Want to make some serious money online? Don’t know what it is that you want to promote? Learn what a “niche” market is, and how to select the one that is right for you.

A “niche” market is a group of people with a common interest, hobby, desire, or need. You want to find a “hot” niche and develop ideas to market to that niche. You don’t want to try to sell an idea to just anyone, so you have to find people interested in your product already. You want to seek out the most popular markets, and make sure there is a large online community that is interested in your niche. Because you want to make money online, you need to target these people in your tactics to drive traffic to your site.

Some pretty popular types if niches include, hobbies, health, fitness, self-help, and money making sites. But one should consider their own passion when deciding which niche it is that they want their site to cater to.

Once you have found the niche market that you are interested in, you need to figure out what would be valuable to the people in that niche market. Maybe you could provide a product, or a service. If it is indeed a valuable service or product, the word of mouth advertising will far outweigh any advertising that you could go out and buy.

Just like it is easy to find groups of people that have a common interest, it is even easier to target them. You can even target individual people on the internet, based on their needs or desires. One can even send them a message at the exact same time that they are looking for the solution that you just happened to be providing. It is more simple than you can imagine to do this, especially with the tools and resources available on the web today.

After you have found an idea that caters to your niche market, you need to make sure that the idea is a good one, by using an inventory engine, such as the one recommended by my mentors. You just enter a keyword, or keywords, and the engine will show you how many times that keyword or keywords were searched for. You can then compare one keyword to another, and get an idea of how popular different markets are. You should do this to make sure that you are developing something that people want. You can also use this information to decide if maybe you want to branch out to other niches, widening your circle of potential clients.

For more detailed information about niche markets, and a step by step guide to finding a good one, use the links found on my own website, at the address below. Register, and I will send you incredible reports, and other cool stuff! Or just click on the links to go directly to these sites dedicated to financial success, as well as personal success! Take action! Go there NOW!

Choosing the right keywords can really increase your website traffic by increasing your search engine ranking and by encouraging visitors to stay on your site and return to your site. Choosing the wrong keywords, though, can be disastrous. There are five simple ways to choose your keywords wisely and improve your web traffic.

The first, and perhaps the easiest, way to choose the right keywords for your website is to brainstorm ideas with regard to your individual goods and services. Sometimes simply the name of your goods or services will work as an excellent keyword. For example, if you offer writing services, consider “technical writing” as you keyword. Creating a page around “writing” may not get you the customers you deserve. Think specifically about what you offer and create a page to advertise it. Within this, though, you must remember to stay away from general keywords. The competition for these keywords is rather stiff.

Thousands of sites are optimized for words like “computers,” and doing the same thing with yours can simply make it redundant and hard for customers to find. Moreover, customers are more search savvy than you are giving them credit for. If a customer wants to find information on something specific, he or she will search for something specific. For example, they may want to know about flea treatments for their cat, but instead of searching for “fleas” or “cat,” they may search for something more specific like a product name or type of treatment. If you feel you must use a general keyword, try taking a keyword and adding a more specific term to it. For example, if your key word is “cat,” try adding more specific terms like “behavior” or “specialist” to that for site optimization. With these general terms, you might also consider adding regional terms. If you service a particular area of the country, you may have some regional terminology that will help customers find you. Names of nearby cities or towns can help as can terms that your customers know and respect. For example, if you run a sandwich shop in New Orleans, you might want to optimize for the term “muffuletta.”

The second way to choose the right keywords for your website is to use a service like Google Keyword Sandbox or Overture Term Suggestion Tool. This way to choose your keywords can be a bit time consuming, but in the end, it is certainly worth it. Start with either service, and you’ll end up with a huge list of possibilities. Once you’ve finished with that service, pick another and try running the same search. See what keywords you have in common with the two lists.

The third way to choose the right keywords for your website is to check your server log files. When someone visits your site from a search engine, the words they used to find your site are recorded in your server log files. Analyzing the actual files, though, can take some work. You can use various methods to examine those files depending on your server operating system. It can sometimes be best to use a software program to extract the information if you are not technically inclined.

