After a long and heated dispute regarding the sales tax, Amazon and the State of California seem to be coming to a treaty. This treaty, if implemented, is conceived to be a win-win solution that will benefit both Amazon and YOU, if you are a resident of or one of this Amazon’s affiliates in California.

Sales Tax Controversy

Before we go and find out what agreement Amazon and California is coming down with, let’s first take a look at what they have been through to reach the agreement…

The sales tax controversy started in 2010, when California lawmakers began to eye giant retailers who don’t have physical stores in their state but are earning millions, or even billions, of dollars each year. While online dealers such as Amazon are protected by the 1992 Supreme Court ruling that says businesses are not obliged to pay sales taxes if they don’t have a physical store, headquarters, or warehouse of any kind within the state, lawmakers saw a loophole in it, especially when they found the possibility of raking in $150 million from the company annually.

The idea was that, although Amazon (and other online shops) might not have a physical presence in a state, they might have affiliates in the state. Thus those affiliates would be recognized as physical presence and sales tax could be collected.

With a hundred million on the line, the government made a strong stance to get the tax due. Amazon, however, does not agree and chose to immediately cut ties with its California-based affiliates last June. There were no notifications made beforehand; affiliates just found themselves abandoned by the company.

To make up for this, Amazon made a proposal. The proposal basically states that if the California government holds on the implementation of the tax collection until next year, Amazon will not only be paying taxes but will also have distribution centers constructed in the state and will employ more than 1000 workers in the process. While the government claims that it will never agree to such a deal, an information leak reveals that the said treaty is already well underway.

Amazon-California Treaty

Just to further emphasize, the agreement that Amazon and California is supposedly working on includes the following provisions:

• The government will not collect sales taxes from Amazon until September 2012
• Amazon will forego a part of its revenue, amounting to $200 million
• Amazon will re-open its line of communication and transaction with its California-based affiliates

One thing worth noting, however, is that the bill that will make all these possible is still being processed, waiting for the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown. Until it is signed, none of the above conditions can or will be fulfilled.

National Intervention

One question is continuously bugging critics and followers of the Amazon-California dispute. That is: Why does Amazon seems so giving when it comes to foregoing part of its coveted advantage (selling without paying tax)?

The answer probably lies in the fact that the federal government may take on this case if it becomes a strong national concern. If the federal government does take on this case, a nationwide employment or consolidation of sales taxes will probably be implemented, taking precedent over the California bill and relieving Amazon of its obligation to pay separate taxes—certainly the end result Amazon is betting on.

Right now, it is still unknown whether Amazon will end up paying separate taxes or if it will benefit from sales tax consolidation. Nevertheless, regardless of the result, California affiliates, as well affiliates from states Amazon formerly cut ties with, will probably get another chance at making money through this commercial giant.

There, the final general rule of thumb is to always put importance to get the conversation started, no matter what form of Web 2.0 you are using. Whether you’re firing off an @reply on Twitter or discussing some important topic on your Facebook fan page forum, it is important to take the initiative to get people involved. While a lot of people tend to come off strong on the internet since they are not meeting others face-to-face, there are still a lot of potential customers who will not ask or say anything unless encouraged. That is definitely why you must always make the first move.

When you first start your web 2.0 marketing efforts, the only person who will be invested in your business is you. You must accept this and understand that growing your network of followers is ultimately your responsibility and no one else’s. If you do a good job, the responsibility will slowly shift over time from you to people who will become heavily invested in your network and will want to play a role in making it happen.

Starting an online business and using various Web 2.0 marketing strategies can help you attain your goals, but only if you are careful and wise. Always create a plan before you act, be patient, and surely, you will achieve success.

Google Plus is a continuously rising network that will allow you to easily interact with your customers, business partners, and family. It is a strong rival to Facebook and provides innovative takes in features such as friend and post segmentation. 

As of this writing, Google Plus is still in beta phase. Nevertheless, new features are being added and adjustments are being made based on feedbacks gathered. Some current notable features of Google Plus that you can take advantage of are the following:

• Circles- this feature guarantees that specific things you post are shown only to a certain group. For example, family matters are shown only to your family circle, and so on.
• Hangouts- regardless if you are starting a mini-conference with friends or business associates, this video chat system will be of help.
• Games API- a lot of marketers like us doesn't really appreciate getting bombarded by game updates. This nifty tab helps us get rid or, at least, effectively and easily ignore them.

That is why once you have your fan page in place, you must consider promoting it with a Facebook ad.

Since Facebook can capture a tremendous amount of demographic information about its users (because they freely post it in their profiles), you can drill down carefully to determine which types of profiles your ads should be placed near.

The great thing about this is that it is both an inexpensive and highly-targeted strategy for bolstering the ranks of your fan page. If you have just created your fan page and are looking to make it grow faster, then I highly suggest that you promote it with Facebook ads to get the ball rolling.

After Google launched its service on June 28th, he created his own profile and quickly covered the top spot.

It was a cool move of him. That he created his own Google+ profile exuberated an aura of self-confidence.

‘We’re cool with Google+, we’re not afraid.’

Guess what?

Within days, Facebook’s coolness vanished like morning mist in the rise of a supernova.

Google+ received raving reviews, and its user base grew faster than any social network before. News started to popup that Facebook banned accounts and apps who promoted Google+ in any way.

Facebook suspending ad accounts.

On July 15th, Facebook suspended web developer Michael Lee Johnson’s advertising account because one of his ads promoted his Google+ profile.

The ad said: "If you're lucky enough to have a Google+ account, add Michael Lee Johnson, Internet Geek, App Developer, Technological Virtuoso."

Facebook said: "Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped."

Not so cool anymore.

Getting cold feet?

On August 11^th, just hours after Google+ launched its games tab, Facebook announced improvements to its own games platform. One can’t help but wonder if Facebook is starting to work hard to stay ahead of Google+.

I’m not saying they hadn’t been working on that for a long time, but the timing of the announcement is suspicious.

Are they rolling out their features in a mere response to what Google+ does?

1. Facebook didn’t announce their group chat and video call feature until after Google+ had beta launched, getting great feedback for their video hangouts.
2. Shortly after Google announced it will offer a custom profile type for businesses, Facebook launched its ‘Facebook for Business’ page.
3. Then Facebook announced their game improvements, just a day after Google+ launched its own games.
4. Well, just read below…

The news today, Facebook likes the clarity of circles, straight from Facebook’s blog.

Facebook says: “Today we're announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want.

You have told us that "who can see this?" could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward.”

Facebook should say: “Today we're announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want.

Google+ circles are such a success; we finally had to make a move. Our users did complain in the past, but we didn’t care as much as we do now.”

It's not only a response to the targeted sharing that is possible with Google+, it's also a response to the frequent privacy issues, that Google+ addressed better than Facebook.

What do you think? Google+ banks on the weaknesses of the old Facebook. Did Facebook need the competition to improve? Are they afraid now of big bad Google+?

Mini Reveiw: Tim O'Reilly isa bit more on the technical, abstract side, while Bradley Horowitz is more on the practical side, so a few of the questions aren't really going anywhere. Also don't expect any breaking news about Google+. But overall it's an interesting watch.

It covers topics like:

• How’s Google+ different from other social networks?
• How to keep up with the increasing speed and volume of the stream?
• Why is it called a field trial?
• How circles eliminate the need for multiple accounts.
• How Google works on keeping Google+ speedy.
• Is there Spam in Google+?
• How can users control their information across different social sites?
• What about Facebook's announcement this morning? Looks familiar?
• Creative ideas for video hangouts.
• Is a pause button to stop the stream coming?
• Are threaded comments coming?
• Implicit circles – how commenting builds new relationships.

Tim O'Reilly had collected user questions on Twitter and Google+ in advance, these are some of the questions discussed:

• What about the 'real name vs. pseudonyms' controversy?
• What about Google+ for businesses and brands?
• How to offer Google+ to children?

It also goes into more technical and abstract concepts behind Google+, like:

• Web stacks.
• Data liberation.
• Is this a platform developers can rely on?
• How Google+ wants to protect users from bad apps.
• Is there a future for open social?

In the end Bradley announces 'new unexpected features, that will change how people think ofthe service entirely.' Ah, too bad he's still hush hush about the details.

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You may think this is a joke, but it is not. German privacy protectors asked web sites owners to remove Facebook like buttons from their sites, and threaten to fine € 50,000. They claim Facebook Like buttons and Fan pages violate European privacy law.

From the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection's web site:

The Data Protection Commissioner’s Office (Independent Centre for Privacy Protection – ULD) calls on all institutions in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany to shut down their fan pages on Facebook and remove social plug-ins such as the “like”-button from their websites. After a thorough legal and technical analysis ULD comes to the conclusion that such features are in violation of the German Telemedia Act (TMG) and of the Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG), respectively the Data Protection Act of Schleswig-Holstein (LDSG SH).

You can read their reasoning here:

https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/presse/20110819-facebook-en.htm

If I told you now what I think about this newest German bureaucracy stunt, I'd probably go to jail…

What do you think? Tell me in your comments.

Another way in which you can use your Facebook fan page is to promote fan photos and testimonials. As I mentioned earlier, you should make a concerted effort to extract testimonials, photos, and relevant artwork from your customers and visitors; this is one of the reasons why you should.

Once you get them, you have to add then to your Facebook fan page (if they’ll allow it). This will provide you with some evidence that you are running a legitimate business and selling good products. With such testimonials and photos, you can rest assured that people will be more willing to accept your friend invites, join your fan page, and give you traffic and sales.

In case you never heard of it: it's a service that allows users to post comments to a web site and, at the same time, get these comments posted to their social profiles, like Facebook or Twitter. There are more features, but the core for me is connecting comments on this blog with social networking sites.

I considered this several times in the past, but never did it. Mostly because I thought I would lose my Disqus comments once I might decide to revert back to wp's comment system. That is not true anymore, since Disqus will synchronize the comments with the wordpress database. Cool!

What made me change my mind …

… was using Disqus today not as webmaster, but as commenter on other sites. Really nice how the comments show up in Facebook, and get interaction that wouldn't happen otherwise.

I did some research about alternatives and finally chose Disqus. It's clearly the most popular, and thus has the best chances for a long live and future improvements. Others might have some bells and whistles, but that means nothing if they go out of business.

I made that mistake back in 2007 when I used a more sophisticated blog software for my Internet Business Blog (the one you're reading right now). It was a great tool, but simply didn't have a chance against the fast and innovative progression of wordpress. So later I switched my blog to wordpress. Lesson learned: go with market leaders!

So, I'm giving the Disqus comment system a try!

Please help testing my new comment system.

I still wonder if there will be any mess with my wp theme. Please help me test the installation by posting a comment, especially also a nested comment, i.e. replying to an existing comment.

Now, just what could this something be?

It seems Google has figured it all out, and that is why it has added a good number of games to its new social network.

Games Invade Google+

Google+ is still in its beta phase, but new features are frequently being added. One of its new features is the games API. This new tab allows members to gain access to all the games Google+ has to offer. Although it currently has only 16 games, Google made sure that it is offering nothing but the best. Some of its starter games are Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz, Bubble Island, and Zynga Poker.

Crowd favorites like Farmville and Mafia Wars are yet to be added, but rest assured that Google+ are working on getting more quality games up on their network soon.

The great thing about this new feature is that you have all the game notifications in just one place. Invitations, updates, high scores, etc.—they are in that one tab for you to check and access. This makes it a lot easier since you won’t need to click on multiple buttons just to see what your friends are up to, if you are leading or losing the top high score race, if you want to check out new games your circles are going crazy for, and so on.

Even better, this new tab helps game haters like me.

Game Haters Don’t Need to Hate

Now, one thing that I didn’t really like about Facebook—and probably one of the factors that made a lot of users like me favor Google+—is the fact that it bombards users with game notifications.

I mean, I created an account with business purposes in mind, and my business is far from being related to games. That is why I do not really appreciate all those game notifications cluttering my news feed.

Are you the same?

If yes, then you will surely like that Google+ had that in mind when it created the games tab. That is to say, since there will be one separate tab for the games, we won’t need to see all those game updates when we are not interested in them. Our feed tab will be clean and be full of only real news and personal updates from the people in our circle.

Calling Interested Developers

With its aim to bring the best games to its members, Google+ has also opened its doors for developers. It even created a separate developers’ blog for fast and easy communication with any parties interested in the offer.

If you are a web app developer and you want to take this opportunity, you can simply head over to the Google+ Platform.

Google+ is definitely still on its way to developing a top-notch social network. However, if it continues to bring well-thought features like this one, I’m sure it is going to win over a lot of users faster than anyone ever thought possible.

One of these often-ignored features of Facebook fan pages is the “insight” feature.

This feature lets you break-down your fan site traffic in great detail. It provides you with traffic info such as:

• Location
• IP addresses
• Likes and dislikes
• Other details about your fan site traffic.

This information can prove extremely useful if you are trying to analyze your visitors to determine what types of people buy your product and have an interest in your niche. Try it today, and see how your business is doing and how you can improve it to get better traffic and sales.

Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, helps us discover the answer by holding an interview session with 3 big shots of Google, namely, Amit Singhal, Ben Gomes, and Matt Cutts.

These 3 men are authorities as they control and monitor particular areas of the Google search engine that directly relates to users’ queries. Amit Singhal is the master of algorithm; he’s the one who sorts the sites and figure out which should and should not be presented to users for specific queries. Ben Gomes takes hold of the look of Google. That is, he plans how the Google search engine looks like and what features should be added on it. Last, there is Matt Cutts who generally takes out spam and keeps the search results clean and orderly.

The interview covers a lot of topics such as the following:

• How Google decides what to rank and which to mark as spam
• Google’s opinion on the claim that it is keeping rivals from search results
• What Google thinks of social media, now that it has launched Google+
• What factors Google base on to measure a site’s relevance to a query

But of course, I don’t want to spoil it by giving you all the details. So why don’t you take out some time and watch this Google interview?

Some think that the internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing; people use these two terms interchangeably, in fact. However, they are actually two very different things. The internet and the first internet message was sent over 40 years ago, but the websites, delivery of information, and user interaction that we are so familiar with today only started with the WWW Project in 1991.

WWW Project

Back in the 80ies, the internet is a place where physicists share information. If you are a common folk, there is no way that you can access the internet and use it for personal or business gains.

Fortunately, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee realized that for the internet to grow, it should be a platform not only for experts but for everyone. That is the year that the World Wide Web is conceived and given birth to.

And today, my friend, that is what we celebrate—the World Wide Web’s 20th birthday.

The world wide web has reshaped the world.

• New industries and new professions have been created.
• Millions of online and offline businesses only exist because of the internet.
• Work became location independent, for workers as well as for business owners.
• Organizations, businesses and governments manage and interconnect their work online.
• Applications move from PCs to online servers, soon bringing an end to the classic desktop PC.
• On the downside new threads emerged, making governments and businesses more vulnerable than ever before.

Looking Back at Yesterday

Twenty years has brought along a lot of changes to the World Wide Web. From coding to user interaction and to graphic presentation—the internet has evolved from static to brimming with life and activity. As we commemorate this great day, let us look back at 22 particular events, or milestones, that made the World Wide Web that we know today…

1990-1991: The Birth Year

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the WWW Project, launches the first web server and the first site that is still online today info.cern.ch. This website, and his WWW project, started free use of the internet and is the reason why we are all able to convene in a virtual world and easily share information.

1993: Infancy

The World Wide Web continuously and rapidly grew. Enthusiastic marketers began to start online campaigns, using websites and emails to deliver information and advertisements.

Sadly, in1993, “spam” gets commonly accepted as term for unsolicited email. Email marketing gets its bad name, making business harder for serious marketers.

On the upside, the first web cam is used in the same year. The first image it captured is of a coffee maker in a computer lab in Cambridge University. The popular coffee machine stays online until 22nd August 2001.

1994: Access for All

While the internet has become free for use, there is no doubt that in 1994 a certain amount of knowledge of computers is still necessary. Fortunately, in 1994, Netscape Navigator makes WWW accessible for non-geeks. It's the first popular internet browser.

1995: Start of Today’s 3 Top Sites

In 1995, three big websites and corporations emerge: Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay.

We all know that Yahoo created a search engine and news portal, but do you know that Amazon made affiliate marketing popular? Yes, when we are talking about the easiest and most lucrative form of internet businesses, you can count on Amazon being its forefather. Amazon became the number one online shop it is today through its affiliate marketing program. In the year 2011 countless other businesses use affiliate partners for promoting their products and services.

1995 also saw the birth of eBay—today’s most favored site when it comes to private selling and small internet businesses using eBay as their affordable and easy to use ecommerce platform.

1996: Internet Explorer and Flash Takes the Scene

With the internet becoming a necessary part of businessmen and common folks’ lives alike, Microsoft finds the need for a new and reliable browser. Thus, in this year, it integrates Internet Explorer into its Windows operating system. At its peak IE reaches a market share close to 70%, 15 years after its introduction IE has a market share around 40%.

1996 also marks the release of Macromedia Flash, the software that is used to create multimedia applications for web sites.

Sidenote – Everything Is Impermanent. The year 2011, in my humble opinion, marks the soon to be celebrated death of the Flash format, thanks to HTML5, CSS3, and web developers coming to their senses.

1998: Go Google

Probably the most memorable event in 1998 is the birth of today’s most popular search engine, Google. In this year, Google was incorporated by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students of Standfor University at the time. They used a friend’s garage as base and hired a fellow student, Craig Silverstein, as their first employee.

We all known what Google has become, and what a huge impact it has for internet businesses. It sends traffic to our web sites through search and ads. It creates new industries (SEO), and allows millions of people to make easy money online by simply putting adsense on their sites.

By 2011 it spreads into gazillion business ventures, frequently launching new services.

Such a humble beginning that rocketed to unimaginable heights, isn’t it?

1999-2001: Napster is Born

Today, we know Napster as an online music store and a Best Buy Company. However, it first began as a P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing company. Of course, it easily attracted attention, criticism, and lawsuits. After all, it is offering copyrighted materials for free—something that music and label owners can’t stand. It is eventually shut down by court order but was bought and revived into a music store by Roxio.

2000: Dot Com Boom Meets Its End

During the 90ies the internet is the new gold rush. Investors pour billions of dollars into seemingly promising startups, wihtout even asking how the startups ever plan to make profits. With this thought, numerous sites popped up in mid-1990s—all using “.com” in their web address, thus the term “dot com boom.” At this period, stocks are boosted and profits abound. Sadly, though, every beginning has an end. In 2000, the dot com bubble bursts, leaving a lot of loses and tears.

Sidenote – The New Dot Com Bubble. In 2011 Facebook's (still theoretical) stock value is estimated to be higher than $100,000,000,000.00. That's 100 Billion dollars, more than $130.00 per Facebook user. In 2010 the revenue (not profit!!!) per user was $4.00. The public will be ripped of again, the little guy / investor will lose his money, banks and CEOs get 100 Billion richer.

2001: We Get Wikipedia

What do people do when they want to get quick information about something? They open their browsers nad do a search on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia with information submitted by users, making it a continuous, collaborative project.

2002: Finding Friends in Friendster

One of the earliest social networks founded is Friendster. It is established in California by computer programmers Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin. At that time, Friendster is the talk of the town, its creator being the cover, or at least feature, of numerous publications as well as by late-night talk shows.

Sidenote – Everything Is Impermanent. Although it savored its peak, though, it had to go through rough times, especially when strong rivals like MySpace came around. In May 2011 Friendster says goodbuy to social networking, and turns into a gaming site.

2003: MySpace and Skype Get on a High

In 2003 Niklas Zennström from Sweden and Janus Friis from Denmark create Skype, an application that allows users to make phone calls and chats via internet. For internet entrepreneurs it's another piece in the puzzle of location independent businesses. Skype will later be sold to eBay, and finally, in 2011, to Microsoft.

With social networks being a hit, MySpace came up strong after it is launched in 2003. In fact, it is named the most popular social network in the US in 2006 to 2008. Of course, that is until it got beaten by Facebook. Let's see what Justing Timberlake will do about that.

2004: Facebook, Flickr, and World of Warcraft

Facebook is one, if not the most, popular social network today.

Flickr is the most popular photo-sharing site today.

World f Warcraft or WoW is the the most popular multiplayer online role-playing game of all time. For me it's most of all an adorable internet business model.

Now, what do these 3 have in common? They are all established in the year 2004! Indeed, it is a year where the internet bears witness to sites and games that turn into legends.

2005: Rise of YouTube and Web 2.0

If there are just two internet things 2005 came to know of, it will probably be YouTube and Web 2.0.

For one, YouTube was, is, and probably will be the most popular video-sharing site. In 2011 it is the third most popular web site in the world, according to Alexa.

In 2005, Tim O’Reilly also popularizes the term “Web 2.0.” It was actually first used in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci. Web 2.0 is the shift from web site publishers pushing content to their web sites, and thus to users, to users pushing their own 'user generated content' to the web site.

Users now have the power to post their own articles and comments, publish their photos and videos, share their interests, and the like.

2008: Twitter Gets Tweeting

Today, people like things fast and instant. That is probably why fast food chains flourish. Perhaps it is also the reason why, when Twitter is introduced in this year, people hold on to it with much ardour. After all, who does not have just a few seconds to type their thoughts and share them with the world?

2007: Web Goes Mobile with Apple iPhone

The internet started on the computer, but it is definitely not where it will end. In 2007, Apple unveiled the iPhone, a device that does not only allow users to send SMS and capture photos and videos but also access the internet. It's the first mobile that makes browsing web sites somewhat comfortable. Without doubt, the iPhone is the frontrunner of the mobile World Wide Web.

For marketers and businesses the mobile web means having to expand their efforts, knowledge and investments on more platforms than ever before.

2008: Google Creates Android

Apple got iPhone, so what is Google to do? Having such a competitive spirit, Google came up with Android, a software stack for mobile devices. Android covers not only the operating system but also the middleware and key applications. Talking about creating an all-in-one system.

2009: Cloud Computing Soar to Popularity

Cloud computing is all about saving your files and installing your applications on web servers, instead using a local PC. Once this is accompliched, files and software can be accessed from any computer all over the world – as long as internet is available.

Cloud computing is specifically useful to internet business owners who are on the go, those who love to travel, and those who simply feel more secured with their files and other data in a separate web space. It's also great for backups.

2010: Apple's iPad takes the world by storm

Considering the still not so exciting web experience on mobile phones, and the relatively small market share of netbooks, the iPad is what finally frees the internet from the PC. Within a very short time, more people will access the internet from mobile and tablet devices than from traditional PCs.

Besides offering new platforms for browsing the internet, mobile hardware also introduces the use of apps (including the years before 2010), bringing the web and 'software applications' (how old people like me tend to call apps) closer together.

2011: Google+ Starts a Buzz

So, what is the latest in the World Wide Web today? Why, Google+, of course! Google+ is just launched on June 28, but it already acquired more than 20 million members. That is saying something considering it works on an invitation-only system. There is really no doubt that Google+ is the fastest growing social network ever. If it is able to continue its rapid growth once its beta phase is over, who knows just how much popularity and influence will it get? That will definitely be something to look forward to!

There are so many things that happened within the 20 years of the World Wide Web’s life that I probably just scratched the surface with this news. Nevertheless, it is great to take a moment, see how far we have come and dream of how far we will be able to reach tomorrow!

Basically, what happens is that the news feed filter, which categorizes your friends' or fans' posts, is removed. This means whenever you post something, all your friends or fans will immediately see it, if they are logged in at that specific time.

With appealing posts and irresistible offers, this can greatly help in our marketing campaigns. And if your fans or friends "like" your posts, this can mean instant viral boost. Of course, you will still have control over who gets to see your posts and don't. That is the control Facebook is now offering to developers, business owners, and common users.

Facebook News Feed Floodgates Are Finally Opened!

Although it might seem that users are able to see feeds in real time—exactly after they are posted—the opposite is actually true. That is to say, up until now Facebook actually controls what feeds users are able to see: the feeds you get are from friends who are active users or those you constantly communicate with. That means if a relative or a close friend does not post often on their account, it will be likely that when they do post, it will be buried beneath all the posts of those who log on to their Facebook regularly.

Now, this is something that is disadvantageous not only to common users but particularly to business owners—to internet business owners like us.

Why?

First off, Facebook is meant to be a marketing platform for developers and businessmen. Now, with millions of us competing on this popular platform, getting recognition is tough. With the Facebook administration filtering what users see and don’t, our chances of getting more attention are further diminished.

Second, internet businesses don’t just use Facebook for marketing but also for research. To know what our target customers really want to have, what changes they want to see, and what we can offer to guarantee sales—that is one of our primary goals in starting a Facebook account. Sure, there is Facebook Insight, and yes, we might be able to track leads with our web links. However, those alone can’t provide us with concrete information. Only the posts, opinions, and activities of our target customers can really give us easily actionable data.

Last, without enough data, we can’t guarantee that our new marketing plans will exceed or at least reach our expectation. While it is common for business experiments and first launches to deliver mediocre results, it definitely pays to gain as much market data as possible for our results to continuously improve.

That is why the former stance of Facebook in filtering news feeds is highly unfavorable.

Fortunately, Facebook now understands that users, especially developers and businesses, need more freedom with regard to what feeds they get, what they don’t, and what they want others to see; Facebook finally understands that while letting go of valuable content might become a weakness, it is also the only real way for this social network to continuously grow and, perhaps, beat continuously rising competitors like Google+.

Internet Businesses Taking Advantage of the Revamped News Feeds

Although I keep saying that this big step Facebook is taking will be of benefit to all type of users, there is no denying that developers and internet businesses will be the ones to get the most out of this change.

Basically, this revamped news feeds answer the three problems I earlier noted.

• First, it allows us to stand out in our target customers’ news feeds, once they “liked” our page or accepted our friend request, if you are using a personal account. When we post something, they will instantly be notified on their home pages.
• Next, we will gain instant access on their activities. We will effortlessly discover what activities they like to do, what things they love to have, what apps they often use, what games they will willingly recommend, and so on. This new wealth of information may be a little unorganized in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, it will beat any simple statistics tool out there on the market.
• Last, with the information we are able to gain, it will be easier to create marketing plans and products that the market will definitely grab. There is no more trying in the dark; with enough data directly acquired from our target consumers, production costs will be reduced and revenues can increase more rapidly.

