Blog Along With Me

WE HAVE MOVED!

2009-10-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

Thank you for your visit.

Blog Along with Me has moved! If you arrived at this page please click on

http://www.blogincomelife.com

for the latest postings.

Bloggers are Born at the Crossroads of Crisis and Opportunity

2009-09-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

At the crossroads of Crisis and Opportunity entrepreneurs are born. It’s true. Tough times bring out the latent entrepreneurial spirit in all of us. Whether that spirit moves us to successful entrepreneurship is up to you. It’s akin to leading a horse to water.

I believe there are two types of entrepreneurs. There is the A type of entrepreneur, the individual who may have tried the nine to five but couldn’t stomach the stifling atmosphere. Typically this type of person has an innate restlessness, an impatience for something bigger and better and quite honestly, does not make for a good employee. Such a person has a different agenda. You see such a person in the faces of Richard Branson, Warren Buffet and Phillip Knight.

Lesser known and flying under the radar of visibility is the entrepreneur who becomes one out of necessity, or, for want of a better term, the B type of entrepreneur. These are legion and account for a significant portion of multi-millionaires – not a bad place to be financially. Faced with economic uncertainty they actively cast about for opportunities and finding them take action. Today that opportunity is writ large on the internet and the entrepreneur born is often a blogger.

Blogging for money is the easiest introduction to making money online. Everyone can write, the cost is negligible and it is a user friendly introduction to cutting your teeth in the field of Internet Marketing. In fact knowing what I now know, after having taken several internet marketing courses, were I starting in Internet Marketing today, I would definitely start with blogging.

A word of caution though, you need to do more than just publish posts on your blog. If you want to make money blogging you need to treat it as a business. There are some basics that need considering:

1. Select a niche
2. Select the blogging platform
3. Monetize your site
4. Market, market, market.

Each of these basic to the bones steps form the foundation upon which you will build your business. That is why I wrote the e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money which you can download in PDF format for free.

Once you get the basics down pat you can expand, bit by bit and eventually become a super blogger pulling in at the very least a mid-six figure annual income.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina Bellicova
Blogger for Money

Blogging is all about getting your own cheese.

Quick Lins:
ABC’s of Blogging for Money

Start of new year, blogging for money results, and random thoughts

2009-09-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

Happy Labor Day everyone! Last days of summer barbeques and the wearing of white. Hmmm...I will continue to wear white.

Here in Vancouver the weather has decided cooled from just a few weeks ago when we were melting from the heat ... yes, they were scraping us off the sidewalks then! I love working from my home office which looks out on a grove of oak trees. The leaves haven't even got a hint of rust anywhere, they are green as green can be. It won't be long though before the squirrels start coming to gather the acorns of which there will be plenty.

I always look at Labor day which usually is a bit earlier in September (I guess September 7th is as late as it can be)as the beginning of a new year. To me this is more of a new year than January. I guess it goes back to school. We always started a new grade or "year" in September and finished in June, with the summer off for fun. I still do that now with my business. I have noticed that this is also a time when people start new things - not make resolutions like they do on New Year's Day, but things like signing up for a course on something they've always wanted to learn, or sign up for a new activity like fencing or tennis. Corporations typically ramp up their efforts in sales and marketing to finish the year strong ... statistically October and November are the most productive months of the year, both in business and personal lives.

Ok... enough of the musing already.

Found a site today that publishes blog incomes of bloggers who, well, publish their incomes publicly. I wrote last week that I was going to try and compile such a list well Jeremia Froyland has done it. I noticed that the big earners were absent, Jeremia and I had a little bit of online conversation about that and agreed that when you start pulling in the really big bucks, a la John Chow, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak to name just a few (easily in the half mil a year league)then you stop publishing. Privacy and other things come into play. So the big guns are missing but it will be interesting to see the incomes of the current list members rise over time. Hmmmm..... gee, I'd like to be on that list soon ... and then earn to the point where I will stop publishing.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

I guess acorns are like cheese for the squirrels

Quick Links:
Jeremia Froyland

Top Bloggers for Money

2009-09-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

As I was doing some research on the top bloggers for money, I came across a posting by one of my "do follow" bloggers, the author of The Digerati Life which is a whole year old but the thread of comments keeps lengthening. Here is the link to her post titled
Make Money Blogging: Top Bloggers And How Much They Earn

Of course the stats need updating, notably her own. Two years into blogging she was making 50% of her corporate income as an IT engineer in Silicon Valley. That can't be too shabby. It is now three years. Is she at 75%?

This is the time of month that bloggers who publish their monthly results ... well, err..publish. So I am putting together a list of my own, which will not be a complete list, but its one to start with.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... today, blogging for cheese!

Quick Links
The Digerati Life
Make Money Blogging: Top Bloggers And How Much They Earn

August Report - No Zero Days!

2009-09-02T10:07:00.000-07:00

August was a busy month. I have three distinct income streams and they all needed chunks of time. My internet marketing time chunks were devoted mostly to 30 Day Challenge. I thought that this blog would suffer. Looking at the graphs I’m actually quite pleased - 38% increase in visitors from July! The graph above is one that is a comparative between August and July. The green line being July and the blue August.

Considering that August is the slowest month for business whether it is on the internet or in the “real” world I am quite pleased that the numbers are up. This is the first month that not a single day passed by without a visitor – NO ZERO DAYS! That is a milestone for me. That spike up there for August 10 reflects the day that Google picked up one my postings and included it in its Google Alerts for the keyword phrase "Blogging for money."

Search engine traffic is way down. Another encouraging factor. When the search engines begin to deliver the 8% - 12% traffic I have been receiving in the past few months then the visitor stats should increase.

Top three blog postings to date:
1. Yes Virginia, there is money in blogging
2. 30 Day Challenge More Like 30 Days of Christmas
3. Rock Stars at Frank Kern’s Mass Control

I am also encouraged by the increasing number of downloads for my ABC’s of Blogging for Money e.book.

Earnings were paltry. No affiliate sales. Adsense not even at $3! I came across a blog that posted the top 10 blog earners and I was going to put a link to that post here as I wanted you to see that there's money in them thar blogs, but then I noticed that some of the top earners were not mentioned. It’s hard to come by hard data but maybe what I’ll do for next first of the month report is come up with my own top ten blog earners. This info is based on those bloggers who publish their monthly results.

Its time to move on. I have started the process of moving this blog to Wordpress. The shenanigans behind the scenes will take a while since I am doing this myself, so the new look won’t be up for a week or two, but I am both excited and looking at the exercise with trepidation: excited as I will be able to make immediate comparisons between the two platforms, trepidation: because it means more learning or at least perfecting the Wordpress Direct system which is quite different from that of Blogger.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... What cheese?

Quick Links
ABC’s of Blogging for Money
There’s Money in Them Thar blogs
1. Yes Virginia, there is money in blogging
2. 30 Day Challenge More Like 30 Days of Christmas
3. Rock Stars at Frank Kern’s Mass Control

Secret Affiliate Weapon

2009-09-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

Ewen Chia is one of my favorite Internet Marketing Gurus ... I have been receiving his newsletters for some time now, bought the book How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business and his course.

What I really like about Ewen is the easy to follow, step by step instructions on how to do something. I mean it's like learning ABC's. As mentioned many times here, anything techie and my spine stiffens (I am getting better). When I first started looking at Wordpress, I found it a bit of challenge. I downloaded several e.books/instructions on how to install, upload, download, FTP and all that stuff. Frustration set in. Then I remembered it was part of Ewen’s course that I had (at the time this part of the course was beyond my capability, so I left it alone). I quickly went to my files, opened the videos, and voila! Easy as a cake walk! I now refer to them all the time.

Why am I telling you all this (and isn’t today the “statistics” day for August?

Yes ... it is.

But the reason I am telling you this is because Ewen has just launched his Secret Affiliate Weapon 2.0. I knew it was being launched today so was watching my Inbox like a hawk as I wanted to grab a copy of it quickly.

Affiliate marketing is my next step in developing my internet marketing muscles and it should be yours too. It's the natural progression to making money. I like Ewen’s easy to follow style. As I write this, I am busy downloading. All I can say is that if this is only half as easy/good as Ewen’s other stuff, it will take my internet marketing up a notch or two ... or ten!

What hooked me on this is that this is an automated system. After doing the 30 Day Challenge I am on the lookout for anything that will save me time and help me generate a PASSIVE INCOME ... Ewen says this is the same system that he uses to generate $18,291.75 per month from ONE affiliate product!

OK. I’m game. But I was SHOCKED at the price ... you will be too! I think the boy has lost his marbles or his brain has turned to mush. I am certain it will not last at this price for too long. I recommend, without reservation that you go and get your own copy of the Secret Affiliate Weapon 2.0

Happy Blogging ... and Affiliate Marketing!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS. This is cheese is rare.

Quick Links

Secret Affiliate Weapon 2.0

How I Made My First Million

From Below Broke to Self Made Multi-millionaire

2009-08-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

“I quit every day, but I also got up every day and started all over again ...” July Ono

On a cloudless Sunday morning, July and I sat outside of Petra’s, a popular local café. We drank tea, shared a decadently lethal sticky bun and spent the better part of the morning getting to know each other.

I had the advantage. July is a celebrity, not just locally but in the world of real estate investment. She is also the author of Your Million Dollar Network: How to Start and Build Your Million Dollar Network She is known internationally, so of course I know a lot about her already, notably, that she went from below broke to being a self made multi-millionaire. July has 440 “doors” - that’s real estate investor speak for units- and counting. Conservatively that translates into an impressive $30 million property portfolio. Not bad for someone who was $40 thousand below broke a scant seven years ago.

Success leaves clues. I love meeting with successful people. There is something special about them not in the sense that they are different from other people, in fact they are ordinary people just like you and me, but what I find is that they exude an energy that sets them apart from others. I think that the more time we spend with people like that the more we learn and the more that energy rubs off on us. Oh yes, they are willing to do what is required to get their first whiff of success.

What’s that got to do with blogging for money and internet marketing? ... you want to know.

Nothing, yet EVERYTHING!.

July was telling me about the first 6 months in her real estate investment career. It was poorly focused and filled with frustration. Nothing was coming together. It took her 6 months to get the first deal put together and even that almost unraveled literally hours before closing. I remarked on her tenacity and that’s when she told me that every night she quit, every morning she got up and started again.

I thought about how that holds such a parallel to what we do in internet marketing. So many people sign up for courses, spend lots of dollars on learning, but never do anything with what they learn. Or they go through the first three maybe four lessons of the course, find it overwhelming, and put it aside for a later time. A time that never comes. In the world of blogging exact statistics are hard to come by but it is estimated that there are some 150 million blogs created, but get this: 60% - 80% are abandoned after three or four postings, usually within a month!

While the sheer numbers are nowhere near as staggering in the real estate investment community, July concurs that the statistics are similar: most people who get started don’t continue. I venture this holds true for most entrepreneurial endeavors. What sets the true entrepreneur apart from the wannabe is the pit bull mentality and tenacity that these people bring to the game – a willingness to learn, to take action, to adjust, to sharpen and execute. They are willing to do what is required to get the job done. Eventually they get a taste of success – now they’re hooked!

It’s just a game. Master it. Have fun. You will live a life others only dream of.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money.

PS... make a point of being in the company of big cheese.

Quick Links:
Blogging Statistics
July Ono
Your Million Dollar Network: How to Start and Build Your Million Dollar Network
ABC's of Blogging for Money

Blogging for Money? You Need a System

2009-08-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

The best run companies in the world have effective systems in place. There is a progression of tasks, efficiencies, output, and sales. Everything is tracked and continuously fine tuned.

