Kindness

Just as courtesy is contagious, kindness often begets kindness. Anything good is worth repeating and most people will reciprocate.

Those that consider your kindness suspicious usually find it hard to be kind to others without a hidden agenda. When they reflect on their experience of giving, they judge others by their own standards of giving. Don’t be fooled or fall into their trap.

Keep being kind! This advice is timeless and yet bears repeating. You can find it in Galatians 5:22.

Commandment 9

Joy

Joy, delight and happiness are all feelings that come from within. As you release your higher self to connect with others, it is important to remember everyone you meet will not be happy about your jovial disposition and this is okay.

No one has the power to rob you of your joy unless you provide him with that power. Bear in mind the words of Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inaugural Speech, “As we are liberated from our fears, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Your joy can make others suspicious and fearful. You may on occasion encounter this fear in different forms while networking.

Commandment 10

God Is Light, Let His
Light Shine through You

Like joy, the light you project externally is a reflection of your internal peace. Do not allow others the power to dim your light. You always have a choice to be a thermometer that registers the atmosphere or a thermostat that sets the temperature for the entire interaction.

You can light up the environment; do not let the environment dim your light. If you share the natural beauty of your existence, you will make it a joy to be in your own company and a joy for others to be with you. If you wish to make friends you must first show yourself friendly.

Again, people are more inclined to do business with people who are friendly and positive.

Commandment 11

A Tip from the White House

In observing the presidential state dinners held at the White House, I’ve observed that the president seats 130 people at 13 tables, ten people per table. Each table seats one representative from the White House and usually one representative from the country of the dinner’s honored guest.

Most guests are invited with a spouse. However, what the invited guests usually don’t know is that they frequently are assigned seats separately from their spouses.

The networking lesson however, is that you should not sit with people you know at a dinner. Sitting with strangers’ will position you to get a broader perspective and to make new friends and to also expand your business.

“Remember the ‘Networking Factor,’ everyone is important!”

(The above four commandments are taken from my book, “The 101 Commandments of Networking: Common Sense But Not Common Practice.” )

http://www.101NetworkingCommandments.com
Ms. Smallwood-McKenzie is a Networking Coach in Los Angeles and she coaches small businesses and professionals in expanding their political, business, and social bases. She is the Author of “The 101 Commandments of Networking: Common Sense But Not Common Practice.” Enjoy Free Preview compliments of http://www.101NetworkingCommandments.com or visit Amazon.com to read Customer Reviews of this guide. This networking guide is available wherever fine books are sold. Janice’s e-mail address is ConfirmedCoach@netscape.net

You need to make it a point to know who your upline is. I just spoke with a lady last night on a 3-way phone call. She was the first woman in this network marketing company who built so quickly that she went to the top of the payplan in 4 months.

Her upline was envious and jealous. And part of her network marketing strategy was NOT to read the company Policies & Procedures. Bad, bad combination.

Before You Ever Join Any Company, Read Your P & Ps

Before this lady built the program, she did tell the company that her fiance was promoting another MLM company.

But guess what? Her company’s Policies & Procedures state that you cannot make any money from another network marketing company - not even an affiliate program! If you violate this provision, you can be terminated.

And these restrictions apply to everyone living in YOUR household!

Now to me, that sounds like you’re an employee. If you’re an MLM independent contractor, how can they put those kinds of restrictions on you?

Anyway, this lady build to the top of the payplan. She was rocking and rolling. Everything was great. She was about to receive a $7,000 bonus check for reaching the top of the payplan … first woman to ever do it …

… and all of a sudden her website is turned off. Everything is shut down. The company didn’t even send her a letter.

Bad News From the Viperous Upline!

Her upline called and told her she was terminated because her fiance was in another program. She had already told the company they weren’t married and that he was in another program. So it had nothing to do with her or her network marketing strategy, but because they lived in the same household, the company used that lever to get her out of the line of compensation.

