But I lost interest back then for one reason or another and kinda forgot about aged domains for a while.

That is, until recently. I started buying them a few at a time about a year ago. But this time I noticed that a few were losing their PR and wouldn’t get it back. Without knowing what I was doing, I bought several that had been recently dropped and a few that had fake PR. To say I over spent for those domains is an understatement! For those domains, it was like I had to start the backlinking and content building all over again, just as I would a new site. I knew there had to be something I was missing.

I started hitting the blogs and forums again trying to find someone who knew the ins and outs of this game. I found the usual fluff and B.S. on most sites. But one name kept coming up on several sites as someone who knew what they were talking about. So I found this guy posting on some forums and started to read his post. From past experience, I knew that a lot of what he said was true about aged domains.

It was what I didn’t know that was killing me. I needed to know what I was doing wrong with those domains that went no where after I bought them!

How To Buy Aged Domains – Automatic Authority Review

I learned that Lando, the person everyone was talking about on the forums as having the inside track on buying aged domains, was about to release a course on Buying aged domains and setting them up on WordPress. This course was also suppose to show people a few things to help them keep their PR once they owned the domains. I was still a little skeptical until another blogger that I trust recommended Lando as well and had told me how well he was doing with aged domains.

So I waited a few weeks while Lando put the finishing touches on his course that he called Automatic Authority. Justly named because that is what you’ll get if you buy a quality aged domain.

Well, the course finally arrived and I was the first to buy it. I sit down right then and watched the Video tutorials from start to finish. I found out rather quickly that I had been on the right track buying aged domains, but there were some very important steps that I was missing. As is with most things, it’s those important two or three pieces of the puzzle that prevent you from achieving success with a technique or process.

The Automatic Authority video course is very detailed. Lando walks you through step by step showing you what tools to use and how to analyze a domain before bidding on it. He also gives little inside tips on what is important when you’re evaluating a domain and what you can do away with. It’s a combination of all these little tips and tricks in the process that keep you on track and keeps you focused.

One of the techniques he uses will help you refine your search for domains, saving you hours, if not days, in finding the potential gold mine in aged domains. Because if you haven’t figured it out yet, not every aged domain is a good one.

He also answered my question about dropped domains and gave me his opinion why some were actually good buys while I should avoid others. It made perfect sense to me after I watched that video. I now knew what I had done right in the past and why some of my other domains I bought didn’t rank well.

There are 10 video’s in the Automatic Authority course. You’ll learn how to spot fake domains and how to set up your newly acquired aged domain on a WordPress site and what to do to help you keep the PR once you have your site set up.

Lando also mentioned one little trick that some people do to boost the PR of their domain they’re selling and then once you buy it, POOF, you can watch your PR vanish. It’s tips like this that really makes this course worth the money if you’re serious about building a network of aged domains with websites that have authority.

Why You Should Be Buying Aged Domains

For some of you, you may be scratching your head wondering why you should be buying aged domains. I’ll try and break it down for you now.

1. If you haven’t learned yet, Google gives a great amount of weight to aged domains with PR. When you buy a new domain, it may take your anywhere from 6 months, and in many cases longer, to rank for profitable keywords. But with aged domains, many will rank quickly once you start building backlinks. This is because in Google’s eyes, these are aged domains with “trusted” authority.
2. If you haven’t noticed lately, Google’s farmer update has really been taking it’s toll on a lot of websites. From what I and others can figure out, Google is favoring older websites with old links. In their eyes, if these websites have been around and have old links, then they must be trustworthy. While some of my newer sites have lost rankings, my older sites with good PR have stayed the same and some have actually gained rankings – which leads to increased income!
3. You can used Aged domains in several ways. You can buy them and set up an affiliate site on them or you can use them to link to your existing sites. If you’re a serious marketer, then you know the value of having high PR sites linking to your site. When you buy aged domains with PR, you’re getting a site with authority in Google’s eyes.
4. Websites that have authority are able to rank for a variety of keywords…and usually do so much quicker than newer domains. This means you can create websites with a broad set of keywords and they should rank much quicker than trying to start a bunch of new sites with exact match domains for each keyword you want to rank for.

As you can see, there’s fewer things more advantageous than having an aged domain.

For example, shortly after watching Lando’s Automatic Authority video course, I was able to do some research and narrowed my search down to 3 domains that were up for auction. One of them had a PR 3 and 2 had PR 4. I followed all the steps that Lando outlined in the course and decided that any of these three would be a good addition to my portfolio of websites. But I wasn’t going to over spend. So I patiently waited for the end of the auction and put in my highest bid for each domain.

I ended up winning one of the PR4 sites. The PR3 actually went higher than both PR4′s! That’s just something crazy that will happen if you follow domain auctions long enough.

That was 3 weeks ago. This domain actually already ranked for 7 keywords when I bought it according to SEMRush.Com. When you’re doing research, you sometimes come across domains that already rank for keywords. When I find these, I check out the Adsense CPC or whether or not there’s an aff program for the keywords.

Now, my new PR4 aged domain I bought, with just a little backlink building and 6 pages of content, is ranking for over 29 keywords and 13 are in the top 10 of Google SERPS for their keyword. 4 are in the top 3. Some of these keywords have $8 to $11 CPC on Adwords. Can you say “Instant Adsense or Affiliate Income”?

Basically it boils down to taking a short cut on your efforts to get your website ranked and authority built. Like I’ve said before, I’ve had new websites take over a year to rank for competitive keywords. Buying aged domains moves you to the head of the line in a shorter amount of time!

If you’d like to find out how to buy aged domains and not make the costly mistakes I and others have made, then you should really consider getting Automatic Authority. It’ll teach you the right way to buy aged domains and set up websites to help you keep your authority and PR. So if you’re serious about building your own high PR websites or building websites that have the ability to rank quickly, you’re going to want to get Automatic Authority.

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But in my opinion, they have made some good changes. At least from an Affiliate Marketing standpoint. They’ve upped the minimum word count to 400 words. The old word count was 250 words. I guess they figure Google will like their articles better if they’re 400 words of How to Bake A Cookie rather than 250 words.

But the increase in the minimum word count should turn away some spammers no doubt. Especially those that were getting spun articles past the editors…and there was quite a bit of that!

Another change they’re looking into is to block articles on niches that they feel are over saturated. In a recent blog entry, they asked members how they should handle these over saturated niches.

Some of the niches they consider over saturated right now are penis enlargement, get your ex back, acai berry, reverse cell phone look up, credit card debt relief, male enhancement pill and TV to PC.

Some of the ways they expect to deal with this is a lottery system where only a select number of articles in these niches are approved, a blanket ruling where the prevent any articles covering these niches to be accepted or develop guidelines on trending topics.

I’m not 100% sure that blocking these niches is going to help EzineArticles get back in the good graces of Google, but hey, who am I? Perhaps this was  a suggestion from Google itself?

Other Editor Guideline Changes At EzineArticles

If you’re using EZA and using one Author Profile for several different niches, they’re going to be watching you real close. They’ve done said that they feel one person can not be an expert in many fields. This decision won’t affect me, as I have had Author Profiles for each of my Niches for a long time.

Tip: Since I brought this up, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The Author Profile pages are do follow. They can also achieve PR if they are backlinked properly. And all those articles listed on the Profile pages will receive some link juice from the page if you build backlinks to them. Better hurry though, no telling if EZA will stop allowing do follow links on Profile pages or not in the future!

EZA will not only make sure that the Author’s articles are all relevant, but they’ll also be checking the links in your Resource Box to make sure they are relevant to the article. So if you’re going to write an Article over how to rebuild a 350 Chevy engine and put links in the Resource Box pointing to your Acai Berry site, well friend, they’re going to start rejecting your articles. Don’t laugh, there are many so called “Guru’s” that claim you don’t need relevant links to rank pages….really….

How This May Affect EzineArticles

As I said before, I believe many of the changes at these Content sites are knee jerk at best. They’re scrambling around to try and please Google and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

I’m not sure if the folks at EZA really believe that a 400 word minimum and some relevancy for resource boxes will please G. EZA claims it’s going to give its editors more time to look over articles. They’ve warned us it may take twice as long for articles to be accepted or rejected. My last few articles after the Slap took nearly two weeks to be approved.

Will Internet Marketers stay with EzineArticles? I don’t think so. At least not in the huge numbers they have in the past. I myself stopped writing for EzineArticles for nearly a year because their Editors were getting ridiculous on what they would reject an article for. Then the for about the last year, it seemed they got better and would accept well written articles in a timely fashion.

Are you willing to wait two or more weeks for your articles to be approved or denied?

Also, if they keep adding niches that are “oversaturated” in their opinion, will you still write articles for them?

Right now, they say they’re still getting over a million views per day. That’s pretty darn good. The month previous to the Google Slap, they had approximately 57 million views.

For my money, there are other places where I can write an article and get the benefit of a backlink quicker than at EZA. Hubpages, InfoBarrel, Snipsley and others all offer quicker approvals and they can be ranked just as fast as a EZA article, sometimes faster!

So, is it worth my time to submit an article that may not be accepted for up to two weeks or more? Remember, this is an article with increased requirements. If you’re just starting out, then you may have time for all the hoops. But I can get double or even triple the amount of quality backlinks from other places in the same amount of time that it will take me to write, and hopefully get approved, an article submitted to EZA.

I’m thinking that EZA will see a huge decrease in articles submitted to them. At least article that have a good Adsense CPC.  Of course, since they already have hundreds of thousands indexed articles on high paying CPC niches, I’m sure they’re not that worried about it…yet.