With this big change on the news feeds, Facebook might just regain the spotlight that Google+ is trying to steal away.

Another good use of YouTube is to make live announcements. This is not for everyone, but if you decide to use it, it has the potential to lend a significant amount of credibility to your business.

Now, before you actually start creating the video, whipping out the webcam and getting to work, you must first spend some time planning out how your video will look. What do you want to communicate and how do you want to organize your message? These are important things to ask and answer before delivering a scatterbrained or confusing video message. You do not necessarily need to create a script; you just need to prepare an outline, which you can easily look at while filming.

It's just a quote from this video that I found. Actually, I never liked Facebook at all. That's why I'm promoting Google+ so much.

If you're a happy Facebook user, click below and take a look:

Adobe Edge is a tool for creating website animations. It allows you to add rich motion designs to any of your HTML projects, regardless if it’s a website, desktop program, or mobile app. With Edge’s current tools and capabilities, you can effortlessly create new compositions, import popular graphic files like JPG, PNG, and GIF, and give life to existing HTML pages without messing up their underlying code.

Before anything else, I want to point out that I have never really favored Adobe Flash. Yes, it is flashy (pun intended), but it comes with several flaws, namely:

• Bad for search engine optimization.
• Horrible usability on standalone Flash web sites.
• Breaks default browser behaviors (like the back button).
• Renders invisible on an increasing number of machines, for example Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

In fact, I recommend to clients that they stay away from Flash as much as possible, and I have been doing so for years, knowing that this technology doesn’t have a bright future.

The Apple Adobe War

Apple Inc. has been in a close relationship with Adobe Systems before. However, as time passed by, a rift formed between the two.

Apple continuously motioned Adobe to develop Flash and fix its internal problems that result to Mac crashing and apps not being compatible with Apple’s mobile platforms; as a cross-platform tool, these issues are definitely unacceptable. The problem was: Adobe had been too slow in its actions.

This Apple-Adobe problem worsened and ended up in an explosive issue:

Apple completely banned Flash from iPhones, iPods, and iPads.

Apple’s top bosses have been relatively calm and tight-lipped about it, but with Adobe Systems seemingly insinuating that Apple is on the losing end, Apple simply couldn't let it slip. Finally, on April 2010, Apple’s Steve Jobs released a controversial statement called "Thoughts on Flash."

This statement pointed out not only the problems Apple Inc. is encountering with Flash but also listed reasons why people should generally stay away from Adobe Flash—the statement that has indubitably mapped the downfall of Flash.

With Edge, though, Adobe Systems seems to be trying to convince critics, myself included, that it is still the leading multimedia software provider. Adobe Edge is based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—Adobe’s answer to the new demands of the market and the continuous complaints against the poor performance of Flash. With this new product, Adobe Systems reaches out to markets that it can’t otherwise touch into with Flash.

Intended to be added to the Creative Suite Package, Adobe Edge features a simple drag-and-drop interface guided by a timeline. You simply drag your objects around and make your settings, and Edge transforms everything into professional HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

As Edge uses CSS controlled by JavaScript, it offers a smooth text and graphics transitions.

As of this writing, Adobe Edge is in its beta phase. That is why Adobe is still polishing its to-do lists, aiming to allow incorporation of videos and audios alongside the graphics formats they currently handle. Nonetheless, even at its current stage, Adobe Edge already offers a great alternative for web content design. Aside from the fact that it integrates with Dreamweaver, Edge also adopts WebKit, the layout engine used by popular browsers and top corporations such as Apple Inc., Google, Amazon, and Nokia.

There is no doubt that Flash is starting to get thrown over. Nevertheless, with Edge, Adobe Systems hopes to keep their leading position and recognition among web and mobile users alike.

Adobe Edge: The Reason behind Its Creation

Adobe Systems Incorporated has always been one of the leading computer software companies. Founded in 1982, it has since grown into a global provider of computer software, with products ranging from desktop publishing, video editing and special effects software, to web design programs.

When it comes to web design programs, Adobe is most popular for Flash. Adobe added Flash to its portfolio (together with Dreamweaver) when it purchased the orignial Flash developer Macromedia Inc. back in 2005, thereby killing its own web design software ‘GoLive.’

Adobe Flash is actually a multimedia program that allows web masters to include video, animation, and other forms of interactivity on their web pages. With a lot of users, websites, and even browsers relying on Flash to run applications, allow video streaming, and leveling differences between browsers, there is no doubt why Adobe Flash has hold the position of top web content plugin for years. That is, until numerous issues, especially usability and security problems, gave it a bad reputation and alternatives came up.

So, why did Adobe Systems create Edge? If you are still wondering, here is the straightforward answer: because now there is HTML5 and CSS3!

The most important reason why Adobe Systems started to change ship and created Edge is the fact that HTML5, the successor of the HTML4 standard, has created a solid foundation with regard to structuring and presentation of content on the Internet.

With HTML5 it is possible to play audio and video without using any plugins, like the Flash plugin. Playing video has been the major reason for millions of web sites to use Flash. Now even YouTube is offering HTML5 rendered video.

With CSS3 and JavaScript, it is now possible to animate graphics and text, also without need of any plugin.

With these new alternatives for multimedia playback and animation, there is little need for resource hungry workarounds like Flash.

Why You Should Not Opt for Flash

Among the points raised by Steve Jobs, the most notable are probably that Flash doesn’t provide sufficient security and that it only prohibits developers from continuously advancing.

Security. Flash has raised concern among developers and users due to its poor performance. Not only does it make web pages load slower; it also has a tendency to crash, leaving users no choice but start working again on online projects they are handling at the time it crashes from the beginning—a big inconvenience that Adobe has yet to create an effective, permanent solution for.

Development. Flash is meant to help developers deliver top-of-the-line apps for consumers by being a cross-platform development tool. However, Adobe Flash is developing relatively slow, putting up a strict limit to which platforms certain apps can be viewed—something that opposes its supposed objectives.

The above two points are strong enough reasons for users to deviate away from Flash.

After several years, Adobe Systems fully felt the impact, prompting it to finally create an HTML-based program in the form of Adobe Edge. Contrary to Flash, Adobe Edge embraces open standards yet retains qualities like clean, crisp graphics and movements that made Flash a phenomenon before.

Future of Adobe Edge

Right now, a lot of speculations are budding around Adobe Edge. While it proves that Adobe Systems is ready to move forward and adapt to the demand for open systems, the fact that there are already several players, such as Sencha animator, that have already established tools for CSS-based animation, might make it hard for Edge to gain the recognition it aims for.

But then again, Adobe has a knack for getting attention and ahead of competition, so we can only just wait and see how Edge will be welcomed by the community.

You can downlaod the beta version of Adobe Edge here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge

Another thing you may want to consider doing to get more traffic to your site is adding a “Tweet This” and “Post This to my Facebook account” button to your blog posts. Facebook and Twitter are very popular media people use to share ideas, photos, and videos; if your post is interesting, this will become your number one marketing tool

These buttons will make it easier for visitors to promote your site to their friends and family members, which will ultimately benefit you.

As we already know, Internet users can be a very, very irritable and impatient bunch. That is exactly the reason why webmasters like us aim to optimize our site’s performance by limiting content and use of graphics. But, you see, who doesn’t want to add nice images, creative Flash graphics, and videos to their websites? They are like icing on the cake that makes our web pages lively. The only problem is that with too many of those, our websites load slower than a garden snail—something that will turn off potential customers.

Fortunately, today, Google launched yet another part of Page Speed: Page Speed Service.

Page Speed is a project started by Google two years ago. However, until early this year, Page Speed is only available as an extension and an online tool. While these options are useful by themselves, they require time and some learning curve—some things that may perhaps peeve web developers.

Page Speed is a notable project as it promises improvements of 25-60% in loading time. With such benefit, you will not only guarantee your customers’ satisfaction, but you can rest assured that you can continuously engage them as well as be able to reduce bandwidth and hosting fees.

Now, you’re probably already asking: how much will it cost me?

There is no doubt that Google will be asking a fee for using this service once it is finalized. In fact, Google already allude to the fact that the service will be offered at a competitive price in the future. Nonetheless, for now, we can enjoy this service for free as it is currently an open source project that welcomes ideas for further development. If you are planning to use or have already tried it and think there are still ways to enhance it, you can simply join the discussion or offer your thoughts in the Page Speed page in Google Code.

Page Speed Arsenal

Although Page Speed is intended mostly to help your website load faster, it actually serves a lot of other purposes. For one, it assists you in further optimizing your website’s content. This is valuable since the suggestions come directly from the search engine we are all targeting to get first page ranking from.

Even better, Page Speed provides you with several options, each with benefits that will suit your role or preference.

First of all, you can get the browser extension. This will evaluate your site’s current performance, taking into account your web server’s configuration and front-end code. After the analysis, it provides you with suggestions on how to improve them. Sadly, though, this extension is currently offered only to Chrome and Firefox.

If you are hesitant to download the extension or are using a different browser, Page Speed Online may be your best bet. Not only will it help you analyze your website, but it can even look into the performance of your mobile site, specifically how it looks on Smartphones.

If you want your site to be automatically rewritten and optimized, perhaps mod_pagespeed Apache can useful. This module uses different filters to optimize JavaScript, HTML, and CSS stylesheets. You have to remember, though, that is effective only for web pages using Apache HTTP Server. If you are not using it, it is best to look at the options.

Then there is the latest addition to the family: Page Speed Service. Page Speed Service is Google’s “automatic” answer for web masters who want to get their web pages loading faster without breaking a sweat. To start using this service, you only need to fill out the web form here.

Unique or Not

Right now, Google Page Speed is creating a buzz because of its seemingly unique features. Not to mention it is launched by a renowned company. However, we are yet to find out whether it delivers real results and if it does more than already existing services like Amazon’s CloudFront, which also relies on a content distribution network (CDN) to help its clients.

Source:

Page Speed Service Launch

Page Speed in Google Code

These seem to be the issues that pushed Google administrators to change Google Places’s content and formatting and present a revamped Google Places last Thursday afternoon.

If you visited Google Places on July 22, you have probably already noticed the difference—third-party reviews are completely removed. This means that Google Place pages, which used to show snippet reviews from sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, are now a lot cleaner in the sense that they hold a lot less information.

Overall ratings are now based only on a few reviews and ratings left by Google users. Although they provide insight, Google Places pages now seemed to be stripped of its former value. Considering it’s supposed to be users’ one-stop-shop for information, the move seems to be proving the opposite.

It’s in line, of course, with my prediction that Google will rely more and more on its own content, and significantly reduce references to other people’s content. As odd as it sounds – it will even happen on search results pages!

Organizations are apparently requesting followers to leave reviews as well to reestablish their now relatively empty pages. This seems to be one of the contracting issues about the Google Places change. That is, while some think that they will get less exposure since Google Places usually rank high in search engine results pages, others think that the change is providing smaller and newer establishments to get a head start.

Google Places now also put more emphasis on encouraging visitors to give reviews. Whereas the “Write a Review” prompt is shown as mere link before, it now stands out in a big red box that somehow screams “Review, please!” However, it must be noted that for users to leave a review, they must first log in using their Gmail accounts.

The Reason behind the Move

Now, you’re probably wondering: why exactly did Google Places have to take a drastic step? Aside from the fact that Google has been getting a lot of complaints from business owners saying that they’re getting nothing from Google Places, as surmised in the first few sentences of this news article, Google is also trying to avoid hitting the wrong nerve.

A month ago, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started a stricter anti-trust investigation of Google and its web advertising dominance. FTC is an independent agency in the US that aims to promote consumer protection, both offline and online, and its tasks include investigating issues raised by reports from consumers and businesses—that’s why the change.

With the European Commission still hot on its heels after complaints from Foundem, a European business, Google is probably hoping not to dig its own grave. So while a lot of users have already expressed disapproval, Google Places is firm on its stance.

Some Hopes for the Future

It’s obvious that most users are skeptical of the change in Google Places. Nevertheless, there are some that see the brighter side. For one, some speculate that this can be the start of a good connection between Google Places and Google+ wherein users can easily leave reviews or find establishments faster than through regular search engine queries.

How about you? What do you think will this change in Google Places bring?

Sources:

Google Places Blog

Google Places News on CNet

Google under EU Investigation: CNet News

With social buttons you can usually do 1 of 3 things:

1. You can share something you find interesting with your followers. When you share, it will show up in your stream or on your wall. The ‘Tweet’ button works like this.

2. You can give your vote for a piece of web content. The Facebook ‘like’ button or Google’s ‘+1′ button work like this.

3. You can invite people to visit your profile and follow you. Think of  ‘Follow Me’ buttons for Twitter.

For Google+ so far we have seen the +1 Button. You can use it to mark some web content as worthy. When you put it on your own site, your readers can add their vote to your posts. That’s good for your reputation, but it doesn’t actually connect anyone to your social profile at Google+.

What’s missing is a button to invite people to follow you and your Google+ profile.

Earlier this evening April McGowan gave me the idea (thanks April!), so I asked my graphics guy Andy to create a set of buttons. There’s no fancy programming, it’s just images. You can download them, add them to your site, and link them to your Google+ profile.

Either call it ‘Follow Me At Google+’, or call it ‘Add Me To Your Circles.’

Here’s what the buttons look like. You can download any button by right-clicking and choosing ‘Save as.’ Or you can download the zipped set of all Google+ follow buttons.

Facebook has, for years, enjoyed monopoly over the social networking market. MySpace is continuously plummeting, and smaller networks like Orkut and Hi5 have yet to gain popularity and appeal as strong as Facebook. With such power, Facebook implemented a lot of changes—some excellent, some good, and some seemingly bad. Although Facebook users enjoyed and endured the changes, with a new player out to steal the scene, it seems that the tides are starting to turn.

Last June 28, Google+ is finally launched. With a year spent in its making, Google+ promises more control, more targeted search, and more privacy for users. While Facebook allows users to control who can view their photos, videos, and the like, the latest annual report from ForeSee Results indicates that users are finding greener grass on Google+; in other words, Facebook is now becoming just a second option. There are a lot of reasons why users are now thinking that Google+ will provide them with better services, but probably one of the biggest factors is that it currently offers a more private and personal network.

ForeSee Results further noted that Facebook is currently at the bottom 6% of the 2011 American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). ACSI is a renowned and respected economic indicator established in 1994 that, as the name implies, measures the satisfaction of American consumers with regards to goods and services.  Annually interviewing 80,000 Americans, it has easily become a reliable source for academic researchers, market analysts, corporations, investors, and government agencies–as well as individuals who wants to constantly be at the top of their games like us.

Now, with Facebook being left behind by its competitors as proven by ACSI, specialists speculated a big impact on how Google+ will be welcomed, and indeed, it turned out that a big space was left for Google+ to penetrate and leave a strong impression.

Google+ Launch and Growth

Since its launch, Google+ has experienced a boom in its member base. Within 10 days, it has reached 2 million members. By July 18, it has reached 18 million members, and on July 21, barely 3 weeks after its launch, its member count has already reached 25 million. Although this number is not yet on the official releases and is simply insider information as cited on SFGate, the steady increase in member count and activities as well as the constant flow of feedbacks is proving to be a good sign.

As of this writing, Google+ is still in beta mode and has currently restricted access even to those who already received invitations (Google+ works on an invitation-only access). This is because it has already exceeded its capacity—indeed a sign of the successful launch of Google+.

Google+ Features

Critics are describing Google+ as a Facebook-style Google network. However, Google+ has some unique features that definitely make it stand out. Three of its notable features are Circles, Hangouts, and Sparks. What are these features for?

• Circles- this groups your contacts (e.g., family, co-workers, etc.) and allows you to share items with them through various Google products, services, and platforms.
• Hangouts- this features lets you have a group video chat (with 10 maximum participants). Only people who you invite or posses the unique Hangout URL can join.
• Sparks- Sparks make searching for topics you’re interested in a lot easier.

Google+ is still in its baby stage right now, but it certainly has a big potential to succeed. With its current statistics and its continuously growing popularity, Google+ might just outshine Facebook faster than we might think possible, just like how Facebook has easily grabbed the spotlight from MySpace before.

Sources:

Google+

ForeSee Views on Google+

ForeSee and ACSI 2011 Report

Paul Allen on Google+

SFGate Google+ Report

As I mentioned before, it’s always a good idea to try to get your customers and site visitors to follow you on Facebook and Twitter. However, those are not the only websites you can get a lot traffic from. It is also worthy to try to get your customers to help you promote your internet business through sites like Digg and Reddit. These are the top 2 social bookmarking/news-sharing sites, taking pride in gaining millions of daily visitors

For your customers to easily promote your business, you have to create buttons. This buttons have to be posted on your blog posts and on your site pages to allows visitors to “Digg It” or “Vote Up.” The more diggs and votes you get, the higher your posts will rank on the respective social bookmarking sites. The higher the rank you get, the higher your chances of getting massive web traffic as well.

It’s the same like adding a Facebook share button or a twitter button to your site. A Google +1 button allows people to share your website with the social circles on Google+.

It comes in 4 different sizes: small, medium, standard, and tall.

In this post I’m giving you the simple code to copy and paste to have your own Google +1 button on your site within minutes.

Here’s how to get the +1 button for your web site, it’s easy to do. You need only 2 things:

1. In your web page’s source code you need to link to some Google JavaScript code that will integrate the button’s features into your site. That’s just 1 line of code, and it’s the same for all pages and for all button variations. It looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

Where to put it?

Technically correct you could put it into the head section of your page, for example right before the closing head tag.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script></head>

Or you could put it close to the end, right before the closing body tag.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

2. Next you need to put the actual button into your web page. You can chose to use a standard button without adding any properties. The basic code is unbelievably short:<g:plusone></g:plusone>Yes, that’s all you need to make the +1 button show up anywhere in your page

Add a +1 button, the quick & dirty way.

By ‘quick & dirty’ I mean: not worrying where to put the JavaScript. Just put it all together with the button itself.

In your web site’s source code find the spot where you want the button to show. Then enter the following code into your site.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script><g:plusone></g:plusone>

It will look like this:

How to customize your Google +1 button

If you want more control, you can chose one of the 4 sizes shown above, and you can chose NOT to display the share count. Here’s the code ready to copy and paste:

Small button with count:
<g:plusone size="small"></g:plusone>

Medium button with count:
<g:plusone size="medium"></g:plusone>

Standard button with count:
<g:plusone size="standard"></g:plusone>

Tall button with count (it’s not available without):
<g:plusone size="tall"></g:plusone>

Small button without count:
<g:plusone size="small" count="false"></g:plusone>

Medium button without count:
<g:plusone size="medium" count="false"></g:plusone>

Standard button without count:
<g:plusone size="standard" count="false"></g:plusone>

In this post I wanted to give you a super fast and easy way to get the +1 button for your site, and I’m sure it’s enough for 95% of all web masters. For the geeks: besides ‘size’ and ‘count’ there are more parameters you can use. The complete documentation for the button can be found here:

http://code.google.com/apis/+1button

By the way: all those buttons above are working, feel free to click and share this post.

If you have not done it yet, then you are getting left out. It is best to start using Twitter to promote recent updates about your website. You can give links to articles or reviews you have made, new products you have to offer, or even the maintenance schedule.

In this case, you don’t have to say anything blatantly commercial. Instead, you can simply point out that your site has been updated and mention that followers should check it out and let you know what they think.

Once you’ve completed your iPhone application, the next thing to do is to modify it. By doing this, you can easily distribute your application for use on other platforms such as Palm OS, Windows, and Android.

In many cases, programs that allow you to create applications uses a drag-and-drop interface. This lets you create versions of the app for multiple platforms. In this case, the process will be relatively simple; you just have to follow the instructions laid out in the program.

If this is not the case for you, then you may want to consider hiring a programmer to make the adjustments. With a professional programmer, you might have to spend some more time and money. Nevertheless, the resulting Smartphone app will be feature-packed and easy to use. If you are unsure where to find a good programmer, you can start by looking at freelance sites such as Elance.com.

As I’ve mentioned before, some of the tips we will cover are broadly applicable while others are not.

It may be best to take some time to read the process before deciding whether or not this is beneficial to your and your business.

The idea here is to create an iPhone application that showcases your web 2.0 campaigns. For instance, you can create an iPhone app that allows people who download it to:

• Follow your blog RSS feed
• See your tweets
• View your Facebook update status.
• Have a calendar for your internet business that provides product, sales, and coupon updates.

It’s important to note that you don’t need any programming experience in order to create a great iPhone app. You can do it using a program such as the following: http://www.taplynx.com/.

One recent trend in this web 2.0 site is to create “re-tweeting” contests. The idea behind these is both simple and brilliant. If you can do this properly, you can rest assured that your Twitter account will get a tidal wave of new followers.

Creating a “re-tweeting” contest is very easy. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Start by coming up with a sufficiently desirable contest prize. After all, if you are not willing to give good prizes, you won’t be able to convince anyone to join. Some prizes you might want to offer are: $150, free products, or a gift card.
2. Once you have decided on the prizes, then you can already announce the contest. You have to discuss the details of your contest. You have to say when it will happen and how the winner will be chosen. Ideally, you can give prizes for free via a raffle. There is a catch here, however; in order to enter the raffle, a person must a) be a follower and b) must re-tweet your contest announcement.
3. Hold the contest on the scheduled time and date. Tweet reminders every day, for the last 4 days before your contest. Once the day and time arrive, start drawing raffles and discussing prizes with the entrants.

The idea behind this, as I’ve said, is simple: each entrant in your contest will re-tweet to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of followers. The followers of your followers will see the re-tweet, become your follower and then re-tweet to others. This is a viral strategy that allows you to gain not only more followers but a lot more potential customers.

As a rule of thumb, it is always a good idea to cross-promote your web 2.0 marketing campaigns. Let us use the example above. Say, you have a Facebook and Twitter account. Every now and then, you can post a link of your Facebook account on your Twitter. You can also publish posts about your Twitter account on Facebook.

Doing this will give various benefits. Some of them are:

• Increases exposure in both campaigns
• Increases your chances of getting sales from both campaigns
• Increases your customer engagement

Frequently, businesses and organizations will leave their “info” or “wall” pages as the default arrival page. However, one recent trend is to make a “splash” page as your default page.

Splash pages are basically initial pages wherein info about the website (in this case, your Facebook fan page) is included. Splash pages may include a lot of things like

• Coupons
• News
• Sales information
• Product inventory information
• Upcoming events
• Awards, if any

Creating splash pages is beneficial if you want to easily attract fans. After all, who can resist a page that offers not only great information but discounts to products they are longing to have? Try creating splash pages for your Facebook fan page today, and start seeing the difference.

Article marketing is a great, free way to bring targeted traffic back to your product page, as relevant articles can entice people who are interested in the relevant topic back to your product page to sign up to your list and purchase your product.

However, there are a few downsides to article marketing:

• You need to write high-quality articles.
• High-quality articles take time to write.
• You need many high-quality articles to spread across the Internet in order to effectively utilize article marketing.

The main problem is that you have to put in a lot of time and effort in order to make article marketing a profitable promotional effort for your business.

The more time you use to make this method effective, the less time you have to work on other aspects of your business.  Conversely, you can’t just create poor articles to take advantage of the benefits of article marketing, so what do you do? Here’s your solution:

Free Article Rewriter Tool Released

I’ve added a new tool to Internet Business Mastermind that should enable you to produce high-quality articles in a shorter amount of time.  This tool is called the “Free Article Rewriter,” and you can find it here:

http://internetbusinessmastermind.com/free-article-rewriter

How does it work, you ask?

First, you need to input an article that you’ve written or had written for you in the past into the provided space, add your email address so that the entire rewritten article can be sent to your inbox, and press the “Submit” button

Second, your sentences will be broken up so that you can rewrite them sentence per sentence.  Afterwards, you’ll hit the “Submit” button.

Third, you will see the entire rewritten article made up of the rewritten sentences that you wrote.  This rewritten article will also be in your inbox at the email address you provided in the first step.

That’s all there is to it!

Now, you might be thinking, “Why do I need to rewrite each sentence?  Isn’t the point of using shortcuts and software programs to prevent me from having to rewrite my articles?”

It’s true that it will take a little bit of time to rewrite each sentence, but the completed rewritten article will flow much, much better than articles you will receive by inputting them into an article-spinning software program.  Those programs may be able to input synonyms into the articles more quickly than you can rewrite each sentence, but too often, the articles read awkwardly, not leading to a smooth reading.

Let’s face it – if the article doesn’t read smoothly, people won’t bother reading it.  And if people won’t bother reading it, then they won’t find the link to your product page, won’t sign up to your opt-in list, and won’t purchase your product offer, thereby making the whole exercise of creating the rewritten article useless in the first place.

Therefore, doesn’t it make more sense to take the time to rewrite each sentence as is needed in the “Free Article Rewriter” to create rewritten articles that are enticing enough to draw your prospects in so that they will click the link to your product page and enter your sales funnel.

Once you go through the process of the “Free Article Rewriter,” you’ll find that rewriting one sentence at a time is much easier and goes much quicker than trying to rewrite by looking at the whole article while rewriting it.  Therefore, you’ll still save more time than you would if you tried to rewrite your article without utilizing the “Article Rewriter.”

Best of all, the “Free Article Rewriter” is free and ready for you to use, so head on over to the following link and utilize it now:

http://internetbusinessmastermind.com/free-article-rewriter

P.S. Feel free to leave your comments and feedback at the Web page above – we are continuously working to improve the “Article Rewriter,” so all relevant comments and feedback are welcome.

Facebook fan pages allow you to create a forum section. In this forum, you can create threads where you can better interact with your business fans.

You can discuss your old and new products. You can answer common questions your customers have relating to your offers. With every post, you can provide a link to specific parts of your website where they can get more information.

You can easily create forum threads by adjusting the settings to the “discussion” tab on your Facebook fan page.

