When should you begin building your dream house?

‘When it’s finished,’ is the answer given to us by world class business philosopher, Jim Rohn.

It’s similar to building your expert internet empire.  You should only begin when you’ve made your plan and mapped it all out. 

If you’ve already begun and are in a muddle or feel your empire needs some work then that’s fine because it’s never too late to restore what you have or begin again!

I was watching a programme the other day called, ‘The Restoration Man,’ and became fascinated watching this young architect plan how to restore this once beautiful 19^th century water tower.

It was incredible to witness his stamina as he went to work on this empty shell of a building with big dreams and a perfect vision of what a beautiful home this water tower would become.

Most wouldn’t even be able to see what he saw.

Most wouldn’t turn up to work on their dream every night after a hard day at work.

But he wasn’t most men.

He was beginning with the end in mind and creating a solid foundation by implementing his plan brick by brick.

He turned the 19^th century derelict water tower into an opulent family home within 12 months!

Building an expert business is also a labour of love.  It’s not always easy.

Sometimes people you aim to serve won’t see the value in what you offer.

Sometimes you may doubt yourself.

Sometimes you may not feel like doing the work.

And that’s okay too.

As long as you can begin with the end in mind and know where you’re going it won’t be long before you pull yourself together and get back on track.

You have to know where you’re going and you have to have a plan so that when you waver you can remind yourself of exactly how your expert empire will look when you have done the work.

Visual reminders are very powerful so if you don’t yet have your expert empire and marketing funnel mapped out begin today.

Begin with the end in mind and it won’t be too long before you too see your dream coming together blog by blog and video by video.

One piece of content at a time is all it takes.

The big question is can you see it?

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Lots of business owners who are just finding their way online don’t understand Affiliate Marketing at all and are missing out on some great streams of income.

If you want to tap into these rich veins of income first of all you need to tget clear on your niche (unless you want to work in multiple niches.) 

Once you’re clear on your niche or niches take a look at which products, courses or tools can be helpful to you.

Let’s say you are an author and want to build a big following online.

You have a book you want to promote so you’re getting started with that and it’s all cool.

How about if you could add in some extra income streams so that while your book picks up momentum and you master your craft you are not dependent solely on your book income?

My publisher teaches the concept of becoming a wealthy author and it’s completely in line with being a niche expert.

Unless you have an immediate best seller on your hands the chances are you’ll need to find other ways to create income as making big money with books can be tough.

So back to choosing some complimentary affiliate programmes you can promote.

In the author’s case you would be advised to learn all about internet marketing so there are many courses and books you can promote.

The best way to find them is to do a search for specific things you want to learn and seriously consider taking some good courses so that you get the skills to market successfully online.

As you develop your skills you can promote the courses and books that you yourself are taking or reading.

It’s very easy and all you need to do is mention the courses in your blog posts or articles and include your affiliate link so that interested readers can purchase the course too.

EBooks give a much higher affiliate return than paperbacks so consider researching some eBooks on topics that are of interest to you and then you rinse and repeat.

By using and sharing courses and books you can pay for your education but also make some extra money if you choose good ones with high commissions.

I prefer 50% or more commission programmes and I favour those that are available all year round so that your blog posts and website reviews can be working for you 365 days and 24/7 while you sleep.

Tools are another good area to promote as an affiliate.  With internet and social media marketing there are tons of tools so just pick your favourites.

One of my favourites is Tribe Pro which enables me to have other business professionals syndicate my blog posts to the social bookmarking sites on auto-pilot!

It’s amazing because submitting your own posts to social bookmarking sites can be extremely tiresome and I found I just wasn’t getting round to doing it.

Do you see how in this real life example I can recommend a tool and also give value to my reader?

It’s that simple so once you’ve set up your blog begin looking for courses, books and tools that you can recommend in your niche and before long you’ll have some nice flowing income streams.

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Affiliate Marketing has been one of my favourite income producers since I first got started in online marketing.

If you know how to use affiliate marketing to attract your ideal niche clients there are multiple benefits with not the least of them being some great commission notification emails plopping into your inbox. 

