Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as "pligg" sites. I'll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?

Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!

But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?

Build your own social pligg site!

Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don't like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.

The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious - you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.

A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.

As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse's mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.

TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB

TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?

And much to gain!

Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum

Let me start off by saying that affiliate marketing does have its advantages over selling your own products. The biggest advantage is that there is simply a whole lot less work for the affiliate marketer to do. For one thing, you don't have to go through the agonizing process of creating your own products. If you think it's easy to do that, it's not. I've been creating my own products for years and the amount of work is astronomical.

Aside from the time factor of creating your own products, there is the cost factor as well. Affiliate marketing doesn't cost anywhere near what it costs to create your own products. Some professional quality software products needed to create certain types of products cost hundreds of dollars. For example, take Photoshop which is the top product for creating ecovers. You're talking about $600 in cost. If you want to create video products, Camtasia is about $300. That's close to a grand for just two products.

And then of course there is knowledge. To create your own products, you have to have a solid handle on the subject matter. All my products are created from what's crammed into my head. That knowledge did not come overnight. Some of it took me years to accumulate. What you don't know, you have to go out and research. And let me tell you, research can be a painstaking process. One product I created took me almost one year to create because of the research required.

Okay, so you can see where affiliate marketing has its advantages. However, we haven't touched on the disadvantages and other pieces of info. Well, in my signature is a free report that you can pick up. It will go over all the pros and cons of affiliate marketing versus creating your own products. I am sure that by the time you're done reading it, you'll know whether or not affiliate marketing is right for you.

So you wanna be an affiliate marketer?

Then you better know what you're up against.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Why Affiliate Marketing?...Find Out HERE

The first thing is your price. I don't know how some marketers come up with the prices that they do, but a price that is either too low or too high isn't going to convert as well as a price that is just right. And this requires testing. However, the point is, your copywriter can only work with the price that you give him to work with. If you're determined to sell your widget for $47 when everybody else is selling theirs for $27, you're probably not going to make as many sales.

After price, there is your guarantee. Now I realize that if you're selling your product through Clickbank that you're stuck with their 60 day guarantee. However, if you can, by increasing your guarantee length, you can, in many cases, increase your conversions. I sometimes offer 6 month or even 1 year guarantees on my products. This is another thing that is beyond the copywriter's control. He can only work with the guarantee that you give him.

Then of course there are your bonuses, or lack thereof. Like it or not, most people expect to get bonuses when they buy something. That's just the nature of the beast. So if you don't offer any, that's going to hurt your conversions. But you can't just offer any old bonuses. You have to offer bonuses that are really worth something. Again, this is something that is out of the control of your copywriter.

Finally, there are your testimonials. Some people just don't know how to give them. They'll send you something that is so lame, it's not even worth putting in print. Well, guess what? Your copywriter can't do anything about these. You can't fudge testimonials. You have to print them just as you get them.

So before you start throwing stones at your copywriter, take a good look at these four items. They may be the REAL reason why your conversions are in the toilet.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Want to save $2,500 to $15,000 in copywriting costs? Want to write copy yourself that can command that kind of payday? Visit my site at http://www.bcipe.com/ and discover killer copywriting tips that have allowed me to write my own copy for years and earn myself a 6 figure a year income selling my own products.

PLR stands for Private Label Rights, but you already knew that. What you probably don't know is that PLR is one of the most misunderstood and misused items in Internet marketing today. That's right...people just don't know how to use it properly.

The reason is because they think they can just pull it out of the box as is, slap it up on their web site and sell it...WRONG! That is the worst way to use your PLR material.

See, people think that the value of PLR is that the writing has already been done for you. Again, WRONG. The real value of PLR is that the RESEARCH has been done for you. That's where the true worth comes in.

Think about it. You decide that you want to break into a new niche, say health. Maybe you want to write about acne. Well, you don't know anything about it, so what do you have to do? Well, for starters, you have to do research...tons of it.

What's tons?

