• comments, personal observations,
• articles,
• reports,
• ebook chapters;
• news,
• specialized courses;
• website pages,
• RSS feeds,

and so forth.

Tune them up and you can consider yourself a proud owner of a successful web property, bringing you profits days in and days out. And here is how you do it.

First question is what Blog system to use?

Quite frankly there is great number of possible options free and paid. The winner choice for many is free well-know blog by name of Wordpress. Very easy to install, manage, publish and upgrade with thousands of mods available in order to ease your blogging life.

Question number two. What niche to target?

If your main source of income would be contextual advertising like Google AdSense and promotion of affiliate products then you obviously want to choose a market with:

1. high-demand niche by analyzing a list of related keywords. There are tens of softwares available to create such list for you. You can choose any like this one - Good Keywords. Don’t forget to use the Overture keyword-suggestion tool and Google
   Sandbox. You want to see how many times people are searching for particular keyword related to your niche and, what is important, how much advertisers are bidding for your niche keywords. In other words how much money will you be able to earn via AdSense or other PPC programs, when your site is ready. Your task is to find keywords with high advertisers bid amounts and low search engine competition, so you can optimize your blog pages for them, rank high and rip the profits.
2. find possible affiliate programs with powerful products and link partners. See what their Google PR and Alexa traffic ratings are. Estimate how great their products and how tough your competition is.
3. how powerful and optimized are your niche website competitors? Will you be able to conquer your place under the search engine sun and what kind of work is required?
4. collect unique content for your website by writing it yourself, outsourcing the job, “borrowing” from public domain, licensing or republishing.

When you discovered a good niche with relatively high demand and relatively low direct competition you are ready to setup a blog and start posting your way to riches.

Its very easy now to start from outsourcing free content by republishing related RSS feeds. Also consider republishing targeted articles, reviews, reports - anything you can get.

Concurrently strongly consider writing or ordering your own unique content optimized for high-potential keywords you found during your research. Unique content is a must for getting high SE rankings and separating your web resource from hundreds or thousands of others.

Search engines will give you top rankings on two conditions. These two things are often underestimated by novices what literally dooms them to failure. They are:

• content uniqueness and
• quality backlinks.

You will solve both problems by publishing unique content and then promoting it in the form or free articles, reports or courses with your link to your site, thus generating a number of one-way incoming links.

As soon as search engines picked up your site and provided you with more or less steady traffic, add Adsense ads, create PPC resource pages and start testing n tracking process. Tune your ads until you discover best colors, format and position that repeatedly reports highest clicktrhough rate (CTR) per visitor.

Now it is time for joining chosen affiliate programs and adding ads and links for products you promote. Blend and test these affiliate ads for maximum return as thoroughly as you did with PPC ads. Affiliate income may become the main source of revenue for your niche site.

That’s it, maintain your site, keep posting new content and enjoy steady income growth.

Next level is securing a financial prosperity for yourself by developing a network of such profits-pulling web-property. So what are you waiting for?

People online look for fresh, relevant information on a certain topic and this is where Blogs come into arena and win that battle for a visitors’ attention hands-down.

They give you exactly what you need - targeted, updated information on any given topic, with an access to archive, search functions and even some sort of interactive experience as you can usually read comments of other visitors and participate in a small discussion like on a message board.

Why Blog can be just the perfect solution you have been looking for and how it can solve massive publishing problems at once. Here is why Blog can be your website and money-making system in one:

1. Blog is a simple CMS (Content Management System). It helps you solve hundreds of little hassles webmasters were forced to waste months before in order to solve each of them such as means of easy creating new pages with automatic cross-linking and archiving functions, installing visitor feedback script, managing and updating navigational menu, republishing RSS feeds and creating own feed and so on.

2. Built-in promotion. RSS feed is also a great viral marketing tool by itself. You don’t have to stuff your head with “how-to-make-my-content-viral” problems any “traditional” website webmaster faces.

As a Blog publisher you use the same RSS feed as a way of syndicating your Blog content for any other websites. What they need is adding your RSS feed to their Feed rendering software. The technology is highly popular, so you will not have any problems with that.

Just add your RSS feed to a number of Blog Directories, ping (notify) Blog servers each time you make a new post (a common built-in feature for almost all Blogs) and in 90% case it will be enough to start your marketing ball rolling plus reassure fast search engine indexing.

3. Built in RSS (Atom) feeds are considered by many to be the ideal solution for all SPAM and filters problems of “traditional” email marketers.

