I see a lot of bloggers giving the tip “Traffic now, monetize later” then telling that it’s more important to concentrate on getting traffic and building readership first BEFORE you monetize your blog.

I don’t agree.

Now here’s the 3 reasons why you SHOULD monetize your blog before even launching it:

Yes it is important to get traffic and build a good relationship to your readers…

But why not do it while monetizing your blog?

It only takes several minutes to setup some simple monetization for a blog – or if you’re like me who can’t figure out HTML, it’s going to take a couple of hours but after that it’s good to go :-)

Why you shouldn’t monetize your blog now

There’s a downside though.

Monetizing your blog can make you a bit statsaholic and make you check your Affiliate account/Adsense account from time to time. While you see cents everyday, it drives your focus of generating good content for your blog away.

But the way I see it, it’s a matter of discipline. Time will come, you’ll have to monetize your blog. So why not start disciplining your self to stop checking your accounts and prioritize tasks?

P.S. Thru some stroke of luck, I finally got an HD cam. HOOORAAH :-)

P.S.S. Please excuse the video, it’s weird. I tried this “Youtube style” video editing where they cut stall moments so it looks like you’re continually talking.

© Make Money Online

I must admit this blog has been inactive.

Today I’ll revive it – and this time, it’s on.

The last couple of months I got the most severe case of… guess what?

MULTI TASKING.

Seriously, I’ve been juggling 5 projects. Add to that the holidays plus school work (I’m at senior year, high school)

All this time I’ve been blind. Multi tasking…

• Made me work more
• And work more…

BUT with all those work, believe it or not, my earnings decreased.

The TRUE Secret

With that experience, I realized how important the tip “focus” is. I knew it before and I’ve heard of it a lot of times but I never really paid that much attention to it.

But before that, let me show some examples (cause i find it funny that even before, focus really IS the true secret)

300 – 300 Spartans fought thousands of Persian soldiers by focusing on one little narrow pass called Thermopylae. They funneled all the Persian soldiers in one pass and concentrated on only one side.

Blitzkrieg - The infamous blitzkrieg, focus on one single area and flood em’ with tanks, soldiers and air power. Served the German pretty well.

NBA – Ok that’s a weird jump but I think that also proves that FOCUS can be, should be applied anywhere.

Most players on the NBA before (way back! The time when they didn’t have a 3 point line) were all rounded. To play you have to be good at dribbling, shooting, rebounding and all skills. But look how players play today, each player focuses on 1 skill. One is good at dribbling, one at shooting, one at rebounding then they put it all together. They play better.

How did that happen? Because each player were able to train and master a specific skill instead of practicing all of it to get well rounded.

Here’s The Game Plan…

Now let’s put that into a business perspective. Let’s say you’ve got 3 projects. Each project consists of 3 weeks of work, on the 3rd week you make money.

The multitasker, let’s call him Thomas just for the sake of sounding cool, would do:

Week 1 – Project 1
Week 2 – Project 2
Week 3 – Project 3
Week 4 – Project 1
Week 5 – Project 2
Week 6 – Project 3
Week 7 – Complete Project 1 and Make Money!
Week 8 – Complete Project 2 and Make Money!
Week 9 – Complete Project 3 and Make Money!

That means it took Thomas 7 weeks before he started making money.

Now here’s Hocus Focus Max would do:

Week 1 – Project 1
Week 2 – Project 1
Week 3 – Complete Project 1 and Make Money!
Week 4 – Project 2
Week 5 – Project 2
Week 6 – Complete Project 2 and Make Money!
Week 7 – Project 3
Week 8 – Project 3
Week 9 – Complete Project 3 and Make Money!

The Blind Side

(Coincidental title, heh. Saw the movie btw – very touching and inspirational)

To me this is very crucial because I’ve missed this for a long time.

As you can see, Thomas makes money on weeks 7, 8 and 9 but Hocus Focus Max makes money on weeks 3, 6 and 9. That means Max makes money earlier and if Max is even smarter, he’ll use that money to finish the other projects faster.

Thomas however, makes money on the last 3 weeks – but that doesn’t include the time between switching projects to work on.

© Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Alan Cheng.

I assume you’re reading this blog because you want to know how to make money online. If you’re still struggling and wonder how to go about doing it, then read the following business model which virtually guarantees success.

There are 4 reasons why you’re not profiting online:

1. Lack of visitors

If no one knows what you’re selling, then obviously you won’t make any sales.

The life line of any online business is getting traffic to the website.

2. Unwanted Offer

Even if you have tons of traffic, it’s totally useless if you’re selling something no one wants to buy.

Persuading someone to buy something they’re not interested in, is not easy. Make sure you sell what people want.

3. Small Profits

Entrepreneurs promote one affiliate product for $20-$30 and then the next. To make a good living online, they need to sell hundreds per month.

This is difficult to achieve with so many other affiliates offering bonuses. It’s an uphill battle to make a lot of money online with such a small profit margin.

4. Wrong Target

Your information product maybe excellent, but you’re targeting the wrong type of prospects to your website.

Make sure that the people visiting your website are interested in what you have to sell in the first place. Don’t target the wrong people.

The business model which can help you conquer all 4 of these problems is having your own information products business.

Unlike selling products as an affiliate, you call the shots. You can do whatever you want because the information product is yours.

Here’s a quick summary of how to implement a profitable information products business.

The Business Model

1. Create an ebook that the market wants. Do your research in forums and survey your list. Find out what questions and problems people have and create a product to help them.

2. Provide links inside the ebook to products with your affiliate link. This will give you back end profits on autopilot.

3. Add videos, interviews and workbooks to your offer so that you can sell at a higher price.

4. Create an affiliate center for your ebook. Provide the best marketing material you can to support your affiliates. Make their lives as easy as possible so that they will promote your ebook.

5. Give the best possible commission you can afford and spend a lot of time finding affiliates to promote your product. Your affiliates will give you the targeted traffic you need to make sales.

6. With your list of customers, create another ebook that is related to your previous information product and sell it to them. Keep 100% of the profits.

If they enjoyed your first ebook, they will buy the second one.

7. Contact your affiliates again for your second ebook. They will promote for you and send more traffic to your website. You should have more new customers to add on to your list.

8. Rinse and repeat.

By the time you sell your 3rd product, you should have a lot of customers who you can sell to without having to pay commissions. The more ebooks you create and sell, the bigger your list will become and the more you will be recognized as an authority in your niche.

When you become an authority, more people are willing to buy your products as well as products with your affiliate links. So you’ll be earning increasingly more with affiliate products you recommend.

This business model has a snowball effect.

The more products you create, the more money you will make. With several ebooks under your belt, you will have thousands of customers waiting to buy your next product. With only 500 people buying your product for $37, you will earn a total of $18,500.

So create your own information products business now and start this snowball rolling.

Download a free report on how to build your own information products business. For more articles, videos and tips on how to promote your business online, visit http://www.eliteghostwriters.com/blog – Alan Cheng, Elite Ghostwriters

© Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Welly Mulia.

The idea of building and running a profitable Internet business from the comfort of your own home sounds great, and I’ve seen a lot of people get very excited at the thought of doing this.

As great and awesome that may sound, one has to carefully think about the effects of building an Internet business, both from the positive and negative aspects.

You might think that there can ONLY be positive effects since everyone out there is talking how they are making 5 or 6 figure per month easily and effortlessly.

Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

Of course there are going to be NEGATIVE effects as well. Not only in business, in everything that we do there are always going to be 2 sides to every coin.

So what kind of negative effects are we talking about?

You see, when trying to build a successful online business, 99% of the time you’re NOT going to make any money at all when you’re just getting started.

Why?

Because you’re still learning the ropes of the game.

Let me ask you this question: “Let’s suppose you have never played tennis before, but you want to be good at it. Can you be good at the sport in a very short period of time?”

The answer is NO!

The same thing goes when trying to build a successful Internet business from scratch without much knowledge and experience. Heck, it’s not just about building an Internet business, it applies to every endeavor that you’re trying to learn and conquer.

