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When I am not blogging and connecting with amazing people through social media, I am working side by side my husband at Purple Key Marketing. Right now we are working with a few great clients and are having fun in the process!

Drop me a line if you would like to connect!

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My husband Todd and I decided to open our own marketing business. We are the proud owners of Purple Key Marketing and are very excited about it. This was the perfect time for us to pull together our expertise and do something together.

Here’s a little about our business and what we can do for business owners:

At Purple Key Marketing, we build customized marketing blueprints that show you how to dominate your marketplace and build customer loyalty while slashing your ongoing marketing costs.

Learn how Purple Key Marketing can:

1. Dominate your marketplace
2. Significantly increase your sales
3. Create raving fans out of your customers (this becomes your volunteer sales team)
4. Slash your ongoing marketing costs

That’s what we can and are doing for business in a nutshell. If you own a business or know of someone who does, give us a call at 303-495-3495 or email me at julie@mypurplekey.com. We can get together for 15 – 20 minutes (on the phone or in person) and chat about what you can do for you, as well as what you are looking for with your marketing efforts.

I will be around here more and plan on blogging about a little of everything – Denver happenings, my life as a work at home mom, marketing and blogging tips and who knows what else. I am looking forward to sharing a little bit of my life with you. And don’t be shy. Introduce yourself and let me know a little but about you.

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I have always been told and have always told people (my kids included!), that you should do what you love and you will succeed. I have tried so many different avenues online to try and make money. I have been successful and I have bombed big time. The ones I was successful at where the ones I enjoyed the most. Makes sense right?

My husband also shares the same passion about the internet, but he has different strengths than me. The online projects that we have done together, we have succeeded at. We compliment each other and work well together.

With that being said…we are starting a business that we are both pumped about! We have come up with a name, almost have our site up and running, ordered business cards and a few other advertising items and are hitting the ground running today. I don’t want to officially make the announcement of what it is, but I imagine some of you (especially those of you who know me) can guess what it’s about.

So stay tuned!

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• Their Number 1 Way book makes it sound a little too easy: Do not be fooled by the idea that you can build a site and have money coming in, even within 6 months like they say. Why? Because it is HARD and I mean HARD to get accepted by eBay these days. That’s what their whole system is modeled on and I can tell you from experience online for 6 years, it’s not that easy. Once you get in, that’s great, but you have to realize that you need to have a site up and running for awhile, with good numbers, before eBay will even look in your direction.

After saying that,  let me also say that I still think the book is an excellent “Make Money Online” book. I do believe it’s one of the best and that it explains their system really well. Just know that their model is built around eBay and that if you are not an affiliate with them right now, it takes some time and hard work to get your foot in the door.

• I did not like the BANS template system: I had problems from the get-go with their BANS template. I did do some digging through the forum to find a fix for one particular problem and felt like I was being sent on a wild goose chase. I have dealt with a lot of template building tools and this one just didn’t jive with me. Since I am so familiar with Wordpress, I decided to go that route and asked for my money back from BANS.
• Success was far and few between: After spending some time on the forum, I could see that the majority of people were frustrated from not having the success they wanted. Things either weren’t happening as fast as they wanted (which is a very common complaint when trying to make money online – people want that instant gratification!), they were getting booted by eBay or they had worked their butts off and just weren’t seeing the results they wanted. There were a few people who were seeing some good results, but that wasn’t the majority.

Needless to say, I am not using the BANS system and have moved on to other projects. If you decide to try out this system, do your research. I know there are people out there who have had success and love it. I just decided after taking a look at it, that it’s not going to work for me.

Feel free to ask me any questions if you are trying to find a way to break into this make money online world.

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I realized at one point, that I was spending all of my free time online. I stopped reading, stopped having people over for dinner, stopped getting involved in activities outside of my online world and felt like I stopped being human. When I started feeling like I didn’t want to ever leave the house, I knew something needed to change.

Like I said, you’ll see me write about balance a lot. I have a series of articles planned on the topic, but for now, let me ask you one question: Do you have a life outside of your online world?

