When I first started my online business, life was tough.

I had a demanding job in the IT industry which required working over-time, regularly.

I have wife and kids to attend to when I got home and barely 2 hours to work on my business.

Through close self monitoring and talking with different mentors, I realized that I had in fact, a lot more time that I realized to grow my business.

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If you’ve been studying internet marketing or business in general, then you would know that understanding what your customer want is critical to business success.

If your customer thinks that you understand him and that your products are a perfect fit for him, he’ll keep buying from you for a long time. This article will teach you how to do that.

If you’re the type that buy clothes regularly, then it’s likely that you’ll visit some particular shops a lot. It’s either because you think their clothes match your style, or you love their brand name. If the shop continues to sell the same style of clothes, you’ll continue to be their customer.

This is how powerful understanding your customer is. This is why McDonalds don’t sell pizzas and Louis Vuitton don’t sell anything that is cheap.

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It goes without saying that word of mouth is extremely important for an online business or offline business. But getting customers to tell others about your company when the right time comes, is very hard.

This is why internet businesses are easier. You can pay commissions for people to refer sales to you. Needless to say, they will be telling others about your products to everyone they know so that they can get a nice income.

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It’s the year 2011 and it’s time to start planning for this year if you haven’t already done so.

Ask yourself a quick question…”Why are you making resolutions for yourself and setting goals for your business at the beginning of the year?”

It is because you want to improve your current situation and want to use the new year as a motivator to kick you into gear.

For there is no reason why you set goals in the new year and not throughout the months when you need it.

If you want to have 2,000 visitors to your website daily as a goal, then there’s no reason not to set this goal earlier on when you thought about it.

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Here’s what happened a few days ago which can teach you a thing a two about why some people achieve the success they do.

I was writing some marketing material for my business and I was interrupted by a Skype message. I normally turn off my Skype when working but I forgot to turn it off this time.

I was initially going to ignore this message but it was from a very successful internet marketer friend who I respected.

So I put on my headset and microphone for a quick chat. This quick chat lasted about an hour!

My friend wanted to discuss his business model. Without revealing too much, he wanted to know my opinion on his ideas and most importantly, would it last?

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There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of business models to make money online. Every entrepreneur’s goal is to find a business model that they like, comfortable with and is profitable. After watching how many internet marketers run their business, and speaking to a few successful marketers, it’s bloody obvious that the money is in the list.

Even though you’re sick of the phrase, I would advise you to put those words on your computer desktop so that you can stare at it every day. Remind yourself that whatever tasks you do, one of them has contribute towards building your list.

From my observations and from speaking to many marketers, the best way and the simplest way to make money online is to create squeeze pages to build your list, build the relationship and sell using emails.

This business model is simple, fast to create and works very, very well.

If you’re game, jot down these steps and start taking action right away. You can’t fail to profit with these steps.

Step By Step Business Model Using Squeeze Pages To Sell

1. Find a niche that is huge. Making money, self-help, health, golf, weight training, digital photography, dating and so on.

2. Go to Clickbank or any affiliate program network and make a list of all affiliate products which you think looks good to sell within your niche.

3. Create a squeeze page focusing on solving a problem within your niche. Look at the affiliate products which you have listed out to get some ideas.

Offer a bonus on your squeeze page where you reveal the information/solution. Make it a great offer so that people will sign up.

4. Get a good autoresponder. If you haven’t got one already, sign up for this autoresponder. Write as many emails as you can for the people who subscribed. 52 is a good number since if you space them out at one per week, you will stay in contact with your subscribers for a whole year.

5. With your autoresponders, give a tip in each one. The mail messages don’t have to be long. Short emails work best. Just give a tip that they can use and then recommend the product with your affiliate link. Since the messages are short, writing 52 emails won’t take that long.

6. Do the same thing again but use a different squeeze page focusing on another topic in your niche. The first 5 emails could be about the information as promised in the squeeze page and the rest could be the same as the previous autoresponder.

Once you have two squeeze page systems going, just promote these 2 links and you’ll be building a list of subscribers where you’ll be selling to them for the whole year.

When you have a big enough list, you can do adswaps to build them more quickly and enter JV contests to get your name around.

All it takes is the initial set up, then you can focus on just promoting the links. This is the one of the quickest ways to make money online because the money is in your valuable list! Don’t underestimate the power of this simple business model. Making money doesn’t have to be complex.

When you write an ebook or hire a ghostwriter to do it for you, the focus is on creating a valuable information product so that your market will find it useful and recommend other people to buy it.

The purpose at the end of the day is to make money online with your products and establish yourself as an authority.

But one of the mistakes that I see a lot entrepreneurs getting it wrong is naming their ebook. What your ebook is called is very important in determining how many copies you can sell.

When a reader sees a boring title which doesn’t sell them a benefit or doesn’t make them curious, they’ll quickly ignore it.

It’s like going to a bookstore to find a book on losing weight. Normally you’ll only have 2-3 books to choose from. The reason is because the title doesn’t grab you. Nearly everyone buys books based on the title unless the author is famous.

Here are some tips on what to name your ebook.

Tips On Naming Your eBook

1.  Put your keyword in the title. If your niche is in self confidence, make sure these words appear in the title.

2.  Mention a benefit. For example, Building Self-Confidence Within 7 Days. The benefit here is how quickly the book can help someone achieve their goal.

3.  An alternative to mentioning a benefit is being mysterious. For example, Magical Self-Confidence Transformation.

4.  It’s a good idea to come up with names using a domain registry so that you can get the available domain name that goes with your ebook.

5.  Use a keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Tool to find out the hot words that people are searching for.

6.  Go to Amazon and read the titles in your market. Make a note of the titles which get your attention and make you want to buy them. Use similar titles for your own ebook.

Another reason why you should have a meaningful title with your keywords in them is because of the valuable back links that you will have. This will help your search engine optimization because when people mention your ebook, the keywords you are trying to rank for are displayed.

Additionally when you write articles to promote your ebook, you can create an anchor text based on the title.

Makes perfect sense right?

So before you start getting an ecover created, spend a lot of time coming up with  a good name. The time you will spend in thinking of a good name will pay handsomely for itself.

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.