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I just won a 40in Sony LCD TV in an affiliate competition, and that wasn’t even first place. In another competition this month I won a Rolex watch. During this year I won a Apple iTouch and some other prizes.

In July when I reopened Blog Mastermind, I ran an affiliate competition for my partners, giving away top 10 prizes, including a Mac Air as a first place prize.

These competitions are common place for Internet marketing launches. The people who sell products related to how to make money online know how effective a prize competition is for motivating affiliates to promote. Strangely enough, it’s not the prizes the affiliates really want since they could easily buy the items - it’s the glory and beating their peers that matters most.

Regardless of the motivation, affiliate prize competitions work and help you make more sales, so why is it that marketers in other niches don’t make use of this technique?

Prize competitions could be considered a standard in Internet marketing launches so it’s not going to surprise anyone, but if you were to run a competition in a non-IM market, you are going to be doing something new, something different - and I’m pretty confident it’s going to work REALLY well at motivating your affiliates too.

New is Powerful

What creates buzz in any market is something new. “New” is powerful, and while the bar is rising very high in the Internet marketing niche for what can be considered innovative, it’s still relatively easy to be seen as an innovator in online marketing if you just take what the Internet marketing crowd are doing as a standard and apply it to your non-IM market.

This is why concepts such as the product launch formula work so well. Outside of the film and television industries and a few innovative companies like Apple, most companies market their products with stock standard - and let’s face it - boring styles of marketing like dry television, radio and newspaper campaigns.

While affiliate competitions and product launch formula style buzz campaigns won’t work for every type of product, chances are what you are selling online could benefit from a few innovative techniques that no one is doing in your industry.

Let me ask you this - if you are currently selling in a non-make money online market right now, has anyone ever done an affiliate competition to motivate launch partners when a new product is released? Even the concept of affiliate marketing is not applied to a majority or products sold online.

This to me spells opportunity. All it takes is for you to put in a little extra effort and you could be seen as an innovator in your market - and best of all, a winner when it comes to your profits too.

Yaro Starak
Copy-and-Paste Marketer

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It’s not quite as easy as the title makes it sound, but bear with me, this article will explain the three steps that are the foundation of every Internet business, why so many people go wrong and give you some realizations that might just be the key to take your Internet business to the next level…

I’ve been studying resources lately designed to teach Internet business, but not just introductory materials, content that goes beyond beginners and is intended to take you to making making millions online.

In my case I’m interested in advanced topics that I can apply to what I do and fill my current knowledge gaps to take the next step forwards. While hunting for those elusive gold nugget ideas I invariably scan the introductory materials and learn with interest how this particular person or organization cover the basics - how they suggest you get traffic and make sales.

My studies have led me to the conclusion that Internet business is actually quite easy. Explained in simple terms (which I will do in a moment), the structure of a successful online enterprise is comprised of a few components, that when linked together can deliver hundreds, thousands and even millions of dollars in online profits.

Easy As 1-2-3

While we all have different ways of presenting what we do and the tiny details of getting a result vary, most Internet marketing experts teach the same few principles, which are in fact no different from what direct marketers have been doing and teaching for decades.

It goes something like this…

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We’ve almost nutted out the bugs with the new design and I must say I’m very happy with how everything looks. I’ll talk more about the design process (and reveal who did my blog design) in a later post, now I want to tell you about a little free report I’m giving away to my RSS subscribers as part of the new blog design launch.

My First E-Book (unreleased until now)

Several years ago around early 2006 I had just begun blogging seriously and had spent the previous six months pumping out some of my early pillar articles.

At this time my proofreading business BetterEdit was my main focus (I sold it in 2007) and I was not a professional blogger. I don’t think I was making much, if anything from my blog yet, but my other business was doing well and I made a good living from it.

Those who have read this blog from the beginning might remember back during the early days I talked a lot more about entrepreneurship, setting up a business and general passive income strategies - and not so much about blogging (though I was starting to write about it even then).

It was around that time I decided to write my first e-book. I had no idea what I would do with it, but I felt with the several years experience running a few different businesses and I had enough content to produce a short book.

How to Start an Internet Business by Yaro Starak

Over the course of a couple of months I wrote a 50 page report detailing some of the key lessons I learned about starting and running my business and what I felt were the foundation principles necessary that all entrepreneurs understood and practiced.

The end result was a book I titled “How To Start An Internet Business…and stay happy doing it“.

For the new release today, I decided to change the tile to something a little more appealing to most people’s desires -

“How To Start An Internet Business…and make your first $1,000 online“.

The book is not about basic tutorials on the practical aspects like setting up websites, choosing domain names, etc. It talks more about mindset and business strategy, although I include 12 steps necessary to start an online business at the end which are quite practical.

The book is a companion to this blog. You can read it and gain a grasp of what you need to do and how you should think when starting your Internet business, and then use the content from within this blog to find information on the finer details about Internet marketing.

Create A Passive Income Business

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