This may sound a little weird to some of you that I’m asking this, but I’m currently working on a new membership site and was actually wondering (yes I know, I should have done this upfront) if you would be interested in getting access to my membership site.

Let me explain what it is all about and the actual reason why I’m building it:

What kind of membership site is it?

When you join, you’ll get access to this:

- Access to a growing vault of quality resell right (RR) products (some even with master resell rights - MRR).

- Each month access to 2 brand new created “Personal use” ebooks covering the internet marketing, making money online niche. Here’s an example: TheProfitPlan (check the price).

The membership will work with credits, so as a member you’ll get a certain number of credits added each month that will allow you to download the personal use products and at least 5 or 10 quality resell right products. (haven’t decided yet). 

Plus there’s a RR vault to which you’ll have continued access to and don’t need credits to download the products. The quality of those products are much lower, but they can be used to offer as bonuses or whatever…

- Huge discount on high priced products

- This one’s a biggy, because each month you’ll get:

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If you are not good at marketing your website, then outsourcing may be the perfect solution for you. Instead of learning how to write articles, use Pay Per Click, social media, viral marketing, video marketing and the list goes on, you can spend your time working on your product or content and have someone else do the marketing.

There are a lot of ways you can outsource your marketing (I have a very good course coming for this), but I can’t possible cover them all here in this article. So what I will do is point you in the right direction and tell you what I personally do:

- You can do a search on google for “Marketing Firms”. But make sure to check out very carefully what they have to offer and if the price is reasonable. Don’t spend thousands of dollars with one firm.

Here is one that I often use and get good results from: WLMarketing

- You can use freelance sites like:

* www.elance.com
* www.getafreelancer.com
* www.guru.com

I’m personally using elance most of the time. I use them for my article writting, programmers, proof readers, etc… Just check them out and post a project. It won’t cost you anything to get your project posted.

A word of caution about scriptlance.com. I don’t use it anymore because in my opinion the quality of the providers isn’t as high as on elance and the other sites I mentioned. This may be from my personal experience and maybe I had bad luck each time. But I used them many years and only had a provider or 3 who finished my project on time.

Let’s continue, once you decided which site you will use, just open a free account and add your first project. Here are a few things you MUST include in your project description:

- Be VERY specific. Just saying, I need someone to advertise my business is way to vage. You can’t expect people to make a bid on that.
Tell them exactly what you want them to do. Write articles, create squidoo lenses, setup a PPC account,… Or if you have no idea, ask them for some sort of marketing package and let them explain exactly what is included.

-  Set a time frame. If you ask to have articles written and have them submitted to article directories for example, set a time limit you want the submission to be finished.

- Ask for examples. Most providers will give you this without asking, but if they don’t, you know they either didn’t read your description very well (you don’t want those) or they don’t have any yet. Again, stay away from them.

- Stick to your budget. If you have a small budget, then don’t be afraid to say so. Not everyone has thousands to spend on marketing. So even if it’s just $50 or less. Tell them. You might be surprised what they can offer you.

Then once you have bids coming in (don’t settle for the first bid that comes in, have some patients), check who they are:

- Read their feedback
- What’s their feedback score?
- How many returning customers do they have?
- Check their portfolio
- Is the price they offer reasonable?

Most of the time, you will have several good ones, it’s up to you which one to pick. A good way to check out their response time is to send a private message and see how long it takes before they reply. If you need to wait 2 days, don’t go for that one.

And finally, after accepting their bid, make sure to set milestones for the project and only pay when they actually finished it. I ALWAYS use escrow and if they don’t deliver or it takes way to long, simply contact elance (or the site you are using) and explain them why you want to cancel the project. I always got my money back this way.

This will get you started in the right direction. Let me know if you have any other questions about this and if you find this article useful.

Grow Big,

Nico

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How much money do you want to make each month?

