AdSense allows you to display contextual ads from Google AdWords advertisers on specific areas of your site and share in the revenue generated by Google from bids paid by advertisers to display their ads when visitors to your site click on these ads.

Joel Comm – who many consider to be one of the world’s leading authorities on making money with AdSense, calls AdSense “the easy button of the web” and his ebooks on the subject have been some of the world’s most popular for the past five years!

Yesterday I received an email from Joel letting me know that he is currently offering his best-selling 4th edition of his Adsense Secrets eBook (235 pages) for FREE! This same ebook has been selling until recently for up to $97!

Joel Comm also assured me in his email that this offer comes with no strings attached.

To download your free copy of Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets eBook, go here:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/adsensesecrets-giveaway.html

While we are on the topic of monetizing your website or blog, have you ever heard of Kontera or Chitika?

Well, it turns out that Joel has also written guides to making money with Kontera and Chitika. As far as I am aware, Joel’s guides are the only ebooks on these topics.

Both of these contextual ad services (Kontera and Chitika) work alongside AdSense and can help you create additional streams of revenue.

According to Joel, by taking just FIVE minutes to add Kontera and Chitika to his sites, he has created an additional $100-$200 per day!

His guides on getting the most our of Kontera and Chitika ads have previously sold for up to $47 each, but Joel is also giving these away, as well as another ebook he has published on some of the best ways and strategies for making money online quickly.

To download all four of Joel’s ebooks at no cost and learn how to make money with AdSense, Kontera and Chitika, visit each of the sites below:

• Adsense Secrets
• Kontera Secrets
• Chitika Secrets
• Build A Profitable Website Fast

I have purchased many of Joel’s products in the past, including some of the ebooks he is now giving away at no cost, and I am sure you will find the content in these valuable resources to be extremely helpful.

Blog Categories

Keeping your site’s content organized is very important, as this makes finding information easier for your visitors. The way to do this, is to work out what kind of broad yet distinct “topics” you will be publishing content about on your site regarding your specific niche (my client is setting up a blog for her marriage celebrant business).

You then convert these broad topics into “categories” (Posts > Categories), so that everytime you add a new article or post to your site, you simply tick the category box before publishing your post and this will immediately organize the content on your site in a logical way that makes the information easier to find.

For example, on a wedding celebrant’s site, I imagine that some of the broad topics (i.e. categories) you would write information about would be things like:

• Celebrant FAQs
• Celebrant Services
• Wedding Vows
• Wedding Locations
• Wedding Tips
• Other Ceremonies
• Etc …

So, if you write an article about “beach weddings”, for example, you may want to post this under the “Wedding Locations” category. This way, people visiting your site can quickly find information on beach weddings by clicking in the “Wedding Locations” category.

Likewise, general questions people have about using a marriage celebrant’s service could go under “Celebrant FAQs”, but information about the types of services you perform, could be found under “Celebrant Services”.

This part of the planning process is important for various reasons, including:

1) It will help to organize your strategic approach when adding new content to your site. For example, you might want to write a series of articles discussing different kinds of commitment ceremonies that can be performed through a marriage celebrant, or tips on how to plan for different types of wedding locations, etc. As you publish more and more content to your site on various topics, you will begin to notice which categories need more information to boost your “authority” on the subject and eventually turn your site into a well-rounded hub for people looking for marriage celebrants.

Remember, too many people use a website as little more than an online business card, but the way to use your site to grow your business is to have a long-term goal of using your online presence to present your expertise and build “authority” on your subject and trust with your visitors. This increases your exposure online and creates new opportunities for your business.

2) The words you choose for your categories can help to bring people to your site and increase your relevance in the search engines. This is because the site I have built for you incorporates a smart system that creates URL addresses for each of your site’s pages that is specifically targetted for your intended audience and that search engines love. If, for example, you write an article entitled “5 questions to ask before choosing a marriage celebrant” and you post this article under the category “Celebrant FAQs”, then visitors searching for information about marriage celebrant services will see a link to your article that looks something like this …

http://www.yourdomain.com/celebrant-faqs/5-questions-to-ask-before-choosing-a-marriage-celebrant

Instead of this …

http://www.yourdomain.com/7/0567325

Which of the above links looks more enticing for someone thinking about using a marriage celebrant’s services to click on?

So … give some serious thought to the topics your site will provide information to visitors about, create a list of distinct categories based on the results of your planning process and you will find that, as your site grows, it will grow in an organized fashion that will make it easier for you to manage and for visitors to find what they are looking for.