This is a feature of Facebook fan pages that is most underutilized. Today, forums are a hit as they allow members to share their opinion freely; this is something you must observe on your discussion page. Do not just allow your members to reply on threads you yourself have created. Rather, encourage them to start their own threads and provide your own thoughts.

If you are able to fully use this feature, you can gain a lot of benefits, some of which are as follow:

• Ideas about new products
• Solutions for problems existing customers are having
• Ways to develop your marketing strategy, products, prices, etc. to better appeal to your target audience

The discussion forum on your Facebook fan can be very handy. Try using it more, and you will soon see how it ca help you and your business reach success faster.

If you don’t know anything about creating applications, don’t worry;  we will discuss the basics of Facebook app creation today.

While you might be eager to create a Facebook app, keep in mind that you don’t actually have to program the application yourself. Rather, you can simply work through the Facebook app steps we will share with you.

Facebook App Creation

One: Create a Facebook app draft. Before anything else, there are several questions you need to answer. These questions will determine what kind of application you will create. These questions are:

• What is the purpose of your application?
• How do you want your fans to interact with it?
• Do you want them to play an interactive game?
• Do you want it to serve some other purpose?

Two: Review your plan. If you leave your Facebook app plan and return to review it after a day or two, you will find that there are things you will want to change, things you want to add, and things you simply want to polish. Go through your plan thoroughly, so that someone who knows nothing about your project can understand it.

Three: Post your product on Elance. As mentioned earlier, you do not exactly need to be the one creating the Facebook app. Once your Facebook app plan is complete, you can simply post it on freelance sites like Elance and allow programmers to bid on it. Provide some time to gather bidders, and carefully consider offers that are at or below your budget. Visit the bidders’ portfolio and settle on the one who has the greatest examples.

If you work through this process, you should be able to get a good Facebook app at a reasonable price. From there, it will be up to you to promote it not only through Facebook but through your blog and website as well. You can even write an article and press release about it, if you like.

The success of your product launch is crucial to your achieving business success. With the help of social networks like Facebook, you can easily reach out to hundreds or thousands of people with a few clicks. By creating a Facebook event, you can easily tell people about your product launch’s itinerary. It’s important that you spell out exactly what it means to participate in the launch event, so you will have to give specific details. Aside from the date and time, you can also describe what the launch is all about. For instance, you might explain that on the launch date, you are going to hold a variety of contests and award prizes, ranging from cash awards to coupons for products.

It is also vital to remind fans that they must confirm if they are attending the event in order to be eligible to receive prizes in the contests. This will create a buzz about your event and possibly encourage new people to become fans.

Depending on how many people are attending, you can plan different sets of prizes: smaller ones if you have, say, 50 attendees or less, or bigger prizes when you are able to get hundreds of confirmed attendees. It is also best to post reminders on your Facebook page to ensure that your business fans will not miss your product launch.

Three Things to Get from Your Customers with Your Facebook Fan Page

1. Filled out survey form about your internet business. To adapt to the changing needs of your customers, to triumph over your rivals, and to continuously gain attention, reputation, and sales, it is best to learn what your customers feel. If you can get your fans to fill out surveys about your products (perhaps by offering some incentives), you have a good chance of capturing vital information that you can use to create, market, and fix your products. This is a surefire way to make your road to success smoother.
2. Photos or art related to your internet business. There are not a lot of cases where this can be applied, especially if you are focused on creating and selling virtual products like ebooks. However, if you can collect these, you can rest assured that you will have powerful proofs of your products’ or services’ excellence. To do this, you might want to ask your fans to post pictures of themselves using your products; this can be a very useful way to draw in additional people on Facebook.
3. Testimonials. Regardless what kind of business you have started or what niche you are targeting, testimonials can play a vital role in improving your credibility. For this reason, you should make a concerted effort to get testimonials from your customers through Facebook. You can post a link to a testimonial form or leave an email address where they can freely send their thoughts about the improvements your product or service has brought to their lives.

There are a lot of things you can do with your Facebook fan page. Getting feedbacks is just one good way to use it to enhance customer experience and help yourself achieve success.

http://internetbusinessmastermind.com/free-article-rewriter

I’ll publish a longer post about it Monday, but for now you should be good by just going to the tool, it’s easy to use.

There are a lot of ways through which you can send updates with your Facebook fan page. Some of them are:

• Post on your fan page wall.
• Start a discussion.
• Upload a photo and caption.
• Upload a video.
• Post a link to your blog or website.

What kind of updates or information can you give to your customers and colleagues? Well, you can talk about different aspects of your business such as dates of sales, coupons, and upcoming product launch information. You can even use your Facebook fan page to collect feedbacks and suggestions from your customers. This way, you are not only giving updates but getting ideas for further developing your business.

What if they go out of busines, put your articles way back down the archives, or simply decide to ban your content any time in the future?

It’s crucial to focus your efforts on YOUR OWN WEBSITES that you have complete control over.

An easy way to get your own website is to get a domain and install a blog from WordPress.

Most web hosts offer a 1 click installation that requires just about zero technical knowledge; check the features of your chosen web hosts to determine if they can do this for you or not. With 1 click installation, your WordPress blog will be set up in minutes, and you will be ready to go and post content to your own site. Later, you can promote this new blog through other Web 2.0 properties that you’ve already build.

WordPress takes pride in its vast range of plugins and designs (the latter called “themes” in the WordPress world). You have to take advantage of these themes and plugins to make your new hosted blog relevant, professional, and protected against threats such as spams. Here are some other thoughts that might be of help:

• If you do decide to start a WordPress blog, I personally recommend installing a good SEO plugin for starters. This will allow you to increase your chance of getting search engine love. (More good traffic is equal to more sales, so you can’t miss this.)
• After you do that, it’s a good idea to begin filling your blog with relevant content. You can do this by writing yourself, hiring a ghostwriter to create your blog entries for you, or taking free content from article and ezine directories.

Are you unsure whether WordPress is good enough or not? There’s an easy way to test WordPress before getting your own website. You see, it has a counterpart. WordPress.com , another Web 2.0 site, is a free publishing platform. Hence, it is filled with user generated content. Here, you can sign up and create your own blog using their wordpress platform. Try out different themes, look at how plugins work, test how possible content will look, and analyze whether all of what you see and experience will be good for you and your business.

Here are the direct download links for the 5 B2B social media PDFs, no sign-up required.

B2B Tech Marketing and Social Media

The Infinite Dial 2011: Navigating Digital Platforms

2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Social Media for B2B Marketing

Emerging Trends In B-to-B Social Media Marketing

However, doing the reverse can actually be very beneficial as well. That is to say, you can use Twitter and Facebook to grow your email list.

Can you just imagine it? With Facebook and Twitter, you can reach out to hundreds of thousands of prospects; getting even a mere 5% of those you are able to befriend will already give you a big mailing list. You can then use this list to continuously promote your products and services.

But before we get too excited, let us see how this will work.

First, you need to deal with your marketing campaign and mailing list. To make best use of email marketing, you need an autoresponder. Everything else is just too much work, especially if your list grows over time. This is how autoresponder works:

1. If you don’t already have an autoresponder, get one such as Aweber.
2. Create an email series that includes several product pitches.
3. Begin capturing subscribers.

Once you have setup your autoresponder, you can announce this on Twitter or post a status about it on Faceook. You can’t simply just say “Subscribe to my email course today!” or something similar. Rather, tell your fans and friends (on Facebook) or followers (on Twitter) that you are giving free, useful content through a free subscription. Once they subscribe, you can send the promised to them and start sending pitches and informative emails after.

Firesale

What is a firesale? A firesale means bundling several of your products together and offering them for a price significantly lower than what the products would usually cost.

When it comes to achieving success with a firesale, here is something you must remember: You must set a time limit for your firesale, the shorter the better.

Of course, for a lot of people to participate in your firesale, you’ll have to promote it. Here is where Twitter comes in. Here is what you have to do:

• Let your followers know you’re having  a short-time steep discount.
• Tweet reminders of the firesale each day of the firesale.
• Thank everyone who participated and, if you would like to, ask for feedbacks.

A firesale, if attractive enough, can put quite a few new customers on your list. While the initial firesale may not give you the biggest profits due to low price, you can then continue to market and upsell to your list of customers.

They’ve added a new feature to their ranking algorithm, and it basically says:

If users let Google know they don’t like your site, your ranking will suffer.

Google’s Amit Singhal explained it this way:

“… we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms.”

I don’t know what ‘some high-confidence situations’ are, but at this point it probably means it’s a minor change that will not have too much effect on the overall search results. But, I’m predicting that …

We are going to see a huge shift in how Google rankings are measured.

5 years from now we will have rankings that are LARGELY based on user votes.

A long time smart people have been claiming that it is vital to build high quality sites, because Google wants high quality. But actually that is NOT EXACTLY what Google wants.

It’s clearly Google’s goal to give users what they are looking for, what they like most. Pardon me, that’s not necessarily the same as high quality.

Anyway, Google will work hard to find ways to do this.

• In the past Google counted webmaster votes, using backlinks as a measure for site ranking.
• In the future Google will be counting user votes, be it blocking sites, or referencing them socially in Facebook, Twitter and the like.

=> In the long run the internet users will determine which sites are ranking high, and which sites go down.

It’s harder to figure out for Google, but it’s definitely coming at you!

SEOmoz has researched how URL mentions on Twitter and Facebook seem to influence a site’s ranking already:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

What do you think? Tell me in your comments;

1. Will my prediction come true?
2. Will site owners who play the social game well (despite having crappy sites) win over those who build excellent sites?
3. Or will great content finally be king?

Twitter for Promoting Products

It is quite easy to start promoting and selling products on Twitter. What you just have to do is to gather followers, which would be composed mostly of your customers, prospects, and colleagues. You can then start tweeting.

Naturally, most of your tweets should be quality information about your industry. However, it makes complete sense to use Twitter for selling your products and especially create buzz around product launches.

When you have a new product coming out, you should also tweet frequently to let people know about the upcoming launch. You can tweet reminders every few days and every day, five days before the actual launch. You can also upload twitpics and start re-tweeting contest. There are a lot of things you can do to make sure that Twitter will help you profit with your product.

Of course, there are certain things you have to keep in mind. One thing you must remember is this: Obviously, you should have your Twitter account(s) in place looooooong before your product launch or promotion. Why? Simply because you need to have followers to get your promotion seen. Aside from that, it will also help you if you have already established your online presence and credibility before you start selling with your Twitter account. So, create your account early and start building up your followers.

Also, you must know that this article relates not only to your customers but, especially for newly launching products, to JV partners as well.

When planning a product launch, consider early enough how you can use Tweets to drive customers and JV partners to your related web sites. Don’t make the mistake to mix customer and JV promotions, though; each has its time, and each has its own communication channels.

Now one those web masters was “smart” enough to complain about his site not being indexed in the Google forum. Haha.

Google took the time to actually quote his badly spun content and show him where it came from.

Let me end up with quoting the closing sentence in this thread: “Scraping content from another source without adding value violates our guidelines.”

Real Way to Make Money from Social Networks

A friend of mine built a Twitter following of more than 1 Million followers. One day, I asked him if he was making money from it. Do you want to know what he said? He didn’t really give me an answer. It was something like “going to be soon.” But, how soon is soon?

That’s something I see happening with promotional and web traffic efforts a lot. It seems there is really no goal, and that is why no achievement is being made. Sure, people put work into it, but at the end of the chain, there isn’t really a proper plan for monetization.

What does it mean? Simple. It means you’re just wasting your time and money on something you won’t get anything from: you’re working on something that’s not profitable.

So, what can you do about this? You have several choices:

• One obvious route is to use your social networking accounts (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.–whichever you prefer) to channel traffic to your products and services. You can lead visitors either to your website or to a specific sales page. Of course, for this to succeed, you have to try to make sure that your networking efforts were targeted at the very crowd that is interested in what you have to offer.
• Another way to monetize your traffic is to generate revenue by selling ad space on your site. You can do this directly by selling banner ads, text ads, and other ad space. This is a very lucrative thing once you’re really getting big traffic. How do you use social networks for this? They will be your promotional platforms. You can tweet and post updates about the ad spaces you offer, possible prices, and so on.
• With low or mediocre traffic, you’d better go for a simple pay per click solution, for example put Google AdSense on your site. Once your ads are running, you can start getting traffic from your chosen social networks to your site.

Assuming you’re running a business, whatever you do, there is just one question you need to ask yourself: How will I monetize this business step I took?

If you can’t figure out the answer to this question, then you might want to stop what you are doing for now, reevaluate your position, go over your goals, and then continue once you find a good answer.

How to Get Social Network Members

Before you think about getting thousands or millions of members, you must first aim to get a hundred or more people to join. There are various methods you can employ. Some of the best ways are:

1. Look for members in broad and popular networks like Facebook and MySpace. You can do this by seeking out people who look like good matches for your network and then casually exposing them to the network, so that they can decide whether or not to use it. It will actually be best to persuade your close friends or some acquaintance sharing similar interests to join.
2. Make a “Get More Members” Campaign on Twitter.” TwSince your Twitter marketing campaign will revolve around capturing people who already work in your niche, most of the people who are following you on Twitter will already be good matches for your network.
3. Search for new members on blogs in your network. There will always be people interested in the niche-based social network you have created, and a lot of them will be talking about this interest on their blogs; you just have to find and capture them by commenting on their sites and including a link to your new social network as well as your contact info.
4. Participate in niche forums where your crowd naturally hangs out. Forums are virtual communities where people who share similar interests come together: that is exactly why they are great places to get new members for your social network. Your goal here is simple: you must participate in discussions without blatantly promoting your site. Use the signature and make sure to have a good, catchy line that makes people curious about your new social network. As you build your reputation, start inviting people to become members of your new social network.

Whatever you do, remember that creating and populating a social network is not a trivial task. However, if you decide that it is a good route for your internet business, then make sure you spend the time and resources to make it work.

Do you want to create a social network of your own? You might think it is tough, but nowadays, it is actually a relatively easy task to accomplish. This is made true by the fact that there is now software you can use to make the social network creation smooth and easy.

ABC: Make a Social Network For Me

One software you can use to create your own niche-based social network can be found at www.phpfox.com. It makes creating social networks relatively easy and allows you to do so entirely through a user-friendly control panel. Although there are many products that now allow you to do this, phpfox is one of the best and allows a great deal of customization.

I can’t exactly narrate all the steps for creating a social network with phpfox. However, let me just give you some friendly reminders:

• Before you venture into creating your own social network, it is probably a good idea to spend some time thinking about whether this approach is compatible with your current internet business.
• Carefully consider whether you can come up with a good strategy to monetize the social network you will create in the long run.

Creating a social network can be your very key to success, and with phpfox, there is no doubt that you can build a network in as short as a couple of hours. However, before you go on and create your own, think of the future and decide whether it is really going to be your stepping stone toward fame and fortune.

Monetizing Your Forum

We all take on different businesses and strategies online. Regardless of the choices, however, we all have one thing in common. What is it? We all consider how we can get returns on our investment. There are actually tens of choices available for you, but personally, I would suggest that you adopt one or more of the following three strategies:

1. Use a service like Adsense to place pay-per-click ads on your forum- this is the easiest choice. You simply have to create an account of Google AdSense, have your website verified and embed those ads on your site.
2. Use the forum to announce product launches and to promote sales- if you already have your own line of products, if you are getting a commission from other marketers’ product launches and sales, or so on, you can easily use your forum for spreading an announcement.
3. Use the forum to promote your products through sticky threads- you can use sticky threads as announcement area for your products.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, there are a lot more strategies you can use for monetizing your forums. However, it is best to start with any or a combination of the above options.

Alternatively, you might consider using your forum to address customer service issues and questions about your products. This is a good way to increase customer engagement and to encourage customers to buy new products. If you are spending a good amount of time on your forum, it will even become a great tool for constantly getting feedbacks from your customers; it will allow you to get data for polishing products and creating new ones.

Top Ways to Get Forum Members

Numerous forums are being created every day, and a lot of them begin and end as ghost forums–forums nobody have heard of and forums nobody caresabout. Why? This is because the their owners never take the time to populate them, to ensure that there are hundreds of member who continuously post and participate in discussion.

If you want your forum to be successful, you will have to take the time to populate it with individuals who will engage in lively discussions and who will help you reach more people by promoting it in other platforms like their blogs and social networking accounts.

There are several ways to find hundreds of new members for your newly created  forum. Let us look at some of the best methods:

1. Create threads on the forum about important topics in your niche. Since new visitors will find that the forum is empty, they will be hesitant to post. However, if there is at least one other person posting threads, they may take the time to respond. That said, it is essential for you to create new threads and post about specific topics about your niche. You can  even create another spare account to encourage others to start posting.
2. Pull forum members from blogs and forums. What better places to get new members for your forums than in places where individuals already engage in active discussions? Find blogs and forums where there are members actively posting and solicit them for your forum indirectly. You can do this by frequently posting, giving relevant and quality info, and including a signature with your forum and blog posts that links to your forum.

Once you start getting new members, remember that you will have to keep them engaged if you want to retain them. Otherwise, you will soon find new members leaving your forum one after another. So, as you step up your promotion efforts, remember to simultaneously scale up your forum engagement efforts.

Creating a Forum

Many hosting services now allow you to create a forum with a plugin. If you want to create one, you might want to check your web host to see if it offers a feature that will allow you to do this.

Once you created a forum, you can simply manage the site through the control panel, adding threads, managing sticky notes, and deleting posts as you find necessary.

If you are thinking that it will be rather easy to manage your forum one you have created it, you are mistaken. The process can actually be rather tricky. You must also understand that it is unlikely that your forum will be successful unless you dedicate a significant amount of time to the launch phase and try to acquire as much members as you can. You must also need to keep in mind that you have to continuously encourage people to participate.

Without dedicating sufficient time to your site, it will be hard to get it to go from a “ghost forum,” where no new members join and much less post, to a forum where there is lively activity. What you want is a forum teeming with life; make it one by becoming a good example, posting regularly, answering questions, and so on.

Optimizing Your Use of Disqus

Disqus is a great commenting platform that allows you to build an interactive website and allows both you and your site commentors to simultaneously post updates on Facebook and Twitter. While you might think that Disqus is something solely used for facilitating comments. However, you can actually use Disqus for the following purposes as well:

1. Ask visitors to leave feedback about your site. You can use the feedback you get to adjust your current marketing plan, make changes on your products and services, and so on.

2. Ask visitors to post product ideas. Sometimes, it ‘s hard to get new ideas. When you are feeling stumped, it is best to ask your customers and visitors for ideas. You will not only have new ideas, but you can also rest assured that your new product is something your customers really want to purchase.

3. Ask visitors to post testimonials and product reviews. Testimonials can be very powerful persuasion devices. That said, you have to encourage customers to leave reviews and testimonials which you can attach or use for further promoting your products or service.

There is no doubt that allowing anyone to freely comment is similar to allowing your site to be spammed. However, asking for people to sign up separately just to leave a few words will appear demanding and might discourage customers to share their ideas. That is why using platforms such as Disqus can be very beneficial.

With Disqus, your site followers will feel more comfortable with leaving a comment or two every now and then. Even better, they can share your posts and their comments in their favorite social network. or set them up so that they need to be approved before they are posted. Of course, you still have to look over comments to make sure they are okay or useful. For this, you have to set your comment system to manual approve.

Do you have a Tumblr account? Tumblr is a very popular publishing platform today and is also a good marketing platform you can use. If you have thought or are already using it for marketing, then you have to know how useful comments are as well as how beneficial using third-party commenting systems like Disqus can be.

Tumblr and Disqus

Tumblr is a favorite blogging platform today as it is easy to customize, user-friendly, and allows for sharing just about any type of media. If you are a Tumblr user and are thinking of a great way to encourage your blog followers to comment and repost your posts, then you should consider using Disqus.

How does Disqus work with Tumblr?

Simple. Instead of requiring a Tumblr account for someone to comment, you can just configure your account to use Disqus’s commenting system. With Disqus on, your blog followers  can login and comment using accounts for which they already have profiles.

For instance, if your visitors already have Facebook or Twitter accounts, they can login using their account username and passwords for those sites instead of creating a Tumblr account (if they don’t have one yet). They can then post comments that are linked with their social network identities. The great thing about this is that if they don’t want to be identified, they can opt to post comments as guests.

It’s indubitable that this strategy can help divert more traffic and probably more sales to your website. However, it can actually be more beneficial if you are using your website to lead people to your other Web 2.0 accounts as well.

Getting More Followers in Your Web 2.0 Accounts

In addition to pulling people from your Web 2.0 sites and directing them to your website, you should also think about doing the reverse: taking people who visit your website and getting them to follow you on your Web 2.0. You might be a little hesitant about this step. You might even ask: Aren’t we supposed to lead people to our sales pages to get profits? Why should I do the reverse?

Well, your concern is understandable. However, this reverse approach can actually be very, very profitable. The reason for this is that it increases customer/visitor engagement, which ultimately translates into more contact and then more sales.

One way you can do this is by creating a “Find Us” box. This box is like a badge you can use on your website. Within it, you can put links or icons directing to other accounts you are using for your Web 2.0 marketing campaign such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. With these buttons, your site visitors can find you in social networks or blogging platforms where they are members as well and decide whether or not they want to follow you or become your friend/fan.

Overall, this is a simple strategy that can yield very great benefits. One of the best things about this is that it is entirely hands-off. Once you create the “Find Us” box and put your Web 2.0 account badges on it, there’s no need to do anything else about; you just have to look at how many new friends, followers, or fans you are getting.

How to Attract Site Visitors with RSS Feeds

A lot of people opt to subscribe to RSS feeds because they do not want to miss out whenever their favorite websites are updated. However, you must also know that they choose to get RSS feeds so they won’t need to go to individual sites all together and simply read updates through their RSS readers. This is quite a disadvantage if you are looking to get more web traffic for your site.

Fortunately, there is a way to get followers who rely on RSS feeds to continuously visit your site. What is it? Shortening or truncating your RSS feeds!

Rather than simply allow them to gain all of the information from the reader without re-visiting your site, you should consider shortening your RSS feed. That is to say you will set a certain character limit for your feeds. This way, you will prevent people from reading the entire message through their reader. Instead, they will get hooked by your catchy opening line and end up coming to your site to read the entire post. Of course, for this method to work, you have to make sure that you have very appealing headlines as well as opening sentence(s).

Why RSS?

If you decide to use a service like Tumblr, or if you generally start utilizing blogging platforms, you have to understand how critical it is for you to setup an RSS feed.

Today, a lot of people are engrossed with finding and reading information online. That is exactly the reason why blogs and info products are much sought-after. However, while people love to discover new blogs, you must know that most of them do not visit a blog more than once. Instead, what they do is:

1. They assess the blog.
2. They determine whether the blog provides high-quality content or not.
3. If it does, then they add the blog’s feed to their aggregator.

With that in mind, is absolutely essential to generate an RSS feed for you blog. This way, those who exclusively use readers and are unlikely to follow your blog closely will have an option. By providing RSS feeds, you also gain an advantage over your competition who do not provide feeds.

Using Email List to Get More Twitter Customers

If you began your email marketing campaign using a free email account, say, like Gmail, and then opted to use an autoresponder, you will need to manually copy your contacts from your mail to your autoresponder. Now, if you are going to use your email list to find more customers on Twitter, you will have to follow the same steps. That is to say, you will use Twitter to search for each person by email address.

Every time you find new people, you will request to follow them. Of course, not every one you wish to follow will respond and follow you back. Nevertheless, doing this will help you jump start or expand your Twitter marketing campaign, giving you a significant boost to your reach.

To achieve success with this strategy, however, you must remember to continuously stay focused on developing your list of Twitter followers and ignore all other objectives for the time being. You see, it is good to have a clear strategy. Sure, you can benefit from working on multiple revenue streams at a time.

Also keep in mind that handsome profits will not come to you overnight. Hence, if you cannot sell your products to your followers immediately, you must think that it is okay. You just have to worry about getting them to follow you in the beginning. When you already have a big follower base, you can then focus on trying different Twitter marketing strategies.

Turning Friends to Facebook Fans

While you might think that having Facebook friends is similar to getting business fans, they are actually quite different. For one, with your Facebook fan page, you can create a forum and start various discussion threads with fans. With this, you can easily collect data for product creation and marketing plan adjustment–something you just can’t do with just a personal profile. Hence, it is essential to invite your personal friends to join your Facebook fan page.

Of course, you must first begin on your mailing list. Once customers choose to become your friend on Facebook, you can then suggest that they become a fan of your business. While doing this, however, you must remember not to spam them or be too pushy. Otherwise, they will refuse to join, or worse, they will block you. Also, you must realize that many will decline or ignore your invitation.

It is important for you to take this approach rather than just building a Facebook fan page and silently looking if there are new fans coming every day. By taking this step, you can rest assured that your Facebook marketing campaign will have higher chances of leading you success.

You see, a fan page offers more benefits such as follows:

• A personal Facebook profile limits you to 5,000 friends; a Facebook fan page allows you to have millions of contacts
• A personal profile lets you communicate through wall posts, polls, and private messages; a fan page lets you easily acquire more data through wall posts, polls, and discussion threads

How to Get More Facebook Fans

It is undeniable how beneficial a Facebook fan page can be for you and your business. After all, the more fans you have, the more people you can market to on a recurring basis. Aside from that, with more fans, you can instantly have more fan referrals without doing any additional work. That is to say your fans will help you get more fans.

However, the only problem you will encounter is this: How do you get more Facebook fans?

The answer is rather easy.

A good place to start when it comes to building a fan base is to take your email list from your autoresponder. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. First, you must create a spare Gmail account.
2. Add all of your autoresponder contacts to it.
3. Next, login your Facebook account.
4. Select the option to locate friends using email addresses.
5. When you have done this, use the option to search from an existing contact list (here is where the spare Gmail account you have created will come in handy).
6. Let Facebook quickly determine whether anyone from your original autoresponder list is already a member.
7. When you have found customers using Facebook, start adding them as friends.

Of course, with this approach, it will be crucial to have a good mailing list to begin with. Nevertheless, if you have already acquired some subscribers, the process will be smooth and easy for you.

