What is Article Marketing and Why Should You Be Doing It?

One of the key ingredients to making money online is to generate quality traffic to your website or blog… and there are many ways to achieve this. You have to work on getting traffic to your site both directly and indirectly, and you should work on building your reputation within your niche at the same time. One method that can help you accomplish these goals is article marketing. When used correctly, article marketing can be an extremely powerful method of traffic generation, and the best part is it is FREE. Well it’s free if you write the articles yourself.

Article marketing is the actual process of first writing an original article(s) and then submitting it to a variety of online directories, databases, and magazines, but most everyone I know usually just submit their articles to article directory sites like; EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, etc….

Once your article has been accepted by a directory (or directories) it is then added to their large database of articles and it will then become accessible for anyone to copy and paste into their newsletters, blogs, magazines, etc…. The more directories you add your article to the better, as you are exposing your articles to potentially thousands and thousands of people with each directory you submit them to. At the bare minimum you want to submit each article to the top 3 to 5 directories for sure!

The person using your article must display the article EXACTLY how you wrote it, and they must also include your resource box at the end of the article which contains all the information about you and your site, but we will get more into that in a minute. The key to understand here is once you submit your article (and if it is well written on a fairly hot topic)… there is a good chance many people will take your article and share it with all their readers. If lots of people do the same thing… your article could easily be viewed by thousands and thousands of people in a very short period. Plus your article will stay in the database for many years, so there is a good chance it could be viewed for many years to come and hopefully continue making you money online.

Now getting back to the actually writing of the article… generally you write articles that are relevant to the nature of your website. You can’t directly promote your site, and you wouldn’t want to anyway because it would just turn people off and that is the last thing you want to do.

Instead, you want to provide valuable, worthwhile information that can help solve a problem, answer a question or teach them something new. In doing so you will be proving yourself as somewhat an expert in your field, and hopefully people will begin to trust and respect your opinion. In this way you can make a name for yourself within your niche, and your reputation will grow.

While that’s great (and important), what’s even better is that every time you write and submit an article you get to include some information about yourself with a link or two in the resource box at the bottom of the article. These links can lead back directly to your site, targeting whichever pages you choose. Additionally, since you are the one creating the link, you get to decide the exact anchor text you want to use. This provides an opportunity to build up a bunch of highly targeted, highly valuable one-way links leading back to your website or blog.

By doing this, you will be increasing your site’s value in the search engines like Google, and hopefully you will start getting ranked higher for your desired keywords. This is because incoming links leading to your site are one of the largest factors for determining your site’s Google PageRank. Not all links are created equally however, and you want to go after links that really provide a good amount of value. Links from the best article directories are extremely valuable because they are from high ranking sites, and they are one-way links that you didn’t have to pay or exchange for. Additionally, you can control the anchor text and destination page, so the links have the potential to be very powerful.

Therefore, with article marketing you are indirectly boosting your traffic and your online presence by raising your search engine ranking. Additionally, you will also directly see an increase to your website’s traffic when people read your articles and then click on your links to follow through to your page. The more valuable and original your articles are, the more people will click through to your site, and the more interested these prospects will already be about your ideas, products and services.

Article marketing brings along many different benefits. By providing high quality articles you can help build up your reputation, both within your community and within the search engines. You will see an increase to your site traffic and you will end up finding more prospects for your website and online business. If you aren’t article marketing yet, you are leaving a valuable opportunity sitting on the table.

So if you are serious about making money online… go and write an article right now and get the ball rolling.

Making Money Online with Your Passion

At what point does a hobby become a job, and a job become a career? This is the million dollar question that a lot of people are looking for the answer to while combining their passion with a money making career. When it comes to making money online, you should take your passion and match it with a strong business model and make it profitable.

When I was a teenager, my hobby was music. I loved to listen to music, and the greater part of every dollar I made went to the local record store. For those of you under 25, we had to go into a store to purchase our music on these 12 inch vinyl discs called Records. Records gave way to the compact disc, and those gave way to Mp3’s that you can snap up from home on iTunes.

This post isn’t about music, but to some extent it is still relevant. I turned my hobby of music into a job when I became a disc jockey. For five years I made a living working in nightclubs and doing weddings and house parties. I loved what I did, and I enjoyed a great lifestyle while in my early twenties.  Suddenly, I noticed a shift in the marketplace. Night clubs started to close down due to the increase in violence, alcohol related issues, insurance rates skyrocketed, and business owners just didn’t want to take the risk of losing their hard earned gains to a potential lawsuit. I had to make a career change quickly, and back then there wasn’t any way for me to make money online. I didn’t even own a computer.

