Many times in our life, when we want to make something big, we spend many times planning how everything will work. Either your next vacations or your next business, before carrying it out is recommendable to organize your ideas in order to have everything clear and be ready to work on it.

The planning process is essential if you want to know what to do when things don’t go according to plan.

That’s a great quote that I always remember when I’m planning something. May be it’s obvious, but is good to remember that planning everything before to do something is essential for the thing you want to do. Many people who start making things without goals, end failing and quiting the project because they were not following a path. They never had neither goals to reach nor purposes to keep working, and finally when they get stuck with something, they quit. Ok I have mentioned the word planning many times in this post but what’s the big deal with that? What should you know when you are going to write a business plan?

The Planning Process

In this graph you can see what’s the process of planning suggested by me. First of all, you need to have a vision of the project, defining how everything will operate and how all its elements will be interconnected. So then, defining the mission and goals of your project will help you to keep working the hardest in order to achieve these things. Basically, if you don’t know what do you want to achieve, you will be wasting your time working in something that hasn’t an end…

Study the environment in order to know the market: competitors, consumers… By studying and knowing the competition you will be a step forward of them, so you could develop and offer something better to those people who are using the service or product of your competitors. Once you have analyzed your targeted consumers, determining what they are looking for and what they expect of your service, you will be ready to keep working on your project.

When you want to achieve something, you need to have more than one way to do it. By analyzing and planning different strategies you will have different alternatives in case you fail with one of them. So this could be trial and error, changing of strategy and trying again could be a process of weeks until you get the secret formula, which will give you the highest conversion rates, sales, etc.

After that, once you have analyzed some strategies, analyze their risk. Which one can make you lose more money? Which one can make you lose in front of your competition? All that kind of questions are studied in this phase, and answering them can help you to choose and implement a strategy.

Great! You have selected a strategy but now, it’s time to run your plan! That’s right, now you have to materialize all your efforts in something that you can feel proud of. It would be great for you to see that you didn’t spend time planning the project in vain, and to see how everything is working as you thought and planned before.

Everything will be working fine, everything is pretty and you will feel happy… for a while. Since the first minute your project’s life, you need to start tracking everything in order to analyze and see if going well, if you are not wasting money/time or if the consumers are doing what you expected… So it’s time to analyze the results.

No matter what’s the result, if your business is going well or bad, you need to optimize it. This is a critical phase because of it will depend the life of your project. Find the way to improve the experience of the consumer with your service or product, find how to make them stick to you and keep them using what you offer them.

The Loop

As you can see on the graph, once you are in the bottom of the chain you need to go back to the beginning. In the phase of optimization, you can improve the current strategy or look for another one. No matter what you choose to do, you need to evaluate the risk of the future changes you want to do in order to have everything under control.

I don’t guarantee anything, but if do everything well following that scheme, it would be hard to fail on what you do. Perhaps this is a very simple and general scheme, is good to have an idea of what you need to do when you want to plan something. Also, depending of the business, you should add more phases to that scheme to complement the current phases.

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to recommend you to take your time and don’t put yourself under pressure, try to define some milestones and deadlines for the project, and stick to them. If you cannot meet your deadlines, give you a second chance and extend them, but always have a top. This will motivate you to work the hardest.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

-Leonard Bernstein

The fact is that many people use this kind of marketing just to send unwanted emails, or commonly called as spam. In the last years, the number of spam messages in people’s inboxes have considerably increased. In a year, more than 3 trillions of emails are sent, of which an average of 70% of them are spam. For our luck, email service’s providers are constantly improving their algorithms to filter the good messages of the bad ones .

What should you know to run an email marketing campaign?

Well like everything related with marketing, creating a good campaign can take you more time than you expect. Obviously, the first thing you need to do is create a newsletter. You can do this by using Aweber, a service which you can send scheduled emails, broadcasts and configure autoresponders… And as every service of this nature, it lets you send bulk emails to your mailing lists.

