Today I want to talk about blog design. As I browse the Web, I stumble on many different blogs, most of them ugly. It’s understandable that people can’t design web pages, but with many free descent templates available, there’s no excuse for ugly looking pages. All I can say – if you don’t know how, get a free or buy a template, or hire a professional.

Finding The Right Blog Template

A blog template is the format in which the blog will appear and how it can be used. If you are designing your website and want to include a blog, you will want to choose something that will serve your needs and not just look good on the page. You first need to decide the use your blog will serve.

Will you use the blog to communicate with customers? Will you use it more of a log to track your thoughts and new ideas? Regardless of what you use it for, you will want to find a blog template that suits your needs.

Finding this blog template is not going to be hard. More then likely you will find so many that you won’t know which to choose. In order to find a blog template that’s right for you, find a website that has them and browse. There is no better way to find what you want then to see one working. How is it set up? Do you like the initial appearance? Do you like how it works? Is it easy to use?

When you have found something you like and know what your looking for, take a tour of the many sites that offer blogs and different templates. You can often find several for free on most sites. Take your time to find the blogger that offers the best solution to satisfy your needs and wants. Doing all of these things can lead to the perfect blog for your website.

Using an Agency to Design Your Website

Hiring an agency to create a custom web site design can be a huge benefit for your business. Most people will not return to your web site without having an agency designed web site. In order to achieve ideal results, it would work to your benefit to hire a web design agency because the best possible outcome for the company’s profits will be produced.

In order to broaden the increasing amount of customers, web agency designs will benefit and increase the marketing horizons. On top of reaching more people, having a web design agency create your web site will give your business a more professional and credible reputation. First impressions are sometimes the only impressions so a web design agency will work to your benefit if you wish to compete with other companies with similarities and services.

If you want your web site to be more unique and creative it may be beneficial to have a custom web design as opposed to a business web design. Custom web designs will benefit your business and will stick out in the minds of the potential customers. You will be able to focus your web design on a clear objective.

There are numerous web design software programs that are on the market but none of them will produce a unique design because of the common templates used. A design agency will take your individual and professional preferences and show iton your web site. To get an edge in such a competitive business world, a web design agency is a must.

The agency will benefit your web site by allowing you to have a great deal of input and creativity to your design. This uniqueness will stand out to potential customers and give you an advantage over your competitors and benefit your bottom line.

However, if you still want to design your own blog template, here are some tips that could be helpful:
1. Keep it simple

The master advice. Don’t use many different fonts and colors. Pick few fonts and a color scheme, and stick to it.

2. White background

Except if you’re in some unusual industry where colored backgrounds are in, forget about it. Most of the third-party images you will insert in your blog posts are made for the white background, making their appearance on some other-than-white background, well… ugly.

3. Clear navigation

Usability is important in blogs, as it is in regular websites. Don’t complicate too much. There are dozens of plugins available which tempt you to install them and add some additional elements to your navigation. Resist the temptation and leave the navigation alone.

4. Don’t let the social bookmarking ruin your design

I’ve seen many sites that add social bookmarking (del.icio.us, digg, etc) buttons to their design even if it looks awful. If it can’t look good – forget about it. Use text links instead.

5. Make sure that user knows what’s a title

This seem too obvius, right? However, I’ve seen blogs where it’s hard to know what is the title and what is the content. They put the title in some heading boxes and one can not determine where post begins and where it ends.

Albert
Blog Designer

Time for the 5th and final article in my step-by-step list building series. In the first 4 articles I have focused on setting up a full list building system, monetizing the sign up process, and putting up a great follow up series, featuring good affiliate programs (you will find links to the first 4 articles at the end of this post). Today we’re going to take what you’ve learned so far, and explore how you can take it to the next level.

So How Do You Get Filthy Rich On The Internet?

Following the steps in the first 4 articles is a very good start. Building your
own list is extremely important if you want to be successful in internet marketing, and you can make a very decent income just from promoting affiliate products… But in order to take your internet marketing career to the next level (the filthy rich part), you really need to have your own products. As you are about to discover, setting up your own product isn’t that difficult. But first lets take a look at some of the benefits from having your own products.

Leverage Your Affiliate Program

If you have your own product, you can also have an affiliate program. By giving your affiliates an incentive (usually cash commissions) to promote your pages – you can move from just you promoting your squeeze pages, to having hundreds, even thousands, of people driving traffic to your site. Sure you give up a percentage of each sale, but the extra sales will outweigh that by far… Being able to run an affiliate program is one of the biggest reasons why you want to have your own products.

Leverage The Power Of Joint Ventures

With your own products you are also poised to do joint ventures with other marketers… You can promote their products to your list of customers/members, and they can return the favor. You can find products related to your service and add them to your auto responder follow up series. Not only will you earn commissions on any sales you make, but you can get your JV partners to turn around and add your product to their follow series. You can also do various other forms of integration marketing with your JV partners, including swapping thank you page ads, log in/log out ads, exit pop ups etc. Doing joint ventures like this is arguably the fastest and most profitable way to grow an internet business.