For the club DJ, this meant that there was a shrinking market with fewer jobs available. Times were changing, and I made a decision to get out of this industry and look for something with a brighter future. I could have easily stayed with it until the company eliminated my position, but what good would that have done me? I look back now, and I realize I made a good move at the right time. The three companies that I worked for have not only eliminated DJ’s from their payroll, but they are no longer in existence. I stayed in the hospitality industry which is something I knew quite well. I shifted into management and succeeded because I took my passion and found a new way to channel it. I still got to make people happy, but instead of packing a dance floor I was packing a dining room.

On the other side of the issue, having a steady source of income before you follow your hobby in the hopes that it will become your dream job or career makes a lot of sense. Pursue your dreams with a passion, and in the mean time do your research. Like the expression says; “Don’t quit your day job” until you know that you can make a living doing what you love to do. For anyone out there that is looking for the quick easy way to riches and a carefree lifestyle, I offer this one bit of sage advice: It isn’t out there.

If you are looking for a way to make money online, I would suggest you find something that you love, and work hard to make it profitable. Solve a problem, fill a need, or share your wealth of knowledge on a particular subject that people will pay you for. Sell a product that serves a purpose or meets a need or desire. This will gain you wealth, and lead to a better lifestyle. Live within your means until you are disgustingly wealthy, and then make sure you have a long term plan to protect your newly found wealth.  It goes quickly, especially if you never had an abundance of wealth to begin with.

One of my favorite sayings is this: “The man who loves what he does never works a day in his life.”  I try to live my life by this motto, and I also feel that when most people say that they have to go to work, I say that I get to go to work. See the difference?

Traffic Monetization Program Beta Test Results

Here is a quick follow-up to my post a couple of weeks ago on a new Beta Traffic Monetization System we are testing out on one of our other blogs to see if it can help us make more money online.

To refresh your memory here is basically how the program works:

The program is basically an advertising revenue sharing program, similar to Adsense, but with a cool twist. With this you place keyword text links that you choose right on your website. You can choose high paying keywords if you like, but for my test I chose keywords I know my readers are actually searching for. When a visitor clicks on one of the text links, relevant ads are then displayed right on your website. The site owner then earns money each time a user clicks onto an advertiser’s link.

Here is how the text ads looks on our website MiraMesa.com.

So for the past 2 weeks the site has been averaging between 200 – 300 visitors per day, with about 75 – 80% of that traffic coming from search engines. Below is the earning’s chart which shows you exactly how much the site has earned with this traffic monetization system so far.

As you can see… not the greatest numbers ever, but not the worse numbers either. If the numbers stay like that, we will ending up earning a little over $20 for the month from those ads… which really isn’t too exciting.

We have decided to let the ads run through the rest of the month, and after that take them down, as we can earn more money selling banners ads to local merchants in that same spot.

Here is a list of the pros and cons we have come up with so far:

PROS:

1. I REALLY like the ability to choose our own keywords, as we could choose all high paying keywords if we wanted too. We didn’t for this test, as the blog is an extremely focused niche and we didn’t have a lot of choices, but I could see where it could work very well on some other sites.
2. I also like the ability to display the ads anywhere and anyhow we like. You could display several keywords like we did on that site, or you can just add a text link in a post and that would work as well. The display flexibility is very cool.

CONS:

1. It is not available in all countries, and many of the countries where it is available… they seem to not have a large ad inventory, so not many ads (if any) display. So a website that gets a lot of worldwide traffic, I don’t think it would be too good a fit.
2. Unlike Adsense where you can login to your account and see how your ads are doing every hour, and get a very detailed report… that is not the case with this program. The report information is very limited (as you can see above), plus the report is always 2 days behind. So if I login today (which is Thursday), I will only see my commissions through Tuesday. I really don’t like that!
3. The earnings per click do not seem to be that great either. The problem I think is… this company is using another company (Hotkeys.com) for their backend system and both of them (at least) have to take a cut of the commissions before it gets to us. I believe with Adsense you are only sharing your commissions with Google (but I could be wrong).

So for the time being (for us), the Cons outweigh the Pros… but that might not always be the case. The company is very new and as they grow… they might be able to fix everything that I have listed in my Cons section. If that happens, I would absolutely recommend this company.

As you noticed I never mentioned the name of the company. That is because they are still in Beta Testing mode and it is not available for everyone to use yet.

If you would like to test out the system yourself, send me an email and I will put you in touch with the owner. The only requirement is your site has to average over 300 visitors per day to be considered.

Making Money Online Swiping Ideas

When it comes to making money online, there are literally unlimited ways to go about accomplishing that goal. But the smart internet entrepreneur is always keeping a close tab on what other successful online marketers are up to with their business. That is where the “Swipe Files” and “Idea Files” come in extremely handy.

