I have been thinking this question for some time. Ya. Where exactly is your passion? As many have said, passion is one of the key factor of success. Without passion, you will be like a sailor without a direction to continue.

Frankly speaking, I have been looking for many ways to make more money, as you may know, this blog is one of them. I have always been opened to many make more money methods, reading books, reading newspaper, magazines, etc. But end of the day, it seems like I found no way of making MORE money from these methods.

For those who don’t know me, I am a security consultant in a private limited company in my country, the reason why I involved in this industry is because of my passion, yes, passion. Because I like this security thing, I have been working in this industry for many years. After looking for many ways to make MORE money, I suddenly realised that why I never look into the possibility of making money online with my passion? That is to have a blog talking about security, sharing my own knowledge and experience throughout my professional years.

You see, without passion, people will find it hard to continue, like a lot bloggers, they setup their blog, write for few days, weeks or months and suddenly stop, why? One of the reason is passion. Without passion, you will not continue to do what you plan to do. The situation is even worse when your blog is not making any money, you need your passion to provide the consistency in this blogging business.

After some thought, I decided to setup another blog. The main purpose of this blog is basically to share my security experience and knowledge to anyone who are interested at learning it. And of course, it will serves as my knowledgebase as well if one day I forget them.

Some people may have the opinion of not having many blogs at the same time but I believe my passion will help me in this way. So, stay tuned for my new blog.

The first step of the formula is to determine what affiliate products AND which program to promote because end of the day, it will affect how much money you will make as an affiliate! This step is important and choosing the wrong programs should and can be avoided, otherwise, it will leads to loss of time, resources and many more, so it is important get it right at the first place.

Here are some criteria you must take into consideration when choosing your affiliate programs:
· Your targeted markets
· The quality of the affiliate product
· The conversion of the product’s sales page
· The availability of instant marketing tools
· The incentives you are getting paid!

We will look at each criteria individually below to understand why they are very important in your selection of the right affiliate program:

Your targeted markets

Before deciding to promote any affiliate products, you need to decide on the market you want to target at. As a rule of thumb, it is best to decide on a market you want to stick with for the major time, as this will enable you to build a business around as you continue offering products and building your list. As an illustration, there is not much sense in selling an affiliate product for hair loss to a group of young teenagers. That’s mean in other words, choose a market that actually based on its relevancy to your business.

It would be also help if the target market you are choosing is aligned with your interest or knowledge because it will makes everything more enjoyable and motivating. A good way to select your target market is to base on two factors:

1. Demand And Profitability

Checking the types of products constantly on the first two pages in a category gives an indication that it is ‘hot selling’ status. There must be a good demand for them. As a warning, huge demand does not always automatically equate to huge profitability. It actually depend on WHO you are marketing to, and how much money they can spend. A very simple example is that working professionals will have more money than young kids, thus being a more profitable target group.

2. Market Supply

The lower the market supply for the demand, the more profitable it would be. This may seem very obvious, but you will be surprise to know that many people ignore this basic economic principle. One of the method to check the availability of the products targeted to your market is through the search engines. For instnace, a search for ‘weight loss’ at http://www.google.com showed an average of 2.83 MILLION competitors out there. However, if you just narrow down your market to ‘weight loss tip’, it has just 300,000+ competitors. This is a big difference which will you in term of the market size.

So, bottom line is, focus on specific, niche markets instead of the overall general industry. You will see more sales and money coming in this way.

The quality of the affiliate product

It has often been advocated that one should know and use the products they endorse, and I couldn’t agree more. This is especially critical if you are planning to run a serious business online. Recommending a bad product will hurts your credibility and destroys trust almost immediately. Only promote products that you feel comfortable with, knowing they are of good value. Don’t chase after the quick dollar sign, you should aim long term.

The conversion of the product’s sales page

Before promoting a product, check out the sales page. Does it have a killer web copy that converts visitors to customers well?

Does it make you want to buy? Does it load fast? Are there many payment options? Etc…

It is not your job to sell the products, that is the affiliate owner’s role. Your responsibility as an effective affiliate would be to send qualified traffic to the main sales page by preselling to your prospects.

This is again why knowing and using the products you promote is essential, it is only when you have experience it that you will be able to presell well.

