The hot term right now is influencer. So and so is an influencer, this person over here is a micro-influencer, you've heard it before.

Eyeballs. Views. Clicks. That's the beginning part of being an influencer, essentially, traffic. Do you have an audience that watches your content? Then you're an influencer.

It doesn't matter if you have 117 million followers and almost 10 billion likes as Charli D’Amelio does, or if you have 3000 followers and 10,000 likes. You are an influencer.

And believe me, I'm not keen on the term "influencer" term or the connotation and rapport behind it. But it is what it is.

Influencers and Influence

What matters is how many of those people who follow you are true fans and will follow you across networks and across time. How many of those people are willing to listen to you when you tell them to go check something out or to visit some other website or property because you like it or endorse it.

There are two factors that really matter when making money online. Traffic, and conversions. You can have a viral video get a million views, but it could also net you $0.00. That means you have traffic, but no conversions.

On the other hand, you can have a video that gets 10 views every day but makes you a few hundred dollars each month, which means you have a little bit of traffic, but it converts.

Now, what if you had a video, or several that get hundreds of views AND convert into money? That's what we're after. Making money as an influencer, or making money online for that matter takes fine-tunning. It takes some practice and trial and error, but if you don't have the basic elements to work with then you'll never be able to fine-tune them.

Are you waiting for a viral moment?

You could blow up and become an Internet sensation and capitalize on that. Like Nathan, the guy with the Oceanspray juice and Dreams song. You could also win the lottery. But who's actually counting on that?

Even after all the success Nathan experienced when his video went viral, I know he left hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on the table.

Let me tell you what you need to have a steady income, a long-lasting legacy, and a path to go from a lucky (or unlucky) influencer to a true digital entrepreneur.

Be Prepared

Part of going viral, getting free stuff, getting sponsors, making money, and all that could be luck, but the other part is preparation. And as they say, luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

The following are the things you need to do to make money from your social media presence. I'll go through them in a quick list kind of way. If you'd like me to expand on any of these, let me know, leave me a comment or send me a message here, or on Instagram and I'll be happy to answer your questions in greater detail, in a video or in a dedicated post.

What you have

An audience

Don't worry if you only have a few followers. Everybody starts at 0. You don't need to have a million followers. Don't worry if you don't have 10,000 followers. Really, you can start this with 50 followers. The part that is important is that you have a profile and you're going to develop it.

A little bit of time

Let's face it, we're busy. Everybody's busy. I recently posted on Facebook about this and the common response is that we have 1000 things to do. But if you've got time to scroll through Tiktok for 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, check Instagram for 15 minutes, then you can make time. If you're up to speed with the latest bingeable Netflix show, then you have time. Especially if you can get paid for this time.

A desire

This is key. I can't force you to do this. I can't compel you to do it. You either want to or you don't. Could I persuade you to do what I'm saying here? Of course, I could use psychologically powerful words to convince you; I could promise you riches; I could offer all the assistance in the world, but if you don't have a desire, then you might as well scroll on by and keep spending time on TikTok without earning any money.

What you need

A website

I will tell you until I'm blue on the face. You. Need. A. Website.

A website does a few things. Number 1, It legitimizes you in the eyes of reputable companies. Number 2, it locks in your fans and audience. Number 3, it establishes the foundation for your legacy, independent of the social network you want to use.

With a website, you aren't subject to the social network's terms and condictions, your posts aren't banned, your comments won't get you shadowbanned, you control the narrative.

A list

This has evolved overtime, but the principle is the same as it has been for 100 years or more. You need a list of interested parties. A mailing list. The easiest and most common is an email list, yes believe it or not, people still read email and it's in fact the most trusted and relied upon messaging system in the planet.

Not everybody has a Facebook account, not everybody has an Instagram account, some people don't even have a phone number that can receive a text message. But almost every person that has access to a computer has an email account. It's how banks, hospitals, doctors, schools, and other institutions keep in touch with you.

Get an email list. Plug it into your website and this will let your audience and your fans stay in touch with you no matter what platform is hot today, and no matter what you're promoting (see the next item). Remember when Snapchat was all the rage? Yeah... who cares about them anymore?

An item or something to promote

This is the trickiest part because it is a universe in and of itself. I can't quickly tell you what item to promote, but the opportunities are endless. There are three big areas that you could explore to make money with this. One is affiliate relationships, two is sponsored promotions, and three could be your own product. There are a few other notable mentions, but they pretty much fall into these three categories.

A good amount of companies that you use everyday have affiliate programs. Take for example, the trends on TikTok. One of the trends is summervibes, summer bodies, etc. If you're a girl and you're already posting bikini videos or dancing videos, one easy way way to make money is to become an affiliate for those products. Shein has an affiliate program that pays 10 to 20% commissions.

Sponsors work in a couple of different ways. You can get paid just to be an ambassador or spokesperson for a brand --this requires a highly engaged audience and generally a large audience. But you can also do one-off sponsorships, where a company will pay you a flat fee for posting a number of posts.

Your own product can mean that you develop and engineer an actual physical item. That's a lot of work, but it is profitable in many situations. You could sell your art, or crafts.

You could also create a digital product, like a course, a book, or even a private membership site. You could become the product, or you could offer your services.

I know what you're thinking, but no, I'm not suggesting that you go out and join OnlyFans, but you can have a private membership area on your own website where you give your audience what they're looking for or an extended version of what you post in your public social media profiles.

While OnlyFans is making all the headlines right now, the private membership area concept isn't a new thing and there are many other platforms besides OF that you can use for this. Your website for one, but there are also others like Patreon, SubscribeStar, Thinkific, Kajabi, and the list goes on.

In Conclusion

You can monetize your social media profiles. I know people that make 4 or 5 figures per month; that's nothing to sneeze at as a side hustle. Others make over $100,000. You can do it from anywhere in the world where you have an Internet connection.

You don't need to be a huge celebrity. It takes a little bit of effort, some time, and preparation, but at the end of the day, the opportunities are endless, the payouts are fantastic. You can do this, doesn't matter if you're 16, or 73.

Dedicated to my TikTok fam, You guys are killing it. Shout-outs to you guys @ayuputurossa @marivic59mommy @dumb_bricklayer @iamtiktokelle @findingmea

The post How To Monetize TikTok Influence appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

In a short video (below) I took a moment to answer this question which comes up regularly. It applies to moms as well, so technically it's good for WAHD and WAHMs.

When you read it or watch the video, you'll think it's obvious and simple, even trivial.

But I think this small aspect is critical if you want to succeed with a home or online business AND also raise kids without putting them on the care of strangers.

As a quick side note, I pass no judgment if you have to leave your kids with babysitter services, or even regular daycare.

I know, as a parent you gotta do what you have to do, but all things considered, I think it's always better if I am with my kids whenever they're not at school. Call me old-fashioned if you wish.

But if you think this is a simple and obvious tip, watch the video and also read the entire blog post. I think you may reconsider after you absorb everything.

Simple, yet powerful.

Also as a side note and quick disclaimer. Someone I know and admire runs her entire life from a regular, pen-and-paper calendar system and it works amazing for her.

So whatever works for you, that is what you should do, but as you'll see in the video and read below, I prefer a digital option.

The option is yours, simply be true to yourself and use what works best for you.

How Can You Do It? Tips for Time Management for SAHD & WAHD and SAHM & WAHM.

You can start simply with a good calendar app.

I recommend Google Calendar, but since we're talking about using it for business then use the G-suite version instead of just the free Gmail version. Here's a link to a free trial.

Update (2021-07-19) After numerous negative experiences with Mailchimp, I no longer recommend it. Yes, they're still one of the leading email marketing service providers, but the headaches and heartaches that come with it just completely removed it from the options I think you should consider.

This lets you use a professional email address when using your calendar.

Using a professional email address when you invite customers or leads to an appointment will look more professional than if you use a free Gmail account.

Also, you can use the free trial link, but after the trial, you'll need to pay for the service. When you pay for a service like this, it helps you to commit and solidify it as a critical part of your infrastructure and thus helps you do everything better.

It's a psychological hack. It should help you think that you have to use it, since you're paying for it. And this helps create a full loop.

Use the calendar to do better, do better and make more money because of your calendar, rinse and repeat.

A Few Other Tips

In addition to the main calendar where I keep my appointments and commitments to my family, I use a few other tools worth mentioning.

Mobile notifications

My mobile device alerts and notifications are critical. Make sure your phone alerts you of upcoming appointments ahead of time.

To make sure this works and nothing falls through the cracks, I set my calendar to remind me of upcoming appointments using the free Zedge notification app to customize the sound.

You're going to laugh at me, but I literally have the "Trollolololol song" as my calendar appointment reminder notification sound. Keeping things interesting and fun right? -- Not the whole thing, just like an 8-second clip, you'll find it on Zedge. ?

Using the new notifications control panel for my Android device lets me get really granular with notifications so I get notified by sound and don't even have to look at my screen sometimes to know what's coming up.

I set up multiple notifications for every appointment, by default with the following list of notifications are set:

• 1 day in advance
• 4 hours in advance
• 30 minutes in advance
• 5 minutes in advance

I adjust these four different notifications on a case by case basis for each event that makes it into the calendar.

For example, sometimes I may need more than 1-day notice for an event, and other times I don't need to be reminded more than once.

Remove Myself From the Equation

Sometimes managing the calendar in and of itself is a chore, I try to automate as much of that as possible. I have a system configured to minimize my time spent managing the calendar.

For client appointments, I use Calendly.

This way if I'm working with a lead, I send them a special link where they can book an appointment with me.

For most people, the free version of Calendly works just fine. Connect it to your Google calendar, set your rules of availability and you're ready to roll!

The Calendly system is based on settings I set in advance and also on my current availability. This prevents the usual back and forth series of emails trying to find a time that is convenient for both parties; they just find an open slot that works for them and automatically pencil themselves into my calendar.

I get notified and the appointment system will then remind me of the appointment as needed using the four notifications I mentioned earlier.

For Family Events Use the Shared Calendar Feature

In order to coordinate with family members, we all have our private calendars but we share availability with each other.

You can also do this within the settings of your calendar, or you can create a shared calendar for everyone that needs to participate.

We know what times are available, which times we're together for an event, and we can easily invite each other for future events.

For Social Events I Automatically Add Them to My Calendar

If you like to attend a lot of different events and have to deal with different websites to see your agendas, it is very useful to get all of those calendars to work in your Google calendar.

Meetup.com, Facebook events, EventBrite, and other types of calendars can automatically show up in your google calendar. Take a moment to search for instructions for your particular need and you'll find ways to get those appointments to show up in your own Google calendar.

I have this for my active Meetup.com events, and Facebook events. This way when I commit to an event in Facebook, or Meetup.com it automatically gets added to my calendar so I don't double-book myself with personal or professional activities.

If for some reason, you can't find instructions to connect a specific calendar to your Google calendar, you can try an app like IFTTT or Zapier to help you integrate new appointments with your calendar.

In Conclusion

This is a short video where I talk about how to run a business from home and raise kids at the same time.

I recommend getting a good calendar that works with you and for you. The last thing you want is to add more work to your daily life so take advantage of the technologies available.

This is just one aspect of managing the entrepreneur lifestyle while raising kids, but it's a big part of staying productive and maximizing efficiency.

Keep Your Eye on The Prize

Keep an eye on your desired outcome. For example for me it's imagining something like the scene below. Total relaxation, everything at peace. With a calendar in order, this is one step closer to reality than a distant dream.

In a future blog post and video, I'll cover other aspects talking about other productivity tips, including more automation, task management, time tracking and keeping a log of activity.

The post WAHD, Running a Business and Raising Kids. But How? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Improving the customer experience isn’t only about getting more customers; it’s about lowering the risk of losing your customers to your competitor. On average, 47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within 24 hours of a poor customer experience. That means if your customer experience isn’t up to par, you risk losing one out of every two customers you already have, not to mention the opportunity cost of visitors who were discouraged before purchasing.

Here’s how to use marketing to improve your customer experience.

Build Your Marketing Plan Around Lifetime Value (LTV)

Short-term marketing approaches often neglect the customer experience and create a transactional relationship with customers who could potentially become loyal lifetime users of your product. A report by Econsultancy noted that 64% of companies rated customer experience as the best tactic for improving the customer lifetime value.

Simply put, if you offer your customers enough value to stick with your brand, they will be worth more in the long-run. A marketing plan built around long term value (LTV)  focuses on improving the customer experience at every possible interaction. Each touchpoint is an opportunity to add value and convince users that they will make the right choice shopping with your brand.

This is a no-brainer for subscription-based businesses, but it still has practical applications in virtually all types of business. A higher LTV means more profits, and, since previous customers have a 60 to 70% chance of converting and are cheaper to market to, your overall profitability will greatly improve.

Your marketing plan should be focused on building a personalized relationship with your customers. Customers want to feel special, and, if their needs are met, they will be happy to start and continue doing business with you.

Customer Retention Is Key

So many businesses focus their marketing efforts on customer acquisition while turning a blind eye on creating a better customer experience for the customers they already have. The average eCommerce store commits over 80% of their marketing budget to customer acquisition, and retention is left on the back burner. While new business isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there is a wealth of potential within your active customer base.

Loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as the first purchase they made with you, and they are more likely to shop with you again than new customers. A customer is 27% more likely to return to your store after the first purchase, and 54% more likely after the second purchase.

Focusing your marketing strategy to improving the customer experience for your existing customers has the potential to substantially improve your bottom line profitability. Dropping your customer churn rate by a mere 5% could increase your profitability by anywhere between 25 to 125%.

Using Marketing to Test the Waters

A good marketing strategy is enough to get your brand and business some exposure, but, if you set the end goal at just awareness, you won’t really understand what components of your business customers like, and which ones they don’t.

In the Lean Startup, Eric Reis notes that instead of devoting the majority of your budget to a sudden “showtime” moment, it should be devoted to finding a product-market fit. A product-market fit is essentially when your business and products are paired with demand in the market based on real-world experience.

This lean startup methodology can be used to A/B test tweaks to your business model and customer experience. No matter how good you are in your ideation phase at creating a service or product customers want, there will always be intricacies that can be tweaked to ensure the best customer experience.

Perhaps your landing pages aren’t engaging enough to lead traffic to your subscription box, product pages, or other CTA? Split-test to find out which type of landing page works for each specific goal.

Your marketing can be used to improve your customer experience, and the holistic customer experience data you receive can be used to refine and perfect your marketing strategy.

How to Use Marketing to Improve the Customer Experience (CX)

The goal of a long-term customer experience focused marketing plan is to create a seamless customer experience on multiple channels that rewards customer retention with more value and entices new customers to become lifetime users. Customers can engage with a company through a multitude of different ways.

For example, they could walk in a physical location, scroll through their website, and check their Facebook page in one five-minute period. Since the customer experience could potentially be anywhere, your marketing must ensure that your business is showing its best face on all channels.

The first step to creating this plan is to understand your buyers, and this doesn’t mean going through customer research and white papers. This step involves actually speaking and interacting with your customers to understand what drives them. In doing so, you’ll understand critical nuances that could greatly improve your strategy that would otherwise be missed.

Your competition likely has access to the same research and resources that you do. Going the extra step to understand your customers at an intimate level is an excellent way to make use of phenomenal resources otherwise neglected.

The next step is to audit your existing marketing and customer experience processes and look for ways to reduce wasted costs and simplify the CX process. All additional unnecessary steps in the customer experience process can range from being mild frustrations or entire reasons customers will abandon their cart or move to a competitor.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, in order to improve the customer experience, you must understand the buyer scale. At one end of the scale, you have the value offered. On the other end sits the cost, risk, and effort. At every step in the customer experience, customers are actively weighing that scale.

A seemingly flawless customer experience could be ruined by a single off-brand marketing message, and a creatively refreshing marketing message could be ruined by a poor customer experience. Place your company on the better side of technology and focus on creating a positive synergistic relationship between your marketing efforts and your customer experience.

Ronald Dod: CMO And Cofounder of Visiture.
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Ronald Dod is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-founder of Visiture, an end-to-end eCommerce marketing agency focused on helping online merchants acquire more customers through the use of search engines, social media platforms, marketplaces, and their online storefronts. His passion is helping leading brands use data to make more effective decisions in order to drive new traffic and conversions.

The post Using Marketing to Improve the Customer Experience appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

They often do pull your heartstrings in Hollywood, but there's more to this movie than cheap emotional tricks.

A Few Lessons from the Pursuit of Happyness

This is real. This happened. This is possible.

You can do what you set your mind to. But will you? That's the real question.

I know I've failed time and time again but I get up again and I tweak my approach I try something slightly different and then I see progress. You have to be willing to work at it and you have to be able to put your ego aside to be flexible.

1 You Need a "Why"

You gotta have a motive. In the movie, the motive is the kid. That is the why.

The "why" has to be bigger than one's self. It has to be something that motivates you, a bigger purpose. It's easy to say my why is to make more money because I can't pay my bills. That's not going to work. Why do you need to pay your bills? What's the next step? What's the bigger purpose? It needs to be a higher-purpose reason.

2 You Need Desire

You gotta have desire, it's one thing to have a why and have it be your rock, your cornerstone. The one thing that drives you to get up in the morning. But what happens when you have your why? What then?