Getting Facebook Fans

When it comes to using Facebook to promote your internet business, it is almost always a good idea to have both a business/personal profile and a fan page. Doing this gives you a great deal of versatility when it comes to recruiting new fans as well as provide you with options for collecting valuable consumer data.

Now, one problem all marketers encounter, regardless which platform is being used is the fact that it can be difficult to get lots of customers (in this case, Facebook friends and fans). Fortunately, I have an approach that might be easy and beneficial for you to use.

Here is the “Get More Facebook Fans” approach:

1. Locate people who could be potential customers for your business- you can do this by finding your customers (if you have their email addresses) or joining groups and fan pages related to your niche.
2. Use your business/personal profile to add them as a friend- this is purely based on the hope that they will accept.
3. After you’ve added the people in question as friends, you can then use Facebook to suggest that they become a fan of your business. As earlier mentioned, it is best to have both a personal profile and a business fan page. That is why after your prospects accept your friend request, you can start inviting them to join your fan page. Remember, though, that at this stage, a lot may ignore or reject your offer. Nevertheless, some will join and this will add to your fan base.

To make sure that your invitation appears friendly and not spammy, however, remember not to send invites multiple times. For instance, each time you add a friend, do not suggest that they add other people that you know. Also, do not ask them to join the fan page multiple times.

Last.fm

In a nutshell, Last.fm is a form of Internet radio that automatically creates playlists for you, with the help of a program called the “Scrobbler.”

How does this music network work?

After joining the site, you will be able to list your favorite music, either manually or by letting it capture the music that you listen to on iTunes or elsewhere. Every time you do, Last.fm records your choices. Then, it adds them to your profile, which any user may view.

But how will this help your business?

This may sound like a fringe idea, but if you happen to be in the music business or if you are selling “how-to” music products, you can easily find potential customers Last.fm. Not only that but this site will also help you establish a more solid reputation; your customers will recognize you as a real person (and not just some mysterious person trying to hammer products down people’s throats). Aside from those, you can also exchange ideas and music preferences with your customers–a great way to establish customer loyalty and perhaps gather data.

Tumblr Alternatives You Must Consider

• Ping.fm. A very versatile system, Ping.fm allows you to update your various social networking accounts at once. That is to say, if you want to post something on Twitter, but you wish for it to be posted on Facebook and MySpace as well, then you can easily depend on Ping.fm. Compared to regular social networks, Ping.fm is definitely a time-saver worth using, especially if you are a really busy businessman.
• WordPress. If you’re not satisfied with Tumblr’s blog interface, then you might want to consider using something like WordPress. WordPress is a very popular publishing platform today–one you can use for creating simple free blogs or even websites. Not only is this website easy to use, it also offers a lot of options when it comes to themes and plugins; you will surely get satisfied, and, if you spend enough time on creating your blog, you will feel like it is a professional website.

Ways to Get Your Perfect Tumblr Theme

It does not matter if you are leading people from Twitter or your articles toward your Tumblr account. What you always have to remember is that: first impressions last. If you want to make visitors stick around and keep coming back, you must select a clean theme that you can use on your Tumblr blog. Make sure that you create a good impression quickly. Otherwise, you risk losing a potential customer before you’ve had any time to present your pitch.

There are basically two ways through which you can get the perfect Tumblr theme:

• Select one of the available Tumblr themes. Tumblr offers largely clean and professional blog designs. These are very easy to use and install. However, you have to keep in mind that your theme will be similar to hundreds or thousands of other blogs.
• Use custom theme. Another option is to go to your Tumblr dashboard, and then click “customize,” “theme,” and then “use custom HTML.” You can then take HTML code from any site that offers free Thumblr themes and paste it into the form.

Themes are a great medium to express your feelings and your business’ purposes. If you want to make sure that your visitors turn into customers, then you have to make sure that your theme is appropriate and appealing.

For one, Tumblr easily integrates with your Twitter and Facebook account. There is no doubt that websites today, regardless if they are regular sites, blogs, or social networks, are focused on creating a sort of unity. This is a way for users to easily share information with family and friends.

Aside from that, once you create an account, you will surely find that Tumblr is one of simplest blogging platforms you can find today. You might think that WordPress stands out for its simplicity, but once you try Tumblr, you will discover that it offers a more basic user interface that allows you to choose between functions such as “text” and “pictures.”

This can be very important if you want to use Tumblr quickly and move on. The downside, though, is that it does not allow complex customization like WordPress does.

Nevertheless, if you are looking for a publishing platform that is easy to use, easy to market with, and easy on the eyes, then Tumblr is one you can’t miss to use.

Tumblr for Longer Tweets?

Tumblr has always been known as a publishing platform–a blog where you can share thoughts and pics. However, those are not the only great things you can do with Tumblr; you can use it for a lot of other things, too.

For instance, if you find that you are often unable to communicate enough information in a 140-character Tweet, you may want to consider using Tumblr to Tweet instead. This will allow you to write a message of any length; and then allow Tumblr to automatically Tweet the first 140 characters of it with a link back to the blog post.

Adding Scrolling Twitter Feeds

Adding scrolling Twitter feeds is actually quite easy. Basically, you will just add a script that cycles through all of your tweets, displaying them in sequential order in a nice-looking frame.

This is always a nice touch to add to your site. Not only will it make your site look more appealing and dynamic, but it will also encourage your visitors to join Twitter and follow you. This way, you will gain additional point for your site and you will get additional customer for your Twitter marketing campaign as well.

To create such a feed, all you have to do is use a widget like this: Scrolling Twitter feed widget. This widget will let you generate code which you can simply copy-and-paste into your site editor and voila! You already have scrolling Twitter feeds on your website!

It can be very beneficial to market on different social networks. However, it can also be tiring–logging in and out and continuously posting updates on different accounts every time. If you feel like this routine is starting to weigh you down, then you might want to start using Tumblr.

Tumblr

Working on various social networks can be really tiring. If you are already feeling the weight, it may be a good idea to consolidate your workload. This way, you will not need to spend a large chunk of your time repeating the same tasks. One medium you can use to consolidate your workload is to start a Tumblr account.

By creating a Tumblr, you can easily post an update to all of your accounts at once. This means you can tweet, post a Facebook status update, and post to any of your other social networking accounts at the same time.

When it comes to becoming a good businessman, being knowledgeable is good, but having a heart is better.

How to Sincerely Build Your Reputation

If you want your business to flourish and if you sincerely want to help others as well, then you should consider doing regular give-aways or charity events. You can either:

• Give your product to someone who needs it but cannot afford it
• Hold a firesale and give a portion of the proceeds to charity

If you are sincere in sharing your blessings, it will surely come back to you, more than you would have probably expected. As they say, “What goes around comes around,” and when it’s good karma you will get, then why will you avoid doing it? Besides, doing such acts of charity will make you feel good about yourself–you are helping people become better, personally and financially. It will also help demonstrate what kind of person you really are and how well you will treat your customers.

In the eyes of your customers and those you help, your credibility will be boosted and your business will be seen as reputable; it will give you a good social standing. So, why not try doing it today?

Conquering Your Fear of Making a Mistake

A lot of people start internet businesses because they think here is where they will get a lot of profits fast. However, their fear of making a mistake, of falling before they achieve one of their goals, is so strong that they end up with fear of making mistakes.

And when they do make a good progress, they start fearing more that they would rather stick with what they already have than create a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, or a blog to reach more audience and open more revenue streams. In other words, they fear that they will may make an embarrassing mistake that will reflect poorly on their businesses.

This is definitely something you must avoid!

When it comes to Web 2.0, it is definitely possible for businesses to make embarrassing mistakes. However, more than the grave mistakes you read other marketers commit, the most serious mistake you can ever make is to not take action and strongly establish your business and customer base.

Let’s face it. How can you even imagine committing some mistakes about social networking when you are not even trying it in the first place? And how can you ever get the wonderful benefits We 2.0 provides if you are not giving it a shot? You will lose more if you choose to try anything!

Hear my personal recommendation: Work hard to build up your network and spend less time worrying about making mistakes. If anything, you’re more likely to make these mistakes in the early stages of your campaign, which is exactly when the fewest people will be able to observe them (because you won’t have many followers).

In short, stop being too much of a worrywart! Instead of worrying about mistakes you might commit, start working on campaigns that promise good fortune!

However, there is a pressing question that relates to this site. What is it? Will my privacy a an individual person be secured?

Question of Privacy

Many who are new to Web 2.0 marketing are anxious in using sites like Facebook, worrying that these media will expose too much information about their personal lives. It is understandable. After all, although we put up internet businesses and uses strategies to establish our online presence and build our credibility, we are still individuals who have reputations to protect and privacies to secure. However, while this concern certainly is valid, it is often much less important than people think it will be.

Personally, I suggest that you avoid making your privacy a top priority. Why? Because if you are a decent and hardworking marketer, associating your name and photo of yourself with your products should make you proud and not embarrassed.

Of course, giving more personal information like your address or home phone number will be another case that you should carefully consider whether it will be good for you and your business or not. Nevertheless, for minor pieces of personal information, there are good reasons to believe that giving it out will do nothing other than help you.

There is an old adage that says, “Time is gold.” However, for serious marketers like us who want to achieve success, time is definitely more precious than diamonds.

Making the Most of Your Time

As a business owner, you value your time greatly; I do, too. It is essential for us to understand that every move we make affect the productivity of our entire business.

This is exactly why you must pay close attention to how you manage your time and how you come up with important decisions.

Web 2.0 has completely changed how the internet works and how users and web masters interact. If you want to optimize the results you get from your web 2.0 marketing campaigns, then you should aim to engage your customers as much as possible. You must always keep in mind: In this type of strategy, over-engagement is always preferred over under-engagement.

Just because you need to engage customers, however, does not mean you have to devote all your time to them–you still have a life to live! If you want to create a harmony between your personal and business time, then you have to take steps to automate certain procedures of your campaign. This way, you cam engage customers efficiently without forsaking the time you would love to spend with your loved ones. For example, if you want to save time in posting to different social networks, you have to look for a service or website like Ping.fm that will allow you to post an update to, say, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr all at the same time.

While I’m pointing out that it is important to save time for yourself here, you must still remember to treat your Web 2.0 marketing campaign like a true marketing campaign. If you are wasting a lot of time in one aspect and are not getting any good results, you must either:

• Stop the part of campaign entirely and start a new one
• Adjust that part of your marketing campaign and observe the changes in the results you get

It was the W3 Total Cache plugin. I’m a little bit sorry about deactivating it, because having it was a huge performance boost for wordpress.

Unfortunately it caused several problems that I wasn’t able to fix.

• After submitting the secret password it wasn’t shown to the users that they were actually logged in. Consequently they could not get the free downloads.
• The Javascript that displays related posts and tags in the sidebar stopped working after I minified it using W3 Total Cache.
• Some Javascript in the footer bar also did not work anymore.

Long story short: W3 Total Cache is gone for now, performance is back to its much slower state, you can now easily unlock your free downloads again.

P.S. If you’re familiar with W3 Total Cache and know how to fix these problems, you may chime in here:

My wordpress forum post about this problem.

That does not mean you won’t have to do anything about angry customers, though. Today, you will discover a way to make angry customers love you and develop your business into a very reputable brand everyone talks good about.

Turning Upset Customers to Happy, Loyal Ones

Here is an easy way to make upset customers happy and make them fall in love with you:

1. Use Twitter Search Engine- Using the Twitter Search Engine, try to find all instances where your products and services have been mentioned. You must specifically look for bad reviews of your products, complaints about customer service, and generally anything else that speaks about your company and offers negatively.
2. Find negative comments and respond- Once you found negative comments, create a list and start offering a response to each and every one of those bad comments.
3. Give freebies or other solutions- Along with your response, you can offer free products, give a solution to the problem they are having, or let them give their suggestions. If you find that people are complaining about a certain feature of your product, then you should take that chance to announce a change you will make on your product and then offer a free updated release to all who have already purchased.

If you carefully follow the strategy laid out above, you should be able to turn any negative press you find into positive press, as people are likely to say good things about you after you promptly redress the problems they presented and offer compensation.

Have you been building an internet business, but it isn’t as successful as you’d like?

Then take a moment and read this article.

The intended effect: Complete freedom.

The side effect: You STOP wasting months or years of experimenting with business opportunities before you finally succeed.

Many people start their own business to gain freedom and control over their life.

If this is your motive to build a business, then it’s called a lifestyle business.

Today a lifestyle business can be built, easier than ever before in history, through the internet, by creating an internet business.

So, they say:

• An internet business will bring you good money. Maybe more money than your day job.
• It will give you the freedom of working when and where you want.
• It will give you the power of living (and working) on your own terms.

Sounds good to you?

Well, for MANY gaining riches and freedom through an internet business is indeed a sexy proposition.

But MANY try, and FEW succeed.

Why is that so?

Let me tell you this: it’s really EASY to make money online.

BUT…

… but at the same time it’s not likely that you (or anyone else) succeed right from the start. It’s possible, but not likely.

Very few are wonder boys or wonder girls who become an overnight success.

Breaking NEWS: These detours in business WILL cost you many years and tens of thousands of dollars. And they’ll happen, like it or not…

• You’ll find out (through your own hard work and experience), that a lot of things simply don’t work. Even if others told you they would, they don’t.
• You’ll probably spend some time (weeks, months, years) figuring out what you really want. What business is right for you?
• You’ll start projects, that in the end you will want to drop.
• You’ll be stopped dead in your tracks by unexpected obstacles.
• You’ll waste your money on fraudulent business opportunities and stupid people.
• You’ll spend time learning things that you never knew you’d have to learn.
• You’ll create products and services that turn out to be a complete waste of time and money, except for the experience gained.
• You’ll create beautiful things, only to find out that no one is interested.

The business opportunity promoters didn’t tell you that; did they?

But do you see how this will cost many years and thousands of dollars?

This is Part 1 of a 9-part article series that will explore how to create complete freedom through building your own internet business.

It’s meant to give you short cuts.

What I’m writing to you in this series is not written hastily. It’s not a quickie article.

It’s the essence of what I learned in 23 years of business.

• It will save you months, years even, in getting where you want.
• It will leverage successful principles; you’ll earn more money quicker.

Reading this series will not save you from gaining your own experience; it will not spare you from doing the work.

Reading this series will open your eyes about the hidden success factors in internet marketing.

• You’ll see how to avoid the pitfalls,
• how to save time and money,
• how to grow a business that fits to your dreams.

Your starting point today?

Uncover the INNER purpose of your internet business!

(You’re already guessing there must be an OUTER purpose too…)

By ‘inner purpose’ I simply mean: What the business is meant to do for you.

It looks like soft talk at first, but defining the inner purpose:

1. Will help you setting up your business efficiently.
2. Will prevent you from losing one or two years every time your business is going off track.

The inner purpose is a description of what the business is meant to do for you, the business owner. It’s defining the freedom you want to achieve.

Each person has their own set of reasons to do the job or business they’re doing.

• How does working in the comfort of your own home and spending more time with your family sound?
• How does earning more money than in your day job sound? Some work only for money and for what money can buy.

• Some don’t care about money at all. They care about having lots of free time, or working while traveling the world, or doing work they love to do.

Take a few minutes to become clear and make a firm decision about the ‘inner purpose’ of your business.

Does any of these ‘reasons why’ apply to you?

• I want to be my own boss, feeling empowered instead of being a cog.
• I want to create things, turn ideas into reality.
• I want to choose my own working hours.
• I want to work less and spend more time with my family.
• I want to work more, and become insanely rich.
• I want to explore the world and to take my business with me.
• I want to work from the comfort of my own home.
• I want enough cash to fulfill my dreams.
• I want enough cash to make my loved ones happy.
• I want enough cash to make a difference in the world.
• => Your idea here…

First, find out why you’re really doing your business.

Don’t just say ‘yes’ to all the nice ideas listed above. Instead be very specific.

1. What is the overall goal of your business?
2. What is it meant to enable in your life?
3. How you know you achieved it?
4. What will change in your live?

Next, evaluate how your current business model fits your business’s inner purpose, and how to re-think your business.

If you don’t want to lose years, you need to become absolutely clear about how to setup your business to meet its inner purpose.

Example: For me the inner purpose of moving my business from offline to online was that I wanted to travel the world. More precisely: I wanted to escape the icy German winter. I feel much better in sunny climate.

When I made ‘traveling’ to be the inner purpose for my business, it had massive impact on how to setup my business.

I had to change everything.

Ten years back I had a real office with real local staff and the option to work for local clients.

But now I can completely forget about that, because I’m away most of the time.

So my goal ‘traveling’ came with a price in how I run my business:

• Working with local stuff is much more efficient than outsourcing all over the world. But for me it isn’t an option. So I have to accept less efficient work with freelancers far away from me.
• Working with my team in my office was more fun, compared to working alone all the time.
• I can’t accept local clients who might have big budgets, but would require me to show up for meetings. Instead I had to set up other ways to find clients and run the customer projects 100% online.
• Instead of taking phone calls myself, I had to hire a local telephone service to take calls for my business.

I had to figure out these things before I could start living the dream. But at first, when you conceive your dream, you don’t really think about it that way.

And if you don’t, you’re losing precious time.

There are many other implications, depending on your personal goals, on your business’s inner purpose.

That’s why you need to be clear about your primary goals.

You need to match your business model to your goals.

Reason #2 why you need to firmly decide the inner purpose for your business.

Have you ever been in a rut? I’m sure you know what I mean. It’s something that happens unnoticed at first. Many experience it in their relationship.

But it happens in business too.

In the beginning you start out with a clear goal in mind.

Then over the years the business takes a certain direction. You move along with that course, and your everyday decisions are not in line with your original goals anymore.

But you don’t notice – until you suddenly feel unhappy, without even knowing why.

Example: Let’s say your business is going through a phase of financial pressure.

To make some quick money you launch a new service. It works, and the new service helps you raise the money to keep the business healthy.

Two years later you’re still doing that service, it has become your main source of income … and suddenly, one day you wonder why you feel so unhappy and bored all the time.

That’s because this specific service wasn’t in line with your initial goals.

It became a part of your business quite naturally by the flow of events over time. You didn’t really notice it wasn’t in line with your original purpose.

But there you are, doing something you really didn’t plan to do – with dire consequences.

1. You can easily lose one or two years when something like that happens.

1. Plus, once you notice you’re on a detour, you might need several months to rebuild the business to go where you want to go.

Knowing the primary purpose very consciously makes it easier to notice when you’re on a detour.

The inner purpose of your business is your driving force, it shapes your business model, and it’s the guideline to frequently check if you’re going into the right direction.

Today, you have a choice. Yes! You have always been given a set of choices, but thanks to the internet, the possibilities are undeniably limitless!

An internet business can be the start of your every dream’s reality.

Your starting point?

Answer these questions…

1. What is your business meant to enable in your life?
2. How will this shape your business model?
3. How can you keep track (over the months and years) you’re still moving in the right direction?

=> Answer these questions for yourself NOW, not later.

It takes only 2 or 3 minutes. After all, you know the answers already. You just need to make them 100% conscious and very specific.

I told you a little about my business, driven by the inner purpose of me traveling the world.

Where are you going? What’s your motivation? What’s the inner purpose of your business?

If you like, tell me about it, the comment section is wide open for you…

Actually it is working, but you have to REFRESH the page after login. Click the refresh button in your browser or use the key combination Ctrl + F5 on your keyboard.

This problem is caused by a new plugin that I installed. When it’s enabled, the code that displays the download to the logged in users is only executed when refreshing the page.

I’m working to fix it and update you once the solution is found.

Make Your Customers a Real Part of Your Business

One of the most important functions of Web 2.0 is that it allows businesses like our to receive and actually encourage feedback from customers and visitors. These feedbacks are very valuable. Why? Because you can use feedbacks to develop your business. You can use it to:

• Establish customer loyalty
• Polish existing products or services
• Create new products or services

But, how can you easily collect feedback from your customers? One of the best way to is by using your Facebook fan page. These are the methods you can employ:

• Post an update, sincerely asking visitors to post or send you a story about how they’ve used your product
• Hold a contest where the person who wrote the best story gets free products or discount coupons from your online store
• Open a discussion thread and let customers air their thoughts

You’ve probably made that mistake yourself.

Excited by unlimited opportunities you take on dozens or (in my case) hundreds of projects…and in the end there’s little chance of creating anything of excellence.

Simply because you’re diverting your resources.

You’re spreading yourself to thin.

That’s what I’ve been doing the past 5 years. While I enjoyed the freedom of the internet lifestyle, I did not build anything to really be proud of.

Because I was falling in love with too many ideas and projects.

But no more…

Last week I said goodbye to 55 domains and 55 web sites.

And now ‘ll focus to make InternetBusinessMastermind.com really good.

Here’s what I’m working on to give you better value.

1. Articles, downloads, and tools for your internet business success.

Internet Business Mastermind has been around for 3 years now, and I’ve published about 150 posts.  Yes, you can call me lazy.

Now, that I’ve freed myself from some unfinished projects, I’ll publish new content much faster.

• We’ll publish new posts more often, covering what you need to make more money using the internet.
• You’ll get free, downlaodable ebooks and software on a weekly basis.
• You’ll also get free online tools, that will help you to get some of your tasks done more efficiently, and save time.

2. More focused on what matters for your success, less clutter.

I’m building a new category structure. It’s more focused on giving you a framework to start or grow your internet business.

There are now 3 main blog categories:

• internet business ideas
• getting more web traffic
• increasing internet sales

Some of the old categories are gone, some will come back, and a few new ones will be introduced.

I’m also removing unnecessary content and items that distracted you from the main content. Lots of redundant stuff and hundreds of links have been removed from posts and the sidebar.

3. Better Newsfeeds for your Feedreader.

From now on the newsfeed will contain the article intro only. That’s easier for you if you don’t check your feeds on a daily basis. You’ll see all new posts with short intro, and can click through to whatever you’re interested in.

I will soon offer category specific feeds. That’s great for readers interested in specific topics. For example you could subscribe to a newsfeed that only notifies you of new posts for the ‘getting more web traffic’ category.

So, that’s the stuff I’m working on to improve the blog, making internet business mastermind more focused on your success.

To get the ball rolling I’ve recently uploaded your first free download, it’s a huge package of 32 free ebooks.

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In traditional marketing, what simply happens is that you’ll create an ad, purchase ad space somewhere, and then wait for the buyers to come in. They might come, or they might not.

It’s quite the opposite with social networking sites.

In Facebook, Twitter, or other social sites, you can’t just create a profile, add some information, and then wait for people to show up and buy. You have to take the initiative: you have to take action!

Web 2.0 is All about Conversations

If you are going to use social networks for marketing, then you have to know that you are expected to socialize and to talk. A lot.

Look at Twitter for example.

You’ll see that the majority of the posts are from people engaged in communicating, reacting to each other’s posts. Some of the tweets will be:

• A directly response to what someone else has posted. This starts a nice, long conversation.
• Re-post of their friends’ message, so that more people can read it. This is commonly called retweeting.
• Suggestion of specific profiles to friends and followers.
• Recommendation of links to other people’s web sites. The owner of the websites can be friends or followers.

To get something from Web 2.0 marketing there’s no doubt you need to start similar conversations, too. By engaging with people on your network, you’ll get more attention and you will get connections to real people, both customer and professionals. Start conversations today; otherwise, you will find yourself losing more than you are gaining.

Why Start Conversations?

“So, I might get losses instead of gains if I don’t start conversation. However, if my products and services are good, and if am courteous and approachable, shouldn’t that be enough?” Well, that is true. However, you must know that the more you engage in conversations with your friends or followers, the greater your base of people will become.

At some point, it’ll become self-perpetuating, so that your friends bring in new friends on a regular basis. However, if you can’t maintain good conversations, your efforts might be in vain. Here are some ways to start and maintain conversation:

• Start responding to your friend’s posts.
• Keep up the conversation when some else sends a response to you or when a follower recommends or retweets your post.
• Actively recommend/retweet other people’s posts if they are useful and you think your friends will be interested in them.
• Recommend links to interesting web sites.

This strategy, of course, is not only true for Twitter but for all Web 2.0 sites, regardless if it is Facebook, MySpace, or a blog that you are using. As long as you are using a medium where people might engage in conversation through commenting or trackbacks, you should always to take the initiative, start conversations, and keep them alive.

On a final note, I suggest not to do Web 2.0 conversations randomly. Also think about focusing only on a couple of sites at a time. This way, you can guarantee that you will have enough time to engage in conversations through each of your selected medium and build strong relationships with the people who follow you on those Web 2.0 sites.

If you really want to use several social networks at a time, say, 6 or more, then here is what you have to do:

• Choose 2 or 3 main sites where you will take the time to engage customers.
• For the rest of the sites, choose to post and react only when you have spare time or when absolutely necessary such as in cases wherein someone is posting bad things about you.

In the end, it’s more profitable, not to mention more fun to heavily engage in only 1,2, or 3 sites and ignore the rest.

One of the reasons to become a member of internet business mastermind is that you’re getting lots and lots of free downloads.

There are free e-books, free software, and free web site templates right here at internet business mastermind.com.

So let’s get right to it…

Here’s your first free e-books download, and it’s HUGE.

Today I’m giving you a huge package of 32 free, excellent, and actionable reports. That’s no typo, it’s not 1 but 32 free ebooks. All of them have been created by marketing mastermind Jason Fladlien; and there’s profitable info in each of them.

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Each report is short and focused on a specific topic and on precise steps you can take right now to make more money faster.

