Making Money With Squidoo

Have you try making money with squidoo ?.Last month a colleague asked me to give Squidoo a try. So after much research, I signed up and placed a few lenses online with the goal to complete one new lens every week over the next few months. To make sure I understood how Squidoo worked and what made the lenses profitable, I researched various lenses and their lens makers. The formula for making money with Squidoo seems pretty cut and dry: create great content and promote the heck out of the pages. There is, however, one caveat: the lenses that receive the highest ratings tend to be lenses that have a good balance between: content, resources, and targeted advertisements (i.e. affiliate links).

Here are the tips I've used with my own online endeavors and which have been confirmed for success with Squidoo.

• Find a niche. Choose a broad topic you want to become an expert in or a topic you really enjoy. Write a single lens on that niche, then branch out into other lenses as they relate to that niche.

• Choose a single topic per lens. Focus on one part of your niche within each lens; instead of writing a broad, generalized lens that briefly discusses many areas within that niche.

• Write something concrete. Share information that isn't readily available on the Internet. Don’t be afraid to include resources you can’t easily find online. Share information based upon your own personal experiences.

• Offer a variety of lenses within your niche. Write how-to articles, quick tips, holiday related material, and personal experience essays. Include a gallery of samples and/or images, recommended websites, and supplies.

• Keep paragraphs short. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read online so keep them between 2 and 5 sentences. Each module should have no more than 2 to 3 paragraphs with a 100 word introduction.

• Break up the article with sales tools. Sales tools, otherwise known as money makers, are affiliate programs and/or products you sell yourself. With traditional magazine articles, the ads usually accompany the article via a side bar, the adjoining page, or sometimes above or below the article itself.

With Squidoo, the ads are a little more intrusive. They tend to be placed within the actual content itself and can look something like this: introduction, sales tool, part 1, resource, sales tool, part 2, resource, sales tool, part 3, sales tool, conclusion, sales tool, guest book. It’s also important to label each sales tool, especially if it doesn’t necessarily match the overall theme of the lens, i.e: Clothing for Pregnant Women or Work at Home attire for busy moms. Finally, if you sell a product or service that doesn’t fit the lens, but you want the reader to be aware of it, place it under your guestbook so that it’s less intrusive.

• Cross promote your lenses. Recommend one of your old lenses in one of your new lenses. Share your lenses with your newsletter readers, with your Twitter friends, on Facebook, in a byline on a forum, as a resource in another article on another site, or in a paid advertisement.

• Include images. Each lens should have at least one relevant image (preferably 3) and the image title should include a keyword relevant to the lens. When using images in your lens, make sure you own the copyrights to those images; don't just snag them off the 'net. Purchase them through a stock agency or create your own.

• Be personable and approachable. Include a guestbook and reply to commenters—either on Squidoo or personally by checking out their lenses.

• Update your old lenses with new information from time-to-time.

• Promote your lenses off site through social networking, forums, chats, article bylines, search engines, and various directories.

Good Luck

Happy New Year 2009

Happy new year 2009

If a promotion is one of your goals for this year, are you doing everything you can to make it happen?

It would be nice if hard work and talent would automatically lead to a job with more pay, more responsibility, and a better title. But in most cases, it takes more than that to move to the next level.

Make Yourself Known

Look at the job you'd like to have a year from now. Who selects candidates for this position? Who does that person work with and ask for advice?

"Then you systematically sit down and think about how you're going to make contact," says Helen Harkness, founder of Career Design Inc., in Dallas. There are lots of ways to do this. You can volunteer to serve on a committee with the people you need to know, for example. You can forward them articles or information that relate to their expertise.

Help Your Boss Succeed

Often, your boss is the person who will decide if you'll be promoted. But even if not, your boss will almost certainly be consulted. So impressing your boss is a top priority.

Marianne Adoradio, a recruiter and career counselor in Silicon Valley, suggests focusing on your company's key goals, then talking with your boss to find out which are most important in your department. "It's really important to be aware of what is going to make your boss successful, what is most important to him or her."

Start Doing the Job

You don't want to stage an office coup and start making personnel decisions that are your boss' responsibility. But you need to show that you can work at a higher level than your current position.

"People are easily promoted when they show that they can already do parts of the job they want to move into," says Steve Levin, principal of Leading Change Consulting & Coaching, in Portola Valley, California. "If you want to move from being a manager to a group manager, start taking on responsibility for what a group manager does. Start thinking like they do."

Then you can make the case that "I'm already doing the job; I just need the title."

"That's pretty irresistible to your boss," Levin says.

Have a Plan B

Many people think there's a system in place at work that will take care of them and their career path, Harkness says. "They expect it to happen 1-2-3, automatically. They do the right thing, and they're going to get that promotion. It doesn't work that way."

