Hello all!
I have decided to bring some fun into this time of the year. The next event to take place is Mother’s Day. As I am a mother of 3, have a wonderful mother who has 6, and incredible grandmothers who have had numerous children, I have come to appreciate the true joy and specialness only a mother can bring/give.
I have set up a contest to honor mothers that are out there day in and day out looking after their families, their jobs, and their homes. This contest is open to everyone, but I decided to have the theme involve mothers in thanks of all their hard work. I have created some special prizes for 3 lucky winners with products that will help you either get started online or help benefit you with an already existing business.
The rules of the contest are as follows.
Complete the survey here Click Here to take survey
and I will announce the winners the day before Mother’s Day.
That’s it. Pretty simple isn’t it?
If you want to have a look at the prizes
1st Place Prize
2nd Place Prize
3rd Place Prize
GOOD LUCK to all our players. The winners will be picked at random. We will be making our contests more of a regular occurrence so you will have many opportunities to play again.
Many times when new beginners start out trying to build their own online business, they have big dreams and unrealistic timelines. Sure they know it is not an over night thing, but often they do not know how much dedication and effort is going to be needed to get their name/business out in that big wide world of the web.
With more and more businesses starting up online these days, the competition just seems to keep mounting. Some days you can be grateful for a dollar in sales and other times you can laugh with joy when you see hundreds or a thousand. Then there are those beginning days where it seems like you only get one or two visitors a day, and no sales for months. These are the times when the negative emotions strive to take hold and bring you down.
I remember all too well(and even as recent as last week) where things were not looking quite the way I felt they should be looking for the amount of hard workd I was putting into my business. I’d call up my mom(another online business owner) and whine to her about my lack of fortune, and make her listen to my self pity for a few minutes. Then she would say “tomorrow is another day” and I would realize, that yes, it is.
The next day would come bringing good news to my inbox once more, and I would be refreshed with a whole new revitalized outlook on my situation. Realizing that everyone has their down days, and just because things don’t always work out every day like you would prefer, does not mean you should be throwing in the towel regardless of how your mind and emotions would like to play with you.
I like to think of it like this. My grandparents were married for over 50 years before my grandfather passed away a few years ago. Over time they had 7 children, 30 grandchildren, and 15 great grandchildren. They lost houses, jobs, cars, and family members along the way. They hated each other, loved each other, wanted to leave each other, and couldn’t live without each other. In the end, it was a daily commitment and dedication of a promise made and a future planned that held them together in love.
The same goes for a business. When you first decided to commit, you set out a plan. You spend every day putting one step forward into making this plan succeed. Some days, are not so good, other days are awesome. But the big picture is why you decided to pursue this business. Even if you did not make a dollar today. Tomorrow you are still able to be home with your children and may end up making $2. Take the time to look for and enjoy the positive in every day, even when what you were hoping for or anticipating did not pan out. Keep your eyes upon the goal, make every day count in some way, and believe that THE PLAN will work out.
I have come to see now that when things aren’t going the way I want, if I stop thinking about money and working so hard, and instead take the day off to spend with my family, the next day usually makes things all work out. Even if I don’t necessarily still make up the dollar missed, my mind set and body have been refreshed and re-aligned to be once again ready for my journey in the online world.
To your success! Life, Love and Liberty!
I have a few students who have expressed a desire to make money from affiliate products online but they are concerned they can not compete due to the fact they are not good writers. They have asked what could they do to get in the game.
Some products you find to promote from Clickbank offer you the sales page and hoplink with you affiliate number within it, but leave you with the task of creating your own advertising blurb, article, or review. What if you can’t write one? How do you promote the product so others will choose to buy off of you and not someone else?
You can either find other products that offer a more complete promotional tool box to work with, or you can research the product online, find some reviews for it and see if you can re-write the reviews mixing a few reviews together. Re-writing is a lot easier to do than writing from scratch. If you are concerned with your grammar or spelling, or even making sure you have proper sentence structure, you can run your re-write through the Word spell/grammar check tool, or ask someone you know to proof read for you.
