My Money

Soft Sell Takes Another Step Into the Mainstream

2008-10-30T00:41:00.000-07:00

By Jim Sniechowski Platinum Quality Author

We just received an email quoting very successful copywriter, Bob Bly. He's been writing for years and is very well known in Direct Marketing as well as in Internet marketing industries.

A few of his many clients are: CBS Market Watch, Forbes, Harvard Business School, Kiplinger, McGraw-Hill, Nature, Nightingale-Conant, New York Times Syndicate, Prentice Hall, Scientific American.

Here's the quote:

"The teaching of how to make money marketing information on the Internet has gone from an honorable, honest profession to a hype-filled, slime-infested jungle. Each day, the claims get more and more outrageous.

'I made $1 million in 17 seconds on the Internet!' one promoter screams.

'Join my Delta Mega Force Team today and get a Rolls Royce with your first affiliate commission check,' another shouts even more loudly.

"Does brag-and-boast advertising like this - especially from so-called marketing gurus you never heard of before - make you skeptical?

"To me, these outrageous promotions ... sorely lacking in credibility ... make me want to toss my cookies!"

That's what we've been saying all along. Outrageous. Not credible. Hype-filled.

Copywriters who depend on hyperbole aren't believable because their copy isn't authentic. It lacks a sincere emotional connection because they're not sincerely emotionally involved. Their entire focus is on making the sale rather than truly servicing those who might be interested.

When genuine, heartfelt emotion is absent copywriters are compelled to use hype which pushes them over the top because they're forced to try to generate a feeling response from their readers but they only have their brain-space to work with.

We welcome Bly's acknowledgment of the problem for which Soft Sell Copywriting and Soft Sell Marketing is a solution.

Because we all need to treat our potential customers with respect and dignity. And it serves our own integrity and the growth of our businesses to use a caring conscience to create compelling presentations in our writing, whether blog post or sales letter.

It's the human-to-human, heart-to-heart connection that makes for the best sales.

Remember, your marketing campaign stands on your Internet platform. You can get solid, proven guidance on how to build your Soft Sell platform by downloading our FREE 60 minute audio - "How to Build Your Soft Sell Platform - at http://www.bridgingheartandmarketing.com/platformbonus

Internet Marketing Tips - The Best Kind of Internet Marketing Income

2008-10-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

By Roger Hoggers Platinum Quality Author

The best income of any kind is always residual income. With internet marketing, what you are always trying to accomplish, if you are doing it right is to develop residual income.

What is the difference between residual income and regular income? When you go to work, you work for a period of time and are paid for the time that you are at work. When you develop a residual income, you work for a period of time, and you are paid on an ongoing basis for the work that you did. Even if it is a small amount, it is important because they add on to each other.

Lets say you build a website which earns you $20 per month. That does not seem like very much money, but if you build 10 websites that all average about $20 per month, now you have $200 per month and you are starting to see the value of residual income.

One of the best ways that I have ever come across to build a residual income is internet marketing. In one of my past careers, I have been a real estate agent. This was fun and lucrative. When I sold a house, I would earn a great deal of money for the sale. However, if I wanted to earn more money, I would have to sell another house.

In my current career, I can very easily build a website, and earn a certain amount of money practically for ever. If I need more money, I can build another website.

What are the 3 things that internet marketers must do to survive?

Find out this and more with the help of Action-Innovations.

Making Money Online - How Do You Find a Product That Will Sell?

2008-10-27T23:52:00.001-07:00

By Andy Mordley Platinum Quality Author

I make money online by selling other people's products via affiliate marketing. I find a niche, find products that I can promote and then set up a website to market them. Finding products to sell is one of the trickiest parts of any project - and my choice of product has led to some huge successes - and some monumental failures!

The most important aspect to consider is what people are likely to be searching for when they come across your product. Are they looking to buy something (or could they be persuaded to buy) or are there just looking for information. You could get 1 million visitors to your website, but if your not selling a product that those visitors would want to by then you won't make any sales.

To illustrate the problem I set up a website recently to sell an autism information product. I thought that I couldn't go wrong - a high quality product, a great sales page, a very poplar condition (1 in 160 births) and virtually no competition in AdWords. I set up an amazing website and launched a pay per click campaign. I had loads of targeted visitors but didn't make a single sale. And the ppc campaign cost me a fortune. Why did it fail? Because people trying to find information about autism aren't looking to buy because there's heaps of free information out there.

When selling information products you need to focus on finding products that are likely to appeal to people who are after something for nothing, trying to achieve the impossible or are likely to buy out of desperation. These buyers are always very eager to part with their money out of hope. For example, information products promising cures to poorly treated and unpleasant conditions always sell well as do products teaching people how to improve their appearance or figure (weight loss or muscle building). Is this ethical? Yes! Welcome to the cruel world of marketing. It goes on all around us every single day. Think about cosmetics for example - you can sell a cream for $100 a gram if comes with a promise that it will make you look 10 years younger. When finding products to market one of the most effective strategies is to focus on selling hope.

Bear in mind however that you must also focus on finding high quality products. Promote poor quality products and the refund rate will be high and people will never buy from you again. I never sell a product unless I have personally bought and reviewed it myself and feel happy and comfortable with the content.

If you are interested in learning more about what types of products to promote there are blueprints available elsewhere on the net that not only tell you precisely what products to promote, but also exactly how to go about marketing them.

Check out Andy's website to learn about online income generating methods which can be successfully applied by anybody - http://www.smallonlineincomes.com

Name Some Methods to Make Money With Ebook Writing

2008-10-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

By Sean R Mize Platinum Quality Author

Looking for ways on how you can make more money from your electronic books? Then, read on and find out!

1. Go with profitable topics. If you want your ebooks to sell like hotcakes online, you better write about topics that are interesting and valuable to the lives of your potential clients so you can easily convince these people to make a purchase. Instead of doing the guessing game or relying on your intuition, it's better if you can do a keyword research that can help you identify the most searched keywords/subjects within your chosen niche. You may also opt to talk directly to your potential clients and ask them about the information that they need through relevant blogs and forums or by sending them surveys or questionnaires through your autoresponders.

2. Multiply the number of your ebooks. You can easily augment your earnings from this endeavor if you can boost the number of your ebooks. Just make sure that you don't sacrifice the quality in the process so you can still offer your readers with their money's worth. Stay productive by managing your time effectively, staying focused and motivated, and by writing short ebooks instead of lengthy ones.

3. Satisfy your readers. This is not only to promote repeat business among these people but also to convince them to recommend your ebooks to their friends and family members. Remember, word-of-mouth advertising is such an effective advertising tool that can help you augment your online earnings in no time. Ensure that your ebooks are of high quality and offer your readers with after sales support.

4. Aggressive marketing strategies. You cannot possibly generate huge sales if no one knows about your ebooks. Give them the right kind of exposure by advertising them using all efficient and cost-effective tools that are available in the internet today. If you don't have the money to spare just yet, you can focus your time and energy on free advertising tools. These include article marketing, forum posting, ezine publishing, email marketing, blogging, and SEO.

5. Sell ad spaces. Another way to augment your earnings from your ebooks is by selling ad spaces to interested marketers. To bring value to your readers, ensure that the ads you put on your content are highly related to your main topic. If you are writing about weight loss, diet pills and supplements are the best choices.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article writing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide'

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Writing

Do you want to learn how to build a big online subscriber list fast? Click here: Secrets of List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.

Make Easy Money Online in 3 Easy Steps

2008-10-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

By Steven Wagenheim Platinum Quality Author

Everybody wants to make a killing on the Internet and they want to do it fast. Well, I'm going to share with you the three best ways to make some real easy money online. They won't cost you more than a few pennies to implement and you'll be raking in the bucks before you can say "Bob's your uncle." Sound good? Great, then let's get started.

Step one is to go get yourself a free blog at either Blogger, Wordpress or wherever. It doesn't really matter where. The reason you want to do this is because Google, for whatever reason, has a love affair with blogs. If you have a blog and update it often, you'll find that Google will shoot you right up the ranks of their search engine pretty quick. This in turn will translate into you getting a lot of traffic.

Step two is to sign up with an affiliate program like Clickbank. You're going to promote one of their top affiliate products. The niche almost doesn't matter, though some are better than others. What you want to do is write a review of this product and post it on your blog. Why? Because people looking for products are looking for reviews so that they can make informed decisions about the product. Write to the creator and ask for a free copy. Tell him you want to promote it. Nine times out of ten, he'll send you one.

Step three is the critical step. Write articles based on the topic related to this product and submit them to article directories. Make sure in the resource box that you have a strong call to action to go to your blog to read the review of the product. People will then go to your blog, read the review, check out the sales page and ultimately buy the product. If this sounds too easy, trust me, it is. All you need to do is follow the steps.

For more info on just how to make this work like magic, check the link in my signature.

Making money online really IS easy...once you know how it's done.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to really make this system work like magic? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and turn yourself into a money making machine literally overnight.

If You Can't Make Money Without Money, You Can't Make Money With Money

2008-10-11T01:21:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Massicotte

Picture a student living in a 1.5 room apartment with an internet connection, a full course load and a driving passion to make on online business that works. Ten years ago, most people would have thought this student is a fool.

Today, I know that this student is going to find what he is looking for, because of one word:

Resourcefulness

The saying goes, "You need money to make money." I disagree.

Allow me to explain with three scenarios:

Student-entrepreneur A makes a business of his HTML site building skills to make websites for people at $100/contract. All he needs is a computer and an internet connection. Because this entrepreneur has taken advantage of a skill he can provide (that he is really good at) at no additional cost to himself, upon graduation he is already ahead of his peers.

Student-entrepreneur B writes an E-book to guide his fellow classmates when they give an oral presentation in class. He has had countless success stories of presentations he has given with positive results. He sells his book on the internet to other students who are looking for the key to giving a good oral presentation. The book is a flop, but he keeps trying to find ways to market new products and gain experience.

Here we have two examples of students who have nothing but free time on the weekend and an internet connection to begin taking control over their own lives.

Let me give you a third profile.

Student-entrepreneur C is studying business in university. Unlike the first two he decides to wait until he graduates before he takes on any new projects. He has some great break-through ideas, but all his advisors are telling him to focus on school because "it is a full time job in and of itself" and "your grades will follow you for life." Upon graduation this entrepreneur gets a full time job in Documentation at a paper company and during his evenings he works on his business projects. He also gets married, buys a house and starts raising a family.

