Well, what do you know. The truth finally revealed.

Here it is.

I have been searching the web for "How To" sites about making money using the web. I have found a bunch of them all with the same look and the same story. Buy me! Buy me! I'm the only one on the planet that knows the truth! Everyone but me is doing it wrong!

After spending an incredible amount of time with some of these sites and signing up for these systems I can only conclude one thing...they are all full of garbage! In every case they all claim to be "Experts" in using the web to propagate their product. Well...if they're making a boatload of money with their product, why are they on the web selling their "how to" stories along with training, mentoring, and other assorted literature that tells you how to compete with them?

The reason is simple...they don't have a product and they have never had a product. Their "product" is the information that sucks you in by telling you that you can duplicate their success by using "proven" techniques that have worked for them. The only problem is that the "proven techniques" are only working on selling their system and they don't work for dirt when selling anything else.

They are not making a dime at anything other than telling you how much you can make by using their system to make money. Most of them have you buy their information and then set yourself up as an affiliate selling their system to others rather than selling your product or opportunity. This is how they make money. They suck you into spending your hard earned money to buy their system and to make a few sales for them while you starve trying to figure out how to sell your product. They make money from you, and make money from a few sales through you, and you make dirt.

Now here's the real secret...
These people are not stupid, they have sold a boatload of information that does have some real value included. They are really good at writing copy that sucks you in to buying their system. They really do have a system that works to get you to suck more people into buying their information.

The question is what do you get out of all this garbage?
Well, first you get an education about the web marketing business. Quite a bit of it is some kind of scam. Scams work. Yes, you can make money from scamming others. If you have any moral decency this is not going to do you much good except teach you to pay attention to what is being offered. It will also teach you to pay attention to what is not being said. Most of these sites never tell you what they have sold other then the information that they are selling to you. They usually back up their claims by showing you a bank statement with a bunch of little deposits that add up to reasonable money. But they don't tell you what they sold to make that money. It is the stuff you are reading on their web site.

What real value can you get from these sites?
If you pay attention you can actually get quite a bit from these sites. You just are going to have to look a little harder for the real truth and figure out how to apply it to your product or offering. These individuals are great at getting you to pay for thier product and then getting you to sell their product for them. Hmm, sounds a little like network marketing doesn't it? Looks a little like viral marketing, doesn't it? What this shows you is that duplicating yourself and your offering WORKS!

So, when you figure out what you want to do, and how you want to do it, you want a way to duplicate your effort through others. You can do this without being misleading or obtuse about how you tell them. You do have to be sensitive towards the standard misconceptions about network marketing though. If you open your website with "MULTI LEVEL MARKETING" in bold, capital letters, you are going to loose a lot of potential customers before you have ever had the opportunity to tell them what you are talking about. So you want to be honest, and upfront, but at the same time you want to be discerning towards getting them to hear your opportunity or product before you go on about duplication.

There's a lot more that you can learn from these sites that will help you to figure out what say, what not to say, how to advertise, how to get traffic, and how to close business. But you are going to have to look at all of them with an open mind towards your needs and your ability to sleep with yourself at night.

Be careful, pay attention, go into any offering with an open mind towards what got you there in the first place and what is driving you towards potentially becoming an customer. Compile this information, write it down, try some it for yourself. The more you do, and the more you learn, the faster you are going to find the key to unlock your potential.

The main thing is this, anyone can succede with any product if they are passionate and comitted to solving and overcoming the stumbling blocks along the way. With some common sense and a little prodding in the right direction you can learn enough before you go broke or become weary of trying and you'll be successful with your business too.

What Do You Want To Achieve In 2008?

Well, it's almost time for the start of a new year. What are you going to do with it? Would you like to join the ranks of successful home based business people?

If your answer is no...go back to complaining and moaning about how you never get a break and everyone you know that is doing well had everything handed to them on a silver platter. This advice is not for you and it will never apply to you.

If you answer is yes...it's time to get into action and figure out what you want to do and how you would like to be able to do it. Make no mistake, it's not going to be easy. It probably won't be fun at first. It will probably take more time then you thought. It will probably cost more to get going and generate traffic than you thought.

So What!

If you really want to change your life, it's up to you to make it happen. How much time are you willing to give up to get to where you want to be? How far out of your comfort zone are you willing to go? What's going to be your deadline for success? One week? One month? One year?

