And it makes us feel very active. We spend the day learning all this new stuff and we feel like we’ve accomplished something, but in all honesty we’ve just wasted away a day without growing our business one little bit.

Now I’m not suggesting that we never take time to learn new tactics and strategies for our business, or spend time keeping abreast of the latest developments in our field whatever it may be. But we need to be very selective in what we spend our valuable time learning.

Yes, learning is good, but it shouldn’t be done at the expense of growing the business. This is why it is essential to plan each day, each week, each month so that you can be sure you are allocating time to tasks that will grow your business and make you more money FIRST, then once those tasks have been done you can allocate time to reading an ebook or browsing through forums for neat new ideas.

Don’t get bogged down with learning, if you’ve been taking course after course and are still not making any money online, you’re not spending enough time on tasks that are building your business.

The two reports that have come out contain a few interesting stats and some solid bits of content, but most of it wasn’t new to me and won’t be news to anyone who’s done much search engine optimization. He starts with the ‘Perpetual Traffic Report’ showing some stats on the decline of pay per click traffic and a switch back to organic traffic which was (if true) pretty interesting, I have to admit I didn’t realise that sponsered ads got such a small percentage of clicks these days although I don’t do much PPC so that’s not surprising.

Getting to the meat of the first report, he claims that a combination of content, backlinks and activity will boost your rankings but that you MUST do all three and most people just concentrate on the first two. He emphasises that if google doesn’t see activity on your site in the form of comments, feed subscriptions and changing content then they will not rank your site highly. I’m not sure whether this is true, he talks about a google algorithm shift but seeing as google never realeases information like this I am currently taking his claim with a pinch of salt. It seems his course will teach you how to use google tools like feedburner to make it look like your site has a lot of activity, although he’s making the assumption that google uses these tools in it’s website search engine rankings.

Of course, results are king in my book. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with in his course next week and if implementing it shows the massive gain in traffic that he is claiming it will then he obviously knows what he’s talking about!

The second report, the authority codes, is useful if you don’t know them but they’re not really secret codes they’re just search expressions to find high PR blogs that you can comment on to get links. If you don’t know how to do this then download them by all means.

Sign up here: Backlink Checker.

I initially wrote this as a PHP script just for personal use so that I could keep track of all my linking campaigns. If you’re anything like me you have dozens of websites each with numerous links linking to them that you have either arranged with other webmasters or gained through some other link building service.
I found that I was trying to keep track of these links in all sorts of places, emails, spreadsheets, even written on bits of scrap paper! I soon realised that I wouldn’t know if half the links that I had worked hard to get were even still linking back to me.

As the little project grew along with the number of sites I wanted to keep track of I decied to create a website to host and administrate it, and realising how useful it would be to others in the same boat as me I decided to set it up as a free service.

At some point along the way I also realised it would be useful to keep track of the pagerank of the sites that are linking back to yours so I added that feature too.

Once you sign up you can start adding your sites and the backlinks to those sites and you will receive an email report of the status of every link. You can receive these reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. I’d urge you to get signed up ASAP as I may have to limit the membership based on how much load the scripts put on the server as more members and sites are added.

Hope you enjoy and I’d welcome any feedback or suggestions for improvements.

Carl.

One such success story was a tactic I discovered to cash in on the Christmas period as an amazon affiliate. After discovering the idea I spent a couple of days in November setting it up (I really wish I had spent more time now!) and netted around $500 in sales commisioned. Not a huge amount I know, but I only really had time to test the water to see whether it would work, and the idea is totally scalable. Next year I will be looking for some people to join me in creating a network of affiliate sites for amazon so we can all benefit from this tactic.

I have also been working on a membership site for people who want to become affiliate marketers. It probably won’t be for those who are looking to become big name internet marketing millionaire guru’s (you’ll have to buy some other course for that) but for the average Joe who wants to make a decent income just from being a behind the scenes affiliate. Not everybody likes the limelight, I realise, so this site will be about giving you all the tools and training to succeed in affiliate marketing. I will also be looking to use the power of the collective members to help in the promotion of products.

So I hope everyone has a great Christmas and a very prosperous New Year, and look out for more from me very soon.