If you’re in the market for a contractor to help with the creation of content for your next project, it’s important to know if Elance can measure up.

Elance for Buyers

As a buyer, Elance is your oyster. The site has been built around the user experience of the buyer. This means you’ll never spend a dime on the site, other than to the providers you hire. Signing up is also very simple, taking only a few minutes and culminating in the posting of your first project. As most Elance review writers will point out, the site is eager to get you on there as quickly as possible.

Setting up a project requires minimal work, though I recommend you do take a few moments to review the options available for any project. You want to be thorough in outlining your needs so you don’t get inundated with bids from low quality contractors. This is unfortunately the one weakness of a site like Elance (if not Elance in particular). Anyone can be an Elance member if they pay their monthly service fee, and they can then bid on your project.

It then becomes up to you to winnow down the field. You’ll need to read samples, ask for interviews, and setup milestones that ensure you get the quality you’re seeking.

The Providers

When it comes to finding quality providers, most Elance review writers note that Elance has long been in the middle ground due to the sheer volume of providers here. But, the old maxim of “you get what you pay for” almost always come into play. If you want low cost, high quality work, it will be hard to find quality providers. However, if you are interested in paying a bit more, the top level providers in any category are scored to help you track them down. They have ratings for each project, total earnings, repeat clients, and an overall aggregated score that shows how well regarded they are by other buyers.

Workroom Tools

Early Elance review writers raved about it as Elance was one of the first services to provide escrow services and they work wonderfully. Providers pay the escrow fees out of their earnings and in most cases, it is instant (once your payment source is verified). The workroom has undergone recent upgrades to provide the same hour tracking and screenshot tools as Odesk, though they still lag behind without mobile apps and desktop tracking offered by Odesk.

Most Elance review writers will also mention the fact that Elance’s backend can be a bit confusing with a slew of seemingly overlapping options for payment and invoicing. This is the result of their rampant upgrading and feature testing. Every month or two you can expect a change to the way Elance operates, sometimes in small ways and sometimes with a full overhaul which leaves you confused and grasping for options. Documentation is limited and customer service is sometimes hard to reach in a pinch.

The Bottom Line

As any good Elance review will tell you, there are both good and bad points to make for the use of Elance as your outsourcing tool of choice. On one side, Elance has more providers and a greater network of projects than any other site in its class. As a buyer, you pay no fees and can access providers almost instantly from around the globe. However, the platform itself can be dizzying at times and the quality of the providers is often hard to verify, and there is no way to guarantee where the bids are coming from, a major problem in certain categories, like Writing and Translation.

Overall, Elance is a useful tool that can help you reduce your work load significantly. Don’t expect it to do all the heavy lifting for you, however. Interview your prospects, edit their work, and liberally use the feedback tools to land solid contractors that you can count on for future projects.

Share on Facebook

Additionally the cost of hiring a writer to churn out content for your marketing campaigns can get costly fast. So, in this Rapid Rewriter review, I want to touch on this hot new trend of article spinning and how it can be the saving grace for your fingers and your pocketbook when it comes time to get new content for your web business ideas.

What Rapid Rewriter Does

To start this Rapid Rewriter review, let’s take a look at what Rapid Rewriter does for your marketing efforts. The goal of a spinner is take an original article that has injected with synonyms and sentence variations. The software then takes those variations and spins them into dozens of articles that say the same thing in different ways. Some people will submit those articles to the same sites, while others will use the software so they can submit an original article to dozens of directories and not get any duplicate content dings.

As you’ll read in this Rapid Rewriter review, not every spinner spits out the same quality of work. Some of them offer downright low quality articles – bad enough to get article directory accounts banned and sites blacklisted.

Rapid Rewriter, on the other hand, quickly rose to the top of the spinner charts with its seemingly simple approach to the process. Instead of just spinning words, the software will spin entire sentences, mixing up the entire article rather than just sentence level structure. It is also very fast – something you do not always find in the alternatives. It can reproduce more than 500 articles in less than 10 minutes, all with varying word counts to ensure they look unique at all times.

