Being an artist doesn’t mean you have to starve.  Forget the archetypical image of a tortured soul, emaciated and malnourished, battling inner demons in a Lower Manhattan studio apartment—in the internet age artists are everywhere, even in the most unpredictable places, and making names for themselves online.

Is it selling out?  Maybe.  But you’ll never write the next great American novel or paint the next timeless painting if you can’t make rent.  You can get paid for your art, and in more ways than you think.

The Neo- Classical Way

Why fight fierce competition in your area or (worse yet) a shortage of demand for art, when you can sell your one-of-a-kind pieces online, with the entire globe as your market?  There are hundreds of communities and sites that facilitate the buying and selling of art; all that you are required to do is produce the art.  The best part?  Interested buyers come to you.  Of course, the more you want to sell, the more you’ll have to advertise yourself in the real and online worlds, but your pieces will get views just by being online, which is more than they’d get sitting in your basement.

A few of the major online art trading communities are Etsy and Yessy, which feature hand-made art and craft items specifically, and eBay and Amazon, which aren’t limited to hand-made works (or to art, for that matter).

Many artists also choose to build their own websites to sell their work rather than creating an account with a third party site.  And with websites like Foliotwist that offer web page templates and customizable page construction, along with traffic booster tips and website reviews, you don’t even have to be an expert coder to get your art seen by potentially hundreds of thousands of people every year.

An Avant- Garde Approach

Maybe you aren’t comfortable posting your serious art for sale online, or maybe you are an artist that doesn’t take art too seriously, but still want to generate some income by being creative.  For clever and creative artists with an instinct for quality graphic design and an intuition about mass commercial appeal there are sites like Café Press, Zazzle, and Threadless which allow registered users to set up their own “stores” where they can upload their personal designs and print them on pretty much anything—t-shirts, coffee mugs, sticky notes, shot glasses, skateboards, shoes—and then sell those items to anyone who visits their store.  It may not exactly be “high art,” but it can pay the bills if users are proactive in marketing their wares.

Even Michaelangelo Sold Out

Michaelangelo was paid to paint the Sistine Chapel—he did not do it out of an altruistic love for the church, or to preserve his lofty ideals about art.  Art doesn’t have to be the thing that keeps you in poverty; rather, it should be that which transports you to higher realms of wealth and happiness (think Gatsby’s yellow Rolls Royce if you need a mental image).   Make your art make money for you!

About the Author

Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online schools. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @gmail.com.

If you enjoy working with computers, consider converting that enjoyment to a profit by starting an online home business.

One of the best things about the Internet is that it enables you to reach out to an unlimited number of clients. Since you are not restricted to focusing your efforts within one specific area, you’re limited only by your dedication to the business.

To start, you’ll need to figure out what sorts of products or services you want to provide to customers through your online home business. You’ll likely find that you can fill an existing need by either selling a product that hasn’t yet been introduced to the market, or by offering your expertise to others. You could even create an online home business that is centered around selling items that you no longer need through auction websites such as eBay.

Since the success of your online home business will be largely dependent upon a good Internet connection, make sure that yours is functioning well before you start. If you will have a website to advertises your online business, try to find a hosting service that offers great service at a price you can afford. Reliability is particularly important because if your website is down frequently or does not offer a secure connection for customers who want to buy something, they’ll look elsewhere to get what they want.

Make sure you don’t leave out the small aspects of your online home business too. For example, in addition to a trustworthy Internet connection, you’ll also need to budget for other things that help keep your business running smoothly. Although your needs will vary depending on the type of business you have, examples include a printer, ink, a separate phone line for business calls, and papers.

In closing, don’t forget that a strong marketing plan is a vital ingredient for anyone who is committed to the success of an online home business. Think about ways that you can spread the word about your business and reach your target audience quickly. If you’re able to keep up a high level of service even as your business grows, you’ll very likely benefit from favorable comments from your customers.

Here are some proven Home Business Opportunities that really work!

In order to keep up with regular posting schedule, we are now accepting guest posts.

If your guest posts are approved for submission on internetwealthlab.com, you will get the following benefits:

1. Resource box at the end of the blog post sending traffic to your own blog or website.
2. Dofollow links to help you in SEO (Maximum of two)

However, as with anything there are guidelines to follow:

• Most importantly the blog posts must be informative and unique. The article must not be submitted anywhere else on the web.
• The blog posts must be 500 words and more and in Microsoft Word
• The articles must not have formatting and grammatical errors.

