This week I’ve revealed more about myself and my reason for starting my website and this blog. I’ve made these admissions because I want you to understand that my physical debility causes me to take a leave of absence.
Not even my need to feel that I am helping people (that I’m not just taking up space) no longer compels me to do what needs to be done for both my website and blog.
The truth is I’ve been struggling all summer to keep going. This morning my husband really had to keep after me so that I would get up. I felt I could have gone on sleeping forever.
While these spells, which I call “sinkers”, have come and gone throughout the course of my illness; I never quite recover to the full vigor that I enjoyed prior to one of these episodes. Whether I will get to the point where I feel I can once again join the conversation remains to be seen.
But you’ll continue to find everything you need to know about starting an internet business from your home computer both here and at Personal-Business-Protection.org.
You can still contact me through my website and I hope to be able to continue to answer emails.
Whether I am gone a week, a month or never make it back at all, please know my thoughts are with each one of you.
There is a reason why I was retired in 2007. In 2000, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. This particular cancer is quite rare. I’ve had it so long that the handful of researchers who study it have renamed it!
I had no idea why I was still alive seven years after the diagnosis. But after our daughter was scammed, I strived to attach a purpose to my survival. I was too late to help her, but I could launch an information hub.
I made my goal to keep others looking to make money online from getting scammed.
Having owned two businesses back in the 60s and 70s, I know what goes into business ownership. I also know that most people, regardless of what they want to believe about themselves, are not really prepared to spend the 15-hour days that it takes to operate their business, keep records, handle taxes, manage employees, and run the public side of their business.
The goal of my previous businesses was to make money doing something I loved and believed in. Without the conviction that I was making a difference for the people I served, I could not have stuck with either of them.
The goal of my current business has less to do with making money. Of course, I did create my own product (quite by accident), an ebook, and I am an affiliate for a handful of products and services that have served me well.
An internet business has additional challenges.
First and foremost is the technical side. Without programming skills, you won’t get that business idea launched, unless you select a modular website model like Site Build It (SBI), which I discovered back in April of 2008. I am an SBI affiliate, too.
(Of course, you can upload your own programming into SBI. When I talk about it I usually stress the features for beginner marketers, because that is my audience).
Second, internet marketing is based on communication skills; most of it written. If you hate to write and freeze up at the thought of picking up a phone to talk to strangers, you’re going to have a tough time running an internet business unless you have the money to outsource these necessary chores.
Third, every business whether it is educating, providing a service or products relies on salesmanship.
Not one of us has escaped the hard sell pitch. Very few of us have avoided being talked into buy something we didn’t want. We carry scars of purchases that sit in our basements. We don’t like sales.
Despite that, unless you are able to support your reason for being online out of your own pocket, you need sales skills both written and spoken, to make the time you spend online profitable.
I’m a big believer in the Bell Curve. If you picture the silhouette of a typical bell, you know the center of the bell is the thickest tapering to narrow flares at both sides.
Suppose you take a group of people, any group, and measure them for a specific ability. The majority will fall in the middle; this establishes the average for that ability in that group. A few will fall into the narrow sides; one side represents the overachievers and the other represents those who will fail.
As a former teacher, I can tell you most students in my classes were average. A few excelled and a few were never able to focus on the class material to their advantage.
The same holds true of any given group wanting to make money online.
Some will investigate the information necessary to make a business succeed. Others will not bother. Of those who conduct their own research, most will be able to apply the information they have learned. A few will apply those lessons assiduously and soon put their own stamp on it to excel in ways the rest of us can only dream of.
Knowing that the majority of my readers will break even or lose money, I provide a list of legitimate internet employers on my website.
The work is not glamorous. Few of these employers offer benefits. But it is an option for the many thousands of people out of work whose true goal is to make money online until the economy recovers.
Courtney Tuttle is a former internet consultant who gives pointers for improving website performance at Court’s Internet Marketing School.
Tuttle has had an online presence for about four years and has made a fulltime income offering free information in the “make money online” niche through selling advertising space.
This is an internet marketing model anyone can copy.
In addition to adding valuable information to his site, Tuttle participates in blog carnivals and article marketing.
Of course, your niche may be much different. In the make money from home or make money online niche I’m providing similar information as Tuttle, Darren Rowse, John Jantsch, Jeremy Schoemaker and a host of others.
No matter what your niche is success is achieved through investing in
• setting goals for your business • lots of time in learning how to achieve those goals on the web • creating content consistently • a little money • persistence
For me persistence comes through feeling that what I do makes a difference. My goal is to provide useful internet marketing information so that what happened to our daughter doesn't happen to you.
When I started out 17 months ago, I was propelled by anger over the fact that out disabled daughter had been taken for thousands of dollars when she tried to launch an online business.
I’ve told her story many times. She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2001 and has steadily grown worse to the point she can no longer work.
She is not a stupid person. In fact, she earned her masters degree. She was very good at her job.
She is not a spendthrift. She invested in a mortgage and she had close to $10,000 in savings at the time she had to give up her job.
More than $6,000 of her savings went to the con artist who promised to set her up in her own online business.
I went online and discovered all the information needed to develop an online business is out there—free!
So I culled through the best of the information available and reported it. I’ve thought of myself as sort of an administrative assistant, tracking down business tips for you home business CEOs.
From time to time I share marketing resources from around the web that you may find useful.
Marketing
Charlie Cook is a business mentor and coach who provides a range of internet marketing resources from free marketing plans to ad copy analysis on his website Marketing for Success. Opt-in required.