The availability of marketing tools

Good affiliate programs tend to provide affiliates with a range of marketing tools for their promotion campaigns. These may include cut-and-paste solo ads, classified ads, banners, articles, samples, rebrandible ebooks, ecourses, etc. It is always advisable to join only those programs that do offer such tools. First of all, creating these tools show a certain sincerity and seriousness of the affiliate program owner. Secondly and ultimately, they save you time and headaches. More importantly, you’ll be able to use them to compile your ebooks.

The incentives you are getting paid

Make sure you will be paid! That’s the entire point of promoting affiliate programs. Check the credibility of the owner, the domain name (how long it is registered for) and other signs that indicate it is a genuine business. If it smells different, you may end up losing all your commissions. Coming back now, look at the overall incentive package, rather than just on the direct commission you receive.

Questions to ponder include:

· Does the affiliate program offers extra incentives, contests or benefits to motivate you to promote it? Do you get additional rewards upon achieving certain sales volume?

· In terms of commission, you’ll want at least a 50% cut to make it worth your time and effort. A program that pays out more means higher profits in your pocket! This has to be balanced with the selling price of the product. Promoting a higher end product will be more rewarding than one that sells for just $27.

· Another important factor to consider : is this a two (or more) tier affiliate program? Essentially a deeper tiered program rewards you with extra earnings from your personally recruited sub-affiliates. You make money from their sales too. This converts to greater leverage with the same amount of effort!

· I would encourage promoting a residual income opportunity. This can be in the form of service-oriented programs such as web hosting, membership sites. Such programs allow you to continue earning recurring or lifetime commission, which is much more logical and profitable in the long term.

So, perform your own research, email the owners and select the products to promote carefully. In this way, you will have a better chance of success in cashing in more commissions!

I expect you have seen what Yaro Starak released during the previous week. The videos and interview with a million dollar blogger he published to help us all become better bloggers really impressed a lot of people - including me.

Today is your chance to become the next blogging success story and Yaro is willing to help you get there.

His private coaching program has just opened to take on new students. You can join here -

Yaro’s Blog Coaching Program

The program, called Blog Mastermind, is comprehensive and includes - 

- A step-by-step coaching course delivered in weekly lessons in text and audio format 

- Private members-only forum community and access to regular live training calls with Yaro (you can ask him anything you want about your blog)

- Video case studies of blogs and a ten-part series of audios from Yaro covering the core aspects about what it takes to earn big dollars from a blog

- Access to the social traffic club, a special community of members who help each other drive traffic to their blogs from social media sites

- 5 unique interviews with professional bloggers like Darren Rowse, Brian Clark and Andy Wibbels

- Plus loads more.

You can take a behind the scenes tour and hear Yaro talk about his coaching program if you watch the short video at the start of the sign-up page here -

Yaro’s Blog Coaching Program

This is definitely the only course I know of that teaches you how to make a full time living blogging only part time, and how to build a real business from a blog, taught by someone who has actually done it.

Yaro’s teaching style is unique, he’s easy to learn from and has an ability to make complex subjects simple to understand.

He’s also one of the only bloggers I know of who really understands Internet marketing and how to build a business that doesn’t suck all your time.
 
Plus he makes over six-figures a year from his blog, so that’s enough proof for me!

No matter what level of blogger you are, whether you are brand new and still don’t even have a blog, or you are an experienced blogger who wants to take their income to the next level and stop working so hard, Blog Mastermind is for you.

Yaro is offering 3 fast-action bonuses for the first 100 new members who join his program today. They include three interviews and videos on important subjects to any blogger - 

- How to effectively implement Yaro’s “Conversion Blogging” system on your blog

- How to use video to market online, just like Yaro did with his recent videos, with advice from video expert Gideon Shalwick

- Advanced tactics to improve your conversion rates to sell more from your blog posts and email newsletters, coming from Will Swayne, the conversion specialist Yaro hires to improve his blogging business

You can read more about the bonuses at Yaro’s blog post here -
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/954/fast-action-bonuses/

These bonuses are only for the first 100 new members today, so you better hurry if you want these extra goodies. Here is the link to join the coaching program - 

Yaro’s Blog Coaching Program

Even if you don’t join Yaro’s program today, make sure you study his videos and the Blog Profits Blueprint report he gives away. 