After working with clients recently I realised that many people working online have no idea how to use affiliate marketing to build their income streams and generate hot prospects.

So today we’ll cover some of the reasons WHY you might want to use affiliate marketing to bolster your online efforts:

Why Affiliate Marketing?

It’s easy to do when you know how – by sprinkling affiliate links through your blog posts you can pick up extra commissions by doing what you would be doing anyway

For the Niche Expert model you can give much more value by referring your clients and subscribers to the tools that can help them grow their business or deliver their services more effectively

Multiple streams of income – I don’t know about you but I like to have multiple streams or sources of income, and affiliate marketing is a very simple way to give great value and get paid even when your prospect doesn’t join your business or become a client. Sweet.

If you’re focused on training in a niche; let’s say you are in the personal development for women niche (which is broad and you would need to narrow it down) the women you are looking to attract to work with you or buy from you will be open to books, training and resources that you don’t provide so they will be investing in them anyway!

You can’t provide everything and won’t have the skills or the time to be all things to all people (even in your niche!) so why not plug into programmes that are done for you?

Some affiliate programmes such as MLSP provide marketing training but also are a source of lead generation for you in the network marketing niche so you can follow up and see if you have a potential business partner as well as an affiliate.

Other affiliate programmes don’t share the lead info with you but they just pay you per sale of product or tool. Nice!

You can market affiliate products and programmes in your ezines, reports, books, blog, videos, membership sites, courses and other marketing pieces easily by recommending tools and training that compliment your message.

It’s a great way to monetize your online marketing plan from the get go because you can do this before you have a big list or even have any clients or customers.

You can promote affiliate programmes as stand-alone offers to your list directly by email when you find a really good one.  I only ever recommend affiliate products that I use or would use myself and am familiar with so that way there is no risk of tarnishing your reputation.

If you want to invest in a course or programme you can partially or in full pay for it by recommending it too.  This is easy when you are using the product or following the course because you can share the benefits in real time and from the heart.  This is how I funded a lot of my marketing education.

You can JV or joint venture with people in your niche that might otherwise be ‘competitors,’ and that way you all benefit from their skills and they can in turn promote your stuff too.

You can make your own products and create your own affiliate programme with Digital Access Pass.  This way as you develop your niche expert business your subscribers and clients can promote your products and programmes and be rewarded for doing so.

Your own affiliate army is a powerful sales force and you only pay a percentage to your affiliates on sales so this is a great way to market your stuff by leveraging others marketing time and dollars.

I recently came across an amazing affiliate tool that sprinkles your affiliate links throughout your marketing funnel and blog posts on AUTO-PILOT! Yes seriously it’s blown me away.

Rather than sitting creating affiliate or other links in your blog posts now your keywords can be automatically converted into links to the programmes of your choice. Mind blowing and you can see how it works in this post.  Check out the ninja affiliate tool here: Ninja Affiliate

In the next post we’ll be looking in more detail at exactly how to use affiliate marketing to create income streams in your business so make sure you’re signed up for my weekly ezine and don’t miss out, as affiliate marketing can add thousands to your bottom line without a lot of extra work when done well.

If you enjoyed this post please share, like on Facebook and/or comment below.

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I find bloggers generally fall into one of two camps as follows:

1)      They have a pretty blog all set up but are too frightened to go after blogging in a big way and therefore think blogging doesn’t work

2)      They are blogging like fiends but haven’t got a proper strategy to make sure they get the most out of their blogging activity.

I’m going to talk about WordPress because this is the platform that will get you the most return on your time investment.

I’m still amazed at the number of business owners who haven’t taken the leap to set up their own wordpress blog yet. 

It’s not that difficult, really!  You can do it here in less than 30 minutes or have someone do it for you:

WordPress Blog Set Up

If you have a blogger blog or some other type of blog and it’s bringing you first page ranking on Google for your niche keywords, leads and sales etc then happy days, keep going with it.

 You may still want to consider getting your own WordPress blog because you OWN a self hosted wordpress blog and guess who owns a Google blog?

Yes well done. You get an A* because Google own it.

