a lot of traffic coming in. As your site begins to make money on AdSense, you then introduce affiliate products on things such as “How to Win at Poker.”

Instead of also starting something else right away, you want to focus on building your AdSense content up to levels that will boost your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and also test which affiliate items have the highest conversion rates for you.

Once you see maximum returns on your investment so far, then you introduce a new element to our income stream. It might be a product that you develop on How to Play Nickel Slots and Win Big. This way, you get to keep 100% of the earnings and not split it with someone else.

Launching your own product takes a lot of time and effort to get it to take root successfully. At the same time, you have to be capable of maintaining your other income formulas – the AdSense site and affiliate revenue.

If at any time you focus on the newest endeavor and completely ignore the previous ventures, then your income will dip again until you provide some attention to it and run each one as if they’re separate businesses that each need a CEO in charge.

Jack of All Trades…Master of None

You want to take your multiple streams of income journey slowly, but not put it on the back burner forever. You have to get good at one thing – become a master at one thing – before you move on and try to tackle something else.

Anyone who tells you that online entrepreneurs have it easy is lying. Its hard work, but if done properly, it works and provides you with unlimited profit potential like no other business in the world.

Too often in the online marketing world, an entrepreneur will think he’s getting a great education by tuning into (and paying for!) what all the gurus have to say and staying abreast of changes in the online marketplace.

But how often do you get sidetracked and want to jump on to the “next big thing” before anyone else does it? You’re intimidated by saturation and don’t want to miss the boat while many other entrepreneurs go after the goldmine that’s yet to be tapped into.

Here’s where you can stay afloat above the crowds. You want to let everyone else make a fool’s rush to the new concepts while you stay focused and prepared to monetize your own efforts.

Compare your online business to a garden. You can’t plant seeds and expect to see flourishing plants the very next morning. First, you have to space the seedlings apart and give each one room to grow; you have to water and feed them on a regular basis; and, just as a gardener has to remove weeds that could jeopardize the health of their plants, you, as a cyberpreneur, must devote time in your day to evaluating your online strategy and tweak it so that you’re not spinning your wheels and impeding your success.

Don’t let product launches and new ideas get the best of you. Hold onto your wallet and save your purchase for a later date when your schedule is open to developing your next stream of income.

It’s too easy to see the next big thing on the horizon and invest in it just because you’re hoping to hit one out of the ballpark and have a million dollar day. Just keep reminding yourself, “Do I want to spend time and money and only to wind up back to square one in six months, or spend my time wisely and see substantial profits in six months?” Be a wise business owner and your efforts will pay off as others chase the instant profit mirage.

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Those that can’t move higher are the ones that get stuck in daydreaming mode.  Everyone has a tendency to ponder the “bag full of riches” they could have in their hands once they’ve reached success. It’s normal to see an opportunity and stop and think about what this could mean to you and your family.

Something you’re pursing might provide your child’s college education, help you build your dream home, or deliver peace of mind and financial security for years to come. It sometimes inspires you to take action.

There’s nothing wrong with daydreaming, but in order to reach your ultimate success and hold on to that dream, you’ll need to do something about it. Staying in thought mode won’t get you anyplace, but putting those thoughts into action and becoming a doer will.

Walt Disney himself once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” Walt Disney made fame and fortune with the Disney Empire we’re all familiar with today.

How do you suppose he got there? Did he daydream his way to a worldwide brand, or take action to promote and build a recognizable brand that would turn into a household name? In his case, it was a little of both – but the point is, he got out and made his daydreams come true.

Online marketers can reach the same success in their own way if only they would realize there’s a time and place for thinking, and a schedule for doing. It can be tough, since it’s easier to dream about success than it is to actually reach it.

Sitting around thinking about this strategy and that new tool or gadget won’t deliver profits in your pocket. Any successful marketer will tell you that they reached success by envisioning the life they wanted and then acting on it.

They concentrate on the strategies they want to implement in their business and find ways to make them work. After a lot of hard work and dedication, they’re then rewarded with the lifestyle they’ve always dreamed about.

Even a beginning online marketer can be side by side with the so-called gurus if they get themselves out of the dreaming stage that has them stuck in what can be like quicksand. All you need is a little motivation to get you going.

Put your dreams on paper and stick it where you’ll see them every day. Use those dreams as your goals, not as your distractions. Break those goals down into baby steps with specific dates of when you will accomplish them. Then you can cross that milestone off your list as you achieve it.

You can even use a chart with a picture of a ladder with rungs on it. Each time you meet one of the baby steps, you can move a token of some kind up one rung on the ladder you have on your chart.

For example, if your goal is to get 1 million visitors to your site, you would break that down into baby steps. One step could be to get a website up and running. When that’s done, move up a rung on that ladder.

Keep going until that token has reached the top rung, which would be your ultimate goal for your business. When you’ve reached the top rung of each of the ladders of your goals, then you can truly hold onto that “bag of riches” you daydreamed.

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The concept of the site is simple. You sign up for an account and then fill out a profile. You can make a list of your interests, add photos of yourself, and even include fun add-ons to your profile. Then you can look for other people you’d like to network with and add them to your list of friends.

Most people use these friends lists just to meet like-minded individuals and make friends, but marketers also use the site to get in touch with potential customers. It can be a great way to find traffic if you know what you’re doing.

Marketing on Facebook is a complex system that may take a while to master. You see, unlike most other social networks, Facebook has no problem with people using the site to network for business purposes and even do a little marketing. But they don’t like certain kinds of marketing, so you have to be very careful about the type of marketing you use.

