These sites are generally kept open for a few months and then closed down, with the next one instantly opened up. This practice has been going on for years. The sites are even sold daily on EBay; I would imagine they are just about to be banned.

What normally happens when a few people misuse a system is it leads to others suffering, and in this case it has happened. Google is sandboxing new sites for longer. Saying this company had to act, they have now introduced the ‘Big Daddy’ update. This update has affected sites that have large numbers of irrelevant links or millions of irrelevant web pages. Unfortunately it has also affected the ranking of genuine businesses; hopefully this is just a temporary blip. My own opinion is the internet should be a level playing field for everyone; however I somehow doubt it ever will be.

I believe there is a place for adsense on most sites as long as it is discrete, well set up and does not look out of place, (fonts, colours etc), The main thing to think about is what do you want from your visitors. Most sites offer a product to potential customers. This causes the dilemma of balancing potential revenue from adsense against losing a potential customer, what I mean by this is, a visitor may be interested in your site, however you could lose them instantly to Google. This is why in my opinion is if your site has a product you are selling, you should never employ adsense on your homepage.

In conclusion I like the system, it is easy to set up and user friendly. I hope Google manage to filter out the unethical element who in the end will only spoil things for everyone.

The only set back most people run into when wanting to start one of their own online business is How and Where to get started. I did a search under the keyword term “home based business” and the search results returned 575,000,000 results for that keyword alone.

That’s a pretty intimidating number for someone wanting to start their own home based business on the web wouldn’t you say? These were the same obstacles I was up against when I first ventured into the online world of business. But I didn’t let that stop me and I hope that won’t stop you either from wanting to start your own online business. So, I saved you the hassle and put together 3 of the quickest ways for ANYONE(that’s You) to start their own online business with next to no investment required and can get started in less than 24 hours. Are you ready? I hope so.

Business Model #1. Affiliate Programs. Affiliate Programs are simply programs set up by the business owner for others to sign up for and promote for the business owner for an agreed upon commission(usually between 10 – 75%). The great thing about Affiliate marketing is it doesn’t cost you a single penny to get started, you don’t have to worry about refunds or customer service that come with owning your own product. All you have to worry about is generating the traffic to your affiliate link and collecting your commission cheques. This is the quickest way to get started online… Period! Here’s a few Affiliate Directories to give you a start: Associate Programs – http://www.associateprograms.com Refer It – http://www.refer-it.com

Business Model #2. Resell Rights. Resell Rights are simply products that have already been created and are available to anybody who is willing to pay for the Resell Rights to market them. The upside to this is you get Ready-To-Go websites with PROVEN sales letters that convert. The best part of all is… you get to keep 100% of the $Profits$. The draw back is you can’t claim those products as your own. The original creator of the product maintains full rights.

You just get to keep all the profits. Not such a bad trade off wouldn’t you say? Business Model #3. Private Label Resell Rights. Private Label Resell Rights are simply products that are ready to be branded with your name to it. What I mean by that is you get full rights to the product or products and are able to claim them as your own even though you didn’t create them yourself. This is the fastest way for anyone to start a online business who really doesn’t have any experience or knowledge on how to create their own products.

The other really cool thing about Private Label Resell Rights products is they come with Ready-To-Go websites which then again saves you time and money in having to create them yourself. Well there you have it, 3 Quick Ways To Start Your Own Online Business In Less Than 24 Hours. The easiest way to locate any of the above via the search engines is by entering something like this into there search engine web form: affiliate programs + “what your niche is” (Note: make sure you use the quotations around what niche you want to target. Very Important!)

This will save you time and target your search much better, where as if you were to just enter ‘affiliate programs’ into the search engine web form you would get a gazillion results, leaving you frustrated. Now, the only thing left for you to do Right NOW is make a decision on what you would really enjoy doing as a business online. Once you’ve figured that out the only thing left for you to do is put together a… Plan For $Profit$.

This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June.

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy – videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. – videos with millions and millions of views.

Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.

Secret #1: Not all viral videos are what they seem

There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t care how “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.

The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we don’t get a video 100,000 views, we don’t charge.