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No matter what type of business you have or are thinking of starting, starting a blog can definitely help you grow your business. For “step-by-step” videos and tutorials on how to set up a business blog that will help you grow your business online faster, click here: Start A Blog For Your Business

Subject: Self Publishing My Website

My interest is to start an online business ( I’m interested in a membership site ) my knowledge is limited around getting this set-up  and running. Do I need a site first for your services. . . or do you set this up from start to finish?  Also, what is the cost ? I can add the content my self, I’m ready to go so far. THANKS

Below is my reply – I thought I’d share this with you, in case you have similar questions …

=======================

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us. Below I’ve attached some information in reply to your request that I hope will help to answer your questions. If you need any further help after going through the information below, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Warm Regards,

Martin Aranovitch
www.SelfPublishWeb.com

==============================

BUILDING YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS SITE

The training product on SelfPublishWeb.com takes you step-by-step through the process of setting up a WordPress blog that can then be used as a standalone website for your online business, or as a very effective marketing tool that you control and can use to promote anything you like (i.e. another website, affiliate products, etc …).

We created the step-by-step training product for people who want to save money by setting up a professional blog themselves. The videos and tutorials in the member’s area show you everything you need to set up the blog yourself, from installation and configuration, to getting your site indexed by search engines like Google very quickly and automating many aspects of your site.

Once your site is built following our tutorials, all you do is publish new content to it and the system we’ll show you how to set up will instantly notify search engines as soon as you publish new content and help to drive traffic to your site. You can see this happening on one of the videos we’ve posted on our blog that shows you the results after 2 weeks of installing our blog on a brand new domain:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/demo/business-marketing/44-how-to-grow-your-business-using-a-self-managed-business-site

We can also build the site for you if you prefer. You can read more information about the service where we build the site for you here:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/faq-setup-service.php

The difference in price is really the cost of our time to build your blog instead of you building your blog, plus any additional consultation you may require. As far as building your blog website is concerned, we follow the exact same instructions shown in our step-by-step video tutorials, which you can currently purchase for just $67.

Please note that the primary purpose of our site is to provide online entrepreneurs like yourself with access to time-saving and money-saving information, tools and training materials you can use to build an effective online presence yourself. If you do decide to purchase our DIY blog set up and training package, we will still provide you with support, we just won’t be doing the site building for you, as we show you exactly how to set it all up yourself.

BENEFITS OF USING WORDPRESS

One of the most powerful aspects of using WordPress as a platform for your online business, is that you have full control over the content (i.e. you don’t need to be a web designer or programmer to create new pages and add new content), and you can make your site look any way you want it to look. There are literally thousands of themes you can use to give your site a unique look, and thousands of plugins to give it specific functionalities. The best part is that most of these themes and plugins are free.

We include over 50 professional themes and some of the most powerful plugins for WordPress in our package. You can read more about the themes here:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/demo/wordpress-themes/139-over-50-wordpress-blog-themes-for-your-business-blog

All themes and plugins are available in the member’s area.

Which brings us now to the topic of setting up a membership site …

SETTING UP A MEMBERSHIP SITE

There are several ways to set up a membership site. WordPress allows you to set up a membership site, and you can read more information about setting up a membership site using a WordPress blog here:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/demo/wordpress-plugins/230-turn-your-wordpress-blog-into-a-membership-site

In the case of our own site (SelfPublishWeb.com), we use our business blog primarily to educate visitors about our training product and direct them to our main site for purchasing and accessing the product.

We didn’t use WordPress to create our members area (the secure part of our site where customers can access our videos and tutorials on how to set up a blog), because at the time WordPress did not have membership plugins that could do what we wanted (e.g. allow different users to automatically create separate logins). They do now and we cover some of those on the membership site post mentioned above.

In case you’re interested in knowing what applications we did use to create our membership site area instead:

Xsite Pro – We used this excellent website building software to build the main website on our SelfPublishWeb.com domain. You can read more about XSitePro here:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/xsitepro-special.html

DL Guard – This is a powerful and very easy-to-use application that allows you to create secure membership areas in your website. You can read more about DLGuard here:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/dlguard-features.html

As mentioned earlier, our aim is to provide online business owners like yourself with the means of building a highly effective online presence for your business at the lowest possible cost (under $100 total cost) and in just a couple of days, if you are willing to invest the time and follow our step-by-step videos and tutorials.

If you don’t want to use a Wordpress blog to set up your online business and/or membership site (our #1 recommended option), then your next best option for DIY website building is to use a platform like Xsite Pro, which makes building professional websites very easy and requires almost no technical skills. If you are new to the process of website creation, then we recommend you look at “The Complete Guide To Website Building” here:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/websitebuilding-guide.html

And of course, the last option is where we can build you a blog or website from start to finish. If this is the option that interests you the most, then please feel free to contact us and we will discuss this further with you.

I hope the above information helps you in your decision.

Warm Regards,

Martin Aranovitch
www.SelfPublishWeb.com

• Just get started, and
• Make sure that your articles are always high quality.

Getting Your Article Marketing Strategy Started

So … you know you need an article marketing strategy, but you don’t know where to start? The good news is it’s not as hard as you might think. The most important part of any article marketing strategy is that you just begin to do it in the first place, then make it a consistent habit to write and publish your articles on a regular basis.

So many business owners know that they need to be doing article marketing to grow their business online, but something else always seems to take priority.

