The Internet lifestyle is an awesome way of life. My last book is called Living the Internet Lifestyle because it has changed my life completely. But it may not be what you think. It refers to our ability to do something we enjoy from anywhere in the world, and being able to choose your own hours. It represents a freedom in our lives few people get to experience until they retire.

Leveraging the power of the Internet includes taking advantage of improved automation tools that allow us to enjoy our day to day lives while our businesses hum along smoothly in the background. My clients and students are on six continents and in more than fifteen countries around the world.

While I was working as a classroom teacher and also in real estate I had no time of my own to speak of, bosses that treated me terribly at times, and very little time or money to travel, spend time with family and friends, and little opportunity to be involved with charities and volunteering. I now have both active and passive streams of income in which to live the life I choose.

But getting all of this in place takes time, planning, and massive action. I’ve never seen anyone make significant progress towards an online business without massive action. The people who lead you to believe you can create the Internet lifestyle for yourself without doing the work and laying the foundation are not being honest with you.

These days I spend about fifteen hours a week actually working in my business, but that was not the case during my first year online. When you’re starting out, it takes even greater action to gain momentum.  When someone tells me they envy my lifestyle I always remind them that my life today is a result of the hard work, effort, and massive action I took in the beginning.

Those who are successful make a commitment to doing so. They turn off the television, stop going out with friends, and give up sleeping in on the weekend. They save money by not going out to restaurants and skipping their yearly vacation. If your family is supportive and believes in what you are working to build, they will understand this completely. If not, then it’s your job to convince them.

The sacrifice is worth it because the reward is so great for your future. You can accomplish a lot more with a year of focused, intense, massive effort than you will with three years of start and stop attempts. My favorite saying is:

‘Do for a year what other won’t, live the rest of your life the way others can’t.’

So, just how badly do you want to live the Internet Lifestyle? How much is your freedom worth?

If it’s valuable enough, you’ll do what it takes.  And it all begins with taking massive action.

Are you familiar with the concept of learning modalities? These are the sensory channels or pathways through which individuals give, receive, and store information. Perception, memory, and sensation comprise the concept of modality. The modalities or senses include visual, auditory, tactile/kinesthetic, smell, and taste. There are three primary learning modalities, including visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic.

We will focus here on the auditory learning modality and how it relates to your online business. Did you know that a large portion of the population, at least thirty percent, retains information better when they hear it than when they read it? Auditory learners must hear what they are learning to really understand it.  They enjoy listening, but cannot wait to have a chance to talk themselves. These students respond well to lecture and discussion. If you are creating information products or writing books, these are the people who will want to have an audio or mp3 version of what you have created.

This is one of the many reasons that it pays to offer audio as an option for your site visitors.  Here are some additional ones:

• Audio can inject personality into your website in a way that text and graphics can’t.  There’s just something special and unique about hearing someone’s voice that makes site visitors feel welcome.
• Audio is convenient. Those who want or need to multitask can listen to audio while doing something else. They do not have to be right in front of the computer screen to use it.  You can also make audio available for download to an iPhone, iPod or MP3 player, so your visitors can take it with them wherever they go.
• Using audio will most definitely separate you from the competition.  Many sites and products do not utilize audio, and if yours does, those who enjoy it will be likely to come back to you instead of seeking out your competition.

Ways to Use Audio

There are plenty of different ways that you can incorporate audio into your online business.  Here are a few to consider:

• Record a podcast. This is similar to blogging, only it is done in audio form.  Users can subscribe to your podcast so that it is automatically downloaded to their feed readers or iPods.
• Host a streaming talk radio show. This is a great way to get targeted visitors to your website, and it allows you to interact with your audience by accepting calls or answering emails while you’re on the air.
• Offer recordings of online conferences or presentations for download. This gives visitors an incentive to come to your site as well, and it may entice them to participate in future conferences.
• Record a message for site visitors. Tell them a little about yourself, suggest areas of the site to visit first, or just welcome them. This adds a unique personal touch.

Making Audio Accessible

There are a number of file formats that you can use when saving audio, but it is important to use popular ones so that your users will be able to listen to them. The most popular format for most types of recorded audio is MP3. It offers great file compression while preserving the quality of the audio. Virtually every computer has an application that can play MP3 files. The Windows operating system comes with Windows Media Player, which will play these and several other types of audio files.

Another benefit of the MP3 is its versatility. It can be easily converted for burning on a CD with most CD burning programs. Users can also put them on their iPhones or just about any other type of portable music player.

Auditory Information Products

When you are creating your first, or next information product, be sure to include it as an auditory file, in addition to any written content or videos you may also be including.

