Training Archives - Monetization Magic

Website Design/Development versus Virtual Assistance

Let’s start with some definitions:

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; interface design; authoring, including standardized code and proprietary software; user experience design; and search engine optimization.

Web development is a broad term for the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, and social network services. A more comprehensive list of tasks to which web development commonly refers, may include web design, web content development, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, web server and network security configuration, and e-commerce development. Among web professionals, “web development” usually refers to the main non-design aspects of building web sites: writing markup and coding.

A virtual assistant (typically abbreviated to VA, also called a virtual office assistant) is generally self-employed and provides professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients remotely from a home office.

What does all this mean? In layman’s terms, basically the website developer builds the house, the website designer decorates the interior of the house and the virtual assistant creates the open house party. Now if your foundation cracks, typically you would not call the person who created your open house party, you would call the person who built the house.

What I see happening in the market place is that in a rush to make some money, folks are advertising that they are some sort of web/virtual guru who have no business even attempting much less getting paid high dollars until they have some training, certification, degree, sizable portfolio or massive experience. But they’ll only charge me $2.00 per hour! That’s great! How do you know they’ll finish the job? On time? With quality workmanship? It seems the entrepreneur is now learning exactly what the Fortune 500 companies had to learn and that is that not everyone has a great work ethic, experience and commitment and it doesn’t matter how much you saved on the job if those ingredients are not included because what you’re really losing is the time that you could’ve been pursuing income generating opportunities. You’ll never recover that time.

Technically what I see happening as a result of the blur between these terms is half built websites, websites that look like a 13-year old built them, hacked websites due to non-existent security, angry entrepreneurs who are dazzled by the buzz words but don’t really know what they want beyond they want a professional looking website that brings them money every month.

To help bring clarity to the intimidating task of hiring your technical team, here are 7 basic questions that you can start with to get you closer to what you really want:

1. How long have you been doing web design, web development, virtual assistance? 2-3 years is a good starting point

2. Do you offer a guarantee? If they won’t even guarantee that they will honor their word and deliver what is promised, RUN AWAY!

3. May I have a link to your online portfolio? Even someone who is just starting out will have done some practice work and will have digital portfolio.

4. May I see your testimonials? If they haven’t started collecting testimonials, ask for references who can speak about their quality of work.

5. Do you maintain the solutions that you build? If they’re not willing to maintain the solutions they build, again RUN AWAY!

6. Do you have any degrees or certifications? Degrees and certifications tell you that this individual has spent some time, money and effort to advance their knowledge. Yes, there are some who choose to teach themselves and that’s where the portfolio comes into play.

7. Who are you currently being professionally coached by? A true professional is always learning new techniques, expanding their pool of knowledge!

When you’re starting out as an entrepreneur, don’t be afraid to work with a true professional who has experience and produces quality work. If that little voice in your head says, “But you can’t afford it!” acknowledge the little voice by saying “Thank you for sharing” and ask the professional how you can work together to make this more affordable for you. You may need to sell some of your products and services before you can contract the professional or perhaps they have a payment plan that you can take advantage of that is not advertised up front.

10 Biggest Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Starting Out

By SoftwareGirl

While it is expected that someone just beginning a business is going to make mistakes, there are many which can be avoided. Wouldn’t it be nice to know where the largest potholes are on your freeway to a successful and profitable business venture?

Thinking “I can figure it out”

I only work with smart women who can “figure it out”. In fact, given enough time, I believe you eventually will figure it out. I’ve been in the IT industry for over 20 years and I’ve invested well over $100k in not only my formal education but also sitting at the feet of millionaires to learn what I know today. Do you really want to go to that expense and effort? Probably not, if you know there is another way! Would you rather have someone hand you a template and some really easy instruction and get it done?

Saying or believing “I Can’t Afford It” , (whatever IT is)

I used to say this all the time and I was mystified that my reality was that I was frustrated all the time. When I began to not say this and instead I asked a better question. The better question was, “How can I afford this?” and almost like a miracle, a way appeared that I did not see before that made it possible for me to be able to afford what I wanted. You would be amazed what you can create for yourself when you choose to ask a better, more empowering question!

You don’t believe in yourself enough to truly charge what you’re worth and get it

Most of the women that I work with are not charging what they are worth in the beginning. They’re also overworked and stressed out about not being able to meet their financial obligations. There is a formula to what you should charge for your signature program. Do you find that you are not able to spend time with the important people in your life? Do you eat meals at your desk? Are you tired? Are you creating a marketable product for someone else who charges 10 or more times what you are paid to create it? You’re probably not being paid what you’re worth.

