Now it’s time for the optimization. This is a fancy word that means you:

• Test


• Change


• Retest


• Change some more


• Beat your head on the wall


• Scream at your computer


• Pull on your hair


• Then repeat until you have a sales letter/opt-in form/solo ad/whatnot that does what it’s supposed to do.

I’m currently at this stage in my latest ebook release, but not far enough along for the hair-pulling or scremaing yet. Have no fear, I’ll get there eventually.

You may have already noticed already that it’s not my favorite thing to do. It won’t be yours either, but it’s an absolute necessity if you want to successfully sell. Unless you’re a prodigy, you’re not going to get whatever you made right on the first shot. That’s quite all right, because that’s the way it works for the vast majority of us.

So, here are a few things you might want to change or test if your site or strategy isn’t performing as planned:

Initial impressions: The initial impression is the very first sensation someone gets when they land on your site. You don’t have long to make a good one, so if you’re not garnering any conversions and your site stats say the visitors are only staying for a second or two, you have an initial impression problem. Headers, layout, and colors all affect this.

Your headline: You’ve probably seen The Big Read Headline. It’s the “Attention” portion of AIDA, and makes a huge difference in whether or not you get and keep someone’s attention. Make your headlines short and hard-hitting, and if its not working, tweak the wording, word-wrap breaks (which you can manage with a <br> HTML command), and embellishments like quotation marks or underlines.

Your copy: It helps to go back to your copy once you haven’t looked at it for a while, because you give yourself some objectivity. You may notice things like awkward sentences, weak selling, and bad layout that makes it unpleasant to read. Again, these are things which require tweaking over time, and small things like the font family and its point size.

Images: Chances are I’m going to have to get a header for my new site, and I’ll be doing that soon. As I stated last week, other images like your picture, ebook covers, return guarantee ribbons, and fancy ‘Buy Now’ buttons might be necessary to add, or you may have gone too far and have to remove a few things.

Yes, I find optimization is about as much fun for me as a dental appointment, and even worse, takes much longer than a dentist would. It is a necessary evil though, and obligatory to make your sites convert like they should.

I have been meaning to review Aaron Wall’s SEO book ever since I interviewed Aaron last year. I am finally getting around to it.

First of all I want to say it’s REALLY, REALLY loaded with information! His ebook had over 300 pages and his training program has more information than his ebook ever had.

The SEO Book training program covers A LOT more than just Search Engine Optimization. In addition to SEO, the SEO Book covers:

• Copywriting


• Social Marketing


• Website Usability


• Website Monetization


• Blogging


• and more!

Aaron uses a combination of articles and videos to teach you how to rank high in the Search engines. He also teaches you just about everything imaginable about marketing a product or service.

Not only that, but the SEO Book has a private online community where you can ask and answer questions of both Aaron and other members of his program. The community really blew me away. I have been a member of many paid online communities and none of them were as good as the one that Aaron runs. The most amazing thing to me about the community is how active Aaron is in it. The last time I checked Aaron Wall had 2,799 posts (16.26 posts per day). If you want to get direct advice from Aaron then you should sign up soon, because I just don’t see how Aaron can continue to be so active on his forum and continue to take on new members. It doesn’t seem like a very scalable business model to me.

Anyway, if you are new to online marketing or you want a great place to learn about online marketing (especially SEO) then I recommend that you click here to join the SEO Book Training Program. It is one of the best deals on the Internet for beginners to learn how to make money online.

img by jimmyroq

Working from home poses its own challenges for people who do, namely working in a somewhat lonely environment, deciding on whether to shower, dress for success or simply working in our PJ’s. Either way, whatever we do, it does require some form of control and measure to get things done in a timely matter.

The biggest issue work at home entrepreneurs have would probably fall into time management and staying on track of our goals. After all, it is only too easy to get sidetracked with important visits, movies, game nights, shopping, outings and what not.