You also need a desire, something that helps you drive just a little harder and drives you to win, not just to make it and cross the finish line, but to do it with pizazz like Tony Montana would say.

3 Find and Make the Opportunity

Some people call it luck, others point to the law of attraction as the culprit when things we've been longing for materialize.

No matter how you come to have an opportunity, you need to seize that opportunity and do everything you can to capitalize on it.

In the movie, this happens twice. Once when he goes to the football game and the second time when he gets the job and then has to beat everyone else.

The first lesson in this regard, create your opportunities. Ring that doorbell!

Then the rest is simple and straightforward, when an opportunity reveals itself, take it.

Grab it, chase it, do everything you can to make the outcome of that opportunity be favorable to you. It is by these kinds of advances that we often have a chance to make outstanding leaps forward in a short period of time.

4 Pursue "Hapyness" at All Costs and Don't Let Others Tell You What You Can't Do

This is a good lesson that lots of people shout from the rooftops but few entrepreneurs follow.

The time when Chris Gardner (Will Smith) is shooting hoops with his kid and he denies him. He crushes the kids dream in an instant, with one sentence.

He tells him that he probably won't become a pro basketball player, instead he tells him he'll be just average at basketball so he better pursue other things.

Then the scene turns and Chris notices what he has just done, probably the same thing people have done to him his whole life.

He is devastated that his son just accepts that and ends up telling him to protect his dream and pursue it.

Don't let anyone tell you, you can't have that, is what he says. That's the lesson that we need to burn into our heads too. If your why is solid, if you have the desire, if you're working for it, and someone tells you that you can't have it. Fuck 'em.

5 Hard Work Pays Off

In the end, one of the last scenes always gets to me.

When the guy passes by and tells Chris, "come" and beckons him to the office with the bigwigs.

Spoiler alert -- if you haven't watched the movie (first, what's wrong with you!?) you should stop reading now. When Chris is told to "wear a shirt tomorrow" for his first day.

Then he's asked if it was as easy as it looked, and Chris' answer was "no sir."

You see, after all the sacrifices, all the embarrassment, all the family leaving and lack of supporting friends (if there were any, to begin with) after seemingly everyone deserting him, he still pulled through.

As they say, where there's a will, there's a way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8-7mHT9edg

Hard work pays off in the pursuit of happyness.

Do you like this movie? What do you think of the lessons I extracted from it? What other ones have I missed? Let me know in the comments.

The post What Every Business Owner Can Learn from The Pursuit of Happyness appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

He shared a little-known trick about getting your book into Barnes & Noble stores and didn't mind me capturing it on video for you.

As with anything like this, YMMV. Obviously, your book is going to have to be good and desirable and all that good stuff.

Then I also wonder if you do it correctly how many big box stores could you sneak your way into with other products, not just books?

It would only work with small items because it would be difficult to sneak a lot of them in.

But anyway, here's the video

How to Get Your Book into Barnes & Noble Video

Errm... we'll call this the quick, not-guaranteed, probably-will-not-work, legit-but-not, red tape-less, jump-the-line, method to get your self-published book into the big bookstore.

Years ago, I had heard of a similar trick to get promotion and visibility but it didn't really aim at getting picked up by Barnes & Noble or even other retailers.

The trick was to bring your own books in a backpack or a duffel bag when you go to the airport, for example, and where you see books and magazines, and just pop your books in there.

If you designed a great cover and your book looks good, if it is attractive then it will sell.

Granted, won't see any money from the sale of the books but you'll gain new readers hopefully. The book might cost you $3-10 to print so it could be a fair price for a new name on your list.

The cashier will just manually ring up the book. If the book doesn't come up then they'll just charge the customer the price listed in the cover.

If their system is more sophisticated they might put it into the database.

My buddy called it reverse theft, lol.

Since you most likely will not receive any money from the sale, your only benefit will be having a new reader and the opportunity for you to put a great offer in front of your new reader.

So make sure you've set up your incentives, multiple tier funnels and email list ready for action when you do something like this.

Since Affiliate Summit West is coming up soon, I thought I'd share this with you. A good reminder of the value that Affiliate Summit has to offer.

Even out of sessions, you'll learn little tips and tricks that can be worth the price of attendance.

The post How to Get Your Book into Barnes & Noble appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Sometimes the fear is really unfounded because these same people don't really investigate the true costs of starting an online business.

And before they even start, they extinguish their business.

In this short video, I explain what you *need* to start an affiliate marketing business online.

The good news is that starting an affiliate marketing business, and many other online businesses, the start-up costs are small. In some cases, the cost can be zero. That's what this video is about today.

How Much Does it Cost To Start an Affiliate Marketing Business?

The basics to start an affiliate marketing business are as follows:

#1 Website (hosting & domain)

This amount is generally for one to two years, $60-$120. If you want to learn more about web hosting, I have this blog post here that might help.

Get hosting through Inmotion Hosting here and receive up to 50% off your first invoice. And you get a domain for free, or a free transfer if you already have a domain.

#2 Email marketing

This ranges from $0 to $20/month approximately.

Get email marketing services through Aweber here and get 30 days for free. I think in the video I mentioned you could do email marketing for free. And you can, although I don't recommend it for a couple of reasons.

You may want to try Mailchimp if you really can't afford $20/month for Aweber. ** If you really want to know why I advise against using free email services, you can read this post and watch this video.

The next steps are basically free, just take some of your time and effort.

#3 Start producing content and build your email list and email sequence. Free.

Publish content to your website and or blog and start an email sequence. The email sequence should introduce your subscribers to you and to your vision. It should also explain what to expect in future emails. The sequence can be a few days or a few weeks long.

An easy way to tackle this part is to answer all the "About" related questions in several blog posts. These blog posts then become the email that you send to your list as you introduce yourself and eventually you'll be sharing the current blog post instead of the introductory sequence.

#4 Find products to promote. Free

To find products you can promote, you can start with some affiliate networks, here are three easy sites to work with: Shareasale, Peerfly, and Refersion.

These are free to join and you can browse through the various offers and see if any of them would be a match for your blog or website.

There are another dozen I could list, but that's a good start. Also good to get familiar with the concept of an affiliate network.

If you don't see a product or service you like inside those networks, you can also go to your favorite product or service and see if they offer a rewards or affiliate program section.

Sometimes they have it under sections titled "work with us" or "earn money" or "webmasters" if you don't see it on their own website, then do a web search for "Brand-name +Affiliate Program" where brand-name is whatever brand you're looking for.

Sometimes the affiliate program is run through a network like the ones I shared above or something like CJ.com and many others but the search I gave you above should find it for you.

If you don't see it, then maybe they just don't have one.

For physical products, if you can't find it on a network or directly through the manufacturer, one last resort tends to be Amazon, they have most of the products available for sale also available through their affiliate program.

That is also free to join and you'll find it under Amazon associates. Sign up, then you'll be able to search for any product and get your own affiliate link to share on your blog articles and monetize it that way.

Please note that in a few cases, you may need to own the product you want to promote. This is especially true with software, or web tools. I just wanted to note that because I make a point on this section to say "Find products to promote. Free" so I want to make it clear, you can always promote products for free without paying for fees or memberships.

But there are some cases where an affiliate program is only open to active members or owners of the product, for example, Leadpages.

#5 Work Your Butt Off. Free.

The start-up cost is small, but your effort needs to be big. Constant, and relentless. Even when you face major setbacks that make you want to quit, you must be committed to publishing, on time and consistently.

The post How Much Do I need To Start an Affiliate Marketing Business? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've been battling with a lot in my head but I finally started picking myself back up.

One of the things that have helped me is reconnecting with the basics. Talking to people and just taking one step at a time.

Just going back to the basic premises of a business, keeping things simple yet effective.

Here is a simple premise for a business...

Provide a valuable service or product and find the audience that will pay for it. Then present it to them.

Or if you want to flip it around, you can find an audience that has a need and you can fulfill that need in the form of a product or service.

Seems simple enough, right?

But sometimes as a business grows, it becomes complex, full of extra stuff. In some cases the complexity is necessary, but many times it isn't.

I had a good reminder of that simplicity earlier today while watching my co-host Kim Dang interview Marcus Campbell.

I was blown away that during a part of the interview, Marc said that he uses FrontPage 2003 to build websites.

Still today. Yes, Frontpage 2003. He called it the best $200 he ever spent.

I even asked if he was just trolling us with that. I mean anybody today would almost laugh at that. I must admit that if I didn't know Marc and hadn't heard the beginning of the interview I would have closed the interview right there and then and laughed my way to refill my cup of coffee.

I mean who uses FrontPage 2003 in 2018?

But I ate a slice of humble pie when he said he wasn't trolling and he still builds sites this way and teaches with it.

But why?

Because it works. It's simple, effective and it gets the job done. And apparently, it makes him a great deal of money with niche affiliate sites and teaching about the whole thing.

But he was right, you know.

If it gets the job done, and you know how to use it, and you can be effective with it. Then use it.

I mean I remember using Frontpage back in the day, I think I started using it in like 1999?

I remember I built a site in 2003 with it and I was pretty proud of it because I made some custom buttons by hand which I then scanned and tweaked a bit. The good old days.

As Marcus talked about it for a moment or so I was also reminded of Joel Bauer. When I attended one of his training events I remember him using a pretty old camera to record his videos.

The training was like 5 years ago, but the camera was old even at that time, like 3 or 4 years old. For someone making several million dollars per year as a single person business, you would have thought that he'd have a nice state of the art camera.

But no, it was a simple point and shoot pocket sized camera. I want to say it was a canon but it might have even been Kodak.

But in a short group Q&A he explained that he used that specific camera because it produced an AVI file and this allowed him to quickly transfer the file and edit it on his Windows computer without any formatting, converting, rendering, etc.

As a Youtube content creator, I know how much time can be wasted in getting your file to the computer and then making sure your editing software can read it and then rendering it quickly.

He had simply eliminated as much wasted time from that process as possible. Keeping things simple, yet effective.

And this would be the end of the blog post if it was that simple, but no. He took it a step further, in order to create his "graphics" for slide decks and presentations he would use the very old school Microsoft Photodraw.

That's right. A piece of software that was already dead and unsupported. But his answer was the same. It gets the job done, it's quick and easy to use.

I'm pretty sure he has updated his stuff quite a bit by now, or at least I hope so but the point is that sometimes you don't need a lot of fancy stuff and complex systems and all that stuff.

You just need to get shit done, quickly, effectively and with as little friction as possible.

But my favorite story about simplicity is this one

I'll tell you one more story, that's of a client of mine that has an airplane parts company. Pretty unique business.

One day when I was still doing computer and network support, I went in to fix something on his local network.

I was already building WordPress websites for clients so I thought I'd pitch him an upgrade to his ordering and inventory system.

He said, Nah. Not interested, my system is great as it is right now.

I pressed him a little bit and he said, I'll tell you what let's finish this up and I'll show you something.

So I fixed the issues I was there to fix and then asked him to show me what happened.

So we walked over to this little cubicle thing in the middle of his warehouse.

As we walked there I told him he'd be able to get SMS alerts, inventory notifications, he would be able to order from his phone, have pictures of all the items and more.

And he wouldn't have to walk for 3 minutes from his office to this place in his warehouse.

Lots of shiny objects for him to salivate over and for me to make money on. Don't laugh, I was green and trying to make a buck.

So he stands over this dirty old keyboard, and when I say old, I mean OLD. The keyboard was connected to somewhere behind a pile of clutter and next it on the desk was an old monitor and a couple feet away an old dot-matrix printer.

I really mean, old.

The monitor came to life and it wasn't years old, it was decades old. It was not even a color monitor, my jaw dropped. It was an old monochrome monitor, not that bios-like blue-white color, not Windows 95 colors, not even that green on black Matrix colors, but orange. Orange on a dark gray background.

You could see lines of characters burned into the screen after so many years of service.

A few moments later he began frantically hitting keys on the old dirty keyboard, I could see different screens come up and flash away and I could see him checking boxes on and off, tabulating to the next field as fast as I can type.

He would pause briefly on some screens screen to review something and then continue on. About a minute later he said, ok I'm done. Moments before he said that,  the dot matrix printer came online and started spitting stuff out.

The printer ended up working for about 10 minutes while he explained a few things to me.

He said, when we're done talking I'll have the reports for the week and the reports for today. I also reviewed about half a dozen orders that needed to be completed. I placed all the orders and found out I was running low in a few items while I have an overstock of other parts that needed to be moved quickly.

He had notified the floor manager of this and was also printing a report for him.

He did all that in about one minute of keyboard work.

Everything he accomplished, he did so without a mouse, without waiting for a browser to load, without having to log into different systems and click here and there. Without typing an email, without hesitation.

Then he said, you know that system you're telling me about, tell me more, do you think I can do all that in a couple minutes also?

I had no choice but to say no.

I could have said, no, but I can get you pretty nice graphics and reports with interactive charts and projections automatically emailed you daily. I can tell you who ordered what and at what time. We can email all your customers on demand.

I could have said that I would provide visibility into his supply-chain.

I could have a 3d picture of each of the products --mind you he had over 16000 SKUs-- I could have said a lot of things and try to make the sale.

I mean, I should have said at least a couple of those things.  That system was old and had to be replaced, right?

Maybe.

I could have pointed out that the system could die at any time and he'd be stuck until someone could fix it or replace it. Then he'd really be in trouble.

But I didn't. I just said, nope, you are right.

There was no way I could compete with the simplicity and efficiency of his configuration. This was 2006 or 2007 and he had been using this since 1984. Old habits die hard, but this was a little more than that.

The company was highly profitable with revenues in the high 8-figure ranges, with a very lean staff.

So what business person in their right mind would muck with that system?

After seeing that little demo, there was no way I could introduce all this complexity I had in mind for the sake of using arguably a "better" system.

Sometimes, simplicity beats everything else because it's profitable. Strive to avoid complexity for the sake of complexity and K.I.S.S.

The post Business Success. It’s All About Simplicity appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I kept finding more and more to add to the list, so it grew to what it is now.

Almost seven hours, 52 revisions and just over 5400 words later, I wrapped up this post.

It is by far, the longest blog post I've written for my blog. I hope you enjoy it and find some useful tips that will help you make money online.

Before I get into it, I have to remind you that making money online is real, anybody can do it. And with the "gig" economy or "sharing economy," the notion of a regular job is eroding even more.

You just have to get started.

The options and possibilities are endless, and once you get started the limit of how much you can make depends on your efforts, the niche you pick, and a few other things, but it's mostly up to you.

The biggest limit will be your own mindset and belief.

You have to believe you can do this, you have to. If you're cynical about it, you may never crack the nut. If you're negative, you will see negative results.

And without further ado, here's the list of 37 ways to make extra money online and offline. There is technically a little bit over 40, but you'll see why I didn't count them all. Enjoy, please share if you find it useful and you think others will benefit from it.

Oh yeah, and I'd love to hear any feedback you have, whether it is about the post itself or any of the methods I described.

Ok, enjoy these ways to make money online & offline.

1 - Found money

The reason this post was inspired is that a family member reminded me of the "unpaid money" you can find from the government. I know this sounds fishy right off the bat, and it may not really count,  but bear with me. This could jumpstart your whole making money online adventure!

Someone had told me about this years ago, but I totally forgot about it. Then just recently another family member reminded me to check again and sure enough. I had some money waiting for me.

Apparently, when certain financial events happen with companies, they may have to pay or give some money to the state to "hold" for you until you claim it.

I checked the unclaimed property for California website and I had a little over $90 waiting to be claimed. I claimed them and about a month later they sent me 5 separate checks authorized by the Controller of California, Unclaimed Property Division.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Right!?

Well, it's just $97.29 and that isn't a lot, but it could easily pay for a domain and hosting for an entire year and maybe even the first couple months or more of email service! Think of the possibilities. You could start a business with that!

You could literally start a business on a website that could bring you anything from some extra spending money for the weekend to a full replacement of your income.

Instead of giving you a link for each state, here's the official website, a good location to start your search depending on where you live. There are other types of searches you can make as well so look around on this page: Unclaimed Money from the U.S. Government

2 - Start a blog!

I put this at the top of the list because I cover this all the time with videos and blog posts and tweets, it's how I make most of my money online. This blog, the one you're reading, makes me money.

Still today and for the foreseeable future, blogging will be around. And I consider it one of the best ways to increase your income.

At the very least, you should have a blog to brand yourself, document special events, news, and opinions. That could be a personal blog.

At best, financially speaking, a blog could make you a millionaire. It's a small step to go from a personal blog to a money making blog. But both can make you good money.

But isn't blogging dead?

Don't listen to the naysayers, they've been saying "blogging is dead" since 2005. Sure, blogging has evolved, and it will continue to evolve for the next decade and beyond.

We see a lot more integration with video and audio, and surely trends in culture an technology affect how blogs get produced. Blog creation, distribution, and consumption will simply adopt new technologies and fit the current trends, but the process of sharing thoughts, news, and other types of information will be around for a while.

If you think of a blog as a way to share any type of information, with people interested in the topic, whether the information is free or behind a payment system, that's a blog.