In which of these examples do you see Bill Gates? What about Steve Jobs?

Of the three entrepreneurs, which ones do you think are following their passions?

Since I am throwing quotes out quite a bit, here is another one:

"What a man does on his free time determines who he really is."

When you graduate with your undergraduate degree, employers are looking for experience. Unfortunately, you can only get experience by being hired by an employer who understands that you have NO experience...but all the employers want candidates with experience!

There seems to be a vicious circle.

However,

If you have been working in tune with your passion, this should not be an issue. If you are passionate about starting businesses, or writing books, or geography or politics-You should have plenty of experience from initiatives you have taken up on your own. Enough that would amaze any employer.

Daniel Massicotte, Fourth Year Student at McGill University (English Major, Business Minor). Have a Presentation You Need to Ace? Visit http://www.aplus-students.com for more tips and a student-priced e-book that guides you step by step to make it to the top of your class.

7EASY STEPS HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH ZERO BUDGET

2008-10-07T00:23:00.000-07:00

By Rudy Tanaka

Are you a newbie marketer and trying to make easy money from internet??
Maybe you have heard many way to make easy money from internet.Or you have tried many programs that promise you a lot of profits and you have lost much money for those programs but you didn’t able make money with them.
Many people have asked why they didn’t make money even they have paid much money.
Or even you are one of them before…….
Don’t worry…
Today is your lucky day.Because this article will tell you how to make easy money online just in 7 easy steps with zero budget.

These are the 7 easy steps to make easy money online:

1. Find a niche
First of all, find your niche.Pick 1 spesific category you interest or you can analyze what is hot right now.You can find what is hot now at Google by using “hot trends” keyword or you can find it at Amazon what is best seller now.

2. Find your product
Now, I assume you have make your “hot” niche.The next step is find your product.But don’t create your product first because it will spend your time and of course your money.This is why most newbie quit from internet marketing.They have spend much money and time to make their product and no sale...
You can find your “hot”product in few affiliate programs.This is simple and you must not make product.Once somenone buys the product through your link, you immediately get commission.Simple and easy right?

3. Create a website
Next, build a website to place your product in.You can find many free hosting on the internet.
If you are an experienced programmer or are familiar with html, frontpage, or dream weaver, then creating your web site should be a cinch.
If you are beginner I recommend you to use blog because it is easy to manage.

4. Write Article related to your niche
Now you want to add article related to your niche.You can write that article yourself.Or you can read other website and rewrite the information in your words.The article must written in your words to avoid duplicated content that will hurt your site rangkings in search engines.
If you don’t have time to write that article you can hire a writer.Even you can make your name as the author.But you must pay to the writer.

5. Give Something to your customer/visitor
Don’t let your visitor or your customer leave your site with empty hand.Give them free download ebook that you have written with your link in it.Beside your visitor/customer happy you can promote your website and your product in it and increase your website traffic.

6. Increase your website traffic
Join some forum related to your website.Or you can find some website related to your website and ask them to exchange link.Beside that, I recommend you to submit your site to famous search engine like Google, Yahoo, etc.You can also submit your article to article directories like ezinearticle.com.
Find popular blogs that are related to your website's subject. Frequently post feedback and be sure to include your website's address. Be sure that the feedback is genuine and useful, so it is not viewed as spamming. Give helpful comments often, and others will visit your website.

7. Generate Your visitor
Of course you must build a relationship between you and your customer,Ask their email when they visit your website so you can email them regularly about your new product and helpful information.So promote, promote and promote..
These will make more, more, and more money for you…
An don’t be forget to update your site continually.

Good Luck in your adventure!!!

I strongly recommended of “make easy money with Google” because in that book therea are so many secret about adsense and of course you can make easy money from Google adsense.Get it for only $6.68 in here

Do you want to learn more about make easy money online and the secrets of make money online?Get it for FREE in here!!!!

Rudy Tanaka is a internet marketing specialist and dedicated to helping others and offering the best information on how to make more money online.

How To Make Money Easy

2008-10-03T00:36:00.000-07:00

By Guillermo Puyol

Are you trying to find out how to make money easy online? You are in luck! This article will tell you what I've found that works, and what doesn't.

In the few years I have been marketing online I have stumbled upon several programs that promise miracles but they just don't follow through. I also witnessed how some people would accuse great programs of being scams, not because the programs were faulty or because they made untrue statements of income, but just because these people were not able to make money with them. They just didn't follow the system and gave up. It is like accusing a gym of not working just because you paid for the membership and didn't lose weight. It is not the membership fee that helps you it is the workout. After all these experiences I realized it is not a matter of finding out how to make money easy, it is a matter of finding a system that you are willing and able to follow, and something that doesn't clash with your personality.

It is important also to realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything requires an investment, whether you invest time or money it is up to you, but you must put something in to get something out. Online businesses are the same. If you want to be able to make money online, you must also either invest money or time. There are programs out there that promise autopilot profits and the set it and forget it types of things, those are either scams or they are not as automated as they make themselves out to be.

The following is a way of how you can make money easy from the comfort of your own home.

Craig's List

Garage sales are very common. People empty all the junk from their garage and put a price to it. Others, visit their street, buy their stuff and go back home happy with their newfound treasures. Craig's list is the same!

People find stuff around their house or garage and list it online at craigslist.com. Sometimes these people have no earthly idea how much their junk is really word and they let it go for pennies on the dollar. That is were you come in. If you take the time to check Craig's list frequently enough, you are sure to find some of those deals. When you do, just buy it, and list your item back online at an auction site like eBay. Just make sure you start out with a low investment because you really never know what is going to happen with the things you buy.

Another great thing about Craig's list is that they have a huge free section where people list things they are ready to part with. Usually they ask that you pick them up, so this works better if you can move around your city with ease. Find free items you think you can sell, pick them up and sell them for one hundred percent profit. There is no risk at all with this tactic.

This is just one of the ideas I discussed in my website, follow this link to find out how to make money easy

TOP 7 HOW TO MAKE EASY MONEY FOR NEWBIE MARKETERS

2008-10-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

by Rudy Tanaka

Are you looking for the easiest way make money online??Here, I’ll tell you how to make money money from your site from A-Z…But before we get into actual marketing techniques I want u to understand what internet marketing is, how vast the opportunity really is and the important is making money is not easy..You can’t looking for a get rich without working for it..

After u understand all of it, let’s begin the lesson.
I’m sure that you have thought before about making money online or even you have already tried some online business strategies provided by many internet business experts.I will tell you my plan to make money online using one of the simplest money maker, Google Adsense.

Maybe you have heard about that affiliate, but you must know only 5% success making money from adsense.But don’t worry I’ll tell you the way how to make money money form adsense.

The main idea is to build a site based on some keywords and try to get it at the first result of search engine;we will take Google as our primary search engine.
In the following step, you will provided how to make money with Google adsense program right now.

Here is my easiest way make money online:

1.Choosing a good niche(keyword)
First, you must determine your niche, you can choose whatever niche as you want.But I recommend you to choose niche you know more about it or you can choose niche you interest in.In addition when you determine a keyword I hope it will be 3 -5 words.Because it will be more specific and most of search engine like it.Again more specific the keyword you choose, the better chance it wil get sales!!!!

2.Build a site
I assume you have finished the step 1.Now, step 2 is build a site..You can find many free domain site in the internet.You can also build a blog.I recommend you to use blog because it is easy to manage.

3.Write article and submit it!!
Now you want to add article related to your keyword.You can write that article yourself.Or you can read other website and rewrite the information in your words.The article must written in your words to avoid duplicated content that will hurt your site rangkings in search engines.
If you don’t have time to write that article you can hire a writer.Even you can make your name as the author.
After you write that, you can submit it to article directories.This is one of the effective way to increase your site rangking.
4.Submit your site at search engine and other website/Blog directories
Now you have website or blog and the content in it.After that you can submit your website or blog at search engine and other website/blog directories.

5.Join Forum
You can also join forum to increase your site traffic. Most of the forum provides you with signature. You can add your URL to your signature.

6.Exchange link with other TOP 10 related website.

7.Update your site continually and be patient.

Good Luck in your adventures!!

Do you want to learn more about easiest way make money online and adsense secret?Find out more in here.

Hans Ikegawa is a internet marketing specialist and dedicated to helping others and offering the best information on how to make more money online.

Guide to Pay Per Click Search Engines

2008-09-23T21:38:00.000-07:00

by: David Greene

Search Engines. What is a Pay Per Click Search Engine?

A pay per click search engine is designed for pay for performance advertising. That means that an advertiser pays the search engine owners only for traffic that is delivered to his web site in accordance with key words that the advertiser chooses to bid on.
Example: An advertiser has a web site that advertises vacations to Thailand. The advertiser can bid on "vacations to Thailand" as a key word. If he wants to be in the number one position on the search results page he can place a bid that is one cent more than the existing high bid for the key word term "vacations to Thailand". Let's say that the present high bid is $0.20 per click. A bid of $0.21 would than gain the top position for the advertiser.

If his key word was clicked on 10 times in one day he would pay 10 X $0. 21 , or $2.10 for the traffic that was delivered to his web site for that day. The advertiser is paying only for performance. There is no charge for the number of times that the advertisers ad appeared on the search engine web site that day. The charges are based only on the number of times that a visitor clicked on the key word and was delivered to the advertiser's web site. Thus the name "pay per click".

Why Use Pay Per Click Search Engines?

In just a few words it is because the leading Pay per Click Search Engines (PPC) can quickly deliver quality targeted traffic to your web site. Anyone who has build web sites know that building web sites is the easy part. The tough part of the process is in driving enough qualified traffic to the site to make it worth while from a commercial view point.
Even if you are successful in building a web site that the search engines love it will take some time, probably two or three months, perhaps longer, for the search engine spiders to find your site and for your site to be listed in the search engine. If you are trying to make money on the Internet that is a long time to go without traffic.

No traffic means no sales and no income. That should not be your objective unless you enjoy building web sites no matter how few people ever visit them.

With pay per click search engine accounts you can almost immediately drive qualified traffic to your web site. If you are serious about building a business on the Internet that is a pretty good reason to use Pay Per Click Search Engines.

Pay Per Click Search Engine Tips.

1. Use quality pay per click search engines that already have a high volume of traffic. It doesn't matter how cheap the bid for your key words may be if there is little traffic on the search engine and your key words are never clicked on.