Yaro offers so much great advice that won’t cost you a cent and I’m sure if you follow his instructions you will begin earning rewards from your blog.

How to increase income seems like everybody issue. Am I right? I believe most of the people will agree with this. But in practicality and reality, how can we increase our income to live the lifestyle we desire? By looking at all those millionaires and billionaires, have you thought of how actually did they achieve what they had today? This is one of the interesting topic most of the people are interested at. From different books, magazines, seminars, conferences to even bootcamps, you name it, people are finding different ways to increase their income so that they can live the lifestyle they wanted so deperately.

How about me? You may ask. To be honest with you, I am one of them. I have been reading many books and magazines and those I have mentioned above and only recently, I discovered one formula that actually opened my mind from one of my mentor, Adam Khoo. He is the author of the best seller book “Secret of Self-Made Millionaire” and also one of the famous public speaker in Asia. Not only I discovered this wonderful formula from his book, but also other secrets to wealth as well, to learn more, you can get a copy here.

So what and where is the formula?

Income = Value x Time x Scalability

According to the formula above, in order to increase your income, you need to increase your value, increase the time spend on creating value, and increase your scalability of your value. By increasing each of the components above, you are able to increase your income tremendously. Since we are on Internet business, let’s take it as an example. First, how to increase value to your reader? Basically, you can provide free reports, valuable tools, or themes to your reader. By providing more values to your reader, they will come to back again. Thus, increase the chance of getting more sales. Second, by spending more time to create these values, your sales and income will increase as well. Thirdly, scale your value to more people through various channels, for instance, advertising, joint venture with other bloggers, buying list, ask for referrals, to name a few.

So, that’s it for now, I have given an example above on how to increase your income by using the simple formula, if you want to learn more about how it works, take a look on this book.

Whoever said blogging can’t make BIG money had not heard this story.

Yaro Starak interviewed his previous student, Alborz Fallah, who is the owner of caradvice.com.au - a car blog for Australians, which was valued at $5 million dollars and generates close to $50,000 a month.

You can listen or read the interview here -

Link to interview

Alborz started his blog like most people, sitting at home, writing content each day outside of the time he spent at his full time job. His blog grew, he started making money and he just kept working.

Eventually he was approached by people who wanted to buy his blog. He said no, until someone came along who only wanted to buy a share in the site and help it continue to grow. Alborz agreed and his blog immediately went from part time hobby, to full time business.

Today Alborz’s blog has full time employees, he travels to Europe to test some of the most prestigious cars in the world and it’s fair to say he is living a dream - making big money writing about a topic he loves.

In this interview you can hear Alborz talk about how he grew his traffic, how he brought on investors to help grow his site and what’s it like being in charge of a multi-million dollar blog.

It’s worth listening to this interview because you can learn some key things to help with your own quest to make a profitable blog, for example -

- How Alborz chose the topic for his blog is a great lesson for anyone else out there struggling to come up with a blog topic

- The search engine advice Alborz offers is powerful yet simple and will immediately help your own blog get more traffic, if you follow it

- The story of how investors came on board to take Car Advice to the next level is unique, but definitely worth hearing because it shows how you can grow a blog from just making a few hundred dollars, to making six or seven figures a year.

The interview is available for instant download in MP3 or text transcript. Here’s the link again -

Link to interview

Yaro released this video to inspire people to believe what is possible with a blog.

If you want to follow in Alborz’s footsteps, consider taking on Yaro as your blog coach and join his Blog Mastermind coaching program and you might just become the next Alborz.

I’ll speak to you soon.

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world - reporters and experts - and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something - experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts - there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry - the Internet marketing industry - not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche - Internet marketing - and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things - email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it - making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) - your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion - your stories - and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

http://www.blogmastermind.com/

A new make money online opportunity is around the corner, yeap, you can make money by searching, commenting and voting using the latest search engine, Scour. According to their web site, you can earn income by using their point system, basically, every member is awarded one point for every search, two for a vote and three for a comment with a maximum of four points a search. Once you aggregate at least 6,500 points, you can then cash them out for a $25 Visa gift card. Does it sound great? It is like more than you currently make from searching, right? In fact, I bet you earn nothing by searching now.

