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27. January 2012Uncategorizedadmin0 comments

Online Marketing Strategy

When you think of marketing, what do you think about? Most online business owners think they can mount an effective online marketing campaign by doing some cursory keyword research to see if there is a possibility they can conquer some keyword phrases in their chosen niche, and then start writing content and designing web pages to tackle those keywords. This is their marketing strategy.

But there is much more to marketing than that. An online business is a real business, and just like a brick and mortar business, you need to do indepth market research before you can even think of designing an effective marketing strategy. Just look at the large well-known companies out there. They spend millions of dollars doing market research. Ask any market research firm and you will find out that designing any effective marketing campaign can take months, if not years, to complete.

And so it is online. Fortunately for us online business owners, we can do very indepth research without having to spend lots of money. There are many avenues you need to explore when doing market research online:

Keyword research is, of course, very important. You need to find out how people are searching for the products or services you are offering. Such research needs to be very indepth.
Once you have selected good keywords to target, then you need to research your competitors. How are they conquering the search engine results for your chosen keywords? What do you need to do to beat them? Is there anything you can add to the product or service that would make customers choose you over them?
You also need to get a feel for the problem that your target customer group needs to solve. How can your product or service solve some or all of those problems?

Sounds like a daunting task, doesn't it? It can be, but if done correctly, you will easily conquer your competition, because most online business entrepreneurs don't take the time or put in the effort to really create an effective marketing strategy.

And even more important, this sort of research should be done even before you join a business opportunity.

Do this correctly, and you will be very successful online. Do it incorrectly, or not at all, you will join the 95 percent of online businesses that struggle to make ends meet.

Bill Brine
Home Small Business Mentor And Coach
Online Marketing Strategies
Skype: billbrine
Web: BillBrine.com (read more)

Promotion And Marketing Using LinkedIn

The Power of LinkedIn

Yesterday at our regular Tuesday Platinum Control training session, our marketing manager Burch Hamilton digressed a bit and gave us some incredible training on the SEO power you have at your disposal when you create a LinkedIn account, and especially when you set up keyword-specific groups.

Did you know that the LinkedIn domain has an Alexa ranking of 14? Wow! Talk about promotional power. With a low ranking like that, any links you place out to your websites are going to be highly regarded by the search engines.

There was a small group in attendance, and together we explored the details of setting up a LinkedIn account, how to set up and manage groups, and how to use those groups very strategically to get high search engine rankings on your chosen keyword phrases.

To me this training was invaluable. The recording is now available in the back office for those of you who are Gold Veretekk members. Another example of the hard-hitting, informative and educational trainings we have come to take for granted in Veretekk.

To those of you who are Silver Veretekk members, what are you waiting for? For the small price of $1.65 a day, you have at your disposal the most powerful and integrated promotional system on the Internet, as well as a dedicated team of serious marketing professionals who are willing to share their knowledge with you. Upgrade today and we'll help you every step of the way!

Not a Veretekk member yet? I'll bet you're working a lot harder than you need to, and are not seeing the results you want to see. Come join me at Veretekk and start building a real business.

Overview of Veretekk: http://billbrinevideos.com/veretekk-overview.php

Bill Brine
Home Small Business Mentor and Coach
Skype: billbrine
Email: platinumonlinemarketing@gmail.com
Web: Contact Me
Join Veretekk: Contact me first. I want to understand your business.

http://billbrine.com (read more)

Time Efficient Promotion

How Much Time Do You Spend Promoting Your Business?

Do you want to work harder, or smarter? There have been times in my Internet career where I have put in 16 hour days, week after week, month after month for years. Yes, it produced results, but it was sure a far cry from the freedom that we all crave when we start our online businesses. Sometimes it felt like I had just found myself another job.

That was until I found Veretekk. Then the whole picture changed. I learned how to work smarter, not harder.

Last Saturday, I attended an incredible presentation by our Marketing Director, Butch Hamilton, where he showed us how, with the Veretekk system properly set up, you can do everything you need to do to promote your business online in about an hour a day. It was an eye-opener, even for me. Write an article, submit it using the Veretekk assets, and you immediately launch a whole series of backlinks from some very powerful aged domains, as well as promote it on various social sites. That's it, you're done for the day and can go on to other things. Amazing!

I was very surprised to see that only 30 or so other Veretekk owners were there. You have to wonder about all the other Veretekk Gold subscribers. Perhaps they're so busy blasting out the same thing over and over again that they're not interested in learning how to properly and efficiently build a real business on the Internet. Me, I'm all about saving time and doing powerful promotions that actually produce some results for the long term. I never miss any of these sessions.

The training is now available in the Veretekk back office, for Gold members only. This is just another example of the hard-hitting, no-nonsense and informative trainings that are available 24/7 as part of the Veretekk system. Even just this one training would be worth the $54.95 a month upgrade fee.

Why is it that so many online business owners spend upwards of 16 hours a day desperately trying to promote their businesses? I think its a combination of things. No-one has told them there is a better way. So-called gurus are always trying to sell push-button solutions, when it is true that you can't buy the solution. People who are trying to make money online are short of cash, and unable (they think) to afford the powerful tools they think they need to do effective promotion. And they don't really understand how marketing works in the first place,

The list goes on and on, and the poor online business owner is left struggling, working many hours a day doing things that probably will not produce long term results.

If you're on that list, perhaps its time to re-evaluate your approach to business. You need to take a step back and rethink your approach to marketing.

For an overview of what the Veretekk system can do for you, come watch my video:

http://billbrinevideos.com/veretekk-overview.php

And you can contact me if you'd just like to discuss your marketing strategy.

Bill Brine Home Business Coach and Mentor

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Time Efficient Promoting Using The Veretekk Automated Marketing System

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NCD Wellnesceuticals Review

NCD Wellnesceuticals is a new company in the Network Marketing scene. It entered its pre-launch phase on January 18, 2012. The company was formed out of the vision of a team of scientists and a very progressive laboratory who have built a very reputable worldwide brand by selling exclusively to doctors, naturopaths, and customers who continue to buy from them on a monthly basis. They are now bringing over all of these resources to combine them in a single distribution channel, using a Network Marketing business model.

An Easy Way To Build Backlinks

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Home Small Business Marketing Strategies

There are many useful strategies, all free, which you can use to increase sales and traffic for your home small business website. Click Here for 10 tips which will get you thinking. (read more)

Cost Reduction For Home Small Business

As a home small business owner, you are no doubt on a very limited budget. All those great internet ideas for doing free things have turned out not to be so free after all, right? Well there are ways you can reduce your costs. Click here for some great tips on how to do just that!

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Online Marketing Tip - Wordpress Author Feeds

Wordpress Tip

I just came across an interesting tidbit of information that you may find useful.

If you are using Wordpress blogs to publish websites, you most likely know that each Wordpress blog has a built-in RSS feed.

The URL of your blog RSS feed will always look like this:

http://blogname.com/feed/

One of the uses of this RSS feed is to submit it to any online RSS Feed aggregator site you may find. There are lots of them around. You only have to do this once for each feed. This is another way to get the search engine spiders to index your sites again and again.

But did you know that if you are posting to a Wordpress blog where you are not the only author, that Wordpress also provides a feed for just the posts authored by you?

Here is what the URL for your author feed would look like:

http://blogname.com/author/yourauthorname/feed

So using this you can pick out just your posts and get them added to any RSS feed aggregator sites.

For example, I am a contributing author to this blog:

http://creativewritingfortheinternet.seoexperttechniques.com

My username there is businesscoach, so here is the RSS Feed for my posts:

http://creativewritingfortheinternet.seoexperttechniques.com/author/businesscoach/feed/

And, of course, by hyperlinking my feed here, the spiders will revisit all my content on that blog when they see this article posted somewhere else...

My short online marketing tip for today!

Bill Brine
Online Marketing Consultant
Generate Premium Leads For Your Business
Learn How To Build An Online Business
Ph: 902-667-0511
Email: platinumonlinemarketing [@] gmail.com
Skype: billbrine
Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST

BrinCom Internet Business Services

Read about using forums to drive website traffic (read more)

Onlline Marketing Strategies

Driving More Traffic To Your Web Site Using Internet Forums

Using forums to boost visitors to your web site is a tried and tested online marketing method used by numerous webmasters. It doesn't matter what niche your site is in, because there will commonly be at least one relevant forum you can use. The best sources of traffic will be the larger more popular Internet forums and you should use various forums to get more visitors. This article will explore the best ways to use forums that will help drive traffic to your websites.

What you are doing when you use forums to market your site is to attract visitors from two different areas. The first source of traffic to your site originates from within the online forum itself. People will come across your link and if it is intriguing there is a good chance they will click the link to look at your site. This is a traffic source that will be interested in what you are marketing since they belong to a forum that focuses on your niche area. The next way to build more traffic is that whenever you make a comment on a forum or ask a question, you will be building links to your site which will help you get better search engine rankings.

Now you only need to find forums related to your niche and join as many as you can. Still, you will want to be active on these forums so just join as many as you can be active on. Once you join the forums you will want to create your forum profile and leave a link in your profile pointing back to your website. A good means of bringing your profile backlinks to the attention of the search engines and into their indexes is to ping all the urls of your forum profiles.

The next thing you will want to do is to set up your signature on the forum and include keyword targeted links pointing back to your site. This way when you leave a comment your link will automatically be added to the comment in the signature. However, you will have to realize that some forums will not allow you to add a signature until you have made a certain amount of comments, usually 10, but all forums will require different amounts.

See to it that you become an active member in each of the forum discussions that you're a member of and continue logging in every day. This way you will not run the danger of being seen as a spammer but you will create an increasing number of backlinks for the search engines to find and more link exposure to other members of the forum. Forums can have good search engine rankings for internal website pages which means your links may be viewed by a lot of other individuals searching the web who are not forum members. By becoming a regular contributor to forum discussions you boost your credibility as some sort of expert on the subject which will encourage people to follow your links and learn more.

Even better, start your own discussion on a relevant topic and provide good, useful information. Other forum members who have in interest in the topic will be glad to jump on board and join the discussion.

The real key here is to promote yourself as an expert, rather than promoting your product as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Even your links should point to an informational website and the anchor text should not be promotional in nature. Some forums will ban you if they think you are promoting a product, but I have not come across a forum yet that will ban you if you are promoting yourself!

So consider adding this strategy to your online marketing strategy. It can bring highly targeted visitors to your business.

Until next time,

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Online Marketing - Think Local

Online Marketing - Think Local

Over the last couple of years, there has been a significant increase in the number of products devoted to becoming successful in local marketing. Sometimes we as online marketers forget that there are many businesses right in our own town who will pay us to use our expertise to help them build their businesses. Take a look around the town or city where you live. What can you offer to your local businesses?

You'd be surprised. Up until a couple of years ago, I never even considered my local businesses. I was busy wrting articles and generating traffic to my websites, and interacting with clients and prospects all over the world.

At the same time, I was building up a repertoire of knowledge and expertise that is invaluable to small business owners ('brick and mortar' businesses), who are always looking for ways to expand their business. They've heard of the internet, but they are too busy running their business to learn much about it. They have some vague notion of setting up a website, but they really don't understand the value of having a good website well-positioned in the search engines to target those keywords that will bring in customers.

Just think of all the things we have all learned while building our online businesses:

Online market research - aka keyword research
How to buy a domain name
How to create a website
How to host and manage a website
How to promote a website
How to produce content that gets people to the website
How to publish that content
How to set up and manage autoresponders

And the list goes on. Now think about this for a moment: each and every one of these skills is of tremendous value to small business owners in your community. Presented properly, you can drum up tons of local business who will pay you to do things that are second nature to you, but for which they are mystified.

In any business, its always a good idea to have more than one stream of income. Yes you do have a global business, but think about promoting yourself locally as an internet consultant. Sit down and think about how you would like to offer your services to a local business. Get involved with your local Chamber of Commerce. Join any local business networking groups. Offer advice at every opportunity. And make sure you have a great answer to the inevitable question "So what do you do?"

Food for thought? I think so!

Until next time,

Bill Brine
Online Marketing Consultant
Generate Premium Leads For Your Business
Learn How To Build An Online Business
Ph: 902-667-0511
Email: brine.bill [@] gmail.com
Skype: billbrine
Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Online Marketing - Patience Is A Virtue

Online Marketing - Patience Is A Virtue

When you start marketing your website online, do not expect instant results. So many of my clients and the people I am mentoring expect to see their website at the top of Google after just a few days of starting a campaign. Not going to happen!

I remember a new Gold member in my Veretekk system just a few months ago: I trained him on how to use one of our services to generate quality backlinks to his website. So he did that, and called me the next day wondering why he could not see any of these backlinks in Google! Now that is simply an unrealistic approach.

SEO is an art as well as a science, and, like anything of value, takes time to mature. How quickly your website ranks for the keyword phrases you are targeting depends on any number of factors, such as:

how much competition you have
how much the Google spiders value your content
how much content you are publishing
how often you are publishing content
how well your website pages are optimized for their target keywords
how many backlinks are being generated to your website by your publishing efforts
how often those backlinks are being created
how well you are doing compared to others who are targeting the same keywords
.....

You get the idea! There are so many factors involved that no-one can predict with any accuracy how soon your site will start to get ranked highly in the search engines.

You may see results in a week, You may not see results for many months. The point is to continue promoting. Produce good relevant content and distribute it constantly to the right places and you will see results.

I've been an online marketer for many years, and I rarely check the rankings of my sites. I don't need to, because I know that the techniques I use and teach, work and work well. How do I know when a site is doing well? That's when I start getting calls and emails from people interested in what I have to say, or, in the case of sites employing Adsense, Ebay, Amazon or some other affiliate product, when I start to see some sales.

I see so many marketers who worry and fret about how well their sites are ranking. No need to panic, I say! On the Internet, slow, easy and persistent will win the race.

Simply do something to promote yourself and your business every day and you will be rewarded. It make take a few weeks or even a few months. Be patient!

Until next time,

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Online Marketing: Are You A Complainer Or A Profiteer?

Online Marketing: Are You A Complainer Or A Profiteer?

It seems that almost every week someone in a forum somewhere is lamenting the 'end of online marketing' due to some change in the online business environment.

Google made an algorithm change? "Oh no, that is the end of all affiliate marketing!".

Twitter suddenly banned thousands of users? "Oh no, that's the end of using Twitter for online marketing!"

Amazon no longer allows affiliates from this state? "Oh no, how is the little guy supposed to make any money?"

Granted, many of these are most likely so-called 'gurus' who are preparing to sell you their next latest and greatest 'secret' to making money. Some are new business entrepreneurs who are looking for some direction. And of course there are those who just like to complain.

Personally I never pay much attention to such things. What do I do? I keep promoting myself and my sites...

Online business is in a constant state of flux, and you have to learn to roll with the punches. It is so easy to get caught up in self-pity or panic about the latest change, and to throw up your hands in defeat. But you know, if you take a step back, you'll see that someone, somewhere always has something to complain about.

For sure, it is not as easy these days to build an online business. I can remember the days when you could get Adwords clicks for one cent, and send those to any website you chose. Or you could create crappy sites and stick Adsense on them and make some income that way. Those days are gone forever. But there is some good news as well: there are many more tools and strategies available now that make the process of marketing your business online much easier. Its still a lot of work, but if you do it right, as I can teach you, you can see predictable results.

Online marketing is a great opportunity, and it will always be in a state of change. That's the nature of the beast. But that should not stop you from working on your business and promoting it properly. Realize this: the complainers are busy complaining and doing nothing to build their business, while the doers are getting their sites ranked for relevant keywords.

So don't ever buy into the latest panic. Do what I do: keep building and promoting. If you provide good, keyword-specific and relevant content, you are giving the search engine spiders what they want, and they will never penalize you for that. I have a large network of sites in many different niches, and I have never been affected by any Google algorithm change for more than a few weeks. Give the spiders what they want and they will love you for it!

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Creative Writing For The Internet

Creative Writing For The Internet

Today, August 27 2011, is the completion of our first week in attacking the keyword term creative writing for the Internet on Google. Its amazing to see how our team already owns this term on Google, out of over 100,000 competing pages and in such a short time.

It just shows what results concentrated effort can produce. All we've done is write keyword-specific articles titled properly, and there we are on the first page.

Is this going to make us any money? Probably not, but the important part is that we each have started to brand ourselves as an expert on this keyword term. Someone somewhere may see one of our articles, will like what they read, and will contact us for more information. That's how you build a real business. Provide information that make the customers want to find you.

This week has been a journey of discovery for me personally. I must admit I had fallen out of the habit of writing every day - there are so many things that take your attention when running a business that its easy to lose sight of what's really important. Now I'm back on track, and am committed to creating something of value every day.

Along the way I've learned some very valuable tips from our mentor, Butch Hamilton. Like how to make any blog very keyword-specific. Like how to edit your blog template so that you are promoting only yourself and no-one else. Things I had not thought of before.

Writing articles about yourself and your business is the most important task you can accomplish to build your business. This begins the process of branding yourself. If you want people to do business with you, they first have to trust you. The more good content you have out there, the more chance that someone who is looking for what you offer is going to read the article and contact you for more information.

There's no way around it - you have to do the work or you will not be successful in today's Internet business world.

If you want to learn how to do this correctly and with the least pain, come join us on our little team. There's always room for more, and you'll be in a supportive environment where you can learn from your mistakes and get free training from the top SEO guru on the Internet today. Contact me and I'll set you up!

Bill Brine
Home Business Coach and Mentor
Generate Premium Leads For Your Business
Learn How To Build An Online Business
Ph: 902-667-0511
Email: brine.bill [@] gmail.com
Skype: billbrine
Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Creative Writing - Your Point Of View

Creative Writing - Your Point Of View

Again this morning, I was not sure what to write on the topic of creative writing for the Internet, so I did a Google search again and came across some interesting information about how the point of view from which a story is written can have a big impact on the success of a story or novel. While this was aimed primarily at fiction writers, it got me thinking about how we can apply this to our online endeavors as Internet business authors.

One important element of your creative writing business projects is the point of view of your article. In this article I'll share with you some of the practices I have used over the years that I have found produce the best results and make your writing more personable.

A disclaimer: this is purely based on my own experience. There are no doubt many authors of Internet articles who will disagree with me. You need to find out what works for you.

Point of view is the perspective from which the article is to be considered. When you are writing an article about yourself, you should be using the First Person - use pronouns such as "I", "We", "me" and "mine" quite a lot. You will notice that I do that a lot in my writing. I find that it makes my writing more personable if I refer to myself as "I" or "me" rather than by my name when writing articles such as this.

Now on the other hand, if I were writing a Press Release, I would write it as if I were being interviewed by someone, so I would refer to myself as "Bill Brine" or "Mr. Brine".

The Second Person, in the context of my creative writing, is the use of 'You" to refer to the person reading the article. If I am looking for information on a topic, I have found that articles that refers to me, the reader, as "you" or "yours" have more of an impact than when the article is written more generically in the Third Person to refer to the reader as "He", "She", "One", "the reader" or "dear reader". I try to craft all my articles as if I were talking to someone face to face. If you were talking to someone, you would use 'you' a lot (unless you knew their name). So why not do the same with your writing?

Now of course there are situations where you would want to use Third Person to refer to the reader. Again, I go back to Press Releases, which I write as if I were being interviewed or as if I were an objective reporter simply reporting on this world-shaking event. In this case I would use Third Person.

The key here is to make your articles as personable as possible. You will often hear it said these days that "people do not join businesses, they join people". The more personable you make your articles, the more people will begin to trust you. If you have some interesting quirks, let those come through occasionally. Your readers will like that sort of thing.

I hope you have found today's article useful. As usual, if you have any questions, contact me.

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Learn Creative Writing For The Internet

Learn Creative Writing For The Internet

Today in this ongoing series about creative writing for the internet, let's talk about how to learn to write creatively.

If you do a Google search for creative writing, you will find lots of online courses, some free, that will teach you to be a creative writer. All of these are deisigned for authors who wish to produce novels, short stories, poems and the like. While these may be of some use to us as internet authors, we need a little more direction.

Our job as business creative writers is to produce quality, keyword-relevant content that informs, teaches and mentors. This requires a different mindset from those authors who wish to produce novels and short stories. In exploring the results of my Google search, I was unable to find any existing programs to teach this sort of writing. Of course, my search was not exhaustive - there may be such programs available. But you get the point.

So what's a person to do? Well, it is precisely for this reason that Butch Hamilton, Director of Marketing for Veretekk, and an acknowledged SEO expert, has launched his multi-week program to teach us exactly that - how to write creatively for the internet. The first session last week was very eye-opening and defnitely worth your time. You can see a recording of that session here: http://butchhamiltonvideos.com/creative-writing-for-the-internet.

If you're struggling with how to write creatively for your business, I highly recommend you make plans to attend these sessions. The sessions run for an hour on Saturday afternoons at 2 PM PST, and you can register by going here: http://butchhamiltonsconferenceroom.com/webinar-invitation/

I hope to see you there!

Bill Brine
Home Business Coach and Mentor
Generate Premium Leads For Your Business
Learn How To Build An Online Business
Ph: 902-667-0511
Email: brine.bill [@] gmail.com
Skype: billbrine
Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST

BrinCom Internet Business Services

(read more)

How To Get Started With Creative Writing

How To Get Started In Creative Writing

In my last article about creative Internet writing, I showed you one way to get started on this important process.

Getting started is important. Keeping going is even more important. If you don't do something every day, the process of creative writing will certainly not become easier over time.

You have to keep yourself motivated, especially if you dislike writing like I do. If you're keen, its easy to jump straight in and start writing: just don't be too disappointed if your first efforts aren't as good as you'd hoped. The important thing is to get in the habit; your quality will improve over time. And even your worst efforts are still of some value to your readers and to the search engine spiders.

I recommend starting small. Don't aim for a 500 or 1,000 word article. Produce some 300 word articles, or write some classified ads as I suggested my last article.

There are days when you will end up chewing your pen and staring at a sheet of paper, or gazing at a blank screen for hours. If that happens, you can try kickstarting your writing with a short exercise of some sort, just as I did when I started this article today. I was not sure what I wanted to write about, so just out of curiosity I did a Google search for creative writing and found a great blog which had lots of articles that gave me ideas. This article was the direct result of that search. Don't stop to think too much about it ... just get going, without worrying about the quality of the work you produce.

Creative Writing Tips And Tricks For Newbies

Here are some more ideas for improving your writing ability:

Use short exercises to stretch your writing muscles. If you're short of ideas, read this article on "Writing Bursts". Also check out this site: Creative Writing Prompts. When you are just starting out, you will most likely find that doing the laundry, shopping for groceries or weeding the garden suddenly looks appealing, compared to the effort of sitting down and putting words onto the page. But if you can force yourself to get through these early doubts, it really will get easier. Try to get into the habit of writing every day, even if it's just for ten minutes. You don't have to always write something about your business. Write a poem. Write a letter to an imaginary or real friend. Just Write!
Are you stuck for ideas? Carry a notebook everywhere and jot down anything that you see and hear that may be relevant to your business. Write it down so you don't have to remember it!
This is very important: you need to determine the time of day when you're at your most creative. If you're a 'lark' like me, this will be first thing in the morning. If you're a 'night owl', your time will be late at night. Try different times and see what you are most comfortable with.
Don't be a perfectionist. You are writing for the Internet, not for a magazine or some prestigious publication. Sure, grammar, syntax and spelling are all important, but don't agonize over getting it absolutely perfect. Just get it down, and you can revise it afterwards if you think you need to.
While you are writing, don't stop to correct grammar and spelling errors. That's why we have spell checkers and grammar checkers. You will lose your train of thought. Just keep writing while you are on a roll.
Most of all: HAVE FUN! Writing can at times seem to be a chore, something that must be done, something that you can delay as long as possible. I often feel that way. But you know, once I have finished and published an article, I feel really good about it.

So get out there and get those creative juices flowing!

BrinCom Internet Business Servicestags: creative writing,creative writing blog,creative writing blogs,creative writing for the internet,creative writing tips,ideas for creative writing,writing for the internet,writing for the web,writing on the internet,writing web content,home business coaching by bill brine,creative writing tips by bill brine,bill brine - home business coach :end (read more)

How To Get Started With Creative Writing

How To Get Started In Creative Writing

In my last article about creative Internet writing, I showed you one way to get started on this important process.

Getting started is important. Keeping going is even more important. If you don't do something every day, the process of creative writing will certainly not become easier over time.

I recommend starting small. Don't aim for a 500 or 1,000 word article. Produce some 300 word articles, or write some classified ads as I suggested my last article.

Creative Writing Tips And Tricks For Newbies

Here are some more ideas for improving your writing ability:

Use short exercises to stretch your writing muscles. If you're short of ideas, read this article on "Writing Bursts". Also check out this site: Creative Writing Prompts. When you are just starting out, you will most likely find that doing the laundry, shopping for groceries or weeding the garden suddenly looks appealing, compared to the effort of sitting down and putting words onto the page. But if you can force yourself to get through these early doubts, it really will get easier. Try to get into the habit of writing every day, even if it's just for ten minutes. You don't have to always write something about your business. Write a poem. Write a letter to an imaginary or real friend. Just Write!
Are you stuck for ideas? Carry a notebook everywhere and jot down anything that you see and hear that may be relevant to your business. Write it down so you don't have to remember it!
This is very important: you need to determine the time of day when you're at your most creative. If you're a 'lark' like me, this will be first thing in the morning. If you're a 'night owl', your time will be late at night. Try different times and see what you are most comfortable with.
Don't be a perfectionist. You are writing for the Internet, not for a magazine or some prestigious publication. Sure, grammar, syntax and spelling are all important, but don't agonize over getting it absolutely perfect. Just get it down, and you can revise it afterwards if you think you need to.
While you are writing, don't stop to correct grammar and spelling errors. That's why we have spell checkers and grammar checkers. You will lose your train of thought. Just keep writing while you are on a roll.
Most of all: HAVE FUN! Writing can at times seem to be a chore, something that must be done, something that you can delay as long as possible. I often feel that way. But you know, once I have finished and published an article, I feel really good about it.

So get out there and get those creative juices flowing!

How To Get Started With Creative Writing

How To Get Started In Creative Writing

In my last article about creative Internet writing, I showed you one way to get started on this important process.

Getting started is important. Keeping going is even more important. If you don't do something every day, the process of creative writing will certainly not become easier over time.

I recommend starting small. Don't aim for a 500 or 1,000 word article. Produce some 300 word articles, or write some classified ads as I suggested my last article.

Creative Writing Tips And Tricks For Newbies

Here are some more ideas for improving your writing ability:

Use short exercises to stretch your writing muscles. If you're short of ideas, read this article on "Writing Bursts". Also check out this site: Creative Writing Prompts. When you are just starting out, you will most likely find that doing the laundry, shopping for groceries or weeding the garden suddenly looks appealing, compared to the effort of sitting down and putting words onto the page. But if you can force yourself to get through these early doubts, it really will get easier. Try to get into the habit of writing every day, even if it's just for ten minutes. You don't have to always write something about your business. Write a poem. Write a letter to an imaginary or real friend. Just Write!
Are you stuck for ideas? Carry a notebook everywhere and jot down anything that you see and hear that may be relevant to your business. Write it down so you don't have to remember it!
This is very important: you need to determine the time of day when you're at your most creative. If you're a 'lark' like me, this will be first thing in the morning. If you're a 'night owl', your time will be late at night. Try different times and see what you are most comfortable with.
Don't be a perfectionist. You are writing for the Internet, not for a magazine or some prestigious publication. Sure, grammar, syntax and spelling are all important, but don't agonize over getting it absolutely perfect. Just get it down, and you can revise it afterwards if you think you need to.
While you are writing, don't stop to correct grammar and spelling errors. That's why we have spell checkers and grammar checkers. You will lose your train of thought. Just keep writing while you are on a roll.
Most of all: HAVE FUN! Writing can at times seem to be a chore, something that must be done, something that you can delay as long as possible. I often feel that way. But you know, once I have finished and published an article, I feel really good about it.

So get out there and get those creative juices flowing!

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Creative Writing For The Internet

Creative Writing For The Internet

In yesterday's article about creative writing, we looked at some of the reasons why people shy away from creating good quality content for the Internet, even though this process is the key to effective promotion of their websites on Google or any other search engine.

There are many reasons why you need to get into writing content on a regular basis:

You will start the process of branding yourself as an expert in your chosen niche. Brand yourself in this way and you will have people calling you instead of you having to call them!
As you write, you will find that it gets easier after a while.
As you write you will find that you will learn some amazing things about your business, yourself and your prospects.
The content that you provide generates backlinks to your primary website, which is how you can, over time, ensure that your site gets ranked highly by Google.

So how do you get started? Well, here's a challenge I have for you that will get you on the right track. As you will see, this is easier than you may think.

Do some simple keyword research to see how people are searching for your products or services on the Internet. Don't know how to do this? Here's a great video that will get you started: http://www.veretekk.com/veretraining.recordings/keywords.htm.

Pick one keyword phrase to target.

Go to my Free Classifieds site and write and submit 1,000 ads for your business. Do not attempt to sell, just provide good quality information on what your business is all about. Each ad should be slightly different. Here's a great video to get you started: http://seoexperttechniques.com/Classified_Ads.htm.

1,000 ads? Am I kidding? Actually, no - by going through this process you will actually train yourself to be focused and will start to learn how to write content that is of good quality. And, by the way, you have just begun a very effective SEO campaign for your website...

Now take those same ads you just created and create 500 free web pages at my Free Web Pages site. Again, this will train you to be focused and you will also learn some simple HTML in the process. If you need some direction here, contact me.

If you want to build a successful, profitable and sustainable business on the Internet, you need to learn to be focused, to write good content, and to work hard at it. You will not see overnight success, despite what the 'gurus' would have you believe. Over time, with concentrated effort and focused direction, you can generate whatever level of income you are willing to work to achieve.

One word of wisdom: don't try to do it alone. Find yourself a good mentor or coach (like me...) or join a great team of like-minded people who can give you direction. Online business these days is all about relationships and contacts.

Stay tuned for more articles about Internet marketing, and creative writing.

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Creative Writing For The Internet

Creative Writing For The Internet

There are many reasons why you need to get into writing content on a regular basis:

You will start the process of branding yourself as an expert in your chosen niche. Brand yourself in this way and you will have people calling you instead of you having to call them!
As you write, you will find that it gets easier after a while.
As you write you will find that you will learn some amazing things about your business, yourself and your prospects.
The content that you provide generates backlinks to your primary website, which is how you can, over time, ensure that your site gets ranked highly by Google.

So how do you get started? Well, here's a challenge I have for you that will get you on the right track. As you will see, this is easier than you may think.

Do some simple keyword research to see how people are searching for your products or services on the Internet. Don't know how to do this? Here's a great video that will get you started: http://www.veretekk.com/veretraining.recordings/keywords.htm.

Pick one keyword phrase to target.

Go to my Free Classifieds site and write and submit 1,000 ads for your business. Do not attempt to sell, just provide good quality information on what your business is all about. Each ad should be slightly different. Here's a great video to get you started: http://seoexperttechniques.com/Classified_Ads.htm.

1,000 ads? Am I kidding? Actually, no - by going through this process you will actually train yourself to be focused and will start to learn how to write content that is of good quality. And, by the way, you have just begun a very effective SEO campaign for your website...

Now take those same ads you just created and create 500 free web pages at my Free Web Pages site. Again, this will train you to be focused and you will also learn some simple HTML in the process. If you need some direction here, contact me.

Stay tuned for more articles about Internet marketing, and creative writing.

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Creative Writing For The Internet

Creative Writing For The Internet

Creative writing for the Internet! What goes through your mind when you read this phrase? Do you cringe in fear thinking about how you are ever going to come up with good quality content day in and day out? Or do you like writing and are ready to tackle your latest project?

If you're like most people I know, you shudder at the thought of coming up with new relevant content on a regular basis. Look, we all know that creating unique good quality content is the key to building an online business these days. But it does not have to be an onerous task. If you really know your business, you will always have something to share with your customers and prospective clients. Share your thoughts, your ideas, even what's happening in your life. If you're stuck for ideas, there are plenty of places online where you can do some quick research.

Here's one idea I use: I subscribe to news feeds for many of the areas in which I am interested. Then when I see something that peaks my interest, I will put together a quick article about my perspective or opinion of what is being talked about and share that.

Here's another idea: I use Private Label Rights services to deliver regular articles in areas for which I want to produce content. I DO NOT post the articles that are delivered; rather I use them as idea generators and heavily modify them to add my own touch. This can often done very quickly, and sometimes I even learn something in the process!

There are also many simple to use techniques to help you create good quality articles quickly. Contact me and I'll show them to you!

The key here is to get out of the 'promote my affiliate program mindset'. That simply does not work anymore on today's Internet. Online Business now is about relationships. People join people, not businesses. Promote yourself and your expertise and you will have success.

Bill Brine
Home Business Coach and Mentor
Generate Premium Leads For Your Business
Learn How To Build An Online Business
Ph: 902-667-0511
Email: brine.bill [@] gmail.com
Skype: billbrine

Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Web Conferencing

Just a reminder about our free webinar about web conferencing today....

Web Conferencing

Web Conferencing can become the center of your online business. Without a doubt, using our state of the art web conference room system by Vereconference can make the difference between your business succeeding, or failing.

Consider the following:

Web Conferencing Offers Communication with Others Around the World
Web Conferencing Means Increased Notoriety for You and Your Business
Web Conferencing Offers Professional Profile Branding
Web Conferencing by Vereconference Offers All This, and Much More!

Want to learn more? If you are not sure what web conferencing is all about or how it could help you, then come to Butch Hamilton's Veretekk training room today, Saturday, 8.06.2011 at 3 PM PST. Login to your Veretekk backoffice, click on Veretraining, bring up the calendar and join us!

Don't have a Veretekk system? Grab a Silver system for free (click here) and join us. No worries, as soon as you sign up I will be in touch to help you get oriented. We never leave anyone on their own in Veretekk!

We will be covering all aspects of the Vereconference room, plus ideas and suggestions on how to promote your web room to others.

For complete details on The Veretekk Corporate Blog, click here.

Web conferencing is the basis of many very successful businesses on the Internet.

Come to our live webinar today, and learn how you can begin to approach your business from an entirely new level!

Regards,

Bill Brine
Home Business Coach and Mentor
Business Building Made Easy
Powerful Online Marketing System
Phone: 902-667-0511
Skype: billbrine
Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST M-F

BrinCom Internet Business Services

(read more)

Web Conferencing

Web Conferencing

Consider the following:

Web Conferencing Offers Communication with Others Around the World
Web Conferencing Means Increased Notoriety for You and Your Business
Web Conferencing Offers Professional Profile Branding
Web Conferencing by Vereconference Offers All This, and Much More!

Want to learn more? If you are not sure what web conferencing is all about or how it could help you, then come to Butch Hamilton's Veretekk training room on Saturday, 8.06.2011 at 3 PM PST. Login to your Veretekk backoffice, click on Veretraining, bring up the calendar and join us!

We will be covering all aspects of the Vereconference room, plus ideas and suggestions on how to promote your web room to others.

For complete details on The Veretekk Corporate Blog, click here.

Web conferencing is the basis of many very successful businesses on the Internet.

Come to our live webinar on Saturday, and learn how you can begin to approach your business from an entirely new level!

Regards,

Bill Brine
Home Business Coach and Mentor
Business Building Made Easy
Powerful Online Marketing System
Phone: 902-667-0511
Skype: billbrine
Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST M-F

BrinCom Internet Business Services

(read more)

Home Business Customer Service

Today in my blog I've published an article about the lessons we all can learn from a very poor customer service experience I had this morning. Do take the time to read this and see if you can relate.

You can read this article by clicking on the link below:

HomeSmallBusinessInfo.com

Best Regards,

Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coach and Mentor
Online Marketing Systems
Phone: 902-667-0511
Skype: billbrine
Office Hours: 9AM-6PM EST, M-F

BrinCom Internet Business Services (read more)

Affiliate Marketing Secrets

One of the easiest and fastest ways to make money online is through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to a product sales page that is owned and managed by someone else. They make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

What Are The Benefits?

You can get started almost immediately because you do not have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing and delivery system.
You have almost no investment of time because you do not have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it's clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

What Is The Downside?

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you're losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What Is The Solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors before sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you are really on top of your game, you'll then send to a pre-sales page in between.

Here's what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

You'll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
You'll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you'll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it's well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it's set up, it runs automatically - you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you do not have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the entire system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it's much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it's instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn't much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it's an important step that you need to take if you're going to be serious about your affiliate marketing business.

Affiliate Marketing can be a lucrative and exciting business, if you know what you're doing and are willing to put in the work. (read more)

Supplemental Income Tips: How Good Is Your Website Content?

The Importance Of Content To Your Business

If you are currently marketing your business online and have not put a great deal of thought into the content on your website, you may be making an incredibly costly mistake. The content on your website is invaluable for a number of reasons:

First Impressions

Your content gives visitors to your website their first impression of your business and the products and services you offer. If the copy is poorly written, does not hold the visitors attention and does not promote your products and services very well, visitors are likely to exit your website without making a purchase and will probably never back. Conversely, if the copy on your website is well written, engages the reader and promotes the products and services you offer, the visitor is more likely to investigate the website further to learn more about the products and services and may make a purchase. If they like what they see, they may return in the future for more purchases.

