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How to make money online with your website or blog.
It’s not easy to make money online with your website or blog but it is possible.
Here are, what I believe to be the most important things you need.
1. Products that sell.
2. An opt-in box on your website with a sign up gift like a useful e-book.
3. A great opt-in mailing list.
4. An easy to use e-mail marketing system.
5. Good affiliate partnerships.
6. Good publisher partnerships.
7. Traffic
8. Traffic.
9. Traffic.
10. Traffic.
1.) Here is a list of items that sell quite well on the Internet.
- Tangibles – items like mobile phones, gadgets and other IT stuff. The reason that people buy these things online is that they are usually cheaper than on the high street and sometimes difficult to find. The problem with selling tangible items is that you would either have to risk a lot of money to buy stock or you would have to use a drop shipping company. Drop shipping companies hold the stock and you merely showcase the products and set up a good shopping cart. When you make a sale they then ship the item to your customer.
- E-Books, any electronic device that features a controllable viewing screen can be used to read e-books. You can buy e-books to give to people who opt-in to your newsletter or you could even sell the e-books on your website. It is important to choose great titles and well written books to sell. We at “The Business Woman” sell our e-books for just $1 each to cover administration but you could sell them for much more. It is important that you buy e-books that give you reseller rights, as ours do, or you would not legally be allowed to sell them on. Take a look at our bookshop.
- Internet services, if you were looking for digital services like website builders or domain name registrations then you would automatically go to the web to find them.
- Normal books and DVDs. Amazon do very well selling paperbacks and hard cover’s as they have a massive infrastructure in place. It would not be a good choice for you as a start up for obvious reasons. Can you imagine how many books you would need to stock.
- Tarot readings and esoteric goods. There are so many Tarot reader hosting sites. The readers wait at the end of a phone for your call and you pay them for the reading by the minute. As a professional Tarot reader myself I am a little skeptical that one could read for someone they have never met. I believe that there is no replacement for a comforting, inspirational reading, face to face, but many people swear by these telephone services.
What ever you are selling there is one thing that is paramount….give them a risk free call to action! In other words make them feel safe buying from you.
Think of all the things that could be going through their head at that moment before they buy.
Is there a catch?
If I don’t like it, can I have my money back?
Can I hear from someone who has used this?
Do I trust this person?
Will my hair fall out?
Will my………
Remember a busy website with the right money making products can actually make money for you while you sleep but you need to work very hard at marketing the website when you’re awake!
I have made a pact with myself, I will only sell products that I firmly believe in, like Darren Rowse’s Bloggers Workbook. This course actually helped me to change my blog into a great little business.
So my advice to you is to only sell the stuff that you would use yourself, that way you have more conviction in your sales pitch.
2.) and 3.) The mailing list is your life’s blood. Always have a sign up box on your website. If you can give something away as a sweetener then that is even better. Make sure that it is something worth having.
I would like to E-SHOUT an important point at you….do not abuse your mailing list. If they have signed up to receive a newsletter then that is what you should send them. Your marketing can be inside your newsletter.
If they have signed up to a general mailing list then you have a little more freedom but the content of anything you send to them should be, value, value, value, you can add a subtle sales pitch but then give more value.
4.) There are many marketing systems out there, the one I use is Aweber, I find them the easiest to use and one of the cheapest. There are many more like IContact, Constant Contact, Getresponse.
The marketing system works by allowing you to set up e-mail campaigns. So when your visitor registers to be added to your mailing list it automatically generates an e-mail from you. You will have already been in to the system and prepared your follow up emails, all you need to do is tell the system which ones you want sent and when.
It’s as simple as that!
The beauty of this system is that any new subscriber, no matter when they join, will receive the first message and then the second and so on.
You can actually configure your sign up box within the system too! Here is a link to Aweber, take a look and see what they have to offer.
5.) Affiliate partnerships. Most online businesses have affiliate schemes nowadays. If you like a product, either you have used it or have bought it then search their website and see if they have an affiliate scheme. The other option is to join Commission Junction or one of the many other Affiliate management companies. Once you join you can search and apply to many different schemes.
6.) Good publisher partnerships. I am a publisher for a company called LinkLift. They are a link placement service. I would write a blog post and they would ask me to include keywords and phrases that would link to their client’s website. You see having external links is a great way to encourage Google to spider their site so people pay LinkLift to pay me to host the links in my posts. You would need to have a relatively busy website to become a publisher so that leads me to the last on my list….
7.) and 8.) and 9.) and 10.) Traffic.
