This is a guest post on “How to write an ebook” by Nichole Weathers. In case you wish to guest post, read the guidelines.

Many people are choosing to write an ebook and sell them. Not only are e-books popular amongst customers, but, you, as the author, can avoid the hassles of paper publishing.   After you write an book, all you have to do is provide customers with a download link after purchase. Sometimes even that will be handled for you by a third party. Like many other passive income businesses, you do the work once and keep reaping the rewards for life.

If you are considering venturing into this arena of business and to write an ebook, read on.  I’ll walk you through how to write an ebook and then preparing it for publication.

7 Things to keep in mind before you write an ebook -

There are a lot of things that you should keep in mind before you start off to write an ebook. Careful consideration of these would ensure that your ebook is a success and that you are able to earn good money out of selling your ebook.

1. Before deciding to write an ebook, decide on the topic of your eBook.

   Pick a topic that you know a lot about, or something that interests you enough to learn more about. Some of the most popular e-books are ”How to” guides, such as a guide on how to flip web sites.

2. Research your chosen topic, even if you are a pro.

   You may come across new and innovative ideas that had not occurred to you. The more nuggets of wisdom you can give the reader, the better your book is going to be received. This may also impact sales of future books you may write.

3. Draft a general outline for your eBook, making note of the topics you want to cover.

   Think about what you would need to complete the idea or, task from start to finish. Think about what common questions the consumer may ask regarding this particular topic. This all should be covered in your eBook.

4. Proof your eBook to ensure it has all of the best information possible.

   Ask a trusted friend or colleague to read over it and offer constructive criticism. You want this book to be worth your asking price. If one person loves your eBook, they are bound to talk about it or even recommend it to others.

5. Consider interviewing other experts in that field.

   Ask them questions and include it as an added bonus in your eBook. Make references to experts and reputable resources.  Such references enhance the credibility of your own work.

6. Fix any errors in your book and prepare the book for sale.

   Add any personal images or royalty free images pertaining to the subject. Make an index and a bibliography.

7. Determine where you are going to market this eBook.

   If no one knows it exists, it is not going to sell. Amazon and other book dealers sell eBooks for writers. Consider starting an affiliate program (i.e. ClickBank) and have other skilled internet marketers market the book for you. Market it on your own web site, or consider investing in a web site on the subject with considerable page rank and traffic to market this book.  Add a link to your email signatures to your book. Post on forums with a link to your site or book. Think outside of the box when it comes to advertising your book. You can also consider marketing the book in your local community or in newspapers, or hand out flyers to local businesses.

To write an eBook is not as easy as it sounds. Many people lose motivation fast, since financial gains are not immediate. Other people may suffer the dreaded writer’s block. Use positive affirmations and don’t give up. Take a break if you get frustrated and peruse other books or articles for inspiration.  And keep reminding yourself that once you have written the book and finalized it, all of your hard work will pay off.

This is a guest post by Shirley Kelly. You can check out the guidelines to guest posting here.

Internet marketing can be a scary venture for individuals who are new to how Internet marketing actually works. People often overlook the importance of marketing their website due to their lack of knowledge. However, the best way to overcome the fear of venturing into unfamiliar territory is to get educated about the things you have very little knowledge about.

Let us assume you have just finished creating a spectacular website that has all the bells and whistles. You are confident that visitors to your website will find it very useful and the overall objective of the website design has been reached. Nevertheless, in spite of all that, you are still left with the dilemma of how to draw visitors to your site.  When sound marketing techniques are not applied to a website it sits out in a part of hyperspace commonly known as the World Wide Web and gets lost amongst the thousands of new websites being launched every day.  It does not matter what type of website one might have. Whether it was designed to sell products or whether it is the most basic personal blog, if a website falls short in the marketing department, it will not receive enough visitors to make it worth the time and effort spent on maintaining an online presence.

With that being said, how can someone with little to no website marketing experience successfully promote a website? The basic and simply answer to that question is to educate oneself about what one should and should not be doing to market his or her website.

