Free Tool to Create Cool Newspaper Clippings

just had to tell you about a free tool I found that I can see myself using quite a bit. Its called The Newspaper Clipping Generator.

This is a very cool tool for making your own newspaper clippings that say whatever you want. This can be a very powerful eye-catcher on your web site or blog.

Here's one I made that took me less than 2 minutes to create and save...



You can use it on your sales page to support your headline, create bullet points or testimonials, or add an editorial feel to a product review. he uses are only limited by your imagination. The tool is completely free and easy to use.

Obey Anti-Spam Laws or You'll Get Canned

A vital part of any successful internet marketing campaign is a mailing list. Sending follow-up emails to your prospects is a tried and true method for making sales.

But its important that you follow the law when doing so. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2004 establishes requirements and sets penalties (fines up to $11,000 per violation) for anyone who sends commercial email.

Some of the key points:

You must include a method for your recipients to opt-out of future emails.

You must not use any kind of misleading or false information in the header or subject lines of your email.

You must identify all commercial emails as an advertisement and include your valid physical address.

The official FTC page has more details regarding the CAN-SPAM Act. Follow the rules and you'll have no problems.

Also, consider using a respected mailing list/autoresponder like Aweber or GetResponse. They make it easy to manage your mailing list and they make sure that you are following Anti-Spam guidelines.

Keeping Your Readers Updated

Okay, so you've started your own blog or a website with an RSS feed to keep your readers up to date on new features and articles as you post them.

That's great!

But now you have to take the next step to getting your message out. You can greatly increase the number of people who subscribe to your feeds just by offering them an easy way to do so.

Scroll up to the top of this screen and look right under the Blog title and description. Go ahead, I'll wait for you...

Back? Did you see all the little boxes that say "Add to Google", "My Yahoo!" and "My MSN"?

Well they didn't come with this blog, I put them there.

They are an easy way for anyone to subscribe to my blog feed. Just click on that "My Yahoo!" button and a screen will pop up allowing you to add the Internet Marketing Insider to your My Yahoo! page.

People spend a lot of time on pages like My Yahoo! because they added the content themsleves and they know they can trust it.

That makes it valuable online real estate and there's no reason you should be on it.

At the very least you should add buttons for the Big 3 of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. You'll see great increases in both subscribers and traffic to your site.

Plus, it only takes a minute to do:










There, I just did it again...pretty cool huh?

Now I'll show you how to do it. Just copy and paste this code into your site or blog:

<a href="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=
http://yourdomain.com/atom.xml">
<img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com
/i/us/my/addtomyyahoo4.gif" style="border:0"></a>
<a href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://yourdomain.com/atom.xml"><img src="http://www.google.com/webmasters/add-to-
google-plus.gif" border="0" align=middle alt="Add to Google"></a>
<a href="http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://yourdomain.com/atom.xml&tt=
CENTRALDIRECTORY&ru=http://rss.msn.com">
<img src="http://sc.msn.com/c/rss/rss_mymsn.gif"
style="border:0" width="71" height="14"></a>

Just change "yourdomain.com" to your actual domain and you will have given your readers an easy way to stay up to date on everything you have to offer.

Grab your free $97 ebook before its too late...

I'm going to share a secret that will let you download a $97 ebook for free.

Interested?

"The New Age Work at Home Plan" is the brand new ebook just released by marketing wizard Jim Daniels and although he is selling it for $97 on his site, he also embedded a secret link to allow free access only to those who have been personally referred.

I was let in on this secret link and I'm going to share it with all of you too so you can take advantage of the free offer before it disappears forever.

Here's what you do to get your free $97 eBook:

Click on this link: Free $97 ebook

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the GOLD KEY. This will allow you to bypass the order page and download the eBook for free.

Do NOT buy the ebook! Just click on the Gold Key and you'll get a copy for free!

Your IRS Business Code

Tax time is over for most of us this year, but its never too early to think about next year. You still have about 7 months to prepare.

If you're just starting to earn money online, you'll need to know what your Business Activity Code is. What the heck is that?

Its simply a numeric code the IRS uses to categorize your business activity. Mine is 516110, which is for "Internet Publishing."

Depending on how you make your money online, yours could be different. You can do a keyword search at the link below to help determine how to classify your internet business.

http://www.naicscode.com

Possibilities...

I'm reprinting this post with permission from Neil Shearing's blog as motivation. I just want to show you what is possible in the worl of Internet Marketing.

Just take a look at Neil's Clickbank earnings from just one week and you'll see what I mean...

