However, as pointed out by one of my readers on the weekend’s software project update, the maintenance of my software is going to be a big and continuous job. I want to focus my time on development of new features and don’t want my time to be sucked up by doing maintenance of all the sites that the software will support. This is an ideal candidate for outsourcing.

So, Tyrone’s report is quite timely as I’m at least thinking about it now even if I’m not quite ready to implement it. His free report is called Secrets of Outsourcing Experts Revealed and it’s quite a hefty 64 page PDF and focuses mainly on interviews with Tim Ferriss, Jeff Mills and John Jonas. I don’t know who the last two guys are but I have certainly heard of Tim Ferris of the 4 Hour Work Week fame, though I’ve still not read his book :-)

One reason I’ve always thought of outsourcing as something for ‘later’ is the money issue. It seems like one of those things where you need to earn the money first before you can afford to pay for staff. I was really surprised to read about how one of the guys interviewed in the report hires a full time PHP programmer in the Philippines for just $300 a month! If I could hire a PHP programmer to do all the maintenance for me for that kind of money, that would free up a lot of time to work on new features and get them released quicker.

The first 50 pages of the report concentrate on the interviews and then the remainder has some outsourcing resources such as project management software, sites to find workers etc. I haven’t yet watched the videos that accompany the report but I’ll probably have a look at those in due course.

What Software Am I Developing?

The aim of this project is to build a paid membership site that provides tools for Internet marketers. Specially the tools will be designed to automatically build backlinks to your websites. Over time, a comprehensive and integrated suite of tools will be developed but I am starting with a single tool to automate social bookmarking. I have at least a dozen tools planned but will not be announcing details until nearer their release.

When Will The Tools Be Ready?

As any true software developer will tell you, it will be ready when it’s ready :-) However I have started to work more closely to a schedule in recent weeks and I think it’s about time I made myself accountable and gave some time estimates. The software will be released in phases. Each release will contain new tools, enhancements to earlier tools and a price increase! However, the very first thing I am doing is releasing a free version which I am calling Release #0. My plan for the first couple of releases is as follows:

• December ‘09 – Release #0 (FREE): Social bookmarking tool
• March ‘10 – Release #1: (~$25/mo):  Enhanced bookmarker + 2 new tools

Beta Testing

Even though I have been developing software for 12 years, this is the first time I have developed a web application and it’s quite different to what I have done in the past. All software has bugs but I am expecting to hit some unforeseen problems initially because that’s just the way things work. One thing I never want to do, is provide buggy software to paying members – that is of course a big no-no.

Therefore from Release #1 onwards, all new features will first of all be released to the free members for a trial period. This gives me two distinct advantages. From a software testing point of view, it gives me a chance to have the software used by real people. In order to encourage the free members to test the software thoroughly for me I shall offer an incentive for those who report new bugs to me – this will be free access to the paid version for some period of time. I’ll work out the details later.

Another advantage of course is that this strategy works as a marketing tool. By giving free members access to the full version for some time, they may like the paid features and decide to upgrade.

Restricting Members

Despite my testing strategy outlined above, I am still concerned about the initial free launch in particular. As much as I want to eventually bring in as many members (free as well as paid) as possible, I don’t want to suddenly have thousands of people descending on my brand new software the first week of it’s launch! If I got any problems I could be overwhelmed with bug reports.

So ideally, I want to restrict memberships though at this time I am not entirely sure how I am going to manage that. I am using aMember to manage the actual memberships but as far as I can see it doesn’t have a built it mechanism to restrict members so I think this is something I will need to code myself into my backend software.

The long term aim is to open up the memberships slowly at first to allow me find find and fix initial teething problems quickly and then gradually open it up to more and more members until it is stable and I can lift all restrictions. At this time, I’m still a little hazy on the details. However one thing I will say is that I am likely to invite initial members from a list of those who have explicitly shown an interest in the software and not from my general blog readership. I have been building a prospects quietly for some time now. If you’d like to be added to the list, fill out the form below:

Development Progress

Up until around the time I went to Florida, I had been really struggling with development. I first announced the project almost a year ago and I spent the first few months faffing around with learning PHP and trying to figure out a lot of the basics such as what PHP framework I should use, how my code would be integrated, how I would manage members and so on. This stuff took way longer than I expected!

When I finally got around to starting actual development work I still encountered a lot of problems and for the longest time it felt like all I did was hit problem after problem after problem. It felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all which is why I didn’t really have very much to say in the way of updates. Over the last couple of months since I’ve been back from holiday I seem to have managed to get over that hump and things are progressing much more smoothly now so I am hopeful that I will actual hit my target dates hence why I have finally felt brave enough to mention them!

If you have any questions about the project feel free to ask in the comments :-)

Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $4,858.88
• Bluehost – $605
• Membership Site Mastermind – $328.45
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Traffic Rush – $44.87
• The Immediate Edge – $25
• Twitter Rockstar – $21.24

Total Income Earned During October 2009 – $5,937.04

The income boost this month is of course down to my birthday promotion of the Bloggers Bible which I documented shortly afterwards. This is sadly another one off so next month I expect it to go down to more regular levels.

Subscribers

Subs at beginning of October: 11,507

Subs at the end of October: 11,752

New subscribers in October 09: 245

This is quite odd – the growth in subscribers dropped quite dramatically this month and I’m not sure why. The traffic dipped slightly this month (in the next section) but only by about 5% whereas the subscribers dropped by about 50% but I don’t know why.

Traffic

You can see a discernable drop in traffic this month where my website was down for almost a whole day. Other than that, it’s been the usual pattern and numbers as every other month.

Conclusion

My birthday promotion brought me a nice boost in income but I don’t think there will be anything like that coming up anytime soon so I imagine this will remain the record month for some time to come in terms of income.

Last month I toyed with the idea of perhaps boosting income from this blog but I have abandonned the idea now in favour of still continuing to concentrate on my software project which is coming along better now, if still slowly.

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What is Membership Site Mastermind?

MSM is an intense six week course designed to teach you everything you need to know about planning, developing, marketing, maintaining and possibly even selling a membership site with the aim of bringing in an income of $100,000 a year.

The course is delivered in 6 weekly modules, mainly in video and accompanied by lots of supporting material and additional resources. Even though the course is presented over a fairly short period of time you are quite likely to need longer to actually put a lot of the material into action. I joined a few months back when it first opened and as well as the course materials Yaro runs regular live calls in which members can ask anything they want and has an active support forum.

To get a good idea of what the course is all about, the best thing you can do is have a read of Yaro’s free report, the Membership Site Masterplan. This outlines the whole process in a condensed report and will give you a very good idea of whether or not the full course will be useful to you. And if not, it’s a brilliant report in it’s own right – you can read my review of it that I wrote last week.