Learning sound Internet marketing techniques is akin to starting elementary school for the first time. Remember back to when you first laid eyes on that big red brick school building and how intimidating and scary it made you feel. Everything was new and unfamiliar. You wondered if you would be able to meet new friends or if the teacher was going to be mean to you. However, before long you learned your way around the grounds; discovered that your teacher was there to help you learn; you met new friends; learned how to avoid the things that will get you in trouble; eventually you became familiar with every aspect of your elementary school; And before long, you were graduating and promoted to middle school. Educating oneself about proper internet marketing techniques is very much like attending school for the first time. It is unfamiliar territory and everything seems daunting. There is a lot to learn but you will have others who are willing to teach you the ropes. Along the way you will learn to tell the difference between practicing marketing techniques that will get you in trouble and techniques that are conducive towards you graduation to the next level of learning.  In order to propel your website from the black hole known as the hyperspace of the World Wide Web to having a solid online presence, you must learn and implement sound Internet marketing techniques.

There are many online schools which offer Internet marketing courses designed to help beginners as well as further advance the knowledge of novice website marketers. If this option does not appeal to you, try joining online forums and blogs whose primary objective is to help others learn more about how to properly apply online marketing techniques.

Whether you decide to enroll in an online school, become a member of forums whose main focus is website promotion or participate in online blogs that write about Google friendly, time tested, Internet marketing techniques, is up to you. Just remember, knowledge is power and power is knowing what one should and should not be doing. Get educated about internet marketing techniques. You will be glad you did.

Are your still reading this post, right now?

In all likelihood, you are on the verge of quitting your Internet Marketing business and is on a last bit quest to see if there is anything that you can do to save your sinking IM business!!!

That’s right. The fact still remains even if you deny it today.

I too, hate the Internet Marketing business for obvious reasons of mine. Having said that I should say that I am not a failure in the IM business. I am making a living out of the internet. My wife who had to quit her job and take care of my new born daughter is also now on the verge of becoming an independent business owner in the Internet Marketing arena.

So the question is, If I am not a failure and am making a living out of the Internet, then why is it that I hate Internet Marketing?

The failure rate in Internet Marketing is about 96%. That means only about 4% succeed in any online business. Why is the success rate so low?

The internet marketing business is about persistence. You are a failure only if you quit the business. If you remain in the business and do whatever is right, there is no reason why you should fail.

10 Things I Hate about Internet Marketing -

So what are the 10 things that I hate about the Internet Marketing business?

1. I cannot drive to work anymore – One of the biggest charms of starting on an Internet Marketing business, for me was time. When I read articles and posts and watched videos where Internet marketing Gurus were leading a lavish life, I was fascinated not by their houses or, cars. Instead I was fascinated by the time that these guys had because they did not have work a 9-5 job. They had all the time in the world to spend with their family. In my 9-5 job which would often get extended up to 14 hrs a day, I could hardly find time to chat with my wife. I hate Internet Marketing today because I cannot drive to my office anymore, because I do not have to.I love to hate Internet Marketing for that. I only drive for pleasure and that is all that I want.
2. No Investment – Internet marketing does not require huge investments like a normal brick and mortar business does. This is the biggest bane of the IM business. Since there is no monetary investments involved, people just don’t take it seriously. Since they are not tied down with the burden of investments, they prefer quitting than being persistent. I hate this aspect of the Internet marketing business. There should have been huge investments involved and people would not have quit it so easily.
3. Unbelievable income – When I first started on my Internet marketing journey, I was surprised to see the amount of money that people were earning. People kept showing their checks on their websites and I had a difficult time convincing myself that this could be true, especially if you are only spending a few hours everyday and that too at home. Most of the non-starters remain non-starters because they were not able to convince themselves that they could earn so much money online.
4. No Proofs can convince – This is an interesting aspect and I was also a party to it when I started. No proofs can convince anybody to start an online business. There are thousands of courses and ebooks released everyday and people buy it, read it and let it be there on their shelf to gather dust. No proofs can convince them into using these strategies to start an online business.
5. No Education required – I hate Internet Marketing because there are school dropouts out there who are more successful than I am and I hold a post-graduate degree and some other professional qualifications. Internet Marketing does not require any education. Even and absolute layman can also start a successful internet marketing business. All my degrees are gathering dust and I hate IM for that.
6. Overwhelming options – When I first started my online business, I had a difficult time deciding on what to do. There were so many options that a newbie would get overwhelmed by it. Affiliate Marketing, blogging, reselling, product creation, article writing etc. can all make money, if done correctly. But what to choose is a million dollar question. I hate internet marketing for the sheer reason that so many options at times makes it difficult for the newbie to decide on what to do and a wrong decision could end in his exit from the IM arena.
7. Free is the least opted for – Nobody would believe you, if you say that you can start an Internet marketing business for free, without having to invest in any ebook or, software. That is right!!! Successful Internet marketers keep saying this, still people prefer spending thousands of dollars on ebooks and software, which anyways they would dump deep down in their store-rooms after reading. In everything else that you do, you would prefer to look for anything that is free, but Internet marketing is one place where free is the least opted for.
8. Easily Misused Tools – There are thousands of tools out there that can help you build a successful online business. Social Media is one such platform. I have been using Twitter to build my business. But it is often observed that these tools are misused because of the sheer magnitude of reach that they have and because these are free of cost.
9. The Confusion of which Guru to follow – “GURUS” are plenty in Internet marketing. Every second day there is a new self-proclaimed GURU on the internet who would come out with a product of his. How to distinguish the genuine GURU from the fake one and whom to follow. This confusion is without a solution and often people end up following the wrong person.
10. I had to cheat on my wife – I had promised my wife that I would never love anybody else and I had to cheat on her. I had to break this promise because I fell in love again – with my computer and my Internet marketing business. But this is one cheating that my wife is also happy about because she is able to spend more time with me.

