Chances are you know how to do something that other people need to be educated in. Maybe it’s as simple as you being a plumber. You could easily make videos about how to fix common household problems related to plumbing and sell them for a small fee online. Maybe even give some away as a way to build reciprocity with your audience. If you don’t have a formal education or training, perhaps there is something that you have learned recently that you could leverage into a product.

Something as simple as setting up a proper profile on twitter, YouTube, Google maps etc. might be second nature to you. But a small business owner may not have the first idea about setting these things up. That’s the business that almost anyone could do in their hometown.

It has never been cheaper to start a new business than today. You can have a free website running in less than 30 minutes. There is no excuse for not trying something new every day until you find what works for you. Your online business is no different than the off-line business world. You need to try new things constantly to see what works. Once you find something that works all you need to do is work on scaling it as large as you can.

If you are still asking the basic question, “how do I make money online?” Consider that you might really be asking “what do I want to do when I grow up? If you still don’t know the answer you should probably consider looking at additional education for yourself.

What if you want to add it to your sidebar though? You could probably use the text widget but then you would have to change the code yourself to change it’s size. This is fairly straight forward, but it might be something that people are not interested in doing. This is especially true if they have no coding knowledge.

Like usual though, WordPress has a plugin to help you out. Doesn’t it always? There are a couple plugins that can address this issue, but my favourite is simply called the Video Widget. All you have to do is download this plugin and activate it. Once that is done you will be able to add videos to your sidebar.

When the plugin is activated, you will notice you have a new Video Widget in the widget section of your WordPress back office. A little reminder; the widget menu can be found under the appearance heading. You simply grab the widget and drag it where you want it to appear in your sidebar.

This video widget will give you a few options. It will allow you to title the Widget so you can call it something like “Check This Out” or “latest video”.

It will also allow you to specify the width and height of the videos. This is extremely important because the average video won’t naturally fit in the sidebar.

Another cool feature is right underneath the width and height values. There is a box that will let you put in multiple video IDs. You don’t need the embed code for this plugin, just the video ID. The plugin works with 25 of the most popular video sharing sites so no matter where your video is you should be able to use this plugin. If you have multiple videos, your videos will be chosen randomly for your web visitor.

Underneath that you will see an area to use if you just want a single video. You will also be able to add some text either before the video or after it.

This plugin is no longer updated, but it still works as of WordPress 3.0. If you want to put a video in your sidebar the Video Widget is one of the easiest and most flexible choices you can make.

This short report will cover the most critical items you need to be aware of when it comes to social media for your business.

Everyone is on Twitter and Facebook: OK, not everyone is on Twitter and Facebook, but the amount of users are staggering. It is estimated that these two social media hubs have around 700 MILLION users combined. That is a lot of people. Even more surprising is that all age groups and demographics are represented. Some more than others of course, but even the older demographics are steadily growing. It is likely that millions of people interested in your offer are using these social media services

Social Media Is About Engagement: Joining social media sites like Twitter and Facebook isn’t about spamming your offers. It is about engaging with your potential customers. You want to watch and listen to what they are saying about your product or offer online. You want join some of these conversations, and know when not to. You want to offer helpful advice more often than you advertise. The goal of social media is to built a community around your brand or product, only engaging with customers will allow you to do that.

Monitor Your Reputation: Social media makes it easier to share information faster than ever. People seem to love to circulate bad reviews of businesses or professionals. One irate customer can lead to thousands of people seeing their rant in minutes. You want to ensure you have a presence in social media so you can meet these claims heads on. You can defend yourself from any slander, explain misunderstanding or make things right with the customer. Any of these actions will lead to more loyal followers.

Get Staff Involved: The number one complaint I hear is: “I am a business owner, I don’t have the time to be on Twitter and Facebook 24 hours a day.” Great point. Neither do I actually. I don’t think many business people in general do. I have two responses to that. First, it doesn’t take a huge time commitment to do the minimum required to have at least a basic social media presence. Secondly, get your staff involved. Younger staff will often enjoy a task like this. One tip though, make sure you have a couple staff participate, that way if you lose one of them there is no pause in your social media marketing.

Where Do I Start: We have went over why social media is important, and some of the ways you should use it. What should you do if you want to get started today? I think at the very minimum you need a Twitter and Facebook presence. You can set up your Twitter account at Twitter.com. I suggest that you fill out your profile fully and add a picture. On Facebook, you will want to create a personal profile and then use that profile to create a “fan page”. A regularly updated Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account are basic social media steps that all businesses should take.

As a consumer base we are growing more cynical and wary of traditional advertising. If you want to ensure that you can still reach a broad audience then you need to tap into social media. This relatively new technology allows businesses unparalleled access to their customers. At the end of the day you want to be where your customers are, so don’t ignore the 700 million people on Twitter and Facebook.

The best way to go is to start by building a big keyword list of words and phrases that are closely related to your niche. Ideally, you will want to find keywords that get at least 1,500 searches a month and no more than 20,000 competitors.

Once you have your keyword list built all you need to do is to pick one keyword per article and / or blog post and write a well written article around that keyword. You should then include the keyword in the title of your article or blog post.

Please do not make the mistake of thinking that the more keywords you include the better. That is called keyword stuffing and it will do far more harm than good. The search engines have remarkably sophisticated algorithms that can pick up on this and your article will be penalized if you try.