The second most important thing about your article marketing strategy (besides just doing it at all ) it to be certain that you do it well. Many people go through all the difficulty of building a great article marketing strategy, planning all the different directories that they’re going to submit to and how frequently they’re going to submit, and so on and so on . And then, when they actually submit their articles, their articles are too short, poorly written, and full of spelling and grammatical errors.

By not taking care to put well-crafted content in your articles, and then checking them to make sure that they’re free of spelling and grammatical errors, you’ve just wasted all of the time and effort that you spent putting together your article marketing strategy. If your article is bad, it will not get approved, and your article marketing strategy will have failed before it actually had an opportunity to get off the ground.

Once you have added solid content to your articles then you can start to work on the logistics of your article marketing strategy. And truly, the best strategy, if you’re just starting out, is to find someone who is able to say what they are doing and has found tactics (and built tools) to make executing your article marketing strategy much easier and less time consuming for you.

So, now you have great content for your article and you have found a way to get your articles out there that’s faster than having to do it all by hand. Now, you’re ready for the next step of your article marketing strategy: getting your articles out there.

There are several article directories that you can submit your articles to; one of the largest and most popular article directories is Ezine Articles. You may also want to search for specific niche directories and social networking sites that you can submit your articles to; it all depends on the nature of what you are marketing. For example, if you promote green products or sustainable technologies, then an online community like EarthHuddle.com can offer your business an ideal platform for article distribution. EarthHuddle.com is free to join and allows members to post articles on their blog, which then gets syndicated to various other green sites online and puts your content in front of people searching for information about sustainable living, green living, and organic products and services.

All websites need great content to attract and retain visitors. To achieve this, many webmasters look to content syndication avenues like article directories and RSS feeds for sourcing content that is relevant to their sites and blogs.  The more educational and informative your articles are, therefore, the more chance it has of being syndicated throughout other sites and blogs. This creates links back to your site, which increases the “authority” of your site, giving you better search engine ranking and creating more exposure for your business online. Best of all, over time, this process creates an ongoing and FREE source of traffic for your website or blog.

So now you know the 2 things you want to get started with a basic article marketing strategy – write good quality articles and make a habit of submitting them on a regular basis.

How To Get Results Quickly With Article Marketing

You can speed up the article marketing process and grow your business faster using automation and leverage. And you can do this very inexpensively too.

To do this, I recommend using the following strategy outline below:

1) Start a blog - A blog is an ideal platform for getting your articles published quickly and for ensuring that you have complete control over your content. With the right automation system in place, your articles not only get published fast, but they will also be picked up by search engines like Google and shared around social media sites like Twitter the moment your articles are published. For step-by-step tutorials on how to set up a professional business blog with all of the automation systems in place quickly, go here: How To Set Up A Blog

2) Use a proven article marketing system – You can do things the slow way (write articles and manually post them around). Or, you can set up an article marketing system, where you take your articles and then use specific article marketing strategies and tools that automate the execution of your strategy and syndicate your content to a whole bunch of topic-relevant sites in a few minutes with only a few clicks of the mouse. If you are looking for step-by-step training that walks you through how to do your article marketing strategy properly then provides you with all the tools you need to get lots of high quality backlinks, increase your traffic dramatically and improve your Google ranking, check out Web2Mayhem.

I hope you have found the above information useful and I wish you great success with your article marketing strategy.

Even if you’re already sold on the value and benefits of blogging, however, launching a blog for your own business and jumping into the blogosphere can be a daunting prospect. Starting a blog and then turning it into a successful online venture requires careful planning and strategy.

Our step-by-step blog tutorials will show you exactly “how” to install, set up and configure a blog that will help you grow your business faster. If you want to know “why” you should start business blogging and how to plan for success before you go ahead and start a blog, however, then I have found just the perfect guide that will explain to you why merely having a web presence today is not enough to drive your business growth, why, in fact, a static site with no regular new content and no engagement with visitors might even work against you, and why blogging is the simplest and most effective way for your business to deliver what your customers are after.

Renowned speaker, author and internet marketing consultant Chris Garrett has recently teamed up with WordTracker (the keyword research company) and written a fantastic 162 page electronic guide for creating, writing and promoting a successful business blog called “Business Blogging – 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales”.

The plan outlined in this book is a valuable roadmap for blogging success and comes from Chris’ own real life experience as a sought after professional blogger. “Blogging For Business” is a straightforward guide to business blogging and will help any business understand how to create a popular and profitable blog.

In “Business Blogging – 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales,” you’ll learn:

• How to identify a target audience for your blog.
• How to address the technical challenges of blogging.
• How to determine your blog’s unique selling point in order to gain a competitive edge.
• How to implement a successful blogging strategy that will improve your company’s reputation.
• How to drive traffic to your blog, which blog traffic building solutions give the best return on investment, and which ones you should avoid.
• How to create a phenomenal experience for blog visitors and generate more sales.
• How to convert casual blog readers into loyal blog subscribers.
• The benefits of adding multimedia to your blog

I recommend you purchase a copy of  Chris Garrett’s comprehensive guide to business blogging, then simply follow and apply the 50 steps he has outlined in his method. In no time you will find traffic and sales from your blog will be growing steadily, and helping your business move with purpose and a clear direction towards greater success.

