What Steven Cousley Does

I haven’t really been hiding but I’ve been so busy learning the ropes over on Squidoo that my blog has been a bit neglected the past few weeks.

Until I joined Squidoo I hadn’t realised how much potential there was for earning some great “passive” income. Simply by creating Squidoo lenses that get interest from the general public you get to share in Squidoo’s revenue earning.

So far I’ve built 16 lenses, which is really easy by the way. Just choose the modules you want on the page and add content. 6 of those look like being money makers and that is with very little effort to promote them. With a little bit of time spreading the links around I could do even better. Admittedly it would take hundreds of active lenses to produce what I would call an “income”, but it is possible. Even without that level of effort there is some nice spare change to be made.

The other really nice feature about Squidoo is that part of the sites overall revenue is given to charity. So anything you do to build and promote your own lenses is helping out someone else in need. If you choose you can donate all or just part of your personal earnings as well.

For a sample of what I’ve been doing over there, here’s my latest lens on a topic I know a little bit about, What is bread improver

And these are some of my most poular lenses so far, seems to be a fair bit of interest in recipes.
Yeast Free Bread Recipe
Easy French Toast Recipe
How to Make Ciabatta Bread
Simple Gluten Free Bread Recipe

If you can’t tell already, I really really like Squidoo.

There’s Much You Can Learn From Competing eBay Auctions
If you haven’t already, you need to start looking at your
competitors’ auctions because you can learn a lot, as long
as you know what you’re looking for.

To begin with, don’t waste your time looking at currently
running listings because you don’t know what’s going to
happen with them. Instead, use the advanced search form and
search the completed listings for auctions that sold.

To do this, simply go to eBay’s advanced search form, type
in your best keywords, check the “Completed listings only”
checkbox and set the minimum number of bids to 1. Also, set
the sort order at the bottom of the form to “Price: highest
first”.

This will show you competing auctions that have recently
ended, with the ones that sold for the most at the top. Go
through and take a look, ignoring auctions with a red price
because they didn’t sell. Pay special attention to the
following things:

Titles. What are the other sellers putting in their titles
and what are they leaving out? If your titles are very
different then it might be a good idea to see if you can
make improvements.

Descriptions. You’ll probably notice that the successful
sellers haven’t just copied text from a company website or
from an Amazon.com review. They’ve gone through the trouble
of writing a little about the item and about themselves.
Learn from their example.

Pictures. I can almost guarantee you that the top selling
auctions will have good quality pictures which show enough
detail to let eBayers see what they’re getting. With items
of any significant cost, you will probably find multiple
picture, each from a different angle.

Style. Is it written conversationally or with a
businesslike tone? The way you should write depends on your
target audience, and these people seemed to like what the
top sellers wrote. After all, their items sold.

Time. It might seem insignificant to ignore this as a
factor, but pay attention to when the top selling auctions
began and ended and how mamy days they were listed for.
This might give you some clues about the best way to
attract buyers who will bid your item up. Then you can
schedule your items accordingly.

Price. If your competitors are selling using Buy it Now,
check to see what the maximum price is that they’ve managed
to sell for recently and consider setting your own Buy it
Now price slightly below that.

Shipping. Search the listings to find the “sweet spot” for
shipping. If you can figure out a way to get your shipping
costs lower than the highest sellers then this might be a
great opportunity to differentiate yourself in the market.
You might be surprised at how much of an impact a small
difference in shipping can make.

Once you’ve done your research and you find out what works,
you can start to emulate your competitors. Of course don’t
just copy them completely. Instead, structure your auctions
in a similar manner and make sure they include the same
information.

—————————————————-
Clint Herman is a successful eBay seller with over 6 years
experience selling on eBay. He also loves teaching others
how to sell on eBay. He is the author of “How to Get
Started Selling on eBay,” which is a beginner’s guide to
selling on eBay designed for people who are new to selling
on eBay. The guide is available at
http://www.beginnersauctionguide.com/ar.html

TOP Article Directories Article Marketers Should Focus On First
With article marketing being one of the most popular and
leveragable online marketing practices today one often asks
themselves how they can maximize there articles exposure
once written and ready for publishing.

