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Getting traffic isn’t rocket science – it’s actually pretty easy when you know a few of the best tricks pro-bloggers are using every day to get more traffic to their blogs.

Create an not-so-secret inner circle of your best buddies.

Put together a list of your very best and most influential readers. These are the ones who regularly interact with you or post replies to your posts, share your posts with their followers, send you articles, buy your products and so forth.

Put these folks on your special inner circle list, and email them to let them know of their newly attained status. Let them know the benefits – they’ll get to see your posts before the general public and they’ll be apprised of any new offerings, updates and ideas before anyone else.

Solicit their feedback on your posts. This creates a sense of ownership for them and increases the odds they will go out of their way to share your content with their followers. Give them special benefits to thank them for their help, and offer to help them in return.

Make it brain dead easy to share your content.

If content is too difficult to share, your readers and inner circle are less likely to share it. So add the appropriate social sharing buttons for sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Write in-depth content that makes your readers look sexy-smart.

Here’s a little secret: People like to look super smart to their readers and friends. Okay, so maybe it’s not a secret. But the fact is, in-depth articles tend to get shared more because the people sharing them want their friends to think they read in-depth articles. Plus, when someone new lands on your in-depth article, they are more likely to subscribe to get even more info than if they land on a simple fluff piece.

Another secret: Posts with images, lists and videos will attract over 5 times more links than posts containing only plain text. So don’t stop at just the words – add things like images and graphs to make it share-worthy.

Cheat. Just a little.

This isn’t really cheating, but it sure feels like it. Look at your old content and find the pieces that are still relevant, whether they were written 3 months ago or a year ago. Now share them again via social media. This way you get new traffic without having to write new content – how awesome is that?

Write a mini-sales letter to promote each blog post.

Traditionally, when a blogger writes a new post she sends out the title and first paragraph to her list with an invite to click the link and read the rest. But the real meat of a blog post isn’t in that intro paragraph, which is why this method isn’t worth beans.

Instead, write a mini sales letter that gets the email reader curious and excited to know more. This doesn’t have to be long; 50 -100 of the right words is perfect. Build curiosity and show them what the big benefits / takeaways of reading your article will be, and your click-through rates could double if not triple.

That’s it – 5 simple tips to increase your blog traffic. Pick out your favorite and try it right now, then make a note to use the other 4 within the next 7 days and you’ll begin to see a real boost in your traffic within the month.

When you make the decision to earn income from the internet you will need to go through a set up process to be ready for business.

Following are the basic steps in setting up for home business success.

1. Attitude

The key to your business success is your attitude.

Treat your business like a business.

This is critical whether you are working part-time or full-time. One of my colleagues is a mother who works from home around her family. She has always put her family first whilst at the same time developing her business. She says, “I work part-time, but I have a full-time attitude.”

Put another way, “If you have a hobby attitude you will have a hobby income, if you have a business attitude you will have a business income.”

You can be successful working part-time and you can be successful working full-time but it is highly unlikely that you will be successful working in your “spare time”.

2. Working Environment

A space that you can call your own, free from distractions for your scheduled time.

A comfortable chair and organized desk. Stationery supplies as required. For example:

– pens – highlighters – stapler – hole punch – sticky tape – note book(s) – a simple filing system – ring binders – manila folders

Consider the value of a broadband connection. Your time is valuable and a broadband connection can allow you to get more done in a given time frame.

3. Schedule

Develop a schedule that works for you, your family (or “significant others”) and your business. When you allot a block of time for work then use that time for work. Equally important is to schedule time for your other commitments – family time, self education ( reading, listening and viewing), “health time” (exercise, cooking and eating), and leisure time. During these other times don’t work. After all if one of the reasons to work from home is to spend more time with your family then you don’t want your working at home time to consume your family time.

You are working for yourself and your schedule (by your choice) is your “boss”. When you have people calling you or dropping around unexpectedly or maybe out-of-town visitors may want to catch up with you then you need to make a choice. Are you committed to your own business success? What will be your choice in these situations? Only you can decide what is important to you.

In a family environment you may need to negotiate with your partner and children to have your business time agreed upon, during which you will not be interrupted. Put this schedule prominently somewhere so all family members are aware of your work schedule.

4. Describe Your Business

Be able to describe your business concisely; a powerful one or two sentence description that someone can repeat in describing your business to others. A unique and memorable tag line can also be invaluable for promoting your business.

5. Know Your Product or Service

Once you have selected your product or service to sell, it may or may not be something that you use yourself but you need to know your product intimately. If you are selling ebooks then know the content and its value. If you are selling software then use it know it “inside out”. You will develop a reputation of providing quality information and because of your product knowledge you can become the preferred supplier.

