Your opt-in email list is the nerve center of your online business. Whether you are a blogger, an affiliate marketer or a freelance online content producer like me, you must build your own contact list of prospective customers if you have not already done so.

But it’s not enough to just gather up those emails and sit on them like they are going to hatch. Each one of those emails is your direct contact with a person who has visited your website, seen what you had to offer and liked it enough to give up their contact information. They have agreed to continue to receive emails from you, so go ahead and communicate with them.

Your list is only valuable to you when you foster a warm relationship with them. Take off your ’sales’ hat and put on your, ‘getting to know you’ hat. If you want to be able to send promotional offers you must first create a mutually beneficial relationship with them by providing value.

This afternoon I joined a fabulous webinar put on by Janet Legere, who was talking about, How To Write Auto-Responder Letters. Here are a few tips that I learned from her on this content-rich webinar:

Your goal is to get your opt-in members to begin to know, like and trust you more, so be real, be authentic and engaging with them.

Janet and her husband Don do these free training webinars at noon on Saturdays, so I recommend that you scoot on over to her blog, http://janetlegere.com, right now and sign up for her email list so that you can get a link to sign up for her next webinar.

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An important key to successful online marketing is to keep in mind that, despite what your mother always told you, it really is all about you. In order to rise above the sheer volume, and the noise of the marketplace, you must find an effective way to communicate to the world–or at least to your target market–what valuable solution you provide.

But in order for the world or your market to get how valuable and just plain awesome you are, you’ve got to believe it yourself. You’ve heard it said countless times that everything is energy. You radiate energy that vibrates at a particular level. If you are confident, secure and full of joy you are radiating at a higher level, and as that famous Law of Attraction states, you will attract others to you who are vibrating at a compatible level.

Everything you do, and everyting you create and put out into the world is totally infused with your energy. Therefore, your clients and customers are either drawn to your energy or they are not drawn to it. This is important to keep in mind when you are doing Internet marketing online because if you are not getting the results you desire, you might take a step back and look at your energy and your vibration.

Are you up and eager and excited, or are you feeling down, desperate and frustrated? You can have the most beautiful, visually appealing website with fabulous copy, but if you are not coming from a place of being confident in your value, your contribution and your unique gifts that energy will keep your ideal clients away.

Remember that you are the sparkle that draws traffic, customers and clients to you. What are you doing to make your visitors enjoy their visit to your website or blog? How are you making it fun for your customers and clients to do business with you?

Successful online marketing begins and ends with you. Be radiant. Be passionate, heck, be freaking awesome and take the necessary, consistent, bold action steps and watch your website begin to sizzle.

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With thousands of journalists having lost their jobs as the global economy as a whole and the publishing industry in particular under go major shifts, many writers are turning to Freelance writing as a way to earn a living. But one of the challenges of making your income by providing a service is that when you are not doing client work you are not getting paid. The nature of the service business is that there will be lean times when you don’t get enough assignments from clients, and other times when it seems like you might need to sub-contract out some of your work.

For those freelancers who are striving to find a way to be free of the tyranny of trading time for dollars there are many opportunities on the Internet to create additional passive income streams that can generate income for you while you pursue the work you love. Eventually, you may be able to build these income streams to the point where you can actually work less and enjoy life more without losing income. Let’s take a look at three options:

Create Niche websites
Choose a topic that you are knowledgeable about and passionate about and create a blog on that topic. Do some research to narrow down some core keywords and focus your content on those keywords. Create a rich variety of content including video that goes deep within your narrowly defined niche. For example, rather than writing about womens shoes, you might choose a few specific designers, or styles to cover.

In between client assignments you can create content for your own site. As your following grows you can start to sell advertising and generate some revenues in that way.

Creating a blog widens your exposure, helps you begin to establish a platform and can serve as an example of your work for future clients.

Create your own information products
Take your passion and knowledge about your topic and write an eBook, a video tutorial series, or a podcast. First create a valuable, informative eBook that solves a problem or supplies useful information and give it away in exchange for your visitors’ name and email address. Once they are signed up to your email list you can continue to communicate with them sharing more content and offers to buy products or services in your niche.

Sell PLR rights to your articles
Another great way to create passive income is to write up sets of articles between 450 and 550 words on a particular topic and sell Private Label Rights (PLR) to them. People buy PLR products and then re-purpose that content for their websites, blogs and information products. It saves them the time of researching and writing the content themselves and you get to do the work once and get paid every time you sell another batch of articles.

So, if you’re a freelancer who has experienced those ‘feast or famine’ days, try setting up some additional income streams to help tide you over and maybe eventually replace some of your regular income.

