Bill McRea

How can you tell if you need a virtual assistant (VA)? As an online business owner do you ever find yourself hunched over your computer late into the night working more hours than you thought you’d have to? Does your family often beg you to step away from the computer and spend time with them? If you are an online business owner and you find that you need more balance in your life, then it might be time to consider hiring a virtual assistant.

On a practical level, how do you value your time? If you bill your time at $75. per hour, for example, for the next few days, keep a running list of every single task that you complete in your business and how long it took for you to complete those tasks. Then ask yourself if all of those items were worth $75. per hour. That exercise alone should help you decide when it’s time to consider hiring a VA. Let’s take a look at who a virtual assistant is and what they do.

What is a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant is a contract employee who works remotely using their own computer and Internet connection. They can be located in your town or on the other side of the globe. You assign specific tasks that you need to get done and they complete them and send the project back to you.

What do VA’s do?

Virtual assistants can do a ton of different tasks related to running an Internet based business. If you are considering hiring a VA, you should make a list of all of the tasks that must be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis for your business. Next go down that list and check off the ones you can delegate. Knowing the kinds of tasks that you need done will help you to choose the best virtual assistant. Here are some typical tasks that you might delegate to a VA:

• Scheduling & managing your calendar
• Research
• Pay bills
• Online shopping
• Travel planning
• Event planning
• Traffic generation tasks
• Screen incoming calls
• Manage your email
• Moderate blog comments
• Data entry

Where do you find virtual assistants?

There are countless online job boards where you can find and hire VA’s such as elance.com, odesk.com. If you want to hire someone from your local area and in a hurry, you can place an ad on craigslist.com.

If you are feeling nervous or tentative about letting go of some of your tasks, ease into it by hiring some of the folks at fiverr.com to handle one task at a time for you. At five bucks a pop, you can definitely afford it and when you see that the work gets done and you are free to do more of what you are passionate about you’ll begin to see that hiring a virtual assistant might be just what your business needs to move up to the next level.

When you are ready to discover more tips and strategies for growing your online business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find more information about all aspects of Internet Marketing today.

Freelancing is one of the quickest ways to start making money online. If you have a particular skill that is marketable and in demand, you can start making money by consulting with other businesses on a freelance basis. You can become a freelancer using many skills including photography, graphic design, programming, writing, web design and more. Another proven way to make money online that is inexpensive to get started with is Affiliate Marketing. Let’s compare and contrast these two money making methods and see which one might work for you.

Freelancing

To get started as a freelancer, all you really need is to be proficient enough at your chosen skill that clients will want you to work for them, and you need a website to market your services. When you set up your website you’ll want to include a portfolio of samples of work that you have done for other clients along with testimonials from satisfied clients.

One of the benefits of freelancing is that you get to choose the clients that you want to work with. You choose your projects, you do them and then you get paid right away.

One of the down sides of freelancing is that you are basically trading dollars for hours. You are only making money when you are doing the work. You complete the work, deliver it and get paid once for it. Then you must find more clients to work for.

Freelancing is appealing because you can do it from anywhere you have an Internet connection, and it’s flexible enough to fit in with the busy lifestyle of people who work from home.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers make money by referring buyers to product vendors. They generate traffic and build relationships with prospective buyers and then pre-sell them on the merits of a particular product. If the visitor clicks on a special affiliate link and purchases the product, the affiliate marketer earns a commission that represents a percentage of the product’s sales price.

Affiliate marketing takes time to set up a blog or a website and to start generating traffic. You can focus on using free methods to generate traffic that take time, or spend money to purchase PPC (pay per click) traffic that kicks in right away.

With affiliate marketing once you get your sites set up and generating traffic it can become a passive income stream, but until you star generating sales, there is no money coming in.

In comparing the two ways of making money online, with freelancing you’ve got a way to get started quickly and a way to make money quickly. With affiliate marketing it takes time to get your sites set up and get the traffic flowing before you will start making money, however, the potential for making more money is greater with affiliate marketing because of the fact that you can keep setting up more and more affiliate sites, which will continue to build on your income streams.

