While focusing is such an important aspect of being
successful and getting lots of work done, it can be a
double edged sword.

If you focus on an activity for a short period of time then
you may have not given that activity enough time to work.
If you work on an activity for too long then there’s a
chance you’re focusing your efforts on something that will
never work.

So how do you know where to focus?

I tend to only focus on one activity with all my efforts
and then let time take care of the rest.

I see a lot of people give up on something too quickly
before giving it a chance to work. I guess its
a habit that grows on people who work online. They want
instant gratification because they heard things
were supposed to be easy and quick online.

When compared to offline marketing, doing things online
does often time provide faster results but you
still have to give it time to work.

I’m referring to things that you may do on a regular basis
such as generating backlinks to a website or
waiting for your site to get indexed using a certain
method.

Back to the issue of focusing, I will try my hands at
different methods and then once I see some results, I will

focus my attention on which methods worked the best. You
should cast a wide net and then hone in on what works with
intense focus. Study what worked for that method and try to
improve on it.

You will never know for sure why something worked but if
you focus on it then you will get a better understanding of
the method.

This will get you a lot further than to randomly do one
thing here and one thing there with no way to actually
measure your success factors.

So the main point of this lesson is to try many things and
then focus on what works best. You can use other people’s
experience as a base for making your own discoveries.

Only once you focus on a single task will you be able to
analyze it and really know for sure how to make it work
best for you.

If people wanted to take advantage of these deep discounts, they have
to arrive at the store very earlier as quantities are limited and the demand
is sky high.

I remember one year when I was looking at the Black Friday ads for the
Best Buy Electronics retailer. I saw a nice and really cheap laptop for
under $400. I figured if I got there right at opening, I would be able
to pick up a super cheap laptop. To my surprise, when I got to the store
at opening, there was already a line wrapping around the inside of the store
with people waiting to pay for their items.

The computer that I wanted was already out of stock and they would
not offer any more at that price. Needless to say, I was very disappointed.

After I went home, I went online to research Black Friday and found out
that people had formed a line as early as 8:00 AM on Thanksgiving Day
to get into Best Buy. This was a common occurrence at most major retailers
on Black Friday.

It seems like a ridiculous idea when you initially learn about this fact but
if you think about it then it starts to make more sense.

Many people are willing to forego celebrating a treasured holiday and wait in
cold weather for 24-48 hours so that they can save hundreds of dollars on
their Christmas shopping. For them, that extra several hundred dollars is
equal to their weekly paycheck, a mortgage payment, or a car payment.

Knowing this fact, do you really think you could use Black Friday as a way
to buy products that you don’t need and sell them later for a steeper price?

You’re essentially taking away someone’s opportunity to save much needed
cash.

The holidays are about giving. It’s a bit ironic to think that after the
Thanksgiving holiday, you’re TAKING away someone’s chance to save
money on something that they need.

If you give a gift card to someone and then the store closes then the gift recipient will not be able to redeem their gift card and your gift is wasted.

I had a friend who was given a gift card to Sharper Image. You may know that Sharper Image filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year and thus ended up closing all their stores. Even before they closed their stores, my friend was not able to redeem his gift card. It’s a bit unfair since they already received the money but what can you do?

If you’re a die hard gift card giver then make sure the store you’re planning to buy from is not about to close any stores.

Here is a list of companies I got from Aol’s website which are facing some big financial troubles.

1.) Circuit City

Just filed for bankruptcy and closing 155 stores nationwide.

2.) RadioShack

Cash tight. Small player catering to low-end consumer base.

3.) Safeway

This large grocery chain operates on a very small profit margin.
Tight consumer spending could decrease that small margin to nothing.

4.) Tiffany and Company

Catering luxury consumers who are seeing layoffs in the financial sector.

5.) Apple

Imacs are expensive when compared to PCs. Most people have an iPod
already. Bad news!

6.) Tuesday Morning

Problems with inventory

Below is a list of stores which are closing. I found them on Craigslist so you
should do some fact checking on this list.

