You would have heard of people making a lot of money with eBay, selling various products. These success stories compel us to read about eBay and understand how it works.
It is an auction website that is said to be one of the largest online websites and receives millions of visitors every day. Selling on eBay gives us the opportunity to sell to people from all over the world, unlike a physical store, where only locals are targeted. Earning a full time income from home is no longer a dream!
Your first question would be what to sell and where do you find products to sell? Start by selling the few odds and ends that are lying around the house. The saying that one man’s junk is another’s gold holds so true. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you sell under quality stuff. Below are some of the ways to find products to sell on ebay:
Your Home
A good place to find products to sell in the initial stages is your home. I am sure you have plenty of baby clothes, car seats, toys, monitors, books, china, cards, comics, electronics and a number of other things. As long as they are in good condition, these can be sold easily. Once you make some cash with these, you can venture into buying stuff for selling on eBay.
Second Hand Shops and Garage Sales
With the money that was made from selling things around the house, you can now start buying from second hand shops and garage sales. Look out for things that are in good condition. If you are lucky, you may find things that sell well. Do not venture into selling things that are too heavy and go for lightweight items that are easy to send. You will be amazed at the number of things you will find and the profit that can be made.
Wholesalers
Once you have made enough from the above methods, you can start searching for a good wholesaler, where you can find goods at great wholesale rates.
Finding a good wholesaler is not an easy task. There are so many so-called wholesalers whose prices are not competitive. You will not find much help here if you ask others because nobody wants to share the names of good wholesalers as they don’t want competition. This is the art of survival at it’s best!
First, you will need to look around at what is being sold on ebay and what sells well, and check the pulse of eBay. From my experience, I would say that electronics sell very well and since new ones keep entering the market every day, you will find a lot of buyers. Search for wholesalers in this niche, and settle for one that is the best.
I would suggest you join Salehoo.com. This is a place where you can find some of the best wholesalers for anything and everything you can think of. They even have a forum where you can meet others and get some ideas on legitimate wholesalers.
Click here to read part 2 of this article.
Drop Shipping
Drop shipping means selling for someone else. You will not have to buy anything or stock any 
products. The supplier stocks all products at the warehouse and shipping is done directly to the customers you point out. All you need to do is decide what you want to sell and list it on eBay. Once the item is sold, the customer will send the payment to you, you will then send the payment to the supplier and the supplier will dispatch the item to the customer.
The supplier has his product catalog with wholesale price to each product and you decide what items in the catalog to sell at a retailed price fixed by you. How are you going to fix the price? The price you fix should be based on the supplier’s price, eBay fees and delivery costs.
The advantages of drop shipping is that you don’t need any upfront money nor do you need any stock. There are a few disadvantages too. You will not know whether the supplier has enough stock of the item you are selling. You will need to constantly keep in touch with the supplier and checking out supplies. This is where a good genuine drop shipping company helps. I have compiled a list of US drop ship company to help you find a drop ship company that is suitable to your ebay business. Click here for the list.
Flea Markets
If you are one to frequent flea markets, you would know that it is a place where vendors sell their goods or even trade goods. You will find inexpensive goods from various parts of the country. It is a known fact that the second hand goods found at flea markets are sometimes worth far more than what the buyer pays. If you can lay your hands on something like that, you can make a fortune at eBay.
Discount Stores or Department
A discount store is a retail store where things are sold much cheaper than at a traditional department store. You can find a wide assortment of goods like electronic equipment, jewelry, electrical appliances and many others. Wall-Mart, Target and K-mart are examples of such discount stores that attract price conscious customers. If you are living in the US, this is going to be great for you, as you can make a ton of money just buying here and selling on eBay.
Trade Shows
Trade shows are the place to be for someone who sells on eBay. This is where all the manufacturers meet and you will have a chance to get the information straight out of the horse’s mouth, before actually deciding on buying their goods. Before deciding on going to a trade show, try and find out which manufacturers are going to be there and what the goods are. If it is anything that you are interested in selling, you can meet the supplier.
Just use your imagination to find goods at inexpensive prices. There are some more for the road, which include Government auctions, Liquidators, Newspaper and magazine classifieds and wholesale gift catalogs.
Remember, wherever you choose to get them from, use your judgment in determining the quality and worth of an item and go for it only when you are sure in your mind that this is going to bring in profit after deducting all the other expenses involved.
Click here to read part 1 of this article
Some good Internet marketing resources that you will enjoy reading them.
Area51marketing.com/weirdvideo.php
Frank Kern has made a 30 minute video revealing an email copy wrote by him that produces the best conversion rate he has ever had. He has shot this video that takes the email and breaks down every little step ...and explains why it worked and how you can use his techniques.
Internet Business Entrepreneur
Internet Business Entrepreneur collected a list of Internet business products that will help you create and grow a profitable online business. For a limited time , you can get full access to these products for free at http://www.net-marketing-services.com/ibenms.htm.
Affiliatesalesvideos.com/anik
Do you know that online videos could be used to increase affiliate commission? Dr. Mike has prepared a video presentation to show you how he has used videos to increase conversions substantially just using his video techniques.
Here are some startup suggestions for new marketers. You may be familiar with some of them and some may be new. The aim is for you to be able to learn something from these tips.
The first thing is an overall game plan and breaking it into days. Breaking down things into smaller fragments and goals makes it easier to tackle the job. First, you need to identify which route you wish to go. Do you want to create an ebook, build software, affiliate marketing, flipping websites or something else?
Once these are defined and the goal written out, then start working on the project. For example, if you do decide to go the way of creating software, you have to ensure that you have all the tools that are required to create one. Before creating this software, you need to do a bit of research if there is a requirement in the first place. The best thing to do is see if similar software exists and if it does, look at the features. The clever way to go about it is to check your competition and offer something better that what they are offering.
