My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘home business’

One layout that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). Why choose this format out of the many you can use? On the whole because the ads will look like regular web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links.

Construct a custom palette for your ads. Choose a colour that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, attempt to use white as the colour of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colours is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

Get rid of the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Don’t try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them fast. Preserve links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

There are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It’s best to think of making a good ad that will be a bit different and distinctive than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will click on.

If you’ve been struggling trying to make a respectable amount of money from AdSense, you don’t have to put up with any more watch the step-by-step videos here: .lionel1.com/

Today we will look at the most common myths about making a living on the Internet. There is no shortage of scams and hucksters out there.

1. “Build your downline” – Beware of any program or person that promises to “build a downline” for you. Usually what they don’t tell you is that almost all of these people placed under you are completely useless. Read the fine print and you will find that most of them don’t even have anything to do with your commissions. They are just numbers and names that are below you. Also beware of “one big downline”. Same concept, same scam.

2. “Overnight success” – I don’t care what program you are a part of. You will not be a complete success overnight and quit your job next week. This kind of hype is counterproductive and cheapens the honest programs that are lumped in with this garbage. Any success will be due to hard work and persistence.

3. “It’s all in the list!” – Maybe this is partly true. However, the quality of your list is also important. If you have a list full of harvested email addresses or a list of other marketers, you won’t make much progress. That is unless you are selling shovels instead of gold.

4. “All I need to do is join an affiliate program, buy a million email addresses, do one email blast and I’m rich!” – This is the quickest way to lose your internet service provider, and probably your position in any reputable affiliate program. If you have received spam emails about Viagra or cheap software, then you have seen this in action. The best way to profit from email marketing is to use reputable sources.

5. “I need a modern, flashy, techno-geek site” – Everyone does not have a high-speed internet connection. If your site takes too long to load, visitors will go elsewhere. Make your point with words and use the smallest amount of graphic “clutter” that you can.

Here is the bottom line. If you are looking to make extra money online, then take action and then jump in for the long haul. Doing things right in the beginning will increase your success later. Learn from the best and don’t make the same mistakes others have.

Millions have tried, millions are trying right now and millions will continue to try in the years ahead. There is so much misinformation out there regarding making money online, that you can easily be forgiven for thinking that all these millions are enjoying unbridled success.

The real truth of course is that the vast majority are failing. Their hopes of earning a healthy living from home are usually shattered before they have even begun. There is no single reason for this. It’s usually down to a combination of factors, and I intend to look at some of the reasons for the now infamous quote, “95% of people fail in their online business”. Some of the things I list below will doubtless be contested by many people but the harsh facts are that making money online, whilst entirely possible, is not the cakewalk that a lot of people will try to convince you it is.

So, let’s get down to debunking some of the nonsense – hopefully this will save a lot of people a lot of time and frustration.

1) Affiliate Marketing – so much rubbish is spouted by so many people who have never made an affiliate sale in their lives. The affiliate marketing model is indeed a powerful one and has made a number of people very wealthy. However, you are very unlikely to succeed with affiliate marketing without going through an arduous and sometimes lengthy learning process.

A huge swathe of articles you read about affiliate marketing are no more than rehashed PLR articles being used by lame hopefuls who are incapable of writing anything original on a subject that they are hoping to convince you they know all about. You can spot these peddlers of fifth hand information easily enough – look at the sites they link to, check their traffic rankings. Ninety Nine times out of a hundred you will find a cookie cutter website just like thousands of others or a direct link to an affiliate program that they foolishly believe you will sign up for having read their blindingly convincing pitch.

Are they the people to look to for advice? Think before you answer…….

2) Freebie Seekers and Freeloaders – this encompasses so many people it’s laughable. They talk about their “business” and seriously expect others to follow their blind lead. The term “business”, at least to my mind, indicates some sort of investment on behalf of the owner of that business – both in terms of time and money. Those most guilty of this faux pas are usually those who sign up to a free program, usually in the network marketing or MLM arena, and use every useless and pointless form of promotion as long as it’s free.