The company views 2 people living in the same household as if the two people are the same. And they can do that because it’s in the Policies & Procedures.

Isn’t that amazing?

What are the chances the company would ever find out about this if not for the viperous upline? Because this lady just got terminated, her sponsor inherits her entire organization. It all rolls up.

The Upline Couldn’t Build It Themselves - And Now They Don’t Have To!

I know a number of network marketers who have lost everything, because they never read their Policies & Procedures. Go to your company website right now, and read your P & Ps. You may be astonished at what you find.

FACT: When you joined your company, you checked a box stating that you agreed to abide by each of those P & Ps. But I’ll bet you never actually read them!

Which reminds me of a trap that a lot of network marketing reps fall into. They think, “Well, everybody I know is violating this rule. The company must not care.” Believe me, you can violate any rule you want, so long as you’re not making any money. But once you start to build a significant income, THAT is when it’s worthwhile for your viperous upline - or your company itself - to terminate you for violation of your Policies & Procedures.

What’s in there that YOU don’t know about? Go find them and read them. Now!

Visit long-time network marketer Michael Dlouhy at http://www.AskMichaelDlouhy.com/. Michael will be your coach, mentor, and ally. He’ll train you online and by conference call, 15 hours a week, no matter what company you’re in, to build a large, profitable, high-retention MLM organization, easily & consistently, thru education & teamwork.

That’s NOT niche marketing, that’s Adsense marketing. It’s a numbers game and it’s dangerous. I’ll explain that below.

How did this so called Niche Marketing develop? Solid niche marketing advice already existed for some time. Very often you were advised to follow your passion or expertise and set up a site for that.

Then, RSS feed techniques lead to software programs that scrape content from directories. You have to do absolutely nothing but entering a bunch of keywords and presto … thousands of new content rich pages are automatically added to your niche site.

And when Joel Comm presented his Adsense Secrets showing how he went from $30 a day to $500 a day - mind you, a good book with solid advice, no doubt about that- suddenly we had three variables that are responsible for the hype:

1. niche marketing,

2. content generating software and

3. high paying Adsense keywords.

Let’s have a look at each of these variables in reverse order.

High paying Adsense keywords.

Suddenly someone discovered that there are certain keywords that are of great value. Advertisers paid a lot of money to have their products displayed on pages using these specific keywords. It was said that a keyword like ‘mesothelioma’ or derivates would pay 50 to 70 dollars a click. I just entered this in Google Adwords, bidding 90$ per click and it returned with an estimated number of clicks per day of 6.2. Now, these figures are just estimates, but if this is true, with a 1% click-thru it means you would have to wait about 16 days to earn my 90 dollars!

Again, just assumptions, I only want to make a point. Adsense is a numbers game. You’ll need thousands of visitors AND good click-thru’s to make decent money.

To get thousands of visitors you either have to buy traffic (Adwords or other PPC’s) or create search engine friendly pages. Now, type in ‘mesothelioma’ in Google and observe the PageRanks of the resulting pages. PR 5 or higher! Hard job to beat them! That means … work!

To get great click-thru’s you’ll have to test where you place your Adsense code. Dang, even more work!

But there’s something else, something more important. Read this carefully …

Do you really believe …

that advertisers are going to pay that much money only …

to have their expensive ads displayed on …

automatically generated content pages?

Huh … do you … huh?

OF COURSE THEY WON’T!

There’s a fine line you have to follow playing the Adsense game. And generating content automatically, no matter where it comes from, is like walking an elephant over a paper bridge. It kills the system!

Now, let’s have a look at …

Content generating software

I’m sure in the past you have used the search engines to find information about a specific topic only to find that if you click the resulting pages … you’ll see another ’search-engine’-like page.

That was the work of a niche marketer (specific info) scraping search engine result pages (SERP’s) with ‘page generating software’ to quickly generate thousands of pages about the topic.

Search engines don’t like that. You see, they are looking for great, valuable and original content. That’s what they want to provide to their users so they keep coming back.

