Some time back I did a Linxboss Review (February! has it been that long…) Anyway, the link for linxboss is here and at the time I was looking for something that would help build inbound links with a “set it and forget it” kind of mentality. I’ve had a busy offline work stretch and just didn’t have the time I felt like I needed to devote to “promoting my sites…” So… the $127 a month seemed slightly steep, but if I could attain some of the rankings for the keywords I was looking for it might be worthwhile.

Not long after I posted here I had a post in the warriorforum as well trying to answer someones questions about linxboss….

In response to my post I had a private message asking if it had been worth the $127 a month. To be quite honest at that time it had not. Initially I had decided to go for at least three months with linxboss and see if it worked out. After three months I’d decide whether or not to continue. Well, I had been just about two months in. Had one pretty good month of increasing ranks and then a bit of a fallback in month two. What really got me was the evening I started looking at what the inbound links were. You can’t find them through the linxboss interface, but looking through yahoos site explorer…. I did find some that I’m pretty sure are in the linxboss network. I won’t disclose those here.

The quality of the content was discouraging, but they were links. I do question the long term (years) value of the sites in the network and will be curious to see how they police it to increase/maintain quality. I see a few of them that had some decent pagerank, but…. I basically saw a paragraph or two of less than stellar text with an anchor text link at the end of the post.

At that point I was disappointed and thought about canceling my subscription. I wasn’t very happy and frankly had not seen $127 of benefit (I wasn’t recouping my cost…) But I decided to stick with it and have had plenty of time to think now.

First off, I have not included all of my sites in the linxboss experiment. I think it’s wise to diversify anyway.

That much said, I’m seeing signs of continued improvement for most every site/keyword that I’m focusing on through Linxboss. I haven’t promoted many (if any) of these anchor texts any other way since I was in month two with linxboss and frankly, a couple of them I had pounded effort at for months prior and hadn’t cracked the top 100 in google. Today I’m seeing promising signs that I may be recouping my investment (and quite possibly much more) in coming months. On some of my sites it’s hard to measure because I have so many inbound keywords, but trends like I’ve seen – sudden upticks in one keyword and a sudden jump in revenue the same day I’m correlating to my linxboss work.

Anyway – I’ve struggled with how to detail how my sites have fared…. I don’t want to name them (or their niches)..

Site 1:
Primary Keyword phrase a – up from #137 to 51 as of 5 days ago – #30 today
alternate phrase a1(includes phrase a)+ one word… – up from #19 to #7 – this one made me some good money today… even though I’m still just at 7. I had pounded on this for months to get up to #19
alternate phrase a2 (again includes a plus one word) moved from #44- up to #18
alternate phrase a3 (completely different – shares one word and a similar word root with a though) – up from #394 to #11

primary keyword phrase b – up from #30 to #3
alternate phrase b1 (same as b +one word) – from #5 to #1
alternate phrase b2 (same as b +one word) – from #3 to #1

Site 2:
Primary keyword a- not in the top 1000 results prior to starting – #16 today…. (steady in the 60s last week) – this one also made me a good amount of money today in spite of being on page two (can’t imagine the traffic I’ll see on page one…) This is another one that I had pounded for months without cracking the top 1000
alternate phrase a1 – similar to a except missing trailing s (not plural) – not ranked in top 1000 when I started – number #12 today – again pounded at this one prior to linxboss….
alternate phrase a2 – matches domain name (also same as a plus one word)- started at #10 – now #4
alternate phrase a3 – (close to a – but missing plural s and added one word) not ranked previously – now #32

Site 3:
Primary keyword a – very competitive phrase – one word in domain name – First ranking was #257 – not sure if I was ranked when I started linxboss though – currently #6
alternate keyword a1 – again very competitive – shares two word with a plus one word – started at #68 (may not have been ranked before linxboss) – currently #40
alternate keyword a2 – (this is the BIG traffic keyword phrase in this niche – shares 1 word with keyword phrase a (minus a plural s) and adds one word.) – was not ranked prior to linxboss – now #10
alternate keyword a3 – same as domain name – shares one word with keyword a – started at #3 – still at #3…. (go figure…)

