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  • Well Known Social Network Websites

    Social networking sites are the big buzz around the internet and not only are they great for socializing with friends, but there are hundreds of Internet Marketers that use these sites to promote their businesses.

    There are a lot of different social networking sites around the internet that you can use to market your business and the more of them that you join and use the more potential customers you can connect with.

    Let’s take a look at some of the Social Networking websites that are very effective at driving targeted traffic to your own business website.

    1. Facebook – Facebook would have to be the most popular social network site on the internet and has millions of members from all over the world. With Facebook you can request people to be your friend and so you can search for people that are interested in the niche of your business and send them a friend request.

    You can also set up group pages with Facebook so you can set up a group for your business and your friends and other members can join your group.

    The most effective way to market your business is to get to know your potential customers on a personal basis before promoting any offers to them. So you will want to connect with them on a social level as well as a business level.

    2. Twitter – Twitter is a website where you can ‘follow’ people. You can follow friends, family and people that you share similar interests with. To use Twitter for your business you will want to follow people that have interests in the niche of your business. When you follow people there is a good chance they will follow you too.

    Whenever you make an update on Twitter, the people that are following you will see your update. If used correctly Twitter can be a very powerful marketing tool for your business.

    3. Squidoo – Squidoo is another popular social networking site where you create ‘lenses’ where you can write and share information on any topic you choose. Squidoo lenses tend to rank very well in the search engines so if you create a lens for your business it can rank highly resulting in a lot of targeted traffic coming through to your own website.

    You can even promote products as an affiliate using Squidoo although you don’t want to abuse the system and be too salesy. As long as your lenses are subtle and offer good quality content then Squidoo can be a very effective tool to market products as an affiliate.

    4. Hubpages – Hubpages is a social networking site that is very similar to Squidoo but instead of creating a ‘lens’ you create a ‘hub’. You can share lots of information on your interests or your business as long as you offer good quality content. Hubpages is a very effective method for building backlinks to your own website and driving targeted traffic to your site.

    5. Tumblr – Tumblr is another site where you create a type of blog that you can post content to on a regular basis and share your information with the other members of the Tumblr community. With your Tumblr blog you can add video and audio and you can also chat with other members. You can also follow other members and if you are active within the community you will soon have other members following you. The more members you have that follow you then the bigger customer base you are building.

    Which social networking sites should you use?

    The sites above are just some of the social networking sites available that you can use to promote your business. There are other sites such as YouTube, Stumbleupon and more. It is sometimes a matter of personal choice as to which one you use so why not try them and see what works for you. The more social networking sites that you are a member of the more customers you can connect with.

  • Essentials of Adding Google Feedburner to your WordPress blog

    Video: How to add Google Feedburner to your WordPress blog

  • Affiliate Marketing – What NOT To Do

    As the handbook draws to a near end and closing publication, here are some hazard signs and dangerous waters you shouldn’t be treading on in the affiliate marketing scene!

    So listen up…

    Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective and powerful ways of earning some money online. This program gives everybody a chance to make a profit through the Internet. Since these affiliate marketing programs are easy to join, implement and pays a commission on a regular basis, more an more people are now willing in this business.

    However, like all businesses, there are lots of pitfalls in the affiliate marketing business. Committing some of the most common mistakes will cost the marketers a large portion taken from the profit they are making everyday. That is why it is better to avoid them than be regretful in the end.

    Mistake number 1: Choosing the wrong affiliate.

    Many people want to earn from affiliate marketing as fast as possible. In their rush to be part of one, they tend to choose a bandwagon product. This is the kind of products that the program thinks is “hot”. They choose the product that is in demand without actually considering if the product appeals to them. This is not a very wise move obviously.

    Instead of jumping on the bandwagon, try top choose a product in which you are truly interested in. For any endeavor to succeed, you should take some time to plan and figure out your actions.

    Pick a product that appeals to you. Then do some research about that product to see if they are in demand. Promoting a product you are more passionate about is easier than promoting one for the sake of the earnings only.

    Mistake number 2: Joining too many affiliate programs.

    Since affiliate programs are very easy to join, you might be tempted to join multiples of affiliate programs to try and maximize the earnings you will be getting. Besides you may think that there is nothing wrong and nothing to lose by being part of many affiliate programs.

    True, that is a great way to have multiple sources of income. However, joining multiple programs and attempting to promote them all at the same time will prevent you from concentrating on each one of them.