As per any Rapid Rewriter review, the software goes another step and serves as an auto-submitter as well, inputting your logins and article data to major article directories around the Internet. It’s easy to use and can also produce simple HTML versions of articles that will provide easy to use web content in seconds.

In short, it takes all the best features of the other article spinners on the market and puts them into a single, well designed product. The price is competitive with any other service and the bonuses offered by the author are tremendously useful.

Downsides of Spinning

It’s impossible to write a Rapid Rewriter review without mentioning the inherent downsides of article spinning. While spinning and produce instant content that is then instantly submitted to directories, the actual viability of those articles is reduced significantly. While they work great for back linking, you will never be able to replicate original content’s ability to drive clicks and build trust in a niche.

That’s not a knock on the product itself, but rather a reflection of the way article spinning itself works. It’s not an all-in-one solution, but rather a tool to use for a very specific type of article writing. The templates and extra instruction you gain by purchasing this product make it far more valuable than all that as well, providing a blueprint of sorts for how to use your new software tool. However, if you are interested in trust building content, you will still need to pay for original articles.

The Bottom Line

But, for what Rapid Rewriter does and how it does it, you won’t find a single product on the market that works so well. Taking the best of every article spinner out there, combining the uses of each, and ensuring Copyscape friendly, non-duplicated content, you can generate hundreds of back links from a single piece of content. This Rapid Rewriter review must whole heartedly recommend it to anyone interested in the ultimate spinning software.

Share on Facebook

The allure of these is hard to ignore however in this review we will look to clear the fog around Sky High Auctions and get you the important points on how to use this. Hopefully by the end you will be able to find products and develop a good, focused plan to sell them

What Sky High Auctions Has to Offer

Any good Sky High Auctions review will showcase the benefits of buying a product that can help you cut out so much of the research and leg work that goes into starting an eBay business. It can be costly and most of the time, you’ll make a few mistakes along the way. That’s why I’m such a huge fan of this product. It’s not another basic “how to eBay” book and it’s definitely not another list of wholesale directories with no instructions or tips on how to use them.

Instead, Sky High Auctions is a product that will show you how to go out and find your stock for eBay and then how to implement a sound strategy for marketing, selling and then reselling those products time and again.

According to any Sky High Auctions review, this product never messes around and tells you that making your fortune online will be easy, because it’s not. Using eBay to make your fortune is time consuming and involves lots of hard work. But, it’s also fun and can be extremely profitable when done right. Sky High Auctions shows you how to start an eBay business that relies on any number of product sources – from drop shipping to digital goods to breakdown lots that you flip from eBay.

This is not a small product either. The beginning courses involve 15 separate lessons with 18 videos for you to enjoy. These videos walk you through using eBay, running auctions, handling feedback, editing photos, getting paid, and shipping – all the basics that so many eBay users ignore and get burned because of.

After the basic lessons, a good Sky High Auctions review will mention the Advanced Lessons, delving deep into the advanced topics related to running your eBay business. Here, you’ll learn how to deal with unpaid items, use second chance offers, market on eBay with a store, blog on eBay, use International sites, reach powerseller status, pay taxes in the Us and UK, and much more. This set of 25 additional videos covers everything you can imagine related to eBay and making money.

Finally, you’ll get a series of expert and bonus lessons covering topics like surplus liquidation, researching the marketplace, drop shipping, and more.

The Bottom Line

As any Sky High Auctions review must do, I should point out a few shortcomings. First, the videos do spend a tremendously long time going over the basics. This is okay for newbies, but it can be frustrating for veterans of eBay who want a structured way to move on to business status, especially because there are some tips in those beginner videos you’ll need to dig through to find. Additionally, the lessons are not necessarily broken down in a step by step order in terms of how you would sell your own products. An action plan or day-by-day process would have better.

But, as with any Sky High Auctions review, the bottom line here is that you’re getting one of the premiere high quality eBay auction house products on the Internet. This isn’t just another lame “dropship this” product. It’s a full walkthrough of everything you’ll ever need to make eBay the home of your next big business venture. There’s money to be made here and Sky High Auctions will show you how.

Share on Facebook

That simple organic search bump can be the determining factor for thousands of small businesses trying to stand out and take their business to the next level. Below are some of the most powerful search engine optimization methods you’ll find online and the ways you should be putting them to use right now.

