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Visit Self Storage Auctions for eBay Merchandise to Sell

One of the hottest new ways to acquire eBay merchandise to sell is by visiting self storage auctions.

I realize right now you’re probably saying “what in the heck is he talking about?”

So please allow me to elaborate.

The latest craze for hungry money makers, eBayers and flea marketers is to visit local self storage facilities on a daily, weekly or monthly basis in hopes to bid on an expired or unpaid self storage unit in an auction type atmosphere. (continue reading…)

A Simple Way to Use Your Blog to Earn Extra Money Online

Today I want to tell you about a very simple way to use your blog to earn extra money online.

If you’ve been struggling with earning money online, chances are you will be very happy after reading this because the program is so easy to use and you can literally start making money right away.

As long as you own or operate a blog you can use it to earn money and if you work hard you can earn big money doing it. (continue reading…)

Earn Extra Money Online Selling Posters

Selling posters can be an awesome way to earn extra money online as long as you do it properly.

I’m not talking about buying a crap load of posters and then selling them on eBay. You wouldn’t be able to compete.

Rather I’m talking about becoming an affiliate and selling posters for the world’s largest poster and print store.

If you have a website and you have traffic to that website you can register for free and earn extra money online selling posters for AllPosters.com right here.

How much you earn is as always……completely up to you. It depends on how much work you put into it.

Everybody loves art work and everybody loves posters.

Being the largest poster and art print store in the world AllPosters.com has over 1 million products available to your blog readers and website visitors. They’ve been around since 1998 and sold posters, prints and art work to over 4 million customers to date.

They also do custom framing and multiple sizes allowing you to earn more money.

Once you become an affiliate you’ll have access to advanced tools such as deep linking, custom links, high converting banners, data feeds, web services and etc.

You will be paid monthly via USD check or PayPal.

The standard commission rate is 20%.

Remember though….if you’re going to earn money at this you have to do it right! Use the keyword knowledge and search engine marketing we’ve been talking about. Drive enough targeted traffic to those pages and you’ll do very well for yourself.

What are you waiting for?

You guys are always telling me you want more ways to earn extra money online so check them out and start selling posters on your site right now.

Grow Your Online Business in 2011

In today’s post I want to present some ideas you can use to grow your online business in 2011.

After all…. what good is an online business or any other business for that matter if it doesn’t ever start growing or continue to grow?

Not much of a business at all I’d say.

Some time ago, I added a (1) question survey in the right hand widget bar of this blog asking readers to help me get to know them so I could better understand how to help them.

The majority of people answering the survey all say the same thing: “I’ve been trying to earn money with Internet Marketing for a while now but have earned very little.”

My answer to you is, don’t feel like you’re the only one. As a matter of fact you’re in good company with approximately 96% of online start ups in the same predicament.

But know that you have an outstanding opportunity, particularly this new year of 2011, to do something about it.

Good SEO will always be a factor but as long as you’ve been doing your homework you should really be starting to get a grasp on that department by now. Even if you’ve hired an SEO consultant you still must always keep a hands on approach and stay up to date with new and fresh SEO ideas and techniques.

The real force to catapult your online business in 2011, however, will be a sincere and devoted effort to connect with your niche peers and your potential customers.

In a year when social networking is almost at it’s peek you simply can’t afford to miss out on the connections being made available to you.

If you’re serious about growing your online business this year then you need to reach out and touch a lot of people using all the tools at your disposal.

Blog more, spend more time building your Facebook network, Tweet more, email more, go to more conventions, make more phone calls, text more, read more, comment more and so on.

When things get stale, and I promise they will, it’s ok to change it up a bit. Just be sure to keep multiple lines of communication open with your peers and your customers and stay close to the topic of your business.

Don’t be afraid to reach out and communicate with others. On the contrary, you should make every effort to connect with, help and learn from as many as possible.

In the words of Jack Humphrey, author of the very successful blog Friday Traffic Report, everything we do is about getting attention on the web. We’re all great at being social for personal attention but seem to have a disconnect when it comes to being social about our business. You can read the full article Traffic Equals Attention: Your Goals for 2011 and maybe it will help put things into perspective.

If you truly want to grow your online business in 2011 then start it off right by making a conscious decision, or even a habit, to connect your business socially with the online world.

