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Now more than ever is a good time to start your own internet business. I say that as the US economy is sliding drastically. Not that it wont ever rebound or that we all should be so worried we need to start pulling all of our money out of the banks. But the truth is, it is just wise to find other means or forms of income off the board. What I mean is that it would be smart to find another source of income that is not at all reliant or dependent upon a 9-5 workday that pays the same amount like clockwork every week or every other week.

Times change and the way to make money changes right along with it. Lets face it, a secure job or position in a corporation or company is not as secure as it once was. Having extra income come from the internet can provide you with a sense of security and piece of mind knowing that things will be alright even if you were laid off or lost your job. Here’s a few ideas you can use to start your own internet business.

First of all you wont need much capital to start your own internet business. In fact, you can register a domain name for under $10 a year and find a server to host your site for about $10 or less a month. That’s pretty low considering that off line franchise fees and startup costs can run will into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the potential to make money on-line can well exceed what you can make from a normal brick and mortar store only because online, you have the entire world to market to.

There are many ways to start your own online business. I want to talk about one method specifically though today. This method can work for anyone who puts the effort and action into making it work and it involves running your own blog.

All a blog is is a website platform that allows an easy to use interface so users can easily add text, video, podcasts, and integrate that content wherever they’d like on their blog. A blog also allows visitors to participate in discussion by leaving comments and/or even be able to log into the blog to leave posts and content as well.

You can start your own internet business on anything you’d like and put it onto a blog platform. Let’s say for example you are passionate about fishing and you are wondering how in the world you can monetize with your knowledge on fishing. Well let me explain…

If you have extensive knowledge on anything, fishing, quilting, biking, hiking, or anything for that matter, there are ways to make money online because there are always going to be others somewhere in the world who are seeking the information that you can provide. Back to fishing…

You are a skilled fisherman and provide a brief blog post on how you bait a certain type of fish. Once you publish that post it will get indexed by the search engines so anyone who is looking for information on how to bait that fish will find your website simply by typing in some keywords in the search bar. The more informative posts you publish the more traffic you will get to your blog. And obviously some subjects will get more traffic than others so it is important to do a bit of research on which keywords people are typing in to get the maximum amount of traffic to your site.

So knowing now how to get traffic to your site, even for a fisherman, it comes down to making money from the traffic you are already getting. A fisherman may have an informative ebook for sale or maybe even find some affiliate products to advertise on the site to sell as well. Or maybe the fisherman has so much traffic, all he has to do a place a couple of Google Adsense ads around his site and those ads could bring him a hundred dollars a day or more. Or the fisherman could just up and sell 8 different advertising spots on his site for $250 a pop pulling him a nice $2000 a month. Or maybe he could even start a newsletter and capture names and emails of people who would like to hear more and then he could advertise to those people whenever he chooses. Or how about a combination of all the above?

My point is that there are plenty of ways for anyone to start your own internet business and a blog is just one way you can monetize by writing about the things that interest you. And what better way to make a living than writing and discussing with others about the things that you love to do. Starting your own internet business with a blog allows you to use your own personality, be your own boss, and to work whenever and wherever you please.

But why stop there? Like I said, a blog is just one way to make money online. You could also look into selling items on eBay, taking paid surveys, start a ghostwriting service, flip websites, or promote affiliate programs and earn passive residual income.

The opportunities to start your own internet business and to make money online are vast and what better time to do so. Break yourself from the norms of society and make a living working from the comfort of your own home. The internet is the future of money and it also holds a very lucrative future for you. Start your own internet business today!

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 3% [?]

Finding a credible and legitimate home based businesses on the internet is really not as hard as it may seem. Of course the internet being the size as it is certainly does have its fair share of non-legitimate home based businesses where people may try to coax you into spending money on products or services that are bunk. But we can avoid these bunk opportunities by doing just a little research.

