Your email account gives you access to the people in your life. You must be able to communicate in this way in order to maximize your effectiveness in the shortest amount of time. That’s why I was shocked to see so many people struggling with this during a three day marketing conference I attended and spoke at recently.

I now receive hundreds of emails each day, and enjoy reading and responding to those that require my attention. The other ones are filed or deleted from my email account. This can be manageable. Each day at this event there were people trying to find messages from friends and business contacts, and saying they couldn’t remember which email they had used to sign up for a particular program or event. They would log in and out of several email services, sometimes giving up before locating what they were looking for. I could not believe what I was seeing.

I am not an Outlook person. The idea of my email being

There are many ways to connect with your prospects and build a profitable online business. It used to be that writing an eBook, or having one written for you by an author with more experience writing on your topic, was the way to make money on the Internet. Things have changed quite a bit since 2005 or 2006, and this is no longer the best way to make residual income online. The industry has shifted, and now it is better to start off with a short report, in order to build a list of as many prospects as possible.

There are several reasons for this change in the way we now do business, but perhaps the greatest one is that there is just so much more competition these days in almost every niche you can think of. Instead of sending people directly to a sales letter for the eBook on your topic, you will want to send them to an optin page where they can exchange their name and email address for a short report that will tell them more.

You can then direct them to a sales letter for a product or course on your niche topic, and you will also be able to send them follow up emails that contain more information. Over time you will be able to

Is it possible that we do not connect well with our prospects and clients if we do not know a little bit about their daily life experiences? I got to thinking about this after one of my mastermind partners made a comment about watching television. She said that she watches a few popular shows sometimes, just so she will understand the references that are made. This makes a lot of sense.

I was a classroom teacher for many years. I taught various grade levels during that time, all the way from Kindergarten through high school. I would always immerse myself in the culture of the age group I was dealing with, and it made me better able to relate to my students. They never had to explain jokes to me, and sometimes I was the one who started the conversation. One of our favorites was the show ‘Super Nanny’. When one of my fifth graders would not stop talking, I asked him if he needed to spend a few minutes in the naughty chair. It brought us all closer together.

What are your prospects doing in their spare time? Is there a magazine you could be reading or a forum you could visit to make sure you are in the loop? Think about how you can better

You can write down some main points about your topic and record a 30 minute audio to have a product to sell or give away to your prospects. This may sound like it would not be a good idea because not enough time and thought went into it. Actually, it is just the opposite. If you put too much time and thought into creating your product, it may never get finished.

Do this quickly, within one day, and set it up online as a product. Going through this process will teach you exactly what you need to know in order to create your second product. This is the one where you will take more time to get it just the way you want it.

The idea is to get into action as quickly as possible. Once you do this you will understand completely what I mean. Let me know when you have your first information product ready by leaving a comment here. We all have to start somewhere, and this is the best way to jump in and test the water.

I write lots of articles, but I needed a better way to connect with people online. Writing short reports is the best way I have found to reach out to new prospects by showing that you have a level of expertise in your niche. These reports are a way of providing useful content to your prospects while showing that you are credible in your niche. You can then use them in a variety of ways in order to build your list and to drive traffic to your sites.

There are several ways to create your report. I have learned this strategy from a training course I took on how to write short reports. The fastest and easiest is to use articles on your topic and combine them together. Remember to follow the rules on this by keeping the article intact. This means that you must not change a word, and keep the resource box at the end. You can choose several articles on your topic and create your short report. Add a few paragraphs at the beginning and end and it will be complete.

I also like to repurpose other writing I have done in order to create my report. This would include using outlines from teleseminars I have given, using transcriptions of webinars I have taught, and even taking my autoresponder messages and turning them into a logical sequence to present to my prospects.

For each report, my goal is to

Continuing your education after you begin achieving some success online is crucial to your growth process. The Internet changes very quickly, and you simply must stay abreast of the changes in order to serve your prospects and clients. I enjoy the learning process, so I find this part of my work to be joyous.