Blogging for money is a business, not as complex as a huge corporation’s, but the basic principles need to be implemented if you want to be successful. The importance of a system is that when in place and executed properly, the business can run without you and isn’t that what we are looking for - otherwise we are just building a job for ourselves. That is why I am so excited about the 30 Day Challenge.

As I chunk away, day by day, I am amazed at the tools that are made available to us, the clear and explicit instructions on how to use them, the efficiencies that are now going to save me days and days of time. The output is visible. Tracking is key. Areas that need attention are quickly identifiable. Fine tuning is continuous. Back links are adding up and the domain URL and relevant pages has been bookmarked by a total of 240! In less than a month! Heck! Actually in less than a week as I am somewhat behind in the day to day and only began serious marketing this past weekend. As an example I have no idea how many have bookmarked this blog. Is it important? Numbers are a concrete measure of your progress and are a clue to where you need to do some fine tuning.

What makes this possible are the efficiencies that I have been able to implement. Some of the tasks have been either fully or semi-automated. Market Samurai keeps unveiling new features and now I have been introduced to Traffic Bug, a program that submits your articles to directories. As an example, according to the stats the one article that I wrote has been submitted to 33 Directories (and counting). Between Market Samurai's and Traffic Bug's automated systems an estimated 558 minutes have been saved! That is mind boggling. It’s not so much that the time has been saved but that with the efficiencies in place, so much more can be done in the same amount of time that I normally spend on internet marketing. Suddenly the money making potential has taken on a telescopic view and I have to tell you, it looks good. Gotta like that.

When you have a system in place you can outsource the tasks – yes, even the writing if you want. This frees up your time. Dan Lok who started his online business some seven years ago worked long hours to get his business off the ground, he now works four hours a day, four days a week and if he wants to, he can go on a holiday for several weeks at a time and his business will just keep on chugging and spitting out a seven figure annual income. He has a fine tuned system in place. That should be our aim – to have a business with a fine tuned system that keeps on chug-a-lugging and putting dollars into our bank while we are out doing what we like. Now that’s what I would call an enviable online income life.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

A ball or a brick of cheese?

Quick Links:

30 Day Challenge
Market Samurai
Traffic Bug

New Cheese

2009-08-24T07:46:00.000-07:00

For several months now I have been adding a PS at the end of each posting here. I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed, or made any comment. The PS always has something about cheese. Today I received this from a reader:

Cheryll wrote:

I thought you would like this little quote:

"Today is the best time to venture into the Maze -
even if it just means taking the smallest of steps
that leads to the next step that leads you to New
Cheese" - from "Who Moved My Cheese?"

What are your thoughts on cheese? Do you think Blogging for Money is all about getting your own cheese? Post your comments below.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

Quick Links:
Cheryll's Basket Talk
Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

30 Day Challenge - more like 30 Days of Christmas!

2009-08-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

Somewhat behind and today is 30 Day Challenge catch up day - again! I love this course and think it ought to be renamed to the 30 Days of Christmas! Every day a new box is opened and it is filled with gifts, gifts of new toys to use in our internet marketing, toys that will help us get the traffic, the conversions, the money.

Definitely not a beginner in internet marketing I classify myself as one who is quickly moving out of the newbie ranks – what comes after newbie I wonder? That progression has been escalated since I started the 30 Day Challenge on August 01 ... and I am only on day 13!

Having taken a good number of courses, the “basics” are now well entrenched in my internet marketing foundation. I find reviews are good as invariably I find a nugget of gold that I somehow managed to leave on the ground before. Result: stronger foundation, more confidence and improved sales.

But that is not what has taken my experience on to a steep trajectory of knowledge with 30 Day Challenge – it is all the new toys that I have been introduced to or become better at using. After I finish this 30 Day Challenge I will take all my existing sites, even those that are performing and take each one through the 30 Day Challenge system. It will be interesting to see what sort of up tick in traffic and revenue I will have from those sites.

One of the products that has totally got me gob smacked is Market Samurai. This is not a new toy as it was introduced last year but omigosh! The upgrades are phenomenal. This is a complete niche marketing research suite that literally saves you days of research. If for no other reason, joining the 30 Day Challenge just to experience this software for free is worth the effort --- and typically, it is offered at a more favorable price during the 30 Day Challenge for those who want to own a copy.

Here is the thing. I find it interesting that in the last month or so my inbox has been deluged with offers of various “keyword” research tools, software programs that are taking a direct hit against Market Samurai. I cannot comment on their claims. I am not buying I have an excellent program, which by the way is still in beta and therefore much more good to come. I met the Market Samurai team when I was in Los Angeles at Frank Kern’s Mass Control in April - they’re brilliant.

Me with Ben Stickland. Top "Gun" of the Market Samurai Shogunat

I know that a lot of time has gone into the development of this product (years) and money. I feel confident that the final copy of the product will be outstanding ... I mean what else could it be, its already got everyone, including seasoned internet marketing professionals giddy like kids set free in a candy store! I love it that the purchase gives you all the updates. I would not be at all surprised if, when the beta is completed, the product would be offered on a monthly subscription basis.

Back to more catch up (yes, I am waaay behind) on 30 Day Challenge.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... Market Samurai is Big Cheese.

Quick Links
30 Day Challenge
Market Samurai
Frank Kern’s Mass Control

F.U.Money

2009-08-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

No 30 Day Challenge this weekend – I’m falling a tad behind so this will be short.

This weekend I attended the Cashflow Marketing seminar in Abbotsford. Think Cashflow, think real estate and Robert Kiyosaki and Darren Weeks, right? Think again.

This seminar was attended by entrepreneurs, mostly brick and mortar business owners. They came to learn how to market in these tough economic times, how to strategize, deploy tactical maneuvers and come out big time winners. The seminar spanned two days and by its end everyone had a workable system they took home with them. I am certain that their businesses will take a significant uptick on the sales chart.

One of the speakers was Dan Lok – I’ve written about Dan before. He’s a self made multi-millionaire in internet marketing. When I met him the first time several years ago, we chatted a bit about my interest in internet marketing. His advice: "Blog, blog, blog."

With Dan Lok

Dan is nothing if not to the point- blunt, some might even say. Dan has written several books and there is a new one in the offing ... we got copies of it. Did I say that Dan pulls no punches? Aptly, its title is F.U. Money. its listed on Amazon but not available for sale yet!

The book dovetails very nicely with a program that he launched a few months back as a beta and in which I have been participating. It's a system that puts much of your internet marketing on auto pilot ... so easy even grandma could do it.

Maybe I'm letting the cat out of the bag as Dan has been awfully quiet about it ... but here is the thing, I mentioned several times here that I will be moving this blog from Blogger to a Wordpress based platform. I am still thinking as to where exactly I want to move it. I am thinking that putting it on the beta program system would be good, as I already have hard data and stats, and then it will be easy to compare historical data with new results once it has been moved. From my experience with the system so far, I think blogging for money will take on a completely different trajectory ... UP! Stay tuned - new look coming up in a few weeks.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... wouldn't you know it, one of the attendees owns a gourmet cheese shop!

30 Day Challenge - progress

2009-08-14T13:18:00.001-07:00

Thought I would weigh in quickly with just an update on my 30 Day Challenge.

As those of you who follow this blog know, whenever I am met with techie type stuff my back stiffens and an innate resistance takes control. Such has been the case this week with 30 Day Challenge. Worked my way through it. Feel awesome.

Now, I want to assure you that the "techie" type stuff is not very complex and had I not already had some active programs/software, the progress would have been smooth as silk and I would have been much further along in the challenge. As it was there was a "merge" process that I had to go throug.

But here is what I found. I worked through the glitches. The support at 30 Day are phenomenal. Its about being in your zone of discomfort and working through it. By doing so I learned things that will be valuable for me in the future. I learned how to

1. export (import) an existing WordPress Blog
2. upload plugins and activate them
3. ensure that the plugins are properly configured

and other things too numerous (and mundane) to mention here. What I can testify to is that this has been a particularly useful exercise for me, one I will be able to apply in the near future. You may recall that several months ago I had mentioned that I aim to export this blog from Blogger to WordPress ... well, now I will probably export it to WordPress Direct.

So even though I am days behind schedule, the detour will serve me well in the future.

This is my first year of 30 Day Challenge - I joined last year but save for Market Samurai did not even crack open a single training module. This year I am asking myself why didn't I? I can guarantee you that had I done the challenge last year my internet marketing IQ would be much further along than it is. It is so simple, so easy to follow and the introduction to programs and plugins that I did not know about is outstanding.

Yes, I am excited! You have to peel me off the ceiling!

If you have not registered for the 30 Day Challenge yet, what are you waiting for? Yes it started on the 1st of August, but you can register and work each module as your time allows - take a few weeks more, months, even a year. JUST DO IT. Guaranteed, you'll be glad you did.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money
The variety of cheeses grows!

Quick Links
30 Day Challenge

Yes Virginia - there is money in blogging

2009-08-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

I just read a post by a blogger colleague and I am super disappointed ... in essence this blogger is saying that you should first and foremost blog because you have a passion for blogging and to forget about blogging for the purpose of money. That most bloggers blog from the crack of dawn and deep into the night. This person obviously subscribes to that group that believes in living your passion and the money will follow!!! Or another way they put it “do what you love and the money will come.”

Bull Dung!

I am getting tired of hearing this refrain. It gets me angry. It does a disservice to those who are serious about making money online. Blogging for money is a business and should be treated as such. If you are going to spend your waking hours blogging then why not make money? I have yet to meet anyone who was able to walk into a bank and deposit a whole bunch passion. Try paying your rent or buying groceries with love. Lets get serious.

First, if you want to make money at blogging you have to treat it like a business. That is why I wrote my ABC’s of Blogging for Money so that people can follow a system to lay down a foundation for success.

Yes, you also have to work at it. Nothing for nothing. But from crack of dawn into the dead of night??? I know several bloggers that are making money that CEOs of companies would eye with envy. You do need to put in consistent effort but I can guarantee you that these successful bloggers are not not up at the crack of dawn and working into the dead of night blogging.

You also need to be an ongoing student. Even my ABC’s of Blogging for Money is just the start. You need to be continuously learning about how to be a better internet marketer – that’s how you become a successful blogger. That's how you start making a bit of money which with effort becomes some money and then one day you wake up to lots of money.

It helps if you blog about something that you are knowledgeable on, and if it happens to be a passion, great! If you want to make money blogging about it, you need to make sure that there is a market out there that actually wants to know more about your subject (covered in my ABC’s of Blogging for Money). No market, no money honey.

As I mentioned earlier, blogging for money is a business. Apply business principles and through diligent effort the money will indeed come. There is an excellent online course right now, the 30 Day Challenge that I encourage everyone to register for and apply. It is free. You learn how to select a profitable niche, install a blog with Wordpress, and most importantly you learn how to market. If you have not signed up for it yet it is not too late. What is great about this is that you can work on it at your own pace.

Happy Blogging

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... oooh! It gets me angry when someone tries to tell me there is no cheese!

Quick Links:
Fee PDF Download of ABC’s of Blogging for Money
Register for 30 Day Challenge

"Tweak" along with me

2009-08-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

For my 30 Day Challenge I am researching a new niche and as I do so I am learning things that I can apply immediately to this blog and I made such a change today.

When you first open this blog, the first thing you read is a blurb about the blog. As mentioned several times in my postings, I am fight for the keyword phrase "blogging for income" yet this phrase

1. is not in my URL
2. is not part of my domain name
3. is not part of the title
4. is not in the header
5. was not used in the description or "blurb" of the blog.

The first four items I cannot do much about right now - or at least I choose to leave till later, but I tackled item no. 5 right away and "tweaked" the description. I changed the wording and used several keywords that are good in this niche, but which I had omitted and I made sure that "blogging for money" was front and center.

Why is this important?

