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Business blog is an incredible online marketing tool that saves you thousands of dollars but provides great business opportunities in just one click. Blogs are user-friendly, customized and flexible medium for disseminating useful information for effective positioning of your products in the market.

Companies engaging in business blogging have a definite edge over its competitors. Here are some advantages:

a) Word-of-Mouth. In a survey, there are currently 14 million blogs with 80,000 more being added each day and about 30 percent of the 50 million users are blog readers. Imagine how much gain your company will have, if your products are advertised through blogs. With Internet, information spreads so quickly especially if an impressive write-up goes with your product. Soon your blogs will be passed on to hundreds of possible customers.

b) Awareness and loyalty. Open communication with your customers creates trust and loyalty among them. Being there to respond to their questions and comments make them all the more willing to try your products and services.

c) Feedback. Blogs is good for product research and reviews. It would be easier to improve on your products if you observe your customers’ thinking and behavioral patterns. You can also take immediate action to your customers’ concerns.

d) Community halo-effect. Bloggers are reasonable, friendly and helpful. They are more than willing to create blogosphere of comments regarding your product. The only thing you have to do is embrace and take active part in the culture and your product will surely be considered in their next stop to the supermarket.

For better marketing results, actively promote your business blogs by submitting your blogs to blog search sites and directories. Do not forget to paste in with your blogs, your URL. Be sure that your blogs contain exclusive information with value and are always updated to keep readers popping in, read up your blog, move on to the next and click on again for updates.

Blog is like a setup booth in the biggest trade show on earth everyday. Marketing possibilities are just around the corner waiting to strike your sale scales up.

The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are important too in conjunction with your blogs to get the best benefits. Use effective keyword phrases to generate high ranking status in the search engine traffic. In this way you have better chances of people finding your website leading to your blogs. More traffic means more potential sales.

For this to be successful, you can use RSS for news update feeds which can be read through RSS reader application. This is a very useful tool for business and internet marketers as well.

If you are already convinced with the potentials of business blogs for marketing and targeting sales increase, your company is now ready to start blogging. But first, you have to be in tune with your company’s business objectives and determine if blogging will really help you achieve your goal.

1. Several blogs are dedicated to teaching people the do’s and don’ts of blogging, READ them! Include in your reading materials blogs that are consumer-based too to give you an idea.

2. Setup several test blogs right away.

If your initial try out with blogs worked well, you can now start setting up your blogs.

1. Study blog design. Blog hosting services provide pre-designed templates. But if you opt for paid blog service, you can ask your artist to design and layout your blog site to match the company’s identity and needs.

2. Choose a topic. Its good to have a line-up of topics you want for your blogs but be sure they are in consonance with your business objectives. This would be a test of your flexibility and open-mindedness since results may be going against the set objectives.

3. Remember the following safety measures in blogging:

- legal issues are sometimes involved in blogging; it is safer to include disclaimers and limitations of liabilities;

- corporate communication and legal department are responsible in educating the senior management on how blogs might affect business;

- create blogging policies; set limits on who gets to blog and what information are allowed to be made public;

- avoid outright marketing blog or you will shy away your readers;

- make content updated, relevant and fresh;

- reinforce the company’s core values; and,

- encourage employees to use it.

4. Start blogging and complete 20 posts before going to marketing.

5. Begin marketing.

6. Regularly monitor the coming ins and outs of readers and get updates. Then, measure your results.

7. Adjust if needed. You can always play with your designs in the blog site as long as it remains to match the company’s identity.

8. Strive to be consistent with your topic all the time.

9. Try to have unrelated topics with general and broad appeal.

10.Schedule updates regularly. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday would be best to update blogs.

Once you have done all these things, you can now ultimately enjoy the benefits of business blogging.

No. It is not true that the so called “get-rich-quick-scheme” exist at all. Maybe if you venture into illegal businesses, you might find your riches quickly. But you also will be busted and be a bankrupt as quickly as you became rich. To me, a get-rich-quick-scheme does exist. In a way that if you work hard, you will get rich the fastest possible way you can ever imagine. Getting rich quickly is not true, unless you work hard and are willing to learn, you definitely will be much richer than those people working a day job.

As a saying goes,”time is money”, must be remembered for those who wish to get rich quickly (I don’t mean in a day or two). You have to spend every second available to you to get on with your research and to plan your strategies if you wish to venture in the online market. The online market is saturated with online-marketers-wannabes. But if you put in the extra effort, I am a hundred and one percent sure that you will be able to succeed.

