My name is Connie Ragen Green, and I teach people just like you how to build an online business and use the technology needed to get started in this fun and lucrative field. The first year was difficult for me online, and I ended up spending about 10K and not making any money. I vowed that my students would not have to struggle like I did.

I have been making money online since 2006, and now make a comfortable mid 5 figure monthly income, primarily from my own programs and courses, information products, and affiliate marketing. I teach you how to write short reports and articles, as well as how to set up your own blog, set up mini-sites, use Twitter and Facebook, create info products, and write your own web sales copy, which is copywriting for the Internet.

My motto is: “If I can do it, YOU can do it!”

I took one of my students, Helen Raptoplous, to 10K a month as part of the 10K Laser Coaching program, and now I am doing it again in 2012 with student Geoff Hoff. This will help you to do the same thing in your online business, so please join us.

Follow me on Twitter!

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Are you challenging yourself to productivity online? You can always increase your productivity in your online business, and challenges may be helpful. I believe that we can all benefit from a good challenge. In fact, challenging yourself to improve can make a huge difference in your business and in your personal life.

In 2007 I challenged myself to write 100 articles in 100 days. I was able to reach this goal in only 78 days, and I’ve gone on to write 1,655 articles since that time. As I got into the habit of writing every day my skills improved and my productivity naturally increased.

In 2009 I hosted the first ever 30 Day Blogging Challenge. This was a huge milestone, and now many people have gone on to host similar challenges. What started out as my way of helping others to increase their blogging output turned into a global endeavor that still pleases me to watch.

Right now I’m part of a team to lose weight and improve my health in a Fitness Challenge. I work at this every single day and love seeing the results. Being a part of a team keeps everyone motivated and committed to success.

There is currently a List Building Challenge that will show you how to get more qualified people on
your list. You can join in and increase your numbers quickly.

I’m also currently on Day 6 of my own 21 Day Productivity Challenge. Join us and see just how much your productivity online will improve over the course of just a few weeks.

Challenges definitely make you stronger, so I encourage you to make them a part of your daily life to see what you can accomplish.

You can avoid making affiliate marketing mistakes by learning how to set up your marketing campaign for optimal results.

So maybe you’ve found a good affiliate program, one that pays you recurring commissions on a high-quality product or service. Now you’re just imagining all the money you’re going to make. But then something happens…

Or to state it more accurately, nothing happens. You can’t get traffic. And the little trickle of traffic you do get doesn’t seem to convert very well. And so all your dreams about raking in tons of recurring commissions get crushed.

So what’s the problem?

It could be a number of things, but here are the three biggest mistakes that affiliates make:

Mistake #1: Sending untargeted traffic.

If you’re using “home page swaps” to sell dog training, that’s untargeted traffic. If you’re using a vague pay-per-click keyword like “dog training” to sell a dog agility course, that’s untargeted traffic. Or if you’re sending weight loss offers to your online marketing list, then you’re tapping into an untargeted traffic source.

Point is, you’ll get a much higher browser-to-buyer conversion rate if you send laser-targeted traffic.

Example: So if you’re trying to sell memberships to a weight-loss site that’s designed for women, then find women who need to lose weight (brides-to-be, new moms, those who’ve experienced the “Freshman 15” or middle-aged spread, etc).

Mistake #2: Neglecting to presell the offer. You can’t just throw your affiliate link in front of your prospects and expect them to jump all over the offer. Instead, you need to tell them why they should buy it.

Once your prospects are “warmed up” and interested in the offer, then you can send them to the sales page to close the sale.

Mistake #3: Not building a relationship with prospects. Let me ask you something: Whose advice do you trust more, your friend’s or that of a stranger you just met on the street?

Naturally, you trust your friends more. And so do your prospects. That’s why you’ll get more sales if you build relationships with your prospects before you start selling to them. You can do this by publishing a blog or newsletter and interacting with your readers.

Now you know the mistakes. So let’s talk about the RIGHT way to send traffic to your affiliate offers…

Step #1: Create a Mailing List. For this step you’ll need:

• An autoresponder, such as through Aweber.

• A freebie to entice people to join your list, such as an ecourse, report or video. This freebie should be directly related to the affiliate offer you’re promoting.

• A squeeze page. This is a mini sales letter that gives your prospects all the reasons they should join your list.

Now your goal is send traffic to your squeeze page to build your list (rather than sending traffic directly to your affiliate offer).

You can do this in a variety of ways, including:

• Forum marketing (using signature files).

• Writing and submitting articles to article directories, like IdeaMarketers.com and Submit Your Article.

• Guest blogging (getting your articles published on other people’s blogs).

• Using social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

• Leveraging other peoples’ resources through joint ventures.

