Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

I wrote this article for EzineArticles, but I thought I’d publish it here too with the hope that it will spark a few ideas for ya. Enjoy!

Make Money By Giving Away Special Reports

A lot of internet marketers create special reports in their niche to sell to their customers or to use as incentives to sign up for their newsletter.

However, there are ways to profit from special reports without selling them or requiring your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter first. In this article we’ll talk about three different methods of making money from special reports by giving them away for free.

Affiliate Marketing

No matter what your niche is, or your target audience, chances are there are numerous affiliate programs that you can promote to your readers.

If you don’t already promote affiliate products or services, it’s easy to find them by searching through affiliate websites like Clickbank or Commission Junction. You can also do a Google search for your keywords along with “affiliate”.

For example, if your website or blog is about beauty tips, you could do a search for “cosmetics+affiliate” and come up with lots of programs that offer their products through an affiliate program.

Now it’s time to write a short report – about 15 pages or less – with some beauty tips and advice. Choose a good quality product to promote and link to it strategically throughout your special report. Make sure that you’re providing great content that is useful to your reader, but find a program that complements the information you’re giving them.

Here’s another example. You can write a special report about how using a detox diet can cure acne. List the benefits of using a detox diet and how it works, then link to an ebook with your affiliate link that teaches people how to cure acne with a detoxification diet. You give your readers the “what” and “why”, the affiliate program gives them the “how”.

Click here for more ways to make money with affiliate marketing.

Promoting Your Own Products

While affiliate products can generate a substantial income, there’s nothing like having your own products to promote. You receive all the profits, plus you can create your own affiliate program and have people promote your product for you.

Writing a special report about your products is a great way to get the word out about them. Let’s go with the “beauty” niche again as an example.

You’ve either written an ebook with your own beauty secrets or you’ve purchased the resale rights to one. Now you want people to know about it, so write a short report listing a few of your best beauty tips.

Include lots of details and pictures. Maybe you’ve got some advice on how to create the “smokey eye” look using eye shadow. Now link to your ebook and tell your reader that there are even more great beauty secrets in it that aren’t mentioned in the free special report.

Promoting Your Services

You may not have your own product, but you might offer services like graphic design or consulting. Writing and distributing a special report is the perfect way to show that you’re an expert in your field.

With your special report, you can show your readers that you have extensive knowledge about the services you offer. You can also list the benefits they would receive if they used your services, and don’t forget the disadvantages of NOT using your services.

Let’s use copywriting as an example. We’ll assume you have great copywriting skills and you offer your skills to clients for a nominal fee. Explain in your short report how copywriting can increase sales by improving conversion rates.

Now mention how a poorly written sales page can generate a lot of traffic but few sales. This works for not only internet marketers but brick and mortar businesses as well. Any time someone writes an advertisement for a newspaper, radio or TV ad, they’re using copywriting skills.

If their ad isn’t converting well, they’re losing out on sales which means their wallets won’t be as fat. We’d all like to have fat wallets, and paying for your copywriting skills will help us achieve that. Your special report will send that point home.

Profiting From Special Reports Doesn’t Have To Mean Selling Them

If you get creative, there are lots of ways for you to make money from giving away special reports. By not selling them or making your readers give you their email address, you’re increasing the chances that your special report will go viral. You’ll reach potential customers and clients that you normally wouldn’t reach which means more business for you.

Holy friggin’ crap, it’s Friday! This week flew by but since my weekends are pretty much the same as the week days, I could care less. However, today is the day that I get to shoot out some link love. If coding isn’t your bag, you still might want to take a quick peek at this one.

30 HTML Best Practices For Beginners

I was helping a friend yesterday with her blog and I came to the realization that even though you don’t require any coding skills to blog, it does make things a helluvalot easier if you have some basic knowledge. Most of this article might sound like a bunch of gobbledegook to you, but the following tips are something every blogger should learn:

1: Always Close Your Tags
10: Keep Your Tag Names Lowercase
11: Use H1 – H6 Tags
19: All Images Require “Alt” Attributes
21: View Source
24: Learn Photoshop

Check it out and find out why.

5 Tips for Successful Pre-Selling

If you’re into affiliate marketing, Lynn Terry has a few pointers to get more sales. Pre-selling isn’t rocket surgery but if you get it right, it can really increase your conversions.

