Cindy Szponder’s Tips

Tim Gross has a great article on his site about how to make money online and in the quickest way possible. Is there some magical formula that will make it happen overnight? Is there an easy way to get from online broke to online wealthy? Can you simply wave a magic wand and voila be an internet success story?

It’d be nice if things would work that way, and some marketers try to make it seem that simple. However, to succeed online requires research, hard work, tracking of results, and more hard work. Do you have what it takes to succeed online?

Here are some other opinions about making money online that you might want to explore:

Are You Struggling To Make Money Online? Here’s Help - One of the easiest ways to make money online is selling digital products. Digital products could be an ebook, an MP3, video or software. Selling these products is fast, easy and commands big profit margins. No inventories to watch, …

Find & Replace Limiting Beliefs, Part 2: Replace Old Ideas - Think about the internal dialog that created, or exists because of, this belief—for instance, making money without effort is morally wrong, or I don’t deserve to make money easily. Look for the fear that reinforces this belief—if I make …

136 Business and Blog Improvement Tips from SOBCon08 - 9.1 Promote affiliate offers to see what the market wants - this is a great way to make revenue, and also a great way to test the waters to see what people really want - just observe and people will tell you what they want - so build …

Making Money Online Is Not An Ordinary Job - Becoming an Affiliate is perhaps the quickest way to make money online. Becoming an affiliate simply means that you’re selling someone else’s product for a percentage of the selling price. Becoming Successful In order to really make it …

I realized that maybe people aren’t as familiar with Twitter as I thought. Being fairly new to Twitter myself, I decided to find the best, most recent articles about Twitter to hit the blogosphere. Learn and Enjoy!

Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know - Right along with Facebook, YouTube and blogging, Twitter is one of the most often written about social media communication tools. (Follow me @leeodden) We’ve run polls about how people use Twitter as well as aggregated tips from the …

Video: Twitter in Plain English - friends to use the micro-blogging service Twitter, but can’t seem to explain it well. We hope this video helps. Feel free to share this video by emailing it or using the code below from You Tube. <param …

Use Twitter to keep up with family members - I’ve started going on the occasional business trip again, and my husband came up with a great way to keep me involved with what’s going on at home — he’s twittering regular updates on what he and my daughter are doing, and I’m getting …

Twitter With Your Voice With Twitterfone - It uses speech recognition to turn your voice into tweets on your Twitter account. A number of services also provide a similar service: Jott and Spinvox come to mind. However, Spinvox is a pay service and Jott is “free in beta. …

Personal Coaching - On Twitter? - Right now I’m doing coaching on Twitter! You can ask anything about internet marketing, social media, SEO, mindset - any topic, really, and I’ll answer quick-like. Remember to post your questions on Twitter with @michellem in the body …

How We Use Twitter for Journalism - Here at ReadWriteWeb we’ve been leveraging Twitter heavily for some of our most important news writing. While cynics dismiss twitter as frivolous, we’ve got stories to share that should make anyone reconsider their doubts about the …

4 Useful Twitter Tools You Shouldn’t Twitter Without - A new Twitter tool pops up everyday. However, not all of them are necessary and don’t always provide a useful purpose. Here’sa short list of Twitter tools that you could use to better enhance your Twitter experience. …

Twitter for beginners - SheGeeks isn’t just for the fairer pronoun and they posted a great guide to twitter for beginners. I’m going to break one of the commandments (below) and post my twitter link, http://twitter.com/alexlewis. …

Need a little traffic boost? Wish you could figure out how to incorporate social media sites into your traffic building methods? Well, over at Tropical SEO there is a sweet little article that highlights the top 38 niche social media sites for sending traffic to your blog. Hop on over and see which social media sites fit your niche. Don’t find anything interesting there? Here’s another great list at Traffikd that’s separated by category. Explore and have fun. And, oh yeah, happy traffic building!

Found a great piece about how valuable Twitter can become to someone over at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s blog.

Depending on how it’s used, Twitter can be more or less valuable to someone. He gives a great explanation of how to make it more useful more quickly. I’m finding that it gives me more of a social feeling rather than feeling so isolated in my home office. I feel more in touch with others and with what is going on.

Interesting read if you get a chance.

