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After creating the latest version of the Dateless Sniper theme (Dateless Sniper 2.0), I thought that it might be a little difficult to implement everything that the theme can do. In order to help you guys to get the most of this theme, I decided to make a little video that shows you how to install and configure it. Guys please watch the video, it will help you to understand more about getting ranked in search engines. Please comment on this post if you have any questions!

Links I referred to in this guide:

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(original article)

Freelance writing has been the business model for many online entrepreneurs to fuel their dreams of a better life. When we dream of making money online it is often to escape a life that has lost its spark. While many succeed, most never will and the dreams die as quick as they are born.

Hopefully after reading this article, you will understand that you too can make money online with freelance writing if you feel passionate about it.

As some of you know, I came to freelance writing more by accident than by design. After a failed business venture in MLM I discovered that I wasn’t cut out to be a die hard sales person, but more so a writer who enjoys blogging and writing about a vast range of topics, while expanding my ever growing knowledge.

I basically slipped into my business and I will be eternally grateful for the opportunity, regardless of what happens in the future. I thrive on writing about many subjects and every time I do, I learn something new.

The fun part of this is that you can too!

Here are some of the characteristics you will need (in my eyes) to make this work.

1.) You need passion for the written word. That means you mustn’t flinch at the idea of having to write a 600 word article, regardless of the topic. As a matter of fact, on an average day I write about 4,000 words for clients.

2.) You also need to be a voracious reader and learner. I’m convinced that reading hundreds of books has helped me to understand English grammar without having to study the subject.

In case you wonder, I grew up in Switzerland and what I know today is the result of years of reading and learning. Plus, I never feel that I stopped learning and am always soaking up new information. I guess I am like a sponge.

I simply crave new knowledge.

3.) Get into action. You’d be surprised as to how many people wish to be a freelance writer but never actually do anything at all to make it happen. Action is the magic word and the sooner you jump into the cold water, the quicker you will be able to swim. To help you get started, I created a freelance writing guide for new freelancers. In the guide I touch on many subjects to do with freelance writing so if you are interested to learn more, feel free to take a peek.

4.) Brand early. Branding is everything in our business. If people don’t know who you are, you make it complicated for them to find you. The best way for a freelance writer to brand himself is to use his own name.

The sooner you actively do this, the quicker clients can recognize you. More recognition = more work!

5.) Use an online portfolio. Show the world what you are about. Make a statement, like McDonald’s. Be proud. When you are good in your field, there is no room for false modesty but always, always stay humble.

There is a difference.

6.) Build step by step. No new freelance writer will be run over with tons of work when he first starts out. As long as you are prepared for this, you can build your business as it grows without the need for speed and pressure.

7.) Look for expansion. There will come a time in your business when you need to expand. You might need to outsource, or cap your clients to keep on top of all your assignments. The sooner you weigh up your options, the smoother your business will move into the next chapter.

8.) Never stop looking. Even if you business is flying along, it pays to keep a couple of options open. The nature of freelance writing determines that you won’t always be fully booked. Plan for those quiet times and work that plan.

9.) Network. Networking has been my biggest income source. Without networking, I wouldn’t have half of the clients I have now. Every day I am amazed at the power of networks and how they help my business. Before you wonder though, networking didn’t come easy. It required months of hard work to stay in the loop and connect with other bloggers to eventually get noticed by them.

A comment here, a blog post there and more will be required to build a strong network of other business owners who might be prepared to recommend your services to third parties.

10.) Hard work. I said it before, I say it now. Working hard is part of making it happen for any online business, regardless of the industry. Long hours, repeat work, frustration and success are all part of any serious entrepreneurs daily life.

The question is, do you want your own slice?

(original article)

Since I quit my full-time job about a month ago, I’ve had quite a few people ask me how I prepared myself to make the transition to being self-employed and working from home.
I want to make two points about the personal finance aspect of making this move:

1. Debt creates stress that clogs your creativity and creates a need for income that your fledgling web business may not be able to realistically provide. So before you try to quit your job, work yourself into a solid internet income and use it to pay down your non-mortgage debts.

Not only will you experience a huge effective increase in your income (as that money is no longer going to your creditors), you will feel a big boost in your confidence and creativity because you won’t have the burden of debt weighing on your mind.

2. Get a sense for exactly how much money you need to reasonably earn to maintain your lifestyle. I don’t believe it’s realistic to say you’re going to change years of spending habits when you become self-employed. Look at how much you’re currently spending, try to trim the excess where possible, and then set your income goal equal to your current lifestyle. Trying to figure out entrepreneurship while simultaneously trying to adjust to a significantly reduced lifestyle will do nothing but frustrate and discourage you.

Now, about the work of being a full-time internet entrepreneur:

1. Find Your Best Method For Making Money Online

When you quit your job it’s not time to learn what will work. It’s time to scale up the effort you’ve already been investing in a system that is producing results. It doesn’t matter whether that’s Keyword Sniping, BANS, consulting, or freelance work.

Any of those could give you the full-time income you need to stay job-free. But you need to have momentum and success behind you before you expect any of those methods to sustain you as a full-timer. An extension of this advice is that your chosen method has to be one that will reasonably scale up to a level that will pay you what you need to live.

Let’s say you right now you have an internet income of $200 per month, and it takes you 15 hours per month to maintain that income. If your monthly income requirement is $4000, you’ll have to increase your current income 20x. If you can’t introduce some new efficiencies into your business, you’ll need to invest 300 hours per month (or about 75 per week) to make that $4000 per month.

That’s probably not realistic. So make sure you can grow your income to the level you need without having to put in outrageous work-weeks. Hundred hour weeks aren’t bad if a few of them create a more passive income. But if you’re not seeing your income grow as your work hours decrease, you need to improve your money-making methods.

2. Develop the Discipline Necessary to Work At Home Full Time.

If you want to prepare to quit your job and work from home on the internet, you have to start thinking of your home as the place you work. You will have no boss other than yourself, so you have to require yourself to complete tasks.