1. Steal This 12 Step Autoresponder Sequence
2. Make a Small Fortune With $7 Products
3. The Secret To Creating 20 Minute Sales Letters
4. Win $500 Offline Clients Immediately
5. 5 Step To Split-testing For More Profits
6. $60 An Hour Video Ghostwriter Method
7. The Aritcle Marketing Hoax
8. 6 Dumb Mistakes That Keep Marketers Poor
9. Affiliate Stardom – Easy Affiliate Sales
10. Score Blockbuster Joint Ventures
    This report is featured on the right, it is
    just 1 of 32 free e-books on this page.
11. Continuity Program Profits
12. How To Eliminate Procrastination
13. Case Against Video Sales Letters
14. Email Marketing Genius
15. Secret List building Tactics
16. Winning Your First 100 Email Subsctibers
17. Free Essential Internet Marketing Tools
18. Mastering The Google Content Network
19. Healthy Distrust For Gurus
20. How to Take Instant Actions On Info
21. Using NLP In Internet Marketing
22. Easy PLR Tactics – Easy Profits
23. How To Make Money Interviewing Experts
24. How To Slip Into State Of Peak Productivity
25. How to Sell Big Ticket Items
26. Squeeze Page Stupidity
27. WordPress Secrets
28. Time Management Secrets Of A Madman
29. 4 Traffic Tornadoes
30. The Great USP Myth
31. Why You Fail To Make Money
32. 27 Tweaks To Instantly Improve Your Marketing

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As I will explain in a more detailed post later today, there’s going to be a lot of new content coming to the internet business mastermind blog.

Up until now I had only 1 post per week. Sending you the full post via news feed was comfortable and a fast way for you to read the whole article.

But with posts coming out much faster now, it’s not so easy to digest anymore. After all, who would want to read a news feed with thousands and thousands of words?

Making the feed show only the summary will make it easier for you to see what’s new and to decide what’s interesting for you.

For those articles that you like to read entirely you can then simply click through to the full post.

You can see how it looks like here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/InternetBusinessMastermind

Establishing Good Online Reputation

No matter which Web 2.0 sites you are using, be it Twitter, Facebook, forums, or blogs, there is something you have to remember: you’re always representing your business.

That said, you have to make sure that you will talk and act in a nice manner around customers as well as colleagues. Engaging in flame war on a forum or personally attacking a blog reader will not make a good impression. It is better to hold back and stay calm. Otherwise, you will get yourself a good number of enemies, and your reputation will surely be tarnished.

In addition to creating enemies, flaming will also make your business look unprofessional. Your existing customers and prospects will go about questioning your integrity. They will go about, wondering, “Is this the kind of merchant I want to associate with?” Surely, the answer to that question will be a big “NO!”

Therefore, when you start an internet business, you must always be cautious. Keep these 2 points in mind as well:

1. Never start criticizing and bashing others publicly. If you have nothing good to say, then don’t say anything at all.

2. Be very conscious when others start a nasty discussion with you. Don’t react emotionally; instead, think about the best possible response. If you stay collected and think things thoroughly, you will find that sometimes, it is best to not react at all. Sometimes, it is enough for you to keep calm, lay out facts, or just expressing that you don’t see any value  in fights.

However, not all marketers have enough money or products to give away. If you feel like you don’t have enough resources or you are simply feeling lazy to organize such a scheme, then you have to learn this other “Get Fans and Followers” scheme.

Easy Way to Get More Fans and Followers

Facebook and Twitter have become very powerful marketing platforms, thanks to them being home to thousands and millions of our targeted customers. However, if you can’t get a good number of fans and followers, marketing on these media will be in vain.

Do you want to get more followers for your Twitter account or more fans for your Facebook page? Why not try this approach?

1. To get started, simply ask your readers to tell friends about your Twitter page or your Facebook fan page through a status update or tweet.
2. In your status or tweet, include 2-3 lines of encouraging text. You can simply say that you will appreciate if they recommend your page to friends, should they find your content and resources useful.
3. Let your current friends and followers do the scouting and inviting for you.

For best results, you might want to use any of these tools or posts they can easily use and re-post or re-tweet:

• Tell-a-friend scripts
• Direct links for social bookmarking
• Pre-written e-mail copy
• Facebook update/comment
• Pre-written tweets

You might be wondering: Will this bring instant massive traffic to your Web 2.0 business profiles and primary website? The answer? Probably not, but if you combine many of these tiny steps, which take very little time to do, you will surely reap a combined result that’s worth it!

Giving a Behind-the-Scenes Tour

You can gain a lot of benefits from freely interacting with your customer base. Some of them are:

• You can collect important information, which you can use to adjust your marketing plans or products as well as create new products or services.
• You can easily give them an update about your internet business.

Now, the question is: How do you engage your customers?

There are various methods you can employ. However, one good strategy is to use your Facebook fan page to offer a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on with your business on a daily basis. Basically, what you do here is:

1. Post status updates to announce the various stages of your product launch, announce new product ideas, or present changes you are planning for your website.
2. Provide photos, screenshots, or videos, if possible.
3. Allow your customers to share their thoughts, comment, or share their own stories.

If I do this, what benefits will I exactly get?

If you are asking this, then here are the answers:

• It will increase customer engagement by exposing them to your thought process and daily business happenings
• It will show them how much thought and work goes into the products you create. Eventually, they will grow to appreciate your brand and efforts in connecting with them.

While it is beneficial to market on both social network, however, in time, you will find that it can be tiring; you will need to post an update in Facebook and then tweet it on Twitter. Logging in and out and doing several tasks twice can be boring, don’t you agree?

How to Save Time When Marketing with Facebook and Twitter

One way to save some time while maintaining your presence on both Facebook and Twitter is to link the two accounts. This way, whenever you post a new tweet, a status update will instantly be posted on your Facebook account. The process it involves is very simple. Aside from that, you won’t need to hassle yourself and move between the two accounts and re-post the same messages multiple times.

Does that sound good to you? If yes, then you should check this out: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/. Here, you will need to login to directly access the app. Once you are logged in, the Facebook page will present you with a request from Twitter app to access your information.

All you need to do is click the “Allow” button. Once you do, your Twitter and Facebook accounts will be connected. After that, every time you post a tweet, your Facebook account will will automatically be updated.

Well, there is nothing wrong with starting your Web 2.0 marketing campaigns with these networks. However, it is worthy to consider going after smaller, niche-based networks, too. 

Why Niche Networks?

Today, there are a lot of niche-based social networks you can find. For instance, there is ActiveRain, a social network exclusively for real estate professionals. There are also networks focused on internet marketing, aviation, golf, and virtually any topic you can imagine.

Why should you join niche networks? One of the biggest benefits you will find is that everyone on these networks is a potential customer. This is especially true if you sell business-to-business products or services. While you and your fellow members are both professionals, you can rest assured that there will be people there who will need and appreciate the products and services you provide.

Of course, there are still rules that you have to follow, if you want to achieve success with niche networks. Some of the most important ones are:

• Don’t spam members with commercial advertisements
• Strive to offer something that is truly valuable for free, regardless if it is information or sample products

Use the above strategies at attract members, provide them with valuable information, and when the time is right, you can start selling your products to them.

Now, you don’t exactly need to get returns overnight. In reality, it might take months or even a year to realize your goals. Nevertheless, your end goal should still be a return.

Keeping that thought in mind, you have to think about how you can make your Web 2.0 ventures more profitable.

One way you can do this is to cut down the amount of time you spend doing things that aren’t profitable. Let us look at an example. Let us say you have a Facebook and Twitter account. Every day, you might get several Facebook friend requests, Twitter follower requests, and other requests. You might want to accept these requests as they come. However, accepting all invites once a week is actually more beneficial. This way, you will be more focused on doing other tasks, and your schedule will be more consistent.

Alternatively, you might consider using social networking sites with your mobile phone. This will let you do the following even when you are not in front of your PC (e.g., if you have a meeting, on your way to the office, or if you simply have some free time):

• Make requests
• Accept requests
• Perform updates

These hot shots are marketers from your niche who stand out and, therefore, have tens of thousands of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. If you want your business to further develop, then it will be beneficial for you to associate with these influential. However, you must be careful when searching for these successful and influential personalities; remember that they are different from movie stars and politicians who do have social networking accounts.

To properly identify the important people in your niche, you can do a quick research. Look at forums and see who are creating a buzz. When you are sure who to look for, you can then start searching for them on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Become friends with these people and then aim to solicit their help in discrete ways. Maybe you can ask for their opinion about your product, software they are using for their own business, and so on.

As we have pointed out in previous Web 2.0 marketing tips, you have to make sure that you are not directly pitching to them. Rather, make them pay attention to you by providing useful information and insightful commentary. On Twitter, this might buy you an influential re-tweet and in the blogosphere, this might buy you a link to your site from a high-traffic blog. It can be tough to get a hold and connect with great people, but the result is definitely worth it!

Also, whatever you do, never try to spam the influential people you contact. They probably receive hundreds of similar pitches every day and have grown accustomed to simply ignoring them, so don’t expect them to do different for you. Therefore, you have to work hard and stand out from the crowd for them to give you attention and assistance.

However, not a lot of marketers realize how forums can be powerful marketing tools. That’s the reason why, in this We 2.0 marketing tip, we will discuss:

• How you can get traffic from forums
• How you build network through forum marketing

Most marketers know that forums can be used for marketing, but not all know how powerful they can be. If you’re like the majority, you are probably “lurking” on a few forums and posting on a few threads, too. However, are you using forums to boost your profits?

When it comes to forum marketing, it’s important to keep in mind …

… that you have to observe all the usual Web 2.0 marketing rules.

For instance, just as you wouldn’t make shameless pitches on Facebook, you also shouldn’t do that on forums. The only difference is that a forum has a section dedicated to promoting products like, say, the WSO section in the warrior forum.

Easy Traffic Generation on Forums

Forums offer great potential when it comes to capturing visitors for your site. However, there is a certain strategy you have to employ. The best strategy is to post useful information and then send readers to your site through a link on the signature part of your profile and posts. The more interesting your posts are, the more likely that fellow members will check out your web site.

Why this strategy?

Because with this method, you can avoid high-pressure sales situations; with this, your prospects won’t feel as if you’re only after their money, and they will be your subscribers and customers willingly.

Network Building on Forums

You’ll find that your network builds naturally if you contribute a lot of useful posts to the forum. Instead of you trying to push yourself to specific people (your ideal customers), people will start noticing and looking up to you based on the ideas and tips you share on the forum.

The  natural style of a forum thread encourages conversations, make good use of it. Respond to what other forum members are writing, and give answers to whatever they might respond to your posts.

Have you been planning or are you already using to promote your business and products or services? If yes, and you’re still not getting your desired results, then you should start taking action! You should strive to do the following:

• If you’re not active on forums yet, your first step is to use Google and find a few forums related to your niche.
• From any forums you find through search, or you already are a member of, you must now decide which ones are the best to spend your time with. Prefer the busier and bigger forums; they will give you more exposure and more contacts.

If you follow the above two steps and if you continuously provide other members with useful information, your web site is sure to get more traffic and more sales.

Your web sites, blog, and Web 2.0 accounts are probably created at different times, and at such, you are using them for separate purposes. Perhaps, you did not have the big picture at that time, so never planned on how to interconnect these different “points of contact” for your prospects and customers.

Need for Integration

While you might be getting good profits from your Web 2.0 accounts, it is still a good idea to connect all your sites and Web 2.0 profiles. This way, you can deepen the connection with your visitors easier, as you are giving them more ways to stay in touch with you.

For example, it has become common on news channels to refer watchers to company and reporter Facebook profiles and Twitter profiles.

The reason for this is simple: by getting people to follow them through social networking sites, those news stations gain yet another medium through which they can advertise and engage watchers. Aside from that, their customers are able to know more about them, further establishing their loyalty.

If you opt to integrate your Web 2.0 accounts with your other marketing website and blog, you can gain those same benefits as well.

Cross-Promotion

Aside from integrating your marketing platforms, you should consider cross-promoting, too. You can try any of the following cross-promotion methods:

• If you do print advertising, you might consider using it to channel traffic to your social networking site profiles.
• You can add a badge for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking accounts to your web sites and blog.
• You can use your blog’s news feed and publish them on your Web 2.0 accounts.
• You can add links to your web sites and blogs on your Web 2.0 accounts.

If you use the above strategies, you can rest assured that the traffic all your marketing platforms get will be boosted, and your profits will generally increase. Aside from that, you will have more ways to keep in touch with your customers, and you will have a lot of options for tasks such as:

• Collecting consumer data
• Product launch advertisement

Using LinkedIn for Web Traffic Generation

How can you use LinkedIn to get more organic web traffic?

Simple. By getting your customers to give you a positive review on LinkedIn.

With each positive review, your profile’s search engine ranking position will improve. And as you already know, getting better rankings for your profile will give you a lot of benefits. Two of the most important benefits you’ll get are the following:

1) It will send more people looking for products or services in your niche to your LinkedIn profile.

2) It will get more people to find your website through your LinkedIn profile.

In either case, you have the potential to capture a great deal of extra traffic from individuals who are highly-targeted and who are interested in purchasing a product or service in your niche from the get-go.

Next step for you:

Now that you know how useful your LinkedIn profile can e, you should begin collecting positive review. Start by sending an email to your customers and ask them to review your business on your LinkedIn profile. If you have a physical store, you can talk to them directly, or you can choose to give them a call.

It’s paradoxical – you might now be asking whether or not you should follow this tip, since I’m suggesting that you follow your own intuition rather than MY advice.

Nevertheless, when it comes to building your brand online through Web 2.0 platforms, it is important that you think about your own internet business rather than the generic business that experts have in mind when they write guides like this.

While experts may give you some good general advice, in the end…

• You know your business better than anyone else
• You know your customers better than anyone else
• You know your industry better than anyone else

Sure, you can use other’s people words as guideline. However, you must always have a firm opinion of your own. If you find any advice that conflicts with the brand you want to create for your internet business, then you should go with your own ideas rather than misapplying advice that may be useful for other business models but not your own.

Everyone says you should be on Facebook and on Twitter. However, those may not be the best media for you to use; there might be better places where your real target customers hang out.

Everyone says you should promote through Web 2.0 this way or that way. However, maybe you have OTHER ideas that fit your market better and thus provide you with better results.

That said, you must never hesitate to try something different! Don’t just listen to what other people say; be your own man and don’t hesitate to do things your own way! That is the key to real long-term business success.

And this is precisely why I recommend developing your basic writing skills before you try to delve deep into copywriting and other forms of sales writing.

How to Improve Your Writing Skills

Good Grammar is the Minimum

When it comes to copywriting, no one is going to be impressed by your good grammar. In fact, no one will notice your grammar at all unless it is bad. And this is precisely why it is important to think about good grammar being the starting point for any sales letter—not a lofty goal to achieve.

If you have a weak background in writing, there’s a good chance you are frequently making grammatical errors that most readers perceive as a poor reflection on you. For instance, you might use sentence fragments often; or you might have subject-verb agreement issues. Either way, you are probably repeating these mistakes again and again without even noticing it.

In fact, writers make these mistakes all the time. And when they do, it not only makes them look bad, but it can even confuse the reader by providing the wrong information.

So what can you do about it? You can start by identifying your areas of weakness; and then practicing grammar drills to improve.

Doing “grammar drills” isn’t on the top of the list of the things you want to spend your weekend doing, but if you truly aspire to be a MASTER copywriter—not a mediocre copywriter—you must start by mastering grammar first.

When it comes to doing grammar drills, you have a number of options. I personally recommend that you use one of the following three sites, all of which provide free information and drills:

1. http://odl.vwv.at/english/odlres/res8/Grammar/grammar.htm

-This site will familiarize you with with basic grammar construction rules through various grammar exercise such as multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks.

2. http://dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/ac_paper/drills/index.shtml

-Providing a wide variety of grammar drills ranging from agreement and pronoun reference to sentence strength to words commonly confused, this site will allow you to master grammar in no time.

3. http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/exercises_list/alle_grammar.htm

-If you want to be a master when it comes to grammar rules and construction, this is the site to go to.

As with most things in life, your time is probably best used concentrating on your problem areas. So, rather than re-learning English grammar in its entirety, you should eliminate your weaknesses. You can use the following tests to identify which areas you should work on:

1. http://www.wordl-english.org/diagnostic_grammar.htm

-This site provides a three-part test that will clearly define your weak grammar areas.

2.http://www.dailywritingtips.com/grammar-test-1

-If you want to know how much you know about basic grammar in a short period of time, opt to take this 20-question test.

3. http://www.grammarbook.com/grammar_quiz/grammar_mastery.asp

-To acquire a more comprehensive report on your grammar knowledge, taking this site’s 50-question exam is the best choice.

The Power of Your Facebook Fan Page

Taking some time and encouraging your customers and subscribers to visit your Facebook fan page and to become a fan can be an advantage to your business. It will provide you with various benefits, and two of those are especially vital for your business to flourish.

The two benefits you must aim for through your Facebook fan page are:

• First, you can get additional exposure for your messages besides using the paid mediums (such as Facebook ads, PPC ads, or any paid advertisements)- you can use the money you save for your other ventures or for new software you might need.
• Second, you can market new products and services to existing customers without pitching to them directly- regardless if you admit it or not, customers don’t like getting pitches, especially those that make them feel you’re only after their money. With your Facebook fan page, you can appear friendly and nonchalantly share thoughts and ideas.

If you are able to lead your prospects to your Facebook fan page, even if they overlook your email offers or opt out of your mailing list, you will still have a way to communicate with them; you can readily establish contact through something as simple as a quick status update.

Whenever your customers log into their accounts, even if they have no actual interest in purchasing something from you, they’ll see your status update on their feed. If you don’t spam them (e.g., post updates every half hour), then surely, once they find something you’re offering as useful, they might go and buy it immediately.

The best part of all of this is that you don’t have to make a high-pressure sales pitch, which might be awkward to do with existing clients. Instead, you can simply let them choose which pitches interest them and which do not.

Next Step to Take

So, you have discovered how powerful Facebook fan pages can be, and you now want to use it to your advantage. What are you to do? The next step you ought to take is to find ways to tell your customers about your Facebook fan page. Start by sending a link of your fan page to your subscriber list, and then work your way from there.

However, there is one great way to generate massive traffic for your blog without doing any of those!

Yes, there is actually a strategy like that, and that approach I’m talking about is simple: Get direct traffic from other blogs by commenting frequently!

Blog Commenting: Secret to Massive Traffic

Commenting on other blogs is a surefire way to get more traffic that cuts all the need for keyword and data research as well as article writing. But of course, it’s important to understand that when I say “comment frequently,” I don’t mean spam other people’s blogs with irrelevant information. Rather, I simply mean that you should look for relevant posts in niche blogs and then make a useful, intelligent comment that links back to your blog. Don’t just randomly comment; it will make you look bad and desperate.

By providing useful information, you can easily attract both customers and potential partners without appearing as if you are directly after more profits. Well, you are, but it’s best to do it discreetly. Besides, if you spend a lot of time making useful comments, there’s a good chance you’ll re-direct some of the traffic that lands on the big name blogs to your own. You can then pass this traffic through your sales funnel.

This way, you may also get the attention of other blog owners. Don’t overdo it, though; don’t start commenting on the same blog again and again just to connect the owner. It might be tempting to mass comment on some guru’s blog, but they’ve seen it all before and might already be aware of most of the things you share–mass commenting is something they don’t like it, and they might block you if you do it.

So, if you are going to do blog commenting as one of your primary web traffic generators, this must be your overall guideline: “Is my comment a good contribution to the given blog post?” If yes, then go on, hit the “Submit” button, and let traffic come to your own blog or website.

What you probably need is a simple step by step plan to implement web 2.0 marketing to your business.

The ebook ‘Web 2.0 Marketing’ is just that: an easy to follow guide to build your presence in the world of social marketing and social networking.

If you follow through with this simple step by step plan, you’ll achieve a presence in the web 2.0 sphere that very few of your competitors can match.

Download Web 2.0 Marketing Ebook.

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As I’ve mentioned in previous We 2.0 marketing tips, though, it is always better to give, so you can receive more. That is to say, when it comes to optimizing the profits you get from Web 2.0, you must strive to provide something truly useful for your readers.

For example, you can give them free information about topics related to your niche. Give such free tips every now and then sincerely, without thinking of profits ahead, and you’ll find yourself a good spot in the internet marketing world.

If you are wondering what kind of free and useful information you can give, you can offer any of the following:

1. Links to important news related to your niche
2. Commentaries and opinions on important happenings within your niche
3. Links to sales and coupons (even if they’re not your own)
4. Links to useful resources and web sites.

If your readers can trust they will get useful information from you, they will come back to your pages (your Twitter, Facebook, and the like) again and again.

Hence, I suggest you make it a habit to quickly post whatever useful information you stumble upon during your day. It takes only 1 minute, or just a few seconds when tweeting, to get a tiny but useful post out there.

Once you use these strategies to build rapport with your visitors, you can then begin to reap the rewards by marketing your services and products to them.

Why? The reason is simple: in general, people will be hesitant to interact with profiles that don’t have faces attached to them. It’s just like when you are out in the market, and somebody–who happens to be cloaked and masked–approached you and offered you something. You won’t accept anything from such a person, right?

That is basically similar to offering your products to people. Of course, this is a personal decision and is ultimately up to you; however, if you plan to take your web 2.0 marketing efforts seriously, this is an important step to take.

This is especially true…

• If you want to brand yourself as a person, expert and authority
• If you are the main person in your business getting in customer contact
• If you are the official spokes person for your business.

What to Do

There are actually 2 things you can do to get a nice picture for your Web 2.0 accounts:
1) Get a nice photo, taken either by yourself or by a professional and post it to your web 2.0 profiles individually (if you don’t have one, you can easily get a nice haircut and then have your picture taken).
2) Go to Gravatar, register an account, and upload your photo there. This will allow you to put your photo on other people’s sites–sites where you can leave your comment and email–such as WordPress blogs. With Gravatar, everywhere you go and leave a comment using your email, your photo will be shown; you will easily be recognized by both the blogs’ owners and readers. It also saves you time as one photo submission can be used on many, many sites.

If you are going to do the first option, it will probably take 3 minutes of work per site. However, those 3 minutes can give your profile a face for years to come and for thousands of visitors to see.

Today, we will look at another big player in the web 2.0 world: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is currently (May 2010) at #17 at Alexa’s rank of the world’s most important web sites.

I bet you didn’t know that! Getting such a good spot on Alexa’s list, it certainly is an asset for your business!

LinkedIn: The What, How, and Why

In a nutshell, LinkedIn is a social network focused on gathering professionals–teachers, graphic designers, writers, engineers, marketers, and on. If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, you might be surprised to find out that they’ve already collected information about you and have used it to construct a profile that might include some or all of the following information:

1)    Where you went to college

2)    What jobs you hold or have held in the past

3)    What businesses you have owned or own

4)    Miscellaneous personal and professional information about you

That might sound creepy. However, you can look at it in another light: that is another tool for you to present yourself and your business as well as showcase your skills and experience. Of course, you will still have the ability to change what the profile shows and you can always opt to use it to establish connection with other business owners and potential clients. You can do this simply y creating a profile.

Once you have created your own profile, you will gain a lot of options in terms of promotion and networking. Nevertheless, for now, you don’t need to worry about anything but getting the ball rolling by creating a profile.

Hop right over to their site and sign up. It’s only 5 minutes, and you’ll own another piece of Web 2.0 real estate.

Today, if you want to get your message to your audience through the most effective medium, then you will  find videos to e very beneficial. However, there are many ways in which you can use YouTube improperly and, in the end, get nothing out of it. In fact, that is what most internet businesses do when they try to make money off of YouTube or video content in general.

The Real Way to Profit from Videos

If you decide to use Web 2.0 video sites for marketing, then I suggest that you start by…

… creating a tutorial series. This could be something like 5 videos, each covering a topic in an area related to your business. Of course, these 5 videos must be connected as well. For example, you can create a 5-video series about how to set up a website and make it ready for handling customers.

If you find a series to time consuming, you can choose to just put up one video instead.

If there’s something you have to remember about video marketing, though, it’s this: Don’t go for beauty, and don’t go for perfection. Just get the ball rolling.

What do I mean by that? Two things.

First: Don’t make your plan too big

You don’t have to deliver 52 installments on your topic right away. Start with anything between 1 and 5 videos. This will make your task seem easier; the easier your goal is, the faster you can finish and move on to your next project.

Second: Don’t make the production process too complicated

When I created my first online videos, I used green screen technique for special effects. It was nice, but it took much more time to finish a video. Today, I just skipped all the fancy stuff. I put up some good light, point the cam to my face, and start shooting the video.

That’s what you should do. Instead of making your video look very professional or high-class, it’s more important to make your video USEFUL. After all, you want to position yourself as an expert. You want to show your web site visitors that you are the-go-to-expert in your niche. Therefore, you must always provide your viewers with valuable information.

This is the est way to position yourself as expert in your niche and the best way to give credibility and good reputation to your company.

If your videos are well-made and if you market them well to get the ball rolling, there’s a good chance you can see a viral effect, where others begin referring friends to your videos without any compensation for doing so. The more viral your video gets, the more traffic and sales you can possibly generate.

This is a Web 2.0 marketing tip that requires a little more effort, but one that’s well worth it: Integrate your video marketing strategy with your overall Web 2.0 marketing plan to achieve optimum results.
(See web 2.0 marketing tip #16)

They hope that by simply creating a Twitter account, or any Web 2.0 accounts in general, adding every person who is willing to follow them, and spamming blatantly commercial messages will make them lots of money.

Quite obviously, this is a misconception. In fact, this is one of the worst ways to make money with a social network, as potential buyers will see through it easily and will choose to opt out.

On the other hand, marketers often miss the great opportunities that Twitter presents…

…such as doing market research.

Market Research with Twitter

In the past, it was very hard to observe your customers when they talked casually about your products or about competing products. However, this is something you can easily do with Twitter today.

In Web 2.0 marketing tip #7, I recommended that you use the Twitter search engine to find tweets related to your business niche. The idea was to find people suitable as followers or people to follow.

Today’s idea is: using Twitter search for your topics as part of your research about your business.

What to Search in Twitter

There are a lot of things about your business that you can discover through such a simple task. Some keywords that can help you with your search are:

• Your name
• Your company’s name
• Your web site’s name and URL
• Your products’ names

You can also use Twitter search for finding out:

• The names of your competitors as well as their companies’ names, products, and web sites
• Other keywords related to your niche and the problems your products solve

Finding out what your customers think about your business and products can help you develop your business and achieve long-term success. Learn everything that can help you business by using Twitter search today.

