Online Biz | Business Blog | How To Start An Online Home Business | Get Started Online | Use WordPress | Learn WordPress | The Happypreneur | Celene Harrelson
Every week I go to my Network Masters meeting where we help each other build our businesses with referrals.
It’s a great way to get new business and keep my pulse on the local community as well.
As the group’s “web go to gal” I do quite a bit for my chapter and get paid gigs from the members.
Are you taking advantage of the opportunities offered in your local area to network and tell people about your business?
I hid behind my computer screen and was isolated for far too long. [Read more...]
Please enjoy this very inspiring message written by Olga Hermans.
“It is our choices that show what we truly are…, far more than our abilities.”
Starting a blog is easy – keeping a blog interesting and fresh is a whole other matter. While many marketers have no trouble beginning a niche blog, the sheer number of abandoned blogs around the ‘net speaks to the fact that many marketers don’t know what to do to keep a blog going. According to blogging experts, the key to keeping a blog going is to post frequently. This means that you’re going to need a ever present stream of content coming into your blog.
You may be intimidated by the thought of having to come up with lots of topic ideas. Finding topics for your blog posts are easy if you use the following ideas.
1. News in your niche
Your blog should be timely and there’s no better way to attract attention on your blog than to tap into some ongoing news. No matter what your niche is you can find news stories and breaking information that will help fuel timely blog posts. Sign up for Google Alerts (it’s free) and set up alerts on important words in your niche. This way you’ll be able to see the news in your niche and blog about current topics.
2. Comments section
The comments section in your blog can be a great source of writing inspiration. Let’s say you have a post on your marketing blog about keyword research. Within the comments section, a few people start asking about how to use keywords in articles for article marketing. Voila! You have your next blog post. Look through your comments section to identify topics that you can write about or questions you can answer in the form of a blog post.
3. Resource lists
Are there some websites or other resources that your niche needs to know about? Write a few resource list posts. Resource lists posts are very easy to write and they provide maximum value to your readers because they can get the information that they need easily. When you can’t think of anything else to write about you can pull together a helpful list for your readers.
4. Other blogs in your niche
Keep your finger on the pulse of your niche. Watch other blogs in your niche and see what they are writing about. You can take a different angle on the same topic, or cover an area of the topic that the original author missed. If you disagree with the author, feel free to go ahead and express you opinion on your blog. Other bloggers can be a great source of information so be sure to get involved in the community.
5. Quick tips
Start collecting a list of quick tips you’d like to share with your niche. These can be inspired by your personal experience with the niche, from other blog posts you’ve read or from other products in your niche. When you find yourself stuck for blog post ideas, you can write a quick tips post.
These tips just scratch the surface of where you can find ideas for blog posts to populate your blog. Start keeping a notepad file with blog post ideas and you’ll never be at a loss for material.
Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. We love hearing from you. Please don’t forget to share and tweet it, too.
Anyone who knows me, knows I use WordPress.In fact I LOVE WordPress. There, I said it! I’m in love – yes, in love with WordPress. Ah, does Bill know this, your wondering? I’ve been up front and open with him all along about my office romance and being the husband he is, well, for my sake, he looks the other way. [Read more...]
Welcome to the very first Q and A Friday – Your Blogging and Marketing Questions Answered! Every Friday I will be answering questions from my students and readers. Please submit your questions in the comments, reply to my emails or hit the contact button above. That’s pretty self explanatory, so without further adieu, here we go!
Question:
“I have accumulated home made beauty recipes and meditation exercises and from may different books. l would like to use them to create my own eBook to use as a free giveaway. Should I give footnotes, acknowledgements or just change things up a bit to make them my own?”
Answer:
It is never a good idea to use others copyrighted material without written consent. [Read more...]
Clueless? Where the heck do you learn how to get started online?You want to get started online, to work from home and build an internet business. You want to spend more time with your family, have the freedom to do what you want when you want and to make your own decisions. In fact, you’d like you tell your boss where to get off! Whoa, slow down there! That’s not a very wise thing to do when you are clueless about how to get started online. You might need a steady income to pay the mortgage until your internet ship can keep itself afloat.
Here’s the deal. This is not something you can just wake up one day, tell your boss where to get off, hang your online business shingle and voila! you’re [Read more...]
Yep, that’s what I said, myths! Many Internet marketing beginners have fallen for untruths, stretching the truth, exaggerations, telling stories; no matter what you call it, a myth by any other name is still a myth. Let’s take a closer look at some these myths and see if we can sift through to the truth.