For me the toughest part of entrepreneurship is imposing deadlines on myself. But if you can say “I will not let today pass without accomplishing x,y, and z” you are really setting yourself up to succeed. I’m working at this one every day, because I still often let myself push things off until ‘tomorrow’. The real danger of that is you can’t have today back. Once time is gone, that’s it. If you have real goals and no boss to force you to complete the necessary tasks, you have to develop the ability to complete the work - today.

3. Consume 90% Less Information

I’m going to confess something here, and I hope it doesn’t ruin our business. I don’t use an RSS feed reader. Why? Because I only read two or three blogs. I read everything Court says, I check in on SEOBook once or twice a week, and sometimes I pop over to Blogger Unleashed to see what Vic is up to. I read Grizz’s site whenever he posts, which isn’t often.

I don’t read many blogs because it’s not the way to get the highest ROI on my time. Since I have found my method for making money online, I spend my time working my method and I ignore 99% of what’s being said in the blogosphere.

There is good information out there; I’m just ignoring it because I can’t afford to be distracted. As my income settles in and becomes lower maintenance, I think I might start some BANS sites. Until then, I’m just going to do my thing.

I know many of you are on information overload, and I completely understand. That’s why I’m saying you have to work one method until it yields a result, then keep working it until you hit your goal, then start looking for additional methods. You should read only as much information as is necessary to hit that first income goal.

I really don’t believe subscribing to 50, or even 10 blogs in a reader is necessary. Find your mentor, do whatever she/he says, and ignore everybody else until you’ve reached that first goal. If your mentor is on this site - great. Spend 10 minutes a day reading this site and the rest of your work time building content and links so you can increase your income.

If your primary mentor is not on this site, I suppose you’d have to leave us for a few months until you hit your first income goal. See you when you get back.

(original article)

I think one of the best aspects of SEO is that it’s both cumulative and compounding in nature. It’s cumulative because every time I put a page on the internet it has potential to rank, bring me traffic, and make me money.

As long as I don’t let the domain expire or let it go stale with a lack of links, it stays on the web forever (basically) with very little maintenance. If I add 500 pages per year to across all my sites, the net I’m casting on Google gets a little wider with every single page I add.

Your Authority on Google Can Grow Exponentially

The compounding element of SEO comes from our ability to add pages and links within one domain, and with each new link and page, the entire domain becomes exponentially stronger.

So while my Google net is getting incrementally bigger each time I add content, the entire net is also becoming stronger and more effective every time any one of my pages gets new links. This compounding effect is why sites like this one can achieve high rankings for keywords they’ve never really targeted with nothing more than internal links.

So how can you enjoy the full compounding benefit of your SEO efforts? There must be hundreds of answers to that question, but the answer I’m offering today is deep linking. As you strengthen the individual pages of your site by getting them links, you increase your entire site’s ability to rank exponentially.

How to Drive Link Strength Deep Into Your Site

The real question, then, becomes “How do I build links to the individual pages of my site?” We’ve posted in the past about strong internal linking strategies and also the use of the related posts plug-in. Internal linking is powerful, but if your deep links are going to help the entire site get to a new level of authority, they need to come from other sites. So here are the two strategies that are guaranteed to yield results:

1. Blog Carnivals

For any of you not familiar with blog carnivals, they’re basically group writing projects hosted by sites as a way of sharing good content and community building. You can find carnivals relevant to your topic at the Blog Carnival website. It will walk you through the simple submission form you see below. What you’re going to do is submit a post of yours that best fits with the theme of the carnival.

The deep linking power comes from that fact that if the host of the carnival likes your submission and accepts it, you’ll get a link from that site directly to your post. And very often you’ll get another link to your home page. It’s not uncommon for authoritative sites to host these carnivals, so there are some quality links to be had if you’re willing to do the work of regularly contributing posts to the carnivals in your niche.

**Blog Carnival Bonus Tip**

On the submission form after you’ve pasted in the permalink you’ll often see a space for you to enter your name or the name of your blog. Find a way to get your desired anchor text into that name and it will make the link pointing to your homepage that much more effective for SEO.

Be warned - there are some carnival hosts who feel this is spam and will refuse your submission based on your use of a keyword as the name on your submission. Others will understand why you’re doing it, and as long as your submission is high quality and relevant, they’ll give you the link with your anchor text.

The big upside of blog carnivals is they usually give you both a link to the post you submit and to your homepage. They can also be a source for traffic and more links. I’ve had people find my other blog this way and like it so much they added it to their blog roll. That may not happen often, but it’s nice when it does.

The downside of blog carnivals is submitting to them can be time consuming and tedious. It’s a low leverage method for deep linking, but it’s a good way to get started when your site is newer. Eventually the goal is to have your content be good enough to attract links of its own (Court’s post on starting a blog has received over 1400 external links - a lot more than blog carnivaling will ever get me). At that point, submitting to carnivals doesn’t make sense anymore from an SEO standpoint, although you may still want to do it occasionally for community buidling purposes.

One last thought on Blog Carnivals: DON”T SPAM THEM. You’ll quickly ruin whatever name you’ve established for yourself if you aren’t submitting posts with the intention of contributing to the quality of the carnival. This can be a good supplemental link building strategy, but if you take it too far you’re not going to make friends.

2. Article Marketer

Yes, it’s our old friend Article Marketer. Sometimes Court and I feel like A.M. is the nerdy kid in high school that nobody else will talk to, but we know he’s cool, so we’re going to stick with him even if everybody else thinks he’s a loser.

So in this edition of Article Marketer Does Not Suck, I want to show you how to use the html Author Bio on the article submission form to give a link to both your home page and one of your subpages every time you submit an article.

It’s pretty simple. On the form you see where you can create the html author bio with up to two links. All you have to do is have one of the links (with your main homepage anchor text) point to your homepage, and use the other link (again with the anchor text of your choosing) to the page you’re trying to build. Repeat that process as many times as you like. Remember to vary your anchor text to avoid Google Bombing.

