Popups to the rescue! A popup is a smaller window that appears on a page where you convince a visitor to opt-in to your list so you can contact them later.

Action PopUp is a very cool script that can appear when a visitor
is about to leave your site or when they enter your site. The popup is unblockable since it uses HTML layers instead of actual pop-up windows.

A lightbox effect dims the screen behind the popup to prevent visitors from being distracted by what you have underneath. They fill in that info, the popup disappears, and Action Action PopUp submits that info to your autoresponder in the background while your prospect continues to read the sales message.

You can use any autoresponder you want with Action PopUp.

Action PopUp has a built-in sales letter personalizer. After they fill in their first name in the Action PopUp, the sales letter will change to match that first name. If the visitor typed “Steven” as their first name in the opt-in box, then hit submit, the opt-in form would invisibly submit the information to your newsletter, close the popup, and suddenly the sales page would say “Steven” wherever you’ve put the special code on your page.

Action PopUp can work as a WordPress plugin so you can add popups to your blogs with just a few clicks.

Best of all, this tool comes bundled with two other complementary tools!

Action Opt-In allows you to use your existing opt-in form on your site and makes it disappear after people subscribe.

Under normal circumstances, placing an opt-in form on a sales page is a definite no-no in Internet Marketing. When a visitor is about to buy, and they decide to sign up to your list instead, they are taken to a “thank you for signing up” page where they can’t order. You just lost a sale!

With Action Opt-In, once your prospect has filled out the subscription form, it vanishes and they can keep reading the current page.

Action Opt-In remembers if your visitors have already subscribed to your list and will hide the subscription box on repeat visits so they won’t be bothered again and again.

Action Opt-in can also work as a Wordpress plugin.

The second bundled tool is Action Comments, a Wordpress plugin. When someone fills in the comment form on your blog, they type in their first name and e-mail address. So why not ask these already-interested people if they’d like to subscribe to your mailing list?

You can pitch your newsletter to commenters using either a checkbox or a popup dialog box.

You can see all three of these tools working here at my site, and it’s true – my opt-ins have increased since I started using these scripts!

All three tools are very easy to install and the developer provides PDF installation guides for each. They’re particularly easy to install as Wordpress plugins. But if you’re interested in using one or more of them and would like help installing and configuring them, I’d be happy to help you with them.

Learn more about Action PopUp, Action Opt-in, and Action Comments here.

If you are writing articles or posts, learn all the ways you can leverage them to build your business.

And if you’re not regularly writing now, maybe seeing how much each can do for your business will motivate you to get started!

Join me to discover all the ways your writing can grow your business. I’ll share specific techniques, sites, tools, and plugins to make the process quick and effective.

If you can’t make the live call, a recording will be available for you to listen to afterward.

Whether your site is a simple brochure site, a blog site, a content-rich site, or an e-commerce site selling products, you need these elements for your site to best enhance your business. This is true no matter what type of business you have.

Join me to learn whether your site is covering all the bases. I’ll show you examples of sites that do it well and sites that fall short.

If you can’t make the live call, a recording will be available for you to listen to afterward.

For example, one stream of income was paid teleclasses. So, I asked myself how many participants at what price I needed to attract each month to make the amount of income I wanted for this income stream. I did this for each of the five streams to make it very clear what I needed to accomplish to earn the monthly income I wanted.

By breaking down each stream this way, I could make sure the subsequent, more detailed plans I made would support the number of clients, registrants, customers, etc. I required for each area of my business.

Now I had to get down to the nitty-gritty. I knew I needed to make more detailed plans I could execute each month, week, and day that, if executed diligently, would lead to the results I wanted.

I designed a weekly schedule that included activities in each of the 6 areas – income streams and list building – every week. As I did this, I realized that I couldn’t actually do everything every week, so I chose the activities that were the most essential to achieving my goals and those that were leveraged – helpful for more than one project – to do each week. I then divided the remaining activities between two weeks.

So, my plan has an A Week and B Week. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday’s activities are the same each week, while Wednesday and Friday are different between the two weeks. Saturday and Sunday are reserved for catching up on email, reading various blogs, and reading or listening to learning materials.

The key to coming up with these weekly plans is to make sure that over the course of every two week period, I’m actively making progress on all six of my projects. When you do this correctly, that’s the main benefit of having these plans.

The other benefit is that you know exactly what you need to do each week, and when you’ve done enough. One of the pitfalls of working for ourselves is that it’s tough sometimes to know if you’ve done enough. After all, there’s always more you could be doing. So when can you feel comfortable quitting work for the day or week? This plan makes that a lot clearer.

