Day 30 - Help pay it forward

How can I help you? How can we help each other?

Of course, you probably knew this was coming.

It's not the end, it's the beginning.

You now have a window into my soul, as it were. And into the soul of the universe, if this rings true for you.

The universe is built on open-handed help.

As you give, you will receive - but giving happens first.

And if you want more income from your own online activities, it is just logical that you would work to help as many people as you can to become successful and profitable with their own online activities.

You have my email. I'll answer any questions you have, as long as you have them. If I don't know, I'll work to find out for you. After all, learning is a 2-way street - the teacher is learning as he teaches.

I'm not telling you what to do, but I've given enough hints already that it should be a little obvious.

What I would suggest you do is to start over and read The Online Sunshine Plan again. Then study each day of this blog again.

Once it clicks for you, then so should all life.

And success will be unstoppable, whatever you attempt.

So I wish you the very best at anything and everything you attempt.

Good Hunting!

Robert

Day 09 - Affiliate Programs: Good, Bad, and Remunerative

Hello again.

Today's topic is Affiliate programs. Figured it's about time we tackled this by the horns.

I went through the entire book and see that this is an omitted section. It's touched on, but not worked up directly. So - relief is yours - no chapter to study today as preps.

When and Why Affiliates?

The purpose of affliates is to get additional sales people to pitch your products/services. They can cover more ground than your own two hands and feed can. They use their resources to promote your product, in return for some percentage of your price.  So affiliates come with an overhead - but they are getting you sales you wouldn't normally have.

The other side of this coin is that you can build up some income by finding and pushing an affiliate product which is valuable. This is how you can get paid while you learn.

The logic of this is simple:

• You are producing content anyway to forward your own purpose of delivering value to people.
• You might as well get paid for telling people about a good product or service which aligns with your purpose.
• And you can meanwhile learn from any effective affiliate marketing program, as the good ones will regularly be sending you special offers which you can promote.
• So you learn while you get paid for producing content.
• As you get better producing content, then you get paid more.
• Ultimately, you've both had the time to perfect your own product or service and also learned how to enable others to do affiliate sales for you (or signed up with some company that does - like writing ebooks for Smashwords).

Now while you are just starting out, you'll probably want to get into product- or service-lines which give you the maximal leverage for your time and money. Best return on your investment.

To get this best return, you want 2 things:

1. Offer services or products which people must renew, restock, or re-supply.
2. Offer services or products which enable others to sell under you, where you also can get paid for their work.
   

In this, there are a few - "evergreen markets", they are called:

• Food (and food supplements, medicines fall into this)
  
• Clothing
• Housing

- - - -

• Children's items
• Pet items
• Insurance

- - - -

• Entertainment
• Education
• Enlightenment
  

The above lists are roughly in order of how people will pay for and buy stuff. They also are in the order of greatest return.  As you can get people to subscribe on a continuing basis (such as Insurance), then you can earn a "piece of the action" on a continuing basis.

One sale gives potentially a lifetime of income. Get several of these and you have what is called "autopilot" income. You'll also see this in simple things, such as where a person continually re-news his domain name and his ISP hosting. (As in Domain Samurai - which has a good affiliate program.)

If you can become an affiliate on that chain, you'll get a piece of that action as long as that person continues to renew these services. And is why people who sell Insurance (and who own Insurance companies) become very well off indeed.

While fashions and food needs change, children grow up, and pets get older - people will usually stay with their same Insurance companies for years - and will often expand their coverage to include other items they own. (No, I haven't researched Insurance companies to find out which has a good affiliate program - but thanks for asking. Now this starts to make sense, yes?)

By supporting companies which have affiliate programs, you can get people funneled through your site and link to buy these programs. And then you get a continuing income based on those sales.

Oh No -- Not "Network Marketing"....