Choose one or two people online to connect with, and then learn as much as you can from them. Make sure they understand what you are trying to achieve, and can give you the support and training you need in order to build your business and take it to the next level. The person who has been there for me since 2008 is Armand Morin, and I am thankful that I have the benefit of his ongoing training and wisdom.

Think of yourself as a lifelong learner, and you will reap the rewards in more way than you can imagine. People do business with those they know and trust, but those who are knowledgeable have an even greater advantage in the marketplace.

Interviews have been around forever, but think of them as a way to communicate with your prospects in a new way if you haven’t been using them regularly. You can increase both your credibility and visibility by interviewing others and allowing other people to interview you. When making this a part of your online marketing strategy, you will want to think about a few things, including where to find the people you will interview, how to give the best possible information while you are being interviewed, and what to do to monetize the entire process.

On the ‘About Page’ of your blog, let it be known that you are available for all interviews. Include some details about the topics you are an expert on, and the titles of some of these. You want to make sure to give the reader as much information as possible so they will know if you are right for their audience. Do this same thing when you are looking for people who may be a good fit for your audience.

Anyplace you go to network with others, whether it is online or offline, let it be known that you have a topic to speak about. Finally it will be common knowledge that you are interested and available to be interviewed and looking for others to interview as well.

Think about how you will monetize these opportunities in advance. There are a variety of possibilities, including selling a package of interviews later on, charging a fee initially, and promoting your own and affiliate products during the interview. I use this service for all of my interviews and teleseminars. You can sign up for a 21 day trial for only $1 to see if this strategy is for you.

When I was a classroom teacher it was a big deal to have a class paper. For my first three years of teaching my class published the ‘Room 5 News’. This was back in the early 90’s, so desktop publishing was not so easy to do. I can’t even remember the name of the program we used, but I do know it was on about twelve 5 1/4″ floppy disks, and I had to keep changing them throughout the process. This was before hard drives were commonplace. The result was a beautiful newsletter that we printed for the entire school, and a group of 5th and 6th graders who were very proud of what they could accomplish on a computer.

Today the process of creating and distributing a newsletter to your prospects is much simpler. You write an article, and then ask several other people to do the same. They are able to promote themselves at the end of their article, and you receive content that can be passed on to your list. The idea is to connect with your audience many times, so they can get to know you better over time. Take a look at the newsletters currently published by Armand Morin and Dr. Jeanette Cates and see what you think.

When we work exclusively online, there is not much opportunity to connect with our prospects and clients in the same way as we would if we were meeting with them regularly in person. That is why it is so important to do whatever we can to make that connection with the people we want to do business with.

Have you ever known someone who got contact lenses after years of wearing thick glasses? Or how about someone who wore braces for a few years and suddenly had them removed? Remember how different they looked for the first few times you saw them? It is the same thing on the Internet; people get used to only receiving our emails and reading our blogs. As soon as you meet them in person, your relationship completely changes.

The best way I have found to make this connection on a regular basis is by holding teleseminars and inviting my prospects and clients to attend. By hearing my voice they are able to see me in a completely different light. It works the same way in reverse; when I hear them I feel like I know them more intimately.

Teleseminars are the next best thing to meeting people in person. It rounds us out and gives us a multi-dimensional quality that is just not possible through emails and blogs. Video and webinars also work well for this, but holding regular calls is the fastest and easiest way to connect with our audience. Take a closer look at your online business. You may just find that this is the perfect solution to building your business and increasing your bottom line.

I have sent press releases out to announce that I was attending a conference, had written a new short report, or even to let people know I was now posting regularly to my blog. I call this the ‘Kindergarten Effect’, and it refers to the idea that five-year-olds get excited about every little detail of their life. Do the same thing in your business to let people know what you are up to.

Learning how to write your own press releases will help you to build both credibility and visibility on the Internet. This is now a simple process, compared to previous days when you had to write in a particular style and then fax it to the editor of your local newspaper. It was then a game of wait and see until they decided whether or not your story was truly newsworthy. This all changed in the early 2000’s, and now anyone can learn how to write and distribute their own press release that will be picked up by publications all over the world.

I have prepared a Special Report to help you write your own press releases for publicity and to build your business.