Payment Options & Lifetime Money Back Guarantee

Yaro offers two payment options. Firstly you can pay in 3 monthly installments of $297 for a total cost of $891 or, option 2 allows you to save $144 by paying $747 up front.

Yaro is unique in that he offers a LIFETIME money back guarantee on his products! You don’t have to prove anything – if for any reason you feel that Membership Site Mastermind was not for you, you’ll get your money back.

Click here to order Membership Site Mastermind

Anyway, I thought it would be beneficial to have another read through the report to see how well it applies now. I’ve written a fairly in-depth review here of both how it applies to my own upcoming membership site and how I think it would apply to other membership site models.

Chapter 1 – Preeminence & Building Proof

What preeminence is, why you need it and how to build it. Basically this is about demonstrating to your audience that you are qualified to offer them the content of your site. Yaro’s course & report is very much geared towards teaching and although that’s a somewhat narrow focus in my opinion, you do still need to give people a reason to buy from you so this is an important chapter.

I must admit I feel a lot more comfortable about the idea of launching a membership site now, than I would have done 2 years ago when I was a complete unknown.

Chapter 2 – Marketing

This was a weak chapter in my opinion as I believe that marketing is just about the most important part of anything you ever want to sell. Without potential customers you cannot make any income! Yaro stresses the importance of an email list which I totally agree with but there is so much more he could have included in this chapter. I have a lot of marketing ideas for my own project and very few of them were mentioned here.

However he also discusses joint ventures and the use of affiliates which is very useful as I have not managed this particularly well in the past.

Chapter 3 – Technology

A membership site is probably one of the more technically demanding ways of making money online and the technology can scare people away. Even I, a true techie at heart, found all the technological options a bit overwhelming. This chapter talks about protecting resources, taking payments, adding content features such as forums, email list services and affiliate management.

There’s no waffle, Yaro clearly gives several options in each category, and discusses them all in detail. This chapter is amazingly useful and it applies to any kind of membership site that you might want to build.

Chapter 4 – Content and Pricing

As mentioned, Yaro’s work is quite strongly geared towards lesson based content and I personally believe that this is a flawed model in many cases because you’ll run out of content to deliver! Yaro himself has launched 3 membership sites and whilst they have all made him a lot of money, they are still on a fixed-term timeframe. I consider this to be a single sale spread out over multiple payments.

In my mind a TRUE membership site is one that can keep it’s members for YEARS, not just a few weeks or months. My own project is delivering software tools which of course most people can’t do because it requires programming knowledge but one of my favourite posts that I have written is 6 Models for Membership Sites and there are at least 4 there that fit in with more traditional forms of content that Yaro discusses, and can keep your members for as long as they remain interested.

This chapter also talks about pricing and it’s quite interesting as most people are frightened to charge money for their services!

Chapter 5 – Phychological Triggers

This stuff could have been put into the marketing section really as it’s in your marketing campaigns that you might want to use these triggers. It’s all about giving people a reason to buy from you and to buy right now. Most people who choose to buy later, simply don’t buy at all! Very interesting chapter, I enjoyed it a lot and intend to use some of these triggers in my own work. Indeed, I have already have  just last week with my Bloggers Bible birthday promotion which brought in a rather nice big payday :-)

Chapter 6 – Prelaunch and Launch

This chapter talks about the steps to take in order to actually launch your site and also the pre-launch process which aims to build buzz so that your launch goes well. This is really good stuff and a lot of it borrows from Jeff Walkers Product launch Formula. I paid $2,000 for a that course!

This chapter also talkes about sales letters and copywriting and I was a little disappointed with this section as it doesn’t really present any alternatives to the traditional long-form sales letter which is something that I personally loathe! Many products these days would do better with a short introductory video or something similar and he could have branched  out a bit here.

Chapter 7 – Dealing with Attrition

Attrition is the rate at which people drop out of your site and it’s a real problem! Many people (me included!) get very excited when crunching numbers based on an ever-growing membership base but if people are dropping out on a regular basis you’re wont really be growing your business. This chapter discusses solid ways of dealing with it and minimising it – very useful indeed.

Chapter 8 – Putting Your Membership Site on Autopilot

I’m a big fan of automation – my own software project is all about automation! This chapter discusses how to implement systems that allow you to automate and outsource as much of the work as possible so that once your site is stable, you don’t have to do very much work to keep it going. It then becomes more of a residual income.

Chapter 9 – Selling Your Membership Site

When I first looked at this my initial thoughts were, why on earth would you want to sell your site if it brings in a regular income for you? However, when done correctly, a site can sell for several years times it’s earnings which can lead to a massive cash injection and of course it also frees your time to work on your next big project with all that money behind you.

Yaro teaches how to prepare your site to sell, determine what it is worth and how to find buyers.

Conclusion

Many people think a membership site is just about delivering some content but there is SO much more to it than that and this comprehensive report really does a great job of giving you the big picture even though it’s weak in a couple of places. The report is free so be sure to download your copy and if you are serious about starting a membership site, consider joining Membership Site Mastermind when it opens for the last time this year, next week on the 27th October.

Last week I ran a similar promotion for my birthday and reduced my course about making money blogging down by 68% for just 24 hours. I expected to get a good handful of sales but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it brought in quite a few more than I expected and I made well over $4,000 on that day! That’s more than I usually make in a couple of months!

The Reality v The Myth

You often see Internet Marketers use days like these to promote their other products. They will want to show you how you can make $10k or $100k in a single day. It looks damned impressive and when you can back it up with proof of earnings, it’s a serious lure for the uninitiated. I don’t try to prove my earnings – I just report it and assume that people will believe that I’m not just making up the numbers :-)

The problem with these kinds of days – the big payday’s is that although they are entirely possible to create, it’s a little more complicated than it seems. I’m delighted by the payday I got for my birthday but I know it’s a one-off so I just want to bust some of the myths that go around about these things.

You Need a Product

To have a big payday, you need to sell something! Though technically, it doesn’t have to be your own product – you could sell somebody else’s but then you are relying on that person’s launch and so you’re working to somebody else’s timescale. To create your own big payday you need to have your own product that you can sell and it needs to be something substantial. Unless you are going for massive volume of sales, you need to be able to have a reasonably high price tag.

Building the Audience Takes Time

This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in all of Internet marketing. I don’t care if you are a blogger, an affiliate marketer, an ebook writer, developer of Internet tools or whatever else you may do – you need some kind of audience to which you promote your product. This is often built up using an email list and this is the part that takes time to build. To get people onto an email list in the first place you need an audience in itself – some kind of traffic.