I’m sure that if you fall under the label “self employed, working from home” you have your very own demons to wrestle with at times (or had in the past at least).

What were your biggest issues and how did you grasp them in the end?

When I first started out in my first home business, I always dressed up, brushed my teeth, combed my hair and did everything else I was supposed to do to run a successful home business.

After all, working from home is no different than working for a boss, except of course that we are the boss. Or so I thought… soon enough I learned that following the same behavior to get ready for work than if I was actually going to an employers premises didn’t really work out as I hoped it would.

All the nice suits, cool hairstyle and mint fresh breath didn’t get my work done, did it.

No, I learned that instead of living that pre-cut life of doing things this and that way, I was better off to focus on the actual tasks at hand and really stay the course.

Since nobody is watching over our shoulders except perhaps our spouses and clients (if we have them) it is a challenge for many entrepreneurs to stay on course of their self imposed work schedule.

Perhaps that is why it is so easy to make excuses, since we “only” work for ourselves.

To do that you would only kid yourself and risk your own lifeline and success. After all, if we make too many excuses nothing good will ever come out of it.

Don’t you agree?

So what is the secret to keeping the focus without falling prey to daily distractions while working from home?

Personally I think the most important part of running a business from home is to set targets. But not just any targets. They have to be in bite sized chunks to stay manageable. It also helps to factor in distraction time every day.

In the years I have been online I finally learned that no matter how many tasks you set yourself every day, you will fall short of them on most days due to unforeseen distractions. As long as you allocate extra time for this, you won’t have any issues. I also learned that setting myself too many targets never works out so I keep them in a manageable way.

What works for me is to take 2/3 of my working day and plan it out while leaving the rest free for the less important work that has to be done regardless. This has worked really well for me over the past year.

Maybe you have your own tips on how to work successfully from home.

Their first video, talks about how StomperNet co-founder Brad Fallon’s Wedding Favors site was dumped from Google’s Search Engine results. It also tells you exactly what Brad did to have his best 6 months ever – without a home page listing in Google by using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.

You can watch how he did it, by clicking here.

Also, be sure to keep your eye out for more videos from the StomperNet folks. Their videos tend to be REALLY good.

So, here’s the how and why of all the other images you might see:

The merchant’s picture: No, it’s not about the owner’s ego, although there might be a little of that too. It’s there because people don’t like buying from a faceless, impersonal web site. Therefore, many merchants selling digital products online add their pictures by putting them next to their first paragraph, in their headers, and occasionally next to their products. If you’re not already doing this, you should consider it.

The pictures of people in the testimonials: Mostly this is a means to reassure potential customers reading the testimonials that they’re not fake. Yes, some people are sleazy enough to post fake testimonials, and they’ve made their customers cynical for the rest of us. So post a picture, or if not that, a link to prove the people who are saying nice things about your product actually exist.

Digital product packages: I’m using this as a catch-all for images of ebook covers, software boxes, CD sleeves, and membership cards. They add a sense of reality to an otherwise intangible digital product, and on top of it, images and text convert better than text alone. These work best right next to the ‘Buy Now’ buttons, and are so useful you should plan to add them for any digital product you sell as a part of the start-up cost.

Red check marks: These go beautifully with benefit lists. It’s a psychological trick that helps give more selling power to them. Mine have shadow effects for some extra ‘wow’ factor.

While a header and footer image can certainly help your sales, don’t forget that other images have a purpose on your sales page too.

While sitting at my keyboard and typing away I’m watching a movie. Yes, that officially confirms that I can multi task. Isn’t that a woman’s birthright anyway?

The movie is about a girl who does an experiment in school about fat people and how they are being treated by most people. I think you can guess that many fail the test because they shun, ridicule, ignore and outright bully fat people and it made me ask myself “what right do any of us have to judge others for how they look, are dressed, talk, behave and what not.”

The sad thing is we all do it. I do it and while I stop myself every now and again and remind myself that I’m no better than the fat lady shopping with her three fat kids in tow. I look at them and feel repulsion for letting themselves go so far.

