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Hi everyone and welcome,

as many of you know by now I started my online business with Stone Evan’s Plug-in Profit Site and quickly went on to join the PIPS Power Group. This group has to proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt The Importance of Mentors When Starting A Work From Home Business.

When I joined the PIPS Power Group or PPG as the members call it  I was lucky enough to get 6 mentors and not just one. Each and every one of them started their work from home business with PIPS (The Plug-in Profit Site) and now earn a full-time income working  from home  using the Internet. They’ve all “been there, done that” and have made the mistakes and come out the other side. They are there to help us get through the same hurdles they faced and hopefully stop us making the same mistakes.

I just got through with chatting to one of my mentors Jeff Casmer and getting his advice on what I should be doing more of to improve my online business. Jeff was very encouraging and gave me lots of good advice and left me feeling much more positive and focused as a result of our chat.

Jeff is just one of the mentors I’ve chatted to, I’ve already had some great advice from Cynthia Minnaar and I’m looking forward to having a conversation with Jeff Schuman in the near future.

Being part of the PPG really makes you realise the importance of mentors when starting a work from home business.

The other mentors are  Ken Troyer, Mal Keenan and Suzanne Morrison and they are always ready to answer any questions you might have and to point you in the right direction and they all have their own special area of expertise.

You can find out all about these great people in the PIPS Power Book which is a free download, trust me, you’ll learn a lot. If you’ve ever thought about starting your own work from home business, it doesn’t matter whether you have a Plug-in-in Profit Site or not, it will help you immensely.

Joining the PPG was the best thing I did after joining PIPS and made me realise the importance of mentors when starting a work from home business.

All the best,

take care,

Carol

Find Out How To Start Your OwnWork from Home Business and Get 6 Free Ebooks Help You

Recommended:  How to Use Squidoo to Promote Your Business

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Hi and welcome everyone,

When I first discovered Twitter I must admit I wasn’t sure what to make of it, in fact I thought it was pretty pointless, Since then though I must admit I’ve changed my mind, after what I’m going to tell you I think you’ll agree and start to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business.

The first thing you need to do is go and set up an account at  http://twitter.com/

You will get your own page which asks “what are you doing?”, yes i know, as I said it seemed pretty pointless to me too but after I filled in my profile and simply entered just set up my Twitter account I started getting emails saying people were “following me”. So I went back in and had a look at what the people who were following me were doing.

Nearly all of them were promoting a business of some kind or another and the more I looked at it the more I realised that when you fill in the “what are you doing” and click update you are submitting a mini blog post. Take a look at my Twitter page and you will see what I mean:

http://twitter.com/caleka

I think you are now beginning to realise how to use Twitter to promote your business.

Here’s how it works;

There are 3 ways to update and these are called Tweets, you can send a Tweet to all subscribers, directly to one person or even send a private message to someone.

To send a Tweet to all subscribers, make sure you are logged in and go to your Home page, type your message in the box where it says “What are you doing?” and click update. You only have 140 characters to use up in this box so if you are putting in a link it’s best if you use TinyURL to shorten the link. Everyone will see this message and can click the link.

If you want to make sure that one person in particular sees your message first you have to be “following” each other then just type @ followed by their username, for example @caleka would make sure I got your message. All your other followers will also see this message.

If you want to keep the message private then you can send any of your followers a Direct Message, you’ll see the Direct Message box on your Home page.

More and more websites are catching on to the value of using Twitter, Squidoo, Ezine Articles, Mixx to name just a few. And if you use TweetMyBlog to automatically update your Tweets on your Wordpress blog you will even get paid for it! All these are free methods of how to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business.

Take care,

Carol

Find out how to Use Squidoo to Promote Your Business

FREE Information on how to start your own Work from Home Business including 6 FREE  Home Business Ebooks

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Hi and welcome,

Are you worried about losing your job because of the recession? Have you made up your mind what you are going to do if the unthinkable happens to you? Running your own work from home business could be just the answer you are looking for. Unlike working for a company  working for yourself on the Internet could be a recession proof business if you go about it in the right way.

If you are willing to make the effort to master Internet marketing skills there are huge advantages of setting up a work from home business.