So far, we’ve worked on 80-90 videos and we’ve seen overwhelming success. In the past 3 months, we’ve achieved over 20 million views for our clients, with videos ranging from 100,000 views to upwards of 1.5 million views each. In other words, not all videos go viral organically – there is a method to the madness.

I can’t reveal our clients’ names and I can’t link to the videos we’ve worked on, because YouTube surely doesn’t like what we’re doing and our clients hate to admit that they need professional help with their “viral” videos. But I can give you a general idea of who we’ve worked with: two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international.

This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and asked to help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of a blockbuster. The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI. Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, they couldn’t get more than a few thousand views.

We took six videos and achieved:

• 6 million views on YouTube
• ~30,000 ratings
• ~10,000 favorites
• ~10,000 comments
• 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
• All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.

The following principles were the secrets to our success.

2. Content is NOT King

If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonize over determining the best “viral” video possible. Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral “ads” pointing people back to websites:

• Model Falls in Hole on Runway
• Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
• PacMan: The Chase
• Dude
• Dog Drives Car
• Snowball – Dancing Cockatoo

3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page

Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?

The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.

If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.

So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
• Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.

4. Title Optimization

Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

5. Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

Also, when we feel particularly creative, we optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

See the highlighted videos in the screenshot below for a good example of how a compelling title and screenshot can make all the difference once the video is on the Most Viewed page.

6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

7. Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do we keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

A lot of the time our clients say: “We’ve got 5 videos and we’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If we have multiple videos, we post all of them at once. If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. We don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Once our first video is done, we delete our second video then re-upload it. Now we have another 48-hour window to push it to the Most Viewed page. Rinse and repeat. Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole

This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness

The following is how we measure the success of our viral videos.

For one, we tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

Conclusion

The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.

Now, the good thing is that each post you make in your group is seen by all of your members, then each member that ‘likes’ your post is seen by all their friends! So lets break it down, if you have 20,000 members 1 post is seen by 20,000 people, then 10 people from your group ‘Like’ your post (more will like it but this is just an example) and if those 10 people have 200 friends then 2,000 more people will see the post!

Then those 2,000 people will either join your group or like it so your group just keeps on growing! ITS A GOLDMINE!

How to do it:

1. Create a group or page.

2. The title of your page is obviously the most important, check trends websites to see what is hot. Or alternatively if you see a big group that everyone is joining, you can just reword their title and create you own. You will get about as much members as they do.

3. Pick a relevant display picture

4. Send an invite to all your friends, this will start the snowball effect because all their friends will see the posts if they like it.

5. Don’t post your site just yet, just post funny posts relevant to your topic. Sometimes I cant be bothered thinking of anything so I just post a full stop (.) because it comes up like this Coke Is Better In A Glass Bottle. So it does the same as a normal post, still get likes and new members.

6. When you start getting members, look at the stats of your page. Facebook has a cool little stat that shows you where the majority of your members are coming from. Say most of your members are coming from the UK (this is usually what happens because they use facebook religiously) so me living in New Zealand, I post late at night just before I go to bed because I know thats when everyone in the UK go on facebook.

7. Once you have like 5,000 members it will keep growing like you cannot imagine. I was so suprised but 100,000 is not an unrealistic goal. I get 3,000 mnew members daily.

8. I post once a day, and one post every week I post my website link or you can post your affiliate link. You can post it more but I choose not to.

9. The next step is to just keep making more and more groups! Once you have 1 successful group its easy to create other large groups. The secret to doing this is to post your new group link in one of your posts with your big group. Then create a ‘fake account’ and pretend your a real person and have a picture of a hot girl as your display picture. Then add all the people from your big group as friends. Then suggest them to join your little group, so you get about half of your members from your other group. Easy as that! No one has found this about before but jump on it quick! Because soon it will become huge and everyone will be doing it!

Meanwhile I’m still out there working hard for you, the reader. I’ve been speaking via email, IM and even phone with people who are making good money online. They are all reluctant to talk, but I’ve managed to coax information out of them. My first observation was the importance of viral marketing to their success, which I’ve covered in other posts.

I’m a fan of the content-rich site. I think providing information to your prospective customers is what will make them customers. Google agrees with me, and is moving its pageranking system to reward so-called authority pages, meaning information rich pages that link to other sites and have other sites linking to them.

