create-an-income.com

Have you ever heard or read the phrase “multiple streams of income” before? Do you know what this phrase means?

For many businessmen, creating multiple streams of income online or offline is one way of securing themselves as well as their businesses in the future. They also believe that it can also save them from the so-called famine effect in the business industry.

Once you are engaged in affiliate marketing business, it is advisable to have multiple streams of affiliate marketing income so that if one of those income streams vanished, it will not upset you the way losing your sole stream would.

If you depend on just one source of income and this single stream has been downsized or has lain off, you’ll surely find yourself bankrupted and hopeless. If you ask the most successful online entrepreneurs, you’ll discover that they have established multiple streams of online income.

There is a businessman that said and attested that the very first step you must take in creating multiple streams of income is to assess or evaluate your resources. Start by assessing yourself first. Jot down your answers to the following questions: What are the talents, abilities, strengths and gears that you possess? Are you gifted with excellent and creative writing skills? Can you do well at sales? Are you good in communicating with people? Are you born with an artistic skill or unique ability that other people don’t have? Through this, you can determine the kind of business where can possibly excel.

Next, look around and write down you assets and physical resources such as computer, color printer, scanner, digital camera, cell phone, CD or DVD burner. Write these all down because it can be used as a resource. Consider also your friends and family. Find out what do they possess that you have access to. Remember that no man is an island. You can use the talents, abilities, knowledge and resources of everyone you know.

That’s basically the initial step if you want to create multiple income streams. But if you’re already a webmaster or a site owner, you definitely have an edge. Why don’t you join affiliate marketing business to help you gain extra income out of your own website?

Being involved in affiliate marketing is one of the most desirable ways to make multiple sources of income. It is because affiliate marketing programs come in various shapes and forms. There are a large number of affiliate marketing programs that you can sign on with and start gaining bucks right away. In affiliate marketing, you can make money by promoting and reselling your affiliate products and by recruiting new affiliates. What’s good about this is that you can find widest array of training materials that can enhance your marketing abilities. In affiliate marketing, you can be sure that there are genuine products to promote and sell and there is real income to make.

Either part time or full time, being an affiliate marketer is an excellent way to create multiple income streams by means of promoting products and services from web merchants. Here, you can get affiliate commission without investing big bucks in making your own product and without worrying about book keeping, customer support and ecommerce. All you have to do is to promote and resell the products and services in your site and pass on potential customer’s the merchant’s site.

In affiliate marketing, it is advisable to promote more merchants in your site so that your visitors will have variety of destinations to choose from. Using multiple merchants in the same site or niche means only one thing; you have multiple streams of affiliate income. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business strategy because this is one of the best ways to protect your business and expanding your horizons. Through this, you can be assured that you won’t experience crisis if ever one of your web merchants closed his/her program.

However, you should choose only those affiliate programs that interest you so that you can effectively advertise and promote them. Don’t ever be tempted into signing up for numerous affiliate programs in the hope that one of them will bring income. Select wisely and don’t be engaged in selling products you know nothing about. Go with the stuff that jives with your enthusiasm; your passion can capture your client by the nose and guide him/her to your affiliate link.

You should also work hard to make your multiple streams of income more stable. You can do this by embracing some strategies and tactics and by developing within yourself, some traits that can help you become successful in any kind of business such as patience, persistence and thirst for knowledge.

Lastly, just remember the adage that says “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” So that if one of them is lost, you can still have some to make omelets. And what do these eggs have to do with multiple streams of affiliate income? Well, it goes without saying that the more streams of income you possess, the bigger and better your money lake becomes.

In addition to having multiple streams of income on a single website, it is also advisable to create multiple websites focusing on different topics, each drawing visitors towards your affiliate links; but done by hand, this is a mammoth task. Multiple websites to design and code, multiple articles to create to populate your websites, multiple hosting accounts, multiple websites to promote.

However, there is a solution that could easily bring you multiple income streams from multiple websites with hardly any work on your part; Article Site Power Kit.