And this is where "Network Marketing" comes in. Regardless of the bad press it gets, the principle is to have people selling under you which gives you a piece of their action as well as your own sales. You would prefer to get programs which are at least 2-tier affiliate programs - meaning you can sign up people and get commissions from their sales as well, and they in turn can sign up a person under them for their own commissions, and so on. (And yes, Insurance Companies utilize this same principle from top to bottom in their organizations, as well as any sales company or sales section. People get paid by their production, but also take a piece of the pie of those salespeople under them who are producing.)

My book, Online Sunshine Plan (OSP) deals with making an "online" living in general terms. The underlying basic is that the Internet is built on information and usable content. The search engines are evolved from helping people find out what they want by constantly studying what people want and how they want it presented to them.

What ranks on the search engine findings are simply the content which best answers the question being asked. Google published guidelines for these years ago and simply following their outline gets the best results.
You find problems people have, then find an affiliate program which solves those problems. Providing content in a way that the search engines can use - you get a large number of people to visit your site and click on those links to visit those affiliate programs. When they buy, you get credit for the sale and a commission payment (or in Amazon's parlance - advertising fees.)

All that work in OSP deals with the Internet as a content-driven scene. However, it's only one of several ways to get visitors to opt-in to your program or someone else's (which you are writing/blogging/videoing about.)

There are  5 main ways to earn income online:

1. Organic SEO - being at the top of the rankings and so getting search engine traffic to your page
2. Classified Ads - driving to a landing page for conversion to sales.
3. PPC - also driving to a landing page for conversion to sales.
4. Email - biggest app on the Internet, you develop a stable of readers and provide them good content and opportunities.
5. Social Networking - Facebook is a prime example right now. Engaging in chats can lead to off-line conversations where you can personally pitch your offer. (Takes considerable time-investment.)

All of these have minimal finances invested if you know what you are doing. Mostly you are investing time. And as you get better at writing and posting online, you'll get improved results (income).

The reason affiliate programs are easier to get started than developing your own product is that these companies are doing the research to create effective landing pages. (Nothing like spending years perfecting a product or service which wasn't ever an item people really need in their lives.)

Affiliate Products of Mention

The programs I recommend all have affiliate links and can give you some income, although it's been spotty for me as I'd rather do research than promote their products all the time. Pushing any of the 6 that I lay out below will give you some regular on-going income, plus the ability to put affiliates under you and increase your income from their sales. (Win-win-win.)

Here's the short list, though I'll tell you more of why these work below (and note all the affiliate links, as well as how they are set up):

Top of the list right now: Shaklee (http://order-online-today.myshaklee.com/us/en/whyshaklee.html) and a fairly complete set of pages for you to do your due diligence on this company - with lots of videos: http://order-online-today.myshaklee.com/us/en/about.html
SBI - http://affiliates.sitesell.com/limited_offer0.html - they have an incredible amount of training offered, which push their time-proved site-building services.

Synnd - Social Media Marketing - http://socialmediascience.com/affiliates/?p=worstell&w=afflink - these guys are a leader in this area for serious SEO users.

Silva Life Systems (plus other self-help/enlightenment programs) - http://mindvalley.hasoffers.com/signup/1081 - lots of programs an regular new releases for people.

Peak Potentials - Millionaire Mind Intensive / T. Harv Eker - http://peakstrategicalliancetools.com/cmd.php?af=mmi8806&p=1 - their Millionaire Mind Intensive or http://www.peakambassador.com/cmd.php?af=mmi8806&p=fbw-speedwealth -Their current Facebook webinar, which is a good informative deal on its own. Sign up as an affiliate at peakpotentials.com, but you'll want to get on their mailing list to see how they do things.

And here's an odd little one I just recently found, which is a good study of how network marketing works: Magnetic Sponsoring - http://robertworstell.magneticsponsoringonline.com - once you buy one of their products (about $30), then you are automatically in on their affiliate scene. And they give 7 free video lessons on how network marketing works in general. And the ongoing emails from them are a hoot - entertaining and educational as to what good copywriting (mostly) consists of (though my own style wouldn't be so brash - or so frequent.)

Another, found only a few days ago, is Domain Samurai, as I've told you about before. 2-tier affiliate, but no real work at promoting their product - so it's not rated well on the scale below.