I found this list of “20 Signs You’re Online Too Much” on a forum a couple of years ago. Check it out and see if you can relate:

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Now, please remember, I have been at this online thing for 6 years. I first started out building content sites online, so I know a thing or two. Well, at least I think I do. HA!

The creators of the ebook suggest you take one week to read through it first and soak it all in. I completely agree with them if you are a newbie. I did read through it all before I got started. It just didn’t take me a week.

I spent a few hours doing some keyword research (which is my least favorite thing to do!) and found my topic. I already had a broad idea of what my first site would be, but with their helpful step by step instructions, I narrowed it down to a niche.

After I had my topic nailed down, I bought my domain name!

Now, it was time to write. Since I already have a full time blogging position with b5media, I am doing the writing in my spare time. As of today, I have 5 articles written. What’s next? More writing! For me, the writing part is fun because it’s what I love to do. If you give me a topic to write about that I have some knowledge of, I get going and the words just flow.

My goal is to have my writing completed in the next two weeks and then I can go into the building phase. I LOVE the building phase. I guess you could say I am a total website geek because I love it so much. I even have a tee-shirt that says “I am a Geek” and I wear it proudly!

So that’s where I am at. One domain name and 5 articles. The future looks bright.

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John Chow says that Twitter Follower is one of the best methods to get more twitter followers and of course, make money online.

I signed up this morning and have, as of now, 168 more followers. Not bad. It’s fun to watch your numbers grow. I plan on keeping track of the results since signing up with Twitter Follower and seeing if the people I am following from the list, are even worth following.

There are 2 things I would change to Twitter Follower:

1. Pull their latest tweet

When I choose to follow someone, I like to look at their latest tweet. When you click on who’s following you on your twitter profile, you can see what their last tweet was. If their tweet was, for example, “Take a look at my naughty pictures”, I say “No thank you” and do not follow them back. Twitter porn is not my thing.  Which leads me to my next point.

2. Have a filter for the porn

When I say “have a filter for the porn” I mean there should be a separation between the people who want you to look at their naughty pictures, and those of us who don’t want to have anything to do with it. If triple x Heather follows me, I have to follow her back right? No thank you.

I suggest that when you register, you have to click if you are an adult twitter stream and if you want those shown in “the list”.

That’s just my two cents.

Have you signed up with Twitter Follower? Are you checking it out? Now it’s time for you to share your two cents with me.

Oh, and speaking of twitter, are you following me?

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I was reading JohnChow.com at the beginning of this week because I hadn’t been there in awhile and something jumped out at me.

It’s called The Number 1 Way to Make Money Online. At first I thought “Oh, great…another make money online scheme”, but I decided to take a look at it anyway. I am glad I did.

I am not going to go into detail regarding what the Number 1 Way to Make Money Online is, because I want you to go read about it. It’s basically taking me back to where I started this online adventure in the first place. It’s funny to look back on how successful I was at this and ask myself “Why in the world did I ever stop?”

I bought the ebook on Monday and already have 5 articles written. My goal is to be ready to start the building phase in about 2 weeks. I am not messing around with this! I’ll keep you updated on my new adventure and let you know how it’s going.

Let me know if you take a look at the ebook and what you think. Now, I have some writing to do!!

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When I first bought the domain name - Julie Anne Bonner - I turned it into a making money online blog. I made some good connections, did some blogger profiles (meaning breaking down how they were making their online money) and over all, just told you what and how I was doing it.

Then, that all changed. I can’t even tell you why I decided to remove all of those posts I did, but I can tell you it was one very, very stupid move on my part. I now look back and remember some of the things I wrote and it just makes me mad that they are gone Yes, I know I didn’t have to erase them to remove them from here. Don’t get me started. I think I decided to start fresh in a moment of insanity.

Then, I decided to turn it into a personal blog. You know, the kind were I upload pictures of my kids and tell you “We went to the pool today”. That lasted about a week, because really, Facebook is what I use to upload pictures and let people know what I am about to. Having a blog dedicated to that just wasn’t working out for me. Some people do it brilliantly and it’s interesting. Not so much for me.

