Claire Morawski

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Whether you are involved in a Network Marketing Company (MLM) or you are a service professional or you are a small business owner, internet marketing can help you explode your business. However, one has to have a strategy in place for the marketing to be effective.

Branding YOU as the Expert

The NUMBER ONE rule of thumb is that you have to Brand You and Your Company as a leading thought in your industry, to succeed on the internet. You have to respect the ‘law’ that first you help people before asking for their business. It is human nature that when people start viewing you as an expert in your field, they automatically do what you tell them to do – as they have come to respect your opinion and trust you that you are advising them for their own benefit. You have become a source of authority in their life – so they buy from you, they ‘hire’ you as their service professional, they follow your guidance, …

To become known as an expert in your niche, you mainly start by helping people. You have to earn their trust, by showing them that you are a leader in your industry and you know what you are talking about. But first they have to experience first hand that you know what you are talking about and that they can trust you. Hence, a complete no-no is pitching your sales talk at first sight. Rather at the first meeting offer some tips on how they can better their situation.

Let me give you an example for all this to be clear. Let’s say you are a florist by profession and have a store (can be online or offline). You are in an online forum when someone complains that they bought these flowers and after just 1 day they died. So you would write in the forum about tips how to make your flowers survive longer than 1 day – you would go into how to choose flowers when buying, if to cut the stem or not, how often to change the water, what room temperature should the flowers be and so on. At the end of your comment, you would write your name and your website address. This would position you as an expert, and people would come to visit your website and then your store. Compare the above to instead leaving a comment and writing something like this: ‘Buy your flowers from www.FxLxOxWxExRxS.com – guaranteed to last you for 10 days.’ I am sure you realize which comment will generate more traffic.

Who can Market Online?

Anyone who is alive and breathing can use the power of the internet to market and brand oneself and one’s company.

If you are a Service Professional or a Solo Entrepreneur, you can use the internet to brand yourself as an expert in your field. Set up a blog and market yourself as a thought leader in your niche, by writing articles and giving free knowledge to your readers. For example if you are an accountant you can write articles on how to calculate your yearly income tax, how to save on your taxes, simple tips for business owners, and so on.

Same goes if you are a Small Business Owner – use the internet to brand your business as the leading company in your niche. If you are an owner of a hairdressing salon – write articles on how to have a hair cut that suits your features, the latest trends, 5 easy tips on how to ensure healthy hair, and more.

Let’s now look at someone who is involved in an MLM company. You were given a generic company website, you were not taught how to market effectively, and hence you are suffering from a lack of leads. So you turn to the internet to brand yourself as an expert in your niche, and hence start generating endless leads. Let us say that you are involved in a company selling vitamins. So you create a blog where you market yourself as an expert in vitamins – you write articles on why vitamins are important, how many vitamins a day is needed, what vitamins to avoid if you are breast feeding, and on and on. This will brand you as an expert in vitamins, and people would automatically follow your advice and buy vitamins from you. Now in Network Marketing, one makes a living from selling but also from recruiting. So it is also important to brand yourself as an expert in recruiting. You can do this by targeting those individuals who are aspiring entrepreneurs. (Note: not your friends and family, nor the strangers at the mall, nor the leads that you call off a list, but aspiring entrepreneurs who have always dreamt of being their own boss). You would write articles to teach them on how to start their own business, how to market online, how you recruit people, and so on.

One thing I have to emphasize is that the information that you supply to people has to be the truth – as otherwise if someone finds out that you have been tricking them, then your reputation and business takes a quick downhill turn.

How to Market Online

Your next question must be how do I market online and brand myself as an expert?! You have to use marketing strategies to generate traffic to your website – some of them are free and others are paid strategies. An easy-to-understand example, which many of you are familiar with, is offline marketing – stores and other businesses use different mediums, such as newspapers, magazines, press releases, postcards, radio, TV to advertise and generate traffic to their store or business. Exactly the same goes on in the internet. There are different marketing strategies that you can make use of to advertise you and your business, to generate traffic to your online store (your website) and / or your offline business.