Next step after checking your competition would be to check the market and the need for this software. This can be done through the relevant internet marketing forums where people usually use something like this. Find out from people what they think and what are the features they are looking for. This way, you would get plenty of feedback. Create a list of features and keep adding to them.
Once you are through with researching and your feature list is ready, time to now decide on what the features are that you are actually going to include in the software and what you are not going to include. Check the time factor too; deciding how much time it is gong to take for you to create this software. This is important, as your advertising campaign needs to be coordinated based on the time of completion.
The next thing is how you are going to market your product. Building a list of potential buyers makes a lot of sense and it helps in the future too. This list should be ready even before the software is ready. For this, you will need an autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse, which are reputable.
Once your software is ready, give out the beta version in the forums that you are already a member of and offer a free version for people to try it out, limiting it to about ten people.
While this testing is going on, you can start working on the sales page, which is most crucial. This is what is going to be on your website once you are done. It is important to write your own sales copy. You know what you are offering people and there may be things you want to include or removed based on the feedback. You can ensure your sales copy does the job it is supposed to.
The title needs to be an attention grabber. Have an introduction and summary of the key features and benefits. Also try and get some testimonials from the Beta testers. This is one of the reasons you submitted your software for testing. Check out other sales letters for ideas. At the end of the sales letter, sign your name.
Once you get the feedback from the forums and your software is tweaked to finally take shape, now its time to register with an affiliate program like Clickbank or PayDotCom or anything else. The idea is to have several affiliates promoting your software and you offer commission percentage. Make it attractive to sell by giving affiliates at least 60%. This will attract people and believe me this will earn you thousands of dollars in the long run.
Next email all your friends and people you know with the link to your sales page. The affiliate program you created takes over from there. If using Clickbank, your product will not be listed in their market place unless there is one sale and you can make that first sale for things to start moving.
Next thing is to concentrate on the opt-in form on your sales page and capture visitors. People may not buy on their first visit, keep sending reminders at regular intervals and in no time, you will have a huge list of people you can market all your future products to.
Hope this outline gets you started and acts as a springboard for your own ideas. I just used ‘software’ as an example and this plan can be applied to any product, even an ebook.
The World Wide Web is filled with opportunities for all types of people to make money. Whether you're a writer, a webmaster, an affiliate marketer, a direct seller, or a niche marketer, there are an infinite number of ways in which someone can make money on the internet. Out of all the millions of ways that people have found to be successful in their money-making ventures, one of those ways to make money is by creating a web directory. There are many people who may think that creating a web directory is a difficult process, but in reality it's as simple as driving to the store.
Once you have figured out which type of web directory you want to make money online with, the next thing you must do is to set up the website. This is pretty simple to do because all you need is the PHP Link Directory Software installed to your domain page. The PHP Link Directory is the most popular software for setting up web directories so one should have no trouble getting a hold of it. After the software is installed the directory owner then must decide which categories to add and which to exclude. This is where the part comes in where you will really be making money with your web directory.
Click here to read part 2 of this article
In case you have not read part 1 of this article, please click here.
How to Make Money with your Directory
The basic idea behind making money with your web directory is through the paid advertising method. In order to make money with your web directory then you should set a price so that
other webmasters will be able to advertise their websites and links for a fee that you specify. Through this process of paid advertising, your web directory will be receiving revenue and income each month from the webmasters that advertise their website in your web directory categories.
There is one basic principle to remember, though, when setting a price for the paid advertising. Webmasters will not pay if your website is not popular so PageRank (PR) matters very much to your web directory. Once your directory has achieved a PR6 or PR7 then you will be able to raise the price of advertising for webmasters because more internet traffic will be exposed to their websites through your web directory. Webmasters will pay for that type of exposure and the higher the PageRank of your website then the higher price you can charge for their websites' advertising.
Promotion of your Directory
Of course, your web directory will not achieve a Google PageRank of 6 or 7 overnight and there are some basic promotional tools you can use in order to achieve a higher PageRank quicker. For example, advertising your own directory on other webmasters' directories will give your own directory exposure. Second, advertising your directory in your signature on popular webmaster forums will give you even greater exposure and create even more traffic to your web directory!
Speaking about webmaster forums, DigitalPoint Forum and V7n Forum are two of the largest webmaster forums you can use to gain free traffic for your web directory. These 2 forums provide a section specifically for web directory owners to announce their new directories and directories listing price discount promotions. Your directories or promotion announcement may receive a great respond, depending on the quality, design and PageRank of your directory, your directories or promotion announcement may receive a great respond. An announcement of high PageRank directory that charge a low listing price may attract a lot people visit the directory and pay for a listing.
The heavier you promote your web directory then the more handsomely you will be rewarded!
Altogether, creating a web directory for the sole purpose of making money doesn't have to be a difficult venture. If you understand the basic principles behind paid advertising then creating a web directory should be a pretty easy task. Figuring out which type of directory you'll want to promote, actually creating it, putting a sticker price on the advertising, and promoting your web directory are the four central steps to successfully setting up a web directory to make money online!
I have reading on two interesting money making programs you can take part. It is called Zangocash and ReviewsArena.
ReviewsArena.com
Do you like to review clickbank's merchants sites and products? If yes, you can submit your review to www.reviewsarena.com. In return you're allowed to include your Clickbank affiliate link into the page of your review. Your review will be read by visitors and some of them will click your affiliate link to the target sale page. If a visitor decide to make a purchase in the sale page, you earn Clickbank sale commission. To submit a review, please go to http://www.reviewsarena.com/write.php.
ZangoCash.com
Zango is an online media company providing users free access to different type of content including videos, audio, online games, software, tools and utilities. To access and enjoy the free content and entertainment of Zango, users must first install a free software called 'Zango'. And web publishers can make money by distributing the Zango software in ZangoCash.com.