RSS feeds are updated automatically as soon as you make a new post to your Blog. No more troubles with managing “email lists”, subscribers, unsubscribers, email filters, HTML forms, SPAM complaints, follow-ups and so on and so forth. Forget about it. RSS will help you do everything, including follow-ups and even email courses publishing.

The difference, and many consider it to be the true benefit, is that RSS uses so-called “pull” method of delivering a message. Unlike “traditional” email, you don’t have to send (push) anything to anybody. When you publish a new post, your RSS feed updates automatically, pings syndicating websites with a new Blog post and notifies (or not) your RSS subscribers about your new post, so they can load (pull) it and read.

That is how RSS solves SPAM emails and SPAM filters problems with one stone. Your subscribers just don’t receive anything to be complained or worried about. They just personally subscribe to your RSS feed (no one can subscribe for them) with their special RSS reader program (RSS aggregator, available free everywhere on the net). Then they periodically and mostly automatically load your new Blog posts. If they don’t like it, they just remove your RSS feed from their RSS feed aggregator software and that’s all. Unlike email you cannot “push” your post to their RSS soft without their wish. Depending on set options, they need to manually, semi-automatically or automatically load your Blog post themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against email. Quite the contrary, at some point, when you feel that you have a lot of spare time because of advantages that RSS brings, I strongly advise you to add email marketing to your arsenal. It does help you out in some special occasions. It is just you won’t rely on email as the only money-making resource and will use it professionally as a great add-on instrument, limiting its possible negative effects.

From what you can see, blogs are perfect and simple software machines to run and maintain your informational business. They proved their efficiency in small niche markets as well as multilevel blog systems generating stable income for their glad owners. You can be one of them.

Auction/eBay Marketplace

Well-known store or marketplace full of buyers and sellers. You task comes down to either promoting and auctioning your stuff directly or locating ideal power-sellers for arranging lucrative deals as their back-end sales. Either way you benefit from the developed market and exposure of targeted bidders or established customer databases and reputation of power-sellers.

Big vendors and power-sellers have established auction businesses with thousands if not tens of thousands auctions closed with the respective list of subscribers, customers and repeat customers. Ask them to promote your product/service on the back-end as valuable complementary addition to the products they sell or up-sell your solutions through their web-pages or other means.

Offer free copies of your products to reassure vendors in its benefits as well as prepare information necessary for vendor to promote your solution to minimize their efforts and maximize their returns.

eBay of course is not the only auction in town, so you can successfully experiment with this strategy in other places online.

Indexes, Directories & Catalogues

Any accessible professionally organized list of websites, products, ezines, affiliate programs etc. is a valuable resource for respective visitors or buyers. It is clear that submitting your listing there allows you to attract extra market exposure for the item or resource you·ve listed. Depending on the type of catalogue or index you may want to make your listing to be like an ad more or less. Your end-target in most cases is to make people click the link and take your desired action, so approach your submissions as such.

The tastier you listing and its position are and the higher rank of the index, directory or catalogue is, the more exposure and benefit you gain. Want directions? Check out the DMOZ and Google directories. They will swamp you with dozens of relevant niche directories and valuable resources.

This is efficient marketing since, in most of cases, you submit your listing once and benefit ·forever·.

Joint Promotions

Joint promotions help you tap into the other people·s market and goodwill, monetizing their credibility and years of business development. You can participate in either tete-a-tete JV deals or partnerships with multiple parties.

In some cases the combined benefits from multipart promotions are higher than derived from a single affiliate, but it may vary from deal to deal. As you know, there are several ·super-guys·, who can open such a huge customer market to your solution during exclusive tete-a-tete JV deal that no other joint efforts of 5, 10 or even 30 webmasters have chances to compete with.

Your task is all about finding leaders of your niche market and arranging such joint promo deals with them. It many cases, but not necessary, you can locate B2B directories, what means memberships of niche businesses, so you can close deals almost in volumes, without organizing one-on-one JVs over and over again.

Membership sites, associations

We started to look into benefits of membership-based sites, where you can get instant access to systematized list of members or address to them via mass email. Not only does it help you save massive amounts of time, but also money that you otherwise would have had to spend for ads or other means to reach this market.

Here you gain almost similar exposure to showcase your products and services as with the help of super affiliates, close JV deals with respective site owners, promote your relevant publications or offer other type of useful material depending on the aim of the particular membership site. The same goes to Internet associations, where you can find your customers or potential partners in one place. In any case your task is to introduce your business to the members, gaining extra exposure and profits if term ·extra· can be relative to the profits.

