Welcome to Day 4 of 30 Days To Build A Bigger, Better, More Profitable List.

The other day I suggested that you should include a monetization plan as part of your overall list building plan.

Today I want you to focus on how you intend to make money from your list. There are three main options available to generate profit from your list of email subscribers.

1. Product/Service

The first option is to promote your own product or service, either digital or physical to your list.

When you have a product to promote, most of your website visitors won’t buy it directly from your site. But once they’ve signed up to receive your email newsletter and received repeated exposure to the benefits of your product, they’ll be more inclined to buy when the need arises.

This is backed up by the research which shows it takes an average of seven exposures to a message before a business becomes relevant in the mind of a prospective customer.

So on the strength of this it’s vital to build a relationship with your subscribers and contact them on a regular basis. This will increase the chances of them buying the product or service that you offer.

2. Affiliate Products

The most popular way to make money from a list of subscribers is to promote a product or service belonging to another business in return for a commission.

So with that in mind, here are the most popular ways to promote affiliate produsts to your list.

a. Direct Email

The simplest option is to send an email to your list where you show your subscribers how the product/service will improve their lives/solve their biggest problem, then include your affiliate link for them to check out the offer.

If any of your subscribers click through to the offer and subsequently buy you’ll get credit for referring the sale.

b. Site Content

The second option is to send the email to your list and encourage them to click through to additional content on your site which has been designed to promote the offer. For example, you could write a detailed product review and publish it on your site including your affiliate links to the offer.

The great advantage of this option is that your page will help to improve the search engine optimization of your site and may also be seen by people who haven’t subscribed to your list.

c. Your Report

The third option is to email your subscribers and send them the download link to a free report that you’ve written.

This report would then provide them with valuable information which can be greatly enhanced by the product or service that it promotes. The report would contain your affiliate links so that if anyone clicks through and buys, you get the credit.

If you write a high-quality report that contains valuable information, people will naturally share your report with their friends which increases the overall distribution of your report, spreading your affiliate links far and wide.

d. Their Report

The fourth option is to send your subscribers a link which allows them to download a free report which is provided by the product owner but contains your affiliate link.

This has the advantage of being much quicker to arrange, but the disadvantage is that you lose a certain element of control when you promote an external report.

e. Their Signup

The fifth option is to use your list to direct your subscribers to a signup page operated by the product owner. Once they signup through your affiliate link the product owner will then continue to promote their products on your behalf.

Many list owners are hesitant to use this technique unless they know and trust the product owner, otherwise they could discover that they’re helping to build another person’s list for very little return.

If you consider using this promotion technique, make sure that;

• You trust the person who runs the affiliate program,
• You know the product converts into customers at a high rate, and
• You will be sufficiently rewarded for your promotional efforts (high value or recurring payment products only)

These are the five main ways that you may want to monetize your list using affiliate products.

3. Advertising

And finally the third category, which is less popular than the previous alternatives, is to use your list to promote new content that you’ve added to your site which is then supported by the sale of ads.

For example, if you use Google Adsense on your site, you could send an email to your list to inform them about the latest content you’ve added to your blog. A certain proportion of your subscribers will click through to your site and in turn some of them will click on the ads displayed on your blog.

Using content supported by advertising provides a relatively quick way to generate money from your list, however over the long-term this option will generate considerably less revenue than promoting your own product or affiliate products.

Conclusion

Ideally, when you’re getting started, you should consider using affiliate promotion to generate money from your list. Once you’ve discovered which products are most in demand, move on to create your own products and build your own team of affiliates.

Take Action

For today’s task, spend time considering the different ways you could generate profit from your list.

• Do you have any relevant products or services to promote?
• Research the top affiliate products which will be most relevant to your list as it begins to grow.
• Check out your competitors, browse through their websites, signup to their lists.
• How do they make money?
• What products do they promote?

Once you’ve done that, add more detail to your list building plan.

How To Make Money From Your List Of Email Subscribers was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

Welcome to Day 3 of 30 Days To Build A Bigger, Better, More Profitable List.

Following on from yesterday when I encouraged you to create your list building campaign plan, we’re going to look at 6 sources of traffic that you can use to build your list of subscribers.

These are ranked in order of importance, with the first method providing the highest quality subscribers.

1. Existing Assets

The first option is to use the existing assets that you’ve developed within your online business to start building your list of subscribers.

This includes your existing website traffic, your RSS feed subscribers, perhaps an email notification list which notifies people whenever you add new content to your blog and existing relationships with other people who operate in your niche.

All of these existing assets can be leveraged to increase the speed at which your list attracts new subscribers.

The great strength of this method is that the people are already familiar with your work and in many cases have already taken action to keep up to date with your content (RSS subscription etc).

2. Syndication

Syndication is one of the most powerful methods to build a list of quality subscribers. It involves providing free content or perhaps one of your existing products that you allow your promotional partners to distribute to their new subscribers or new customers.

This means that whenever someone signs up to their list or buys their product, they will be exposed to your content. And if your content is both valuable and relevant to their needs, they may check out who you are and what else you have to offer.

So with that in mind, it’s important to provide your partners with top quality content because syndication is a great way to increase both the distribution and the reputation of your work.

It also helps to get your name into the consciousness of people who have already shown that they’ve got an interest in the type of content that you provide and a track record of signing up to receive quality information.

3. Endorsement

Endorsement is similar to syndication and occurs when you get someone else within your niche to recommend your site, your content, your products or even your list to their audience. This could be their website visitors, their list of subscribers or social media followers.

The great strength of endorsement is that you and your content are in effect pre-qualified. Someone that these people trust has recommended that they check out what you have to offer, so they’re not approaching you entirely cold.

This makes it more likely that they’ll sign up to your list. It also makes it much easier for you to begin building a relationship with these people.

In effect these people are pre-disposed to trust you on the strength of the recommendation provide by your promotional partner. Of course this benefit is only as good as the relationship of trust that already exists between the person who recommends you and their audience.

4. Ads

The next way to drive traffic to your sign up form is to advertise. There are various options available. You can use one of the leading pay per click ad programs such as Google Adwords.

Alternatively, you can buy banner ads or media placements if you have more to spend. There are also various options where you can pay people to write about and review your content.

The aim is advertising is to get your message out to a highly targeted group of people as quickly as possible.

The downside of using advertising to generate list building traffic is that it costs more money up front to add new subscribers to your list.

And if you want to run a profitable advertising campaign you need to know two vital performance stats;

• The conversion rate of the squeeze page that receives your advertising traffic, and
• The average amount of profit you generate from each subscriber over time.

Once you know these numbers, you will be able to make an informed decision at to how much you can spend up front to acquire a new subscriber and how long on average it will take to recoup that expense.

So if you’re just starting out you may not have a great amount of money to spend on an advertising campaign and you probably won’t have access to these performance stats.

However, the one great strength of advertising is that it’s extremely quick. And as I’ll mention below, it’s something that I encourage you to use in order to test an new idea before you put a lot of time and effort into a new list building project.

5. Search Engine Optimization

The next option is to drive people to your sign up page using search engine optimization.

A massive amount has been written about search engine optimization and it takes years of experience to become an expert practitioner in this constantly shifting arena.

However, it’s also worth bearing in mind that over time it’s possible to drive a significant amount of traffic to your website if you follow certain basic principles.

First, when you add new content to your website, remember to include the keyword that you’re targeting in the page title tag and the page description.

You should also have the keyword that you’re targeting along with related words and phrases within the body of your page text, with a slight bias towards them appearing at the top of the page.

However, it’s important not to become obsessed with writing for the search engines. Ultimately, you’re writing for the people who visit your site and the search engines should be a secondary consideration.

Second, links are an essential part of promoting your site in the search engines. The more high-quality, relevant links that point to a page (both from your site and external sites), the better that page will rank in the search engine results.

And finally, more pages are better than fewer, so if you have a blog, create new content on a regular basis (preferably daily). The search engines love indexing sites that are frequently updated with new information. The more pages that your site contains the more collective weight the pages will have when they interlink to each other.

6. Social Media

The next option is to use social media to attract people to your signup page. The great advantage of social media is that it’s extremely quick way to get people to your site.

And as an added bonus, if you can provide good quality content for your subscribers, these social networking users may recommend it to their friends and followers, creating the potential for your social media traffic to grow virally.

The downside of social media traffic is that is doesn’t produce such a high-quality list of subscribers.

There’s also the danger of ruining your online reputation if you’re seen as being overly aggressive in your self-promotional efforts.

Another thing that social media traffic dislikes is being sent to a sign up page where they have to enter their email address to get more information.

So if you choose to use social media to promote your sign up page, you may have to find a more subtle technique, such as providing a video squeeze page that provides great value even if they don’t sign up, or using a free to download report that includes details on how to sign up for more advanced material.

Conclusion

So when you first begin your list building campaign, which of these options would I recommend?

First, I would put together a powerful incentive that is quick to create and solves one of the biggest problems faced by your ideal subscriber. Then I would create a squeeze page and use pay per click advertising to test your signup offer quickly.

Advertising traffic is generally quite hard to convert into subscribers, so if your squeeze page and your offer convert well with advertising traffic it has the potential to do even better with higher quality sources of traffic such as endorsement and syndication.

If you don’t want to use ads or you don’t have the money to spend on them at present, then I suggest that you use your existing social media accounts such as Twitter and Facebook to drive some quick traffic to your signup offer.

The main aim is to get quick feedback (either from advertising or social media traffic) so that you can test your initial inclinations and determine whether your offer is relevant to your target market.

If your test indicates that there’s sufficient demand for that type of content that you plan to provide and that people are willing to sign up for it, then you can spent time putting the rest of your traffic plan to work.

As you progress through the live testing phase, your main objective is to avoid spending a lot of time and money creating an elaborate list building mechanism, only to discover that your offer is not relevant or that nobody wants to sign up for it.

Once your offer is a proven winner you can then increase your seo efforts and proceed to find promotional partners for syndication and endorsement deals.

When you do this I suggest that you focus on one source of traffic at a time, do the setup work, monitor the results and improve the system. Once it’s running well and generating a constant stream of new leads, move on to the next source of traffic.

So that’s a broad outline of the various methods you can use to drive people to your signup page.

Take Action

The action I’d like you to take for today is to look at the traffic section of the list campaign plan you created yesterday and add more detail.

Include information about how you intend to drive traffic to build your list. Which methods do you intend to use? What method will you focus on first?

Make sure you’re clear in your mind about how you’ll proceed when you’re ready to drive traffic to your list building mechanism.