2. Know your market. If you are selling "vacations to Thailand" do some research to find out what words and phases folks who are thinking of traveling to Thailand are actually using in their searches. An excellent tool to assist in this research is Wordtracker . Wordtracker will quickly help you to decide which key words are truly worth bidding on.

3. Quality pay per click search engines will have starting bids from one cent to five cents per key word. It is important to know that about 80% of the traffic for any key word will go to the top three bids. So if you want a lot of traffic to your web site try to position yourself in the top three spots. Just as with real estate location makes all the difference in results.

4. Set up a realistic budget for each search engine. Quality pay per click search engines get a lot of traffic so be prepared for a lot of traffic to your site if you bid on popular key words.

5. Popular key words can be expensive so choose your key words with great care. It is best to stay away from key words that are too general in nature. Thus to continue with the example above bidding on the key word "vacations" would not be wise if you are selling vacations to Thailand. Yes, you would get a ton of traffic but it would be more than likely be too general and you would spend a lot of money for poor results. It is almost always a better strategy to bid on phases instead of one general keyword. Therefore bidding on "vacations to Thailand" would be a far better choice than bidding on "vacations".

If you are selling vacations to Pattaya Thailand it would be better to bid on "vacations to Pattaya Thailand" than on "vacations to Thailand". The more keywords that you can find that exactly match up with whatever it is that you are selling and that folks will be searching for the more money you will save (less money will get you in the top three spots) and the better your results will be.

Wordtracker is an excellent tool that can find key word phases that are actually being searched for and that you would probably never think of going it alone.

6. Think about using a lot of keywords rather that a common few. The common few will be expensive and will likely deliver to your web site a lot of poorly targeted traffic with poor conversion ratios (traffic to sales). People search for the darnest things and those who actually plan on buying something usually search by using phrases. With some effort you can find phrases that are cheap and that will deliver highly targeted traffic...the kind that converts into sales.

7. No matter how much traffic you drive to a web site if you are marketing sorry products or services or if you have excellent products and services but you have a sorry website you are wasting your time and money. Everything must be right to achieve business success. Make sure that your site is "order taking ready" before you turn on your pay per click traffic.

How to Mint Money Using Affiliate Products

2008-09-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

By Jo Mark Platinum Quality Author

Most of the people start an online business because they lured in by the success of other online marketers. But there is no magic wand that you can wave and begin to make money. Like any other business, it takes real work to do well. But you can eliminate some of that hard work by promoting affiliate products. And, as an added bonus, you can begin to make money right away.

The best part about affiliate marketing is that you don't have to develop a product or service on your own. This saves a lot of time and money that otherwise would have been invested in creating your own product. So, if you are an affiliate marketer, you have a product readily available for sale. You are also totally free from the responsibilities associated with developing, launching and maintaining a product. The merchant takes care of the details; he creates th product, develops an attractive sales page, takes care of the payment terms, sales, delivery and customer care. All you need to do is visitors to the sales page.

Another advantage of affiliate marketing is the generous commissions you can earn. You earn a commission every time someone you refer buys the product. The amount of commission varies between 30% to 75% of the total sales price. It is difficult to find another business that pays such high commissions. In addition, you don't have to pay anything to enroll in affiliate program. There is no registration fee and it is up to you decide the number of products that you wish to promote.

Even newbies can make money promoting affiliate products. Many vendors will provide you with sales aids and marketing tips to help you get started. Some provide you with free study material including reports and videos to train you. Added to this is the free supply of sales tools like email and sales reports that makes it totally hassle free. Other impressive features are; versatility, flexibility and the freedom to run your business at your own pace. At any point of time, you have the option to drop a particular product or stop promoting it if you are not satisfied for some reason.

Are you interested in knowing how I mint money? Then, try my latest ebook and mint hot cash online.

FREE Ebook - Make Money Every Day! http://www.milliondollararticle.com

Easiest n Quick Way to Make Money

2008-09-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

By Michael Nalbone

Still struggling? Damned shame. It's not that hard to make money
online.

Heard that before, have you? Well listen...I'm going to lay it
all out for you, right here, right now & I'm not going to charge
you a dime - you can thank me later.

This is by-far the easiest, fastest way to make money. But it's
important that you follow-through.

Step 1: If you don't have a ClickBank affiliate id, go there now
& get one. It's free.

Step 2: Browse through or search the ClickBank Marketplace and
find a product to promote that pays at least $25 in commission.

If you don't have any money to get going, write a short article
that relates to the ClickBank product. Explain how using the
product will benefit those reading the article. Include your
cloaked affiliate hoplink within the article body as well as the
"about the author" footer. Submit the article to article
directories. Write and submit one or two articles per week.
Within a week or so, you should start seeing some cash coming in.

Step 3: If you don't have a Google AdWords account, go there now
& open one.

Step 4: Gather some relevant keywords & launch a PPC campaign to
promote the ClickBank product.

Step 5: UNDERSTAND THIS: Make sure you use the proper hoplink
format! I cringe every time I see someone post an ad for a
ClickBank product & use the wrong link. Then they wonder why
they're not making any money! The correct format is:
http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net - It is NOT
http://www.some-vendor-site.com/?hop=affiliate - You MUST send
the visitor to CLICKBANK in order for the affiliate cookie to be
set & proper credit awarded for the sale.

Step 6: Keep your keyword bids low and test different ad versions
until you get one that pulls some traffic. If the ClickBank
product has even a half-decent sales page, you should be able to
make more than you spend on the ads. If it doesn't, you're either
paying too much for the keywords, or the sales page sucks - in
which case, dump it & try a different product.

That's all there is to it.

Re-invest your profits to launch & test new products/ad
campaigns. Branch-out and add Commission Junction products to the
mix. Grow slowly & use the money you've made to create your own
product. If you can't write, hire someone to do it for you. Have
some graphics created & set up a sales page of your own.

Repeat the process until you're making the kind of money you're
happy with. It isn't rocket science. I know it works. I've been
doing it this way myself & this method has allowed me to quit my
job & enjoy true freedom. Anybody (and I do mean ANYBODY) can do
this. There's no reason that you can't make money online &
finally tell your boss to kiss-off too.

Here's To Your Freedom! - Mike Nalbone

Make Money From Your Content Site

2008-09-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

By Derek Vaughan

If you're a Webmaster whose site receives even a modest amount of traffic, you've no doubt dreamed of the untold riches that lie untapped in your traffic stream. The burning question is: "How can I make the most money possible from my Website traffic?" This article will help you answer that question, as we explore several of the most common and profitable methods that are currently being employed to convert page views into dollars:

*Traditional banner advertising
*Pay-per-click (contextual) banner advertising
*Subscription revenue
*Affiliate and CPA programs
*Text links

We'll finish up with a review of the finer points of online selling.
Traditional Banner Advertising
One of the earliest and most prevalent forms of monetizing site traffic is the ubiquitous online banner. Originally most popular in the 468x60 pixel version, banners are now available in many different sizes and shapes. In fact, the Interactive Advertising Bureau now lists 16 standard ad units in its guidelines. It's not hard to find a site that uses banners: CNN displays a 728x90 banner at the top of the page, eBay uses a 468x60 banner spot at top of listings pages, and AOL displays banners of various sizes throughout the site.

Business Model and Mechanics
The basic business model of the banner is simple: the Website vendor sells page views (impressions) to the advertiser. There are 2 basic banner ad payment models: paying as you go for every thousand impressions delivered, and a flat fee that's charged regardless of the number of visitors who actually see the ad.
Under the pay-as-you-go model, the most common metric is cost-per-thousand (impressions), also known as CPM. Prices will vary depending on targeting, volume, term of commitment, and market forces. Typical CPMs for less targeted inventory can range from $0.25 to $5.00 per thousand impressions. Therefore, a media buyer who wishes to purchase 100,000 impressions at a $5 CPM will sign a contract for $5,000. Targeted impressions are worth much more to an advertiser. If your site attracts car enthusiasts who are an attractive demographic for a local or national car dealership, you can expect to command 10 times the rate of untargeted ad inventory. Typical CPMs for targeted inventory run between $10 to over $100 per thousand impressions.