One of the first advantages is the price, if you compare it to setting up any other business it is much, much cheaper. The money you have to spend on a work from home business very small indeed.

Another big advantage is how fast the whole thing can be set up. All you need is a computer and Internet access and you’re all set. Then all you need to do is get yourself a reputable web host and a domain name, most good web hosts will let you register the domain name through them, and set up an autoresponder. The autoresponder I use is even free for the basic account.

If you don’t have anything to sell you can get started very quickly as an Affiliate Marketer and sell other people’s products and get paid a commission every time you sell something. Most affiliate programs are free to join and only take a few minutes to join.

If you choose your niche market carefully you will  see  good profits  during the course of the recession. For example, niche markets related to making money online, business start-ups, job hunting, c.v services, discount voucher services etc. could all be good niches as more and more people seek to save money, earn some extra cash or start work from home business.

Hopefully I’ve helped you to realise that it won’t be the end of the world if you do lose your job because of the recession, in fact it could be the start of something much, much better if you decide to start your own work from home business.

Take care,

Carol

FREE Information on how to start your own Work from Home Business including 6 FREE  Home Business Ebooks

Find out how to Use Squidoo to Launch Your Business

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Hi and welcome,

You may well have seen the words “Niche Market” quite a lot on the Internet by now. So what is a niche market and how can you Find Your Niche With Long Tail Keywords And Make Money?

Firstly one of the definitions of Niche Market is  “a relatively small and specialist, yet profitable, market”

Anybody can build a successful business focusing on just one or two niche markets on the Internet. You don’t need to go for the whole market. You can find a very comfortable position for yourself by choosing just one section, or sub-section, of the market and “dominating your niche” by focusing all your marketing effort on it.

By focusing on a single niche you will also quickly build up a reputation for yourself as an expert in your chosen field.

So, how do you find your niche with long tail keywords and make money online?

First of all, find something you know a lot about, something that interests you and that you would enjoy talking to others about.

Once you have found something that interests you it’s time to get down to work. Being specific is one of the keys to niche marketing. The long tail keyword is long precisely because it extends over a huge range of specific interests. Your aim should be to find a specific niche that is small enough for you to dominate, but large enough for you to establish yourself as an expert and make a good living in.

Let’s say you are interested in games. “Games” is a huge category so “board games” is an improvement but you are still faced with a huge amount of choice, so narrow it down further to something more specific such as “British board games”.

This would serve as your primary niche and if possible should be incorporated into the name of your website, i.e., British-Board-Games.com or britishboardgames.com.

You now have the exciting choice of deciding whether to buy and sell physical games, or whether to make your own product such as an ebook about the British gaming scene, or a series of ebooks each dealing with a particular British board game.

Selling physical products from your niche site is a good thing to do if you have time to deal with purchasing, packing and shipping as well as customer enquiries. If you sell physical products to a niche  it also opens up sites like eBay for your business.

However, there are only so many units of product that a single person can turn around, so if you go down this route you will either have to stay small or begin hiring staff at a certain stage as your business develops.

Making your own information product will require a lot of research and writing for no immediate return. However, once you have your information product up on your site you can sell it again and again without having to worry about handling stock. This gives your business more scope to expand without your having to employ any more staff.

In addition to these two options, you may want to find some niche-relevant affiliate programs to promote in order to generate extra revenue. If you sell an ebook, having a related affiliate product to sell on the back end is an excellent profit-boosting strategy.

Your aim is now to make your site the top destination for people looking for online information and about “British board games” or whatever your chosen niche happens to be. As a niche marketer you don’t have to compete with the marketing giants and sell to the whole world. All you want is to attract a few hundred people to your site each week and work on turning those visitors into customers and those customers into fans.

By setting up a website that pitches to a well defined niche with long tail keywords  you stand a much better chance of succeeding online and dominating your chosen market.

Now that you know a little more about “niches” it’s time to get out there and find your niche with long tail keywords and make money online!

Take care,

Carol

Find out how to Use Squidoo to Promote Your Niche Site

FREE Information on how to start your own Work from Home Business including 6 FREE  Home Business Ebooks

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Hi everyone and welcome,

If you have just started an online business, you will need to seriously think about whether or not to use an autoresponder email service to build a relationship with visitors to your website. You will want to keep in touch with visitors who request more information so that you can inform them about your products and services. The best way to do that is by sending out an autoresponder email newsletter to your mailing list.

