AS far as what to write about, when you are starting you just need to learn the mechanics of writing. Waiting until you get all your research and perfect affilatie programs are lined up can be frustrating as you feel that you must do step A, then step B, then later learn that step C needs to come before Step A.

Here’ is what I would do.

1) Pick a topic you enjoy. your hobby, your sport, etc.
2) Think of a skill or task realted to that hobby…

• -How to knit one, pearl two
• -How to do a basketball layup
• -How to set a volleyball

3) Enter the phase into google with quotes around it like this “How to knit one, pearl two” and note thenumber of search results for that phrase

• “How to knit one, pearl two” = 6 pages!
• “How to do a basketball Layup” = 4 pages
• “how to set a volleyball” - 69 pages

*Note that at this stage you don’t need to focus on teh perfect keywords nor worry on how often this phrase is searched for. The idea here is to learn to write an article, post it on a web 2.0 property and rank for your kewyords.

Any of these will be easy to get your article to rank for your phrase very quickly!

Now set up an account at any one of these web 2.0 authority sites or take your pick among hundreds of others…these are just starter ideas
Squidoo
Wetpaint
Wordpress.org
Google Knol
Ezine Articles
Hubpages

Now write an articel on your topic at one of these sites. Use your kewyord phrase in your headline, at least once in the first sentance of your article, and 1-3 times every hundred words or so. Some people will say more often than that. Use your keyword phrase bolded or as a subheadline in your article as well.

Once your article is written, copy teh URL into your clipboard, and go to one of these bookmarking sites and make an account if you havn’t already

• -Digg
• -Propeller
• -Reddit
• -Stumble

Submit it to one or more of these bookmarking sites then let it simmer for awhile.

Tomorrow (or in a few hours), check google for your search phrase and look for your apge to show up!

This should give you confidence in how the process works. Try it with a few phrases in your hobby area. Even if you decide not to go inot your hobby area as your niche, you will have a nice small collection of articles that will be useful to the itnernet community.

The next step in this type of process is to put some anchor links in your web 2.0 pages pointing back to your “money” page, which could also be a web2.0 page like squidoo or blogger. Now youare building a network of information so that when people search for

• -how to do a layup
• -how to dunk a basketball
• -how to play point guard
• -how to shoot a three pointer

the likelyhood of them ending up on your niche site for basketball goes up exponentially with each new article you post.

hope those ideas help. Just get out there and try it and see what happens.

One commenter asked what it was that I did…sorry if I didn’t mention it before.   I made two major changes to my site which should be the first step anyone takes in doing on-page SEO.

1)  Title Tag - I updated my sitewide default title tag to use my 3 word keyword phrase (targets both location and niche) rather than using my business name as the title tag.

For example, let’s say I lived in Austin and my business was Neon Signs. I’m hip, so I named my business, Austin City Lights.  Before my update, My title tag would have read, “Austin City Lights - Home”.  Boring, but pretty common.

After my update, the title tag would say, “Austin Neon Signs - Custom Signs for your Business”

2)  Description

Description is a META tag.  Meta tags are descriptive information about your webpage.  Using plugins for wordpress or the advanced paramaters in Joomla, you can specify unique descriptions for each individual page on your website. This “meta” description is the default exerpt displayed by search engines in their search results.  By customizing this meta description, and again using my keyword phrase first, I ‘ve highlighted my business in the eyes of my potential customers who are typing “Austin Neon Signs” into their search engine bar.

So that’s pretty basic SEO 101…update your TITLE and META DESCRIPTION tags to reflect the keywords you are targeting for your site and for that page on your site.

It may then take a few days to get your site spidered, but you can speed this up by pinging one of your posts or submitting it to a social bookmarking site or RSS feed.

After implementing one small change to my website, 5 days later I now rank #2 for both of those search terms!

Way cool. I continue to make improvements to my site’s structure and anticipate a solid landing at #1 in no time, as well as improvement on many of the other search terms.

However, I’m thinking of going into SEO consulting for local small businesses, and decided to use my own business site as a test.  It’s been indexed by Google for a long time ( over 200 pages), last on March 6th, so fairly fresh.

I dug into the site tonight and discovered that my meta tags sucked!  Much like doing PPC, you want to stay away from an SEO tag that is too general, like “endurance” and “coach”.  No one looking for a triathlon coach in my hometown is going to go to google and type in “endurance”.  Amazing how much you learn in a year.