Ann Taylor closing 117 stores nationwide.
Eddie Bauer has already closed 27 shops
Cache closing 20 to 23 stores
Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, Catherine’s closing 150 stores
Talbots, J. Jill closing 22 underperforming stores
Gap Inc. closing 85 stores
Foot Locker to close 140 stores
Goodbye Levitz / BOMBAY - closed
Zale’s, Piercing Pagoda close 82 stores
Home Depot 15 store closings
CompUSA (CLOSED
Macy’s - 9 stores
Pep Boys - 33 stores
Ethan Allen Interiors close 12 stores
Wilsons, the Leather Experts - 158 stores
Sharper Image 94 store closings
KB Toys 356 stores that it is closing

I was working like normal on 1.4 year old HP Laptop when all of a sudden my screen flickers streaks of colored lines. I turn off the computer and then turn it back on only to find that the screen is totally black.

The lights powered on but I was not able to get a picture on the screen no matter how many times I restarted. I just couldn’t figure out what happened. I’ve owned 4 different laptops in my lifetime and none of them had any problems like this. I never spilled anything on my PC nor did I drop it. I treated it like a Queen.

I decided to bring the laptop into a local repair shop for them to have a look. They charged me $65 to take a look at it and find out what was wrong. A couple of days later they called me and told me some bad news. They said that my motherboard was fried. What?!!! How can that be?

It wouldn’t be worth the price to fix the PC since I could get a brand new one for the same price or even less. After regaining my composure from this shocking event, I decided that I must move on. Before thinking, I told the PC technician to recover my data as it was essential for my business.

They quoted me a price of $75 which seemed like a fair amount to trade for retrieving my data. Only later after doing some research online did I find out how much money I had wasted.

The next day, I went into the shop to pick up my PC. Can you believe they wanted another $75 to transfer the data they backed up onto my external hard drive? That what they charged, I figured I would get the whole thing. Luckily I had done my research and knew with a little confidence that I could simply recover the data myself.

I picked up my laptop, took out the hard drive, went to Fry’s Electronics and purchased an external hard drive enclosure for $10 measely bucks! All I had to do was stick the hard drive into the enclosure and connect the unit to desktop computer via a USB connection.

I then went into My Computer and there was a new drive that I could access and find all my data sitting right there! If I hadn’t done my research I would have been out $150.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that when I picked up the laptop from the repair shop, the technician asked me why I didn’t want to transfer the data to my external hard drive for $75. After I told him why, he wanted me to give him my non working laptop and he would drop the transfer fee.

To hell with YOU! was on my mind. I paid good money for this piece of equipment and I will not just give it to you so you can profit even more. I’m going to take my dead laptop and sell the parts myself on Craigslist.

OMG, these PC repair guys are just as bad as car mechanics and lawyers. It just irritates me to no end when I get overcharged for something that doesn’t require much work or time.

At least I have my data now safely stored away.

If you’ve ever searched for the long-tail keywords in any market, you
may have encountered phrases in which a majority of the first page
rankings belong to Web 2.0 and social networking sites.

It’s becoming common knowledge that the search engines love to
rank Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Propeller and many
others.

Here’s how you can benefit from this fact.

Perform a search for your long-tail keywords of choice. When you
find one of these keywords which rank on the first page, go to the
Web 2.0 site which is ranking and sign up for an account.

Now that you have an account at the site that is ranking for
your keyword, create a page on the site and use your keywords
when creating the name of the page.

Usually, the Web 2.0 sites will place your keywords in the url for
that specific page. Let’s look at Squidoo for example. When you
create a Squidoo lens, your page will look like this:

http://www.squidoo.com/your-long-tail-keyword-phrase

Let’s say however that your keyphrase is already taken
on the site. The site would not allow two people with the
same url so you would choose something similar. For example,
if someone has already used the key phrase with dashes in
between the words then you create a page without the dashes.

What will happen is that you will also rank below the page
that is already ranked. On Google, your page will be indented.
Google indents pages which belong to the same website but
have similar title tags. This method will generate some traffic
for you as you already know that the page has the ability to
rank well for that set of keywords.

Here’s a little tip that will boost your rankings even higher.