Not doing enough marketing or follow up

Marketing and followup are systems that you use to help you identify which people need what you have to offer and which people know other people who need what you have to offer. Do you have a system for following up with people you meet after you’ve spent your time and money at a networking event? Do you know what you’ve sent to whom and when? Do you have a stack of cards on your desk that you promise yourself you’ll call but somehow you never have time to call? Do you know what to say when you pick up the phone? You need a system so that follow up is a breeze and you can delegate the follow up to someone else when the time is right.

Not getting personal, professional, interactive or memorable enough in your marketing/website

Do you have a website? Does it make you money every month? Your website needs to perform certain functions and if it doesn’t, you’re likely missing money that could be going into your bank account. Do you know what functions the website should be performing? If not, go to the top of my website right now and sign up to receive the list. It’s free, I don’t keep these things a secret!

Talking too much about what you do to prospects

Your prospects do not care about the vehicle you use to get them what they want. They do care about the transformation you provide for them. They are wild about the transformation. Tell them how much better their life will be once they invest in your program or service. Typically, your prospect has a pain point or a problem that you are going to solve for them. For instance, a leak in the roof. They generally do not care how it will be repaired as long as they know that it will be done efficiently, for a fair price and you won’t leave a mess. They do want to know that the leak is fixed, it won’t leak again and the roof will look nice afterwards. That is the transformation they are looking for.

Not having clear and easy systems for what needs to get done, lead generation and sales processes too

Clear and easy systems help you to automate many of your time consuming and repetitive tasks. If I had to think about when each of my prospects customers received a piece of email from me, my brain would quickly overflow. It’s important to get the right systems in place and at the same time not have an overly complicated system that will not provide enough value for the amount of money you spend for it. For example, let’s say you’re just starting out. You have maybe 20 people on your current email list and you sell a $67 product. Would it make sense for you to spend $197 a month on an email generation system? Probably not. You want to scale your systems to the appropriate size of your company.

You get too busy to pay attention to important $ tasks

Are you so busy filling orders that you don’t have time to do your marketing each week? As a result, you experience gaps in your cash flow. You should never be the reason why your cash does not flow in your business. You want to clear all obstacles between your customers wallet and your bank account. Tracking your money is an important task so that everyday you know what your money goal is for the money and what you need to do to attain that goal. You need to know which marketing efforts will yield how much money and when that money will appear in your bank account. If you’re falling short, you should immediately know what needs to happen in order to meet your goals for the month.

You simply don’t know what you don’t know and haven’t invested time or money yet in finding out

While it is true that there is a lot of free information out on the internet, most beginning business owners do not know what to do to produce a given outcome in their business. They try this and try that and while the information may be valuable it may be too advanced or not solve the right issue for what you have going on today. The result of this is wasted time and effort. You won’t find everything you need to know out on the internet for free even if you knew exactly what to look for. That information is like precious gold nuggets and it is attained by investing in your self and your business. When I invest in myself and my business, I push my beliefs and as a result I typically will take better notes and actually implement what is being taught. By investing with my money and my time, I am committing to a program and the instructor is committed to me. I experience breakthroughs that I normally would not have experienced by just looking for free information on the internet.

Not hiring a coach

A coach is like the engineer for your business. While it might be expensive to hire an engineer or coach, within a short period of time, they can look at your business and analyze exactly what you need to do to produce your desired outcome. They are valuable just for their experience and knowledge. They often have simplified the exact systems you need to a fill in the blanks form that can take years off effort and expense off of your learning curve. I have studied with several coaches and I have done more and gone farther than I ever would have if I had not hired a coach. Coaches work with a high caliber of student who has also invested in their business and because you share the common bond of the coach’s training it is much easier to create a joint venture partnership with your fellow classmates. An experienced coach can also tell you what to concentrate on and what not to be concerned with which will provide you with a lot less drama and more calm, sleep filled nights.

Monetization Series

By SoftwareGirl

We’re kicking off the year with a series of training events on how to monetize your existing business. If you’re just starting out, these training events will help you too. The trainings are 3 hours in length and cover some amazing content. This is the roll up your sleeves information that you need to actually get into action. No fluff. No hype. This is the real deal!

Just as results come from our thoughts which are transformed into our feelings which is typically transformed into action, I want you to get the results. It’s great to receive great information; however, most folks get all motivated and then somewhere on the way to the action step, something happens…maybe confusion sets in or life happens or something doesn’t work out right and the action step doesn’t quite get put into place.

Well, no more, I say! I want you to get the awesome results that you’re after so I’m including a Q&A call after the training call so that you’ll have time to put the training into action and if something is not working right, you can ask questions and get back on track! What?! You mean I get support for the training?! Yes! That’s right! This is Build It Yourself training; however, you can consider it your “Get It Done” training. I want you to get the pieces done so that you can move on to the more exciting bits of what you do!