The fourth way to choose the right keywords for your website is to use a keyword counter service. These analyze your web page and compare them with other, similar web sites. They offer you a density percentage report and the top words for the two pages based on their analysis. Keyword counter services are available all over the internet in both free and costly forms. Choosing the right service for you will simply be a matter of reading the reviews.

The final way to choose the right keywords for your website is to review sites that have both similar missions and products with regard to yours. It is important to notice sites that have rankings within the top ten on any given search engine. The point here isn’t to copy the site; it is to figure out which keywords they are using to draw in potential customers.

Choosing the right keywords can be both a difficult and a long process. However, if you pick the right terms, you won’t regret it based on your increased web traffic.

One of the fastest ways to generate traffic to your site is with the use of blogs, RSS and article marketing. In addition, Bogs, RSS and article marketing are almost free to low cost, thus assuring you of greater profits.

Blogs are easy to set up quickly and can be on any topic imaginable. It is a good idea to set up a blog to cater to a particular niche market or to have one for your existing site. Combined with the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary), your blog’s online content can be turned into a RSS feed and syndicated (distributed) pretty easily. RSS creates a simple headline that if clicked on leads the reader to the full story. All the reader needs to do is to subscribe to your RSS feeds through a little orange button from your site with the aid of a RSS feed reader. Blog posts are usually short and if you post often enough, spiders from the search engines will come crawling more often.

Article marketing is simply writing articles about your niche area and submitting them to online article directories and ezine newsletters for publicity. At the bottom of the article, you are allowed to insert your author’s resource box. This is where you write a few promotional lines about yourself and your site and include your site link.

You can use your blog posts to link to the articles that you have written. A good size article is usually longer at about 300-600 words compared to a blog post. By referencing your articles in your blog, you are giving them more publicity mileage. In fact, I highly recommend the use of article marketing to generate publicity for your site. It is almost free, save for article distribution costs that you may decide to purchase instead of submitting to the sites manually.

Many online article directories also offer RSS syndication from their sites. This provides an avenue for online visitors to subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular category that you have submitted your article to. Chances are some of them may also be looking for RSS feeds to be incorporated into their sites for their own website visitors. Others may simply be very interested in this category for their own personal consumption. A good example is if your article is on constipation and you submit your article under the category of “health”. A webmaster may be on the lookout for RSS feeds for his health site. Or someone who is highly constipated may be particularly interested in what you post in your blog. Through the author’s resource box in your article, they can find your site and the RSS subscription button to your blog posts and articles pretty easily.

Thus, RSS has the potential to give your blog great exposure to a wide audience of subscribers building a bigger readership in less time. If you also optimize your blog content and the articles that you write for your site at the same time with a good keyword strategy, then you will be assured of free search engine traffic. Lots of traffic plus huge readership can only mean greater profits!

“101 Ways To Market Your Website” is the title of a book found at a cheap publisher’s outlet in town for about three quid and purchased out of interest.

So, we sat down with a cup of coffee and worked our way through the index, see what these people thought was useful, and if there was something new there.

Extraordinarily enough, in my past 10 years on the net, I’ve done EVERY SINGLE ONE of those!

EVERY single one. And some of them, I could have added another 12 chapters on top of what was in the book.

Question. If I actually really do know how to do that web thing so very thoroughly (and it appears that I actually really and practically do!), then why don’t I have 9 billion visitors per second?

The answer is simple.

EVERY ONE of these 101 ways TAKES IMMENSE INVESTMENT IN TIME – IF you’re going to do it right and get it to a point where it actually works well enough to really start generating that mysteriously elusive web traffic for your site.

Let’s just take a single one for example, the autoresponder, in all its glory.

Even if we leave out the time spent learning the software, soliciting ads, writing the content, if you really, REALLY did that thoroughly, with a number of multiple chained autoresponders with thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers on each one, the sign up pages, advertising the sign up pages, keeping the whole thing up to date and dealing with the correspondence this generates, the trouble shooting, unsubscriptions, and everything else, you would end up doing NOTHING ELSE ALL DAY – and have a full working week.