We reserve the right to publish or not to publish the articles. Only informative, unique articles will be published

Please use the “contact” link to submit your articles

Selling low cost products is an excellent way to get started in the online retail business. The inherent low cost of small and basic items requires less start up money, time and effort to sell online.

Selling low cost products online is also a good way to entice customers to purchase higher cost products in the future, once they have become familiar with your online retail business. In order to sell the products to customers you must first get the low cost products from a distributor or manufacturer, which is not as complicated as it may seem.

Wholesale Low Products

Wholesale distributors and manufacturers are the best places to get low cost products so you can sell them online. Practically any inexpensive household item that is small and durable is supported by a wholesale distributor willing to sell the products to you at less than retail prices.

Since low cost products inherently require fewer resources to manufacturer, you’ll also be saving extra money purchasing in volume compared to purchasing a volume of high cost televisions or MP3 players.

Additionally, the inexpensive nature of low cost products means that there are many different wholesale distributors and manufacturers competing against each other. By cross comparing wholesale distributors and manufacturers based on your product specifications and available prices, you’ll be able to find excellent deals for low cost products to maximize profits when selling online.

Low Cost Online Retail Store

There are many different ways to get your low cost products from China out into the online market where customers can purchase them. Many online retailers take the traditional route of creating their own online retail website.

However, getting low cost products to sell online can be maximized for profit by using one of the streamlined e-commerce services such as eBay, Amazon or Yahoo. These e-commerce services provide you with an intuitive way to set up your own online store so you can sell low cost products online without the hassle of building a website from scratch.

Low Cost True Wholesale and Drop Shipping

Using the true wholesale method where you store and ship the products to the customer yourself is excellent when it comes to selling low cost products online. Low cost products have a smaller shipping expense than high cost products and you likely won’t be spending a lot of resources on storing small low cost items.

However, you can also keep the process of purchasing low cost items from distributors and selling them to customers entirely online based by using a drop shipping service. With drop shipping, you’ll be able to transfer the customer’s order online to the wholesale distributor who will arrange for the ordered low cost products to be shipped directly to the customer.

This lets you keep your entire low cost product selling operation online without having to physically ship any packages or store any low cost products yourself.

Network marketing or MLM is one of the most powerful passive income systems on the internet. The income potential of network marketing can be explosive.

In his book Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki writes:

“When I speak to adults who want to earn more money, I always recommend the same thing. I suggest taking a long view of their life. Instead of simply working for the money and security, which I admit are important, I suggest they take a second job that will teach them a second skill.

Often I recommend joining a network marketing company, also called multilevel marketing, if they want to learn sales skills. Some of these companies have excellent training programs that help people get over their fear of failure and rejection, which are the main reasons people are unsuccessful.”

Many people however come online with a bad experience with offline network marketing and thus tend to shy away from online network marketing.

Online network marketing is however different from the traditional offline network marketing that required you to make cold calls, run newspaper classified ads, and radio ads among other marketing strategies in order to generate leads. What’s more, you no longer have to hold your family-get-together at ransom anymore with all the lead generation methods available today.

In this article, we’ll look at several tips to succeed with network marketing or MLM.

Join network marketing companies with good uplines and training systems:

The strength of your upline has a significant influence on your success with network marketing because good upline offers you excellent support.

A good upline should also be abe to offer support to your downline so that you can concentrate on generating leads. You see, if you don’t have a capable upline to tap into, you’d have to learn how to generate traffic and leads all on your own, then train your downline so that they are equally competent in traffic generation. Otherwise, your downlines will just quit after a few months and sad to say, you are back to square one.

What that means is that if your upline is not reliable, you’ll need to develop a system to train your downline, their downline and so on so that your network keeps growing exponentially as well as your income.

You can easily do that if you are an experienced internet marketer but if you are not, then you should consider joining a network marketing company with a reliable training system and/or under a capable downline.

Ideally the network marketing company that you join should have a good training system and a proven marketing system that convert prospects into downlines at a decent scale. This allows you to focus more on generating leads and sending them through the training system.

Invest in advertising or be patient:

To get on track to success with network marketing fast, you must be willing to advertise at the beginning.

This is not to mean that you shouldn’t use free traffic generation methods such as article marketing, forum marketing, social networking etc. on the contrary, you should have as many free traffic and lead generation strategies in your mix alongside the paid ones. Why do I say that?