You don’t want to get banned. You may spend a lot of time building lists of friends and developing relationships with them so you can market to them. If your account is banned, you’ll lose all of the friends you’ve built up and thus lose all of the work you’ve put into building the list in the first place!

Smart marketers know that time and money should never be wasted, so it pays to follow the rules. Why spend weeks building a large list of friends, only to destroy what you’ve built with a few big mistakes? It’s much better to play it straight and make money from your list of friends for the long term.

The basic premise of social marketing is to build a list of friends orfollowers, then network with them in order to build name recognition and get your links seen. In order for social marketing to be truly effective, you’re going to have to actually network with people. It’s not called a “friends list” for nothing!

You’ll need to actually talk to people, build relationships, and build trust. Basically, you want people to remember your name and trust you enough to buy whatever it is you are selling or recommending. This is true for any niche, not just marketing to other marketers.

Let’s say you’re building a list of friends in the golf niche. You’ll want to specifically seek out golfers to comprise the majority of your list, of course. Then you’ll need to actually talk to them about golf. Imagine for a moment that you’re not there to make money – you’re actually just a regular golf fan who wants to talk to other golfers about your passion.

This is the frame of mind you need to be in. You need to build a presence as if you’re just there to discuss your passion for the market you’re targeting, whatever that market may be. It helps if you’re really interested in the niche, because it will make it easier for you to interact and become trusted by the people you want to market to.

Pouring your heart into your interactions with people will get you friends who are loyal and trusting. They’ll feel the passion you have for the topic, and they’ll start to respect you as someone who really knows what they’re talking about.

This is key. If you want people to trust you and buy from you, they need to believe you’re really an authority on the topic. Most people are smart enough to know they should only take advice from someone who actually appears to have expert knowledge and experience on a particular topic

The point is, people buy from people they know, like, and trust, and they take advice from people they believe are knowledgeable about the topic. It makes little sense to do otherwise, because taking advice from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about can potentially cause problems, and at the very least be frustrating.

One very good way to market on Facebook is to start groups. A group is filled with people who share a common interest. For example, if you’re in the golf niche you could start a group specifically for golfers.

You could even further focus the niche by building a group specifically for female golfers or professional golfers. The more tightly-focused the niche group is, the more effective it’s likely to be in selling products to that target audience.

Groups are great, because you can do almost anything you want with them. You can invite anyone on your friends list to join your group. They have no obligation to join, of course, but those who do are fair game for marketing.

As long as you don’t use the group to constantly spam members and you actually make the group a fun and educational activity, you’ll have a list of people who are proven to be interested in a topic and you’ll have permission to market to them. And, voila, you have the perfect seller/buyer scenario!

You’re also free to place links to your own websites and products on your Facebook profile page. Anyone who becomes your friend and looks at your profile can see those links, and they can follow them to visit your websites. Just don’t add affiliate links to your profile. Facebook doesn’t want people using their site to spam affiliate links.

One thing you should not do is spam your friends’ “walls.” A wall is the section on a profile where peoplecan leave comments. Some people will write on other people’s walls and drop links in. This is not only considered bad form, but it could get you banned.

If you want to make use of walls, you can just leave interesting comments regarding your niche, and people can become your friend if they like the post you made. This is a great place to show off your knowledge of your niche.

You can post interesting tidbits of information or answer people’s questions this way. To make money online through Facebook may seem a bit complex, but it’s actually very easy. The traffic potential is great, so it’s worth taking the time to learn how to do it the right way!

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How does it make you feel to look at a long list of tasks, goals and projects? Do you feel empowered or do you feel overwhelmed? Your feelings are the first indication that you may be taking on too much or hanging onto dead weight.

The purpose of a goal list is to empower you and focus your energy on getting things done. If you look at it and feel tired and discouraged, then there is something wrong with the picture. The psychological letdown you experience when you realize how much work you have to do can be enough to make you want to avoid the important goals that you’ve written down.

You can’t grow if you’re holding onto tasks and goals that aren’t working for you. You will also have trouble achieving anything if you are stuck believing that you need to achieve every single thing you set out to do.If you hold onto everything, then you are stifling your own personal growth.

The truth is, some of what you have written down in the past is not as important as it once was. In order to feel a sense of completion, we often hold onto ideas that aren’t serving us well.It’s important to evaluate your priorities and get rid of the goals that have lost their importance.

If you don’t have a physical written list of things that you want to do or achieve, take some time to write down the things that you have been stressed about getting done. Once you complete the list evaluate it carefully. Is there anything that you can immediately let go of?

First, look for tasks that have passed their expiration date. Some goals or tasks are important for brief period of time and then they lose their priority. Sometimes situations resolve themselves without your involvement.Other times things fall through and can’t be done like you expected them to be. Go ahead and remove these items from the list.

Next, remove all of the tasks or goals that you have written down out of obligation to other people. It is one thing to be generous, but it’s another to give when it costs you stress or overwhelment. If you find that your goals are more about fulfilling other people’s expectations of you than about making yourself happy, you need new goals.Remove anything that issolely there because of obligations to someone else.

Now your list should be a little lighter of a load. Look at what’s left and ask yourself why each task is important. Does it fulfill a personal goal? A business goal? Is it vital to your personal growth? Is it something that you legally must do?

The answers don’t matter as long as you know why the item is there. If you look at something you have written down and don’t have a clear answer for why you feel obligated to do it, then you need to remove it, or at least move it to a “maybe” list.

Everything on your primary list must have a purpose within the guidelines outlined above.As you look over your trimmed down list, you will feel one of two things: you will either be totally refreshed, motivated, and ready to move on or you will be worried and stressed about the things that you removed.

