Generate Money at Home

Posts Tagged ‘articles’

In this post Dan Kaufman from Bar Zine shares some tips on writing Sharp Snappy Blog Posts.

When you write a story you’re lucky if you can get a reader beyond the first paragraph. This is true in print and it’s even worse online (a recent study by Jacob Neilson at http://tinyurl.com/mubtmr makes for interesting reading). After all, your post is just one out of millions online – and the difference can lie in how well written your copy is.

Writing is a craft that involves a continual learning process.

Having been a journalist and editor for the past 15 years (and I’m now a blogger as well) I still find myself learning – but there are some hard and fast techniques to make your copy snappier and more engaging. Here are some of the basics:

1) Write Short Sentences

Next time you pick up a book and can’t put it down, stop and have a look at the sentence length – you’ll often find the sentences are short and punchy. 32 words is the maximum for an article’s first sentence and while there are exceptions they ought to be rare. Aim to only have one point per sentence.

2) Use the Active Voice

Have a look at the following two sentences:

The cat chases the mouse

and

The mouse is being chased by the cat

Which one is punchier?

It’s the former because the subject (the cat) is doing something to the object (the mouse). As such, it makes sense to have the subject appear in the sentence before the object. In other words, the sentence is written using the active voice (whereas “The mouse is being chased by the cat” is passive).

Using the active voice is more direct and requires less words – and the less words, the snappier the sentence becomes.

3) Write in the Present Tense

Which of the following headlines seems punchier?

PM halts peace talks

Or

PM halted peace talks

Unless your blog post takes the form of a hard news story you should use the present tense. Even hard news headlines are written in the present tense to make them seem more immediate.

4) Use Positive Language

This means avoiding negative words such as no, not and didn’t when appropriate. You’ll see why when you look at the following example:

Troops have not pulled out of war zone

Vs

Troops stay in war zone

The bottom example reads better since, as with using active voice, making sentences positive often makes them snappier. We also changed the tense from past to present.

5) Write in a conversational tone

A lot of people don’t realise that good writing means using a conversational tone – albeit with better grammar than you would use when talking to a friend in a bar.

Avoid hype, pretentious words, jargon and acronyms – instead of impressing readers it’s a turn off. You should never talk down to your reader by using language they may not understand and you should never assume they know something they may not. Unless you’re trying to spin something or confuse, use simple, clear and direct language. As the old saying goes, if you confuse your readers you lose your readers.

George Orwell put it another way in The Politics of the English Language.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

Dan Kaufman publishes Bar Zine (barzine.com.au), where he reviews Sydney bars. He also writes for The Sydney Morning Herald and teaches online journalism at UTS.

Video from Problogger.net

Got a messy sidebar on your blog? It’s time to clean it up (like I cleaned up my sock drawer today).

When you start Internet Marketing you suddenly realize that this work from home thing is going to take a minute, and time seems to fly right on by. If your trying to learn about your niche and trying to promote it then you have even less time to play with. Not to mention writing articles and posting to your blog. Typing 500 words or more seems to be the biggest hurdle of them all. Especially the article marketing side of things.

Well I have an idea that might work for some. Many of you probably already have this one down pat but some may not. It also may never cross some peoples minds to do something about it. Or how easy doing this actually is. This idea is simply learning how to type. If your struggling when posting to your blog or doing article marketing then learning to type is what you need to do.

You might say that you would be losing to much time by doing such a thing, but you are losing more time by struggling with the seek and destroy method. Plus, learning to type will only take a few days or maybe a week. It will take a little more time getting your speed up, but you can learn the basics in no time.

To give you an idea of the basics of typing is that each finger is assigned a letter, or several letters. Let’s start with your right hand for instance and starting from your index finger the letters assigned would be: J,K,L, ;  and your thumb is always used for the space bar ( it doesn’t matter which one). Then you get your fingers used to these letters by typing: jjj,kkk,lll, ;;; , and then you do the left hand. You can also practice this to music and you type the letter’s to the beat of the music, slowly speeding up the tempo as you go. Next you have the letters above and below each of the main letters, for instance, the right hand again, the letters assigned to each finger starting with the index: y,u,i,o,p. Your going to have an extra one assigned for the upper keys and lower keys. Speaking of lower keys you would assign them the same way. Your right hand would therefore be: n,m, comma, period, ? . Once you know the letters your fingers are assigned to you practice variations of  typing letters, then start typing words when that becomes comfortable.