In the first part of this training, you decided which niche to dive into. Have you don’t that yet and written everything down? If not, go do that now, don’t skip that step.

Ok, the next step is to actually decide how much you want to earn each month. This is a step most people simply forget to take, yet it’s a very important one as it will clearly show you what you will need to do to achieve that.

If you don’t take this step, it’s like getting in a car and start driving without knowing where you’re actually going too. It just makes no sense.

So in part #1 you already decided your niche, but also what kind of business you want to put up. In my opinion, if you are just getting started you should start as an affiliate or directly go for the membership site. An affiliate business will make you money faster, but in the long run, a membership site will earn you more money. (Check my blog for more about membership sites)

In the example I’m going to give you, I’m going to use a membership site. But no matter what you choose to do, the principal stays the same.

Example: You want to make a realistic $3000 per month. Btw, I’m not going to use big numbers here to make your head spin and see dollar signs in your eyes. You need to be focused and clear in your head.

And like we said, you will create a membership site that will sell memberships at $19.97/month. That means, you need:

$3000 : $19.97 = 150.23 => 151 paying members.

Do you think that you can find just 151 paying members out of the hundreds of millions of people online? Don’t just think you can do this, I KNOW you CAN do this.

Next step: Let’s set a realistic conversion rate of just 1%. That means out of every 100 visitors that come to your site, only 1 will become a paying member.

To get 151 paying members, you need 15,100 visitors to your site.

That may seem like a big number, but it actually isn’t that hard to do. (I’ll show you in the next steps how to do this).

Also don’t forget that this is when you have a 1% conversion rate. What if you have  3%? Then you only need 5000 visitors. With some tweaking and testing you can easily get an even higher conversion rate.

Plus, the traffic you will build will keep growing and growing and so will the number of paying members.

And we didn’t even talk about upgrades to higher levels, back-end sales etc…

By taking this step, you now know how much traffic you actually need to get to your goal and that makes it a lot easier to setup a marketing plan.

So by now you know what you want to earn, how much visitors you need to make that kind of money, and what conversion rate you need.

Everyone and I do mean EVERYONE can get 151 paying members into their membership site. It’s not as hard as you think. And just like I said, when you do get 151 people to signup for your membership, you will actually make more than $3000/month.

But that’s stuff for one of the next steps.

For now, start doing some math and put this all on paper. But be realistic!

Your next step will be: “How To Check If You Picked A Profitable Niche?”

Until next time,

Nico

P.S: Some people may say they would first check if the niche is profitable before they do their math, but if you know how much visitors you actually need to get the income you want, you will see much faster if the niche can bring you the number of visitors you need. You’ll see why in the next part.

P.P.S.: let me know your thoughts about this post. Thanks

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I just discoverd this free 50 page report by PotPieGirl that explains you in detail how to setup your squidoo lenses.  Here’s in short what you’ll learn:

• Simple step by step directions to creating a Squidoo lens… You’ll be AMAZED at how easy it really is! You will watch over my shoulder and watch me create an entire lens from start to finish!
   
• How to avoid the “Magic Builder” when making a Squidoo Lens.  (This one tip will save you a TON of aggravation!!).
   
• From Squidoo account creation all the way to getting your lens live and online. This free guide is jam-packed with loads of example graphics to make it all SO much easier! (This is my personal lens creation guide that you can only find right here).
  

Btw, make sure to check out PotPieGirl’s (yes strange name) OneWeekMarketing course too. It’s REALLY good! I bought it myself and considering the price I learned more from OWM than most books who cost 10 times that much. 

Let me know what you think about the free guide.

Nico

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Many people want to start an online business but don’t have a clue where to start or are overwhelmed by all the opportunities.

Now before I go deeper in to how to get started with your online business, I want to ask you one thing:

STOP BUYING THE LATEST MONEY MAKING PRODUCTS!

That’s right! You DON’T need them!

