Fortunately, we have the internet and finding leads has never been easier. Instead of chasing people, it is now very easy to setup a web 2.0 based social media marketing strategy to attract people to you. But that is only part of the equation.

Too often in our industry, we tend to drive prospects to a company branded page and while these corporate sites are good at providing information, they do not do a good enough job of ’selling’ the business to people.

For my top 5 steps to generate your own fresh leads, visit MLM Business Lead Systems.

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing, network marketing

I’m a big fan of low or no cost ways to make money from home and while my focus is on internet marketing of either mlm or affiliate products, she has an amazing resource of websites that pay you for doing just about anything online.  From writing articles to reading webistes to blogging – there is just a ton of info on her site and it’s well put together.

Many of the resources she recommends I was not aware of and I will be sending folks her way, particularly those that do not find my businesses to be their cup of tea.

I encourage you to head on over to her lens.  Click HERE.

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing

Never has there been a better time to work from home. There are more opportunities than ever before – with more and more opportunities opening up in the future. This report will reveal just a few work at home business opportunities.

For someone starting out with the goal of working from home who has no idea where to start, this report gives a great overview of what working at home means.

It provides a good overview of the advantages of working for yourself and the qualities of successful self employed entrepreneurs.

Covering some popular work at home opportunities, it closes with a summary of action steps you should take and provides a list of helpful tools.

For those just starting out, this is a great simple guide that will help point you in the right direction to a starting point.

Get the free report by CLICKING HERE.

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing

My method for marketing involves lots of free resources so you can minimize the amount of money you have to spend to get started.  I teach you how and you execute so along the way, using free tools, we both generate wealth.

Not everything in life is free so where I feel it is important that you consider purchasing a tool, I will let you know and in most cases, I do not have a vested interest in the sale of those tools.  In some instances, the paid tool is better than a free version as with some free tools, the creators or authors may be lax in updating or fixing bugs and in these cases, it is worth your time to avoid headaches by paying for the tool.

At a very basic level, I will begin with the steps you need to get yourself started.  Your goal should be at mastering one program or income stream and then expanding into other programs or income streams.  Why?  Because in order to create consistent residual money, you need multiple programs or income streams.  This allows you to spread your risk by not putting all your eggs in one basket.

If a program has hiccups or tanks for any reason, unless you have others you are working it can be a painful experience.  I know as this happened to me when I first started out.  Digging a hole is easy but if you fall in, it’s much harder to climb back out.  So learn from my mistakes and I will help you develop strategies for your own ’safety net’.

One word of caution.  Do not expect out the gate to hit a home run.  Some programs, if things are aligned well and you have laid your groundwork properly, you can knock it out of the park.  If that does happen, do not let yourself become comfortable and lax thinking “wow, that was easy, now I can relax”.  For many programs, it takes consistent effort and persistence to build long term wealth but I will tell you that you will reach a point when it starts snowballing and runs into auto-pilot mode.  This is what everyone should be striving for.  For any venture, you will need to continually tweak and adjust what you do, especially to accommodate the changing climate of the internet landscape.  Stay on top of your game and your chances of succeeding are high.

Here are the basics of what you need to get started:

A program of some kind.  Preferably one that generates high dollar returns but programs with small returns are good too.  Just keep in mind it takes the same amount of effort, time and resources to promote either type.

Resources to get your programs off the ground.  This includes tools, software, ad copy, advertising sources, etc…

Advertising. There are many ways to go here and free stuff works great, especially Web 2.0 social networking which is totally free and a great way to build your ‘brand’ and recognition so that you attract people to you.  Some form of paid advertising is a must and if you have a low budget, that’s fine as you can get a lot done with inexpensive solo-ads and various other vehicles.

Time. This is probably the biggest area people fail to consider when getting started.  During your ramp up phase for any program or income stream, even if it’s a ready to go affiliate marketing program, you have to put in the time.  Nothing runs on autopilot out the gate and even after you have established yourself, there is ongoing maintenance you have to account for which involves some of your time.

For me personally, my time is precious and valuable and everyone has their own perspective on what their time costs to them.  I am raising my daughter alone so for me, it is important that I do not get caught up in unfocused “busy” work that takes away from the time I want to spend with her in helping her grow.   So I look for programs that have an abundance of tools, have a great support team of mentors and will not take up tons of my time on an ongoing, daily basis.

I am at the point now where I work my programs about 4 hours a day.  But I won’t lie to you – there were plenty of weeks and months where I pulled all nighters learning and working on getting things off the ground and the work I put in during this time is what allows me to spend a few hours a day on my income streams.