You cannot hate Internet Marketing!! You spend a whole night thinking for reasons you would hate an Internet marketing business but you will find none. All of the above reasons mentioned above are only reasons to love my online Business.

To be successful in an Internet Marketing business, all that you need is a bit of commitment and the determination to remain there and be persistent.

My blog is no more a “Make Money Online” blog!!!

There was quite a bit of research that went into my selection of the earlier title and description for my blog but eventually after about 24 months of being into blogging with that punchline for my blog, I decided to go for a change.

But what was it that prompted me to change my blog’s title?

The keyword “Make money online” is probably one of the most costliest term if I would go for a PPC campaign. It is one of the most competitive terms as well in PPC Management. You search Google with the term and find about 115,000,000 results for the term. That indeed is pretty competitive.

But competitiveness doesn’t mean that there were no terms that you could rank well for. On running my research in micro niche finder I was able to derive about 4 terms that were extremely good in terms of competition and I was able to rank well for these terms as well. So I would not want to buy the logic from somebody who says that the “Make money online” market is saturated and that you would not want to get into the market. This market still has a lot of scope and anybody wanting to get into the market can still do it.

So, you would ask me, what is it that made me exit this term, right?

I recently started my Facebook campaign and started getting quite a few visitors from my Facebook pages. There were quite a few of my friend and acquaintances who visited my blog here at DKSpeaks. I found that they had a very strange opinion about my blog and did not dare to visit it again. As such I had found that the drop rate at the blog was quite high. So I decided I would run a small questionaire with these friends and relatives to find their opinion about my blog.

I was surprised at the views that they shared with me.

The majority of them said that they felt that they were about to read something about one of those money scams or, a get rich quick schemes that they were tired of hearing and reading about. The moment they were being directed to my blog they would read the title and find the “make money online” term in it and would get the impression that this blog is about another scam and hence browse away from it.

Did it really give such an impression?

I felt it did. The term was giving me an impression of a scam. My blog was not about a scam. Instead my purpose was to train the newbies on setting up an internet business. There were a lot of mistakes that I did and a lot of misguiding information that I fell prey to. I wanted to beware the newbies joining the internet to stay away from such information and set up a lot term internet marketing business. The objective of DKSpeaks was to develop “Internet Entrepreneurship” and help people start an online business.

This is where I decided that I will change my punchline and start giving my visitors an impression that is actually what my objective was.

It is an established fact that most of the newbies spend almost 70% of their time in evaluating the stats of whatever thing they are doing. Why am I so confident about it? It is because I too, was a victim of this when I was a complete newbie to Internet Marketing.

I call this the “Statistical Obsession Syndrome”. Its took me quite a while to understand that there was nothing that I could achieve by continuously evaluating the statistics.

No Businessman has ever achieved glory and profits by only evaluating their statistics. Too much of statistics is injurious to your business’s health.

