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

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 468x60px 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 125x125px 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 125x125px advertising on iDesignStudios.com – Value $20 NEW!

6th Place

• A paid review on Balkhis, courtesy of Syed – Value $80
• Two months of 125x125px 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 125x125px 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 125x125px advertising for a month and 1000 EC by Louis Liem – Value $30
• One month of 125x125px 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 125x125px 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.

The most common Internet business is the affiliate marketing. Many entrepreneur and bloggers, use this Internet business to get an extra income. But many of them, don’t get a little income, by the contrary, they get huge commissions from these programs. Before to continue with this post, let’s read the meaning of affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Source: Wikipedia

In other words, it is to promote other company’s products and services on your website. When a sale is made, you get a commission. Some advertisers offer multi-tier programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-partners. Snowballing, this system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup.

The affiliate programs can give you a great income. In fact, bloggers as John Chow, Zac Johnson or Darren Rowse, make thousand dollars a month with them, but the question is How they have that success? They are normal people like you and me, how can you get high incomes like them?

They make thousand dollars with these programs for a reason, their brand. Think about it, they are elite-bloggers, the top bloggers on their niche. When a new affiliate program is launched, they are the firsts testing it. So, they make a post reviewing the service, inviting to the people to join to the program with their referral link. A week later, they have hundred dollars just with all the people who joined to the program with their links.

It is very easy for them, because they don’t need to do anything. In addition of the post, they just place some banners in their blogs, as everybody does. A month later, their accounts are full of money cause by all these referred people. Easy isn’t it? The problem for the regular bloggers, is to catch all these people to join in the program under your name, with your referral link. Being a regular blogger, you will catch few people, I’m talking about 10~30 persons. As a elite-blogger, you will get hundred of people referred.

The difference between you and them, is the brand, that’s all! To get their popularity level, you need to be persistent, participate as much as you can in the social media networks and make friends as much as you can. I know that I have told you this before, but this is the key to be successful with your blog. Establishing your presence on the web will give you the credibility that you are looking for, attracting more and more people to your blog and signing up to these affiliate programs with your referral link.

I have to admit that I really don’t know the exactly key to be successful in these programs. I have referred many people to Pepperjam and Chitika for example, but I don’t have made thousand dollars as other does. That’s why I ended the title of this post with a question mark. If you think that I missed something or you consider that there’s another important factor besides the brand, please comment your idea here to share these information with me and all my visitors .