It's pretty common to need a special graphic for your website. For example, today I wanted to add an arrow pointing to the right with the words "Prize Drawing" or something similar to one of my sites. You'll probably find you need special graphics too - so here's what I do to make them easily.
The program I use is called "Webstyle 4" and it's sold by Xara corp. Here's the graphic I created this morning...
It only took about 5 minutes and ZERO drawing skills! That's the part I like best. I am not an artist but Webstyle makes it easy... just pick the graphic you want, change the lettering to suit your needs, and change the colors to suit your site.
I think everyone reading "Crank" knows that I am a membership website owner. We also own several other websites too where we sell products, information and offer affiliate links, along with other ways of making a living.
I wasn't going to say this, but just have to get it off my chest! What I didn't say yesterday has been bothering me and I'm just going to lay it out here.
The couple I was working with yesterday "get it". They understand that owning your own business requires you learn to wear a lot of different hats and that you work your "buts" off to make it succeed. I'm not talking about the thing you sit on! I am talking about the "buts" that people bring into the conversation when talking about starting their own business.
"But I didn't know I'd have to learn all this stuff"
"But that's a LOT of work!"
"But I don't have that software - that'll cost a lot of money."
"But I don't have the time."
When someone has asked me for help, then bring their "but" into the conversation, I smile and say "Yeah, it's a lot of work" and I stop wasting my time on showing them how to build their own business. People with big "buts" won't do anything! That's okay because it's their choice how they live their life, just don't try to waste my time!
It's about the bottom line. Or three bottom lines, and here they are...
Personal Freedom. We can come and go as we choose. We move south for the winter and come back to Illinois when the snow is gone. Not many employers will let their employees do that.
Financial Freedom. We don't have a boss deciding how much money we can have this year. And by extension, the person that decides that also decides what town a person can live in, what house they can buy, what car they can drive, etc.
Time Freedom. There is no time-clock in my office. I work a lot of hours, but I can also decide to take some time off and do nothing any day I want to. Where I used to work, they took a dim view of that sort of thing.
I know personally many, many membership website owners that are making 6 figure incomes! I know several personally that are making 7 figure incomes! I also know there are millions that make almost nothing.
If you split these website owners into two groups... those with big buts and those that work their but off... then look at their bottom lines, it's no surprise that the big bucks go to those with small buts.
Those that choose to work their buts off can build a membership website with a huge income. Don't let your buts get in the way of having the personal freedom that drew you to this business to start with.
I've been helping a couple that are very good friends with building their own web business for the last few days. They are great people and very successful already in their own business, but want to add a complimentary web business to their income streams.
Meanwhile, I am keeping up with the day-to-day demands of our own websites as well as preparing for an engagement in West Palm Beach where I will be speaking on developing an internet business.
Believe it or not, all 3 activities tie in with each other! I have been struggling with "What do I need to tell the folks at the Florida conference" to be sure I don't leave anything out. Working with our friends every morning for several days has been a great help because they keep asking questions that I didn't think of telling the folks in Florida about until they asked. Then while working on our own sites I keep coming across other things I need to add to both the one-on-one time and to the workshop.
The only drawback is the days aren't long enough sometimes. Or more accurately, I run out of steam before I've finished everything I need to do. Well I guess we all run into that problem when we are doing more than the average Joe. But this brings up the point of this post...
I am often asked to help someone get a web business going, and when I give them an overview of what it takes they tell me "That's a lot of work. I don't have enough time to make something like that happen."
I smile and say "Tell me about it" and let the subject drop... Along with any attempt to help them move along farther.
What amazes me about this comment is the misconception in people's minds that building your own business is an 8-hour a day undertaking. It's not. If you think it is, then please go back to whatever you do as an employee and decide to be happy with that.
If you readthis previous post about building your list, then you're ready for this next bit of information. Once you start building your list, the next step is bringing customers to your website using that list.
Each time you add new content to your site, you should let your list members know about it. A short email that includes a link to the new article is the best way to do this. Don't copy the entire article and put it into the email going to your customers. There are two problems with emailing the whole thing to them...
One problem is the ISP-Filters. Most ISP's today do at least rudimentary filtering of emails inbound toward their customer's email inbox. A long email from you stands a much higher chance of being deleted before it ever reaches your customers.
Another problem with emailing the entire article is that your website thrives on getting visitors to the site. Once they visit your site, the customers are exposed to your other articles and also to your advertisements. Distributing the entire article in your email defeats the purpose of creating the website.
It's created using www.typepad.com software. You can sign up for 3 different levels of usage...
1) Basic - gives you 1 blog and 1 author can use it. $4.95 / mo
2) Plus - gives you up to 3 blogs and multiple authors can use them. $8.95 / mo
3) Pro - gives you unlimited number of blogs and multiple authors can use them. $14.95 / mo
I chose the Pro plan because we know we will be creating at least one more and possibly 3 more blogs in the coming weeks. Right now I have only created this one so I can get used to how the tools work.
