Click here to watch my video on How to double your income in under 6 months.

We all know a person who is extremely talented at doing something and they treat it almost like a hobby. Perhaps it is a hobby for them. But when you need help fixing your car or with a computer they are there and lend a hand for next to nothing. Perhaps they are a good friend or acquaintance but at the time you would have been willing to give your left arm to have whatever working again. Why do you think so many people pay tons of money to the Geek Squad?

What is your true value?

Your true value is what you think you are worth. You might lie to yourself and say, “I don’t know as much about SEO as So-and-So”. That doesn’t matter. If you think you are worth $10/hr, you are going to make $10/hr. We all know people who make a lot of money doing something they have no right doing because they are a complete, incompetent a-hole. But that doesn’t stop them now, does it?

Value is a frame of mind and the sooner you establish what your true value is, the quicker you can start making some real money. This will likely prompt you to make some drastic changes, but that is ok. In six months, I went from a 40 hour per week, 23k per year help desk technician to working 15-20 hours per week and making over 86k per year! I did that all by making a choice and so can you.

How do I find my true value?

You probably think the idea of simply asking for more money is crazy, but in essence that is what I did. The most important thing you can do for your emotional, financial or spiritual life is to simply ask for what you want. It’s not enough to ask for more money. You have to ask for specifically what you want. I want $50,000 per year and the flexibility to work from home.

There is one caveat to this asking for more business. You have to believe it is possible to reach what you are asking. Asking for a million dollars is nice but if you don’t truly believe that having a million dollars is possible you’ll have a very hard time reaching that goal. Aim for a goal that is substantially higher than what you are making now but within reach. Start with doubling your income first.

If you currently make $25k a year, make your goal $50k a year. Then take that $50k and figure out how much per day it takes to reach that goal. Figure the average workweek of 40 hours and 50 weeks per year minus vacation and you get ($50,000/50 weeks = $1,000 per week)($1,000/40 hours = $25 per hour or $200 per day). This could be as easy as setting up one WordPress blog/business website per week, per client, granted you know how.

Nobody should have a problem trying to figure out how it is possible to make $1,000 per week. If you are having a problem figuring out how to make additional passive income, it is probably due to not having a specific enough goal. Try it once for one week and once you prove you can reach the $1,000 goal for one week I am sure you can find a way to repeat that.

What are people willing to pay?

The short answer is a lot.

People are willing to pay any amount granted the value is there. It is not their job to prove your value assessment right but your job to show their investment is worth the value you offer. This starts with you. Going back to how much you value yourself, your time and your skill set is key. If you don’t truly believe you are worth $25/hr then you wont make $25/hr. You will continually find yourself in low paying jobs constantly grinding away to make ends meet.

I had my wake up call when a family friend put me in my place. I learned from that experience (the one I describe in the video above) that making more money isn’t about the opportunities but about your mindset and your goals.

If you are in the business of solving people’s problems, you’ll find they’ll be willing to pay just about anything in order to make the pain of whatever go away. If you are in the business of providing additional value to their already successful business, you’ll need to show how and why they need to pay you to ensure they don’t end up in pain. The Internet is changing at an exponential rate. It used to be ok to just have a website, an online brochure, but now millions of people (customers) are hanging out in places like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and consume content by the bucket loads.

Tons of businesses are finding themselves behind the 8-ball when it comes to things outside their business. If you believe you are worth more and your value justifies, you’ll have no problem finding clients who are willing to pay that exact amount. You’ll find that you will begin to make deals that fall right in line with what you are asking for. Then you simply ask for more again.

Ideas on how do you increase your value to your clients?

Pain is the number one motivator for 99.99% of the human population. I am not saying to start threatening people with physical pain in order to gain their business but to show them how you can stop a certain type of pain for them. If their company is online and their sales have remained the same or tapered off, show them how you can gain them a larger audience.

You can begin by showing your client the number one business website in their field in comparison to theirs. Now show them how quickly their competition is adapting to the changing circumstances and how you can help them to avoid becoming irrelevant in the future. Relevancy and eyeballs equal more sales and profit. Then lay out a plan for them to regain what has been lost and then where it will go from there. You’ll have to rely on past experiences to make sure you aren’t promising a bill of goods you can’t deliver.

Another way would be for you to work for a small base pay and take a percentage of sales or start selling the leads you generate. In the end you can charge a lot more this route because you are taking on more of the burden or risk. This will vary with the amount of trust you have with your clients.

