22.  Become a guest author on another website.

If you’re a pretty good writer and can commit to a regular schedule of articles, then becoming a guest author or columnist is a really great opportunity.  You get free publicity and the website you write for gets free content from you… Another win/win!

If you’re really feeling good about your writing, why not extend this idea and ask to become a guest columnist/writer for a print publication?  All they can say is no. Read the rest of this entry

I often hear online business and marketing types talk about how important it is to have a good subscriber list.  In many cases, having a reasonable sized list of responsive subscribers can make the difference in whether your online business succeeds or dies a slow painful death.

You’re heard it before, “The money is in the list.”

What exactly is a list?

Simply put, a “list” is generally a database of subscribers that you contact regularly.  Your form of contact could be direct mail, email, phone, fax, or any other technology available.  For purposes of this discussion, we’re talking about how to successfully build an email list, but many of the strategies below could also apply to other kinds of list building.

Most online businesses create newsletters or ezines to send to their subscriber lists (a method I highly recommend), you can also create email lists in order to disseminate other types of information like website updates, ebooks, email courses, reports, blog posts, etc.  As long as subscribers know in advance what kind of information they’re signing up for, the sky’s the limit. Read the rest of this entry

No matter what kind of email you send — promotions, follow ups, newsletters, etc. — You only have a few seconds to catch your reader’s attention and get them to open your email, read it, and click through on your email links.

The most difficult obstacle in email marketing is to get people to actually open your messages.

After all, you can’t provide value to your prospects, develop rapport, or establish yourself as an expert in your industry if they won’t open the skinkin’ email!

So let’s talk about the most important factors in getting people to open your email and increase your email open rates.

There are two things that you’ve got to focus on, you’re email subject line and the “from” field of the email.  Let’s do “from” first. Read the rest of this entry

Twitter can be a great tool to increase your visibility, create new leads and subscribers for your business, and produce more sales for your business or affiliate marketing, but you have to use it the right way to accomplish all those things.

That’s where all the self-proclaimed Twitter Experts and Gurus come in.

There are a lot of people out there who claim to be “Total Twitter Gurus,” and they just LOVE to give advice on how you can become a Twitter Expert too!  So I thought it would be kind of fun to talk about the top three totally stupid twitter tips that I’ve see over the last few weeks.

Read the rest of this entry

Yesterday I worked on setting up a new email marketing campaign and realized that Aweber, my autoresponder service, made some MAJOR improvements to their service that will help everyone who uses autoresponders.

Aweber added a new form generator that will make your subscription forms look ultra-professional without having to do any fancy coding yourself.  The web form generator now has templates to give your form that professional edge.

Check out the video below to see what I mean: Read the rest of this entry

The whole idea of blog commenting for traffic has been around for a long time, but you don’t hear too many people talk about the effectiveness of this strategy. Maybe that’s because sooo many people do it all wrong.

So, is blog commenting a smart traffic strategy?

Well, it depends on how you do it. Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry

People ask me all kinds of questions — “Should I go with affiliate marketing or network marketing?”  “What’s the best thing to sell online?”  “How can I REALLY start a home business that makes money?”

Most of the time what people really want to know is:  How can I make the kind of money all those gurus talk about?

Well, the first thing that you need to know is that many of those internet marketing gurus aren’t being completely honest about their income, the size of their lists, or their products.  I’m sure you already knew that — after all, it’s hard to take anyone at their word anymore, especially online.

But here’s the other thing you need to know about a lot of internet marketers… for some, the major source of their income doesn’t actually come from selling their internet marketing products (or any products for that matter) online .  Let me explain… Read the rest of this entry