To be honest, I do feel rotten when I catch myself with these thoughts and it wasn’t until I read a book that talks about the conditional cause of obesity that made me realize that it might not be their fault at all.

If you are interested, the book is called The Gabriel Method and will most likely be the most eye opening book for anybody who ever has or still suffers with extra weight. (And it isn’t a diet!).

It was for me. See, throughout my life I have struggled on and off with extra weight. I have pedaled between $62 kg’s all the way up to $90 kg. After reading this book I now know that the cause of my weight gain is emotional based and I need to resolve this before I can lose weight once and for all.

But I don’t want to talk about my weight issues. I want to address the problem of judging others because of their appearance. While I am heavier than is good for my height, I don’t particularly look fat.

I wanted to know why we judge others constantly and why we do this, even though we know it is wrong. After much consideration and thought provoking discussions with my husband I came to the conclusion that in many cases it is a result of our upbringing and the influence we were exposed to while growing up.

Knowing this doesn’t make the act of thinking these thoughts any better, but it does help the healing process and getting better at not judging others because they look different to us.

I suppose the stereotype advertising we are exposed to every day doesn’t help this cause either. Our role models these days are stick insects (not mine BTW) with collar bones that nearly touch the nose. (Ok that is also judging but I like to drive home a point here about false advertising).

Upon realizing this myself I have started to consciously see the good in every person I meet. I really does help. While it isn’t much, I believe if we all did that, the world would be a much better place.

In case you wondered why I’m rambling about judging others by a cover I’d like to make the connection to working from home. We do the same while surfing websites and blogs and our minds are constantly in a state of judgment. We judge other blogs on their colors, their RSS subscriber feed, their comment section and in the way we can or can not navigate their website.

Funny thing is that while we do this we miss out on some really good reading because we are blinded by appearances. Instead of giving someone the benefit of the doubt we click away, never to return. I have come to learn that some of my favorite bloggers own very basic blogs. There is no fluff about them. They are simple and on the first look boring, but when I looked beyond the “facade” I found real treasure.

Does this happen to you too? Have you caught yourself judging other websites or blogs, only to be positively surprised once you looked more closely or is appearance everything to you, even if it contains a shallow shell? What do you think?

If you are planning to buy a blog or a website then you need to buy one that is highly ranked for competitive keyword phrases in its niche. If it’s a site about making money online or home based business then you want it to be ranked for a lot of keyword phrases related to that. This is because search engine traffic is free, long term, not dependent on your writing style or personality, and won’t require any work on your part since the rankings have already been built up. If it doesn’t have high search engine rankings then you are wasting your money!

For example; I have a website that is ranked for just about every keyword phrase you could think of related to home based business, work at home, and make money online. Almost all the traffic comes from search engines with most of it from Google. If you bought that site from me the traffic would stay exactly the same and the money it earns would not drop at all.

The reason it would continue to make the same amount of money for the new owner is because the traffic, profits, and popularity are completely independent of me. My personality doesn’t matter. My writing style doesn’t matter. My knowledge of making money online doesn’t matter. My subscriber count doesn’t matter. My popularity among internet marketers and bloggers doesn’t matter. Nothing about me matters. The site has the rankings and the traffic and money comes from those rankings.

This is not usually the case with most blogs. At least it hasn’t been with the blogs I have seen sold lately. Most of them don’t have good rankings for important keywords. Their traffic and money mainly comes from RSS subscribers and other bloggers, and they are highly dependent on the owner of the blog for one reason or another.

But don’t get me wrong, there are blogs that could also be sold and continue to get similar levels of traffic and earnings. It just has to be a blog that has good search engine rankings. For instance, the blog you are reading right now, Can I Make Big Money Online, is ranked very highly for keyword phrases like: make money online, make money, how to make money online and many more. Those are competitive keywords that get a lot of searches so the traffic would continue to come in even if this blog was sold.

