Got a passion for exercise, health & fitness? Find a company that offers an affiliate program and you could well be on your way to making money from home. You just blog about what you know about those topics, share your tips, successes, …whatever. Talk about the products from the company you’ve signed up to promote (of course you have your affiliate links and banners on your blog) and as people click on those banners (containing your affiliate id info) and purchase these products- you are making a commission. And if you are thinking to yourself…”but I can’t write!” …there are people out there who have done that part.  Check out Nicole Dean’s Easy Plr- even Lynn Terry is a customer

You’ll find niche (specialized) topics from pregnancy to business to feng shui, cycling, debt  and more! And its so reasonably priced. You’ll also find e-reports, e-courses and e-books.  PLR stands for Private Label Rights and its basically this- someone else has done the writing for you and is giving you permission to use it!

(NOTE: If you have some basic questions about what PLR is and how to use it I have a separate blog about it right here.)

You can  also monetize your blog by just adding Adsense by Google (Google Ads). When someone makes a qualifying “click” through those ads you make money.  There is also Widget Bucks and other ad companies you can use.

You can also sell ads yourself.  My niche is to help women who want to or are working from home. I sell ads to them and often I include blogging about them and their businesses as well.

You can really be creative with your blog- just make sure you are adding value to it and helping your target market reach their goals!

To success!

What got me thinking about this recently was due to a conversation I was having  with my mom about her getting one to advertise her Ebay listings.  She’s a Top Rated Seller on Ebay and sells old or antique post cards.  She doesn’t have a “store”. But she CAN link her Ebay url to a button for advertising if she wants.

A brief word about them.

Buttons and banners are the square and rectangular “cute” pictures you see with store names or ads on them.  I don’t make them, but they are built with code and inserted in that code is the url of your website.

I use WordPress for my website. I can upload images (pictures of whatever) and click the “html” option in my draft to see my code. WordPress also provides an easy way to insert the url you wish to direct someone when they click this image.

For instance,  you can click on WebForU or SuzyQWebDesigns buttons to the right in my sidebar and be taken to their websites. By the way, WebForU designed my header (the top of my website with the juggling mom) and she made my cute “grab my buttons”.  SuzyQ is working a button/banner for a different purpose for me now.

My recommendations for button/banners makers:

WebForU

SuzyQ Web Designs

Ready Banner You can buy a set of matching predesigned banners for one set price here and this person also has a “free” banner generator. I was able to design  a few of the long horizontal banners I may use when the time comes. I created the banner below from Ready Banner.

For FREE miscellaneous premade banners that advertise “sales”, etc. you can visit MisBeehaven Banners. I’ve used theirs on my blog and on my Ebay store when I had one.

Another option is to upload a picture (say of yourself) or a scanned image from a biz card into a “draft” post in your WordPress site add the url of your desired location where indicated and save it.  See example below.  Our family participated in the March for Babies 2009 walk and I linked this image to my Squidoo Lens (page) about Preemies.  (By the way, both our boys were preemies).

We Marched For Babies in 2009.

And I shrunk the image a bit too. I could shrink it down to a 150×150 and it would fit in my sidebar and be the same size as the buttons in my Holiday Ad column. I could’ve typed anything in the caption line where I have “We Marched For Babies in 2009.” You could type a biz name.

Now, I’m no “techy-guru”.  I’m just sharing what I know. I hope this helps some of you!

I recommend these affordable WordPress Hosts.

Okay so I touched base a little recently about some offline marketing ideas and why you probably should be investing a little money into some promotional items (biz cards, magnets, etc.). I finally broke down and took Vista Print up on their offer of free biz cards and then they offered me a whole lotta more freebies that I scooped up all for the price of shipping. I’m glad I finally did it. Because my specialty on this site is highlighting the work at home mom or woman in general and not on selling my own products (physical) I guess I didn’t think much about needing promos. I don’t think that way anymore.

I won’t go all into the offline marketing ideas I already shared. You can find them by clicking here for that post. But I do want to share a few ideas for some online marketing…they are basic. But they could help you out with your bloggin’ adventure or selling business.

Social Networking.