To start off, you will need to make sure you have some free tools.  Here is what I use and I provide the links where you can download and install them.

Squeeze Page Creator – very simple squeeze page creator

Loaded Squeeze – this is an easy tool to quickly create base squeeze pages which you can easily modify in Kompozer.

http://cantstandmyboss.com/download/loadedsqueeze.rar – you will have to unzip this file and then run it to install on your computer.

UPDATE: For squeeze pages, I now provide tons of free templates to my team members and do not recommend using this tool as it did not work with well with my new Vista machine.

HTML/Website Editor – use this to edit HTML and website pages

Kompozer – in my opinion, the best tool for editing website pages.  Simple to use, easy to understand.

http://kompozer.net/download.php

FTP Program – use this to upload files to your hosting account from your computer

FileZilla – awesome FTP software which is what you will use to upload files to your hosting account.  You can also use the hosting company’s built in file uploader but an FTP program is best.

http://filezilla-project.org/

Zip File Archiver – use this to unzip and zip files

WinRar – my favorite and it’s free to use.  You just have to close the pop up that appears every time you run it but you can also pay to remove that if you want.

http://www.tucows.com/preview/194276

In future posts I will cover ‘how to use these tools’ and provide an overview of my process for choosing  programs to promote.

To Your Success!

-Eddie
aka Loaded Beach Bum

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing

If you have read my previous posts, by now it is fairly obvious that I love to write. I could literally spend hours writing on subjects that interest me (and hopefully interest you as well) but truthfully, my life as a single dad with a full time, high demand job allows for little free time to focus on my marketing efforts to the level I would like – transitioning to Wordpress from a previous platform and writing new content has easily kept me up until 2 am a number of nights this week.

With all of the steps involved in writing content – research, outline, drafts, crafting copy, checking it double checking it, etc…I can easily spend an hour, in most cases more, on just one article or piece of content.

For that reason, I am always on the lookout for simple to use FREE resources and tools for online marketing – the simpler, the better. So rather than try to reinvent the wheel here and explain everything in detail, today I am going to give a basic overview of keywords and traffic research and then provide you with some amazing free resources to help you in these areas.

So let’s get started.

Keywords – when you want to find something online, you probably head over to Google or one of the other search engines. The text you enter for your search are keywords that search engines use to provide results of websites that match what you are looking for. A simple way to look at keywords is to think of them as the market you are looking for or interested in.

Keywords in the internet marketing world are like the keys to a car – they are the starting point in your journey. The car itself is like your business – the vehicle that gets you where you want to go (and hopefully you have a Ferrari vs. a Yugo for your business – but if not, there are ways to make your Yugo perform better).

As with any car, it requires gas (and in this analogy I think of ‘gas’ as the traffic to drive your businesses). And of course there are ongoing maintenance and performance enhancements for your car – content and optimization.

In my post on Internet Marketing Strategies and Ideas, I shared a process to identify your market or subjects of interest for your business and you will use those subjects as the basis to find the keywords you can use to ‘start the car’.

I am a huge fan of the 30 Day Challenge team as they provide a no-nonsense, straightforward FREE course on internet marketing and they do an awesome job of showing you how to go from A to Z in starting an online business. The 30DC team has tons of great videos on Youtube that show you exactly what to do. One I like a lot on the subject of keywords uses the FREE Google Keyword Tool to research keywords.

Watch the video on how to use the Google Keyword Tool here.

Traffic – is the gas that fuels your business and like a car, without traffic (gas) your business will go nowhere. There are basically two types of traffic – broad or targeted. Either of these can be obtained via paid or free sources.

Broad traffic is in most cases not targeted and is based on volume for its success rates. An example of broad traffic is unsolicited spam. This type of traffic is really a numbers game – massive traffic will get you conversions (sales) but the percentage of conversions depends on how effective your traffic campaigns are and it take time. I will cover in a future post some of the sources of broad traffic but here I want to focus on targeted traffic. After all, that is the purpose of researching keywords for your business and FREE or organic, natural traffic is what we are looking for.

Why? Because eye tracking studies have shown definitively that natural or organic search results are where people focus nearly all of their attention on search engine results pages. People spend a small amount of time looking at PPC or sponsored links. For more information, visit http://www.enquiroresearch.com.

Ok, well I will close this post here. Hopefully you have garnered an understanding of the basics of keyword and traffic research and can use some of this to help you in your own ventures.

To Your Success!

- Loaded Beach Bum

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So, you want ideas to make money in the internet marketing business?

Great! Before we get started, some housekeeping related to my Internet Marketing Wake Up Call post here, specifically about my background.