We would all love to be seen on the first pages of the search engines and if you are selling something unique then you will probably be there after a couple of days. But there are many thousands of blogging sites out there, all trying to get to the top spots so the competition is fierce for us.
My answer for you is to do what you do best…blogs, blogs, blogs and more blogs.
“Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.
In my ebook, we look into the profitability of a blog and how to set up a blog of your own at no cost! Interested? Read The Blogger’s Bible. You can get it free by signing on to our mailing list.
When you write your blog post on your website you need to also upload it to the best networking sites as well, sites like EZines, Ecademy, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
There is no easy way to do this, you need to work hard at it but the rewards can be great. To make it a little easier, make sure that you have social bookmarking share buttons at the bottom of your blog posts so that you and your visitors can syndicate your writing out across the web.
Here is a screenshot of Google, notice how my blog, “6 steps closer to monetising your blog”, had actually got three….not just one spot, on the front page of Google and that’s not paying a penny in advertising.
Clever eh!
One last word:
“The baker puts bread on your table, not to feed your family but to feed his own“.
Affordable Websites for Independent Retailers
Free trial of e-commerce solution
Multi-channel commerce is increasingly important and relevant for independent retailers, especially at this time of year when many consumers turn to the Internet to do their Christmas shopping. But without expertise and knowledge, building an e-commerce website can be a minefield as you struggle to find an option that best suits your business, let alone one that is affordable.
With many years experience in designing websites, Kevin Flannigan has set up a 30 day free trial for independent retailers looking to test the water for a new or improved site. The trial also gives you the opportunity to see how much you can do yourself, and how much help you need to get started. The trial uses Magento Go, a scaleable e-commerce package that includes hosting and technical support.
Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched in 2008. At the start of 2012 it had surpassed 4 million downloads worldwide. In fact, the software is so good, in 2010 eBay announced it had made an investment in Magento and by 2011 it owned the software outright.
Magento Go is a streamlined version of Magento. It’s trusted by more than 125,000 businesses worldwide and offers the power and flexibility of Magento at a price that every business can afford. The beauty of Magento Go is the fact that it’s a totally scaleable, hosted e-commerce solution. In times of austerity, having a scaleable ‘one stop shop’ that can be amended very quickly is a great way to control costs.
Kevin recently built and launched the website for Miss Milly, a new supplier of affordable, quality jewellery, and has also worked extensively on retail websites for the fashion, health and beauty industries.
“Miss Milly wanted a reliable platform that showcased its products beautifully with good search facilities whilst also being straightforward to use,” explains Kevin. “Even though the company is a wholesaler, it wanted to have an aesthetic retail feel, which I think we’ve achieved.”
Once you have played around with the trial website, if you wish to go ahead and develop it further, there are different options available from just £9.99 per month. And you will not be left on your own as Kevin offers a variety of design and e-commerce support packages from helping with new branding and logos suitable for online use, to building a website optimised for search engines, setting up a payment provider, and pre and post launch training and support.
With the www.missmilly.co.uk website now live since late August, the company’s managing director, Sarah Watmore, is delighted with the functionality. “Kevin was hugely supportive, creative and proactive throughout the design, development and launch process. He really understood our brief and took a real interest in the business, which has resulted in a fantastic showcase for Miss Milly.
“And with his help, hard work and advice, it has only taken us six weeks to reach page one on Google search for our priority key phrase.”
To start your no risk 30 day free trial, go to www.kevflannigan.co.uk/trial or contact Kevin on 07813 206786 or by email to info@kevflannigan.co.uk for further information or design and project management quotes.
Work From Home Ideas and Work from home business Opportunities
Work from home ideas are being searched for everyday on the internet and web directories. Considering that the year 2009, the actual unemployment rate may be above 8%. It is estimated that more than 12 million individuals are out of a job right now. If this doesn’t discourage you, I don’t know what is going to. Americans have fought since the economic crisis reach back in 2009. Lots of people are struggling to pay their own bills, buy household goods and worse yet, paying their home mortgage.
Numerous Americans have got themselves into financial debt and find out no end in sight. The majority are taking considerable shell out cuts just to be able to afford a somewhat sustainable living. When you are in this predicament or perhaps don’t want to find yourself within it, there are many opportunities waiting for those willing to perform a bit of leg work and also research.
Work from home ideas and opportunities
There are many work from home ideas and possibilities for the grabbing. And if you’re looking to earn some additional cash or fully earn a comfortable existing, there are home based businesses to take into consideration.
