Do you want to make money online, but you’re not certain how? I’ll tell you one good way to get your readers to take the action you want them to. Use the how-to trick.

How-to headlines immediately grab our attention. They dangle a promise: How to make more money, how to lose weight, how to have more fun in life.

Even if readers already know what to do (eat less, exercise more, for example), they think some missing piece of info might help them move from simple awareness of the problem to taking action. The how-to headline taps into their craving for another perspective. That’s why your readers dropped by your website to begin with. They want to solve a problem and suspect that you can help.

As a professional freelancer, I had researched and written many pieces and had my work published in national, regional and trade magazines and websites. But when I stepped into the pilot’s seat as an entrepreneur everything was different. Being in charge of my own business demanded that I begin writing directly for an audience that I was going to generate.

As Steve Jobs said, “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Instinctively, I started writing how-to articles. I had an urgent goal, which was to make money from our online business. It was all about how to start a cleaning business. I decided to study and master the art of the how-to.

So, I bought an e-book called “How-to write a how-to,” and it worked like a charm. I knew how to write a how-to already. However, I couldn’t bear the thought that some morsel of information remained of which I was unaware that would teach me — once and for all — how to craft a killer how-to. The e-book author included a long list of headline prompts I couldn’t resist filling in.

The act of filling in the blanks moved my inner writer off her lazy tuckes. Writing headlines was fun and easy with the templates. Suddenly I couldn’t type fast enough for the ideas that came pouring in. Not only for how-tos, but I was getting ideas and whole chunks of writing for many other articles too. That exercise opened the floodgates.

Use the following list to help generate posts and pillar articles, press releases, advertisements, and more.

How to ________

How to get the most out of ______

How to get ______

How to avoid _____

How to have______

How to end ______

How to increase _____

How to get rid of _____

How to start_____

How to conquer _____

How to begin _____

How I _____

How to improve your _____

How I improved my _____

How to become _____

How to enjoy _____

How to develop _____

How you can _____

When you grab your readers’ attention and then move him or her to action, you will start making money online.

Happy Holidays from us here at the Online Business Cookbook.

2012 will be the perfect year to start an online business. This is the sweet spot in the history of the Internet for entrepreneurs. There are enough far reaching and proven tools to launch fast, but an online business is still not on the minds of most people, so you can still carve out your niche. When we started – going on 10 years ago, it was the wild wild west in terms of Internet businesses. Sure, it was exciting, but it was also very risky, stressful and unstable for the long term. It is much easier today.

2012 will be the sweet spot for starting an online business. We look forward to the year ahead and with helping you to start an Internet business of your own.

What are the 5 Uses For Tumblr On Your Online Business Blog? Tumblr, a blogging platform is getting billions of page views as people come up with various of creative ways to maximize its use. It is definitely a great platform that allows users to easily share their content online, It also has a mobile platform where you can upload content to it in seconds from your phone via a certain app.

It is mostly popular because it combines two powerful features of blogging and micro blogging. So what is the difference between the two? Webcom wiki states that “The difference between a traditional blog and microblogging is, that microblogs often are headlines of present activity, thoughts and news from a given source. Whereas blogging mostly is larger stories, with more background information, research including links and pictures since web blogs allow more content.”

Tumblr recognizes bloggers who post unique and quality content and applies it to a timeline. When you follow users you can see their posts in your dashboard. Like Twitter’s retweet feature where you re-post links or updates that you like, Tumblr has its re-blog feature where you can interact with other bloggers very quickly as well.

Getting started with Tumblr is so easy and very fun. When you sign up with the site, you enter your email address, a password and a url of your choice in which you are given the chance to set up your own custom domain in this format YourName.tumblr.com. Once you are done setting it up you can post right away.

Customizing your page with your preferred themes from its hundreds of themes are available on Tumblr’s official theme garden, the best is that most of them are free! Its lightweight platform and easy to use features grabbed the hearts of many bloggers and in turn many business entrepreneurs use it for promoting their products through blogs. Tumblr is hosted, you don’t have to worry about server maintenance or worry about hackers or other server issues.

