The internet marketer knows the importance of an email list. Anyone who has a blog or website should have an email list. A proper built email list with highly responsive targeted people who are interested in what you have to say, teach and sell.

There are paid ways to build an email list and they can be very costly. The newbie marketer getting into the industry might have spent a large sum of money learning the skills to become wealthy with an ironic twist, after spending large sums for the information they are no broke, unable to afford to go forward and build an email list.

Having a website or blog requires traffic, it is as simple as that, and to get traffic without money can be a mission and a half. So with that in mind, I will share with you some of the tricks used in the industry by many of the top bloggers and marketers.

Building an email list will require using an autoresponder service like Aweber or infusionsoft. I currently use Aweber and it does the job that I need. Within Aweber you can build the email capture form then using the code that Aweber gives you, you place this within your site or sites ready to start collecting emails in exchange for one of many things you will offer.

 Here are my 10 Free List Building Methods.

Building an email list for free with free reports and EBooks.

Giving away a free EBook or report is an old tried and tested method of getting people to part with their emails. The report or EBook has to be good quality and full of very useful information for the person to want to give their email in exchange for it.

Once they have filled in their email and name details in your form they are either emailed the report straight to their inbox or directed to a page where they can get it online.

The same report/EBook can be used as a lead magnet by selling it on EBook stores like Amazon Kindle. It should be sold at the cheapest price possible as it isn’t for making money but generating traffic to your site. If you make some money from it then that is a bonus.

Inside the EBook should be several calls to action that send the reader to your site where they can sign up to your list for a follow up report or newsletter.

This EBook or report can be uploaded to PDF share sites like Scribd.com where people can read it and download it. If they like it they may share it on with their friends and they then might pass it on, it can have a viral effect sending your website details all across the web. So why stop at just one report?

Places like Scribd.com have a description box for your EBook so make sure that you write an enticing description and put in your website details. Getting your website address out in front of as many people as possible is the main object here for these free list building methods.

Use YouTube videos to build an email list for free

Many people do not understand YouTube or its potential to build an email list, they still think it is a place where teenagers hang out to watch videos of ‘fails’ and people making complete fools of themselves.

This is not the case, YouTube is one of the biggest search engines around, owned by Google, many of the videos can appear in Google’s search results. People go to YouTube to find videos on every topic you can imagine.

A lot of these videos are tutorials and this is where we come in. We can easily record quick information and tutorial videos that we can upload to a YouTube channel that will then direct viewers to the website where they can sign up for a newsletter or EBook.

There are several types of videos that can be recorded at home and uploaded to YouTube. There are the face on chat style that can be filmed with a webcam, mobile phone or a proper digital camera if you have one.

There is the screen capture video which can be a tutorial where you show the viewer how to do something like use certain software which can be recorded using screen capture software like Camtasia.

If you do not have or cannot afford to buy Camtasia software, (it is pricey) you can always use a free online software like www.screencast-o-matic.com, this will allow you to record 10 minutes free and that will be more than enough. For traffic generating videos 10 minutes is usually long enough.

If your helpful tutorial needs to be longer, record it in 2 parts as 2 parts or stitch them together using another free software like Windows Movie Maker.

Videos on YouTube can be seen 24 hours a day 7 days a week from anywhere in the world for as long as you leave them live. Having a series of great tutorials that solves a problem the people in your chosen niche experience regularly would have many people coming to your site for more great information.

They can be sent directly to a page where they need to sign up for a newsletter /free report or straight to your blog where you will have your email form somewhere in an easy to see place.

The key is to have on the video a slide or an annotation that can be added later with your website address and a call to action. If you are offering a free EBook let the viewer know and where they can get it from.  In the description box of each video put your full website URL with the http:// at the beginning of any description so it is seen first and clickable. Make the description enticing so the viewer will watch your video.

Using social media Facebook, Google + and Twitter.

These are great ways of building an email list for free by creating a following and a fan base.  The idea of social media is to be social (obviously) which means, be fun and helpful. Build a Facebook page and share your blog posts, thoughts videos and helpful tips on your page with links back to your website as well as engaging and chatting with your followers.

The key here is to interact, a little; you cannot do it all day every day otherwise you would not get any work done. If you keep sending out tweets and statuses that get comments but never reply to any of them people will soon realise that you’re just out for self promotion and will turn away from you. They want to know that you are real.