And here’s another biggie …

they want SATISFIED ADVERTISERS!

The last thing they’ll need is another copy of their own pages. And that’s exactly what this software will generate.

Mind you, the software IS good, it does exactly what it promises. I’ve used one of these packages long time ago and that one certainly DID work.

But this kind of software also leaves fingerprints for the search engines who are getting smarter all the time. Eventually they will discover automatically generated content, ignore these pages of even penalize them. That’s why I stopped using such software long, long time ago.

The only way to use this kind of software in a responsible way is to change the templates that come with the package. And to do that right means …

(a lot of) work.

And that’s something that wasn’t included in the deal!

These days this strategy has changed into scraping articles from directories. All you have to do is enter a keyword and presto … an article containing that keyword is placed in your page.

That won’t work either and for the same two reasons: fingerprints and copies.

Search engines don’t like duplicate content and that’s exactly what this software generates.

The latest trick is software that uses a thesaurus to change article content on the fly. Apart from copyright issues, I’ve seen results of that and they were just hilarious.

If you want to use reprint articles for keyword rich content, you have to at least add some unique content to the page. You could write a review or your own opinion telling what you think is good and bad about the article that you posted below.

Dang, work again!

Publishing a reprint article every now and then won’t hurt you, but it does when you do nothing else. And the article content better fit well into your pages and even into your site. If it’s way of topic, you won’t get far.

Here’s a great tip: find unique Public Domain Software! Go here: http://www.anownsite.com/products/public-domain/

Now, let’s go down to the core of the business …

Niche Marketing

Let’s define a niche first:

A niche is just a tiny, (highly) specialized marketplace.

A marketplace means that there’s demand and supply. Basically there are two ways to enter a niche:

1. follow your passion (supply) or

2. follow the money (demand).

If you follow your passion it will be easy to develop content: you’re the expert and you do what you love. But you still have to find out if the passion you’re following is profitable!

And if you follow the money, you’re already on the right track, but you will have a difficult time to develop content. Recently I found one on Ebay. But I didn’t do a thing with it. Know why? Cause I don’t know squat about millinery! (THERE you have it! a niche market!)

In order to follow the money, you have to develop some … passion for the niche otherwise you can’t fill your site properly.

So, either way you have to do something extra. Now, let’s redefine a niche. Let’s define a … profitable niche!

A profitable niche is a highly specialized marketplace with few competitors, high demand and money to pay for that demand.

That’s what you have to find out.

“Gheesssss Case, you really make it sound like … eh … work!”

Not necessarily.

If you have no idea how to do that, read my article about niche markets. http://www.anownsite.com/articles/niche-markets.shtml

It’s just to give you an idea. Right now I’m working on a special guide on how to find profitable niches, so stay tuned.

If you don’t want to do all the work to find profitable niches, just have a look at the 50 hot niches that were selected by niche expert James. B. Allen. http://www.anownsite.com/products/niches/index.html

Or, if you act quickly, you can join what looks like a very, very promising and brand new niche site where everything already is done for you called Niche Site Special. http://www.anownsite.com/cgi-bin/u.cgi?nss

Now, if you really have found your niche and you’ve found profitable affiliate programs that you can gently pre-sell, then and only then you can consider adding Adsense to your pages. Provided that you deliver unique, high value content! You CAN add some reprint articles, but most of your content should be yours.

And you’d better use a search engine optimized website for that! (Right now I’m developing such a system, so again, stay tuned.)

Bottom line: you still have to do some work or buy the results of such work!

THAT is the right way to perform niche marketing!

Have fun!

Case Stevens

Case Stevens, owner of AnOwnSite Internet Marketing, is experimenting with different marketing techniques, websites, traffic and lead generation. He publishes his experiences in a newsletter featuring understandable, successful low cost Internet marketing techniques, ideas and strategies, articles, news, tips & tricks and interesting (free) downloads.

