How to Make Money Online without a Website

This is a very popular question and because of this I thought I might just touch on the possibilities once more. It is very possible to make money online without a website - all it takes is a little time and effort.

First and most obvious I would think would be blogging. Anyone can blog. Just chat about the things you know or learn about your chosen 'Niche' and recommend any quality products you find which might help your readers.

In addition to recommending products, you can also sell ads on your blog, to either Google or others for additional income.

Other ways to generate cash are to write articles. Write about issues in your chosen niche and once again recommend quality products which will solve problems for your readers, specific to your chosen niche.

Follow the links if you would like additional information on either choosing a niche, or learning to blog or if you wish to try your hand at article marketing.

Hope your day is going well and you're having great success.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Learn How to Make Money Online

Free Research Tool

Just wanted to add a quick post and tell you about a free research tool available to download at UnderAchieverLife.com. There is a brief video that explains the tool and you will be able to quickly see the value.

Hope your day is going well and you're having great success.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Learn How to Make Money Online

Browser Shortcuts

Though I'm not the most technological kid on the block I do like a shortcut or two. Today's shortcuts come from Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror Blog. Jeff gives us 5 browser shortcuts that you can use everyday. (I love the one about the middle button. That's great for browsing forum posts.)

And last buy not least - tomorrow is Super Tuesday. Get out and vote. It's an honor you shouldn't miss out on.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Learn How to Make Money Online

The Secret of a Business Plan

I'm a big list maker. I seem to get more done if I have a list. If I know exactly what I'm suppose to be doing, getting or where I'm suppose to be at a given time, I'll generally do it, get it or be there.

But without that list, I'm pretty much like the proverbial duck out of water - rather lost and waddling around looking pathetic.

Business plans are very much like that 'to do' list you make. They give you an idea of where you're suppose to be, or what you should be doing or getting at specific point in your day, week or month.

For an Internet Marketer it's a wonderful way to combat analysis paralysis and information overload. Sometimes I find myself re-learning something I already knew but forgot. A business plan keeps you on track and helps you remember all the stuff you should be implementing.

Check out this business plan for Article Marketing.   As with any business plan you'll want to modify it to meet your needs, but it's a great place to start.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Learn How to Make Money Online

Market Your Affiliate Products with Ads

Lots of time we get our minds fixed on something and then we have trouble letting go of the idea.  I do a lot of  Article Marketing  and sometimes I have more products and keywords to promote than I have time to write articles for.   So they get shoved to the background and often I never get to them.

But I can write several ads in the time it takes to write one article . . . duh, but I sort of forget I can use ads as well as articles.

In case you've never tried them,  USFreeAds  is a great inexpensive way to market affiliate products.   For $9.95 a month, you can place an unlimited number of ads each month, that automatically renew.  (Tip: You can get a  premium acount for less  if you follow this link and my advise.)

And if you haven't checked us out lately, drop by the EarnOnYourComputer website . . . we've had a facelift.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Learn How to Make Money Online

Are Your Landing Pages Relevant?

Are Your Landing Pages Relevant? Relevant to what you ask? Relevant to the keywords you’ve optimized your page for.

If you have lots of traffic but no sales Relevancy could be your problem. Let’s say you have a keyword phrase extolling the virtues of an acne e-book that’s suppose to be the greatest and latest cure for acne. But the landing page you send your customers to keeps talking about scientific research into the causes of acne or how to cover those zits with makeup. No Sale!

Make sure your landing pages deal with the questions your potential customers have. Be the ultimate matchmaker. Your customers have questions and problems – and you have the answer. Make sure they know you have the answer to their dilemma right away.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Submit to Social Websites

Have you visited Quantcast?

If you've never visited Quantcast, you're missing out on a lot of very useful information. You can go to Quantcast and enter the URL of a website you may be interested in promoting (as an affiliate marketer) and get a whole wealth of information about not only the site but the demographics of the average visitor.

This information can help you target your advertising and landing pages to your potential customers and relate to their needs. Anything you can do to see through their eyes will put you one step closer to making that sale.

You will still want to do your niche research (here is a link for help with your niche research), but Quantcast can be a valuable tool in your research.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Submit to Social Websites

How to make a Squidoo Lens

Today we're going to look at how to creat a Squidoo Lens. You can make a lens and sell products using your affiliate link without even having a website.