Here’s how it will look (sorry it’s so small):

And that’s it. Using this strategy I was able to get the ranking you see below for my ecommerce site. It’s a #9 ranking and the keyword isn’t particularly difficult, but it shows the power of linking to a subpage.

Now that page of my site not only ranks on its own, but it passes authority back to the rest of my ecommerce store. That’s the compounding effect of deep linking.

There are more deep linking strategies out there. What are your favorites? I’ve heard of people using squidoo lenses, hubpages, and obviously social bookmarking to accomplish the same goal. What have you tried and gotten results from?

(original article)

Guys I am REALLY excited about the release of the newest version of this theme. To say the least, it has some major upgrades from the last version. Here are the changes I made this time around:

• Dateless Sniper 2.0 is fully Adsense-ready and has four easy-to-use options for Adsense placement
• Moved the ‘Filed Under’ section below the posts
• Added the ‘Sponsors’ section for optional banner support with Got Banners
• Changed links from blue to underlined black
• Added ‘Tag’ section with support for a non-list-style tag cloud (the old tag could was very annoying)
• Added tag support to single post pages that adds tags below post content

Download Dateless Sniper 2.0

Download Dateless Sniper 2.0

(original article)

Being an entrepreneur sounds so cool to many people who are forced to slave away their days for a boss in the cubicle. These people dream of a life spent working from home, while actively building their wealth without having to answer to anybody else.

While the thought of entrepreneurship is one that has inspired millions before us and will no doubt do again long after we are gone, it isn’t as smooth sailing as you think. To be an entrepreneur, it requires certain disciplines and habits that will help us along on our path to business bliss.

These are often reasons enough to stop many from even trying. While they might sound scary for you, think about the alternatives instead. What do you prefer? A boss and no control about your professional future, or hard work and a chance at success.

The choices are entirely yours.

Not everyone is an entrepreneur by nature. That’s perfectly fine too. In the end, it is all about happiness and being truly excited about our life on a daily basis. For most, it is when unhappiness strikes and we hate what we do when we start thinking about owning our own business. Whether it is an online or offline business is irrelevant.

For some minor few though being an entrepreneur is an inborn passion, a drive that keeps them going until…

To see whether you are suited for this type of life see the pointers in this article and whether they resonate with you or not.

1.) Uncertainty

Entrepreneurship is uncertain business. When you become self employed you don’t know whether your business will take off or not. But if we never try, how do we ever know? This could especially be a problem in the beginning stages. In a young business it is hard to tell whether our ideas will eventually work out.

The problem with many businesses who fail is that they give up way too early. They totally underestimate what it takes to run a successful business and fail to plan accordingly. Many failures could be avoided, if only proper research were done upfront.

In the end though all we can do is try.

2.) Risk of failure

Being afraid isn’t bad as it instills a healthy respect into our conscience. When we are aware of certain challenges in business, we can prepare against them and increase our chances of survival.

Most of us are afraid of things, situations or even people. Being in business for yourself won’t change this. Especially when our own capital is involved we tend to get very scared. The secret here is to plan in stages.

Don’t throw all your venture money into your business upfront. You will be much better served by starting small and expanding from there.

3.) Hard work

If somebody ever told you that being an entrepreneur is easy, they were lying. It isn’t easy. What is easy anyway. Picking your nose perhaps. If you want to step into your own entrepreneurial shoes you need to understand that there is hard work involved. Not necessarily hard as in physical, but mental and tiring. Which brings us to the next.

4.) Long hours

As an entrepreneur myself I work long hours. While some might say; what is the purpose of slaving away from home with the worries about business, if you can work for a boss instead and do half the work, I understand.

Entrepreneurship is perhaps not the right thing for you then.

But for all the rest of you, think about this. When was the last time you got a pay raise? Or are you one of the not so lucky ones who has to work back regularly for your boss. How about job insecurities, inflation, downsizing, automation, outsourcing? Shall I go on?

To be honest, I rather take my chances with my own business. I actually feel more safe than I ever did being employed for 22 years.

Plus I can give myself a pay raise whenever I feel like it. Come to think about it…

5.) Irregular income

There is no doubt about this. Owning your own business will expose you to income fluctuations. It is just the nature of doing business. Depending what industry you launch with, this could be seasonal, dependent on the time of day, or even fueled by an ever changing economy.

As long as you are prepared and put some pennies aside for the slower times you should be fine. Problems start when entrepreneurs burn all their money, thinking it will just keep flowing. While the thought is one I rather like, nature has shown us that it won’t always work that way.

6.) No benefits

When I say no benefits I don’t mean tax. As a matter of fact, business owners have huge tax benefits and they should peruse them.

But we don’t get sick pay, holiday pay or even 401k benefits. Life insurance is also another topic to consider, as well as work cover if that exists within your country. Basically any benefits we take for granted as an employee will fall away when we go into business for ourselves. Therefore it is best to be prepared and informed.

That is another reason why you should never sell yourself too cheap. Nobody else will pay your bills for you.

7.) Marketing

Ah, the dirty word. Many see marketing as an evil side to doing business. But it doesn’t have to be. You can market yourself without driving away potential customers or clients.

One problem is that hardly anybody is a born marketer. That means we all have to learn and adapt to our industry as an ongoing learning experience. We can’t afford to rest and have to keep our eyes on the ball to stay competitive and in the game.

8.) Lack of quality time

Ok, this is a biggie. If you have family, pets or friends that are used to seeing you around on birthdays, Xmas and other common holidays, then you might be in for a shock. Sometimes in business we have to keep working when the world parties.

Yes, I know this is hard and we all face the same tests and tribulations. The thing is, that the earlier you build your business up the quicker you can allow yourself to be back in the party zone whenever you want to (ok maybe not that often).

9.) Missing funds

Depending on the business you seek to run you will need some major funds (even if you start small). Sometimes those funds are simply not available to us and that could be the first major hurdle to face as a budding entrepreneur.