What is a swipe file? It is basically exactly what it sounds like. It’s a file full of content that you have swiped from other sites, magazines, newspapers, etc…. Swipe files are usually used by copywriters, and whenever they see a great ad, sales letter, headline, etc… they make a copy of it (or cut them right out of a magazine or newspaper) and put it a file for future reference. Then when they are getting ready to write an ad or sales letter, they can browse their swipe file to get ideas. People have been creating “Swipe Files” forever and there is nothing wrong with it, as it is a commonly used practice. Just know that the content in the file is used for inspiration and ideas, not for copying and pasting as that would be plagiarism.

Like swipe files, I like to visit my favorite sites and take notes on what I like and don’t like about each site and save that information in what I call my “Idea File”. My idea file is similar to a swipe file, as it is a place to draw inspiration, but it is different because I am not saving actual content. I am creating a list of things that I like about different sites I visite. Here are just few examples of things you might find in my “Idea File”.

SITE DESIGN – When surfing the web (which I do a lot of each day) I love to take note of each site I visit’s overall design to see if there is something that I really like that might look good on one of our sites, or future sites we have planned.

For example, this site’s design was created from a cool site I saw that was using the WordPress Church theme from StudioPress. So I purchased the theme, customized the color layout, added a logo, uploaded it to Making Money Online Dot Com’s server and I thought I was done.

Then a few days later I found another theme that I really liked called the Ultimate Blogging Theme from Carl Ocab. I loved the theme, but I really liked 2 elements of the design a lot (the 3 boxes on the top of my index pages and the footer layout), so I purchased that theme too, and extracted those 2 elements and added them to my site.

Then there was one more thing I really wanted, which I had in my Idea File for months before ever opening Making Money Online. John Chow and Zac Johnson both have this cool way of displaying their featured posts on their index page with a scrolling display plugin. So I sent a few emails to the guys over at Unique Blog Design (the company that designed both their themes) asking them what they would charge to create that for me. Well I never heard back from them, so I just went to Elance and found someone to create it for me there.

Of all the things I keep in my Idea File, “Site Designs” probably has the most in it. Not only do I have just a whole bunch of URL’s in there, but I have taken hundreds, if not thousands of screen shots over the years of sites where I like some part of their design.

COOL PLUGINS – Since this site is built on the WordPress platform there are just TONS of plugins out there to enhance your visitor’s experience. Whenever I see some kind of cool function on sites I visit I try and find out if it is a plugin, and if so… which one they are using.

Also, many bloggers nowadays run posts each month (if not several times a month) listing their favorite plugins and/or any new plugins that have just come out and let you know exactly what they do. I have a HUGE LIST of plugins now and what they do in my Idea File for whenever they might come in handy.

PROMOTIONS – Everyday website owners are coming out with new promotions for their sites, as well as running contests to get people coming back each week (or if you are lucky each day). The first contest we ran was a result of a post we read from Dan Keller over at TycoonBlogger.com. It is a Comment Contest which we are still running now.

Another example of a promotion I have in my Idea File is Shoemoney’s “Free Shirt Fridays” where each Friday Jeremy promotes a company that sends him a shirt. It is an ingenious idea, and he gets a ton of free shirts to wear (or do whatever he wants with) as well as other products sent to him each week. We have a cool idea planned for this site that I am sure you are all going to love, and the inspiration for it came from that promotion.

WHAT THEY ARE PROMOTING – It is hard to stay on top of every new product, eBook, service, etc… that comes out in your niche each week. A good way to find new products is by visiting other websites and see what they are promoting. Of course everything your competition is promoting might not work for your current site(s), but it might work down the road, so I like to keep a list of things people are marketing. This really comes in handy when you are writing a post, as one of the products you saved might be perfect to promote in that post. Also, if you are short on ideas of something to write about… you could always do a little research and write a post on one of the products in your file.

NEWSLETTERS – Do you have a subscriber list for your site, or are planning on building one? Before we ever added our first sign-up subscription form to one of our sites, I literally signed up to hundreds of online newsletters, and I kept a copy of my favorite newsletter layouts in my idea file. Not only did I keep a copy of the layouts (which helped a lot when designing our newsletters), but I also kept notes on how each webmaster’s subscription process went. Many have cool “Next Step” pages that explain the double option process so the subscriber knows they have to do one more step before they are actually subscribed.  Others have thank-you pages that are designed to get you to do something else. I really like the fact that every newsletter is different and you can learn something from everyone you sign-up for. With some you will learn something that you want to add to your newsletter, and with others you will learn things you do not like and want to stay away from.

If you are ever planning on creating your own subscriber list, I suggest you sign-up for as many newsletters as you can and see what others are doing. If you don’t like receiving a bunch of newsletters in your current email account, I suggest you create an email account just for newsletters. Then you can check your account once a week, or whenever you feel like it.

