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Be Your Own Guru

Often times new internet marketers get lost in a sea of information when starting online. They buy hundreds of eBooks on how to make money, go to seminars, get private coaching, etc. And often, after all this effort, they still don’t make money.

Obviously it’s great to learn from others. However, everyone has their own unique methods and strategies for accomplishing things.

“There are many ways to skin a cat.”

Remember, no two e-books you read are going to be the same. Why? This is because every internet marketer has developed their own strategies and methods along the way.

No two marketers do their keyword research the exact same way, or use identical strategies for writing headlines. And yet there are thousands and thousands of people making full-time incomes online, even though they all do it a little differently. This means that you don’t have to follow a certain formula to make money, because there are many paths to success online.

And as you take action, you will also develop your own individual style. So the important thing is that you just take action and learn from your mistakes. If you try to follow someone else’s guidelines to the letter, you could get held back.

Remember that you are responsible for your success. There are a lot of people waiting for someone to come along and rescue them from their financial struggles and help them start making money. Then they blame that mentor when they still don’t succeed.

Don’t be that person. Instead, take control of your own entrepreneurial actions. Do not expect someone else to do it for you.

Does that mean you shouldn’t listen to anyone? No, because everyone needs guidelines when first starting anything. Otherwise they will have to go through a large amount of trial and error until they finally succeed.

However, it does mean that the person you are looking up to is human as well, and they don’t have all the answers. Many of them learned what they know entirely by trial and error, and they didn’t have access to any secret information you are being kept hidden from.

In other words, try out what others say, keep what works, and discard the rest. For instance, if you take a course on copywriting, and it has ten tips on how to write great sales letters, you might test all ten and find that only five of them work. That’s okay. Just use the five that do and discard the rest. Don’t get caught up in thinking the gurus have all the answers, and that if you don’t follow their strategies to the letter, you will not make money.

A lot of your success will be trial and error, despite what everyone tells you. While you can speed that process up a bit by learning from others, you are still going to make plenty of mistakes. Many of your marketing campaigns are still going to fail.

So the key to making money online is to test out what others are telling you, keep what works and get rid of the rest. Hopefully this info will help you become another online success story. 

GDI - Global Domains International Home Business Opportunity
TrafficWave Autoresponders - Work Smarter Not Harder

Common Link-Building Mistakes

Link building is an important aspect of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. The more quality links you have coming into your site, the better. It the sites linking to you are quality sites and contain your keywords, even better. However, on the path to the number one spot on the page rankings, many business owners make a few common link-building mistakes.

#1 Limiting the sites you target for backlinks - Yes, high page ranking websites and pages are lucrative opportunities. However, don’t neglect the smaller businesses either. Focus on getting a wide variety of links from relevant websites.

#2 Not using keywords, anchor text, in your backlinks - Keywords are your bread and butter. Not only do they help motivate actual clicks, they help the search engines index properly. And they boost your search engine ranking, which is of course the ultimate goal. Skip using anchor text like <Click Here> or <Download Now>. Use your keywords!

#3 Too many links on a page - Too many links on the page confuses not only the website visitor but also the search engines. It divides the power of your links and minimizes their effectiveness. Instead, choose your links wisely. Choose the ones that seem to carry the most weight.

#4 Counting on social media to provide links - Social media links are not considered quality links. And most networking sites nofollow external links. (A nofollow is when a webmaster tells the search engines to essentially not pay any attention to links.) However, don’t neglect social media as a tool to generate awareness for your content and your website.

#5 Placing backlinks only to your homepage - One rule of thumb is to identify key strategic pages and work to increase backlinks to those pages. Your landing page likely already receives an abundance of links.

There are of course other mistakes which it shouldn’t be necessary to mention. However, just to make sure we’re all on the same page and striving for success, these mistakes include linking to link farms or link exchanges. They also include avoiding any black hat or spammy behaviors. And no cloaking.

Link building is about creating great content, building relationships online with your associates, prospects and customers. It’s about planning and creating a strategy. The old "throw spaghetti to the way to see what sticks" approach won’t get you where you want to go. Avoid these mistakes, create a link-building plan, and regularly assess your success.

Baby Boomer Business

What’s the best small business to start if you’re a baby boomer and nearing retirement? There are so many choices out there that it can be hard to know what to do.

One of the most popular business opportunities today is online marketing. This is because the start-up costs are low. In some cases, you can do most of your advertising for free.

However, there are many choices when it comes to starting an online business. Here are three of the best you can begin with:

#1) Affiliate marketing

This is easily one of the top ways for any beginner to start earning money online. You don’t even need your own product. All you have to do is to send traffic to other people’s websites. You get a commission for each sale.

You don’t have to deal with customers, and in some instances you don’t even need your own website. This can be a slow method, but if you use paid advertising you can start making money very fast. Being a “traffic broker” is one of the top strategies for earning online. 

#2) Sell on eBay

EBay selling is one of the most popular small business start-ups for people, and for good reason: it works. However, the vast majority fail to earn money on this site. One of the main reasons is they don't have a good backend.