Driving Sales

Well written content can be instrumental in selling your products and services to your potential customers. The sales copy should accurately describe the products or services offered, stress the importance of these products and services and compel the visitor to make a purchase. All of this should be done without appearing to be blatantly advertising the products and services. Writing this type of copy can be quite complicated and typically requires hiring a sales copywriter who is experienced and skilled at writing this type of informative and persuasive content. Sales copy written by an amateur or an inexperienced writer will not likely be as effective as copy written by a professional with a great deal of experience in Internet marketing.

Increasing Your Market Share

The content on your website can influence the size of the target audience you are able to reach by helping to improve your search engine rankings.

Internet users are typically looking for information quickly and want immediate results to their inquiries. Search engines understand this profile and write complicated algorithms which help them to supply the most relevant websites when a user searches for a particular word or phrase.

This is important to you as business owner because Internet users realize the value of search engines and are likely to only visit websites which rank well in the search engines. Most visits are made to the sites which rank in the top 10 results. Your business might sell football jerseys and you may have a well designed website, a superior inventory and excellent prices, but if your website does not rank well in search engines you are missing out on a great deal of free advertising. If your website lands on the third page or lower most visitors who search for relevant terms will not likely visit your website because they will have found what they were looking for on earlier pages. This is where the content on your website becomes important. Websites containing content which has been optimized for particular keywords will likely rank well with search engines. Hiring a writer skilled in writing optimized content can help to improve your search engine rankings so you can reach more potential customers.

With your content capable of doing so much, it is clear that you should be putting a great deal of effort into creating that content. Get some ideas by studying other sites in your market that appeal to you. If you have the budget, hiring a professional content writer to assist you writing the copy for your website could be one of the best investments you have ever made.

Whatever you decide, do not underestimate the importance of well-written, engaging and informative content to your home business success. Lear how to write effectively, and make sure you keep the content updated as things change in your market.

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Generating Supplemental Income From A Home Business

(read more)

Supplemental Income Tips: Why Articles Are The Best SEO Tools

If you are marketing anything online, you will need a website. And if you want people to find your website, you will need to use many different tools and strategies to improve your ranking on search engines and drive traffic to your website.

One of the best search engine optimization (SEO) strategies is writing and submitting articles. Let's examine why:

1. Article writing is a powerful SEO strategy. It allows you to use many keywords and phrases that apply to your niche. If you know all your essential keywords, you can use them in your articles. Your keyword-rich articles will get picked up by the search engines. Eventually, if you do a good enough job of creating and distributing lots of great articles, when people surfing the internet search for these keywords, your website will appear in the results pages.

2. All the articles that you write are stored and archived on the directories in which they are published. Your articles can be read by anyone and can still drive traffic to your website, even years after the articles were created. Articles bring long term results.

3. Articles create back links to your website, which improves your website popularity rank and ultimately drives large volumes of traffic to your website. If you write high quality articles, your articles will get published by many websites and e-zines, which will add high-quality backlinks to your website.

4. Articles are affordable. Writing and submitting articles is not expensive. You can write your own articles, you can hire a ghostwriter, or you can use one of the many online article writing services. You can manually submit your articles or you can use some software to automatically submit your article to many directories and blogs. Generally, use of articles to improve your position on search engines is not expensive and anyone can afford it.

Writing and submitting articles is arguably the best strategy for improving the ranking of your website on search engines. If you want to succeed in SEO, it is important that you write and submit articles on a regular basis.

The articles do not have to be overly long or complex. Just present good, useful information that is of relevance to your target market, and do so consistently. I personally write at least one article every day, and use the Veretekk Marketing System to distribute the content to huge numbers of blogs, portals, forums and other content distribution points to build up a large volume of good content and backlinks.

Go get out there and start writing!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coaching
The Last Business You Will Ever Need

(read more)

Supplemental Income Tips: 7 Ways to Manage Your Business Contacts

Your clients are the number one reason why your business exists. So once a customer uses your business, how can you keep them coming back for more? The secret is simple: keep in contact with them, and give them reasons to come back to your business.

Each business is different, so you will want to look at what will work best for you. Here are a few ideas you can use to keep in contact with your clients:

1) Make sure you always collect some sort of contact information from your clients. Otherwise, you will have no way of contacting them. You can do this in a number of ways:

- get customers to sign a guestbook
- have a fishbowl available where people can leave their business cards
- suggest that customers sign up for a newsletter
- run some sort of contest

Once you have a list of clients, you will be able to contact as often as you wish.

2) If you add a new product or service, or expand your business in any way, inform your clients first. You can achieve this a few ways:

- If you have a newsletter, include it in your newsletter.
- Do a mass mailing using postcards, letters, etc
- Call any client that has provided their phone number. You should only use this idea if the change would directly relate to them.
- Post the change on your website, if you have one.

3) Start a website if you don't have one. Provide information about your business, and other information such as tips and articles that are useful to your clients. Your customers will appreciate this service. Don't forget to have some sort of opt-in form on the site so you can collect their email addresses!

4) This one is simple: write thank you notes to your clients. A handwritten thank you note shows the client that you truly appreciate their business. If a client feels that they are appreciated and welcomed, then chances are they will come back to your business before doing business with one of your competitors.

5) The use of marketing materials can keep you in contact with your clients. You would be surprised how much impact a simple pen with your logo and phone number can do. Other marketing materials include: magnetic business cards, key rings, and notepads. These marketing materials are typically fairly inexpensive, and can be ordered in mass quantities.

6) Discount coupons are a great way to bring your customers back. Will 10% off hurt your business, especially if it means that client will come back? You may want to mail these coupons out, or supply a code for use upon checkout if you have an online business.

7) Consider starting a referral system. A referral program will not only get your previous clients to come back, but it will also help you obtain new clients as well. For example: for each referral, you could give the client a 10 dollar gift card to use in your store. Be careful not to give out cash, as this may or may not be used for products or services for your business.

I hope these 7 ideas will spark more creative ways to help you glean contact information from your clients.

To your business success,
Bill Brine
Build A Successful Home Small Business
(read more)

Supplemental Income From A Home Small Business

Learning about Internet Marketing

If you are building an online business then you will need to learn about internet marketing.

Internet marketing is not overly complicated and is a very important component of your overall marketing strategy. If you wish to implement Internet marketing into your overall marketing strategy, you need to carefully study the basic principles of Internet marketing before launching any online marketing campaigns.

Researching Internet marketing online is one method which can be used for learning more about this topic. This type of research can be very informative and can provide you with a great deal of advice and other information. However, it can also provide you with a great deal of misinformation. When researching any subject online it is very important to note that not all of the information available online is accurate. This is due to a variety of factors. Some content is written by those who do not have a great deal of knowledge about the subject matter. Some content which was written years ago and is outdated. You need to be cautious about accepting information as gospel. Always verify your info if you can.

Published books are another valuable resource for learning more about Internet marketing. There are a variety of books available which focus on this subject and provide a wealth of useful information. When selecting a book for use as research material it is important to seek out a book which received independent reviews which were positive. It is also important to seek out books which were published recently. This is important because the Internet marketing industry is evolving continuously and a book that was published only a few years ago may be outdated and may lack information on some of the new developments in the industry. The appeal of using published books to learn about Internet marketing is you can keep the books on hand for easy reference when you launch your Internet marketing campaign.

Here are a list of my current favorites:

- How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider's Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business

- The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition

- Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business

You can learn a great deal about Internet marketing simply by studying successful Internet marketing campaigns. Try my Internet marketing blog at BillBrineMarketing.com for some great starter tips and some free ebooks on all aspects of internet marketing.

If your business offers products and services in a particular niche, consider entering relevant terms in popular search engines and studying the websites of some of the highest ranking businesses. This can provide you with a great deal of insight into what these business owners are doing which may be contributing to their success. Examining everything from their website design to their search engine optimization strategies and even the content on their website can help you to determine why they are more successful than you. You should also consider how they are marketing their website which may include banner ads, affiliate marketing programs or other types of advertising.

Armed with this information you can take the opportunity to implement changes to your own website and marketing strategy which may help you to gain a greater degree of success.

Do not plagiarize, however: care should be taken to not copy anything directly from your competitors. Try to emulate their degree of success in your own way.

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Supplemental Income Strategies Coaching
A Home Small Business That Anyone Can Do
(read more)

Supplemental Income From A Home Small Business - Advice and Suggestions

4 Critical Ways To Generate Traffic To A Newly Created Website

So you've just set up your business website and you're ready to start making some sales! In order to make those sales, though, you will need to drive high volumes of traffic to that website.

There are many ways to get traffic to your website. In this article we will explore four important steps you must follow to start generating some traffic to your website.

1. You will need unique content on your website. Search engine robots look at all websites on a regular basis looking for sites with fresh and new content. You need to have fresh and high quality content which will get your website quickly indexed by search engines.

There are many ways do generate this content. You can write it yourself, you can research PLR for your niche, you can hire someone to do it for you, or you can utilize one of the many online article writing services. Whatever you need to do, get it done! Fresh unique and informative content will be a central component of driving good targeted traffic to your site.

2. Research your niche and pick a few of the best keyword phrases that people are using to find products or services like yours. Don't guess at what you think people might be searching for. Once you have chosen your keyword phrases, make sure that you have all the relevant keywords and phrases that relate to your topic on your web pages and any articles you post on your website. This will increase your website ranking on search engines, which will drive more traffic to your site. When people visit your website, the high quality content you have will make people spend more time on your site and ultimately buy some of the products or services you offer on your site.

3. Because your website is new, you must submit it to search engines. The search engine robots will find your site eventually, but they will find it much more quickly if you tell them it exists.

Here are 3 simple way I get the robots to notice my sites:

- Submit your URL to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
- Go to http://pingomatic.com and submit your URL to all the sites listed there
- Write a simple online press release announcing your site and submit it to one or more of the free online press release sites such as http://www.free-press-release.com.

4. Exchange some website links with websites that have a high page rank (PR). Exchanging links with popular and related websites is an effective way to drive traffic to your website, and improve the raking of your site. You will get some traffic coming to your website through other websites that you have linked to. This is something you will need to do on an ongoing basis, perhaps a few times a month.

By following the tips outlined in this article, you will start to see an increase in traffic to your website. Don't expect this increase to be immediate, though. The search engine robots will tend to visit your site many times before they deem it worthy to appear in the search engine results pages. Eventually, you will start to see a trickle of traffic, after which you can really start ramping up your efforts to get your site noticed, through the many techniques which are available such as article marketing, blogging, paid advertising such as Google Adwords, building backlinks, etc. But those are techniques for other articles. For some great tips on promotional techniques, check out this blog: Supplemental Income Tips.

Stay tuned for more advice soon, and good luck with your efforts to generate supplemental income.

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business The Easy Way
Supplemental Income Coaching
(read more)

Supplemental Income From A Home Small Business - Advice and Suggestions

Supplemental Income From A Home Small Business

5 Tips To Make Blogging Easy

When marketing your home business on the internet, one of the tasks you will no doubt be doing on a regular basis will be writing articles about your business and your products. For most marketers, this will mean creating and maintaining a blog to help drive traffic to your website.

Many bloggers, including myself, find it difficult to blog regularly. There are some people who just love to write; I will admit I am not one of them.

In order for your blogging to be effective, you will need to add fresh content to your blog on a regular basis, preferably daily. Looking at that blank screen and wondering what to write can sometimes seem like an onerous task. Here are five ideas to help make the process of blogging easy:

1. If you're having one of those days when you really feel on top of things and are full of information to share, write your blog content in advance and save it so that it�s ready to be posted everyday. When you have time to write, try to write enough blog content for several days or for the whole week. You can write and save your blog posts on your blog, and all you have to do is to publish the posts everyday. Most blogging systems will allow you to set a future publication date for posts, so the publishing is automatic. This means that on those days when you do not have the time or the inclination to write, you can still post fresh content on your blog.

2. Blog about a wide range of things that relate to your niche. Think about any information relating to your niche which your website visitors will be interested in seeing on your blog. Identify the sub-niches in your niche and write about those as well. You should never run out of ideas on what to blog about.

3. Invite your blog visitors to leave some comments relating to your posts and your niche. This is an easy way of getting unique content on your website. The more interaction you allow on your blog, the more content you will have on your blog. Do be sure that you moderate comments and have some spam protection in place so that you only get relevant content!

4. Research the key questions and issues that people in your niche are interested in, and provide information that addresses those questions on your blog. Look in the relevant forums for the hot topics that people are asking, and provide answers to these questions on your blog. This will make your blog useful to your visitors because it will have information which your visitors are looking for. This gives you a wide range of topics that you can blog about.

5. Use PLR (Private Label Rights) content. Make sure to customize it and make it unique before you break it into blog posts. Using PLR content as a starting point for your blog posts means that you will be able to create blog content easily and quickly.

Use these five tips outlined above to make blogging easy. The more you blog, the more traffic you will drive to your website.

Stay tuned for more tips real soon, and good luck with your marketing efforts.

To your success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coach
Supplemental Income Made Easy
(read more)

Home Small Business: Finding Your First Freelancer

As your home business grows, you will soon come to the realization that you can't do everything by yourself. Sooner or later, even though you don't want to, you are going to have to outsource some of the more mundane tasks so you can concentrate on doing the things that make you money. Freelancers, also known as virtual assistants, can be a valuable and time-saving part of your business.

There are so many places where you can hire freelancers, that it may be confusing. Where you go will depend on what it is you need done.

Forums are one great place to find freelancers. The Internet is teeming with freelancers who need work and are willing to work at great prices for the members.

Hiring people through forums has the added benefit of being a place where you can look around to see a person's reputation before you hire them. You can search the forum for their name to see if anything negative has been said about them, and to see if any positive remarks have been made.

You can also make a post on a forum and ask for recommendations. You can post something like, "I'm looking for a good graphics designer who works quickly and charges a fair price. Who do you recommend?" You'll probably get a number of recommendations, as well as a few private messages from freelancers who want to work for you.

Elance is a very popular freelance website. You can look through a number of different freelancers' portfolios, and you can also see their feedback. People with high feedback and very few negatives are less likely to do a bad job than others might be.

You can also post a bid request and have freelancers bid for your job. You can get a variety of prices and freelancers to choose from, but don't automatically choose the lowest price. Lower priced freelancers are sometimes cheap because they're less experienced.

That's not always the case, though! Sometimes they're cheap because they're new to the site and they need to build a reputation.

Vworker (formerly known as rent-coder) is another popular freelancing site. They're popular for being a place to find programmers, but they don't only have programmers available.

You can also find writers and graphics designers there, and sometimes people who will do things like site submissions and other administrative tasks.

Perhaps the best way to find a good freelancer is to ask for referrals from friends and acquaintances you've met while networking.

Another good outsourcing site is Odesk.com. Odesk is a highly structured site that allows you to monitor the work as it is accomplished, and allows you to build a team of experts to do what needs to be done for your business.

By using one of the more reputable outsourcing companies and checking references and feedback, you stand the best chance at finding a good freelancer that works at a reasonable price and will do a great job.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Strategies

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

How To Build Profitable Membership Sites
(read more)

Home Small Business Online Marketing: Building Profits With Your Own List

Listbuilding is a cornerstone of any online business. You might have even heard or read that "the money is in the list." First of all, let's answer the question, "What exactly is a list?"

A list in Internet marketing terms is a database of your prospects and their contact information. If you have a product or promote products and I sign up for your list knowing that you might promote to me, then I'm a prospect that you can now market to repeatedly, with my permission, until I unsubscribe.

So why is building a list so important? Let's say you start off as an affiliate marketer. You find a niche to promote to and you start working what you've learned into some traffic for your affiliate links.

Over a period of 30 days, imagine that you funnel 5,000 prospects from the Internet who are interested in your niche straight through your affiliate link to the product owner's site.

To continue our example, let's say that some of them even buy the product you are promoting. If you've made a 50% commission with a 2% conversion rate, for example, that means 2 out of every 100 people you sent bought the product, and your share was $26.00 (as an example). That would mean you earned a cool $2,600 this month - good for you!

But you're leaving money on the table. Those 100 people who bought from your 5,000 clicks? They're now on the product owner's list, not yours. So what he's going to do is send them more offers over the coming weeks.

After all, they are proven buyers. Over the next 30 days, those buyers fork over some more money for products that complement the original one they bought. That money goes to the product owner, not you - because you passed on building a list the first time around.

A better way to build an Internet marketing business is to start with a list from day one. Before you let a single person slip through your link without capturing their name and email address, have your system set up to build a list.

You can have unlimited lists for different niches using a simple tool called an autoresponder. Every day you can log in and see how many people have signed up, and you can create automated messages that get sent out to help convert your list into more sales.

Why should the product owner get to cash in on that person again and again when you're the one who brought him the customer in the first place? Stake your claim to each prospect and leverage your relationship with him or her for future sales and commissions.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Building Made Easy

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Secrets Of Profitable List Building
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing: Driving Online Traffic With Offline Tactics

You probably already have a business card with your website address on it. Handing it out might get you a trickle of traffic, but there are several very powerful offline marketing methods you may simply have never considered yet. They might seem a bit radical at first, but when you realize how few of your competitors are using them, you'll start to see the potential of these techniques to drive traffic to your website.

Consider utilizing a local marketing or PR firm in your area. Many of them are run by skilled single agents - and although good ones don't come cheap, their services may not be as out of reach (or non-cost-effective) as you might think.

A local marketing consultant has his or her hands in many different networks. They know plenty of resources and probably have some creative ideas about where to promote you, often at low or no cost to you.

A basic rule of business is to expend your energy where your money-making skills lie. So you can be focusing on those areas, leaving your marketing or PR consultant free to do what they do best... promote you and drive people to your sites.

You also may be shocked to hear that you should consider advertising on local television stations. That may be because we've all been conditioned to believe that TV advertising is something only the Big Leagues can afford - and, in general, that's certainly true.

But did you know that advertising with your local TV station can be surprisingly affordable? As well as building your visibility as a "celebrity" - and even in just your own home town, you'd be surprised how inexpensive it can actually be.

There's another big advantage to local television. Local newspaper editors may be much more inclined to print your press releases if they know you're also appearing on TV in your area.

Now this may not sound as exciting as your own local TV ad, or as easy as simply hiring a marketing consultant or local PR firm, but offering a workshop to your Community College is a long term status and traffic-building strategy every online business person should consider.

It can be quite easy to draw up a solid proposal, find out who to contact and make your pitch. Once you're done, the audio and video recordings make a great new product for you to sell, and the transcripts can be chopped up into articles, free reports, and more.

Teaching provides another great opportunity to increase website traffic by sending out press releases - both to offline sources like local newspapers and trade magazines, and to online paid and free PR services.

Another great way to promote yourself: join your local Chamber of Commerce or Trade Association, and participate. Networking with other business operators is a great way to get your name known. In the course of conversations, you may develop leads. Some of these organizations will allow members to have a display promoting their businesses at meetings and special events. Take full advantage of these, they are usually free.

If your business could benefit from displays at trade shows, check out your local farmer's markets or flea markets. Again, booths at these markets are usually relatively cheap.

The more offline promotions you do, and the more enthusiasm you put into them, the more you'll notice benefits returning to you... So stay positive, stay proactive, make the most of every online and offline opportunity - and watch your credibility and business reputation grow.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coaching

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your
business:

Techniques For Generating Huge Amounts Of Hungry Web Traffic
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing:: Testing Conversion Rates To Boost Profits

Split testing can significantly increase profits almost effortlessly. The process of testing conversion rates by sending traffic to multiple versions of a sales page or squeeze page can be done manually, or it can be automated with software. The important thing is to have a very good tracking system in place.

Why should you split test? You should split test because tiny changes can generate huge results. That's why almost everything should be tested, whenever possible. You should test at least two versions of your headline all times, at least two different price points, and at least two different calls to action.

You might also test multiple versions of your sales copy, different graphics on your sales page, and even different product names. Great marketers always tweak their pages for the best possible conversions.

Very few people achieve maximum conversion rates for the first version of their sales letter. And many marketers underestimate how minor changes can have a huge impact on your conversions. A 1% change in conversion may not sound significant, but it's not so small if you think of it in terms of dollars instead of percentages.

If you have a 1% conversion rate and you make a total if $3,000 from 10,000 visitors, that seems pretty good. But what if you doubled your conversion rate to 2%? Then you would have made $6,000 off of the same 10,000 visitors. An increase from $3,000 to $6,000 is a pretty big improvement for a tiny bit of work.

Some people do their split testing manually. In this case, you simply have at least two different versions of your sales letter, and you send the same amount of traffic to each version.

Ideally, the traffic will come from the same source, because different sources of traffic can have wildly different conversion rates. For example, traffic from Google AdWords might perform better or worse than traffic from an alternate pay-per-click or advertising source.

After driving enough traffic to be able to see a difference, look at your conversion rate for the two versions to decide which one performed better. It's vitally important to send a decent amount of traffic to each version before deciding which version is the true winner or you could make the wrong choice from inadequate data.

One hundred hits will probably not be enough to provide statistically valid data. You should probably send at least 1,000 hits to each version before you make your decision. However, the cost that may be involved is often a reason why marketers resist split testing their sales letters.

It can be costly to drive traffic during the testing phase. If you send 1,000 hits to each version at a cost of $0.50 per click, that is $500 per version, for a total of $1,000. That might seem like a lot, but keep in mind that you should make some money off of the testing exercise if either of your sales pages is any good.

Even a 0.5% increase could mean an additional $1,500 in your pocket in the earlier example, so it really pays to test. Remember to track very carefully. Be sure to use an analytics program like Google Analytics, or one of the many other programs available.

This way you can track where your traffic is coming from, where it goes, and how well it performs on your site. Google Analytics is free, and it can help you track a lot of very important information, so you can test conversions more easily than ever before, without spending any money on tracking software.

Some split testing tools do all of this work for you, automatically rotating your files and tracking the conversions for you. You simply log in, tweak something new, and sit back to see how much better (or worse) it affects sales.

Never underestimate the importance of split testing. Be sure you make this strategy of your marketing plan.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Strategies

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your
business:

Internet Marketing Quick Start Guide
(read more)

Home Small Business Strategies: Discovering Profits In Physical Products

Internet marketers love to promote digitally downloadable products. For some reason, many don't want to promote physical products. To some, it can seem like a nightmare of packaging and shipping, stocking of inventory, and dealing with suppliers.

But there are some ways you can work them into your online business while minimizing the hassles. It's good to know your options and what's involved when thinking about promoting tangible goods for the first time.

You could start by selling products yourself on eBay. Then if you're successful there, you could go off on your own and launch a dedicated website to sell the goods. Either way, you'll be in charge of making sure you have enough inventory on hand, and if an order comes through, it will be your job to box it up, take it to the post office, and ship it out.

If the customer doesn't receive the goods, you should be able to verify proof of delivery. In some instances, you'll have to accept returns on the products, and won't always be able to resell it again, depending on what the product is and the condition it's returned in.

Another option is to use a dropshipping service. With a dropship account, you may have to pay a fee to get set up with your own website, but they handle a lot more things for you.

Typically, the customer would place an order, paying you for the items they purchase. Then you would pay the dropshipping company a portion of those earnings and they would ship the inventory to your customer directly.

In that scenario, you don't have to deal with any of the inventory, but you do have to deal with customer relations. Your customers probably won't realize they've ordered from a dropshipping arrangement, so even though you're just a middleman, you'll often be perceived as the same organization.

Another option is to become an affiliate. Millions of people shop online each year, and especially during the various holiday seasons, the demand for physical items to be sent as gifts is high. As an affiliate, you can get a share of that spending frenzy for yourself.

The major benefit of being an affiliate is that you get to hand off the customer to the product provider, and they have to do all the work of getting the product to them and making sure that they are satisfied. That's why many online marketers start off as affiliates when adding physical products to their promotions.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Building Profitable, Sustainable Home Small Businesses

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Secrets To Building Profitable Membership Sites
(read more)

Home Small Business Email Marketing: Staying Clear Of Spam Complaints

Some people seem to think of marketers as nothing but spammers, and it's easy to understand why. It seems that we all get mountains of spam emails on a daily basis - regardless of whether or not we gave out our email address.

In order to avoid being labeled as a spammer, you'll want to take precautions to be careful about who you email and why. Spam is basically defined as sending unsolicited commercial email messages to people without their prior explicit permission to do so.

Smart online marketers don't even get near spamming because it hurts their credibility, risks their reputation, and doesn't convert as well as targeted, welcomed email does, anyway. You can even have your ISP ban you for sending spam, and you can lose your autoresponder account, too.

A rule all professional marketers should follow is to use an opt-in form where subscribers can willingly enter their first name and email address. In fact, it's best to utilize the double opt in option most autoresponders provide you

A single opt in is when you just let the person enter their information once. But what's to stop one person from going around entering another person's contact information for unethical reasons? There's no way to verify who made the request with a single opt in system, so it's preferable to use double opt in to protect yourself.

In a double opt in situation, the user lands on your website and sees an opt in box, asking for their first name and email address. They enter their details, usually in exchange for a free download or the promise of information at a later date.

Then the autoresponder tool automatically sends out a verification email. The end user gets the email alerting them that they've signed up to be on your list, but it asks them to verify their subscription by clicking on a link in the email before they are sent their requested information or download.

This means if someone goes to your site and signs someone else up, that person who was signed up will get a notification and have the option to decline if they weren't the one who really opted into the list.

Make sure you follow permission marketing standards and give people a choice. Your subscribers trust you enough to hand over their important details, so don't abuse the privilege. If you respect the people on your list, it will grow and you'll have a ready-made pool of prospects that can help you earn more money over time.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your
business:

How To Create A Push-Button List Building Machine
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Strategies: Unleashing Web 2.0 Profits

Web 2.0 is a term that's often misused. Some people use the term to refer to a particular style of graphics design, or type of website, but that's not what web 2.0 is really about. Web 2.0 is, above all, about user-generated content.

This means the visitors to your site generate the majority of the content on the site, as opposed to the site owner or writers creating the content. A perfect example of web 2.0 is Squidoo. Squidoo is a social network, which is a type of web 2.0 site.

Although the site does post some of its own content, such as the lensmaster tip blog, the vast majority of the site was built by individuals creating their own pages within the site. When a user signs up to the site, they're allowed to position themselves as experts on anything from A-Z (they even have a separate section for R and X rated pages that are kept from the general G-rated public).

They create a unique page on the Squidoo domain, with all sorts of information about their niche topic. They can create or join groups and post in the SquidU forum to communicate with others in the community.

One of the oldest types of web 2.0 sites is the forum. Forums are almost as old as the Internet itself, and they were one of the first types of web 2.0 concepts. Other very old web 2.0 predecessors were guestbooks, free-for-all link sites, and classified ad sites.

These days, web 2.0 sites are more complex. Rather than simply posting messages on a forum, users can typically generate their own profiles, create their own custom pages, and have more involvement in creating the site and its content.

There are many different types of web 2.0 sites. MySpace and Facebook are two well-known social networking sites. Blogger is a very popular blog platform, which allows people to develop a type of online diary or journal.

Twitter is somewhat like a blog, only users post very small snippets of content in each post. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg allow users to post their favorite links, and allow other people to vote on those links.

Squidoo and HubPages are two sites that let people create pages of information about specific subjects, a bit like a one-page website about a particular topic, similar to Wikipedia. The basic function of web 2.0 sites is to allow users to post their own content to the site.

Web 2.0 sites can be leveraged for marketing purposes if used correctly. The key is to immerse yourself in the community and become known as a real person rather than a nameless marketer hoping to cash in on their pooled traffic generation.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
How To Build A Profitable Home Small Business

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your
business:

How To Make Money Online Using CPA Marketing
(read more)

Home Small Business Marekting Strategies: Succeeding With Social Marketing

Social marketing can really give your home business marketing efforts a big boost and help you achieve the success you want... not only more quickly, but also more efficiently. A social network is an online community that shares mutual interests. It is a "place" online where people gather to communicate and learn about things that they have in common. It gives them the capability to interact with each other through blogs, email and instant messaging, forums and any number of other online means of communication. They present some great ways to build your business.

To get the most out of your social marketing potential, you have to be active in the community. The people have to see you as one of them and not someone trying to use them or sell them something. Members listen to each other, especially those who have been around a long time and have a solid reputation in the community. Those who are obviously intelligent and knowledgeable about the subject can gain a large amount of credibility.

Social marketing easily exposes you to a larger market of interested and potential customers, which can help you with your research. It is a very cost effective means of finding out what your target market is interested in. You can find out what their true needs are, who they are, what they are drawn to, what they look for, and pretty much anything else you could want. It is a good way to throw ideas out and see what they think about them.

Social marketing can also help increase brand awareness, as long as you are careful to not sound like you are selling something. This will turn many people off. If you see a discussion going on about a certain topic, and think you can make a contribution, you can subtly provide product awareness while helping to solve their problems. After you deliver value, others will be more interested in checking your link to find more about you.

The greatest benefit of social marketing may simply be that it is a tremendously easy and cost effective means of communicating and interacting with your target market. Most networks are free and it only takes a little bit of time to keep interacting with the members of the network once you have gotten established. As communities grow, so does the amount of exposure you get, and the more success you will be likely to have.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Helping You To Build Your Home Small Business

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Complete Guide To Profitable Blogging
(read more)

Home Small Business Tips: Outsourcing Success Secrets

So many new marketers are reluctant to outsource, because they don't like spending the extra money. They think it would be a waste of cash to pay someone else to perform tasks they can do themselves. The truth is, outsourcing can be a great way to grow your business more quickly and much easier than doing it yourself.

The top home small business marketers you know today have teams to help them go from the conception of an idea to a product launch. But before they could afford a staff, many used freelancers to outsource the more mundane tasks while they worked on building their businesses.

Name just about any millionaire or billionaire in the world and chances are, that person has employees or outsourcers who take care of the vast majority of their work. It's nearly impossible for one person to grow a business to the seven figure range or greater by themselves. It can be done, but it would require a level of dedication that very few individuals possess.

Try to think about outsourcing in terms of the money you deserve to be paid. What do you think your time is worth? Are you willing to go out and work at a job making minimum wage or a bit more?

If not, then you're better off delegating your tasks to people who are willing to work for that. If your time is worth more than what it would cost you to hire someone else to do it, then it just makes sense to outsource the task.

Trying to do everything yourself can also prevent you from reaching success. The more you try to do by yourself, the less you'll actually get done. Think about this. If you spent every single waking moment writing ebooks, you might be able to pull off one a month.

If you're a very fast writer, you might be able to create a few more. But if you hired outsourcers, you could create a much greater number of them - and take the time to launch each one properly and get a hefty return on your investment, too!

The number of ebooks you could have would only be limited by the amount of money you had to pay the outsourcers.

You may have heard horror stories about finding reliable outsourcers. Yes, it can be hard to find someone who is reliable. But you don't have to get ripped off.

You can give each outsourcer a small order first to test the quality of their work and the speed of delivery. The first few jobs might be smaller jobs. Once they've proven themselves a few times, you can start giving them larger jobs. Go from a pack of 5 one-page articles to a 50-page eBook.

Some outsourcers will ask for payment up front, because they need to protect themselves, too. That doesn't necessarily mean you should discount them. Some very excellent outsourcers require payment up front to make sure they don't have their hard work stolen.

Just make sure you always ask for references or take the time to examine their reputation and profiles first. If they have a lot of good testimonials from people you recognize, or they have a very good word-of-mouth reputation, then you're probably safe working with them.

Even people with stellar reputations can let you down sometimes, but it's less likely than it might be if you went with a total stranger with no standing in the freelance community. Remember, outsourcing does cost money, but as long as the work they do makes you a profit and saves you time, it's worth it in the end.

Here are some commonly used sites where you can outsource your work:

- Fiverr: http://www.fiverr.com

- Odesk: http://www.odesk.com

- vWorker (used to be called RentACoder): http://www.vworker.com

- The Warrior Forum (http://www.warriorforum.com/) is another great place to find experienced virtual assistants. Check the Warrior Classifieds section or place an ad there yourself.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Backlink Strategies To Increase Website Traffic
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Strategies: Adding Graphics To Your Toolbox

Almost every home small business online marketer needs graphics. Many graphics are available pre-made. You don't necessarily need to have every single graphic customized for your use only. Some graphics should always be custom made, but others can easily be stock material.

If you're making sales pages of any kind, there are a few types of graphics you should almost always have. You don't necessarily need a header and footer, but sometimes you can't get away with having no graphics at all.

The most important thing you need if you're selling an eBook, software package, membership site, or other digital products is a good eCover. This will have to be customized with your product name.

A good eCover graphic lends credibility to your product. If your eCover is poorly done, a lot of people will think the product itself is sub-par. If your eCover is especially attractive, it will make it seem like your product has a higher value. A good eCover is essential, especially if you're selling to other marketers!

A guarantee graphic is also important. Guarantee graphics help draw attention to your money back guarantee. A guarantee graphic can increase your conversions. If you don't have a clear-cut guarantee policy on your sales page, or if visitors don't see it, you could be throwing sales out the window.

An attractive order button that draws attention is almost as important as your eCover. The order button is what people need to click in order to purchase your product. If they somehow miss the button, or if it's difficult to see, people might get frustrated and leave.

Also, some people specifically look for the order button on your site first. The price of a product is usually near the order button, so some people will instinctively scroll down to the order button before they even read the sales letter.

If your order button is especially tempting, your price is good, and your eCover is exceptional, they may hit the order button and buy without even reading the whole sales letter. This is especially true if they've already heard a lot about your product before they make it to your sales page.

Bullets or accent graphics can also be important. They help draw attention to essential benefits and features. They should be used sparingly. Using bullets to accent everything on a page takes away from their usefulness, because they should only be used to draw attention to your most important benefits.

If you're running an affiliate program, you should have a selection of banners for affiliates to use to advertise your site. Although some affiliates will only promote you through text links or emails, a lot of affiliates will still need banners for websites and blogs.

Remember, pre-made graphics can really save you time and money, but it can also pay to have part of your graphics custom made. Great custom graphics can really help skyrocket increase sales.

When using pre-made graphics, always check the usage licence to make sure you will not be violating copyright if you use the graphics on your website. Most sites which sell royalty-free stock images will grant you such a licence automatically.

Here are some of the resources I use when purchasing stock images or creating my own graphics:

Royalty-Free Stock Images:
http://www.istockphoto.com

Full-featured Graphics Editor (Free)
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Flickr Creative Commons
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Development And Coaching

And here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Increase Your Profits With These Simple Backend Strategies
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Strategies: Mastering The Art Of Article Marketing

Your home small business website is only as good as its content. If people don't want to read what is on your site, then they will be less likely to use your services or buy your products. That's why it's important to have well-written articles on your site whenever possible, to keep users interested and generate revenue.

A simple way to get excellent articles is to hire a professional writer to develop them, but that can get expensive, especially if your site is just starting out. For many people, it is far more economical to write your own articles. But before you tackle this task, make sure that you're up to it, because the quality of your articles can make or break your website or online business.

Anyone can write effective articles for their site. All it takes is practice and research. Read everything you can online. Find a writer or group of writers online whose work you admire and learn from their techniques. Eventually, you'll find your own rhythm for your articles. Having your writing on your site will add a personalized touch to your site that users will appreciate, because no one knows how to say what you mean better than you. The key is to just keep writing.

Online, less is more. When you're laying articles out on your site, try to put as much space in as you can. Break paragraphs up and try to keep it so the reader needs to scroll as little as possible to read the entire article. Also, if you can, include pictures with the articles. The goal is to make your articles appear as short and text-light as possible, so users won't be intimidated and not bother reading them.

Keep your sentences simple and easy to understand, without any unnecessarily long or academic words. Try to organize your articles so that the paragraphs can be broken up very easily into sections under descriptive headings. This will make the reading experience much smoother and faster for the user by allowing them to pick and choose what they want to read, as well as helping them find a specific piece of information when they come back to your inspirational and enlightening articles.

Never publish your first draft. No matter who you are, it won't be up to your potential. After you write an article, put it aside for a day and don't think about it. Then come back to it with a fresh set of eyes. You'd be amazed at what you'll pick up, both grammatically and content-wise. Sometimes, it won't be uncommon for you to write three or four different drafts of an article before you find the one that you really like.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your
business:

Making Money With Simple Article Marketing Tactics
(read more)

Home Small Business Affiliate Marketing Tips: Finding A Profitable ClickBank Product

Do you know how to choose a winning Clickbank affiliate program? If you're going to be promoting a product, it's useful to have good solid criteria you can use to determine if the program is going to be profitable for you. Some of the key things you should look at are Gravity score, competition, the sales letter, the payout and the price. Learn what to look for in each area and you'll be able to quickly find the best products to promote.

For beginners, it's best to promote products in the 20 to 50 gravity range. These are products that have been proven to be successful sellers, but don't have an overwhelming amount of competition. These are the products you want to shoot for when you first start out. Once you're more experienced, you can aim at the 50+ gravity range. Anything below 20 probably won't make you much money.

Even if the product has a good gravity, that doesn't mean it'll sell for you. Sometimes gravity scores are elevated by vendors artificially boosting the score by selling their own products through affiliate accounts. Take a look at the sales letter and decide for yourself whether or not you think the product will sell. If it's not well-written and professional-looking, move on.