Freelancing and affiliate marketing are just two of the many different business models when it comes to making money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover more about Internet Marketing today.

Entrepreneurship in the online world is simply about transferring those skills of taking an idea to market, seeing an existing need and filling it and creating new ways of doing things to the digital marketplace. Rather than dealing with a brick and mortar location and attracting foot traffic for their new ventures, online entrepreneurs focus on generating web traffic by satisfying the needs of their online visitors for elegant solutions to their challenges.

What is an entrepreneur?

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics defines entrepreneurship this way:  “An entrepreneur is someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise. An entrepreneur is an agent of change. Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering new ways of combining resources. When the market value generated by this new combination of resources is greater than the market value these resources can generate elsewhere individually or in some other combination, the entrepreneur makes a profit.”

Source: econlib.org/library/Enc/Entrepreneurship.html

To describe entrepreneurs as, agents of change and people who assume risks is just scratching the surface. The word entrepreneur conjures up images of trailblazers like Richard Branson, who see a need, create a business to fulfill that need and get compensated handsomely for it.

How is entrepreneurship different in the online world?

In the online world, entrepreneurs often focus either on creating software and information products, which can be purchased online and delivered instantly without intervention at the customer’s convenience, or on creating an entire online business that can then be sold. The true entrepreneur always has some kind of business venture brewing. Their passion is creating a thriving enterprise from a nugget of an idea, or even taking a struggling business, reviving it and selling it at a profit.

The Internet provides the perfect venue for entrepreneurs because there is so much opportunity to start a business from a single idea and get it going without a large amount of financial investment unlike starting a brick and mortar business, which has a whole host of expenses including the physical location and inventory.

The word “entrepreneur” taken from an archaic French verb, entreprendre, which means, “to do something” or “to undertake,” so by the nature of the origins of the word, entrepreneurs are those who use their talents and ingenuity to do something to change the world, and they always find a way to get handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Out of the big successes that entrepreneurs bring about, the world is changed. For example, Apple, now one of the wealthiest companies in the world, was started by two men in a garage. The massive Wal-mart chain began from a single store in Arkansas, and Ford Motor Company, started by Henry Ford, brought a product to market that has without exaggeration, changed the entire world.

In the online world, youtube.com is a prime example of entrepreneurship in action. It was about seeing a need, filling it and getting rewarded handsomely for it. Youtube.com was developed, as the story goes, by three college friends because of the challenges they faced sharing a digital video among themselves. Now, who can imagine an Internet without Youtube?

Whether online or in real life, entrepreneurship is about taking action on your ideas, and finding a way to create a profit.

If you are looking for more information about entrepreneurship online, or how to start your own business venture, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover lots of actionable information about Internet Marketing today.

When you think of video Marketing online, youtube.com is where most people think to go first. It’s been around a long time and now that it’s owned by Google it’s one of the most popular video sharing sites on the Internet. But it’s not the only one. There are several viable alternatives to youtube.com  when it comes to video sharing sites for video marketing. Let’s take a look at seven of them in no particular order where you can host marketing videos and include a link back to your site.

1. Metacafe

Metacafe’s  content is carefully cultivated and reviewed by an 80,000 member viewer community.  With 38 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, your video hosted at Metacafe will get viewed.

2. Revver

Revver provides a way for video producers to generate revenue with their videos. They attach a contextual ad to the video and the more the video is viewed the more revenue it generates. All of the videos are rated similar to movies with a G, PG or PG13 rating system.

3. Daily Motion

DailyMotion is a video sharing site that puts a lot of emphasis on building community by incorprating some social media elements to their profiles such as the ability to create a contact list of other DailyMotion members and share your feedback with them about the videos that you watch.

