Online video is nothing new.  But not everyone knows how to effectively use video. 

• You can use video to get more traffic to your sites - Post humorous or entertaining videos on YouTube and display your site link.  The viral effect of a good video can launch your site’s traffic.’
• Create free video content for your website and incorporate some good keyword-rich article content on the same site.  Search engines will index your videos to improve your ranking.
• Turn your old articles and ebooks into videos and sell them on your site.  You can set up a membership site and provide new videos each month for a monthly subscription fee.  Use a membership script like AMember or DLGuard to protect your video downloads.
• Use videos to promote your own products or promote others’ products as an affiliate.  Provide some useful bit of content in your intro video, and give the link to your product at the end - or better yet, redirect to the product automatically at the end of the video.
• Use videos to encourage visitors to sign up to your mailiing list.  Fewer people want to give away their email addresses due to spam, so a creative and useful video can help to persuade them to trust you.
• Link to your videos and sites with video content from twitter.  But be sure the content you provide is actually useful.  if it’s obvious that you’re simply promoting a product for quick profits, you may just lose some followers.

There are numerous ways to use video content.  And if you’re not comfortable in front of the camera, you can create a PowerPoint presentation or a screen-capture tutorial video with Camtasia.  If you’re the creative type, you may also enjoy creating your own cartoons with a tool like Toon Boom Studio.  With the right approach, you could become the next YouTube celebrity and have all the traffic you can stand.

But if you can outsource some of the work to others - or better yet, automate it through the use of software, you can build your business to work without your direct involvement.  You can be the captain of your ship rather than a member of the crew.  This allows you to steer your business toward the goals you’ve set for yourself, and it allows you to create real wealth - and to help others do the same.

Social media sites allow you to interact with others and get the word out about your products and services.  It’s important to engage your visitors and to provide quality information that will help to position you as an expert on your chosen topic.  But you don’t want to spend all of your time at the keyboard interacting with visitors.  After all, you have a business to run.

Where it makes sense, you can automate a lot of the mundane aspects of social media interaction.  A perfect example of where automation makes sense is the Twitter follow process.  If someone follows you, and you want to reciprocate, you would normally send them a message to thank them for following.  And you’d click their follow link to add them to your list.  But that takes a lot of time when you’re usually going to respond with the same information for each follow.

To automate this process, there’s a great tool at TweetLater.com that is perfect for the task.  You can set up an automatic message to be sent to your followers, and you can automatically follow those that follow you.  You can also un-follow those that drop you.  This helps to keep your follow ratios in balance to stay within the Twitter terms of service. 

Your follow message should be something that sounds somewhat personal.  I get responses from a lot of users that include a link to one of their products.  That’s okay if you have lots of followers or already have an established reputation.  But if you’re just getting started and trying to build a following, you’ll probably do better to keep it to a simple “Thanks for the follow” type message.  This sounds more personal, so you’re less likely to have them drop you when receiving your reply. 

People are smarter than you think.  If they think you’re simply after their money, they’ll find someone else to provide the information they’re seeking.  But if you genuinely care to provide quality information while also getting compensated for the effort, you’ll be much more successful.

Examples:

• If you relied on Google AdSense income prior to 2006, you probably saw it all but dry up a couple of years ago due to changes in terms.
• If you rely on PPC advertising for most of your traffic, a change in Google’s terms can drive your costs beyond your break-even point.  This happened to a lot of site owners in the past year.
• If you rely on affiliate income from a single vendor, that vendor can change any of their affiliate terms and send you down the tubes in a split second.
• If you rely on income from the sale of a product or service, a bigger competitor with deeper pockets can enter your space and drive you out of business.

Any number of things can change to leave you scrambling to keep the lights on while you figure out which way to go.  The only surefire way to keep this from happening to you is to have income coming from several channels.  Get your traffic from organic and paid search as well as offline methods.  Set up affiliate programs to let others help you sell your own products, and promote products offered by multiple vendors.  Offer your services to other business owners for a premium and use that as an upsell behind your other product offerings.

You have to prepare before the storm hits so that you’re ready to go if or when it ever happens.  And if it never happens, at least you’ll be enjoying the benefits of multiple streams of income.  This doesn’t mean to jump around between opportunities.  You’ll only lose focus that way and never get anything accomplished.  But once you have one or more income streams running smoothly, you owe it to yourself to work on setting up 2-3 different cash-generating methods.