Let me walk you through some of the business opportunity ideas Possess seen that will not only enable you to pay off some of those costs piling up, but could even help get you to a better financial position as compared to you were or are near. In order to be successful which has a work from home job, you must be willing to put some time straight into it and be individual. If you can put in a little effort in to a few of these work from home opportunities, then you give yourself a fighting likelihood at living your current dreams.
Preparation when looking for home business ideas
The most important prep one needs to do when evaluating any work from home opportunity, is the mental preparation. Many people get overwhelmed with the research one needs to do when looking for those excellent home business ideas. They begin to acquire frustrated because it is something new to them. Work from home ideas may, at first, be time eating. With a little bit of corporation, though, things will quickly make sense and those work from home concepts will soon start to make perception.
One of the first work from home ideas can be selling your own item. This could also be an email finder service that you provide. As an illustration, let’s say that you are an cpa and have just recently been laid off. Well, you can market yourself and provide data processing services from your home for small business that do not want to hire a full period accountant.
As for the item issue, one businesses would be to market your product or service via the internet. There are several ways of doing this. That’s the attractiveness of figuring out what it is you need to market yourself within, is that there are many strategies in which you can promote your product or service. Some of these advertising tools are websites like eBay or Craigslist. You can promote your product on internet websites and wait for folks searching for your form of product to purchase it.
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10 quick, wicked blogging tips
1. Put your blog post into a list, like this one.
It keeps it neat and easy to read, (doesn’t look so onerous).
2. Put a lot of thought into the title of your blog post, 
it needs to catch their attention.
3. Keep the introduction and conclusion short.
4. Don’t try to include too much info, keep the tips clear,
clean and concise and to the point.
5. Keep one post focused on one topic. If you have
several things you want to talk about then try writing
separate posts for each topic.
6. Write with a sincere desire to help your reader.
7. Don’t write an article that is basically just a
sales letter for your company. You can promote yourself,
un-ashamedly, in the signature at the end of the post.
8. When writing a good signature make sure it is good enough
to entice your reader to go to your site or request more
information from you.
9. Don’t forget to mention what you have coming in future posts
to encourage them to subscribe to your blog.
10. Give something away free. In the past I have offered a free
marketing email course. This gave me the opportunity to create a
relationship with my readers.
Opportunities to make money online
So, you want to make money online, enjoy the opportunity to work from home via internet? It does sound like a wonderful opportunity, but it can sometimes be too good to be true. For example, let’s start with the companies that offer positions where you get paid to write reviews. Do your research before giving any of your personal information. How long has the company been in business? What are the full details of the position? When and how are you compensated? The internet can be a wonderful tool to allow you to make money from home, but it can also be very harmful if not approached properly. 
You get online and check e-mail messages. You notice a message from a company promising you can get paid to write reviews, all from the comforts of your home. You do not remember applying for this position, have never heard of this company, and cannot find any more details regarding the position. This would be a great example of a situation where you do not want to provide your name, address, or any other personal information. Identity theft is a very big problem and the internet has been a great way for this problem to grow. It’s always better to be safe than sorry, so remember to do your research before committing to any online business opportunity!
Blogging as a Marketing Tool
Blogging, writing, speaking are all ways for entrepreneurs to develop a following, increase their email marketing lists, and eventually acquire 
new clients. The two burning questions that I hear from clients in this regard are:
When do I have time to blog?
What do I blog about?
Let’s take the first question, having time. Blogging has to be seen as a marketing tool, not just a nice thing to do or a creative outlet. Yes, it might be the only time you get to spout your words of wisdom uncensored, but more importantly are you providing something that is meaningful to your clients? If so, the time you spend writing a blog entry is a great use of your time. However, if you still feel like you are short on time, consider these five options:
- Speak your blog into a digital recorder or an online recorder such as audacity.com. Driving or maybe even taking your daily walk might provide great ideas. Record these ideas and buy a translator program such as Dragon Naturally Speaking and turn your voice into a blog. Editing once it is transcribed is fast and easy to do.
- If you work with a team, ask them to contribute to the blog. No one said you have to do all the writing or provide all the ideas. Enlist your team to help you.
- Include your customers, associates, and partners in blogging with you. Invite key people to contribute to the blog. Possibly ask them questions in which they respond or link your blog to something insightful they have written.
- Set a schedule for your blogging. Decide if you will blog once a week, once a day, or every two weeks. Your readers will want to know what to expect from you. Allow yourself to write drafts of different blogs as ideas pop up and once a week pull one out, edit it, and voila you have a blog post completed in 15 minutes.