A Facebook page is great; it is like having a second website but for free. Using the Static HTML tabs you can add email forms on your Facebook page, which can be handy for those suspicious people who dare not venture out past the confides of Facebook.

Twitter is a fast moving network and your Tweets can soon be lost, so trying to send out good information and tips can be a full time job, unless you invest in something like Tweetadder. It costs around £30 for a 1 account license. Tweetadder can be set up to do the mundane job of following and unfollowing of people. It can also be set up to send Tweets out throughout the day on automatic. (I will do a full review of Tweetadder soon)

Upload slide shows to slide sharing sites.

In this method you create slide show versions of your posts and articles then you share them to sites like www.slideshare.net , some sites will take your PDFs and convert them into slides when you upload them so that can save you some extra work.

Creating a series of slides can be fairly easy, take some of your past blog articles and posts and simply copy them into slides.  I believe all computers come with free slide presentation software. If not you can find several free ones online. If you have a Google account you will find one in Google docs.

You can use templates to give the slides a professional feel, the text that you paste into the slides should be played around with a bit, making parts bigger, using different fonts and colours so it doesn’t look like a box standard article. Make it look good enough for the potential reader to want to read it.

If your articles seem long and a bit comprehensive, edit them into bullet points or easier to read chunks. As long as the information is still present on the slides it is ok to weed out the fluff and filler often used in articles.

Remember to put your website details on as many slides as possible with a slide at the end giving a call to action for the reader to get a free report or EBook, whatever it is you are offering. Don’t forget to put a great description and your website details in the description box.

All these sites in these methods need you to sign up so it is important to put your website details in the relevant places in your profile and other places you can put it. You will not get arrested for putting it in your bio box

If you choose to use some professionally made slide templates you can buy some for only a few pounds from www.graphicriver.com.

Build your email list with blogging

In many ways this is your main site, you drive traffic to this site as this is where you will have all your best information and content. Here is where you will make your money from selling affiliate products, your own products or even money from advertising.

You can have squeeze pages here to collect email names and email capture forms within content pages giving away free reports/videos and newsletters.

Content rich sites with articles written with properly chosen keywords are loved by Google and can help you get free organic traffic from the search engines. When people arrive they can sign up to your free giveaways from links within the articles sending them to dedicated squeeze pages, email capture forms can be placed in side bars or even have them pop up as soon as someone lands on the page.

Blogs are easy to update, I use the self hosted WordPress system. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) platform. It is very easy to install, easy to update and can be made very professional looking with incredible functionality with all the plugins that can be added to it.

Blogs can have many pages so it is easy to do little SEO tricks like create pages full of ‘quotes’ people love searching for quotes, or you could blog about your ‘thoughts on recent happenings’ these can have your posts and blog ranked high in Google quickly for trending news. This can have the bonus of people finding your blog, reading your posts then looking around the rest of your site to see what else you have to offer.

Writing regular posts on a blog can set you up for 2 great traffic generating tricks…

1. After writing several weeks or months on certain topics you will have plenty of content that can be edited into free reports or eBooks. It is far easier to edit when it is written down than just floating around in your head.
2. Writing good quality blog posts regularly will give you plenty of practice for the next traffic generating trick; guest blogging.

Free List Building with Guest blogging

Guest blogging is cool, you write blog posts for other popular blogs in your niche and then get your name and website seen as well as people visiting your site. You can write posts for many blogs and spread yourself out but it is advised that you should write to a manageable network of sites and do it regularly.

Writing to the same site more than once gets you noticed and not forgotten whereas if you wrote for loads of sites once your post will soon be lost and forgotten about by the loyal readers of that blog.

When you write for several blogs over and over again then you become a recognised and trustworthy ‘friend’ that will result in more traffic to your site as well as repeat visits from those who after reading your last post paid a visit to your site. (Ideally your site will be so good that after just one visit they will come back anyway!)

When guest blogging different blogs will have different guidelines and they may not choose your articles. They could be fully booked up with guest bloggers, or you may have written about something that they covered only the month before.

The one piece of advice for guest blogging you really need to take on board is this; you need to write really good posts! Otherwise they will not be accepted.

Guest blogging in my eyes is a lot better than article marketing and I will tell you why, with article marketing your article is sat waiting to be found to be read or used. With guest blogging it goes live to a site that already has a loyal readership.

Your article is only seen in the one place, with articles in directories they can be picked up by many and used on other sites, Google do not like duplicate content so any links that you get back from them can be deemed weak.

