My heart is open
My heart is free
It thinks of you
Your warm embrace
It aches for you
Your loving touch
It remembers you and the secrets we share
It touches me in a way nothing else can
I love how my heart misses you because it means I will always return

Written for my new love Dominica

You can checkout their YouTube page which is getting more and more visits from around the world.

What a blessing it is to be alive…

Music & Lionz

This is almost an aucoustic song and I love it…

YouTube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/lapwetpointemichel

My sights are on 2012 being my next visit to Dominica – this time with the kids rather than on my own – unless someone wants to invite me back to speak of course which is always a pleasure to do on any Caribbean island.

This is the talk I gave on the day.

My visit to Portsmouth with a whole bunch of family that I had only just met

I was always obsessed with the view and took loads of video of the moutains and surroundings – great for me – boring for anyone else!

Next time I will make sure I take loads of photos too because I didn’t get any and I still have a few more videos to put together which show Fond St Jean – the place I will be setting up home in Dominica.

You can buy the album here

http://www.reverbnation.com/cameronpierre

Our favourite songs – Room 115 and Another Star

Find more videos like this on Dominican Diaspora

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/Caesarina

I was listening to her poem ‘I am David’ which is on Youtube

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNQ99puqSxY&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Ceez has done an excellent job at getting herself online. Here blog is here

http://ceezpaul.wordpress.com/

and on her blog you will see that she has promoted her book on Facebook and Twitter – as well as selling the eBook version of her book through SmashWords

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/93862

She is doing all she can to promote herself and with consistent effort and continually connecting to people I have no doubt she will be able to sell them. The key is to do A LOT of work at the beginning so eventually you can slow down as the book sales start to come in but I am telling you it really is A LOT of work to promote yourself online.

I know people get online and think it will be easy because there are thousands of people but there is an old advertising rule that says people need to see something seven times or more people they take action so if you think of all those thousands of people you need to try and be in their mind and eye level at least seven times – that works out to be a lot of work on promotion!

Is it worth it – of course! When you receive emails knowing people around the world are buying your book one after another. You just need to be patience.

What can help is if you give a free copy to influencial people you know and ask them to write a review on their blog. Of course there is no guarantee they will do that but if they have a lot of people reading their blog already it can make a difference.

You can also think about trying to get yourself interviewed on online radio stations. People are always looking for material and it can really make a difference.

I will be promoting my own eBook soon which will be on Amazon Kindle. I already have one on their that covers the online marketing work I do but this one will focus on the work I do helping women raise their self confidence… will talk more about that soon.

In the meantime check out Ceez’s book

What’s On Your Mind – Diary of a self-esteemed woman

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/93862

If you pay using paypal it doesn’t show you that you are paying for the book as you checkout but then you get taken back to the book once you have paid.

I read this great article by Ayeola George called “If I were in Dominica for Independence 2011″ that I thought I would share – you can click here to read it.

I haven’t had the pleasure of being in Dominica yet at this time of the year and until my youngest isn’t in school I guess it is not going to happen but it is only another 4 years to wait before I can be at my first and as my birthday is a couple of days later it will be a great way to celebrate. By then I will be close to 50… what a thought

There is music, food, dance, good company and plenty of people around – all the things that Dominica do so very well.

I need to get myself back there in 2012! The video below isn’t from independence celebrations but from when I was at the literary festival in 2010…. just remembering….

If you are not a member you can join here at

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com

Do you have a connection with the Commonwealth… by DianeCorriette

Not sure how many members it has now but it is definitely over 8,000!

So what is it I do? Well, when people need or are looking for a service or product a lot of them now rely on the internet to find it. They use their computer or mobile phone and search for anything from flower shops, restaurants to hypnotherapists and personal trainers.  I help these experts create a blog and use that to develop a profile online so that when people are searching they find that business.

I do search engine optimisation (SEO) work to ensure they are found and I market their blog on social media. Loads of business owners write in a blog and think that is all they need to do but they do also need to actively market their blog and take part in different SEO activities so the search engines know they exist among the millions of other blogs.