Stop Gambling With Your Customers

I love me a good rant, and Michel Fortin has gooder today. I’m proud of myself for not being one of the “sheeples”. Can you guess which “term of a sexual nature” he’s talking about at the end of the post? Very clever

And just for shits and gigglez, and because it’s Friday and I feel silly, here’s an extremely embarrassing picture of myself looking like a moron that I took while I was messing around on my grandma’s Mac.

I tweeted this today:

Quit obsessing about the skills you don’t have and focus on the ones you do have.

I’ve been giving myself a really hard time lately because I can’t do all the things I’d like to. I’m a great piano player – I used to teach it – but I suck butt at playing guitar even though I’d love to play better.

I love to mess around with code on my websites and there are certain aspects of it that I’m pretty good at, but I can’t design a whole website from scratch even though I’d like to.

I love to cook and bake, and making dishes with fresh ingredients is something that makes me really happy, but I couldn’t grow an herb garden if my life depended on it.

So what does this crap have to do with blogging or running a website?

Well, if you’ve been at it for any length of time, you’ll know that it requires an insane amount of work to be even a little bit successful. There are so many aspects to it that it’s impossible for one single person to do all of them well. (Yay for virtual assistants!)

I got to thinking today – which can be a dangerous thing – and wondered why I’m so worried about all the things I can’t do well and decided to focus more on the things that I do very well and will now spend more time doing them even better.

Worrying about the things we can’t do is a colossal waste of time.

If you can’t do something, you have a few options:

• You can hire someone else to do it, or trade services with them.
• Just don’t do it and leave it unfinished. I’m great at that.
• Learn how to do it.

Each solution poses its own problem.

1. Hiring someone can be expensive. Trading services with someone can take up a lot of time.
2. Leaving a task unfinished means loose ends that should be tied up. In a business, this could mean bad things.
3. Learning how to do it yourself can be extremely stressful and time consuming.

I bet you are expecting the perfect workaround at this point. Guess what. I don’t have one. I’m going to cop out and say that you have to choose which solution is the best for you. Ha!

I personally like to do a healthy balance of all three. I’ll get someone else to do the really difficult stuff that I just don’t have the skills/time for. I’ll leave the tasks that aren’t really important or beneficial to my blogs. I’ll figure out how to do the little things that I should probably know how to do anyway which usually saves me time, frustration, and money down the road.

The main thing here is not to have unreasonable expectations. Don’t assume you can do everything by yourself. Don’t feel bad that you can’t do something that others are naturally gifted at.

Instead, pinpoint your strengths and the things you’re great at and use that to your advantage.

Instead of wracking my brain trying to come up with new content for some of my websites, I’ve been focusing more on improving what I already have.

I’m talking about increasing my conversions.

I’ve been going through each page and making little changes here and there to see which changes make a positive impact. Sometimes all it takes is increasing the size of the subheadline.

It’s ridiculous how tiny changes can make such a huge difference, yet these are things that many website owners don’t bother to do. If not, you’re leaving money on the table!

I’ve got a short report for you that will help you:

• Increase sales.
• Keep your hard earned traffic on your site longer.
• Generate more income by increasing sales conversion rates.
• Get more newsletter subscribers.
• Learn what mistakes can cost you visitors and sales.
• Learn and use copywriting skills to improve your existing content.

It’s a short report, but it’s packed with information that every website owner should know. You can learn more about Website Makeovers and Conversion Strategies here.

I don’t think it really matters how old your kids are, it’s always going to be difficult to work at home when you have little ones running around (or crawling around or maybe even just laying around).

When my youngest was still a newborn, I just held him in my arms the entire day and typed a bit while he was sleeping. Now that he’s three and wreaking crazy havoc all over the place, my tactics have changed a bit. Instead of trying to cope with late night feedings and lack of sleep, I’m now trying to prevent all-out war between my two kidlets.

I’ve found that having your day and their activities planned out makes for a much more peaceful environment when attempting to be a WAHM. If you’re not paying attention, a kid covered in yogurt and marker from head to toe is the least of your worries.

To keep the yogurty-marker monster at bay, I have a little table set up beside my desk that I get my son to sit at with some paper and crayons. I get him to draw me pictures while I work. This way he gets to spend time with me and I get to make sure he isn’t drawing his masterpieces all over a wall.

My daughter has a toy laptop that she loves to work on when I’m working. While I’m writing articles, she’s playing monkey games or making her own princess websites. Too cute.

When the kids are together, they make a “ship” with the kitchen table and chairs. I can just turn my head and watch them steering the ship and calling each other “me matey”.

How about you? How do you keep your kids occupied while you work at home?