4. Vimeo

Vimeo allows users to create channels for sharing videos among groups. They have a video school to help you improve your skills, and Vimeo has an app that lets you watch, upload, edit and manage your videos right from your smart phone.

5. Blip.tv

Blip.tv seems to attract webseries–webisodes and other kinds of video series. You can sign up for an advertiser account and split the revenues 50/50 with Blip.tv. You’ll find analytics and other useful tools on their user dashboard.

6. Veoh

Specializing in long form videos, Veoh does not restrict the size of your videos when you are uploading them. They do not have the vast audience of youtube, but they feature high quality content.

7. Viddler

Viddler promises to help you build your brand using video marketing with a bias toward larger corporations as opposed to home grown videos produced by individuals.

All of these alternatives to youtube.com are video sharing sites that offer free memebrships. They may not have an audience to rival the millions at youtube.com, but some sites emphasize the power of community, and cultivating quality content for a more satisfying user experience.

A good video sharing site should be intuitive enough for a newbie to understand, have helpful features and available support to answer questions and concerns.

Video marketing is a powerful way to get lots of exposure and targeted traffic to your website. Making short, engaging, entertaining and educational videos will attract prospective customers and help you to expand your brand online in a cost-effective manner.

So, there are just a few of the alternative video sharing sites that you can try instead of or in addition to youtube.com for attracting traffic and getting exposure using video marketing.

When it comes to building a buzz online about your business, video marketing is just one strategy. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover lots of additional ways to grow your online business.

Above the Matrix is a software app that promises automated affiliate income even for those who have yet to earn any income online, but how does it do that, and is it really possible to automate the Affiliate Marketing process? Let’s take a look at what ‘Above the Matrix’ is, and what it does. You will be the judge when you try it if it really works.

Affiliate Marketing is an simple, low-cost way for people to get started making money online. Marketers sign up with product merchants to sell their products in exchange for a commission. There are all kinds of ways to do affiliate marketing online, but the bottom line is that no matter what approach you take, you will be required to invest a lot of time and effort before you start seeing an income in return.

Here are some of the steps that you will have to take when setting up your affiliate marketing empire:

Keyword research

Your first step will be to decide on a niche. You will begin this process by doing keyword research. There are lots of keyword research tools available both free and premium tools that can help you narrow down a list of viable keywords that you can focus on to get rankings in the search engines.

Choosing a domain name

Once you have selected your niche and your list of primary and secondary keywords, you will then choose a domain name for your affiliate marketing website. This can be quite challenging as you’ve got to find a domain name that contains your keywords, is easy to say, easy to spell, and is as short as possible.

Creating content

Your next step after you have chosen a domain name and set up your affiliate blog is to create lots of SEO content. The content is what is going to get your website or blog found by the search engine. The majority of the traffic that your site will receive will come from the search engines, so you must have a consistent flow of keyword relevant content on your site to keep both the search engines and the visitors coming.

Website monetization

This is where it gets interesting. Now you will choose the products that you will be pre-selling to your visitors. You will choose products that appeal to your visitors who are interested in the topic of your niche. After your site has built up some consistent traffic you can also monetize your site by selling advertising space.

Building traffic

In the world of Internet Marketing, traffic equals money. You can’t sell anything or earn any commissions if you are not getting a decent amount of traffic to your website. You’ve got to put in the time to build lots of quality, relevant back links to your site to make sure that you will receive the traffic you need.

Above the Matrix automates all of these processes for you saving you time and effort making sure that you start earning an income from your marketing efforts quickly and effortlessly.

Above the Matrix includes a hosted website and all of the following automated tools:

• Keyword research
• Domain finder
• Content posting software
• Website monetization tool
• Automated link building

Finally, there is one piece of software that can automate your affiliate marketing tasks. Now it up to you to decide if you would like a tool to handle these tasks, or if you would prefer to continue to do them all by hand.

Above the Matrix is just one of the many automated traffic tools available that can transform your Internet marketing business. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover lots of other tips and strategies for growing your business online.