ZangoCash offering several unique ways for web publishers around the world to earn money through their websites:
Syndicating Zango's Content
You become a web publisher of Zangocash and then decide what Zango content (video, audio, games, tools, etc) want to put on you site. Visitors who come to your site and find your Zango content interesting will need to install Zango to gain access to the content and your will be paid up to $1.20 per install depending on the visitors countries and the number of downloads your have generated for the month.
Software Bundle
If you own a software, you may combine your software or application with Zango to make money per download - users who want to use your software must first install Zango. This is a great opportunity to make money online if you have a free software that can attract many users to try your software.
Refer Zango to Others
ZangoCash also has a referral program to reward people who refer new web publishers to Zango. ZangoCash provides banner ads, links you can display on your site. You will earn 20% of all revenues generated by your referred webmasters who use it to sign up with ZangoCash.
Creating an information product for the first time may seem to be a daunting task, but it is also the most profitable way to go!
Going through the web will bring up a lot of information but it is difficult to understand how
exactly to go about it. This is where a step-by-step concise guide comes handy. This is exactly what you will find in this article.
The first step, before getting into the actual product creation is the mindset. The right mindset goes a long way in ensuring the success of your product. If one has been in Internet marketing for long and has a list to sell this to, it is easy, but when one is new and has no list, it takes a lot of hard work and some good elbow grease! Never ever get started thinking this is going to be easy. Have faith and leap into it with the dedication and commitment that is required. See it through no matter how much time it takes, one week, two weeks or a month. The first product is always the most difficult to create and let me stress that it gets only easier, especially if the first one is a success. Ensuring its success is in your hands.
The second and most important step is one of the most talked about subjects. Finding a hungry niche. With the first product, it is always best to go with a niche that you have an interest and knowledge in. There may be several niches that are profitable, but pick one that you are passionate about. This makes things easier. After choosing a niche, check if people are interested in that niche. Use keyword tools, of which several are available, and find out the number of searches that are made for that niche and how much competition there is. Make sure the niche search results have at least 2000 searches or more. This shows that people are keen on finding information related to that niche. If it is a very small niche (less searches), then think of something else that has good search results and less competition. Choose at least ‘key phrases’ that people are looking for in that niche and note them down. Do not pick anything with too much competition for the first information product. Once you gain a little experience, you can get bold.
Click here to read part 2 of this article
Once the niche and the five key phrases are ready, next step is to start writing the ebook. How do you go about it? How would you know what chapters to have in your book?
This is where Yahoo answers comes in. If you have heard of it, you would know that people ask questions and find answers to those questions, and it is an excellent resource to learn what people want to know within a particular niche. This is an awesome tool to find chapters for the ebook.
Suppose you are writing about ‘dog training’. Type that in the search bar and yahoo will bring up several questions on the dog training topic. The amount of chapters for your book should be based on the number of questions being asked, but about 5 or 6 chapters with decent content should be good enough. Note down 5 or 6 important questions that are being asked and these will be your chapters. There may be a lot more but since this is your first book, concentrate on a few.
There should be chapters for the ebook and also good titles for each chapter. Creating content for each chapter comes next.
Always start an ebook with an introduction, telling the readers who you are and what it is that you wish to convey through your ebook. Although, this doesn’t have to be long, a short story will be good.
Here are some guidelines to help with the titles. Pick a catchy title and use some words like ‘Secrets’ or ‘Never before seen’ or ‘Top 5 reasons’ in the title and make it attention grabbing. Once the titles are formed, content should be written based on those titles.
Try and ensure there is not too much fluff. Remember, people crave for information, give them as much as possible. This makes all the difference between a well-made information product and one that has been written just to make a few sales.
When writing for the first time, it is natural to feel awed by the whole process, but it sure doesn’t have to be that way. Time to get some ideas for the titles. If you are running out of ideas because you are new, read various articles on the topic of the chapter, writing down points all the time. Then expand on those points in your own words. The biggest mistake and one that will pull a writer down is copying content. There is no excuse for doing that. Taking ideas from other articles is fine, in fact it is good as it provides the much needed learning curve.
It is a lot of writing but staying focused is the key to succeeding in coming up with a great product!
Construction of each chapter becomes very important. Start off by telling them what you want to tell them. Then tell them about it and write the main content, advice and a few tips. At the very end of the chapter, summarize what you told them briefly and write a little about the next chapter.
That’s all there is to it! If you follow these steps you are on your way to creating a very profitable product!
Click here to read part 1 of this article
Loads of free study materials for making money on the Internet, below are the links to get them.
FreeMonthlyGift.com
The above site is like a Internet marketing library. It contains all kinds of products useful for online business building such as web graphics, software, reports, tips and tools. All the products in Freemonthlygift.com come with private label rights and master resell rights.
Internethomebusinessvideos.com
Are you a beginner wanting to learn how to set up an e-commerce website to make money online? Dan B Cauthron has created a series of Internet home business video courses specifically to help beginners start an online business or e-commerce site from scratch. The video courses can be accessed at Internethomebusinessvideos.com.
Privatelabelpublishing.com
Privatelabelpublishing.com is currently offering two free gifts:
1) FREE Membership to a One-of-A-Kind Resource Site!
- Free Internet marketing tips and resources inside the membership site.
2) Clickbank Automated Download Protector In A Box!
- A tool that will create secure download page for your ClickBank information products.
Squidoo has been penalized by Google most likely due to spam on Squidoo pages (lenses). It happened on 7th July, nearly all the Squidoo lenses (pages) that use to rank top 10 were 
dropped by Google according to an investigation by Tubbynerd.com.