These are all factors that are taken into account by Google and other search engines. When compared to other blogs in the "blogging for money" keyword phrase this blog did very well in a number of areas, those that are known as "on page", in fact it outperformed some that were in the top 10 list, but I failed miserably in the "off page" criteria which are the 5 mentioned above.

Its a small "tweak" but it will be interesting to see what, if any, difference it will make in traffic.

So here is what you need to keep top of mind when finding a domain name and setting up your blog site:

1. keyword in the domain name
2. keyword in the URL (usually one follows the other)
3. keyword in the header
4. keyword in the Title
5. keyword in the description.

If you incorporate these five strategies you'll be way ahead over those who don't and have a leg up on the blogging for money game.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

can you say cheese?

Quick Links
30 Day Challenge

And the winner is .....

2009-08-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

This year’s 30 Day Challenge, a free course on how to make money online, opened with a bang on August 1. Right from the get go there was fun - a contest!

The prize? A $100 certificate to iTunes
The contest: Submit your favorite source of searching for new topics

For a $100 cert to iTunes and just a few clicks on the keyboard it’s a gimme. I submitted as did many other “Thirty Dayers” ... I read the submissions and can tell you that there were plenty of good ones. I have added them to my arsenal of “idea generating sources” and plan to use them in the future.

Did I win? NO.

The winner was someone who suggested searching Google using site search operator looking for things people want, i.e.,

“I want ....”
“I like ....
"I want to buy...”

The variations on this theme are endless and the brilliant part about it all is that the results are based on actual searches.

What did I submit?

I subscribe to an online trend watching newsletter. I like this because trends are typically within broad markets but by the very nature of the “trend”, the market is niched and more often than not, micro-niched. If I like the micro-niche then I go and do additional due diligence using Market Samurai.

Market Samurai is a software program which saves you countless hours of searching for niche topics and identifying whether they have money making potential. For the duration of the 30 Day Challenge it is offered free to participants – it’s a great way to test out a software program without paying for it. Last year it was offered at a special “at challenge” price and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was repeated this year. If for no other reason, this is a good one to register for the 30 Day Challenge.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS. Niche? Cheese? There are some similarities.

Quick Links:
30 Day Challenge
Market Samurai

Avoid brand names in your domain URL

2009-08-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

From postings in the 30DC forum I learned something very valuable today and thought I should pass it on to you ... just in case to save potential heartache in the future: avoid using brand names in your URL domain name.

One of the members started a blog/site early this year promoting a brand name, put a lot of time and effort into promoting it and its products and lo and behold, he was served with a cease and desist from the company's lawyer with a demand to turn over the "goods" i.e., the domain name. Months and months of time and effort down the drain.

Other members jumped in with similar experiences.

Not to belabor the story, but I have a blog/site with a brand name as part of the URL which will remain nameless as it appears that the "brand name" police have their own "spiders" searching the net for "illegal" use of their brand names.

Apparently it all boils down to trademark laws and when a major brand has trademarked their name but allow it to be used without permission, they stand the chance of losing their exclusivity to that name, think Kleenex as one member pointed out.

So if you are thinking of starting a blog on Harley Davidson Riders ... or something along those lines, choose your domain name carefully and do not use HARLEY DAVIDSON in the domain name,

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... That is some stinky cheese!

Register for 30 Day Challenge

30 Day Challenge buzzing with excitement!

2009-08-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

30DC - Day 1 ...

Today is easy peasy - three videos to get you in the groove and the first task is to come up with 7 niche topics. Although I have already decided what my topic is going to be, I came up with 7 niches. It will be interesting to go through the exercise and see what the research will bear out.

Fun part: $100 iPod cert for the best answer a to where is your favorite place to get ideas for topics. I put in ... up against some stiff competition as there are some really good ones being posted. The winner will be announced Sunday night. Will let you know what my fave place is and whether it got a mention.

I belong to a team of three and we are literally circling the globe as we have the UK, Vancouver Canada and Sydney Australia represented. We discussed live chats via SKYPE but the time differences were difficult without someone's time zone being in the dead of night.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money.

PS ... if you haven't signed up for the 30 Day Challenge yet ... GO, GO, GO!
Register at the Thirty Day Challenge . It's best deal on the internet and you will learn a lot.

July Statistics - Melting in the heat!

2009-08-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

Whew! I feel like one of those melting subjects in Dali’s paintings! We are setting record temperatures here in Vancouver and the humidity is right up there. It’s enough to fry a brain or should that be melt it? Not the best environment to be blogging for money in.

Everything I read by the gurus is in sync with business in the summer ... down, so I am somewhat pleased that July had an uptick on this blog.

Posted is the chart that shows the comparison between the two months, June and July(July is the blue line). The differences are not huge and July is still below May, but seeing as these are the dog days of summer, I am OK with that.

Comments and observations:

I like that there was an increase in visits in July over June and that page views also had a decent increase. Page visits and average time per page are down however. I am still frustrated that the overall visitor stats are not significantly better than when I first started this blog in January of this year! Yes, I know that I am in a very competitive niche and I am doing this for the long term, but still I would have thought the results would have been better by now.

What I find really puzzling is how did I happen to drop my page ranking? At the beginning of July I was super pleased to have finally been awarded a Google page rank of 1 (10 being the highest, but you have to start somewhere) and Alexa was down to the 2.5M level (the lower the number the better, ideally get below 100K)– today, no page rank and Alexa up to 4M. What gives? What did I do wrong? Did I offend mother Google somehow? But Alexa has nothing to do with Google.

Another puzzling statistic. Throughout most of the month my search engine traffic was running at the 18% mark, yet, today’s stat shows a mere 8%. Clearly, there is something I did (or did not do) that dropped that statistic as well. I am confident that had the trend continued to month end, the stats would have been better. Hmmmmm.... it is a puzzlement.

I have no affiliate sales to report for the month of July and Adsense is a mere $2.92!!! That makes it the lowest ever!

OK... maybe this is what the gurus refer to as being in the trenches. What can I do to achieve better results?

1. Increase frequency of posts
2. Review keywords (I am still fighting for “blogging for money”
3. Use selected keywords in postings
4. Repurpose posts and publish in article directories

These are steps I can take right now. I know how to. There is a fifth thing I can do, but I am not sure how to use appropriately yet and that is social media.

Having said that, today is the kickoff for the 30 Day Challenge and I will be spending most of my internet marketing blocks on this endeavor ... most of my posts will have to do with my 30 Day Challenge experience and how it translates here.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS...I think somebody stole my cheese!

Quick Links:
30 Day Challenge

Did Google just get Slapped?

2009-07-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

Internet marketers live in terror at the possibility of offending Google and getting banished from its graces - better known as the Google Slap. Did Google get a taste of its own medicine today when Microsoft and Yahoo joined forces to take the world's largest search engine, Google, head on.

In the virtual wars of the internet today’s announcement of a sweet deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has certainly chalked up a win for the Redmond based software giant. The new alliance between the two rivals gives added punch to Microsoft’s search engine BING and much needed relief in R & D expenses to the beleaguered Yahoo.
The combined muscle power will go head to toe against the world’s largest search engine Google in an effort to woo away advertisers and attract publishers.

Full article here

No shrinking violet, Google has invaded the sacrosanct waters of Microsoft’s sizable grip in the operating system world with its introduction of Chrome OS, a free open source project which is still in beta mode. While years away from becoming a viable threat to Microsoft, you can bet your bottom dollar that the current OS world leader is not taking the introduction of Chrome OS lightly.

What does all this mean to you and me – the independent internet marketers mere specs of cyber dust on the radar screens of the giants? But important specs nonetheless for it is you and I that drive the profits of the likes of Google et al.

What I am thinking is that the newly formed behemoth is going to have to really get aggressive. The current combined statistics of the freshly minted partnership is a mere 11% worldwide share compared to Google’s 67%. The recent introduction of Microsoft’s Bing may hold clues. Buoyed by a hefty 100 million, Bing opened with a slick, jazzy and sexy campaign. Reviews have been positive to date and Microsoft has already picked up some traffic. Watch for continued innovative marketing techniques to steer you and me towards using Bing as our search engine.

But what about the bottom line? Will we switch?

Granted added traffic will form a case for switching your ads from one billboard to another and moving online real estate ad space on websites and blogs to the not so new but impressively aggressive kid on the block. But I think that won’t be enough. Bing and Yahoo will have to dangle another carrot ... money. How that will look is left to conjecture but an obvious first step is higher commissions to the publishers (that would be you and I) and lower advertising costs.

Don’t hold your breath for this to happen overnight though. The “deal” still has to pass the antitrust regulators and it is anticipated that it will be at least the early part of the coming year before the giants move forward, plus a two year “merging” of the minds, wills and cultures of the two former oponents – no easy feat to accomplish.

Add to all this online intrigue the thorny presence of Twitter which is the latest and hottest entry in the social media corner of the virtual world. Google it seems is an ardent suitor. Rebuffed but not rejected I wager that the big G will continue its efforts to win over this latest phenomena. Should it be successful Google will once again go under the microscopic scrutiny of the antitrust laws ... the very same set that deep sixed its courtship and proposed alliance with Yahoo in the first place.

Star Wars? This is far more exciting. Stay tuned for further developments in the virtual wars of the internet as the big guys duke it out for your business and mine.

Happy Blogging

Valentina
Blogger for money

PS... Any Grande Fromage I may have alluded to previously is instantly eclipsed by this big cheese!

Quick Links:
Microsoft, Yahoo announce search deal

Networking with other bloggers

2009-07-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

Why Network with other bloggers?

Blogging for money is a business and just like in the offline world it is important to throw out your tentacles and network. Too many mistakenly think that to make money online all that is needed is to sit at the computer and just blog away. Your results will be immeasurably higher if you partake of some good old fashioned networking.

Think about it.

If your business was offline, you would attend Chamber of Commerce luncheons, join an association in your industry, attend conferences and conventions. Why? To promote your business of course, but also to network, to learn about what others in your industry are doing to move their businesses forward and to form strategic alliances. Why should blogging be any different?

Good news.

You can network in your pajamas if you want. Actually I like to network both online and off for my blogging businesses. I think that a mix of the two is important. Let me explain.

Lets start with the obvious one: networking online. There is a saying that no one reaches the pinnacles of success alone. Ask any guru out there. Cheering peers and colleagues were an integral part of their success. Did these colleagues and peers materialize out of thin air? NO. They were cultivated. This is an important strategy and there is nothing subversive about it. Here are some ways you can network online:

#1. Source out other blogs in the same niche as yours. Follow these blogs and post comments on their articles. Make sure they are quality comments.

#2. Select your favorite blogs and ask if the owner is willing to consider a guest article by you. If the offer is accepted, submit an original article. There is no guarantee that the owner of the blog will post it but chances are that if the article is well written it will eventually appear. This is the beginning of a relationship with that blogger. Treat it well.

#3. In your own blog give some link love to the blog and blogger that you are now cultivating. The blogger will be aware of your support – trust me on this.

#4. Join forums in your niche, follow for a while before posting, then post quality comments – comments that are helpful. Others will begin to take notice of you as will the owner of the forum.

#5. Review the blog that you are following. Tell your readership what you like about that blog, maybe a little bit of advice/critique as to what you think might make it an even better blog and summarize the highlights.

I can bet you dollars to donuts that over time you will have developed a good relationship with the owner of this blog. Rinse and repeat. This is the online version of networking.

I think that offline networking is equally important. Meet other bloggers or internet marketers in your area. Attend “meet ups” and other scheduled internet marketing functions. Some of these functions are free, others have a nominal fee. You will meet people in different disciplines of internet marketing and you will be surprised at how generous they are in sharing their knowledge.

Surprise, surprise. You might even be one of those who is able to share your expertise with a newbie. I recently attended a function that was not internet based. Everyone present was a small business owner. They were intrigued about my online marketing business and wanted to know more. We talked about blogging as a good way to begin their online marketing efforts. Of course I pointed them to my free e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money.