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I have actually had an account at Twitter.com since August of 2006. I was in Ed Dale’s famous, 30 Day Challenge, and he was raving about the potential that Twitter held for engaging with our audience, building a following and sending traffic to our blogs. However, there was one small problem. There were not enough people on Twitter yet who ‘got it,’ so, I had about a dozen followers for about six months.

Flash forward to today when I have almost 2,000 follower. I find Twitter to be a fabulous marketing tool. I get lots of traffic from it, I am able to spread the word about what I’m up to and I’ve developed a community of friends there where we chat and re-tweet each others posts.

I do not use any of those apps that auto-tweets for me, although it would save me a lot of time. I don’t spend more than about 30 minutes all together over the course of a day on Twitter. I often send some tweets in the morning and then I sprinkle them in throughout the afternoon. I check my @replies and see if any of my peeps have anything that needs re-tweeting.

In my estimation, I send about a dozen or so tweets a day, unless I am trying to get a lot of exposure for something like a webinar or teleseminar. Then I might send a few more.

So, yes, I’m a Twitter fan. I try to keep it real, and yes I tweet about what I’m cooking, what I’m eating, what I’m writing, and when I find inspirational quotes. I tweet about what’s happening in my world–for instance right now I’m a bit snowed in as we’ve received about 24″ or so of snow this weekend and I haven’t got a shovel to dig my car out. . .

My Twitter handle is: @evelynwrites. Follow me.

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I’ve been a member of a fabulous network of business women, created by LaShanda Henry, for a couple of years now. It’s called, Black Business Women Online, and this is an incredible group of powerful, driven, female entrepreneurs who are making things happen.

Earlier this week LaShanda put out a request for articles to be published in a new, free eBook called, “Get Your Business Straight: Black Business Advice from Black Business Women.” I jumped right on it and wrote up an article and submitted it. I got word today that my article was accepted, and it’s been included in the ’sneak peek’ edition that was just released today.

So, I invite you to download a FREE copy and read my article and the other articles inside. If you are a business woman, I invite you to join BBWO where you will meet a great group of professional, driven women who also happen to be a lot of fun to hang out with.

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Guest post by Kathleen Gage

We’ve all heard stories of people making boatloads of money online by selling information products. Yet for most people making their first $100 would make them very happy. You see, once you make your first $100 the next $100 is much easier.

One of the best ways to develop your first information product is write a report. The best part of all is you can charge anywhere from $5 – $25 for the report! In some cases, even more.

Before I get into more on reports I want to explain what information products are. Information products include books, CDs, MP3s, white papers, reports, teleseminars, webinars, Podcasts, etc. In the Internet context, the term refers to electronically deliverable, knowledge-based products.

Anything that contains knowledge and you can deliver it electronically is considered an information product.

One of the easiest (and quickest to create) information products around is a report. And yet, many people have no idea where to start, how to market and how to turn their information into profits. Let’s start at the beginning.

There are ample benefits to creating low priced reports. Nowadays, many consumers would rather pay a few dollars for a fast solution to their problem than have to search around for the information (even if it’s free).

It doesn’t matter what topic, market or industry, reports are a great way to provide solutions to readers and generate great revenue with very little work.

Reports are also a great way to build your opt-in subscriber list. Most people have heard, “The gold is in the list.” This is so true. With a good opt-in list of subscribers you can literally make money at the press of a button.

Reports are so easy to create that you can often do so with little or no money out of pocket. Sure, there is time involved, but when you consider that you can generate hundreds (and even thousands) of dollars in revenue from a 10 – 20 page plus report, the time invested is worth it.

Because your reports will be delivered electronically, there are no storage costs. With physical products you have to keep inventory on hand, find a place to store them and often watch them collect dust. This won’t happen with online reports.

After the initial costs of developing your report, there are literally no additional costs to continue selling them.

With the right systems in place you can generate excellent revenues fast, easy and with what seems like the press of a button.

Kathleen Gage, The Street Smarts Marketer™, is an Internet marketing advisor who works with spiritually aware speakers, authors, coaches and consultants who are ready to turn the knowledge into money-making products and services. Visit http://budurl.com/zmkr for her report on how to develop money making reports.

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Most writers have found themselves staring at a blank piece of paper, or a blank screen and feeling a bit of panic in the pit of their stomach because they can’t think of a single thing to write. The goal of this article is to make sure that you never find yourself in that position ever again. Let’s take a look at a few ways to create a never-ending flow of article ideas.

This article is written on the premise that you will be writing keyword optimized articles for the purpose of article marketing, but the tips on idea generation can really be used for any kind of writing projects.

Plan Ahead
Keep a list of keywords that your web site is focused on, and update this list every week. When you are ready to begin writing, consult this list to get the ideas flowing.

