This is another excellent post that I found sitting on the Warrior's Forum – all too many of them are wonderful people, who are willing to share their method of earning money online. The simple truth is that if you put work into it, you've increased the size of the pie – so just because someone else begins using your method of earning money, doesn't mean that you will earn less. In fact, have you ever noticed that fast food restaurants always seem to 'hang together'? It doesn't detract from McDonald's income to have a Taco Bell right next door – indeed, it'll improve the income of both… since far more people will begin frequenting that area.

So here's the article I found – you'll find my comments in [brackets]:

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Step By Step Plan For Earning Money Via Affiliate Marketing! is a post from: BurningKnife

Okay – so you're confused about how to get started, and you don't want to spend any money… here you go – step by step plans to get you earning money quickly… One of the truly simple ways to get started is to pick a product at Clickbank… one that solves a problem people are desperate to solve: weight loss, acne, stop smoking, are typical products of this sort. Picking a niche that people are desperate to solve is critical to your success – because picking a 'desperate' niche will over-ride any marketing mistakes you make, and still make you money. So pick a niche where people are really desperate to solve their problem… At this point, you have two options:

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Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing – The Easy Way! is a post from: BurningKnife

I'm going to tell you a truth you might not want to face – you can make money by almost any method that you see being hyped on the Internet. It doesn't matter – they all make money. Just like in the offline world – you can make money selling tires, fixing TV's, mowing lawns, selling securities, clerking for a law firm, teaching in school… well, I think you get the picture. Virtually anything you can do to make someone else's life more pleasant or happy, can make you money.

But what all these offline jobs have in common is that you have to:

LEARN HOW TO DO IT!  Then Simply Do It.

Most people have trouble with one or both of those statements… you either aren't willing to spend the time learning how to do it, or you aren't willing to simply do it! For some strange reason, people look at the Internet as if it were different from the offline business world, and that money simply falls into your Paypal account if the "secret of Internet marketing" has been 'revealed' to them.  This is where many people online make their money – selling the latest great 'secret revelation' that the 'gurus' have been keeping from you… And after you spend more money on the latest 'revelation', you STILL don't take action.  It's why the lottery is so popular – instant wish fulfillment, but no learning or work required.  And if the latest lottery ticket (or money-making ebook) doesn't work, well… next week or next month – you can buy another one…

Take Action Now!

Stop reading my rambling thoughts RIGHT NOW!  Most of you already know how to make money online. It's simple. The problem for most people is that it takes work, and you don't get immediate satisfaction. You have to have the patience to know that your efforts will be rewarded, if only in knowledge that something you did does not work…  How many light bulb ideas did Thomas Alva Edison go through before he finally succeeded?

I can see that you're really not interested in making extra money online – you're still reading instead of taking action. There's only two possible excuses you can legitimately offer:

1. My writing is so compelling that you can't stop reading. (yeah, like I'll really believe that one…)
2. You sincerely don't know what business model you'd like to employ. (ie: you don't know how to start)

If you really think my writing is so compelling that you'd rather read it than to make money – shoot me an email – I'm always on the lookout for suckers that I can employ for below minimum wage.

If you don't know what business model to use, or how to get started, register for this website and read the posts in the members area. Or head over to the Warrior's forum, and READ EVERY SINGLE POST WRITTEN EACH DAY for a month – at the end of a month, you'll have the equivalent of a High School diploma in Internet Marketing.  If you cannot decide how to begin earning money after doing one of those two things – I can't help you.