One way to research and find some legitimate home based businesses is to join some internet marketing forums and just ask some people. It sounds fairly simple because really it is! Most people in forums are there to prove their own credibility and rapport and wont lead you astray as far as advice is concerned. I myself have found the Warrior Forum to be a very credible source of information and have received very valuable advice, ideas, and information from all of the wonderful people over there.

Another way to find legitimate home based businesses is to see what information you get just by doing a search in Google. Only the top authority sites get ranked on the first few pages of the search results, meaning that those websites have put in a massive amount of work to get to the spot where they are and you can usually find credible information from those sites as well. Of course it should go without saying to be careful before giving anyone your credit card information until you know for sure it is a legitimate home business.

A few legitimate home based businesses I have found and use are paid surveys, affiliate marketing, and creating your website or running your own blog.

In fact I would highly suggest the latter of the above mentioned legitimate home based businesses. Really you can make money in just about any subject there is. So if you can find a hungry market with a subject that you enjoy, you can really bank off of that opportunity simply by writing to a blog every day.

It really is as simple as that!

Listen… people have jobs and other people have careers. The people that have the jobs are the ones that are working their butts off doing something for someone else. They don’t necessarily want to be at their job but have to because it pays the bills. When you work at a job, you check the clock often because you want to get the hell out of there. Time just does not seem to go by any slower at a job.  Think about that…have you ever looked at your watch more than once counting the minutes till you leave?  That’s a job.

The people with careers notice that there is never enough time in the day. They are the ones who are constantly trying to find more time in the day to get the things done that they need to get done. Time flies and they are having genuine fun and enjoy what they do because it is their passion. These people often have much more money than the people with jobs and are overall just a happier bunch of people.

Where do you land? Do you have a job or a career? Can you imagine the possibilities of landing a legitimate home based business? And one that pays more than your job ever would!

Imagine working from home whenever you please. Imagine making your own schedule and being your own boss. Just think how nice that would be to spend more time with family and friends.

Finding a legitimate home based business may make all these possibilities a reality. There are plenty of ways to make money online and plenty of ways to make a full time income online. Find out what you are passionate about, what makes you tick, then find out how you can monetize your passions on the internet. You will most likely be surprised to find that many people are earning a full time income using your passion. You can too. All you have to do is mimic what that person is doing, then just work harder than them.

Matt Helphrey
Legitimate Home Based Businesses

Popularity: 4% [?]

I haven’t been giving away as many free things as I would like, today I will.  It is the mother of all affiliate marketing ebooks and it is called “Dotcomology”.

This affiliate marketing ebook really has it all. It is the book that got me started and if you are new, I hope it has the same effect on you.

“Dotcomology” was written by Stone Evans and written well I might add. It is a no nonsense, no bs affiliate marketing ebook that goes into great detail about how anyone, and I mean ANYONE, can go from no money, to making a full time income using the great power of the internet.

This affiliate marketing ebook gives you not only all the tools and information you will need, but also gives you a great sense of direction about what you need to do next. For starters it is an awesome read and it really fuels that burning fire to go out there and make something of yourself.

Stone himself had nothing, found that he could make money online, then set goals and took action to achieve his dream of financial independence.

Just think how nice that would be to work for yourself, whenever and wherever you want. No bosses to answer to, no deadlines to meet, and no ceiling for the amount of money you can make.

If this is something you are interested in, this affiliate marketing ebook, “Dotcomology WILL SHOW YOU THE WAY!

Enough talk. Here’s the Free Affiliate Marketing Ebook I was speaking of….just right click and select save as. Feel free to pass it along to anyone looking to make a living for them self…

Matt Helphrey

Affiliate Marketing Ebook

Popularity: 6% [?]

I apologize for not giving more updates but I have really been inundated with a massive amount of work.  That’s no excuse though and I will make it a point to be updating about what I am doing at least twice a week.

Today is Oct. 1 and I am going to go over all the stats from September.  What we are looking to see is that traffic, the most important stat (aside from money, but that’ll come), continues to climb.