6 Ways To Drive Traffic To Build Your List was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

Welcome to Day 2 of 30 Days To Build A Bigger, Better, More Profitable List. Now that you’ve made a public commitment to begin building your list (check out List Building Day 1 if you haven’t already seen it), the next stage is to move on to create a list building plan.

The aim is to provide an overarching structure for your list building efforts.

Purpose

The first section of your plan should set out the main aim of your list. Why are you building a list? What do you want to achieve with your list?

In order to make the most of this opportunity I encourage you to create an elevator pitch for your list.

Just imagine that you have 15 seconds to explain to someone what your list is about, the main aim of your list and the benefits people will receive when they sign up to join your list. How would you outline your list to someone else in just 50 words or less? And how would you achieve the same in just 10 words?

Once you’ve spent time creating your elevator pitch it will help to make the whole campaign clearer in your own mind.

This exercise will also allow you to determine other aspects of your list building project, such as how often you’ll contact your list, the communication style that you’ll use and how you’ll build a relationship of trust with your subscribers.

Research

The second section of your plan should provide information about the level of demand for the type of list that you intend to build.

One of the quickest ways to assess the basic demand for a new list is to use the Google Keyword Tool to search the websites belonging to your competitors.

Enter the address of your competitors’ websites and the Google Keyword Tool will return a list of keywords categorised by theme that it thinks the website is about.

When you find keywords that are relevant to the list that you will be building in your niche you can re-enter the keywords into the keyword tool in order to discover the monthly search volume for each keyword.

This will help you to gauge whether there is demand for the type of list that you intend to build. Once you find the keywords that have a sufficient level of demand, you can then use the search engines to search for each of these keywords.

Take note of the number of ads that appear in the search engine results. If you see a number of ads displayed alongside the search engine results it’s a good indication that the keyword attracts relevant traffic that can be monetized.

Otherwise you wouldn’t have advertisers prepared to pay for their ads to appear next the search engine results for keywords that don’t convert into subscribers/buyers.

Ideal Subscriber

The third step is to identify your ideal subscriber. I’ll cover this topic in more depth in the days that follow, but for now bear in mind that it’s essential to create a detailed picture of your ideal subscriber.

Once you have a clear mental image of your ideal subscriber, including things such as what makes them tick, how they think, what they want/need, their personal circumstances etc, you’ll be able to draw inspiration from this every time your work on building your list and communicating with your subscribers.

Monetization

Once you’ve written a short description of your ideal subscriber, it’s important to think about how you’re going to monetize your list.

There’s nothing worse than spending a significant amount of time and effort building a list of subscribers only to discover it’s almost impossible to monetize.

So the monetization section of your plan should include a broad outline of how you intend to make money from your list.

You can then take your research further and research various affiliate products that are available which may be relevant to the needs of your subscribers. If you already have your own products or services you should add them to your plan.

Incentive

Once you’ve verified both the demand and monetization potential of your list the next step is to begin working on the incentive that you intend to offer in return for people giving you their email address and permission to contact them in the future.

In general, many people have become rather jaded with all the sign up offers that they see on the internet every day, so the incentive that you offer has to be highly relevant to their needs and must be seen to carry significant value.

You sign up incentive can take various forms, it can be a free report, an audio file, a series of videos or even just one page of text that contains a golden nugget of valuable information.

We’ll cover this point in more detail in the days ahead, but for now it’s a good idea to have a broad outline of the content that you plan to create in order to tempt new subscribers to sign up for your newsletter.

Traffic

At this stage of planning, it’s important to have a broad outline of how you intend to drive people to the pages where they can sign up to your list.

There are several different ways to attract visitors to your sign up form including, endorsement, syndication, search engine optimization, social media marketing, advertising and using your existing assets.

These and other options will be reviewed on Day 3 of 30 Days To Build A Bigger, Better, More Profitable List, but for now, I suggest that you spend time considering how you can use your existing online assets to kick-start the development of your list.

This might include your RSS feed subscribers, your email notification list, existing traffic to your site and accounts with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

It’s also important to consider the lead capture mechanisms that you intend to use to leverage these existing assets.

You can collect your subscribers email address using a range of methods including a dedicated squeeze page, a sign up form in the sidebar of your site and if you have a blog you can even include your sign up form within specific posts which are geared towards getting your visitors to sign up for more information.

Take Action

Today I’d like you to spend time creating a broad overview of your list building plan. Spend time thinking about each of the different aspects covered in this post and make notes about how you intend to build your list.

Once you’ve done this you’ll be ready to add more detail when we cover these items in more depth over the next few days of this list building series.

How To Plan Your List Building Campaign was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

Do you want to build a successful online business? If you want to build a profitable and stable online business, it’s absolutely essential to build your own list of email subscribers.

So to help you get started, this month Midnight Marketing Tips will be dedicated to the art of list building, introducing…

30 Days To Build A Bigger, Better, More Profitable List

The aim of this series is to give you all the information and motivation you need to start building your own list of email subscribers.

Every day for the next 30 days, a new post will be published which will guide you through all the necessary steps from planning your list to securing your first subscriber.

At the end of each post, I’ll include an action step which will help you move towards your ultimate goal – Attracting your first subscriber.

If this series encourages you to start building your list, it will have achieved its aim.

So to help motivate you, here are five of the most important reasons why you should start building your own list of email subscribers.

1. Traffic – Insurance Against A Row With Google

One of the best reasons to start building a list today is to guard against a sudden drop in traffic to your site. Most websites receive the majority of their traffic through the search engines or advertising.

But what if Google suddenly decides that you’ve broken one of their rules and bans your site from their index?

And what if Google takes a dislike to your ads or more competitors enter the market and your advertising costs triple overnight?

If you don’t have a list, your business would be severely damaged by such as development.
But if you have a list of loyal subscribers you’ll retain the ability to drive traffic to your site or your latest offer even if every other source of traffic to your site disappears.

When you build a list, you own the permission that these people have given you to contact them by email. When you build a relationship of trust with your subscribers over time, you’re building a powerful business asset which will add to the stability and profitability of your business.

For example, a few years ago, leading blogger John Chow fell out with Google and they downgraded his site in the search engine results. Now you would imagine this would lead to a dramatic drop in the profitability of his business.

But thanks to the fact that he had spent time growing and nurturing a list of loyal subscribers, the profitability of his business continued to grow during the months after his difference of opinion with Google.

And it’s not just Google, building your list will provide you with insurance in case any of your existing traffic sources disappear.

2. Relationships

You’ve probably heard a dozen times before that you have to contact someone an average of seven times before they buy, well that’s not exactly true. It actually takes 7 exposures to your message before people will even regard it as relevant.

But whatever the actual number, the principle remains the same. It takes time to build a relationship of trust with people before they’ll listen to your advice and your recommendations.

You can’t achieve that unless you get their email address and permission to contact them on a regular basis. If they leave your site without subscribing, they may never come back.

So it’s essential to collect their details and begin the process of building a relationship with them before you expect them to act upon any of your recommendations.

One further advantage of email is that it’s regarded as more personal than other forms of online communication such as social networking.

People willingly give out their social media contact details, but are more reluctant to share their email address. So when your messages land in their inbox, they will be more likely to take notice of what you have to say.

3. Monetization

As your list continues to grow and you position yourself as a trusted advisor, it gives you the opportunity to recommend various products and services which will help your subscribers achieve their end goal.

The three main methods used to monetize your list involve promoting your own products and services, promoting another person’s products and services in return for an affiliate commission and displaying advertising within your content.

As a rule of thumb, it’s reckoned that you should be able to generate at least $1 of profit per subscriber per month. However, the actual number will depend upon various factors such as;

• The quality of your list
• The niche within which you operate,
• The level of trust that you establish with your list, and
• The number of promotional offers that you send your list.

4. Competition

Once you’ve got permission to contact your subscribers by email, gained their trust and spent time building a relationship where you’ve positioned yourself as a trusted advisor, that puts you in a powerful situation compared to your competitors.

For example, when one of your subscribers is looking for a product review or a recommendation from someone they trust, who are they most likely to consult?

Whose opinion are they most likely to value, yours or another person that they’ve never heard of before? And who are they most likely to buy from?

So provided you continue to nurture the relationship with your subscribers and provide them with relevant, top-quality content, it will allow you to block out your competitors more effectively.

A list of quality subscribers is a substantial business asset and a major barrier to entry which makes it extremely difficult for new competitors to establish their presence in the niche that you occupy.

5. Leverage

The fifth and final benefit of building an email list is leverage. When you have a large list of quality subscribers it’s possible to achieve many things that would otherwise be out of your reach.

Let’s say you want to get the attention of the market leader in your niche. All previous attempts to contact them have failed. So you use your list to recommend one of their blog posts/products causing a spike in their traffic/earnings. Do you think they’ll notice you now?

Absolutely!

And that’s just the beginning. When you have a list of high quality subscribers, it’s much easier to get the best affiliate promotion deals (special discounts, exclusive offers etc), the best list swap deals and to reach the top of affiliate promotion leader-boards (to get more recognition from your peers within your niche).

Take Action

When grouped together, these benefits overwhelmingly show that building a list of quality subscribers is an essential part of developing a vibrant and profitable online business.

But for many people the toughest part of list building is getting started. They know why they should be building a list, but something prevents them from taking action.

It could be a lack of confidence, technical problems or even just the lack of motivation during the early stages of list building to keep sending emails to a handful of subscribers.

But you need one subscriber before you can have 100,000. So as the aim of this series is to provide you with simple, actionable steps to build a better list, here’s your first task.

Action Step 1

I want you to use the comments section below to make a public commitment to start building your list.

Include your name and your commitment to start building your list over the next 30 days. And please indicate whether you’d like to be featured in a list building case study at the end of this series.

Once your commitment to action is down in black and white, two powerful things will happen; first, your intention will shift from the mental to the physical realm. This will increase the reality of the whole process and make it more likely to happen.

Second, you’ll become accountable to other people for taking action on your commitment.

So add your public commitment below and I’ll see you for Day 2 tomorrow.

5 Reasons Why You Should Start Building Your List Of Email Subscribers Now was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this post I’m going to suggest the future of online marketing and how to grow your business by focusing on intellectual capital.

Intellectual capital, which I’ll mention in a moment, should be compared with traditional capital. This covers tangible assets including land, property, factories and machinery. There are elements of the old economy.

In contrast, successful online businesses of the future will be those that focus on developing their intellectual capital.

So what is intellectual capital?