Article directories are always an article publishers first
resort but today the internet is so saturated with article
directories one often wonders which article directories
they should submit their articles to first to get the most
exposure to them so they can start receiving Traffic and
Sales from their hard work.

I’ve been publishing articles online for a few years now
and religiously submit them to the article directories I
have listed below simply because they are considered the
TOP article directories on the web today and is where I
receive most of my traffic from.

From my experience I recommend anyone just starting out
online with article marketing to submit your ready to
publish article to the article directories listed below
first before searching the web for all the other hundreds
of article directories that only get a fraction of the
traffic these ones get.

So with that said here’s the list I’ve put together with
the article directories Alexa Ranking and Popularity Rank.

And just so you know these numbers may change but as of
this writing this is what they are.

TOP Article Directories:

www.EzineArticles.com (Alexa Ranking – 327 | PR 6)

www.A1Articles.com (Alexa Ranking – 78,153 | PR 4)

www.ArticleAlley.com (Alexa Ranking – 23,377 | PR 5)

www.Amazines.com (Alexa Ranking – 29,699 | PR 4)

www.ArticlesBase.com (Alexa Ranking – 4,007 | PR 5)

www.GoArticles.com (Alexa Ranking – 21,680 | PR 6)

www.IdeaMarketers.com (Alexa Ranking – 42,871 | PR 3)

www.SearchWarp.com (Alexa Ranking – 7,094 | PR 4)

www.ArticleCity.com (Alexa Ranking – 43,159 | PR 5)

These article directories should give you a good start and
as you can see from the numbers above these article
directories get great amounts of traffic and have good page
rank which will also help you out with your Search Engine
Ranking.

I have a few quick tips for you before I wrap this up and
that is make sure your articles are at least 500 words or
more. Article directories are starting to decline articles
that are less then that number. I know this because it
happened to me on a few occasions.

My next tip is try to write your articles around some
keywords that are actually being search for. I recommend
keyword phrases with three or more words in them. The
reason being is these keywords have less competition which
means your article will have a greater chance if ranking
higher in the search engines for that given keyword phrase.

The last one I have for you is about Anchor Text. Most of
the above article directories will allow you to use Anchor
Text within your resource box so make sure you do your
keyword research and find some good low competition
keywords that you can rank for and link to within your
resource box.

Hope this helped and good luck with your article publishing.

—————————————————-
Subscribe to The Web Development Central Blog if you want
to get MORE ‘Insider’ Information on How-To build and drive
Traffic to your website. ==> http://www.corythrelfall.com |
New article directory launched that pays YOU 8 ways called
AffSphere. Go To ==> http://affsphere.corythrelfall.com

Evaluating The Response To Your Online Home Based Legitimate Business Promotions
One of the most important ways to foster a continual
improvement to your online home based legitimate business
is to track and evaluate the responses to your promotional
efforts. This can be done in a number of different ways.
Customer surveys and embedded HTML codes are two of the
most popular methods of evaluating the effectiveness of
marketing campaigns. This article reveals how you can do
that and why.

Customer surveys can be as simple or as complex as you like
depending on how detailed you want your feedback to be.
However, one of the most effective ways to find out how
well your marketing tactics are working is to include a
question asking consumers where they first learned about
your products or services. This is important, because if
you find a big number of your customers come from a
particular venue, it is a good indication this method of
advertising is working more effectively for you.

Embedding scripts into your advertisements for the purpose
of tracking feedback is also a popular method of evaluating
the response to your online marketing strategies.
Advertisements can be coded so that you receive feedback
each time somebody clicks through a particular
advertisement. This is useful for letting you know which of
your online home business advertisements are attracting the
most attention.

If you are using more than one design for your
advertisements, you will find one that attracts more
attention than the others. This is when you should make the
decision to convert your advertisements to the more
effective style. Similarly if you run your online home
based legitimate business advertisements on several
different websites, you will find one that pulls in more
traffic than others. You may also discover some websites
are not attracting much attention at all. This would give
the you a good indication of which advertisements to be
canceled and which to be kept running.