You will still want to do your niche research. (Here is a link for help finding a profitable niche.) And you'll want to find profitable keywords (click here for the best keyword tool at the most economical price).

Check out this free video to explain how to open a Squidoo Lens. This video has some great information.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Submit to Social Websites

Learning Social Networking

Web 2.0 and social networking is the process of site promotion via social media channels to attract targeted traffic. It is low-cost, but can be confusing and time consuming.

There are three types of marketers in respect to social networking. First there are those who don’t believe there is any value in social networking and don’t realize a social networking strategy can bring targeted visitors to any site or business. Then there are those who know nothing about social networking and last but not least, there are those who are interested but don’t know how to use it.

Those who don’t see the value are doomed to marketing mediocrity or worse total obscurity on the internet, fairing little better than those who have been living under a rock and know nothing about it. They both have much worse marketing problems than just not knowing or understanding.

The rest of us fall into the interested but don’t know enough about it group. We know participating in social networking can drive traffic to your site directly from social media websites. We also know, participating can provide links from the social networking sites which as we all know, are so very important to raise your page rank and help you garner visitors via the search engines. After that, it all seems to be just an insurmountable heap of indecipherable information.

To rectify this problem, over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some ideas and suggestions to help us get up and running in this area. We’ll take things one step at a time; we'll learn as we participate.

The first is the Netscape 9.0 browser. The main reason to use the browser is for its integration with the Netscape.com social news portal. You can submit and vote for sites, whether they have widgets installed of not. Just surf the net as usual, and when you run across a site of interest, simply vote for that site.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Submit to Social Websites

Who are you marketing to?

Whether you’re doing business at the local mall or online, you’ve got to know your market. And if you’re doing business on the internet, over the last seven years the average internet user has changed.

According to eMarketer, the internet market that use to be mostly men is now mostly women – and likely to stay that way. In 2007, women equal about 51.7% of the internet population, and those numbers are expected to reach 51.9% by 2011.

Among other information reported, the eMarketers’ Women Online report analyzes the impact that new Internet video content and advertising are having—or not having—on female Internet users, who make up that very large US Internet population.

Amid all the excitement online video is causing, marketers must keep one fact in mind: Of the estimated 97 million females online in the US, only 66% of them actually watch videos online, compared with 78% of males who do. This and other statistics may change the way you want to market to your potential clients.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

No more sitemaps? You don’t say . . .

For those of us with websites, the competing search engines at SES (Search Engine Strategies) made the following announcement yesterday:

“Today, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! together are announcing support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.”

Find the full report at Ask.com’s official blog.

As far as I’m concerned the jury is still out as to whether sitemaps are worth the effort made by web owners. Personally I’ve found I have more pages indexed without a sitemap – autodiscovery or manually submitted. With my 60 page site I can count on having all my pages indexed unless I have a sitemap. With a sitemap my total pages indexed usually drops to 20 or so. And I’m not alone.

Many website owners I’ve talked to find they have the same results. To be fair, there are those who believe sitemaps are just wonderful. (The cat's meow.) My opinion is you need to test for yourself. Try your site with and without sitemaps and see which works best for you.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

What is Web 2.0?

Just what exactly is Web 2.0? What is it, what does it do, and what does it mean? Is there a precise definition that webmasters can get their little SEO boggled minds around? Well there probably is . . . . but I’m one of these people who likes to cut to the chase and get to the heart of the matter.

In business terms, Web 2.0 is the wave of the future. There are thousands and thousands of web surfers who depend exclusively on Web 2.0 for their web search choices. But the short answer is, Web 2.0 is just a giant game of tag. He who gets the most tags, wins the traffic prize.

The problem is, how to learn the rules, systems and players. It could be a full time job. And to overlook this market is to leave a lot of money on the table for somebody else.

If you try to Google Web 2.0 you get a lot of confusing and long rambling articles leaving you knowing just about as much as you did when you started. Enter Mike Worthington – this young man has taken the topic and made it his own. For a cut to the chase e-book on how to master Web 2.0, check out Web 2.0 Traffic System.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Co-Citation - and SEO

Okay, apparently getting backlinks to your website is not the "be all, end all" it use to be. For some time the prevailing thought was to get the search engines attention - to show them your worth - you had to get massive amounts of backlinks. However, it seems backlinks won't get you where you want to be . . . there's more to it.