Subscribe at Affordable Online Strategies

My coaching students email me all the time and ask questions along the lines of -

“I’ve got 60/100/200 website visitors a day but I’m not making any money yet, what’s wrong with my site?”

Of course, you need a lot more traffic than that to make a decent income from your site…in fact you need a lot more traffic than you think.

Let’s go through the numbers.

We’ll assume you have a site that promotes either affiliate products or you use your content website to generate leads for another website (like a mini or sales site) or an offline business you have.

We’ll also leave Adsense revenue out for now, because every click on an Adsense ad takes away one chance you have for selling your ‘real’ product or service.

On average, for every 100 visitors who arrive at your site, only one or two will click on an affiliate link or click through to your main site where you sell your product or service.

And then depending on how good your sales copy is (or how well the sales letter of the affiliate merchant converts) only 1% or 2% of the people arriving at that site will make a purchase.

So, looking at these numbers, and taking a 1% response rate as pretty normal, you have to get 10,000 visitors to your website to generate just 1 sale (100×100 visitors=1 sale)…

Now if your site is getting 60 visitors a day, and they are reading on average 3 pages before they surf off to somewhere else, it’s going to take you on average 55 days to make each sale.

If the product you sell is a 30 dollar ebook and you earn 15 dollars commission every time somebody buys a copy, you’ve set yourself up to make 99 bucks a year from your site…

Pretty dismal isn’t it.

Now obviously, the more pages your visitors read, the higher the product value they buy, and the higher your conversion rates are, the better.

You could double or triple this number, or more.

The point is, you need a LOT of traffic and/or big ticket items to sell to make the average site earn you a respectable living.

So, here are my top 3 tips for increasing your website’s potential revenue and breaking into the big league of online entrepreneurs…

1) Do some research and find several big ticket items you can promote

It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in, you can find things like seminars, big box home study courses, membership sites and the like to promote to your visitors.

Sure you can promote $20 ebooks, but the big money is in making $200, $400 or a grand each time somebody buys something through your site.

It’s a lot easier to earn a hundred grand a year online by making a few large ticket sales than by selling 6,000+ ebooks that make you 15 bucks each.

2) Work on creating keyword specific landing pages for all of the affiliate products (or your own products and services) so that when people arrive at your site they find the exact solution they are looking for right there.

Don’t make your visitors click around your site while they try to find what they are looking for.

Give them the exact solution they want immediately or they will hit the back button and leave without finding what they are after.

3) Build a list and build long term relationships with your readers

If you have your visitors’ names and email addresses, you can send the same people back to your site (where they are exposed to your affiliate, Joint Venture and product links) again and again instead of just once.

This gives you a multiplier effect and can exponentially increase every visitors’ value to you.

Use a service such as Aweber to send out your autoresponder messages and they will go out in the exact order you want your readers to receive them reliably, on time and automatically.

The main thing is that you get to work on building your list as soon as you can…

So there you have it - 3 simple things you can do straight away to get started on increasing your traffic and maximizing the income you receive from every website that you own.

1. Ask the right questions

Unless you ask the right marketing questions, you will waste a lot of your valuable time on things that don’t matter. Abraham Lincoln was quoted as saying, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.” Gather the people you trust to work on business problems and ask them to make a list of the three main problems your customers have identified for you. Then analyze those problems to see what marketing questions you should be asking. Instead of asking how to increase revenue, perhaps you should be asking how to make it easier for your customers to check out using your shopping cart. Continue to drill down and simplify until you have a list of very specific questions and set about to answer those.

2. ‘Think Big; Act Small’

This principle captures what I think is imperative for anyone marketing online today. Jason Jennings’ book ‘Think Big Act Small’ details how companies succeed by maintaining a small business attitude. Embrace the qualities that ’smallness’ provides- quick improvements, employees that are close to the problem and the ability to connect with your customers. I’ve worked with companies that assume their competitors are better because they have deeper pockets. The notion that more marketing dollars ensure success is misguided at best. Look at your product or service and continue to improve it. Online buyers want quality and service. That part never changes.