Make Money With CPA, Ebay, Surveys, Blogs… is a post from: BurningKnife

I ran across a website recently – and as I forced myself to keep reading, the question kept popping up – "Why am I wasting time with this?" But before I explain myself, it's only fair that you get to suffer through reading this too – or perhaps you'd like to just skip to the bottom and read my commentary…

I've left in all the links (or rather, I made the original links continue to look like links) – but they aren't clickable. I wanted everyone to get the real flavor of this web page exactly as I was reading it. All misspellings and grammar errors have been left exactly as I originally found it. All of the above "links", with the sole exception of the final three – led to other internal pages on this website. (and no, I'm not going to give you the website URL – no need to offer link juice to such a site, nor would I want to embarrass the website owner)

Now, after slogging my way through that tortured web page, I finally figured out that the author was simply stating that you can trade your time for money, or you can trade your knowledge and efforts for a longer term cash flow. To put it simply, you can work 40 hours for your employer, and get a paycheck for those 40 hours, or you can create a song, and earn royalties for years to come… (or, as in my case, direct traffic to landing pages that lead to affiliate sales)

But what was the purpose of that article? Surely it wasn't designed to have anyone read it! And, in fact, there were quite a few outgoing advertising links (I counted six of them, all 'above the fold')

I'm just going to guess here – but I'd be willing to bet that I'm not far from the truth… this site paid someone a dollar or two for the barely readable article, and the internal links were all created by a plugin. The entire purpose is to virtually force someone to click a more interesting advertisement, just to escape the torture. While this might work – why not spend the time developing good content?

You see, the big problem with earning online will always be a lack of traffic. And as Google (and other search engines) continue to refine and improve their algorithms, sites such as this one that put garbage up – will disappear from the listings. And without search engine listings – where are you going to get the traffic?

Yes, it's more work to do things the right way – creating unique and readable content that people will want to read is surely more work than paying a foreign article writer a dollar or two to spit out garbage. And doing your own intelligent internal linking is certainly more work (I need to do more of it myself…)  But in the long run, who do you think will earn more money from their work?

And are you proud of the website you own?  Would you willingly share the URL with friends & family?  Does it rank in the SERPS?

How People Can Make Profit The Easy Way Online! is a post from: BurningKnife

One of the best ways to get traffic is to appear on the first page of Google. Depending on the keyphrase that you target, being on the first page of Google can mean 3 visitors a week, or tens of thousands of visitors a day. It's likely – following the method given here, that you will start with around 20-50 visitors a day… then with further backlinking, you can build up from there.

Using this method, I recently put three domains on the first page of Google – one domain is sitting at number 7 with one backlink (an article submitted to EzineArticles), one domain is currently Number 3 on Google (with 60 backlinks done in about 2 hours time), and one domain is sitting at Number 7 on Page 2 with no backlinks. All three domains STARTED on page one, the one domain I've not done any backlinking to simply drifted downward over a period of a couple of weeks.

Now, can you imagine what you can do with a first page listing on Google? Simply slapping up an affiliate product can start producing some Clickbank checks… putting up some Adsense ads can do likewise… so what's the trick to getting first page listings on Google? It's incredibly simple… all you have to do is…

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1st Page Of Google – Revealed is a post from: BurningKnife

In a nutshell, proper SEO is a whole range of techniques and procedures to allow search engines, such as Google, to properly rank your website as high as it's possible to go in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

If your business is 'Mobile Screen Repair' – then you obviously want your website to come up when local customers type in 'cityname screen repair', or similar keywords. The only way to get 1st page listings for the keywords you want is to make sure that the search engines believe that you are the most relevant website for that keyword.

Google has become the powerhouse in search engines because of one simple rule – they understand who their actual customer is, it's not their advertisers, its who use their search engine to find something. So Google always tries to put the very best websites for a given keyword at the top.  When you search for "Purple Elephant Miniatures", you can be sure that the website that comes up first has more information on that topic than any other website on the Internet. Or, more accurately, that Google believes this.  Because of this simple fact – that your results are extremely likely to be what you're looking for – Google has become the powerhouse that it is.

So when doing proper SEO work, you simply have to do what Google is looking for in order to convince Google that your website is the very best (or at least, one of the best) websites for the search term that you want your customers to find you with. This is a complicated task, as it's constantly evolving as Google changes its algorithms. What used to work no longer does… meta tags, as merely one example; used to be more highly rated by Google. Other search engines still rank meta tags highly, but Google no longer does.

