These days it is becoming more and more popular for people to plan on creating their online appearance. This first step is done easily most of the times. But shifting a normal blog into an online business to earn some extra money, if not even making it to the main income stream is more challenging for most.

What are the reasons for that? There are so many examples of people out there in the net, who reached the goal of earning a good living online, while at the same time gaining more freedom of lifestyle. And these people are not holding back their knowledge and share publically how they did it. So what is the reason many people cannot follow through even if all the knowledge is out there.

Well – one of my personal experiences is that the amount of knowledge out there can be overwhelming. Just when we think we have it all together and can finally start, we find another email in our outlook saying we have to study the newest „whatever“, cause the „old internet“ as it was before will be dead tomorrow and the old recipes will not work anymore.

Of course we all have to keep an eye on developments and stay up to date. But rarely we have to throw all our knowledge over board and start over instantly.

So it is what it is today and tomorrow: a few simple steps we have to follow through. Or let`s say reading these simple steps is simple:-). Doing what we read for some reason needs some extra energy, even if the the actions required sound so easy. Acting on concepts is more challenging than reading about concepts. And we know it all out of experience: knowing is not doing. Its neuroscience involved. We have to build brain cells for the required action and that takes a little time at first and we have to overcome some resistance level. So we need to push ourselfes a bit after the brain cells are established (wait at least a night after reading the information at best). Then take step by step and be aware the first steps are the toughest, it get`s a lot easier later once the momentum is going and our brain pattern built.

So once again, here are the exacts steps to follow, if you plan on making some money online:

Step 1. Find your Market

Please be aware I am stating market and not passion or expertise as you often read, too. To be an expert or have a passion is nice and will help you write content, but there is no use in it, if there is no market (meaning people wanting to buy products in that segment). In an ideal world market, passion and expertise come togehter for you in your niche. But even if that is not the case, you can become an expert fairly fast with some research (at least enough expert for the online business you want to start). Know what your customers want by searching in forums or google it and give the hungry buyers just what they ask for. It is much easier to sell what people allready want, than to convince people to buy what they should want (in your opinion).

Step 2. Get your webpage online

Find a nice domain, which in best case is benefit driven and has some of your markets keywords in it (that is not a must, as my site is built around my name, too). You can find plenty and easy to follow descriptions on how to set up a webpage and where to host it (hostgator.com for example). I do not need to repeat it here. You can nowadays also outsource this for little money and focus solely on your content.

Step 3. Find a way of interacting with your visitors

Give your visitors the chance to write comments and and have an optin page (people leave their email adress and name for further contact) installed, so you can keep communicating with them. Of course, allways offer an unsubscribe button, too. Send out quality content on a regular basis via e-mail, build a relationship and have them revisit your site, so at some stage, they might want to buy your products (which you have created meanwhile: for example an ebook). For leaving their information you might want to provide them with a free report or some information of value for them, so there is some incentive for action.
You can deliver that report using an autorespondersystem like Aweber for example. That way you do not have to send out all manually by email.

Step 4. Find readers and build traffic

You can allways get traffic easy by using a google adwords campagne and pay for every click. If you don`t know what a campagne like that is, just google it, the system itself has an easy to follow instruction. So if you have the budget to do so, you might choose this to find some quick successes. At the beginning though, you might want to consider using “organic traffic” (not paid traffic). This can be done by writing good content with keywords and the put it on your blog and several article directories (like www.ezinearticles.com for example).
Also publish your content on facebook and twitter and get it spread in the net. Maybe team up with friends and let them spread it, too.

Step 5. Last not least, have products ready and offer them to you customers/readers

Of course we can feel happy if we are passionate about a topic and people come to our site and discuss these topics with us. There is already some mental value or payment if you want involved. If you want to use your blog or website to earn money though, you have to be prepared to have some really high class content to sell at your webpage, so people who like your material can purchase it. After all, if you earn money with your blog your are more free to put more energy in it and produce even more value. A win-win situation with your readers.

