You Can Never Do Too Much to Increase Your Income!

Here’s a question I get asked a lot. “What can I do to increase my income?” Fair enough question. Here’s the obvious answer.

Do more stuff!

Yeah, it’s kind of a duh statement, but it’s true. And guess what? You can never do enough stuff. There is always something more that you can do. In this article, what I’m going to do is share with you just a few things that I do to increase my income. Some of these work on the spot and some work through time. The key is to take action and always think about what more you can do.

First thing I do is look at whatever I’m promoting at the time and see if I can do some extra promotion. For example, I currently have a special offer running at a forum that was on page 3 of the ads. Sales were slowing down considerably. So what I did was pay an additional posting fee to get the ad back to page 1. After I did this, sales started picking up again, thus increasing my income considerably. Considering the posting fee was only $20, this was more than worth doing.

I might also look at my current products, see what I’m not promoting as much in certain places, such as in social medai, and post a few ads for the product there. Usually, I’ll find that this post will result in a few sales that I normally wouldn’t have gotten. This works very well when you offer people free reports. People love free reports. If you give these away in exchange for building your list, you can make lots of money down the road.

Another thing I’ll do is think about what new products I can create. Every product that you put out there is another product that you can sell and make a profit on. Product creation is not hard. All you need is a program to type into and something to turn that report into a PDF. Open Office, which is free, can do this instantly. I’ve churned out products that have made me $2,000 in just one day.

Another great way to make some extra income is through freelancing. You’ll be surprised how many people are looking for others to do things for them like article writing, copywriting, programming and so on. If you have any of these skills, you can make thousands of dollars a month as a freelancer.

If you put your mind to it, you can bank an extra $2,000 to $3,000 every month quite easily – just by going the extra mile.

Build It, Promote It, Earn It – The Beauty of Passive Income

So I went on vacation in Mexico without my computer or hardly any internet access for 10 days. I enjoyed my vacation and I didn’t have internet withdrawals. There was a computer in the lobby of the hotel and I only went on it twice for all of 10 minutes, and it was to check my emails and make sure I hadn’t missed something that was vital to get back to immediately — there wasn’t.

I realized I had more control of myself and my income than I thought and I’m not a computer addict. Not that being a computer addict is necessarily bad or anything (though I think it probably isn’t good, lol). I also realized a lot more after I came home from my holidays…

What did I learn?

I learned if you set the groundwork of your business from the very beginning it really pays off in the end. You have to work hard, put in the hours, be consistent, persistent, patient, persevere and promote, promote, promote. Eventually you get to the point where you can work part-time hours, or take extended time off, and still get the same or better results than when you worked 50+ hours every week. This is called residual passive income!

Have you ever spent a full day working your business and not seen any results and then the one time you didn’t work you found you made sales or gotten leads? Been there and done that. During those times, I think to myself I should go out more often. Do you ever wonder why the water never boils if you keep staring at it?

Not only can I spend less time on the computer and still receive the same or better results, I can better balance my work, family and business in a much more effective and productive way. I can take a vacation knowing my business can run on its own steam because I built it with integrity and hard work.

I’m enjoying passive income and you can too! Just read all the information on this blog and you will be there before you know it!

Boost Your Affiliate Business with Behavioral Targeting

Targeted marketing is the wave of the future for internet advertisers and affiliate marketers. The key to advertising is knowing what consumers want. Once an advertiser understands the potential consumer’s needs, he has a much better chance of making a sale. This is the theory behind online targeted marketing.

And while in the Internet’s infancy the best way to advertise via the Internet may have been to simply rapid fire your advertising message to as many places and users as possible, today’s Internet marketer can make use of targeted approaches to online advertising to create a more efficient advertising model. One interesting example of this is indeed behavioral targeting.

What is Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting is marketing ads to individuals based in prior buying or surfing habits. When an Internet consumer comes to a website enabled with behavioral targeting code, the site analyzes prior habits and places relevant ads on the site based on those patterns.

To do this a special program is used that, like we mentioned, gains access to where the visitor has been before. The program then uses this information to generate ads on the site.

Why Is Behavioral Targeting Useful?

Psychologists know that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. People who like to buy state of the art stereo equipment over the Internet are unlikely to restrict their online purchases to floral bouquets anytime soon. If advertisers can find out what someone has bought or taken an interest in before, they know the right things to try to sell to them in the future.

Putting the same ads on the same pages for every viewer to a certain webpage is simply a missed opportunity. Just as car manufacturers advertise in car magazines and makeup vendors advertise in beauty magazines, Internet advertisers want to advertise to people who are interested in their products, which is just what behavioral targeting allows them to do.