Site 4:
This has been the worst performing site with linxboss….
primary keyword a – started either unranked or at #214 – now at #465
alternate phrase a1 – (adding one word to a) – was 184 – now 162
primary keyword b – was at #11 – now at #8
alternate keyword b1 (add one word to keyword phrase b) – was at #9 – now #6
alternate keyword b2 (add one plural word to keyword phrase b) – was at #12 – now at #10

Site 5:
This is probably the second poorest performing site.
Primary keyword a (part of domain) – started unranked – now #13
alternate keyword a1 (shares one word with a) – started unranked – now #545
primary keyword b – started unranked – now #47
alternate keyword b1 (keyword b – minus one word) – started unranked – now #407
primary keyword c – started unranked – now #6
alternate keyword c1 (similar to 6 reversing the wording and adding one word)- started unranked – now #8
These last two have got some traffic the last month or so….)

Okay – here’s the summary. The two poorest performing sites – are hosted at blogspot – the other 3 are not. Maybe that has to do with the lack of stellar improvements. I should note that with site 5 I’ve also gone through two other primary keyword phrases that I was getting links for (one of which I still am ranked okay for and am getting some good traffic with… including the alternates – this is a longer tail search though and not as competitive as the ones I’m currently working on.

Focus is another issue – in some cases – I have as many as three primary phrases – which means the 200 links per site per month is getting diluted even more – about 66 per primary phrase and half of those will go to one of the alternates…

The worst performing site – I did have another primary keyword that I’ve discontinued – so again – maybe it was too dilute… Although – I also suspect the blogspot hosting may be an issue – (to add to it – neither of those two have any authority links…. I imagine one or two good authority links – could…. open the floodgates there. It might be worth testing.)

One issue with the blogspot sites is that you need to check that it’s a web 2.0 site in the configuration or they will see it as a duplicate in the system and not build links for it…. although for these I have verified that all is setup correctly and I have found inbound links for them. All of the ranks noted above are google rankings – although yahoo has seen good improvements as well (as has bing.)

So, there you have the gory details…. at this point I’m content to continue this proposition for longer probably another 3-6 months easily and possibly expand the number of sites that I’m using with linxboss (I have LOTS of sites…. so it’s not like adding another five would put me at risk of having ALL of my sites lose ranking if the linxboss network is devalued.) Which brings me to an interesting point – the dreaded “will my site be penalized…” Sometimes google can take away benefit from incoming links if they decide the site is worthless – that doesn’t necessarily PENALIZE the sites receiving links from them…. it just means the link doesn’t count… if that was a valuable link for the sites rankings for a keyword – you’ll drop and think “oh I’ve been penalized…” but that’s strictly not what’s happened – let’s say you just had a goal disallowed….

They’re currently in waiting list mode over at linxboss – but if you follow any of the links in this article you will be able to get in on the waiting list. I suspect there may be a number of people drop out after one month that fail to reap the full benefits. Frankly – I think it’s their loss. Oh and one other thought – if you’re not seeing enough $ return on your investment – think carefully about your keywords and their traffic stats according to linxboss – in other words – don’t spend $127/month to chase after 5 keywords that only have enough traffic to give a combined $1 a day. Their part of the equation is to increase your ranking – you worry about conversion/keyword research/etc.

Oh – and yes I do get referral revenue from all the linxboss sign up links listed above…. they have a great affiliate program btw….

If you want to promote linxboss.com’s services as well click here!

As I mentioned last post this has been quite a week. I’ve set a couple of personal online earnings records. The first just under $100 in one day, the second just a bit over. All within the span of a week. It’s had me thinking about my goals, goal setting the reward for reaching those goals and really what my ambition is. Let me be honest with you. I work all the time. I have offline commitments that many times keep me away from my sites. Truth be told I have probably around 50 sites. I’m interested in a good many things and really if I’m not careful I could easily wind up with a hundred different sites. I’m very easily a workaholic. I have been known to get up and start working and keep going until the wee hours of the morning. I usually am quite driven and when I start chewing on a task or problem just can’t let go of it until things are done.

Of course, all the good things that go along with that can be bad too. Sometimes I get burned out. I seem to oscillate between the extremes of high energy, enthusiasm for my online work, to the “why am I doing this – it’s not working?” when I have low earnings days. For that reason, perspective is a good thing. I’ve spent some time this week putting the recent good earnings in some perspective. Looking at the things that are working, seeing how I can improve those and charting a course for what next to push on to the next level.