There are several other things I keep in my Idea File, but you get the basic understanding of how it works. There is nothing worse than seeing something really cool and saying to yourself, “I need to do that on my site” and then a little while later totally forget what it was. If you are good about keeping an Idea File, then you won’t have to worry about that happening.

Remember… Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, so don’t feel bad doing something similar to what your competition is doing. Just don’t copy them exactly or you might offend them a little, and you don’t want to do that either.

Making Money Online Promoting a Free Secret System to Help People Earn $300-$500 a Day

I love learning different ways that people figure out for making money online. If I see an ad that catches my attention in Adsense or Infolinks I usually click on them to see what the advertiser is trying to market. So I have decided to add a new segment to Making Money Online where I will search out unique methods that people use to market affiliate programs (that I find interesting) and share them with you. I hope you find them interesting too.

Today I am going to be writing about a way that I have actually seen used on many sites lately, and I am pretty sure it works (for making money for the affiliates), as I have been tempted to sign-up and to test this system myself, and I have pretty good willpower for these types of programs. So I know if I am tempted, I am pretty sure there are people that are actually trying this out and making some affiliates very wealthy.

What the affiliate marketers are promoting on these sites are different Online Casinos, which all pay quite a bit of money. The secret is they are not promoting the casinos directly. What they are doing is promoting a “Secret System” that will show you how to make $300 to $500 a day beating the casinos. This is basically how it works on most of the sites I have seen this on. The owner of the site says they are going to share a method with you to beat the online casinos day after day playing European Roulette with their secret system. What makes this work for me is they don’t try and sell you anything at all. They don’t even ask for your name and email which is really smart.

They reveal their entire secret system to you right there on the webpage. They spill all the beans, as they are trying to make it seem like they are helping you out just because they are nice guys. Not only are they sharing their secret “beat the casino” system with you, they also let you know that they have personally tested this system out on many of the online casinos out there, and they recommend the ones that they have found to work the best for them. Wow, they must be super nice guys I guess. Well they could be nice guys, but there is definitely an ulterior motive to their generous information.

So why would these guys share their secret money making online system with you for free? Do they really want you to make money? They might want you to win some money, but in the long run I am sure they would prefer that you lose money instead. Why would they want you to lose money? Because if you joined the casinos through the affiliate links they recommended, they will earn a certain percentage of all the money you lose.

I checked out several of these sites and many of them recommend the same casinos. When I checked out those casinos, each of them has affiliate programs that pay the affiliate 30% of whatever the people they refer to the casino lose for as long as they stay a member. So as long as the person they referred continues to gamble on that site, they will earn 30% of however much that person loses. So if they lose $100 the affiliate earns $30. If they lose $1000, the affiliate earns $300. Not bad for making a simple recommendation.

So let me give you a short explanation on their secret method for beating the casinos,  and show you that there is a much better chance in the long run that the affiliate will earn a lot more money than the gambler ever will.

Here is the secret formula in a nutshell. They go into more detail on several of the sites, but hopefully this will make sense to you.

I am guessing you guys understand the basics of European Roulette. It is a casino game which is basically a spinning wheel with 37 slots. There are 18 red and 18 black slots and 1 green spot numbered zero. The green slot (0) is what gives the casino their slight advantage, which makes all the difference for the casino. It is important that they play European vs. American Roulette, as American Roulette has 38 slots, with two green slots; zero and double-zero… which gives the house and even larger advantage.

There are lots of different bets you can place when playing roulette, but for this particular money making system…players will only be betting on either red or black which pays even money. That means if you bet $1 on black and the color black comes up, you win $1. If red comes up or the green zero, you lose the dollar you bet. Definitely pretty simple stuff. So here is how this system works.

• Take $1 and bet on red or black.
• If your color comes up you win. Yeah… you won $1.
• If you lose, double your bet ($2) and then bet on the same color again.
• If you lose, double your bet ($4) and then bet on the same color again.
• Keep doubling your bet on the same color until you win.

If you have enough money and you keep doubling your bet, eventually your color will come up. Once your color comes up and you have been following this method you will have won $1.

Once you win, you start over by betting $1 again and follow the same routine over and over again until you win a total of $200. Then they say it is time to go to a new casino, so the casino you are currently playing at doesn’t catch on to your method.

I have actually tested this many times using the “Play for Free” mode at a few different casinos and I have done quite well, but that was with pretend money, so there was no stress on me actually losing my own money.

So let’s break this down to see how this would play out in the real world… at least if it were me following this secret formula for making money online with my own hard-earned cash.

I would start out following the routine… making a dollar here and there slowly building up my winnings. But then I would probably get on a losing streak (at some point) as most gamblers often do. So let’s see how much money I would be down if I lost 10 spins in a row.