Also, if you are the one selling a site or blog with high rankings you don’t have it on your conscience that you just robbed someone out of $10,000 or whatever you sold your blog for. You can sleep at night knowing that the person who bought your site is getting their money’s worth.

Another good thing about being the seller of a site like this is that you can do it over and over again to keep making money. It’s a lot easier to build up the search engine rankings of a website for a few competitive keywords than it is to build up a highly popular A-list blog with thousands of RSS subscribers. You can do this a few times a year and keep making big money on each sale. Whereas a highly popular blog usually takes at least a year or more to build up, if you can even do it at all.

Basically the biggest point I am trying to get across here is that if you are going buy a blog or a website make sure it’s one that has high search engine rankings for top keywords in its niche. And a lesser point I am trying to make is that if you are going to build a business out of selling sites then don’t try to build up A-list blogs to sell.

So, the next time you see a blog or website for sale that you may be interested in buying, don’t look at the RSS count, technorati ranking, how many posts it has or how many comments each post gets. For the most part, you should really only be worrying about how highly it is ranked for competitive keywords in its niche and how much traffic it gets from search engines.

That said, I am going to give you a quick review of Ryan’s book “The Ebook Walkthrough“.

In his ebook, Ryan walks you though the process of creating an ebook from start to finish. He explains what tools you will need, how to use those tools to create an ebook, and how to make money with your ebook.

The Ebook Walkthrough lives up to it’s promise. It reveals exactly how to write and publish your own ebook in clear, simple and easy to implement steps. I would recommend this ebook to anyone that wants to learn how to create their very own ebook.

Click here to go check it out for yourself.

The desirable quantity in a list is its responsiveness. Therefore, the only time you should put someone on a list is when that someone has already bought something from you, (i.e. has demonstrated the capacity to be responsive to your sales pitches). This insures a higher chance they’ll buy something else from you later, because they’ve already paid money to be there now. A lower volume of names, to be sure, but more responsiveness.

I know the $7 report theory puts this to some use. You buy the report before you’re asked to for your name and email, which means the person selling it already knows the latest addition to their list will buy from them. Granted, they’re probably not going to buy a product in $97 dollar range if this happens, but other $7 products and their 100% commissions? An entire web site full of them called 7dollaroffers.com exists as nothing more than a clearinghouse for those sorts of offerings in multiple niches, giving you plenty to promote.

So, what do you think, and what are your circumstances?

• Can you get responsiveness out of your free ezine list? If so, what are you doing?


• Do you already do it this way? How’s it working out for you?


• Have another strategy you’d like to share?

Leave a comment and give me your opinion.

Joel Comm has just released something he is calling “Instant Resale Templates”. Joel has invited a limited number of people to try the same business system that he has used to create over two million dollars!

Basically, Joel is selling you an online business in a box. If that interests you, then click here to check out the deal Joel is offering.

I am pretty busy with a new baby on the way, but I did want to let you know that May 1st is RSS (Really Simple Syndication) awareness day and in honor of the day I wanted to provide you some good resources to learn more about RSS:

RSS Awareness Day (Official Site)

What is RSS?

What are RSS feeds?

What is an RSS aggregator?“.

How to use RSS

Online entrepreneurs have something in common. Our desire to succeed has made us take our financial destiny into our own hands with the idea of becoming financially successful one day.

While success can mean many things for each of us, a common measure of success is managing to become financially independent of an offline job and have the freedom of working from home. While working from home is generally associated with the American dream, many entrepreneurs fail to set proper milestones in their business to get ahead.

It is too easy to become complacent while things are going well, but not setting targets that help us to grow would be like committing business suicide.

The first step is always the hardest since it often involves a tremendous amount of courage, trust in our abilities and mojo to get even started.