Most good websites exploit a niche – that is an area of focus for your content-rich site. Coming up with that niche is probably the most difficult and most important part of your Internet Marketing strategy.

You need two things: A subject and an angle. We’ll work on subject first.

As I have said countless times, most people just need a little push to get started, then everything starts flowing. You should always be in niche-hunting mode. I keep a small, spiral bound notebook next to my laptop and I write down ideas as they come to me. When you are looking for something on the Internet and can’t find it, that something needs to go in the book once it passes this simple test:

Will someone pay a reasonable amount for that product, service, or idea?

If the answer is even probably, it needs to go on the page. I always start with broad, general categories and drill down later.

Why not start with yourself? Take a moment right now and list your interests. What do you search for on the web? Put that on the list. Think about all of the things that fill your day at work or at home. While you are living your life run stuff through the niche filter in your mind — there’s always something that you can add to the list. If you don’t have something to write it down on, call yourself and leave a voice mail. I’ve done it many times. Everyone says I wish there was a [insert something here] on the Internet. Some of us say that a lot. Put it on the list.

Work with someone — I find that my wife is a great person to bounce things off. When we are going somewhere in the car we often brainstorm my latest ideas and she usually has a lot to add. In no time you should have a good-sized list.

Still drawing a blank? Here are some places to pick up some good general categories:

1. Alexa – Look over the Top 100 and the Movers and Shakers. Delve into the categories that appeal to you and see what strikes you. Write it all down, because you’ll end up clicking all over the place and will never re-create the path.

2. Sites that show you what people are searching for. Try Google Zeitgeist or The Lycos Top 50. There’s a fairly long list of such sites over at Search Engine Watch that I’ve bookmarked.

3. Google Answers. I am fascinated by Google Answers, and I sometimes spend a long time looking over what people will pay to find out. There are some great ideas here too.

You could even go to Alexa and look over the top sites trying to come up with an angle that would make them better or easier. Or you might come up with a complementary site (MySpace companion sites come to mind).

Once you get your general category ideas together it’s time to do some supply and demand research, along with what I call sanity checking.

The short answer is yes but you need to put in a lot more time than a few hours per day to start with. Over the past 6 months I have worked up to 12 hours per day building an income to replace the one I lost when I left my previous job. It takes dedication and focus and slowly but surely your income will grow to the point that you can cut back your hours and get some quality time with your family.

The first thing you need to do is to sit down and have a long hard think about what you want from life. I would bet that most of you will at first think about the fast cars and mansions and the celebrity lifestyles that are depicted in many aspirational adverts. However think harder, these are things you would like to have not what you want from life. If after you’ve thought deeply you decide that you want to see your family grow up, you want to be able to make it to your children’s school concert and not have to work late on that important project. If you decide that you want to be able to take your wife for a romantic lunch before you collect the kids from school then you have the correct frame of mind to start making an income for yourself. If you don’t have a family and you decide you want to be self reliant and not a wage slave then you are on the way. Be realistic and you won’t be disappointed.

Now you know what you want and you know it’s realistic it’s time to get yourself a strategy. I like to think of my income building strategy in terms of building a house, before you put up the walls and roof, the part of the house you can see and admire you need to put in the foundations. The foundation of your income has to be a steady source of reliable income that you can build on. For this I built a number of content websites and monetized them by adding Adverts and Amazon feeds. I write articles and submit them to directories. I do everything I can to get the sites into the search engines and get traffic to them. Once the visitors started coming and I was getting a steady income then it’s time to branch out and work on the 4 walls of our strategy.

The second part of the strategy involves taking some profit from the site building and investing it in well researched programs that have a long history of paying out. You need to do your research and due diligence here and spread the risk among a number of programs if you have any doubts about a program walk away. Now you have your foundation and 4 walls in place it’s time to top it all off with the roof.

The Roof like in your house is the top level of our strategy, this is where you take everything you have learned building your foundations and walls and apply it to your own programs, by now you will know what works, you will have developed a network of contacts through programs and forums and you are ready to develop your own programs.

The great thing about this strategy is that if you have no spare cash you can start out with very little, in fact it is possible to start out with $0.00 and turn this into a full-time income by clever use of resources. If you don’t believe that this is possible then have a look at the blog detailed in the resource box at the end of this article and watch start with $0.00 and prove there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Remember be focused and realistic and a full time income is within your grasp.

