Got My $125 Bonus from Acme People Search

It's taken me a while to learn what I needed to earn enough to qualify for my bonus, but now I have it. It feels so good to get my first real earnings from the program.

I've been a Super Sponsor for a while, and thus I've received payments from that before, but this marks the first payment I received through the referral system. A good $204 as can be seen below (click to enlarge):



This is the final confirmation that this program is real and true. Don't miss your chance to try it out yourself here.

If you want to learn more, see what I have to see about the program at my site, Guide-to-Making-Money.com

Don't Spend Money To Make Money

I've been running this little special deal for a while now and figured that I would finally get around to posting about it on my blog for any readers.

I previously reviewed the Acme People Search system as a legitimate business model for making money online. The only problem with it, like most business ventures is start-up costs.

Typically, you have to purchase a domain name and web space for your search engine and then pay a $30 a month subscription to the owner for setting everything up for you. Now while any kind of business—online or physical—needs you to invest money to get started, there is easily a suspicious air surrounding online business opportunities. It is easy to feel like it is a scam when they're asking you to pay them and you never know if you'll make anything.

The problem is that people look at it like a job instead of an investment. People say that you shouldn't have to pay someone first before they pay you to work for them. This is true. However, these ventures are equivalent to creating your own business, not working for someone else's. That is the mindset you have to be in when going into something like affiliate marketing.

Despite that, I feel the need to make things easier for people. That's why I wanted to start offering people a risk-free solution. The first month subscription to Acme People Search is already free, but there's still the hosting fee. What if that was free as well?

Well, I am offering new sign-ups this very opportunity. All you need to do is sign-up and set-up your GDI domain through the system. GDI offers a 7-day free trial on .ws domains, but that runs out quickly. Within that 7-day window, I am willing to send you $10 via PayPal to cover the costs of that first month. This allows you a full month paying nothing out of your pocket to get started on the system. In this month, I am also perfectly willing to work with you and help you learn how to make money with the system so that you can pay your own fees in the months to come.

You can't make it easier than that. Interested? See this page for more details and the sign-up link.

GDI Downline Growing System

I know I haven't been making any post in a while, so I'm going to cut the lazy by quickly letting people in on something I recently came across.

I found a system that was developed to help people grow their GDI downlines merely by using free traffic exchanges. Now I've never been to big on the traffic exchanges in the past because anyone surfing one is just trying to wait for the time to get to the next page and get more credits. No one ever really reads the ads, they just want credits for their own site.

However, there are a few types of pages that will catch the eye of a surfer. One is an advertisement for another exchange. More credit earning potential is always appealing to someone using a traffic exchange. The second is something that could potentially be beneficial to them. Whether it's a list builder or a downline creator, if it can help them in their efforts, they will be intrigued.

This system I found can appeal to people on two different levels. Those who want to make money can sign up with GDI, enter their user name, and then receive monthly commission from referrals. Those who just want traffic exchange credits can benefit from the fact that there are a whole slew of exchanges in the system that referrals can sign up with through them. Anyone familiar with the way exchanges work know how referrals can help boost your credit count (and even further make money in many cases).

For those interested in this system, see this GDI Income Team link. Whether your are an existing member of GDI or not, it doesn't matter. Anyone can use the system to credit residual income for themselves.

My Free Advertising Model - Socializing

Social Networks

In my last post, I covered Article Marketing. It is very important to right informative and compelling articles to gain attention.

Now that I have gone through and showed you all of these free methods of marketing, you need to know how to let the world know about your creations. Making all the sites, lenses, blogs, and articles will do you no good if nobody ever hears about them.

It is essential to create some sort of internet presence for yourself when marketing. This is something that holds true for not only Affiliate Marketing, but standard businesses as well. You need a persona and people need to know who you are. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through social networking.

You need to have both a myspace and FaceBook account for your company/campaign. Myspace is starting to die out a little now, but it still won't hurt to capture what audience is left. Make a highly attractive page on myspace, utilizing the freedom the site gives you in regards to page customization. You should have already identified your target audience, so now hunt people in that target down and send friend requests. Get people to see your page and in turn, your product. You should post updates of the things you do and create on your page. Link to blogs, lenses, articles, etc.

Your FaceBook approach will work similarly. FaceBook doesn't allow all of the flashiness of myspace, so you should focus more on being professional here. If possible, create some sort of FaceBook app to give something to your viewers. It's always good to provide people with something that may capture their interests.

If you are more professional-oriented, you may also consider establishing a presence on a Professional Networking Site, such as LinkedIn. Befriend people within your industry to establish connections and get the word out about what you do or anything you may need.

Another good way to broadcast your creations is through email blasts. Sites like Awebber can provide you with double opt-in lists for you to broadcast whatever you want. These people sign up to receive emails about product and offers, so you won't be spamming them. I won't get into Awebber much, though, as it is not a free service, and thus is out of the scope of what I am covering in this series.

