An Article Source You May Not Know About

2 of the problems I hear the most often are:

1. I can't write.
2. I don't know what to write about.

And up until recently my first recommendation was to use article directories to either find content or to do research.

However, I recently discovered an article resource that provides more flexibility when using articles authored by someone else.

As described at Wikipedia, Creative Commons is "a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work."

So what does that mean to you?

• If you're looking for content, it means that now you can find articles that may be used and modified for your own commercial use by using the Creative Commons search service because it finds content across the web that is tagged with a "creative commons license".




• If you're a writer looking for traffic, it means you can put a Creative Commons License on your articles to get more exposure. There are 6 types of licenses to choose from and all you have to do is copy and paste a little code onto the page that contains the content. Just make sure you give some thought to the type of license you want on your article because Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable.

If you're looking for content or have content you're willing to share, Creative Commons may be just what you're looking for

• It's 100% free. There's no fee and no registration.

• It finds content that can be modified and used for commercial purposes.

• Articles do not have to be submitted to a directory to be found.

• Authors have control of how long the content is available. (Just remove the page and it's gone.)

So before you discount having a list or a blog because you can't or don't know what to write, give Creative Commons a look and see if it can solve your problem. For a real example see the CC logo in the right margin.)

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. Please feel free to leave a comment.

Tags: creative commons, content, article, article directory, copyright license, traffic

Watch and Learn How To Build A Squeeze Page

Everyone keeps telling you how important it is to build your list so this week I've got a video by Liz Tomey that shows you how to modify a squeeze page template and a lot more.

Watch it free here.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you found this tip useful, please leave a comment.

Tags: list building, email marketing, build list, squeeze page, landing page, autoresponder, aweber

One Of The Mysteries Of The Internet: Web 2.0

One of the latest buzzwords being used in the internet marketing circles is "Web 2.0" so I asked you, my readers, if you are were using any Web 2.0 methods in your business.

Only 2 people voted and 1 of the 2 votes stated they didn't really know what Web 2.0 meant!

Now I may be wrong but I am going to take a wild guess and state, the lack of response in this recent poll was because most people don't know and understand what Web 2.0 is.

So today let's examine what Web 2.0 is and how it's different from Web 1.0.

First let me state that Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 is unlike what you're used to when it comes to most products. Usually when a new version of computer software or computer technology becomes available it is so different everyone can see the difference and improvement. Also, the move to the newer version is a clean and clear changeover.

With the internet, things evolve. So as we move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and eventually to Web 3.0, you won't wake up 1 morning to discover a whole new internet. No 1 big internet entity is going to upgrade everything while we are all offline.

Rather, the move to Web 2.0 started several years ago and is still happening. Many people are using Web 2.0 sites, products and services without knowing that these are part of the new, improved internet.

Second, Web 2.0 doesn't have the characteristics most expect when upgrading to a newer version of something. Web 2.0 doesn't mean faster, it doesn't mean major bug fixes and it doesn't mean new capabilities. Although Web 2.0 does have these things, that's not what Web 2.0 is about.

At this point I'd like you to take a few minutes to watch a short video I've shown you before. The first third shows what Web 1.0 is and then it moves into the birth of Web 2.0 with examples of some Web 2.0 sites that you already know about.

**********

SIDE NOTE:

The video you just watched was created by an anthropology professor at K-State, my alma mater, and it is currently the best and most viewed online video showing what Web 2.0 means.

**********

So what is Web 2.0?

"Web 2.0 is linking people ...
... people sharing, trading, and collaborating ..."

Web 2.0 allows internet users to connect and interact with each other through means other than email, forums and chat rooms.

Web 2.0 is allowing the internet to actually put some meaning into "global community" by bringing it's users together and letting them share ideas, pictures and videos.

Blogger, MySpace, Squidoo, Flickr and YouTube are some of the most used and well known Web 2.0 sites. They are free places where internet users can submit things so other internet users may see them. They allow the submitted items to be viewed, commented on and provide links so the items may be shared on other sites across the web.