So I corrected the metatags and keywords.  I’m taking screenshots of before and after and I can then use this information in my presentations to local businesses.

My current goal is to rank #1 for two local search phrases, and if possible, show up in the Google Local Business Listings.

After fixing the meta tags, I dugg one of my articles to get the google bot back around sooner.  I am upgrading the underlying site structure (Joomla) in order ot further maximize the SEO of the site.   I’ll keep you updated.

So far I have only added 4 of the articles to my site.  For each article, i first submit it to my site to have unique content, and progress towards turning it into an authority site on the topic.  Then I slightly rewrite each article and submit it to ezinesarticles.com.

Today, I am taking those 4 articles and submitting them through iSnare, which is an automatic article distribution service.  I spent a long time comparing article marketer and iSnare before choosing iSnare. The reasons I went with iSnare are that it allows you to use multiple pen names on the same account, and you pay per article.  At the rate I am submitting (4 articles in 2 months?) I don’t want to waste $67/month, but would rather pay $1/article to have it distributed.

It took me only about 20 minutes to reconfigure each of the 4 and get it submitted to iSnare.  They state a 5-7 day approval process, faster with the paid service, so we’ll see what happens.

Now I am submitting 2 additional articles, first to my site, then to ezinearticles.com

Since starting the article submission, I have seen almost a doubling in my traffic to the site.  But it’s also a seasonal site, so my increased traffic may be simply due to the weather.   I’ll keep you posted…

Formula Five Videos

But if you are like me, I simply don’t have the patience for videos, I’d rather get the information in writing, sit down with it at the coffee shop and dig in.  The Stompernet guys must have been reading my mind, because here it is,

MBA in a Box

It’s a 96 page PDF download of the transcripts from the videos.  The PDF is free, and I’d download it quick while it’s still available.  Sometimes great stuff like this tends to dissapear quickly!

Did you download it yet?  No?  Get it now!

OK, so here’s what it covers, I’m not going to rewrite it all, but just wet your appetite

“Dead Simple” Video

• What not to waste your time on (has things like article marketing, blogging, social posting, etc) Huh?  this one shocked me!
• Introduction to who Paul Lemberg is
• Review of the 60 day test run of the Formula Five material from Stompernet Members
• The Five Essential Money Making operations of a successful business, known by these Stomperfied names:
  • Margin Magnifier
  • Sales Stacker
  • Conversion Control
  • Lead Landslide
  • Turbo Thruster

The next part gets into the meat of the the first Module, Margin Magnifier

• “Successful Business is NOT about how much you make, it’s about how much you keep.”
• The law of Compounding as applied to your business (either on or offline)…if you improved each of your five components by only 15 % you will double your profits as each component has a magnifying (Compounding) effect on the next.
• Review of 4 ways to magnify your Margins
  • A “brazen” price increase in your products of only 15% (leading to a 53% increase on profits you get to keep)
  • How only a 4% increase in price can result in a 15% increase in your profits
  • How to enhance the VALUE of your OFFER so that your customers are happy to pay more
• Conversion Control
  • “Total Offer Control” - all the elements of value that your customers will get when they purchase your product(s).  He goes over 22 components of your offer…the more you can cover the more value you can provide to your customer (and the more you can charge)
  • What to do about “weak points” - areas where your competition may be better than you, and how to find your relative benefit for your customer
• Superior Value Propositions - incorporating these into your sales process simply makes “Sales Happen”
  • Valuize -he covers several different industries here (direct sales, B2B) and several components of “vaulizing” your product or service
  • Free Focus Factor - showing your customer how quickly their purchase will be Free.  For example, cost savings on an energy efficient product int eh home will cover the cost of the purchase in x number of months.  The customer may know this on some level, but if you SHOW them, it will result in sales
  • Total Return Engine - Do the math for the customer, showing them the dollar value of your product features.

At this point, I was pretty well saturated with information and had to take a break from the first video.  But he goes on to discuss the Total offer matrix - how combining the “SVPs” above plus the 22 components of your Offer will help you write killer copy for your sales letters, web pages, etc.

This is just a peek at one part of the FIRST of the Five modules that make up the Formula Five, or F5 system by Stompernet.

And the MBA in a box report covers yet a second video avaiable on the site.  It’s just a lot to try and review!

So…go check it out for yourself, you will definately pick up some things that will take you only minutes to a few hours to implement.  if you are willing to give it a shot and implement some of these things, consider entering the Stompernet Contest too.

