First off this is not a typical "training series" in a sense that I will not be doing any teaching. Instead it’s about us teaching one another on important lessons about internet business building.

How do we go about it?

The idea is very simple. Every post in this series I’ll share with you an important business lesson or principle that I have learned or am currently learning. Then the comments section open for your insights on the topic.

Share your thoughts on the subject and let’s learn from one another’s experience. Keep your comments in answer to the following as much as possible.

1. What are your thoughts on the lesson?
2. Do you agree with it or not? Why?
3. How do you think can this be applied in your business?
4. Have you applied it in your business? How did it help you? Or how not?

Free Gift Awaits You

To encourage more sharing and learning from among all of us I’ll add in a little bit of icing for this project. 30 days after the post is made I’ll be picking the top three comments and send them a gift.

Three of the best free ebooks on Internet Business building written by the most trusted names in the industry. These are the references I currently use. You will hear from

Yaro Starak of www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
Rich Schefren of www.strategicprofits.com
Brian Clark of www.copyblogger.com

So let’s get started now. The first lesson comes in a few hours.

Check out these related posts:

1. Internet Business Lesson #1: It’s About Your Happiness
2. Internet Business Lessons from a Parking Lot
3. How Do You Start Your Internet Business?
4. Internet Business Lessons: How Blogging Changed a Man’s Life
5. Who is Looking for an Internet Job?

GRADUATION = HOPE

That’s how I see it. But I’m guessing not everybody does.

But for most people or fresh graduates, graduation is a milestone, it’s like telling to the world “I’m ready to face you”. It’s liberation day. It’s a new chapter in life. It’s filled with joy. It’s getting ready to create your future. It’s about being hopeful for what lies ahead.

Unfortunately that feeling is short-lived!

The first few months is exciting, you may have even taken a one or two month break. Then you head on out to the world and start looking for a job and then you begin to wake up to one stark reality that they never told you in school.

It’s not easy to find a job… a job that fits your course… a job where you can apply your skills… a job that pays well… or just simply a job!

And with all the other fresh graduates like you competing for the same positions you begin to wonder how you could ever land your dream job. And this is when you begin to settle for any job as long as it pays.

You come in on your first day excited, hopeful, telling yourself “I will do great here”. You receive you first paycheck, you look at it, and your jaw drops as you see that line there that say withholding tax! And you realize how much the government takes so much away from the hardwork that you put and they will do that for the rest of your working life.

You look again at your take-home pay and you look at your dream and begin to wonder, how could you ever reach your dream?

And now begins, one of the biggest mistakes many people do in their working life. They change their dream!

It might not happen immediately, some take years, but for many people it does happen. They hop from one job to another only to realize that the situation they are in is no different, and they begin to settle, and they change their dream!

And you know what changing your dream means? It’s giving up your HOPE!

And many people in the working environment have lost this precious thing they held on to during their graduation.

Are you in this situation now? Let me help you get out of it!

But first you have to dig deep down in your heart about what it is that you hope for right now. What is your dream?

Let this commencement speech given by Steve Jobs in 2005 at Stanford University help you rekindle that fire if hope you once lost.

Check out these related posts:

1. Do You Still Have Your Dream?
2. Lesson 1: Do You Want an Internet Job or Business?

Warning: It’s not what you think it is…

For all my employed readers, here’s something you might find interesting to ponder upon. And it’s rather controversial.

I wouldn’t be surprised to get a few comments out of this. In fact I would love to hear your thoughts about this. So here it goes.

5 of the BEST benefits of having a day job.

1. A monthly salary…
2. A monthly salary…
3. A monthly salary…
4. A monthly salary…
5. A monthly salary…

LOL, I think you get my point.

It seemed like an eternity already since I had a day job back in June 2008. And I was really trying to get my thoughts back again on the real benefits of having a day job. My conclusion…

A monthly salary…

Other than this, everything else is there just to keep you from leaving should you get another job opportunity offering a bigger salary.

Forget about company car, free gasoline, medical insurance, free training, etc. They are just a bunch of freebies to console you from what an 8-5 job is really stealing away from most of us.

1. Time with family
2. Time away from doing what you really love (assuming you know what you want and you know it’s not your job)
3. Freedom to do the things that matter most in your life.

Now you ask. What about the possibility of achieving our dreams in life with your job?

