Work at Home Based Business

Archive for April, 2008

I’m sometimes known as the junk marketer. I use forms of promotion that many people laugh at. The reason they laugh at them is because they don’t understand how to use them efficiently. But I’ve made a 5 year study of these crappy forms of advertising and have them down to a science.

How much of a science?

They account for about 33% of my monthly income, and let me tell you, that’s a pretty good chunk of change. A normal month, I’ll bank about $3,300 alone from this crappy advertising.

Okay, so what crappy advertising am I talking about?

Well, there are 4 kinds in particular that I’m referring to.

Traffic Exchanges
Safelists
FFA Sites
Message Boards

I can see a bunch of people right now scratching their collective heads thinking that I’ve flipped my noodle. Well, I haven’t. These poor misunderstood orphans can be real gold mines if they’re used properly.

For those of you who have no idea what these things even are (after all, respectable marketers don’t go anywhere near these) let me give you the 5 cent tour. Most of you will probably think the tour isn’t even worth that much.

Traffic Exchanges - These are sites where you surf members pages in exchange for them looking at your page. On the surface, seems plausible. Unfortunately, because of the incentivized nature of these sites, they don’t work for the average person. But, if you know how to tap into their power, they can make you a good $500 a month easy.

Safelists - Safelists are group lists where each member can email to the other members on the list without having to worry about spam complaints. The problem with safelists is that most people don’t bother reading their emails. However, if you know the secret to getting around this problem, you can have thousands of members reading your emails.

FFA Sites - These are sites where people get to post their ads free. The problem with these sites is that nobody sees the ads. They end up on pages that nobody even knows about. But, there is a way to actually get every FFA poster to see YOUR ad. I’ve been using this system for 5 years and it makes me a solid $1,500 plus each month.

Message Boards - These are kind of like forums but not exactly. They’re the same format except people go there to post their spam. That’s about the size of it. However, if you know the secret, you can turn these posters into customers.

Okay, I know you can smell a sales pitch coming and it is. I’m finishing up a book on these crappy methods of promotion. It’s not ready yet, as of this article, but it will be soon. If you want a copy, send an email to:

swagen2167@aol.com

Put “Crappy Advertising” in the subject.

When the book is ready, I will send you a link where you can pick it up and some other goodies if you’re interested.

Like I said, these crappy methods earn me $3,300 a month on average, so don’t dismiss them before you at least know how to make them work.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

There are many people who like to use free blogs not just for the enjoyment and personal satisfaction of writing down their thoughts and publishing them on the web, but also for Internet Marketing purposes in the pursuit of making money. Likewise, there are many people who prefer to buy their own domains and host them on a professional server, for much the same purpose.

So is one really better than the other?

As this is an Internet Marketing flavoured blog, we’ll leave the bloggers who blog for enjoyments sake to their own and take a look at the avantages and disadvantages of the two options open to those that want to use these different outlets as vehicles for making money.

First up, lets take initial startup and running costs of the two sides of this debate.

A free blog will cost you zero dollars to acquire, zero dollars to set up and zero dollars to run. Ok, that’s pretty convincing for anyone without much cash to start their own online enterprise.

A hosted domain will cost you the price of buying and registering the domain, currently you can buy and register a .com for less than $10. Then there’s the cost of hosting, although currently you can get good hosting for as little as $4.95 a month, although you might want to pay a little more and get a package with more features. Either way, you can find very good professional hosting for less than $10 a month. The other running cost is the annual registration of the domain, which is currently less than $10. So for an outlay in your first year of around $130 you can have all the benefits and control that a hosted account will give you. Even if you are short of cash, that is one expense that is easy enough to cover as the hosting part isn’t paid all in one go, but spread over 12 monthly payments.

So far so good. Now lets look at the fringe benefits.

Free blogs have great, easy to use templates and are the simplest things set up and start writing. Ads are easy to include with Blogger blogs, although some platforms, notably Wordpress won’t let you put any ads up at all.

A self hosted blog is also fairly straightforward to set up, with a huge selection of free templates. There is no problem over displaying ads, its your site so you can put up whatever you want.