The final free way to broadcast that I wish to discuss is Twitter. It's an increasingly popular service where you can send short messages telling the world what you are doing. Take full advantage of this service. Anytime you create a site, Twitter it. Anytime you update a site, Twitter it. Anytime you publish a blog post, Twitter it. Anytime an article you write gets published, Twitter it. Anytime you publish/update a Squidoo lens, Twitter it (Squidoo makes this easy by linking your accounts). I think you get the idea. Make a tweet for whatever it is you've done so that you can keep promoting your work. Twitter followers are very easy to accumulate, and following other people can increase who you pick up. By amassing a large following and constantly telling people about your marketing creations, you increase the chance of someone seeing that and checking out what you made.

This concludes the explanation of my Free Advertising Model. With this, you should be far more successful in your internet marketing efforts. Good luck and keep checking back for more advice!

My Free Advertising Model - Article Marketing

Article Marketing

In my last post, I covered Blogging, noting the importance and how to get your blog attention. This time, I will discuss Article Marketing. The article-writing strategies discussed here can be used for more than just what you submit to article sites. You can take what you learn here and apply it to your blogging techniques or ad copy.

One of the key ways of attracting people without spending money is through writing articles. Article Marketing is a very powerful and effective marketing strategy if done well. Your articles also give you something else that may come up high in search engine rankings, increasing the chances of someone finding whatever it is that you are trying to promote.

First, let me cover some things to avoid doing with your articles. Some sites are stricter than others, but I think it's best to follow Ezine's guidelines as a general rule of practice. Ezine articles are clean and do not feel like spam or bad advertisements. You don't want your articles to come off that way, no matter where they are.

To get accepted to Ezine, your article has to provide valuable information. This is something you should strive to do at all times. I say this a lot, but nobody likes a salesman. Sound too much like one, and you'll have the metaphorical door slammed in your face. Ezine frowns upon articles that take on the tone of promoting something and will reject promotional articles. Instead of talking about how wonderful something is, try figuring out the problem your product solves. Discuss that problem, providing factual information on it. Then offer a link for them to learn more. This link can take them to a landing page that is designed to actually sell them on the product if you wish. Just don't try to sell them in the article. Ezine also doesn't like self-serving links. They only allow one and it can't be too early into the article. It's best to save that for near the end. You also should utilize your resource box for links instead of the article body. This will make your article more likely to be accepted.

I briefly touched on focusing on a problem for your article. This is the easiest way to write. Every product is designed to do something. Most likely, it is supposed to provide some sort of solution to a problem people may have. If the product is sun block, the problem it solves is sunburn (as well as possibly preventing cancer). If the product is anti-virus software, the problem it solves is computer infections. I think you get the idea, so just ask yourself what problem the product is designed to address. Gather up what is detrimental about this problem. Why would people not want this to happen to them? What makes this solution or prevention important? Throw this information into your article to educate readers of the importance of solving this problem. This will make them want a solution. That solution is what you will lead them to.

With articles, it is bad to directly link to a product's sales page. It is much better to link to a blog or Squidoo lens that will then lead them to the sales page. This will increase the quality of your article. Throwing in a sales link just reduces the integrity.

Another thing to be mindful of is that you can use emotional hooks to draw people in. A compelling article may sympathize with sufferers of a particular problem, but remind them of how bad the problem is. Draw on their negative feelings towards the problem and then be their savior, offering them relief. The more you can show yourself relating to the target audience, the more successful you will be. You may also take a more positive approach, highlighting how wonderful it is to be free of the problem and how grateful you are to the product that enabled it. There are many options and strategies. You just have to find what works best for you.

Finally, I want to suggest to you some article sites I use to submit articles: EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleAvenue.com, 3stepAds.com and Unique-Article-Database.com.

Next post, I will wrap up this series by discussing how to utilize social networks and other broadcasting methods to draw attention to all of your creations. You can create all the Squidoo lenses, blogs, and articles you want... but if nobody knows about them, it will do you no good.

My Free Advertising Model - Blogging

Using Blogs to Generate Traffic

In my previous article, I discussed How to Optimize a Squidoo Lens. This time I am going to cover blogging.

Blogging is something that has really caught fire and any smart company has a blog on their site to attract extra visitors. People like to read blogs and blog posts often come up in Google search results. These two points suggest that blogging is definitely something that every advertiser should take advantage of. Some popular blog services are Blogger.com (which is hosting this very blog) and WordPress.

Blogs, like anything else, have to be content-optimized. When you pick a subject for your post, you want that post to be highly focused on the topic. This is how search engines pick up your post and tie it to a particular key phrase that a user may type in.

Aside from providing insightful articles, blogs are also a handy way to linking to other resources such as websites that you want to call attention to, or Squidoo lenses. Some people use blog posts as article teasers, introducing the nature of an article and then linking to the full thing. This is a good way to generate extra links to those articles.