And that is just ONE item on a “101″ item list.

The same holds true for EVERYTHING.

To really build, use, police, update, enlarge and maintain a top class directory, a 40 hour working week by ONE SINGLE PERSON with their computer is taken up, just with that and ONLY that.

To run, police, advertise and expand a popular forum is yet the same again.

To produce an exciting, content rich, constantly up to date blog that brings in followers and sales, yup, it’s a full time task.

To produce, maintain, advertise and run a really good ezine does exactly the same again.

So does “article marketing” with its multiple submissions, updates, multiple directory listings, authors bios, and so forth.

And so does “newsgroup marketing” once again.

Want to try your hand at running a good affiliate programme?

How about keyword optimising each and every page of your website with content alignment, meta tags, robot instructions, and maintaining this with feedback on your listings in various search engines to keep in the top ten as the fashions change radically overnight?

Perhaps a multiple placement dedicated banner advertising campaign with feedback statistic adjustments?

Really get into Google adwords and maintain, track, fine tune and keep it perfectly up to date in response to your competitors and customers?

Same story, all over …

And so it goes on.

Here’s the deal.

All these things, I only did in order to support the business I’m actually SUPPOSED TO BE IN!

My 40 hour working week (well don’t make me laugh! but anyway, just for argument’s sake and to have a figure there) SHOULD theoretically be taken up by research and writing, as I’m a writer.

So what we have here is 101 ways to spend a full 40 hour week, plus your own job’s 40 hour week.

Shame we don’t live on Pluto, isn’t it. They have weeks that last centuries …

So what is ONE SINGLE PERSON trying to do web marketing supposed to do?

Well, and after ten years of beating myself up for not doing all those things “properly”, I think the following is of the essence.

No.1 is to understand that unless you have dedicated staff, there is no way on Earth you can do all of that yourself.

There simply isn’t enough time, even if we leave the steep learning curves and time spent trying to understand software and such quite out of it.

So what one has to do is to pick and choose from these 101 strategies the ones that are:

a) the easiest and fastest;
b) the ones that last the longest on autopilot;
c) the most natural to what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place (yeah that’s the original job/product/mission, remember that even still?)

If you like databases but abhor article writing, concentrate on building a good directory and forget about article submissions, for example.

We need to prune, prioritise and perfect only a very few of these 101 options, and stick to those.

That’s the only way to survive this.

It is to understand that you PHYSICALLY CANNOT do all that; that if you try, you can’t help but fail at everything (as then, NOTHING gets the attention it needs to actually bring results eventually!); and that you have to PICK AND CHOOSE which battles you’re going to fight.

Lastly, all that 101 traffic stuff has to be subjugated to the real reason we’re here, whatever that is, and must NEVER be allowed to get to a point where it is taking up more than 50% of your time.

So.

Go look at a list of these internet marketing devices.

Pick just those you are naturally attracted to, and just FORGET about all the rest.

Try and make those as good as you can, and build up your business to a point like that until you can hire staff and manpower to expand into some of the other traffic generating devices.

And in the meantime, take a deep breath, relax, and know that NO-ONE, not even someone with 8 tentacles instead of arms and who never sleeps, can actually do that myth and successfully implement “101 Ways To Advertise Your Website”.

Wisdom is a fine thing …

SFX

Silvia Hartmann

http://SilviaHartmann.com

Article Body:

As a newbie in Internet Marketing each of us has faced an uphill task; the task of seeing money come to us quickly. The thirst to see money in one’s account before one can start full throttle in the business. Each of us indulging in the business of income through internet desire: a checklist method of working, predictable hours of input, a foretold time when income would start and the timetable of amount of income to expect. I have some Dos and Don’ts for you.