Many Web 2.0 sites have RSS feeds for your pages. Just take
these RSS feeds and submit them to various RSS feed directories.
This will generate backlinks to your pages and increase their
rankings.

Here is a small list of Web 2.0 sites which are very search
engine friendly. Look for these sites when using this strategy
for ranking your long-tail keyphrases:

Wordpress.com
Hubpages.com
Weebly.com
Propeller.com
Squidoo.com
Ezinearticles.com
Wetpaint.com

Searching for long-tail key phrases will uncover many more sites
which are search engine friendly.

By focusing your energy on just this one tactic, you can receive
some nice free traffic to your webpages.

In fact, there are some activities which necessitate being outsourced because you may not have the skills required.

What we’re trying to figure out is when to begin outsourcing.

If you begin outsourcing at the wrong time, it could hinder  your growth and cause more problems.

A lot of people make the mistake of waiting too long to outsource.

By waiting too long to outsource, you could lose the motivation to work on your business. If you have to do everything yourself, it gets pretty easy to become bored and complacent.

If you find yourself doing the same activities over and over again then you must figure a way to systematize your activities and then hand it over to a qualified freelancer.

By creating a system to optimize your work flow, you will reduce your outsourcing costs. An optimized method of doing things will speed up the production of your outsourced project. If you’re paying by the hour for a virtual assistant you could greatly reduce your costs.

Something else to consider before you outsource is your profit margin
and the value of your time.

While outsourcing can cut into your profits, it can greatly increase your productivity, allowing you to scale your business.

Let’s say that you can consistently make a profit of $200 while working on an activity for 4 hours. Let’s say that number is an average profit for 4 hours of work.

When calculated, you’re making $50 an hour. If you can pay someone to duplicate your process for under $50 an hour then you’re making a
profit.

Of course, when you’re first teaching your process to someone it will
take them some time to learn at first. Once they learn the process,
they can complete it faster and increase your profit margin.

Let’s recap what we’ve discussed thus far.

Before you begin outsourcing, you should optimize your work flow by creating a system that is duplicatable by someone who has little to no knowledge of your system.

You should also write down the amount you make per hour doing things yourself. This way you know how much to pay freelancers to take over your work.

By outsourcing at the right time, you will substantially increase your volume of work and not lose motivation in your business.

Here’s the link to the application which is free to install:
Visa Business Network Application

I tried advertising with Facebook before without success. My ads did not generate a high CTR so they were disabled after generating just a few clicks.

I think your first hurdle is to get a high enough CTR so that your ad not only sticks but your CPC will decrease.

You can generate a high CTR by having a relevant ad to the target market you’re trying to reach. FB allows you to target your ads via keywords and/or demographics.

Next is to make sure that your ad uses keywords which are relevant to the target market.

Third is to use an image which attracts attention but doesn’t scream advertisement.

From hearing other people’s experiences with FB advertising, I can tell you that they are very inconsistent in the way they approve ads. If your ads don’t get approved for whatever reason, try submitting it again as a different time.

Types of offers which work best with FB:

I have no experience with which offers best work with FB. Look through the CPA networks and find giveaways which pays per email or zip submit. Try financial aid offers, paid surveys, dating, acne.

Make sure to know your target audience and speak to them in your advertising. Remember that relevancy rules.

Now that I have the $100 in free credits, here’s what I’m going to try.

I am going to look at celebrity gossip sites and look at hot/controversial topics. Then I’m going to create a simple yes/no poll and advertise it on FB.

For example, I could ask something like: Is ‘x’ celebrity a good match for ‘x’ celebrity.
Vote yes or no. On the landing page, they would have a button for yes and one for no. Whichever they click on would be an affiliate link for a zip code submit offer.

On FB I will target people who are interested in the celebrity names.

On the ad title I would put for example: “Rihanna Controversial Poll?”
I would have a picture of Rihanna and text which says:
Is Rihanna a good match with Chris? Vote and win a MacBook Air Now!

Moving beyond FB advertising, you could use Google’s content network and place your advertising on celebrity related sites.