Adding posts is as easy as using a word processor. You have several choices for layouts and color schemes and you can even edit the style sheet if you know how to use CSS. (If you don't then just leave it alone!) This blog is straight "click-click-click-done" with nothing fancy about it at all. I still haven't added a list signup point yet but once I do, this could turn into a great little stream of income!
The Purposed Of A Business Is To Get And Keep Customers!
Get that right and you will have a big business. And your business will thrive. Get that wrong and you will soon be out of business.
I can hear it now..."But I thought the purpose of my business was to make money!?"
Nope. Making money is a side-effect of focusing on getting and keeping customers. It cannot be the focus of your business.
What IS a customer? Well - isn't that a person that buys something from you? And if you focus on finding people that will buy something from you and keeping them buying from you, then you have a sustainable business. And you make money.
On the other hand, if you focus on making money, you can lose customers. How? Let me tell you what happened to me recently at a local business...
About a month ago there was an advertisement in my mail for a new local car service place called "Roy's Rapid Oil" for a $12.95 oil change. I thought that was a great deal and since I needed to change the oil on my Jeep, I drove over there and told them I wanted an oil change. The OWNER of the business asked what kind of oil I wanted. I said "Penzoil". He said okay and had his employee changing the oil for me in a few minutes.
I leafed through a magazine while I waited and about 20 minutes later the owner said my car was ready. When I went to pay the bill, it was $24.95 for the oil change. I asked what happened to the $12.95 price? He said, that's only if you use Quaker State oil and pointed to a small sign over his right shoulder that spelled out the terms of the $12.95 offer. It said in about a 14-pt font that the $12.95 offer is only valid when using Quaker State oil.
Of course I said "Why didn't you tell me that when you asked what kind of oil I wanted in the Jeep?"
He said "I can't help it if you don't read the sign!"
I asked him how many of those mailings he sent out. He said he paid $500 to print and mail out 1,000 of them. I smiled and paid him the $24.95 and walked out. Could I have argued about this? Sure. Could I have called the attorney general's office about this? Sure. I could have done a lot of things, but it was worth the extra $12.00 to me to have this experience to write about.
Naturally, I will never go back to his shop for any kind of service. AND I have told this story to every neighbor I see because it's so stupid on his part. One of my neighbors said "Thanks for telling me, I was going to take my car there next weekend for thier special but now I will go to my dealer instead." I saw the neighbor again last night and he said he passed this story on to another neighbor who said exactly the same thing!
I went to my local car parts store for new wiper blades this morning. The subject of oil changes came up and I started to relay this story again. The guy behind the counter said "So YOU"RE the guy!" He had already heard my story from one of my neighbors! Word is getting around pretty fast. Amazing how far the story of cheapskate-Roy's $12 had traveled!
How long do you think this new oil change shop will stay in business? The customer you make the most money on is your repeat customer because you had zero acquisition costs to get him in the door. On the other hand, Roy paid $500 to acquire customers via his mailings to my neighborhood. A typical direct mail response rate is 2%, so his $500 should have bought him 20 new customers. His $12 extra income had just lost me and two other customers he would have picked up from his mailing. Unless the NAPA store manager relates this story to other potential customers.
Even more fun is that this story will be read by over 100,000 people this year. Some of them will live in the Elgin/Streamwood/Schaumburg area. Let's just say Roy's will reach a whole lot of people with his $12 extra income. :-)
How does YOUR business treat customers? Are they just the pathway to your money, or are they the focal point of everything you do? When your customers find a flaw in your strategy, do you sacrifice their future business so you can make an extra $12 today, or do you make them feel like you are the sort of place they want to come back to over and over again?
If you haven't read Customers For Life: How To Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer yet by Carl Sewel then you need to buy the book and read it. You'll never see customers the same way again after reading how Carl turned his business from the worst to the best by simply focusing on building customer loyalty.
A freelance writer was recently recommended to me by a mutual friend. The writer is looking for some side-jobs to supplement his day job. I'm not looking for any writers with this person's area of expertise but I do have a simple plan to help him out.
This article is called "Three Steps To Making Money OnLine" for a reason.
Here's the three steps...
1) This site was built using TypePad.A similar site can be created for $4.95 a month at www.typepad.com You can even find free software at www.blogger.com and free hosting too. It has ads on the site that you don't have any control over which I don't care for so I opted to pay at TypePad instead.
2) Once the website has been set up, create a Mailing List at http://groups.yahoo.com/ for free, or if you want one with no advertising in it, use the ones atwww.aweber.com instead. The email list is THE KEY to making a website profitable because it helps bring readers back to the site over and over, increasing traffic expotentially. (See this post for more on this topic)
3) To turn this site into a revenue generator, either sell advertising on it, or place Google Ads related to the topic on the site. Take a quick tour here... https://www.google.com/adsense for more info on how AdSense works.
For Example: The ads on the right side of this page... http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pocket+pc could appear on a website about Pocket PC's and when a reader clicks through one of the ads, the site owner would make a percentage of the revenue that Google collects for sending the customer to the advertisers website.
