Ok, many of us have been fighting the same battle for a very long time. The battle… Too many projects – not enough time. We start a blog or website and just as things start getting interesting we start another. And another. The next thing we know we’re up till two in the morning everyday trying to keep up. That battle can only be won if we know what we’re up against. Below shows how a single blog post can take up to five hours or more.

1. 2 Hours: The first step to any post is deciding what to write about. It is impossible to put a time on that step. Once we have our subject we need to consider our keywords. A little keyword research goes a long way. Now we draw up an outline and begin to form the post. We sometimes go to a dozen or more sites checking details and researching facts. We also need to decide which posts are relevant enough to link out to. Once we have the outline in order it’s time to check sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. Having someone proofread your article helps a lot. Now we’re almost ready. All we need now is an image. Searching for that perfect image that we are allowed to use can take a lot of time. So we publish our post. If you are anything like me you just spent at least two hours of your time on this single post. But we are not finished investing time on this blog post.
2. 1 Hour: Now it’s promotion time. The post needs to be pinged, dugg, and tweeted. We need to add the post to our Facebook and FriendFeed. We need to add the post to the best blog directories and build backlinks. If we really want success we write a couple of separate unique articles to submit to article directories linking back to our post.
3. 2+ Hours: Hopefully we’ll get a bunch of comments to moderate and reply to. We clean up the spam and moderate the rest. We need to follow the link back to each blogger that commented and return the favor. Here’s where many of us get very distracted. Reading posts and comments, following links and commenting more. I’ve lost many hours here.

I have heard some bloggers say they can toss up a post in twenty minutes. I envy them. What about you? Do you spend a lot of time on a single post? How many blogs are you running and how often do you post?

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spaunsglo/ / CC BY 2.0

I fully expect this short little post to end up as one of the more popular ones on Extreme Ezine. Today I was reading a friend’s blog, Keith from HotBlogTips.com, and he has a YouTube video on one of his posts, Linking Out For SEO. Cool, another connection. I went to YouTube and subscribed and added Keith as a friend. Yesterday I made a few Twitter friends (followers) and I noticed by visiting their sites that a couple of them have Facebook accounts. I added them as friends there as well. The same with blogs I visit, I try to subscribe.

I always visit blogs and sites from those that comment here and I usually find myself looking for other connections. So I thought, why not just ask. So I am asking, do you have other connections you would like to share? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs or whatever. Feel free to list them in your comment (not dozens please, a hand full is fine). Hopefully everyone will follow each other and our community can grow even bigger from it.

BTW, connections are not sales pages, squeeze pages, niche sites or anything like that.

File This Under General Advice For Newbies: I have an all paid membership site that has given me a vivid insight on why most newbie internet business owners never make money online. My site is just $4.95/month or $49.95/year (no, this is not a promotional post – I’m not even going to link to the site). I am amazed at exactly how many people sign up for the membership and simply don’t have five bucks in their PayPal account a month later to keep the service. I’ll get a couple of notifications from PayPal that the payment subscription has failed and many times I get emails from members asking for more time.

This post isn’t to insult anyone, we all have to learn and that takes time. My membership site is an ad tracking site so I have the unique opportunity to take a peek at what members are promoting and there is definitely a disturbing pattern.

Without naming particular sites, most of those not earning are wasting their time with traffic exchanges, safelists and free for all (FFA) type sites. Crazy things like gifting and survey sites. Others are trying affiliate marketing which takes some skill to gain success. But the biggest common denominator is marketing. Almost every member that loses their account from non-payment has setup a ton of tracking links and has no or very few clicks on their trackers.

My recommendation to new internet marketers?

1. First of all, subscribe to this blog and newsletter. Seriously, I’m here to help and I won’t take your money to do it.
2. Second, make some friends. This is one of the best ways to learn the ropes. I love the group of marketers and bloggers we have here. Everyone is quick to help each other and we have fun doing it.
3. Third, find a mentor. Find someone successful that has the same interests and see if they’ll give you the time of day. If they’re too into themselves to notice you, move on and find the right fit. You don’t have to worship a mentor, just learn from them.
4. Fourth, Subscribe to every blog that you can find that offers valuable information in your niche. Who cares if they’re your competition? Subscribe anyway and compete as friends and always interact by sharing and commenting.
5. My fifth, and most important piece of advice – help others. It’s true, you can go a long way by serving others. Go out of your way to help, always acknowledge your friends and don’t be stingy when it comes to giving credit where credit is due.

I’m sure there’s more. I hope more will be added in the comments below. The internet is big enough for all of us to make money and I’d love to see all of my friends get there. Your comments and advice are welcome.

Image Credit: PassionatePhoto.com

Do you still frequent online forums? Forums are still a powerful place to network, promote and learn from. Many bloggers have grown apart from the big marketing forums and spend all their time blogging. What if there was a forum for bloggers run by bloggers. Well, you’re in luck because popular blogger John Sullivan has put together a do-follow community for bloggers.