What Are the Concerns About Behavioral Targeting?

There is an ethical question of whether recording and storing people’s buying and viewing practices and habits is an invasion of privacy. However, since only the practices and not the personal information of the individual are analyzed by the program, this is not as much of an issue as some people may believe.

Hence these programs generally function “blind,” that is to say, they take the pattern data and spit out ads as a result. Not only does this benefit the advertiser but in the end also the consumer. Rather than being bombarded with irrelevant banners and ad-messages website advertisements is tailored to fit our needs and desires. It’s a win-win!

Are You Suffering From Information Overload?

This seems to be a common complaint from aspiring internet marketers and those looking to start an online business. There’s too much information out there and they can’t keep up with it all. As a result, they’re completely overwhelmed and get nothing done.

Are you one of these poor souls?

If you are, don’t fret.

There are ways to deal with information overload. Even as an established and successful marketing specialist for many years now, I have to deal with this problem all the time. So, in this post, I am going to share my personal tips for dealing with information overload. I have no doubt that you will find these to be very helpful.

At the top of my list is doing just that… making a list. What kind of list? Let’s say that you’ve decided that you want to learn pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, list building, article writing and copywriting. Now, obviously, you can’t learn all of those all at one time, or even in less than several years. Your head will explode! So what I do is make a list of each item I want to learn and order them according to importance. In other words, which one do I need the most right away? I then concentrate on that one and ONLY that one until I have mastered it. I then cross if off my list and move on to the next thing. Trust me, this is a very effective method to dealing with information overload.

Another great method for dealing with information overload is developing what I call tunnel vision. This is a little harder to do, but if you can pull this off, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Let me try to explain how this works. Let’s say that I am working on a project that requires me to do certain things and have certain skills. I will look at my list of things I want to learn and see if any of those skills for that certain project are on it. If so, I will tackle ONLY that skill and master it. I will pretend that the other skills don’t even exist, no matter how tempting it might be to include them in the project. If they’re not needed, pretend they don’t exist.

Basically, what this all comes down to is discipline. And quite honestly, I don’t know how to teach that. Yes, it’s very easy to see the new shiny ebook, course, or video training on “whatever” and convince yourself that you need to have it. But if you really look at it rationally, you’ll discover that there are very few things that you really need.

And THAT is how you successfully handle information overload.

Top 3 Affiliate Marketing Blunders to Avoid

When I see some of the boneheaded things that some affiliate marketers do, I begin to understand why the failure rate is quoted at 95% or higher. So much of this failure could be avoided if people getting into affiliate marketing would just avoid some of these mistakes that are easy to correct. Well, in this article, I am going to cover just a few of the things that turn aspiring affiliate marketers into failures in a hurry. If you avoid these, you’ll have a much better shot at building a successful affiliate marketing business.

The first thing I want to go over is how they pick their products to promote. Sometimes I think they just close their eyes and pick them randomly. Absolutely no thought goes into this process. Hey, let’s just find the top selling product at Clickbank and market the heck out of it. Um, no offense, but this is probably the stupidest way to go about it. Product selection is critical and just picking the top selling product is NOT the way to go about it. Do your research, be methodical, and find the RIGHT product to promote.

Next on the list is how affiliate marketers promote these products. Laziness doesn’t even begin to describe it in many cases. Most marketers simply take the ads that the product creators kindly write up and blast them all over the internet without changing one word. Let me tell you something, this is no way to promote a product. Think about it. if everybody on the internet promoting this particular product is doing the same thing, how does anybody stand out from the crowd? They can’t! And if they don’t stand out, how can they make any sales? They won’t. This is why this is such a stupid thing to do. You aren’t differentiating yourself at all and people become blind to the same ads/content very quickly.

Finally, there’s getting paid, or more specifically, making sure you’re promoting a product where you know you’re going to get paid. Hey, I’m as guilty of this as anybody else. But after being burned way too many times, I have finally smartened up and made sure I was promoting a product where I could be more than reasonably sure that I was going to get paid for the sales I make. The last time I didn’t get a commission was a very long time ago. Look into the vendor, talk to them, ask around to other people about them, check their reputation, etc… and make sure they are known as the type of person/company that pays their affiliates without any hassle.

There you have it. Those are three of the biggest blunders that I affiliate marketers making on a consistent basis. They pick lousy products, they don’t promote them properly, and they don’t even know if they’re going to get paid for their efforts. Please don’t make the same mistakes that so many affiliate marketing newbies (and even a lot of veterans) make. Nail all of these down and you will be well on your way to becoming an affiliate assassin!