Especially in today’s economy, it is getting harder all the time to obtain funds from official sources like banks and credit institutions. But fear no more. Think about alternative ways to get “cashed up”. Short of robbing a bank, think about that rich uncle who might be willing to borrow you the money with interest, or a JV partner that has the money, but no idea on how to run a business. Even a quiet investor who wants to sit back, collect parts of the profits and see you work might do the trick.

In the end it is all about grabbing available opportunities and run with them. During the life cycle of a business there will be mistakes, maybe even failures and tons of headaches, but in the end it can be and is for me the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life.

If I haven’t scared you off just yet you might have what it takes to become an entrepreneur after all. Good on you. Grab the opportunity and run with it.

(original article)

Not all affiliates become expert in affiliate marketing the moment they begin. Even those individuals, who are expert in affiliate marketing or have been practicing it for quite sometime, may also face problems in promoting the affiliate links. There is no hidden or big secret for the art of affiliate marketing. The only secret behind successful affiliate marketing is planning and executing some wining strategies so as to successfully carry out the affiliate programs.

Here are certain guidelines and tips that would certainly help beginners to promote affiliate program and earn great profits.

1. Provide exclusive content

You must have heard people saying that content is king, actually this a half-truth. In reality any content is not king but the unique content is. Provide informational content to your audience to read so as to attract their attention. The best way to promote your website is through writing articles and adding them to the website. It is one of the effective tools of search engine optimization.

2. Customer friendly website

Design a user friendly website where there is proper co-ordination between graphics and text. Always give professional look to your website so as to make the brand image on world wide front.

3. Make certain that your content is quite printer-friendly

Visitors love to read offline too. So provide with the option of printing.

4. Create simple to navigate web pages

In order to make the website easily navigable, always make the option of site map in the website. A site map helps the visitor to navigate and choose the section of his interest out of the whole website.

5. Offer complimentary features on the site

Perks are always well liked as well as well received. You are actually creating nice value for your prospects to persuade them to spread the remark regarding your website. This is by now is the most effectual affiliate program marketing secrets.

6. Make all the links of your website clickable

Make sure to check them out first, so that there is no broken link. Conked out links are breeders of misplaced opportunities.

7. Make a FAQ page on to your webpage if you are selling an in-house product

Think and turn up with a catalog of possible questions which visitors might ask. This is important in order to assist your potential customers to understand your brand in a better way. Affiliates fail to apprehend that it could be used for pre-selling too. Furthermore, the FAQ pages save your time in answering the queries related to products.

8. Make it handy for your visitors to get in touch with you

Contact option should contain varied options so that the visitors can have the choice of selecting the most comfortable means to contact you.

9. Permit your guests to give suggestions and opinions on your website

The suggestions of visitors would help you in making the site customer friendly.

10. Promote your site by creating links to your website

Creating backlinks help in search engine optimization and increase the page ranking of the website in search engines.

This way you will have a great website that will drive tons of new visitors – from search engines, other websites to read your content. When you have such website, all you have to do is just to place your affiliate program links in some places of your content and people will click on them. This way you can easily earn money. All you have to do is just to find the affiliate programs that suit your website’s content. You can easily find such programs on networks like Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) and place affiliate links on your websites, so your website visitors would buy from you. If you want to make money online, you need to put some work. The more work you put into promoting your affiliate links, more money you will earn online.

For about the last four months, Court has been providing personal coaching to a handful of our readers. In the past we’ve only offered the coaching directly to a small group of our RSS subscribers, but Court’s schedule is opening up again as he graduates students, so we wanted to let everyone in our audience know what we’re doing.

You can read the details of the program on Court’s Opportunity page, and below we’ve posted a couple of the reactions from students who have completed the program. You’ll notice one of the students was our very own Monika Mundell.

I’m posting the feedback for two reasons. The obvious one being that I want you to see how happy our students are after their one-on-one time with Court. The less obvious reason is I want you to read about the experiences of others and ask yourself “Is this something I’d enjoy and benefit from?” We realize that personal coaching isn’t a good fit for everyone, and we want to work with those who will be most enthusiastic about the opportunity.

Here are the stories of Chris, Monika, and Max (thanks to all three of them for their willingness to share their experience):

Max Jarrar, Former Business Development Manager for Microsoft:

I enjoyed the honest, personal, never-rushed approach to the coaching. It was especially refreshing because there are so many “gurus” out their claiming to be experts and claiming to making millions of dollars per day that are only after a quick buck.

From day one working with you I saw that you don’t make any ridiculous claims about income; and you never claimed to be the “gurus”. You set the pace for what you could teach me and then you told me it was up to me to take it to any level I chose, whether that be a few hundred dollars per month or a few thousand. I truly appreciated that from you. Along the way it was obvious to me that Court and the team were willing to help above and beyond what was committed in writing at the beginning of the program!

Working one-on-one with Court was time well spent and well worth the money. I’ve always appreciated the high quality of the free information on CourtneyTuttle.com, and the coaching maintained the same standard. Court’s one-on-one, never rushed coaching is a shortcut to making money online that will save anyone time and money wasted on techniques and “secrets” that never work. Once again I appreciate Court’s honesty, focus, and willingness to help above and beyond.

- Max

Chris Copeland, a family man (and great guy) from Texas:

The strongest part of the coaching for me was to be able to physically speak with Court once a week - to have that mentor tell me what to do, walk me through the process, tell me what to look for and then suggest what I could be doing.

It was great setting out with some goals and seeing that I could accomplish them in a week’s time. His patience and overall knowledge of the process was impeccable and he was able to lead me down a straight path without having to go over the hills to get there.

The favorite part for me was simply being able to talk with him. It allowed me to get the answers that I was looking for. He walked me step by step through keyword selection, site building, and then marketing - there was never a “dull” moment!

I’ve been floundering around this business for almost a year now and have had a hard time developing the proper focus. I never really knew what I was doing, although I thought I had it all figured out because I “read it on someone’s blog”.