For more details, visit the website here: Business Blogging – 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales

Business Blogging Made Simple

A real-world guide to creating, writing and promoting a successful blog

Inside “Business Blogging – 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales,” you’ll discover:

• Why your business needs a blog (yesterday!)
• The biggest pitfalls of blogging — and how to avoid them
• How to build a following of faithful blog subscribers
• Proven tips for converting your blog traffic into sales

Order “Blogging For Business – 50 Steps To Building Traffic And Sales” now and get instant access …

.

If you don’t know how to set up a blog to automatically drive new visitors to your site, then please subscribe to my “insider tips” newsletter (see form at the top of the sidebar), or go here to learn more about my “step-by-step” tutorials on how to set up a blog.

Now, if you have been involved in any type of business marketing before, then you are probably familiar with the concept of lists, e.g. customer lists, email lists, prospect lists, opt-in lists, customer database, etc.

And if you have ever subscribed to any newsletters or update lists from professional internet marketers, you will soon also become familiar with the popular list building edict that “the money is in the list”.

In other words, if you are not building a list for your business, then you’re leaving money on the table. A lot of money!

As most marketing experts will tell you, it is much easier to sell your products and services to existing customers, than to keep investing time, effort and money searching for new customers.

If you offer real value and genuine products and services that benefit others, then it only makes sense that someone who has already bought something from you will be more likely open to hearing from you again, than someone who has never done any business with you before.

Putting this principle into practice, then, means that every time a prospect visits your site or a customer buys something from you, you should get their permission to keep in touch with them (e.g. via email) for the purpose of keeping them informed about anything that comes up in your business in the future that you believe they would benefit from knowing about – like new products, tips, “how to” information, sharing other customer experiences, etc …

To do this requires you to have a process in place to get their contact details (e.g. name and email address), and their permission to stay in touch.

Fortunately, you can incorporate both of these processes into one simple and effective strategy with an opt-in or subscription form, and begin building your list even before someone becomes a customer (i.e. before someone actually buys something from you).

An opt-in form placed on your web site or blog helps you collect the contact details of visitors who would like to stay in touch with you.

Your opt-in form process also includes things like:

• Letting people know why you are asking for their contact details (i.e. what specific purpose you will use their details for, e.g. to send them regular tips and updates, new product releases, etc.)
• What you will and will not do with their details (e.g. you will not sell their details to third parties).
• How they can unsubscribe from your list if they no longer wish to stay in touch with you

Once you have worked out the “front-end” of your customer list building strategy – i.e. where you want to place an opt-in form, and what aspects of your opt-in form process you will communicate to your customers to encourage them to join your list, then the next step is to set up the “backend” of your list building system, which refers to all the aspects involved in managing the information collected.

The most basic types of list management scripts simply collect your visitors details from the form fields you set up on your site, and then forward the information to you (e.g contact forms). You then manually extract the information from the form that is sent to you and input these details into your own list management system, be it an excel spreadsheet, or a more advanced type of application.

Sophisticated professional list management systems will automate all the essential tasks of list building, such as adding new subscribers to your database, setting up and scheduling sequential auto-responders, managing your messages, broadcasts and opt-outs, segmenting customer lists into targeted subgroups, split-testing emails, tracking how many users click on your message links, creating reports, and so on.

The service I personally use and recommend for all of the above is aweber.

Aweber offers a professional and highly affordable list building, auto-responder and email marketing solution. Some of their features include:

• Send Email Newsletters – Aweber lets you send engaging email newsletters to your opt-in subscribers.
• Publish A Signup Form To Your Website Or Blog – Publish a signup form to your site using a simple and intuitive point-and-click Web Form wizard.
• Create Autoresponders – Autoresponders allow you to build relationships with your subscribers. Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products and services and drive your email readers back to your website, all on auto-pilot.
• Manage Unlimited Email Campaigns – With Aweber you can not only create unlimited sequential email newsletters for your subscribers and set the frequency for each message, but you can also create unlimited lists (e.g. for building lists on different niche markets, segmenting different types if users, etc …), send email messages as often as you want and manage all of your lists and messages from one account.
• Email Templates – If you want to send colorful, image-rich newsletters, Aweber offers over one hundred HTML email templates that have been tested for readability in all popular email clients, or you can paste in your own template, or create one from scratch using their point-and-click message editor.
• Email Deliverability – Aweber has one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry and has built relationships with most of the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This means that while many small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to get their email delivered with all the spam blocking and filtering in place, your emails are almost guaranteed to get through just about every time.
• Free Expert Customer Support – Apart from the fact that AWeber is extremely easy to use and offers excellent educational materials such as a blog, knowledge base and video tutorials, they also provide access to free customer support staffed by real people via phone, email and live text chat.