Are you one of those people who get an email from the top guru’s promoting each others latest products and immediately you jump on it? Just to realise you just wasted more money because it doesn’t work for you (if you actually tried the stuff to begin with).

Common admit it, you don’t need to be ashamed about it, because I’ve done the same thing and spend thousands of dollars each month and nothing seemed to be working for me.

So stop buying them and let’s get started “the right way”.

In this first part of the “How To Start Your Online Business”, I’m going to discuss: How do you want to make money?

This is a very important question and many times people don’t ask themselves that question. They just jump in and try everything they find.

Remember: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”!

I didn’t believe that either, but it can’t be more true!

So how do you want to make money online?

- As an affiliate
- Have your own product
- Start your own membership site
- Blogging
- your own webshop
- ebay
- MLM

I’m probably missing some things, but you get the idea. As you can see, depending on what you want to do, you need to have a different approach.

Personally I don’t go into MLM and stuff like that anymore. There are to many scams and is very hard to make decent money that is steady.

Once you decided which road to go with, you need to decide your niche or preferred, micro niche.

To find your niche, you should write down what you like doing yourself. Like your hobbies. Do you like fishing, skiing, gardening, painting,…
Even though you probably don’t realise it, but I’m sure there are several things you can come up with in which you have more expierence than many other people.

I for one, don’t know squad about gardening… Yet my neighbour knows quite a bit about flowers and plants (no he is not a professional gardener)and when I talked to him about the stuff I had in my garden he told me that I had thrown out some plants instead of the weed, go figure.

The thing is, you know more about something than most others do. No matter what your background is.

So try to write it down and see what you come up with.

To continue with our example ‘gardening’, you probably understand that the term gardening is way to broad. You need to narrow it down (micro niche).

For example: roses

That’s very specific and depending on the search volume for this, you might even narrow it even more.

Ok, that’s it for this lesson. Here’s your homework (you didn’t think you would get away with this so easily right?)

1. Decide how you want to make money online

2. Decide which niche you want to go into.

Write everything down and keep it in a safe place. You’ll need it when we get to lesson #2: “How much money do you want to make each month?”

To your success,

Nico

PS.: Please comment to this post and let me know what you think

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Yes, I need your help. See I just started this blog and I know a bunch of topics that I can write about. In fact my head is almost exploding from the info that needs to get out.

But instead of just writing about a something that I think might help you, I rather ask YOU what I should write about. What kind of information do you need to get started online or to get to that next level?

I want to help YOU and you can get that help here for FREE! All I ask in return is to reply to this post and tell me exactly what you want to know.
Then after I answered your questions, leave a comment on my blog about it and we are both happy.

Sounds fair?

Ok, then let me know your questions.

Thanks

Nico

Note: I won’t be answering all the questions directly and all at once. I’ll pick the most commen first and work my way through it. So please be patients if your question isn’t answered right away.

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Just like webhost providers, there are a lot of places where you can buy domain names. Some cheaper than others. But they aren’t all the same.

And when it comes to your domain names, you shouldn’t just go buy them from the grocery store on the corner who just started a domain name service.

Buy them from people who know the business. Also, don’t buy them all from the same company. If for some reason they go out of business, it can mean a lot of trouble for you. Better be prepared, right!

I’m using 2 services. The first one is godaddy.com and the second one is namecheap.com

Godaddy.com

Many people aren’t a big fan of Godaddy and for some things they are right (I’m not going deeper into this here). But they do provide a great service and as long as you use them for honest business, you won’t have any problems.

Personally I don’t buy my domain names from them anymore (although I still have about 40 in my account with them). I only use them for my .be domain names as they charge only $17.95 (or something like that) compared to local domain registars who charge from between 25 - 45€ (yes euro’s).

Namecheap.com

Currently I’m buying my domain names with Namecheap. I also have about 50 in my account at the moment, and haven’t got any problems with them so far. They are cheap and provide a good service.