If you end up in the second ategory, ask yourself what your attachment to those tasks or goals was. Did they represent security to you? Are you the type of person who doesn’t feel like you can give up on something?

You have to remember that clearing out the cobwebs of your life is not giving up – it’s about allowing room for growth. Think about a flower bed with beautiful plants and flowers. If there are too many plants shoved into the tiny bed, none of them have a chance to grow and mature. They are entrenched in a state of hibernation and never reach their potential.

You can only start to grow and develop in your business and in your life when you trim out the old and unnecessary tasks and goals. No new growth will develop if you are hanging onto the past goals that don’t serve you any longer. Trust that the future will bring more opportunities, trim down your list, and get ready to experience the growth that you have been looking for.

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Once your financial life is in balance, you’ll begin to see money flowing in your direction more freely. In addition, you’ll be able to handle the money you receive in a better way. Evaluate your financial life, make changes where necessary, and you’ll see great results.

One of the first steps toward financial health is acknowledging and dealing with your debt. Credit cards and other high interest debts need to be reduced and eliminated if you ever hope to be free. The most important step is determining how much you actually owe.

Write down all of your current debts and then set a realistic date when you will have them paid off. Create a debt management program and put it into action. It is a generally accepted strategy to first pay off and close the account with the highest interest rate and the lowest balance, while making at least the minimum payment on all other accounts.

When you take an active role in reducing your debt, you’ll be on the way to having more control over your finances. Many people have a very distorted idea of how much money they spend. An important step in financial health is making a spreadsheet of your expenses and the various ways you spend money every month, along with expenses that come up a few times a year, like school supplies or winter heating bills.

When you have an accurate view of how you are spending, you can figure out where to cut back and how to spend wisely. Once you have a plan that is realistic, based on your income and true expenses, then you can incorporate other financially healthy steps, such as smart ,savings, charity, etc.

Another vital, and sometimes overlooked, part of being financially healthy is actively seeking to increase your income. Many people focus so tightly on controlling the money that they forget about thinking abundantly. People who are financially healthy work on both sides of the equation, inflow and outflow. Setting and reaching goals with your online business will help you keep your income growing and your budget on track.

Your relationship with money is a very important part of the picture. Money is a point of stress for most people, and this creates a great deal of negative thoughts and feelings surrounding money. All of this negativity creates an energy wall around you where money is not welcomed. You may not think that your perception of money effects how much you earn or receive, but the impact is profound.

Take a look at your past relationship with money, including behaviors or attitudes that you learned in your early life, such as “money is the root of all evil” or “we’ll never be able to afford it”. Examine those beliefs and ask yourself if they serve you well. If not, replace them with new, empowering beliefs that will allow you develop a healthy relationship with money, such as “money is one of many of rewards” or “right now I choose to spend my money another way”.

By taking proactive steps in your financial life, both practical and  psychological, you can transform your financial health even beyond your dreams and expectations.

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People are asking questions like: Which methods work best? How will I get the fastest return on my online marketing efforts? Should I divide my marketing tactics into multiple methods or use one or two tried and true ways to drive traffic to my sites? Marketers feel anxious and want to know how fast they’ll start making money.

In the Beginning – A Few Words About Branding

Until you become well known in your niche, you have to work on becoming the go-to person for your consumers.Branding gets your name out there. It lets people know who you are and what you have to offer. It plays a major part in the success of your business.

Branding is not about your logo – it’s about you. How you present yourself and your business when strategizing for an Internet marketing campaign should be first and foremost in your planning before you even begin advertising.

Keep in mind that you have to achieve the goal of rising above your competitors so that you stand out in the customer’s mind, leading them to choose you over the rest. So focusing on your branding will greatly assist your marketing endeavors regardless of which electronic advertising methods you ultimately
choose.

Different Methods Deliver Different Results

Joint ventures and affiliate marketing are two profitable and fast-working methods of marketing your products that sort of work along the same wavelength. In a joint venture situation, you actually unite with another marketer and advertise via a list using email marketing campaigns.

You can set up a JV relationship and start seeing results as soon as your partner’s list receives the email and converts their readership into making a purchase. It might also be a situation where you blast your list with his product, and he does the same for you in return.

The partners equally share in the responsibility for each other’s products and services as well as the expenses and revenues. It’s a little more of a personal means of getting yourself known in comparison to other Internet marketing methods because it’s a more direct route to the target audience and you have a realpartner working with you that those on the list already trust.

This is more effective than a link to your business on some generalized website. Joint ventures can be a very lucrative method of getting a quick return on your web-based advertising endeavors. You just have to pick the right partner.

In the e-commerce industry, affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of web-based advertising – because it’s easy. The way it works is you join an affiliate network and you advertise your sales page using methods such as posting your link in forums, in signature files, through email marketing, and on the web using article directories, social marketing, and your own web content.

You don’t have to take time out for product creation or site development if you don’t want to. Using a site like ClickBank, you can get a free affiliate ID, link it in your sig file and start seeing sales instantly from whatever product you’re promoting when people read your post about it and follow through on your link.

The bottom line on how fast you’ll make money from affiliate marketing is that it all depends on how fast you can get the links in front of the eyes of your target audience.

Google AdWords can also deliver fast results. As soon as you set up your ads to run, you can experience click-throughs and sales in mere minutes. You’re probably familiar with term AdWords even if you haven’t begun your marketing endeavors yet because it’s basically become a household name – which is great for Google and could be for you as well.

