Then again….

Let’s say you have a successful business or maybe you are just working a day job and want to dabble at night.  What ways are there to make money?

This is not exclusively Internet Income – I am going to mention some things like speaking and books, but the funny thing about those is that my speaking leads usually come via my marketing speaker website.  And my book would have never been so easy and profitable had it not been for print on demand and amazon as my main book store.  So even those areas that are not direct internet money making strategies can still be influenced by them.

Here are some other ways to add revenue to your life or business:

1. Create a membership site – yes, this is one of the ways I make money.
2. Build up a newsletter following and sell products to them.
3. Blogging – Yes, you can make money lots of ways with blogging.
4. Consulting and Development
5. Webinars
6. Affiliate Income
7. Set up an eCommerce Store and sell eBooks, Etc.
8. Set up your own Reseller Program for Web Tools

These are just some of the revenue sources I have.  Some are very small and some do very well for me.  And yes, I do have my main business that is doing very well, but it is not that much more work to add many of these things to my daily effort.  In fact, many of these things not only produce side income for me but they also help sell the main company.

It can include video, articles and any other kind of content that someone can create to help them be found and encourage people to take action.

Inbound Marketing is simple for people that have been doing Internet Marketing in the past, but can seem like a lot of voodoo to someone that has only ever had up a basic webpage.  Let me spell out how to do Inbound Marketing in a simple, step by step plan.

1. Have a great call to action.  When someone lands on your website, they are not necessarily going to call you or buy your product.  Create a good call to action – maybe with a free give away – that will collect information and turn your visitor into a lead.  For example, I offer a free lead generation course.
2. If you know your call to action is good, then you need to start building bridges from the big Internet world into your call to action.  This is a critical step:  Identify the problem your product solves and think about what people are searching on to create content that will rank high and attract attention.  Do keyword research to find those words that are not too difficult to get but have good traffic.
3. Create a business blog and hire someone to do blog writing if you cannot do it.  This is going to be your inbound marketing engine that will generate a steady flow of leads for you.  Make sure your business blog software is designed for automatic seo and is 100% ROI focused.
4. Create Content Often – The search engines love fresh, relevant content.  If you set it up and forget it, you will not be very likely to have an Inbound Marketing success.  The trick is to keep building and growing your effort, which is why business blogging is the best Inbound Marketing technique today.
5. Know your sales funnel – Leads are just where you start.  Make sure you know how your online lead generation feeds into the sales process and do not drop the ball on leads that are coming in daily once things get going.

Find Out More: Inbound Marketing with Business Blogs

But what are you really talking about?

You are talking about the purpose of your business. Why does your business exist?

Then, each action you take in your business must have a purpose that supports the overall purpose of your business.

So when you buy an advertisement in a magazine, you have to ask yourself, “Does this ad spend contribute to the purpose of our business?”

Now if your business is a for-profit business, the obvious purpose of your business is going to be to create wealth and security for the owners and employees. Seems obvious, right?

But think about all the problems going on today. Most of those problems were created by over reaching and over spending. Some companies were buying things because their competitors were, others were looking at short term wealth creation at the expense of long term wealth creation.

In every instance, ask yourself what the purpose of your action is. How does it contribute to purpose of the business? If it is not crystal clear, it probably is not something that you should be doing

Instead, understand what you want and find a specialist in that area.  For example, there are some great Akron Ohio Marketing Firms that do many things very well.  But a marketing firm that does everything is either going to be looking for big clients with big budgets – or they are not going to be good at everything that they do.

That is why knowing what you want to achieve is important before you start shopping around for a marketing firm.  If you are looking for a web and SEO expert, then Buzzoodle is the best choice.  If you are looking for lead generation via the web, Buzzoodle is the best choice.

If you are looking for a specialist in Direct mail or print, Buzzoodle is a terrribe choice.

It is good to work with someone locally.  In fact, I am writing this post just ten minutes before running off to see one of my local, Akron based clients.

But before you pick a local marketing firm, make sure you know what you want and make the firm prove to you that they have the skills and expertise to get the outcome you desire.