Build your email list with list swaps

This one does exactly what the sub title says. When your list is growing to a size of 2000 for example, you join a site like www.Safe-Swaps.com where you will find people with lists willing to send an email to their list promoting your site/newsletter/product in exchange for you doing the same.

The list exchange takes place with someone who has a list the same size as yours. It makes it fairer but as we are on the topic of fairness it is only right that I warn you of some dirty unhanded tactics some people have been using to build big lists.

There are some people who have found ways to create big lists very cheaply using ad sites like ad.fly, these lists are full of non buying non internet marketing people who have in many ways accidentally got on the list trying to get to view a video or something. This list has been called by some as the extreme list.

Once they have a large extreme list they approach Safe-Swaps.com and do exchanges with people who have similar sized lists, lists that have taken time and good money to build. In the exchange emails are sent and the good list gets ‘raped’ of people who may join a new list owned by the dodgy marketer.

Unfortunately the good list owner has little chance of getting any new names on his list due to the exchange email being sent to the extreme list of non responsive and ‘unlikely to open the email let alone sign up’ people.

If you have spent time building up a good list the last thing you want is some scumbag ‘rape’ your list, taking people from you and giving you (if any sign up) useless unlikely to buy people. So be careful!

Satellite sites

Another great free list building method is creating satellite sites in places like Tumblr, Squidoo, Hubpages and at WordPress.com. Open up accounts and fill the pages with re written short articles with links pointing back to the bigger well written articles on the main site.

Anyone who visits these sites can come across your pages and hopefully visit your main site to read more. There are many networks that you can use to create satellite sites which create a web that can capture traffic and filter them to your main site.

These sites with links back to your site can help with SEO for your site; however after the last Google Panda slap the power of these links may not be as powerful as they once were.

The great thing about satellite sites are they are easy to make, free and quick to fill. There is no need to populate these sites with all the same content as your site, take every new post you add to your main site, copy the first few paragraphs, maybe re write them so you are not penalized by Google for duplicate content then paste the new smaller snippets on to the satellite sites with a call to action like ‘To Read More Click Here’ then hyper link it to your site.

Using Podcasts to build an email list.

Podcasting might sound hard and scary but it really isn’t. People love listening to people talk more than they do reading long articles. One of the benefits of Podcasts is that unlike reading articles, people can hear the excitement and the subtle nuances in the voice which can show how serious and genuine you really are.

Reading needs full concentration, listening to a Podcast can be done while jogging and driving.

The great thing with Podcasting is that it can easily be done at home using free recording software like [Audacity] and cheap microphone headphone set.

If you wanted to make it sound more professional you could add some intro music, you can buy a royalty free piece of music or have someone from www.fiverr.com to make you a piece that you can use over and over again on every podcast you do.

Using several of your blog articles as a guide, talk into the microphone, elaborating on a few points and talk as if you were talking to a friend. These articles can be turned into short 15-30 minute podcasts full of interesting and useful information that your listeners would enjoy.

Apart from buying the microphone podcasting can be done for free, using the Podcast plugin your podcasts can be added to your own WordPress based blog and uploaded to places like iTunes and www.PodBean.com.

You can sell your podcasts or give them away for free, they can be given away after someone has swapped their email details to access them on your website or pre given away with details of your site where they can go and get more of your great information and sign up for further podcasts, videos, reports etc.

When uploaded to sites likePodBean.com be sure that you

1. Put links to your blog/squeeze page in the description.
2. While recording the podcast be sure to mention at the end of it your website URL so the listener knows where to go next for more information.

Remember you are doing this to build an email list for free so make sure that your website details are placed in every place possible. Make sure that you mention it several times in all your podcasts as long as you do not overdo it and annoy people.

Article Marketing

This is one of the oldest free list building methods around and was one of the best. It isn’t a method for those who fear writing as this will require a lot of articles to be written and re written to be distributed to article directories on the internet.

The articles are submitted to directories where website owners can freely take your article and use it on their site or in their newsletters/free reports as long as they keep your author bio and website link in place.

If you had several hundred articles in directories with links back to your site and those articles were each taken and used by several websites, there would be loads of great links back to your site that would help get your site ranked high in the search engines.

However times have changed, Google now look over the article directories and penalize duplicate content on the web so having the same article all over the web doesn’t have the same kind of ‘link juice’ power they once did.

Other problems with article marketing is that your article is sat around waiting to be found and used, they can soon be buried by loads of new articles uploaded each day by other writers.