I’m sure that their highest earning Adsense dollars are from pages that have a high number of Internet Marketers trying to rank for those keywords also. So if all the Affiliate Marketers leave and go to alternate sites for their links, can EZA continue to make bank with articles on how to bake cookies or 10 tips for watching your grass grow? Me thinks not. It will be interesting to watch the events unfold!

Personally, if they want to continue to attract quality writers, I think they should develop a profit sharing plan similar to Snipsley or Hubpages. But I realize they’re not going to do that while the hundreds of thousands of article they already have are making them cold hard cash!

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Now that you’ve signed up, or if you’re already a member at HubPages, here’s how I make money with HubPages. Let me say up front that if you’re thinking you’re going to make money quick with this technique, then you’re going to be disappointed.  It won’t make you a lot of money quick, but it will bring in some residual income month after month if you do your part.

The thing about HubPages is that they generally get better as they get older, just like most webpages. I love Hubs because they allow me to cover a subject that has too few profitable keywords to justify building a website. I may find some good keywords, but if there is only one main keyword and few, or a bunch of low paying secondary keywords, it’s not really worth my time. But if I can whip out a HubPage in 30 minutes and cover that one main keyword and the 2 or 3 secondary keywords, then I’m money ahead!

Plus, as an added bonus, HubPages has authority, so Google is more apt to rank a page from HubPages quicker than from a brand spanking new site!

The other nice thing about HubPages is that once they’re built, you have to do very little to keep them up. I build links to them just as I would any other site and sometimes update the content, but I pretty much build ‘em and forget them with the exception of building links to them.

I monetize my HubPages with Adsense, Amazon and Ebay. Even though I have a Kontera account, I don’t bother with it. I have also used affiliate programs from third party networks like ShareASale and Commission Junction to make money with HubPages.

Here How I Make Money With A HubPage

First off, you need to find a subject that you want to write over or a product. I’ve only been using HubPages for a little over 2 years and in that time, product reviews and comparisons have been my biggest money makers. For example, a comparison Hub might be a Hub comparing the Apple iPhone to the Samsung Galaxy S. With proper link building, I would bring in all types of people looking for a comparison between the iphone and the Galaxy S, people looking for iPhone reviews, people looking for Galaxy S reviews and probably people looking for an iPhone alternative!

Then, once they land on my Hub, they see that there is a Galaxy S add from Amazon right next to the review. If the review has done it’s job, they’re going to want to buy the Galaxy S and will probably do so through Amazon or Ebay!

Step By Step Guide on How I Monetize HubPages

For those of you who need a step by step guide, here goes.

You’ll need to find some profitable keywords. For you people that have no money, this is going to take some time. For those of you who are a Keyword Academy member, you already know how to find those profitable keywords with Niche Refinery (which is a free keyword tool only available to The Keyword Academy members). You members get to finding those green keywords! (If you don’t know what the TKA is, here’s my The Keyword Academy review)

If you don’t have access to The Keyword Academy, then you’re going to have to go and find profitable keywords. I suggest you start making a list, a long list, of products and things you think may be profitable. Then go to the Google Keyword tool and start typing in those keywords into the tool. Make sure you search for “Exact” matches by checking the box on the left side. There will be 3 boxes labeled ‘Broad’, ‘Exact’ and ‘Phrase’. You want to check ‘Exact’.

You’re looking for keywords that have at least 1000 searches per month (‘Exact’ matches) and have a CPC of at least $1. Once you’re done there, you’ll need to go to Google and search each of the top 3 to 5 websites for that keyword and see the authority of each website. You’re gong to need a tool like the SEO for FireFox Plugin to check the rankings of those sites. I look for sites with a PR 3 or below in those top 3 to 5 websites. This means those sites have a relatively low PR and that a HubPage with some links built to it should be able to outrank those sites. There’s a little more to this, but that’s what I’m looking for in a nutshell.

One way I find things to sell is to go to Amazon and click on a Category. Then use the “Bestsellers” tag or the “Highest Ranking” tab to find products that other people are buying. You can also do this on eBay by going to pulse.ebay.com. This will give you the items that are selling the most on ebay. Once you have a list of products, follow the technique above to narrow down your search for profitable keywords.

Once you’ve found some low competition but profitable keywords, make sure one of three things. One is that Amazon has a good variety of the product you found. If it’s not a product, make sure that it can be found on Ebay. If it can’t be found on either Amazon or Ebay, then go to the Google Keyword Tool and make sure there are at least 1000 ‘Exact’ searches or more for the main keyword and secondary keywords. Also, I want that keyword to have a CPC of at least $1, more would be better. These are the criteria I use for Adsense.

If it’s a product but you can’t find it in Amazon or eBay, then see if you can find an Affiliate Program for it.

Once I have my list of profitable (green) keywords or Product keywords, I go to HubPages and create a new Hub.

I make sure my Keyword comes first in the Title, for example ‘iPhone 4 vs Samsung Galaxy S’ or ‘Samsung Galaxy S – iPhone Killer?’.

Next, I choose the appropriate category from HubPages, then I select the layout. I use the third layout from the left most of the time.

Next is an important part. The Tags. I use as many tags as I can. You only want to have relevant tags for your keywords. Don’t just stuff your Hub with any tags or you run the risk of getting banned.

One trick I use is to go back to the Google Keyword tool and type in my Keyword. The list that Google returns should all be closely related to your main keyword. I use many of these (10 to 20 if I can find them) closely related words at the Tags in HubPages. This has been one of the biggest success secrets to my HubPages paying off. Because I will rank for many of those keywords that I typed into my Hubs as Tags!

I then click on the ‘Submit’ button and continue building my HupPage. I break my content up into little section with lots of text boxes. In each text box you can put a Heading. Make sure you Main keyword is in the Top text box heading and your secondary keywords are in the additional text module headings. I also want to make sure that my Main keyword appears on the page about 3 to 5 times.

How much content should you  use on your HubPages?

This depends upon the subject you’re writing about, but my hubs are always over 500 words and most are 700 up. The more you tell, the more you sell. Work those primary or “cousin” keywords into your content!

The other things I do that help my HubPages is that I write my own summary. I never check the automatic box. You’ll find several tabs above the box where your tags and modules appear. The one all the way to the right is called the Groups tab. I include all my related Hubs into related Groups. This give me great inner linking for my HubPages.

The next tab to the left from the end is the Summary. This is where I write my summary, including my main keyword and a few secondary keywords if I can.

Where To Position Amazon and Ebay modules for the Best Results

It seems everyone has their own way of building a HubPage and where they like their Amazon and eBay modules (Hubpages will automatically insert Adsense blocks into your Hub) I like my Amazon and eBay ads running up the right side of my content. If I’m reviewing or comparing several related products, then I make sure there’s an Amazon or Ebay ad right next to the sub-review. You’d be surprised at how well this words.

My next step after getting everything set up is to publish my Hub.

Next, I start building links to that Hub like crazy. For most of my Hubs, I use EzineArticles and GoArticles. Once again, if you’re a member of The Keyword Academy, you have access to PostRunner which is a directory where members can submit written articles in exchange for a link back to their sites. And once again, it’s only available to members of The Keyword Academy!

On average, I write 5 articles and submit them to EzineArticles for each Hub. I also write 5 more that I send to GoArticles and 5 that go to PostRunner sites.

I watch my Hubs over a Period of months and if that doesn’t get me good rankings, then I repeat the process over again. 5 articles to EzineArticles, 5 to GoArticles and 5 to PostRunner sites. This is usually enough to get me my HubPage on the front page of Google SERPS for my chosen keyword.

And that Boys and Girls is how I make money with HubPages. It may seem like lot of work, but once you get the hang of it, you can turn a Hub out pretty quick.

I currently have over 200 Hubs and they bring in a good amount of my income. My goal is to have over 500 by the end of the year. I try and build 10 per week (some weeks I do, some I don’t). If you work 7 days, that’s less than 2 per day. If you work 5 days, it’s 2 per day. It takes me about 45 minutes to an hour from start to finish to create one Hub.

And as I said earlier, this is probably the easiest way to make residual income because these hubs will continue to pay month after month (if they’re profitable keywords and on the front page of Google).

And remember, IT WON’T WORK IF YOU DON’T!!! No one is going to make these Hubs for you (unless you pay them well!). They won’t start making money until a few months down the road in most cases, but if you do your part, most Hubs will make money! On average, I don’t usually start making any noticeable money from my HubPages until they’re about 6 to 8 months old with lots of anchor text backlinks and on the front page of Google for my main keyword!

If you’re not a member yet, click here to sign up for HubPages and get started today.

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After a few months, my research has taught me several things. One is that no matter what, to make good honest money at anything online, it takes some patience and effort. Finding ways to make money with parked domains is no different. I tried several methods to make money with my parked domains and I’ll share some of my findings with you below. Let me just say this though, if you’re expecting a story about how I made a killing with parked domains, you’d better go read something else!

To be honest, the only people I’ve ever heard of, or know of, who are making a lot of money with parked domains are those who have thousands of domains. These are your domain brokers and domain speculators. I don’t know of anyone with a few hundred domains who are making huge profits. But then again, the whole notion behind a parked domain is that the only traffic it gets is type in traffic, so unless you have a few super popular domains that are one or two word keywords, you’re not going to get the traffic that you need to bring in huge amounts of dollars!

So, here’s my findings over several months.

Adsense for Domains

If you have an Google Adsense account, then you have access to this feature from Google. Basically what happens is whenever someone types in your domain name, for example; example.com, and comes to your site, you’ll get a small amount of money if they click on one of the ads on that site. These ads are very similar to Adsense ads (afterall, it is Adsense we’re talking about!).