It’s official… we won!
May 10th, 2006
Hey, it’s not every day you win a competition, right… and certainly not a sales competition against the likes of Joel Comm, Michael Campbell, Mike Filsaime and other top sellers. In fact, the competition we won was for the most sales of Adsense Videos in the first 7 days. We shifted 280 copies, 63 more than Joel who was in second place. In fact, one in ten of every sales was referred by us.

Take a look at the top-ten chart…



For more details, see the JV blog at Michael’s site.

Here’s a quick screenshot of the affiliate commissions I earned from the promotion of Adsense Videos. This graphic includes just a few sales of other products and is up-to-date, so it includes a few sales of Adsense Videos since the end of the Joint Venture competition…



I hope that by showing the commissions you’ll see the potential of an online business… the potential to make money and get rid of your debts… the potential to pay off your mortgage in a few years, not 25 or 30. If I thought the graphics wouldn’t motivate you, I wouldn’t show them. I’m not interested in bragging, I’m interested in showing you what’s possible with an online business… working your own hours from your own home.

If you want to be really amazed, check out the payment that Clickbank owe Michael! That’s a real show stopper.

Written by Neil Shearing
http://www.neilshearing.com

Yahoo's New Beta Site Explorer

Just a quick note about a new free tool that I just stumbled upon myself this morning.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool that's still in Beta, but it lets you explore the all of the pages indexed by Yahoo! Search as well as explore the backlinks of each page.

Here's the link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

I just started playing with it myself so I'm not sure of all the features. But it looks like a good way to quickly take inventory of a site's structure and backlinks.

Looks a bit like a poor-man's SEO Elite in that you can research your competitor's link structure and search for your own link partners.

However, SEO Elite offers far more details about the backlinks that Site Explorer doesn't. And of course Site Explorer only provides Yahoo! results. You still need a way to research in Google and MSN.

But hey, its free. It will give you a good idea of how well you site is doing in terms of backlinks. And if you find you need more information than it can give you, which you eventually will, you can always upgrade to SEO Elite.

SEO Elite is not free, but it will quickly pay for itself in the time it saves you.

Blog and Ping your way to riches...

Getting to the top of the search engine results pages (SERP's) is a never ending struggle. One key startegy is to constantly add new content.

Search engines love sites that consistently add new content. Its one reason blogs are so prominent in the SERPs. The content is always fresh, which is an advantage ofver static web sites.

But in order to take full advantage of blogging, you have to make sure the seach engines know that you have added new content.

The easiest way to do this is with automatically. Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat are free services that let dozens of different search engines know that your blog has been updated.
Each time you update your blog, you should go immediately to Ping-O-Matic or Pingoat and do a Submit. It only takes about 5 seconds to do, and your blog will get a great amount of exposure.

Here are the links...
http://www.pingomatic.com
http://www.pingoat.com

High Performance Affiliate Marketing

Have you taken a shot at affiliate marketing but failed miserably?

No traffic? No sales? No income?

Well you're not alone. ALL successful marketers failed in the beginning, myself included.

The great majority of affiliate marketers give up after less than a year. They throw together a website with a bunch of banner ads and links and wait for the dough to come pouring in. When it doesn't happen, they give up.

But the great web marketers, the ones who make the BIG MONEY...they don't give up. They dust themselves off, learn from their mistakes and keep plugging away.

They learn what works and what doesn't. They learn the 'secrets' that those who give up never do. They learn by trial and error, sometimes taking years before they finally put the pieces together.

That's the way its always been.

Until Now.

Now you can skip all the costly failures and learn the secrets that the 'Masters' have been using to get rich.

In his new ebook, Quit Your Day Job, internet marketing guru Jeremy Palmer shares the secret tactics he used to make over $1,000,000 in affiliate commissions last year.

When you read his ebook, he will walk with you step by step as you:

-Research topics and size up the competition (if you get this wrong you are doomed to failure before you even start)
-Find highly profitable keywords that no one else is using
-Design and create a site in no time
-Promote your site into the top ranking positions in the search engines

Plus, when you buy the ebook, you also get access to Jeremy's 'members only' forums where you can ask him questions and advice...and he actually responds personally.

It's like having your very own marketing consultant in your back pocket.

I've purchased "Quit Your Day Job" myself and I can't recommended it highly enough. Every affiliate marketer should own this ebook...

Buy it right now and become a high performing affiliate marketer.

Finances and Tax Deductions

If you are serious about making money in internet marketing, you need to treat it as a business. Whether that means forming a corporation, an LLC, an S-Corp, or a sole proprietorship depends on you and your business plan.