Remember that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, hence follow one course at one time – do not get attracted to too many pop-ups or other advertisements that will chase you on your way. Lucrative advertisements will call you – promising the moon BUT be careful. You have to apply yourself and experiment intelligently. Do not throw away your money. Studying available literature is the key to sound foundation before starting any business. This is the first & foremost investment that you have to make. Without it your other investments in form of time or money may go waste. Navigation is started after mastering the basics otherwise accidents are bound to follow. Today programmes with multiple income streams are in vogue as compared to single income streams. Slow & long term residual income is desirable rather than a one shot fast buck.

I can suggest to you few ways to read and build your basics.

Subscribe to a reliable free newsletter. Several free newsletters are available to you on the net. They get delivered regularly in your email and guide you in several ways to strengthen your knowledge about web business.

You can also read ebooks, several are downloadable free. These ebooks can turnout to be your philosopher and guide. They can virtually catch you by your hand and take you to your goal. Several are in step by step guideline format. They may prove to be a goldmine for beginners who want to start but have no directions. They also protect you from making mistakes that prove to be costly and may be inevitable when you are new in this field.

You can subscribe to blogs or attend web forums. Both are full of rich knowledge for beginners. They help you identify scams and expose you to common problems faced by most. The good thing is that solutions can also be found right there in these resources.

Reading all the above like a course in your graduation and examining yourself for retained knowledge and skills can prove to be your biggest asset. Applying them in business to ensue will differentiate you like a professional from a layman. You will need less help, you will waste less time, you will be confident of your decisions and you will be sure of your success.

I wish you all the very best in your endeavors and am sure that success will come your way if you keep your cool; read and take guidance; start after a foundation has been laid and do not be in an undue hurry to either spend or to earn.

Ok, You have heard of 1000’s of people making money on the Internet, the so called “Gurus” are telling you, do this, do that, programmers are saying use this script and that script and webmasters are luring you into their E-zines, teasing you with a bit of information, bit of the truth, only to sell you more products.

MLM companies got hold of your email address and they are sending you emails to join their downlines, others are telling you forget all that and use Adwords or Adsense.

Hey what about the Blog Brothers who wanted you to cash in on the blog industry? RSSfeeders? Ipodcasters? Membership sites ? And the list goes on……..

Hey this stuff costs money, only if you have a money tree in your back garden, giving you more money every morning you visit it, you would have bought them all. But that’s not real, nobody has a money tree in their back garden, if you disagree please let me know where I can find one ?

The reality is different, newbies come in with brand spanking new credit card, fuelled with the hype, by the time they are done with internet marketing they are drained of energy, lost faith in themselves because their credit card is maxed up and so used that it probably would pass as antic. They are now thinking that they have been lied to, all they see in their paypal or stormPay account is zeros without any of the following numbers in front of those 0’s 1-9. It’s not just their card that is maxed up but their hard drives as well, It is full of ebooks and software. But this doesn’t mean that they have read or used all the software they have. The reason they kept buying this stuff is simply they are looking for a magic bullet product. The ideal product that would read itself or install itself, market and collect money for them while they are watching. But the truth is, there is no such product.

If you don’t believe me, check your email account, how many emails do you receive from the same epublisher that you bought from or gave you free products trying to sell you something? How many ebooks do you have stored and still zipped in your hard drive? How many of those have you read in percentage? 2%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 100%? Even if you do read 2% you would notice that some are very informative where the author went through a lot of details to make his point across. Some just tell you what you already know. Others don’t say anything at all, their ebooks are full of affiliates links to make more money of you, squeeze that credit carda.

Yet everyone claims to make a lot of money on the internet and here you are sitting duck, frustrated, don’t know what to do, so many projects to do and you don’t have time, your day job, your family, your spouse is begging to you give up, you can’t focus and all this adds up to your stress of not making a dime. The budget is very limited and no where to go, confused you jump from business opportunity to biz Op, from a new program to another but yet no money is coming in, you have just invest $197 on a product in the hope that you would resell it and make more money, now you just want to break even, but you can’t even do that because someone else is selling it for nickel on Ebay.