On Page Optimization

No search engine optimization strategy is as old and well tested as on-page optimization. It also happens to be one of the least useful listed here. Once upon a time, these methods would make all the difference. Today, it makes up maybe 15% of your total search engine ranking and Page Rank. However, if you do not use these methods, it can hurt your small home business ideas significantly.

On page optimization includes keyword optimization, alt tags on your images, deep navigation, SEO friendly links, title tags, and SEO friendly code.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is another search engine optimization strategy that has been around for some time and is highly successful. Essentially, you will write articles with a single keyword focus and a link back to your website. You then upload those articles to article directories that post them for free in exchange for the link to your site.

Once an article is posted, it provides a back link to your site that the search engines pick up. Article marketing is not a one-time process, however. You will need to continuously post new articles over time to maintain the SEO value of those links.

Trusted Site Back Linking

Article marketing generates back links, but if you want truly valuable back links, you need to find trusted sites. Trusted sites are those that Google holds in high regard. Anything that ends in .GOV or .EDU is a trusted site. Additionally, high level directories like DMOZ or Yahoo! are trusted sites, along with major forums or information resources.

Link Baiting

Link baiting is a search engine optimization strategy where you produce high quality content that will attract attention on its own. For example, if you had a dog training site, you could produce an article on the Top 101 dog behaviour problems. The article would be massive and take hours to write, but it would also be a powerful authority resource in the niche, drawing attention from many other websites.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a common tool today, though many marketers misuse it. The goal is to use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to set yourself and your business up as an authority as well as a recognizable personality and brand that can be trusted for niche information. You need to provide constant, daily value that your readers can take away from it.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing, like social media and link baiting, focused on drawing people to you. As a search engine optimization strategy, viral marketing is the least measurable, but can be the most effective. Examples of viral marketing include video productions for YouTube, sending out free reports, building squeeze pages, and giving away free software.

No single tactic is going to make the difference between a no-name site and the number one page in your niche. However, if you’re not using the strategies above in tandem, you’re missing a fantastic opportunity to get free traffic for your site. Search engine optimization strategy starts with a long term, detailed plan on how to get your site to the top. Use multiple strategies, test constantly, and adjust when necessary – only then will you find the free traffic you’ve been looking for to take your small home business ideas to the next level.

Share on Facebook

There are dozens out there and with monthly fees and massive potential income to consider, you’ll want to have a clear idea of which one performs the best.

What to Look for in Your Autoresponder

An Autoresponder review will point out many things, but there are some features that need to top your list. First, delivery rate is vital. Those emails need to get through to your prospects and they need to be read. That means not only should the service provide top notch technology to reach the prospects, but they should help you reduce spam in the process.

Additionally, the service needs to make list management and analysis as easy as possible. You want to be able to review subscribers, read messages, link clicks and historical open rates so you can adjust and tweak your messages over time.

Most autoresponder review writers will focus on one service and try to sell you on its benefits over the others, but I want to take a look at the industry’s top three services

Aweber

The first autoresponder review is Aweber. Aweber is very easy to use when it comes to setting up a new campaign, inserting video or audio, and managing your subscribers across multiple lists. The scheduling and sequencing is very simple and straightforward and allows for any number of custom options, including easy broadcasting. The tracking is also very useful. Most autoresponder review sites will cite the tracking and monitoring of your lists as one of the premiere reasons to consider Aweber. On any given day you can analyse impressions, subscriptions, verifications, and click thrus on links you’ve sent out. The two places where Aweber stumbles are in its importing of other mailing lists and its pricing scheme, both of which pale compared to the next two sites.

Get Response

The second autoresponder review I want to touch on is Get Response, the current industry leader and a very comparable service to Aweber. Get Response allows the same easy level of customization as Aweber, allowing you to attach documents, audio, or video, copy in messages from any format without extra formatting needed, and ensure delivery on any day of the week, through any email filters. The tracking system is often compared to Google Analytics, which is a good thing, providing a wide array of details about message open rates, subscriptions and more. It can get a bit complicated, but the tutorials are designed to help there. The pricing is slightly better than Aweber, though it does require a monthly payment of $17.95 to start (it can be lower with quarterly or annual payments).