For the past 6 months, Squidoo lenses have been ranking well for different keywords and niches in Google. And most of the owners (lensemasters) get their Squidoo lenses in top 10 without requiring any SEO work and effort. They rank well easily and gain consistent free Google traffic by just picking the right keywords for the title of their Squidoo lenses. This has long discovered by webmasters and online marketers who then used Squidoo as a tool to generate traffic and income by creating a number of lenses in different keywords and niches in the hope that Google will pick some of their lenses for first page ranking.
But now it seems that Google don't like what the Internet marketers have done, probably due to the lack of helpful and quality content in the Squidoo lenses.
Is Squidoo still helpful to Google SEO?
Squidoo is still inside Google index with PR 6 and their pages (lenses) are free for anyone to create in any topics. So it is still a great tool to gain free one way link for Google SEO.
Will Squidoo comes back?
Google gives second change to websites and blogs that drop from top 10. I have been noticing this for a year. Some of the sites and blogs actually re-gain the original position after dropped by Google for some time. I hope that Squidoo will figure out the possible causes for the drop, fix their problems accordingly and get back their rankings. There are some good Squidoo lenses that are helpful to Internet users, I hope they will be back to first page of Google
Few days ago I have posted a video presentation by Joel Comm that talks about whether is it risky to build a business on AdSense. Now Joel Comm has created another video presentation to let people know what are the other programs web publishers can use on their websites besides AdSense to make money online. You can watch and listen this presentation from this link:
http://www.askjoelcomm.com/what_are_some_other_ways_to_ma.shtml
Joel presented it well. As usually he will give some useful tips to the viewers to make sure anyone will benefit watching his video.
Are you using a website or blog to earn money on the net? If you are, you will be spending most of your time and effort on promoting you website or blog to get as much traffic or visitors as possible in order to generate online sales and advertisement revenue. Whenever there is a new traffic generating techniques, you will want to learn about it to find out whether it can increase your web traffic.
Speaking of new traffic technique, online video marketing is one of the newest techniques you can apply to explode your web traffic. Online video marketing is where you upload promotional videos to online video sharing sites to send the visitors who watch your videos in the videos sites to your blog and website.
Online video sharing sites are growing rapidly and very popular that their growth and 
popularity may be able to help you make your site or blog a success. Some of the most visited video sharing sites that host a huge collection of different videos are Youtube, Metacafe and Google Video. Many of these videos are considered homemade as they are made by people just like you.
When marketing your blog and website using online video sharing sites, there is one important thing that you need to know. Most internet users don't enjoy watching videos that appear as spam. So you need to try you best to make your promotional videos not to be too pushy.
Increase product sales with videos
If you are promoting or selling a product or service through a website or blog, you may think about showcasing that product or service. This can be done by showing samples of your work. Another idea is to tell people how long you have been creating the product or offering the services that you currently offer. This is to keep your video as general as possible and avoid your video viewers think that the goal of your video is only to sell your product. The only opportunity to promote your business is at the end of your video. Make sure you include your business, product or service information at the end of all your videos.
Increase advertisement and affiliate revenue with video
Video sharing sites aren't just benefiting to those who sell products and services on the Internet. For websites and blogs that make money with online advertisements (Google AdSense, YPN, etc) or affiliate programs, it is likely that the websites and blogs are content driven. Often these sites and blogs focus on a particular topic with a collection of articles related to their topics. So, if you have a content based site or blog, it may be a good idea to make a video providing information and even interactive displays on the topic that your site or blog covers, whether that topic is traveling related, weight loss, or something similar. At the end of your video, adding your blog and website address will help to gain more web visitors and increase your AdSense earning or affiliate commission.
These are just some of video marketing ideas, I'm sure that are a lot more ideas you can explore from the Internet and use them to explode your traffic.
Want to make some extra bucks? Perhaps the two opportunities can aid you.
Messagingtalk.org
Messagingtalk.org currently has an earning opportunity for people who write article and content relevant to
- Microsoft Exchange Server
- MS outlook
The 7 Dollar Mall
Richard Madison has created a new free membership site at http://www.the7dollarmall.com/members to let individuals make money online by selling information products. Anyone who sign up with The7dollarmall.com will be given an online store called "The 7 Dollar Mall" loaded with hundreds of information products in different categories that can be sold immediately on the Internet. The mall is updated daily with new information products to help members attract returned visitors and sales commission is paid instantly via Paypal when a sale occurs from your mall.
If you are an ebay seller, your primary goal probably is to make as much money as possible on ebay by selling the products you get from wholesalers, drop ship suppliers, flea markets, garage 
sales or your own basement. But unfortunately, there are now thousands, if not millions, of people interested in doing the same thing as well. For you, this often means a consistent raise in competition. However, taught competition is not going to stop you from profiting in ebay if you know about marketing.
When you list your items for sale on ebay, you sale items will be viewed by potential buyers. But because of high competition, these potential buyers will also look at other similar items offered by your competitors and thus making harder for you to generate ebay sales. You may want to consider taking a step further to promote your ebay auctions. There are several ways that you can go about marketing your ebay sale items, without spending money for the marketing.
Perhaps, one of the best ways to market your ebay auctions is by joining the ebay community, otherwise known as the online message boards. When you communicate and discuss with other members in the ebay community, your ebay name will be used as your screen name. Whenever you creaet a new message or reply to an existing one in the ebay community forum, your name is left with a link to your main ebay webpage. That is the age that outlines all of the items that you currently have available for sale. Many ebay community members click other member’s pages just out of curiosity, but it not uncommon for someone to find something that catches their eye. Simply starting a few conversations with other ebay community members, even just occasionally, may help to increase your ebay exposure.