Enter - Co-Citation. I won't pretend to understand completely, but Jim Boykin's Internet Marketing Blog seems to have a handle on it and has a marvelous explanation of the whole thing.

As you've probably noticed, there are groups of marketers who all market similar products or maybe I should say complementary products. They'll each refer customers to each other and will all benefit from the association. And this is a natural thing and search engines recognize this. If you are a quality site - a site which provides value to the web and those searching the web, you will have people in your business or in businesses complementary to your business linking to you.

This is what Google and the other search engines are looking for. Natural linking. For a great (read better than mine) explanation of Co-Citation, check out Jim Boykin's Internet Marketing Blog.

Of course getting great backlinks is not all there is to SEO, it is a piece of the puzzle and the info on Co-Citations is great information to have.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Digging your way out of Googles Sandbox

Many have debated it’s existence, but if you’re in business on the web and your site is less than three years old . . . you’ve probably been a victim of it. I’m of course referring to the infamous ‘Sandbox’. Google’s way of say, “I won’t trust you until I can see you are trusted by your traffic . . . but of course you don’t have any traffic because Google doesn’t trust you. Ahrrg!

Andy Hagans of the Link Building Blog gives us the Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 Revealed. The self proclaimed "Organic-Is-My-Middle-Name" Hagans gives practical advice to help you dig (or maybe Digg) you’re way out of the Sandbox.

Andy writes: “The sandbox is no longer the pink elephant in the room. As webmasters, together we've cried about it, argued about it, and fretted over it. We've gone through the emotional steps, too; first there was grief (waah waah my site won't rank), then bargaining (I promise I won't spam if you un-sandbox me), anger (darn it, greedy Google just wants me to spend more at AdWords!), and finally, acceptance (OK, how do I beat it?).”

Andy gives information to first decide if you're in the box and ideas of why you're there and then gives suggestions of ways to get out of the box. His suggestions are complete with linking strategies to help you gain the trust of Google. Great information to have.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Improve your blogs performance - Increase Traffic

For those of us who are dependant on the traffic we are able to generate for our blogs, we have “3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic”. And to add further, Nick Wilson of Performancing Blog, gives us The Art of Linkbaiting.

Nick cuts to the chase on Linkbaiting and gives us the answer to what we have all wondered in the past . . . how do you get someone to link to you if you’re a new blog. He writes; Ever found it hard to get other bloggers to link to a new blog? Sure you have, it's not easy sometimes. Even established blogs need to expand their traffic and influence on a regular basis, and linkbaiting is one way to do it. It's not without potential perils, but the time honored tradition of being contrary, in order to get attention is well proved, and done right, it's a killer way to break into a new area. There are also safer ways of linkbaiting, they're just less fun :)
In order to bait a link, you need a hook. Hooks come in variety of flavors, some of the more popular would include:

• News Hook
• Contrary Hook
• Attack Hook
• Resource Hook
• Humour Hook

And then he proceeds to show examples of each which are very enlightening. If you’re planning on earning on your own blog, you don’t want to miss this one. Performancing Blog is dedicated to helping bloggers succeed; great site.

You may also want to check out the Copyblogger post; 'How to Attract Links'. Great reading. Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Traffic – Give me Traffic . . .

The bane of every online marketer is the need for traffic. You can have the perfect site and sell the perfect product at an unbelievably low price and it won’t matter unless you have traffic. And unfortunately organic traffic is one of the hardest things to get.

In fact to stay in business, at least in the beginning, you almost have to resort to some form of advertising. And paid advertising can cut into profits pretty darn quick if you’re not extremely careful.

Kim Roach of 'UnleashTheTrafic.com’ wrote this week about Untapped Advertising Hot Spots. With an expected 20 Billion in online advertising next year (yes that’s a ‘B’ – Billion) every affiliate marketer should be able to find advertising venues that fall within their budget. She explores 4 of the most lucrative online advertising spots that are currently available to you. They include CPA programs, blog ads, comparison shopping engines, and the ISEDN.

Hopefully this will give you some advertising ideas that extend past the Pay-Per-Click we all seem to rely on. Check out the Traffic page on www.EarnOnYourComputer.com for more ways to increase your traffic.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a business from home!

