Your Guide to Filling Your Blog Editorial Calendar

When the time comes that you decide to really dive deep into your blogging, you really want to start off on the right foot. You take the time to find out which platform is best, which plugins will help you make the most of your visitors’ experience – but you get stuck when it comes time to create the actual content for your blog.

You’ll find that many marketers who teach this topic are always talking about themes and plugins – but that’s often because they make a significant commission on the promotion of those tools! 

When it comes time to instruct you on creating content, they’re often just as lost as you are about the process, so you’re left struggling in front of your audience. It can be embarrassing and it can hurt your blog traffic if you start abandoning your blog frequently to wait for inspiration to strike.

You have to take a three-pronged approach to blogging. First, get everything organized. If you’re scattered on your blog, it confuses the readers, search engine spiders – and even you.

Picking a Passionate Niche & Finding Time to Work On It

Picking a Niche that Suits Your Passions

When working from home, it’s important to choose a niche that suits your passions. Working in any niche can be more challenging when you don’t like what you’re doing. But when you love what you’re doing, you wake up in the mornings with the energy and the enthusiasm to get to work.

Take a few minutes and consider which niches might fit with your passions. If you’re not sure what your passions are, imagine you have a whole day to yourself. What do you spend it doing?

Would you spend it perfecting new recipes? Exploring your city? Writing movie reviews? If you’re still having trouble, look at your existing hobbies. What do you enjoy doing in your spare time? What do you spend your money on?

Taking a moment to consider what you love doing will help you decide which niche is the best fit for you. Or maybe you recently discovered niche you’re passionate about. What do you do then?

Begin reading and researching. Fully immerse yourself in your chosen niche. Sign up for every email list that you can. It pays off in big ways to know the current issues and events in your niche.

Do You Want Cash or Clicks?

When you stay vigilant with the monitoring of your audience's responses through various marketing campaigns, it won't be long until you begin to get a feel for that which initiates your readers to convert the clicks on their end to sales on your end.

Clicks are certainly paramount (if you aren't getting clicks you won't get sales), however, the most imperative metric to study is your conversion rates.

Early at the onset of the internet, business owners would keep track of hits. If a site owner had a thousand hits, it would be considered to be a success - without calling to mind any other factors.

When you assess your clicks versus cash made, you begin to understand that's it's incredibly important to look at which clicks result in money being earned. This background information about the behavior of your readership is essential to coming to terms with whether your marketing strategy is working well or not.

Today we have great web analytics tools, including but not limited to Google Analytics. We are able to sift through a variety of metrics and create a reliable collection of charts and reports that help to determine the behavior of the average website visitor.

Key Points to Attracting Industry Influencers

Aligning yourself with some of the best industry influencers is certainly not a requirement to become successful, however, it helps a lot, and can make a world of difference for you in establishing personal and professional success.

Building strong relationships with some of the biggest players within your own niche is helpful in that they will let you know what sells and what doesn't, as well as providing you with a host of other benefits.


So Just What Is An 'Industry Influencer'?

An 'industry influencer' is someone who has a large following within a specific niche. You can easily find industry influencers on any social media site. These people are talked about, and everyone wants to be associated with what they do and say.

When you note that someone has thousands of subscribers to their blogs plus blog comments always seem to be new and engaged fully in the topic at hand, you know you have found an influencer.

These people are very involved in their particular niche, offering a variety of services, products, and promotions to their loyal fans. Some may even have published books related to their niche. Writing and blogging may just be a part of what they do.

How to Know Your SEO

Learn the Language of SEO 

Whether you are an internet marketer or an offline business going online, you are going to hear about search engine optimization (SEO) very early on. SEO is the term online marketers use to refer to the process of getting as much traffic as possible from search engines like Google. 

It can be confusing to try to understand this new foreign language that everyone online seems to feel so comfortable with. So rather than struggling to translate everything, learn a few of the basic terms to give yourself a head start.

Here are some of the most common SEO terms that you’ll hear.

Make Your Work Truly Your Own

If you see the word “personalization” and you stop breathing – either because it petrifies you to even consider, or you become paralyzed by a lack of knowledge, you’re about to feel a lot better about working your own style and voice into your online business efforts.