For about a year and a half I have had as a goal $100 online income per day average. Of course, I setup little goals along the way and have met quite a few of them. Over the last seven days I’m looking at a daily average of over $40 a day. There are two sites that contributed the most to this recent run and I’m in the midst of massive construction on 10 more just like them and could easily (time permitting) keep duplicating the idea by the dozen.

The thing is – I have even more ideas…. more than I have time to do. More than I have money to do.

My whole motivation for my online business is ultimately to climb out of debt and put food on the table. We have quite a bit of credit card debt. Most of it is health care related. In one year we had over $10,000 in medical expenses and during the same year our card balances ballooned the same $10,000. It hurts, it’s preoccupying. It prevents us from doing many things that we would like to. It is my single daily problem number 1 to resolve.

So, I have to be careful in my ventures that I judiciously spend and balance it against what I’m earning. Now, $100 a day is probably not a lot of money. It’s 3000 a month, 36,000 a year. Not a lot. It’s just enough for us to live on though. Add it to my offline income and it’s more than enough to live on and pay down our debt. I have done the math on this and every 6-12 months take another look at it just to make sure I know what I’m aiming for.

Today though I set a reward for mysefl when we get our debt paid off and have a $3000 cushion. I’m going to take a 2 week vacation from work. I don’t know if well really go anywhere or not, but I fully intend to take 2 weeks to do things other than work. Offline/Online – whatever. Why? First off, it’s good to give yourself rewards for meeting goals. I’ve done little rewards along the way. The truth is there aren’t many THINGS that I want. I know a lot of budding internet marketers drool after fast cars, big houses, etc. I have a car that works, home that we’re comfortable in. Sure there are a few little things here and there…

One of my personal questions the last few years has been the “what if I won the lottery” kind of question. What would I do?

Pay of debt is issue #1. Shore up retirement/college savings is next on the list. After that? I don’t know, we have a car that could use a repainting. I don’t know that we’d be in a hurry to replace it though.

Sometimes I’ve thought that this lack of greed for things has made me slower in the earnings. “I’m not hungry enough”. But, quite frankly the crushing debt feels like motivation enough. If I was drooling after too many things I can’t imagine how much worse our debt would be at this point.

So, after that 2 week vacation – then what?

I feel like I’m a chronic entrepreneur so I’m sure I’ll come up with something. I don’t know yet what my next goals will be – probably $150/$200 a day. In some ways that’s not as important as what my motivation will be. What should I use to fuel the ambition to get there? Maybe the next motivation is all the good things I could do int he community with more money?

So, what about you – what’s your motivation for what you do online? What will your rewards be?

Last Sunday, my online earnings were ~$95 between Clickbank, Adsense and earnings over at lulu.com. That was a direct result of some positive actions I had taken in regard to a couple of my sites and was my single best online day yet. (A majority of my income is offline still.) I’ve been a bit down over the last few months because I have had so little time due to my offline commitments to develop my online sites/etc. The last week or two though I’ve been able to start digging in a bit more and building out some sites that have been on the drawing board for quite a while. Today, I’ve seen another record online earning day at ~$109 between clickbank, another referral service and adsense. Unfortunately Adsense is registering it’s lowest day for me in a LONG time at around $5. (My first $100+ day in affiliate/advertising revenue!) So, I’ve had two days near $100 within a week and yet I’m still probably going to be down about it in the next couple days…

Why? Inconsistency. Sure, it’s a good couple days, but I’m extremely hard on myself and want to see that kind of earning on a more consistent basis. It’s okay to critique yourself and push for more, but don’t let it discourage you from taking POSITIVE ACTION. Everything that I have managed to get is the result of action on my sites. Even if tomorrow is a grand total of 53 cents I need to be reminding myself and keep pushing ahead with positive action.

In a lot of ways I feel like I’m just getting started. I think it’s been less than two years since I decided that I had studied things long enough and it was time to start implementing what I had learned about web sites, ranking, etc. I haven’t been able to devote full time to it due to my offline work, but I’m still chipping away at it and the earnings are still improving. On the weak earnings days it can be hard to remember how good things look on the high earning days, but I’m trying to remind myself to keep looking to those things that are working and scale them up/duplicate the formula/etc. On the weak earning days it’s easy to feel like “none of this is working, I’m wasting my time…” Make a note of the good days though and use them to lift your spirits, strengthen your resolve and give you fuel to get through the bad days!