- Subscribe to a photo service such as dreamstime.com and you will have easy access to inexpensive photos to support your blogs. Pictures tell a thousand words. If you are an amateur photographer, feel free to include your own photos as well. This is a great way to show the human side of yourself to your customers.
Now, what you say and what you blog about needs to be considered in the following ways.
- What type of blog you are presenting to the world. Strategically, you have to decide if you are sticking only to business issues, mixing business and family, or business and personal anecdotes, or just personal. Who is your target and what is of most interest to your target reader. Answering this question will provide you with parameters for yourself and others on your team.
- Make a file on your desktop that is entitled “Blog Ideas.” Every time you read a blog, an article, an rss feed and it spurs some new ideas for you, copy it to your folder. This becomes a reservoir for future blogs. Once you use the idea, file it to another folder entitled “Blog Ideas Used.” You may want to recycle them at another time, but for now, it keeps your blogs fresh and makes sure you don’t repeat yourself too often.
- Once a month or once a quarter make a list of topics you will blog about in the next 4-8 weeks. You may choose to focus on a theme a month or vacillate between business and pleasure for example.
- Something hits you. From time to time a new idea, something you heard on the radio, or something you read will spur your creativity. Jot down the idea and allow yourself to write free flowing. If you don’t have time to reread, research and edit the article, put it in a file to revise later. These fresh ideas can be some of your best blogs and the most fun to write.
Don’t sack the receptionist – give her more work instead!
Isn’t it frustrating when you arrive at an office reception only to find that there’s no receptionist! There you stand, waiting for someone to notice you.
And some how the staff manage to beaver away while at the same time giving you glances but, infuriatingly, not making any effort to come to your rescue?
You think to yourself, should I wait, should I talk, should I….
I have worked in many busy offices in my time and the one person who seems to have the most fun and the cushiest job always seems to be the receptionist.
The problem is that when a company has a belt tightening period, then the receptionist is usually the one that bites the dust leaving a void in the reception area and some poor employee out of work and me, the poor visitor, left to her own devises.
I can understand the reasoning for her demise – maybe she spent a lot of time filing her nails or chatting on her mobile – but who’s fault is that? She could have been kept busy with a crucial occupation that most small companies tend to ignore usually to their peril.
She could have been the companies “Social Media Whizz Kid”!
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you would encourage her to chat on Facebook all day, I am talking about structured marketing using Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn and all the other important social networks.
She would be given targets to meet and results to report on, in fact she would be kept extremely busy.
There’s four things you would need to have in place in order to ensure you really do benefit from her activities, in other words to make sure she is actually marketing your business not chatting and making dates with her new found friends.
1) Big Brother is watching!
What a lot of companies don’t know is that if an employee is using a company e-mail then you have every right, as their employer, to monitor their e-mails. This is the first thing you should make clear to your new “Online Marketing Manager”, (it is amazing how a good title can incentivize).
2) A weekly feedback report.
This would be to ascertain, (sorry for the posh word), things like, how many followers you have gained on Twitter and how many Facebook, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Plaxo friends you have on your business pages etc.
3) Somone to write good copy.
Find your cleverest writer, (you could hold a competition!), and get them to write a couple of blog posts a week. The posts should contain all the right key words for the search engines and, ideally, should come out of your website but if you don’t have a blog on your website then you can start a blog easily using blogger, or blog spot, there are many others! (A little bit of training for your blogger wouldn’t go amiss either!)
4) A good trainer.
It doesn’t matter how much she thinks she knows about Facebook etc. she will not know about the right way to leverage this new media to market the business.
The beauty of teaching a member of staff Internet Marketing is that you will be in complete control; your staff member will be gaining some great skills and you will save a lot of money down the line – money that you would have had to pay to a marketing company to do it for you.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach him to fish…………
Pat Sutton – Professional Blogger and Marketing Director at Niche Media Marketing
One to one training, workshops and seminars on Social Media Marketing.
Pat Sutton – Forbes Listed as the 30 women entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter!
How to market your website so that people buy from you!
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have and how benevolent you are, you can give things away for free, you can raise money for great causes, you can hold people’s hands but everyone at sometime needs to make a living.
The baker puts bread on your table, not to feed your family but to feed his own!
I am sure, if you own a bakery or a grocers then online marketing is not so important but if you have a product or service that has a website at it’s heart then you need to know how to drive traffic, create a contact list and to make sales.
Ok, so you have a great website that showcases your products or services or you have signed up for an online, work at home business that has provided you with their propriatory website to promote – what next?