3. Search for what’s different and strive to understand it

The popularity of online marketing tactics go up and down like the stock market. Pop-ups, podcasts, ezines and blogs are all effective if applied to the right audience at the right time. The key is to continually ask yourself, “what’s different today?” Are customers suddenly responding to something you don’t highlight? Are they bored with your current promotion? Read everything you can about new ideas and cultural trends. You don’t have to try to apply every one of them, but you do need to know what your customer knows. Keying into changes on a weekly basis ensures that you won’t suddenly find yourself with an outdated marketing strategy and no customers.

4. If you’re not the customer, ask her!

Don’t spend your time debating with other staffers about what you ‘think’ your customer wants. Unless you ARE the target customer, you don’t really know. I have listened to endless debates about customer needs based on no actual customer data. Ask your customers. They will be happy to tell you what they think. If you don’t want to hear what they think, you’ve got a different problem.

5. Do what’s difficult

I find that this principle separates the wannabes from the real innovators. If you know what tactics need to be applied to make a difference, but you are too lazy or disinterested to try them then stop reading now. Nothing you do will make a difference until you tackle the hard work necessary to grow. If you need a better designed website, a new database or an easier shopping cart, you need to do that, NOW.

About Digital Media Works
Digital Media Works, Inc. is an Internet marketing and design firm that specializes in solutions for e-commerce companies. A seasoned 25+ year management/marketing professional, founder Stephanie Diamond is experienced in building profits in a broad range of product and services businesses. As Marketing Director at AOL, she created a highly successful line of multimedia software products that sold millions of copies.

Exclusive Internet Mortgage Leads are a boon to all those in the Mortgage Industry today and could be purchased online! This is a new technique in the mortgage industry to offer mortgage loans to the needy. These internet mortgage leads are seen to have given freedom and flexibility to consumers, mortgage leads and mortgage lenders. All that the consumer is expected to do is to search for “internet leads”. Search engines will list many accredited Internet mortgage lead providers at a click!

Hence in general, websites of Internet mortgage lead providers bring the mortgage consumers, mortgage leads and mortgage lenders under ‘one roof’. So, the mortgage consumers will fill up the online loan request forms. This information provided by the mortgage consumer will be sorted out by the internet mortgage lead generators and will be distributed to the concerned mortgage lenders. Since it’s all done online, these generators will use filters, based on the following parameters, to be more specific about choice of leads. The parameters are credit rating, type of loan required, loan amount required, home equity, geographic location etc.

Through Internet mortgage leads any consumer could understand all about the mortgage lenders and lead generators before attempting for a business. However, there are just seven questions that the mortgage consumer is likely to encounter variations of no matter which Internet mortgage lead generator he or she chooses. The mortgage consumer will be asked to specify the state, loan type, property type, credit requirements, Loan to value ratio (LTV), loan amount and ZIP code. The number of leads the mortgage consumer receives will be closely matching the filters he or she chooses. The more flexible the consumer is, the more leads will be sent. Note that all companies will allow mortgage consumers to change their filter preferences to better customize their leads. Certain types of possible errors can be credited to the consumer’s account. For example, false email addresses and leads that turn out to be unqualified. In general, the consumer’s forms will be sold to a maximum of three mortgage lenders, so the consumer can enjoy three competing offers among which to choose with a guarantee that both the mortgage consumer and the mortgage lender are treated fairly.

To maintain a healthy supply of leads to work is one of the most challenging parts of any lead generator’s job. The following are the five most common problems lead generators face while generating leads and let us see how internet mortgage leads solves them.

• Uninterested prospects could be solved.
• Slow response time could be improved.
• Tedious follow up could be made easy.
• Poor return on investment could be made great.
• Unreliable supply could be controlled.