I moved 10 domains over to Adsense for domains to see how well they’d do. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect much. And it’s a good thing, I hardly made any money at all. But after all, they are just domain names with no content so I shouldn’t have been that surprised!

Domain Parking Sites

Chances are at some time or another you’ve typed in a domain name into the address bar of your browser and got a generic page with a bunch of ads on it. Maybe you misspelled the name or you thought the domain you wanted was adsenses.com rather than adsense.com. Whatever the reason, the generic page you see with all the ads are generally hosted by a Domain Parking Site.

In a nutshell, here’s how most domain parking sites work. You transfer your domain dns to their servers. This is generally really easy to do and most web hosting companies have a feature on their hosting dashboards to make this easy. If they don’t, you need a new host or some written instructions!

There is usually no charge for you to transfer your domain’s DNS to their server. I would be suspicious of any company who wanted to charge you to do that. These companies usually make money by putting ads up on the generic pages that pop up when someone types in your domain name. Most of these domain parking sites keyword target their sites so you have a good chance whenever someone clicks on an ad.

Don’t try and pin down any of these sites as to how much they’ll pay you per click. The price varies by how much the advertiser pays for the ads and how much of those dollars the domain parking company wants to keep.

Again, I transferred a little over 10 domains to one domain parking site to see how well they would work.

All I can say is that they paid just about as much as the Adsense for Domains did. I didn’t make enough money to get my blood pressure up, but again, the only way most people get traffic to a domain without a website is if someone just types it into a browser.

Affiliate Programs

Probably my favorite way to make money with parked domains is using affiliate programs. But the downside is it takes a lot more work!

For starters, there are two ways you can go about this.

Method number one involves getting a blog hosting account. One where you can host unlimited number of domains! Like I said above, this take some work but it can pay off a lot better than the other two methods.

Then you create a mini site. You add a page or two of content that is keyword targeted to whatever your domain is. You’ll also want to add a privacy, contact and about page to make the search engines happy (you know, just in case one of them may actually rank your site)

You’ll then find an affiliate programs that is in the same niche as your domain name. For example, if your domain is rustyoldbottlecaps.com, then you’d want an affiliate that is about rusty old bottle caps! Don’t try and feminine products to people who are looking for rusty old bottle caps, that’s affiliate marketing 101!

You can promote this mini sites the same way you promote any other site, but the whole point is that these domains are ones you don’t have time to fool with, so you throw up some content and affiliate ads and forget them.

Method number two can be easy or hard depending on your host. Some host allow redirects, others don’t. Some make it easy, most don’t! (this is also called ‘domain forwarding’ by some companies)

The thing here is that you’ll redirect (or forward) the domain to a site that closely resembles the redirected domain so your traffic is targeted. If you have a parked domain like rustyoldbottlecaps.com, you wouldn’t point it at a site about online dating. However, perhaps you have a site about antiques and that site has an affiliate program that you’re making a few bucks off of. You may do yourself a favor by having your type in traffic from rustyoldbottlecaps.com domain redirected to your antique website!

Summary

At the end of the day, I didn’t make a killing with any one method, however creating a mini site with affiliate links did end up making me the most money. But it does take a lot more time, which is why these domains were sitting in the first place, I just didn’t have time to build on them! Obviously if you have thousands, or even a few hundred domains, the mini site method won’t work for you unless your a mini site creating monster!

So what I did was to plan to take a few hours each week and work on putting up a mini site or two on each domain.

These are just a few ways to make money with parked domains. There are others, but I’d say these three ways are most popular.

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What I really wanted to see was just how well that system would work if you followed it to a “T”. Much like a beginner would do.

First off though, I want to rant a bit. I don’t visit the forums much over at the Keyword Academy. As stated above, I’m very busy and don’t have a lot of time. When I do get time, I’m working on my sites. The other reason is because of all the nonsense that goes on there.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a boat load of good info on there. The people are nice and very helpful.

No, what I mean is the ridiculous questions that keep being asked by beginners who obviously are not following Court and Mark’s program.

Look, if you’re a beginner and you’ve started the Keyword Crash Course, do yourself and others a favor and watch ALL of the video’s, especially the Core Video’s. They’ll answer just about anything you need to know. Don’t join and immediately go the forums and ask silly questions that are answered in the video’s!! It tells everyone that you haven’t sit down and watched the Core Video’s or the Webinar Video’s. It’s like saying you don’t want to take the time to watch and learn!

Okay, I’ve ranted long enough.

What’s New With The Keyword Crash Course

Court and Mark have done an amazing job with the Keyword Crash Course. I can’t imagine how much work they must have done in order to make everything run seamlessly. I have a great deal of respect for those two. They have, without question, put together the most informative and legitimate course on making money on the Internet that you’ll find anywhere. Bar none in my opinion, and I’ve seen a lot of programs come and go in my time.

Here are just a few of the things that are new.

1. The Niche Refinery. Helps you sort through keywords and helps you discover which ones have the potential to be the profitable ones. No more guessing whether or not the keywords you use will earn money. It’s the best Keyword Tool I’ve ever used, hands down.
2. The Forum has changed layouts and is much more user friendly in my opinion. There are a ton of features, including icons and badges that Members can obtain. They’ll show up next to your Screen name and Avatar.
3. The Webinars are now nicely organized so they can be downloaded and watched.
4. The Earners Club. This is a cool feature, especially if you visit the Forums. The Earners Club is a progress tracking system that is totally voluntary. You send your earnings verifications privately to Court or Mark and they’ll reward you with a badge showing how much per month you make via Internet Marketing. This let’s you know who knows what they’re doing and who is just regurgitating the same old crap found on the Internet! It’s like ‘I dunit, here’s proof’.
5. By far the best feature that I’ve found most useful is the Post Runner system. I can’t really go into detail what this system is or how it works, but once inside you’ll see that it’s worth it’s weight in Gold for getting your ranked!

Like I said earlier, Court and Mark have done an impressive and amazing job in just one year! At the time of this post, they’re running a FREE trial offer for the first 30 days. This is plenty of time for you to see what all the Course has to offer and learn some of the tools and methods successful Internet Marketers use.

The Keyword Crash Course – One Year Later

So what I did after doing the initial review was to go out and grab 7 domains for niches that I felt would be profitable using the formula for finding high paying keywords that Court outlines in the Course.

I then followed the directions outlined in the course. I did not use any of my other resources that I had available unless they were mentioned or proved by The Keyword Crash Course.

I built the sites using WordPress. I used Hostgator for my blog hosting provider.

From here, I simply followed the course’s instructions.

I have to admit, I had my doubts even though I knew this system worked. Of course, even when I do it my way, I have doubts. I don’t know why because they always work out.

In the first month or two, I saw little to movement in the rankings for these 7 sites. Of course, that’s normal unless you’re in a very Uncompetitive niche! Plus, I’m not a person who can sit for hours on end at the computer. I usually work about 3 or 4 hours total in one day and I break that amount of time over the period of the day. I guess you can say I have Affiliate Marketing ADD…LOL

But then months 3 and 4 saw these sites breaking into the top 100 and slowly creeping up the SERPS. This was exciting even though I’ve done it many times. I guess I was anxious because I was watching these 7 sites much closer than my others new sites I built doing it my way.

By month 5 and 6, a few real winners were beginning to show up among the 7. I had one that just wasn’t (and still isn’t) performing the way the numbers say it should, but that’s the real world. The site is in the top 5 for several of it’s keywords, but the traffic just isn’t there. I’m hoping it will come along once I expand the keywords it ranks for.

By months 7 and 8, I was making money with the sites. Well, actually some of them had been making money by month 4, but by the seventh and eighth months, nearly all were (all except 2).

I monetized several of the sites with Adsense and several with affiliate programs. Since I’m an affiliate marketer, I prefer affiliate programs over Adsense. You’ll also find out that some niches are just naturally easier to monetize with Adsense or affiliate programs.

Months 9 through 12 were spent tweaking the sites, adding content and promoting them further. I spent a great deal of time on the 2 slow performers and I found additional keywords to help one of the slackers. The one mentioned above is still giving me fits. Sometimes you just have to let ‘em go. Kinda like tough love for websites!

Am I making a killing off of these sites? No. But I am making some good money. How much you ask? Well, if you read my blog any amount, you know I stopped outing a lot of my methods and other info. But I’ll say they’re making just a little above 1k per month now and we’ll leave it at that.

If you need further proof this system works, as of the time of this blog post, the Keyword Academy blog has an unsolicited post from a Member who is making $800 per month from his website! Geez, it’s taking me 5 niche sites to do a little more than that!

It’s not surprising really. This system works if you’ll just put the time and effort in. I just wanted to prove it to myself even though it’s along the same lines I’ve been using for years. And the cool thing is, now that all the work has been done, they’re nearly on auto pilot. Very little work will be required to keep their rankings. This means you’ll have more time to create more sites following the Keyword Crash Course method.

They’re still running the FREE 30 Day Trial at the time of this blog post. What will you get for your free trial? You’ll have access to everything in the Keyword Crash Course. Unlike some other programs that only tease you with a few pieces of info, The Keyword Academy will allow you access to all the info. (if you choose the Premium account) The FREE trial is the best way to see what all the Keyword Crash Course consist of. If you’re a beginner or someone who has been banging their head against the wall trying to make a buck on the Internet, try the Course for Free for the first 30 days. If you’re like me, you’ve blown a lot of money on the Internet! Click here to look over this system Free for the first 30 days.