Needless to say I was far from where I needed to be and I was working myself fruitlessly into deeper holes. After working one-on-one with Court I now have a plan, a focus, a mission. Would I do it again? Heck yeah!”

- Chris

And this is what Monika had to say:

For me, the strongest part of the coaching has been getting to know Court better and interacting with him one-on-one. Being coached from a pro that knows what’s happening in a particular field is very important. Not only in regards to learning from the master himself, but also for the mind. I looked forward to the calls every week.

Working with Court one-on-one has given me a new-found belief. I now know that I can make a residual income online because I have the exact blueprint in my head and in my endless notes. It was worth every penny I spent and the value of this knowledge when put into practice will pay me back tenfold and more.

- Monika

We look forward to talking with any of you that want to learn more about the details of the program.

By the way, we realize the first question in most of your minds will be how much this costs. It really doesn’t make sense to discuss the investment into the education except in context of what it can do for you, so we’d ask you to hold your questions about the investment until we can actually have a conversation about whether this is a good fit.

I will tell you that we have a money back guarantee in place with the education, and we refuse to have anyone leave the program unhappy.

(original article)

If you are using an ad broker, Adsense, or just about any other method to create advertising income from your site, chances are you aren’t making as much as you could be.

• Most people believe that Google is taking a 50% cut of Adsense earnings.
• Text-Link-Ads takes a 50% cut of link revenue
• ReviewMe takes a 50% cut of review sales

While I honestly could care less about ‘trends’ in the make money online world (Why would I? Most of them are ridiculous), there’s one that you can’t ignore. People that are selling their own ads are making a lot more money than people who aren’t.

In this lesson, I will cover 5 steps to selling your own ads:

1. Make room for your ads and get some up before you try to make sales
2. Contact your competitors.
3. Set your prices.
4. Create a solid advertising page.
5. Contact potential advertisers.

Step 1 - Make room for your ads and get them up.

You will have a hard time selling ads if you don’t already have ads sitting there. This means you need to create a section for the ads now.

A very popular and effective format for selling ads is the 125×125 ad banners in the sidebar. I use this ad placement and it has worked out very nicely for me. Your sidebar will need to be at least 260 pixels wide to use the 2-column placement that I have. If your sidebar isn’t wide enough, you could use a single column.

In order to make sales, your ad section will need to appear as high as possible in the sidebar. I took a look at some of the big sites in my industry and tried to match their placement.

In order to be able to charge the same amount to all of the advertisers, I knew that I would need to banners to rotate. To make them rotate, I used a plugin called Got Banners. The page I got it from no longer exists so I guess I’ll just post it here: Got Banners Download. You basically install a little piece of code in the sidebar and then manage the banners by going to Options>>Got Banners (Settings>>Got Banners in WP 2.5+) in your WordPress admin.

Some of you may want to sell advertising on niche or keyword sniping sites. This could be very effective if you do it right. Create a section where you can put the banners now, and we’ll discuss making the sale later on in this lesson. If I had a bunch of keyword sniping or niche sites, I would probably create the section in a theme that I could use on all or most of my sites. Your enemy with that approach is wasted time, and using the same theme will save tons of time.

Another very common ad placement is the 728×60 banner like the one they use at SparkPlugging.com. They don’t sell their own ads as far as I can tell, but the placement is what we’re looking at. Again, you have to create the placement before you can make the sale.

What banners do you put in until you can make sales? I would use affiliate banners from sites like NeverBlueAds and AzoogleAds. They have all different sizes of banners that should fit in nicely on almost every site. You can also use banners that point to other sites that you are trying to establish.

Perception is everything when it comes to making these sales and you have to put your best foot forward. Trying to sell banners when you don’t have any banners in your section will be a HUGE waste of time.

Step 2 - Contact your competitors.

At this point of the process, you are NOT trying to sell advertising to your competitors. You are simply going to contact them to determine the rates they sell advertising for. Many of your competitors will have the rates published somewhere on their sites, others will have to be contacted via email or telephone. You should ask how much they charge, and how many impressions (total hits on pages the ad is on) you could expect to get per month if you were to purchase an ad spot.

Step 3 - Set your prices.

Once you have determined how much your competitors are selling advertising for, you will be able to set your prices accordingly. You should figure out exactly how much your competitors are charging per impression.

If your competitor can deliver more impressions than you each month, you will want to lower the amount you charge per impression by a slight amount, something like 10%. If you can deliver more impressions than your competitor, I would increase the amount you charge per impression by 10%. After you start selling ads it will become easier to determine whether you can sell your ads for more or not - this formula is here only to get you started.

Example: Your competitor is charging $500 per month for an ad spot and can deliver 500,000 impressions to that ad each month. That means he/she is charging $0.001 per impression. That’s 1/10th of a cent.

If you can deliver 50,000 impressions to an ad, charging the same amount per impression would give you a price of $50 per month. Lowering your rate by 10% would give you a monthly price of $45. This gives a slightly better value than your competitor, which is a trade off for not being able to deliver as many impressions.

Step 4 - Create a solid advertising page.

9 out every 10 banners I sell are sold directly from my ‘Advertise‘ page. In order to sell advertising, you will need to put your best foot forward - talk about your strengths as a site.

Possible Strengths:

• High amount of traffic
• Valuable traffic - maybe you don’t have that much but you have people that are looking to spend a few thousand dollars on a cosmetic surgery or something.
• Targeted traffic
• Solid organic traffic - Organic traffic has a longer attention span than social traffic.
• Good rankings for solid keywords
• Loyal traffic

I use PayPal subscription buttons to make the sales on my advertising page. That way, all of my ads are sold on subscription. During the first few months I sold my own advertising, I created a HUGE hassle for myself by not selling on subscription. I had to invoice each advertiser every month and that ended up being a major pain. Switching to the subscription method made my life a lot easier.