You have to find out what acne is, what causes it, what the standard treatments are and so on. This research can take you days if not weeks. By the time you get around to actually creating your product, you've wasted one month of your life.

Why do I say wasted?

Because let's just say that you find a PLR product on acne where all of this information, all this research, has already been done for you. What is then left for YOU to do?

I'll tell you what...almost nothing.

Notice I said almost. See, you do have to rewrite the PLR slightly and make some other minor changes, but the time you will spend doing this is nothing next to the amount of time you would have had to spend doing the initial research.

This is basically the misunderstanding that people have about PLR. You can't just buy it and sell it. But by following a simple procedure, you can turn your PLR into absolute gold.

How so?

My friend John Rhodes purchased PLR for about $10 and turned around and made well over $200 from it in a very short time, simply by doing a few rewrites.

If you want more info on how to really turn your PLR into massive cash, check out John's new product PLR EXPLOITATION which may be the definitive product on such subject yet. John leaves nothing out. I know...I helped write it.

PLR gets a bad rap, but with this product, you can turn YOUR PLR into a gold mine too.

To YOUR PLR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
PLR EXPLOITATION

Unlike the John Chows of the world who don't know shit about making money online, other than the fact that they got lucky with a blog that doesn't actually teach anything, Griz really does know what he is talking about and he has no problem giving away his knowledge so others can follow his path to success.

I will tell you right now how you can get all the information you need to make money online for free. It comes from three bloggers who have made it their mission to expose all the lies and misconceptions about making money online and give you the honest truth about what you need to do and how to do it. And they don't charge a cent for the information.

These three bloggers are Grizzly Brears (mentioned above), Vic Franqui from Blogger Unleashed, and Courtney Tuttle from the Internet Marketing School.

I've been making money online as an internet marketer for the past 5 years (started in May of 2003). And I can say with 100% certainty that these guys know what they are talking about and the information they freely give away will work. I have learned more about making money online from those three in the past few months than I have in all my 5 years of internet marketing combined.

I have no idea why anyone would waste their time reading blogs like John Chow or any of the hundreds of other so called make money online blogs like his that don't actually teach anything at all. The only thing they do is suck your money from you and whore their blogs out as much as possible to gain as much profit as they can without giving anything in return.

If you DON'T want to make money online but you do want to GO BROKE trying, then I suggest you follow John Chow and any other blogger that has adopted his style.

But if you are serious about making money online and you are tired of not getting anywhere with everything you have tried then I recommend you follow the Griz, Vic, and Court schools of making money.

Let me say it again...

Forget John Chow - Follow Griz! (As well as Vic & Court)

Oh and since you are reading my blog, I suppose I should probably tell you to follow me as well. There really is a lot of great home based business information here too so don't forget to come back often. End of shameless plug!

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Work at Home Based Business.

Fortunately for me, I have dial up as well. Oh yes, I don't just rely on one way to get onto the Internet. You never know what's going to happen. So as a result, even though I'm working a little slower than usual, I am still able to get my daily chores done and even write this article, which you are reading now.

And this is just one of the many areas, Internet connection, where things can and do go wrong. So the question I put forth to you today is simple. Do you have a backup plan? If something goes wrong with a part of your business, do you have something to fall back on? And I'm not just talking about a temporary thing like an Internet connection going down. I'm talking about when a whole business model goes up in flames.

Think it can't happen? Remember all those made for Adsense sites that were all the craze about 2 years ago? Well, guess what? After Google cracked down on those crappy pages, people who were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month were suddenly out of business. So make no mistake about it...business models DO crumble.

So again I ask...do you have a backup plan? More to the point, are you diversified or do you have all your eggs in one basket? I have so many different product lines out there that I can't even keep track of them all. But at least I don't have to worry if one of them stops selling.

It's certainly something to think about.

If you're having trouble even thinking of one business to run, let alone several, you might want to sit down and think of other niches to get into besides the one you're stuck in. It doesn't take long to do niche research and get some ideas. As a matter of fact, I have a free book that will show you just how to do niche research and pick out a niche that has the potential to be profitable. You can find it in my signature.

Point is, you don't want to be waking up one day and find that your bread and butter has turned into dust.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Niche Research In Plain English

We do this naturally and we do it almost every single day. When you recommend a favourite work at home website, rave about a great marketing e-book, share a new business adventure or talk about a new product with such enthusiasm you are spreading the word. One friend will tell another and so on and so on. Word of mouth is still one of best free advertising tools today.

Signature advertising is by far the single easiest methods available. Use it in forums (where it is permitted) and emails. A signature file or sig file is a text of information about your business that may include your name, your email address, telephone number and other pertinent information. The link is automatically appended to outgoing emails and internet postings (forums). Signature advertising creates one way back links to your business or website and drives targeted traffic to your website.

Writing articles have proven time and time again how powerful and effective it really is. It drives traffic to your website creating more exposure, you gain more incoming links and you get higher ranking in search engines. The more traffic you receive the more profits you make, but it's only effective if you write quality articles rich in keywords and keyword phrases and provide useful information. Otherwise, no one will want to re-print them and your resource box like a signature file is null and pointless.

From community forums to social networking sites such as Ryze, Facebook, MySpace, Adland Pro etc. networking groups is taking its place among the other great free advertising options. It's a place to gather, meet, share, discuss, inform and learn about various businesses. The same can be said for networking marketing in the real world where you can meet in person at various venues.

There are many different avenues to explore and promote your business online or offline, but when it comes to free advertising these are the four methods that have proven to be on the top of the list for being successful and effective.

Article by: S McIntyre owns Work At Home Space, a free work at home resource offering telecommuting jobs, daily job leads, articles, business resources and other work at home related issues. You can also visit her blog Healthy Perspectives, featuring an array of health topics, nutrition, fitness and recipes for maintaining a healthy and well-balanced lifestyle.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I am taking a brief time out from my usual ramblings posts to fill you in on this Nitro Marketing thing that's going around. I am sure you're all wondering if it's the real deal.

Before I answer that, let me tell you what I think of most of the stuff in the "make money online" niche.

It's crap!

It has gotten to the point where I just don't buy anything anymore. Everything is either rehashed or just plain awful. That's why I busted my butt to create products that are actually of value. I was convinced that there was nothing out there worth spitting on.

Boy...was I wrong!

Nitro Marketing is the product I wish I had created if I had the time and the manpower. Yes, it took a team to put this thing together and it shows.

In a nutshell, Nitro Marketing is everything that took me a painful 4 years to learn...all wrapped up in one tidy package. It is step by step...just the way my products are...which is partially why I like it so much. For the new person, this is a blueprint that has to work IF you put in the time. I will get to more of that later.

The core of Nitro Marketing is the box principal. This is where they essentially give you a flowchart with all these boxes that need to be filled in order to fully take advantage of your business.

Now, the beauty of this is that you DON'T have to fill ALL the boxes. One person, with just 2 boxes filled, is generating an income of $20,000 a month. I only have a few boxes filled and my monthly income is about $10,000 a month.

Yes, I use this system. I have used it LONG before somebody actually came out with it and I can honestly say that it works.

But...

Let me tell you...I put in some long days. I work very hard to make my business succeed. Maybe if I took the time to fill in more of those boxes, I'd do better. I am going to start working on them. Finding out that somebody actually put all this together has inspired me to want to do even better myself.

I can honestly say, and I am putting my reputation on the line here, that I have never seen anything like the Nitro Marketing system in my 4 years of Internet marketing...and that includes my OWN products. Yeah, I'm damn jealous.

I strongly recommend that you at least go to the URL below and read as much as you can there. Sign up for the free reports. They give you more info for free than most ebooks charge you for.

Here are a couple of links so you can see the great videos and read their "dirty laundry" report.

http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/nitro_video.php

http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/nitro_report.php

Here is where you can check out the actual product.

http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/nitro.php

This is the real deal...and it's about time.

Sincerely,

Steven Wagenheim