How to make passive income from Clickbank?

Make Money using Facebook and Twitter

Do you enjoy using Facebook and Twitter?

Why not make money doing what you enjoy?

Learn the WEIRD trick that allowed this single Mother to climb out of debt and make over $700 per week helping businesses with their Facebook and Twitter accounts!

It is part of most people's everyday lives - you chat to your friends and you interact with people who also enjoy Facebook and Twitter.

So why not earn money while you do it?

If You Find It Hard To Believe, Check Out This Fox News Video Report On Social Media Managers

I’ll show you how to find hundreds of easy social media jobs that you can begin right away!

Plus I’ll show you how you can get businesses to give you their products for FREE to test as part of your social media manager duties!

Many businesses will send you free samples of their products and services as part of the job, to ensure that you know enough about their business. I’ll show you the secrets I’ve learnt to keep all of these products for free!

Here are some of the free items I’ve received in the past month!

- Sat Nav

- Tablet computer

- HD Camera

- Sunglasses

- Lots of smaller household products

And this was just last month!

If You Publish Content and Don't Promote It, Will Anyone See It? (Infographic)

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The same could be said about a content-marketing strategy, when it comes to optimizing the elements of a company's blog or other website copy for sharing. If you publish content without a plan for its distribution, it certainly won’t get noticed. Then all the time and effort put into the work are lost. That's unless, of course, you want your blog to remain a private journal.  

The performance of that content online can be affected by little changes in the call to action, optimizing the web copy for search, adjusting the post's timing, using images and even where social-media buttons are placed.  

The infographic below explains some basic points to consider for your blog and content-marketing plan. 

Click to Enlarge+

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8 Home-Based Business Ideas That Pay

When starting your first business, it’s not always the smartest idea to dive in head first, especially if you don’t have the money or expertise (yet) to dominate a brand-new industry. Luckily, there are great home-based businesses not many people take advantage of early on in their careers that can provide the perfect launch pad. Why not start out small to make it big?

To learn more, we asked eight successful entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC):

Q. What’s one home-based business idea that aspiring entrepreneurs can use as a jumping-off point for something bigger?

Their best answers are below:

1. Start a Service-Based Business

Service-based businesses are a great jumping-off point for newer entrepreneurs. In college, I began a digital marketing company out of my apartment. It was a great business to start with because there was minimal overhead, and I used my network of independent contractors to expand my bandwidth and service offerings as needed. Use your business to generate revenue and build your network.
- Kevin Tighe II, WeBRAND

2. Sell Products on Etsy

If you’re crafty, make things at home and sell your handmade goods on Etsy. It’s free to set up an account and only costs $0.20 to list an item. If what you make is interesting, it can fetch a good price. It’s a great way to test the market for an item you make and want to turn into a real business. Clothes, jewelry, gifts and decorative items do particularly well.
- Matt Ehrlichman, Porch

MORE ALLBUSINESS: 

• The  Top 25 Home-Based Business Ideas
• 10 Web Sites Where You Should Have Your Company Profile Listed
• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• The 10 Most Creative New Business Ideas Out There

3. Build a Following

Start blogging, and build a following with your blog and social media networks. Having a blog not only makes you more influential as an entrepreneur, but it also makes it easier for you to establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry. Where is your passion: education, technology, startups, payments? Learn about that industry and write about it. Your idea might just come naturally!
- Sarah Ware, Markerly

4. Clean Homes With Green Techniques

If aspiring entrepreneurs want to target a more specific niche, they should try green home cleaning. This is a business that can literally be launched out of the trunk of a car without a huge amount of startup capital.
- Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

5. Produce an E-book

Tim Ferris’ “The 4-Hour Workweek” was the first to showcase information products to the mass market as a viable way to generate cash. Today, there are innumerable success stories (e.g., Nathan Barry and Sacha Greif, Pat Flynn’s blog and Chris Guillebeau’s “The $100 Startup”). It can be a very fruitful path, but for some reason remains unknown to many.
- Michael Simpson, DJZ.