I think many people have already come into terms with this. And I hope you do too.

Your job is only good to pay your bills not to build your fortune! And I repeat even that bolder this time.

Your job is only good to pay your bills not to build your fortune!

I don’t know about you but the world as we know it is changing and it is changing fast. Suddenly a safe and secure job like what our parents wanted for us is not true for most people anymore. Everyday people lose their jobs. And everyday some of those vacancies are never replaced. Responsibilities are absorbed by the ones left behind.

Indeed many more jobs are created but they are different than what we studied in school and many are left jobless and unqualified for the jobs that are open.

And I repeat my conclusion to this topic. The only real benefit a job gives you is a regular monthly salary. Other than that there is none. Not security, not free time, not even your dreams.

I you want to get more out of your life you better start thinking outside the box of your own cubicle and take charge if your own freedom.

We live in a world where freedom is not anymore in the hands of a good job opportunity but is earned from paying the price of constant self education and building your own business.

And that is what we want you to achieve here at cajammed. But that of course happens only if you are willing to pay the price.

Let me know you thoughts about this by leaving your comments below this post.

Be free!
Charlie Aquino

PS. Start you journey toward your FREEDOM by subscribing to our newsletter and RSS feed. It’s never too late to start. Here at cajammed, YOUR FREEDOM is our business!

Check out these related posts:

1. The One Day Trap are you caught in it?
2. How Do You Start Your Internet Business?

And look where it got him only after 2 years in the blogging industry.

His blog Zen Habits was rated number 9 by Time.com among the 25 best blogs in the world for 2009.

He has published his story on a FREE ebook to inspire us all to take a chance and really do something for ourselves that would make us truly happy. Download his ebook and be inspired.

And on my personal note for you…

I believe you also have this chance to achieve whatever it is that you dream of and you have a chance to get of of that box that prevents you from becoming what you can be. If there was one lesson I learned in this ebook, it’s not how to make money out of blogging, it’s focusing on what you really love to begin with. Everything else falls into play.

Enjoy the read!

Always helping you get out of your box!
Charlie Aquino

Check out these related posts:

1. Internet Business Lessons from a Parking Lot
2. 12 Must Read Internet Business Free Reports
3. How Do You Start Your Internet Business?
4. Mistakes to avoid in starting your Internet Business
5. Internet Business Lesson Series

Of all places huh… but the lesson was so good I really have to write it down. If you drive a car I’m pretty sure you will relate well to this experience.

I was in Robinsons Galleria parking lot earlier today and for some reason it was more difficult to find a parking spot today than most other Mondays I was here. And it wasn’t just me, there were a couple of cars as well that were  competing for a coveted space.

If you drive a car, you know too well that your strategy should not be to follow the other cars or you’ll never find a parking space. You have to venture out on your own and seek one for yourself.

You check out a lane and if you see that there are cars waiting there to park you don’t go there. Instead you look for a lane where there are no waiting cars and maybe you be the first to wait there or just pass through the block to see if there is a spot available.

And that’s how you find a parking space.

Incidentally that is also how you can succeed in your internet business. You look for opportunities that no one is serving and that you can provide to people, just like a lane with no waiting cars.

You don’t just follow what other people do, instead you learn from them and devise your own strategy.

Sadly most people who want to earn money online follow other people blindly. Here’s an example…

Most people starting it out online set-up a blog put some adsense to it, and then drive traffic hoping that people will click those ads. It’s a legitimate model and it has proven to work. But the question is for how long?

I mean talk to many of the experienced bloggers out there who have implemented this same strategy and most of them will tell you that their click rates have gone down this year.

Why is it not working as it used to? Because everybody else is doing it. And frankly when you see a blog that is all adsense and just a few valuable content are you honestly enticed to click on the ads, or even before that, do you even take time to read them?

You see there are many ways to earn money online. Some are fads and some have stood the test of time. But the success of your internet business will not lie on the tools or software you use, or which social marketing site you use to promote you business to. It will lie on how you can make yourself different from the rest.

In business there is such a thing called a USP or a “Unique Selling Point”. And that is what puts offline businesses in business. Their uniqueness is why people buy from them and that is what makes them successful.

And so, if you want to succeed online, you better find out how you can be different. You have to find out your unique selling point. You have to do things differently than your competitors do.

That is the parking lot lesson.