There are many ways for you to choose if you wish to work from home. There are jobs ranging from online marketing to doing online surveys. It is up to you to choose which job you really want to do. But let me tell you something, even if you know practically nothing about the internet, as long as you are willing to learn and put in the extra effort, you will be able to succeed and earn even more than those who have ventured in online marketing for a long time.

So, getting rich quickly is impossible if you think short-term (maybe a week or two). If you think long-term (maybe a month or two), it is possible to achieve your desired results. And you can start planning for a holiday to Hawaii or whichever country you wish to visit.

Working from home and earning a handsome amount of salary might be a fantasy to others, but not to you and me.

In anticipation of an upcoming launch of Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula 2, I told my list that I was going to offer a solo mailing to one of my lists of over 120,000. This immediately started a flood of emails asking how they could order early… something that I anticipated.

The second flood of emails asked how I had managed to build such a huge database. Rather than answering that second question in individual emails, I decided to answer it with this article.

First of all, I should point out that I’ve been in business online since late-1996, and have been slowly building my lists almost since the very beginning. So, I didn’t accomplish this overnight. Still, I know that you can build a huge list rather quickly if you use the right techniques.

Here are some of my favorite list-building techniques:

1) Put a sign-up form on every page of your websites, except for direct sales pages where it would interrupt the flow too much. Next to that sign-up form, give a powerful reason why they need to join your list, and ask them to take action.

Next to the sign-up form, assure them that you will protect them from spam. Also post a few testimonials as proof of the value your newsletter provides.

2) Write information-packed articles and distribute them everywhere appropriate. I’ve written over 850 information-packed article on the topic of Internet marketing. Those articles demonstrate my expertise, share useful information, and bring visitors to my websites ready to join my lists.

I believe in sharing a lot of cutting edge information in my articles. Many people only drop hints, but I’m not afraid of sharing too much. The reason is that knowledge grows exponentially, and since I’m constantly learning new things, I can never teach you everything that I know.

Since I don’t fear running out of useful information that you will value, my articles are genuinely helpful, and that generates lots of loyal subscribers.

3) Write information-packed, inexpensive ebooks and then allow affiliates to sell them for most of the profit.

I create a steady stream of ebooks - largely expansions of my articles - and then I set up affiliate programs where affiliates earn as much as 100% commission. Money is a great motivator for getting others to send you lots of new “paying” customers and subscribers

My favorite tool for setting up these “ebook traffic magnets” is Sid Hale’s Rapid Action Profits script. This script allows you to set up a system where an affiliate earns INSTANT commissions which are paid directly to their Paypal accounts.

High commissions are a great motivator for people to send you new potential subscribers. When those commissions are paid instantly to affiliates who often have cash-flow problems, it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.

You’ll find Sid’s Rapid Action Profits System at: http://TheRealSecrets.com/RapidActionProfits/

4) Run pay-per-click campaigns… when the math makes sense. This is something that I don’t see a lot of my competitors doing. However, when I know that my conversions rates or backend profits are sufficient, I often run pay-per-click ads… sometimes even for free items.

With pay-per-clicks, you need to closely monitor your results. You also need a good idea of the lifetime value of a new customer or subscriber. To me, it makes perfect sense to lose a dollar to gain a new highly qualified subscriber.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice numerous Internet marketers who run promotions where they pay a dollar or more for referrals who simply opt-in to a list. I essentially do the same thing when using pay-per-clicks. With pay-per-clicks you reach new subscribers who may not already be on a dozen other marketers’ lists.

5) Use free giveaways where appropriate. I contribute to, and help to promote free giveaways, when they are well managed and the quality is high. I’ve built large lists doing this and have a friend who got over 5000 subscribers from one of his first giveaways. I’ve written about how I do that many times before.

The key with free giveaways is that you need to offer a gift of high enough value that your new subscribers instantly bond with you. You still have to develop the relationship, but your gift should start it on a positive note.

Many people who participate in free giveaways offer “absolute garbage.” Once their new subscriber downloads their free “gift” and look through it, they HAVE to feel insulted.

My rule is to always offer a gift that’s good enough to sell. I was humored when, in one recent giveaway, I contributed resale rights to one of my new ebooks, along with a rough website. Before the giveaway was even over, at least one fast-acting individual had my ebook set up using the Rapid Action Profits script mentioned in number three, above.

6) Give away free viral ebooks. Write ebooks on topics that you know a lot of people are interested in. In those ebooks recommend specific solutions to problems, and include affiliate links to buy those products. Make some of those links rebrandable.

If the ebooks are filled with lots of useful information, AND they have links that can be rebranded, then you have an ebook that should go viral. People are incentivized to spread it!

