Blogging Archives - My Last 5 Dollars

Make Money Online – How Do You Get Started – Continued

To make money online, we previously discussed two focus points – 1. read as much as you can before you spend any money, and 2. pinpoint what your niche will be so you can be as specific and laser targeted as possible. Here are a few more suggestions as you get started online making money.

3. Organization. Pretty simple concept, but extremely difficult to implement. If you do not plan out your day, you are going to lose. So much time is wasted randomly surfing without any specific plan in mind.

Each day you need to choose 3-5 things you want to accomplish and actually accomplish them! That means they need to be SMART goals.

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

One of my secret weapons in day to day operations is a basic blank notebook. In the morning over coffee, I write down my goals for the day. Some days they are not hard to accomplish, other days they are a bit more labor and time intensive. But as I move through my list of goals, I check them off and have a real sense of accomplishment.

This level of focus is imperative you want to succeed and make money online. You probably are very aware that time can get away from you when surfing the net, and next thing you know your day is shot and you have accomplished absolutely nothing.

In addition to daily goals, it is also important to look ahead and have weekly and monthly goals. For me, these longer term goals are a little less exacting, as I tweak them as I move through the days and week.

In the next post I will give you another tip you should consider when getting started making money online. Follow along and with persistence, focus and patience, you will see success.

To you success and freedom,

Dean

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Make Money Online – How Do You Get Started

To make money online in reality is not that simple.

If you are interested in making money online, and you are just starting out, then read on. What you are about to discover may save you hundreds or thousands of dollars and many wasted minutes and hours!

Every day there are a number of new money-making products released. Unfortunately, most of these turn out to be a waste of time and money. Many are re-hashings of products that have come before, and offer very little help to those who are starting out learning how to make money online.

So before you go out there and get suckered into buying something that does nothing for you, here are some tips to consider.

1. READ, READ, READ – There are a ton of resources online that are FREE that will give you the basics required to make money online. I suggest you sign up for internet marketer newsletters offered by experts in the field. They will provide you with great tips that you can add to your arsenal that will help develop your business.

** Keep in mind that they will try to sell you something – quite often – and you have to carefully choose whether to purchase or not. Many times these products you purchase only give you some basic information (which you readily can find for free with a bit of searching) and not truly give you the whole picture. **

Joining forums and getting actively involved also is a great way to learn more. There are thousands of people like you looking for the answers and forums can really help you find out what works to make money online.

2. Stick to one or a few areas within internet marketing. If you start trying out everything in hopes that something will work you are going to be overwhelmed, spreading yourself too thin, and in the end be no better off that you started.

So choose your niche, and then decide how you want to approach it. Just start with one strategy and work through it. Making mistakes along the way is a GOOD thing, and you learn so much not only from what works, but what DOES NOT work. Don’t let failure bring you down, and instead use those failures to your advantage.

Some people try to do too many things at once and little focus comes from that. You know the saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none”. This is good to heed and with internet marketing it could not me more appropriate.

In the next posting I will continue the list of tips to consider as you enter then world of internet marketing. Slow and steady wins the race, and patience is extremely important. Consider that over 90% of those that look to make money online fail and give up.

Which are you going to be?

To you success and freedom,

Dean

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It Is Not Always Just About You – Care For Your Visitors

When i started blogging and working on my internet endeavors, I spent a lot of time figuring out SEO, working on getting links, looking for tips and tricks to help build traffic, doing pretty much what I needed to do to get people to my sites.

What I soon realized was that it did not matter what I did, if they were coming to my site and got nothing out of it, what was the point? People browse the web for many reasons and are always looking for what they need, the faster the better. If they visit a site and do not see what they need or want, they quickly move on.

You have to engage your visitors. There are a number of ways to do this, but you need to do it, or they will be there and gone before you know it. So what can you do?

1. Give them quality content that no one else does – make it interesting and to the point. Boring them will send them running for the hills.

2. Make sure your site is easy to read and organized. Nothing is worse than trying to navigate yourself around a disorganized site.

