Time Management Mistakes

Are you an internet marketer who finds it difficult to stay focused and stay on task? If so, you have a time management problem. The first step in curing a time management problem is to know what the problems are.

So, how do you know what your time management problems are? An easy approach is to examine common time management mistakes and see if they apply to you.

Mistake #1 – Not Realizing Time is Money

Whether you sell your internet marketing services or use internet marketing to drive traffic to a website or blog where you sell a product, service, or generate income through affiliate links, time is money. Your ability to market a product, service, website, or blog, is what generates income. When you are successful, you make a sale or receive an advertisement click.

The ability to make money based on your productivity is a unique opportunity. In the corporate world, it doesn’t matter how efficient and productive an employee is, they usually receive the same paycheck week after week. Since you have a unique opportunity, realize the potential. Remembering that time is money can serve as a source of motivation.

Mistake #2 – Using the Internet for Personal Communication

Yes, the internet makes it easy to stay in contact with friends and family. You are encouraged to do so, but on your own personal time. If you are working from 9 am to 3 pm, work only. Do not check your email, unless for business purposes only, avoid instant messaging programs, and so forth.

When you take the ability to socialize away from the internet, you will find it easier to manage your time and tasks.

Mistake #3 – Not Knowing Where You Are Wasting Time

Unfortunately, many home based workers waste time without realizing they are doing so. Many think that quickly checking their email won’t waste time, but it can. What if you check your email multiple times a day? You could waste as much as 15 minutes or more. That doesn’t count the time you may spend responding, clicking on links, and so forth.

Yes, it is important to start managing your time and right away, but first complete a trial run. Have a pen and paper handy and go about your day. Each time you find yourself stepping away from work, record the time and what you are doing. No that you know what your distractions are, eliminate them.

Mistake #4 – Allowing Distractions

Once you determine what distracts you from completing your daily internet marketing tasks, it is important to eliminate them. Do you use instant messaging programs to communicate with others for personal reasons, not business? If so, disconnect the program. When you do, it no longer becomes an issue.

In addition to eliminating distractions online, look at your surroundings. If you work from home, it is easy to find many distractions. Background noise is ideal for some, but do you find yourself watching television instead of working? If so, shut it off. Do not answer your phone. Instead, use caller identification and an answering machine so you can be alerted in an emergency. Otherwise, do answer the phone.

Mistake #4 – Justifying Your Actions

When may realize their common distractions, most will take steps to eliminate the problem, but others tend to justify it. Do not do this, as it will not improve your time management skills.

A unique way to market a website, blog, product, or service is with the use of applicable internet forums. For example, do you sell a dog obedience eBook? If so, create a message board signature with a link and a catchy sales phrase. Each time you post a message, your link will appear below. So, this approach involves chatting on internet forums. Do so, but only in moderation. Set aside a specific block of time, such as 30 minutes or 1 hour. Do not spend all day socializing and justifying your actions by claiming it is a marketing tactic.

Prioritizing Your Tasks

Is internet marketing one of the many tasks you complete as a webmaster? If so, you may feel overwhelmed. After all, your to-do list may be two pages or longer! So, how do you manage your time without feeling overwhelmed and working to the max? You do so by prioritizing your internet marketing tasks.

As nice as it is to hear that you can and should prioritize your internet marketing tasks, you may be wondering why. For starters, prioritizing has its own benefits. It lets you know what you need to do and how. Items are often categorized in order based on importance. In terms of internet marketing, this can make it easier to complete your daily duties, as well as in an effective manner.

What is ideal about prioritizing your internet marketing, aside from improving productivity, is your options. Since it is your to-do list, you can prioritize its contents however you see fit. For tips and suggestions on how to prioritize your tasks for the ultimate results, please continue reading on.

Before focusing on how you can prioritize your internet marketing tasks, make sure you can. If you work as an internet marketer for hire, you work for others. You may be provided with a specific list of duties. This means that you might not have a choice, as these tasks may already be prioritized and in order for you. However, if you do have freedom:

Start with something new. Many internet marketers put off certain tasks, especially those they have yet to try. This is mostly due to a fear of failure. Yes, if an internet marketing campaign falls short, you lose money and time. But, you also lose money by not taking the risk. So, get your to-do list started with a new internet marketing technique you have yet to try.

Start with something you know works. As previously stated, you want to try new internet marketing tactics, but that doesn’t mean you have to start your day with them. If you want to ensure your time will translate into money, start with marketing tactics you know work. For example, have you seen an increase in website traffic due to article directory submissions? If so, start your day producing content to be distributed.