A word of caution; when networking seek what you can do for the other person before asking them to do something for you. This will differentiate you from 90% of the attendees and will do you more good in the long run. When you meet someone for the first time, ask them what you can do for them that would help their business. Be sincere. Maybe all you can do is introduce them to someone who can be of help. Maybe at the moment there is not much you can do, but you never know when you will run into someone or a situation that is just right for your newly acquired contact.

One other thing when networking offline – its not about how many cards you give out or collect. Make two to five meaningful connections and begin to cultivate a relationship. Be open but be selective as to whom you decide to invest your time with.

Networking is an important component of any business – whether you are selling flowers to the corporate market or blogging for money cultivating relationships is what will take your business to the highest pinnacles of success.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for money

PS.... There’s plenty of cheese at the pinnacles of success.

Quick Links:
Blogging for Money
ABC’s of Blogging For Money

Is Tweeting for Bucks the New Blogging for Money?

2009-07-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

Is anyone out there tweeting for bucks? Is anyone making money in social media?

That was the subject of a newsletter I recently received.

Is blogging for money being edged out by its sexier cousin tweeting for bucks?

I don’t know.

It seems that social media marketing is the hottest subject on the internet today and everyone is suddenly an expert and weighing in with their opinion – in my opinion it is highly misunderstood, misused and definitely abused.

I confess to not “getting it” when the hullabaloo first started – I mean, who cares if I just had sausages and toast for breakfast or if I’m packing to go and visit aunt Millie? It's a lot of noise about nothing, I thought, and ignored the phenomena for as long as I could.

Interestingly I began to receive emails from people in the internet marketing industry whom I respect. Successful internet marketers. Without exception they were extolling the power of social media marketing and how when applied properly, it can put dollars in your jeans.

HUH?

Adding dollars in my jeans always gets me attention. I began to read more.

Then I attended Frank Kern’s Mass Control in San Diego where Ed Dale made a compelling presentation on the power of Social Media and Perry Belcher followed up with conclusive evidence that yes, there is money in social media marketing, but, and here is the big “but” you really need to know how to apply it properly or you’ll be ignored; worse yet, you could be banned.

Social media sites are popping everywhere – they number in the thousands. Each has a purpose for its existence and the application or participation format vary from site to site. The most popular ones are Facebook, LinkedIn for the business crowd and the one that has all the internet atwitter is ... well Twitter!

First things first. As mentioned, each social site has a purpose. Delicious for example is an excellent venue for generating backlinks to your site. Search engines such as Google look at backlinks as a vote for your site so the more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the better the likelihood of getting both a higher ranking on your site and generating increased traffic. Traffic is the holy grail of internet marketing – we all want it, lots of it.

Twitter on the other hand is the online equivalent of a blog sound bite and most importantly, the information is live. Why is that so important? When managed properly the internet marketer has up to the minute information on a subject of her choice and use it intelligently to leverage her marketing on the subject. Say your topic is celebrity dogs and you just learned that the Taco Bell chihuahua has gone on to its taco in the sky. Immediately you could post on your blog this breaking news content giving you front of line placement with the search engines. Rinse and repeat ... and soon you are the number one celebrity dog blog.

To go into details on social media marketing here is not within the scope of a single post. What is important to understand though is that it is not social media marketing that puts dollars in your jeans – it is a tool that used properly will definitely impact positively on the bottom line of your bank balance. Lets take the Taco Bell chihuahua as an example. With frequent "breaking news" postings traffic to your blog will increase and with increased traffic you are likely to have more clicks for ads, affiliates and if you don't have any paid advertisers on your site yet, this gives you leverage to attract them.

In this year’s Thirty Day Challenge, Ed Dale is going to be giving extensive coverage to social media marketing. It officially kicks off August 1 but the pre-season tools are being uncovered almost daily. To be better armed for a more successful blogging for money career, register today – hey, its free. See you there!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS ... get your own cheese with the Thirty Day Challenge.

Quick Links:
Frank Kern’s Mass Control
Ed Dale
Perry Belcher
Follow Me on Twitter
Register for Thirty Day Challenge

Blogging - a valuable marketing tool

2009-07-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

Blogs are sprouting up faster than a new growth of bamboo shoots. Suddenly everyone is jumping on the expressway to wealth and its called Blogging for Money – or so they think. It is definitely a growth industry. But as an industry is it really making money?

In this fast paced world of the internet, blogging is not a new phenomena. It’s been around for some ten years now – I know, because some of the bloggers that are pulling in the big bucks have been blogging in one form or another for that length of time. It is exactly the financial success of notable bloggers like Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, Nathan Hangan, and Alvin Phang to name just a few that has captured the attention of the young and old alike and suddenly it seems that blogging for money has become the online version of the Klondike Gold Rush.

So, yes there is money in the industry but statistically that money falls to a very small percentage. There are millions of blogs. Most are not monetized nor were they ever put up with the intention of making money. Many more have been abandoned either because the initial flush of creativity died an early death or the promise of money failed to materialize.

Therein lies the challenge. Making money blogging. Manuals on blogging focus on finding a niche and then blogging about it. Plenty of attention is given to the fact that unlike traditional brick and mortar businesses it does not cost much to start a blog.

In my view many newbie bloggers are missing an opportunity that is right under their own noses. I am often asked by eager would be bloggers what it is that they should blog about. The first question I ask is whether they already have a business of their own. Often they do. I have spoken with dry cleaners, bakers, bike shop owners, florists and many other small business owners. When asked if they had given any thought about blogging about their businesses I get a blank stare. They've bought into the notion of unique and niche and their business, in their mind, is neither unique nor niche.

You see, blogging is just another marketing tool and a valuable one at that. It can be an effective way to promote your bricks and mortar business. I had a long conversation with the baker. His bread is to die for – all whole food type of ingredients and so delish. The quality is definitely high end and customers gladly pay the premium price. He wants to expand as a supplier to high end restaurants and local specialty grocers of natural and organic foods.

We chatted. How could a blog help him? Tricky. Go for the business to customer or business to business market?

“Could you handle more walk in traffic?” I asked.

“Absolutely” he said.

"In fact walk in traffic is the most profitable part of my business as the bread is sold at full price."

I happen to know that there are customers who drive an hour each way just to stock up on his bread. What if he blogged as part of his marketing mix? He could start with his story. He can write about what makes his breads different. Talk about some of the ingredients. The origin of some of the breads he bakes and much, much more. Do you think that he could create a continuously increasing stream of traffic to his store? Do you think that maybe those high end grocers just might begin to notice him. If he rolled up his baker's sleeves and employed even just a few online marketing strategies, could the effort pay off with more money in the bank?

I think so.

Now here’s a thought for you. You write. You want a blog. Topics elude you. Are you already a small business owner? Are there stores in your neighborhood that would pay you to market their businesses online? Is there a successful baker who's too busy to blog but has bigger ambitions for his business who would be willing to pay you to do so?

You could approach one store – preferably a friend – and offer to help market their business online for free as something to cut your teeth on while learning how to blog. Could you monetize that blog so that not only does the business get added traffic but makes money off of the blog? Do you think your friend would give you referrals to his small business buds? For pay? Could you become a professional blogger writing for established bricks and mortar businesses – and they don’t even have to be where you live, not if you learn how to market your blogging service properly.

Now there’s something to think about. Is that a possibility that can be a probability?

Happy Blogging ......

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... Now there’s a completely different spin on “a brick of cheese”

Time Managment

2009-07-13T15:37:00.000-07:00

Time management is the bete noire of productivity – or should that be, lack of time management?

I run three businesses.

None of them on their own provide a livable income. One is a mature business in network marketing which provides me with the biggest chunk of change for my livelihood. Another is one that I fell into less than a year ago: marketing a pet product to the retail pet industry. It is growing. The third is internet marketing. It is at once the most time consuming and the least profitable, yet, it is the one I am pursuing with unfettered enthusiasm.

None earn enough so that I could outsource some of the more tedious tasks

Conventional wisdom dictates that I work only one business, build it up to extraordinary success and only then turn my attention to a second one. And as they say: rinse and repeat. Indeed, I give that very same advice to others.

Why do I not follow my own advice?

Frankly, I enjoy the diversity. It keeps my brain active.

The question I am often asked is how do I manage to run three businesses. The answer is with great difficulty. But I have adopted a system that seems to work: time blocking.

Time blocking is a management system where you take blocks of time – in my case I use a one hour block - and you allot so many blocks for a certain activity. Each day I allot several blocks to each business. Neither the number of blocks nor the sequence is uniform for each day. For each business I have a monthly and a weekly goal. The daily blocks are then focused on making the weekly goal. An example might be:

July:
Internet Marketing: Increase traffic by 10% to each blog/site
How?
- Publish 10 articles in Article Directories
- Blog daily (I have several blogs – so not each one gets a post every day)
- Each week take the best blog posts and repurpose into an article to be published in Article Directories
- Visit “Do Follow” blogs and comment as appropriate

Those are not the only internet marketing activities I engage in, but they are the bones which are then fleshed out.

As I am still very much a student of Internet Marketing and spend a good deal of time reading, listening to or watching videos of a course or a subscription I block time for that as well. This keeps me growing, increases my knowledge and improves my skill sets. I do not implement everything I learn – indeed, sometimes I feel that something is beyond my current grasp, and I leave it, to be returned to later.

I decided on this model because the previous one, which was based on task oriented results as a measurement of time for each business, was not working. An example might be to write up 4 new retail orders for the pet product that I market for the day. Sometimes even after hours and hours of following up by email and calls to my key contacts, it just did not happen. It was frustrating. Now, I have flexibility as to how many blocks I assign to this project on any given day – and there are days when one of the businesses may not be assigned any block at all. At the end of the month I have measurable results which include new customers, repeat customers and added prospects in the pipeline. Adjust as necessary

You may have a regular day job. A family to raise. A fitness routine to fit in ....and, you have decided to enter the world of internet marketing by blogging for money. How do you do it?

Ewen Chia, author of How I made my First Million on the Internet had all that to juggle – well not sure about the fitness regime. He blocked 4 hours each night to work on his internet marketing, but get this he did that between 11.00 PM and 3.00 AM. It’s a wonder he did not keel over from sleep deprivation. Now that is what I call driven and many would term that as being extreme, but what it has done is delivered extreme success to him.

You may not want to follow in Ewen’s footsteps (heck, I would drop from sheer exhaustion myself), but do take a page out of his book ... block some time for your success, daily. Turn off the TV and use the weekends to chunk in some real quality effort, say four or six hours straight, you’d be surprised how that escalates your results.

I use this system for my businesses, but really, it can be used for anything. Managed well, with systemic time blocking you will see incremental progress. I love comparing where I end the month with where I began that month. There is always progress. Progress built on progress eventually takes on a rocket ship trajectory.

Believe it. It's true.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... How do you cut your cheese?

Quick Links:
How I Made My First Million on the Internet

My network marketing business

All Natural Pet Balm

Google Alert - a useful tool for bloggers

2009-07-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

The 30 Day Challenge pre-season is in full swing. New “tools” are introduced on a regular basis. Some of these tools are not new to me yet I decided to invest the five minutes or so to view the videos. Amazing. Even though I thought I knew how to use these tools, I found something that I was not fully utilizing from each video! It's always good to review!

One tool however was new to me – Google Alert. This is different from Google Reader. It made sense to check it out so I registered for my Google Alert account.

What Google Alert does is send you freshly minted content on the keyword phrase you want to be kept up to date on. You can put as many such phrases as you want and Google will send you the aggregate list of articles on the topic within the time intervals you choose. What I like about this service is that I don’t have to go searching for fresh material on my topic. I also become better informed on my subject and therefore more of an authority on it. One of the phrases I submitted was blogging for money.