For many people, introverts or not, personalization is something they don’t understand or don’t want to do. After all, isn’t making money online all about being able to stay anonymous and rake in cash?

No, it’s not actually.

Working from home online is about finding your passion to help other people, and reaping both monetary rewards and personal satisfaction from your efforts. Personalization elevates you from anonymous, possible scumbag (in the eyes of a wary consumer), to a trustworthy source of valuable information.

Tips on Building Your Business

Building a Work at Home Part Time Business

If you’re one of the few entrepreneurial-minded individuals who want to pursue a career working for themselves online, then you should be proud of yourself for pursuing this dream.

Some of you might be doing this on top of a fulltime job – maybe working on weekends or after your regular work hours. That takes a lot of dedication and good time management skills.

Other could be trying to build a part time business because of other reasons. Maybe you don’t have enough hours in the day to pursue it fulltime because you’re a caretaker r due to your own ill health.

Either way, it’s impressive to go after what you want – and the good news is, even building a business a part time, you should start to see good results quickly from your efforts if you plan it out properly.

Which Online Business Models Work Best for Part Timers?

There are so many options to choose from. Is one better than another for those who only work on their business part time? Not necessarily. But sometimes it can interfere, depending on the business model and your schedule.

For example, you might not be able to pursue a service-oriented business life ghostwriting or graphics or web design if you never know exactly how much time you’ll have to work on your business.

It’s possible that your life is hectic and you’re pursuing this as a “when I have a few spare moments” goal. That’s perfectly okay, too! You just need to find something that fits your schedule so that you don’t wind up with angry clients and customers because you didn’t meet a deadline.

If you do have set hours and you know that you have exactly 2 hours a day to put into your business and that you can write 5 pages of content, then you can figure out a delivery schedule for ghostwriting, for example – and you wouldn’t be putting your business reputation at risk.

You also want to allow for physical and mental exhaustion. If you’re already stretched to the gills with work and life and trying to supplement your income with a part time endeavor online, then you might want something where it comes easy to you – not something that you struggle to learn and master.

Blogging is a great business model because it enables you to work when you can and pull in a variety of profits. For example, your income can be derived on a blog from:

·         Banner ad revenue

·         AdSense links

·         Tangible affiliate reviews

·         Digital affiliate reviews

·         Your own info product creations (like eBooks)

The great thing about schedules is that blogging allows you to schedule blogs ahead of time, so if you have more time on one day, you can queue up a few days’ worth of blog posts and let them automatically go live without you having to log in and publish them.

Coaching may or may not be a good business model for you because it requires you to be available at certain times of the day. If you’re a day worker planning to work on your part time business at night, that may not work for your clients – or it could be perfect timing! It depends on the niche and each individual’s needs.

A membership site can pull in quite a bit of money for you – and it doesn’t require you to be there daily except to make sure things are running smoothly. You can create an entire membership ahead of time that drip feeds to your customers when they sign up. Then you can spend the bulk of your work hours on marketing and promotion.

Things like affiliate marketing and info product development are all easy to pursue as a part time work at home individual. You write when you can – even on your lunch hour at work – and publish whenever something is completed.

Balancing Life and Work for Part Time Entrepreneurs

Perhaps the biggest obstacle any work at home man or woman faces is the balance of life and work. You have to eliminate distractions – whether it’s the TV or a family member – and get things done with the few hours you have to invest in your business.

Make sure your loved ones understand what it is you need to do during your work hours. Sometimes family gets confused because they see you home yet you’re saying that you’re working.

Any interruption is a pull on your resources that contribute to your profit plan. But of course, working from home is also a perk. If your whole reason for doing this is so you can enjoy more time with your kids, for example – then by all means, put the keyboard down and hold them for a few minutes if they need you!

You’ll need to make sure that you get plenty of sleep and keep yourself from becoming run down. Sometimes we bite off more than we can chew and you end up exhausted and uninspired to work on your business.

Which Tasks Should You Do in Your Part Time Hours?