It doesn’t matter what kind of online or offline business you have, if you sell from a website then you need to get it out there to the right target audience.
Not many of us are really clever enough to know, for sure, who will buy from us, I promise you, I have had many surprises! But somehow we need to work out how to get our business in front of buying customers. So a scatter gun approach is not really the way to do it, you need to target the right people.
So how do you recruit people to an online business. How do you get people to come to your website?
Online? Offline? Cold calling? Friends and family?
Let’s look at Friends and Family first.
If you want to lose friends then pitch to them, the same with family members. I don’t know about you but I would hate it if my loved ones avoided me because they felt guilty for not buying into my business! So that is a definite “no no”.
Cold calling? Hey! I’m into this online gig because I want to enjoy it, I want a better quality of life and cold calling just does not do it for me! So, for me, that’s out too.
Offline – now here’s a thing – yes it can work, even for an online business. You could:
1. Get out there to your local business networking events.
2. Build relationships with local business owners to encourage referrals.
3. Take stands at exhibitions.
4. Advertise in the newspapers.
5. Give out flyer’s in shopping malls and markets.
6. Carry business cards for those chance encounters!
Then there’s ONLINE.
Now this is where your marketing can really rock!
Here are my 5 very best online marketing tips.
1. Any good at writing?
You don’t have to be Jeffrey Archer but a good clear blog with all the right keywords can be a fantastic marketing tool.
The article should not be about your business but about something helpful for the reader. Of-course it should be linked to your business, for instance if you are a garden landscaper then an article or blog about growing roses would be good but a blog about baking a chocolate cake may not be.
You need to engage with the reader, they need to see you as a leader and expert.
Once you have constructed your blog or article you then need to add a clear succinct signature at the bottom, this is very important for obvious reasons.
I know what you’re asking….what do I do with my blog once it is finished?
Well if you have a blog section on your website then that is ideal as readers can click to your website to read the blog.
You would open your blog on your website, copy the URL or address and add that link along with a catchy intro like:
An easy way to bake a chocolate cake – if you love chocolate you’ll love this – http://www……
You would add it to places like Facebook, Twitter, Ecademy, LinkedIn etc that’s assuming that you are a member of all these social sites, if not why not???
If you have written your blog on someone else’s website, like Blogger, Ezines or another blogging platform like my site for business women, TheBusinessWoman then you need to make sure that all your website details are in your signature.
2. Twitter!
I know a lot of people think that Twitter is a waste of time well, I promise you that it is not, if you do it right.
A daily tweet containing great advice to followers who are your target audience can really boost your profile. If you have a good profile then people will see you in a good light and are more likely to buy from you. If you read my blog, How to market on Twitter, you will see how you can make Twitter really work for your business.
3. Facebook Fan Pages.
Create a fan page with the same name as your business then set to work making friends and then inviting them to become fans of your page. Once you have a reasonable amount of members you can create a badge to upload onto your website. This creates a sense of community and will give confidence to your website visitors. Of-course you also have your fans to market to as well.
4. Relationships.
Join groups and forums to get to know people, (not to pitch to them), once they get to know you they will eventually ask you what you do and then you can get away with a subtle pitch.
5. LinkedIn groups.
Join the groups on LinkedIn, you are allowed upto 50 group memberships. Of-course you need to find groups of people who would be interested in your sector and will be beneficial to you as well. Then once in a group you can upload your articles or blogs to their discussion pages. These are then sent out by the system to the group members in update e-mails. Some of the groups have memberships of thousands of people each so your one article alone can get you enormous exposure.
Pat Sutton – Internet Marketing Specialist – Official Blog Site http://www.PatSutton.com
Business Mentor with LifePath Unlimited – http://www.ThisBusinessRocks.com
To Retweet – What does it mean and how important is it?
A Retweet allows Twitter users to share their favourite tweets with their own followers.
So if someone has 10,000 followers and they like one of your tweets and they retweet it, then it will go out to all of their followers, good eh!
It is done by copying and pasting the original tweet and sending it out. It’s usual to put “RT” plus the originator’s username at the beginning of the tweet. Here’s an example:
RT@thebizwoman: How to monetize your blog!
Obviously, if you regularly tweet great content then people will pick up on it and retweet you. They will also retweet you if your tweets are relevant to them or even, dare I say it, complementary.
A good way to get people to retweet you is to to ask to be retweeted.
This works really well if your tweets are for a good cause or are likely to be helpful to your follower’s audience.
Here’s an example:
Entrepreneurs – learn how to monetize your blog PLEASE RETWEET ME!