Fear of failure holds back many would be entrepreneurs and unfortunately this common human trait will hold these folk back from ever experiencing the power of failure. Yes, that wasn’t a misprint since failure is ultimately responsible for our successes. Without failure we very rarely grow and without growth, there won’t be any success.

Depending on what business you are involved in, you will have to set different milestones on your journey to financial abundance. To give you an idea, I have listed the goals I achieved along the way so far and how I advanced my own business by striving to meet them step by step:

• Starting my own freelancing business – check!
• Earning $1,000 month – check!
• Earning a full time income (minimum of $2,000/month) – check!
• Becoming a pro-blogger – check!
• Networking with other writers and webmasters – check ongoing!
• Taking on other writers (outsourcing) – in progress…
• Earning enough to help my husband quit his job – in progress…
• Building niche sites to pay me residual income for years to come – in progress…
• Working mornings only, while living “my dream life” for the rest of each day – in progress

Ultimately, the last statement is my largest dream. Being able to run my business from anywhere in the world and not having to work all day long every day. My dream is to earn enough money for both myself and my husband and be financially free to work anywhere I please, living the lifestyle of an LIP.

Here is what you can do to determine your very own business milestones.

I’m sure you’ve heard the terms:

• short term planning
• medium term planning
• and long term planning before

These are common denominations when it comes to setting goals and getting things done. The thing is, while for one of you short term means this week, for others it means the next three months.

It really is hard to throw all into the same bucket and depending on the nature of your business, short term really does mean today. If you are in an industry that deals with fast changes like money, real estate or trends for example, today’s hot deal could be stone cold tomorrow. Entrepreneurs in these particular industries have to set different goals than a writer like myself.

Also, often our goals have nothing to do with money but a simple measurement.

Measurements are needed regardless of the business you are involved in and could relate to any of the following and anything else for that matter if I have forgotten to mention it here: time, money, grades, recognition, education, positions, the amount of clients you have, the amount of employees you have, etc.

I’m sure you understand what I mean by now. Unless we use some kind of measure in which to advance our business with, it will be really hard to move ahead.

Measurements evoke another most important attribute. This attribute is called focus.

Without focus most of us would barely be able to earn a dime to support ourselves online, let alone our family. Focus is what gets us out of bed in the morning and keeps us pushing on toward yet another goal when the going gets tough.

As you can see, setting milestones is barely the first step we take when we embark into entrepreneurship. Milestones are a constant evolving matter that power us toward the dreams we always had.

Search Engine Results Pages are a critical means of ensuring more visitor traffic to your website or blog and yet they are often one of the main areas that are badly neglected by site owners.There are thousands of great articles on link building strategies, how to boost your page rank, blogging for links and the latest paid advertising approaches to get your site seen by a wider online audience, and whilst this is excellent and very valuable there is little point if your site fails to sell itself in Search Engine Results Pages once you break into the top 10.

Let me highlight my point with an example. Below are two descriptions that could be displayed in SERPS for a search on the phrase “Make Money Online.”

Description 1

“Make money online with proven techniques from Internet marketing experts. Learn how to make big money online with integrity.”

Description 2

“People enjoy it when they have the opportunity to use the internet for many different purposes including making money online, I’ve often thought that when individuals…” It is pretty obvious that the first makes full use of the description Meta tag to actively promote its business whilst the second has neglected this aspect and is vague and uninviting. It is important to remember that if you don’t insert a description for your page, Google will automatically generate one for you, but this is normally poorly organised and disjointed and mostly likely accounts for description two above. The question you have to ask yourself is who is the best person to sell your site YOU or a third party?

2. Take Your Time

Google is very upfront about its use of site description tags. It makes it clear that it DOES NOT, use the description tag to index pages in Google, but some people have interpreted this as meaning that the description tag is not important. Exactly the opposite is true. To use an analogy, description tags provide the “shop window” for your site. If your shop window looks cluttered, unorganised and unattractive, who will want to visit your site even if you have the best online content inside? So take your time and ensure that each web page is optimised for that specific tag.