There are many good programs out there that do offer great affiliate tools for you to work with. I would suggest working with a few of those, studying the reviews that are written for you and slowly learn to write a review for another product based on the same copy. When I first started asking questions on how to write an effective sales page/copywriting, I was told to find a few sales pages for products I found to be effective and copy the style. Go line by line and change it around to suit your product specifically. Highlight the good points, the benefits of why this product would be great for them to purchase, etc.
There are many people on the internet today who have a hard time writing. If you can not afford to hire some writing help, you need to dedicate some time and effort into learning to “copy” off the big guys.
I am going to give you a few links to great products that I use right now. They have wonderful promotional tools to help you get started. If you are looking for products in another niche, then just sign up to these as an affiliate and check out the tools so you can get an idea to model after.
Smart DD- Digital Delivery the Smart Way
LeadsLeap-Build a Huge Optin List
Instant Sqeeze Page Generator
Free Viral E Book Explosion
A bit of trial and error will get you there!
When you’re just getting starting in Affiliate Marketing, one of the most important things you need to learn about is traffic – specifically what it is and how to get it.
Why?
Because although it’s become somewhat of a cliche these days, the truth is, “the money is in the list” – but that means YOUR list, not the list of the people whose products you’re selling – at least not if you want to be successful.
Here’s why. As an affiliate, your job is to find people who want to buy the products you’re promoting, right? So to do that, you need to write an ad (or hire a copywriter to write it for you), and send people to a Website where they can buy the product.
BUT – there’s a serious problem with using this method. Do you see what it is?
Anywhere from 60 to 95% of the people you send to the sales page probably aren’t going to buy the first time.
1. Most people want to be certain that they’re making the right decision, so they usually need to see or hear from you between 5 to 12 times before making a buying decision.
2. If you’re paying for the ad and sending people to the seller’s Website, the ones who don’t buy disappear forever. (And neither you nor the seller will benefit.)
3. Of those who do buy, if you’re only sending them to the sales page, YOU still lose them forever because you have no way of knowing who they are.
Here’s the solution:
1. Write your ad and send prospects to a well-written squeeze page – YOUR squeeze page. (A squeeze page is a single page Website that has one purpose – to convince prospects to give you their contact information. Squeeze pages should be simple – no flash, no links, and if you use a graphic or photo, keep it simple and make sure it relates to the purpose of the page. How do you convince prospects to give you their contact information? By giving them information that is what they’re expecting to find and that’s useful to them.)
2. Offer them an incentive to give you their contact information. (This could be a free report, a free newsletter, an audio or video product – just make sure it’s related to the niche or affiliate product.)
3. After they’ve opted in to your autoresponder, send them to your affiliate sales page.
4. Follow up with them on a regular basis – mixing good information, free bonuses from time to time and additional affiliate products.
Lather, rinse, repeat. (Once you’re making money from your first affiliate product, move on to the next and then the next and the next.)
The best thing about this is that you can set most of it up on your autoresponder, so you turn it into a “system” and it runs “almost” on autopilot. (There is NO SUCH THING as a business that runs 100% on autopilot – and don’t believe anyone who tells you differently.) Any business – real business – takes work and effort. But by setting this system up this way, your autoresponder does the majority of the work, and you will only need to do simple updates and make sure you keep fresh information flowing
Many new beginners to online marketing are often at a loss as to what to do first. They know they would like to have a website but are unsure of where to go, what to get and how to proceed. The following is a quick list of steps to follow to have you up and running in the shortest amount of time. You may need to have some experience with uploading files to your server through an FTP client.
Many times new beginners get all bogged down with the thought that they need to create a multiple page website to look professional. Often this is a deterant for some owners who do not have the knack to write or have no graphic design skills. When you are first starting out all you need to do is get a domain name and hosting account.
There are many places online to purchase a domain name and hosting account. I find with the cheap domain names, the hosting is more expensive. More expensive does not necessarily mean the best service and quality. I would recommend Host Gator you can host unlimited websites for $7.95 USD a month. When you order you will want to choose the “Baby” package and type in the coupon code name “wordpress”. Purchasing a domain name can be done at the same time. It is $15 for one year of registration. There are cheaper domain registration places, but if you are not adept at changing name servers over(or do not even know what I mean); you would be better off to just buy the domain name at the same time and not worry about anything else for configuring.