With Tumblr it is always easy to post. The text is already pre-formatted depending on how you will want to share your thoughts. You can share a quote, a link, text, a video and a photo with your own style. With the kind of technology we have right now, whether your online or if you are offline you can still access your Tumblr account through a mobile app. It is always easy to share with Tumblr.

You can use Tumblr to update other social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Readers subscribe to your Tumblr which brings all your posts in one timeline. This is very handy for niche marketing, people relative to a certain topic will subscribe to a certain post or content in a niche that they are passionate about.

If you want to make money with your blog, you need to get a good ranking in the search engines. It is never an overnight process! It is a process that you have to work with over time, using the right proven strategies and methods.

Getting a good page rank for your blog, chances are you will definitely get good revenues from it. For this strategy you need to work on providing useful informative content to your Tumblr page. Trying out various methods and incorporating a variety of perspectives is indeed the best approach to the road to a high page rank.

There are various ways to follow in making use of blogging to have an extra income. It is not just about blogging everything you want to say to the public. It is also about following certain rules and a blueprint to hit a certain target audience. This is not as easy as it may sound but following these strategies can give you promising results.

Here are some ideas you can always do for your first Tumblr…

Posting interesting quotes in your blogs and link them to full stories is a good way to catch attention. Consider business blogging as a marketing tactic for your business, though blogging is a long term process, not short term, it still can bring in some short term traffic. Investing time and a creative mindset is crucial with this strategy. Often entrepreneurs, business owners, and operators tend to get overly excited when they see good traffic yet they receive less than impressive calls from customers or prospective customers.

Most online business entrepreneurs tend to forget that they need to produce fresh quality information every post. This means updating the account regularly in order to maintain the visibility of your page. Some leave their accounts like a ghost town which makes the rank lower and lower. Don’t just go for the first link, build up links overtime with original posts that are only on Tumblr pointing to your business blog.

When blogging you should look after what your customer want to hear rather than what you want them to hear from you. This requires thorough research on your niche. Seek for quality advice that informs them on the topic they are interested in. This research will save you from producing a lot of redundant content. Try to write personal blogs. Blogging is really informal by nature. Try not to be too stiff.

Blogging can really be rewarding yet there are certain things you need to do in order to keep its effect long lasting. Blogging regularly is not that easy. To avoid burning out, you should brainstorm terms and ideas ahead of time. Setting up attainable goals is a must. Never give up on blogging. Most people give up blogging after a few months. Doing so will lead to your website business failing.

Blogging with Tumblr has already been proven that it will give you more and more readers. Internet business blogs gets the right traffic through capturing keyword-focused searches in the search engine – primarily Google. The visibility of your website is maximized. Providing high quality advice and information to your readers is also a must since they always crave for the right knowledge and solution for what they need and want!

According to their web page, Sphinn is “a social site for search and interactive marketers. It is designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.”

Sphinn is similar to Digg in terms of search marketing. If you want to broaden your online marketing and visibility, this is definitely the site for you! Despite its weird spelling, it is pronounced as “Spin”.

Danny Sullivan launched Sphinn in late 11th of July 2007. The site has a lot of exceptional functionality despite its newness. It has easy to use features and not so complex interface. Sphinn accepts a variety of content, discussion topics, and forums from site users.

The site takes after the same interface and almost the same use as Digg where users submit a story and other users can vote on whether they like it or not; they can “sphinn” it for yes, and “desphinn” it for no. Once a story is “sphunn” a lot of times, it will be featured in the front page of Sphinn and is immediately visible to anyone who logs in to the home page except for posts submitted to the Water Cooler category, which no longer have the ability to hit the main page. Stories submitted to Sphinn can also be discussed by members on the comment portion of each post.

Here are the different important tabs you can see at the Sphinn interface. The Hot News tab is the first tab you will see when you come to the site. It serves as the site’s home page. In these page, you will see news stories and discussions that the Sphinn admin have chosen to feature.