So the key to making real money online is to have a front-end product that’s attractive to a large number of visitors.  If you can produce a viral website that gets passed among friends, you can really profit.  The main thing is to have something unique and valuable to attract a large number of visitors.  From this, you can upsell the visitors to more profitable products and services.

If you capture the visitors’ email addresses or get them to sign up for your RSS feed or Twitter feeds, you can continue to offer them new products and services.  The first sale should never be the end of the line.  You should always have a pipeline of new product and service offerings for your visitors and subscribers.

You can make a little money online with your own product.  But if you’ll build sites that provide monthly income from subscribers, you can make much more in the long run.  In upcoming posts, I will go into much more detail about how to create viral campaigns and how to build sites to produce a continuous monthly income - so stay tuned.

But the talk about Twitter has been increasing in recent weeks, so I suppose I can’t resist any longer.  I have to join the “in” crowd and become a twittering fool.  Actually, I do see the tremendous benefits of Twitter clearly now.  Email marketing still has its place, but spam has really but a damper on it.  Blogs are great, too, but Twitter adds something a little more personal to the concept.  I can see that, with the right approach, Twitter could be used to make mountains of money online.

Just how could you make money with Twitter?  Maybe I’ll write a few posts to detail methods for using Twitter to make money online.  I certainly see the potential for it.  Once I put things in place myself to test my theories, I’ll report back to let you know how it all works.  For now, I can see that pulling together an audience of like-minded individuals with varying interests and ideas has more potential for profits than anything I’ve seen recently.  If you can build a solid following by providing good ideas and content, you’ll quickly establish a reputation in your niche.  You can then leverage this to sell your products or services, and your pool of potential customers is following you each step of the way.

It’s time to start Twittering…

But to just make some basic site changes that help to make your site stand apart from the rest of the crowd, there are a few quick things you can do:

1. Select one of the base templates.  Any template will do.  I usually select one that has the logo section centered on the screen, but you can choose any theme.

2. Create your own logo.  This is important because the basic template includes a blank gray logo with the name of your site in large text.  You want a good graphical logo.  But even if you’re not an artist, you can use the graphics software of your choice to create an image 968 pixels wide by 180 pixels high.  Even the Paint program that comes with Windows will allow you to create a jpeg image that will suffice.  I prefer PhotoShop, but I also use Paint Shop Pro and GIMP.  GIMP is open source, so it’s a good choice if you don’t want to shell out the cash for PhotoShop.

Now comes the fun part.  You get to create the logo.  And if you’re not an artist, you may want to get help with this part.  You want your design to look professional.

Once you have your logo image finished, save your file as logo.jpg.  You can easily upload the new logo to your website through the admin panel.  Click the “Template” button to go into the editor and click the “Upload Logo” link beside your selected template.  This will allow you to locate and upload the logo you saved.

3. Remove the title from the BANS template by clicking the header.php link beside your selected template. Don’t worry if you don’t know what you’re looking at.  You don’t have to for this. 

Just find the words <a href=”<?php print URL_PATH.”/”;?>”> <?php print SITENAME.”";?></a>.

Then delete that whole line.  Don’t worry, it won’t break anything.  That’s just code to print your site name and make it a clickable link.  Be sure to click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

4. Now you can customize the template even more by changing the style sheet.  To do this, click the styles.css link beside your selected template.  This will open up the style sheet file for editing.  Then you’ll want to open Notepad, select all of the text in the style sheet editor and paste it into the Notepad window.  This will preserve the original style sheet in case you make a change that you’d like to reverse.

Changing Colors

Now look for lines that include the word “color.”  The number value beside the “color: ” tag is a hexadecimal value that indicates the RGB (red-green-blue) value to be used for a particular part of the website. 

You can use your graphics program to choose a color and get the RGB value.  This is the easiest way to get the number to use for a particular color.

The number is actually the combination of three values - one for red, one for green, and one for blue.  So, if you see a value like #000000, this is black.  The first two 0’s are the red value, the next two are the green value, and the final two are the blue value.  They’re all 0, which means red, green, and blue are all turned off.