Step #2: Build Relationships With Your Subscribers. Now that you have your prospects on your list, you need to start building trust.

The best way to do this is to send them useful content. In other words, solve at least part of their problems… for free.

Step #3: Give Your Subscribers a Reason to Buy. The last step is for you to start telling your subscribers about the affiliate product or service you’re promoting. At a minimum, you need to tell them WHY they should buy. That is, what are the benefits of this product or service?

You can also sweeten the deal by tossing in your own bonus for those who purchase the offer through your link.

Example: If you’re selling memberships into a weight loss site, then offer a free low-calorie cookbook to everyone who joins.

And there you have it: The top three affiliate mistakes and the three easy steps to earning more money with recurring commission products.

Your next step is easy – get promoting!

Your marketing funnel is a part of doing business online. Creating and repurposing your content will help you to set this up in record time. I use a simple but effective five part process that I will explain in greater detail here.

You may already know that eBooks continue to grow in popularity on every niche topic imaginable. This is true around the world, where sales of eBooks and books for the Kindle and Nook have long since overtaken those of traditional books in paperback and hardcover. So, how can this help you to set up a marketing funnel that will build a profitable online business?

I recommend creating five pieces of content as your basic marketing funnel. These could include a short report, which I refer to as a Special Report; an e-course, broken up into five parts; an eBook on your specific niche topic; a book written for the Kindle and Nook; and a multiple lesson online course where you explain in greater detail how someone can benefit from what you know. I have done this in several areas over the past few years, earning a great income along the way and increasing my visibility and reputation as an expert in my field.

Start by making some notes about the information you wish to share with your target audience. This will give you some clarity about how you wish to present yourself to the world. Remember that you can become an expert in just about any area you are willing to take on and learn about extensively, so give this enough thought that you can feel good about what you will be doing for the next few years. You can always change your goals, but I recommend choosing an area where you will be comfortable for at least the next one to two years.

Write a few articles on your topic and submit them to the article directories. This enables you to receive almost immediate feedback on whether this topic is of interest to the marketplace. You can tell by how many times it has been viewed and how many times someone has clicked on the link in your resource box.

You will then want to expand those articles and include them in one document that will become your short report. Give it a title, add a border around each page, and include a call to action at the end so that your reader will know what to do next.

Now you can pull out five key points from this report and turn that into an e-course. Remember that each lesson need only be two or three paragraphs, and that you may include a link to one of your products, or to an affiliate product, at the end of each lesson.

The next step is to put together an eBook that encompasses all of your knowledge on your specific topic. Use your articles and short report as the foundation of this writing, and then expand upon each section until you have more content. Jim Edwards has a new training that will help you to write your eBook quickly. You can then publish your eBook on Amazon for the Kindle and on Barnes & Noble for the Nook.

The final part of your marketing funnel is a multiple part course that you can teach live. I do this several times each year, and each time I do I am able to reach a new audience of people who are interested in what I am doing. I also recruit affiliates to help me get the word out about what I am doing. These live courses then become home study trainings that can be sold for years to come.

This method of product creation gives you a funnel with a variety of price points. You start with free e-courses and short reports, move on to eBooks and books for Kindle and Nook, and then move up to online courses that can sell for hundreds of dollars. You can see how having an eBook just makes sense when it comes to creating niche-specific content to build a marketing funnel for your business.

You can learn more about affiliate marketing from ‘Super Affiliate’ Rosalind Gardner than from any other individual online today. Starting out in the late 1990s, Rosalind took her interest in online dating and turned it quickly into a half million dollar a year business she can run from home. Earning this type of income made it possible for her to travel the world, so now she runs this same business from wherever she happens to be that has a high-speed Internet connection.

All of her income is derived from affiliate marketing. That’s right, the only product she has, after more than ten years of working online, is the eBook she has written on How To Become A Super Affiliate. I recommend going through this 209 page eBook page by page to learn exactly how you can get started in a similar way. That’s what I did and the results have been nothing short of amazing.

Rosalind worked for years as an air traffic controller. Even though this is an excellent career, there are strict regulations on when you must retire. Also, it involves nights and weekends, and Rosalind made the decision to change careers while she was still in her thirties.

She started her dating blog, and then joined the affiliate programs from several online dating sites. Each time she mentioned one of them in a post, or included a banner on her site, she had the opportunity to earn income as an affiliate. This can really add up over time. Soon she was recommending other products and services, including clothing, jewelry, travel, and much more.

These affiliate programs enable entrepreneurs to create a business promoting other people’s businesses and bypass the entire product development and product testing phases. This is huge in that you can literally start earning money on the first day if you are willing to set up a blog and provide helpful information to those who are interested in your topic.