It's also common for a site to charge a media buyer a flat fee for an advertising spot. Depending on the placement and traffic, the fees can be quite high. For instance, a fixed placement on the home page, in a prominent spot, with a 100% share of voice on a targeted site is quite desirable.
The advantage of running banner advertising on your site is that you may be able to get paid purely on the basis of page views, thereby monetizing all your available inventory. The drawback may be that not everyone is willing to pay simply to be seen: often, advertisers demand a response to the advertising. Media buyers may be looking for a per-click type of payment arrangement.
The main disadvantage of running banners on your site is probably the adoption of maintenance responsibilities for someone else's creative units, and the responsibility for a banner's performance even if the banner is poorly designed, or the advertiser's Website doesn't convert well.
To make real money from banner ads, it's essential that you have a clear idea of how many unique visitors visit your site, and how many page views they generate -- data that any decent Web analytics program will show. You then have a basis on which you can establish realistic expectations of how much money you might earn.
Next, decide where on your site you're going to display advertising banners. I would suggest testing ads both at the top and bottom of your pages -- this is a proven model that has worked well for large publishers. Once you've decided on ad placements, you should set up an ad server to display the banners, and keep track of pages views and click throughs. I would also suggest developing several banners that 'sell' the ad space, which can run when you have excess inventory. The banner might say something like, "See Your Ad Here -- Contact Us to Advertise," and link to your advertising rates page.
Once your ad server is set up, sell! This is a hurdle for many; we'll address it later in this article.
Pay-Per-Click (Contextual) Banner Advertising
With the emergence of Google's AdWords and AdSense programs, the business of pay-per-click banners has exploded. This type of ad unit offers the tantalizing combination of ease-of-use and payouts for each and every click, regardless of whether that visitor converts to sale or not. It's no wonder this unit is so popular with the likes of Slashdot, which shows PPC marketplace links on the right-hand side of the site's main categories and posts, and Go.com, which uses Yahoo! Search Sponsored Results to power its search function. And these are just two among many, many other sites.
Business Model and Mechanics
As the name implies, pay-per-click banners are ad units that pay out each time they're clicked (with obvious fraud prevention engaged to prevent self-enrichment). These ads are sometimes called 'contextual' advertising, as the ad suppliers will often regulate where specific ads are placed, to ensure that they're relevant to the Web page on which they're viewed, and the audience that sees them.
The bounty paid out on each click is usually determined by the value of that click as set by the advertiser. This is a nice way of saying that you really don't know what you're going to earn from any given click until you check the back-end reporting.
Don't neglect checking out alternatives to Google's AdSense program. While Google is large and established, many smaller services actually share more of the advertising revenue with you. For example, bidvertiser.com is one alternative that pays out at a much lower threshold ($10) than Google. Also, if you specialize in Webmaster or Web hosting-related traffic, a new service at Webmaster911 offers much higher revenue sharing than Google currently offers.
Subscription Revenue
Any site that has recurring or frequently refreshed content may be a good candidate for a subscription revenue model. News sites fall into this category, with the Wall Street Journal and CNN offering some form of subscription service for their online content.
Business Model and Mechanics
Subscription-based services migrated from the offline world to the online world. The most common forms of subscriptions were originally used for newspapers or magazines. The end-user of the news or information service typically pays a weekly or monthly recurring service fee (subscription fee) to have full access to the publisher's content. The practical implementation of this model online may work as follows.
A publisher offers additional coverage, or premium content that is only available to subscribers. Under this model, the content is usually in a special password-protected area of the site. A new subscriber may gain access to the content by filling out an online form including (usually) credit card information for billing purposes. Once the credit card transaction has been authorized, the subscriber is emailed a unique and secure password permitting access to the subscription-only content. Typical subscription fees are in the range of $10 per month. For example, CNN charges $12.99 per month for its 'NewsPass,' which permits access to premium streaming video content on the site. The Wall Street Journal currently charges $6.95 per month for access to online content for those not already subscribed to the print edition.
A hybrid of the pure subscription model is simply to charge an increasing fee as access to higher level services increases. This model is common in online forums, where additional charges are levied to access certain forums, or users' signature lines are expanded at higher fee levels.
Affiliate and CPA Programs
Affiliate programs have existed from the infancy of the Internet. Amazon.com was an early adopter, and was able to convince many Webmasters to offer relevant books for sale on the site in exchange for a share of the profits -- today, Amazon has an extensive affiliate program. Affiliate programs have matured considerably since then, and there are now many more options for making money from your site traffic.
Basic Business Model
Affiliate programs essentially work like this: the Website owner (affiliate) offers the merchant's goods for sale on the affiliate Website. When a visitor clicks through the affiliate link, an identification code is associated with the visit (usually via a cookie) and in the event that the visitor takes the appropriate action (visit, conversion to a lead, conversion to a sale) then the affiliate is paid by the merchant. The merchant or affiliate network will also usually provide tools for the affiliate to monitor various metrics, such as the number of visitors sent to a merchant site, the number of clicks or sales generated, and the earnings accumulated.
Affiliate relationships may be established either with each merchant directly, or through an established third-party affiliate network. The two most popular third party affiliate networks are Linkshare and Commission Junction.
Linkshare boasts that it has created the largest network of affiliate partners of any program provider -- over 10 million partnerships -- in addition to becoming the first affiliate network provider to achieve sustained profitability. Linkshare also lays claim to being a pioneer in online affiliate marketing. The Linkshare network is touted by the company as the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet.
Heidi Messer, President and COO of LinkShare Corporation sums up the service this way:
If you are looking to partner with the Internet's top brands, then LinkShare is the affiliate network to join. Find programs for Fortune 500 and other leading companies such as American Express, Avon, Dell, Office Depot, Apple Store, 1-800-Flowers, and more - only at LinkShare. We don't use cookies to track, so you don't have to worry about blocked or disabled cookies. And with our proprietary SynergyAnalytics application, LinkShare affiliates have a wealth of information and reports not available anywhere else to help them optimize their relationships. We're the leaders in the industry, and will continue to pave the way in both service and technology to foster profitable relationships online.
Text Links
In this era of ferociously competitive search engine optimization, competitive online marketing, and the race to appear first in the search engine results, an active market has arisen in the buying and selling of text links.
The beauty of text links from the Website owner's (or seller's) perspective is this: in order to boost search engine placement, the link must go directly to the Web page that's being optimized. There can be no tracking mechanism, or third party ad serving to interrupt the click. Therefore, these links are not scrutinized in the same manner that more conventional advertising is. It's simply not that important how much traffic comes through the link, or whether it's really being noticed by site visitors at all. This means you can have the links tucked away at the very bottom of your pages in a footer, and use a small font. The links can be very unobtrusive to your regular site traffic: as long as your Website meets the buyer's criteria, they will continue to pay for the link. Of course, as the likes of the TopXML and phpbb sites show, text links can be cleverly integrated into a site's design to provide a prominent advertising feature.
So what criteria do buyers look for, and what are they willing to pay? You can check the spot market for text links at sites like http://www.linkadage.com/Auction/XcAuctionPro.asp.
Another benefit of text link selling is that you don't have to really maintain the 'ad' at all. As long as the link is active on the page, you've done your part. This is much less labor and resource intensive than building an ad server into your site, rotating ads, and keeping creatives up-to-date.
Finally, as if it weren't already a great deal, you can have up to 20 text links on a page without suffering any negative consequences in the search engines. So, even if you only sell your links for $25 each (read: cheap) you can still net $500 per month just for letting the links sit there.
A Word on Selling
Let's face it: even the most attractive inventory won't move unless someone gets out there and sells it. That someone may have to be you, if you're an entrepreneur. Many people view selling with disdain, or they hate the rejection that goes hand-in-hand with the selling profession. You've got to get over this in order to be successful in translating your page views into dollars. If you can't do it yourself, then work out a commission-only arrangement with someone who can sell your inventory.
Jean Landry is a sales executive with The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper, daily offering readers from coast to coast unparalleled national, international and business reporting, analysis and commentary. The Globe and Mail has nearly 1,000,000 readers each weekday and even more on weekends: their online version at globeandmail.com attracts over 2.5 million visitors per month.
Jean offers the following key selling points for Webmasters:

Know your audience. Conduct a user survey and collect research when your visitors sign up for newsletters, pdf's, and registrations. Carefully profile your visitors. You may think you know who your visitors are, but you'll need to prove it to people, especially when HP says they want to buy up 10 million impressions from you for $50,000/month -- they'll most certainly want more than who you think is coming to your site.

Know your competition. Find out what your competitors are charging for their ad space, what ad unit sizes they are offering and what advertisers want. You may keep an eye on your competitors, as well, to determine their inventory churn or rollover. If you go back every 2 to 4 weeks and you see new advertisers all the time, it either means the site has a really aggressive sales person, or that it can't return results for advertisers, so clients are canceling.

Understand the language and understand the benefits and uniqueness of online advertising as an advertising medium. What's a cpm? What's a clickthrough? What does CPA stand for? A few months ago, we interviewed people for an online sales position and candidates couldn't answer those questions. Spend a little less time watching TV and a little more time reading Clickz.com, eMarketer.com, and MarketingFind.com, or check out adglossary.com. Industry knowledge and research can really help you move your inventory and sell online advertising. For example, I bet you didn't know that Internet accounts for about the same % of media time for consumers as TV now -- each accounts for 30% of their media usage time! However only 4% of media budgets are going towards online, while about 25% are going towards TV ...sounds like a pretty good opportunity to reach a huge untapped audience doesn't it?

Be creative! Online advertising is boring and predictable and doomed for failure if all you are going to sell is the standard 468x60 banner at the top of your Web page. Ever heard of banner blindness or banner burnout? It means your visitors tend to ignore the most common or basic forms of advertising online if you don't put some thought into their delivery and placement. You need to think about offering content sponsorships on your site, targeting your ads to geographic regions, day of week delivery, etc. Think strategic and offer strategic advertising solutions. If you have a section of your site dedicated to Web design, why not think of a creative way for a major brand's new Web service to sponsor it with customized buttons, content, or an online custom quote service?

Be aggressive in your sales...but be professional! And remember online advertising is not new, it's not trivial, and it shouldn't be given away for free or always be performance based. Don't be pushed around by arrogant media buyers who think that they can bully you into not paying their balance just because they didn't make 15 sales (not to mention the fact that they never signed a cost per acquisition agreement -- CPA).

Selecting Appropriate Keywords is Vital in Dental Internet Marketing

2008-09-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

by Ali Husayni

March 27, 2008 -- HIGHLANDS RANCH, COLORADO -- When it comes to search engine positioning, selecting appropriate keywords is the most important component of a successful campaign.

It is imperative for dentists seeking to optimize their Web sites and increase traffic to them to know what words people enter into search engines when looking for their practice, said Sinai Marketing Founder and President Ali Husayni, a search engine positioning expert.

There are many tools SEP experts use to determine those keywords. One of the most effective tools actually is free- Google's Keyword Tool.

An Internet-savvy dentist might question the wisdom of paying a SEP expert to use a free tool, instead of doing it himself or herself. That is where experience comes into play.

"It's a free tool, but it's important to know how to use it to get the best results out of it," Husayni said.

Knowing how competitive a keyword is determines how difficult achieving first-page placement will be. That information enables a SEP expert to give clients an idea of how long it might take to get on the first page of search results and what the SEP campaign must entail to achieve that.

Selecting the Right Type and Number of Keywords

Search engine positioning can be described as a never-ending battle, Husayni said. Dentists interested in getting to the first page of search engine results and staying there must maintain a steady campaign to achieve those results.

The client also must provide input as to the specific keywords to target for their Web site.

"We can offer input on which ones they need to use, but we must work closely with the client to determine their keywords list," he said.

That keyword list also must include variations of different keywords. For instance, Los Angeles cosmetic dentist is a different key phrase than cosmetic dentist in Los Angeles. Both of these variations must be included in the keywords list and steps must be taken to get positions for both of them.

"We don't want to just have one keyword because then we're putting all of our eggs in one basket," Husayni said. "We must have as many keywords as the site allows, and we must try to position for all of them."

A general rule of thumb is not to optimize one HTML page for more than three keywords.

Inbound Links Another element SEP experts look at is the number of links a Web site needs from other Web sites to move up in position, Husayni said.

These inbound links can be created by having other Web sites link to the client's Web site and by posting documents on the Internet that provide optimized keywords that link back to the client's site, he said.

Read the full article titled Selecting Appropriate Keywords is Vital in Dental Internet Marketing

Learn More If you would like to learn more about selecting keywords, link building and search engine optimization, or you would like a free analysis performed to see how a SEP expert might assist you in marketing your Web site, call Sinai Marketing toll free: 877-932-6559, or (303)-932-6559 for international callers. Or visit the Sinai Marketing Web site: www.sinaimarketing.com.