Article Site Power Kit, is a software package that enables you to create content laden websites, complete with Adsense and affiliate links, at the click of a button. All you need to supply the software with is a HTML template, a folder full of related articles and your Clickbank affiliate Nickname.

When you click the create button, the articles are written into the template, and you have all the web pages ready to upload to your web host. It really is that simple.

Check it out at Article Site Power Kit, by the end of today you could easily have 10 or more websites up a running!

Giving away Free ebooks, reports or software is one of the main tactics used by Internet Marketers to build an email list of prospects. To give away a free ebook, you would go in search of a suitable ebook that the writer has provided giveaway rights for, place a autoresponder form on a web page and give the ebook away in exchange for the downloaders name and email address.

The problem with this method is two fold. Firstly, to comply with laws you must give the sign-up the option to opt out of your list by providing an unsubscribe link in you email messages. Secondly, as you are not the original creator of the ebook, and unless the ebook is rebrandable, you will not have a link in the ebook to your website (assuming you are lazy and didn’t write the ebook yourself).

If you didn’t write the ebook yourself, and your prospect unsubscribes from your list, you have lost them. They have the free ebook, but by law you may no longer contact them. They’re gone, and in a short time they will have forgotten where they got the ebook from.

How can you overcome this scenario? By branding the ebook with your own message, even if the ebook is not rebrandable!

A software product called Instant Profit Brander does just that. Essentially, Instant Profit Brander is a wrapper for the free ebooks or software that you give away.

The software has a simple to use, single form, user interface where you fill in a few fields to “tell” it where to find the ebooks you want to “wrap”. The best part is that you can add an advertising message using simple HTML, so that every time someone opens the package they see your message.

Your message could be an advert for your own or affiliate products you are promoting. You can include graphic images or you could include an opt-in form to your autoresponder, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Once you have filled in the form fields, you click a button and the package is created in a .exe format.

When the package is run, the viewer will see a drop-down list of the ebooks or software included in the package. They can then either open the ebooks individual or extract them from the package.

The only downside of using Instant Profit Brander is that the .exe file that is produced can only be run on a computer running Windows. But this limitation isn’t such a problem as most computers are run on a Windows platform.

As an Internet Marketing Tool, a Viral ebook is probably the most powerful tool that you could have in your toolbox. So what is a viral ebook.

Viral marketing has been around for a long time, in the offline world it basically means word of mouth. People see or have a great product and tell their friends about it, their friends tell some more friends and they tell even more friends and before you know it lots of people know about the product and want to find out more about it.

In the online world, telling other people about someones product that you like or would recommend can be done in several ways. If you have a newsletter, you could tell your subscribers about it. If you uses chat rooms and forums, you could tell others about it there, but for those who want to make money from their product recommendations as an affiliate creating and distributing a viral ebook is probably the easiest way to get the message out.

Creating an informative ebook isn’t difficult. In fact it is as easy as typing out something like this, and it could be easily done in a few hours. But how do you get people who have downloaded your ebook to pass it on? Simple, make it rebrandable.

Making an ebook rebrandable give people who have downloaded the ebook a reason to pass the ebook on, because at the very least you could allow people to put their name and website address in it. As these people are always looking for ways to get their own name and websites in front of other people, they will have a reason to pass your ebook along.

Also, for people who are running, or starting their own affiliate program, rebrandable ebooks are a great way to help new affiliates promote your products. If you give the ebook to your affiliate and they can rebrand it with their affiliate links, they have much more of an incentive to pass the ebook on because of the potential of making money from it themselves.

So how do you make an ebook rebrandable?

There are several ebook rebranders available, some are overly complicated and others aren’t that good, but I would recommend Affiliate PDF.

Affiliate PDF, is a rebranding software that takes all the hard work and technicalities of rebranding away from the user. Quite simply, you create your ebook in Word or OpenOffice, placing links to products etc strategically throughout the ebook and then convert it to a .pdf format. In OpenOffice this can be done from within the software, but to convert a Word file to a .pdf file you will need another package such as PrimoPDF.