Of course, your weekly plan might work out differently than mine. You might be able to work on all of your income streams and list building every week. Or you might require 3 weeks to cover everything at least once. I urge you not to let too many weeks go by without working on one of your projects, though. You’ll lose momentum and have a harder time making your monthly income projections if you don’t make steady progress toward each goal.

Once I created these weekly plans, I wrote them up in a document as checklists. Each one has space for the date at the top and check boxes next to each day’s activities. As each item is accomplished each week, I check off the box for that item. I find this very satisfying!

I put together a binder with a tab for four weeks. I printed out two A Week Checklists and two B Week Checklists and put one in each tab. I use a small Post-It note on each tab to indicate which calendar week it’s for. When the first week is complete, I remove its contents, move the tab to the back and add a fresh Week Checklist and Post-It to that section.

The next step is to create detailed checklists for each activity on the weekly checklists.

But there’s one major area that needs to be included in my plan – and in your plan – before we do that: list building. By list building, I mean adding people to your email list so they get an email notification each time you post an entry to your blog, as well as occasional announcements and promotions. That’s how I communicate with my list. You might send an e-zine to your list instead.

While list building is not a stream of income itself, it is a project that deserves the same level of attention as any stream of income. As more interested people join your list, it becomes much easier for you to fill your events with participants and make more money selling products.

For example, if 3% of your list typically responds to an offer and your list has 100 people on it, you’ll get 3 customers for a particular offer. However, if your list has 1,000 people on it and you have the same response rate, you’ll get 30 customers. And if your list has 10,000 people on it, well…

Now we’re talking!

All your streams of income will have a much better chance of getting larger as your list grows larger. Remember, these are people who have chosen to receive information from you, so they’re likely to be good prospects for the services and products you offer.

The large internet marketers understand this concept all too well and are constantly working on growing their lists. For those of us who aren’t so flush (yet!), it’s tempting to focus solely on what will bring in money now. I know I’ve frequently fallen into this short term thinking.

It’s a big mistake.

Of course, we need to make enough to pay our current bills, but if we don’t put some energy into building our lists, we’ll be stuck on the rung we’re on now forever! The way to leverage our time and make more money with every service and product we offer is to get more customers for each offer. And, as we’ve seen above, this becomes easier as our list gets bigger.

For those of you who’ve been doing business online for a while, you’re familiar with the mantra, “Build your list.” You hear it everywhere online. What’s not always so clear is exactly how to do that. We’ll get to that, but for now, let’s just agree that building our lists is going to get equal footing with each of our other income streams. That means when we drill down to create more detailed plans, list building will be a major area we want to focus on every single week.

How much attention do you give to growing your list? What’s the best way you’ve found to add people to your list? Leave a comment and share what works for you.

I’m sure you received many emails at the beginning of the year, as I did, expounding on the virtues of establishing goals for your business this year. I, as usual, chose not to go through the exercise at that time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in setting goals. I just don’t think we should reserve the process for January 1st.

And it’s that word – process – that we need to focus on. It’s not just about setting goals, but about following up with more details about how we plan to accomplish them. It’s this lack of additional planning that causes New Year’s Resolutions and other goal-setting exercises to fail.

For the last few months, my business, my mindset, and my finances have been changing. And I’ve spent time in denial, distracting myself, confused, paralyzed, as well as working very hard. In my own way, I was processing the changes. (I wouldn’t mind finding a more efficient way to do this!) I finally found my way out of the fog last week and starting some serious business planning.

First, I clarified how much income I wanted each month. Then, I decided what streams of income I would continue, create, or enhance to achieve that income. I used a few guidelines here. First, I couldn’t have too many streams. It just becomes unmanageable to split my time and attention between too many “departments”. I chose five streams for now since several of them are new and will require a lot of attention to get going. As these streams become more established, I can choose to add new streams if I wish.

Each stream of income needed to involve a product or service that I knew I would enjoy providing. There’s nothing harder than trying to start up a line of business when you just hate what you’re doing. Why try to force it? There are so many ways you can earn money, and this is how you’re going to spend a great deal of your time, so make it something you enjoy.

