If you’re in the internet marketing industry, then you would have heard that John Reese deleted his Twitter account of 25k followers.

His reasons are:

1. Response to his tweets are decreasing
2. He has better results doing other marketing stuff
3. It’s taking up a lot of his time

Since he’s one of the more popular internet marketers, many look up to him and follow his advice.

If you’re thinking whether you should follow him and delete your own Twitter account, here’s some advice.

1. If you enjoy using Twitter to get business, then carry on.

2. If you’re making good sales with Twitter, carry on.

3. If you spend many hours on Twitter with hardly any sales, then maybe you should call it a day.

Just because Twitter does not work well for John Reese’s business, doesn’t mean the same applies to you.

It’s as simple as that.

It all boils down to what works for you and are you happy with it.

If you tell Gary Vaynerchuk that video marketing sucks because it doesn’t work for your business…do you think he gives a damn?

DISCLAIMER: I personally hardly use Twitter but a lot of my peers get decent traffic and leads from it.

The most important and difficult decision entrepreneurs need to make is what online home business they should have. Sometimes the online home business never gets off the ground because the would-be-entrepreneurs don’t know what they can sell and profit from. This article will explain the steps on how to decide what business to be in.

Here are three things you need to understand:

1. The product or service you’re selling, needs to solve a problem for your market.

2. The product or service does not have to be original. Copy what is already selling well and try to add something extra to it.

3. Have a passion and interest in your online home business.

Whatever you’re selling online, you need to make sure that it is a good offer. Something that solves a problem and improve people’s lives.

For example, selling an ebook on how to trouble shoot a PC is a good one. It is a clear offer and people are willing to pay to learn how to troubleshoot their own computer.

For your product or service, don’t force yourself to think of something that is unique. This is very important because it is much easier to make money by selling things which are already a success. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel.

If you see there are already a lot of ebooks or services on teaching people how to do furnish their homes, then you know that it’s a profitable market. Otherwise there won’t be that many people in the business.

Coming up with a original product or service is very hard. Plus it doesn’t mean that it will sell. The chances of failing with an original idea are high.

Try to think of something extra to add to your product. Either by offering free telephone support, free gifts, or email support with the purchase. Or add an additional 2 weeks training when a customer purchases your ebook.

You can come up with many ideas to make your offer stand out. After that it depends on how effective your marketing is in promoting your business.

The third and most important element to consider for your online home business is to choose a business that you have a passion and interest in. If your business is something which you love and have an insatiable desire to learn, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding with the business.

Here’s a real life situation of 2 people who purchased an online home business package, ghostwritten for their business. The package contains everything they need to start their online home business which includes an ebook, website design and sales copy.

The first client wanted to create an ebook about the real estate and how to stop foreclosure. He didn’t have an interest or any knowledge about real estate but knew there was lots of money to be made in this industry.

The second client had an online home business ghostwritten for him on the law of attraction. He had read several books on the law of attraction, how to access the subconscious mind and self improvement. He was passionate with the subject.

After several months of running their website, the first client reported that he hardly got any sales. The reason was because he didn’t do much to promote it. He thought that visitors would miraculously find his website and start buying his ebook.

He was advised to write articles and create short reports to build traffic to his website. However, he couldn’t and didn’t want to. He had no knowledge on the subject, didn’t know what to write about and was not really motivated in promoting something he had no interest in.

His home business bombed because of his lack of knowledge and interest in his business.

The second customer did a lot better. He reported steady, growing sales and is expected to sell more copies in the coming months due to word of mouth and increased marketing.

He had a lot of knowledge with his own business and had a passion for it. Right after his website was online, he continuously promoted it by writing articles, posting on forums, commenting on blogs and offering to do interviews with experts.

He didn’t think it was work. He enjoyed doing it.

This is the reason why you need to choose a business that you have a passion in. It will affect how you go about promoting and growing it.

If you decide to hire freelance writers or a ghostwriting company to develop your online home business, make sure that it is a business which you are passionate about and has existing competition. By following the 3 elements to making a decision on your business, you’ll have a much better chance of making money.

I have started to explore LinkedIn which is a social website that hasn’t gotten much attention if you compare it to other social websites such as FaceBook and Twitter.

Although still in my research phase, I’ve found LinkedIn to be very valuable in finding business. Here is what I’ve found to be exciting:

- nearly everyone there are business owners or professionals. They have money to spend.
- there is a question and answer section which you can use to show your expertise
- search engines rank the LinkedIn web pages very well – you’ll get search engine traffic
- you are seen as a professional on LinkedIn – someone who is serious with their business.

Now one of the most useful features I’ve come across is LinkedIn Recommendations.

You can give a professional a recommendation if you have worked with them in the past. If your recommendation is good, they will display it in their profile. This means it acts like an ad for you.

In addition, giving recommendations show that you are a nice person and someone who should be good to work with. The key is to give a quality recommendation and not just bullshit “‘Yeah, he was cool. Excellent service”.

If you get a lot of recommendations for your business, then it’s just the same as showing testimonials on your website.

But these recommendations are more valuable! People will check up on the person recommending you and see if they are genuine or not.