Deciding which tasks to work on in a limited amount of time can make you feel stressed. But it’s easier to manage than you might think. You basically have four branches of your business:

1.    Creation

2.    Promotion

3.    Traffic

4.    Analysis

You should be creating something in your business. That could be a piece of new content that reviews a product, an eBook, a viral report that you plan to launch with money links in it, etc.

Once created, you’ll be focusing on promoting your online pages. The most successful entrepreneurs are those who don’t stop at task #1 – they’re the ones who really dig into the promotional aspect of their business and build a brand and a buzz for their business.

You can do that through social marketing (like using Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). You can also write press releases, participate in forums, and comment on blogs to help promote your online offers.

There’s a difference between promotion and traffic, although some entrepreneurs use the terms interchangeably. Promotion is how you develop a name for yourself. It’s how you engage people and create loyal customers.

Traffic is the mere act of getting your target audience to your site so that they can build that connection with you and convert into paying customers. Traffic can be achieved through your promotions (like when you Tweet a link to your site), but you can also use different methods.

If you’re building a list of subscribers, you always want to notify them whenever you have something new up. This includes blog posts, reviews, and even new products for sale.

You can also purchase advertising for traffic using things like Pay Per Click ads on Google, or by purchasing solo ads that go out to another marketer’s list of subscribers.

Analysis is something that never ends. Some people never tackle this task – and subsequently, their business doesn’t achieve the most success that it could if they’d just paid attention to the details.

You need to analyze what you’re doing online and always look for ways to:

·         Improve your products

·         Increase your traffic

·         Heighten your conversion rate

For example, if you have sales copy for one of your own info products, you want to always be split testing to see how one element performs against another one. You’ll have two identical copies of the same sales letter – with just one item slightly different so you can see which one out-performs the other.

It might be something as simple as the color of your text, or a headline change. Maybe the font, or an image you’re using will make a different. Everything should be tested and tracked over time.

How Outsourcing Can Help You Get Ahead

As a part time entrepreneur, you need to make the most of all of your resources – including both timeand money. What you currently lack compared to other fulltime entrepreneurs is time.

You may even lack money at this time, but as you see earnings coming in, put aside some of those profits to reinvest in your business using freelance workers who can help your profits grow in a shorter period of time.

For example, let’s say you took the time to create your own info product. It’s stellar and you think it will be a big hit on a minisite or on Kindle – wherever you decide to launch it.

Problem is, you need an eCover for that info product and you aren’t good at graphics. You have two choices. You can download a tool and spend time learning how to use it and create your own eCover (which will probably look amateurish because it may not be your strength), or you can outsource it to a pro.

Some people mistakenly believe that freelancers all charge too much – so what they do is either ignore them and take the DIY (do it yourself) route – or they go to opposite extremes and hire a cheap worker on a site like Fiverr where they won’t get the best quality (it’s the same as if you did it yourself in many cases).

True, some Fiverr gigs can be well worth your money – but you can hire a proven professional for a decent amount and get perks like revisions or extra specs that you’d have to “add on” with a Fiverr worker.

What should you outsource? There are several ways to decide this:

·         Things you dislike doing

·         Things you aren’t good at

·         Things someone is better at

This career is supposed to be enjoyable to you – so if you hate writing, by all means, outsource it to someone else. If you aren’t qualified to create graphics, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by doing it yourself and creating a poor visual for your product.

Even outsourcing things you enjoy and that you can do yourself is sometimes a smart move – if someone else can do it better. Like sales copy – if someone else converts at 35% and the most you can do is 7%, then it makes sense to hand that task over to another, more qualified professional.

Tools and Tips That Make Your Part Time Efforts Easier

As someone who has fewer hours to work on your business, you need tools and ideas that help you take formidable shortcuts in your business. Consider investing in tools like keyword research tools that help you pick out profitable words and phrases you can hone in on without doing much guesswork with a freebie tool.

Use quality products right away, like top hosting and email autoresponders. You don’t want to have to migrate everything from a free option to a good paid version later.

Set up a system through a tool like Download Guard where you can take payments and automatically deliver products without having to be at your computer 24/7.

Part time entrepreneurs often perform better than fulltime marketers do – for the sheer fact that they know their time is limited, so they use a laser-focused approach to completing their tasks whenever they get the opportunity!