6. Start an eBay Store

One home-based business idea that I think is great for aspiring entrepreneurs to use as a jumping-off point is starting an eBay store. The site is extremely intuitive, and the cost of entry is cheap. Start in an area you feel knowledgeable, and start looking for deals. For instance, if you know about boats, you should start buying and selling small accessories that you would buy for yourself.
- Jay Wu, A Forever Recovery

7. Help Friends Sell Their Products

I’ve seen this model work particularly well on Etsy, but it also works on most e-commerce platforms. Everyone has friends with cool projects that they aren’t prepared to monetize themselves. You can quickly learn how to set up an online store and manage it for your friends, acting as their representative for a percentage of the store’s income. You can run several stores easily.
- Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

8. Find Niche Online Communities

It’s easy to say Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can help you find like-minded individuals and connect with your friends and acquaintances. But don’t you wish there was one place you could congregate with those same like-minded people who could get to know each other and have constructive conversations and build, share or do great stuff? That’s a killer idea worth pursuing.
- Danny Wong, Blank Label

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11 Marketing Psychology Tips to Tap Into Buyers’ Minds

Perhaps unsurprisingly, psychology has emerged as one of the most useful tools used by marketers. It gives us a glimpse into workings of the human mind, along with some useful techniques for subtly influencing it. Below are 11 useful tips that you can use to improve your customer engagement and your conversion rate.

1. Engage the Senses

Buying anything online can be a tricky proposition; people don’t necessarily have a chance to really see or touch the product before they commit to buying it. As a result, you’ll want to help your customers feel as though they know the product intimately. This can include high-quality product shots or testimonials from other customers. In other words: make them feel as though they already own it.

2. Use Emotion to Your Advantage

Humans are emotional creatures, and our range of feelings can be easily played to. The most effective marketing techniques have nothing to do with spewing product specs or shouting about how low prices are; instead, they’ve become about telling a story, about making the audience feel a deep and personal connection with the brands they interact with.

Related Resources from B2C
» Free Webcast: How to Craft the Ideal Content Strategy for Your Facebook Page

3. Assuage Suspicions

Most of us are naturally suspicious; after all, the Internet is full of people who are only too willing to take advantage of overly trusting people. To that end, guiding customers along toward conversion involves no small amount of reassurance. Try to anticipate potential doubts or suspicions, and then do your best to reassure your customers. There are many ways to do this, such as backing up your claims with authoritative sources and providing reviews from existing customers.

4. Offer Exclusivity

There’s no getting around the fact that online retailers and “big box” brick-and-mortar stores can be both cheaper and more convenient than buying direct. The solution to that problem lies in exclusivity; offer something that they can’t get anywhere else, and you’ll tap into customers’ love of owning something uncommon.

5. Provide Flexibility

If there’s one thing online shoppers hate, it’s a lack of flexibility. This can include everything from the checkout process itself to shipping and payment options. Don’t force customers to register; allow them to check out as a guest if they wish. In addition, offer a variety of payment options to make sure that nobody is left out.

6. Offer Fewer Choices

This one might seem just a little bit strange, but it definitely plays to a well-established phenomenon in psychology. People tend to get overwhelmed when presented with more than one or two choices, which is why it makes sense to simplify your product offerings. By offering just a few very clear-cut choices to customers, you’re helping to ensure that they don’t lose their momentum in the face of an array of potentially confusing options.

7. Draw Comparisons

Customers want to know that you stand behind your product. One way to demonstrate that confidence is to compare your offerings to those of your competitors. Show them in black and white why your products stand out from the crowd.

8. Take Advantage of Crowd Mentality

The reason why social media marketing is so effective is because people love “belonging” – that is, they love being a part of emerging trends. If you can, find a way to tie social media into your product offerings; reveal just how many people have clicked that “Buy” button, or how many people in their networks have subscribed.

9. Explain the Benefits to Your Customers

Whether online or offline, impulse buying is an important thing to capitalize on, and tends to be fairly effective in the eCommerce world. That said, more expensive or involved purchases need to play the game of reciprocity. If you’re expecting your customers to commit to making a big decision, whether it’s parting with their money or simply giving up their personal information, they need to have a very clear idea about what’s in it for them. Don’t by shy about explaining, clearly and concisely, in a way that will provide a feeling of self worth, precisely what they’ll be getting out of the arrangement.