There is no guarantee that your article will be used and even if they were, some unscrupulous people may use the article and not publish your author bio and link.

Because each article directory wants a new never published anywhere before article you will need to re write each article before submission.

Rewriting all your articles can take a lot of time to do,  you could outsource it and have someone write these articles for you but that will cost you money and after all this is about building an email list for free!

There are software programs available that can automatically ‘spin’ the articles making new versions but they do tend to be of very poor unreadable quality.

Article marketing isn’t as powerful as it used to be but there are many who still do it a lot and swear by it so it could still be worth you looking into as a free list building method.

Tutorials and Affiliate Offers

There are many ways to make money online, one of the easiest is the selling information business. This is the main thing that all internet marketers have made their monies from.

They create free pieces of information in small amounts that they use to create their email lists. Well this small home business idea is based on making money by giving away free information. Instead of small amounts of free information you give away more in the guise of free online video tutorials.

If you do a search on YouTube or on line in general you will find there are loads of tutorials covering all topics like using software to creating websites. There are a couple of ways of setting up this business idea.

If you know how to do some things or use certain software that others may want to learn then you can make tutorial videos using software like Camtasia. There are several free to use online software that can be used like Screenr, Jing and Screencast-o-matic.com.  Screencast-o-matic will record 15 minutes for free where as Jing and Screenr will only record 5 mins.

If you do not know a lot about a software package in great detail then you can simply watch other people’s tutorials then copy them. There are plenty to copy; you don’t really need to be an expert.

15 minutes is usually ample for video tutorials, people don’t like to sit for hours learning, they would rather have tutorials in short bursts. So if 15 minutes isn’t long enough to cover what you need in 1 tutorial then you can record it in several parts.

Once you have created several video tutorials they can be uploaded to YouTube where an annotation can be added to the video. This can be timed to show at whatever time you want so they can appear directing them to click on a link of your choice. When you get good at tutorials you can add call to actions on slides that you incorporate into the tutorial.

Build a blog website like a WordPress site and embed the tutorials into a page on the site. Between the videos you can place text information about an affiliate offer and an affiliate link that takes the viewer directly to the affiliate product.

For example, you create a series of videos showing how to set up a domain, set up hosting for a website, and add WordPress to the hosting account. Between the videos you can have a link to a domain registration company like GoDaddy.

After the video showing how to set up the hosting account you add a link that is an affiliate link to a company like Hostgator and then after the WordPress video you can have an affiliate link that goes to several premium WordPress themes.

I think you are getting the idea. Your site can also have Google Adsense or other advertising that your site visitors might be interested in. This is one of the quickest and easiest small home business ideas, especially if you copy other people’s videos. Within a week you can have a series of videos and a webpage set up with affiliate offers.

When you offer plenty of great free quality information people begin to trust you and rely on your recommendations. What happens when people begin to trust you? They trust the things you offer and are more likely to go with your recommendations which results in you earning the affiliate commissions.

You have taken all the work out of them searching for and researching the products they think they need. You have given them the information they need and the products they should use. Job done in their minds, and they will be very grateful to you.

When you have a series of video tutorials done, then there are several other options available to you. You can sell them as a special tutorial course; give them away as a lead generating exercise to build a big email list. Give so many away free then use the Media Pass WordPress plugin to charge to see the rest of the series. (Media Pass account will be needed to take the payments) or they could be given away as a bonus for a product that you are promoting.

Remember to come back regularly and I will share with you many more fantastic Small Home Business Ideas – The Secret Insider

The big problem with copywriting is that it has been used for years effectively by marketers to write up sub standard products. The product is sold as the only product you need to make your millions and leave your job. Well the truth is they have written the sales page in order to persuade you to buy the product. Copywriting is great for the product owner and not great for the buyer.

Many of you, myself included have spent thousands of dollars buying products that do not deliver what they promise but we bought them as victims of nothing more than the well written sales copy. (and a desire to change our lives that the sales letter feeds off)

To say they are lying is wrong, some might but in reality it is illegal to lie and the law is getting tougher due to unscrupulous marketers. However copywriting is the art of ‘over egging the pudding’ and hinting at what results you can get. The results that are referred to are usually made by doing more than what a product can deliver.

They will use the product to generate some results then hint at some better result that they believe is possible on the sales letter, it will of course be well written so that they haven’t said the result is a definite more of a possibility that you could achieve. You yourself are left to come to the conclusion that the software or product is excellent.

