I thought I would share a great video talking about how to make money online. This video was posted in my Internet Business Models class that I am taking for my Internet Marketing degree by my instructor.

This isn’t the same old video you have seen a billion times. David Heinemeier Hansson shares some ideas that we don’t often hear of online about starting up a business online. Once you hear it, you realize it is all common sense, so why don’t we hear more of these kind of ideas?

There is some language that may offend some people.

If you have trouble with viewing the video on this blog, you can click the link below to go directly to the video.

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

Please share your thoughts on the video. What did you think?

Make Money On Your Articles - Photo Courtesy of iprole

I want to share my favorite article submission sites. I only use two article submission sites right now and they aren’t the traditional places I see most bloggers refer others to such as Ezine Articles.

With these article publishing sites that I recommend, you have a bit more control over what you do with it and they are more like mini sites. You can even add affiliate links to the information you publish to these sites. They also have modules for you to add, so you can refer someone to other resources that you can make a commission from if they purchase something after clicking through.

The two sites I prefer are:
1. Squidoo
2. HubPages

I have tried others, but I either had to pay to use all the good features, or they made it hard or impossible to add any links to the articles. Squidoo and HubPages both have great communities that are very helpful and supportive. They also have revenue sharing for their members. The royalties that you can earn come from the ads on the site. They will share the revenue from those ads with the publishers, which is way cool.

Those are my referral links that you can use to sign up and start creating articles. I could possibly get a commission if you use those links.

Have you has experience with HubPages and Squidoo?

Let me know if it’s worked for you.

What is Article Marketing?

Ok, great question folks. I’m glad you asked. Article marketing is is the concept of submitting an article (it doesn’t have to be long) to different sites that will either publish the information for you or allow you to publish the article to yourself.

What are Backlinks?

Oooh! Another great question. Backlinks are links on one site that lead back to your blog or website.

Back to the main programming.

Article marketing is another way to get links of your blog or website out there on the great big web directing traffic (hopefully) back to your site. This will help generate traffic for your website in two ways.

1. People clicking the links.
2. SEO – search engines ranking your site higher with more links going to your site.

Remember that the more quality and relevant sites that you have your links on, the better Google will rank you and the more likely you will get organic traffic from searches people will do on the search engines looking for information you have.

A Word of Caution!

You shouldn’t go out and post links on as many sites as you can find all at once just to have a bunch of back links. It doesn’t work this way. This is spamming and will get you on the bad side of the search engines. Not to mention it will turnoff any potential visitors.

Again, back to our regular programming.

Do some research and find an article submission site that you would like to use. You do want to use more than one site. That way your information will show up across the web and someone searching for that type of information (and the search engines) will see you as having more authority.

I recommend starting with one site, then when you get familiar with it you can branch out to another. While you are getting familiar with the site, you are also getting familiar with the community on that site. (If you use one that has a community.) When you are involved in the community, you are building relationships with others that will help you along in your journey. They will also visit your site and may keep coming back if they find it interesting.

Since you want the articles to be relevant to your topic, you can talk about your product, service. I write an article about similar information to what I have on my blog. I will write my blog post, and then I go and write a companion piece to the post with a link in the article to my blog. I will choose a small part of the post that I can expand on and instead of maybe writing another post I just create an article. In the article I will add relevant links by choosing words in the article that would be relevant to the blog post and make them a link leading to the post.

You can check out an example from my blog post last week about getting traffic from bookmarking sites and the article I wrote on HubPages about automated bookmarking tools.

How do you use article submission to get traffic to your sites?

In my previous post Components to Increase Website Traffic Generation I said I had planned on doing some follow up posts regarding each of the components I mentioned for getting traffic. So, here is the post on social bookmarking.

The idea behind social bookmarking is to get your links out there for others to come across and visit your site. By having links to your posts or website on these bookmarking sites, you are exposing it for more people to come take a look and see whatcha got. Frankly though you probably won’t get a ton of traffic from these sites. It’s a bit like playing roulette. The odds aren’t in your favor, but you will occasionally get some traffic from those links. Who knows, you may even get lucky and your link makes it to the top of the social bookmarking popularity contest and you do get a ton of traffic.

There is a bigger benefit to having links on some of these social bookmarking sites than what I have mentioned so far. They are great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes and getting backlinks. Backlinks are links on a site that link back to your site. Part of the calculations that a search engine uses when assigning PageRank to a site is based on how many sites link to your site.

Now, don’t get carried away and start bookmarking all over the place. The search engines like to see natural and genuine links. If all of a sudden you have 100′s of bookmarks that weren’t there 2 days ago, Google and the other search engines will count that against you. You can bookmark to one or two bookmarking sites that you are active on, but don’t go crazy.

You can in-fact find a ton of (looking for a decent word here) poop, when you perform a search for “social bookmarking” or “social bookmarking traffic”. There are many folks out there selling automated bookmarking tools and bookmarking services. Stay away from these! These will get you in trouble with the search engines. It is much better to have links happen naturally than by having 300 of them suddenly appear out of know where. The search engines do know the difference. I don’t know how, but they do. You will see what traffic you do get from the search engines start to fall dramatically if you use these methods.