Much is said regarding failure rates in MLM schemes being so high, but one of the biggest is the freebie mentality. Don’t get sucked into believing you will ever make money online this way. The freeloaders are kidding themselves, but don’t let them kid you. The programs they sign up to for free often offer a paid upgrade and they live in hope (if they ever manage to recruit a single person of course) that they will grow fat on the subscriptions of others. Naturally this rarely happens, simply because they advertise to other freeloaders who have no intention of spending any money on their “business” either, and so the vicious circle continues.

If you don’t believe me, visit any free traffic exchange and look at some of the webpages circulating there. These people are dreamers – they will never make money online until they accept that they are eventually going to have to spend money to make money. Let’s get real here – when you’re looking for potions or energy drinks or some other latest greatest product that is no more than a copy of an already well established brand, is the first place you think to look going to be a free classified site on the internet? Maybe you’d head for the closest traffic exchange? Think – you don’t have to do it for more than a few seconds to see why these things do not work!

3) Throwing up a blog on a free platform and filling it up with Adsense or other PPC ads is unlikely to deliver much success. This applies whether we are talking one blog or fifty blogs. Adsense is great, but it’s also a numbers game – you need big numbers in terms of pages and visitors to make big returns. By big, I mean big – tens of thousands of pages receiving tens of thousands of visitors and you will probably start making a nice income. Throwing up fifty, a hundred or more useless blogs or splogs won’t work even if some people tell you that all you need are a couple of Adsense clicks a day on each one and you’ll be raking in the money. Great theory, but you won’t get the traffic to even generate those occasional clicks in the first place. Throwing up such poor quality free pages will achieve nothing – in fact, you’re more likely to get banned from Blogger and Adsense to boot if you’re not careful. Oh, and don’t think you’ll be smart and use auto surf sites to rack up huge numbers of impressions – using any kind of traffic exchange in conjunction with Adsense will get you banned very quickly.

Our freebie seekers of course will tell you otherwise, expecting you to believe that their PR0 blog with no comments is really generating a thosand dollars for them every month, and that all you need to do is visit this or that site, where you can learn to do exactly the same. You will naturally be directed to a page through an affiliate link – Clickbank or similar – to purchase an ebook that the freebie seeker has naturally never laid eyes on, let alone read.

4) Making millions with PPC advertising. This is a no brainer – all you have to do is pick some keywords, write a snappy ad, link to an affiliate program and gve your credit card details to Google, Yahoo, MSN or whoever. You will wake up rich beyond your wildest dreams.

OK, maybe too heavy on the sarcasm, but it’s really not that easy. Ask anyone who has rushed blindly into PPC and lost their shirt in the process, paying for a truckload of clicks but generating nary a sale. I have a little more sympathy for these types than the freeloaders; after all, they have accepted that they need to spend money to make money, but unless you do your homework, it’s likely to prove costly. Even if you do your research beforehand, there are no guarantees that PPC campaigns will work for your business. Having said all that, PPC can be a very profitable tool, just don’t believe overly hyped claims from the totally inexperienced.

5) Start a blog and you will soon be collecting checks on a regular basis. Don’t believe this one either. There is a lot to be said for blogs as a marketing tool, don’t get me wrong. Blogs can and do increase your exposure tremendously, but apart from an elite few, blogs are usually not their direct revenue generators. A blog is a tool, and used wisely it will help an online business to grow, but it’s unlikely to pay the bills all by itself.

6) Article marketing – another area where a lot of ill informed and overly hyped prose is written. As a long term strategy, carried out correctly, article marketing can be hugely beneficial to a business of any kind, but it takes time to see results and there is a learning curve to go through.

I actually saw someone advocating the tactic of blanket bombing article directories with PLR articles and slapping affiliate links into the resource box. This was in an article submitted to one of my directories. They even went as far as to claim that this would guarantee a huge number of hits and sales. This is just one piece of foolish nonsense from a clueless fool, who, no doubt is wondering why article marketing is so useless, whilst trying to tell others how rich it will make them. It is a fact that most article directories do not permit linking directly to affiliate programs in the resource box! It follows that this is hardly the way to proceed.

7) Work from home opportunities have become a breeding ground for scams and hucksters the world over. Global oppportunities for peddlers of schemes and tricks to make themselves rich have never been more plentiful.

There are several “opportunities” circulating at the moment that are borderline illegal and when they disappear into the ether there will no doubt be plenty to replace them.