These are the questions that you are going to have to come to grips with in order to succeed. Most people who have gone down this road spend years figuring out how to "make it". The people with the best chance of success are going to be the ones that never give up. They'll be the ones that are constantly learning how to market, how to drive traffic, and how to keep going when the going seems the bleakest.

The people who will change their lives this year are going to put in some serious sweat equity together with passion all wrapped around faith and they will keep going until they make it happen.

Make up your mind. Make it happen for you this year. Change your life. Turn your dreams into reality. It can be done and anyone who makes up their mind to do it will succeed.

New Links to Advertising and Web Business Creation

I've just started a links list for free, or inexpensive places to place your ads for your business.

It will take some time to populate this list, but as I come up with reasonable places for advertising that won't cost you an arm and a leg I'll post them here. So check back frequently.

The two I have placed there so far have been working for me. I track all my ads and how many hits they receive, how many people go on to the secondary pages or opt-in for more information. The second link has brought reasonable traffic to my site with over 4% opt-ins. That is a great percentage of opt-ins for any ad. How well you can do with your ad depends on the title, the copy or body of the text, and any picture that you may put with your ad.

When you are writing an ad, stop and think...What would attract me to click on this particular offering? A good title? A good picture? No-nonsense copy? A specific word like FREE or EXPOSED?

When you are moved to click on the ad, what will make you go further for more information? Is it catchy prose? Is it a killer picture of the rewards for getting more information? Is it a free newsletter or E-book? Is it insider information for your particular opportunity?

The main thing to remember is don't try to wait until you think everything is perfect. You'll never place anything. Just make yourself a promise to place a new ad somewhere in regular increments. Like one new ad every two weeks. Or one new ad every day, whatever works for the amount of time you have to devote to your business. Remember start small and cheap. Many people go for the higher cost ads thinking that they will outproduce the cheap or free ones. Sometimes they will if they are written and targeted expertly. Most times they won't. Usually when you are starting out, you'll be writing ads for the first time and you'll make mistakes along the way. If you are using free or inexpensive ad placement, you don't have to worry about going broke waiting for someone to click on your page.

The next thing you need to remember is...How do I know when someone clicked on my ad? How do I capture their information if they want to opt-in for more information or for some free offer? How do I rely to them after they have given me their e-mail address for more information? How do I know if they clicked on more pages then just my first splash page? This is called tracking and testing. You have to do this in order to evolve and succede.

There are tools on the internet that will help you to figure all this out. The easiest and most comprehensive one that I have seen is a complete training and hosting package. It includes a custom website and a tool for researching your particular niche and finding ways to "monetize" your opportunity. It is listed under "Easy to Follow Web Business Tool". This site tool will guide you through all the steps necessary to learn, select, research, target, build, host, and market your opportunity or idea. And it comes with capture pages so you can capture data from prospects that choose to opt-in for your information. This is easily the best tool I have ever come across for building a web based business from scratch.

To recap...
1) Placing a mediocre ad for free, or for very little money, is better then trying to wait until you get it perfect.
2) You won't know if what you're doing is working if you can't track the results.
3)You will probably need some tools and instruction to help you get going.
4) It's definitly a process. The more you do, the more you learn. Start with the "Easy To Follow Web Business Tool" and you will save a lot of time and money along the way.

Again, check back for new links often.

What results do you expect?

What results do you expect from your opportunity? Why?

In every business opportunity there are a few things that are true.

1) It doesn't matter what opportunity is as long as it is a valid opportunity and not some scam.
2) You can put as much time and faith in your business you want, if nothing is happening, nothing is going to keep happening until you change something.
3) Most of what you need to make it in your opportunity is common sense.

Why do you need to know this? Because in every opportunity there are the rah-rahs that will tell you to just hang in there and it will turn around for you. They're wrong! They're just repeating what someone else told them. Something has to change in order to produce different results. It's the way of the world. If everything got better just by waiting, wouldn't our homes look better after 10 years of neglect instead of worse? Wouldn't our cars get better with age instead of getting less efficient and all banged up? Wouldn't our bodies get better as we grow older instead of worse?