Intellectual capital consists of three main elements;

1. Distribution Channels

The first part of intellectual capital is your ability to get your message to your target market. This covers a wide range of communication methods including your list of email subscribers, rss subscribers, podcast listeners, radio listeners, people who watch you on live streaming, site visitors and search engine rankings.

To a lesser extent, social media assets, such as your Twitter followers and your Facebook fans should also be regarded as distribution channels.

These can be a good way to spread your message, but they’re generally not under your control so they’re not such a high quality asset as the other options.

Businesses that focus on building these assets and their ability to leverage these channels to communicate their message to their target market will do well.

2. Intellectual Property

The second aspect of intellectual capital is intellectual property. This refers to the more traditional legal definition of intellectual property, which includes copyright, trademarks, patents etc.

So this category covers your website content, reports, articles, videos and products which exist within your business. These items are important because they will;

a) Help you to build your distribution channels, and
b) Give you something to distribute

3. Recurring Revenue

The third aspect of intellectual capital is recurring revenue. Once you’ve developed your distribution channels and you’re using them to promote your products, this element will help to supercharge the growth of your business.

The best type of product generates a residual or recurring revenue stream. This covers products and services which people pay for on a continuing basis at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually etc).

From your point of view as the merchant, these products are far superior to the traditional pay-once-never-to-return revenue models that are widely used online.

As you continue to promote your continuity products, you’ll attract more and more customers who pay you on a monthly basis. Not only will this add great stability to your business revenue, it will also allow your business to grow far quicker than if you sold products to people on a one-off basis.

And The End Result?

Taken together, these three elements of intellectual capital can make the difference between a business that struggles and one that continues to grow strongly over the long-term.

So I hope this has provided you with ideas about how to construct your business so that it continues to grow and has the best chance of becoming highly successful and profitable.

But these are just my observations based on the themes that I see developing within the business world.

How do you see the future of online business? What are the essential factors of creating a successful online business, both now and into the future? I invite you to add your thoughts to this post using the comments section.

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The Future Of Online Marketing – Intellectual Capital was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

As the end of the week approaches, here are some of the best blog posts that I’ve read during the last 7 days.

They focus on different aspects of improving your blog, building your community and developing your online presence.

Enjoy.

• How To Market With Blog Comments The Right Way – Attract more visitors to your site by commenting on other people’s blogs. But you have to know the right way to proceed. Yaro Starak shows you the right way to post comments so that you stand out from the crowd.
• How to Make Your Blog Addictive Like World of Warcraft – If you want to make your website super sticky and dramatically increase the number of repeat visitors, check out this excellent post from the Blog Tyrant.
• How to Get 40+ Comments on Every Post – If you’ve just started blogging, one of the hardest tasks is to get people commenting on your blog. Alex Whalley reveals 3 essential elements which will attract dozens of comments to every post you write.
• Staying Focused and Avoiding those Distractions as a Blogger – Want to achieve more during your online marketing time? Stuart McMinigal provides a 3 step plan to avoid distractions and supercharge your productivity.
• 9 Sneaky Little List-Building Secrets to Attract More Customers – Joshua Black reveals 9 powerful techniques that you can use to improve the size and quality of your list.

Midnight Marketing Links – Part 1 was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

Does your family support your efforts to make money online?

It’s one of life’s ironies, you get involved with online marketing in order to earn more money and have the freedom to spend more time with your family.

Photo by Pierre Bédat

But you get drawn into the world of internet marketing and end up so absorbed in your online projects that you barely notice you’re hardly spending any time with your family. And even when you find time for them, your head is full of traffic, content and conversion.

And when your family complains you resent them for the demands that they make upon your time and for not understanding what you’re trying to achieve.

Does that sound familiar?

It’s a scene that’s repeated in thousands of households all over the world every day. Girlfriends feeling neglected, husbands being forgotten, parents being irritated and children being abandoned.

It takes a massive amount of time and energy to build a successful online business, so it’s essential to have the full support of your family.

If you’re locked in a constant struggle to make your family accept your online projects it will drain your creative energy and destroy your chances of online success.

So here’s how to gain and retain the support of your family as you continue to build your online business.

1. Set Your Priorities In Stone

One of the great attractions of both blogging and online business in general is that it’s extremely flexible. You can work where you like, when you like.

But that’s also the biggest danger to your family life. So when you start working online, there are certain things that you need to fight against.

First, it’s easy to get drawn into the world of internet marketing until you reach the stage where you’re obsessed by it. There’s a significant risk of this happening if you’ve;

a) Just started online (so you need to build your site and your audience.), and

b) Have chosen a niche that you’re really passionate about.

Second, it’s really easy to nip back to your computer in the evening “for a couple of minutes” only to be disturbed by the daylight appearing through the curtains.

So it’s vital to set your priorities before you go any further. What is more important, your family or your website? When you’re torn between spending time with your family and your site, which will take priority?

2. Set Your Boundaries

Once you’ve chosen your priorities, the next step is to divide your attention accordingly. What parts of the day and week do you set aside exclusively for family activities? What chunks of your time do you want to reserve for internet marketing? Does this division of your attention reflect your priorities?

For example, I never touch my blog on a Sunday, ever. It allows me to get away from my computer for a full day, stops any obsession developing and reminds me that there’s more to life than pixels on a screen.

It’s also important to get your family involved with policing these boundaries as it’s incredibly easy to slip back into your old ways without being aware of it.

So get your family to hold you accountable. If you’ve promised that won’t focus on your internet marketing projects between 6-9pm on weekdays, get them to call you out on it if you break your commitment.

Once you set these honor barriers, it will allow you to enjoy your family time without having to think about deep-linking, email subscriptions or RSS feeds. Both you and your family will notice a big improvement in the harmony of family life.

And when you need to spend more time online, make sure you encroach into your own time rather your family time.

So when you have a big deadline to meet, you cancel that round of golf with your friends rather than missing your children’s play time. You cancel the evening out with friends rather than missing a date with your partner. And if necessary you sleep fewer hours rather than missing family commitments.

And once your deadline is out of the way, make an extra effort to compensate your family for all the time that you’ve spent working over the recent days and weeks.

3. Share Your Vision

Before tensions begin to arise, let your family know why you’re working online. Explain your reasons and demonstrate what you want to achieve.

Show them how they will benefit from the time that you spend in front of your computer. Will you earn more money? Will it allow you to be at home more? Will it make you a better person? Let them know.

It’s also a good idea to explain why online success is so important to you, as this will help them understand why you have to spend so much time using your computer.

If you want to take this idea even further, encourage your family to help out with your online efforts.

For example, your spouse your proofread your work and if your children are older they probably know more about technology that you do.

Once they get involved, they will find it easier to share your vision and feel as though they have a shared interest in your online success.

4. Share The Proceeds

Once your online business begins to gather momentum it’s important to share the proceeds with your family.

So reward them for their patience. Show them that all the compromises and sacrifices have been worthwhile.

If your online work allows you to be at home all day, set aside chunks of family time where you can collect the kids from school, prepare an evening meal or watch TV with your family etc.

If you make more money online, use it to go on a family holiday, move to a bigger house etc.

This will show your family why you’ve been spending so much time working online and ensure that you receive continued support from them in your future endeavors.

5. Respect The Privacy Of Your Family

Thanks to the boom in social networks, online business is becoming much more personal these days. So unless you’re careful it can reach the point where it becomes overly invasive towards the rest of your family.

You may be building a personal brand online, but your family may not want their privacy or security compromised. So before you make any references to your family in your online work, it’s vital to discuss online privacy in depth. Cover issues such as;

• Do you mention them by name?
• Do you show photos of them?
• Do you share personal stories in your online content? If so, which ones are allowed?
• Do you show photos of where you live?
• Do you shoot videos of your home which would allow anyone to map the location or layout of your living area?

Draw a line in the sand which must not be crossed.

Respect your family’s right to privacy and they’ll be more likely to respect your online business activities.

6. Draw Strength From Your Family

As I mentioned earlier, building a successful online business required an enormous amount of physical, mental and emotional energy. So unless you have the wholehearted support of your closest family members it will be almost impossible to make any progress.

But beyond that, your family can be the source of endless strength and inspiration. Use the love that you have for your family to propel you to greater heights.

Use your time with them to completely forget about your online projects and recharge your batteries. And when you sit down to work, use thoughts of how your online business will improve their lives to supercharge your motivation.

Take inspiration from your family to tell a story that will resonate with your online audience. Build relationships by showing glimpses of your family life.

The happier you are and the better your family life the more it will show through in your work. It takes a massive investment of time and effort to generate the results that you want from your online business, but given a genuine reason and a worthwhile cause it’s possible to achieve almost anything.

Your family and the benefits you want to provide for them are the reason, so use it to push your family life and your online business to greater heights.

7. Turbo Charge Your Efficiency

Bill Gates was once asked why he was so serious when he was at work. His reply revealed a lot about his character.

Any inefficiency on his part reduced the amount of time he could spend with his family. So his work time was extremely serious and focused so he could have more fun time with his family.

And this is an area that’s often overlooked when discussing family approval of internet marketing. But there’s no point using these techniques to gain family support for your online business time, if you then proceed to use it inefficiently.

Improving your efficiency will help you to build a more successful business and provide you with greater fulfillment. But crucially, it will allow you to spend more time with your family, which in turn will make it easier for them to accept your business activities.

So this means learning to resist the million and one temptations that flit through your mind as you try to work. I’m hungry, I need the toilet, what’s on TV, I’ll just call Steve, did I put the trash out, I’ve got to cut my fingernails etc.

It also means learning to focus on the tasks that will make the most impact in your business and outsourcing the rest. In general, your biggest contribution to the success of your business will be creating content and building relationships with other people.

For example, if you work on your site for 60 hours per month and it generates $3000 per month, that’s equivalent to $50 an hour. But if you take 2 hours to install a plugin, that represents a cost of $100. Do you reckon you could find someone to make the change for less than $100?

So unless you can make structural changes to your site quickly, get someone else to do it and focus on what will have the greatest impact on the success of your business.

You owe it to yourself and to your family.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this potentially thorny issue. Have your experienced problems getting your family to support (or even understand) what you’re trying to achieve online? And what solutions have you devised to improve the situation? What have you done to ensure the support of your family?

Share your thoughts using the comments below.

How To Build Family Support For Your Efforts To Make Money Online was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

Do you want to make money blogging? Here are a few options that you should consider.

As the months pass, there are more and more opportunities to make money from blogging. So I thought I’d revisit one of the questions most frequently asked by bloggers “How Do I Make Money From Blogging?”