Don’t blindly follow every advise you get, chart a strategy for yourself, be different, and see your business grow.

Helping you get out of your box,
Charlie Aquino

Check out these related posts:

1. Internet Business Lessons: How Blogging Changed a Man’s Life
2. How Do You Start Your Internet Business?
3. Mistakes to avoid in starting your Internet Business
4. 12 Must Read Internet Business Free Reports
5. The three BIG ways to earn money online

Just today I was having a chat with a friend of mine and one of my downlines in my MLM company. We were catching up on things and discussed a little bit about Internet Marketing when he popped up the question,

Where do I start?

Now there are generally two kinds of people who will ask that question,

1. Those who do not have even the slightest idea about Internet Marketing or Internet Business, and
2. Those who have read a lot about Internet Business and are suffering from information overload.

WARNING: If you are new to Internet Marketing, its bound to happen that you will suffer from a case of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) as a result of information overload. I guess that is really inevitable. But don’t worry, you have us to guide you along the way… :)

Now if you are case #1 then I suggest you start reading more about Internet Marketing before proceeding. It really doesn’t help to show you a roadmap that you don’t even know what to expect along the way. (even the slightest one)

But if you are like Gabby, welcome to the club! Everyone has to start somewhere. And I tell you, its not a simple ride as some may tell you.

Now here’s what I want you to understand.

There are two big decisions you make in life…

First is “Who you will marry?” and second is “What business will you start?”

The first one is quite obvious. You would never want to spend the rest of your life with someone whose company you never enjoy.

But the second… hmm… let’s see…

For most of our lives we spend it at work, or in our business. That’s 8 hours or more everyday, 5 days a week. That’s 1/3 of your day and of course you have to sleep, that’s another 1/3 of your day, and the remaining 1/3 you spend it travelling to work, eating and spending time with your family.

You see, choosing the work you do and the business you start is a major decision in your life. Now answer me this question.

Do you want to spend 1/3 of your life doing something you never enjoy?

I guess not.

And that my friend is why it is so important to choose your business wisely.

Every successful business owner, either online or offline will tell you the same thing. If you want to start a business…

Start with something you love to do!

You want to start a blog? Blog about what you love.

Do you want to start selling eBooks? Sell books about what you love.

Do you want to train people online? Train them on what you love.

There is a basic principle in life here and pardon me if I have to sound philosophical here.

We exist on this earth to live a purpose. And life is not about chasing after money or our dreams, it’s about chasing after our purpose. Only when we live it can we be truly happy and truly alive.

Unfortunately, I wish finding that out was easy, but for the most part we live our lives trying to figure that out until most of us grow old and give up and just simply settle for second best.

But I wish for you not to do that. I wish for you to find out what you really love to do and your purpose in life and build you business around it. I’ll try to show you ways I did it and hopefully you will find it too.

This is going to be exciting!

Let’s get you out of that box shall we!

Your Friend,
Charlie Aquino

Check out these related posts:

1. Mistakes to avoid in starting your Internet Business
2. Internet Business Lessons from a Parking Lot
3. 12 Must Read Internet Business Free Reports
4. Who is Looking for an Internet Job?
5. Internet Business Lessons: How Blogging Changed a Man’s Life

Well personally I haven’t got one yet for my business but I have  a friend and mentor who is looking to hire a lot of Filipinos and he’s hiring A LOT and HIRING FAST.

If you ever want to start a career in Internet Marketing or just want to learn the ins and outs of doing an Internet Business then this is the best place to start. Let me give you several reasons why.

Faster learning curve

Doing internet business requires a lot of skills, web design, social bookmarking, copywriting, article writing, video editing, blogging, seo, etc. etc. etc. and it takes time to master just even one of them. And in this job I’m telling you, you can learn these things in a real live working environment where experts can teach you these skills.

Resources at your fingertips

Do you know that you need to spend thousands of dollars to build a large internet business? And you need to invest on tools just to do this. In the job thay my mentor is offering you can gain access to thousands of dollars worth of tools and you can have it for FREE, well depends on what you will be working on but you will gain access to the best tools to do your job for free.

A real live team environment

Doing internet business requires teamwork. You cant go out venturing alone, otherwise you will be eaten by all the things you need to do and to learn. Here in the job I’m referring to you can get to work with experts and you work on teams to maximize productivity and learning.