You see, while these free lead generation methods are free, they are quite slow and you wouldn’t see immediate results. For that reason, you ideally want to advertise at the beginning while building your free traffic.

Be prepared to do some real work.

Contrary to what many people want to make you believe, network marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Of course there are lots of people that explode their income, sometimes to millions of dollars within a few weeks or months but you must be prepared to do the work it takes to succeed.

If you only join a network marketing program and stop there, then you can be sure that you will go nowhere, but if you diligently and passionately grow your network, then you’ll truly enjoy the real power of network marketing.

Advantages of MLM or network marketing

• Your income grows exponentially and is potentially explosive.
• You don’t need to offer any customer support especially if you have a good training system.
• When your downline grows enough, you might not have to do anything anymore. That’s, you keep earning even when you don’t work.

Disadvantages of network marketing

• You must be prepared to spend on advertisement at the beginning as your free traffic and lead generation system grows.
• Income is low at the beginning and can be discouraging. This is where most people quit, but those that stay on succeed.

Summing up:

If you’d like a passive income source, the multilevel marketing is for you. All you need to do is to sign up with some network marketing company online and start building your downline. Here are some few popular ones to get you started building your network marketing business but before you go, please leave us a comment using the form below.

Pyxismpreneurs (Travel and vacation network marketing company)

Herbalife (weight loss network marketing company)

Marykay (Cosmetics network marketing opportunity)

Lifepathunlimited (a personal development MLM company)

Wishing you success with Network marketing,

Kevin Njoroge

I personally visit online forums almost everyday. Forums are excellent places to hang out with like minded people for several reasons:

a) Getting solution to problems:

Whenever I have a problem that I don’t seem to find an answer to, my first stop is normally online forums. And I in most cases find solutions without having to go any further.

I get amazed sometimes how nice the world has become. Instead of balding your head or banging your computer in frustration over a nagging problem, just visit online forums, ask a question, and someone somewhere, sometimes halfway around the globe, gives you the perfect answer or solution, sometimes in a matter of a few minutes. And above all, for free. That’s the power of the internet

b) Information sharing:

In forums, people with similar interests gather to talk about trends in their industry, changes etc. They also share ideas, new tricks and lessons on various topics and aspects of their industry.

c) Research:

If you enter forums with a sharp eye, you can identify new niche markets and products ideas by:

• Noting the commonly asked questions
• Noting the popular threads
• Reading comments by forum members

d) Hire affordable professionals:

Most online forums allow their members to but and sell their products and services. By visiting the sections in the forums where this is allowed, you can hire affordable professionals such as programmers, copy writers, web designers etc.
e) Driving traffic to your sites:

The signature link in forums can be an important source of free targeted traffic to your website. The secret here is to create a benefit-driven, witty signature link that make people want to click it. e.g. Instead of:

-”Click Here to Visit My Weight Loss Site”

Go for something like:

“Discover How I Shed 20 Pounds in 1 Week”

As for the title of this post, here are five internet marketing forums that you must be a member of:

a) Digitalpoint webmaster forums:

This is one of the oldest webmaaster forums online. It’s also one of the most popular , with hundreds to thousands of members online at any given time.

b) Webcosmo webmaster forums:

This is a fast growing webmaster forum. You can also register your website for the website of the month contest, but you must have posted over 25 comments to win the contest.

c) V7N forum

Another nice online marketing forum. This one allow you to display your latest blog post in your comments.

d) Seochat.com forums

As the name suggests, this forum is a specialized one, allowing only search engine optimization related discussions.

e) im4newbies forum

This one requires manual approval by a forum administrator to complete the signup process. This one is not so popular but you can still get decent traffic from it.

This is a guest post by Dave Martin of http://getmoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/

When you install a code from Statcounter or Analytics in your site or blog you are starting to get information that will help you to earn money online with backlinks. Let me explain you how this is done.

There is a premise before we move forward. The premise is you are getting visitors from search engines. If this is not yet true please review your site and optimize it for some very low competitive keyword in such a way that you rank high in SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) and receive visitors from Google or some search engine.

This is the hardest step for a beginner, to understand that you need traffic from search engines. There are so many scams at internet that promise you millions of visitors a month that you really do not know who to listen to.

Make sure you are receiving visitors from search engines by utilizing some tracking software such as analytics or statcounter. In this way you will have the evidence that visitors are coming from there.