I don’t need to be in England to do that. Most of my clients (at least 90%) find me by searching the internet and get in touch. I don’t even need to attend networking groups anymore and I actually find they don’t work for me. What does work is people finding me, watching my videos, reading my blog posts and then getting in touch, which is exactly what I do for my clients.

I started this off back in 2009 by writing an ebook about how to do it. I thought I would teach business owners how to do it themselves but most of them wanted me to do it for them so I did. That bought in consultancy fees and was far more lucrative income wise but sucked away at all my time and kept me chained to my computer. In May 2011 I started a membership site called influencer.biz – people blog and I promote. This has been a great happy medium between expecting people to do it and them wanting me to do it.

People pay a membership fee which is how my income is made. It cost £70 a month for one business so all I do is keep increasing the number of business owners who set up their blog with me until I have a few hundred. Of course in return I have to work on promoting their business.

Membership Sites

For me membership sites are a great way to earn a monthly ongoing income but many people who run them find after three or four months people drop out and stop paying unless you can keep them interested. Nowadays with money being tight you need to be able to deliver on your promise to keep people paying each month.

You can also run a membership site that focuses on a specific timescale e.g. three months or six months so people know once they have paid that amount they are done. Or that just charges a one off fee e.g. £297 and nothing else.

200 people paying £10 a month is £2000 a month! You can see why membership sites are popular online. You need to write all the information that will go into a membership site but once that is done promoting it will be your only task – and retaining members.

I find membership sites can be hard work and take up a lot of time because you need to provide support for members so they are not something you want to do if you are just starting out learning how to make money online but they are still a good one.

So my consultancy work and membership site  is one source of income from the internet for me

Affiliate Marketing & Adsense

Another I use is to promote products and get paid when I sell them. I have websites up like

http://www.weightlossfooddiary.co.uk

I promote a product called Diet Solution and receive around $15-25 every time I sell one (depending on what the person buys) – I could just do affiliate marketing only to make my income but it is a very lonely existence. Yes you make money but you never interact with anyone and I miss that. So I use my own business plus affiliate marketing. I currently have a few blogs all of which sell a product that brings in an income for me.

Because the membership site takes up a lot of time in terms of promoting and doing the work that needs to be done I have let affiliate marketing slip. When you stop promoting anything online you soon lose your income from it! This is why outsourcing (paying someone else to do some of the work for you) really helps. If you can’t afford to outsource then stick to one way of making money online and make it work for you – resist the temptation to move on to something else. I always had too many fingers in too many pies when I started online so it took me a while to settle down and finally make an income from it but now I am I can see the best ways for ME to continue making that income. Everyone is different and you will find something I will never use (like eBay) you might love to use.

There are also products you can promote and receive income for each month. For example if you promote a membership site each month that person stays a member you receive an income. So it is ongoing monthly income and you only have to promote it once.

Then there is Google adsense. I don’t use this as much but I have sites that advertise products on them using Google. You literally get paid cents (no one really knows how much Google pays when someone clicks a link) but when you have a big flow of visitors coming to your site you can build it up. Or if you set up several sites you build your income that way. In the past people would set up 100 – 300 – even 1,000 different sites all making maybe $100 each but collectively it adds up. It is also a lot of hosting and domains to manage so this is not my choice of income but it is one that works for people.  You need to make sure you choose a topic that thousands of people are searching for each month to make that work.

I don’t use this method much because Google changes things all the time and it doesn’t help your income. When I was new to this around 2006 people were making $10-20,000 a month using Google adsense and having hundreds of sites up with information on them and the advertising from Google. One day Google changed the rules about their advertising and overnight people lost their income as their sites were no longer seen as good enough to place adverts on. This is one of the downsides to the internet – people change things with very little notice and if you have spent 2 years working on a site overnight your income can go down to nothing or disappear.

This is why I use methods that will help me build an income on my terms like running influencer.biz and writing eBooks (see below)

Paid Advertising

When you have a blog with a large number of visitors each month you can also charge for paid advertising. You need to get several thousand people coming to your site every day to really make this work for you but every month a company pays money to advertise on a site you are promoting anyway and nothing is greater than that.