AdWords is only one of the payper- click search engines. There are many of them, but Google is the premiere search engine, so many marketers focus on that system instead of branching out to others.

You determine which words you want utilized to activate a search engine result and ultimately drive traffic to your site. If you’ve ever performed a search via the Google engine, you may have noticed the ads in the column to the right of the page’s main result links. Those are Pay-Per-Click ads and are displayed as sponsor links in that right-hand section of the results page.

Advertisers pay to have their site links displayed in that area of the search engine results page and based on how click-throughs are achieved, rankings can increase based on that as well as how much has been paid for the listing initially – there’s actually a bidding process that takes place amongst marketers who want higher Google rankings, so your advertising costs could increase dependant on that factor.

However, if you’ve got what Google considers quality content (automatically determined through their algorithm) commissions could reach the higher end of the profit spectrum for you. Yahoo! and MSN are two more of the popular search  engine systems you will want to check out if you’re considering Pay-Per-Click advertising.

The Big Picture Overall

What you really want to do when exploring your Internet marketing options is to think in terms of the long haul. Making a quick buck can be an appealing benefit to many advertisers, but your real goal in all of this is to attract visitors who will ultimately become lifetime customers.

If you can afford it, try out several methods and give it some time in order to determine what’s working best for you and providing you with the most revenue. Then you can re-determine your choices based on the results because you  obviously don’t want to spend money on advertising that isn’t giving you a  decent return.

With most marketing on the Internet, it becomes a snowball. Your first sale grows into more, and soon you have many streams of income funneling cash into your account. The key is to focus on whatever generates the best conversions for you, and that, dear reader, takes time to test.

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This can be particularly important if you’re trying to brand yourself or your product through the use of an image. Here are some tools that can help make your site memorable and keep your visitors coming back:

Cartoonist

Have you ever wished you could create a caricature of yourself or perhaps one of your friends? Some marketers even have cartoon characters representing their persona online. Well, now you can do it easily with this free, easy-to-use software.

Even a computer novice will be able to create funny caricatures or apply some warping effects in no time at all. You can view some funny examples in the gallery on their site. The program utilizes a simple, easy-to-grasp interface for quick operation.

Cartoonist lets you watch the results of each operation in real time so that you can undo any operation at any time or jump back to the original image if you aren’t happy with the results. Try using it with one of the images on your blog or Squidoo lens. Keep people laughing and they’ll keep coming back to see what you have to say.

Photo Toolkit

For those who want to add the features of a more complete image-editing program, why not use the complete photo toolkit? Some of the more interesting features are a color correction tool, a makeup plug-in which adds some portrait enhancing capabilities, a lighting effect which can also add 3D effects and a straighten plug-in to straighten tilted photos.

Photo/Graphic Edges

Photo/Graphic Edges is a suite of 32 photographic effects that enable anyone to give images a unique, artistic look. It includes a stand-alone imaging  application as well as a plug-in that works with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro and Corel Draw.

Their site includes a comprehensive gallery demonstrating the powerful effects each of the different options offers. You can download demo versions in both Windows and Macintosh to try out this versatile program. If you  want to own it indefinitely, the cost is $179.00.

Photoshop Facelift

This is a simple website that offers Photoshop tutorials on different web effects that can be applied to faces or people. Each effect is demonstrated
through screen shots and step-by-step instructions.

Some of the interesting examples are, “How to add cartoon eyes to fruits or
other objects” and, “How to make regular pictures look like old pictures.” There are also some stranger effects like, “Creating buck teeth in a photograph” and “Changing the mouth in one photograph with that of another.” You can have a lot of fun with these effects if you want to interject some humor into your site, blog or profile.

Polaroize

If you want to give your pictures a unique, just-taken look, you’ll like Polaroize. This free to use site converts any photo to a Polaroid-like image.

All you need to do is browse your hard drive for the picture you want to use and upload it to the site. You can even resize it to your own specifications. The site then generates a picture that looks like it just came out of a Polaroid camera. Now you can save it to your hard drive and use it wherever you like.

Font Twister

If you want to give your text an extraspecial touch, take a look at Font  Twister. This program contains more than 50 professional styles, which can be changed and enlarged to your own specifications.

Other text effects can be created with the random text effect generator. You can try it free for 30 days and then pay $39.00 to upgrade to the full version.

Web Graphics Creator

Web Graphics Creator is a combination of six different programs and can be purchased for $39.95. This very flexible program can create items like web page titles, e-cover titles, graphics for blogs and podcasts, eBay ads, images for ezines and much more. It has over 2,000 built-in objects and over 150 templates you can use. This exciting program offers a lot of possibilities for adding a unique touch to your web venture.

Working on the Internet can seem so impersonal, but it doesn’t take much to add a personality to your marketing campaigns. Try out some of these interesting tools to show some of your own individuality.

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We’re living in an exciting era.With just a little time and very little money invested, you can be on your way to making a fulltime income online.Internet marketing is the easiest way to make money online from home.

Everyone from teenagers to retirees are cashing in on the phenomenon. With new technology being developed, hundreds of ways to make money and an endless supply of buyers, Internet marketing can be your “golden goose.”

How To Make Money Online?

Internet marketing is a broad term for marketing products and information online. When most people think of making money online, they assume they have to open some sort of online retail store. While plenty of Internet marketers do this, the vast majority of them make their money from marketing ideas and information.

Starting an “offline” business usually cost a ton of money. Starting a retail business online however is definitely cheaper, but there are still costs involved. Marketing ideas and information to people has the lowest start up cost of all. Depending on how you run your online business, your monthly costs could be literally nothing per month, with several thousand dollars of profit.