But no matter what business structure you choose, you should consider using Nitro Tax Helper to track your income and expenses. It's an inexpensive piece of software that is designed specifically for small business owners. It will save you tons of time that can be better put to use by working on getting your business rolling.

When you are first starting out it may seem easy enough to keep track of everything. But unless your are incredibly organized its just too easy to miss something, especially when it comes to tracking expenses that can reduce your taxable income. You definitely want to find every tax deduction you can use.

So don't be like me when I started out, or you'll be left digging through a shoebox full of receipts at the last minute. Get organized now, and save yourself time and money later.

Get more info on the Tax Helper software now.

How NOT to Get Targeted Traffic...

You've seen the headlines all over the internet...

10,000 Visitors for Only $9.99!

Get 10,000 Unique Visitors for Just $12.99!

For someone like yourself who is struggling to get traffic to your site, it sounds almost too good to be true. Well, that's because it is.

Will you get a ton of traffic from these services...sure you will. But what kind of traffic?

What you will likely get is 10,000 hits from people who are not at all interested in your site. They are probably either surfing for cash via a reward site of some kind or they are participating in a traffic exchange in which they get hits based on how many other sites they hit themselves.

You will get a huge spike in traffic, but each visit will only last a second or two and you're unlikely to see a single sale from it.

No matter what kind of product or service you offer, you want targeted traffic. You want unique visitors who are looking for what you are offering and are already in the frame of mind to buy.

I say save yourself the trouble and put the ten bucks toward something more useful. Just keep adding content and features that your users will find useful and the traffic will come.

The BIBLE of Web Copywriting

The best book I've read to date on copywriting is without a doubt Maria Veloso's Web Copy That Sells

I picked it up not too long ago and have read it twice already. Its an easy read and I keep it on my desk as a reference everytime I write.

Maria brilliantly explains how to get inside your readers mind and gently lead them to your 'call of action'. Whether you want them to buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, or whatever...Web Copy That Sells will show you how to do it.

I'm not a fan of the hard-sale approach, so I found Maria's gentle approach much more to my liking. She recommends using an editorial style rather than a 'ram it down their throat' style.

Writing copy for the web is much different than writing in other mediums, and Maria's years of experience can be helpful even to experienced compywriters. For newbies, it's required reading.

When you start using Maria's tips, you should see a noticeable increase in conversions/income almost immediately.

Pick up your copy with this link right now before you forget:
Web Copy That Sells

Finding 'Targeted' Directories

So you've submitted your site to most of the bid dawgs in the world of online Directories. Those are great for links and they'll help bring in some traffic too, but you want more. You want really targeted traffic...you want people who are already looking for what you are offering.

What you need to do is find some highly targeted directories to list your site.
How?

It's easy, just do a Google search for "your main keyword" + directory. Just click on the first site, find out how to add your link, and add it. Then just hit the back button to return to the search results and go on to the next site. Do this to as many as you can find.

Then do another Google search for "your keyword" + "add a link" and do the same thing there. This should get you a good number of highly targeted backlinks.

Some of them may require a link from your site before you can add your own, but if the site is targeted and had good content its a good tradeoff. Just don't link back to sites that have no content or look spammy. You don't want to be associated with bad apples. Just skip it and move on to the next site on the search results page.

Submitting to Directories...

One way to get lots of good links fast is by submitting your site to directories. A good resource to use for finding directories is http://strongestlinks.com/directories.php.

This site keeps an updated list of the best directories, their PageRank, and whether or not submission is free. Start with the free ones first. Others either charge a fee or require you to link to their site before they will add yours.

Be careful not to spend too much time submitting though as you could easily waste days at a time. Your best bet is to block out an hour or so a few times a week and use it strictly for directory submissions. This will help you get listed in a whole bunch of directories and still leave time for other work.

Use this list wisely and you'll soon have loads of backlinks and you'll also start to see some traffic coming from them.

Next, I'll share a tip for finding directories that are targeted specifically to your site's topic. This is much better than most generic directories because the traffic will be much more targeted and so also more likely to bring you a sale.

Dashed Domains??

There's always a lot of debate in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) over what works, what doesn't, and what will get you banned by the search engines.

One of the hot topics these days is the dash, also called a hyphen.

Yup, that little dash on your keyboard has caused a lot of arguments lately. Why?

Some people think that using dashes in your domain could appear spammy to the search engines and it will get your site banned, all traffic will stop and your site will implode into a giant black hole.

