Michael Rasmussen
Being the person behind the unprecedented success of a score of websites and online businesses, Michael Rasmussen is definitely one of the most revered online entrepreneurs of today. Not only is he a part of a dozen systems that make money for him in a virtually autopilot mode, he is also known as the philanthropist willing to share his marketing secrets with everyone and anyone interested.
Having grown up as a kid who was meant to get into the standard white collar job, Michael had different plans- he started exploring the capabilities of establishing a direct marketing business using the enormous power of the internet. Having saved himself from the “average” American life, Michael started his journey towards being an information baron. He knew, right from the inception of his ideas, that in the closely knit world of today, information processing and selling was one of the most lucrative and upcoming businesses.
He started out with selling a “hard copy” of his compilation, which was basically a guide on making money. Soon, he switched (and thankfully so) over to the internet and started selling digital brochures, softwares and other sell-able digital products. All this seemed more inviting to him, as it was all on the auto mode and he had nothing much to do other than finding out newer ways to market these products online- something he is a genius at.
He started out by studying the plans that the already existing internet gurus had started. He then started putting them in place and replicating them. Rather than undergoing numerous courses and reading tons of e-book already being read by hundreds of wannabes, he preferred to apply and test the methodologies being applied by some of the most successful internet entrepreneurs of today. His plan worked and soon, he started replicating the “hidden” and “intangible” business ideas being followed by the internet cash cows.
He then took his game a notch up and started documenting these within a series of e-books, which were one of the hottest selling products across affiliate networks- from Amazon to Clickbank- Michael’s e-books were a hot favorite with every one in search of a tip or two to become cash laden. Active participation in forums and being an aggressive part of the media made Michael shoot to limelight within weeks of his first few releases. His mantra is simple- research, pen it down in a simpler manner and sell the information to those seeking it- with no strings attached.
Free Search Engine Optimization
Not everything is free in life but sometimes the best way to get your website ranking well, is to do some free search engine optimization on your own. When I was first getting started with optimizing my websites for my own online business, I really didn’t know how everything worked until I started doing a lot of reading and I ended up finding out that you can optimize your website on your own without having to pay other companies and getting other people to do the work for you.
Now, when people mention free search engine optimization, they may not necessarily be referring to the fact that everything is free – but that it almost is free. For example, when you want to get links pointing to your site, you may have sought out professional help. Well, instead of paying a company to find you relevant links, you could spend your time doing some article marketing and getting your name out into the industry. If you were doing article marketing, you would be trading your time for money and that’s the way in which you can get links pointing back to your site to help you rank better. So these are the ways search engine optimization can be free. But in general, you will have to spend some money regardless of whether or not you do it yourself. You must have a few basic principles that you will have to follow, no matter what kind of business you are running.
Your website will have to contain relevant, unique content. The content will have to be on topic and related to everything else on your website in one way or another. So if your website is about gardening, you could have articles on how to plant beans, how to plant tomatoes, and on it goes. You shouldn’t be talking about the best way to install a fence in your backyard, unless of course it is a fence for the garden. So you always want to try and keep your website on “theme” and this will help you in other advanced ways, in relation to how the algorithms process your site.
Free search engine optimization is not really “free”, but by learning to do some optimization on your own, you are able to save yourself a good deal of money rather than if you were to hire a company to work for you. So it’s in your best interest to learn the ins and outs of optimization and how to properly start your own home business. Why? Once you are able to get this going, you should be a lot better off in the long term. Get started with some beginner optimization articles. Start reading about on page and off page optimization, so you can get a general idea of how it all works. From there, you should be able to start testing some techniques on your own website and see if it helps your own rankings.
No Fee Work At Home Data Entry
No fee work at home data entry programs are pure trash. That’s right, they are nothing but garbage. Seriously think about what you are doing before you sign up to any one of these so called “data entry” programs. Data entry in its most basic form is nothing but writing advertisements and that is known as Pay Per Click. You don’t have to sign up to some free program where they claim that they are going to make you a millionaire. It just doesn’t work that way.
Data entry has been so obscured and twisted in the past few years that it has become nothing but a scam. Data entry itself originally was involved with secretarial work and writing forms, letters, and this sort of thing, and then it got switched over to the internet and data entry became a popular way for spammers to really confuse beginners into purchasing their product and this sort of thing. Data entry is ppc advertising. Nine out of ten times when you see a program that promises that all you have to do is write an ad for 5 minutes a day and you make $250 bucks, that is just screaming fraud, you know? There is no other way to put it.