Leverage Your First Product To Expand…

Launching a product, doesn’t matter if it’s a free or paid service, ultimately comes down to building a list of customers/members. Chances are that your original customers will be the people most likely to buy from you again. In other words you can leverage your original lists to launch new products and services. This particular strategy is very well covered in Robert Puddy’s Mastering The Membership Model ebook, you can download a free copy here.

Setting Up Your First Product…

… Is actually quite easy. In line with Robert’s ebook above, I highly recommend that you set up your first product as a free to join membership site. I use and recommend the full version of the Launch Formula Marketing Script. But if you purchase the one time offer at either Floating Action Button or TweetMyBlog you will actually get a free copy of the LFM Lite script, which is perfect for setting up your first product. Creating a free product, that people want to sign up to get, is very similar to the process I described in How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process. Here’s a rough battle plan for you.

1. Create a free product that has enough value to make people want to sign up at your membership site to get it.

2. When they sign up for the freebie you present them with a one time offer. This could be for an upgraded version of the product, some related products, rebrand rights to the ebook etc. This will of course generate some profit that you can reinvest, and thus grow you site faster. But the real purpose of the OTO is to generate commissions for your affiliates and JV partners – keep them happy and keep them building your list.

3. Then you have your follow up series for your new customers. With a free to join program you want to monetize it the same way as I explained in How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy. Of course now that you have your own product, with an affiliate program – you should put more effort into finding JV partners, so you can swap auto responder emails.

4. Use your new list of members (and affiliates) to launch new products and services. Using something like Launch Formula Marketing, makes all of this very easy. It has an inbuilt affiliate program (every member is automatically an affiliate), it automatically integrates with your auto responder and it presents the one time offers to your new members.

Some Ideas For Your First (Free) Product

Write a short ebook on a topic people in your niche are interested in. If you don’t want to write your own ebook you can go to elance.com and hire a ghost writer. You can get a super quality ebook written for under $500. If you go the ebook route, it’s pretty simple to come up with a good one time offer – you can offer rebranding rights or maybe resale rights, plus some related bonuses.

Doesn’t have to been an ebook, you can give away software, scripts, plugins etc. TweetMyBlog is a good example of free to join site, giving away a free WordPress plugin. Again you can go to a freelance site like elance and get a programmer to create something for you. Another (very simple) option is to grab one of the many private label rights products out there, and put your own spin on it. New graphics, edit the sales letter a bit, maybe bundle a few products together. Resale Rocket is my favourite place to hunt for good PLR and resale rights products.

You should also consider making your first product an interview product. Get on the phone and interview some marketers on a topic your target market would be interested in. By interviewing successful marketers you get the benefit of becoming "famous by association" – and if they are willing to do the interviews in the first place, chances are that you can also get them to promote your product (instant high profile JV partners right there). I highly recommend that you grab a free copy of Bob Jenkins’ Teleseminar Formula – It will show you step by step how to get an interview product set up in 10 days or less.

I also recommend the Dominating Clickbank Videos. They will show you step by step how to take a resale rights product and turn it into your own successful product. I actually used Dominating Clickbank as the blueprint for one of my first product launches, and as you might have guessed, that turned out pretty well for me

We’re At The End Of The Series

I hope you have enjoyed these list building articles… And that following the steps, have gotten you started building a list and that you are starting to see some profits from your efforts. As I said the first 4 articles deal with laying down the foundation for internet marketing success, and it’s something I believe everyone should set up… before even starting on creating their own product. But as we have discussed here today, creating your own products is the key to taking it to the next level… and possibly getting filthy rich on the internet.

Here are the first 4 articles, in case you missed them:

1. How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process
2. How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy
3. How To Drive Massive Amounts Of Traffic To Your Squeeze Page
4. How To Drive Even More Traffic To Your Squeeze Page

What About The Ebook?

As I’ve said before, I’m going to take this article series and turn it into an ebook. However I have a bit of work to do before you get to see that. I want to add some more content, make the ebook rebrandable and add a killer affiliate program to it. In other words, you’ll have a to wait a bit, but I can promise you it will be well worth the wait.

Got Any Comments, Requests Or Rotten Eggs You Want To Throw?

Feel free to leave a blurb below if you have any questions or comments about todays article (or the series as a whole) – or maybe a few suggestions for what you would like to see in the final ebook – thanks

by Soren Jordansen

Motivation is the essential fuel to the fire

In order to succeed in your attempt to make money online from home, it is imperative that you have significant motivation and are able to stay motivated throughout the course of your online business life. Motivation is essentially that thing that essentially fuels the fire. Motivation is what induces you into action and action is what allows you to do the necessary tasks that enable you to be successful and make money. Therefore without sufficient motivation and the ability to stay motivated, the likelihood of your success diminishes significantly.