1. Private Sales Portal – Use Wishlist Member to create a private sales portal for your sales team or for your affiliates.
2. Course – You can develop a one time course using WP Wishlist Member.  It does not have to be a monthly thing – and you can later upsell items as they stay involved in the course.
3. Intranet – WP Wishlist Member is a great way to create a simple intranet for your organization.
4. Upsell – I use Wishlist Member to manage a free membership site – but the free site is not open to the public, it is an upsell for another product where the customers that join via my reseller account get bonus training.

I am sure there are even more uses for Wishlist member that you can think of.  Feel free to leave ideas in the comments area.

Working with a specific company in a specific niche, it is much easier and faster to get great results.

[Get More Waterproofing Leads from the Web]

Why?  In the case of basement waterproofing it is easy to target your prospects.  You need to define your target geographic region and then use Inbound Marketing to draw people that need your service to you.

The Basement Waterproofing Marketing results that we have been getting are great, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Any industry that addresses a specific solution to a specific problem that people are doing searches on and researching is going to get great marketing results in the form of targeted traffic and lead generation.

Granted, Basement Waterproofing is not the sexiest market.  However, it is a great example of how to pick your niche, understand your value to your prospects and make yourself easy to find.  It works like magic.

However, it is important to remember that business blogging software is only a software system to manage your articles.  You need to write regularly around topics that are important to your target audience.

If you do this well, then you will experience some traffic to your business blog.

But traffic does not make you money.

You need to have a strategy to either make money via affiliates and advertising, or you need to do lead generation for your business.

A lot has been written about how to generate affiliate income in this way.  But what is less often written about is how to create real leads for your business from a business blog.

Here are some ways to do lead generation.

1. Download a white paper – Offer free white papers or reports to visitors in exchange for their contact information.
2. Autoresponders – You can use autoreponder tools to create automatic email courses or sales funnels.
3. CRM Integration – If you use a good CRM, it will have web forms.  You can use these forms on your business blog to invite people to schedule a free consultation or demo.
4. Social Media – Make following you in Twitter, FaceBook or LinkedIn easy.  These people will keep getting regular messages from you if you use the tools, and some may become leads eventually.
5. Webinars – Invite people to sign up for your webinar or teleseminar.
6. Video Download – Very common now – people will happily add an email to a form to watch a video with a great tip or secret in it.

There are many more ways to do lead generation with your business blog software, but these are some of the most common.  Just remember, when you get a business blog set up, that is your starting point for lead generation and writing.  It is not the final product.

Only a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to someone that knows Ron Finklestein as well and she compared him to Dr. Phil.

Ron is a Tough Love kind of business advisor that cares more about your results than about your feelings.  Something most of us need, if you ask me.

So is Ron Finklestein the next Napoleon Hill or the business version of Dr. Phil?  Maybe he is just Ron Finklestein.

If you have been in business for a while, you have heard the various MLM pitches.  I have never personally done one before, and as soon as I hear MLM my eyes glaze over.

However, lets appreciate a good marketing structure when there is one.  Go over to the iLearning Global site and take a look at how they have structured their MLM compensation.  It really is brilliant.

They structure it so that your best case scenario is to have only five people below you.  Then you get paid a bigger amount if you help them build their business.  At first it seems counter intuitive.  Usually you get paid more for something you sell directly and less for the people below you.  In this case, there is a huge upside to helping the people below you build their business.

I do not know about you, but for me the idea of helping five people market their business is much better than selling like crazy to lots of people.

There is one other thing that makes this effort impressive to me.  They have attracted many high quality trainers into adding content to the online learning system.  The monthly cost for the training you get is very impressive.  Several people I have talked to already have said they will join because it will save them thousands of dollars per year and give them more diverse training.  Of course, these are people that spend money on self improvement.

This is not a sales pitch.  I recommend you look at how they have structured their payout and then rethink how you are organizing your affiliate program or MLM effort.  If it turns out this kind of opportunity interests you, contact me.  If not, at least lets appreciate a markting work of art.  Anything that made a skeptic like me join an MLM has to be great.  iLearningGlobal.tv is very interesting.

Find our more about iLearningGlobal

#1: Alltop Virtual Assistant Blog

Our Virtual Buzz Assistant blog has been recognized as a leading Virtual Assistant Resource by Alltop.com.  This is a big success because it will generate much higher traffic and higher online respect, which translates into better SEO and a bigger audience.