In addition to the above services, Aweber also offers advanced email marketing tools such as:

• Send Blog Newsletters (RSS to Email) – The Blog Broadcaster feature automatically turns your RSS into email that you can send to readers daily, weekly, monthly or whenever you have something new on your blog.
• Email Web Analytics – You can easily see what’s working and what isn’t in your email campaigns with Aweber’s powerful testing tools and easy-to-read reports.
• Easy Shopping Cart Integration – You can integrate e-commerce with email marketing into your business.

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CLICK HERE FOR A FREE TEST-DRIVE
OF AWEBER’S EMAIL MARKETING SYSTEM

***

Adding An Opt-In Form To A WordPress Blog

Adding a subscription form to a wordpress blog is quite simple. For example, I have an account with Aweber (I’ve been with them for several years now!).

Here’s how I added the opt-in form on the sidebar of my blog:

1. First, I created an opt-in form in my Aweber account using their web form wizard.
2. After creating and saving the form, I then copied the subscription form code to my clipboard.
3. Next, I logged into my blog.
4. I then added a text widget to the sidebar.
5. Finally, I pasted the code into the widget and saved.

As you can see, adding a subscription form to a blog is a pretty simple and straightforward process.

There are also plug-ins available that allow you to add an opt-in form to your Wordpress blog. One that I especially recommend you check out if you don’t want to mess around with code is MBP Optin Form Adder.

This FREE plugin from MaxBlogPress allows you to create optin forms to match your blog’s look and feel in just 4 easy steps. MBP Optin Form Adder is a very flexible plugin that allows you to style your opt-in form any way you want, place the form almost anywhere in your blog, and easily add (or switch) details from your autoresponder or email marketing solution providers.

Please note: Although plugins make it easy to add an opt-in form to your blog, you will still need to have an account with an autoresponder / email list management provider like Aweber or Get Response, etc.

I hope you have found this information on adding subscription forms to your blog useful. For more tips on using autoresponders and email marketing to improve your sales online, please consider subscribing to my “insider tips” newsletter. It’s FREE to join and I guarantee that you will only receive practical strategies that will improve your business, as well as learn about new methods, tools and resources before your competitors do.

CLICK HERE FOR A FREE TEST-DRIVE OF AWEBER’S EMAIL MARKETING,
AUTO-RESPONDER & LIST MANAGEMENT  SYSTEM

I’ve just come across a great new service today that I just have to share with you.

Everyone on Twitter uses shortened URLs. With only 140 characters to say your message it only makes sense to use the shortest possible links.

For example … here’s the full link to the blog post I wrote on using Twitter to grow your business online:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/demo/online-business-automation/238-growing-your-business-with-blogs-and-twitter

The above URL is 110 characters long. If I wanted to share the above post on Twitter with my followers, this would leave me only 30 characters to post my tweet.

I guess I could write something like “check out this blog post:” (25 characters) then add the above link, but why not turn this link:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/demo/online-business-automation/238-growing-your-business-with-blogs-and-twitter

Into this link:

http://bit.ly/2KMsIl

Now … link shortening services like the one above don’t cost anything. Most of the popular ones I know are 100% free.

But … what if you GOT PAID to use them?

This would be a real game changer, don’t you agree?

In other words, you do nothing different but now you have an opportunity to get paid, where before you didn’t.

Interested in knowing more? Then go here for a better explanation on how to shorten your URLs and get paid:

http://bit.ly/4gbSSY

Ok, now back to the concept I was explaining …

There is a new URL shortener service called eCa.sh that works just like all of the other link shortening services, with no technical hoops to jump through or any complicated stuff you have to do other than sign up and start using the service. You get the same ease of use as any other shortener of choice – copy URL, paste into shortener, get link, use link… GET PAID!

So, now instead of promoting this link:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/demo/online-business-automation/238-growing-your-business-with-blogs-and-twitter

Using this short URL:

http://bit.ly/2KMsIl (where you don’t get paid)

You can promote the same blog post link above using this short URL instead:

http://eCa.sh/iT2k

Not much different is it? Except that with the above link, you have a very clever opportunity to make money from various affiliate sources, while you tweet away or promote your products and services as you normally would.

As you probably noticed if you clicked on the shortened URL above, you still get sent directly to the intended destination page. The only thing that’s different, is a small ad bar appears at the top of your screen below your browser toolbar. To earn referral commissions from sales of the products advertised on this small ad bar, you first need to become an affiliate of the company that manages all of the ads on behalf of the advertisers using this service, then start using the link shortening service which contains your affiliate ID.

To sign up as an affiliate of the Low Stress Income network (it’s free), go here: http://eCa.sh/KBz3.

Once you become a Low Stress Income affiliate, you can promote any of the products in their advertiser network using the special links they provide for you in your affiliate control panel. You will also find lots of great resources like a quick-start guide, banners, links, etc … to help you get started.

You then use your affiliate login details to access the eCa.sh URL shortening service and start shortening your links for Twitter, emails, banner and image links, etc.

Your special affiliate URL will be embedded in all of these links, creating an additional online income source for you on auto-pilot. The more you use this service (e.g. shortening your links for Twitter), the more opportunities you create to earn an ongoing affiliate income.