When I first started out wanting to promote affiliate products, I thought I had to buy a domain name for each product I was going to promote. That can get a little pricey, no? What I later realized is that you can have sub-domains on the one domain name, and just name it whatever you want. Ex. your domain name is http://mysite.com so if you wanted to sell/promote a marketing tips ebook you would add a sub-domain name and the address would then be http://mysite.com/marketingtips2go
You need to choose a domain name that is easy to remember but has relevance to what you will be dealing with. You can either choose something like your full name or mix in words like “info”, “marketing”, “tips”, “publishing”, “ebook”, “news”, or secrets as these words let the reader know you have content.
Next you need to create a simple direct response driven website with just an Opt-in form on the main page. For this you will need:
1. free or low cost WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get) web page editor. You can try 1st page 2000 for free from Evrsoft.com
2. the code to create your opt-in box form from your autoresponder. (if you do not have one, I highly recommend Aweber for $19.99 a month-the best in the biz and easy to use)
3. you will need you hosting account log in
4. a FTP client such as Filezilla (free to download and use)
Now for your main page often referred to as the squeeze page, you want to make sure you have the following:
- Bold attention capturing headline
- Simple, uncluttered design with no or few graphics
- compact and centered formatting. You can achieve this by placing your text within a “table”
- similar to a standard sales page with bulleted benefits and important information bolded or highlighted in different colors
- a definite call to action which in this case is to get visitors to opt-in so you can capture their names
If you are unsure of how to create a squeeze page from scratch and would not fee comfortable trying right away, there is a service that you can design and create a squeeze page and host it on their server. All you would need to do is copy the link at the end and put it into the thank you URL address on your Aweber account message. Go and check out the site now. It is free to join. They also even supply you with a free gift to offer your visitors to increase your optin numbers. Instant Squeeze Page This service is good to use for starting an email marketing campaign. You may still want to learn how to create a Squeeze Page for your own site, especially if you plan to be promoting many affiliate products.
These are quick tips to market affiliate products in which you will most aggressively be advertising and marketing through article distribution, PPC(pay per click), linkswaps, pay for leads, giveway sites, free classified ads, forums, email marketing once you begin to have a list, social network sites such as Squidoo, Hub Pages, and Facebook, and many other forms of free or affordable methods.
Depending on the affiliate program you decide to promote you should be given many promotional tools and ideas of where and how to market in the most effective way. If the program you are looking at does not provide you with good promo tools, you may want to think twice, and keep on looking. If a company is serious about making money, they know that the more tools an affiliate has to work with, the more sales will be made, thus providing the most financial benefits to both owner and marketer alike.
Now adays it doesn’t matter what niche you decide to market. Most companies are jumping on the bandwagon to create affiliate programs knowing the power of many out numbers the one. Since affiliate programs are free to join, just look at the bottom of the website for the link to sign up and go for it! If you find a product or program is not selling well, you can always try another program with no investment or loss on your part.
Affiliate Marketers Handbook
If you are new to affiliate marketing download this free ebook to help you decide on your course of action. There are many helpful tips to help you start making money online today!
One of the hardest things for any online business is developing a list. When you have first set up your website, chances are you will not have any visitors. While there are many ways to market your business online such as article marketing, PPC campaigns, forum posting, free classified ADs, social network sites, etc; obtaining a mailing list of subscribers you can regularly email bonuses and offers to, is a much harder process to learn.
There are sites set up where you can pay for leads, mailing lists, and targetted traffic but there is no guarantee that any of that traffic will turn into anything. I remember paying $20 for 10,000 targeted visitors to my first store website I set up. After a few months, it showed that 10,000 visits had indeed been sent, but only a small portion actually made it to my home page. I have no idea where the other visitors landed. I was not impressed in the slightest. Once again, lesson learned. I needed a way to find more specifically targeted traffic for my niche.
One of the most popular free ways to build up a list these days is JV giveaways. What these are, is a one site owner in a certain niche will launch a giveaway event. He will invite other marketers in the same field to join and offer a product for free in order for that marketer to be able to obtain more leads. Anyone who joins and offers a freebie, creates an opt-in page the interested party must sign into with their email in order to get their gift. This member then becomes a listed lead for the marketer.