Yes, we’ll be dealing with technology; however, I want to help you through and shield you from as much of the crazy coding as possible. We’ll be doing some cutting and pasting but that’s about the worst of it. You don’t need to be intimidated by technology any more! You can literally look over my shoulder as I do the actual work to get these items done (as in “off your to-do list!”). As a bonus, you may also get some insider information from me along the way about no cost and easier ways of getting these items done.

The topics for the training events are as follows:

Build Your Bodacious List
How to Build an Income Producing Website
Traffic Creation Made Easy
Newsletter Creation Made Easy
Time Leveraging for the Already Overwhelmed
Social Media for Lead Generation
10 Steps to eBook Creation
How to Create Your First Audio Series
Membership Programs
How to Automate Your Operations (and get your sanity back)
Teleseminar Creation
No List Marketing: What to do while you’re building the list
How to Use Webinars to Expand Your Circle of Influence
How to Create Joint Ventures
Proper Pricing Strategies
Creating Holiday Cash
Creating Workshops
Product Creation

Note the exact names for these events will likely change; however, the topics will remain the same. Most of these events will include live training, webinars and the Q&A call after you’ve had time to implement the material. The live training and webinar will both be 3 hours in length. That is 7 very full hours of content! The training will be held on the weekends.

I’m attempting to accommodate folks from all walks of life which different demands on their time so some of the training is held on Saturday morning, some on Sunday afternoon. If you are unable to attend the training due to physical or time constraints, it’s no big deal, it’ll be recorded so you can catch up on your schedule. You can even submit your questions to me for the upcoming call on the AskSoftwareGirl! tab and I’ll do my best to address your question on the recorded Q&A call so even if the Q&A call happens in the middle of your night, you can rest assured that your concerns will be addressed.

Each of these trainings is easily a $397.00 value. If you register early enough, you will receive significant early bird pricing. For example, the Build Your Bodacious List class will be this weekend, January 7, 2012 and there is current early bird pricing for registration of $97.00 available on the Monetization Series page at http://monetizationmagic.com/monetization-series/.

Creating Your Own ATM

By SoftwareGirl

When is the List Used?

The list is used each and every time you wish to communicate with more than one person that you do business with. You can also create multiple emails to be sent out to certain people on the list over the course of days, weeks, or months. You can create different series of emails to be used for different processes in your business. For instance, you might have a certain communication that happens consistently to welcome a customer, to walk a customer through a process, to announce a new product or even to say good bye to a customer.

Creating Your Own ATM

By creating regular communication with your customers, your business will always be top of mind with your customers. You can use the autoresponder to give your customers regular tips and training as well as to periodically offer them a product or service to help them to move forward in what they are doing.

Because you are able to make an offer through the email, once your list becomes large enough, you will learn what your normal conversion rate is so that you know as an example if you have 100 people on your list and you make an offer that typically 20 people will purchase what you are offering.

If you have a follow on product for what they just purchased because of the email you just sent, wouldn’t it make sense that you would offer them the follow on product within a few weeks? Of course, it would! As such, since you can calculate your conversion rate (percentage of people who buy), you can also know approximately the dollar amount of sales you can expect when you make an offer.

If creating money this way is interesting to you, you’re in for a treat. I’m still working out the details; however, I believe you’ll be excited by what I have to share!

Add an HTML Signature to WebMail

By SoftwareGirl

Have you ever wanted to add a nice HTML signature to your webmail? Most webmail clients do not allow the display of HTML without a VPS or dedicated server hosting account. There is one webmail client which will allow this feature. The webmail client that allows you to set up an HTML signature is called RoundCube. Basically, inside the signature setup area there is a check box that when checked will allow for this functionality. I have created this video to show you exactly what to do:

httpv://youtu.be/5sc6ObIR0zQ

The code that I refer to in the video is:

Your name goes here Your position goes here Your Company Name Your Tag Line <a href=”mailto:yourname@yourdomainname.com”>yourname@yourdomainname.com</a> Your phone number goes here
<img src=”Your Logo Location” alt=”” />

You will want to change all the highlighted areas to the appropriate settings for your environment prior to placing in the signature area. If you need to host your image or logo outside of your normal hosting environment, you can set up a free account with Image Shack. I’ve used them in the past and they are a great resource.

YOUR Website Advertising 123 Easy!

By SoftwareGirl

A great way to monetize your website is to sell advertising space. You can easily create and sell 125×125 pixel ads and place them on your website using nothing more than Microsoft Paint and some HTML code. You do NOT need fancy software to put the ads on your website. A typical ad price would be $50 per month for a 125×125 ad. This is 123 Easy. If you can cut and paste you can do this!