Ideas on how do you increase your value to your boss?

This can be a little trickier. This will depend a lot on your relationship with your boss coupled with some good negotiating skills.

Start by framing up exactly what your intentions are. Creating a solution for a common problem and/or a way to improve the way things currently are. This of course can raise lots of opposition, especially depending on where you are in the organization and whether or not your organization has people willing to change or adapt. For this very reason I decided to quit my full-time job and pursue the life of the self-employed. Others have stayed with their employers and succeeded massively.

For instance, my good friend has stuck with his corporate job and started heaping all of the value he could onto his back. This year he received twice the raise that all my old coworkers received and has positioned himself as an authority to significantly increase his income in the next two years. All of this amid a recession. He was able to position himself as a high commodity in the workspace. This can be done a number of ways.

Firstly, determine what you want and make a plan to reach it. The people who win wars don’t necessarily have better warriors but better plans for reaching their goal. Decide what your goal is and start your plan of reaching it. This will likely not happen overnight, so be patient. If you need to increase your value, then do so.

Secondly, by increasing your interaction within the workplace and with your company’s clientele you gain more leverage. If my friend above were to leave that job for another, chances are high that it would be for much more money due to the added value he could bring to the table. A more complete package. By positioning yourself within a company as an invaluable resource, you arrive to the table with much more bargaining power. This isn’t to say that anything is a sure thing but with the right goal and understood value you can drastically change your position.

Lastly, you can use your past experiences and successes as a bargaining chip for your new future boss. If your current employer doesn’t fully appreciate the value you bring to the table, another will if presented correctly. Know exactly what your goal is and if your current path is not leading to it, find another. That could possibly mean relocating your job.

Conclusion

The most important thing to know is where you want to be and by when. Answer those two questions and you’ll find a way to arrive on time.

I know I am not alone in finding ways to drastically increase my income in a short time-frame. Tell me about some different ways you have exploded your income.

By the end of this post you will be able to make money via Twitter marketing.

First off, I am tried of people saying they can’t figure out how to make money by using Twitter. There are over 60 million people on the thing and you can’t figure out how to monetize Twitter off of that? Seriously?

I am not going to go over the wrongs or rights of the different Twitter marketing ideas presented here or how to play the Twitter game. To each their own.

I have been a part of these ideas at some point in order to bring you this list. I do not continue to use all of these Twitter marketing techniques. Some were purely for trial/error or experimentation.

Twitter is a communication tool

Twitter’s sole purpose is to help people communicate, period. If you are broadcasting on Twitter like an ad machine you’ll constantly need to add more and more Twitter followers to your list to sustain the click-thrus in order to make money. This is a waste of time and never ends.

Work on building relationships and stroking egos. A Twitter account with 200 loyal and dedicated followers will do more than an account with 100,000. I promise.

With Twitter’s open and easily accessible API there are a 1,000,001 programs enabling you to find people who would be interested in you, your product, site, business or whatever.

Gain Niche Traffic from Twitter

It used to be that you could create a Twitter account for the purpose of promoting your website and masses of people would flock to everything tweeted by everyone. This is not the case anymore.

People have begun to find a balance in the things they like to see and experience on Twitter and will drop over-promoting assholes in two seconds flat.

With that said, if you use Twitter and your account properly, you can find a goldmine of like-minded people for your niche site. As you establish relationships with these people they will in fact click-thru to your site.

Most of these click-thrus to your site will not click on ads, but they will click on affiliate links and reviews. If you are running a niche site about lawn and garden and promoting this site with Twitter, don’t expect to make any money from Adsense. If you are linking people to product review pages with some good bits of info and some Amazon affiliate links, you’ll do much better. If people click on the link in a Twitter stream, they are going there to read the content, not click on a Google ad.

Search.Twitter.com is a goldmine

The old fashioned way of searching for people on Twitter is still possible by running search queries through search.twitter.com and watch the stream. With the advent of Twitter programs, much of this can be done with many additional features allowing you to cover more ground at one time.

I use CoTweet a lot for my Twitter marketing and for managing my various Twitter accounts. Currently CoTweet is in beta and you’ll have to beg them to let you in. The best thing you can do with Twitter is find people who are like-minded for your website or community.

With websites like twellow.com/twellowhood and others you can find lists of people who have related interests. Tweepsearch.com will allow you to search people’s Twitter profiles/bios and so on. If you’re into lawn and gardening, search people’s Twitter bios for gardening and check them out. See if you have anything in common and begin a conversation.