Once you store it away on your hard drive, it’ll be stuck there.

This applies to resale rights as well…only purchase what you plan to use immediately or in the very near future.

Aside from that, my main gripe with private label rights is that they’re usually complete junk!

Whatever you do, please follow this advice: If you are not a programmer or have extensive knowledge with scripts or software, do not purchase private label rights to them!

You’ll most likely be stuck with a non-working copy of a software product that will require a lot of money to get working.

You could also be under the impression that it works and then your customers will be upset and asking for refunds left and right

Be smart. Only purchase what you plan to use at that moment or in the near future, and don’t buy scripts or software unless you’re comfortable with programming (or have someone who can handle fixing them and can help you with support).

This can seriously damage your reputation, and as an Internet Marketer, a good reputation is extremely valuable. You must protect it at all costs.

Do your homework. Make sure you are buying private label rights to a quality product that has potential, not some piece of garbage that you will never use.

Stick with what you’re comfortable with, and private label rights will allow you to create some great, unique products!

“HotDotCom is here to teach you everything you need to know, to start making a good comfortable living across the web.“

What if, What if, What if. This question comes at us every day. What if I said this, What if I did that or what if I didn’t. It comes down to decisions. We all have decisions to make every day of our lives. We all make good and bad decisions. That’s life.

When you look back on your life you can think of some really great decisions that you made, decisions that have altered the course of your life. You can also remember some really bad ones that have affected you in a negative way.

Life is never static, it’s always changing and opportunities come and go. Doors open and we have to decide whether to step through and seize the opportunity or not. When you are standing in front of that open door of opportunity the question arises “What if?” do I or don’t I. We need to make a decision. How do we make decisions? This depends on our background, education, life experiences and sometimes advice from others.

We don’t know each other, but I would like to give you some advice. Suppose I said that I knew something that could change your life forever for the better. Would you be interested? Suppose I said I knew someone that was showing other people how to acquire something like real estate for free. Suppose you could also learn how to build on your “land” something like a five star hotel. You would also learn how to market your “hotel” and collect rent from guests that pay to stay. Would you be interested?

What am I talking about? It’s called virtual real estate. Your own space on the World Wide Web or Internet if you prefer. If you own a space there it can turn out to be very valuable property.

The most expensive house in the world is a 12 bedroom mansion in London England for which an Indian steel tycoon paid $128 million.

The most valuable web page in history, to date, will probably be thesixmilliondollarpage by Alejandro Saavedra and Robert Kanaat. Now here’s the difference. The tycoon paid $128 million for the house. How much did these two guys pay for the page. Next to nothing. Maybe a couple hundred bucks at the most depending on how they went about it.

I am going to open a door for you that could literally change your life. The only cost is your time and effort. Now you must decide!

I started online about 4 years ago. Nothing major or earth shattering. Just a little website that I built as best I could with the little knowledge I picked up along the way. My first day made me some money. That encouraged me, so I commited to it just a little bit more. I made more money, and I was up and running.

And that’s what I’ve been doing on and off, ever since. I say on and off, because there are times when offline life kicks in and you have to focus on other things.

So, let’s get to it. How can I and this website help YOU?

Over the past few years, I’ve learnt a hell of a lot, and I am in a position to pass on that knowledge to you. I am more than happy to coach you as best as I possibly can. That help will cover,

• How to build websites for yourself or to sell on, and the best kind of websites to build.
• Information on keywords and why they are important.
• Info on how to create your own digital products such as ebooks and guides.
• Info on creating and selling websites, (better known as Site Flipping.)
• Help with creating graphics and even FREE graphics.
• One on one help with taking the first steps getting your business off the ground.
• Access to FREE ebooks, website templates, online tools, graphics, articles and a lot more.

So to summarise, if you want to start your own online business, register here at HotDotCom, it’s FREE and keep popping back. I’ve set up a forum for my site members which you can use to ask questions or request help. It’s worth popping back regularly,as you’ll always find something new and relevant to starting your new online career.