Have you noticed how all sales letters tell you how great the product is, what wonderful results you may get, what a great work free life you will have, plenty of cars and holidays yet they hardly ever tell you what the software of product does or how it gets the results?

Notice how the ‘new software is a secret’ so no one else can copy it before they get to share it with you good folks?

Curiosity and excitement is the key here. Copywriters use a system known as A.I.D.A. which stands for

• Attention – Get the persons attention
• Interest – Get the persons interest and keep them interested
• Desire – Induce desire in the person reading the sale copy so that they want more
• Action – Create enough desire in a person so that they will take action like buy the product

Johnny Rotten is famous for saying ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ at the end of The Sex Pistols final gig. Well he was in many ways referring to the band and the manager Malcolm McLaren. The fans were sold hype and they bought it.

The same can be said for copywriting, it is an excellent skill to have, to be able to motivate people to buy is powerful but at times it does appear very unethical. Being motivated to buy something that you believe will change your life and financial circumstances but only to find out that it doesn’t really work just isn’t right.

The truth is many marketers work on the fact that what they teach or sell has a different value to other products. If it can change your life then it is worth more than the price of a DVD of a Hollywood action film that only creates enjoyment for a couple of hours.

They believe that a product that can make you an extra $50,000 a year is worth $2000 or more. There is a truth to this but here is the big important fact you need to remember, they actually know that only a fraction of the people who buy the products will do something with the product.

Then many of those who give it a go will quit soon. They know that most of the people who bought the product will never do anything with the software or knowledge.

They say that it is not their fault that the buyer didn’t do anything with the product. Again this is true however what is the issue for me is this, by creating seriously good copywriting for the sales letter they persuaded people to buy a product offering them riches, people who are unlikely to use it and will buy the next product.

It is not the marketers fault or problem if the customer who has bought a product or attended a $10,000 seminar has no spare money to make a start with their new business knowledge.

After spending several thousand dollars learning the ‘How To Make A Million’ they are left realising that they now need a further few thousand dollars to get started and had they not spent the first initial lump sum they might have had a fighting chance in setting up a profitable business.

Now they are left poorer than when they first started and with no way of going further without taking a big gamble and risking more debt.

Had the marketers not created powerful sales copy would their customers have bought the product? Probably not buy yet the marketer seems to be devoid of all responsibility.

They want you to fail because you will buy the next product. They also don’t like hard work, if they sold a DVD product at $15 and wanted to make a million dollars from it they would need to shift loads of the product, need more staff to take the orders and sort out the products for postage. There would be massive overheads.

The reason many of these marketers got in to the make money information product selling is because they can charge $500 or more for simple DVDs that cost only a few dollars.

The profit margins are huge, the work is less and the responsibility is passed over. This is a business remember, and the marketers are in the ‘make money’ business, not the pizza delivery business. Their one main goal is to make money. They don’t really want you to succeed otherwise you won’t buy their next product and then they will have to find new customers which is a costly big job.

The bottom line here is this. They make their millions by selling you ‘How To Make Money’ products. There are marketers who first made their millions selling niche products and then went into selling courses teaching how they did what they did for larger sums of money. But they all made money selling products.

Some of the less scrupulous marketers will try something out, make a few dollars from it then create a product saying that is can potentially make a lot because we tested it and it makes money. Making a few dollars with a system is a lot different to making a million from it and having it as a usable long term business.

There are many genuine marketers out there who have made millions and can teach you how to do it, the value of a product can be decided on how much it can change your life but remember this.

You can find the same information in many places on the internet for far less, maybe even free. You just need to look. If you want to attend a $10,000 seminar, be aware that you will need money and hard work to get results from the system. If you are willing to risk $10,000 to learn something why not use $2000 and set up a business online that you can learn for free from YouTube or free websites?

Another thing you should remember, marketers often do price testing on a product, sending a small amount of people to 3 different online sales letters where the only difference is the price. The price variations can be as big as several hundred dollars between each sales letter.

They will monitor how many sales each sales letter generates. If the highest price has the same amount or more sales than the others then the product will be priced at that for the bigger main product launch.

So often it’s the people who decide what price a product should be, it can depend on how much people are prepared to pay for the product. Not what the product and its materials are actually worth.

Internet Marketing Advice from the Secret Insider:

Before you buy that next new big thing, read the sales copy, see how vague it really is, see how it points out WHY you should buy it and what kind of life you will have once you have bought it, see the price and really think about it before you buy.