In my introductory post I told you I was new to the world of internet marketing (a little over a year) and did not know what I was doing. This is true. I plugged along trying to learn what I could about internet marketing and I ended up joining literally hundreds of forums, dozens of affiliate programs and a number of online businesses. I really did make money by accident without any real ideas to make money.

The problem for me was I was inundated with tons of things all at once – spam emails, latest tools and software, ebooks, sites, forums, memberships – and because I had just coughed up $4000 to get started (and at the time money was very tight), my focus was on trying to recoup that as fast as I could. I didn’t look as closely to the process as I should have so I made mistakes and lost money. Fortunately, I did not lose tons of $$ as a lot of others have but I think you get the point.

I have had a number of enlightening experiences and here is one I will share – keep in mind that this was just one of the many balls I tried to juggle, things I mentioned above. I spent the first 60 days of my baptism to the internet marketing world in traffic exchange hell trying to earn enough credits for clicks and banner impressions and I found that for me at least, it was a waste of my time. Hours and hours with multiple tabs and traffic exchanges trying to drive traffic (clicks) to my site.

Never mind that most everyone on these sites was there for the same reason – I mean, how many of us are REALLY going to click on other people’s pages beyond the initial click to get credit? Sure there were some neat sites and products on the traffic exchanges but nothing that I couldn’t already find via Google directly and I did not get one sale from traffic exchanges. The analogy I use is playing darts blindfolded and trying to just hit the board (forget about the bullseye).

It may work for some and I know people that have outsourced the clicking of banners overseas to countries like India where the costs are lower, but for me that was not what I was looking for.

In any event, the point here is I spent my time in the trenches learning what did not work (had I spent more time studying what did work, I would have been a lot farther along the curve early on) so you will not have to repeat my mistakes.

You see, the ’skill’ or techniques of sales have been around as long as man and they are quite simple to understand. The basic sales process no matter what you are selling or where you are selling it can best be described by the acronym AIDA.

AIDA
Attention/Awareness – attract the attention of the customer
Interest - raise their interest level
Desire - convince the customers that they want and desire what you offer
Action - lead the customers toward taking action – opting in, buying, subscribing, etc…

As I mentioned, I was new to internet marketing but I was not new to sales. For over 20+ I have been in sales – operations, marketing and management. I worked for some large Fortune 500 companies primarily in the beverage industry and later in the technology space where I learned a lot about sales contact center operations.

The principles of online and offline sales are exactly the same. The main difference is the environment and the execution.

When I sold Pepsi, my process for sales was AIDA. I had to (A)ttract the attention of both my existing customers and new prospects (I worked in the soda fountain division – bars, restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, colleges – and in the early days, customers were loyal to either Pepsi or Coke and most places did not sell both so we were always trying to steal away Coke retailers). Obviously that is not the case today but I digress.

I had to (I)nterest them in any new products or promotions we were offering.

I had to (C)onvince them that they had to have the new product or take advantage of the killer promotion.

I had to lead them to take (A)ction and buy what I was offering.

AIDA is the sales process you will be following to drive your marketing efforts with your business.

Your first thing you are going to want to do is familiarize yourself with the concept of AIDA, if only from the perspective of understanding how the sales process in general works. You do not need to become an expert in any of these areas and frankly an in depth discussion of AIDA is beyond the scope of this blog and not something you need great detail about. Just know that these 4 components are the underlying basis that drives the sales process. With Web 2.0, much of the components of AIDA are simplified and I will touch on these in future posts.

The second concept you need to understand is that traffic + conversions = sales. As basic as the formula looks, this is of extreme importance for you to comprehend. Without traffic you will not have conversions to sales with which to fill your pockets with money. This topic alone can fill hundreds of pages but the main focus here is that you need traffic, but not just any traffic – targeted or highly targeted traffic is the key.

I’m betting that you probably receive hundreds of unsolicited spam messages like I do every day (I receive upwards of 300-400, all redirected into my spam folder). Consider that there are roughly 220,000,000+ internet users in the US alone and well I think you can picture how much unsolicited spam is out there.

By design, unsolicited spam has to function the way it does (“help, I’m being electronically assaulted”) because the conversion rates are minuscule (the click through rates are so ridiculously small – you literally have better odds of successfully herding cats) that it takes a MASSIVE amount of it in order to generate revenue. My point? Traffic is essential because without it, you have no conversions BUT traffic without a targeting strategy is useless because you will not get the conversions you want and you will spend a ton of time, money and energy that would be better spent in more practical revenue generating activities (affectionately known as ‘RGA’).

