Don James is an online marketer and internet strategy consultant. Discover how to earn money online by following one man’s path to a million dollars in just 5 years at Internet Millions Wealth – How to Earn Money Online
How to Earn Money Online in Five Simple Steps
November 12, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Finding the right path to earn money online can be a vexing experience especially for those who haven’t done it before. There are so many ways to begin that many people typically give up because they get overwhelmed by the number of possible paths and online experts.
If you follow these simple steps to get started, you will find that earning money online does not have to be quite so difficult.
1. Find Your Idea – Your own knowledge and passion is the place to start. Many who attempt to earn money online tend to focus on money for money’s sake and not their own interests and passions first. What most online marketing guides do no cover is the core starting point of your online business – your own knowledge and interests.
For example, imagine your real passions are mystery books, coffee, and gardening. Besides that you are an expert at fixing small engines and have a lot of knowledge on that topic. The key is that any of those topics can become a means that can be managed to an income source.
If you love to fix engines then build on small engine repair – if you love gardening then build your online sites around gardening. Always remember that it will be five times easier for you to create and maintain original content to anything that you really care about.
2. Create a Blog – I’m always surprised when people go out and try to create websites by hand and spend literally hundreds of hours learning HTML and paying for hosting centers. Unless you are passionate about page layout and want full control of your page design this is truly a waste of productive time.
Free blogs such as Blogger and Wordpress allow you to pick your site look and focus directly on the content. Some worry that blogs are not well ranked in the search engines. That is not true, however. Some of the highest ranked and traffic heavy sites on the internet are blogs. They provide a huge jump-start to your online business without paying a single penny.
Plus, with the vast number of blogging search engines you can submit your blog articles immediately while you are building out your daily content.
3. Use Ads – Now that you have your idea and site created you now need some means to build income. Ads are one of the best ways to start generating simple income on your site. The concept is easy – you just place ads on your own sites. Each time someone comes to your site and clicks on the ad, you make a small profit, or, a portion of the advertising costs.
Advertisers love this because they can spread their ads across thousands of sites and rely on the ability and creativity of the site owners to get ad clicks back to their products.
Ad profit varies widely based on the popularity and competition for the advertising space. Depending on your site topic this could range from $.05 a click to $1.00 or more a click. Google Adsense is the easiest and best place to start.
4. Find Affiliate Products – Don’t forget that many people worldwide share your interests as well. In fact, it is almost certain that someone has written an ebook or created a product that matches your interests exactly. The catch for them is that they need a way to sell their products and services.
This is where you come in. Most online products allow you to sell them on your own sites and keep a portion of the revenue. If your site becomes very popular with a large amount of web traffic you can earn a significant amount of affiliate revenue because people will want to buy the products you recommend.
I know of one man who became a millionaire in only 2 years on this concept alone. He focused on his interest; laptops, and built an online business that gave him both affiliate and advertising revenue. There are many affiliate directories that you can use to find a product that matches your site. Great places to start are Clickbank and Linkshare – both are free to use.
5. Write Articles – If there is one point to take away these steps on how to earn money online, it’s this one. Articles are the best means to driving traffic back to your site and increase your profits.
Why is this? People are constantly looking for information on topics that are similar to yours. If they find your article and like it they’ll be very likely to go to your own site to get more information.
There are a large number of article directories available today that you can submit to for free. Your articles are simply classified and categorized in the topic areas of interest and then publicized for distribution. Others can use your articles on their own websites which gives you the benefit of having links back to your own site.
This is a very powerful way to promote yourself and your interests. Remember, getting traffic to your site is the only way to earn money from your ads and affiliate products.
Remember to stay focused on your topic of choice – if you stay productive every day you will learn how to earn money online.
Twitter: Common Marketing Mistakes
October 29, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Many internet marketers join Twitter for the purpose of promoting their products, for building their mailing lists, for keeping in touch with their customers or prospects, etc.
Nothing wrong so far …
However, if you don’t take care HOW you use Twitter, you may just waste your time or even worse … you can even damage your reputation.
You don’t want this to happen, do you?
Then … take care and avoid these mistakes …
MARKETING MISTAKE # 1
Letting your followers know EVERY LITTLE thing you do. Like “Drinking my coffee”.
Decide what you are. Are you a marketer or not?
Who do you think that cares when you drink your coffee? I bet that not even your mom!
If at a certain moment in time you have nothing important to say or you cannot help anyone, then … don’t say anything.
Sometimes silence is better.
If you want to show a human, friendly face instead of a corporate one, that’s a good approach, no problem. But …
Do it not by telling your followers when you drink your coffee but by trying to help them when they need and by offering them free tips & resources.
MARKETING MISTAKE # 2
Setting up automatic direct messages that are sent to ALL your followers but contain a message that is targetted to a very narrow niche that excludes many of your potential followers.