One great way to utilize Twitter to get more sales is to use the Twitter search engine to find tweets related to your business’s niche. This is an easy way to locate people who might be interested in your products or services.

This strategy involves a simple process:

1. Determine keywords related to your business
2. Use the Twitter search engine to locate tweets that include your chosen keywords
3. Follow the tweets back to the source
4. Determine whether the person involved might be interested in your niche
5. If yes, invite him to follow you

Initially, a lot of people you add may not follow you back. Nevertheless, if you persist, over time, you will find it relatively easy to accumulate 50 new followers each day; when this happens, you’ll gain momentum. Of course, you must not only think about getting new followers. You must also strive to create interesting tweets, come up with offer coupons, or provide vital information. If you do, you will find that most of your messages will get re-tweeted, expanding your reach and possibly bringing in new followers without you exerting extra effort.

Why not try it today? Log on to your Twitter account, do a search for some important keywords related to your business, and start getting new followers.

When it comes to using any form of Web 2.0 services to promote your internet business, it is always a good idea to think in terms of building social media capital that will generate flows of returns over a long period of time.

It’s very important for you to understand this because many marketers treat Web 2.0 sites like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising services.

That is, they expect to see returns immediately after creating an account on Facebook or Twitter. That’s impossible!

In reality,…

…using web 2.0 sites requires that you build up a large following over a long period of time.

You can think of these networks that you are building as a form of capital.

Once sufficiently large, you can easily get additional members for your fan page and additional customers, practically without doing anything.

What does it mean?

Consistency is key to success with social networks.

It’s just like starting a habit; you have to do it for every day for you to succeed, and even if you are already getting positive results, you must continue the tasks to ensure that you will maintain the traffic and sales you get.

Basically, there are two things you need to remember:

• Do a few steps every day (adding friends, updating your status, starting polls and discussion threads, etc.), and soon, your influence will grow.
• As your influence grows, so does your social capital, and you’ll start earning “compounded interest,” providing you with handsome profits.

Tracking how your campaigns and marketing plan is doing is important if you want to discover:

• If you are getting profits
• If there is something that can be done to improve your products or services
• If you have to adjust your current marketing strategies or use entirely new ones

As with any marketing campaign, you should monitor your Twitter promotional campaigns by tracking the results…

Twitter Tracking Systems to Use

If you want to track your Twitter results but are unsure where to start, then let us offer several tools that can do the work for you or ways to discover your results:

• http://search.twitter.com/ -One free way to find all instances of people talking about you or your business on Twitter; this can give you a rough idea of how your marketing plan is fairing.
• Tweet Beep: http://tweetbeep.com/ - This service will automatically email you whenever something about you or your business is tweeted.
• Analytics/traffic statistics program- this kind of program will help you determine how much traffic you have received from Twitter. If you don’t currently have a good traffic statistics program, you can get one for free Google (http://www.google.com/analytics). Google Analytics is a tool will tell you where all your visitors come from, including those that come from your Twitter profile or your Facebook fan page.

Aside from tweets, you might also find it beneficial to track whether the links in your tweets get clicked and how often. I’m using HootSuite for this as it has lots of useful features for professional tweets. However, you can easily find a more suitable one online, if you prefer.

We are not going to focus on those, though. Rather, we will discuss one of the best ways to use Facebook: Creating a fan page on the site and using it to draw in potential buyers.

Creating a Profitable Facebook Fan Page

You can start your Facebook marketing plan by investing some time to create a high-quality fan page.

This page should include…

• Links to your site and/or blog
• A well-written description of what you do or what your business is about
• A brief description of the purpose of your fan page

A sample for the purpose could be: To provide all of your loyal customers with free information about upcoming product launches, product give-aways, and coupons.

How to win “fans” for your facebook fan page?

The way to get more traffic and sales for your web site is to get as much fans as possible. If you don’t have enough fans to get the ball rolling, it might make sense to start by giving people an incentive to become a fan.

You can do something like these:

• Offer everyone who joins your fan page a 20% discount coupon for one of your products.
• You can say something like “If this fan page has over 5,000 members by July 10^th, every fan will get product X for free.”
• You can start a contest where you will give a nice prize like a free product, a ticket to a seminar or something similar. The only thing they need to do is to join your page and post an update on their walls about your page.

There are a lot more ways to get more fans for your page, but the above are already enough to get you started. Of course, before you actually plan ways to get more fans, you should first create your fan page.

No reason to put it off; it takes only a few minutes.

Login to your facebook account now.

Creating a Twitter Profile

It’s actually very easy to create a Twitter profile. First, you must go to http://twitter.com and look around.

Once you are familiar with the site, go to the sign up page (https://twitter.com/signup) and create one or more accounts. (See Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #1.)

Once you have setup your Twitter account, it is critical that you spend some time to personalize your profile: this is the key to achieving success with Twitter marketing.

Why Personalize Your Profile

Personalizing your Twitter profile will help you establish a credible identity. This way, you will not be perceived as spammer when you ask Twitter users to follow you.

When it comes to setting up a personalized profile on Twitter, there’s not much to do. It’s very easy and takes only 5 minutes. All you have to do are:

1. Login to your Twitter account and go to your Twitter settings page
2. Select a pre-existing background (or create a customized one)
3. Select or upload an avatar thumbnail photo
4. Fill in your “Bio” and “About me” section (you can put short descriptions here)
5. Add your primary web site URL

That is all there is to it! Here are some useful reminders, though:

• Avatar- As far as your avatar goes, it is probably a good idea to use the logo for your internet business. If you don’t have one, you can choose to upload your picture instead, if you feel comfortable enough to do so.
• Background- It can be a good idea to create a custom background, so that it includes your logo.
• Bio- Regarding the bio section create a bio section that briefly explains what your business does and what the purpose of this Twitter profile is (i.e. to give away free stuff, to hold contests, or to provide free information).

Twitter can be a great platform for reaching out to a lot more customers. If you plan your actions well, it can surely be your key to success.

Have you already set up your Web 2.0 site profiles? If yes, then, here are the next 2 steps you have to take:

1. Start finding followers or fans. Ideally, they must be people interested in your line of products or services or, at least, generally interested in your niche.
2. Using your followers and fans to collect information for adjusting your marketing plan and creating new products. Also aim to market your products to your followers and fans.

This is a rather simple process, and through this, it is important to maintain a coherent message.

For this reason, it might make sense…

… to spend some time planning a general “theme” for your Web 2.0 profiles.

You have to ask yourself some questions to determine the most appropriate theme to use:

• Is the purpose of your Web 2.0 profiles to alert people to sales and to tell them about contests you are holding?
• Are they made to discuss with your customers the general industry in which your internet business falls and mention your new products casually?

There’s not necessarily a best approach to take here, but it is important that you pick one and stick with it. This way, your customers will not be confused about what your profiles are about, what they are made for, and you will get more targeted followers and fans. Status, posts, and tweets can deliver your message easily. However, the theme you use will definitely remain the best way to deliver a specific message to those who visit your Web 2.0 profiles.

Before you go out and spread the word about your business through We 2.0 sites, it’s important for you to spend some time carefully thinking about your Web 2.0 identity. That is to say, before you create a Twitter account, launch a Facebook fan page, and begin to market your business through web 2.0 channels, you need to know what image you want to project.

Beginning Your Web 2.0 Campaign

When it comes to Web 2.0 marketing, the first thing you will want to do is…
…decide whether you should create profiles based on:

• Your business
• Yourself
• Both.

Each of the three options has benefits, but it is ultimately up to you to decide which will work best for your particular situation.

Once you have selected your route, you should create accounts on web 2.0 sites and setup a profile that reflects your choice. For instance, a Twitter account for your business should focus exclusively on business activities and not your personal life.

What you probably need is a simple step by step plan to implement web 2.0 marketing to your business.

Well, you guessed it: here it is!

If you follow through with this simple step by step plan, you’ll achieve a presence in the web 2.0 sphere that very few of your competitors can match.

The rise of web 2.0 has transformed internet business as we once knew it.

In the past, business owners were limited in

• how they interacted with customers,
• how they collected information about them,
• and how they marketed new products and services to them.

Today, these strictures have been removed, permitting business owners to gather information, learn, and respond much faster than ever before.

It has also transformed the internet business landscape in another way:

by creating a rift between those who know how to navigate web 2.0 sites and services; and those who do not.

Those who don’t know how to use web 2.0 services may find themselves on the defensive constantly—doing anything to retain customers—even if they had a successful business model only years ago.

Those who feel comfortable with web 2.0 may now find themselves at a significant advantage.

Whether you’re currently using web 2.0 to promote your internet business or are thinking about doing so, it is important for you to understand how to do it correctly.

No matter whether you’re inexperienced or a veteran social marketer, if you don’t have the right information, it can be easy to botch a marketing campaign or simply run out of ideas.

Fortunately for you, this blog post series was designed for people in your exact position: those who know that web 2.0 is an important part of doing business today; and who want to learn how to use it correctly.

In the rest of this blog post series, I’m going to provide you with 77 easy top tips that you can use

• to integrate web 2.0 into your internet business,
• to market your products,
• to find new customers,
• to manage existing customers and extract information from them.

They are stand-alone tips. You can do them step by step from start to finish, or you can just do a few of them.

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #1: Consistent Web 2.0 Identity is Key

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #2: Keep Your Web 2.0 Message Simple

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #3: Twitter Profile Tweet

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #4: Facebook Fan Page for Success

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #5: Tracking Your Twitter Results

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #6: It Is All about Social Capital

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #7: Using the Twitter Search Engine to Find New Followers

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #8: Use Twitter for Market Research

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #9: Earn Instant Credibility and Expert Status through YouTube

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #10: Get A Profile at LinkedIn.com

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #11: Put a Photo in All Your Social Networking Site Profiles

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #12: Get Loyal Followers by Posting Useful Information

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #13: Promote Your Internet Business through Blog Commenting

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #14: Encourage Your Customers and Subscribers to Visit Your Facebook Fan Page

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #15: Trust Your Own Intuition and Experience

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #16: LinkedIn.com Reviews

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #17: Integrate Your Web 2.0 Marketing Efforts with Everything Else

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #18: Use Forums for Traffic and Networking

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #19: Connect to Influential People

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #20: Web 2.0 Marketing is Still Marketing

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #21: Going After Niche Networks

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #22: Power of Twitter and Facebook Combined

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #23: Get Closer to Fans with Your Facebook Fan Page

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #24: Make Readers Your Facebook and Twitter Advertisers

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #25: Courtesy Is a Must

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #26: The Need for Conversations

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #27: Give Freedom with Your Facebook Fan Page

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #28: Build Your Reputation with Charities

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #29: How to Make Angry Customers Love You

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #30: Harmony between Personal and Business Time

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #31: Keep It Private but It Keep It Real

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #32: Conquer Your Fears

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #33: Quickie Posts with Tumblr

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #34: Twitter Feeds on Your Homepage

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #35: Create Longer Tweets with Tumblr

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #36: Tumblr vs. the World

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #37: The Perfect Tumblr Theme

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #38: Tumblr Alternatives to Discover

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #39: Last.fm Your Music Network

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #40: Seduction Tip for Getting Facebook Fans

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #41: Getting Facebook Customers with Your Mailing List

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #42: Easy Way to Get More Facebook Fans

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #43: Email to Twitter

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #44: Spreading the Word with RSS Feeds

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #45: Short RSS Feeds that Get Readers Hooked

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #46: Vital Use of The "Find Us" Box

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #47: Disqus and Tumblr for the Win

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #48: Give Identity with Disqus

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #49: Making a Moneymaking Forum

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #50: Go and Multiply

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #51: Start Reaping Profits from Forums

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #52: Creating a New Sensational Social Network

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #53: Draw in Members

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #54: Turn Social Networks into Money Generators

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #55: Use Twitter to Sell Your Products

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #56: Create a Firesale

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #57: List Building with Twitter

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #58: Creating a WordPress Blog

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #59: Update Customers with a Facebook Fan Page

Consolidate everything that is working; and move forward with a new model.

These unprofitable sections of your internet business might include websites that are poorly monetized; or products that don’t seem to sell very well.

Whatever the case may be, consider selling it on a forum like SitePoint.

If you have monthly revenue data (from AdSense or PayPal records), this will be helpful.

Even if the site doesn’t sell well for you, that doesn’t mean it can’t for someone else.

This is something that is important to highlight when making the sale.

Point out the positives about the site (such as its daily unique visitor counts); and then mention how this can potentially make more money if monetized better.

One good thing about selling your unprofitable sites is that you can usually get something like 7-10 months worth of profit from the sale.

Even if your site was making a meager $100/mo, this could translate into an immediate sale for $700-1000.

As far as e-books, reports, and unprofitable intellectual property go, consider selling them on forums.

Do whatever you need to in order to make the most from them—whether it be selling the master resale rights; or simply selling them to many people with a restrictive license.

One way to do this is to make offers that they cannot refuse.

For instance, you could offer to develop a product independently and at your own expense (and also agree to revise it until the JV partner finds it acceptable) if your partner will give you a mere 5% split of the profits she receives from promoting it.

While it might seem like you’re giving away too much here for it to be worth it, this can often be one of your best options when you’re in a bind.

If even one marketer with a large list accepts this offer, you have the potential to make hundreds—if not thousands—of sales. This could translate into you making several hundred dollars in the span of two weeks.

This might consist of something like a standard graphics package for a site, including a logo and banners; as well as a 10-15 articles.

Once you have created your content mini-site, consider how best to sell it.

Usually, the best place to sell it is a marketing forum.

The price and the number of copies you want to sell may be harder question.

If you believe you can make two sites per day, then it may make sense to sell them for as little as $30/each.

Remember, also, that you should research the topics you pick in advance, so that the sites you create will target lucrative keywords for your buyers.

If you need cash badly, consider using this section on one of the larger Internet marketing forums to sell something that a lot of people need for very cheap.

For instance, consider writing a 15-page report on a current hot topic; and selling it for $3 per copy as a special offer.

This may sound like a tiny amount—and indeed it is—but that’s exactly the point.

You’re not selling a massive, comprehensive set of encyclopedias.

You’re simply selling something small and targeted for a tiny price, so that potential buyers don’t have to think hard about what to do.

If you do a good job with this approach and create a valuable product, there’s a good chance you’ll make hundreds of dollars from your offer.

You know how to create ad campaigns, exchange links, create salesletters, manage autoresponders, create check-out pages—and all the other things that Internet marketers do on a daily basis.

As it turns out, this can be very useful if you’re in a bid and need cash.

You can simply offer your services to Internet marketers on forums and in other places in exchange for small fees.

For instance, if you need to make $50/day for the next week, then offer to submit a site’s link to 50 directories for $5.

You should have no problem pulling in 10 sales per day with that a strategy like that.

When it comes to joint venture partnerships, there are three things to keep in mind:

1. Most good JV partners will reject you initially. If a person immediately accepts your JV offer, there’s a good chance that she is not receiving many offers.On the other hand, if she doesn’t respond initially or tells you that she’ll need more time or a better offer, this probably (but doesn’t always) mean that a lot of people are pursuing her as a JV partner.

   Why is this important to understand?

   Because you will get rejected many times initially when you first begin sending out offers. It is important to understand that partnerships can often be a numbers game; and that you shouldn’t be discouraged too easily.

2. Be courteous and make a generous offer.Often, the simple presence of a JV partner will boost your sales and your profile as a marketer far beyond what it will do for you in direct sales from that partner.For this reason, it is always a good idea to approach JV partners with a generous offer; and to be patient, kind, and courteous.
3. Stay focused in your presentation.If you’re looking for a JV partner who can drive traffic to your site; and you are willing to offer a profit-sharing arrangement in exchange, then say that upfront.Make sure they understand exactly what it is that you need from them; and exactly what they will get for participating.

If you do these three things—and if you remain persistent—you have a good chance of finding at least a few JV partners who will be willing to work with you and promote your project.

1. an inexpensive, entry-level product,
2. a sales page, and
3. a check-out system.

All you need to do now to make more cash is direct additional traffic to it.

While posting on Myspace Forums was a good way to start, there are still a lot of options available for traffic generation.

One such option is Twitter.

If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s a social networking service that allows you to add and remove friend as you would on Myspace or Facebook.

The difference is that the main purpose of Twitter is to send out 140-character “tweets” to your friends; and, in return, to read what they are tweeting about.

Of course, Twitter can also be used to make emergency cash.

1. To do this, you’ll need to start by creating an account if you do not already have one.
2. After that, you will want to begin adding people who might be good targets for your sales campaign. You can do this by searching to see who is tweeting about topics related to your product. You can then add them.
3. After a week or so, if you worked diligently, you will have hundreds of followers.
4. What you should do next is begin making tweets that do not directly pitch your product. Instead, they should simply communicate interesting and useful information about your product niche.

Your goal in this whole process is to spur some interest in your twitter profile.

There you will place a link to your salespage. That’s right: instead of using your profile to conduct a massive pitchfest, you will use it to draw people in naturally, so that they view your profile on their own terms—and then decide whether to buy.

Internet marketers have held contests to see how much they can make in one day, one week, or one month by creating a new product and selling it through a social marketing medium.

When it comes to this type of project, there are two things to ask yourself:

1. What type of product should you sell?
2. What medium should you sell it in?

In this article , I will cover how to sell on Myspace forums. In the next article, we’ll consider Twitter.

Let’s start with the types of products you might want to sell on Myspace.

What Product to Sell

You might immediately assume that you should sell one of your flagship products, but in fact, social media sites are not always the best place to do this. For this reason, you will want to answer this question by doing market research, rather than simply picking a product and running with it.

One way you can approach this is to begin browsing through a variety of Myspace member forums. Do this for various categories; and make an attempt to gauge how large the forum following is. Are there hundreds of people who post regularly? Thousands? What is it that they’re talking about; and what information could they possibly need to help them in their endeavors?

Once you find a group that strikes you, begin reading up on their topic of choice; and then participate in the forum discussions. Try to make friends and be helpful. This will benefit you in the long run, since they are unlikely to respond well to you if they perceive you as a green-eyed infiltrator whose only interest is in selling them stuff.’

After you have a feel for the forum and the topic, commission a writer through a site like Elance to create a powerful, but brief, “how to” manual on some specific facet of their topic. For instance, you might follow a jewelry group; and decide to create a guide on how to purchase high quality beads online at a steep discount.

Whatever you do, make sure that this topic is something you hear about on the forum frequently. Your goal should be to provide a product that solves a problem that seems to be common among forum members.

Once you have this guide in hand, create a mini-site with a short copy salespage; and a PayPal checkout button, so that you can receive payment immediately. On the salesletter, highlight the following benefits of your guide:

• Explain how it will tangibly improve the lives of your target demographic group (i.e. after you read my guide, you will be able to do task x twice as fast) in general.
• Highlight the specific benefits of certain chapters (i.e. chapter 8 alone will save you $100 per month).

Also, consider selling your guide for a very, very low price. Your goal here should be to make the decision to purchase a no-brainer. At least initially, you shouldn’t bludgeon your new customers with high-end products. Introduce them to your work with something that costs around $3-7. If you do a good job with everything else, you could easily make around $500 in a matter of days.

The final step is market your product by creating a signature that references it. Beyond that, all you can do is post frequently; and hope that people see it and buy.

Instead of creating a website, building traffic over time, creating a product, and then waiting for the profits to flow in, you can simply look for a babysitting job that will likely pay you cash (and possibly even the same day).

Today, the process of getting a babysitting job isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago.

You don’t need to know someone who knows someone who needs a babysitter.

All you have to do is locate good places online to find parents who need babysitters; and then submit dozens of job applications.

In a matter of hours, you very well could have a job lined up for tonight.

Start by going to www.care.com. This is one of the best places to find sitting jobs. All you have to do there is create a profile, and do a good job of advertising yourself. Remember to highlight things about yourself that will put potential employers at ease; and will communicate to them that you will be good sitter.

In addition to this, there are two other things you may want to consider doing: 1) allowing www.care.com to run a background check on you, so that you can demonstrate to parents that you do not pose any threat to the children. Also, you may want to consider including a picture of yourself in your profile, so that your application has a more human feel to it.

In addition to www.care.com, there are many other places for you to locate sitting jobs. One of those places is www.craigslist.org. You can start by going to the site and then selecting the major city closest to your place of residence.

Once you have done this, browse and search through the “gigs” and “jobs” section to locate promising sitting jobs. Look for parents who are willing to pay cash; and who need a sitter immediately (perhaps because they have plans for the evening). Since they will have fewer options and will be in a rush, there’s a better chance they’ll select you and do so without taking up a lot of your time with interviews, questions, and other formalities.

Overall, this strategy is an excellent way to make cash fast when you’re in a bind. This is especially true if you have past sitting experience or have had children of your own.

What I did not mention originally is that there are several other possibilities when it comes to freelance writing.

You don’t always have to look for a buyer; and then create a project that matches her specifications.

Rather, there are other models of freelance writing that don’t involve you using Elance or forums to find customers.

In particular, sites like www.associatedcontent.com, www.helium.com, and www.constant-content.com permit you to participate in such alternative freelancing approaches.

Within this class of sites, there are two important categories:

1. the category of sites that facilitate direct sales of your writing; and
2. the category of sites that permit you to post content—and then pay you according to how frequently it is viewed on the site.

Category 1 Sites: facilitating direct sales of your writing

Sites like www.associatedcontent and www.constant-content.com will permit you to post articles on their site. Publishers will then browse the site for topics of interest; and purchase your articles if they think it would be a good match for their site’s content.

1. One benefit of using this category of freelance site is that your articles will usually sell for a high price (i.e. for $15-20/each, rather than $5/each).
2. Additionally, if you truly enjoy writing, the higher prices will permit you to create something requires research and careful thought, rather than something that simply requires you to write as quickly as is possible.

The major downside of this type of freelancing is that there’s no guarantee that anyone will buy your articles at the end of the day. This means that you could invest hours in your articles; and could ultimately never make any money.

Category 2 Sites: pay for views

Unlike category 1 sites, category 2 sites, such as www.helium.com, do not match you with a buyer. Instead, you give the site your content; and, in return, you gain revenue whenever someone views your article. Usually, this amounts to something like 1-3 cents per view.

In general, if you plan to use category 2 sites, you should be careful about which topics you pick. Since these sites usually generate revenue through Google AdSense, they often pay accordingly. This means that you should write about topics that businesses spend a lot of advertising money on.

It might not initially be obvious what these topics are, but if you spend some time on Google Adwords searching for keywords, you should be able to scrape together some keywords that people pay a great deal to advertise for.

Summary

Ultimately, neither of these methods provides a lighting-fast way to make emergency cash.

If you need emergency cash today or by the end of the week, you definitely have other options that are better (such as using Elance.com or Guru.com to find freelancing projects). As a form of supplementary income, these sites are a good option.

If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s basically just large advertisement that is either painted on or attached to your car.

Normally, companies will pay to put wraps on their own fleet of cars.

But some companies also choose to advertise by paying normal drivers $300-750 per month to use a wrap that advertises the company’s products.

Unfortunately, getting selected for these positions can be difficult.

Hundreds or even thousands of drivers often queue up as soon as companies begin offering these opportunities, so it can often be hard to find a spot.

Additionally, if you have a history of moving violations (such as multiple speeding tickets within a short period of time), then you may not be eligible—or at least your application won’t be given top priority.

You may also not be disqualified if you do not drive frequently or if you don’t live in a major population center.

If this still sounds like a good idea to you, you can get specific information about this opportunity at the following sites:

1. http://www.adsmartoutdoor.com/driversreg.htm

2. http://www.ad-wraps.com/driversinfo_signup.htm

If you live outside of the U.S., there are still many other similar advertising opportunities.

Just look for mobile advertising companies in your area.

In addition to this, there are other ways that you can make emergency cash through web design.

Selling Your Services as a Freelance Web Designer

If you haven’t already designed multiple web sites, it’s probably not a good idea to try to sell yourself as a high-end web designer.

However, as long as you have a WYSIWYG editor, know a little about Internet marketing, and are willing to work hard, you can expect to earn a decent bounty from mid-to-low level web design work.

Since I’ve gone over the general concept of freelancing several times already, I won’t focus on it too much here.

Again, look at sites like Elance.com, SitePoint.com, Guru.com, and others when trying to sell your web design services.

Additionally, remember that it is vital to have a portfolio (perhaps one site with multiple sub-domains to show off various styles and themes) and to avoid overselling your skills.

Sell Site Re-Designs to Companies

This is a little bit harder than doing typical web design work. Instead of simply selling your services, getting site specs, and then performing the design job, you will need to start this process by seeking out sites (and preferably sites of local businesses) that could benefit from a site-re-design.

Once you have located these sites, make a pitch to the business owner.

Offer to redesign the site, so that it is more functional, provides more interactive features for visitors, generates more traffic, and appears more professional and better-organized. When you begin this process, offer to do it for a very low price until you build up a customer base; and begin receiving some feedback.

Another thing you should do is to offer to maintain the site once it is re-designed.

This means that you would be on call to monitor downtime; and to make any changes needed.  This might seem like a hassle, but it could be well worth it if you accumulate a large portfolio of sites that require very little maintenance. B

y charging around $50/month for maintenance, you could reap a large and virtually passive income while only working 10-15 hours per week.

Summary

Freelance web design is an excellent way to make emergency cash, even if you have only created one or two websites and know nothing about Flash, php, or even html.

The key is that you should work with a WYSIWYG editor (and master it over time), focus on working with local businesses, and sell the maintenance work as a package. Additionally, you should make an attempt to pitch your proposal over the phone.

In many cases, local businesses do not have websites; and do not actively market their businesses via the Internet.

You should take advantage of the knowledge and experience you have to sell Internet marketing services to local businesses.

A Website Is A Must For All Local Businesses

In general, most companies can benefit from a web presence, even if it doesn’t gain them any additional new customers.

This is why it is a good idea to contact small, local businesses (who have Yellow Pages listings, but not web sites) to offer to help them setup a site.