Promises of overnight riches rarely hold much water if you examine them even superficially. Just because you see a video of someone opening envelopes full of cash does not make it so. One “gifting” program of this nature has obviously sucked in a fair number of gullible souls who really believe that people will be queuing up to send them three thousand dollars just because they show them a poor quality video on a traffic exchange.

Have you ever managed to sell a product online for three thousand dollars or more? I’m guessing the answer in most cases is – probably not. If you fall for this kind of scam, you probably deserve to get rooked – after all, how difficult is it for someone to get three thousand in cash (there are plenty of ways), go to FedEx, mail it to themselves and then film it’s arrival and subsequent opening on a webcam. If that’s all the proof it takes to convince you, you have some painful lessons to learn.

Whenever you read outlandish claims offering boatloads of money and retirement before you’ve even started working, in conjunction with proclamations that you don’t have to sell anything, don’t have to advertise, don’t have to do anything at all really, other than sit back and watch the money roll in…..and you find yourself believing it – my advice is to seek professional help.

Making money with sites that pay you to read ads, emails, visit sites, sign up for free offers etc etc etc I’m not saying that none of them work but in terms of time expended set against financial reward, they are usually a dismal prospect. Would you go and do a job for $20 a month?

There you have just eight of countless things that you should not believe. Trust me there are plenty more.

If you are serious about making money online, you are going to need a plan. You are going to have to spend some money to get yourself set up to do business. You will need a website of your own for starters (unless you intend to buy a hundred ebooks and courses telling you how to succeed without even this most basic of needs). This means hosting fees. If you are starting from a position of very little technical knowledge, you will have to dedicate a lot of time to learning the ropes or you will have to pay for the services of others. With most things online, the sooner you bow to the inevitability of having to lay out a little cash as you go along, the sooner you will start to open up some real possibilities.

There are countless ways to make money online, there are many people who are living proof of this, but try not to get caught up in the rubbish.

I have not mentioned things like stock or currency trading simply because they are not scams. Trading online can be lucrative and you won’t need a website of your own for this kind of venture but you will need capital, and you need to understand the risks, which are not insignificant.

However that’s all a subject for another day. As grandpa said, free advice is often pretty much worth what you pay for it. Just be careful what you believe in your quest for online wealth and you’ll avoid a lot of wasted time and disappointments.

There IS plenty of free information on the internet and there are also plenty of free tools and software and services that may help you – but – you are starting a business and business means you will need some business capital to get off the ground. If you think otherwise and persist in looking for the elusive, no cost magic bullet, you are destined to fail and I don’t care what any rehashed nonsense some self help book tells you about irrefutable laws of nature or anything else. You need to do a lot more than just dream about online success if you wish to achieve it.

A closing thought – money may well make the world go round. If nobody spends any, nobody receives any. If you can find me something that disproves that 100%, tell me where to sign up.

I have been in internet marketing for over ten years and have seen marketing techniques come and go. Some are still around and some are new and innovative. Below you will find what I believe to be the best and most effective online marketing techniques.

Article Marketing – Article marketing was and is one of the most powerful online marketing methods available. Not only does it do wonders for you and your business, it is free as well!

Article marketing consists of writing helpful, informative, easy to understand articles that actually help your readers, not try to sell them something. Then you submit them to article banks, directories and ezine publishers. When your article runs in a popular ezine, it can do great things for your business. Writing articles is not as hard as you might think so give it a try. You will be delightfully surprised at how much it can affect your business.

Remember:

Don’t worry about fancy words. People are looking for help, not big words.

Advertise in your resource box, not your article.

Provide real, helpful info and resources, hot hype!

Write from the heart! Let your personality shine through in your articles.

Blogging – Blogging is a newer form of online marketing that just started becoming popular in the late 90′s. Blog is short for weblog and means an online publication in the form of a log or journal. Blogs can increase your customer base, your traffic and your search engine ranking, thus increasing your sales.

Blogging can be done for free through such sites as:

blogger.com

wordpress.com

and livejournal.com

Be sure and update your blog regularly; everyday would be best as people like fresh content, ideas and information.