Currently, the most popular platform for a blog is WordPress and requires pretty much the same stuff it has used for the past 15-20 years. A web host, a domain and the blog engine (WordPress). Next year it may require something else and we may produce and consume the content differently, but it will be an evolution so it's never too early and never too late, today is just right to start a blog!

So How Do You Make Money With The Blog?

The blog can make money in a few different ways. In fact is one of the most popular ways to make money online.

For example, the easiest is by selling advertising space on the blog. You can sell ad space directly by using a plugin like OIO Publisher, or Adsanity,  or through a network like Adsense or Media.net. With OIO Publisher you can place your own ads, sell ads directly or place network ads easily.

With a list too! Every blog and website must have an email list. This is one of the key components to a blog monetization strategy.

I debated whether to add having an email list as a separate way to make money online because you can actually make a paid newsletter, that's becoming trendy in some spaces and especially with some real niche content.

I will probably talk about this on its own blog post, but whether you use an email list for your blog or for a stand-alone newsletter, Aweber is the place to go to get that started.

Native content is a hot topic right now also. A blog can make money by accepting long-form blog posts as "sponsored posts," aka "native content," or "influencer promotions." Depending on the niche and traffic or influence of the blog, a blog post may be worth $50 to $10,000 to the right company. The better you develop your blog, grow your active audience and prove that you can compel the audience to take action, the more you can charge per post.

The last method I'll mention to help you make money with a blog is to use affiliate marketing like Notagrouch.com blog does.

Almost any time you see links on my blog they may be affiliate links. This means that I could get paid a commission if you purchase something through one of my links. You'll often see a disclaimer like the one in the introduction of this post.

Ok, one more method to make money with your blog... I can think of at least six more right now as I write this, but I'll cover this one more before moving onto the next big section.

The last method I'll mention is by creating a private membership blog or website where you charge access for content using a membership system likeMemberpress orWishlist Member. You can charge per month, per quarter, per year, or any way you want.

Some websites charge per article. You can also separate membership levels into as few or as many as you want or need. This way you can also offer different pricing and value models.

Both of the plugins I mentioned help you manage access, record keeping and payments so the logistics making money from access to your content is fairly easy.

Ok, onto the next section. If you want more ideas for blogging for profit, let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

Making Videos

There is a huge trend favoring videos overwritten and other visual content. People love watching videos so this could be a way to make some money. There are a few options that don't involve a lot of production costs, just your expertise, a little bit of elbow grease and actually doing the work.

3 - Youtube monetization

Youtube started as a video sharing platform and now it has become ingrained in our lives. People go to Youtube to learn, explore and be entertained. But you can also produce videos to make money. Years ago, Youtube started their ad-revenue program where you can get a portion of the proceeds generated from advertising on your videos.

You could make anywhere from a few dollars to several thousand dollars each month; some people make over five figures from their Youtube channel. The key is to make videos that are advertising friendly.

To start, get a Youtube channel, plan out what you're going to make videos about and start making them. You could start with your phone's camera and a basic video editor that comes with your computer, Youtube even has its own video editor and a huge collection of music you can use for free.

After you meet the threshold for your channel to become monetizable, you can apply to the program and once approved you'll start making money from each ad that shows in your videos.

You can also make money by hosting live videos and allowing people to use the superchat feature to donate to your channel.

Learn more: Youtube partnership program

4 - Patreon

Patreon is a site that lets you share your videos to a select group of people that have paid to have access. It works in a way that people can pay a membership fee to access the content.

In exchange for the membership payment, people expect content to be unique or special in comparison to regular content you may be posting on Youtube. You can also offer rewards based on each level you create, like special access to Q&A sessions, or one on one calls, or other member perks.

One of the benefits of Patreon is that the memberships tend to be recurring, so whether you charge $1 or $100 per month, as long as you continue producing good content and your audience likes it, you get those payments every month.

Learn more: Patreon

The Sharing Economy

One of the newer phenomenon in recent years is that type of business where an owner, presumably you, has "downtime" on a property and thus this property may be listed on a website or app where it will be cataloged as available for rent, lease or hire. This essentially gives the owner an opportunity to monetize their unused or little-used property.

So if you have a vehicle that is just sitting there while you watch TV, you could make money with it by renting it or driving it.

If you have a piece of land doing nothing, you could make money with it. Same goes for just about anything nowadays so the following section is dedicated to that type of business.

While the marketing materials, commercials and most of the buzz you hear about these companies is geared towards and from a consumer point of view, consider the other perspective.

You may be one of the owners and thus, you can make money by listing your room, boat, RV, or another type of property and in some cases you may be able to make upwards of 6 figures just with stuff you already have!

I broke down the next section into 4 sections, driving someone, delivering food, delivering something or renting something.

Driving Someone

This is sometimes regulated and controversial in some places so check the different apps to see if it's available in your area.

This could be fun and profitable. It seems that "everyone is doing it", but new companies and niches keep coming up.

Take a look at all of the options I found:

5 - Uber

The kind of money you can make with Uber varies from location to location. I know a few friends that can make $300 to $1000 per week, but it all depends on the time and other factors. Buzzfeed has a very interesting article about how much Uber drivers really make right here.

Uber pays referral and performance bonuses too so that could bump your pay quite a bit if you make it a goal to get those bonuses. This is also dependent in your area, if you live in a rural area, service calls may be sparse. Use my Uber link and you'll get $5.00 or a driver bonus.

Learn more: Uber

6 - Lyft

This is the closest competitor to Uber and in some cases, it is better for you as a driver. It is all about economics, right? Well, with Lyft, things may be a little more than just financial. It seems that people like Lyft a lot more than Uber because of Uber's controversial history with some of its leadership and business practices.

You definitely will want to try both Uber and Lyft if you're going to try the driving for hire game. Some people report earning a lot more with one or the other then they focus on that for the most part.

Learn more: Lyft

7 - Wingz

While it has a limited reach, it is growing and growing fast. Wingz is like a normal ride-sharing service but more specialized and ideal for pre-scheduled trips. As a consumer, you can establish an ongoing relationship with your favorite driver. This seems a bit more like a limousine service but a little bit more relaxed. You get to pick which rides you want to accept.

The opportunity to make money here is to offer special features and a friendly service so that frequent travels select you as their driver. Their website seems to indicate that they are focusing on specific niches so check them out if your vehicle is special in any way.

Learn more: Wingz

8 - iCarpool

This is very unique and it's good if you have regular commutes and have empty seats in your car. That's their slogan, in fact: turn your empty seats into cash.

The way it works is that you stop by one of the stop spots and people can join your "carpool" and then you go about your business to your destination. You'll stop at another designated area and you're ready to go. No detours, no short rides, no long rides, just the rides you want to provide. The website doesn't explain how much you can make or how much each rider pays but if could be profitable in some areas and certain time zones.

Learn more: iCarpool

9 - HopSkipDrive

This is another niche service and limited to certain areas, but if it fits, it could be a great way to make extra cash. The site talks about how some drivers can make about $30.0 per hour. The focus is on driving kids.

The service is available in San Francisco and the Los Angeles areas, but I believe they'll be expanding to other metro areas soon. This is a highly sought after service by many parents I've talked to.

Learn more: HopSkipDrive

Delivering Food & Beverages

10 - Ubereats

The food version of Uber. Restaurants need food delivered to lazy busy people, you come in and save the day. If you're a restaurant, you can enhance your profit by offering delivery in your restaurant, or you can become a delivery partner and deliver food in exchange for that sweet sweet money.

You'll be paid a pickup fee, a drop off fee, and for mileage from the pickup to the customer. Some people will give you tips as well. Drivers report making between $8.00 and $12.00 per hour.

Learn more: Ubereats

11 - GrubHub

If you are within their service area, GrubHub claims more orders than any other delivery service; they are partners with Seamless. Other benefits include keeping 100% of the tips and making up your own hours. I couldn't find any reliable figures to quote for drivers, but GrubHub claims it's competitive, so I'm guessing that it would be between $8 to $16 per hour or more.

Learn more: GrubHub

12 - Doordash

If you want to make money with Doordash, you'll be a "Dasher" and from the research I've done, you will make anywhere from $10 to over $18 per hour. But this really depends on a lot of factors. One interesting feature available in some areas is a minimum payment. In some locales, you are guaranteed a minimum hourly rate, while other places guarantee a minimum per-delivery payment.

Learn more: Doordash

13 - Postmates

Postmates is another food delivery service that lets you drive for them. Very similar to other services and available in certain locations, drivers report earning between $8 up to $13 per hour. Your mileage may vary (literally and figuratively)

Learn more: Postmates.

14 - Saucey

This is what many party people have been waiting for. Saucey specializes in delivering beer, wine, spirits and the snacks that go with that. Ideal for people that want to have alcoholic beverages delivered to their doorstep. As a driver, this can make you a good amount of money, but reports are mixed. It seems that you could make at least $10 per hour and maybe more, depending on tips and the popularity of the app in your area.

Learn more: Saucey

15 - OrderUp by Groupon

OrderUp was acquired by Groupon about three years ago. Specifically focused on food, OrderUp strives to create a vibrant community of passionate drivers to deliver food to hungry folks. Also known as Groupon to Go, they're quickly expanding and currently serve just over 55 different areas. It wasn't very obvious how much drivers can make by delivering for OrderUp.

Learn more: OrderUp

16 - Caviar

Caviar prides itself in having the other restaurants in their offerings. The ones that usually can't be found on Postmates or GrubHub, the high end restaurants. This is a little bit different in that you can make about $25.00 per hour, and you get paid instantly after each delivery is completed via the Cash app. Areas of service are still limited so you may not have this available, but it is still worth checking.

Learn more: Caviar

Delivering Stuff

17 - Amazon Flex

Amazon Flex is where you can join to deliver packages for Amazon customers. Amazon advertises an hourly rate of $18.00 to $25.00 per hour. Seems pretty straightforward and you can sign up now.

Learn more: Amazon Flex.

18 - Roadie

Roadie is really cool, lets everyone play a legal version of The Transporter. As a driver, you get to chose which gig you want to accept. The gigs are one-way deliveries of random items.

For the consumer, this is ideal when you want to send something across town or across the country. For you as a driver, you can offer your empty space if you have long commutes or plan on taking trips where you have additional cargo space. Some of the more common items you may be transporting include art, construction equipment, furniture, bikes, that sort of stuff.

They have a pretty good app indicating how it works and what's allowed. They report that local gigs pay up to $60 and long-haul gigs pay up to $650. Ideal if you have a truck for example and make regular trips between California and Arizona, or Nevada and same for any other state group of states.

Learn more: Roadie

19 - Deliv

This is a delivery service for businesses. You designate when you're available and you'll be making deliveries for customer orders from places like Best Buy, Macy's, Walmart, and other big retailers as well as other stores. One benefit is that you don't have to deal with people, or food orders, you don't have to run errands either. Just spend your time delivering boxes. Deliv claims you can make up to $22/hour.

Learn more: Deliv

20 - Burro

Burro lets you use your truck to complete deliveries. You help people haul and move stuff and can make a minimum of $40 per delivery while some people making up to $1600 per week. If you don't own a truck, you can sign up as a helper too.

When I checked out the app, it seemed a bit overcomplicated to sign up. You first have to get a "driver token" and you do that by emailing them. Seems like a big obstacle to sign up or use the app, but if you're in an area where it gets popular, you could make a good amount of money.

Learn more: Burro

21 - CitizenShipper

Similar to Roadie, this service lets people post a job and allow various drivers to bid for the job. When I was browsing around I found most of the shipments are across several states and the bids can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. It seems like a great way to make money if you already drive a lot across states and want to make some extra money by taking small detours.

The jobs appear to be scheduled a few days up to a few weeks in advance so you have time to bid for jobs and maybe negotiate the deal. A lot of people seem to use this service to send their pets across the country when they're moving. Your pay may vary from gig to gig, depending on the distance and the type of cargo.

Learn more: CitizenShipper

22 - Instacart

One of the more popular grocery shopping apps. You can join and shop and deliver groceries for people that need help with that. You get paid weekly and normally make from $10 to over $20 per hour depending on times and the area where you live.

Learn more: Instacart

23 - Favor

Limited to various areas and cities in Texas, this service matches you with people that need errands run basically. Pick up groceries, pick up dry cleaning, much like the other delivery services but almost anything goes. It would be killer if it were available outside of Texas too.

Learn more: Favor

24 - Shipt

Shipt is a grocery delivery service. They partner up with big name brands like Target, Meijer, Western Market and H-E-B. You can become a delivery person for them and earn around $22 per hour. While they're in limited areas at the moment, they are expanding every week so they may have a service area close to you soon if they don't already.

Learn more: Shipt

25 - GO Share

This is the solution for people that need quick hauls the same day. Think about that time you bought something at IKEA but couldn't take it home and the IKEA delivery service would take 4 or 5 days to schedule your delivery. GO Share can get your stuff delivered within one hour, or so they claim. As a driver you can make between $47 to $71 per hour plus tips. The service is available in 12 major cities in the US so check it out and see if you can make some extra money with them.

Learn more: GO Share

26 - Burpy

Groceries ordered and delivered in as little time as one hour. You can join Burpy to become a shopper for select stores, mostly in Texas. You'll be delivering from stores like H-E-B, Wholefoods, Costco, Kroger and more. The reach of this app seems to be limited to Texas and I can't find any indication that they're working on expanding but you never know. For the time being, if you're in the great big state then check it out and make some extra money!

Learn more: Burpy

Sharing economy

This is the section where you have something others are willing to rent or lease from you. This provides you as the owner with a new form of income and provides the marketplace with a unique experience or something that wasn't available for consumers at all.

If I think about the longevity of this newer economic model, in human years, I think that the "sharing economy" or "gig economy" as it's often referred to is but a few days old. Great time to get started!

27 - Wrapify

This one is interesting. The way Wrapify works is that you sign up and activate the app and allow it to track your driving behavior for about 50 miles. After that, your app will alert you if there are any advertising gigs for you. Then you go to a location to get your vehicle "wrapped" with the advertising campaign and you'll get paid for driving with your car wrapped up in an ad.

It's a clever way of using your car to promote a product or service and I suppose that the more you drive on busy highways and during rush hour, the more you can make. They estimate on their website that you can make between $262 to $452 per month.

This is really good if you combine it with another driving service so that you can make double the money, you could get paid while you deliver someone AND by advertising at the same time. You can see some examples here.

Learn more: Wrapify

28 - Carvertise

Similar in process to Wrapify, this pays between $100 to $200 per month for wrapping your car and between $300 to $1200 per campaign. You need to drive at least 30 miles each day and have a vehicle newer than 2008.

You can make additional money by parking your vehicle in strategic locations; this pays up to $30 per hour.

Learn more: Carvertise

29 - Hipcamp

Hipcamp is the only app in this list for which I've written a dedicated post. Hipcamp allows landowners to let people camp out in their property. As a property owner, you get to keep 90% of your bookings. It's up to you how you want to offer your land.

This is their commercial, I love it.

Maybe you want to let people rough it in your undeveloped land and pitch a tent, or you could develop it with amenities to attract the people that are into glamping. You could for example, turn a working farm into an attraction with a camping site, other types of outdoor locations could offer different opportunities to visitors.

The website reports that some property owners are making over six figures each year from renting their spaces out to travelers.

Learn more: Hipcamp

30 - GlampingHub

This is similar to Hipcamp but it includes international locations and the locations fetch much higher prices on average. They boast over 34,000 locations and include some places in Asia, New Zealand, Africa, South America in addition to locations in the USA.

It appears that they're a little more selective but if you have a good location that would attract tourists looking for an experience closer to nature than a hotel can offer, this may be the way to monetize your property.

Learn more: Glamping Hub

31 - BabyQuip

Previously known as Babierge, this is a great service for parents and a good way to make extra money with your unused kids' equipment. They focus on toys, strollers, high-chairs, and other types of kids items that traveling parents would want to use but don't want to necessarily pack and bring along in their trip.

The way you can make money with this is by making your unused children equipment available for travelers.

Items rent out in the range of $8 to $40 or more per day. Their website shows that you get to keep 80% of the fees and 100% of the delivery fees.

Learn more: Babyquip

32 - Turo

Turo is a peer to peer rental car system. You can make money by listing your car as a rental. Turo, in their own words: Skip the rental counter and book unforgettable cars from friendly locals.

For consumers, it sounds like a great offering to eliminate the boring options you get with traditional car rental agencies. As a car owner, you are paid on a percentage basis when your car gets rented out.

For example, if your car is worth $12,000 and you're willing to rent it out for 10 days out of the month, you could make around $3200 per year. You're not going to spend a week in the Bahamas with that money, but it could pay for all your vehicle expenses for the year and leave you a little bit of pocket change. If you increase the car value to say, $35,000 then you could make around $6300 per year.

This seems to be one of the most passive options if you don't use your car frequently or have a second or third car mostly just sitting around.

Learn more: Turo

33 - GetAround

Similar to Turo, but it aims to let you rent a more "regular" car. GetAround claims you can earn upwards of $800 per month which isn't bad if you have your car sitting around a lot of the time.

Worth checking out. It appears that they are rolling out the service in select areas. GetAround is currently available in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Portland, Chicago, Washington DC, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston! But they promise to have more locations soon.