John works hard every day to help others and will stick his neck out for your success. He got together with a great group of bloggers and launched Blogger LUV. Blogger LUV is a blog, chat room and forum for bloggers. The concept is admirable, the group is unstoppable and you can get involved in the beginning by becoming a member today and logging in regularly.

For those new to blogging that wonder what the secret is to getting blog traffic and comments, this is it. Not the forum it’s self but the group of bloggers that help and support each other. We are very fortunate to have a great group of friends and John has created a central place for us to meet and share information. Join Blogger LUV today!

Note: I would be remiss not to mention another do-follow spam free community that I’ve been enjoying for a long time – The Internet Marketers Guild. More on the Guild later but don’t wait, join today.

I feel like I lost a lot of weight when I look at the new theme the Extreme Ezine is using. Just the other day I was on the new blog of Dennis Edell and commented about load time. I’ve known for a while that the Extreme Ezine blog was far too heavy and to long to load. I decided to get that corrected yesterday.

The first thing I did was run a few tests. I compared the Extreme Ezine with a few other sites and it wasn’t pretty. I ran five (5) tests in a row using iWebTool.com’s Website Speed Test. You can see the complete results here but here are the averages:

Domain name      Size      Average Load Time

http://csc4u.com/ 9.73 KB     0.39 seconds (basic HTML site)
http://kikolani.com/ 40.27 KB     0.77 seconds (Thesis Theme)
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ 25.53 KB     0.92 seconds
http://www.copyblogger.com/ 28.11 KB     0.99 seconds (Thesis Theme)
http://www.dennisedell.com/ 21.13 KB     1.77 seconds (not complete)
http://www.problogger.net/ 52.04 KB     1.23 seconds
http://thatsrightisaidit.com/ 41.28 KB        4.23 seconds (micro-blog)
http://wassupblog.com/ 85.33 KB     5.12 seconds
http://www.youradtracker.com/ 27.63 KB     5.26 seconds
http://extremeezine.com/              52.55 KB       5.44 seconds

As you can see the Extreme Ezine came in dead last (with our previous theme). Just by choosing a lighter and cleaner theme we were able to cut the load time in half to 2.72 seconds. That’s still too slow so now comes the work of cleaning up the code and dropping a few plugins. My expertise is very limited in this area so I may need to hire a pro.

I like the clean look and it seems easier to navigate. I will miss a few lost features but we can’t have it all. I’m still trying to get a decent photo gallery plugin working. I love the photo gallery running on ExtremeJohn.com but I can’t get it working for some reason. Hopefully we’ll see those promotional button pics rotating soon.

What are your thoughts about the change and new look? Is load time a big factor to you? Go ahead, I can take it

A quick note about the Thesis Theme: Kristi of Kikolani kicked everyone’s tail with respect to load time in my test. She’s using the Thesis Theme (her affiliate link). I ran a separate test with five sites (Kikolani.com, ChrisBrogan.com, CopyBlogger.com, SugarRae.com and LaughingSquid.com) that are using the Thesis Theme. I ran the test five (5) times and ended up with an average speed of 1.4 seconds with all the sites. That’s very impressive so I think I’ll end up using the Thesis Theme in the end.

Do You Have Over A Million Twitter Followers Yet? What does it take to get a million Twitter followers? (Assuming you’re not cheating with some lame following program) We all know it helps to be very famous like Oprah Winfrey (over 3 million followers) or very popular like Twitter it’s self (2.9 million). You could provide a valuable service like CNN Breaking News (2.8 million) but according to TwitterHolic.com only 219 Twitter accounts currently have over a million followers.

There are probably a million articles about getting a ton of followers and just as many people tripping over themselves trying to get there but the real folks that Tweet work hard to keep the numbers low and the quality high. That’s what I have tried to do with our Twitter account. I’m not a fanatic with it but I am a little selective who I follow and when I have a little free time I start blocking followers that look too spammy.

Ok, with all that said, what does it take to get a million Twitter followers?

My answer is…

Wait for it
.
..
…

Be very interesting! That’s the only explanation I can see on why a 29 year old guy living with Dad, has no website and doesn’t even have a location on his profile has over a million Twitter followers. His name is Justin Halpern but goes by just ‘Justin‘ on Twitter, follows only one person, never re-tweets, never replies and only Tweets things his Father says. You gotta love it! Check it out, http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays Seriously, It’s hard to stop reading his Tweets.

I’m happy to announce the official takeover of HotBlogTips.com by Keith Bloemendaal

Last week I posted Who Wants To Run HotBlogTips.com? and Keith decided to take the challenge and he is more than qualified. Keith has experience in business and blogging and he has the drive that most of us just think about. I’m very excited about the new HotBlogTips.com and to see what Keith does with it. He has already done more than the previous admin did in six months but that guy was a slacker

Keith has full control of the blog and can do anything he wants with it. I decided to hand over the blog and just keep ownership of the domain. Keith agreed to keep a link on the blog to my online consulting site but other than that it’s his baby.