Think of it this way. You are new to the whole online marketing thing and the economy is rough and you are trying to look for a way to put a few extra dollars in the bank to help out your family; you then see this site that offers a program and they say they are going to show you how to make $500 a day. All you will have to do is write an ad in Google. With this ad you will be able to make it big. I can’t tell you how many people fall for this trap. The trap itself is promising people the world simply by writing an ad.
It is true that you can make $200-$500-$5000 a day if you really wanted to, by using advertising services through Google (ie: Adwords). So it is true that you can make a great deal of money with the ppc advertising method. Essentially, you have a website and on that website you have a product you promote. Maybe you are simply directing visitors and traffic from your website directly to another company’s site, and you earn commissions on any sales generated through you.
You do this through Pay Per Click advertising. So if someone was searching for a way to stop their anxiety problem and you offered a product which taught people how to cope with anxiety, you could place an ad on Google and Yahoo. You could rack up $20 in advertising but you would make a sale (hopefully) and make $10 to $20 profit. So if you keep multiplying that formula, you can keep generating a substantial income for yourself.
Pay per click is no fraud. It is a basic fact of business on the internet and everyone uses it. But I want to make sure that you understand that data entry and pay per click have been mistakenly mixed together and there is a big difference between how you should approach the subject. In a nutshell, don’t keep searching for data entry programs ok? Stop believing that you are going to get paid for putting an ad online. You are only going to get paid when people come through to your website and end up buying a product. That is where most people get confused. So hopefully this lesson cleared up any confusion you may have had in regards to this way of making money online and working from home.
How To Build A Website
A lot of people are looking around the internet and they want to know how to build a website. Websites are so popular in today’s society, that everyone from your brother to grandma, to your parents, either has their own personal web-page or perhaps they have a Facebook profile or maybe they have a MySpace page or something. Regardless of what they are using it for, it is just that everyone wants to have their own website. So this brings up the question of how to build a website. How do you go about doing it, what’s involved, and what does it take? So let’s look at the basics of how a website is put together.
There are a few options you can choose from. You can either host your particular website with a free service such as Yahoo, or if you want to spend the extra $100 bucks a year, you can have your very own website and make it look professional. It isn’t shared on any other service and it is just your site appearing alone. This is the recommended option. The service I use is HostGator and if you don’t know how to put a website together from scratch and build it, you can choose from one of their pre-designed templates. Last time I checked they had over 4,000 ready made templates for you to use at the push of the button. This is a large number of designs for you to use. These designs range from business and arts, electronics, apparel, and more. Anything you can think of, they have a design ready for you to use.
The other option would be to either learn how to code your own website by simple HTML and there are plenty of free resources on beginner HTML out there on the web. You could also use a WYSIWYG editor. This is known as “what you see is what you get”. You design the web-page by clicking buttons and it creates the code for you. A good example of a piece of a software that many beginners choose to use is XSitePro. It’s known for it’s ability and ease of use to put good looking websites together. It is especially helpful for people that have no idea how to put up code or edit graphics. You basically push a few buttons and it generates these websites for you. So it’s very handy to have if you are new to putting websites together.
Overall though, building a website isn’t very difficult once you have done it a couple of times. It is just like riding a bike. Obviously the more advanced features will take some knowledge and skill, but the beginner stuff where you put up a simple web-page, a photo gallery, or do a website for your family; those aren’t hard to do. I recommend getting involved and getting your feet wet. Put up a website, see how it looks, and then go back and touch it up once you are a bit more comfortable with how the process works. So you can either get free website software included with a web hosting package, which is done through a company such as HostGator or perhaps you may want to invest in your own web software instead and host your website anywhere you want. Like I said, the beginner software I would use is XSitePro.
Search Engine Optimization Services On The East Coast
If you have been involved in the search engine optimization industry for any length of time, you will know that achieving top rankings is absolutely vital to having more business come to your website, getting more leads, making more sales, increasing a community around your site, and the list can go on and on. What is important about search engine optimization is that you have to do it correctly from the start otherwise you are wasting a lot of time. So you really have to find a service that works for you.
Now, depending on whether you live on the east coast or the west coast, it doesn’t’ really matter. You could search for search engine optimization services on the east coast and do just fine with a company that’s based on the west coast. So, optimizing your website isn’t specifically related to where you live, unless you really want to go and visit that company in person and talk to them and see what they are all about. Like I said, you can sign up with a company anywhere in the country and you’ll be doing just fine. Just make sure to research and review their services before hiring them.
Here is a little background though since you are looking for a service of some kind. It is important to understand what SEO (as it is commonly called) is all about. There are a few basics to optimizing your website. You have write content on your website which is relevant to the industry you are in. You also must have a topic on your website that is thematically related to the overall theme of your website. Another way of looking at it is this. You couldn’t just have a website talking about hardcover notebooks then start writing articles about how to have a beautiful saltwater fish tank. It just doesn’t work that way.