I would definitely learn to type if you don’t know how, it will save you a lot of time and may make article marketing and other forms of marketing more pleasurable. Like I said previously it really doesn’t take long to learn how to type at all. This post may have just confused you of the whole process, so your best bet may be to get a good software program to show you how. If you look over to the left of this post in the sidebar you’ll see a Clickbank search engine. Just type, “Learn to Type” in that search engine and you’ll find all kinds of programs to help you learn how to type. You can also just click this link and go straight to a page with products listed on it.

I hope this has helped some of you that may have thought it would take months to learn to type and is the reason why you never considered doing it. It really isn’t very hard at all and knowing how to type will up your productivity considerably.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please fell free to leave them in the comment area. Thank You,     Jay Picklo.

If you have been working on a blog or posting articles then you probably know how hard it can be at times to come up with content for your blogs or articles. If you have been listening to some of the top Internet Marketing experts then you have probably learned a few tricks for coming up with content. Some of the ebooks and articles I have read talk about doing searches and visiting forums to see what questions people are asking or what they are searching for to get ideas. I’m sure these strategies are good ones, in fact I know they are, yet they can be very time consuming. So, what I have done is come up with another strategy to save some time.

Here’s what I have come up with. Now some of you may already be in a niche that you have a lot of knowledge in, but this may come in handy for you on certain days as well. Maybe your having a bad day and are experiencing a bad case of writers block. If you are new to the niche your trying to work with I think this strategy will work great for you.

• Go to your favorite blogs and do your research there. I have noticed when I am reading someone Else’s blog I will suddenly come up with an idea of something to write about. I don’t know why this happens, it just does. If nothing pops into your head, just take one of the articles, absorb and understand it, then go write about the subject on your blog. I am by no means saying copy anyone, your post should be 100% original. By doing this your going to be helping someone who may not have read about the subject and you are learning at the same time. If you draw a blank on a particular point refer back to the article just to refresh your memory. But again I say, do not copy anything, this should be done in your own words. The way I see it is everybody starts somewhere, and as  long as your trying to learn, be original and help someone then this strategy is ok.
• If your like me you probably have 10,000 free ebooks on your computer. Take one of the short ebooks or a chapter of one of the long ones and read it. Fully digest the material so that you know and understand it. Now you know something that someone may not know and can therefore make a post on the subject.
• Read some of  your own past posts. You have most likely mentioned something in some of  them that could be elaborated on.

I try to get all my information from the most popular blogs and ebooks. Try to focus on the names you are hearing about all the time. Here are a couple of my favorite blogs to get ideas from:

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

http://www.surefirewealth.com/

If you don’t have a lot of  ebooks I recently came across a website with so many free ebooks it made my head spin. I think I spent an hour downloading material and still only have about 45% of what was there. If you would like to check it out go to PLR Wholesalercom. There is seriously so much material here it will be coming out of your ears. So don’t get frustrated if you can’t think of anything to post, just go read and learn. Something will come to you one way or another.

Are you losing Clickbank commissions.  ClickHere to avoid losing commissions.

Have you recently lost your job due to the economic downturn? That may not be a bad thing if you are able to recognize opportunity and jump on it. Even if you haven’t lost your job, but have tons of experience in something you need to read this. In every economic downturn there are a new group of millionaires made. This is because they can recognize opportunity when it is there. The economy goes through it’s ups and downs all the time and there are always ways to capitalize on them. In this day and age there just happens to be two different worlds developing. You have the offline world and the online world. Well, the online world is the place to be right now and it is fresh for the picking. You may be saying “That’s great but I have no idea how to make money online.” Let me tell you that is not a problem. I don’t have a whole lot of experience myself. All I’m doing is reading all the free ebooks and watching all the free videos I can to learn. From doing this I have learnt how to make money online. I’m not making millions (yet), but I am making enough to were I am going to be leaving my day to day offline job. So what were you doing before you lost your job. Did you work for GM, or maybe a restaurant outside of GM somewhere? Maybe a clothing store around a brokerage firm that went under or the brokerage firm itself. What ever you did, that is your specialty. You were probably doing it for many years and could tell someone a lot about how to do whatever it is you were doing. Can you see where I’m going with this? There are so many opportunities out there it would be almost impossible to list them all here. Or if I did I would be here for a week listing them all. It’s time for you to take your knowledge online. The fact is there are a lot of  virtually untouched niches out there were big money can be made and you hold the knowledge in these niches. You don’t have to be in the “how to make money” niche to make money. Actually if you have a specialty other than that, that is even better. All you have to do is start a blog and start blogging about what it is you know. It isn’t hard at all to start a blog, if I can do it you surely can do it. Just go to becomeablogger.com where you will find free videos showing you step by step how to start a blog.