Surf a few successful business websites and you will notice that in almost every case they include some kind of form which you can fill in to receive some kind of benefit. It may be more information in the form of a free newsletter, report or ebook, or perhaps some kind of software download.

When you fill in the form you will be required to give your email address so the information can be sent to you. When you supply your details they are added to the mailing list and you will start receiving regular messages in your inbox.

Does your website have a lead capture form on it which visitors can fill in and subscribe to your newsletter?

You can easily set one up by subscribing to an autoresponder email service such as  GetResponse.com. Autoresponders are e-mail marketing tools which can be used to sign up subscribers and send them your messages at pre-set time intervals, track your subscribers and sales. It will also provide you with a block HTML code that you can simply cut and paste onto your website to create a lead capture form.

Place the form in a prominent place on your website where people will see it as soon as they arrive. Offer them a big free incentive to sign up.

When people fill in the form their details are automatically added to the auto-responder. Next, the auto-responder sends the subscriber an email thanking them for signing up and inviting them to “opt-in” to the mailing list in order to receive your messages. This “double opt-in” procedure ensures that you build a permission-based mailing list and protects you against accusations of spamming.

The subscriber clicks a link in the email message to opt in to your service. When that step has been taken the subscriber will begin to receive your messages, which you will have preloaded into your auto-responder and set it to mail them out at pre-determined intervals. That way, each new subscriber receives a similar series of messages from you at similar intervals for as long as the subscription remains active or the last newsletter has been mailed.

You can continue to expand your newsletter series by loading new articles or messages onto the end of your mailing series in the auto-responder.

Auto-responders are powerful tools for Internet marketers. You do not have to limit yourself to just one newsletter. You can build a separate mailing list within your auto-responder for each product you sell and follow up with email messages that focus on that product or market niche.

You can also use your autoresponder email service to broadcast an email to all your subscriber lists in one shot, which is great for sending out time-limited special offers, or timely advice.

As you can see, by beginning g to use an auto-responder email service and writing a newsletter you will have put in place a powerful resource to turn targeted traffic into subscribers and subscribers into customers.

You will find more information about the Autoresponder by GetResponse on my website.

Take care,

Carol

FREE Information on how to start your own Work from Home Business including 6 FREE  Home Business Ebooks

Find out how to Use Squidoo to Launch Your Business

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Hi and welcome everyone,

I have some great news for you today, my friend and mentor Suzanne Morrison has just released her new ebook 3 steps to Search Engine Success.

It has now been a year since I started working online with The Plug-in Profit Site and for most of that time I have been a member of the PIPS Power Group. Suzanne is one of the mentors who run this group and she is the brains behind all the SEO and Website Optimization in there.

In the time I have spent in the group I have learned more than I ever thought possible about marketing an online business, especially in such a short space of time.

If SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is still like a foreign language to you, as it was me when I first started, then I highly recommend reading Suzanne’s 3 Steps to Search Engine Success.

Firstly Suzanne walks you through an introduction to SEO, what it is how it works and why it is so important.

Then it’s on to Step 1 - Choosing the Right Keywords. This is the basis for your search engine success, if you choose the wrong keywords then you could be doomed to failure from the start. In the guide Suzanne explains how to pick the keywords everyone is searching for and which ones have too much competition. She also lets you in on a secret way of how to ’spy’ on your competitors to find out how well how well they are doing with the same keywords.

Step 2  - Optimizing your Website. In this step Suzanne tells you how having great keywords but not having a well optimized website also means you won’t get very far.  She teaches you how you can make sure the search engines notice your site for the very keywords you are targeting and gives you tips on the best ways to update your site with fresh content (which the search engines love).

Step 3 -  Offsite Optimization. In the final step, you’ll learn how to determine your site’s popularity and  how to easily s increase your site’s exposure for free! You’ll learn some simple techniques that most webmasters haven’t even heard of and others which a lot of people don’t bother with, which means you can gain the upper hand.