From what I can tell, this service is brand new but growing very quickly, so if you are interested in making money shortening your own URLs for Twitter, then go here now and sign up for this great tool (it’s free to join): http://bit.ly/4gbSSY

(click on the above banner to learn more about how to make money shortening your URLs for Twitter)

The main problem for most business owners when it comes to using social media to grow their businesses (and especially small business owners), is that there is too much new information to take in and so little time, that most people end up feeling either overwhelmed, or frustrated that they are missing out on some powerful ways to expand their business online and take advantage of all these new emerging technologies.

Take Twitter for example. Everyone’s talking about it. Many businesses are using it quite successfully to get their message out to a growing number of potential prospects and to keep in touch with existing customers, and some very successful Twitter marketers have even created guides on how to make money with Twitter (see Twitter Marketing Product Reviews for a review of some of the more popular guides on Twitter marketing.)

Part of using Twitter successfully to grow your business online is to get people “following” your tweets. To achieve this, however, you’ve gotta be tweetin’ often and follow some of the people who are following you. This means that there are tasks you have to perform on a regular basis (e.g. writing and posting tweets and clicking on links to follow people), which means piling on more work on your daily “to do” lists.

In this post, I am going to share with you a couple of simple strategies I use to help grow my businesses using Twitter that you can easily duplicate by following the instructions I am about to give you. At the very least, the automated strategies I am going to share with you will get your finger in the “Twitter pie” until you can devote more time to learning how to maximize the benefits of using social media for growing your business.

The strategies below assume you already have a Twitter account set up. If not, visit twitter.com and set up an account now (it’s best to set one up sooner rather than later, before someone else takes up the username you may want).

Step 1 – Set Up A Blog

A blog allows you to easily publish content online. If you don’t have a blog yet, then check out my “step-by-step” training product on how to install, set up and configure a fully optimized blog that will help you grow your business online fast.

Step 2 – Get TweetMyBlog Plugin

I have written a whole post about this fantastic free plugin for WordPress blogs here.

TweetMyBlog is free, very easy to install and it automatically notifies Twitter every time you publish a new post on your blog. It then links your automated Twitter post back to your blog, so visitors can read your post. (When I downloaded the plugin, the software developers also included a great and really useful FREE guide on how to use Twitter – what to do and what not to do, etc …)

Once you have set up a simple system for automatically notifying your Twitter followers about your new blog posts with TweetMyBlog, it’s time to take things to the next level.

Step 3 – Automate Twitter Account Management Tasks

When you first get started with Twitter, it can be fun to try and follow everyone who is following you and get to know what’s going on. After a while, however, it just becomes too hard to try and keep up with all of the messages flowing into your account. More importantly, however, is to develop a routine of regularly broadcasting and promoting your business to others.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just spend a couple of minutes each week writing a few great tweets about your products and services and special offers, then scheduling these messages to be delivered over the following week, say once or twice each day, or at a specific time to coincide with a particular event you will be attending or presenting at?

Well, this is what Social Oomph allows you to do.

Social Oomph is a fantastic FREE tool that allows you to automate and schedule your Twitter feeds, send welcome messages to new followers, and do so much more to help you promote and grow your business on Twitter. This tool has a free signup and a paid option. Obviously, you get a lot more benefit and functionality with the paid version, but the free sign-up option has many great features too, such as:

Auto Welcome – You can automatically send a message to new followers (and even rotate several different messages using their spinnable welcome message text feature).

• Auto Follow – Automatically follow people who follow you.
• Vet Followers - You can manually approve a new follower before you begin to follow them.
• Auto Unfollow – SocialOomph will automatically unfollow people who unfollow you.
• @Replies Digest Email – If you get too busy to check your replies in Twitter, this option will email you a digest of the replies other people have sent you.
• Keyword Alert – This is great and really useful feature that allows you to set up an automated search for tweets containing certain keywords. (One great use for this feature for example, is to see what other people are tweeting about your business, by simply adding your business name or domain address to the list.)

You can see a full list of all of the features and a comparison table when you visit their site.

I suggest you take up the FREE trial offer for the Professional level when you register for your FREE account, and get a feel of just how powerful this tool can be. Then, if you don’t think the upgrade is for you, just don’t renew at the end of your trial period and you will automatically revert back to the FREE membership.

Your first step, then, should be to open a free account with Social Oomph.

Once you’ve got your account set up, take a few minutes to go through the video tutorials that explain how to use all of the features and start automating some of the tasks you need to do for growing your business using Twitter.

Let me show you just how useful this tool is, using my audiobook store business as an example.

1) After setting up my account with Social Oomph, I then clicked on “Tweets’ > “New Tweet” and scheduled a message promoting one of my monthly special titles.

2) I then went ahead and scheduled several more tweets, using the “publish at exact time” feature.

3) In just a few minutes, I added and scheduled an entire week’s worth of posts. Each day, a new post will be automatically added to my audio book store Twitter account and sent to everyone following my tweets.

A terrific time-saving feature of this tool is that it allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts and schedule a ton of messages ahead of time.