But like I said, I’m nog putting all my eggs in one basket and will probably start buying from another registar very soon. I’ll let you know which one that is.

Now here’s a money saving tip for you:

Most registars (godaddy and namecheap do this) have a COUPON CODE form on their checkout page. So if you have a coupon code, you can save 10% or more on your purchase.

Hey on $9, 10% isn’t much, but every cent counts, right!

So here’s the tip. If you don’t have a coupon code, just go to google and
type in “coupon code Namecheap” or “coupon code Godaddy” and you’ll find a bunch of sites who list the latest working coupon codes for those sites (or any other site you searched it for).

If you have 50 domain names like me, that’s $45 saved. (average).

Let me know what you think about this post.

regards

Nico

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Having your own webhost really is a must if you are serious in building your online business. Without it, you not only look like an amature, but you you also depend on free services that may be gone in a flash.

That means, all your hard work GONE!

These days, you certainly don’t need to worry about the cost of a good webhost. You can open an account for as little as $5 per month (you can even find cheaper if you want).

Now if you don’t even want to invest $5 or $10 per month in your business, then you definitely are at the wrong place. If you want full control and want to actually BUILD your business, then you need your own webhost.

Ok, so how to choose your webhost from the hundreds of thousands providers out there?

Here are a few tips:

1. Before you do anything, go the webhost of your choice website and check how you can contact them. Do they provide online support or can they be reached by phone as well? 

Most of the time, you will contact them online, but if it’s an emergency, you need to be able to reach them by phone.

2. Do they offer 24/7 support?

My webhost is in a total different timezone than I am. So most of the time that I am online, it’s night for them. That means if they only respond during office hours and during my day my server goes down, they can’t be reached.

But if they have 24/7 support, you can contact them even if it’s 3AM their time. I needed to contact my host on several occassions already and even when it’s the middle of the night their time, I get a response mostly in less than 10 minutes.

3. TEST their support and response time:

Just open a ticket with them and ask them something about the hosting package that you want. If you don’t get an answer in 20-30 minutes max. Then move on. Even very big companies will reply withing that time frame.

4. Don’t stare yourself blind on the package details. Just make sure you have enough space and bandwidth for what you want to do. Don’t search for the webhost who offers the largest number of space. If you don’t have enough space (which won’t happen overnight), you can always ask your host for more.

5. Don’t buy your domain name from your webhost! (or visa versa).

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It’s very important to not buy your domain name with your webhost. You are giving them full control over you this way.

See, even if you don’t use spam, some of your affiliates (if you plan to have them) might be using it (conscious or unconscious). Then if someone complaints to your webhost they can close your account and you lose everything. All the traffic you build to your domain name will be lost.

But if you bought your domain name elsewhere, you can quickly setup a new webhosting account somewhere else and point your domain name to it.

You may only lose a few hours or a few days maximum, but you didn’t lose everything.

Ok, those are a few things to consider. Now you may be wondering which one I’m using and which ones I recommend. So here they are:

- I’m personally using Rackforce.com for my dedicated server and have never been dissapointed in them (been using them for 4-5 years now).

But they are a bit pricy, so I’m also using the ones below. They allows you to host multiple domain names on one account (highly recommended)

- HostGator
- BlueHost 

To finish this up, if you are at all serious in starting an online business, then you really need your own webhost. The 2 above are a really good place to start.

Let me know what you think about this post.

Take care,

Nico

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Hi,

I’m finally starting my new blog. But as you can see, it’s not ready yet. My designer is currently working on the design so when it’s ready, I’ll fully launch this blog. (Can be any day now).

What will you find here? Plenty of things:

- How to make money online: What to do and what not
- How to drive traffic to your site
- How to use free blogs and turn in into profit
- And many more things

See the reason I’m starting this blog, is because I have to much information in my head and I feel like it’s going to waste. So I want to share it here with anyone who wants to know more about these topics.

So stay tuned!

take care

Nico

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