The first step in optimizing any kind of website is to make sure that it’s thematically related. Just like if you were to go to the library and pick up a book on pet birds. You wouldn’t expect to be reading articles on how to properly train your horse. The same thing applies here. It applies everywhere around the world. The next step in optimizing your site is to make sure that it is actually structured so that it benefits you and the visitor but more importantly, that it benefits the search engine spiders which come through to your site and crawl your content, so that they can effectively rank your web pages in their search index.
A lot of people that work from home tend to get into the optimization of their website all on their own and this is perfectly fine. If you wish to do so, a service that I use to track my own websites (actually it is a piece of software) is called SEO Elite. You might want to check that out if you are interested in doing it yourself and saving a few thousand on services. That’s the way I got started and I would recommend that if that’s the kind of thing you want to get started with so as to “get your feet wet”.
Getting back to the point though, once your site is properly structured on-page (and there are a variety of factors involved with that too) with the title and meta tags, unique relevant content, as well as the use of “strong” keywords, you have to focus your attention elsewhere. More importantly, you have to actually have votes coming in from other websites. Now when I say votes, it isn’t a vote that you cast on a ballot. A vote on the internet, is considered to be a link coming from another site to yours. They are linking to you with the words that you want to rank for. So if you are looking to rank for the phrase “how to train your pet bird”, you would want to make sure that other sites are linking back to your article/site with that phrase.
This is a practice known as off-page optimization and it is important to become familiar with. These techniques will get you a very solid framework for the foundation of your website. In time, you will begin to see the pages of your website ranking higher in the search engines and you will be receiving more visitors to your site each and every week. Stay the course and you will see your work through to fruition.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work
The other day I had some family over and I was talking with them and someone brought up the question how does affiliate marketing work? You know, how does this whole internet marketing thing play out? What is involved with it? The answer is somewhat twofold. There is a lot of work on my end but it also depends upon the work of others as well.
The reason for this is simple. Being an affiliate is simply that. An affiliate is someone that sells the products of another person or another company and they end up making a commission on any sales that are tracked through their account. You can think of affiliate marketing almost as digital real estate. A real estate agent earns a commission when they sell a house. They earn maybe 5-10% percent. With affiliate marketing you typically see commission rates anywhere between 30-75%.
I have even heard of products that pay back a 200% commission rate. That is crazy stuff folks. That means if the product itself costs $100 – you are getting $200 per sale. The company or person doing this can only afford to do so because they must be making a lot of money on the back-end of their product with other promotions and offers but that is besides the point.
So in a nutshell, affiliate marketing works like this. You have a website and on that website you have a whole ton of useful articles and visitors come to your website by simply searching on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. When they come to your website they read your articles and may end up buying a product.
Let’s say that someone was searching for ways to tune their guitar. Well if your website was all about guitar and you had an article that taught them how to tune that guitar; then at the end of that article, you have a link that goes off to another website. Well, that other website has a product that teaches people how to play the guitar, tune their instrument, play songs, and so on.
If that person ended up buying, you would get a commission because they went through your own personalized affiliate link. You get the credit for the sale and you would earn “$xx.xx” amount. So essentially, affiliate marketing is a groundwork for traffic brokering. You are driving traffic as a middle man through to a parent company or website and you earn money on all sales made through you.
Now affiliate marketing has a good deal of substance to it. It actually has a lot of substance to it. There are different ways to go about promoting products. You can have a blog, you can have your own website, you can go through pay per click marketing, you can do search engine optimization, you can advertise on other sites in your particular niche or industry and ask to advertise on their sites. More often than not, many website owners would be happy to receive a payment to place an ad for relevant material on their site if it is useful to their visitors.
You could grow a member base by using subscription software and get yourself a large list of subscribers which with whom you can communicate to and promote to them down the line. You could ask family and friends if they would be interested in one of the products you have to offer and simply let them know you get the commission. It could be a way to get you started and earn some pocket change too. There definately isn’t a shrotage of markets to promote too. You are only limited by the amount of time you have and the amount of work you put into your own business.
Legitimate Work At Home Jobs
As entrepreneurs, we have motivation. We have a striving desire for success and we also have the ability to form new ideas and attack them with a solid plan for success. In the end, every entrepreneur wants to make it big, they want to have their own thriving business, they want to make a good deal of money. That is all well and fine but it is the inner desire and true principles of business which allow an individual to succeed, not just their vision of monetary gain. A lot of people seek out legitimate work at home jobs only to find themselves depressed a few weeks later.