You can easily find all types of membership websites depending on your target market by means of Search Engines. It may be useful tip for you: don·t to try to find membership sites first, but search for niche-targeted informational portals, so that you can find there the whole lists of such niche membership resources.

Publicity

Publicity is a great way of covering large customer market for relatively small input. Unlike advertising, publicity exposure is free, long-lasting and catchy.

Publications entice readers of different media to explore your business in more detail.

Often, one free-submitted tasty-written press release can do for you much more than ten super-expensive magazines ads. Publications and press releases will be seen by thousands of publishers, editors and targeted Internet readers what means gold alone. If it is going to be further re-published and announced or you happen to be interviewed by interested media your solutions will surely get thousands of dollars in free publicity. Such action bringing in long-term benefits is the smart marketing indeed. Use it to make more sales.

There is a simple logic line · if you experience shortage of time and money, you need results and you need them fast. You can be sure such ·stores· are almost the perfect places of fast profits you can ever find. Why spend months of SEO, waiting in vain the day when your traffic finally starts buying, when you can access established online ·stores· full of ready-to-buy customers or ready-to-do-business marketers.

Direct your marketing efforts towards attracting massive exposure to your solutions via these ·stores· like all the major players do (if you were smart enough to notice this) and stop wasting your time reading hundreds of all these ·I-want-to-help-you-email-sales-pitches· you get daily. Spend your time on real results and information that show you how to get these results, rather than on reading email solo ads and buying never-to-be-used products.

Auction big-ticket items opportunity.

You have no need to be a guru to try selling big-ticket item that may be anything from ancient coin and cars · to diamonds and mansions. Of course, you don·t have to own them personally. You can just become a reseller and post your eBay lot on behalf of the actual owner.

What you will do need to spend your time on is research. You obviously don·t feel like loosing eBay listing fees, so good research on the subject matter is compulsory.

When conducting research on possible profitability of your eBay listing consider to:

1. Check how similar items are currently being sold.
2. Determine the demand among buyers and bidders of similar items or category by checking how many bids are placed in each category. Look at the visitor webpage counters that majority of listings have by the end of the page.
3. Browse the bidding history. If you spot bidding wars on many listings for similar items – it is a good sign of high demand.
4. How many lots have been successfully ended and what the winning bids were.
5. Estimate the supply. How many sellers are placing their lots, how saturated the category is in general.
6. You may also want to save the best listings and create a collection of the listings closed with high profit margins. Analyze their listings, offers, type of the auction, copywriting style, start price, bidding history and winning bid. You may even want to start from this 6th point in your research in order to determine which items were sold the best before discovering such a big-ticket item to sell for yourself.

If you personally don·t wish participating in listing your lots, supporting and dealing with bidders, there is good news for you. What you need is just to search for power-sellers specializing in items you plan to list and arrange a deal with them. You will act like an intermediary and collect a nice commission just by arranging a deal between the owner of the big-ticket item and an eBay power-seller. This scenario may be more beneficial for you, since your eBay lot will be sold by a professional seller, who knows all ins and outs of this business, who has already built credibility, most likely having an active eBay store and a list of subscribers and customers, so the sale of your item can be really quick and efficient.

When you decide to partner with other eBay seller or do the auctioning yourself, do not forget to take advantage of resources of other power sellers. I·m talking about using their lists of subscribers, customers or ·About Me· pages. You just need to locate sellers with proven track record in your field or category. Then you contact them and ask to mention or announce your complimentary items among their previous customers or at the ·About Me· page for a commission. Just try to leverage the potential of eBay marketplace to the full extent.

If you want to know about a man, who pioneered high-priced eBay sales earning $30K in commissions from a single eBay sale, if you want him to show you exactly how he does it or even if you want him to sell your big-ticket item for you and share his massive profit with you, take a close look at this website: http://www.IWillSellYourStuff.com/

Multi-level JVs.

Next winning opportunity is a variation of partnership that, by the way, may also take place on eBay. The difference lies in the multi-tier scheme of partnership, where you play the role of a middleman between ·provider· and ·promoter·. You also need to have nothing, except for Internet access and email box.