Google own nearly everything online it seems so I highly recommend that you take ownership and control of whatever you can as far as your ‘online real estate’ goes.

There have been multiple Google slaps in the past few years so although Google are unlikely to slap their own blogs they are very likely to change their rules and regulations about what you can do on your blog WITHOUT consulting you!

Ok so the other MAJOR benefit of a WordPress blog is that you can easily get listed on the first page of Google for your niche keywords.

It’s phenomenal how this happens and sometimes I can get on the first page within a day or two or sometimes even hours.

If you follow my stuff you know I’m not a hype queen and if anything I always underplay the power of the strategies I use because I know that results are not typical and depend on YOU implementing.

But if you do some keyword research and identify your niche keywords, begin including these keywords in your posts regularly you will start to come up for them.

So here are some top tips for getting on Google Page 1 FAST:

• Choose some ‘long tail keywords’ because they are easier to rank for and they also bring you very targeted readers who then sign up to hear more from you because they see immediately that you offer what they want.

An example of a long tail keyword would be ‘building confidence,’ rather than just ‘confidence.’

• Don’t choose keywords which show they have ‘high competition’ because you’ll struggle to rank for those and you want quick results so you can be encouraged to continue.

• Create your marketing strategy so that you are always mentioning the same keywords in your posts. This is easy to do if you have identified your niche.

• You can go after some other keywords once you’ve had success with your main keywords but focus on your main 2-5 keywords first as your blog strategy so that you can dominate them and not spread yourself too thin.

• Choose your niche wisely and then stick with it so that you can stay around long enough to reap the benefits of being listed for your keywords.

Okay so this is how I and many others have ranked on page 1 of Google for many search terms over the past few years.  This makes a massive difference to standing out online and becoming known in your industry.

People can’t find you if you’re not on page 1 so why not go for it whilst you build a blog, brand yourself and create a long term asset for your business?

Oh and did I forget to tell you that this strategy is free?

So here’s a quick link to the free keyword tool I use: Google Keyword Tool

And here’s the set up blogging page which takes you right through how to set up your wordpress blog, optimise your blog and collect those lovely leads: WordPress Blog Set Up

To receive good stuff like this from me every week pop your details into the box on the top right and you’ll be hearing from me soon.

Leave me a comment with any questions or tips.

If you want to get your hands on my complete Niche Expert Strategy go here and order your copy of The Niche Expert in paperback, kindle or e-book: The Niche Expert

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Getting free publicity for your book can be a bit daunting when you first start out can’t it?

I’ve been trying to figure out how Amazon works which is a bit of a mystery. Apparently on Amazon.co.uk when your book is first released it doesn’t show as ‘in stock’ until a certain number have been bought which seems a little bit chicken and eggish to me! 

I’ll be sharing my publishing journey with you as I know it will benefit other new authors who have just got their books out into paperback and/or kindle edition.

If you’re in the UK and would like to get a copy of The Niche Expert I’m pleased to say that it’s now in stock … Buy on Amazon UK

Amazon.com seems much more with it and leapt straight into action so it seems as with so many things our American brothers and sisters are often speedier than the Brits to get things moving!  Here it is on Amazon.com

Aside from that I can report that being a published author really does almost immediately catapult your credibility through the roof so I’d encourage anyone who wants to position themself as an expert FAST to get their business system or method down on paper and begin turning it into a book and/or ebook.

Think of the number of people you can help when you reach large numbers instead of just working one on one …

Think of the time leverage when you attract the right clients, customers
and partners to you instead of chasing after them …

If you need help with writing I’ve put together a page of resources for you here: Writing for the Internet

I’ve also updated the Blog Set Up Page here so if you’ve been fumbling around worrying about how to blog go here:

Set Up & Promote WordPress Blog

Begin attracting free publicity for your book by posting related and educational content on your wordpress blog. 

I believe everyone has an important message to share and we’re very fortunate in the internet age to be able to get it out there inexpensively and globally so don’t let this moment pass you by …

To receive more tips and training on how to market your book and/or business online pop your details into the box above and I’ll send you good stuff.

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No matter what type of business you have, if you’re not talking to new people each day about it the chances are you’re not doing too well.