Next, determine how much the product costs and what it pays out. As an affiliate, you should look for products that pay out at least $20 per sale. Anything below that amount may not be worth your time... and believe it or not, it's often as easy to sell a high ticket item as it is to sell a low ticket item.

There are products on Clickbank that go for $97 - $197. If you can find a product that you believe you can promote and has a gravity of over 20, it's generally a better idea to promote that product than it is to promote a $40 product with similar gravity.

In addition to payout and price, one other thing you can look for is continuity. Continuity is basically a month-to-month membership program that will pay you commission every single month. Again, it takes about as much effort to sell a product without continuity as it does to sell one with continuity... except with continuity, you keep getting paid.

You also should look for competitors, because you actually want some competition in your area. That usually means other people are making money doing what you're considering doing. For example, if you plan on advertising a hypnosis product on AdWords, you will want to see at least one or two other advertisers selling hypnosis ebooks there, too. If there are no competitors, then chances are someone's tried it before and it didn't work.

Keep in mind, however, that you don't want to go into an over saturated niche, either. Too many competitors can be just as bad as no competitors.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Let Me Help You Build A Profitable Home Business

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Complete Affiliate Marketing Handbook

(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Tips: Triggering a Flood of Testimonials

Testimonials are an important part of any sales process. They are a form of social proof, which may help buyers trust a you more. Although some people have become suspicious of testimonials, they can still be extremely important in convincing other people to buy.

But getting testimonials can be difficult. In general, people are bit lazy in this regard, and don't usually provide feedback unless it's negative, or unless you ask for it.

You shouldn't offer money as an incentive for people to offer testimonials, because then they become "paid testimonials." People tend to distrust testimonials that people are paid for, because prospects know that some people are perfectly willing to lie about a product if they're paid to do it.

Instead, you could offer some small token of your appreciation, just as a "thank you" to those who take the time to write a testimonial for you. It might be a free report, a link from your site to theirs within the testimonial box, or a coupon for 10% off their next order with you.

As long as you're not offering cash, most people won't feel you're being dishonest to get your testimonials. It's not that they don't really want to offer one if they like the product, it's just that they don't think about it. Those that do think about it will often put it off "until later" and then forget about it.

So make sure you ask your customers for their testimonials. You could ask them on your "thank you" page. You could ask them again on the last page of your product, or at the end of each audio or video file.

You could ask them in a follow-up email. "Hi, I just wanted to find out how you're enjoying XYZ Product. Is it working out for you? If you haven't done so already, I'd really appreciate it if you could send me your thoughts on the product - I may even use it as a testimonial with a link back to your website! It'll only take five minutes of your time, and I'll send you a free bonus report as my thanks for taking the time to do this for me."

Be sure to ask people if you can include their real name in the testimonial, or if you should use their initials. Some people don't want to have their real name anywhere on the Internet, and others don't mind at all. You might also want to ask for a picture, if appropriate.

Some people have a tendency to trust testimonials more if they include a picture, because it seems more like a real person wrote the testimonial. Although some dishonest marketers might just steal photos to use for testimonials, don't give in to that temptation.

Audio and video testimonials are great if you can convince your customers to call in an audio testimonial or email you the video file, but this is harder to obtain since many won't be versed in more advanced technology. If you can make it easy enough for them to give you these kinds of testimonials, you'll be glad you did.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coaching

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Learn How To Generate A Flood Of Targeted Hungry Traffic To Any Website

(read more)

Home Small Business Tips: Setting Up Your Internet Marketing Home Office

If you're new to Internet marketing, you may not yet have everything you need for your home office. Many people find they work better after they have all of the things they need for their business. Productivity can really go up if your office is equipped properly - even if it's nothing more than a laptop and convenient Internet connection.

A computer and Internet connection is the most obvious thing you'll need. It doesn't matter if your computer is a PC or Mac. Either will work just fine for your marketing efforts. Just keep in mind that most Internet marketing software is created for the PC, so if you have a Mac, you may need to make sure you can also run Windows programs on it by using a Windows emulator, or installing Windows on your Mac.

Your computer doesn't have to be a high-end model unless you intend to do a lot of extreme graphics work or video editing. Most Internet marketing tasks can be accomplished well even on systems that are several years old.

You should probably have a high-speed Internet connection, but if you can't get one, you can still get the job done. You might be slower, but you can still accomplish most tasks on a dialup connection.

However, a few things might be out of your reach on dialup. For example, you might not be able to do much video marketing if it takes you 12 hours to upload a single 10-minute video. But for the most part, you can do whatever you need to on dialup until your success takes off and you're able to upgrade.

You'll need a comfortable place to work, preferably with an ergonomic chair. Most people find they're most productive if they have a clean room with few distractions. Your work surface should be as clear of clutter as possible. Have folders ready for projects and a place to store and file your receipts and other things you print out.

You don't have to have a separate office, but you'll need to make sure you can have a little quiet space if you need it to work. If you live in a small apartment with a family, you may find it difficult to get any privacy, so a good set of noise-reducing headphones and a good white noise CD or MP3 can really help. White noise will help block a lot of bothersome noises, and will help you focus on your work. Music can also work, but it may be too distracting for some people.

Some marketers even find it helpful to have a small refrigerator and microwave in their office area. This way, you can easily grab food and drinks without breaking your focus too much. If you only have to walk three feet to grab a soda, your focus won't be broken as much as it would be if you had to travel downstairs to the kitchen. But at the same time, it's equally important to take some small breaks to relieve stress and maintain your sanity.

A fax machine and printer can also be very good purchases. Many companies will require you to print and fax documents like a W-9 tax form. Merchant accounts, banks, and government agencies can sometimes require you to fax certain documents to them as well.

Most importantly, use a good planning and scheduling program, and keep your tasks well organized and documented so that you can achieve your goals easily.

Stay tuned for another home business tip real soon, and good luck
with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine, Home Small Business Made Easy

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Quick Start Guide To Internet Marketing And Online Business
(read more)

Home Small Business Advanced Tactics: Repeat Revenue with Membership Sites

Many Internet marketers are turning to membership sites as a way of earning recurring cash. Membership sites can be great for bringing in money month after month, with very little extra work required to maintain them.

A membership site is a website that's password protected, and generally requires users to pay a monthly fee. Most membership sites are protected by special scripts that handle the managing of the usernames and passwords of members. They also take care of canceling members whose payments don't go through, or members who cancel manually.

Starting a membership site is relatively simple. You need a script, a billing provider, and content. The script will generally take care of the automatic monthly billing, member management, and protection of the content in the members' area. All you need to do is set up the script, add a billing provider such as PayPal, and add content to the members' area.

Sometimes, a marketer gets burned out with their membership site, or they need money quickly for something. Selling a membership site with members can bring in pretty good cash.

Another huge benefit of having your own membership site is that you can offer products and services to your list of members as an affiliate. Simply poll or survey your members to see what their needs are. Then investigate the affiliate programs that offer solutions to their problems. Sign up for a program, and send a link to your members, and you can generate relatively easy affiliate income.

Getting new members is probably the most difficult part of managing a membership site.

The best way to get members is to run an affiliate program and have other people bring in members for you. You can also get members by running PPC ads, advertising on forums, posting ads to relevant magazines and newspapers, and forming strategic partnerships and JVs with other webmasters.

As you get more members, your monthly income can continue to grow, so you can have money coming in each month. You'll just need to continue delivering whatever it is you promised your members and subscriptions should remain relatively constant, or perhaps even increase.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine, Home Small Business Coach
Learn How To Build A Real Business, No Hype

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Guide To Building Profitable Membership Sites
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Tips: Setting Up a Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is a web page that's used for the purpose of getting people to opt in to your newsletter or mailing list by entering their name and email address. A squeeze page generally doesn't have as much copy as a sales letter, but most squeeze pages have some teaser text and bullet points.

Increasingly, video is being used in place of text on squeeze pages. Most text-based squeeze pages consist of a headline, a short paragraph or two of copy, a few bullet points, and an opt-in box - all "above the fold," meaning the reader doesn't have to scroll to continue reading.

Some squeeze pages will also have graphics, including a header and footer, and perhaps other graphics such as an eCover for a free report that's being given away as a reward for opting in.

No matter which you choose, you'll first need to create a basic HTML page.

You can do this using a WYSIWYG editor, which should make it easier for beginners. WYSIWYG stands for "what you see is what you get." A WYSIWIG HTML editor lets you design visually, and you generally need to know little, if any, HTML to use one.

Many people use a darker red or a medium blue as the background color for their squeeze page, but you can use any color you like, as long as it isn't incredibly bright and distracting and it looks good with any other graphics you might use on the page.

You don't want to put your text directly on this colored background, because it will probably be difficult to read. What you want to do is create a table with a white background, and put all of your text and graphics inside the table.

In your program, create a table with a single cell (1x1) and set the background color to white. This table should probably be between 700 and 800 pixels in width. Most people use between 750 and 770 pixels, because it's large enough to look good on monitors with very high resolutions, yet it still shows up well even at 800 x 600.

Inside this table, you'll want to put the rest of your squeeze page information. This should include a headline, a little copy, bullet point or a video, and your opt-in box (you'll get the code for this from your autoresponder).

You can also put the eCover of the product you'll be giving away to subscribers, if you have one. Your headline should be something that will tease visitors and make them really want to sign up to get the information you have.

Next, you need to include some very short teaser copy. Just put in a paragraph or two of text or bullet points that describe the product you're giving away for free. Then, you'll create a list in your autoresponder and get the code for the opt in form.

You'll need to paste the form code into the HTML area. Then you're finished with your squeeze page. Just save the file, upload it and test it, then start sending traffic to it.

Stay tuned for another online business marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine, Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Secrets Of Building A Profitable List
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Strategies: Pulling Profits From MySpace

Making money on MySpace isn't as easy as it once was. It used to be incredibly easy to make money on the site. A marketer could create a profile, add thousands of friends using an automated program, and then simply send bulletins out to all of those thousands of people.

Then people started complaining about the ridiculous amount of spam messages they were getting from marketers. Some people would receive dozens of daily spam offerings for everything from Viagra to ringtones to payday loans, and everything in between.

Those people started to complain to MySpace, and so to protect the site's reputation, they got a lot stricter about enforcing their rules. One of the first things they did was put a limit on the number of friends you could add daily. This seriously hampered a lot of people, who were used to adding hundreds or even thousands of people per day to their lists using those automated programs.

Then they started cracking down on the number of bulletins users could send, banning some users who abused the privilege. Users would find themselves banned within hours of sending out their first bulletin, which cause many marketers to simply give up trying to make money on MySpace.

But smart marketers found out you could still use MySpace to make a great deal of money if you used it properly. Gone were the days of sending out bulletin spam, spamming affiliate links on guestbooks, and spamming the MySpace forums. But you could still promote your offerings tactfully on MySpace.

You should offer MySpace users real value in return for being your friend. If they're just on your list for marketing purposes, make sure you provide them with plenty of free incentives, information and education to get them to stay.

Once you've made friends with people, you can direct them to your own websites outside of MySpace. You could ask them to join your forum, sign up to your newsletter, or visit your blog. Once you get your friends to start networking with you outside MySpace, you're free to market to them however you choose.

MySpace won't interfere with your marketing efforts off their site, even if someone reports you for trying to sell them something after they joined your email list from your own private website. Just keep in mind that there's always a chance you could be banned from MySpace for using any kind of marketing there.

Although you can greatly minimize your chances, due to their terms of service that prohibit blatant marketing, there's still that small risk that you should keep in mind. The financial rewards are still there, but be sure to consult their terms of service and follow them to the letter in order to maximize your results.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Learn How To Build A Home Small Business

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

How To Make Money Online With CPA Marketing
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Strategies: Moving Your Blog to Your Own Domain

Many people start their blogs on free hosted platforms. Free blogging solutions can be a good way to start, because they're free and they're generally trusted in the search engines. But there are perils associated with hosting a blog on someone else's server.

For one thing, you're at the mercy of the owner of the platform. Blogger, for example, can delete a blog without warning because they decide that the blog was too much like spam or too commercial. Recently, Google has become much more active in deleting blogs. Apparently, they now designate any blog which promotes anything as a spam blog, and will summarily delete it. And there is usually no recourse.

WordPress is another blogging host that doesn't allow affiliate links to be used on their blogs, so making money by hosting a blog on their servers can be more difficult for some. Ideally, you should start your blog on your own server, preferably in the root of the domain.

Some people have their blog in a subdirectory, such as yourdomain.com/blog. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you are not using a squeeze page in the root directory, then putting your blog on its own domain can have special benefits.

For one thing, a root domain often ranks better in the search engines than a subdirectory.

Putting your blog on the main domain (just yourdomain.com) can help it rank better, and might even give it a little more credibility in the eyes of your visitors.

If you have some sort of content on the root domain, and you have a blog in a subdirectory, then the people who come to your domain specifically to read your blog will need an easy way to find it. If your blog isn't easy to find, they may leave and never come back, unless you put an optin box somewhere on the site, so visitors can join your list.

Many people who host a blog on their own server use WordPress. If you host the software on your own server, you're free to have affiliate links if you wish. WordPress also has a lot of support in the form of themed templates and plugins.

If you're going to host your blog in the root of your domain, you'll upload all of the files and folder directly to the root instead of a subdirectory. If you had your blog previously in a subfolder or another domain, you'll need to do a 301 redirect to tell search engines and visitors that the files have moved, and where they've moved to.

If you don't know how to do this, you can search Google for "301 redirect" to learn how to set this up. If you move your blog from a hosted solution, it's a lot easier to provide a link to your new blog in a post on the old location.

Simply create a new post on the old blog, and say something like, "We've moved! This blog has been relocated to a new domain. Click here to visit the new blog, and be sure to update your bookmarks!"

By linking to the new location, you'll not only be telling your visitors where to find you, but you'll also be telling search engines where to find your new blog. They'll follow that link to your blog's new location, and you'll probably get the new domain indexed faster than if you didn't link to it from the old one.

You can save yourself from having to do this later by starting your blogs on your own domain from the beginning. A domain name is generally under $10, and hosting can be found very inexpensively.

To install a fresh blog on a new domain, log into your Cpanel and click the Fantastico button. On the left sidebar, under Blogs, click WordPress. Then click New Installation. From the drop down directory, choose the domain you want it to reside on.

If you want it to be located on yourdomain.com, leave the next field blank. If you prefer it to be on yourdomain.com/blog, then put the word blog in the next field. Then you'll just enter all of your administrative login information and click Install WordPress and your blog will be live! You can find plenty of free themed templates to customize your blog with a quick visit to your favorite search engine.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Made Easy

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Make Money Online With Niche Blogs
(read more)

Home Small Business Web Design: Integrating Text Links And Image Ads

Most visitors pass through one of two types of links. Text links are when you string together a word, phrase or sentence that's hyperlinked to another domain. Image ads are things like banners, button, and pictures - graphical images that are hyperlinked with a URL.

Both types of links have their benefits and drawbacks. Which type you use will be based on your site and your traffic - and you should ideally test both types to see which performs best with your particular demographic.

In general, text ads tend to pull a lot more clicks than image ads, because many people have become "banner blind." That means they have learned to ignore banners, because they know they are ads.

Text ads are a part of every website, so they're harder to ignore. This is one reason why Adsense is so successful. Of course, some sites could benefit from a few image ads. If your site is primarily text, you might be able to make it look more appealing through the use of a few graphical banners, and make some money in the process.

Choose attractive banners with a clear call-to-action, such as banners that clearly state, "Click here for ____!" Believe it or not, some new Internet users may not yet realize that they can click directly on graphics, so it's important for banners to have this kind of call-to-action.

Just be careful not to overdo the ads on your site. Two or three graphics per page is plenty. If you add more than this, you risk your site looking like a banner farm, and visitors may leave before they even have time to read any of your content.

Text links are generally more effective than banners. They can be blended in with your content and can look more like recommendations than ads. Many people prefer to buy through recommendations rather than blatant ads, so text links can help you get a higher click-through ratio than you might get with banner ads.

Coding a text link is very simple. To create a text link on your site, you need to use the "a href" code. A simple text link code might look something like this:

<a href="http://www.domainname.com">Here's where the text you want hyperlinked will go.</a>

Coding a banner link is only slightly more complex. You still use the "a href" code, but you also have to use the "img src" code along with it. It should look something like this:

So the first website address in that piece of code is the URL where you want your traffic to go. The second one is the URL where the image is being hosted on your server. This will make the image show up and when the user hovers his or her mouse over it, they'll see that it's clickable.

Make sure you test your links to be sure they're going to the right place! If you accidentally link to the wrong place, you could end up losing money in commissions or sales, so it's very important to make sure your links are working properly.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Development

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Powerful Backlink Strategies
(read more)

Home Small Business Advanced Tactics: Launching Your Own Affiliate Program

If you have your own product, launching an affiliate program is a necessity if you want to reach your full profit potential. Even if you manage to control a massive 10% of your entire niche market on your own, that still leaves 90% of that niche's traffic on the table.

By setting up an affiliate program, you can harness the power of having other people make money for you. Instead of spending your time promoting your product, you can let other people do it for you while you spend your time forming JV partnerships, developing new product ideas, getting new products created, and taking care of other tasks to grow your business.

There are many ways to set up an affiliate program. Which one you choose will probably depend on what type of product you're selling, and where you're located in the world.

A lot of people purchase affiliate scripts that allow them to run their own affiliate program through PayPal. However, PayPal doesn't allow users from many countries, and if you live in one of those countries, you'll have to find a different solution. If you're selling physical products like shoes or books, you might go through Commission Junction.

Commission Junction is one of the largest affiliate systems in the world. They may be a little complex to set up, and they have certain rules you'll have to comply with, but they have a huge database of affiliates ready and waiting to promote your products.

If you're selling digital products like software or ebooks, you might want to go through ClickBank. ClickBank is the world's largest seller of ebooks and other digital products. They make it extremely easy to run an affiliate program, and they take care of almost everything for you.

They handle the billing for you, they handle customer refund requests, and they can even handle some of your customer service questions. They'll even pay your affiliates for you. ClickBank does take a percentage of your sales, so if you're paying your affiliates a 50% commission, you'll be making a bit less than 50% yourself, because of ClickBank's fees.

They also charge an up front fee to approve your product before you're allowed to sell through them. But you'll have fees with any billing solution. After all, they have to make money somehow, too.

An alternative to ClickBank is PayDotCom. PayDotCom is very similar to ClickBank, but with a few differences. With PayDotCom, you don't have to pay an upfront fee to sell a single product through them.

The money also goes to your PayPal account, which can be another big benefit. But for people without PayPal accounts, PayDotCom isn't going to work. You need a PayPal account to be paid, and you'll also have to pay your affiliates out of your PayPal account, as well.

Another easy solution for selling digital products is e-Junkie. E-Junkie has an affiliate program built in, and they also host your product downloads. They're very inexpensive to use, charging a monthly fee rather than high percentages... but not as many affiliates promote products through e-Junkie as through ClickBank or PayDotCom.

Running your affiliate program can be very simple with a hosted solution. You might be tempted to use a script you host yourself, but it's probably better to leave it to the pros.

Don't forget to create an affiliate toolbox, too! In order for your affiliate force to make sales, they'll need ready-made marketing materials such as banners, buttons, eCovers, emails, and articles they can use.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine,
Home Small Business Made Easy

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Complete Affiliate Marketing Handbook
(read more)

Home Small Business Online Marketing: Profiting From Long Tail Keywords

"Long tail" is a big buzzword in marketing these days. Long tail keywords are less-searched and often overlooked words and phrases that can often get more traffic combined than a broader, more general keyword ever could. Understanding the concept of long tail keywords and applying it to your business can open you up to new visitors, and new profits as well.

For example, let's say the keyword "dog training" gets approximately 2,420 searches per day. Start looking at the lesser-searched keyword phrases for that niche - dog training collars, dog potty training, dog training careers, and so on. When you add up all of the long-tail keywords, which are easier to dominate in the search engine results pages, it equals more traffic than you might get if you simply went after Dog Training.

If you have 10,000,000 websites competing for the term "dog training," but only 361,000 competing for "dog training DVD," then you have a far greater chance of reaching the first page than you would if you were competing against 10 million pages.

Being ranked number one for a broad term like "mp3" would probably take a truly exceptional SEO expert many months of very hard work and a very large budget for buying backlinks to accomplish. But, ranking for a term like "1970s rock mp3s" might be much easier - because it's a long tail keyword. If the term gets 50 searches per day, and you rank number three, then you might get 20 or 30 hits to your website per day.

If you rank number 30,714 for the term "mp3," you probably won't get any traffic from that at all. Finding good long tail keywords is very important, because you need those long tail phrases to bring in traffic... especially when it's harder to get placement with more popular keywords.

While some marketers shun long tail keywords, believing they have to rank well for the prime keyword phrases, others are using it to reach a demographic that has money in hand. Rather trying to get traffic from people searching the word "golf", it's much easier to attract someone who types in "Taylor Made R580XD Titanium Driver," and could be potentially much more profitable.

The searcher who gets more specific with their searches is often someone who's more ready to buy, because they know what they want. The person typing in "golf" may want to know its history for a project, might want to take a golf vacation, or could be interested in attending a local tournament. That won't do you any good if your site sells golf clubs, but the long tail phrase will cater to the right crowd specifically.

Therefore, pick your keywords and phrases carefully. Separate your broad, generic terms from your long tail phrases so that you can monitor your search engine positioning and see how your keyword list is performing for you.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coaching

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Traffic Siphon: Get More Traffic And Make More Money Now!
(read more)

Home Small Business Online Marketing: Increasing Profits Through Complimentary Offers

If you launch your Internet marketing business as an affiliate marketer, then you'll want to know how to add complimentary offers into your marketing plan. On eBay, it's called cross-promotion.

For example, go to an eBay auction for an iPod. You will find cross-promotions of all sorts of accessories, battery packs, and bling they can add onto their order. You can do the same with an affiliate business.

Let's say you want to promote work at home opportunities - like Internet marketing to stay at home moms. First, you could start with an ebook promotion about affiliate marketing.

It's broad, it fits a large demographic - and it converts well. What else could the stay at home mom (who is soon to be entrepreneur) need that you can sell? Try to put yourself in situation for a moment.

She has kids running around the house, she may have limited space, and so she may be in need of a dedicated home office space, for example. That means you could also promote affiliate items through Amazon that cater to her home office needs, such as:

- An ergonomic chair
- A space-saving desk that will fit in a corner
- A laptop computer to take work on-the-go

But there's more she's going to need. If she's learning the ropes of affiliate marketing, she'll need to understand tactics and tools that are available to make her work easier and increase her profit potential.

You could cross-promote offers such as:

- Article marketing software and guides
- Pay per click ebooks
- Social marketing tutorials
- PLR (Private Label Rights) memberships

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When you first scout out your affiliate product promotions, think of all the ways you can add other offers into the mix so that they complement the original product and still suit the needs of your prospects perfectly.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Quick Start Guide To Marketing And Online Business
(read more)

Home Small Business Online: Networking with Other Online Marketers

Building an online business can make you feel isolated at times. You work from home, usually on solo projects, and except for the occasional forum and chat room participation, you don't have much opportunity to interact with others.

Some new marketers make it worse by never branding their name, or simply watching forum posts from the sidelines, perhaps because they fear exposing themselves to judgment in the marketplace.

But networking will help you make big gains as an online marketer. First and foremost, it helps you brand your name in the marketplace. You'll always want to participate in the Internet marketing niche, even if it's not the niche you're making money with.

The reason for this is because you can find potential Joint Venture partners who are in the same (or a complementary) niche as you. These relationships and bonds you build with other marketers could serve you well in the future.

Within every money-making niche you're in, you'll want to network as well. Always put your sights on someone who's a step above you on the ladder of success. This will help you build your own business because you're catapulting your momentum forward.

If at all possible, try to attend Internet marketing seminars and seminars within your niche. You'll meet people and gain valuable insight that isn't sold online - secrets shared between friends rather than sold to a general public.

Seminars can help you bounce ideas off other marketers and generate new ideas based on what you learn. It can also help you locate products and services that will help your business.

You might meet graphic designers, freelance writers, or an expert who could give your product or site a mention to his or her own list. If you attend a seminar, have some business cards ready to hand out to people that include your name, email address, and website.

Get cards from others, too and then follow up on those contacts to remind people of who you are - thanking them if they provided you with any information that helps you on your journey to becoming a successful Internet marketer.

After you attend enough seminars and become more well known, you may even be asked to be a speaker at one!

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Secrets Of Building A Profitable List
(read more)

Home Small Business Online: Defining Your Online Revenue Streams

For many, success in the Internet marketing industry is a trial and error process. You have to learn as you go - on your own - soaking up information along the way. The first thing you need to know is what it means to be an Internet marketer, because it isn't always clear to everyone.

Internet marketers can actually pick and choose from a whole host of options available to help them make money. Your opportunities are virtually endless, and can include one or more of the following:

- Selling digital downloads (information products like ebooks)
- Promoting other people's products for a commission (affiliate marketing)
- Selling on eBay or other auction sites
- Running a membership site
- Selling your online services (writing, graphics, etc.)
- Owning a website that sells dropshipped or wholesale items

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Being a newcomer to Internet marketing, you might be worried that you don't have anything to sell. That's okay - most people don't start out with anything, and you never have to stock a tangible inventory if you don't want to.

Internet marketing is great because it has no gender or age boundaries in the way of your success. There are teenagers and even grandmothers who have launched successful online ventures, who started out as budding Internet marketers just like you.

You don't have to do anything unethical or shady to succeed at Internet marketing. You can build a respectable business with a solid reputation if you simply learn how to find out what people need and then give it to them... it's as simple as that.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine, Home Small Business Coach
Let Me Help You Build A Real Business

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Online Cash With CPA Marketing
(read more)

Home Small Business Ideas: Making Adsense Work For You

Adsense can be a fantastic moneymaker. There are many people who make thousands of dollars per month through Adsense alone. Hearing this may get you excited, and you may already have dollar signs in your eyes. But don't get your hopes up just yet!

Although you've probably heard about people who bring in five or six figures per month with Adsense, you need to keep one very important thing in mind. In order to make that kind of money with Adsense, you need to have a ton of traffic or a LOT of websites, or both.

In fact, most people who make more than $100 per month with Adsense either have a very large website with thousands of visitors per day, or they have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller websites.

For most people, Adsense may not be worth the effort to create sites only for promoting it. Adsense only pays a few cents for each click, depending on the keyword you target (some pay a lot more) and those few cents are a lot smaller than they were just a few years ago.

A few years ago, some people were getting several dollars per click for many keywords. These days, $1 clicks are relatively rare in most niches. Most clicks seem to bring you under $0.50 now, and smaller niches may experience clicks of only around $0.10 (or even less.)

In order to make $10 per day, at $0.10 per click you would need 100 clicks. If your click through ratio were 5%, you would need 2,000 visitors to your site every single day just to earn $10 per day.

For sites with very little traffic, you would have to have a really fantastic click through ratio in order to earn decent money with Adsense - or, choose highly competitive keywords that pay a lot, but are harder to rank in the search engines.

Some sites just naturally have traffic that doesn't buy much as far as paid information, but the visitors like to click through links to access free information. Webmasters who have sites that target the freebie-seeking demographic should test Adsense links to see which type performs best.

If you're running a site that has an extremely general audience, Adsense might also be a good alternative. Adsense is usually pretty good at delivering targeted ads. You can create thousands of content pages with Adsense links, place the code in your blogs, and watch your monthly earnings rise as you create more content for your readers.

If your only goal is to make money without becoming a product owner, then consider creating a content-laden site that weaves affiliate links into the text and provides ample opportunities for clicks to Adsense links so that you can profit from the information you're delivering.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Secrets To Profiting With Niche Blogs
(read more)

Home Small Business: Making The Most Of Your Marketing Hours

How do you know when you should keep working at something, and when you should just give up and call it a day?

Whenever you start a new project, it's usually very exciting. It's fun, it's new, and it's a lot easier to stick with. After awhile, however, you may start to lose interest in the project. When it starts to get boring, it gets a lot harder to stay with it.

Many people might tell you to keep pushing no matter what - that it's the only way to be successful. That's not always true. Smart people know when to escape those dead ends and walk away. You shouldn't always keep working at something with blind faith, because if it's going nowhere, it could be preventing you from realizing success.

Yes, winners do quit, sometimes, but they quit when it makes sense to quit. Here are a few tips you can use to help you decide when you should quit and when you should keep pushing with a particular project.

First, ask how long you've been at it. If you've been going quite awhile, giving up might be a waste of the work you've already put in. Then again, if you've stuck to something for a very, very long time and you're not seeing any results, it might not make sense to keep going.

Next, ask yourself if the potential rewards are worth it. If you're really working hard to carve out a chunk of a very tiny niche, maybe it really isn't worth it. Will that tiny niche ever be worth the amount of work you're putting in?

On the other hand, if you're already making some headway into a very large market, giving up might be a bit premature. Why give up on potential future earnings when you may already be halfway there?

Finally, ask yourself if it's really worth it, not strictly in terms of money, but also in terms of quality of life. You're the one putting the time, effort, and money into a project. If the potential reward doesn't seem worth the hassle anymore, maybe it really is time to give up.

By taking the time to consistently evaluate your progress and answer these questions with objectivity, it's easier to stay on track to success. You might even benefit from asking friends and family to occasionally help you with these questions... their answers may surprise you.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Powerful Backlink Strategies To Generate Unstoppable Traffic
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing Online: Turbocharging Your Backend Profits

Every good marketer knows how important it is to increase the lifetime value of the customer. It's much cheaper to make a sale to a previous customer than it is to get a new one onboard. The cost of acquiring new customers can be high, but getting more money out of existing customers won't cost you a penny.

Building a backend to your business isn't hard... but without one, you're limiting your financial potential. A backend is how you continue selling to an existing customer. For example, let's say you sell an eBook on how to make money by blogging,

Your eBook could discuss what a blog is, how to set one up, and how to make money from it. Your backend sales could come from affiliate items (if you don't feel like taking the product creation route again) or a new eBook, membership site, or video/audio package you sell.

Whenever you first start selling online, always think of complementary topics you can tack on as a backend. For our example, your backend sales could be about social networking on other web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Facebook, or bookmarking sites.

After you've begun seeing success with those, your backend sales could continue by focusing on more paid methods of marketing, such as AdWords. You set up your offers with your audience like stepping stones, moving from the first logical starting point to a more advanced stage.

Insert your offers right into your autoresponder system and it will automatically serve the needs of your subscribers the longer they stay on your list.

Another common way to add a backend onto a product is to offer personal coaching.

Personal coaching can be expensive, sometimes even costing up to thousands of dollars per month. A lot of marketers offer this as a backend strategy, giving them the potential to significantly increase the return on their investment (ROI) of acquiring the prospect.

If you take care to create top quality backend offers that add value to your customer's needs, they'll continue buying from you. If you promote anything and everything just for the sake of cashing in, they'll eventually lose trust in you.

Your backend sales strategy isn't limited to just your autoresponder. You can put links to backend products on your "thank you" pages as well. And don't forget that each product can act as a backend item for another one. So you might start with an ebook about social marketing and then use a blogging ebook as your backend item for the customer.

Just make sure you don't set yourself up for limited profits by using a single product without implementing a backend strategy that will work to increase your ROI over and over again. You're building a business, not dabbling in a few hit or miss sales.

Stay tuned for another home small business marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Quick Start Strategies To Building A Profitable Backend System
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing: Harnessing The Power Of Adwords

Pay-per-click marketing can be very difficult to master. A lot of people have spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars before they learned to make a profit. Some people never become profitable, and give up after losing a considerable amount of money.

In order to have the best chance at being successful, you have to learn to be extremely vigilant about your campaigns. You have to monitor them carefully, and always end campaigns that remain unprofitable for a long period of time.

One of the first things you should monitor is your Click Through Rate (CTR). If your CTR is very poor, your ads will cost more. It will take more money for the same number of clicks your competitors might get if they have a better CTR.

If your CTR is too low, you need to tweak your ad copy. You need to look at the text your competitors are using, and attempt to make yours better. Try to get inside the minds of your visitors, and think about what they're looking for when they search for a particular word or phrase.

Use split-testing to test multiple versions of your ads, and use the best ones. Keep an eye on your quality score (QS). If your score is too low, then you need to do a few things to get your quality score up.

The higher your QS is, the less you'll have to pay for your clicks, and the more profit you can potentially make. The quality score takes several factors into account for its ranking algorithm, and Google doesn't release the details of every single one.

They give you a little general advice, but it's not really enough for most people to dominate AdWords right away. After a lot of experimentation, experts have come up with some guidelines than can help improve your quality score.

Make sure you have each campaign's keyword phrases on the landing page itself. Don't use the keyword "golf carts" if the word "carts" doesn't appear anywhere on the page. That could bring your quality score down.

Your landing page shouldn't be a single page with no internal links. Google doesn't favor single page landing pages. Add links to relevant products, articles related to the niche, or pages such as a privacy policy, terms of service, and a contact page.

Keep your campaigns focused on a few highly related keyword phrases each, such as one for the product name only, another for long tail phrases, and a third for more broad keywords. You should make sure you target those keywords in your ad.

For example, if you have "golf clubs," "golf bags," and "golf club warmers" as your keyword phrases, you should try to use at least one of those phrases in your ad. You might have something like "Golf Clubs, Bags, and Accessories" in your ad. The words people search for will appear in bold in your ad, so the more of them you have in your ad, the more likely it is to be clicked.

Finally, you should carefully track conversions. Make sure you have a way to track which traffic came from AdWords if you're sending traffic from more than one source. Conversions are ultimately the most important factor in the success or failure of any pay-per-click campaign.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Complete Guide To Making Online Income With Article Marketing
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing: Creating Your First Affiliate Link

Creating your first affiliate link is very simple. First, you'll want to register for a free affiliate (or associate) ID. On ClickBank, they call it a nickname. On Amazon, it's an associate ID, and on PayDotCom, it's your affiliate member username.

On ClickBank.com, you'll go to the marketplace, which is the link at the top of the page. Enter some keywords to find a product you want to promote. You can select the option to view the pitch page if you want to review the sales letter, and then select the option to create a "hoplink" when you're ready to get your link.

Enter your ClickBank nickname and click, "Create." You'll see two options, as shown below:

http://Nickname.Publisher.hop.clickbank.net/

and

<a href="http://Nickname.Publisher.hop.clickbank.net/" target="_top">Click Here!</a>

The first one is your direct link, and instead of nickname and publisher, you'll see your personal nickname and the publisher's ID. The second one is ready for insertion into a web page. This makes the words, Click Here hyperlinked to the site via your own personal affiliate link.

If you choose to use PayDotCom, you'll log into your affiliate account and click on Promote Products at the top of the screen. Next you'll click on the option that says, "Create a new campaign...from marketplace."

Search the marketplace to find a product you wish to promote. When you find a product you'd like to promote as an affiliate, click the Promote link. Here, you'll see your raw affiliate link that you can use - as well as any other tools the product owner provides, such as banner ads, email announcements, etc.

In Amazon, you'll log into your associate membership and then on the left sidebar, click "Build Links." You can choose which types of links you wish to build, such as a text link.

Here, you'll enter the full URL of the product or search results page you want to promote and enter the words you want to be hyperlinked. You'll be able to quickly cut and paste the HTML code into your website or blog.

Although they may look very different, each affiliate program has a similar system in place to help you create viable links, so don't let the technology differences confuse you. Basically, for each one, you'll log in, enter your username, and generate a link to copy and use online. It's easy, but if you get stuck somewhere, check out the support tutorials or email the product owner and ask for assistance.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Complete Affiliate Marketing Handbook
(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing: Adding Audio To Your Website

Audio is a very powerful selling tool. Some people aren't very good at reading, or really hate to read, but they don't mind listening as they multi-task. Using audio on your site is a great way to capture their attention and sell to people who really can't stand reading long sales pitches.

Audio instantly captures attention. Some people see this is a bad thing, because audio can be very startling if someone has their speakers turned up loudly and aren't expecting a verbal pitch. This is why some marketers choose not to have their audio start automatically, but have a "play" button instead.

Other marketers say audio loses its power if it's optional. It's probably better to test both options on your site to see which performs better for you. Audio is also very good for selling to those with visual impairments. Many of the visually impaired use the Internet frequently. By adding audio to your sites, you'll make it easier for them to understand your product.

You can also use audio to provide tutorials. These can be tutorials that you place on your website or allow people to download. Some people learn better when they hear instructions than when they read them. Providing your tutorials in audio format will help reach these people in a way that written tutorials might not be able to.

Audio testimonials are a very useful selling tool. By having people give you their testimonials in audio format, you help lend credibility to the content. A lot of people feel that since anyone could write a fake testimonial, they often don't trust them as much.

But if you offer your testimonials in audio format, they'll be more likely to believe they were provided by real people, because they'll hear different voices in each audio file. Remember, if you're using audio for multiple testimonials, make sure you don't have the audios all start automatically.

It may sound obvious, but there have been cases of marketers forgetting this and ending up with several audio files all playing at once! This would definitely chase off a lot of visitors.

If you're going to offer audio on your site, it's important to use the best quality audio you can.

If your audio quality is poor, people probably aren't going to want to listen to it. In fact, if the audio is bad enough, people may just hit the back button to get away from it! You don't have to record your website audio in a professional recording studio, but you should use a decent quality microphone and minimize background noise as much as you can.