Blogging as a Website Promotion Tool

If you’re looking for an excellent website promotion tool to add to your arsenal you might seriously consider the idea of blogging as an integral part of your business.

The concept of blogging or writing a web-log has been around for quite some time but didn’t really make an impact on the mainstream population till about 1999.

Back then and even now most people wrote blogs for simple personal use as a way to connect with others around the world.

Those in the know, however, understand that blogging can also be used as a powerful tool to promote a business website.

It is not my intention to get into the specifics and technical aspects of blogging within this article because I have mentioned technical aspects in other articles. If you missed those pages you can find them here. Blogging for Success and then 20 Ideas to Help Your Blog’s Popularity. You might also read some of the related posts if time allows.

Instead my hopes are for you to truly comprehend just how important blogging can be to a modern thriving Internet business of any kind.

It has proven to be the most effective and least costly website promotion tool that I have for my business.

Blogging should be used as your way to create your own massive piece of highly sought after Internet Real Estate.

For example…..let’s pretend you have a 6 page business website which markets or sells hunting gear.

You noticed early on that the “hunting gear” niche has a sizable amount of competition on the net.

You’ve already submitted your site to directories, done some social bookmarking and exceeded your website promotion budget but just can’t seem to get over that hump.

Sound familiar?

One reason you still can’t get the kind of traffic you need to start really rocking is because you only have a 6 page website. Even though the site may be optimized properly, chances are it doesn’t have enough keyword depth and backlinks to both compete with your competitors and raise your site’s trust factor with the search engines.

This is where blogging can really help break things wide open for your business.

If you can find a way to write consistent useful blog articles about your product(s), then link to those website products from your blog articles along with proper keyword application and titles, you will soon notice that your site is becoming quite a bit more popular.

How soon you ask?

It depends on how often you blog and whether or not you apply good on-page optimization technique.

Generally speaking the more you write the higher your traffic will climb.

When traffic goes up more sales are generated for your business.

Sales are good for your business right?

Don’t be intimidated.

After much practice and plenty of frustration you will eventually learn how to find balance between providing great information for your readers and pleasing the search engines as well.

Once you get to that point you will completely understand what an awesome website promotion tool blogging really is.

4 Ways to Increase Organic Website Traffic

As an online marketer I’m always looking for result oriented ways to increase my organic website traffic.

I’ve found organic traffic to be the most highly targeted and profitable traffic coming to my websites.

Don’t get me wrong…all traffic can be good including paid traffic as long as it is targeted and reasonably priced but organic traffic is by far the best.

It’s also however the most difficult and time consuming to obtain but well worth it in the long run.

This stands to reason since the majority of organic website traffic is generated by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo and the biggest chunk coming from Google.

You see….Google and the other big players are interested in only one thing and that is providing the absolute most relevant information to their clients.

So the idea, of course, is if you can be sure your web pages have the most relevant information for a particular keyword you can be sure to get lots of organic traffic.

Below are 4 ways I’ve used to substantially increase my organic website traffic.

On-Page Optimization

Take a look at each page you want to increase organic traffic for and be sure you’ve used good SEO practices such as…

Using your keyword(s) in your title.

Applying alternative text to images.

Proper keyword density in comparison to amount of words on page. (roughly 2 to 3 percent)

Good meta descriptions and meta tags for each page.

A business phone number listed if available. (Looks more professional to search engines)

Proper anchor text used on each page for links.

Check for broken links frequently.

Quality Link Building

You should be constantly striving to build quality links for each web page you want to increase the organic traffic for.

Try to use the title of the page or your keyword as anchor text for each link you are building. For example….if you’re trying to compete for the keyword phrase ” stainless microwave ovens” your article or page title might be “Brand Name Stainless Microwave Ovens.” In this case I would recommend building your link anchor text using both phrases. Long tailed keyword phrases seem to be all the rage now so feel free to mix it up a bit but always making sure each link definitely includes the original keyword or phrase.

Always try to get your anchor text links displayed on relevant and quality websites as well. I don’t care what anyone says…PageRank is still a factor! So the more high pagerank links you can get using your keywords the higher your organic website traffic will climb. Just be sure the sites are in some way relevant and related to your product or niche.

Be sure to use an assortment of ideas for your link building campaign. ie…blogging, blog commenting, guest blogging, article marketing, image marketing, social bookmarking, etc.