Learn More: GetAround

34 - Outdoorsy

Outdoorsy is like Hipcamp but for RVs. If you ever wanted to go camping in an RV, this is the place where you would look for one.

But as an RV owner, you can make in the range of $900 to $1800 in average, each time your RV is rented out. That's really cool since you wouldn't be using your RV most of the time anyway.

Learn more: Outdoorsy

35 - RVshare

Similar to other services listed here, this lets you rent your RV out to people. They provide RV insurance, roadside assistance, and all the payment processing.

Their website shows that you can make in the range of $5000 to $30,000 per year with your RV. Another way you can make money with RVshare is by promoting them on your website using their affiliate program.

Learn more: RVshare

36 - Rover

Rover is for dog lovers. You can make money by becoming a sitter. You can walk dogs, or dogsit them for the day or several days. It's up to you. There are other services you can provide, like house sitting or drop-in visits.

Although Rover recommends the rates for you, you can modify them to whatever you want and you keep 80% of the bookings. Not a bad deal, especially if you make this a full-time gig or part of an established pet caring service.

Learn more: Rover

Honorable mentions:

EatStreet.

A delivery service that is expanding quickly, but it wasn't listed because the only way to work for them at this time is to become a regular employee. This blog isn't about that regular job thing so it didn't make the cut, but you're free to check it out if you want a regular job: https://eatstreet.com/

PeerShip.

Seems like a promising idea. You deliver packages "on your way" no need for pickups and deliveries, no need for shopping and dealing with people. This one didn't make the list because their literature is out of date and seems to have no activity in their social streams since 2016. I'm guessing it was a good idea, poorly implemented. https://drivers.peership.io/

Landapart

Landapart is for hardcore outdoor enthusiasts as it focuses on "primitive camping" guests are expected to leave no trace so it's akin to camping in total wilderness. The reason it didn't make the main list is that their system is rudimentary, they don't offer insurance or anything like the other services listed do. I'm not entirely sure what they are other than a directory and messaging system, their listings are limited and their copyright notice hasn't been updated since 2016 so I'm not sure if they're even active. https://www.landapart.com/

Doorman

Another deliver-anything service where you pick your hours and you deliver packages. One feature for customers was that you could use Doorman addresses as delivery addresses and then have a delivery person bring the package to you wherever you were.

However, it seems that this service is no longer active, browsing around their site you'll notice the application forms don't work. There's also this article by TechCrunch from almost 2 years ago.

Learn more: Doorman (appears to be defunct).

In Conclusion

This is a very long list, and while it may seem that many of the methods listed are the same thing, just for different types of products, each one has its own unique features and income possibilities.

I hope that it was useful, if so, please share this out on Facebook, Twitter, even Pinterest or Reddit if you're active there. I would appreciate it tremendously.

I still favor the ways to make money online vs offline. These require no physical presence from you. Not only can I work from any location with Internet access, but I don't even have to dress up or anything like that. I can work any time I want, and making money is limited by my own efforts instead of an arbitrary salary set by my boss. The True Dot Com Lifestyle!

Investment in an online business can be very low and the profits can be huge. Web Hosting can be under $70 for the year, your email list can be started for free, and you can work as hard as you want.

But I know that breaking away from your regular 9-5 job can be difficult and unnerving so a lot of the "gig" jobs listed here can help you make that transition or simply just add another income stream to your bottom line. The possibilities are endless!

The post 36 Ways to Make Money Online and Offline appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you measure then you can make smart decisions based on the data instead of just a feeling.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with gut-feelings but if you're trying to improve your productivity and use your time better, you must measure it and find where you're using your time poorly.

It's like anything else, let me give you a couple examples.

A Food Example

For example, if you're trying to eat better and exercise more, you should track your food intake so that you know how many calories you're taking in, and you should track your physical activity to estimate how many calories you've burned.

If you don't measure your food intake with an app like My Fitness Pal, it's easy to dismiss a quick snack as being suitable for your diet because it was just a "quick bite" but you don't realize that a quick snack can be up to a quarter of your total daily calorie allowance.

A Website Example

If you want to improve traffic on your website, you should track it with a traffic analytics software like Google Analytics.

Using analytics to review your traffic will show you what are your most trafficked pages, it may also show you where people tend to abandon your website and other things that will let you find where you can make improvements to your website.

But what about your time?

But how about your time? Can you track your time and find out when you're using it poorly?

Why, yes you can!

The other day I was asking about your time and productivity, I asked: Are You in Control of Your Time and Productivity? and the post was about how to track your time spent and increase productivity.

So I wanted to highlight another feature of Time Doctor which I talked about in that blog post. The feature I'm going to show you today is pretty straightforward.

It helps you find out if you could manage your time better by guessing that you spent too much time on a time-wasting website. Like Facebook, Youtube, and others.

By the way, you can check out TimeDoctor here. It may be one of the best apps you get to use this year.

Take a look at this screenshot:

But Facebook is Business too!

Now, I happen to run part of my business from Facebook so time on Facebook may very well be business time for me.

But this was flagged as potential poor time use because I wasn't tracking any other time in Time Doctor so it assumed I was just wasting time.

Most employees and most people's work doesn't require that they check Facebook, Youtube, or other sites that could be a distraction. The exception, of course, granted for digital marketers, CEOs, and social media managers.

Identifying the potentially poor use of time can be useful if you have employees or virtual assistants whom you pay by the hour. You can determine when they're supposed to be working and all they have to do is check in and keep track of which tasks they're working on.

The desktop and mobile app make it so you or your employees can easily track their tasks and time no matter where they are.

In Conclusion

I already mentioned TimeDoctor before, I love it. This is another feature I love about the software. It tries to keep track of my productivity and reminds me if I've been spending time on websites that could be time wasters. See screenshot above for an example of a report of possible time spent poorly.

I use it for myself, and you should too. But if I had virtual assistants or employees, I would use Time Doctor as my timesheet software for the entire team. I love this feature and the screenshot feature --which I'll cover in another blog post.

If you want to check out Time Doctor, visit here to start a free trial. I really recommend it and can't speak more highly of it.

The post Are You Using Your Time Poorly? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Who's Stephan Spencer?

Stephan is an SEO authority expert, author, speaker and consultant helping some of the most prominent companies in the world.

Stephan is the author of The Art of SEO and he's one of the foremost experts in the field of search engine optimization. Stephan is also the host of two popular podcasts. The Optimized Geek and Marketing Speak. I'll tell you a little bit more about each podcast next, and you can find out everything else you need to know about Stephan at his website, stephanspencer.com

The Optimized Geek

I listened to a few episodes of The Optimized Geek when he first told me about the podcast, but it wasn't until recently that I started listening to every episode.

The Optimized geek talks about "life-hacks" for lack of a better term. Stephan interviews interesting people that have achieved high-level accomplishments and amazing personal transformations.

The podcast is about biohacking, personal transformations, I would say they're about self-optimization (is that even a real term?). Its official tagline is: Reboot and Improve your Life.

Stephan went through his own amazing transformation. If you knew him 6 years ago, you wouldn't recognize him today. I was flabbergasted when he first showed me and told me about his transformation.

I'd recommend it to anybody looking to learn how to master your body, your life, and relationships.

Marketing Speak

The other podcast, Marketing Speak is also a high-value podcast covering monologues and interviews with field and industry experts. I don't recommend it to everyone because it isn't for everybody.

If you're an entrepreneur, marketing geek like me, blogger, vlogger or business owner, then this is a must podcast to add to your subscriptions.

Both podcasts are available everywhere it matters: iTunes, Google Play, Sticher and probably other podcasting apps

So what did I ask Stephan Spencer During the Interview?

Our interview was about voice search and how it's changing the landscape of SEO.
⠀
Imagine that in the future, actually... right now, Google will not be showing you 10 blue links to pick one you like. Instead, it will be reading the summary of the top one result.

I say reading it because we have a boom in virtual assistants being deployed in our homes. Google Home, Alexa, Cortana and others are listening to your commands and queries triggered by your voice commands.

Most of these devices take the top-most result on a search query and read it out loud. This is the featured snippet of search engines. You might have noticed these the last time you did a search online.
⠀
Those little summaries in the search engines are called featured snippets and Stephan tells us the steps we can take to take advantage of those results so that our websites provide those results.

via GIPHY

If you can answer a question on your website, and your answer shows up on that spot, then Google Assistant in Google Home, Alexa, Siri, Cortana and other "smart" assistants will use your answer to give people searching with their voice.

The tricky part is making your blog or website the one that provides that answer. The interview is short, but packed with useful and actionable information to help you rank for featured snippets and start integrating voice search results as part of your overall SEO strategy.

The post How To Rank For Featured Snippets appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I much prefer Affiliate Summit West, but East is really cool too. This year there are two new editions of the beloved event, one in Asia, and one in Europe. Affiliate Summit Europe takes place about a month after Affiliate Summit East, and Affiliate Summit APAC is taking place on October in Singapore.

I'll tell you more about both events in posts coming up, but I wanted to share this video talking about why I love going to Affiliate Summit, especially in Las Vegas.

Check out Affiliate Summit here.

The post Why I Love Affiliate Summit appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I'd venture to guess that he was like the average 20-year-old kid. Enjoying life, coming to terms with the realities of becoming an adult and just trying to figure out life. One day as he was enjoying spring break in Florida he received a message.

The message was an invitation to make a radical change in his life. This invitation went out to thousands of people, I'm pretty sure it was actually tens of thousands of people. It was a radical proposition. At the time I saw the invitation as well and I felt like I should have responded. But having two kids and a wife and a mortgage made me doubt the ability to follow through with that response.

I thought I would sleep on it for a couple days and talk it over with my wife.

Empty Pockets photo cover credit by Richie Diesterheft licensed under CC.

But in just a couple days, a second announcement came out saying that the invitation was now closed as they had received enough interest and they were certain that one of the applicants would fit the job.

I chucked it off to bad timing and moved on. But I kept an eye on the development of this opportunity.

A few months later, that's when I heard about Steve for the first time. Steve was the person that responded to the opportunity and was granted the chance to take it. His commitment, or his quick response or the fact that he didn't have a lot of commitments helped him win over hundreds of applicants.

Steve literally dropped everything to take a chance. With a few bucks to his name, Steve left school, he left so fast, he left laundry in the washing machine and took a flight on a one-way ticket to South East Asia. His future was uncertain, but he held onto the idea that this would work.

He went to work on his business, learning everything he could and soon began to make money. And yes, I get it, it's easy for a student to drop everything and travel half way around the world. He didn't have a care in the world, right? No mortgage, like you or me. No kids. No real commitments.

And so he continued working and working and then he began teaching others how to make several thousand dollars per day. This is when things got real.

But is it really as easy as it sounds? I don't think so. The part that matters is that he made it work, he followed directions, he learned, he applied his lessons and started making money. I remember him posting just earlier this year about how he was going to break the $200,000 mark in just one month.

The craziest part is that he went from poor student to millionaire in just about two years. I can write another 2 thousand words telling you how he did it, but it comes down to this: commitment, faith, and a following a system.

He had the commitment to succeed and he knew what he was doing at the time wasn't going to get him the financial freedom he desired. Faith because he had to trust the opportunity and he showed his belief by dropping everything and taking a chance. And finally, the system is what helped him achieve such success in a short amount of time.

I could tell you about the things he did to achieve a million dollars, I can explain how it all works. In fact, I've been telling you about this for years now, here on the blog, and in my emails. But I rather you hear it directly from him, if a picture is worth 1000 words, then a video must be worth a million.

There is no secret, it's affiliate marketing.

This is high-level, hight-ticket affiliate marketing and it's purposeful, driven and highly profitable. Unlike the average affiliate or blogger, this system provides you with the marketing, the products and the fulfillment that you need to make high-level commissions. If you're a beginner, or you're looking to start making money online then you should check out Steve's story right here.

Steve put together a guide that will help rookies start making money. Watch his video and take a chance, who knows where you could be in 6, or 12 months from now. Steve started without knowing anything about affiliate marketing, internet marketing and by his own admission he wasn't really tech savvy even though he's a young guy.

Here's a short excerpt in his own words:

In the first 210 days of 2017, I made over $1,000,000.

That breaks down to about $4,761 per day, $198 per hour (every hour, even while I sleep), $3.30 per minute…
27 months ago when I first started this journey I could have never imagined it taking off this fast. It feels like I started yesterday…

At first, I did this as a matter of necessity. I needed the money – to pay student loans, to help my family, to escape my credit card debt. I was in a deep deep hole and I needed to climb back out.

I used to make $198 in 4 DAYS! ($7 minimum wage x 8 hours = $56 a shift working a regular job). Now as each hour passes, my bank account grows by that amount regardless of what I’m doing.

It’s honestly mind blowing.

Once I made my first $1k, $10k, $20k it became less out of necessity and more of a game for me.

“How can I make more money this week? This month?”

And

“How can I help others do the same?”

Continue the story here...

The post Struggling to Make a Profit as a Beginner appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

My grandma taught me to make my bed as a boy, she taught me to completely undo the bed, leaving only the box sheet in place. The one with the elastic. Then smack the bed with the pillow or the flat sheet a few times to clear any crumbs or dust or whatever might have fallen into it.

After that, I was to put the flat sheet back on, tuck the footer part under the mattress, fold and tuck the corners, then stretch it to the top, fold it down just enough so the pillows sit on the box sheet, then finish tucking the sides.

If it was winter, we would use a blanket as well. Then we'd top it off with the bed cover or duvet, finishing up with the same motions as the sheet without tucking in the bottom or sides, resting the pillows just a few inches over that top fold and then covering the pillows with the remainder bed cover.

She said this is how they do it in hotels and hospitals, "it's the right way." I never questioned that part, but it doesn't have any bearing on this story anyway, although I can confirm that the best hotels do this.

Another thing I didn't understand until well into my 20s was why do I have to make my bed? I'm going to undo it all again tonight. It seemed like a waste of time.

In my mind, it would be easy to just toss the sheets up haphazardly and cover it all with the bed covering; that takes 20 seconds. making the bed properly might take 2 minutes.

As a young boy and even a teenager, I had things to do, places to be, people to see, 2 minutes seemed like an eternity.

Eventually, I came around to the idea that making your bed was "just a good habit."

By the way, YOU should make your bed every morning.

So what bearing does this have on your success? How will this help you? Why should you make your bed?

You know I'm right about the part where I say that sooner than later, you'll be back in bed to undo it. You may even live by that idea right now. Like me, you may think it is a waste of time to make your bed every morning.

But here is the thing. Just like I told my student from the previous blog post, that her canceling of the TV cable subscription wasn't going to help with her unrelenting debt, making your bed isn't going to magically bring you more business.

That is, unless of course your business is conducted in bed which is a topic that doesn't really fit in this site, but I digress.

The real reason to make your bed every morning is small wins, low hanging fruit. Making your bed every morning helps with discipline, helps you start a routine, and gives you a small win. A small sense of accomplishment, it builds momentum to take on bigger and more crucial tasks.

What's next? Make that dreaded phone call, write your daily email for your readers, publish something on your blog. More wins.It's like starting your day off on the right foot.

If you start off your day without making your bed, you're starting off with a sloppy day, maybe even lazy and it can easily permeate to other parts of your day.

Another benefit is that even if you have a crappy day, at the end of the day, you'll have a nice bed to come back to.

If you think I'm crazy, watch this video which inspired this blog post. It's a video of Admiral William H. McRaven giving a commencement speech.

If you want to watch the full speech, it's here:

Want to have another small win? How about you start something that can change your future, today. Learn how to do internet marketing in 21 steps and take a small win today.

The post If You Want to Win, Make Your Bed appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

When this happens to your business you should be considering an expansion in the form of outsourcing the marketing work. Not only will this free up your time to do the important things you should be doing, it will also allow your business to grow in a timely manner without stunting or stopping it.

Here are proven steps to outsourcing all of your marketing work and making sure you have a reliable team you can count on when you do it.

#1 - Understand What Needs To Be Outsourced

When the rubber meets the road, there are certain tasks you should be doing yourself and tasks you should be allowing other people to complete for you. When you finally get to the point where you seem to be out of time during the day you should consider the responsibilities your business can outsource.

First of all, you need to realize which marketing tasks need to be done on a daily basis. Here are a few ideas you can use because when it comes down to it, your company should always have these things running in the background:

• Search engine optimization
• Social media consistency
  • Posting
  • Communicating
  • Sharing
• Relationship building
• Sales funnel creations
• Content marketing
  • Article writing
  • Email sequences/email blasts

These are just a few ideas your business should always have running in order to succeed over time. While you may enjoy doing some or all of these tasks, when your company grows, you should consider stepping away from these responsibilities and handing them over to a team of people you can trust.

#2 - Know What You Want

Once you have determined what you’re willing to outsource, the challenge begins to start looking for a responsible person to meet these specific needs for your business.

As an entrepreneur, you want people in your corner with whom you can put your trust in. People who are just as driven and motivated as you are.

So how do you find those people?

You find them by understanding what you really want for your company. If you’re looking for someone to do content writing for your brand, make sure the person has the right qualifications and work samples before you allow them a voice in your business.

Here are some tips for finding those people...