But before we go any further, always remember that every source of income can increase, decrease or disappear overnight. So if you want to build a stable business that generates profits consistently into the future, it’s essential to develop multiple sources of revenue for your blog.

This example has been used before, but think of your blog as a stool. If your stool only has one leg (income stream) it will be really unstable and fall over easily. As you add a second and a third leg (additional income streams) it will become more stable. Once you reach 5, 6, 8, 10 legs (multiple sources of income) your stool (blog) will be much more stable and won’t fall over if one of the legs (source of income) is suddenly removed.

It’s an old example, but illustrates the point well.

Ok here goes…multiple Revenue Streams – How To Make Money From Blogging

Advertising

Advertising is still the most popular monetization option for bloggers, with Google Adsense leading the pack of advertising networks which includes Chitika, WidgetBucks, YPN, Adbrite etc. Various advertising models exist including pay per click, pay per impression and pay per lead.

RSS Advertising

As many blogs have a substantial number of readers who consume their content through an RSS reader, RSS advertising has grown rapidly in recent years.

Leading advertising programs such as Google Adsense, Feedburner and YPN now provide bloggers with an easy way to include ads within their RSS feed. And although the revenue generated through RSS ads has not set the internet on fire, it’s another source of passive income that will help to increase the profitability of your blog.

Sponsorship

Despite the wide range of advertising networks on offer, many businesses are now discovering the power of cutting out the middleman and advertising directly on blogs. Sponsorship is more attractive from the advertiser’s point of view for three main reasons;

First, it’s more cost effective as the advertising network is removed from the equation.

Second, it’s more subtle than traditional advertising. It allows them to get their message out without having to rely upon blatant ads, especially as many sponsorship deals now involve companies paying bloggers to write about specific topics.

And third, it allows the advertiser to freeze out other competing businesses from advertising on the same blog.

From the bloggers point of view, there’s the potential to earn a greater proportion of the advertising revenue (compared to network ads) and build a reliable source of long-term revenue by associating yourself with a commercial partners that relate to the topic of your blog.

Sponsorship is also becoming one of the leading ways to monetize podcasts.

Digital Products

Developing your own range of digital products has become one of the most important aspects of building a successful online business.

Creating your own ebooks, video courses, audio tutorials, teleseminars etc provides several powerful advantages that will allow you to generate a growing income stream, including;

• Unique content that can only be bought from you increase your pricing power
• Build an army of affiliates who promote your products in return for commission
• Leverage your content for syndication, endorsement deals, list swaps etc
• Build a list of customers

And thanks to the traffic and community generated around successful blogs, the ability to promote your digital information creates the perfect combination.

Affiliate Marketing

As an extension of digital products, if you haven’t developed your own products, there are millions of products and services just waiting to be promoted in return for a commission. Many bloggers report earning a significant proportion of their income through affiliate marketing.

You can choose to promote products sold through affiliate networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction and ShareaSale. Alternatively, there are millions of independent affiliate programs ranging from Amazon Associates at one end of the spectrum right through to single products sold by the smallest online businesses.

Selling Blogs

Create a blog, add content, generate traffic, build a loyal community, monetize and then sell it on to someone who has the money to buy an established revenue steam.

Buying and selling blogs involves both individual blogs and entire blog networks.

Donations

Donations have been part of the blogosphere for many years, with Paypal donation buttons, Amazon wishlists etc. However, unless you have a massive amount of loyal visitors with whom you’ve developed a personal relationship, this option will only generate a small trickle of cash rather than an income stream.

Merchandising

If you have a blog with a cult following of fanatical readers, selling branded products can be a lucrative source of income. Everyone else need not apply.

Writing

As blogging has become more popular, many businesses (both online and offline) have discovered the potential benefits of using blogging to market their goods and services. Many of these businesses have hired staff writers to generate content. But for every business that has an in-house writing team, there’s another business that has to hire independent bloggers to run their blogs.

So if you’re an experienced blogger, there’s an endless stream of opportunities to get paid to write.

Even better, if you occupy a prominent position within your selected niche, you may also get the opportunity to write for local/national newspapers, magazines and industry leading websites. Some leading bloggers have also had their own book published. Blogging can lead to a wide variety of exciting opportunities.

Blog Networks

As the number of blog networks has increased, the amount of content required has multiplied exponentially.

So many bloggers also write for one of the blog networks to provide them with an additional income stream while their own blog continues to grow.

Although you lose many of the advantages of blogging for yourself, writing for an established network means you can concentrate on creating content without having to deal with blog structures, seo, admin, promotion etc.

Speaking

One of the most powerful aspects of blogging is the ability to establish people as an expert in their chosen topic. So as a natural extension of writing, successful bloggers are increasingly being sought out for paid speaking engagement at conferences.

Consulting

Once you’re perceived as an expert and an industry leader within your niche, it’s possible to charge a sizeable hourly rate for consulting services.

Over time even more options for making money with your blog will appear. For example, mobile marketing is an exciting area to monitor at present. So feel free to suggest your own ideas and insights in the comments below.

How To Make Money From Blogging was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

Which is the best self hosted blogging platform to use? That’s a question I get asked on a regular basis.

So here is a more in-depth look at the different blogging platform available for those of you who want to use a self hosted blog (For more information about hosted blogs, take a look at 3 Hosted Blog Options That You Should Consider).

This post covers three of the leading self-hosted blog options, WordPress.org, MovableType and Expression Engine, including the main advantages and disadvantages of associated with each of these platforms.

If you have experience of using one of these blog platforms, either good or bad, please use the comments section below to add your thoughts. And if you prefer to use a different stand alone blog software, I invite you to share your opinions with the rest of the Midnight Marketing Tips community.

Self Hosted Blog 1. WordPress.org

Launched in 2003, WordPress is the World’s leading open-source blog software with over 50,000 of the top million internet sites using it.

Installation: Once you’ve installed the WordPress software on your server (which is made easy thanks to the famous 5 minute install) you can select from thousands of free and premium themes to alter the look of your blog. It’s as easy as uploading the files of your chosen theme and activating them within the admin area of your site.

As you develop more experience using WordPress you have the flexibility to modify the look and feel of your site until it meets your exact requirements.

Community: The popularity of WordPress brings many additional advantages. The software is constantly being updated and improved. It also has an extremely active support community that has generated thousands of plugins which can provide your blog with every imaginable function.

Support: It’s also possible to find the answer to almost any problem with your WordPress blog thanks to tens of thousands of online guides about every possible aspect.

Search Engine Optimization: One of the main disadvantages of WordPress is the lack of search engine optimization. This has improved over the years, but the standard WordPress software could be more search engine friendly.

However, it’s possible to make the standard installation more search engine friendly using the all-in-one seo plugin or investing in the Thesis theme which will greatly improve the ability of your blog to rank well in the search engines.

Conclusion: Ultimately, WordPress is extremely flexible and can be as simple or as complex as you desire. If you intend to become a professional blogger, WordPress has the potential to accompany you right to the top of your profession.

WordPress.org POSITIVES

• Wide range of professionally designed templates
• Advanced comment/trackback spam management
• Active support community
• You maintain total control over your blog

WordPress.com NEGATIVES

• You have to install the software on your own server which requires a basic level of technical experience
• It takes slightly more work to maintain as you have to update WordPress, themes, plugins etc
• The standard WordPress platform could be more search engine friendly

Self Hosted Blog 2. Movable Type

Movable Type is owned by Six Apart and the software is based on the same platform used by the hosted blogging service TypePad.

Features: However, unlike its hosted cousin, Movable Type is more than just a blogging platform. It’s an all-in-one content management system which allows you to manage large quantities of content, operate an ecommerce site and create a social networking community in addition to the general blogging function.

The template system employed by Movable Type is extremely flexible, which means you have complete control over the look and feel of your site.

Access Levels: Another powerful feature is the ability to adjust the level of access that you assign to different people who use your blog. These roles allow you to give a different level of access to everyone who works on your blog, such as staff writers, guest posters, administrators, moderators etc.

If you intend to build a team of contributors as your blog grows, the ability to fine tune the level of access that you give to every team member is extremely useful.

So that’s the good, now for the bad…

Disadvantages: Although the templates can be customized almost any way you want, the range of standard templates is rather limited. So if you want your blog to adopt a specific look, the chances are that you’ll have to make your own customizations.

Another common criticism of the Movable Type software is the process for uploading images to your site. Even with a plugin this is rather complex, so if you intend to focus on publishing images to your blog, it might be worth looking elsewhere.

If you want to take advantage of features such as advertising management, database reports, events calendar or ecommerce you’ll have to upgrade your account to one of the paid levels.

Support: And unlike WordPress, which has a massive community of users and developers, the Movable Type community is considerably smaller so the level of support that you receive from the general community will be much lower.

Conclusion: In summary, Movable Type is an extremely flexible publishing system that’s used by many professional bloggers. If you intend to use it for the sole purpose of blogging it provides a wide range of powerful features for free.

However, this added functionality does mean that if you’re new to the World of blogging, it will take you longer to install your blog and get used to the full range of controls.

Movable Type POSITIVES

• Highly customizable template system
• Several options to expand the scope of your blog to include ecommerce and social networking
• Powerful access control system

Movable Type NEGATIVES

• Fewer standard themes available
• Smaller support community
• Complex image uploading process
• Flexibility makes the learning curve steeper

Self Hosted Blog 3. Expression Engine

Expression Engine is a popular commercial content management system provided by EllisLab.

Features: It provides a long list of core features including blogs, a photo gallery and the ability to create a wiki. It’s also possible to expand the features thanks to more than 20 addon modules and more than 100 plugins.

Management: The Expression Engine software also provides a full suite of management features such as data export, blacklisting, whitelisting, admin logs, an advanced search engine etc.

Security: The security features also extremely impressive, including Captcha, content approval, audit trail, ssl compatibility, email verification and the ability to set various user privileges.

Support: As always, the level of support provided by commercial software is an important element. The user guides provided by Expression Engine are well organized and contain both screenshots and useful examples to help you get started. As you would expect from software that provides this functionality, Expression Engine has a helpful Wiki which you can consult to solve any problems that you encounter.

Conclusion: In summary, Expression Engine is a content management system that goes well beyond blogging. While WordPress has been described as a screwdriver (a useful tool that’s extremely good at what it was created for), Expression Engine is a screwdriver factory (able to create almost any type of content management system that you desire).

Expression Engine POSITIVES

• Endlessly flexibly content management options
• Good looking templates
• Advanced search engine
• Integral image resizing and thumbnail creation
• Wiki capabilities
• Powerful custom field creation system

Expression Engine NEGATIVES

• You have to pay to license the software
• Public user registration not allowed
• Much Steeper learning curve

So Which Self Hosted Blog Is Best?