Now, I can just go ahead and keep working on my business as usual, while my business marketing goes on happening 24/7 thanks to:

1. A blog that has been set up to notify search engines and feed directories automatically each time a new blog post is published (go here for more details: How To Set Up A Blog Step-By-Step Tutorials),
2. A plugin that automatically notifies Twitter of my new blog posts (TweetMyBlog)
3. A tool that automatically manages my Twitter posts and followers (Social Oomph)

After setting up all of the above (a one-time only effort), the total time required to keep growing my business online using blogs and social media tools like Twitter using the method I’ve just shared with you here is less than 2-3 hours per week (writing new blog articles and Twitter posts).

I hope you have found this information useful and I wish you great business success using these great new technology tools.

(click on the banner above to sign up with Social Oomph)

PS: If you want more special “insider” tips on how to grow your business using Twitter, then sign up to my FREE Newsletter below where I share with subscribers many proven strategies for growing your business online fast.

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PPS: Follow me on Twitter here: @internetadworks

This plugin turns your Wordpress blog into a fully fledged membership site. You will be able to easily restrict specific pages or posts to your subscribers and start collecting automatically recurring subscriptions from your members.

The main features of WP Membership Tool are as follows:

• Easy-to-use tags to separate free content from premium one
• SEO optimized
• Support for unlimited user levels
• First click free feature
• No change needed at blog level
• Payments: support for ‘Subscribe’ and ‘Buy Now’ Paypal buttons
• Registration: seamless integration with internal WP user system
• Terms &conditions approval feature.
• Feedback from members feature
• Membership and subscription cancellation automation

For more details about this brand new WordPress plugin click here to visit their website: Mass Automation Tools

Why Start A Membership Site

Membership sites can be free or paid. Some of the main reasons for starting a membership site are:

1) To create a growing database of people focused around a common interest.

2) To generate a recurring income.

3) To give exclusive access to specific content or information to registered members only.

Growing A Database Of People Focused Around A Common Interest

Just off the top of my head, I can think of the following examples of blog membership sites someone with an entrepreneurial mindset may want to build:

• business blog
• christian blog
• fashion blog
• finance blog
• green blog
• mom blog
• music blog
• sports blog
• technology blog
• etc …

All of the above target specific interests and niches that could be turned into a profitable membership site (e.g. by attracting advertisers targeting people interested in your specific blog topic), or just a great place for passionate people to hang out, meet other like-minded people and get more information about the things they’re interested in.

Generating A Recurring Income

If you decide to start a paid membership site and are able to provide regular content of great value, then your blog has the potential to earn you a very nice income from your one-time effort (i.e. creating the content) multiplied by a growing number of members who will pay you to access your content and information.

Giving Exclusive Access To Content To Registered Members Only

Another reason for turning your blog or sections of your blog into a membership site, is that you may not want to make your content available to everyone who visits your site then leaves without giving you the opportunity to contact them again. By having people register for your membership area, you can keep in touch, send them updates and special offers, etc.

These are just some of the reasons for turning your blog into a membership site using the WP Membership Tool plugin.

By the way, if you would like to know more about the benefits of starting a membership site, then go here to get more information, and get some of the latest marketing methods for growing a membership site: 

Membership Millionaire

(clicking on the link above will take you to a special page where you can register for FREE as a lifetime Silver member – this is a special deal for visitors to my blog!)

Mass Automation Tools

I own several software tools created by the folks at Mass Automation (WordPress Cloner and RSS Bookmarker), and I highly recommend their products. Their software is robust and they are highly responsive in terms of customer service. I have no doubt that WP Membership Tool will be one of their best-selling and most popular tools yet.

Go here for more details about the WordPress Membership plugin: Mass Automation Tools

For this post, I am going to assume that you have done your research and found a reliable webhosting company that is customer driven and that offers excellent support. If you’re looking for a great blog hosting service provider but don’t know where to start, then the two companies I highly recommend you look into are:

Hostgator – This company offers great value for money hosting for most blogs and websites, especially for small businesses.

LiquidWeb.com – They’re not the cheapest host, but they offer superior web hosting services and heroic customer support. I recommend this hosting company if you need a dedicated web server for your web presence with 24×7 support that will guarantee your peace of mind.

I use both of these companies for hosting my own sites as well as those of my clients and I am more than happy with the excellent service and value for money they provide.

Now, let me share with you some great cPanel Webhosting features that will make your blog hosting management really easy:

cPanel Video Tutorials

Here are just some of the video tutorials users can access from their cPanel management consoles:

• My SQL – Learn how to create and modify MySQL databases in cPanel.
• Subdomains – Learn all about creating and managing subdomains.
• Addon Domains – Learn about creating and managing addon domains.
• Parked Domains – Learn about creating and managing parked domains.
• Redirects – Learn how to make a specific web page redirect to another page and display the contents of that page with redirects
• Password Protect Directories – Learn how to limit access to a certain part of your site by requiring a user name and password to access a folder or folders from the web.
• Hotlink Protection – Learn how to prevent other websites from directly linking to files on your website.
• IP Deny Manager – Learn how to block a range of IP addresses to prevent them from accessing your site.
• Site Software – Learn how to install Blogs, Bulletin Boards, CMS, Chat, Ecommerce, and more!
• File Manager – Learn how to quickly manage all of the files in your server.
• Web Disk – Learn how to easily drag and drop files to your hosting account.
• Email Accounts – Learn how to manage the email accounts associated with your domain(s).
• Forwarders – Learn how to send a copy of all mail from one email address to another.
• Auto Responders – Learn how to send a message back automatically to anyone who sends an email to a certain account.
• Mailing Lists – Learn how to send messages to a large group of people.
• … and more!