Start with something that is easy. Internet marketing tactics come in all different formats. Some are easier than others. To get the ball rolling, start with a tactic that you know is easy. For example, do you post messages on a related forum with an advisement in your signature? If so, this is easy. Starting with an easy task not only gets the ball rolling, but it can also help you get into your groove.

Start with something that is hard. Do you have a hard marketing method on your to-do list? For example, do you want to write two new pages of copy for your website? If so, you may find this hard, as it is time consuming. For that reason, move this step to the top of your to-do list. When you get the harder tasks out of the way, you can breathe a sigh of relief and stop ferreting about it.

In conclusion, there are many ways to prioritize a to-do list. Your choice should depend on your own personal preferences. With that said, look for an approach that is easy to work with and one that improves productivity.

Make Money With Dedicated Servers

There are thousands of ways to make money on the internet. If you can create a website, you can try to drive customers to your website, either to purchase goods or to click on ads. Ads on websites generate substantial revenue for website owners. Some websites just depend on ad revenue to keep going.

All websites need to have a host. A host is a server that is the link between your website and your customers. All websites have a server. Most small business websites use a shared server. This means that they pay a small fee each month to share a server with other businesses.

Large businesses, however, use a dedicated server. A dedicated server only hosts your website. Because you are not sharing the space or bandwidth on the server with others, you have a lot more space. You also have the ability to bring a lot more traffic to your website because of the bandwidth.

If you switch to a dedicated server, you can use the space to make up affiliate websites. They can generate revenue through ads and also link to your business website. By adding a bit of content to these smaller websites, you can earn revenue through ads as well as affiliate ads. Affiliate ads give you a percentage of profit if a customer purchases a certain product or service after seeing it on your website.

By having the freedom of space and bandwidth afforded by a dedicated server, you can earn an unlimited amount of money on the internet. Although a dedicated server costs more than a shared server in monthly fees, the difference in fees can more than be alleviated if you put the additional space to good use.

Once you understand the concept of having a dedicated server, the sky is the limit when it comes to making money on the internet.

Another way to make money on the internet with dedicated servers is to use them to host other company websites. If you have the ability to create a dedicated server, using a template as well as a quite a bit of computer knowledge, you can either use the dedicated server to provide service to other websites on the internet or you can use it to host your own group of websites.

Ads are a great way to generate revenue on your website. If you have your own dedicated server, you can decide which type of ads you can put on your website as well as which affiliate products you wish to sell. You can have a myriad of websites all connected to your dedicated server and have total control of the money making properties of each.

Whether you choose to use the dedicated server to host your own websites or to host other websites, you can make money on the internet using a dedicated server. Whether you choose ad revenue, affiliate sales, your own product sales or service to other individuals and businesses, the internet has limitless possibilities for making money.

Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

Affiliate marketing is one way in which bloggers utilize their blog to generate revenue. The amount of revenue generated by a blog featuring affiliate marketing links may vary significantly depending on the amount of traffic the blog receives as well as the compensation offered for the affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing essentially entails creating a link on the blog to another company’s website. The other company then compensates the blog owner according to a previously agreed upon contract. This compensation may be awarded in a number of different ways. The blog owner may be compensated each time the advertisement is served, each time a unique website visitor clicks through the advertisement or each time a blog visitor performs a desired action such as making a purchase or registering with the website. This article will discuss some aspects of affiliate marketing which bloggers should understand including selecting opportunities carefully, maximizing the income potential for these opportunities and understanding the requirements associated with these affiliate marketing opportunities.

Selecting Affiliate Marketing Opportunities

There is a wide variety of affiliate marketing opportunities available. Many different companies and websites offer affiliate marketing opportunities. In most cases the blog owner simply needs to submit the website address of his blog along with some other basic information for approval. In most cases the company is not likely to reject the application unless the content of the website is deemed to be objectionable or otherwise in conflict of interest with the company’s goals. However, although getting approved to display affiliate links on your website is a rather simple process, this does not mean blog owners should select these affiliate marketing opportunities without discretion. It is a far better idea to carefully select affiliate marketing opportunities with companies who are of interest to the target audience of the blog.

A well focused blog that is reaching a specific target audience should seek to display marketing links directing website traffic to companies which complement the blog without acting as direct competition to the blog. This helps to ensure the blog visitors will not only be interested in the affiliate marketing links and therefore more likely to click on the links but will also help to ensure the blog visitors do not find the affiliate marketing links to be bothersome.

Maximizing Affiliate Marketing Opportunities

Once blog owners have selected affiliate marketing opportunities it is time to consider how they can maximize the profit generated by these links. There are a couple of critical factors which blog owners should carefully consider to help maximize their profit from affiliate marketing. This includes regularly evaluating the effectiveness of the affiliate links and promoting the blog to maximize traffic.