These subscription buttons can easily be made from your PayPal account. You simply go to ‘Merchant Services’ and then click the ’subscribe’ link in the ‘Create Buttons’ section. It will have a simple form that you will use to create the button, and will then give you code that you will paste in on your advertising page.

Step 5 - Contact potential advertisers.

At this point you basically have two options. Firstly, you could wait around hoping that you can make advertising sales from the traffic you currently have. I’m doing this now, and am selling out my advertising almost every month. However, in the beginning I was a lot more aggressive, because I needed to be.

After I created my ad sections and set my pricing, I contacted all of the companies that were advertising on my competitors’ sites. This resulted in some sales during the first week. I didn’t have an awesome sales rate, but was able to get a few because I contacted so many people. I want to say I contacted about 30 and sold maybe 3.

When I emailed these companies about the possibility of advertising on my site, I let them know that I was offering advertising at a better rate than other sites they were advertising on.

It’s very wise to contact some sites in the beginning, because once you have some legit advertisers, it becomes a lot easier to sell to more.

One trick that I considered using (in the end I didn’t have to) was selling a few spots at a huge discount. For example, you could contact a premium advertiser in your industry and offer them an ad spot for $1 per month. That gets a high-end advertiser in your ad section and that looks great to potential advertisers. As an alternate method, you could tell them that you would like to give them free advertising for a few months. That way, you get a premium advertiser in your ad section and might be able to sell to them after the free period ends.

Conclusion

Selling your own advertising can result in a lot more profit for your online business. Making that sale will require creating a good perception and providing a little more value than your competitors. This value can be provided by either providing more impressions or a better rate per impression.

(original article)

Although I’ve now been able to make money online with several different approaches, my first legitimate attempt was with ecommerce. Since I’ve been posting at Court’s Internet Marketing School, I’ve had quite a few comments and questions about how I feel about ecommerce and whether I’d recommend it. Here are five pros of ecommerce to consider:

1. It’s Tangible

For people who have never attempted to make money online before, an ecommerce business can be easier to conceptualize and imagine. Although the world at large is becoming more and more internet savvy, the vast majority of people are still going to get a little cross-eyed when you throw out terms like ‘ad-supported’, ‘user-generated’, monetization, etc. But almost anybody understands “they come to your web store, buy a product, and you make money.”

When a visitor makes a purchase, you’ve succeeded (made money). When the visitor clicks away without buying anything, you’ve failed (didn’t make money). I think it’s easier to conceptualize “How can I make more sales and therefore more money?” than “How can I get more RSS subscribers…and how do RSS subscribers help me make money anyway?”

2. The Product Already Exists

It’s hard enough for most beginners to believe they can get traffic to their websites, let alone convert it into dollars. If they also have to think of, design, and produce a product they’re just going to be too overwhelmed and give up before they ever really get started. One of the best parts of ecommerce is being able to say “Somebody is making these so there must be a market. I just need to get involved in that market.” As opposed to “I wonder if anybody wants or needs the product I’m spending all this time and money developing.”

3. Easy Expansion

Because you don’t have to worry about developing and producing the product, it’s easier to believe you could start ten ecommerce stores. It’s just a matter of creating a site and getting traffic to it, which you should have mastered with your first store. And theoretically your entire ecommerce business gets easier to run as it gets bigger because with more orders comes enough money to hire a person to fill the orders for you, and at that point your business can be mostly on cruise control.

4. It Provides an Opportunity to Learn Solid Marketing Principles

An ecommerce store with a good mix of related products is a great learning environment for upselling, cross-selling, bundling products, discounts and sales, and so on.

5. Minimal Content Requirements

I doubt any of you would argue that content creation is just about the toughest part of maintaining most internet businesses. One of the very best things about ecommerce is the products are the content. As the site owner your content creation usually consists of writing two or three sentence product descriptions.

The shopping cart software we use on our ecommerce store lets us use Excel to mass produce and upload those descriptions, so the work is relatively easy, even when you have thousands of products on your site like we do. This aspect of ecommere does make SEO a little more difficult, but it can be overcome. Once your site is set up, you can leave it there for months or years without changing it.

How about you? Any insight the appeal of owning an ecommerce store?

(original article)

Failure is a word that carries a lot of weight. In fact, it can have so much power that it will stop a man from succeeding because of the assimilation’s associated with the word. According to WordNet, failure has several meanings, but despite those we often see failure as a lack of achievement in whatever we do.

I did too.

I was wrong. And I will tell you why.

See, for most of us, failure is missing out on; that academic recognition, the promotion at work, the riches in our business or the sports medal we couldn’t win.

What failure isn’t:

The word failure has a sour by-taste. It makes us crawl into a tight space. We are ashamed. We cry. We rant. We become angry and bitter.

And while most people eventually move on with their lives and achieve something, some never will and those are the true failures. Because failure is NOT - you missing the promotion at work. Failure is also NOT - you not succeeding in your first business venture, unless of course you…(scroll down to the definition for the answer).

All those are mistakes we learn from. Some are massive mistakes, some are small and others yet are downright stupid. I used to be afraid of making mistakes, of making a fool of myself as I called it. I was ashamed of doing something wrong and as a result of this fear I missed out on a lot of opportunities.

It took me many years to learn that I shouldn’t be afraid of mistakes. Quite the opposite really. Once I learned that mistakes are what help me to grow, both as a person and in business, I learned to embrace them and treat them for what they are…

… namely a vehicle to move ahead another step.

The sad thing is that we are only too ready to label somebody a failure. Doing this doesn’t help the other person. In fact, we would be better off to encourage others no matter how small a battle we think they fight. For them it could mean a mountain.

Let me show you a typical example:

I received the following email the other day. The person is obviously desperate and has taken the time to email me, asking me for help.

pls i am very good at writing most especially christian article, how can i make my money with this. i want a very good details in an aesier way.

thanks,

I will be honest. My first impulse was to delete the email since I clearly saw that his English wasn’t up top par, but then I hesitated because I didn’t know this person, his background, his circumstances.