Primary forms of motivation

In discussing motivation as it is a must to make money online from home, you must realize that people are motivated by pleasure or pain. Individuals who are motivated by pleasure are motivated by the rewards and benefits that are possible in the future as a result of taking action. By taking action and being successful, they realize they could have things that increase the pleasure of their lives.
Examples of pleasure motivators include buying a new car, going on vacation, purchasing a new home, etc. People motivate by pain are motivated into action because the lack of taking action will result in some sort of pain in that persons life. People with no outs so to speak and their backs against the wall are people who are motivated by pain. Essentially if these people don’t get into action, they risk losing certain things which would cause pain in their lives. The motivation for these people then becomes to avoid that pain. Understand that these are the two primary forms of motivation can allow you to look at your situation and determine which one’s would best motivate you.

Write out your goals and your why

One excellent way to get and stay motivated so you can make money online from home is to write out your goals and your why. If you constantly remind yourself of why it is you are attempting to make money online from home, and keep in your mind exactly what you are trying to accomplish, you will stay extremely motivated (given the goals and your reason for attempting to make money are meaningful to you.) The more powerful and emotionally attached you are to your why and your goals the more motivating it will be.

Personal development

In trying to make money online from home, another way to stay motivated and increase the likelihood of this is to spend a few minutes (10-15) engaged in personal development, listening to or reading motivational programs and/or books. Listening to or reading inspirational and motivational material will have a positive overall impact on your attitude as well as on your level of motivation. The more motivated you are, the more inspired you will be to take action.

Find testimonials of successful people

One last thing you can do to stay motivated which will also help you to make money online from home is to find testimonials of people who have been successful doing what you are trying to do and review them. There are videos, audios, and literature (books and magazines) that tell stories of people who have successful and able to make money online from home. Seeing this can remind you that it is possible and inspire you to do the same.

Conclusion

Being motivated is critical in order to make money online from home. Without motivation, you will not take action, and without taking action you will fail. All people who are successful and actually able to make money online from home are extremely motivated and able to turn this motivation and desire into success by taking major action and doing what they must daily.

Resources
Life Strategies For Helping You Help Yourself

Albert
Your motivator

You have been building your list for some time now.  Perhaps you have 100 subscribers to your list, or maybe you have 500 or 5000.

You have heard that some internet marketers can earn up to one dollar for every name on their list, per month, but you aren’t near that.  Why?

One of the most important things to know and remember about list building is that list building is not just about assembling a collection of emails.  If that were the case,  you could buy a list of one million and make one million per month, right?

So the key with list building is not the volume of subscribers, but the relationship with those subscribers.  Sure, as your volume of subscribers goes up, your revenue goes up, holding the relationship with your subscribers constant.

The mathematical formula for revenue from your list is:
List size x relationship with list x quality of list = revenue from list.

It is just that simple.  But it is multiplicative, not additive in nature.  No matter how large one or two of the elements of your revenue formula is, if any of the elements is = to 0, your total revenue will be 0.

If you have a relationship quantity of 0, then your revenue will be 0.

How do you develop relationship with your subscribers?

You must communicate with your subscribers.  Note I say subscribers, not list.  You must communicate with your subscribers personally, not as a group.  Sure, your auto responder will go out to the entire list, but as much as is possible, personalize the list.  Use the subscribers’ name.  Write the email to each person individually by using the word ‘you’- never, ‘my list’ or ‘you guys’ or ‘my subscribers’.

- Ask your subscribers questions. 
- Ask them what they want to learn about. 
- Encourage them to ask questions. 
- Answer the questions in your auto responder campaign. 

Your subscribers will begin to feel a sense of community.  They will begin to relate to you personally–hence a relationship.

As your relationship with your subscribers grows, so will your revenue.

If you want to learn to make more sales from email marketing, it is crucial you follow a proven formula. Here’s the one I use in my email marketing:

Get Your Subscribers To Open Your Email

If your subscribers never open your email, well, you’re a dead duck. This is the first thing you have to overcome. And you can do it by writing an intriguing, benefit-laden subject line that gets your subscribers wanting to open your email right away.

Give Out Free Content

Don’t continually pitch products to your list, if you can help it. You must send out content to your list at no cost on a consistent basis to build trust with them. If your subscribers don’t see any value in staying on your list, you guessed it, they will hit the unsubscribe link sooner rather than later.

Get Your Subscribers To Click Through To Your Links

The next step after your subscribers open your email and read it is to click on your links. This is important because if your subscribers don’t see the need to click on your links, you won’t make any money from your products or your recommendations. Always include a call-to-action in your emails.

Offer Bonuses To Your Products

If you are promoting your own product, or even if you are promoting an affiliate product, always give out free bonuses that accompany the product. This increases the perceived value of your offer and you will make more sales of your product.

Albert
List Builder