Finally, the response to an online home business campaign
can be evaluated by carefully reviewing website traffic
statistics after implementing changes to the marketing
strategy. This information is useful because an unusual
spike in the amount of website traffic immediately after
implementing a stage of the marketing campaign can provide
positive feedback that the change was well received by
potential customers.

While this method of evaluating the response to an online
business campaign can be effective it is important to note
implementing multiple changes at once will make it
difficult to determine which changes were the most
effective. Therefore, if you plan to use website traffic as
feedback for how well your online home based legitimate
business promotion strategy is working, it is important to
only implement one major change at a time so they can each
be evaluated separately.

—————————————————-
Steven Fu, is an authority in testing and recommending top
online home based legitimate business. Find out how you can
easily start your own home based legitimate business by
downloading his “FREE Toolkit” at;
http://www.PluginPassiveIncome.com

Make Money Online:  Crawling Before You Walk

I guess you’re bound to have heard the old saying “You’ve got to crawl before you walk” plenty of times, there aren’t many instances in life where this doesn’t apply, and making money online is no exception.

Along with “Head down, bum up”, although not a pretty sight, these two age old adages form the very backbone of what you need to know if you are wanting to make money online. And, contrary to what you may think or read on the internet, the other lessons you need to learn have always applied to offline marketing, and been around since Adam was a boy.

You see, there are no ’secrets’ to making money online. Internet Marketing is all about mindset. If you’ve been online for any length of time, then just like me, its likely that you get a heap of emails every day expounding the virtues of all these programs designed to make money online. Probably the only difference between you and I is that  it didn’t take me long to figure it all out. I learned to look outside the box.

Sure, there may be some programs that will make you money, but who do you think is enjoying real success? Let me answer that: it’s the program developers. For this reason, if wildly outrageous success on the internet is your aim,  you need to learn to be a leader, not a follower.

There are so many squillions of people trying to make money online, and more appearing everyday (I think the daily number is quite staggering). They all have the same hopes and dreams that you do. So, why should people listen to you? Why are you different? How do you think you can rattle their cages?

To answer those questions, you need to take a time- tested and irrefutable lesson from the world of offline marketing, and that lesson is to do what  everyone else DOESN’T do! Find a unique perspective. A way to do things differently than everyone else, so that you don’t just become another wannabe in a sea of wannabes. Stand out. Be different.

Think of the internet as a fantastic vehicle for reaching a huge number of people and turning our world into one gigantic global community. Nothing more, nothing less. Its not magic. Whether you use this vehicle socially, or to make money, there has never been a time in history where we have the ability to be in contact with so many others, in so many places, and where the power of ‘word of mouth’ advertising and recommendations can be multiplied to an unbelievable level.

The potential is incredible. Learn how to use it. Develop relationships with others and nurture your reputation, trust and reliability. It will pay you back a thousand fold.

Have fun! Enjoy what you’re doing. Aside from the obvious benefits of this, there’s a huge added bonus; your passion shines through! People can feel and sense your passion, and when you are genuinely passionate, it rubs off on them. When you’re doing something you love, it’s not work, it’s play!

You are not an island.  It isn’t necessary for you to  try to do everything yourself. The vast majority of big name, successful internet marketing gurus online will tell you the same thing; their success did not eventuate until they found someone they believed in. Someone they trusted. Someone who showed them what to do, notice I said SHOWED them, not told them, there’s a big difference.

Once you find someone that you can model, the sky truly can become the limit.  And it’s not hard, it just takes the ability of being able to sort out the genuine folks that walk the walk, and talk the talk, and both are vital.  No sense having someone who has the gift of the gab, but hasn’t got a clue as far as experience goes.  And conversely, someone with tons of experience but no idea how to explain it is equally as frustrating.

I hope this  information rings true for you, and you’re finally ready to stop procrastinating and jumping on every latest and greatest fad that hits your inbox. Once this happens for you, it will be like another huge realization – you’ll see the light!.

————————

When you’re finally ready to stop all the frustration,  and credit card statements that make it look like you’re supporting an entire small country,  go take a look at http://www.secretcashrecipes.com – you won’t be disappointed.