Update —

As for bad days, the day following my ~$95 day, one of my older sites went from a couple hundred page views a day down to about 30-40 pageviews. I pulled up the page to see if it was down or just ridiculously slow loading…. no. It’s there. I checked backlinks to see if that one huge site that used to link to us had taken down my links….. no….. checked the search results – they seemed about the same, maybe a few positions lower in some of them, but it should be a big enough change to make that big a drop in traffic.

I resigned myself to the assumption that it was an across the board rankings drop that must have made a huge difference in traffic and sulked about it for a few days.

Last night in a check of my broken links (for another site) It claimed that a link to that site was dead. I checked – 404…. permalinks on wordpress were not working. (.htaccess file had disappeared and I have no clue why….) Ah…. I checked this morning and it’s already had more visitors than it did all of yesterday, so it’s looking like it may be back on track. So, the moral of the story? Checking to see if your main page is up isn’t enough….. In some ways though it may be a sign that I just have too many sites. I’m glad to see though that it wasn’t a rankings slight of some sort.

RIght now I have 10 sites that I’m developing simultaneously. Yes 10!

Sometimes I think I border on insane.

What’s even more insane is most of these sites will have around a hundred pages each with a good amount of content and resource links.

They are in the niche that has proven itself to be my most profitable and consistent. (Which is why I’m doing them to begin with.)

So, how am I doing it? The first part of the site was easy – wordpress and template out pages with a bulk page creator plugin. I knew the titles of the pages, but adding them one at a time was too tedious. On some pages I also knew what the content was going to be (or at least what part of the content was going to be.) I templated that part too and used a script to build out the initial pages. Now though, I’m into the hard slog portion of the building and am having to add the custom content for each page. One at a time. That’ s really the only way (other than outsourcing.) The key is to be persistent and get in one a day, two a day and just keep at it. If I get five pages in during one day, great – only around 20 days and I’ll have that site finished and be on to the next one.

Making money online isn’t quick and easy – it beats digging ditches, but don’t let anyone tell you that it doesn’t take any effort – if they do – they’re likely selling a “quick and easy toolkit” and are making a bundle themselves….

Persistence. Stubborn determination. Unyielding constant pressure. This is what you need to do to succeed at anything. Oh, I know, sometimes you’ll luck out and something comes easy for you. For most things though you need dogged determination to improve and succeed. I’ve been away for a week at the beach and made a little bit of money over that time from my online efforts. Now, I didn’t spend time working from the beach, but I did chck in once a day to see how things were going. I probably didn’t make enough to quite break even on our trip, but it was really probably not too far off. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that my online work is going to replace my offline work income. It’s just a matter of patience, persistence and determination. I spent a lot of time watching the ocean of course at the beach. Water is relentless and it always wins because of that relentless nature. It churns and eats away at the beach gradually, bite by bite, grain of sand by grain of sand. Many of our North Carolina Beaches do beach re nourishment projects to help fight the erosion. The ocean doesn’t give up though, it’s constantly working. Sometimes a storm comes along and there will be more erosion, but it doesn’t stop. That’s how you have to be with your online work….

I have several offline jobs and am self employed in all my offline efforts. Sometimes it keeps me very busy, but I still work on my websites, expanding the existing sites, promoting existing sites, creating new sites, making notes of ideas that are just beyond my grasp right now. I’m always chipping away at it. That’s why I am sure sometime my online work will be paying the majority of my bills.

Some days it’s hard to find time. Some weeks it’s hard to find time, some months even. But I don’t give up on it. The net result is that I’m now getting about a third of my monthly income from online projects. Right now we’re in a slower season for it, but it’s still providing a decent amount each month and I’m in the midst of a massive project to scale up my online presence.

At this rate I have no doubt that in 1-3 years I’ll be able to take a look at my online earnings and decide that I’m just going to the beach for a week and not expect to see a drop in income just sitting at the beach compared to having spent the week at home. If you want to read more about our trip – you can read about the Ocean Isle Beach and Sunset Beach, NC Vacation on my Family Vacation Destination Reviews site.