Scheduling
At the end of the day do you wonder where your time has gone? Download a desktop calendar and planner from BizWare Magic and stay on schedule!
Skype Apps
Pamela for Skype is a personal digital assistant for Skype that allows you to do many things, such as recording your calls into .mp3 files, recording your text chats and also record video calls for future reference. The basic version is free and lets you record 15 minutes of every conversation. There are also three premium plans available.
PrettyMay is an add-on for Skype that allows you to record and replay your calls. Save your Skype chats in MP3 audio format and also listen to the same background music with friends while conversing with them. Share your recordings with your friends. In addition, you can set PrettyMay to answer calls while you are away from your computer or you don't want to be disturbed. PrettyMay requires a download. It is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Free to use.
Teach Yourself Internet Marketing
Learning is an ongoing process that you can achieve at your own pace and for minimal investment at Success Book Club. In fact, several free tutorials are available there and at Small Business Classes.
In case you haven’t heard of him, Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter and marketing consultant. He’s one of a handful of guys on the internet who I love to read, even when his message doesn’t relate to me, simply because his writing is so darned good.
One of the tips he offered about keeping your reader on your page is to tell a story.
The truth is telling a story isn’t difficult; writing a story is time consuming.
When you’re blogging five days a week as most of us are, it is hard to justify making the effort to share your information through the structure of a story.
Nevertheless I’m going to frame this post on blog comments as a first person story.
I was inspired to share my own experience with commenting when I launched Practical eMarketer back in January.
I did in fact seek other blogs in my niche and when I discovered a post that covered a subject that I had discussed here or on my website, I added my own experience to the conversation.
Since I have analytics on both of my sites, so I am able to see not just the number of hits on each page, but where the visitors come from and where they go next.
Back when I set aside 30 to 45 minutes a day to make comments, I did in fact pick up subscribers and the occasional commenter. But between Twitter, two other sites that I regularly contribute to, and posting on this blog weekdays, I ran out of steam.
I stopped making visits to other blogs for the purpose of commenting. Nowadays I make comments only because I’m inspired by some deep feeling to say something.
The result is that two months may pass before I see a new subscriber. While I was actively commenting, I was picking up a couple of subscribers each month.
And commenting here on Practical eMarketer has fallen off, even though I added a new comment feature this summer.
However, the number of people visiting this blog has steadily risen.
I suppose the takeaway from this is: if you are actively seeking the opportunity to network or need to interact with your readership, you should set aside some time each day to comment on other blogs in your niche. If you are satisfied with a hundred or so views most days, then that extra time might be better spent on posting articles on other sites.
Alltop is designed to answer the question, “What’s happening?”
Guy Kawasaki describes his news aggregator Alltop as a “magazine rack” of top stories. Members create their own home page featuring blogs that cover subjects of interest them. Membership is free to those who use the service.
You can suggest your own blog for inclusion in Alltop, providing it fits one of the categories allowed there. Acceptance is not automatic. There is a decision-making process but there are no published details about the elements being judged.
The question you need to ask yourself before getting involved in any sort of social media site is, “Is it worth my time?”
Not being tech-savvy, I always worry about getting involved in anything that requires a tutorial. But since autopinger is no longer a free service and since I’ve found nothing else that compares to it, I’ve drifted back to the notion of using Alltop.
According to Quantcast, Alltop receives an average of 120,000 US visitors monthly for a total of 207,000 hits from around the world. But most of its traffic data has been hidden by Kawasaki. So there is no way of knowing the demographics of those who use the site.
Quantcast only reveals that most visitors access Alltop from their home computer. Roughly one third of its audience comes from the business world.
Last year Michael Arrington gave Alltop “a big thumbs down” which he called “a big pile of nothing.”
My question for Alltop members is, Has your use of Alltop helped your business in a measurable way?
Please be sure to add your business category in your comment.
As children we played games. We pretended we were moms. We pretended we were soldiers. We pretended we were astronauts exploring alien worlds.
The question is did we learn anything from those games that serve us in our lives today?
Even if we didn’t grow up to be cowboys, is it possible that those long hours of pretending to be a cowboy taught us about getting along with others? You might recall that certain friends in your group continually directed everyone else with their ideas about how the game should be played or setting the game goals.
Here are five online games designed to teach business skills in a surprising number of areas.
IBM’s Innov8 offers three different scenarios to teach how to analyze existing traffic patterns and re-route traffic based on incoming metrics; develop more efficient ways to respond to customers in a call center environment; and balance supply and demand while reducing environmental impacts.
Informationist is a multiplayer business game that helps develop real life business skills. The game features 16 scenarios. You can practice developing joint ventures, offers 35 real estate markets, and a stock exchange to teach you how to buy and sells stocks, as well as how to select employees.
EIS puts you on a team of 22 people within an established company. The goal of your team is to get company decision makers to adapt a new policy or technical innovation. This teaching program is aimed at managers and teaches evaluating proposed changes, keeping the team on the same page and getting the company decision makers to yes within a 6 month virtual timeframe.
Robo Rush teaches salesmanship and business building in this online Sim game.
Indiana University developed Quest Atlantis to teach 9-16 year olds strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. QA has also been cited for teaching empathy, which is vitally important to any business strategy.
A retired journalist, I became an internet marketer last year after our daughter lost her savings in an internet scam. Since then, I've been publishing the results of my research into safe online solutions for home business owners.
Online success rests with good content and dogged promotion. I'll be covering practical marketing on this blog.
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