Once you have created your .pdf run Affiliate PDF and select the file you just created. Affiliate PDF will search the file for all hyperlinks and for each one that it finds present you with three options,

1. Not a brandable link
2. Allow people to replace this with their own link
3. Allow people to enter an affiliate ID to be inserted into the link

If you want to keep some of your own links in the ebook, then select option one.

If you want to allow people to add their own link (in a “brought to you by” field), then select option two, or if you are running your own affiliate program and want your affiliate to only change the ID part of the link, then select option 3.

Once the software has stepped through all the links in your ebook, and you have made any changes that you require, it will produce an executable (.exe) file which you can save to your hard drive. The .exe file will contain both your .pdf ebook and your rebrander.

When people have downloaded this .exe file, all they need do is run the file, make the changes that they want and the software will reproduce your ebook with other peoples links, in .pdf format ready for them to pass your ebook on to others. It’s as simple as that.

Although Affiliate PDF is primarily designed for affiliate program owners, there is absolutely no reason why anyone wanting to use the Viral Marketing power of ebooks cannot use Affiliate PDF to their own advantage, it really does make it easy to create a rebrandable pdf ebook.

The only downside to this software is that when it is run, it creates a .exe file that can only be run on a PC with the Windows operating system. However, as 80% of PC users use Windows as their operating system, this isn’t much of a limitation.

So now there is no reason for you not to start your own Viral Marketing machine with your own rebrandable ebook.

You can try out Affiliate PDF software with a Free trial. Click here to download Affiliate PDF.

What’s a blog?

A blog, short for web log, is a software script that allows you to tell other people about your interests, your business, other peoples business, how-to guides, providing news, pretty much anything you want to write about really.

Blogs are great for letting your visitors know what you have been up to and for Internet Marketers they are a easy method of keeping visitors informed of the lastest developments and offering them ebooks and Internet Marketing Tools.

One of the best bits about running a blog is that they are web-based, meaning that you can post to your blog from anywhere that you can find an Internet connection, just login and type.

The two main players.

There are two main players in the blogging script world, Blogger and Wordpress.

Both of these scripts have their advantages and disadvantages, but in my mind one comes way out on top. But first let’s take a look at the both.

Blogger.com

Blogger was the first to create this kind of software and was originally owned by a small company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs. When blogging started to take off, the mighty Google got interested and bought Pyra Labs. So now Google owns Blogger.

To start a Blogger blog, all you need to do is go to Blogger.com, create a free account, give your blog a name, select a theme (the look of your blog) and away you go.

When you first create a Blogger blog, and have signed in you are shown what is called the Dashboard. Here you will see the name you gave your blog and underneath links to create a new post, Manager you posts, change the settings and a layout option, that allows you to change the look of your blog.

When you select any of these options you are taken to a screen with tabs along the top, each tab representing one of the options of the previous screen.

The content of each tab is mainly a series of options that you can select or deselect, depending on your preferences.

Posting to your blog is as simple as selecting New Post, entering a Title and composing you post, followed by clicking on the Publish link. It really is that simple. There is no need for you to have any technical knowledge in order to start your own Blogger blog.

If you want to change the look and feel of your blog, using blogger, you can by clicking on the Template tab. Here you can add and remove page elements which can include things like links to other websites, or images. Adding a link, for example, is a case of selecting the edit button and typing the website address (URL) in to a text box. There is no need to know how to create an HTML anchor tag, so for the technically challenged, Blogger is an easy to use solution.

When you make a post, you can check the content of the post before publishing it by clicking on a preview button. Although this is a good way for you to check your writing for spelling and grammer, personally I found this a bit annoying because it would take you away from the post screen, therefore possibly needing several screen refreshes.

When you create a Blogger blog you will get a website address of http://myownblog.blogspot.com . What this means is that your blog is being hosted on a Google server and you, the blogger, have no control over the blog, other than the posts and links etc that you put on it. In recent times this has proved to be a major drawback with Blogger, because many people who have spent hours posting on their blogs have found that they are not there anymore. Blogger has decided, for whatever reason, to delete the blog.