It is complete insanity to continue to do the same thing, the same way, and expect different results. Nothing gets better with time including business. You have to work the business. You have to find ways to overcome challenges. You have to learn new technologies and tools as they come along. Even if your business opportunity is doing well now, stop working it for a while and see if it is getting better and better each day. Never happen. If it was that easy everybody would be self employed and we'd all be making millions of dollars every year.

The people who rise to the top are the ones that have worked the problems and have come up with solutions to overcome them. They're the ones who not only have faith, but they understand the importance of action. Faith without action is meaningless. One goes hand in hand with the other. In business you have to be willing to keep on going even when the future seems uncertain or even impossible. You have to be willing to trade pain for rewards.

Make no mistake about this...in business, you will experience pain. The pain of rejection. The pain of failure on some level. The pain of inadequacy. The pain of not wanting to put in the effort on days when you are tired, discouraged and feel like relaxing instead or working. The pain brought on by fear of the unknown.

This pain can be overcome. But it can not be overcome if you don't change something that you are doing. And you have to change the right things. I know, been there, done that. I started a software distribution business where I bought expensive software from a company that wrote it and distributed it to companies that needed it. I had to train them in using it. I had to set the software up and configure it to work correctly. I was trained by the parent company. I did everything that they told me to do. I advertised, called prospects and leads, I mailed postcards. I drove all over the US doing presentations and sending out quotes. And I still didn't make it. Why?

Because I didn't change the right things. I should have been changing the way I came up with prospects. I could have added other products to my line to have different offerings for current customers. I should have researched different ways to reach new customers more effectively. I should have looked towards people who were doing it right and learned from their successes. Instead I became a creature of habit. Working the business and having faith that things would get better when the market got better. The market never got better. The business never got better. I ended up closing the business and working for someone else for over a year before I jumped back in and started researching what my next opportunity would be.

This time I'm a changed man. I'm going to spend less time beating on prospects. I am going to spend less time buying and calling leads. I'm going to work very hard at getting prospects to come to me. I'm learning to use all the tools available to increase my chances of success. I will still have faith in my opportunity. But I will back up this faith with action. Even when I don't feel like it. I will not expect things to get better on their own. I will observe successful people and learn from their successes.

I will not continue to do the same thing and expect different results, and neither should you.

What are You Going to do?

It's amazing how many people are not happy with their current situation. Some of it revolves around money, but there are other issues as well. Maybe you don't like your boss. Maybe you don't like your job. Maybe you don't like your marriage. Maybe you don't like where you live. It could be anything. The questions is..."What are you going to do about it?"

There are two main responses to this question. The number one response is...nothing. The people who respond by doing nothing, will continue to complain. They will continue to blame everyone and everything around them. The will continue to live in pain. Why? Because they are afraid or because they are lazy and don't consider the reward worth the effort.

The second response is to go into action and change what you don't like. This is definitely the land of opportunity. If you decide that you want to change you boss, or where you live, or how much you make, or the quality of your marriage...you can. It is a matter of mindset.

When I was 19 I had my first child. I wasn't married yet. I was making $72 dollars a week and I had a girlfriend and a child to support. Did I go running home to mom? Did I blame the government and try to make a living off of them? Did I leave and run away from my problems as fast as I could? Absolutely not.

I accepted my responsibility, worked towards trying to get a better job. I married my girlfriend and made her my wife. We have had some trouble along the way with our marriage. Did we give up? Did we blame it on someone else? No, we went to counseling (free counseling as I was still working for peanuts) and we solved the problem. My wife and I have been married for 30 years. Our two daughters are grown up, one is married and has given us a grandson. We are continuing the journey we started over 30 years ago. The bottom line is that we determined that we would make our marriage and lives work and we never gave up or stopped learning and trying. We always believed that what we wanted to accomplish was worth the effort.

When we were young the internet didn't exist. There weren't hundreds of business opportunities that you could start for very little money with a lot of sweat equity. I started and ran three business along they way to where I am today. They all did O.K. but they weren't the opportunity that I was looking for. They all cost some serious money to start and took 16 hour per day effort to keep going. I eventually closed all three down due to lack of a life and not enough money. In all of them I made most of my money back and in two of them I made more than my original investment back, but they weren't really taking me to where I wanted to be. I worked each business for three years before closing them down. So what should I do now? Give up and accept that things are the way they are for me?

No way! I learned from each business experience that I was involved in. Now with the internet there are ways to start and run a business with very little investment. They all take hard work and a belief that success can be obtained. But the opportunity is there.