In this morning’s serving there was an article that I thought was very interesting ... talk about “niche” marketing. A blogger in the UK has decided to blog about his very unique house as a way to market it to buyers. The blog has been up for two months or so and already he has had 10,000 visitors and a few who expressed further interest in possible purchasing it. The article’s title is Sold to the Highest Bidder and you can read it on Times Online

The real point of this little soupcon on Google Alert is that if you want to get returns that are exactly what you are looking for then you need to put quotation marks around the phrase, like so: “blogging for money”. Clearly the article in question about the house for sale by blog, while it met the criteria of blogging for money, was of a different stripe than what I am looking for.

Now the dilemma. Do I go and manage my Google Alert and change the instruction by encasing my phrase with quotation marks or, do I leave it? Reads such as above are interesting.

To make my decision I asked these critical questions.

Am I looking to expand my general interest knowledge or am I looking for targeted information? Which choice takes me towards my objective of making money online?

The answer is targeted information. I am an easy pushover for good reads. It is one of my biggest “distractions.” I could easily lose myself in this type of activity and spend precious little time on the real activities that make a difference to my business.

What about you? Is the time you spend on internet marketing put to productive use or are you just visiting in your own business?

Happy Blogging!

Valentina Bellicova
Blogger for Money
Free download ABC’s of Blogging for Money

PS. The cheese is not in the wheel.

Quick Links:
30 Day Challenge
Blogging for money
Google Alert
Sold to the highest bidder

June Statistics - into the summer

2009-07-01T22:12:00.000-07:00

Holding steady, well almost. Bloggers I am following and who also frequently post their results for the previous month ... haven’t, yet! And I must say, that I am blogging away towards the close of day. Today is Canada Day – Canada’s birthday and today we celebrated Canada’s 142nd! Yup. As countries go, we are still just a babe in the woods - which is how I often feel about my own internet marketing career. Many years ago I came to this country and officially became a Canadian as soon as I qualified. Took my test. Was so proud to be sworn in. Am so proud to be a Canadian.

So, how did June pan out? A small downturn from May which is a bit disappointing ... I am looking for growth after all. But I have been told that the summer doldrums hit even the internet and my postings are not frequent enough to counteract.

As usual there are some peaks in the month. The two posts that drew the most traffic were

The Dot Com King
Ed Dale Kicks of 30 Day Challenge Pre-Season

The bright light is that it seems that the search engines are beginning to find this blog – at 15.93% it’s the highest to date.

The only earnings to report are Adsense at $6.83 ... no affiliates this month.

There were 46 downloads of my ebook ABC’s of Blogging for Money

Overall growth seems to be eluding me. I’ve looked at how I could improve the stats, get more traffic and have more people subscribing to my RSS feed (not sure I have that set up right), the newsletter or the “follow me” group. I checked to see what my more successful compatriots are doing:

John Chow who reportedly makes $40K per month really works hard at his blog. I just went over the past month and not only does he blog daily, but several times a day! And it’s all good stuff too ... some of it on his daily life, some of it on internet marketing, some of it on our buds in the biz. He’s got several products as well. He enjoys over 200K in traffic per month. Much of his revenue is from the paid sponsors. Not bad for someone who started to blog in 2006 “just because”

Yaro Starak who is known to have taken $100K to the bank at least one month – but more importantly, consistently pulls down over $35m monthly. Yaro has been blogging on one blog or another for nigh on ten years now and brings a lot of experience to the table. Not only does he post kick ass info but is now successfully joint venturing with other successful internet marketers -that's striking the gold vein in the mine!

Caroline Middlebrook – a software professional who started her blog some two years ago. Modest - compared to the two above - monthly income that hovers at the $2000 mark, but she’s been a rare presence on her own blog due to the time she is spending in developing a new software program.

How did I spend my Internet Marketing time blocks this past month?

- published 9 posts on this blog
- submitted 2 articles to one article directory
- kept up to date in the 30 Day Challenge pre-season
- researched niche topic for the 30 Day Challenge (I think I have one nailed)
- working on the beta project that Dan Lok put out
- Read my RSS feeds
- Read my favorite blogs and posted comments (got backlinks)
- Visited some forums
- Working on my postings for July which will be on linking.

Thoughts to Ponder: Now that I am much more familiar with WordPress I am seriously considering migrating this whole blog to that system. I am also seriously scared – scared that I’ll mess the whole thing up in the process techie type stuff not being my strong suite. But I now understand why the top dogs in the internet marketing scene choose Wordpress.

Soon I will unveil my project in the beta program which I think will work in good stead with the niche I am considering for the 30 Day Challenge. These will be covered in this blog in the future as each will have something to contribute to my progress and hopefully yours.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina Bellicova
Blogging for Money

PS. Another top notch blogger, Alvin Phang baked a cheesecake for his first anniversary. Pictures and recipe on his blog.

Quick Links:
The Dot Com King
Ed Dale Kicks of 30 Day Challenge Pre-Season
John Chow
Yaro Starak
Caroline Middlebrook
30 Day Challenge
Alvin Phang

Google Page One - How Important is It?

2009-06-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Is Page One on Google The Ultimate Goal?

In an earlier post this week I published that this blog was on Page One of Google. But is being on Page One of Google the end all and the be all in internet marketing?

NO!

There is a perception out there that unless your business/site is on Google’s page one, then you’ll be whistling Dixie. Yes. In terms of online real estate that is an enviable position to be in and certainly not to be discarded, but there are plenty of other ways to promote online and make good money without having reached the dizzying heights of PAGE ONE!

Before going into some of the other options I want to make it clear, that getting on page one is not all that difficult … or so it seems as witness my 6 month blog doing fairly decently for the keywords “blog along with me”. It really does depend on the keyword that you get ranked for and not all keywords are created equal. The collective wisdom of the gurus is that we should go for keywords that have a decent daily search, over 80, but which are in a small market of ideally not much more than 50,000 returns for that keyword - much more than that and the competition gets stiff. That is what is called a NICHE market or as they like to say “inch wide, mile deep”

But there are huge markets out there which if tackled right can bring in the moolah as well. Anything on money, wealth and wellness, and personal development is a huge market and not only are these markets huge, but they have a lot of activity, that is people are searching, clicking and buying. It may take longer to make money in these seemingly saturated markets, but there are ways to shorten that time:

Adwords: This takes money and you do need to know how to manage this option. You pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad, be that ad is placed in pages of the search result for a keyword or on someone’s content relative site. It is the other side of Adsense, which if you recall, is when Google pays you for hosting relative content sites by Google and when those ads are clicked. With Adwords you need to develop a plan and set a budget and really get to know which of your keywords brings in the business.

A friend of mine is in the travel business. She does almost all her advertising online with adwords. The result is a multi-million dollar business – enough to keep 7 agents busy and a thriving inbound tour business at the primary destination that she markets.

List. This is one of those chicken and egg things … build a list and now you have a target market that is interested in your product. It takes time to build such a list and you need to have something to offer for free that catches your market’s attention. But what if you have a mature offline business and want to branch out to online? You have an income and part of that income should be budgeted for online marketing. You “rent” a list of your market. There are lots of list brokers who will rent you a list of qualified buyers for your type of product … you email this list two or three times for that one time “rental”. The conversion rate will determine whether it is worth a repeat. Good copywriting plays a huge part in conversion rates. If you are not a copywriting professional, it is worth the expense to hire one. The difference can be between no business and a conversion of up to 20% and sometimes even more!

Article Marketing. Another good way to get traffic to your site is article marketing. Write articles on the product you are selling online and publish those articles. They will be published in the category that you select. There are plenty of article directories, my favorite free ones are

Idea Marketers
Ezine Articles
Article Dashboard

You can also submit to for fee article directories. These articles directories market in paid subscription publications and so the interest of the reader on your topic is of a higher quality.

Joint Ventures: Works best with complimentary products … yes, that may mean working with your competition. What if you have a site that specializes in handbags and you joint venture with someone who specializes in shoes. These are really complimentary markets. You are not really competitors but it would be safe to say that you share a common market. Each of you has a list that already buys from you. Cross market to each other's list. Again, this is one of those things that takes time to develop but you might want to identify some of the key players in your broad market and start developing a relationship.

Blogging. Lest I forget …blogging is yet another way to drive online business. While this blog is on blogging, there are plenty of blogs that are specifically set up to promote the main product which may be a natural pet balm or a site on handbags.

PAGE ONE? Important but increasingly less so as other forms of online marketing become available.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for Money

PS........... its all about sniffing out the cheese.

Quick Links:
PAGE ONE post
Idea Marketers
Ezine Articles
Article Dashboard

30 Day Challenge Forum on Internet Marketing Courses

2009-06-26T08:10:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month I posted an article on Internet Marketing Courses and the importance of being ready to take one.

I have always felt that often people do not complete the courses they buy because somewhere along the way the upward curve becomes overwhelming. It usually happens early on in the course. Mistakenly, they then go in search of another course that will take them to the heights of success of the gurus they read about. They start looking for the "secret", the magic bullet that will bring the money truck driving up to their driveway. The vicious cycle begins.

On the 30 Day Challenge forum a somewhat similar question was poised; “…should I first take Course A or do the 30 Day Challenge?”

The replies that came in from both the seasoned moderators and experienced internet marketers were unanimous: take the 30 Day Challenge first.

Why!

The 30 Day Challenge lays the foundation for an internet marketing business and prepares you for more challenging courses.

My point exactly.

Without a strong foundation the business you build will be like a house of cards lacking structural support and therefore susceptible to crashing with the slightest setback. It's a business. There will be setbacks. You need to be able to weather those setbacks.

Lay a strong internet marketing foundation. If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to go an register for the 30 Day Challenge
.
The price is right - FREE! It doesn't get better than that.

Valentina
Blogging for Money

PS… go get your cheese!

Quicklinks:
Choosing the right Internet Marketing Course
Register for Thirty Day Challenge

ABC's of Blogging #1 on Page One of Google!

2009-06-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

WOW! ABC’s of Blogging for Money is #1 on Google and Blog Along With Me holds a respectable #2 position on Google’s page one! I am soooooo happy … I don’t think I have ever been #1 before! But before I sink into the euphoria of this most honored position I have some explaining to do …………..

The next round of topics on this blog is going to be on linking. While I have a fairly good working knowledge of this marketing technique I thought it would be a good idea to bone up on what other top dog bloggers have to say.

The more I read, the lower my spirits sank. I thought once again I did not do enough homework before starting this blog. The glaring error?

Keywords! Or the lack of them in my links. The most powerful link that you have is your domain name. For this blog I had decided to fight for Blogging for Money … while I frequently pepper this phrase in my postings, the domain name rules and it is glaringly bereft of the keyword phrase that I want this blog to become known for.

In an earlier post I had mentioned that this is a long term blog. I am blogging on how to blog – that is a crowded market with professional sites such as Blogger and Wordpress sitting comfortably in the top ranks on page one. Then there is Darren Rowse with his long standing and very popular Problogger coming up strongly in the middle of page one. When I was researching my keyword phrases, I decided that I could live with going for the phrase “blogging for money” which generates a daily search of 145.

While I did not expect to be sharing page space with Blogger, Wordpress or Darren, I did think that at least I would have got Google’s blessing with a page rank … oh, even page rank 1(with Google the higher the number of the page rank, the better it is) would have been great. Nada. Not even a nod.

Linking. Aha. The more I read on linking the deeper the realization sank in … It’s the link, stupid! The domain link does not have the keyword phrase in it! What does it have? It has the far more competitive word “blog” in it. Over 2 million searches daily. Other established and more savvy marketers are cornering that market! Dumb!!!