Have A Clear & Defined Role

When you’re looking for the perfect person to outsource a job to, you want to make sure you clearly define the role you want them to fill.

Create your opening and be as specific as possible. Outline what your goals are for them and where you would like to see this certain job going in the next 6 months. Have a vision you can share and make sure you give them as much information as possible about the role.

Invite Specific People To Apply For Your Job

One of the many mistakes people make when outsourcing is to blast a job opportunity into the WWW and hope for the best.

When it comes to your business, you don’t want every Tom, Dick, and Harry applying for the position just because it’s there.

Get out there and do your homework!

Do you have a favorite blog you like to read? If so, take a look at some of the guest posts on the blog. Who wrote the ones that stood out to you? This is just one way that how you can find specific people to offer your position to.

Once you find the right person, contact them and let them know about the position you would like them to fill. Also, let them know they are one of only three or four people you have invited to apply. This will make your business stand out and also make them feel needed and important in your company.

Refer to the Experts

When you are feeling the need to outsource some of your work, you will probably not have a lot of time to go digging around in a bunch of resumes. This is where the experts come in. There are a lot of hiring platforms out there where you can find experts in your area, or outsource to a remote team. You can browse portfolios online and invite interesting candidates to interview. If you want to skip that stage as well, you can try FreeeUp. This platform is unique in that it is designed to take care of the entire process so that all you do is sign up, fill up a worker request, and wait to be introduced to your match.

Freelancing is a good way to go if you are looking to build up at a manageable pace. It allows you to hire on a project basis or for just a few hours a day or week to start. Many skilled workers also prefer to freelance these days, so the right person for the job is probably not your typical office type. Finally, freelancing allows you to search a wider, global pool of talent instead of just your local area.

Don’t Just Hire Cheap For The Sake Of Cheap

You’ve heard the old saying, “You get what you pay for”. That is so true. If you cannot afford to pay someone what they’re worth, it will hurt both of you. Furthermore, if you hire someone whose rate is lower than average, this should raise a red flag for you about the quality of their work.

Cheap work is just that. While you may be able to find someone who is cheap and writes amazingly well, it’s not going to happen all the time. Remember, someone who has experience and reliability in their field understands the work responsibilities and has honed their craft, so expect to pay for their experience and expertise. It’s worth it.

Ask Screening Questions

Another great way to understand if the person in question is perfect for outsourcing a specific task to, create screening questions to run interference on the people who are just trying to take your money.

You can do this a couple of ways, and it doesn’t really matter how you do it, but I recommend setting up a questionnaire on Google Forms. This way you can always have it handy when you find someone out of the blue and you can send them the link to the questionnaire.

Screening questions will allow you to learn a little more about them and help you determine whether or not you want to take them to the next step in the outsourcing process.

Conclusion

I understand you may feel like the Lone Ranger. You’re powerful, smart, and motivated. However, your business WILL begin to grow after a while and you need to understand you cannot be the Lone Ranger forever. You should make room for a team which will help you grow in the long run.

Having a team will allow each person to devote their time and talent to the tasks that they are best suited for, which allows you to focus on the bigger picture of growing your company. Don’t be nervous about adding people to your team. When you use these tips to your advantage you will begin to see how much a team can really help.

The post Proven Steps to Outsource Marketing Work to a Reliable Team appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I know I said that I'm going into this challenge by myself. I didn't announce it to my groups, as of the writing of this blog post I haven't even told my VIP group about it. I'll be emailing them about it soon.

But that doesn't mean that you just get to sit back and watch and read only. I would like you to get something out of this challenge too, a large percentage of the videos and content I'll produce over the next 99 days will be to teach you and share with you tips, tricks, methods and techniques to help you make money.

So while I'm doing this challenge by myself, you have to do something for me, well, for you really. All I ask for now, is that you subscribe to my YouTube channel and to my VIP email list. This will help you not miss anything and also make sure that you get all of the tutorials, or discounts or insights that will make you more money, save you money or help you start a business.

If you have any questions you want me to answer in an upcoming blog post or video, please send them to me. To send me your questions, join the email list and reply to one of my emails and let me know you'd like me to answer a question.

By the way, did you notice my new introduction in the video? I just made that. I'd love to get your feedback on that as well.

The post Your Turn to do Something 100 Day Challenge, Day 2 appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I know I'm a salesman, everyone else is a salesperson too, some of you just don't know it, so this post should be helpful to you as well.

So I've been studying some sales techniques and methods. Today I'm breaking down a video I found that was extremely helpful and I think it might be useful for you if you want to improve your sales at skills.

See, selling is just about overcoming objections to convince the prospect that what you have is valuable and useful for them, today. Not tomorrow, not after they talk to their partner, not after they think about it, today. Now.

The first thing is to be sure and make sure that your product or service is, in fact, valuable and useful. Without that, even if you can convince someone to buy something, your results in the long term will be lackluster.

If you don't believe in your product or service, your prospect will feel it, and even if you sell it, you will have trouble sleeping at night, so don't do it. But if you know in your heart that the product is good, the service is good then the sale needs to happen.

Closing the Sale: 9 Common Objections by Brian Tracy

This video covers nine common sales objections. I've been studying this video and a few others on the same topic. I'll probably share those with you soon as well.

This video is by Brian Tracy. If you have never heard of him, you should learn a little bit more about him.

Before you watch this, and as you go through your own journey on learning to be a better closer, remember one of Brian's quotes:

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, 'What's in it for me?' - Brian Tracy

This reiterates what I mentioned above about making sure the product or service you are offering is going to help your customer. On with the video, a few notes after the video below.

The nine common objections and how to recognize them and deal with them effectively are listed below with timestamps.

1. The unspoken sales objection  (0:24)
2. The excuses and impulse sales objection (1:03)
3. The malicious sales objection (2:00)
4. The request for more information sales objection (2:47)
5. The show-off sales objection (3:11)
6. The personal sales objection (3:54)
7. The factual sales objection (4:26)
8. The general resistance sale objection (4:58)
9. The last ditch sales objection (5:50)

The video is short and sweet and I wish it had some more guidance about the specific situations, but it's a great start. My main question is whether these objections have a relationship to each other, specifically I wonder if they come in a particular order.

Do you agree that these are the most common objections? How would you handle them differently?

The post How To Close the Sale: 9 Common Objections appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

There are so many issues with blogging, and you really don't need to add yet another problem to your blogging process. comparing yourself to others is going to do one of two things for you.

First, it will give you a false sense of achievement and security; it will boost your ego. If you compare yourself to someone that hasn't achieved what you have achieved, you will feel good. You'll feel good temporarily. But this satisfaction is empty, it will last very little and then you'll be on your way to find someone else you consider "less than you." Needless to say, this isn't good for you.

The second thing that comparing yourself to others will do is get you down. If you compare yourself to someone else that seems to be ahead of you the opposite will happen. You will feel like you're not good enough, you will feel that you can't do this and you are a failure. You may even feel like you need to quit and go back to something else you are good at.

The thing that both of these scenarios have in common is that both are temporary and under your control. You don't need to compare yourself to others and go into this dark hole of self-deprecation or false edification.

Instead, spend the time working on your craft. Revisit your "Why?", revisit your purpose and focus on your goals. This is the most important part of the video. Your why is important and I also talk about how to deal with haters.

photo cover credit: ericaxel. 

The post Why You Shouldn’t Compare Yourself to Others appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

On this day (May 20) pretend to be a millionaire or start working on your plans that you think will make you a millionaire.

Word on the street is that everybody would like to be a millionaire. That means you, right? And in jest, timeanddate.com suggests you should pretend to be a millionaire today, or start working on your plans to become one.

Let's not pretend

I want to talk about the second part of that. Being a millionaire can give you security. But it's difficult to make a million dollars, or so it seems. Here are some ideas:

Some people will tell you that all you have to do is visualize it, think about it, project it and it will become so. That's a bunch of baloney if you ask me.

Other people will tell you to invest in the stock market, or in options or commodities. I'd say that you have a chance of making a million dollars or more with that, but you have an equal or greater chance of going broke as well if you don't know what you're doing.

Maybe you want to find a new hot startup and invest some money into it, wait and hope that they become the next Uber, or Snapchat or Blue Apron; well, maybe not Uber right now, but you get the idea.

Instead of talking hypotheticals, I'm going to give you two practical ways of getting closer to being a millionaire, starting today.

Spend less than you make

Here's the first method to help you become a millionaire. It's not always about how much you make, but how much you get to keep so be thrifty and wise with your money. Will Rogers, the highest paid Hollywood actor of his time said this:

And it's true. The best way to accumulate wealth is to not spend your money. So next time you go out, next time you go shopping, next time you are browsing Amazon, remember this: spend less than you make.

If you're going to use credit cards, make sure you can pay the full amount all the time, so that if you're using a credit card, you're using it to accumulate rewards, get a better deal, or get some consumer protection. Do NOT use a credit card because you don't have cash in the bank.

From first-hand experience, I can tell you that using credit cards to purchase things for which you don't have the funds in the bank, is a recipe for disaster and financial enslavement.

Add multiple streams of income

The second way I'll suggest to becoming wealthy is to add another revenue stream. Most people make money from a single source; their job. You are probably in this group, and you may even have a good job that pays you well. You feel secure, don't you?

But the bottom line is that your job is the only source of income, if you become disabled, or if you get laid off, or if your employer goes out of business, you're shit out of luck. There goes your security!

Even with a job, you should have other streams of income. Not only will this help you generate money faster, but it will also give you real security and freedom. You'll feel less stressed, and you'll be happier overall.

Sell something online, start a blog, become a consultant, become a reseller, learn to invest, work on ways to get more money for the same amount of time and effort you spend every day!

Living proof

What I describe above is exactly how I work and live, my blog generates part of my income, I also consult and coach people on how to start businesses and how to improve their businesses.

The results are great because they allow me to spend time with my kids and wife and friends and still my blog makes money. I earn money while I'm at the park with my kids, out with my wife or having dinner with friends.

Sometimes one of my sources of income may dry up, as I talked about with Coco Jack, but I don't need to worry about it because I still make money with all the sources of income I have working for me.

You can see in the screenshot below, that I get paid various amounts from different sources, I also receive physical checks from a few companies, and as of the writing of this post, I am waiting for 3 checks adding another $1500 or so.

There are also about half a dozen other companies that owe me between 230 to 1000 for this month.

The post Be a Millionaire Day appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But I thought I'd give you a new list of programs that piqued my interest.

Before I jump into it, I should also point out another post that you probably want to check out if you're new to the whole idea of making money with your blog. It's a collection of Q&A related to monetizing a blog. There's also a video where I give you some tips I've picked up along the way.

Let's get started, shall we? Oh! One more thing, before we get going, if you don't mind giving this a quick share on Twitter, you can do it with te link below or the quotes sprinkled throughout the article.

Hiver

This is a new company in the helpdesk arena.  It is excellent for businesses because it integrates with Gmail and Google apps and instantly activates a help desk system that can be shared across the support team so that every customer interaction can be managed, assigned, shared, tagged and resolved directly from the inboxes of support personnel. This is a terrific opportunity for blogs that provide business advice, technology reviews, software as a service blogs and other related niches. Payouts are great at $200 to $400 per sign up. Sign up here.

Pure Paw Nutrition

As the pet care market grows, any blog with a pet-centric audience should take a look at these guys. I was impressed by their website which is vibrant attractive, their product seems great too. But what caught my attention is the smart use of an LTO (limited time offer). This should help with conversions significantly so if you have a dog training blog, pet related blog or anything to do with dogs, you should take a look at this affiliate program. Their cookie last 30 days and they pay 11% which is great for such a competitive space. Sign up here.

Zen and Soul

If you're into fitness, well-being, and specifically yoga, then this affiliate program is for you. They have everything you need for your yoga experience so if you have that type of audience, then this might be a great addition to your blog. The user experience on the site is good and the design is attractive so that should help with conversions if you have the target audience. Their cookie will remain for 30 days and they pay out a 20% commission on every sale! You can sign up here.

Connex Digital Marketing

This caught my attention because it's one of the few companies I've seen offering this type of service and using affiliate marketing to promote it. This is ideal for any blog that provides online marketing information. What's more interesting is their pricing structure. They have a great price system that makes these services affordable. The payouts are a flat $100.00 per sale with a 30-day cookie which isn't' that great, but if you have enough traffic, you could make a few hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars each month just from this. Sign up here, and look for Connex Digital Marketing when you log in.

Skimlinks

Skimlinks has been around for quite a while but it's worth mentioning because it makes things easier for you to monetize your content by automatically changing links to be affiliate links. Another benefit of using Skimlinks is that you partner up with them and benefit from their volume rates. The biggest benefit by far is that you don't have to sign up for tons of different affiliate programs. Definitely worth checking out if you have a lot of content that you haven't monetized before, or if you've started a blog recently and want to save time and effort. Sign up here.

Linktrackr

Linktrackr is awesome. It's a private link shortener that works like Bit.ly but you can use your own domain (or pick from one that they offer). I use it for all the links you see that start with oglink.it. The reason this is a good program to promote is because they pay a decent commission and they offer a service every blogger needs. This would be ideal for a blog that talks about blogging, online marketing, social media, influencer marketing and similar topics. Pay ranges from 30% to 50%, the cookie lasts 30 days AND there is a 2-tier program. A 2-tier program means that you get paid an additional commission from the sales generated by anybody that you refer. Sign up here.

Creditsaint

This is a credit repair service that can fit into a financial blog, or lifestyle blog, maybe even a making money blog like mine. Their offering is to help customers fix bad credit and start building good credit and many people need this. They offer a solid $100.00 payout per sale and have a terrific 90-day cookie. Sign up here and search for Creditsaint under merchants.

CEFA

An excellent offer for any fitness-centric blog. This program is attractive for a couple reasons. Council of Exercise Fitness and Athletics offers CEFA certification for trainers and other fitness professionals. The reason it seems like a great program is because it has brand weight by being associated with some of the top fitness brands, like 24hourfitness, Equinox and others. For you as an affiliate, the payouts are awesome at 50% and the cookie lasts forever. That's awesome! Sign up here and search for CEFA

After thoughts and a couple words in closing

Some of you asked me if I gave you the proper link to some of the programs before, because you went to the Shareasale website and didn't find the program. I want to clarify that when I say "Sign up here" and then search for the name of the program, you need to be signed up and logged in with your username for the search to work. Signing up for Shareasale and most affiliate networks is free, just takes a couple of minutes.

The post 9 More Programs to Help You Monetize Your Blog appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

It makes me feel old, but also makes me want to stay current and pay attention to what the younger people are into --oh geez I sound old too!

photo by Joe The Goat Farmer via CC

In any case, I get a lot of good business insights from Adam Grandmaison's commentary and thoughts from his vlogs and podcasts. He's also a pretty good interviewer. One of the latest videos/podcasts I got a chance to listen to was the interview with Ryan Holiday.

Ryan Holiday is the author of a very popular book about marketing called: Trust me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. We have discussed this book in many groups I belong to and it's always an interesting talk.

It's very interesting to listen to Ryan talk about how the media finds, promotes and elevates certain stories. He shares some of his experience in writing other books, being super successful before 30, and also explains how his marketing agency works.

There are so many lessons to pick up from this for any online marketer. I recommend you watch the video, or at least put it on the background and listen to it.

I have to say that I'm not completely on board with his thoughts on working for free, but I do agree that creative types need to work for free until they don't have to. Pay attention to that part of the podcast.

As a side note, I recommend you check out the No Jumper Youtube channel (or podcast) for some interesting, raw and honest opinion on business, marketing, social media and pop culture.

Ryan Holiday has now published a few more books, in total he has published: Trust me I'm Lying, Growth Hacker Marketing, The Obstacle is The Way, The Daily Stoic and Ego is The Enemy.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I'd love to hear your feedback on the comments down below or on social media. If you think this would be useful to somebody else I'd greatly appreciate it if you could hit one of the social share buttons and pass it along for others to enjoy and learn from.

The post Thoughts on Marketing, Business and Success with Ryan Holiday appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I get a hundred new offers every week or more, most of them are boring, others don't pay enough, many of them are pure junk,  and the vast majority are outside of my niche.

I thought I might share some of the most interesting ones with you. These are also the offers that I would consider if I were in their niche. Without further ado, here are 9 new programs to help you make money as an affiliate.

925 Attire. (out of business)

From their own site: Attire 925 was created to bring business casual apparel and footwear to fashionable women of all sizes! The payout is pretty low at 5% and the cookie is only 30 days but the niche is interesting. This would work well for a fashion, or lifestyle blog. It appeals to working women, stay at home moms. Apply here.

The Ruggedbeard Company

This is the shop to get your beard all the TLC it deserves. The Rugged Beard Company provides oils, balms, and waxes for beards and mustaches to keep them healthy and looking their best. The cookie is a bit low at a 30-day retention, but for a physical product, commissions are at a solid 10%. This would work well for a male-centric lifestyle blog or a fashion blog. Apply here.

Cajun Crate

The subscription model is permeating all types of markets and food is one of them. The Cajun crate takes the monthly subscription model and spices it up with a cajun centric box of Louisiana cooking delights. The commission is quite low for a product like this and I really want to strangle the affiliate management team for not offering a recurring based commission, but they're set at 5% with a 30-day cookie. The audience is anybody that likes the convenience and surprise of these type of boxes and anybody looking for a unique gift. Would work great with a lifestyle blog or a foodie blog. Apply here.

