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 had some new people ask me – “What is with all this stuff on these sites selling stuff?”  so I thought about it and you know what?  That’s a valid question.  I’ve been marketing for over 20 years and I like to think of myself as someone who knows a thing or two about sales and marketing (not to toot my own horn…ok, I’m going to do it anyway – I’ve always been one of the top 3 earners at every sales and marketing position I’ve held in the offline world) and I find it interesting to see some of the tactics used online.

So I put together this list of some things to look out for – the reality is these strategies work well but that doesn’t mean everyone should buy something just because they are used.  An educated consumer means keeping more of your money.

Number One

Auto Pilot Anything – this is the first major red flag everyone should look out for. If you see any websites or programs talking about making money on autopilot, take a step back.

True, you can make money automatically or while you sleep – BUT that’s only after you have put in the time and effort and I can tell you from experience that it takes time.

If you notice, many of these programs promote their ‘autopilot’ systems but spend little time in telling you up front that you will have to put in the time (usually on average 18-24 months of solid work).

What happens is people believe they can pay for a program, do a little work and sit back and rake in the cash – which is what many of these programs look like you can do. Complete rubbish!

Number Two

Earn 6 Figures A Month (or insert any other 5 or 6 figure number) – again, this is another one of those claims solely designed to get you to buy into a program.

Yes, you can make 6 figures and yes some people do make that much each month – but it’s not necessarily from their program – rather it’s usually from selling you their programs (which, by the way 95% of people who go into business online do not make any money – think about it).

Like anything and I’ll keep hammering this point home, it takes time. The gurus selling these claims of extraordinary income did not buy a program and overnight start making that kind of cash. So this is another one that you should just be aware of.

Number Three

Hurry, Only 250, 175, 45, 17 Spots Left – I particularly like this one but not from the point that it’s awesome but rather it illustrates perfectly the psychological strategies used by many marketers.

Do you really think they are only limiting their product to 250 people? LoL. No, truthfully, in most cases you can still get their product even after they have ‘reached their number’ of customers. They aren’t going to turn down more money.

Number Four

ClickBank/PayPal Earnings Screenshots – I’m going to let you in on a little secret here.  It’s very easy to setup a fake website and put whatever numbers you want in there.  Shhh…don’t tell anyone.

No, I won’t share how it’s done but it is rampant in the online marketing arena among ’sharks’ looking to take your money.  Ignore any claims of income that you see because truthfully, you have no way of really knowing that this guy actually made that much unless you are sitting right next to him looking at his bank statements – and that is something highly unlikely to happen.

Number Five

Testimonials – this one is especially interesting because there are a number of strategies used by marketers.  One is to enlist other top marketing buddies to write a testimonial for their product and usually it’s done in exchange for a reciprocal testimonial for that marketer’s own product.

Another strategy is to use fake testimonials.  I’ve seen the same guy’s picture on dozens of programs and found his picture on a stock photo site.  I like to go back to old program sales pages and look up the websites from these ‘testimonials’.  Guess what I find?  Many of the sites are no longer active.

How much weight does that testimonial carry if the person giving it is no longer online?  This is common so do not believe all the testimonials you read.

Conclusion

So the bottom line is there are plenty of products out there from marketers that do not rely on these tactics to separate you from your hard earned money.  Keep an eye out, pay attention and before you whip out that credit card ask yourself – is this really something I need?

Technorati Tags: Internet 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

Still struggling with merchant accounts? Are you a high volume or other high risk type of merchant? I now have a partnership with an awesome high risk merchant processor service that will meet virtually any needs for any business.

Regardless of your business type or volume, we can handle all of your merchant processing needs without any volume caps.

Specializing in merchant services for high risk businesses, offshore merchants, high volume businesses such as mail order, telephone sales, adult, gambling, phone orders, online dating, escort services, travel, timeshares, online pharmacies, herbal companies, membership or subscription services, MLM, international accounts – you name it, we handle it.

We represent 25+ different processing sources (US based banks, Offshore banks, 3rd Party Processors, ACH Processors, Check Processors, etc.).