As I have said, I have yet to fully use LinkedIn but at the moment, it seems like a social website well worth looking in to. Stay tuned to see how I develop my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanylcheng

Ping my blog

If you have some internet marketing knowledge, then you’ll know that there are an endless number of traffic generation techniques you can use. Some are effective and some are like a spark.

In today’s video, I show you a 4 hour internet marketing plan which you can use every day for your online business. In time, the effect of these tasks will build up and give you a mass amount of targeted traffic.

These tasks in the video are proven to work. If you continue to stick to the plan, traffic generation will not be your concern.

Enjoy.

If you’re making a lot of sales with your online business currently, then congratulations. You’re doing a fine job with marketing your products and services. But are you sure that you can’t do better to improve things?

A slight adjustment to your website could improve sales and leads. This compound improvement could increase your sales by more than 10% – 20% without you spending more money on marketing.

If you’re struggling with selling online, but think that there’s nothing wrong with your product, it could be that your website doesn’t have the right headline, offer, sales copy or price.

You would never know if you don’t test.

This is what every internet marketing expert preaches – you need to test your website to see if it converts well. What works with other people, may not work well on your website. The reason is because your prospects and market are different.

With so many things to test, it would take you a long time to test several elements of your website. Don’t forget that you need to generate traffic to your website to confirm each tests. So we don’t have all the time in the world just for testing.

We need results and we need them fast.

Here are 5 elements which you need to test in order of importance to gain the maximum benefit in terms of sales and lead generation.

1. Your Offer
The first thing to test is your offer. If you are selling an ebook teaching people how to play the guitar, change the offer to teaching people how to play rock guitar.

You may find that playing the guitar is too general and therefore it doesn’t attract buyers. So change your offer a little and see if it makes a difference to sales.

If no one wants your product, no marketing in the world can sell it.

2. Price
Increase the price of your product or service. See if it increases sales or not. You would want to increase the price up to a point that you gain maximum profit from your marketing.

3. Your Headline
Change your headline which you are using to attract the visitors to read your website. The headline is very important. It determines who your website is targeted to and what you’re about.

Changing simple phrases in headlines has increased responses by more than 100% in some cases. It’s that important.

4. Sales Copy
The next thing you would want to test is your sales copy. Change a few words and maybe focus on some benefits. See which changes give you the better response.

If sales has been poor but you’re getting a lot of traffic, it may be better to re-write your sales copy from scratch.

If you are getting sales then try to improve each element on your sales copy and see if some benefits increases sales.

5. Design
Finally, test your design. Change the images of your graphic header or change the ecover image of your information product.

People tend to buy from websites which give a professional look.

By going through these testing in order, you will be able to split test your website’s most important selling elements. Design is listed last because it is the least effective element in getting you a sale, compared to the other 4.

You can use Google’s website optimizer tool at www.google.com/websiteoptimizer to do your split testing. The results you get are guaranteed to make your website sell more efficiently. Always start testing your website as soon as you can. Don’t waste your effort in driving traffic.

You can increase your profits almost instantly and it doesn’t involve spending more on marketing. Your online business has profit leaks in it which is making you lose a lot of money. Get these leaks fixed and you could gain thousands of dollars quickly. Here are 10 ways how you can increase your online profits almost instantly.

1. Squeeze page

Have you tested your squeeze page to see if the conversion can be improved? A 5% increase in conversion rates mean an extra 500 leads added to your list per 10,000 visitors. 500 more people who you can regularly market to on your list.

2. Build your list virally

When people sign up to your list, give them a free offer if they refer 3 or more friends to your list. This will multiply the size of your list and give you more prospects to sell to.

3. Following up with customers on testimonials

Collect testimonials automatically by following up with your customers with your autoresponder. Place the testimonials on your website to increase the visitors’ confidence and sales.

4. Recruiting affiliates

Continue to follow up with customers after asking them for a testimonial. Ask them to be an affiliate of your products and services. Automate this process to build your army of affiliates and increase sales.

5. Changing headline on sales page

Change and test your headlines on your sales page. See if you can improve the number of buyers with your new headline. If you manage to get a 2% increase in conversion rates, that’s an extra 20 sales with every 1000 visitors you send to your website.

6. Leveraging your thank you page

Customers will arrive on your ‘Thank You’ page after they bought your product. Use this ‘Thank You’ page by telling them about your other services, or other products which you’re an affiliate of. Since the customer is focused on reading your ‘Thank You’ page, don’t waste the opportunity.

7. Using your confirmed opt in page

Do the same with the webpage confirming that your prospects are signed up to your list. Sell them your other services while they are on your website reading your confirmed opt-in message. You have their attention so start selling to them.

8. Survey your list

With your list of subscribers, send them a survey asking for their opinion. Ask them what they think of your products and services and what they would like to buy. With the feedback, see if there are any new products you need to create or changes to be made to your existing business.

9. Monitoring your marketing

Make sure you monitor your marketing results. Know which adverts are effective and which are not. Focus on doing the type of marketing that is bringing you results and removing the ones which are not. You could be currently using a marketing channel which is not getting you any results.