Internet mortgage lead companies are doing the marketing work for mortgage lenders. They find prospects, and the mortgage consumers close the deals. Hence it is easier for the consumers to realize the dream of owing a home! For the lenders, it’s easier to increase sales to keep profit high. Internet mortgage leads are thus a win-win situation for all!

Jay Walker is a freelance author for the finance sector. More information regarding this topic can be found at http://www.nrleads.com and http://www.dotloan.com.

Now that you have written and compiled your new product, it is time for some finishing touches.

Here, we’re going to talk about how generating a specific set of graphics and using them in combination on your ‘mini’ website will help you earn more money and generate a better response than just a plain old text based website. Each portion of the creative process has been broken down into different sections so you can read what you need.

“COVERING” IT UP

A well known fact when selling anything to anyone is that using a picture along with a powerful description will boost your sales. So, you will need to have an image of your product. Whether it is an ebook cover, a report jacket, cd cover, or software box, you need to have an original image for your product.

Here are a few products you can use, AT NO COST to begin generating some good looking cover images.

Scott’s Box Shot Maker - It’s A Freebie, But It’s Really Good!
http://boxshotmaker.com

Ebook Creation Toolkit v4.0
http://www.webadvertisingsecrets.com/EbookCoverToolkit4.zip

MAKING THE PAGE

Now it’s time for the next group of graphics you’ll need to create that will help improve the look and selling power of your ‘mini’ website. However, before you start making sensational website graphics, you need the images that will give you just the right look to showcase your product properly.

Most graphics will be comprised of images and text, but some will also contain special effects generated with the use of more expensive photo editing tools such as PhotoShop — http://www.adobe.com — , or Paint Shop Pro — http://www.jasc.com — (even though Paint Shop Pro costs just $99, it’s a bargain compared to PhotoShop at a more costly $699).

First, let me give you a couple of wonderful places to look for FREE images that you can download and use, most of them anyway, royalty-free:

– STOCK X CHANGE –
http://www.sxc.hu - It’s the BEST online. Check it out, seriously.

– WEBSOUP.ORG –
http://www.websoup.org - You can find lots of things here besides free image repositories.

– iSTOCKPHOTO –
http://www.istockphoto.com - Even though you have to pay for the use of these images, it’s pretty inexpensive at just $0.50 per image.

What good will these images do you if you don’t have a tool to help you utilize them properly? So, here is another free gift for you that will help you create integral parts of your ‘mini’ site. **Please Note** - You will require Adobe PhotoShop to use this gift.

ACTION PAK GOLD ACTIONSCRIPTS FOR PHOTOSHOP”
http://www.webadvertisingsecrets.com/actionpakgold.zip

This package contains 3 action scripts that will generate a header graphic, an order button graphic, and a custom designed logo background. It’s a wonderful package to use. Only downfall, it requires PhotoShop.

So, now that we have our graphics all done up, there’s only one thing left to do before we move on to the final step. And that is creating our ‘mini’ website. To help you out with this process, here is yet another free gift for you to use called

Order Page Magic created by our protégé, Louis Burleson:
http://www.webadvertisingsecrets.com/OrderPageMagic.zip

It will help you develop a great ‘mini’ page, or order page if you prefer, that has been proven to convert potential customers into buying customers. This software tool will take you by the hand and lead you down the path to your ‘mini’ site creation.

And really, a targeted niche ‘mini’ site that only promotes one product is in essence an order page because you want people that come in search of more information on your subject matter that come to your page to buy your product. That’s what a ‘mini’ site will do. It takes all the guess work out for your site visitors and gives them just one option….to buy your product.

You have sucessfully created your own information product. Now, it is time to take your new product “to the market”.

Ronald Gibson is a Web Designer and Internet Marketer. He is the Webmaster of AffiliateUtopia.com, which offers information about some of the best money making opportunities on the Web. For more information, visit:
http://www.affiliateutopia.com/ and http://www.affiliateutopia.com/blog/