Of course, you should always prepare in advance before you contact any company. If your sales pitch is weak or ill-informed, there’s a good chance you’ll be rejected fast.

So, start by writing out a standard pitch. In your pitch, make sure you communicate clearly that having a web presence will allow existing customers to gain more information about the company online, which has the potential to increase sales, even if the customer base does not increase.

Finally, consider starting a single site for a given town. On this site, create an index of all businesses that are willing to pay a small fee (perhaps $50/year, initially); and then optimize the site for search engine traffic. On each business’s page, place pertinent information about what they do, where they are located, and what they sell.

If you really want to make an impact on the business owner, create a page for their business in advance and put it on your site. When you make the pitch, you can call the owner, ask him to look at the site, and then get back to you about whether he would like to pay the fee to keep his business’s listing on your site. Remember, you can do this with many cities and many businesses.

Local Restaurants

One good place to start is by selling your services to local restaurants. One thing you might do for local restaurants is offer to get them connected with Internet-based ordering services.

In many places in the U.S., sites like Foodler.com and Grubhub.com allow visitors to order from sites online; however, many local restaurants do not use these sites and many not even know about them. By joining these sites, local businesses have the opportunity to significantly improve the amount of orders they receive; and also to streamline the process by receiving them via the Internet, rather than over the phone.

Your role in this process would be to assist the restaurants in this process. You can do this by offering to setup Foodler.com and Grubhub.com accounts for nominal fee. This would entail collecting information about the restaurant’s menu, hours, etc.—and then submitting it to these sites.

After you complete this process, you can offer to market these businesses in other ways. For instance, if they do not have a website, you can offer to create and maintain one for a small fee (perhaps for $200 for the startup, but then $50 per month thereafter). Since these sites are likely to require little maintenance, you can accumulate a large portfolio of sites.

Now, if you’re not familiar with web design, do not worry. Without knowing any HTML, you can create a website using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor. If you own a Mac, you can use iWeb. If have a PC, you might choose to do this with FrontPage or DreamWeaver. Alternatively, you can do this using a free program, such as http://kompozer.net or http://www.w3.org/Amaya.

Whatever you do, make sure that you spend enough time working with the WYSIWYG editor before you try to do any work for your clients. If you do a very poor job on a site, you can expect your client to be very angry and dissatisfied, since this will be his/her only web presence.

Summary

Frequently, Internet marketers overlook an important group of buyers: local businesses that do not have any web presence. Without even employing cutting-edge techniques, you can help these businesses to gain a web presence while earning a handsome reward in the process.

• If you’ve already done graphic design work of some sort, this is a definite plus.
• If you haven’t, don’t worry. It’s still possible to make emergency cash online doing graphic design work.
• But if graphic design gives you the creeps, better move on to the next article.

For now, I will assume that you don’t have any prior experience.In that case, it is essential that you begin by accumulating items to put in your portfolio, which you will show to prospective clients.

At a minimum, you will want to create the following objects for your graphic design portfolio…

1. an e-book cover;
2. a banner;
3. a small business logo; and
4. a payment button.

If you’re not skilled with Photoshop (or GIMP, the free analog to Photoshop), this type of work probably won’t be easy initially. You’ll probably do very poorly on your first few banners, but with a little work, you can get better.

If you plan to sell banners, one good way to start is by going to the following site: http://mybannermaker.com. This site will allow you to create a banner by uploading a background image, inserting text, and tweaking a few options. It’s easy to do; and it is also free.

1. One good way to approach this process is to edit each component individually in GIMP or Photoshop before you insert it into the banner using mybannermaker.com.
2. Once the editing is finished, the only step that remains is to combine everything using the site.

Remember, since all of your work is likely to be used for commercial purposes, it is critical to use “stock photos” and photos that are in the public domain. Otherwise, you could be violating someone’s copyright.

Once you have created a small portfolio of items that are sufficiently attractive and well-polished it’s time to begin marketing your work through various channels.

3 Ways To Find Freelance Graphic Design Work

Channel #1: Elance

As I mentioned earlier, Elance is a good place to pick up freelance writing and editing projects. It is also a good place to find work if you are a freelance graphic designer. All you have to do is post your portfolio in your profile, bid reasonably on projects, and then wait for people to accept. As you gain credibility, your acceptance rate will rise.

Channel #2: Sitepoint.com and Warriorforum.com

Site users at both of these places require a great deal of graphic design work; and if you want to make emergency cash as a graphic designer, you should take advantage of this.

Start by making an offer people cannot resist.

For instance, offer to make site logos for $3 (or free) for one week. If you actually produce high-quality logos, the forums will be buzzing about your work by the end of the week; and future work will come flowing in without your needing to do anything else.

Channel #3: Craigslist.org

As I mentioned earlier, Craigslist is a great place to find freelance writing projects. This is also true for graphic design projects. Just keep in mind that you can search for jobs in any Craigslist city site, since many of them do not require you to work on-location.

Summary

Freelance graphic design work is an excellent way to raise cash quickly; however, it is important to keep in mind that submitting low quality work may very well ensure that you never get a project.

1. So, before you get started, work out all the kinks until you can create an acceptable portfolio.
2. After that, go forward with your work and also ensure that you match or exceed your clients’ expectations.

Even if you work very hard, it is unlikely that you will be able to transform your skills significantly enough to make emergency cash with your writing in the short run. In the long run, however, this might be a viable strategy.

On the other hand, if you feel comfortable with your writing, then freelancing is an excellent way to make emergency cash fast online.

With that said, let’s take at your two major options when it comes to sources of freelance writing jobs.

The Most Important Sites for Freelancers

If you decide to become a freelance writer, there are two important sites you should join: www.guru.com and www.elance.com.

These sites allow freelancers to post bids on tens of thousands of writing, translation, graphic design, programming, and administrative assistant projects.

Although you can join both sites for free, you will quickly see why it is a good idea to upgrade your account for at least one of the sites.

1. Upgrading will enable you to bid on more categories of projects and also to bid on more projects within each category.
2. It will also demonstrate your credibility to project posters.

If you decide to upgrade your Elance account, you may want to consider adding the “writing and translation” category, as well as the “marketing and advertising” category.

Even though “marketing and advertising” includes many non-writing projects, it includes things such as special report-writing, salesletter-writing, and ad-writing.

If you’re a good writer and have a background in IM, you’ll be especially well suited to these types of jobs.

When using Elance and Guru, it is important to note that individuals with good reputations tend to receive the most projects. And there’s a good reason for this: they have the most credibility; and this is what project posters want in freelancers.

When you first start off, there’s little you can do to immediately project credibility. So, if you want to compete, you will have to do it along other margins—namely, price and completion time.

If you can offer low prices and fast delivery times, there’s a good chance you’ll get selected every once in a while.

But you will not be selected for most of the projects you bid on.

When you start, you can expect to get rejected at least 75% of the time.

• Don’t use this as a reason to give up.
• Instead, continue to post on all projects that seem reasonable, given your skills; and get comfortable with the idea that you won’t always be selected.
• As you complete more projects and get more feedback, your acceptance rate will improve.

As a final note, it is always a good idea spend some time sorting through projects before you settle on any one in particular.

Here’s how to find your freelance projects to bid on:

1. I would recommend browsing through all relevant projects closing within 2-3 days.
2. Each time you find one that looks good to you, add it to your watch list.
3. When you have completed this process, go back and look at each project carefully. Take a look at the high and low bids, the promised completion times of the other bidders, and the work involved.
4. Decide whether it’s something you can do well; and, if so, whether you could complete it at a competitive price and within a reasonable amount of time.
5. If you decide that all of your criteria are satisfied, then bid on the project.

By the end of the process, you will probably bid on multiple projects at the same time, but keep in mind that most will reject you, anyway, so this is unlikely to be a problem.

If you want to ensure that your bids have a high chance of being successful, then you should spend time reading the project description and writing a good, detail-oriented proposal.

Most project posters won’t selected a generic proposal, but instead will opt for a proposal that demonstrates that the bidder was paying attention to the project, has the relevant skills, and can make a case for his being able to do the work described.

Of course, there’s a lot more you can do with freelancing sites, but for now, I will leave it at that.

If you want to make cash with them fast, you should immediately begin implementing the steps I’ve mentioned above.

More ways to find freelance writing jobs.

Craigslist.org

There’s no need for a detailed description here. Finding freelancing jobs on Craigslist is relatively simple, since there’s no way to receive feedback or develop a reputation through the site. All you have to do is search in the “jobs” and “gigs” sections. Whenever you see something that lines up with your skills, email the poster with a copy of your resume and a brief, but detailed proposal. Try to make a strong case for why you would be the best candidate for the position.

Internet Marketing Forums

Since good marketing involves a lot of writing, Internet marketers often hire freelance writers to complete projects. These projects include things such as e-books, reports, articles, salesletters, text ads, and site content.

There are a number of places where you can connect with Internet marketers to find projects; however, one of the better places is probably on Internet marketing forums, such as www.warriorforum.com. There, you will find tens of thousands of Internet marketers, many of whom need writing done.

Of course, simply showing up and posting on the forum won’t necessarily result in your getting jobs. Instead, you will need to make a reputation for yourself, so that marketers begin to actively seek you out as a source for content.

For starters, a good way to get your name out there and circulating among Internet marketers is to demonstrate that you can produce high-quality work in a way that doesn’t cost them anything.

One way you can do this is to post a special offer in the trade/sales portion of the IM forum. Instead of simply posting a “good deal,” offer something that is truly irresistible. For instance, you might offer to write articles for half the going market rate for a limited period of time. This will probably flood you with work, but will be worth it in the long run, as you may gain may new clients.

Finally, remember that your success will be heavily dependent on word-of-mouth advertising among Internet marketers.

• This means that if you do a poor job on projects, you could permanently damage your reputation; and make it exceedingly hard to get new projects.
• And, on the other hand, if you do good work, it could reap dividends for years to come.

Usually, this means doing things like record-keeping, database entry, and other repetitive tasks.

However, in other situations, it might mean something like submitting links to directories, managing an affiliate program, or something like that.

Whatever the case may be, the only requirement is usually that you be good with computers and with the Microsoft Office suite of products.

Other than that, you will probably be given a detailed set of instructions that explain exactly what you should be doing on a daily basis.

When looking for administrative assistant jobs, a good place to look is www.elance.com.

If you need immediate payment, you should look for one-time, small jobs. Put in a low bid; and offer to work around the clock until you complete it.

If you do a good job, there’s a chance the client will release the funds to you within days, which you can then transfer to your PayPal account.

Alternatively, you can pick up very large jobs; and require clients to make a deposit of, say, 30% on acceptance of your bid. This means that you will get 30% of the project’s full cost as soon as you are hired, which you can immediately transfer to your PayPal account and then deposit in your bank.

As a final note, one key to doing well with these types of projects is to make credible bids.

• You can do this by writing a proposal that is specifically tailored to the project, rather than just writing something generic.
• You can also do this by submitting samples of your relevant work, a copy of your resume, and anything else that might provide pertinent information to the job poster.

If you end up with a successful business as a byproduct, then that’s just a bonus.

With that said, it’s important to realize that internet businesses don’t usually turn a profit overnight.

Instead, it is usually a long process that will only turn a profit after months have passed.

There are two general reasons why internet businesses usually don’t turn a profit quickly.

1. The first is that many Internet-business owners have little or no formal training; and often make serious errors in the implementation stage.
2. And the second reason is that good long-term business plans generally require you to gradually promote your site through things like search engine optimization, cross-promotional agreements, and joint ventures.

While these long-term techniques are essential for business plans, they won’t work to make you emergency cash tonight.

If you want to make emergency cash tonight, you essentially have two options:

1. you can use PPC advertising; or
2. you can use word-of-mouth advertising.

Other than that, it is unlikely that other techniques will yield immediate sales.

With that said, let’s breakdown the process step-by-step, so that you can understand how to make a quick profit with this technique.

Step #1: Create Your Product… Fast

When it comes to writing a special report, don’t be a perfectionist. Spend no more than a half hour to come up with your topic. Once you’ve done that, spend no more than two hours researching the topic. And once you’ve done that, spend no more than five hours to write the report.

When you’re done with the whole process, stop working on your report for the night. Come back to it the following day, edit it thoroughly, format it, and then create a PDF version. Even though your goal is to do everything quickly, you should make sure that it is error-free, well written, and contains useful information.

Additionally, as a general rule, you should pick a topic you’re already familiar with. If you’re familiar with Internet marketing, write a report about Internet marketing. If you’re a good cook, write a report about cooking. If you know something about buying cars, then write a guide about that.

Whatever you do, make sure that you come up with a catchy hook for your product. There should be something about your special report that others will find interesting; and that will draw them to buy.

With the vast amount of free information widely available on the Internet, it is critical to be able to market your product in a way that differentiates from everything else available.

Once you complete your product, it’s time to move on to the site-building phase.

Step #2: Build Your Site… Quickly

Again, the point of this exercise is to get your product made and put in front of as many buyers as quickly as possible. This means that you can’t take your time when it comes to the site-building phase.

I personally suggest that you register a domain, purchase cheap hosting, and immediately install a plug-in that will allow you to edit your site using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor.

Most hosting sites will offer a large variety of these editors, but I suggest using something simple and something that offers a lot of different templates. WordPress is probably a good option.

Once you’ve installed the WYSIWYG editor, it’s time to select a good sales page template. Your choice should be clean, professional, and free of distractions, such as links to other pages.

After you do that, it’s time to put up a salesletter. Again, time is of the essence, so don’t bother with long-copy. Keep it short, sweet, and to the point. Make sure you have a good hook, a number of bullet points that highlight the products benefits (rather than features), and a call to action (to buy).

Finally, add a PayPal payment button. If you want to ensure that you make sales immediately, it’s a good idea to keep the price low (say, between $3 and $7). This will ensure that you maintain a high conversion rate.

Step #3: Advertise

Once you have a functioning sales page, a product to sell, and check-out system, it’s time to begin advertising your product. However, in this case, it’s a good idea to skip SEO and slow promotional methods—and move immediately to PPC and word-of-mouth advertising.

As far as PPC advertising goes, this is as simple as creating a Google Adwords account and making several advertising campaigns. Remember to focus each campaign narrowly. Also, remember to use the root keyword in your campaign multiple times in your advertisement, so that it shows up in bold when people see your ad.

Finally, once you have your PPC campaign working, consider using some word-of-mouth channels to spread the word about your product.

If you are a member of online forums related to your product’s niche, you should include a link to your salespage in your signature; and make an effort to post frequently, so that others see it. You should also consider offering a deal to members of the forum.

Conclusion

If you want to make cash fast, selling your products online is always a good option; however, you cannot do it using the conventional formula for Internet business creation.

Instead, you have to cut out all obstacles that will slow down payments, slow down traffic flows, and generally prevent you from realizing a profit within days.

Using the template I’ve given above, you should be able to make emergency cash within days, as long as you push yourself to stick to the timeline I’ve suggested.

If you’re unfamiliar with the site, it’s a place where artisans can sell various homemade goods in a thick, online marketplace.

Some important things to note about Etsy are the following:

1. everything you sell must be something you made yourself;
2. it costs 20 cents to list an item for 4 months; and
3. each sale will incur a 3.5% transaction fee.

As far as what you can sell on Etsy goes, hot sellers include pieces of art, bags and purses, candles, toys for children, crocheted items, holiday decorations, quilts, vintage pieces, and wedding decorations.

For a basic overview of the “dos and don’ts” of selling on Etsy, you should view the guide they’ve placed online here: http://www.etsy.com/dosdonts.php.

While there are many ways to make emergency cash with Etsy, the experts suggest that building items around a single theme and specializing is one of the best ways to get noticed and to sell items. This is usually a better option that creating a lot of disparate items in different categories.

Overall, Etsy provides a good opportunity to make emergency cash online fast; and while doing something you enjoy already.

However, if you’re not particularly artistic or don’t have an interest in crafts, then Etsy may not be a good option for you.

• an old computer or laptop,
• old electronics, old furniture,
• old textbooks,
• and old clothing.

As far as you’re concerned, this stuff is useless.

You won’t ever use it again; and all it’s doing is taking up space.

But for many other people, they would be willing to pay for an old computer, old furniture, or old clothes.

Once you realize this, you’ll also see that selling junk that you no longer use could been an excellent way to raise some cash without too much work.

In the past, if you wanted to do this, you’d have to hold a garage sale; and would have to advertise for it by posting signs on telephone poles all over your neighborhood.

If you were lucky, a handful of people would show up and pay very little for some of your stuff. But this is no longer the case.

Now, you can use two important tools to ensure that you get a higher price and also close the sale faster: www.craigslist.org and www.ebay.com.

For things like clothing and light electronics, www.ebay.com is probably a better option. It is a thicker market; and will allow you to unload just about everything you have if you’re willing to sell at a low enough price.

On the other hand, www.craigslist.org is good if you’re selling heavy items, such as furniture. Since shipping would be prohibitively expensive for most furniture, it simply does not make sense to do it on www.ebay.com. If you use www.craigslist.org instead, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find someone in your area who will be willing to drive to your house or apartment to pick up the item.

When it comes to using either www.ebay.com or www.craigslist.org, it’s important that you spend time to briefly explain what it is you are selling, so that potential buyers know what you’re offering. It is also important to include pictures of the items you’re selling, as doing this will make browsers significantly more willing to buy.

Much like finding a babysitting job, finding a tutoring job is another excellent way to make emergency cash fast.

Not only is it possible to get a job that starts tonight, but there’s also a good chance that you’ll get paid in cash on the spot.

And when you’re in a bind, it doesn’t get much better than that.

When it comes to tutoring, there’s a good chance that the student or the student’s parents will want you to have some sort of formal credentials.

If you’re already starting to worry that your credentials may not be sufficient, don’t.

If you satisfy even one of the criteria, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find a bunch of tutoring gigs; and then leverage them into future gigs (if you decide to continue with it).

Here’s a list of useful credentials:

• In some cases, they’ll simply want you to be in college.
• In other cases, they’ll want you to have a bachelor’s degree or an advanced degree.
• And in other cases, they’ll want you to have significant prior teaching and/or tutoring experience.

Before you do anything else, start by creating a resume that focuses on skills that you have that are pertinent to tutoring. This should include all prior teaching and tutoring experience, all degrees you hold, all standardized tests scores (if relevant), all reference you have from past tutoring work you have done, and all relevant coursework you have done on the collegiate level.

Once you finish typing up your resume in Word, spend some time to format it so that it looks nice, and then save it in PDF format. Whenever you send out applications for prospective tutoring jobs, you should always attach a copy of your resume.

Now that everything is prepared, your next step is to look for tutoring jobs online. Again, you can do this through www.care.com and www.collegehelpers.com (if you are in college). Another great source of tutoring jobs is www.craigslist.org.

If you do decide to search for tutoring jobs through www.craigslist.org, one thing you’ll notice is that many of the tutoring jobs are posted by agencies. If you want to continue to do tutoring in the long term, working through an agency may be your best option. If you’re looking for short-term work agencies may not be your best option, as they are unlikely to pay in cash; and will require you to do through a lengthy application process.

On the other hand, if you do want longer term jobs, you should seek out all of the agency jobs and post an application on each agency website.

• Some companies do it before going out of business.
• Others do it as a part of their normal sales cycle.

If you’re in a bind and need some cash fast, then holding a firesale is probably one of your best options.

Of course, if it were easy or obvious how to do this, then everyone would do it successfully; and there would be no need for a guide such as this one. But this isn’t the case.

Here’s what I personally suggest you do to ensure that your firesale is successful:

Step #1: Before You Start Your Firesale Pick A Demographic

Before you even begin, it’s a good idea to pick a demographic to sell to.

If you don’t know who your target audience is before you get started, then it will be impossible for you to select the right things to sell to them; and it will also be impossible for you to pitch to them in a relatable way.

Step #2: Create A Truly Attractive Firesale Package

If you currently have a large product line, then this stage shouldn’t be terribly challenging for you. All you’ll have to do is select a handful of your products, bundle them together, and then sell them for a fraction of the normal cost.

If you don’t have your own product line, then this part could be a little more challenging. You’ll have to actively seek out products that offer some type of resale license, bundle them together, and then sell them at a tiny fraction of the normal combined price.

Step #3: Compute the Savings

Once you’ve assembled a large package of goods and have selected the firesale price, spend some time to determine how much it would cost an individual buyer to assemble all of these products (with normal—not resale—licenses).

You can then present the huge savings repeatedly in all of your advertisements.

Step #4: Pitch Your Firesale

Again, if you have your own product line, website, and autoresponder list, then this step will be relatively easier. In this case, you should start by pitching your firesale to your existing customers. As an added incentive, you might offer to make it even cheaper for people on your email list.

A good place to start is by creating a salespage for your firesale. Be careful to detail exactly how much buyers will save, so that they understand exactly how good the deal is. Also, include full descriptions of every product they will have access to after buying.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing copy, that’s perfectly fine. You can always hire someone from Elance to write the copy for you. Alternatively, you can spend some time on copywriting forums; and look for people who are marketing their services there. These individuals are more likely to have a strong background in marketing principles and copy-writing in particular (whereas those on Elance may be good writers, but not know much about marketing).

Once you have a salesletter, your next step should be to pitch the firesale to your email list. This will require you to write some short email copy. Here, you will just want to be brief, avoid the appearance of spam, and keep the tone of a letter. A good approach is usually to say something like the following:

=============

[Name],

I don’t usually do this, but I’m holding a firesale this week.

I’m going to sell my entire line of products for a mere 10% of the normal price. The catch is that I’m only going to allow people to buy at this price on Friday.

If you want a chance to get in on this incredible deal, I suggest that you check out what I’m offering at [firesale URL] and make sure to come back on Friday.

I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Yours,

[Name]

=============

Again, the idea is to avoid something that appears too overtly salesy.

Instead, you want to pitch it casually as an opportunity, but with a time limit and an associated sense of urgency.

On the other hand, if you don’t already have a list and a line of products of your own, it’s still a good idea to start by creating a salesletter; however, your approach here should probably be different.

How To Build Anticipation For Your Firesale

One good way to build anticipation for your firesale is to setup countdown clock on the page; and then incrementally add the items that will be part of your sale over time.

1. On day one, you could add three pieces of software that will be included in the firesale to the page.
2. On day two, you could add a bundle of 200 ghostwritten articles that will be included.
3. And so on.

The goal of this exercise should be to get people in the habit of returning to your site daily, so that your firesale successfully builds anticipation until the final night, when your sale will begin. By this time, if you did a good job, hundreds of people will have seen your sale; and will be ready to buy.

As far as the actual promotional process goes, you have several options if you don’t already have a mailing list:

1. Adwords. Since your goal is to raise emergency cash fast and since the firesale will only be available for a limited window of time, Adwords is probably one of your best options when it comes to marketing. Remember to use multiple campaigns, to carefully write your text ads, and to limit each campaign to narrowly-focused set of keywords and keyphrases.
2. Joint Ventures. Find other business owners who have large, active lists. Offer them a very high commission if they participate (i.e. on the other of 50% or 75% of each sale). This will not only help you from the sales that they bring in directly, but it will help you indirectly by raising your status by association.
3. Post on Forums. While most forums will prohibit you from directly marketing your products through a thread, most will allow you to include a signature that markets your products. You can do this in all large, relevant forums that you frequent; and when you do, make sure that you include the date of the firesale in your signature, so that forum members gain a sense of urgency.

Summary

A firesale can be one of the easiest ways to make emergency cash fast online. You should have products available however, because if you don’t manage it correctly, you could find yourself spending hundreds of dollars on resell products without any real return to speak of.

I’ll show you 21 ways to make emergency cash offline or online fast; and without necessarily having any interest in continuing to do so in the long run.

When most Internet marketers talk about making emergency cash online, they talk about it in the context of doing it quickly or immediately.

In general, this doesn’t work if you want to create a viable, long-term business model.

However, if you just want to make some cash now and don’t care about how stable and scalable your methods are in the long run, there are ways to do it.

If you settle on a handful of these options, take my advice, and work hard, you’ll make that emergency cash you need for now; and once you have it, you’ll be able to return to your long term business plans.

Please note: this article series is not…

• A list of “get rich quick” schemes
• A guide to participating in pyramid schemes
• A list of multi-level marketing schemes
• A list of business opportunities
• A guide for creating a successful business in the long term
• An attempt to get you to sell my products as an affiliate

That’s right: unlike virtually all of the other articles you’ll find on the Internet about making emergency cash fast, this series won’t tell you to do it through questionable, unreasonable strategies; or through a business opportunity that will incur a loss in the short run.

In fact, the tips shared here are the opposite of that.

These articles focus on how you can make emergency cash in the short run–legally, and by using reasonable, easy-to-follow emergency cash methods.

It won’t tell you to incur losses, to make large investments up front, or to be patient.

With that said, let’s get into the real content.

In these 21 articles, I’m going to tell you how you can make emergency cash online and offline in a short amount of time and without risking any large investments in the process.

Emergency Cash Tip #1: Make a Firesale

Emergency Cash Tip #2: Find a Freelance Tutoring Job

Emergency Cash Tip #3: Sell Your Junk Online

Emergency Cash Tip #4: Sell Crafts on Etsy

Emergency Cash Tip #5: Sell Your Own Special Reports… The Fast Way

Emergency Cash Tip #6: Freelance as an Virtual Assistant

Emergency Cash Tip #7: Become a Freelance Writer

Emergency Cash Tip #8: Freelance Graphic Design Work

Emergency Cash Tip #9: Internet Marketing for Local Businesses

Emergency Cash Tip #10: Web Design Work

Emergency Cash Tip #11: Put an Advertisement on Your Car

Emergency Cash Tip #12: Freelance Writing Without Even Having A Customer

Emergency Cash Tip #13: Find a Freelance Babysitting Job

Emergency Cash Tip #14: Use Myspace Forums to Sell Products

Emergency Cash Tip #15: Use Twitter to Market Your Myspace Forum Product

Emergency Cash Tip #16: Enter into a Joint Venture Partnership

Emergency Cash Tip #17: Offer Services to Internet Marketers

Emergency Cash Tip #18: Offer a Special Offer on the WarriorForum or SitePoint

Emergency Cash Tip #19: Sell Custom Content Mini-Sites

Emergency Cash Tip #20: Make a 5/95 JV Offer

Emergency Cash Tip #21: Sell Unprofitable Parts of Your Business

Imagine you had two different sales letters created for you. How do you know which one is likely to produce the better response? The only way is split testing them and comparing the results.