How do I know all this, well guess what? This is how I was, and this is what my subscribers are telling me when they are describing themselves, I have been on the internet since 1999 and I have been in so many programs that I lost count, I have upgraded my hard drive 5 times.(thank God for DVD writer now days I don’t have to do that any more). My head was spinning, I had a gamblers syndrome, when I wanted to throw in the towel I sold something which gave me hope to stay on. In short I was grasshopper, and if you are feeling this way right now, you are a grasshopper too? I should have formulated the Grasshoppers foundation, because I know now that there are more people like and me. but that’s your fault why none of those opportunities work for you, first you are not focused, second you don’t have goal, third you want to make quick money and you want to run before you walk. You want to compete with the big guys without knowing how?

Look at the big boys, don’t you think that they know all this, yet you see them specialising in one thing or most two. Either e-zines or blogs, or both. Ebay or adsense, or adwords. They master one thing before they go on to another, if they ever do. Specialising is the key? Why? The answer is focus. Did you know that a laser beam can cut metal, but your house light couldn’t cut through a feather. Why? The answer again is focus. The laser beam is focused light, concentrated light. When you focus your thoughts on one thing and you put your heart and soul into it, there is no way that it shouldn’t work unless you sabotage your own success.

But for now here are the guidelines you need to follow:
Set a goal “What do you really want out of this?”
if it is money, set exactly how much and when.
Use the method “As if?” How would you feel if you have already achieved your goal?
And use that feeling, anchor it and carry it with you.
Focus on one subject and learn as much as possible about it.
Don’t jump to other programs stick to one field until you master it. Put your credit card away, lock it.

Apply what you have learned, write about what you have learned. Have this in mind:
Internet is an ever changing place, and what makes sense yesterday may not today. So try to experiment with new ideas, you have nothing to loose.
If you do have customers, be honest with them and treat them with respect, don’t lie to them and don’t insult their intelligence.
Set your mind for success, believe you will success. In the subject of belief, here is a tip:
wishing alone doesn’t work, you need to attach emotions to that. Feel success, think of what you really want, and ignore the little voices that distract you to think of what you don’t want. One booster of this technique is being grateful, be grateful for being alive, grateful for your health, (no matter how you feel, there is someone, somewhere who feels worse), grateful for your family, for the knowledge you have, for the opportunities, etc..
Affirmations of gratefulness are the key to success, because when you are grateful you are sending a message to the universe, God, whatever you believe in that you don’t lack anything, and for some weird reason, you will get what you are grateful for. Love yourself for who you are, remember you are unique in this universe, even if you have an identical twin you are still unique, you should celebrate that uniqueness and finally, associate yourself with successful people.

Traffic exchange refers to internet marketing of exchanging your visitors with others and thereby building traffic for yours as well as for others. In simpler terms there are websites where your can post your URL and this URL is displayed on others website, and similarly you get to display others address in your site. This is done such that visitors can be exchanged with others. This helps in increasing traffic to your own website and bringing in more traffic.

There are several websites, which offer traffic exchange. The various advantages of these online Traffic exchangers are ensure more traffic, increase viewership, the registered member website appear in others as unobtrusive as possible, such that it doesn’t cause irritation, the website giving the most referrals are remunerated when their own website is advertised more in others site; this will increase on line traffic for the site owner. The traffic exchanger also provides websites with targeted visitors, for example if a site is promoting products only for pets, then the site is advertised in other sites which are related to pets like that of vets site, pet food site etc. Hence, the particular site gets more referrals from the targeted visitors. Traffic networking has grown largely in the recent years, and is one of the effective manner of promoting online goods and many online newsletters.

When a product is sold on online auction, it needs promotion and advertisements like another products, other than advertising online; Traffic exchange is a cost effective and easier way to increase online traffic. One of the most popular Traffic exchange sites is that of the Free Traffic exchange. The members do not have to pay money to register their websites, but they have to advertise others site in theirs, it is one form of referral and advertisement. There has been a beeline to these Free Traffic exchange programs. It guarantees increased traffic and at the same time, the registration is free. When a website promotes a related website, the viewer ship for the other site also grows and the host website is rewarded when their own site is promoted in others and hence there is an increase in viewer ship and traffic. The big picture of internet business!