Now there are other strategies that I can employ to overcome this error but it would take time and aggressive marketing techniques. I could also go for another domain name and have it redirected to this site – I already did that once. I read that as prominent a blogger as Yaro Starak changed his first blog’s domain name three times. But this linking thing kept niggling at me. Then I had an idea. I Googled “blog along with me” and voila, there is my blog on page 1 holding positions 2, 3, 4 and 5.

My first reaction was big deal! Who goes searching for “blog along with me” but then I looked at the numbers – there it was in the 1 -10 of a possible 111,000,000! Be still my heart. How did my little blog of just 6 months beat out over a 100 million other entries?

I looked at each position to see what it was that helped me get to page one and as best as I can figure it out:

Content: The title “Blog Along With Me” is in the header. The phrase “blog along with me” appears in the description of the blog beneath the title in the header. This is a static part of the blog so that everytime a new post is added and the spiders or bots crawl this site, Blog Along With Me keeps showing up. Fresh content, consistent keyword.

Adbrite: I recently added Adbrite as an alternate to Adsense to monetize the blog. It is an interesting advertising system which works in tandem with Adsense, but replacing it when it can do better. Adbrite advertises to prospective advertisers and its ad for Blog Along With Me got picked up by Google. That is a link pickup. It occupies position No. 3.

Blog Catalog: I had submitted Blog Along to Blog Catalog and that too got crawled by Google and once again it is a link pickup

Twitter: One of my readers (bless you Michael) tweeted one of the posts on Twitter. And even though it was a Twitter URL it was a backlink to this site again!

I keep thinking of Mike Litman who was my first mentor. His favorite saying is “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”

I had an idea! What about my A B C’s of Blogging for Money? That has been up a scant month. To my surprise, there it was on page one holding top spot in the 1 – 10 out of a possible 27,500,000! This time the keyword phrase was in the domain title, and my press release got picked up.

This is really encouraging. It means that if you do enough of the right stuff it will eventually over ride the wrong stuff and your efforts will begin to pay off. More on that in the next post.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for Money

PS… That’s a big smiley on the cheese.

Quick Links:
ABC's Of Blogging for Money
Blogger
Wordpress
Adbrite
Blog Catalog
Twitter

The Dot Com King

2009-06-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Who is Kevin Ham & why have we never heard of him?

Kevin Ham is the Dot Com King. He reigns in the kingdom of Domain. Until recently I have never heard of him, bet you haven’t either. He rules his kingdom from the seat of Reinvent Media Group, a Vancouver based company that owns over half a million domain names and who is arguably the most powerful and successful member of a small, albeit growing elite group of Domainers; landlords of valuable real estate on the internet. Kevin appears to be a very private man.

I recently sat with royalty and didn’t even know it. No, it wasn’t with Kevin Ham, but with Conor Shankey, the CTO of Reinvent Media. Conor is no mean dude himself when it comes to internet savvy and his role in it. We were both guests at a birthday party at the Cellar Jazz Club in Vancouver. Over dinner he sat across from me. I reached over my dish of lamb shanks – no, there was no asparagus; I did not ask him for a date and besides his lovely wife was seated by his side - and engaged him in polite dinner conversation.

Turned out that Conor was in internet marketing and that’s when all semblance of politeness dropped as at the mere mention of anything internet my ears perk up and my “inquisition mode” – as my husband likes to term my natural curiosity - kicks into overdrive. I was floored when I learned that his company owned over half a million domain names, the largest domain owner in the world. My eyes must been the size of saucers as the sheer enormity of that number sank in. He then told me about Kevin Ham.

Conor Shankey is the founder of the very successful Visual Knowledge which was acquired by Reinvent Media in 2008.

OK … enough with the name dropping. What am I getting at? For several years now I have been following the development of virtual real estate. Ed Dale
and Kevin Wilke to name just two big guns in the internet marketing world are big players in this niche, but I first heard of virtual real estate at a seminar I attended almost two years ago in Los Angeles. I honestly don’t remember who it was that spoke about it. What I do remember is that the concept immediately began to churn cogs and turn wheels into motion as the very idea galvanized me completely.

I wrote about virtual real estate on this blog:

- There’s Money in Them Thar Blogs - April 13

That was Danielle Friedland I was referring to.

And again in:

- Owning Google Real Estate: - April 04

Dealing in virtual real estate is a growing business. From domains being auctioned off at seemingly ridiculous prices – Kevin Ham is known to have paid as much as $350,000 for a single domain name – to buyers wheeling and dealing with existing performing sites such as Danielle’s celebrity babies blog and pulling in a mil or two and oftentimes more.

No matter how you look at it, it’s a big business. I began to assemble a portfolio of domains shortly after my return from that Los Angeles seminar. I thought I was doing ok with 27! ...lol... These are all domains that actually have a web presence as sites and require my attention. They are monetized and bring in money, but not enough yet to outsource any of the functions.

It never occurred to me to buy domain names and hold them for future resale whilst systemically monetizing them in the meantime. My previous understanding of virtual real estate has expanded exponentially. Henceforth I’ll view my modest domain portfolio with a little bit more respect and continue to buy, hmmm, that would be "invest." It’s a lot more affordable than the stock market; the downside is negligible and the upside at best stratospheric. It is after all still a game, a domain name game, and its not just kings who can play at it.

It’s a thought … have I expanded your horizons? Just a wee teenzy bit? I hope so.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS. Now that’s cheese worth biting into!

Quick Links:
Reinvent Media Group
Cellar Jazz Club
“I reached over the asparagus and asked her for a date” John F. Kennedy
Kevin Ham
Conor Shankey
There’s Money in Them Thar Blogs
Danielle Friedland
Owning Google Real Estate:

Ed Challenges Twitter

2009-06-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

The pre-season for the Thirty Day Challenge has begun. There is excitement. Lots of chats and questions going on in the forum. Teams are being formed ... and, the "boxes" have begun to arrive.

Thirty Day Challenge goodies come in boxes - just like presents. The goodies are the training sessions, some are video, some pdf(or both). The second box has arrived in the training section and its on Twitter. I just knew that Twitter would be a key player in our 30 Day toolkit this year.

Already the sheep mentality is being challenged. Ed says follow no more than 10, or at best 12. Why? Register for the Thirty Day Challenge and find out for yourself. Its a very interesting take and makes total sense.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... that's a little bit of cheese but oh so powerful.

Quick Links
Thirty Day Challenge

Zero to Ferrari - Blogging?

2009-06-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

Once a week I mine the internet for some good blogs. I usually do it on a Sunday – a day when I visit my faves, leave some comments where appropriate, and then go on the hunt for another. Today is not Sunday. I strayed and stumbled on a blog that caught my attention – it was one of those click this link to get to that site to get to an article I was interested in. The author prefers to maintain her privacy. Her nom de plume is Silicon Valley Blogger, or SVB for short. The name of the blog is The Digerati Life.

She writes well. I’m a sucker for the well written word, so ended up reading not only the article that led me to the site in the first place, but several of her other postings as well. As her name indicates she lives in Silicon Valley and in this particular post she writes about the fast money in her industry. She uses the term “… from zero to Ferrari…” actually she wrote 0 to Ferrari.

I loved it!

Wow! What an image it conjured. I thought it would make a fantastic domain name – never mind the content, that could come later – so quickly went to buy it off of Go Daddy, my domain vendor only to find, gasp! that it was already taken? Logged on to see what this site was all about – and there is no site!!! Aha. Someone besides me collects domain names.

So I’m sorry if you thought that I was going to tell you about someone who hit the mother lode while blogging and went from zero to Ferrari! Wouldn’t that just be awesome.

But that got me thinking. You know, there are lots of bloggers out there that are making more than just decent coin. I would venture that Darren Rowse of ProBlogger could probably spot a Ferrari or two and not feel a dint in his bank account. Carl Ocab, the 13 year old wonder from the Philippines is no slouch either as he makes more per month than most adults he knows make in a year. And then there is John Chow, who lives in my backyard, and routinely makes bank of 40K plus each month. Not exactly chump change.

But they all started from the same place that you and I started. Most often blogging wasn’t their first online venture and success did not come overnight, it was more like overyears. Consistent effort was what paid off, it's like making small deposits to your own Bank of Success. It works the same way as depositing money over time - I think its called compound interest.

So keep depositing your consistent effort. Maybe you could be the first 0 to Ferrari, and in the speed of time implied.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

Cheese? What cheese? Give me the Ferrari!

Quick links:
The Digerati Life
Go Daddy
Darren Rowse
Carl Ocab
John Chow

News Flash - Ed Dale Kicks Off Pre-season 30 Day Challenge

2009-06-08T21:06:00.000-07:00

Short and sweet.

Before you buy any Internet Marketing course, you need to check into the 30 Day Challenge. Its free. Its nothing like you’d ever expect. It’s a full blown course with lots of free resources and even some software. The Pre-Season has just started.

You can register at Thirty Day Challenge

I wrote about Ed Dale and his annual 30 Day Challenge here on May 08. Ed runs this course every year in the month of August. To have a handle on the course you need to familiarize yourself with all the tools that we will be using, things like Facebook Connect – hey get this, you can take the entire course within Facebook if you want. There are going to be lots of bells and whistles to get used to. The first pre-season lesson is already up. Ed says its something like spring training camp before starting the baseball season.

This is a course I recommend without reserve. The idea is simple. The course is set up for you to earn your first dollar on the internet.

To register click on Thirty Day Challenge

Ed and me at Mass Control in San Diego where Ed got a standing ovation for his presentation on internet marketing and the importance of the role that social media plays in it.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina Bellicova
Blogger for Money

PS... Go and get your cheese at the Thirty Day Challenge

Quick Links:
30 Day Challenge: Thirty Day Challenge
May 08 Post on Ed Dale & 30 Day Challenge:

Internet Marketing Courses - What's Right for You?

2009-06-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

My last post on fish throwing … & Internet Marketing Courses generated more emails, not about fish throwing in Seattle but on internet marketing courses. Rather than reply to each email I thought there might be others who visit here who could also benefit from more information on how to select a course that’s right for you.

First. Ask yourself why are you looking at courses? This is crucial. I know. I have spent the equivalent of a small ransom on courses. As a newbie in internet marketing the thought foremost on my mind was to leapfrog over all the dull and boring stuff, get to the meat of things and start pulling in the dough. I jumped from one course to another. Good thing I still have those courses as I am now revisiting them and plumbing some good content that completely eluded me before.

Many buy courses, dig into them, find the first two maybe even three lessons easy, or at least workable. The next lesson is a bit more challenging. By the time you get to the sixth lesson – if you haven’t put the package aside for “later” by then – you find that you are now way in over your head. It’s not your fault. It’s not the fault of the course either. It’s just that you have not built your IM muscles yet. Overwhelm takes over. I know. It happened to me.

In my opinion internet marketing is just like going to school. What if as a child your parents bought a packaged course that took you from grade one through high school in the one go and worse yet, you were expected to finish it in one year or less! Disaster, right? You still had not learned how to read yet by the end of twelve months you were expected to be doing calculus and reading Shakespeare.

Internet Marketing is like that. The good news is that it does not take twelve years to be super good and even better, you can start to make money in grade one.

That is why the question of why you are looking for a course is so important. If you have been in internet marketing for a little while, speak the language and have some online experience already, then a comprehensive course is right for you. These types of courses vary in cost. Some questions to ask yourself before signing up for a course:

1. What level of internet marketing am I at?

If you are a complete newbie and don’t know affiliate from joint venture, a comprehensive course that takes you from A to Z may not be the best option for you at this time. That is why I started this blog and wrote the e.book ABCs of Blogging for Money. This is “on the job” learning. I believe that blogging is the best way to get started. The e.book is an easy to follow, hands on, step by step system that will ease you into internet marketing and help you build your IM muscles and prepare you for more serious stuff later on. Get your free copy of ABCs of Blogging for Money

2. Am I ready for the big picture?

You have some understanding of internet marketing but have no idea of what the big picture looks like. What are the different options that are available to you. Do you want to specialize but don’t know where to begin?