Another relatively easy method to promote your ebay sales auctions to the general public is by posting on several message boards, besides eBay. There are message boards allowing internet users, just like you to post information on items that they have available for sale, both on and off of eBay. However when marketing your ebay listings in message boards, make sure that you only advertise your ebay sale items in areas designated for doing so, to avoid being complained as spamming that will hurt your reputation.
When you have multiple items for sale on ebay, you can put a “please checkout my other eBay auctions,” message at the end of each of your eBay listings. This is also a free and easy way to get more people to view your ebay sale listings.
The below e-books and tips have good information that you might don't want to miss.
Traffic Generation Course
Traffic Generation course was created by Stanley Tang. It contains a step-by-step blueprint to generating consistent amount of unique web visitors daily. Some of the traffic generating techniques and tips you'll learn in this course are viral marketing, the traffic mistake most people makes, places to buy cheap targeted traffic and etc.
Askjoelcomm.com
If you plan to make money with AdSense or you already are an AdSense publisher, you might have these questions:
- Is it risky to build a business on AdSense?
- Can we make money from AdSense in long term using content sites and blogs?
Niche Software Empire E-book
This e-book teaches people to make money selling software products online. It reveals how you can create your own niche software products to profit online without programming and technical knowledge.
Make the Most from Freelancing by Effectively Promoting Your Online Freelance Business Services (Part 1)
For a freelancer, having a professional presence in their area is of prime importance, be it the internet or offline. The latest equipment and the best technology will not be of any use without that much required ‘presence’. This presence is what builds credibility and is acquired by marketing your services in an appropriate and effective manner.
Marketing your freelancing services begins with marketing yourself. You would understand what I am trying to say, if you look at yourself as a ‘Brand’ that requires a very high level of marketing. Just as companies have reputation, each person you meet offline or interact with online, forms an opinion about you and this reputation (positive of course) is what creates a brand.
There are several ways to promote your services on the internet, through email, websites, articles, e-books, and several others.
Sending e-mails is a great way to let people know about yourself and your services. Send emails to people who you are connected with in some way, such as organizations that you belong to or various groups that you are a member of, or to people that have requested you to. Create signature files with details of your name, address, telephone and links to your websites (if you have a website). A small description of what you do and contact information should be sufficient to peak the interest of people.
You can start sending newsletters. Never send too many and watch the pace at which your newsletters reach people. There should be a decent gap between each. Make readers aware of your services through these newsletters. This may require a little bit of knowledge. Read all about newsletters and how they are done, as these could really be a great help to a freelancer.
Now, here is one of free ways of marketing freelancing services. You can start writing articles and send them to website owners, relating to the topic of their website and have a bio box at the bottom of the article, giving details about your services and this would work better if you have your own website, where they can link to.
When marketing offline, you can use newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, press conferences, and advertisements, to market your services. Giving your telephone number as a point of contact is a must. Then finally, if someone calls showing interest in your services, it becomes inevitable for you to meet them, unlike online when all your services can be marketed without actually coming face-to-face with your client.
Click here to read part 2 of this article.
Make the Most from Freelancing by Effectively Promoting Your Online Freelance Business Services (Part 2)
For your offline freelance marketing, remember that you may be asked to submit documentation in relation to your services. Do not be intimidated, although initially when you are new, it may happen, do not show it ever. Be professional to the core.
Do your homework before meeting a prospective client. Get as much information about them as you possibly can. Proper preparation and presentation is the key. Write down the information about what you want the client to know about you and why they should use your services. What is different about you? Do you think just telling them that you are going to do a great job is going to help? NO. Ask questions about their needs and get them to ask you the right questions. Definitely takes some smartness. Use the word ‘help’, whether online or offline. Make them feel that you are willing to help them and once they understand that, then get the ball rolling.
Whatever method you choose to use, the first and foremost marketing technique that will land you projects is to be able to differentiate yourself from competition. Your clients should begin to see you as their preferred choice. Remember, it’s never about what you do, it’s always about what you do different that sets you apart from your competition.
Work on writing the greatest copy so that your message gets into the minds of your prospective clients.
If you do not taste success in the beginning, persist, and persistence pays off. If you give up, you would never know what could have been. Let your services speak of you, let them bring forth your personality. Aping will not get you anywhere and clients cannot associate you with a particular style.
Focus remains the one most crucial aspect that will take you to great heights in your freelancing career. You have to market in such a way that your clients understand they are going to save money and get quality by hiring your services.
Important aspects of marketing are public relations, direct mail, newsletters, discounts, sponsorship, word of mouth and other tactics of communication.
Have a vision and a goal and center your marketing around that. Do not go in a hundred different directions and confusing yourself as well as others.
Once you ensure you have a proper plan on what you are going to be marketing and how you are going about it, and what benefits you are showing your prospective clients, it will be extremely effortless to sell yourself and in turn your services, because people will understand your message loud and clear.
Finally, remember that your reputation is your best marketing manager. Good reputation stands the test of time. You may come across erratic and unreasonable clients, but it is up to you to maintain your calm and take it in your stride. Establish trust in your prospect’s mind and you are halfway inside the door. The more people trust you, the more popular you become and offers will come to you knocking at your door.
Freelancing is all about attracting more business with very less effort.
Click here to read part 1 of this article.
I have written a number of money making articles in the past few months. These articles are specially designed to let you understand how to make money online. They were only displayed at the home page for about a week then they were moved to the archive section. So you might have not read these articles yet. Here are some of them:
7 Ways to Make Money Online Without Involving Internet Marketing
3 Interesting Ideas to Make Money on ebay
6 Ways to Make Money Blogging
Guide to Making Money Online With A Website Without Selling
How to Start an Online Busines Fast and Easy
As you can see the title of the articles. They cover different ideas and ways to earn income on the Internet. So, take some time to read them to find out what is ideal for you.
Blogcatalog, a social networking site for bloggers has made some changes to the site to make it more easier for bloggers to network and promote their blogs.