Web 2.0 is making the internet 1 big global community where everyone has the opportunity to become a recognized expert at something.

The above video is an example of what I mean. Before this video became available, I'd never heard of Mike Wesch and his ideas of Media Ecology and Cultural Anthropology. You'd probably never heard of K-State (BTW, it's a really good school in other fields of study too). Now, that video has been viewed 2,442,062+ times, has received 5334 comments and has been bookmarked by 22,008 viewers. That's a lot of people who now know more about Web 2.0 and the creator of the video. Professor Wesch has become a recognized expert to more than 2 million people!

To quote 1 of the more recent comments on another of Professor Wesch's YouTube videos,

"That's Awesome! Web2.0 is really connect people together in a way that's never been done before!

We have passed the information age.

We are NOW in the Communication AGE!"

Web 2.0 is not just another buzzword. It means we now have the capability to actively communicate and share with other internet users. So the next time you're asked, are you using any Web 2.0 methods with your online business, you'll know what they're asking and how to respond.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you found this tip useful please leave a comment.

Tags: web 2.0, internet marketing, communications, blogging, youtube, myspace

To Squidoo Or Not To Squidoo, That Is The Question

Over this last week I've been reading a lot about how online marketers can use the free lenses at Squidoo to make money. And although I haven't tried it yet, I am considering it because it's basically a free way to get a web page with a good page rank and, of course, includes the opportunity to earn income.

With that said, today I'd like to share some of the information and videos I discovered this week.

1. If you go to squidoo.com you'll see that the home page has a page rank of 6 out of 10. You'll also see that there are currently 21 main groups that contain anywhere from 47 to 365 subgroups within them. I checked out some of the lenses and never found a lens that had a Google page rank less than 3 out of 10. There may be some, I just didn't find them.




2. On the squdoo.com download page you can get a free TypePad Blogging Widget, Buttons and Badges for your Squidoo lens, a Squidoo-Firefox Extension and free ebooks like Everyone Is An Expert.




3. Squidoo.com lets you build your own lens through the use of modules and some of these modules can earn money because they are linked to affiliate programs like Amazon, Cafepress, GoogleAds and eBay. You earn 50% of the affiliate commissions for these purchases and squidoo.com donates 5% to charities and keeps 45% to maintain the site. You can also donate your commissions to a host of charities automatically if you want.




4. While there are millions of lenses on squidoo.com, some of them do really well in the search engines. I found http://www.squidoo.com/meatsnacks/ listed on the first page of Google and AOL and http://www.squidoo.com/jerky/ listed on the second page of Yahoo. Both of these lens were set up to make money and recruit a downline for Jerky Direct.
   
   Since http://www.squidoo.com/jerky/ offered to share their lens stats, I discovered that the lens had 196 unique visitors this last week. And while that doesn't seem like very many, that same lens had almost 5,000 unique visitors in February. (Bet they were on the first page of Yahoo that month.) And although I don't know if they made any sales, since they had almost 5,000 highly targeted visitors, the odds are they got a few sales and signups.




5. The person who owns http://www.squidoo.com/jerky/ has a free membership site, SquidooSecrets, where he shares a lot of information on how to use squidoo to earn money.




6. I've reviewed the information shared both at SquidooSecrets and in Squidoo Blueprint and found that they both state pretty much the same thing on how to set up a lens to make money. The primary difference between what they offer is that Squidoo Blueprint gives a lot more information on how to put content on your lens, how to get a good page rank, how to avoid being deleted from squidoo for having a spam lens and how to get more traffic to your lens. So if you want to use squidoo.com as a marketing tool, I'd suggest you first get a free membership at SquidooSecrets and play with building a lens. Then if you're lens isn't getting traffic or making any money, invest in Squidoo Blueprint to get some ideas to fix those problems.




7. If you're interested in squidoo but not ready to join a free membership site, I found 3 very good videos by Tiffany Dow of SocialMarketing101 on YouTube. You can click the links below to watch the videos.
   