1. $1
2. $2
3. $4
4. $8
5. $16
6. $32
7. $64
8. $128
9. $256
10. $512

So if I had 10 bad spins in a row (which is possible) I would be down a total of $1023, and I would be starting to get very stressed out. I am a family guy now and I just hate losing money. I hated losing money before I was married and had kids, but it is a much bigger deal nowadays for sure! I would think to myself, if I lose another spin I will be down $2047. Then if I lost again, I will be down twice that. The fear would probably overcome me and I would probably just cut my losses and quit right then. I’d be down a little over a grand and the affiliate that signed me up would be up a little over $300. So who’s the winner there? Definitely not me.

Now I am not saying this system doesn’t work, but I think if it did all the time… EVERYONE would be doing it.

Actually… if you had unlimited funds (like the casino) and the casino had no caps (the maximum amount of money you are allowed to bet), this system is guaranteed to make you money if you followed it to the tee. But none of us have unlimited funds and casinos do have caps… so if you get on an unlucky streak, you could literally lose your house! That doesn’t sound like a good bet to me!

So why did I write this?

Am I trying to promote online gambling? Absolutely not!

Am I recommending that you start promoting Online Casinos? Nope!

What I am trying to promote in this post is CREATIVITY! I just thought the method they used to market those affiliate programs was very creative and I am sure they have had much success with it.

So next time you decide to promote an affiliate product or service… or even your own product or service… try and think outside the box!

Making Money Online Promoting Affiliate Products in Your Blog Posts

As you know there are unlimited ways of making money online, and deciding what is best for your business model can be really tricky. Well today I am going to be talking about affiliate programs, as they are one of the best ways to get started making money online. Actually I am going to talk about the best way to implement affiliate marketing into your blog as it is one of the better ways for bloggers to generate income.

Below are 6 tips to help you convert more sales when marketing affiliate products on your blog…

1. Market to your niche – Make sure you promote things that are relevant to your readers. If you are running a Martial Arts blog, don’t try promoting a “Guide to Making Money Online” just because it pays a 75% commission. Stick with affiliate programs related to your blog’s audience. I see people all the time trying to sell things that have nothing to do with their blog’s niche and I just don’t get it!
2. Don’t just rely on banner ads, instead promote affiliate products in your posts – I find it amazing that many bloggers still think the way to monetize their site is to sprinkle some Adsense ads throughout their blog, and display some affiliate banners on their sidebar and they are done. You are not going to sell many affiliate products that way. To get people to buy affiliate products you need to write about them in your posts. You can write a whole post dedicated to one affiliate product, or you can write a post on a broad topic and recommend one or more products throughout the post.
3. Know your product – The best way to promote something is to try it yourself first, so you can give an honest review. Not only that, but you know the ins and outs of how it works, and if you have used it a while you can tell people how it has worked for you. If you just can’t afford to purchase the product first, make sure you learn as much about it as you can before you try and promote it.


4. Only recommend quality products and services – Do you want to get a bad reputation fast? Then start recommending crappy products to your readers. That will do it! But seriously, if you want to be successful and be known as a person that people trust… make sure you only recommend really good products. If you do, those past buyers will be much more inclined to purchase whatever you’re promoting next. Plus, they might even write some nice comments thanking you for your great suggestions, which can only help your sales conversions… as well as your reputation as an honest marketer.
5. Try and keep out the competition as best you can in your posts – Usually when I am promoting an affiliate product in a post I try and not have any Adsense ads in the post, as those ads could actually steal your affiliate commissions if clicked on. Sure, you might have made 50 cents for the click, but you might have lost a 50% commission or more if they decided to purchase the product through that link instead of yours.
6. Display ad banners in your post that relate to what you are trying to market – Instead of displaying a bunch of rotating random banner ads (which I did in this post)… when writing posts to promote affiliate products I usually display banner ads that relate to whatever product I am writing about. I like to keep my reader’s mind focused on what it is I am trying to promote. If the affiliate merchant doesn’t offer any good banner graphics, I usually just create my own banner ad and use that. If you are not good at creating banners yourself, you can always use 20DollarBanners. You can save 10% on your order (packages not included) with the coupon code “mmodotcom“.

Those are the major things I think about when promoting affiliate products in one of our blogs. Of course the key to converting more sales is to get more traffic. So if your blog does not get a lot of traffic, don’t expect to be making a lot of money just yet. Hopefully, if you stick with it and your site becomes more popular and your traffic grows… so will your sales.

How about you? Do you have any tips for promoting affiliate products on your blog? I am sure everyone would love to hear what works for you.

Lee Silber – Business Spotlight Interview

Lee Silber is one of my favorite authors, because his books are innovative, entertaining, highly motivational and easy to read. The timing for this article is perfect so I can introduce his latest book “Bored Games” which will become available August 18th. Lee is not only an accomplished author, but he also owns several businesses, travels the country hosting workshops and seminars, and somehow manages to have a happy family life with his wife and two children.