You should make sure you create your audio in a room with decent acoustics. It's best if you make it in a room with carpeted floors and a lot of plush, soft furniture. If you create your audio in a room with hard floors and little soft furniture, there may be a hollow, echo-like quality to the sound.

You should also make sure the room isn't full of crying babies, screaming children, and barking dogs. Any background noises can be very distracting, so close the door and turn off the television, and turn off the phone.

If done well, audio can be a remarkable tool for selling and teaching. You can even take a simple PDF file and turn it into a batch of downloadable MP3 files that your customer can take with them on the go.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Traffic Siphon - Get More Traffic Now!
(read more)

Home Small Business Online: Creating Your First Easy MiniSite

The word "minisite" can refer to a number of different things. Some people call small niche article sites minisites, but that isn't the general use of the word. In Internet marketing, the word "minisite" is generally used to refer to very small websites that are set up to sell a product - usually an eBook or other digital download.

Most minisites are only 1-5 pages. Some of them are only a single sales pitch page, plus perhaps a thank you page to be displayed after the customer places an order. Others have a contact page, a terms of service page, a frequently asked questions page, or other general pages.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll just work on creating a single page minisite, and we'll cover only the design - not the sales copy. Most minisites have several key parts. They usually have a header and footer, although some have only a header, or may have neither.

They also have a sales letter of some sort, which is used to sell the product. Finally, they have an order button that is clicked when a customer wants to purchase the product. Some minisites also have an eCover, which is a computer-generated image that mimics what an information product for sale might look like if it were an actual physical product.

For example, if the product is an eBook, the eCover might look like a hardcover or paperback book cover (sometimes a spiral notebook, too). If the product is a membership site, the eCover might be a membership card. Software products usually have a 3D software box as their eCover.

The first step in creating a minisite should be creating your eCover, if you intend to use one. Most people create their eCovers with Photoshop, because the eCover action scripts needed to create them only work with Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop, you may need to create it from scratch, or have it made for you by a professional graphic designer.

After you have your cover design, you'll need to create a header. A well-designed header can draw attention to your headline, and it can make your site look more professional.

The header should contain your product's name and a tag line - like a one-sentence blurb that tells what your site is offering. It can also contain a photo that's related to your niche, and it might also contain a small version of your ecover - all tied into a theme that matches the interests of your audience.

Let's say you're creating a minisite to sell your dog-training ebook. Your header could potentially contain a picture of a woman pointing at a dog, and the dog sitting down. The text on the header might say something like, "Dog Training 101: The Ultimate Guide to Training Your Puppy or Adult Dog!"

Don't make your header too large. If the header is so large visitors can't see the headline without scrolling, it's too big! It should attract attention to the headline, not hide it. Headers are generally between 700 and 800 pixels wide and 100-200 pixels in height.

The footer is usually the same width, but about half the height of the header. It may only contain the product name or logo, but may also contain an image or copyright notice. Finally, you need an order button that draws a lot of attention. Your button might contain your eCover, plus a brightly colored button and a call-to-action, such as "Click Here for Instant Access!"

If you have the money to invest, you might consider ordering a minisite package from a professional designer. For about $300, you'll get the header, footer, eCovers, and even sometimes extra banners that you can use for off-site promotions.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Quick Start Marketing Guide
(read more)

Home Small Business: Online Income From Digital Downloads

One of the great things about marketing online is that you can sell digital products. Instead of having to physically create, store and ship tangible goods, you can eliminate all those costs and deal strictly in information products and other virtual items, which can significantly increase your profits.

As a product owner, you get to set the price for your digital downloads. As an affiliate, you seek out products that have a good commission to promote. Both options are great for making money on the internet, without needing to maintain a warehouse full of stuff.

Overall, digital downloads usually have a much better payout than tangible goods. Of course, if you're promoting a high-ticket tangible item, you might make more - but it could be harder to sell, too.

A digital download is a text, audio, or video file that buyers can download instantly onto their hard drive and access immediately. Instead of waiting until tomorrow afternoon to run to the local bookstore, they can conveniently log in at 3 o'clock in the morning when they can't sleep and download an ebook on the topic they want.

A tangible book that costs $14.95 in a local bookstore can sell for $27 and up on the Internet as a digital download. As an affiliate, your commission will probably be at least half of that, but even though you might make less, you also don't have to do any of the creation, selling, delivery or customer support, either.

If you promote a tangible book on Amazon that costs $14.95, and you get 7% of that, you're only earning a little over a dollar. But a $47 digital download, for example - for an ebook about the same topic - can easily offer you 50% commission, giving you more than $20.00 per sale!

It's not hard to see which one pays better. As a product owner, you can create ebooks to compete with tangibles. You'll charge a lot more, but you'll be able to pay your affiliates a lot for their efforts, too.

If you're not a writer and prefer a different type of product creation for your digital download, you can choose to create a series of MP3 files - audio tutorials that teach your topic to a paying audience. The public loves information they can digest on the go using their portable audio player, smart phone or other electronic gadget.

You can also use a screen-capture tool like Camtasia and create videos as your main products. Many people actually prefer to watch a lesson rather than read it. With both audio and video digital downloads, your price point can be much higher than what text-based infoproducts can bring in.

Combine all three media elements and you can be poised to market a high-ticket digital download that takes in hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single sale - something affiliate marketers will jump all over.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Building Profitable Membership Sites
(read more)

Home Small Business: Building Your Business With Joint Ventures

Joint ventures (also known as JVs) are partnerships between two or more people, usually with the purpose of cross-promoting products. There are various types of JVs, and what you offer your JV partners will depend on what you have to bring to the table, and what you're looking for in return.

Most JVs are really affiliate relationships. You have a product, for example, and your JV partner has a forum, website, or email list. Your JV partner sends an email to his list about your product, or puts an ad on their website, blog, forum, etc.

Then you pay that JV partner a commission for the sales he generates. (It could also be the other way around, where the other person is the product owner.)

Although this type of relationship probably shouldn't be called a "JV," a lot of people do refer to it as such - probably because the product owner approached the JV partner to ask for a promotion instead of the product owner just deciding on his own to become an affiliate.

A more common form of true JV is when two parties with email lists or websites exchange ads. Usually, both parties have lists of comparable sizes in the same general niche, and each person agrees to send a mailing out to their list on the other person's behalf. You send their message to your list, and they send your ad out to theirs.

Joint ventures are great, because they allow you to go far beyond what you could accomplish by simply promoting to your own list, or on your own site. If you have a list of 10,000 people, and 200 people buy the product you're advertising, you have a 2% conversion rate.

If you could find ten other people with lists of 10,000 people to send out your ad, and you also experience a 2% conversion, you could make ten times the money you'd have made by sending out a message only to your list of subscribers.

Of course, in many niches, lists will often have duplicate subscribers. In the Internet marketing niche, many webmasters are on dozens of different lists. When a major launch goes out, you might get five or ten messages promoting the exact same product on the same day.

But no two mailing lists will consist solely of exact duplicates. Even in the same niche, people can attract different audiences. JVs are a great way of reaching more people than you'd otherwise be able to reach on your own.

If you're interested in doing a JV with someone, you should be well prepared before you write to him or her with your proposal. You must bring something to the table that is of value to the other person. A JV can be a cross promotion or a bartering situation, where each of you offers up a service or skill to jointly create and launch a co-branded product.

Don't expect to write to a well-known marketer with a huge list and get an instant JV when you don't have a list and aren't offering anything special. It could happen, just don't expect it.

Occasionally, you can entice a JV partner with a very generous commission. In that case, be prepared to pay 70% or more in order to get JV partners, unless you're already very well known in the niche or have a very large list of your own.

You'll also probably have to JV with people who have lists that are similar to yours in size. Most people won't be willing to JV with you if their list is over 10,000 people and yours is only 200... but it never hurts to ask.

Once you build up a large list of your own, you can start getting bigger JVs. Just don't forget about what it was like when you were new and your list was smaller. You shouldn't automatically pass over someone because his or her list is currently small.

If they're offering you a good commission on a very high-quality product, it might be something you should consider. Plus, you'll be developing a relationship that might be very valuable in the future!

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine, Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Secrets Of Profitable List Building

(read more)

Home Small Business Online: Generating Cash Through Keyword Research

Your keyword choices are critical to your success in nearly any online home small business model. Whether you're pursuing Pay-Per Click (PPC), blogging, Virtual Real Estate (VRE) and Adsense, or any number of Internet Marketing strategies, the keywords you choose can make or break your success.

Keywords are important for several reasons. First of all, there's traffic. If you choose the wrong keywords to target, you're probably not going to get nearly as much traffic as you'd like. Whether you're using PPC or search engines to get your traffic, your keywords are going to affect your ranking and link performance.

Another reason why keywords are so vital is the fact that you need targeted traffic. Ten thousand visitors coming to your domain via the keyword "books" is probably going to be worthless compared to 500 visitors who come via the keyword phrase, "Harry Potter books," if that's what you're selling.

Someone who is searching for "books" is probably just browsing. They may not even be interested in buying anything - they could be interested in selling books, book history, book publishers, and more.

But someone who is searching for "Harry Potter books" is probably ready to buy something right then and there. So it's not enough to just get a lot of traffic - you need a lot of traffic that's willing to take the action you want them to take.

Whether you're looking to sell ebooks, promote affiliate products, get leads for a CPA offer, or just get sign-ups to your list, you want targeted visitors who are likely to be buyers now or in the future.

Once you've chosen a niche you'd like to pursue, you need to research the keywords you'll use. If you're writing articles, you'll need to choose keywords to use in the titles and content. If you're building niche websites, you'll need to use keywords in the domain name, the title and the content. If you're buying PPC traffic, the keywords you choose will likely be one of the biggest factors in determining whether or not your campaign is profitable.

WordTracker is a very good tool for researching keywords. If you can't afford to get a paid membership there (even for a day), they have a very good free keyword tool at

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

Google has their own free keyword tool, and you can glean some useful information and ideas from their results:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

There are also many paid solutions for keyword research out there. I've tried most of them at one time or another, and the one that I keep coming back to is Micro Niche Finder. It is easy to use, and I really like its ability to show you which keywords are most likely to be profitable for you.

I always recommend using more than one keyword research tool to generate keyword ideas, and then I use Micro Niche Finder to pare the big list down to something manageable and to identify the probable winners in that list.

To start your keyword research, you'll first want to research a base keyword for your niche.

For example, let's say you're targeting the golf niche. You might enter "golf" into the keyword tool of your choice. Then the keyword tool will show you a number of related keywords.

You might come up with "golf clubs," "golf tips," "golf swing," "golf bags," "golf carts," and "golf courses." This is a short list of more broad terms. Then you need to research each of these broad terms in more detail to come up with even more targeted phrases.

You'll want to eventually generate a big list of targeted keyword phrases that you can use over the coming months and years, so get started today!

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine, Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Insider Trade Secrets To Generating Easy Online Income With Simple CPA Strategies

(read more)

Building Your Income with Blogs

Blogs are a fantastic way to make money. They perform well in search engines, they're easy to promote, and they can offer very sticky content. If you blog often, and you're good at what you do, you can develop a pretty large following of readers who subscribe to your RSS feed and read your content on a daily basis.

One of the biggest keys to success with blogs is posting consistently. If you don't post regularly, you probably won't get much traffic, and people won't return. Posting frequently also keeps your content fresh, and search engines love fresh content.

The more often you post, the more often the search engines will visit your site. And every time you post, you can ping your site at the various ping locations. This can also bring in more traffic.

Another major key to blog success is creating sticky content. This means you have to write posts that people will actually be interested in reading.

Readers probably don't care what you had for dinner, unless you're running a food blog. They want to read about topics related to your niche. If you're running a blog about golfing, at least 75% of your posts should be related to golf. Preferably 100%.

You should talk about golf courses you've recently played on, tournaments you've watched, and clubs you've tried. You might occasionally post about family matters, or your dog, or your favorite restaurant as a way to connect on a more personal level with your readers, but most of your posts should be on target with your niche.

Blogs are great for people who sell services. If you're a graphics designer or writer, having a blog is a good way to keep in touch with your clients. You can offer updates on your schedule and availability, current prices and special offers, and when you'll be taking some time off.

You can also post samples of your latest work. If you have a number of clients subscribe to your RSS feed, you'll be able to keep in contact with them so they'll order from you more often.

Don't start a blog with the intention of letting it sit dormant and earn money. It probably won't work. If you're going to start a blog, you need to be prepared to commit yourself to growing the blog, posting often, keeping it updated, and not giving up on it.

They offer multiple selling opportunities - from text links woven throughout the content to image ads like banners you strategically place in between blog posts. The sidebar can also be utilized as an affiliate or direct sales revenue space.

Make sure you take the time to transfer your blog over to your own domain instead of hosting it within the blogging community. This makes it more professional to the person who lands on your website and lends credibility to your efforts as the go-to person in your niche.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Making A Fortune With Niche Blogs

(read more)

Home Small Business Marketing: Building Links With Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is extremely popular with marketers in many niches. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati allow users to add links to sites they like, and then other visitors can grab those links and add them to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.

Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains. You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links, and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users often do.

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site. A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day. But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy - not just your sales pitch page.

Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance - let's say you're in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But let's say you read an article about a discovery by a group of scientists that says people who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, for example. Then you'd have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share your links with others.

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn't worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links. Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear "spammy" - remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don't necessarily own yourself.

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a "friends" list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day. You shouldn't go crazy and add 100 links the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site. It's often helpful to keep it to ten or less per day, but check the individual site's tutorial to be sure.

After you've been a user for several weeks, you might be able to add more per day. Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at a news site every once in a while, or a funny Youtube video. This helps make your profile a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Powerful And Fast Action Backlink Strategies

(read more)

Home Small Business: Unlocking The Secrets Of One Time Offers

One time offers are a great way to increase the money you make from your product offerings. A One Time Offer is an additional offer that is shown right after the customer clicks the Buy button for something they are already buying. Before they checkout, the OTO is presented for them to consider.

The hook is that the price on the second offer is only available right at that moment. This is obviously a good way to increase the amount of your sale since they're already in a buying mode.

One time offers are a very good way to give customers more value. The offer provides them with a chance to purchase something additional at a cost that is less expensive than the product would normally be, giving your customers the opportunity to grab another great deal from you while they already have their credit card out.

Another great way to offer additional value is to trade OTOs with other marketers. For example, if you have a product that complements another marketer's product (and vice versa), then each of you would present the other's products to your customers as the OTOs, either sharing the revenue or giving the owner 100% in exchange for a reciprocal arrangement.

If you can't find someone who will JV with you on an OTO offer, you can try to find someone with an affiliate program who will allow you to offer their product as an OTO at a discount. Simply tell them you expect a good volume of sales and you'd like to offer their product at a slight discount.

You probably won't be able to land a deal like this unless you can prove you can do a large volume of business, because it would mean setting up a special sales page (or at least setting up a coupon code that could be easily tracked with your affiliate ID).

The best OTOs are usually very difficult to turn down. They offer exceptional value at a very special price. There are three particularly popular types of one time offers. One is usually an upgrade to the first product, such as a more comprehensive version of it.

The second could be a coaching program that takes the ideas of the product and offers them in a one-on-one coaching system. And the third could be a turnkey solution that goes along with the product you sold. For example, if you've sold an eBook about making money with Adsense, you could offer a package of Adsense templates as the OTO.

Membership sites can also have OTOs. When someone joins your membership site, you could offer them an upgrade to a higher access level. Let's say you have two access levels - silver and gold.

The silver level typically costs $50 per month, and the gold level costs $100 per month. You could offer anyone who joins at the silver level an upgrade to gold for only $25 more, at $75 per month - a $25 savings off of the normal gold level price. You can also offer one-on-one coaching as an OTO for membership sites. Since memberships are already a monthly fee, coaching is a perfect complement to many membership sites.

Make sure you test your one time offers just like you test any part of your sales copy or site performance. Replace the offers and see which ones convert better and then tweak that offer until it performs as well as it can.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine - Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Backend Mastermind - Quick Start Strategies To Build A Profitable Backend System

(read more)

Finding A Niche To Make You Riche

Finding profitable niches can be difficult. Discovering one that isn't extremely saturated can be intimidating when you're just starting out as an Internet marketer. The key to finding niches that are profitable without a lot of competition is to drill down through a top-level niche to find profitable sub-niches with fewer competitors.

For example, let's say you're interested in creating a site in the beauty category. You can drill down into several different sub-categories. You could choose hair care, skin care, fitness, organic beauty, cosmetics, or any number of niches related to beauty.

But these categories are still too broad to be profitable with small numbers of visitors. You need to drill down further. Let's say you decide to tackle the skin care demographic. Sub-categories of skin care might include eczema, acne, blackheads, wrinkles, age spots, psoriasis, and dry skin.

Now you have a list of smaller niches that you can begin to narrow down. Acne might still be too broad. You can drill down even more by targeting teenage acne, infant acne, and adult acne.

While you want to find niches that are narrow enough for you to dominate, you don't want to choose niches that have too little traffic available. To figure this out, it may be helpful to spy on your competitors.

Go to your favorite search engine, like Google, and search for things like "how to get rid of acne." Try to really get inside the mindset of your target prospect. However, if you drill down too much, like targeting "blackheads," it may not turn out to be profitable.

You should verify that your possible niche gets a decent level of search volume by using a keyword tool like WordTracker or the Google Keyword Tool. When you search within the niche using Google, see if there are plenty of AdWords ads on the right sidebar of the screen.

If so, this means people are almost surely making money in this niche. The key is to take something that's already working and make it better. Any time you can come up with an original slant on an idea that's already churning profits online, you're in a good position to achieve success.

For example, if you want to get into the online auctions niche, don't go after a broad subject area like "eBay for beginners." Instead, target something more focused and unique such as "eBay Success for Baby Boomers." Pick a specific target audience and then cater to their needs instead of approaching the masses with too broad an idea.

Watch your inbox for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Complete Affiliate Marketing Handbook

(read more)

Getting Indexed Fast in Google

A lot of people seem to think it takes weeks (or even months) to get indexed in Google, but that's just not true. Almost anyone can get his or her site crawled and indexed in two weeks or less - sometimes you can even be listed in the Google index in as little as a few hours!

There are several ways to get indexed quickly. All of them involve getting links to your site on other sites that have high PageRank, or sites that are updated often and get crawled frequently by search engine spiders.

You don't have to pay to do this. There are plenty of ways to get these types of links to your site without paying a penny. One of the easiest ways to get indexed quickly is to ping your site. You don't have to own a blog to ping your site at places like pingoat.com or pingomatic.com.

Just add your site's name and URL, and leave the RSS feed link blank. (It's not necessary.) Sometimes this technique alone can get you indexed in a day or two. Next, you should submit your link to various social bookmarking sites.

These sites get crawled several times a day, so they can be a very good way to get your own site crawled and indexed quickly. You should get an account at all of the major bookmarking sites. Don't miss StumbleUpon, Digg, Furl, del.ico.us, and Slashdot.

Press releases can be very helpful in getting your site crawled and indexed quickly. Most of the more popular press release sites have good PageRank, get crawled often, and can even get your press release posted on a number of different sites that borrow news from the PR directories. Sometimes it can be worth submitting a press release simply for the ease and speed of being indexed.

Article marketing is another way to get indexed fast. Submitting an article or two can also help you get backlinks, better PageRank, and targeted traffic to your site. A lot of article directories have very good PageRank, so it definitely has benefits other than just quick indexing.

Blog commenting can be a very good way to get indexed quickly. You'll need to find blogs that don't have the "nofollow" tag, because blogs that have "nofollow" won't let search engines crawl the links anyway.

This is debated by SEO experts - some saying the "nofollow" tag doesn't even matter, since some search engine spiders ignore them anyway. Others claim you might get a small amount of traffic from the blogs themselves, but "nofollow" blogs will do nothing to help you get indexed faster.

You should also make sure you do all you can to maximize the ability of spiders to crawl your site. You should have links that are easy to find and follow, use text links instead of only image links, don't use Flash or image maps unless you also have text links for spiders to follow, and make sure you keep your site as clean as possible. Having too many links on your main page can confuse spiders, and your site may not be indexed properly.

Forums often get crawled on a regular (daily) rotation since the content is updated often. Popular forums have had posts on their site show up on Google just minutes after they're posted! It's very common for posts on very popular forums to show up in Google in less than 24 hours. Posting a small link in your signature on some of these forums can help you get your site indexed quickly. Please don't spam the forum! Make sure your posts are relevant and full of great content.

Finally, you can exchange links with other webmasters in your niche. This a great way to build backlinks, and if their sites get crawled often, you'll be adding to the chance that your site will be crawled and indexed quickly, too. Link exchanges won't penalize your site, either - unless you amass too many too soon - so stick with organic growth (a few a day) and it shouldn't put up any red flags for the search engines.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

How To Generate Tons Of Website Traffic, On Demand

(read more)

Home Small Business: Solving The Mystery Of Internet Marketing

When you make a living online, many people will not understand what it is you do. Some of them will think you are nothing more than a spammer - just because you work on the Internet. You might even run into people who automatically assume you are into promoting something unscrupulous or undesirable, because they think that is the sole purpose of internet marketing!

You need to be prepared to deal with people like this. Some of them may even be close friends and family members who are simply ignorant about the various marketing uses for the World Wide Web.

The first thing you need to explain to people is that very few people who work on the Internet are spammers. Spammers actually make up a very, very small minority of those who make money online.

If you do any sort of email marketing, you should explain that every single person you send email to has signed up specifically to your newsletter, and clicked a link to confirm that they really want to be on your list.

Explain to them that subscribing to your newsletter is a lot like signing up for delivery of the newspaper, or a magazine subscription. People sign up to your newsletter, and then you send them valuable information, not just advertising.

If you sell ebooks online, you can explain to people that you are a bit like a book publisher, but all of the books you publish are in digital format. You can tell them that instead of paying a lot of extra money for the printing, binding, marketing, and shipping of a physical book, you eliminate those costs by selling all of your
books as downloadable products.

If people still no not understand, you could even show them what an eBook is by letting them view one on your computer. If your main business is advertising affiliate products, you can tell people you are in advertising.

Explain to them that you run a website (or websites) and you place advertising on that website. Every time someone clicks an ad and purchases something, you receive a commission. If you make most of your money through Adsense or selling advertising on your sites, you can simply tell people that you place advertisements on your websites, and you charge advertisers for that ad space.

Perhaps you may feel more comfortable just telling people that you design websites. If you are a decent website builder, this will probably really impress people, but be prepared to get requests from people asking if you will make them a site, too.

If you no not want to deal with all of the technical questions, just telling someone you design websites will usually be enough to satisfy them. If people are particularly doubtful, you can start to point out some examples of people who have been very successful making money online.

You should realize that some people will just never understand what you do. Try to explain it the best way you can, and if it does not work, accept it. Some people just will not get it. If the in-laws or your spouse are nagging you because your money is not yet streaming in, and you feel pressured, put together a simple presentation that answers all of their questions and puts their minds at ease, or find some statistics or proof of earnings of someone who is doing what you are trying to do.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine - Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Your Fast-Start Guide To Internet Marketing And Online Business

(read more)

Getting Started With Video Marketing

Video is a spectacular way to market on the Internet, especially now that so many Internet users have broadband access. More users are able to view and download video. Video sharing websites are more popular than ever.

Youtube is one of the most visited websites in the world, and other video sharing sites are growing in popularity, too - including niche-specific sites, like those for Internet marketing. As a result of the gain in popularity of video sharing sites, more marketers are turning to video as a way to promote their products and services.

Almost any type of product or service can be promoted through video, but it's important to do it properly. People generally don't visit video sites to view commercials. There might be exceptions for people who want to watch classic commercials, funny commercials, or extremely popular commercials.

But for the most part, people don't want to watch commercials. They come to be entertained or to learn something. If you want your videos to be viewed a lot, you need to either be very funny, exciting, controversial or educational.

If your free videos offer a ton of quality content, they have a good chance of going viral and making you money. Video is so powerful - not only because of the sheer number of people who view video sharing sites every day, but because it can be much more persuasive than the written word.

Some people respond better to writing, but others respond better to video. Video can really help you to get your point across to people who don't read well, or people who really hate to read.

Many marketers feel they don't look good on camera, or don't have the budget to produce quality videos.

That's one big reason behind the popularity of Camtasia. Camtasia is a great program that allows you to make videos by taking video screenshots of your computer. You can select a portion of your screen to be shown, and then you can make your video by simply moving from through your online presentation. You can find more information about Camtasia at http://www.techsmith.com. If you're on a tight budget, check out Jing at the same site.

You can also use a microphone to record your voice explaining the process as you go through it. Camtasia is very easy to use, making it extremely popular for people who aren't very good with technical things.

Many people are able to make their first video with Camtasia within an hour of opening the software! This makes it perfect for almost any marketer. If you're promoting an eBook about Squidoo, for example, then your video could be a short tutorial about one aspect of how to use the site - like adding images to a Squidoo lens or setting up your own group on Squidoo.

You can do this with nearly any kind of product. If your product is a dog training DVD, you can post a couple of samples from it. Show how to teach a dog to sit, and another showing how to teach a dog to heel.

If your product is about how to make money with ebooks, you could have a couple of sample videos on how to get affiliates, or how to get more traffic to your website, making sure you show proof of your results within the video production.

Even if you don't want to post your videos to the video sharing sites, you can post them on your own site or blog. You can even put video on your sales page for higher conversions. Video can be an important selling tool, but it's also effective as the primary media you use to create your product, too.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

How To Build Profitable Membership Sites

Enjoy!

(read more)

Branding Yourself Online

Branding your name (or your pen name) is very important on the Internet, no matter what niche you're in. You need to establish yourself as an authority in your market, because people trust authority figures most of all.

They trust their recommendations, they trust that their products will be of good quality, and they trust that they have integrity. It also gives your buyer confidence that you're a real person - not just some nameless, faceless entity trying to sell them something on a static, automated website.

You should put your name on everything you create. Whether it's a membership site, an eBook, or something as small as a PLR article pack for sale - you should put your name on it. Getting your name out there and recognized is essential to your ongoing success.

Think about all of the marketing experts you've heard of. People know and remember them because they put their names on everything they put out.

Their names are all over the marketing forums, their eCovers, their headers, and everything else they do. They work very hard to brand their names, because their names become their brands. People buy their products simply because their name is on it.

Buyers think that the product must be good, because the person is so well-known. You should do the same thing with your name. Always use the same name on everything you do within a particular niche.

You may not want to use your real name for whatever reason, but your name needs to be a "real name." A nickname usually won't cut it in most markets, but sometimes it works.

If you've signed up for forums under a nickname, ask the moderators if they can change your name to your real name or pen name. You might not want to tell the moderator's it's a pen name. That's up to you.

Keep getting your name out there any way you can. Host teleseminars, JV with well-known people if possible, and offer to help create content for famous people in your niche in exchange for a Bio Box that hosts your name and link to your website.

Offer to be an interview subject for someone. Be a "guest author" for popular websites and blogs in your niche, and create 100% original content for them. Never stop branding your name. Even someone as famous as Donald Trump, the king of name branding, doesn't stop marketing.

Donald still puts his name on everything he does. His name appears in huge, bold letters on his books. He names buildings after himself. Think of Trump Tower, Trump Taj Mahal, and Trump Plaza. His name is all over everything.

Not only is it a matter of pride, but it keeps his name everywhere. You may never be as famous as the Donald, and you may not even like him, but if you follow these instructions, you might become known as the king or queen of your own little niche or for a particular slant that grows in popularity.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Secrets Of Profitable Listbuilding
(read more)

Building Your Ebook Empire

While there are many ways to build a business online, building your own eBook empire is one method that can create long-term residual income for years to come. Of course, eBooks provide many perks up front.

You don't have to stock any inventory. You can keep overhead costs low (no publisher and agent percentages like there are with print books). You have an endless supply that can be purchased at any time of the day or year.

But they also offer many benefits that aren't so obvious. While a tangible book in your local bookstore might sell for $14.95, an eBook on the same subject could sell at anywhere from $27 or more online as a digital download.

You don't have to be a professional writer to launch your own eBook empire. The writing is much easier for an online audience - more like you do every day via email than what you learned in a college-level English class.

Many ebook authors start out as ghostwriters for other top Internet marketers on a freelance basis. When they discover how profitable their ebooks actually are, many actually decide to learn the entire process of launching their own ebooks themselves.

You can even find quality freelancers to create your products for you at a fraction of the price, and turn around and launch them with your name on them - and it's not only legal - it's standard practice in this industry!

So what does it mean to launch an empire of ebooks? You start with one, and then branch out - branding yourself as the go-to person for that demographic's needs. You don't have to write one definitive guide to wedding planning, for example.

You can write one about picking the perfect wedding gown, another on wedding flowers, one on honeymoons, and so on. Each smaller niche idea that you drill down into gives you more selling opportunities.

There's a step-by-step process for developing an ebook - which begins with finding your niche and ends with the launch of your own powerhouse affiliate program. You want to have an army of virtual salespeople out there pulling in profits for you while you continue adding building blocks to your empire with follow-up product ideas.

You can use many free and low-cost tools to launch your first and subsequent ebooks online. It isn't a business opportunity that requires a large investment of money, but you do need to commit some time to ensure it's properly launched in a way that bolsters your reputation in the community.

Watch your inbox for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

How To Make Money With CPA Offers

(read more)

Getting Help To Build Your Business

In the world of Internet marketing, unfortunately there are some unethical money-hungry con artists ready to prey on your ignorance. They know you're new, and they know you won't realize you've been suckered until it's too late.

So how does a newcomer to Internet marketing safeguard his or her pockets from the greedy, self-indulgent scams of an unscrupulous marketer? First, you want to do a bit of background research.

If you land on a page where someone has recommended a course or tool that you feel will help accelerate your Internet marketing earnings, don't buy on impulse. You might regret it later and have to ask for a refund, or absorb the cost if no guarantee is offered.

Google can be your friend here. Type that marketer's name into the search engines and see if there are any negative reports. But beware! One of the most common affiliate pre-pitches is to promote a product by using the "scam" keyword approach initially and then build the product up with the detailed review to make a sale for themselves.

You may see about 5 page's worth of links if you type in [marketer's name] and scam, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're real scam accounts. Always read the pages with care.

You also need to know that practically every marketer has a disgruntled customer. Some people get angry if their download link doesn't work and they don't get a response within 30 minutes, late on a Sunday night. Others intentionally try to sabotage the competition by posting false negative reviews online.

You should be able to find at least as much positive endorsements as you do bad ones. If not, it might be best to exercise caution.

Never rely on a marketer's own claims alone to make your buying decision. And if you find them in a forum, don't think that just because they have the highest post count, it means they're the best marketer.

Get personal recommendations from other marketers or customers whenever possible. If you want to find out who has the best affiliate marketing guide, for example, then you can ask around in a forum to find out. A recommendation from a marketer you already trust can usually be counted on, because if they provide you with a poor product recommendation, it tarnishes their own reputation, too.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Profitable Blogging Guide

(read more)

Forum Marketing For Fast Results

Forum marketing is an excellent way to get the word out about your business for free. But there are a few tricks to marketing on forums without getting penalized. You have to be careful not to do any blatant advertising or you'll probably get banned very quickly.

The first thing you should do when you're new to a forum is create an interesting profile. Add an avatar, such as a picture of yourself, or a picture related to the niche. If you're in the dog training niche, for example, you might use a picture of a dog - preferably your own. In the golf niche, it could be a picture of your favorite golf club or course. You get the idea.

Next, start making posts that answer questions. You should never push your website or product outright at this point. Being a member of a forum, you're there to give people helpful answers to their questions and post an occasional thread of your own to spark a discussion or provide helpful tips.

The point of this phase is to start establishing yourself as an expert in the niche first. By giving people valuable answers, you'll be seen as the go-to person in your niche. As forum members start to recognize your contributions, they might even start looking for your posts. This is a great way to develop a fast following.

Check the rules of the forum to make sure they allow links in signatures. If they do, be sure to add a link to your site. You might prefer to link to a squeeze page, so you can start building a list of forum visitors that you can market to later.

Don't do anything to draw attention to your signature - such as continually telling people, "I have more information on the site in my sig file." Just keep posting as you have been, giving out helpful information. Let your helpful posts do the talking for you.

After you've built up a very good reputation at the forum, people may start searching for you on their own. Make sure the name you use on the forums is featured in the name or text of every project you promote, because you need to make it easy for people to find your products if they start looking for them on Google.

You might even be able to JV with the forum owner after you've become rather well-known around the forum. You could offer a standard JV, or you could just ask the forum owner to be your affiliate. You might offer them a special deal, with a higher percentage of commission than normal affiliates - or a discount reserved just for their members.

Respect the forum boundaries. Don't private message people and ask them to check out your site unless you already have some sort of previous relationship with them. The only time you should ever draw special attention to a project of yours is if someone makes a post that specifically asks for recommendations about products.

For example, if someone asks, "Does anyone know of any good books that can help me housebreak my puppy?" You could probably get away with posting, "Actually, I wrote a book about how to housebreak a puppy recently. If you're interested, you can find the link in my sig." If it's an invitation to provide a product link, it's probably okay - but otherwise, let the forum traffic funnel in on its own.

I hope you have found these tips useful. Stay tuned for more!!

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

Fast-Acting Backlink Strategies
(read more)

Protecting Your Commissions With Cloaking

Link cloaking is a very important part of affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, link cloaking is a way to protect your affiliate commissions from being stolen. It's not totally foolproof. Smart individuals who are well-educated about the matter can still figure out how to keep you from getting your commission.

But most people won't go that far, so cloaking your links will prevent most commission loss. How do people steal affiliate commissions? Well, have you ever hovered over a link and noticed that the link was an obvious affiliate link?

Some people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for the sale. Some people falsely believe that if they buy from an affiliate link, they'll have to pay more for a commission mark-up.

Some people actually do it for a different reason. If you're promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other marketers, many of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get what's usually a 50% or more discount on the product.

This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the person doing it gets the affiliate commission themselves, rather than just making sure you don't get it. Most people don't do that, of course, but it happens.

Most people are pretty honest, and don't mind giving you a little affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to them. But it's enough of a concern that you should take steps to prevent it.

You can easily set up your own link cloaking system. You can set up a directory on one of your domains. Most marketers use the domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com. Then they typically have a subdirectory called /recommends/.

Inside of that directory, they create a new subdirectory for each product, like this: bobsmith.com/recommends/productname. In that directory, they place what's called a redirect file, which instantly takes the visitor to the actual affiliate link without displaying it. You can easily find out how create a redirect by looking it up online. It's very simple to do.

There are also a number of link cloaking scripts available. Most of them are relatively easy to install and use. There's a big benefit to using a script rather than doing it yourself. Using your simple redirect, there isn't an easy way to check how much traffic you've sent to your link, like scripts do.

Most link cloaking scripts also allow you to add new links very easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link. If you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic you've sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or through your web server's stats, which may be difficult to use and hard to understand.

Cloaking your affiliate links is the smart thing to do if you want to be sure you are protecting your hard-earned commissions online.

To your online success,
Bill Brine

P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your
business: Backend Mastermind: Quick Start Strategies To Build A Profitable Back End System
(read more)

Avoiding Online Information Overload

If you haven't yet heard this phrase, information overload, you will soon - because it happens to the majority of new Internet marketers at some time or another. Information overload is when you simply have too much to learn - so much that you feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and more confused than before you had help.

It happens easily with this industry because there are so many options you have - an endless array of opportunities. You can be a product owner and an affiliate at the same time.

You can use article marketing, social marketing, or pay per click campaigns. You're new, you may not know much about any of the above, and suddenly you're thrust into an environment where everyone's opinions differ and you don't know where to start!

The first thing to do is calm down and take some of the pressure off of yourself. All of this information you need to digest isn't going anywhere. It's going to be here tonight, next week, and a year from now.

Don't invest in a guide about Google AdWords, another about Squidoo, and one about Private Label Rights all at the same time. There's an old saying, "How do you eat an elephant?" Answer: One bite at a time.

Internet marketing is your elephant and you have to choose whether you want to start with the ear, the foot, or the tail section first. It doesn't matter if you start out learning about social marketing before you know the ropes of article marketing, for example.

The point is that you're educating yourself and putting that knowledge to work for you. As long as you start somewhere and then actually apply that insight to a method of making money, you're on the road to success! Execution is everything.

However, there are a few things that will not make sense to learn before others. If you have no money to start with, then don't buy (or even download for free) a guide about pay per click marketing. Stay focused and start with something you can do.

You also may not want a 5000-page guide to everything all at once. You'll probably want to invest in small, bite-sized chunks of information that you can digest and utilize before moving on. Want to start with a free blog? Get a blog guide. Launch a blog.

Then move on to whatever interests you next, such as product creation or selling on eBay - whatever floats your boat. The key is to not get stuck by having too much information and too many choices at once.

Good luck with your online marketing efforts! To get you started, pick up a copy of my Complete Guide To Article Marketing.

To your online success,
Bill Brine
(read more)

Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

You are engaging in affiliate marketing when you sign up to promote other people's products (or services) for a share of the sale in the form of commissions. As an affiliate marketer, you usually don't need any special training or start-up funding.