Some spammy sites have been known to stuff their domain with keywords and use dashes to keep it somewhat readable. These sites offer little valuable content and use keyword stuffing and other black-hat (unethical) tactics to get a high ranking.

But there are simply too many websites out there that use dashes for perfectly legitimate reasons. And keyword stuffing can be done without dashes anyway.

Thousands of established sites being dropped just because a few spammers used a couple dashes in their domain? I just don't but it. If you want to use dashes, go right ahead.

Personally, I try not to use them only because I find it easier to communicate the site name without them. For example, one of my sites is top5affiliateprograms.com. It's a lot clearer when speaking to say than top-5-affiliate-programs.com.

Plus, some people will forget to add the dashes when typing the address and you may lose some customers.

But that said, I've used dashes on sites before and had no problem with being dropped by the search engines. So its really whatever you like best.

Don't waste your energy arguing about it. Use the time to work on your site instead. :)

Simple Copywriting for Beginners

By Ken Leonard Jr.

So you want to sell online... You have a product ready to go, but how are you supposed to write a sales letter like the ones used by the biggest names in internet marketing? A sales letter that attracts prospects and makes sales?

It's no secret that the biggest names in online marketing have been studying the art of writing sales copy for the web for many years. If they haven't, they hire someone who has.

Just having a product to sell online is not going to make you sales. Unless you have the budget to hire a pro copywriter for the web (which will cost you as much as $15,000 for one sales letter, possibly plus 10% of the gross sales), you had better start learning how to write a sales letter that will bring you sales.

The key to a winning sales page for your web site is crafting a great offer. Your offer must be so irresistible, that it almost looks like you are getting the short end of the deal. Like the customer is taking advantage of YOU!

Your irresistible offer must also stand out from the crowd. Develop your own USP (unique selling proposition) and wave it around like a flag. This is why they should buy from YOU, instead of somebody else.

One more thing your offer must do is solve a pressing concern or problem that your prospect is AGONIZING over. Your sales letter must clearly state their biggest problem. Prove how bad this problem really is to your reader. Then give them the clear solution to their problem available only from YOU!

Lead off your sales letter with the offer's biggest benefit to your potential customer. Then lead them into an interesting story dealing with their situation. Capture their attention and hold it, by inserting subtle "teases" that tell them what's to come further on in your letter. This creates curiosity, and if done well, will keep them GLUED to your web page.

To build value for your product from their perspective, educate your reader and inform them of what your product will do for them (always keeping "What's In It For Me" in mind). Make sure any strong statements are backed up with a "reason why" so they are more believable. This does wonders for your credibility in their eyes. If price is a major objection use a strong reason why to make the prospect understand your product's real value to them.

As your offer develops use a limited time or limited quantity deal to create a sense of scarcity and fear of loss. Spell out your bonuses clearly and recap the benefits they will get (and WHY they are important). Then go over everything they will get WHEN (not IF) they buy from you.
Some sales people would call your next step closing the deal, but you should really look at it as a "call to action". Tell your reader EXACTLY what you want them to do NOW, then tell them WHY.

Sign your sales letter as you would normally, with a pleasant goodbye and your signature or initials (a scanned or hand drawn signature works well). Include a P.S. where the first paragraph is another recap of what they will get, and in the second paragraph nicely question their commitment and attitude concerning the biggest benefit, ending with another strong call to action. (The second paragraph can be a P.P.S.)

The more your practice, the better you will become at writing sales letters for the web that sell.

Studying "The Masters" helps a lot, too. It is common practice in the world of copywriting for the web to collect a "swipe file" of sales letter examples from various copywriters and marketers. Use the examples in your swipe file to build (also known as modeling) your own successful sales letter, written mostly in your own words. Be sure you customize the examples for your market and offer, and don't copy anything word for word or you may be facing copyright infringement troubles later on.

Save yourself a boatload of time and money and get Internet Home Business advice from Ken. Got information overload? Ken Leonard Jr. will help you understand.

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog! My name is Mike Collins and I started this site to teach you how to make money on the internet.

I'll post articles and tips that I've picked up and used for my own web marketing projects, and I'll teach you how you can use them to make money too.

If you work hard and follow the tips I lay out for you, you can make an amazing amount of cash. But don't forget that how much you get out of it will depend on how much you put into it.

There may have been a time when the internet was a baby and all you had to do was throw some banner ads on a web page and watch the dough roll in. But there's a lot more to it now.

And since the rules of what works in Internet Marketing are always changing you need a place to come for up to date news and tips.

Fortunately for you, you found this web site! :)
Now add it to your favorites or you'll miss out on the tips that will make you rich!