Archive | June, 2018

We didn’t start online businesses to make 10 bucks an hour, right? Our goals are obviously much bigger. But here’s what new comers need to know that only seasoned online pros can tell you – you’ve got to start somewhere.

There are three key components to that sentence – “You have got to start somewhere.”

First of course is “you,” because nobody is going to do it for you.

Second is “have got to start” – if you haven’t started to make money online, now is the time. Not tomorrow. Not next month. NOW.

And third is “somewhere.” Meaning you’re not going to start out making a thousand dollars an hour or a million dollars a year. It’s not going to happen. You start out making maybe 10 dollars an hour, and you move up from there.

I’m not saying you can’t move up fast – you can. But you have to START where ever it is that you’re able to start, and for nearly everybody it’s making a few dollars an hour and working from there.

For those who don’t want to work your way up, that’s no problem. Close this site and go find a get rich quick scheme or 2 or 20. Then get back to me when you’re rich (should be next week sometime, right?)

You might even get lucky and find yourself a one hit wonder. You know, like those musicians who get a song on the charts – and then can never duplicate their success so they just fade away. It’s almost worse then never getting success at all because then people say,

“I know that song, who did that?”

“Oh yeah, that was Jo Blo and the Tweektonics.”

“Whatever happened to them?”

“They were one of those one hit wonder bands. I think they’re playing airport lounges now, and the lead singer is the cook at Ma’s Take-in-Bake.”

Whoop-de-do. 5 minutes of fame and the rest of their life is a punch line.

I see that happen in online marketing. Some newbie makes a product that sells a few hundred copies, they get some money in their pocket, and then they just fade away, never to be heard from again.

Who the heck needs that? But it’s the get rich quick mentality that makes failure like that happen.

For the rest of us who have the common sense to know you don’t win a marathon by starting on the finish line, let’s get started.

And one more thing: As you begin making money online, a funny thing happens. You get addicted. You get to where you want to make more, and you do. You want to find ways to leverage yourself and your work, and you do. You want to find methods to make a lot more money in a shorter amount of time, and you do. But it all starts at the beginning – making a few dollars an hour and then working up from there.

Method #1 for making $10 an hour online – freelancing.

Maybe it’s freelancing writing articles or blogposts. Or building backlinks, or putting up websites, or whatever. Pick out that thing you do the best, and offer it as a service to others who either don’t do it as well as you, or would rather hire you than do it themselves.

What’s that? You don’t have a skill worthy of hiring out your services? Then get one. You’re going to need to master these skills to get good at online marketing anyway, so pick something that really appeals to you, then research the heck out of it for 10 hours. In 10 hours you can learn more about any topic than 99.9% of people know.

Then advertise your service on sites that let you sell services like Fiverr. Start out working for cheap, get some clients and some testimonials, and gradually increase your pricing.

Find faster ways to perform your service, and even hire out the work to someone else. In other words, LEVERAGE what you’re doing to increase your hourly rate.

For example, if you’re getting paid $5 an article and you write 2 articles an hour, you’re making $10 an hour. Get faster to where you can write 4 articles and hour and you’re earning $20 an hour. Hire someone overseas to write the articles for you for $2 apiece, and you’re earning $3 an article for simply reading them over and doing light editing. If you can edit 10 articles and hour, you’re earning $30 an hour. And so forth.

Of course what is the problem with all of this? You are trading time for money – something that by itself will generally not get you to that magical six figure per year income.

Unless, of course, you not only hire out the work – you also hire someone to take the orders, edit the articles and fill the orders. Now you have a completely hands free system for making money, and it all started with you earning $10 an hour and working your way up from there.

Method #2 for making $10 an hour online – writing and selling PLR.

In our previous example we were writing articles for others. Of course in freelancing you can choose to offer any service people are willing to pay for – writing articles was simply one example.

But what if, instead of writing articles for one person, we write a packet of 10 to 15 articles on one specific topic using the best keywords for that niche, and then SELL that packet of articles to fellow marketers for their own private use?

Now you can sell the same articles over and over again. If you sell that packet of 15 articles for $10, and you sell 15 packets, you’ve earned $150. If it took you 5 hours to write the articles, you’ve now earned $30 an hour. Of course, if it takes you less time, you earn more per hour. And if you sell more packets, you’ve again made more per hour.

There are PLR writers who do exactly this. They write packets of articles, offer those articles either on their own websites or a popular internet marketing forum, and do quite well.

Can you outsource the writing of the articles? Of course you can. And with PLR, you are not limited to just articles – you can write blog posts, reports, ebooks, make recordings, videos, etc. You are also not limited by how many times you can sell each PLR product you create, unless you choose to set a limit so as to create scarcity.

So now you’re naming your own price, and you’re creating a bank of products you can continue to sell for as long as you choose. And you’re also creating a loyal following of buyers because once your buyers see that you offer good quality at a good price, they will come back time and time again.

Maybe your first PLR product only sells 10 copies, but then your next one sells to 10 new buyers and 5 of your previous buyers, and your next one sells to 10 new buyers and 10 of your previous buyers, and so forth. Every time you offer a new PLR product you’ll have more customers who already know that you put out great stuff, and so they’ll snap it up in a heartbeat.