I asked Lee to answer a few questions that I thought would be helpful to our readers, and here are the questions and responses. There is also a link to his website if you would like more information about his books, workshops, seminars, or to sign up for his free newsletter (This is a no-brainer!). Thanks again Lee for being our inaugural Business of the Week spotlight!

Mark: I loved your book “Rock to Riches”.  Rather than just relying on your publisher to sell the book, how affective has adding online sales been to the success of this and your other books?

Lee: Bookstores are NOT a great place to sell books, believe it or not. For one thing, there are tens of thousands of titles to choose from and they are not organized that well. Plus, they only stock certain titles. Online booksellers are a blessing for the book buyer and the bookseller because it’s easier for the book buyer to find what they need, and online booksellers “carry” more titles (which they order as needed, so they have very little risk.) For many authors this point is mute because they can’t get their books in traditional bookstores to begin with, so online booksellers are key to their success.

Mark: What creative methods have you used to add sales through your website CreativeLee.com?

Lee: I think the best button on a website is the “FREE” button. By offering something for free to capture a potential purchaser’s e-mail address you have built up good will, given them a sample of your great work, and have a way to follow-up. So many times a person has asked for and received a free sample of a book or product and turned around and placed a large order that same day.

Mark: Your products are not only informative, but they are very entertaining and highly motivational. What tips could you share with other writers/bloggers for starting a business that would be helpful?

Lee: Businesses exist for one reason and one reason only. If you were thinking to turn a profit, you would only be half right. The bottom line is the bottom line for the business owner, but for the consumer the reason they buy is because you solve a problem for them. The saying, “Find a problem and solve it” makes sense because it’s true. No matter what the product or service is, it must make someone’s life or business better. Focus on figuring out what that is and then make sure that is the emphasis in any and all marketing efforts.

Mark: CreativeLee is the perfect name to describe how you get your message across to your readers. How do you keep coming up with such one of a kind ideas?

Lee: I made a list of a hundred possible names for my business. Guess what Creative-Lee Speaking was on that list. Exactly, number one. Most of us have great ideas; we just need to trust our instincts. Confidence in your creativity is the key to coming up with clever solutions. I wanted a name that said what I did but also was memorable. I wanted a name that when I told someone what I did, they would want to know more. So far, so good.

Mark: Music is definitely a passion of yours, and it seems fitting that your book focused on Rock and Roll as the main theme. How did you gain access to so many different artists in so many different fields of music for your stories? Were there any artists that you wish you could interview, but couldn’t? Which story was your favorite?

Lee: Every time we went to a manager, publicist, or record label to request an interview with a famous rock star (Steven Tyler is a good example) we were given one excuse after another why they couldn’t do the interview. But, when we were able to name drop and say we were referred by a person who knew the rocker, we were in. It really is who you know. What’s interesting is how we overlook the obvious. Our friends and family know people who know people who can open a lot of doors. It’s worthwhile to let the people around you know what you are doing and want to do so they can help.

Mark: Let’s say I wanted to become a motivational speaker, but had no idea how to get started. What would you recommend I do to start a career similar to the path you followed?

Lee: There are three ways to build a career as a paid professional presenter. The first is write a book that becomes a best seller, or wins rave reviews in a particular field. That’s the fastest way. Another is to do something that is so amazing people want to hear about it. To make sure enough people know about your amazing story, getting your name in print and on radio and television is important. In fact, fame of any kind can lead to lucrative speaking opportunities. Finally, there are seminar companies that pay you to give talks on topics they offer. You get to travel all over the world and make money training and teaching people skills.

Mark: What do you do once you have completed writing a book? Do you jump into promotions, or move onto the next book? How much feedback to you get from your viewers? Do you use a blog or network of your peers for inspiration on your projects?

Lee: To get a book from an idea, to a book deal, to a completed manuscript, to a bookstore takes a LONG time. But that’s only the beginning. The promotional part is the most important phase. I will spend weeks just on magazine and radio interviews, in-store events, and anything else that will help get the word out. That doesn’t mean I dislike this time. In fact, I love talking up one of my titles. It takes passion to get published, and that passion carries over into promotion or publicity.

Mark: The success of Amazon’s Kindle is growing. Are your books available on this format?

Lee: This is an interesting question. Kindle could (and I say “could” because we are at a crossroads) be the next big thing. The problem for Amazon is the iPhone is so popular and can do the same thing, it’s keeping the Kindle from becoming a phase and may make it an (expensive) fad. We’ll see.

Mark: What are some of your favorite websites that you like to visit on a regular basis?

Lee: Being a writer and speaker I find information fascinating so of course Google and Wikipedia are the best.