Just as a side note, in case anyone is wondering, Keith is not going to build that blog up just to get stuck paying me a bunch of money or worse later. I agreed to sell the domain to Keith anytime he wants to buy it at the value it was the day he took it over which, as we all know, is ten thousand dollars …. just kidding. I don’t even know honestly, but I’m not going to do him wrong. He’s doing me a favor by freeing up some time and easing my stress level a bit.

So please, stop by and visit the new HotBlogTips.com, comment on a couple posts and don’t forget to subscribe. You can’t go wrong because it’s a great blog on it’s way to the top. You can also follow Hot Blog Tips on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

I’ve been planning this post for a while now. I have far too many blogs to run and still maintain everything else so it’s time to start scaling back. I’ve been dropping domains (letting them expire) little by little but HotBlogTips.com is simply too good to just drop. I have a blog setup that is running a multi-author theme and it’s just waiting for the attention it deserves.

I’m not selling the site or giving it away. I’m going to retain ownership of the domain and simply hand the reigns over to someone that has the time and drive to make a go of it. I’m looking for someone that has experience running a successful blog and can see the potential in Hot Blog Tips. See BloggingTips.com to get an idea of what I wanted for HotBlogTips.com. In fact, the multi-user theme on HotBlogTips.com right now was originally designed for BloggingTips.com

So if I am not selling or giving the site away then I must be looking for someone to hire, right? Wrong. I will hand the site over to a qualified and trustworthy blogger that can run and monetize it in any way they see fit. If the site makes a hundred a month, they make a hundred a month. If it makes two thousand dollars then that’s theirs too. All I want from the deal is a footer link (hyper-linked and do-follow) to my main site and the word of the new admin that they will do their best and not ignore it like the last admin did (that would be me).

I will even host the site free of charge or the new admin can move it too their own server, it doesn’t matter to me. If it starts getting too big for my server then we will need to move it or the new admin will need to pay for hosting.

I have already tried something similar with HateMyShape.com I partnered with Brenda Franzo and she’s doing a great job. She runs the site the way she wants and, in her case, I run AdSense on the site. I don’t see much potential in running AdSence on Hot Blog Tips so I’m just asking for a link.

Later on I will be making similar offers for eZinePress.com and SocialExchanger.com. Eventually I think I’ll be saying goodbye to Extreme Ezine too but I will probably put it up for sale. I’m just thinking about it for now. I may decide to keep it once I get everything else in order.

Here’s how you get to run HotBlogTips.com. Comment below showing your interest. Convince me you are the best choice, it’s as simple as that. Feel free to include link/s to a successful blog/s you run. Experience with WordPress and CPanel would be very helpful.

Current Site Stats:

• 35 Posts
• 218 Comments
• 2 Pages
• 7 Categories
• 53 Tags
• PageRank: 01/10
• Alexa: Higher than I can count
• Domain age: Two years in May

In The Spotlight

Anyone that has spent more than an hour on YouTube knows how cool many of the videos are. They also know how lame most of them are. The great ones go viral and that’s exactly what HornBlasters.com has achieved.

I found a pretty funny YouTube video the other day through a tweet by John Sullivan @jsinkeywest. It’s Train Horns Scare Daytona Florida! [below] by Matt Landon Heller of HornBlasters.com Matt has many YouTube videos, several with around half a million views. The video below alone has over 440,000 views, 860 ratings (4 1/2 stars) and 853 comments. Can it get more viral than that? Driving traffic to their site to sell product -- that’s what I’m talking about! I love this stuff. My hat’s off to YouTube Viral Marketing at it’s best and HornBlasters.com. I am now a big fan.

HornBlasters on Facebook
HornBlasters on Twitter

HornBlasters.com Train Horns For Your Ride!

I live in Michigan, US where we have pretty cold winters. This is the time of year that I do most of my reading since it’s too cold for many of the things I normally to outdoors. That’s probably why it was right at one year ago that I posted ‘The Extreme Ezine Recommends Website Magazine‘. I like to think more people visit this blog now so for those that are not aware of Website Magazine I’ll blog about it a little.

Website Magazine is a print and digital magazine focusing on the issue of running a business website. Website Magazine is free for many subscribers. You can get 4 issues a year FREE if you live in the U.S. or Canada. Other countries are $49.00 per year for shipping. There is also an Interactive Digital version accessible online FREE Worldwide. Personally, If I lived outside the US or Canada I would subscribe to the digital version. You could probably print them out yourself cheaper than the shipping cost.

You can sign up for a Website Magazine Professional Membership to receive 12 issues per year for just $44.95. This is the option I choose but I went with the standard complimentary/FREE version for the first couple of years.

Don’t let the cost, or lack there of, mislead you on the quality of the Website Magazine. It’s a professional, top shelf publication that is well worth the time it takes to read. I look forward to each issue and enjoy every single one. It’s nice to have something physical to hold other than a mouse and keyboard every now and then. Request your free subscription to Website Magazine today.