    The result? The maximum potential of your affiliate program is not realized and the income generated will not exactly be as huge as you were thinking initially it would. The best way to get excellent result is by joining just one program that pays a 40% commission at least. Then give it your best effort by promoting your products enthusiastically. As soon as you see that it is already making a reasonable profit, then maybe you can now join another affiliate program.

    The technique is to do it slowly but surely. There is really no need to rush into things, especially with affiliate marketing. With the way things are going, the future is looking real bright and it seems affiliate marketing will be staying for a long time too.

    Mistake number 3: Not buying the product or using the service.

    As an affiliate, you main purpose is to effectively and convincingly promote a product or service and to find customers. For you to achieve this purpose, you must be able to relay to the customers that certain product and service. It is therefore difficult for you to do this when you yourself have not tried these things out. Thus, you will fail to promote and recommend them convincingly. You will also fail to create a desire in your customers to avail any of what you are offering.

    Try the product or service personally first before you sign up as an affiliate to see if it is really delivering what it promises. If you have done so, then you are one of the credible and living testaments aware of its advantages and disadvantages. Your customers will then feel the sincerity and truthfulness in you and this will trigger them to try them out for themselves.

    Many affiliate marketers make these mistakes and are paying dearly for their actions. To not fall into the same situation they have been in, try to do everything to avoid making the same mistakes.

    Time is the key. Take the time to analyze your marketing strategy and check if you are in the right track. If done properly, you will be able to maximize your affiliate marketing program and earn higher profits.

  • Are You Making Extra Cash From Your Blog?

    Monetize Your Blog Today, It is Easier Than You Think

    If you are looking at transforming your blog traffic into income then follow the five tips here and you will be able to instantly monetize your blog. If you can create a product, or display some ads, you should be able to start making money from all your efforts.

    1. Products: Products are a great way to monetize your blog. If you have a loyal community they will be open to purchasing from you. You could easily use a site like CafePress to create just about any physical product you want. This is especially effective if your blog has morphed into it’s own brand.

    Besides physical products you can also create your own eProducts. You could create your own eBook and sell it on your site. If it is enticing to your current web traffic you could sell hundreds of these books with little effort and marketing. Anything you can think of can be a product.

    2. Lead Capture: This isn’t an instant monetization but it can have far reaching benefits. If you capture the emails of people who are visiting your site you will be building a “list”. You can keep a running dialogue with these people and when you do have an offer to sell, you will have a list of warm leads. What salesperson wouldn’t kill for that? You just need an autoresponder service (like Aweber) and an offer that people will want to give their email to get. Overkill the value here – offer something you feel like you should be charging for.

    3. Members Area: If you have a ton of traffic you can also create a premium members area. This would be best for helpful blogs. If you had a blog about WordPress tips, you could keep your premium tips, advanced code, and offer support in a paid members area. If your blog is powered by WordPress (it should be) there are free plugins that will give you this capability.

    4. Adsense: Adsense might not make you a rich man, but it can be a nice boost to your income. You can choose to display Google ads on your site and whenever they get clicked you get paid. Google ads will display ads based on your content and some content is worth more than others. One downside is you have to be really careful how you display your ads, because Google has strict requirements. You probably won’t make a killing, but a couple bucks a day (or more) is entirely possible. There are also a ton of other similar Pay Per Click advertising opportunities out there,just do a Google search to learn more.

    5. Donation: I saved this to the end because I personally do not like it. If you want though you can easily add a donation box to your blog. These boxes usually have you the blog owner asking for a donation, or for your guests to buy you a beer, or coffee, or etc… Much like everything else, you can add this through a WordPress plugin. To me it seems kind of like electronic pan handling, but that is my own personal bias. If you offer a helpful blog, then asking for a donation may not be that bad.

    There are many ways to monetize your blogs, and I just showed you five quick tips. if you put even a couple of these tips into place you will be ahead of most people. You spend your time blogging faithfully, it is time to get something back. Monetize your blog today and get what you deserve.

  • Setting Agreed Upon Milestones For Outsourcers

    If you want to get the best people working for you, you simply cannot ignore milestones and escrows. Milestones are especially important when you are working on huge projects and want people to give you their deliverables in smaller installments so that you could manage work at your end as well. And we have already seen how escrows are important.