   How To Set Up A Squidoo Lens
   
   Make Money On Squidoo
   
   Adding An Opt-In Box To A Squidoo Lens
   

Will a squidoo lens make money for you? As with all other forms of web marketing, there are no guarantees. However, squidoo is becoming a popular place for people to gather in groups, it is possible to get good search engine placement and creating a lens is free. To Squidoo or Not To Squidoo, the choice is yours.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you found this tip useful, please leave a comment on the blog.

Tags: squidoo, sqidoo secrets, squidoo blueprint, social marketing, make money, squidoo lens

1 Way To Lower Your Home Office Expenses

When you have your own online business you get to be the one who pays all the bills and buys all the supplies. So this week's tip isn't about how to make money but rather on how to same some.

As you learn how to design web sites, how to build a list, how to write copy, etc. you have probably gotten some ebooks, reports and articles that contain information that helps you. And you may have even printed some. I know I do when I find a good one and want to make notes or have it available when I am not at my computer.

But soon you discover that you're going through printer paper and ink faster than you can afford to buy it. Plus, the shelves and file drawers are soon full and you run out of places to store what you've printed.

So today let's talk about how to save ink, paper and storage space for all that wonderful material you want to print.

The easiest way to save ink, paper and space for your printed material is to print more than 1 page per piece of paper. No, I don't mean printing front and back although you can do that too. I mean printing 2 or more pages on the same side of a single piece of paper.

Now unfortunately the ability to print multiple pages on a single sheet of paper is not available for ebooks that are .exe files or at least I haven't found a way yet. However, it is possible to print multiple pages of a pdf ebook on a single sheet and here's how:

To print some or all of a pdf ebook and have multiple pages on 1 sheet of paper:

1. Go to the file menu in the upper left corner of the ebook and click print.




2. When the Print popup box appears find the area labeled Print Range. You can select to print All, Current View, Current Page or a Subset of the pages in the ebook. All is the default and will print the entire ebook. Current View is the part of ebook that is showing on your screen. Current Page is the complete page for what is showing on your screen. To print a few selected pages of the ebook simply select Pages and enter the page numbers of those pages you want like 3 - 5 or 5, 6.




3. Next, find the area labeled Page Handling and set Page Scaling to "Multiple pages per sheet." The default for this field is "None" so if you don't change it, you will only get 1 printed page per sheet. In the next field, select the number of pages per sheet you want.




4. After you have made your selections you can see how the printed page will look on the right side of the popup box and when you're happy with how it looks you can click the print button.

Printing long articles and email reports requires a little more work and the use of a word processor like MS Word or OpenOffice Writer.

1. Highlight the text of what you want to print by placing your mouse at the beginning of the text you want to copy and then while holding down your left mouse button, drag your mouse to the end of the text you want. When the text is highlighted release the left mouse button and either click the right mouse button and select copy or do a "cntl c".




2. Open a new document in your word processor and paste the selected content onto the page by either going to the Edit menu and selecting Paste, doing a "cntl v" or clicking the right mouse button and selecting Paste.




3. When you have all the content you want in the document, under the File menu, click Print Preview or Page Preview.




4. On the tool bar there's a button for doing multiple pages. If you don't recognize it, slowly slide your mouse over the buttons and read the labels.




5. After you've selected the number of multiple pages, simply click the Print button.

Printing multiple pages on a single sheet is a great way to reduce the amount of ink, paper and shelf space required for your printed material and a great way to cut your costs without giving up any of the benefits of having printed copies. Also, by selecting the pages you print you can quit printing the unnecessary pages that are often at the beginning and end of an ebook. Instead of using 65 sheets of paper to print a single ebook you can print only those pages that contain the information you want and print them 2 or more to a sheet.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you found this tip useful, please leave a comment.

Tags: home office, print, print ebook, print multiple pages, save paper, save ink, save space, save money