3. Avoid Duplicate Description Tags

“Want to make money online? Make money online with proven expert techniques and learn how to make big money online with integrity.”

The combination of the use of keywords in the title tag and repeated three times in the description meta tag make this site stand out and is a powerful marketing tool for your website or blog.

Summary
So how about spending a few hours doing some housekeeping this week on your site and ensuring that you make maximum use of your description meta tag. My experience is that it has increased visitor traffic to my site by between 15% within 1 week of doing this. Let me know how it works for you and if you notice a difference by leaving a comment on this post.

Finally, a big thanks to George for letting me use his meta tag description for this blog as an example for illustrative purposes.

Wendy is very altruistic and would love to help everyone work from home. She recently made major changes to her blog and even changed the domain name from emomsathome.com to sparkplugging.com. She has done amazing things with her blog and I highly recommend you go check it out.

I may talk more about some of the things we discussed at a later point in time, but the main thing I took away from meeting Wendy is that she sincerely wants to help people learn how to work from home for a living.

Before I go, here is a picture of the two of us from earlier this week:

How do you put the ‘Now’ in ‘Buy Now’? It’s a big concern if you want your sales letter page to sell. Better known as a call to action, it’s the last thing you’ll write that pushes your customer over their last little bit of resistance, and nudges them into buying your product. It appears before the button that sends your customer to your selling mechanism, and is the last “A” in AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action).

You must have a call to action, even with an excellent sales letter. Otherwise, most people won’t do anything except ‘think about it’. Then, they’ll think about it, and think about it, and think about it, and you won’t make any money from them because they’re too busy thinking about it.

So, here are a few tips for putting the “Now” in “Buy Now”:

• Say so: It’s the basic approach that’s used with the simple “Buy Now” button companies like Amazon.com put in their affiliate material or on their site. This method is so commonly used I don’t even give it much thought when I see it, but I don’t see anyone getting rid of it yet.


• Give your customer a reason why to buy now: Want to call someone to action? Don’t forget to tell them what’s in it for them (the “WIIFM” approach). An example would be something like “Give me my free stuff” on the submission button for an ezine sign-up.


• Limited time offers: The digital equivalent of the scarcity tactic. There is never any scarcity in downloading a digital product, because it was never physical in the first place and therefore unlimited. However, you can say that you might raise the price or pull the offer entirely after a limited time, and motivate a customer to buy that way.


• “If you’re serious…”: This is a bit on the rough side to do to someone, but it also works. It’s the “If you’re serious about such-and-so, you’ll buy the product” approach, and you may have seen it for yourself on other sales letters.


• Overdeliver: Want someone to give every future product you try to sell or promote to them serious consideration? Overdeliver on the first one they buy from you. If you build a reputation for overdelivery, it will put a world of punch into you “Buy Now” calls to action, because your previous customers will know your products overdeliver.


• The P.S.: Yes, the post-script section of a sales letter can give you a second chance to get a sale that you might otherwise miss with an additional call to reconsider. They tend to be right under the “Buy Now” block, and say things like “Wait a minute, before you go” with a quick recap of the sales letter. Their intention is to increase conversions by attempting to change the action that’s about to happen (reader leaves the sales page) with the action you want (reader buys the product or service).

If you’re going to write a sales letter, or generate advertising to cause some sort of action, you have to put the “Now” in “Buy Now”. Forget your call to action, and chances are your visitor won’t take one.

There has been an alarming trend of bloggers lately, who complain about all the rehashed crap that is being blogged about worldwide. I have to agree with this and a sure proof of this is my shrinking RSS feed reader. Bloggers who posted like 5 blog entries about how their ebook performed after being released have been eradicated as well as those who simply blog to sell me their rubbish.

These days I hardly read MMO (make money online) blogs and it looks like I’m not missing out on much anyway. What is it with bloggers who think they should blog everyday but don’t manage to put out one meaningful post during the week – yet they are treated like the gods and goddesses of the blogosphere.