Tips for Blogging More Seriously

Blogging has become a household term and a business must-have.  While not everyone understands the technical jargon that goes with running a successful blog, most people now understand how crucial it is to their project, business, or organization to have a place on the  web with which to make their presence known and present their personalities and points of view.

Julie and Julia is a good example of this. It’s a movie that originated from a true life tale of Julie Powell, who set out to blog about her experiences cooking each of Julia Child’s 524 recipes from her bookMastering the Art of French Cooking in just 365 days.  Both the book and the movie are incredible - I can say with complete honesty that I have watched the movie more than thrice!

Julie's blog became so popular that she was offered a book and movie deal for her efforts, and she also published her second book. Her success isn't common, but not everyone needs a book and movie deal to make a substantial profit from their blog!

Where Most People Go Wrong

Looking for “blog jobs” online is something many people do these days. They know they love to post on Facebook and they hate their current 8-5 job, so they think they’d love to get hired as an official blogger for a company.

It’s true that more and more companies are coming on board as blog entities – because they understand the value of having a social media presence online, part of which is their blog audience (in addition to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, for example).

But you have to understand that when a company sets out to attract a blogger to represent their business online, they don’t want an amateur blogger. They want someone who understands thebusiness side of blogging – because when you’re a blogger, you’re building a brand (or destroying it, in some unfortunate cases).

When you start looking at professional blogger-for-hire jobs, you’ll see that they want you to understand online marketing fully, they want you to deliver a certain number of blog posts per week (usually five), and sometimes want you to go out and find guest blogging opportunities where you can blog elsewhere and link back to their main blog.

It’s not a good career for someone who is new to blogging and thinks it “might be fun.” This is for seasoned professionals – and sometimes the company will even want to investigate to see what kind of current reach you have with your own content in the social media world.

If you’re already at a company that doesn’t have an online presence, then maybe you can make a suggestion that they allow you to head up that operation. This would give you a little experience so that you could then go out and brag about launching and generating a good buzz for your current company.

Choose a More Rewarding Blogging Career

The do-it-yourself route is far more rewarding when it comes to blogging. It’s something you can do anytime – in the morning before work, on your lunch hour, after work and on the weekends.

Then when it becomes profitable, you can use it to replace your current income and begin blogging full-time.  When you choose this path, you have much more personal satisfaction in your blogging career.

Blogging is a real business when you start pursuing it for financial reasons.  Yes, it gives you much in terms of happiness – but when you’re making money doing something you love, it’s very rewarding.

You have to do your best to treat this like a business from the very start.  If you start blogging haphazardly, then your readers will recognize that it’s an amateur site.  Yes, some will become fans anyway – but others want to know they’re following a leader in whatever niche you choose to blog about.

How do you pick a niche for your blog?  Some blogs have a multitude of topics – from entertainment to fashion to business to health.  You can do that, but unless you have a team of contributors, it’s hard to maintain the momentum needed for a broad blog like this.

A better option might be to narrow down your focus into something that you really love.  It can still be broad – like a women’s health blog for example.  But it’s not as narrow as “everything” or “health in general” (including both genders).

You can even drill down more and go with one form of women’s health, like menopause or pregnancy.  You don’t even need to be an expert in it – it’s all about sharing information and as you learn, you can share!

One thing that’s important is that you make sure that you love whatever topic you’re blogging about.  You should want to wake up every day, eager to get to your computer.

If you dread it because it bores you or it’s depressing, then you won’t help your readers and the blog won’t become profitable for you.

Aside from the overall slant, you get to choose what each individual entry on your blog is all about.  If you were blogging for another company, they might tell you what to blog about each day – even if you found it mundane.

You can set an entire editorial calendar for your blog where you choose which topics are presented to your readers.  (Personally, I use both an online editorial calendar, and an old school wall calendar.  A bit old school, I still like to see my projects straight in front of me as I go about my day, and project reminders written by my own hand.)  You also get to pick the tone for the blog pieces.

For example, let’s take the diet niche.  You could be a fad and trend diet blogger who emphasizes fast weight loss – or someone who harps on the fact that weight loss should just be the adoption of better nutrition and exercise and the pounds should come off slowly. 