So, I hope you found some of these steps helpful. Very likely you have read similar articles like this. But repetition is also supporting a learning curve and if this article gets you to implementing things then the goal would be reached. Once again, be patient with yourself at the beginning. The first steps are the hardest part.

To your learning success,

Dirk

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1. How to Add More Profitable Products to Your Product Funnel

Dear Reader,

Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and “taking statistics” on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

2 your learning success, Dirk

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In another great “Ted talk session” Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers.
Worth watching:-)

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You may be familiar with leverage as it applies to an investment – borrowing funds to expand a business, for example, or using options to control a stock.

Simply put, leverage is a way to get more with less. In the case of online marketing, this means getting more products, traffic, and sales with less of your own time, energy, or money.

Today, I’m going to share a powerful strategy you can use to add multiple products to your product funnel. The idea is to work once to create a product, and then leverage that product into several different products with different price points.

Most information marketers start by creating an e-book as their front-end product. Then they create a midlevel product, perhaps an audio course. Then they create a high-ticket product, perhaps a video recording of a live event. Three different products, created on three separate occasions.

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a lot of work.

Using my strategy, you achieve the same goal with much less work. You start by creating a product at the high end of the funnel, then work your way down. Here’s an example…

First, you record a video of a live event. That video is your high-ticket product.

You then extract the audio from the video and turn it into your midlevel product, delivered through MP3 or audio CD.

Finally, you have the audio transcribed and turn it into an e-book. That gives you a good low-ticket front-end product.

Right about now, you might be asking yourself, “Will people really pay more for the same information just because it’s in a different format?” The answer to that is “Absolutely!”

Take a look at the above example. A video of a live event can sell for anywhere from $297 to $497 – even up to $997. Keep in mind that it can cost five to 10 times that amount to attend the live event. Why would people pay so much if they can get a video of the same event for much less? Because there is extra value in actually being there.

The same is true of having video of the event instead of just the audio, or having the audio instead of just a transcript. People will pay more money for the same information if they get it in a format that adds something to the experience.

Now, let’s take this strategy one step further.

Instead of simply selling the video as your high-ticket product, you could package it into a home study course. This would include the video, the audio recording, and the written transcript. If you wanted to add a little more value, you could turn the transcript into a “workbook.” You might call this your Platinum Level Package.

Instead of simply selling the audio as your midlevel product, you could include the workbook and call this your Gold Level Package.

Instead of simply selling the transcript, you could include the workbook and call this your Basic Package.

As you can see, all we’ve done is repackaged the same products to make them seem more valuable. However, we’ve still used the power of leverage by starting with the highest-level product and working our way down the product funnel.

We worked once to create the original product. Then we created three separate products, in three separate formats, at three separate price points. Now that’s what I call leverage!

By the way, there are many other ways to leverage your existing content. Here are just a few ideas:

If you have a series of articles, turn them into an audio product by reading the articles into a microphone and saving them as an MP3.

Take that same series of articles, combine them into a single PDF file, and make that a special report that you can give away or sell.

You could even take your longer articles and break them down into smaller chunks to use as blog posts on your website.

The possibilities of leveraging content are really endless – limited only by your imagination. So the next time you’re thinking of developing a new information product from scratch, think, instead, about how to get more from what you’ve already got.

[Ed. Note: Brian Edmondson, successful Internet entrepreneur and online marketing expert, is the creator of Internet Power Coaching. In IPC, Brian walks you through the process of starting and growing your own profitable online business, step-by-step. If you're at all interested in making extra money - or making a living - online next year, go here.]

[Ed. Note: Brian Edmondson, successful Internet entrepreneur and online marketing expert, is the creator of Internet Power Coaching. In IPC, Brian walks you through the process of starting and growing your own profitable online business, step-by-step.

2 your online success, Dirk

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to creating wealth and success through inspiration and practical, proven advice. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

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One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from?

With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

Beginning with Charles Darwin’s first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines.

Most exhilarating is Johnson’s conclusion that with today’s tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow’s great idea.

Hope you enjoy!

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