The bottom line:

Commit for the long term.

Learn, build, grow, promote, repeat, brainstorm, repeat, continue and succeed!

Long time no write…. other work has been very busy and I’ve had some health issues as well, bt that’s not what I’m here to type about today.

Earn Money Online Adsense alternatives. I like adsense, in fact by FAR the majority of my online income is coming from adsense these last couple of years. It’s not quite yet enough to replace my offline income, but when I’m able to spend time with it I do hope that my online income can surpass offline work and even make offline work optional.

Anyway, for a long time one of the items on my todo list has been to generate other streams of income that would help supplement adsense and “diversify” my earn money online portfolio. I have from time to time managed to make a referral sale from some of my leftover clickbank promotions that were my first wave of attempts to earn money online. But, the truth is for calendar year 2009 I made just under $80 from clickbank. If for some reason adsense were to go south for me I would lose out on a substantial amount of online income with no good fallback.

So, as luck would have it I was contacted by a company that has an affiliate program through clickbank and had seen referrals from two of my sites to their site. They had some good numbers of how many clients I had sent their way, how much I would have received from adsense for those referrals and how much they could have paid if they were direct referrals. Of course, I pointed out that I would have to think about it. After all they weren’t the only advertisers rotating through those adsense slots. In fact while I may have made a measly $3 and change from THEM for my adsense placement, overall that spot across two sites was north of $150 for a month. It sweetened the pot when they offered me a bonus to give them a try for the month and so I have (and have already made more than $150 total even though just two weeks have gone by. Not counting the bonus we’d still be a bit shy of $150, but I suspect we’ll probably be looking at closer to $275 or $300 by the time a one month trial is done.

So, what is the point of all this. One it’s nice to have a site with decent predictable traffic. I range 200-450 page views a day on each of those sites. Not much, but healthy. They both are in the same fairly targeted niche. In fact, it would take time, but I could create lots more sites just like them in the same niche and probably get traffic from 100-500 pageviews a day when I was able to ge them ranking well. (This particular deal may make it worthwhile to pursue that….)

Really though there are a couple of morals to the story.

1) Plan to diversify
2) Don’t just stick to one method because you like it – look at the bottom line.
3) track everything – domain/page placement/etc. So you know what an ad spot is worth to you.
4) Don’t be afraid to experiment, but make sure you have real numbers (the tracking) to compare with and be patient enough to get a real trial. (2 days is not a real test…. 1 month is.)
5) Adsense can be a good starting point.

This is not the only advertiser I think that keeps track of where their adwords clicks and conversions come from. I suspect, they saw this as a win – win. They knew that they weren’t the only ones in the ad slot and may well double their referrals from my sites by having direct ad placements. (Or possibly more than double?) So, they get more business, I get more for that slot – we both win.

This has also had me taking a hard look at some other sites. Especially those where the ad targeting seems poor. One of the benefits with adsense is contextual ads that relate to what is on the page, but I have a couple of sites that it just seems like a poor fit much of the time. So, I’ve started looking at offers there that might fill/replace that leaderboard placement from adsense. In one particular example the site had a targeted ad front and center, but it was not one that seemed to be a good ad. (I wouldn’t click on it.) So, I replaced it and we’ll see what the clickthrough rate does.

So, test, track and test more. Then look to see how you can duplicate or expand what you’ve started into other areas.

As I have probably mentioned before I have from time to time outsourced some of my online web work tasks. One of the tasks that many webmasters despise is that of linkbuilding. Search engines consider incoming links to be votes in favor of your site for the keywords that are used as anchor text and the more inbound links you have for a specific phrase or word, the better your rankings likely will be for that word or phrase. There are lots of ways to do this, good and bad. Many people will submit articles to either article directories, other websites or blogs as well as other web 2.0 sites such as hubpages, squidoo or the like. This can be a great way to build your link popularity, but it can take time.

You may also want to see my updated linxboss review.

There are companies that will charge you $30 to make one blog comment and ad your link text. (Although they don’t advertise it quite that way.) I’ve tried many companies to help with the linkbuilding in a good way and many that I’ve found have either been ineffective, too expensive and or plain old junk. I’m about to talk about linxboss.com which is a site that I’ve experimented with some in the past month. I DO get referral revenue from the links in this post to linxboss. I am an affiliate of their product and if you read on, I’ll tell you some of the reasons that I was EAGER to find their affiliate program when it launched.