The first stat I want to show is the number of back links…

Thirty days ago that number was 2519.  I have increased my visible back links by 194.  Of course I have seen that number at 2833 so again, not too reliable or accurate, we just want to make sure it is going up and it is.

As you can see above, I finally hit that elusive 10,000 visitor mark last month, increasing my traffic by 831 visitors with an average of 354 visitors per day.  I expect those numbers to be crushed next month.

Last week there were 2522 visitors.  The week before I had 2459.  That is a gain of 63 more visitors and I just missed the record by 12 visitors.

Thirty days ago I had a total of 56 subscribers.  That means it took me 12 months to get that number and an average of a little over 4.5 subscribers per month.  As of today, I have a total of 103.  I added 47 last month alone!

Thirty days ago I had an Alexa traffic rating of 766,169, today I’m at 733,540.  I climbed 32,629 spots last month!

Really encouraging stats and exactly what I was looking for.  I seem to be moving up in all facets so there you go… more proof my efforts are working.

I have a couple of projects on the horizon that I am just now beginning on that I feel is really going to make a name for myself in this industry.  of course not without help from a friend though.  More on this another time…

Stay tuned…

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 5% [?]

Are you looking to increase your list and are finding that your current methods just aren’t working?  No worries, a little patience and hard work is all you need. There are many things you can do to boost the amount of subscribers you get to your list.  Here are 5 email marketing tips you can use to explode your list.

Email Marketing Tip # 1

Create a squeeze page to capture subscribers:  You need to make a separate page aside from your static website or blog to capture subscribers.  This page should capture the readers attention by highlighting all of the benefits.  Use bullet points to list what the reader will be gaining by entering their name and email.  Also be sure to add a note at the bottom of the squeeze page that says something about the fact that their name and email will not be shared or sold and that you hate spam as much as they do.

Email Marketing Tip # 2

Market your squeeze page in traffic exchanges:  This can be a very effective method, especially because traffic exchanges aren’t much good for anything else.  Some traffic exchanges allow a certain number of ads unless you pay to have more.  To be as effective as possible, place as many ads as you can, and have them all link back to your squeeze page.  Try different ads and different squeeze pages to see what is most effective.  And enroll in several different traffic exchange programs as well.

Email Marketing Tip # 3

Place the opt-in sign up box in the most optimal places:  Mainly above the fold where it is visible to all.  Having the opt-in below the fold will not be as effective because many people never scroll down to see it.

Email Marketing Tip # 4

Market the squeeze page using pay-per click advertising:  The main search engines offer advertising programs called PPC or pay-per click advertising.  It allows you to advertise whatever landing page you choose, even your squeeze pages.  You must be very careful though when using PPC programs.  If done the wrong way you can end up paying money for a lot of non targeted hits that will result in little or no results.  Do some research before you delve into PPC advertising.

Email Marketing Tip # 5

Create an info product and give it away to boost your list:  If you can create something of value, you can offer that product for free to boost your list.  Tell people in forums about the product and you’ll get sign-ups.

What works best is to ask some big time joint venture partners to see if they would be so kind to offer it to their list as well.  One way to approach a jv partner is to do a little research first, see if they have a product and if they do, buy it, make a blog post about it, and send a mail to your list promoting it.  Then when you email them, let them know you have been promoting their products and that you would be thrilled if they could return the favor.  It is a free product after all that would benefit their members as well.

Use all five of these email marketing tips religiously and I will guarantee you will see your list explode to enormous proportions.

Best,

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 8% [?]

Copyright © Stone Evans, The Home Biz Guy
http://www.livelifetothefullest.biz/pips.html

GET MAD!

I mean it… Get *REALLY* mad!