For me, this blog draws in the traffic from the search engines and other sources and it directs people to my email list which sends out the free version of the Bloggers Bible lessons every week. I introduced the Bloggers Bible just under a year ago, at the end of October 2008 and started building my email list then. During that year, over 7,000 people have subscribed and that is what gave me the audience for last week’s birthday promotion. If I only had a few hundred people on the list, I’d only have got a fraction of the sales – it’s all a numbers game.

This is very often the factor that Internet Marketing gurus leave out. There are ways to use other people’s audiences – advertise on somebody else’s list for example, but once again you’re not in control so for best effect, you need to build your own list and this is something that takes time.

You Need a USP (Unique Selling Prospect)

Whatever you sell, you need to give your audience a reason to buy it and in the case of a big payday, you need to give them a reason to buy it right now! There are various tactics for doing this but two very common ones are the urgency factor and the scarcity factor. Urgency is simple – you have your offer open for a limited period of time. In my case, I offered my discount for just 24 hours. I ended up running over for a few hours but it was still very limited. The other common tactic is scarcity where you only offer a limited number of your product.

The Payday is Usually a One-Off

I was able to run my promotion because it was my birthday. It’s not something I can repeat over and over. Firstly, most of the people who are interested in buying will have now done so therefore I would not make as many sales next time. Also, if I was run these offers on a regular basis then the urgency factor simply disappears because the unique offer becomes a lie! Have you seen some products that are launched, and then closed down and then re-launched some time later for no apparent reason? I must say, this is something that annoys me a little bit because I can see no reason for it other than as a marketing tactic.

The Reality of the Big Payday

Let me backup and show you exactly what needed to happen for me to be able to pull in over $4,000 in a single day. First of all I needed a product and it took me a few months of hard work to produce the Bloggers Bible. Then came the promotion and here is where we need to back up a bit more. I promoted the course on the blog and it was a combination of the existing subscriber base of my blog and then the continued on-going traffic that gave me the 7,000+ subscribers to which I ran the promotion.

However, my blog has been running over two years – there’s now almost 400 posts and I have spent countless hours building it up and promoting it. Without that I would not have RSS subscribers and I would not get the search engine traffic that I do month after month.

The reality is that I could never have had a day like that without the 2 years of effort that went before it. Of course I’ve also earned a lot of money month after month in those two years as well as last week’s big day but the point being that some marketers will try to hype the big payday and make it look like something that can be achieved very easily by a complete newcomer which is not really the case.

For those who are interested, full sales stats will of course be reported in the October stats report.

As mentioned earlier in the week today is my birthday and for today only as a celebration I have dropped the price of the Fast Track version of Bloggers Bible to just $38! The offer is live right now and will run for 24 hours until tomorrow, same time.

Click here to buy Bloggers Bible Fast Track for just $38

This is a one-time offer and tomorrow the price goes back up to $119 so if you were thinking of buying, now is definitely the time!

The fast track version of the Bloggers Bible is the PDF version of the course which weighs in at almost 200 pages! The email course which is delivered in weekly lessons will always remain completely free but for those who want to work faster, I made the Fast Track. You can download a free sample of the PDF which contains 3 free lessons to give you an idea of what you are getting.

I’m based in the UK but the vast majority of my subscribers are based in the US so I will be running the promotion on PST time. The price will go down to $38 at 9am PST / 2pm EST / 5pm UK time on Thursday 15th October and go back up again 24 hours later on Friday 16th. I will make another blog post when the discount is live and I’ll also be announcing it on my Twitter feed.

Where Did the Sales Come From?

I made three sales, two high priced ones at over $700 each and a lower one, all of a membership site called Teaching Sells. This originally opened up in October 2007 and I joined it but didn’t get around to reviewing it on my blog until April 2008 when they launched a $1 trial.

It’s this review, written in April ‘08 that brought in the $1,659 in sales in September ‘09 – almost a year and a half later! I also made some sales back then too but the reason this has paid out now is due to the way that cookies work with affiliate programs.

How Cookies & Affiliate Programs Work

The vast majority of affiliate programs work by storing what is known as a cookie on the computer of anyone who clicks on the affiliate link. A cookie is simply a tiny text file with some information in it. In the case of affiliate programs it would store the ID of the affiliate who referred that customer. Cookies have an expiration date and with many affiliate programs, they last a long time.

What this means is that if a customer, Bob clicks on an affiliate link of mine today then a cookie is stored in his computer with my affiliate ID. But Bob might not want to buy the product today, or next week or next month. However, as long as that cookie is on Bob’s computer, if he goes back at a later date and follows through to make that purchase, I will get credit for the sale.

Many cookies last 3, or 6 months, some are even a lifetime cookie that never expire. I had a look at the sales report from Teaching Sells. The two high priced sales that I made came from the same referring link – that review post in April and the other was from a stats post. When they clicked through to those links, that would have put that cookie on their computer.

In September, Teaching Sells opened its doors again for a limited time. Usually I would have promoted it but this occurred whilst I was away on holiday with no Internet access so I completely missed the opportunity and it was all over by the time I got back. However… anyone who was previously a member of Teaching Sells, including all those people who signed up for the $1 trial would have been on their mailing list and would have received the promotional emails that the Teaching Sells guys came out with.

When those three people got those emails and decided to make a purchase, my affiliate link was still stored in that cookie on their computer from my original review post back in April 2008 hence how I got credited for the sales!

I hope that has clarified the source of the unexpected sales in the September stats and it just goes to show that a blog post can bring in money for a very long time, even if you happen to be on holiday :-)

Income

• Teaching Sells – $1,659
• Bluehost – $580
• Membership Site Mastermind – $194.37
• Private Advertising – $191.60
• The Bloggers Bible – $114.06
• Traffic Rush – $89.74
• Unique Article Wizard – $80.40
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $18.27

Total income earned during September ‘09: $2,927.44

The income took an unexpected jump this month due to Teaching Sells. I had to scratch my head over that one! How on earth could I earn $1,659 on something that closed months ago? I have a post about that coming up :-)

One thing I noticed this time is that I have been reporting my Bluehost income incorrectly – my commission is reported in UK pounds but I list it as US dollars for consistency but I was reporting $95 per sale (or $65 if it goes through my old links), but it’s actually only, $90 – boooo lol :)

I was pleased to see that even if I take off Teaching Sells, which is a one off as it is closed again now, the income was back into 4 figures (there really must be a summer slump) at $1,268. Good timing really, as I really did overspend on my holiday to Florida!

Subscribers

Usually I would use the stats from the previous month to compare against to determine the subscriber growth but of course I didn’t do the stats for last month. However, on the FeedCompare graph and I see the first number reported for the beginning of the month (not quite accurate as it’s the 2nd today but close enough!) and use that.