In most of these cases above, I've given you the straight affiliate sign-up link if they have one. But do look around their sites and see what you can find out - sign up for newsletters and so on (you can always opt-out.)

- - - -

10 Ways to Accurately Pick Affilate Programs That Do Earn You Extra Income Online

Yes, this is opening a can of worms. People who have been burned by affiliate schemes in the past - not to mention Network- and what passes for "Internet" Marketing - will be heading toward the door or hitting their browser's back button right about now.

Because about 97% of all the programs out there are utter crap. Worthless. Shinola. Scams.

True. And you know it.


So what makes a good one? And which ones should you invest your hard-earned money and valuable spare time into?

Let's look at what you would want to buy as a product - if you were the customer (an acid test):

1. Does it actually have a valuable product which solves  some problem you have?

2. Does it actually give more in return than you expected?

3. Is it ethical - does it actually improve the culture you live in? (Could you easily tell your mother or partner what you just emptied your savings account for?)

4. Is this product or service you can keep buying for the rest of your life - because it keeps helping you? (Like food, vitamins, insurance...)

5. Has the company been in business for a long time and doing well even during recessions?

Now, given that this is a product which is high-quality and useful, and you'd tell your friends, family, and anyone else who asks you about it - let's now look at how you could earn extra income doing just that. Is it worth becoming an affiliate sales outlet?

6. Does this company have an affiliate program which pays a substantial return?

7. Does this company enable you to put 2nd tier, or even more sales people under you who can in turn sell (and make you even more commissions)?

8. Does this company put out regular helpful marketing material which helps you get these offers out to people who are looking for this solution?

9. Does this company offer substantial training to help you succeed in selling their program?

10. Does this company take care of product delivery and returns? Has effective online presence and converting landing pages?

Those 10 points will tell you everything about whether that company is a fly-by-night scene, or will give you effective return on your investment of both time and money. Obviously, we don't want to get into something which will tie up either time or money which we can't get a decent return out of.

(One scam I was suckered into had a fee of about 1/4 year's salary, and some 20 hours a week going through their training - and when it failed, they would say you didn't put enough time and effort into it. Not "their fault" you failed. Actual success rate was around 1 in 10,000...)

Just to keep a regular job you are already putting more than 40 hours in - not counting commutes, which is a sizable hidden drain on your take-home pay just in fuel prices alone.  Having a regular job is often the worst example of how something cannot be leveraged, isn't something you'd recruit other people to join, and isn't something you'd want to do for the rest of your life.

I've found maybe 6 product lines which are effective and rank highly on this scale above.

Company	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Shaklee - health supplements	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*
SiteBuildIt! - site building, online marketing	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*
Synnd - social media marketing	*	*	*		*	*	*		*	*
Silva Life Systems - meditation and clearing	*	*	*		*	*	*			*
Peak Potentials - Millionaire Mind Intensive	*	*	*			*		*	*	*
Magnetic Sponsoring - network marketing training	*	*	*				*	*	*	*

The results:

10 stars - Shaklee, SiteBuildIt!
8 stars - Synnd
7 stars - Silva Life Systems, Peak Potentials, Magnetic Sponsoring


This doesn't say these are the last word in affiliate products you can try. This does give you a sensible 10-point approach to figuring out which ones are the best. Practically, you can find affiliate programs in almost every product line. Just type in [product line phrase] and then the word "affiliate" after it. The checklist above helps you with finding programs which are more than just "making money online". 

They give you the chance to find real products which you can enjoy putting content online to promote - because you are helping people improve their lives with every purchase. In some of these, just reading the materials alone can give them a life-changing experience. And really good programs, in my experience, offer substantial free material which shows their value and excites interest in purchasing the full product.

Additional note is that the best affiliate programs have a substantial library of data you can use to educate yourself on how to promote, how to convert leads, how to keep yourself enthusiastic - lots of free training. Because their success is based on how well you succeed...
 

- - - -

Assignment:

1. Go over the evergreen product lines above - with a modern popular (or tabloid) magazine to hand (or study the ads on TV or in Internet sidebars for awhile). Which do you find represented?