So what are these principles of business that an affiliate entrepreneur needs in order to be a success? Well the first one is patience. Without patience you are likely going to fail, especially in a market where relying on your own business ideas will take time and perhaps it may not work the first time around.
Consider the light bulb for a moment. The light bulb took many thousands of tries in order to finally be a success. Now what if you took that same example and applied it to your own business. Can you imagine how many people would give up before, even the 20th attempt at their own business? So patience is definitely a virtue but it is also a quality which many successful business owners attain. So it is important to keep that in mind when you are going about your daily business.
The second principle which is extremely important to have is something in the way of business versus emotion. You should never allow your emotions to rule your business decisions. Many people don’t even realize that they are being governed by their own inner self. Consider for a moment someone who is starting a new business and they decide to look around the internet for new ideas and ways in which they can expand their sales. On top of that it just so happens this week was a bad week for them.
Yet they just so happen to come across a product that promises to expand their sales. This person becomes feverish and suddenly decides to buy. Now without even knowing it, this person allowed their emotions to rule them, to judge them and to ultimately effect their purchasing power. This is a trait which successful entrepreneurs have mastered and overcome. They can separate their emotion from regular business decisions.
You see, when you are able to separate your emotions from your decisions, then you are effectively able to maintain your personal life from your business life. The point I am trying to make here is that your emotions may be able to negatively work against you within your business. Sometimes they may work for the better but a lot of the time it works for the worse.
This is how success is made on the internet. It does not come easy. It can come in time with patience and it doesn’t have to be difficult, but it isn’t easy. Far too many people believe that by simply having a website you can be a success. In order to be a success on the internet you have to focus, have a plan, do your market research, and you have to have the desire to work from home. Understanding marketing concepts will also help your cause. If you attack a market with no research, your chances for success are extremely low.
Making money online is not as simply as some people make it out to be. It is possible though as long as you stick with a game plan and keep building upon your business instead of jumping around from product to product like a fly on poop. If you want your own home business, you are going to have to get motivated. Without motivation, you have nothing.
Search Engine Optimization Tutorial
So you are looking for a reasonable search engine optimization tutorial yet you can’t seem to put all of the pieces together. I know when I was getting started on the internet, looking around at different places, I found a ton of information on search engine optimization and some sites dealt with how to put your title tags together, and other sites focused on keyword density. Still other sites just focused on relevant content usage and rules.
It wasn’t until, I would say, a couple of years later, that I actually found a reasonable amount of information that I could piece together myself and I have been using it ever since. This SEO tutorial is specifically for people who are beginners and for those folks who can’t seem to finish the puzzle. Without further delay here is what you want to do.
You have an article that you have written, you have your website or blog, depending on what it is, it really doesn’t matter. Now you want your website articles to rank for a specific word do you not? So let’s say that your website is about training your pet dog. For this example we will use dogs because there is a huge market for this animal.
Within your dog training website, you would have a series of articles and let’s say that one article talked about how to stop your golden retriever from digging. Another article talked about how you can stop your german shepherd from barking. These are two distinct examples and what happens is that you want each one of those articles to come up in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, when someone types in those search phrases.
So how do you get it to rank? Well, here is a quick list:
- Relevant website, well categorized, well written
- Proper on-page optimization
- Proper off-page factors
- Decent size website (50+ pages)
So, let’s go through that list. You want to make sure that your website is actually built upon a proper foundation of categories. If you walked into a library with no sections, it would be an absolute mess trying to find the book you wanted. The same principle applies to your website. You want to organize your website both from a hierarchy standpoint for the search engine spiders and for your visitors and their navigation while on your site. Keep your your website themes related and you will see your rankings improve, perhaps even without doing extra off-page work. Although it should be noted that off-page optimization is the bread and butter 90% of the time.
Following the proper category structure of your website should be well written unique relevant articles. Make sure to include your on-page factors within these articles. The on-page factors you want to focus on are the title, the amount of times you use your key phrase, and the use of bolded or “strong” words. By bolding your keyword within the article, it is letting the search engines know that the particular phrase is of greater importance than all other words within that article. You are putting this word on a pedestal above everything else.
You also want to use the phrase within the title, meta keyword tag, and meta description tag of your page. I can’t do this for you. You have to find out how to do this with whatever software you are using to build your website. At the very least you should be able to easily change the title of your page. This is the basis of on page optimization and from here you switch gears and focus on your off-page factors. So what are off-page factors anyways? This is anything that helps your site rank well, but isn’t in your control (to an extent). Allow me to explain.