At this point I would once again like to bring in the 80-20 principle. 80% of the results of what you do comes from 20% of the things that you do.

Statistics is definitely not one of these 20%. Let’s spend some time to evaluate what is it that you have gained in the past 15 days by evaluating your statistics.

• Were your really able to increase the traffic to your website?
• Were you able to increase your earnings from the internet by at least 50%?
• Were you able to make that first blueprint of your business?
• Were you able to decide on the first product that you were to launch?
• Can you say that you have achieved twice as what you have achieved the last month?

I am sure that it will be difficult for you to answer all of these questions. It is obvious because you have spent a good amount of your time evaluating your statistics, time that you could have invested in a few other more important things in such a way that your achievement for the month could have been double of what you achieved the previous month.

When I question the reason for spending so much time on statistics, I don’t mean that statistics and their evaluation is absolutely useless. It is statistics that help you be on track. It helps you identify areas of improvement. It tells you what is good and can be kept the way it is and what requires improvement and changes.

But, like all other things excess of everything is bad. And excess of statistics is extremely bad.

I normally recommend statistical evaluation only once a week. Choose a day of comfort as per your schedules and evaluate all your statistics that day. Based on the evaluation that you have done, chalk out your plans so that you can work on these for the entire week and then review it the next week.

If done well statistics can be the base of your growth, but if done in excess it could be the worst thing you could do to your business.

What is your opinion on this?

But the fact of the matter is that finding niches that will make money is not as difficult as it sounds.

If you want to know how to find niches, then read this now. You will find out how to find a niche to make money online with information products.

Step 1: Look For A Personal Connection

You should have some kind of connection with your niche.

High personal connection basically means that you should have expertise, passion, and commitment for it. If you do not have all three of those, you will soon become bored with it and give up.

True success is about fulfillment and doing something that you believe in. This first step will help you weed out the niches that will not keep your attention in the mid to long term.

Step 2: Look For High Potential Profits

Secondly, you want to look for a niche that has a high potential for making money. The question you want to ask is – are other businesses paying for advertising for that niche? If you see other marketers consistently advertising for that niche, that means that field has the potential of making money.

Another way to find out if a product is profitable, is to do some testing. Start promoting affiliate products through pay per click advertising. If you are making some money out of it, most likely that is a profitable niche.

Step 3: Look For Low Competition

Step number 3 is to look for a niche that has a low level of competition. You can make a judgment on this by assessing marketplaces like eBay, Clickbank and online stores to see the number of competitors. If there are too many competitors, that is not a very good sign because it can take a lot more time, effort, and energy to make money in that niche.

Step 4: Pick Your Niche

You do not want to spend months looking for a niche. After a few hours of research, go ahead and pick a niche. If you spend any longer than that, then you are just wasting time.

There are a lot of extremely helpful tools like micro niche finder, which can automate the work of finding a profitable niche. This will cut out the unnecessary tasks that are otherwise associated with finding a niche and you will be able to do other more important activities while your software tool finds the niche for you.

—

If you want to learn how to find a niche, then go to my website and sign up for my free newsletter at http://www.NicheDictator.com.

Photograph Courtesy Angel-13

Related Blogs

• 3 Issues All Affiliate Marketers Want To SurviveOn-line | Internet and businesses online
• » Blog Archive
• EBay expects to generate $1.5B via mobile in 2010 – Mobile Commerce Daily – Applications
• How To Find Niches : A Strategy That Is Guaranteed To Work « Free Craft Articles
• Health reform requires marketers to rethink their approach | FavStocks

Do you find yourselves in a situation where you do not get enough time to blog? Does it happen that you create a schedule for your entire day, and find that have most of the things that you planned went untouched, the entire day.

This is a normal phenomenon and every internet marketer and Blogger comes across this situation a lot of times. How would you arrest this situation?

Time is of utmost importance in blogging and Internet Marketing. The 80-20 principle, about which a lot of bloggers have written and talked about, is something that has proven to hold true in Internet Marketing.

What is the 80-20 rule?

The 80-20 rule is also called as the “Pareto Principle”, “law of vital few” and the “principle of factor sparsity”. It is defined as follows -

Pareto principle is a theory that states that 80% of the effects are the result of 20% of the source(s) or participants, of any given event. A few items contribute the most; these are the vital few, as opposed to the trivial majority.