Blog owners who incorporate affiliate marketing into their blog should regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the affiliate links. This can be done by comparing the percentage of blog visitors who click on the affiliate links to the overall blog traffic. A blog which has high traffic but a relatively small percentage of visitors who click on the affiliate links should consider making changes to attempt to entice more blog visitors to click on the links. These changes can involve the aesthetics, size or location of the advertisements. Making only one change at a time is recommended because it makes it easier for the blog owner to evaluate which changes are most beneficial.

Blog owners can also help to maximize the profit from their affiliate marketing opportunities by doing self promotion to drive additional website to the blog. This will likely be beneficial because higher website traffic will generally translate to greater profit from affiliate marketing. Additionally, the blog owner may want to occasionally mention companies for which they are an affiliate to generate interest in the advertisements on the website.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing Requirements

Finally, blog owners should pay careful attention to the affiliate marketing agreements they enter. This is important because some companies may place restrictions on the usage of a link to their website. This may include restrictions such as avoiding objectionable content, not including links or advertisements for direct competitors or restrictions on the appearance of the affiliate links. Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in the blog losing affiliate privileges and the blog owner being denied compensation.

How To Choose Affiliate Banners For Your Site

Internet affiliate marketing is a relatively recent concept, but internet affiliate marketing has often worked out quite well for many different business owners who have given affiliate marketing a try. Internet affiliate marketing often brings to mind ideas of affiliate marketing banners posted on one’s website, and although there are other ways of utilizing affiliate marketing, this is probably the most common.

If you are looking for affiliate marketing banners to place on your website, it is important that you try to pick the correct affiliate marketing banners. Some affiliate marketing banners are very colorful and full of graphics aimed at targeting your customer base, who may be interested in the affiliate marketing products or services. However, these involved affiliate marketing banners often do not produce very good affiliate marketing results. One of the reasons for this is because the affiliate marketing banner that is so full of color, fancy text, pictures, etc. can take too long to load on many computers, thus defeating the whole idea behind the affiliate marketing strategy. It may be more worth your affiliate marketing time and money to find affiliate marketing banners that are based around text. Many business owners who have used internet affiliate marketing have discovered that these text based affiliate marketing banners do not have any less of a click rate than other affiliate marketing banners.

These text affiliate marketing links and banners are also probably less bothersome to your customers. It is also recommended that you be careful with the flashing affiliate marketing banners and blinking affiliate marketing banners. Although these affiliate marketing tools can sometimes cause more clicks from your affiliate marketing target audience, these affiliate marketing tools are also quite bothersome.

If there are affiliate marketing graphic ads that you decide to use as part of affiliate marketing strategies on your website, it will be wise to try to make sure that the affiliate marketing advertisement fits in with the theme colors and ideas of your site as much as possible. This will help the affiliate marketing enhance rather than distract from your own website. Affiliate marketing banners and affiliate marketing text links are definitely helpful for those interested in affiliate marketing.

The Internet Marketing Buzz: Are You Going To Be In Or Out?

Internet marketing has grown to huge proportions these past few years. It seems like if you are doing research to get the word out about your Internet business or website, you are able to find plenty of information about Internet marketing search engine placement, and other types of marketing ideas. So what is going to work for your business?

Internet marketing can be a hard nut to crack. It is definitely confusing to understand what the particular Internet marketing solution is for your business, but once you understand what direction you are headed and how to market your company, you are already halfway there to getting a lot of business for your company from the Internet.

New business owners, especially those who run smaller businesses, may not think that they need to concern themselves with Internet marketing, when they can try traditional marketing for their business. Smaller business owners can’t see how a good Internet marketing search engine placement is going to bring much more business into their shops than a yellow page ad.

Even those business owners, who are primarily on the Internet with their businesses, don’t really understand the importance of solid Internet marketing. Some of these business owners seem to think that by advertising on the Internet, they are going to be bombarded by work at home Internet marketing business schemes and other Internet marketing solutions that have absolutely no relevance to their businesses.

So what exactly do you have to do to get yourself into the Internet marketing game? Doing research on your competitors and similar businesses is going to definitely give you a leg up. Even if you are a local business, and you have no competition, you may want to check out your competition in other areas, to give you some good ideas. With other websites, find out what they are doing and how they’re doing it to win the game.

Sure, for some businesses, Internet marketing is going to be pretty expensive. If you are just starting out, you may not want to plunk down all of your budget for advertising into this type of marketing. As time goes on, you are going to want to add more and more of your money into getting to the top of the search engine results, which means that people will be able to find your business easily on the web, and you will get new customers from the buzz of the Internet.