Remember there will be work involved even if they say there isn’t. Work will always be required, and the chances are, you will find the same information or very similar elsewhere on the web for far less maybe even for free.

One of the easiest methods of making money online is through advertising either selling advertising space on your site and/or showing Google Adsense on your site. But to make money from this you need a lot of traffic.

A site that has a large number of monthly visitors can expect to charge a lot each month for private advertising space. As for the Google Adsense, you need traffic to click through the ads for you to make the revenue. So it is clear, we need traffic to make money from a site, and a lot of it.

There are many methods to gain traffic to a website but the best has to be getting the organic traffic that comes from being high in the search engine rankings for many competitive keywords. This is the domain of the big content rich websites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Ezine Articles. Big content sites become what are known as authority sites and these sites rank high in Google.

The big content sites have regular content added daily, whether it being videos, articles, pictures or podcasts. It can seem out of the reach for the average internet marketing wannabe, but the earnings potential from a big content site is huge. It is seriously worth considering but if you are short of funds and time then it may be too much work for you to take on.

Ideally a big content site needs several new posts per day, say ten for example. Can you write ten articles or make several videos a day? Probably not, it takes a lot of work to create unique quality content and to keep churning it out.

The content can be outsourced but that brings with it problems.

1. Finding someone that can create the content to the standard and speed you desire can take time and can be costly while trying out several people.
2. Good quality writers can charge up to $30 per article, ten articles a day is $300

Ten articles a day at $30 each is between $9 and $10k a month.

So as you can imagine, building up a massive content site over a year could cost over $100,000. Can you afford that? You should be making money back from that investment but the cost up to that point is well beyond the reach of most people.

Not all massive content sites rely on the owner to fill it up with content. Take YouTube as an example, they rely on the user to upload the content. The owners keep the site running smoothly and reap the rewards from the advertising that is placed within the site and on the videos.

Google noticed the potential and power in YouTube and bought it for $1.65 billion, also that YouTube was giving Google’s own video site a good pasting in the popularity stakes.

These are what we call platform sites. A user friendly platform is designed & built for people to easily add content. The site owners maintain the site, check that none of the material is copyrighted or illegal (this is often done by software) and then earn revenue from advertising on the site or charging a fee to use a premium version of the service. Linked In is one of these premium sites.

Some of them charge a small monthly fee so you no longer see the advertising banners within the site and enjoy a pure non commercialized time on the site.

The technology is there to create these types of site but like the large self populated content site they are not cheap to create or to run. The large platform site is probably out of the reach of most people unless you have a large pocket of coffers to delve into. They require being designed by a professional web designer who knows all about coding.

There is a cheaper smaller way to get started and that is to smart a localized platform site that can grow into a site like Gumtree.com and Craiglist.com. These are basically directories where people post mini ads of the things they have for sale or to offer, from jobs to selling houses. You could create a site that covers your state, county or city that allows people to upload mini ads or links to their services or offers.

I recently came across a small site that was looking fairly new in the US that was similar to these two types of site and it was a platform site where users offered their own stuff like trailers, power tools and caravans up for hire. Pretty cool idea, how popular it is though I cannot say.

Can you think of a site that can generate you money from advertising and affiliate sales without you doing most of the work? I am sure you can.

Remember there are many ways to make money online and they don’t all involve selling make money online information products that don’t really work.

For those of you who do not know, a blog is an online diary, well they started out as diaries but they have grown into full blown websites. Special blogging platforms were created like blogspot.com and WordPress which have developed over the years.

WordPress has developed so much over the years with plugins and themes that allow you to create professional looking websites. Blogging has gone from just writing down your thoughts to a fully professional online business.

Blogs that are full of great unique and quality content that informs have huge readerships who visit them regularly can make great monthly income from Google Adsense, private advertising and affiliate commissions.

Anyone can write a blog, as long as you enjoy writing and the subject that you choose is one you are happy to write about.  You will need to add regular content to keep the readers coming back to your site. You may not be familiar with the term mommy blogging but this is currently doing a storm on the internet. Stay at home mothers started to write about parenting tips and issues, they did reviews about products that they have at home including food they enjoy or TV shows that they watched.

These blogs attracted a lot of readers but it didn’t stop there. Big brand-name companies realized that their products were getting great honest reviews by the people who actually used them. They contacted the owners and gave them free products to use and review, and offered them private advertising contracts. These mommy blogs were now getting paid well from advertising fees and commissions. Adding Google Adsense to the blogs, which is another advertising revenue, and adding affiliate offers like Amazon.com products these blogs were now becoming highly profitable and earning their owners several thousand dollars each month.