The next tab which is the Comments tab is obviously for the comments all Sphinn user make in real time. You can freely link it to your site as well. The good thing about this is that you can choose in this page which comment you want to get involved with. It has a neat rss feed and a crisp timeline to boast. It gets updated every time a user comments on a blog.

Submit News Tip is the super tab where you read news stories. Do you have a news story you want to share to the site? You have a lot of options in which way you are going to share your own piece. For newbies who have not joined yet, it has an awesome option that you can always submit to the news editors via Twitter. Include “tip @sphinn” in your tweet and our editors will review your link as if you submitted it directly at Sphinn.

The Discussion tab is somewhat like a forum where you can interact with other users with the same level of business and interest. You can always start a topic yourself, give the topic a title and classify it in the right category.

Here are the top features that you’ll love when using Sphinn with your online business…

Getting Started at Sphinn is such an interesting experience for everyone. You can always read the articles on Sphinn without setting up a profile, but for you to leave comments or “sphinn/depshinn” anything, you need to join. On your profile, you can either use an avatar or a profile picture, and you can add in all your personal infos like your IM names like AIM or MSN in your social media profiles like Facebook and Delicious.

Do You Love snooping on Your Friends? Prospect Clients Perhaps? Your Competitor as well? Snooping is a very interesting process on Sphinn. Users that love to check the home page for new posts and love to interact with other users can easily do so. It lets you monitor in real time what others are posting or submitting. Sphinn also helps keep track of all of your social networking profiles since you have an option to link it to them.

The What’s New page is where you can find the freshest content updated in real time. The more experienced you are in online business as well as in marketing the more you will be able to decipher what is good and what is not with the kind of content you encounter.

Now, how do you submit an article to Sphinn? How does Sphinn work best with your online business? Making use of outstanding networking tools will definitely help you achieve your business goals in the process. This platform gives you the chance to show off your abilities and achievements. A business that has good credibility and is run by someone who knows what he is doing is surely the one who succeeds. Credibility indeed leads to better relationships between entrepreneur and prospect customers and loyal customers as well.

This shows up on search engines which makes your business findable when searched. It is also highly established in Google. This is definitely good news since Google is the most commonly used search engine. In this way your business will rank well eventually. Just never forget to set your profile to public otherwise the search engines will not be able to list you.

There are a lot of areas in your profile where you should provide all the necessary details in order to describe in detail the kind of business that you have, what markets you cater to and how you will be able to help them. You will need to add details about you and your business in your profile.

Choose the best photo that will make an impression on the users that when they see that icon they will think of your business. This is commonly called branding. By maximizing the use of your profile this will help other related business to link to your profile as well. Making use of the updates you should be posting regularly by syncing it to other social sites like Facebook and Twitter, this will increase the impact through the systems of all three sites!

I think many people take a backwards approach to finding an internet business idea. They try to figure out what they think is a sure deal as far as making cash flow. They hyper-rationalize it. It’s understandable, but very few good business ideas make any rational sense. No one thought Twitter made any sense, who needs it! Ring tones? Ridiculous! Why would anyone buy them? Take pictures with your phone. Yeah, right! Google makes billions offering free services. What sense does that make? Well, it does make sense in the topsy turvy world of the internet.

One of the main mistakes people make with their online business is that they super impose real world business ideas onto the technospheric realm. This data-heavy realm has its own evolving ideas and its own rules of the game. To many people, this became apparent only in hind site, with the dot-com boom and bust of 2000.

Here’s what happened. Investors figured if they double up on free market concepts with funding new online businesses, the profits would be tenfold online, but it did not work that way. Start-ups with little-to-no money beat out dot-coms that had millions. Many ideas that seemed to be sure-fire things, like making it easy for people to pay parking tickets online, completely bombed. See the movie, Startup Dot Com. Here is a list of the biggest internet flame-outs: http://www.cnet.com/1990-11136_1-6278387-1.html

Some ideas were too early. Some did not address a problem, and some were just too rational. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of logic and rationality, but it must be applied differently online.