The Changes include:
- Complete Visual Redesign
The have finally shed our dated look for a much cleaner interface.
- Shout-to-Shout
Get a better picture of your shoutbox conversations with the new shout-to-shout feature.
- BlogCatalog Broadcasts
Send mass messages to your BlogCatalog followers with new Broadcast tool.
http://www.blogcatalog.com/broadcast
- Special Features For Our Supporters
Get frequent thumbshot updates, no ads, access to beta features and much more when you help support BlogCatalog
http://www.blogcatalog.com/account.donate.php
- Improved Language Support
With blogs in dozens of languages Blogcatalog have updated their encoding to a much more friendly UTF8.
Blogcatalog.com is similar to MyBlogLog.com. If MyblogLog.com can help you get more traffic and increase you revenue, then blogcatelog.com may do the same for you.
Search engines traffic/visitors are highly profitable to websites and blogs because they are converting well into sales and AdSense revenue. To gain free search engines traffic you have to get in top 10 in search engines. And there are not short cut to reach top 10, you need to spend a lot of of time in SEO work to get result. But before you start doing SEO work, you must first gain the right SEO knowledge. James Martell's 5 day backlinks mini-course is going to help you get some of the right SEO knowledge. You can sign up free and download the 5 day audio course visiting the below link:
http://www.backlinksworkshop.com/free-mini-series/5-day-course.html
The audio courses are actually the recordings of his recently sold-out Backlinks Workshop.
I recently wrote a blog post titled 'How to Earn Money Online with Craigslist' and part of the post talks about promoting an online business using Craigslist but it isn't detail enough. So I added this post to help you understand more about how Craigslist can help you make more money from your e-business.
Savvy Internet marketers who are able to identify the target audience and create sales copy which entices the reader may find advertising on Craigslist to be incredibly profitable. Conversely Internet markets that do not do their research and take a spamming approach to advertising on Craigslist are not likely to see significant financial gains. So the answer to the question in the title is yes and no and maybe. It all depends on the way in which the business owners utilize Craigslist.
There is certainly an opportunity to gain financial benefit through advertising on Craigslist. Except job posting, advertising for all products and services is free on Craigslist making it cost effectively. Additionally, Craigslist already receives extensive traffic with approximately ten million visitors generating four billion page views each month so there is no need to drive traffic to the website. While Craigslist offers so many advertising benefits, these benefits may be wasted if the advertiser does not do his research or evaluate the competition.
Research before Posting on Craigslist
Advertising on Craigslist is similar to advertising in other forms of media. Despite the existing heavy traffic flows to the website, successful marketing campaigns require extensive research. This research should provide the Internet marketer and his staff with insight into where post the advertisements to most effectively reach the target audience, how to word the copy of the advertisement to make it most appealing to the target audience and which relevant keywords should be included in the advertising copy to make it likely for members of the target audience to find the advertisement easily when searching for products and services offered by the company.
Research of this capacity can be conducted either online or offline. One of the most effective forms of this type of research is to have members of the target audience fill out market surveys. The answers provided by the participants should give the marketer a good idea of what the target audience is seeking. Incorporating this information into the marketing campaign can make it noticeably more successful.
Evaluate the Competition on Craigslist
The search feature on Craigslist gives an Internet marketer an excellent way to evaluate the competition. Studying the competition is important because it can help you to learn how you can be more successful. This increased success can be a result of determining successful aspects of the competitor’s marketing strategy and implementing these strategies as well as determining faulty aspects of the competitor’s marketing strategy and avoiding these strategies.
To get a good idea of the competitors who are advertising on Craigslist, use the search feature to search for keywords relevant to your own products and services. You will likely receive search results including advertisements from competitors. Next, carefully analyze these advertisements to determine how your can not only create better products and services at more affordable prices but also write more engaging advertising copy. Many wise Internet marketers have the reasoning skills necessary to properly analyze the advertisements for competitors but they often falter when taxed with the dilemma of creating better advertisements. This is when the services of a professional sales copywriter with search engine optimization (SEO) skills becomes a vital part of the equation. This writer can use his SEO training as well as his knowledge on the subject of writing advertising copy to effectively entice members of the target audience to either purchase products or services or at least investigate these products or services further.
1) Products that needed to be used immediately
When People want to use something instantly, they will choose to buy the thing from the nearest shop instead of buying it online as they need the thing fast. However, there are people will buy it online but they would expect super fast delivery services. So unless you can deliver your products as fast as McDonald, if not you should avoid selling these products or you'll need to spend a hard time convincing your customers to accept longer shipping time. The remedies for headache and sore throat are some of the products that needed fast.
2) Products that are highly competitive
If a market is crowded with tons of sellers offering the similar type of products, this could mean that the market is very profitable. But if you are just starting out selling online, it is better not to compete in this highly competitive market. Because the existing sellers have experienced and profited long enough in the market that they are able to offer much lower price than you and they can invest a lot in marketing and promotion to dominate the market, making you hard to sell your products in the market. Web hosting product is a good example of very profitable but highly competitive product.
3) Low Demand Products
You obviously don't want to sell a product online that no one want to buy. So when you have come up with a product idea, it is always good to do some research online to find out whether the products are profitable, how many people are searching it online every month. The more people searching it online, the higher the demand.
There has been a total of 20 money making opportunities I posted in the last 10 posts. In this post, I will continue to add two more programs that you might be interested.
Linux.com
Linux.com offers a great earning opportunities for people who write articles directly related to Linux, open source, or free software. They are paying $100 - $300 for an article, review, case studie or HOWTOs guide relevant to the above mentioned topics. The article should be between 800 and 1,500 words and must be original to be consider for possible publication on Linux.com. There are several steps to follow when submitting an article to Linux and you can get the submission instructions here.