Ocassioni Eleganti (out of business!)

This got my attention because it is a jewelry shop with unique and affordable designs, but their commission is very high for a physical product like this and their cookie is awesome. They make some really eye-catching jewelry that won't break the bank so it's perfect for a fashion blog, lifestyle blog, or other blogs with similar budget conscious but stylish driven audiences. Their payout is 15%, paired with a 120-day cookie! That's yummy! Apply here.

Breast Actives

This is interesting because the payout is big! The product is based on a do-it-yourself at home therapy program. It's essentially a breast enhancement program based on natural products. I can't say if it works or not because, well... I don't need the product; my man-boobs are big enough, thank you very much. But the results and testimonials look terrific. This would be great for a site centered around self-image, body image, self-confidence, body positivity, self-help, natural remedies and related topics. The payout is $44.00 per sale! Apply here, then look for offer number: 31681.

The Flavor Run

Perfect for fitness blogs! This is a program where you can promote these awesome 5K runs that are happening throughout the country. They're adding new locations each week and it would be a perfect fit for a fitness blog, running, lifestyle and even a local or events blog. The commissions are 10% and the cookie lasts for 30 days. Apply here, then search for The Flavor run.

Bunny Williams

This program is for blogs focusing on the sophisticated side of home and living. The products offered would fit into the home and garden category but after browsing some of their catalog, the pieces are fit for a museum or a model home. The commission is really competitive at a solid 15% commission but their cookie leaves a lot to be desired with a short 15-day lifespan. If you want to promote this, you better be good at closing the sale quickly. Apply here, then search for Bunny Williams.

The Nooky Box

This one is rated R or maybe even NR, but it's definitely NSFW. I told you that the box subscription business is thriving. This one is a box subscription service for your wilder side. Their tagline reads Yay Sex! So yeah, this is an adult subscription box service that sends you new toys, oils, and games to spice things up in the bedroom. The payout is great at 10% and they have a great long lasting 120-day cookie. Apply here, then search for The Nooky Box.

Patch Collection

Sports are always a good seller if you have the audience. As you gear up towards your favorite sport, your visitors will want to get patches for their favorite teams. But there's a twist, even if your blog isn't about sports, you can make money with Patch collection. They offer pop-culture related patches as well for things like DC Comics, Star Wars, Marvel and more. Commissions are 10% with a 30-day cookie. Apply here, then search for Patch Collection.

In conclusion.

That wraps up a round-up of 9 new and promising affiliate programs you can join today and start making money. I would love to hear back to know about your experiences with them and if you found this useful, I would appreciate it if you took a few seconds to share this post in social media using one of the buttons available or any of the tweetable quotes.

Money by Andrew  Magil via CC

The post 9 Programs to Help You Make Money with Your Blog appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Recently at Affiliate Summit West, during the Millionaire blogger panel, at least three of the four panelists talked about having a group of peers that hold each other accountable.

I decided to invite some of my close business friends to start a mastermind group. The benefits of the group are a mix of accountability, camaraderie, and mastermind objectives shared with like-minded individuals that are committed to their own success but also want to each other.

I'm taking tips and guidance from other people about how to run the group. I've been reading a lot of Pat Flynn's blog posts about his own masterminds, I've taken lessons from my friend Bob Watson and his super successful social media mastermind (SMMOC), I've also ran the Dot Com Lifestyle group and the Free Lunch Friday events.

I think the biggest challenge will be fine tuning this and finding out just how much I don't know yet about this. You would think that having so much experience teaching, running groups and attending groups I would know exactly how to do this but I'm smart enough to know that there's a whole lot that I don't know.

At first, I thought it would be good to make it a fully democratic endeavor and ask everybody for input before making decisions. That didn't work.

Everybody has an idea of how it should work and the input was so varied that I couldn't come up with a clear majority on anything, from topics to discuss, to schedule or even what type of medium we should use to meet and discuss things.

For any given issue I asked the members I had as many different responses as the number of members in the group.

I had to just step back for a little bit and take the reins. I hope that works out in the long term. The main goal is to help our businesses grow and to help each other with online marketing.

All the members are already good at what they do, some have physical businesses, some are in the service industry, some of us are bloggers, but our biggest common goal is growing our business.

I launched the group with a handful of friends and we meet using Slack to discuss issues, ask questions, and give each other tips and advice throughout the week. Once a week, we meet "face to face" using a Google Hangout.

I'm interested in sharing my experience about this mastermind group here in the blog, and perhaps invite you to join us. This has been something that I wanted to do for a couple years now, my friend Emily and I have talked about starting it as well, but the timing didn't feel right before.

I think that the right time is now, so without any more hesitation, I started it. I've had experiences with other masterminds and I can vouch for the positive outcome and the value I've derived from those groups.

I hope that I can replicate some of that in this mastermind and I want to provide value, support, and encouragement to all members while learning from them as well.

If you feel like you could be a part of this, let me know.

Also, I've just added my blog to Bloglovin' - Follow my blog with Bloglovin

The post Masterminds and Mentorship appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

The panel, from left to right on the photo:

• John Chow - Dot Com Mogul and blogger, Johnchow.com // Twitter
• John Rampton - Entrepreneur, blogger and connector. Founder of Due.com // Twitter
• Syed Balkhi - Award-winning entrepreneur with several 7-figure online businesses, blogs at SyedBalkhi.com // Twitter
• Zac Johnson - World renown blogger and entrepreneur, founder of Blogging.org // Twitter

The experts in the panel have remained the same for some time because these guys are the top bloggers in the industry and their blog's income range from 7 to 8 figures yearly.

As a side note, before I get on with the rest of the article, Affiliate Summit East tickets are now on sale and you should take advantage of the early bird pricing. Tickets usually sell out well before the event so if you're interested, make sure you get yours check here for more info.

How to Become a Millionaire Blogger.

This panel is also one of the highest rated sessions at Affiliate Summit, this year it was ranked as the number one session.

The recurring theme of this panel revolves around a discussion of the strategies and techniques these super bloggers use to achieve the massive success they enjoy now.

Specifically, I felt the tips were very practical and I want to focus on a few.

Everybody talked about quality over quantity

Blogging has evolved significantly in the past 10 to 15 years. You have to produce great content. It used to be that you could just post as much as possible and you would get people to your blog because the competition was low.

Now you need to produce content regularly and it needs to be high-quality content.

Zac Johnson doubled down on quality over quantity.

Zac doubled down on the point about quality over quantity. Forget about producing a lot of content, instead, write the best you can he said.

Zac also suggests that a way to increase quality when you're building your reputation growing is to gather information from other experts and create round-up blog posts.

Syed suggested analyzing your most successful posts.

One of the things that you can do to improve quality and maximize your efforts is to write a lot of content and then analyze it by looking at your statistics and see what is the most sought after content. Then, write more of that.

A great tip that Syed reminded us about was to use the advanced search feature in Twitter to find new ideas for content. Use the "questions" filter to narrow down to topics people are talking about in your niche, Syed suggested.

John Rampton talked about promoting.

All bloggers should know that just because you wrote it, doesn't mean people will find it. You have to spend time promoting and making sure your posts reach the intended audience.

My personal rule of thumb is to spend at least 10 - 12 hours of promotion for every 1 hour of creation. John made it a little more simple by suggesting you split your efforts to about 40/60 on creating and promoting. So spend 40% of your time creating content and 60% promoting it.

John Chow talked about leveraging your efforts across various platforms.

There's a trick that all bloggers should leverage and that is to reuse your content in different formats and mediums.

John suggested that a video can become a blog post, and a series of blog posts can become an eBook and you can turn that into an e-course and even a live workshop, thus maximizing the monetization potential for what amounts to virtually the same information.

How do you actually become a millionaire blogger?

First, start a blog about something you are knowledgable about. Follow the other advice I've given you about that, then I highly recommend you attend an upcoming Affiliate Summit and make it a point to attend the millionaire blogger session if you want to learn how to make money from blogging.

The post How to Become a Millionaire Blogger Session at Affiliate Summit appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I decided to share this here with you because there's a bit of a marketing lesson here. Sometimes success depends not just on the quality of the product but on the perception of it.

Some accounts say that Mondavi used the Fume blanc name instead of Sauvignon blanc because Sauvignon blanc had a muddied reputation. Other stories say that Fume blanc was created to reflect a variation of the traditional Sauvignon blanc wine.

Whether Rhonda in the video or the other versions of events is correct, the fact is that Fume blanc didn't exist before Mondavi decided to sell this wine. Fumé Blanc was just created to change the perception of an existing product to make more sales.

That's brilliant marketing!

The post Fume Blanc. A Story of Brilliant Marketing appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Her skills come from working with high-level CEO's and high-level executives as an administrative assistant. This is a highly desirable skill, but also a very competitive market. Traditionally, these jobs are reserved for candidates that can be physically available and by definition, they can be limiting.

But just like many other service based jobs, a lot of it can be done remotely and that's what I'm suggesting here. Here's how I would start a virtual assistant agency online.

My friend is based in the United States, but my answer and advice applies to anybody that wants to start a virtual service business. In her case, my suggestion was to start a virtual assistant business online. And I cover the basics in the video below.

Resources to get started

The total cost to start something like this should be well under $300.00. And you can count on spending between $500 to $1000 per year or less for basic operating expenses.

To start a website, you can get your web hosting from these guys: Inmotion Hosting. In fact, if you use that link, I will setup your website at no additional cost. I highly recommend them and endorse them, they host my blog and a few other blogs I run as well as many of my clients' websites.

But if you want to give it a try and DIY, you can just install WordPress from the control panel after you purchase your hosting account ($60). Remember that you get a domain for free also.

You can then add a WordPress theme that you like, I have a list of the ones I like the most, some of them are free themes, some of them are paid themes. Then customize the site so it is unique and attractive.

You could also have a logo designed inexpensively at Fiverr. Quick disclaimer, Fiverr can be a tricky space to find good service, but look for logo designers that have a lot of gigs completed and good ratings. Also expect to pay more like $45-$100 for a good logo. Definitely, do not go think that you can just use the $5.00 service, it will not be good.

You could also use a logo maker service for free, there are several online like this one called: logomakr, or freelogodesign.org, onlinefreelogo, or even Canva. Keep in mind, your mileage may vary with free services when creating a logo, because they largely depend on your creative eye and your ability to use the tools, but at least you can get something started quickly.

Remember: done is better than perfect. You can always come back and improve upon it once you launch and get your first couple clients.

To promote your new business, I recommend you establish a Facebook page, a Linkedin presence, and a Twitter account. Spend time developing each of the networks and grow them as much as possible for free. When you have enough content on your blog, you should do some targeted ad campaigns on Facebook and Linkedin.

I also strongly suggest you get an email service like Aweber (free trial), to help you create an autoresponder series and a newsletter that will keep your leads and prospects informed. Make sure you put a sign-up box on your blog & website to get people to join your email list.

A phone system may be necessary and you could look into Grasshopper, Skype or Google voice to take care of those needs on a budget.

Some of the other stuff I mentioned in the video include:

Woocommerce - Free plugin to handle orders and payment directly on your website.

Freshbooks will help you handle invoices, estimates and even time tracking for your staff. It provides you with amazing billing capabilities and lets your customers pay directly using bank transfer, a credit card or PayPal.

WP Forms is a plugin that can be used to create application forms for virtual assistants and prospects. As well as surveys, questionnaires and other data collection needs.

You can and should definitely establish an email address based on your business domain name, and I would recommend taking it a step further and having Google host that email address via their Google for business service.

To start and save some money, you could just use the built-in e-mail provided by Inmotion; this will match your domain name so you'll look more professional than if you use a "hotmail" or "gmail" address. You'll be able to check and send email with your favorite mail app such as Outlook, Apple mail, Thunderbird or the one that comes with your phone.

Whether you use a Google for business account to host your email or not, you will probably benefit from Google drive to handle documents and internal files that you can share with your virtual staff. So you can set that up and create a shared folder for your staff to get documents and other files.

There's something I wanted to point out about the video. The plugin to integrate WordPress with Freshbooks hasn't been updated for a while so it may or may not work. However, you can find other ways of integrating the two services and in doing some last minute research for this blog post I found that there is a Woocommerce addon to help with Freshbooks integration.

* Some of the links I use here are affiliate links. This means that not only will you help me keep the blog going and provide you with more information in the future but in some cases you actually get a better deal by using my link than you would otherwise. Under no circumstance will using my links cost you more than going directly to the vendor directly. I appreciate your support.

The post How to Start an Virtual Assistant Business Online appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I talk about my thoughts on the Superbowl here.

The mom and daughter approached us steadily with a pull-cart behind them. I quickly noticed that it was full of Girl Scout Cookie boxes. The girl was all dressed up in her uniform and she lead the charge as the mom-daughter team went door to door.

They went through four houses quickly before getting to us. I guess they got turned down on each house.

They made it to us and sheepishly both of them asked if we would buy some cookies. One of us said, "I already bought from 3 other girls" and the rest of us said "no thank you."

With their basket full of boxes, they moved on to the next house to face defeat once more.

That sparked the conversation amongst us if girl scouts are allowed to sell cookies online. Nobody knew definitively, and the conversation died there. I kept thinking that if my daughter was in the girl scouts, I'd help her sell online. A good online marketing strategy is sure to bring a boost of sales, right!?

But then I thought... if it were that easy, then everybody would be doing it. There has to be more to it and there has to be an easier way to get that sale.

In perfect timing, my buddy Jeremy from Shoemoney.com posted a sales technique that is sure to close more sales than ever.

This same method would work for so many other products and services and it reminds me of Zig Ziglar's approach. Sell without selling, make conversation and ask for the sale in a way that is almost impossible to refuse.

Jeremy, being one of the top online marketers shared this:

Feel free to share if you know someone selling girl Scout Cookies.

Taught my daughter this last year while she was working a booth for 4 hours at a hardware store. Just off the top of my head. This technique drastically increased sales.

At first, her friends and her were going up to people and saying "Would you like to buy some girl scout cookies?" course the natural reaction is "no". No.... such an easy out for a consumer.

Then I took them to school. I told them you have to sell without selling and never give them the chance to say "NO".

I told them to now approach people and ask them "What is your favorite girl scout cookie?" to which gave them no out but to name one. After all who the hell doesn't have a favorite?

After all who the hell doesn't have a favorite?

After they say their kind then, simply say "Oh how many boxes of those can I get for you?"
They now feel uncomfortable and the easy way out for them now went from "NO" to "I'll take 2".

You're welcome Girl Scouts.

And so you see, that's almost fail-proof method of making a sale. Ask an engaging question, LISTEN, then follow up with a closing pitch.

It would be hard to say no at this point and had the mom or daughter opened up their conversation to us with a question like that, I bet one of us probably would have bought one box.

Something to think about next time you need to make a sale.

The post How to Sell More Girl Scout Cookies appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

A sales funnel is in fact, a key element to making money on any business, not just online businesses. Marketing funnels have been around for centuries but they were very difficult to analyze before the Internet and all the access we have to analytics and statistics.

In online marketing, you can track all the steps of the funnel and really get detailed statistics on how the funnel is performing, allowing you to make adjustments quickly. I'll cover that in the future, but for now, I want to just explain what is a sales funnel.

I've noticed that many of my readers are totally new to online marketing so we're going to explain some basics now, today let's talk about sales funnel and answer the question:

What is a Sales Funnel?

The definition of a sales funnel, which can also be referred to as a revenue funnel or sales process, refers to the buying and selling process that companies and customers go through when a customer buys a product from a company.

Sales funnel have at least a few steps, sometimes a sales funnel can have half a dozen or more steps. Generally, in my experience, the most concise sales funnels perform better. I'm going to show you how it works with a four step sales funnel.

Sales funnels in theoretical terms

Following, I explain how a 4-step sales funnel might work step by step, and after it, I give you a practical example of each step.

Step 1 - Contains the most people. At this point, the buyer is just a prospect, and this step is relatively inexpensive for both, the company and the prospect. During this phase, the prospect doesn't know much about the product or the company or both. The company is defining what the profile of a customer could look like.

Step 2 - This shows a small but measurable commitment in part of the prospect and usually converts the prospect into a lead. The cost of setting this step up may be significant for the company, but it's negligible for the prospect. During this phase, the company is trying to establish trust and begin a relationship with the lead in order to educate them.

Step 3 - Educate the interested parties and request a bigger commitment. At this point in the funnel, the company knows more about the lead and will generally request a financial or emotional commitment. Sometimes a trip wire offer is used in this step.

Step 4 - This is the most narrow part of the funnel. In this phase, the company will ask the lead to purchase the product or service. The lead should now be familiar with the offering, and the customer is likely expecting the offer to be made.

If at step number 4, the lead became a customer and purchased a product, then they should be moved to another funnel. This new funnel is geared specifically towards existing customers and known buyers. During this sales process, the company will attempt to offer more value to the customer and ideally develop a lifetime buying relationship.