You may be ready for a comprehensive course. A comprehensive course will take you from niche selection, to domain purchasing, to setting up your site, to the different methods of generating traffic to your site. You will be introduced to marketing models such as affiliate marketing, article marketing, social media marketing, podcasting, video marketing, copywriting and yes, even blogging.

There are so many disciplines within internet marketing that you can never learn them all, but you do need to have a generalist’s knowledge and appreciation of them. A comprehensive course will give you step by step, practical applications to apply to a full blown site. It will also help point you towards a direction that you want to become an expert in. I have taken several comprehensive courses on internet marketing but if I was to pick one, it would be the Nitro System.

3. Am I looking for a specific skill set?

You have taken a comprehensive course and now want to be a specialist. Congratulations! You are now entering the field of where the big boys and girls play. Yes, gurus specialize. Some are great at copywriting, some are great at list building, some are great at social media. They play to their strengths and it is time you do too. Look for a course that is targeted towards the area you want to become an expert at.

4. Am I looking for software to automate some of the steps in my marketing?

You already have at least one site, have been working at it diligently and now understand that there are efficiencies you can implement simply by installing the appropriate software. When looking at software there are two options:

- Buy the software program with a one time purchase fee. Make sure that unlimited upgrades are available to you for the life of the software program.
A software program typically addresses itself to one specific action. An good example is Atomic Blogging which concentrates on driving traffic to your blog.

- Subscribe to a software system at a monthly fee. The advantage here is that the developers of the system typically include several online marketing functions in one. A good example is the F.U. Money Machine which is a fully automated system that helps you run your online business.

5. Am I looking for someone to coach me through the course?

If you have the money to pay for one on one coaching go for it. Often the coaches are contracted out and they cost in the thousands. When considering a coaching program ask:

- is the coaching course specific?
- will the coaching include technical assistance?
- how many coaching sessions are included and over what period of time?
- how long is each coaching session?
- is there additional email coaching support?
- what results can I expect from the coaching program
- what guarantees (if any) are given with the coaching program

Coaching is a tough call. Successful people in all walks of life have coaches and/ or mentors. They don’t come cheap but the trade off is that a good coach will take you to a new level of success … improved performance, increased earnings, heightened public awareness, and the list goes on. A good coach will cut the learning curve in half, but keep in mind, that a coach does not do the work for you, you still have to do the heavy lifting where needed. In my view, I think it is important to first familiarize yourself with what internet marketing is all about. An athlete does not start with a coach on day one but has already displayed some ability in a sport.

The whole question of courses is a broad one and could probably be expanded into a report or even a mini-e.book. The above is a good place to get started.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS... plenty good cheese above

Quicklinks:
ABCs of Blogging for Money: http://www.abcsofblogging.com
Nitro System: http://www.nitromarketing.com/g.o/valentina
Atomic Blogging: http://twurl.nl/dmltoq
F.U. Money Machine: http://www.fumoneymachine.com

Fish throwing, Experience Music and IM Courses.

2009-06-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

Back from Seattle. Had a great few days with my duaghter. We had so much fun - did the touristy type things.

Yes! Pike Market and the fish throwing guys were in top form - there were lots of people buying fish, which meant lots of fish throwng! If you've never seen this its worth the visit alone!

The Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museums were very impressive. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft put up the big bucks to make it happen and Frank Gehry, the pre-eminent architect of the Bilboa Guggenhiem was commissioned to design the building! I wonder if Frank Lloyd Wright's creations were so out of this world for his time?

Discovered an absolutely fab boutique Synapse 206. If you are looking for one of a kind, to die for couture that you don't have to take out a second mortgage for, this is one of those rare "destination" boutiques.
Just one of the many unique creations you can find at Synapse 206. This dress was completely fashioned from "retired" designer jeans, and it is simply to die for!

So much more but that would be straying from the topic of this blog! Or would it? Whenever I go and visit John Chow's blogI find it interesting to read about not only the art of blogging for money, but also the places he visits and the people he meets.

Got back to a lot of emails - some from readers of this blog. One was a question on how to leave a comment here. Easy, just scroll down where it says "comments" with a little graphic of an envelope, click on the envelope and a form will pop up for you to leave a comment.

Had several questions on courses. Of the several courses that I took I really liked Nitro Marketing Blueprint
You get so much for your money. When I took it I got hard copy material as well as downloadable material so that I could work on my computer as well as have the material at my elbows for ease of reference. Everyone learns differently, whether your learning style is visual, auditory or through reading, you will find it all there - in a box! Now I did not take the coaching program. At the time that I took this course the coaching program was a bit steep for my budget.

But here is the thing, from my perspective, unless you already have some sort of a grounding in internet marketing, it is easy to get overwhelmed. That is why I started this blog. In my view, blogging is the best way to get your grounding in internet marketing. You learn so much and then you can wade into full blown courses. I know that most every course out there says that if you can log on to your computer you can take their course. That is just no so for the majority of newbies. It is a learning process and it does not happen overnight.

Having said that I strongly endorse Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge. Ed runs this for free every August and launches with a pre-season which will be this coming Monday. I encourage each of you to register - I will publish the link here as soon as I have it. I think this is the 6th year that Ed is holding this and each year it gets better and better. If you are a newbie you will not be able to get through it all in30 days, but never fear, you download all the material and then you can take your sweet time going through each item, mastering it as you go along. The value is amazing and that it is available for free is nothing short of astounding.

So... hold on to your horses ............. my registration link coming up!

Happy Blogging!

PS... there was plenty of cheese at Pike Market - handmade local smelly yummy stuff! Bought a load!

Quick links:
Fish Throwing at Pike Market
Experience Music Project
Synapse206 Boutique
John Chow Blog
Nitro Marketing Blueprint
Bilboa Guggenheim

May Results

2009-05-31T15:44:00.000-07:00

May was good. The charts below show an improvement over the previous months. Traffic is up, page views are up, although the length of time spent on the site is significantly down (gulp!) Most of the activity was from April 30 to May 18 and then the graph lapses. Search Engine traffic also weak. All this once again underscores the value of fresh content.

I also made a little bit of money in May:

Google Adsense: $5.31
Nitro Marketing (affiliate) $118.18
Total: $123.49

Most read posts to date

#1. Rock Stars at Frank Kern's Mass Control
#2. How to Monetize Your Blog
#3. Ed Dale Launches Intro to Pre-Season 30 Day Challenge

This blog does not convert well for Adsense. Caroline Middlebrook who also writes a similar blog and from whom I swiped the idea for this one concurs that she also does not get much Adsense conversion on her blog on blogging so much so that she has taken it off.

The beginning of the month always seems to have good traffic. I got a very nice boost midmonth from Dawn Hunt the mystery shopping diva. She facilitated a teleconference on Blogging for Money and I got to speak on the subject and field a few questions during the one hour conference. It was a great experience. I’ll be scoping out the possibility of more.

I had promised a report on Blogging for Money to all who registered for the call. What started out as a 17 – 20 page report turned out to be a full blown e.book of 46 pages. At the time of the conference call on May 14 the ebook was far from finished – it took another week before it was published in very much a “beta” form. I finally had to take control and stared down the temptation to edit, re-edit, and edit again. I decided that it was what it was and it was time to send it on its way.

The next step was to make the ebook available to the readers of this blog. The techie part of internet marketing is not my strength but I am a firm believer of at least learning the bones and understanding the basics. My goal was simple: design a banner that visitors could click on for their free copy. Here are the steps that I had to take:

1. Design the Banner
2. Put up an Opt-in page
3. Program the autoresponder to send an email with a link to download the ebook
4. Thank you page

I spent more hours on this exercise than I care to fess up to. Finally was talking with my mentor Brandon Roe and he helped me out with new graphics and some techie details. I think they are so cool. They are both my new front page and the banner. The next time you visit this page there will be a neat banner for ABC’s of Blogging for Money.

I work in time blocks. The Blog Along blocks were taken up with the above activities … that is my excuse for lack of fresh content during that time and the cost of that is a lazy graph for the second half of May. This also reflects in the low search engine results as well – no new content, no google visits! This is still a very young blog and requires fresh content and marketing for the continuous flow of traffic. Caroline Middlebrook is at that stage of her blog where she gets over 2000 (be still my heart)visitors daily without adding much fresh content - she is busy developing a software program so her posts are further apart.

So what’s in store for June?

- Publish fresh content twice weekly
- Repurpose content into articles
- Publish articles in article directories
- Promote ABC’s of Blogging for Money
- Take the 30 Day Challenge (more on that later)

I am off to Seattle for a few days – it will be a mini-holiday so am leaving the laptop at home. Stay tuned throughout the month for announcements, "next steps" in blogging, progress in “satellite” sites spawned from this one and the occasional juicy tidbit from the internet world.

Till next time ……….

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

PS. Where the heck is the cheese?

Quick Links
Caroline Middlebrook
Dawn Hunt
Rock Stars at Frank Kern's Mass Control
How to Monetize Your Blog
Ed Dale Announces Pre-Season ;30 Day Challenge

How to Monetize Your Blog

2009-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

Been absent from posting here as am focused on my e.book on blogging for money.

Here is what happened. An online colleague asked me to be a guest speaker on her teleconference call on blogging. Of course I accepted and thought it would be great to sweeten the invite with a free report to all who registered. Well, that report on blogging is now a full blown e.book, and could be the draft for something more substantial. If you would like to get a copy of the "beta" version, contact me via the email option on this page. No cost. Feedback appreciated.

During the Q & A I was asked just exactly how does one monetize a blog and where does one find these advertisers. Duh! But of course! If you are blogging for money then you have to monetize your blog! I thought that would be a good thing to post on this blog as well. Listed below is a beginner's list but I feel that it will keep you well "affiliated" and monetized for a long time.

Google Adsense. You do need to have a published site in order to get accepted. So here is what you need to do.

1. Open your blog account with the platform of your choice.

2 If you are going with Blogger go into your admin area, click on settings and write something in the “description” part of your template. A similar option is available with other blog platforms and their templates.

3. Publish your fist post. When you are completing the application for Adsense with Google, the URL is your blog address: http://www.moneymusclegym.com It can take up to two weeks for Google to approve your submission. Don’t let that stop you from working on your blog and making posts.

Adbrite: This is an advertising service similar to Adsense. I just recently discovered it and what I like about it is that it can sit alongside your Google Adsense and will kick in its ads if the clicks will pay more than the Adsense ones. You can actually set a minimum per click pay once you have historical data to refer to from Adsense. For now, just set it up. I also like that you do not have to wait till you reach a minimum of $100 for a payout.

Amazon: Open your account. Select products that are compatible with your blog topic. Amazon will pay up to 15% on sales. If you opted for WordPress and have static pages this is a good place to populate them with your selection from Amazon.

Clickbank: Clickbank is a directory of suppliers of information that offer affiliate programs. Typically this means products such as downloadable courses, training manuals, how to videos, subscriptions to newsletters and so on. Commissions can be as high as 75%. When you are looking at the affiliate offers in your category, look not only at the commission rate but also at the conversion rate. You want something that converts well. After selecting my affiliates, I like to go to their sites and register through their sites (they will redirect you to clickbank). The reason being that you will then be given a password to log on with and get valuable banners that you can put up on your site.

Commission Junction: This is another affiliate directory but unlike Clickbank offers physical products as well. To register from the home page, click on the “publishers” tab and select “application” from the drop down menu

The above should be enough to get you started. There are many other sources of affiliates. To find more options Google “affiliate marketing programs” but honestly, I think the above will keep you busy for quite a while.