Who am I to turn him down, just because his English isn’t up to par from what I see in the email? He might have been stressed, or crying, for fear of not being able to pay the bills, or he might be a great writer in another language.

If I am the only person he might trust with hopes to help nudge him in the right direction, then turning him down by ignoring his email would be devastating.

While I’m a firm believer that only we as individuals can make a difference in our life’s, I also believe that we need to help encourage each other. We need to nurture our spirits by empowering others. Especially if they reach out to us.

So while we class making mistakes as failing, true failure is something else and I tell you what in a second.

True failure is…

Giving up!

If you are being rejected, experience setbacks, feel disappointment or are unsuccessful in trying something, you are not a failure.

Real failure is when you stay down after you tripped or stumbled. Failure is when you shut down and simply check out. Failure is when you give up!

As long as you persist and try, you cannot be a failure, you are a winner, regardless of the outcome and that is why I say I’m running a successful home business.

I might not make the millions I dream about (just yet), I also might not earn $20,000/month (just yet), but I do work from home, following my dream and am making enough money to pay my bills - even though I failed in MLM. I failed because I gave up MLM. But I didn’t fail my home business, all I did was change tactics and it worked.

What can you learn from this?

I hope that this changes your beliefs in regards to failure if they were somewhat tangled up. Remember to help encourage others when they come to seek your help, regardless of what you think. Wonders never cease to happen and as you already know, the human mind is an amazing and very powerful weapon against defeat.

Fight on. Keep on going. Battle away. And never give up. Unless you really want to. By the way, it is ok to fail too, after all why bother pushing on in the wrong direction when it clearly isn’t the right path for us.

You also might find this story very thought provoking.

(original article)

The State of New York recently enacted new legislation that addresses tax registration, collection, and other time-sensitive obligations related to affiliate advertising of tangible products. As with all laws, this law may or may not apply to a business depending on several circumstances. However, web based affiliates of online stores and web sites can, for the first time, be treated as extensions of the store itself and creates new obligations similar to if the retailer had a physical presence within New York.

Amazon.com is currently suing the State of New York over the new tax laws while other online retailers like Overstock.com announced last week that it has notified its more than 3,400 New York-based affiliate advertisers that as of June 1st they can no longer provide advertising for Overstock items until New York changes its controversial new internet consumer tax law or the courts say the law is unenforceable. Rather than just collect these taxes, Overstock has decided to cut New York affiliates entirely, removing their “physical presence” from the state.

“Unfortunately, due to the State of New York’s new legislation, we now believe it’s prudent to discontinue, temporarily, our current relationships with our New York affiliates while the battle over the constitutionality of the New York legislation is contested in the courts,” reads a letter (PDF) sent to one New York affiliate, BusinessKnowHow.

“We love New York,” said Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com’s chairman and CEO in an article on the Dow Jones Newswire, “but New York’s new tax law required us to choose between New York customers and New York ad businesses. In the end, we chose our customers.”

In the past, retailers were treated as a business of the state only if they had an actual brick and mortar location, but these new changes apply specifically to affiliates acting as agents for a retailer. Under the new law, beginning June 1st - any retailer with New York-based affiliate marketers is required to collect sales tax on all goods shipped to a New York address.

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. A Marketing Sherpa Inc research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned $6.5 billion in commissions from a variety of online advertising and lead generation. Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling and retail sectors.

New York businesses engaged in affiliate based e-commerce should perform the appropriate due diligence as it relates to their business. Provided is a link to a memo from the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Office of Tax Policy Analysis, Taxpayer Guidance Division that addresses the new legislation:
http://www.tax.state.ny.us/pdf/memos/sales/m08_3s.pdf

Affiliate marketing is something that many webmasters know how to do. They know what it is about, and what it takes to be successful. However, if you are new to the webmaster world, you may just be wondering how you can get into affiliate marketing and making an income on the side for yourself. Doing so is not that complicated, and we have created this guide to get you started.

First of all, lets cover just exactly what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is when you sell or get leads for someone else’s service or product. You are going to find that there are so many people that do this. When a company needs some help making sales, and they allow people to sign up as affiliates, they are willing to pay a commission or a flat rate per lead or sale. Depending on the company, this percentage or flat rate will vary.

Affiliate marketing can be used to make a decent income several ways. You can use a website, a blog, newsletter, email, ads etc. The list goes on and on. However, the most popular form of affiliate marketing is done with a website. When you choose the market that you want to promote, be sure that you choose one that you are some what familiar with. This way you can become an expert on the topic, and everyone will know that you are the king of that market. Once that is done, it is time for a URL. There are many places that you can get your own domain from. Once you have decided where you will purchase that from, choose a URL that has the topic you are selling in the URL for the best results. For example, if you are wanting to market cat food, you wont use a URL that has dog in it. Make sure that everything is all relevant.

Now that you have your market and your URL chosen, you will want to determine the hosting that you will use for your website. You need dependable hosting for the best results. A hosting company that has more up time than down time is best because during the down time, your website will not be accessible. So, get some recommendations from others that have tried a few and use the best that you can find. It is worth it to pay for good hosting.

Once that is done, you are ready to get your affiliate links and website set up so that you can market the most effectively. Determine the amount of money that you want to make, and set up an outline of how you are going to make it. There are so many ways that you can get a website out there to be seen, and you will want to make the best decisions. So, finding out the best ways for you to do this is that is cost effective is a good start.

Learning SEO which is also known as search engine optimization is a great idea. Using SEO to get your site higher in the search engine rankings with keywords will pay off in the end. You can learn it yourself, or you can pay someone to do this part for you. It is up to you. However, you should know that learning and using SEO yourself is time consuming. Hiring an SEO guru might be better for you.

Write articles about the market that you are promoting from your website and submit them to all of the article directories. When you include a back link to the site that you are optimizing that will help you as well with the search engines.

Affiliate marketing is not anything that you can make money with over night. You need to be able to build up and keep adding to your website daily or weekly, and keep it going. You can do it, just don’t give up.