This means that 80% of the result is influenced by 20% of what you do. This holds good in anything that you do and and that is where this rule carries value.

In blogging too, it is true that 20% of the things that you do is what determines 80% of the results. Put it in a different perspective, it means that only a few things amongst everything that you do in your blogging and Internet marketing business is important. But what are these few things?

It is not a difficult task to do, but at the same time it is also not that easy to identify the real activities that influence the majority of your results. In order to do that it is extremely important that you identify your prime activities. In other words, it is important for you to prioritize everything that you do in a day.

As an affiliate marketer, I always faced this problem of “too much to do with too little time”. Even after planning the entire day, I found that I could only do 10% of what I had planned. I often wondered as to what could be the reason for this.

Look at this statistics about what newbie internet marketers felt they did in an average day -

When I saw these statistics, I felt as if it was a survey done on me. This is was indeed, my story. I realized that I was spending time on un-important things and lost focus of the more important things that I should have been doing.

How to be more productive?

In order to be more productive, you will have to start concentrating on activities that are more important for your internet marketing business. The following tips can help you in identifying the activities that are un-important and thus eliminate them. This will in turn, help you focus on things that are important.

Unsubscribe from those newsletters – It is a tendency with all ‘not-so-famous internet marketers’ to subscribe to the newsletters and other such mailing lists from those so-called marketing Gurus. We do it with an intention of getting something that they offer for free, and to be aware about what they are promoting and how they are promoting. Good intention and valuable indeed!!

But,…. either unsubscribe from those newsletters or, create a separate mailbox or, mail ID, that you will only visit once in a week and provide that email address to all such subscriptions. Don’t waste your time browsing through their offers and signing up for more offers.

Stop Browsing – You need to stop browsing the internet immediately. You might have seen from the above statistics that this is the most un-productive activity of all. We have a tendency of checking out every other website that we see and browsing the internet and Google to find more such websites. But what is it that this activity yields? Nothing..

I would recommend that you install Firefox and close all unnecessary windows and keep open only the ones that are important to you, like your blog administration page, before you exit or, close your browser. So the next time you open your browser, there will be just that one window that will open and you will be reminded on what you should focus more on.

Limit reading emails – Do not share your email address with anyone except the ones that you think is really important and vital for your business. This way you will be able to reduce the number of emails that you get and thus will be able to reduce the time that you spend reading emails.

Get rid of your Statisticophobia – After about 2 months that I started my Internet Marketing business, I was making about $2-$3 per day from Adsense and I used to get about 25-30 visitors to my blog. I would check the statistics at my blog and at Adsense as soon as I login to my computer and then would keep checking it as if the statistics would have gone out of the roof. It was as if I had something to do with that visitor coming to my blog and as if I was waiting, so that I can catch him.

Check your statistics once in 2 days. That is enough. The statistics will improve when you do the right things and at the right time. But if you keep checking your statistics only, then there is nothing that is going to improve and the numbers will remain the same.

Enough of Blog Tweaking – It is not uncommon for us to keep designing and re-designing our blog or, website till we get that perfect design. But the fact remains that, the perfect design just doesn’t come. You are browsing through a few blogs and you find about some tweak that some guy is talking about and set out to implement that on your blog. Was it required? Was that important?

Blog designs are something that you can change once you are done with all your priority-1 tasks. even if you don’t tweak it today it will not stop functioning. Similar is the case with wordpress plugins. That jazzy plugin that you saw at the other blog is not going to get you new visitors or, money.

Stop focussing on the designing and tweaking of your blog. Leave it to the professionals if at all you think that it is that important. Find a blog management service that can help you do it for you, while you focus on other important things.

Order only what is required – The internet is full of courses and ebooks that promise you a millionaire lifestyle in a few days. Let’s face the truth. There is nothing that can make you rich quick unless you are a character from “Ocean’s Eleven”. Don’t fall for all that stuff out there on the internet, even if it is free.

Find a mentor – We as newbie internet marketers keep doing things the wrong way multiple times until we find the right way of doing it. This, in a way is wastage of precious time and money. But the question here is, why should you be re-inventing the wheel? Get a mentor who has seen through the difficulties and who know how to do it right. That ways you will not waste time on un-necessary activities and in turn and utilize that time in other productive activities.