And last, but not least, I decided to turn it into a blog about the home – everything from organizing tips, to home decor, to kid stuff and everything in between. As you have probably guessed already, that was too broad of a topic for me and yet again, it just wasn’t working.

So, where does that leave me know? Confused and dazed? Possibly a little, but I have a more clear direction of what a site that holds my name should really be about – me and what I am doing for a living. Yep, that’s right. I am almost going back to where I first started with this domain name.

You see, I have been working from home for the last 6 years (with a brief moment of insanity where I went to work for someone else) and I love it. I have people ask me ALL the time – how, what, where, when, why – they want to know::

• How I made money online in the past.
• How I am making money now.
• What my plans are for making money in the future.
• How I balance working from home with being a wife and mother of 3.

That’s what Julie Anne Bonner is going to answer for you. What I did, what I am doing, what my plans are for the future and how I juggle it all.

To say I am excited to FINALLY have a real clear picture of everything feels so good. This whole week has been full of epiphanies and “Aha” monents. I can’t go into details quite yet about what those epiphanies and aha moments were all about, but I will soon.

I have left one post up, that you’ll see below, from my old organizing blog and that’s my review of MenufortheWeek.com. I left it up because that is one way I juggle it all- with a meal plan in place.

Anyway, thaks for stopping by and I hope you will stick around. I love getting to know people from this huge thing we call the internet. I have made some amazing friendships and know that more are to come.

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I love to cook. There are days when I want to just shut off my computer and spend some quality time in the kitchen whipping up a 7 course meal.

I was raised by very good cooks, so I know my way around the kitchen. But, I have had major and I mean major problems with meal planning since I started working full-time from home.

When taking care of the home was my only job, I would sit down for hours and scour through recipe books, make out my menu for the week, clip coupons and then head to the store. I loved planning meals!

Well, times have changed. I now hate planning meals simply because I do not have the time, the patience or even the desire to spend hours on end looking through cookbooks and making out a grocery list. I want to spend my free time either actually cooking the meal or hanging out with family and friends.

Mealtime around my house has not been pretty lately. I’ll be honest. It has been a major stress for all of us. We started going to fast food places a lot more, or I was relying on frozen foods that I could pop into the oven. For someone who loves to cook, that just wasn’t cutting it for me. I have three growing kids and a wonderful husband who deserve and need a good meal.

I have now found a solution to my meal planning woes and I couldn’t be happier. It’s called Menu for the Week. Here’s a little excerpt from the website:

Menu For The Week The Answer to “What’s for dinner?”

The On-Time, On-Budget, Online Dinner Planner

As busy parents we are all too familiar with the mad dash to get dinner on the table. Menu For The Week makes it easy for you to cook and serve your family quick and healthy family meals every night.

What they do for you, is every week you are sent a menu and a grocery list. You know what ingredients to buy (which are already organized for you by grocery store section on the list), you know what meals to cook and you know that they won’t take you longer than 30 minutes.

I decided to try out the free menu and see how I liked it. Try before you buy. You can’t beat that. Not only was I in and out of the store quickly because of the organized grocery list, but I had a full refrigerator and pantry of meals to cook for the next week. The best thing about all of this is, I didn’t have to sit down and prepare it myself and that, to me, is worth pure gold in my busy life. I also happen to have 2 picky eaters. One of my kids will eat anything, but the other two…not so much. The meals that I cooked from Menu for the Week received a thumbs up from all three of my kids and my husband. Success!

In order to join, it’s only $25 for 6 months or $40 for a year. That’s pennies to me when I take into consideration what it is doing for my family and myself. To say I am thrilled with this program would be an understatement! I was asked how I found out about Menu for the Week and it was from Twitter. Follow Meal Planning Mom on Twitter and see how she can help you beat the daily struggle of ‘What’s for Dinner?’

Image Credit: sxc

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