Business in general, not just Internet or online business, is about investing for the future. I’m not talking about investing in shares, bonds, options or the likes. I’m talking about investing in our business NOW so that the business generates profits for us in the future.

Like what I’ve said earlier, when you’re just starting out to build your Internet business, your income for the first few months will most likely be zero. Even if you’ve managed to earn any money during this time, they will most likely be pennies.

You work on your business 30 or 40 hours per week and you don’t see any results. What do you do? Do you give up like most people do? Or do you continue to work hard and fine tune your business along the way?

You may only start to see results a year or two from now, but when you’ve successfully made that first dollar, then it’s going to be easier to make subsequent dollars.

Once you hit the next breakthrough in your business, your business has the potential to grow exponentially.

In fact, it’s very possible to grow your business exponentially while working less. You do this by having systems and quality team members in place to run the business WITHOUT you.

This is what I call the entrepreneur spirit.

Contrast this when you work as a full time employee for a company. You get paid a fix salary each and every month. You have peace of mind and can concentrate on your work because you know that at the end of the month you’re going to get paid by the company.

You get your full time salary at the end of the first month, at the end of next month, the month after, and so on. However, your income increases on a linear basis (usually only once per year).

Initially when just starting out, most people would rather be in the full time employee position because of the fix salary they can bring home every month. However as time goes on and the business keeps on improving, people would no doubt choose to be in the business owner position rather than just an employee whose income increases only linearly.

But that’s just how it works.

Entrepreneurs are rewarded for their determination and perseverance during the toughest of times, and are rewarded when their business starts to take off and make them even more money while working less.

Employees who have been enjoying consistent, fixed income continue to bring in that amount for the rest of their working lives while still having to work the normal 9 to 5.

Clearer picture

Having read this far, you should now have a clearer picture of the risks and rewards associated with building and running your own online business. Don’t simply jump in and get your feet wet at the thought of making money online from your Internet business. Consider carefully the advantages as well as disadvantages as outlined above.

Again, there’s always 2 sides to every story…

INSTANTLY Claim Your $488 FREE Internet Marketing Gifts That Will Show And Teach You How To Build A CONSISTENT Four Figure Per Month Online Business FAST!

© Make Money Online

Well that was a pretty frank question.

Actually, I wanted to know because it will REALLY help (that’s how helpful it is, it’s all caps!) as to what I’m supposed to post here.

Would it be advance stuff, beginner stuff or would I recommend you read other blogs because your earnings is too high ;)

Anyway, I managed to figure out how to make a poll so we could do it confidentially and easily:

By the way, I’d be doing polls like this every 2 weeks (hopefully!) from now on.

Would appreciate your vote, and if you feel like it, you can comment your predictions below ;)

© Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Darren Chow.

There are so many ways to drive traffic online that it can be confusing for new marketers. If you are just starting out learning how to make money online, you may need to focus on traffic generation methods that have been proven to work. One of the most effective methods of traffic generation is article marketing.

What exactly is article marketing and how is traffic driven using this technique?

Article marketing is the process of writing and distributing useful articles that is related to the website you are trying to promote. When you write and interesting article and publish it on an article directory, you get both short, mid and long term traffic.

The short term traffic comes from the directory’s existing reader base. For example, if the article directory has a newsletter, your article headline is likely to be published in the newsletter. That way, you get an immediate surge of traffic. The more popular the niche, the more short term traffic you will get.

Mid and long term traffic will come from the search engines. Once your articles have been published, it’s only a matter of time that the search bots will come and lap up the yummy content. Since your articles remain online indefinitely, you stand a chance to have visitors find your articles and click on the links in your author resource box to visit your website.

In addition, many article directories also syndicate their content through RSS feeds to other blogs and websites. That means your articles get published in related websites. Remember, these articles have your links in them. The more they get noticed, the more traffic you are going to get.

Having traffic is really nice. But in order to make money online. You must have something to offer on your website. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take it that your offer can mean anything from clickable ads to leads registration to product sales (i.e. anything that makes money). The very first thing you need to do is to setup your own website.

Setting up your money making machine.