Myth: It’s easy. You can make lots of money fast with little effort.
Nope. Sorry, there is no easy button. Nothing to push for instant success, no business in a box. Set it up and voila! Instant riches! You are not going to get rich quick. It just doesn’t happen that way. “If you build it they will come” only happens in the movies for Kevin Costner. That movie was called Field Of Dreams not Field Of Internet Marketing Beginners Dreams! Bummer, huh?
Fact: There is no easy button. Building a successful online business takes work and dedication and persistence. It’s not easy. It takes time to get traffic to your blog or website, to build a list of prospects, to build a relationship with them and turn them into [Read more...]
Have you been wondering how to make money online from home, but have no idea what that might be or where to start?
“I wanna know how to make money online from home, how’s that work?” seems to be the $64,000 question! It’s one I get asked all the time. If I had a nickel for every time someone asks me that, well… OK, I couldn’t retire, but my lil’ grandson’s piggy bank would fill up pretty quickly.
These days, many people are looking for a way to create income due to the unstable job market, lack of opportunity in a rural areas, the need for additional income, retirement funds that won’t cover the bills or perhaps your a stay at home mom who needs to help support her family. Sometimes it’s just the old entrepreneurial spirit wins out over trading time for dollars. Whatever the reason, there has never been a better time to get started online. The fact is that when we need information these days, we don’t go to the phone book or riffle through the newspaper – or if we do, it’s likely an online edition. We go to the internet for our information.
The internet is still the new frontier. It’s a ground floor opportunity to be a part of a world wide community of trail blazers! YeeHaw!
OK, I’m gonna do it! Now what?
You’re gonna take the plunge! “But what do I know how to do that I can make a living at?” you ask yourself. Most of us come online without [Read more...]
If you want to have a serious Internet business, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes.Are you sure you’re willing to pull out all the stops to make it happen? A couple of months ago my mentor Connie Ragen Green (who by the way does have a serious internet business) invited me to a live event in Orlando that she was attending and offered me a free ticket to attend. At the time I said that I would give my right arm to go, but just couldn’t afford it and turned it down.
Let me back up a bit and give you a little background. I am going to bare my soul and share this with you for the first time. A couple of years ago my husband fell 24 feet and shattered both of his heels. His recovery has been very slow and painful. Our finances have suffered terribly as a result. Actually, our finances were devastated. I hadn’t been online for very long when he fell and was not making much of an income at the time and we became very deeply in debt. [Read more...]
So many things that are easy when you are an experienced internet marketer – such as buying a domain name, getting it hosted, designing a website the easy way really fast, setting up a home page and download page and an autoresponder – are completely alien for most of us when we start our journey to becoming internet marketers.
Internet marketing for beginners can be confusing. We can so easily become overwhelmed by complex information and not even get started. We learn about pay per click and optimizing websites for search engines and navigation. We agonize over keywords. We learn about writing articles and back-linking strategies, list building and product launches.
We go off and explore a whole range of different business models – affiliate marketing, drop shipping, blogging, information products. We fret about payments systems, merchant accounts, what kind of web design platforms, copy writing. We explore social media, podcasts and video…
Before we know it, a load of time has passed, we haven’t even got a website up, absolutely no sales and we’re getting very low and overwhelmed.
It can be very different.
What is the secret? Actually there are TWO – probably guessed already: keep it simple, and keep going till you have implemented.
And the way to do that is to go for ONE simple course that explains all the steps – and keep going till you have a website up that is making a few dollars in sales.
This is about getting started, taking action and actually going through the whole process from the beginning to getting sales.
It is not about learning all you need to know before you start. It’s about starting and getting results, learning from your experience and testing what you have done.
It’s not about setting up the perfect website right out of the gate. It’s about practice and improvement.
It’s not about getting floods of traffic from day one – it’s about discovering which ways of doing things attract traffic, doing more of what gets results THEN adding in more methods.
It’s not about creating the perfect product and waiting for everyone to buy. It’s about testing what the market gaps are, what customers are really looking for and THEN creating round your customers.
It’s not about telling, It’s about listening and learning. It’s about researching and understanding your niche and customers, learning from them, really getting to know what they want, and developing a good relationship with them.
That way you build a business for the long-term that will be valuable, whether you sell or grow it to as large as you want it to be.
Please leave a comment or question below. I’d love to know what you think!