Another major drawback is that because you have no control over what goes on the server, you cannot upload videos or ebooks to the server, and you are limited in the size of images that can be uploaded. For the Internet Marketer this is a major problem, as many people use ebooks etc to entice people to their blogs, websites, newsletters and marketing lists. So for these people, they have to find another way of providing these services.

It is a fairly straight forward procedure to have Blogger installed on your own hosting account. When you sign up, instead of entering a Blogger name, just scroll down and click on Advanced Blogger Setup. This shows a page where you can enter the FTP address and user name of your host account. When you click on continue and after selecting and entering a few other settings, the blog software will be uploaded to your website for you. No need to change any scripts or know anything technical.

If you have a bit of knowledge of HTML and CSS, then modifying the look of a Blogger blog can be done by selecting the Template tab followed by Edit HTML. As also the posts use the same template, you can make global (all pages) changes from here.

Another plus for Blogger is that you can create any number of accounts and have multiple blogs running at once, all for free.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress comes in two varieties too; one hosted on their servers and one as a script download that you can host on your own server. Lets have a quick look at the first option.

In a similar way to Blogger, you can set up a blog at Wordpress.com. This kind of wordpress blog is host on their servers, so you will be limited to just making posts. Any images, ebooks, or videos will nedd to be hosted elsewhere and linked from your wordpress blog.

As with Blogger, you get an easy to use dashboard type interface from which you can control the look and posts on your blog.

One of the features that I mentioned earlier about Blogger was it’s preview screen. Well with Wordpress, the preview is below the area that you are typing your post into, so there is no need to switch between screens, just scroll down and you can see how your post will look.

Using Wordpress from their servers you will get a web address similar to blogger, in that it will be something like http://yourblog.wordpress.com.

Of the two, for ease of getting started I personally would recommend Blogger, even setting it up on your own server is a breeze. But, for support and available “plug-ins” I would recommend you download the free Wordpress script from Wordpress.org.

Now most people would shy away from the word “script”, as that means programming to them. But the way the script has been written, it is extremely easy to do. The instructions are clear and it will take only a few minutes to do.

The only things that you need to be sure of is that the host you choose supports PHP (which most do) and MySql databases, again most do. If you are not sure how to set up a database, your host company will be able to help you.

Now, with the Wordpress script running on your own hosted website, you have complete control. The layout (or skin) of your blog can be easily changed and there are many third party templates available, many for free. These can be easily plugged into your software and away you go.

With your own server, you get to choose your own domain name (http://www.yourname.com) and you also have the ability to do other things like post video, cloak affiliate links, host your own products, the list is endless and all because you have spent a few dollars on a domain name and hosting. To me all that flexibility is worth it.

So in answer to the initial question, which blog software is the best, for pure flexibility it has to be an own hosted Wordpress blog.

Hi and welcome to the first post of the new look create-an-income.com.

Up until a couple of weeks ago this website was selling internet marketing tools to mostly, I guess, people who were just starting out in Internet Marketing. These tools were great and have helped many people, by reducing the time and effort they need to put into their marketing tasks.

But why the change of direction? Well, I haven’t really changed direction. What I intend to do with this new blog, is give you the visitor my unbiased reviews of some of the Internet Marketing Tools that are available out there today. Why?

Simply because, like many people, when I first started out in Internet Marketing I bought and downloaded a lot of stuff, and to be honest most of that stuff has been absolutely useless, or it was only good for a short time because it exploited a loophole in another service and you what happens when that happens? The loophole gets shut down.

So hopefully, with my knowledge and experience of selling Internet Marketing Tools, I can bring you unbiased reviews of the Internet Marketing software and ebooks that is primarily made available to help you speed your way to Internet Marketing fortunes.

So please do check back now and then and let me know what you think.

All the Best

Tim