Writing & Selling eBooks and Information Products

If you have a hobby or an expertise you love it is really easy to write it down and create an eBook to sell online. For 2011 and beyond I am focusing more on this – especially now that Kindles are around and people are buying eBooks more than ever. In 2008-2009 I had a number of eBooks on sale but took them all down because I didn’t sell loads (big mistake, who knows what they would be doing now!) and  the “experts” kept saying eBooks are dead. Like a fool I listened but now I am slowly re-writing them and getting them back up.

http://www.howtobooklets.net 

They don’t sell for much each but collectively they can add up and as well as selling my own eBooks I will be adding other people’s too and making income that way.

The great thing about eBooks is once they are written they can stay up and be sold. The initial work is in putting it together but then you can sell it day after day, year after year. It needs to be a good quality product if you are going to avoid people asking for their money back! Never think you can get away with selling rubbish online – you just hurt your reputation. Always be willing to give 150% to anything that has your name on it.

What I love about selling information products and eBooks is this – once everything is up someone comes along and buys it and the system you have in place delivers the eBook to them so I never have to be there and people can buy day or night depending on where they are in the world. This is where the expression “make money while you sleep” comes from. While I am in my bed in England someone in Australia is awake and buying something from me.

Because of this it also means I can be free to enjoy my day knowing the system is taking care of everything. Of course someone might have a question, or a person asks for a refund and you need to take care of that but apart from that it is a nice system to have in place.

Other media like audio and video can also be put together and sold. For example if you want to put a cooking course together you can create a recipe book as an eBook but also make a few videos that show the person how to actually make some of the recipes then sell that as a package. Then you become an information marketer because you are selling information and you can charge much more for the product. An eBook might sell for £2.99 or £9.99 but an information product sells for £47-197 sometimes much more depending on what is included.

The downside to being on the internet

There are a few things you have to watch for if you are going to successfully make money online.

1. Watch which affiliate programs you join. I joined one by a famous marketer who boasts about having a 2 million dollar ranch and yet I haven’t been paid the commission he owes me so I stopped promoting. Use sites like clickbank.com and promote products from there because then you know you will definitely be paid.

2. There are so many people online selling products that promise a lot and deliver very little. It can be hard to know who to trust. You might want to follow someone and get to know them before buying any products. I do recommend you buy something that will teach you though because all the free information out there on the net can not always be trusted. So pay for your education and learn how to make money online.

3. Be patient. It might take several months maybe even a year or two before you make your first few dollars. Can you wait that long? Are you willing to? Some people come online and are making $10k in 6 months (or so they say). If someone talks about how much money they make, make sure they are willing to show you proof! Plus, just because they were able to do that it doesn’t mean that you will so be patient.

4. Keep promoting. I used to make the mistake of promoting something for a little while then giving up. You may need to promote a blog or an eBook for months before you see results. It is an ongoing thing.

5. Sometimes you start promoting a product and then it is withdrawn. It is really frustrating when you put in hours of work promoting something and then the owner decides to take it down – especially if you were making money with it! Stick to promoting people and products that have been around for a while when you start out.

Build Your Income Online Using Small Amounts

Online it isn’t always about selling one product for £1,000 but it is the collection of little amounts that seem to help build an income – e.g. 8 eBooks selling at £4.99 to 1000 people! The internet provides you with a worldwide audience but you HAVE TO market your eBook. Once written you can’t just leave it to sit and do nothing – that is the mistake many make. Think about adverts on the TV for a minute, do they appear only once? Of course not, they are shown over and over again. So it is with the marketing of an eBook. You need to be on social media, talking on internet radio shows, promoting what you do on blogs – a combination of different methods come together to help your eBook sell and eventually you can slow down and enjoy the income but you can never stop!

So there you have it. None of this requires me to be in England to make it work which is why I am looking forward to living in different counties. As long as I have my laptop and an internet connection I am fine.

There are so many other ways to make money online that I don’t use that selling stuff on eBay or promoting drop shipping (you promote a large product like a TV or sofa and the company post it to the person who buys it – you get paid for each one you sell) so it is important you find something to do based on your skills and abilities.

How do you get your money?

How do I get paid? Well everyone pays using Paypal – a wonderful tool for anyone looking to run an online business.

With my membership site/consultancy work someone gets in touch with me and I send them an invoice which they pay via Paypal.