One of my favourite marketing strategy is blogging, and hence article marketing. I am sure that you have realized that having an online presence is a must nowadays for any business. If you don’t have an online presence, you are invisible to the world, and generating business would be harder. Some businesses choose to have a static website, however I strongly prefer a self-hosted blog where you are constantly updating information and constantly communicating with your clients. (Note: creating a self-hosted blog is easy to setup – no knowledge of HTML needed, and you can set up your own self-hosted blog with one 90 minute training webinar. You can Click Here for the free training) With blogging comes article writing, where you can even submit your articles to different directories – this marketing strategy will help to continue branding yourself as the person-to-go-to in your niche, and will help to promote your blog as a platform to your business.

Other marketing strategies include using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn to brand you as an expert, and direct people to your blog, and hence to your business (can be online store or offline business). Using paid strategies such as Pay Per Click ads and Paid Press Releases is another form of generating traffic to your business. Leaving comments on other blogs, participating in forums and interacting on the internet is also effective, especially in the beginning. Advertising for free on Craigslist and Backpage is another option. E-mail marketing is another effective way to keep a correspondence with your list of readers and clients.

As you can see, there are many ways one can ‘advertise’ on the internet. But MY ADVICE TO YOU is to choose one marketing strategy, or maximum two, and stick with it till you start seeing results. Keep tweaking and testing till you become an expert in that marketing strategy, and your conversions start pouring in. Always follow the mantra ‘expect to give before expecting anything in return’ – give out free valuable information (not spam and not pitching your sales story) that will brand you as a leader in your niche, and eventually this will earn you big bucks. And also keep in mind that using the internet as a medium to brand yourself as an expert takes time – so be patient but consistent – your determination will eventually pay off big time.

I personally use MLSP as my marketing system – it is my educational platform where I constantly learn effective marketing strategies that brand me as an expert in my niche, strengthens my reputation, and consequently gives me great leverage and power to explode my business. If you would like to test drive the same system, then visit www.BrandingYouandCo.com for more information.

To Your Success

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Before going straight into how it is possible to generate an income from the internet, I will start first with discussing 2 mechanisms that you need to have in place, before thinking of earning money from the internet.

1. You need to work hard and consistently towards having good content on your blog. This will in return drive traffic regularly to your blog, because your readers are curious what your next post is about – what they are going to learn from you.
2. Build an e-mail list. This is usually an ‘opt-in’ box, where your readers will fill in their name and e-mail address to give you permission to send them a regular newsletter, such as once a week, on educational content, information about a product, a tip for them, and so on.

These 2 tools will give you leverage – because now that you have built traffic, attention and an audience to your blog, it is time to convert that into money.

7 ways to earn money from the internet

1. Affiliate promotions. This is one of the ways that I personally like, of earning money online. So to give you an example, let’s say that there is a piece of software that I like and use for my business. I have personally bought it and use it regularly myself. I will write a review of it with links to the software’s sales page, and when my readers will click on this link and buy the software I will earn a commission for promoting this product. My Review of the Automatic Article Submitter is an example of this.

You can actually promote anything – a physical product such as a book, a downloadable e-book, a subscription service, a software, a system, and more. It is basically anything that offers an affiliate program. For my part, I prefer promoting stuff that I personally use, but you can also choose to subscribe to affiliate programs, without actually buying the product, and selling them through your blog.

The advantage of this is that there is no physical product to move, since your ‘job’ is to direct your traffic to the product’s sales page, and the company will take care of the rest. You are given an affiliate ID which is unique to you, which will look something like this: www.aweber.com/?333695 – with the first part being the product’s website and the second part being your affiliate ID, so you will earn a commission when people buy from your link.

Now if the product is a one time payment, you just get a commission once, but if the product is actually a subscription based service, then you are actually getting a commission every month. And each product will have a different percentage. However, all this adds up, especially if you have a successful blog.
Affiliate marketing uses the concept that word-of-mouth from the customer is the best advertising. So they actually reward you for promoting their product for them.