If you are using article marketing to drive traffic, I highly recommend that you buy your own domain name and setup your own website. Sure, that means a little bit of work on your part. But you’ll be glad that you did it, for a few reasons.

Firstly, not all article directories accept affiliate links. Affiliate links are simply URLs that point directly to the affiliate website. Secondly, what happens if the offer that you are promoting goes offline? You would be driving traffic to a webpage that is not making you any money.

It’s best that you have control over the traffic source. If you direct the traffic to your own website, you can always replace the offer with another active offer and continue to make money online.

If you really don’t want to buy your own domain name, you can always consider using a free blog from Blogspot.com or Wordpress.com to promote your products and services.

To ensure that you get a high approval rates from the article directories, make sure that you have some solid content on your website. Add a few articles to your site. They don’t take too long to write. The reason why you have to do this is because Ezinearticles (the top article directory on the Internet) rejects URLs with nothing but advertising on them. In other words, don’t just paste a bunch of ads and affiliate links on your website. Add some images and content to make your site look like a real site with content.

If you have your own products to promote, you may add these products to your website to promote. But if you don’t, you can always grab some killer products from the Clickbank marketplace or the CPA networks.

Joining Clickbank or one of the CPA networks is free. It’s a little harder to get into CPA networks these days and they usually require phone verification. Once your account has been activated, you can promote any of the offers you see in the CPA network.

CPA stands for Cost Per Action. This means that you don’t have to make an actual sale to make a commission. It may be a download, a lead registration, or someone adding their ZIP code to a form. For every lead that you capture, you are paid a small sum of money. Of course, for offers that require a sale, you stand to make a much larger commission.

Now that your money making machine has been setup, it’s time to start driving traffic.

Driving traffic with article marketing.

Driving traffic with articles is an effective method to get targeted traffic. But you do need to know what you are doing. Start by preparing your articles for submission.

• Working on the headline. – The headline of your article must be creative and be able to capture the attention of your target prospects. What are some problems they are facing? Do you have the solution that they want? For example, if someone is facing a hair loss problem, they will probably respond to a headline that offers a hair loss prevention home remedy. If your headline is not interesting enough, the rest of the article becomes useless.
• Write a good article summary. – Most article directories accept the first two or three sentences of your article as an article summary. There are a couple of approaches that you can adopt. You can write a teaser that entices the reader to read the rest of the article. Or you can sum up your point to make sure that the reader gets the message that you are trying to convey. Both ways have been proven to work very well.
• Provide some meat in your content. – Note that your articles cannot be blatant self promotion. They must contain useful content for the readers. Otherwise, they tend to look more like press releases and may be rejected outright by the article directories. A well written article makes you look good, and you do want to look good in front of potential customers. Whether they want to do business with you depends very much on that first impression. Position yourself as a true expert and give some genuine tips and advice. Then at the end of the article, invite them to learn more at your website.
• Inviting readers to visit your website. – At the end of each article, you are allowed to promote yourself and your website. This is where you can promote your products and services directly. Keep it to about 300 words or so. A good author resource box uses proper anchor texts of between 3 to 5 words. You can also provide additional information about your website.

The key to success for article marketing is consistency and patience. As mentioned earlier, the search bots will find your articles sooner or later. After a few weeks to a couple of months, you will notice your rankings in the search engines rising. That is when you get a steady stream of traffic. If you continue to work on your link building, there is no reason why you shouldn’t expect to receive the traffic month after month.

Having traffic means the visitors are now coming to site, looking for solutions to their problems. Provide them with killer products and services and watch your conversion rates go through the roof.

Darren Chow is a full time article marketer. He founded a successful article submission service, and has been offering high quality article writing and submission services to hundreds of Internet Marketers worldwide.
http://www.fastsubmitarticles.com

© Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Corry Cummings.

Each and every day more and more people are catching wind of the make money online phenomenon. The more people that start to get involved, the harder it gets. Not only that, but you will see a whole lot of other people trying to take advantage of those newcomers with scams and get rich quick schemes. Well, today you are going to learn an honest and true way to make money online with Drop Shipping.

What is Drop Shipping?