Spammer in the Slammer – and – Human Phone Support

Spammers and Customer Service Reps . . . wouldn’t you know it, we seem to have an abundance of the first and a shortage of the second. Though these two items are not directly related to Internet Marketing at first blush, they both serve to rob marketers of their time. Hopefully these two items will serve to help the situation.

• Lisa Barone posted on Bruce Clay, Inc.’s Blog, that Jeremy Jaynes, one of the worst spammer in the world, received 9 Years for his nefarious deeds. (Only illegal because he exceeded an average of 10,000 unsolicited e-mails sent per day; doesn’t that seem a tad high or is it just me?)
  
  I’d like to believe this might slow the flow, but I’m not holding my breath. It looks as though tighter controls would be in order just for starters. Click the link to look at the full article. Of course the spam filters of most e-mail service providers have to be cutting into their profits. Right? We can always hope.
  

• Next, is there anything more annoying than the endless phone trees you find yourself on when you call customer service departments? Stephen J. Dubner of Authors’ Blog gives us
  Things to Do in Customer-Service Hell. If phone trees were as interactive as the talking computer on Star Trek – and don’t forget the voice of Majel Barret – perhaps we wouldn’t mind it so much. But until that happens, visit GetHuman database before you dial that CS number to see if they have any suggestions to help you ‘get a human’.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start your own home business!

Eat like a bird, and poop like an elephant.

To write a blog that others want to read, you have to read blogs . . . lots of blogs. This will not only help you stay current on the issues and provide topics for your own blog but will also help you find that all important scoop. And while the following could not be classified as a scoop, it is good advice.

Here's a great post by Guy Kawasaki (he posted it in April . . . I'm behind in my reading to say the very least). In his post The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog he points out the interesting honor system in blogging. "Suppose Blogger A finds an obscure article and posts it to his blog. Blogger B reads about it on Blogger A's blog and links to it. However Blogger B doesn't link only to the article; she also links to Blogger A to give him credit for finding the article.

"This means that if you hustle and scoop stuff, other bloggers will link to you. For example, when I found and publicized the Stanford Social Innovation Review article by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, many other bloggers linked to my blog, not just the article itself. I was surprised by this. Bottom line: if you want lots of people to link to you, read voraciously and find cool stuff first. As a Japanese philosopher once said, "Eat like a bird, and poop like an elephant.""

To read the entire post on Evangelizing your Blog follow the link. Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Business from Home

Going for the 'Long Tail'

If you’ve been around the net for very long you’ve heard the expression ‘Long Tail’ being bandied about and wondered what it was and why everyone seemed to be going for it. For a great explanation of ‘Long Tail’ you may want to follow the link.

Savvy Internet Marketers will want to chase the ‘Long Tail’ and capture those shoppers. To do this there are several simple things we can do.

• First, look at each of the pages on your site with a critical eye and evaluate the buyers as they arrive at your site. Exactly what are they looking for and what would have been the best and most specific terms they could have used in their search to arrive at the perfect site (yours of course).



• Next, add these terms to your ‘Meta Keyword’ and also optimize your page for those terms. Visitors using highly descriptive search terms to arrive at your site are more likely to buy than the casual surfer using broader terms.



• Last but not least, provide links, in and out of that page using those same terms as anchor text. This will further optimize that page for those keyphrases.

Rest assured someone is going to capture the profits from those buyers – wouldn’t you much rather it be you?

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a business from home !

Boost response rates with a "Johnson Box"

What is a Johnson Box? Glad you asked . . .

Some say it's named after the 'Johnson Boxes' at train stations that have offers and brochures displayed, but others credit a direct sales guru named Frank H. Johnson some sixty years ago or so who wanted to increase the conversion rate of his sales letters.

He decided that instead of making his potential customers read through a long sales letter before making his offer, he would highlight it in a rectangular box, centered, and placed at the very top of the letter above the greeting.

The results were fantastic, and the rest, as they say, is history. It's a no-brainer. The box really stands out at the top of the letter, and catches your attention. Your eye just automatically gravitates to the headline. There are statistics claiming the addition of this one little feature can boost sales by as much as 20%; which is well worth the effort.

Just remember to put your offer, the main benefit of your service or product, and the URL to visit in the box. If you have a guarantee now's the time to tout it and if the offer expires in the near future that's even better. (This adds the ticking clock element.)

There are lots of ways to increase your income without having to increase the number of visitors to your site. The easiest is to convert more of the visitors you have into buyers.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start your own home business