This site is dedicated to teaching you how to make a 6 figure a year income with a small list, but that does not mean that you should ever stop thinking about ways to continue to build your list. I use article marketing as one of my listbuilding strategies, and it does help me when I use SEO (search engine optimization) in my article title and body.

Your articles serve many other purposes as well, such as establishing you as an expert, pre-selling products and even helping to build relationships with your prospects. But you can also use them to drive traffic to your site when you optimize them for the search engines.

Here’s the 3S Strategy for creating and distributing optimized articles:

S – Search
S – Sprinkle
S – Share

Today I’ll discuss the ’search’ part of this strategy.

Step #1: Search

Your first step is to search for the keywords your market is already using to find information in your niche. You do this by using a keyword tool (such as Google’s free keyword tool).

All you have to do is enter in a broad niche-relevant search term like “homeschooling”, “organic gardening”, or “golf”. The tool will then offer you suggestions for related search terms which you can use to expand your list of keywords. In most cases, you’ll generate a list of hundreds if not thousands of possible keywords.

What you’re searching for are longtail keywords – these are phrases that are typically four or more words long. The key is that they have very little competition in the search engines, which means you can rank well for them.

Tip: Many keyword tools check the competition for you. For example, WordTracker offers a KEI (keyword effectiveness index) value, which looks at the number of searches against how many other websites are indexed for that keyword. The higher the KEI value, the better chance you have of ranking well. Look for words that have a KEI value of at least 100 – but the higher the better.

 Next week I’ll discuss the ’sprinkle’ and ’share’ strategies.

You can make huge profits with a tiny list, and social media can help you to do this very quickly. Marketing your small business with social media makes sense for many reasons. It’s the modern day version of meeting new prospects and clients, you can extend your reach further than you ever thought possible, and it sure does save you lots of time.

Just a few years ago we were all still going to breakfast meetings, networking lunches, and after hours mixers. If you could connect with one or two new prospects you considered it a success. This was a tiring process, and the rubber chicken lunches became legendary. The Internet changed this somewhat at the turn of the century (doesn’t it sound funny to say that?), and social media revolutionized the way we connected with people starting in 2007.

Within a very short time, sometimes just a few hours, we are now able to

Marketing online opens up a whole new world to you if this is your first time as an Internet entrepreneur. My background was in real estate, but it turned out I knew next to nothing about marketing myself and my services. If I had known then what I know now, things would have been very different.

Most of us were told by our family that it was not polite to brag about yourself. My mother always said that if I was good at something people would find out. To this day I still don’t know what that saying meant, but I did learn to keep quiet about my accomplishments.

Fast forward to this millennium, and now we know that great marketing begins with telling your prospects exactly who you are, what you do, and how that can help them to achieve their own goals. Writing articles, blogging, holding teleseminars, and sending press releases are all a part of my work every week.

If this sounds like it will take you too far out of your comfort zone, start slowly by

Making money as an affiliate is an excellent way to build your business on the Internet. We start with the affiliate marketing model because most people do not have their own product when they are just getting started online. It also enables you to learn from people who have been working online for several years. You will get some of your best product ideas by seeing what is already available and then looking for the gap between what is being offered in your niche and what the market would still like to know. I will explain this in further detail.

When you are just getting started online, you may not even have an idea of what type of product you will want to create. At the end of 2005, when I first saw that people were selling products and making money on the Internet, every product looked like a huge production to me. I wanted to start making money quickly, so being an affiliate for others seemed like the smartest thing I could do.

As I began purchasing information on Internet marketing, I would become an affiliate for that person and their products. Soon I was signed up with more than twenty programs, but I still needed to understand what to do next.

Finally, I chose a product on Clickbank about training small dogs. That was the product I used to learn how to market online, and how to make money with affiliate marketing. I still earn money from that product every month, and it is a reminder to be of how far I have come with my online business.

I was in a discussion today with several people on the merits of using forums to connect with new prospects. We all agreed that being a part of three or four forums is an excellent way to answer questions for others on your area of expertise, get your own questions answered, and to just be a part of something that has staying power.

Using Facebook and Twitter may be good for your business, but our tweets and posts soon disappear as new ones appear in the timeline. Forum posts are there forever, and can be read by someone searching that thread at any time in the future. Another thing I truly love about forums is the idea of being able to change my signature line whenever I have something new to promote. It is then changed on every post I have ever made in that forum, for as long back as I have been a member.

I belong to two paid forums and several free ones. There are benefits to both, but if you are just starting out I would recommend going to Google to search for a free one on your topic. Spend some time just reading what other members have to say, and then offer valuable tips and resources if you have information that will be helpful. Remember that your signature line does the marketing for you, so you do not want to try to sell anything when you are commenting.

I want to share an exclusive interview with Nicole Dean on how and why to use private label rights content for your blog. It’s on my other blog, Building Your Online Empire. Please read the interview and tell me what you think about this strategy.

Time is the great equalizer. No matter how smart you are, how much money you have, or who you know, we each have the same twenty-four hours each day. The goal of time management is to make sure you use your time more effectively to be as productive as possible. I have found that using the right time management tools, knowing when to delegate and outsource, and not wasting time make this all very manageable.

Decide which tools are best for you. I use a wall calendar and a notebook to schedule everything in my business. This may not work at all for you. Take a look at online schedulers and other tools that can make each day much more organized for you. There are even iPad and iPhone applications that will assist you in managing each hour of your day. Dr. Jeanette Cates has an excellent program created just for Internet marketers at Internet Marketing Organized.

I believed that I had to do everything myself when I started my Internet business. I did not think I could afford to pay anyone else, and I also thought that others would not do what needed to be done as well as I could do it. I was wrong. Instead, I have found that the people I have delegated and outsourced parts of my business to are doing it much better than I could ever do it. It feels good to

During my recent family vacation to Europe I decided that it might be an interesting experiment to see if I could earn money while I was away from home and all things familiar to me. I refer to this as the ‘European Experiment’ becuase I started to think about it while I was in Amsterdam, before going on to Helsinki, Finland.

The idea was that I wanted to make one hundred dollars a day by working only one hour each day. I had promised my family that I would not work every day while we were together in Europe for two weeks. I promised them that I would only be on the computer for an hour a day during that time. I wanted to challenge myself, so I worked out a plan to be able to do everything I needed to do within that one hour time frame.

This experiment forced me to become more organized and focused with what I was doing. On the first day I posted to my blog, answered some emails, and spent a few minutes on Twitter. I realized that I would have to be more efficient if this was going to work. By the second day I had a plan, and that included making a schedule of when I would post to my blog, write articles, spend time on social media sites, create new short reports, and email my list. It turns out that you can accomplish much more if you plan it out in advance.

My rule for this was that I would not count the money I earn from my own membership sites, recurring billing services income, or from my existing products. This leaves affiliate income, which is the very best way to get started making money online. I am now halfway through with my trip, and I will tell you that I am way ahead of my goal. I will give you an update with more details when I return home.

I still believe that teleseminars are the best way to connect with your audience. I just took a 16 hour flight from Los Angeles to Helsinki, and listening to teleseminars given by some of my colleagues helped to pass the time. I could not have watched a webinar this way. I closed my eyes and listened to training that will make me more effective in my own business. At home I do this while I’m out walking or driving somewhere.

My recommendation is to give a free, one hour teleseminar each week to answer questions on your topic and to build credibility with your target market. I did this for the first 18 months I was in business, and continue to do it at least once a month. Even on a free call I am likely to make a thousand dollars or more, so don’t let the word ‘free’ stop you. The service I use to host my teleseminars is the industry standard, and you can start out with a 21 day trial to see if this business model is for you.