Capture Ideas
Use a small notebook that you carry with you everywhere to jot down ideas that strike you throughout the day. Better yet, jot down these thoughts in your PDA or smart phone and then email them to yourself. If an idea strikes and you don’t have your notebook with you, call and leave yourself a voicemail message with as many details about the idea that you can come up with.

Create a Swipe File
Open a Notepad or word processing document and use this to capture snippets of copy, headlines, graphics–anything that inspires you or gives you an idea to write about. Keep this open while you are writing so that you can take down those quick things that occur to you as you are working on other writing projects.

Brainstorm Article Titles
Come up with a list of titles for articles that you want to write articles for. Copy good titles that you find into your swipe file to inspire you.

Use Mind Maps
Mind mapping is a fabulous way to prime your brain’s creative pump. You simply write a keyword in the center of a piece of paper. Draw a circle around it and jot down thoughts related to that word or idea and draw lines from the keyword out to the related words. Visit mind-mapping.org to find an endless supply of mind mapping and creativity resources.

Try any of these techniques that appeal to you and you will never again face the terror of a blank screen. Keep adding to your swipe file and use the mind mapping technique and you will exponentially expand your productivity.

Evelyn Bourne is a freelance writer who specializes in creating compelling Internet content from SEO articles to blog posts, eBooks and special reports. Guess what? She is available for hire. You are invited to visit http://contentcreation.wordpress.com to find out about how she can create content for you.

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Article marketing is really one of the best ways to create free quality, targeted traffic to your web site. There are plenty of people out there who would love to make use of article marketing, but they are not confident in their writing ability. The goal of this article is to encourage you to give article writing a try because if you can speak clearly enough to be understood, then you can write an article. Let’s get started.

The purpose of your article is to share a bit of useful information about your web site’s topic, product or service. You will write your article using the keywords that you want searchers to use to find your site. In order to accomplish this, the first thing that you want to do in preparation for writing your articles is to gather your list of keywords.

For each article you will need a primary keyword and a secondary keyword. For example, if your topic is weight loss, then you might use your ‘long tail’ keyword as your primary, such as “weight loss tips for diabetics” and the secondary might be “weight loss.”

An article should follow the basic structure of: 1. Introduction, 2. Body, 3. Conclusion. You want to tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them what you have to say and then tell them what you told them. You want your readers to come away from your article feeling as though they benefitted in some way from having read it. The article is your opportunity to share your expertise with your visitors in hopes that they like what they find and decide to click through to your site to find more good information.

To begin, type your keywords at the top of the page and then begin to do a bit of a brain dump. Write down everything you know about your topic as it comes to your mind. Get a friend to ask you questions about your topic and write down their questions and your answers. We are not concerned right now with structure, but simply with getting what’s in your head on the page. When you have a few notes written down, type your keywords into your favorite search engine and take a look at what comes up. Peruse a few web pages with articles written around your keywords to get some fresh ideas. Jot down some more notes. Keep searching until you have found enough information for your article.

Choose three main points and then fill in those points with the information you came up with. Finally, write an introduction for the main points, and a conclusion that summarizes your article and wraps everything up.

Next, you want to create a title for your article. The title should contain your primary keyword, and it serves as the headline for your article. Make sure that your article delivers on the promise made in your headline. Clarity trumps cleverness when it comes to titles because it will be read both by human eyes and search engine spiders.

The last thing you will write is your article’s resource box. This is where you share a link to your web site where your visitor can find more great content like what they see in your article. If you do a search on “article resource box examples” you will find some good inspiration for creating a good resource box for your articles.

See? That wasn’t so bad was it? If you followed these steps you now have a completed first draft of your article. Now go through and do a spell-check and grammar check. If you have MS Word, you can find these items under the ‘Tools” menu.

Don’t stop there. Go ahead and write some more articles and jot down some ideas for additional articles so that the next time you sit down to write you will not be facing a blank screen.

Evelyn Bourne is a freelance writer who specializes in creating compelling Internet content from SEO articles to blog posts, eBooks and special reports. Guess what? She is available for hire. You are invited to visit http://contentcreation.wordpress.com to find out about how she can create content for you.

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I just listed my newest blog project at sitepoint.com. It’s a yoga blog created on the WordPress CMS platform that is all ready for someone to customize it and make it their own. This blog was a labor of love, and the topic of yoga is near and dear to my heart as I have been practicing for over ten years.

The site is a complete package that comes with a Twitter.com ID: yogafittoday, (which, btw, already has over 120 followers) 1 promotional video(already posted to youtube.com and 9 other video sharing sites, 10 unique articles written by me for this site, a seven part yoga tips email series complete with squeeze (opt-in) page and thank you page. It is monetized with adsense and amazon.

Head on over to sitepoint.comand have a look. It makes me feel good to be able to create and offer quality sites that you can add to your portfolio.

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