Autoresponse Plus

Both Aweber and Get Response are remotely hosted autoresponder services. You pay a monthly subscription fee to use them. Autoresponse Plus on the other hand is a software program that you will install on your own server. As such, you’ll need to pay an upfront cost for the license ($99 for one and $167 for five), but you can then use it forever without paying anything. The value of this software is that you get to customize pretty much everything. You have full access, which makes importing and using your own external email services very easy. Unfortunately, if you’re not tech savvy, it can also be much more complicated, requiring the assistance of someone with extensive tech knowledge. Each license can be installed on one domain, but allows you to have unlimited autoresponders for that domain without paying again.

Autoreponders are one of the three services every business owner needs – right after hosting and right before outsourcing. If you’re not yet signed up for one of the three autoresponders above, reread this autoresponder review carefully and choose one that fits your business’s needs.

Share on Facebook

How do you, as a start-up marketer, know which tips will help you master the strategies that have made so many men and women filthy rich and take your latest business ideas to great heights? Gathered below are a series of simple tips that will help you focus on, master, and generate your own Internet marketing strategies.

Internet Marketing Tips 101

Internet marketing starts and ends with your audience and how you approach them, whether it is your latest business ideas or a time test one. So, before you can do anything, you need to do some research and learn about your niche and your audience.

• Niche Research – Niche research involves getting to know who your potential customers will be. Use sites like Clickbank and Amazon to review both good products and demand. On Amazon, you can find products and niches based on how many reviews a product has. More than 20 reviews means that thousands of copies have been purchased. Additionally, visit forums and blogs where industry experts gather to share with interested readers. Learn the terms and the needs of your target audience.
• Keyword Research – Keyword research is probably the most ignored aspect of online money making. One of the best Internet marketing tips I can give you is to spend as much time as possible learning about keywords from tools like Traffic Travis and running through them in AdWords or competition searches. Know the phrases you should target well.

Internet Marketing Tips for Your Website

Once you’ve gotten a good idea of what you’re product, niche, and audience will be, it’s time to start generating websites to market those products. There are many different sites you can build – from blogs to forums to squeeze pages or full blown sales letters.

• Learn the Basics of Sales Writing – Whether you’re writing 150 word squeeze page or a 10,000 word sales letter, learn the basics of effective sales writing to influence and entice your readers to follow your calls to action. There are dozens of methods you can use to generate interest in your product – from powerful headlines to benefits laden product descriptions to carefully worded guarantees and pitches.
• Email Marketing – One of the most important Internet Marketing tips you’ll ever receive is to setup an account with an autoresponder service like AWeber of GetResponse and start gathering email addresses from within your niche. Do this by inserting a newsletter subscription form into your squeeze page or your website and offering some for free to entice readership. A 6 day free mini-course or a free report are both good ways to gather readers that you can contact later to make sales.

Getting Traffic To Your Latest Business Ideas

The most important part of any marketing campaign is to get traffic to your site. You do this with sound back linking and SEO.

• Viral and Social Marketing – To generate interest, you must saturate the Internet with content that points back to you. Use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and YouTube to place interesting content that your readers will follow. You can also use a blog to create an authority destination and set yourself up as an expert.
• Back Link Generation – Most Internet marketing tips will tell you to submit articles to directories for back links and post on forums or blogs with comments. However, you should also use tools like SEO Quake to find high PR sites with “follow” links where you can post. Use a trusted site tool to find government sites or directories that you can get listed on as well.

Ultimately, your goal as an Internet marketer is to know your audience, reach your audience, and then funnel as much of that audience as possible back to your site where they can buy your products and create interest in your latest business ideas. Once you master those basics, you’ll be well on your way to becoming the next big marketing success.

Share on Facebook

A word of warning though, these websites aren’t “million-dollar” “superstar” websites.

These are a practical form of creating $5 per day to get you going on your way to a completely independent income. $5 a is starting target. If I can do that with one site, how many more can will I create like that, and if I am creating that in a week, how many weeks before I will be financially independent. You can do the math for yourselves – for me this took less than 6 months, it may differ for you.