Whether you’re looking for new customers for your products, new clients for your services or building a team, you need new people coming through your marketing funnel every day. 

It’s easy to overcomplicate things and spend a lot of time making fancy funnels.

I’m all for creating or plugging into online marketing funnels and doing things the smart way so that you have leverage online to attract new people to you.

However if all you do is tweak your fancy funnel, things can get kind of slow.

So have a plan in place for speaking to new people every day and do it for at least 90 DAYS.

Notice I don’t say chase 10 people a day and bore them to tears with all the un-fascinating features of your products or services.

What I mean is develop relationships with people every day and see how you can help them.

This is so critical because if you position yourself as a solution provider you’ll never be short of prospects and you’ll build a valuable network.

This is exactly how you begin to set yourself up as an expert in your niche so here are 5 ways for you to start generating hot prospects today:

• Reconnect with all the people in your life that you haven’t spoken to in a while. Just a quick call to see how they’re doing. Update them briefly on what you’re doing, see what you can do for them and ask them to spread the word and to pass on your website etc. if someone they know is looking for what you offer. (Follow up with an email link if they are open to passing on your info)

•  Go through your business cards, email address book, skype,  mobile phone, social networks  and any other resources you have for people you’ve met through business events or have worked with in the past. Give them a quick call or email to touch base. Phoning works best but if you can’t bear it then an email is better than nothing.

• Create one piece of solution providing content per day by which I mean a short blog post, article, audio or video. Post it to your blog and to your social networks. (Oh pleeease don’t say you don’t know how to do this because I’ve been mailing you free ‘how-to’ info every week in my ezine forever so just go back to the blog and read some of the posts there.)

• Always be open for business. As you go about your day to day life be open to making new friends. Where appropriate exchange contact details and follow up with them to develop the relationship.

•  Google the networking meetings going on in your area. There are tons of them these days so find the ones for you and attend each one as a guest.  Join at least a couple and commit to attend each week or month so you start to build relationships with the influencers in your area.

These are just a couple of ideas of how you can attract more people to take a look at what you’re doing, join your newsletter or download your free report.

Wherever possible either add them to your newsletter database so you can stay in touch with them or send them the link to add themselves. Remember to always operate ‘permission based’ email marketing.

I, like many of the top online marketers use aweber so that I only have high quality subscribers who have clicked a link to confirm they want to hear from me.

The most important thing is to take some action each day to generate new prospects for your business so that you are pro-active and not just waiting for people to come to you.

And please remember to always come from a position of offering assistance and helping others to get what they want rather than focussing on selling them something.

When you do this the rest takes care of itself.

Have you found other ways of generating prospects for your business? If so I’d love to hear about them with any tips you have so please leave a comment and others can benefit too.

If you found this useful please share it with your Facebook, Twitter  & social network friends.

Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today & I hope you’ll take action and implement these activities because what you do now dictates how you will be positioned in 2012.

If you’d like to receive weekly training like this to your inbox be sure to complete your details in the box on the top right hand side.

If you’d like to know more about the plug and play lead generation system I use with all the latest internet marketing training for home-business owners go here for more info:

Internet Business

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I’m not good at short but I’m going to try to keep it on the short side today as I know how busy you are and I want you to read it!

It’s not an ego thing – I mean read it if you want … or not … it doesn’t make that much difference to me.

But it might to you which is why I care if you read it.  

If you’re using social media and trying to figure out how to ‘be seen’ or how to ‘stand out’ then this is a super important message for you.

Whether you’re an author, coach, consultant, network marketer or other home based or small business entrepreneur you need to create your platform.

What’s a platform? Well it’s not Facebook and it’s not Twitter and it’s not your blog.

But it is all of these things and more working synergistically together.

Oh but Rachel it sounds exhausting I hear you cry!

I know – I understand how you feel.  It is a lot to get your head round so I won’t pretend otherwise.

However if you don’t set this up and get your head round it, you’re going to be left behind.