FreeIQ
Brad Fallon believes that everyone knows something that is of value to someone else. So he created FreeIQ few months ago to let people share ideas, knowledge and information through streaming video, audio and PDF e-books. You can join the FreeIQ community to market your products; increase your publicity and revenue by showcasing your knowledge in the marketplace of FreeIQ.
And also the new affiliate program of FreeIQ let you earn money by referring content providers and information searchers who then purchase products in FreeIQ.
I have read Google AdSense Policies several times and I have to admit that I am not a good reader. Today Sushith from http://brokencodes.blogspot.com commented on my blog stating that I have made an AdSense mistake by placing a label "Topics" above an AdSense ads link unit. After reading this comment I quickly went to www.google.com/adsense to read again the AdSense policies. And yes, Google doesn't mention about label. Here's what Google said:
Publishers participating in the AdSense program may not place misleading labels above Google ad units - for instance, ads may be labeled "Sponsored Links" but not "Favorite Sites"
Well, it seems that Sushith is right. I have made an AdSense mistake that can lead to my account being disable. So I decided to remove the "topic" label placed at the top left sidebar of this blog to comply AdSense policies fully.
You may have spent a hard time optimizing your AdSense ads to make the most money from AdSense. But if you use label with AdSense ads, you can only label "Sponsored Links" above the AdSense ads or link unit.
Another AdSense mistake that is easily made by AdSense publishers is placing AdSense ads in second level domain names that contain the word "Google". Some of the example of second level domain names that use Google are:
http://googleadsensetips.blogspot.com/
http://google.blognewschannel.com
http://google.blogspace.com
http://google.weblogsinc.com
Publishers who display AdSense ads in these domains can get their AdSense disabled by Google and actually Google disallows people to register Google trademark as second level domain name as stated at http://www.google.com/permissions/guidelines.html.
Craigslist is a growing and continually developing online community that offers great deals to its users. This community is a place for searching information, finding online and offline jobs, advertising, looking for friends and dates, buying products, selling goods and services or discussing important matters. Craigslist gains approximately 4 billions page views monthly with a plenty of financial opportunities posted daily, so it is possible to make money on the Internet using Craigslist.
Freelancers and independent contractors who offer services like writing, editing, translation, admin support, SEO, transcriptions, web design, business consulting, accounting and many more are finding Craigslist to be a great place to offer their services or respond to advertisements from those seeking services. There are getting more small businesses and companies outsourcing their part of their work which lead to increase of outsource opportunities to independents contractors. This definitely is a good news, as more companies may use Craigslist to advertise their need of freelancers and independents contractors.
E-entrepreneurs may use Craigslist to gain more exposures for the online businesses and e-commerce websites. The most obvious way to promote your products and online store is post your advertisement to most the relevant category under the 'For Sale' section. Since Craigslist gets billions of page view monthly, you may get a lot of potential buyers viewing your ads and subsequently purchase from you.
Craigslist's job section is unlike other job search websites. Craigslist not only contains full-time and part-time job ads but also telecommute positions are available. By using the search feature, checking the telecommute box and pressing search; a list of home based and online working opportunities will show up on the page. And to make searching a telecommute position that is right for you easier, you can select the most appropriate category when searching.
Haven been posted a lot of resources links in the previous posts. In this post, I have three more resources links to add.
Online Marketing Monthly Magazine
Ommweb.com has released their very first professional print Internet marketing mazagine packed with money making information that will keep you stay ahead of the online business trends. You can get a copy of the premiere issue of the Online Marketing Monthly send to your door free by subscribing at Ommweb.com now.
Technobloggie.com
The site has a list of free tools for blogging, AdSense, niche marketing, keywords research and etc. You may need them for you online money making venture.
Resellrightspack.com
Cody Moya has put together 200 resell rights information products into one mega package that anyone can have free access at Resellrightspack.com. All these info products are relevant to online marketing and making money on the internet. They can be resell for 100% profit or distributed to your web visitors for marketing purpose.
Should Cost-Per-Click (CPC) AdSense Earners Worries about The Google's New Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Programs?
I finally understand how the Google's CPA programs will work on AdSense publishers after reading the latest announcement of their launch of AdSense Referrals 2.0. The CPA program will only affect CPC AdSense earners slightly in the future because the CPA program has placed under the referral section. AdSense publishers can choose not to display Google CPA ads and continue enjoying pay-per-click earning.
Advertisers like CPA advertising most because they pay for the ads only when a sale or other actions specified by them occur. But unfortunately, they wouldn't get the traffic they expected (possibly getting little traffic only) from CPA advertising since AdSense publishers can choose not to display their ads and send visitors to them. So most AdSense publishers in niches that work poor in CPA programs will not use the CPA ads, they want to continue earning steady income with Adsense CPC ads. And thus advertisers in those niches who want to gain consistent paid traffic from Google still have to stick with CPC advertising.
Internet has become a great place to find information in the past five years and will continue to be a popular place for information searching. Every day over 100 millions of people in the world using search engines, directories and other free online tools to search for the information and resources they needed for their life, work, business, health, hobby, etc. So the demands for information are extremely huge. Because of this huge demands, more and more people have come up with their own information products to profit online.
Today, Selling information products has become one of the booming markets in Internet. The market is competitive and it will be hard to make money if you sell the same information other people offer. You need to be different. The key is to offer valuable hard to find information at a reasonable price.
There are numerous types of information products you can sell online and in my opinion the 3 most profitable information products are:
- E-books
- Reports
- Digital Video
Some of the advantages of e-books are that they are not expensive to develop, high profit margin and no inventory to carry as they are in digital format. You can find all sorts of e-books on the net. Topics rank from art to health and from health to travel. E-books that teach people to do something (how to e-book) sell well usually.
