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Do you know that 95% of the people starting out in their internet businesses fail? In the middle of all the noise and hype on the internet today, not many people realize that all the ideas and techniques you can find are useless if you don’t first understand what your business model is or how you are going to make money online. Even the most remarkable internet marketing technique will not work if you don’t understand how to apply it to your business.

The 3 most popular Internet marketing business models are:

1) Affiliate Marketing

Perhaps the most popular way of making money on the Internet, affiliate marketing provides a good start for newbies. Almost anyone can sign-up for an affiliate program for free and start promoting the chosen product or service. Commissions start coming in if someone buys or participates in the programs promoted. Affiliate marketers don’t carry any risk, since they don’t pay for the creation of the product or handle customer service or need to know how internet transactions work.

It’s even possible to be an affiliate without a website. Some affiliate marketing programs you may participate in require a small up-front investment. Some are free. It’s no surprise therefore that almost everyone and their brother promotes one affiliate program or another. In fact, if there is a single reason why the Internet today has so many ads and banners, it’s because of affiliate programs.

However, only 5% of the millions out there involved in affiliate marketing, ever make ANY money and only 1% makes really BIG money. The “Super Affiliates,” as they are called, do it very differently from the rest, therefore they earn the big checks.

2) Writing an eBook or other type of information product, or recording an information CD.

The possibilities for this type of Internet business are endless. There are so many niche markets that you can write about. It could be a course on rose gardening, how to start your own dog sitting business, how to sell your artwork, how to juggle your time as a mom. There are endless topics and still many that have not yet been explored by online marketers.

You can even outsource the work so that you don’t have to write the information yourself, or produce the CD.  Although EBook authors need to invest more than affiliates do, in time getting the EBook written, and in getting the business up and running, the payoff in this Internet business model is much more rewarding, when done right. These marketers make more money because they have very, very low production and maintenance costs. Once the product is produced, it doesn’t cost a cent to reproduce thousands of copies. Start-up costs can be covered by selling just a few copies of very high-margin eBooks. You can even recruit hordes of affiliates to do the selling for you.

3) Adsense

This model of making money online was all the rage a few years ago. There are tons of testimonials from people who made outrageous income from Adsense.  Adsense is Google’s advertising program wherein webmasters display ads from Google’s extensive list of advertisers. Unobtrusive text-based ads are served in member sites, who then earn a commission every time someone clicks on the advertisers’ links. Google has changed the way the game is played, but if a person follows their rules, they still stand a chance of making really good money with this Internet business model.

Google Adsense uses a technology to deliver ads that are highly relevant to the content of a page. Google’s search engine will scan through the content of the page to determine its topic, and will then serve ads that are relevant to the page’s content.

Running Google Adsense is quite simple. First build a website full of content of your desired niche or topic, and then register in Google’s adsense program. Once approved, you then paste a code in your page, and the ads start appearing immediately after you upload the changes to your server.

Google is silent on how it shares the revenue per click with their partners, but how much you will earn per click depends on the topic and the product being advertised. Products with low profit margins for the advertiser will most likely give you a smaller pay per click than a product with a high margin. Similarly, ads with high conversion rates will normally give you higher payouts than less effective ads, since they can afford to pay more dollars per click, with a portion of that money going to you.

These are the top 3 most popular ways of making money online today. No matter which model you choose, make sure you understand the basics. Stop buying courses or information not applicable to your business. Information overload can stop you before you even get started.

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Gil (http://www.gilscorner.com/)tagged me to write these 25 things that everybody is writing about themselves, so here goes:

1. I’m a committed Christian.  I attend what was determined to be the fastest growing church in America last year, http://www.ChurchoftheHighlands.com in Birmingham, AL.  ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL church!!
2. I have 3 grown children
3. I have 5 grandchildren, ranging in age from 4 to 8 years, three boys and two girls
4. My back yard is adjacent to my daughter’s back yard, so her 3 children visit often, I babysit often, and I’m called on for many other things OFTEN, which is why it is very difficult for me to get much done each day.
5. In one of my former lives, I was a pilot.  My first husband was learning to fly and he wanted me to learn to fly also.   I was immediately drawn to it and received my pilot’s license within the minimum required hours.
6. I continued my pilot training to become a flight instructor so other people could pay me to fly. I taught basic flight training, commercial training and instrument training in single engine land planes (the small planes).
7. Another one of my former lives – I had my own stained glass studio where I taught people how to make stained glass windows and other stained glass objects.  Just as I was about to start making money in that business there was a 100-year flood in the area where most of my customers lived.  Their priority changed from making stained glass windows to getting their homes livable again.  My business did not survive that catastrophe even though I was not flooded.
8. You can see that I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit.
9. I started college as an art major because growing up, I always knew that was what I wanted to be.
10. But my husband-to-be told me that being an art major would not make me any money, so I changed to library science because that was what my sister had majored in.
11. I was a children’s librarian for 2 years after college and then started having my children.  When I went back into the work world, I went more into business than library work.
12. It was while I was a pension administrator for a life insurance company that my boss showed me an article in Working Women Magazine that said a corporate librarian was one of the top 25 jobs for women in America.
13. Having found out that the professional degree for librarians is the master’s degree, I went back to school and got my master’s degree.
14. The job that God had waiting for me when I graduated was a research librarian in an electric utility.  So my daughter (my youngest) and I moved from Mississippi to Alabama to take this job.
15. I found out that my varied background and all my “former lives”, including being a business owner, prepared me perfectly for my research job.  Although a librarian doesn’t have to know everything, he/she needs to know where to find things.  Sometimes you have to have SOME knowledge about a subject in order to even know where to start looking for information.  There were things that I know that most people wouldn’t have a clue: information about weather that I had to learn to be a pilot; documents that you need to have to start a business and run a business; or even human resource type things that I learned as a pension administrator.
16. I retired from my full time job July 2008, after 18 years, so I could devote my time to getting my online business started.  Only after starting with Alex Jeffreys have I actually begun to make progress!
17. One of my heart-felt desires is to help people who need jobs.  There are so many people out there who have always worked and have a good work ethic and now through no fault of their own, they are out of work.  I not only want to help people online who want to make a living online (wherever they are in the world), but take what I am now learning to local people and teach them “hands-on”.  That would have been so helpful to me because the main obstacles that I’ve had to overcome in this course are the technical challenges.  These don’t come naturally to me.  But if I can take others and walk them thru the steps, I think they would get up and running 10 times faster than I.
18. I want to go on mission trips with groups from my church.  They are usually gone for 3 weeks at a time.  My Internet Marketing business running on auto-pilot will allow me to be away that long.
19. Our church also plants churches throughout the US and in some foreign countries.  I want to be a part of that. And I want to contribute resources to that.
20. In Gene’s answer to the Challenge (http://geneilten.com/i-have-taken-up-the-challenge.html/ ), he mentioned that he is on the shy side.  I tend to be shy, as well.  It is much easier for me to write, rather than speak, because I can think about what I am going to say and rewrite as necessary.  Also, there is a sort of “hiding behind the computer” going on.  However, once I’ve gotten to know a few of you online, I will be much more willing to talk to you in person if we all meet at a conference or something. I’ll feel like I already know you.
21. I watch very little TV.  I will catch the late news cast if I remember it.  Otherwise, there seems to be little on TV that I consider worth watching.
22. Oh yes, my 91 year old mother lived with me for almost 4 years.  We got along fine for the first almost 3 years until she began to act like an “old person.”  Told everybody I thought I was HER mother.  Actually, the roles do get reversed.
23. She decided in late May of this year that she was ready for assisted living.  I had decided that a long time ago and was SO GLAD that it was her idea.  She is happy there and I am at least a little freer to do what I need to do, although still taking care of her affairs.
24. I’ll steal #21 from Gene: “Don’t even ask how much I have spent on Internet Marketing related stuff and how much of it is sitting on my shelves or on my hard drive.”
25. That has made me deeply in debt which seems to be a prevailing theme among those of us who aspire to “make it” online.
26. I’ll add one more – I was just told today by our fellow student, Gil – http://www.gilscorner.com/ that what I had thought was a negative, my long-windedness, should actually be viewed as a positive – I should be able to write an ebook!