There was a recent article started asking how to make just 1k a month. The person had tried a few systems out and had seen no success as of yet and wanted to make enough cash to live. They estimated this to be around 1k a month. I have been in a similar position before and shared a seven-step plan to achieve this that I used a little over a year and a half ago.

The system is still relevant today and my post seemed to be well received, but some Warriors mentioned they’d like a little more detail. That thread degenerated a little and looked like it was going to get deleted. Rather than put the detailed version in there, I thought I’d post it here. This is specifically aimed at people who have yet to make money and would like to make some cash while they learn about the industry that is Internet Marketing.

My Seven Step Quick Income Plan

If you want to make 1k-2k a month then I am going to give you a detailed break down of how I did it a little over a year and a half ago. I did it by selling services to webmasters. It’s not for everyone and I’ll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of this system in this post as well. Before I go on, I’d like to say, although this is essentially freelancing, I never once advertised or found work on any freelance sites such as elance etc. I’ll explain in detail how I got customers in this post.

Some Background:

I had just graduated from University and lived in a remote and rural part of the UK. There were some low-paid seasonal jobs available in my area, but I took a decision I would never work such jobs locally again. I wanted to make my own money until I got good at building a business or until I found a job. I found a job, but used this system for several months to make enough money so I could travel the country to go to job interviews, networking events and so I had enough money to live, run my car, phone and have some pocket change to have some nights out with friends. I worked part time at this system, I decided what hours I worked and in a typical month I would earn between 1k-2k USD a month. Not a lot of money by English standards, but it was all I needed, and it was a start.

The Business Plan in a Nutshell:

I didn’t have too much knowledge or skills at the time, so I used what I had, which was a reasonable grasp of the English language. I then assessed what webmasters need and what problems they came across. A lot of them needed content, a lot of them needed backlinks. I could do both easily. I could do video, audio and article content (and I did).
I didn’t stop there, I decided on a USP as well (a Unique Selling Point). I had read enough forum threads here and elsewhere that content creators had a reputation of being unreliable and would often disappear after taking the cash. I decided to be reliable, affordable and VERY fast with turnaround times in as little as a couple of hours some times and 24 hours maximum (usually and depending on the order). Good communication and speed were my USP’s.
I effectively sketched out a little business plan in one of my notebooks that I keep. I decided what I was going to sell, at what prices and how I would get customers. I covered the basics.

The Seven Steps (In Detail):

1. I created a small website advertising my services. Just a couple pages, about me, my services and a contact form.
I did this by getting a super cheap account with Hostgator (it was less than five bucks a month) and then I installed a wordpress script on my hosting using the Fantastico icon on the cpanel. (New people, learn about cpanel, fantastico and wordpress when making your first site. It will make life so much easier, PM me if you have further questions about this).
It was a basic wordpress site and I installed a nice looking free theme on it. Wrote a couple of pages of the essentials on (no need for any hypey or complex copy) and I was ready to go.
When I did this, I had never made a website or ran one before. I learnt from scratch, bought a course from a Warrior on how to setup and edit wordpress, and then went and applied what I had discovered (still my best move to this day). If I hadn’t overcome the “create a website hurdle” I wouldn’t be doing this today.

2. I advertised my services in my forum signature links. I belong to several web forums such as this one. Out of respect for Allen and this forum, I won’t list them all here. I went to each forum and put a small line of text with a link to my site in my signature link.
The signature link is the lines of text that appear by default every time you create a post, just underneath your post. You can edit them on any forum’s “User CP”. You can find this on the Warrior Forum in the top left-hand-side of the screen.
I can’t remember what the text said, but it basically just said what I did. I.e. “Get articles for $5. Fast, Reliable Service”. It was something along those lines. Anything will do really, as long as the text gets to the heart of what you are offering.

3. I setup a Twitter account. I made sure my website url was on my Twitter profile. I saw a lot of threads on this forum and others about people joining Twitter. Anyone who asked people to connect with them on Twitter got added to my Twitter.
I NEVER marketed aggressively or consistently. I just chatted with people, shared ideas and made some new friends. Don’t abuse Twitter by using it as an advertisement bill-board. It isn’t one and is unlikely to ever be one. By this point, people were finding me on Twitter and contacting me to do work for them.

