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The reality of Quitting Your job in 90 days to work full-time online

- by Tony Shepherd

© Tony Shepherd

Quit Your Job In Ninety Days

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I’ll say right here and now that I DIDN’T manage to quit my job and go full time online in 90 days…

It actually took me 97!

And that was from the point that I actually put my mind to it and said ‘OK – this is it – playing for keeps and no looking
back!’

The secret to managing to quit your job and go full time into your own internet marketing business is down to two things:

1. Determination

2. Having a ’system’ in place.

I can’t give you the first one – that’s up to you.

It’s like quitting smoking. You try so many times using various methods, props and crutches, but the time you actually succeed
in quitting is the time you finally decide to just DO IT.

So if you want to quit your job, the determination part is up to you I’m afraid.

But the SYSTEM that you’ll need to have in place – that all successful marketers have in place, to a greater or lesser degree is up to you.

Basically you need to install an ‘automatic process’ in your business that converts leads into subscribers, and subscribers into buyers.

And best of all it’s pretty easy to put into place.

For example you could offer a free report, then push your prospects through a sales funnel where they’re given options based on their needs and wants.

It should include upsells (they’ve bought one thing from you so why not just add a complimentary product to the basket)

And if they’re not interested in that product and decide to leave your site, maybe another of your products would be more suited to them.

You might have heard marketers talk about ‘the sales funnel’

But did you know that most marketers leave PILES of money on the table by not thinking about the process from their customer’s point of view?

For example if you’ve just subscribed to a newsletter to receive a free report, you’re less likely to spend $997 on a coaching program.

But the same prospect might well be interested in a DVD telling them how to build a simple blog and profit from it within 30 days, especially if it’s priced at $27, and advertised as a ’subscriber only discount’

There’s a very real art to building your system.

And the best way of all is to subscribe to other marketers lists, and to see how they do it….

If you like an idea you can use it yourself, and if something makes you angry or you feel like they’re just out to take your money, you know to avoid that idea when you build your own system.

The secret is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

Too few marketers actually do this.

Good luck.

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Tony Shepherd has just put together a blueprint for building your own online system.

For a VERY short time you can get this for free (actual value $97)

Quit Your Job In Ninety Days

Feel free to reproduce this article to your own website/ ezine list.

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Increase Sales By Flying Under Your Prospects’ “Radar Defenses”

- by Jim Edwards

(c) Jim Edwards – All Rights reserved

http://www.thenetreporter.com

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How do you persuade someone to do what you want them to do?

A whole world of marketing exists around us trying to do that every minute of the day. Do you even notice it anymore or, like your prospects, have you subconsciously set up a system of “radar defenses” against the daily bombardment of marketing messages?

Take a minute and count up the advertising methods which fight for your attention (and money) every day. Just the basic list includes:

· Yellow page ads

· Newspaper and magazine ads

· Postcards, catalogs, and direct mail circulars in your “snail mail” box

· Radio pitches interrupting the flow of your favorite songs

· TV ads – about 20 minutes worth per hour now

· Hundreds of storefronts, “mega” malls, and strip malls

· Highway billboards by the thousands

· Circulars hung on your doorknob

· Illegal signs on stop signs and telephone poles

· Legitimate email messages

· Spam email or UCE (without permission commercial email)

Just these 11 sources can overwhelm your brain with marketing messages. Like trapped rats, people develop defenses against this never-ending onslaught. They throw up a wall or a “radar defense” that goes into action the minute they smell a “pitch” or a sales job. Don’t blame them. We all do it!

So how can you get around this psychological wall against the constant sales and marketing messages? Well, the answer does NOT lie in hitting people with more frequent and obnoxious advertising or sly, sneaky tactics. You might get them to trust you for a minute, but it will backfire in the long run.

You must do two things instead:

1. First, you must establish credibility for yourself and your business as an expert.

2. Second, you must reduce their fears about doing business with you.

Doing these two things will get you past their defenses and allow you the opportunity to persuade them to buy your product.

So how do you accomplish these two “simple” things? What will win someone’s attention, raise your credibility, and lower their fear factor all at the same time? The one-word answer really applies to most everyone.

Trust!