Linxboss advertises that it’s links on autopilot and truly it is a “set and forget” kind of service. To be able to build links to pages on five different domains it will cost you $127 a month and I’ve really got to hand it to them for being very up front and giving a good warning page. They don’t plan to raise their rates, they don’t plan to limit to only so many seats, no pressure. If you want to the think about it, fine. They reassure you that they’ll be there when you make up your mind. The point is that they want you to be sure, they want you to be a long term customer.

Now the service is that you will get 1000 back links each and every month. One thing to keep in mind is that this is spread across your 5 domains. Even if you only setup one domain in their account you will just get 200 backlinks for pages on that domain. The reasoning is simple, too many links too quickly could cause your web rankings to plummet temporarily. Slow and steady link building has better consistency for your long term results.

For each domain you can specify a number of different pages that you would like to build links for. You are required to enter at least two sets of anchor text for the page. Your 200 links for the domain should be relatively equally distributed between the pages you setup. There may be some variation, but if you setup two pages for a given domain you should get around 100 links per month for each page. The primary anchor text they say is selected 50% of the time that the page is selected. I’m not sure at the moment if having 3 or 4 anchor text tags for a page dilutes that percentage more or not.

They have an excellent reporting tab that keeps track of the keywords you’ve entered as well as up to 30 other keywords for the domain that you may wish to track. It can currently track the keywords position in yahoo or google and keeps track of the first ranking spot from when you first setup the keyword and the current position. The information is updated within a day of setting up your keywords and then every 5 days after that. It will also make some good charting of your progress. One other feature that I like is the keyword traffic volume is shown in the tracking results as well. There are even times when it will chastise you that the keyword gets too low a traffic volume for it to track. (hint: find a higher traffic keyword phrase!)

One thing that you cannot get directly from the linxboss.com interface is a listing of WHERE you are getting your links from. This is the one area that I can see some people getting antsy about because many people like to know exactly where each and every one of their links are coming from. It’s a minor point for me because I know I can visit yahoo’s site explorer and start looking for all of my backlinks. According to their information they have a vast network of sites of varying topics that they submit content to and that is where they generate your links from. At this point I haven’t researched details although I have been with them long enough to see some positive movement in the search results.

For those of you with more sites to get inbound links for they have discounted packages to add on additional groups of 5 or more into your manager interface. I believe $90 is their first add on rate. It’s also possible to delete a site to “free up” one of your five slots. They also let you select when adding pages to get links for whether or not it’s a web 2.0 site (where other people may have pages.)

I’m still in my first month and have had very little trouble getting up to speed on using the interface. I will update as I get more information and feedback on the progress but at this point in time I can wholeheartedly recommend this unique and affordable service.

If you want to promote linxboss.com’s services as well click here!

You may also want to see my updated linxboss review.

Autoblogging Plugins for any blogging platform are the kind of thing that can be controversial. I think we’re all aware of scraper sites that copy a paragraph or so of our contend from an rss feed and then have a link to our site. Sometimes they copy even more. I know when I first ran across these I was aggravated at best. But, in all fairness I did get a backlink out of it (albeit from a poor quality site – but it is a backlink anyway.) In sum, it didn’t irritate me quite as much on reflection, but I took it more as a sign that my site had reached a certain level of visibility. Of course, would I run a site that just scraped content from others? No. Then why would I consider an autoblogging plugin. Autoblogging is not just about scraper sites….

Like so many tools they can be used for a variety of purposes. An autoblogging plugin can be used to scrape other sites content without their permission and the autoblog will look like a mishmosh of scraped content. But, what if you have multiple sites and one category on site A would be of interest to visitors on site B. Wouldn’t an autoblogging plugin be a great tool to help syndicate your articles from that category?

Similarly what if you have a fairly active site, but want new streams of content from article directories. You are likely looking to simply supplement your in house produced content. This gives the article writers more visibility, your viewers get more relevant content and you may not have to type as much or as frequently. Really, the whole point is that if it’s done RIGHT autoblogging is not necessarily a bad thing.