It is not practical to use certain products (for example a woman may choose to sell man’s shoes or vice versa) in which case the seller won’t be a product user, however the seller can still know the benefits and features of the product intimately.

6. Administration

Use good record keeping practices.

This may involve a consultation with a tax advisor who can let you know about the optimal way to set up your financial records and what records need to be kept. Your advisor will also recommend record keeping systems and you can find out what software may simplify this aspect of your business. Additionally your obtain advice on the best arrangement for your bank accounts. You will most likely be advised to have a separate bank account.

You will also need to keep track of your various logins, usernames and passwords. A very handy little software tool for this is Treepad available as either the free Lite version (without password protection) or the commercial Plus or Biz versions. http://www.treepad.com

There are other useful tools for this also from a simple paper notebook to free and commercial password keepers. One popular solution is Roboform that will remember your login details and can automatically fill out your login and other registration forms. http://www.roboform.com

7. Computer Protection

Your computer is the lifeline to your business dealings and must be protected including the data that is stored.

You need a virus scanner, personal firewall, anti-spyware and anti-adware and preferably an email scanner with the ability to delete suspect of spam email from the server before it is downloaded to your computer.

Some suggestions are:

Free AVG Anti-Virus: http://www.grisoft.com Spybot S&D: http://www.safer-networking.org Microsoft Anti-Spyware: www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx Adaware: http://www.lavasoft.com/ Mailwasher Email Scanner: http://www.mailwasher.net

8. A Domain Name

You will most likely need a domain name for your business and one cost effective registrar is GoDaddy, http://www.godaddy.com.

9. Payment Processing

You will need a way to process credit cards; that may be using services such as: – PayPal https://www.paypal.com – Storm Pay http://www.stormpay.com – 2 Checkout http://www.2checkout.com – Clickbank http://www.clickbank.com or others.

This is the most economical way to get started. Once your business picks up you may need to look into your own merchant account for credit card transactions.

Consideration may also be given to other forms of online currency such as eGold http://www.egold.com

10. Email accounts

Once you have your own domain you can use an associated email account. This can further assist in the promotion of your business and promotes a more professional business image.

As a final comment on continuing in your internet business, conduct your business ethically, provide extraordinary service and be proud to put your name to the products or services that you are selling and you will be on track to developing a sustainable long term internet business.

Republished with author’s permission http://jtmoreno.info

Social media marketing is the “it” thing in the marketing world right now and Twitter is at the very top of that list.

If you haven’t already become involved in this technique, it’s time that you started.

If you are somehow now aware of Twitter, it’s a service that allows you to send out short messages (Tweets) to all of the people who have decided to follow you.

It started out as a way to talk to your friends and family (and to keep track of famous celebrities), but has quickly turned into a powerful marketing method.

However, before you get started, you should understand what Twitter is NOT.

It is not a platform that you should be using to directly “sell” your products or services.

If all you do is send out messages asking people to buy something, it will not work.

The key to successfully using Twitter is to use it to build relationships with your followers and to give them value.

People want to know that they are doing business with a person, not just a website and Twitter lets you do that.

People can ask you questions and you can easily interact with them.

You can also make it fun by running contests and occasionally offering a discount.

Another way to use Twitter is to provide value to your followers.

They are following you because they are interested in your business.

Give them fun facts of information about the topics they’re interested in.

As you continue to give them quality information, they will begin to think of you as an authority.

That will lead them to want to check out your website to see what else you can teach them.

Twitter can be a powerful marketing method if it’s used correctly.

Provide value with your followers and interact with them, don’t just sell to them.

Republished with author’s permission http://jtmoreno.info

While it really is easy to make a very good living online with affiliate marketing you have to realize that you will need to learn some new skills and be patient enough to implement what you’ve learned. If you’re not willing to do this than you may as well save yourself some time and forget about making money online. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to work but you want to know how to work smarter, not harder, I have some information on affiliate marketing the easy way, just read on.

One of the most amazing things about making money online is all the automation you have available to help you. Once you get your website set up and are generating a lot of highly qualified traffic, your business can run virtually on autopilot. Of course, it will take a lot of time and work to get it to that point, but once that’s done you can continue to earn money from that site for years to come all with very little additional effort.

Once you’ve got one website set up and generating a nice steady income, you can set up another. Do this until you are making as much money as you want. If you do your homework and choose the right product to promote and take the time to set up your site and get a nice steady flow of traffic you can be making around $1,000 a month, per site. Some will make more and some will make less, but that is a nice average. Just think what would happen if over the course of the next year you set up 10 of these sites and they were all making an average of $1,000 a month, every single month.