2. Visit http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ and search around for various affiliate products. Note those which have multi-tier affiliate structures as well as those with continuing payments. Do some rough calculations to see how many sales of what you would need to make your own income goals.

Freebie:

This week it's Inside the Mind of Winners - a nice little inspirational essay collection which should be a nice reference to come back to now and again. (Or even offer as a giveaway on your own site...)

Day 05 - Insider's Guide to Marketing Research

Good marketing research pays off well.

Now we are in the thick of it.

We are still on section III of An Online Sunshine Plan - Market Research (pg 115-154, sans Articles).

As a note: review the three main essays on this in that book -

• Where to look for your keyword research - Part I - Basics (pg 141)
• Where to look for your keyword research - Part 2 - The Real World (pg 144)
• Where's the money? I'm from Missouri - show  me. (pg 146)

These cover a very distilled research cycle and how to go about it. (Hint: Get a 3-hole punch and some binders to hold it all.)

Marketing Definition - Revisited

As covered on that first page of Section III - "Marketing" is simply finding and building markets. A "market" is anywhere people exchanges goods and services. Anywhere.

This, of course, plays right into our hands, as we are interested in earning extra income by leveraging our online investments (time, money - but mostly time.)

Market research is NOT: "Look for a niche, find a niche product, promote that product, get the sale/get the commission." That is just one step shy of a scam. Impersonal, and non-rewarding personally. It will simply tire you out.

The other reason (besides having endless content inspiration you can tap) is to work out your purpose/bliss first is so that you can stay involved and interested in what you are doing. Money has to go somewhere - your wealth has to be for a reason. (And that's not good enough  to be able to "buy stuff and show it off.")  There is no reason you can't enjoy every single moment of every single day and also be richly rewarded for your efforts. It's not work, it's a passion you are following.

Market research, you may recall from yesterday, is figuring out

• Who
• wants What
• Where and 
• for How Much.

Who - is market demographics.
What - is product selection.
Where - is product production and delivery.
How Much - is pricing.

In all of these, as covered in the book, you want to look for a viable scene which matches what you are most interested in doing to provide real value to those who find you.

Demographics can be simply found by looking at Quantcast.com or MSN adCenter Labs

Product selection can be studied by looking up Ebay, Amazon, Clickbank, About.com, etc. (see pg 148).

As we are dealing with affiliate products, you can see that they will take care of delivery and guarantees. Some sites, like Clickbank, will also show a quality score - which is the rate of returns for that product.

Note: Frankly, I don't recommend settling for Clickbank or Commission Junction or Amazon when you do adopt an affiliate product. Reasons - mostly in how they treat their affiliates. Clickbank has a nasty habit of taking back commissions if you don't meat their minimum every month, bit by bit. Commission Junction will simply dump your membership after 6 months with no sales. Amazon - unless you are pushing big-ticket items (not books) gives you only tiny payments.

But these three tell you what type of products people are buying and what to look for (and look out for).

In a later post, I'm going to give you a fuller breakdown later on what makes a good affiliate product, along with my own recommendations of a handful which have tested out over years. Right now we are looking through our Market Research to find a community which is viable and you can give value to.

An article you should review is on page 177 of An Online Sunshine Plan. Charles Heflin is quoted where he gives more steps to study the community in order to best serve it. His steps: Observe, Gather, Reward, Engage, Seek - and you are already doing these in life, so his article simply enables you to apply this to your online income production.

Paid Tool

Again, I go to Market Samurai to get a lot of this homework done faster.

Unfortunately, their "Samurai Dojo" doesn't go into much detail here about the tools in their product. 

There is one lesson, which tells you the "commerciality" of a keyword phrase.

But consider this screenshot:

(click to enlarge)

This is their "monetization" page. "Be Healthy" came up as a keyword, so searching in Amazon found a nifty little set of products you can promote. Note that if you sold the Cuisinart Griddler, you'd get a tidy sum (take about 4-8% of that price).