Having your pulse on your Twitter community enables you to make decisions about topics, trending topics, possible products to review and much more. If you see some person talking about xyz widget very favorably and that widget has an affiliate program or is sold on amazon.com, imagine what you can write a review about…

Then go back to the thing you know best and rank that review in the serps for all the organic traffic for people to find and buy.

Review Products and Services

Information is key to determining what you can write about and make some money. If people who are not invested in a product or service are still interested and talking about it, that is a potentially good product to review.

Do your homework. Write a review of whatever and rank that for people to find. When you publish the article/review, it is natural to Tweet that out to your followers, and if you have the right followers, they will do the same to help promote you. This isn’t where the money is made, but it helps so don’t count it out.

The sure money is using the info gleamed from Twitter to determine what people want and have an appetite for.

Selling Ads on Twitter

There are dozens of ad companies that are jumping into the sponsored tweets game such as ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets and Twittad.  These companies are trying to help you make money from Twitter by tweeting ads to your followers. I prefer Sponsored Tweets and ad.ly as they seem the most legit and expanding their services super quickly in this new game. They also offer referral programs so as people below you make money, so do you without having to blast your own community with ads. It’s a wicked little circle.

Selling ads will make you money, but unless you have a high CTR from your followers your rates will drop fast. You might only make a few hundred before your good karma runs dry with your followers. So unless thousands of people can name you from Adam online this will be short lived. If you and your Twitter account are the go-to place online for a niche, you’d probably have better success selling ads.

Twitter Referral Programs

Most programs online made for making money have affiliate programs attached to them to help spread the word and love around. You can find tons of these programs made just for Twitter that help you find and follow masses of people closely related to your interests. Buy the program, use the program, write a review, rank, make money and rinse/repeat.

Just about every day a new program comes out, so opportunities are plentiful for making money with referral programs. Just take a look at the program/software and see if it looks useful and well put together, then give it a try. Not all are good, but you should be at least be able to break even from the crappy ones so you don’t really lose anything while trying.

I have made great residual income from this, and for the time invested it is a no brainer.

Buy Ads

If you’d like to find targeted Twitter users for your website or product you can do so using the same companies listed above for selling ads on Twitter. But another overlooked idea is buying ads for product reviews.

If there is interest in a product you see on Twitter, quickly write a review of that product. Then you can post some Google Adword search ads pointing to your review and scrap a lot of affiliate commissions way before you rank for the product. Then, as you rank you can determine whether or not to discontinue the ads.

A lot of the software being offered online has high payouts, even $60 per lead. If the ad costs $.10 per click to run because it is you and two other people doing it, then how many clicks can you afford per one sale? Following me here… There is money for the taking just need to keep your eyes open to the opportunities.

Make Money Managing Others’ Twitter accounts

This is where things change in approach big time for users, branding, interactions and so forth. Most companies that would want you to manage their Twitter account will want results that help their brand. This is a no nonsense, person to person interaction for the purpose of getting more people through the door.

This is not simply setting up a Twitter account and then proceeding to blast anyone following you with specials and ad-like tweets. You’ll quickly lose their interest and they will begin to ignore anything you do.

This becomes about building relationships and reinforcing why this particular brand/company is worth spending money at. I have had great success with this form of interaction including a steady 60 clicks per tweet out of 2,000 followers. This does not seem high, but for Twitter and the number of followers this is good given that maybe 300 people out of that 2,000 probably see one tweet at any given time.

With services like bit.ly you are able to easily track clicks, find the best time of day to tweet different specials or promotions and much more. Simply take any bit.ly url you see and add a + to the end of it to see the stats of that tweet. I love when my tweet and 2,000 followers gets twice the clicks of our trust agent Chris Borgan, LMAO.

Unless you know some businesses that need this service, it is a tough sell. In fact, if they cringe at the sound of social media or Twitter, just move on and save yourself the time. The best way to get in the door is to prove yourself online with Twitter and talk to local/regional business owners at any kind of public setting. Offer up a challenge to them and if they bite, you just might have a new client.

Know what your demographic is and hunt them down on Twitter. Use Twitter search, use Twellowhood for people in specific areas, Tweapsearch for interests, look at patrons’ websites and followers and approach them as well. Finding people is the easy part, taking time to interact with them is a different story.

The most important thing with this type of promotion is to be real, honest and interact with everyone, even if it has nothing to do with your product/service. We all love when people remember us and make us laugh. Use their name, create experiences people will remember and have a good time. This will work.

