This week one of my marketing tips podcasts was named by Small Business Trends as one of the Top 100 Small Business Podcasts. I was surprised by this honor because it was the first time and I have only been podcasting for about two and a half years. Most of the other honorees have been around for five years or more. It just goes to show that consistency pays off.

Being able to share your message with the world is a powerful and effective way to grow your business. Set up an account in iTunes at no charge and then connect it with your audio recordings to have your own podcast. Your target audience will be able to find you from anywhere in the world, thereby increasing your visibility and credibility.

Subscribe to my Online Marketing Tips Podcast here.

Writing your eBook as an affiliate marketer works extremely well for niche topics and Amazon products. It seems like people have forgotten just how powerful an eBook can be, and that you can sell them for much more than similar content would sell for as a book on Kindle. As far as using this type of content to drive affiliate sales, it is one of the most effective and underutilized techniques available to us for our online businesses.

I wrote a guest post for Jim Edwards where I discussed a step by step affiliate domination system for niche topics. If you go through this article you will see that I have developed some specific methods that are not being taught anywhere else. With the exception of Squidoo, which is currently in the process of merging with HubPages you will find that everything I teach is up to date and continues to work well in today’s world.

You may also want to listen to the podcast interview I did with Jim Edwards by clicking here.

Living your best life is all about doing the things that make you happy and bring the greatest rewards. I relate to this concept after choosing to leave my former life as a classroom teacher and real estate broker/residential appraiser behind in 2006 and coming online to live my life as an entrepreneur.

Rachel Rofe recently posted her list of the ‘7 Reasons You’re Not Living the Life of Your Dreams‘ and I found it interesting that it was mostly about reframing the way you think of your current situation. I did this when I was in the last year of working as a classroom teacher so that I could mentally detach from an unhappy situation and move into my new life as an online entrepreneur.

Are you ‘living your best life?‘ If so, congratulations! If not, look over Rachel’s list and see where you can make some changes immediately and in the near future to have the life you want and deserve.

You can listen to my podcast interview with Rachel Rofe here.

Goal setting and goal achieving can be done using something called ‘Smart Goals’, where SMART is an acronym for goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Agreed
• Realistic
• Time bounded

Marlon Sanders has an excellent post on this topic that is worth reading. He gives examples of SMART goals and shares where he went wrong with his own goals before learning more about this.

I can speak from experience when I tell you that writing down your goals is the best way to begin. I continue to do this and focus on the steps I must take each day to move closer to each of my goals.

Listen to my podcast interview with Marlon Sanders here.

Prime time for entrepreneurs refers to those sacred hours every day when you can accomplish the most. For me, those hours are between about six-thirty and eleven in the morning and I am reluctant to give them up very often.

Mike Darling was discussing this topic of prime time in one of his recent posts, and he brought up some salient points that are worth reading. He shares that his best hours are in the early morning, and says:

“So I have found it useful and helpful, to live my weekends as if this was a weekday and I was self-employed, until I am self-employed.  Which means yes I have to wash the car and mow the grass and exercise, but I need to preserve and protect those precious hours in the morning.”

This topic of ‘prime time’ is from Day 19 of my Online Productivity Challenge. Join in at any time to grow your online business.

Finding the best book font combinations for your printed books can be a challenge, but may be well worth the time and effort to find the ones that work best for you. Book publishing expert Teresa Miller discusses this topic in her recent post, where she also shares a list of top fonts and combinations from Douglas Bonneville.

Teresa says that one her personal “go-to” combinations is the first one on Bonneville’s  list: Helvetica (bold) for chapter titles and Garamond for body content.

I have written all of my print books (nine to date) using the Georgia font throughout. Now I can see that I have limited myself with this choice and intend to be more creative with my next book (due out in October, 2014).

Which fonts are you using in your printed writing, and why do you prefer those to the more traditional font combinations?

Niche sites are a favorite passion of mine when it comes to earning income online, and one person who has done this exceedingly well is Susanne Myers. She calls herself ‘The Hillbilly Housewife’, and in a recent post on her site she explains how and why she doesn’t use paper towels any longer for day to day spills and messes. In this post she also shares the wisdom of another expert in this area.

I recommend reading these posts, checking out all three of the blogs, and thinking about how you can create a niche mini-site that reflects your life and your interests. Think about hobbies, sports, fashion, pets, travel, and anything else that you or someone you know enjoys and spends money on. These are all possible niches, and business opportunities as well.

Could there be one or more niche sites in your future?

Debbie Benstein first reached out to me in a Skype group we were both a part of. I felt an immediate connection with her and loved what she had to say on her Marketing Morsels site. I soon found out she was living in Israel and assumed she was Israeli. She is not.

Debbie’s Marketing Morsels are filled with solid, valuable marketing tips based on her more than twenty-five years of real world marketing experience. I love how she describes what she does on her site:

“I care deeply about old-fashioned values such as honesty, integrity and ethical behavior. Marketing can often be manipulative and that’s the kind of marketing I despise. But marketing done well, and to a receptive audience, can promote a win-win scenario for both the business and the target market. That’s the kind of marketing I like to do.”

Please listen to this marketing tips podcast with an open mind and see if you don’t agree with me that Debbie Benstein is indeed a rare gem.

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Online marketing productivity habits can definitely increase your bottom line, and Dennis Becker has written a post about this that I highly recommend. He breaks down his strategy into five ‘Productive Habits’ and I resonate the most with #1 – They plan what they are doing each day. This is what Dennis says about this:

“This is one of the biggest problems Internet marketers face. It’s next to impossible to be productive if you don’t have a plan for what you’re doing each day. If you just plop down at your computer with only a vague idea of what you want to get done, nothing will get done at all.”

Please read and comment on his full post at the link above, and let me know what you thought about it by commenting here.

You can learn more about Dennis Becker by listening to an interview I did with him for my
Online Marketing Tips  podcast series here.