If your passion was cooking, then this would be a nice review page to do with an affiliate payment for every sale.  However, the much cheaper coffee filters are in much higher demand - and would require much more research to get that figured out.

They also allow you to search from  ClickBank, Commission Junction, and PayDotCom.

Again: you start out with your own best interests at heart - your purpose/bliss - and find what community already exists which you can serve, find out their keywords, find out what they are like, find the products they are buying.

Once you settle on that community, then you can go to the next phase - which is figuring out how to tell them what they want to hear - which is not politics (although they undoubtedly got it from marketing) - it's so you can help them improve their lives by offering and delivering true value.

- - - -

Here's an ebook which really builds on what we covered today: "Clickin' It Rich" by Michael Campbell. He used to sell it, then gave it away, and now it's hard to find as he's only dealing directly with a select group of clients.

He'll take you quite beyond what we deal with here and starts to give you an inkling of what is needed to make extra income online. Whole picture stuff.

Assignment today: catch up on your reading above.

And it would be smart to go ahead and get your binders, yellowpads, and 3-hole punch to start collecting and organizing all this data for your niche.

(Also - catch up on your comments below. It's key to be writing something every day as part of learning the discipline of creating content.)

Day 04 - Why is Market Research Dreaded?

You'd think that something so fascinating would have people lining up to start it.

With the right tools, I can stay on the trail of discovery for hours and even days.

But missing adequate tools, it becomes arduous - with results that are sketchy at best.

Before we get into todays' content, let me say that this is based on Section III of The Online Sunshine Plan - which is a hint to review this as part of your studies today. (But just as there is a lot in this section, we are also not going to attempt to cover this subject in a single day's lesson.)

Let's see how we've gotten here:

• To make extra income online, you have to provide something valuable to exchange with someone else. 
• You need to promote solutions to people's problems. 
• And you have to give good content so people can trust your solution and ask for more information (become "leads").

There are 3 myths that I mention in this section of that book:

1.  "Markets are impersonal." Truth is that they are very personal and the more interaction you have with your prospective buyers, the better will be your sales and income.
2. "Customers and Consumers." There are no customers (literally means people of habit) or consumers (people who use things up.) There are really only clients - people who you service for as long as they need your help.
3. "Competition." Also doesn't exist in actuality. There are levels of creativity - and if you don't have enough income, you can become more creative in finding valuable solutions to offer. Nature is abundant. Only people create "competitors" so they can have a game to play, figuring that they need opponents.

I continue (pg 117 by now) to logically define marketing as an extension of the Golden Rule. The subject is summarized by the statement that you have to give in order to receive.

So what, then, is marketing research? 

A nutshell definition: Finding who has problems and how they talk about it so you can provide solutions in a way they can easily understand.

In that statement, you see that we are working to find out:

Who are the potential buyers.
What they are looking for.
What phrases they used to describe it.
Where they are using these phrases to find it.

Those phrases are known as "keyword phrases" or "keywords".  They define what people are looking for. 

Now, how to find these keyword phrases has free tools and paid tools. And the ones I recommend in the book aren't (now) the ones I use. KeywordResearchPro quit working when they had a major Google Algorithm change. RankTracker has an annual payment (plus add-on's which also cost you), and is mostly good for tracking your site ranking. Otherwise, the tools they offer are based on older Internet traffic theories, which have either changed or been superceded in the last 2 years.

(I favor buying a tool once, and ensuring that the company who offers it supports continued development. Continuing subscriptions need to be really worth it. (Other than my Internet provider and site hosting, I have just one service I pay for. Food, clothing, and housing and cel phone are different - we're talking about our online business activities...)

Free tools to find keywords. 

Mostly, these come from Google. Almost everything else online either uses Google as a backend, or has been bought up and now doesn't work. Not that Google has a monopoly, but rather that they are far more effective.

1st Google tool: Adwords Keyword Tool
(Go ahead and open that up in another window so you can look at it. ) This was designed around people looking for keywords to use in their advertising. But it's far more versatile than that. Enter a search term and you'll see lots of columns of data. And you can export these to a spreadsheet (CSV) and play around with the data offline.