About Sinai Marketing Sinai Marketing is a search engine positioning firm that utilizes knowledge of the Internet market and ongoing research to develop and implement search engine positioning strategies for its clients. Ali Husayni created the Sinai Marketing firm, based in Highlands Ranch, Colo., in 2004. Husayni serves as the firm's chief executive officer and search engine positioning expert.

Â© 2008 Sinai Marketing. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Sinai Marketing is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this article is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

Selecting the Right Type and Number of Keywords

Search engine positioning can be described as a never-ending battle, Husayni said. Dentists interested in getting to the first page of search engine results and staying there must maintain a steady campaign to achieve those results.

The client also must provide input as to the specific keywords to target for their Web site.

"We can offer input on which ones they need to use, but we must work closely with the client to determine their keywords list," he said.

That keyword list also must include variations of different keywords. For instance, Los Angeles cosmetic dentist is a different key phrase than cosmetic dentist in Los Angeles. Both of these variations must be included in the keywords list and steps must be taken to get positions for both of them.

"We don't want to just have one keyword because then we're putting all of our eggs in one basket," Husayni said. "We must have as many keywords as the site allows, and we must try to position for all of them."

A general rule of thumb is not to optimize one HTML page for more than three keywords.

Inbound Links Another element SEP experts look at is the number of links a Web site needs from other Web sites to move up in position, Husayni said.

These inbound links can be created by having other Web sites link to the client's Web site and by posting documents on the Internet that provide optimized keywords that link back to the client's site, he said.

Read the full article titled Selecting Appropriate Keywords is Vital in Dental Internet Marketing

Learn More If you would like to learn more about selecting keywords, link building and search engine optimization, or you would like a free analysis performed to see how a SEP expert might assist you in marketing your Web site, call Sinai Marketing toll free: 877-932-6559, or (303)-932-6559 for international callers. Or visit the Sinai Marketing Web site: www.sinaimarketing.com.

Best Way to Make Money Online

2008-09-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

By Willie Davis Platinum Quality Author

Are you looking for the best way to make money online using free traffic methods? If you are new to your online venture and are scared of overspending on your marketing efforts; then you will definitely want to read this article in its entirety. We will take the time to discuss the best way to make money online using free traffic methods.

If you were to start an offline business then you know that there is no way to really begin your business without spending money; whether it is your own money or someone else's money. However the beauty of internet marketing anyone can begin making money online; even if you do not have a lot of start up capitol. So what is the best way to make money online if you do not know a lot about marketing or using the internet to begin making money?

Affiliate marketing is the best way for any newbie to begin making money online. You do not have to have your own site or product. There are many affiliate networks you can join to begin promoting other people's products. So what is an affiliate network you ask? It is a market place that has thousands of products in several different niches that you can browse and literally begin making money today. However when you begin browsing these sites you want to know what people are willing to spend money on. Otherwise you can spend a lot time putting effort into something that does not work.

Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks that people join. They keep track of all your sales for you and will even give you statistics of what people are willing to spend their money on. I highly recommend it for anyone who is just beginning. You can begin getting biweekly checks from them whenever your commissions reach $25; so the pay out is extremely low.

If you can get enough traffic to the sales page that the affiliate program provides you can begin making sales today. This is the most important part of any business; whether it is an online business or offline business. Without any customers you can forget about making money in any venture.

However when you are first beginning I highly recommend not spending too much money on your marketing efforts; as it can be a huge learning curve and not many people understand how to really use PPC (pay per click.)

If you are looking for the best way to make money online using free traffic methods; visit our site below. Yes you will still need a little bit of start up capitol; however I can guarantee that in just 30 days you will begin getting commission checks from Clickbank. If you are willing to follow a proven system that will take you step by step on how to succeed online with an affiliate program. The best way to begin making money is to follow someone who had success in the area you are looking to have success in!

Simplicity With Money Works!

2008-09-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

by Sharman Lawson

Some people say we are in a recession and some people say we are headed towards a depression. However, no matter where the economy ends up, unfortunately, most people are living the "American dream" paycheck to paycheck and that has created problems for many. With downsizing, reengineering, economic slowdown and everything else wrong with the economy, wouldn't it be nice to have a life of simplicity?

What is simplicity? Webster's Dictionary defines simplicity as "freedom from complexity, absence of luxury, or a simple state of quality." Most American's lives have become very complex, because they have given themselves a false sense of security by not using common sense to manage and spend their money.

Simplicity is a way of thinking and doing things--it's a way of life!

It doesn't matter how much money you make or do not make. Simplicity is a way to improve the quality of your life while making headway toward your financial goals. So how do you move towards simplicity? Simplicity is getting back to the basics of what's important in life. For example:

* spending quality time with your family, kids, and friends

* watching a good comedy eating popcorn at home

* lying in bed reading a good book

* having a quiet picnic in the park

* walking on the beach

* going to a free concert on the waterfront

* having time to hug your child

* setting aside time to just "think"

* letting people know you love them, and

* taking some time for you

That's right, simplicity is FREE--it doesn't cost you a penny! Simplicity says bigger isn't always better, newer isn't always nicer, and more isn't always more desirable. It's being content with the little pleasures in life. The Bible says Godliness with contentment is much gain. Simplicity is a hidden treasure that can determine the way you think, spend, and respect your money!

Debt is the opposite of simplicity! Debt causes a lot of pain, stress, sleepless nights, and can ruin the best of relationships. Debt says live a materialistic life, have expensive do-dads you can't afford to maintain, work 60 hours per week, live paycheck to paycheck, have no time for your spouse or kids, have a car payment as high as a mortgage, and have a closet full of designer clothes you can't afford to clean.

Simplicity says get the house, car, clothes, or bike I can afford, start to save for the future, stop trying to impress family and friends, and be willing to make small sacrifices in order to have a better financial future. Simplicity allows you to stop, look, and listen to your mind, heart, and spirit. It gets rid of the clutter in your life and replaces it with personal and financial freedom.

Today you have a choice. You can choose the complex life that debt affords you or choose to go back to the simplicities of life that brings freedom. I've chosen freedom, will you?

Sharman Lawson is a debt, money and financial coach, speaker, and author of the book 12 Steps to Eliminate Debt Forever. Sharman Lawson and her husband paid off all their debt including their mortgage, in less than five years, on a combined income of less than $50,000 a year. Contact Sharman Lawson at 770.429.9670 for a FREE 30 minute consultation. Visit her website at www.sharmanlawson.com.

How To Crank Out Million Dollar Product Ideas From Scratch

2008-09-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

(C) Copyright Ewen Chia, http://www.EzineArticle.com

Are you currently stuck trying to think up ideas for that million dollar product?

I’ve got a surefire formula to get you unstuck and on the road to generating more profitable product ideas than you can handle.

First, let’s talk about the real reason people hit a blank wall when they start brainstorming. The sad fact is that our brains are a bit lazy. The human mind hates sustained concentration and always seeks the shortest, quickest and easiest path to solving any problem.

When you sit down with pen and paper in hand and ask yourself, “What product do I want to create?”, you’ve just given your brain an overwhelmingly open-ended question…

The problem is that the term ’product” is far too abstract. It includes literally thousands of possibilities. Your mind gets overwhelmed and doesn’t know where to begin. Think of your mind as a young child on a playground. You want to give him a clear set of boundaries. He can play freely and safely as long as he knows your parameters – but set him loose with the command to “do anything”, and he’s likely to run out of your control.

Fortunately, there’s a formula you can use to take control of the brainstorming process… This formula gives your mind something it absolutely loves: order and categorization.

When you use this formula, ideas will come to you automatically. The reason is that you are giving your mind a logical map to branch out from, rather than asking it to start in the middle of nowhere.

Are you ready to learn the formula for churning out million dollar product ideas at will? Here it is:

==> Consumer Class + Product Purpose = Winning Idea!

Each of the above variable represents a set of questions you must answer. Your answers do not lock you into anything. Instead, they create a series of sub categories to guide you in your brainstorming sessions. These sub categories enable you to open up new tightly defined niches the farther you go.

(1) Let’s start with the “Consumer Class” variable...

Who is your consumer? Is he/she:

- An individual?
- A small business?
- A large business?
- An end user at home or at work?
- A single product consumer?
- A bulk product consumer?

Also ask the question of what your consumer is interested in, and which market niche he/she belongs to.

(2) Now, let’s look at the “Product Purpose” variable...

What is the purpose of this product? Is it:

- Pure information and education?
- Aimed at solving a problem quickly and efficiently?
- Designed for entertainment?
- Factual or fictional?
- Text only or will it include software, audio or video?
- Complete as is or will it require updates?
- Suitable for download or better off rolled into a membership site?

You can even add additional variables to plug into the formula if you want.

Notice how each variable opens up further room for categorization? Let’s say that you chose “a single product consumer” for your consumer class variable, and “fiction” for your product purpose variable. What you really have is a fictional entertainment product. At this point, you have a new map to branch off from.

What comes to mind when you think of a single product consumer? E-books come to mind. Maybe the product should be a work of fiction in e-book format? This sounds good, so now all you have to do is figure out what types of fiction people are actually searching for online…

The next step is to go to overture.com and type in some keywords. In this case, I tried out “e-book”, “fiction” and “stories”. It appears that Harry Potter e-books are popular, but you risk copyright infringement on that topic. The number one niche for “fiction” happens to be “fan fiction”. Fan fiction usually involves new story lines (often of an explicit sexual nature) between popular science fiction characters. We’ll pass on that one as well.

However, the keyword “stories” pulls up something interesting: ghost stories! Here’s an area where you could collect a lot of content from the public domain (For tips and secrets on using public domain for profit, you can find excellent information in “Public Domain Riches” at http://tinyurl.com/5xkwn).

You could also hire a professional fiction writer from Elance.com and have him or her put together some ghost stories or old wives’ tales for you…and voila! Instant niche product.

You can come up with other fun ideas within this one niche by continuing to play with the variables. For example, if you repackage the product purpose in the audio-visual category, you might come up with other ideas like:

- A CD or downloadable set of mp3’s containing “spooky sounds”
- A set of graphics or screensavers for Halloween
- Some novelty software like a virtual ouija board or ghost-hunting game

Now, wasn’t that easy? Four new ideas generated almost instantly and you didn’t even have to break a sweat...just fill in the blanks of this formula and the product ideas pop out like magic!

