When your blog is already highly trusted by Google and has over 50,000 subscribers, it would seem that anything you say is instantly popular. For example, Shoemoney had free internet marketing guides, as does John Chow– and anything they put out immediately gets a ton of traffic. But what if you’re starting from zero? It’s a catch-22.

Consider the case of Keith Wilcox, a stay at home dad turned professional blogger just two months ago. He had zero experience blogging before, doesn’t have programming experience, but does know a lot about parenting, home schooling his kids, and fitness.

Consider Velina Lujan, a Boulder massage therapist whose business was struggling, after suffering a yellow pages rip-off. She put her site on wordpress, too, wrote articles, and started driving traffic.

Here are the steps they both followed– brand new to blogging– to start getting enough traffic to make a living. Not a crazy, superaffiliate lifestyle, but one that a normal person could sustain– one that is possible for you, too!

Are you following these simple steps that they did?

• They put up a wordpress site, which takes all of 5 minutes to do. Go to wordpress.org or use one of the many free or almost free hosting sites that can one-click install your blog. We don’t have to go into all the reasons why wordpress is great for SEO– it just works.

• They wrote about a topic they know DEEPLY– in this case, parenting issues and how to do a great massage. Keith put up Hooked on Phonics video reviews, as he is good in front of a camera, while Velina wrote articles on Boulder elder care. If you don’t like to write, but enjoy making videos– do that. If you prefer doing podcasts, ditto. Just start creating great content about something you are passionate about, since odds are that it will be expert content that others will want to read and share with friends.
• They connected with similar users: Most bloggers stop at the above and wonder why they don’t get traffic. Keith spent days assembling the Top 115 daddy bloggers on the web and attracted attention from those site owners. He developed relationships with these folks– and started exchanging posts between each other. Those guest posts back and forth demonstrated to Google that he was a trustworthy site, like the ones that he friended. If you aren’t connected to these other guys, Google will think you’re a spammer.
• They began reaching out socially: Velina tied in her Facebook profile and added 157 friends. Granted, she doesn’t have thousands of friends, but the ones that are there are good quality and drive traffic to her site– especially clients that are repeat customers. She also started doing some Facebook advertising, setting up geo-targeted campaigns– and this was much more effective than traditional Google AdWords PPC, which is quite expensive in the United States.
• They did not SPAM: Meaning no fake content, no paid links, no cloaking– just good old fashioned networking combined with solid information. The results grow over time and you build great reputation with the search engines and human users.

Sounds like magic? You’d be surprised (or maybe not) how many people WISH that they could be successful, but don’t actually take steps to do it.

How much effort does it take?

• For a niche that is low in competition– such as for the term “unnecessary baby products“– 100 blog posts should be enough to start to get you traffic– so that’s just one blog post a day for 100 days, and each blog post will take you only 15 minutes. Can you do that?

• For a moderately competitive niche, maybe “alaska garage sales“, you need perhaps 1,000 posts to get to rank on the first page of Google or Yahoo!.

• For a term like free ringtones, that’s ultra hard– you might need 10,000 or 100,000 posts and links to be competitive. That’s the area where social media, linkbaiting campaigns, and large teams come into play.

But if you’re just one person and you don’t need more than a couple hundred dollars a day, winning on low competition terms– to dominate your small niche– should be more than fine. I wish you the best fortune on your blogging journey!

This post was guest blog by Dennis Yu.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Considering that you are reading John Chow dot Com, I’ll go out on a limb and say that you’re probably interested in making money online. Each of you may bring a slightly different skill set to the table. Some of you may be interested in affiliate marketing, others in freelance writing, and others still in professional blogging.

One of the biggest hurdles that you will face with any endeavor is the inevitable learning curve. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just start making money right away? That seems to be the idea behind Websites for Sale World, which serves as the subject for today’s review. From this site, you can you grab a wide range of turnkey businesses that require no prior knowledge or expertise.

Get Started with Turnkey Online Business

While its name may lead you to believe that you can buy individual websites for the purpose of making money, Websites for Sale World is actually a membership-based site that grants you access to all the resources all at once.

Available as a UK version or a US version, Websites for Sale World offers “all types of turnkey packages ready to start making money.” This includes not only the raw website files themselves, but also information on how to earn money from Clickbank, AdSense, Amazon, eBay, and so on.

