June is Effective Communications Month, and my friend and colleague Felicia Slattery, an expert in the field of communication, celebrates this each year in a big way. She has once again asked me to be a part of her annual giveaway, where you can connect with people who will help your business to grow by leaps and bounds.

Communicating effectively starts with the way you connect with others, both online and off. You’ll want to share a little bit about yourself, but, most importantly, listen to what the other person has to say. My grandmother used to say that we have two ears and one mouth for a good reason, and that still hold true today.

Reach out to the people you want to connect with. Let them know who you are and what you do, and then take a step back and allow them to share their gifts, talents, and information with you. You just may find that you have effectively communicated with someone who will change your life over time. This has been my experience with many of the people I have met, especially during the past five years.

Be sure to sign up for your gifts and see what’s happening with the Effective Communications Month giveaway. You will love what we have included for you there.

Getting started online can seem overwhelming, especially if you don’t have a technical background. This was my experience when I decided to leave my former life behind and start an online business by becoming an online entrepreneur. Even though I worked as a classroom teacher and real estate appraiser for twenty years, setting up websites and creating products was not familiar to me. Now I have more than twenty products of my own, along with almost one hundred websites.

As I continue to work with new people and give them guidance as they strive to achieve something similar for themselves, my goal is to never forget what it was like during that first year. It turns out that most of us are not cut out to be entrepreneurs, but that certainly does not mean that we can’t be successful with an online business.

It’s important to take a look at the big picture of how you will earn income with online marketing, as well as the day to day tasks that will be required if you are to attain any level of success. You will be more successful if you

After working online for five years now, I have seen many people come and go. It seems like everyone is excited when they first decide to start an online business, but many fall by the wayside within a few short months. I have identifies some habits that are common to everyone who is successful, and those include positive believing, decisive action, and connecting with other successful people. I think of these as the everyday habits of successful entrepreneurs, and believe it is worthwhile to take a closer look at each one.

The first habit is that of positive believing. You notice that I said believing, and not thinking. That’s right, you must believe that your goals are possible and that it is simple a matter of moving from where you are currently to a place closer to where you want to be. By always acting as if you are on your way, you set yourself up for success.

Decisive action means that you review a situation quickly and make a decision as to how you will move forward. Once I recognized this as a success factor, I began to take a much closer look at how I made decisions. Years ago, while I was still a classroom teacher and working part-time in real estate, I would agonize over

If you’re a content marketer, then you already know how to write reports, eBooks, articles and blog posts. But do you know how to turn ordinary content into viral content? That’s what I want to share with you today.

Generally, a viral report is one that sweeps across your niche because readers share it with one another. I do this with rebranded reports, such as this one you can download right now.

In order to be “share worthy,” the report needs to have most of the following characteristics:

Unique content.

Your report may include: 

• Unusual or even controversial ideas or information. If your report includes something that no one else is talking about, people will share it. 
• Entertaining/engaging content. If your writing style is as exciting as burnt toast, then get a ghostwriter to write it for you, or use rebranded reports. Even if you share unusual content, it won’t be share-worthy if it’s boring to read.

Tip: You can liven up your writing by including humor (where applicable), stories, analogies, metaphors and colorful language.

For example, instead of saying, “he left the party quickly,” you might say, “he left quicker than a cat exiting a hot oven.”

See the difference? The second line is simply more colorful and fun to read because it creates a strong visual impression.

• Extraordinarily useful content. Tip: Give away what others are charging big bucks for. Go to Clickbank.com to find out the top sellers in your niche.
• Funny content. This doesn’t work in every niche, but it’s effective if you can pull it off. Think of your email – I bet most of your email forwards are jokes.

In other words, ordinary content doesn’t cut it.

Tip: If you want an idea of what kind of content to create, just look at the types of content that arrives in your email every day, forwarded from friends. Think about the content you share with others.

For example, if someone is giving away a report that most others charge for, you’re going to tell your friends.

Or, if someone has a report that’s highly controversial – such as one that seems truthful but goes against what the niche experts are saying – you can bet people are going to pass it around.