Mark: What do you think are some of the keys that have lead to your success? I am sure our readers would really love to know this.

Lee: I’ve been asked this question a lot lately and I think I have narrowed it down to two things. The first is, finish what you start and do what you say you are going to do. So many people have great ideas, but so few follow through. If it were simply talent or intelligence that determined success, well, I would be pretty average. What I do is go for it, no matter what the odds or how hard it seems. The saying “When there’s a will, there’s a way,” is my motto. And if I didn’t have a will, there’s no way I would do something. I pick projects I am passionate about and that helps me persist even when it looks like it’s impossible.

The second thing that motivates me, and this will surprise people, is the drive to not be average. I am sure a psychologist could have a field day with this one, but the will to be the best (or at least better than most) is a powerful force when harnessed and used for greater good. I truly want to help others and make a difference, but I also have a drive to be the best author in my field, the best speaker at a conference, and the best person I can be. It works for me.

Again, we want to thank Lee for taking the time out of his busy schedule to help with our first Business Spotlight interview. Please make sure and stop by his website, “CreativeLee.com” and learn more about about him and the products and services he has to offer.

Also, if you could please leave a comment below letting us know what you think of our first interview. Did you like the format and the type of questions asked? Our plan is to personalize the questions for each interview so we can get the information our reader would like to know. Hopefully we did that here.

What is Private Label Content?

As everyone knows there are unlimited ways of making money online and new ones being created all the time. Today I want to talk to you about Private Label Rights Articles and Products. If you want to learn about it in much more detail I suggest you sign-up for our free e-Course here. It is a 2 week email course that teaches you all sorts of ways of making money online with Private Label Rights content. We use Aweber as our autoresponder service, so if you don’t like the course (which I know you will love) you can unsubscribe at any time, plus we will NEVER share your email address with anyone.

I am sure most of you know what Private Label Rights content is, but there are some people that don’t, so I think I better go over exactly what it is first…

For those of you that have signed up for our free PLR Secrets Course the description below might sound very familiar, as I am taking a lot of the information below right out of the first day of the course. It was easier than having to rethink everything over again, plus we only have a little over 30 subscribers so far… so most of you have not actually read it yet.

You probably keep seeing the term Private Label Rights popping up everywhere you look these days. You may have even seen them abbreviated as PLR products. If you’ve been wondering what the heck they are, but were afraid to ask, well now you’re going to finally learn.

In a nutshell, Private Label Rights products are products that you buy (sometimes when you’re lucky, they’re even given away) that you can use, basically any way you please. These types of products can take on a several forms nowadays, as you can see them as articles, e-books, software, graphics, audios and we are starting to see a lot of PLR videos as well.

PLR content is sold in several different forms; people sell articles and products individually, they sell them bundled together as packages and there are lots of membership sites that charge you a monthly fee for unlimited access to there usually ever-growing collection of PLR content. We have joined several of these type of membership sites over the years and still belong to a few which we love.

So listen up, because here’s the good part. Let’s say that you were to buy a bundle of PLR articles. You’d then be able to take those articles, and change them in anyway you want – by rewording them, adding to them, taking away from them; you name it, and making them your own. In fact, though many people don’t change them like this, I highly recommended that you do. Actually… the more you change them the better. If I am using PLR content for a project I really just like using it as a starting point. From there I delete whatever information is not needed, then I try and add a lot of my own content, and then I arrange it so it fits my project

What Are Your Rights?

Before I go on any further and confuse you, let’s talk about different types of rights on the products you can buy, and the rights you have with those products. We know that with Private Label Rights you can change them however you want, but that’s not always the case with everything you buy, and it’s important to know the difference to help keep you out of heaps of trouble for using someone else’s content illegally (as in getting sued!).

Okay, the one you’ll see very often are products with Resale Rights. These are very simply a product that you have the right to resale, however you do not have the right to claim them as your own, or change them in anyway whatsoever. You pretty much have to sell them for whatever they’re priced at by the creator of the product. You can make money from resale rights, but more often than not, these products are sold by everybody and their mother. You can definitely make money promoting these types of products, but there are better options in our opinion.

Master Resale Rights on the other hand are a little more lenient. With these, in many cases you have the right to give them away (but check with the TOS) – for instance to your list, or to new subscribers as a gift, etc. You also can pass the right for others to resell them, or give them away to their customers. This comes in handy for the purpose of viral marketing.

Here’s something else that you’ll like. With Master Resale Rights, you usually are given the sales copy, plus the graphics for the website, very often given in a handy little zip file for your convenience – therefore letting you bypass that step which is not easy for most.

All of your rights are given to you in what’s known as the Terms of Service (TOS). ALWAYS read these… just because you’re getting a certain bundle of rights, say Master Resale Rights, it doesn’t mean that all Master Resell Rights are the same. Some things change just as in any contract. The only one way for you to truly know, and keep yourself out of the deep stuff, is you must read the (TOS) and follow the rules.