Plus, as new customers arrive they’ll see your previous PLR products and purchase some of those as well. So that packet of 15 articles you wrote 3 months ago is still selling a couple of copies a week, and if you’re putting out new products every week, you’ve got more and more to offer and thus more and more to sell.

Leverage this by outsourcing some or all of the writing, and you’ve not only created a method to earn $10 or more per hour – you’ve actually got yourself a nice little business where you are in control, you set the hours and you set the prices.

Do you see how you are progressing from a freelancer to a service provider? And it really is that easy, but the first step is you have to actually START. And that’s the step that trips most people up. The second step of course is that once you start, you keep going. You’ll find the more you do, the more you want to do, and it just gets easier as you go because you’re building momentum and you’re seeing success. Plus as you go you’ll get more and more testimonials, which will make it all that easier to make more and more sales and even to charge more money for your work.

Again, getting started is the hard part, yet it can be easy if you get started right now before you have a chance to put it off. There is nothing stopping you because if you have time to read this, then you have time to start your freelancing business or even jump straight into your PLR writing business.

Method #3 for making $10 an hour online – Write an Info Product on How You Did It.

Did you get started? Are you now making $10+ per hour freelancing? Or writing and selling PLR? Then your next step is to write your own case study on how you did it, and sell that. For example, you might title your report, “How I went from $0 to $10 an hour in one day, and now earn $30 an hour doing simple work online.” Or something like that (perhaps a bit shorter.) Then sell your report in a niche forum or on your website, ClickBank or where ever you choose.

In fact, no matter what you’re doing online to succeed, once you get good at this you can always write a report detailing what you did and sell it to make easy, extra money.

In our example, if you price your report at $7 and sell 50 copies, you’ve made $350. The cost to run a special offer in a popular niche forum is normally less than $100 so you could net $250 for something that probably took you 3-5 hours worth of work. That’s $50+ per hour, PLUS you now have 50 additional buyers on your list that you can sell to again and again.

More tips – whatever service you’re offering, be sure to offer it with a twist. If you’re writing articles, use a spinner to give them multiple versions of each article, or use a program to transfer them into video, or blast the articles to article directories. If you’re doing backlinking, don’t just offer a standard package of one type of backlink – offer a package that includes multiple types of backlinks so it looks far more natural to the search engines. And so forth.

Your service could be something as simple as creating videos using any of the video programs out there. There are programs that make videos that look like Hollywood trailers, and others that make videos that look like home movies. Do your research, find a program you like, and offer the service. Sure you might spend some money on software or access to a special website that produces these videos, but then it’s as easy as ‘plug in and create’ to fulfill your video orders.

Now I know a lot of people are going to want me to outline a detailed step-b-step plan on exactly what you should do to earn your $10 an hour and work up from there, and I’m not going to do it.

First, I’d have a hundred people all competing against each other and complaining of the competition. Second, it’s not about me telling you what to do – it’s about you finding what you’re best suited for and following that path.

More to the point, this is where you do your research and you find something that resonates with you, and then you learn everything you can about it. Set aside 10 hours and just learn, learn, learn. Then you’ll know more about your topic than most people, and you’ll be ready to offer your service. And it will truly be YOUR service, not something you copycatted from a step-by-step action plan like a hundred other automatons.

This isn’t just about earning $10 an hour – this is about you stepping out of your comfort zone and stretching yourself just a bit. This is about you taking your first steps without the aid of a hand railing, and it’s the best way to get started and realize just how simple all of this is if you’ll only just DO IT.

Has anyone ever told you to set goals? I know, silly question. People are always telling you to set goals because goal setting can and does work. But has anyone told you there is a right way and a wrong way to choose those goals?

For example, you want to earn $10,000 a month so you set a goal to reach that $10,000 mark. So far so good, right? Actually, no, because this is what’s known as a “static” goal rather an action goal. Static goals sap your motivation because they’re focused on outcomes that are, for the most part, outside of your control.

Bottom line – they seldom work.

Imagine you’re in your living room and the house is a mess. You set a goal to to have a clean, straightened, neat house in the next 2 hours. You visualize your house being clean, you look at pictures of your house taken when it was clean, you write down your goal, and 2 hours later? Your house looks exactly the same.

Why?

Because you didn’t DO anything. You took no action because it was a static goal, not an action goal. “Have a clean house” has no action tied to it.

But what if you reword that goal to the following:

“Straighten, vacuum and clean the living room, kitchen and dining room.”

Do you see how you are firmly in control of whether or not this goal is achieved? And now you’ve got a goal with ACTION in it. You could even break this goal down into several smaller, action oriented goals to make it even easier to achieve.

So let’s look at how action goals can help you in your business:

Instead of setting that, “I earn $10,000 a month” goal, how about…

Week 1: I create my first product on ____ (subject)
Week 2: I set up the website, sales letter and emails to promote this product.
Week 3: I contact my list to offer them my new product, I write 3 guest blog posts on this topic to promote my product, and I contact 25 potential affiliates and joint venture partners and ask them to promote my product.
Week 4: I create my second product.