The next guideline was to be realistic about how much I could really make with a stream within the next few months. I didn’t want to start with totally unrealistic estimates for these streams of income because if I did, I would certainly fail in making the income I needed each month. That would mess up my finances, but even more importantly, it would doom me to failure right from the start. This is a key problem we often have with goal-setting. When we make our goals too lofty, we’re almost guaranteed to fail and of course, that’s pretty discouraging. We might decide that setting goals is pointless and we lose our motivation to keep moving forward. As I execute my plan and the income from each stream meets my goals, I can always adjust my target income for a stream upward.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Duh. I know to do this. Is this the first time Peggy has ever done this?” The answer is “No.” I do know this and have done it many times over the years. I’m going over it again now for two reasons,

First, I want to emphasize that we need to do this over and over again through the years of our businesses. And not necessarily just at the beginning of the year. If we’re working a plan and getting the results we want, great. But if we’re feeling at all off course, going back to this exercise can help us refocus on where we want to being spending our time and energy. And even if we are getting the results we want, we will want to readjust our plan – raising income targets, adding additional streams – periodically.

The second reason for discussing these goals is to move on to what comes next. Far too often, I’ve set these goals but not continued the planning far enough or detailed enough for the level of successful results I wanted and could have had. I’ve resolved (“resolved,” get it? ) to do better this time, which means drilling down into each stream and creating plans that make it simple for me to know what I need to do each week and each day to achieve my goals.

So in the weeks to come, I’m going to share more about my planning process, hoping to inspire you to make yours as effective as possible. You’ll also be hearing more about the new products and services I’m going to be offering, so stay tuned!

Do you have a business plan for this year? How do you stay on track? I’d love to hear what works for you, so share what’s working – or not – in a comment below.

First, let’s look at who can benefit from offering a teleclass.

Who Should Offer Teleclasses?

Teachers and Trainers: Reach a much wider audience without the hassles of managing a live event.

Consultants: Establish yourself as an expert with people you otherwise might not meet.

Service Professionals: Get paid to promote your services and create a lower price point for those who can’t afford you one on one.

Information Marketers: Learn how to easily create new products whenever you wish – with less work than you ever dreamed!

Small Business Owners: If you sell products, teach people why they need them and how to use them to maximize your product sales.

Hobbyists: If you are passionate about something, whether it’s fishing or stamp collecting, you can share your expertise – or that of others – and get paid for it!

You probably saw yourself somewhere on that list. But specifically, what’s in it for you to offer teleclasses?

What Results Can You Expect From Offering Teleclasses?

• You’ll know how to make money quickly anytime you want to.
• You’ll have one or more completed products. This is a terrific way to write that book!
• You’ll create more sales for your other products/services.
• You’ll have a larger list.
• You’ll gain recognition as an expert in your field.

That sounds pretty good!

Remember that teleclass program I mentioned earlier? It’s called the Success With Teleclasses Live Program and it starts Tuesday at noon Eastern, so this is your last chance to join us and add teleclass income – current and future – to your revenue stream. Register here!

If you haven’t decided to offer teleclasses, why not? Maybe for one of these reasons:

“I don’t see how teleclasses fit into my business.”
If you want to build your list, make money quickly, add a mid-priced product to your portfolio, create a product easily, OR be seen as an expert in your field, then you want to offer teleclasses. They will help you achieve every one of these results.

“I don’t have a big enough list to market teleclasses to.”

Good news! Several marketing techniques make use of OTHER peoples’ lists, so you can succeed with teleclasses without your own list.

“I don’t believe I can attract enough people to register.”

I know at least 12 different ways to attract registrants to your teleseminar program, so you CAN fill a class.

“I don’t have any content to offer.”

Well, I’m not sure I believe that, but there’s a simple way to offer teleclasses where you don’t have to know anything at all about the content.

“I don’t have time to set everything up and create products at the end.”

Well, here’s a big one for many people. Setting up your class can be so simple that it won’t take any time at all. And, if you wish, you can inexpensively hire someone else (like me!) to set up the registration process for you. Once you’ve completed your first teleclass program, all the hard work for creating the products is already done.

“I don’t think I can lead teleclasses well.”

Perhaps you’re concerned about the “performance” aspect of leading your own teleclasses. Don’t be! There are numerous formats for teleclasses and some of them have other people providing nearly all the content and doing most of the talking.

“It’s too technically difficult for me.”

Very little of the process of offering your own teleclasses and creating products from them is technical. An obvious solution for the small bit of technical that is required is to hire me to help you set up your registrations and put together your product packages at the end. The rest of the process is well within your abilities.

Now you have no excuses for not creating your own teleclass program. If you’d like to learn a step-by-step method for designing, promoting, leading, and packaging your own teleclass program, check out my new Success With Teleclasses Live Program.

The early bird pricing goes away at the end of the day Tuesday, so don’t delay – register now!

During the last few months when the economy has been troubled and we’ve all been concerned about our finances, I’ve been thinking about what I can offer to help. I realized that for many people, teleclasses (also known as teleseminars) can be a great solution to make money now and later.