Laurisa White Reyes Children's Book Author [ 24:28 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (211)

Laurisa White Reyes is a children’s book author and editor-in-chief of Middle Shelf magazine. She is also a mother of five, ages six to twenty, and active in her community. We met when her teenaged son was looking for book donations for his Eagle Scout project, and we soon realized we had much in common around reading, writing, and publishing books. I asked her to be a guest on my podcast so that we could get to know her better and to learn more about writing and publishing fiction through traditional publishing houses.

She shared with me that she had wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember. Laurisa wrote a poem at age five that launched her as a writer, at least in the eyes of her family. After college, she spent thirteen years writing for various magazines and newspapers, working as a book editor, and teaching creative writing. But what Laurisa really wanted to do was write novels. So about six years ago she turned her attention to fiction. She reads to her five children at night before bed. One night her oldest son, the one who just became an Eagle Scout, asked her to make up a story instead. That story eventually became a fantasy entitled The Rock of Ivanore. She spent a year writing it, two years submitting it to publishers, and three years getting it from contract to publication. She says that it’s been a long process, but well worth the wait. Laurisa also has a second book out, The Last Enchanter, and both of these titles are a part of a series she calls The Celestine Chronicles.

We discussed the writing process, especially for those of us with busy schedules. Finding the time to write regularly is her biggest challenge right now. We also talked about the process of going through an agent and a traditional publisher. It’s a very different world from what entrepreneurs are able to do with self-publishing.

I know you will enjoy this interview with children’s book author Laurisa White Reyes. Her books are available on Amazon, if you have an interest in this fascinating genre.

You may have seen the movie Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner builds a baseball field in the middle of the countryside and people come from far and near to visit. This concept of ‘if you build it they will come’ is a romantic one, but does not apply to your business. Probably the trickiest part for any online entrepreneur is getting targeted traffic to their sites.  This is more science than art and has spawned an industry all of its own.  Search engine optimization or SEO as it’s more affectionately referred to, is a major player in how you get targeted traffic to your sites or in this case, your blogs.

Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Blog

There are other promotional and marketing strategies that you can employ to get traffic, but it all starts with optimizing your blogs for SEO.  If you want your blog to be found, you have to optimize it for the search engines. Google and the other search engines will crawl you site to see what it’s about, and then send traffic (people) who are searching for those specific topics. It must be general enough to garner attention, yet specific enough to weed out those you are actually searching for very different information.

The level of optimization you can perform on your blog depends once again on whether you’re using a free platform or a hosted one.

A blogging platform like WordPress.org is the best way to go for SEO purposes.  There are no limits as to how you can customize your WordPress.org (hosted) blog.  But because most beginners tend to use the free blog platforms, we’ll explore SEO tactics that everyone can benefit from.

Split Your Blog’s Search Engine Optimization into Offsite And Onsite SEO

Offsite SEO can be summed up as just this – inbound links.  This means blogs other than your own, are linking to your blog and a wide variety of your content.  Inbound links are quite possibly the most important SEO tactic that could get your blogs highly ranked in the search engines.

So how do you get others to link to you?  Here are some ways to get you started:

Write Quality Content – Nothing gets you links faster than writing content that affects your readers.  If a little bit of controversy helps, throw that in.  As word gets around about your posts, bloggers will inevitably link to you.

Post Comments On Blogs You Read – Don’t hesitate to post worthwhile comments on other blogs, be it your competitors or not, but realize blog comments themselves don’t have impact on your SEO results. You may get a follow-up with a link pointing to your blog.  And if that happens to be from a competitor with a huge audience, you’ll be looking at some major traffic influx to your blog.

Submit Your Blog To Directories – You can submit your blogs to blog directories to generate more inbound links.  Apart from buying links, this is something many bloggers do to get more traffic.  Technorati.com and DayPop.com are amongst two of the more popular blog directories right now, but you can perform a Web search to find more.

Onsite SEO requires customization within your blog itself.  Here’s how to get started:

Optimize Your Content With Targeted Keywords  – This topic really requires intense study, as it is one of the more important subjects when discussing SEO.  But in a nutshell, your blog posts should contain the keywords or keyword phrases that your potential customers or readers would most likely type into the search engines to find what they are looking for.

This requires advanced research of keywords on your part so that you can place these targeted keywords within your blog content.  The result would be a highly optimized blog for the very information your potential customers are looking for.

Have each of your posts focused on one specific topic so that you can moderate the keywords going into your content.  Over-stuffing keywords can make for terrible reading which defeats the purpose of finding and keeping your customers.