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Aside from being a fun hobby, what is the advantage of having a blog? The answer is to get readers. Whether you are selling advertising, a product, or merely your own collection of ideas, you are looking for as sizable a readership as possible. So if that is the situation, it follows that it is valuable to know how to pull readers to your blog. There are several ways to enhance the readership of your blog. Here are four tips that will help you to grow your blog readership that are painless to accomplish and will beyond doubt compensate you for your time.

First of all, to multiply readership you would need to add to the number of pages each visitor is seeing. You don’t need to be judged simply on your last post, but instead on the sum total of your labor. To that outcome, try highlighting interrelated posts within your blog. At the close of an article, highlight posts that may perhaps be of significance to individuals who like the current post. Generally blog platforms are fitted with plug-ins that will help you with this, but if they are not, then go ahead and at least record the links to other pages manually.

An additional related idea is to highlight the allied posts within the content of your post. If you are chatting about an area of interest you have discussed previously, link off of one of the keywords into the former post that is associated. This will furthermore help a previous post to preserve its freshness.

A second tip for increasing your blog readership is to do a series. A series is a terrific way to keep a visitor coming back again and again. In addition, if you are linking back, you can get readers looking at multiple posts even after you are through with the series. Be conscientious while running a series, because you don’t want to frustrate readers. However, if you come up with a theme you genuinely think you ought to carry out over a period of time, a series can really help your overall readership. If you are interested in finding out whether or not a series is working for your blog, then check posts. Observe to see whether readers are posting through the series, to determine if they are following you. If they are, it follows that your series is a winner and you are simply helping your blog readership.

An additional way to boost readership is a little more “controversial” if you will. You can try putting excerpts on the front page of your blog from a selection of posts. Many people allege it is only a way to acquire additional hits on your site. The fact is that extra hits are a small fringe benefit of it, but the real treasure is that it can render your site more engaging. By adding excerpts to the front page you can manage the front and keep it fresh while additionally teasing people into reading more than merely your most current blog post.  This will persuade a visitor to explore your blog site a little more than they may possibly have normally. Again, you would like to be judged by the total of your handiwork, or at least by a larger part of your creation than solely one post and this will do that. If your writing is up to par, it follows that you will witness an increase in your readership.

Finally, if you really want to build and increase readership, you must have good quality content. It should be valuable, unique, and appealing to your target audience as well as keeping them seeking more of the same. The more you raise the quality of your blog’s content, the more you will see your membership, readership, and page hits go up without even having to utilize any other “tricks.” People know what they like and they like quality for the most part. Giving the readers what they are seeking is probably the best way possible to build up your blog readership.

Having a blog can not only be fun, but if you are doing it correctly it can additionally be profitable. Either way, though, you want to sustain and grow a following, or readership. There are as many tips available to increase blog readership as there are blogs, but to really get things going, consider using these four tips. Follow them and you will see your readership grow.

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I’m going to tell you about a really
awesome way to get traffic to your website…

…and if you are sick of all the ‘Google
Slaps’ – the way Google can be a big fat jerk
to it’s advertisers you’re going to love this!

At least when it comes to the normal Adwords
ads they show on their search engine results
Google can be a pain in the butt…

But at the same time there is a really cool
way to use Google -  where you can place
your ads directly on other peoples websites.

You can do this on Googles ‘Content’ network.

This is good for some good reasons.

1) You won’t have to worry so much about
stuff like quality score, getting keywords
in your ads and Google slaps in general.

2) You can get very cheap clicks as opposed
to advertising on Googles search engine results.

How It Works

You choose the keywords that you want to use
and Google will come up with the sites
it thinks are a good match (also called
contextual advertising).

The trouble is Google hardly ever does a good job of
this and you can find your ad on sites that are
totally unsuitable for your campaign.

But much better than this is that you can
advertise on specific websites that you choose
(as long as they show Google Ads)

The Power Of Placement Ads

I suggest starting a brand new campaign where you
will run only ‘placement’ ads.

This is because you will want to bid differently,
use different ads and track these results
totally seperately.

The power of this is that you can advertise on
targeted websites that already have a good ranking
in the search engines for your keywords.