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Having said that, a while back I bought The Keyword Crash Course. This is a course that Mark Butler and Courtney Tuttle have developed. The whole course was about starting Niche sites, monetizing them and getting free traffic from search egnines like Google. Although I was sure I knew 99% of the stuff they were going to teach (afterall, I make a good income from this stuff already!), I was hoping to learn a few tricks that would make me more money or save me time. I wasn’t disappointed in the course. In fact, I felt like the Course paid for itself within the first 30 minutes of watching the first video. By the way, the course cost $597. I’ve spent a lot more on courses that didn’t have near the amount of information in them.

If you know Court and Mark, then you know that they are honest and helpful. In fact, they’re some of the most honest and helpful people I’ve ever met on the Internet. Everything is laid out for you and they don’t hold anything back. (unlike a lot of courses I’ve bought!) In fact, I’ll go as far as saying the Keyword Crash Course is the most legitimate and easy to follow course I’ve bought. It’s a nuts and bolts Course that nearly anyone can follow and make money with. You can take a look at it by clicking here.

Within the first 30 minutes of the first video, Court describes how to find profitable keywords using “The Formula“. This was the bombshell that I had been looking for. Every once in a while, something will come along that makes you set back and take a deep breath, all the while thinking “Damn, this is what I’ve been searching for!” That is how I felt when Court showed me The Formula for evaluating profitable keywords.

I’ll tell you this also, when you start finding those little Gold nuggets of Keywords, it won’t take you long to figure out that you can use them to build Affiliate Sites rather than Adsense sites if that is what you want to do. If more people would use The Formula, there would be a lot less people failing at this game.

Before this, I had my own system for finding good Keywords, but it was hit and miss. Some keywords paid very well, while others fizzled. I still get some keywords that don’t pay when I use The Formula, but a lot less. By using Court’s Formula, I’ve been able to amass about 90 keywords that will turn into some very nice Niche sites.

Now Court and Mark have opened up the site to the Public and you can see everthing in the original Course for only $1 (yeah, the same Course I paid $597 for!)

Learn How To Make Money Online With The Keyword Crash Course

Whether you’re a beginner just starting out, or an advanced marketer, The Keyword Crash Course has something for you.

What You’ll Get For $1

You’ll be able to see the original course including the 10 training video’s. These video’s will take you step by step and show you how to pick profitable keywords for your niche site (using The Formula), setting WordPress, how and where to find backlinks, how to obtain content for your niche sites and how to set up Adsense and other advertising to make money from your sites.

Plus there is a little video at the end that will show you how to flip your new sites for Money. I found this one to be very interesting and something I may try down the road.

Why Are They Only Charging $1?

Court and Mark feel that once you’ve seen the quality of the training material, you’ll want to subscribe to their monthly service where they’ll be bringing you more information about building and ranking websites, live Webinars and live Q&A sessions. This subscription is $29 per month and totally optional. You can sign up for $1, get all the information that was in the original course for $597 and forget about the rest if you want to. They’re fine with that. They only want people who are serious about making money online.

People, if I could stear you to another course that I thought was better, one that taught you how to make money online with Niche sites, I would. But there is simply nothing out there as thorough and easy to follow that Court and Mark’s Keyword Crash Course. If you’re serious about learning how to make money online, this is one course you need to take. If after the course, you can’t make money online, then this business is probably not for you. That’s how good I believe this course is. And for only $1, you sure as hell won’t find a better bargain. Click here if you want to learn more and take advantage of this opportunity.

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No one is real sure what the deal was/is with Google. Some speculation was that it was a PR update, some said that Google is changing its algorythm while some others said they were changing their inbound link filters as it apply’s to your inbound links.

I have no idea what caused it. I had many sites bouncing around a few days. The good news is that most of them have their rankings back where they were before this whole shake up started. This isn’t the first time that a big movement in the Google SERPS has happened and it likely won’t be the last.

I had a few keywords ranking on other sites that lost their rankings altogether. These weren’t major keywords that the sites were ranking for, but they did bring in a little traffic. I’m not sure why these keywords lost their rankings, so the theory about changing filters may have some legs.

Whatever the cause, don’t panic when this happens. Most of you who’ve been around a while have learned to live with it. Judging by my email, some of you new people have been freaking out about it. Just relax and the let the little ball on the Roulette Wheel come to a stop…errr…I mean…just relax and let your sites settle down in the SERPS before you go bonkers.

Either way, whether your rankings returned or if you discovered you previously high ranking keyword is not on Page 6 of Google’s SERPS, it brings me to a very important tip for all affiliate marketers. If you haven’t diversified, do it now. I know how tempting it is to keep working on a site that is making you money. But if that site is your sole source of income, you could be living on shaky ground.

Work on getting your low paying sites up to being profitable. If you only have one or two sites, get more. Make sure you have sites in different niches. Ideally, you want your income spread over several sites in case one loses its rankings.

In fact, I’d say increasing the number of sites you have or making the ones you already have more profitable, is a great project to work on if your site has nose dived in the rankings!

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While most web host will pay you between $25 and $100 per sign up, there are many Credit Card affiliate programs that will pay you $50 to $300 per sign up. Some of these affiliate programs will pay you every time someone fills out a credit card application while others just pay you whenever someonen you refer qualifies for a credit card.

Why Credit Card Affiliate Programs Can Be More Lucrative Than Web Hosting Affiliate Programs

Well, it’s simple really. How many people do you know need Web Hosting? Now how many people do you know need a Credit Card? Yeah, now you’re seeing the potential.

While you may have a hard time getting people to sign up under your webhosting affiliate program, simply because most people don’t need it, most credit card programs work well simply because you’ll be steering people to the sign up page with your affiliate link. Most of these programs have multiple cards to choose from, so if your Customer has bad credit, no problem, there’s a card for that. Do the want a credit card with reward points? No problem, most programs have those cards available. Have someone who wants a credit card with balance transfer? You guessed it, most programs have cards available for that also.

If you choose a Credit Card affiliate program that pays you per applications filled out, (which they pay around $2 to $5 per application), you may find that you can get more people filling out CC applications than are approved for the Cards. It just depends on what type of traffic you’re targeting.

Once you realize that it’s quite easy to steer people through your affiliate link, you start to realize the potential available to you to make money with these programs. In many cases, it’s as easy as putting your affiliate links where people who need credit cards will find them.

How To Get Started Making Money With Credit Card Affiliate Programs

There are a lot of credit card affiliate programs out there today. Due to the credit crisis we’ve fast over the last year or so, the number of credit card companies using affiliate programs has declined, but there are still plenty of others out there to make this a profitable venture.

One program that Beginners can get started in the Credit Card Affiliate business with is My Credit Card Cash. When you sign up with them, they give you a website already pre-populated with nearly 100 card offers. All that you must due is to promote your affiliate website url. Since they’ve already made the site for you, there’s no site building or other technical knowledge required.

Then, each time someone goes through your website and is approved for a credit card, you earn a commission. Some of these cards have a payout as much as $121. Most are in the $30 to $75 range. It doesn’t take long to see that there is a lot of potential here.

As of this writing, they’re offering a 14  day trial for $1. After that, they’ll charge you $37 per month until 4 people have been approved for credit cards through your website, then it’s free. I was able to get 4 sign ups easily within the 14 day trial so my website was free. Click here to learn more about this program.

Most of these types of programs will charge a fee until you have a certain number of sign ups through your website. This is in part to keep people from signing up for their affiliate program and then doing nothing. They only want Affiliate Marketers who will be promoting their affiliate sites. This is why most will give you the website after you’ve signed up a certain number of people that are approved for a credit card.

Ways To Promot Your Own Credit Card Website

The nice thing that I like with credit card affiliate programs is that offline promotion is very effective. Once I had my website, I went and had some free business cards made up. The first batch simply said “Bad Credit? Need A Credit Card?” across the middle of the business card in bold print. Below that my Website url.  I had 500 business cards made up the first time and left these everywhere I went. Grocery stores, drive-in’s, bulletin boards around various  businesses (especially cafe’s) and so on. This is how I managed to get 7 sign-ups within my 14 day trial.

And that’s the trick to making credit card affiliate programs pay off, just as with any affiliate program, get your affiliate link in front people who want what you have to offer.

You could try having some free biz cards made up with your affiliate URL on them and then leaving them every place around your town. Laundry Mats, C Stores, Cafe’s…a lot of these places have community bulletin boards and would be worth a try.

Although I haven’t tried it yet, a Classified Ad in small Local and Regional newspapers may also do just as good. In my area, I could take out one ad and have it placed in 8 different local community newspapers for about $90 per month.

Ways To Promote Your Credit Card Website Online

Now that I’ve showed you a few effective ways to market you credit card affiliate website offline, let me show you a few ways to do it online.

Basically, the way I started out marketing my own credit card affiliate website was the same method I used in the January $2500 Challenge. I signed up in several forums and answered questions about debt, finance, family related questions and questions about credit cards. My signature had a link to my site in it. In some post, where it was relevant, I left a link to my site.

I also promoted my affiliate website on Yahoo Answers and Wiki’s whenever I answered a question and where a link made sense and was helpful. If you go in and start throwing links all over the place, you’ll be banned in no time flat for spamming, as you should be.

Another good way to promote your affiliate link is through article marketing as well as building a network of sites over family and personal finance. Although this will take a while, once you have the traffic coming in, this could be a very good money earner.

And that’s how I make money with Credit Card Affiliate Programs. I did it for a while and once you get your system down, I think you’ll find that this is a pretty good way to earn income. I find it a lot easier than promoting some other affiliate programs, but everyone is different. You may find it more difficult or easier. If nothing else, sign up for a trial and give it a try to see if you’ll like it. You never know, you might have a big earner on your hands.