NOTICE to Barbara Deville (if that is your real name), Queen of Unsolicited Spam (uniteddvds or titaniumsoloads): please get an autoresponder service and allow people to opt out. You are in violation of the CANSPAM act.

I will go into a broader discussion on traffic in the future but just know this – the components of AIDA will help guide your strategy to target traffic (read CUSTOMERS) to your business, traffic from people who want to know about you and what you offer. And these are the people you want – targeted, interested, like-minded folks hitting your sites are the most likely to purchase from you or opt in to your newsletter, take (A)ction either now or later, and guess what? They are even more likely to purchase from you a second, third or even more times, provided you gave them what they were looking for, it met their expectations and the ‘customer experience’ was a positive one.

For now, if you are not already, become familiar with the following tools:

Flock – the next generation of browsers. It puts the process of Web 2.0 social browsing on steroids and it is phenomenal. I have replaced IE and Firefox with Flock (don’t worry, it is built on the Firefox platform and works great). There are some great getting started videos on the site. Check it out.

Twitter - a great little tool, designed primarily for people to keep tabs on each other and what they are up to at the moment. While I myself am a real novice with this tool (I only recently decided to try it out but I have friends that make good money using the power of Tweets), I can see the value in using it to attract people interested in me and what I have to offer so Twitter is now part of my strategy

That’s it for now. Until next time – To Your Success!

- LoadedBeachBum

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Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing, Tools

I use a well known method to determine what businesses to invest in and it is this exact process I used to find my second income stream: the two-filter test.

This second income stream is in the health and wellness field and it is progressing nicely – I am 1/20th of the way towards my income goal of $50,000 per month. from this new venture.

The questions I am asked the most are: If you have no experience with online businesses, where do you start? How exactly do you do it? What is the best strategy to navigate the thousands of choices out there?

In order to answer these questions, you should first ask yourself the following:

• What are my goals with my business?
• Am I looking to augment or replace my current income or job?
• What do I decide to market or sell? A product or a service or both?
• What resources do I need to successfully build my business?
• Is my business going to benefit everyone who is exposed to it?

TIP: With the wide selection available today and depending on your budget and available start up capital, it is important to determine if you want to invest in top tier programs such as those that pay high commissions of more than $1000 per sale or low to mid tier programs that pay considerably less. Why? Because it takes the same amount of time and effort to market either type of program but with top tier programs, you need far less highly qualified customers to earn a significant income. This tip will further define the list of available businesses out there for you to consider but remember that you cannot keep the right type of person out of the right business so keep an open mind.

To start, there are two filters and three dimensions or test areas you should use to determine what business to invest your money in. The filters are Common Sense and Proof and the test areas are Company, Product and Compensation.

If these three areas can pass the two-filter test then the odds are extremely high that you have found a business worth your effort and attention and you should seriously consider investing your money in that business.

Company

• How long has the company been in business?
• Have the owners ever been sued, been to jail or shut down?
• Can you contact the owners?
• Does the company have a headquarters?
• How many offices do they have?
• Is the company financially stable?
• What kind of support does the company provide?

It is amazing how many startups are being run out of a basement or a garage with some down line software and a white label product…ask the right questions and you will get the right answers. It is equally amazing how many company owners have records of convictions in their past.

Product

• How much competition is there?
• Is it the 25th new product of its kind this month?
• How long have they manufactured the product/provided the service?
• Do they have any proof or credentials for the product or service?
• Do they make their own product or is it made for them and hundreds of other companies like them?
• How big is the target market?
• How many people actually need or want your product?

Ask yourself why you want to start an online business in the first place? Is it for financial freedom, more time for you or your family, do you like the product, something fun you like to do? Why don’t we have all of this with most companies?

Compensation

• How long does it take to explain the compensation plan?
• Do you have to read a 30 page manual or attend a two hour comp plan training session?
• Do you need an accountant, a lawyer or an actuary to understand the business?
• Do you get knocked out of your position in the company if you don’t maintain your monthly quota?
• Do you need to understand PV, BV, CV and dozens of other cryptic acronyms?

Many companies make the compensation plans difficult to understand because if you actually knew how little you made, you would never join in the first place.

Hopefully you have found the criteria I use to be useful and helpful in stopping the insanity in your search to find the right business for you.

Best of luck in your search!

-Loaded Beach Bum

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Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing, Tools

First off, I am by no means an expert or ‘guru’ or a HUGE success in the arena of internet marketing, no where near guys like Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, Shawn Casey or any of the other top marketers you may have heard of (I do make good money from the few ventures I have started but not enough – YET – to replace my J.O.B but stay with me here) but over the last few months, thanks to people like Andy Jenkins, Brad Fallon, Paul Colligan, Ed Dale, Robert Somerville and many more, I had what I can only call an epiphany of epic proportions.