Your job as an affiliate marketer will be to build traffic to the product owner's pitch page, allowing them to convert the prospect into a buyer. The more targeted you are with your traffic promotions, the higher will be your conversion rate.

There are many things you can promote as an affiliate. On Amazon, for instance, you can promote anything tangible (and a few digital downloads as well). If you want to be in the paintball niche, for example, you can include links using your Amazon associate (affiliate) ID to sell specific paintball guns, paintballs, and attire.

You can go to sites like ClickBank or PayDotCom and get a unique affiliate ID to promote an endless supply of information products. They have everything from acne to organic gardening products.

You can even become an affiliate promoting actions. There are many Internet marketers who focus their business on getting a steady stream of traffic to take an action, such as filling out a survey online. These are called CPA (Cost Per Action) offers.

With affiliate marketing, you don't have to worry about developing ideas and creating products. You don't have to deal with customer service follow-ups or continually create more products for the marketplace.

Your job is made easier by product owners who care so much about their own success that they provide a toolbox to help you with your promotions. The toolbox usually includes ready-made emails, web reviews, and banner ads you can use with your own link embedded in them for to help you succeed.

Most Internet marketers will eventually blur the lines of product owner and affiliate marketer. Product owners continually use their list of buyers to promote affiliate items, and affiliates often build such a good reputation in a niche that they're urged to come out with a product of their own.

How much can an affiliate marketer earn? There are virtually no limits. You can market to multiple niches and work as much or as little as you want to generate targeted traffic through your links. Super affiliates can earn six figures or more, but even a beginner affiliate can often earn enough to pay the bills each month - with some change to spare!

Want to know more about affiliate marketing? Pick up a copy of my Affiliate Marketing Handbook: a complete guide to making money with affiliate marketing.

To Your Success,
Bill Brine

Bill Brine has been earning income online for over 10 years now, and has written extensively about online lead generation, home small business, and internet marketing. You can pick up a free copy of a complete library of ebooks which will help you build your internet business at http://www.billbrinemarketing.com

(read more)

The New Rules Of Selling In 2010

Now here's something interesting I just came across:

Marlon Sanders has just released a brand new PDF called "How To Get People To Buy Your Product or Service Using the 7 New Rules of Selling In 2010"

You can snag it here:

http://www.my-linker.com/hop/pdf1

If you have a product or service and want to get someone to buy it, then this report will be of great value to you.

Here's why:

The things you did in the past to get people to buy aren't sufficient in 2010. The rules of the game have changed and this report explains why this happened and what the new rules are. You won't find this idea or method being taught anywhere else.

And best of all, you can apply it immediately to your:

* Emails
* Facebook status updates
* Twitter posts
* Article marketing
* Bog posts
* Teleseminars
* Webinars

To grab the PDF just go to:
http://www.my-linker.com/hop/pdf1

The information in this PDF is brand new and I haven't heard anyone talk about it before, including Marlon. You won't find this information anywhere else. So I know you'll benefit from it greatly.

P.P.S. I don't know how long Marlon will have this PDF available so you should snag it right now while you can:

To grab the PDF just go to:
http://www.my-linker.com/hop/pdf1 (read more)

Epic Traffic Systems Giveaway

Epic Traffic Systems Giveaway:

Do you need more and better ways of driving traffic to your website? I know I do. Here's a way you can find out about some very powerful methods to do just that, and if you choose to help spread the word about this system, you might just win a free copy of the product when it is released.

Watch the intro video here:

http://www.brincom.com/recommends/etsgiveaway

Also be sure to watch the ongoing series of free videos they will be releasing this week. I just finished watching the first one on using Twitter for marketing purposes, and I was blown away. In it is revealed a complete system which you can use now to generate sales today! Nothing to buy, but you do have to opt in to their list.

Just follow the link on the giveaway page (right above the video) to get access to the free training. Powerful stuff!!

-------------------------
Bill Brine is an online entrepreneur and a home small business coach who writes extensively in the areas of internet marketing, website traffic generation, and work-at-home business. Check out his latest website for generating tons of targeted website traffic for free:

http://www.awesomewebtraffic.com
------------------------------------

(read more)

Generating Targeted Traffic

As internet marketers, we all know that getting targeted traffic for our websites is one of our most important tasks. The more targeted the traffic, the better your conversions will be, and the more sales you will make.

For those of you who want something simple to generate targeted traffic, I have recently launched a new service that is proven to generate traffic that has a 19.5% clickthru rate and a 29.5% conversion rate. And best of all, it is free to use! Conversion rates like these are unheard of in the traffic generation industry, especially for free traffic generators, but I can assure you that this technology works very well.

Of course, there are paid upgrades (gotta make money somehow, lol), but you don't have to use them if you don't want to. You can even turn this into a business if you wish, there is a built-in affiliate program.

Check out my new site to generate targeted traffic today, and sign up for free:

Generate Free Targeted Web Traffic (read more)

Home Small Business You Can Start With Just $5

Can $5, $40 or $150 Return $1,000,000? For over 15 years providing above average income for average people! (read more)

Home Small Business Tips

Home Small Business Tips

Asserting Your Rights as a Customer

As a home small business owner, you are also a customer of those who supply you with products and services which support your business venture.

Have you ever run into a situation where one of your suppliers provides little or no response to a problem? You feel frustrated and powerless to do anything to resolve the situation.

As internet marketers, we have more power and influence than we realize. You can sometimes use this power and influence to help resolve such situations.

Case in point: I recently signed up for a new service I wanted to try out. After about a week or so, I decided that I was not interested after all, so I consulted their website Terms of Service and dutifully submitted a support ticket as instructed, giving all the pertinent details and asking for the account and the monthly charge to be deleted.

All good so far. I got the normal automated response that the system had received my ticket and it would be addressed within one business day.

Hmm ... after 5 days there was no response. I logged into the ticket system and saw that nothing had occurred. So, I raised the priority of the ticket and inserted a response asking when someone was going to look at this.

Still no response. I waited another 5 days (I'm a patient fellow). This time I raised the priority to critical and inserted the following response:

"I have been more than patient waiting for a response to this issue. If I do not receive a positive response to this issue within 24 hours, I will initiate the following escalation plan:

1. I will submit 1 ticket per day requesting account deletion for 1 week, then 2 tickets per day, and so on until I get a response.

2. I will begin a massive blogging and online Press Release campaign detailing your company's unresponsiveness. Your website claims you pride yourself on good customer service. Lets see some of that."

I got a response within the hour! The issue was resolved and my account and monthly charge were deleted, and I was happy.

What can we learn from this? First, I think it is important to be patient. Don't expect instant resolution. But if something hasn't happened after a reasonable amount of time, come up with an escalation plan and tell them what you are going to do. Be nice but firm.

Use your power wisely and proportionally, but never be afraid to use it. And above all, always provide excellent service to your own customers!

Bill Brine-Home Small Business Coach
Start Your Home Small Business Now

Previous Home Small Business Tip

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Free People Search Engines

New Free People Search Engine

Today my company BrinCom Internet Business Services announced a new free people search engine. Following is a copy of the press release:

------------------------------
BrinCom Internet Business Services today announced the launch of a new website and service to assist those US-based internet users who are searching for information about people.

Free people search is a heavily-used function on the internet, and there are many free people search engines which offer the ability to search for people information and then request a payment before you can actually view the information.

Click Here to visit our new Free People Search Engine.

This free people search engine offers free access to publicly available information such as Names, addresses, and telephone numbers. No payment is required to view the information.

The site also offers paid subscriptions to services such as background checks, reverse phone lookup, search by Social Security Number, and finding email addresses.

-------------------------
BrinCom Internet Business Services is located in Amherst, NS, Canada and specializes in business lead generation, internet marketing, website design, website hosting and maintenance, and assisting online entrepreneurs to develop multiple streams of income ethically and responsibly.

Bill Brine, the CEO and owner, specializes in teaching small business owners how to establish and maintain a strong internet presence using the power of the Veretekk Automated Marketing System. Mr. Brine also assists would-be entrepreneurs to develop multiple streams of internet income using a variety of techniques and programs, using his unique Tomorrow's Home Business model as the basis.

Click Here for more information about the Veretekk Automated Marketing System
Click Here for more information about BrinCom Internet Business Services
Click Here for more information about the Tomorrows Home Small Business Model.

###
Bill Brine-Home Small Business Coach

Previous Home Small Business Advice

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Home Small Business Tip: Are You Ready to Work From Home?

Home Small Business Tip: Are You Ready to Work From Home?

When most people decide to start a home small business, they have visions of how easy and convenient it is going to be. They think that they will be rolling out of bed and rolling up to the computer in their pajamas. They have visions of being able to work and still never miss any of their favorite soap operas and talk shows during the day. And, of course, more importantly, they will have more time with their family. However, there is a lot more to contend with after making the decision to work from home than no more suits and no more commuting.

To run a successful home small business, you need a lot of personal motivation and self-discipline. After all, there is no train you are going to miss and no boss you are going to tick off by showing up late if you can't get yourself out of bed by eight in the morning! Instead, people who work from home have to be their own boss and monitor their own schedule. This can be difficult if you're used to being motivated by the strict schedule imposed by an office environment.

On the other hand, for many individuals who don't necessarily function optimally during "normal" working hours and who prefer a more alternative approach, the home small business option can be a blessing, because it allows them to work from home when it is convenient for them to do so. In many cases, this arrangement will make someone more productive, not less. Having a flexible working schedule is a business advantage, but it can also lead to failure if not managed properly.

If you are planning to star a home small business, the best thing you can do is to set yourself a few ground rules and make sure you stick to them. Plan your workdays in advance - know when you are going to get up and start work, when you will break for lunch and when you will quit for the day, just as you would at the office.

If you work from home, your schedule doesn't have to be the same as it would at the office, but it needs to exist in order for you to be productive. Set yourself a designated work area where you will operate your home small business and try to keep it as separate from your non-work life as you can. If you can close the door to this area at the end of your workday, do so.

You will find that you will need this separation of work from non-work. Otherwise you will not fully appreciate the freedom that comes from operating your one home small business. Discipline is very important to keep some perspective in your work from home life.

So are you ready to work from home? Its a great life, if you can be disciplined.

Bill Brine
Start Your Home Small Business Now

Previous Home Small Business Tip

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Home Small Business Tips: Phrases That Will Increase Traffic

Home Small Business Tips: Phrases That Will Increase Traffic

Looking to increase traffic to your home small business website? Here are 10 sure-fire phrases that will increase your traffic:

1. Add This Website to your Favorites
Tell your visitors to bookmark your home small business website. They may see your home business website listed in their bookmarks and visit again. You should also give then a good reason to bookmark your site. For example tell them you add new content everyday.

2. Subscribe To Our Free ezine
Tell your visitors to subscribe to your ezine. When they subscribe you'll capture their email address. Every time they read your ezine, it will remind them to return to your site.

3. Participate On Our Forum
Set up a forum and ask your visitors to participate on your online discussion board. By participating they will meet other people. By meeting other people, they will revisit your home business website on a regular basis to stay in contact with them.

4. Sign Our Guestbook
Ask your visitors to sign your guest book. When people sign your guestbook you may get valuable feedback or constructive criticism on how to improve your home business website. This may help you increase traffic to your home business website.

5. Use Our Free Content On Your Site Or In Your Ezine
Allow your visitors to use your articles on their own home business website or in their ezine. Just ask them to include your resource box. This will spread your advertising all over the internet.

6. Tell A Friend
Ask your visitors to refer your home business website to friends. They may know someone that would benefit from visiting your home business website. Even better, offer incentives for referring people if you have some free products for this purpose.

7. Fill Out Our Online Survey
Ask visitors to fill out your online survey or questionnaire. You could use it to get valuable feedback on ways to improve your web site to increase traffic.

8. Enter Our Contest
Set up contests and ask your visitors to enter your online contest or sweepstakes. People love to win stuff, and they will visit your home business website to try.

9. Give Away Our Freebie To Your Visitors
Allow your visitors to give away your online freebies to people that visit your home business website. Include your ad on the freebie and those freebies will multiply your traffic.

10 Join Our Affiliate Program
Set up an affiliate program and allow your visitors to make money selling your products or services. This will increase your traffic because they will link to your home business website.

There you have it, 10 ideas to increase traffic to your business website. You don't have to do all of these things, but even tackling one or two will make an noticeable improvement in your traffic.

Bill Brine
Why Start a Home Small Business?
Start Your Home Small Business Now

Previous Home Small Business Tip

(read more)

Home Small Business Tips: Following Up With Your Leads

Home Small Business Tips: Following Up With Your Leads

So you've managed to generate some leads for your home small business. What do you do now?

In any serious work from home business, following up with your leads properly is absolutely essential. Proper followup can turn a lead into a buying customer or even a business partner. Your leads should be treated as the finest gold.

In the online business world, you will most often see autoresponders promoted as a solution to following up with leads. The general rule of thumb is that a person has to see a marketing message seven times before they will take action, and that email is the best way to do this.

Email works very well, and it does have it place. There are many good autoresponder systems available today, and a good autoresponder is certainly a powerful part of your overall business strategy. But don't rely solely on autoresponders. Don't try to hide behind your computer or your website, as a lot of online business owners seem to want to do. You are in business after all!

Nothing beats personal contact. One phone call, offering advice or assistance, can do more to build your home small business than any number of email messages. I recommend a simple 'courtesy call' (make sure you say that when you call) to touch base. Ask your prospect if they have any questions about your service or product, and ask them about their business and it goals. Do not try to sell them anything. By doing this, you are starting a positive relationship with this person. This will bring you more repeat business in the long run than any number of emails.

Online business is really all about helping others to succeed. Treat your leads as the finest gold - help them, get to know them, and provide top notch services and products that solve their problems, and you will be successful.

Bill Brine
Why Start a Home Small Business?
Start Your Home Small Business Now

Previous Home Small Business Tip

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Home Small Business Tip: Easy Video Production

Home Small Business Tip: Create Videos Quickly and Easily

As internet marketers. we need to keep up with new ideas and trends in internet marketing. I have been making money on the internet in my small home business for a long time now, and I have seen the internet change by leaps and bounds.

Today, in order to be relevant in internet marketing, your website or blog has to do more than just be a static web page. These days, you have to have content and different methods to share that content, such as having a blog, a forum, and now the biggie, video. With increasing access to broadband, video is now possible for virtually everyone to use. Video has become the new must have , not only for internet marketers but for everyone who has a website.

Local business owners who have a website can especially benefit from video. With video, there are new opportunities to get out your message, advertise your business, make video postcards, send video e-mails, create how-to videos - the ideas are endless.

We website owners however, are thinking we want to get in on the video thing, but it is something else we have to learn how to do, another learning curve, and for many of us the idea just sort of fizzles.

Well, no longer. I'm excited because I don't have to miss out this time, simply because I lack the expertise to create and broadcast videos, or just don't have the time to learn new technologies.

I just found a unique new online free service which anyone can use to create videos, without having to learn all the techie stuff that goes along with that. If you have a webcam, you're good to go.

This service makes it drop dead easy to make videos and to put them on any website. You can make a quality, professional looking video in less than 5 min. It works very well.

If video is something you have been wanting to do but felt really intimidated by up to this point, you might want to try this service for yourself, because the best part is you can use the software and it doesn't cost you anything.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. You will find the site at

http://easyvideoproducer.brincom.com

Until next time!

Bill Brine
Why Start a Home Small Business anyway?
Click Here to see a Home Small Business that is successful for anyone

Previous Home Small Business Tip

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Home Small Business Tip for 2009 02 23

Home Small Business Tip for 2009 02 23

Effective Ways To Reduce Your Home Small Business Costs

Most people who start a home small business on the internet are on a tight budget. Let's face it: we've all been lured by the promises of low startup costs, free or low-cost advertising, and the power of email marketing.

But remember: even though you are running a home small business, this is a real business. There will always be ongoing costs. Until you start getting some real returns on your time and money, it is important to keep the costs associated with your home small business to a minimum.

With that it mind, here are some effective ways to reduce the costs of operating your home small business:

1. Bartering
You need to be bartering goods and services with other businesses if you can. Try to trade for something before you buy it. Bartering deals usually require little or no money.

2. Networking
Try networking your home small business with other businesses. You could trade leads or mailing lists. This will cut down on your marketing and advertising costs. You may also try bartering goods and services with them.

3. Wholesale/Bulk
You'll save money buying your business supplies in bulk quantities. You could get a membership at a wholesale warehouse or buy them through a mail order wholesaler. Buy the supplies you are always running out of.

4. Free Stuff
Try visiting the thousands of freebie sites on the internet before buying your business supplies. You can find free software, graphics, backgrounds, online business services etc.

5. Borrow/Rent
Have you ever purchased business equipment you only needed for a small period of time? You could have just borrowed the equipment from someone else or rented the equipment from a "rent-all" store.

6. Online/Offline Auctions
You can often find lower prices on business supplies and equipment at online and offline auctions. Before you pay retail for these items try bidding on them first.

7. Plan Ahead
Make a list of business supplies or equipment you'll need in the future. Keep an eye out for stores that have big sales. Purchase the supplies when they go on sale before you need them.

8. Used Stuff
If your business equipment and supplies don't need to be new, buy them used. You can find used items at yard and garage sales, used stores, used stuff for sale message boards and newsgroups etc.

9. Negotiate
You should always try negotiate a lower price for any business equipment or supplies. It doesn't hurt to try. Pretend you are talking to a salesman at a car lot.

10. Search
You can always be searching for new suppliers for your business supplies and equipment. Look for suppliers with lower prices and better quality.

Application of some or all of these ideas will help to reduce the operating costs of your home small business, and will help you see profits sooner.

Bill Brine
Why Start a Home Small Business?
Start Your Home Small Business Now

Previous Home Small Business Tip

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Home Small Business Tip 2009 02 19

Home Small Business Tip 2009 02 19

10 Tips to Increase Sales and Profits for your Home Small Business

Another in my ongoing series of home small business tips. Here are 10 ideas for increasing your sales and profits:

1. Offer to write exclusive articles for your home small business niche. "Exclusive" means that you only submit them to one place. Write these articles for high traffic websites in exchange for a link back to your site.

2. Create a positive online image. Tell your visitors about fundraisers you have sponsored or that you donate a part of your profits to charity.

3. Improve your customer service on a regular basis. Try out new technologies that make it easier to communicate with your customers over the net.

4. Ask your customers what they would like to see offered by your home small business in the future. This type of information can boost your sales.

5. Make sure your web host is not responsible for lost sales. If you get an email from someone that told you that they couldn't access your site, it might be your host.

6. Allow your visitors experience to be an enjoyable one at your home small business website. Provide easy navigation, good content, fast loading graphics, search options, etc.
Stay away from flashing lights and audio that loads immediately. These can drive people away.

7. Keep changing or adding freebies to your web site. If people see the same freebie in your ads they will say to themselves, "been there done that".

8. Add a directory to your home small business website. When visitors submit their home business website, email them confirming their link has been added and remind them to revisit.

9. Organize your marketing and advertising into a plan. Create a list of daily, weekly, and monthly goals for promotion.

10. Trade links only with home small business websites that your target audience or yourself would visit. They should offer their visitors valuable content or freebies.

I hope these tips will help you to increase profits for your home small business. Stay tuned for more profitable tips.

Bill Brine
Why Start a Home Small Business?
Start Your Home Small Business Now

Previous Home Small Business Tip
(read more)

Home Small Business Tip 2009 02 18

Increase Traffic to Your Home Small Business Website

Do you have a website for your home small business? If you are not getting the traffic you think you should be getting, maybe its time to examine your website in more detail and rethink some of the things you are doing.

There are many reasons why people do not visit your home small business website, or why they do not stay for long on your website. Here are 10 ideas that may entice them to stay longer or to come more often:

1. Offer free original content. It's important to give your visitors information they can't find anywhere else. If you're the only source for a certain type of information, people will flock to your home small business website.

2. Offer free software. Most people like to find good deals on software. If the software is free, that is even better.

3. Offer a free contest or sweepstakes. People love to win things. If you can fulfill that need, people will stop by to visit.

4. Offer a free directory. Create a directory of home small business websites on a particular topic that is related to your target audience. People will visit because they will find what they're looking for, all in one place.

5. Offer a free ezine. Most people love to get free information that they're interested in emailed to them on a regular basis. This saves them time and money.

6. Offer a free community. People like to have a place were they can have discussions with others on a particular subject. You could add a forum to your home small business website.

7. Offer a free affiliate program. One of people's basic needs to survive is money. When you offer them a free opportunity to make money they'll line up to visit your home small business website.

8. Offer a free online utility. When you offer a utility that can solve a problem, people will visit your home small business website. The utility could be a free autoresponder, email account, search engine submission, etc.

9. Offer free current information. Supply news stories related to your home small business website. People want up-to-date news on the topics they are interested in. They will also be interested in visiting your home small business website.

10. Offer free samples of your product or service. Have you ever been to a store and you jumped at the chance to get a free sample of food? This same concept will also attract people to visit your home small business website.

These are the top 10 strategies, in my experience, that you can use to increase the attractiveness and stickiness of your home small business website. Consider these ideas carefully, and implement those ideas that are appropriate to your home small business.

Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Why You Should Start a Home Small Business
Build a Real Home Small Business

Previous Home Small Business Tip

(read more)

Home Small Business Tip 2009 02 17

Home Small Business Tip 2009 02 17

Are you trying to build a home small business on the internet? You do have a website devoted to your business, I hope. If not, you'd better get one soon. A website is by far the best way to promote your home small business on the internet.

To maintain a successful home small business website, you have to keep your visitors coming back again and again. Unless you offer them a reason to return, then chances are they will not. You will need content on your website that not only interests them, but also changes regularly.

Here are 6 quick tips to keep people coming back to your home small business website:

1) Articles: Articles give your visitor something to read. Your customer may have a question, or want more information about the product or service that they received from your home small business. If the articles pertain to your business and the products and services that you offer, then they will be able to access the information. You do not necessarily have to write these articles yourself.

You can post information about your products directly from the package, or the manufacturers website. There are several article directories online that provide good, quality content at no cost to you. It is as simple as visiting the directories, searching for articles that suit your home small business, and then copying them into your website. You are only required to provide a link back to the original authors website.

2) Contests: Who does not want to win something? By offering contests (especially if they change frequently), you give your visitors a reason to return. When the visitor signs up for the contest you may also want to include a link to your newsletter.

The key is to change the contest frequently, whether it be weekly, monthly, or semi-annually. Just remember, the more you change your contest the more times your visitors will come back to your site.

3) Coupons and Discounts: You may want to provide coupons or discounts for your previous clients to entice them to return to your website.

4) Forums- Forums provide something that everyone craves: conversation. If a forum is provided on your site, the visitor will have a reason to visit your website frequently, whether it be to ask a question when help is needed or to keep up on a conversation.

You can host your forum from your site, or choose to use a third party forum, whatever your prefer. Both have their pros and cons, it just comes down to what is best for your business.

5)Blog-- Believe It or not, people are interested in what you have to say! A blog will not only allow you to update your clients on your business and life, but it also gives you a great opportunity to add those much needed keywords to your website.

There are quite a few free applications available that make blogging easy.

6)Newsletter- A newsletter is one of the best ways to keep your visitors coming back time and time again.

You will want to include part of a unique article or tip in your newsletter, and then a link to the rest. This will force your viewers to visit your site to get the remainder of the story.

Once again you do not have to write all the content yourself. Using free article directories will cut the time it takes to put a newsletter together in half.

These are just a few ideas to help you develop strategies to keep people coming back to your home small business website. Stay tuned for more home small business tips.

Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Why You Should Start a Home Small Business
How to Build a Home Small Business

Previous Home Small Business Tip

(read more)

Home Small Business Tip 2009 02 16

Home Small Business Tip for 2009 02 16

The power of Twitter as a home small business marketing tool

I recently discovered the power of Twitter as a home small business marketing tool. Twitter is a free service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called "tweets" of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.

These tweets can be used to increase exposure to any of your websites, as you are able to include a URL as part of your tweet. And to create a Tweet takes only a few moments. If you make tweeting a part of your daily routine, you have a powerful SEO tool at your disposal.

For example, I download the leads generated by my Veretekk system portals on a daily basis in order to extract the email addresses for uploading into Veremail.

This generates 3 tweets:

Tweet 1:

Downloading my daily list of new leads from my Veretekk system http://brincom.veretekk.com

Tweet 2:

xxxx small home business leads were generated by my Veretekk system yesterday http://brincom.veretekk.com

(where xxxx is the number of leads generated by the system)

Tweet 3:

Uploading the leads into my Veremail system to start the optin process. http://brincom.veremail.com/ Veretekk makes it so easy!

See how easy this is? Now if you post these tweets in your blog, you have another source of ever-changing on-page information that Google just loves! I have seen some of my tweets appear on page 1 of Google for particular keyword phrases within hours of producing a tweet.

The key is to be keyword-specific and to tweet every time you do anything. For example, as I am writing this article I posted a tweet saying "Writing article to promote my home small business site http://homesmallbusiness.whystartandneverquit.com/". And when I have written and submitted that article, I will post another tweet that says "Article finished! Check it out at http://www.homesmallbusiness.org".

Discover the power of Twitter for yourself. You can join Twitter at http://www.Twitter.com/BillBrine.

Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Build a REAL home small business
Why Start a home small business anyway?

(read more)

Home Small Business Tip 2009 02 14

Home Small Business Tips

So you've decided you want to start a home small business? Great! But before you start on this adventure, make sure you keep these important tips in mind.

Starting a successful home small business should be a rewarding experience. And, if you approach it properly and in a businesslike manner, it will be.

There are many important questions to ask yourself when starting a home small business:

- Is this a viable home small business?
- What is the ROI (Return on Investment?
- Does the business have merit?
- Is this something that interests me?

With online businesses in particular, it seems that most people really miss these important considerations when starting that great home small business on Google. They succumb to all the hype about easy riches and "get-rich-quick", and click the "Submit" button before doing the groundwork to see if the business is really what it claims to be.

On the internet, we call this doing your due diligence. The following are important considerations:

o First, review the policies and procedures of the business. Does this program suit your particular needs? The policies and procedures should be available to you before you decide to join, usually from a link on the home page or sales page. If it is not available or readily apparent, you should reconsider before joining.

o Go to Google and search for this opportunity. Are there many people promoting it? If not, find out why. If this is a 'startup' or a 'prelaunch' - stay away! You want to spend your time and money on established, proven business models.

o Now search for the business owner's name in Google. Are they real and reachable, or simply hiding behind a website? If the latter, this could be a warning sign.

o You should also conduct research to see if the company provides tools, training, and customer support by phone. No matter what business you start, you will not have all the skills and tools necessary to be successful from day one, and so you will need guidance, a recommended set of tools, and somewhere to report problems and have them addressed.

o Contact other members of the program and get their opinions. If the program is real and credible, these people should have no problem in speaking with you without trying to recruit you. They should not be pitching you their deal here. You are only looking for valuable information that will assist you in building your home small business.

o Now check some of the more prominent press release services and ezine article services. If the business owner is as good as he or she says he is, then he or she will most assuredly be well schooled in promoting on Google using these systems.

The internet is a great place to work. Using the internet to leverage your time and effort to build a solid and profitable home small business will require thought, work and visualization. All the pieces of this puzzle must fit nicely together. Once you find a good organization where you can spend your valuable time and your hard earned money, you will definitely be in for the ride of your life. Making money online and starting a successful home small business is not complicated. It simply requires the right business plan and working that plan to assure your success.

Once you start your business, especially if you get involved in any sort of MLM opportunity, you will be pressured to purchase leads as a quick way to build a business. Don't do it! Purchasing leads is not an effective way to build a business. You will waste hours of your valuable time and experience countless hours of frustration as you call and call people who really have little or no interest in you, your deal or your products. It simply does not work unless you are a hot-shot telephone salesperson.

For more information on building a home small business, see Why Start and Never Quit a Home Small Business.

Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
BrinCom Internet Business Services
http://www.brincom.com
Learn how to build a REAL business!
Email: jwb@brincom.com

(read more)

Home Small Business Tip

Home Small Business Tip

Are you using Twitter as part of your marketing strategy? If not, you should!

If you are a Twitter user, check this out:

I just found this site that shows you a way of getting thoudands of new followers on Twitter. I just started using it myself and its starting to work already!

http://tweetergetter.com/BillBrine

Thought it might interest you.

Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Ph: 902-667-0511
Email: jwb@brincom.com
Web: http://www.buildarealbusiness.com
http://homesmallbusiness.whystartandneverquit.com/

(read more)

Avoid the Home Business 95% Faliure Rate

Bill's Bully Pulpit: Avoid the Home Business 95% Failure Rate

Welcome to my Bully Pulpit for February 11, 2009
If you are not familiar with Veretekk, see the overview page I put together at

http://www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

This week's issue includes:

1) Avoid the Home Business 95% Failure Rate
2) Quote for Today

1) Avoid the Home Business 95% Failure Rate
If you have been looking at Internet marketing for any length of time, you have probably heard about the depressing 95% failure rate for new marketers. Why does this happen? Most people with enough intelligence to surf the Internet are capable of following instructions, so there has to be a reason for so few success stories.

In this article we'll explore some of those reasons

Unrealistic Expectations

Most people attempting to market on the Internet for the first time have unrealistic expectations. These are fueled by all the hype they see in ads and on websites. These new marketers have no clue that they are viewing hype that is simply meant to separate them from the contents of their wallets. They believe what they see in these ads, and shell out their hard earned dollars for an unending parade of ebooks, membership sites, and eCourses, the contents of which are almost all available for Free on the Internet if they knew where to research the topics. They embark on an endless road in search of the magic formula that will put them in the top 5% of marketers online who actually do succeed. They really believe they can realistically earn a six-figure income within 90 days as some websites claim.

Because they believe the hype they are seeing on the Internet, they spend unnecessary money and waste far too much time digging for that one big secret that will let them earn big bucks by setting up one website that will pump money into their bank accounts on autopilot. After all, isn't that what the gurus they have constantly paid keep telling them? Push a few buttons and get fabulously wealthy...

Facing Reality

First of all, these so-called "gurus" have lists of thousands that they have built up over several months or years. The guru develops a new "revolutionary, secret" informational product that is then promoted to these people who have opted-in to the mailing list. The members on these lists, are probably new or struggling marketers desperately searching for the magic pill that will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

No wonder these gurus make six figures - they have the right tools, such as autoresponders, set of autoresponder letters they have developed, squeeze pages, presell pages, bonus offers, back-end offers, Newsletters, affiliate products, ebooks, back links, joint ventures and ad-tracking software to tell them which ads and advertising resources actually work. That makes all the difference.

The new marketers, of course, have none of these at their disposal, and the new 'secret' revealed by the guru usually does not give the entire picture of what needs to be done to use the secret effectively. It only reveals enough to whet the appetite of the new marketers for the next 'secret' that is sure to come along soon.

So what happens? The new marketers eventually realize that a LOT of time and effort has be put into building a business, so they give up this 'opportunity' in disgust and try another one that promises quick riches by just pushing a button. And so the cycle continues...

Information Overload

Most new marketers waste far too much time searching for the magic bullet. They end up jumping around from opportunity to opportunity when they find out that building a business takes time and effort. Basic information that they already have is probably more than enough to get started, but they will not earn six-figures in 90 days...that much is certain.

Here are four suggestions to help you become one of the 5% who are successful:

1. Never get bogged down in information overload. Time spent on gathering information on marketing should be limited to reading only a handful of newsletters and information sent from opt-in lists. Too much of either is bogging you down and is simply a waste of time. If a Newsletter or opt-in list is only sending you an endless list of links that sell you stuff, and gives very little valuable marketing information, drop it like a hot potato. Such things are designed to do only one thing - to separate you from your hard earned cash.

2. Spend your valuable time on the Internet where it will offer the most benefit. If it will not earn you money, it probably is a waste of your time. A wise marketer always will refrain from jumping around from opportunity to opportunity and will pick only one or two long running, proven money making programs to promote.

3. Always do your due diligence before entering any program. Choose companies with a proven track record, with good support. Is the person whose business you are joining available by phone and email? Check out the company and the person by searching in Google.

4. Take things step by step and focus on actively promoting one or two of your chosen programs. Choose those programs carefully. A good program, if promoted, tested and tweaked properly, will be successful at earning a substantial income. Find programs that are selling to a particular niche market and which offer great support and training.

If you follow these simple steps, online success will definitely follow. Just break all this down to four words.

1. Focus - Focus on less to achieve more
2. Time - Manage your time to ROI ratio - Use time, do not waste it.
3. Choice - Choose good programs with good track records, and do your due diligence.
4. Target - Target to the smallest niche possible and you will keep more money in your bank account.

Keep things simple. That practice alone has worked for hundreds of successful online marketers. Quite a few successful marketers have practiced the above principles all the way to the bank to deposit six-figure incomes. Are you next?

For more information on building a home business in this manner, I offer 2 websites which may help:

http://www.buildarealbusiness.com

http://homesmallbusiness.whystartandneverquit.com/

My contact information:
Bill Brine
Ph: 902-667-0511
Email: jwb@brincom.com
Skype: billbrine

2) Quote for Today
Blessed are they who heal you of self-despisings. Of all services which can be done to man, I know of none more precious.
- William Hale White

Would you like free inspirational messages like this
for your website or your list? Just go to

http://brincom.dailymessageonline.com/

to get the code.

That's a Wrap for this Week
That wraps up another week's newsletter and I hope you enjoyed this issue.

Don't forget to send me any comments or questions you may have. I would be only too happy to help you in any way that I can.

From time to time I'll send you important updates that will provide information that has the potential to greatly improve your online business... and of course your profits!

However, you can rest assured that I will only ever recommend products that are considered to be of HIGH value and will provide indisputable benefits to help you grow your business.

Have a great week!

Until next time,
Bill Brine
Brincom Internet Business Services
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6
Ph: 902-667-0511
Fax: 760-280-8685
Office Hours: M-F 8-5 PM EST
Skype: billbrine
Email: jwb@brincom.com
http://www.brincom.com
http://www.buildarealbusiness.com

P.S. If you know someone who might find my newsletter
useful, send them to

http://www.brincom.com/weekly-marketing-tips.htm
(read more)

PRESS RELEASE: Gold Coins for Sale

PRESS RELEASE: Gold Coins for Sale

(Amherst, NS) BrinCom Internet Business Services has just launched a new website devoted to finding good prices for gold coins and gold bullion.

The site is located at

http://gold-coins-for-sale.BuyItForLessHere.com

Collectors who are looking for gold coins or gold bullion now have a new resource to help them search out great deals.

A unique feature of the site is that visitors can subscribe to each pre-defined search as an RSS feed, so they can use their favorite RSS reader to monitor when the particular types of gold coins or gold bullion they are looking for are available.

The site currently lists only American and Canadian coins and bullion. Gold coins and gold bullion from other countries will be added on a regular basis over the next few weeks.

----------------------------------
BrinCom Internet Business Services is located in Amherst, NS, Canada and specializes in business lead generation, marketing, website design, website hosting and maintenance, and assisting online entrepreneurs to develop multiple streams of income ethically and responsibly.

Bill Brine, the CEO and owner, specializes in teaching small business owners how to generate premium leads for their businesses using the power of the Veretekk Lead Generation System and the Its Good Business model. Mr. Brine also assists small business owners to develop multiple streams of internet income using a variety of techniques and programs.

More information on Veretekk is available at

http://www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

More information about the company is available at

http://www.BrinCom.com

More Information on the Its Good Business model is available at

http://ItsGoodBusiness.net
###
(read more)

Effective Link Partner Strategies

Bill's Bully Pulpit: Effective Link Partner Strategies

Welcome to my Bully Pulpit for December 19, 2008

===================================================

This week's issue includes:

1) Effective Link Partner Strategies
2) Quote for Today
3) Do You Have Any Comments?

===================================================

1) Effective Link Partner Strategies
Developing a good link partner strategy is an excellent way to leverage your internet marketing efforts and increase your productivity.

What is a link partner? Quite simply, a link partner is someone who links to your site in return for you linking to their site. These are also known as 'reciprocal links'. Google places great value on incoming links to your site when it is determining your page rank, especially if those links come from what Google considers to be an 'authority site'. And the higher your page rank, the better chance you have of appearing high up in the search engine results for your chosen keyword phrases.

A link partner strategy is only one way to leverage your internet marketing efforts. Before we discuss this strategy, let's review some of the other methods. You should consider implementing some or all of these over time:

- Advertising in ezines, online forums, websites and other sources

- Participation as a member in online business and marketing forums, and forums related to your business niche

- Participation in Social Networking sites

- Get yourself a Gold Veretekk system and learn how to dominate the search engines

With each of these leveraging systems, it may take some effort and time to get them set up and to begin establishing your website presence, so you need to be patient. You are in this for the 'long haul', so take your time and do it right.

The advantage to any or all of these systems is that once set up, they will produce results for you with minimal effort and will continue to do so for quite a long period of time.

Now back to link partners...

Links can be in text ad form or banner form. Links might be included in an article, a site review or a blog post. Or they might be listed in a business services directory. The style or nature of the link exchange should be agreed upon before the links are posted to prevent any misunderstandings or disappointments.

Link Partners may be easy to find, but the real essence of an effective Link Partner strategy is exchanging links with quality websites - sites with a respectable PageRank and who are already attracting the same kind of visitors that you are targeting for your online business.