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The System I Used To Make Money In Two Weeks

If you read the mid-month Challenge update, you know up to that point I had made only approximately $200. So I’ll pick up from there.

Since I was really strapped for time, I had to change the way I would try and reach $2500 in two weeks. What I finally decided on was to build two simple WordPress blogs and 2 Blogger blogs.

I then searched for two different products or service affiliate programs that I could make anywhere from $9 or more from each sale. I chose products in the Health Care and Pets niches. My other offers were in the $20 to $35 range.

One thing you want to keep in mind when choosing an affiliate products is whether or not it has appeal to people who are desperate for solutions. The more desperate, the better the product. For example, Gamblers and Smokers are two desperate groups of people. One group wants to learn quick tips for making money with Gambling, the other wants to learn how to stop smoking. Addicts are a great group of people to target.

I started building a Network of profiles on Social Media sites. I’m not a big fan of Social Media, but for this system, I needed some eyeballs on my offers and I needed them quick! So I made multiple profiles on places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers and others. For example, for this Challenge, I made 17 MySpace profiles and 8 Yahoo profiles.

In order for all your profiles to be effectice, they have to look like real profiles. If you get lazy and create a bunch of spammy profiles, you’ll get them banned very quickly.

Another thing I did (which proved to be the most profitable) was find 8 forums that were relevant for my Health Care offer and 5 forums that were relevant for my Pet care offer. Again, I made a profile on each forums and made it look good. This takes time but will pay off if you don’t get greedy and try to spam the forums.

How To Set Up WordPress and Blogger Blogs To Use This System

To be effective, once again your blogs need to look legitimate. So I set up each WordPress blog with 5 to 7 pages of Content, an About page along with Privacy and TOS pages. I did the same with my Blogger blogs.

The only two plugins I used with the WordPress blogs were Redirection (this is an important one) and All In One SEO pack.

I didn’t worry about getting them indexed quickly. They wouldn’t be live long enough to bring in the organic traffic I needed to make these offers pay off. I needed them as Sales pages to divert traffic to so I could pitch them my offers.

On each WordPress blog, I used the main index page as my landing/sales page and all the additional content pages were redirected to my affiliate link to the Merchants. The important thing here is that these index pages looked like normal blog post, not those long spammy looking sales page most of us are used to seeing. Each sales/landing page was written like a review or as a product info page. You just need to make it irresistible for them to go and sign up once they’ve finished reading it!

Where The Money Came From

Since I was strapped for time, I started pushing the offers before I had all my networks set up. I normally would have cultivated those profiles for a few weeks or months before using the links. But I just didn’t have to time so I had to do the best I could.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to make your Profiles and your post look normal and not spammy. If you don’t know how to write a good blog or forum post recommending a product and not make it look spammy, then go to your favorite forums and start reading. If you’ve been in this business long enough, you’ll soon be able to spot the spammers from the regular posters.

Another area where some of you get hung up at is the nofollow vs do follow links on some Social Media sites and forums. It doesn’t matter! You’re looking for traffic here, not backlinks that push link juice to your sites. Leave links to your blogs everywhere you can without making them look spammy and forget about whether or not they pass PR.

My most profitable avenues for income were from the Forums and Yahoo Answers.

My conversion rate on the Health Care product was around 4 percent and my conversion rates for the Pet Care products ranged from 3 to 6 percent. The highest converting of these was one Forum and Yahoo Answers.

I ended the month earning $562 for the Health Care products from Forums and Yahoo Answers and $157 from other Social Media.

For my Pet Care products, I ended the month at $781 from Forums and Yahoo Answers traffic and $117 from other Social Media.

The grand total of these came out to be $1617. When you add the $200.43 I had already made, the total for the month comes out to be $1817.43. About $700 short of my goal but pretty darn good in the small amount of time I had to make it.

Once again I have to tell you that in those last two weeks, I spent an enormous amount of time making this money. I worked from 2 to 4 hours in the evenings and a lot of weekend time.

Although you can make money with this system, I wouldn’t advise it for long term income. It’s just too tedious and time consuming for me. For the amount of time I spent on this project, I could have set up 6 blogs, wrote content for each and started building backlinks to them for long term growth and income.

Using Social Media To Make Money

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here. Social Media doesn’t convert well. The reason I believe is because these people are not looking to buy anything. They are also Internet Savvy. In order for your affiliate programs to do well, you really need to target people who are looking to buy what you have to sell. Simple technique but one that many people fail to implement. That’s the real secret to making money on the Internet!

The reason the Forums and Yahoo Answers did so well is because I targeted my post to people looking for what I had to sell.

Another important thing to remember is not to spam the Forums or Yahoo Answers. For every post I put a link in, I had made around 10 to 15 helpful and informative post without a link in them. Many of you get greedy or impatient and use short, spammy comments to leave a link in and then wonder why you get banned or or links removed. You have to make your profiles and comments look real!

With this Challenge, I only had 4 MySpace profiles banned. Which is very good considering the time I had.

The Giveaway

As promised, I’ve decided to give something away for the followers of this Challenge. Even though I built several Squidoo lenses, I’ll be keeping those for further use. I can’t stress enough how important it is to build good Squidoo lenses for making money and backlinks. The best resource I’ve found for building high quality Squidoo lenses is an ebook from Tiffany Dow titled “Flip That Lens“.

What I decided to give away to 3 readers is 3 of my domains. These don’t have sites on them and you’ll have to be registered with NameCheap in order to get them. It’s free to sign up for an account at NameCheap, so 3 of you can expect emails from me in the next few days. If you haven’t signed up for a free account at NameCheap, you might want to do it now.

Final Thoughts

For now, I’ve got to get back to my sites that make me money. The way I earn money online is by building sites and getting them ranked in the Search Engines. Once built and ranked, these sites are pretty much hands off except for building links to them and adding content once a month or so. This is long term work and I don’t expect to make money with any of these sites for at least 6 months and most likely a year or more. Many people don’t have the patience to make sites like these! I love free targeted search engine traffic!

If you decide to try the system I used, take your time doing it. Don’t get impatient and spend some time building believable profiles. Add pictures (you can get them at Istockphoto.com) and other stuff that real users add to their profiles. Don’t spam other people. Build friends slowly and don’t blast them with alerts.

Now you know that it is possible to make decent money in a short amount of time. The question is, do you have the will power it takes to spend the time and effort doing it!?

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The first thing according to Forbes that we Consumers are still spending money on is Smart Phones. If I was in this niche, I would concentrate on building sites over a specific phone. Say, the Blackberry Storm or a Samsung. The iPhone niche is very competitive and unless you already have a authority website about iPhone’s, I’d stay away and go after one of the other lesser known Smart Phones.

Video Games and Consoles are the second item on the list in the Forbes article. Their theory on why we’re still buying this is that Consumers want a quick escape from reality. I say it’s because Video Games are addictive and addicts buy stuff! Whatever the reason, people are still buying them in droves. Pick a game and build a site around it. Websites about the Wii, PlayStation and XBox are really popular. Unless you can come up with an unique angle, I’d concentrate on picking a game since the Console market is flooded right now.

Gym memberships are also on the list. I’m not sure why people would cut back on their spending then blow bucks on a Gym memberships, shoes, clothes and gym bags when you can get a decent workout at home or by walking/jogging around your neighborhood, but Forbes says it’s so. I’ll just stick with my Health niches and maybe write some articles on Gym reviews if I need that traffic.

Personal care also made the list of things we keep spending money on. This would be an easy one to implement with Health. You could also start a affiliate site with a lot of persona care items. Just research the niche and try to find one not full of big players like Johnson and Johnson.

Toy building sets also made the top 10. This one surprised me a bit and I’m still not sure if they mean the Toy Building Sets their self or Toys in general. Their theory is that it’s hard to say NO to you kids. There’s a lot of truth behind that statement as I can relate to that! The article says that Lego sales were up 12 percent in 2008! In November, the word “Lego” was searched for over 673,000 times according to the Google Keyword tool. Anyone have a Lego blog?

Car Maintenance is also on the list. Consumers aren’t rushing out and buying a new car now days but they are spending money on the ones the do have. This would be a good niche if you could find some specific products and build an affiliate site around them. Everything from products that clean and beautify your car to performance enhancing products would be good sellers.

Another surprise for me on this list was Dress Casual Shoes. Google shows 33,000 searches for Casual Shoes and 49,000 searches for Dress Shoes. Grab a domain with the words Dress Casual Shoes in it and you have several options to profit from this niche. A blog reviewing Casual and Dress shoes to an affiliate site selling both Casual and Dress shoes would be a hit if you can rank the site on page one of the Google SERPS.

Restaurants was on the list also. Most specifically fast food chains as people are looking for inexpensive meals. I’ve always thought about starting a blog and reviewing the popular menu items at fast food places since I eat out a lot. But I just haven’t had the time.

Movie tickets took my be surprise also. I guess the American Family is looking for alternatives when it comes to entertainment. The article says that attendance is down but profits rose in 2008. I’m not sure how good a niche this would be because I the prices of everything at Theaters are outrageous these days. I also believe services like NetFlix, Blockbuster and Red Box have taken a big chunk of money away from the Theaters. But hey, maybe you can get an unique angle on this niche and make some money from it.

Netbooks is a niche I think some money could be made at. These are relatively new to the market and due to the low price, becoming more and more popular. Review sites and affiliate sites would be a good way to monetize these niches.

If you were looking for something to make money from in 2009, the above niches to make money with should do you well. Several have been good niches for years and will likely be so in the future. Do some research on them and pick one or two and give them a try!