From here, I would like to direct you to my post on learning a few ways you can begin to establish a relationship with your readers.  This is so crucial, it is not a step to be missed if you are seriously considering taking up blogging as more than a personal hobby.

Supporting Yourself Financially With Blogging

When you start blogging for profit, you should be consistent with your efforts.  You should blog regularly – daily if possible, but at least several times a week.  There are a few ways you can make money as a blogger.

Build a list from your blog so that whenever you have a new blog post, you can notify people about it.  Also have an RSS system set up for people who use RSS feed readers to get notified of your new content.

Whenever you have a list, it gives you a certain amount of power – the power to instantly communicate with your target audience when you are selling or promoting products.

Because of this, you have to make sure that you don’t abuse that power by spamming their email with useless or irrelevant offers.  If you do this, you build a reputation as a spammer.

Sell ad space for a certain amount of profits. You can arrange a specific area of your blog for ad space that people rent on a monthly basis, paying the ad revenue to you directly.

If you go this route, make sure you have specifics in place to control what kinds of ads can get placed on your blog – all the way down to the colors and animation of it if you want.

Sign up for AdSense, too.  This can help you get clicks and revenue.  You can put different sized ad banners on your blog, from buttons to skyscraper ads.  You can include images or go with just text.

One thing you have to remember whenever you place any ads on your blog is that yes, it gives you some money when people leave your site for somewhere else – but in leaving, it also means someoneelse is capturing their name and email address and selling something to them, not you.

Promote tangible products as an affiliate. You can sign up as an Amazon Associate and promote anything they sell there that they offer a commission on.  Using our menopause example, if you promoted a chilled pillow, you could earn a percentage of each sale from your blog post.

Promote digital products as an affiliate.  Digital products can be found at sites like ClickBank.com.  You can sign up for free and get a hoplink (affiliate link) where you earn around 50% for each sale.  JVZoo is another wonderful affiliate site for online products, and JVZoo also provides the option to you as a seller of your own products.

Create your own products and sell them from your blog.  You don’t have to promote other people’s stuff.  Why not create an info product (eBook, video or audio course) and teach something you blog about in more depth – or in a more comprehensive manner?

Offer services from your blog.  Freelancing like writing, graphics, or other services can be offered right from your blog.  Coaching is something you can offer.  Many people pay top dollar for one on one coaching sessions via Skype or even email!

Blogging can be a very fun and very profitable venture if you approach it correctly.  Don’t make the mistake of flying by the seat of your pants.  If you do this, your blog will be scattered with topics, have no set monetization plan, and you’ll end up unhappy with the effort you’ve put in.

With proper planning and enthusiasm, you’ll never need to look for “blogging jobs” again – in fact, you might be the one putting out feelers for a professional blogger to come onboard and help you with your content needs!  Being in a position of power makes a world of difference.

Why You Need A Content Listening Plan

Do you take the time to listen to what your customers and prospects are saying? Are you aware of what your competition is doing? Do you know what they are talking about and publishing? Are you up-to-date on the latest content trends and the industry news? If you answered no to any of these questions then you need to think about having a content listening plan.

Content Listening Plan

A content listening plan is simply a way for you to track what your customers, prospects, industry leaders, and your direct competition is saying and doing. This is an extremely valuable strategy that lets you listen in to what others are doing, and create content and headlines that are timely, relevant, and offers valuable content for your own customers and prospects.

The Elements In A Content Listening Plan

Keyword Research:

Are you aware that keywords change and evolve very quickly? It's important for you to stay on top of what is trending right now. You should make it a habit to do some keyword research at least once a month. This will ensure you catch the latest keywords and phrases. There are a number of keyword research tools available. Find one you like and use it on a regular basis. Keywords are the backbone of searches: make sure you know what people are searching for.

Social Media Trend Analysis:

Visit as many social media sites as you can, and take note of what people are talking about. Knowing what is hot at the moment helps you identify opportunities. If everyone is talking about a football player who has had numerous concussions, and you have a sports blog, you can write about the hazards of concussions and how to avoid getting hurt.