A powerful way to reap huge profits here is to act on the right ideas fast. Turn million dollar ideas into million dollar products.

If you're stuck with the actual process of product creation, look to proven blueprints like "Create Your Own Products In A Flash" (http://www.l1nk.com/urr/productsinaflash.html) or "How To Create Best Sellers Online" (http://www.l1nk.com/urr/bestselling.html).

These will help you churn out profitable products easily in no time!

How To Make Money From Your Blog

2008-09-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

by : Steve Pulina

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

* blog publishing software
* HTML/CSS
* blog comments (and comment spam)
* RSS/syndication
* feed aggregators
* pings
* trackbacks
* full vs. partial feeds
* blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
* search engines
* search engine optimization (SEO)
* page rank
* social bookmarking
* tagging
* contextual advertising
* affiliate programs
* traffic statistics
* email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Text Link AdsAutomated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment. :)

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details.
Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum.

This Affiliate Program Tutorial aims to give you a quick overview.

2008-08-29T01:42:00.000-07:00

by: Allan Gardyne

It's your road map to success as an affiliate.

I've been earning a good living from affiliate programs since 1998. Based on that experience, this tutorial tells you the 18 steps to take to generate a useful income from affiliate programs.

No tricks. No gimmicks. Just solid, reliable methods designed to work for years.

You have the choice of many different ways of earning affiliate commissions.

In my experience, you'll have your best chance of success if you do the following. Find a niche and create a useful, interesting, content-rich, keyword-rich website on one topic and weave in affiliate links and AdSense ads.

This method – with the more recent addition of AdSense ads – has worked beautifully for me since 1998.

I urge you to master this basic method. It's a bit like serving an apprenticeship.

As part of your apprenticeship you'll learn SEO (search engine optimization) skills, copywriting skills and various other Internet marketing skills which will prove to be invaluable, whatever route you choose next.

With any luck, you'll have a bit of fun, too! I do.

I include Google's AdSense in this tutorial. Strictly speaking, AdSense is an advertising network. However, in many ways it's similar to an affiliate program. I think AdSense is fantastic. It's free to join, free to use and easy to use.

It's often much easier to earn good money from AdSense than affiliate programs, so it's essential that you include AdSense in your plans.

OK. Let's get started...

1. Set a goal.

If you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you're going.

Let's start with a modest goal. Say you aim to earn a total of $300 (US) a month in affiliate commissions and AdSense revenue. Imagine what you could do with that money. A holiday? A better lifestyle?

I've kept the amount low, because it's important that you believe you can do this. Achieve small successes first, see the money in your hands or in your bank account, and then increase your goals.

Perhaps you have much larger goals. That's OK. Whatever your goals, I strongly recommend that you serve your apprenticeship by taking these 18 steps. They'll give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.

2. Find your niche.

Read Ken Evoy's free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits you and your interests.

Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times.

Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.

You'll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It's much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.

Choose a topic that is easy to write about.

Even if you've already chosen a niche, I urge you to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make you change your mind.

You can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck – and a bit of keyword research – you may be able to do both.

Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until you've taken the next two steps...

3. Choose a profitable niche.

Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you've chosen. Because you're planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

You're going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don't rely on guesswork.

You must do this BEFORE you start building your web site. That's critically important.

Here's a useful free tool I like using for quick, rough keyword research: pixelfast.com/overture/

Type in a phrase, for example, "hiking boots", click "Go", follow the instructions, and you can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) network of websites.

You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.

Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.

Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. You can do that by playing around with Google's free Keyword Tool.

For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as "recipe" and click on "Get More Keywords". Pretend you're willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows - 100. (It won't work properly if you ignore this.) Over on the right side of the page, make sure that "Cost and position estimates" is selected.

The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases. Try entering a different word, say "debt" or "hosting", click on "Re-calculate" and watch how the CPC changes.

You don't HAVE to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.

If you use Site Build It you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought of without it.

Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you'll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.

Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.

For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see: https://www.google.com/adsense/

Publishers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you're planning to create and look at their AdSense ads. You can also use AdSense's preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.

4. Research affiliate merchants.

Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match your topic.

You want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. You can search the AssociatePrograms.com affiliate directory for ideas.

Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.

If you're lucky, you'll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions – the sort reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com.

You'll earn repeat commissions when "your" customers make more purchases.

5. Build a useful, interesting web site on your niche.

Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.

Show your personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. You need to connect with your visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like.

There's no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a web site. For that, you'll need a good instruction manual.

If you're short of money, you can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies.

You'll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual written specifically for affiliates.

Here are the two best options:

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For keen do-it-your-selfers, I recommend Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook.

Rosalind is a real been-there-done-that super affiliate.

Her instruction manual shows you how she builds very successful sites using web authoring software.

It starts right at the beginning, discussing topics such as myths about doing business online, mistakes to avoid, how to choose the best topic, how to choose the right domain name, etc.

The book, updated in May 2006, takes you step-by-step through the whole process.

One particularly useful feature is her explanation of how she achieves high conversion rates (visitor-to-sales ratios), achieving conversion rates of 4% or 6% while most affiliates are happy with 1%.

Another of the strengths of the book is her descriptions of a wide variety of ways to get traffic to your site. This is important - too many affiliates rely on just one or two traffic-generating methods. The more traffic-gemerating methods you have, the safer your business is.

Rosaland is genuinely successful, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now she's also a very successful author, with sales of more $1 million from her book, which is excellent value.

When you learn from her, you're learning from a winner.

Learn more about Rosalind's Super Affiliate Handbook here.
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For affiliates who want to simplify things as much as possible and automate the tedious techie stuff, I recommend Ken Evoy's Site Build It (SBI).

SBI is a site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools, all in one place.

Once you have SBI, you don't have to go scurrying all over the Net adding more tools and software. You have almost all you need in one package, so you can concentrate on the fun part – creating useful, interesting content.

(Once you have SBI, the only addition you need to buy occasionally is a cheap, one-day subscription to Wordtracker. It's useful to double check the SBI brainstorming results against Wordtracker results.)

SBI comes with a newly updated, truly comprehensive instruction manual, a step-by-step Action Guide.

SBI is the tool I give my assistants.

Ken Evoy's instruction manual is doing my work for me. First it taught Rupert and now it's teaching Ros how to build a high quality, successful, revenue-generating site.

You could build a site without SBI, but using it saves you time and effort by simplifying the process.

SBI teaches you how to optimize your web pages so they'll be found in search engines. After building a page, you click the "Analyze It" button and it tells you what you need to do to improve it.

The SBI technique really works. Two of the SBI sites that Rupert built are included in the case studies on the SBI site.

See the proof in the SBI case studies

6. Add affiliate links.

As you write the articles for your site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as you write the articles. Speak to that visitor.

Your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy.

One successful technique is to gradually lead your visitor towards a purchase. Start by outlining a problem, discuss a good solution that has worked for you, and end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, "Find out more here."

Your task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that's the merchant's job) but to presell, to warm up your visitors. You want your visitors in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when they arrive at the merchant's site.

For superb advice on preselling, I strongly recommend you join Ken Evoy's 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. It's free to join.

Ken is an absolute whiz at preselling and he's renowned for working extremely hard to help his affiliates succeed. He has a superb program. It's been No.1 in my Top 10 for several years.

7. Place AdSense ads on your site.

Here's an excellent free AdSense tutorial.

If you have a good, popular site, it's remarkably easy to make good money with AdSense.

8. Get links.

First, link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to you.

This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular.

Now you see why I said build a useful, interesting web site. If you do that, people are more likely to link to your site.

Here's an article I wrote describing how to get reciprocal links.

9. Anchor text.

You'll also need to understand the importance of anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site.

To search engines, anchor text is very important.

10. List your site in major directories and niche directories in your industry.

You probably already know about Yahoo! (good but expensive), DMOZ (often takes months to get into) and Zeal (tricky to get into; for non-commercial sites).

Here are some more directories (some charge a fee):

Gimpsysearch and directory
Skaffe
Joeant
GoGuides
Business.com
SevenSeek
ThisIsOurYear
Looksmart (probably too expensive)
BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind

Guides to web directories

David Mahler has a Guide to Web Directories. It's a good list of recommended web directories.

Here's another list: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php

How to find niche directories:

*

Go to Search It! (It's a very handy free research tool.)
*

Scroll to the Search Category, "Specialty Hubs and Directories"
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Choose one of the 4 options in STEP 2
*

Read the "Click Here for Information..." help before proceeding
*

Complete STEPS 3 and 4, and then click on Search It!
*

Read the tutorial. It tells you what to do with the search results
*

Get your search results. You should be able to find relevant, themed hub sites and directories which will list your site. Some charge a fee, some are free.

11. Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them (more challenging). This step isn't absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if you do it. Now you understand why it was so important that you chose a topic that was easy to write about.

12. Add more pages and get more links.

Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (you do research at Wordtracker for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to your site.

Make friends with other web site owners, and more people will link to you...

13. Be patient.

If your new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and you'll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.

You're likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. You're likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk.

Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If you're persistent and get the details right, the process I'm describing works beautifully.

Learn something new every day. Do something to improve your business every day. If you do that, success is inevitable.

14. Expect to see signs of success.

Eventually, because of all the links to your site on other sites, Google, Yahoo! and MSN will find your site and start sending you traffic.

Perhaps around the three-month or four-month stage you'll be receiving 100 visitors a day. Visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to you and asking you to link to them.

Keep at it. You're just getting warmed up.

15. The payoff...

About six months down the road, after little expense but quite a lot of hard work and research, you hit your magical $300 a month mark, from affiliate sales and from AdSense ads on your site.

Depending on the niche you've chosen and the skills you've learned, you might earn considerably more than $300.

Perhaps after 12 months, you'll be earning $500 to $1,000 a month from your site.

The checks keep coming in, month after month, even when you take a little vacation. You start telling friends how easy affiliate marketing is, and are puzzled when they're not convinced.

Of course, it's not really easy. It just seems easy after you've done the hard work.

...or the NON-payoff

If you've merely scanned the instruction manual and jumped right in without doing any research and built a "Make Money on the Internet" site, you'll probably earn very little. A search on Google for "make money" displays more than 4 million pages. If one of those is yours, you have a LOT of competition.

If you did this and it isn't working for you, go back to step 1 and start again.

16. Tweak your site.

To boost your conversion rate (your visitor-to-sales ratio), try little experiments, one thing at a time.