Whether or not you need regular SEO maintenance work done on your website depends entirely on the competitiveness of your business. If you are selling "Purple Elephant Miniatures," you can be sure that virtually no SEO work beyond the initial correct install of your website is needed. But if you offer credit card repair – be prepared to invest a large monthly retainer to an SEO firm to get your website ranked on the first page.

SEO can be divided into two separate categories, onsite and offsite. Onsite SEO is the proper use of meta tags, header tags, Alt tags, internal links, proper titles, search engine friendly permalinks, and so forth. Proper onsite SEO can enable search engines to rank you higher in the SERPS because they better understand what your website is all about. Bad SEO, such as a heavy dependence on graphics or flash intros, can stop search engines cold, and your site may look pretty, but if no-one knows how to find it, what good is it?

Offsite SEO consists largely of backlinks to your website, whether in the form of articles, press releases, blog commenting, link exchanges, or other forms of links. Search engines consider links to your website as 'votes' for your site, the more websites that 'vote' for your website, the higher up in the search engines you'll appear. The more competitive your competition, the more links you'll need to be on page one.

Which is more critical? Onsite or offsite SEO? The simple truth is that although "Content is King" is the cliché, and everyone believes that onsite SEO is more important, it's not. I know of at least one website that ranks #1 in Google for a keyword phrase that is NOT the domain name, has ZERO content, no <h1> tags, no title, nothing… but what it does have is quite a few backlinks with anchor text pointing to the site. (For fun, try searching for "virtual personal your self" – the number one result as of this article is 'yourselffitness.com' – view the page source!)

Now obviously, if two sites have identical offsite SEO – roughly the same number of backlinks from roughly similar types of sites, then content and onsite SEO will be the difference that will jump one site over the other. But all things being equal, you should be spending time creating backlinks – it's by far the most important SEO task you can do to move your site up in the SERPS.

Proper SEO is critical to your website – if you want your website to be advertising your business. If you are paying for monthly SEO maintenance, you need someone who knows what they're doing. Unfortunately, it's difficult to know whether your SEO 'expert' really knows what he or she is doing without the investment of time to see if your website moves up to page one. Keep in mind that you cannot be on page one of Google for every keyword, so sit down with your SEO expert and decide which keywords you should attempt to optimize for – then ask for monthly reports from them, showing monthly improvement. On a daily basis, your website will jump up and down in the SERPS, but you should see improvement in monthly tracking.
 

What is SEO? is a post from: BurningKnife

Yes Virginia, there is a secret to Internet Marketing. Those who understand the secret will eventually make money online, and those who don't will continually spend money (buying the latest 'how to make money' ebooks, videos, and reports)

Which category would you like to be in? Those who make money? Or those who keep spending money?  I can't tell you how much money I've spent in buying various products that all but guaranteed me an instant mind-blowing income starting next week… I have a hard-drive filled with them (as, I'm sure, you probably do too!) Indeed, I've gotten quite good at guessing what the ebook will tell me based on what the sales page says… you learn to recognize the various techniques for earning money online… one fact you might not know – is that ALL of these methods work! Pick your poison, whether it's BUM Marketing, Adsense sites, Clickbank Affiliates, Amazon Affiliates, Ebay Affiliates, List creation, product creation, PPC, etc… they ALL work. Some are more difficult than others, some require more highly specialized knowledge (such as PPC), some are tedious (Article writing), but they all make money.

You probably know most of these methods, why aren't you making as much money as you want? Here's the secret – "You have to take action". In fact, I might even change that sentence to "You must fail in order to succeed". But if you aren't taking action – you aren't failing. And if you aren't failing, you aren't learning what DOES work. If you aren't busy creating Internet real estate, and learning how to get eyeballs on your offers (affiliate or otherwise), then how can you expect people to be buying things – and making you a commission?