Usually you play the role of either creator of the product/affiliate program owner or its promoter/seller, but the reality is you can “wedge yourself” between these two parties. This is possible with all multi-tier affiliate programs, where you ·occupying· a place yourself between the owner and the actual promoter. After signup, your task is to find entrepreneurs or businesses with powerful means of promoting such products and offer them more beneficial deal in order to solicit them to join affiliate program under you and automatically earn you a 2nd-tier affiliate commission.

If the owner of the product pays out, for instance, 40% on the first and 10% on the second affiliate level, you can try to attract promoters by sharing with them special commission rate, say, 45% at the expense of 5% of your commission. The remaining 5% is yours to keep. As a result, you can create more lucrative terms of partnership for affiliates to motivate then join under you.

Of course, you can always add special bonuses and services to make affiliates join as your referrals or negotiate special terms of cooperation with the product owner, so he can arrange special deals with you to promote his affiliate program. This is a great opportunity of recurring income for every entrepreneur.

Google AdWords Profit Machines.

This is a true money-machine and I·m going to reveal its principle of operation right now, so you can set it up, test and maintain its workability while it earns you hefty checks days and nights on an autopilot.

Google AdWords is a service of a Search Engine context advertising. You create an account by targeting specific or all languages & countries, creating an ad or ads, supplying a number of keywords that will trigger the appearance of those ads, choosing maximum cost-per-click and daily budget.

It may take about 15 minutes. As soon as your account is created and email is confirmed your ads will start rolling on the Google.com and throughout the Google AdSense network.

With the invention of Google AdWords real-time tracking and aggregated summary of your campaigns you now can efficiently test performance of any sales letter or marketing materials, sending quality traffic whenever you want and in volumes you want.

Google AdWords brought down the whole process of marketing and promoting to the matter of several browser windows and a table data, where you can adjust, add and delete almost any parameter of your marketing machine.

As you know the biggest challenge of affiliate promoters is how to attract quality traffic. Google AdWords solves this problem once and for good. You are in full control over what, where and how much visitors to send. What you need is to test keywords, keeping an eye on your advertising budget and your ROI. When your ROI is positive, consider you have a 24/7 money machine which convert traffic into sales without you lifting a finger. You don·t care about creating a product, customer service, maintaining your own affiliate program, newsletters, marketing your business the conventional way or doing affiliate marketing. Your sole responsibility is to maintain, test, probably develop your AdWords campaigns further and cashing them into incoming checks.

For you to have such a machine, your task comes down to locating a hot selling product. Creating a new Google Adwords campaign, choosing proper set of targeted keywords, adding enticing ads and start directing quality traffic anywhere you wish.

The rest depends on your advertising budget. If it is more than $1000, you can afford to setup several campaigns simultaneously and test general keywords starting from broad matching. If you are on a shoestring budget, try selecting untapped market niches and bidding for exact match of your keywords. This budget-saving strategy will show you the winning ad campaigns and reassure affiliate sales before the end of your advertising budget.

AdWords system will mark best-performing keywords for you by impressions and click-throughs as ·Strong·. Keep them, the rest you can delete or replace. If you have weak keywords by click-through, AdWords system will block them and you will have to adjust your list of keywords selection and reactivate your advertising campaigns again.

The universal rule for raising response rates of prospect with any advertising, including AdWords, is targeting. Start from testing keywords by phrase match and mainly exact match. That tactics will guarantee less but quality traffic what is higher conversion and money savings for you. Leave broad keyword matching for general terms to corporate world that is able to spend $100.000 for ·ground testing· purposes. We need to act much more astute.

Want to explore this proven automatic money-making strategy in more detail? Then check out “Google Cash”. It will make your journey from ·nowhere· to ·fat affiliate checks· quite exciting and easy.

Here are another several free services to make you locate better keywords:

http://inventory.overture.com/ - Overture keyword suggestion tool.
http://www.kwmap.com · Keyword Map.

Furthermore, this affiliate marketing takes place in the Internet, where, as we all know, one should not take a round-trip train or plane ticket to get the same product from other merchant. Such surrounding may be beneficial for customer and technological progress, but becomes a nightmare for an unestablished entrepreneur.

This is, no doubt, the toughest competition ever existed from the advent of economics as a science, because you sell exact same thing for often the exact same price at “the same street” to the same “targeted customers”. As the result, all your struggle and efforts will be rewarded in 20-50% of the sales price only, so, at best case of 50% sharing affiliate program, you will need to persuade customer to pay, say, $50 in order to earn $25 only without ability to profit from “back-end” sales stream and other. Yes, you can subscribe this customer to your ezine and advertise your other offers, but this is not “back-end” sales for one simple reason - this customer is not yours, but the affiliate product owner’s.