Make your posts as original as possible and update your blog frequently, at least three times a week.

Place Your Keywords Here Too – Within the URL of the page, page and post titles, heading tags such as H1, image alt tags and meta tags.  Bold your keywords where you can too.

Create A Good Linking Structure Within Your Blog – Create links that link from a certain post in your blog to another relevant post which you had written previously.  This interlinking makes it very easy for search engines to re-index your blog, allowing for more of your pages to be indexed.  Categorize your information and place them on your blog’s sidebar.  Create a sitemap once your blog starts growing larger in size.

But one thing to remember is not to over-optimize your blog. Write naturally and don’t overdo it with keywords. Use descriptive wording and use synonyms rather than repeating the same keyword phrases over and over. Following these strategies will increase the amount of targeted traffic you receive to your blog, and will ultimately increase your bottom line as well.

When you become a local celebrity and the world can be your oyster. Recently I had a special dinner with a friend at an Italian place in Santa Barbara called Ca’Dario. The owner is an overnight sensation thirty years in the making, who followed his passion when he came to America to learn the restaurant business. I think many of us can relate to this in that everything we achieve during our lives is the result of many years of hard work and preparation. Knowing exactly what you want at a young age can certainly be helpful, but this does not ensure that it will take less time or effort.

When I met the restaurant’s owner I complimented him on the food and the restaurant and then asked how he had learned to market his business so well. His answer surprised me; he said that he told a few ‘key’ people what he was doing as he went along. He knew they would spread the word, helping to make his restaurant a success.

This is brilliant, and you can do this for your own business as well. It’s not the same as word-of-mouth advertising; it’s more of a focused way of letting people know who you

are and what you have to offer them. Especially in a small town like Santa Barbara, this type of face to face interaction can catapult you to the top of your field very quickly.

Have you identified some key people or groups in your city that would be interested in knowing more about what you are doing in your online business? Take the time to make a list, and then seek them out to share your thoughts and ideas. I’ve done this with some of the charities I am involved with and have found the people to be quite open to spreading the word about my business.

Some examples of this are that I now write a monthly column for a local print magazine that is owned by someone in my Rotary Club; I’ve been interviewed on the radio as a result of connecting with the owners of the station; and I was given an award by my city’s Arts Council when I connected with someone on the City Council.

Make the effort to become a local celebrity and your business may grow exponentially.

Sue Guiher - Coaching and Transformation [ 23:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (394)

Sue Guiher is a powerhouse when it comes to coaching and marketing, and that’s why I wanted to interview her for my podcast series. After spending more than twenty years in Corporate America working in marketing and sales, Sue decided to step away from that world in favor of a life as an coach and entrepreneur where she would have more time with her family. She also teaches at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

We discussed how she came to leave the corporate world and become an entrepreneur. After working from a laptop in the hospital as she awaited an emergency C-Section for the birth of her son in July of 1999 she realized that she had become a ‘corporate-aholic’. While on maternity leave she had an epiphany around the life she wanted to create for herself and her family. With a passion for teaching and helping others to reach their full potential, Sue sought out mentors who could help guide her path. She began working with Michael Port and now trains his coaches on how to serves their clients with high level business coaching.

She is an expert in taking people’s information and knowledge and turning it into programs by ‘modulizing’ it into a system that works so that everyone benefits. She does this for a variety of industries, including Internet marketing and online training. She teaches about ‘Core Essence’ and how that should show up in what you offer others. Sue feels that my Core Essences are around security, connection, and service in helping people to earn income through an online business and I agree completely with that assessment of what we discussed. Hers are teaching, transformation, and thriving. This is fascinating information that we can use to change our lives through our work. As long as you’re moving forward you can thrive and prosper.

Sue takes people through a transformative process to see where their strengths are and how they can best use these to serve others. Her clients have experienced huge shifts simply by working with her to find out more about their core values and exploring what type of business would best serve their needs.

Sue also takes us through an exercise during this interview to help us leave perfectionism behind and move into the space of creating the business we desire as quickly as possible. This will shift your thinking and attitude immediately and get you into positive, inspired action.

She has set up a special page where you can go through the Core Essences Exercise to gain better insight into what you are doing as an entrepreneur. I’ve done that and I encourage you to do it now while you are thinking about it.

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Are you releasing your inner entrepreneur as you build your online business? Entrepreneurship is different from most anything else you will ever go after in your life. There are no rules, no bosses, no schedule, and no direction. You must find your way intuitively and forge ahead using everything you have.