You'll see it time and time again – 'You must take action' – so when I label it a secret, I'm only doing so because few people seem to read this assertion and actually follow it. Stop buying lottery tickets, and start working. Buying a lottery ticket and buying the latest greatest “Make Thousands Starting Next Week" ebook have much in common – they give you a nice dream. It's great entertainment – but it's not money in your pocket. So stop buying them, and start spending some time every single day towards your goal.

Each night, before you fall asleep, ask yourself – what did I do today to further my goal of making money online? Did I write fresh articles? Did I spend any time backlinking one of my sites? Did I do keyword research for a new website project? If you can't answer affirmatively MOST days to this question – are you really serious about making extra money online?

I'm slowly improving how often I can answer 'Yes' to this question, and the connection between how much money I make every month with my online activities seems strangely tied to how often I can say 'Yes' each night to my question … What did I do today to further my goal of making money online?

Set aside an hour a day, and make daily goals – each day you'll find X number of backlinks for your site (it doesn't have to be a huge number, I'm happy to find just 5 each day… I document them in an Excel Spreadsheet so I can go back in a few weeks to backlink another site…), you'll write one new article, you'll submit it to 5 article directories… of course, your goals depend on your chosen method of online earnings – but the secret is consistent action – stop jumping around to the next method when you didn't see any money for a few days or weeks – consistent long-term action is the secret that's the key.

Understandably, it's difficult – since we're used to receiving our pay for our work much faster in the offline world. Whatever work I do today – my employer will pay me for no less than 2 weeks from now… The online world is different, you may not see results for weeks, months… you may not understand that you're about to learn from a failure, and failures pay off too – because the more failures you have, the more you can learn what doesn't work, the more quickly you can begin spending your daily online activities in ways that WILL pay off.

Once again – TAKE ACTION! That's the number one secret to online success… One more secret for you that took me a long time to learn – always ask the question – how am I going to get eyeballs? How am I going to get traffic? If you could somehow guarantee just .0000000001% of the daily Internet traffic, you can't help but become a millionaire online in your chosen business model. So always examine every method with an eye to answering the question – "How can I get traffic". Whether that traffic is for a list, a website, an affiliate offer, whatever – you must have traffic.  But before you have that traffic, you have to take action…
 

Learn Internet Marketing – The Secret Revealed! is a post from: BurningKnife

As returning visitors have figured out, I changed this past July 4th weekend to running BurningKnife on WordPress – it had started to become quite the spam magnet under Drupal – and I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with Drupal – it's just easier to manage this site under WordPress. It seems that I really don't need the extra power of Drupal.

But I wanted to sing the praises of Akismet – one of the first WordPress plugins I always install – and it's really getting a workout here on Burningknife – in just two days, it has buried 96 pieces of spam… all without any intervention on my part. Perhaps this just goes to show how popular this site had become for spam purposes… I even caught one SEO firm in India trying to check up on some spam comments that they'd submitted (saw their request in the search referrer)

Well guess what folks? I'm still a dofollow blog, I've even added Keywordluv and the Top Commentators sidebar widget… and with a homepage rank of PR4 – this site can add quite a bit of value for your keyword linking stratagy – but I'm going to demand something valuable from you – your time. You have to take the time to make a comment personally – no robots will get past Akismet, and any that do still have to get past me.

But right now, as of the date I'm writing this – any comment at all that's accepted will get a sitewide Top Commentator's link!  So if you'd like a PR4 link – by all means, jump in and comment on any of my posts… get the ball rolling. Just be aware that your comment has to get through two hoops – Akismet, and me.

Backlinks are the key to getting your websites noticed by Google – to get them on to page one. I'm happy to trade a good backlink to your site in return for some great comments… But I will no longer allow my site to collect garbage, since I'm also interested in providing a great website full of interesting information – and spam simply doesn't fit the bill.

Comments anyone?