For example, I am optimizing this post for the phrase, earn money online with backlinks. I got this phrase from Statcounter and I am not ranking on Spot 1 on Google. I expect to rank there after I make this post and build some backlinks with that phrase.

Later on, after you do it once and again, you will continue climbing higher on SERPs for more and more keywords and phrases. After a while there will be a good quantity of visitors that are finding you with more and more phrases.

You just need to reinforce the idea to search engines that your site is relevant for those phrases and keywords by creating unique content optimized and building links for those phrases and keywords.

There will be phrases that make money that you will be found with. You will optimize your site to be on spot 1 for those phrases to get more visitors. Those will come and read your site or blog and it may happen they will click on your ads. This is the way to earn money online with backlinks.

Building pages and taking them to the first position in search engines is a good method to get some cash at internet. This process is almost self sustained. When you take a page to be on spot 1 for phrases that make money, then you will earn money online in a steady manner.

Dave Martin has blog to show you how to make money online in several ways. He says you can learn how to get money and can show you the way.

As you may already know, freelancing is one of the best legitimate ways to make money online especially if you are just starting our and are pressed for cash. As a matter of fact, there are thousands upon thousands of freelancers earning a full living off such skills as programming, copy writing, general writing, research, web design, graphic design and typing among others.

In this article, I am going to share with you four proven ways to find freelancing jobs online.

1) Freelancing sites:

There are many freelancing sites on the internet that connect people and companies seeking to outsource tasks they don’t have time for or aren’t willing to undertake with people willing to undertake them at a fee. Such jobs are posted as projects for freelancers to bid on. Now, all you have to do is to signup with these freelancing sites so that you can start bidding on projects posted on them.

Here are a few freelancing sites you can start out with.

• Elance
• Freelancer.com
• Peopleperhour
• Scriptlance
• Guru.com

2) Writing communities:

If you are specifically looking for writing jobs, then this option will work very well for you. There are an ever increasing number of online writing communities that connect people with writing needs with freelance writers. Here are a few of them:

• Uvocorp
• Essaywriters.net
• Allwriting.net

3) Using Online forums:

More and more forums are allowing their members to to post threads about tasks for which they are seeking assistance with. Others have sections where members can buy and sell their products or services. Here are a few forums that you might find useful in that regard:

• Digitalpoint
• Webcosmo forums
• V7N forums

4) Using classifies sites:

You can also find freelancing jobs by visiting online classified sites like Craiglist, Backpage and Epage among others.

Summing up:

If you follow these four steps diligently, you can easily see lots of freelancing jobs flowing in and as your reputation grows, you can start charging higher prices for your services.

You can also organize your own team of freelancers and concentrate on bidding and securing new jobs

1. http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com/2010/05/11-mistakes-bloggers/

In this post, John Smith discusses the mistakes made by new bloggers. You can increase your chances of success by following the advice of John in this post.

2. http://www.copyblogger.com/strong-guarantee/

In this post, Dean Rieck shares useful tips on increasing your sales using powerful guarantees. If you have been checking keenly, almost all (or almost all) product launches come with solid guarantees nowadays. This is because it is one of the most important ways to guarantee more sales and profits. Why? Because online buyers are wary of losing their money to a cheat somewhere on the web. Enjoy the rest of the reading:

3. http://www.smartbloggerz.com/2010/06/gain-leverage-on-twitter-and-how-to-get-more-traffic-from-it/

In this post, stephanie shares tips to make good use of your twitter account as an online marketer and/or blogger. You see, twitter is hot right now and if you know how to use twitter well, you can generate lots of traffic and business off the microblogging platform. To read this post anout twitter, follow this link:

4. http://www.sitesketch101.com/how-to-build-credibility-for-your-blog

As you may already know, building credibility for your blog is a perfect way to command a loyal following and build a readers base. This post by Onibalusi will share with you important tips to do exactly that.

5. http://kikolani.com/simple-on-page-tag-optimization-for-bloggers.html

Search engine traffic is one of the best free traffic to  any site. Search engine optimization however is not an easy task for most people. In this article, Tola Famakinwa shares important on-page seo tips that can give a boost to your website or blog

6. http://www.bloggingaccess.com/top-20-list-of-2-0-sites/

The link building game changed with the introduction of the nofollow attribute and its acceptance among the major search engines.

The link you should should consider adding in your mix for search engine optimization efforts are quality links and this include links from high pagerank sites and dofollow sites and blogs.