Instead use the keyword once in your article or blog post title, once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and once or twice throughout the rest of your article. You want the article to read naturally.

Remember, you aren’t just trying to attract the search engines, you want to make sure your article makes sense for human readers too, actually this should be your main focus. You don’t have to short change your readers just to keep the search engines happy, you can do both.

You want to strive for a keyword density of no more than 3%. Obviously the longer the article the more keywords you can include and still make that 3% goal. I recommend you keep your article and blog posts at about 350 to 500 words in length.

That is the optimum length because it is long enough to allow you to include some useful information without being so long that it turns off any potential readers. If your article is too short it just looks like it is all for the purpose of keyword stuffing and many search engines and article directories don’t appreciate that.

On the other hand, internet surfers are notoriously short on attention span, so to get the most out of your articles you can also include bullet points and keep your paragraphs short and to the point. Also, don’t make your articles too long, over 500 words, or too short, less than 350 words.

There is a lot more you can do with search engine optimization if you want to invest the time and effort. But, for most people just a little knowledge and keyword placement in your articles or blog posts can really help you get more traffic to your website.

Any PLR product you create should include the specific rights you wish to grant and/or disallow.  Commonly, those will be found in a plain text file that follows this general template (Feel free to use this one in fact, just change the yes’s and no’s to your desired choices):

Usage Rights:

[YES] Can edit, take apart, add to, or sell as is

[YES] Can be bundled with other products

[YES] Can be offered as a bonus

[YES] Can use the content as a viral report

[YES] Can be used to create audio/video products

[YES] Can give them to your affiliates to publish to promote your products

[YES] Can be used for opt-in bonuses (newsletter signups, etc.)

[YES] Can be added to paid membership sites

[YES] Can be offered through auction sites

[YES] Can claim full authorship

[YES] Can alter ecover graphics

[NO] Can be used as web content

[NO] Can Sell resell rights

[NO] Can sell master resell rights

[NO] Can sell private label rights

[YES] Add to free membership sites

This is not the entire scope of usage rights you can grant or withheld, but it is a great starting point, and feel free to use it for your own creations.

I won’t break down every right as they are fairly self explanatory but their are a couple that take a little more consideration then others:

[NO] Can be used as web content – This right basically means people can’t break down your products for blog posts, or website copy.  This is a right you need to think about.  A lot of our products are full product suites that we fill lose value if they are found as web content across the net.  If we were just selling a pile of articles, it might make sense to allow them to be used as web content.

[YES] Add to free membership sites – This is also a right to consider.  If you feel the value of your PLR product is hurt by offering it to free membership sites, then feel free to use no.

[NO] Can sell private label rights – This is one we had to add to our products after initial launch of our site.  We were allowing people to sell OUR PLR as their own PLR products – welllll that was a problem because then they’d populate entire PLR membership sites with just our products.  We essentially were creating competition every time we created a product.  Not a great business model.

When you release PLR products, remember to include usage rights.  It might take a couple tries to balance, but the best combination of rights will protect the value on your PLR while still leaving it desirable to online marketers.

While you are free to copy ours, make sure you consider what works best for YOU.  You can change yes’s to no’s, you can add or delete rights – but at the end of the day you want a list of rights you and your buyers can live with.

Does anyone have any other usage rights they add to their own products?  Let us know in the comment area.

Most single keywords will just be way too competitive. They will literally have millions of online marketers all competing over that word. That is why the long tailed keywords make so much more sense.

It will be much easier to rank for the term, “cheap golf balls” than it would be to rank for the term “golf balls”. Either way you will still have a lot of monthly searches but you may actually have a shot (pardon the pun) of ranking for the longer keyword phrase.

Don’t get misled by the huge amounts of monthly searches some keywords get. If they are getting hundreds of thousands of searches each month you can bet that there are millions of competitors all fighting over the scrapes.

Why bother? You can easily compile a long list of long tailed keywords. Each keyword can average over 1,500 searches a month. And the best part? You can rank high for most if not all of the keywords on your list.

Just ranking high for one of those keywords might not get you a lot of traffic, but what if you had a list of 20 long tailed keywords, each receiving about 1,500 searches a month and you were able to rank high for all of them? That is a lot of traffic, traffic that you just wouldn’t get if you tried to rank for the much more competitive keywords.

You can use the Google Keyword Tool, which is free, or many other online versions which are not, to find a great list of keywords associated with your niche market. Just start off by using a fairly broad term and then burrowing down to find a nice long list of highly targeted keywords that consist of 3 or more words.

Once you have your keyword list you can then use those keywords for many things such as article marketing and on site search engine optimization (SEO). This will allow your website or your articles to show up high on the first page of Google for a particular keyword. That means a lot of highly targeted traffic to your website… all for free.

Another important thing to keep in mind, you need to make sure that the keywords you choose not only have a decent number of monthly searches, and that they aren’t too competitive, but also that they are highly relevant to the content of your website.

This is another parameter the search engines use to determine the rank of your site. If the keywords that you are targeting do not relate really closely to your website you won’t rank as high for that keyword. It’s not a big deal, just throw out any of the words on your list that don’t relate directly to your website.

Finding the best keywords phrases for your online marketing is a very important step to take to assure your online success.