Making Money With Twitter Conclusion

Like everything in the world, there are a 1,000 ways to skin a cat (no offense, Beamer.. ) and the same holds true for Twitter. Find what you know best and use Twitter as a tool to assist you on that path. Not all people are into Internet Marketing, so they could manage a Twitter account vs. writing reviews and ranking webpages and visa versa.

Here’s a good rule of thumb to follow: If you don’t like seeing it on Twitter, don’t do it and you’ll be safe. If you love getting auto Direct Messages, then feel free to do that. If you don’t, then DON’T. If you wonder how people will react to what you do on Twitter, just look at how you reacted to the same thing a few days before (honestly).

If you treat your followers like gold and worth $100 each, you’ll have high CTR, referral purchases, interactions, people through the door and so on. If you treat them like a penny on the ground, you attract the same, which won’t help you a bit. Use your head and you’ll do great.

It is no secert that Newspaper sales across the country are down and newspapers are having a hard time adapting to new technology and customer trends. In this post I am going to use Fargo’s local newspaper The Forum as an example for my Newspaper Marketing Ideas.

The Forum has been around a very long time and because of that it has seen the twilight years of journalism come and now go. Some of its most prized sources of revenue are drying up and even disappearing completely. I can’t blame the people who are shifting their advertising dollars away from newspapers into other sources. When you get better value elsewhere, it’s only natural to pursue it.

Issues facing newspapers

One of the newspaper’s bread and butter sections is the classified section. The problem is some guy named Craig came up with an idea of a free online classified website. It took a while but now people are using it, a lot, even in small towns.

My girlfriend runs a dog running business in Fargo and is a former employee of The Forum. In an attempt to drum up business and clients, she took out a classified ad in the paper and waited for the clients to roll in. It cost her $140 for a one-inch by one-inch ad. Nothing happened. People just don’t look through the paper for certain information anymore.

The natural progression was to post a free listing on Craigslist about her new service. Sure enough, she got multiple calls, emails and clients from this free website. Can you see a problem here?

This is a problem for all the newspapers that make money off classifieds and ads.

The good news for newspapers sales is that most are small and pretty local. This is a great opportunity from them to mimic the actions of Craigslist and others and get people to their own website by offering a similar service.

But how will they make money by offering this for free? Simply, they won’t, other than through paid ad placements on those listings. For example, businesses might be interested in newspaper advertising where related companies have posted free listings. A little competition, perhaps.

At the top of its site, The Forum boasts having 9,308,484 “pages” for November 2009. All of North Dakota has approximately 641,000 citizens, by the way. All that web traffic is great for The Forum, except anyone going to its web site for the first time is greeted with a wall garden (login form). If you’re not a member, you must become one in order to read the article. I simply hit the back button. What a shame.

I bet that out of those 9 million “pages” viewed on The Forum, the number one page is its login page. How can that possibly help generate revenue? It doesn’t. One time I visited drudgereport.com and noticed an article about an Ozzy Osbourne concert in Fargo and how the local police used the concert to nab wanted criminals by offering them free concert tickets.

Drudge Report gets over 600 million hits a month! So, all of those people reading Drudge clicked to see The Forum’s story about Ozzy and instead they were greeted with a login screen! Epic FAIL! How many of those people do you think registered to read the article? I bet 1% did.

In fact, if you do manage to register, you were automatically re-directed back to the home page, requiring you to go back and find the original link to the article you wanted (I believed this has been fixed now). Most people aren’t that patient.

Newspapers’ sales are losing ground to other services that are free and widely available. This means that much more time and emphasis have been placed on newspaper marketing ideas. What we forget is where all of the newspaper customers originated from. Their rock solid demographic has changed dramatically. I can’t remember the last time I looked a phone number up in a phone book, and the same goes with newspapers. We rely on the Internet for all our information.

Newspapers once had the ability to call each and every one of the residents in their town through Newspaper Telemarketing. But as more and more people ditch their landlines for unlisted cell phone numbers, this has made it even more difficult for newspapers to reach the younger demographic.

I can think of a few ideas that would help newspapers to be able to compete and continue in the coming century:

Charge much more for printed copies of the paper.

Let’s face it. Newspapers have extremely high overhead with paper, gas, electricity to print, a big building and distribution centers to heat/cool. I would charge appropriately for the honor of having a printed version of the paper. As people quit paying the higher prices for the printed version, scale back the overhead to match.