10. Increasing your price

It is very possible that you can increase the price of your products and services and have no effect on the number of sales. Try it and see. Gradually increase your price until it decreases your profits. Look for the sweet spot where you have the most expensive price possible.

These 10 techniques won’t take up a lot of your time but they will give you almost instant results. Improving your online business internally is one of the best ways to increase profits before you consider spending more on your marketing.

Any internet marketer who’s been running an online business will tell you that there are a lot of tasks to do. This means that multi-tasking is necessary. Entrepreneurs regularly perform several tasks because they have so much to do.

But multi-tasking is bad. It delays your progress and quality. Instead of completing one task before the next one, internet marketers will try to complete 3 tasks at the same time.

Firstly, none of the tasks are done properly because not one of them is being focused on.

Secondly, concentrating on doing one task first, will actually increase the progress. Try it if you don’t believe it to be true.

So why is it that we are in the habit of doing many things at the same time with our online business?

The reason is because:

- we think we can do it
- we think that everything is important
- we get distracted by other tasks

For example, if you want to create a squeeze page to build a list, you would:

- create a free offer first
- build the squeeze page
- set up the autoresponder messages
- drive traffic to it

The average internet marketer will do all 3 of these tasks at the same time. The only reason for you to do several tasks at the same time is if you are outsourcing.

eg. hire a ghostwriter to create your report, hire a graphic designer to create your squeeze page while you write the autoresponder mesages.

If you are not outsourcing, then focus on completing one task first. Oh yes and ignore all the latest offers or other distractions which don’t help your particular task which you’re doing.

Using the above list of tasks, do them in order. You’ll find that:

- you’ll complete the tasks quicker
- the tasks are complete with few mistakes
- and your squeeze page will convert better (due to the time you spent on describing the benefits why people should sign up to your list).

Remember, outsource your online business tasks if you want to multi-task, take it one step at a time if you’re doing everything by yourself.

I had the honor of being a guest blogger for Reed Floren – The Master Joint Venture Broker.

The title is “How To Make A Fortune Selling Cheap Ebooks”.
www.reedfloren.com/?p=421

Judging from the comments, it looks like it was a HIT!

I will be posting as a guest blogger more often as it gives me and the blog owner benefits.

By the way, if you want to launch a product or have a mass giveaway, contact Reed. This guy will give you so much exposure it’s like becoming an overnight success!

Writing a press release is one of the most cost effective marketing strategies a company can use. It’s very cheap and the effect can be nothing short of breath-taking. It is surprising why a lot companies don’t use this type of marketing more. It could be that they found their previous press releases being ineffective. Here are 5 mistakes to avoid your press release being a failure.

1. Your Objective

When you publish your press release, you must understand what the objective is with the news story. Is it to make the public more aware of your business, is it to tell them that you have a special promotion, is it for collecting leads or is it for selling your new product?

When you are clear with your objective, you will write a much better story. There are many times when a company writes a press release with no clear objective. They just think it’s a good idea to write one.

If you would like the public to know that you have a new product, then the whole of your article should be targeted on what your new product is and how it benefits the customers.

Once you have this explained in your story, give the public information on how they can visit your store or business and purchase your new product.

2. Self Promotion

If you treat a press release like a self promoting advertisement, then your story won’t be distributed. You have to understand that journalists and editors that are reading your news have to decide whether it’s worth publishing or not.

If your news is a blatant advertisement, then the public won’t be interested in reading about it. Therefore there is no reason for the journalist to publish it in the media.

So before you send out your release, ask yourself if the article focuses too much on promoting your products with no benefiting news to the public.

3. No call to action

After you end your story, is there a call to action for the reader? This is important because it is what matters at the end of the day. This is why you need to know what your objective is for the press release.

It’s normal to have your contact information at the end of your article and instruct the reader to take action. This could be to visit your website for more details, visiting your business with a discount coupon or ringing a recorded message for the latest news.

4. Search Engine Optimization

One of the major benefits of distributing your company’s news online, is to rank your website high for certain keywords. Since the press release websites are authority websites which search engines like, the link to your website will help you rank high for your targeted keywords.

When distributing your article, make sure that you put the relevant keywords in the title and throughout the content of your story. This will help people to find your story using the search engines and therefore give you more traffic.

5. Following up

After you distribute a press release, make sure that you follow up with the journalists or editors. Ask them if they received your story and if you could provide them with more information. This will increase the chances of your story being published.

If you avoid these mistakes when distributing your press release, you should be able to get a lot of sales and enquiries for your business. If you are uncomfortable with writing a press release and have trouble coming up with a news-worthy story, you can outsource this to professionals who can help you market your business effectively.

For more details on how to outsource your press release to professional ghostwriters, visit writing press release.

In the last video, you saw how easy it was to upload your videos to Amazon S3 and use their cheap but quality service.

In today’s video, you will see how to play the Amazon S3 video on your website.

The web video we created is a flash video with the extension MP4 or FLV. These require a flash player to play the videos on your website.

One of the flash players which is compatible with Amazon S3 and is FREE, is JW FLV Player which can be downloaded at www.longtailvideo.com

In today’s video, you will learn how to configure JW Player so that it accesses your web videos on Amazon S3 and play it on your website or blog.