Selling to your current customers multiple times is how to be profitable. The backend is not something most eBay sellers focus on, but it offers a lot of income potential. It's much easier and cheaper to sell to a current customer than to find a new one.   

#3) Google Adsense

What is Adsense? It’s a simple concept. All you do is create a webpage about a particular topic, and Google will put ads on it related to your page.

So if you have a page about camping tents, the ads that appear will also be about tents. Then you get paid a certain amount every time a visitor clicks on an ad.

This is one of the fastest ways to start earning online, but it takes some time to start seeing serious results. This is because you don’t make that much money from any one click. You need a lot of clicks every day to really see progress, which requires a lot of traffic. The visitor value is relatively low when compared with other methods.

The bottom line is, there are lots of opportunities for baby boomers to start an online business. These are three of the best ones to start earning relatively quickly with. However, there are plenty more options out there as well. Hopefully this info will jump-start you to having your own profitable business very shortly. 

GDI - Global Domains International Home Business Opportunity
TrafficWave Autoresponders - Work Smarter Not Harder

Attract Younger Customers - Onilne Advertising

It’s no secret that getting younger customers is critical. It’s important, because you could potentially have a client for life if you handle the relationship correctly.

So how do you attract them? Here are five tips to make it happen:

#1) Know where young consumers hang out

One of the obvious places they go to is social media sites. The biggest age group using the popular social networking sites is the eighteen to twenty-four bracket. YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace are all examples of social sites that offer a huge amount of profit opportunity.
  
#2) Know who your customer is

Trying to target all young people is not going to work because it’s not specific enough. You will want to narrow it down to a certain age and gender to be more effective. This will enable you to speak exactly to your customer, instead of trying to design some generic advertising that appeals to everyone.

#3) Get in a conversation

More and more, young people are doing business with companies they trust. Trust is one of the most important words today for business.

How do you build trust?

You have to show you care about their needs, and can help them. If you ram one advertising message after another down their throats, they will know you just want the money.

So you first have to identify their needs, and show that you have a solution for them. You want to engage your target market in a conversation and answer their questions.

This will establish you as an expert. So you first have to give them a lot of great free information. If your free information isn’t that good, they will assume that what you are selling isn’t that valuable either. 

Ask them questions. This will show them you care about what they want. After you’ve done this, you can explain how your product would meet their needs.

#4) Use video

As mentioned above, video social networking sites are really taking off. Video is one of the best ways to engage your customer. This is because people can comment on them, much like a blog.

From the comments, you will be able to see the needs that your customers have. Then you can design you product to better meet those needs. 

#5) Emphasize benefits

More than ever, young people don’t care about how long you’ve been in business. They are interested in what you can do for them. Your credentials aren’t as critical as the benefits you provide to them.

So don’t talk about yourself; talk about what you can do for your customer. It might be useful to mention you are an expert, but the main focus should be on the benefits.  

Remember, you are in the business of helping people. That’s the only way to make money. So engaging your customers, finding out their needs, and meeting those needs is how to attract younger customers.

Where to start when online advertising?
Advantages Of Buzz - Online Advertising

Article Submissions 101

Now that you have written those helpful articles to bring more business to your business, they’ll need to find a home.  Good articles can find plenty of homes at article submissions websites.  Here are the basics for getting that article ready and submitting it to an article site.

1.  Write about what you know.  This goes for anyone who wants to write articles and have them accepted by a submission site.  For the business owner looking to increase traffic and revenue, the topics will pertain to your business in general, business products that you sell, and/or business services that you provide. 

2.  Aim for an article length of at least 400 words.  Some sites will accept articles with as few as 250 words, but it will take at least 400 words to flesh out an idea and gain the interest of the reader.  Check with the sites you will submit to for word count requirements.

3.  Proofread the article.  There is nothing worse than an article with typos and grammatical errors.  Good articles have been rejected because of simple errors that could have been avoided.  Use spell checker or a second pair of eyes to be sure the article is ready to go to a submission site.  Even if you use a ghostwriter for the articles, give the work a once over to be sure it says exactly what you are trying to convey to the reader.  Don’t forget to use keywords for a more SEO-friendly piece.

4.  Check out the sites where your article will get the most coverage.  Popular article submissions sites with high marks will work the best.  If you don’t want to put all of your eggs into one basket or even a few baskets, use an article submission service.  They submit good quality articles to hundreds of sites for you depending on the subject matter of your articles.  You submit once on their site and that’s that.  Be aware that there are sites that don’t accept submissions from article services.  For those you will have to submit one by one.

5.  Some sites require registration.  Even for the free ones, the registration comes with a profile page.  This is where you will post links to your business and talk about it. 

6.  Keep a running list of article submission for your records.  This way, you can track when the articles are published, the upfront payment, and how business traffic and sales change as a result of the articles.

7.  Wait for news that the articles have been published and are being viewed.  Submit more articles as you have time.  It is a good idea to keep making regular submissions.  If you gain a following you don’t want to lose them.