All Hail Akismet! Stopping Spam In its Tracks is a post from: BurningKnife

If you've been to this site in year's past, you've probably noticed a dramatic difference that happened over the July 4th, 2010 weekend – I've moved the site from Drupal to WordPress.

Now, unless you're a geeky CMS type, who builds websites on the side, this probably doesn't mean anything to you – so let me explain what happened… the original intent of this site was to form a community bases website where everyone could help each other learn the tricks of making money online with a website. Sadly, all that happened was, for the most part, simply spam. I created a spam magnet, and as the Google PR rose (currently PR 4), the attraction of this site for spammers greatly increased.

So it's time to close the door on the spam, and take back the website to a slightly less ambitious phase… instead of a community based site, it will be a platform to pass along information I learn on Affiliate marketing, Website design, Adsense, and similar topics. I will remain friendly for those looking for backlinks – but will completely restrict unfettered access to the spammers.

If you want a backlink for your site – it's simple – just log in as a member, and provide meaningful comments. I guarantee that you'll get solid one-way backlinks for your efforts. If you'd like an in-page link (very valuable indeed!), simply email me with an article that I can put on my site – it must be unique, and it must be at least 500 words.

I'm often amused at the frequent emails I get requesting link exchanges – it's quite clear that the webmaster didn't bother to look around this site – I offer free one-way dofollow links – and as long as commentators can provide valuable comments, and not be linking to any disreputable website – I'm happy to allow the links. I'm a big believer in do-follow links, and will make additional efforts to help make this site friendly to those who'd like backlinks. I'll be putting up 'KeywordLuv' and 'Top Commentator' plugins soon, so there's even more link juice to help everyone out.

By moving to WordPress, I can control this website far easier, and yet still offer useful information for one and all… so I hope that you'll bookmark this site, and continue to visit!

What Happened To BurningKnife? is a post from: BurningKnife

For those of you who are interested in affiliate marketing – particularly Clickbank – I've been toying around with a couple of great products that I thought I'd tell you about.

Everyone needs a good landing page if you're trying to do affiliate marketing with Clickbank – but many Clickbank products have really great landing pages… and I can't do better than what they already have. So I'd like to use their landing page, yet I still want something on my website… so with instant landing pages, you can get a copy of the Clickbank landing page, yet still have your cookies, adsense, and Google tracking installed… This is an amazing product, and though I dislike the fact that it's a website (you have to log into their website to create your landing pages), there's nothing else even close to this out there.

Another product that I'm still learning is the Samurai Link Cloaker, it features three different types of link forwarding – simple redirect, masked, and stealth. It offers a way around EzineArticle's new rules that all affiliate links be from the top domain of a website… in other words, you can no longer use 'www.yoursite.com/productpage' as an affiliate link, it must be only 'www.yoursite.com'. Samurai Link Cloaker has a great way to avoid this new restriction, and still use just a single website to funnel all your different affiliate products through. I wish it had better stats, all it has is a click counter for the links… but that's the minimum that I need, so I bought it. So far, I'm quite happy with my purchase. (They offer a single domain version, and for $10 more, a version that can be used on all your domains)

The third product is something that every Internet Marketer needs – a good article submitter. I've tried quite a few of them, and was using Brad Callen's 'Power Article Spinner' until I ran across this article submitter… and I must say, I've changed products! If you don't understand what article submitters do – you definitely need to get informed! The best way to get incoming links & traffic is to put unique content out on Web 2.0 properties… article directories, WordPress, Weebly, Blogger, Hubpages, Wetpaint, Vox, etc… By writing a single article, and modifying it into video & podcasts, then submitting with this software, you can post to all these sites, create link wheels, and gain fantastic traffic to your affiliate offers or website. Making money on the Internet is all about having Internet 'Real Estate' – and a good submitter program will help you make the most of each article, video, and podcast that you create.

So if you're making money with affiliate marketing… or if you want to make money with affiliate marketing… these are three really great products that you might want to check out.

Great Marketing Tools For Affiliate Marketers… is a post from: BurningKnife