All three of these stand alone blog platforms have elements which make them worthy of consideration.

WordPress.org provides a massive range of blog themes and a well developed support community. Movable Type provides the ability to expand into areas such as social networking and ecommerce. Expression Engine provides the option to setup and manage your own Wiki.

Professional Blogging
So if you plan to become a professional blogger, devoting considerable time and effort to get the style of your blog just right, WordPress is a strong contender.

Create A Social Network
If you intend to enhance your blog community and turn it into a social network, Movable type is worth considering.

Content Site
And finally, if you want to move beyond blogging and build a powerful content site, perhaps with a wiki, Expression Engine is worth investigating further.

Which self hosted blogging platform do you use? How did you arrive at that choice? Add your thoughts using the comments section below.

3 Self Hosted Blog Options You Should Consider was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this short video, you’ll discover the five essential questions to ask before you build a website.

But first, here is the biggest trap to avoid. It’s a trap that many beginners fall into (yes, I fell into this trap a couple of times when I was starting out online) – Never do something just because you can.

When most people are new to internet marketing, they learn how to do a few things, they find a new script and they automatically run off in that direction.

They don’t have any coherent plan or strategy. They do something just because they can. They learn how to build a new website or they learn how to build a new squeeze page (and all these things are good), but they must be led by a specific strategy instead of just running around doing the things that you can.

If you follow that path it will lead to short-term fire-fighting, constant frustration and ultimately failure.

So before you take action, here are five crucial questions that you need to ask;

Question 1: My Target Market, Who Are They?

The first question is “Who are the people that make up my target market?” What group of people am I going to serve?

How old are they? What are their interests? How do they speak? Where do they live? What is their income level? Where do they hang out online? How do they think? What makes them tick? etc.

That’s just some of the background information you’ll need to collect as you build up a clear picture of the people who will make use of your product or service?

Once you know your target customer it will allow you to tailor your marketing message so that it speaks directly to them.

Question 2: What Problem Do They Need To Solve?

The second question is “What pains do they most want to solve?” What things in their life have reached such an unbearable degree that they need to find information that will allow them to alleviate the problem or to improve their life?

This will allow you to focus on their pain, which will (a) build empathy with your potential customers and (b) make them more likely to seek a solution.

Question 3: What Do The People In My Target Market Need/Desire?

Following on from this, question number three is “What do they need/desire?” What things do they need to make their life (a) bearable or (b) better than it was before?

Question 4: How Can I Provide The Most Value?

The fourth question to ask is, “How can I provide them with the greatest value?”

How can you be different? How can you be more relevant? How can you really resonate with the people in your target market?

If you can provide a detailed answer to this question, you’re well on your way to creating a solid strategy.

By this stage you’ll have everything you need to create a powerful marketing message and an offer which generates a powerful response from the people in your target market.

Question 5: How Do I Monetize This Project?

And finally, before you take action, you need to know how you intend to monetize the project.

There’s nothing worse than spending time planning, doing all the work and then discovering that there’s either no market for the product or the people that you’re targeting either don’t want it or can’t afford it.

So make sure you have a plan of how you intend to make money from the project. This normally includes having your own product or service, either physical or digital, selling another person’s project in return for an affiliate commission or driving traffic to your site and monetizing it through the sale of ads.

Take a look at these five questions and make sure that you can provide detailed answers before you do anything else.

Once your plan is ready, then you can proceed to use all the new techniques that you’ve learnt – build your site, build your squeeze page etc.

But it has to be this way around rather than beginning with the tactics (building something just because you know how to do it) and then struggling to fit them into an ad hoc strategy.

But that’s just my opinion. What do you think is the best way to approach a new project online? What do you do before you start building a new website? Add your thoughts to this post using the comments below.

5 Essential Questions To Ask Before You Build A Website was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

Which is the best hosted blog platform?

Following on from the post that I wrote the other day about 5 crucial questions to select the right blog platform here is a more detailed look at the options available for those of you who want to get started using a hosted blog (For more information about self-hosted blog options check out 3 Self Hosted Blog Options You Should Consider).

This post provides a short review of three hosted blogs including the positives and negatives associated with each option.

However, as there are many more options available, I encourage you to add your own experiences of hosted blogs to this post using the comments below.

Hosted Blog 1. WordPress.com

This hosted version of WordPress contains several features from the stand alone version without the need to install and maintain the software on your own hosting package.

With the free account you receive 3GB of file storage which should be sufficient for most bloggers. However, there are several additional paid levels which increase the level of features available, including custom css so that you have more control over the design of your blog, unlimited private users, additional storage capacity (5GB, 15GB, 25GB) and Videopress to embed videos within your blog.

Design: When you sign up for an account you can choose from a range of blog designs. You can customize your blog further using sidebar widgets which you can drag and drop to add additional items (archives, stats, feeds, twitter stream etc) to your blog.

Some of the templates even allow you to upload an image to alter the look of the main banner at the top of your blog. Beyond that you have to upgrade to edit the css file which gives you complete control over the design of your website.

Stats: One of the major strengths of WordPress.com is the advanced tracking stats that are integrated to the system. This allows you to view a graph of your visitor numbers, your most popular posts and the words people are using to find your site through the search engines.

When you click through to the advanced stats page, you can drill down into the data to view these graphs per day week or month.

Of all the free hosted blogs, WordPress.com provides the most comprehensive referrer statistics without having to install an external tracking package such as Google Analytics.

Publishing Options: Your WordPress.com account also allows remote posting to your blog using your mobile phone. Once your mobile device is setup, just send your new content to https://m.wordpress.com

Limitations: On the downside, WordPress.com doesn’t have the ability to post new content by email. And if you want to schedule future posts, embed videos or add links to your posts using the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor, you have to upgrade to a paid account.

Support: Another important issue is the level of support available when you run into problems. WordPress provides a range of support options including email support, FAQs and an in-depth knowledge base. There’s also an active community of forums and blogs where you can find the answer to almost any question.

Conclusion: If you intend to blog for fun without the need to display ads on your blog, the hosted blogs available at WordPress.com are quick to setup, easy to use and provides a whole host of expandable features which will meet the needs of most hobby bloggers.

WordPress.com POSITIVES

• Quick to setup
• Easy to use and maintain
• Range of professionally designed templates
• Integrated tracking stats system
• Advanced comment/trackback spam management
• Active support community

WordPress.com NEGATIVES

• No ads are allowed unless you have a high traffic blog
• It lacks mobile blogging capabilities
• Some of the paid upgrades such as Videopress are rather expensive
• You don’t own your blog, so it can be deleted at the discretion of WordPress

Hosted Blog 2. Blogger

Blogger was launched in 1999 and after being acquired by Google in 2003 has become the most popular hosted blogging solution, used by almost 30% of bloggers.

Design: The Blogger dashboard is well organized and intuitive to use. When you setup your free account Blogger provides a wide selection of templates which you can switch at the touch of a button. Once you’ve chosen your template, you can venture into the html code and further customize the look of your site. You can also drag and drop a range of gadgets (a.k.a. widgets or plugins) into the structure of your blog.

Another Blogger benefit is the ability to build your own template. This option will appeal to more advanced users who want more control over the look and feel of their blog design.

Posting Options: It’s also possible to post new content to your blog by email or from your mobile phone using the BlogThis! application.

Income Stream: As Blogger is owned by Google, it’s really easy to generate another income stream by displaying Adsense ads on your blog.

Costs: Everything within the Blogger platform is free and there are no core upgrades. However, there are various external services which will improve the quality of your blogger site. For example, when you upload an image to Blogger it gets added to your Picasa album which is part of your Google account. Once your allotted data storage is used up, you can pay for additional storage in 10GB chunks.

And if you want to access your blog through your own domain name (rather than the standard blogger address provided as standard) you’ll have to buy that and point it towards your blog files which are hosted by Blogger.

Support: And finally, for a blogging solution that’s based on ease of use, the quality of technical support is an important issue. As you would expect from a Google service, plenty has been written about Blogger both in the official knowledge base and the wider support community.

There is also a series of videos for people who are new to Blogger showing them how to get started. So it’s possible to find answers for every conceivable question that arises.

Conclusion: So to sum up, if you’re new to blogging, intend to blog for fun and want an easy to use platform that gives you the option to earn some extra money through Google Adsense, Blogger puts forward a powerful case.

Blogger POSITIVES

• Easy to setup and manage
• Significant control over the design of your blog
• Easy to integrate with Google Adsense

Blogger NEGATIVES

• Blogger is not the most search engine friendly blogging platform
• You don’t own your blog, so it can be deleted at the discretion of Blogger
• No automatic ping mechanism. This leaves you to manually notify services such as Pingomatic or Pingoat whenever you publish new content

Hosted Blog 3. Typepad (Monthly Subscription)

TypePad, which was launched in 2003 and is owned by SixApart, is based on the same platform as MovableType, sharing the same templates, APIs and functionality.

Costs: But unlike MovableType, which is now a free stand alone blogging platform, TypePad is a premium hosted blog platform which is aimed at the non-technical blogger. Packages begin at $8.95 per month but you get your own .com domain as part of the deal.

Features: TypePad provides an extensive range of advanced blogging tools and features including stats, word banning and automatic submission of new blog entries to Technorati, Feedburner etc.

The basic entry package provides access to thousands of theme designs, allows you to post all types of media (images, video and audio) and display advertising on your blog.

If you move up to the enhanced packages you’ll get more storage space, gain the ability to schedule posts for future dates, create multiple blogs, assign additional authors and receive priority support.

Publishing Options: Another TypePad strength is the number of options you have to publish new content to your blog. In addition to posting through your web browser, the remote posting features allow you to post new content via email, PDA or your smartphone. These are great features if you want to make regular posts to your blog while you’re away from your computer.

And if you’re a fan of social media TypePad makes it easy to display your Twitter feed on your blog and allows you to post directly to your blog from Facebook using an application called Blog It, which means you never have to leave Facebook to post new content.

Statistics: TypePad also makes it easy to integrate your blog feed with Feedburner which allows you to collect extra information and statistics about your RSS subscribers.

Support: On the technical support front, TypePad offers a full range of support options, as you would expect from a premium service.

Typepad provides a sizeable collection of video tutorials and screencasts to help you get started and a truly massive knowledge base that you can consult if you have any problems. If you still can’t find the solution to your problem, you can raise a support ticket at the email helpdesk.