Subs at beginning of September: 10,961

Subs at end of September: 11,507

New subscribers in Sep ‘09: 546

Traffic

Same old same old more or less… well not quite actually. I’ve noticed that I am no longer earning money from Twitter Rockstar which is surprising as my Twitter Guide promotes it heavily. I checked the affiliate links and they are all working fine so I decided to have a look at the traffic and that revealed my problem.

The Twitter Guide pages – namely the landing page and page 1 of the guide itself used to be very high trafficked pages on my blog but not anymore! Well, it’s still fairly high but no where near as high as before so I’m not making sales because the pages are not getting the traffic they used to. And why not? Easy – my guide ranked number #1 on Google for the search term “twitter guide” for the longest time but it has dropped down now. It’s at #4 today but I had a look the other day and it was at 6 or 7 if I recall. It just goes to show that the number #1 listing gets a LOT more traffic than others even on the first page.

Conclusion

I’ve said this many times before but this month really is proof of the power of a monetized blog as a source of residual income. As usual, all income earned here is from work done a very long time ago and yet continues to bring in a decent income month after month with the occasional big boost.

As I discussed in my 2 year anniversary post recently, the progress on my Software Project is steady but excruciatingly slow. I’ve been taking a closer look at time scales this month and because the first release will be a free one, it will not be bringing me any additional income for a few more months which means that my only source of income for a while longer continues to be this blog.

I don’t have time to take on any new projects but I might be able to make a few tweaks here and there, possibly post a little more – perhaps try and bring in some fresh search traffic without too much additional effort. I’ll keep you posted, pun intended :)

Freedom Is Still Paramount

My reasons for quitting my day job were simply the desire for freedom and that hasn’t changed one bit. I love that I can do just whatever I like, whenever I like and never have to answer to anybody. Of course this freedom has a downside too – it’s very easy to abuse and I have done quite a bit of that in 2009 in particular.

2008 was a really rough year for me on a personal level. I was reeling from two broken relationships and I moved home 3 times. My whole world turned upside-down and I had to re-adjust to a whole new life. This took a massive toll on my business as I simply wasn’t able to work for much of that year – I was at a very low point for much of it and had no enthusiasm. But the freedom that the business gives me allowed me to get through that – I simply don’t know how I could have coped if I had been in a regular job.

2009 has been a polar opposite. I got my own place, I made a whole bunch of great new friends, I met a new partner, I started karate and snowboarding, I’ve been to music festivals, to DisneyLand in Florida and basically had the time of my life! But… the business paid the price. Once again, I have done very little work this year but at least it’s for happy reasons rather than sad ones but still the fact that I have the freedom to do that is so wonderful and that’s why I could simply never go back to being employed again.

A Shift Away From IM Back to Software

In my first anniversary post I talked about the difficulty of coming up with a long term business model that works online in a world where technology moves so fast. At the time I had started experimenting with AdSense and I said that the second part of my master plan was top secret. That was of course the software project and it’s actually quite shocking to me to realise that I was first thinking about doing it a year ago and I’ve still not released anything! Time really can fly when you’re self employed!

However, at least this second year I have felt more focused even if I have not actually put the hours in. Over the last year I have cut out all other commitments so I literally do nothing but work on my software project and this blog now. That feels much better to me than in the first year where I seemed to be all over the place with lots of different project and I always seemed to be knee deep in several training courses which were all conflicting with one another.

Writing software is much more natural to me than Internet Marketing but of course I can apply everything I have learned about IM to market the software that I am now writing. I am hoping that will put me in a unique position as most programmers are not marketers and most marketers are not programmers :-)

Even though I have been working on this project in one way or another for a year and have still barely touched the surface, it still feels like the right thing to do. For me the only business model that I am interested in now is a membership site.  Therefore I have no interest in creating more ebooks, courses or anything of that nature. It’s not easy to come up with an idea for a membership site that can keep members for months or ideally, years on end. I listed a few membership site models in a previous post and online services was one of those models.

Even if the particular site that I am building does not draw in enough paid members, the skills I learn building that site can then be used to build something else so if my first idea fails, I have the skills to try something else. The software skills I am learning will open doors for me that marketing alone simply cannot do.

The Blog Plods On

This blog has most certainly taken a back seat this year but what is fascinating to me is that it continues to make a fairly decent income month after month after month from work I did well over a year ago. It has become a truly passive income. Just as well too, considering how long my software is taking me :-)

Of course now that I am only developing software and not really doing much in the way of IM or social media etc, there simply isn’t much to blog about and I can’t see that changing in the foreseeable future. However the goal of the blog remains the same as it always – to chronicle my efforts in making a living online. What you read here is real. I’m not some guru who’s made millions online and has a hyped up blog to sell the know-how. I’m a regular person who’s been struggling to make a living for the last two years and who has discussed all the efforts along the way.

Income Earned

• September ‘08 – $958
• October ‘08 – $1,153
• November ‘08 – $1,392
• December ‘08 – $1,498
• January ‘09 – $2,439
• February ‘09 – $1,352
• March ‘09 – $1,745
• April ‘09 – $1,776
• May ‘09 – $1,627
• June ‘09 – $1,062
• July ‘09 – $960
• August ‘09 (Estimated) – $950

I was away on holiday for August last month so I couldn’t do my usual stats but I have done my business accounts and August came out virtually identical to July so I’ve put in estimated earnings. The total comes to $16,912 which averages at $1409 a month. Like the previous year there’s no real pattern in the earnings though they have declined fairly steadily in the last few months. I do wonder if the drastic slow down in blogging has been partly responsible for that. It’s hard to say.

I’m annoyed with myself that another year on, I’m still basically earning about the same as I was this time last year but that’s exactly why it can be useful to take time out at pertinent times like these to reflect :-) My excuse for the first year was that my life basically sucked so I couldn’t work properly and my excuse for the second year was that I was having too much fun to work properly so now it’s time to find a balance and fit in some more work amongst all that fun :-)

Happiness Still > Money

At the end of the first year’s post I stated that happiness was far more important to me than money and of course that is still true. But it’s easier for me to say that because I have money! A lot of new readers to the blog don’t understand how I am able to survive on such a small income and ask if I have any other income streams. The answer to this question is no – I only earn what I show in these monthly stat reports. Well slightly less in fact as I have a few expenses such as hosting, and some services I pay for.

The reason I am able to basically survive with such a low income is due to savings. I was fortunate enough to build up a large amount of equity in my house which I sold in the beginning of 2008 (right before the housing market in the UK crashed!) putting a large amount of cash in my bank account. I now rent a house so that I can live off those savings until I am earning enough to support myself properly and feel secure enough to buy another property. I have enough savings to continue my current lifestyle for several more years so although I am annoyed with myself for slacking so much this year, I have a few more years of slacking potential left before I run out of cash!

What’s In Store For Year 3?

I am 100% dedicated to getting my software released. That is my one and only goal and I don’t care about anything else (work wise I mean). The income from this blog could drop to zero and even though that would be scary, I will continue working on the software project without getting sidetracked by anything else which might come with a lure of easy money.

One personality trait which I do possess is persistence! Nobody can call me a quitter :-) I may suck at getting things done quickly but when I decide I want something I will not stop until I get it. This year I REALLY want to make that full time income which is about $6,000 per month. I’m confident that I shall achieve that goal at some point in 2010 but if not I guess I’ll be even more annoyed with myself in my 3 year anniversary post :-)

As for the blog, I’m not sure what the future is… as long as I don’t reach my goal I will continue to have something to talk about but once I have released my software and have enough paying members to support myself, I’m not sure what will be left to say. I intend to keep posting monthly stats as long as they are relevant but after a certain point it’s really just showing off unless you have something new to teach.

I envision at least a year’s worth of work on my software project after the first release simply because there are so many features that I want to implement. However, the marketing will remain pretty much the same for each release so once again, I’m just not sure what there would be to blog about. I know what I am doing with my time work wise, but I don’t know what the future holds for this blog!

The Meaty Content

With any work there is always some kind of activity which is the most important ‘meat’ of the work. For a piece of software its developing the features of that software, for a blog it’s writing the posts, for an ebook business its writing the content of the book and so on. This activity is always something to spend a lot of time on because without it, you have no business.

Software that doesn’t do anything is not software, a blog with no posts is just a dead blog and a book with no words is, well, non existent :-) For any kind of business its important that you figure out what the meaty content is and prioritise your work around that. Often this work is harder to do than other stuff and so it can be easy to procrastinate and avoid it by keeping yourself busy with other less important work. However there is a time and a place for that too.

Adding the Polish

If you’ve ever started a blog, did you fall into the trap of spending an age fidding with your theme and plugins before actually getting any posts written? This is a common pitfall and is really just a way of procrastinating. However saying that, the polish to any business is still a necessary activity in the vast majority of cases.

Whilst a blog, software or ebook doesn’t really need to look good in order to do its job, it really does help – especially if you plan to make money from what you are producing. I don’t think there’s any doubt that this polish work needs to get done, the question is when should you do it?

It’s this question in my software project that prompted me to write this post today. Before I stopped work for my holiday I had completed the functionality of a specific chunk of work which I was pleased with. It works but it doesn’t look pretty. I am not done though as I still have another couple of important features to implement so I have the dilemma – do I continue working on those new features which need to get done before I can release or do I stop and polish up what I have done already?

With any work that is somewhat ongoing such as web software or a blog, you’ll soon find that you’re never really done with the content so it can be hard to know when to polish. If the work is more finite such as a book then the decision is clearer – you can get the first draft of your book written before you even think about polishing it up.

What I’ve decided to do is alternate to some extent. Now that I’ve completed a major chunk of work I’ll take a break from development to add some polish but I won’t try and do everything as that can be a never-ending job in itself. Once I’ve added a little polish I’ll develop another specific feature and then stop to polish and so on. For a blogger I would suggest concentrating on post content for the most part but setting aside some time every now and then to just polish things up the blog and keep doing this on a regular basis.

Keeping up Your Skills

With most online businesses there is some kind of learning curve at the beginning and then there is ongoing study. Obviously if you are starting something you have never done before then you need to invest in a period of study before you can really get any work done at all. In my case, I needed to learn the PHP language and a few web technologies – this took much longer than I anticipated.

If you’re starting a blog you might want to learn about blogging first but with anything like this, there is usually an inexhaustible supply of free information out there and its easy to get so caught up in the reading and studying that you never actually get anything done. I remember when I first started this business 2 years ago, and I broke down where my time was going I realised I was doing this very thing.

On the other hand, another mistake that people make is that they learn what they need to get started but then they just stop learning. This is a mistake, especially with an online business, because things change – technology changes, new sites, tools and trends come and go, and if you don’t keep up you’ll find yourself left behind. It’s always a good idea to keep yourself up to date using whatever sources are relevant to your work whether that’s a few blogs, an industry magazine (PHP Architect magazine and some blogs in my case), podcasts or whatever.

Balancing It All Out

Personally I find that the meaty content work is the hardest, and requires the most concentration and enthusiasm. It’s not easy for me to start developing something new and challenging at 4pm on a Friday afternoon but I can quite easily catch up on a few blogs at that time. There’s always some work that’s easier than others and always some times or days when you are more or less motivated than others.

Always set aside time for your most important work and do that work when you are at your best but also allow time for other work so that you don’t neglect the other little details.

I’m back home now but wow that was one exhausting holiday! I’ve decided to take another week off to re-adjust to the time zone, get back into the swing of things and spend time with my loved ones who I missed. I’ll be back at work on the 21st September ;-)

I still wont be doing stats as I have missed the date now and I actually don’t have a huge amount of spare time but I have been catching up with emails and can respond to comments now!

As a result, there will be no stats post this month and all blog comments and emails will have to wait until around the middle of September. The little time I do have online is reserved for my special people back home :-)

Speak to you all soon!

Hopefully I will have Internet access (if not I’m flying back lol!) at the villa we are staying in so I should be able to keep on top of email though I doubt I will be posting much. I’ll try and do a stats post at the end of the month but I’m not promising anything.I’m due back in the UK on the 10th September and plan to be back working around the 15th.

Pricing / Volume Considerations

With most products you can choose to price cheaply and aim to make your profit on high volumes or price high and sell fewer numbers but make more profit on each sale. I’ve already said that with my software I’d prefer to have a higher price point and fewer members. There’s actually several reasons for this:

Customer Support

As soon as you start charging money for any product you have yourself a customer and in the case of a product which has an on-going fee, you need to offer those customers support. This is a big issue in my case as I want to ensure that all members are fully supported in case of any issues. Therefore the more members I have the more time is potentially taken up by customer support which makes a strong case for having fewer members and a higher price point.

Technology

A higher number of members means more work for my server to do. I don’t actually think this one will be much of an issue unless it had to support a great many members in which case I’d be making so much money that I’d just pay somebody else to deal with it :-) However it still makes a case for fewer members.

The Exclusivity Factor

The idea of the tools that I am developing is that they will automate many of the tasks which have to be done manually – this gives the member a massive time advantage over people who don’t have access to such tools. Therefore the fewer people who have access to the software, the more of a benefit it is to those who do. It’s probably a relatively minor point as there are of course competing products out there but it’s still a consideration.

Competing Products

There are already products out there that do the kinds of things that I want to do. None of them are quite the same of course but I need to keep them in mind. There’s one new product in particular that has been released recently which is very similar to what my first paid version would look like and it’s introductory price is much less than I was planning to charge for my first version which is the main reason I am having a re-think!

It’s all very well deciding how much I want to charge but I need to stay competitive as well so if there is another product out there that does the same kind of thing for half the price then I doubt I’d get many customers!

My Pricing / Release Plan

I’m not just building a single tool but a suite of tools. However each one obviously will take time to develop so the idea is that I will release new tools incrementally and increase the price as I go along. As new tools are added to the suite, the whole product becomes more valuable hence justifying the price increase. Existing members will only ever pay the amount they signed up for as an incentive for early members.

Initially I had planned on 3 paid releases with the first version starting at $50 (well probably $49 or $47 for marketing purposes) but I have had a re-think and now decided to release 4 versions instead starting at $25 so the $50 version will have a lot more functionality than originally planned.

So that’s good news for the customer but I need to make sure that I am still being profitable. The problem with locking in the price is that if I get all my potential members on board at the earliest release with the lowest price point then I’m not going to get many members paying the higher prices later on down the line.

The way to solve this problem is to restrict the number of members that I take on board with each release. This is something I had decided on before as I want to use the initial members as testers too but I hadn’t really thought about the numbers. I shall have a think about it more carefully nearer the time.

This is all rather moot at the moment as I haven’t even released the free version yet and I’ll no doubt change my mind again but I like to post about my thoughts as I go along!

The way I work is that the vast majority of comments are automatically approved and then whenever I check my blog comments I’ll manually go through them and delete any that I don’t want on there. Sometimes I’ll be away for a couple of days or something so a few rogue comments get through.

Now there are some people who have been commenting on my blog for some time and do genuinely leave personal comments but they still use a keyword as their name. If you are one of those people then I urge you to re-think because your comments are getting deleted so it really is a waste of your time!

Furthermore, the spam button is right next to the delete button and sometimes I wake up feeling a little tired and I simply spam them all rather than just deleting them. I know it’s a little harsh but there are plenty of other blogs out there to comment on and it just looks lame when you comment as “web design seo” or whatever. So be warned, if you continue to comment here using keywords as your name, you are likely to end up in the spam filter on the Akismet system!

I don’t mind if you use a name with a keyword, “Mikael @ Retire Rich” for example is fine, because then at least I can address you if I choose to reply but if you choose to use a keyword in this way please be sure to leave a decent comment because if you catch me in a grumpy mood I might still mark you as spam anyway :-)

When I started the experiment the page ranked number #49 and had a PageRank of 2. I have been trying to track backlinks on this blog for several months but none of the tools I use are accurate – they vary wildly from month to month so I now don’t bother looking at the number of links that are supposedly reported and instead just check the rankings – after all, that’s the only thing that ultimately matters anyway.

Soon after starting to submit a few articles to UAW I noticed that the page had moved up to PR3 but it hadn’t really moved up in the rankings so it wasn’t really at that useful. I then got distracted with my software project so didn’t submit any more articles for a while and forgot all about it.

Then a couple of weeks ago I submitted another one and decided to have a look today to see if there had been any change. My Bloggers Bible page is now at PR4 and has climbed in the ranks accordingly. Today it sits at position #24. This is still not high enough to actually bring in any significant traffic but it’s an improvement.

A Breakdown of the Article Stats

Here’s a shot of my article list in the UAW dashboard. Let me explain the dates as it’s a bit confusing… The date ’scheduled for’ is when I actually first submitted the article into the UAW system for submission. It then begins submitting it according to the schedule you set. As I have mine set to a fairly low 20 links per day, it can take a while for these to finish. The ‘date submitted’ is the date the last article was submitted.

So for example, if you look at the second article in the list – the SEO one, I submitted it near the end of February and the links were still coming in at the end of April – two months in all. This would probably explain why I didn’t see much in the way of results for a while. I wonder how I would be doing now if I had been submitting articles more regularly.

Submitting these articles using Unique Article Wizard is the only work I have done to increase the ranking of my target page. What this service does is take your original article, twists it around and submits unique copies of it to hundreds (they claim thousands!) of blogs and article directories on a schedule of your choosing.

I have set mine up to submit to 20 directories a day and it has actually submitted most of the articles to several hundred directories over the following days and weeks. Not all of them show up in Google of course but that’s why I now prefer to check actual rankings than worry about how many links are out there.

How UAW Works

The way UAW works is that it uses your category keywords to determine appropriate places to submit your links. The better your categories and the more popular the topic of your article, the more links you’ll end up with.

Now I reserved judgment on this for a while because even though I could see all these links flooding in (many of them show up as Trackbacks in my admin panel in WordPress), I wasn’t sure how effective they would be as many of them are PR0 only.

PR0 links are the bottom of the pile – you’ll get more juice from a single high PR link than thousands of PR0’s but the thing is that good quality links are not easy to get and these ones are – they are a doddle. I have gained over 4000 links from just 7 articles so far.

This is not high quality but it’s quantity. It’s easy to do especially if you can rework existing content to use as article fodder and using something like Unique Article Wizard is dead quick too because the submissions take just a few seconds to upload and then they just do the rest automatically.

So to those of you who were asking before, yes now I DO recommend the UAW service :-)

A Side Note on Affiliate Marketing

Recently I posted a condensed guide to making a 4-figure income with your blog and I stated that a lot of the money I make is from affiliate marketing. This kind of post you are reading now is an example of that but what you’re seeing here is an approach that is fairly aggressive but avoids the hard sell.

I could write a review of UAW but that would immediately be dismissed as a sales pitch, which would be accurate. Instead, I much prefer to promote programs that I actually use and then visibly demonstrate exactly what I’m doing and how it is working for me – this is real and avoids all the hype. I have seen quite a few sales of UAW trickle in since I started the article marketing series and yet not until this post have I actually said that I recommended it.

Also, right now, in this side note what I am doing here is being transparent. I don’t need to cloak my affiliate links or try to hide the fact that I am promoting UAW with these posts as that would just insult your intelligence. In my experience I find the up-front way of marketing in a way that is authentic to be far more effective than just trying to hype products up and do traditional hard-sell marketing.

It’s the approach that I use, that works for me and that I recommend to others. Don’t be afraid to promote stuff heavily but do it in an authentic way and provide value as you do so.

Income

• Membership Site Mastermind – $278.92
• Bluehost – $270
• Traffic Rush – $135.07
• Become a Blogger – $84.96
• Unique Article Wizard – $80.40
• Twitter Rockstar – $63.19
• Private Advertising – $47.75

Total income earned during July 2009 – $960.29

This is the first month I have not made a sale of The Bloggers Bible! That’s a bit sad :-) I’m fairly sure that the income from Become a Blogger will dry up soon as that was a six month program so income may drop even further in the coming months which is a little scary but I’ll hold my breath and keep plugging away!

Subscribers

Subs at the end of June: 10,099

Subs at the end of July: 10,574

New subscribers in July ‘09 : 475

Traffic

Erm I just looked at last months post – either I forgot to post of the pictures or the images are not displaying! It’s a little annoying as I can’t compare the stats to the month before but I think it’s pretty much the same.

August / September Holiday

On the 26th August until the 10th September I will be on holiday – a proper one for a change! I’m going to Disney World, Florida so I’m really looking forward to that. However it probably won’t make much difference to this blog as I will be taking my laptop with me so I can still respond to comments etc as usual though I’m not sure if I will get my stats post done or not. We shall see.

What it Does

When I first came up with the idea for this project it was really quite vague but over the last few months I have been clarifying it a little more. In a nutshell I am developing tools that will automate some of the manual tasks done by Internet Marketers – mainly in the name of building links. The first tool that I will develop will be a social bookmarking submitter.

We’ve all seen those before of course and I’ll be the first to admit that what I am developing is not especially new but that’s just the first tool. I have some ideas for future development but they are still a little vague right now and of course I don’t want to give it all away just yet :-)

Technology Basis

The site is being developed from scratch using the PHP language. At first I toyed with the idea of using a content management system as that does a lot of the work for you. I tried out Joomla and Drupal but I concluded that I would have to put so much effort into trying to bend those systems to do what I wanted that I may as well build from scratch.

What many people don’t understand is that this is not some teaching-based membership site like many others around at the moment. I’m not teaching anything – I am providing tools. The idea is that members have an account which they login to and then they submit jobs for submission which the software automates on their behalf in the background. The tools themselves are the crux of the project and so I need to develop that myself – CMS systems don’t help with that.

However, when I say I am developing it ‘from scratch’, that’s not entirely true. I am using a PHP framework as a basis. There are several major ones – Zend, Cake, CodeIgnighter are the three that I looked at. I picked Zend in the end due to the support that is available for it.

One of the disadvantages of working at home on a solo project like this is that if I do get stuck on something I have nobody to turn to but the Internet. I can’t just pass my problem over to a colleague like I would when I was working at a regular job. Therefore having good community support is a huge factor in my decisions.

Member Management

This is another area that has been a point of confusion when I have tried to explain it in the past. There are two distinct areas of member management that I have to deal with.

The first is that of authentication – this will be a paid site so obviously only paid members can login. Well I shall have a free version too but those free members will still need to login. This is the kind of thing that I don’t want to code from scratch as security is such an important issue. I decided to use aMember and this has been working well.

The way this works is that for areas of your site that you want protected from the general public you insert a little piece of code which executes the aMember script and requires the user to login before he can see the content.

However, this is not the only member management issue I have. My software also needs to keep track of members because it will need to store their data in a database. For example I will want users (yes I keep using the words user and member interchangeably!) to be able to setup bookmarking jobs to be submitted so the details of those jobs have to be stored along with their username. Furthermore, this has to tie in with the aMember user.

So what I have done is written some code to check when a user logs in using aMember and then create a corresponding profile in my own database so that their data can be saved. This is where a PHP Framework comes in handy as the code to manipulate databases is really quite simple using the Zend Framework.

The Software Engine

This is something I am still working on… The idea is that users can setup jobs to be submitted and then the software will toddle off and do it on its own in the background. This is different to how some of the other social bookmarkers work as they require you to manually click the submit button for each site. I wish to automate the entire process as much as possible.

I’m not entirely sure how I am going to do this yet. A lot will depend on how much of a load there is. I will restrict the number of members when I first launch and I may even put a restriction on the number of jobs that can be submitted so I can control how much work my server has to do. I have never written this kind of software before so I wouldn’t want it to collapse in a heap under the strain!

Feasibility Testing

One area that has been a sticking point for a while is that I knew what I wanted to do with my software but I had no idea how! I knew it was possible because there are some competing programs out there that do the same thing or something similar so I just had to figure it out.

Thankfully I recently made that breakthrough and was able to automate submission of some social bookmarks to several sites. Now that I know how to do it in a basic way I know that the idea can actually be done so I can move forward properly now. Many sites that I wish to submit to have some issues that I need to get around so I still have much work to do.

For example, many sites use a captcha image to ensure that it is a human doing the submission and not a robot! This is something that cannot be fully automated that I know of so I will probably have to have some sites that are only partially automated and still require some manual intervention by the user.

But in order to get something working I shall leave sites using those kind of techniques until later.

Promoting the Paid Version

I’m going to have a free version and a paid version of the software. The idea of course is that the free version acts as a pre-seller for the paid version. Initially my plan was to have free members put on an email list and promote the paid version from there but of course the rules with any email list dictate that subscribers may remove themselves at any time.

At first I was trying to find a way to ‘force’ members to stay on the email list if they wanted to keep their account and I wrote a post explaining how I was trying to do this with aWeber but the more I thought about it the more I realised it was a bad idea and not really necessary anyway.

Instead, when a user logs into the site I have a small section in my layout that will show the latest new developments of the paid version. Also… and this part is genius even if I do say so myself… I am going to release every new feature to all the free users before it gets integrated into the paid version! That probably sounds odd so let me explain!

I am quite aware of the fact that this is a learning curve for me and although I am a reasonably good programmer, I am not familiar with web development so I could and probably will encounter all sorts of problems. I don’t want that to happen if I am charging people money! That’s a BAD thing! So ideally I want to find people to test the software first – who better than users that are already using it?

By releasing each new feature to the free members they get to test it for me and they get a freebie for a while. I don’t know yet how long each feature will remain free for – I’m thinking maybe something like 7, 10 or 14 days. This should be enough time for the users to know if this is a feature they would be interested in and may just provide an incentive to pay for the full version.

Pricing Considerations

I can announce now that the first version of the software is almost certainly going to be released at $49 per month and it will become more expensive from there. With any product, pricing is a very important factor and you really have to consider your target market when making a decision.

My target market is Internet Marketers, and more specifically, those that are already making money with successful sites. I am not targeting newbies with this software and that’s why I decided to start out with a fairly high price point. Somebody who is already making a decent income from their sites will think nothing of spending $50 a month on something that will save them hours of tedious work but try explaining that to a newbie!

As an incentive for early signups I will be fixing the price upon initial sign up. What that means is that whatever price is paid when a member signs up will be the price they will always pay as long as they stay a member. I intend to release new features as often as I can so over time the software becomes better and better value.

I could release at a much lower price, say $19 a month instead in order to make it more available to a wider audience but to be honest due to the technical considerations I mentioned before I would actually prefer to have fewer members at a higher price than the other way around to ensure that my server can cope with the load!

Release Date

I am not ready to mention any dates yet but hopefully a test version may be available to play with in the not too distant future. Though saying that I am going to on holiday at the end of August for 2 weeks so I probably wont release anything until I get back which will be September.

An Aside – July Stats Will Be Delayed

I am going away for a long weekend and I wont be able to do the July stats until around the 3rd August so the figures will be slightly off but it can’t he helped!

I loved this video so much, watch it, and SMILE :D

What is Outsourcing?

For those not familiar with the term, outsourcing simply means paying somebody to do some work for you. Currently there are two areas of work that I outsource – I pay somebody to re-write articles that I have written for submission to article directories and I pay somebody to do all my graphic design work.

In most businesses, especially online ones, there are many aspects that can be outsourced. Link building, any kind of writing such as articles, blog posts, ebooks, copywriting etc, technical work, design work, and of course the subject of my own project – software development.

Why Outsource?

Quite simply to save time. There are 168 hours in a week and every single person on this planet has the same amount of time. What we do with it determines the substance of our lives and the income that we earn. Lets assume a working week of 50 hours (which is way more than I work but hey, it’s a round number!) If you do work that pays or earns you $10 an hour then you will earn $500 in that week.

Now what if you could pay somebody else to do some of the work you do? Let’s say that you could outsource 30 hours of the work you do and you have to pay somebody else $8 an hour to do it. That will cost you $240 a week but that now frees up 30 hours of time. The big question is what do you do with that 30 hours. In purely financial terms it is only worth outsourcing if you can spend your time doing something that will bring in more money.

For example if you have a new task to work on which earns you $15 an hour but you still want the $10 work done, you can outsource 30 hours of $10 work costing you $240 but you are now earning $450 from your $15 work so in total you are now bringing in $710 a week instead of $500.

There are other reasons too – I outsource my article re-writing work because I simply hate doing it! It bores me to tears and I just don’t get it done. I also outsource things in the real world too. I like having a clean car but I don’t like cleaning it so I pay somebody else to do it for me!

Why Not Outsource?

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of outsourcing is simply lack of income to pay for it but I will assume that is not the issue for the sake of this post. Why else may you not want to outsource? It seems like a perfect solution so surely once the income is there you should outsource as much work as you can? There are two main reasons I can think of not to outsource certain aspects of your work.

You Can’t Outsource Yourself

This is not a generic Internet Marketing blog – it’s Caroline Middlebrook’s blog. With the exception of the odd guest post here and there, only I can write it. This is my personal touch and I cannot outsource myself. I could if I was Britney Spears or something but last time I looked in the mirror I wasn’t even close :-)

Where this becomes a woolly area is knowing where you need that personal touch and when you really don’t. My brother owns a landscape gardening business and it’s been going for over 30 years now. He hates it and really wants to retire yet he doesn’t because he moans that nobody else can do what he does. In other words, he refuses to outsource. Personally, I highly doubt that is the case. I’m sure somebody else could be trained to do what he does, he could outsource his work and retire.

If you are developing some kind of course where you are teaching something and it is your hard earned knowledge that you want to impart then you probably want to do that work yourself but if you are developing a website to generate AdSense income then outsourcing the content creation for that site is perfectly okay because it really doesn’t matter who has written it.

You Are Learning a Skill

Everything you do requires some kind of skill. With blogging, one of the most common aspects to outsource is the techy stuff – getting it setup, installing plugins, designing the theme and so on. These tasks require specialist skills. If you outsource the work you need to hire somebody who has those skills and of course it means that you won’t be developing them yourself.

This is the reason I am not outsourcing my software project – because I want to learn all of the skills involved in developing a website myself as this opens up a whole load of possibilities for me in the future, and not necessarily just related to Internet Marketing. These are skills I really want to learn and therefore I have no desire to outsource the work even though the project would probably get done much faster if I did.

If you are in this position ask yourself if you actually have a need and desire to learn the skills that are required for the task at hand.

Now in some cases, you may simply not be the kind of person who can develop the required skills. For example, I get all of my graphic work done by Linda from eCoverSource.com and she is brilliant. Even though I could in theory learn a package such as photoshop, I have absolutely no artistic flair whatsoever and so I’d never be able to do what she does. This is a perfect candidate for outsourcing.

Similarly, most people wouldn’t be able to learn software development unless they had done it before which is probably why many people who comment on my project are confused as to why I am doing it myself. It’s all about evaluating your own skill sets really.

I’ve been working on my software project for all of this year and when I first started on it I was certainly hoping that I’d have something released by now. There are two main reasons why I haven’t – I have only been putting in a fraction of the working hours that I was intending to, and secondly, I have encountered many more problems than I anticipated.

So now I have a harsh reality facing me – it’s not going to be released anytime soon. I do intend to put in a few more hours than I have been recently but it still won’t be anywhere near full time and I am understanding enough about the technology now to also know that I am going to continue to face many technological challenges.

I am looking at my income and seeing it trickle in and it’s a little scary for it to continue at a relatively low level for the foreseable future. I have another instinct that is urging me to try and do something to just get some money in quick.

I’ve been in this situation before. The time that sticks out the most was actually when I first quit my job and started this business. Back then I was intending to do some kind of web development (though I didn’t have a specific idea at that time) but I figured that it would take several months so I decided to do a little Internet Marketing as an interim measure in order to bring in some ‘quick’ cash!

Well, we all know how that went! I didn’t earn anything at all for those first few months! Now of course back then I really didn’t know what I was doing, I was a complete unknown, and I didn’t have any kind of web presence or assets. The situation is different now. I have an established blog that gets reasonable search engine traffic, I have some decent sized email lists and I have various other little assets.

So feasibly, if I were to put the effort in then I could reasonably expect to make some money relatively quickly. However what this all boils down to is really time.

The reason my software project is dragging out is due to time – not enough time spent working and more time needed for the actual work. Therefore if I take time away from that project to make a more immediate income then I am only going to drag the project out even more.

I suspect many people go through this kind of dilemma when starting an Internet business such as a blog. I am making a decent income through my blog right now but that is only happening because of the months of work that went into it at the beginning. I am earning money now for work that I did over a year ago.

I think it is very difficult to continue to work on something that is not providing an obvious immediate benefit and not to get sucked in by the lure of the ‘easy money’. I’m going to resist the temptation to try and make some quick cash (well unless I can think of something that really doesn’t take up much time) and continue to dedicate my time to my software project.

If you are starting a blog, or writing a course, or building a membership site or working on any project that you know isn’t likely to really pay off in the short term and you are feeling the same thing as me I’d say hang in there and stick with it :-)

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 Samurai. 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.

Have a Twitter account? Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

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?