After the Wall Street dot-com bust, erroneous conclusions were made about the bad results.The venture capitalists and Wall Street hotshots, along with the press and blogger pundits, concluded that business would not fly on the internet and that it was a passing fad that could not be monetized. Eventually, they claimed, Ebay and Amazon too would fail. And many did – Netscape, Lycos, Alta Vista, and even in recent months, Yahoo, has made the news for not being able to keep afloat without merging with AOL, which is also in trouble in regards to sustainability.

But look at the growth of the web since then. Especially, business. Business has continued to grow exponentially right through the dot com bust. Most of the huge successes have happened post-2000 dot-com bust. See Ray Kurzweil’s predictions on the growth of the internet. Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, LinkedIn, Bebo, and on and on and on – many thousands of thriving small businesses online including our four web businesses.

We started our online business in October, 2003, and were making a profit by May, 2004. Our business has been growing on an average of 40% per year with very little additional money put in. We started with a $1 (purchased from a friend), hopelessly out-of-date laptop that had broken keys. We spent roughly $25 per month for two services and eventually were beating out Entrepreneur Magazine for our niche – passing up a Fortune 500 company, in other words.

So what is the best internet business idea? The one that motivates you and has niche attraction. One of my favorite niches online (that I don’t do for a business) is the synthesizer hobbyist. Another one I have watched is how to grow bonzai trees, and another is origami.

If you told a random person ten years ago that you are going to make a living writing about Origami, they would say that is irrational — and it was. But no longer. The best internet business idea is the one that motivates you and has a hungry audience. Don’t think you can start a shoe merchant store online and ever get a foothold in that. Too big of a niche.

The passing of Steve Jobs got me thinking about the tools we use. I’m die hard Mac fan – I have 7 of them and one PC. The only reason I have a PC is because Microsoft forces me too, to check my designs in Internet Explorer – A browser that refuses to comply with web standards and no longer runs on a Mac.

I’m not going to get into the silly Mac vs PC debate. You obviously can run an online business with either just fine. I do think you’ll be a whole lot less frustrated with a Mac, but only if you are not switching from a PC. You’ll do best on the machine you are familiar with.

You do want to have the best tools and luckily many of the best tools are free. We use Google’s free tools to run our whole business. The other tools we use on top of Google’s tools are our Macs, Aweber, web hosting – of course, PRweb, Olark and imanageproject.com. That’s it. A total of maybe $150 per month! We net over 50k a year. That’s an amazingly low overhead percentage.

In future posts I will focus on each of these tools individually as well as other proven online business tools.

when starting an online business, you need to have a system that is time tested and flexible enough to grow with the coming changes of the Internet. The web is very unpredictable. We tend to think otherwise, and there are many things that one can predict about the Internet such as – one day images will be able to be crawled for content for the search engines. That is a tangible objective technological advancement.

What is much harder to predict is what the online culture will come up with, this is much more subjective. Facebook and Twitter seem somewhat obvious now, but they were not so a few years ago.

We cannot expect search to always work the way it does or that it will be the preferred way to find information online in the future. I guarantee you that people are trying to come up with data scraping and sequestering technology that will undermine Googles hold on search.

A flexible, scalable and tested online business system built on code fundamentals is the key to secure and long lasting success on the Internet.

The best online business idea is the one you feel genuine passion for. An online business takes years to mature, you will need to be motivated for the life of the business. You better make your internet business be about something you care about. You will need to provide real services and products that help people in the ways that they need. Do not think in terms of how can I make a quick buck, those days are long gone on the web!

A proven Internet business guide is a must these days. Entrepreneurs know that setting up a website has a lot of benefits. But when they don’t have a clue how, don’t want to learn and are not inclined to start an online business such as a social network site like Facebook or Multiply, they have a hard time looking for people that can do the job for them. Internet business models that rock