YOU ARE BEING LEFT BEHIND. (I’m raising my voice so you can hear me)

If you’re chit chatting on Facebook and making ‘friends’ or you’re tweeting on Twitter and attracting followers it’s all very cool. It’s so cool but it’s not marketing and it’s not creating your platform unless some of those cool people are joining your mailing list and buying your stuff.

You don’t chit chat all day and expect to be productive in any other arena so why would you do so on social media?

Hopefully you get my point. If you have a business to run, an important message to share about an important topic (what I call your ‘Niche Expert Topic,’) then there is not a moment to waste.

You need to be making friends, helping them get what they want and turning them into raving fans, loyal buyers or at least helpful promoters (or sneezers as Seth Godin calls them)

For all of this to work you need to create your marketing funnel and platform so that what you offer is easily accessible and you lead people to it by sharing good value information through your social media network and blogging.

If you’re too tired and overwhelmed to think about doing all this then it’s probably not for you so just keep doing what you’re doing but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If the concept of having raving fans that help you and a loyal base of newsletter or blog readers excites you then this is definitely for you.

You may be stuck in the middle and need a helping hand across the bridge so you can see the light. That’s ok – that’s why I’m writing this blog post instead of filing my nails.

If you have a life-changing product, service or book to promote but you think someone else should do the marketing for you as you ‘can’t sell’ and ‘can’t market,’ you’re probably in for a rude awakening in this new media world.

If you have pots of money to invest in outsourcing and advertising then of course you can get some help and focus on what you are good at.

But you will still need to get to grips with social media and your brand because otherwise you will be at the mercy of someone else who may not even understand the brand you wish to create.

So in summary – create your marketing funnel and social media platform however you wish. Either get down in the trenches and do it yourself or outsource it to a savvy dude or dudette.

It matters not,  as long as you know how to update your blog and how to interact on your platform.

Because that is where the magic happens;  now it’s time to attract and interact with your target market so if you’re not clear on your niche (who will buy your stuff and what exactly they want) then you better get clear very quickly!

One final tip before I go. Don’t allow fear and lack of confidence to hold you back. The people that judge or criticise you usually have too much time on their hands. The people who support you and love what you do are the ones who matter so do it all for them.

Build your platform, get your message out to your niche and stop worrying about everyone else!

What do you think?

Please share this blog post if you think it will help someone like you to get their important message out there.

If you want a step-by-step blueprint of how to get clear on your niche, set up your platform & a lot more check out my new book The Niche Expert and get started right away.

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Marketing can be a confusing business and even more so for those in a niche unrelated to marketing and therefore have no marketing experience.

You can have a client attractive website that converts like crazy but if you don’t have enough of the right people visiting it on a daily basis, business will be slow. 

On the one hand there is no point having the wrong people visiting it as that’s just numbers and will waste your time and resources if they sign up for your free offers. If they’re not a match they won’t buy your products or pay to work with you.

So you must figure out how to get the right people coming towards you consistently. Once you do that it’s just a case of fine tuning your products and services to produce better and better conversation rates.

In simple terms a better conversion rate just means that from a certain number of people seeing your offers, a certain percentage signs up or buys. You want to continually be trying to improve that number so that you get better results for less effort.

Once you’ve got your basic marketing funnel in place you can begin attracting the right people towards you. I recommend you start with free methods, as paying for traffic requires a skill set that you will need to acquire to do well with it.

If you have a marketing budget you can pay for some traffic from Facebook adverts or Google Adwords to test your offer. It’s a good way to get a flow of traffic so that you can see if your offer converts.  You will need to understand some basic marketing copywriting skills to be effective with this as well as understand the complexities of how the advertising works.

I wouldn’t recommend running paid adverts unless you are willing to invest in some specialised training with this as the landscape for paid advertising is becoming more and more difficult to navigate and changes constantly.

That leaves us with free methods which take more time and so in that respect cost you money but otherwise are free. If you have less money for marketing and more time then this is definitely the way to go.

The other thing I love about free marketing methods is that if you understand how to position your content and set up your marketing funnel your efforts stay on the search engines long term. They provide a residual benefit to you.