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Anyway, the first weekend of the New Year found me running a few errands into town. I browsed Craigslist that morning before leaving the house. I always check out the ‘Free’ section to see what people are giving away. Saturday morning I found a lady giving away 2 wheels and tires to a Chevy pickup. They were out by her Garage and she wanted them gone. Also near the same place was a Family cleaning out their Garage and they had some Sports equipment set out on the curb. Since I would be going by there, I decided to stop and check it out.

As luck would have it, the 2 tires and wheels came off of a late model compact Chevy pickup so I took those. I think they were factory originals. The tires had some wear, but still had life left in them.

I didn’t make it to the Family with the stuff from the Garage until later, by then most of the stuff was gone but I did score on 4 rods and reels that were left. They were pretty junky except one, which I kept for myself.

One the way home, I stopped by a Tire store and sold both tires and wheels for $45. I figured they were worth more, but I didn’t want to waste time with the guy. Besides, $45 for a few minutes work isn’t bad.

I stopped at a Pawn Shop to offload the rods and reels (except the one I kept for myself). Since they were pretty crappy, I could only manage to get $20 combined for the 3 that were left.

Oh well, I made $65 that morning simply by taking a few minutes out of my day. I had to go in that direction anyway, so stopping by those homes wasn’t a big deal.

Craigslist is an excellent place to find stuff to sell offline or online!

Sunday I logged on to my Project Payday account and filled in some offers. It’s been a while since I’ve used Project Payday, but filling out offers is still as boring as it ever was. I spent about 3 1/4 hours Sunday and made $45. Not bad for sitting at the Dining room table pecking out offers in my shorts and T-shirt!

Sunday evening I start getting calls from Clients and for the next week and a half I was on the road a bit. I did manage to type out 10 articles, in two 5 article sets, on a competitive subjects and sold them on Digital Point. These articles ranged from 600 to 1100 words each. One set I got $30 and the next set I received $35 for.

These were just rewritten PLR articles. They were well researched and written in SEO copy for websites. One gentleman has already emailed me back asking if I had more. I’m not sure if I’ll do that again. I hate having to set down, research and write lengthy articles on subjects I know little about! As you can probably tell, my attention span isn’t very long

I also started creating some Squidoo Lenses and HubPages. I’ll probably use some of these to help push offers and I might try and flip a couple of the Squidoo Lenses. I’m not sure yet, but I know there’s a chance that I’ll need them later on.

Now I’ve known how to make Squidoo Lenses for a while. But it wasn’t until I read “Flip That Lens” by Tiffany Dow that I found out how to trick a Lens out that I could flip. While there are some people selling Lenses on DigitalPoint Forums for $30, she gets anywhere from $125 to $250 for her Lenses. One look at them and you’ll know why. She takes building Squidoo Lenses to the next level!

Start Small and Work Your Way Up

As you can tell, these small sales will not get me to $2500 this month alone. But there is an important reason you want to start with these small sales.

1. They give you a little bit of confidence. There was a time long ago that I was ‘between jobs’ and made yard sales, estate sales and grabbed up free stuff off of Cragslist to make some extra money until the next job came along. I either sold this stuff locally or I would put it on eBay. So I knew I could make some quick cash that way. But if you’ve never done this before, these are easy ways to make money while you learn.
2. I know I’m going to need more than $50 in the future to buy stuff for bigger projects. These small sales gives me some operating room to buy what I’ll need later on.

Back To Making Money From Home

Once I was back at home, I started doing some keyword research to see if I could find a niche to make some serious amount of money before the end of the Month. Now that I only had about half the month left, it was going to be a big challenge.

I found a few niches I thought I could make some money off of. So the first thing I did was start visiting some of the Affiliate Networks to see what kind of offers were out there for these niches.

Tips For Choosing An Affiliate Offer

I visited ClickBank, Azoogle, CJ, Copeac and ROI Rocket looking for the best offers. Now, when I say ‘Best Offers’, I don’t necessarily mean the highest paying offer. What I look for first and foremost is what the Customer has to do in order for me to get paid.

For example, for this niche there were several offers that I found. One offer paid $37 per sale. In order for me to get paid, the Customer would have to buy that product. Another offer for the niche paid $22.50 per lead. In order for me to get paid, the Customer has to fill out a contact for and pay $2.95 shipping & handling.

Another offer paid $9 per lead and all the Customer has to do is fill out a contact form with a valid email and address before I get paid.

Now, which one do you think I chose?

For this niche, I chose the $9 offer because I know it’s easier to get someone to give their email address than it is for them to whip out $37 or even $2.95. If this Challenge were longer, then I would come up with an action plan to make money with the $37 per sale offer.

Even though I’m making less money per lead with the $9 offer, I can get people to sign up quicker than making them pay for something. In essence, I can make money quicker in the short term.

As I said before, I have several other niches that I’ll be looking at and finding offers for those too. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to start working them, I’ll just have to wait and see.

Getting Started Promoting Affiliate Offers

Here’s how I started getting ready to push this offer. Again, this is not how I would do it if I had more time. This short term promotion isn’t the best way to make money with these offers in my opinion, but I have to work in the constraints that I set for myself.

I started off by buying two domains for 8 bucks and change from NameCheap for niches. They’re normally $9.69, but I used the NameCheap Promo Code of ‘Happy2009′ to get a discount of $8.81 per domain. If that NameCheap Promo Code doesn’t work for you, then just Google “NameCheap Promo Code” and you can find one that does.

I also signed up for the Pro Hosting Plan at NameCheap because they will let you pay by the month. It’s not the cheapest plan, but it’s the cheapest plan you can get and still pay by the month. You can also host multiple domains on one account for the $6.95 where you can’t with the cheaper plan.

I then went to Blogger and built two Blogger Blogs for that Niche.

Next, I’ve started writing some articles that I will be promoting my Niche with. I’ll use both EzineArticles and GoArticles since they are both free. I’ve written 10 articles and have submitted them to promote my niche.

I’m nearing the point now that I’ll be setting up the WordPress blogs and designing them the way I want to push the offers. I hope to generate some quick targeted traffic and start making sales!

Finally, I used www.big-boards.com to find forums relating to my niche. So far I’ve found 8 forums where I’ve set up accounts at and have started posting some general information post and answered a few questions to get my post count up.

I’ve also set up accounts at MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo Answers and Facebook to do the same. I’ve started using these accounts and building up friends and post.

The reason behind doing it this way is because I’m going to need a lot of traffic and need it fast. These places have a lot of traffic. Not great converters, but some will take the offers I push. It’s very important that you get started on the Forums and Social Media sites early and build up a reputation. Do not Spam them. You should be actively involved and asking real questions or giving real help. This will pay back huge dividends down the road as you’ll see with the next update.

As you can see, just getting ready to push an offer can take quite a bit of time!

The next update should be at the end of the month and I’ll let you know how well it’s gone. Don’t be surprised if I don’t make it with the unforseen time I spent on the road, I ended up with about half the month to work on this. But I think I’ll still have a pretty good show!

A Word About Making Money Fast On the Internet

These tactics that I’m using to make money quick aren’t the same ones I would normally do. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that making money online is quick or easy. It’s hard work, at least it is for me. I spend a lot of time working on my online businesses.

Whenever I start up a new website, I plan on working on it a year or more before I start seeing any tangible results. Especially if it’s in a competitive niche. For smaller niches with less competition, maybe 6 to 8 months before I start seeing any real rankings and sales.

I like to use organic traffic to drive sales to my websites. I’ll admit, I’m kinda lazy and don’t like spending all my time on one website. I like to build them and forget ‘em as they say. Still, it takes a lot of time building content and backlinks to these sites to get them making money.

The only reason I decided to do this little Challenge is to show you that money could be made rather quickly online. It’s been my experience that these little quick cash cows don’t last long. With more work, you can generally turn them into long term money makers. Sometimes they do well, other times they don’t. That’s just the fact about making money using websites and organic traffic on the Internet.

I’m kicking around the idea of starting a new website after this Challenge is done and doing a 1 year challenge where everyone can follow along with me. I’ll have to wait and see how this idea pans out and whether or not I think I’ll have time to take on another project! I do think it would be ver beneficial to many of you just getting started in Internet Marketing though.

The Janurary Make Money Online Challenge Financials

Okay, I wanted to share a little bit with you about how much I’ve made and spent so far. Here’s the breakdown.

Startup: $50

Craigslist Sales: $65

Article Sales on DP: $65 (two article packs, one sold for $30 the other for $35)

Project Payday: $45

Total not including initial $50: $175

Total money including $50 seed money: $225

Expeditures

Two domain names at NameCheap: $17.62

Web Hosting: $6.95

I’m not counting the Gas I used to get the Craigslist items because both places were in the same area as I was going to run errands. (less than 3 miles away) The cost of gas is minimal for these items.

Total Spent so far: $24.57 (this will start changing here soon)

Subtracting the money made from the money spent leaves me with a Grand Total of $200.43

Only about $2300 to go in about a week and half! WooHoo!

Once I get into really pushing these offers, you’ll probably see the expenditures go up a little.

Be sure to sign up for my RSS feed so you can find out how this all ends at the end of the month. I’ll be  sharing with you more details about how I set up the offers, reactions and lessons learned.

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I know many of you use article marketing as a means to brand your blogs and websites and to drive traffic to them. That’s cool, I do for some of my blogs and websites also. Article marketing is a very good way to get the word out about your product or service.

The problem for many blog and website owners is deciding on which article submission site or service to use. There are many article submission sites on the Internet today. For the purpose of this head-to-head review, I’m choosing the most popular article submission sites that I know of. Some are free and several are paid. I have either used these services in the past and/or I currently use them. The article submission websites are Ezinearticles, iSnare, GoArticles, Article Marketer, Article Marketing Automation and Unique Article Wizard.