Why You Should Offer Teleclasses

1. A teleclass program is easy and fast to setup. The cost of hosting or participating in a teleseminar is extremely low compared to other methods of training or promoting a business. It can be very inexpensive to setup and record your program. And it’s not hard – even technophobes can do it!
2. Offering a paid teleclass program is a fast way to make money. You can go from initial concept to accepting registrations in a matter of days, or even hours!
3. It sets you up as expert. Whether you’re sharing your own knowledge, or leveraging that of others, people will see you as the person to go to for the type of information in your program.
4. You can easily create one or more passive products from your live event. Once you’ve prepared and offered your teleclass program, you’ll have what you need to quickly create a set of products you can market.
5. You can actually promote other products/services while getting paid. You can weave references to other products – yours or ones you’re affiliated with – into your classes. You can deliver a ton of valuable content and still subtly point people to other products you want them to buy.
6. Offering teleclasses leverages your time. If you compare how much you can make with a client one on one versus how much you can make per hour during a teleclass, you’ll be amazed.
7. You don’t need your own list to be successful. It can be tough to make money online if you don’t have a large list of your own. But there are lots of ways to promote your teleclass, and several of them leverage others’ lists.
8. Teleseminars are available for anyone in the world to take. Unlike workshops or speaking engagements, teleclasses are not constrained by geography. Anyone anywhere with access to a phone can attend your program.
9. There’s no travel, room rental, or dressing up as for live events. The convenience of attending a program over the phone or internet can’t be beat, both for you and your participants. I’m usually in sweats and a T-shirt when I’m on a call, as a leader or a participant. (Don’t tell anyone!)

When I remembered how terrific teleclasses can be for quick as well as long-term income, I decided to create my own teleclass program – on offering teleclasses! If you’d like to learn more about offering teleclasses yourself, check out my program at www.successwithteleclasses.com. Even if you’ve offered teleclasses in the past, I’ll bet you’ll discover ways to make more money than you have before.

I’m not planning to offer this material in a live program again, and it starts in just a few weeks, so if you’re at all intrigued, I encourage you to learn more about how you can make money with teleclasses at www.successwithteleclasses.com.

I almost forgot! There’s an early bird special good until March 31st, so make sure you register by then.

This concern is amplified by the increasing number of tools available to create alternate versions of your articles so the same one won’t be posted everywhere.

The Truth

The truth is, though, that you won’t be penalized for having identical articles around the web. The “duplicate content penalty” refers to duplicate content within your site. Even then, you’re unlikely to have a problem unless you’re trying to game the search spiders. Search engine penalties are reserved for sites trying to trick the search engines and very few average sites ever experience such a penalty.

What will be the effect on your Google search results if you have the same article posted to 30 different articles directories? Well, all the sites may not show up in the search results.

Remember what Google’s goal is: to return to searchers as many of the most relevant sites related to the search term they entered as it can. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to return 30 pages with the exact same article! So Google will filter out some of the duplicate pages from the search results.

Should You Be Concerned?

But that’s OK! As long as one of your article pages shows up fairly high in the rankings for the search term, the searcher may well see it and click to your article. And in many cases, there will be multiple links to versions of your articles.

Remember too, that even the sites with your article that get filtered from showing up in the search engine results are still contributing to the list of links pointing back to your site. You still get credit for that with the search engines even if they choose not to display that site in the search engine results.

And, of course, humans who browse or search directly at these sites can still find and read your article and click through to your site.

A Strategy to Consider…

There is one strategy you may wish to adopt if you publish your articles on your own site as well as elsewhere on the web. You may wish to publish on your site first and wait just a bit to publish to the other sites. The search engines will give some extra priority to the site that they believe is the original site for the content, and that site is more likely to show up in search engine results.

So, if the search engine spider finds the content on your site and later finds it elsewhere, your site will be considered the originator of the content and will likely get more weight in the search engine results than those sites with the content it found afterward.

While it may be slightly preferable to publish to your site first so it’s more likely to not get filtered out of search engine results, it’s not the end of the world if your site doesn’t show up. As long as other sites with your article are listed, searchers can read one of those instances and still click through to your site from your author’s box.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that you can feel comfortable publishing identical versions of articles both on your site and to article directories and ezine publishers. If you want to take extra care, publish to your site long enough before publishing elsewhere to allow the spider to find your instance first.

The most important point is to publish your articles in as many high quality places as you can! The good it will do your business in terms of visibility, perception of expertise, new people clicking through to your site, and incoming links for the search engine spiders greatly outweighs any downsides.