Suzanne Morrison has written 3 steps to Search Engine Success in plain English so that it’s easy enough for anyone, even newbies to understand. I  highly recommend this ebook to anyone who has an online business..she even includes a section on “What Not To Do”.
Take care,

Carol

FREE Information on how to start your own Work from Home Business including 6 FREE  Home Business Ebooks

Get your own Free copy of the PIPS Power Book

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Hi and welcome everyone,

A good way to make money on the Internet is to Start Promoting Clickbank Products.

If you have no idea where to start with this the first thing you are going to need to do is head on over to Clickbank   and open a free affiliate account.

Once you have done that you need to find a good product to promote! One free way of doing that is to go to the Clickbank Marketplace and search there. However, the Clickbank Marketplace is pretty basic so you might want to try an alternative service such as  Cbtrends.com, which is also completely free.

With Cbtrends.com you can browse Clickbank products and order results according to various criteria such as popularity, gravity, earnings per sale, commission rates and so on. You can also check the performance history of individual vendors or products, which is a very useful research tool indeed.

The next thing you are going to need to do before you start promoting Clickbank products is to choose your keywords. You should be able to find several useful keyword phrases by reading the sales page. When researching keywords, look for phrases that have a high level of search activity and a relatively low level of competitiveness. You can use the free Google Adwords research tool to do this.

Now set up a product-related blog. Go over to Blogger.com and set up a free blog specifically about the Clickbank product you want to promote. Ideally, you should include the name of the product in the title of your blog. Now write a short report about the product with a link through to the sales page. The blog is there to generate excitement and curiosity about the product so make the language punchy, powerful and urgent. You can also set up a Squidoo lens about the product to generate more more links and sales. Make sure you place a link on your lens to your blog.

Ok, so now you need to write an article about the product you have chosen.Write the article around one of your keyphrases and submit it to some of the top article directories such as Ezinearticles.com. Your aim is to generate interest in the Clickbank product that you want to sell. You could write a product review or a background news report about the product. However, do NOT try to sell the product and under no circumstances should you put your affiliate link in the main body of the article or even in your signature file at the foot of the article.

So, how do you get the reader from your article to your Clickbank product sales page? You do it by linking your signature file to your blog, the blog you just set up to promote your chosen product.

You have now set up a traffic funnel from your article to your blog and finally to your Clickbank sales page. The blog acts like a bridge between your article and your salespage and if you write a strong blog post it should help to presell the product so that the surfer will arrive on the sales page in a receptive frame of mind, ready to be persuaded that this is the product that he or she needs to solve the problem that you dealt with in your article.

Once you have your blog-sales page link set up you can write more articles, utilizing some of the other keywords that you researched, and submit them to various article directories. Your articles will also be picked up and republished on other websites, which will help to increase traffic flow to your blog. Your blog will also begin to show up on the search engines as you continue to fill it with product related information. Remember to include a link to the sales page with each post.

So there you have it. A quick and easy way for you to Start Promoting Clickbank Products that will help you to start earning money online.

Take care,

Carol

 Find out how to Use Squidoo to Launch Your Business

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Hi everyone, and thanks for continuing to read my blog.

Today I have a question for you, have you heard of  Craigslist.com? If not you could be missing a FREE opportunity to post classified ads online. So why should you start  Advertising on Craigslist?

Whether you are a seller interested in selling a one-time product, a small business owner with many products or services to sell, or any
entrepreneur or marketer — if you aren’t using Craigslist, you are missing a valuable opportunity to drive hoards of traffic to your site.
Now you want to know, “What is Craigslist?” For many, the ““List”” is a community website that uses Web 2.0 technology. This website,
like many others of its kind, focuses on providing users the ability to build an online community. Serving more than twenty million users each month, Craigslist.com is among the highest-ranking sites on the Web today.

What does this mean to you? And how can you use Craigslist to benefit you? Most community forums provide a place for people to chat, get to know each other, or share common interests. Craigslist is unique in that while it does offer a forum, it is also a place where people can promote and sell. Craigslist allows users to post classified ads to a community bulletin board. Most users can start advertising on Craigslist free, although there are charges for certain services in certain locations.