Successful blogs are interesting. You have to provide content that people will want to read. Otherwise, why would they waste their time reading? Whether your blog has a personal or professional feel...it still needs to keep the reader entertained and not bore them. Make your content fresh and inviting. A successful blog also has new content added often. You should aim to make 1-5 new blog posts a day as a general rule. The more content you are generating, the more opportunities you give your blog to be caught by a search engine.

Once you have created your blog, you want to get it out there. Absolutely include the feed in your Squidoo lenses. Also bookmark it everywhere that you can. My Yahoo is an option, as are My AOL, My MSN, Google's Bookmark, etc. A couple of other good sites to submit and bookmark a blog are Technorati, Feedage and Feedest. It is also a good idea to have your blog pinged by as many different sites as you can. Ping-O-Matic and AutoPinger are a couple of good sites for submitting pings to multiple services at once for your blog.

It is important to get your blog as much attention as you can, as it can really draw in extra visitors, which will in-turn make your job easier. Also be sure to keep your blog as organized as you can with good tagging. People like to search and look for related posts.

That's about all that I can tell you about blogging. The basic concept is a fairly simple one and everyone probably already knows how to create one. Some people may not have known how to get one noticed, however. Hopefully reading this post has imparted some of that knowledge onto you. Be sure to read the next article which covers Article Writing for Ezine and other sites. It will provide some very useful information that can also be put to use when making content for blogs and Squidoo lenses, so you won't want to miss it.

My Free Advertising Model - Squidoo

Squidoo Optimization

Last time, we discussed the importance of Keyword Research, which is the basis for everything you do. No matter what you are creating, the same general SEO techniques apply. You want to find a low-competition keyword and make that the focus. Make sure the keyword density is high and evenly dispersed throughout the page. This goes for web pages, blog posts, articles, and Squidoo lenses.

Now, we are going to look more closely at what is needed to make a good Squidoo lens. Obviously, like with any URL, you want the URL of your lens to contain your keyword. If your main focus keyword is "how to train a dog", you want your Squidoo lens to end: /how-to-train-a-dog. This should be the main lens title and primary keyword for the lens. You also want this in the title and content of every module.

Lens Content

A good lens should have at least four different modules. A good approach to lens-making is to create an outline of the information you wish to provide. For every section of your outline, you can make a new text module. Consider you are making a lens to promote a dieting product (but don't actually do this. Squidoo frowns upon these types of lenses). Your outline may look like:

I. Flatten Your Stomach Without Surgery (lens title and introduction)

II. Why You Want to Flatten Your Stomach (text module explaining health concerns behind obesity)

III. Ways To Flatten Your Stomach (text module detailing treatment options)

IV. In Conclusion – Flatten Your Stomach (text module wrapping up and pitching your product as the best solution)

V. Learn More About How To Flatten Your Stomach (big link module to your product)

VI. More Resources About Flattening Your Stomach (featured lenses module, linking to your other lenses)

VII. Updates on Flattening Your Stomach (RSS module with your blog's feed)

VIII. (Guestbook module)

Another optional thing you may want to add in is a flash video module that talks about the product you wish to promote if applicable. Also, don't forget the power of quotes. If there is a really strong quote that you want to emphasize, throw it in a BlackBox or Talk Bubble module.

One thing you want to keep in mind is that you do not want content to be written in the form of a sales pitch. You want to just provide information to the reader. Give them facts and valuable information. If your lens has no value, it will be marked as a junk lens. You don't need to try to sell people with your lens. Instead, just work your link into every text module. Whether it be a separate line at the end of the module that tells them to click for more information or linking text within the content to the site, you want your link shown as much as possible. You also will obviously be using the big link module to throw in another link.

Another thing to make sure to do is using pictures. People like to see pictures, because they catch attention. Make sure to have pictures relevant to the lens. Funny and eye-catching work, but anything that gives you a breath of fresh air from the text is good. For an example of how a finished lens might like, check here.

Once again, do not forget your keywords. Try to make them appear once every 100 or so words. You will also want to use your tags to throw in more keywords. In addition to this, tags should include any tags used by popular lenses on the same subject. Just do a search and find out what other people are using. This will link your lens to that category and increase potential traffic.

Create multiple lenses on every subject. Remember in step one that I had you gather a list of keywords? Obviously your first lens will be centered on your primary keyword, but you should make another lens for every other one of your top 4 or 5 keywords. You will need to alter each one a bit so it's not a carbon copy of the other. Perhaps change the mood of your writing or angle of approach. This is also a good way to experiment with techniques. You can link all of these lenses together with featured lens modules.

This covers the basics of working with Squidoo. In my next article, I am going to discuss how to incorporate blogging into your marketing efforts. Many sites use blogs as a way to attract more attention to their websites. It is a popular method as there are many ways to get your blog noticed and read. I will not only discuss how to make articles for blogs, but more importantly how to get people to the blogs.