4. I tweeted a special offer on Twitter. So there was a week where work was slow. I figured it was time to get my name out there. I Tweeted on Twitter that I was offering a free article to the first 5 people that asked. A few people got in touch, I did a free article for them all and all of them seemed satisfied. I got three new orders from that activity and a much busier week than I had first anticipated!

5. I got put on a small retainer. One person liked me so much and had enough work for me to do to setup a contract with me and put me on a $500 retainer. This person gave me consistent work and income, I was very grateful. This person found me on the Warrior Forum and is a friend of mine today. Several of my clients from this period of my life are friends to this day.

6. These people knew other webmasters, entrepreneurs and business people online. My clients recommended me to their friends and peers which meant the work didn’t dry up for me. If you do something well, and people like you, they’ll help you get more business by talking about you to people they know could use your services. This is the power of building and maintaining relationships with people in life, online, offline, personally and in business. It’s an important lesson that I am forever mindful of in everything I do.

7. I offered more services. Throughout this journey, I had discovered how to create a wordpress website, so I offered it as a service. I offered SEO services. I was always learning and expanding what I could do. This meant I could reach and work with more customers and I enjoyed it.
It was at this point I found a well-paid job in Internet and Direct marketing and I gave up my freelancing. I don’t regret that decision, but I always wondered what would happen if I had ever scaled up my operations? Who knows. No point on dwelling on that though, the point is, whilst this can be hard work, the business model has a lot of potential.

So there are the seven steps in a bit more detail for those that were interested.

I’d like to briefly talk about why this business model works and why it doesn’t, because it is not for everyone. But this approach and system was ideal for me when I was desperate, needed cash fast and needed to make things happen. Not only did I make money I learnt a lot about business, people and myself.

Strengths:

1. I met A LOT of people and it led to me getting the job I had last year. Some of these people have sent business my way for my new venture as recently as this month and I still talk to one old client regularly on the phone. Contacts are valuable, and I love meeting and interacting with people. The people I connected with has been the best part of this experience for me.

2. It forced me out of my comfort zone. I did things that scared me and I had previously found difficult (like creating a website).

3.I learnt so much from this, and in turn acquired a skill-set that I could use and sell as services. I was always leveraging what I had learnt and my prior successes.

4. I worked part time hours.

5. I decided when, where and how I wanted to work.

6. This is work people online will always need. I had virtually no “online skills” but I still made myself valuable to webmasters. With the growth of the Internet there is still so much opportunity in this industry/marketplace.

7. You can still beat the competition. My USP’s were based on what I observed what was going on in the market. I looked at where a lot of service providers were failing, and I made sure I didn’t make the same mistakes. I communicated effectively, worked hard and fast and delivered. You too can stand out from the crowd of other people doing this.

Weaknesses:

1. It can take up a lot of time.

2. You have to have a good work ethic.

3. You are swapping time for cash, which is very like a job.

4. It doesn’t initially generate massive cash.

This system has it’s limitations, but it also has it’s potential. Lets assume you decide to work on this full time on this for a couple of months. You cover your living costs and make and also make a profit. Now, with this profit you can hire a virtual team to help you take on more work, or you can invest it in another money-making project which you can develop on the side. This is a way in which you can scale-up your business and income. If you approach this as a small business and with the right attitude, you can make as much money as you need.

In summary, I think this works for people who are just getting started in online marketing are good workers and are keen to learn more about the industry. It’s especially useful for those who need to make some quick cash. Again, it’s not for everyone, but for those that it does apply to, to make this work, all you need to do is put a little bit of effort in and treat it like a business. If you choose to do something like this, I wish you all the very best and good fortune.

The real truth of course is that the vast majority are failing. Their hopes of earning a healthy living from home are usually shattered before they have even begun. There is no single reason for this. It’s usually down to a combination of factors, and I intend to look at some of the reasons for the now infamous quote, “95% of people fail in their online business”. Some of the things I list below will doubtless be contested by many people but the harsh facts are that making money online, whilst entirely possible, is not the cakewalk that a lot of people will try to convince you it is.

So, let’s get down to debunking some of the nonsense – hopefully this will save a lot of people a lot of time and frustration.