If you want me to continue, let me add to this affiliate marketing “picture” one final touch - you as an affiliate will compete not with just one, but with hundreds or even thousands of affiliates. The more powerful and beneficial your affiliated product is the more competition you will get, so, to some extent, and, as strange as it may seem, marketing unknown and even mediocre-quality products may be more lucrative for your short-term affiliate marketing success, simply because of weak competition.

This picture was designed on purpose to revolutionize your view of doing affiliate marketing and mobilize your efforts to drive at the full throttle, otherwise you are doomed to occupy the 90% share of no-sales affiliates that is common statistic for any affiliate program owner.

First you need a powerful engine that can move your affiliate marketing vehicle at full speed and under any “alien environment”. Your engine is your promotional materials, that whether or not:

1. have built-in viral marketing engine, popularizing your offer beyond your marketing horizon;
2. efficiently pre-sell your affiliated product;
3. provoke reader’s desire to further deal with you.

If your affiliate marketing engine implies viral marketing strategies, efficiently pre-sell and encourage readers to subscribe for your email list, bookmark your page and refer to you in future as a reliable source of information then you have about 300 horse power engine capable of driving you off the “toughest crisis pit”, where others “low-power” marketers would stuck for good and simply go bankrupt with their affiliate promotions.

Second vital engine part is fuel supply and injection system. Reassure you have constant flow or, at least, access to enough gas supply or you risk to stuck somewhere “in the middle of the desert” with no hope of getting out. In other words, you need to have the sources of targeted traffic and make your offers exposed to your niche market. Needless to say, no matter how good your marketing engine or promotional materials are, without fuel or traffic you will move nowhere.

Keep an eye on all machine parts working smooth without breakdowns, some of them are out of your control to fix like problems with “weather” around your 3rd party hosting server, but the most of them are related to proper functioning of your site, customer service etc. and are totally your responsibility.

Keep your head up and drive your affiliate marketing fast, but watch for pitfalls.

Help may come from two massive marketing instruments:

• viral marketing;
• business partnership based on outsourcing necessary resources.

Today we are going to speak about latter instrument of gaining exposure you deserve.

Business partnership is an agreement between two or more legal entities to cooperate together in order to reach mutually beneficial results.

By extrapolating such statement into a framework of gaining market exposure, we can narrow this meaning down by focusing on uniting promotional efforts for reaching mutually beneficial results.

In practice the owner of affiliate program with the aim of gaining extensive market exposure attracts fellow marketers to promote the owner’s(s’) product(s) for a reward usually in the form of commission from retail price per sale. A commission for popular info products may vary from 5% to 70%.

Promotional materials (like, endorsement letters, reviews and articles) can greatly assist your partners in promoting your product as highly effective pre-selling tools.

The dilemma of joining affiliate programs

The most common mistake beginners do is registering with all possible and impossible affiliate programs they see in hope to promote them all and collect all the money they were promised to get on the page of respective affiliate program owners.

In dominating majority of cases they end up with wasted time and money. The reason is simple, they don’t have necessary resource - a database of consumers, subscribers, business partners - people who may be interested in such type of offers. Instead, those newcomers decide to start their online businesses by promoting other people’s products, what is extremely hard, because you will build client database and credibility for the company products of which you promote, not for yourself. The only thing you can do is to grow the subscription database, unfortunately, the most valuable asset - loyal clients - won’t be accessible in any case.

Some well-known internet millionaires, making fortunes cross-promoting 3rd party products may truly support the idea of “easy income with affiliate programs”, but they tend to forget that all their profits were possible due to huge subscriber databases, thousand of affiliates and customers a newcomer does not have!

That is why start wise by creating your own product, grow your credibility, circle of loyal customers and then join and promote as much 3rd party products as you consider necessary.

Setting up partner program

Every partner program you will create or setup should have, at least, basic must-have features:

1. Database driven registration of affiliates.
2. Tracking affiliate sales in order to count commission.
3. Admin control panel to support affiliates and track their sales.

There are 3 basic methods of having fully functional partner programs application, not going far into science, they are “do it yourself”, “setup 3rd party application”, “use 3rd party service”.

The first method is for those, who are knowledgeable programmers and fortunate enough to invest a lot of time in creating such a solution for personal needs or those, who are lucky to have a lot of money and hire those knowledgeable programmers. Responsibility for taking under control all support and function-related issues would lie on your shoulders.