One of the most popular methods of making money online is by becoming an affiliate for someone else’s product. Of course, this is just one of many, many methods that you can use online to make money. Even if you did decide to have a small website or a mailing list, you could have both for under $30 per month.

That can easily be made back with the sale of just one eBook. Anything on top of that is pure profit. Even the largest Internet marketing businesses have lower overhead than a small retail store in the offline world.

It’s no wonder so many people are realizing that working online is a perfect solution for entrepreneurs. The rewards in Internet marketing are exponential. The more you get to know the market and the methods for making money, the more you’ll be able to make.

You can find one idea and use several different methods to make money from that niche. Imagine having a half dozen profit streams from the same group of buyers! Let’s look at another example of how you can easily profit from working online:

Most people start their online businesses while they’re still working fulltime. The beauty of the Internet is that you can set up automated systems that can make money for you while you sleep and while you’re working for someone else.

For example, you know a lot about gardening. You have a lot of advice to give and feel that people could benefit from your experience. You write an eBook about the topic and then set up a small website to sell the eBook.

With just a few systems in place (basically a payment system and a delivery system) you’ll be able to automatically sell your eBook to anyone that visits your website.

The best part is that you won’t have to do anything after the initial set up. While it does take a little bit of time to set up these systems, once you do they’ll be making money for you indefinitely.

Many people concentrate their Internet business on setting up dozens of systems just like this so they can multiply their profits. I’ve talked about eBooks in both of these examples, but they aren’t the only ways to make money online.

You can make money online from displaying ads on a website. You can promote physical products and services and make commissions from their sales. You can even offer a service to others like graphic design or writing.

Since the costs of doing business online are so low, you can realize your dream of owning your own business. The variety of projects you can complete and the different niches you can market to will keep your Internet marketing career exciting.

The time involved is minimal when you compare it to a traditional business. How often is a store able to sell items while the owner sleeps? When have you been able to make a paycheck without even showing up to work?

The problem with owning your own business offline is that you often end up creating a new 9 to 5 job for yourself (or 5 to 9 job!). With Internet marketing, you can make money and live your life at the same time.

Your business won’t consume your free time, even if you’re running it in addition to holding down a fulltime job. Once you’ve had enough success to quit your day job, you’ll have even more time to do the things that you love to do.

Working online isn’t something that’s out of your reach. With the technology available today, even the least technical people can build a website and start making money online.

There’s no reason to delay your online success any longer. Internet marketing has opened up opportunities for so many people around the world. You can live the life you’ve always wanted to live and work for yourself from the comfort of your home, without spending a lot of time, energy and money. This golden goose isn’t flying away anytime soon, and has something to offer for everyone.

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Deciding to start a home-based business, whether online or otherwise, is one method of developing new streams of income for numerous individuals these days.

Many just don’t understand who to target and what to sell. A niche can be built around a demographic, such as parents, senior citizens, or single people. It can be gleaned from geography, like U.S. citizens paying taxes, Middle Eastern citizens suffering from earthquakes, or ex-pats wanting to live and work abroad.

A niche can also be found through technology, like iPods, cell phones, or plasma TVs. It can be discovered through s, like “living green for the environment.” And it can be honed in on according to certain time parameters, like holiday sales for Christmas, Easter, and Halloween.

Niche Business Ideas – Where to Begin?

Lots of people who haven’t yet made the move into starting an online business but are seriously considering it may be wondering where and how to get started. The best advice you can heed is to use what you know – find your niche.

Start by asking yourself, “What am I good at? In what area do I have what is considered some level of expertise in by others who are not as knowledgeable on the subject?” Everybody is good at something.Everybody has a passion for something. Everybody is skilled – in one way or another – in a certain area.

Use that existing knowledge and ability to turn your dreams into a reality. It can and has been done – over and over  many people just like you and very successfully in countless cases as well.

Making Money Simply by Sharing Your Wisdom

Information products alone are presently and will continue to be one of the best selling products on the ‘net. People want to know how to do…everything! If you want to take off at a slower pace and just get your feet wet to start, create an information product by writing up some good content about a topic that you have extensive knowledge of or a great enthusiasm for, and post it on a single web page.

Provide tips and techniques in regard to whatever the genre is that you’re strongest in. Reach people on a personal level by offering examples of your own  personal experiences in that area and just simply share your talent and wisdom.

You might want to do some research as to what others are charging for similar products and base your price on that.Make your content valuable. Stand behind it and share your belief that this information is going to enrich people’s lives in some way.

If your readers can connect with what you’re providing and even more so with you personally, you’re on your way to having created a successful web-based business around your own newlydiscovered or existing, known niche.

Coaching

Niches can also be geared into a certain demographic. Life and Business coaching is a growing industry, as so many different types of individuals as well as companies are seeking assistance in so many different areas – both personally and professionally.

For instance, parents are in need of guidance on raising their children in today’s busy and ever-changing world and also want to know how to fit work and family together so that neither area suffers from neglect.

Single professionals want advice on how to fit work and play into their lives so that they can actually have a fulfilling life. Companies seek out coaches to train their employees on how to be productive, yet gain satisfaction in their jobs. They want help with organization and management skills. By taking a look around, you can easily see how the list goes on.

Product Niches

What’s the most sought-after product on the market today? Well, with today’s constant technological advances, the answer to that will greatly vary in lieu of current demand, which as you know, can turn on a dime.

But if you’ve found a popular product that you can market economically and profitably, go for it. Ensure that it’s something of value and provide the necessary resources to make your clients feel comfortable purchasing it from you. A warranty or guarantee, outstanding customer service support, and even a good refund and exchange policy will lead people to like and trust you for lifetime loyalty.