Go here to download the MBA in a Box before they take it down!

(If you want the quick story, just go here to watch the free videos!  Stompernet Going Natural 5   )

It means that they simply provide the BEST most useful information for free.  Stompernet’s homepage has always had a video opt-in series that covers a number of topics to help you improve your website’s conversion rates and more…with a bottom line of increasing your profits.

When I got word of a collabaration with Paul Lemberg I looked up more information on line about Paul Lemberg and learned that he is a successful business coach, helping people double their profits and more with just some simple changes to the way they do business.

Formula Five is Stompernet’s Evolution of Paul Lemberg’s teachings as applied to internet marketing and online commerce stores.  But the principals can be applied to your offline business as well.

The basic premise is the law of Compounding.  Albert Einstein is quote as having said, “The law of compounding is the most powerful force in the universe.”   How do you apply the law of compounding to your business?  By making incremental changes in parts of your business that all relate to one another, you compound the improvment of each step in the process!

Confused? No need to be.  Here are the latest Stompernet videos that explain the process.  Just from these free videos, readers are posting success stories in less than 24 hours on Stompernet’s blog…1 day increases in profits of nearly $1000 from one man making one change to his sales process.  Pretty awesome!

In case you’ve missed the videos, go here to check them out:

Stompernet Going Natural 5

Once there, you can view 2 of the free online videos and download them to your computer.  You’ll need to opt in in order to receive the 3rd video, but don’t worry, it’s totally worth it (it’s free afterall!)

Here’s the link again:

Stompernet Going Natural 5

The rule of 72 is a quick equation used to determine the doubling time of investments. IN other words, if you had a savings account at 5% interest, how many years would it take to double your money?

Divide 72 by 5(%) to get 14…14 years to double your investment at 5% interest.

The rule can be manipulated several ways. I have not checked the math on this, but recently learned how to apply this to marketing to double your income in a year from your current projects.

First determine the number of different factors that lead to your income. In my case, I used this list for my Build a Niche Store sites:

Number of sites
Number of unique articles on each site
Numbef of backlinks from article directories
Number of backlinks from blogs

So that’s 4 factors, and some of them are interrelated, but all of them are needed in order to continue getting traffic and profits.

Now you take 72 and divide it by 4 to get 18%. If I make an 18% improvement in each area, I should double my profits in the next year.

I currently have 7 sites making money on Build a Niche Store…18% is less than 2 sites. So in the next year (probably next month), I plan to put up 2 additional Build a Niche Store sites

I went through each site adn determined how many unique articles I had posted ON the site. Guess what? Only about 3 per site! I tend to get bored and move on to the next one. So…18% of 3 is way less than 1, so just 1 new article per site will get me toward my goal…that’s pretty easy.

Same story with backlinks and blogs…just calculate 18% (or whatever %age you came up with) of your current efforts adn make a plan to implement those changes.

Can I make those changes in 1 month instead of over 1 year? Sure can!

I’m not a financial math wizard, but hopefully you can see from tehse examples that it’s not too hard to DOUBLE your business by planning ahead and making small improvements across your marketing efforts.

So today I took some success focused action, posted 2 articles to ezines, put a new page of unique content on one of my sites, created a “store” page with that kewywrd and interlinked them all. EZines doesn’t seem to have a problem sending traffic to a BANS content page, only to a thin bans front page or store page.

You can apply these prinicipals to ANY model of affiliate income…

So what are YOU planning to do?

I recently read an article that talked about exactly that, and it’s not as hard as it sounds like it could be.  I’ll fill you in on more details as I wrap my head around this!

How is your January going?

So the totals are…

BANS $2880 (through EPN), $525 (through Commission Junction),

Text Link Ads $725

Wealthy Affiliate Commissions $860

Total(ish) :  $4187.00

Holy cow.  I never would have thought a year ago that I’d be telling you I earned over $4000 doing affiliate marketing!

What about expenses?

Well there were some…hosting ($9.95/month), domain names (bunches), Wealthy Affiliate membership fees ($290).  I’m not including advertising fees here because those were all for clickbank products and the whole package there was pretty much break even.

I did spend a good part of my earnings reinvesting…things like buying article packs, hiring a site designer…but so far everything has paid for itself easily.

I’m having a blast doing this and here’s hoping this coming year is exponentially better!