Drop shipping is a fairly easy concept to understand and there is nothing really too tricky about it. The process is simple. There are several dropship companies on the Internet, that offer a membership to their users. With this membership, the users are granted access to millions of wholesale products. Along with that, the dropship company also packages and ships all of the products sold. The goal is to take a handful of these wholesale products and sell them on the Internet. It is an excellent way to get started with making money online an honest and true way. You can get a good dropship membership for anywhere between $50 all the way to a few hundred.

How to Make Money Drop Shipping

The first step to making any sort of real money is to get yourself a dropship membership. It is a good idea to check out all of the different Dropship Companies. From there, you will have no problem finding what you need. Once you have a membership, you will need to start working on a small plan to have success with this process. You will need to figure out what you are going to sell and how you are going to sell it.

The key to making any amount of money with drop shipping is to pick a good niche. The last thing you want to do is start trying to sell anything and everything all over the Internet. You should pick a nice small market to start out that is not overly competitive. It also helps a lot to have some sort of interest or passion for the market. From there, you will want to build a website around your niche. Before that, you can start out on eBay and/or Amazon to test things out. If you are lucky, you might even be able to make some good money on the auction sites.

It truly is that simple. The hardest part is trying to get through the struggle. You will not just start making money over night. The only way you will have any real success if by working hard and sticking with it. If you build a website with a lot of good content and sell your products around that, then you will make money. Most people quite before they get to that point. Stick with it, and you will not regret it.

This was a guest post written by Corry Cummings, the owner of dropshipstrategy.com. For more information about dropshipping, feel free to check out this great drop shipping source.

© Make Money Online

You’ve probably got tons of emails about “Launch Tree”, but I didn’t really wanted to tell you about it until I actually see what’s inside.

And that is what I did in the video above. I gave a buyer’s point of view to the bonuses they are giving away.

(I did *buy* the product, it wasn’t a promotional copy)

I also explained what Launch Tree is using a flash light and a toilet paper – I get “creative” sometimes.

To cut to the chase, it’s totally worth it. Especially those incredible process maps, to the point checklists and tips, product creation report (yes, even if you don’t have a product or just starting out, they have guides for you) and of course, the sweet 10 module ecourse – just priceless.

Click here to go to Launch Tree

P.S. I kinda look “new” in the video and I’m not quite sure if in a good way or a bad way, but please bear with me here :-)

© Make Money Online

Anyone with a good slice of creativity can fire up Photoshop and whip out a good looking banner in a jiff – but not anyone can whip out a banner that’s a click magnet that still – looks good.

Not anyone until now.

I know I’ve been out for awhile, and the reason I keep telling you guys is that I manage a lot of stuff lately, especially right now because I was so blessed that I was able to get my own office with a full time programmer – which is pretty cool to say the least. Someone calling you “sir” just ups the ante.

So to get back to the game, I’ve compiled a couple of insider secrets that happen to work and get good results when I make banners for the advertisers on this blog.

And these insider secrets, doesn’t need you to be a graphics expert or a high paid copywriter, these secrets are the kinds that you can do by yourself.

1. Know Who Are The People You Are Talking To

The ad above is the one I give out to Ultimate Blogging Theme affiliates – and they work great. If you look at the first line of the banner, it calls all the bloggers. The Ultimate Blogging Theme is a product for bloggers so most likely, my affiliates place this banner on sites where most people have blogs.

Having the line “hey bloggers” get people’s attention because they can relate.

2. Short And Sweet, To The Point

People on the internet have less time compared offline.

The thing is, there’s a big “x” button on the upper right hand corner of the screen. There’s also a nifty back button on the browser – and there are tons of websites to visit. A lot of choices, so why would they stay on your site?

Like they say, the first 3 seconds is your chance to impress, to make them stay or to tell them your message.

3. Curiosity, Curiosity, Curiosity

This ad has been on my blog for quite some time. With a little dash of attitude, POOF! Click magnet!

Curiosity is one of the most effective techniques to get people to click, it’s human nature – we want to know more, we don’t need to, but we “want” to.

