If you are anything like me, you’ve spent time online trying to figure out how to make some money. Actually, how to make some serious money, not just pocket money, but a living which allows for the freedom and lifestyle you dream about.

I’ve downloaded files, paid and free, until the most I’ve got to show for them is gigs of space used up on my hard drive. Some I’ve read, some I started to read and then got distracted to the next ‘shiny coin’ and some never even got opened before I got distracted.

The problem was first off that I hadn’t yet developed the mindset which I needed. I needed to embrace a business model, plan and implement it, and then work on it until it either succeeded or showed me why I failed at it.

If it failed, then pick myself up and get on with refining what I was doing until I got it right. Instead, I kept looking for that one magic new bullet that was going to make it all work.

Doesn’t exist. There might be variations on techniques that will boost your results a bit. For the most part, none of them are new, they are variations on something that has already been done before.

So, I’ve finally reached a conclusion. I need three things to make my online business work: a blog, a list and traffic. Will that give me overnight success? No. Will that give me a base to build longterm success. Yes. So, as of this post, I have stopped chasing overnight success and embraced doing what will give me longterm success.

The content on this blog will share with you what I’m doing to establish the base I’m seeking. The techniques I’m going to use are not fancy, miraculous or ground breaking. They will provide me with the financial base I want and need.

So, if you want to settle down and establish that online business you’ve been racing around trying to find. Come on along for the ride. Subscribe to my newsletter so you never miss a post. I am planning on sending some material to my list that will not appear on the blog. There has to be a perk for joining, right?

How’s your business plan going?

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Keeping it Simple

This site is currently undergoing some revamping. I’ve finally reached a better sense of where I need to go with it and have some great content coming. Stay tuned!

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Site Changes Coming

When you think about marketing / selling either online or off, is that not one of the first questions that comes to mind? It can be a question which inspires you to shape your marketing message and target your audience or it can send you running off into the night screaming in frustration.

From a focusing standpoint, the question “who is going to buy from me?” is one which demands you define what you are going to sell, what need or want it fills for your customers and what size of market you can expect to reach. For someone who is going to do more business offline than online, the question also has to answer if there is a sustainable market within your reach.

For offline marketers, sustainable determines if there is enough potential business or repeat business to provide a living. There is not a lot of sense in trying to sell snowballs to Eskimos when that is what your business will depend on. Now, shipping snow to the snow deprived (I’m taking orders if that is you), that is another story.

For an online business, the question needs to define how you’re going to reach the target market, not if there are any out there to buy from you. I’ve seen figures of somewhere in the area of 6billion Internet users worldwide. Now, if only 1billion of them would actually make an online purchase, I’m pretty sure a niche can be found to make some serious money off of. As long as you find where your buyers hang out.

Now, I’m not saying just finding where they hang out is going to bring in the sales. If you think all you have to do is show your stunning face and buyers will flock to you, you might want to give that a second thought. Selling is still going to take some work but at least at that point, you are selling to people who have some level of interest.

The more convincing you are and the more interesting you are, the greater the opportunity for sales and creating customers for life.

Okay, so you have read this far. Have I bored you yet?

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So, Who is Going to Buy From Me?

Wendy Piersall over at eMoms at Home has posted an excellent article on the ups and downs of joining ad networks. If you are looking to monetize your website or blog with an advertising, don’t do so until you have read her piece.

In addition to a list of ad networks to link to, she includes a great FAQ of tips and pointers to keep in mind as you select a network that’s right for you.  She covers a range of issues, a lot of which I sure wouldn’t have thought to even look at let alone ask.

Who knew that an ad network could expect to try to claim your traffic as part of their ComScore and the implications that it would have? I had never heard of them or knew they could do it.

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Thinking About Joining an Ad Network?

For over a year I’ve been wanting to create an online business that would allow me the freedom and security to work from home. I’ve read and researched until my eyeballs were ready to fall out of my head, I’ve made notes and took runs at applying processes until I’m confused which is which and it seems I don’t make any head way towards my goal. Sound familiar?

There is a lot to distract a person in life, especially online. Add to that an offline life… do we have them?… and distraction and chaos grows exponentially.  I’ve been spending a bit more time looking at what I do and how. The results is downright scary. My lack of forward movement has less to do with finding the SECRET to great income online and more to do with managing time a whole lot better. 

I’ve allowed chaos to creep into my life. It’s tentacles are spread throughout my very existence and they need to be cut off. The chaos comes from allowing myself to get too distracted, pulled in different directions and then losing any  direction because I lose track of where I was going on any of them.

I’ve always been a pretty good at multitasking. One of the ways that ability is harnessed is keeping careful track of the status of each task and avoiding repeating steps unnecessarily. I’ve got sloppy on that.

Yesterday I opened up the site where I get my autoresponders, looked through what I have set up there and realized that I have a dog’s breakfast of dead ends that I’ve lost track of even where they are. I didn’t make notes… bad bad bad.  I decided that I could create a few main autoresponders to focus on. I sat down and made some notes about what I had in mind and started to implement the notes.

One of the first moves I wanted to make was to create email addresses that corresponded to the autoresponders. So, over to my hosting account to create email addresses I go. Now, if I thought that my autoresponders were in a mess, they are totally organized compared to the mess of email addresses I have/had.

SO, ok… new year, new beginning. Either chaos gets out of town or I do. Stick around could be a fun ride.

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Welcome to Chaos

I was exploring the press releases over at PR Web the other day and followed a link to the site for This is True,  a weekly newsletter  of  weird but true news items that has been publishing since 1994. I subscribed and then spent a bit of time exploring the site.

“Get Out of Hell Free” caught my eye in a graphic on the page. Curious, I took a look.  It seems when you are writing about the weird, you tend to attract the weird. One of his stories prompted a reader to write to Randy Casselman, the owner and writer,  that he was going to hell. He responded that the newsletter’s consulting minister liked the story to which she promptly replied that he was going to hell too.

Rather than getting ticked off, he decided if this moralizer could consign someone to hell so easily, he could give them a ‘get out of hell free’ and created a card modeled on the Monopoly “Get Out of Jail Free” card. They went viral and people started to order them. Randy doesn’t try to make a profit on them, he covers cost of the items which now includes stickers and T-Shirts. In the last seven years, he’s sold over 1,000,000 of them around the world. You can read the complete story here.

The best part is, every card, sticker and T-shirt has the URL of the True newsletter. The cards are being handed around as people order them to give to other people for fun. So, next time a reader sends you a bitchy note, think about how you can turn that negative into a positive.

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Turning Bitching Into Winning