Regardless of business type or volume, we’ll get your account approved quickly and keep it running smoothly without any volume caps. Let our staff of processing industry veterans find the solution that’s right for you.

Please contact me to take about 1 minute to complete our NO OBLIGATION quick form and submit it to us.

This will allow our team to evaluate your needs and present a banking / pricing solution for your particular business.

Whether you need one or multiple merchant accounts, we can accommodate your processing needs.

Contact me for details and a quick no obligation info request. 404.592.1253 ext 10

Eddie@LoadedBeachBum.com

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, LinkedIn, online shopping, technology, Tools

Gone are the days when copy was the sole determining factor in sealing a salesletters’ fate. Things have changed since then and marketers who preach that copy should be the only tool in your marketing arsenal are simply living in the past, oblivious to the rapidly changing landscape of direct response marketing and Web 2.0.

Let’s face it. It’s 2008, not 1998 anymore.

Graphics, layout and presentation have risen to become as equally important to a salesletter as the copy itself. If all elements are perfected, working in unison, these four key elements together can create some seriously high converting marketing pieces.

Just yesterday I happened to stumble across a brand new design studio called ‘Pulp Minisites’ that specializes in turning poor performing salesletters into cash-sucking sales machines that will explode your business with new customers.

Now the thing that makes these guys different than your everyday freelance minisite designer is the fact they’re a real design studio, they have a real team with a real office and treat their operation as a real business. In other words, they’re not your typical minisite designer working out of a basement.

It looks as though these guys have some real big plans for this niche and you only have to see their work to realize that. I’d recommend checking them out and see for yourself whether this new design studio is just ‘hot air’ or whether they’ll become a ‘household name’ in the internet marketing community.

See for yourself, click on the link below: **Apparently they are no longer around.  06/29/09

http://linktrack.info/lsxr3lu

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, LinkedIn, Tools

Now, there’s nothing wrong at all with making money and using ideas and concepts to do it.  But what strikes me particularly odd about using this strategy with the Law of Attraction is if you are following the premise and spirit of this law, you would NOT be focusing on trying to use it to make money.

In fact, you would probably be doing the opposite which is helping people understand the law of attraction and providing value related to the law of attraction in order to attract people to you.

Which brings to the forefront the other side of the coin when it comes to the law of attraction – the Law of Reciprocity.

If your use of the Law of Attraction is from the perspective of selfishness and greed, you will manifest these characteristics either in yourself or in what you attract to you.

I found an enjoyable little article by Jeffrey Gitomer in the Eagle Tribune earlier this month about the Law of Attraction which had an interesting comment from a reader named Marlowe regarding James Allen’s classic titled ‘As A Man Thinketh’ and the misguided interpretation of the Law of Attraction.

To read more, head on over to the full article here.

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, LinkedIn

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

This article is meant to inform and educate you as to what information I have learned through research and in no way is meant to be used as a guide to what to do.  Do not use this to post with posting software or services.

People have used CL for years to sell personal things as well as find renters for properties and have pursued posting ads for internet marketing, primarily because they find CL to be a great source of leads (although some haven’t found a ton of categories to be that responsive for their niches and many posts to categories such as jobs automatically get flagged).

There are some CL cities where it seems flaggers live to flag internet marketing ads they deem inappropriate or out of category and some marketers will go back and flag other ads (even legitimate ones) if theirs get flagged. The reality is the best candidates for a home based business are those people who are unhappy with their current jobs and looking for something better – so sources say the best section to post about any business opportunity is the jobs section but keep in mind that this is against the TOS

There are various ways of trying to get ads to stick – tweaking the html of the ads, using the right kinds of subjects, random characters and text and many have managed to get ads to stick for a few days to a few weeks.  The key is volume so if approached from that perspective, having ads up for only a day or two is fine as the ads will generate good free traffic easily.

Some cities there are so many ads posting daily it’s easy for ads to get quickly buried at the bottom of the list (many post as late in the day or evening as possible so the ad has a better chance of displaying near the top of the page longer).  There is even a variety of posting software available to accomplish this easily.