To do this just type in your keywords into
Google and Yahoo and go through the first
page or two of results for each one.

What you are looking for are sites that are
showing Google ads. Make a note of the
ones that do.

More Tips

1) Target specific web pages or sections
of a website.

Look for individual pages on the site where
you think the visitor will be most qualified.

2) Top Fold Display

Make sure your ads are showing in the
‘top fold’ of the webpage.

This just means that they will be seen without
the visitor having to scroll down.

This is especially true if you are advertising
on a CPM basis (see below).

3) CPM Vs Cost-Per-Click

CPM means ‘Cost Per 1000′

If you choose this option instead of ‘cost-per-click’
then you are charged every thousand times your ad
is shown (which is called an impression).

When done correctly you can get some very cheap
clicks, the name of the game here is to get as
many clicks as possible!

So with this model it is important real people
see your ads – which is why you want to be
sure they are displaying at the top of the
web page.

If it is stuck at the bottom hardly anyone will
click on it and you’ll lose your shirt!

4) Build A List

Understand that the frame of mind
of the traffic is generally not
in the ‘buying’ mood.

This is because you are pulling people
off of other websites it can be unwise
to try and get the traffic to buy something
right away.

Instead I would look to build a list
that you can make multiple sales
with other time!

5) Start Small & Test

No need for me to go on here, track
and test on a small level and see
which sites see you in profit
before ramping up!

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Get more marketing tips from Dave Gale
and get free Niche Marketing Videos from:

http://www.nichesuccesssystem.com

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Reprinted with permission from Dave Gale.

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Since I am rather far behind the rest of the class of Alex’s students, I intended to do some catching up yesterday.  However, I tried all day to get into Alex’s website and couldn’t get in. Found out they were having some technical difficulties.  Apparently those difficulties are still continuing because I still can’t get in. At least I hope it’s them and not me.  But I really want them to be back up soon.

When I couldn’t get into Alex’s site, I decided to do more work on my blog.  But wouldn’t you know, something was happening with my blog that was causing everything I did to run verrrrryy sloooowy.  So that didn’t work either.  Thank goodness my blog seems to be running okay today.

Last night, when nothing I did seemed to work, I decided to take a breather and watch a TV show that I hadn’t watched in a couple of years.  Better to chill out that to get all uptight about things that are beyond our control.

I had downloaded the MP3 of one of the coaching modules so I could listen to it while I drove back from the Smokies the other day.  So I have been listening to that today.  It’s really a good idea to go over the modules again because you pick up things that you missed before.

Isn’t technology WONDERFUL … When It Works!!!

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Today is my birthday!  At first I was a little sad that I would be spending it all alone, but then I started getting messages from my Facebook friends wishing me a Happy Birthday.  Just made me realize how rich I am to have so many friends.  Next year I’ll be getting Birthday wishes from my blogging friends!

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I retired from my full-time job to start my home business.  I’ve been searching for the past year for a way to make money online so that I can spend more quality time with my family and have the money to enjoy it.  Since starting my coaching course with Alex Jeffreys, I have discovered that my main problem has been a lack of organization and planning.  Once I started doing that, I am finally making progress in my internet marketing business.

Also, the fact that my daughter and her family live around the corner from me, I am called upon quite frequently to babysit for her three children.  My mother has been living with me for the past 4 years and she (and I) recently decided that she was ready for assisted living, which has at least freed me up somewhat.

But I decided that in order to really get some work done, I would need to get away from all the responsibilities and distractions.  So I am currently in the Great Smokey Mountains at a time-share that I own, for the week.  Sadly, I will be having to leave on Friday, but it has been a great few days so far.  I really have accomplished quite a few things, one of which is getting my blog up.  Not perfect yet, but as Alex says, “don’t get it perfect, just get it going.”

I took some pictures from my balcony, as Alex did on one of his vacations.  So, not to be outdone, I’ll post one of them so that you can see my beautiful view.

Aren't you impressed!

Well, I did say I was here to get some work done without distractions.  A beautiful view would have definitely been a distraction.

I’d love to hear from my fellow students and from others who are just starting out or those who are farther along on their journey who might give words of wisdom.

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