My initial reaction to Websites for Sale World was not a positive one. It seems to be completely lacking in any of its own branding, not offering a unique logo or header image at all. The rotating banners at the top lack in professionalism and the same can be said about the site in general. A simpler, cleaner layout could work wonders.

Types of Sites for Sale

Navigating a little further down the main page, you’ll see the different types of websites that come with a membership to Websites for Sale World.

These site templates, like the ones for Amazon or online travel, come pre-populated with products and services for sale. The sites are meant to be completely turnkey, so you can start making money right away.

According to the documentation, the sites will update themselves too, so you only need to focus your attention on driving targeted traffic to your site. Naturally, you’ll need to provide your own domain and hosting too.

Flipping Ringtones and Wallpapers for Profit

One example of the available websites for sale in this “world” is the ringtones website. From this site, you have the opportunity to sell ringtones, wallpapers, screensavers, games, and other mobile content. You can check out the live demo to get a better sense of what you can expect.

The layout is relatively easy to understand, but it makes me feel more like I’m looking at a simple landing page or a parked domain page. The profitability can be good, though, if you manage to get the right traffic to the site.

As an example, Websites for Sale World says that you can sell a cell phone wallpaper image for £3.00 to earn a commission of €1.38. Expanding this example to include 110 sales of various mobile products each day, they say that you can earn a profit of €47,772 a year.

How Much Does It Cost?

To go along with the eight turnkey websites (and counting), Websites for Sale World also offers a number of bonus items to go with your paid membership.

There are SEO tutorials, monetization tutorials, “free software to help you in building your websites,” information on website flipping, a list of over 2000 wholesale suppliers, and e-books on building an e-book empire and making money from ClickBank.

Interestingly, joining the membership network is not a monthly subscription. Instead, joining Websites for Sale World comes at a one-time cost of £149 through the UK site. Alternatively, you can hit up the American site and pay $246.

CLICK HERE TO TRY WEBSITES FOR SALE WORLD

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

I have been blogger for almost a year. Over the past year I have learned that to be a successful blogger you need an amazing amount of self discipline.

When you are starting out enthusiasm drives you. At the beginning you will be spouting out content machine gun style. Ideas will automatically form in your head. You sit down at the computer and write and before you finish the post a new idea will form. Post after post with no problems. The first 10 posts come easy.

Then one day you sit at the computer and your fingers don’t move. Your mind is blank. Putting your elbows on the table you rest your head in your hands waiting for an idea to come. Nothing happens.

You try to remember that idea you had while waiting for bus. Or the post you completed in your head while taking a shower. But what seemed like a good post at the time now seems like drivel. You want to write, but you can’t.

So what do you do?

Most likely, if you are a beginning blogger, your next move will be a mistake. Like Odysseus without beeswax in his ears, you will be lured by the Siren’s song. Odysseus was wise – he had himself tied to the ship’s mast to avoid temptation. But as a new blogger you are not wise – you will be lured and you will succumb.

With nothing to write and nothing to do, you will open an internet browser window and check your blog stats. How many new visitors, how much AdSense revenue, how many affiliate sales. You go through the routine of checking all your stats and like always, nothing has changed. Same as it was 10 minutes ago – no new visitors, no AdSense revenue, and no affiliate sales. It has not changed in the last 10 minutes, the last hour or even since yesterday. The sad fact is that it will not change for a long time.

You have a problem. You are addicted to checking your stats. Every time there is a lull, every time you find yourself with a moment of idle time you check your stats. Over and over again. Like a pigeon repeatedly pecking at a button hoping for a pellet, you check your stats.

There Is No Point Checking Your Stats

For at least the first month of your blogs existence there is absolutely no need for you to check your stats. Your blog is virtually invisible and only a very few people (your mother and best friend) visit.

After the first month you probably have enough content to start promoting it. You do the standard stuff: comment on other blogs, frequent forums and article submissions. At this point it is enough to check your stats once a week. On a day to day basis not much will change – why do you need to know if you had 12 visitors today or 15? All you need to know is that the average for the week was 13.

Of course, this does not apply if you are the first to discover that Micheal Jackson is alive and you have video footage of him in your living room. Since this is bound to be a good post with lots of visitors your stats should be checked daily. But for most cases, weekly is fine.

It is not until at least six months, when you have page rank, subscribers, and search engines send you traffic, that you need to start checking your stats on a regular basic. Only after you have a presence on the internet is there any chance of a surprise with the number of visitors, AdSense clicks, or affiliate sales. First six months – you do not even need to bother checking your stats (OK, once a week is fine).