Over time, Internet marketing is going to definitely boost your revenue and build your customer base. Time and patience is definitely needed, and learning about Internet marketing is going to really increase your profits more quickly and give you an advantage over everyone else who has no idea what they are doing. .

The Internet is more than just work at home Internet marketing business proposals and those who do a bit of research are sure to find the best Internet marketing solution for their businesses. Doing a little research in the beginning is definitely going to pay off. Once you get the Internet marketing nut cracked, you are going to see the sweet rewards of more business, higher profits and higher quality customers.

7 Surefire Steps To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest and fastest way to make money from the Internet. If done properly, it might even bring you huge fortune over a short period of time.

For anyone who is keen to participate, or just started in the affiliate marketing industry, here are a 7-steps system to help you get started and receive your affiliate commission in as little as 7 days.

Step #1: Finding A Profitable Affiliate Niche Market

This is the most important steps that you need to do. The trick to locate a profitable niche market is easy. First, compile a list of topics from your interests, hobbies or the problems that you are trying to solve. Next, use existing Internet resources such as the search engine, directories, forums, discussion groups to identify the public’s level of interest for each topic. Lastly, use keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to determine the profitability of the topic. A profitable affiliate niche market should have a high level of interest from the public with a good range of affiliate products already exist in the market.

Step #2: Setting Up Your Affiliate Website

The next step is to set up a website to build your mailing list and market your affiliate link. This can be a product review site, informative content site or just a one-page website with a redirect to the affiliate site. Whatever you do, do not forget to include an opt-in form to capture leads and build your mailing list. This list will bring you income over and over again in the future.

Step #3: Building Relationship With Your Leads

This can be achieved by setting up an autoresponder. Write content rich email message and set it up in your autoresponder system. The purpose here is to automate the whole follow up system and at the same time educate and build relationship with your leads.

Step #4: Final Checking Your Website Before Launching

The purpose of this step is to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Test drive your website to make sure all links are working, check for spelling and grammar mistakes, image layout, browser compatibility, check all your autoresponder messages etc. The last thing that you want to do is to scare your visitors off with bad website design and tons of broken links.

Step #5: Generating Traffic To Your Website

There are various strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website. The most common ones are pay-per-click advertising, article writing, forums posting, joint venture.

Step #6: Back End Affiliate Marketing

This is a crucial part to generate extra revenue. Make use of opportunities to market more affiliate products. Checkout page, thank you page and error404 page are good places for you to do back end affiliate marketing

Step #7: Duplicating And Leveraging

The last step is to duplicate your current success and apply it to another affiliate product. Once you have automated the process from step 1 to 6, this last step will become much easier.

Marketing Myths

Your online marketing battle will include a number of different methods in different areas of the Internet. You may have a web site, use an auto responder, post classified ads, post articles, place banner advertisements, sponsor lists and newsletters, distribute press releases, and much more. Keep in mind, though, that when you are first starting out, it is critical that you focus on one aspect of your marketing campaign at a time and promote it to its fullest extent before moving on to the next.

It is better to slowly become profitable by focusing on one issue at a time, than to barely be profitable because you are attacking all of the issues half-heartedly.

Diversify and spend small amounts on advertising at first. If you use a cautious approach, you will not be wiped out financially if an ad doesn’t generate the sales you were hoping for. Just keep testing ads as your budget allows until you find the one that works best; then you can roll it out and be confident that you are going to make money rather than lose it!

If you have a lot of competition, state that you will honor all of your competitors’ coupons and/or discounts; use “their” advertising to your advantage.

An age-old problem in business is collecting final payment for services rendered. As a business owner, you need to be prepared for “difficult” clients and “mooches” by doing such things as…

1. In your contract or sales agreements, state the interest rates and late fees that will be assessed if payment is not received within 30 days of completion.

2. Write form letters to be used for collecting the balance. There should be three letters in total — one after the payment is ten days late, another after twenty days, and a third that lets the client know that you’ll be turning their account over to a collection agency (or taking them to small claims court). The third letter should not be sent until 45 days after the payment is late. And of course, never bluff. If you say you will turn it over to a collection agency, do so.

3. The best way to protect yourself is to take payment via credit card. State to your client that you will bill their credit card one third of the total price as an initial down payment, another third just after you have passed the 50% completion point, and the final third on delivery. Or use the two-payment system — half at the initiation of the job and the remainder upon completion.

Your Affiliate Marketing Guide

Affiliate marketing is something that many webmasters know how to do. They know what it is about, and what it takes to be successful. However, if you are new to the webmaster world, you may just be wondering how you can get into affiliate marketing and making an income on the side for yourself. Doing so is not that complicated, and we have created this guide to get you started.