Some Final Words of Advice

Keep your eyes and ears open to any new ideas no matter how silly they might seem at first impression. Untapped markets are popping up every day. So if a seemingly workable idea comes to you, act on it.

Any new business venture can be intimidating. But by finding and sticking to a specific niche, especially one that you believe in, and then putting that fervor into action, you can experience amazing, life-changing results both monetarily and personally.

A good tip is that if you offer anything for free as an opt-in benefit, you’ll most likely increase your conversion rates from visitor to paying and even repeat customer. Just keep in mind that you want people to get to know you in a positive manner and trust you.

When the niche product or service you provide via your chosen venture is helping to enhance the lives of others at the same time, then you should be highly commended and deserve nothing less the highest level of success, happiness and well-being that you can achieve.

Also read:

10 Most Profitable Niche Markets on the Internet

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Seth Godin has authored many best-selling books, including Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Unleashing the Idea Virus, and All Marketers Are Liars. In one of his latest creations, called The Dip, he unveils a sensible approach to analyzing your success and progress.

It’s almost pocket-sized and a mere 80-pages long, but it packs a powerful message that not all marketers need to keep going if it isn’t working. It’s okay to quit, but you need to know when it’s going to better your success and when it would be wiser to stay the path.

Seth starts out teaching you why it’s important to be the best in your industry, in your market, and in your niche. This is where the dip starts out in life – you choose a path and to get to the pit stop, your going to have to endure some potholes along the way.

Some people will pass the dips with ease, like a driver behind the wheel of a powerful truck. Others will get stuck, spin their wheels, and give up. Some settle for where they’re at and never move anywhere.

Seth says that society rewards the exceptional. How can you be an exceptional marketer? You can adhere to ethical marketing practices. You can create top quality products and provide excellent customer service. You can think outside the box and attempt something unique.

The Dip will happen to you, if it hasn’t happened already. You got into internet marketing with excitement about the income possibilities and enthusiasm to work for yourself.

Then the Dip happens. You’re putting in the effort but not seeing the results. Think of the dip as the velvet rope keeping you out of a nightclub. You were all excited getting dressed up and going to the club, but once you got there, the bouncer said, “Sorry, you can’t come in.”

Will you wait it out and sweet-talk your way through the door or leave and go to another club? People who get in don’t follow the rules – they make new ones. They work the bouncer until he caves in.

It’s an opportunity to become better at what you do, not just get through it all. Be aware of your dips so that you can make a decision about pushing through or quitting before you waste time. If you recognize yourself as a serial quitter, then it’s time to read The Dip and get your focus back on track.

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Have you noticed a recent decline in sales? Are customers still buying in this economy? Maybe you haven’t noticed any negative changes, and if that’s the case – great! But there’s a good possibility that you have, or that you will. And no matter what, even in a great economy, you need to instill in your customers a sense of urgency.

So why is getting your customers to feel the urgent need to buy now so important? After all, people don’t like to be pressured – too much pressure will scare them off, right? And some people need to think things over, to take their time in making any decision. If you’re pushing them, it could backfire on you.

That’s all true, but creating a sense of urgency really isn’t about pressuring and pushing. It’s about recognizing and/or creating a real need in your customer and handing them a way to fulfill that need. It’s about saying, “This is going to make you feel better right now, and I’m going to make it very, very easy for you to agree with me and say yes – I need this right now!”

Here’s why you need to create urgency and your sales page needs to deliver a strong sense of urgency: Your prospect/client/customer already knows he or she has a need, but they’re going to hold out unless you make it impossible for them to wait.

Why do customers balk at buying? In this poor economy, it might be because they’re afraid to spend the money. In a great economy, it might be because they figure they can get a better deal from your competition. Of course, these reasons can cross over each other in a good, bad or middling economy.

Even if the customer knows or suspects they need and want what you have, they’re programmed to wait until the need is so strong that they can’t wait any longer. Your job is to point out that they’ve already waited long enough and that if they wait longer, their situation is only going to get more uncomfortable.

Your sales page may be a great sales page. It might be eye-catching enough, but not obnoxious. It might be full of compelling information about your product. It might use all the right words and catch phrases, and make it very easy for a customer to buy. But if it doesn’t create a sense of urgency, it doesn’t matter.

The sense of urgency is what will ultimately bring your customer to the point of getting out his or her wallet. They have to believe that they will somehow be cheating themselves or worsening their condition if they don’t make that purchase RIGHT NOW.

How can you create a sales page that delivers urgency? There’s no one way to do it. In fact, you should strive to create urgency in a variety of ways because not all customers will respond the exact same way to your tactics.If you deliver a sense of urgency on your sales page in several different ways, you will be increasing your chances of finding one that works for each person who lands there.

Pair the sense of urgency with an easy way to buy and you’ll have a winning combination, regardless of the state of the economy. Let’s take a look at some great ways to deliver a sense of urgency in your sales letter:

· Make sure they feel the pain. If you’re offering a great line of anti-aging skin products or an info product on natural skin care, make absolutely certain that your customer feels the pain of wrinkles, skin that is losing elasticity, age spots, sagging eyelids and dull skin tone.

Remind them that they don’t have to live with any of those problems one second longer. They can start to reverse these effects of aging from the second they click on the Buy Now button.

· Create a need out of their vanity. Everyone likes to stand out in a crowd. Everyone wants to be thought of as cool, or innovative or ahead of the pack. You can use this to create a sense of urgency. Don’t your customers want to get a jump on the competition or have something very few others do?