So what is the big deal? What is wrong with checking your stats first thing when you wake up and then after your shower and then while you drink your coffee and then while your word processor is loading? This small ritual might seem harmless. But it is not.

Productivity Loss

The biggest issue is the the amount of time you lose. If you are addicted to checking your stats you will be checking them all the time. Everything will be an excuse to check your stats. Staring at a blank page – check your stats, cannot think of the right word – check your stats, do not want to do promotion – check your stats.

Instead of doing productive things – things that actually help your blog, you are checking your stats. True, to view your stats only takes 30 seconds, but if you multiply that by the 30 times a day you do it then it is 15 minutes lost everyday. If you have a full time job and a baby on each arm 15 minutes is an eternity. Every minute counts, minutes spent confirming that nothing has changed really cut into your chances of having a successful blog.

To increase your productivity – do not check your stats. Simply assume that you have no new visitors, no AdSense click and no affiliate sales. Not only will your assumption be correct, but you will save 15 minutes a day.

Demoralizing

Ancient Greeks did not understand the concept of zero. They asked, “how can something be nothing”. Endless debates ensued about whether zero should be considered a number.

For the first few months as a blogger you will wish that zero never become accepted as a number. At the beginning you will see zeros everywhere and every day. Zero new visitors, zero new subscribers, zero AdSense clicks, zero comments.

Seeing zeros all the time is demoralizing. Especially after spending your Saturday night writing what you consider a great post. You wake up in the morning and jump to your computer, check your stats and see nothing but zeros.

The more you check your stats the more zeros you will see. I do not care how strong your armor, those zeros will get to you. You will start to feel like nothing you do makes a difference. Every time you think something should happen, nothing does. Beaten by the zero stick over and over again, 30 times a day will leave you bruised and battered. If you don’t stop checking your stats you risk being defeated by the number zero.

How To Kick The Addiction

A year of blogging has taught me one very important lesson. If you want to be productive, if you want to give yourself a chance to succeed you need to quit your stat checking addiction.

Do not have a shortcut to your stats on the desktop. Do not have them bookmarked. Do not let the browser store your username and password for easy access. Make it difficult to check your stats.

Set a specific time to check your stats once a day (or once a week) and stick to it. You will be tempted many times a day to break your rule but don’t. Remember – nothing has changed, it will only waste time and it will be a zero. By checking once a day, you minimize your wasted time to 30 seconds and are disappointed only once.

I am free from my stats addiction and it feels great. A year ago I would of checked my stats at least three times during the writing of this post. Now, a year wiser, it is the middle of the afternoon and I am proud to say that I have not checked them today.

Forget your stats and start doing something productive.

This was a guest post by Roman from How This Website Makes Money.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

My friends at Unique Blog Designs, the design agency that created the WordPress theme that powers this blog, is about to release an incredible new tool that will help you quickly build your email list and further systemize your online marketing. It is called Squeeze Theme and it is coming out Tuesday, November 24th. I was given a sneak preview of the theme and I have to say it’s pretty damn awesome. I plan to use Squeeze Theme to power a new site I’m working on.

Squeeze theme is a premium product that will sell for $147. However, Unique Blog Design is running a promotion right now that will give you 50% off Squeeze Theme if you purchase Affiliate Theme between now and Tuesday, November 17th. That’s right – you only have one week to take advantage of this promotion, so don’t miss out.

The Easiest Way To Create Affiliate Niches Site with WordPress

For those who don’t know, Affiliate Theme is an affiliate website building tool for WordPress. More than 2,000 people are using Affiliate Theme to quickly build and profit from affiliate websites. The themes makes it extremely easy for anyone to create an affiliate niche site using the WordPess blogging platform. Instead of using WordPress to create a blog, Affiliate Theme uses WordPress to create an affiliate site! It really is a genius idea.