Here is one of the funniest DM I received:
“Free ebook ‘Internet Marketing Essentials for Newbies’ with subscription at …(link removed)”
Well, if you bother to read my short Twitter bio, then you find out within seconds that I’m the CEO of an ezine advertising network, not a newbie.
What someone may think about you when receives such message? “You’re ridiculous.” Or … “You’re a newbie”, or “You’re not professional”, or “You’re not polite”.
Is this the result you were looking for?
MARKETING MISTAKE # 3
Not responding to direct messages or replies that require an answer from you.
When you do this … it’s like saying, “I don’t care what you say or what you need, I only want you to signup for my mailing list and buy my products”.
If this is how you understand that a prospect has to be treated, you better try something else other than internet marketing.
MARKETING MISTAKE # 4
Don’t understanding that your tweet is actually a headline.
If your tweet is “Check this out: …(link)”, you have just wasted your time by writing that tweet.
Any marketer should remember what David Ogilvy said: “When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
To Your Success!
Adrian Jock
Adrian Jock is the CEO of ADS MARKET Ezine Advertising Network. Do you want free ezine advertising tips that will help you improve the results of your ezine advertising campaigns? Follow Adrian on Twitter and visit his blog Ezine Advertising Tips & Reviews.
Twitter- Race For More Followers- Good Or Bad?
October 28, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Are you also in the race to have more followers than others on Twitter.com? Is it good or bad? Let us not forget that we live in an age when stress is all around us. Some amount of stress is unavoidable – we have to take it. But what about activities where stress can be avoided? Social networking sites have added stress to our life in many ways.
We want to open and view our page every day without fail. If we do not do that, it causes stress. If we post something that may not be liked by others, we are worried. That again causes stress.
We want to tell our friends about everything in our life. Is that necessary? In earlier days, you did not call your friends to tell them that you are drinking coffee, but with Twitter many people are doing exactly that. This is another stress causing factor. Rather than enjoying a sunset, you want to tell your followers that you are watching it- sad but true.
Twitter is the latest big bang on the Internet and everybody wants to have a profile. They were devotees of Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, etc., but suddenly they feel bad if they do not have a page on Twitter. Everybody is thinking about what to write on his or her page. I made a page and decided to write nothing. Why take stress about telling others about when I take bath?
The race for having more followers is a big stress. Tell me, why should I expect people to read what I write? Unless I have a reputation for writing things that are witty, interesting, informative and useful to others, why should anyone follow my page? Till I do that I should be happy with my friends following me. And once I develop some art to make others interested I should be happy to have few followers. I cannot get followers by spamming or by copying others? And ultimately what do I gain by having more followers – nothing. I can gain something if I am there to promote a product or sell a service, not otherwise. Please avoid stress at every cost. Stress takes the joy out of our life. Follow your own friends and let them follow you on Twitter. Following unknown people so that they will in turn follow you is just a stress creator which will amount to nothing in future. So follow your common sense and opt out of the race for more unknown followers on Twitter.
The author writes text messages and advises and consults for social networking content like twitter backgrounds and myspace graphics. He also writes quizzes on subjects like personality, etc.
5 Tips for Using Twitter in a Generous Way
October 28, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Apart from having Ezines and Wordpress automatically feed Twitter, there are various ways you can focus on giving to others with it. I have created a list of 5 things that give you the satisfaction of sharing with others useful information on Twitter, instead of rambling on about how “ticked off I am that it is raining”-useless information! I am not condemning fun on Twitter. However if you are following 10 people, and one of them just focuses on personal expressions like the one above, chances are you expect their future tweets less worthwhile.
1. Offer a Free Report
To do this you will need a File-Transfer-Protocol so you can upload a PDF of something you want to share. Sometimes you will find it already online, in which case you can just give the link through twitter.
2. Give people news/link to something you found that was particularly helpful to you.
I recently added names like Timothy Ferriss and Steve Pavlina. These guys do this all the time. They will link to a website that helped them or complements the content on their blog.
3. Promote your blog.
Of course this is being generous. You just want to hone in on Twitter WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). Put your topic in a broad light and post it on Twitter with a URL. Twitter allows you to “mini-blog,” which means you can explore a slightly different title through it to attract visitors to your site.
4. YouTube
This one is a no brainer. Video information is being transferred between people at an alarmingly high rate. A website that does not have some kind of movies is being ignorant of a high percentage of its visitors who may not want to read pages and pages of information.
5. Announce your presence
Making face on through various events is important. Don’t be a faceless blogger who never shows up in public. Create free speaking events or just an event for coffee reserved for your readers. I understand websites and blogs are global, however there could be people who are in town and would like to meet you.
And that’s it really. What you want to do is create anticipation from your follows so that you keep going back for more updates.
Live for something!
Dan Massicotte is perhaps the most positive oriented individual you will ever meet. You can learn more about him on his website: http://danmassicottespositiveliving.com/ Join his newsletter to be informed of new articles and website developments.
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