Conclusion: In summary, TypePad is the ideal blogging tool for people who want an easy to use hosted blog that allows them to avoid dealing with technical issues and the peace of mind knowing that their monthly premium entitles them to a dedicated support system.

And while most professional bloggers may prefer to seek out one of the self-hosted blogging platforms, it’s worth noting that [Seth Godin], whose blog is in the top 5000 sites in the world, uses Typepad.

TypePad POSITIVES

• Quick to setup
• Easy to use and maintain even if you have no technical abilities
• Advanced mobile blogging capabilities, post by email, phone and PDA
• Choice of professionally designed templates
• Comprehensive tracking statistics

TypePad NEGATIVES

• Monthly cost
• Basic level package doesn’t allow you to schedule posts

So Which Hosted Blog Is Best?

The three hosted blog platforms that have been covered each have something to commend them.

WordPress.com is well optimized for ranking in the search engines and provides powerful integrated statistics. Blogger is extremely easy to use and can be customized extensively. Typepad achieves all of these things but charges a monthly fee.

Fun + Non Profit
So if you intend to blog for fun, without attempting to generate any income through displaying ads, WordPress.com is a good option.

Fun + Profit
If you want to blog for fun with the option of building a new income stream through Google Adsense, Blogger makes sense.

More Focus + No Technical Input
And finally, if you intend to focus more time and effort on your blog but don’t want to get involved in the technical side of things, TypePad is worth considering.

So what blogging option have you chosen? Do you use one of the hosted blogs or do you prefer to host your own blog? Add your thoughts to the post using the comments section.

3 Hosted Blog Options That You Should Consider was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

When you first start blogging, it’s important to select the right blog platform. The aim of this post is to provide you with all the information you need to make an informed choice about the best blogging platform to meet your needs.

Photo by Lightmatter

• Which blog platform should I use?
• Which blog platform is best?
• Should I use WordPress, Typepad or Blogger?
• Should I begin with a free blogging platform and upgrade in the future?
• Should I use a hosted blog or setup a stand alone blogging platform on my own domain?

These are just some of the questions that I get asked on a regular basis by bloggers who are just getting started and want to select the right blogging platform.

However, due to the number of different blogging platforms and configurations that you can use to meet your own individual circumstances, I’m not going to tell you which solution to use.

Instead, I’m going to flag up the essential questions you should consider when selecting the platform to use for your blog.

If you’ve already chosen your blog platform, please add your experiences to this post using the comments section below. This will help to balance out the natural preferences that I’ve picked up over the years and make this post a more valuable resource for readers who are currently trying to select the right blogging platform to use.

Essential Questions To Consider When Selecting A Blog Platform

When it comes to selecting a blog platform there are several options available. Each option has various advantages and disadvantages. The best option for you will largely depend upon your own unique circumstances. What is best for one blogger may not be the best option for you.

And while it’s possible to move to a new blog in the future switching platforms is something to be avoided if possible as it creates an additional outlay of time, effort, money and technical uncertainty.

For example, switching from a hosted blog to your own domain can cause significant problems with your search engine rankings and put a real dent in your visitor numbers for many months.

So take time to consider the various options and don’t settle for the first platform you investigate. Your aim should be to find a blogging platform that will meet your needs for the foreseeable future.

Once you answer the 5 questions that follow it will greatly improve your chances of selecting the right blog platform the first time.

Question 1: What do you want to achieve with your blog?

This question is an essential part of starting a new blog, both in terms of helping you to develop a clear strategy for your blog and selecting the best platform to use.

If you’re completely new to the world of blogging, you may not be entirely clear about your future intentions, but it’s important to nail down your main blogging goals because some platforms are more suitable for business blogging, while others are perfect for occasional bloggers.

So spend time considering these questions until you can provide clear, specific answers;

1. What is the main purpose of your blog?
2. Are you blogging for business or personal reasons? (Are you blogging for profit or pleasure?)
3. Do you envisage blogging being part of your life for the long-term?

If you will be blogging for profit and can foresee it becoming a major, long-term pillar of your business, it’s important to select a platform that will be able to grow with you.

4. Do you intend to place ads on your blog?

This is an important consideration because not all blog platforms allow advertising.

For example, at the time of writing WordPress.com (the hosted version, not to be confused with the stand alone version you can download from wordpress.org) states;

“Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not allowed on free WordPress.com blogs.”

You may be allowed to host ads on your wordpress.com blog if you have more than 25,000 page views per month, but even then you’ll have to split the revenue 50/50 with them. Of course these rules may change at some point in the future, but at present, if you plan to monetize your blog using ads it would be best to consider other options.

Question 2: What Is Your Budget?

The cost of blogging varies enormously, ranging from free at one end of the spectrum to extremely expensive at the other.

So it’s possible to find a blogging platform to suit all budgets. That means it’s important to know how much money you have to spend on both creating and running your blog.

As a bare minimum there are three elements to consider;

The blogging platform - This is the software which runs your blog. Most blogging platforms are available for free and are divided into two main categories; hosted or stand alone.

Hosted blogs such as Blogger or WordPress.com provide you with the software which is hosted on their servers under their domain name. These three elements are rolled into one so it’s much easier and cheaper to get started.

In contrast, stand alone or self-hosted blogs, such as WordPress.org provide you with the software which you then host on your own server under your own domain name.

The Domain Name - Domain names costing from around $9 per year

The Hosting - Basic hosting packages from $5 per month.

Beyond these basis costs, you should take into account the cost of various items which will help to improve the quality of your blogging platform.

Blog themes - All blogging platforms come with a free default template. However, the quality and functionality of these templates can vary enormously from respectable to downright rubbish. So if you want a more professional looking design you’ll have to pay for a premium theme or pay someone to create a custom template design.

Analytics and testing - If you’re serious about developing a successful website there are several tools and services that you can use to track and improve the performance of your blog. Some of these services such as Google Analytics and Google Optimizer are completely free, while many of them are free with the option to upgrade for advanced features.

Lead capture - Building a list of email subscribers that you can contact on a regular basis is another important aspect of developing a successful blog. There are several different email marketing services to choose from, but Aweber stands head and shoulders above the crowd. I’ve used it for a number of years and it has made a great difference to the success and profitability of my websites.

Question 3: How Much Control Do You Want Over Your Blog?

If you use a stand alone blog, such as wordpress.org, it provides you with almost complete control over how your blog looks and functions.

Your blog is hosted on your own hosting package and is accessed through your own domain. It’s free from the commercial controls imposed by WordPress.com (which doesn’t allow you to display ads).

So if complete control is an important factor in your choice of blog, you should give one of the self-hosted blogging options some serious consideration.

Question 4: What Is Your Level Of Technical Ability?

In general, hosted blogging services such as Blogger, Typepad or WordPress.com are much easier to setup and operate, but as a result they’re less flexible in terms of functionality.

So if you’re new to blogging and aren’t technologically proficient, these hosted blogs are quick and simple to setup and use.

Alternatively, if you’ve got previous blogging experience and are prepared to learn, it shouldn’t take long until you know enough to setup and run your own stand alone blog.

Once major advantage of stand alone blogs such as WordPress.org, is the level of information that’s freely available online. If you need to know how to do something there’s sure to be a blog or a forum somewhere with

Alternatively, there are thousands of technical experts all over the world who will be able to help you either for a fee or in return for bartering your own experience.

Question 5: What Are The Most Popular Platforms?

Although you should always select your blogging platform to meet your own specific needs, it’s worth being aware of the most popular options.

Platforms that are highly popular are more likely to stand the test of time, they will be regularly updated, encourage a greater range of plugins to be developed and generate an avalanche of useful online information. Obscure platforms are more likely to disappear and attract a much smaller support community.

In May 2009 Darren Rowse at Problogger held an online poll and discovered that 43% of blogger use a self-hosted WordPress blog, while 29% of people have their blog hosted at Blogger.com

So nearly three-quarters of all bloggers polled use one of the two leading competitors.

Check out full blogging platform results here

To Sum Up

It’s extremely important to select the right blogging platform before you get started. And if you forced me to make a solid recommendation (arm twisted up the back routine), it would be as follows…

If you want to blog for fun, your family or for therapeutic reasons and you want something that’s quick, easy and free to setup, a hosted blog should fit the bill perfectly. But if you have more technical knowledge or like tinkering with websites then by all means go for a stand alone blog.

On the other hand, if you want to develop a professional looking blog which will generate revenue over the long term, I would go for a stand alone blog. Midnight Marketing Tips uses a self-hosted blog from WordPress.org. The level of control and the power of the WordPress community make it a formidable option.

Even if you don’t have a great level of technical proficiency, it’s easy to learn enough to get by or pay a designer to help you get started.

But there are no hard and fast rules. The overall success of a blog involved more than just the software used to run it. Seth Godin, one of the best known bloggers in the world uses a hosted Typepad account yet it’s one of the top 5000 sites on the internet.

Additional Resources On Selecting The Right Blog Platform

• A Brief History of 9 Popular Blogging Platforms
• Top 10 Blogging Platforms
• Blog Software Review including comparison chart

I hope this has given you enough information to help select the right blogging platform for your needs. However, it’s always possible for more details or a different perspective to be added. I’m sure many of you have your own experience of making this important choice and I invite you to share your advice in the comments section below.

5 Crucial Questions To Select The Right Blog Platform was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this blog post, Internet Marketing Explained – How To Make Money Online, I’m going to show you the main business models for making money online.

There are many different ways to make money online, but in terms of a sustainable business model there are 5 main options.

Online Business Model 1: Digital Products Or Services

The first online business model is digital information products or services. This can take the form of an ebook, pdf reports, a course of videos, audio recordings or a combination of these items.

They can be one off purchases, where the customer pays once in return for the information, or it can involve recurring payments where they pay on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, annually etc) for example, to access a membership site.

This has the great advantage of providing repeat income for your business.

Online Business Model 2: Ecommerce

The second option is ecommerce, where you provide physical products or services. This is really the same as the digital information option above, the only difference is that you physically deliver the products or services to your customers.

Online Business Model 3: Affiliate Marketing

The third way to make money online is affiliate marketing. This is where you promote other peoples’ products and services, digital or physical, in return for a commission.

In general digital information products provide the greatest potential because they have a much higher commission rate. Physical goods and services usually offer commission rates that are in the single digit percentage range.

However, with digital information products it’s not uncommon to see commission rates of between 50-75%. So in terms of the amount of business that you generate, digital affiliate products are the most profitable.