All marketers who have added a product offer, must then promote the giveaway event to the list of members on their mailing list they have acquired up until then. If they do not their freebie is taken off and they have lost the opportunity to build their list even bigger. This is a great way to have your offer seen by many new members for free since the more marketers get in on the act and spread the word to their own lists, the more members are available to partake in the giveaway and sign up for your offer.
This is a great cheap way for new beginners to build up their list quickly but if you do not have a list you miss out. So, what can you do? There are a few free or affordable methods to resolve this issue and get you into the giveaway game.
One excellent service available is called LeadsLeap.com. It is free to join, and offers many promotional tools to help you get your list built up. You can re-brand and give away a free report on forums. You can copy and paste the classified ads they have created for you to use. You can post banners up on your website. Or if you do not have a website yet, you can start a free blog at http://blogger.com and post the link provided you with your own affiliate URL to take your visitor to the signup page on LeadsLeap.com
Posting classified ads in the many free classified sites available on the net is one way to get the word out to help you to build up a list. You should think about getting that website put up soon to help build a more professional base for your business but if you are not ready for that yet and would just like to build a list of subscribers to your newsletter first, then there are still many options of advertising available for you within this program.
How this program works is, the more people you can get to join you in the listing, the more times your personal ad can be seen for free by other members who receive the LeadsLeap newsletter. For a thorough explanation of this process you can download the free report here: http://www.leadsleap.com/1signupaday?id=1206097399
Once you have started to build up your list you will be ready to join the next JV Giveaway event and build your list even more. If you sign up to my newsletter, I keep all of my subscribers informed of when the next great giveaway is scheduled for. There are tons of freebies you can download and either use for your own business or re-sell again depending on what the rights are that come with the product.
Why So Many People Enjoy the Benefits of Buying on eBay.
Every day people are finding out the benefits and joy of shopping on eBay. Millions of American’s and Canadians prefer to shop online. Online shopping is popular because it provides a quick, easy and convenient way for people to find and buy what they are looking for from the comfort of their own homes. Shopping online makes it easier for one to do a comparison price check without having to spend hours walking around. One place that has become a big favorite is eBay. There are a great number of benefits to shopping on eBay.
On of the greatest benefits of shopping on eBay is the huge array of products to choose from. With the ability of retailers of all sizes being able to sell their products online,the eBay marketplace has an unlimited number of products to choose from. You can buy products ranging from real estate and cars, to clothes, toys, pet supplies, home decor items, entertainment goodies, and much more. Almost anything you can think of to buy you can find on eBay.
With the popularity of eBay reaching an all time high over the last few years, more and more sellers are starting to do business on eBay. Another benefit to shopping on eBay is the number of sellers you can do business with. Since eBay allows all internet users to sell items they no longer need or want, many parents, students and retired people are beginning to start selling on eBay. Since many sellers are selling the same products or similar products, you should have the option to choose who you want to do business with. When buying a product online, particularly one that is offered for sale by a number of different sellers, you must remember to examine product costs, shipping and handling costs, as well as each seller’s feedback. With the proper research and comparisons made, you will be assured of a positive experience buying on eBay.
Another reason eBay has become a popular place to shop online is the ease in which you can complete a transaction. You need to register for a free account that will allow you to buy on eBay. Once you are a registered member, you can easily start searching for products that you are looking for. For instance, if you are looking for a particular movie, you can just type in the of the movie into eBay’s search box and you should be given a listing of available auctions which have the movie for sale. If you are only looking to spend a certain amount of money or purchase a movie that is located in Canada, you can perform an advanced search. An advanced search makes it easier to find what you need.
The benefits as listed above are just a few benefits that can be found doing your online shopping through eBay. Even if you have not decided whether or not you want to start shopping on eBay, you may want to take a look through the marketplace and see what there is to offer. As an eBay guest, you can navigate the site to get a taste of what items can commonly be found for sale on eBay. With a large selection of products, a number of sellers to choose from, and ease of use, there is a good chance that you may find that eBay is the place you want to do all of your online shopping.
I was reading an ebook today titled “Making Money Online” by Sara Brown. When I had finished reading her book, I felt like I could indeed become successful in the competitive business of making money online.
Although, I have been in business for 6 years, I have only recently within the last year started to develop my products to help others, and market online. I have spent a lot of my business years learning software programs and finding free resources to benefit my business.