In fact, Harkness says, it can happen that "you do everything you're supposed to do and it doesn't work." It's important to understand that the workplace is uncertain -- and to know what your backup plan is if you don't get the promotion you want.

If the promotion was a stretch and your boss is encouraging even while turning you down, it may be worth spending another year gaining experience. But you may also want to looking outside the company.

5 Great Ideas to Market Your Business With Video

Successful online marketing requires that you keep your marketing and website fresh. One of the best ways to do this is with new and innovative, and interactive, marketing techniques. Currently, one of the growing mediums is the use of video to interact with and engage potential clients. Here are 5 great ideas to use this fantastic medium.
1. Give away free video tutorials
What's better than visiting a website that can show you how to do something useful? For example, imagine that you have a website that sells mediation supplies. Cushions, altars, music, books etc...one great marketing video idea is to provide your website visitors with a quick video demonstrating how to use a product you sell on your website. Even better would be to create a video that demonstrates a popular meditation technique.
Another example might be a website that sells information about pet training. The video could be an image of an expert using a superior training technique to train their dog or bird an interesting or useful trick. For example, teaching a dog to sit might be useful but demonstrating how to teach your dog to grab a beer from the refrigerator might me more interesting and exciting. It all depends on your target market and their needs.
2. Video testimonials on your website.
Credibility is extremely important to a business. If you're considered an expert in your field, product or service, you don't have to seek customers, they seek you. Credibility can be enhanced by a variety of tools including but not limited to testimonials.
Let me just ask you this question, which would you spend $500 on, a product you thought was a good product or a product you knew was a good product because relevant and quality testimonials, success stories, and endorsements were available for you to review? Personally, I'm much more likely to spend my money on a product with evidence to back it up. Video is a useful tool to provide this credibility.
For example, you can ask customers to send in video testimonials, create a contest out of it to make it more fun. Now it's both a marketing campaign and an excellent credibility tool. You can also take the time to visit some of your biggest fans and record testimonials. Case studies and success stories are extremely motivational. They enable your prospective customer to not only see how successful they can be but to also connect with your customer on a personal level. Speaking of connecting with your customer on a personal level, let's move to the next great way to use video.
3. Video welcome message.
Many businesses are enhanced by connecting on a personal level with your customer. For example, if you're selling a consulting service, a coaching service, or any type of product or service that helps people improve their personal lives, it can be extremely beneficial to share some of yourself with them. An easy way to do this is to connect with them via a video welcome message.
It doesn't have to be long, just a 60 second spot where you're sincerely welcoming them to your site and inviting them to take the steps they need to improve their lives. It provides reassurance that you're a real and genuine person and encourages them to take the next step whether that is to make a purchase, make an appointment or simply to inquire and ask for more information.
4. Interview an expert.
Interviewing an expert is an excellent tool to draw traffic to your website. You can offer the interview as a free giveaway in exchange for their email address. You can promote the interview as a limited time offer when they make a purchase. You can simply use the interview with an expert as a way to improve your company's credibility. There are many, many uses for a video interview with an expert. You can even use a portion of it to create a video advertisement.
5. Create an advertisement.
Advertising is a great way to market your business and video makes it easy. You can create an ad and post it on YouTube. You can also create a You Tube video and embed it on your site or pay others to post it on their site. When creating a video advertisement, there are a few things that sell well. They are:
· Humor
· Talent
· Celebrities
· Special effects
· Animal/pet tricks
· Cute kids
· Spoofs
The key to any advertisement is to make sure it is both memorable, unique, and that it communicates the benefits of your product. A good video advertisement will be forwarded and shared amongst fans thus generating a viral effect.
Videos must be quality or they will hurt your image rather than enhance it. There are numerous tools available on the web to create quality videos. YouTube is one of the most commonly used. This is because it is fairly simple to use.
The steps to create a YouTube video are:
To first make your video. In order for your video to be viewable via YouTube, it video has to be taken with a digital device like a digital camcorder, a digital camera, or a cell phone. I've taken movies of my dog with my cell phone and depending on your cell phone's camera, they can be very good quality.
To upload it from a digital camera or camcorder, it is important to know that any video uploaded into YouTube must be less than 10 minutes long, smaller than 100MB, and in an acceptable format, .AVI, .MOV, .WMV, and .MPG file formats.
Once you have your video in the right format, simply get online and go to the YouTube site. Click "Upload Videos" in the upper-right-hand corner of the page and enter the video's title, description, tags, and category to make it easy for people to find your video, and forward to others. Set your video to Public Click the "Upload a Video" button and then select the file you want to upload by clicking the "Browse" button.
That's it. You have now created a highly interactive and viral marketing tool that you can use to build your business.