For affiliate products check Claire Morawski’s Recommendations (they are all products that I personally use for my business – and most of them are affiliate products). Can also have a successful blog on a particular topic, such as fishing, go to Clickbank (a retailer of e-books and digital products) and Amazon.com (a popular online superstore), search for products which are relevant to your topic, example fishing, and sell the products on your blog.

2. Once you have an audience, you might want to consider having people sponsoring your blog. You would accept adverts on your blog and get paid for it. You can come up with a service like Yaro Starak’s Advertise Page, where he explains the different packages that he personally offers to people who want to place an advert on his website. Like this he has complete control over the adverts.

3. Another way is to go through other sites, where in a way they will place the adverts themselves for you – the only problem with this is that you don’t really have total control over the adverts and the companies. Such sites include,
 Google Adsense that enables you to display relevant Google text ads and earn a commission when people click on the ad,
 TextLinkAds place static text links on your blog, and finds the sponsors for you,
 Chitika puts little advertisements on your blog and you get paid if people click on the adverts. Great for people who have blogs with topics such as computers, electronics, digital cameras, etc.
 Widget Bucks puts advertising on your blog, similar to Chitika,
 Kontera puts hyper-links inside your content. So actual words in your posts will become advertisement. If people click on the links, you actually make some money.
 Commission Junction is like an affiliate network. You will find people who want to advertise their products or services, you’ll place their advert on your blog, and you will get a commission for each sale, each click or each lead you send them.

4. Writing paid reviews or a blog post is another way of generating money online. This does not necessarily require that you have your own blog. Review Me is a broker that finds people who want to find paid reviews from bloggers. You are paid for writing a review about someone’s website or product. With Pay Per Post you are paid to write a blog post. It’s a good way to start making the first money, if you do not mind writing about something that in a way you are ‘forced’ to write about.

5. Become involved in a multi-level marketing (MLM) company, and earn money by selling a product and by recruiting people. The products can be anything – insurance, memberships, vitamins, gold, etc. The only advice that I would give is to choose a company that reflects your values. With such companies you are usually given a generic website and basic marketing training. I would strongly recommend building your own website (a self-hosted blog) to brand yourself and have a unique presence on the internet, and to learn how to market effectively to once again brand you as a leader in your niche. If you are selling products, you can add a cart to your blog.

6. As you travel down the lane of internet marketing, you will find that time and experience has been a great learning curve. And you might decide to start selling YOU. Using the knowledge you have gained, you might want to start writing ebooks and selling them. Or you could also venture into selling your services such as training new entrepreneurs on how to succeed online, or consulting businesses on website building and search engine optimization,… The list is endless, and the potential of internet marketing is huge and untapped – so you never know where the road will lead you to.

7. Another point worth mentioning is that you can build an online presence to promote your offline business. Let’s say you have a small restaurant, and you build a self-hosted where you brand you and your website. The blog can have the recipes of items off the menu, calories of each meal, recommended wine pairing for each dish, conversations you can have with the chef, ratings of each meal, comments and suggestions from customers, videos teaching people on how to cook, and so on. This kind of blog for sure will generate a vibrant online community, which will in turn market the restaurant, and bring in more business.

I totally believe that as a platform, one should have a self-hosted blog – which can be considered as you business or your store online, where you can market yourself, brand you, place ads, add a cart, communicate with your readers, and more. It’s worth noting that without a self-hosted blog most of the above won’t work. However, if you don’t have a blog, don’t let that stand in your way towards your financial freedom, as creating a self-hosted blog is quite easily achieved with a little bit of training. Visit Here For Blogging 101 Training. Once you have a blog in place, and a little bit of good content, then focus on building an audience through marketing strategies such as Article Marketing.

When it comes to making money online, in the beginning, focus on one or two of the above 7 strategies and make them work for you. The trick is to be consistent, and to keep testing and optimizing each system. Once you have one working for you, keep at it and gradually introduce another strategy. Eventually test all the 7 systems to find the best combination that works best for you. The internet is a huge marketplace with huge potential. Enjoy the ride.

To Your Success

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