In these ebooks, offer some type of a free bonus… perhaps an audio recording, or a template, or free piece of software, but require readers to visit your website to get this bonus. On your site, require them to register, or join your mailing list, to get the freebie.

If the original ebook delivered tremendous value, then the new potential subscriber will have no objection to joining your list. If the free ebook offered marginal value, then they have to assume that your other “gift” will be more of the same, and so they won’t subscribe.

For creating viral ebooks, I recommend using the “Viral Document Toolkit” a next-generation PDF brander created by David Schwartz. The Viral Document Toolkit allows you to easily create rebrandable documents where you can specify links, and text that can be rebranded. You can even specify rather large BLOCKS of text as rebrandable… and even rebrand hyperlinked images! You create a rebrandable ebook, and then pass along the ebook (with most parts locked, but some parts changeable) along with the rebrander tool, to your subscribers, website visitors, customers, etc. Since they can profit from changing the ebook, they happily spread it, and in the process build you a huge list.

You’ll find the Viral Document Toolkit at: http://ViralDocumentToolkit.com

David finished testing the Viral Document Toolkit software March 1st, 2008, so you’ll be using a tool that 99.9% of your competitors will have never seen. VDT is actually so revolutionary that NO ONE other than a few of David’s closest friends have even been allowed to touch it, until now.

If you make your new viral ebooks good enough, you may be pleasantly surprised to see your competitors promoting them

6) Take massive action and do it immediately. One of my secrets to building my database so large is that when I’m shown a new tool or technique, and it passes “the common sense test,” then I put it to immediate use… provided it doesn’t distract me from something more urgent that I’m already working on.

Many of my contemporaries, and subscribers, complained about having no list as long as five years ago. Many of them still use that same excuse for why they’ve not made any real business growth progress.

I’m not sure why this is since all of the techniques that I, and that many of my mentors use, are so simple… and even obvious!

The key is not to over-analyze things. That traps you into “paralysis by analysis.” Instead, get into the habit of doing while others are still “thinking about it.”

My friend, Dr. Joe Vitale, taught me that “money loves speed!”

I’ve just shared with you some of the techniques that I’ve used to build a massive subscriber database. Of course, I can’t cover every technique that I use in this short article. I will close by sharing that part of the key to growing your list is actually retaining the subscribers after you get them. To do that, you merely need to deliver tremendous content telling them how to solve their most pressing problems.

Simple - right?

So, you have discovered that perfect home-based business that is going to have prospects banging down the door to sign up…but you don’t have the money to invest. The investment requirement may be $1500, it may be $1000, it may be $100.

The point is that you have NO money to spare, if you want to keep a roof over your head and food on the table. This describes most, in today’s economy, but you are special because you are wise enough to realize that if you just keep doing what you are doing now, you are just going to keep getting poorer.

Now mind you, that doesn’t mean you can walk into your boss’s office, drop off your resignation letter, and tell him to pound sand just yet…that comes later. But, you know that while your day job will make you a living, your online business will make you a fortune. Right?

So the challenge is to raise the money to start your business as soon as possible. The methods I am about to teach you will do just that, PLUS generate recurring monthly savings that will become your advertising budget.

Step 1: Where is My Money Going Now?

The simplest and best way of making money is to reduce your costs. But you may already only be buying what you need! So, we are going to reduce our costs WITHOUT sacrificing the goods/services that we need. But first, what ARE our costs?

Exercise: Take out last month’s bank statement and credit card bills. Itemize each of your major costs. Your list may look something like this:

* Mortgage on house or cost of renting
* Car payments
* Health Insurance
* Car Insurance
* Homeowners Insurance
* Groceries
* Fast food/lunches out at work
* Telephone/Internet/Cable
* Gas

These are just a few. It can be frightening to see just how much money you are spending to keep a roof over your head!

So now that we know WHERE our money is going, let’s take action to divert more of it away from other people’s pockets and into our own. We will do that via…

Step 2: Competitive Bidding–Who wants my business?

It is simply astonishing how almost every company utilizes competitive bidding, and yet how few households do! For every item we listed up there, there are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of different companies who would love to have you as their customer!

Let’s make them compete against each other, shall we?

Exercise: Find your policies for Health, Auto and Home Insurance. Find exactly what your coverages are, and your premiums. THEN, go online to a competitive bidding website, fill out your information, and request quotes from dozens of bidders! I personally use LowerMyBills and E-Health Insurance (links are provided in the resource box below). Representatives from these companies will be scrambling all over each other to provide you with their most competitive quotes, especially if you…

Tip: TELL THEM that other companies are bidding for your business! No one wants the competition to get a customer, so they will cut their margins as much as they can!
Tip: Create URGENCY by telling them that you are only accepting bids until X date, at which point you will choose the most inexpensive offer that meets your needs!