Get MAD anytime you have to do something that you
don’t really want to do (like going to work FOR
SOMEBODY ELSE early in the morning)…

Get MAD for all the times you’ve wanted to buy
something nice for yourself, go on a vacation, take the
day off, or (insert your desires here) but couldn’t
afford it…

Get MAD if you’ve ever worried when the stock market
goes down…

Get MAD if there has ever been an opportunity to
improve your life or the life of people you love, but
you couldn’t take advantage of it because of time or
financial limitations…

Get MAD if what you *REALLY* wish you could do in this
life isn’t happening YET…

Why I’m a telling you to get mad? Don’t all the
self-help materials tell you to keep a positive
attitude… things will “work out”???

Guess what… THEY’RE WRONG!

*Before* you jump in and ride positive attitude parade,
you need to get red-hot, ***boiling*** MAD about the
way things are RIGHT NOW… It’s only when you GET
MAD, get fed up and get really pissed off with the way
things have been or the way things are now that you
will take the ACTION necessary to change your current
situation and make it into something better.

We are creatures driven by two desires only:

1) The desire to gain pleasure.

2) The desire to avoid pain.

And the latter is stronger than the former. We are much
more motivated to *avoid pain* than to gain pleasure.
Yes, we are all driven by the carrot and the stick, but
fear of the stick will get the average person moving a
lot faster than a salad at the end of a hard days
work…

Why do you *really* go to work every day? Is it because
your pursuing your passion and some grandiose goals? I
truly hope so! But most people get up and go to work
because they FEAR losing their job and ending up
homeless on the side of the streets begging for KFC
leftovers to get them through the night… The desire
to avoid this horrific pain is EXTREMELY motivational,
isn’t it?! USE IT!!!

Don’t fight against the forces that govern your very
existence… pleasure and pain. Use them wisely to your
benefit. If you know that pain motivates you, MAKE
YOURSELF FEEL PAIN so that you will TAKE ACTION and
change your current circumstances. It’s OK to use your
imagination here.

Think about what would happen if you got fired and
couldn’t find another job for the next 6 months… How
freaked out would you get then? Feel that.

Think about what would happen if you simply did nothing
different for the rest of your life and continued to
live the “status quo”, do-what’s-expected-of-you
lifestyle that’s got you this far, and left many of
your most sacred dreams and ambitions on the table. How
painful will it be to be on your deathbed knowing that
you never even tried to do what your heart was telling
you that you *really* wanted to do in this life? Feel
that.

Think about what not having enough time or money is NOT
ALLOWING you to do that you really, really, really,
really wish you could do (insert all the things that
are important to you but seem out of reach right now
here)… Feel that.

THEN GET MAD!

GET ANGRY!

GET FRICKIN’ PISSED OFF!

….. and then RIGHT NOW, before the feeling fades away
or is numbed out of existence by your favorite
television show or alcoholic beverage, MAKE A DECISION
to change. That’s all it takes. As soon as you decide
that you’ve HAD ENOUGH with the mediocrity you’ve
accepted up to this point, the world shifts on it’s
axis and will present you with new ways to think, new
ways to act, new ways to LIVE.

Big doors swing on small hinges and the hinges that
open the doors of opportunity are always the DECISIONS
we make about what we will and what we won’t settle
for in our life. If you allow yourself to get MAD
ENOUGH, the “settling point” for what you can and
will receive in your life will be raised and you will
experience a better future… a future more closely
aligned with WHAT YOU WERE BORN TO DO here on Earth.

So GET MAD, TAKE ACTION, and GET PREPARED to *be happy*
as you start creating your life on your terms the way
you always hoped it would be… and it can my friend -
it really, truly can!

When I *GOT MAD*, I decided to find better way to make
my living contrary to what my parents and society at
large told me was possible… I’m so glad I did
because now I’m living my dream life and helping
others live theirs. Read my story at:
http://www.livelifetothefullest.biz/pips.html

To Your Happiness!

Stone Evans, The Home Biz Guy
http://www.livelifetothefullest.biz/pips.html

Popularity: 6% [?]