But the numbers are hexadecimal (base 16), so they don’t range from 0-9 like you’re used to.  They range from 0-16.  And since we don’t have digits to represent value greater than 9, we use the first several letters of the alphabet instead.  So, A = 10, B = 11, C = 12, … F = 16.

Since all 0’s is black, it makes sense that white would be the exact opposite - all values turned on.  And since F = 16, the value for white is #FFFFFF.

If you want red, you can use #FF0000.  Green is #00FF00.  And blue is #0000FF.

You can vary the values of each to get different shades.  And combinations of red, green, and blue will give you just about any color you can imagine. 

Changing Borders and Fonts

You can also change the borders and fonts of any section of the site.  Just find the corresponding tag in the style sheet and change it to the value of your choice.  After making a change, click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page to save your change.  Then click the “View Store” link at the top of the page to see your latest changes.

Advanced Changes

You can make many more advanced design changes by altering the style sheet.  If you learn the rules of CSS, you can learn how to move parts of the design around to completely alter the site layout.  The sky’s the limit when it comes to the ways to customize a BANS template.  I’ve seen many unique designs that in no way resemble the original BANS templates.  Making these types of changes will help your niche store website stand apart from the crowd.

And of all the ways you could possibly make money online, I think the fastest and easiest way to go from zero to profitability as quickly as possible would be to start a niche store.  This is especially true throughout the holiday season.  I’ve operated several of them for well over a year, and they continue to provide a nice monthly income.  Although they’re fairly easy to set up for someone with a little computer knowledge, they can be tricky for newcomers. The niche store site provides some good reference material to help you get started, but feel free to ask me a question if you get stuck.

I’ve learned some interesting ways to create sites that attract visitors and keep them coming back.  And I continually look for ways to add value to my sites beyond just the products that are available to purchase.  This is very important because anyone can set up these niche stores and compete with you.  You have to find a way to stand out from the crowd.  And you have to know how to get the visitors to your store in the first place.

That’s why from now until the end of the year, I’m going to be offering lots of tips and tricks for getting the most from your online niche store. There are several store scripts out there, so you don’t necessarily have to go with the one I recommend.  In fact, I’ll cover a couple of the others as well.  But I happen to have my preference simply because I think it’s the easiest to set up and maintain.

Go ahead and subscribe to my online niche store blog to be sure to get every tip as I post them.  It’s time for the holidays, and you’ll want to be ready for making some good holiday cash.

Here are a couple of earlier posts that may be helpful as you begin to build your new store:

Choosing a good web host 

Getting content for your niche store

Reasons for starting an online business

Finding good niche keywords

Getting traffic to your online store

That’s seems to be all we hear and see these days. 

The stock market’s down, age-old banks and insurance companies are dropping like flies, our retirement accounts are being decimated, we’re piling up so much debt that our grandchildrens’ grandchildren will still be paying it back, and on and on…

But did you know that many millionaires were made during the Great Depression of the early 30’s?  Most of these were the result of having plenty of liquid cash to invest in undervalued assets.  That’s the absolute best way to profit from hard times.  When times are tough, cash is king.  Because so many are already deep in debt or simply can’t borrow enough to keep afloat, those with cash to spend will find real bargains.

But what if you fall somewhere on the other side?  What if you’re in debt, barely paying the bills each month, or out of work?  How can you possibly find a silver lining to the dark cloud of the current economic environment?

What I would suggest is that you first stop thinking of the current situation as “bad” or “hopeless.”  I’ve heard these terms used a lot lately by friends and family, and thinking like this will only make things worse. 

Instead, try to think like an entrepreneur…

People still have money, and they’re still spending it.  I promise you this will not change.  Even if we were to enter a period far worse than the Great Depression (and this isn’t likely), people would still be spending money.  Granted, the items they buy might change, but the money will be flowing somewhere.  So you really just have to keep an eye on where the money is going and try to get in on the action.

One thing to watch for is mass panic. 

Gas stations are running out of fuel because of panic, banks have lost a lot of capital due to panic, retirement accounts are being depleted because of panic, and the list goes on.  The global economic system is based, in large part, on the perception of the masses.  When everyone feels good about things, they invest and spend.  When they don’t feel so good, they save and pay down debts.  And when they get really scared, they cash out their retirement accounts and stuff cash under their mattresses.  They’ll even start to sell off assets just to have cash on hand.