Key columns to notice: 
Global Monthly Searches - how many searches are done for a given term. Doesn't mean people - it means how many times this phrase is looked for. If there aren't very many, then it's probably not an easy phrase to earn income with.
Approximate CPC - tells whether other people consider it worth running an ad for. If you have .05 or less, it's basically not. (You can set the filters at the top and eliminate those where no one is running ads for them.) If people are paying money to run ads, they figure that they can get that money back with sales. Means you can make income here.
Local Search Trends - shows whether its a fad, has seasonal issues, or is a regularly searched phrase. Lack of any trends usually means the volume of searches is too low to register.

The next free tool you'll need is to simply look up those top words in Google search. Unfortunately, this is a one-by-one approach. The good part of this is that you can find out who the top-linked sites are. Plug all this data into a spreadsheet and you'll have a lot of your market research right there.

What you want to find out is what Google says are how many sites exist with that keyword phrase in them - in some type or kind of combination. Remember that while others refer to this as "competition", you can also use this number to see the probability of how many sites are actually search engine optimized. (Rough rule of thumb - less than 1%. So just knock off 2 zero's to start with.)

However, it gets even wilder - those Charles Heflin links I gave you in the book (page  128) will show you how you are really only having to be interested in the first 2 or 3 pages, since the rest aren't even using your exact phrase.

Meaning that if you optimize your page well, you will pretty easily rank at the top for that phrase (well, we have some additional tools - both free and paid - which can cement your top standings.)

The thing to worry about is the SEO'd pages. And in the book, I have you Web1Marketing had a tool to check "all in title", "all in anchor" and "exact phrase", which would give you a good indicator if those pages were optimized. Unfortunately, this page now produces no results for Google. (Meaning the algorithm was changed - or that page was blocked by Google.) But you can do these searches on your own. Check out Google Guide (http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html) and find the operators you can prefix your searches with.

You can string these operators together with "AND" in between, but be warned that Google will shut you down after just a few searches like this. (Spammers have been there, done that ahead of you.)

All told, it's possible to do this for free, but time consuming and frustrating. You may need to wait hours between a few searches (and I have, many times.)

A word on Wordtracker. Their free tool isn't worth it, and their paid tool costs too much for what you get from it - because it is again, a subscription. IMHO. Tried it, didn't get the results I needed.

Paid Tools. 

And I finally found a replacement. (Told you I was doing this for hours and days at a time...) It's a one-time purchase and they keep improving it. It's called Market Samurai. (And it has a free intro version you can try out...) They've signed up for various professional-level/corporate API's to keep their tool running. Those API's are prohibitive for an individual or small start-up.

They have substantial pages on Keyword Research, which I recommend to you as part of the homework assignment today. Because they explain things with videos and also provide a transcript - doing this so well, that it's ridiculous for me to try to reinvent this wheel. (And did I say their training is free?!?)

Even though they discuss their tool through out, the simple points they present are very basic.

Introduction to Keyword Research
The Golden Rules of finding remunerative keywords

Now, skip to the next lesson we need - which concerns how to find pages which are already SEO'd and which are ranking for some reason with no real SEO (yes, these do exist - and I'll mention some probable reasons in later lessons)

Discovering SEO'd pages existing for your keyword

- - - -

And that's more than enough for today. This will get you started on the basics. We have some more work to do on our keywords, and our market research. But that's another day.

Do let me know what comments and questions you have. Either post them below, or send me an email.

Today's freebie: A Millionaire's Secret

- - - -

Coming up tomorrow is more about how to discover who needs your help and how to help them find your solution...

Day 02 - Purpose and Success

Now, right off the bat, I'll tell you that the assignment today is to re-read Section I of An Online Sunshine Plan. I just did. And there's a good article (even though I wrote it, I keep telling people this same thing) "The 2 Reasons Affiliate and Bum Marketers Fail are Simple" (pg 30)

Business Logic

Let me tell you the logic of where we are heading with this:

- In order to have extra income, you have to run it like a successful business.
- In order to have a successful business, you have to offer a valuable service or product for which people can exchange something valuable.
- You are going to have to promote in order to have people find your service or product.
- And when those interested people contact you for more information ("leads"),  they will then need to be helped to purchase/invest in your product.