How The Article Marketing Smackdown Will Be Judged

To judge the Smackdown, I wrote an original article for a specific website of mine. I made it unique for each article submission site (as best as I could, each site has it’s own rules). I then submitted the article to each submission service and I’ve been waiting on the outcome for a few weeks. I believe enough results have come in now to bring this Smackdown to an end.

So, without further delay…I bring you the results of the article submission smackdown!

Unique Article Wizard

I’ve been using Unique Article Wizard (UAW) for about 6 months now.

I’m here to tell you that this has been a very good investment for me. I simply love UAW!

UAW’s is a very unique service. Due to the non-disclosure letter you have to sign when joining, I can’t go into details about how UAW works, just trust me when I say it will bring in a lot of one way links to your sites by distributing unique article to blogs, websites and directories. This service has been the fastest way to build legitimate one way back links that I’ve found, bar none!

But that’s not all. Unique Article Wizard also has another very powerful feature in that it can make each of your resource boxes unique as well. It’s possible to add links to many websites with just one article.

You can also choose how many times your article is distributed each day. You can have it blasted out to all the places at once or choose your own number. I like to “drip” my articles out as I think having a bunch of backlinks show up at once is not good for a site. Especially small sites. So I “drip” my articles out by choosing to have them submitted at a rate of about 20 to 30 per day.

After your article has been distributed, you can check to see the actual number of sites and email subscribers where your article was submitted to. You find this button in your dashboard in the column next to your article title. Neat stuff.

Now, the article I submitted to was distributed to 543 websites and directories and 71 email subscribers. Out of that number, I can track about 107 backlinks (as of this writing, I expect this number to increase over time) I received to the website I had listed in my resource boxes. That’s a pretty high number! (I’ve actually had some articles do better than that!)

The cool thing is, as people find these articles, they’ll use them and I’ll still be getting backlinks long after the submission is over with.

Another benefit that isn’t advertised is this. Hit the page reload button on your browser when you’re viewing your article on UAW and you’ll see a completely new article every time your refresh (again, I can’t tell you how they do this, but it is very powerful). It’s awesome. I then will take one of these unique articles and submit it to the free article submission sites. I’ve also submitted them to Article Marketer to have them submitted. If you have blogs or websites in the same niche, you could use one of these unique articles that UAW makes as content on your site.

Click here to learn more about Unique Article Marketing.

Article Marketing Automation (AMA)

I’ll be honest and tell you that I passed Article Marketing Automation the first time I heard about it. I wasn’t impressed with the advertising or the $47 per month price tag. Besides, I was already using UAW and figured that this service couldn’t be any better. Plus they used the words “spin” and “spun” in their advertising and that sounded cheap to me. I had visions of my sentences looking like “Affiliate marketing rolls down ice cubes after desert” or some other crap like that.

Thankfully, I was wrong.

But about two months ago an Internet Marketer who I trust told me I should be using AMA. He told me it was as powerful as UAW and had some other cool features that UAW didn’t.

So I signed up, figuring “What the hell, I’ll cancel if I don’t like it“.

Do I think that AMA is as good or better than UAW? No. But it’s close, damn close!

What I like about AMA is that its network is only made up of websites and blogs, not directories. Also, my favorite feature is that you can add up to 3 links to the body of the content. There is no resource box! All links go into the body. In my opinion, these anchored links will pass more authority when in the body of the article than a resource box. (some site owners either remove the resource box or nofollow the links in resource boxes when using other article submission services)

Here’s a big tip for you. Whether it’s an article you’re submitting or whether it’s your own site, put the links as near to the top as you can get. Google figures they must be important if you put them near the top and you’ll get more weight passed on to your site or to an interior page if the link happens to be on your site.

What I don’t like about AMA is that their network seems pretty small. They advertise 2000 sites, but I haven’t seen near that many. Of course, I know that my articles don’t go out to all of them, but the best I’ve seen is a few hundred. Word has it that they’re continually building their network, so that is the good news. Since they’re fairly new, it may take a little while longer for them to get to the size that some of the others are.

But, since the links are in the content instead of at the bottom of the page in a resource box, the backlinks I am getting are passing more weight to my sites. It’s probably only a small difference, but I’ll take all the help I can get!

The article I submitted to AMA has been published 77 times (as of this writing) and three quarters of those articles have been indexed by Google so far. Not bad!

If the level of service, both Customer service and the level of article submission, continues to grow, I see great things happening with Article Marketing Automation. Right now, I think it’s well worth the money. You can spend a lot more and get a helluva lot less with some of the other article submission services out there! This one is a keeper in my book! If they’re like any other Internet services, once they start growing, they will continue to raise the price, so you’d better get in quick if you want to lock in at a low price. Click here to learn more about Article Marketing Automation.

Ezinearticles

Ezinearticles has been around a while. In fact, I believe they were one of the first article directories. At least as best as I can remember. If any of you have read my previous post about Ezinearticles, then you know others as well as myself have had some problems with them over the years getting articles accepted. Looking back, I think this started in earnest whenever they started their “Premium” paid service. I don’t know if it was coincidence or not.

They offer both a free submission service and a $97 per month “Premium” service. I looked over the “features” of the premium service and to be honest, I don’t see the benefit. Certainly not $97 per month worth! There are too many other services that offer better service and more features for less than $97 per month IMHO.

But back to the smackdown.

I submitted the article about 3 weeks ago. It took several days for the article to be accepted. I have noticed over about the last month or so that my articles were being accepted faster. I don’t know why, I just know the last few times I’ve used them it has went off without a hitch.

Anyway, the article has been viewed 232 times and published 16 times as of the writing of this post.

Ezinearticle doesn’t tell you where they submitted the articles to or which sites have accepted your article. But judging from my WordPress dashboard, this article has sent me 19 backlinks to a site of mine. Looking through my sites, I found 8 visitors who came to my site through that article and my EZA dashboard said I’ve had 9 URL clicks. Not great, but better than nothing, especially on the backlinks.

GoArticles

GoArticles is a free submission site. Being free, the features are limited as to the stats you’ll get from your articles. The article I submitted has received 56 request since I submitted it. Now that doesn’t tell my everyone who has used my article because any article on GoArticles can be cut and pasted without requesting it.

One thing I really like about GoArticles is that you can put links in the body of the article and they don’t get bent out of shape about it.

As for the backlinks I received from that article, a search of my stats showed that I’ve received 8 backlinks from that article. One of them on an Authority blog.

Not great results, but remember, it’s free and you can add links in the body of the article without them getting all pissy about it. Also, I’ve never had an article rejected by GoArticles. From what I can tell, you’re article is accepted very quick. Hey, it’s free, what do you have to lose!

iSnare

This is a paid to submit an article service. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably don’t make much money from this site because of the poor customer service and submission time I and others have had with them. It took over two weeks for my article to be accepted and distributed. From what I can tell, I haven’t received any traffic or backlinks from that article.

For the price you have to pay iSnare, their customer service and submission time should be a helluva lot better. I personally wouldn’t use them again until they start submitting articles for free or improve their customer service. There’s just too many good article submission sites out there, both free and paid ones, to put up with the B.S. from them.

Article Marketer

Update 2010: Article Marketer ceased operations around October of 2009. I figured this would happen because of the lousy service everyone was getting and the poor performance of the submitted articles. Sure enough, I was right. This service has been replaced by two other companies, which I’m now reviewing and waiting to see what the long term performance will be (or lack of). Look for the updated review here on my site. Thanks!

I’ve been using Article Marketer for over a year now. I’ve never really been happy with their service, but at the time they were one of the best article submission sites around. They advertise that you’re article will be reviewed by the next business day (or the use to advertise that, haven’t checked recently) but that hasn’t been my experience.

Here’s what normally happens. I submit an article and generally there’s something wrong with it in their eyes. Either it doesn’t meet the 400 word requirement, the keyword density is too high or a dozen other reasons I’ve had. They kick it back to me, I fix it and resubmit it. Now I’ve lost another day.

You see, apparently the “by the next day” starts at the time of the LATEST SUBMISSION, not when you originally submitted it. So when they reject your article and you go back and fix it, the submission process starts all over. You move to the back of the line.

The problem is, I think they’re overworked and their editors look for reasons to reject your articles. I’ve had some of my articles rejected for the stupidest reasons imaginable. One of the most common is that the article does not meet their 400 word requirement. Doesn’t matter that I just pulled it off MS Word document that showed the word count at 500 words. Or that I rewrote an article from EZA that said the article had 475 words. Somehow their counting doesn’t add up.

I also like their excuse. “Most directories won’t accept an article with less than 400 words” or something to that affect. Bull! I get 250 and 300 word articles accepted at many article directories all day long.

Like I said, either their editors are snowed under or they are not native English speaking editors. I have a hunch it may be a little of both.

I once wrote an article on a classic consumer product. For the sake of this post, let’s say the article was over the Model T Ford. So in this article I’m giving the history of the Model T Ford and describing how automobiles have evolved over the years.

They rejected the article the first time due to ‘too many keywords’. So I changed it up and resubmitted it. Then it was “we don’t accept articles that are product reviews. You will have to either change the wording of the article or compare the product with two other like products”.

WTF! Who’s smoking crack over there!

So I changed the article up. Sounded really stupid without using the words Model T Ford, since it was an article over the Model T Ford (well, not over the Model T, but over a Classic product that has been in service for more than 50 years). But I hope you get the point.

That’s just a few of the problems I have with them. It’s not uncommon to take a week or more to get my articles accepted by them after jumping through all the hoops they put in your way.

Since this is a paid service, I expect a lot better Customer Service than that and way better service from their submissions. I noticed that they’ve lowered their price to $21 per month now. I wonder if those of us who are already subscribed will get a discount?

I have to be honest with you. Until their submission acceptance service and their Customer Service gets a lot better, I wouldn’t recommend them. Not at $21 per month. If this was a free service, I could handle it. But when I’m paying top dollar, I expect better service from a company.

Now, on to the submitted report. Their site says my article was submitted to 945 directories and websites. It doesn’t tell me how many accepted my article. NOTE: Just because your article is submitted to a directory or website doesn’t mean it will be accepted. The site owner has the final say. This is true with all services that I’m aware of.

Out of that 945 directories and websites, I can track 22 backlinks. The reason is because of Google’s duplicate content penalty. Since this service blast out the same article to a thousand or so directories and blogs, only a few will be indexed by Google.

And the Winner of the 1st Annual Article Marketing Smackdown is…

Well, IMHO it’s a tie between Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation.

The Pro’s of Unique Artilce Wizard is that my articles were submitted to more directories and websites, bringing me more backlinks.

The Pro’s of using Article Marketing Automation is that each article ends up on a website or blog, not an article directory (that’s not a bad thing either, it’s still a backlink to your site!). Plus, I love how the anchored links are embedded into the content, not at the bottom of the page in a resource box. While I got fewer links with AMA, the links I did get were embedded into content on legitimate blogs and websites. This equals maximum passing of the link juice if the subjects are relevant!

Article Marketer comes in at third simply because of the amount of directories it submits too. The number of backlinks should have been greater, but they weren’t. Which tells me not all of the articles are getting indexed because all 945 articles were same with the same resource box. Other factors could have contributed to this, I don’t know. 

Another negative about Article Marketer is that they use two types of resource boxes. One that you can only type in your url, which does not become a hyperlink on the site it ends up on. The other is the traditional resource box with two links in it. I speculate that many site owners choose to use the 1st resource box that only shows your URL as text. This could also be the reason for low backlinks versus the numbers of sites the article was submitted to.

Down at fourth we have Ezinearticles. Pretty decent backlinks for a free service. If I had to pay for this service, I drop it in a heartbeat due to the lack of submissions and the backlinks it produces.

GoArticles isn’t great, but they’re free and you can put links in the body of the article as well as the resource box. That alone makes it worth my time to add my articles to GoArticles.

iSnare. I wouldn’t waste a dollar or my time on them until they get their act together. When I hear others starting to have good results with them, maybe I’ll try them again, but not any time soon!

So there you have it. The finals of the Article Marketing Smackdown. If you’re on a limited budget, then use GoArticles and Ezinearticles until you can afford either Article Marketing Automation or Unique Article Wizard. You’ll build backlinks with the free sites, but at a much slower pace than you will with UAW or AMA. UAW and AMA will give you the most bang for the buck and help set your linkbuilding on the fast track to higher rankings.

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Anyway, it was probably a troll email, but it did get me to thinking.

Could I start out with nothing and make some decent money online without all my tools and resources? Yes, I think I could.

So I decided to challenge myself for the month of January. I’m going to start a Challenge to make $2500 online during the month. Why $2500? I don’t know, it seems like a decent number. Plus, that’s $30,000 per year before taxes. I’d say that’s pretty close to what the average household brings home in the U.S. At any rate, that added income would sure come in handy to many families across the World right now, not just here in the U.S.

I’m setting some guidelines for myself to try and make it as fair as possible.

Here are some of the guidelines I’m setting.

• I’ll only be using free or low cost resources that are available on the Internet and accessible to the general public.
• I’m only going to start the Challenge with $50. Nearly anyone can beg, borrow or steal (just j/k’ing about the stealing part) fifty bucks. Sure, you can get started with nothing, but in reality, an online business is just like any other business. You’re going to have to put up a little money. Any money I make, I’ll reinvest it into the challenge if I need to.
• I won’t use any of my existing websites for help. It would be much easier, but I realize many people do not have a network of websites in place, so mine will be off limits to help me with this challenge.
• I’ll use a variety of techniques to make money online. I haven’t sit down and figured all the ways that I’ll try, but I will do a weekly post and let people know what I did the previous week and how much money was made or lost for that week.
• At the end of the Challenge – win, lose or draw – I’ll be giving away a lot of my resources to a few lucky readers. (I’m thinking a website here, tools, ebooks, etc…) Since I don’t know where this will take me, I don’t know yet what I will have to giveaway!
• To be elgible for the giveaway, all you need to do is leave a comment on any of the post relating to the January $2500 Challenge and ask to be entered. You must let me know through the comments you want entered as some people will not be wanting to enter but yet want to comment. Extra entries will be given to people who blog about the January $2500 Challenge.

Although I sincerely believe anyone can make money online if they just put forth a good effort and stay focused, I know that many people don’t have a clue where to start. I’m of the mindset that making money online is a long term proposition, but I believe some money can be made rather quickly in certain areas. These short term money making projects can help you get by while waiting on your long term business to become profitable.

I’d love to hear from you folks. Suggestions, comments or just to enter the giveaway that will happen at the end of the Challenge, leave me a comment. I’ll keep you updated as I sit down and plan how I’m going to make money online with the January $2500 Challenge.

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Outsourcing your work isn’t for everyone. But at some point in your affiliate marketing efforts, you’ll have to decide whether or not to bring new people in. People who are just beginning in affiliate marketing generally have time to do all the things necessary to become successful.

Once you’ve started building up your portfolio, things can get pretty tight. Especially time. If you stay in this business long enough, there will come a point when you discover that you don’t have enough time to get everything you need done accomplished. When this happens, it’s time to look into outsourcing some of the chores.

For me, it was content writing. I had so many websites that I didn’t have time to write content for every one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to write. But I can only do so much. Plus, there are different types of content. For my Adsense sites, I don’t need the best content. In fact, I’d say poor content will actually convert better on an Adsense site than good content. I can get 500 to 750 word articles written for these sites for as little as $3 to $5 per article. I don’t know about you, but my time is worth a lot more than that plus these articles pay for their self rather quickly.

There are literally people willing to do anything that you can think of. And many of them will do it rather cheaply. It comes down to the value of your time plus how much more money you could make by spending the time you do have on actions that create the most money for you.

By having a lot of articles written for my sites, the time this frees up is spent on building backlinks to my sites and creating more sites, which makes me a lot more money than writing content!

Where to find outsourcing resources

There Internet is a wonderful place to find people willing to work for you. All you need to do is look.

Here are some of my favorite places to find people to outsource my work to.

DigitalPoint forums. They have a section called the Marketplace. You can find anything you want here. Content Writers, Coders, Content, eBook creation, Link building services to people who will build backinks for you and submit your articles to directories and so on. Make sure you check the iTrader reputation of the person before hiring him/her to work for you. Most other Webmaster forums also have a similar marketplace. Other sites you may want to look into are; SitePoint, Webmaster World, V7N, Warrior Forum, etc.

eLance, Rent-A-Coder, RentAFreelancer, GetAFreelancer. These are great places to find people to outsource every aspect of your affiliate marketing. From building website templates to PHP coders and people who will build you landing pages, you’ll find them here.

Need-An-Article. When I need great content, I use these people. I can get 1000 plus word articles written by native English speaking writers for as little as $12.50 and these articles are as good, or in many cases – better, than ones I have paid $30 or more for. Their research is excellent as well and most of my article request are turned around in a few days.

Craigslist – Ha! Gotcha didn’t I? Yeah, I’ve found some good freelancers on Craigslist. Several Content writers and a Coder. Look toward the bottom of the page under the heading of “Services”.  Also be sure to check out the “Gigs” section. If you want someone local, just put up a post and you should have plenty of people responding shortly.

There are tons of other places to find people to outsource your work to. For many of you, you get hung up on the cost to hire these people. I think this generally comes from lack of confidence on most peoples part. If your sites are making money, then your outsourced work will pay for itself many times over. This will free you up to create more sites or work on an area that you enjoy and let the freelancers work on the chores you hate to do or are not particularly good at.

One last bit of advice here. And you’d better take this to heart. Once you find several freelancers that you like, keep their contact info close by. These people can be invaluable to you. Also, treat them fairly in all your business dealings. If they’re good, they’ll be an asset to your business. The few bucks you’ll save by trying to screw them over isn’t worth it. A good freelancer can be like the Goose that laid the Golden egg.

Remember, you’re the Money Man, the Rainmaker, the person with the Creative Ideas. Do what you do best and let the freelancers do what they’re best at!

To you people, I’d say give it a try. Budget some money and get those time sucking jobs that are holding you back outsourced! Your bank account will thank you!

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For others, once I approved your comments, they would simply vanish and not show up under the post they were suppose to. I couldn’t find them anywhere. Sorry about that!

I upgraded WordPress and the WordPress Plugins this morning so I’m hoping that took care of the problem.

I believe there was a commenter on my Embarg post name Susan who become very hot at me because she thought I wasn’t approving her comments. Susan, (if I have your name correct), try commenting again. I didn’t delete your post, it just became a casualty of this black hole where all my approved comments were going!

As for you others, I have Akismet set to hold all comments with links. Honestly, when I see the amount of post in the Akismet spam section, I just delete the whole mess. Akismet is good at catching most of my spam and I don’t have the time to wade through thousands of Spam comments hoping to find one or two good comments.

If you want your comments to show up, it’s best to make one that says something other than “good site, me learned lots” or one with a link in it.

Don

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