Where have you gone today?

Do you find yourself getting nowhere with your internet business? Perhaps you're new to the game of affiliate marketing or creating and promoting your own product.

One of the most common themes I run into when hearing from other new and relatively new marketers is that they aren't making any money and have no traffic. Maybe the "big boyz" out there are the only ones making the money with their next "latest and greatest big opportunity".Well, in a sense that may be true, but only in a sense that their plan is well defined while you're the one jumping from "opportunity to opportunity".

That's not to say that there isn't good information out there that will give you a good value for your money. But if you find yourself buying information that's "guaranteed to put you at the number one spot on Google for any keyword", or a "secret system" that will make you a million dollars with no effort, then you may seriously need to consider exactly what your goals are. I'm also going to let you in on a secret. THERE IS NO SECRET SYSTEM!

Do you have a real plan mapped out for your business? A real vision? I'm not talking about some lofty goal like "my plan is to make a million bucks with some system that will do it all for me from the start". I mean a real tangable plan, a defined vision of exactly what it is that you want. Do you want to write e-books on Air Guns? Sell eBooks? Create software or information products? Maybe sell hard goods online using drop shippers? Or maybe you want to do affiliate marketing? There's thousands of things you can do, but first you need to make up your mind what that "thing" is. Let's say for example, that you want to sell hard goods online using drop shippers. OK, you're half way there, you've defined a goal. Now you have to take action on your goal to make it happen. This is the critical step where most people never follow through. Think about this for a moment. When you're thirsty, your body tells you that you need a drink. You naturally take whatever action is neccessary to get that drink to quench your thirst. You should treat your business in the same way. Think of your business as your body, and take action to keep it healthy, feed it when its hungry and it will grow and be strong. What do you want to sell? Is there a market for it? How much competition is there? Remember, "competition" isn't always a bad thing either. Now find some wholesaler that will drop ship. By wholesalers, I mean "real" wholesalers. If they don't ask for your tax ID, or they want a membership fee, they are NOT true wholesalers, and you'll be paying too much. Also, if you deal with so-called wholesale sites that have an online retail store on the same site, you should realize that your "source" is also a competitor. Hmmmm. You'll also want to consider how you will create your business to give you the maximum amount of freedom. After all, the idea is to leave your job, not create another one that is going to suck away all your time, right? The more automation features that you can get into your system, the better. So the next time you feel that you're drifting too close to the event horizon of another black hole called the "latest & greatest opportunity", reverse your engines for a second and ask yourself whether this really fits into your plan. Maybe you'll discover that not following the herd of lost sheep can be your real path to freedom. [tags]affiliate marketing, drop ship, drop shippers, ebooks, google, information software, marketer, make money online, wholesaler, wholesalers, internet business, business opportunity[/tags]

A Useful Firefox Tool

Every once in a while I come across a neat little gem while surfing the net. I like to share these with my readers, especially the free stuff! After all, you can't get a better price than that, right? I am a [tag]Firefox[/tag] user and rarely use Internet Explorer unless I'm testing a [tag]webpage[/tag] that I'm [tag]designing[/tag] or if I need to get on some backwards website that was designed for IE users only. One of the cool things you can do with firefox is that you can add many nice extensions to your browser. Some of my personal favorites are "Forcastfox", "Download Them All", and "[tag]StumbleUpon[/tag]". The newest member of my collection is "SEOpen", which has many useful tools for checking your page rank with [tag]Google[/tag], Yahoo, MSN, [tag]Alexa[/tag], etc. With the top 3 search engines, you can also check your [tag]backlinks[/tag], cache, indexed pages, pages that are related, and even translate too! On the Alexa button you can check your alexa rating, [tag]traffic[/tag], related sites, and backlinks. If that wasn't already cool enough, you also get an "Other Tools" button which allows you to Check DMOZ, analyze your links, check your [tag]keyword density[/tag], server headers, page size, robots.txt, archives, and whois info! Whew! that's quite a list and I didn't cover them all! If you value the importance of keeping your webpages optimized for the search engines, you might want to get this tool. It's free and you can also use it to check out your fellow marketers to see how you rank in comparison to them. [tags]SEO[/tags]