Don't dismiss AdSense as an income source! There are many people that make over $1,000/mo just from AdSense revenue sharing on their websites. Some people make over $10,000 / mo doing this! I recommend the book The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense by Joel Comm to learn how this is done in detail.
This is a simple 3-Step Approach and it will work provided the content is worth reading and the site owner works at building his readership up. For a more complex plan with even higher income potential, stay tuned for "The Apprentice" - an in-depth look at how to make money on the web for the beginner.
Right now I am in my Jeep driving along I-294 outside of Chicago. We drive 58 miles one-way to see our vet in Tinley Park Illinois. I drove down and Holly is driving back. That gives me time to be on the computer and get some work done.
The system I am using to connect is from Verizon. I am using their PC-5740 card that plugs into the PCMCIA slot on my laptop. Since I already have my cell phone with Verizon they discount the monthly fee to $59 for adding this sevice onto my package. That's unlimited time.
I was really skeptical about trying the system out because I thought the coverage would be spotty and the speed would be slow. I was wrong on both counts. The speed is almost as fast as my cable ocnnection at home and the coverage area is large and solid.
For example, we drove from Detroit to Chicago a couple weeks ago and only dropped the connection in two or three places in the whole trip. And the dropped connections only lasted a couple minutes. Somehow their data network seems to be better than their voice network but I think it's really that the data only needs to connect in bursts.
As a comparison, I have had a Cingular system similar to this in the past and it was slow (like a dial-up connection) and coverage was not as wide as the Verizon area. We also had (still have actually) another system. It's called "Internet In Motion" and runs through the Sprint system. It is CRAP compared to this Verizon card and I will be disconnecting their service.
We travel a lot and until now have been at the mercy of finding WiFi systems to stay connected. The Verizon system has replaced the need to find those WiFi's now. Yeah!
If you've read a few of my articles already then you know the number one thing I will tell you is to build a list. Build A List - BUILD A LIST - BUILD A LIST!
Your question is "HOW DO I BUILD A LIST?"
You need three things to do this...
You need the software to make a list with.
You need a website where people can opt-in to your list.
You need a "strategy" for getting people onto your list.
Let's start with the software. There is nothing better on the market than AWeber. Take a FREE TEST DRIVE from them! Just fill in the form below and see how their system works...
AWeber Demo
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builds lasting customer relationships, and increases your
profits! Find out how with Unlimited Autoresponders.
Don't bother messing around with looking for a cheaper service, or a better service or a faster service. I have used several other services and I'll tell you what you will find if you research the alternatives...
PRICE: Most services charge you a LOT of money. Here's a price list from one of them that is pretty typical.
I'll call them "Competitor C"...
The first 500 people on your list cost you $15/month.
Up to 2,500 people costs you $30/month.
Up to 10,000 people is $75/month.
Up to 25,000 people is $150/month.
Over 25,000 people -- call us!
You've heard the saying "Life begins at 40" right?
Well "LIST begins at 10,000" in my book. With a list of 10,000 names you begin to make a living on the web. That means it would cost you $75/month to host your list with this competitor. And when your list gets to 30,000 and you're really doing well - I don't even KNOW what they'll charge you - but it's at least $300/month!
AWeber charges $19.95 for the first 10,000 on your list. Then $9.95 more for every 10,000 above the original 10,000 people. So a list of 35,000 people will cost you $39/month with them.
SERVICE: Yesterday I was looking at my list and wondering what all those "unsubscribed" names on the list were all about. I called their toll-free number at 800-531-5065 and got a real person in tech support on the phone in less than 3 minutes.
She explained that "unsubscribed" people had subscribed to my list then opted out at some point. They may have clicked the UNSUBSCRIBE link embeded automatically into every email or they might have clicked the AOL "report as spam" button and been automatically unsubscribed.
That brought up another question I had... after three years of hosting my list I recently received my 500th SPAM complaint. All 500 were from AOL users! How did their company view that? Her answer was that they and AOL both know that AOL users click that link instead of finding the UNSUBSCRIBE button in their emails and that it wasn't a problem for me as long as we weren't really spamming anyone. And I had another question, and another, and just one more. And she answered them all for me and even deleted the unsubscribed list for me when I asked her to.
I still remember the frustration I had when trying to get a tech-support question answered by "Competitor T" a few years ago. There is no phone number. Only an email form. And I waited 4 days for a response. And I was paying over $100/month for their service with just over 10,000 emails on my list. For the monthly service fee I pay AWeber, I didn't expect to get a real, live technician to talk to on the phone. But I did and that's impressive!
Look for parts 2 to follow showing you several options for building a website and keep reading here in the "Let's Talk Strategy" section for more on how to get people onto your list!
yet, do it now! It's all about adding income streams!
by Joel Comm to learn how this is done in detail. 
The system I am using to connect is from Verizon. I am using their PC-5740 card that plugs into the PCMCIA slot on my laptop. Since I already have my cell phone with Verizon they discount the monthly fee to $59 for adding this sevice onto my package. That's unlimited time.