If the lead did not purchase at step number 4, then they should be moved to another funnel that continues building the relationship (step 2), and offers different levels of commitment to the lead (step 3), and eventually, makes a new offer or positions the same offer under a different value proposition.

From all people to a prospect, to a lead, to a buyer.

Before I give you a concrete example of what an online sales funnel might present at each step, I think I need to clarify a few terms. The company or seller will deal with individuals. Depending on their buy-readiness, they can be classified as follows:

All people. This is basically everyone and anyone. You don't sell to all people because that means that your product would be good for every single person on the planet and every single person in the world would want to buy from you. That will never be the case.

Prospect. This is an individual that belongs to a more defined group of people which you have identified as someone that needs your product or service. When someone is a prospect, it means they're a person that would be qualified to buy your product if they have the money and are ready to buy.

Lead. A lead is someone that has confirmed undoubtedly that they need and want your product. They might even be ready to buy, they know you and also have at least a basic relationship with you. But a lead can be lost to the competition, so this is the most vulnerable step of the sales funnel.

Buyer. Once an individual pays for a product or service they become a buyer. This is the ultimate goal in the sales funnel and establishes trust and commitment to between the seller and buyer. As long as the seller continues to provide value, the buyer is likely to remain a buyer and spend more money in the future.

What should go into each of the steps?

We're talking about online marketing so my example will be specific to selling a product online, and these contain practical examples.

Step 1. This is basic and it will be something like a web page. A landing page of some sort, it could be the product page on an e-commerce site, a blog post or even an ad on Craigslist. Based on the classification I mentioned earlier, this should be shown to prospects and must contain a call to action to invite the prospect to learn more or to make a small commitment moving them along towards the status of a lead.

Step 2. Lead magnet, in this step I would offer a lead magnet. One that would be designed to fit the needs of the profile of my prospect. For example, an ebook, a free download, a training series, access to additional exclusive information or something that helps establish authority, trust and moves the prospect towards becoming a lead. Generally, this is a free offer. Sometimes it can be a very low priced item called a tripwire, like asking the lead about paying for shipping on a free product or buying a digital product for a few dollars.

What is a lead magnet? In short, a lead magnet is a free or very low-cost item that you can use to exchange for the prospect's information, like a PDF, a report, a video or a free gift. I'll cover this in more detail in the future.

Step 3. This is about educating the lead, so the best thing to use during this step would be a series of emails, videos, or the ebook (step 2) itself and use it to educate the lead about the different ways that the product or service can help them solve a pain point or enhance their lives. The easiest and most used method of delivering this is with an email autoresponder, like Aweber.

Step 4. The method of delivering this step is up to the seller, but it must clearly contain a call to action to buy or order the product or service. The previous steps should have developed authority, trust, and education with enough substance to make the request for a buy be a natural step.

A few other things to consider

A sales funnel can be made to fit the sellers needs easily and can be completely different from what I have described here but this is a basic overview of how you may start developing your own sales funnel.

To build a sales funnel, you need a plan, a notebook or a way to write down your steps and a few tools. I would recommend the following tools: WordPress, LeadPages, Optinmonster and Aweber in addition to either the lead magnet or a shopping cart to deliver the goods. But I'll cover that in another blog post soon.

The post What is a Sales Funnel? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

We met up during Affiliate Summit at the EIG party to have some drinks, food and to hit some golf balls at Topgolf. But the rest of the event was all about sharing tips, tricks, and learning how to take our blogs, videos, and businesses to the next level.

Hitting golf balls with my buddy Harsh, @denharsh from @shoutmeloudcom during #ASW17 At the EIG party. #lasvegas #topgolf #enduranceinternationalgroup #hosting

A photo posted by Oscar Gonzalez (@notagrouch) on Jan 21, 2017 at 10:02am PST

This time during Affiliate Summit West 2017, we met again to catch up. I also interviewed him and asked him some questions about blogging, his new project and I asked him for some tips to share with you. You'll see those in the video.

Want to help me share this post? Tweet it out with the link below, or share it on your favorite social network. I'd really appreciate it.

[bctt tweet="Interview with one of the world's most influential bloggers, Harsh from Shoutmeloud." username="notagrouch"]

Last year, Harsh attended Affiliate Summit as a regular affiliate. But this time around he was also a speaker. His session was dedicated to sharing his growth hacking tips which helped him double his affiliate revenue in about 1.5 years.

Naturally, I asked him about his growth hacking techniques during the interview. Even though I hate the term growth hacking because most people misuse it, I really got value out of Harsh's presentation. If you are a blogger, you should have been there. He was one of many speakers why it is always worth going to Affiliate Summit.

I asked him about his newest project which might surprise a lot of people. It's related to bitcoin and other alternative currencies; an emerging market to say the least. The name of that project is Coinsutra. And at the end, I asked him to share three tips for bloggers going into 2017.

On a side note, you can get the early-bird pricing for Affiliate Summit East 2017 already here. If you attended but missed Harsh's session then you should get access to a recording of the session soon.

You can watch my interview with Harsh in the video below:

The post Growth Hacking Tips From Harsh Agrawal – Affiliate Summit Interview appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

While this may seem like a lot of money to you, many people are happy to pay this and even more to get the right advice.

Why would someone pay so much just to talk to me, to go over ideas and to get some feedback on those ideas? Value, when you're looking to succeed, you need to change your mindset form price-driven, to value-driven.

Value, as I mention in that video is in the eye of the beholder. Once you understand that, you will be able to make certain breakthroughs in your online business because you will stop selling yourself short.

The post The 400 Dollar per Hour Rant appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

An immigrant from Pakistan, he began his entrepreneurial career at the young age of 7. At age 12, his family came to the US and Syed took what he had learned in five years of selling wares and snacks to his neighborhood and applied it to the digital world.

You can read his story on his own blog, right here.

I meet up with Syed about once or twice a year, sometimes more if our schedules work out and I always have something to talk with him about and something to learn. He's much younger than me, but I feel like I am the student when he's around. I can always learn something new from him.

I think this is a good way of looking at life in general, we are always students, even when we are usually the teachers, we must continue to learn.

During this interview, I asked about success. I asked about habits and how he handles what needs to be done. I also asked him the question everybody wants to ask, what do you do to be successful?

We also talked about his recent acquisition of the popular Google Analytics by Yoast plugin, now renamed to Google Analytics by Monsterinsights.

In the video we talked about a lot of things, so here are links to all that stuff. If I missed any, please let me know:

You can find more about Syed on his personal blog http://syedbalkhi.com/

Optinmonster is used to increase your engagement on your website and to grow your email list.

Envira Gallery, my favorite gallery plugin. It's what powers the photos section on this blog and I use it for all my clients' sites.

Soliloquy, arguably the best slideshow plugin available for WordPress.

More related articles & videos

• This blogpost talks about how I used Envira Gallery to replace Nextgen Gallery.
• No more Ultimate plan with Optinmonster? - This was a warning post that Optinmonster was going to get rid of their Ultimate plan; and they did. But the current plans offer incredible value.
• How to get more traffic to your blog part 2. In this post we talk about the email list and some of the tools used for this, included Optinmonster.
• Optinmonster blogpost. This WordPress plugin will increase optin rates to your list.
• Optinmonster's exit intent is one of the best features of the plugin.
• Interview with Syed Balkhi & John Chow at Affiliate Summit.

The post Interview with Syed Balkhi. On Business and Success. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

It's hard for me to save money too, so I focus on making more money. But I have to acknowledge that saving more money would be a really good thing.

I've been trying to make savings a habit. Trying to put away a certain percentage of all income is good practice but it's not always as easy as it sounds. Maybe the habits book we're reading in our book club will help, but if I don't have to think about it, even better.

I've tried all kinds of ways to save money, from keeping a daily log, to incentivizing the process of savings, to using programs like "keep the change" from Bank of America. These haven't worked for me in the past.

Now, I use something that is better. It came across my inbox in a newsletter I think. It's a new startup, a company that can really help you save money. It's quite ingenious how it works.

The company name is Digit.co, and it really is a virtual bank. The way Digit works is that you link Digit to your bank account. Their algorithms then analyze your income and expense patterns for a while.

After the system analyzes your account they begin making small withdrawals from your account and deposit these into a savings account.

In my experience, the withdrawals range from $0.81 to $6.97.

I've now been using them for about a month, and so far I've saved almost $30.00. This is money I didn't really need at the moment, and the deposits amounts happen every day or every couple days but don't disrupt my cash flow.

I tend to ramble a bit, so maybe check out this video that explains it very clearly.

I wouldn't have saved these $30.00 on my own. Looking through their blog, I found that other people have saved anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

Digit automates your savings, so you don't have to think about it. If you want to give it a try, use this link, I think they'll give me a few bucks for referring you, so that's cool too.

Setting it up was super easy, it took like 5 minutes to connect to my bank and using it is simple as well. After you have your account, you can text Digit to inquire about your recent transactions, or your balance.

They'll even tell  you the last 3 transactions that took place in your regular bank account, so it works as a quick balance check without having to login to your bank app and all that stuff.

Because everything is automatic, and intelligent, this is by far one of the best methods I found to save more money. When you have saved enough for your goal, or when you decide you want to make a withdrawal, you request the money and it will be transferred to your regular bank within 24 hours.

It's like that old idea that you should put all your pocket change in a jar at the end of the day and after a while you'll have enough money to buy yourself a little something. Except this is virtual and way better than a can full of pennies.

Who's endorsing Digit?

Digit is backed by some really big names, and equally important there are some big names writing about them. I'm confident my money is safe, just like I knew my money would be safe when I joined Mint in the early days.

Mint revolutionized how we spend money, how we track money when they launched.

Digit is going to revolutionize how we save money.

Who's Using Digit?

It seems that every kind of person is using Digit, from students to professionals and even retired folks. Just looking through their blog, you'll see some featured members, like Marriam Yakeem, a student. She says:

I’m not a good planner, so I like the fact that Digit saves for me. I don’t have to think about it.

There is Eric Patrick too, a family man, alright he says:

I never even think about it anymore and when I receive a text message out of the blue showing my balance, I’m simply amazed every time.

I'm sure Digit can help you too. Now you really have no excuse not to save money. If you want to give it a try, and I think you should, click here to learn more or to get started. It's free, and it's awesome.

The post How To Save Money With This Revolutionary App appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But recently in my trip to Las Vegas, we used two Uber rides and the driver in one of them was very friendly. He told us he makes great money and quit his other job to do Uber full time. Says he works about 9 hours each day. I don't think we asked him his age, but the driver was young, probably early twenties or late teens so he's happy doing the hustle.

He says there is a high demand in Las Vegas all day long, 24 7 he says. He often gets rides that are worth more because the demand for drivers is so high at that point, they call that a multiplier.

But let's be a little more realistic, you will not find crowds gathering outside a river of luxury hotels like you do in Las Vegas in many other places.

Maybe a couple of cities in the country can offer that consistent number of crowds to provide work for a large pool of Uber drivers. So I have always wondered, can you really make money with Uber? Well, the mystery has been cracked. Once you find the average hourly rate that a Uber driver makes you won't look at Uber again.

How do you find the average hourly wage for an Uber driver? You watch this video of course!

Why Uber is Terrible - Explained

I haven't tried it myself, and if I did it would only be for fun, to try the experience because I can think of a dozen things I can do with internet marketing that pay way more than Uber, and don't require risking your life or safety.

The post Can you Really Make Money From Uber? or Why Uber is Terrible appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

1. Interview with Harsh Agrawal from shoutmeloud.com.
2. Interview with John Chow and Syed Balkhi

During the last Affiliate Summit my friend Michelle Simmons from momsvilleusa.com decided to interview two of the most influential bloggers that attend the event, John Chow and Syed Balkhi.

I met John Chow several years ago during a local social media meetup in Costa Mesa, California. Then John introduced me to Affiliate Summit when I won his contest for a free ticket and I've been going to Affiliate Summit ever since.

He is famous for taking the revenue for his personal blog, johnchow.com from $0 to $40,000 per month in two short years and then teaching countless people how to do the same.

Part of the reason I keep coming back to Affiliate Summit is because of the amazing opportunities to meet new people like-minded individuals, bloggers, entrepreneurs and  influencers. The word influencer is getting thrown a lot around in social media lately. But I don't use the term lightly, these two individuals are some of the most influential bloggers in the planet.

I met Syed Balkhi during my first time at Affiliate Summit, and he was friendly and approachable. I had heard about him from WPbeginner, but I had no idea I would meet him. John introduced us and we hit it off talking about tech stuff, like WordPress and servers and MySQL, just geeking out. At the time, he was working on an early beta version of a plugin that has become the gold standard for lead generation online.

Whether by teaching or by inspiring others to start blogging and to try entrepreneurship, both John and Syed have influenced hundreds of thousands of people over the years.

Syed broke into mainstream with his WPbeginner blog which is the number one WordPress resource in the world, second only to WordPress.org.

Hanging out with technically awesome @syedbalkhi #asw16 Harsh, Syed, Oscar & John john-chow-oscar-gonzalez

They both contribute incredible amounts of time and effort into the communities that they belong to. And this willingness to participate and help others is part of why they are so successful.

They are both bloggers, but they have now branched outside of just blogging into additional ventures. But let's not forget that blogging helped them achieve incredible levels of success. They are both part of that exclusive internet millionaires club.

In this interview that took place shortly after their panel on Six figure blogging, they talk about things like how to get started, how to meet other like-minded individuals, goal setting, how to measure your progress and more.

Hope you enjoy, and your feedback is welcome!

Thank you Michelle for doing the interview, thank you John and Syed for participating and always giving back so much, and Thank you Missy Ward and Shawn Collins for putting Affiliate Summit together for all of this to happen.

If you found this interview useful or interesting then get yourself a ticket for the next Affiliate Summit event. You can still get the tickets on sale without a coupon or anything, just hurry up because the sale doesn't last long, and the event will sell out.

The post Interview with John Chow and Syed Balkhi – Affiliate Summit Profiles appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Update: The second post in the series is available now.

1. Interview with Harsh Agrawal from shoutmeloud.com
2. Interview with John Chow and Syed Balkhi

During the last Affiliate Summit, I had a chance to hang out and interview one of the most influential bloggers you've never heard of. How can that possibly be?

Well, Harsh Agrawal (@denharsh) runs the largest blog in India. His site has an Alexa rank of 1,888 in the U.S. Ranked 198 in India, his blog Shoutmeloud.com ranks higher and probably gets more traffic than Oracle, Mailchimp, The guardian, Searchengineland, Entrepreneur, and even Techcrunch (source).

His following is just under three-quarters of a million people. And he's a young dude, but his blog is serious business.

He works as a full-time professional blogger and he probably makes more money than you, just by blogging. Harsh considers himself a blog scientist and a digital nomad. He employs one person and outsources some of his work to different virtual assistants.

Living the Dot Com Lifestyle

He truly lives the dot com lifestyle by leveraging all the technology to make sure his business runs no matter where he is. When I met him, we were in Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit West 2016, then he was going to San Francisco, then to Atlanta before making a stop in Los Angeles, then back home to India.

But how serious can a blog be? You may be wondering, how much money can you really make with a blog. I've told you in the past that you can make a full-time income by blogging if you do it right. And Harsh is one of the best examples of this.

Shoutmeloud's income report from September 2015 shows Harsh made almost $17,000, yes, that is USD. That is amazing considering most people in the US only dream about 200,000 per year! When you consider the cost of living in India, Harsh is living like a king.

But Harsh isn't someone to boast or brag about what he does or how well he does. When I met him, I expected someone full of himself, a young kid with a head overblown by the ego that often comes with such success. Instead, I met this humble man, an old soul if you would. Soft spoken and friendly.

We got along great and made the rounds about the meet market and the exhibit halls. He is thorough in his work and even though I've been doing this thing longer than he has, I felt like an apprentice. As we walked the aisles filled with vendors and exhibitors, he tried to talk to every single vendor along the way.

Speaks softly but carries a big stick

Never bragging, but always asking How can we work together? Most vendors dismissed him at first. Probably thinking "here's another affiliate that's just going to suck up my time, move along." Probably because Harsh doesn't stand out from the crowd. But the demeanor of most vendors would change when they would hear about his blog.

Other vendors knew him already and were glad to finally meet him in person. From walking up and down the aisles with Harsh, I picked up a few tips from him.

• Ask questions, many more than you may feel comfortable with.
• Listen, many people want to get their words in, instead Harsh listens.
• Oh yeah, and when it is necessary, drop in the fact that you generate 1 to 2 million unique per month.

Harsh is a perfect example why I attend Affiliate Summit. I have met and continue to meet amazing people there. Of course, you can meet online and chat, and Skype and do the Google hangout thing, but nothing beats a face to face conversation. Nothing beats having lunch with someone and talking shop and talking life.

I had only learned about Harsh and his blog about a month before when for some strange reason I started getting many people from India following me on Facebook and asking me questions about blogging. During my conversations with these aspiring bloggers, the topic would come up every single time.

They would say to me: I am very inspired by Harsh from SML. SML has great tutorials and the guy makes a lot of money, I wish to make only a small portion of that.

So I had to find out what "SML" was and who this Harsh character was.

Once I learned more about him and his blog I felt a little embarrassed that I didn't know about him before. But in the end, I'm glad I had an opportunity to meet him and get to know him. If you're a blogger, you should get to know him too.