    Some websites, like eLance in particular, help you to state the form in which you want your deliverables. You could actually set up milestones for the whole project. Among other benefits, this ensures that your employee can manage the deadline in a much better manner. You can also keep tabs on things better.

    It is ideal anyway to post only short-term projects at the start, until you have a rapport set up with the worker. Even though everything might seem all right to you in the bid, there are chances that something might go wrong when the actual project is underway. If you have a long project running, it could be cumbersome to bail out of these difficult situations. However, a short-term project can help.

    On GetAFreelancer, the shortest project you can post should be worth $30. However, on most other sites, there is no minimum limit for the project you post.

    The best way to make the payment is through an escrow system. Most jobsites work with escrows (which is actually the main reason why you should use these freelance jobsites because an escrow protects both parties). When you select a bidder, you deposit some money into an escrow account. This money is held by the website but not released to the bidder yet. When they accomplish the task, you can direct the website to release the funds to them.

    Escrow helps you because in case there is any problem with the project later on and you don’t feel like you should pay, you could ask the website to arbitrate. No freelance website will arbitrate if an escrow wasn’t made. Also, the worker knows that you have money for the project and it motivates them to do a better job.

  • Your Content Is An Extension of You

    I was talking with one of my coaching clients yesterday, who was complaining to me about time management problems. It seems that she can’t find enough hours in the day to make videos, write articles and participate in the global conversation online.

    Normally when I hear this problem I know that most people who complain about time management are actually time wasters. Case in point: my client was spending an hour each day making cold calls which she felt was a good utilization of her time. Entrepreneurs love to make justifications for the things they do and cold callers are no exception, in many cases we can always look to the one or two really good customers who we have found through a cold call to make it all worthwhile.

    What my client didn’t understand was that if she spent that hour each day publishing content to the Internet she would be much more effective over the long term. Filming a five-minute video and putting it up on YouTube is very easy. It’s also very easy to get 1000 people to view that video. YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world next to Google. If 1000 people watch your video, it’s the equivalent of making 1000 five-minute phone calls.

    Start thinking about the messages you want to get across to your audience and start thinking about the mediums you want to use to deliver those messages. I prefer to use articles and video to deliver my messages. Increasingly my audience has been growing exponentially because I spend more time putting content out and less time talking to people one-on-one.

    I am not saying that you should completely replace face-to-face or telephone communication, I am suggesting however that you find ways to maximize that communication and leverage it to a larger audience. As a for instance yesterday I spent 30 minutes on the phone with one of my trainers. We did a question-and-answer session that was intended for a larger audience. This call was recorded and will be heard by thousands of people.

    Lately when people have been asking me for mentoring or business coaching and they don’t have any money to pay for my time, I have been asking them to do recorded calls with me that I can later release on my blog. These calls will be a valuable tool for me to recruit new clients, so even when I give up some of my free time, I am able to monetize it down the road.

  • Exercises to Research and Prepare Promotional Marketing Materials

    Here is a helpful exercise on how to research and prepare promotional marketing materials to bring the right people to your business. When I do this exercise with my marketing students, we always have a lively conversation that not only sparks solutions but also leaves participants feeling enthused, inspired, even excited about showing up in the marketplace.

    The themes we explore and the fun we have doing this exercise are so central to an authentic approach to small business marketing that I have decided to highlight them in this article.

    First, let us stipulate that somewhere in the world there are prospective clients or customers who will fit you and your work “just right.”

    (If this does not feel true for you yet, then you have work to do. Perhaps you need training, practice, or mentoring before you can attract “just right” customers. Or perhaps, like I did with my art business, you are trying to make an avocation into a vocation. For now, let us assume that you are in the right business with the right skills.)

    Second, let us assume that “just right” clients are those who get great value from working with you just the way you are. These are clients who share enough of your standards and values that it is easy to develop mutual respect, appreciation, and benefit. With these two assumptions in mind, here are some unconventional yet highly productive questions to help focus the image, tone, and message that will attract clients who fit “just right.” Answer them quickly to tap into your creative subconscious. There will be plenty of time later for thinking about the answers and deciding when and how to use them in sharing your gifts with the world.