This is an opportunity not to be missed. Don’t be the one years from now saying, ” I should have got into that online thing.” There is a big shift coming with more people staying home more often. They’re getting on there computers and finding deals on products and also discovering how they can make money. Even if you don’t have a product to sell you can still make money as an affiliate. All you have to do is post valuable information about your specialty and put a link on your blog to a product that your an affiliate for. There are lots of affiliate programs out there for every niche that there is. Here is a link to a product for shed building and woodworking. I got this link from clickbank which is a good place to find a product to sell and make a commission from. Signing up for clickbank is easy and free. Eventually you’ll start learning how to write your own ebooks and many other things you can do to make money online. This is the best time to get into the online business than there ever was.

I just sit here thinking about all the years of knowledge and experience that some people have and the money that they could be making right now and don’t even realize it. For instance say you worked at a popular hair salon or still do. You could easily start a membership site and offer a 3 month online cosmetology course for a lot less than some of the schools that are available in the offline world and make an absolute killing. Now is the time to get into the online world of business if there ever was. Yes there are scams out there, but there are also legitimate programs a resourses as well. If you visit my blog you will not be scammed. I have posted a few helpful articles on how to promote your business and other things related to online business.  Don’t be the one a few years from now saying I should have.

Here are some websites and tools that will help you in getting started in your online journey.

For helpful tips and tools on getting a mini-site up and running and a good affiliate program visit MiniSiteSecretsReavealed.com.

Start your own blog visit becomeablogger.com. For a great course on blogging visit BlogProfitsBlueprint free report.

For must know information on clickbank ( so you don’t lose commissions) visit “CickbankforNewbies.”  ( and oldies). For another great book on clickbank check out “Ultimate Super Tips.” 

A Free ebook ” How to Multiply Sales of Any Product.”

Copy and Profit these campaigns. Click Here!
Don’t miss the bus and good luck.

how-cbmall-creates-autopilot-income                  If you have been looking for ways to make money at home then you have most likely heard of Clickbank. If you haven’t heard of Clickbank let me tell you a little about it. Clickbank is a place where you can sell other peoples digital  products as an affiliate or you can sell your own digital products through Clickbank as a vendor. Being an affiliate is the easiest way to make money online. This is because you don’t have to have your own product. Producing a product can be very time consuming and people that are just getting started with online self employment want to make money as fast as they can. Learning to produce your own product comes with time and experience. So the best way to get started is to be an affiliate. Clickbank is the largest retailer in the world  for marketing digital products. You can set up a free account here.  Another good place to start is learning resell rights and how to rebrand books. Harvey Segal, who is the owner of “Clickbank Success Forum”, has written a series of books dealing with this subject inparticular. Just one of his many very informative books is ”Clickbank for Newbies”and gives you a detailed account of how to sell CB products and not lose commissions.  I have been doing very well with his products and the many tips and tools he provides. So if your interested in generating income online I would highly recommend being an affiliate and also looking into resell rights. Harvey Segal has said that if he had to start from scratch he would definitely start with resell rights and Clickbank is  the place to find a lot of ebooks and sofware with resell rights. OK, that’s a brief summary of CB and it’s benefits it’s now time to go over the “New Opportunity.”

The CB Mall

Now you know a little about Clickbank and how beneficial it can be I would like to tell you about a new opportunity that CB has come up with to help you make even more money online. I’m not sure how long it has been around but I am sure it hasn’t been long. It’s called the CB Mall and basically it’s a website with all the digital products being sold on CB. There are 40,000 digital products here and you can promote them with one link. The good thing about the CB Mall is, ( just like CB itself) is free to join. You can have your own CB mall for free. They do offer upgrades which helps you with getting traffic to your CB Mall among other great tools and tips. Just with the free membership you get:

• Affiliate center where you can create links with the “Link Builder.” This is great for the simple fact that you won’t be displaying  a long, ugly affiliate link when you promote the mall.  Not only can you create a link to the mall front but you can also create links to specific sections of the mall depending on the niche your promoting. Here is my link to the  sign up page. http://www.cbmall.com/to/club
• I have counted a total of 9 ebooks so far but there may be some that I have missed. One of these ebooks is even a rebrander that you can resell. It also comes with a rebranding tool and video of how to rebrand a book. Amazing!
• There is a support center where all your questions can be answered. If you can’t get them answered they have a reliable contact e-mail address.
• A section on CB Mall security and how to test the system.
• Features a video with targeted ideas on using CBmall with your existing web site business.
• Ideas for people without websites. There are many different ways to drive traffic to your mall.
• Banners and artwork
• Different ideas on niche marketing. No matter what your area of expertise you can make money online with this mall.
• How to buy something at your mall and collect the commissions.
• Product codes so you can track what you have sold if it’s a CB Mall product.

That’s just scratching the surface. There are so many more things that come with this opportunity it’s hard to remember all of them. Clickbank definitely knows what their doing and I’m sure this free offer isn’t going to last forever. So if you have been looking for an online self employment opportunity look no further. Your not going to break your bank account and you’ll have plenty of tools, ebooks and other amazing things to show you exactly what to do. I have been doing this for a little while now and know that some of these products that you will get for free other people are purchasing with a high price tag. All you need to do is look and see for yourself. Clickbank is just going to grow even bigger from this so don’t be surprised if two or three months from now you start hearing a lot more about this opportunity and there isn’t  free memberships available.  

For more details visit: CB Mall

There are many good reasons to use forums

What’s not to like about forums? That’s my question. Forums are probably one of the best weapons in your marketing arsenal besides submitting articles. Forums are fun and interactive, kind of like a chat room on delay, but with purpose. There are so many ways that forums can help your business and your learning experience at the same time. For starters, say you have been banging your head against the wall trying to find the answer to a question you have that isn’t that easy to find in the search engines. Usually because it’s a question that requires a specific answer tailored to you. Sometimes you can search all day and almost, just almost get the question answered, but not quite. That’s where the forum comes in, you can ask questions all day, (with the link to your website  in the signature box provided for all who post) consistently exposing your link to the masses. Now, you do want to make sure that your being legitimate and asking questions that’s either going to help you or someone else. Another words providing value in some shape or form. Another valuable piece of advice that was once given to me is “The only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask.” You can have a lot of very technical questions answered in the forums by a willing participant wanting his URL to be seen. You will also find many tips, tools and ideas just by looking around the different topics and seeing what everyone is discussing. For instance I was in a forum just the other day with a question about something and I was looking around at some other posts while waiting for an answer to my question and just happened to see someones post that had a video tutorial specifically geared toward the issue I wanted resolved.  I’m not done yet, that’s just the beginning. 

Site promotion

I hinted at site promotion in the first paragraph while asking questions. Which is good people see your URL and may click on it because of the informative question you may have had, but what really is going to entice a person to visit your site is answering questions. When you can answer a question with solid information (that is well written and spelled correctly) you have now become the authority on the issue and have made it that more likely to get a visit from the now happy participant whos burning question you just answered. Don’t completely answer the question, you can withhold some information and say for more details please visit the link below or something to that effect.  The good thing is this is a strategy, but at the same time it’s  legitimately providing someone with value. Providing the answers they want. I know almost every marketer that has given me value ( I say almost because I can’t afford to buy everything) has earned my business/my hard earned dollar. They have EARNED it, and I haven’t been disappointed at all.

Where are the questions they’re asking?

First you want to look for the forums with long threads. Then just look and see if you can find a repetitive question that comes up. This is also a good way to find a topic for your next article or blog post (There is also a handy tool called the forum tracker that you can use, you can find this tool in a free ebook called “Forum Marketing Super Tips”, along with some other helpful information, it’s actually where I started learning about forums) for instance if someone where to ask “I am a Clickbank affiliate and haven’t been making what I think I should, could there be a reason?” Now you can turn that into different subjects like:

“Six ways to lose Clickbank Commissions” or

“How to Boost Your Clickbank Commissions”
and so on. You can do this with any question imaginable.

These examples that I just gave you can be used for article topics, a new forum topic, an idea for a product to sell. You could have a product sitting there with resell rights just waiting to be sold and see the question being asked and immediately start setting up a landing page. The possibilities are almost endless.