This is how you’ll grow a readership or fan base. My Twitter following is almost at 700. This doesn’t just happen. Or it didn’t “just happen” for me. I pick people I want to follow and some of them follow me back…though there are people that find me first and I decide whether or not to follow them back.

Facebook. I already had a personal Facebook page. I eventually decided to add a Fan Page for my website. I’m pretty strict about what I post on my Fan page. I post my recent posts from my website but I also do something for my Fans on FB that I do not do for my post readers. I post selected freebies or other great deals I come across. I do get a lot of info on freebies and great bargains that I just don’t have time to post about on my website and that is not exactly the niche I want for my website. So when I come across something great I like to share that with my FB Fans. And I’m getting away from giving that info out on my personal profile too, cuz I want my friends to Fan my website page as well.  However, I do share some Misc $$  Savers – you can find them under that category…and keep checking back for more to come!

Other social networks. I just wanted to add, there are many. I don’t have time to be involved with too many.  So I pretty much focus on the two above.

Niche groups/forums.

So this is where you can lock shields with others in your area of interest. I’d like to expand my connections but for now I’m connected with The Mom Pack. Its free to join. You can click on my member button in my side bar for more info. Last I’d read there were possibly over 6 or 8,000 members there. I am a member of Twittermoms too. That group exploded with members fairly quickly and I just haven’t spent much time getting involved over there. But I remember when I joined I was like #124 to join and I think there are thousands there now.

Emails and more.

When you do anything electronically, if you can, put your url in your signature line. Always reminding people, quietly , that you have something going on online that maybe they need to check out.

Relevant Content.

Yeah, you need to blog if you want to get movin’ on the internet. Click here to read a short article about it. And you need to link up with other niche related sites.  At least thats what I’ve been taught.  It supposedly tell the search bots (?) that your stuff is worth crawling…or something like that.  I’d take their word for it. Get your url on sites that you respect and are in your genre and do the same for others. Perhaps you can use the power of  “reference” when you’re blogging.

So, now what do you do? Well, how about becoming a Fan of Hall of Fame Moms and joining me on Twitter too?!  The links are right over there in the sidebar. If you tell me you read this post and are joining me on Facebook or Twitter…I’ll follow you back

Cheers,

I have to share this with all my fellow technically-challenged blogger friends. You know that really cool thing you see on some blogs…the little mysterious box with the scrolly that holds the code that allows reader to just copy/paste your button onto their site? Well, I really don’t know what its called either. But I found a fellow blogger who spilled the goods about how to make one and better yet…(alas, some of us are code-illiterate) she made it so we could just copy/paste the code into our widgets or posts!

So kudos to All About Kimberly for making it so simple to have something so cool on our blog too! There are a couple different ways this trick pans out. I prefer putting the code into the text widget of my sidebar. You can also put it on a post or page and it seems to look different when you do it. But its your choice either way. I like the scrolly box myself.

Thank you a hundred times over, Kimberly! Now go check out Kimberly’s blog for the details

Cheers,

Ps- Okay, just realized that my quotation marks in the code needed changed. So if you grabbed my button before I fixed it, you might need to go in and change the quote marks (replace all the curvy ones w/ the straight up and down ones)… don’t ask…I don’t know.  I just used the keys on my keyboard and did the obvious and it worked. Now my link is up. The image was fine otherwise but the link wasn’t right. Now I see what Kimberly was talking about when she mentioned it in her “how to”.

I haven’t really needed promo items or so I thought and most of what I do on this website is free or pretty cheap so I don’t have much money to spend on that kind of stuff anyways. Well, after years of getting these Vista Print emails for free business cards I decided to try them out. Why not. So I picked out a look and paid my shipping. After I became an “insider” I got an offer I couldn’t refuse again.

They called it “giving away the farm”. All kinds of free stuff for your business and you only paid the shipping. I got a t-shirt, a pen, lots of post cards, rack cards, fridge magnets,  address labels, window decal and car magnet…for free. And I think there were other things too that I just didn’t want at the time. Cost me less than $20 for shipping. I am impressed. I was a bit disappointed with the quality of the fridge magnets but that may have been due to the design I picked. But overall, it was worth the $19 and change I paid.

Did I need this stuff? Do you?