You will be astonished at how much this will reduce your monthly costs. This is a service that I perform for clients, in exchange for a % of whatever I save them, and believe me that is a pretty penny. But you don’t need me to do it for you, you can do this yourself!

Savings: (will obviously vary from person to person, this is what I tend to see on average)
Savings on health insurance: $200 per month
Savings on car insurance: $100 per month
Savings on home insurance: $75 per month
First-month savings on insurance: $375
Ongoing monthly savings: $375/month

Wow! That’s a nice chunk of change right there towards your business. And your actual results may be much higher or much lower, but chances are that right now, unless you bid out your insurance annually, your provider is probably treating you like a 200-pound 4th-grader taking your lunch money.

Step 3: I Can Pay Less, to Save MORE?!?

Have you been reading the news about the economy? In an effort to turn around the recession, the FED has been slashing through interest rates with speed and vigor usually seen only in Japanese Samurai movies.

Take out that mortgage bill, and see what rate you are paying. 7%? 6%?

We’ll use an average mortgage amount of $200,000, and assume your current interest rate is 7% at a 30 year fixed loan. Ergo, your payment is $1,330.60 per month.

Do you have any idea JUST HOW MUCH money you can save by refinancing now at a lower rate?

With the Fed rate cuts, loans at 5% are easily available. Just that 2% drop in interest will lower your payment on the SAME LOAN to $1,073.64…saving you $237 per month!!
Let’s add that in…
1st-Month Savings on Refinancing at lower rate: $237
Ongoing monthly savings: $237/month

And you can roll in your closing costs to the loan, so you don’t pay anything up front, and STILL be saving this much (a few thousand over a 30-year loan just knocks off about $20 per month from your savings, which is already factored in above).

Step 4: Waste Not, Want Not

Now we are going to look at such a simple, obvious, and EASY way to save money, that never even occurs to most people.

What are you doing for lunch at work? Are you getting fast food, because it’s easy and convenient? If so, you are spending about $6-$8 per meal!

Or do you eat out a restaurant? That gets REALLY expensive, anywhere from $10-$20 per meal or more! For this example, we will say that you are like most of working America and you eat lunch at a fast food place, spending $7 per meal.

So not only are you clogging your arteries and getting poor nutrition, but you are spending $210 per month just on lunch!!

Start bringing your lunch to work with you. Make yourself a sandwich, or whatever you please. The groceries will add up to $1-$2 per meal, if that. Let’s say $2 per meal.

1st-Month Savings on Brown-bagging it for lunch: $150!!
Ongoing monthly savings: $150/month
Benefit to your health: Priceless!

And how badly do you REALLY need that $3 Mochachino from Starbucks every morning on the way to work? If you cut that out of your budget, there’s another $90 per month you save!

BUT I LIKE MY FANCY STARBUCKS DRINKS AND DON’T WANT TO GIVE THEM UP!!

Ok, fiiiine! Give it up for just the first month then. If you are going to be able to make $1000’s of dollars per month by starting your internet business, wouldn’t you be willing to make that small sacrifice?

In the words of Jim Rohn, “OF COOOURSE!!”

Step 5: Take Advantage of the Economic Stimulus

By now you’ve probably gotten the letter from the IRS about the Economic Stimulus Plan…you are going to be receiving a check for somewhere between $300 and $1200 in May 2008!

If you spend it on bills, it’s gone, and the bills will be back…with friends. That’s why you want to start your internet business in the first place, right? So that you will have gigantic loads of income streaming in again and again from your marketing efforts?

For this example, let’s assume you are married, below a certain income level, and have 1 child. Your tax rebate will be $900 (or possibly $1200, but let’s be conservative).

Ok, let’s recap. So far, we’ve managed to raise:

Savings on health insurance: $200 per month
Savings on car insurance: $100 per month
Savings on home insurance: $75 per month
Savings on Refinancing at lower rate: $237 per month
Savings on small luxuries like Starbucks: $90 month 1
Unexpected Tax Rebate Coming in May: $900 month 1!
Savings from not eating out for lunch: $150 per month
Total Savings for First Month: $1752
Ongoing Savings per Month: $762 per month

WOW! We are there!! You have raised $1,752 to start your business, which is more than most cost! Not only that, but you will be saving almost $800 per month…let’s take $400 of that and invest it our business as our Advertising Budget, and we will have LOTS of prospects coming to our site…and from there, it is just a matter of the Law of Averages to generate out your sales.