In this case, you already know what the problem is and can help your niche audience by sharing your knowledge about sports injuries. This is just one example; knowing what is a hot topic can help you draw people to your site. You can also take this trending topic, take your hashtag research tools and find other topic trends.

Newsworthy:

You want to know what is happening in your industry. Set up a Google alert system to tell you when certain keywords or phrases are used. This not only helps in keyword research but helps you keep track of what your competition is up to.

System Of Delivery:

In order to make use of these elements, you have to choose whether to receive your information through email or have it downloaded onto a database. This is the easy part: using this information to build a larger customer base is the key to your success.

How To Use The Content Listening Plan

Brainstorming and creating a working plan is something that should be done on a consistent basis. You really should plan to sit down once a month and review all the information you have received through your listening plan.

You can do it more often if you know things change that rapidly in your industry. By taking the time to go through your content, you are able to put out timely, relevant content that has value for your audience. Your goal is to respond to what your audience needs, and fill those needs quickly.

7 Tips on Using Youtube for Marketing

YouTube is a great marketing tool for those of us that know how to make the most of the opportunities that it offers.

In the space of just a few years, YouTube has become one of the most popular websites on the entire internet. To a large extent the popularity of YouTube and other websites that host video clips is due to the early onset of broadband.

Once this occurred, those who are technologically savvy have been able to learn the latest methods much more quickly, as well as create videos of their own with which to drive traffic and educate others. YouTube has the extreme advantage of being easy to use, easy to upload videos to, and of course as we all know, it has had millions of videos viewed.

Astute marketers soon worked out that they would gain the most from amusing or viral videos. Such videos can prove to be very popular, and if the marketing material is cleverly used reach a large audience of potential buyers or users. A viral video or two can create far more interest in what they are selling than expensive advertising campaigns, and the added bonus is that these cost absolutely nothing to do.

Essentially YouTube offers amazing opportunities for marketers that get their video uploading strategies spot on. Certain types of video are more likely to go viral than others and making sure those that do have an effective marketing message will benefit marketers greatly.

 

These kind of videos generally do well:

• Old commercials: People like to see them again, you have already paid for them, but they are free to put on YouTube.

• How-to videos: While you are teaching your viewers how they can do things you can also advise them that things are done better by using the items that you are selling.

• Show special events: Things from trade conventions of fairs can generate a lot of views, so if you go to conferences anyway take a camera then upload the video.

• Upload something funny: People will watch funny videos so it is a sure way of getting hits, just make the marketing message clear.

• Remember to avoid common mistakes that leave videos unwatched and marketing plans in tatters.

• Pay attention to where videos are uploaded: Make sure you put them in the most apt sections and make the best use of tabs. People will only look for things in their most logical so make sure you put them there in the first place.

• Put keywords in your product descriptions to make sure your videos are high up on the search results. People tend to look at the first few results so good keywords are a must. Make certain you include your URL to direct traffic to where you want it to go.

• Allow embedding, comments, and ratings: All these things can be really good for marketing providing the positive ratings outnumber any negative ones. Higher ratings mean more people will see your video, and see your marketing material.

YouTube is so easy to use, and videos are easy to make. For some people making videos can initially be intimidating, and understandably so. There is a lot that needs to happen in order to make a good video and have it flow with your personality in order to complement your online presence.

But people today really like to see the face behind the website and the marketing. So practice speaking into a camera, over and over, as much as you need to until you feel very comfortable... and then just go ahead and do it!

Break the Copywriting Code! And Improve Sales...

The first step you want to do with any sales copy is make sure that you present the problem. Without a problem, people have no need to buy or take any kind of action at all. Presenting people with a problems is the same as letting them know they need to (and can with your help) take the necessary action to resolve whatever the problem is.

There are a handful of simple changes you can make to improve your sales - and one of those changes is the way you present your written content. Believe it or not, there is a formula that copywriters use to convince people to buy products and you can use that same formula on your own website.

Beginning Steps to Host Your Own Webinar

Hosting your own webinar doesn’t have to cost a lot unless you decide to pay for more advanced services. Those worried about the technical aspect can relax. If you have a working web cam, speakers, and a microphone, then you can easily host your own webinar.