If you want to earn more income from Scour, they offer you the chance of getting referral points for the friends you introduce to Scour where you can earn 25% of the points they make. That’s mean, the more friends you introduce to Scour, the more you earn. Besides that, if you install the toolbar offer by them, you can earn another extra 100 points. So, do not miss this chance, just install the toolbar and you will have 100 points in your pocket.

Oh ya, some people may think that it is a scam or probably another pyramid scheme, but if you see from their website, they said that they are NOT pyramid scheme and they are NOT trying to get you rich quick, what they offer is basically to share the success with those who make it possible. Nice story heh… Only time will tell.

Anyway, I have registered one, what are you waiting for? Register here now!!!

Many people have already jumped into the Internet Business and hoping that it will help them to make money online and of course, make more money online to be specific. Even though Internet Business Income is merely an extra income for some of the people, however, it should not be taken lightly. Even though most of the people spend only few hours or may be less to conduct their Internet Business, it should not be taken lightly as well. Why say so?

Most of the people spend most of their time building their career and business with all the time they have. They have the dream of making a lot of money, therefore they put all their effort and time into their business and career. Similar to this situation, when you setup an Internet Business, you should treat it as a full time career rather thatn just a part time job. Spending fewer time into your Internet Business does not mean you should take it as a part time job.

As I mentioned in my previous post (How much time and effort do you need for your Online Business?), you need to spend a lot of time into building your Internet Business, do not think and have the impression that it is easy to achieve what those people who claimed in their sales page, in fact, those people actually spent a lot of time achieved what they have today.

I believe a lot of people like me, purchased a number of online product, subscribed to numerous newsletters, blablabla… and the end result is - bulk of promotional email flood into my inbox. Honestly speaking, I really hate them and don’t enjoy receiving all these email. Why hate them? You may ask. The reason is obvious and simple, because it is very irritated and time consuming to read all of them. I have to spend a lot of time just to go through all the email everyday.

However, on the other side, I don’t hate them all, why? Hahaha, another why. The reason is simple as well, it is because some of the email actually help me to generate income. In fact, reading the email is simple, the most time consuming part is actually to going through all the links inside the email, not only that, you need to look at the web site offered by the affiliate marketers. If not filtering properly, you may miss an important and popular product which can help you to make significant amount of money online.

So, what I am doing now is basically going thru all the email very quickly and only identify the potential link to open, which mean that I don’t open all the email. By simply judging the email sent from the affiliate marketer, I choosen only those opportunities that interested me and go from there. This actually save a lot of my time, if I don’t do that, you can imagine how long I am going to check email everyday.

So, how about you? How do you handle all your email? Do you read them all? Share your thought here.

This morning when I was reading my email, suddenly one email just came me and asked me to check my comment because he was not able to comment using my comment form. So I decided to log into my blog and it came to my surprise that my comment form was not working!!! As many bloggers have already know, comment from user is one of the most important communication medium to interact with the reader, if the comment is not working, who the hell in the world can talk to you. So I quickly investigated into the matter and to my surprise, it was actually a line of cryptography code I inserted few weeks ago which I no longer using caused the problem. OMG, that’s also means that my comment is not working for weeks. Even though I have yet to have a real comment on my blog, but this is definitely something not suppose to be happened.

After some thinking, I decided to write a post to talk about ‘Test Whatever Tool You Have Installed In Your Blog’ to make sure that it does what it suppose to do. Even though some times when you remove certain tools or plugins from your blog, make sure you perform some test to ensure that the rest of the related tools and plugins are still functioning properly. What I remembered for my case is that I tried to implement some new spam free plugin, so I dis-activated the old anti-spam tool. Now, the problem lied here, I dis-activated the plugin, but I actually forgot to remove the plugin’s coding from the comment file. That actually caused my comment not to be able to allow reader to see my submit button and thus, not able to submit any comment for my post. This is really a painful lesson to me, but fortunately, my blog does not receive much comment. Imagine if my blog receive hundred of comments each day and I am away from my blog, I will lose a lot of reader.

So the moral of this story is, make sure next time, whenever you remove or dis-activated some tools or plugins, test your other tools and plugins to make sure it is workable before you log out from your blog.