If you’ve been wanting to get into affiliate marketing but hesitated because you don’t know the first thing about creating an affiliate landing page, then you should definitely check out Affiliate Theme. If you’re already an affiliate marketer, then Affiliate Theme adds one more tool to your affiliate marketing arsenal. Some of the features of Affiliate Theme include:

• Customize your Affiliate Theme with incredible ease! Change the color, fonts, call to action buttons, and even page layout! A highly-modified Theme Options panel allows you to choose between six unique layouts.
• Build and modify your Affiliate Theme in minutes! Adding personality and branding to your affiliate web site is key to its credibility. With over 30 pre-made backgrounds and 30 pre-made headers, and the ability to change every tiny look and feel of the theme with a simple click, you’ll be able to create excellently branded sites in a few minutes.
• Photoshop-like color picker allows you to instantly change the colors! Affiliate Theme made switching colors insanely easy. No need to play with HEX codes, or switch between programs to choose your colors. Even if you want to use a specific HEX code, just copy and paste it in.
• Helpful, comprehensive Affiliate Theme Resource Center and Support. Unique Blog Designs know how important it is to have clear, concise instructions when working with web tools. That’s why they’ve created an incredibly comprehensive Resource Center. On top of that, they’ve interviewed more than 10 top affiliate marketers to pick their brains and give you huge money making ideas.

To give you an idea on how easy Affiliate Theme is to use, watch how simple it is for Josh from Unique Blog Design create an offer landing page from Azoogle Ads.

If you’re already an Affiliate Theme owner, you will get the 50% discount when Squeeze Theme is released. If you’re not an Affiliate Theme owner yet, then you need to check it out now. It’s easiest way to create money making affiliate websites. Don’t miss out on this opportunity. Unique Blog Design has NEVER offered this large of a discount before on any of their themes before.

Buy Affiliate Theme and Receive 50% Off Squeeze Theme

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Move over Bellagio fountain, you just got pwned. The Dubai Fountain can shoot water 492 feet up in the air! Everything about it is off the scale big. It was built for $217 million by WET Design, which is the same company that created the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel. The Dubai Fountain’s 900 foot long water show uses 6,600 lights, 50 colored projectors, and hundreds of servos, all computer controlled and synchronized with music to offer a show that would make Las Vegas envious.

The Dubai Fountain is located next to the recently finished Burj Dubai, which happens to be the world tallest building. This just adds one more reason for me to take a trip to Dubai. Here’s a video of the fountain in action.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Have you been watching as your stock portfolio tanks into oblivion? Is it at all possible to make money in this market when everyone seems to be losing value, laying off employees, downsizing operations, and declaring bankruptcy?

One of the biggest keys to financial success is finding a way to make a buck under even the worst of circumstances. One strategy that many people have tried is short selling and just like conventional stock trading, there are certainly techniques and tactics to maximizing your profits through shorting. Short Screen, which serves as the subject of today’s review, is designed to be a robust tool with short sellers in mind.

Sell High and Then Buy Low

Let me start out by saying that I am no stock market expert, but I am somewhat familiar with what short selling is all about. Under normal circumstances, you’d probably be on the lookout for stocks on the rise. You buy them while they’re still low and then you sell them when they’re high. That’s how you turn a profit.

Short selling still adheres to the “buy low, sell high” mentality, but it reverses the order of the steps. What you do is “sell” stocks (that you do not own) at today’s higher price with the promise that you’ll “buy” them at a future date, ideally at a lower price. Instead of looking for stock prices on the rise, you look for stock prices that are destined to plummet. You look for companies about to declare bankruptcy.

What is Short Screen?

Offering tools and ideas for short sellers, Short Screen is a website that will help you find the stocks that you should be shorting and the ones that you should be avoiding. The main information is based on the Altman Z-score model, which describes how “distressed” a stock is.

Short Screen offers three main areas: message boards, screener, and calculator.

The Free Message Boards for Everyone

The only real area of the site that is readily available to members and non-members alike is the message board. This is where your fellow stock traders can post their tips on which stocks could be on the rise and which are about to fall.

One of the more recent examples is the post for Domino’s Pizza. You can adjust the stock chart for a number of different time periods and premium members can rate the “tip” on a five-star scale. If the average rating drops below two stars (with an adequate number of total votes), the post gets removed from the site.

Screener: Who’s About to Go Under?

Possibly the most valuable tool on Short Screen is the Screener. Here, you can find the fifty most distress stocks based on the Altman Z-Score or Z”-Score. For maximum profitability, you can also adjust for the minimum share price.

In the screenshot above, Verisign looks like it could be in for a world of hurt. The computed score is -21.6585. This scoring model is said to be about 72% accurate in predicting bankruptcy up to two years in advance and about 80-90% accurate for a one-year timeframe.

By using the screener, you can determine some of the best candidate for your short selling endeavors. This sure beats trying to work out the score on your own for the thousands of different stocks available on the market.