These are just a few things that you could do to be more productive in your Internet marketing business. There could be many other such things that you might have to share. Share them by commenting here in this post.

Another year has passed and it is time to sit and review you achievements for the year. But what is even more important is planning for the next year. The big question at this point is – Do you have an agenda for the next year?

Every new year brings in time for newer resolutions. But the year that went never gives you the time to sit down and evaluate your performance on the last year’s resolutions. This is probably because of the what we have been taught all these years – “Focus on the future. Forget your past”. If you were not taught this, then you were really lucky. But I learnt it this way and hence have always been focusing on the future and ignoring the past.

Am I doing right? The answer is obvious. What is it that I was doing wrong?

In my attempt to focus on the future and forget the past, I did not take the time out to evaluate things that I did wrong. I did not evaluate the reasons why they went wrong just to ensure that I do not repeat the same mistake again.

As the New Year has dawned it is now time to sit down and analyze your past year and chalk out some fresh and practical plans for the new year.

Things that I did right in 2009:-

When I look back at 2009, I feel there were quite a few things that I did right and consequently worked well for my business.

I jumped into the Twitter Bandwagon on time – Twitter was the most happening thing in 2009. It exploded towards the beginning of the year 2009. People who did not know how to use this explosion to their advantage, sat pretty on the fence. Others who took advantage of the explosion reaped its benefits and made money out of it. I made the right decision at the right time and learnt how to monetize Twitter. Today as the New Year dawns I have newer strategies and plans for Twitter.

I attained partial freedom – The beginning of 2009, brought in the worst recession in the recent times. Stock prices tumbled and the bottomline of most companies showed negative results. People were afraid of losing jobs. A few thousands even lost their job. Internet Marketing was not serious for me until then. But then I found a reason to be independent, to be free of the fear of starving, to be free of the fear of losing jobs, to be free of the fear of being burdened with mortgages and loans. As the year ends, I know I have attained partial freedom. I have a self-sustaining income from my business and I am free.

My wife’s first blog – I got my wife to blog. At first she had very less interest but when she found that what she was to write was on topics of her interest, she just freaked out. Her blogs was ranking in the first page of Google, for quite a few prime keywords and she had increased her readership by almost 360%.

I registered my Company – I was able to register my company in 2009. My company will be into social media marketing and web designing.  I will be launching my company website and other details in the year 2010.

Things that I did wrong in 2009:-

These were some things that I did wrong in 2009 -

I made the mistake of jumping into too many things – blogging, minisites, affiliate marketing, web designing, social media marketing etc. etc. The consequence was pretty straight – Failures and losses. Some of the businesses that I was making profits in suddenly declined, because I had not taken them to a level where they would run on an auto-pilot. What I learnt from – concentrate on one business or, a couple of related business which does not require additional focus until your have built it to a self-sustaining level.

I chose the wrong hosting company -  The biggest mistake of 2009 was the choice of a wrong hosting company to host my blogs and mini-sites. Midway in August, my hosting company’s servers were attacked by hackers and my blogs and website were gone. They couldn’t even provide me with a backup. My blogs and websites were gone. I had to start everything from scratch, including my money generating mini-sites, for which I had not backups at all. What I learnt – Do not compromise on brand name and quality in order to save a few bucks especially in critical aspects like hosting.

I lost my entire list I built over the past year – The second biggest mistake was the choice of a wrong auto responder. My auto-responder company closed its business and ran away without even providing me with a backup of my lists. I chose the wrong auto responder service in order to save a few bucks. Consequently I lost my entire list that I built over the past year and a half. What I learnt – List building can be successful only if you choose the right auto responder service.

I did not launch my products – I did not launch any product in 2009, though I had plans of doing it in my agenda. Why I couldn’t do it? Reasons would only be excuses. Two such products are in the work-in-progress stage and should be ready for launch somewhere in March 2010. A product of my own would certainly have helped me build my online presence and my business.

I did not outsource – When outsourcing was the mantra of the year, I did not outsource. I wanted to do everything by myself and the result of this was that i had too many things to do and too little time. A few start-ups just remained as start-ups and yet others just did not start-up. I have about 21 good domains that I got for very cheap. These cheap domain names are still lying un-utilized. What I learnt – Outsource things that you necessarily need not do yourself.