She would write a review of the various dating services so her visitors could quickly understand the main benefits, pitfalls, special features, and other information to see if the service met their needs. If it did, and they clicked through her affiliate link to sign up, Gardner made a commission.

She also recommends not spending much on website design. I have always followed this thinking as well, and use free or inexpensive themes to get my sites up and running quickly.

Gardner also offers a newsletter from her dating website in order to update her visitors when new dating services and products come available. People look forward to receiving her information because they are so passionate about the topic. She is building trust with her readers so they are more likely to make a purchase using her affiliate links.  Instead of just referring them over to the merchant’s site and losing them forever, Gardner captures them and makes them her customer first… and then hands them off to the merchant.This make much more sense.

So, what can you learn from Rosalind Gardner’s business model?

~ Keep it simple
~ You do not need your own product in order to get started
~ Affiliate marketing is profitable

I encourage you to read Rosalind’s Super Affiliate Handbook and get started today.

Advancing yourself and your business by becoming a published author has become simpler than ever. Now you can self-publish your writing on the Kindle and the Nook almost effortlessly. You can do so without a middle man, without a publisher, and essentially free, as neither Amazon or Barnes & Noble charge for publishing on their systems. They do take a cut, of course, of your sales, but in the end, you still end up with more of your money than you would if you had published the traditional route.

I have now done this a number of times, and you can take a look at all of my books at my Amazon author page. This has given me credibility, increased my visibility, and added an additional stream of residual online income.

It will take you some time to format your books properly for each system but both make it very easy to do so. Create your book with a word-processing software, then save as an .html file then simply upload the .html file with your cover art to both Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook, and you’re done. Wait for approval, and start promoting your book. Both Kindle’s Direct Publishing and the Nook’s Pubit system allow .html uploads so there is no reason to create the files in any other way than this because you can “kill two birds with one stone” by using this method.

The important part of the advent of publishing books is that once you’re on Amazon or Barnes & Noble you’re a legitimate author and can promote yourself as such. Being a published author has been a tried and true method of marketing for many types of businesses long before the arrival of eBooks or paperback books. In some circles, your published book is your calling card. Additionally, many online marketers published eBooks and promoted them on their websites, and via places like Clickbank, before the ability to publish so easily on these venues arose. Book publishing on Amazon and Barnes & Noble is now an exciting and lucrative addition to your publishing options.

It is very important not to take the ease at which you can publish, lightly. Create publications you’re proud of showing off and promoting, and you can’t go wrong. While you will have to charge less per book using these venues than when you sell and promote an eBook on your own website and sales pages, you will have a larger audience in which to promote your book and more eyes will see it. Use each system to their fullest advantage to promote your book, and use your book to promote your business. In this way, you will have the best of both worlds.

Consider hiring an editor to help you edit the book. Even if you’ve previously sold it on your own, via other means, ensure that mistakes are taken out, and information is updated. Next, don’t skimp on your cover art. If you have a cover now that is not high quality, it is important to change the cover by creating or outsourcing the creation of a killer cover. People do buy books based on their cover, and the information provided about what’s inside, so do all in your power to have not only good inside content, but also professionally created art and outside content.

I highly recommend Vaughan Davidson over at eBook Covers and Graphics. His work is excellent, and he has a quick turnaround time. Be sure to tell him I sent you. Best of success with this, and please let me know if you have any questions or comments on adding this lucrative business model to what you are working towards online.

Affiliate marketing can best be described as recommending what you use and love to others who would benefit from the same products and services, in return for a commission each time a sale is made. You can build an entire business using affiliate marketing as your business model, or simply add it to what you’re doing already for an additional stream of passive online revenue.

My new course on this topic is now available at Affiliate Marketing Secrets Explained, and is designed for newbies as well as intermediate Internet marketers.

I believe the best way to build a lucrative affiliate marketing business is by building a list from the very beginning. Start with a simple blog or one page website where people who are interested in your topic can go to find out more information. You will offer these visitors a free report or an audio recording where they can find out even more about you and your topic. When they enter their name and email address they will now have given you permission to include them in future mailings.

As soon as the first person joins your list, start writing to them to better connect with them and to find out more about what they want and need from you. This will be similar in any niche you choose, so jump right in and get started. Too many people make the mistake of waiting until they have a specific number of people on their list before starting to send emails. This is a huge mistake. Start the process immediately and you will build your business much more quickly.

Look for the products and services you have been willing to spend money on yourself when it comes to making affiliate offers to your list. Remember always that you are only recommending what you love, so look to see what you have purchased and benefitted from so that you can share these valuable resources with others. Write an article, post to your blog, and tell others about them on the social media sites. When others see that you are a raving fan they will be more likely to take you seriously when it comes to making an investment of their own.