You can either create your polls by hand or use this software which I use:
Poll Factory

It’s very simple to use and you can create many high quality polls at once for split testing purposes.

I hope you take this idea and run with it. You may find another nice little income stream.

I was intrigued so I asked him how he was doing with it. He said that a few months ago he set up a website selling an ebook and now he’s making close to $3,000/k on autopilot.

Now I’m not going to tell you his niche of course, but it’s a niche that my friend is very familiar with. He created the product and webpage himself.

It’s a rather obscure niche also. My friend is generating traffic via free search engines (mostly Yahoo and MSN). All he did was create videos and posted them on YouTube.

His sales page is not your typical direct response salesletter with bullet points and such. His site does however have a video above the fold which does very well at converting visitors into buyers.

I’m telling you this story because I thought it was interesting how someone turned their hobby into a profitable business without really much thinking about it.

There are probably tons of people out there who create websites just for fun and are making nice sums of money. I think the key factor to their success is that they provide really good content. Everything else works itself out.

You probably have a passion but your passion may not be in a niche where people are buyers. If that’s your case, the best route is to find a hot niche, hire someone who is passionate in that niche to work for you. You pay them to do something that they already enjoy doing.

You can find these passionate people in forums. Did you know there’s a forum for just about everything online? My brother is a member of a fashion forum, a shoe forum, a photography forum and a computer overclocking forum. There’s even a forum for flashlight lovers, lol.

Go find these people in  the forums, strike up conversation with them and then hire them to create content for you.

1.) Promote Products as an Affiliate

This has to be one of the most common ways for people to start their internet marketing career. As an affiliate marketer you don’t need to create your own products or provide customer support.

The downside to this is that you will constantly need to look out for new opportunities to promote as conditions change. The affiliate program may fold over, you may not get paid for whatever reason.

I think the biggest drawback with promoting a product as an affiliate is that you will be building someone else’s business. Now if you were building a list however, then you can leverage that list to launch a competing offer to the affiliate product you’re promoting. If you’re sending traffic to an affiliate offer, then you should be able to gauge the conversion rate of the product. Just create your own product and offer affiliates a higher payout.

2.) Launch Your Very Own Product

Launching your own product requires more work but the efforts are multiplied by a great factor. Now you can set up your own affiliate program and recruit affiliates to generate sales for you. You don’t have to pay them until they make a sale so it’s free advertising.

Many people shy away from creating their own products because they don’t know what product to create or they’re afraid their product will not be good enough for the market.

Here’s an easy little way to generate a product idea.

Create simple little software and sell it for a low price. If it’s your first product then it’s ok to start small. You can leverage on the success of your first product to create bigger and better products.

To get ideas for software programs, just look at software that’s already in the marketplace. You want to look for simple software, not something overly fancy. Go to a software directory such as downloads.com and see which types of software are being downloaded and getting good reviews. That site will give you those stats.

Now go to a freelance programming site such as Rentacoder.com and post a project. Rentacoder and other similar sites work on a reverse bidding process where the lowest bidder may get the project. Be very detailed on your project specifications and make sure to only accept bids from someone with a good feedback.

Once you have the software created, list it on the free software directories found online. Downloads.com is just one of those types of directories.

3.) Build & Flip Websites

A website in the information age is a valuable asset that can be created and then sold to an investor. You don’t need to create flashy 100 page websites. Just create a 10 to 20 page website focused on a specific niche. Make sure that the content is of decent quality.

What you’re going to do is build the website, generate a little traffic and revenue for it and then sell it in a few months. Many baby boomers are looking to supplement their income and work from home. They want to go the easy route and just pick up an already proven and profitable website.

A general rule of thumb is that a website which generates about $5/day in income should be able to fetch you $1,000 when flipped. Here’s what I would do to get a brand new website to that income level.

I’m going to use Adsense as the monetization method simply because Adsense is the easiest monetization method. Just paste some code on your site and you’re ready to go. No need to write good sales copy or reviews.