You probably all know someone who has tried some kind of internet business or multi-level-marketing opportunity. You have all heard the horror stories of endless phone calls, of alienating all your friends, of investing time and money for no return, of being outright scammed. It happens. But how do you respond? Do you give up? Or, do you figure out how to make your opportunity work? The answers are all out there. You just have to be willing to make the effort to find them, implement them, and make them work for you.

I don't buy all the negativity about MLM businesses or other opportunities. I don't buy that I have to accept my lot in life as if some cosmic entity or fate has already decided my life for me and there is nothing that I can do about it. (I most definitly belive, accept, and follow Jesus Christ) I refuse to spend time with people who whine and complain about life. Instead I surround myself with dynamic, successful, upbeat people who have a healthy outlook on life and the opportunities that exist. I learn from them. I try to duplicate their success. I am not afraid to fail, as long as I learn something along the way. I am not afraid to try new things. I always weigh the risk against the potential rewards. I will always move in a positive direction and will keep on trying and changing until I get to where I want to be. The reward is definitely worth the effort.

What are you going to do?

How to Start a Web Based Business Part 5

Social networking...YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, Etc...

So far we have talked about advertising using some of the paid advertising sites. There are plenty of lists of different sites out there like www.usfreeads.com that let you place ads for free.

You'll soon find out that most of the free text ads don't bring in much traffic, if any. It's still a good idea to try because all you have to loose is a little time, and who knows, you may find an ad that is successful. At the very least you'll get a real life opportunity to write copy for your ad and see it in print.

Lately there has been another web revolution. Social Networking sites. Sites like MySpace and YouTube as well as a multitude of others offer a ready opportunity for you to put yourself and your business in front of other people for free. You can just go to the social networking site that you want to start with and sign up for a free account. The trick is in getting people to view your profile and then get them to go to your site. Many have tried and many have failed. That doesn't mean that it can't be done. There are people doing it everyday and they are reaping the rewards of free advertising.

The first part of the equation is you. You need to put up who you are, what you like or don't like and what you are interested in. You also get to put up what kind of people you would like to meet. This takes a little time and some thought. Very few people will follow someone who doesn't stand out from the crowd. You have to be real, imaginative, intriguing, and you have to let people know the real you. People want to follow people who are where they want to be. If you are successful, people want to know. They want to know how you became successful. They want to follow you. All this points towards you being or becoming a leader. Everybody on the planet is on the web somewhere. People post their profile or their blog, or their story and that is the key to attracting others of like mind. If you post a whining, woe-is-me story, you'll attract the same kind of people. If you post a winning business story (and it is true) you'll attract those kind of people. You don't have to be successful to post a winning business profile. You have to be passionate about what you are doing and you have to provide information that people want to know or want to hear. You can start a blog about your subject and the RSS feeds will pick it up and as people sign up for it your traffic will increase. If you want to sell an item like pet supplies, you can post a video or multiple videos of you doing stupid pet tricks that leads them to the next step...to your business site. There are all, kinds of ways to use the social networking sites to gain increased awareness of you and your product or opportunity. You just have to learn how to use the sites and start posting.

Just because this is free doesn't mean that it's easy. It takes effort and creativity. If you spend the time and work at it, and learn from the pros, you'll be able to master this medium and your business will never be the same. Your wallet will thank you too...no more expensive ads that don't work. If your free social networking site isn't working, it cost you nothing. If it is not working, spend the time and crack the code and you'll be on your way to success.

How to Start a Web Based Business Part 4

This one should really be titled "Web Marketing 101"

I'm sorry I didn't get back to writing this yesterday. I had to work O.T. both yesterday and this morning, so I'm just getting to it now.

This session is all about marketing yourself and your opportunity or product on the internet. In some of my previous articles I wrote about the importance of your offering, your domain name, and the path you want to take to making a living from home by using the internet.

This is where it all comes together. I have already stated that your domain name should be unique and targeted towards the market that you are trying to reach. As you begin to post ads and check traffic to your site, you may try different domain names. You'll find some that definitely make a difference in how many visitors you log and how many opt-ins or subscribers you generate. I've read countless marketing books, e-books, copy writing and AdWords secrets, as well as taken multiple sales courses from companies with different approaches to marketing and sales in general. The main thing that I have learned is that in order to be successful in any kind of sales and marketing you need to have a plan. Part of that plan is that you also need to have goals....Where are you going? How long do you want it to take to get there? What will you do when you get there?