Once you have ordered your email marketing service, you can start creating email lists and promoting your campaigns! On now, , let’s start with reviewing the things you need to have in mind to create and run with success an email campaign:

Respecting the Subject

• Keep it short: Make your subject as short as possible, with a maximum of 50 characters including spaces. This way, the message will be direct and concise.
• Keep it simple, don’t overdo it: Avoid using capital letters in all the words, as well as using punctuation like exclamation marks. In the case of the capital letters, they will be directly filtered by spam protectors, but if you want you could use exclamation marks, is not so bad but sometimes it could be misinterpret.
• Don’t forget your brand: Include your brand, i.e. the name of the company, product or service in the subject line. It helps the subscriber to recognize you.
• Create a sense of urgency: You can include time-depending words in order to encourage your subscribers to read the newsletter as soon as possible. Phrases like now, this week, for limited time, exclusive offer and similar can be use it to create this sensation.
• Motive the subscribers, entice it: You can let the reader know about the benefits it will get by reading the newsletter. Things like get free… or get a discount for… can work.
• Be honest: I think I have been a good broadcaster of that phrase. Being honest with the subscribers will create a sense of loyalty between you and they. You won’t get anything by deceiving them.

Respecting the From

• Don’t forget your brand: Your brand should appear either in the subject or the from fields.
• Use your website tags: This is something relatively optional, you can choose between adding or not the tags of your website, i.e. Mr Javo dot Com – Blogging and Internet Marketing Tips. This can give you good or bad results, it depends of its length. In my case, it’s fairly long to include my tags in the From field. If your tag is too long, I recommend you not to use it.

Respecting the Message

This is may be the most important aspect of email marketing because here will be displayed the information you want to promote. So let’s see the guidelines for this field:

• Provide relevant content: What would you feel if I send you through my newsletter something related with Food, Cars or Deports? Exactly, you could find it surprising and annoying! If you signed up to receive blogging and internet marketing tips why are you getting information related with other niches? So with this I want to tell you that it’s really important to match your content with your audience. You will get better click-through rates if you send relevant content.
• Emphasize your brand: Including logos and URLs related to your business will boost your click-throught rates and at the same time, you will be imposing your authority.
• Send copies in both HTML and Plain Text: It is very recommendable to send the newsletter in both HTML and Plain Text formats. The reason of this is because there are people who don’t allow HTML code in their email inbox. If the subscriber don’t allow HTML code the text plain version will be shown instead.
• Include a link to unsubscribe: Is a really important thing to include a link which the subscribers could use to unsubscribe for your newsletter whenever they want. By doing this, they won’t be moored to you if they don’t want to!.
• Provide a RSS link: If you constantly update the content of your website, as the case of blogs, you could include a link of your RSS feed encouraging the people to subscribe. Remember to tell them the benefits, i.e. a little message explaining them that they will get (quicker) updates of your site…
• Include your contact information: Is a must to include your personal information, like your company’s street address, phone number and contact email. Some services ask for this in their policy.

Ok these were the recommended things that you need to do in order to run an email marketing campaign successfully. Another great tip is to set a Follow-up message in order to give them a welcome when they sign up for your newsletter. This create a good relationship between you and them, and helps you to estimulate the sense of loyalty. For this message, you can include a kind of coupon or offer of your product/service to estimulate a sell.

To conclude this post, remember to tell to your visitors the advantages of subscribing to your newsletter or how do you expect to attract subscribers if you don’t tell them what will they win? Keep in mind NOT to send spam, and send emails only to people who are willing to receive them.

By the way, if you are not in my newsletter yet, I invite you to take part in to receive my very best tips, exclusive offers and mailings, in addition of a free copy of my ebook The Affiliate’s Start Guide .

Hi everyone! As you may noticed Mr Javo 2.0 is live and it brought with itself many changes, which considerable improve the old theme.

In order to promote Mr Javo 2.0 and my first eBook titled The Affiliate’s Start Guide, I have prepared a contest for you.