Ezine Publishing – Ezine publishing has been around much longer than blogging and is far more effective, in my opinion. Your ezine needs to contain helpful resources and information, not just sales pitches. Develop a relationship with your readers. Let them know they can trust you and rely on you when they need your help.

Things to remember when putting together your ezine:

Keep it clean and easy to read.

Limit your advertising and be selective.

Always provide quality content and information.

Add your personality so your readers can get to know you.

Always provide contact info and be accessible.

Be consistent; send your ezine regularly as scheduled.

Be sure and proofread before sending it out.

Online Networking – Online networking, as with offline networking, is very important to your business. This is when you connect with as many people as possible to learn more and share more about your business. Many leads can come from networking. There are several ways to do this online.

Email Discussion Groups: Go to yahoogroups.com and search for appropriate groups.

Message Boards: Be sure and follow the rules for posting and offer your help as much as possible.

Social Sites: Such as MySpace.com, Ryze, Merchant Circle, etc. These can be great ways to make more contacts and get leads.

Joint Ventures – This is when you enter into an agreement with another online marketer that will benefit both sides.

Examples of joint ventures:

Ezine Ad Swaps

eBook Ad Swaps

Subscription Page Ad Swaps

Affiliate Programs

Exchange Advertising for % of Sales

and the list goes on and on. Be creative and come up with new ways you and your associates can help each other.

Podcasting – Podcasting is using digital media files which are distributed all over the internet via syndication feeds. Podcasting is still a fairly new way of online marketing and has great potential. Podcasting can be powerful because it uses voice not written words to get the message across. Offer your articles, do voice interviews, offer a chapter in your ebook via podcast, etc. Again, use your imagination to create new ways to spread the word about your business.

Ezine Advertising – Advertising your business, product, service, etc. in quality ezines can be well worth the money spent. There are a few things you can to to help you choose which ezines to advertise in.

Do a search to find ezines that cater to your target market. For example: if you are advertising kids’ books, you don’t want to advertise in an ezine about cars.

Once you find several targeted ezines, subscribe to them so you can look them over and see if the publisher is reliable in sending them out. You can also look over the other ads and make sure the publisher is selective in their advertising. You can possibly learn what the other readers think of the ezine as well.

Try contacting the publisher to see if they respond to your email. Ask about testimonials from other advertisers. Find out how many ads they run per issue and what the costs are.

You could also ask the publisher to do an ad swap to get an idea of what the response is like. Be selective in your choices and always code your ads so you know which ezines actually deliver.

I hope this article has given you some insight as to how to market your home/online business. I use several of these methods (and should be using the rest) and know from experience that they work!

The possibilities with the internet are endless and we need to keep up with new and innovative ways of marketing ourselves and our business. And we need to keep using tried and true methods as well.

Top web sites are site lists focused around a common topic, for example clip art, pets, music etc.

Sites on these lists are ranked in order of “votes” – the site that gets voted most gets the top place, the site that gets the 2nd biggest amount of votes gets the second place and so on. The voting system is simple; each top web site member places a link back to the top web site on his site and for each visitor that clicks the link, the site gets one vote.

WHAT ARE TOP WEB SITES?

It’s a links site, that ranks member’s sites by the amount of traffic they send in. They usually rank a list of the top 10 – 100 sites focused around a common topic, for example health, business, music etc.

The sites on these lists are ranked in order of “votes” – or referrers. The top referrers get one banner of theirs listed free of charge, in the top web sites section.

The top web sites have three common areas:

* The Index: that’s the actual list of sites ordered by hits in

* The Sign up and Login page, where webmasters add their sites, modify setting and view stats

* The Enter page. Some top web sites have gateway pages in order to protect themselves from cheating.

In order to generate votes, each top web site’s member places a link back to the top web site on his web site, and every time one of his visitors clicks over that link, he gets one vote. The more votes he gets, the better his position will be on the top web sites list.

The site that gets voted most gets the top place, the site that gets the 2nd biggest amount of votes gets the second place and so on.

Obviously, most of the traffic that goes to the top web sites pages, go to the high ranking sites, although some of the lower-ranking ones can also get a reasonable share. And the top web sites pages get traffic through the voting system, so everybody gets more traffic.