There are many good web tools available that can be used to check the PageRank of a website. You can do an Internet search for page rank tools. I personally use the Google toolbar, which can be set to show the pagerank of the current page in your browser. You can download the Google toolbar at

http://toolbar.google.com

To find quality sites and to encourage them to want to support your Link Partner strategy, here are some recommended steps. Keep in mind this is an ongoing process. Google loves to see sites where incoming links grow over time. So try to set a goal of getting 1 or 2 new link partners a month.

1) When you are surfing the net, watch for and bookmark sites that you believe are suitable for your purpose. You could also do internet searches for your keywords, then check out the sites that rate the highest in the search engine results.

2) Once you identify a suitable link partner candidate, write a complimentary review for the site and post the review on your website or blog.

3) Contact the webmaster or owner of the reviewed site, advise them of the review and give them permission to publish the review on their site along with a link pointing back to your site as the review source. As an alternative to publishing the review on their site, they can simply include a link that points to the review on your site.

4) Once the link has been established, be sure to check once a month or so to ensure the link is still in place. If not, contact the site webmaster or owner to find out what happened. This is supposed to be a reciprocal process; so if the site owner or webmaster has disabled the link to your site and you can't find out why or they will not re-establish the link, remove your review from your blog or website and keep looking for more suitable sites. No freeloaders here!

A number of Veretekk members have reported good success with using the following method as an adjunct to the primary method given above:

1) Use the following search in Google (include the quotes)

"powered By: hot links sql 2"

This will provide you with a list of sites that are set up to allow you to request reciprocal links. You simply visit the sites and input your information. You will be given the information you need to place the reciprocal link on your site. Some of these sites will not allow you to request a link unless you pay; bypass those and keep looking.

2) Once you have requested the reciprocal link, check on a regular basis as usual to ensure the link is still active. If not, take the reciprocal link from your site.

The links generated by this process will not have as much value as those generated by the first method. However, there is still some value in doing this every once in a while to get more links.

You can apply these link partner strategies to any number of partners you choose, keeping in mind that the more link partners you have, the more effectively you will be able to leverage your efforts and expand your reach.

An effective link partner strategy is one of the most important tasks in your internet marketing efforts.

2) Quote for Today
An optimist stays up to see the New Year in. A pessimist waits to make sure the old one leaves.
- Bill Vaughan

Would you like free inspirational messages like this
for your website? Just go to

http://brincom.dailymessageonline.com/

to get the code.

3) Do You Have Any Comments?
This is your chance to speak out.

Comment on articles I've run in the newsletter, give me your thoughts on changes or your ad testing results or questions relating to your business, etc.

In other words, just talk to me about what you think I need to do to improve the newsletter.

Be sure to include your website address too, because if I use your comments in a future issue of the newsletter, I'll thank you by posting your address so that you can get additional free traffic to your site!

Email your questions or replies to: brincom@veretekk.com with the subject "Bully Pulpit Feedback".

All articles from this newsletter are also published in my blog at

http://brincom.com/blogs/LeadGeneration

That's a Wrap for this Week
That wraps up another week's newsletter and I hope you enjoyed this issue.

Don't forget to send me any comments or questions you may have. I would be only too happy to help you in any way that I can.

From time to time I'll send you important updates that will provide information that has the potential to greatly improve your online business... and of course your profits!

However, you can rest assured that I will only ever recommend products that are considered to be of HIGH value and will provide indisputable benefits to help you grow your business.

Have a great week!

Until next time,
Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Brincom Internet Business Services
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6
Ph: 902-667-0511
Fax: 760-280-8685
Office Hours: M-F 8-5 PM EST
Skype: billbrine
Email: jwb@brincom.com
http://www.ItsGoodBusiness.net

P.S. If you know someone who might find my newsletter
useful, send them to

http://www.brincom.com/weekly-marketing-tips.htm

(read more)

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Welcome to my Bully Pulpit for December 11, 2008

This week's issue includes:

1) Search Engine Optimization Tips
2) Quote for Today

1) Search Engine Optimization Tips
As you know if you have been reading my columns for a while, I am a proponent of the Veretekk marketing system. There is simply no system anywhere that is as powerful for promoting any business online.

One of the powers of the Veretekk system lies in its ability to take advantage of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to propel your small business website onto the first page of Google in record time. In this article I'd like to answer some of the basic questions that new marketers often have about SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is a collection of strategies that can be applied to a website to increase its search engine ranking. Search engine ranking is the position that your site occupies on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when a search is done using keyword phrases that are relevant to your website and your business.

Why is search engine ranking important?

The higher your site's position in the SERPs, the more people will see it. Many of these people may click on your listing, especially if you appear in the top 2 or 3 positions, thus bringing you more traffic. Google lists 10 search results per page. Most searchers never look beyond the first or second page of search results. If you can get your site listed in the Google top ten for your search terms, you will get significantly more traffic than if your listing shows up on any subsequent pages.

There are two broad categories of SEO techniques: on-page factors and off-page factors.

On Page SEO factors

On page factors are all the things you can do on your website to increase SEO. These usually revolve around keywords, and you use these techniques to let the search engines know what your site is about. On page factors include things like the use of TITLE, KEYWORD and DESCRIPTION meta tags, the use of the ALT tag for images, HTML header tags, keyword placement, and so on.

Off Page SEO

Off page factors revolve around backlinks. Keywords are important here as well. Backlinks are the links placed on other sites that point to pages on your site. Backlinks are also known as "inbound links", a term which is often easier to understand. Inbound links are those links pointing to pages on your site.

Steps You Can Take To Improve SEO

1. Always use TITLE, KEYWORD and DESCRIPTION meta tags

For every page on your site you should have meta tags unique to that page.

Here's a good reference for using meta tags:

http://www.freelancedesigners.com/tools/meta_tags.cfm

The TITLE tag is what will appear on the top of the browser window when someone views the page. It should be keyword-specific, and no more than 60 characters in length. The search engines use this tag as well.

The KEYWORDS meta tag is a comma-separated list of keywords that are relevant to your site. Keywords don't have to be single words - you can and should use keyword phrases relevant to the content of that page. Do not use too many keywords or keyword phrases in this tag; I usually recommend using no more than 6. More than that and you will run the risk of having Google designate your page as keyword spam and thereby not indexing the page. Also, try not to repeat any single words more than 5 times.

For the DESCRIPTION meta tag write a short description of your site that would make someone want to click your link. The recommended maximum length is 150 characters. This tag is used by Google as the text description of your site. So it is not just for the search engine's benefit, it is also likely to be seen by a person and it may be the difference between that person clicking on your site's link or another site.

2. Wherever you have images on your site, always include an ALT tag for each image

The HTML code for including an image in your page has an optional attribute called the ALT tag, short for 'alternative text'. It was originally intended as a text description to aid viewers surfing with images turned off or using a screen reader so they could get an idea of what an image was about, since they couldn't see it. But search engines also use the ALT tag to find out more about your page.

The ALT tag should contain keywords relevant to your site and the image they are describing. Instead of just putting "header" in the ALT tag for your header image, use the opportunity to tell the search engines what your site is about, with something like "Puppy Training Header", if your site is about puppy training. Don't over do it though, you want this description to be concise rather than stuffed with every keyword relevant to your site. Here's a good reference for learning more about image tags:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/article.php/3478181

3. Use header tags wisely

The header tags such as H1, H2, and H3 are used by search engines to figure out what the important keywords for your site are. You can easily change the appearance of the header tags by using stylesheets, so try to use the standard HTML header tags instead of custom styles for your headers. Then just make sure you've got relevant keywords in the headers. The H1 tag should contain the primary keyword for your page, the H2 tag should contain the secondary keywords for your page, and so on.

4. Get backlinks with relevant keywords

Get backlinks. Lots of them. This should be an ongoing part of your SEO campaign. The more backlinks the better, but you want to grow your backlinks naturally. It looks a lot more natural if you work on getting a handful of backlinks every week than if you suddenly got 10,000 backlinks overnight because you bought them from a link farm. The search engines are watching for these unnatural patterns, and you are likely to be penalized for engaging in such practices.

There are many ways to get backlinks:

- You can develop relationships with other webmasters to get reciprocal links from other related sites.

- Participate in forums related to your topic and be sure to have a link to your site as part of your signature.

- Write articles for article directories which include a link back to your site in the bio box.

- Create Squidoo lenses or HubPages with a link back to your site. If you have a blog submit your RSS feed to RSS Aggregator sites, and add it to your Squidoo lens or HubPage.

- Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark your pages and encourage your visitors to do the same.

- Use Twitter to send out a 'tweet' when you post a new article.

- And by far the most powerful technique: get yourself a Veretekk Gold system and configure it to target your keyword phrases. You will be able to generate hundreds of quality backlinks from many different domains very easily. For more information on Veretekk, see my information site at

http://www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

This is just to get you started, it is not an exhaustive list by any means.

Now that you have some ideas for where to get backlinks, it is important that you choose good anchor text for your backlinks when you can. The anchor text is the text that turns into the hyperlink (it is often blue, sometimes underlined). The search engines also use this text to figure out what your site, or page, is about. So always specify what the anchor text will be, if you can. Use your main keywords, and variations on your main keywords. Keep in mind that the keywords you use when you are linking to a specific page are not necessarily going to be the same as when you are linking to your homepage.

In some cases you don't have the option of specifying the anchor text. But don't miss the opportunity to specify it where you can. If you trade reciprocal links with another site, specify what you want your anchor text to be. The other webmaster will probably appreciate it because it saves them time having to decide what it should be. When you create Squidoo lenses and HubPages, or for your forum signatures you have total control over your anchor text. Use it wisely.

In this article I have covered just a few basic, but very important, aspects of SEO. This is a very good place to start if you want to improve your sites search engine optimization. Keep applying these techniques until it becomes second nature and you should see an improvement in both your search engine rankings and an increase in the traffic to your site.

2) Quote for Today
It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.
- John Gray

Would you like free inspirational messages like this
for your website? Just go to

http://brincom.dailymessageonline.com/

to get the code.

That's a Wrap for this Week
That wraps up another week's newsletter and I hope you enjoyed this issue.

Don't forget to send me any comments or questions you may have. I would be only too happy to help you in any way that I can.

From time to time I'll send you important updates that will provide information that has the potential to greatly improve your online business... and of course your profits!

However, you can rest assured that I will only ever recommend products that are considered to be of HIGH value and will provide indisputable benefits to help you grow your business.

Have a great week!

P.S. If you know someone who might find my newsletter
useful, send them to

http://www.brincom.com/weekly-marketing-tips.htm
(read more)

Building a Business Ethically and Easily

Building a Business Ethically and Easily
- by Bill Brine, Lead Generation Master

As regular readers of my blog know, one of my main sources for internet revenue is the Its Good Business model. This morning I received and unsolicited email invitation to look at a business (i.e. spam), but the authors of the letter did not seem to be hyping the usual get rich quick stuff (although there was a bit of that in the letter). So instead of sending my usual spam reply and adding them to my blacklist, I decided to send a thoughtful reply. I will include the letter and my reply here, with some editing, for your education.

First, here is a copy of the letter. The subject of the email was "This will be the hottest home based business this holiday season." Sounds a but like hype, but let's see what it says:

-------------------------
Good day to you! We are Chris Herriford & Ariana Reed. We are writing you after viewing one of your websites. We have a long track record of being successful in marketing and enjoy networking with other professionals. We would like to get better acquainted with you. We are interested in finding out if you are open-minded about hearing about a new opportunity in the television business.

We are with a large and established media company that has had a lot of success producing many winning infomercials for the last 10 years. We would like to show you how you can earn a passive, residual income with us from the TV business with a new business model that combines direct response, network marketing, and the Internet.

While building traditional MLM we've made substantial money but we established a couple of key things right now (1) people can't afford costly leads (2) people are sick of bugging friends and family (3) there are no real customers in a traditional model of MLM.

We were introduced to TV infomercials about 10 months ago. For the first time we could see real customers that ordered from TV and grew one�s business very rapidly from home. Let us highlight a couple of things for you.

Picture people sitting in their homes, watching TV. They see a 30 min infomercial and pick up the phone, dial an 800# and place an order. Now, imagine that a percentage of those customers who placed an order through a call center become your customers.

Picture that you don't have to host another party or buy another lead.

Picture that you have a chance to work and be mentored by some of the best in the industry.

Picture that you can start for under $100 (includes kit, website, and product)

Listen, we know that you have likely been pitched and promised before and don't want to reinvest your sweat and tears in something that will fall through. We understand! We know where you are coming from. But imagine being able to partner with one of the top infomercial companies on the globe that is poised to do 300 million in sales this year, spend 80-90 million on media, that is right now generating 15-30k customers a WEEK and you can capture a percentage of those customers.

Opportunities like this don't come around every day. So what do you do next? TAKE ACTION!

Call us at: 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out more!

We always enjoy talking to others in the industry, and we have many friends throughout the networking community. If this is not for you we would still love to hear how your business is going.

Sincerely,

Chris Herriford and Ariana Reed

-------------------------------

Well, that's not too bad in terms of hype, But it sounds a lot like our Its Good Business model, so here is my reply. Due to legal restrictions, I am not permitted to mention the name of the company I am promoting in a public forum like this without prior permission, so I have replaced the name of the company with XXXX. The original reply, of course, does contain the name of the business.

------------
Hi Chris and Ariana:

This email address is used exclusively for my XXXX business, so that must have been the website you saw. Normally I would consider an unsolicited email like this to be spam and take appropriate action, but you seem like someone who is actually serious about business building and not promoting a get rich quick scheme, so I would be happy to continue our conversation.

Are you by any chance promoting XXXX? If not, perhaps you might like to look at our model. Here are some details:

What you have described is exactly how XXXX works, and it works very well. They have been doing this for over 10 years now. They call it co-operative marketing. They own one of the largest media empires in the US, and they run infomercials on the cable networks that they own, they swap time with other cable networks, they run infomercials on radio and now are starting to run infomercials in Canada as well. They do all the customer followup and continue marketing to existing customers to keep them buying. All I have to do is purchase customers whenever I want, and the commissions from those customers are mine for life.

In addition, the team that I belong to has blown the doors off this model by incorporating the most powerful internet marketing system on the planet, Veretekk, to drive massive amounts of traffic to our business model to introduce it to people who are sick and tired of the traditional MLM business model, which we know does not work. The entire team works to build the organization, without regards to crossline, downline, or sideways. I have never before worked in such a cohesive and motivated team. As members of the team, each of us contributes what he or she is good at and interested in to the overall team effort, and everyone benefits.

XXXX is not an MLM, but it uses an MLM model for commissions. So I still have to build an organization that contains distributors. However, unlike traditional MLM, the focus is not on building an organization of salespeople who are all buying products in the hope that they can make money by recruiting other salespeople. Our organizations are built upon a stable customer base that we purchase from XXXX. As members of the team, we will occasionally have new customers assigned to us that we did not purchase, or even new distributors that we did not personally recruit. So there is no great pressure to recruit, even though it is still a good idea to do so.

As a consequence, I do not have to send out any spam or do massive amounts of marketing. Nor do I subscribe to the '3 foot rule'. I only have to speak to people who are interested in building a real business, and who have seen our business plan and are excited about it. I spend my time contributing to the team effort and purchase customers on a regular basis, and regularly report on all this to the subscribers of my marketing newsletter, from which I have already had one person sign up as a distributor.

This business model has propelled some of our team members to Presidential Director, the highest rank in XXXX distributors (we are called Business Associates or BAs), in a 2-3 month period, a process which before our team appeared would normally take a year or more. I personally advanced one rank within the first 2 weeks of signing up. In any traditional MLM, as I'm sure you are well aware, this would take 6 months or more, depending upon your ability to sell and recruit. So far I have not had to sell to or recruit anyone. I love this model!

Our team offers free advanced training on all aspects of internet marketing from some of the most knowledgeable marketers online today. These are not the 'gurus' you will see promoting their crap ebooks which tell you nothing. These are people who are making real money by using ethical methods and powerful tools to promote real businesses.

With our team working together employing our Veretekk marketing technology, we can easily dominate any keyword category in Google within a matter of days or weeks, and none of us have to learn everything about everything in order to get anything done. We simply concentrate on one area and learn as much about it as we can.

So I invite you to take a look at our model. All you have to do is go to

http://www.ItsGoodBusiness.net

There are regular Saturday presentations you can attend online. If you are unable to attend, contact me and I can send you to a website where I have archived some of our past presentations. We don't do conference calls and you will not come across any of the usual hype in our presentations. We don't believe in that stuff. We don't need it, because we only seek people who 'get' our model and are interested in participating.

-------------------

So there you are, I hope this has been of some use. At least now you know what the Its Good Business model is all about!

-------------------
Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0511
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine
Its Good Business
Its Good Business Blog
Its Good Business Forum
Its Good Business Links

Previous Posts

(read more)

PRESS RELEASE: Snowshoes at discount prices

Snowshoes at discount prices

A new site has been launched to help winter sport enthusiasts find snowshoes at discount prices.

(Amherst, NS) BrinCom Internet Business Services has just launched a new website devoted to finding snowshoes at discount prices

The site is located at

http://discount-snowshoes.BuyItForLessHere.com

Winter sport enthusiasts who are looking for good prices on new or used snowshoes or accessories now have a new shopping resource to help them search out great deals on snowshoes.

More information on Veretekk is available at

http://www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

More information about the company is available at

http://www.BrinCom.com

More Information on the Its Good Business model is available at

http://ItsGoodBusiness.net
###
(read more)

PRESS RELEASE: Cool and Fun Online and Downloadable Games

Cool and Fun Online and Downloadable Games

A new site has been launched to help gamers find cool and fun games to play online or download to a PC or Mac.

(Amherst, NS) BrinCom Internet Business Services has just launched a new website devoted to finding cool and fun games to play online or to download to a PC or a Mac.

The site is located at

http://fun-online.games.GetItForLessOnline.com

Gamers who are looking for new cool and fun games to play online or download now have a new resource at their fingertips. New games become available on a regular basis. A large selection of online games is available, as well as games that can be downloaded to a Mac or a PC.

A unique feature of the site is that visitors can subscribe to each pre-defined search as an RSS feed, so they can monitor the release of new games in their favorite category by using their own RSS reader.

An online gaming community is also available.

More information on Veretekk is available at

http://www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

More information about the company is available at

http://www.BrinCom.com

More Information on the Its Good Business model is available at

http://ItsGoodBusiness.net
###
(read more)

Cheap Video Games, Systems and Accessories

Cheap Video Games, Systems and Accessories

A new site has been launched to help consumers find great deals on video games, video game systems and video game accessories.

(Amherst, NS) BrinCom Internet Business Services has just launched a new website devoted to finding great deals on video games, video game systems and video game accessories.

The site is located at

http://cheap-video-games.GetItForLessOnline.com

Consumers who are looking for a new or used video game, video game system or video game accessory now have another shopping resource which they can use to find good deals. A large selection of video games, video game systems and video game accessories is available. New items become available on a regular basis.

The site is based on eBay auctions, and presents specific real-time pages devoted to video games, video game systems and video game accessories. Most popular brands are represented, such as PSP, PS2, PS3, Xbox, and Xbox 360.

A unique feature of the site is that visitors can subscribe to each pre-defined search as an RSS feed, so they can monitor auctions for video games, video game systems and video game accessories using their own RSS reader. For those who are unfamiliar with eBay, a short training video is available.

"We have done all the hard work for our visitors", says Bill Brine, the CEO of the company. "We have determined where most sellers post their auctions within the eBay structure for video games, video game systems and video game accessories. All our visitors have to do is click on the type of video game, video game system or video game accessory they are interested in and they will be presented with a list of current auctions for those products."

More information on Veretekk is available at

http://www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

More information about the company is available at

http://www.BrinCom.com

More Information on the Its Good Business model is available at

http://ItsGoodBusiness.net
###
(read more)

Canon G9 Best Price

Canon G9 Best Prices

The Canon G9 Powershot digital camera was launched in 2007 as the successor to the PowerShot G7. It is a 12.1 Megapixel camera which incorporates a number of improvements.

For more information about the Canon G9 and to find a Canon G9 at the best price, visit my Squidoo Lens at

http://www.squidoo.com/canon-g9-best-price

Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
(read more)

PRESS RELEASE: New Shopping Site for GPS Systems and Accessories

A new site has been launched to help consumers find great deals on GPS systems and accessories.

(Amherst, NS) BrinCom Internet Business Services has just launched a new website devoted to finding great deals on GPS systems and accessories.

The site is located at

gps-navigation.GetItForLessOnline.com

Consumers who are looking for a new or used GPS system or GPS system accessories now have another shopping resource which they can use to find good deals. A large selection of GPS systems and accessories is available. New items become available on a regular basis.

The site is based on eBay auctions, and presents specific real-time pages devoted to GPS systems and accessories. Consumers can search by brand name and type of GPS system, as well as the type of GPS accessory they are looking for.

A unique feature of the site is that visitors can subscribe to each pre-defined search as an RSS feed, so they can monitor auctions for GPS systems and accessories using their own RSS reader. For those who are unfamiliar with eBay, a short training video is available.

"We have done all the hard work for our visitors", says Bill Brine, the CEO of the company. "We have determined where most sellers post their auctions within the eBay structure for GPS systems and accessories. All our visitors have to do is click on the type of electric guitar they are interested in and they will be presented with a list of current auctions for those products."

More information on Veretekk is available at

www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

More information about the company is available at

www.BrinCom.com

More Information on the Its Good Business model is available at

www.ItsGoodBusiness.net
###
(read more)

PRESS RELEASE: New Shopping Site for Electric Guitars

New Shopping Site for Electric Guitars

A new site has been launched to help musicians find great deals on electric guitars.

BrinCom Internet Business Services has just launched a new website devoted to finding great deals on electric guitars.

The site is located at

http://electric-guitars.GetItForLessOnline.com

Consumers who are looking for a new or used electric guitar now have another shopping resource which they can use to find good deals. A large selection of electric guitars is available. New items become available on a regular basis.

The site is based on eBay auctions, and presents specific real-time pages devoted to electric guitars. Consumers can search by brand name and type of camera.

A unique feature of the site is that visitors can subscribe to each pre-defined search as an RSS feed, so they can monitor auctions for electric guitars using their own RSS reader. For those who are unfamiliar with eBay, a short training video is available.

"We have done all the hard work for our visitors", says Bill Brine, the CEO of the company. "We have determined where most sellers post their auctions within the eBay structure for electric guitars. All our visitors have to do is click on the type of electric guitar they are interested in and they will be presented with a list of current auctions for those products."

More information on Veretekk is available at www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

More information about the company is available at www.BrinCom.com

More Information on the Its Good Business model is available at www.ItsGoodBusiness.net
###
(read more)

New Site for Digital Camera Shoppers

Press Release - New Site for Digital Camera Shoppers

A new site has been launched to help consumers find great deals on digital cameras.

(Amherst, NS) BrinCom Internet Business Services has just launched a new website devoted to finding great deals on digital cameras.

The site is located at digital-cameras.GetItForLessOnline.com

Consumers who are looking for a new or used digital camera now have another shopping resource which they can use to find good deals. A large selection of digital cameras is available. New items become available on a regular basis.

The site is based on eBay auctions, and presents specific real-time pages devoted to digital cameras. Consumers can search by brand name and type of camera.

A unique feature of the site is that visitors can subscribe to each pre-defined search as an RSS feed, so they can monitor auctions for digital cameras using their own RSS reader. For those who are unfamiliar with eBay, a short training video is available.

"We have done all the hard work for our visitors", says Bill Brine, the CEO of the company. "We have determined where most sellers post their auctions within the eBay structure for digital cameras. All our visitors have to do is click on the type of digital camera they are interested in and they will be presented with a list of current auctions for those products."

More information on Veretekk is available at www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

More information about the company is available at www.BrinCom.com

More Information on the Its Good Business model is available at www.ItsGoodBusiness.net
###

(read more)

Bill's Bully Pulpit: Your Business Office Anywhere

Bill's Bully Pulpit: Your Business Office Anywhere

Welcome to my Bully Pulpit for October 17, 2008

For those of you who are new to my newsletter, my name is Bill Brine and I am a Lead Generation Master and a Veretekk Marketing System owner. As always, I am here to help you if you have any questions. My contact details are at the bottom of this email. If you wish to contact me, use the email address supplied there.

If you are not familiar with Veretekk, see the overview page I put together at

http://www.squidoo.com/whatisveretekk

===================================================

This week's issue includes:

1) Your Business Office Anywhere
2) Quote for Today
3) Do You Have Any Comments?

===================================================

1) Your Business Office Anywhere
One of the most important aspects of setting up a home business is setting up a productive and efficient office for your business.

These days, modern technology makes it simple to set up an office almost anywhere. Cell phones, email, laptops and updated office situations offer unlimited opportunities to start your own business. Whether you want a full-time enterprise or a part-time income, you need the right setup to be successful. Take advantage of advanced technology to have a convenient, functional office on your own terms.

Home Offices
For an office at home, you can renovate your garage, your family room or even a large closet into your own office space. Create a corner in the house just for your work. Have a designated area for files, your computer and other business essentials. Stay organized so you know where everything is and don't have to waste time looking for it. Scattering your work around the house makes it difficult to run a successful enterprise no matter how large or small.

The Mobile Office
Sometimes situations at home make it impossible to focus on the business at hand. In such times, it is important to have a laptop and cell phone ready so you can work at your favorite park, coffee shop or library. If peace and quiet are impossible to attain in one spot, take your work elsewhere for awhile. Often the change of scenery will help you to regain focus so you can get back to business more effectively.

Virtual Offices
Virtual offices provide a designated business address, telephone number and fax number along with an answering service and receptionist. For a monthly fee, you can set up a virtual office in almost any major city in the world. Virtual offices also create a presence in a metropolitan area and give your business image a boost. If you need a professional space to meet with clients, most virtual offices have conference rooms available on short notice. Having a virtual office also makes it easier to work at home. You have someone else receiving packages, telephone calls, faxes and mail so you can work without interruption. A virtual office also maintains the privacy of your home address and phone number.

Managed Offices
Managed offices are run by a management company that rents out rooms and suites to various businesses. Everyone has a shared receptionist, answering service, security and common areas such as lobbies, restrooms and conference rooms. You can rent an impressive single office or suite in a local business area without a long term lease or buying office space. This gives businesses more freedom to expand, downsize and relocate.

Outsourcing
As businesses expand, they often seek virtual offices and managed offices for the access to receptionists and clerical staff. Another option for small enterprises is outsourcing. Use a freelancer to handle writing, research and public relations as you work on other aspects of your business. Hire a virtual assistant to manage appointments, telephone calls and client data. Get help to make your business more profitable and productive.

Start your own business, gain credibility and build profits by customizing your offices to suit your unique needs. Whether you want to quit your day job or supplement your current income, you can create your own perfect office anywhere and anytime.

2) Quote for Today
Achievements are the accomplishment of persistent individuals.
- James Jones

Would you like free inspirational messages like this
for your website? Just go to

http://brincom.dailymessageonline.com/

to get the code.

3) Do You Have Any Comments?
This is your chance to speak out.

Comment on articles I've run in the newsletter, give me your thoughts on changes or your ad testing results or questions relating to your business, etc.

In other words, just talk to me about what you think I need to do to improve the newsletter.

Email your questions or replies to: brincom@veretekk.com with the subject "Bully Pulpit Feedback".

All articles from this newsletter are also published in my blog at

http://brincom.com/blogs/LeadGeneration

That's a Wrap for this Week
That wraps up another week's newsletter and I hope you enjoyed this issue.

Don't forget to send me any comments or questions you may have. I would be only too happy to help you in any way that I can.

From time to time I'll send you important updates that will provide information that has the potential to greatly improve your online business... and of course your profits!

However, you can rest assured that I will only ever recommend products that are considered to be of HIGH value and will provide indisputable benefits to help you grow your business.

Have a great week!

P.S. If you know someone who might find my newsletter
useful, send them to

http://www.brincom.com/weekly-marketing-tips.htm

(read more)

Make Money Online Advice 8

Make Money Online Advice 8
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

So you've out a lot of time and effort into doing some market research, and have designed a great product that you think will sell like wildfire.

Unfortunately, it doesn't sell well. It hardly sells at all...

Now what? Is there still a way to make money online with this product? Or should you just throw it out and start again?

Well, there are some things you can do to resurrect the situation. Here are 10 ideas you can use to make use of the product and still make money online:

1. People are always looking for new products to sell. Sell the reprint or reproduction rights to the product. Sell a resale license.

2. Give the product away as a freebie from your home business website. Just because it won't sell doesn't mean people won't visit your home business website to get it for free. They may see another product you sell and buy that one while they're there.

3. List the product at an online auction site such as eBay. You may make part of your investment back. If you're lucky, you may even make a profit. People sometimes get into bidding wars and will bid a higher price than the product is actually worth.

4. Offer your product as a free bonus for another product you sell. This will increase the perceived value of the product you're selling. People will feel they're receiving more for less.

5. Contact businesses with the same target market and see if they would be interested in using your product as a free bonus for their product. You can get free advertising by placing your ad on the product.

6. Sell your product to businesses at wholesale cost as a promotional item. Businesses are always looking for products they can give to their customers with their advertising on the product. You could make part of your investment back.

7. Barter your product to other businesses for things you need for your own business. You could trade for their products or services. This will save you money and help make up for your profit loss.

8. Create an online contest with the product as a prize. This will attract traffic to your web site. You could also get free advertising by listing it on online contest directories.

9. If you decide to give away the product for free, allow other people to give the product away for free as well. Place your home business website ad on the product. This will spread your advertising and attract even more people to your site.

10. Ask businesses with the same target audience if they would be interested in combining your product with their product. You could then sell them together as a package deal and split the profits. You may have better results selling your product this way.

There are many more creative ways to make use of a product that is not selling for some reason. You can still make money online, even if the product is a poor seller for some reason.

Previous Posts

(read more)

Make Money Online Advice - Increasing Sales Volume

Make Money Online Advice - Increasing Sales Volume

Are you frustrated in your efforts to make money online because of low sales volume? This article may help.

Here are 10 proven strategies that will help increase your sales volume.

1. Make people feel safe when they order. Remind people that they are ordering through a secure server. Tell them you won't sell their email address and all their information will be kept confidential.

2. Make your ad copy attractive. Do not concentrate on features; market the benefits instead. Make sure your headline is attractive to your target audience. Always include testimonials and/or guarantees.

3. Remind people to come back and visit. People usually don't purchase the first time they visit. The more times they visit your site, the greater the chance they will buy. The most effective way to make them return is to give them a free subscription to your ezine.

4. Tell people about your business. They will feel more comfortable if they know who they are buying from. Publish a section called "About Us" on your home business website. Include your business history, profile of employees, contact information etc.

5.Give people as many ordering options as possible. Accept credit cards, checks, money orders, and other forms of electronic payments. Take orders by phone, email, home business website, fax, mail, etc.

6. Make your home business website look professional. You must have your own domain name. Your web site should be easy to navigate. The graphics should be related to the theme of your home business website.

7. Let people read your ad before they get your freebie. When you use free stuff to lure people to your home business website include it below your ad copy or on another web page. If you list the freebie above your ad they may never look to see what you're selling.

8. This may sound simplistic, but be sure that you are attracting the target audience that would buy your product or service. A simple way to do this is to survey your existing customers to see what attracted them to buy. This information will help you improve your target marketing and advertising.

9. Always test and improve your ad copy. There are many people who write ad copy and never change it. You have to continually test and improve your ad copy to get the highest possible response rate. Start out with 2 different ads and then test their respective conversion rates. Then choose the one that has the best conversion rate and design a new ad to run against that one to see if you can beat the conversion rate. Repeat this process as long as you are marketing the product or service.

10. Give people some urgency to buy now. Many people are interested in your product but they put off buying it till later and eventually forget about it. Entice them to buy now with a freebie or discount and include a deadline date when the offer ends.

Take a serious look at your marketing strategies and see if your efforts fall into one or more of these areas. Correct those deficiencies and you will be well on your way to making money online.

Previous Posts

(read more)

Make Money Online by Working At Home

Make Money Online by Working At Home
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

So you want to make money online?

In researching you have probably come across dozens of money making home business opportunities websites saying just join our program or that program and the money will flow in while you sleep.

Be careful and take everything you read with a large degree of skepticism. Every make money online program out there needs your effort and money for the program to work. Not a lot of money, in some cases. Even just a little can go a long way. But any business will require time, effort and some of your own money to be successful. If you know how and where to invest your money, work at home online success can be yours.

If you are not willing to work hard and wisely and spend money on your work at home business to make money, the odds will be stacked against your success.

This is where you get an unfair advantage in your pursuit of success. You will have to guide yourself to finding quality information, tools and tactics to become successful at making money online.

With some or absolutely no idea how to make money online you have to be diligent in your efforts to succeed.

My experience suggests that you should follow the path you feel comfortable pursuing. This will enable you to be successful and happy in the pursuit of your goals.

You'll see lots of no cost work for free business models on the Internet and in business opportunity magazines. Stay away from these! How can anyone possibly make money if it costs nothing to sign up? If it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

You need to find proven business models that are working. Stay away from pre-launches and new programs. Be sure to contact other business owners in whatever programs you are investigating to find out their experiences. Any reputable business owner will be happy to share their experiences with you.

Good luck with your search. Now go make money online!

Previous Posts

(read more)

Make Money Online Advice 7

Make Money Online Advice 7
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Here are more tips for those of you who are looking to make money online. Today we'll once again look at ideas for increasing sales volume for your products and services:

1. If you are using mass media advertising, consider investing in targeted advertising instead. Don't waste your limited ad dollars on people who aren't interested.

2. You can increase your profits by concentrating on small details. Improving small things like text size, color, or graphics can really make a positive difference.

3. Keep your offers flexible. For example, if you offer a set price for your product, offer an optional payment plan for the people can't afford the whole cost up front.

4. You can offer your knowledge or consulting as a bonus to those who order a product. For example, you could offer a free 15 or 30 minute consultation. This will add tremendous value to your product.

5. Make sure to personalize all your email messages so they get read. Include the recipient's name in the subject line. This will grab peoples attention quickly.

6. Keep your home business website consistent. Do not keep things on your home business website that are unrelated to the theme of your home business website.

7. You can attract more subscribers to your free ezine by giving them free bonuses like ebooks, software, online services and other incentives.

8. Sell advertising space in your ezine and on your home business website. This will create an extra income stream for your business.

9. Make your home business website ready for the public. Have an "About Us" page and clear descriptions of what actions you want your visitors to take.

10. Don't just start advertising everywhere. Plan out your marketing. Locate places and publications that your target audience would congregate around.

These 10 ideas will help you to ramp up your online sales volume. Stay tuned for more ideas in the next article in this series. Now go make money online!

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Make Money Online Advice 6

Make Money Online Advice 6
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome to another in my ongoing series of articles to help you make money online. Today we'll look at more ideas for increasing profits:

1. Try selling a few back end products that are not related to your main product but are needed by people in their everyday lives. Your customers do have a life outside of your business....

2. Cut down on expenses by taking on as many of your business' chores as you can handle. Outsource what you can't handle.

3. Don't be afraid to try out new business opportunities, even if they are not related to your main focus. Multiple streams of income are the way to go if you want to make money online.

4. Search out home business websites that are related to your market and create an alliance with 3 or 4 of them. Include each of your ads or banners on the other home business websites. You will all share targeted traffic from each other.

5. Create a free ezine directory. This will attract a lot of traffic from ezine publishers and people that want to subscribe to the ezines. Gather contact information by offering people the ability to sign up to be notified when a new ezine is added to the directory.

6. Offer freebies from your site and submit them to free stuff sites. These sites provide target categories, which means targeted traffic for you.

7. Make your visitors curious about your product by telling them they need to sign-up to get into a password protected site to read the rest of the ad.

8. Keep in mind that the little things about your web pages really do count. Include the title of your site at the top right corner, a description of your site, make it easy to navigate, etc. Do not assume that anyone who visits your website understands how it all fits together.

9. When you ask someone to sign-up to receive a freebie, don't ask for really personal information. This is a fast way to lose a potential prospect.

10. Make use of newsgroups. Newsgroups are still very popular. You can post your ad in ones that allow it or you can simply leave messages with your signature line included.

Stay tuned for more tips designed to help you boost sales and make money online.

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Make Money Online Advice

Make Money Online Advice
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

If you want to make money online, you have to sell something. And if you want to sell something, you are going to have to design ads or sales pages.

When designing an ad, one of the most important considerations is how to end the sales message. Here are 10 ideas for ending your sales message that will persuade people to purchase the product you are selling:

1. End your sales message by telling people what will happen if they buy your product. Use your most powerful benefit as the example.

2. End your sales message by telling people what will happen if they don't buy your product. Use a problem that they won't be able to solve without it.

3. End your sales message with a question to which they will always answer "Yes". This will put them in the right frame of mind to answer "Yes" when you ask them to order.

4. End your sales message with a short review of your whole ad. Repeat all the major benefits and features they will receive.

5. End your sales message with a deadline. Tell them it's a limited time offer and they need to order by a specific date.

6. End your sales message with a powerful guarantee. Give them a lifetime or triple your money back guarantee.

7. End your sales message with a testimonial. Use one or more of your customers' testimonials that are believable and include specific results.