My Passport to Wealth business only costs $997 to get started, and an advertising budget of $350 per month gets you a professional Marketing Manager who does all your marketing for you, AND a personal sales assistant who calls all your prospects! I have included a link in the resource box to learn more about this hands-free automated internet business.

So that would leave an extra $752 in month 1, even above and beyond the cost of investing in your business…AND you would have ongoing savings of $412 per month.

Do you think you could find a use for this extra money that you raised?

“OF COOOURSE!!”

Marketing is the part of business that no one seems to like. Perhaps that’s because it’s confusing and made to be even more confusing when you begin to read books on marketing and its applications to the business world. So, are there any secrets that actually work and that you can actually apply to your online business? The answer is yes. There are three home based business marketing secrets that you can keep in mind as you begin this adventure into running your own business - and as you become a success.

Less is More

One of the things that marketing professionals don’t tell you is that you really don’t need to do as much as you think you do. By simply adopting a strategy of telling as many people as you can, treating each customer with respect, and then repeating this cycle, that’s going to bring in a lot of new business. Word of mouth advertising may not get as much press as it once did, but it certainly still works when it comes to smaller home based businesses.

You also want to keep in mind that these marketing secrets don’t require a lot of time or a lot of money in order to be effective. Something as simple as adding your website address to your emails is just as effective as running a commercial on TV and a lot less expensive to implement. Think about smaller ways to spread the word instead of bigger ways. Target only the customers that have already shown interest in what you have to sell and you’re certain to market for success.

More is Less

You also want to remember that a customer on the internet these days is accustomed to seeing a lot of advertisements, so they know when they are being ’sold’ something. Instead of focusing your messages on sales exclusively, try bringing the customer information they can use - informational articles, etc.

When you put too many advertisements in outgoing emails or you simply push your company too much, you will turn off prospective customers. Even if they are interested in what you have to say, the more you talk to them about the same things, the more they’re going to wonder what the ‘catch’ is and why they should buy from you at all.

Recognize that your customers are smart and that they WILL respond to you, even if you don’t tell them about every sale or every feature for your products. You just don’t have to beat them over the head with what you want to sell them.

Use Your Home Based Appeal to Bring People to You

By adding a personalized touch to your marketing strategies, you will begin to pull in more customers, almost without trying. So often, online businesses forget that it’s their placement and location that allows them to be unique. Instead of downplaying the fact that you work from home, make sure that your customers know it. Show them pictures of your office and pictures of yourself to make the experience more personal. This is a marketing strategy that works no matter what you are selling. Since people aren’t meeting you in person, the personalization will do the ‘talking’ for you, making a customer more comfortable with you.

Try adding a blog to your website that will introduce the kind of person you are and what you are capable of helping a customer with. Or you might want to include a video of yourself talking about your product or a personal story that relates to your product. The internet can be such an impersonal place, so try to connect with your customer more.

No matter what you choose to add to your website, if you can sell products available on other sites for a much lower price, you are going to do well. This goes for fashion, beauty, exercise, sports, etc. If you can find high quality products that can be sold at much lower prices, you will draw in many more customers than you could have with higher priced goods. For example, if you can find a way to sell organic goods and clothing for much cheaper than healthy food specialty stores, you can help those that want to be healthier, but can’t afford the higher prices of other stores.

Of course, fashion is still a hot seller, no matter where you are. If you can present high quality fashions on your website, you will attract not only the teenaged sector, but also those in their twenties and thirties - of both genders. Look to celebrity and gossip magazines to show you what’s hot and what’s not and then look for a vendor that sells the same or similar items that you can them turn around to sell for a profit.

But weight loss isn’t the only concern with it comes to health for customers. Exercise and sports are other areas where you can make a profit with your online business. For example, selling sporting equipment or products related to sports fans is still a big business. When you work with the team and their product line, you will be able to access thousands of fans who want to support their team with licensed products.

While it used to be that beauty was something that only women talked about, that certainly isn’t the case any longer. That said, women are still the consumer group that is much more likely to invest in makeup and skin care products, though men too are looking to improve their appearance. With anti aging face products, both genders can begin to reclaim their youthful appearance, which will help them feel more confident in any setting. Selling high quality makeup products and helping customers with their choices is a great business plan, as it allows customers to have the department store experience from the comfort of their home.

Everyone either wants to lose weight or wants to improve their health. We’re a society that wants to take care of our bodies and if we look good at the same time, that’s all the better. If you want to start an online business, you might want to focus on ways to help people lose weight or simply to improve their health. You can do this by offering fitness and health related products on your website or perhaps by offering eBooks that will help them make better health decisions. Try to find something that relates to a question or a concern a person has about their health - and then you have a viable and profitable business plan.