Setting up 3rd party affiliate program solution requires much less time or money, if any. The result will be the same as above - fully functional partner program and inevitable support problems. The only difference is that you won’t be able to develop that partner application the way you need and like.

The main advantage of 3rd party service is the ability to stay unaware of how your partners sign up, track sales, receive checks and so forth, because in this case servicing your partners or affiliates will be the headache of independent company, not yours. For such “reluctance” 3rd party affiliate program provider would charge you on monthly or per sale basis, slightly decreasing your net profit at each sale.

Having your own affiliate program in place enables you to expand your market boundaries exponentially.

Building by Giving.

·Giving· in respect to online business usually means sharing valuable information. It may be gathered online or be of your own unique origin.

Whether you work in PC hardware industry promoting technological inventions or run international travel ezine, promoting 3rd party international trips, your main channels of keeping communication and delivering benefits is Information.

For PC hardware industry it may be previews and reviews of new hardware, devices, results of conducted tests, your own analytical analysis etc. International travelers are fond of trips and country reviews, publications about available tours and comparisons.

Another supportive way of ·Giving· is providing bonuses, gifts, running contests and encouraging your virtual community for intercommunication.

Each market has its own preferences, satisfying which you build credibility and trust.

Capitalizing by Getting.

·Getting· means selling through promotion and advertising. The success of capitalization depends on two instances:

• the quality of established trust, the more trust the more sales you convert;
• the quality of offered products or services, the more beneficial they are, the more sales you convert.

If you managed to gather responsive and trustful community around your business and don·t have high quality solutions to promote, try to acquire them via resell rights or partnerships, joint ventures.

Pay close attention to the balance of ·Giving· and ·Getting·. Shifting your priority to ·Getting· will do you no good as you will betray subscribers· trust and increase the number of unsubscriptions, instead of sales.

People like participating in interesting contests and games, that is why it opens innovative potential for endorsement.

Having me bored with promotions and ads is the quickest way to my unsubscription. Giving me information I need is the quickest way to my credit card.

The Endorsement

Endorsement is the most responsive marketing method of promotion.

Skilled endorsement combines ·Getting· and ·Giving·, because it integrates delivering useful information that can benefit subscribers with lucrative potential of capitalization for the endorser.

Efficient endorsement is based on established trust, so no endorsement can be run until the ·circle of Giving· is completed.

When endorsing, it is important to position yourself as concurrent part of the target market you address to. You are ·birds of one feather·, otherwise suspicion is inevitable. Associate and present yourself as an advocate of your target market·s best interests.

It is clear that ultimate task of any endorsement is to make reader perform desired action such as buy, signup, participate in survey or test, email question and so forth.
I will not discover America if I say that your endorsement should be beneficial, i.e. include enough benefits for the reader to conduct this action. Keep note that benefits should play the role of answers for target market·s questions, needs and wants. This is the most important step of the endorsement course.

The intermediate task of this course is to lessen advertising pressure. Actually it implies using non-advertisement jargon and non-selling attitude.

Endorsement should be information-oriented, not a sales driven. Web-sites visitors are referred to usually represent sales pitches, so why make them read it twice?
Power marketing endorsement is based on soft pre-selling that means educating about benefits of market solution you promote.

Curiosity as a human feature is also actively used by many marketers. Practically this means endorsing Secrets, not a product, service or solution. People want to know hidden secrets, unknown for the rest. Unfortunately often what marketers call ·secrets· turn out to be well-known old crap, so if you use curiosity factor in your promotion, make sure your solution is truly innovation-rich.

Another feature of winning market endorsements is their basing on private positive experience and achievements of the endorser as a trusted source. Such endorsements proved to generate the biggest response and ·click-throughs.

This should be enough for you to generate maximum response for your endorsement, but always remember that it is market solution that is responsible for your long-term success of your promotion campaigns.

To the full text of the law, please, refer to
http://anesbo.com/files/reports/CAN-SPAM-Act-of-2003.pdf

The main concern of all epublishers in respect to the new Law is how to continue to operate legal online business and avoid violations and “accompanied” penalties.

There is no clear definition of ePublishing, but from all evidence, industry-related professionals can enjoy sound sleep, as there are, at least, two reasons why electronic materials on subscription-based basis cannot be considered as “unsolicited commercial electronic mail” - the major concern of the Law:

1. Subscription-based electronic mail cannot be unsolicited by definition;

Please refer to the SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS (1) of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 where the term - “Affirmative consent” is clearly explained.