Ahhhh things are finally starting to get interesting as yesterday I spent the whole day setting up my new website/blog.  Thats right, I’m now branching out to other markets to test the waters.  I decided to go into the food/cooking niche because I felt that it may be an easy niche to get a good flow of traffic, and good flow of traffic means a good flow of money as well.  I am still working on finding a good template but you can view it in the works at http://www.cookingwithease.com

The idea with this website is to offer great cooking advice and recipes that are easy, quick, efficient, and most of all enjoyable and delicious.  I am going to write as though my website is the authority website for easy cooking and I hope to build a base of followers and repeat traffickers.  I plan on monetizing by selling ad space, using adsense, and maybe a downloadable recipe book.  Obviously I will be switching things up and doing more and more research as we move ahead but I am excited and can’t wait to show you all the results.

First of all, before we get into the current stats for this website, let me take you step by step as to how I started up the new website.

Step one is to register your domain name.  I did that at NameCheap.com and it cost me $9.29 for one year.

The next step is to find a host to host your website.  I use Host4Profit, it costs $24.95 a month but since I have this site hosted on the same server, it’s only an extra $5 a month.

After that I went to Wordpress.org and downloaded the new Wordpress blog to be used as my main site platform.  Once the download was complete I extracted all the files and then uploaded them to my server.  That’s it!  My website was up and running in just a few hours.  Of course the research took much longer than that.

I’ll be promoting that website much the same as this website and it will be real interesting to see how soon I start seeing some real traffic.  I’ll keep you posted.

As far as what I am doing here… I had 2465 visitors the week before and last week I had 2459.  Didn’t go up but still pretty consistent, averaging well over 300 a day.

My opt-in list last week had a total of 77 subscribers, I now have 92.  I remember not too long ago where it took me a few months to get 15 people to opt-in to my list.  This compounding viral internet effect is so apparent and so fun to watch too!

I think what I am going to do now with the Follow My Footsteps series is keep giving the weekly updates as far as what I am doing along with my traffic stats.  That won’t change, but I will run down total costs and profits from the previous month at the beginning of each month.  So stay tuned, things are starting to heat up.

Matt Helprey

Popularity: 8% [?]

It’s no secret that article marketing really works to increase the amount of traffic to your website.  Well, you can also use article marketing to get traffic to your squeeze pages to boost your opt-in list.

If you followed the instructions from the last post, you should now have your own squeeze page set up promoting the free software Squeeze Buzz.  Now that you have this squeeze page set up, you can really use this to your advantage by promoting it through article marketing.

All you have to do is write an article dealing with squeeze pages, opt-in lists, email marketing, or anything that would make the reader want to download the free software from you.  Catch the readers attention, then offer them the freebie software in your resource box.  Works every time.

What works better is to submit your article using keywords so you can catch even more viewers and visitors from the search engines. Then… rinse and repeat with another article making sure to submit that article to anywhere and everywhere you can.

This process does work and it works each and every time.

Think about this…Submitting just one article to one major article directory may bring you a handful of opt-ins after the first few weeks but… that article will continue to bring people to your opt-in list forever!  Just think what submitting 10…20…50…or even 100 articles to 40 different directories can do!

How many articles can you write?

The more places you can put those articles the more people you are going to get into your opt-in list.

Imagine if you will tens of thousands of people in your list!  That would be like having your own personal atm machine that you can tap into anytime you need money.  It’s possible, you just gotta work hard now and reep the benefits later.

Here are a few links to help you out…

Use an article distribution service to save you massive amounts of submission time - I’m currently running a limited deal here so get in while you still can…
http://tinyurl.com/6ke6kc

Manually submit to the top 20 article directories…
http://tinyurl.com/4k5rqv

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 7% [?]

I wanted to make a post here to help you get the most out of your new SqueezeBuzz squeeze page generator.  If you have not downloaded the free software, please do so now.