Try changing the heading on a page, the words, the colors, the placement of your links. With each change wait until about 1,000 visitors have seen the change, and monitor your affiliate commissions to see if they rise or fall.

You do this because you understand that if 1% of your visitors are buying and tiny changes boost your success rate to 2%, you'll DOUBLE your commissions.

17. The future

When you reach your goal of $300 a month, you wonder whether you should expand your site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an autoresponder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell ... and turn it into a portal. You dream big. Perhaps you even start dreaming of having your own affiliates promoting your reports for you...

Or perhaps you just research another little overlooked niche and start on your next simple little, low-maintenance money-generating site.

It can be done. The main ingredient needed is persistence. Been there, done that, and I have a very nice lifestyle to prove it.

The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that's all you earn, you've done something "wrong". You haven't chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, you haven't built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, you haven't learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or you haven't attracted enough good quality links to your site.

That's the wonderful thing about this business. You can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don't make TOO many mistakes.

18. Take the first step.

That's the one that matters most.

I suggest you go back and read through this affiliate program tutorial again.

Picture yourself owning a successful Internet business. Picture yourself opening letters and finding checks in them.

Imagine enjoying yourself spending the money, perhaps even giving up your day job so that you can concentrate on your own business.

Now take the first step.

And when you've quit your day job, please write and tell me. I love getting emails like that.

Make Money

2008-08-29T01:39:00.000-07:00

Money Making Hobbies
by: Steve Gillman

Which ones can be money making hobbies? A friend made a life-sized cow out of plywood once. He painted it, put it in the yard, and people started asing if he would sell it. He soon had a waiting list of customers for his plywood cows. With a profit of about fifty dollars each, he wasn't getting rich, but isn't making money with your hobby more fun than a job?

Money Making Hobbies - Two Approaches

The first approach is obvious: Look for ways to make money with your existing hobby or hobbies. What do you produce that other people might want? Do you collect dolls? You might produce a newsletter for other doll collectors, or buy and sell doll furniture.

The second approach is to think of all the hobbies you might take up that can generate a second income for you. When I found that I really enjoyed making walking sticks as a hobby, I sold more than a thousand dollars worth one summer. There are probably things you would enjoy doing that can make some money.

Get creative in your thinking. Look at the list of activities or hobbies below, and see if you can think of a way they can be used to make money. Do you like to travel? You might become a tour guide, or write articles for magazines.

Painting ... Crafts of all sorts ... Sewing ... Caring for animals ... Talking ... Playing with computers ... Traveling ... Rock Climbing ... Stamp Collecting ... backpacking

How To Make Money With ANY Hobby

In the past, you could argue that not all hobbies can be money making hobbies. This is no longer true. If you go to my sites, you'll notice the ads. I just copy and paste some code (no selling involved), and make a little bit everytime you click on one. In a matter of days, with almost no money, you can have a website up where you write about your favorite hobby, and collect for the advertising clicks.

Something You Must Know!!!!!!!!!!

2008-08-29T01:29:00.000-07:00

by: Shaj Mohamed

Paid surveys are being promoted as an easy way to make money online. Some ads promise you up to $250 per hour for taking paid surveys. Are they realistic? Can one really expect to earn that much money from online paid surveys? Let us find out the answers to these questions.

Such advertisements are usually put up by paid survey database companies like Surveyscout. They charge you for giving access to a database of market research companies, often in the range of $30 to $60. They typically have 400 to 500 survey companies in their database.

Is it worth paying these companies to get access to such a database? Whatever information you get from these companies, you can get for free on the internet on many free online survey sites. Secondly, these survey database companies do not send any surveys by themselves, and you have to join each market research company in their database individually to get any surveys. In addition, most of the survey companies in their databases are good for nothing. Only about 40 to 50 survey companies are really worth joining.

What does this mean? If you are planning to try online surveys, you never have to pay anyone. You can get the list of the best survey companies for free on the internet. You can join them and get started.

Now let us take a closer look at on the rewards offered by paid online surveys. Survey companies can be divided into those which reward you with cash for each survey, those that give you points which can be redeemed for cash, and those which enter you into sweepstakes or prizedraws.

Survey companies that pay cash give $1 to $20 or more per online survey depending on many factors. This group includes many of the best survey sites like American Consumer Opinion Panel, Surveysavvy, Ciao Surveys, Greenfield online(Gozing) and Pinecone Research. You can expect to get 1 to 4 surveys per month from each site.

Surveys that reward you with points let you accumulate reward points which you can later redeem for cash or gifts. Some of the most reputed market research companies like Globaltestmarket, Opinion Outpost, NFO Mysurvey and Lightspeed Research reward you in this way.

Yet other companies enter you into draws for cash or gifts as reward for taking surveys. Although many people don't like this form of reward system, your chances of getting the prize is quite good as the pool to select the prize winners is usually small. Some good survey companies that follow this reward system are Synovate, NPD Research, NOP World (Surveys.com), ECN Research and Nielsen Netratings.

Another important factor which determines how much you can earn from online surveys is your profile, particularly your country. Generally residents of the USA and Canada can expect to make more money from paid surveys, as there are more market research companies operating in these countries. Also they get more frequent surveys. However, participants from other countries can also hope to make some good extra money from paid online surveys.

All said and done, the maximum earnings an average person can expect from doing paid surveys is not more than $200 to $300 per month. This can be a good source of extra income for some people. But the claims that paid surveys can make you rich or replace your real job are largely unfounded. Hence, it is always best to stay with free paid surveys.

Make Money Today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2008-08-29T01:13:00.000-07:00

by: Costa Dedes

Make money successEver heard of the Swap Clix Method?
"How would you like to earn an extra $100, $500, or $1000 every week with 15 minutes of your time?"
Im not pulling your leg!
Make money 15 minutes from now!
Discover the secrets of Swap Clix! New methods combine the power of Google's AdWords and AdSense -never seen before!
Are you like me? Trying to make money on the internet but failing at every attempt? I spent all sorts of money on how to make money products, guaranteed income products, MLM marketing. You name it I've been there.
Then one day I had an idea. An amazing idea actually.

I have found a way to create a never ending stream of income. This method has never been released to the public before. Very few, if anyone has implemented this. I have decided to share my idea with you. The only thing I ask is you do not share this information with anyone.
Why am I sharing this information you ask? Well the main reason is I spent so much money on programs that promised me riches. None of them have delivered. I know how you feel, and I want to put an end to it. I guarantee you will make money with my system or I will refund you 100% of your purchase price!

Now before I get to deep into the details let me tell you what this program is NOT.
This is not a promote my affiliate program to make money! This is not a put ads in the newspaper to make money! This is not a stuff envelope scam to make money! This is not a make money with surveys program! This is not a paid to read email program! This is not a paid to click program! This is not like anything you have ever seen!
YOU DO NOT EVEN NEED TO SELL ANYTHING!

Earn Money Online

2008-08-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

By Anna Williams

Earn money online. Easier said than done, it seems. Yet still, a lot of people are looking for ways to make money. If one starts to look around, one will find that there are lots of ways of making money on the Internet, even in these days of economic slowdown.

The Internet has opened up many new money making opportunities that were not possible before. Some skeptics may say it is virtually impossible to succeed online, or that it is difficult to make money at home, but this is not necessarily true.

One of the key methods of making money on the Internet is having an honest product or service to offer. After that, it is simply a matter of getting that product or those services known and delivered.

So how do you factor the Internet into this proposition of how to earn money online?

Well, due to the ability of just about anyone to log on to the Internet, at any location at any time that they have access to a computer with a connection, you can essentially have an online "store" or business that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at little or no running costs. This is one way to work from home.

So what are a few of the ways to earn money online?

One of the ways that people earn money online is through building websites around specific subjects that people are interested in. They work to get their site into the top ten results of search engine (such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) for related high-traffic keywords. Once the site is in the top 10 rankings it can get hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors per day - depending on the subject they choose.

When you have enough correctly-targeted visitors arriving on your site, you will start to make money with the site.

How do you set up the site to earn money?

Well, there are actually many ways to make money from your website.

One can offer products for sale; this is a good way to make money. But it requires one have a product to sell. Believe it or not, this is much easier to solve than one might think.

There are many companies that sell products online. Most of them will offer a commission if you help sell their products for them. These are called "affiliate programs." They have the product, you offer the product for sale on your site, and when you get a sale from your site, the company will give you a commission. It is very simple to set this up. The company will give you special text links or banner ads which you can add to your site. These links are embedded with tracking codes which will enable you to be credited for the sale and paid a commission.

This can be a relatively easy way to make money online, once you have sufficient traffic to your site.

The beauty of this system of generating income, is that you don't have to deal with any of the details of production, shipping, customer service, etc. All you have to do to make money is refer the sales.

The above is just one of the ways to make money on the Internet. There are many more.

Another method used to make money is the Google AdSense program.

There are many companies that want to advertise on the web. A lot of the advertising is done by "pay per click" advertising programs run by companies such as Google, Yahoo, and others. You provide ad-space on your web page, and they place the ads. When people arrive to your website and click the ads, you receive a small commission for each click (the amount of the payment depends on the ad).

A high traffic-page receiving clicks on ads can earn tens or even hundreds of dollars per day in AdSense commissions.

There are many more ways to make money on the Internet. But the above should give you a general idea of how simple it can be to earn money online.

But, although I say it's simple, that doesn't mean you won't have to work for it - or that it's an easy way to make money fast. That would be a lie.

This is what the famous "dot com bust" was all about; people thinking they could just set up an "Internet business" do nothing, and make lots of money.

One of the really great things about the Internet business opportunity, is that you can do it at your own pace. In fact, while working from home in your spare time, you can establish it, bit by bit.

I'm not saying that this would be the fastest way, but it is a safe and it is doable. You do not have to quit your job, and you can start this as a part-time home business.

This is a way to make money at home, through what we call "passive income" or "residual income." As you build your site and get more traffic to it, your income builds up, bit by bit.

What qualifications do you need, to earn money online while working from home?

None whatsoever. There are many work-from-home moms who make money on the Internet. And many people without college degrees or even high-school diplomas are earning hundreds of thousands online.

But one would need a willingness to learn, and to devote some time to setting up your business at home. You have to be willing to work for it.

If you are not willing to work, it is better to buy a lottery ticket. But that is leaving things up to chance, and you will only make money fast if you have the winning number.