The first step to creating an e-book is to come up with a topic or subject. Think about your area of expertise, hobbies, interests, experience and background and you may come up with a subject you want to write. There are two options in creating content for your e-book. You can either write it yourself or hire a freelance writer to do the work for you.
E-book generally in PDf format because it is widely accepted and Mac users can use it. You'll need Adobe PDF to format your e-book into PDf and it will cost you money to use Adobe's software. But Dirk Dupon is willing to do it free for you at http://www.ebooks-made-easy.com/create.htm.
Reports
Reports are similar to e-books but they are shorter (10 pages to 50 pages usually) and easier to create. But the downside is you can only sell report at price between $1 and $20 depending on what sort of information you are offering. Writing the content for a report is far simple than writing an e-book. Some of the ideas to creating reports are
- Interview someone who is an expert and write down the conversation between you and the expert in a report.
- If you run a blog. You can pick some of the best blog posts in your archive and combine them to come up with a report.
Today, most people are using high speed Internet connection to surf the net. With high speed Internet connection, users can gain access smoothly to large files like digital videos. It is not very difficult to create a digital videos product and the selling price you can charge for digital videos product is higher than most downloadable products.
It is time for another update on the money making programs:
Leadpile.com
Leadpile.com provides an opportunity to you to earn more money from your website and blog. 
It is actually a marketplace where you can sign up to sell leads on your website and blog to companies and lead buyers. Selling leads to online companies is different from selling affiliate products online. A lead refer to online request made by a customer for a specific service or product. When a visitor fills in a form displayed on your site to ask for more information about a product or service, you generated or sold a lead and will be paid for the lead generated by you.
Getting leads is a lot more easier than selling affiliate products from your site as there are no costs for visitors to fill a form to ask for a product or service, they will usually take action instantly to request more details on the product or service that interest them.
How to Get Started
- Create a seller account with Leadpile.com.
- Login to your Leadpile account and search for your targeted niche.
- Select the style of online form you want to display on your site and generate the code of the online form.
- Copy the code to your website or blog to start selling leads.
I found this opportunity when reading Dane Carlson's Business Opportunites Weblog yesterday. He is currently recruiting writers or bloggers passionate about entrepreneurship for his business weblog. Here's a couple notes from Dane to applicants:
- Please send me a writing sample.
- Experience blogging isn’t required, I will train you.
- Some positions are paid, and some aren’t. Please specify in your email whether or not you’ll work for free.
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are four important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
3) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!
4) Avoid using music on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some music looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.
I just went over to AdSense official blog and found that Google have created an Optimization Demo 
where you can view and learn Google suggested Adsense optimization techniques to maximize your AdSense performance. The demo will show you the ad positions that are proven to be generating high CTR with screen shots of AdSense websites and other useful AdSense tips like what ad formats and color you should use......
If you are a beginner or an experienced webmaster not satisfied with your current AdSense CTR and earning, I suggest you take a look at Optimization Demo to learn some techniques that you can apply instantly to your site and blog.
Well, You have been thinking to make money on the net. You found a new online money making venture which is affiliate marketing. You are excited about affiliate marketing, learned it diligently and then worked long hours to make your new venture succeeds. Many of the marketing techniques you applied have helped you make a number of sales. The end of the month has arrived and you can't wait to receive your first payment. When you check your affiliate account and found that the amount you will be receiving isn't as expected, you are slightly disappointed. You then check your sale history, there were several items sold returned and your affiliate commission have to be deducted for the returns.
This is disappointing but it does happen. Generally, companies don't pay commission for returned items. You need to know about this. Affiliates will not be paid a commission on a returned good but; some dishonest affiliate marketing companies can use this to scam some of your profit. You should read their returned policies and understand clearly how it will effect your affiliate commission.
When a customer send an item back, a return occurs. Charge back also can occur when the customers dispute on an amount paid for a purchase. You should look closely on those items that are being charge back or returned. If you find that the purchases charged back are always very high ticket orders then they could be giving you false information. They are doing this to keep your commission down and keep some for themselves. Keep a close watch on returns especially if you think it is occurring often.
Chargebacks can also be an signal of another more serious problems. If many of the chargebacks are occuring during the money back guarantee or initial trial period, then this is could be an indication that the product or service you are marketing isn't up to customer satisfaction. The product can be misleading or just low quality. It will affect your affiliate earning and your future as an affiliate marketer. If this occurring too often, you'll need to look for an alternative of the affiliate program to promote.
You also should be aware of which products are actually earning commission for you. Make sure you understand which products you will be earning money from to avoid disappointment later. There are companies offer a selection of products to place on your website or blog, but only several products are profitable. Before agreeing to anything like this read carefully the terms and conditions.
Finally, you also need to ensure that the products that are sold have not other conditions attached. Certain companies will only pay commission if the customers fill out the payment details instantly. If they select a product and continue to shop, you may not earn commission on the product. You can also loose commission if the customer clicks on any other links before completing the order. If a customer order 10 products you are marketing, but then clicks on other link, you'll lose the opportunity to earn a large amount of commission.
It is now first July and my first post for this month is to share some resources links with you.
Underground Secret Society
Underground Secret Society was recently launched by the well known Internet marketers, Yanik Silver. It is a membership site that provide Internet marketing secrets, strategies, research, ideas, cases studies, tools, & resources… And you can get these money making resources free by signing up the one month trial offer of Underground Secret Society.
The Attention Age Doctrine E-book
The e-book is designed to inform you that online business building is changing. It explains how and why internet business building has changed; and the things you needed now to successfully grow your business and market online.
Words Equal Money
A free 37 page PDF special report that talks about the important of content in making money on the net. The report gives you some ideas on how to get web traffic, attract inbound links for search engine optimization and make money with articles.