I admire this friend and mentor of mine because he has a vision of really helping our country and if you need a job I believe what he has to offer can really help you. His name is Joel Christopher and he’s Filipino and one of the most sought after Internet Marketing trainers in the US. Now he’s here to help our country.

So what is this job exactly?

You can check it out at www.mlb.ph and see all the job openings there. I believe there’s got to be one that can fit you. Good luck and God bless!

Oh and a tip… Joel will kill me for this. Hehe…

The application itself is a test. If you understand what I mean by that then I guess you are really fit for an interview. :)

Charlie Aquino
Internet Entrepreneur

Check out these related posts:

1. How Do You Start Your Internet Business?
2. Internet Business Lessons from a Parking Lot
3. Internet Business Lesson Series

True in a sense that a successful SEO campaign is indeed a task that requires a lot of work one because of competition and two because search engines change the way they rank sites quite frequently to deliver high quality content to their customers.

And false because a successful SEO campaign can actually be achieved by everyone by just knowing the right principles behind it. I met one of the most famous young bloggers here in the Philippines who was able to rank #1 on a very competitive keyword “make money online” and he did it in just 5 months when he was just 13 years old! See his blog here.

And this is because he stuck with three basic principles, just like every other successful blogger out there.

#1 Know the keywords you want to rank for.

Every successful SEO campaign starts with “effective keyword research”.

The key to finding something is to know what you are looking for. And the key to being found is to knowing what you have to offer.

People look for things on the internet regularly and guess what they use to find what they are looking for, “keywords”! Keywords are the life blood of SEO and there are many tools you can use for this. Here are some of the ones I personally use.

• Wordtracker
• Google Keyword Tool
• Keyword Discovery

Now if you are looking for guides on how to do effective keyword research here are some references you can use.

• Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research – by Stoney deGeyter
• Keyword Research How I Do It – by Potpiegirl
• Keyword Research for Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide – By Brian Clark

Note this important principle every time you start a website or a blog or even to optimize an existing one.

Choose from 1-5 keywords you want to rank for in your site and use it relentlessly in all your campaigns.

#2 Organize your site to be easily indexed by the search engines.

This is usually called “onsite optimization” and let me explain this.

This step is just like in a bookstore where the books are organized by section so you can easily find what you are looking for. There is the arts section, computers section, fiction section, non-fiction, etc. I think you get what I mean.

Onsite optimization is all about arranging your blog so that the search engines can index it well and there are many ways to do this.

• Make sure your titles carry your main keywords
• Organize your blog into categories using your keywords as categories when possible.
• Make sure the body of your article contains the keywords you want to rank for.
• Arrange your permalink structure.
• Use SEO plug-ins to optimize your site. (I use Headspace 2 for my blogs)

Joost de Valk of www.yoast.com created a comprehensive guide on doing onsite optimization for wordpress blogs. You can find his article here.

Now the techie stuff usually ends here. The next principle is the most time consuming one but the most effective and this is where you will definitely spend most of your time on.

#3 Promote your site to the world and make friends.

Technically, this is called “offsite optimization” or “creating backlinks”!

Backlinks are basically links in the web that point back to your blog or pages in your blog that’s why it called “back” – “link”.

How do you achieve this? There are tons of ways to do it but the key principle is very simple.

1. Make content that is worth linking to
2. Make friends online

Of course there are strategies you can use as well like submitting to blog directories, social bookmarking, etc., but I like to keep the principles very simple and sustainable and I believe those two are the core ones. Content that is worth sharing and making friends.

I found this post on 9 ways to make worthwhile backlinks to your blog very helpful in doing a sustainable backlink building strategy.

Again the three principles for a successful SEO campaign

1. Know the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Organize your site to be easily indexed by search engines.
3. Promote your site to the world and make friends.

Happy blogging!

Charlie Aquino
Internet Entrepreneur

Check out these related posts:

1. Featured Friend Concept

I mean when you search for keywords like “make money online” or “earn money online” you get results such as these.

• How to earn money online at www.pinoymoneytalk.com
• 10 new ways to make money online at www.webworkerdaily.com
• Ways to make money online at www.doshdosh.com
• 40 ways to make money on the internet at www.dumblittleman.com
• 6 easy ways to make money online at www.msnbc.msn.com
• 28 ways to make money with your website at www.dailyblogtips.com

And I’m pretty sure you can find a lot more. The web never runs out of it.