Affiliate Marketing - One Way to a Successful Home Based Business

By Dee Power

It sounds complicated. What exactly is affiliate marketing? It's simple really. Affiliate marketing is selling other people's products (or services) for a commission or portion of the money generated by the sale. Commissions can range from less than 10% to more than 70%. The price of the product can range from $5.00 to $500.00 and higher. Special training or start up funding isn't required to become an affiliate marketer. However, your home based business will be more successful if you know about the product you're selling and you're excited about it.

Your task as an affiliate marketer is to drive traffic to the product owner's sales page, allowing them to convert the prospect into a buyer. The more targeted the traffic the higher the conversion rate will be. Conversion is the percentage of people who visit the site who then buy the product. A cookie is embedded with your affiliate ID on the browser of every visitor who uses that affiliate link to visit the product owner's page. If the visitor buys you get paid.

There is no limit to what types of product you can promote as an affiliate. On Amazon, you can promote anything they sell from flat screened TVs to diamond jewelry to food. If you want to be in the beauty niche, you can include links using your Amazon associate (affiliate) ID to sell specific beauty products, beauty magazines, books, DVDs, clothes, and spa products. For example golfonabudget.com is one of our sites and as you can see we promote golf books, DVDs, training equipment, and golf equipment.

An affiliate marketer doesn't have to be concerned with developing ideas and creating products. You don't have to deal with customer service follow-ups. Your home based business doesn't have to worry about inventory to store, credit card processing and shipping. Once you've made the sale your work is over.

The product owners want you to be successful. They know that their affiliates can sell a lot more product than they can by themselves. The owners provide formatted emails, reviews that can be placed on blogs, banner ads, and articles. Add your affiliate link and you're ready to go.

When choosing products make sure you're comfortable with the quality of the product and the sales pitch. Those qualities reflect back on you.

Building a list of interested potential customers is an important part of affiliate marketing. Your list should be focused on one niche, but there are probably a number of products you can sell. For example: Brides to be would be interested in wedding gowns, invitations, weight loss, flowers, and travel. Offering a free report on romantic weddings that don't cost a fortune would be one way to build a list of brides.

Affiliate marketing is one way your home based business can be successful on the Internet.

Free report 27 Ways to Earn Money Online no up sell, no one time offer, no fluff, just 27 ways you can earn money on the Internet. Dee Power is the author of several nonfiction books and the novel Over Time. Moms work from home you can too.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dee_Power

Your Greatest Asset

Your greatest asset is your own customer list. These people have already purchased something from you in the past. If you've delivered as satisfactory product, they are very likely to buy from you again.

The easiest sale you'll ever make is to an already established customer of yours. They already trust you. They feel comfortable in dealing with you. You've delivered what you said you would so a certain degree of trust has already been established. Your customers are probably quite confident that you wouldn't sell them something that wasn't in their best interest.

The high road to increased profits always takes the route of established customers. There's always an expense associated with finding a new customer. Regardless of the marketing method used there's always an investment required in establishing a customer whether in terms of real dollars or human capital. Once you have a customer, any subsequent sale is made without the cost of locating that customer. The cost or finding a new customer is proportionally much higher than the cost of retaining an existing customer.

Keys To Success

The secret of capitalizing on your customer base is to continually feed them with new products and services you know they'll want. This is no time to diversify into completely new areas. Everything that you make available to your customer list must be compatible with what made those people customers to begin with.

Whatever subsequent products and services you offer must be related in some way. Think of your customers as belonging to a specific group. They're gardeners or small business owners or health enthusiasts. Whatever you offer must fit that product niche.

Always be on the lookout for new things you think your customers would gladly pay for. And give customers first crack at any of these new products and services. If you can offer a discount, that's even better. By letting them in on new products and services, you're giving them priority customer status, an added value of doing business with your firm.

Be careful not to overdo it. You don't want to annoy anyone, least of all your customers. Allow enough time and space between customer contacts. How much time you allow between mailings or calls depends on the nature of your business.

Examples

When a clothing store receives a shipment of new designs, they should first notify all previous customers who've purchased in the same price range. All the store has to do is contact these customers by phone or by mailing invitations to a special event where this new line is unveiled. Suggest to customers how additional new outfits can be created by mixing and matching and you've provided an extra service that will help retain customers.
This approach would seem natural for a wholesaler who relies on distributors or retailers to act as re-sellers. By showing your new merchandise and suggesting ways to move more of it, you're providing a valuable service while keeping in touch with your customers.

A self-published author of book on camping tips, should come up with natural additions to his product line to sell to buyers of his book. Things like maps of parks, local facilities, lists of "must-see sites" or specialty camping equipment, could all be add-ons made available to the author's buyers.

One final note; in order to start making more sales and build your business empire – you must become an avid student of lead generation and marketing strategy – the high-payoff items necessary for you to magnetically attact new clients to skyrocket your profits.