10. Don’t “Sell” – “Impress” Instead

People staple their wallets shut and it takes a crowbar to get them open. The crowbar is, in this sense, direct advertising and propaganda. Show people the same ad enough times (20+) and they might finally cave in, at least once. However, there are other less intrusive and arguably more commendable paths to get wallets open without even showing them a product. This is content marketing psychology working at its finest. For example:

This infographic showcases, as you would guess, the world’s fastest roads. It’s filled with beautiful visuals and insightful statistics. This is content marketing. But, at a more subtle level, there is a psychological process going on. We are engaging the brand by sharing the infographic on social media with our friends and peerswhich is a type of referral. We comment about it which is a type of rating. By creating referrals and ratings in a setting free of “get your wallets out folks!” we soften the staple and remove the need for crowbar marketing.

11. Stop Forcing the Issue

It’s only too easy to start thinking that you have control over somebody’s behavior. The truth is that all we can do is attempt to influence, guide, and inform; when it comes to clicking the “Buy” or “Subscribe” button, only the customer can make that decision. Anything that attempts to push them more forcibly is only going to come across as off-putting or desperate. What you have to do is state your case clearly; what they do with that information is ultimately up to them.

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The psychology of impulse purchase

Here's a new entrepreneur guest blog on the psychology of impulse purchase and what it has to do with entrepreneurs...

Retailers have been cashing in on impulse buying for decades. Theres probably no better example of this than supermarkets, where customers preferences are boiled down to a science: candy is placed at kids eye level, marked-down items all but jump off the shelves, and essentials like milk are shoved to the back so that shelf upon tempting shelf lies between them and the customer.


Youd think the recession would have curbed that, but no: a 2010 survey, Harris Interactive', commissioned by the National Endowment for Financial Education, shows that no less than 80% of Americans made an impulse buy in the past year. Its bad news for consumers - more than two out of three impulse buyers in the survey admit they regretted their purchases shortly after - but the implications for business owners are promising.


First, what drives impulse purchases? There are different views on this. According to Engel and Blackwell in 1982, an impulse purchase is anything you didnt have the intention of buying when you first entered the store, but bought anyway. Phillips and Bradshaw, in 1993, narrowed it down to the point of sale, saying a buyer can constantly change her mind about an item all the way to checkout. But Dennis Rook, in his 1987 paper The buying impulse, provided todays generally accepted definition: a sudden, often powerful and persistent urge to buy something immediately.


How impulse buys happen


An impulse purchase starts with exposure according to Specialty Retail Report. Its all about seeing the product - thats why supermarkets are paid a premium to put certain products on the front line. The next step is problem recognition: the product will remind the customer of a problem that the product in question can solve. Take, for example, the lumping together of chips, popcorn, and soda. A buyer may only come for a bag of chips, but the whole arrangement reminds him of his last movie night. So he grabs a 2-litre orange soda, and since hes already there, figures he might as well pick up some popcorn.


Entrepreneur Virgil Klunder pares it down further to just two things: pain and pleasure. Every customer buys to avoid pain or heighten pleasure, and the easier it is for them, the more likely the product will sell. It sounds simple enough, but millions of dollars are poured into market research every year in search of the straightest line to customer satisfaction.


Online, it happens a little differently. The general belief used to be that price was the main driving force in impulse purchases, an idea brought forward by consultancy firm Ernst & Young in 2000. But a study by User Interface Engineering found that only around 8% of impulse buys arise from special prices or promotions. Rather, it appears, people simply think of buying one item while shopping for another. Users who surf the website using category links were around three times more likely to make an impulse purchase than those who found the item through search engines. The latter takes them directly to the product they need, so theres little to no exposure to the rest of the store. By contrast, navigating the site is the online equivalent of zigzagging through the whole store.


The Costco effect and other case studies


Costco, the largest warehouse club in the US, uses a unique business model to maximize impulse buying. In an interview with The New York Times, the companys chief financial officer Richard Galanti said they work out what customers really want and stock a small number of popular items, say the top 4,000. This contrasts with the business models of Wal-Mart, which stocks up to 100,000 different items, or a typical grocery, which can stock around 40,000.


This promotes impulse purchases by limiting peoples options to trendy, popular items, which include anything from consumer electronics to packed lunches. They cater equally to bargain-seekers and the brand-conscious. They also create a sense of urgency by rotating items on a seasonal basis, urging people to buy on impulse because the item may be gone when they come back.