In order to effectively explain what I mean, I need to take you down a little trip through my experiences to date with internet marketing. To start, like many of you looking to make money online, I was lured into this space initially by the latest and greatest business opportunity spam email message.

I remember my initial altruistic dreams of being my own boss, owning my own business, working only 5-10 hours a week and providing the best life for my family possible. I saw the internet marketing world as the ideal place to leverage my 20+ years of sales and marketing experience in the offline world and, jumping right in feet first, full steam ahead, filled with ambitions and dreams of riches. I clicked on my very first spam marketing message – “Make $3-5k per week on autopilot” and I have to tell you, this was a BIG step for me.

You see, at that point in my career I was working for one of the largest ISPs in the world in sales operations (8 years) and one of the biggest things I learned while there was to absolutely avoid clicking on spam. Reason: a lot of spam messages are intended to ‘trick’ the readers into clicking on links that in many cases invariably lead to installing some kind of software with spyware on your computer. This of course opens you up to the potential threats of scammers, identify thieves and phishers online (there are more out there than you can imagine). So I NEVER opened spam!

So why exactly did I open the email? As I mentioned, I had dreams of making more than I was at my J.O.B., a better life, I was tired of working for someone else, tired of struggling to pay bills and I was in all honesty in a financial crisis so in a sense, I was desperate.

Now, like I said I do make money from my ventures – to this day, that first business opportunity does generate cashflow for me, just not enough – but what happened were two things. First, I found that I LOVE the business of internet marketing – it is exciting, fun and it really is the future of major wealth today. Second, my initial investment of $4000 (product, back end, marketing, etc…) turned into $12000 within the first 90 days. Then $15000, then $18000 – within my first 5 months I had more than tripled the investment in my very first venture and I had no clue what the hell I was doing. Not bad, right? Especially since my child support stopped coming in (yes, I am a man who gets child support – imagine that!).

WRONG! Andy Jenkins says it best in the inaugural issue of The Net Effect and I will paraphrase: Basically, my Vision Mindset is what drove my initial success but I forgot how to actually RUN a business – I ignored the Process Mindset which is the critical piece of running any business. I was full of excitement at making so much money in a short period of time that I became so comfortable (and I believed the autopilot hype) I STOPPED working the business actively and I actually left my job.

I believed the hype that my online business would simply run by itself with little effort on my part and I would just collect the cash. I am sure you can guess what happened next – my income stream DRIED up. Traffic trickled down to zero, sales stopped coming in and the competition within the business I had joined became fierce. It seemed like there were tens of thousands out there promoting the same thing using the same email copy and tactics.

So, very humbly after 6 months with internet marketing I picked up my shattered ego and I went back to work for someone else. Aside from dealing with the depression of failure, I resigned myself to my old reality and gave up.

By now you are probably thinking “I hear you Eddie, I see what you went through but what exactly changed in the last 30 days, what is the wake up call you are talking about?”

The wake up call is this: thanks to some awesome guys (see above), I learned it is actually very easy to get started making money online and it doesn’t have to cost you anything. That’s right – you can make money online absolutely FREE. I know, you’ve heard the hype before but I am not here to sell you anything, I am not here to ask you to give me $997, $197, $97, $47 or any other number you want to think of.

The reality is there are TONS of free tools and resources out there to get you started and maintain your business. The key is to get started, be persistent and never give up. Don’t get me wrong here – there is tremendous value in paying for tools and resources, for eBooks and systems that help your business. Any business, offline or online, requires a steady investment of some kind to stay alive.

The point here is you can easily get started for next to nothing (I will show you where to look) and by learning the right tips, tricks and processes (I will show you where to find them), you can build a successful online business and achieve your dreams and goals.

The very first step is to align yourself with the right mentors. This is the key – no matter what your product, what your strategy or goals may be, if you have the wrong mentors you will go nowhere fast. Plain and simple.

Am I asking you to follow me or listen to what I say? No, because I believe that is an individual choice you have to make about who you want to listen to. However, if you do choose to follow me and want to learn what I have painfully learned, if you want to avoid wasting thousands of dollars on the next greatest thing, I can only promise you this – I will openly share what I have learned, including all of the FREE resources and tools as well as information on exactly how to use them.

So get off that couch, turn off the TV and find your own wake up call. I am here to help. Fair enough? Thanks and until next time!

-Loaded Beach Bum

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Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing