#1: For all my boon-docking friends out there (and this really only applies to my sister circa 2009), here’s a nice little map detailing reviewed boondocking sites in the US:

Deadline:

Diverse:

Essence:

Focused:

Nimble:

Magazeen:

Work&Play:

1. Sign into your Facebook account – just your regular profile.

2. Go to your profile page – not your wall – and scroll all the way to very bottom.

3. Click on Create a Page

4. You’ll see this:

5. Select the type of page you’d like to create. For businesses I am promoting, I always choose ‘Company, Organization or Institution’ or ‘Brand or Product’

6. Now your page has been created. Let’s make it interesting!

7. On your new fan page, scroll to the very bottom and click on ‘Developers’

8. I don’t know the easy shortcut, so this is how I get to where I want to be:

Click on Build Apps for Facebook, then getting started tutorial, then Creating your App, then Developer App

Most likely, since you just came from your page, Facebook is going to make you switch to your personal profile. This is fine.

10. Click on the Create App button on the far right of the page

11. Create a name for your app – this doesn’t really mean anything since we’re not exactly creating a Facebook application. We just need some info. Name it the name of your site or business.

12. Copy the AppID and AppSecret codes to Notepad or somewhere where you can retrieve it for later. This is the only reason why we created this app.

13. Save Settings at the bottom of the page. Go back to regular Facebook – if you can’t figure out how, don’t worry – no one can. Just retype it in your browser.

14. Now you’re at your profile. At the top of the screen, on the right, you should see your name. You’ll also see a little arrow pointing down. Click on the arrow. You will now see the Fan Page you just created. Click on that.

15. Now we’re back at your fan page. Paste this link into your browser: https://apps.facebook.com/iframehost/

16. This is a neat little app on Facebook that lets you add iFrames to your Facebook fan page. Agree to everything it says and click on Add iFrame app to my page.

17. When you get back to your page, you should see some settings that can be configured. This is where you can choose cool things like displaying an email capture form or a nice picture that prompts visitors to like your page. You can add as many tabs as you want – say for showing special videos or allowing .pdf downloads. You’ll obviously need your own site to host the content on to display on Facebook. If you need help with this, just contact me at michelle@ilacreations.com and I’ll help!

Good Luck!

How do I work from home, and keep myself motivated?  How do I make myself get out of bed every day and actually work?   How do you make sure you have enough to pay your bills?  Don’t you feel like your work isn’t stable enough?

Well, my first answer for those questions are – if you are asking me, you aren’t ready for at-home work.  The second one is you also haven’t found the thing you are supposed to be doing yet either.

I am a firm believer that stability is overrated.  Stability makes you soft, and lazy.  Stability makes you feel entitled, and dulls your senses.

If you are out there every day upping your game, and challenging yourself with every move – you have no choice but to be sharp and ready for anything.

I have no problem getting out of bed in the morning for work.  I’m freaking on fire for what I do.  I have trouble putting it down.  In fact, it isn’t work.  And it definitely isn’t a job.  It’s my business.  And that’s what I may start saying to the doubters… It’s my business – so mind yours.

Do you feel that fire for your business?  If you do, there’s no stopping you.  Let your biz evolve as you do, and just keep moving.  If you start feeling “stable” you’ll know you’re heading in the wrong direction.

Now, as a senior executive with the search giant, Mayer is one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley. Her work at Google influences how hundreds of millions of people access information on the web and she plays a key role in shaping Google’s most important products, from the look and feel of its homepage to popular features like Google News and Gmail, as well as its more recent forays into location-based services.

One of the most iconic women in tech today, Mayer’s career path offers lessons for how to attract more women to a male-dominated field and undermines the assumption that to foster more female techies, it’s early or never. Mayer, who calls herself a “proud geek,” did not grow up obsessed with computers — she bought her first one in college — or with dreams of becoming the next Bill Gates. She wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon.

Mayer credits Stanford’s “exorbitant” tuition fees with turning her on to tech. Frustrated with how much more she was paying to take the same courses and memorize the same chemistry facts as her peers attending less expensive colleges in her home state, Wisconsin, Mayer switched to a major that would let her take advantage of courses and faculty only offered at Stanford: symbolic systems, a blend of psychology, linguistics, philosophy and computer science.

Even after the switch, working at Google was not an obvious pick for Mayer. “I like to overwhelm myself with choice,” she said. She received 14 job offers, and in an effort to choose between them, she created a matrix ranking how each position compared across a slew of characteristics, including location, salary, lifestyle index, career trajectory and predicted happiness on a scale of one to ten.

The Google Mayer was considering joining after graduation was a far cry from the powerhouse it is today. The company had just grown out of its office in a Menlo Park garage and was up against over a dozen more established search engines, such as AltaVista and Yahoo, that themselves had trouble eking meaningful revenues out of online queries. Then there were the workplace demographics to consider: there was not a single other female engineer — Mayer would become Google’s first — and she would be one of fewer than two dozen employees.

The other position Mayer was most seriously weighing was with McKinsey & Company, a prestigious consulting firm with a distinguished lineage and dozens of alumni who went on to become the CEOs of Fortune 500 firms. It had smart people, more women and a strong track record.

Unable to decide, Mayer recruited an economist she knew to help with her analyze her options. The night before she ultimately accepted Google’s offer, Mayer spent over four hours with her friend graphing and charting the pros and cons of the jobs. Frustrated, she eventually collapsed in tears. Her friend then gave her what she says is still the best advice she has ever received — advice that ultimately convinced her to pick the burgeoning search engine company over McKinsey.

“You’re approaching this all wrong,” she remembers him telling her. “You’re approaching this as though there’s one right answer and that’s just not what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing a bunch of really good choices and then there’s the one that you pick and that you commit to and that you make great. Go and sleep on it, and then just pick and commit to that.”

Mayer said that when she woke up the next morning, she had made a decision. “I wanted to work at Google because the smartest people were there,” she said. “And I wanted to work at Google because I felt utterly unprepared to work at a search engine.”

The odds for success Mayer gave Google were 100 times better than what she calculated for the other startups she was considering. But Mayer admits that she could hardly have predicted that the company, which today has over 1 billion users and a dominance that has attracted antitrust scrutiny from regulators, would have grown so far beyond search.

“I thought if we were successful, we’d be successful as a search engine,” said Mayer. “I had no idea we would come to mean so many different things to so many different people and that we would be doing such interesting work along so many lines of technology.”

She advises people pursuing careers in the high-tech industry, whether at startups or Fortune 500 firms, to consider four things when choosing between jobs: “Work with the smartest people you can find, do something you’re not ready to do, find an environment in which you’re very comfortable so you can find your voice, and work for someone who believes in you — because when they believe in you, they’ll invest in you.”

SOUND BYTES: Marissa Mayer on…Her indispensable gadget: Her phone

Her favorite app: Google Maps and Bejeweled Blitz

Her favorite account to follow on Twitter: @TechCrunch

Her “required reading” recommendation: Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things“

In her latest role as Google’s vice president of location and local services, Mayer has been pursuing what she describes as the next big idea in tech: developing new cellphone-based programs that deliver customized ads, directions, recommendations, and other information based on users’ locations. Yet even as Mayer and her employer deliver an increasing number of services designed to keep us glued to our phones, tablets, browsers and keyboards, Mayer acknowledges that these services and our gadgets may be negatively affecting how we engage with complex topics that require focused attention.

“All of this technology has allowed us to multitask to an incredibly deep degree. Normally that’s a good thing, but I do worry about what it means in terms of people’s ability to go really deep on a topic and understand it really thoroughly,” Mayer said. “I think it’s hard to deeply understand a concept when you have ten things going on and so many of those things operate in short blurts of information.”

Mayer also has concerns about the relatively low number of women working in tech. She estimates that just 15 to 17 percent of Silicon Valley engineers are women, who make up less than 20 percentof all engineering and computer science majors in the US.

Mayer blames the dearth of female programmers and Internet entrepreneurs in part on tech’s image problem. She argues that growing up, girls are offered a narrow stereotype of what it means to be a “geek” — something akin to the bespectacled loner who spends hours typing away at a screen. Attracting more women to the Silicon Valleys, Alleys and Roundabouts of the world requires doing away with those stereotypes and showing young women that techies don’t have to love video games. Mayer herself is no ordinary geek: she’s a former ballet dancer with a penchant for cupcakes and the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta.

“The number one most important thing we can do to increase the number of women in tech is to show a multiplicity of different role models,” Mayer said. “The stereotype of that very complete and rigid picture of what being a computer scientist means really hurts people’s understanding and ability to identify with the role and say, ‘Yes, this is something I can be in and want to be in.’”

Mayer is optimistic that sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google, as well as smartphones and the programs they run, will be a catalyst for changing the ratio in technical fields by clarifying the practical applications of computer science. Though she maintains that men and women in the industry face similar challenges, she allows that some women differ from men in that it’s important to them to understand how their careers will influence people’s daily lives

“Women, to some extent more than men, really want to see the application of what they do in people’s everyday lives,” she explained. “For a lot of women, they didn’t see how computer science touches people.”

As women become more familiar with technology, Mayer predicts they will become more curious about it, which in turn will attract more of them to computer science and engineering.

“One reason I think this will improve in coming years is that girls are experiencing a lot of computer science and a lot of technology on an everyday basis,” said Mayer. “When you use those things every day, you become curious in terms of how they were made. And that type of technology hasn’t touched us the way it does today for very long. I think it will create a curiosity and spur a lot more women into computer science and the technical fields.”

In chapter 8 of his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes his attempts to achieve “moral Perfection” by examining certain aspects of his character. When Franklin attended a Presbyterian sermon that focused on Philippians 4:8 (“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things.”), he was unsatisfied with the 5 virtues that the minister provided (“1. Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the publick worship. 4. Partaking of the Sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God’s ministers.“). He made his own. 12 of them.

1. Temperance Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. Silence Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. Order Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. Resolution Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. Frugality Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

6. Industry Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. Sincerity Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. Justice Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. Moderation Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. Cleanliness Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

11. Tranquility Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. Chastity Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

“My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances…”

13. Humility Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Franklin then made a booklet and dedicated a page to each virtue. Each page looked something like this:

+-----------------------------------------------+
|                  TEMPERANCE.                  |
|-----------------------------------------------|
|              EAT NOT TO DULNESS;              |
|            DRINK NOT TO ELEVATION.            |
|-----------------------------------------------|
|     |  S. |  M. |  T. |  W. |  T. |  F. |  S. |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  T. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  S. |  *  |  *  |     |  *  |     |  *  |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  O. |  ** |  *  |  *  |     |  *  |  *  |  *  |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  R. |     |     |  *  |     |     |  *  |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  F. |     |  *  |     |     |  *  |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  I. |     |     |  *  |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  S. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  J. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  M. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  C. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  T. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  C. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|  H. |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
+-----------------------------------------------+

Franklin devoted one week to each virtue, during which he would strive to rid the day of any offenses or bad habits related to that virtue, “leaving the other virtues to their ordinary chance.” Each evening, he would mark any offenses in the appropriate box, and Franklin hoped that the 13th week would leave him with a blank page, having already spent a week on each of the first 12 virtues.

In addition to these pages, the booklet contained several quotations that Franklin believed would help him break his habits:

“Here will I hold. If there’s a power above us (And that there is all nature cries aloud Thro’ all her works), He must delight in virtue; And that which he delights in must be happy.” - Joseph Addison, “Cato”

“O vitae Philosophia dux! O virtutum indagatrix expultrixque vitiorum! Unus dies, bene et ex praeceptis tuis actus, peccanti immortalitati est anteponendus.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” - Proverbs3:16-17

To assist himself with Order, Franklin created this daily schedule and placed it in the booklet:

The Morning – What good shall I do this day? 5am-9am: Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness! Contrive day’s business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast. 9am-12pm: Work

Noon 12pm-3pm: Read, or overlook my accounts, and dine. 3pm-6pm: Work

Evening – What good have I done today? 6pm-7pm: Put things in their places. 7pm-9pm: Supper. Music or diversion, or conversation. 9pm-1am: Examination of the day.

Night 1am-5am: Sleep.

Franklin saw his faults diminish as he performed the complete 13-week examination several times over the next few years. Business and voyages abroad began to interfere in his examinations, but he always kept the booklet with him.

All information and quotations were found in Franklin’s autobiography and all of the odd spellings are preserved from the original document.

It has long been my belief that the ability to create intent would define web monetization but I had no idea it would play out (and literally “play” out as in Zynga et al) the way it has. Certainly we are at the dawn of a new age where technology powers marketing in more powerful and relevant ways. Never has more intent been created. Never has intent been more monetized and never has the cost of not creating intent been higher.

I thought I would share this list I’ve been using for the past few years with creating search and display ads and landing pages. Feel free to add any intent triggers in the comments below.

Ten Intent Triggers for Digital Media

Motivating Action – The psychological condition of reward is not new to marketing strategy but it forms the backbone of creating intent and persuasion. Understanding it and using it appropriately can yield great rewards…or stickers and badges.

Cause and Effect – This is really helpful for people in discovery mode on the web. Think how intent can be created for a loan refinance business by having a savings calculator on their homepage. An offline example is the calorie burn rate calculator updated in real-time while you are on a treadmill. This trigger can be very helpful to push people through online forms/applications as well.

Observation – Watching something can create intent. Voyeuristic tendencies and desires have been leveraged by marketers well before P.T. Barnum’s first sideshow in 1835 and Facebook today. According to Nielsen 80% of social network behavior is voyeuristic. Also, the gating of this behavior (paywalls) can create intent as can the very behavior itself (think porn).

Visual Attractiveness – It is incredibly important to note that attractiveness takes many forms online. From the design aesthetic of forms to landing pages to full sites to images, we know from testing that visual presentation is a key to creating intent.

Reciprocity – Digital Media presents a bevy of opportunities to create intent in this form. It is a core strategy of creating intent in social networks. Personally, I had never done a LinkedIn recommendation until one was done for me and I felt a desire to return the favor. Reciprocity is a social norm found in every society ever studied.

Trust and Credibility – These are two factors that often turn interest into intent. Their power can range from the most important of factors of influence to the least depending on the timing and placement of these messages. In a strange twist of fate it’s where all the ROI from branding dollars takes place yet it’s the most vulnerable to customer empowerment driven by the social web.

Incentives – If you incent, you will intent. Coupons, loyalty rewards, closeouts, sales — these methodologies are tried and true intent creators. Email and affiliate marketing are two early examples of the technology shift that enabled offer marketing to gain power. Offers are by far the most successful way to create intent and encompass a number of underlying intent creation strategies. As technology advances I believe we will be able to use it to create intent in ways that incredibly more targeted, relevant and powerful than “Click to Get a Free iPhone.”

Disposition – An intention will also be more easily created if there is disposition that can be leveraged. This is the reason why some sites have higher conversions on the 15th and 30th of the month (payday).

Impulse – These triggers are in the context of a response or action in response to an intention. As every supermarket checkout person knows impulse is incredibly powerful for marketers. Digital is the perfect medium to create impulse because marketers can immediately deliver. On the web creating impulse is often a technology problem but that doesn’t mean it has to be thought of less strategically than other factors of motivation.

Competition – This takes many forms from keeping up with the Jones to the the Hashable leaderboard. It is obviously a key component of most social platforms as well as the online gaming and virtual currency spaces. Competition breeds virality. Competition motivates.

There are probably more psychological intent triggers than this list and certainly new executions of triggering are created everyday. An amazing place to learn more is the seminal book from 2002, Persuasive Technology.

What’s most important to understand with all these techniques is that to create intent our marketing must be emergent – meaning it must take people’s latent motivations and/or existing interest and deliver an ability to act. Intent triggers are an action suggestion or action tool — ideally both. Intent triggers can be implicit or explicit but they must be realtime.

With the growth of realtime content delivery and new platforms for measurement, testing and optimization we are just beginning to create the technology that will trigger intent and power web monetization in the coming years. Exciting and profitable times are ahead for much of digital media and that is important, especially for publishers. My finger is on the trigger.

via Jonathan Mendez’s Blog: Ten Intent Triggers for Digital Media.

1. Publish An Article Write a good article in your niche and e-mail bloggers in that niche to let them know. You’ll be surprised at how many may link to you. Just make sure your article is good, or you may get some bad press. (On the other hand, even bad press still ups your pagerank, unless they link with a nofollow tag. But really, who takes the time to do that?)
2. Make a Sig Link Make sure your signature has a link to your site, whether it’s your email sig, forum sig, or even just a chat profile. (This includes any posts you make in Yahoo! or Google groups.)
3. Post in Newsgroups Post in Yahoo! or Google groups. Just don’t get addicted to it, or you may never finish going through the rest of these suggestions.
4. Go Web 2.0 with Social Bookmarking Sites Submit your best pages on major social bookmarking sites like digg and stumbleupon. Just be aware that while social bookmarking sites tend to give high traffic, they usually don’t convert that well, so only submit content that you know is good enough to catch at least a few visitors onto your rss feed.
5. Be Active in the Blogosphere Comment on blogs! Most bloggers love to see new comments, and if you comment on their blog with a link back to your blog, they’ll be sure to return the favor. (If you’ve got a good eye for which blog topics might support a large audience, you may want to check the upcoming section in digg for blog posts that are about to receive a lot of traffic.)
6. Be In the Blogosphere That reminds me: start a blog. Having a blog for your site is a great way to train yourself to create new content on a regular basis, and you can later mine your old blog entries for ideas that you can turn into fully-fledged articles for your site. (Just remember not to duplicate your own content!)
7. Be Opinionated If you notice a blog entry or forum topic where the majority opinion seems to be wrong, be very opinionated on letting them know that you hold an opposite opinion. You may get a few links back saying that you’re wrong. (In fact, why not just hold the opposite opinion every time, even if they’re technically right? In the SEO world, any link back is a good link back.)
8. Answer a Question Answer some questions in your niche on Yahoo! Answers. Just keep in mind that answering a few questions in depth is much better than giving a lot of single paragraph answers. It’s also best to answer recent questions, since you have a better chance of being voted up that way.
9. Make a Creative 404 Page Make your 404 page really useful by including links to your most popular content. More than likely the user was looking for this content anyway, and, even if not, they may very well become interested in it by seeing a teaser line when they hit your 404 error page.
10. Tempt Fate with Opt-In Forms Consider trading links with a company in a similar industry that doesn’t compete with you. Better yet, if you can stomach it, experiment with the idea of trading the creation of a small opt-in form on each of your confirmation pages. That way anytime someone buys from this other company, the purchaser will have the option to sign up for your newsletter, or something else equally innocuous. The drawback being, of course, that you will have to submit your customers into dealing with the dreaded opt-in form on your confirmation page. You might consider minimizing the negative reaction by putting the opt-in form on the very final page, so nothing is lost if the user just closes the window at that point.
11. Review Products Do a review column in your blog where you review products or companies on a bi-weekly basis. If your review is positive, e-mail the company in question and ask to be featured in their press section. But don’t forget that having nothing but positive reviews is a big turn off for most readers, so mix it up a bit.
12. Publish Articles Compose articles in your niche and submit them to article directories. Just be sure to make the articles you submit top-notch; otherwise you’ll have info dispersed on other sites under your name with no way of correcting any errors in the article. And remember not to duplicate content!
13. Go Public with a Press Release Write a newsworthy press release and submit it to PRWeb. If it’s genuinely newsworthy, the release may get picked up all over the place.
14. When All Else Fails, Just Pay for Traffic Use payperclick services (like adwords and adcenter) to get traffic. But make sure the keywords you sign up for are worth the cost. Just because a keyword costs a lot doesn’t mean it’s a good value—and it similarly doesn’t mean anything if the keyword costs very little. Do a bit of research on which keywords are worthwhile before going the payperclick route. But once you’ve found the right keyword combinations, it can be a good source of supplemental incoming traffic.
15. Start an RSS Feed RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way to get subscribers to see new content on an ongoing basis. Once you have an RSS feed, subscribing is easy for web visitors, and generally gets a stronger sign up ratio than email subscriptions. Just make sure to advertise your feed in a good place, so it’s easy to subscribe to. (If you’re looking for a good syndication service, try Y! Pipes.)
16. Start a Mailing List While getting people to signup for an email newsletter is generally more difficult than getting them to subscribe to an RSS feed, the extra difficulty means that when you do get subscribers, they’re generally good targets for conversion. Just keep in mind that email newsletters have specific laws that pertain to them, and noncompliance can land you in deep trouble.
17. Include a Bookmark-This-Page Link Reminding your visitors to bookmark your page is a great way to make sure they come back in case they leave prematurely. Of course, if they’re anything like me, then they have a gazillion bookmarked sites—so make sure to make your bookmark stand out with a well written title and a good favicon.
18. Create a Great Favicon A good favicon image accomplishes so very much: it increases brand awareness, makes your site stand out from the crowd, and gives you that street cred that comes along with every well-made favicon file. Just don’t make it animated gif style—you may think it makes you stand out even more, but users have been known to delete a bookmark or close a tab solely because of an animated favicon. Just don’t do it.
19. Submit Your Site to Internet Directories Internet Directories are an excellent way to get high quality linkbacks with just a little investment of time. Thankfully, we here at ila creations recognize this, and so we’ve compiled a great list of sites to start with, each sorted by pagerank. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend concentrating on the free ones first.
20. Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories The great thing about blogs is that you can submit them for links both in site directories AND blog directories. Meaning you get twice the linkbacks! Unfortunately, this also means you’ll have to actually submit them twice as many times as your main site. Believe me when I say that it gets pretty tiring around the thirtieth submission.
21. Advertise on Craigslist If you haven’t heard of craigslist, then it’s time you got out from behind that rock you’ve been sleeping under since the twentieth century. You can publicize your site on craigslist for free—but it’s only worthwhile if you make your posts interesting enough to go viral. A well written craigslist ad consists of a catchy title, a funny and/or mock-serious body, and a well-keyworded link back to your site. But whatever you do, don’t spam with pointless ads, because you just won’t get a return that’s worth your time.
22. Use a Tell-a-Friend Script By including a ‘tell a friend’ link on your site, every visitor you get will potentially advertise your site to a few of their friends. And then each of those may in turn tell their friends, and so on and so forth. This is actually a pretty powerful tool, especially if you use software that follows up the note with a well designed marketing campaign.
23. Submit Your RSS to Feed Directories You thought I’d forget about this one, didn’t you? I guess I fooled you by making 21 and 22 on non-directory topics. In fact, now that I’m really thinking about it, number 4 should probably be about just submitting to whatever directory you see, for whatever reason.
24. Submit to Whatever Directory You See, For Whatever Reason In other words, if you sell widgets, make sure you’re listed in the widgets directory. And also the doodad directory, if you can link doodads to widgets in some believable manner in the short description you provide for your link. Remember: every link is a good link.
25. Teach a Class No, really. If you possess a higher education degree of any kind, you can probably find a part time position teaching a night class at your local community college. It won’t pay very well, but if you can invest in teaching on night a week, it will really help to get your name out in the local community. Colleges love to have teachers who run real businesses because the fact that you run a business at all is enough to legitimize you as an expert in whatever field you’re in. And since most of your students will be adults working in the business world that are interested in taking the class you’re qualified to teach, you will be making contacts left and right. Plus think of the resume building opportunity—when you’re trying to sell yourself to potential clients, it never hurts for them to conveniently notice that you’ve actually taught classes in the field they want to hire you for. You just can’t lose with this one.
26. Create a Cartoon Mascot Cartoon mascots can be great when they’re used in an appropriate setting. Cartoons attract all kinds of people (not just kids), and studies have shown that the eye tends to gravitate toward cartoon characters more often than simple logos. Of course, not everyone is agreed that that is a good thing; some people make the point that a residual background logo that doesn’t attract attention is more appropriate for your main website, since you’d really rather have readers checking out your content. But others argue that an eye-catching logo is essential to building brand, and more than makes up for the fact that it takes viewers eyes away from content temporarily. Plus, if your visitor happens to have a kid in the vicinity, the child may prevent the user from clicking away from your page too quickly. Of course, this effect will be minimal, but every bit helps, right?