What is this all about?

With my eBook you will learn the basic things which will let you create a website and start making money with it, specially with affiliate networks.

This guide explain step by step everything you need to do to start making money online, and it can be understood for any person without preview experiences in the matter.

So then I though it would be good idea to make a contest, giving away prizes which could make easier the process of creating an online business.

The Prizes

Until now I have over $1800 $2000 in prizes, which I will distribute among 10 lucky winners!

1st Place

• $200 filled into an advertiser account on Bidvertiser – Value $200
• A custom blog design courtesy of Canadian Web Design – Value $195
• One hour consultation with Mattaw of MoneyBites – Value $50
• One copy of OIOpublisher – Value $47
• One copy of the Traffic Rush Course, courtesy of Caroline MiddleBrook – Value $47
• One copy of the SEO eBook Don’t Get Banned by The Search Engines – Value $40 NEW!
• One year VIP membership on CreateBanner.com, courtesy of Xavier Media – Value $35
• 50,000 BlogUpp! impressions, courtesy of BlogUpp! – Value $30 NEW!
• One copy of the eBook Work Smart, Get Rich!, courtesy of The Net Fool – Value $15

2nd Place

• No Compromise Logo Design Package, courtesy of Logo Design Team – Value $229 NEW!
• A professional audio Intro / Outro for your Podcast or an Audio Introduction for your Blog by Mary-Lynn at Bigg Studio – Value $150
• A copy of the UBD Citrus Theme, by UniqueBlogDesigns – Value $79
• One hour consultation with Benjamin of Big Ben Patton’s Place – Value $50 NEW!
• One copy of OIOpublisher – Value $47
• One copy of the Traffic Rush Course, courtesy of Caroline MiddleBrook – Value $47
• One year VIP membership on CreateBanner.com, courtesy of Xavier Media – Value $35
• 30,000 BlogUpp! impressions, courtesy of BlogUpp! – Value $17 NEW!
• One copy of the eBook Work Smart, Get Rich!, courtesy of The Net Fool – Value $15

3rd Place

• One Wordpress theme from PremiumThemesNow.com, courtesy of Daniel Scocco – Value $50
• One hour consultation with Benjamin of Big Ben Patton’s Place – Value $50 NEW!
• One copy of OIOpublisher – Value $47
• One copy of the Traffic Rush Course, courtesy of Caroline MiddleBrook – Value $47
• One copy of the Instant Blog Traffic eBook, courtesy of Ben Pei – Value $47 NEW!
• One year VIP membership on CreateBanner.com, courtesy of Xavier Media – Value $35
• One month of 468×60px advertising on Big Ben Patton’s Place – Value $20 NEW!
• One copy of the eBook Work Smart, Get Rich!, courtesy of The Net Fool – Value $15
• 20,000 BlogUpp! impressions, courtesy of BlogUpp! – Value $10 NEW!

4th Place

• One Wordpress theme from PremiumThemesNow.com, courtesy of Daniel Scocco – Value $50
• A blog review on Shanker Bakshi dot Com – Value $50 NEW!
  
• One copy of OIOpublisher – Value $47
• One copy of the Traffic Rush Course, courtesy of Caroline MiddleBrook – Value $47
• One year VIP membership on CreateBanner.com, courtesy of Xavier Media – Value $35
• One month of 125×125px advertising on Big Ben Patton’s Place – Value $20 NEW!
• One copy of the eBook Work Smart, Get Rich!, courtesy of The Net Fool – Value $15

5th Place

• A pre-made toon, which is a guy with a laptop “making money” while on the beach, courtesy of Vic Ocampo – Value ?$50
• One copy of OIOpublisher – Value $47
• One copy of the Traffic Rush Course, courtesy of Caroline MiddleBrook – Value $47
• One year VIP membership on CreateBanner.com, courtesy of Xavier Media – Value $35
• One blog review by Benjamin of Big Ben Patton’s Place – Value $30 NEW!
• One month of 125×125px advertising on iDesignStudios.com – Value $20 NEW!