Do you feel that you have valuable information to share with your customers and prospects that just won’t feel the same in text format? Perhaps you know about some breaking news happening within your industry that your customers might appreciate knowing firsthand.

When Will You Succeed with Internet Marketing?

Don’t trust marketers who guarantee that you’ll make a set dollar amount in a certain time span. Without knowing your situation, it’s impossible for them to make such claims and you should be very wary of them.

What is it that makes the difference between faster profits and having to wait? One of the factors could be the way you’ve set up the business - the model that you use in your strategy for success.

Why You May Want to Outsource the Harder Tasks

There’s a tendency when running a business to do it all yourself. You want to make sure that every aspect of the business runs smoothly and is completed in a professional manner. 

When you’re just starting your company, that school of thought might not only be best, but it might also be better for you financially. As your business grows (and it will thanks to all of your hard work), you’ll start to feel stretched thin from all of the tasks that you have to take care of and you’ll start to feel like you’re always working. All work and no play will eventually lead to sloppy work - or worse, burn out.

Set Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Customers and Prospects to Gather

A Facebook fan page is like having a Facebook profile dedicated to your business. While you could make a profile for your business, Facebook will likely flag it and remove the profile, leaving your customers and prospects without a way to connect with your brand on Facebook.  Instead of a profile, you want a fan page for your business. Fan pages are a way for your customers and prospects to identify with you and associate who you are with your brand as well as share the page with others.

How To Turn Your Profits Into Monthly Payments

If you have a niche or a business idea that you believe is an evergreen one (evergreen niches never get outdated) then you can choose to turn the profits you earn from that niche into a recurring monthly income. How can you do that? By creating a membership site. The great thing about a membership site is that instead of selling once, you make money repeatedly. And because it’s a repeat moneymaker, you’ll find affiliates who like that as well and want to promote for you.

What Works Better - Banner Ads or Text Links?

View image | gettyimages.com

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When it comes to making money from a website, one of the first questions entrepreneurs ask is, “What works better, banner ads or text links?” First, recognize that there is no one size fits all answer when it comes to advertising. You’ll get a variety of responses depending on who you ask. Most entrepreneurs will tell you that adding advertising on a website is a process of trial and error. Because what works for one website may not work for another and vice versa, so it’s important to carefully track the conversion rates of ads on your site.

4 Ways To Reach Your Target Audience (& Up Your Affiliate Commissions!)

If you're not already an affiliate marketer, then you may not be aware that the business of affiliate marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to make money online ... assuming that is something that you would like to do!  This is because there are so few start up and maintenance costs that it greatly increases your bottom line. 

There is also the fact that you do not have to deal with product development, shipping, customer service or product maintenance. This frees up a lot of time to work on engaging targeted traffic that will convert on the offers you are promoting, which in turn will increase your profit margin.

How do you increase affiliate income?  This can be achieved through building more traffic, however, there are always other things you can do to increase revenue from existing affiliate offers and any new potential ones you may plan to promote.

4 Powerful Methods To Increase Affiliate Commissions

1. Choose High Paying Offers (Naturally!)

Look for the best programs and products to promote that offer high payouts. Your bottom line can increase exponentially when the commissions are high and obviously, you want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time. This tactic allows you to earn more from less traffic, and as the buying traffic increases so do your earnings.  As a side note, I find it much more beneficial to promote products for my affiliates when I am passionate about what they are offering.  Then I am able to promote these products from an earnest and heartfelt place, and my readers can sense that.

7 Great Methods to Monetize Your Viral Traffic

Today we will talk about some different ways you can work to leverage larger volumes of traffic you may be receiving.  And of course, as you continue to work on your blog or website - diligently, and keeping your passion for it thriving - you will in time begin to organically grow your traffic volume. Making money from viral traffic differs than that earned from other types of traffic. The fact is that viral traffic lands on your page without looking for something specific, as is the case with everyday traffic like that from the search engines or from a specific link on the web.

7 Simple Steps to Build Your Networking Skills

In today's economy, a lot of us are looking for work. One of the best way to find new employment is by networking with friends and colleagues. For shy or inexperienced folks, this exercise can be daunting. Here are some helpful tips for developing your networking skills.