27. Host a Game w/ Your Mascot Games drive traffic; that’s just a fact. You can actually get a pretty good game made with minimal investment by holding a contest for people to come up with the best game that includes your cartoon mascot. Just make sure to advertise the contest on a site where gaming programmers visit often, and you should get lots of entrants. Right now, flash turret defense games are all the rage, so you may want to try one of those, if it’s appropriate for your business. Oh, and don’t forget to submit your game to game directory sites when you’re finished.
28. Sell on eBay Selling on eBay not only gets you an additional avenue to hawk your wares, but also means you get lots of additional incoming links for linkback purposes. Of course, only your profile page will be a permanent page, but if you are able to consistently make sales via eBay as well, then keeping some extra links back to your site from there can also work really well for you. eBay is one of the sites that are spidered by google multiple times each day, so you can always be sure that your links will count toward your pagerank. (Not to mention the whole new audience you’ll reach via eBay!)
29. Use Facebook & MySpace Creating a MySpace and Facebook account can do good things for your business, but be careful. A badly run MySpace page can be a magnet for people to leave negative feedback, and experience has shown that the creation of a Facebook account is a permanent procedure that you really can’t ever take back. Nevertheless, if you can oversee these accounts to make sure they’re always a positive thing for your site, the linkback as well as traffic generation can be quite useful.
30. Create a Facebook App While we’re talking about social media sites, I can’t neglect the idea that creating a good facebook application can easily go viral. But I must stress that it MUST be well made. If you can manage it, you might be interested in noticing that you can run the application on your site as well. The best apps do something unique for the user and includes high levels of interactivity.
31. Use Business Cards Aggressively If you don’t have at least ten business cards in your wallet right this very second then you are seriously lacking in your marketing efforts. But if this is the case, don’t opine; instead, look at it as an opportunity, because you’ll be able to see dramatic returns just from getting well designed business cards made and passing them out anytime you go anywhere. And I don’t just mean at trade events; if you have a really good card made up, then handing out cards will turn from a chore to a conversation starter. And after all, that’s what you really need from a business card. Just don’t forget to put your website address on them.
32. Start an Affiliate Program I am always amazed at how many businesses go without an affiliate program. Really, it is completely beyond me as to why a business would think that using affiliates would ever be a bad thing. Just think of all the money you spend on advertising, and consider that you pay for ads whether or not anyone responds to them. The difference with affiliates is that you only pay for this kind of ad when you actually get a sale from it. Affiliate ‘advertising’ is quite literally the best advertising you can spend money on for your business. The real reason why most businesses haven’t caught on to the whole affiliate idea yet is not because the idea is flawed, but instead because affiliate technology has traditionally been overcomplicated and difficult to manage.
33. Cross-Promote Your Pages Cross-promotion can be very powerful, since most people who visit one part of your site will likely never see the other parts. By making sure that every page you run gives links to other pages that offer content a reader would likely be interested in, you will get high-conversion leads. After all, since they came to the page from another of your pages, they already trust you as a source, plus they’re directly interested in the page that was linked. The moral here is that targeted advertising is important.
34. Purchase Misspelled Domains If you have a few main competitors in your niche that are doing well, consider purchasing misspellings of their domain name and having it redirect to your site. This does not mean that you should pretend that you are that other company—that would be quite illegal. But it does mean that you’ll get hits from people who can’t quite spell rite. This technique is especially useful if you can grab the ‘.com’ version of a competitor’s ‘.net’ (or other) address. If you want to know which misspellings are the most common, you may want to check out the stats on how many google searches were made for certain misspellings, and use it as the basis for an educated guess on which misspellings were most common in people’s address bars.
35. Review a Book Or anything else for that matter. A well written Amazon review will be prominently placed on a moderately high pagerank site, and a strategically placed link back to your website can do wonders for you.
36. Advertise on Bulletin Board Sites Find boards where individuals who fit into your target market congregate. These are the perfect place to advertise your site, just make sure you aren’t violating the site’s spam policies. An especially effective technique is posting discount codes or special offers for the board members to use.
37. Donate time or resources Charities are a great way to help promote your site, simply provide them with services and they will be able to help you, with a mention in their mailer or a link on their site. This kind of promotion is invaluable.
38. Offer web applications Build small web tools for your customers, these applications will keep them coming back to your site. This content can also get you listed on indexes of web apps.
39. Develop mobile applications The advent of the iPhone and iPod touch have made developing applications for mobile platforms a booming business. You can bring in traffic by making apps specifically for mobile users, guaranteeing that traffic keeps comming back to use your product.
40. Partner with other sites Synergy in advertising is important, and by partnering with another site to offer your services in tandem, you can gain access to each other’s customer base, as well as benefiting from the buzz that comes with a partnership. These special deals can help put your product in front of new customers, virtually the best kind of advertising you can get.
41. Go Viral Viral marketing is popular for a reason, by comming up with clever ways to get your customers interested in your product you reap the benefit of free advertising. This means participating in contests that drive traffic, giving things away, and usually trying to interact with your customers, allowing them to participate.
42. Think Locally While the convenience of the web allows you to do business arround the world, your local chamber of commerce and other organizations can help drum up local business for your site. These relationships can be really helpful because it tends to also lead to networking with your peers in the area.
43. Update Regularly Using blogs and podcasts to drum of traffic only works if customers are subscribing, and that means regular updates. How often? You usually want to shoot for weekly podcasts and daily or as close to daily as possible for blogs. Each post doesn’t have to be long, but you need to be providing regular content, as that is what the typical subscriber is looking for.
44. Sell Clever Swag No matter what your business does, it likely will benefit from selling gear with your logo on it. The number of sites selling articles of clothing and other accessories has multiplied greatly, and you can now easily sell your own gear through their sites, with no work besides designing the logo on your end. Cafepress.com is one such example. By offering products with a clever tag line you can promote your site, make a little money, and benefit from free advertising anywhere that product is worn.
45. Hire a Marketing Specialist In the end, it sometimes takes a professional to take your site to the next level. As your company grows, marketing becomes more important, so you may want to hire someone with marketing knowhow to work solely on improving traffic, allowing you to improve your content. After all, your site has a lot more to it than just how you get visitors.
46. Publish to News Services There are a lot of sites that want content without generating it themselves, which means sites like ezinearticles.com can provide you with an avenue to provide your content to other sites and recieve links back in return.
47. Join a trade group Collaborate with people running sites in the same field, advertise with each other, and network to provide customers with better service. Trade groups provide a great opportunity to improve your site!
48. Offer special deals to your customers You can get great advertising out of your customers by giving them benefits for bringing in new customers. You can also bring in returning business by offering special discounts.
49. Optimize your site for search engines Search Engine Optimization or SEO has become one of the quickest and easiest ways to drive traffic to your site. Most web browsers are using search engines to find websites. If you focus on optimizing small things on your site, like using keywords and meta tags properly, you can notice a fast improvement in your rank on sites like Google and Yahoo!
50. Hire an SEO specialist Once you have exhausted your own knowledge of SEO, it may be necessary to hire a specialist who can advise you on how to proceed with your site’s search engine needs. They tend to have a greater knowledge of details that will help get your site higher.
51. Break a Record It may seem like a gimic, and it is, but breaking a world record of some kind is a great way to get your website traffic. News agencies will pick up a quirky story about a site going for an obscure record, and even if you fail you get the benefit of press.
52. Ask your customers Your customers know one thing, what they want, so get their feedback about what would bring them back. Customer feedback is guaranteed to give you ideas.
53. Look for niche markets Targeting small groups with dedicated members is a great way to increase your site’s traffic. Find a group you would like to market to, read other sites associated with them, then create content aimed at these users and promote it on their sites. This is a great way to expand as well.