The board on Craigslist.com hosts millions of ads and has billions of visitors every year. As more and more people turn to the Internet for their purchases, the “List”” is rapidly becoming one of the most important places people bookmark. Remember, most ads placed on Craigslist are free. Even when you do have to pay for ads, usually you will pay far less than you would if you paid for an advertisement in a local newspaper (or national one). And, more and more people are using the Web to find what they need, whether they want to find a job, a new home, a new car or anything else.

OK, so you want to post an ad on the “List”. Great! Now, how do you do it?

Advertising on Craigslist is easy. First, go to the main page, where you will see a list of countries and cities, choose the place you would like to post your ad and a new page will open. Scroll up to the left-hand corner where you will see a link to “Post to Classifieds.” Next, you will want to select the proper category to post your classified ad in. Most people will search for advertisements by category, so be sure you put your ad in the right category. And don’t worry too much if you don’t… you can always change the category you originally selected.

When you post an ad, Craigslist.com places it in chronological order. So, the more recent posts get more attention because visitors see them first
naturally. Many times your ad will remain listed for up to 30 days. However, if you want to gain maximum exposure for your ad, you will want to post your ad often, so it rises to the top of ads posted on the “List”. You can also increase the odds of people searching for your posts by using keywords to describe your posts. Try adding popular keywords to your item description, so when people search for items using key terms your ad is most likely to pop up.

As with anything, Craigslist has its rules, regulations and limits. You need to follow these carefully so your ad does not become accidentally banned from placement on the board. If your violation is severe, the “List” will ban you from posting in the future. Now, how do you know what the rules are? First take your time and review the site completely. Pages you want to review include the terms of use and the general posting guidelines.

Craigslist hosts ads in over 400 cities around the world. If you want a cheap and innovative tool for promoting your business and making more money, check it out now.

To find out more about Advertising on Craigslist get your copy of my ebook Craigslist Advertising Revealed

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Hi everyone,

In my post called Build more Backlinks I talked briefly about Squidoo. They say you can Build a Squidoo Lens in about 10 minutes although in my experience it takes a little longer to get it looking the way you want it.

Squidoo is a great free way to drive more traffic to your website and you can create  good quality pages dedicated to any given niche.

The first thing you need to do is go over to Squidoo and create an account, once you have done that you will have to give your lens an official URL, it will look something like www.squidoo.com/YOURTITLEHERE and you may have to try a few different variations before you find one that is free. After you’ve done that you will need to name your lens, you can call it anything you like (within reason) but make sure it reflects the content of what your lens is going to be about.

The next thing you will need to do when you start to build a Squidoo lens is pick a main category and give it a some ‘tags’. Tags are just keywords and are very important on Squidoo, but don’t worry, you can add more and change and delete them as you want.

You will also be asked which template you want to use, I always go with ‘Do My Own Thing’ but the choice is yours and how you want to get paid..yes you get paid too! It won’t be a lot at first but it does get better the more lenses you create.

Ok you’re up and running, now it’s time to build a Squidoo lens!

Need more help? Then get your copy of my ebook Squidoo Basics which will soon have you building lenses with the best of them..and earning money too!

Take care,

Carol

Find out how to Use Squidoo to Launch Your Business

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Hi again,

When writing articles online you need to know how to go about  optimising your articles with keywords. First do a search in Google for a few ideas for a title, type in the title you would like to use and see how many search results it brings up, it will tell you this at the top right hand side of the page. Don’t aim for those with the highest results as you are going to get loads of competition, you want to get traffic to your blog or article so try to go for something that has an average amount of searches, experiment with this a bit, you’ll soon get the hang of it

Once you’ve decided on a title make sure you use it a few times throughout your article, not too many or you’ll be accused of spam, two or three times should be good and bold those keywords especially if you are using them in your blog.

You can also go over to Quintura  this is a free site that will give you words that are related to your keyword phrase, just type in the phrase in the search bar at the top and it will search out all the words for you. Include some of these words in your article. this is called latent symantic indexing and the search engines love it. You are now well on your way to optimising your articles with keywords and this will help drive traffic to your article.

Take care,

Carol

FREE Information on how to start your own Work from Home Business including 6 FREE  Home Business Ebooks

Get your own Free copy of the PIPS Power Book

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