Financial stress is hitting a lot of people these days, me and mine included.  And to try to ease the pain of not having enough money to do what you want to do, a lot of people have started to try to earn a living online in a hope of staking their claim in the Online Gold Rush. 

But most of them will fail.  Harsh though that may sound, it’s the reality.  In fact, it has been estimated that fewer than 5% of all people trying to make money online, actually succeed.  So how do you make sure you are one of the 5% who is successful?

Well you could look in online forums (fora?) for advice.  After all, there are plenty of them, like the Warrior Forum, a fantastic forum for all things internet marketing and I highly recommend it to anyone who is marketing anything online…  But sadly even there, you can often see posts simply rehashing the “old faithfuls” of how to make money online. 

Take yesterday for example.  I was in the Warrior Forum, when I saw a post about what it takes to be successful online.  The gist was that the difference between the success and failure online is simply “taking action”.  In essence, if you would only “take action”, you would be successful.

Ouch!

Far be it from me to disagree with the formidable WF, but, in this case, I have to.  I agree that you will be unsuccessful if you don’t take action but the reverse is simply not a “given”. 

It really is not that simple.  Having tried a lot of things online, I know that it is perfectly possible for any newbie to be extremely busy taking all sorts of actions and STILL be getting nowhere!  I think every single newbie who ever comes online is VERY busy taking action because they are so full of enthusiasm. 

No.  Simply taking action will not guarantee you online success.

And it isn’t even focus.  Newbies can be very focused – tweaking and prettying their websites or using Google Adwords to drive traffic to other people’s squeeze pages for pennies.

The key to success is simple.

You need to follow a tried and tested method for success without deviation.  Do NOT try to reinvent the wheel. Do NOT miss out steps and do NOT “improve it”.  Find someone who speaks your language; someone who is successful (and can prove it) and COPY them.

The key to success online is following a successful blueprint to the letter.

Trick is to find the genuine article with so many wolves out there… 

The simplicity of Twitter is what helped make it one of the most popular and powerful online social media sites today. If used well, Twitter can be an effective and invaluable marketing tool that will let you reach a vast audience of potential customers and clients. The 140-character limit imposed on tweets forces your messages to be concise, and in this media-saturated culture, that is exactly the type of easily digestible format that people crave. Here are 5 tips for taking advantage of Twitter in your marketing strategies.

1. Enhance the reach of your business blog
The more popular your company’s blog becomes, the higher its standing will be in search engine results, and thus the more exposure your brand name will get to potential customers. Twitter provides a great way of increasing your blog’s reach. Use twitter feed to give your followers immediate access to your main blog page.

2.  Engage your audience in conversation
Engaging members of your target audience in conversation is one the key pillars of a good marketing campaign. It’s not enough just to shout your slogan at them. You have to see what they have to say so that you can deliver your message in more effective and unique ways. To see what other people are saying and to respond to their tweets, use TweetGrid and TweetDeck. Look for relevant topics and add your two cents to the conversation.

3. Valuable, concise tweets
The 140-character limit that’s at the center of Twitter’s success forces you to really think carefully about your tweets. The trick to gaining a good following is to put out immediately valuable messages that are concise and compelling. This is what will get you new followers and retweets.

4. Keep up on your market’s trends
One of the key elements of good marketing is to know what’s going on in your industry. Twitter Search and Monitter makes it easy to look up important industry topics and see what the market is currently leaning towards.

5. Build interest groups
By creating compelling interests groups you can initiate discussion about specific industry topics that are relevant to your marketing campaign. Building interest groups on Twitter is easy and is a great way to generate followers and buzz.

For more internet marketing information and SEM services please visit, http://www.bestrank.com, a Portland SEO agency  http://www.bestrank.com/services/local-seo/portland-seo 

Guest Post by: Ryan Frank  a 23 year writer and blogger living in San Diego, CA.  Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/social-marketing-articles/5-marketing-tips-for-twitter-1283390.html

Affiliate marketing with eBooks is one of the best ways to create a strong stream of income through Internet marketing.  Whether you promote your own eBook, or one that someone else has written, this can work well as a facet of your online business venture.

You can sell your own eBook, inviting affiliate marketers to promote it on their website or blog for you and giving them a percentage of each sale.  Or you can promote eBooks that others have written by joining an affiliate program such as ClickBank or PayDotCom and choosing a good product to feature on your own site.

When you choose to promote someone else’s eBook, it’s important to look for eBooks that will sell well and that offer a good commission.  Choose a good quality product that’s relevant to your niche.  Take a look at the sales page for that eBook.  Does it make you want to buy the product? If not, it probably won’t excite your website or blog visitors to buy either.