In Conclusion… Hopefully these ideas have given you the impetus you need to get started on promoting your site. If you have a great idea that we don’t have listed here, leave a comment to let me know? If it’s useful and/or funny enough, it may just make it in. (With a link back to your site as compensation for contributing, to boot!)

I’ve done it myself. I actually started out with the idea that I shouldn’t have to spend any money at all to get to where I wanted to be online. Now I make most of my money from writing –- either for other people or for my own websites. I’ve got blogs that have content and Adsense ads on them that bring in an income quite steadily. I’ve also got advertisements and various affiliate schemes that I am a part of that bring in other income streams. Individually, these are reasonably small but they certainly add up once you take them altogether.

Can You Start An Internet Business With No Money Down?

Yes, you can certainly start your own online business without having to fork out any money. I began with no money down at all. I looked for writing job ads that I could reply to and I had a free PayPal account to receive monies for jobs completed. Whenever I joined a bidding site, I made sure that the membership was free. Some I used, some I didn’t –- but I never spent anything in those early days of starting out.

I have since branched out and invested some money into my internet business though. I run this with my partner and we agreed we’d get our own hosting and a couple of domain names to get started. As anyone else who has their own hosting set up will know, this can be amazingly cheap if you don’t need too many sites. The domains were cheap too.

But you don’t need to do this at all until you are prepared to go this route. Let’s say you want to make money with a blog by installing Adsense ads on it. Just sign up for a free Blogger.com account and get started that way. I’d recommend keeping copies of all your blog posts on your own computer though if you’re going to do this, just to be on the safe side.

The point is that you can indeed make money online with an online business without having to put any money down whatsoever. Sure, some people spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on various courses and items that they want to use to make their internet business work. But this is by no means a prerequisite, and it doesn’t mean that they are guaranteed to succeed either.

The secret is in knowing where your strengths lie and how to use them. By knowing what your strengths are, you can figure out how to make the most of the skills and abilities you have, in order to generate some money for yourself. I think my main advantage was that I wasn’t prepared to give up -– I wanted to do this full time and I couldn’t imagine ever being happy doing anything else. I didn’t want to invest loads of money in my internet business in the beginning, so I wrote and wrote and worked for various people and went from there. Eventually, I had a good solid writing business built up, and all without much investment from me –- except for time and skills I built up along the way.

And believe me, you could certainly do the same!