Thus Traffic exchange is the most remunerative and effective manner of promoting ones website and hence promoting products which are sold online. There are many instances when sales of products have increased with the help of Traffic exchange. Free Traffic exchange sites are a novel concept, which does not cost anything for registration, except that he gets an opportunity to advertise related sites on his own website. Hence, if you are some one selling products or promoting an opportunity online, then try a Traffic exchange to increase on-line traffic

Article Body:

Creating a culture of process improvement, whether you are operating an online venture or traditional brick and mortar establishment is vital to success and increased profitability. There are many tools available for defining, measuring and analyzing a business process to identify potential problems and more importantly find areas of improvement. Although several methods exist for data analysis, in this article we will review the use of charting tools.

Charting tools have been around for quite some time, popularized by the wide spread Six Sigma initiatives at major corporations like General Electric and Home Depot, help reduce costs and waste while at the same time improving quality. Armed with accurate data sets it is easy to see with the use of charting tools how processes are performing and when they are out of control to make necessary corrections.

Some of the more popular data analysis tools available are run charts, control charts, paretos and histograms. Although each has a different purpose, for example a pareto could be used to track and identify historical customer complaints with a given product while a control chart can be used to monitor the variability of a process.

Pareto Charts are an excellent way of graphically representing the 80/20 rule as it applied to nearly all process-related problems.

A Pareto Chart is built through a process of segmenting the range of available data into related groups. For instance, if you wanted to investigate why online shoppers were abandoning their cart before checkout, you could segment the data as follows:

* Shoppers who dropped out when their credit card data was requested

* Shoppers who dropped out when their address was requested

* Shoppers who dropped out when their telephone number was requested

You would then identify and add new groups to the chart until you had listed and identified every step in the checkout process where cart abandonment was experienced.

With the use of a chart like a pareto it is very easy to begin to visually identify problems and establish trends without having to rely on anecdotal or heresy testimonials. From an overall business performance perspective these charts can be systematized and compiled into periodic visual style dashboards making it easy to quickly review key business metrics without having to get bogged down in data analysis paralysis.

Another additional yet extremely valuable perk to putting together data charts is it usually forces the need to break down and document the business process into well defined flow charts and procedures. These types of flow charts and in depth documentation make it very easy to locate non value added steps of a process that can be eliminated or identify other low hanging fruit that with a little work or improvement can reap large benefits.

To stay competitive in most businesses today, especially when it comes to the cut throat world of Internet Marketing, the never ending cycle of improving processes is critical to continued success and profitability. Establishing a culture of continuous improvement with the use of data analysis and charting tools can help to ensure the business is operating at optimal performance.

An internet business promoter is a program that can help you attain higher page rankings on search engines. In other words, it is an application that will help you optimize for the search engines.

If you have been operating an internet business for any period of time, you know that optimizing for the search engines is one of your main tasks. For the obvious reasons, you want as many people to know about your site as possible. More people mean more business, more business means more profits.

Whenever potential visitors use search engines to find the sites they want, they will usually only visit the sites that rank the highest. If you are ranked number 112320 out of 237,899 results, you are out of luck; and pretty soon, out of business. Most visitors will not bother to look at a site ranked so low. An internet business promoter (IBP) can help you ameliorate this situation.

Internet business promoters offer a variety of features, which usually include the following:

Search engine optimization, ranking, and submission tools. Your main objective in using internet business promoters is to improve your rankings on the search engines, so obviously your IBP should include a set of tools geared towards this goal. IBP optimization programs analyze the current top search results for particular keywords on the search engines you select. After the analysis is complete, the application will generate a report that details the changes you have to make to achieve the same results. It is important that your IBP optimization program use up-to-date information for its analysis; it should preferably operate in real-time. A good IBP will allow you unlimited use in terms choosing keywords, checking rankings, and so forth. It should also allow you to analyze the various elements that comprise your site.