First of all, lets cover just exactly what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is when you sell or get leads for someone else’s service or product. You are going to find that there are so many people that do this. When a company needs some help making sales, and they allow people to sign up as affiliates, they are willing to pay a commission or a flat rate per lead or sale. Depending on the company, this percentage or flat rate will vary.

Affiliate marketing can be used to make a decent income several ways. You can use a website, a blog, newsletter, email, ads etc. The list goes on and on. However, the most popular form of affiliate marketing is done with a website. When you choose the market that you want to promote, be sure that you choose one that you are some what familiar with. This way you can become an expert on the topic, and everyone will know that you are the king of that market. Once that is done, it is time for a URL. There are many places that you can get your own domain from. Once you have decided where you will purchase that from, choose a URL that has the topic you are selling in the URL for the best results. For example, if you are wanting to market cat food, you wont use a URL that has dog in it. Make sure that everything is all relevant.

Now that you have your market and your URL chosen, you will want to determine the hosting that you will use for your website. You need dependable hosting for the best results. A hosting company that has more up time than down time is best because during the down time, your website will not be accessible. So, get some recommendations from others that have tried a few and use the best that you can find. It is worth it to pay for good hosting.

Once that is done, you are ready to get your affiliate links and website set up so that you can market the most effectively. Determine the amount of money that you want to make, and set up an outline of how you are going to make it. There are so many ways that you can get a website out there to be seen, and you will want to make the best decisions. So, finding out the best ways for you to do this is that is cost effective is a good start.

Learning SEO which is also known as search engine optimization is a great idea. Using SEO to get your site higher in the search engine rankings with keywords will pay off in the end. You can learn it yourself, or you can pay someone to do this part for you. It is up to you. However, you should know that learning and using SEO yourself is time consuming. Hiring an SEO guru might be better for you.

Write articles about the market that you are promoting from your website and submit them to all of the article directories. When you include a back link to the site that you are optimizing that will help you as well with the search engines.

Affiliate marketing is not anything that you can make money with over night. You need to be able to build up and keep adding to your website daily or weekly, and keep it going. You can do it, just don’t give up.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing to Succeed at It

On the surface, affiliate marketing looks like a very simple concept. You find a product for sale and you recommend it to others who might buy it. In return, you get a percentage of the sale as a commission because you’re associated with it. It’s so simple.

Just like how it is with insurance agents, door to door salesmen and real estate brokers. Affiliate marketing is all about sales and commissions.

But here’s something you should know – simple and easy are two different things.

Trust

When you’re selling online, in most cases, you’re not face to face with the prospect. The human element has been removed from the equation. Visitors to your site can leave with a click of the mouse.

Someone who doesn’t like your email can delete it and unsubscribe in seconds. Selling online while highly profitable, is a slightly different ballgame.

For starters, people come online looking for information or to be entertained. In other words, they’re looking for ‘infotainment’… and even if you’re in a niche like gardening, golf or woodworking, the same rule applies.

Your content not only needs to help the reader, but it must hold their attention… and guess what? Social media sites, instant notifications and a short attention span are all waiting to rob you of that sale.

Door to door salesmen never had it this tough. There is much more rejection online. The only difference is that it’s not so obvious.

So, always make your content relevant, entertaining and useful. The goal is to get the reader to trust you.

Use whatever it takes from infographics to videos to pictures of the product, etc. to remove all mental obstacles from the buyers’ minds and show how useful the product can be for solving their problems… and be subtle about it.

Traffic

The next thing you should know is that unlike real-life sales where the prospect comes to your store or you can go knocking on doors prospecting, when it comes to online marketing, things are a little different.

Building a website alone doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll get floods of traffic. You may not get any for years. To sell online, you need to go and GET traffic. It’s all about ‘getting’ and not sitting around waiting.

You’ll need to drive traffic on your own by using free or paid methods. So, you must learn a few traffic generation techniques and take action.

Tracking

When running an online business, you must track your results. Does your site have visitors? Do your products convert? Where is most of your traffic coming from?

Are your emails being opened? Which pages on your site see the most traffic? Which ads are performing well and which need to be shut down?

As you can, there are many variables involved and by tracking your results, you’ll know where to multiply your efforts and scale up… and where your efforts are yielding no fruit.

You’ll also know where you’re not performing as well as you should and be able to remedy the problem.

You’ll never know this if you don’t track.

So, remember the 3 T’s of affiliate marketing. Trust, traffic and tracking. If you follow these T’s to a T, you’ll succeed at affiliate marketing in record time.