8. End your sales message with a free bonus. When you give them a free bonus it increases the product's perceived value.

9. End your sales message with a discounted price. Just list your regular price and then offer a discounted price off the order right now.

10. End your sales message with a free sample or a trial version of your product. If your ad didn't attract them to buy, maybe a free sample or trial would.

Using one or more of these strategies to end your sales message will make your readers more disposed to purchase the product. Try different combinations, and be sure to test the different combinations of strategies to see which works best.

Watch for more articles in my Make Money Online Advice series.

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Make Money Online Advice

Make Money Online Advice
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

If you are trying to make money online, you are no doubt offering some sort of product or products for sale. In this ongoing series of articles I will offer short ideas to increase your sales so you can make more money online.

Here are 10 more tips to increase sales for the products and services you offer in your home business:

1. Create instant rapport with your target audience by expressing the same views as your audience. Bring up common likes and dislikes in your ads.

2. Consider adding viral marketing to your promotional plans. Allow your visitors to give away your free stuff, just include your ad somewhere on all the freebies.

3. Design your website to be less confusing. Don't use a lot of graphics, links or anything else that takes away from your sales message. The best sales page for any product is a page that has no outgoing links to anywhere else, except perhaps for the usual terms of service and contact page.

4. Your website visitors may not have the time to review your entire website at the time they visit. Give them the option of viewing your web site by autoresponder or printing it out. It is also a good idea to provide an "Add to Favorites" button.

5. Want to increase your opt-in email list quickly? Give away a product at no cost as long as people subscribe to your ezine in exchange.

6. Seek out joint ventures with offline businesses. Look for businesses that have the same target audience and create a win/win deal with them.

7. Expand your target audience by adding a new product line or packaging your main products with other ones. You could also add-on extra services.

8. People buy from people they like, so if you can persuade your visitors to like you, you will automatically be more trustworthy in their eyes. You could tell them a joke, give them a compliment, give them a freebie, etc.

9. Submit all the free stuff you offer to online freebie directories. These directories get tons of traffic, because people like to get things for free.

10. Always use headlines and sub headlines that are aimed directly at your audience. For example, if you're selling things to real estate agents, use a headline like "Attention All Realtors!".

Stay tuned for more home business ideas and tips to make money online in future articles.

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Make Money Online Advice

Make Money Online Advice
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

When you are designing ads or sales pages for the products that you develop and/or sell, try to design them with certain things in mind. If you want to make money online, you have to hit people's hot spots - you have to motivate them to want to buy your stuff.

Here are 10 motivational triggers to keep in mind that will make people eager and willing to buy your products and services:

1. Everyone wants to make more money. For example, they may want to start their own home business, get a higher paying job or invest in the stock market. This makes them feel successful.

2. Everyone wants to save money. For example, they may want to invest for the future or save for a big purchase. This makes them feel more secure.

3. Everyone wants to save time. For example, they may want to work less and spend time enjoying life's pleasures. This makes them feel more relaxed.

4. Everyone wants to look better. For example, they may want to lose weight, tone their body, or improve their facial features. This makes them feel more attractive.

5. Everyone wants to learn something new. For example, they may want to learn how to change their car oil or build a deck. This makes them feel more intelligent.

6. Everyone wants to live longer. For example, they may want to get in shape, eat better or gain extra energy. This makes them feel healthier.

7. Everyone wants to be comfortable. For example, they may want to relive aches and pains or want to sleep in a more comfortable bed. This makes them feel relieved.

8. Everyone wants to be loved. For example, they may not want to be lonely anymore or want to start dating again. This makes them feel wanted.

9. Everyone wants to be popular. For example, they may want to be a famous celebrity or be more popular in school. This makes them feel praised and admired.

10. Everyone wants to gain pleasure. For example, they may want satisfy their appetite or their sexual desires. This makes them feel more fulfilled.

Work one or more of these ideas into any ads or sales pages you are designing. This will increase your chances to make money online.

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Make Money Online Advice

Make Money Online Advice
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome once again to my ongoing series of tips to help you make money online. Today we'll continue looking at ideas for increasing the order rate for your products and services:

1. If your business is an online business, automate as much as possible. This will save you extra time for marketing and advertising. Consider such tools as auto- responders, time saving software, submission software, etc.

2. Host a free hall of fame or a museum on your website. Of course, it should be related to your target audience. This will attract people just as real world museums or halls of fame attract visitors.

3. Whenever you have an idea, write it down. Don't judge whether it is good or bad; record it anyway. Any of these ideas could be the key to your future success.

4. Your ad copy should be designed to target the goals, dreams and desires of your visitors. Your products should attract their emotional and physical needs.

5. Create a small treasure hunt on your website. Allow people to get a discount on a product you sell if they find a certain graphic somewhere on your site.

6. Offer free promotional merchandise. It can be hats, bumper stickers, cups, or anything with your home business website URL printed on it.

7. Check out the latest new fad and create other home business websites related to this fad. Advertise your main home business website on your fad home business websites.

8. Load your site with a wide variety of content. Your site will become known as an area of regular reference for many of your visitors.

9. Interview famous people that your visitors want to know more about. Publish the interview in article or audio format on your home business website.

10. Tell people the purpose of your home business website. When they visit a home business website and have to figure out what it's about, they may get frustrated and leave.

I hope these ideas will trigger some creative thinking on your part. You have to be constantly looking at new marketing ideas when you want to make money online.

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Make Money Online Advice

Make Money Online Advice
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Are you trying to make money online with a business? Wondering how to increase sales for your products and services? Well here are some ideas that may help:

1. Always be enthusiastic about your products and your business. If you're convincing enough, your prospects will also be enthusiastic. This may sound simple, but its surprising how many business owners will forget this simple and powerful advice.

2. When you are creating a sales letter or ad copy, always end it with a strong closing. Some ides for this area: offer a free bonus, offer a discount price, remind the reader of a benefit, tell them there is an ordering deadline.

3. It is incredibly important to please your complaining customers. Always operate your business with these 2 rules: (1) The customer is always right, and (2) If you think the customer is not right, see rule number 1. Do whatever you can to rectify the situation: refund their money, give them a discount, give them a free gift, solve the problem quickly, etc. These customers will recommend you to their friends if you please them.

4. Give you customers free vacation coupons, coupons, or free gifts and they will get excited about your business and they will tell their friends.

5. Give your prospects extra confidence so they will order. Use endorsements, testimonials, a strong guarantee or warranty, etc.

6. Build your opt-in list by allowing your visitors to sign up for a free ezine, ebooks, software, contests, sweepstakes, etc.

7. Don't design your business website like everyone else. Be unique. Give your prospects or customers a breath of fresh air. Don't be afraid to design your home business website and ad copies different from everyone else.

8. Allow your customers to get part of your total offer right after they order. For example: if you have to ship the item, make one of your bonuses available online.

9. Write and submit articles to ezine publishers or webmasters. If you want it to be published, it should be like an article and not like an ad.

10. Show your prospects that you are an expert, because authority can persuade people to buy. You could publish an article, write an ebook, etc.

These are some of the many ideas that can help you to make money online by increasing sales of your products and services. Stay tuned to this series for many more.

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Make Money Online With Words That Make People Buy

Make Money Online With Words That Make People Buy
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Are you selling a product or service online? Then you are no doubt designing ad copy or sales pages. In today's article about making money online, I'll show you 10 words that you can use that will make people purchase the products or services that you are advertising.

1. "Fast: - People want fast results, fast delivery, fast ordering, etc. Nowadays, we usually value our time more than our money. Use this word somewhere in your ad.

2. "Guaranteed" - People want to be assured they are not risking their hard earned money buying your product.

3. "Limited" - People want to own or receive things that are exclusive or rare because they are considered to be more valuable.

4. "Easy" or "Simple" - People want easy ordering, easy instructions, easy to use, easy payments, etc.

5. "Testimonial - People want to see believable proof before they buy your product. Your testimonials should be reputable and specific.

6. "Discount" or "Sale" - People want bargains. You can offer rebates, one time sales, percentage offers, get one free offers, etc.

7. "Free" - People want free incentives before they do business with you. They could be free books, accessories, services, etc.

8. "You" and "Your" - People want to know that you are talking them. This will make them feel important and attract them to read the whole ad.

9. "Important" - People do not want to miss important information that could affect their life. People will stop and take notice.

10. "New" - People want new products or services that will improve their life like new information, tastes, technology, results, etc.

If you work these 10 words into your ad copy, you will vastly improve sales for your products and services.

Stay tuned for more ideas to make money online.

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Smoothies - a Healthy and Tasty Weight Loss Treat

Smoothies - a Healthy and Tasty Weight Loss Treat

Have you noticed all the smoothie shops springing up lately? There seems to be a new one opening up almost every day.

Why makes these drinks so popular?

Smoothies can very soothing and invigorating. When you are in a hurry they can be a great meal replacement. Plus they are quite tasty, and if they are made right, they are low in fat. They can be a great weight loss tool.

Smoothies fill you up so don't feel hungry. They are easy to make. You can grab them and take them on the go. These are all huge advantages in our busy lives.

You can pack lots of fruits and vegetables in your meals or snacks by making a smoothie. They refresh and energize your body.

Best of all, drinking smoothies as an aid to weight loss really does work. You won't feel hungry or deprived. You won't feel like you are on a diet. Smoothies are so filling that you will never feel hungry. There are a few tricks to preparing your smoothies and some special ingredients you can add to your smoothies that will assist with your weight loss goals.

Because smoothies can contain so many different ingredients, not all smoothies are created equal. To lose weight with smoothies you need take care that your smoothies include a variety of nutritious vegetables and fruits. The majority of the ingredients should be low fat and low calorie. This does not mean that your smoothie won't be delicious, however. You can make smoothies that are highly addictive because they taste so delicious!

Smoothie recipes that encourage weight loss and improve your health are simple to find online and in many recipe books.

You can hasten your weight loss, boost your energy, enhance your health and improve your appearance all by adding nutritious tasty smoothies to your daily regimen. So try adding smoothies to your menu today and start to see those extra pounds disappear and the new healthy you begin to emerge. Lose weight with smoothies!

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Bill Brine

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Make Money Online in a Home Business 080918

Make Money Online in a Home Business 080918
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome once again to my ongoing series of tips for those of you who are trying to make money online with a home business. Today we'll look at 10 ideas for increasing the order rates for your products:

1. Set up a reward program for repeat customers, and for referrals. This will keep people revisiting your home business website and buying your products. Sample rewards could be small gifts, discounts, discounts on future purchase, etc. Be creative.

2. You can increase traffic to your website by publishing ezines for other home business websites. You could do it at no charge and in return just ask for a sponsor ad in each issue.

3. Another way to increase traffic: trade endorsement ads with other ezines. These types of ads give your message instant credibility and will pull more hits and sales than simple classified ads.

4. Test your ad copy before you start taking orders. Tell your visitors to email you if they want to be notified when you launch a new product.

5. Get your visitors excited about your product by letting them know how excited you are about it. Tell them why you're excited and use exclamation points.

6. Use incentives to get referrals if you don't have an affiliate program. Tell people when they refer customers you will reward them with free products.

7. Tell your visitors the reason why you're having a sale so they don't think your products are cheap. It could be a holiday or seasonal sale or a clearance sale.

8. Do not overload your home business website with high tech gadgets such as fancy flash, videos that play immediately, etc.. They can create a slow loading web page and distract people away from your offer.

9. Eliminate words, phrases, and paragraphs in your ad copy that aren't selling or supporting your product. This will stop people from getting bored with your ad.

10. Keep people at your home business website as long as possible. Allow them to download free ebooks, sign-up for contests, use free online services, etc.

There you are, more ideas you can implement in your home business strategy to help you make money online.

Stay tuned for more in this series.

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Make Money Online with Blogging - But Not At Wordpress!

Make Money Online with Blogging - But Not At Wordpress!
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Most everyone who knows anything about internet marketing knows that blogging is a great way to drive traffic to a business website. Put up a blog, start posting some unique content, and include links to your business website. Post new articles regularly and often, and you will start seeing Google pay more attention to your business website. This is a very important step on the road to helping your business make money online.

You may have heard that Wordpress is great software for blogging. That's true, but you need to be very careful. Whatever you do, DO NOT set up a blog at Wordpress.com. You need to own your own domain, upload the software, and set it up where you have total control.

Here's why:

I set up a blog on Wordpress.com to promote a home business website. Since I never do anything black hat, but always employ standard and ethical internet marketing techniques, I did not read the Wordpress TOS before I set up the blog. I figured that Wordpress, like other free blogging sites, would welcome unique content giving great information to others who are struggling to build an online business and make money online.

Big mistake!

A couple of weeks after setting up the blog and posting regular unique content, I was happy to see that other blog owners were linking to my articles and I was starting to get some traffic.

Then suddenly my blog was deactivated by Wordpress for "violation of the Terms of Service". What???

As it turns out, Wordpress does not welcome business-related blogs at their site. Anything else is OK, as long as you are not trying to promote a business.

Here is a quote from their TOS:

"here are some examples of blogs that are banned from Wordpress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of "spam blogs", or splogs, and we will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported):

* Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it's gone!

* SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. Wordpress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

* Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes ("Make six figures from home!!", "20 easy steps to top profits!!", etc). To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.

* Warez blogs: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc.
Automated blogs: Blogs that are generated by computers, including randomly generated blogs, blogs that re-publish press releases, marketing material, search engine results, link dumps or any other mass-produced content."

I was doing none of these things, but Wordpress deactivated my blog anyway. I have not bothered to try to get them to reactivate the blog, since I know from others who have experienced this, that the geeks at Wordpress are very unresponsive.

Fortunately, I have saved all my posts and I will set up a new blog at a site which I own and control.

So, lesson learned: stay away from Wordpress.com if you are trying to promote a business. Set up blogs only on domains that you own and control. Don't let Wordpress.com, the Big Brother of the Internet, control how you run your business!

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Weight Loss Advice 15

Everyday Weight Loss Advice 15

This is the last in my ongoing series of weight loss advice articles. I hope you have found this advice useful. Here are today's tips:

1. Stop slouching in your chair! Try to maintain an erect posture with your tummy tucked in. Slouching is a very bad habit. It is bad for your back, and it also contributes to your flab. It is your way of saying yes to a comfortable position that detracts from your weight loss program. Always make it a point to sit as erect as you can. This is also a terrific way to ward off back problems.

2. If you have a banister rail or a balustrade that will support you, sit on it and pump your legs as if you are riding a bicycle. Be careful not to fall off! This might sound like a crazy idea, but by doing crazy things like this, you are in fact not missing a single chance to lose that weight. It is a way of keeping your mind alert all the time. Try to fit some form of exercise into everything that you do and into every situation in which you find yourself.

3. Most people tend to put on weight around the mid section. Our tummies seem to have minds of their own. Here is a sure shot method to reduce that flab around your waistline: breathe in as strongly as you can, and, as you do so, tuck in your tummy as much as you can. Hold it like this for a few seconds and then slowly release your breath, taking care not to let out your tummy. Try to keep breathing like this as often as you can. Aim for 50 or more times a day. After the first day, you should feel the muscles of your stomach tightening each time you do this. That's when you know you are on the right track. If you practice this without fail for 20 days, at the end of the twentieth day, you will have lost at least an inch around your middle.

4 Here is a list of various exercises and the number of calories that are burned by each exercise during a 20-minute workout. Choose what you can do best, and choose something that you will enjoy doing on the long run. The choice of the exercise is completely up to you. Try to do whatever exercise you choose for at least twenty minutes. It is only after you do the exercise for twenty minutes that the actual calorie burning sets in.

Aerobics: 200-250 calories
Bicycling, Stationary: 250-300 calories
Bicycling, Actual: 300-400 calories
Running, 5-6 mph: 300-350 calories
Stair climber: 200-250 calories
Swimming laps: 350 calories
Walking briskly: 150-180 calories

You can see that even walking is good for you. If you really find your days to be too full to fit in any other form of exercise, then walking is your best bet. Walk as much as you can. Try getting to places and leaving places a little early. This will give you time to walk.

Well, that's it for my series of weight loss advice articles. The ball is now in your court, so what are you waiting for? Get rid of those extra calories and pounds and try to enjoy life the best you can without inviting all those terrible diseases that come with a few extra pounds.

Good luck with your weight loss program!

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Bill Brine
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Weight Loss Advice 13

Weight Loss Advice 13

Are you feeling overloaded with weight loss information? You're not alone. There is so much information out there today that it can get confusing, and each and every program is hyped as the answer to your prayers. In reality, of course, there is no foolproof way of knowing what works and what doesn't. There is no way of knowing if the diet is one that enables you to lose weight and then keep it off. This is what is most important.

When considering any weight loss program, start by trying to determine if the diet has a scientific basis for its claims. Have there been any significant trials done to ascertain if people have been able to lose weight effectively? Is there any data to show how successful the program participants are in keeping the weight off after 1, 5 or 10 years? Do your research.

Did you know that you can lose weight by eating a diet high in a particular type of fat?. This fat is called a MUFA - monounsaturated fatty acid. MUFAs are the good fats you find in food like peanuts, olive oil and avocados.

Current research has demonstrated that MUFAs help to seek out and reduce your belly fat. They all also have additional health benefits: they help to lower cholesterol levels in your blood, and they lower your risk of heart disease and strokes. Other studies have shown that MUFAs can also help fight diabetes. Experts believe that MUFAs prevent and even eliminate central fat distribution in your body.

One of the most difficult things about any weight loss program is usually the diet. Whatever program you choose, you will be reducing the amount of food you consume, or you will be replacing those foods you crave with foods that are not all that interesting until you get used to them. This means that, at least for a time, you will be left feeling unsatisfied and hungry. This is a another benefit to MUFAs: their higher fat content will have the effect of satisfying your appetite for a longer period of time. As a result you will be less likely to want to snack, and you will also be less likely to have cravings for sweets.

As with any weight loss program, it is advisable to add some exercise to your dietary regime to encourage your body to lose weight more effectively. With as little as 10 minutes exercise, your brain will begin to produce beta endorphins. These chemicals will calm you down, regulate your stress hormones and make you feel good. A recent study demonstrated that the secretion of beta-endorphins can actually offset the belly bloating effects of cortisol and insulin.

An exercise plan that will help you with weight loss will take no longer than 25 minutes a day. The plan consists of three parts:-

1. A cardio component - this can be as easy as walking

2. A strength training program to build lean muscle

3. A Pilates-based workout - this is excellent for building your core strength

A combination of these will provide all you need for a successful weight loss regimen. Remember, its all about balance. With a good healthy nutrition program, combined with sensible eating habits, plus some daily exercise, in time you will be successful in your weight loss efforts.

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Bill Brine

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Make Money With Better Banner Ads

Make Money With Better Banner Ads
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Have you ever tried to sell something via banner ads?
Banner ads are not as effective as they used to be, but if you use banner ads correctly you can still make money. Here are 10 tips to help you with your banner ad campaigns:

1. Use reverse psychology when designing your banner ads. You could tell people not to click on your banner ad. For example "Don't Click Here Unless You Want to Make Money".

2. Make your banner ad words as attractive as possible. Use words like ultimate, powerful, sizzling, hot, etc. Your words should relate to and highlight your total offer.

3. Offer a discount on your banner ad. People are always looking for good deals. You could offer a percentage discount, dollar discount, buy one get one free discount, etc.

4. Use a testimonial on your banner ad. This will give people proof they aren't wasting their time clicking on your banner ad. The testimonial should include enough information so they understand the offer.

5. If you can have a famous and respectable person on your banner ad representing your product, web site or service, people will click because they'll trust them.

6. Use a strong guarantee on your banner ad. You could include the guarantee as a headline for your offer. Offer things like double or triple your money back guarantee, lifetime money back guarantee, etc.

7. Tell people to click on your banner ad. Newbies to the internet may net even know they can click on banners. Just having the phrase "click here" on your banner will increase your clickthroughs.

8. Advertise a trial or sample offer. This will tell people there is no risk or obligation if they click on your banner ad and try out your product or service.

9. Tell people the major benefit of your product, web site or service on your banner ad. It could be benefits like make money, lose weight, increase energy, save money, save time, etc.

10. Advertise a free offer on your banner ad. People love free stuff. The freebie should relate to your target audience. If the freebie is attractive to them they will click.

Stay tuned for more tips about how to make money in future articles.

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Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine
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Weight Loss Advice for Every Day 12

Weight Loss Advice for Every Day 12

Welcome once more to my series of daily articles about things you can do every day to help you with your weight loss plan. Here are today's tips:

1. Try doing pelvic rotations when nobody is watching. The mid section of your body is the part that gets the least amount of exercise. That is probably why weight gain is mostly seen in that section. It is hard to lose weight around your midsection for the same reason. The best thing you can do is to consciously try to give that part of your body a little bit of exercise. Stomach crunches might be too strenuous an exercise to start off with, but rotations are relatively mild. This is the best way to tighten every muscle in that midsection.

2. Develop proper posture by tucking in your tummy and inflating your chest whenever you are walking. Do not let your tummy hang above your belt line. Bring it under the belt. Each time you tuck in your tummy, you will feel the pressure on the muscles of your stomach. This tightening and loosening of these muscles is even better than stomach crunches.

3. Did you know that breathing exercises also help with weight loss? If you perform the breathing exercises properly, you will find that you can exert a lot of pressure on the muscles around the mid section. You will feel these muscles tighten each time you breathe in or out. So go ahead and breathe properly, it is good for you.

4. Try yoga. Yoga is one of the best ways to supercharge your weight loss program. One of the benefits of yoga is that you learn to control virtually every muscle and joint of your body, which will really help you with your weight loss regimen.

Stay tuned for more weight loss tips in tomorrow's article.

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Bill Brine

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Weight Loss Tips 11

Weight Loss Tips for Every Day 11

Welcome back. Once again here are some tips you can incorporate into your everyday life to help you with your weight loss program:

1. Wiggle your toes and your fingers whenever you can. This is a great stress buster, and it gives you a chance to at least work your hand and leg joints. This will tell you how sore they are. If their condition is so bad, What about the rest of your body?

2. When watching TV, walk around during commercial breaks. If you want to sit all evening with your eyes glued to the tube, then do so. But at least spare your eyes the agony of a commercial break. When the next commercial flashes on screen, instead of channel surfing, get up and take a walk. Reach over and try to touch your toes or do some simple exercise that will at least get the blood flowing in your veins.

3. Turn on music and dance wildly. Let your hair down once in a while. Go back to the days of your childhood. Close the door of your room, turn on your sound system to the highest volume possible (but a little lower than the level at which your neighbors start to complain) and then do the wackiest dance that you can think of. Jump on your bed and jump off it again. Just get moving!

3. Carry a soft flying disc or Frisbee with you. Toss it around and get up to fetch it. This is also an excellent way to beat stress. It makes you feel good to throw something away forcefully when you are all worked up. And since the thing that you throw is something soft, you can't damage anything. It is not really the throwing part that we are interested in. It is the fetching part. Each time you get up to fetch it back; you are giving yourself a chance to stretch those muscles and joints

4. If you are taking a taxi somewhere, get off a block before your destination and walk the rest of the way. You might not have time to fit in long walks in your busy schedule, so this is one way of ensuring that you at least get to walk for a little bit every day. If you take the bus or the subway, get off at an earlier station and see if you can walk the rest of the way. If you drive to work, see if you can get space in a parking lot that is a little further away from your office.

It's all about moving as much as you can. Keep moving and you will be successful with your weight loss program.

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Bill Brine

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How To Succeed in a Home Business

How To Succeed in a Home Business
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

We all want to have a viable home business that offers financial security and time to enjoy life. However, looking for that "cash cow" can sometimes mean that you can fail to realize what it really means to market online.

The first thing to remember when working a home business is this: do not to try to do everything at once! You will come across tons of gurus online who tell you to do all sorts of things that will make you fabulously successful. What you have to do is to successfully separate the real from the fictional. That is not always easy to do. Look at the sales letter and see if there are exaggerated claims such as, "Purchase this item and you will never need any other marketing tools" or "This particular item will be so easy to use that you will have thousands of dollars in your bank account next day". Claims such as these are a definite indication that you are being hyped. Only one situation will bring you success online: hard work, diligence and service to your customers.

Always, always, spend time researching your niche, your marketplace and your competition. Your customers have a certain mindset. They have a certain way they like to shop. They have a certain way they will find your website. The list is endless. You must make it easy for them to find out about you, your business, your products, your attitudes, your service policies, and your abilities. Do not hide behind your computer. Make it easy for your customers to contact you. Check out other websites in your niche and see what they are doing. Can you offer a better product, solution or package? Can you offer a better price?

Price points for products or services can make or break a home business. You do not have to have the highest price or the cheapest offer, but you do have to provide value for the dollar or you will not get repeat customers. Repeat customers are your bread and butter, so do all that you can to keep people coming back for more. It takes a lot to get a customer to your website, so you had better be prepared to do more than one follow up to complete that sale. You need to decide how you will accomplish this. Will you use autoresponders, an ezine or newsletter, a blog? How will you correspond with your website visitors to continue to convince them of your integrity and honesty and build a trusting relationship? You need to decide this before you even design your website.

You will need the proper tools to build a home business online. Consider the purchase of such tools as part of your research and development expenses. You will need one or more domain names, a webhost, a product or service that you own and can profit from, a way to build a website either by yourself or with a web designer, and multiple ways to bring traffic to your website. Without any of these components, your online home business will not be successful.

All of this will require a lot of work. Building any business takes time and effort. There is no short cut, despite what the gurus might say. There will be a lot of late nights and time spent in front of the computer before you see success in your business. If anyone tells you differently, that is a good sign that you need to run, not walk, to the next website! Of better yet, stop looking at all the offers you get about the latest and greatest tools, and start actually building something!

Continue to believe in yourself and in your product or service and you will soon operating a successful and viable home business. Keep a positive attitude and you will avoid countless mistakes. Trust your instincts and watch out for hype. Continue to build and you will reap the rewards of having a successful online business can make you very happy.

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Work At Home Business Ideas: Print Brokers

Work At Home Business Ideas: Print Brokers

Can you imagine a work at home business that is always in demand, thrives in any economic condition, and requires no special skills other than the ability to read and write?

Can you imagine a work at home business you can start on Monday for less than the cost of a tank of gas, and can have people practically begging you to take their money by Friday?

Believe it or not, there is such a business. It is called print brokering. Starting and operating a work at home business as a print broker may just be a perfect business.

Think about this for a moment. Business people need business cards, printed forms, and documents. Every business, club, group, or organization in any town, city, or county... need and use various printed forms and documents in doing business. And, they all need these forms and documents over and over again. Virtually any business or business person uses at least two or more types of documents or forms that need to be printed.

As a work at home business print broker, you simply take orders and forward them to printers who do the work for you wholesale, and then ship the work to your customers.

Operating a work at home business as a print broker is quite straightforward, and will grow to make as much money as you desire without paying a penny for advertising or getting more customers. How is this be possible? It is possible because of a concept in the print business known as co-op printing. One customer's non-conflicting document is printed on the back of another customer's document.

Using this concept, you, as a print broker, can easily grow your work at home business to make as much money as you desire... without spending one red cent on advertising.

Here's an example: Norah's beauty shop needs to drum up some more business, and Norah decides to have 1,000 flyers printed up on color paper to distribute locally. Local printers would charge about $50, plus tax for the job. You offer the same service for $40... if Norah allows you to print your non-conflicting discount printing services flyer on the back of her flyer. The beauty shop saves 25% on the cost of printing, and you get 1,000 of your advertisements printed and distributed free or charge.

The beauty shop is happy, and you are happy. It is a win-win situation for both of you. However, note what just really happened: you were actually paid to advertise and grow your work at home business because your printer only charged you $25 for the order. 1,000 people and businesses will see your discount printing services... which will cause more orders to come rolling in without any effort or expense on your part. And, you can repeat this free money making work at home business growth technique as often as you desire by offering co-op printing services to other customers and businesses.

Be careful with this technique, however. Many work at home business print brokers have used this technique too often, and found themselves overwhelmed with orders that they cannot handle on a quick enough basis.

There is probably no other work at home business you can imagine that is so easy, costs so little to start, recession proof, and actually pays you to grow it.

Of course, this is a simplistic view of this work at home business. There would still be a lot of legwork to set up the business, find and strike deals with discount printing services, and do your initial advertising. But I think it is an intriguing idea.

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Make Money Online Tips

Want To Make Money Online? Defeat Your Competition
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Are you struggling to make money online in your work from home business? Here are some tips that might help.

One of the best ways to make money online is to scout out your competition and offer things that they don't offer. Here are some ideas to consider:

1. Offer free useful original content. If your website is the only place where your visitors can find this stuff, your home business website will get lots of visitors.

2. Offer your visitors free software. Most people like to find good deals on software for their computers. If the software is free, that is even better.

3. Hold free contests or sweepstakes. Most people like to win things. If you can fulfill that need, people will stop by to visit.

4. Provide a free web directory. Create a directory of home business websites on a popular topic that will attract your target audience.

5. Offer a free ezine. Most people love to get free information that's emailed to them regularly. This saves them time and money.

6. Make your home business website look professional. You want to have your own domain name, easy navigation, attractive graphics, etc. This inspires trust and confidence in your visitors. A professional look and feel will go a long way to help you make money online.

7. Let people read your ad before they get to your freebie. When you use free stuff to lure people to your home business website, list it below your ad copy.

8. Attract the target audience that would buy your product or service. A simple way to do this is to survey your existing customers.

9. Test and improve your ad copy. There are many people who write an ad and never change it. Make sure you get the highest possible response rate.

10. Give people an urgent reason to buy now. Many people are interested in your product but they put off buying it until later and eventually forget about it.

Stay tuned for more tips on how to make money online in future articles.

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Weight Loss - Your Big Belly

Weight Loss - Your Big Belly

It seems that everywhere you look these days, you see an advertisement for a weight loss product. We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic, and advertisers and product manufacturers are itching to cash in. You see so many compelling commercials to sell you on why a particular weight loss product is the best. Weight loss claims are subtle enough to stimulate the imagination and create the illusion of benefits in your mind.

Have you considered purchasing an exercise machine?

What about diet pills. Have you ever talked to your doctor about these drugs?

Have you walked into a health shop and looked for information about weight loss, fat-burning or muscle-building supplements?

Have you bought the latest fad diet book?

Have you done a Google search or watched TV and listened to a fitness guru talk about an amazing new diet that helps you to lose weight in record time?

Have you searched the web for information about diet, nutrition or weight loss programs?

If you have done any of the above then the chances are you've been told a lot of things that are just not true!

It is an unfortunate fact that if you are looking for honest and accurate information about nutrition and effective weight loss, you will find that it is hard to come by these days. Nearly everyone has been misled at one time or another. Now, it could be that the so called "guru" thinks that the information they are giving is correct and may have been misled themselves. But to ensure that you are receiving or giving accurate and honest information you need to look very carefully at the scientific evidence surrounding the claims.

One of the most important principles in any weight loss program you may follow is to be able to see visible results quickly. Getting rid of that big belly can be a great incentive for most people. Better to get rid of it from the start than be left with it at the end of your diet.

So what causes this big belly?

Ingesting foods that your body cannot tolerate can cause inflammation. This is one of the main reasons for a bloated belly, especially if that belly is of the pot belly variety. Inflammation and excess gas caused by undigested food can be a major cause of both inflammation and a bloated belly.

Most people who have tried any weight loss program will be familiar with the term "water retention". Although this can often be more prevalent in the ankles and other joints. it can also be a contributory factor for a swollen midsection.

For weight loss to take place it is advisable to address these underlying intolerances first, especially if you want to a flat belly not a fat belly as a result.

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Bill Brine

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Everyday Weight Loss Advice

Everyday Weight Loss Advice 8

Welcome to another in my ongoing series of weight loss advice. Once again, we will explore some of the many ideas you can implement in your life to help you with your weight loss program. Let's get started. Today we'll continue our focus on exercise.

1. It is important to stop exercising when your body has had enough. There is no sense in pushing it. When you have worked out for a considerable time, your body will start giving you signals. Heed those signals. This is particularly true in the initial stages. Take it one step at a time. Stop when you are out of breath or when a certain part of your body tells you that it has had enough. It is the cumulative amount of exercise over time that will help you with weight loss. Take it slow and easy.

2. If you want to increase your exercise time or the number of reps you do, do it gradually and not in sudden steps. This is easier said than done. Most of us have such hectic schedules that we think it is quite impossible to fit in time for exercise. This could not be further from the truth. Your body needs proper exercise. Just do it!

3. Select an exercise pattern to suit your lifestyle. All of us have different lifestyles and professions, so there is no sense in trying to follow the book strictly. Try to follow an exercise routine that is suitable for you. You have to understand that, even more important than the exercise itself, is sticking to it. So unless you choose something that can suit your lifestyle, you are not going to stick on to it.

4. Are you standing right now? Don't just stand there. Walk!. If you can walk around then do so. Do not stand in a fixed position. Pacing around is a good thing to do. If you are thinking deeply about something, try pacing around, it will aid in your thinking.

5. Are you sitting down? Don't just sit there. Stand up! If you can stand, then do not sit. The golden rule is to choose a position that is less comfortable.

6. Are you lying down? Don't lie down. Sit! The rule that we mentioned above rings true here as well.

7. Stop being a couch potato. It is the easiest thing in the world to become a couch potato: that shapeless thing that sits or reclines on a shapeless chair in front of the television and stupidly munches away at something fried!

If you are inclined to become a promising old couch potato, break the habit. What is the best way to do that? Take away that favorite chair of yours. In fact, it would be a very good idea if you could keep a chair that isn't too comfortable in front of the TV. This will discourage any tendency to become a couch potato.

I hope these daily advice articles are helping you with your weight loss program. Keep up the good work!

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Bill Brine

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Work At Home Business Advice

Work At Home Business Advice: Increase Your Profits With These 10 Tips
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome to another work at home business advice article. Today, let's look at more ways to increase your profits.

1. Gain an advantage over your competition by finding one benefit your competition doesn't offer. Use this as your main selling point (your Unique Selling Proposition).

2. If you don't already do so, start publishing an ezine for your work at home business. Design this ezine so it creates multiple free advertising streams. Ask readers to forward it to people they know, offer ad trades, etc.

3. Allow your website visitors to subscribe to an update ezine. Anytime you make changes to your web site they will receive an informative email.

4. Focus any articles that you publish on information that is relevant and important to your readers and other ezine publishers in your market. Your articles will get published more often. This means free publicity.

5. Use problems in your niche to attract online traffic. Find a common online problem and use your work at home business website to solve it. People will visit and see your ads.

6. Have an informative FAQ page at your work at home business website. Anticipate questions your prospects or visitors may have; this will help improve your sales ratio.

7. Improve your negotiation skills. This will improve your business because you're always negotiating ad swaps, supply prices, joint ventures, wages, etc.

8. Want to beat your competition? Give away a similar product or service that they charge for. It could be add on products, warranties, servicing, etc.

9. Build a larger online community by giving your visitors bonuses for participating on your message boards, chat rooms or forums. Try free products, ads, etc.

10. Instead of starting an affiliate program, start a referral program. Give people discounts and free products for referring people to your site.

Stay tuned for more work at home business advice in future articles in this series.

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Everyday Weight Loss Advice

Weight Loss Advice for Every Day 7

Welcome to another article in my series of weight loss advice for every day. Today we'll look at exercise in more detail. We all know that exercise is an important part of any weight loss program.

1. Check your weight before you start your exercise routine and keep checking for changes. But do not expect a radical change immediately. It might be one or two weeks before you notice some weight loss. In fact, your weight may increase for a bit as you turn fat into muscle. However it is crucial that you continue to monitor your weight. Even a few pounds or inches lost is a big achievement.

2. When you do notice a change, reward yourself. Now, don't go for some goodies like chocolates or sweets. After all, this is a weight loss program! Maybe you could go for a movie or buy yourself something like a new dress or a trinket. This is something that can keep you going.

3. You can take a day off from exercise every week. This is not just a very good idea but it is part of the exercise routine. Your body needs a day off from an exercise routine.

4. Exercise outdoors as often as possible. There are two advantages of exercising outside. One advantage is that it gives your body a chance to get much needed fresh air and sunshine. The second advantage is that the surroundings keep you perked up and it is a break from remaining cooped up all day long

5. Try to collect some information about exercise. There are a lot of things that you can do at home. Extensive research has been done on exercise and plenty of this information is easily available. You can try browsing the net or getting a book or two on how to exercise at home. This information will be useful to you to know how much you need to work out on each specific exercise in order to burn off the desired number of calories.

6. Try to get somebody to exercise along with you. It should be somebody committed to exercise and/or weight loss or else your interest might dwindle. One of the advantages of getting a committed person to exercise with you is that it keeps you going. There may be days when you feel just too lazy to crawl out of bed in the mornings. On such days, the knowledge that somebody is waiting for you is enough to slide out of bed. Another advantage is that you can discuss your progress and fears with another person and be a sympathetic listener to the other person as well. This is a great way to get motivated your self.

In the next article in this series, we'll continue looking at exercise, an important part of your weight loss program.

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Bill Brine
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine

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Tips to Make Money Online

Tricks to Make Money Online
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Wouldn't it be great if you knew some easy tricks to make money online on the internet? Now, the word "tricks" implies a short cut or a cheat of some sort. As a general rule, using a short cut is bad news for anyone looking to build an online business. Building an online business properly requires a plan, then a foundation, and then a structured system of making money.