Now lets look at the stickier point of control and ownership.

I’ve heard using free blogs as opposed to self hosted domains likened to the difference between renting an apartment and owning your own home. Nice comparison and it fits very well.

With a free blog, you’re only renting the space. If the owner (Blogger, for instance) decides they don’t like your face, they can at their discretion, suspend or even delete your blog. The content on that free blog may be yours in principle, but when it comes to what the search engines see, that content belongs to Blogger.

With a self hosted domain, you own that piece of cyberspace like its a piece of real estate. No one can take it away from you and the content is yours. If you’ve worked real hard on your site and gained a lot of authority, just like a home that you own you can sell that site with the domain for a hefty profit down the line.

With a free blog, as with a rented apartment, no matter how hard you work on it and how much authority and value it gets, you can never sell it.

There are other advantages and disadvantages to both, such as guaranteed uptime, storage space and bandwidth limits that self hosted beats free hosted hands down, but the main advantage of self hosted over free hosted has to be the real estate value, which, just as with the argument for renting or buying a property, you have to ask yourself this question. Do you want to have the option to sell it down the line and profit from it?

I prefer to own my own home rather than rent. Likewise, I prefer to own my own cyber real estate too.

Terry Didcott

Author of The Honest Way

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The amount of people deciding to work at home has been on the rise for years and it increases much more with each new year. There’s about a million reasons why you many want, or need, to work at home but here are five of the top reasons I have heard people give for deciding to work at home…

1) Gas Prices - It’s no secret to anyone with a car that the gas prices these days are ridiculously high. When you have to commute an hour to work each way, you can go broke just paying for gas. If you work at home you don’t have to worry about paying for gas just to get to work.

2) Pay Yourself - You aren’t limited by an hourly wage or yearly salary. The amount of money you make rests almost entirely within yourself and you can virtually write your own checks. With all the ways there are to make money online, you can do many things to make a living working at home and there are few limitations on the size of the income you can earn.

3) Freedom - When you work at home you have the freedom of working a schedule that you set. Don’t like to get up early? Fine just start working later in the day. Want to go to the beach today? Just pack your lap top and get some work done while soaking in the sun.

4) Family - One of the best benefits of working at home is that you get to spend much more time with your family. You aren’t away all day or night working at the office. You can finally have the quality time you have always wanted with your family.

5) Necessity - There are plenty of reasons why it is simply necessary to work at home. Maybe you have a disability that prevents you from going to a regular job. You might have to be at home to take care of the kids. It’s possible there aren’t any good jobs in your area. Or any of about a thousand other reasons why it is necessary for you to work at home.

That is by no means and exhaustive list of the reasons for working at home. There are countless reasons why working at home might be for you and it’s possible that none of your reasons are even on the above list. That’s ok. We each have our own reasons for doing things. What’s important is that you have made the decision to improve your quality of life and start doing something that you enjoy!

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Owner of Work at Home Based Business

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Ebooks have been extremely popular for a long time and don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. If there is a subject you’re searching for, no matter how obscure, there is a strong chance that an ebook has been written on it. You might wonder why there are so many ebooks being written every day, even in highly competitive niches like “work at home” - “make money online” - “internet marketing” and many others. Why do people keep writing these? Hasn’t all the information already been covered?

The reason so many new ebooks come out all the time is because they are relatively easy to create, they tend to sell well, there’s always people looking for more information on a topic, and the ebook author stands a good chance at making a lot of money from their efforts. Sounds like some damn good reasons to write one if you ask me!

Even in this digital age, much of the market for ebooks is still surprisingly untapped. You would think by now that every topic would have been fully covered but there is still more than enough room for new ebooks and plenty of opportunities to make money online selling them.

Anyone looking get into making money online via ebooks should definitely not be discouraged by the amount of ebooks out there already being sold because there are plenty of great niches that are still largely untapped. Even in the big time competitive niches like “make money online” you can always expand on topics and improve on existing ebooks.