Capitalize on the brand of the newspaper by focusing on local/regional news only.

The best thing newspapers have going for them is their local brand and recognition. They should leverage that by only providing local, relevant news that people in the surrounding area will highly appreciate. Local and hyperlocal blogs have been springing up in every town across the country for the simple fact that people love their local sports, travel, news, dining, nightlife and the like.

Why waste time with national or even regional news at all? Make the paper completely local with news no one else offers. Ditch the world news section.

Imagine the savings each paper would have by not paying the Associated Press and other sources for the use of articles from outside the area. I believe The Forum pays roughly 2-3 million a year for the honor of republishing AP articles in its daily newspaper. How many jobs and overhead could be eliminated by focusing on local news only?

People have the Internet and TV/Satellite for national and world news. It’s a fallacy that local newspapers have to republish national and world news. I can’t recall a national article I read in The Forum that I had not already heard two days before on Twitter and the day before on Drudge Report.

Open up the classified section

Make the classified section of your website open and free to the public like craigslist.com. Your newspaper already has the traffic and trust and most newspapers are in smaller towns and communities that don’t yet have a functioning Craigslist page. Right now, people in small towns have to look to the nearest mid to large city if they want to use Craigslist.

Allow people to post for free for x number of days and then charge them to post for longer periods of time or with featured preference like ebay.com listings. This way people with a coffee table can get rid of their goods and those who want more permanent exposure can have it at a cost. Locals and outsiders will use your brand to facilitate their transactions and bring traffic, recommendations and so on.

Open up contributions

People love to be heard and share their ideas with the world. Give them the ability to do so. Employ an editor to read over submitted pieces and publish them to the rest of the community. This will add more content to be searched by more people to increase overall exposure, relationships, drama and just about everything else you can name.

This process can be made easy by auto filters for submitted articles. Filter for correct content type, foul language, formatting and so on. Article submission sites use this software all the time to ensure a uniform format to articles and content being submitted. Then once the articles pass auto checking, a person reviews and either approves/rejects for correction.

This process allows for a community to have hundreds or thousands of extra articles written for their site every year. Meanwhile, you collect revenue from the ad placements, gain extra traffic, links, etc.

Employ successful local content producers

One of the smartest things AOL has done in the last couple years was to buy up and enable further already successful blog sites. It simply looked at sites that were already successful and poured in resources to help expand those sites’ growth and revenue. This can and should be done on a local level.

There are bloggers in the area of every newspaper who are operating a successful blog about any subject you can imagine. Pay these bloggers to do what they do under your umbrella. You gain their readers support, interaction, favor and can possibly send them much more traffic, increasing their/your revenue, traffic and the circle continues.

Pick up the top 10 bloggers and their sites in the area along with their readers and now your local papers is attracting attention from all over the world. Here is where local pays on the world stage.

Triple the opinion section

Another newspaper marketing idea would be to expand the treasure trove of free content and participation known as the opinion section. People love to voice their opinions, and people like to hear others complain. Why not publish every letter to the editor and every editorial that comes in rather than picking and choosing? There’s nothing unique to a community quite like the opinion section of its newspaper.

Newspaper marketing

Newspaper circulation has been in decline for the past two decades, and signs for the future are not looking good. In order to increase newspaper circulation, more emphasis should be placed on marketing. Newspaper marketing jobs might be the only newspaper jobs available! Still, other newspapers outsource their marketing to a newspaper marketing agency. Either way, newspapers need to make big changes.

Conclusion

Eyeballs matter. Get the eyeballs and you’ll have newspaper advertising dollars. Newspapers used to be the only source of news for an area, but that has changed. Newspaper sales show how much the industry has changed.

Newspapers now have to fight for their readers now against everyone nationally, locally and worldwide. Focus on what you know best – your local community – and you can’t go wrong. When you have a solid base, expand into other areas. Tap the local talent because those are the people who matter the most to you. Can your newspaper compete against Drudge Report for world/national news online? No, so compete where you can win and focus all your energy there.

It would serve newspapers wisely move to a method of advertising control and brokering verses relying solely on subscribers. If newspapers combined marketing magazines, billboards, and local niche website such as blogs all the way through mega sites like Facebook. They would better serve their advertising base, by increasing exposure and managing advertising dollars across all local platforms.

Journalism isn’t dead. Journalism has more opportunities than ever before, but the energy has to be focused where it can make the most impact. That’s survival!

*top image from http://andygreenhaw.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/newspapers1.jpg