Duplicate content is what so many of you are screaming right now. “You’ll get penalized for duplicate content!!!!” Oh really? Prove it to me. I have searched for countless products in my years online and nine times out of ten the product descriptions that I find on each and every site are copied and pasted from the original manufacturers description and specs. Yet, those pages on different retail sites still show up in the search engines. Why is this if there is a duplicate content penalty?

What so many people don’t understand about duplicate content is that google is trying to filter duplicate ways of seeing the same data on a single site. So, if content on your site has 3 different ways to find it, they don’t want to show three different results on their search results, they want to filter it to one. But if that same content shows up elsewhere I would be willing to bet that will be shown as well. If that’s not enough to put your mind at rest then look at your page the way the spiders do. The text on your page is more than just your article, it’s the navigation, header, footer and other content that each page has that makes it unique.

So, although autoblogging plugins may be controversial to some, they can be a good tool if used right.

Here are some suggestions for you:

wp-robot – cost varies depending on what features you are looking for.

wp-o-matic – free plugin with a good range of features.

New Years bring many good things. Many people make resolutions to do certain things differently in 2010 than in the old year. In my journey in internet marketing if anything I’m resolving to keep doing more and more. The last year saw 622% growth in my revenue in online sources over 2008. 2008 saw a bit less growth over 2007 (340%). But still… during the “worst economy since the Great Depression”…. to see that kind of growth is fun, exciting and in many ways validates what I’ve been doing the last year or so. It only makes me wonder what I would be seeing if I were doing Internet Marketing full time instead of squeezing it in as a third job. So… .what’s the secret to making things work and earning money online with a blog?

It’s really no secret. It’s the same story that you’ll see over and over in every field. Hard work, persistence, patience. Some things don’t work out well. Learn from the mistakes. But don’t, whatever you do, don’t fail to take action. I’ve boiled it down to the folloiwng: brainstorm, research, build. Not every idea is going to pass the research phase, some you’ll find don’t get much traffic or the competition is very stiff and it will take years to break into the top search rankings.

Some, get good traffic and you want to build it in spite of the fact the competition is stiff because you know that in several years you’ll be able to compete with them and in several years you can take them on if you start today. Patience is one of the things that is in short supply in internet marketing. In reading the forums I see it every day. “I’ve been working on my site for a whole month now and I’m not making any money. What’s wrong with me?”

Expectations…. in spite of the hype and sales pitches there are very few people that make it overnight in internet marketing to turn things into a full time subsistence and put food on the table operation. It takes time. You need to invest time in it, but you also need to wait, you need to gain age for your sites and reputation for your sites. You need to gain links and search positioning. You need the one thing that can’t really be bought…. time!

Start working at it a bit at a time on the side, develop and develop your site or sites persistently day in day out, week in, week out, month in and month out. Build content, build links, continue. Move onto new ideas if you wish but keep feeding the old ones. That’s what I’ve done. When the whim hits me to read up on an old hobby I go back to the site related to it and work it a bit more. Sites that get really big I consider breaking the content up into subsites and hosting them elsewhere (blogspot/wordpress for instance.)

The articles (depending on article directory rules) can be reused for promotion off site to get inbound links. The point is keep working at it. If you resolve to anything for the new year, resolve to be relentless. Most of you reading probably have day jobs already. That’s fine, pour the time in you can, whittle away at the corners here and there. Keep whittling. Even with a small pocketknife it’s possible to whittle a giant oak down to size. It’s not something you’ll do in five minutes and in many ways it’s not easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible!

When you’re getting started it may be hard to decide how to manage the little income your getting, but go ahead and plan. I like to use 15% of the income from online work to plow back in for article writing, outsourcing of all stripes, subscriptions. If I could I would push it up a bit greater than that. Some months I’ve gone ahead and claimed the 100% take to go back into the business as our other income has allowed. It has payed off over the last year as I’ve used outsourcing to multiply my available time.

It was two years ago in January that I decided it was time to start putting what I had learned about search rankings and online marketing into practice and build an online business. I had a false start in that year chasing fools gold of sorts, but by September of 2007 I had latched onto the way that I’ve focused on since. That has already turned into some significant money each month, but it’s still not able to replace all my other income (yet). As it gets closer though it will be time to consider diversification so that I can have other options.