    1. If your work were a color, what color would it be?

    2. What shape would it be?

    3. How big would it be?

    4. What texture would it have?

    5. If you pressed it with your finger, what would happen?

    6. If your work were a popular song, what song would it be?

    7. Who would be singing?

    8. How loud?

    9. If your work were an historic personage, who would it be?

    10. If your work were going to a party, what would it wear?

    11. If your work had a typical mood, what would it be?

    12. If your work were a plant, what kind of plant would it be?

    13. In what environment would it thrive?

    14. If your work were an animal, would it be domestic or wild? How big?

    15. If your work were a meal, what kind of meal would it be? (Fast food? Haute cuisine? Mac and cheese?)

    What is the point of questions like these? Simply this: Answering them can reveal aspects of your personality that inform and augment the work you do. By surfacing these unique associations, you will be unearthing imagery and attitudes you can use to set the tone for your marketing so that it is easy for your “just right” clients to differentiate you from other people doing similar work.

    Try this exercise – it could be the start of something beautiful.

  • Getting Free Marketing Through Forums For Your Offline Business

    A social media outlet that people often overlook is the forum. While sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn get a lot of attention when people are focusing on social media, many people forget about the saliency of forums when it comes to making a reputation for your business online.

    The great thing about a forum is that it’s an easy place to establish a reputation of expertise. What you should absolutely not do is join a forum and start spamming it with ads for your business. This will only annoy the other users of the forum, and could possibly end up getting your account deleted by the moderators of the forum itself.

    The best way to use a forum is to join one that is specifically related to your area of interest and product sales and start offering advice. For example, if you own a car dealership, you should look for dealership-related forums that pertain to the kinds of autos you sell. Then, you put in the address of your website or social media profile in the “signature” area of your profile and start answering questions. Giving out advice for free sounds like it might not be the best way to end up producing revenue, but once you can establish yourself as an expert on the forums, you can start drawing people into being curious about your products and services. After all, if you’re so helpful on the forum, you might have something useful to offer in the realm of sales, as well.

    Another way to drum up trust in your business area using forums is to create your own forum. Of course, you’ll need to go through proper advertising channels in order to make people aware of your forum, but this is a great thing to announce on your Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles! If you can get a lively forum going that is directly attached to the website you have for your offline business, it’s a great way to get traffic to your site and a lot more customers, since you’ll have daily traffic to the forum. A successful forum might even have thousands of hits per day!

    Establishing a reputation of excellence and expertise is the lifeblood of any small business. As it’s likely that you’re competing with a big box store of some sort, your bread and butter is the personal touch that you can add to your customer’s experience. When the business is online, or when you’re advertising your offline business online, a great place to show that you actually do possess both excellence and expertise is by engaging people on forums. In this way, you start building relationships of trust with the online contingent, and draw them further into your store and products.

  • Essentials of Generating Traffic with RSS Feeds

    Video: Brad explains what RSS feeds are and how to generate traffic using RSS.

  • Setting Up A Blog In Just 4 Simple Steps

    You have a small business, home business or hobby that you want to monetize. You want to build your online presence but have no start up cash. Do you give up? Hell, no. The web is so full of free options that you can build a new business website for free in less than half an hour. Taking it one step further you can build a trendy company blog in the same amount of time. That is right, you can have a company blog like all of the “big guys” in about the same time it takes you to shower in the morning. Don’t believe me? Well, try it.

    You can easily start your business blog right now by following these few steps…

    1. Sign up At WordPress.com – WordPress.com will offer you a free website built on the easily customizable WordPress platform. Visit the site and follow the instructions to get your initial site set up. All you will need is an email address. WordPress.com will even handle the hosting for you.

    2. Choose A Theme – Using the back office of WordPress.com you can search for themes for your website. The theme will cover all of your major design details. You can search by a number of different parameters that will allow you to find the perfect theme for your business. If you have a logo there is sure to be a color scheme that matches.

    3. Create Your Pages – In the back office of WordPress you should set up a couple static (not changing regularly) pages first off. You should add an about page that explains about your company. You should also add a products or services page that goes into what you offer. Lastly create a contact page so people can find out how to get a hold of you.

    4. Add Content – Posts are different than pages, posts are content that you add on a regular basis. These posts can be how-to articles about your niche, industry news, insider information or just helpful tips. You will want to add information as often as possible. The more information and posts you have the more likely you will receive web traffic.

    Four steps. That is it. You now have a fully functional business blog that can help you find prospects, leads and like minded individuals. Obviously each of those above steps are a little more detailed in practice than explained here. Also you can take this company blog much further with some education, but if all you want is a basic company blog then there you have it. All you have to give up, is about 20 minutes.