What you can do, other than bookmarking on the one or two sites you are active on, is to have a tool on your blog or website that allows the visitor to be able to share and bookmark your stuff for you. You know, like that little bookmarking button I have at the bottom of every post. This way they can save it for later if they want to come back to it or send it to his/her sister. Once it’s on the bookmarking site (and assuming he/she didn’t mark it as private) other people that use that bookmarking site can see the link and possibly pick it up.

It helps when you bookmark yourself to carefully select your keywords that you are listing with the bookmark. You want to make them highly relevant to your site and terms that someone would use when searching for your site on the search engines. This is what the search engines will see when looking at the other site to determine which search results your site shows up in.

I found a video on YouTube that I thought was useful and relevant to today’s topic. Have fun! There is more we could cover, but we will have to do that another time. You can find more tips on how to use social bookmarking sites to get traffic on my Squidoo lens.

Directing Traffic To Your Site

I thought I would brainstorm on the different components to increase web site traffic to your site, blog, article or whatever. You can’t just focus on one part of the chain.

• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Articles
• SEO (Keyword Research)
• Social Networking Sites/Tools
• Comments
• Videos
• Mom

My plan is for you to see some follow up posts coming that go over these tools to create traffic to a website.

I would love to hear some additional ideas from you. I know I probably missed something, so leave a comment and share how you generate traffic to your website or blog.

I haven’t really been away. I just didn’t have time for any online activities that didn’t include school.

I started school the week of Thanksgiving, and I am going for my bachelors in Internet Marketing. My first month of classes was very difficult for me. I started a week late and was always struggling to catch up.

This month I have a bit more leisure time, so I am hoping I will be able to update my squidoo lenses occasionally and drop a post at least once a month on two of my blogs.

These are my hopes, but there are no guarantees that I may find time.

P.S. When you buy the Giclee Print of the woman with bellhop carrying all of her luggage at AllPosters.com, I will receive a commission.

Like a lot of people starting out trying to make money online I ran across PLR (Private Label Rights) and MRR (Master Resell Rights) and Resell Rights membership sites. Most of us figure out that it’s just too hard to compete with all those hundreds of other online marketers selling the same exact PLR products and Resell Rights products so we give up. I did too….kind of sort of.

I gave up trying to sell the stuff on these sites, but started to look at it in a different way. A lot of the products on these sites are junk. It’s the same old thing that you already know if you have read more that one blog post. There are some internet marketing tools on these sites however that are very useful.

Take time every once in a while to look through the resell rights software on some of these PLR and Master Resell Rights Membership sites. You may be surprised by what you find. It doesn’t matter what type of online business you have. If you do any type of online marketing, you will find something useful. I have found some great theme templates for blogs and websites. As well as software for keeping track of your affiliate programs, links and products that you promote.

If you don’t already have a membership at these types of sites, get one. Don’t worry, most offer a free membership. I have found the free membership works for me, but if you can you may like to get the upgrade to get some of the nicer products offered.

There are so many of these resell sites out there I can’t list them all, but here are some membership sites that I can recommend.

Resell Rights Weekly
PLR Wholesaler
SureFire Wealth

I am curious as to how others use these types of sites. Please leave a comment below and share your tips and suggestions.

If you do business online, you Need a Privacy Policy. Even if all you do online is run a simple blog you have to have one. There are all sorts of laws in many states and countries around the world and many of them are recent changes that state you have to reveal certain things to your readers and visitors.

Researching and coming up with your own privacy policy that conforms to all these laws is quite daunting. It would take up a lot of your time and energy. You can find some professionals online who will work with you to come up with a custom privacy policy. They probably to an excellent job, but I am all about going the free route if at all possible.

I’m going to save you a huge hassle. I have done a bit of research and found two places online you can get a Free Privacy Policy. You just fill out a few questions and press the button and voila. You have a policy that has you legally covered. The two sites are listed below.

FreePrivacyPolicy.com
DMA Privacy Policy Generator

I finally bought the Squidoo Queen e-book. As I was reading it, I kept thinking that I really should have gotten it when I first started on Squidoo. This is great for those new to squidoo or those thinking of trying squidoo, but are a little confused on where to start. Kelly Stone did an excellent job laying out every step you need to do in order to research your topic and get targeted traffic to and sales from your squidoo lens.

It is true that all the stuff in the book you can learn with out buying it. You can learn everything by going to the Squidoo forum SquidU, asking other lensmasters and researching on the web. However, this book will hugely cut your time spent researching and learning and will cut down on your number of mistakes that are normally made by those new to squidoo.

I also know some people just prefer having instructions they can refer to. This is perfect for those that want a reference or want to hurry up the learning process. The sooner you gain the knowledge you need, the sooner you make money!

Squidoo Queen: Squidoo Meets Bum Marketing

Buy at AllPosters.com

One of the best ways to get free traffic to your website, blog or web page is through bookmarking. Bookmarking is a great way to get back links. A back link is simply a link on one site to your site. There is however a right way and a wrong way do this. You want to make sure you do not spam these bookmarking sites and are actually contributing to the social community within them.

Bookmarking your site gets you traffic from more than one source. You get traffic from people on the bookmarking site that come across your link and from the search engines. Once your site starts to show up in these places, the search engines such as Google and Yahoo start to take notice. If you do it right, it’s a good thing when they notice. Your site will start to go up in rank with these search engines and send you traffic.

You can find more details on how to make sure you do it right on Squidoo Friendly Social Bookmarking Sites. These tips work for both squidoo lenses and all other sites.