Share on Facebook

But, some reviews have an inherent bias as they try to sell you on the product and others are simply lacking in details, so this Commission Blueprint review will delve a bit deeper into what makes Commission Blueprint a good choice for beginning marketers like yourself.

The Good Stuff

Know that Commission Blueprint is another Clickbank marketing guide. There are quite a few of them out there and if one has already been successful for you, it’s unlikely you need another. However, if you’ve yet to find success on Clickbank or simply haven’t yet committed to a guide, keep reading.

Commission Blueprint is loaded with content – pure and simple. These days you shouldn’t even try to offer help in this niche unless you can bring the goods and CB does just that. The first thing you’ll likely look at is the series of 14 videos that walk you through using the program, choosing products, researching keywords, choosing your domain and so on. It’s a step by step video guide to getting started with Clickbank and if you have not yet started an affiliate campaign, the information and tips here are downright incredible.

The next thing our Commission Blueprint review looked at was the written guides, showing you how to create opt-ins, pre sale pages, and review pages. I found the opt-in guide downright incredible in terms of the time tested copywriting tactics that even some of the veteran marketers out there could learn something from. The best thing about these written guides (and the videos) is that theory and fluff are nowhere to be found. Every strategy has proof and examples of when and how it was used, all the while showing you how to do the same yourself.

Finally, there are the templates, which are fantastically well designed and help anyone get started with a pre-sell page in less than an hour. Three quarters of the course is boiled down and knocked out right here, saving you time and effort.

Overall, this Commission Blueprint review is flabbergasted by how good the content is here. High quality, well written, no fluff, and proven results. How can you beat that?

The Bad Stuff

No product is perfect and I’d be remiss if our Commission Blueprint review didn’t touch on the few shortcomings that CB does have. There is something of a laser focus on PPC advertising in the video course that I didn’t necessarily like. There are so many other powerful traffic generation tools out there that don’t require PPC budgets and while I know the course would be less structured, I think it would have been good to at least touch on them. Another issue you may find is that the keyword research section focuses pretty heavily on spending cash to use subscription based tools. Those who don’t know about the free keyword research tools out there might be discouraged by a guide telling them to go spend more money right away.

The bottom line here, though, is that Commission Blueprint is one of the best Clickbank instruction products on the market. This Commission Blueprint review, along with almost any other guide you’ll read, is completely sold on the product – from the video presentations to the written guides and the templates. If you’re looking for a product that will live up to its promise to show you how to develop an affiliate marketing empire, this is by far one of the best places you can start.

Share on Facebook

He has in excess of 25 years of experience marketing in the real world and over 10,000 clients. Jay is a premier marketer and consults both online and offline. He’s had his consultancy role for nearly 20 years and will hold this position for many years to come.

Techniques That Jay Uses

Jay Abraham has built his success on a number of endeavors in the realm of online marketing and developing tools for web business ideas. While many online marketers have made a name for themselves purely online, Jay has been a prolific marketer in all fields, including offline and for major companies around the United States. His testimonials come from both small time marketers and major CEOs who have been able to make millions from simple changes he suggested.

One of Jay’s most powerful marketing methods is to take strategies from across a wide array of industries and retool them for use in a new business. He doesn’t look at any single strategy or tactic as being attached to a specific niche or industry. Instead, he uses whatever is at hand without ever letting that business get “stuck”.

Jay’s Successes

Jay Abraham has been featured twice in Investor’s Business Daily – including on the front page – and in 2000 was listed among the top 5 executive coaches in the country by Forbes Magazine for his work in helping companies that underperform to boost sales and market more successfully. His list of client success stories is more than 10,000 long and he has been featured in publications around the country including the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, Success and Inc. Magazine among many others.

How Jay Abraham Thinks

Jay has become successful not just because of his prolific client base, but because of the unique way in which he approaches a business. Instead of using traditional methods to rehash old methods, he focuses on finding hidden assets and areas of a business that are underperforming beyond what anyone else can recognize. As a result, he is able to reshape the strategy and vision of a company so that it can move forward instead cycling through the same failed methods over and over again.