You’re going to choose a niche in which there are high paying advertisers for Adsense. There are some niches which will pay over a buck per click on Adsense. The way to pick those niches is to target high cost products. Examples are finance niches, and medical niches. Plastic surgery would be something I would try.

Now create a website in that niche, place the Adsense on the site and then promote the site using article marketing. Create 5-10 articles and submit them to Ezinearticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, and personally contact other webmasters to have them syndicate your articles. These articles that you use for syndication should be of higher quality than the articles which you use for your site content because the articles should be good enough for people to distribute.

Make sure that you include Google Analytics code on your site so that you know which keywords are generating the traffic for the site. In a few months time, you will use the traffic stats as proof that the site generates decent traffic. You will be able to sell your site more easily.

4.) Domaining

This term is referred to when someone buys a domain and sells
just the domain to someone else for a profit. There is a group
of people successfully doing this up to today. You would think
that all the good domains have been taken already. That’s just not the case. Every day, domains expire and they’re grabbed up by investors. They use special tools to evaluate the value of a domain before investing.

I’ve dabbled in domaining here and there with a small amount of success. You must remember that the overall profits from selling your portfolio is what should be considered. Let’s say you sell a few domains for a loss. The domains that you sell for a profit should wipe out your losses and generate an overall profit for you.

Those are just some ways that you can make money using the internet. Of course they are not the only ways to generate profits online. Whatever route that you choose, the most important factor is to do a lot of things. Some things will work out and some won’t. The more actions you take, the more likely you will find something that may be a hit and send you on your way to financial freedom.

Feel free to comment and let others know what’s your preferred method of generating income online.

In this post I’m going to talk about one such tool, Firepow Blogging Software,because I believe it might just be a cut above the rest in terms of it’s flexibility of use, and overall effectiveness in accomplishing the three primary aims of blogging - creating a blog, managing it or maintaining it, and getting traffic to it.

It was hard to know where to start with this post because there are so many individual features of this software that could be mentioned.

To give you a brief overview of how it works…

Firepow is based on the Wordpres platform, and allows a user to install a fully customized and functioning wordpress blog with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you’ve used Wordpress before, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is it’s ability to be enhanced by third party plugins. You’ll also know that it’s not hard to get LOST in all the plugins and potential feature additions that CAN be made.

The first thing great about Firepow from my point of view is that they have done the plugin work for you. The best 50 or so plugins from around the web have been programmed into the software so as to be automatically installed when your blog is.

That’s a good feature, but it’s even better when you consider that while these plugins normally require manual fiddling to get installed, tweaks made to your theme CSS code and more - the software actually does that part for you too - so you click the button, and you have the function of that plugin added - VERY time saving!

The “Create” part of the process is also helped by the ability to create your own custom wordpress theme completely from scratch, with more functionality than we’ve seen from free theme generators EVER before - not to mention the ability to create your own categories from scratch, automatically create the perfect permalink
structure for SEO, and more.

Before even getting into the Wordpress panel of the site Firepow creates you’ve also got a site management tab where all your blogs can be managed from one place, an SEO tracking tool to monitor the search rankings of all your sites, and a task manager
that tells you what needs to be done to maintain your blog/s and when.

I dare say though that the best things happen once you’re actually IN the blog.

Here you have crazy abilities to make your post content better, easily being able to add relevant images, videos, or trackbacks (automatically building backlinks to your site) to your posts… and even that’s leaving alot out.

OR the crazy abilities to monitor your blogs success, like being able to split test the results of different posts, monitor your traffic through in depth reporting (utilizing Google analytics), monitoring your search spider activity, the popularity of your posts, the terms people are searching on your site, and more still.

I feel like I’m getting too salesy in this post to you but I can assure even with everything you’ve read here, I haven’t even really touched the surface of what’s going on inside this thing called Firepow - heck we didn’t even get to the promotional tools.

The best thing I can probably do is tell you go to look at the darn thing yourself:

http://www.garyhuynh.com/likes/firepow

Oh and I could also tell you that if your into blogging and you don’t, you’ll probably regret it big time.

I hope you’ve found the information here valuable, and don’t hesitate to leave your comments on Firepow here to share with others.