With affiliate marketing I spend the month promoting something then each month the company send me a commission payment via paypal.

My bank account is set up to send the money from Paypal to my account. It takes 3 days and that is how I get paid from anywhere in the world to my bank account in England.

Some companies also pay you directly into your bank account. You set it up when you join and the money goes straight in which is quicker and better than Paypal.

And some companies pay by cheque (although not as many anymore) – I promote one product in America and they send me a cheque with my commission in dollars. I then have to bank it and pay a fee for the money to go into my account.

As I have five years before my round the world trip starts that gives me time to build up my eBook collection and sales from that. I think my first five years online have been about me finding my feet. Now between my

• eBooks
• consultancy/membership site (just one!)
• adsense (not much but a little)
• affiliate marketing

Offline I also speak at events and run workshops (only ran one this year so far been a bit lazy!) but they too bring in income.

I can build a solid income for myself and I use a blog to promote them all so blogging is a big part of how it all works. My favourites are affiliate marketing and eBooks for their ease of making it work online and if you stay focused on one of them you can make it happen too. If you are willing to put in the time to learn the internet can become a real source of income for you.

Get help from experts who have made money

I used to teach people how to do this but I find despite people saying they really do want to learn most people just don’t have the determination it takes to really build an income online. I was on my computer for 12 hours a day seven days a week for my first two years…. and that is a conservative view of it. I spent all my time on my computer and still got very little results. Now after learning what it takes I understand what I need to do and what works for me.

I have spent years and loads of money (LOADS!) trying to figure this out and there have been a few people who I trust and recommend.

Three sites I do recommend (and I am an affiliate for them all so I get paid if you join) are:

Blog Success. They teach people how to use blogs to build an income.

Click here to find out more about Blog Success

The training you get here will not only help you start your own blogs but eventually – because they teach you how to set them up and market them – you can use those skills to get paid for putting up blogs for other people.

If you want to learn about how to succeed with affiliate marketing then Mark Ling is one of the best at teaching that. He runs a membership site called

Affilorama – affiliate marketing training

It covers all the basics you need to know to build an income using affiliate marketing and is great for beginners. If all you want to do is put up sites and promote a product without having to deal with refunds and customers affiliate marketing is the best choice.

If writing and selling eBooks is something you are more interested in there is a product I can recommend that takes you through how to do it

Click here to find out about how to write and sell ebooks

You can figure this all out on your own but its a long and frustrating process. The one thing I recommend is that whoever you learn with you stick with them until you see results. Don’t be tempted to move around and don’t buy anything else even if they are promoting it. The owners of Blog Success and Affilorama make additional income by promoting products as an affiliate – ignore all of that and just stick to their course. What they provide is enough. Once you are making money online then you can consider buying other stuff.

I hope that is all useful! Any questions let me know.

So what did I do to survive and make sure this still goes ahead? I simplified my life – I downsized! I took my outgoings in 2009 from £3,000 a month down to what it is now around £1,700. In 2008-09 when I needed to find £3k a month just to pay bills it was a real struggle at times but now in 2011 after releasing myself from “stuff” and credit card bills and car payments life is a lot better and I feel free.

Right now the ONLY thing to keep me in England are my children. I have no car payments, no mortgage (I sold my house to pay everything off), no ties of any kind and it feels great.  I think the biggest thing I gave up was my car but I am now used to life without one because to be honest working at home every day meant I hardly ever used it. I also got real lazy and would jump in the car to go post a letter!!!!

The biggest CHANGE I made was to move a couple of months ago. I decided to stop paying London prices for rent and move just out of London to Luton, Bedfordshire. I am LOVING it here. It is far more open to black/caribbean events and activities than Harrow. In Luton black people actually count for something! I am saving £300 a month on rent which is going into my travel pot – or at least it will once I stop spending money on stuff for the house!

I missed not having a garden. Our last place was a top floor flat on a main road. This time I choose a house with a big garden and it is so quiet. I live in a really nice part of Luton with an (so I have been told by my estate agent) “affluent” black and asian community.