Calculator: Researching Specific Stocks

While the screener can point you toward (at least) 50 candidates for your short sales, you may be interested in the Z-Score for a specific company. I used the Z-Score Calculator on Short Screen for Motorola (MOT) and got a score of 2.0348.

This is in the positive and it looks like the stock has been on a steady rise for the last few months. I guess the introduction of the Motorola DROID with Verizon is helping those guys out, so it’s probably not a good idea to short sell Motorola at this point.

Making Money from the Losers

You have many options when it comes to stock trading research tools and it seems that short selling utility can be a valued addition to the mix. The calculator is handy, but I think it’s the screener that could really help you turn an imminent loser into a winner for you.

A premium member’s account is $14 a month, but you can recoup these costs through your short selling profits and through the Short Screen affiliate program. This pays a 15% recurring referral commission and the people you refer get a 5% discount on the membership fee.

CLICK HERE TO BECOME A SHORT SCREEN PREMIUM MEMBER

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

My buddy Aymen will be doing a sit down tomorrow with Internet superstar Shawn Casey and you’re invited to sit in. The chat start tomorrow at 5PM Vancouver time (8PM EST). Only 10,000 seats are available and will be given out on a first come, first served basis. You can try to grab a seat for the webcast here.

Aymen is the most successful Super Affiliate I have ever met and the cool thing is he now lives in Vancouver so I get to meet him quite often. For some reason, Vancouver has been attracting a lot of Super Affiliates lately. Must be the weather or something. Anyway, Shawn will be asking Aymen to reveal his 7 simple steps that anyone can use to generate more money online — and be paid in virtually any currency, from anywhere in the world.

You may think there is no way Aymen can fill 10,000 spaces for the webcast but I know he will because this is being promoted by all the big names in the affiliate marketing game. If you want to see what the hype is about, go reserve your seat now.

The Shawn Casey and Aymen Webcast

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

This morning, the mailman dropped of a box with over 40 Broke DVDs in it. Needless to say, I’ve never been this broke before. Broke is a movie by Michael Covel on how America went broke and who’s to blame. It’s a really good movie and I enjoyed it a lot.

Michael Covel traveled 75,000 miles in the making of this film. He did face-to-face interviews with financial gurus; from Nobel Prize winners to professional poker players to fund managers. From big Wall Street names to real estate agents to ordinary citizens, Covel asks the critical questions: how did we get here and what can we do about it?

Broke: The New American Dream also cracks down on the media influence upon money decisions. It nullifies media hype and Jim Cramer propaganda. It takes a hard look at the state lotteries and draws remarkable parallels to the Social Security system. Most importantly, this film is about hope. We don’t have to behave like sheep and we don’t have to go ‘broke.’ Active and mindful audiences will discover that there is a way out.

Who Want To Be Broke?

While I’m sure no one wants to be broke, I bet many readers will want a copy of Broke. Well, you’re in luck because I’m got to give all these copies away. The first five copies are going to the readers who beat me in that Halloween Slot game. The next batch will go to everyone who shows up to this week’s Dot Com Pho. It may not be as nice a gift as Apple giving us new Macbook Pros, but it’s better than nothing!

If you want a copy of Broke but can’t make Dot Com Pho, then simply reply to this blog post. I’ll draw a few winners this Friday and announce them at Dot Com Pho. Good luck!

Broke – The New American Dream

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Are you getting tired of receiving a thousand DM spam on Twitter everyday? Are you following so many people that your iPhone Twitter app no longer works because it can’t download all the updates? Do you feel like starting over with a clean slate? Well now you can with my newest Twitter service, UnfollowAll.com.

Enter your Twitter information into Unfollow All, hit the start unfollowing button and it will nuke everyone you’re following on twitter. Once your following count hits zero, you can start a fresh list by following only the people you want to follow. Be absolutely sure you want to do this because once you hit the button, there’s no going back!

Unlike some other Twitter unfollow services, Unfollow All is completely free to use and I have no intention of every charging for it. The service is a good way to find out just how much influence you really have on Twitter. Many big Twitter accounts with a lot of followers got that way because they mass follow everyone with the hope of getting followed back. Unfollowing your entire list will mean only those that are truly interested in you will continue to follow you. The rest will unfollow you because you unfollow them.

If you only wish to unfollow people who are not following you, then you can use Twitter Follower.

Unfollow All – Sometimes, You Just Want To Start Over