Have we really become suckers who simply hang out at a blog because the RSS feed reads in the thousands, even though the blogger doesn’t have anything of value to share?

Where has the focus on quality gone?

What do I mean with quality anyway? I guess I’m talking about meaningful posts that either educate, help, provoke or make people really think.

When I first started blogging I also blogged daily for many months. But I soon realized that I was going down the same road many of today’s bloggers travel on and that is the road of “overdoing it with unmeaningfull content” that only serves one purpose…to bring them more traffic.

It was actually Maki of Dosh Dosh who got me thinking when he announced that he would cut back his posting frequency in the middle of last year.

I thought, I rather do this myself than write rehashed stuff just because…

Since then I have cut back severely and in my eyes this has been the best thing I could have done. My traffic hasn’t suffered at all. Actually quite the contrary and unless I have something of quality (see above) to share with my readers, I won’t post.

To be fair, one man’s/woman’s quality could be another’s trash. I know that but I also think you would agree with me when I say there is far too much rehashed stuff floating around online. Just to blog because you ought to is simply like sticking a knife in your throat as your readers will notice eventually if there is a lack of quality.

Instead of trying to sell every affiliate program under the sun and blog about it when the next “wonder” hits the Internet, why not blog about a topic which is your forte and allows you to help educate others instead?

What would be your favourite:

Blogger A: who blogs about this and that affiliate program, posts every day, talks all the time about how they don’t really know anything about the make money industry and yet tries to flog an ebook (free or paid) to their readers in order to make money on the back end. Plus they pretend they are the next A-lister because they have enough readers to fill a small stadium (OR NOT).

Blogger B: who doesn’t claim to be something special, but makes money in a particular niche and uses his/her knowledge to help their reader with lots of informative and free info. This blogger hasn’t got a huge following because he/she doesn’t rub shoulders with the A-team, sucking up to whatever they say.

Mmmhh… it is a hard choice, isn’t it? Would you forfeit a minute in the limelight for a minute of true learning that can actually help you make money? I guess it comes down to two things:

1. how gullible you really are
2. how serious to succeed you really are

Anyway, do you focus on quantity, quality or both?

http://twitter.com/georgemanty

My wife Jill told me I should use Twitter a year ago. Considering how big it has gotten, maybe I should have listened to her. One of these days I am going to remember that she is always right

I wasn’t sure what to do with my Twitter account, so I thought I would ask you what you would like to see me do with my Twitter account.

Here are some ideas I have come up with so far:

Twitter my wife’s labor
My wife Jill is due May 15th and I was thinking maybe I could twitter the whole labor. Now, sure if she finds out, she will probably kill me. Considering the way she reacted when I had a long conversation about golf with her OB-GYN when she was in labor with our second child… I guess twittering the labor is out…

Twitter my random thoughts through the day like…

“Had yogurt for lunch… when nobody was looking drove to Taco Bell and ate a REAL lunch.”

Twitter what I am doing in my business
That could be useful, but could also be boring. For instance, it could look like this:

“Spent five hours debating whether to use twitter for marketing, networking, fun or not at all.”

What should I use Twitter for?

What would you like me to use Twitter for? Or maybe the better question to ask is, “What could I use twitter for that would make you want to follow me on twitter?”

Please let me know…

Please let me know by taking the poll below!

So then, how can you use a report to make money?

1.) Build lists: You can use them as freebies to build a list. You sell any visitor on how amazing your report is when they come to your opt-in page, then tell them they can get it free just by giving you their name and email address. It’s a classic technique, but I still see it used.

2.) Make them freebies with a product sale: Freebie additions to products tend to become more necessary as that product’s price increases, and reports are great for that. As it is, freebies are a matter of course when you’re selling online nowadays, though I do see some exceptions (like the $7 report strategy).