Apple exploits impulse buying using another model, that of associated buys. The company makes only a fraction of its fortune from hardware sales; the bulk comes from selling content for these gadgets for as low as $1, according to marketing consultant Jeff Bullas, apps for the iPhone and iPad are made by third-party providers, eliminating development costs for Apple while allowing them to charge a 30% commission on sales. Impulse purchase fits in nicely with this setup because $1.99 for a cute little game doesnt usually call for a lot of introspection. People just go ahead and buy it because its just two bucks - but when there are 200 million of them, the money gets serious.


Online retailers such as Amazon have combined impulse buying psychology with targeted marketing, recommending products based on a specific users purchase history. While supermarkets take a slight gamble at the checkout counter - not every customer will want breath mints - e-commerce sites make it so that the checkout is lined with things a buyer will most likely be interested in. A perennial book buyer will be bombarded with books from the same author or genre; one who has recently purchased a camera may be offered lenses, filters, and bags. And by eliminating the physical task of walking to the counter, these sites make impulse buying all the more effortless, according to Main Street, an online financial magazine.


Promoting impulse buys


Rook outlined five characteristics that define an impulse purchase:


An overwhelming attraction to the product

An intense need to buy the product at once

Ignoring negative consequences that may arise from the purchase

A feeling of excitement at buying the product

Conflicting feelings of indulgence and self-control

Obviously, when one makes an impulse buy the first four urges win over, and the self-control factor is brushed aside. To take advantage of impulse buying psychology, businesses must cater to these urges. Chintan Bharwada, marketing expert and contributor at focus.com advises businesses to relieve the negative feelings tied to impulse (e.g. guilt over unplanned spending) and highlight the non-economic rewards (e.g. contentment over a new gadget). Basically, their advertising should say, So its $500 you never meant to spend, but hey, youve got a nice new home theater! A complex environment that gets in the way of rational thinking, and thus makes impulses seem stronger, can also go a long way.

This also means eliminating the risk of an impulse purchase, according to Bharwada. This can be done through straightforward return policies and readily available credit. Knowing that they can change their mind, or at least not have to pay up in full if they do, makes an impulse buy seem less of a bad thing.


The new consumer


More recent research suggests that the old idea - that impulse buys should be displayed at the checkout counter - may be out-dated. For example, according to an Inc.com article, the cashier may not always be the best spot to put last-minute items because impulsiveness tend to die down the longer a customer stays in the store, and the more options they are presented with. However, they say, the urge can be rekindled through properly placed signs and promotions.


Most of our examples have obviously been industry-specific. Some demographics are simply more inclined to buy on a whim - women are more impulsive than men, for example - so businesses catering to this market will rely more impulse than rational thought. Also, more and more consumers are shopping online, and as weve explained above, this will require a whole new approach to marketing last-minute buys. At the end of the day it seems to come down to the age-old tenet of knowing your customers, and subsequently knowing how to trigger their impulses.

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Choosing a Niche for Your Blog or Online Business

As part of Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel 2.0, I’m going to be starting a new niche website from scratch and slowly build it up into a sustainable and mostly passive source of income.  I’ll be documenting my progress on this blog as I go so you can follow along and learn from my successes and failures.

Without a doubt, the most crucial step to building a successful and profitable website is choosing the right niche and keyword to target.  Making a poor choice here is like a horse stumbling out of the starting gate.  Sure the horse can get up and try to continue the race, but he’s already at such a disadvantage that winning is no longer realistic.

On the other hand, a wise choice will give you a leg up on the competition and put you on course for victory.

There are many factors to consider when choosing your niche and it is really more of an art than a science.  Let’s take a walk through the process and discuss some of the key elements to consider.

Follow Your Passion or Follow the Money?

Some people say that if you follow your passion the money will follow.  Others believe you should look for a proven market where people are already spending.

While these may seem like two completely contradictory points of view, they don’t have to be.

You see, if you sit down and think about it you’ll come up with all sorts of topics that interest you.  Some will have very little profit potential but if you keep searching you’ll find something that does.

Put visually…

I don’t recommend targeting a niche that doesn’t interest you at all.  If you’re only choosing a subject because there is money to be made there you’ll have a very hard time keeping up momentum and your site will most likely fail.

I learned this the hard way when I created a number of small sites targeting various keywords that didn’t interest me at all.  I found it very difficult to write about them and the sites quickly faded away.

Remember, you don’t necessarily have to be an established expert on the subject.  You just need to know a little more than the average person or be curious and interested enough about it to learn more and then share what you learn with your readers.

Brainstorming

If you’re just starting out you might not have the slightest idea what topic your website should focus on.