6th Place

• A paid review on Balkhis, courtesy of Syed – Value $80
• Two months of 125×125px advertising on Direct Sales Web Marketing, courtesy by Dennis Edell – Value $50
• Thirty-minutes of blog consultations with Jim from The Net Fool – Value $30
• One blog review by Benjamin of Big Ben Patton’s Place – Value $30 NEW!
• One month of 125×125px advertising on WebTrafficROI.com – Value $20 NEW!
• A link after every post during one month on Piggy Bank Pie – Value $10

7th Place

• Thirty-minutes of blog consultations with Jim from The Net Fool – Value $30
• A blog review, a 125×125px advertising for a month and 1000 EC by Louis Liem – Value $30
• One month of 125×125px advertising On Mr Javo dot Com, courtesy of Revvenue.com – Value $25
• One blog review on Niessuh.com – Value $20
• One month of text-link advertising on WebTrafficROI.com – Value $10 NEW!

8th Place

• A Blog review on SponsoReview.com – Value $30
• One month of 125×125px advertising on IndoContest, 2500 EC – Value $20
• 1000 EC from Give Away City
• 1000 EC from Danandmash In Oz

9th Place

• One month of 125X125px advertising on Work From Home Business Blog – Value $10
• One month of 125X125px advertising on Blogging From Scratch – Value $3
• 1000 EC from KisahberuanG.com

10th Place

• 1000 EC from ThemeLib
• 1000 EC from Cash In Style

Wow! writing all those prizes took a long time! What do you think huh? As you can see, if you are among the top 5 winners you will have everything to start a blog and make money online!

How To Participate

The winners will be chosen of a drawing using the service provided by Random.org. To take part in this drawing you need to sign up for my newsletter by using the form provided below:

By signing up and confirming your email , you will get 3 tickets!

You can also get TWO additional entries by writing about this contest in your blog, using the script provided here. Notice that you won’t get this 2 additional entries if you don’t sign up for my newsletter!

And if you don’t have a blog but you want to get additional entries, there is a solution for you. You can get ONE additional entry for subscribing to my RSS feed by email. Notice that you won’t get this additional entry if you don’t sign up for my newsletter!

To claim the 1st prize you need to have an Advertiser’s account on Bidvertiser. Get your account now!

Deadline

This contest ends in 1 month, so it will be on Nov 16th at 22:00 GTM -4. I will make a screencast of the drawing to guarantee the transparency of the process! So come back in  month and check if you are a winner!

PS: How to use the script? The “script” is just a .txt, you need to copy and paste it into your post editor in HTML mode, click publish and done!

Good Luck!

It is almost finished! Yes, this series that talks about building an online business using blogs is almost done. This is the last article which talks about something really important and something skipped in the previews lessons, making money! If you are building “a business” you should want to see money flowing through it, so let’s talk about some useful ways to earn profits from your blog.

5. Make Money

First of all, remember when I said in the preview lessons that you can promote your own products or services on the blog, well it’s time to do it! You can build banners in order to let your visitors know about what can they find in your blog.

Depending of your product or service, you can offer some basic features for free and then charge for some “premium features” which the users can get a better experience of your service. This is usually a good way to get money, once the users are familiarized with your product they will pay to get a complete version of it (if they need those features).

Besides by selling your product or service, you can also get money directly from your blog by using other services like the following ones:

• Google Adsense: This is may be the most common way to earn money on Internet. With Adsense you can display relevant ads on your website or blog and get paid for each click the people make on that links. The minimum payout is $100.
• Bidvertiser: This service is very similar than Adsense, you can display banners which you can personalize to make them look similar than your blog’s theme. The advantage of using this program is its minimum payout of $10.
• SponsoredReviews: With this service you can earn money by writing reviews about services or products on your blog. This is a perfect way to make money just by writing an article of a product or service related with yours.
• Text-Link-Ads: This is an excellent way to make money passively. With TLA you can earn money by selling text links on your blog’s articles. It works completely automatized and you don’t need to contact anyone to sell links. You only need to install a plugin on your blog and when someone buy a link on your blog it will be displayed automatically.
• Market Leverage, NeverBlueAds and PepperJam: These three services are affiliate networks which you can find many products and services that you can promote on your blog. Excellent way to get checks with good amounts.