Plan Questions...
How much traffic do you want to send to your site?
How fast do you want to get them there?
How many new customers can you deal with at one time?
Who should those new customers be?
How much will your marketing budget be?
How long can you sustain that budget until you are successful?
What mediums would you like to use for your marketing?
How do you take your prospects from tire kickers to paying customers?
Will you offer other products to encourage paying customers to come back again?
How will you keep in touch with your prospects and customers?
How often will you keep in touch with your list?

These are just a few of the questions that you will want to ask yourself as you begin to plan your marketing strategy. You do not have to finalise all the questions and answers at once before you begin, but the closer you come towards finding the answers to the important questions, the easier it will be to market effectively.

The big question is "how do you get traffic to your site?" Your site can be the awesome but if you can't get anyone to click on it, it might as well not even exist. I know, I've been there before. I put up two different sites in the mid 1990's and one in early 2000. The only hits I ever got were from directing people there through word of mouth, or from search engines in other countries. I received some very strange international calls about my products! I spent months developing the sites, the graphics, link pages, and writing copy and it all came to nothing because I couldn't figure out how to get people to my site. I even paid a big company to help me write me keywords and optimise my site for the search engines. I consistently came out in the top two or three pages on search engines, but I still wasn't getting any real traffic to my sites.

I have learned that there are two ways to get consistent traffic to my sites. The first is to write ads and pay to submit them to different web sites that target the same kind of people that I'm looking for. The second is to use the free resources on the web to point people to my sites. They both have pros and cons. Depending on the medium that you select you can drive a ton of traffic to your site and not one becomes a customer. Or you can pay to drive traffic to your site, but you find that the traffic is not consistent and not predisposed to becoming your customers. You can also buy targeted leads, but this can get very expensive, very quickly, so be careful. How do you sort all this out into something that makes sense?

Simple...start very simply and very inexpensively and work your way towards where you think you want to go. I have placed inexpensive ads (less than $50 for 1 month) just to see what kind of traffic they will generate. I place them only once for one month and see what kind of traffic I get. You need to have a way to track traffic and what pages they view on your site. You also need a way to track where they came from if you have more then one ad going at one time. There are very inexpensive utilities that will track pretty well if you have only one ad running at one time. The only problem with that is it doesn't allow you to fast track your testing and traffic generation. I like to place a number of small ads in different places all at the same time and track the business from each one, the pages they view and the conversion rate from prospects into new customers. How do I do that?

One of the opportunities that I offer comes with software that will track all that plus it will track specific ad campaigns, cost per lead, conversion rate, and it will send opt-ins to an auto responder that will send them the information that they requested without me having to be involved in any of this activity. This frees me up to keep testing and tracking and writing copy to generate even more traffic. If you want to learn more about this system click on the link at the upper left titled "Internet Driven Business System". This is only one of the business systems that I use.

I have another system that helps me research target markets, similar websites, Alexia page rankings, content, keywords, and ways to generate income from ideas for market niches. This system is also in my links under "Easy To Follow Web Business Tool". These tools all have some cost associated with using them. The first one is somewhat expensive for a newbie, but is the most powerful automated system for creating traffic and customers that I have ever seen. Well worth the cost. It also comes with a personal mentors group that has a forum, ad samples that work, best places to advertise, co-op advertising to decrease cost, and one-on-one question and answer sessions to help you grow quickly.

The second one is less expensive and is also the best research and targeting tool I have ever used. I have used many free tools too, but you get what you pay for. Most of the free tools were very disappointing because they included a ton of information and as I read through days and days worth of information, I found that they only posed problems, not solutions. The two tools that I use will get you up and running creating a well thought out, working business, in record time.

This is key. The longer that you take to learn and research, the less opportunity that you have to generate traffic and income. If you can shortcut that research and traffic generation time, you can jump into the fray and begin generating income while you are learning and testing. Both tools that I use come with training, group and private mentoring from people using them successfully, and software up and running to assist you. They also come with some sample campaigns that are working, some come with sample ads, banners, and ad copy that you can cut and paste. These ads are already tested and are working for other marketing businesses.

In my next post I'll talk about using social sites to generate business traffic.