Most of the posting software costs anywhere between $197 to $397 – and the free stuff is almost always loaded with malware, spyware and oftentimes viruses.  Again, using posting automated posting software or agents to post is against the TOS.    However, if you ‘un-automate’ the posting software, I have heard that this little change keeps you within the TOS.

You are prohibited from posting the same ad over and over and the definition of ’same’ is open for debate.  Technically, changing one character or one pixel or one address or one word makes the ad no longer the same.

CL Posting Tips

For many posters, the goal with CL isn’t to avoid flagging (there’s too many people on CL just waiting to flag ads) but to get a high volume of he ads past the CL filters and posted (and thus keeping from being ghosted – this means the ad appears published but does not appear in CL listings).  Having enough of a variety of the below items creates some level of randomness. Plus a high enough volume means even those over zealous flaggers only manage to catch a small percentage of ads.

Titles - a variety of titles for posts related to the opportunity/service/item.   It’s perfectly acceptable to say ‘looking for sales professionals’ or ‘marketing experience’ if the goal is to attract people with experience in these areas.

Ad Type – there are two schools of thought here, each defended vigorously by those who use them: Text or image based ads. It’s up to preference and for many they prefer image ads as they are easy to create and randomize which means less coding to worry about and they get good results with image ads. Split testing is used with or without URL links embedded to gauge responses.

Ad Content – Keeping the ads simple and normal – CL bots can pick up words that would relate to MLM or home based businesses – It’s interesting to review some of the other ads and find some that are about home based or online marketing and see what works for them. Viewing the source of an ad is simple using the View Source menu of a browser.  Posters  like to save the html of good ads that stick to stay on top of what works best.  Split testing. here is also used heavily by posters.  They use these tests to fine tune and tweak their ads so they have some reliable ones to use.

Images - The primary repository for posters is Photobucket, another FREE online tool which is great for uploading the same groups of images multiple times in order to generate unique URLs (posters have found that another CL filter is repetitive URLs both in the images and in the links they use except they have not banned Photobucket since millions of CL posters use it and it would probably be bad for CL if they cracked down on photo hosting services).

For easily croping and resizing images, picnik.com is a tool used by many ad posters.  The free service only allows an upload of 5 images but by deleting them after saving, 5 more images can be uploaded to resize and crop. No registration is required.

Links - domains are so cheap these days that the best practice here is to buy them as needed. But it is not necessary to buy a ton in order to generate unique links. The top ad posters use promediacode.com and while they have a free version, their is a better discount by going with the paid annual option.

This service is so simple to use – enter the ftp username and pwd (create ftp user accounts in the domain Cpanel to use if there is concern in using the main ftp account info), the domain name of the site, the path on the server (/public_html/domainname), the domain for the URLs to forward to and then use the random generator to obtain random domain folder names. By entering this text into the tool, it spits out up to 20 URLs at a time, pre-configured for forwarding, ready to use and if more are needed, just rinse and repeat. That’s it. This creates a batch of URLs to use without spending HOURS in a hosting account Cpanel creating them one by one to point to affiliate programs. It takes about 2 minutes to make 100 URLs.

Email addresses/CL Accounts – Posters here differ on this too.  CL accounts make it easier and faster to post ads. There are people who use CL accounts and want to post high volumes of ads, so they keep an inventory of multiple CL accounts. This of course is not condoned by CL (also against the TOS) and I am only telling you this to inform you of what’s out there. Same thing goes for email accounts. CL filters will pick up if many ads are posted using the same email account so posters randomize the email addresses used.

IP addresses – this is another tricky one but easy to manage. CL can tell when a large number of ads are being posted from the same IP address and these will get ghosted as well as IP banned meaning inability to post from that IP again. If using DSL for the connection and it’s fairly simple to power cycle the modem after posting 4-5 ads. Then obtain a new IP address and post another 4 ads, power cycle, then do it again and that’s the process.

That is it for now.

In a future post I will cover 16 awesome and FREE tools you can use to free up some time in your internet marketing efforts.

Until next time!

-Loaded Beach Bum

PS.  Here is an awesome video I just had to dig up from a couple of years ago.  Talk about tricks.

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, posting tips

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

Follow Me

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing, Tools