Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $342.18
• Bluehost – $285
• Membership Site Mastermind – $181.23
• Become a Blogger – $97.12
• Unique Article Wizard – $80.40
• Traffic Rush – $44.87
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $18.27
• RSS Feeds Submit – $13.09

Total income earned during June 2009 – $1062.16

I was surprised to find that I hadn’t made any sales of Twitter Rockstar as I thought that was going to be a regular thing from the traffic that goes to the Twitter Guide every month. Oh well, you can never tell.

Subscribers

Big milestone this month – I have hit the 10k mark which is rather nice. I’ve pulled this diagram a day late so I’ll take the subscriber number from yesterday which is when I usually do it.

Subs at the end of May: 9,171

Subs at the end of June: 10,099

New subscribers in June ‘09 – 928

Last month I noticed that the growth had been lower than usual at just 344 and this month it has shot up to 928. This indicates that perhaps the numbers weren’t quite being reported correctly last month. You’ll see from the graph that Feedburner had a rather big glitch at the end of the month too.

Traffic

Traffic levels have taken a bit of a dive this month but I’m guessing that’s due to a natural summer slump as well as lack of new posts here. Much to be expected really.

Where Have I Been??

I’ve actually had people emailing this month just to check if I’m still alive :-) There are two reasons why I haven’t posted this month. The first is that my work now is entirely focused on my software project. I’m not doing any kind of marketing activities at all so I’m working on all technical programming related stuff and as this isn’t a development blog there’s simply not much to write about.

However the main reason is quite simply that I have done very little work at all of late! The reason I quit my day job back in September ‘07 is not just because I wanted to do my own thing but far more importantly because I wanted my freedom. I don’t like having to be at a certain place at a certain time. I don’t like having to call in sick or ask permission to take time off.

Over this last month here in the UK we have had the most gorgeous weather which is rare as usually it’s so unpredictable! Over the last few weeks in particular I’ve been having BBQ’s, going to the beach, snowboarding, picnics in the park, walking along piers, indoor skydiving, partying etc and have been having the time of my life! I do feel guilty that I’ve hardly done any work but you know what? I had a really crappy time for most of 2008 and it’s about time I had some fun so I decided to live now and work later :-)

However I am still working on the project, even though it’s doing my head in at the moment so I will write some updates if there are some non-techy developments to report!

Income

• Bluehost – $570
• Become a Blogger – $275.39
• Membership Site Mastermind – $273.72
• The Bloggers Bible – $228.12
• Private Advertising – $95.80
• Twitter Rockstar – $92.69
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $26.36
• Article Marketing Domination – $11.98

Total income earned during May 2009 – $1,627.66

Well this has been a bit of a funny month income wise. I noticed a significant drop in the sales of my own products so I expected the overall figure to be down a lot but some other affiliate sales seem to have made up for it instead so I’m happy with the overall figure.

Subscribers

Subs at the end of April: 8,827

Subs at the end of May: 9,171

New Subscribers in May ‘09: 344

The growth in new subs has slowed quite a bit this month though I only really wrote one real post in the whole of May! The others were sales pitch so don’t really count. The low growth is also I suspect caused partly by the drop in traffic this month – see below…

Traffic

Traffic is quite a bit lower this month and looking at the traffic sources shows a drop in both search engine traffic and referral traffic. Referral traffic is quite likely lower due to lack of new posts recently but I’m not sure about the search engine traffic. It could be related actually… Google favours busy sites with lots of fresh content so perhaps a lack of posts is lowering my rankings in Google. Of course it might also be something entirely out of my control, it’s difficult to tell.

I became a software developer in the mid nineties but lost my career after a couple of years. I then spent a few years self employed doing work I hated (it was Internet Marketing but the dark side!!) and finally went to University as a mature student. After I got my degree I was able to get a job as a software developer and for a while I was really happy but after a year or so I started getting this nagging feeling going round my head – “it makes no difference that I am here doing this…”

It occurred to me that I was just using my skills to do somebody else’s work and it didn’t seem particularly important or interesting. We wrote the software that puts pretty graphics on the TV for sporting events and as I’m not into sports either, it was really quite meaningless to me. I worked in an office of less than a dozen developers and each day we’d have a short meeting discussing the project and what part of the software we were each working on. People would get moved around onto different parts – we were all just cogs in a wheel, doing as we were told.

I thought to myself, if I leave this job they will just hire somebody else to do it. It makes no difference that I am doing this. If I don’t do it, somebody else will. This bugged me for about six months until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I quit. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do but I knew that it had to be mine, whatever it was and so I started this blog and any of you have have been around a while or have read the archives will know the story from there.

I’ll be honest here, I look at my earnings, I look at how long I have been doing this, I look at my day to day life and sometimes I just don’t see the point and I feel quite fed up with it all. But every now and then something happens to remind me why I’m doing this and the reason is – because everything I do here in this business makes a difference even if it’s in some small way.

Right now as I write this post I know that these words will be read by the thousands of people that read this blog. Nobody else can write this post because it comes from me and I am unique, just as you are. Everybody who reads this post will react differently but I know that for some people who read it, it will make some difference and I know that I am the one that made the difference – hopefully a positive one!

I had an email today from RJ Licata of siteroast.com thanking me for my WordPress ebook (that I wrote 18 months ago now) and telling me what a difference it made. I get emails like this all the time but for some reason this one stuck out. Maybe it’s what I needed to hear today.

What Makes a Difference and What Doesn’t?

I have worked in Internet Marketing for almost 5 years now though most of it was in that time between my development and University days and in those years I have tried many different things to make money. There are some things that I have felt better about than others and now I can start to see why – those things that I didn’t feel good about usually made no difference (or worse with some of the dodgy stuff I was involved in years ago!) and the things I felt good about did so I’ll take a moment to look at some of those business models.

Affiliate Marketing

This is not something I do anymore but it was my bread and butter for over a year and there are a lot of IMers now that made an absolute fortune from it. You can incorporate affiliate marketing into just about any other business model (how I promote products in this blog for example) but the model I am talking about here is the more ‘pure’ form where you set up landing pages that are designed to promote a specific affiliate offer and then drive traffic to that page, usually with PPC.

When you get this right, it’s easy money. If you can spend $100 on traffic and make anything more than $100 from that traffic you are onto a winner and the more traffic you can buy the more profit you can make. Does it make a difference? Nope, not a diddly squat. You promote something that somebody else has produced and with this model of using a landing page you don’t even produce anything of value along the way.

Niche Websites

In my WordPress ebook I showed you how you can use WordPress to build small niche sites and I wrote a post about how this can become a good income stream if you can find the right niches. I used this technique for a few months for my AdSense project and I hated every minute of it. The income here usually comes from an on-page ad system such as AdSense but many people will promote affiliate products as well.

It can be a slight step up from a landing page because in order to get traffic you are building a website with ‘good content’ however usually that content is nothing more than a rehash of what is already out there. I know that for my niche sites I simply read about the topics from other sites and article directories and re-wrote what I had learned into my own words so although it was unique in terms of the Google duplicate content filter, I was still just spewing the same old crap that was already out there.

Writing Ebooks

There is a very fine line here. I have seen a lot of information online about how to make a living from making ebooks and the danger is that it can be very easy for the ebook you write to be just a rehash of whats already out there – just like the content of most niche sites. However on the other hand if you write something that is truly unique and genuinely useful then it can make a difference.

I was always surprised at the success of my own ebook and I think the reason for that was that I wrote it at a time when I was in a very bad place and just needed something to do to keep my mind occupied. Still, it obviously has made a difference and 18 months on it still does as today’s email shows me so this is good. Unfortunately for me, I never really got any more ideas for ebooks so that was a one-hit wonder!

Courses, Membership Sites & Other Teaching Materials

Since that ebook I’ve since gone on to write two courses which I have been quite proud of. These do make a difference because although I teach a subject that has been taught many times before (especially in the case of the Bloggers Bible), I write in a way that nobody else does so there will always be some people out there that prefer my style to somebody elses.

I look around the Internet and see a lot of teaching resources and I suppose every one of them makes a difference in some way simply because they are unique but there is also that fine line here between creating something that’s truly useful or is just a rehash of what’s been done before.

Blogs

For a blog that is written by a single author (not those corporate blogs that hire writers) they really can’t fail to make a difference because as long as you are writing your own posts and not using stock articles or something, everything you write is unique to you which means that nobody else could have written that post which means that every one of your readers gets uniquely affected by every post that you write.

That’s quite a nice feeling. There’s lots of ways to monetize a blog and ways to do it that don’t feel sleazy so I think that blogs are one of the better business models out there. Plus as I have discovered in recent months, once you get some revenue streams setup, they can continue to pay out for quite some time.

I’ve been so wrapped up in my software project recently that I haven’t had much to blog about but I miss it really. I often find myself wanting to ramble on about random stuff as I am today but I hold back thinking I should stick to marketing material but hey, maybe I’ll just post whatever is on my mind anyway as having the blog just sitting there with no new posts is kinda pointless so I may as well post something :-)

Services

As most of you know, I have been moving away from writing ebooks and courses and looking for something that will provide a more stable income stream and I am in the process of creating a software service that I shall charge a monthly fee for. There are lots of sites that provide services and I think they can be some of the most useful sites out there but the question is, do they make a difference? I suppose the answer depends on how unique the service is.

I worry a little bit about my software project because I’m not really doing anything truly unique – I’m taking some existing ideas and putting them together in my own way which I hope will make a difference but we shall see.

Conclusion

This has been a bit of a ramble. I’m having a funny day, well funny week & month I think. Nevermind. I think sometimes the drudgery of day to day life gets the better of me and I wonder what on earth the point of it all is? But then I look at what I’m doing and I see little areas where I am making a difference and try to remind myself – yes that’s the point.

Course Outline & Delivery

There are 6 modules and the primary teaching method for each module are videos which are about 2 hours worth for each module. There is a ton of information in each one though luckily the slides and full transcripts are provided for all of them. The transcripts for each module are running to about 70-80 pages so that’s about 450 pages worth of information in all! You can also download just the audio if you prefer.

An Emphasis on Blogging & Launches

There are two points that I noted when working through this course that I thought were quite significant. Firstly, in order to create a membership site (or any product in fact) you need an audience to sell to. Yaro recommends (as do I) building an email list and using your blog to do so. Membership Site Mastermind assumes you have a blog but does not teach you about blogging as that has all been done before elsewhere. If you don’t have a blog, you’ll need to put some groundwork into that first before you can really get much benefit out of Membership Site Mastermind.

Secondly, I noticed that Yaro is borrowing heavily from Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. For those of you not familiar with that (I bought it last year when PLF 2.0 was released) it is a formula to launch a product on the Internet with such a bang that it gets you a huge pay-day. The idea is that you prepare for your launch in phases. In the pre-launch phase you start to warm people up to the idea of your product, you demonstrate preeminence in your niche, you start putting out great value content that relates to your product so that you can build trust and authority.

When your product is ready you move into a specific launch phase (this is where Yaro is right now with MSM) where you work hard to build up buzz and excitement and then open your doors to what should be a hungry public who really want to buy your product. Lastly, you move into a post-launch phase where you make sure you deliver your product well and then setup marketing activities to ensure that you get a steady stream of buyers in future.

Yaro’s modules on traffic (module 2) and content (module 4) in particular focus on this formula. He discusses the different traffic strategies that you should use for each phase and similarly describes the kind of content that you’ll need to produce in each of those phases. Whilst this is all great information it may not necessarily apply to everybody. For example, for my own membership site (my software project) I intend to release my software very quietly in phases to make sure I can test everything thoroughly at each stage. The last thing I would want is to generate a huge buzz, open the doors to a large audience and then have my software fall over and die under the strain!

Membership SIte Mastermind Is Not For Beginners

Unlike Yaro’s earlier courses about blogging, this one is not aimed at beginners. There’s a lot of information here but a lot of it is given at the bird’s eye view point meaning that you’re going to have to dig a little deeper on your own to actually implement what it being taught. For example, in the Traffic module Yaro gives you several strategies and explains when to use them. Two of them include Pay Per Click and SEO but he doesn’t actually teach either of those subjects in the course itself and instead points you at some free resources you can use to learn more.

In the technology module there’s a whole bunch of information about email list providers, content protection systems, payments systems and so on but Yaro does not teach you how to implement these things. Actually his recommendation for this stuff is that you hire somebody to do all your tech stuff for you! For most people that’s probably good advice but I’m a techy so no need :-) Still, if you think you’re going to get a tutorial video on how to setup and install the technical details of a membership site you will be disappointed.

A Criticism

There is one thing that I think could be improved. Obviously Yaro is drawing on his own experiences with membership sites in order to deliver this course and as a result he uses a lot of examples from his own sites. The problem with that is that most of the examples assume that your membership site is going to deliver a teaching resource and the examples are also drawn from the Internet Marketing niche.

Personally I don’t think that a teaching resource is necessarily good content for a membership site because with most subjects you will run out of stuff to teach in a relatively short time so you may not be able to keep your members for long. Also, I suspect that there will be lots of people who’d like to have a membership site but will not be in the IM niche. A few more examples in other niches could be very useful. This is certainly something that Yaro could add as bonus materials over the coming weeks though so I hope he does :-)

Last Day To Join is Today!

Don’t forget that Membership Site Mastermind closes the doors at midnight Eastern time so today is your last chance to get the course. I’m also offering my two courses as bonuses for those of you who purchase through my link.

Even if you decide that Membership Site Mastermind is not for you and you later ask for a refund (there’s a lifetime guarantee!), you get to keep my courses so you have nothing to lose! However, don’t forget that MSM is only taking in new members until the 11th May.

How To Get Your Bonuses From Me

In order to get your free copies of my Bloggers Bible Fast Track and Traffic Rush Advanced courses you need to be sure that you make your purchase through my affiliate link and to be 100% sure of that it is best to clear out your browser cookies before clicking the purchase link.

For Firefox users, go to the Tools menu, select Clear Private Data and make sure the Cookies box is checked and then click the button, Clear Private Data Now.

If you use Internet Explorer, from the Tools menu, click Options and then on the General tab, look at the section that says Browsing History and click the Delete button. This brings up a panel with a bunch of things to clear and from here click the Delete Cookies button.

Once you have cleared your cookies, use my affiliate link to make your purchase. I will check Clickbank daily for sales details and will email the bonuses to the email address recorded against the sale.

What is Membership Site Mastermind?

Some of you will have already heard of Yaro Starak from his earlier blogging coaching program, Blog Mastermind which teaches you how to build a profitable blog and it is what I first used to learn about blogging back in 2007 when I got started. I have promoted this course heavily ever since and I still highly recommend it.

Blog Mastermind was Yaro’s first membership site and he has since launched a 2nd one and become quite the expert and so has now translated that knowledge into a new course that teaches you how to replicate his success with your own membership site. Membership Site Mastermind is an intensive 6-week course. It is being run ‘live’ which means that each of the modules is being delivered over the coming 6 weeks along with lots of support from Yaro in that time.

This is not a stand alone course and new members will only be accepted for the first week – until 11th of May so if you think you may be interested then you need to act now.

What Will You Learn?

Yaro has one of those long (boring, sorry Yaro!) sales letters advertising his program on which he describes all 6 modules in full but here is my condensed version:

• Module #1 – Topic Selection & Preeminence – market research, tools for collecting prospects, establishing relationships with your prospects and strategies for establishing preeminence in your market place.
• Module #2 – Traffic Generation – driving traffic at every stage in your site development, how to capture leads using an opt-in page, finding joint venture partners and affiliates.
• Module #3 – Human Resources & Technology – hiring people to help you, the technology you need for all aspects of the site including payment processing and affiliate management
• Module #4 – Content & Pricing – how to create content, what to create, how to devise your pricing structure, choosing a payment processor
• Module #5 – The Launch Process – how to prepare your sales page for a launch, how to give away content that drives sales, using social networks to build buzz.
• Module #6 – Post Launch – Managing customer support, keeping attrition rate low, testing your marketing systems, doing promotions after launch, how to sell your established membership site for up to $1 million!

There are also a bunch of bonuses included with your purchase which includes a member forum and live coaching calls with Yaro.

Pricing & Guarantee

I’ll be frank – this is not a cheap product (but there is a LIFETIME guarantee which I’ll come back to in a moment.) Membership Site Mastermind costs 3 x $297 payments and there is also a second option that allows you to pay one extra payment of $297 which will also give you access to the complete Blog Mastermind course that I mentioned earlier. Note that developing a membership site is an excellent move to make for bloggers because you can use your blog to gain your initial members. This is what Yaro did himself and it is what I am doing currently so if you don’t yet have a blog, getting both courses will work very well together.

Yaro is offering a LIFETIME guarantee of this course. The course will be delivered over a 6 week period but of course even though most people should be able to work through the course materials in those six weeks, it is quite likely to take much longer to actually develop and launch your membership site so it might be some time before you really know whether the course has been a worthwhile investment.

Yaro is so confident in Membership Site Mastermind that he is offering an absolute lifetime guarantee. If at any time you feel the course is not right for you, you can ask for a full refund – no questions asked, no limits, no restrictions! You cannot get a better guarantee than that so you literally have nothing to lose.

Is a Membership Site Right For You?

I think that membership sites are one of the best business models to use online. To crunch a few numbers, even if you start with a very modest goal of say a $20 a month membership site and aim for just 50 members, that would give you an income of $1000 per month. You’d pay for this course in one month!

Of course Yaro is encouraging you to aim much higher than that. He suggests aiming for a $50 a month site and trying to get at least 200 members. If you do the math you’ll see that’s a whopping $10,000 a month. For most people reading this (including me!) that would make a massive difference and I know it is what I am aiming for with my own membership site! And I’m sure we’ve all seen how well some of the bigger IM guys do with their $100+ a month sites that have hundreds of members – those guys bring in crazy money!

If you’re not sure what kind of membership site you could create or you’re not sure if its something you would be capable of then check out some of these resources to help you make your decision. First of all I highly recommend reading the Membership Site Masterplan report – this will take a couple of hours to read through but will give you a really good idea of exactly what work is involved.

Also, Yaro has put together a couple of interesting videos. Somewhat sickenly, he was able to spend most of 2008 travelling around the world and during that time he launched two memberships sites whilst on the road! This first video shows a bit of how he did that and also presents a couple of case studies of people who are launches membership sites that are completely unrelated to the Internet Marketing niche.

The second video is just a little tip really in which he shows you a technique for figuring out what your members want before you actually launch your site. This is pretty important because if you don’t give people what they want, they will not buy!

Don’t forget, you can only enroll in Membership Site Mastermind until 11th May so act fast :-)

Income

• Bluehost – $570
• The Bloggers Bible – $342.18
• Twitter Rockstar – $302.56
• Become a Blogger – $296.63
• Unique Article Wizard – $107.20
• Traffic Rush – $89.74
• Private Advertising – $50
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $17.98

Total income earned during April 2009 – $1,776.29

For those of you who follow my stats each month you might have spotted a new income stream this month – Twitter Rockstar. Note that I am promoting this in only two places, one is with a banner ad in my sidebar and the other is in my Twitter Guide and it’s the latter that is bringing in the majority of the clicks and the sales. The popularity of Twitter has skyrocketed over the last year and my guide gets more and more traffic as a result because it ranks so well in Google. Now that I have finally monetized the guide, I expect this revenue stream to continue over the long term which is rather nice.

Subscribers

Subs at the end of March: 8,202

Subs at the end of April: 8,827

New subscribers in April 09: 625

The growth has been virtually identical to last month. At this rate I expect to hit 10k subscribers around June time. That will be nice :-)

Traffic

Very much the same as last month, nothing really of interest to report here.

Best Posts From a Year Ago

Internet Marketing Doesn’t Have to be About Money

There is a myth that the only way to make money online is by teaching others how to make money online! As you can see from my own stats above, only a small amount of my income (Bloggers Bible – $342) came from that. The rest was from other products. In this post I debunk that myth and I still hold that same opinion today.

Be Prepared to Change Strategy At Any Time

Many people have a long term plan for their business but I prefer to simply go with the flow and allow things to change. What is interesting is that in this post I talk about how I had finally stopped seeing myself as a software developer to concentrate on social media. One year on I have pretty much dropped social media and am now virtually a full time software developer again – all part of the changing strategy! :-)

6 Valuable Post Types and When To Use Them

This is one of my favourite posts of all time – I break down six specific types of blog post that offer genuine value to your readers and explain the benefits of the post and when in yur blogging career is most suitable to use them.

Conclusion

There’s really not much to say this month. I am heavily focusing my efforts on my software project rather than on this blog these days and that trend is likely to continue over the next few months I should imagine.

What is Convenience Anyway?

Convenience can mean many things. Generally it saves us time and hassle. Personally I hate hassle, I hate wasting time and I love convenience and I am prepared to hand over my cash for it. There are many examples in the offline world. Internet banking – how convenient is that? I can log in anytime and get my accounts, I can pay myself from my business account online. I never go to a bank – ever, and I like that! Internet Banking just happens to be free but if it wasn’t, I’d pay for it!

When it comes to things like Internet tools, take the example of something like Market Samuari. This is a keyword research tool that taps into the API of Google packages it in a way that is easy to use and quick but it doesn’t really do very much that you can’t do yourself manually by using Google’s tools directly. I bought it for the sheer convenience.

Who Can Afford Convenience?

Paying for convenience is a choice. For example, let’s say you want to learn about making money online. You might want to get into blogging or affiliate marketing, writing ebooks or whatever. We all know that there are thousands of blogs and other resources out there with oodles of information that can give you everything you need to know completely free. The downside? You have to sort through the rubbish to get to the good stuff and that’s inconvenient. That is why marketers like myself charge you to teach you these things in a more concise way. You can choose to go the free route or pay for the convenience of learning what you want from a trusted source.

This choice is partly determined by cirmunstance but also by mindset. There are some people who value money more than anything else. If they can get something free or do something themselves they will. I am not one of those people. Can I wash my own car? Sure! Do I? Hell no! I pay somebody else to wash it for me! These people are what I have referred to before as ‘freebie seekers’ and they are not your customers and neither will they ever will be. They choose not to buy not because they can’t afford to but because they prefer to use only freebies. There is nothing wrong with this – it is simply a personal choice.

There are some people who are obviously restricted by financial circumstances and this is affecting more and more people in today’s financial climate. If somebody is literally scraping by and can barely afford to feed their children, they are not going to pay for convenience – at least not right now. But that might change later on if their financial circumstances change.

Lastly there are people who have money and are prepared to spend it for convenience – people like me :-) These people are your customers and you can charge these people! I pay $67 for Unique Article Wizard. Does it do anything I can’t do myself? Well yeah it kinda does but that’s not why I pay for it – I pay for it because it’s simple and saves me a ton of time.

Who is Your Target Market?

If you are in a position where you have a product that you want to charge for and you are considering the value of the convenience that your product offers, then you need to consider who your target market it. Let’s take the Internet Marketing niche as an example as that’s a real easy one. Okay, forget the freebie seekers to begin with and let’s concentrate on those that have the right mindset.

I would suggest that if you have a product that somebody wants, his chances of paying for convenience will be largely determined by how much money he is already making. If you have a business where you are making thousands of dollars a month and you see a tool or suite of tools that you know can save you a ton of time, $99 a month really is nothing. It’s a solid investment because that marketer knows that the time saved by those tools or products can be invested back into the business to make more money.

On the other hand if you have somebody who is only making a few hundred dollars a month or even less – this person is still at the hobby stage. It might be that the extra convenience won’t help them as much because they are not yet able to translate that convenience and time into additional profits. People who are still struggling to make money will be more reluctant to pay.

How do the big guys in the IM world make money? Who are they targeting? Most of the big guys target other successful marketers and the reason is that they know these guys have both the money and the mindset to pay for convenience.

Now how does that translate into other markets where you are not selling a ‘make money’ type product? I think the same principle applies – you have to find what it is that makes your product convenient or saves time and then market that. I’d love to hear your opinions on this topic so please leave your thoughts in the comments and thanks to Dennis for the post inspiration!

I’ve been reading the report over the last couple of days and it’s quite useful – for me I’d say the most useful section is the chapter on technology that talks about member management, payment systems and so on. These technological issues are something I am beginning to wrestle with in my own software project right now.

Why Build a Membership Site?

Yaro believes that a membership site is one of the best business models for internet marketers and I must say that I agree. The key benefit to a membership site over a product with a one-time fee is that the member will continue to pay as long as they stay a member. If your marketing efforts continue to bring in new members, that can add up to a massive income over time.

For example, I’ve been bringing in a 4-figure income from this blog for a long time now but the vast majority of that income has been from one-off products such as my courses. I’ve been making at least 10 sales a month and of course these are always to new customers. But imagine if instead of selling those people a course – I’m selling them a membership with a monthly fee instead. At say $50 a month, that is $500 income added to the baseline every month! In a year, assuming no dropouts (there will be people who drop out – something that Yaro discusses at length in his report) that would build to an income of $6,000 per month – and that’s with just 10 new members a month!

Keeping Your Members

There’s one area where I have always criticised Yaro – in my opinion, a real membership site should give the member a reason to stay subscribed for the long haul but Yaro has always structured his membership sites as courses delivered over a 6-month period. That to me, is too short term.

I have heard some people argue that NO membership site keeps it’s members for very long but I disagree. I myself have paid for one site in particular (it’s less than $20 a month but probably has hundreds if not thousands of members now) for over five years and I have no reason to quit.

I think courses are a great product but I don’t believe that a membership site is the correct model to market them. However this is a subject that I have discussed before and I have previously described 6 solid models for membership sites that should allow you to keep your members for quite a long time.

Click here to download The Membership Site Masterplan report

A while ago I tinkered with some content management systems such as Joomla and Drupal but seeing as the bulk of the site is going to be the tools that I develop myself I decided that it would have been too much effort to try and fit my code around a CMS so instead I have been looking at simply building the site from scratch with the help of a PHP Framework.

There were three PHP frameworks on my short list – the Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgnighter. I haven’t had time to really build something with them all but I browsed the documentation and I had bought some PHP books and a couple of them had examples using Zend. So far I have built a site using the Zend Framework and also built a user management sytstem that allows users to register, login and so on to test it out. That works fine and the Zend Framework is pretty powerful however I have also managed to integrate aMember with it successfully.

One of the reasons I wanted to use a CMS over building the site from scratch is that my design skills suck and I wanted to be able to use a nice template for the layout and design of the site. Both Drupal and Joomla have support for templates that are just like WordPress ones. However I discovered that you can also get templates that are built using pure HTML & CSS and so I am using one of these and integrating it with my PHP application using the Smarty template engine.

I’m currently working with a template called New Fangled which I got from the Free CSS templates website so that has solved my design issues. My other concern was that I didn’t want to be having to write my own blogging system if I wanted to include a blog on the site (which I will) but I’m hoping that I can just download an existing PHP package that does that for me. It’s low priority though so I’ll worry about that later.

Release Information

I kind of have more of a plan now. My overall goal is to build a suite of tools – around a dozen of them which will all be very useful in isolation but can also work together to be even more useful. However I plan to release the software in stages, adding a few tools each time and increasing the price as I go :-) Note that members will lock in their monthly fee when they join so anyone who joins on the first release will keep the lowest price point for as long as they stay a member even as the price increases for new members. This should make it easier to get those first few members.

To get the ball rolling I’ll start off by releasing the free version and will restrict members initially so I can test out the basic stuff and iron out teething problems early on. I’m only going to be releasing this here on this blog. Eventually once the paid version is complete there will be an affiliate program but to be honest that is probably a way off as I would want to be really sure that I had sorted out any technical issues (and I know I’ll get them!) before asking others to promote it for me so this probably wont happen until at least the second paid release. I have three releases planned so far in addition to the free one – and no I don’t have any timescales :-)

The Freebie PreSell Using Email Lists

Recently I described how I like to make money using email lists that give something away for free and promote something within the free information. I intend to use a somewhat similar model for the membership site that I am building for my software project. The basic business model is this: I’ll have a paid membership site costing $xx a month which will provide various tools for members. In addition to the paid version I shall also offer a free membership which will have a cut down version of one of the tools.

Now of course the idea here is that I use the free membership to attract potential customers but attempt to sell the paid version to those free members and I intend to do that selling via an email list. The content of the email autoresponder sequence will be different to something such as my Bloggers Bible as I’m not offering a course this time. Instead I’ll have tips on how to use the software, show what advanced features are in the paid version etc.

But there is a problem with this approach and that is that customers are in charge of the email they receive and may unsubscribe at any time.

Integrating Email Subscriptions to Memberships

Email spam has become a huge problem in recent years and so now we have all sorts of laws in place to control it. If you are somebody who emails people using any kind of list then you need to be aware of these laws. If you use a service such as AWeber to manage your list then they are taken care of for you. There must be an unsubscribe link in every email, you must include a real postal address in every email and so on.

That unsubscribe link puts the customer in control and so if you want to keep people on your lists you must give them a very good reason to stay subscribed. That is why I have never been a fan of just giving people a free report as an incentive to sign up to your list because once they’ve downloaded it what other incentive is there to stay subscribed? I myself have frequently joined a list to get some freebie and then immediately unsubscribed. So there needs to be some inherent value in staying subscribed to the list.

In the case of my membership site what I want to do is tie in the email with the membership itself (for the free members this is). Ideally I would like the customers email address to act as their login into the membership site so the idea is that as long as they want to be a member and enjoy the benefits of the free tools, they agree to receive my emails. Now of course, because of these anti-spam laws the customer always has that option to unsubscribe from the email list at any time – that will never change but what I want to do is have that unsubscribe integrated with my site so that if the member chooses to unsubscribe from my email list, their membership is suspended at the same time.

What I’ve Tried So Far

I know this is possible because I belong to various membership sites myself that do this so I’m not sure why I’m having such trouble with it. There’s two halves to the solution really – the email list manager and the membership manager of my website. Now for the membership manager there are two ways I can do this. Firstly I can build my own system and I have already built a basic system so I know it works. This gives me full control over what happens to members on my site but to be honest I would rather use a third party system such as aMember to manage members as they have a lot of features such as integration with payment processors which will save me a lot of development work.

The other solution is to try and integrate with a third party email system such as AWeber. As it happens, AWeber is famed for its email deliverability statistics – they get more emails through than any other provider but the downside is that they do not like integration and make it impossible to do what I want to do. When a subscriber unsubscribes from an email list there is no way to setup any kind of automation rule which I could use to notify either aMember or my custom software that they have unsubscribed. I have asked GetResponse if they can do what I need and they cannot.

The aMember Email System

On the day that I started typing out this blog post the support guys at aMember got back to me and gave me some help with their email system. I have since installed the aMember trial software and started to set things up and test them out. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that they do have a decent auto-responder built into their software.

You can setup a sequence for each product you wish to protect and you can even setup a separate sequence for members who allow their subscriptions to lapse. The bad news is that the system is setup to allow the members to unsubscribe from the email list independently of their accounts. This is to be expected for a paid product but in my case I only want this integration for my free product so I am still stuck.

Is This a Problem That Doesn’t Need to Be Solved?

I once had a colleague years ago who always came out with words of wisdom and one particular gem that I always remember is that when you have to try that hard to solve a problem, you’re probably trying to solve the wrong problem.

In essence, what I am trying to do is force the users of my free tools to receive my emails. Do I really need to do that? When I wrote my post on email list marketing one of the first things that I explained is that there will always be a huge majority of people who are simply ‘freebie seekers’ and who will never buy. If somebody really does not want to receive the emails that come with the software (they will be instructional, not just sales pitches) then am I really losing anything if they unsubscribe? Probably not.

Also, email is not the only selling mechanism. Anything I want to put in an email could probably go onto the website itself. I could have a place where I show training information, announcements of new features, special offers right there on the site in a place that would be seen when they login. Plus of course the software itself is a selling tool – if the users like what it can do then that will encourage them to upgrade if they are interested in the advanced features.

So for the moment I have decided to forget about this problem and just use the in-built autoresponder that comes with aMember. However it would still be interesting to know if others have come across this problem and how they solved it if they were able to. If that’s you, please leave a comment. Also, I will post a general update on the software project next week.

Understand The Numbers & Mentality

In order to encourage somebody to sign up for your list you need to provide them with some value and obviously at this stage it must be free. You make money by encouraging those subscribers to buy something that you promote within the list.

Now one thing you need to understand is that there will ALWAYS be a large number of people who will never buy anything from you. These are freebie seekers. There is nothing wrong with them, there is nothing wrong with you, that is just the way it is. Sometimes as marketers and product owners we can’t understand why somebody wouldn’t buy, and obsess over improving conversion ratios but you’ll drive yourself nuts with this line of thinking.

I prefer to accept that many simply wont buy anything for whatever reason, and just concentrate on reaching more people so that I have a chance of grabbing some of those people who do buy. It’s just a numbers game. Whether you make 1 sale in 100 or 1 sale in 1000, whatever your ratio is, the more subscribers you get (that are targeted) the more sales you’ll make.

Balancing Promotions with Managing Unsubscribes

There’s another part of the numbers game which is kinda obvious but easily overlooked – every time you promote is another chance to make a sale. If you have a short 7-part series and all you have is a single promotion in the last part then you only have one shot at that sale. On the other hand if you have a 50-part series that makes 100 promotions you have far more chances to make money.

So you do need to do your promotions – you can’t make money without selling something! But on the other hand, almost every promotion you do can result in an unsubscribe, especially with the more obvious sales pitches. For example, right now Jeff Walker is launching the Product Launch Formula (for the third time, wtf is that about??) so all the big marketers are jumping on it and making sales pitches to their list. These are what I call time sensitive promotions and it is damn hard to promote this kind of thing without it being a blatant sales pitch. I am hyper-sensitive to this stuff and just skip over it entirely.

I have done a few time sensitive promotions to my own list (usually special discounts of my own products) and every time I do I will get a little surge in unsubscribes. That is why I far prefer to integrate my promotions right into the content and avoid blatant sales pitches though there is one exception to this rule…

Give Away Slowly, Sell Quickly

That’s probably a really bad name for the model I have used with my Bloggers Bible course. This is a 49-part course that I offer in two formats. I give away the entire thing completely free as a series of weekly email lessons and I also sell a PDF version of the entire thing. The idea of the free version is that it promotes the ‘fast track’ PDF version and this is promoted in every single email.

It would take almost a year to get the entire course via weekly emails. For the small minority of people who are actually serious about creating a profitable blog (most read but take no action!), that pace is way too slow. The first half a dozen lessons for example could be actioned in a day or two depending on how much time you had available to work on it.

Every one of those emails promotes the PDF and in addition, there are a few other affiliate links dotted throughout some of the lessons but these aren’t the focus. Now some people will always want everything for free. I had one person email me saying that the course was paced far too slowly and that I should do the lessons daily. I resisted the temptation to tell her to buy the fast track if she wanted the lessons quicker :-)

Now whether or not this model works is largely a matter of opinion… you can see my stats posts to see how many new subscribers I am getting per month (several hundred) and how many BB sales I am making (single figures) and draw your own conclusion. Personally I would like to see the number of sales higher but on the other hand the course is priced rather high so each sale makes me a nice chunk of change…

Using Continuity to Avoid Unsubscribes

Now there is another benefit to my model of using a course in this way as the content of the email list – there is a continuity within the emails that is broken if the subscriber unsubscribes. My courses (both Traffic Rush and Bloggers Bible) build up in a structured way – each lesson builds upon the last and I tend to build up slowly and leave the juicier stuff until later in the lessons!

This keeps people wanting more and this is different from something such as a tips newsletter for example. In each email I also provide a teaser as to what is to come in the next issue to keep the reader interested. This seems to be working as I have a very low unsubscribe rate.

Conclusion

There are a few important factors to making money with an email list from your blog:

1) Offer something of value to get the signup in the first place. In addition I recommend promoting the list heavily using a popup.

2) Prefer to work your sales into the actual content of the emails rather than have stand alone sales pitches.

3) Make your entire email sequence compelling so that subscribers will want to stay subscribed.

I make 4-figures every month from this blog and that is consistent even in months where I don’t post much or do promotional work. In this post I’m going to spell out EXACTLY how I make money and what the really important factors are. This is not theory – this is what is putting cash in my bank each and every month.

Where my Money Comes From

There are two main sources of income from this blog – one is direct sales of my courses such as Traffic Rush and the fast track version of The Bloggers Bible. The other is various affiliate sales. These in turn come from three main sources. Some are from links embedded in blog posts such as reviews or places I mention services I use such as Unique Article Wizard. Another source is from affiliate links embedded in my other products – most of my BlueHost income has come from my WordPress ebook for example. Lastly, I also plug a few affiliate products in my courses and get the occasional sale from there.

So to conclude the money aspect I would suggest the following:

• Promote affiliate products in as many places as possible
• Sell your own products

These days my income is probably split around 50/50 with these two sources but note that my own products have often led to affiliate sales also. I strongly recommend you create your own product even if it’s just a short report.

Now, here’s the killer – NONE of this is possible without eyeballs on my stuff and that means traffic / subscribers.

Getting Traffic & Subscribers

These two work hand in hand to some degree. Notice that over the last couple of months my blogging has slowed dramatically and yet my traffic is still fairly stable. This is because much of that traffic comes from search engines. Now in my Bloggers Bible course I talk a lot about traffic and there are many places you can get it. Social media has many sources if you have the time to be active with it. However, social media requires constant work and the traffic will mostly be in proportion to the time you can invest.

I no longer have time to be active on sites like StumbleUpon etc and it shows in my traffic. On the other hand, search engine traffic can last for months or even years. My highest visited resource on this blog is still my Twitter Guide and I wrote that in October 2007! The traffic comes from search engines. It ranks number #1 in Google for the term “twitter guide” and also ranks for many other terms.

Now when you are getting traffic, there are three ways that I suggest you use it to your benefit:

1) Monetize it Directly

Traffic comes in to certain pages, check your analytics to see which are you most highly trafficked (is that a word?) pages and make sure those pages sell something. For over a year I gave away my Twitter Guide for free without making a cent from it but this month one of my readers Nathan Hangen released the rather cool Twitter Rockstar course which I now heavily promote throughout that Twitter guide and the sales are trickling in.

That guide will continue to get traffic for a very long time and so I expect those sales to continue to trickle in. This is a residual income stream – if you can build up enough of these you’ll develop a strong residual income from your blog.

2) Capture an RSS Subscriber

As bloggers you should all know the rules of RSS – make your button prominent, showcase your best work, have a good about page etc etc. If any of this stuff is unfamiliar to you then read my Bloggers Bible course – it’s all explained in there in detail. The bottom line is, when visitors come to your blog, if you do things properly then you will wow them with your content and a proportion of them will subscribe to your feed.

3) Capture an Email Address

The third thing to do, and I would argue that this is more important than RSS subscribers is to capture an email address via an email list. My bloggers bible course is delivered via email and is what is promoted in the popup that appears 5 seconds after a new visitor lands on my site. Here’s the thing – with a popup like the one I use, FAR more people will subscribe to the list than will subscribe to the RSS feed.

My current subscriber count shows 8k+ and over half of that is now the email list.

What To Do With Your Subscribers?

Ok so you’ve built a steady stream of traffic and you have mechanisms in place to monetize it directly where you can and to capture those people in one way or another otherwise. So now, how do you make money out of your subscribers? Well you have two very distinct channels here and they are different:

Monetizing RSS Subscribers

Your RSS subscribers are your readers, these are the ones who are getting to know you and who love to read your writing. You can develop a relationship with these guys, especially the ones who comment although that will be a tiny minority. The best way to monetize these people is to promote something either in a time sensitive way or to have a few killer products that you continually promote.

For example I heavily promote Blog Mastermind, BlueHost and Unique Article Wizard. Blog Mastermind changed their affiliate links last week and I had to trawl through over 40 posts to change the links!! That’s how much I mention it. Over time your readers will learn to trust you and what you promote and if those products are of interest to them, are likely to buy from your recommendation.

The second method is to occasionally do a time sensitive promotion and I do mean occasionally! This is when I will sometimes promote something that I’m not too sure about myself and will give my opinion as best I can. In general though, I avoid these and prefer to focus on a few core products that I can thoroughly recommend from personal experience.

Monetizing Email Subscribers

I take a slightly different approach to most people with this. Most marketers that I know of have a fairly simple formula – they have an email list that provides some value of some kind and then every now and then they will inject a sales pitch into the email sequence in order to sell something. They will also do time sensitive promotions to the list. Now I don’t know about you guys but I have an extremely low tolerance for sales pitches. Generally speaking I will unsubscribe from a list the moment I get a sales pitch.

There is only one exception to this rule – if the list I am on is providing me with such fantastic information that I really don’t want to miss out and so I put up with the sales pitch anyway. This is what I am trying to achieve with my courses. I hope that the course content is so good that subscribers will forgive my sales pitches :-)

There is another tactic at work here too but I’ll discuss that in another post.

Conclusion

Step 1 – you need to get traffic. Search engine traffic is best but one downside is that it can take a very long time to develop. However the more you write the better chance you have of ranking for stuff and when you start to get some SE traffic you can build on it with related posts and so on.

Step 2 – capture subscribers in any way that you can.

Step 3 – monetize in as many ways as you can. Directly in posts that get traffic, sell your own stuff, promote affiliate products everywhere. You can get away with being fairly aggressive in a subtle way if that makes sense. You can promote lots and often without resorting to the hard sell – this is the approach that works for me.

This is a really consensed post. I can and have discussed all of these individual topics in great detail in the Bloggers Bible so read it if you haven’t already. Yes it is possible to make money with blogs and it can provide a semi-residual income but it can take a long time and a lot of work to get to that point.

If you have any questions about anything I have written in here, then please feel free to ask in the comments.

Income

• Teaching Sells – $479
• Bluehost – $380
• Become a Blogger – $296.63
• The Bloggers Bible – $288.36
• Keyword Elite Software – $95.41
• Traffic Rush – $89.74
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• The SEO Book – $25
• RSS Feeds Submit Software – $19.89
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $17.66

Total income earned during March 2009: $1,745.29

Note that the $479 commission for Teaching Sells was actually credited during February but for some reason I had taken it off my sales stats so I didn’t see it until the payment came in a few days ago so I have added it onto this month as I have now been paid for it. That was a nice surprise hehe :-)

Subscribers

Unfortunately I have no graph this month. I did the stats yesterday and snapped the pic (and for once FeedBurner had no blips!) but the image didn’t save and today it’s not working properly. Anyway these are the numbers:

Subs at the end of February: 7,561

Subs at the end of March: 8,202

New subscribers in March 09: 641

What I like about this is that I no longer have to do a thing to keep my subscriber base growing. The blog has now gained enough traction, in the search engines especially, to keep a steady stream of visitors coming in and with the popup in place a good chunk of those visitors subscribe to the Bloggers Bible course. There’s enough content in that sequence for almost a whole year so I really don’t have to do anything else.

Traffic

The same trend continues but this time my search engine traffic has now pushed past the 50% mark with an increase of quite a few visitors from last month. That’s not bad considering I wrote very few posts in March that would bring in search engine traffic.

Inbound Links

January ‘09: 11.673

February ‘09: 13,926

March ‘09: 13,524

Confusing results as usual on the links.

Best Posts From a Year Ago

How to Find the Right Work-Life Balance: 6 Steps

Many people who are self employed work very hard and I think there is a certain amount of pressure to ‘do well’ but that leaves no room for the good things in life. Working too little can be destructive too of course so we have to learn to strike the right balance.

Finding Product Ideas Almost Guaranteed to SELL

If you’re into niche marketing, a common problem is how to come up with ideas for a product to produce and sell. In this post I explain a technique that shows you how to come up with ideas that will almost certainly sell.

Make Money Blogging By ‘Selling’ Your Knowledge

Another post on the ideas of producing and selling products but this time how to package up your own knowledge into a product that you sell via your blog.

Conclusion

A blog can take a very long while to get off the ground but once you have a few solid income streams established and you have steady traffic coming from search engines, that cash will just keep on rolling in month after month without you having to do very much at all…

I have been using some article marketing to try and get my Bloggers Bible Fast Track page to rank for the term make money blogging and using Market Samurai’s latest new feature I can see exactly how well it is performing against the competition and spot exactly where the problems lie.

I’ve Got Nothing To Say Right Now

This is not one of those traditional make money online blogs where the blogger claims to be some kind of guru about making money online and then proceeds to impart his wisdom about making money online through his blog posts. Though judging from some of the comments I get here, some people seem to think thats what it’s about, oh well.

This blog has always been primarily a record of what I am doing in that journey and for the last few months I have shut down virtually all of my marketing activities to work on the software project. This is a programming project – I spend my days knee deep in PHP code and this is not a programming blog so right now there is nothing that I do in my day to day work life that is relevant to blog about.

I have been doing some article marketing to promote the Bloggers Bible in order to keep those sales trickling in but I’ve said just about everything I have to say on the subject now so I really can’t think of anything else to write.

I could do some SEO posts – specific posts designed to target certain keywords in order to get search engine traffic but I can’t really motivate myself to do that unless I have a solid reason for posting about the topic anyway. I can’t write just for the sake of writing.

I’ve never been a fan of trying to force out blog posts just for the sake of it; I think that’s a waste of time both for the blogger and for the reader so from now on I’m just going to post when I have something useful to say. That might be tomorrow, or next week or next month. At this point, I really don’t know.

Hopefully you’ll keep me hanging about in your feed reader in the meantime :-)

Know Your Goals Up Front

The most important thing to do before you start doing any article marketing work is to know what you want to achieve. Specifically, are you looking to get traffic from your articles, or mainly backlinks? You can do both but you have to work a little harder. I explained in detail the difference between article marketing and article distribution in an earlier post.

You need to understand what you are trying to do before you get started. There are a few key questions that you need to ask yourself:

• Which pages on my site do I wish to promote?
• What keywords am I targeting on those pages?
• Am I trying to rank for certain keywords in the articles themselves?
• What content am I using for the articles?

Planning Your Content Strategy

With regards to the last point above, where is your content coming from? If you are writing brand new, fresh content for the article directories then do you know how many you will be able to write? If you are doing this by yourself then you might want to do some content research to see just how much material you will be able to come up with.

On the other hand if you are recycling existing content like I am by using existing blog posts or in my case, Bloggers Bible lessons, I already know that I have at least 53 articles to use but I need to keep track of which ones have been submitted and which haven’t.

If you are re-writing your existing blog posts as article content you need a way to keep track of which blog posts you have used. I haven’t started on this strategy yet as I have enough material in my lessons to keep me going for a while but when I start on blog content I will simply use a spreadsheet to track it. My plan is to go through my archives and copy the links to my posts into a spreadsheet and then delete entries that would not be suitable. I then end up with a list of appropriate candidates and then I can mark them off as I submit them.

Planning Your Submission Strategy

If you are using an automated tool such as Unique Article Wizard then this is handled for you and all you need to do is mark which articles you have submitted and UAW will take care of the rest.

However if you are manually submitting to article directories by yourself then you need to be a little more detailed in your tracking. What I would do here is group my article directories into groups of either 10 at a time or perhaps group them by PR and then on the above spreadsheet just have a column for each group. I’d submit an article to a group of directories and then mark that on the spreadsheet as I complete each group. As it is so time consuming to submit manually you don’t want to assume that you’re going to submit to all of them in one go.

Tracking Your Results

In my case, I am not expecting traffic from the directories – I am using the mass distribution method to get as many backlinks as possible to selected pages on my blog so for me, the best way to track the results is to watch the position of my target page in the serps.

I have been doing this over the previous few weeks and I have noticed something very interesting. The page I am targeting is the Bloggers Bible Fast Track and when I first started writing this series which was exactly one month ago, that page ranked number #49 in the serps for the term “make money blogging“. About a week later it had moved up to number #39 but then it dramatically fell and today it is sitting at #107.

I don’t know what happened… I wonder if perhaps I have been throwing too many links at the page too quickly and it has been penalised? Perhaps I will adjust the rate at which UAW sends out links to just 10 per day. The trouble is, the number of articles I have in the system is growing so even at 10 per day for each article, that will soon approach 100 links per day in all which may still be too high.

But I noticed something else too – whilst my target page sits in obscurity at position #107, my home page is now ranking at number #50! I hadn’t planned to promote the home page at all as I didn’t think it ranked for anything useful but I was obviously wrong so now I am going to change my strategy so that my resource box promotes both the home page and the target page.

Where Is Your Time Going?

First of all it is important to breakdown exactly what specific activities you spend your time on. I have a bunch of tasks related to my software project which I will just lump together but I have broken out the others. The only full month I have tracked so far is February 2009 and this is how I have spent my time:

• Software Project stuff  [31.1 hours / 45.6% ]
• Necessary Admin (email, paperwork, accounting etc) [7.5 hours / 11%]
• IM Study (studying from courses, ebooks, blogs etc) [5.1 hours / 7.4%]
• Blog Work (absolutely anything related to this blog) [18.1 hours / 26.5%]
• Bloggers Bible Promotion (the article marketing for instance) [6.5 hours / 9.5%]

Total hours worked during February 2009 – 68 hours, yes I’m a slacker I know! I’m aiming for at least 80 in March!

However it is not enough to identify what you do… what is really important is that you identify which of those tasks are productive and move you forwards towards your goals. Now for me my main goal is getting my software project going so of course everything related to that is top priority and I spent almost half of my time doing that which is good but I could do better.

Now for the other stuff, what is important, what do those things achieve? Necessary admin, as the name implies is necessary. This stuff is just part of having an online business but it is essentially non productive work that doesn’t make money or build skills in any way. I spend as little time on this as I can but it still takes up more time than I would like.

IM study is mostly a time waster! If I am totally honest there is very little material these days that I actually learn from. Most of my time here is spent just keeping up with a very select few blogs but I still scan as much as I can. I remember when I first started this business and I tracked my time I was horrified to find that I was spending 30% of my time just reading and only 20% of my time on work that could actually make me money! 7.4% reading time is much better!

I think a lot of bloggers in particular fall into the trap of endless reading and not doing. It’s so easy to spend hours and hours just reading stuff – blogs, forums, ebooks and so on and you convince yourself that you’re working but really you’re not! There’s always a certain amount of study to do at the beginning and perhaps a little bit to keep up to date with the industry but other than that, after your first few months it should not be taking up huge chunks of time!

Now blog work and promotion of the Bloggers Bible are currently the ONLY money making activities I have. Although work on my software project will make money in the future it wont yet so I still need to do a little bit of work with my existing revenue streams to keep a flow of money coming in.

Though having said that I do wonder if it is not actually counter-productive. Sometimes I wonder if I would still make money if I simply stopped blogging entirely and just let the blog sit there whilst I spent as much time as possible on the software project. I have a feeling the search engine traffic would still come in and sales would still trickle in. Though I’m not sure I could bring myself to do that!

This is what you need to do with your own business – break down your activities and pick out exactly which ones make you money and spend more time on those if appropriate.

Separating Out the ‘Base Line’ Work

This is where things get slightly more complicated. My work promoting the Bloggers Bible consists mainly of article marketing using UAW and this is 100% productive. Every minute I spend on this work is productive and it doesn’t matter if I spend 10 or 100 hours on it – each hour is still as productive as the last.

However other work needs to be done regardless of what other work is done. For example, under the general category of blog work comes the management of blog comments. This is something that takes time each day and that still needs to be done even if I don’t so much other blog work. This is what I call ‘base line’ work because most days I will need to spend perhaps an hour going through emails, blog comments etc – each and every day regardless of anything else.

What this means is that if I have a particularly slack week where I don’t write many blog posts, I don’t do much article marketing and I don’t do much on my software project I will still have done a fair amount of work but it is all the bare minimum and none of it is really productive. This can be a problem for people who really don’t have much time to work at their business.

In order to make progress you have to move beyond the minimum and spend time doing the super-productive activities and this is where tools like SlimTimer can really help. I know that my super-productive activities are my software project and Bloggers Bible promotion. Everything else really just keeps things ticking over and doesn’t really move me forward very much.

Conclusion

As an exercise, try using SlimTimer for a month, or even just a week and then do similar calculations to those I’ve shown here. How much of your time are you making money, how much of it is spent on frivolous activities, and how much of it do you need to invest just to keep things afloat?

The first step towards improvement is awareness. If you don’t know how much time you are wasting it is hard to make any improvements. Be honest with yourself about the work you are doing – is it really helping you or are you just kidding yourself?

I get this stuff every single month, guaranteed and I no longer take much notice of it. If I do reply, it’s usually with a touch of sarcasm. I usually just leave the commenters to fight it out amongst themselves as they started doing over the weekend on the February stats post. However, it does raise an interesting point for me:

Why The Heck Do You Care What I Earn?

This is the part I don’t get… why do you care what I earn? Or what John Chow earns, or what your next door neighbour earns, or what some government official earns? There is a saying (and I don’t remember who said it sorry) but that there are three kinds of business in the world – your business, everybody else’s business and God’s business. If people spent more time minding their own business than meddling in everybody else’s then we’d all be a lot better off.

I don’t see the world as a competitive place. There is always enough to go around, there is always room for one more, even one more Internet marketing blog. It makes no sense to worry about what somebody else is earning. All that matters is what YOU earn and how YOU feel about that.

For example, one of the commenters said something about hoping I didn’t need to feed a family on that income. The natural assumption is that I need to make a living from my online income. That might be the case for the majority of people but it is not for me (I have savings which will last many years to come) and of course everybody is different. Everybody’s individual needs and motives are different.

I had somebody unsubscribe from my Bloggers Bible course last week with a comment that said it was clear that my course was about making money from blogs (which it is) and as that was not his motivation behind blogging, the course was not for him. Fair comment. You see not everybody is the same as you, not everybody wants to make money in the same way doing the same things and this is exactly WHY there is always room for more and exactly WHY you don’t need to concern yourself about what everybody else is doing!

In the early days of blogging I’d get a bit defensive about such comments and feel the need to justify my position all the time. These days I’ll sometimes post a link to a previous post (this one will now become a good candidate for that!) which explains things but in general I know there just isn’t any point because what other people think about what I am doing is just as irrelevent as what other people are doing! Re-read that line :-)

What I mean is, another area where people get all flustered is not only worrying about trying to keep up with everybody else but they also worry about what everybody else thinks of them! I don’t concern myself with what other people think of me or the work that I do because I know the way the world works – we do not all agree, not everybody will like you. I don’t try to make people like me, or make people believe that what I am doing here is the ‘right’ thing to do.

I just do what I do because I want to do it, and then I write about what I’m doing here. If I learn something on the way I will impart my knowledge and most of the time I’ll charge for the pleasure too! It doesn’t matter how much I earn, there will always be people who object that it is too low or too high. Look at John Chow – he gets as much stick for his high level of income as I do for my low levels!

But here is what is absurd. Can you imagine if I actually took on the opinions of other people and modified my behaviours and activities to try and suit them? Can you see how ridiculous it would be to change the way I work because people on my blog think I earn too much or too little, or think I shouldn’t sell ebooks, or think I should have more ads, or … the list goes on! Doesn’t that sound like the stupidest thing you ever heard?

Is that what you do? I’m guessing that unless you are also a blogger who publishes online income levels that you don’t get the same kind of public critique that I get but perhaps you get it from other sources such as friends and family. Before I started this business I was earning good money as a software engineer and my family in particular were horrified that I would ‘throw it away’ in order to pursue this business.

I still get hassled about it every day. Every month my dear old mother asks me how much I’ve earned. Oh dear, you won’t be able to get a mortgage on that yet! How long are you going to keep this up for? Have you thought about going back to work? And on and on it goes… Seriously guys you are nowhere near the levels of my mother when it comes to whining about my income :-)

Conclusion

In this world it is so easy to get pulled about in a million different directions and there seem to be so many outside pressures to conform to this and that and to keep up with everybody else. It’s all just noise…

Follow your own instincts, do what you want to do, don’t worry about what anybody else is doing, or what anybody else has, just do your own thing.

Now I’m sure this will spark some more fights but you’ll excuse me if I don’t participate as I have work to do!

My Favorite Traffic Strategy – Collaborative Social Networking

Building traffic for your blog or website is certainly not the easiest task in the world, but I do believe that it can be a simple task if you create a system to help you get there. One of my favorite traffic strategy systems is to leverage social networks to prop up your blog and create long lasting traffic. As with any system, it will take time and effort to implement and maintain, but the rewards certainly justify the investment.

Be a Social Media Partner

When you work hard on a post and submit it to every social networking and media site you know of, you are hoping to create back links and traffic. You put a lot of effort into your blog and you’d like people to take notice, right? So answer this for me – How come when you view other people’s Stumbles, Tweets, links, and posts, you don’t do the same for them?
Look, I know your time is short and there is far too much good content on the internet to be able to bookmark, stumble, and tweet it all…but why not do as much as you can to help out other hard working bloggers?

Using Relationships to Build Momentum

If you are a new blogger, you know that getting traffic can be tough. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that everyone that enjoyed your site let you know by sharing it with someone else? Veteran bloggers know this and use their popularity to help their friends build their own. The quickest way to gain favor with a blogger is to let them know that you appreciate their work! A network of allies dedicated to helping you is much more powerful than a large group of people that only see you as a self-promoter.

The goal with social networking and social bookmarking is to create a network of friends and allies online to help you grow your business, but it just doesn’t work if you only promote yourself. Chris Brogan is one of my favorite bloggers because he is always, always, always promoting other people’s work. His philosophy is that if you help others achieve their goals then people will start to help you achieve your own…and he’s right!

Pay it Forward

When I find good content, I make sure that I promote it using at least one method – Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Tumblr, or linking to them on my blog. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but the reciprocal relationships that you build in the process are going to pay off well after your short-term efforts of promoting yourself will. People appreciate it when you notice them and will go to amazing lengths to help you!

On the other end of the spectrum, when people start propping your blog using one of those methods, make sure you thank them. People like personal interaction and are much more likely to repeat that action if you thank them for it.

Lead the Way

The long term goal is to have others promote your blog, so why not give them an example of how it is done. Comment, bookmark, Tweet, or blog the good content you see and people will start to take notice. Use social networks and social bookmarking to build a network of friends and help each other make it to the top of the blogging world. Group efforts are so much more powerful than solo efforts, especially when you start working with “power users,” that help drive these social bookmarking networks.

Keep working on good content and people will have no problem recommending you to their networks. The work you do for free now will pay off down the road and you’ll be helping others do the same in the process. Does it get any better than that?

Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $570.30
• Become a Blogger – $308.79
• Bluehost – $190
• Blog Mastermind – $97
• Traffic Rush – $89.74
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $35.96
• AdSense – $7.06

Total income earned during February 2009: $1,352.45

Unfortunately I didn’t have a big name blogger to promote my stuff to a list of 50,000 this month so my income is lower than January :-) However this level of income is good enough to keep me ticking over whilst I concentrate on my software project.

One thing to note… a while back I said I was going to be introducing some monetization methods to this blog and I tried out AdSense which I quickly removed. I’ve now changed my mind about monetizing the blog in any way other than what I am doing right now by promoting my own products. Out of the three that I have, I am happiest with The Bloggers Bible so my main work is going to be promoting that. Just one sale pulls in $119 which is probably more than I would make in a whole month from any other form of on-page monetization.

Subscribers

Growth in the subscriber base is coming much faster now than it was in the earlier months of the blog. Many of the subscribers are now readers of the Bloggers Bible lessons which helps keep a few sales trickling in so I’m pleased with that. I can now see myself hitting the 10k mark by the summer time which would be awesome!

Note that most of my subscribers are now coming from search engine visitors so I’ll discuss that in the traffic section.

Subs at the end of January: 6,730

Subs at the end of February: 7,561

New subscribers in February 2009: 831

Traffic

I’ve been saying for a few months now that my traffic sources have been shifting and now I am starting to see that shift happening faster. Last month I had a big spike in traffic from Yaro’s promotion but this month I have reached the same traffic levels without that promo – the daily levels are elevated and if you look at the traffic sources you’ll see there has been quite a big jump in search engine traffic this month.

I believe this is for two reasons – firstly, I am paying a lot more attention to SEO these days and so almost every post I write is targeting a keyword phrase of some kind. I am now seeing quite a bit of traffic come in from keywords I have targeted in earlier posts for example twitter faq and multiple facebook accounts. Similarly I expect to see traffic coming in from article marketing related keywords in the coming months from my latest series of posts.

The second thing that is happening is that my blog posts are ranking higher in the serps than they used to so they get a larger chunk of the traffic for the keywords they rank for. I’m pretty sure this is due to the increased number of backlinks coming into the blog which I shall move onto next.

Inbound Links

January ‘09: 11.673

February ‘09: 13,926

When I saw the numbers take a big jump this month I assumed that it must be due to my article marketing efforts and although that has had an effect, that is not all of it. Right now, half of my article marketing links are going to my Bloggers Bible Fast Track page but that is only showing 78 links. I know there are now a lot more out there but they are not yet being picked up by Google Webmaster Tools which is where I am getting these numbers from.

I haven’t done any further analysis to see which pages are reporting an increased number of links so I’m still confused as to how this number is being calculated by Google. However, in my WordPress dashboard I see the pingbacks come into the page and they are coming in thick and fast every day so they must be having an effect.

Best Posts From A Year Ago

• How Hard Do You Need to Work at Your Own Business?

My perspective on working on my business v my personal life has not changed in the last year. Even though my business is now growing in importance as my savings are running out, I still never put work before the other important parts of my life such as family, friends, health & so on.

• A PDF Report v A Series of Blog Posts – Which is Better For Exposure and Traffic?

The subject of PDF’s v a post series is still something that I get asked a lot and in general I still prefer an article series – you can see that in the making right now with the article marketing series that I am putting together at the moment.

• Are You Remembering to Build Assets & Skills?

Lastly, building assets is still so important. Although the assets that I have now are different to the ones I had a year ago when I wrote the post, I still focus all my energies on projects that are going to build an income for me over the long time, rather than short term activities that won’t have a lasting impact.

Conclusion

In the words of Dory from Finding Nemo… “just keep swimming! just keep swimming!” Right now my work is very focused on three key areas:

• Working on my software project – not much to blog about yet
• Promoting the Bloggers Bible, currently with article marketing
• Building search engine traffic to this blog

I’m not doing anything else to actively build income so I am very much at the hands of luck here. Income is quite sporadic I have noticed – I’ll get nothing for a week or so then I’ll make 2 or 3 sales in one day. Over time though it tends to even out fairly well so that is good.

I’m not too sure what I am doing on the blog in March. I have a few more posts in the article marketing series and after that I don’t have any plans but I’m sure I’ll think of something, I usually do!

Due to the nature of a list like this, it is bound to be out of date almost as soon as it is published so like my list of dofollow social bookmarking sites I shall update it periodically every couple of months or so. If you know of a directory on this link please list it in the comments section and I shall incorporate it on the next update.

The PageRank of the directory is listed in brackets

Updated: 27th February 2009

1. Buzzle (6)
2. Ezine Articles (6)
3. Go Articles (6)
4. A1 Articles (5)
5. Article Alley (5)
6. Article City (5)
7. Article Cube (5)
8. Article Dashboard (5)
9. Articles Base (5)
10. Weeno (5)
11. Amazines (4)
12. Article Cat (4)
13. Article Depot (4)
14. Article Rich (4)
15. Author Connection (4)
16. Content4Reprint (4)
17. Dime-co (4)
18. Easy Articles (4)
19. Free Articles Zone (4)
20. Link Grinder (4)
21. Search Warp (4)
22. Social Article (4)
23. Websition (4)
24. 1Article World (3)
25. A1 Optimization (3)
26. AffSphere (3)
27. Afro Articles (3)
28. Article Basement (3)
29. Article Buzz (3)
30. Article Pros (3)
31. Article Trader (3)
32. Articles Galore (3)
33. Expert Articles (3)
34. Ezine Writer (3)
35. Free Article Directory (3)
36. Idea Marketers (3)
37. iReprint Info (3)
38. Lady Pens (3)
39. Post Articles (3)
40. Right Article (3)
41. Search Articles (3)
42. Smart Ads (3)
43. Article Gold (2)
44. ReadEZ Archive (2)

Being Selective With Article Directories

I’m going to post a list of article directories in a separate post. Like my list of dofollow social bookmarking sites I shall update it on a regular basis so it can serve as a useful resource long term. So in this post I’ll discuss some of the issues surrounding article submission so that I can keep that post fairly clean.

The first thing to mention is that not all article directories will accept all articles. There are plenty of generic directories that have categories for just about every topic that you can think of but there are also many specialised directories that will only accept articles on a particular topic such as business, health, environmental issues and so on.

It is imperative that you only submit your articles to appropriate directories because as I have said before, if you are using article marketing to promote your blog and you are using your own name on your articles you need to ensure you play by the rules or it makes you look bad. It does not look good to submit your toenail clipping article to a directory that is about business for example! There are enough directories (like hundreds if not thousands of them!) to not need to blindly submit to innapropriate places.

Correct Category Selection

Along the same lines, you also need to take care to submit your article to the appropriate category. One of the time consuming aspects here is that all of the article directories have different ways of presenting their categories so it can take a little time to look through all the options to pick the best one.

Always pick the most specific category you can find. For example if you have an article about grooming persian cats it would be better to submit it to ‘cat grooming’ or ‘persian cats’ rather than just ‘cats’ or ‘pets’. Of course where a very specific category is not available try and find a broader one that matches.

Article Submission Frequency Guidelines

If you make use of an automated tool to speed up article submissions it can be tempting to submit to hundreds of directories every day but resist this temptation because it does not look natural to Google and some of those links may be discounted or penalized in some way.

Think about your overall link building efforts – you should probably be aiming for no more than about 50 manufactured links per day (as opposed to natural links that you have no control over) but this will include other campaigns such as social bookmarking.

Article Submission Tools

I don’t know of any web based tools that work like social marker for article submission (let me know in the comments if you know of any) but there are some software programs and web based services that do it for you. I have spent quite a bit of time with two of them – Brad Callen’s Article Submitter and Unique Article Wizard.

Brad Callen’s Article Submitter

This was my first choice because I had heard good things about Brad and more importantly, the price was right – free, well for the standard version at least. There is also a gold version that submits to more directories and now a platinum version that fully automates the process.

I struggled to use the software effectively. You enter in your article information and then select which directories you want to submit to from a big list then you click through each one to do the actual submission manually. The problem I found was that most of the directories on the list simply didn’t work – it must have been an old list that was out of date. However I don’t know if the paid versions are any better.

Unique Article Wizard

As I mentioned in an earlier article, Unique Article Wizard costs $67 per month so it is only cost effective if you intend to use it on an on-going, regular basis. It has three major advantages over Brad’s software and manual article submission:

1. You don’t need accounts at the directories – these are all handled for you which is very handy because it can take hours to join them all.
2. The submission is fully automated – this is the biggie for me. Once I have taken time to setup the article for submission I just tell it how many to submit each day and it does the rest without me doing a thing. I get a daily email with an updated status report.
3. If you spend the time to write 3 versions of your initial article the Unique Article Wizard uses a special algorithm to turn those three into hundreds or even thousands of unique versions whilst keeping your original writing – no machine-created content.

Managing Submissions Manually

Of course many of you will simply choose to go through the free option and just submit your articles to the article directories manually. To manage this properly without getting into a mess I would suggest that you use some kind of spreadsheet to keep yourself organised.

First of all you will need a list of directories to submit to. I’ll start building one of these in an up-coming post but for your own purposes you will need to keep track of your login details for each one which of course means that you first need to setup accounts at those directories.

Secondly you will need to keep track of which articles have been submitted to which directories. Some directories will accept articles straight away and then verify them later on but many will require manual verification by a human editor before the article will be accepted which usually means a delay of a few days.

What I tend to do here is have a page which lists the directories down the side and then across the top each column represents an article – I give each one a unique number and then simply put a cross in a box as I submit the articles to the directories.

This post is the fourth in a series of several I have planned on the topic of article marketing. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the rest in the series!

What is Duplication?

Try this exercise – go to Google and paste in the following search with the quotes “How to Properly Clean a Freshwater Fish Tank”. This will bring up a handful of articles written by Josh Spaulding for his experiment comparing squidoo to article marketing. However, scroll down to the bottom of the search results (it helps to have 100 results per page for this) and you will see a message something along the lines of:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 8 already displayed.”

Underneath this message there is a link to repeat the search with the extra results included. Click this and you’ll find a whole bunch more links to the same article on different sites. What is happening here is that Google recognises the content of all these articles as being the same so when you do the initial search it just chooses a handful of them to show you. The others are still there and yes the links do count but there is one problem for bloggers with this situation…

You have no control over which version of the article Google is going to choose to show in its initial search results. Real searchers will not click that link to show the full results – only us webmasters do that! The danger here is that if you are using article marketing to promote a relatively young blog it is possible that the articles you submit to the stronger directories such as EzineArticles will actually be shown rather than the original post on your blog! You want your article marketing efforts to serve your blog, not compete against it.

Of course if you are writing fresh content for your articles then this is simply not an issue but the technique I described in my previous post specifically encourages you to re-use your existing blog content so this could become a very real problem.

How Much Rewriting Is Necessary?

This is the big question and there is no black and white answer because it is just a massive shade of grey. At one extreme you would simply substitute the odd word here and there throughout the article so you may change ’strategy’ into ‘tactic’ for example. However 99% of the article would still be the same. Google’s algorithm is good enough to detect this as the same article.

The ultimate solution would to literally rewrite the article from scratch making every word different. That is simply not practical if you want to submit to tens or hundreds of directories!

The theory is that each article needs to have about 30% of its content to be different from another one to be considered unique. However this is entirely dependent on Google and their algorithm which can change at any time.

The problem really boils down to the submission process. I use a subscription based service called Unique Article Wizard (more on article submission in the next post in the series) which does something funky internally to turn your original article into hundreds or even thousands of versions that are unique enough to fool Google’s algorithm. However, at $67 a month, I suspect most of you reading this won’t be using their service.

A good way to get an idea of whether or not your article is unique enough is to use a website called Copyscape. If you have already published your article you can enter the URL of either the article or the original blog post and Copyscape will look for duplicates. You can also sign up for a premium version which for $0.05 a search will allow you to check if your content is duplicate before you publish it.

Article Spinning

Another solution is to use something called article spinning. This is a technique that allows you to automate the word substitution technique that I mentioned above. It takes a little while to setup each article – you have to embed some syntax into the article to allow the software to work. The advantage here is that if you take the time to put in lots of substitutions, the software can create lots of different versions of your article – enough for all the directories, however it is still not ideal…

Firstly, even changing words in this way leaves the basic article structure the same. Google is getting better and better at detecting this. Secondly, the resulting articles often have very odd sounding language which doesn’t read too well for humans. This isn’t too much of a problem if you’re doing some article marketing to boost an anonymous niche site but if you’re doing it to promote your blog then you will give yourself a bad name and you’ll make yourself look like a terrible writer!

I’m not sure of any free spinners, I know of one called Jet Spinner which is popular but they also now charge a monthly fee and I much prefer what Unique Article Wizard does.

The Solution For Bloggers?

If you’re using article marketing to promote your blog and you’re going to be having your real name on your articles then I really don’t recommend article spinning. However, don’t panic about the duplicate content filter – as long as you do ONE rewrite of your blog post for the article directories and make sure that article is sufficiently different from your blog post you should be ok.

Then you can submit that same article to as many directories as you want. Yes most of them will find their way into that duplicate content filter and not be shown in the search results but the links still count and your blog post should still be ranking so it’s not too important.

This post is the third in a series of several I have planned on the topic of article marketing. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the rest in the series!

The Trouble With Article Marketing…

… is that you need to write articles! Now I don’t know about you but as a blogger I find that when I have an idea for a new topic that I want to write about I want to get that content out on my blog. Unique content is not in unlimited supply so when I have a new idea it feels like a bit of a waste to use it up on an article for the directories.

This is the single reason I have resisted doing article marketing to promote my blog before now. Many people will suggest that you outsource the job of article writing and I would certainly recommend that if you are marketing something generic such as a niche site. However when you are using article marketing to promote your own carefully crafted blog, those articles represent you, your writing and your blog so you need them to be top quality! For maximum effectiveness and authenticity you need to write them yourself.

Article Marketing With Recycled Content

In my first article I explained how I am using article marketing specifically to promote my blogging course by using the actual text of the lessons as the basis for the articles themselves. Rather than trying to come up with new content, I recycle what I have already produced.

You can use this same technique for any written material, including your blog posts. However, there are several things you need to consider. For most blogs, not every blog post will be a suitable candidate and you may need to do some editing before it can be submitted,  and of course you have to pay attention to the all important resource box.

Which Posts To Use As Article Content?

First of all, let’s rule out the ones that are no good. On your blog you can write whatever you like but when submitting to an article directory your article must provide genuine value. That means that link posts, ranting posts, time-sensitive announcements, personal posts etc all need to be ruled out.

What you are looking for here is your pillar content – your best work, the posts that provide something useful for the reader. Also, article directories are mostly text based which means that posts that rely on a large number of images or use multi-media such as audio or video posts are no good either. Hopefully we’ll start to see article directories embrace new forms of media in the future but for now, stick to text.

Turning a Post Into An Article

As a blogger you will often write your blog posts directly to your audience and over time and as you develop a relationship with them you may find yourself talking about your own personal experiences, and referring back to previous work and so on. This is fine on a blog and it can help your readers get to know and trust you but it is entirely unsuitable for an article.

Readers of an article at a directory such as EzineArticles do not know who you are. Here are a few rules:

• Don’t talk about yourself
• Don’t talk about your blog, or any of your projects
• Don’t talk about other people or their projects
• Don’t talk about anything that only regular readers would know

Somebody who has never heard of you before needs to be able to read your article and absorb it fully without having to wade through any kind of personal references.

Also, in a blog post you will want to include links often – internal links to your previous posts, external links to fellow bloggers, affiliate links and so on. Whilst there are one or two directories that allow links inside the articles the vast majority do not and so you need to remove them all. You will have an opportunity to link in your resource box and I shall discuss that separately.

Lastly, your article needs to be completely stand-alone. This post I am writing right now is part of a series and I link to other posts in the series but that won’t work for an article directory. I could use this post as an article but I would need to remove the references to the series. Creating a series of posts on a specific topic can be a very powerful piece of content for a blog but if used as article content, each individual post needs to be able to stand on it’s own.

Your Resource Box

This is the most important part because it is in here that we get to promote something. Now once again each article directory will have different rules about how many links they will accept but a rule of thumb is that all of the ones I have encountered allow 2 or more. I would suggest promoting two pages – your home page and an internal page.

So, what page on your blog should you promote for your second link? That will depend on what the goals of your blog are. If you are blogging to make money then you will want to promote your ‘money pages’. Here are some examples of what I mean by money pages:

• A page that sells your own product
• A page that captures an email address
• A page that offers a monetized freebie
• A page that has a strong affiliate offer

A resource box serves two purposes – it gives a backlink to the target page but if that article gets traffic on it’s own then the resource box is also being seen by real people. For the purposes of the backlink the most important element is the anchor text – pick keywords that you want to help your target page rank for in the serps. But for real people you need to encourage them to click your links.

Here is an example of a resource box that I have used to promote the Bloggers Bible:

Caroline Middlebrook has been blogging since 2007 and makes 4-figures a month from her blog. You can learn how she makes money blogging and download her free guides & courses.

Note I am breaking my own rule here – I don’t promote my home page. I actually have thousands of links pointing to my home page and feel it is more valuable to promote a second internal page. In this case it is the page that shows all of my products, most of which make me money.

Now if you are not trying to make money and instead are using article marketing to grow your readership you will want to focus on promoting your very best posts – the ones that show your writing at its best. This can actually be slightly more difficult as you are not necessarily offering an incentive to click. One possibility here is to pick your best posts, use a cut down version as the article content and then in the resource box write, something like:

‘… John writes about <fish tank cleaning> in far more depth on his <fish tank blog>. Be sure to stop by and take a look.’

The phrases in <> are what I would use as links. That line actually sounds a little lame but hopefully you can come up with something better!

Next In The Series

This post has shown you how to use your existing blog posts to promote the blog itself and now that you have some articles to use, the next subject to cover is that of article submission – where and how.

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I never am amazed about the misconceptions people have about making money online. I bought into one of them just a few years ago. With so much misleading information, everyone can fall victim, especially when he is just getting started.

However, what amazes me is the fact that some people gave up too soon, or at other times, they kept doing the same thing, wasted ten thousands of dollars worth of information products before they realized they were taking the wrong path.

This article contains information that I wish someone would have written. It should have saved at least two years of my struggle, not to mention the money and effort put into the wrong direction.

So without further ado, here are the myths, busted.

1. Make money online is easy

This is perhaps the biggest myth of all. Many of the so called “gurus” use very strong and aggressive words to sell their products. Hyping up the e-book or home study course certainly sells. And that also accounts for why people actually think it is possible to earn “millions of dollars online in six months, starting from scratch without any experience.”

Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to do so once you are at their level, but it certainly involved at least a few bruises on the shoulders when they were getting started.

Making money online itself is not a myth though but like any kind of business, it requires efforts on your part to make it work.

2. The key is in finding the “magic button”

Countless people think Internet marketers who are selling e-books hold back the magic button and that prevents them from making money online overnight.

Remember I told you I was a victim of one of the myths? This was it.

This myth is responsible for millions of dollars of wasted purchases (wasted for the consumers, at least). This myth keeps the victims in a circle seeking for the magic button — and for that reason, keep buying — until they break out forcefully.

I admit it was hard, especially because I was (and still am) such an information junkie.

People purchase e-books over e-books, join membership sites, sign up for courses and attend seminars expecting to find the magic button. The thing is, such button doesn’t exist.

Succeeding in online business is about taking action in the right direction and persistence. Blogs, web sites and information products are there just to guide you through the process.

3. All you need is one hit

Newbie marketers who create a product wish to approach big names. “If only (mention someone with a big list) promotes my product, I will be rich.”

At least that was their thought. All they need to achieve is one big hit before they are financially independent.

This is a huge misconception. Certainly teaming up with big names will help, but at the end of the day, whoever is able to provide the right product to their customers win. In a niche that I’m actively involved in, getting a big name to promote my product generated less sales than I expected, mainly because my product was targeting the wrong group of people it didn’t match his list members.

4. Create it and they will come

It used to be almost this easy. You put up some web pages, submit the site to search engines, and then a few weeks later you would see traffic coming from search engines. If you offered a product to sell, perhaps you got one or two sales immediately with little or no promotion at all.

Nowadays, it doesn’t work that way. The cost of reaching your prospects is much higher. If you publish a web site, chances are those pages will be buried just like a drop of water in the ocean. The only way to make your content stand out is by promoting it. Promotion requires you to invest money or put effort into it.

It is still possible to build an online business, just that you need to have a clear strategy and plan or you may end up wasting your time.

5. Anyone can make money without some skills

A subscriber of my list once wrote me about her excitement of quitting her day job to pursue an online venture. This news was exciting to her, but I was worried more than anything else (not that I wasn’t happy for her).

The problem is, she knew nothing about online business at all. She has no skill beyond browsing and reading emails. An e-book she bought just a week ago told her she could earn six figure income in a few months. And she got three months of saving in the bank, so that was the right decision, wasn’t it?

She learned it the hard way that it was the worst decision she had ever made. The dream of working from home and live in the lifestyle that you can only dream about can be a reality thanks to the online business. However, it is also important to be realistic.

Business is a business. It is still a business. Setting the right expectation from the start helps you anticipate things as they appear.

6. You only need this (or soon-to-be-launched) e-book

If you read in public forums people were talking about one product was just a rehash of old information, the product owner wasn’t always the one to blame. Often, the customers expect to find all the answers in one e-book — that costs $7, I might add.

Building a business is about satisfying a need with a good product or service. If you summarize any business, it is really that simple.

There certainly is a reason many marketers who have been there and done it tell very similar things over and over again. And if you guess because it works, you are right.

One e-book may give a bit of twist to the old information that the marketers believe to be the missing link. Readers who have not yet been exposed to such information may find it very useful and actually succeed after applying that information. On the other hand, those complainers skim through the information, think they’ve known it all, never bother to try again because they have failed once.

Many people already have the necessary knowledge to build a successful business online, but they keep looking for the next big thing. This group of marketers usually believe in the “magic button” myth too.

7. You can start with one hour a week

If you have been following the make money niche for a day, you should have found products that promise high income with little or no work.

The truth is this: no one will ever make money that easily, even the product owner. He still has to put hours into creating a product, writing sales copy and setting up payment processing.

When it comes to product creation, speed matters a lot. If you spend one hour a week, it would take years before it is ready for launch in which case it will already be obsolete.

Here’s a rule of thumb. If a product sounds too good to be true, most likely it is.

Conclusions

Just like a brick-and-mortar business, online business is also about satisfying a demand.

No one is going to throw their hard earned money away but unfortunately people — especially newbies — still think magic actually happens online.

If you’re not on your way to making money online, you may find that you fall for one of the myths above. Don’t let a false believe keep you from achieving your dream.

You may be surprised that success is as simple as taking the right actions and avoiding those myths. After reading this article, you may feel discouraged. Don’t be. It is the intention of this article to help you avoid the pitfalls and become successful quicker.

Making money online is entirely possible. It just requires time and persistent effort on your part. And if you ask me, the fact that I can set my own schedule, be my own boss and working from home (or wherever your favorite place) is really something worth pursuing, not to mention the potential of earning more than average salary.

I believe you will agree. The question is, will you take the challenge?

This post is the second in a series of several I have planned on the topic of article marketing. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the rest in the series!

The Difference Is The Keyword Placement

Article marketing or my variation of article distribution are both just exercises in SEO but the difference is in where the keywords go. Now first of all, let me explain what the ultimate ideal situation would be. First you need a target keyword phrase that you want to rank for. Ideally you would have a post/page on your site that you want to promote and that page has been on-page optimised for that phrase. Then you write several articles also targeting the same keyword phrase and you would also link back to the post on your site from those articles in the resource box using the keyword as the anchor text. The articles are then submitted to the article directories which gives you a bunch of optimised backlinks.

Two things would happen in this ideal scenario. First of all the backlinks to the original post on your site are now giving that post authority so it starts to rank better in the search engines for the chosen keyword. Secondly some of the articles that were submitted to the more prominent directories such as Ezine Articles also begin to rank well for the chosen keyword so they start to get traffic of their own and a portion of that traffic will click the links to the post in the resource box.

With both the original post and the articles targeting the same phrase, they will end up competing with each other in the serps but that is not necessarily a bad thing as if your own resources are dominating all the top spots your page will end up getting most of the traffic.

Traditional Article Marketing

So that was the ideal but usually what happens is that the page you are trying to promote is not necessarily optimised for a particular phrase. People often use traditional article marketing as a way of driving traffic to a ‘money page’ – something that makes money in one way or another. It might be a sales letter for your own product or a landing page for an affiliate offer or perhaps an opt-in page for a free report that has an upsell on the backend. Whatever it is, these pages are designed to get the result such as a sale and so are not necessarily well optimised for SEO.

What you can do here is write a whole bunch of articles that target all sorts of long tail phrases that relate to the target market and then hope that the articles themselves rank well. For the technique to be effective it is essential that the articles rank in the serps. If they don’t, they simply won’t get any traffic and so won’t drive traffic to your page. Not all articles will rank well, in fact there are probably only a handful of really big directories that have the power to do so. Therefore in this case what you really want is quality over quantity – you want to get your highly optimised articles out to a handful of really good directories.

Article Distribution

With my method, the articles I am writing are not at all optimised for keywords so even if I submitted them to big directories such as EzineArticles they are still not going to be ranking in the serps and so I am not going to get any traffic from the articles themselves. If you try to do traditional article marketing without making absoutely sure that you are optimising the article content for a keyword phrase that you can compete on, none of the articles will drive any traffic and this is the mistake that many people make.

However, you still have the all important resource box and you can still insert your links back to your chosen page with appropriate anchor text which gives the page a boost. Now the emphasis on keywords shifts towards the page you are promoting. If it is not optimised for anything then all those backlinks aren’t really going to do it much good – another wasted effort! In my case I am promoting my bloggers bible fast track page and although it is mainly a sales page, I have tried to optimise it as much as possible for the keyword make money blogging.

So now with the page that is being promoted being the one that is optimised – this is the page that should now been ranking in the serps. None of the articles will rank for anything but they can still gain good PR over time with the bigger directories which will make the backlinks more powerful. With this method, the backlinks become even more important which is why I will be trying to distribute as many articles as possible in order to get the most possible backlinks to my page.

Conclusion

With traditional article marketing you optimise your articles for SEO but with article distribution you optimise the page you are targeting for SEO and your articles don’t have to be optimised at all which is why existing content can be re-used. In the next article in the series I’ll expand on this to go over a strategy to re-use your blog posts to promote the blog itself.

This post is the first in a series of several I have planned on the topic of article marketing. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the rest in the series!

Article Distribution v Article Marketing

In the original article I discussed how other people like Josh Spaulding use article marketing to drive traffic. Traditional article marketing is mainly about getting the SEO right within the articles themselves. The idea is that you target specific high traffic / low competition keywords that you want to target and your entire article is built around that keyword phrase. By submitting your optimised article to authotitative directories such as EzineArticles, they should rank well in the serps and thus bring in lots of traffic to your article and in turn to the links in your resource box.

However to make this technique work you need to find keywords that you can rank for. This is relatively easy in all those obscure little niches but for me in this Internet marketing niche I find it rather difficult and simply too competitive. So I prefer to ignore the whole keywords issue (there’s another reason for that too which I’ll explain lower down) and instead focus on volume – using mass article distribution to get an article out to as many places as possible and build thousands of backlinks in the process.

The thing about backlinks is that they vary hugely in quality – a single high PR link embedded in a relevant post with good anchor text of the keywords you are targeting is probably going to be worth more than thousands of PR0 links on non-relevant sites. Articles in prominent directories such as EzineArticles can build good PR over time but many of the smaller directories are not that powerful. However, my experiment here is to see if volume can have a positive effect.

I want to know if using mass article distribution to bring in thousands of potentially lower quality links to my site is worth the effort.

Automated Article Distribution

So, my main priority then is quantity of links and that’s not something I can feasibly do manually. Previously (on my AdSense Project) I was manually submitting an article to about 30 directories and that took a very long time – longer than it took to write the article. I can outsource this stuff but after just a few articles that gets very expensive. What is really needed is a service that handles the article distribution for you automatically. I had previously tried some software to do this but it was really poor!

On the recommendation of Courtney Tuttle who ran a very interesting article marketing experiment recently I joined a service called Unique Article Wizard. This costs $67 a month which isn’t a lot for what it does. The service boasts a top secret technique that promises to turn your article into thousands of unique versions without using any keyword substitution techniques that make the result non-readable for humans.

You even have to agree to a non-disclosure agreement not to reveal the technique when you join. However, what I will say is this… Once upon a time, over a year ago I wanted to start with article marketing ( I called it bum marketing back then) and I came up with a technique which I called the article mashup method. I never got around to finishing it and always wondered if anyone else would do the same thing…

Anyhoo! I wasn’t too bothered by the whole unique content thing as people like Josh swear that the duplicate content filter doesn’t matter. There is endless debate raging on the subject and whilst its obviously better to have unique articles, that wasn’t the top priority for me. What I really wanted was something that would distribute my articles on auto-pilot for me, to lots of places, not just 30 or 40 and on my own schedule – not all at once.

Unique Article Wizard does all of the above and boasts a database of over 11,000 places to submit your links and you can set how many links you want submitted per day. I’ve started experimenting with this and I have set my articles to be submitted at a rate of just 10 per day. My first one is up to 200  now and I know it’s working because everyday I’m getting a ton of pingbacks to the pages of this blog that I am promoting and I’m seeing all the articles come in via a Google alert that I set up.

Promoting the Bloggers Bible

I have to admit, I don’t like writing articles that I don’t have to write. I really hated working on my AdSense project and I have never done any article marketing to promote previous products like Traffic Rush because the thought of it makes me groan. However I do like writing unique content such as these blog posts and of course the content for my actual courses as that is all fresh material on a subject I know intimately. I also find it infinitely easier to do a re-write of something that I have already written then to write something new from scratch.

So I got the idea to use my Bloggers Bible content to promote the course itself. The course comprises 49 text-based lessons that don’t have any multimedia content embedded in them and therefore  they make ideal article fodder. Furthermore, each of the lessons is a completely self-contained unit other than a few references to previous lessons so re-writing these things is easy. Plus, most of them are very long – in excess of 1000 words so in some cases I am actually getting 2 or more articles out of each lesson! You usually want to aim for around 500 words for an article for most directories.

My plan then is to re-write all 49 of my core lessons plus bonus lessons as articles and submit them using UAW. Each one should be able to generate at least 1000 links over time so even if they are poor quality, hopefully they will still be useful. The only way to know for sure is to try it but I’m hoping that 50,000 links, even poor ones, is worth something.

This takes me back to the topic of writing articles for direct traffic – using this method the vast majority of my lessons would not be good candidates because they simply don’t rank for any good keywords and of course I don’t want to have to try and fiddle with the content on the lessons to work around specific keywords.

Am I Giving Away The Farm?

Some of you might be thinking that if I use the content of the lessons to create articles that are spread all over the web that I will lose income because freebie seekers will seek these articles out instead of buying my course. Well to start with I give away the whole thing anyway – it just takes about a year to get through the course! But secondly, the lessons are highly structured to be worked through in order and if somebody was trying to hunt down the articles on the web they would lose that structure.

Having said that, if I was to submit the articles in order of the lesson numbers it would be very easy for people to find my account at one of the article directories and subscribe to it. Therefore I’ll just submit them randomly out of order. It’s still going to take me a long while to get all these articles out (not quite a year!) as this is something I’m just doing fairly slowly. I’m aiming for about 10 articles a month so it will take a minimum of 5 months to finish the whole course.

Measuring the Results

This is going to be a little bit tricky because I can’t use Bloggers Bible sales as a measure here as that is promoted throughout this entire blog, new people sign up to the free lessons every day, there are affiliates promoting it and so on so there is no way to isolate additional sales made as the result of this article distribution experiment.

However this experiment is actually all about backlinks – it’s really an SEO experiment. As you probably know, backlinks are important because it helps the page rank higher for it’s chosen keywords. I am specifically targeting my Bloggers Bible Fast Track page in my resource boxes. Every single article will have a link back to that page with varying anchor text and the most important keyword that I want to rank for is “make money blogging”.

At the time of writing, that page has PR2, and currently ranks at position #49 for the term so it has masses of room for improvement. For the experiment to be deemed successful I would want to see this page rank move higher in the serps and thus bring in more search engine traffic.

Conclusion

I’ve dabbled briefly in article marketing before but the biggest barrier to me has always been, “what on earth do I write?” I had a real issue with the idea of writing unique content for article directories because I felt like if I was going to go to the effort to write something new and fresh then I wanted that content on my own sites and not in random article directories.

So the idea of re-using existing content appeals to me because the original is already in place doing it’s work and then the article are there simply to promote it. You can extend this to just about any text based product that you have, including freebies such as a free report that you might be using to entice people to join an email list for example. Setup a landing page for your freebie and then make sure that in your article resource boxes you link back to this page. I’ll discuss more about the technicalities of how to do this in a follow up post.

List Building For the Future

If you have a current list that you want to heavily promote then it makes sense to put your AWeber form somewhere prominent on your blog so that it can be accessed anywhere. You’ll see that I do this in my blog header which is seen on every page and I also use a popup which appears after a few seconds to most visitors.

However, what if you are working on something new and you want to start collecting details of people who may be interested but you don’t yet have anything to offer them? This is known as a prospects list. This is the situation I find myself in with regards to my software project.

The project is slowly taking form and I am getting an idea of the kind of target market that I am aiming for so I want to use my existing blog traffic to start collecting potential prospects who may be interested in the software when it is released. Specifically I am looking to capture that traffic that comes in from search engines because these people visit once and go away again.

My regular subscribers are not an issue here because you guys are on my RSS list anyway so I can sell to you later :-)

List Building With No Value to Deliver

In general, to entice people to give you an email address, you need to give them something. Many people choose to offer a download such as a free report though I prefer to offer something that provides value on an on-going basis such as the free lessons in both my Traffic Rush and Bloggers Bible courses. The trouble with my software project is that I don’t have anything to give away yet.

I’m slowly forming ideas for something that might be useful later but it’s not ready yet however with hundreds of daily visitors and now around 40% of them coming from search engines I feel I am missing out on potential prospects.

Building a Notification List

Sometimes you don’t have to entice people with freebies. There are times when you can be totally honest and say that you are working on something related to XYZ and ask people to join a list if they would like to be notified when there is more news of its availability. That is exactly what I have done with my software project.

I know I am building some tools, but I don’t yet know much more than that so I just tell people what I know now and invite them to join the notification list if they’d like to know more. Although this will only build a very small list compared to when you offer a freebie it is more powerful because those people aren’t just freebie-seekers and have actually shown an active interest in your product.

Embedding AWeber Forms Into Individual Posts

Regular readers may well be wondering where this form is… I’ve hidden it! Well it’s not exactly hidden, it is just placed only where it will be of most interest. I’ve not said much about my tools yet but my initial thoughts are that I want to build tools to help automate the process of building backlinks. There are lots of these on the market already but I have some ideas to set mine apart from the crowd :-)

Anyway, the point is, this blog is fairly diverse. I talk about blogging, niche sites, social media and all sorts of other stuff. Only a small percentage of the visitors to this blog would be interested in these tools but I can target them by embedding the form into specific posts that are on-topic. One such post is the very popular list of do-follow social bookmarking sites. It was whilst employing the technique on my own AdSense Project that I began to get frustrated with the shortcomings of tools such as social marker and decided to write my own.

If you look at that post and scroll down a little bit to the heading ‘Social Marker’, you’ll see that I have added a paragraph discussing my tools and I have embedded a very small and simple AWeber form directly inside the post. This is very easy to do in the newer versions of WordPress.

You build your form in AWeber and as you can see here I have used just the simplest form possible – nothing but an email address. You then get the code and select the piece of javascript. This is what it looks like for this form:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://forms.aweber.com/form/60/1295879360.js”></script>

Now this piece of code is appearing as text right now in the blog post and that is because I am currently typing in the Visual mode of WordPress. To embed the form into the post all you need to do is switch to HTML view, paste the same code in and then it is translated into the real form like this:

See how easy that is? What I like about this method is that it allows me to specifically target only the search engine visitors that are searching for queries that relate to the product I am building. In the future I’ll probably be discussing more topics that relate to what I am doing and will embed the form in a similar way but it doesn’t dominate the blog in the way that the Bloggers Bible popup does.

I’ve had the form running for a few weeks now and it only has 16 subscribers but that is better than none. Hopefully over time as I get closer to releasing my software I’ll be able to build a small list of people who are genuinely interested in what it can do. I think this is a really neat way of experimenting with list building in general if you’re new to it and don’t really know what to offer your subscribers.

Can You Make Money With Social Traffic?

Leo is not the only one who shares that opinion. There is a blogger called Grizzly who regularly makes over $100 a day purely in AdSense income solely from his MMO blog, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him! Why is that? Because he concentrates on one thing and one thing only – making money with AdSense. He doesn’t do the whole social media thing and regularly criticises the rest of us for chasing social traffic.

It’s from reading Grizzly’s blog for the last few months that I have learned more about SEO, the importance of backlinks and why I knew my AdSense experiment would not yield good results on this blog. The reason for that is that this blog is a social blog – I encourage subscriptions to my RSS feed and email lists, I encourage readers to comment and submit posts to social sites such as StumbleUpon. I tweet my posts, chat with other bloggers and do the whole social thing. My posts are geared towards readers and not towards Google and that is a massively critical element.

To make money with AdSense requires not just the optimisation of one post but of the whole site and if you’re building a social blog those two goals simply don’t mix. Sure you can still make money with AdSense but only pennies. However there are many people that want to build a social blog simply because they enjoy the social element and making money is a secondary factor. So, getting back to revenue, how can social traffic help you make money?

In my post I suggested that the best way to monetize social traffic was to give away free stuff as they are not at all receptive to ads or marketing hype. Of course, the free stuff has to be monetized in some way for that to work. However, that is a direct monetization strategy but if you look at what social media can do for you in general there is perhaps a stronger motivator at work.

Social Traffic Comes From People Who Like to Talk

Social traffic comes from social media websites and the whole point of social sites is that well, it’s social! This means that the users love to get together and discuss things, share things, comment on stuff, debate, and so on. Many bloggers due to their nature will be heavy social media users and so it follows that if you are active in the social media community around your niche you will find yourself connecting with other bloggers in your niche.

As a side effect of that, those other bloggers also tend to link as well as talk. A link with good anchor text from inside a blog post on a relevant topic can be very powerful, especially if the blog post it is coming from gains PR of it’s own over time. These can be some of the most powerful backlinks so in an indirect way, when other bloggers start linking to you it helps your blog build authority which in turn helps you get search engine traffic which gives you another monetization angle.

Relationships Are Key

In my earlier post I discussed three kinds of traffic – search engine, social and referral. I believe that referral traffic is the strongest for a blog or other website that is monetized with your own products because those products bring in the biggest revenue and the referral traffic often comes with an endorsement.

I have made about 95% of my revenue on this blog in one way or another due to the products I have developed – the WordPress ebook and 2 courses. Now here’s the interesting thing, the traffic which I have got by myself (search engines, my social media efforts etc) has not converted anywhere near as much as the traffic that other people have sent to me. All of my products have been heavily promoted by other people in the niche and this is when I have made the most money.

I talked recently about traffic strategies for a saturated niche and stated that I believe busy niches are good because there are lots of other people out there who you can work with rather than against and this is what I am talking about. Those other bloggers in your niche are not your competition – they can help you and when you are social and develop strong relationships with these people you start to get strong referral traffic that has a trust in you and your products.

Social Media Helps Build These Relationships

How do you develop relationships with other bloggers or website owners in your niche? Some people recommend just dropping an email and saying hi, or something to that effect. Personally I find that approach not to work. I know that when I get emails like that (I get a lot of them), I often simply don’t know what to say and just respond with a ‘thanks and hi’ or something to that effect and it goes nowhere.

Social media on the other hand can be a great entry point into the circle of influence of those other bloggers. When you begin to participate, join the discussion, contribute to the community and so on, other people get to know you and trust you and they start to see what kind of information you are sharing. Very often the social site itself provides a convenient medium for chatting (Twitter is superb for this) and so you can begin to build those relationships slowly without trying to force it unnaturally via email.

Coming Back to Revenue

So in case you’re missing the point here, whilst revenue streams such as AdSense may make good money from search engine traffic it’s not going to make you rich if you have a more traditional social blog. It’s much better suited to niche sites. If you want to blog about a topic you’re passionate about, and attract a large volume of readers and start getting lively conversations going on in your comments section then you’re into a whole different ball game which needs to be monetized differently.

You need to develop your own products to really make more than pennies. You don’t have to sell them (my WordPress ebook is free, to see how I made money with that read the posts in the ebook project) but you do need something. You also need to make sure that other people have a reason to recommend your stuff. Then you need to build relationships with other people in your niche and once the trust begins to form you will find yourself promoting each other’s stuff and the traffic that comes as a result will be far more receptive to your products.

Social traffic, or rather the social media sites that they come from can be the starting point for developing those relationships which will drive the more powerful referral traffic to your site and your products. So yes Leo it may be hard to monetize social traffic directly, but if social media is used correctly (and so many people do it wrong and abuse it!) then it can lead to good income in a more indirect way.

There is more I could say on this subject. If anybody is interested, I could write a follow up showing specific strategies that I would use in specific social media sites, or perhaps a more general guide to relationship building with social media the right way. Hmm, maybe I should write both of those!

What WordPress Can & Cannot Do

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a piece of software that allows you to build websites with a nice simple interface without you having to delve into the murky waters of HTML & CSS unless you really want to. As long as you can figure out how to use an FTP program to upload themes and plugins, almost all of the functionality you could want is available with just a few clicks.

However, what if you want to build in some custom-code to your site? Now even if you’re not a programmer this is still very much a viable option because of how easy it is to get programming services at sites such as Elance and RentACoder. If you have the idea and a little cash then you can just pay for somebody to write the software for you. However, the difficulty is integrating that software into your site.

WordPress is designed primarily for blogs but as I have shown in my ebook it can also be used for building static sites too. However, if you look at the HTML editor of a page or blog post, you are limited in what you can do. You cannot insert programming code such as PHP snippets in there.

Now I figured out how to get a WordPress page (not a blog post) to use my own custom code and I can post a tutorial on how to do that if anybody is interested. However, it’s fiddly and somewhat inflexible and if you were ever to move your site to a non-WordPress platform you’d have to change all your files. Plus, the technique works okay for small, simple files but I don’t know how it would scale up to larger applications.

Alternative CMS’s

WordPress is just one of many CMS’s. There are several others that are primarily designed for blogging such as Typepad but there are also others which are more general purpose and allow for application development which is what I want to do.

So I have been looking into these alternative CMS’s to see what might be more suitable for my needs. As well as application support allowing me to write my own code, there are other considerations too:

• aMember Integration – I’m building a subscription-based membership site so I need something a little stronger than a generic password to manage it. I will be using the aMember software to manage this so I need to ensure that it can integrate with that.
• WebHost Support – I need to install the CMS software on the web server. I am not going to be using a dedicated server which means that my webhost (currently BlueHost) needs to have in-built support for whatever I choose. As my ebook shows, they allow you to install software such as WordPress with just a few clicks so it would be very nice if I could do that with the new CMS.
• Theme Support – one of the things I love about WordPress is that I can use a custom made theme to manage the look and feel of the website. I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of CSS and I may be technical, but I am not a web designer. Graphics and design are not my thing so ideally I want my chosen CMS to support something similar so I can get somebody else to do my design whilst I worry about the code.
• Widgets – I’m going to want lots of standard features on my site such as a blog, a forum, streaming video, a downloads area, a helpdesk and so on. Now I could write those myself but why waste the time re-inventing the wheel? I would much prefer it if I can just drop in some kind of plugin that provides that functionality whilst leaving me to concentrate on my own software.
• Developer Support – I don’t like having to figure things out on my own, I much prefer to be able to study from a book or read a tutorial so ideally I want to use a popular, well-established CMS that has plenty of support available so that I don’t get stuck somewhere down the line.
• Free? – Okay this one is not essential. If it has all of the above then I don’t mind paying for it but sometimes you find that the best software is actually open source and available at no monetary cost so of course this would be a bonus.

Joomla & Drupal

After a little googling, browsing some PHP forums and asking my ever-faithful Twitter followers, I found that there were two strong contenders that met ALL of my requirements listed above. They are Joomla and Drupal. Both are supported by BlueHost and aMember, they’re both open source and free, they both have support for themes (or something similar) and extensions that work like WordPress plugins and furthermore, both of them are supported by numerous print books that I could buy to help me out.

Which is best? I’m not sure. I found a really cool CMS matrix that compares all of the major CMS systems side by side but to be honest many of the technical features went over my head. As far as I can see, both Joomla and Drupal will do everything that I need. So, based on the look of the websites and the books / tutorials that are available I decided to go with Joomla because I just like the look of it better.

BlueHost supports Joomla via their SimpleScripts software and enabled me to install it in literally 2 clicks just like a WordPress install so it’s off to a great start.

At the beginning of December Yaro Starak released a new premium membership site with his partner Gideon Shelwick called Become a Blogger. The course has been well received and now has over 850 members but they are developing it as they go along whilst incorporating feedback from members so they feel that they want to limit the course to around 1,000 members so have decided to close the doors to new members on Friday 6th February at 11.59pm PST time.

What Exactly is Become a Blogger?

It is a video-only course that teaches beginners how to literally, become a blogger. It is structured in a similar way to Yaro’s earlier course Blog Mastermind in that it is designed as a six-month course (it costs $47 per month) and new videos are released 2-3 times a week to guide the student by the hand through the whole process. Since the course was launched, these are the premium videos that have been released so far:

1. How To Install The “Subscribe To Comments” Plugin
2. The “SEO Title Tag” Plugin – What It Is, And Why You Need It
3. The “SEO Title Tag” Plugin – How To Install It
4. The “What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin” – What It Is And Why You Need It
5. The “What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin” – How To Install It
6. The “Akismet” Plugin – What It Does And Why You Need It
7. The “Akismet” Plugin – How To Install It
8. The “Sociable” Plugin – What It Is And Why You Need It
9. The “Sociable” Plugin – How To Install It
10. The “XML Sitemap Generator” Plugin – What It Is And Why You Need It
11. The “XML Sitemap Generator” Plugin – How To Install It
12. How To Submit Your Sitemap To Google.com
13. How To Backup Your Blog – Video 1 and 2 of 3
14. How To Backup Your Blog – Video 3 of 3
15. Key Pages You Need To Set Up On Your Blog
16. How To Set Up The Key Pages For Your Blog

I’m going to be 100% honest here – I have not watched all of these videos! I skipped all the plugin ones because I already have all of them setup on my blog so I am familiar with the process. Become a Blogger is aimed at beginners and as you can see from what has been released so far, it goes at a fairly slow pace. This will not suit everybody. If you have been reading my Bloggers Bible lessons and like the pace of those, you may find Become a Blogger to be too slow for you and at the moment the course is only offered in ‘real time’, there is no option yet to purchase the full course as it has not been fully developed yet.

As you can see many of the topics are presented in two parts. The first one is background to the technical one. For example in lesson 15 Yaro presented a 20 minute video explaining the key pages that every blog needs and discussed why they were needed and what to put in them. This is a talking head style video so it contains a lot more information than could just be written down in a text based article.

In Lesson 16 Gideon follows up with a technical presentation showing exactly how to implement the work that Yaro discussed in the previous lesson. This two-step format works quite well and allows you to recap just the parts you need.

When Is It Re-Opening?

Yaro & Gideon plan to wait until the initial batch of members have graduated and the course had been completely developed and so this will not be until around June ‘09 which is still around 4 months away so if you are interested then get in now.

If you’re not sure whether or not it will be for you, note that there is a long 60-day money back guarantee which will give you time to see all of the above 16 videos but you may also cancel at any time in the future.

Get Traffic Rush Free

If you sign up to Become a Blogger through my link then I will throw in my Traffic Rush course free. I will also send you a code to get a $20 discount from my own blogging course, The Bloggers Bible.

Not All Traffic Is The Same

Blogs are fantastic because they are very good for generating all kinds of traffic such as search engine traffic, social traffic, referral traffic from other bloggers and so on. Other types of websites such as niche sites struggle with certain types of traffic sources such as social traffic.

The trouble is that different kinds of monetization work better for different kinds of traffic so what do you do when your overall blog traffic is split amongst different kinds of traffic? Ideally, you would provide several kinds of monetization and tweak them so that the right traffic sees the right monetization. Let’s look at this from the angle of traffic sources.

Search Engine Traffic

People who come from a search engine are looking for something specific. If they find it at your site then that’s great. If what they are searching for is a solution to a problem and your site happens to sell that solution in some way then you can make good money. Generally speaking, a large portion of search traffic is not particularly tech-savvy and they are quite likely to click on ads.

SE traffic is more receptive to on-page advertising such as AdSense than other kinds. Now the trouble is, programs like AdSense are very easy to implement so many bloggers put those ads up first but it usually takes a few months to build search engine traffic because your site needs authority before it is going to rank for any decent keywords and that takes time.

Another alternative is to display banner ads such as ads for affiliate programs in your sidebar. An advantage here is that you get to select what ads are displayed unlike with AdSense where you leave the decision up to a computer.

To do well with programs like AdSense each post needs to be targeted well to a certain keyword or group of related keywords and these keywords need to be something that advertisers are bidding on. Many blogs are not focused enough to do well. Mine is a prime example – most of my mosts are long, and rambly and don’t focus on keywords all that much so when I was running my AdSense experiment I found that the ads were very poorly targeted to my audience.

Social Traffic

This is the kind of traffic that comes from sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon. Usually the visitor will not have seen your site before and is probably just one click away from a whole bunch of other interesting sites. These surfers are tech-savvy and know the Internet well. They know an ad when they see one and do not click on them. Quite often, a large number of ads on a page will turn them off and quickly send them to the next page.

How do you monetize social traffic? You give them free stuff. These people like freebies, a free report of some kind or an email course is always a good bet. These are the primary methods that I use to monetize my traffic here. You need to make it easy for them to get the free stuff without going over the top with the cheesy marketing hype. A popup that appears a few seconds after the page loads has worked extremely well for me, as has my header section which prominently displays a download link to my WordPress ebook.

Referral Traffic

This is basically any traffic that has come from another website so technically it includes social traffic but I prefer to put it in a category of it’s own. Into here I would classify visitors who come from links in other blogs such as from your commenting efforts, article marketing, other people blogging about you and so on. The big difference with this kind of traffic and social traffic is that the link they are coming from usually gives an insight into who you are or what your post is about so they have been ‘warmed up’ a little before they get there.

This traffic is fairly is mixed as far as on-page ads are concerned. If they know you you are as a blogger and are coming from a recommendation from another blog then often they will be quite highly receptive to ads for your own products including freebies. They are usually more tech-savvy than your average search engine visitor but perhaps not quite as much as social visitors.

Putting it All Together

Ideally you have traffic coming from a wide variety of sources in which case to monetize it effectively you may need more than one method. If you have a large amount of both social and search engine traffic and use something like AdSense, make sure you use something like the whoseesads plugin to show the ads only to the search engine visitors.

Having some kind of freebie is always a good idea, but of course you need to monetize it somehow for it to be an income stream for you. A good backup for most kinds of traffic is a few banner ads for affiliate products that you deem to be appropriate for the kinds of topics that you discuss on your blog. When you begin to get a reputation and find your referral traffic growing, think about creating your own products to sell on your blog.

Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $1255.84
• Bluehost – $570
• Traffic Rush – $224.35
• Become a Blogger – $193.11
• Blog Mastermind – $145.50
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $35.53
• AdSense – $15.26

Total income earned in January 2009: $2,439.59

As you can see, there’s been a big jump in income this month and I can tell you exactly why that is – Yaro Starak interviewed me. There were actually two factors at play there. Firstly we arranged a special discount on the Bloggers Bible for people who purchased through him and that was only available for one week so that brought in a nice chunk of sales.

However the traffic that the interview brought to my blog (as you’ll see later in the stats) resulted in pretty much all of my other income increasing as well. Of course this was a one off so unfortunately it wont be setting a new trend for 2009 but it’s always nice to start the new year on a high so I’m not complaining!

Oh for those who were wondering, this month’s earnings although high don’t break any records as in July when I launched Traffic Rush I earned $2,798.

AdSense Monetization

Earlier in the month I decided to experiment with AdSense on this blog and as you can see from the above, it hasn’t exactly been lucrative. Picking apart the AdSense stats has been interesting. Although I cannot discuss actual percentages I can still give you an idea of how this site has performed.

I have AdSense on 2 websites – one niche site that I build over a year ago which gets around 20 visitors a day and this blog which gets hundreds a day. This blog got over 10 times the ad impressions, but the niche site has 12 times the click through ratio making the overall performance 120 times better! That’s shocking really. I didn’t expect this blog to do well with AdSense but didn’t think it would do quite that badly!

So I shall be removing it from the blog and then trying out something else.

Subscribers

Now Feedburner has been getting in quite a pickle this month as it has been migrating it’s system with Google’s servers but now that it has completed the numbers seem to be reporting correctly. So ignore the extremely high peak and ignore the very low days and you can still see the growth which has been very high this month:

Subs at end of December: 5,270

Subs at the end of January: 6,730

New Subscribers in January 2009: 1,460

There were several things going on here. Firstly, once again the traffic that Yaro sent not only resulted in direct sales but a ton of people signed up to the free lessons. You can see this clearly in my AWeber graph here:

But if you look at the numbers in that graph, you’ll see that they don’t add up to anywhere near 1,460 people. What also happened is that many of Yaro’s readers came to my blog for the first time and not only signed up to the Bloggers Bible lessons but also subscribed to the blog – in the current Feedburner stats that would count as two subscribers even though it is only one person. And of course there is also the regular growth that happens each month due to other traffic.

What I suspect now is that seeing as the subscriber number has pushed way past the 5,000 mark it leads to a phenomenon known as social proof which is where new people coming here see the high number and think, well lots of other people subscribe so it must be good and they subscribe based on the existing number. Keeping them is a different matter of course… But assuming I do, then I would expect to see the growth in 2009 to be higher than in 2008. I wouldn’t be surprised to double it by the end of the year.

Traffic

This has been an interesting statistic this month. Usually the traffic is rather flat and it’s mostly the same apart from the spike from Yaro’s interview but can you see what happened afterwards?

Even after the spike had died down the traffic level stayed elevated. I had a deeper look at the source to see if they were still coming from Yaro’s blog but only a few were – the others were from an increase in search engine and direct traffic and to be quite honest I’m not sure where that has come from. Here are the other traffic stats for the month:

Look at the blue area which represents search engine traffic here. In December I had 6,465 search engine visitors and in January this rose dramatically to 9,478 – an increase of almost 50%! Now I have been making more of an effort to make this blog more SEO friendly and build more backlinks to it but I’m not sure is this surge is a one-off seasonal thing, or from my efforts or just weird. I’ll just have to see if it continues and I hope it does.

Inbound Links

I just don’t know what is going on with Google Webmaster Tools which is what I use to track links. These have been the totals since I have been tracking it:

November ‘08: 9,735

December ‘08: 7,401

January ‘09: 11,673

I honestly can’t conclude anything from such widly differing numbers – it seems almost random. I’ll continue to report it though and just see what happens. However if there has been a genuine increase in backlinks this month that would explain the increase in search engine traffic as of course real SEO is all about the backlinks.

Keywords

For the first time this month I saw traffic coming in from a single word generic keyword. Does it relate to Internet marketing? No! It’s ‘juicy’ lol :-) Google it and see! It does make me wonder why people searching for juicy would click through to a Twitter guide; I’m sure that’s not what they were looking for! Oh well :-)

Just a few funny ones that I noticed this month:

• 2 days playing golf was just tiring
  
• 8 ways eggs are used
  
• easy strategies for world domination
  
• how to pose but not to look to cheesy
• let me be your little secret, i promise to keep it dirty

Best Posts From a Year Ago

The direction of my business and online efforts in general has changed a lot over the last year so I’m going to introduce a new section into these stats to show some of my favourite posts from a year ago. It’s interesting to see how they differ from now. So these are ones from January 2008:

• Make Money with WordPress – A Simple Strategy
• Maximising Profits – Is That Really What You Want?
• The ‘Secret’ To Successful Blogging?

The last two posts I still stand by today.

Conclusion

This has been a great start to the year and on a more personal level I am now finished decorating my new house and so I am back to work properly and have started working on my Software project at last. I’m not too sure what I’ll be blogging about over the coming months as I spend most of my time developing software which isn’t really of interest on this blog, but I usually manage to think of something!

She loves lists and has created some popular blockbusters, including 144 Do-Follow Forums Categorized By Niche, and 195 Keyword Suggestions to Find a Niche. Recently, she was able to quit the day job and focus all her efforts on working from home and making money online.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Millions of companies on the Internet pay a performance-based commission if you can drive sales to their websites by promoting their products and services. An affiliate is able to make money online by being a middleman between online surfers and merchant products. By referring consumers with the products they are looking for, the affiliate gets a commission for every sale from the merchant through an Affiliate Program.

Hype and Fact About Affiliate Marketing:

There is a lot of hype and dishonest claims out there about making money online. Basically, if something sounds too good to be true it probably is.

Mostly these claims are tactics to get people to buy some product or over priced e-book. Unfortunately these tactics often shed an inaccurate light on this business and the fact that it is a viable, honest and good way to make money online and create a home business. Learning the truth about affiliate marketing, and the correct techniques to develop this business is crucial to success. Don’t fall for the hype!

Hype: “Get rich overnight” “Make Millions Entering Data” “Make $1,000 by Tonight”
Fact: Affiliate Marketing provides endless opportunities to make money online and the freedom of having your own home business BUT it takes a lot of hard work, correct knowledge, dedication, commitment and patience for success.

Hype: Making Money Online with Affiliate Marketing is easy.
Fact: It is basically simple, but it is not easy. It takes a lot of hard work, commitment and patience. The key to success is learning the correct tools and techniques and consistently applying them.

Hype: You have to buy an expensive e-book or course to learn the business of Affiliate Marketing and to Make Money Online.
Fact: There is a ton of free information about the how-to’s of affiliate marketing and making money online

Hype: Affiliate Marketing requires a lot of money in start-up costs.
Fact: In fact, Affiliate Marketing is special because you can start a home business with very little in start-up costs, especially compared to the traditional brick and mortar business. All that is truly required is a computer, an Internet connection, knowledge of correct tools and techniques, a willingness to work hard, and of course the desire to make money.

Hype: The Internet is too competitive and the opportunities to make money online are no longer available.
Fact: In fact, there are countless viable opportunities within Affiliate Marketing, and while certain market areas are quite competitive there are thousands that are still wide open. Everyday there are millions of new users joining the World Wide Web and there are plenty of untapped niches/markets available where money is waiting to be earned. The key is learning the correct research techniques.

One important fact to always remember is that learning honest and correct techniques is crucial to your success in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Concepts:

As an affiliate your job is to send people to a merchant’s website via a link from your own website. For every required action that the visitor performs on the merchant’s site through the specially coded affiliate link, such as a purchase, a registration or a download, the affiliate makes money by earning the set commission.

The Nutshell of Affiliate Marketing:

Visitor visits Affiliate Website + Clicks on a Link ? Visitor goes to Merchant’s Website + Visitor performs respective action = Commission is recorded for affiliate ? Affiliate Makes Money Online!

Affiliate Programs:

Affiliates make money by joining Affiliate Programs for the products they want to promote. Believe me, there is an Affiliate Program for pretty much everything. And there are Affiliate networks that host many merchants’ programs in one place.

Some of the top affiliate programs include:

• Commission Junction
• Share-A-Sale
• Pepperjam Network
• Link Share
• Clickbank – Digital Products
• Google Adsense
• Never Blue Ads

Basic ways that affiliates make money online:

1. Pay Per Lead – The visitor completes a lead, such as a free trial.
2. Pay Per Sale – Visitor buys something from the merchant and a set commission is paid
3. Pay Per Action – The visitor installs, uses a product or a service.
4. Pay Per Click – For example, Google Adsense. The visitor clicks on an add link and the affiliate is paid for just getting the click.

The merchants and products you choose to promote will depend on your niche, as you always want to promote what is related to your niche.

How-To Do Affiliate Marketing

The most common venue for Affiliate Marketing is a website, which focuses around the niche. A niche is a certain segment of the population where you intend to concentrate your efforts and also can be viewed as a market.

Examples of Niches:

• Cars
• Health
• Video Games
• Golf
• Weddings
• Computers
• Cooking
• Real Estate
• Stock Market
• etc…

How to Find the Right Niche:

There are 3 main factors involved in finding the right niche that will make money for you as an affiliate.

1. Individual interest and expertise within the subject areas of the niche.

The more knowledge you have about the niche the easier it will be to build content and create a truly useful site that will attract and retain visitors and establish you as an authority. I truly believe in the saying “do what you love and the money will follow” in affiliate marketing.

2. Niche popularity and demand for the products within the niche.

If the niche is not in demand and is not being searched for daily in certain numbers then it will be hard to make money. The key is finding the keywords, via keyword research tools, that people are searching for within the niche and optimize your affiliate website for those.

Also, these tools can give some great general ideas about the hot product searches on the web: Google Trends and My Simon Top Product/Service Searches.

Another technique is to visit Niche related forums – Search for “forums + your niche.” See what people are talking about within your niche on the top forums. Find out who the customers are, what they want, what they need, what are they looking for. This can really give some insight into your niche.

3. The number of competing websites within the niche.

While the competition on the web is huge, there are lots of niches still wide open, a close look at the numbers will create viable and successful online money making campaigns.

There are many so called micro niches, that are basically more detailed subjects within a main niche, that people are searching for and often these micro niches are much less competitive and yet are still popular enough to build a website around.

For example, if you look at the niche “golf” there are over 35,000,000 competing websites, that is way too many to deal with, but when doing some simple keyword research, there are several micro niches that come up under golf, such as, “golf instruction”, that keyword has over 15,000 monthly searches and 54,000 competing websites, this is a very viable and wide open micro niche market!

Learn step-by-step tools and techniques to niche and keyword research, analysis and guidelines with lots of helpful screenshots at: Step-by-Step Niche and Keyword Research

Do I Have to Be a Web Designer to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business?

This is probably the number one question that people interested in this business have. The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT! There are tons of affiliates, including myself who are complete amateurs, who started in this business with absolutely no knowledge of web design or code.  There are website builders, such as WYSIWYG’s, that are designed for the non-pro and make building an affiliate marketing website really easy.

A WYSIWYG, which is an acronym that translates to “What You See Is What You Get”, is a website builder that allows you to enter content in English and the software translates everything into HTML code automatically. WYSIWYG allows you to design your website with drag and drop capability, colors, images, and to see your website instantly on the screen as it will look when it is live and published!! HTML and all design codes are configured automatically! You add the content and the programming is done for you.

Two of the best WYWISYG website builders are WebEasy7 Pro and Coffee Cup HTML Editor, both under $40 and require absolutely NO programming skills.

Also, there is Wordpress, which is free, easy to use and while it is primarily a blog software, it can be used to build static niche sites as well.

As far as, Affiliate Links go, every affiliate program generates the code for you so all you have to do is copy and paste.

But, believe me as you get more experience in this business you will inevitably start to learn code and you may find you really love it after all, Huh??? :eek:

You can learn the complete procedure, start to finish and step-by-step to building an Affiliate Marketing website at my post: Building an Affiliate Marketing Website – Step-by-Step

In conclusion, let me say that there are endless opportunities to make money online with Affiliate Marketing. This is a respectable and viable home business that anyone can start, including students, stay at home moms, those with jobs and those without, non-website designers and those without any marketing or business experience.

It does take a lot of hard work and dedication, but if you really love it and work it the possibilities are endless!

Learn more at my Internet and Affiliate Marketing Blog, and please feel free to contact me at any time.

The Trouble With Ordinary Goals / Resolutions

Resolutions are usually pretty final such as “I resolve to quit smoking” or “I resolve write a blog post every day” and they are easily broken which leads to disappointment. Traditional goals are usually based around some milestone to achieve such as “I want to earn $X a month with my online business” or “I want to lose X lbs in weight”. Sometimes deadlines are added.

I have really grown to dislike these kinds of goals because until that magic moment when you hit the target, you are constantly reminded that you aren’t there yet. Plus, the goal itself is useless – it does nothing to actually help you actually get the result.

The Missing Ingredient – ACTION

To achieve anything in life you need to take action. I always emphasise the importance of action in the courses that I write. Reading a book, studying a course, getting a degree – education and knowledge alone does nothing to help you achieve anything. You must put that knowledge into action.

Therefore, I much prefer to think of what you might call a traditional goal as the objective and then think about what action I can take to achieve it and then find a way to follow through. For example, I want to reach a full time income this year, which is around $5,000 a month, and I’m about a quarter of the way there right now. So I can brainstorm ways to make more money:

• Develop web-based software with a subscription fee
• Sell more copies of my paid courses
• Build blog traffic and get more advertising revenue

Now looking at these, are these actionable? Not quite – I would call them strategies. I still have to break them down and figure out HOW to actually implement those strategies. So for example for the second one, selling more copies of a paid product I could brainstorm actual ways to do this:

• Ask other marketers to promote it for me
• Setup an Ebay auction for the product
• Conduct a one-off Warrior Special Offer
• Experiment with PPC

Now we have some real actions that can be implemented. Similarly, looking at the third strategy for building blog traffic, we all want that don’t we? So again, I would look at HOW to get more. For me at the current stage the blog is at, my preferred traffic generation strategy is getting search engine traffic. I like to write posts on a subject that I know is being searched on and then drive backlinks to those posts to give them an extra boost in the search engines.

Continuous, Measurable Progress

Another problem with many traditional goals is that it’s really hard to tell if you’re making progress. For example, for my money goal I only do my accounts once per month and the amount I earn fluctuates quite a bit. I don’t often see direct evidence of the progress I’m making. My primary strategy this year will be developing software but throughout the entire development process, which could take several months, there will be no money earned and therefore if my goal focussed purely on the end result I would feel as though I wasn’t making any progress.

This has really been bugging me lately. I want to set goals so I feel as though I’m making progress but I want to be able to see visible progress every day that I work on them. Therefore I have setup a whole bunch of goals that are based on action and have a numeric component that allows me to make very clear and distinct measurements. Let me give you some examples.

Repeat X Action Daily For X Days

This is such a simple one but very powerful. I’ve used this with a health based goal to exercise every day that I’m at home for 100 days. At that point it should be a firmly ingrained habit. For blogging you might have variations such as:

• Write 10 good quality blog comments per day for 100 days
• Publish a blog post every weekday for 12 weeks

The trick to this type of goal is consistency. The idea is to repeat the action as often as required without skipping. If you miss a day,reset the counter back to zero and start over!

Do X Number of Different Actions

Sometimes you want to push yourself to think outside the box a bit, to brainstorm that little bit harder. This one is easier to explain with examples:

• Find 30 blogs in my niche to comment on
• Brainstorm 50 blog post ideas
• Find 100 places to get a backlink
• Brainstorm 10 ways to market my product

And so on. The idea here is to get your creative juices flowing. Pick a number that is a stretch. These types of goals don’t need a time limit but every time you add to the list you make measurable progress and hopefully by the end of it you have something solid that you can then act upon.

Repeat Action X Number of Times

Sometimes the work you need to do is a numbers game – the more you do, the better results you get. Here you just want to keep doing something over and over. You may or may not want to set a time limit for these.

• Work 500 hours in 100 days (this is one of my actual goals!)
• Sell 100 copies of Bloggers Bible (so is this!)
• Submit 50 articles to article directories
• Build 10 niche sites in 10 weeks

The first two here are my major work related goals. The first goal seems somewhat vague, just ‘work 500 hours’ but that’s because I know what work I need to do so as long as I do the work I make progress. My problem is that I think I’m working when I’m not. I’ll be at the computer most of the day and then realise I’ve got nothing done. I’ve started tracking my time using a utility called SlimTimer like I used to in the beginning so I can see exactly what I’m doing!

The second goal kind of breaks the rule a little bit because it’s not action based, it’s results based. However as long as that is combined with something actionable, it serves as a useful way of measuring progress.

Conclusion

If you know there’s something you want to achieve and you’re feeling a bit stuck, as if you’re not really making progress then perhaps you could adopt this style of goals. You could make them small at first. I’ve used 100 days for lots of mine but you could try just 30 days for example. Use whatever numbers work for you.

The other useful thing about these kinds of goals is that because they are numeric, it’s easy to track a whole bunch of them at once. Being the super-organised person that I am, I am tracking all of mine on a spreadsheet! Yes it’s a little anal but it means that each day I can tick a few boxes and feel the satisfaction of knowing that I’m progressing slowly and surely towards the milestones that I want to achieve.

I know that I am well known in this niche for my use of blog commenting as a traffic strategy. I did it myself for many months and that activity gave this blog the initial kickstart that it needed so of course many new bloggers do the same in order to get traffic and links. But blog comments should always enhance the post – they should provide something interesting to read, both for the blogger and other readers of the blog.

Pointless Comments

Any one-liners like ‘great post’ have always been deleted but I am seeing now people leaving the same one liners but just making them a bit more verbose. Taking a dozen words to say ‘great post’ still doesn’t add any value – it just gives people more words to read and wastes more of their time! I have found myself deleting an increasing number of these comments of late. Due to the natural growth of the blog, there is a natural growth in the number of comments left but unless these are valuable, it simply adds noise to the post which is of no benefit to those readers who like to read the comments and join in the discussion.

Now I don’t automatically delete all posts like this. I read all my comments and I take notice of who leaves them and there are always a handful of regular commenters who just comment because they are taking part in the community. If one of those people leaves a comment like that I’ll leave it but when there is a newcomer who has not been very active and has nothing better to say than’ great post’ (or something else that’s similar) then I’ll still delete it.

Keywords as Names

This has always been a pet peeve of mine. It is well known that a backlink containing your keywords is much stronger than a backlink with irrelevant words such as your name but let’s face it, when you leave a comment with ‘forex trading’ or something similar as your name, we all know that you’re only really commenting to get the backlink. Just to be clear, this blog has always been and always will be nofollow in the comment section which means those comments aren’t useful backlinks anyway.

The reason it’s a pet peeve is that I read all the comments and when people say something useful or interesting I like to reply. I like to take part in the discussion along with my readers. I do my comment work once per day so usually there are a whole bunch of new comments on each post. My preferred format is to make one reply and address people individually with their name such as @Louis, blah blah. This is very difficult to do when people use keywords as their name.

Before now, my unwritten policy has always been that I would only allow a keyword-named comment if the commenter had clearly read the post and was posting something valuable. If it was in any way generic I wouldn’t hesitate to delete it. But frankly, I’m having to do this a lot more now and it’s just more time consuming so from now on I am making my own life that little bit easier – keyword comments will automatically be deleted. Use your name in the name field!

What About Name / Keyword Combos?

This is an interesting one. Some people will leave a name such as “John @ Writing School”. This solves the problem of not being able to reply easily but I often find that these end up being too long and they look messy in the comment section. I’m not doing anybody any favours by allowing keywords in names because the blog is nofollow so sorry, these will still be deleted! If you want to comment on this blog, use your name in the name field!

Comment Signatures

This is another pet peeve of mine. When you leave a comment you have a field into which you can put a URL – most people leave their blog/website so why on earth do some people feel the need to add a second URL at the end of the comment? What is worse is that I have used the CommentLuv plugin for many months now which will automatically give bloggers a second link.

What I used to do before, was edit the comment to remove the signature but that is way too time consuming so once again I’m making my own life easier here – leave a sig and your comment will get deleted!

How Are Comments Viewed By Others?

Ignoring the backlink issue here (which is moot on a nofollow blog), the main reason to comment as a ’strategy’ is to get traffic. How do you get traffic? By other people clicking through to your link. Why would they do that? One reason only – something you have said has sparked their interest and they want to know what else you have to say so they click through to your link to find out more about you.

Alternatively, with the CommentLuv plugin, if the title of your latest post is intresting that can draw in traffic without even needing an interesting comment! But let me ask you this, as a reader of blogs and of blog comments, what do you think when you see a comment that has a keyword in the name and leaves a signature at the end? Me personally, I look at that and see a hardcore marketer. I immediately assume that their website or blog is just going to contain a lot of marketing hype and will probably offer very little value.

On the other hand when I see people like Hendry Lee actively commenting, leaving genuinely useful comments time after time I am inclined to assume that his blog is going to contain lots of useful posts and I am far more likely to click through to it and take a look. I truly believe that if you want to make the most of your  blog commenting strategy you should leave the marketing out of it and focus purely on value.

What is Twitter?

Ok this is one question where I will refer you straight to my Twitter guide! What is Twitter is the title of part #1 of the guide.

How Do You Get Twitter Followers?

There are lots of ways. First of all if you have a web presence such as a website or blog, make sure you advertise your Twitter profile prominently. This can just be a simple text link like I use in my sidebar. For WordPress blogs you can take this a step further and use a widget to display your latest tweets.

If you don’t have a web presence try some blog commenting but using your Twitter Profile as your link. Also insert your link into email or forum signatures if you use those. I now have mine in my Warrior Forum sig. Another way to pick up a few followers is to just follow other people in your chosen area of interest – there are still some people who follow back anyone who follows them!

How To Find Twitter Users in Your Niche

Finding people that use Twitter who are interested in your niche is actually quite easy. You just have to get a little creative with a Twitter Search Engine. Simply enter some keywords related to your niche, focusing especially on current hot topics or trends. The search engine will bring back all recent tweets containing those terms then all you need to do is look at the tweet and if it looks relevant click through to the user profile to see what other things that user tweets about.

For example, to find people in this niche I searched for things such as ‘thirty day challenge’, ‘blog mastermind’, ‘affiliate marketing’ and so on.

Embedding Links Into Twitter

If you use Twitter directly from their home page (not recommended), links are pasted as-is, in full and with a restriction of just 140 characters you can run out of room quickly. However several of the Twitter tools such as Twhirl (runs on most platforms) or TwitterFox (a Firefox plugin) will take your link and automatically encode it using a url-shortening service such as TinyURL. All you do is paste your link and hit enter.

Can I Organize Twitter Followers?

Not through the main Twitter API but there is a utility called CrowdStatus that allows you to categorize your Twitter followers into crowds so you could have a crowd for work colleagues, another for family and so on. It then displays tweets neatly grouped into their crowds. Mark O’Neill has a more in-depth explanation of CrowdStatus on his blog.

How To Hack a Private Twitter Account

There are some Twitter accounts that are marked private which means that you cannot automatically follow the updates by clicking a button – you have to ask permission. To all those people asking how to hack these accounts, you can’t! Just ask nicely :-) And as a rule of thumb, it’s generally a bad idea to mark your updates private if you want to get any followers!

How to Setup Twitter Notifications

It’s always nice to know when people are talking about you. On the web and in the blogosphere you can setup a Google alert but that does not cover Twitter. There is a service called Twilert which acts just like Google alerts but for Twitter. Setup alerts on your name, brand, products or whatever and you will be notified by email when these terms are tweeted.

How Do I Make a Twitter Application?

Ok first up you need programming skillz! Twitter has recently opened up an API which allows developers to build applications that interrogate Twitter in a number of ways. You can write Twitter applications in a number of languages such as C++, Java and PHP.

How to Make a Twitter Digest

There are two ways of creating a Twitter digest, depending on exactly what it is you want to do. If you are following people that tweet often and you can’t keep up with them, you can use a web tool called Twitter Digest to package up tweets from these people into a single RSS feed that you can subscribe to. You can also use this service to create a digest of your own tweets but if you are wanting to display these on your blog, the Twitter Tools plugin that I mentioned earlier has built in functionality to create a daily digest of your tweets and automatically post it your blog. Ed Dale used to do this.

How to Tweet Your RSS Feed

If you want to have an RSS feed automatically tweeted to your Twitter account as it is published you can use a service called TwitterFeed to do this. It allows you to customise how often to post on your behalf. If the feed you wish to publish is your blog feed then an alternative is that Twitter Tools plugin that I keep talking about!

How Do I Send My Plurks to Twitter?

Plurk is another micro-blogging tool that came out last year. It’s rather nice and has lots of cool features but it doesn’t yet have the same following as Twitter. What do you do when you want to use both but don’t want to update two services? FeedTweeter is an application that allows you to do just that (and the other way around if you prefer). It also works with other services allowing you to tweet your delicious bookmarks for instance.

How Do I Tweet My Stumbles?

This is another question I get asked alot but as of yet, I don’t know of any tool or service that allows you to automatically send the pages you thumb up on StumbleUpon to your Twitter account. If you know how, please let me know and I’ll update this question!

Where to Get Twitter Badges & Buttons

Twitter badges are just another name for plugins that you can put on your site containing Twitter information in real time. A Twitter button is really the same thing as a badge, just smaller. There are lots of types of badges and buttons available, and Darren Rowse has a massive list of them on his Twitter Tips blog.

How do I Automatically Follow People That Follow Me?

As I mentioned earlier, some people like to follow back everybody that follows them. Personally I don’t recommend that strategy but this question gets asked a lot so who I am to judge :-) There is a site called TweetLater which allows you to setup tweets at a specific time (very useful btw!) and as part of the account creation, you can select an option to automatically follow people who follow you. Dave Taylor explains the process in more detail.

Can Twitter Be Used Privately Between Two People?

Yes it can but a proper instant messaging tool is much better. The mistake many people make is thinking that @cmiddlebrook is a private tweet and it’s not. I will see this highlighted by my Twitter client but all the followers of the person who sent it will see it too. In order to send a private tweet to somebody you must use the following format ‘d username message’ but there is an extra rule – both parties must be following each other. So of course only the people I follow (which is not many) can directly message me in this way.

How Do I Purge Inactive Twitter Followers?

Again, this is something that I am often asked but at the moment there is no automatic way of doing this. To do it automatically the Twitter API would need to expose information that showed the date of the last activity of a user but it doesn’t do that yet to my knowledge.

What is Twitter # (Twitter Hash Tags)?

Twitter hash tags are a way of organising tweets into certain subjects or groups. This is a community driven convention and it simply allows users to find related tweets more easily. For example, many community events will have a #tag created such as #30dc for the Thirty Day Challenge and this allows people to search on #30dc or set up an alert as described earlier. So far, Twitter has not added any official support for hashtags.

How Do I Upload Pictures to Twitter?

You cannot directly embed an image into a tweet as it is a text-only format but there is a service called TwitPic that allows you to easily insert image URL’s into twitter. Many Twitter clients now have in-built support for TwitPic.

If you have any questions about twitter that haven’t been answered in this Twitter FAQ then please feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll either update the post or do a follow up to it.

Here’s the situation I am in – this blog gets around 500 visitors a day and that traffic varies but around 35% of it now comes from search engines. That search engine traffic is ‘fresh meat’ as far as monetization goes – very often these people will visit the blog, look at one post and then disappear never to be seen again. Placing ads increases the possibility of making a little income from them.

However there is also a real danger. This is a social blog, I have thousands of regular visitors who do not want to see ads and seeing them would degrade their viewing experience. Thankfully, there is a solution to this dilemma in the form of a free plugin.

The Who Sees Ads Plugin

This plugin is an ad management plugin to manage many kinds of ads and specifically, to allow you to create rules that govern who sees your ads. You define a set of conditions such as whether the visitor came from a search engine, whether they are a regular reader (you can define what that is), how old the post is and so on and these together with some ad code form a context. You then insert that context into the appropriate place and the ad will only be displayed according to those rules.

For example, I have used the ugly large rectangle right underneath post titles on individual post pages. This is considered to be the most effective ad unit for most sites and of course on my blog with my large triple-section header, it pushes the real content down below the scroll. This would be disastrous for StumbleUpon for example and my regular visitors wouldn’t appreciate it too much either.

So I have created a context that will display the ad if the visitor came from a search engine, but if not, will not display the ad if the visitor is a regular (anyone who has viewed at least 2 pages in the previous 10 days) and then only on posts older than 15 days. What that means is that search engine traffic will always see it but for anybody else, the only people who see it should be those that don’t usually read my blog and are looking at a fairly old post.

Inserting the actual code can be done in one of two ways. If you want to place an ad blog-wide then you need to edit your WordPress theme and you’ll need to add a line of PHP into the appropriate file at the right place. So for this ad, I’ll edit my file for a single post, and insert the line just after the title and post information is displayed but just before the actual content it displayed.

It sounds complicated but there is comprehensive documentation on the Who Sees Ads website and it’s really quite intuitive. The second way to show an ad is to insert a line directly inside a post so you can finely control individual ads on individual posts if you wish. This could be useful for certain high traffic pages but I don’t want the hassle of doing it that way.

Other Ad Units

The main one that I wanted to include was a large ad embedded inside popular posts that attract a lot of search engine traffic so the above context takes care of that. There is also the issue of the home page which gets a lot of traffic. Looking at my analytics the biggest source of traffic to the home page is direct traffic. That means traffic that has come from a bookmark or perhaps an embedded link such as from my WordPress ebook, one of my online courses and so on. I don’t really want to show ads to people coming from those sources.

The home page is the most popular page on the site and yet it gets very little search engine traffic – really only from people searching for my name so if they already know who I am, they are unlikely to be somebody who is going to click an AdSense ad. Another thing to consider is that I already have my popup which advertisers The Bloggers Bible and that builds my list for me and is very useful.

With all those factors considered, I decided not to include any ads on the home page so for now, I shall start with just that single ad unit and see how it performs over the rest of the month. I’ll discuss the results in the January stats post.

What is ‘Saturation’?

If you have a sponge and you use it to mop some water there comes a point where the sponge can no longer hold any more water – it has reached saturation point. People use the word saturation in business terms to suggest that the market simply cannot take any more – no more blogs, no more products, no more ideas. But think about that, can that kind of idea really apply to business or creativity of any kind?

Can you imagine if novel writers stopped writing romance novels because there were too many already? Or what if movie makers stopped making cheesy action movies? It just wouldn’t happen would it? It simply does not matter how many have been before, we as consumers always want more and always will want more. The same applies in all areas of business. We want new cars, new clothes, new homes. We want new things to read, new blogs, new websites. This is an ever-changing world, we always want more, there can never be a saturation point!

So forget the idea that a niche can be saturated – it simply can’t happen. But of course there are some very competitive niches where many big blogs have thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of readers, where the search engines are dominated by powerful sites for all the top keywords. For the newcomer this can seem daunting but there are ways to break through!

The Traffic Factor

One of the keys to a successful blog or any kind of website is traffic. Without traffic, no income can be made and many people worry that in a competitive niche, they will never be able to attract the kind of traffic they need to grow their blog. There are other factors too of course, such as the value that you give to your readers but in this post I want to concentrate on traffic strategies that you can employ for your blog even if your niche is very crowded.

1) Blog Commenting

I was recently interviewed by Yaro Starak and in that interview he asked me how I got my blog started and my answer was basically via blog commenting. Over a year ago now I wrote a post which outlined a blog commenting strategy which I urge you to read if you wish to adopt this strategy but first let me tell you why this works so well in a crowded niche.

To comment on blogs, you need blogs to comment on! Sounds obvious and somewhat stupid but for some reason many newbie bloggers see other blogs in their niche as competition – something to be feared when it’s the complete opposite! This blog is in a highly competitive niche and when I started nobody had ever heard of me. I started out just like everybody else with just one subscriber (me) but just look at my stats now – it is possible! And the way I got this off the ground was by commenting on other blogs.

If you are in a competitive niche that is absolutely wonderful because you have all their juicy traffic and subscribers to tap into! One of the main blogs I commented on was Yaro’s and he now has a whopping 50k subscribers! Get your comment near the top and that is thousands of potential eyes on your comment and if you write something insightful, some of those people will click through to your own blog to see what else you have to say.

I won’t say anything else about the strategy because I’ve said it all before but my point is that the more competitive your niche – the more blogs you have to comment on, the bigger they are, the more people are out there just ready to read your comments!

2) Social Media Traffic

Social media is a big topic and I devote many lessons to it in the Bloggers Bible so I can’t cover it all here but the same theory applies – if your niche is competitive it also means more potential eyeballs. In some of the social news sites like Digg it can be very hard to get any real traffic because you have to try to get to the front page which is often impossible without a little leg up from friends which takes work up-front but not all social media is like that.

Take StumbleUpon for instance. Their algorithm will send a small amount of starting traffic to any new page that gets submitted to their database. They don’t care if it comes from a brand new blog or a 10-year old blog. If somebody from those initial visitors likes the page and gives it a thumbs up, it gets some more traffic and so it goes on. StumbleUpon was my number 1 traffic source for this blog for many months in the early days when the blog was brand new and I had very few fans on my account. Just check my archives and look for my earlier stats posts to see.

If you want to know more about driving traffic specifically with StumbleUpon then sign up to my free course, Traffic Rush but don’t forget about all the other social media sources out there – there are lots!

3) Search Engine Traffic

A brand new blog is going to get very little search engine traffic unless it has some very high quality incoming links and I’ll assume that you are not in a position to aquire those. As such search engine traffic seems to be a longer term strategy. Again if you look through the stats posts in my archives you’ll see that the percentage of traffic that has come from search engines from the beginning has risen slowly and steadily from just 2% to almost 40%.

However, there are a lot of myths about search engine traffic and probably the biggest one is that you must rank highly for highly searched terms in order to get lots of traffic. This simply is not true. Of course, if you do manage to do it then great, you’ll get a ton of traffic but it is not necessary.

The vast majority of traffic comes from single-search terms. That means terms that have been typed in just once. For example, due to the popularity of my WordPress ebook, I get a lot of traffic from WordPress-related terms. There are some terms that bring in little chunks of traffic such as “make money with WordPress” has brought in 56 visitors in the last 30 days. 56 is not many and that’s the point. There have been over 1,500 visitors brought in from search terms containing the word ‘WordPress’ in 770 different terms and out of those 770, 609 of them were searched for just once – almost half of the search engine traffic is coming from single search terms.

You don’t need to rank highly for popular keywords to get traffic because people type in the weirdest combination of words all the time and you will capture some of that. As long as you blog about topics that in general get some traffic, then you’ll grab a slice of it over time. And once again the popularity of the niche can help here because whilst all your competitors are sweating over their top rankings you can just keep writing about popular topics and grab all that long tail traffic without any effort.

Conclusion

So there you have it – three strategies for getting blog traffic even in a highly competitive niche. If the fear of high competition was holding you back from starting a new blog, just go get on with it :-)

Who Would Want Multiple Facebook Accounts?

You’re probably wondering why anybody would want multiple Facebook accounts… well when you login to Facebook you are shown a news feed that displays news items about your friends and these are in chronological order. When you have a large number of friends, you’ll miss a lot of them unless you login very often. That’s not a problem for most regular Facebook users but if you are a marketer or somebody who has any kind of online ‘personality’ you’ll find that your friends list fills up fast and you miss a lot of news.

This has become a real problem for me in recent months as the growth of my blog (which advertises my Facebook profile) has meant a corresponding growth in Facebook friends. Because I publicise my profile URL both on the blog and on other places, I know that I am going to get lots of friend requests from people I don’t personally know so I make it a policy to simply accept all requests.

Generally speaking, growth is a good thing! In StumbleUpon for example, having a large fan base means that your profile has more authority and will drive more traffic to the sites you thumb up. However in Facebook, having a large number of friends doesn’t really benefit you in any way as a marketer because you can’t mail out to all your friends – just as well as that would reduce Facebook to a spam fest and it would quickly die.

For somebody who uses Facebook both for personal and business purposes like I do, having all these friends is actually a downside because what happens now is that when I login to Facebook I see relationship updates, photos, event notifications and so on from a whole bunch of people who I don’t know and then buried in amongst all of that I’ll see a news item from one of my real friends or family. This problem really hit home for me a couple of months back when I found out that an old friend of mine had got married. All the details were on Facebook but I never saw it as my newsfeed was buried in marketing noise.

Organising Friends Into Lists

I thought I had found a solution to this problem when Facebook introduced a feature to allow you to organise your friends into lists. I created a list for my friends and family and everybody else that I don’t really know are just uncategorised. However, the problem is that Facebook doesn’t allow you to use this list to manage your news feed. Note, if Facebook developers are reading this post, take heed – this is a much needed feature!

You can edit your news feed settings to show more or less of a particular type of item and you can show more or less news from a particular person. However, what you can’t do is tell Facebook to show you more from all the people on a list. If I could do that I would have setup three lists – (1) real life friends and family, (2) Internet Marketing people that I don’t know in real life but have got to know well through my business and (3) people I really don’t know at all. I would want to show the maximum amount from my real friends and probably nothing at all from the last list. Alas, you can’t do that with Facebook just yet!

Creating Multiple Facebook Accounts

The most obvious solution to the problem is to create multiple Facebook accounts – one for your personal life that you keep private for your friends and family and another for your business activities or whatever it is that makes you a public figure of some kind. However, there is a major flaw with this strategy – Facebook does not allow multiple accounts! It is limited to strictly one account per real live person, no matter how many online personalities you may have :-)

Aside from the fact that Facebook doesn’t allow it, it would be very tricky to implement if your online personality is the same as your personal one. I blog as myself, my brand is my name so there is no separation between Caroline Middlebrook the blogger and Caroline Middlebrook who my friends and family know. If you have a business brand then it is feasible that you could create a separate account under your business name but there is another solution that works better.

Facebook Pages

Any Facebook user can now create a Facebook page which is specifically for publicising a person, a brand or a product – perfect for anybody wishing to do any kind of marketing via Facebook. Other Facebook users can become fans of this page which is a one-way relationship and replaces the friendship status. On your page you can add things like notes, events, videos, have a discussion board and so on.

Also, you can add many Facebook applications to your page, so for example, I have added an application that will report my blog posts to my page so that my fans (that sounds so corny!) will know when I have published a new posts and I have now removed that application from my main profile.

To create a Facebook page go to this url: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and get started, it’s quite self-explanatory. Before it goes live you have to publish the page so you can fiddle with it to your hearts content before publishing.

So, here is my new Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Caroline-Middlebrook/43603344682

I am going to start publicising this instead of my personal profile and I shall be removing people that I don’t know from my main profile and making it more private from now on.

In conclusion I would say that anybody who was previously considering creating multiple Facebook accounts to manage their profiles should instead have one personal account for friends & family and then as many fan pages as is necessary to manage the online personalities, products, brands and so on. I may write a follow up post about Facebook pages once I learn a little more about them.

When Caroline offered her readers the chance to do a guest post, I had to jump at the opportunity. Caroline specifically suggested that she would like some posts on Affiliate Marketing so I have a nice treat instore for you guys. The main aim here is to inspire you and open your mind to the many ways people are making money online; there are literally hundreds of them.

Before I start, I would like to note that although I run a couple of ‘whitehat’ blogs, I do dabble in the affiliate marketing space and I’m actually starting to earn quite a nice chunk of change. I might be p*ssing off a few affiliate marketers with this post but if they rely on these tactics 100% for their income then they need to realise the flaw in their strategy in the first place.

Without further ado…

1. Building a Trustworthy Blog

Being trustworthy is definitely one of the keys to success with affiliate marketing. Being trustworthy means that people value and believe in the fact you are giving your honest opinion on a recommendation, rather than just doing it for the sake of a few extra dollars.

Picture this, you stumble upon a blog which appears to do nothing but reviews of a certain industries’ products and constantly links out to them with affiliate links. How trustworthy is that site going to appear? The same goes for a recommendation on someone who isn’t doing what they say this product or service can do for you, some examples of this include:

• Someone promoting a quick method to become an A-list blogger when they only have 30 subscribers
• Someone promoting a productivity ebook when their last blog post said they are bad at organisation
• Someone promoting a hosting company that they don’t even use (there are some exceptions to this)

These are just a few examples but there are so many out there of people who are clearly untrustworthy. Before you see $ signs in your eyes, think about how you will affect your readerbase if you promote something you clearly don’t believe in or you haven’t used.

However, you are much more likely to sign-up for an affiliate program through John Chow because he has proof of making tens of thousands of dollars with them on a monthly basis. You would be much more likely to buy a book from Problogger (Darren Rowse) on blogging because he is doing it and succeeding, and does actually have a book.

Whatever it is you promote:

• Don’t overly push it on your audience
• Don’t just pick the best paying products, pick what works
• Don’t just do it for the money, because your visitors will quickly lose faith

Do the opposite, and the next time you recommend a product, you’ll actually see some sales based on your recommendation. Otherwise, you are clearly just someone trying to make a quick buck.

2. Bum Marketing

If you haven’t heard of bum marketing by now, you’ve probably had your head in another industry for the last few years. Essentially, bum marketing (created by Travis Sago) is about generating backlinks and sales through article marketing. For example, Ezine Articles is an article directory that tends to rank very highly in Google and allows you to write on pretty much any subject that you want.

So the simple step process for this is:

1. Find a product you want to promote on Clickbank or somewhere similar
2. Create a targeted landing page on your own domain
3. Do keyword research around the niche to see what people are searching for
4. Create articles around those topics and build some links to them
5. In the author box of ezine articles link to your landing page

So essentially ezine articles should be used as your funnel to catch the searches that are relevant to the product you have to offer, and then you send them off to the link in the author’s box where they can buy a relevant product. This takes a bit of work but once you have your articles ranking it can be a great source of constant income.

This still works well because there are always new products coming out that you can rank for. For example if there is a new product that is causing some buzz called ‘Middlebrook Mastermind’ then you can create articles around:

• Middlebrook Mastermind Scam
• Middlebrook Mastermind Review

And similar keywords, the idea here is that quite a large percentage of people will want to read a review of something before they give over their hard earned cash. Once you have the targeted visitor convinced that buying Middlebrook Mastermind is a good idea, simply sending back over to the product page with your affiliate link, and collect your commission.

3. Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is basically a questions and answer service where people sign-up to get advice on anything and everything. You do need a Yahoo account so once you have that simply login over here. So once again, the similar principle applies: pick a product that you would like to promote from Clickbank or any other affiliate company. I personally use YepRevenue (mobile offers) and MotiveInteractive (email / zip submits) for my other campaigns as well. Those aren’t affiliate links, just my recommendations.

Now then, the key here is to search for questions that people are asking which are relevant to your product, and you can recommend something to them with the answer to their question. For example if someone is looking for where they can find a free credit report then you simply direct them to a credit report offer (available within motive) with your affiliate link.

Acai Berry is huge right now after being featured on Rachael Ray & Oprah

There are a few things you might want to make sure you do if you use this tactic:

• Create a redirected URL so it does not look like an affiliate link in YA. If you’re lazy, you can simply use a URL shortening service like TinyURL.
• Don’t just answer questions to promote your link, answer some other genuine questions in the niche as well to build up your profile. If all your answers simply promote one site then you are going to get banned.
• Make sure you provide a lot of content with your answer and come across as a genuine person who has used the product / service
• Please actually send people to something they are looking for, keep this ethical

That’s all for now, but hopefully this gives you some ideas that you can begin to work with right away. I have lots more ideas in this area so if you would like to see a follow-up with a few more tactics then say that in the comments.

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Glen Allsopp writes on the subject of Personal Development at PluginID. Help him help you by subscribing to his feed, here.

I have been somewhat slack in getting back to work this year but I do have a valid excuse – a new home at last! Throughout all of 2008 I didn’t have my own place and I lived with friends and family and generally felt very unsettled. I finally got the keys to my own place a couple of days before Christmas and officially moved in on the 2nd Jan. Since then I have been busy cleaning, decorating, shopping, assembling furniture and all that stuff that goes with making a house a home so that’s my excuse!

However my broadband is now connected (10Mb niiiiiice!) and my office is setup so I have no more excuses now so it’s back to work (though I still have a ton of decorating to do!) As you may recall, I ended 2008 by closing off all my projects, finishing up products such as the Bloggers Bible, reducing my social media activities and cutting back on the blogs I read in order to clear my schedule for my new software project which I am really excited about.

As I won’t be actively working on income-generating projects for the next few months (other than promoting the Bloggers Bible) I will be experimenting with some monetisation methods for this blog which I plan to begin implementing next week. Other than that I plan to write some posts about some topics that I’ve been planning to write about for a while but I may cut my posting frequency down a little bit. It’s tempting to think up posts just to hit a certain posting schedule and this is something that many bloggers so but in my experience I think it is best to only post when there is something pressing to post about. If you post filler content (hmm this post is a bit like that!) then you are really just wasting the time of your blog readers!

So I won’t keep you much longer… Any of you who have read my blog for any length of time will know that I am a big fan of Yaro Starak and his products. This morning I was delighted to be interviewed by him via Skype and he will be posting this interview on his blog, the Entrepreneur’s Journey in the next day or two. Also, he will be promoting the Bloggers Bible and will be offering an exclusive discount. It’s not as high as the launch discount that was offered when first released but it’s still very significant so keep an eye out on his blog for that!

Ok back to my decorating…

Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $529.34
• Bluehost – $380
• Become a Blogger – $233.82
• Blog Mastermind – $145.50
• Private Advertising – $95.80
• Traffic Rush – $89.74
• AdSense – $9.71
• Zen to Done Ebook – $8.23
• New Age Email Marketing Report – $6.43

Total Income Earned in December 2008 – $1498.57

Looks like I released the Bloggers Bible just in time to make up for a drop in other affiliate sales :-) Now that I have wrapped up all my projects of 2008, my work will now be focusing on the Software Project which will not be able to generate an income for quite some time – I estimate around 6 months so I wouldn’t be surprised if my income steadily drops over the next few months as I won’t be doing any direct income-producing activities.

However, now that the Bloggers Bible is finished, there are actually a few one-off promotional opportunities that I can use. Another affiliate will be promoting it with an exclusive discount in January, and I also plan to do things like a Warrior Special Offer at some point. I’ll blog about those things when they happen.

Subscribers

Subs at end of November: 4,205

Subs at end of December: 5,270

I had quite a large growth in subscribers to the Bloggers Bible email list earlier in the month when Dan Raine promoted it to his Twitter following. I have changed the delay on the popup again. I had increased it to 10 seconds and that seemed to make it worse so I have put it back to 5 which works best. I will stop fiddling with it now.

Total new subscribers in December:1,065

Traffic

There has been a slight increase in traffic this month which was partly caused by Dan Raine’s promotion which sent nearly 700 visitors. I have also started to participate a bit in the Warrior Forum which has sent a surprising number of visitors considering that the only links are just in my signature. I first joined that forum over a year ago but back then I couldn’t really participate very much and I used to spend so much time reading blogs that I didn’t have time for forums.

It’s a little different now. I only read a handful of blogs which don’t take long to read and I rarely spend time on social media. The visitors of the Warrior Forum are more likely to be potential customers of my future software than any social media traffic so that is a better use of my time.

Inbound Links

Last month I said that I wanted to start tracking external links as I have now hired somebody to do some manual link building for me. The trouble is that I am having difficulty in tracking them accurately. I am using Google Webmaster Tools and last month ended showing a total of 9,735 links but today it is showing me only 7,401. Somehow I doubt that I have lost over 2000 links in one month so once again I am at a loss as to how to track this data properly.

Total External Links:7,401 ??

Funny Keywords

There were a few more that were um, ‘odd’ but a bit too rude to post!

• fat people eurgh
• how to make millions and make your girl happy
• how you can become a mastermind at ants
• kitties puke on everything you love cross stitch
• oops de school girls
• use playdough to copy a key

Conclusion

I had actually written a post yesterday about 2009 goals and such but I forgot to press the publish button doh! However it was only a short post really as I have already talked about my plans for 2009. I have now wrapped up all the various projects that I have been working on during 2008 and I am ready to get started properly on my new Software project now.

Blog Monetization Strategies

You can make money with blogs in a large variety of ways but you could lump them into two distinct groups – on-page monetization, and indirect monetization. By on-page I mean the monetization methods that are encoded into the pages themselves. This includes banner ads, contextual ads, affiliate links inserted into posts, direct advertising etc. Many bloggers stick to these methods alone. Indirect monetization means that you use your blog to leverage a secondary revenue stream such as a paid product, a membership site, private consultation and so on.

I have always favoured the latter and tended to be rather minimal on the on-page side but I noticed something today. I was reading one of John Chow’s income reports from earlier in the year. He had 10x my traffic levels but he was making 30x my income. Furthermore, if you take a close look at his monetization methods they are all on-page. He doesn’t have any paid products, he doesn’t have any subscription based service, and he doesn’t do any private work other than paid reviews. Obviously, John is maximising his on-page monetization well.

Now many people think that John’s site takes monetization too far, for example he uses the Konterra Content-Link system which will automatically highlight certain words as you move your mouse over them – this can greatly diminish the viewing experience. You always need to be aware of striking the right balance between promotion and value to your readers but John’s goal has always been to squeeze the highest dollar value out of every visitor and he has never been afraid to admit that. My goals aren’t quite the same because I am more interested in promoting my brand for leveraging against future projects but it would still be nice if I could increase the income a little bit with the current traffic levels.

A Shift in Traffic

When I first started this blog the vast majority of my traffic came from Social media sources. In fact StumbleUpon alone was responsible for nearly all of my traffic for a very long time! However what I have been noticing and talking about more in recent stats posts is the steady shift away from social media traffic towards search engine traffic.

Many of my visitors have come from a search engine and are visiting the blog for the very first time. These search engine visitors are more responsive to on-page ads than social users or of course regular blog readers who will quickly adjust to any new ad system that is put in place (banner blindness syndrome). However all these search engine visitors are ripe for experimentation!

So, I have been playing around with ideas for different things to try such as:

• Trying AdSense on this blog (omg!)
• Putting extra affiliate ads in the blank space in my sidebar
• Implementing a better system for private ads
• Making more effort with promoting my private ads

In the Bloggers Bible I talk about all of these and I also discuss affiliate marketing and monetization of the RSS feed. I think I already do enough affiliate marketing – that is my largest revenue stream, and I don’t want to start hitting my loyal RSS readers with ads so I’ll skip that one.

Traffic over the Christmas and New Year period is bound to be low so that won’t be a good time to start testing. Plus I just moved into a new home so I’m very busy with that right now so I’ll get started with some of these experiments in January and of course I’ll be testing just one change at a time, letting it sit for a week before drawing any conclusions and so on. I’ll report back as I go along…

In fact from now on, in my monthly stats posts I’m going to add a section to show my favourite posts from that month one year before. As that starts in January and I started blogging in August, here are some of my best posts from my first few months that are still mostly relevant today:

September 2007

• 512 Ways to Make Money Online – Mix & Match Content, Monetization & Traffic Models
• 8 Places to Find Fresh Content Ideas, and Why You Should Bother
• Manipulate Your Blog Post Timings for Maximum Impact
• A Mathematical Cross Linking Strategy

October 2007

• Boost Your StumbleUpon Traffic with Outbound Links
• 11 Pointless Blog Posts that Waste my Time
• Social Bookmarking v Story Submission for Self Promotion
• Blog Validation: Do You Validate Your (WordPress) Blog?
• If Making Money Online Was a 9-5 Job (humor)

November 2007

• The Big Juicy Twitter Guide (Parts 1-7)
• Do You Have A Blog Commenting Strategy?
• Free Internet Marketing Related Ebooks
• 20 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites That Actually Work (and how to bookmark QUICKLY)

Just a quick reminder that the Bloggers Bible Fast Track which is currently at $79 is going up to its regular price of $119 tomorrow. If you’ve been thinking of starting a blog in 2009, my course will ensure that you’ll be making it profitable from the outset. If you already have a blog and it’s not going anywhere, the Bloggers Bible will help you get it back on track. Click here for more details of what you get with the course.

Buy the Bloggers Bible Fast Track until 22nd December for just $79

As we enter Christmas week I’d just like to wish you all a lovely Christmas. I probably won’t be posting very much over the next couple of weeks. I’m finally moving into a new home on Tuesday (after almost a year of living with family) so I’m really excited about that and can’t wait to hit all those January sales!

Two Flawed Methods of Charging

When I say educational material, I am talking here about substantial material – a complete course that takes a significant amount of time to work through, as opposed to something quick and cheap like a little ebook. Let’s take the subject of learning how to make money blogging as an example, as I have three concrete products to draw examples from.

There are two primary ways of charging for education material and subsequently delivering it:

1. Charge the entire fee up front and provide the whole course up-front
2. Drip feed the course in installments and charge accordingly

The Content & Fee Up-Front

Perhaps the easiest way to deliver something, whether large or small is simply to package it into a single self-contained unit and charge a fee for the whole thing. This is what I did for the Bloggers Bible. However this is a seriously flawed method. Why? Because human nature is such that the vast majority of people who are interested in your material will not complete the course!

What tends to happen is one of two things – either people buy the course full of enthusiasm and they end up wasting most of their money because they never finish it (happy marketer, unhappy customer) or they figure that they might not finish it and so don’t even buy it (unhappy marketer, probably frustrated customer). There is no middle ground here – it’s all or nothing.

The bigger and more expensive the course, the bigger the problem. The higher the price, the harder the marketer has to work to convince the customer to make the decision and this is where those awful long-form sales letters come from. This is also where the special one time offers come from. The marketer manages to work the customer into a state of enthusiasm for the product and whilst in that state hits them with a bunch of secondary offers that are never to be seen again. The customer will usually end up spending more money than he wanted to on a bunch of products that he’ll never finish. Some marketers may be happy with this model, but it certainly does not foster a healthy long term relationship with the customer.

So, to combat this we have the second business model which is becoming increasingly common:

Content & Fees Structured Monthly / Quarterly etc

Yaro Starak is very fond of this method. He has marketed both his blogging courses, Blog Mastermind and Become a Blogger as 6-month courses with a monthly membership for those six months. Note that these kinds of products are often billed as membership sites but I disagree with that description. These are finite courses that are delivered over a specific time-frame. A real membership site will be able to keep its members indefinitely. I have written about these in the past and given some ideas for membership site business models.

But I digress… I personally have signed up for at least 5 courses that were structured in this way. On the surface it seems like a good idea because the marketer doesn’t have to charge such a large fee up front and the customer can test out the water, try it out for a while before committing to the whole thing. If for some reason he is unable to finish the course, he can cancel his membership to avoid incurring further fees.

But this model is also highly flawed! The main problem is that the marketer has to decide the time frame over which the course will be delivered – the customer does not get a say in this and of course everybody is different, everybody has varying amounts of time to devote to the course and so on. In other words, whatever time frame the marketer comes up with, it will not suit all of his customers – it probably won’t suit many of them at all.

What’s the Ideal Method?

Think about how we consume things in the offline world – we buy food as we eat it, we pay for utilities such as gas and electricity as we use it. We only pay for what we use and we control how much we want to consume at any time. If we stop consuming, we stop paying. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could consume educational material in the same way?

One somewhat simple idea would be to simply cut the course into chunks and allow the customers to just purchase it one chunk at a time but this has several problems. With educational material there is usually a very structured sequence taking the customer from the beginner level material to more advanced stages and the earlier material is a pre-requisite. As the marketer you want to ensure that the earlier material has been consumed. Another problem is that you want to encourage the customer to continue to purchase extra parts of the course and this kind of system does nothing to aid that. The ‘membership sites’ that Yaro has setup will bill the customer automatically each month unless he cancels.

A Proposed Solution – Pay as You Go!

Imagine if there was a payment/delivery system that allowed you to divide your course into chunks and set a different price tag on each one. The customer has to work through the course sequentially – he cannot purchase part 2 before having purchased part 1 but he can do so at his own pace. As soon as he purchased part 1, part 2 is unlocked and so on. This would allow the customer to go just as far as we wants and at the pace he needs. If at some point he decides that he no longer wishes to continue, he has only paid for what he has used.

This makes for a happy customer but is the marketer happy? Perhaps not as there is no incentive to continue to bill the customer. This could easily be implemented. Perhaps the course could be setup so that each part will be delivered and billed on a set time scale unless the customer purchases early or cancels.

For example, if I was doing this with my Bloggers Bible course (you can still get that for the flawed up-front fee of $79 until the end of Monday 22nd!) I would split it into 12 parts – one for each module. They wouldn’t all be the same price as they are all different sizes. Also I might charge a bit less for the earlier modules than for the advanced ones to encourage the more experienced customers to work quickly through the introductory module. I would then set a default timescale for re-billing between each module and again this could vary for each one. So module 2 might be delivered 14 days after module 1 and so on. At any point the customer could either purchase the next module early or pause the course so that he does not get billed. Of course he could resume again later on if he wished.

The only downside I can see to this is that it might seem a little complicated but really I think its one of those things that easier to demonstrate and use than to explain.

This would be my ideal payment and delivery system for educational based content. I don’t know if such a system exists. If there is, I would love to hear about it. If you know of one please share in the comments. If there isn’t, I might just try and write one for my software project as I am still playing with ideas for that.

What do you guys think?

First let me give you a bit of background and then I’ll explain how you need to set this up.

How I know My List and my Blog Are Building Each Other

I looked at my RSS count this morning and saw a massive jump to almost 5,000. Dan Raine, one of the guys behind the 30 day challenge is currently running a running a rather cool series of promotions originally called the 12 days of Christmas. Each day he gives away some freebies. He gets stuff out of this too. He asked me if he could give away a copy of my Bloggers Bible which of course I agreed to and then he did some clever stuff with it. Have a look at his day 3 promo.

He is doing two distinct things here – firstly he is running a competition to give away the free copy but he also drops a subtle link telling people that they can get a free lesson. I knew something was going on when suddenly my email inbox filled up with Bloggers Bible subscriptions in minutes. He’s running this via Twitter which of course can have instant results. In total, he sent over 200 new subscribers my way yesterday though not all have verified yet.

So that partially explains the jump in subscribers (as my AWeber count is added to RSS count) but not all of it. The jump is in excess of 300 and only 200 of those came from AWeber. The other 100 had to be RSS subscribers and that is a lot for one day. What does that mean? It means that those people who came to my blog to get the free lesson came with the intention of joining my list but some of them decided to subscribe to my blog as well.

And of course I mention my blog an awful lot in the lessons as I draw all of my examples from my own experiences and therefore link to quite a few of my posts within the lessons.

Why is Dan Promoting My Stuff?

Dan has to get something out of this right otherwise why would he bother? Well here’s the thing – the link to the free lesson is an affiliate link. If any of those people who signed up to the free course via his link go on to buy the Fast Track version, Dan will earn 50% of that sale.

I assumed he was also building his own list via the competition butif he is he’s doing it in a weird way that I don’t know about as he’s only asking for a Twitter username and not an email address.

You Need Other People to Build Your List For You

The key to get this working is to get other people to build your list. The primary way in which I have built my list is via this blog. Those of you who visit this blog via a web browser rather than an RSS reader will have seen the popup that promotes it after a few seconds. This is the primary promotional vehicle so it requires that people are already visiting my blog. Thus many of those people are already blog readers so there is not much gained there.

Actually that’s not quite true as I have discovered that since introducing the popup my stats have shown that the list builds at least twice as quickly as the RSS readership. What this means is that people visiting this site from an external source such as a search engine are at least twice as likely to join the Bloggers Bible list than to subscribe to my blog. This means that as they work through the lessons, assuming the lessons promote the blog, the list can act as a vehicle to promote the blog too.

However a far greater gain can be made when other people promote your list for you because the people they send over may be completely new – they may never have heard of you. Dan has a massive Twitter following and I’m sure a ton of people that saw his page have never heard of me. I even had an email from somebody saying she’d found me via Dan and loves my blog so there’s proof.

Incorporate an Affiliate Program Into Your List

The key to getting other people to promote your list for you is to make sure that there is something in it for them. This requires three things:

1. You need to be selling your own product from your list
2. You need an affiliate program for your product
3. Your affiliate system needs to allow promotion via a non-direct sale

So first you have to have your own product. Many people will use a list to promote other people’s products (mine does that too) which is fine but then any sales result in commissions only for you so that doesn’t give anybody else an incentive to promote your list for you. It needs to be your own product and you have to have an affiliate program so that other people can actually make money from any resulting sales.

There’s also another requirement which is number 3. You need your affiliate system to be able to promote in an indirect way. Let me explain what I mean by that. I use E-Junkie to manage the sales, download links and affiliate program for my digital products. When an affiliate joins my affiliate program and get their link code they are given two options. Firstly they can promote the direct sale – the link to the shopping cart of the payment processor for the final product. But they have a second option too, they can also promote a secondary page of my choice into which I have embedded affiliate links. This is the part that makes the magic works.

I provide E-Junkie with the URL of my main sign up page for the free lessons. This page itself does not have any E-Junkie links but of course each one of the lessons does. When an affiliate sends somebody to this page as Dan has done, his cookie is stored on that person’s computer. Now any time they read a lesson in the future, if they decide to buy the paid product, that cookie is picked up (it lasts for six months) and Dan gets credited with the sale so now he has a reason to promote my list.

This is win-win-win all around. Dan promotes my list so my list is being built just from that act alone. The lessons promote the blog which is another benefit to me. If any sales are made, Dan and I both share in the profits. And of course the reader gets my cool stuff so they win too :-)

Bottom line – if you have a list that you promote via your blog, also use the list to promote your blog and then consider building your own product and promoting it with an affiliate system such as E-Junkie.

The Fast Track is Here

I have now produced the Bloggers Bible ‘Fast Track’ – this is basically the entire course re-packaged as a single, instant download so that you can work through the course at your own pace and not mine. I still want this information to be available to absolutely anybody, whatever their financial means so the weekly lessons will remain available, completely free of charge. The Fast Track is for those who want to get going right now and have more time to devote to their blogging project but it is by no means necessary. All 49 lessons, all 75,000+ words will always be free to those who can’t afford to buy the Fast Track.

Buy the Bloggers Bible Fast Track until 22nd December for just $79

$40 Discount for One Week Only!

Normally the Bloggers Bible Fast Track course retails at $119 but until the 22nd December 2008 it is available at a huge $40 discount. Get it for one week only at just $79!

An EXTRA $20 Discount For Become a Blogger Customers

Anyone who buys who has already bought Yaro Starak’s video course, Become a Blogger through my affiliate link will be sent a special discount code which will grant them an additional $20 discount! If you buy within the first week you get the course at HALF PRICE! If you would like to know more about Become a Blogger please see my two earlier posts about it.

If you have already bought Become a Blogger through my affiliate link and would like to get this additional discount but you have lost your discount code then contact me and let me know the email address you used to purchase Become a Blogger and I shall send it you.

In order to claim you discount, when you go to the PayPal sales page click the link that says ‘Enter gift voucher, reward or discount’ and this will drop down a box for you to enter the code.

Buy the Bloggers Bible Fast Track until 22nd December for just $79

Download a Free Sample

I have produced a free sample of the Fast Track containing 3 lessons taken from various parts of the course to give you an idea of the writing style, layout etc. Click here to download the free sample. Note that within the sample PDF, the buy now links say $119 which is the full version but if you click that link anytime before the 22nd of December, the purchase price will actually be just $79.

Affiliate Program Open – 50% Commission

I have opened up the affiliate program straight away so that affiliates can take advantage of the launch discount in their promotional efforts. Affiliate commissions are 50%, I am managing it with E-Junkie as I did with Traffic Rush. You will be able to either directly promote the paid product or if you prefer the ’soft sell’ approach, you can promote the free lessons and get credit for any sales that result from those. Full details of how to sign up, affiliate banners etc are available on my Bloggers Bibble Affiliates page.

What You Get with the Fast Track Version

Instant Download

This is an instant download of the entire course. No waiting for emails! The entire course has already been created, this isn’t one of those courses that gets built as it goes along! Work entirely at your own pace and not on somebody else’s schedule.

Step-by-Step Structure

The course is designed to be followed in order in an easy step-by-step manner. You get the first stuff first and each lesson builds on the previous. I quickly cover essential concepts so that you can cover all the bases and then come back to important ideas with more advanced strategies that you can implement once you’ve built a solid foundation.

Profit-Focus

This is a course about building a PROFITABLE blog, not a hobby blog. This goal is ingrained througout the entire course from the very first lesson. This avoids the trap that many bloggers fall into when they spend months building a blog only to make $0 profits. I made this mistake at the beginning of my blogging career too – but you can learn from my mistakes and build a profitable blog from the outset.

Real HOW-TO, no fluff!

This course excludes much of the theorhetical waffle that you find in so many information products these days. I’ll tell you what you need to know and then show you exactly what you need to do to put it into practice. This is an actionable course.

Free Action Guide

A bonus that is included with the Fast Track version which subscribers of the free lessons do not get is an easy-printable action plan. This is a check list showing you a quick recap of exactly what to do after each lesson including those activities which you will need to introduce on an on-going basis. This will make it very easy for you to not only consume the information but to actually TAKE ACTION with it. After all, knowledge without action is quite useless!

Buy the Bloggers Bible Fast Track until 22nd December for just $79

I Guarantee You’ll Make Your Money Back With This!

This course is designed to teach you how to build a profitable blog – one that is bringing in far more than the cost of the course each and every month! I guarantee you that if you implement the action steps in this course, then you will have earned back the cost of the course (hopefully a lot more!) within 3 months. If you haven’t, I’ll refund you the difference!

The Bloggers Bible Course Curriculum

The course is split into 49 self contained lessons organised into 12 core modules. These are as follows:

Module 1 – Introduction (5 lessons)

The introductory lessons discuss how to select a topic and direction for your blog, how to clearly define your goals, conduct some essential blog planning and prepare an initial post repository. I also give you a brief introduction to SEO as a foundation for later lessons.

Module 2 – Technical Setup (6 lessons)

The technical lessons cover everything you need to know to get your actual blog built. Everything from hosting to WordPress (the software of choice for blogging!), RSS feeds, stats tracking, contact forms, archive pages and some other technicalities. I also discuss the ‘launch’ process of your new blog in this module.

Module 3 – Basic Content (3 lessons)

Content is the backbone of any successful blog and although it can be a large subject, in this module I give you just the essential information to create some really solid content that you can begin to monetize without bogging you down in details that can be left until later.

Module 4 – Basic Monetization (5 lessons)

As this course is designed to enable you to build a profitable blog, we want to start monetization as quickly as possible. In this module I teach you how to effectively implement some of the easier strategies such as contextual advertising and affiliate marketing. These strategies can be implemented from the beginning and allow you to start generating an income as soon as the traffic starts to trickle in.

Module 5 – Traffic (5 lessons)

No traffic = no profits! This module introduces the topic of traffic with strategies can be implemented from the outset. I also discuss how to properly analyse your blog traffic so that you can make tweaks that boost it in the future.

Module 6 – Basic Link Building (3 lessons)

Another source of traffic is search engine traffic but this takes longer to build because it is entirely driven by the ability of your blog to rank highly for traffic-generating keywords. This in turn requires backlinks and so in this module I give you a few easy link building methods that you can begin to put to work straight away.

Module 7 – Social Media (6 lessons)

The final traffic source that I discuss (traffic is SO important!) is Social Media which is a huge subject. In this module I don’t try to cover it ALL – I just focus on those specific sites that have proven their ability to drive literally thousands of visitors and links to even a brand new blog.

Module 8 – Readership (2 lessons)

Building a profitable blog implies that you sell stuff to your readers. If you want that to happen you have to provide them with excellent value, look after them and nurture them. This module shows you how to do just that!

Module 9 – Maintenance (1 lesson)

Just like a car, a blog needs an occasional bit of maintenance work done. Before we dive into the advanced topics, I give you a quick lesson on essential blog maintenance to keep everything running in top condition.

Module 10 – Advanced Content (4 lessons)

There are millions of new blogs created every year. I firmy believe that there is always room for more blogs but if you are in a crowded niche then you need to stand out from the crowd – be different, be BETTER than the rest. You’re already creating good content but now that we’ve got all the essentials down its time to ramp up our efforts and create some truly outstanding content!

Module 11 – Advanced Monetization (6 lessons)

Standard monetization strategies like those in module 4 often have a certain cap to them. There’s only so much you can earn on a per visitor basis and this won’t be as high as you might like. However, if you are prepared to put in some extra effort I’ll give you some specific instructions for transforming your blog into a fully-blown business. Product creation, freebie marketing, membership sites, list building and more are all taught in this module.

Module 12 – Advanced Link Building (3 lessons)

Every blog post we write is an opportunity to increase our search engine traffic but this is only going to happen if we out-rank our competitors which is why link building is so important. This final module teaches you three specific strategies for building quality links – if you’re prepared to put the work in!

Buy the Bloggers Bible Fast Track until 22nd December for just $79