The popularity of mommy blogs has evolved into the boom of daddy blogs. To be honest though, blogs have been around for years, both men and women with children have been blogging about anything and everything.  Not all mommy and daddy blogs are parental based; the term has now been adopted for any blog that has behind it a woman or man working from home. There are so many niches and lifestyles that can become the topic of a blog, what do you do or enjoy that you can write about regularly?

The great thing about blogging is that it can be started for free by using WordPress.com or Blogspot.com. Once your blog is up and running then you can invest by having a proper domain name. If you can write blog posts for 6 months then your blog has a great chance of going the length and developing into a popular money generating blog.

I will be doing a more in depth post regarding blogs and what is needed to set one up so if you like the sound of blogging keep posted.

(Interesting idea that, send 1 person several emails from different people, different approaches, with different sales copy. Customers will eventually choose their favourite, if they do decide to buy all 3 gets a share. Maybe this system has a higher conversion rate!  Anyway I digress however if it is a new super system that works, you read it here first J)

Back to the topic, the 2 systems that I have recently review have a different approach to all the usual marketing systems, there is no selling involved to make the small fortune that they promise you.

(Cynical side of me has to run wild a bit here, the real money is the in the cheap front end product, check, followed by the ‘you need this’ up sell check, now on the email list ready for the next bigger and better following webinar up sell, check.  Ahhh so that is where the real money is J)

Both these systems sound good to be honest if you do not want to deal with people, or if you do not want to build websites, deal with sales and all the other issues that go with the usual internet marketing work. The idea of these two systems is to create free reports, books and how to guides loaded with affiliate links or direct links back to your own website if you have one. These reports are uploaded to PDF sharing sites then shared around the internet hopefully by people downloading them to read or to put onto their websites. They could go viral and get past around leaving your links and affiliate offers to be seen by loads of people.

The great idea with this is the person reading the reports do not feel pressured to buy, they are completely relaxed and at ease so if they decide to click on an affiliate link to buy something they feel that it is completely their choice. You haven’t had to do anything. No hard selling involved.

It is very much like article marketing but better, with articles you cannot have many clickable links, back links or images within the body of the text. With a PDF you can have as many as you want. It is worth noting that some of the online share sites which show your book on the site can make the links un-clickable. The idea is to get the reader to download your PDF and pass it on to their friends, once downloaded your links work fine. There are many great PDF sharing sites and free EBook sites to upload your PDF documents to. Here are a few of the good ones.

www.scribd.com

www.free-ebooks.net

www.getfreeebooks.com

www.myebook.com

Limitless Profits system gives you 20 pre written EBooks where you can add your affiliate IDs into them via their system. You will need to sign up to become an affiliate with programs like Clickbank and Hostagtor. Once you have you input your affiliate IDs into the boxes provided and hit ‘Start Campaign’ the images and links within the EBoook now become yours, the EBook is downloaded to your computer ready for you to share.

As always there are upsells when you buy this type of program, with Limitless Profits you get the opportunity to increase your number from 20 to 100 affiliate link packed EBooks to share. The idea of having 20 or more EBooks circulating bringing in commissions sounds great, but does it work? I fear that with so many posting the same books that it will be diluted. Is it better to have your own books written and send them out so you are the one and only winner?

There are links within these EBooks where your affiliate ID is not added, these could be to sites owned by the EBook creator and with so many people sending out these books there really is only one big winner. I am not saying this is the case however the God Father of EBooks Tom Huh did that many years ago; he created EBooks and allowed people to rebrand them so they could sell them and get all the profits from them however they still pointed back to his sites and affiliate links. It was a very powerful tool back in the early days.

Commission autopilot is similar; instead of rebranding EBooks you use one of the software’s you get (there is two to download to your desktop) to download articles direct from one of the top article directories, you then add your website or affiliate links and it converts the text file into a PDF. The second software then uploads your PDF to about 18 PDF sharing sites. Some of them you will need to set up accounts before you use the software to upload.

There are 3 problems I have with this.

1)      You are using other people’s article so you have to leave their name and website details at the end of the article. Ideally you want your name in there for branding purposes. Getting your name seen is great for business.

2)      The chance of you posting the same article is highly likely. Most people will use the same or similar keyword and the software will bring back the same articles to be used. Some of these PDF sharing sites do not allow duplicate content especially if it is not your own.