There are many other ways to make money with your blog, for example you can sell banners and keep 100% of your earnings with the awesome OIOPublisher plugin for wordpress. There should be many undiscovered ways to make money and it’s up to you to discover them.

Hey there, today I read something that I never expected. One of big popular bloggers aka “John Cow” is selling him blog! What do you think about it?

I think a blog is unique, because it depends of a personality. You could like to read a blog just for the funny comments the author does, or for the way he say the things. However, this is unique! and the new owner will not be the same, although he work under the same nick name.

Once you sell your blog, it will still alive. The people will still reading it, but it will be not the same. At least, the subscribers, or the people who follow a blogger daily, feel him as a friend. Once you leave them, they will not want to go back to the blog.

That is my opinion, but you don’t need to follow it if you are not agree. Let’s check why John Cow is selling him blog:

This dude is moving, from Europe to Australia, and he will be busy finding a place to live. As he arguments, he will be very busy doing this, and it is reasonable. Cow is a very persistent blogger, I followed him. But as he says, he will not have time to attend him online business, so he prefer to leave it.

It is a good reason but Cow, if I were you, I would not sell it. Instead, I would hire many guest bloggers, to keep my blog updated for a couple of weeks, may be months. He is a popular blogger, he has many subscribers and people who would like to post on him blog. Also, he can find help with bloggers like Darren, Chow or ME! (I’m a guest blogger already ).

these are the statistics of JohnCow.com

The stats:

* PageRank 3
* Alexa 22,100
* Compete 41,020
* Technorati 1696, Authority 1457
* 382 Posts
* 13,417 Comments
* 47,412 Backlinks (Yahoo!)
* 2,830 indexed pages (Google)
* Average of 40K uniques per month (without social media)

This guy made a great work with him blog, I don’t understand why are he leaving it… However, it is him choice.

The blog price is 25K~50K dollars. He get about $2500 per month, so if you buy it, you could get your money back very quick… So do you want to buy JohnCow.com? Contact him! and say to him that you read about the sale in my blog (by doing this, I could get 5% of the sale).

Happy Weekend!

Hey there, recently some many bloggers have being asking me to exchange textlinks. Unfortunately, I have rejected all these requests because I’ll be giving many text links this month, in some sponsored contests. You have to understand that I don’t want to overload the sidebar of textlinks.

However, I want to tell them that I’m happy to receive these requests, and I could give you some backlinks through my posts if you want.

Anyways, in this post I want to tell you the importance of socializing and be friendly with the people who visit your blog. This is very important for a simple reason, 6 degrees.

What is Six Degrees?

This is a law which talk about the connectivity between the people. Following the definition of wikipedia:

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six “steps” away from each person on Earth. Is a little hard to understand, I recommend you to visit the link to wikipedia and read the law with more details.

Never happened to you that you find a connection between you and another person through a familiar or friend, but you never thought they know themselves? Well, this is because the law of 6 degrees. Basically, you are connected with every person on the world through a patch created for 6 persons. Everything is connected, and as you can imagine, you should never reject a business opportunity, because you don’t know the turns the world can give.

Also, by the same way you should never be disagreeable with anybody, because tomorrow that person can help you, specially if we talk about business. Every single blogger, can be a potential partner in the future, following the six degrees law.

To conclude this post, I recommend avoiding underestimate every opportunity you get. That insignificant idea, could be the one which explode your blog, giving you thousand readers, improving you revenue and all the things every blogger want to have.

This also apply to everything on the life, don’t forget it