1. Create the Ad

Likely the advertiser has their own 125×125 already created and you can simply upload that; however in the event that they don’t, you can create an ad for them and charge them appropriately.

2. Create the Ad Structure

The simplest ad structure that you can use is a table. The table contains at least one row and cells. Each ad image is uploaded into the cell of the table and a link pointing to the destination is attached to the image. The basic structure code is as follows:

<table>

<tr><td>Ad Image 1</td><td>Ad Image 2</td></tr>

</table>

Calm down! It’s a little bit of code and the good part is that WordPress will create the rest for you. You can copy and paste, right? Simply copy the code above and put it into a temporary post using the HTML tab. Find the HTML tab in the image below:

We won’t be keeping the post, we’ll just use it for a working area for the moment.

Click back on the Visual tab and you will see a basic table. It will look like this:

Ad Image 1

Ad Image 2

Don’t worry about the size as it will self adjust as we move forward. Breathe! The rest is just copy and paste. Highlight the words “Ad Image 1” in the first cell of the table. Click on the Upload/Insert button:

Search for the ad you which to insert and then click on the button to upload the image. Then click on the Insert into Post button. Once the image has been inserted, click on the image and click on the Link button and type in the destination for the ad image.

If you happen to have 2 ads, simply repeat the process to get the 2nd one into place. Once the ads are in place and linked, click on the HTML tab again. You’ll see a lot of HTML code back there. You created that! Now we’re going to select all of it (you can hold down the CTRL key and click on the A key if you have a PC). Next we will copy it in preparation for step 3.

3. Place the Ad Structure Into a Text Widget

Open a text widget and simply paste the code into the lower area. You will not need a title. Go ahead and click on the blue Save button at this point. Open up another browser window and admire your work! Next, click on each of the ads to ensure that they link to the proper destination.

That’s all there is to it!

How to Install the Latest Release of WordPress 3.0.5

By SoftwareGirl

WordPress 3.0.5 Addresses Security Vulnerabilities

2 Vulnerabilities:

Could have allowed a Contributor‐ or Author‐level user to gain further access to the site.
An information disclosure issue has also been fixed that allowed Author‐level users to view the contents of posts which they should not be able to see, such as draft and private posts.

I have prepared a step-by-step video to assist you through the process of updating WordPress to the latest release or you can follow along with the detailed instructions below the video.

In WordPress, log in to your dashboard. In the dashboard at the top of the screen in the gold bar, you will see a message that advises that WordPress 3.0.5 is available.

On the left at the top of the screen underneath Dashboard, you will see an option called Updates with a circle and a number in the circle.

Go ahead and click on Updates. You will now see a screen for WordPress Updates. Click on the Update Automatically button which will launch the update process.

Once it has successfully loaded, it will display a screen telling you the steps that it is undertaking to update WordPress

As you can see, WordPress has updated successfully. From here, you can click on the Go To Dashboard link to return you to the dashboard.

If you have any questions, submit your question on the Ask SoftwareGirl tab.

New 7-Day eCourse Teaches How to Make a Blog

By SoftwareGirl

You’ve heard of a blog but you’ve not really sure if you really can blog to the bank. Having a blog that is monetized properly can introduce 10 or more additional independent streams of income to your business.

A website is the equivalent of a billboard that is passed by everyday by thousands of people…but who passed by? A blog is the equivalent of having a pleasant greeter at the door of your business who can provide your customer with valuable content. It can collect your readers information for you so that you can continue providing information that your customer desires time and time again.

The blog you will learn to create from this training is not the same as a free blog. You will actually own and control the content in this blog. It will become an asset that increases the value of your business. How many other assets can you create that provide 10 or more independent streams of income to your business?

It creates a massive amount of leverage for your advertising dollar. It can help you establish your personal brand and it helps prospective customers get a good flavor for your knowledge and expertise. It helps your audience to identify with the services that you offer as well as learning how they can best interact with your business.

Your blog always gives out the proper information about your business. It never gets sick, goes on vacation, gets sick or goes to sleep. It is available to your prospective customer all the time. It’s never rude or in a bad mood. It always says the exact words you want it to say and gives the impression about your business that you design.

You don’t have to be a great writer to have a blog. There are lots of high school and college age students who can assist you in creating your content for very little money.

This 7-day eCourse is a step-by step tutorial that will guide you to creating your first blog and is available to you by simply providing your information below. You do not need to know how to program or write HTML code. If you can write an e-mail, you can create your own blog!

Take your first step! Get registered at http://monetizationmagic.com/upcoming-classes/ today!