Okay… now I am sure there are many of you that will scoff at the idea of using PLR content as they think the quality is poor and that they are way overused. Well like anything there is not so high quality content out there, but I am here to tell you that there is some really great PLR content out there as well… a lot of it.

To be honest, I would never use PLR content for any of our blogs (except for an occasional website flip or maybe some post ideas), but for creating some product giveaways and some other ways of generating money online… PLR is perfect. If I told you how much money I made over the past 5 years using PLR content you would be be amazed.

I better stop here for today as this post is getting way too long. Stop by tomorrow and I will tell you a little more on why you should think about using PLR content for “some” of your projects and where you can get a lot of really great PLR content for FREE.

Making Money Online Selling Posters

We decided to create a new section titled “Money Making Affiliate Programs”, where each week we will be talking about some of our favorite affiliate programs we have used over the years, or new ones that we think have a lot of potential.

Since summer is going to be over before we know it (sorry), I decided to talk about an affiliate program that has brought me in many 1000’s of dollars over the years and does exceptionally well at the end of summer. Not to say it doesn’t do great year-round for making money online, but I just seem to have promoted the products more at the beginning of the each school year.

So what type of product am I talking about? POSTERS! That’s right, just plain old posters… well not just “plain old posters”, as this company has over 500,000 in stock and they are adding more and more all the time. The company is called, All Posters, but that could be a little misleading as they have grown over the years and now they sell; posters, prints, stand-ups, magnets, apparel, and much, much more…

Like any legitimate affiliate program it costs nothing to join and they offer some very advanced linking methods to make promoting any type genre of poster a breeze.

You can actually earn money a couple of different ways, which I really like. You can earn money by selling posters directly to public, which is where I have made most of my money. Plus you can earn money recruiting other affiliates to market their products, which is called a two-tier commission structure.

So here is how the commission structure is broken down:

Tier 1
You earn 20% commission for any purchase someone makes on All Posters via your affiliate link. If they purchase anything on the site for up to 10 days after they clicked on your affiliate link, you will still earn the 20% commission. The one thing I have noticed about selling posters is hardly anyone purchases just one poster. Most people purchase several, plus they offer framing and all sorts of other products, so their total bill can grow pretty quickly.

Tier 2
You can earn up to $8.00 for each new affiliate you recruit, plus lifetime residual income.

• You get $3.00 when they make their first sale
• You earn $5.00 when they make their second sale
• You earn 5% of every sale they make for life (this can be very lucrative if you recruit yourself some super affiliates)

As for marketing posters, there are many ways to go about it. I created a really basic site, PosterDiscounters.com… many years ago (which really needs a major overhaul), and for not getting much traffic it has always done pretty well at converting sales. It does especially well when I spend some time and promote it.

But don’t think you need your own custom site to make money selling posters, as I have had a lot of success over the years using other more direct methods like promoting to my different mailing lists, PPC advertising, adding their dynamic code to niche sites, etc… The only limit to marketing posters is your own imagination. Once you sign-up you will see all the cool different ways you can add posters to your site(s).

So if you are interested in making money online and are looking for another potentially lucrative income stream, sign-up here.

Making Money Online as a Clickbank Affiliate

I am a big fan of flowcharts. I find them very helpful to understand how things work. With this flowchart we want to show you the basics of how you can make money online promoting Clickbank products. I am not going into detail here on how to drive traffic, or create a sales page or anything like that. This is just to show you how you make money as an affiliate if a customer goes through the entire sales process purchasing a Clickbank product through your affiliate link.

Looking at the image above, you will see that we start with the Customer (the most important person to you making money online). To get the customer into this process you need to do some type of marketing to get them there. You can create a sales page, review site, squeeze page, you can send out an email, create a blog post, etc… We will explain how each one of those work in future posts.

From there, the customer clicks on your affiliate link (Clickbank calls it a “HopLink”), which is basically a link to the merchant’s website with a special tracking code built in so you get credit for referring the customer to their site.

Hopefully the merchant has created a great sales page and the customer decides they must have their product. The customer then clicks on the purchase link that takes them to Clickbank’s secure ordering form where they can pay with most credit cards, as well as Paypal.

Once the payment has been approved and processed, the customer is taken to the merchant’s thank-you page where they can download the product.

Clickbank at the same time (within 2 minutes) credits both accounts; the merchant with their earnings and you (the affiliate) with your commissions. You are able to login to your account and see your sales in real time, which is nice. They also have several different methods to pay you, depending on your needs. All that information can be found on their site.

That’s basically it! For more answers, checkout Clickbank’s FAQ section for affiliates here: http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_faq.html

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