That is what many people are doing online today. It’s totally doable. It’s not a pipe dream. Of course before you can do that you have to learn how to pick the right product to sell, how to get traffic to your website, and how to convert that traffic into paying customers. But once you have that knowledge you can apply it over and over again as often as you want. Learn the knowledge once and make money off of it for the rest of your life.

One thing that trips up a lot of affiliate marketers is that they get too caught up in the idea of making cash with little effort and little time. That simply is not realistic. The scenario I outlined above is extremely possible, but it will take time. If you make the mistake of jumping from one ‘sure thing’ to another you’ll never get rich. You will, however, make all the people you’re buying your ‘sure thing’ business from rich.

Just find a good program, learn everything you can about getting traffic and converting that traffic into paying customers and stick with it. After you’ve created your first successful affiliate business you can just rinse and repeat…as many times as you want.

Follow this blueprint for affiliate marketing the easy way and you can be retiring from your job by this time next year. You will not only be able to replace your income, you will be able to far exceed what you are currently making.

Republished with author’s permission http://jtmoreno.info

Many people are wondering if there is a real way to market their business on the internet for free. In our current day and age, it is highly possible to market your business or product on the internet and to get excellent amounts of traffic using free methods. As long as you know what is involved and the specific steps to take in marketing your business, you will begin to see your traffic and sales increase quite a bit in a short amount of time.

It is a fact that people want to be successful in their endeavors. If they put time and effort into creating a website or a business, they want it to be successful. Promoting your website or product is a great way to help achieve this success. So, the question then becomes how do you market your site properly?

There are seven steps that should be followed in order to get the most out of free marketing and advertising venues. This will ensure the most effective marketing campaign and often ensures a higher success rate.

The first thing is to sign your site up. Look for the newest, most famous directories online and list your website with them. This is the easiest and by far most efficient way to get free website promotion. Start with this idea and you are guaranteed to have more prosperity later on. However, it is imperative to make sure that your website is prepared before you list it. This will make it much more likely that you will be accepted into the directory that you are submitting to.

Next, identify your forums. The reason that forums exist is because they offer free promotion to everyone. Simply sign up, log in, participate and post actively, and let other people know about your website in every post that you submit. This is a sure way to attract visitors to your site.

The next step is to create press releases that will be helpful to you. Free your writing spirit and write a press release that focuses on promoting your website. This is a free promotion tool that can be done as often as you would like. Write a short paragraph and then send it to friends, family, online ezines, and other sources of media. By doing this, you are almost guaranteeing yourself massive amounts of traffic.

Remind yourself that you always need to be friendly on the internet. By utilizing free promotion methods, you need to be sociable and friendly. This is because the friendlier are with people, the more they can help get your site linked in many places. Make contact with people and welcome link exchanges and requests that you receive.

Make sure to produce relevant, high quality articles. Make sure that what you are writing and submitting to people has to do with what you are selling or offering. It does not make sense to have a travel website that has articles written about home improvement. Focus on your particular area of expertise. Articles are your advertisements and are a great source of free promotion.

Let the whole world know about your site. When you are having conversations, add your URL into them. People will in turn tell others about your site. This is an effective way to bring in traffic and potential sales.

Create banner advertisements that get attention. Create a banner for your site. Then, offer to make banners exactly like it for other webmasters. Do this in exchange for links or credit on their sites. If you get in with the popular sites, you are guaranteed greater exposure.

Take a free website promotion course. There are many courses online that are completely free and can teach you a lot. Most of these programs ask you to join their newsletters. If you create a site, there is no fee for advertising it. You only have to do some research about this type of promotion.

If you follow these steps, you will maximize your internet marketing and advertisement with no cost to you. All it takes is some time and a small amount of effort. Most of these steps are simple to follow.

Republished with author’s permission http://jtmoreno.info

There are literally hundreds of ways that you can generate website traffic. They all work, but what you need to keep in mind is that they may not work immediately, so start with one, master it, and then move on to the next. As you do this, you will find the ones that you like better or the ones that work better for your business and website or both.

Here are just three popular ways to generate website traffic.