The ‘up’ side to finding and nurturing your inner entrepreneur is that you will be free forever; free from a life that includes confinement, structure, and consistency. This can also be the downside of this lifestyle, yet truly engaged entrepreneurs will tell you that they wouldn’t have it any other way.

As for me, I have never been so fulfilled in all my life. Each day I wake up alive with ideas on what I will be doing to grow my business. It’s as though I am seeing the world and everything in it with fresh, new eyes and that’s a dream come true. I’m excited, happy, and productive and the outcome is extremely profitable. I truly believe it’s because I’m passionate about what I do. Successful entrepreneurs are always passionate about what they do and how they serve others. And here’s why that matters…

When you’re passionate about something you will do it well no matter what that might be. When you do something well you become successful at it far more easily. When you’re successful at something, you enjoy it even more and that enjoyment makes you even more passionate.

And so the circle continues because the passion for what you’re doing grows and grows and grows. And you grow too.

Your life changes. New things are more important and you become more passionate about stuff that you might never have had the time to think about before you found your first passion.

I get emails from people who say they’re unsure of which niche to choose, are having difficulty coming up with ideas for products, and have very little confidence when it comes to reaching out to other entrepreneurs. It is because they are not passionate about what they are doing.

Find your passion by finding your inner entrepreneur and the success and income will find you.

Carol Amato Online Marketing [ 20:53 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (517)

Carol Amato is one of the most interesting people I’ve connected with during 2013. She is relatively new to online business and marketing, yet has already become someone others turn to for help with setting up their own businesses. We first became acquainted through the site ‘Just Retweet‘, where she was kind enough to retweet my Twitter posts and join my list. Soon we were emailing and that’s when I decided that I must introduce you to her by having her as a guest on my podcast series.

Something I learned about Carol is that she speaks fluent Carinise, a Sicilian dialect, and speaks it like a native according to the people she knows in Sicily. She and her entire family are self-proclaimed foodies and enjoy everything about delicious food. She and her husband live in northeastern Pennsylvania and they have three adult children.

During this interview Carol shares how and why she came online in 2011, what it’s like to have an online business, and how she helps others to get started. We share a deep respect and affection for Dennis Becker, and speak about that as well. I love how we connect with someone and then end up connecting with many other people as well, all as a result of having an online business as an entrepreneur.

Carol is an example of someone who saw the opportunity available to those working online, jumped in to learn as much as could, and took immediate action to build her business quickly. I hope you are doing the same thing as you get closer to having an online business you can run from home or from wherever in the world you happen to be.

I know you will enjoy my conversation with Carol. Be sure to visit her site and join her list if it is of interest to you. I believe you will learn much by connecting with Carol there and on social media.

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Blogging For Business: Tips on Marketing With Your Blog

There are so many different types of blogs, and some of them are for a variety of uses besides marketing for your business. Even my first blog, started in 2005 while I was still a classroom teacher, was not for business in any way. I had started a Blogger site on Google’s Blogspot platform in order to better serve my students with information and technology.

On May 2, 2005 Business Week magazine published a cover story entitled ‘Blog Will Change Your Business’ and the world took notice. While I was not even aware of that story until much later, I know that my simple little blog had a huge impact in the way I communicated with my students, other teachers, and parents.

When it comes to blogging for your business, think of this as opening the doors to awareness and participation. Awareness of who you are, what you’re doing, who you serve, and what you know about your niche topic. Participation in the form of involvement, maintaining a conversation with your readers, and encouraging feedback with comments and guest posts. At no other time in our history have businesses enjoyed such a rich culture of instant interaction and masterminding on a site accessible by people around the world. And instead of your prospects and clients talking amongst themselves, they have the opportunity to talk directly with you, and you with them in a manner that encourages openness and an exchange of ideas leading to improved products, services, and customer relations.

The blogospehere ( a term coined to refer collectively to all blogs and their interactions) has become a vast field of thoughts, dreams, and ideas, yet most blogs are abandoned soon after being set up. With an estimated two hundred million blogs online during 2013, that’s a lot of lonely electrons out there in cyberspace. I have to admit that a dozen or so of that number were mine; forgotten when I changed my mind about writing on a certain topic.

Once you get into the habit of blogging a couple of time each week you will find your voice and understand the true value of blogging for business. I run a seven figure business from my blogs and many other entrepreneurs do the same.

So when it comes to blogging for your business, tips for marketing include creating fresh and relevant content to drive targeted traffic, adding an optin box with a free giveaway to build your list, and inviting comments to increase visibility and credibility. Your blog is your ‘home on the Internet’, so make it a warm and inviting place to receive readers, prospects, and clients.