Or, if someone creates a report that crosses over from controversial to even a tiny bit offensive, people on BOTH sides of the issue will share it. Just look to politics as an example of taking a hot button issue and creating content that offends certain parties.

Easy to access.

If you want a report to go viral, don’t put a lot of hoops and obstacles between you and your audience. Ideally, it should be freely available (no subscription required), with the goal of the report being to get people on your list.

Alternatively, you can offer your report to anyone who gives you a valid email address. This works best if you’re paying affiliates per lead (or if you’re paying commissions on a backend offer).

Which brings us to our next point…

There’s an incentive to share it.

Content that has the above characteristics (e.g., it’s funny or controversial) naturally get passed around the niche. However, you can give people an incentive to share it by allowing readers to change the links in the report to their affiliate links before sharing it.

Tip: You can create rebrandible reports. That way anyone who shares your report has an opportunity to make money on the backend via affiliate commissions.

Summary: What’s Next?

You just discovered what kind of content you need to create in order to turn regular content into viral content. But now that you have your viral report, what do you do with it? Answer: distribute it as widely as possible. This includes: 

• Blogging about it.
• Giving it to your affiliates and JV partners to share.
• Telling your list about it.
• Creating and posting a YouTube video about it.
• Telling your social media networks about it.
• Including it in your forum signature files.

The more people who see your report initially, the more likely it is your report will “go viral” in a big way!

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.

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

Another way to build your business is to stay connected with the people who have had an impact on your life. The very first person to mentor me was Raymond Aaron, and I continue to learn from him to this day. We met while I was still teaching in the classroom and working part-time in real estate. His level of energy and enthusiasm, along with his knowledge of how to change your life, made him the perfect person to mentor me.

Raymond has been there for me during some pivotal times in my life. One was when we shared the stage at an Internet marketing event last year. Another was when I won the ‘Better Your Best’ contest at Big Seminar in Las Vegas. And now that I have completed my first book, Raymond has written the foreward.

Stay in touch with your mentors throughout your life. You will continue to learn from them, and their lives will be enriched by seeing you achieve your goals.

As you grow your online business and more people join your list, you will want to keep the same type of community you started with. The best way to do this is to ask the people currently on your list to refer their friends to you. This is an excellent way to connect with your list, find new prospects who will already know something about you, and to start an affiliate program for yourself, if that is something you are ready to do now.

Think about how things work in the offline world. You may be looking for a new restaurant, or a place to hold a birthday party, or a new hair salon close to where you live. These days we usually go to Google or somewhere on the Internet to get ideas on who we can contact, but isn’t a personal referral always better?

When I moved to my city in 2006 I needed to find a salon to cut and color my hair every few weeks. I looked online, drove around town to see what was there, and looked through the magazines and flyers that came to my home. But for the first six months or so I continued to drive more than twenty miles each way to go to the salon in the city where I had lived for more than ten years.

Finally, I met a woman who

As quickly as possible, take your online prospects and clients offline. This may sound counterintuitive to what we are attempting to accomplish on the Internet with our businesses, but it makes perfect sense in terms of a solid marketing strategy. You will want to think of ways to connect with your list away from the Internet that will work well for your niche. I have found this to work extremely well for everyone who does it.

When I was just starting out online in 2006, I made very few sales. This was partly due to the fact that I only had one product of my own for sale that year. Whenever I would receive an email from my merchant provider to notify me of the sale, I would immediately call the person to introduce myself and to thank them for purchasing.

People were shocked to hear from me. I would talk to them for five to ten minutes and they would tell me all about why they had purchased my

You will want to build a lasting relationship with the people on your list. In order to make huge profits with a small list, one with fewer than a thousand names, you must remember why they came to you in the first place. This may be the most important thing to keep in mind when you begin to connect with them and to promote your own and affiliate products to them. These prospects are much more than just numbers on your list; they are the people that will determine if you are successful or not in your quest to build an online empire.

Think about this as you write your emails, choose the products and courses you will promote, and respond to your prospects individually. Straying off the path and offering them off topic information will not serve you well over time.

Writing an email to your list should be a personal communication between you and each of them. What I mean by this is that you need to