Finding a Forum

When looking for a forum you want to make sure that it’s getting a good amount of traffic. If not, you may want to make a couple of posts just in case it’s getting picked up by the search engines, but I wouldn’t stay for pie. So find a forum where posts are being made frequently and not once a week. Most forums (or probably all of them by now) have statistics, were you can see the last post, how many replies and how many views that it’s had. Of course you want to find the forum that’s in your niche or based around you topic of expertise or your eventual topic of expertise. You have a couple of different kind of forum formats. I would just say go with what suits you best as long as it has a steady flow of people. Normally your going to have to register in order to post to a forum. You should look for one where you can set up a profile and personalize it somewhat. Also go over the forum rules before you dive in and start swimming around. Check to see what the policy is for posting your URL’s. Some forums may be a little different than others, so if  it’s your first time posting to a forum make sure to check things out first. Test the water so to speak. Actually some forums have a test thread where you can get the feel for the forum. Utilize the features in the forum. Some will have a box you can check to subscribe to a thread and have new posts sent to you via your e-mail account. You can also view the most recent posts at most forums. These are two valuable tools in doing your research. Instead of hanging around and waiting for results when you subscribe to a thread you can move on to something else for the time being. When viewing the most recent posts you can see what is on peoples minds in “The now.” Harvey Segal points out in one of his books that you want to make your post stand out as well. If you see replies all with the same title in sequence, change yours up a little. Word it a little bit different so that it catches the eye.  When it comes to the signature box you want it nice,neat and professional. Just put your full name  (for exposure), two lines of text and your URL. You’ll be able to change this up a little to suit you, just keep it professional is really all you need to keep in mind and it will pay off without a doubt. So, that’s a very basic outline of how to start marketing with forums. As you do it you’ll start picking up on more and more on your own. Just like starting a new job were the person training you shows you basically how it’s done and eventually you improve on it to suit your taste. If you would like more detailed look into forums just click on the link I put in this post earlier were it says “Forum Marketing Tips.” It’s a free ebook and has a few more advanced ideas you may want for future reference.

Getting Targeted traffic isn’t hard you just have to use the best resources.

What are the right places to go to get targeted traffic? I can definitely tell you the chat rooms are not the right place to be. If anyone tells you this hit them with a stick. The resources you want to use for getting traffic are:

1. Websites were you can submit articles or ezines such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com. Search engines love enzines and this is a really good way to get listed at the top if you use strong keywords with good placement. I wouldn’t over do it though, too many can also hurt you. Writing blogs or articles is something you get good at with time. You won’t just jump in and be a master. It takes some time to do until you get good at it. Try this tool for some help to start out if you want. Click Here.
2. Websites were you can write blogs and there are quite a few of these as well. Just do a search for writing blogs. Google also has a place where you can set up a free blog. Search engines will recognise these as well. Leaving comments to other articles or blogs is good too because you can leave your signature with a link in most instances.
3. Websites where  you can submit classified ads. A lot of these sites will let you submit ads for free, but I think it’s better to have a membership at one of them. Adlandpro has a lot of great tools and resources with they’re gold membership. You can also get some exposure and targeted leads from Orangeleads.com.
4. Social media is probably the fastest growing way to get traffic. You can learn a lot of different techniques for social media at InstantVideoEmpire.com. This is a great way to put yourself out there because people aren’t much into reading and it is easier to show people something than it is to tell them. Just imagine if you had to read a book before you started a new job instead of learning hands on.
5. Another way for the more advanced would be to partner with someone. Offer someone with a popular website a service or ebook you’ve written in exchange for some exposure. Even if your giving an ebook away you will still have links placed in it which will direct them back to your product or website. Make absolutely sure you offer something and don’t just expect something. That would be the quickest way to get dropped like a bad habit.  
6. Forums are another great way to get targeted traffic, because you can look for a particular topic to respond to. You can also find out what kind of questions people have and therefore acquiring topics for your blogs and articles. You are able to leave a signature with a link in it to a product or your website (or blog). You can also do this when you leave a comment. A valuable comment and or post by the way. I see some knuckleheads in the forums just plugging product and not providing any value ( I guess they haven’t heard of classified sites).If you have any questions your research just isn’t answering you will most likely find a helpful participant to give you the answer.                   

So as you can see, there are plenty of ways to get targeted traffic without having to spend a dime. If you are persistent with these resources you will eventually be in the top of the search engines and will be making a good living.

    We have all seen these little tricks if you have been searching and looking long enough for a way either to boost you traffic or make more money. These tricks and underhanded strategy’s should make you run for the exit. Read the rest of this entry »