Also…always seek out DoFollow sites to exchange links with. NoFollow sites and nofollow directories are acceptable if they have a high volume of traffic, relevant content and a targeted link building process in place.

Ease of Navigation

Keep all of your website and your inner pages easy for the visitor to navigate. Use keyword anchor text to switch between pages whenever possible.

Make sure you text is easy for the visitor to read and understand and free flowing with lots of white space if at all possible. Generally speaking, people don’t like to read big long paragraphs on their home computer or cell phones. It cause them to have to squint and makes it harder to read and enjoy.

If you can break your paragraphs into short 1 or 2 sentence paragraphs it will be much more pleasing to the visitor as well. When your website displays quality it cause more people to re-visit and link to it naturally.

Write Specific and Useful Content

By specific I mean narrow down your product or topics as much as you can per individual page and keep it extremely relevant to your meta description and meta keywords. In other words don’t just talk about “books” if your page keyword is “motivational books.”

Avoid duplicate content on your site. (the same content shown twice on your website)

Always be sure that your page offers the most value to a visitor as it possibly can. Avoid any kind of deception at all times.

Remember….the more valuable information your page has to offer…the more people will link to it and spread it around.

And don’t forget….the search engines are only interested in one thing and that is providing the most absolute relevant sites for whatever their customer types into that little search box.

You might also consider checking out a great little inexpensive book by Heather Lutze called The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing. Check out the reviews also. It can really help you understand how to put all this together and make sure your website is competitive in the search engine arena.

If you can become an expert at the above 4 things and remain patient you can increase your organic website traffic many times over.

Earn Money Online Providing Value

Notice I didn’t say earn money online promoting value, I said providing value.

It’s ok to promote the value of what you’re selling so long as the product actually provides value.

I think that sometimes we get so hung up on advertising our product that we often forget to be sure our offer is sound and valuable to the visitor.

I’m not just speaking of the monetary terms, although our prices must be reasonable too….I’m more referring to what really makes a site, or any business for that matter, a true success.

Value……………Are you valuable to your audience?

If you aren’t the cheapest in town then is your product massively superior to your competition?

In the eye of the customer value comes first and price comes second.

If you sell information….is it the best information possible for your visitors and will it effect them enough to tell others where they got it?

If your site sells nothing but LCD TV’s you’ve got quite a bit of competition but you can still add value by providing the latest and greatest models, extremely fast shipping, after purchase follow-ups just to see if they’re happy, free gift wrapping, online customer reviews, free surge protectors and much more.

It all counts to the customer….they remember those kinds of things! Don’t you?

The added touches can go a long way on building customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

It can be tough to earn money online without providing real value to your visitors because competition in online markets are growing.

The good part is that 99% of your current and upcoming competitors will fail at this one simple little detail. They won’t give their customers any reason to come back or talk about their experience.

You, however, can earn lots of money online because you get it. You now understand the absolute necessity of providing value with every single transaction.

Offer them value and your visitors will reward you for it.

What Will Be Your Legacy

Have you ever given any thought about the term “legacy” and the meaning behind it?

Dictionary.com defines a legacy as anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor: the legacy of ancient Rome.

I thought about and pondered the definition for years and years.

I’ve made lots of mistakes in my lifetime such as treating people poorly, spent too much time partying, spent too much time being lazy, executed a few horrible business decisions, and the list goes on and on.

I’ve also had my share of successes and done some really good things in my opinion such as marrying my wife and raising and supporting 4 children, buying a home, helped those who required help, maintained a successful career, created a couple small businesses, enjoyed lifetime friendships and maybe a few other smaller accomplishments.

One of the goals that I’m most proud of, however, is building and creating this website.

If I have it my way… it will be my legacy to my family, friends and a significant chunk of the world .

It’s something I can give.

Hopefully it will be something to remember me by when I depart this precious and still largely untapped phenomenon we call life.

What will be your legacy?

What mark will you leave on the world?

Will you offer a contribution that will enrich the lives of your own children, grandchildren and a portion of our great human population?

It’s important to work on your legacy.

It will give you personal guidance, definition, direction and above all it will help you to inspire others.

We humans need and crave inspiration to keep driving forward on life’s highway.

Think about your own defining traits, the things your good at and figure out a way to combine them and start building your legacy if you haven’t already.

When you do it will give life purpose and clarity.

What will be your legacy?