I have short articles and blog posts all over the internet that still generate leads for me after 2 or 3 years. They were free in the beginning, apart from my time, and they provide a continuous source of leads over time. That’s pretty exciting as a marketing method to add into your marketing game plan.

Article writing and blog posts are a free and steady way of generating sign ups to your database and sales for your products. It is not the fastest method but what is one good client worth to you?

It may run into the multiple thousands, especially if you offer high end coaching and more expensive information products on the back end.

For a faster flow of lead generation you can add in some other methods into your marketing game plan. Conducting your own tele-seminars is a great way to do this and you can use this service I recommend if you want to give that a go: Instant Tele-Seminar

Another way to leverage tele-seminars is to be a guest speaker. This is one of my favourite ways because it allows you to leverage the time of other people who are setting up the tele-seminar. You just have to show up and share your message which if you’re a niche expert you’ll be very happy to do.

So we’ve covered some ways for you to find the right people who want what you’ve got. It’s a step by step plan and I recommend you start with 2-3 methods and add them in to your marketing game plan. As you master those and get them running on auto-pilot you then add in more until you find the best ones for you.

This is the way to build a long term online business that will have people visiting your website and signing up for your offers whether you’re working, playing or sleeping.

To find out exactly how to set up your unique niche expert online business, get paid as an expert and make a difference doing what you love check out Rachel’s new course The Niche Expert Bootcamp

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I don’t know about you but I’m really tired of hearing about get rich quick and quick fix, short term marketing strategies.  I set out a couple of years ago to build a marketing funnel that will last and thankfully I’ve survived the Google slaps and all kinds of weird and wonderful challenges online.

If you listen to people who teach gimmicks & tactics, you’ll repeatedly have to start again and learn the latest trick to be able to stay in business.

Far better to create a solid foundation with an online marketing funnel that lasts and will allow you to develop your brand as your knowledge and success grows.

WordPress.org is the platform that enables you to easily create your website, blog, capture and sales pages aka your marketing funnel. There are themes that make this even easier to do with absolutely no html or coding knowledge which means that online marketing is accessible to all now.

Online marketing strategy is another important element for you to study and get into place.

You need to identify your niche and your profitable niche keywords if you’re not clear on that yet.  You’ll also need to think about your brand and how you’re going to connect with your ideal clients.

How will you generate visitors to your site? How will you incorporate social media into your plan and will you also do some paid advertising?

It’s getting more and more challenging to be able to run paid adverts on Facebook and Google so it really is essential to create a client attractive marketing funnel with all the key elements in place so that you rank high on the search engines for free.

When you have a strong foundation for your internet empire you’ll be able to build your list with or without paid advertising. There are many ways to do so and you’ll need to create your marketing game plan once your marketing funnel is in place.

What value are you giving and how are you delivering it? A special report or audio is a great way to build your list as people will just click away and forget about you if you don’t give them a good reason to leave their details and sign up to hear from you again.

Capturing your visitors’ details is so important because most people never buy on the first visit to your website. Using wordpress and a user friendly paid theme such as Optimise Press you can create a highly converting marketing funnel that will give you a bullet proof platform for you niche.

Add in some simple content and copywriting know how so that you can connect with your target audience in the right way for your brand and you are ready to rock.

Don’t waste time with tactics – build for the long term and create your marketing funnel step by step and you’ll still be around in your profitable niche many years from now.

To find out exactly how to create your online marketing funnel and all of the above check out Rachel’s new course The Niche Expert Bootcamp

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Last week I put out a survey to my ezine readers and the results clearly show that people are struggling most of all to identify and to stand out in their niche.

You can’t stand out in your niche if you haven’t first identified your hot & profitable keywords so I’ve put together a v.short video for you here that shows you exactly how to research your possible keyphrases for your niche expert topic.

Here’s the external link to locate the google keyword tool: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

Hope you find this useful and if you do please share and leave a comment.

If you want to see a larger version of the video and are struggling to see the details you can do so here:

Niche Expert Topic Video

If you like this you’ll love my new book, ‘The Niche Expert,’ which shows you how to identify your niche and how to create your niche expert business to attract your perfect customers, clients, leads and publicity online. Go here for more details: The Niche Expert

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