Video Interview with Harsh Agrawal

Before we parted ways I had a chance to interview him. Here's the video, enjoy.

Don't forget to check out Harsh's blog, Shoutmeloud.com, or if you prefer, get the app (Android, iOS).

And don't forget to get your tickets for Affiliate Summit East 2016 coming up in the summer. Early bird prices are going on right now. Don't complain later and tell me you couldn't get tickets or they were too expensive.

Update: I met up with Harsh again during Affiliate Summit and interviewed him again. You can see that here.

The post Interview With Harsh Agrawal from Shoutmeloud – Affiliate Summit Profiles appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Minds is an open source encrypted social network with the ability for you to monetize your content. It's not like anything that is already out there.

For example Tsu tries to pay you a share of the money made with advertisements shown on your content; but nobody is really making money with it and it has become a spam and junk center. I dont think it will survive much longer.

So this is not Tsu, and it's not Facebook, but it has some gamification incentives and a way for you to make money with your content on a P2P basis.

In Minds, I can pay for boosted posts and you can also make deals with individuals to help promote content. You set your price, you call the shots.

Let me give you a quick getting started guide with Minds.com

Please keep in mind, that the site is still in beta so a few things may seem clunky, but it's very promising.

Sign up for an account

You sign up by visiting Minds.com, you don't need to provide any personal information beyond a username of your choice, and your email address. You can also do all this through their mobile app (Android, IOS)

My username is Oscar Gonzalez, feel free to follow me, or as it is called here, subscribe to me.

Customize your profile

The first screen you'll see is your profile and you can edit it by clicking on the pencil icon. You can always get back to this spot by using your profile icon on the top right corner.

You can customize your header banner, your avatar and bio from this page. It's a really elegant interface. The date picker to select your birthday is a little odd, but it's simple enough.

This is what I came up with on the first try, it feels a little similar to Facebook but the whole thing is a lot simpler and cleaner. I really like it.

Getting acquainted with the user interface

The top right corner has a small navigation menu with some neat features. Because the network is fully open sourced, you can actually submit a bug here and it will get looked at. If you are feeling adventurous you can also submit a feature request.

There is also an area where you can review your stats on your boosted content. Unlike Facebook, you can promote your regular posts on your profile so they get more visibility.

The small bell represents any alerts that are new since you checked lasta.

The last icon before your profile, gives you access to your wallet screen. In order for you to boost your content, you need to have credits and this is where your credits show up.

Your avatar button takes you to your profile where you can edit your profile picture, banner picture and bio.

Lastly, the three dots next to your profile open up a few more options. You can logout, adjust your global settings for the site or switch to the old interface.

This is a refreshing experience

The user experience is clean and even though the network is still in Beta, it feels solid. The user interface is clean and elegant and everything is simplified compared to Facebook or Twitter.

When you visit your alerts, you can see everything that has happened recently and you can take action from there.

The first few alerts help you get started with finding new content to explore. And as people find you, you'll be notified here when someone subscribes to you.

There is a gamification element too

This has been the downfall for many networks that have tried it but I think Minds.com has the right idea and execution. Certain actions give you credits which you can then spend to promote your content.

As you join, you'll get about 110 points or so to start. 100 for joining, then you'll get 10 points everyday for a "daily login" and you get one point for voting on someone else's post.

One thing I noticed is that they seem to be breaking the secret rules of social networks. That action which takes the most effort or commitment is, or should be the most valuable. For example, a comment is more valuable than a like, and a share should be more valuable than both comments and likes.

Case in point, if you like someone else's post, you'll get a point. But you will not get a point if you leave a comment, you should get more than one point because this is arguably a more valuable action. It represents more engagement.

After your profile is done, you can start using the site. Here's a quick rundown of what's available.

The action menu

The site features an icon-only action menu on the left hand side and if you're new to the site, the icons may not be intuitive enough for you to just figure it out. Here's a breakdown of what you can find there.

Some of the sections highlighted above have a few sub-menu actions. For example, the blog section lets you view featured blogposts, search for blogposts and create your own.

The blogging section is pretty standard and it has a WYSIWYG interface that works fine. Here is the first blogpost I created with it.

The most compelling features of the site

Social networks come and go, but the need for privacy is increasing and this may just be the best attempt at helping us with that. Minds.com is addressing this in two ways, the chats and the network are encrypted so people can't sniff what you're doing on the site.

The other way to help with privacy is to make the software open source. Developers can read through the code and figure out how things work, there is no hidden algorithm and "secret sauce."

The guys from Diaspora tried this before, but unfortunately a few years later the project is almost dead because it was too disjointed, Minds.com addresses this issue by offering a central location to interact with your connections.

Monetization is important for me and for other people that use social media sites for networking and business, and I really like the model offered by Minds. I acquired about 3000 credits and I will be putting the promoted and boost features to the test over the next week or so. I'll let you know how that goes.

For now, why don't you give it a try. Come join me, explore this new network.

The post Minds The New Social Network appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

For bloggers that have found at least some level of success, what they present during this panel may seem common sense. But If you really want to make money and really build something substantial around your blog then this is a great session to attend, even if you have been blogging for sometime already.

Here are some takeaways.

Building a blog to make money is like building a business. You need at least a plan and strategy to achieve your goals. You have to be disciplined and stick to it for the long term.

A blog is not something you can just do and start making money right away. It is a long term investment in time and effort.

You must be building your email list as soon as possible because many people will never come back to your site. They forget, they are uninterested, so try to get their emails with a tool like this one. This will help you reach out to them and establish a relationship.

You can use something like Aweber.

Some of the struggles for bloggers include lack of focus and lack of goals. You have to stick to it, avoid distractions and set clear goals. Don't compare yourself to others because you can be demotivated.

Don't compare your chapter 1 to my chapter 40.

John Rampton

You can compare yourself to try to achieve more, but stick to your goals and persevere. If you compare yourself to much bigger or advanced bloggers, that can be demotivating.

Try to hold off on diversifying too much early on. Instead stick to what is working the most and focus on that. Once you're established and have resources to diversify then you can do it but avoid this at first.

Find something that works for you and double-down on it!

Syed Balkhi

Quality content and valuable services trump aesthetics. Syed says that you shouldn't worry about your photos for example, if they are super high definition, or regular images the normal naked eye can't tell the difference. Work on your content, work on the value you're bringing to the reader and visitor rather than imagery.

Spend time building relationships. A great tool for this is to use the search Twitter feature and use the advanced searches to narrow down your query by location and emotion. Then engage with those people talking about the topic you want and build a loyal fan base this way.

A great way to find good guest spots is to engage with the gatekeepers of the site. Find out who the editors are for the sites you want to guest blog for and engage with them on Twitter.

Recommended tools

• Optinmonster - increase subscription rates
• Adobe Post - graphics
• Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer - write better titles
• Canva - graphic
• Aweber - email list
• Hootsuite - social media
• Youtube - share videos and slideshows to enhance your content

The post Six Figure Blogging at Affiliate Summit appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Shawn Collins is the co-founder of Affiliate Summit and he usually delivers the 1st time orientation session to kick things off at the summit.

Some of the great tips that you can take away from this "session" are pretty simple and sometimes, common sense.

Send a couple of texts to your loved ones to let them know you're missing them because you're going to be busy for the next 3 days. The event is jam packed with sessions and with over 5000 people attending, you should be networking and learning all day long, you are going to be busy!

When you go grab a meal, always try to find someone to eat or drink with. Sometimes you'll create great relationships when sitting down over a meal. Even if you came by yourself, this is a great way to network so don't just go out on your own to grab food and come back.

Get connected to the WiFi, the information is in the agenda.

Use the agenda to plan your days. There is so much to do and the days go fast. Make sure you have a plan of action, set some goals and follow through.

Be present here! Don't spend time on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, or Social Media (unless you're posting about the event). You may be tempted to talk about the latest episode of your favorite show, or talk about your sports team, or whatever. But you'd be wasting your time if you did that!

Stay away from the noise and chatter that's not related to the event because in 72 hours or so, you'll be heading home so make sure you take advantage of it while you are here.

The post First Time Orientation at Affiliate Summit appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.

For those of you born in the mid to late 90s and after, the reference to the red pill could be lost in the droves of pop culture of years past.

Allow me to explain a little bit. The red pill and blue pill have become synonymous of truth and discovery and self deceit and ignorance, respectively.

In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus asks Neo to make a choice between the red pill and the blue pill. You can read that whole exchange here.

Or better yet, watch the video clip of it, it's much more entertaining.

I asked the same question to my friends

Blue pill or red pill?

The red pill would open their Facebook stream to the truth, where I am sharing some of the most valuable information I have about marketing.

I share numbers, techniques, methods, goals, and other things most people don't get to see or even wonder about when outside of the industry.

There is a daily video that reveals or explains a specific topic. I also answer questions and help my friends to do it better, faster, stronger, and more profitable.

Which pill would you take?

If I gave you a choice between taking the red pill or the blue pill. What would you pick?

So far, about 97% of the people have selected the red pill. And I think they don't have any regrets.

This is my informal invitation for you to join these people. If you would like to request access, you need to be ready to learn new things, you must be willing to participate in the conversations and  two things must happen.

1. You have to be my friend on Facebook.
2. You have to ask me to invite you in a private message. You will then receive further instructions.

So stop going around life like most people and go for the #redpill

If you are already in the #redpill exclusive list, then you may find an index of all #redpill past updates here, there are also a couple of public posts so that you can get a preview of what's available.

Yes, this is all free.

Normally I charge hundreds of dollars per hour to give you this information, but because I found a way to do it easily and it helps me sort out my thoughts and write more blogposts I am letting a few people in to see this at no cost.

If you want to join, you know what to do.

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If you didn't get a ticket, check with your favorite vendor or partner and see if they have an extra one to give away or if there's a way to get invited. Some vendors have last minute giveaways and raffles for tickets and some are reserved for top performing partners.

Or check with ASW and see if they have a waiting list you can get on. But frankly, next time plan ahead. This is a premier event and it's quite exclusive even though it continues to grow each year.

Unfortunately, due to an incredible busy holiday season I did not request tickets to give away this time around. But I will try to get some for Affiliate Summit East 2016.

Next time, register and reserve EARLY!

I also recommend that you book your accommodations NOW if you haven't done so. The event is being held at Paris Hotel and this has been sold out for a while now. Staying at the same hotel where the convention is being held is the best thing you can do, but if you didn't book it yet you have two options.

Book the next best hotel or find a roommate willing to split/share their room with you.

The closest hotels to Affiliate Summit are: Bellagio, Planet Hollywood, Flamingo and Caesars Palace. Just a little further you'll find The Westin, Bally's, Harrah's and a few others.

But really, if you have to go back and forth from your hotel to the convention, you are going to waste a lot of time that you could spend networking or attending other events.

If you want to give the whole roommate situation a try, after you have registered for the event use the official Affiliate Summit West app (Android, iTunes) to network with people and find if they are looking for a roommate. You can also do this in the official ASW16 private Facebook group.

I have many friends that have done this in the past and are doing it this year. It's up to you to work out the specific details with your potential roommate.

But avoid getting scammed!

The one thing you want to avoid are companies claiming to be working with or working for Affiliate Summit. At least a few people have gotten scammed by these companies which claim to have reserved rooms for ASW attendees.

They basically take your money and tell you a room is guaranteed, but the whole thing is a scam. They'll keep your money and when you arrive you'll find there is no room for you, and likely the hotel doesn't even have you on record.

The scam also targets registered attendees that already booked reservations with the premise that they can get a better deal. The scam targets attendees or exhibitors and it is not exclusive to Affiliate Summit.

Here's a 4 min video with more details

DO NOT fall for these scams. The best way to book a hotel room is directly through the hotel's website, 800 number OR maybe through a travel agent you already trust and have used in the past. You could also use globally recognized and reputable websites like Hotel.com, Expedia.com and the like.

Here's more information about the Affiliate Summit West/East Scam.

See you in Las Vegas!

The post Affiliate Summit is Next and Scam Alert. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But you are not interested in becoming an affiliate, instead, you have a product. You want to get affiliates to sell your product or service. And you wonder, how do you get an affiliate program started so Joe will sell for you?

This is what I am exploring with you today. I guess, the first thing I would ask is not How?, but Why?

Should you start an affiliate program or not?

As with most marketing decisions, starting an affiliate marketing program isn't something to be taken lightly.

I am think that nearly every company, product or service can benefit from an affiliate program, if you deploy and manage it correctly. With that premise, it is easier for me to explain when you should NOT start an affiliate program.

You should NOT start an affiliate program...

Do not start an affiliate program as a way to save your company or as a last-ditch effort to generate revenue . If your company is in trouble and you need money, you need to fix the problems before you introduce a whole new set of complications to your business.

Do not start an affiliate program without sales statistics or brand recognition. If you are new and don't have a brand or endorsements, then most affiliates will want to see some proven conversions and sales before joining your program.

If you don't have these numbers to show, or if they're too low for your industry then your program may lose affiliates' attention quickly and then it can easily stagnate and make it hard to get traction later.

Do not start an affiliate program expecting the affiliates to do your work for you. You need to guide your program with strong direction and leadership. Even though they are selling for you, they are a type of customer to you as well.

Affiliates are a hybrid of employee, customer. You need to have strong communication channels that work for you and the affiliates. You need to give marketing materials, a good infrastructure, and most importantly, motivation and fresh campaigns to promote.

But if you think you are starting a program for the right reasons, then here is a list of a few basic things to keep in mind as you get ready to start your affiliate program.

If you think you are ready to start an affiliate program, then...

Study the best ones and most popular in your industry and overall. Study the networks, study the affiliates, study the competition, study, study, study.

Get yourself an affiliate manager with a decent track record to help you set it all up and maybe even manage it for you. You can find people and agencies that do this. You can attend local meetups and regional or national events to meet them as well.

Get your self to events with other affiliates and affiliate managers. Immerse yourself in the industry and culture so you can better understand how to work more efficiently, and effectively.

Join other affiliate programs as an affiliate and go through the experience. Did you find it enjoyable, inviting, motivating? What would you change in your program? Ask yourself questions to hone in your skills and develop a better program.

Affiliate Summit West is coming up in January and this is perhaps the best event you can attend to learn about all the different aspects of affiliate marketing also known as performance marketing. If you are serious about starting a program for your company then you owe it to yourself the due diligence of attending. Click here to find out more.

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Affiliate Summit West 2016 is coming in January and taking place in Las Vegas at the Paris Hotel. Affiliate Summit West seems to always be in Las Vegas.

If you are in the industry, I highly recommend you attend this event. It is where all the companies and individuals in the affiliate marketing space meet up to plan world domination.

Tickets just went up a bit from their early bird registration prices, but the prices are still a bargain for what you get. I recommend you get the All-access or VIP level pass. Check out the passes here.

The post Affiliate Summit Tickets are Available Now appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you want to work from home then you gotta take the leap. There is no reason to continue dealing with a soul-sucking job that takes up so much of your time and gives you a minimal reward.

Working from home is awesome and I highly recommend it. But there are risks, and pitfalls and things you'll learn along the way.

This is another great video that will save you YEARS of experience with a barrage of excellent tips. It's like a compilation of things you forgot about and things you never knew could be a problem.

They also cover some of the best tools you could use to get your work done at home and some of the best productivity tips I've seen.

The post Working at Home. Tips, Hacks and Q&A appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you're considering starting an affiliate program for your business or your product then this is recommended viewing.

The Top Five Affiliate Management Myths Debunked.

One of the best takeaways:

If your site is not already primed to convert visitors to buyers, then affiliate traffic will NOT increase your revenue.

The post Top Five Affiliate Management Myths appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Thomas the Apostle is a person in the Bible who does not believe the claims of Jesus (who can blame him?). He doubts the claims that Jesus died and rose three days later. He wanted to see proof.

He was one of the 12 apostles and sometimes people call him doubting Thomas. The story says that eventually Jesus showed up to Thomas and showed him proof.

So maybe you're a little bit like Thomas and want to see proof that affiliate marketing works.

I want to show you a screenshot of one of the products I am promoting right now. By promoting I mean I wrote about it a couple times and I posted it in a few of my blogpost. It maybe took me 20 minutes total to promote this product.

Here's the screenshot of the results so far:

This has been going on since early August and I've generated a total of $269.81 in commissions. When you consider that this is one of dozens of products that I promote, then you realize it's not such a bad deal to do affiliate marketing.

Here's the overview for this account. Not to bad for about 20 or 30 minutes of work. What's even cooler about this is that it will (should) continue making money for some time to come.

The post Are You Like Thomas? Here’s Your Proof! appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I use it and it works great. Once you sign up, you can establish an hourly rate and start promoting your profile as an expert so that people pay you for advice.

This is a great way to make additional income without having to spend a lot of effort doing it. Simply help another professional, or entrepreneur with a challenge.

Sometimes 15 minutes is all that people need, sometimes a full hour is necessary.

If you join, and you have a WordPress website then you can add an interactive widget that allows people to book you through Clarity with just a couple of clicks.

You just copy the text provided by the Clarity website and paste it into a text widget in your own WordPress website. The video below explains it all.

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