If you’re using static goals you’re going to get frustrated. Still using the $10,000 a month goal as an example, it’s going to take you an investment of time and effort to reach that goal. In fact it could take months to get there, and if you’re not seeing results in the mean time, you’re likely to get frustrated and quit. Not to mention the fact that the goal has no action tied to it, and so you’re likely to “wait” for it to happen – which it never will if you’re not taking the right actions to achieve it.

By setting action goals that take you to where you want to go, you are always achieving, you’re always making progress, and you’re constantly being revitalized by the achievement of each action goal.

You might want to set some action goals right now, before you forget. I think you’ll find it becomes an addictive habit that pays off often and exponentially.

When you first start writing a blog the ideas come from everywhere and they seem endless. After all, you’re (hopefully) writing about something you know and love, something that is dear to your heart.

But what happens after that initial burst of writing frenzy, when the ideas dry up and you’re faced with a blank screen?

Here are 21 ways to find new ideas that inspire you to keep writing. And no matter what methods you choose, you’ll always want to keep a log of your ideas so you don’t lose them before you can write them. Remember: The idea you think of right now that is so outstanding you can’t possibly forget it – is the idea you could quickly forget.

Google Alerts. If you choose only one of these 21 methods, then without a doubt this is the one to pick. Whatever your niche is, pick your best keywords, go to Google Alerts, and ask it to send you the best stories every day. Then use these as inspiration and research in writing your own blog entries.

Read your competitors. You never want to copy them, but you will find plenty of ideas of your own simply by reading their blogs.

React to someone else’s post. Did you read a post that you have a strong opinion about? Do you perhaps disagree? Vehemently? Write your own post giving your own point of view. You’ll find the words pouring out almost without effort, and because of your passion your readers will post more replies and send you more social media love as well.

Ask yourself what’s missing. When you’re reading other people’s stuff, ask what they left out, what they missed, or what is going to come next. Both finding the less obvious or predicting the future can make for great posts.

Read totally unrelated material, and then ask yourself how it relates to your own niche. This can provide out-of-the-box thinking that totally rocks and again provides you with social media love.

Find the pain. Your readers have problems – what are they and how can you help?

Do interviews. Get in touch with others in your niche and ask to do a written question and answer interview. You email the questions, they write back the answers, and you’ve got a blog post. How easy was that? If they have a product, let them plug it – if they have an affiliate program, sign on as an affiliate and earn a commission from your post. Talk about easy content and easy money. Even if you make just a couple of sales, you’ve now monetized that post.

Talk about how your view has changed. If you’ve been writing for your blog for a good while, go back and read some of your original posts. Do you still agree with what you wrote, or has your perspective changed? If you think differently now, write a new post referencing how you felt then versus why your views are different now.

Did you make mistakes in your niche? Talk about them. Your readers want to hear that you’re human, and they want to know how you overcame your problems or lived down your naivete or foolishness.

Write something funny. Who doesn’t love funny writing? If you’ve got a unique viewpoint on the humorous side of your niche, by all means write it down. It may be one of your most popular posts ever.

Debate. Do you have strong opinions? If so, can you find someone with equally strong opinions who disagrees with you? Posts written by two people presenting opposite viewpoints can be fascinating, and they tend to get a huge response from their readers.

Make a prediction. Go ahead, lay it on the line and predict something that’s going to happen in your niche. People love to know what to expect, and if it turns out you’re right, be sure to remind them of your original post by writing about it and linking to it.

Sit for ideas. Find a quiet spot, get comfortable, clear your mind and ask yourself, “What should I write about?” Just relax, and the answers will come. Keep pen and paper handy, you’re going to want to write this down.

Exercise. Go for a walk, jump up and down on a trampoline, whatever. Just get some exercise, get the blood flowing, and let the ideas come.

Hold a contest. Why not? Ask the best open ended question you can think of in your niche, and invite readers to respond. You choose the winner, and provide the prize. Or you can let your readers vote for their favorite.

Write a story. Make it an outlandish fairy tale or a modern day drama. Just relate it to your niche and use it to teach a concept. Who doesn’t love stories?

Look to your blog comments. Read the comments you get and find questions you haven’t answered or ideas you haven’t thought of, and then write your post based on those.

Do a product review. A real one. Not one of these reviews that sells the product, but rather a review that tells the truth. Mind you, this is a two-edged sword. The more honest you are, the more your readers will love you and the more your fellow product creators may hate you if you didn’t like their product.

Do a book review. Get the latest books in your niche from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and review the books.

Be ridiculous and see if anybody notices. Write a completely tongue-in-cheek piece about something in your niche, citing outlandish facts and using bogus experts – then see what happens. Some readers will catch on, others won’t, and you’ll get some great reader comments. Then make a second post letting them know it was a farce.

Use guest bloggers. Perhaps the easiest solution of all is to allow others to do your blogging for you.

Now take action! Apply some or all of these blogging tips and you’ll never run out of interesting things to write and post about.