· Speak to their wallet. If your product is selling for $10 today, but the price is set to increase to $12 tomorrow, your customer might feel that they should just buy now and save themselves a couple bucks.

Make sure that you follow through with your timed increases or you’ll look untrustworthy if the customer returns the next day to find the same $10 price and the same notice that the price will go up tomorrow.

· Give your customer lots of incentive to buy. Pile on some excellent bonuses, and give a really good guarantee on your product.

· Use scarcity as a way to create urgency. If there are only 10 of your product left, the customer will feel more compelled to snatch it up! You can make it so that there is only a limited number of your product available or a limited time that you will be offering it.

Some have used countdown clocks or similar tools on their sales page to serve as a vivid reminder that your customer needs to act this minute or risk missing out. Remember, you have to follow through with what you’re telling your customers. If you’re counting down products or time, that countdown has to actually go down!

· Make it very, very easy to buy. Make sure that your sales page gives complete and easy-to-understand instructions for the purchase process. Be sure to have that Buy Now button very noticeable in a few different spots on your page. And give your customers a sense of safety by giving them a good product guarantee.

The results of creating a sales page that delivers a sense of urgency will be quite evident very quickly. You’ll notice that even in a poor economy your sales will remain steady and most likely will climb. You won’t suffer from the customer’s natural leaning toward holding out for a better deal or waiting until they just can’t take it anymore.

The sense of urgency you create will prompt your customers to take action when you want them to take action – now. There’s nothing wrong or unethical about creating this urgency. It just means you’re getting the sale first – before your competition.

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It’s easy to record and save these conversations as MP3 recordings to be made available to share as a podcast or downloaded to your website for members of your business team. First, we’ll look at what software is available for recording and saving these valuable moments.

At the top of the list for recording Skype calls is Pamela,a software that’s designed for the purpose of recording VoIPconversations. It also saves your conversation in MP3 format, which makes it ready to turn into a podcast and broadcast it at a later date. Pamela also answers calls, forwards, faxes and other useful features.

Pamela offers free recording of any type of Skype call for up to 15 minutes  per call! If you want to remove this limitation all you need is an activation key which you can purchase here.

Callburner is another service that Skype callers have access to. It’s free to use if both callers are Callburner members. For those who will use Skype calls where one user is not a Callburner user, then there’s a nominal charge.

If you use Skype a lot and would like the convenience of Microsoft Outlook, then you might consider going with Skylook. With Skylook, you can keep track of your Skype userlist, conversations, an recordings similar to using Outlook with email right from the convenience within Outlook.Skylook comes in a basic free version and a pro version, which you can try for free before you buy.

And finally for you Mac users, there’s an option known as Call Recorder for Skype. Like its PC counterparts, it’s easy to download and use. As you would expect, there’s a trial version and when you want to buy it, it’s just $15.

It’s really very easy to record your Skype conversations, which you can then pass on through your organization or to your list. With the ease of use, convenience, and affordability factors, you don’t have any excuse not to!

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Bottom line is this: your website is a tool to make money online and you need to make sure it’s being used to make every sale possible. Here are the Big 3 – your website’s reason for existing, if you will:

1) Bringing In Customers – That seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many sites were built for just that purpose only to fall dreadfully short of hopes and expectations.

So how can you attract new customers to your site and then turn them into customers who buy something from you? The answer to this question has two parts. First:

- Get your site noticed by making sure that it’s a visually appealing site with lots of good information.

- Get your site noticed by making sure it’s search engine friendly and that you’ve got some excellent-quality backlinks in place.

- Get your site noticed by branding yourself in several areas of the web – use social networking sites to your advantage.

Now that you’ve gotten your site noticed, and the customers are visiting it:

- Make sure your website tells each new visitor what you’re offering and why they need it in very clear language.

- Clearly let your customers see all of the benefits of making a purchase of one or several of your products and services.

- Make it easy for your customers to  complete a purchase. Show them where to sign up for emails and newsletters and give them a good reason for doing so (this will come in handy later).

- Make it clear to your customers that you are a trusted expert and that they can look to you in the future for other great products and services.

When your site brings in new customers and converts them to sales, you both win. Even if a customer doesn’t make a purchase, if you’ve made a positive impression, they may come back later and you might get another chance.

2) Bringing Customers Back Again – Once should never be enough.

You want you get your customers to visit you again and again. So once your customer has been at your site, and hopefully made a purchase, how can you bring him or her back?

- Customers that have signed up for your newsletter or regular update emails will always have your name stuck in their memory because you will be periodically sending them interesting and exciting emails and newsletters. This is perfect because they’ll think of you when they need something that you offer.

- You can bolster your retention by offering specials and promotions via these emails and newsletters.

- You can offer weekly Podcasts or a blog feed to your customers. Give them plenty of useful information about things that are related to your business, and special offers for subscribers.

- Encourage feedback in the form of forums or comments. You can also incorporate a contact form into your site where customers can send you a question or comment.

- Offer tutorials or exclusive reports to those who have purchased products as a special incentive to come back.

Part of getting your customers to stick around is just helping them remember your name over and over, and part of it is getting them excited about what you’ve got to offer.The last part ofthe equation is reminding them that you care and that they can look to you for assistance with what they need.

The third component of the Big 3 reasons for your website’s existence is:

3) To Add Onto Existing Sales – Whatever it is that you’re selling, you can bet that there’s something else (or a number of items) that you could sell along with it to boost revenue.

One time offers, cross promotions, and affiliate marketing will add to your revenue on existing sales and each of these methods should be considered.There’s probably a long list of items that would go with your product or service.