And those steps are simply the logical start to this.

You have to know this before we get anywhere near the Internet.

Why is the Internet so valuable? Because you can greatly leverage your time and money to result in a great deal of the latter without wasting a lot of the former.

All this is described in another article in section I, "How to get your start up small business (more) profitable." (pg 23) In this, it's described how a job is a 1 to 1 relation. You are paid by the hour for doing a single job. With the Internet, you can get other people to do your selling for you, which can wind up leveraging your time 2000X (or more) - which is described in that article.

So while I say to keep your day job, don't hold onto it forever. The idea is to build up what you can offer online and leverage that until the income replaces your salary and also the cost of any benefits you are earning by showing up every day to someone else's workplace.

If you haven't already, Robert Kiyosaki has some great comments and advice in his "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" book, as well as the numerous co-authored books in that series.

In these days, you aren't going to really trust that the company you work for won't lay you off just before they have to start paying your retirement. If that company actually stays in business that long, or isn't bought out.

So you are right to be looking for a way to make extra income from working part time online - and why I'm sharing this with you. It isn't hard to make money online (although it may feel like hard work at first), but it is a long learning curve. This program is set to simply clue you in on everything you need to start up on your own - and cut your learning curve by half or more.

That said - don't take my word for it. Study and learn from as many people as possible, and constantly be on the look out for more sources of data. Things change constantly. A couple of years back, when I wrote An Online Sunshine Plan, I compiled everything I thought was valuable in terms of free online books and materials I'd received and put it into a DVD. That's almost 4 gigabytes of data. Now, I was looking through this and see that nearly a quarter of it now seems quaint. But by reading it, you'd think each one was the latest and greatest ebook about how to do things.

The reason I haven't removed any from that collection is that they still tell you something about the way things are done, or are an example of how to package and offer materials - or to get leads.

And I did discover over 30 books which are more inspirational than pitch, so you'll be getting access to one of these every day - just to help you along. (See the last link at the bottom.)

More logic - 

I realize this gets long winded, so if you feel like getting up and coming back with a beverage of choice, I can understand. (Mine is right here, BTW.)

But what we need to do is cover some basics.

• The Internet is and always has been based on shared information and speed.
• The articles and web-pages which wind up on the top of search engines are there because search engines can read them and think they are relevant.
• (How they come up with "relevant" we will go over later.)
• The top 5 spots get something like 85% of the clicks, which is why SEO is such in demand. (Search Engine Optimization means "making pages readable to search engines without spamming them.")
• If you use the Internet to offer actual value and service to others - and enable others to readily exchange with you for the services or products you offer - then your income will reflect that value you offer.

How exactly you do that is up to you.

We will be covering several ways to accomplish this. And you'll be getting access to many authors who have their own ideas of how to go about this.

In the end, it is you who need to decide on the best way you can be of service to others, what value you can add to this culture, what universal problems you can provide answers and solutions for.

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Today's freebie is an old classic, "Acres of Diamonds". Even if you've read it before, it is well worth reading again. If you can't get through it by tomorrow, please just glance through Chapters 5 and 6.

The point is, as Earl Nightingale was fond to repeat, "When Doctor Russell H. Conwell talked about each of us being right on our own “Acre of Diamonds”,
he meant it. This story does not get old...it will be true forever...Opportunity does not just ‘come along’. It is there all the time — we just have to see it."

Additional Assignment:

Review the "Goals and Purposes Questionaires" from Online Sunshine Plan - pages 14-15. See what you can come up with as far as answers to these questions.

If this gives you a purpose for what you are doing here - great.

If you already have your purpose settled, maybe these will give you some more ideas you can use to forward it.

If you don't come up with a purpose, fine - it will still give you some exercise for your imagination.

But above, all Have Fun with this.