However, there are some "easy" tricks to make money on the internet. The word "easy" is a bit of a misnomer here - each of these tricks will require that you know exactly what you are looking for and that you have some skills to pull them off.

For example, Ebay recently changed its policies so you can no longer sell digital products in auctions. A lot of people went out of business overnight. The more savvy Ebay marketers used a great trick to keep using this service - they now offer their digital products as physical products in the form of CD's and DVD's. To save even more time with this trick you can use a product fulfillment service to take care of everything for you.

This change actually made things better for the marketers who did not give up. Now there is a lot less competition, so there is a much higher conversion rate for the products.

This is a good example of 'going with the flow' in an online business. Instead of throwing up your hands and saying "I'm out of business", these business owners looked at the problem and said "How can I sell the same products in a different manner?". This is how you operate an online business. This is how you make money online.

Next is a neat trick to make money online through Clickbank:

- Find a product that is selling well (high gravity).
- Grab yourself a domain name that incorporates the name of the product.
- Install a Wordpress blog on that domain.
- Write a Press Release announcing the site and submit it to one of the online Press Release Services.
- Write an article to review the product and post it to the blog.
- Hire someone (or do it yourself) to write 10 articles related to the product for you and add them to your blog on a regular basis. Make sure your affiliate link is in the article somewhere. This is common practice for affiliate marketing.
- Now here is the real trick: rewrite those articles at least 50% and then submit them to article directories, including a bio box which sends people back to your website.

You will find you can make money online very quickly this way.

Another trick to make money online:

- join a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) program.
- create an ebook full of relevant information about the CPA offer you want to promote.
- Add your ebook to as many free ebook directories as you can find. Inside your ebook have a statement saying that the book can be distributed or sold by anyone. This will create a viral effect and your ebook will be floating around all over the internet bringing you CPA cash for years to come.

And, of course, my favorite trick to make money online:

Join us at Its Good Business where you will build a solid business by simply buying customers. No cold calling, no website development (unless you want to), no marketing to acquire or retain customers (unless you want to), and all the free training you will need to build a serious walk away income.

Check Out Its Good Business
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Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine
Its Good Business
Its Good Business Blog
Its Good Business Forum
Its Good Business Links

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Everday Weight Loss Advice

Everyday Weight Loss Advice: Creating your Weight Loss Program

So, the time has finally come that you realize that you need to lose weight. But, what plan will you follow to help you with your weight loss goals?

There are a certainly lot of plans and methods available on the internet to help with weight loss. Have you ever thought about creating your own plan for weight loss? Weight loss programs can serve as motivation and as a guide for a lot of people, and have helped them realize their goals for weight loss. Programs for weight loss, whether they be local or online, can give you a plan to follow. You may also like the idea of doing your own thing.

So how should you proceed with the creation of your own weight loss program?

Well, the first thing to do is educate yourself. Become familiar with the different types of diets that are out there. Be aware of fad diets, and supplements that can do more harm than good. After doing some reading, you may find yourself putting together several components from different diets, thereby building your own unique diet.

The most important thing is to eat healthy, no matter what diet you pursue. When creating your own weight loss program, you need to eat healthy, and avoid situations and ideas that will cause you to not eat enough. Calories, fat, carbohydrates and sugar are all important in your diet, and it's important to not eat too much - or too little - of any one food. Depending on your personality type, you may be able to allow junk food in your diet once in awhile, rather than eliminating it forever. Or you may allow yourself cheat days every so often.

You need to keep a close watch on your diet.

No matter what kind of weight loss program you decide to follow, it is important to keep track of what you're eating. Keeping a journal of calorie intake, along with sugar and fat intake will keep you aware of what you consume. It also helps you in real life: soon you'll have all kinds of food and the caloric content memorized. Big bonuses if you weigh and measure everything - after a bit of time you will be able to eyeball anything and know how much you're getting.

You must exercise to lose weight.

Exercise is important. But don't let having to exercise along with dieting put you off from starting a weight loss program. It is perfectly ok to start a diet and then begin exercising down the road. If you are obese, you will most likely not be able to do much exercise anyway when first starting out. But stick with it: as your weight loss adds up, you will be able to exercise more and even like it.

You may not like the idea of visiting a gym an exercising around other people. That's fine. There are lots of home exercise programs and equipment you can use. Your best bet; just start walking! Everyone can do that.

It can he difficult to stay motivated to exercise. If you need support, ask friends, your partner or a coworker if they would like to accompany you. Get an "exercise buddy" and challenge each other to go a little further or do a few more reps each day.

Put your weight loss program in writing.

If you have a plan of action for your weight loss program, write it down! Record any exercise you participate in, as well as what you eat. It can be a great motivator as you try to improve with each passing day. Also be sure to measure and weigh yourself no more than once a week. It is a great motivator to see those pounds dropping off and the waist getting thinner.

Creating your own weight loss program can be a challenge and a huge motivator for you to succeed with your weight loss goals. I hope you are successful with your weight loss program.

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Bill Brine
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine

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Make Money Online Advice

Make Money Online Advice: Autoresponders
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Are you trying to make money online with a home business? One of the many ways to get your message out and promote your products is to use email autoresponders.

Listed below are 10 innovative ways to use your autoresponder to help you promote and sell your home business products so you can make money online.

1. Use your autoresponder to collect leads. Your autoresponder will provide you with an email digest of the email addresses of everyone who requests information.

2. Use an autoresponder to publish a price list of all your products and services. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material.

3. Publish free reports in autoresponder format. These reports should be related to your home based business or your website. Giving away free stuff will quickly increase your traffic.

4. Use your autoresponder to publish a survey to collect vital customer satisfaction information. This type of information will help you serve your customers better.

5. Instead of answering every customer question that's emailed to you, publish a "Frequently Ask Questions" in your autoresponder. This will save you time and money.

6. You could publish your home based business testimonials or endorsements in autoresponder format if you don't have enough room in your ad copy. It's more effective to include all of them.

7. Provide back issues of your ezine archives in an autoresponder. This will give your subscribers and web site visitors easy access to them.

8. Publish your entire web site in autoresponder format. Sometimes visitors don't have enough time read your entire site. They could print it out and read it offline.

9. Do you publish an ebook? Offer it in autoresponder format. Your visitors won't have to download it or have the software to read it right away.

10. Publish the terms and conditions to any business transactions in autoresponder format. This could include return policies, purchases, refunds etc.

Think out of the box and you can come up with more creative ways to use your autoresponder to market your home business products and services.

Stay tuned for more articles in my series of advice for online home businesses. Now go make money online !

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Everday Weight Loss Advice

Everyday Weight Loss Advice

Here we are again with more everyday advice to help you with your weight loss plan.

1. Do not completely deprive yourself of the foods that you love. Go ahead eat them, but only for flavor and only once in a while. There are many things which you have to avoid from your diet but which you may have an undying craving for. Do not avoid them altogether. You could call them cheat foods and indulge in them once in a while. But take care just to tingle your taste buds, don't overeat. Instead of that, share them with others.

2. Watch your intake of fat. Each fat gram contains 9 calories. By reading the total calories on a food item and knowing the quantity of fat, you can estimate the % of fat, which should not exceed 30% of the calories from that food.

3. Go easy on salt. Too much salt is one of the causes of obesity and high blood pressure. Make it a point to really cut down on salt. Try to bring down your salt intake to half of what it was last year. Here's a great tip: make a cup of tea out of ground parsley and have a cup once a day. This will reduce your salt cravings over time.

4. Use cholesterol free butter. Bear in mind that small changes like this can go a long way towards helping with your weight loss.

5. Stop frying food! Try baking food without fat. Baking is a far more healthier method of preparing food than frying. Baking requires less oil or fat.

6. Use a non stick frying pan for your cooking so that you do not have to add oil. The golden rule is to try and avoid as much oil as possible and a non stick pan is one solution to this problem.

7. Boil your vegetables instead of cooking them. Even better, eat them fresh. However if you do not like eating your vegetables raw, try steaming them without adding anything at all. This is probably the healthiest way to eat cabbages, cauliflowers and a host of other vegetables.

8. Carry parsley with you. Parsley is an excellent food to munch on in between meals. Not only is it good for you, but it is also a perfect way to freshen your breath.

That's all my advice to help you with your weight loss plan for today. Stay tuned for more!

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Bill Brine
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine

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Work From Home Business Advice

Work From Home Business Advice: Sell Your Products Now
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome once again to my ongoing series of work from home business advice. Today we're going to look at 10 ways to sell your products now. We'll discuss ways to design sales pages:

1. When writing the copy for your ad, try to make your reader visualize that they have already bought your product. Tell them what results they have gotten and how it makes them feel. They'll become emotionally attached before they buy.

2. Turn your ad into an article. This could be a story or a how-to article. This will lead them into your ad without knowing it's an ad. They will already be interested when they get to your sales pitch.

3. Show your reader that they are getting a bargain. For example, tell them the usual price you sell your product for is $97. Then tell them if they order today they can buy it for $69.97. A little-known tip here: if you end the price with the number 7, you will get more sales.

4. Direct your ad headline to your target audience. Your readers will feel important and belong to a select group of people who buy your product. For example; "Attention! Resale Estate Brokers! Discover A New Way To Increase Your Sales Ratios!"

5. Tell your reader how fast they can receive your product or service. Their buying decision may be based on how fast they can receive your product. They may need it by a certain deadline.

6. Benefits are the key to selling anything. Always use bullets to highlight the benefits of your product or service. Make them stand out in your ad. You can use dots, dashes, or circles to highlight them.

7. Give a money back guarantee that overdelivers. Instead of the normal timed guarantee, give them extra back. Tell them they can keep the free bonus or give them double their money back.

8. Offer surprise bonuses. This will raise your reader's curiosity and make them want to buy so they can find out what the surprise bonuses are.

9. Let your reader know this specific package will not be offered again. It is important to create urgency so that people will buy now. You can always sell the same product with different bonuses or at a different price.

10. Give them a couple of tips in your ad that will help them with their problem. This will give credibility to your work from home business, and gain your reader's trust to buy your products or services.

I hope you have found this short list to be of use. Stay tuned for more work from home business tips in future articles.

--------------------
Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine
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Everday Weight Loss Tips

Everyday Weight Loss Tips

Here we are once again in my ongoing series "Everyday Weight Loss Tips". Here are today's tips:

1. Believe it or not, you will each your weight loss goals if you make carbohydrates 50 to 55% of your diet. It is a myth that you should try to avoid carbohydrates when you are on a diet. Carbohydrates are a ready source of energy. But be sure to pay attention to the quality of the carbohydrates.

2. Proteins should make up 25 to 30% of your diet. Various processes are taking place in your body. Things are broken down and being rebuilt. Resistance has to be built up, recovery from disease is needed. For all this the body needs plenty of proteins.

4. Fats should only be 15 to 20 % of your diet.

5. Consider adopting a vegetarian diet. A vegetarian diet is a very healthy weight loss plan. There are a lot of advantages of keeping to a vegetarian diet. Make non-vegetarian food a weekend or once in a while event if you find it impossible to give up eating all that meat.

5. If you do eat meat, choose white meat rather than red meat. White meat, which includes fish and fowl, is much healthier than red meat, which includes beef and pork.

6. High fiber multigrain breads are better than white breads. This is a great way to increase the fiber content in your diet.

7. Reduce or eliminate your intake of pork. Pork is not something that can help you with your weight loss goals. So the less pork you eat, the better chances you have of losing weight. Remember that pork includes the pork products as well, like bacon, ham and sausages.

8. Limit your sugar intake. If you can't have things unsweetened go for sugar substitutes, or, better yet, Stevia.

9. Graze 5 to 6 times a day. Instead of sticking to just three meals a day, try grazing. Grazing means try having 5 or 6 smaller meals instead of three king sized meals. It is an excellent way of eating smaller quantities of food.

Stay tuned for more everyday weight loss tips in future articles.

Work From Home Business Advice

Work from Home Business Advice: More Ways to Increase Your Sales
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome to another article in my Work from Home Business Advice series. Today we'll look at more ideas for increasing sales for your work from home business:

1. Make your work from home business websites load much faster by cutting down on banner ads and start using more buttons. Button ads are smaller, take up less space, and load much faster.

2. Maximize the effectiveness of your banner ads. Don't just use the same ad on every banner. Use a variety to attract the greatest number of clickers.

3. Offer free advertising space to well known and respected companies on your work from home business website. This will help build your credibility.

4. People have been taught all their life to respect people in authority. Tell your visitors that you are the president or CEO of your business (which, in fact, you are!)

5. Offer people a free telephone consultation before they order your product. When they get to know you personally, it could convert to more sales.

6. Test the "bill me later option" on your website. Most people are honest and will pay you. It is a powerful little niche and could increase your sales.

7. Find a charity your target audience would likely support and commit to donating a percentage of your profits to this charity. Tell people on your ad copy that you will do this.

8. Hold a "buy the most wins contest" on your web site. Tell people each monthly winner will get their entire purchase refunded.

9. Attract visitors to your work from home business website by offering them a free course. The course can be set up in a follow-up autoresponder to send lessons daily.

10. Interview people related to your industry and get their permission to convert the interview into an article. Promote your website by submitting this article to ezines and article directories.

That's all for this article. Stay tuned for more advice designed to help you make more money in your work from home business.

Everday Weight Loss Tips 080830

Everyday Weight Loss Tips

Welcome once again to my ongoing series of articles presenting things you can do every day to help you wight your weight loss goals.

Here are today's tips and tricks:

1. As hard as it seems, try to count calories as you eat. Its a good idea to have an idea of the calories that most food items have. Fewer calories equals weight loss!

2. Do you feel that you have consumed more calories than you should have during the week? Then make sure that you work off those extra calories by the end of the week.

3. Stay away from fried food at all costs. Lots of hidden fats here, and bad fats as well.

4. Do not skip meals. The worst thing you can do while watching your diet is to skip a meal. It has just the opposite effect of what you want. You need to have at least three regular meals every day.

5. Eat fresh or frozen vegetables rather than cooked or canned vegetables. Try to eat your vegetables raw. When you cook them, you are in fact taking away nearly half the vitamins and nutrients in them. Canned vegetables will usually have all sorts of added ingredients that are not good for you, especially salt.

6. Do you like chocolates? Its OK to indulge very occasionally, but make chocolates a luxury and not a routine. Chocolates are not a food group! So do not indulge too much.

7. Make sure to choose a variety of foods from all food groups every day. This will help keep deficiency diseases at bay, and it will help you to experiment with a variety of dishes so you won't get bored with your diet.

8. Stay away from alcoholic beverages as much as possible. Alcoholic beverages too are not good for you. Beer can be fattening. Other alcoholic drinks may not be fattening by themselves, but after a couple of swigs you will be in no position to watch your diet and control your appetite. One glass of wine with dinner is probably OK.

9. Try to have breakfast within one hour of waking. It�s always best to have breakfast within an hour of waking up so that your body can charge itself with the energy it needs for the day. The idea is not to wait for yourself to get really hungry. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day but that does not mean that it should be the most filling meal of the day.

More tips to help you wight your weight loss program will be coming in future articles in this series...

Work From Home Business Advice

Work From Home Business Advice: Tips to Increase Sales
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome once again to my ongoing series of tips for your work from home business. Today I have some ideas that will help you to increase sales for your products:

1. Place a customer survey on your work from home business website. Be sure to offer your visitors a freebie for filling it out, otherwise the vast majority of website visitors will not bother. Surveys can give you valuable insight into your business and your customer base.

2. When creating ads for your work from home business products, turn your ad copy into an article or a story. Your prospects won't be as hesitant to read your ad and will become more interested in your product.

3. Enhance the power of your ad copy benefits by using attention getting words, highlighting keywords, using color, bolding key phrases, underlining, etc.

4. Offer your customers a variety of ways to order, contact you, navigate, etc. Give them lots of choices.

5. Design your work from home business website for your visitors, not for yourself. Put yourself in their shoes. Create your product for your visitors, not because you would buy it.

6. Get free advice from successful online work from home business owners. Participate in business forums.

7. Free bonuses are a great to create an urgency for your visitors to buy. Offer these bonuses only for a limited time with your main product.

8. Offer your customers extra add-on products at the point of purchase. For example, if they are buying an electronic toy, offer batteries with it.

9. Compliment your visitors in your ad copy. If they feel good about themselves, they will also feel good about buying from your website.

10. Investigate multiple streams of income for your home business website. For example: if you are selling business books, try to sell business services, business courses and business supplies as well. Google Adsense may be a good additional stream of income as well.

Stay tuned for other work from home business tips in future articles.

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More Everyday Tips to Lose Weight

Everyday Tips To Lose Weight 3

Welcome to another in my continuing series entitled Everyday Tips To Lose Weight. Here are today's tips and tricks:

1. Set scheduled times to have meals and stick to it. You can stretch these times by half an hour, but anything more than that is going to affect your eating pattern. The result will either be a loss of appetite or that famished feeling which will make you stuff yourself the next time you eat. This of course will defeat your efforts to lose weight.

2. Eat only when you are hungry. Don't use food as an excuse to fill time or to comfort yourself. Some of us have the tendency to eat whenever we see food. We use parties as an excuse to stuff ourselves. Understand that the effect of a whole week of dieting can be wasted by just one day�s party food. Whenever you are offered something to eat do not decline it completely, but just take off a nibble so that you appear to be polite and at the same time can watch your diet.

3. Stop snacking between meals! This is especially true if you have to travel a lot. When traveling, you may feel that the only time you can get a bite to eat is snacks and junk food. The main problem with most snacks and junk food is that they are usually less filling and contain a lot of fat and calories. Just think about French fries - tempting but terribly fattening. Remember your goal: lose weight!

4. If you must snack, snack on vegetables. You might get hunger pangs in between meals, but it is something that you can control. Even better, try munching on carrots. They are an excellent way to satisfy those hunger pangs and are good for your eyes and teeth.

5. Go easy on tea and coffee. Tea and coffee are harmless by themselves. It�s when you add the cream and sugar that they become fattening. Did you know that having a cup of tea or coffee that has cream and at least two cubes of sugar is as bad as having a big piece of rich chocolate cake?

6. Try to stick to black tea or coffee. Black tea or coffee can actually be good for you. Personally, I recommend tea rather than coffee. The caffeine in the coffee is not really good for you because it is an alkaloid and can affect other functions of your body like you metabolism.

I hope you are finding these tips useful for your efforts to lose weight. Stay tuned for more in future articles.

Home Business Advice

Your Home Business Should Give You Freedom
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

As home business entrepreneurs, we know that setting goals is crucial to our home business success. If you don't know where you are going, how will you know when you're there? Or, more importantly, when you're heading in completely the wrong direction?

As the owner of a home business, what is your goal? To make it to the end of the month with enough money in the bank to cover your expenses? To take a holiday for the first time in five years?

Every home business owner should have the same goal - sooner or later, to become independent of the business. Small businesses turn into big businesses only when they are able to operate smoothly without the owner being present. When you can stay away for a week, or a month, or a year, and return to find the business running better than before you left, you have the opportunity to do whatever you like - sell the business and start a new one, retire, buy a yacht and sail around the world.

True financial independence is the ability to live your life doing what YOU want to do. Do you really want to show up for work an hour early every day, leave late at night and never take a holiday, for the rest of your life? I know I don't!

What is the key to being able to walk away?

Simple: you need a system in place so that everyone in your business knows exactly what's expected of them.

Does your home business employ others? When you take on a new employee, how do they learn what they're expected to do? Does an existing employee take them in charge, explaining how things work? How can you be sure that the new employee is learning what you want them to know?

As the owner of the business, it's your job to ensure that a system is put in place as the business grows. The system will ensure that everyone knows what they need to know to do their job effectively.

How do you think companies like McDonald's are able to manage thousands of restaurants across the planet? McDonald's Head Office doesn't sell hamburgers. They sell franchises, and their customers are the franchisees. The most valuable asset they have is their system. It regulates what employees wear, the words they say to customers, how many seconds a patty is left on the grill. Every contingency is dictated by the system.

The system makes it possible for new employees to fit in. They are educated on 'how we do things around here'. They are taught the specifics of their job. They may be required to sign a performance agreement.

In a well-designed system, there is still space for individual creativity. Better ways of doing things should always be sought out and encouraged - and written into the system for the future.

The system provides the framework for ensuring that the business is never entirely dependent on any one person. If you own the business, your future depends on the quality of your system.

But you say that your business does not have employees? Well, this principle applies to us sole home business owners as well. We need to develop systems and processes to handle all the various tasks and to take action when the unexpected arises. And we need to put systems in place that will allow us to eventually walk away from the business and let it run on autopilot.

This is what we have done with the Its Good Business model that I often write about. Our system is simple: we buy customers, not leads. We all work as part of a team of experts building each other's businesses and training each other in our respective areas of expertise.

And it works. Do you know that, after only 3 months in this business, I could walk away right now and receive residual income for the rest of my life? And that income will continue to grow even if I do nothing.

Granted, it would only be a small income at this point, which is why I will stay involved for a few years yet. But my point is, that from day 1, our Its Good Business model is based on a system that will let you walk away from it whenever you have reached your income goals, and never have to worry about it again, except perhaps to buy more customers once in a while. How great is that?

Come see us at http://ItsGoodBusiness.net

You'll be glad you did...

More Everyday Tips to Lose Weight

More Everyday Tips to Lose Weight

Welcome once again to my series of articles presenting tips to lose weight. Here are some more tips to help you with your program:

1. Include foods in your diet that contain more water, such as tomatoes and watermelons. These foods contain 90 to 95 % water, so that there is nothing that you have to lose by feasting on them. They fill you up without adding to the calorie count. Cut the calories and you lose weight!

2. Stay away from sweetened bottle drinks, especially sodas. All those colas and fizzy drinks are sweetened with sugar, and sugar means calories. The more you can cut out on these sweetened bottle drinks, the better for you. So if you must drink sodas, then stick to diet sodas. Even better: just drink more water!

3. Eat fresh fruit instead of drinking fruit juice. Juice is often sweetened with sugar, but fresh fruits have natural sugars. When you eat fruit, you are taking in a lot of fiber, which is needed by your body, and fruits of course are an excellent source of vitamins.

4. If you do have a craving for fruit juice then go for fresh fruit juice instead of those that contain artificial flavors and colors. Or even better, try making your own fruit juice. Take care not to sweeten it with too much sugar! Instead of artificial sweeteners, try Stevia.

5. Choose fresh fruit rather than processed fruits. Processed and canned fruits do not have as much fiber as fresh fruit and processed and canned fruits are nearly always sweetened.

6. Increase your fiber intake. Your body needs a lot of fiber. Try to include in your diet as many fruits and vegetables as you can.

7. Go crazy on vegetables. Vegetables are your best bet when it comes to losing pounds. Nature has a terrific spread when it comes to choosing vegetables. And the leafy green vegetables are your best bet. Try to include at least one salad in your diet daily.

8. Eat intelligently. The difference between man and beast is that we are driven by intelligence while beasts are driven by instinct. don't just eat something because you feel like eating it. Ask yourself whether your body really needs it.

9. Watch what you eat. Keep a watchful eye on everything that goes in. Sometimes the garnishes and accompaniments can be richer than the food itself. Remember that it is the easiest thing in the world to eat something without realizing that it was something that you should not have eaten! Discipline yourself and you will lose weight.

10. Control that sweet tooth. Remember that sweet things generally mean more calories. It is natural that we have cravings for sweet things, especially chocolates and other confectionary. Go easy on these things and each time you consume something sweet understand that it is going to slow down your weight loss plan.

Stay tuned for more everyday tips to help you in your quest to lose weight.

Work From Home Business Advice

Work From Home Business Advice: Creating Sales Pages
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

At some point in your work from home business career, you will no doubt have to create a web page or sales letter to sell your products or services.

Since we are all not born salespeople, it can be hard to get it just right. You should study successful sales pages to get some tips from them.

Here are 9 strategies that I have come across when perusing sales pages:

1. Many advertisers use a hand written letter as part of the sales page instead of text. Write the ad on a piece of paper, scan it and publish the ad on your web page. A personal touch will always increase your sales.

2. Show before and after photos for your products on your web page copy. Show the problem picture and then beside it, show the picture of the resolution to the problem when they use your product.

3. Do you have some famous or respected people who have purchased your product? Publish that list on your sales page. People will think that if these people bought from you, they should also trust your work from home business and purchase your products. Make sure to get their permission first.

4. Include an article or review that has been written about you or your work from home business within your sales page. This will show people that your work from home business is respected and will increase your credibility.

5. Do you offer free bonuses on your sales page? Then list the dollar value beside each bonus. People will feel they're getting a good deal and it will increase the value of your product.

6. Include a good professional picture of yourself on your sales page. This will show people that you're not hiding behind your sales page and will increase their trust. Also, include your work from home business contact information below the picture and a brief statement or quote.

7. Make a commitment to donate a certain percentage of the product purchase price to a specific charity, and tell your potential customers about it. This will show them you really care. They may just buy your product to donate to the charity.

8. Ask your potential customers plenty of yes and no questions in your sales page. The questions should remind them of their problem and make them think about what will happen if they don't purchase your product.

9. Tell your potential customers they will receive a free prize if they find the five words in your sales page that are misspelled or spelled backwards. The longer you can keep someone reading your copy, the greater chance of them purchasing.

Selling is a fact of life in a work from home business. No sales, no profits! Follow some or all of these strategies when designing a sales page and your work from home business will thrive.

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Everyday Tips to Lose Weight

Everyday Tips to Lose Weight: The Importance of Water

Welcome to the second article in my series entitled Everyday Tips to Lose Weight. Each article will explore various strategies you can apply to help you lose weight.

Today we will look at the importance of water to your plan to lose weight.

We all need to drink plenty of water. Most people don't get enough water. Our bodies need a lot of water, so drink it! Water is not just a way to flush out toxins. If you have more water in your body, you will generally feel healthier and fitter. This itself will discourage any tendency to overeat. The best thing about water is that it has no calories at all.

First, start your day with a glass of cool water. Its a wonderful way to start your day, and you will only need a smaller quantity of your breakfast drink after that. A glass of water lets out all your digestive juices and lubricates the insides of your body. You may have your morning cup of tea or coffee but have it after a glass of water. It is good for you.

Drink a glass of water before you start any meal. Water naturally needs some space so that you will feel fuller without actually having to stuff yourself. One of the goals of losing weight is to eat less. You will eat less if you feel full even before starting the meal. Drink that water!

Also, be sure to have another glass of water while you are having any meal. This is another way of making yourself full so that you can actually rise from the table eating less. Instead of drinking it one gulp, take sips after each mouthful. This will help the food to settle faster so that you get that feeling that you are full.

And finally, have a glass of water after the meal. This again will contribute to feelings of fullness.

Water is such a remarkable thing, but seldom do we give it the credit that it deserves. Did you know that over 66% of your body weight is nothing but water? It�s amazing! Water also plays a vital role in weight control.

Stay tuned for more articles about strategies to lose weight.

-------------------
Bill Brine
PO Box 121, Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype: billbrine

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Home Business Tips

Home Business Tips: Boost Your Sales With These Ideas
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome to another segment of my ongoing series presenting home business ideas and tips. In this article are 10 ideas to help you increase sales and profits for your home business:

1. If you don't have a website for your home business, create one! A website is an extremely important part of your internet marketing strategy.

2. Your home business website should be a targeted resource center, full of all sorts of useful information for your target market. Choose one subject and build on it. You will gain repeat visitors that are interested in that topic. If you sell more than one class of product, build a targeted site for each different class of product.

2. Add a forum to your home business website. People love to interact with other people that have the same interests. Make sure to participate yourself as an 'expert' who can answer some of the questions being asked.

3. Want to increase your search engine rankings? Entice people to link to your home business website by giving them something free in return.

4. Trigger your reader's emotions in your ad copy. For example, if you sell a book on weight loss, tell them the feelings they'll get when they lose a lot of weight.

5. Ensure that your site looks good in all browsers and at all screen resolutions. You could be losing sales because it looks distorted in some web browsers or on smaller screens. Also, don't use too many large graphics - there are many internet users who still use dialup access. A slow-loading website is a sure way to lose sales.

6. More and more people are using cell phones to browse the internet these days. Create a mobile version of your home business website for these users.

7. Increase your sales by emailing full page ads to your ezine subscribers. Remember to tell people before they subscribe or they may consider it spam.

8. Ask people questions in your ad copy that make them think about their problems. For example: Do you want to be free of your debts?

9. Magnify the size of your prospects problem in your ad; show how your product can solve it. The bigger the problem, the more sales you will have. Focus on benefits and solutions rather than hype.

10. Always invest a percentage of your profits right back into your home business. Set a target percentage up front, and stick to it. Spend it on marketing, product improvement, customer service, advertising, outsourcing - basically anything that can improve your home business.

Stay tuned for more articles on home business.

Everyday Weight Loss Tips

Everyday Weight Loss Tips

Welcome to the first in my ongoing series about weight loss. In these articles I will be presenting things you can do every day to help you shed those pounds.

Once upon a time, the weight loss was not a problem. People ate well, and they worked all day at physically demanding jobs. As a result, they could eat almost anything they wanted in whatever quantities they wanted. And the food was more nutritious before big business got involved in the distribution and sale of food.

The world has changed so much since those days. Lifestyles have changed, and the comforts and facilities have increased. As a result, our state of physical well being has changed as well. Now most of us have sedentary jobs that demand little or no exercise at all. Modern farming and food distribution methods have stripped our foods of much of their nutrients, and processed foods give us nothing but taste and a lot of sugar and salt. And so, weight loss has become a major concern for almost everyone.

When we're young, this is not such a major concern, although in recent years even the youngest of our children are experiencing obesity problems. However, as soon as you turn twenty, you start showing signs of weight gain - and that in all the wrong places. It�s not about the hour glass figure or the perfectly sculpted and toned body. It is more about staying fit and remaining healthy to ensure a long, disease-free life. Every body knows that those extra pounds lead to serious long-term physical problems.

People everywhere are switching to a healthier lifestyle. The phrase "weight loss" has almost become a mantra. This series of articles will be dedicated solely to the cause of helping you with your weight loss program. Some of what you read may surprise you.

There is only one thing that you have to bear in mind. Weight loss does not happen by itself. There are only two ways to accomplish it:

The first is by watching what you eat and the second is by seeing to it that your body gets the exercise that it needs.

Stay tuned for future articles in this series where I will present some of my everyday tips for weight loss. My hope is that you will be finally able to shed those pounds by implementing small but important changes in your life.

Home Business Tips

Home Business Tips: Exploding Your Orders
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome to another article in my ongoing series about increasing sales for your home business.

Here are 10 tips that will definitely help you to explode your orders:

1. Persuade visitors to link to your home business website by giving them a freebie in exchange for their link. It could be content, software, free service, etc.

2. Link to websites that provide useful information or services for your visitors. If you have many useful links on your site, they may make it their start page.

3. Spice up your website's wording using plenty of adjectives. It gives your visitors a clearer vision of what you are explaining or describing to them.

4. If you use banner ads for marketing, don't make your banner ads look like ads. Most people ignore banner ads. Design them to look like content and have them click to read the rest.

5. Join affiliate programs that are related to the theme of your home business website. Your visitors will have little or no interest in affiliate programs that are not related to what they are looking for.

6. Market your website as a "free club" instead of a website. People enjoy belonging to groups. This will increase your repeat visitors and sales.

7. Interact with your online customers on a regular basis by setting up a forum or chat room. This will show them you care about them.

8. Check your website links on a regular basis to make sure they still work. After people click on one link, and it doesn't work, they usually won't bother wasting their time clicking on another one. They'll just go to another site where all the links do work.

9. Give visitors a positive experience when they're at your home business website. Provide them with original content and free stuff. They'll tell all of their friends about it.

10. Share customers with other businesses that have the same target audience. Offer their product to your customers if, in exchange, they do the same for you.

Stay tuned for more articles in this series about improving your home business.

Help Teens to Lose Weight

Teen Tips: Ways to Lose Weight

Are you the parent of a teenager looking to help him or her to lose weight? Here are some tips that may help..

These days, teenagers face more than just hormonal changes.

For a teenager, losing weight is a perpetual issue. During their times of raging hormones and attempting to adapt to their changing bodies and social roles, you'll find teens complaining about their looks, especially their weight.

The first think you need to do is to consult a doctor or dietitian to determine if your teenager is indeed overweight or if he/she needs to lose weight fast. If a teen is really overweight, then moral and emotional support is one of the most basic things needed to overcome their weight problems.

Weight loss and weight management is a long-term process and involves not just the person who is trying to lose weight. It also involves the people who prepare his or her food, as well as many other factors. Teenagers that have the support of their families show much better results in weight loss programs that those teens that try to lose weight on their own.

When trying to lose weight, be sure that you approach the process in the safest way possible. Recent medical studies recommend losing not more than about two pounds per week. Losing weight can be accomplished through a combination of programs, including exercise and decreased calorie intake. Make sure to get into a program that helps you lose weight the right way.

The medical community warns that it is unsafe to lose more than 2% of your body weight in a period of 24-48 hours. The results would be a decrease in aerobic performance and endurance. Meanwhile, losing more than 5% of your body weight in three to four days will have detrimental effects on your power, muscle endurance and strength, aerobic performances and even mental concentration. With such extreme programs to lose weight, the body also loses the ability to cool itself, which can cause a host of other problems.

Aside from the right exercise, you need to compliment this increased activity with the right diet. Avoid drinks that are high in calories like sodas, high-sugar juices, and other drinks. Stay away from low calorie drinks that are sweetened with sugar substitutes such as aspartame. These products have been proven to have serious detrimental effects over the long term. Make sure that you drink lots of water and fruit juices that do not have added sugar. This will help you stay away from those sodas.

It is best to take your program to lose weight one step at time. More often than not, we all tend to go back to our normal ways quickly if changes are introduced drastically. That's why it is better to move forward gradually rather than leaping two to three steps forward and finding yourself five steps back after a few weeks.

One great tip to reduce your food intake is to stop eating when you're already full. Avoid eating when you're emotionally unstable. This happens a lot, especially in teens with constant body changes.

When people eat because they are bored, lonely, or stressed, they tend to continue eating despite the fact that they are already full. Eat slowly since it will take about 20 minutes before your brain recognizes the amount of food in your stomach. A good strategy here is to put down your fork or spoon after each mouthful. Eat slowly, and take the time to really enjoy what you eat.

Be sure to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Try to replace most of your junk food intake with fruits or vegetables. Not only will you lose weight, but it will keep your heart and body healthy. Don't replace food groups or avoid eating them in your attempt at weight loss.

As a teenager, you should avoid such forms of diets since your body still needs the nutrients for growth and development. Diet pills are also a no-no. These pills can be very dangerous to your health even if taken with a doctor's prescription. It is better to go about losing weight the more natural way. It will create discipline and is more sustainable in the long run.

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Work From Home Business Tips

Work From Home Business Tips: 9 More Ways Increase Sales
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Welcome to another article in my continuing series on how to increase sales for your work from home business. Today we have 9 more ideas to consider:

1. Consider multiplying your marketing and advertising efforts on the Internet. How? Start an affiliate program or use viral marketing for products that you sell in your work from home business.

2. Increase the ratio of visitors that purchase your product(s). Make changes to headlines, offer a stronger guarantee, add testimonials, and so on. Be sure to track everything you do, and once you find something that shows an improvement in sales ratio, work on improving that.

3. Offer a free and informative ezine. This will uncover the strongest potential customers for your work from home business. The visitors that are very interested will subscribe to it.

4. Team up with your competition by starting an association for your specific industry. It could lead to a profitable partnership with them.

5. Search for your name and the name of your work from home business in newsgroups, discussion boards and forums. Some of the comments you find could help you improve your business.

6. Attract people to link to your work from home business web site. You could offer them a discount on the products you sell or give them free stuff for linking.

7. Develop your own opt in email list by giving your visitors a reason to give you their email address. Allow them sign up for free stuff or contests.

8. Create a "PR" web page for your business. On this page, place information items that could be considered newsworthy for ezines, newspapers, magazines, etc. Submit these items to online Press Release services as well.

9. Make sure your home business website links to websites that have written positive stories about your business. This will give both you and your business credibility.

As you can see, its all about getting your message out there in a positive manner without hype. Implement some of these strategies and over time you will see an increase in sales for your work from home business.

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Help Teens to Lose Weight

Helping Teens to Lose Weight
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master

Teenagers can be plagued by many health problems triggered by many factors. One of the most basic issues during this stage of life is the peer pressure to maintain a normal weight. Teens sometimes will take extreme weight loss measures to get to that "ideal" weight, even to the point of becoming anorexic.

Losing weight for teens requires discipline, perhaps more discipline than for adults. This has to be more than just skipping meals - all that will do is make you feel tired and haggard as you struggle with your weight loss program.

Want your teens to lose weight? Start at home. If the environment has erratic schedules, chances are the lifestyle is chaotic too, and this will affect your meal plans. Your teens can end up eating at fast food chains or they will keep busy in front of the TV nibbling junk food. Take the time to plan and serve healthy meals on a regular schedule. After all, the long-term health of you and your family is certainly worth more than any form of recreation.

Get a book which lists the calorie counts of various foo