The media plays a huge role in this these days.  So watch the news.  When the news reporter says that it’s time to panic, get ready to buy assets at rock-bottom prices.  And when the President says this himself, you can bet that the wealthy are laughing all the way to the bank.

Just as businesses everywhere are “going green” to make a buck off of the new environmental movement, you can profit from the panic that results during tough economic conditions.  You can make money just by offering encouragement to those going through difficulties.  They’ll pay you to offer them hope in their darkest hour.  You can make even more by lighting a fire under them and pointing them toward the exit.  Show people how to make extra money in these “tough times” and they’ll invest in what you have to offer.

And here are a few ideas for you to profit online:

Offer free advice on weathering the tough economy. 

Provide tools for calculating debt repayment. 

Include links to affiliate programs geared to debt reduction. 

Include articles on investing in gold and other precious metals and place Google ads on the page for a little extra income.

Include articles on positive thinking, and run ads.  Or give away an encouraging ebook in exchange for an email address.  Then follow up with more encouragement with an occassional promotion for a niche-appropriate product or service.

There are many, many ways to profit even in the worst of times.  As long as you keep your head - even if you’re struggling financially yourself, you can make it through.  And with the right approach, you will actually end up in a better position on the other side as a result.

Most are Doomed to Failure

Most people that get started will make it through the early stages. They’ll invest a few hundreds bucks in courses, books, and seminars. They might even try the water by throwing up a website. But that’s when the rubber really meets the road, and things start to get interesting. At that point, 99 out of 100 will throw up their hands and say to themselves that it’s impossible. (Note: Thinking something is impossible is a good way to make yourself feel better about giving up on your dreams.)

The Brave Press On

But there are a few that have enough sticktoitiveness to stay the course. Those brave souls will likely face the scrutiny of their peers. They have to listen to the naysayers that will gladly tell them it can’t be done. They have to give up their get-rich-quick fantasies and get their hands dirty in the real world. They’ll have to brave the rushing current of change that occurs on the internet. To stay afloat, they’ll have to learn how to embrace change - and maybe even learn to anticipate it.

Anything is Possible

The benefits of operating an online business are well worth the investment of time and resources.  The ability to work from anywhere there’s an internet connection, a global market for your goods or services, and the ability to automate much of your day to day operations are just a few things that make doing business online so great.

The main thing to remember is that there is great potential to earn money online for anyone willing to acquire the skills necessary.  And in those areas where you may be weak, you can always find a partner or hire others to assist you.

Although I do use tried and true SEO strategies to get organic traffic, I’ve found that PPC traffic converts better for some reason.  I can spend weeks optimizing my sites to get them ranked for some decent-performing keywords, only to find that the majority of visitors coming from the search engines are just browsers.  I can send a fraction of the traffic to my sites using AdWords ads to get the same results.  It takes far less time and effort, and it allows me to focus more on building better content.

Anyway, I recently began optimizing one of my campaigns based on some knowledge I gained from a new StomperNet video on PPC ads.  I was able to improve my click-through rates dramatically using their strategies, and I was excited about the results.  But the excitement was a bit short-lived.

You see, I have my Analytics account tied to my AdWords campaigns.  I like to be able to track the performance of my campaigns down to the specific ads and keywords I’m using.  Using the StomperNet ideas, I was able to add a new ad that got a whopping 60% click-through rate. 

After seeing the results, I moved on to take care of other business.  I came back later to find that Google had doubled the minimum cost per click on my account and set my account to inactive until I raised my bids.  I was alarmed, and I waded through my campaign settings looking for an answer.  But the answer was only to be found in my Analytics account…

After clicking over to Analytics, I went to my AdWords campaign and clicked down to what I thought was my best performing ad.  Sure enough, the bounce rate for that ad was over 50%.  So, although the ad attracted lots of clicks and had relevant keywords for my site content, it wasn’t attracting customers - only curious clickers.  So, Google had done me a big favor by increasing my minimum cost per click.  They were actually saving me a lot of money.

After removing the offending ad, I soon saw my cost drop back to previous levels and all was well again.  I’ll continue to create new ads and research new keywords, but I’ll be sure to keep a close eye on the results in my Analytics account.  Some may call it the Google-slap, but I now prefer to think of it as a way to quickly learn how to improve the results of your PPC campaigns.