Are you robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Meaning are you borrowing on other high interest credit cards to pay your existing credit card bills? This is what is mean by the old saying "Robbing Peter to pay Paul". Eventually it will catch up with you as "Peter" will run out of funds and then you will owe both Peter and Paul.
What you should consider is finding a Debt Reduction Service that will help you reduce the principal amount on your credit cards. They will negotiate with your creditors and reduce your existing debt by 40 to 60 percent! This will dramatically lower your monthly payments, and pay off your debts in as little as 1 to 3 years. It is the fastest and simplest way to become debt free without filing for that dreaded Chapter 7 personal bankruptcy.
I recently came across a website that offered a loan to pay off credit cards. I investigated into how much I could save by consolidating all my credit cards bills into one easy payment and I was astounded by how much I could save by doing this! I had been throwing away money each month by only making the minimum payment and hoping that some day I would be debt free.
I started to look for ways to get out of debt after reading an article about how long it would take to pay off my credit card debt if I only made the minimum payment. After reading that I realized I would be in debt forever if I didn't do something about it.
Many people in the past decided on filing for personal bankruptcy when they no longer could pay their biils but since the new finance laws have made it much more difficult now to file, many are instead investigating credit card consolidation instead of filing for bankruptcy. It makes much more sense as it takes many years to recover from filing bankruptcy and the stigma from going bankrupt takes a real toll on you personally.
Credit Card Consolidation
How to Drive Traffic to a Brand New Website
Every single day, more and more people upload brand new websites to the Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be hundreds of thousands of new pages being added daily (if not considerably more!)
The one thing that all of these new websites need in order to make their existence worthwhile is traffic, which leads me to one of the most common questions I am asked and the subject of this newsletter: 'How can you generate traffic to a brand new website?'
Of course, there are a number of different answers to this question and what I would do myself is probably very different to what a completely new Internet entrepreneur would do. The reason I say this is that the first thing I do when launching a new site is make use of my existing website traffic by advertising the new site on my other established sites. In addition, I have the luxury of a large mailing list which I can use to drive traffic to the new site.
I appreciate that anyone starting out in online business won't have these options open to them (and in fairness, neither did I when I first started), so let's look at things from the beginning. Day one of your first website.....
It is a fact that the quickest and probably most effective way of bringing targeted traffic to your website is by paying for it. Now before you rush off and sink $50 into one of those '50,000 hits for $50' schemes, DON'T, this isn't what I mean. Those schemes are largely a complete waste of money. Even if you get the traffic that you are promised (as opposed to some software script visiting your site and pretending to be a visitor), it will not be targeted and therefore there is a very low chance that the traffic will generate sales. When I talk about buying traffic, I mean by using the pay- per-click services offered by most of the big search engines.
You probably already know the sort of thing I mean - for example, Google Adwords. Pretty much any search on Google will display a list of adverts down the right-hand side of the page and these are all paid adverts. Every time you click on one of them, the advertiser pays Google a fixed amount which could be anything from 5 cents upwards (depending upon how competitive the keyword is).
Pay-per-click allows you to be very selective about which keywords your advert is shown for and this allows you to target your advertising perfectly. Other big names in the pay-per-click market include Overture, Espotting and Findwhat.
Now, before you all start emailing me and saying that you already knew about PPC let me just say that I am well aware that people know about it. The problem (as I see it), is that people aren't using this type of service because of the fact that they don't want to spend any money on advertising. That's all well and good but the fact is that the Internet is getting more and more competitive each day and the chances of you building a successful website business from scratch without investing any money are tiny to say the least.
If you want to attract a decent level of traffic to a brand new website in a short period of time, it is almost a necessity that you use pay-per-click on one of the main search engines. If you don't, then the growth of your traffic levels will be painfully slow and inconsistent at best.
When I launched my very first websites I invested heavily in pay-per-click advertising. At one point, I was spending over $6000 a month on Google Adwords alone!!! Seriously I really was spending that much money. It was a constant battle to tweak the website sales copy and continue to test the advertisement text just to make sure that my sales were covering the advertising payments each month. At the time I was probably just about breaking even but buying traffic in this quantity meant that I was able to fine-tune my sales pages and start to build up a list of mailing list subscribers.