Cindy Szponder

Sounds like a new dance doesn’t it? Actually, it is a kind of dance–a social and relationship building dance. And you’re invited. If you haven’t tried Twitter, I’d recommend getting in there and trying it out. Remember, though, it’s not about sending marketing messages or posting links to your blog or other such. It’s about getting to know people that have similar interests and are involved in similar projects.

For instance, do you have some favorite internet marketers or favorite bloggers? See if they’re on Twitter and then follow them. Begin to join and add to conversations as they happen. Ask questions and see who answers.

Once you’re following a few people, see who they follow. Anyone pop out as interesting? Follow them for a while and see if you’ve got anything in common. You can always stop following someone if the comments aren’t relevant for you.

Got some Facebook friends or friends on other social sites? See if they use Twitter and follow them as well.

It might take a while to “get” Twitter, but it really does begin to feel like you’re in an office with a bunch of other like-minded people.

Once you have a good start on Twitter, graduate to Twhirl. I’m just starting with it myself. It’s software that you download and it allows you to keep track of tweets as they happen. You can also track multiple accounts (haven’t gone there yet) if you wish. With a quick glance, you can see if someone you’re following is asking a question or making an interesting comment that you’d like to respond to. You can use Twhirl to post responses or to make your own posts.

So, I’d like to personally invite you do the Twitter and Twhirl. Follow me on Twitter.

I was watching Tweets on Twitter this morning when I saw one come by from Seth Godin. Now, I’m an inveterate meeting hater–most are a complete waste of time–so the title grabbed my attention right off.

If you’re ready for a good laugh break (or stuck in a meeting) check out his post.

While a very simple robots.txt file is fine when you first start out online, once you begin to receive traffic from the robots and spiders you’ll want to restrict their access to unnecessary or private areas of your blog or website. For example, if you’ve created a pdf that you’re marketing online, you obviously wouldn’t want that area of your website indexed so that people can find it for free. This video will introduce you to a way to exclude sensitive areas of your blog or website from indexing by robots and spiders.

Also, if you notice that a lot of your bandwidth is being used up with indexing of things like images or other areas of your blog or website, you can also exclude those from indexing.

I’ve finally completed the ebook package I’ve been working on for several weeks. It was a long but rewarding process, and I’ve now completed a step-by-step blogging for beginners package that will help you research potential niches, make a niche selection, set up your blog, drive traffic to it and then monetize that traffic.

If you, or someone you know, would like to have complete guidance for setting up a profitable niche blog, please go to Niche Blogging for Profits.

This is a complete package that includes an ebook (with over 120 pages of info, complete with screenshots), training videos, and a toolbar that contains all the resources mentioned in the book. I personally use this toolbar almost every day for my blogging efforts.

Cindy Szponder

If you’re new to blogging or simply want to develop your blog to the next level, this is an excellent video interview with one of the top bloggers out there today.

Hey you, blogger, were you sleeping when you dreamed up that last post? Perhaps your concentration was split when you rambled along there? Where were you headed with that post? Huh???

I certainly hope these aren’t the thoughts your readers have when they visit your blog or read your feed. Do you, in fact, have a plan in mind for topics you want to cover on your blog? Have you researched them before writing about them? If so, you’re well on your way to blogging success.

If this is a problem area for you, here are a few pointers that might help you to blog consciously.

How to Blog Consciously

1. Plan ahead. Write down 10-20 topics you want to cover related to your blogging niche. Use these for your next few posts. Continually generate new topics as time moves on.
2. Research early. If you can, it’s always best to be working a few days ahead on your blog posts. Try to have at least 5 posts ready to go at all times. Perform research for the remaining ideas on your list so you can get those articles ready to go.
3. Post consistently. Try to post at least three times a week in order to stay “front of mind” with your readers. Don’t post 5 times this week and then not post anything for 2 weeks. Your readers will begin to forget about you and about your information.
4. Put your best foot forward. Keep your readers foremost in your mind. Produce quality content that will provide value for them.
5. Stay on topic. Please, especially if you have an authority or niche blog, one topic per post and all posts related to your blog topic/niche.

What other ideas have helped you blog consciously and purposefully?

Cindy Szponder