1) Affiliate Marketing – so much rubbish is spouted by so many people who have never made an affiliate sale in their lives. The affiliate marketing model is indeed a powerful one and has made a number of people very wealthy. However, you are very unlikely to succeed with affiliate marketing without going through an arduous and sometimes lengthy learning process.

A huge swathe of articles you read about affiliate marketing are no more than rehashed PLR articles being used by lame hopefuls who are incapable of writing anything original on a subject that they are hoping to convince you they know all about. You can spot these peddlers of fifth hand information easily enough – look at the sites they link to, check their traffic rankings. Ninety Nine times out of a hundred you will find a cookie cutter website just like thousands of others or a direct link to an affiliate program that they foolishly believe you will sign up for having read their blindingly convincing pitch.

Are they the people to look to for advice? Think before you answer…….

2) Freebie Seekers and Freeloaders – this encompasses so many people it’s laughable. They talk about their “business” and seriously expect others to follow their blind lead. The term “business”, at least to my mind, indicates some sort of investment on behalf of the owner of that business – both in terms of time and money. Those most guilty of this faux pas are usually those who sign up to a free program, usually in the network marketing or MLM arena, and use every useless and pointless form of promotion as long as it’s free.

Much is said regarding failure rates in MLM schemes being so high, but one of the biggest is the freebie mentality. Don’t get sucked into believing you will ever make money online this way. The freeloaders are kidding themselves, but don’t let them kid you. The programs they sign up to for free often offer a paid upgrade and they live in hope (if they ever manage to recruit a single person of course) that they will grow fat on the subscriptions of others. Naturally this rarely happens, simply because they advertise to other freeloaders who have no intention of spending any money on their “business” either, and so the vicious circle continues.

If you don’t believe me, visit any free traffic exchange and look at some of the webpages circulating there. These people are dreamers – they will never make money online until they accept that they are eventually going to have to spend money to make money. Let’s get real here – when you’re looking for potions or energy drinks or some other latest greatest product that is no more than a copy of an already well established brand, is the first place you think to look going to be a free classified site on the internet? Maybe you’d head for the closest traffic exchange? Think – you don’t have to do it for more than a few seconds to see why these things do not work!

3) Throwing up a blog on a free platform and filling it up with Adsense or other PPC ads is unlikely to deliver much success. This applies whether we are talking one blog or fifty blogs. Adsense is great, but it’s also a numbers game – you need big numbers in terms of pages and visitors to make big returns. By big, I mean big – tens of thousands of pages receiving tens of thousands of visitors and you will probably start making a nice income. Throwing up fifty, a hundred or more useless blogs or splogs won’t work even if some people tell you that all you need are a couple of Adsense clicks a day on each one and you’ll be raking in the money. Great theory, but you won’t get the traffic to even generate those occasional clicks in the first place. Throwing up such poor quality free pages will achieve nothing – in fact, you’re more likely to get banned from Blogger and Adsense to boot if you’re not careful. Oh, and don’t think you’ll be smart and use auto surf sites to rack up huge numbers of impressions – using any kind of traffic exchange in conjunction with Adsense will get you banned very quickly.

Our freebie seekers of course will tell you otherwise, expecting you to believe that their PR0 blog with no comments is really generating a thosand dollars for them every month, and that all you need to do is visit this or that site, where you can learn to do exactly the same. You will naturally be directed to a page through an affiliate link – Clickbank or similar – to purchase an ebook that the freebie seeker has naturally never laid eyes on, let alone read.

4) Making millions with PPC advertising. This is a no brainer – all you have to do is pick some keywords, write a snappy ad, link to an affiliate program and gve your credit card details to Google, Yahoo, MSN or whoever. You will wake up rich beyond your wildest dreams.

OK, maybe too heavy on the sarcasm, but it’s really not that easy. Ask anyone who has rushed blindly into PPC and lost their shirt in the process, paying for a truckload of clicks but generating nary a sale. I have a little more sympathy for these types than the freeloaders; after all, they have accepted that they need to spend money to make money, but unless you do your homework, it’s likely to prove costly. Even if you do your research beforehand, there are no guarantees that PPC campaigns will work for your business. Having said all that, PPC can be a very profitable tool, just don’t believe overly hyped claims from the totally inexperienced.