Online Business Model 4: Ads

The fourth way to make money online is through advertizing. This is where you build a site, fill it with content, drive traffic to it, then monetize it using one of the options such as Google Adsense, Adbrite or Banner Ads. Once your site grows to a certain size you also have the option to sell space direct to larger media buyers.

So the essence of this option is to create and manage content, then continue to drive traffic to it.

Online Business Model 5: Concept

The fifth and final sustainable online business model is to build a concept site. For example, Twitter is a great example of a wildly successful concept site. While the site doesn’t generate a great deal of revenue, the general concept has grabbed the attention of the world.

Due to the level of activity and the number of accounts the whole Twitter business is worth a considerable amount of money and may ultimately be bought by one of the cash generative companies such as Google or Yahoo.

So if you’re just getting started online, what would I advise?

The best option is to begin with affiliate marketing. Use this to learn about your target market, test various ideas and generate profit to provide you with a solid business foundation.

Once you’ve done these things and you know what people want within the market that you operate, spend time developing your own products and services which you can really expand upon and increase the level of profit that your business generates.

So I hope that has given you a general overview of internet marketing and the various ways to make money online.

Post Summary

There are five main ways to make money online;

• Digital products or services – Sell information that is delivered electronically
• Ecommerce – Sell physical goods and services
• Affiliate marketing – Promote products and services provided by other people for a commission
• Advertising – Provide content, drive traffic, show ads
• Concept – Start a massively popular site (YouTube for example) and flog it to one of the global giants

Internet Marketing Explained – How To Make Money Online was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this video, blogging for beginners I’m going to show you 6 essential wordpress plugins to help you launch your site.

When you initially install your new WordPress blog, there are hundreds of different plugins that you can install.

But for most purposes, there’s a hardcore group of 6-12 plugins that are really essential to help you with the day-to-day running and promotion of your blog.

So I’m going to login to the admin section of the Midnight Marketing Tips blog and show you six essential wordpress plugins that I use.

Blogging For Beginners Plugin 1: Tweetmeme Retweet Button

The first plugin in the Tweetmeme retweet button. Whenever you install this plugin and add it to the template of your blog, a small retweet button will appear in every post that you publish.

This gives your visitors the option to tweet about your posts at the click of a button. So if your visitors like your content and want to share it with the Twitter followers, all they have to do is to click the retweet button.

This will take them to their own Twitter account, where the title of the post and a link to it will appear in the status box. One more click will allow them to tweet the message and share the content with their followers.

This has the potential to go viral if you post good quality, relevant content on your blog.

Blogging For Beginners Plugin 2: Google XML Sitemaps

The second plugin is Google XML Sitemaps. Once this is activated within your blog, every time you make a new post, this plugin will update your XML sitemap.

This sitemap file will help the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to discover that you’ve published new content. It allows their spiders to consume all your content and index it in a more efficient manner.

This plugin is important as it will help your new content to be indexed in a shorter space of time.

To make this technique even more powerful, you can register the location of your XML sitemap in your Google Webmaster Tools account. This tells Google where your sitemap is located so that it can search through it on a regular basis.

Blogging For Beginners Plugin 3: Feedburner Feedsmith

The third essential plugin is Feedburner Feedsmith. This is the plugin which allows you to link your WordPress RSS feed to the service provided by Feedburner which is owned by Google

On many blogs you’ll see the orange RSS button. This allows visitors to subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog. Once they click the rss feed button they have a range of subscription options.

For example, if they have a Google reader account they can click the Google Reader logo and subscribe to the Midnight Marketing Tips blog.

Then in the future, whenever new content is published on the blog, it will automatically appear within their Google Reader account.

Feedburner also provides various advantages including detailed stats so you can see how many people subscribe to your feed.

It also allows you to keep control of the address of your feed. For example, when using Feedburner Feedsmith, the link to your RSS feed will remain YOURDOMAIN.com/feed/ yet when your visitors click the feed button to subscribe they will be taken through the feedburner subscription process rather than the standard feed setup provided by WordPress.

This means that you can continue to promote your own feed address rather than having to promote the feedburner address. This provides you with additional control over the promotion of your site and provides protection in case Feedburner ever disappears.

Blogging For Beginners Plugin 4: CBnet Ping Optimizer

The fourth plugin is one called CBnet Ping Optimizer. This simple, innocuous plugin performs an important function.

With the standard WordPress installation, every time you publish a new page or a new post, WordPress automatically notifies (or pings) various blog networks such as Pingomatic. In turn, this will let a whole range of sites know that you’ve just published new content.

But the standard WordPress system pings these networks every time you make an alteration to a page and save it, even although it’s largely the same information.

So if you’re the type of blogger who constantly makes changes to your old posts, WordPress will ping these distribution networks every time.

This ping optimizer plugin only allows WordPress to ping these networks the first time a new post is published. So it can really help to prevent any problems developing if these networks think that you’re abusing the ping mechanism. Check out the CBnet Ping Optimizer, it’s simple but really effective.

Blogging For Beginners Plugin 5: Contact Form 7

Plugin number five is Contact Form 7. This is a quick to use, easy to setup, lightweight contact form. It provides a good looking contact form that’s easy to install, which will allow your visitors to contact you by email through your blog.

Blogging For Beginners Plugin 6: Defensio Anti Spam

And finally, the sixth plugin is Defensio Anti Spam. This is an essential part of dealing with the comment spam that your blog will begin to receive over time. As your blog becomes more prominent on the internet various robots and scrappers will find your site and automate the submission of spam comments to your blog.

These automated comments are submitted in an attempt to get links to other sites. So unless you’ve got anti spam protection the quality of your site will be lowered by these comments.

Defensio anti spam is a good alternative to Akismet which is part of the standard wordpress installation and now charges for access to their service. So check out Defensio Anti Spam, it’s free, I’ve been using it for a while and it’s done a good job of managing the spam comments on my blog.

I hope these six plugins will help you to get your blog started and set you off in the right direction.

Which WordPress plugins do you use on your blog? Which plugins do you consider to be absolutely essential? If there are any other vital WordPress plugins that haven’t been included above, share your thoughts using the comments below.

Post Summary

Here are six essential WordPress plugins to help you promote and manage your blog;

• Tweetmeme Retweet Button – Make it easier for your visitors to share your content
• Google XML Sitemaps – Help the search engines to find your content
• Feedburner Feedsmith – Added functionality for your RSS feed including stats
• CBnet Ping Optimizer – Take control of how often WordPress notifies other networks about your new content
• Contact Form 7 – Easy to use, lightweight contact form
• Defensio Anti Spam – Keep your blog free of nasty spammy comments. Eugh!

Blogging For Beginners – Six Essential WordPress Plugins was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this short video I’m going to show you how to spice up the quality of your powerpoint transitions. So we’ll begin in powerpoint 2007 and take a look at a simple presentation I’ve put together.

So we’ll click the slide show tab and then play from beginning.

On the first slide we have the main title slide, then on the next we have a sub-title slide with a background image. On the third slide we have the start of the information with a simple text heading and five bullet points. The fourth and final slide is blank.

That’s quite standard and also very boring. We can do so much better than that. So I’m going to show you how to create a more elaborate transition from the second slide (the one with the background image) to the beginning of the main content of the presentation.

The first thing we need to do it to take a snapshot of the second slide (the one with the background image) in it’s final state. So once you’ve got the slide to appear as it will in the final presentation, move up to the Microsoft Office button at the top left of the screen, select save as, then move down to other formats in the box of options that appears.

Once you click the other formats option, the save request box appears. We’ll call this frame1. Then instead of saving it as a powerpoint file, we’ll open the file type drop down box and select to save it as a jpg image. Once we click the save button it will ask whether we want to save all slide or just the current slide. For our current requirements we’ll select to save just the current slide.

The other snapshot that we need to save is an image of a blank slide within our powerpoint template. So we’ll click slide four (the blank slide) in the left hand pane and repeat the procedure. Office button, save as, other formats, select to save as a jpg, we’ll call it frame2, click save then remind it just to save the current slide.

Now that we’ve got our two images prepared, we’re ready to begin constructing our transition. So click the slide with the background image. For our purposes we’ll call this frame 1 of our transition.

Click the home tab, then select to insert a new slide. When all the options appear, click the blank slide. The new frame should appear below the slide with the background image. This will be the second frame of our transition.

Use the left pane to select this new blank frame, then right click inside the frame in the main display area. Select format background from the menu that appears, select the solid fill option and alter the color to black. Close the box then select the insert tab and click picture. Browse your computer and select frame1.jpg that you created a few moments ago. This is the copy of the slide with the background image.

Remaining on frame 2 of your transition where you’ve just inserted the image, select the animations tab, then click custom animations to the left. This will open a new pane on the right hand side.

Select the add effect drop down box, move down to exit and when the new options appear click pinwheel. That will show you the effect of the page spiraling away into the distance.

Still in the custom animations pane at the right, for the start option select after previous and alter the speed to fast. The final alteration to this frame is to select the animations tab and on the top right of the page, look for the area called advance slide. Uncheck the box next to on mouse click and add a checkmark to the box next to automatically after. Then set the time next to this to 00:01

Remaining on the same slide, select the home tab, then click new slide and choose to add a blank slide. This should add a blank slide below the one you’ve just been working on.

Select the blank slide you’ve just added, right click within the slide in the main display and select format background.
Choose the solid fill option, black in color then close the box.

Move to the insert tab, select picture and find frame2.jpg (the image of your blank template) that you created earlier. Now move to the animations tab, select custom animations and in the right hand pane select add effect, entrance and pinwheel. You’ll see the blank image spiral towards the front of the screen.

Still in the custom animations pane on the right hand side, select start after previous, increase the speed to fast and the top right of the page uncheck remove after mouse click then check automatically after and shift the time to 00:01

The final frame of our transition will be the next one that already exists with the main content of our presentation.

So our transition consists of four main frames, the first frame is the original sub-title page with the background image, the second frame is the image of the first transition frame and the third frame is the image of the blank template which then moves on to display the start of the content.

In the actual presentation, the sub-title page will spiral away to nothing, then the new page which contains the content of the presentation will spiral back towards the screen.

So I hope that’s given you a few ideas about what can be achieved with powerpoint. It’s certainly a lot better than the standard transitions that are provided by Powerpoint. Unleash your creativity.

What techniques do you use to spice up your powerpoint presentations and improve the level of engagement that your viewers have with your message? Use the comments section below to share your ninja Powerpoint techniques with the rest of the community at Midnight Marketing Tips.

How To Spice Up Your Powerpoint Transitions was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this short video I’m going to show you how to convert an MOV quicktime file into an mp4 file. The program we’re going to use is a free piece of software called Handbrake.