If a seller can get behind your defenses with information which makes you trust them, then that credibility will carry over into a sale much of the time.

How can you get this credibility?

Well, take this next fact as online marketing “gospel,” for many people have proven its effectiveness.

Fact: Publishing and promoting with free articles gives you one of the most powerful opportunities available to tip the buyer’s credibility scale in your favor.

How can we prove this works? Quite easily actually. Take a break from reading this and go check out a newspaper or magazine for a minute.

Which do you trust more, the ads or the articles? Most people will choose the articles hands down. Why? Because the articles don’t try to “sell” you anything. Instead, they
hand out useful information for educational or other practical purposes.

Most of us grew up in a culture which says we can believe and “trust” what appears in the standard “news” or “information” format. In other words, if it appears in print, then we can believe and trust the author.

So go ahead! Use this lifetime of conditioning to your advantage in selling your products and services!

Very few things will create an atmosphere of trust and confidence in people as reading one of your articles on a subject that greatly interests them. It shows you know your business. It also demonstrates you will do more than just try to sell them something.

Publishing articles literally lets you fly under their advertising “radar defenses.”

So remember these points when deciding whether or not to use articles to promote your business:

1. Few things create as much trust and confidence in the minds of potential customers as reading an article you wrote on a subject which specifically and intensely interests them.

2. Articles establish credibility quickly because, right or wrong, we’ve all been trained to trust the “news.”

3. An article, or series of articles, will differentiate you from the competition, who bombard people with nothing but sales messages.

4. Providing content-rich, non-sales-oriented articles will also help build and solidify your relationship with existing customers so they give you repeat business.

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Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use free articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links!

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Need MORE TRAFFIC to your website or affiliate links? “Turn Words Into Traffic” reveals the secrets for using FREE articles to drive Thousands of NEW visitors to your website or affiliate links… without spending a dime on advertising!
Click=> EzArticles
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I ran across this article from Rosalind Gardner and wanted to share it. She has given me permission to re-print it.

It is several years old but I still think her points are valid. Rosalind has become very well respected and I trust her words.

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15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer

- by Rosalind Gardner

© 2004 Rosalind Gardner – All Rights reserved
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There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business, and I’ve come up with a list of 15 great reasons to become an affiliate marketer.

Let’s look at each reason separately:

1. No Production Costs – The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren’t an issue. The product has been developed and proven – all on the merchant’s nickel.

2. Low Cost Set-up – Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need.

3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy – I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate’s ability to promote his web site.

4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services – What isn’t sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site.

5. No Sales Experience Needed – When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

6. No Employees – The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries. Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for you as an affiliate, it’s doubtful you’ll ever have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions.

7. No Expensive Merchant Accounts Needed – Setting up a merchant account for any business is a time-consuming and costly business. It’s even more tedious for Internet businesses. However, merchant accounts aren’t a concern when you’re an affiliate. The merchant bears that cost and handles all processing of payments. You never have to lose sleep over potential chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account when you’re an affiliate.

8. No Inventory to Carry – Even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment, as an affiliate you can sell large items without storage concerns.

9. No Order-Processing – Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that!

10. No Product Shipping – The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates.

11. No Customer Service Concerns – Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don’t worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers.

12. Make Money While You Sleep – What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night?

13. The World at Your Doorstep – The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than many small-town merchants sees in his or her brick and mortar business in a year.

14. Minimal Risk – The product you chose isn’t making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It’s that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don’t sell.

15. High Income Potential – If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there’s not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination.

There you have them – all the good reasons to start your own online affiliate marketing business. Start today and benefit from this incredibly simple, cost-effective business opportunity known as affiliate marketing. The time is right, and the time is now.

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Article excerpted from Rosalind Gardner’s “Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People’s Products Online”. Rosalind is the ‘Net’s most recognized expert on successful online selling as an affiliate marketer.

Visit her site at: Affiliate Business Blueprint

Blogging Wars – Wordpress Vs Blogger

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.
Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.
Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can be a pain in the ass. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating. With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.
The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content
Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.
As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

About the Author
Gobala Krishnan is the author of Wordpress Adsense System, the unique beginner’s guide to building content-rich Adsense websites with Wordpress. You can download two free chapters of his book here.