In this post, you’ll fing top 20 list of dofollow web2.0 sites

7. http://www.blogussion.com/writing-content/captivating-writing-content/

Here, Karan shares five powerful secrets to writing captivating content for your blog. From having great headlines and titles to having lists on your blog, Karan shares it all in this great post.

8. http://weblogbetter.com/2010/06/11/4-quick-tips-for-writing-engaging-blog-content/

This blog post will have you both educated and tickled as Kiesha tells it all. You’ll love the four tips for writing engaging blog content exposed here.

9. http://www.dailyblogtips.com/5-plugins-to-boost-contact-with-your-readers-and-users/

This post reveals five useful plugins to boost contact with your readers and users. These wordpress plugins are useful for building a sense of community and reliability to your users.  They can help you command a visitor loyalty

As you can see, today I decided to do something different.  But this is for a reason. You’ll know why in my next blog post tomorrow, so check it out.

Today I am going to share with you a 7-step plan to make your first $1000 on the internet affiliate marketing without a website

1. Sign up with an affiliate program.

The first step is, of course, to sign up with an affiliate program of your choice. You can search for affiliate programs in affiliate directories such as cj.com, shareasale.com, Moreniche.com, Linkshare.com, Maxbounty.com and clickbank.com among others or by searching over at your favorite search engine using “Keyword+affiliate program” e.g. “Dating+affiliate program”.

There are many factors to consider when selecting an affiliate program such as availability of affiliate tools, professional sales page, etc.

2) Create an attention-grabbing, witty signature:

Once you have signed up with an affiliate program of your choice and you have been asigned with your own unique affiliate link, the next step is to create an attention grabbing signature. This is basically a statement that you’ll use to link to your affiliate link in forums and on classified sites.

A nice little trick is to modify the headline of the product you are intending to promote. For example, if you are promoting Clone cash system, a completely free to join, top notch coaching program, you can create a signature link from its headline as follows:

Clone Cash System Headline: A Complete A to Z Nothing Left Out, Step By Step, Income Producing System

Signature: Free Video Course Reveals A Complete A to Z Income Producing System

3) Be active in online forums

You can easily drive lots of free traffic to the affiliate program you are promoting by being an active contributor to online forums. The secret to forum marketing is having a witty, attention grabbing signature link.

Visit five to ten forums each day and post an average of 10 posts and/or comments. If you can post 10 posts a day, that’s 100 chances of having your signature link (and affiliate link) spotted by the members of the forum. And that’s free advertising for you.

4) Comment on blogs:

Next, leave comments on blogs using your affiliate link. Create a list f about 20-30 popular blogs in your niche and make a schedule to visit them every day and leave comments using your affiliate link.

5) Article marketing:

Article marketing is a perfect way to drive traffic through your affiliate link. the trick here is to submit keyword rich articles to artcicle directories online, then leaving your affiliate link in the author’s bio section.

The only downside to this strategy is that some article directories do not allow the use of affiliate links. For example, ezinearticles allow linking to an affiliate program only if the link is a domain name you own, redirecting traffic to the affiliate sales page from the top-level of the domain.

You can however work around this by registering a domain name related to the affiliate program, then redirecting it to the affiliate program sales page. I register my domain names on namechep.com

6) Post to classified sites:

The next step in the plan is to post an advertisement in free classified sites such as Craiglist, Backpage.com and Epage. By leaving your affiliate links in the classifieds sites, you can easily close a sale.

7) Send traffic using ppc

The most common type of PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic is Google Adwords. As the name suggests, you pay for this kind of traffic per click. the thing here is to pay Google to place your offer in the sponsored section of the search results and in what is called “Content Network”.

If you know google Adsense, then you already know what content network is; the sites displaying the Google adsense ads. If you’d like a complete guide to Google Adwords, Perry Marshall’s Best-selling Definitive guide to Google Adwords is highly recommended.

The above plan can make you your first $1000 online in just one month. Attaining a superaffiliate status requires nothing more than diligently implementing the above techniques, determining which ones are working best for you, then replicating them over and over again across different niches and affiliate programs.

TIP: If or once your budget allows, consider building a list of subscribers and pre-selling your prospects instead of sending them directly to the affiliate programs you are promoting. With a list you can:

• Drive traffic to any affiliate program or website on demand
• Presell your prospects to the affiliate products, thus standing a better chance to earn the commissions