It’s powerful, especially when you add this ingredient…

4. Benefit, Benefit, Benefit

I’m letting you in in a little secret… that green little ad you see above, is by far, the most effective ad on my blog.

Simple, straight forward – benefit.

All the stuff we do, we do it because we benefit from them.

Let’s have a little question and answer here, for example, the people who go to the gym.

• Why do you go to the gym? – to lose weight
• Why do you want to lose weight? – to look good
• Why do you want to look good? – to impress others, to feel good

Everything we do, there’s a benefit – that’s what keeps us going.

5. Easy To Read

The most often question people ask about ad typography…

“What font should I use?”

Some people say, Arial, some say Times New Roman, Georgia, Tahoma, Verdana, the list goes on – the results varied.

But what most people forgot to test is – the font the blog is using. In other words, blending the ad to the blog.

Now what happens here is that your ad gets read more often because the typography is the same as the blog and people think it’s not an ad.

Also, one thing – don’t let readability suffer for design.

6. Salestickies (Handwritten text)

In the contrary, you can standout. Handwritten texts just grab attention like a man sleeping in a rock concert.

What can I say it’s unique. Have a look at this…

If you want to download some Salestickies, you can check out my Direct Response Templates, it’s one of the bonuses.

7. Namedropping

This simple edit will only take you a minute to implement on your ads but you’ll get something big in return.

For example, you can turn…

“How to rank high in the search engines”

To…

“How to rank high on Google”

“Make money with videos”

To

“Make money with Youtube”

Test, Test, Test!

The good thing about online advertising is you can implement changes quickly. In a matter of minutes, you can change the banner ad that shows up on your website. In a matter of seconds, you can change the copy of your AdWords ad.

The internet is testing paradise.

You should use this to your advantage because not all these tips work on all places.

Like my favorite speaker/author Tom Peters always say…

“Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.”

© Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Caleb.

Any of you who grew up in impoverished inner cities have undoubtedly come into contact with the infamous gang phenomenon. This phenomenon depicts in its rawest form the human need for belonging to something. And although most gangs are involved in questionable or illegal activity, that sense of belonging to a special group keeps then thriving with pride. It gives them identity, purpose, and protection – the same things you miss out on when there is no strong family structure at home.

But not all gangs are bad. After all, the word “gang” only means “a group of people who associate or work together”. Therefore, the internet marketing community of making money online can be considered to be a type of gang. And just like any other gang, in order to become a member you must get “jumped in”!

What does this process of getting jumped in involve?

Normally, it involves you willingly being surrounded by an army of veteran gang members while they literally beat the crap out of you with as many jabs and kicks as possible. If you stand your ground you are in…if you cry, run, or wuss out you are NOT “down” and may never have a chance to try out again.

Now how does this relate to the internet marketing community of making money online?

Nine times out of ten you will not be successful at making money online when you first start out. There is a steep learning curve that no ebook can ever teach because it is something that must be learned through direct experience which comes from you actually marketing a particular product or service. Only then will you get real results that allow you to tweak your offers until they turn into highly profitable results.

Along the way, expect to get verbally assaulted by veteran marketers in the forums, dissed in the comments of various blogs, humiliated on social networks, spat on by Google for attempting to manipulate search engine rankings, and financially broke from failed pay per click campaigns. But you must realize that these so-called failures and humiliations provide the absolute necessary feedback for you to implement in order to truly succeed. Just like you had to fall down to learn how to ride a bicycle, so it is with making money online or any other worthwhile endeavor you aspire to in life.

You must endure the struggle in order to prove you are really “down” with what you claim!

Only then will you truly experience success and fulfillment along with the independent confidence that comes from disciplining yourself to weather the storm and stand your ground. So may you rise among the ranks of online money makers to be a respected untouchable MMO gang leader :)

And if you are “really down” then do like me William “Caleb” Rodgers the Market Secrets Blogger and hurry to get your free copy of the Ultimate SuperTip which Shows the Quickest Way To make Money Online w/o using search engines and includes exclusive money making software(w/o monthly fees) plus A BIG SECRET for getting 100% commissions instantaneously deposited into your PayPal account today!

© Make Money Online