As you get more experienced with this you’ll be able to be more picky when it comes to who and what you will promote. With so many great products and services now available online there will never be enough time to share them all with the people who come to you for a recommendation.

Take your job seriously and you will see that being an affiliate marketer is a worthwhile position. Be sure to check out my new affiliate marketing training course.

Did you know that you can make money as a freelance writer? Tens of thousands of people from around the world are already doing it, and I have a new training available on this topic at this site – How To Be A Freelance Writer.

Making money as a freelance writer is a rewarding way to build a business that can all be done from home. There are many ways to get started with this, including article writing, business blogging, and connecting with small businesses and corporations. You will find this to be a career that can last your entire lifetime, giving you the time and financial freedom to live the life you choose on your terms.

If you are already a writer you may not realize that this is a skill envied by many. Being able to sit down and write on a topic you are knowledgeable about and have an interest in is something that most of the adult population struggles with on a daily basis. This is where freelance writing can be so important; you do the writing to help out small businesses, corporations, charitable organizations, and solopreneurs. You can also turn your writing into short reports, eBooks, books for the Kindle, and paperback books.

Writing as a freelancer can be done throughout your lifetime, giving you a profitable skill that you can do from wherever you happen to be. As long as you don’t need to be inspired by specific routines or environment, you will be able to write from home, on vacation, or from most anywhere. There is almost no other field that allows for such flexibility in time and working conditions that also is so lucrative.

Make a list of the topics you will be able to write about. Write an article about each one of these topics and submit it to the article directories to see what kind of feedback you get from the readers. This will help to guide you as to which topics are most in demand and the results you can expect to achieve over time.

Start a blog that describes what you are doing and how you wish to do business with others. You may find that writing and selling your own writing online is the best way to freelance, or that taking on a limited number of clients to work with regularly over time is most appealing to you. Whatever you decide, you will know that you are in charge of the decisions you will make. This is certainly better than working for a company that dictates what you should be writing and what will be done with the content you create. Get started right away and see what the future holds for you as a freelance writer. This has changed my life in many ways, and earning passive and residual online income is a benefit as well.

Starting an Internet business can still be done, but the competition grows each and every day. If this is your goal you will want to take a proactive approach to be as productive as possible while learning as much as you can each day. Being an entrepreneur means that you do not give in to feelings of ‘just not feeling like it’. Do you know what I mean?

I work with students from a variety of backgrounds. It is quite common for someone to tell me they didn’t do any work on their business for a week or so because they just did not feel like it. This is not an attitude that will grow your business, or help you in any area of your life. Make a conscious decision to be successful and then only engage in activities that will ensure your success.

The idea is to adopt a winning attitude. You have heard the saying ‘Winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win’. It’s true. Just by making a commitment to succeed you will be part of the way there already.

I believe that being too comfortable has quite a lot to do with it. If your bills are paid up for the next month or longer you may feel like you deserve to take time off from your business. This can have
a devastating effect on your overall bottom line. Instead, challenge yourself to run your Internet business as though you had stockholders waiting to see the profit margin and the results of what you are accomplishing each month.

If you need help, seek it out from reputable and recommended resources. There are people who are ready and willing to help you with starting an Internet business and taking it to the next level in terms of bottom line results and profitability.

What about you? Are you simply too comfortable to succeed? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

My travels through the Central Coast region of California continue. Yesterday I visited both an ostrich ranch and a llama and alpaca farm. This area is also home to more than 50 wineries, and they are best known for their Pinot Noirs.

I visited the Fortino Winery today, which has been run by the same family for four generations.

When I stop along the way I always find a place to sit and read for an hour or so. I find this to be an excellent way to learn more, and to remind myself how fortunate I am to be living this ‘Laptop Lifestyle’.

On this trip I am rereading Your Portable Empire: How To Make Money Anywhere By Doing
What You Love by Pat O’Bryan. I first read this book when it came out in 2007, and it  really helped me to move forward in both my thinking and my actions.You can take a look at Pat’s author page and see what else he has written.

Your Portable Empire is the first book on that page, and if you scroll down you will see that I am a co-author on two of his more recent books. That’s right, in less than four years I went from reading Pat’s book to co-authoring books with him. Pat also wrote a foreword for my first book and is contributing a chapter to the book I am currently writing with Geoff Hoff.

It all begins with reading someone’s book, so I recommend that you take a look and then do your own search for the books you will read this month. I order two or three every month so I don’t have to pay extra foe shipping, and this ensures that I always have something new to read.

What are you reading? I’d love to hear which books and authors are changing your life.