You want other websites to link to your particular articles on your site, that contain the phrase you want to rank for. So for example, if you want to rank for the word “stop dog from barking” – you should have an article that talks about the ways in which you can get a dog to stop barking. Make sure you use the phrase “stop dog from barking” within your title, keyword, and description tags and also within the context of the article itself. Do not spam the article with repetitive usage of the key phrase.
Now the fun begins. If your content is well written, other sites may link to you automatically. Otherwise, you may wish to seek out link exchanges with other websites relating to the dog niche. The more websites that link to your article with the words “stop dog from barking”, the higher (for the most part) that particular article on your website is going to rank for that phrase. It is all about proper structure, well written articles, and quality back-links. Combine all of these into a search engine optimization campaign, and you have a recipe for success.
How Does Search Engine Optimization Work
So how does search engine optimization work? I mean, we have our websites and we have our products, visitors, well some visitors anyway. For most of us though, we really want to have our websites found within the search engines. We also want our visitors to come to the right page when searching.
Right now I am looking out the window over the backyard and one of the neighbors has a firepit burning and let’s say that someone was looking on Google, Yahoo, MSN, it doesn’t really matter; someone was searching on the internet for a black antique fire pit. Let’s say that your site was all about fire pits and things in that industry. You would want your visitor to land on the page that talks about black antique fire pits.
So optimization works by having a very relevant site that is well categorized. Not only do you want to have a website that is well categorized but you also want to make sure that you have the proper on-page factors within each article on your site. You want to have the key phrase of your choice within the title tag. You also want to place that phrase in the meta description and meta keyword tags. If you don’t know what those are simply Google them or sign up to my newsletter.
So you want the word of choice in the title, keyword, and description tags. On top of that, you also want the key phrase within the body of your article. Not in a way that seems as if you are spamming the search engines though. You want to use the phrase naturally within the language and context of your article. If you wanted to rank for that word you wouldn’t say “the black fire pit is a great fire pit because it is a black fire pit”. Using it once every 150 words is just fine.
So we have our on-page optimization, we have the proper structure, we have the word used throughout the body of the article, and last but not least you have to have links pointing back to your site that use that particular key phrase. Rather I should say, you want links pointing back to that specific page. So if you have two different articles and one of them deals with black antique firepits and one of them deals with white antique fire pits – you would want other sites within your particular industry to link to your page about black antique fire pits with that word as the click-able anchor text and the same goes for your other articles.
So all in all it is a process of writing relevant information, categorizing your website properly, having a semi large to large website, and having the proper anchor text pointing back to your website. These tips and guidelines are true and vital of any search engine optimization campaign and this is how search engine optimization works. So the next time someone asks you how does earch engine optimization work, you can tell them about this page or you can tell them yourself. Either way, you will have the proper knowledge to carry yourself to the top of the rankings.
Commission Junction Affiliate Marketing Network
The Commission Junction affiliate marketing network is a fine example of a well run, well thought out, and well planned directory. Now as you may know or perhaps you may not know, Commission Junction is an affiliate directory full of programs which you can promote, but they are however, programs which deal with the transaction of physical goods. These goods include, musical instruments, airline tickets, weight loss equipment, luggage, and anything else you can think of. This is in opposition to other affiliate directories which deal with the sale of digital goods and software.
They have a large selection from which to choose and this gives you an almost endless opportunity of items to promote. Their categories include items such as automotive, beauty, financial services, recreation and leisure, sports and fitness, clothing and apparel, insurance, entertainment, babies, and more. Depending on the kind of website you have or want to build, you could choose from a wide variety of products and programs to promote. For example, if you have a website which is involved with the financial services market, you could sign up with a company, within the Commission Junction directory and start promoting offers that deal with credit reporting and credit repair. This is just one small example of one of the thousands of products you can promote from within their marketplace. It is as easy as grabbing your personalized affiliate link and pasting it into your website.
Another example would be if you had a website dealing with exercise and health equipment. You could promote offers on fitness equipment, treadmills, dumbbell sets and more. If you have a travel site you could promote airline tickets, hotel stays, rental cars and other services that people would need when traveling abroad. An electronic site could promote video games, general electronic equipment, and the list goes on. The options are really unlimited. I do however recommend that if you are going to use Commission Junction to earn a living, that you have the basics of affiliate marketing well understood.
Far too many people become somewhat confused with Commission Junction and how to go about navigating around their website.So it is important that you at least have a minimal grasp of how affiliate marketing works. Perhaps maybe having used Clickbank in the past or having used any other of the major affiliate networks such as Primary Ads, Azoogle Ads, Linkshare, and others, could ease you into the use of CJ. The Commission Junction affiliate marketing network is a great way to expand and scale up your earnings if you are already earning a full time livng online.