In 1886, retail businessman John Wanamaker famously quipped, “I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.”

But the truth is much worse.

In fact, most advertising is wasted, because most advertising is not based on what’s been proven to work.

So to go back to my earlier question: how do you know which ad will perform better?

To answer that question, you must first have a history of test results.

That is, you must have a pretty good idea as to what types of elements in an ad produce the best response, based on real-world tests.

• Not what you think or I think what will do best.
• Not your mother or next-door neighbor.
• Not even the million dollar ad agencies.

In fact, nobody would really know what to focus on, UNLESS they had access to these proven test results.

And in order to get these test results, there would have to be some way to specifically measure the results of any given ad. We would need to know which types of elements performed well and which did not. Then we could analyze the ads and determine the common techniques used among the successful ones.

Well, fortunately much of this work has been already done for you.

There are over a hundred years of history on advertising test results in which you can base your assumptions. So if you knew which kinds of ads performed better, then you might be able to take an educated guess as to which of the two ads would perform better than the other.

Of course, that kind of information is just a “starting point.”

You still need to split test your own ads. That means you’ll be using 2 or more versions of your ad, sales letter or whatever and compare their conversion rate.

The one that’s better is the winner. Once you have your winner, you immediately start testing him against another ad.

In the ‘split testing‘ articles on this internet business blog I’m going to show you how to test your own sales letter the right way, so you can cut the dogs loose and go with the winners every time.

No matter how successful your sales letter is, I can’t stress the importance enough of testing it to improve it even further. Sometimes the tiniest tweak can be responsible for boosting a sales letter’s conversion rate considerably.

But how will you ever find out which tweaks those are unless you split test them?

• Sometimes it’s fairly obvious what you could do to improve their response.
• Other times what we may think will work better can actually make things worse. In the end it doesn’t matter what you or I or other copywriters think.

It only matters what your prospects think, and they weigh in on how much they like your headline or offer by purchasing and becoming a customer.

The equivalent of printing money on demand.

Remember, the name of the game is to always try to beat your control (your former winner and best-performing sales letter).

Once you have a proven sales letter, it truly is money in the bank.

When you know your average response rate, you can predict what getting more of the same kinds of prospects to your website will do to your bottom line.

When you get right down to it, who wouldn’t want their average conversion rate to be as high as possible?

I don’t know of anyone who wants a lower conversion rate, but I do know plenty of people who don’t test.

Whether they realize it or not, they are settling for less than they’re capable of achieving.

With a good marketing funnel in place, you ideally want to match each message you portray to your market’s desires. That means everything from the initial pay per click (PPC) ad, article, ezine ad, or whatever method you use to funnel traffic to your site—all the way on down the line.

Everything.

1. Your opt-in/name squeeze page
2. Your email autoresponder sequence
3. Your audio and video podcasts
4. Your teleseminars
5. And certainly your sales page

You see, the real purpose of testing is to develop the most profitable marketing funnel. So you test all elements of your funnel, not just the entry point. It’s easy to see that each tiny increase in one part of the funnel will MULTIPLY with all other improvements of the other parts of your marketing funnel.

That’s ‘compounded’ split testing profit.

• Brand-building, and
• Direct response advertising.

What is brand-building?

The brand-building model of advertising is generally used by large corporations to create an awareness of their brand.

The result brand marketers are hoping for is that, when the time comes to buy that type of product or service, the prospect will think of their brand first.

For example, when you see an advertisement for a coffee brand on TV, they don’t expect you to jump up, run to 7/11, and get a pack of coffee.

But they hope that when you are in need of coffee next time, you will grab their package instead of any competing brand.

Brand slogans, jingles, and the like are frequently used with branding ads for specifically that purpose.

Brand-building, however, is expensive, time-consuming, and requires a lot of brand equity and trust over time before people make decisions to buy from them.

Large corporations typically spend millions of dollars in advertising costs in order to blanket their target audience with as much exposure as possible.

Direct marketers, however, have their doubts if brand building is money well spent.

The Right Choice? Maybe a bad one for AT&T.

In the 90′s AT&T had their million dollar slogan: “The Right Choice.”

Would you or I buy from AT&T because THEY TOLD us they were the right choice? Not me. Not you. Not anyone.

They’re not using it anymore.

Like many big companies changing course all the time, they’re generally having a problem developing their brand identity. Just see what they spent their advertising millions on over the years, changing their focus all the time:

• 
  Your world. Delivered (2005)
  
• The world’s networking company (2004)
  
• Talk is Good (2003)
• Innovative Networks.Innovative Thinking. (2001)
• Right Now (2001)
• We Bring the World Closer (1982)
• Reach Out and Touch Someone (1981)

Army Strong, a $200 Million Brand Building Slogan.

In fact, the US Army paid $200 million to a marketing firm to come up with their new slogan: Army Strong.

That’s $100 million a word!

I’m willing to bet if they took that $200 million and invested it in direct response advertising, they would have gotten a LOT more bang for their buck.

Can you imagine if you dumped a ton of money into an advertising agency and they produced results for you like the AT&T slogan, or the Army slogan?

Well, hopefully you didn’t do that, but if you did, there is still hope. There is a completely effective way to market your business and get real results.

What is direct response advertising?

Direct response ads are designed to get prospects to take some specific action right there and then.

Remember what I said above about brand-building: the idea is that the customer REMEMBERS the brand when he needs the service or product. He is not supposed to ACT when he sees the ad.

With a direct response ad you want the customer to whip out the credit card and buy right away!

Because if they put the ad aside and do something else, the chances are much smaller that they’ll come back later and buy.

With direct response advertising, you’ll frequently see scarcity selling tactics used to get them to act immediately.

• “Call within the next 10 minutes…”
• “Only the next 200 people to sign-up will qualify…”
• “The price goes up this weekend…”

You get the idea. You’ll also find a clear call to action in direct response ads.

• “Register now to start your membership immediately.”
• “Simply check off which report you’d like and return the postage-paid postcard today.”

Direct response advertisers can usually track sales from any given ad to the penny. (That is by the way what the whole ‘split testing’ category at internet business mastermind is about: Tracking the success of your ads, sales letters and squeeze pages, and then optimizing it for better conversion.)

Whether it’s a coupon to be clipped, a special phone number to call, or a business reply card, everything in direct response marketing is coded and tracked.

Why direct response marketing is cheap and easy for an internet business.

You probably figured out by now that I’m an advocate of direct response.

It gets results and you can track how the results were accomplished.

In the ‘old days’ of snail mail direct marketing a huge amount of work and money was involved to get any direct response sales letter out. You had to mail a statistically large enough group for any ad to find out if it would be successful.

Then all the incoming sales and customer inquiries had to be tracked manually. Then you had to manually analyze which parts of your promotions made you money, and where you lost money.

For your internet business it’s so much cheaper and easier.

It’s cheap because you don’t have to print 200,000 letters, and even better, you don’t have to stamp them. You’ll just put up a web site and drive traffic to it.

It’s easy because all the tracking and analyzing is done on autopilot. You don’t have to do it manually.

The only only thing you need is a serious split testing script. That’s a one time investment, and once you have it you can test as many sales letters, ads, and squeeze pages as you like for years to come.

By ‘serious’ split testing script I mean serious. Don’t go for half baked spit testing scripts. Your split testing script will increase your business more than any other software you will ever buy.

The only work and time involved is to enter a few variations of what you want to test to your split testing script. Once that is setup, the script will do the work on autopilot. It will monitor your direct response campaigns 24/7 and increase your conversions without you lifting a finger.

Once you see how direct response advertising combined with split testing boots your income, you won’t think about buying ads for branding much anymore.

Basically you’re testing 2 versions of your web page to find out which one performs better:

• Which of 2 split tested squeeze pages gets the most confirmed subscribers?
• Which of 2 split tested sales letters gets the most sales?
• Which of 2 split tested PPC Ads gets the most clicks?

Most of the work is done by split testing software running on your web site. The only thing you have to do is to setup the 2 versions of your web page. Then the split testing software will control the test, record all data, and show you the results.

In the diagram the split testing software is represented by the gears

1. Each time a visitor arrives at the page, the split testing software sends him to one of the two versions of your testing page.
2. Each time a conversion happens (for example a sale), the split testing software will collect the information which web page that visitor has seen.
3. In the end you simply compare which version created the better results. You pick the winner and put it online, you dump the loser.

The result of your split test may look like this.

In this split test sales letter B clearly sells better than sales letter A. So you’d end this split test, you’d drop sales letter A, and continue running the winner, sales letter B.

If you’re smart, you’ll immediately start creating a new sales letter C and running a new split test C against the former winner B.

It’s important that repeat visitors see the same page each time. Otherwise you could not find out which version is responsible for a conversion.

1. When visitors arrive at the website, the split testing software checks to see if it’s a repeat visit or not.
2. If it is, the visitor is sent to the same sales letter as last time (to ensure the same offer is shown).
3. If it’s a first-time visitor, a sales letter is chosen at random, and the visitor is sent there.
4. The engine records which sales letter the new visitor is sent to (either by setting a cookie on the visitor’s computer or saving the visitor’s IP address), so return visits can be routed back to the same sales letter.

As you see, it’s not so hard to understand split testing. If you’re just starting out, keep it simple. Don’t hop on super complicated setups for your first test, maybe do something very easy, like just using 2 different headlines.

You’ll find more split testing articles here, and you can leave your questions below.

People ask for sales letter reviews and advice on how they should set up their site to be successful.

• How does my headline look?
• Is this a good price to sell my product?
• What kind of font should I use?
• What’s the best ending digit for a price?
• Should I send them to an opt-in page first, or send them straight to my sales letter?
• Will a picture of me help to add more credibility and lead to more sales?
• Should I use a header graphic?

And what’s the answer that marketing veterans and novices alike always give in response?

You guessed right!

“Test it.”

And while that answer is the right one for those types of questions,

• it’s amazing to me how many people know about split testing and still don’t practice what they preach.
• Still others know they should test but have no idea how to do it properly.

I’m not an expert on split testing. I’ve gotten better at it with practice, as will you. I’m also not an expert in statistics.

The nice thing about split testing is that it doesn’t require a lot of marketing know-how to do it. Neither do you have to be an expert in “statistical mathematical experiments”, or even software engineering.

Anyone with a few basic tools and a solid understanding of the basics can increase his profits using split testing.

Here the ‘ol cliché is true: it ain’t rocket science.

There is software available for your website that will automate much of the split testing process, letting you concentrate on the big picture.

The purpose of this ‘split testing’ category at internet business mastermind is to give you the bigger picture of split testing.

My split testing articles will explain the simple concepts for beginners, as well as giving you in depth ideas if you have already mastered the basics.

Once you get it, go out, get the tools, and skyrocket your profits.

Dr.Mani, heart surgeon and infopreneur, is launching his second print book on February 14th, 2010 as part of an annual fundraising event, “The Heart Kids Blogathon”.

But he’s doing something unusual today… he’s letting you read his book for FREE!

http://www.47hearts.com

If you visit his website, you can download a FULL copy of his new book – and read it without paying a cent!

And then, if (and ONLY if) you like it, Dr.Mani is asking you for a favor in return… to buy a copy (or better still, 5 copies) of the print book on launch day – to keep or give as gifts to the special people in your life.

You can also help by joining a “47 HEARTS GROUP” and making a difference to a child’s future. That’s why Dr.Mani is staying up all day and night blogging on Valentine’s Day – to raise awareness about congenital heart defects, and help heal a child’s heart.

By reading this ebook, telling a few of your friends, and (if you can) by making a donation, you can join a worldwide movement that has saved more than 47 little hearts – and will touch many more.

http://www.47hearts.com

Thank you very much for your support.

Ralf

5 minutes ago I uploaded a custom background to my Twitter profile.

http://twitter.com/RalfSkirr

I’m using it now to add a blog news sidebar to my Twitter page.

You can do the same with your own Twitter profile. Login and use the menu to go to:
Settings - Design - Scroll down to ‘Change background image‘.

There you can upload any image from your computer as new background.

this is Ralf Skirr, sending you a New Year’s Gift to help you meeting your goals in 2010.

I’ll keep it short and give you the links to your gifts right away:
(right click the link with your mouse and chose ‘save as’)

http://ibmm.com/Achieve_Your_Goals.pdf

http://ibmm.com/Worksheets.pdf

Many people are using this time of the year to think about the old year that has passed, and to make up their dreams and goals for the upcoming year 2010.

I did this yesterday and today, and my major goal for the upcoming year is to help my subscribers and readers (that would be you) succeed.

If you’re in the process of planning your year, and even more if you have not done it yet, you’ll find these 2 e-books helpful in making things easier for you.

http://ibmm.com/Achieve_Your_Goals.pdf

http://ibmm.com/Worksheets.pdf

To Your Success,
Ralf Skirr

P.S. It’s an immediate download, no strings attached.

But the links will go away in 48 hours.

Ok, so you see, the very first review I write for my internet business blog is about John Delavera’s TurboMembership. Why that?

First of all, because TurboMembership is the single one membership site that I’ve retained for years. I have – just like you maybe – joined many memberships, and over time cancelled all of them, except for this one.

Second, because I believe TurboMembership is one of the best recommendations I can give you, and my guideline for the review section is to give you actionable recommendations.

If you’ve been online for any length of time, you know that there are tons of products out there claiming that they can help you make those profits and help you quit your day job.

I personally cannot speak for all of them (no one could), but the TurboMembership is one product I do have years of experience with that I can tell you about.

So here’s my review on what TurboMembership is about, what I like about it, and also what I do not like about it, what I think could be improved.

What is TurboMembership and for who?

The TurboMembership is essentially a one-stop, all-in-one solution that is continuously updated each month with new products, tools, and training resources that enable Turbo Members to remain on the cutting edge when it comes to building and maintaining a successful internet business.

It’s for everyone who wants to build an internet business, who wants to make money online.

If you’ve already established your internet business just skip the next section and jump down to see the monthly content, products and web sites TurboMembership will add to your internet empire.

What’s in it for the beginners in making money online?

If you’re completely new to making money online, you’ve probably asked yourself these questions…

• How can I earn profits online?
• What is necessary for me in order to quit my day job?
• How does a total newbie get started in making money online?

TurboMembership provides the answer to a lot of the questions stated above, questions that you may be pondering right now as you are reading this review.

How do you create a profitable Internet business?

The TurboMembership is created around a very simple formula of

Web Site Content + Products + Traffic = Profit.

The problem many people have, however, is that they still have to create the products and generate the traffic, both of which are a challenge, if not a seeming impossibility, for many.

The plain fact is that, without a solid product to sell and without traffic coming to your site, you cannot and do not have an internet business.

So TurboMembership has been created to help you out…

Here’s an overview of what’s included.

• You get unique, high-quality ebooks to download every single month.

• You get pre-written sales pages and professional graphics that come with source files so you can easily edit them.

• You get complete mini-site designs that complement the ebook titles you will receive.

• You also get additional Resell and Master Resell Rights Packages.

• You get exclusive scripts, software, audio, video and information-based packages from many different niches, which will allow you to produce products in every imaginable niche.

• You get brand new content, which includes 100’s of articles that can be pre-loaded into your autoresponder sequences – this will allow you to set your internet business on complete autopilot and have it earn automated profits.

• You will receive professional website packages that focus on several high-profit affiliate-based marketplaces, including ClickBank, AdSense, Commission Junction, and other similar programs. This will allow you to start earning additional revenue immediately.

You can get more details by clicking here.

The TurboMembership gives you everything you need to create a successful Internet business.

Above I mentioned you’d also get professional services every internet marketer needs for his business anyway.

Getting them through TurboMembership will save you several monthly costs for other services, because now you do not need to pay anyone anymore for hosting, autoresponders or ecommerce solutions.

These internet marketing services are included with TurboMembership

Powerful, Professional, Feature-Packed Website Hosting

Your website hosting account enables you to host an unlimited number of websites. Each website you build and host online enables you to establish your credibility and to sell the products that you receive as part of your TurboMembership.

JVManager® Delavo™

If you’ve had trouble or concerns over how to accept online payments and/or creating your own affiliate program, JVManager® Delavo™ will make those tasks easy for you. Your entire internet business can be managed from this one software program.

AWeber Autoresponder

This professionally-hosted autoresponder account will enable you to build and manage your list of subscribers more easily and more safely through a double opt-in process.

Here’s what you receive to create your own products and to fill your web sites with content.

4 Private Label Rights (PLR) Reports

By using your unlimited professional hosting account to create a number of niche-related websites and using these reports to supply those websites with useful content, you can cater to many in-demand niche markets.

1 PLR Turbo Script Software Program or Script

By gaining the full source code to these software programs and scripts, you can change and improve these programs and scripts in any way that you choose. As a result, you can repackage these products as your very own because they will essentially become your own products after you modify them.

10 PLR Articles

These articles can be used to easily provide original and unique content for your newsletters, blogs, and websites, saving you time and money when it comes to continuously providing fresh and relevant content for your sites and newsletters.

100 PLR “Niche” Articles

These articles can be used to quickly create valuable ebooks and reports, thereby saving you time and money in coming up with quality content for your ebooks and reports. You can then use these ebooks and reports to quickly build a quality subscriber list who will be interested in your future offers.

You’ll also get templates to quickly build your ‘Virtual Real Estate’ and expand your internet empire.

I’m a web designer myself, but these templates are a huge time saver for me. That is even more true if you are not a geek and don’t want to learn all the html and css stuff. Simply use the monthly templates to build your web sites.

5 New and Unique Web 2.0 Templates

These templates also come with associated graphic packages that will allow you to build a presence in virtually any market that you choose to enter.

1 Unique WordPress Blog Theme

You receive a new, premium blog template each month, which will present your business in a professional manner.

4 New Turnkey Moneymaking Websites Each and Every Month

These moneymaking websites can provide you with a great way to boost your profits by utilizing them in high-profit “back-end” offers or lucrative “up-sell” offers, both of which are key to considerably boosting your online profits.

So we’ve talked about content, and products, and services, and web site templates…

As impressive as the previous features are, the following feature really can make or break your success in internet business.

One thing that struck a chord with me is John’s dedicated personal effort to helping people succeed. From conversations I’ve directly had with him, I can tell you that his interest in helping people is genuine and not an act.

He’s implemented the following ways to help you out with any question or problem or obstacle you’ll ever encounter when building your internet business.

Turbo University

This process begins by giving you access to the “Turbo University”; this is where you learn exactly how to set up your “proven” Turbo Marketing system.

Live Online Conferences

Each month, there is a live online conference that will enable you to learn the latest marketing skills and strategies so that you always stay up-to-date and on the cutting edge in the marketing world, which will help you earn more profits.

Forum community for all your questions and for sharing your ideas

The TurboMembership also has a commited team of moderators helping its members utilize the membership and building their internet businesses the right way. This team of moderators includes John Delavera himself, further proving that his willingness to help people is genuine.

Live Help Via Skype

To ensure that you get the most from your TurboMembership, you can get live one-on-one support every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Therefore, if you ever get confused on what to do next in the TurboMembership or are not sure how to apply the elements of the TM to your internet business, you can find out immediately via live help. This element of the TM is unique, as I’ve never seen this level of service provided by any other membership site.

Click here for your TurboMembership

To wrap it up: TurboMembership is membership site that will give you monthly content, products, and services for your internet business. And I’m talking HUGE content, HUGE products, and HUGE services (featuring some of the best tools in the industry).

Plus it will give you all the help, support, and mentoring you need.

This review would not be helpful to you if I only mentioned the positive aspects of it, so I will also mention the negative aspects of it, though I only think 2 areas of the TM could be improved…

1. When you first log into the TurboMembership area, the site does not look very attractive or professional because it has a disconcerting mixture of design graphics and styles, making it look unprofessional and disorganized. I really wonder why that is not taken care of.

   With that said, the site is totally functional and you can find the areas you are looking for, even though the look of the site could be more uniform and professional-looking in my opinion.

2. When you first log into the site, you’ll only see only a few links, making you wonder if this is all there is to the TurboMembership, which could make you think that you got ripped off. Given the huge list of what the TM includes, at first glance it might be a challenge to find all the many, many items offered to you.

   However, John does provide you with instructions (see the “Blue Workbook” below) on how to find every piece of the TM. If you are the type of person who wants to see everything associated with the site at the very beginning, you’ll likely be disappointed, but if you are willing to follow the instructions that are given, you’ll easily find all areas of the TM and likely be very satisfied with all that the TM has to offer.

The Blue Workbook – the quick start guide for the TurboMembership

John is quite aware of problem #2 mentioned above; this is why he gives you the “Blue Workbook” in order to help you find all of the areas of the TurboMembership and to enable you to get everything you want to get from the TurboMembership.

Therefore, it is vital that you read every word of the “Blue Workbook” – do not skip any part of it and jump ahead, as you’ll make your task of building an internet business needlessly harder than it needs to be.

Getting Started…

There are no guarantees to success, not even with the TurboMembership. The TurboMembership is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Let me give you a healthy dose of truth: Without the proper commitment and effort to build a successful internet business, you will not succeed online. But the TurboMembership does put the odds of success in creating your own successful internet business clearly in your favor.

I would suggest going to the main TurboMembership sales page, printing out that page, then taking 15 minutes or so to carefully read through that sales page.

This way, you will be able to analyze the details for yourself and see if your internet business and life would benefit from joining the TurboMembership.

If you are intrigued by what you see, but are not sure about all of the details, please feel free to contact me with any questions and I’ll do my best to quickly answer them as well as I can.

Click here for your TurboMembership

I really believe you should carefully consider joining the TurboMembership if you want to build a successful and sustainable Internet business for the long term.

I wish you all the best with your decision and with your future endeavors!

Resources related to this review:

The TurboMembership Homepage

The Big Yellow Ebook, free Ebook, where John Delavera shares his best tips for internet business success.

I’ll just want to introduce you to a new kind of give-away that Willie Crawford recommended to me earlier this day.

Seriously, it’s a no brainer…

No other give-away has ever done this before!

Done what?

Offered 100 percent commissions for referrals AND your own special offers!

http://ibmm.com/100percentgiveaway

That’s right the admins are taking nothing and giving it all to you! Sit back and think about it, this is going to be one heck of an event! Everyone will be promoting to earn their share of the referral commissions right? Which means that contributors will be spending less than 10 bux to get the upgrade.

Upgrade?

Yeah! Upgrading as a contributor will take you from only being able to submit ONE gift, to being able to submit 3 gifts and 2 text ads and 1 special offer! This offer will surely be a big hit, as the contributor who submitted it will get 100 percent of it’s earnings!

So the cycle will NOT fail!!!

Which bring us to the LIST BUILDING fundamental.

Now with all these contributors raking it in by promoting…

… guess what happens on launch day?

You guessed it!!

Massive Member Signups !!

Now here is the “win win” for everyone… The admins work their tushes off by helping to make special offers submitted, more attractive and sellable, manually approving ALL gifts carefully to ensure a quality event!

You simply sign up, upgrade your account ($9.97)… and grab an email from the promotional tools section and send it out to your list for contributors and then on launch day for members..

With everyone doing their part, some lists are gonna grow for sure, and some fat wallets too!

Click here for the 100 % Give Away.

So jump on in before everyone beats you to the punch ok?

Best of luck!
Ralf Skirr

P.S. There are plenty of commissions to go around!
Click here and get your FULL 100% share now!

After the disaster with Myriadnetwork’s hosting earlier this year many of my sites went offline and I had to transfer them to other hosts. I’m sorry to say that I forgot to update the DNS entries for Turbomembershipreviews.com and the site was unavailable for a while.

Today I re-created the site and fortunately no entries or user-reviews of TurboMembership were lost.

Stay tuned for some exciting updates and freebies at TurboMembershipReviews.com very soon.

So what is the site about? John Delavera’s TurboMembership (TM) is one of the best memberships on the internet. Some even call it: “The Holy Grail of Internet Marketing”

But obviously everyone promoting the TM would say this, right?

That’s why I created Turbomembershipreviews.com.

Customers, friends, and enimies of  TM can post their honest, uncensored review of Turbomembership. All reviews will be published (except maybe when someone would publish below the line, dirty language insults – but that has not happened yet.) So no matter if you like of hate TM , please remain civilized with your review.

To keep in touch with the updates you may subscribe to the RSS Feed, I can’t reveal much yet, but be sure there are some goodies in store for you!

[flv:http://web-templates-online.com/custom-graphic.flv 502 411]

We’re still working on our major site update, I hope I can put it online within 24 hours.

Visit Web-Templates-Online.com.

Once installed in your firefox browser you will have access to tons of SEO relevant informtion about any site you visit.

You can easily turn it on and off with a click of your mouse, thus making it easy to turn it on fast whenever you want to SEO-analyze a competing web site or when you’re researching a new market.

The SEO toolbar integrates:

• SEO tools from Aaron Wall’s site http://www.seobook.com.
• Site specific information from major search engines and directories, like google, yahoo, dmoz and others.
• Site specific information using a dozen services like Alexa.com, compete.com, domaintools.com and many more.
• Roundabout 50 Newsfeeds from SEO authority sites.

Here’s just a few from the many, many things you can do with the excellent SEO toolbar:

• Analyze how many back links a page and its domain have in search engines and directories.
• See how many people are subscribed to a blog via bloglines.
• Analyze keyword density for a page.
• See google page rank and Alexa rank.
• Get domain age and whois information.
• Highlight nofollow links.
• Read the latest SEO news headlines from SEO expert sites in a drop down menu.
• Compare SEO information for up to 5 web sites.
• See site popularity on social bookmarking sites.
• Research keywords and markets.

You can download Aaron Wall’s SEO toolbar at:
http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar

Besides Roboform this is definitely the most important toolbar you can add to your firefox.