If you generate subscribers through distinct and comprehensible subscription web-form that states what kind of information they will get, this is enough for receiving their “Affirmative consent” and any future emails you send are not “unsolicited”.

The main thing to be mentioned is that in order to further protect yourself from false or deliberate automatic subscription of people, who did not give their consent, you need to setup double opt-in system that won’t add any new subscriber unless their personal confirmation is received.

The last note concerns those publishers, who buy “subscribers”. Make sure that companies you buy from, generate their subscriber databases with a clear note that their Subscription information will be transferred to 3rd party(ies). If such “transfer” was made without subscribers’ consent, you may also be accused of sending unsolicited email.

Please refer to Definitions section of the Law and make your subscription boxes complying with it.

2. ePublishing may not be considered as Commercial electronic mailings.

Even though there is no clear definition of ePublishing and I predict future disputes on this matter, the Law gives definitions to 2 types of electronic mail:

1. Commercial electronic mailings.
2. Transactional or relationship messages.

“Term ‘commercial electronic mail message’ means any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose).” (see CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, SEC. 3, (2), (A))

As for complete definition of primary purpose the Law states:

“(C) REGULATIONS REGARDING PRIMARY PURPOSE.- Not later than 12 months after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Commission shall issue regulations pursuant to section 13 defining the relevant criteria to facilitate the determination of the primary purpose of an electronic mail message. (see CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, SEC. 3, (2), (C))”

For now, unless the main target of your emails are solo ads and commercial promotion, your electronic issue is not a “commercial electronic mail message” as its primary purpose is to inform, educate, discuss and so forth, not advertise.

Though, I believe hundreds of so called “Publishers”, who send mainly solo ads or promotional materials, will have to “reevaluate” their preferences and change publishing policy or rewrite their subscription boxes to state something like: “Signup for receiving solo ads and other promotional materials”.

“…The term ‘commercial electronic mail message’ does not include a transactional or relationship message…” (see CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, SEC. 3, (2), (B))

As you will see, ePublishing is much more likely to be addressed as a transactional or relationship messaging.

“The term ‘transactional or relationship message’ means an electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is -
(iii) to provide - at regular periodic intervals, account balance information or other type of account statement with respect to, a subscription, membership, account, loan, or comparable ongoing commercial relationship involving the ongoing purchase or use by the recipient of products or services offered by the sender;
(iv) to provide information directly related to an employment relationship or related benefit plan in which the recipient is currently involved, participating, or enrolled;” (see CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, SEC. 3, (17), (A))

Next is the compliance with requirements for Transition of Messages.

Section 5 is entitled as “Other Protections for Users of Commercial Electronic Mail”, i.e. it relates to “Commercial Electronic Mail”, so one can assume that by sending “transactional or relationship message” he or she can lawfully violate these requirements, what common sense suggests to be strange.

In any case, I believe this is in best interests of all epublishers, who run their legal businesses in good faith and standing to comply with these requirements, especially senders of “solo advertisements”.

The best way to present these requirements is probably to get acquainted with clear and concise headlines of the respective Section:

“(a) Requirements For Transmission of Messages:
(1) Prohibition of false or misleading transmission information;
(2) Prohibition of deceptive subject headings;
(3) Inclusion of return address or comparable mechanism in commercial electronic mail;
(4) Prohibition of transmission of commercial electronic mail after objection;
(5) Inclusion of identifier, opt-out, and physical address in commercial electronic mail” (see CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, SEC. 5)

Respect these requirements and make necessary publishing adjustments.

As you see, several not-so-obvious moments still exist, so we can expect new amendments in the nearest future and express our hope that they will help to, at least, partially resolve SPAM issue.

For more in-depth definitions and interpretation, please, refer to the full text of the Law and receive legal advice.

Fortunately, Internet is full of free reprint publications that allow you, if desire, to create 15-page newsletter in a matter of 30 min or an hour. The most of this time will go for reading articles to publish and writing short “editorial”.

This easy to implement and powerful method was widely used 5-7 years ago. The publisher quickly gained the “expert” status, attracted advertisers, promoted offers and earned, earned and earned. Such ezine system worked like clock-work. The competition was weak, people just login on the net in desire to discover some new opportunities and gladly “bought”, “participated” and “joined”.