What’s your agenda for 2010?

For those of you who are thinking of starting your online businesses, this is the best time to do it. As the New Year creeps in, the million dollar question is, whether you have an agenda or, not. People who have and agenda and a plan for the year 2010, will see success and the others won’t.

But before you even think of an agenda, you will have to find a few reasons why you want to do all that you think you will do this year. Your reason could be one of the following  -

Repayment of a mortgage – Recession in the year 2009, brought in the burden of a few mortgages an you might want to pay them off and be debt-free.

Get off the 9-5 treadmill – Unable to find time for your kid and your wife? The story is similar with everybody running just next to you in the 9-5 treadmill. The normal 9-5 job has become an 8-9 job and you hardly find time for your family, let alone a picnic or, a party. You might want to get off this treadmill.

Freedom from the insecurity of loosing a job – You just got to know that, your friend was asked to leave his company. You have nightmares and most of your time at home is spent on thinking about the consequences of loosing your job. Get freedom from this insecurity.

The best education for your kids – You missed getting your child admitted to that school of your choice, because you couldn’t afford to pay the admission fees there. You might want to get out of the embarrassment of answering your child’s question on why you couldn’t get him admitted to this school.

The reasons could be many, but what is important is identifying it. If you are passionate towards achieving what you have set out for, and your reason is strong enough to keep driving you, then you can move onto finalizing your agenda for 2010. You can be rest assured that you will be successful.

All the best for the New Year 2010.

Photograph courtesy Billy Alexander

Can you really make money with free materials available on the internet?

I had often asked this question to myself, when I was doing a regular job and happened to hear about the success stories of the internet marketers.

The first thing that I did was to sign up to a few newsletters with the internet marketing gurus, to see what they were promoting and how they were doing it. I found that a lot of these newsletters were talking about getting free money. And I wondered if I could actually get free money. But in a world where there is nothing for free, where will you get get money for free?

You cannot get money for free. You have to work hard for it. I realized that after about a month of clicking on the links that came to me saying I could earn money for free. None of those thousand clicks could get me any money, instead I was just moving off from my goal of creating and running a real online business.

But it is true that you could make money with free things. If you are wondering how, then read on.

I had earlier mentioned that I signed up for quite a few newsletters with the already successful internet marketers.These internet marketers kept sending me free information and links to ebooks and reports. Many of them were absolutely useless and I had to do a shift+delete.

But the ones who were indeed successful and knew how to succeed, also knew that they had to win the confidence of their subscribers in order for them to sell me anything. Hence they ensured that they send me material that was worthy of reading and which could provide me an insight into making money online.

These material was what proved handy for me. When I started my internet marketing journey, all I had was a few hundred dollars to invest, most of which went into getting a few domain names and a hosting account. I used the remaining money to buy one good ebook and one keyword research tool. By the time I had bought all of these, I found that I was left with nothing.

I had no other option but to look for free material that could guide me in my internet marketing business.

Making money with free -

The internet is a free resource. There are numerous sites that are reservoirs of free information – Google, Youtube, Myspace, Wikipedia etc. If you know how to search for information, you will get that information for free.

A “how to” for everything is available at Youtube. Search for it and you will find. But there is one huge drawback with making  money with free.

When I joined the internet marketing revolution, I was able to lay my hands on a hard drive full of free material in the form of articles, ebooks, videos, audios etc. After a month I found that most of it was lying in my hard disk, the way it was downloaded and was gathering dust. I had not touched any of these things in months.

This is a problem with anything that is “free”. You don’t normally realize the value of it and that valuable information contained in it goes waste. My advice is, don’t download too many free material from the internet. Only download things that are relevant and that you think can help you achieve your financial objectives. The basic mantra for any business remains the same. There would be a couple of very simple tricks that are involved and that is what will be repeated in all the thousands of free material that you will download if at all you choose to do that.

But there is one thing that you need to bear in mind. Free information can help your earn money but cannot help you become financially independent. Financial independence needs extensive information and that will only be available for a price because nobody will be willing to part with that information for free. But the best part is that you can use the free information that is available on the internet and scale up to a level where you are able to shell out some money for that extensive education.