3. Allow your visitors to interact – through commenting for one. Give them good content and then ask them for their feedback. But it does not end there – you need to interact with them and respond to the comments. They took the time to comment, you need to take the time to respond.

4. Give something away – free. Yes, free. If you can amaze them with a great free offer, they will come back for more. It might be a program, an ebook, some one on one training. The sky is the limit. The main point is that it needs to be a gesture on your part to take care of their need for something free.

While this is not a complete list, it is a start for you to consider. Think of your site as your own little community. It only thrives as long as you keep it thriving, and do your part to make the visitors welcome. I truly believe that if you do that, and visitors become repeat visitors, the rest will take care of itself.

To your success and freedom,

Dean

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Your “Stick-with-it-Ness” is Paramount

Internet marketing has “struggle” built-in for most of us. It is a fact that very few are able to achieve success, and most throw in the towel. The problem is, they throw in the towel way to early. Are you one ready to throw in the towel?

Maybe you choose to end your IM career for financial reasons, or maybe you just don’t see success fast enough for your liking. Time constraints can weigh heavily on many and can bring your great intentions and expectations to an abrupt halt. Everyone that quits will have their own reasons, but I have to stress that it does not have to be the end of your IM career.

Before you choose to end it all, understand that those things you read about “over night success and instant riches” are for the most part, hogwash. Yes, there are a few that document their 5 and 6 figure sales, but what they do not tell you is the massive amount of time consumed over the months and years getting to that place. They persevered, and because they stuck with it, could finally reap the rewards of their efforts.

Someone once said that if you have a vision and belief in your vision, all will fall into place. What at first might seem like forever, is realized as a journey through the life of your vision. The drive to succeed comes first by having the clear and growing vision of where you want your IM business to go. And above all – don’t give up.

If you can be consistent, and work at your business on some form of regular schedule – large or small – the consistency is what keeps you in the game. Maybe for you that is one blog post a day, or every other day. Or maybe your goal each week is to contact and gather “x” number of followers. Think of a flower that starts as a seemingly insignificant seed. There is no magic bean that, once planted, bursts out of the ground and is instantly beautiful. Regular watering, sunlight and nurturing are needed for the flower to grow and develop. The “stick-with-it-ness” toward your IM ventures is key.

So start with that. Before you can grow your business, you need the right mindset and your vision as defined by you. Think about how you envision your business over the next week, month, year and 5 years. With some sort of direction in place, you will be more accepting of the trials, tribulations, and strife that will come along your road to success. And they will come along. It is not about what is happening in the moment – it is what happens over time. If you are flying blind, without a vision, you are dead in your tracks.

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The Basics – Finding A Theme

Okay, you have a host for your website and have registered your website name. The next step is to publish your website on the internet.

Finding a theme for your website can be a very daunting task. There are literally thousands of website themes out there, and finding on you like can take hours!

A couple of options to start your search include:

Go to http://wordpress.org and browse the free themes that are available.
Search google for something like “free wordpress themes”, and you will be presented with numerous websites.

I warn you now – you could end up spending hours searching through themes. Keep in mind that sometimes what you see in the demo or pictures is only one example. Read the details to find out what aspects of the theme’s design you will have control over.

To help you come to a decision, think about these few pointers:

What color scheme is appealing?
Is the theme too busy and distracting?
Does the theme suit the niche you are focusing on?
Is the theme supported and give you access to documentation?
As your website develops, will the theme allow for growth and development?
Is the theme search engine optimized (SEO) and search engine friendly?
Is the theme designer reputable? Some themes hide callback links and other malicious code in the design, so be careful.

Bottom line. Do not spend (or waste) too much time looking for a theme. The more time you spend, the more blurred your choices are going to get.

Here are a few themes that I recommend (free and premium):

WordPress.org’s default theme, Twenty Ten
The Morning After, by WooThemes
Pagelines themes
Suffusion, by Aquoid Themes
Atahualpa, by Bytes For All
Flexibility Theme, Advantus Media
Theme Junkie themes (one I am using)