Once you have got to the stage where you know your sales pages are converting visitors into buyers, then you can start to gear up with other methods of getting traffic to your site - writing articles, linking strategies, viral methods (ebooks etc), using your eBay 'About Me' page, using your link as a signature when you post on forums etc. All of these methods will win you traffic (and in most cases it will be completely free) but it will take time for the traffic to build to a worthwhile level. If you rely solely on free traffic, you really will be building your business one hit at a time.
Of course, once the free methods of gaining traffic start to pay off, you can begin to wind down your paid methods, though you may not want to - after all, if you are earning more in sales than you are paying for your pay-per-click traffic, why stop it?
As your portfolio of websites grows, you will also be able to share the traffic around a bit by linking to your own sites and of course, if you are capturing your visitors email addresses, you will be building a mailing list of people interested in the products you are offering.
Like I say, I appreciate that the above may not be the ground-breaking secret that you were hoping for but as with so many things online, there really is no secret. Achieving success is simply about taking action and whilst you can succeed online by spending very little money, the chances are that you will succeed a lot quicker by making a bit of an investment. You don't have to be spending thousands of dollars a month as I was but any new business owner should be prepared to invest a few hundred dollars a month in order to get things off the ground....
Top 10 Ways to Make People Buy!
Here's a great list of the top 10 ways to make people become buyers of your product:
1. Use the word "fast" in your ad. People want fast results, fast delivery, fast ordering, etc. Nowadays, we usually value our time more than our money.
2. Use the word "guaranteed" in your ad. People want to be assured they are not risking their hard earned money buying your product.
3. Use the word "limited" in your ad. People want to own or receive things that are exclusive or rare because they are considered to be more valuable.
4. Use the word "easy/simple" in your ad. People want easy ordering, easy instructions, easy to use, easy payments, etc.
5. Use the word "testimonial" in your ad. People want to see believable proof before they buy your product. It should be reputable and specific proof.
6. Use the word "discount/sale " in your ad. People want to find bargains. They could be rebates, one time sales, percentage offers, get one free offers, etc.
7. Use the word "free" in your ad. People want free incentives before they do business with you. They could be free books, accessories, services, etc.
8. Use the word "you/your" in your ad. People want to know that you are talking them. This'll make them feel important and attract them to read the whole ad.
9. Use the word "important" in your ad. People do not want to miss important information that could effect their life. People will stop and take notice.
10. Use the word "new" in your ad. People want new products or services that will improve their life like new information, tastes, technology, results, etc.
RSS: The Wave Of The Future For Ezine Publishing
A powerful innovation, known as RSS or really simple syndication, is destined to revolutionize the way ezines are delivered to their subscribers.
In fact, Microsoft's plans to add RSS to the new version of their Internet Explorer and Longhorn operating system means that RSS will become mainstream very soon.
How can publishing your ezine in RSS profit you?
By using RSS to publish your ezine, you'll be able to completely bypass the email filters that cause many ezines to lose their profitability.
You'll also be able to have complete control over your ezine's content, making your messages much more effective because you won't have to worry about your ezine getting blocked.
In addition, you'll never lose subscribers due to them changing email addresses.
As long as your readers continue to subscribe to your feed, they'll continue to get your RSS ezine, regardless of which email they use.
Now, the key to creating a successful RSS ezine is providing your readers with valuable content.
First and foremost, your readers are going to want useful, informative content from you, and by giving them what they want, you'll be on your way to:
- more sales of your products
- more commissions when you recommend your affiliate programs, and
- more repeat ad sales, because you'll have a very responsive subscriber base.
An excellent way for you to add your own winning content to your ezine is to write articles on the topic your ezine covers.
Through your articles you'll be able to:
- build up your reader's trust in you.
- increase your status as an expert in your field.
- add your own unique voice and style to your ezine.
- successfully promote your business through your resource box at the end of all your articles.
In addition to writing your own articles, you can ask your readers to send you their articles, or you could publish "free to reprint" articles in your ezine.
Some article writers also make their articles available to their affiliates to earn commissions.
You simply join their affiliate program and then publish their articles with your affiliate link in the resource box.
By doing this, you'll be able to easily increase your commissions.
And if you have an affiliate program, you can also use this strategy to get more new affiliates that will successfully promote your products and add to your bottom line.