Don’t worry, that’s ok.  There are a million different ideas out there and you just have to choose which one is best for you.

I like to start out with a blank piece of paper and just write down every topic idea I can think of in ten minutes.  Don’t worry about keywords or competition or anything else just yet.  Just write down every idea that pops into your head.  That should give you at least a few dozen topics to consider.

Another way to come up with new ideas is to simply make a conscious effort to look for them.  Keep an eye out for any niche ideas as you go about your day and jot them down so you can go back and research them later.  I use the Evernote app on my iPhone to quickly save them on the go.

Once you have a list of potential topics you can start whittling them down.  There may be some topics that just aren’t practical for whatever reason and you can just eliminate them.  But don’t be too quick to toss aside a topic until you take the next step and do some keyword research.

Keyword Research

The next step is to start researching keywords for each of the topics on your list.  As you make your way through the list you’ll be eliminating keywords based on two factors:

Demand – if the number of searches is low that means your traffic potential is low.  You need to find a keyword that is in demand so that you’ll get a decent amount of traffic once you get to the top of the search engine rankings.

Everyone has their own opinion of how many searches make a keyword worthwhile.  For a smaller niche site I prefer a keyword that gets at least 3,000 searches per month, but that’s not a rule set in stone.  Remember, even if you rank number one in Google you won’t get ALL the people searching for that keyword.

Competition – Many people think that competition is bad, but I couldn’t disagree more.  Competition is great because it means there is money to be made.  If I see a keyword with no competition at all I question why and tread carefully.  If no one at all is targeting a keyword there is likely a reason why.

Of course there is such a thing as too much competition.  If all the sites already ranked are very strong it will be tough to knock them out.  There are some keywords that are just so difficult to rank for that it just isn’t worth the time and money needed to make it happen.

To use an offline example, let’s say you wanted to get into the food industry by making your own soda at home.  Would you try to come up with a unique flavor that few people are selling and make it a niche product?  Or would you go after Coke and Pepsi with your own brand of cola?

The key is to find the “sweet spot” in which a niche has enough competition to indicate it is worth going after, but not so much competition that it will be impossible to rank for.

There are tools you can use to help you in your keyword research.

If money is tight you can use the free Google keyword tool to help you locate popular keywords.  This option only gives you the number of searches and you’ll have to look at the level of competition manually by searching for each keyword at Google.com.

That is not an efficient use of your time so I suggest using a paid keyword tool such as Market Samurai or Long Tail Pro.  I own and use both of those programs almost daily.  They’re a huge time saver and well worth the small investment.

With either keyword tool, you start out with a seed keyword and then sit back while the program generates hundreds of related keywords that you can sort and eliminate based of various criteria.  They also let you take a snapshot of the competition and give you important stats such as how many sites are linking to them, whether or not the keyword is part of their Title, etc.

I’ll go into more detail on how I use each of these tools in a separate post, but they offer similar functionality and either would be a good choice.

Profitability

A high number of searches and low competition might seem like a dream come true, but there’s one more thing you’ll want to check before throwing your hat into the ring.

Can you actually make money?

If you’re creating a site just for fun than it really doesn’t matter, but I’m going to assume you’d like to actually make some money from this venture.  If that is the case then you need to make sure there is money to be made.

Most niches can be monetized in one way or another, but some are ready to be money-makers right out of the gate while others might require some creativity and ingenuity on your part.

Google the search terms you’re targeting and see if any AdSense units pop up.  If you don’t see any at all that could be a bad sign because it indicates there are no advertisers bidding on those keywords.

Take a closer look at the top 10 results for your keyword search.  Are they commercialized sites where people are making money or are they strictly informational or hobby sites?

Another trick is to go to Amazon and search for the keyword there.  Are there any books on the subject?  Does Amazon carry products in your niche?  How many and at what price level?

What you’re looking to determine here is whether or not someone is already making money in the niche.  If not, you have to question why?  Is it really an earth-shattering idea no one has thought of or is it just an unprofitable waste of time?

The Bottom Line

Researching niches and keywords is more of an art than a science.  You need to find the intersection between what is in demand, what you think you can rank for, and what interests you enough to keep you going.

A niche that works for me now be the best choice for you.  But don’t worry, there are plenty of niches out there and with a little work you’ll be able to find one that fits you like a glove.

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