2. Freelancing Freelancing gives you the ultimate freedom when it comes to working from home. You ultimately control the hours and amount of work to be completed. Many people juggle their full time jobs with freelancing on the side. In fact, I’ve hired several freelancers to help me run my home business ventures! Many have started out by experimenting with this kind of work, and have ultimately found success and gratification. If you’re creative, then you’ve got a shot at doing this sort of thing since many freelancing jobs are in the creative field. Most people I know in this field are either writers, web designers and graphic artists. As I can personally attest, there’s a lot of work out there, and you just have to be willing to try it out. The pay may not be spectacular at first, but you can potentially grow your service over time. Give it a bit of time (say a year or two) and you may just be pleasantly surprised about how much you can make. You may even earn enough to quit your day job! Of course, this is not a given, but it’s a good possibility. Now, don’t think for one second that freelancing is confined to writing, designing or illustrating. For instance, I know some people who make a great paycheck as freelance photographers. Two friends actually got started by taking pictures for their kids’ ball teams by selling the pictures to the parents. If you have a camera and can take your files to Wal-Mart for professional developing, you can become a freelance photographer. You can also find online gigs on sites like Seed.com (an AOL company). I actually know a few folks who make a decent second income by engaging in mystery shopping. And finally, even my own spouse freelances full time: he’s a software architect who develops online games and runs his own digital camera site, among other things. The key to freelancing is to get into what you enjoy doing then turn this into a paying gig.

3. Consulting While many people use freelancing and consulting interchangeably, the truth is that there’s a difference, although there can be some overlap as well. The cool thing about consulting is that you are being paid for your knowledge. Look at it like this: a police officer usually has a full time job as a law enforcement officer during the day. This person could potentially start a business in providing freelance security. Now, if this individual didn’t want to commit to making time available as a freelance security guard, he could make money by becoming a security consultant. Instead of putting himself on the front line as a security guard or body guard, he could simply help the client design a security system based on his or her working knowledge of what criminals are thinking and how they take advantage of vulnerabilities. There are virtually no start up costs in becoming a consultant, with the exception of registering your business with your city/county of operation.

4. At Home Customer Service Sounds too good to be true? Well, it’s not. It seems as though more and more companies are hiring stay at home moms, disabled folks, and currently unemployed people to staff their virtual call centers all over the globe. Ever wanted to earn an hourly rate while working in your pink fuzzy bunny slippers? This is your chance. But here’s the downside to this one. Because this opportunity has been explored by several media outlets like Good Morning America, CNN and such, and the job situation has not yet fully recovered, the demand for this type of work has outstripped supply. But try to get on the waiting list and be patient. Having call center experience will definitely help your chances. A few legitimate businesses that hire at home customer service reps include LiveOps and Alpine Access. You need to have a quiet place (no TV, barking dogs, or screaming kids in the background), a landline phone and high speed internet access to be considered. Also, understand that you are being hired as a contractor. This means that you are responsible for all your taxes and you won’t have access to benefits like health insurance. You’ll have to get your own low cost health insurance plan.

5. Direct Marketing If you are a high energy, highly motivated person who loves to interact with people and have what it takes to sell in a tight economy, then AVON, Tupperware, Mary Kay or HerbaLife might be the place you want to go. I personally know two individuals who were able to give up their full time employment in order to sell Mary Kay products full time. As a matter of fact, they really didn’t have a choice — their Mary Kay business was doing so well, that they both had trouble keeping up with it. But, for every one success story I could tell you, there are probably five that don’t do that well. This is a business opportunity, not a job, and therefore, there’s a level of risk involved. You need to be prepared to put in a lot of sweat equity, pounding the ground and rustling up business in order to be successful here. Take note as well that there’s been some talk on this blog before about the multi level marketing field (or minefield!) and the issues they have, so be aware of what type of product you’re selling before jumping in. Make sure you’re comfortable with the business you’re participating in.

6. Online Stores, ECommerce & Other Sales Other people have found loads of success in selling things online. You can sell just about anything your heart desires. One of the easiest ways to break into sales is to do this in conjunction with direct marketing efforts. As mentioned, you can get involved with direct sellers like Avon, Tupperware, Pampered Chef, or Mary Kay. These are already well-recognized brands, which give you an edge over selling something from scratch. You can choose to sell online which would virtually eliminate your start up costs, except for website design, though there are several options for doing this for free as well. Selling online requires some knowledge of web marketing strategies, good social media skills and a go getter attitude. None of this stuff will sell itself. But, for those who are willing to put forth the effort, there is a lot that can be gained from this form of business. My advice here is to check out what each company has to offer and decide which products you would be most suited to selling. The key to successful selling is to believe in what you say and what you sell. If you believe, so will your customers. If you are offering a service instead of a product, you might want to add your profile to listings such as Angie’s List in order to gain some attention. In fact, you can try to sell through classifieds and help wanted listings that showcase products and services. Some other things you can sell are crafts that you create or that you source from somewhere, which you can then show off in an Etsy store. You can also do a lot of selling on auction sites such as eBay. This kind of thing is sky’s the limit!

Parting Thoughts Making money from the comfort of your own home while being your own boss sounds like a dream…and it can be done as long as you understand that you’re only going to get out of it what you put into it. Never sacrifice a good paying full time job for a dream until you have shown that you can make things work out, and you’re confident about sustaining your lifestyle this way. Never — under any circumstances — pay anyone any money to give you a job. Scams do abound, so be wary of paying up front for anything (unless you need to spend on those essentials that are required to start your business). Be smart. Protect your information and do your homework before engaging in any work from home opportunity. There ARE legitimate companies out there, but you just have to find them! Good Luck and happy hunting!