3.) Driving traffic: You write a report, and then put a link to your web site along with a pitch selling why someone should visit it at the end of your information. Afterwards, you make that report spread far and wide by:

• Publishing it with blanket giveaway rights, so anyone can use it to list build.


• Sell it with resale rights, and make some money in the process before others sell it for
  their own profit.


• Sell it with master resale rights, and watch it go far and wide.


• Give it to your affiliates with the capacity to rebrand it, and let them drive traffic to
  you with their rebranded affiliate link. If you do this, your site link should be the only
  link in that report.

All of this puts your report in circulation, and can potentially give you massive link exposure.

4.) Affiliate link backsales: You can put affiliate links in a report, just like you can put them in an ebook. Better still, you can do this, and still use it with many of the other theories. If you do, use topically relevant affiliate links for a higher likelihood of making sales. In other words, don’t try to sell calling cards in a report filled with cookie recipes.

Now, given all of the things you can do with a report, what makes a report desirable for the
people who might want to read it? What approach to your information will be so appealing to
a potential reader that the report will actually help you do one of the things I mentioned
above?

1.) The ‘How To’ report: This type of report is just as the name says. It’s about how to do something someone in your niche may not already know. A report-sized topic would be fairly specific, such as “How to Make Scented Soap”, for example.

2.) The ‘Easy Button’ report: I mentioned the appeal of convenience in a previous post, and this is the info product equivalent of it. It’s about how to make something easier, faster, or simpler for someone else. The readers in your niche may already know how to do what your describing, but it’s difficult or annoying the ‘old’ way. An example might be “How to Make Beautifully Scented Soap Affordably”.

3.) The ‘Avoid’ report: This report can be summed up simply as identifying something in your niche someone would want to avoid, why they want to avoid it (if it’s not already obvious), and what they can do to avoid it. Going back to the soap example, it might be something like “How to Avoid Ruining Your Scented Soap”.

Reports are quite versatile, even if you can’t sell them for big bucks. Because of this, it’s worth your time to make and use them.

If you follow the make money online blogosphere at all then you have probably noticed the same trend I have seen spring up lately. I’m not sure what to call it but it goes a little something like this… start a blog, build up it’s popularity, get a lot of readers, and cash out big time by selling it.

I guess this must really be the way to make money online. I mean if all these well-known bloggers are doing it then it has to be a great thing to do, right? Well, I suppose it can be a great way to make a nice chunk of money all at once.

But, then what? Your blog is now gone. Your monthly income is now gone. All the hard work you put into it for months or even years… gone!

It’s definitely not an easy or quick task to build up a popular blog so this isn’t one of those “rinse and repeat” business models that you can do over and over again to keep making money. Out of the thousands of bloggers out there only a small percent ever build up a highly popular blog.

Not to mention this is horrible for the person that gets suckered into buying the blog. Most of these blogs are selling for a lot more than they are actually worth. Yeah it looks good on paper because they do have a lot of traffic and a big following. But they aren’t following you, the new owner; they are following the original owner.

These blogs that are being sold have been branded by the original owner and the readers are following them because of their writing style or personality or some other trait they possess. As soon as the blog is sold all that goes away and so do the readers.

The new owner isn’t left with much more than if they would have just started a new blog and built it up themselves. Now they are out $25,000 or so without a whole lot to show for it.

So, let’s take a look at where the seller and buyer are sitting at this point…

The seller has a full bank account but nothing to bring in more income and the money they just got from the blog sale won’t last long. The buyer has an empty bank account and a blog that might be bringing in a little income but not nearly as much as they thought it would.

Neither side wins!

Therefore, I don’t think this is a very good way to go about making money online for either the seller or the buyer.

Of course there are a few exceptions to this. One being if the seller can no longer keep the blog for some reason and must sell it. Another being if the buyer is getting a popular blog for a super low price. And search engine rankings also play a big factor. But these exceptions are a whole other article themselves so I won’t go into them here. I will save that for my next post.