And don’t forget commission.  You get a percent of each sale that is generated by you.  The bigger the percentage, the larger the commission assuming the price of the product is the same!

You’re doing a lot of work to sell this eBook, so go for one with a good-sized commission.  Affiliate marketing with eBooks also requires that you do some work of your own – for instance – you have to make sure your website is search engine optimized for the most possible traffic.  Affiliate marketing with eBooks can be a lucrative business.  Follow these guidelines, and see what selling eBooks can do for you!

Carving your own spot within a niche is an involved process.  You can’t just start a website, write an article or two and deem yourself the new expert of your niche!  Unless you are a celebrity, you’ll likely still be invisible – and if you want to be successful in Internet marketing, you can’t afford to be invisible!

One excellent way to bring your online business to life is to tap into a niche with video marketing.  Video marketing is the newest and possibly best way to get the attention and respect of customers, prospects and your peers as well.  This is because it brings together all of the best elements of marketing – words, voice, and visual to create a vehicle for sharing information in a way that everyone appreciates.  And if you video yourself talking your prospects can see and identify YOU and your body language is there for all to read too!

When you tap into a niche with video marketing, you have a great chance to show what you know to possibly millions of people!  How?  Well, if you post your video on YouTube and promote the video link to it, you literally have the chance of millions seeing that video (it worked for Susan Boyle and it could work for you!)

So here are the “do’s”.

• Create a video that’s packed with interesting and helpful information;
• If you can, make it entertaining, as that increases hits as people embed it on their sites;
• Optimise your video for search engines (tag it with keywords) – and you’ll improve your chances of traffic – after all search engines LOVE videos!

The reason video marketing is so important for staking a claim on a niche is that most Internet marketers still don’t use video, but it’s one of the most popular ways for people to view information on the Internet.  Video marketing has a greater impact because it’s visual.  It helps you create your brand as an expert on multiple levels and helps you gain standing in your niche because it’s so powerful.

Use video and you will put yourself above so many other internet marketers out there.  So what are you waiting for?  Go grab your video camera!

Some Internet marketers try to do all of their work themselves.  All Internet marketing activities are necessary components of a successful Internet marketing business, but take a huge amount of time and energy.  For many, outsourcing some Internet marketing tasks is the answer.

But what are the pros of outsourcing?  And what’s the true cost of outsourcing your Internet marketing tasks?  As you might expect, there are pros and cons!

Pros

1. Improved Focus
   You’ll be able to concentrate on the tasks that you are doing yourself better, because you won’t be trying to do so much multitasking.
2. More Time
   You’ll also have more time to yourself, which can be used to spend relaxing, or for tending to other priorities such as your family.
3. Less Procrastination
   You’ll procrastinate less because you can outsource those tasks that you either don’t feel skillful enough to do or simply don’t like to do.

Cons

1. Money
   Obviously, you need a certain amount of money to pay for your outsourcing.  And this generally means that people do not consider outsourcing until their online business has started to be regularly profitable.  But money spent outsourcing is well worth it when you factor in the time saved and the stress relief you get from offloading certain tasks. 
2. Worry
   Outsourcing can go wrong.  You might find that those that you’ve outsourced work to are not doing a quality job, or do not get things done to your timetable because they are prioritizing other clients’ work!   
3. Upfront Organizing
   And with outsourcing, you still have to do some organizing and you also have to take time to inspect the work you’re paying for – at least until you find that your contracted help is reliable and has high standards for their work. 

Outsourcing some of your work can be well worth it.  Just be sure that you’ve chosen good helpers with good reputations, so that outsourcing is a source of joy – not of worry and frustration. 

OK, I wasn’t being personal.  I was trying to get you to focus attention on your backend… sales.  It’s something that gurus bang on and on about, but still people sometimes forget about the importance of backend sales.  

In case this is new to you, the idea is quite simple. 

Once you’ve converted a site visitor to a customer, which means once someone has bought from you – you’ve accomplished a sale.  But what happens next is crucial.  Before you forget all about that customer and start attracting more new customers, remember that your existing customer could become a repeat customer – if your backend offers are big enough.  

After all, you know that the established customer already likes what you have to offer, so take advantage of that and offer them more of a good thing.  

But how, you say?

Well, why not get creative and use quality niche MRR (master resale rights) in your backend sales?  

Let’s see how that might work.

Well, depending on what you are promoting, you might find that master resale rights can play an interesting role in your backend sales.  You might have a fantastic info product that you’ve bought with MRR, one that you can offer to your customers as an additional product that they will find to be a good investment – especially since they are given resale rights with the product and can sell it to others!  In certain selling situations, this might be an exceptional opportunity for you to make more money… and for your customer to make money too (in the resales).  It’s a classic win-win situation.