Relentless, just like water. Water seeps, wears down rock, infiltrates everything eventually. Small trickles of water can give way to large streams…. Here’s to a prosperous and happy 2010!

I saw an interview with Matt Cutts reported on in the last few days that hinted that page loading speed may in the next year become one of the factors for how a website ranks in the search results. Now, to be honest I already suspected that there might be something used in the weighting already that related to page load speed. Why? Well, one of the things google has emphasized in its terms and conditions is the idea of sites that give a good user experience. Pop ups and deceptive redirects for instance are “bad experience” kind of things and affect sites negatively, while you would assume that a fast loading page would be a “good experience” kind of thing and perhaps benefit a site in the search results.

Anyway, along with the interview I saw a link to a new (to me) resource at Google and that is their listing of let’s make the web faster utilities. Some of them are tools from google and others come from other sources, but you may want to make use of any tricks and tools you can to try to improve the speed of your pages.

I could imagine that this would be a fairly simple metric to add to their current ranking algorithm. The main question would be how much the web site page load would be weighted and as you may know, the way the various ranking components are weighted is one of the main reasons the new algorithm changes can dramatically affect search results for keywords. You never know, initially they may rank the speed a bit too important and we may see search results change dramatically initially and then through several search algo updates they may dial the weighting down a bit to where they like it. The only way I see to be in a spot where you should be impervious to this is to make your site as fast loading as possible now and then you’ll avoid the dance between the future algorithm and weighting changes.

So many people have these ideas in their head that they can make money blogging really just by sitting down and blabbing about their lives. Now, between you and me most peoples lives aren’t really going to draw much of a crowd, much less some real advertising dollars. But some seem to have this illusion that people will care where they go and who they see and really miss the whole point about the “make money online” part of the whole make money blogging equation. Think about it this way…. Product placements in movies work out financially because a lot of people are watching. It’s a mass market. Really there is very little targeting of content to the products advertised. The thing is for mass marketing you have to have MASS! In other words you have to have a huge audience. That’s why most people that know How to Make Money Online realize that the key is in targeting a niche. In other words they specialize and instead of talking about everything under the sun that they want to on one site they focus on a subject. Money Making Ideas might be a good subject to focus on for example and fill the site full of money making ideas giving lots of detail about how the ideas might be implemented and you will get lots of targeted ads if your using adsense and if not, then over time and you get to draw some good targeted traffic you may draw the attention of some advertisers directly. Another idea is a site about how to earn money online with adsense. Does it have to be in the money making niche? no….

Many people find great success (and less competition) by focusing on specific types of products. The iphone for example or accessories for those products. Look around your house and look at the various products everything from ovens to grills, bedding and duvet covers to shower curtains are things that could potentially be good topics for a targeted site. Why?

First and foremost the majority of my experience is coming from adsense, but it’s fairly simple in principle. You want to target things that if someone is searching for that item there’s a high likelihood that they want to buy it. Because long story short it’s the people interested in buying that are going to be good advertising catches. How often have you searched for the lowly Microwave oven. Probably not too often, I would be willing to bet you’ve only searched for microwave ovens when you’re looking to buy one. So, when your search drives you to a site talking about microwave ovens that the site doesn’t sell, the advertising takes care of that. The advertisers are selling microwave ovens, the site provided information on ovens as well as the ads and the searcher is looking to buy microwave ovens. It’s the same age old principle of bringing the buyer and the seller together and everyone gets what they are looking for out of the transaction. Advertisers get an interested customer, site owner gets a few cents or more and the searcher gets a new microwave or at least further along in the purchasing process.

So, lets compare this to a site about nothing in particular. First, google looks at the page to serve up ads and doesn’t really know what this site is about. So you may get a mishmash of ads that include blog related ads (make money blogging style ads for instance.) The visitors that get there probably aren’t there to learn about how to make money blogging unless there really is a post about that and when they click on an ad they’re really less likely to convert into a buyer because they’re just browsing through somebodies personal blog and liked the look of the ad.

The moral of the story is this. To make money with adsense and blogging, do one thing per site. Focus very well, create content to rank well in the search engines. Search visitors are your money in the bank. Once you get one site going well repeat and repeat and repeat as much as you like with other areas. It really is one of the easiest ways to earn money from home that there is.