1. YouTube. YouTube.com is one of the most visited sites in the world (with over 73 million visits per day) and its visitor numbers continue to climb. If you want to be where the people, and your potential leads or customers, are, sign up for an account on YouTube, post a video, and put your link in the description of the video. YouTube also allows you to put your website on the video itself, but it is not a do-follow link so it is just there for visual purposes. As with all of your marketing efforts, you need to do some keyword research before preparing your video. Pick a keyword that you want to use, use it in the title of your video, in the tags of your video, and in the description of your video. The video must be under ten minutes long but you can do a very effective video for under a minute, which is another great advantage to using YouTube to generate traffic to your site. It doesn’t take much time, and it’s absolutely free. If you further want to leverage your video, you can submit it to one of the video submission sites which then sends it out to other popular video sites.

2. PPC. Most people think of Google Adwords when they hear the term pay-per-click advertising. Google is the best place to start because it is inexpensive to register and it currently gets the most traffic. Again, you need to pick your keywords carefully. If you have a low budget, start out with the most uncompetitive keywords, use them in the first lines of your ads and even choose for your ad to show only when someone searches exactly that keyword. This will get you fewer clicks, but they will be more targeted. Once you start gaining ground, you can start to target more competitive keywords as well. You can also try the other PPC platforms like Yahoo and Bing. They have less visitors but the bids are also less expensive.

3. WordPress. You can really use any blogging platform to get traffic to your website but WordPress is very good from an SEO point of view, meaning you can get some incredibly effective, and free, plug-ins that will help you raise the ranking of your website. Include the link to your website in your posts and when you comment on other blogs to generate website traffic.

Republished with author’s permission http://jtmoreno.info

Advertising is one of the oldest ways to promote products or services through the years. Advertising has been done through different mediums such as print ads, magazines and televisions. Technology has changed the way advertising is done. Now the most effective way to advertise is to place them on popular websites. Internet based advertisements really made a boom to every business. May it be a car business, pesticides, shirts and many more. Now the question is this, How can a business owner place their advertisements online? Simple, to jump start their business on the internet they need to purchase online ads. What are the ways to purchase online ads? Read on to know how it is done.

1. Focus your mind that you need a great deal of financial investment, time and energy.

2. Next find sites where you want to purchase online ads. To start negotiating with most sites, you need to know their official rates. Make sure that it is neither a fast rate nor a hard one.

3. Phone around sites you want to put advertisements on. You could actually set the price you want to pay. Tell the sales representatives that you are always ready to pay checks whenever they want to deal business with you depending on your terms.

4. Know your target audience depending on your product. They could be a homeowner, car enthusiasts or parents. Make a good search where most people spend their time when they are online. Definitely those sites are the best place you want your products to be seen. Find sites where most people became customers.

5. The effectiveness of the ad is very important. When you’re going to purchase them, learn first how good it works. The most common ads are banners. These appear as boxes on the Web pages. But it will still depend on you what kind of ads you want.

6. You need to negotiate your prices. Always choose the price terms that will work out for you. The following are some of the price structure requirement for some online ads. Per impression, you are going to pay a CPM (Cost per thousand) price structure when your banner appears. Per click through you are going to pay every success your ads get. Per lead, you are going to pay when somebody gets online registration or they request some of your catalog. Per sale, you are going to pay when someone purchase the products you have advertised. These are some of the payment terms for ads. Anyway you can negotiate your prices since there is actually no standard rates. Rates are always variable depending on your negotiation.

7. Choose the best sites to cover your advertisements. You don?t want your efforts and money to go futile since you’re talking about serious business here.

8. After you have purchase ads, you need to review the results. Make necessary adjustments if needed. Some changes might occur and they might be completed within days. So check if your ads met your standard goals.

Those are some of the guidelines when purchasing advertisements on other sites. Online advertisements should be attractive enough for your main customers. Online advertisements made a real impact on the businesses. Business enthusiasts should be very careful when choosing the site where they want to advertise their products. Let your business grow! Online advertisements – a sure fire for your business.

Republished with author’s permission http://jtmoreno.info

What a great daydream this is: You make a ton of money online and then go tell your boss to ‘have a nice day.’ This is the scenario you see in sales letters all the time. “Buy this product, put it to work and next week you can kiss your job goodbye, forever.”

Real life doesn’t always work like a sales letter. In fact, life continually gets in the way. You make some extra money but then it dries up. Or you have an emergency and the extra money bails you out of that crisis but you’re no further ahead.

Or – and this is the most common of all – you have the best of intentions but you never quite get around to making that fortune online. And so you are still at your job. Even though a year ago/two years ago/five years ago/ you swore you would be retired by now.

Whoops.

How do you eat an apple? Unless you’re a horse, you eat it one bite at a time. In my early years I found that building your online income and telling your boss to shove it works the same way – you go through the process of replacing your income one step at a time.