How to make money with free?

Making money with free things is not difficult. All that you need to do is just repeat whatever you would have done if you were to start and internet marketing business with the free things available on the internet.

I know that it is easier said than done. So let me explain a bit into how to make money with free information.

Just like the way you would be looking for free information on the internet in order to start your online venture, there would be thousands of people who would be browsing the internet for free things. Provide them whatever they are looking for. The information that you give could be in the form of a free ebook, an interview, a report or, any other form that you can package it in.

The golden rule of internet marketing says that,

It is relations that you build that pays you in internet marketing and not the products that you sell’.

It is not difficult to understand the inherent meaning of this statement. You will have to build relations, if you are planning to set up a successful business online.

When you offer valuable information for free, you build a trust and rapport with your prospects. They value the information you have given them and would gradually start to realize the fact that the free information that you offer also carries immense value. It is this trust that will then prompt them to buy the products that you are offering.

Build your prospect base by offering free information and you will realize the fact that you can indeed make money with free information but money is not free.

The success of any internet based business lies in the front-end website. Websites selling products call it the sales page and people running an online store call it the store-front and yet others simply call it a website.

Are you wondering how to build your website like a professional?

If you are new to the internet and is currently in the preparations to launch your internet marketing business, you would surely be scratching your head out of the confusion of getting your website designed. Exhorbitant website designer quotations and difficult to understand HTML codes – your internet marketing business just looks like dying even before it has started.

You are not the only one faced with situation. Every newbie internet marketer, fascinated with the rags-to-riches stories of other successful internet marketers and bloggers set out on a plan to make money and stumble upon the same situation that you are in. Though I never had to face this situation, because I knew a fair bit of HTML to design my website, I sometimes still feel the need to get off with this website designing activity and concentrate on my business.

Web designing options:-

This situation could be a tricky one and you might need to properly and accurately assess your need well, before deciding on what kind of a website or, a website design you should go for.

Some easily available options are as follows:

CMS Platforms – There are a lot of Content Management Solutions available these days and these are pretty easy to install and use. WordPress is one such publishing platform and the easiest of all. You need not know any HTML code if you plan to install WordPress. WordPress installations can be used for blogs as well as static websites. You have the option of setting these preferences in the administration panel of WordPress.

There are other such solutions like Jhoomla, Drupal and such other but these require some knowledge about HTML or, else you could find yourself browsing through websites and search engines to find solutions to problems that you face while installations.

WYSIWSG Site building options – These options are mostly offered by hosting companies. One such easiest site builder is called as Website Builder and is normally offered by Godaddy and their resellers. WYSIWYG means “What You See Is What You Get”. It is a simple click and drag way of building a site.

The drawback about these sites is the fact that there are type-casted. There are a specific number of designs that are available and you choose one of them. So you loose your uniqueness and identity to many other such similar websites.

Site Build It – This is one the best and most recommended options. People who are absolute newbies can also build professional looking and elegant websites with ‘Site Build It’.

‘Site Build It‘ is not a website designing service, instead it is a complete internet business package. You will not have to run after hosting companies to find the best host for you, nor will you have to run after designers to build a site for you within your budget and timeline. ‘Site Build It‘ is a package that offers you all of this and in addition to this, also ensures that you have a website that works.

I have helped a lot of my friends start their first internet marketing business with the help of ‘Site Build It‘. Hence I know this is a package that not only promises results but also delivers.

Custom designs at Chromaa Solutions – Chromaa Solutions is a company that I am a partner of and we are into website designing, logo designing, Search Engine Optimization etc.

In case you wish to get a custom design done for your website, I can offer you a custom designed 5 pager static website for only $199.00.

Whatever the option that you choose, you should align it with your goals. If your decision is to start a blog and you are lost in the world of Drupal or, Jhoomla (assuming that you have little or, no knowledge about HTML), then your start-up is going to be an absolute failure. So your decision should be based on factors like your budget, the website’s objective, you preferances in designs etc.

In case you need any assistance in deciding what is the best option for you, you can contact me and I can help you make a decision. Just use the ‘contact us’ form on the top. (This is a free of cost assistance that I am providing)

Photograph courtesy Jana Kollárová