Top web site lists are then very similar to the reciprocal links exchanges; but with an important difference, at the top web sites lists, there is a “middleman” and you can’t really tell with which sites you’re exchanging traffic with.

The main system utilized for requesting the “votes” to the top web site is usually a picture, and this could be a real problem. If the link picture is too big or you put in a too prominent place, your site might look unprofessional. If you use a small link picture, then you might not get the votes you need to rise on the list because people might miss it.

Top web site lists allow you to automate the link exchange and distribute traffic between participating sites according to the traffic they send in. And they increase the traffic to your web site for free.

But as always the big question is: Do top web sites work?

Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t, it all depends on the quality of the top web site in question.

HOW SHOULD YOU CHOSE A TOP WEB SITE?

* Look for one that doesn’t have any pop-up windows

* It must have a lot of sites closely related to the subject of your site

* It must have it’s own domain

* Monitor the traffic you’re sending to the list and the traffic you’re getting from it. If you send more than you receive, resign and find another topsite or other promotion method. On “How to Sell on The Web” you can find dozens of ways to get traffic to your web site.

HOW TO FIND YOUR TOP WEB SITE

Look for sites dealing with the same subject as you. They might even already be a member of a related top site

Look for “top site” “top web site” or “topsite” at the Search engines

Browse the topsite list directory: dot topsitelists dot com/directory/

Once you chose the top web site that you like, just fill out the form and your site will be ready to be visited. Then you will have to ad to your place the HTML script that the top web site will give you. This script is the one that will allow your visitors to vote from your site.

ARE TOP WEB SITES GOOD FOR EVERYBODY?

No, they aren’t…

If you have a content web site, who’s objective is to provide resources to your visitors, then including your site in a a top web site’s list could be a good idea.

If you have created an awesome site to sell products or services, and give the people the opportunity to vote for your site; they might get so enthusiastic with the good content of your site, that they decide to vote for you, so they click on the voting button and…! They jump to the top web sites page, and your sale is lost!

WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM A TOP WEB SITE?

To have a high ranking in a very visited top web site list can be very good for you, because it will increase your site’s traffic, and traffic means sales, and the opportunity to sell advertising space.

If you chose well your top web site’s lists, picking up the ones with good traffic, and create a professionally designed site like “How to Sell on The Web” teaches you to build, you will get thousands of visitors to your site, and that will give you many sales.

Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi

A few weeks ago I was watching my 7 year old Grandson Joel as he was drawing a picture of a strawberry patch.

As he drew, it began to look more and more like a Christmas wreath than a strawberry patch. I told him that it looked pretty good, but suggested to him that “maybe you could put a few strawberries here, and here and here” as I pointed to the big white area in the middle of his drawing.

He looked at me in all seriousness and said…

“Grandpa, it doesn’t matter what YOU think, it’s what the artist thinks!”

It was funny at the time, but I have been thinking about this quite a bit.

You know what? He is right!

There is a great lesson to be learned here. The lesson applies very well to Internet marketing. Actually it applies well to ANY kind of marketing, it doesn’t necessarily have to be on the internet.

We have a tendancy to come up with an idea that we think is the greatest thing since sliced bread. We’re absolutely convinced that everybody will beat a path to our door to buy our product. We spend lots of money to develop a sales campaign, build a website, buy advertising and so on, and spend a lot of time and effort to draw people to our website, get good search engine positioning, and then more often than not we’re disappointed because very few people buy our products.

Could it be that the marketplace doesn’t care about our opinion?

Does that hurt your ego? It shouldn’t. It should open your eyes to this very simple, but wildly profound truth.

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU THINK, IT’S WHAT THE MARKETPLACE THINKS THAT IS IMPORTANT!

Big companies spend millions of dollars on market research, testing and surveys before they ever spend any money in developing a product or marketing a product. Doesn’t it make sense that before we ever spend a dime on any kind of product development, website development or whatever that we should spend some time first to find out what people are buying, when do they buy, and how do they buy?

By doing proper research in advance, you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort, and you’ll be rewarded many times over by successful, money making websites. Finding profitable “niches” is not a difficult process, but it can make all the difference in the world as to whether or not your website will be a huge success or a dismal failure.

As you consider what kind of websites you’ll be building, keep in mind the lesson learned from a 7 year old.