Now are these “earn money online” options supposed to make our choices simpler? I certainly doubt it. What it does is whet our appetite for possible money making opportunities, and getting us to the point where we’d like to try everything yet end up doing nothing.

The value of the internet in quickly providing us tons of different information so that we can make intelligent decisions or choices is the same reason that many people never get ahead and really make money online.

Choices make decisions difficult to do and the more choices you have the harder the decisions tend to be.

Adsense, blogging, online surveys, paid to click, affiliate marketing, freelancing and the list goes on. All the options are there for you to investigate, the real question is where do you begin? Or what do you choose?

Want to know the best way how? Let’s look at the BIG PICTURE.

Often the most complex of decisions can actually be simplified once you start looking at it from a bigger perspective and the choice of which money making online activity is no different.

The whole gazillion ways of how to earn money online can actually be simplified in three BIG areas.

Internet jobs

The biggest among all of them and often the easiest one to start. Here you have activities like online surveys, freelance jobs, paid-to-click, writing content, writing reviews, pay per post, or any other activity where you get paid for the time you spend online doing stuff.

A job is a job. You continuously trade time for money. If this is your kind of thing then this is probably the best direction you could take to earn money online.

Ad Promotions

Ah you are familiar with this. Set-up a blog put adsense in it and drive traffic.

Probably the second most common earn money online activity there is. Here you have so many different options to choose from, adsense, adbrite, commission junction, affiliate marketing (yes this is included here) and often if you have a site that drives good traffic you can get deals with companies to put their ad banners in your site.

The principle in this model is very simple. Set-up a site, promote the product of others and get paid, often in three ways: (1) get paid when the ad is posted, (2) get paid when a product is bought from your site, (3) or get paid when an ad is clicked.

When done right, this can earn you real BIG money! But to reach that requires a lot of work from optimizing your site, using different link building strategies, driving traffic to your website, and the most important one, really having a site that people would love to go back to.

One of the mistakes I see people do is set-up free blogs in Blogger, put adsense and a few content and hope people will start visiting their site and clicking on their ads.

In ad promotions your site must be a dynamic sales letter of other people’s products. You earn profits not by simply driving people to your site but you get them when you can motivate people, through your content, to click on your ads and buy products using your affiliate links.

But there is a whole group of earn money online activity that is the most profitable and the most lasting of them all. This is where the BIG players really are.

Internet Marketing

This is not about jobs nor is it about ads or blogging. It’s an entirely different science where the BIG players in the online world are.

Simply put, internet marketing is just using the internet as a medium to sell products or services that will provide solutions to people’s problems.

You can think of this as an online store where you sell a product that will solve the problems of people and these problems can be of any kind.

Setting up an ebay store is an example of what you can do here. Using the internet to sell your offline products or services also falls here, as well as selling your MLM business opportunity.

Posting classified ads in free or paid sites and telling people to contact you for more information is not internet marketing, its ads placement. Internet marketing is about setting up a process to sell your products online.

While this topic is really broad you could start reading some materials that can help you from a website called Internetbusinessmodels.org. In my future posts I’d shed some more light into this very broad topic that we have here.

But what I’d like you to understand here is this, if you want a sustainable and profitable online money making activity then setting-up your own internet marketing business is the way to go.

So now you wonder, how can this information help you start to earn money online?

Consider what you want to achieve. Do you need to earn fast? Then I suggest you choose from the many different types of internet jobs available out there. And stay away from ad promotions or internet marketing as these really take time to build.

Do you just enjoy writing about something and hope to earn money from it? Then you might consider ad promotions as a strategy.

Do you have an offline business you want to expand right now through the internet or do you have skills or talents you might want to start building a business around to? Then you might consider learning internet marketing to promote your business or yourself to create that dream business of yours.

Focus is key in earning money online and my hope is that this article simplifies the puzzle for you. Remember the three BIG areas, internet jobs, ad promotions, internet marketing, those are generally your choices. The strategies for each one are different but at least you’ve trimmed down you choices.

If you like this article consider leaving your comments below. And you might want to subscribe to our RSS feed as well so that you won’t miss a new article.

Check out these related posts:

1. Internet Business Lessons from a Parking Lot
2. How Do You Start Your Internet Business?
3. Mistakes to avoid in starting your Internet Business
4. 12 Must Read Internet Business Free Reports