The cPanel video tutorials are short, well-paced, easy to follow and guide users step-by-step through each of the features. If you are new to managing a blog or web site online, then these videos are an excellent source of reference and are included in most webhosting services that use cPanel.

File Manager

You can save a great deal of time when it comes to doing a full site backup and/or exporting all of your site’s files (e.g. you should do a complete backup if you’re upgrading a WordPress blog to the next version), by simply doing the following:

1) Log into your cpanel control area and select “File Manager”

2) If you get a dialog box popping up the first time you access this feature, then just tick the boxes (“show hidden files” and “don’t show this again”) and click the button to dismiss the popup window.

3) Click on “Select All” to select all of the files in your server.

4) Click on “Compress” to create one big “zip” file containing all of your server files …

5) Choose “Zip Archive” then click on “Compress File(s)”. Click on “close” to close the window after all of your files have been compressed …

6) Select the new zip file containing all of your compressed site files, and click on “Download”.

7) Choose a location in your hard drive to save your file and download it. After your file has been downloaded, you can delete the large “zipped” file from your server by selecting it and clicking on the “Delete” button inside the File Manager screen.

Your entire site will now be backed up. This process is much faster than most other methods (e.g. if you tried to transfer your site’s files via FTP).

Using File Manager to backup your website or blog is pretty neat and fast, but not as neat and fast as importing a large number of files into your server.

Now, here’s where this feature becomes really useful …

If you have to import a large number of files (or even a large file – depending on your hosting limits), one of the quickest ways to do it, is to zip all of the files you need to import, then go into File Manager, select “Upload”, find the zipped file in your hard drive, then upload it into the folder in your server where you want the files to appear (e.g. “public_html”).

Once the zip file has been uploaded, you then simply select the file in your File Manager window, then click “Extract” and all of the files will have been imported into the server directory folder you’ve specified. If you’re reimporting files or upgrading them, the unzipped files will automatically replace the existing files in your server with the same filenames.

Again, in most instances this will make uploading files to your server so much faster than trying to transfer a large number files using an FTP software client.

Fantastico

Fantastico is basically an add-on program that allows you to install a number of different applications on your domain very easily. You literally open up the Fantastico management panel from within your cPanel hosting console, select the application you want to install, and in just a few clicks of your mouse, the feature will be installed and ready to go.

Here are just a few of the programs and scripts you can install on your domain easily with Fantastico using cPanel:

• Blogs – Install blogging platforms like b2evolution, Nucleus and WordPress
• Classifieds – Noahs Classifieds
• Content Management – Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, phpWCMS, phpWebSite, Siteframe, TYPO3, Xoops, Zikula
• Customer Relationship – Crafty Syntax Live Help, Help Center Live, osTicket, PerlDesk, PHP Support Tickets, Support Logic Helpdesk, Support Services Manager
• Discussion Boards – phpBB, SMF (Simple Machines Forum)
• E-Commerce – CubeCart, OS Commerce, Zen Cart
• F.A.Q. – FAQMasterFlex
• Image Galleries – 4Images Gallery, Coppermine Photo Gallery, Gallery
• Mailing Lists – PHPlist
• Polls and Surveys – Advanced Poll, LimeSurvey, phpESP
• Project Management – dotProject, PHProjekt
• Plus other scripts like site builders, Wiki software programs, web calendars, form generators, banner advertising management programs (e.g. OpenX) and more.

Most webhosting service providers that offer cPanel will include Fantastico in their hosting packages. If you don’t see it when you log into your cPanel area (the icon with a smiley face), then consider contacting your hosting provider and ask them to install it for you, especially if you plan on installing a blog on your domain name.

Some of the other great cPanel features worth mentioning are the ability to easily set up email addresses and email forwarders, install MySQL databases (used in many scripts and software applications), set up password-protected folders and directories and create subdomains, parked domains and redirects.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, I am not particularly technical, and so having something like cPanel that makes managing all aspects of blog hosting and web hosting very easy, as well as using webhosting service providers that offer excellent customer support when required, means that I can manage my own web presence without having to pay someone else to do it and focus most of my work time on running my online businesses.

I hope you have found this information useful and practical.

If you plan to set up a blog for your business but don’t know where to start, then check out my “How To Set Up A Blog” video tutorials, which includes step-by-step instructions on how to install a WordPress blog using Fantastico, as well as how to set up and configure your blog to help you grow your business online faster.