3)      The software did not upload the PDFs to all the sites like it said it would. Some of the share sites that it should have uploaded to do not require you to have an account and trying to see if your articles had actually been uploaded was impossible.

I love the feel of this marketing idea, having thousands of articles and books full of affiliate links circulating the web going viral, being seen by thousands of people who have an interest in the niches you have chosen resulting in you getting affiliate commissions on autopilot without the hard sell.

It is early days but my results are not looking as good as I was told to expect, however that may be because I haven’t done the Commission Autopilot’s plan of dredging up loads of articles and adding affiliate links to add to the share sites. I prefer to use either my own, or those without an author’s name which is one good thing with the EBooks you get in Limitless Profits.

As I write this, I have 18 PDFs on several share sites, one site alone has had over a thousand combined views of my PDFs, how reliable that count is I cannot say, it also appears that not many of them looked for long. I have not as yet had any Clickbank sales either and this is from all of the PDF share sites.

If you want to check out either of the two systems here for yourselves…

Click Here for Limitless Profits

Click Here for Commission Autopilot

Now I know what you are going to say, well if he is living the dream then it is true and can be done, well yes indeed you are right. It can, but often not in the way they sell you it can… oops sorry I meant to say the way they tell you it can. I work inside the industry, reviewing, and testing out new Internet Marketing ‘magic push button get rich shiny object’ stuff. I know what goes on, I know what the ‘Gurus’ do, I also know what buttons they push to make their money.

Now don’t be too disheartened I will tell you what does work along with the many truths about what doesn’t.  But just be aware, you are more often or not paying well over the top for things that you can get or do for free. In many ways you are paying for the dream not what the push button software can actually do. Much of the information that you pay for can be found for free or far cheaper online (like places like this). Sometimes you don’t really need to do that much digging. Times have changed, with Facebook, Google alerts, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter you can get information sent to you.

As I am sure you are aware, there are people wanting to send you information via email, you sign up to receive a free eBook, report or video. The bonus for them is that they can now send you regular emails with information. Unfortunately, these days the standard of information sent is pretty poor. With more and more people trying to build huge lists so they can sell everything that they think people will buy. The money is in the list! I am sure you have heard or seen that somewhere during your time learning Internet Marketing.  The problem is, they are no longer selling things that they know will work, it is more a case of ‘that will sell well; I’ll promote it in an email’.

Very few Internet Marketers send you free information or inspiring emails anymore. They don’t respect you or your results, they just want to sell as much as possible and take great pride telling folks that they made several thousand dollars that week from one email. I get loads of emails from many of the top ‘caring’ marketers, and none of them have any real substance, not once was there an email urging me to keep with it if things are hard or try this to help increase your results. However I do tend to get a lot of emails selling me the ‘next best thing since the last next best thing’ which was last week! Which usually fails miserably, leaving me more out of pocket than before?

I truly believe that there is a lot of money to be made with the internet, and I do believe the old idea that you can charge thousands to be on a program or seminar is slowly dying because

1)      People can now find most of the information within these seminars and programs for free or cheaper elsewhere which devalues the price of the product.

2)      And as Frank Kern says, this business is about results, people know the information these days doesn’t give results that fast, it isn’t ground breaking and will often leave you without any spare money to get started.

Did you know? A lot of the big earners rely on you not using their systems, or being able to afford to use them. They hope that once the hurt of wasting a lot of money has died a bit, you will get excited at their new wonderful sales letter (written to entice you and stimulate emotional triggers) to a point where you will once again spend thousands on a product you cannot afford to use.

Maybe you are lucky, you buy the new ‘this will change your life for only $47’ product. Which comes with three to four ‘never to be offered again one off’ up-sells of software or information that will get you the results that the sales page originally had you thinking you would obtain using the $47 product alone. So now do you use the $47 product and fail or work really hard for the results or go the whole hog and buy the full set up that will get you some results at a cost of several hundred possibly thousands of dollars you didn’t expect to or want to spend.

Maybe now is the time to make money from ethical marketing? Surely giving quality products, help and respect builds longer bigger lists and customers that are responsive for longer? I have unsubscribed from loads of email lists because of the constant crap product promotions and low quality emails/website content. So how many more have left these lists along with me? I really believe quality and content is king, and that is the one thing we need to be offering, then maybe, just maybe people will happily pay a bit more for what you have to offer.