Focus on which of your products sell best and be sure to offer your customers add-on products with each sale – at the time of the sale. If you have products that are lagging behind in sales, pair them with something that may help bolster them as a special offer.

Use the information you have on what your bestsellers are and which customers bought which products to send out special offers in your newsletters and emails to your customers.

If your site isn’t doing each of these, or not doing them well, it’s time to ramp up your efforts and make a few changes. When these three elements are working, you’ll make more money and your customer retention rate will improve.

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Let’s face it, success is energizing. What does your family think about your online success? Sure, they are thrilled to see you at home, but what do they see? They see the back of your head as you face the monitor.

Are you at home but not with them? Does your family really have more time, or less, with you since you became an entrepreneur? Is this what you wanted? If your answers are at all vague, it is time to reassess your goals and get your life on the track you envision.

Leaving the 9-5 office job for working at home was supposed to give you more time with your family, more time for sports, more time for hobbies … just more time. Is that happening?

Think back to the reasons you wanted to work independently and answer these key questions with brutal honesty:

1.) What were the top three priorities that you would focus on if you had more time?

2.) How many of them do you have time for in your life right now?

3.) Are those still your life priorities? If not, revise your top three priorities list. Don’t just think about it – type it and print it out for a constant dose of reality.

Making your personal development plan work for you, while you work to support your family, takes as much planning and analysis as you put into creating a successful online business.

Now look at the seven elements of your life. Think of these as building block of various sizes that join to reflect who you are and what motivates you.

These elements are:

1. Mind: mental and emotional
2. Body: health and wellness
3. Spirit: connection outside my self
4. Financial: supporting self and family
5. Relationships: significant other, family, friends
6. Recreation: enjoyable activities, sports, hobbies
7. Community: involvement in helping others

If you want to go all the way with your personal development plan, then it is time to create a journal page (typed or handwritten) for each of these elements. State at least three goals for each element. They can be a mix of short-term and long-term achievements.

Short-term goals can be completed in less than six months. Long-term goals take from six months to ten years. Once you write these things down, you will have some direction.

Those random thoughts of, “Gee, I wish I could help with the beach cleanup project” or, “I need to start a walking program to improve my health” become goals that are turned into actions.

You can use this personal development plan in two different ways. You can focus on a different element for each day of the week. Or you can devote a week to each element.

Add notes in your journal about what you did toward that goal and how you felt afterward. Once something becomes a consistent part of your life schedule, like getting up and walking two miles before turning on the computer, then mark it off and add a new goal. Keep at least three goals for each life element.

The biggest obstacle to personal development planning is getting started. The next obstacle is committing to stay with your plan. Yet busy marketers do exactly this process for their work schedule, so why not for their  personal lives?

Could it be because you are so driven to succeed that you don’t see how you could make money by taking a ceramic class or playing touch football in the park with the kids? Well, here’s the surprise: you will make even more money by doing those things.

Toss away any notion that a personal development plan is selfish, because it is far from that. The more you grow as a person, the more you have of yourself to give to your family, friends and community. Sending a check to charity is easy. Giving your time and your attention is a prize of great worth, particularly to your family.

When your life has direction on several levels, not just in business, you are a more relaxed, creative, and energized person. Unless you use the freedom that being an independent businessperson brings, then you might as well get in the car and fight the traffic back to your old job.

Before, you had little time for personal development and you wanted it so much. Now you have the potential to take time for personal development, but it might be left to the wayside while you pave a path to online riches.

Here is your official permission to go for it! Even if you lose a sale from an impatient buyer who can’t wait a few hours for an answer, let it go. What was more valuable in the grand scheme of living: the two hours you went to your son’s soccer game or a few dollars from the sale of an ebook?

Some choices in life are just that basic. You have to take time to keep all of life’s elements in balance. Are you ready to get serious about a personal development plan?

Start with the process suggested here. If you need more structure or  monitoring, consider hiring a qualified life coach to keep you moving forward toward the life you want.

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This level of interaction is more personal and therefore puts you and your message in a different perspective. People don’t want to be “sold to” – period. But they love to get advice, take recommendations, and follow the crowd.

Social networking allows you to interact with your target market on a friendly, more casual level. This lowers their resistance to your marketing message since it isn’t presented as a sales pitch. What you’re offering is perceived as friendly advice or a recommendation.

For example, imagine the difference in acceptance between a direct mail postcard advertising a new model cell phone and a friend telling about their new cell phone and why they like it better than their previous phone. You’ll trust and respond better to your friend’s information and testimonial because you have a relationship with them.

When you present yourself as a reliable and trustworthy dispenser of accurate and valuable information, not only will you receive more traffic toyour sites, but it will be targeted and receptive traffic. Your audience will be ready to interact with your site or buy, depending on the type of site you have. They are interested in your niche topic, and they’ve made a connection with you somehow by interacting with you on the social networking site.

The other big benefit of using social networking is that it allows you tap into small niche markets with very little effort. These platforms can help you brand yourself and distribute information that relates to your business.

The best part is that once you get your platforms established (like your blog, your favorites list, or your profile) other people will start doing promotion for you, boosting your popularity. The audiences on Web 2.0 sites are very eager to interact and share. If you just concentrate on making your content interesting and buzz-worthy, then you’ll have no problem getting attention.

There are lots and lots of social networking sites, so many that you’d make yourself crazy if you tried to develop a presence on them all. To review some of your options, visit www.go2web20.net. This site catalogs lots of different Web 2.0 sites and allows you to search them by their purpose and function.

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