At present there are thousands of publishers who publish their newsletter to tens of thousands other publishers. Is there a way out? Of course. There is always a way out. Some joke, with its own share of truth, states that: “The way out of any trouble is usually located where the entrance is”.

To stand above your competition you need to differ in the best way. Help comes from the golden rule of innovation that proves itself here as well. Requirements became tougher for quality, practical, value-added newsletters filled with personality. This task can easily be achieved when you combine innovation plus knowledge.

The last trend I observe going in the direction of professional, yet simple, one to three pages newsletter that brings practical and original tips with a simple HTML layout.

Professional is not just a meaningless adjective, but essence of newsletter that stresses the importance of expert knowledge of the person who writes materials to it. You or your columnist should be a true expert in the sphere s/he represents.

Second conclusion is that knowledge cannot be “copied”, original content is the vital feature of powerful electronic newsletter nowadays. For this very criteria (original content or not) I can project the level of expertise, establishment and, eventually, the income publisher has, because, in most cases, successful Internet entrepreneurs publish original and unique newsletters only.

Another way to be on top of the market is based on revealing unexplored market niche with big potential and low competition. The benefits of such approach are obvious, but still underestimated by many publishers, who keep on struggling bravely for their share of the “internet marketing” pie, without paying any attention to their natural abilities, hobbies and knowledge background that is neither connected to economics in general nor to management, marketing or e-commerce in particular.

As for the format of ezine distribution, HTML and PDF are to kill text newsletters due to unmatched potential and unbeatable advantages, except for size. While size of the issue may play important role now, I predict a major shift in the nearest future as it cannot compete with interactivity (sometimes in real-time) and reading pleasure that HTML and PDF newsletters can bring. This process reminds development of web-sites that was used to represent simple “notepad” text in the origin of the Internet and after a short period, evolved into design-rich interactive media, the same way text newsletters will go down in history very soon.

First steps are being made in this direction forming new powerful media sector that possesses much more strengths rather than weaknesses. Let us make this incipient trend work for our good.

Remember that you may truly fail under one condition only - when you Decide to Stop! Nobody or nothing else responsible for such sad ending! Opposite is true as well. Your business success is nothing more than a result of your “success”-decision that you pursued and achieved, unless made other “failure”-decision and quit.

What is this success-decision to do with motivation? Simple - motivation is a foundation for your success-decision. If you lack motivation, the foundation will ruin and you will “suddenly” come to, as you may think, logical conclusion that you have failed. In truth, you just failed to feel motivated and support your desire to keep moving further.

Private entrepreneurship demands dedication and desire that fuels your motivation and keeps you moving forward, no matter how hard it may be or what kind of obstacles you meet.

The crucial question is “How to keep oneself motivated?”. Firstly try to practice psychological training for 10 minutes before going to sleep or before falling asleep. Visualize your dream life with your eyes closed. Picture your perfect life the way you wanted it to be. No problems and no stress. Imagine that you have already accomplished all the things you have planned. What would you do, how would you plan to change your life, where to spend your earned money and so forth.

This “ideal” psychological mood will help you in everyday life and business including Internet marketing to overcome everything that is in your force to overcome.

“The Conscious Determines Being” and this training designed to create proper conscious and “psychology climate” that in the future by means of your own actions will determine your being, your private and business life the way you have visualized.

Second advice about being motivated is to establish relations with people who have already reached the success you want to gain. Read and listen to what they will tell you. Step by step you will copy their correct attitude to building online wealth. Besides grasping tons of practical advises you will apply their proper psychological vision for doing business online, transforming perception of Internet marketing from “job to cover credit debt” to “pleasure endeavor and life passion”.

Your closest surroundings may wish you all the best, but if they had never run private business what they could teach you? How to quit or never start? They may be good people, but if you need to bake a pie you will probably ask a cook for a hand, not a software developer.

Next advice is to encourage yourself with “joys” for any short-term accomplishments. This way you create additional source of motivation for accomplishing particular task. It may be some desired present that you promised yourself to buy after finishing writing a free to distribute report about your product or other.

I should say a word of caution though, as such gifts may distract some people from their main task, and they will strive to finish writing the ebook at the expanse of its quality just to buy this present. If you relate to such people, then as an alternative you may set “performance-based” tasks, for instance, overcoming 10.000 monthly visitors level or particular increase in monthly income, which will allow you to buy the thing you want.

The last point is to say motivated for as long as you could. Don’t let disbelief and pessimism to take over your favorable emotional condition. Your success starts in your mind.