Online directory submission tools. IBP programs also allow you to automate or semi-automate various tasks, such as submitting your sites to online directories. Automatic submissions work in exactly the way you would submit your site, there is no appreciable difference except that you don’t personally have to do the work. By decreasing the amount of work that needs to be done, you will be able to increase the number of directories you actually enlist in. This in turn will help you generate more site traffic.

Miscellaneous applications. Most IBP’s also come bundled with various applications; usually those related to crafting reports. These reports are intended to be shown to your various clients. The reports are often fully customizable. You can alter the cover sheet, the title of the report, your business logo, the company name, the company’s address, your company URL, and the recipient’s address.

By using an internet business promoter, you are assured of better ranking results. So why wait? Think of purchasing one today. It will be an investment that will more than pay for itself in the long run.

My favorite one is SEO Elite, you can have a look at it at http://must-have-products.com/SEOElite/seoelite1.php

It actually makes great sense for the kids. In previous articles we have told the story of the Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco. For those who missed it, the 1942 nightly rack rate was $5.00 single and $7.00 double. By 1974 it was $45.00 and $55.00. Last year it was $210 to $270 single or double depending on location. Carrying that price increase forward another 50 years will set the price at $9,058.00 per night!! Can’t happen, you say? It did happen and there is absolutely no reason it won’t happen again. Now what will the kids think of you when they are saving this kind of money down the road? They will think their parents were just about the brightest people in the whole world and they will think that every time they vacation. What a great legacy!!

Why, then don’t they want it now? Even for free? Well, you think back. Several years ago did you wake up one morning, look at each other and say, “This is sure a great day to go out and buy a timeshare?” We all know that didn’t happen. No, you went out not to buy, but just to pick up your free car, Hawaiian vacation or other “free” gift. After you had left the sales presentation, you said, “What happened?” Not only had you paid for your own “free” gift, but you had also paid for those of the other nine people who didn’t buy. You probably didn’t give a lot of logical thought to this purchase as you were intentionally swept away by the slick emotional sales method employed.

So now you offer it to the kids and they decline. Why is that? It is almost always the cost of upkeep that the kids focus upon. The dues of from $350 to $500 and taxes of from $30 to $90 knock them out. They can’t envision spending that much on a vacation. The fact is that they will probably spend a lot more than that even now for a product that isn’t one tenth as good. But the reality is that they have not been sold the product. How many parents will become salespeople to their kids to show and sell them on the advantages of the product before it is offered?

Part of it is timing. If the kids are too young or really financially struggling, it is not a good time to offer the gift. Wait until they don’t have those kind of pressures. Also, have you used the timeshare as a family? If not, how could they know how good it is? On the other hand, if they have used it with you as kids and really enjoyed it, and if they now have kids of their own and are struggling with the ever-increasing cost of vacations, their reception will be much different. Timing is everything.

Don’t neglect the selling of the benefits. Before offering it to them, open the RCI or Interval International catalog and show them all the neat places they can go. If you have already taken them to some of these, it will just be that much easier. Don’t overlook the fact that you should really be able to offer one to each of your offspring. Fortunately, resales offer the opportunity to pick up these additional timeshares at a fraction of what you originally spent. And what a gift it is!! They talk about the gift that keeps on giving. This is one that will provide your children with a lifetime of pleasure. And their children after that.

You might also clip out this article for your kids for the time when they will pass it along to their children.

One final caution. Don’t just add their names to the Deed! In disposing of resale timeshares one of our worst problems has been straightening out improperly deeded property. In some cases it has resulted in the property being unsaleable. In one case a mother just added her four kids names to the deed without any thought to their spouses some of whom were ex-spouses by the time we got into the picture. A nationwide manhunt insued to find the ex-spouses and talk them into signing a quit claim deed. Don’t forget that most timeshares are in fact real property and follow those rules. You are almost always better off obtaining the services of a professional.

The lifetime value of timeshares is just starting to be realized now. It will still take a few more years before it is completely obvious to everyone. When it does, the value of resales will increase dramatically.