5) Start a blog and you will soon be collecting checks on a regular basis. Don’t believe this one either. There is a lot to be said for blogs as a marketing tool, don’t get me wrong. Blogs can and do increase your exposure tremendously, but apart from an elite few, blogs are usually not their direct revenue generators. A blog is a tool, and used wisely it will help an online business to grow, but it’s unlikely to pay the bills all by itself.

6) Article marketing – another area where a lot of ill informed and overly hyped prose is written. As a long term strategy, carried out correctly, article marketing can be hugely beneficial to a business of any kind, but it takes time to see results and there is a learning curve to go through.

I actually saw someone advocating the tactic of blanket bombing article directories with PLR articles and slapping affiliate links into the resource box. This was in an article submitted to one of my directories. They even went as far as to claim that this would guarantee a huge number of hits and sales. This is just one piece of foolish nonsense from a clueless fool, who, no doubt is wondering why article marketing is so useless, whilst trying to tell others how rich it will make them. It is a fact that most article directories do not permit linking directly to affiliate programs in the resource box!  It follows that this is hardly the way to proceed.

7) Work from home opportunities have become a breeding ground for scams and hucksters the world over. Global oppportunities for peddlers of schemes and tricks to make themselves rich have never been more plentiful.

There are several “opportunities” circulating at the moment that are borderline illegal and when they disappear into the ether there will no doubt be plenty to replace them.

Promises of overnight riches rarely hold much water if you examine them even superficially. Just because you see a video of someone opening envelopes full of cash does not make it so. One “gifting” program of this nature has obviously sucked in a fair number of gullible souls who really believe that people will be queuing up to send them three thousand dollars just because they show them a poor quality video on a traffic exchange.

Have you ever managed to sell a product online for three thousand dollars or more? I’m guessing the answer in most cases is – probably not. If you fall for this kind of scam, you probably deserve to get rooked – after all, how difficult is it for someone to get three thousand in cash (there are plenty of ways), go to FedEx, mail it to themselves and then film it’s arrival and subsequent opening on a webcam. If that’s all the proof it takes to convince you, you have some painful lessons to learn.

Whenever you read outlandish claims offering boatloads of money and retirement before you’ve even started working, in conjunction with proclamations that you don’t have to sell anything, don’t have to advertise, don’t have to do anything at all really, other than sit back and watch the money roll in…..and you find yourself believing it – my advice is to seek professional help.

Making money with sites that pay you to read ads, emails, visit sites, sign up for free offers etc etc etc I’m not saying that none of them work but in terms of time expended set against financial reward, they are usually a dismal prospect. Would you go and do a job for $20 a month?

There you have just eight of countless things that you should not believe. Trust me there are plenty more.

If you are serious about making money online, you are going to need a plan. You are going to have to spend some money to get yourself set up to do business. You will need a website of your own for starters (unless you intend to buy a hundred ebooks and courses telling you how to succeed without even this most basic of needs). This means hosting fees. If you are starting from a position of very little technical knowledge, you will have to dedicate a lot of time to learning the ropes or you will have to pay for the services of others. With most things online, the sooner you bow to the inevitability of having to lay out a little cash as you go along, the sooner you will start to open up some real possibilities.

There are countless ways to make money online, there are many people who are living proof of this, but try not to get caught up in the rubbish.

I have not mentioned things like stock or currency trading simply because they are not scams. Trading online can be lucrative and you won’t need a website of your own for this kind of venture but you will need capital, and you need to understand the risks, which are not insignificant.

However that’s all a subject for another day. As grandpa said, free advice is often pretty much worth what you pay for it. Just be careful what you believe in your quest for online wealth and you’ll avoid a lot of wasted time and disappointments.

There IS plenty of free information on the internet and there are also plenty of free tools and software and services that may help you – but – you are starting a business and business means you will need some business capital to get off the ground. If you think otherwise and persist in looking for the elusive, no cost magic bullet,  you are destined to fail and I don’t care what any rehashed nonsense some self help book tells you about irrefutable laws of nature or anything else. You need to do a lot more than just dream about online success if you wish to achieve it.

A closing thought – money may well make the world go round. If nobody spends any, nobody receives any. If you can find me something that disproves that 100%, tell me where to sign up.