My youngest – the future England cricket player – went down to the local cricket club and introduced himself to the adults there. He has been there ever since playing and scoring for the adults. They feed him and treat him really well. In Harrow they didn’t even play him in a team – he was in reserves – apart from at school where they did use him. He was always upset about not being picked to play in the main Harrow team but was happy he had the school team at least.  In Luton the coach hasn’t seen him play yet but is determined to make him a great cricket player – I guess his dedication of giving up his weekends to sit and watch the adults (which he loves to do) makes him a great candidate to succeed!!

He is still waiting to meet England cricket player Monty Panesar who is a regular visitor to the Luton cricket ground and was trained by the guy who will know be coach to my youngest.

Middle child and mister socialable is the only one without a real focus yet but he is down to start college next week and hopefully he will make some new friends. He keeps wanting to revisit Harrow (I think he has a girl there!) and as always he keeps us all laughing and entertained at home. I wanted to send him to Dominica this year to be with his cousins but the move took priority over that in the end.

So, for the next 5 years I will be here living in Luton. I may make one more move to a bigger place because my oldest doesn’t have her own room which is not a big deal while she is away at university but in the next couple of years when she returns I will move to give her some space.

All I do now is save and have fun. There are so many cultural events on in and around Luton that I will love being here and it won’t take me long to connect with some new people.

As for business. It is picking up and I had a real growth spurt last year around September-December. Talk of a double dip recession slowed this down again this year around April-June but so far for September 2011 its looking good again. Its almost as if everyone got back from their holidays and decided to use my services!

I have plans to visit Dominica again possibly in 2012 but this time I want to take the kids with me so I am looking at a £3-4k flight payment before we even think about anything else! My place in Dominica is definitely Fond St Jean which is where my dad was born and it will be my haven away from the England winters.

Here are my top 10 best sounds on Dominican Diaspora profiles:

(Note : you need to be logged in to see these profiles)

Number One : Sylvia Smith

One in a million/come back to bed, Earth Wind & Fire, You Love – Bushman – love it

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/SylviaSmith

Number Two : Natasha Henderson

The heart and soul of Dominican Diaspora and from musical roots too so it was a tough call whether to make Natasha second or first but Sylvia had tunes that reminded me of my English black roots so won…!

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/NATASHAHENDERSONSHILLINGFORD

I had no idea what Zouk music was before DD but Natasha has some great calypso/zouk sounds… trendsetter is my favourite and I shared that one on my profile!  I lost count how many times I have played that tune now

Number Three : Cameron Pierre

Okay so he is a professional musician but I have loved his music since ‘discovering’ him on DD, one of the great things about the network is the music I discovered for myself since it started.

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/CameronPierre

Mo Better Blues is my FAV track and I have his album so that gets plenty of play on my ipod.

Number Four: Rodney Ross

Mr Manje Lokal cook and music man…

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/rodneyross?xg_source=activity

Number Five: Rhea Farrell (Moreau)

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/Rhea

A mixture of tunes I love to listen to over and over again. Most of which remind me of younger days

Number Six: Kalinago Woryi

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/Kalinago

As beautiful and strong as the woman herself this is a great mixture of music and I need to be in a certain defiant mood to be listening to it – not easy listening but great warrior music.

Number Seven : Bo Bannis

Love the calpyso tunes that are on here

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/BoBannis

Number Eight :  My girl Robyn

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/Robyn

I need to get her back in there to update her page but still love the Love Generation song and My Destiny

Number Nine :  Laurel Douglas-Falconer

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/LaurelDouglasFalconer

A great mixture of music to choose from

Number Ten : Ron ‘Baba’ Deschamps

My second favourite man on DD (Cameron Pierre will always be my favourite!) and a great man to talk to – we used to have 2 hour chats on skype about everything and nothing… funny man with stories and creative when it comes to art and music.

http://www.dominican-diaspora.com/profile/zafadomnik

There used to be more music on there but now not so much. It used to be one of my top places to go listen to music but I couldn’t not add him to my list.

So there you have it. This is the music that keeps me going every day as I sit and type at my computer. I bought a Young Bull  CD when I was in DA and would love to know how to add them but they are not mp3s – Bulldozer is my favourite tune. Will have to work that out. So those are my favs.