You do need a computer, an Internet connection, and probably webhosting (which costs a few dollars per month and usually allows you to host multiple websites on one account). Free webhosting can also be found, as well as free blog accounts. While these free accounts also provide many ways to earn money online, they are far more limited than paid accounts. In my opinion, the limits this will put on your traffic and your income is not worth the few dollars per month that you will save.

You can find free publications and reference materials online, which will can you to learn how to make money on the Internet. Some are better than others.

But, as a word of warning: I would avoid any that promote that you can make thousands or millions of dollars by doing little or nothing, or that tell you can "make money fast." These are usually known as "work at home scams," or "get rich quick schemes" and they will uniformly ask you to invest in some product they are offering.

I would look for some reputable sources that really tell you how to do it. And a little time spent on checking up on what you find, is time well invested. If you do decide to invest in an informational product or other service to help you learn how to make money online, try to make sure that it has a refund policy of some kind, in case it turns out not to be useful.

In short, if you are truly want to learn how to earn money online, it can be done. There are many ways of doing it, and you can be successful without making any huge financial investments.

All you need is an ability and willingness to work and learn. A small amount of time set aside every day will get you started.

It can also be fun and interesting. In fact, for some people, learning how to make money online becomes and enjoyable activity and even a hobby. Work does not have to be boring!

Every successful Internet marketer started small, and grew into something big. Once it starts rolling you can always decide whether you want to quit your day job and do it full-time.

Best Way to Make Money Online Using Free Traffic Methods

2008-08-29T00:46:00.000-07:00

Easy Way To Make Money Online

2008-08-29T00:17:00.000-07:00

By Lucas Adamski

Nowadays making money online become a very popular search. Many people are looking to generate income from the comfort of own home because they can be theirs own boss, have more time for the family, friends and be free. A lot of us are struggling of the "rat race" working 9-5, we are looking for a better lifestyle, more freedom and time to ourselves. That's why I want to present you my easy ways to make money online.

Here are my top 5 easy ways to make money online:

1. Make descent money online selling other people stuff, it can be ebooks, software, audios, templates. I recommend you to go to Clickbank.com. It's one of the biggest sites offering many affiliate products. The advantage of being affiliate is that you don't need to bother about payments or card processing. Everything is handled for you, what you have to do is just to promote these products. You will be rewarded with 50-70% commission for each sale.
2. Do you have something to sell on auctions? Internet can be a great way to sell useless products for you and generate some money. Go to Ebay.com, the biggest auction site on the internet. That's a great opportunity if you have some reselling rights of digital products like ebooks, audios, software, templates etc. With reselling rights you will be able to sell legally someone other products and charge full amount. In comparison to affiliate programs where you get 50% here you get the all price.
3. You can offer services to other people. It can be web design, article writing, translation, data entry, research, transcription, virtual assistant. Some of them, like last ones, don't require any specific skills. That's why I think they are best and very easy ways to make money online. If you think that you are good in writing, designing or anything where is a high demand you should create a profile on Elance.com or Guru.com and offer your service.
4. Another easy way to make money online is creating a blog. Registering a blog is very simple and quick to do. You can set up blog very easily either on Blogger.com or Wordpress.org. You can make money from adsense ads on your blog, banners, text links, sponsored reviews, paid posts and other ads. There are many opportunities. Make a blog about the topic you are related to, you have some knowledge. It can be your hobby or interest. Remember that content is a king, write quality posts, rich of keywords and useful information.
5. Make money online selling own photos. You don't need to have any fancy camera, the more important is high resolution of your pictures. If you have already some big collection of good photos, register to iStockPhoto.com and start selling!

These 5 easy ways to make money online are my favorite one. I choose them also because they are easy to implement for new person in internet business and most of them don't require much skills. The problem I found that many people have is that they are not taking action. Act now and don't read another page about "making money online". I already showed you many lucrative ways to do it, so don't think about it but do it!

Can You Make Money Developing and Marketing Information Products?

2008-08-29T00:11:00.000-07:00

by Marnie Pehrson

"If you're an entrepreneur, service professional or small business owner, information marketing is absolutely your fastest, easiest and most economical way to attract more clients and put your business on a fast track to making millions while you sleep!" - Adam Urbanski, official information marketing expert

Marketing information products is one of the mainstays of the internet. In fact, I got my start online back in 1994, in the days of AOL and Compuserve. I wrote a book called "How to Run a Computer Training Business" and uploaded excerpts of it to the bulletin boards on AOL and Compuserve. People sent me checks in the mail and I sent them a spiral bound version of my book with an accompanying diskette. We've come a long way since those days to full-blown websites, teleseminars, webinars, videos and podcasting. Information marketing has gotten more sophisticated, but the principle is the same. If you have knowledge, expertise or an idea that people want and need so much that they're willing to pay you for it, then you can make money as an information marketer.

Adam Urbanski, the official information marketing expert on IdeaMarketers, told us that "Getting started with creating and selling your own info-products is relatively easy. And once you know what you're doing the results of your work can be very fast. Info-products are outrageously profitable. For example, the total cost to print, package and mail my first home-study course was only $8.46. I sold it for $97 and made $88.54 profit from each sale."

He continues, "Information marketing opens up multiple streams of passive and leveraged revenue. Today, using the Internet, you can deliver e-books, special reports, e-courses, even audio and video completely automatically with zero printing or materials cost!"

Kathy Gulrich, who got her start online as an information marketer before branching out into Manhattan real estate, explains: "For many business professionals, the idea of creating, producing, and marketing an information product is totally overwhelming. As a result, most people never even get started.

"Creating an information product doesn't have to be difficult, however. In fact, if you've been writing a newsletter for your customers, you can put together a profitable e-product in less than a day!"

Want to create your own sought-after article-based e-product? It's simple with Kathy Gulrich's free 5-step worksheet download.

While you're creating your information product, it's important to consider more than the product itself, but the entire experience you will give your customers. Customer Service expert, Digital Info Diva suggests, "During the research and design phase of any project, you should be thinking about ways to make your product customer friendly. This includes a follow-up sequence of messages to your customer not only to confirm the sale, but also to step them through the process of using and benefiting with the product. Building customer service into the backend of your launch helps to build a strong relationship with your customer to encourage future sales."

Don't think you have an idea in you? Don't consider yourself an expert. Think again. Stephanie Chandler, the Entrepreneur Expert with IdeaMarketers says, "I believe that we are all experts at something. Whether it's financial planning, parenting, knitting or customer service, you know more about your subject than the average person. With that in mind, you have the opportunity to make money from your knowledge by selling information products. Books, ebooks, workbooks, teleseminars and coaching programs are just some of the examples of products you can create.

"The real key to success," Stephanie says, "is to find your audience. Build a high-traffic website, publish a monthly e-newsletter and get on the speaking circuit. Partner with others who reach your target audience. If you stay focused and listen to feedback from your audience, you can literally build an empire by sharing what you know."

For a free podcast and/or audio download of a recent CreateAWOW interview with Stephanie Chandler, author of "From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur: Make Money with Books, eBooks and Information Products," go to http://www.CreateAWOW.com/podcast.php

Finally, IdeaMarketer's small-business expert Sandy Reed gives these tips for marketing your information product:

1.

"Write benefit oriented sales copy. Your customers want to know why they should buy your product. Remember, they will be thinking, "What's in it for me?"
2.

Your new info product should have prominent placement on your website and blog, preferably above the fold.
3.

Have a dynamite cover made to showcase the product. Vaughan at KillerCovers.com is a resource I have used regularly, although there are many others.
4.

Create excitement by sending out pre-launch emails to your database of clients. Offer a special price for the first 50 sales (or something comparable).
5.

Use your newsletter to promote your info product (and cover). Also, advertise in other affiliates' newsletters, which are serving your target market."

Remember, somewhere within you is knowledge and experience that is uniquely yours and that can benefit others. Identify it, then package it into a format that suits your personality (teleclasses, online courses, a book, ebook, video or audio). The possibilities are endless when you use your imagination and set to work!

Make Easy Money Using Paypal

2008-08-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

By Max Harris

Paypal has been a very popular place for people looking to make money online. In this article you will find 5 easy ways to make money using paypal. These are all techniques both newbies and veterans use and even if you have no experience at making money online, there are many options and all you have to do is try them! Hopefully these 5 ways to make money using paypal will help you get started!

Before we get to the techniques though, it is important that you set up a paypal account. once you're done with that, these 5 different ways to make money all offer great benefits:

1. E-bay:

E-bay is one of the largest online stores in the world where anyone can sell anything. All you have to do here is set up an e-bay account and sell anything you'd like. Whether it be one of your old props you don't want anymore or if you have some collectible item that is of value, E-bay is quite possibly the best place to sell it because you can auction it and find some really good buyers! The set up is very easy and you will receive all the money you earn through paypal.

2. Blogging:

Blogging involves making an internet journal. Blogspot is the most popular one because anyone can set up a blogging website and post entries in there. Based on what your blog is based on, you can attract viewers and link them to your e-bay page or anything else you're selling online.

3. Affiliate Marketing:

This is my favorite technique because it offers very little liability. Affiliate marketing involves you selling other people's items and making a commission on every sale. E-bay offers affiliate programs, but I stick to clickbank (free guide provided later on). Affiliate marketing is quite possibly one of the easiest and most profitable ways to make money using paypal.

4. Craig's list:

Craig's list is a popular website where people put up something to sell. It is like e-bay but is free. It doesn't get as much attention as e-bay but it definitely has a lot of potential to make money if you have something of value. You can even promote other people's items from popular websites like clickbank and commission junction, put them up on Craig's list and let it make money over and over!

5. Article marketing:

This is the technique I use to generate $1,000s every month. It is very easy and doesn't even involves paypal. All you do is register on clickbank and promote products and make money by just writing articles!

It is a very easy task once you try it a couple of times you will be amazed at how much money you can make. You can get a free 27 page guide on how to make $1,000s doing article marketing here!

2008-04-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

I give my heart,
my affection,
my devotion,
and adoration
to you.
People say that nothing
lasts forever,
but they're wrong.
Some things are meant
to be,
and I know that
this love
I feel for you will
burn in my soul
for the rest of my life.
I was born to be
with you.
You are my first love,
and my real love;
you are my one and only,
and I give all of my love
to you.

Juzt Say hello...

2008-04-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

Hi...
This is my first blog..i don't know what i'll say to u all..
i'm very very confuse>>>>
Finallly i have idea...
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I juZt want to SaY

Hav a nice Day!!!!
i hope this blog can be useful 4 u all..thax before...