Thats the big question, right? Well, it just so happens that yes, I do and you probably do to. It occurred to me that with Expos, craft shows, fairs, etc it would be worthwhile for me to have these items to hand out to the work from home women I would meet at these shows.

Halloween. If you pass out candy to the trick or treaters you can attach your biz card to packages of candy or hand them to the mom’s leading the troups around the neighborhood. Thanks to Heather at Freebies4Mom.com for sharing that tip!

Ebay & Trade Groups. I sell on Ebay on occasion and I’m part of an all woman trade group. That means I ship. I can stick my promo’s in the mail with the items I ship.

Gift baskets. If you do any of these for friends or family, you might want to stick something useful in there that just happens to have your company info on it.

The Lil Lambs Closet charity sale uses promotion items, churches use promotional items, bloggers use them and so on.  These are just a few ways to use your promo items and get word out about your business, blog or whatever you are promoting!

Save 25-50% off on custom printed products at VistaPrint. Order today!

I did a post the other day about relevant content for your blog. I only shared the list of packages from one of my sources. (Oops!) The other two involve Jimmy D. Brown and some food related PLR. Be sure to check these out. Jimmy D. Brown has earned a name in the internet marketing field and if you have a food related blog you need to check out those too!

Note: The food PLR offers a membership option (which includes getting 40 pieces of recipe content a month) or a non-commitment in which you can just buy the package of your choice. Some of the packages are as follows and vary in price from $7.97 and up.

Crock Pot Soups PLR recipe pack.

Dinner for two recipe pack.

Fruit PLR recipe packs.

Summer time smoothie recipe pack.

And then there are holiday related PLR packs for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Father’s Day, Memorial day and so on. You can find the list by clicking here! Just ignore the membership info if you’re not interested in that. You  DO NOT have to be a member to purchase the content packs.

Cheers,

Did your wish come true?

 Santa’s got some competition this year. Now, maybe its been going on awhile, I don’t know since this is my first year gettng into online marketing and having my own affiliate website. But

 Kelly McCausey was taking “wishes” recently and granting as many as possible with the help of other WAHM’s in the community…and I bet she didn’t have to don a red suit and white beard to get a response.

Being on her mailing list I also got the “alert” to this project and you bet I went for it. I need coaching. Some help from an expert on how to fine tune what I have and how to move ahead in my business is in order here. You know the saying…”ye have not, because ye ask not”…(its from the Bible too, did you know that) or …”ask and it shall be given”…(that too). Since Kelly was asking…I was up to the giving and receiving. So, I wished for coaching and Kelly has offered to grant me my wish! She is giving me an hours worth of coaching for FREE ($60 value)- Yippee! I say Yippee but my Twitter friends probably would say Woot…or something like that.

To see more about this incredible, ingenious project just click here. You may be thinking, “why does she call it incredible or ingenious”…well I’ll tell ya. Because she got lots of people who need something that they can’t afford most likely to put out there wishes and then got the people who could deliver to grant those wishes. So everyone’s helping each other basically. Spreading the love, their resources…know what I mean? Its great. Towards the end there were some items people asked for that required some cash…within a short period of time almost $600 was raised to meet these wishes. What did Kelly think? Click here to read her blog post about it.  (And I didn’t just receive, I did a little giving too.)

I was also blessed to be the winner of a WAHM-Articles contest called “Saving Christmas”. I won 2 hrs of PR help from Diana Ennen of Virtual Word Publishing. Since I have two websites that need an expert’s loving touch I plan to get some marketing help with my Hall of Fame Products site from her.

So, Christmas has come early for me! Thank you to all the generous WAHM businesses and mentors who really do care about helping us other work at home moms, dads, etc succeed when the resources are in short supply! Its truly appreciated!

Also this week I became one of the featured authors at WAHM Articles. Article writing is something you should definitely get into to promote your websites. I just started doing articles and its way easier than I thought. I didn’t need any special software…go ahead and laugh but when your learning new things you don’t know what to expect. Anyways…I’ve already submitted for free, articles to WAHM Articles and www.EzineArticles.com (those are still waiting for approval) and now have two blog-posts at Moms Talk Network.

Now you go get busy too!

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