So remember your backend sales, and don’t be afraid to think outside the box.  You can let MRR play a role in your backend sales and create some interesting opportunities for both yourself and your customers.

They’ll thank you for it!

I’ve talked a lot about PLR content, where to get the good PLR and things you might do with it usefully, to monetize a site. 

Another way to use your niche PLR content is to fill the pages of a purpose build AdSense site.  If you are not familiar with the term, an AdSense site is a website, blog, lens etc., which is created around a keyword (phrase) or set of related keywords, for the sole purpose of getting clicks on ads.  With AdSense, it’s all about the clicks.

So for all the naysayers who still maintain that AdSense sites are dead, I say “If you say so – less competition for the rest of us”.  And if you’re wondering if they DO still work, I say, yes, if you do it right. 

But to get an AdSense site to work, you have to have a couple things going for you – lots of traffic and interesting content (drawing the traffic).  That’s where PLR content comes in handy.  If you’re wondering if AdSense sites are a good use of niche PLR content the answer is yes – when you do it right.

The AdSense site isn’t going to get a lot of visitors that will be interested in clicking without a lot of good content.  PLR content makes this easy.  You purchase niche PLR content that is high quality, adjust it to fit your keywords, change the titles and anything else you want (within the limits of the license), to make the content more unique – and then post it on your AdSense site.

Search engines love to reward sites that are well-stocked with original, quality content with high page ranks – and that’s where your traffic is going to come from.

So if you’re using AdSense to create a stream of income, your main goals are going to get people to your site and then get them interested enough in the content to want to click on the ads.  Why not use niche PLR to give plenty of strong content, keep it fresh, update it and watch your AdSense income soar.

I have read a lot of blog posts, opinions and teachings online, even from a previous mentor, saying that to be successful online, you have to brand yourself high profile, develop your own product, make it go “viral” and be the “buzz” on all the social networking sites.  And that unless you are adding thousands of new followers on Twitter each week, you don’t “get” the importance of it for developing your online brand.

Maybe.

And some act as if there is no place for you online unless you make yourself highly visible and position yourself as the “go to” guy.  So if you are don’t want to be in the spotlight, and are uncomfortable aligning yourself with the mega-star gurus, then you had better quit the internet now or focus on an online support role such as a forum moderator.

I totally disagree.

I think there is a place online for everyone who wants to be online.  If you play to your strengths, understand your core competencies and talk in “your own voice”, then you will find your own market.  And there are still very good businesses to be hard through automation – which doesn’t require you to have a “name” online.

I agree that if you thrust yourself into the spotlight, it’s highly likely that you’ll develop a wide customer base and more quickly, than people who don’t, simply because more people will gain “fast exposure” to you. 

But you will also have customers even if you prefer to fly “under the radar”.  After all, there are lots of people who have made very good money by doing just that, like Michael Green and Chris Freville.  And if you just said “who?”, doesn’t that prove my point?

So, which way do you go?  Follow the pack to guru status or fly under the radar?

Actually, the choice is not consciously yours.  How you become successful online depends totally on your personal style and preferred method of working. 

If you are independent, free-thinking and largely self-reliant, someone who doesn’t need a great deal of social interaction, you will probably be more successful playing to these traits and staying “low visibility”.  But remember that this strategy takes time and effort to build business momentum.  If your work is high quality, you will get more loyal customers.  In time you will be the big fish in your small niche market.  Having “cracked” one niche market, you will find moving into another easy because your name will not be highly identified as a niche specialist, outside your niche. 

On the flip side, if you are a party animal, someone who thrives on not just “playing hard” but being seen to be playing hard, someone who desires to be “known” as a guru, then you will get more out of being “high profile” online.  Becoming widely known and highly visible will certainly catapult a fledgling business into a cash cow far quicker than the “under the radar” approach.  However, there is a risk that a high profile “guru” cannot enter other niche markets without losing credibility as an expert.  (Hence the common use of “niche names”).

So when you start your online business, decide what kind of person you are (ask your friends and family if they agree!)  Follow the business development profile that suits YOU.  If you aim for “high profile”, when you’re really a “stealth flier”, you will be uncomfortable in your role and less successful than you would have been if you were “true” to yourself.  Likewise, trying to be a “best kept secret”, when you want to shout “look at me” is similarly doomed. 

Be yourself online.  Stay true to you when branding and marketing yourself online.  That’s what the true “gurus” do.