Sara Brown details how anyone who has a learned skill and could write how to do the skill in a manual or booklet, can become competition and start to make money with a valuable comodity in the online world.
The Internet Marketing world has a lot of the same topics covered, so often that it does seem like sometimes you end up reading the same information. There are topics covered through ebooks, videos, and audio products. It is no wonder some are of the opinion you can not make money in this market.
But with all of the resources on the market, all of the software programs available to be used, if you have learned one of these programs and have found a way to make it work in your favor, you could then write a “how to” manual to create another source of income. Writing this information will not allow others to steal your traffic or potential customers, because this is a product you can sell forever as your own. With the many different niches and markets out there, providing a fellow business owner the knowledge to be able to implement a new strategy geared toward helping them; would allow you to become known as the expert in that application, and more business owners would be flocking by to pick up your book.
Most anyone who has the desire to make money online can do so. They just need to spend some thought on what skills they have acquired in their journeys, what their passions are, and what others may have previously told them they were good at. Then if they could create an outline of how they learned this skill and applied it to make money in whatever niche it is, they would have an information product ready for sale. Even if you can not write, you should still be able to jot down notes of all the steps you did and the outcome. You could then hire a ghostwriter(I have a few available on my team), and have an affordable ebook created for you to sell with you having the sole copyrights.
The Internet stretches from one end of the world to the other, encompassing all people in between, with new people finding access to the web every day. Finding ways to make money online sharing your expertise is now one of the best ways to earning a living. In the Internet world, I believe we are all given equal opportunities, it is how we choose to utilize these opportunities to our own benefit that decides whether one business will exceed over another.
I came across a web hosting provider who is offering a new concept I have not seen before. It is called Hosting Ladder and they offer 3 ways to Pay for their service. If you would like a hosting account that has 10GB of disk space, 1000GB of traffic, and the ability to create 100 websites/domains on each account, this is the hosting company for you. You have the option of paying $30 a month, Post to Host-which you agree to post 50 posts a month in their forum in exchange for your payment of $30. Or the final way is to agree to have ADs displayed on your site.
This is a great new concept that is just perfect for the new beginner to the online world. It is affordable and the best way to save some of the money you can be using for other areas of your business(like advertising!)
So why don’t you go and check out what they have to offer today to get yourself set up to start creating those awesome websites for your business ventures!
http://hostingladder.com
I was thinking about the many companies who have businesses out in the real world. I have recently met a few people who had an interest in getting their business into the cyber realm but did not know where to start.
If you have a service business, you could set up a simple 4 or 5 page website detailing your services and have some testimonials, photos, and any other content you would prefer. You would want to put in a section where you can add content daily due to the fact that is what the search engines love and if you would like to stay fresh and indexed, you will need content on a regular basis.
If you have a products based company you can have a store set up but will also want pages where you can add fresh content.
Most shopping cart softwares will have a section where you can add pages.Often times you can add unlimited pages and hide them from the main directory, and just have one page with links and short descriptions. That way you are able to keep fresh content to be indexed by the search engines, but don’t need to worry about cluttering your main section visitors will be viewing.
If there is too much to look at some visitors do not know what to do so instead they will do nothing but leave. If you main concern is to sell your products, you could have your store setup with a link to a blog where you do product reviews of what you sell. You could also have a page with links to articles on topics related to what you are selling.
There are many ways you can do things. The key is to making sure that your site is presentable, offers useful information or resources, is current with fresh content, and doesn’t look like one giant advertisement.
Some people prefer to start small and post their services in places like Craigslist, Fijiji, or even ebay. There are other shopping portal sites where you can just list your products such as IOffer, Ubid, and many others you could find in a Google search. These sites are good because you do not have to worry about trying to get traffic on your own. But they do not give you a website that you could call your own domain.
You could start a free blog at http://wordpress.org or http://blogger.com if you wanted to just get the word out there and promote your products. If you had your items for sale on ebay or IOffer you could post the links in your blog for people to go and bid. If you gave a review or description of why the product would benefit a buyer, people would go to your auction or storefront page and be able to purchase the item.
There are many options available on the Internet to acheive business success. It just takes a little creativity, a little know-how and a whole lot of time and patience.