It’s a funny thing: You can make $5,000 a month online fairly easily, but only when you KNOW you can do it. Until you KNOW it, it seems just out of reach. And as long as the goal seems out of reach, your subconscious will sabotage you every step of the way to see to it that it never happens. If you can’t conceive it, there is no way you’re going to achieve it, no matter how hard you try.

It’s like getting a job. You can’t get the job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. Same way with making money online.

But right now, this instant, I’ll bet you know that you can make enough to cover just one of your bills, right?

So pick a monthly bill of yours, any bill. Now get enough income coming in each month to completely cover that bill. Maybe it’s your $100 water bill. Great. All you need to make is a consistent $100 a month, and it’s taken care of.

Don’t spend this new income on anything but paying that bill. Any money you make above what it takes to pay the bill is either reinvested into your business, or…

… you pick another bill and start covering that each month, too. And you just keep adding another bill and another bill into the mix until they are ALL covered, including your mortgage or rent, including your food, including everything.

But notice how you did it – not all at once, but simply one bill at a time. Your mind can wrap itself around this concept of taking it one step at a time. Your subconscious will stop fighting you and you’ll be surprised how easy the process becomes. It’s all about small steps that prove you can do it, that prove you can move on to the next level, and the next.

Once you’ve got all of your bills covered and then some, you can quit your day job with confidence, because now you KNOW you can make money online. There is no question. You’ve already proven you’ve got the confidence and the skills.

The magic is this: Instead of sitting down at your computer and thinking, “Okay, I’ve got to make enough money to cover all my expenses this month,” you simply tell yourself you’re going to make enough to cover one little bill.

You’re no longer trying to create an entire business, you’re simply taking the first steps. You’re enjoying numerous successes along the way that fuel you to keep going.

Get that first bill paid and you’ll be on your way to achieving total financial freedom, one step at a time.

So, if you are still wondering “Why should I start making money from home” you should really be asking how soon can I start? Check out the program below for an honest way to make money online. It is working for me…

How to Make Your First $100,000 Online in as Little as 30 Minutes Per Day, With Just 3 Super Simple PROVEN Steps

Hunting for the most profitable keywords is no joke to many internet marketers and website owners. In fact, people will pay good money just to be able to obtain these moneymaking keywords because they know that these can translate to incredible earnings. If you’re a little apprehensive about paying for keywords, take heart. There are some cool resources on the internet you can use for Free. That’s right, at no cost. Here are nine ways how you can make use of stuff online to hike your popularity factor:

Find out how certain keywords perform from search engines. Before anything else, remember that not all moneymaking keywords are right for you. What’s the point of using keywords pertaining to techno gadgets if your website is all about scrapbooking?

Find out which keywords work best for your website and then use search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. These are free resources you can use on the internet that will give you an idea of how many searches are performed on a given keyword/s and/or keyword phrase. The number of searches you’ll find will help you determine the kind of keywords that will land you on the SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages.

Submit your website for indexing. It’s tough to get noticed online especially if you’re just starting your website. Be proactive about letting others know about you by submitting your site to the most popular search engines. The three most popular search sites are Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Go to their websites and add your URL address, start building your site’s traffic volume and watch your income grow.

Link up. Another great internet resource that is used by many website owners is linking. You can exchange links with other websites who belong to the same industry as you or are at least related to the type of business you have.

Linking with other websites is free, fun and very productive. Consider it as being referred to by a friend of a friend. If you link your website to a reputable site, traffic from that site can get directed your way. Imagine receiving just 10% of the traffic from a site that receives 2,000 visitors a day. That’s 200 more clicks on top of the ones you already receive on a regular basis from one site alone.

Be careful, though. Some sites with less-than-good reputation can damage yours as well. Search engines prefer linking sites that offer quality. If you’re linked up with a site that pulls you down, consider asking that site to remove links to your website.

Use your own resource. We mean your common sense. Some keywords have a lifespan while others shine brightest during a particular season. Keywords such as ‘Halloween costumes’ and ‘costume masks’, for example, are much more in demand during the months of September and October. When November and December come along, you probably don’t need a free resource on the internet just to find out that certain keywords related to Thanksgiving and Christmas are much more in demand.

Keywords are some of the most valuable resources you can use online. They can help you build your business and drive traffic to your site. They can even be a direct source of income for many individuals.

Learn everything you need to know about how to use keywords to increase your site’s exposure from ‘Keyword Research’ from The Barking Videos series. Using keywords to increase your site’s traffic can be tricky and you’ll need all the help you can get. Learn as much as you can so you don’t waste your time on keywords that will do nothing for your bottom line.

Republished with author’s permission http://jtmoreno.info