#2: iLearning Global

Despite the fact that it is an MLM, I decided to join and promote this great product.  I joined Monday night, and by Wednesday I’d started appearing on Google in the #10 slot, 1st page, for the search iLearning Global.  I revamped an existing site that we were not doing much with.  Liquid Learning, which is our parent company.

#3: Marketing Mastery Advisory Board

Last night was the second meeting of my Akron area Marketing Mastery Advisory Board.  After the first meeting a month ago, one of the members went back after a discussion within the group on Google PPC and revised is campaigns to be profit oriented.  After only one meeting he is now saving over $1,000 per month and increasing his results.  I measure my success by how much I help other people succeed, and this was great to hear.

Did you have some big successes recently?  Go ahead and share them below.

When I launched the Virtual Buzz Assistant Network, I knew I would use a WordPress Blog for the marketing front end.  WordPress is too powerful as a marketing tool, and I do not know of anything that compares to it.

However, to manage my community I wanted really good membership management software.  I wanted to keep the cost low because I did not know how the community would grow.  So I started playing with open-source solutions for membership sites/learning sites.

#1 Moodle – I liked Moodle, but I was putting in a lot of hours to customize it.  Also, there were a lot of features but I was not sure what features would ultimately matter to the members.

#2 Ning – To simplify things, I set up a version two of the network on Ning.  While setup was easy, it was hard to customize elements and was not easy to lay out training materials.  It was far more of a community-only kind of portale.

#3 DontNetNuke – Initially I really liked DotNetNuke because it was easy to set up, had powerful features and could be customized.  I bought a nice template and relaunched the membership site in DotNetNuke, only to find that the next version of the browsers was doing funny things with the layout and most people were not using many of the features in there anyway.

#4 Litmus – I experiemented with Litmus, but decided against it because of the higher cost of ownership and the lack of community features, such as a message board.  (Athough they are adding that feature)

#5 WordPress - I found myself coming full circle to appreciate just how powerful wordpress is for hosting a community site.  I added a message board plugin and a membership management plugin and now have a site that I am much more happy with.  It is steam-lines and easy to update.  It has fewer features, but I found from those past experiences that those features do not get used anyway.

Now that I have a great template and understanding of how to use WordPress for a members site, I am thrilled with the possibilities.  If you are thinking about launching a membership site, I hope this summary helps you avoid the many months of research and experimenting I needed to go through so that I could finally realize the obvious.

To make the whole thing easy, use WP-Wishlist.

How to Avoid Costly Marketing Mistakes

#1 Have a Maketing Plan

I do not mean a big plan, but I do mean a clear plan.  If you do not know what you are trying to achieve, you will not know what marketing is working.

#2 Don’t Buy Marketing that Finds You

I dabble with new things occasionally.  But I have NEVER made money when marketing found me instead of the other way around.  For example, I had someone cold call me and offer to sell me ad space in Sky Magazine.  Originally he wanted $2,500.  I told him if he had any remainder space I would pay $500.  He ended up having the remainder space so I gave it a try.  Result?  Book sales dropped that month because money was diverted from the strategy to a random ad that people could not take action on.

Another example is Northwest Publishing.  A salesman walked into our office and talked us into an ad that would appear in a bunch of restaurants.  We decided to try it for one of our clients.  The end result was that the company is fraudulant, traps you into a contract and does not run the ad you send to them (3 times, because they kept losing it.)  If I did the research, I would have seen that they do not have a website and go by a variety of names including, Table Topics, Northwest Publishing and The Trivia Pages.  Lots of smoke and mirrors to get money.  The sales guy was good, though.

The news here is that I was smart enough to hedge my bets and only pay what I could afford to lose.  But the reality is that when marketing finds me and not the other way around, it is always a loss.  Never let the marketing find you.

#3 Decide what you want and go find it

If you have a good marketing plan, you know the audiences you are trying to reach.  Then you start researching and finding the best places to reach those people.  It could be Sky Magazine or an ad on a blog, but the point is that you are going to be much more successful with marketing if you chose the marketing and the marketing does not chose you.

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