Free Squeeze Page Generator

If you are not aware, Squeeze Buzz’s landing page can be fully customized to boost your own opt-in list the same way it has mine.  In fact you signed up for the software using the customized squeeze page that comes with the package.  Here’s what you do…

Once you have unzipped the SqueezeBuzz.zip file, click on the Sales Website folder and open up the index.html.  What you see here is the SqueezeBuzz squeeze page before any changes.  Your next step will be to customize it by filling in the highlighted areas with your own info.

To do this, open up the view page source in your browser and copy all of the html code (select all or ctrl + a then copy ctrl + c) and paste the code into a text editor like Notepad or Wordpad.

Once you have it pasted into your text editor it is as simple as going through the code and filling in the areas where the orange highlights are.  In the html, you’ll want look for and erase the areas where you see <span style=”background-color: #FF9900″></span> That code is for the orange highlights you see.  Erasing it will get rid of it.

Once you have filled in all the needed areas, go ahead and save the file as a plain text file and open up your cPanel, ePanel or whatever you need to get to the back office of your website.  You need to open up a new html file.  Go ahead and name it squeezebuzz.html

Once you have the new file, you need to copy and paste the edited code from your text editor to your new squeezebuzz.html file and save it.  Not done yet!

Here is the tricky part.  Downloading the images.  If you don’t already have a folder for your website entitled images, go ahead and create an “images” folder now.  Once you have the “images” folder, you need to upload all of the images from the SqueezeBuzz software download.

The images you need to upload into the “images” folder are the background.gif, bluecheck.gif, box.gif, box.jpg, checkbox.gif, footer.gif, and header.gif.

Once you have successfully uploaded all of the image files, your last step is to create a download link for the people who sign up.  Just upload the same squeezebuzz.zip file and you’re set.

Be looking for part 2 of this series to help you explode the amount of sign-ups you get to your opt-in list.

Stay tuned…

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 8% [?]

Welcome back to “Follow My Footsteps”, now 50 days deep into a more aggressive, more business minded promotional stage than the several months leading up to this series.

Consistent blogging, social bookmarking, forum posting, and article marketing has drastically increased the amount of visitors to my blog and website. In fact, up to this point I have had 4 back-to-back record traffic weeks resulting from this more concentrated and well documented effort.

Last week I submitted two articles to SubmitYourArticle for distribution. I made several posts in the Warrior Forum. I also made a total of 5 posts in my blogs and submitted all 5 posts to the social bookmarking sites.

There are may things that I am in the process of doing as well. Things like redoing my website, creating an info product (ebook), and writing a email series for my new opt in list. But it is the small busy work that I do every day that keeps the steady flow of increasing traffic to my website. This is what I hope to show you by documenting my steps here in this series.

By continuing to show you my ever increasing stats, I hope to prove to you that it is possible for anyone to run a successful business online regardless of how much money you have (I had none and was deep in debt), or how much experience you have (also had zero, zip, none!). After all of this, I hope to prove to you that all you need is a strong will and desire to succeed. And a computer and internet connection…duh.

Now on to the stats…

The first graph shows just how much my traffic has skyrocketed over the past twelve months.  Is it going to peak soon?  I don’t think so.  The back links are really starting to add up and I am starting to receive a good amount of traffic from the search engines as a result and still growing.

This last week I had  2465 visitors.  Just 69 shy of breaking the record again.  I really thought I had it going into the weekend but for whatever reason, I only had 270 visitors on Sunday and ruined my shot of hitting 5 record traffic weeks in a row.  Still though it was my 2nd highest ever and nothing to be ashamed of.  Just makes me want to work harder.

Last week I had 64 total subscribers.  As of today I now have 77 subscribers.  Signed up 13 over the course of the week.  Almost 2 a day.  I remember just not too long ago where I would go a whole month without getting 2 opt-ins.  Definitely showing marked improvement there.  Most of my subscribers are coming from the search engines after writing only two blog posts targeting a few keywords and giving away the free squeeze page generator.

Alright, so there you have it.  Traffic still on the rise and so is my opt-in list.  Stay tuned…

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 10% [?]