Jay has long been known for his ability to think in a way that allows him to prepare for any number of possible scenarios, using new and creative solutions that no one has ever considered within a given niche to solve complex problems. This allows him to not only help a company succeed, but helps Jay to develop relationships and connections between a massive network of companies and individuals.

The Legacy of Jay Abraham

Jay Abraham has spread his knowledge not only through the work he has done but in his Consultant Training program which has helped create hundreds of new marketing experts around the globe. To date, you can find more than 2,000 websites that directly reference his work alone and has helped make billions of dollars for his clients.

The key to Jay Abraham’s success is not so much in how he has approached each and every client but in how he approaches marketing as a science and an art form. He doesn’t follow any set rule book and as a result is able to make adjustments and take chances that few others would even consider let alone take. Combined with his unique perspective on the business world, this risk taking creativity has made Jay one of the nation’s premiere marketers – both online and off.

Share on Facebook

In this post we will look at how you can create a banner ad and use it to earn an income for you.

Luckily, you’re assumption that banner ads take hundreds of hours of graphic arts and programming training is dead wrong. In fact, with just a few minutes of practice using a simple, free design program, you should be able to put together a functional, good looking banner ad in no time.

What You’ll Need

When learning how to make a banner ad, you’ll need to download at least one simple software program. You could go out and spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, but why? Unless you plan on becoming a full time designer or have the extra cash laying around, Photoshop is a bit overpowered for our needs.

Instead, head over to www.getpaint.net and download the free photo and graphic editor Paint.NET. The software has been around for a few years and provides all the basic tools you would get with a $500 copy of Photoshop, though without some of the bells and whistles. For our needs, however, it gets the job done very nicely.

How to Make a Banner Ad with Paint.NET

When making your banner ad, first start by setting the canvas size. You can start with a set size such as 468×60, which is a fairly standard horizontal banner. However, there are any number of other sized ads that you can use, including block ads at 250,250 or long form ads at 60×960. Alternately, you can set the size at double or triple the dimensions so you have a higher resolution to start with. This will ensure that any high quality images scale down properly when uploaded to your site.

Once you’ve set up your canvas, you need to lay down a graphical base. A background can be simple, and monochrome or much more complex with a series of images. However, whatever you end up doing, make sure it is singular, doesn’t flash and doesn’t do anything else too fancy.

Most banner ads are almost entirely text. This is for good reason. You need potential visitors to get some information out of your ad. Unless you’re trying to setup a viral campaign or build a brand, image only banner ads will only confuse your readers and send them elsewhere. Images should be used to augment your text, not replace it.

Make sure to use complementary colors as well. Any program that shows you how to make a banner ad will outline how these colors catch the eye. Red is a fantastic color and can be powerful when paired with red or yellow. Blue and orange work very well together, as do yellow and purple. Avoid color combinations that are hard on the eyes like red and blue or green.

The ultimate design decisions for your banner ad are up to you. Many banners will have some form of simple animation which can work well to draw the eye. I recommend you minimize how much animation you use, however. Lots of moving images and flashing can actually send someone off the site completely.

Faster Design

If you’re not fond of building your own banner ads from scratch, there are alternatives. For example, you can use XHeader or XHeader Pro. This software will allow you to choose from dozens of templates, add shapes and text and put animations to work for a website header. Technically, the software is designed for headers, but some quick dimension adjustments will allow you to make a banner easily enough. And if you’re not interested in learning how to make a banner ad, don’t forget the option to outsource.

There are services like 20DollarBanners.com which will flip around a very simple, $20 banner ad in less than a day or two. You can use the same site an sign up on it as a designer and sell those banner ads that you create to your customer. Just remember that a banner ad, whether made by you or a pro needs to be high quality and eye catching. When you learn how to make a banner ad, remember that you want to make sales, not drive people to another site.

There are other places where you can advertise your unusual business ideas including elance.com and craigslist.com If you are just starting out as a designer you may also be able to sell them on fiverr.com for $5 per banner ad.

Where ever you decide to sell, the success of your unusual business ideas lie in your perseverance to keep at it.

Share on Facebook