This is only about 66 characters; very important if you don’t want retweets with clipped off ends as you are only allowed a total of 140 characters in your tweets.
It is always better to simplify the procedure for your retweeter.
There is a great little application called PleaseRT.me – http://pleasert.me/
You add your tweet and it makes you keep it short then it adds a plea for a retweet at the end of your message, (I’m saying “message” because I’m fed up of saying “tweet”), which your follower can then click on to easily retweet without all the copy and pasting.
You can try it out now by retweeting this post.
Let’s face it if you don’t ask you don’t get!
Pat Sutton – Official Blog, http://www.patsutton.com
6 steps closer to monetising your blog!
I’m often asked how to make money from Blogging.
Not wanting to dampen enthusiasm, it’s not a get rich quick scheme.
But it’s not impossible.
To get you there you need to have these six crucial skills:
1. Patience
2. Resilience.
3. A great imagination.
4. Knowledge.
5. The discipline to learn.
6. Multiple Income streams?
Why patience you say?
If you do everything right.
Join blogging forums, create networks of friends and acquaintances, got seen on social media websites and actively collaborate on other blog websites.
Then it can still take months, even years before your have any kind of recognition.
With a legible writing style and perseverance you will make it in the end!
Resilience?
By resilience, I mean being able to take it on the chin!
Being able to fail without labelling yourself a failure.
Being successful at something doesn’t make you a success. When that publisher or editor rejects you, pick yourself up and start all over again with even more resiliance!
A Great Imagination is imperative!
You need to be able to see outside the box.
Knowledge and information is widely available on the web but you need to have the imagination to create a useful blog from that information. When you compose your next blog you need to know who your target audience is going to be, then you need to work out ways of getting in front of them.
Your title, (absolutely essential if you want your blog to be read), needs to grab them and say, “READ ME!”.
Knowledge.
It is all too easy for someone to claim to be an expert.
There’s no Internet police checking your credentials but I believe “what goes around comes around” so don’t copy, don’t pinch other’s stuff and don’t claim to be what you are not!
A lot of people will read other blogs and articles and do a good job of copying them by not copying them. But it is easy to recognise the fakers. Take a look at their other work. If the writing style is different every time then they are probably seasoned fake artists.
Don’t get me wrong, we all do our research, that’s what the web is for, but there’s a lot of difference between learning and passing that knowledge on and copying someone elses articles and changing a few phrases.
If I see something that excites me, then I print the article and read it and then do my report on it. This is a great lesson as not having it sitting there on your computer you are not tempted to copy and paste – you have to use your own words.
One more point on KNOWLEDGE. As is normal with a business, you must be prepared to invest financially – you could do worse than taking up a few subscriptions for products and courses on good blogger’s websites, you will be amazed how much you’ll learn.
The Discipline to Learn.
If you want to keep up with the times you need to be ever evolving. The Internet and Social Media changes on a daily basis.
What was a great strategy yesterday could be a waste of time today.
When I first started to market my blogs on Twitter, I was in-undated with visits to my website even though my followers were under a thousand. Now I have many thousand followers yet the response has not gone up that much in relation. I am afraid that we are victims of our own actions.
We know that most people who ask us to pop over to their website for some great stuff are almost certainly going to have a hidden agenda and alteria motives. But that’s Ok if what you get from then is of value!
If you are like me and you are always inquisitive to see if there are any snippets of information that you can pass on to your readers then you may well profit from these opportunities but many of you are probably far too busy, so the offerings are ignored.
The lesson here is, don’t be too hasty, if there is one thing that has come out of all this, it is that people know that if they give something of value then people will be attracted to them or their business so it is rare that the info is worthless.
Mutliple income streams!
Google AdSense on your website? You’re not going to get rich but you can make enough to pay for the odd evening out. Good affiliates? They may bring in a little more than AdSense, but you have to have a mighty busy website to make any real money from affiliates.
The most efficient way of getting closer to monetising your blog is to create a subscriber list. As they say, “The Money Is In The List!”.
Create a subscribe box on your website where they can get something worthwhile for free then once you have your subscribers you can start to work on the relationship. When they see you as a leader and as an expert in your field then you can start to market to them. The format is: give them good stuff, give them more good stuff, give them more good stuff then, when you have their attention, do the pitch then follow that with more good stuff. Be careful, gently does it! You don’t want them to un-subscribe.
Watch this space for my next article, “How to make big money from Blogging”.
Pat Sutton – Official Blog http://www.PatSutton.com