If you search Google for the keyword Handbrake you should see that the site www.handbrake.fr appears at the top of the results. Once the site loads, click the downloads link on the left and then select the appropriate download to match the operating system that you use.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the software you’ll see a rather detailed user interface.

When you’re ready to start the conversion process, move to the source panel at the top left, select video file from the drop down box that appears and then search your computer for the mov file that you want to convert to mp4.

Once you find the file, click open and after a few seconds it will determine the details of the file that you want to convert.

The next thing to do is to select a destination location where the mp4 file that is created will be placed. So click the browse link to the right of the destination section and confirm where you want the new mp4 file to go. You can also alter the file name at this point. Once you’ve done that click save.

Now we move down to alter the settings.

Below the destination section, check the box to ensure that the file is web optimized.

The first tab (picture) shows the dimensions of the source file. The file we’re converting is 1280 by 720 pixels which is a widescreen format (16:9 ratio). So what we’re going to do here is to reduce the size of it to reduce the amount of bandwidth the video uses online.

To achieve this, click the drop down box next to the anamorphic ratio and set it to none. This then allows us to set both the width and the height of the mp4 file. SO we’ll select 710 pixels wide by 400 pixels high as this is also a 16:9 ratio.

In the video filters tab there’s nothing that we need to alter.

On the video tab, move to the right hand section which allows us to input the quality settings. First, check the box for average bit rate and we’ll set this to 450 which is a medium quality video. For the video codec on the left side of the video tab, make sure it’s h.264 which is the most widely compatible codec to use for mp4 files. We’ll keep the frame rate the same as the source file and finally we’ll check the box for 2 pass encoding.

This means that it goes over the video twice and in situations where there’s no movement on the screen from frame to frame, for example on a powerpoint presentation it will reduce the file size of the video (by instructing the encoding mechanism that no movement occurs and to keep all the frames the same until movement does occur).

For the audio tab we’ll select the aac codec, stereo, sample rate of 24 and a bit rate of 64kbps. Now click add track, then select the audio details that were already there (until they are highlighted in blue) and click the remove button.

There’s nothing that you need to change on the subsequent tabs (subtitles, chapters or advanced), but you can experiment with these settings over time. But for now we’ll remain with the basic setup.

Once you’ve got all the settings ready, move to the top of the interface and click start. You’ll see the black windows screen appear, which will show that it’s working on encoding pass 1, then the percentage completed and the estimated time remaining. Once that’s completed it will begins the second encoding pass which is marginally faster.

Once that’s completed, there will be a fully functional mp4 file waiting for you in the destination location you specified earlier.

So I hope this has shown you how to use the free handbrake software to convert your hi-resolution master video from Quicktime format into an mp4 format which is much more amenable to be distributed on the internet.

What format do you use to distribute your videos online? What are the benefits of the format that you use and have you experienced any problems in converting your videos into a file format that works well online? Share your video production experiences with the rest of the Midnight Marketing Tips community using the comments section below.

How To Convert Quicktime MOV Files To MP4 Files Using Handbrake was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this video I’m going to show you how to keep up to date with new information in a shorter space of time. Now you’ve probably heard this many times before, but if you want to make money online, speed is vital.

This applies to both the speed at which you achieve things and also the speed at which you learn and keep up to date with new material.

Now the problem is that there’s just so much material that’s available these days and much of it takes the form of either audio or video.

So this is a technique that I’ve used for a while to increase the speed at which I keep up to date with all the new developments in online marketing.

It’s a free media player called VLC that you can download for free at www.videolan.org. It can handle most file formats, video as well as audio. And most important for our purposes, it allows you to speed up the playback without the pitch of the audio track increasing. This avoids having to listen to really high-pitched, squeaky voices.

The great advantage of this media player is that if you listen to a recording at 1.5x speed (or a 50% increase in playback speed) a 60 minute recording can be consumed in 40 minutes. And if you can listen at double speed (a 100% increase) the one hour becomes 30 minutes.

So you can see how it can allow you to get through new information considerably faster than you otherwise might have done. Even better, if you have a good recording and the person speaking is both clear and deliberate in their presentation you can often listen to it at a rate approaching triple speed. So a one hour recording would take just 20 minutes to consume.

The other great thing about this technique is that as the weeks and months pass, your brain seems to develop so that it can keep up with the greater speed at which you hear the soundtrack.

I hope this simple technique helps you to keep up to date with all the new information related to your subject of interest in a shorter space of time.

What media player do you use to listen to online audio and video? What specific benefits does your choice of player provide? And have you tried using this technique before? Use the comments section below to share your experiences with the rest of the Midnight Marketing Tips community.

How To Consume New Videos And Audio Content In Half The Time was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In the next few minutes you’ll discover how to double the effectiveness of your videos which will increase the level of engagement with your message and ultimately lead to greater profits.

When people are browsing videos online they become both impatient and egocentric. All they’re concerned with is “What’s in it for me?”. And if you don’t provide them with a good reason to continue watching more than 50% of your viewers will bail out after the first 15 seconds.

It’s essential to create emotional curiosity with your viewers by outlining the benefit they will get from watching your video. So with that in mind, here are four different ways to hook your viewer and make your video (a) more watchable and (b) more effective at delivering your message.

Video Hook 1: Curiosity

The first hook is curiosity. Humans are by nature curious. They have a deep down desire to know things which will help them to stay alive, avoid hurt, embarrassment, shame etc.

This includes anything that’s mysterious, anything with hidden benefits and anything that’s counter-intuitive. Just think about the marketing of the Atkins diet. How can you eat all that protein and still lose weight. It goes against what you would normally assume is the correct way of things.

Video Hook 2: Amazement

Hook number two is amazement. If you can find a story that will genuinely amaze your target viewers, you’ll have a vice like grip over their attention.

For example, if you’re targeting people who want to make money online, do you think it would get their attention if you told them you earned $35,000 every day? Certainly.

Just make sure that your claims are both genuine and genuinely amazing or your credibility will be shot.

Video Hook 3: Perspective

The third type of video hook is perspective. For example, former car thief reveals how to avoid having your car stolen. That would certainly get your attention if you were worried about car crime.

This technique of offering your viewers the perspective of someone who they normally wouldn’t have access to can be an extremely powerful attention grabber.

It provides the potential to get a specific perspective on a topic that your viewers want to know about from somebody who is a recognized authority on the subject. Let’s face it, a car thief is certain to know a few things that makes a car hard to steal.

Video Hook 4: Promise

The fourth and final view hook is a promise. You make a bold promise to reveal something that will improve the lives of your viewers. For maximum effectiveness, make your promise bold and then deliver big.

Promise was the hook that I used at the beginning of this video. I promised to show you how to double the effectiveness of your videos and if you’re still watching this proves that the information works.

Do you use videos to deliver your message to your website visitors? What techniques do you use to improve the engagement of your viewers? Share your video scripting tips with the rest of the Midnight Marketing Tips community using the comments section below.

How To Double The Number Of People Who Watch Your Videos was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this short video I’m going to show you how to add opacity to images that have been inserted into Powerpoint 2007.

So you’re creating a slideshow presentation using powerpoint and you want to add some images to spice it up. But the problem is if you insert an image into powerpoint you can’t alter the opacity.

For example, if we click the insert tab, then click picture and select an image, you can size it, move it around and send it to the back, but crucially you can’t make the image more see-through so that it’s there without being too vibrant.

So we’ll get rid of the image and I’ll show you how to add opacity to images without having to go to the extent of using another paint package such as Photoshop. Adding opacity to an image using Photoshop then inserting into Powerpoint as an image works well, but not everyone has Photoshop and there is a better alternative. So here’s how to add opacity to images within Powerpoint.

Click the insert tab, then instead of going to picture, click shapes. We’ll select a shape that looks reasonable for our purposes, click the left mouse button and drag it across our slide until it’s the desired size, then release the left mouse button.

Now within the shape we’ve just created, right click then select Format Shape from the menu that appears. Now select to fill the shape with a picture/texture fill. Click insert from file, find the image you want to use, then click insert. Now at the bottom of this box, there’s a transparency slider. So we’ll slide it up to 75% then close the box.

We can still move the shape which contains our image around and/or alter the size. And two final things to complete the process. First, click the drawing tools tab at the top of the page, then open the shape outline drop down box and select the No Outline option. This removes the outline around the shape.

Second, still in the drawing tools tab, click the send to back drop down box and select sent to back. This puts our shape containing our image behind any text that appears on the page.

I hope that helps you to quickly add images with opacity to your powerpoint presentations as it will greatly enhance the look of your slideshows.

Do you have any advanced techniques that you use to improve the look of your Powerpoint presentations? Add your comments below to share your Powerpoint experiences with the rest of the Midnight Marketing Tips community.

How To Add Opacity To Images In Powerpoint 2007 was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips

In this short video I’m going to show you how to double the power of submitting your content to the article sharing sites. This is a popular method with many people who want to promote their website.

They write an article and then submit it to various sites such as EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. Traditionally, they select one main keyword, which may provide perhaps 10 visitors per day if they reach the top of google. And once their article has been posted on these sites it may then rank for other incidental keywords.

But what if you could naturally target two main keywords per article? Well the technique I’m going to show you now is called keyword stacking and it will allow you to achieve that.

So let’s say that you wanted to rank in the search engines for the keyword phrase successful list building. If you do some research, you may find another keyword phrase that’s closely related to this, such as list building secrets.

So how about combining the two into one longer keyword phrase, successful list building secrets? If you use this in the title of your article, in the main body, preferably in the first paragraph, in your bio at the end of the article and also in the designated keywords for your article, your article will target the following keyword phrases;

• Successful List Building Secrets
• Successful list building
• List building secrets
• List building

So with this one title you’ve managed to stack up four potential keywords. The long tail keyword Successful List Building Secrets, the two mid level three word phrases (Successful List Building and List Building Secrets) and the harder to rank for top level phrase List Building.

Over the days and weeks after your article is published as you begin to build links to it and people visit your article, it will begin to receive greater prominence within the search engines.

So I hope this technique has helped you to see how it’s possible to rank for more than one targeted keyword within the same article. Over time it should help to increase the amount of traffic you receive from these article sharing sites.

Do you use articles to promote your website? What sites have provided you with the best results? And do you use any specific techniques to increase the effectiveness of your article submissions? Share your article marketing tips with the rest of the Midnight Marketing Tips community using the comments below.

How Keyword Stacking Can Double The Power Of Your Article Marketing was created and published by Midnight Marketing Tips