Transparency is explained by Wikipedia as follows.

Transparency, as used in the humanities, implies openness, communication, and accountability. It is a metaphorical extension of the meaning used in the physical sciences: a “transparent” object is one that can be seen through.

For a business to be transparent, we need to follow certain rules or guidelines that keep us on track. After all, if a business pulls this way yesterday and that way tomorrow when it comes to openness, communication and accountability, clients will start to complain and eventually not return.

Why being transparent matters

As a freelance writer with my own small business I have always been transparent. I believe that this transparency is what brings me new clients all the time, while getting repeat work from existing ones.

Being transparent allows prospective clients to see what they will get, before they actually do. A typical example is the McDonald’s franchise.

Whenever you step into their restaurants, you know beforehand what you’ll get. This is why they have been so successful over the years. We should never under estimate this. The power of being transparent has many benefits, not only the fact that we know what can be expected from a business who applies this principle. Let’s look at some of them:

• Your customers are more knowledgeable about you and your business
• You establish a sense of trust upfront by being transparent
• Others value your honesty and are drawn to you in the process

To me, being transparent comes from being confident about what I do. I guess I have always been like an open book and I’m not afraid to share my pitfalls and warts with my readers. We all make mistakes, even though some are really dumb ones. As humans we show real greatness when we can step over our ego and admit this to the public.

A typical example is the following short story: Two bloggers whom I really respect got into a huge public fight not so long ago. Each accused the other of doing the wrong thing and they weren’t shy of swearing at each other either.

To cut the story short (and stay true to my intro) they eventually made up by publicly apologizing to each other, admitting that they had made a really dumb mistake.

To me this is true transparency and they should both be commended for doing so.

Transparency is about showing guts and character

It takes guts to admit to the world that we make mistakes, besides being good at what we do. Some business owners might not feel comfortable doing this, but for me it has always been about being open and accountable for what I said I would do and being honest.

Admittedly this can also put us into real trouble if we stuff up. If that happens we just have to take the bull by the horn and admit it, instead of making things worse. Even if that puts us into the dog house for the short term.

While I will never agree with everybody’s views on things, I respect those humans most who show me true transparency in their day to day actions. To us Internet marketers, bloggers and business owners, this means to stay true to us and our business ideas. We shouldn’t be afraid to show our true nature, even though we operate online, in a supposedly faceless environment.

If I can’t look people in the eye because of what I write about, then I shouldn’t write it at all. Also, I’d like to look into the mirror at myself and smile without feeling remorse, guilt or even shame.

Personally, I love being transparent, but having said that I also know that not everybody else does.

If you feel strongly about the topic of transparency in business, I’d love to hear your own opinion on why you favour one over the other.

(original article)

Many online businesses use affiliates to drum up business. The affiliate finds a lead somewhere, passes it to the business, and gets a commission if the lead turns into a sale. Web based affiliates are relatively uncontroversial, but affiliates who advertise by e-mail are a chronic problem due to their propensity to send spam, both spam as normally defined and as defined by CAN SPAM. Is it possible to do legitimate e-mail affiliate marketing? Maybe.

CAN SPAM makes it pretty clear that a business is responsible for the actions of its agents, which includes ensuring that they follow CAN SPAM and other laws. Most of the CAN SPAM requirements are handled the the same way by affiliates as if the business were doing its own mailing — headers must not be misleading, mail must have a physical mailing address, and so forth. By far the trickiest requirement for affiliate ads is the opt-out rule, which says a business must follow a recipient’s request not to send any more ads. This means that every time an affiliate mails for a business, the affiliate has to remove all the addresses of people who’ve told the business not to mail to them. Furthermore, people who send opt-outs in response to the affiliate’s mail have to be added to the business’ opt-out list. This is a pain in the neck, but as I read CAN SPAM, it’s not optional.

What makes it tricky is that affiliate marketing is full of sleazeballs, and both the businesses and the affiliates have good reasons not to trust each other. If the business provides the list of opt-outs to the affiliates, the affiliates are likely to steal it and mail to it. (Mailing to it could even be legal under CAN SPAM so long as it wasn’t promoting the same business, although it does seem like a poor idea to mail to a list of people whose common characteristic is that they’ve gone to the effort to say they don’t want mail, I know people who’ve provided tagged addresses that have gotten spammed from ex-affiliates.) So perhaps the business can provide a listwashing service, where the affiliate sends them the list and they send it back minus the opt-outs. No, that’s no good, a sleazy business could steal the list on the way through. The same problem applies to affiliates sending opt-outs back to the business — it’s far from unknown for people to resell opt-out lists as verified live leads and the like.

There’s no perfect solution. One possibility would be to use a neutral third party to handle the opt-outs. That’s what Unsubcentral does with some success, although they’re limited both by the fact that they don’t do it for free (affiliates hate to spend money on anything that isn’t going to turn into revenue) and trust issues of yet another party in the mix.

Another possibility is to use lists of address hashes, one-way scrambled versions of addresses. If you have a list of hashes and a list of addresses, you can make hashes of the addresses on your list and compare to see which of your addresses are in the hash list, but you can’t otherwise tell what hashes correspond to what addresses. This means that if a business provides a hashed opt-out list to the affiliates, they can use it to scrub their lists, and they’ll know what addresses got scrubbed, but since those were addresses they already had, the opportunity for extra mischief is limited. Going the other way, if the affiliates provide the hashes back to the business, the business can scrub its own lists, and provide the hashes in turn to other affiliates, but at each level, they don’t learn about any addresses that they don’t already have. (A sufficiently determined bad guy could go get huge lists such as the ones on Millions CDs, then hash and scrub those to see what addresses he recovers. It’s not perfect, there’s no way to provide information to someone you don’t trust and be 100% sure he won’t misuse it.)

Whatever a business dues, literal lists, third party, or hashes, they have to do something. I would go so far as to say any any affiliate e-mail program that doesn’t include opt-out management clearly can’t be CAN SPAM compliant.