Don’t ever be afraid to get specific with your topics. As a matter of fact, targeting sub niches is one of the best ways to succeed as an internet marketer and ebook publisher. When you write an ebook on a specific sub-niche, you could then follow up with one on a related niche, and sooner than later, you could have a massive empire of hot niche ebooks that make money for you all the time.

Think creating an ebook is hard?

It’s actually a lot easier then you think! Here are the basic steps of creating a new ebook:

1 - The first thing you should do is research the niche to make sure there is a market for it. You don’t want to waste your time on an ebook that isn’t going to sell. If you find that it is a good niche then move on to step two.

2 - Find a couple of related ebooks to get an idea of what information has already been covered, how the author presented the information and what you can do to make your ebook better.

3 - Research the topic to get ideas, facts, and information for the ebook. Even if you think you already know everything there is to know about the topic, you should still do this to ensure accuracy of your information.

4 - Open up MSWord and write, write, write. Don’t worry about much of anything here except getting the words typed.

5 - Now go back and edit, format, spell check, etc… Have a friend go over it too so you can get a second opinion on everything. Add some graphics and a header and footer to make it look more professional.

6 - Covert it to .pdf

7 - Write the sales letter. Or hire a good copywriter to do this for you. This is probably the most important part for getting sales and making money, so you definitely want to make sure you have good sales copy.

8 - Write the affiliate page and any other pages you will have (tos, disclaimer, faq, etc…)

9 - Get the site up and put it all together.

10 - Set it up on clickbank or whatever you are going to use for payment processor.

11 - Market like a madman!

Marketing your ebook is a whole other lesson in itself. There are many ways to market online and you should take the time to learn all about internet marketing so you can maximize your profits.

One good way to get started is to search for forums that relate to the subject you wrote about, become a member of them, and take the time to answer questions and establish yourself as a credible resource on the subject. You can also politely offer free copies of your ebook to reputable members of the forum to get some testimonials and hopefully some affiliates selling it.

Writing and selling your own ebook is one of the best ways to make money online. Getting one created and up for sale is not a difficult task. It will take some time but almost anyone can do it. The hardest part is getting traffic to the sales page and converting it into sales. So you will definitely need to learn all about internet marketing before you will be successful at making money from your own ebook.

Get started right now!

Dedicated to your success,

Trent Brownrigg
Owner of Work at Home Based Business

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I always brag about how I NEVER get sick. Well, mother nature decided to hit me with quite a bad head cold this week. I feel like somebody stuffed a pillow into my head. You’d think there is no way I could possibly work like this. And yet, if I told you what I’ve done this week, you’d probably freak out.

For starters, I did two videos. One of them on PLR and the other on some product. I forget which one because my head is too stuffed. I recorded them, mixed them, produced them and uploaded them to YouTube.

This week I also dabbled in some new niches just for the heck of it. Wanted to see if I could make something out of them. So far, the results have been encouraging. You’d be surprised how many really great niches there are out there that are virtually untapped.

Let’s see, what else did I do? Oh yeah, I also created a brand new sales page for a special sale. I can’t show it to you because it’s only for certain folks who belong to a certain forum I belong to. You understand. But anyway, that took me like a half a day to put together.

I also did my regular daily work, which consists of all my advertising, article writing and so on. I have a regular schedule that I stick to religiously. I have about 14 tasks on it that I do on a regular basis. Some take just a few minutes but others take a few hours. It certainly keeps me busy.

And let’s not forget new products that I am always working on. I got one in the works for later this year that’s going to blow people’s minds. I’m planning, with a friend of mine, to release it in September. He’s doing all the promotional stuff. I’m doing the writing. It’s a great partnership.

Speaking of partnerships, my friend John Rhodes and myself just put out PLR EXPLOITATION this month which I know is going to be a super big seller because everybody into IM wants to know what the deal is with PLR. This product explains everything, including how to find it, use it and so on.

Yes, I have been keeping very busy, even though my head feels like a train wreck.

Maybe I can invent an IM product for a head cold.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Build An Ebook Empire Like THAT!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!