You will find that each offers good tutorials on how to best optimize your efforts in promoting these affiliates. Be sure to read them. It's a great way to pump up your blogging muscles.

Here’s to Blogging for Money.

PS… OK… what kind of cheese are we talking about?

Resources:
Google Adsense www.google.com
Adbrite: www.adbrite.com
Amazon: www.amazon.com
Clickbank: www.clickbank.com
Commission Junction: www.commissionjunction.com

Ed Dale Launches intro to 2009 Pre-Season 30 Day Challenge

2009-05-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

It's started!

The legendary Ed Dale has just kicked off the Pre-Season to the equally legendary 30 Day Challenge for this year. The material for 2009 isn't up yet, but the broadcasts have started.

A little bit of background.

Every year in the month of August, Ed Dale runs his 30-day Challenge. This is an awesome FREE course that gives you the nuts and bolts, the squeaks and tweets, the niggledy piggledy of launching your internet marketing career. There are no holds barred. Completely transparent, all details delivered, and tons of free product including some software programs. This is beyond blogging --- but you'll learn a lot about blogging as well.

Ed has run the 30 Day Challenge for 5 years now. Each year is better than the last and listening to Ed tonight, the 2009 version will literally blow your socks off.

Watch this space for the sign up ... shouldn't be much longer ... the Pre-Season prepares you for the August launch, kind of like limbering up your muscles.

The legendary Ed Dale and me at Frank Kern's San Diego Mass Control

Twitter - Social Media Rockstar

2009-05-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

Social Media is all the rage now. Sites are sprouting everywhere. Its like the old days of blogging, except the growth rate is on steroids! Like it or not, social media is here to stay, and if you want to make bank on the internet, then you need to become a member of the hottest social media sites and to understand - or at least begin to.

The new kid on the block and gaining rockstar status is Twitter. I signed up some time ago, only because I was told I HAD to. Had no idea why. In fact, when I first logged on to read the "tweets", I honestly did not see the point of it. I mean, what do I care if John had bacon and eggs for breakfast or that Jane was just putting on her sneakers to go for a jog?

A while ago I got a niggling feeling that I should pay attention to social media in general and especially to Twitter.

First, I attended a webinar with Brent Leary and posted on it here Social Media - There's a Whole Lotta Tweetin' Goin' On
Then I attended Frank Kern's Mass Control in San Diego, which was an awesome seminar oninternet marketing. Several speakers included information on social media - all of them agreed that the big kahuna of this genre is Twitter.

WHY? And why is Google trying to buy it?

Both those "WHY'S" can be answered in one short answer: Real Time Leverage.

Arguably the largest search engine is Google, but the information that Google digs up when you go searching for a term is archived, that is, it is historical and therefore stale dated. Twitter on the other hand is a search engine that delivers real time data: real data, on real stuff at real time. Marry Google's keyword search ability with Twitter's real time entries and you have a marketing tool that will turn your head into a whirlwind spin.

Twitter is also one of the strongest leverage mechanisms available. Members "tweet" or leave messages for their followers - in fact it is often referred to as a mini-blog, or a written sound bite.

Twitter’s “re-tweet” function is brilliant. Whole groups of followers (they are called tribes in social media) re-tweet a tweet to their group of followers, and those to theirs. If you tweeted something to your followers – even if you have only 10 – and they liked what you tweeted, they then re-tweet to each of their 10 followers, who then re-tweet to their 10. Your message has just gone out to at least 1000 of your tribe. But it doesn’t stop there. A 140 character message can circle the globe several times over between the time you pour your coffee and take your first sip.

Took tons of notes at Mass Control (now, just to be able to read my own writing) at the seminar. Here are just a few nuggets on Twitter

1. Open your Twitter account.
2. Before posting, hang around a bit, get a feel for the culture.
3. Search out the categories you are interested in - that would be your "tribe"
or tribes.
5. Follow people who are active at the time you follow them.
6. Join the conversation before officially following them
7. Best tweeting times: 1 pm to 3 pm and 8 to 11 pm on weekdays. Weekends rule but again the heaviest time is 6 to 8 pm Sunday.
8. Be a valued tweeter (bacon for breakfast is not exactly valued information unless your tribe is in the breakfast business.
9. Feed followers from other social media sites - once your networks are linked together your audience will grow exponentially.

I spoke with Ed Dale of 30 Day Challenge and from the sounds of it there will be a lot more on social media in this year’s challenge.

I follow several blogs. Recently I have noticed that several are carrying a new advertisement: Twitter Rockstar. Checked it out and signed up.

Happy Blogging ... err... that would be, Happy Tweeting!

Follow Valentina on Twitter - oh so cheesy!

Quick Links:
Twitter
Whole Lotta Tweetin' Goin' On
Frank Kern's Mass Control
Rockstar Twitter

April Results Still Anemic - Shot of Iron Prescribed for May

2009-05-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

Results continue to be anemic as evidenced by Google Analytics' screenshot below:

This is the flow of daily traffic. The spikes throughout the month are normal - they are the dates on which I posted on this blog. That statistic supports all that we learn in Blogging 101 - post often. Although there are also some inverted spikes, what I find encouraging is that there appears to be a trend towards an increasing flow of traffic between the spikes which means that traffic is finding its way to this blog not just on publication dates. Now that I have merged rip along and blog along, I see that search engines are once again evident in driving traffic:

Search Engines are delivering 12.75% which is decent if not outstanding. I like that 60.78% are new visits. This is important. While we would all love to have all the traffic that ever lands on our blogs love our blog and its content and return with precision regularity, the reality is that it just does not happen. It takes time to build up a loyal following. When I drill down in my analytics I am super pleased that 16.7% are loyal visitors. In my view, this is the statistic that will be the true measure of this blog's value.

So what's the shot of iron to cure this anemic state?

1. Publishing in Article Directories: The first repurposed article has been submitted. The plan is to publish at least three more in May. The value of these articles is twofold: backlinks (I promise, we'll get to these soon, but basically it means that sites outside of your own blog are pointing to your site); and, viral traffic. This is the sort of marketing that will over time increase the steady flow traffic in between blog posting dates.

2. Teleseminar: An online colleague has invited me to be the guest speaker on a telesimar. The topic will be Blogging For Money.

3. Posting: The backbone of blogging ... post, post, post.

I have mentioned several times on this blog that I have other sites which are not included in these stats. They have been up prior to this project. I will be participating in a launch and a beta from now till September. These are new activities for me. I don't know exactly what we will be engaged in. What I have decided to do is to apply what I learn from these two activities to my dog sites. I know that there will be blogging and social media involved - so it may be that the results for those will be included on this blog in the future (along with appropriate posts).

In the meantime .... Happy Blogging!

PS. Bring home the cheese

Rock Stars at Frank Kern's Mass Control

2009-04-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

Hey! Just got back from a San Diego weekend.

Surf Dude and big time Internet Marketing Rock Star, Frank Kern, taught, entertained and delivered as he played host to a crowd of 500. We rocked, we rolled, we had fun, but most importantly we learned.

Frank Kern and me.

The happening was appropriately held at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego. The stars at this venue did not come playing their guitars or drumming on their skins; instead they played on their strings of knowledge, experience and success. Headed by Frank himself the retinue included names like Filsaime, Deiss, Carlton, Moffat, Dale, Serling, Walker, Mulligan, Koenigs, Belcher, Reese, Lemberg, Jenkins, Johnson, Rozmanith - and those were just the speakers! Now that’s what I call an Internet Marketing Rock Star lineup! And then there was a passel more of them in the audience. So …. Does that make us their “groupies?”

Two pads of notes … too much to cover here, but over the next few months tips will be dropped into the appropriate postings so that you can apply them to your own blogging.

Some observations:

1. The thing that impressed me most was not the content, although undeniably that was awesome. No, what impressed me most was the graciousness and ease of accessibility of these extraordinarily successful men. Is it just me or is it a universal truth that the more successful a person is, the more generous and giving?

2. Twitter and all that Web 2.0 stuff. I have mentioned it here before that I haven’t quite got the hang of why social media is so important to internet marketing. Ed Dale, who runs the annual 30 Day Challenge gave a most compelling talk on this subject. In his view, the holy trinity in social marketing are Google, Twitter and You Tube. There was much more meat on Ed’s talk and for that he got a standing ovation. There will be more posts on this subject in the future.

3. Jason Moffat talked of the 7 Characteristics of Highly Successful Marketers. They were all good but the ones that caught my ear were nos. 6 and 7: Connections and Cause. Connections is not just who you know, but who they know. Cause is do you really know why you are doing this? It really is more than just the money. Another one I liked was courage, that speaks for itself.

4. Jeff Johnson talked on becoming a super affiliate. I thought that was an appropriate subject for this blog and will write a whole post on it, but the gem that I picked up was to make sure that you choose the right product/offer to promote. It’s your time, your list, your reputation. By becoming an affiliate of someone’s program, you are in effect endorsing it.

5. Your ideal client. Who is your ideal client? In other words who are you marketing to. If you could advertise for your client, what would your ad look like?

6. Determine what you want to be known for. Do you want to be the brand or do you want your business to be the brand? Both have their pros and cons.

7. Time Management: Are you doing your highest valued activity? Too often we get bogged down doing the small stuff, the admin: things that don’t really advance our business. Concentrate on those activities that make a difference to your results. The other stuff can wait.

8. Back to Twitter. Be selective as to whom you invite and equally selective as to whose invitations you accept. Follow the right people and the right people will follow you.

People often wonder what is so great about attending these weekend seminars. Aren’t they just pitch fests? Are they not self serving? What do you get out of it?

I am not fond of the term “pitch fest” because that implies that all you hear are pitches to buy, buy and buy. Let me tell you, when you attend a seminar weekend like Mass Control, the host has taken a lot of time and trouble to line up quality speakers who have valuable information to give to the attendees. Moreover, the host will also spend a good deal of time on stage, giving more good free advice and tips on how to ramp up your online success.

Speakers typically are on stage anywhere from one hour to as many as three. During that time they give you information on some of their most successful campaigns, what they did that was different, how they pulled the whole thing together. Granted, there is a lot that is not fleshed out, but hey! give me (and them) a break! You can’t do that in the short period of time that they are on stage. Yes, of course, they invite you to purchase their course – what? What’s wrong with that? I think it is a wonderful opportunity for attendees to purchase valuable courses at “a seminar price” which is often significantly less than the cost of that course on their sites. So you get:

- valuable free information, and
- big time cost savings if you want to purchase the speaker’s course.

Attendees are typically at different stages of their online careers – there are some that are just starting out and others that are well along to big pay checks. There is something for everyone. A seminar is a good place to make connections and form alliances. I for example, have several dog sites and was able to make connections with other internet marketers who also have dog sites. The importance of that is that you can support each other’s endeavors resulting in increased traffic and sales.

Seminars are fertile hunting grounds for joint venture partners – again, very much like connections, but somewhat more advanced and more appropriate to advanced marketers who already enjoy a list of subscribers in your category. Joint ventures differ partner to partner, but in a nutshell say you have an awesome product that you just completed, you are new, do not have a large list to send the offering to, but you meet a few people who also play in your niche and already have a list of hungry buyers who would be good prospects for your product … how valuable do you think such a joint venture would be.

I like meeting and talking with people who are like minded, success oriented, open to new ideas and to sharing. That’s the kind of person you meet at a weekend seminar such as Mass Control. It invigorates, motivates and confirms your own beliefs as to why you are in the market you are in.

When you go home you have a few new colleagues that you can stay in touch with, and you know, just positively know with certainty, that there is a financial future in internet marketing and that you are in the right place at the right time to make a success of it.

Happy Blogging!

PS... talk about cheese! The kahunas of the big cheese were in San Diego!Quick links:

Frank Kern's Mass Control

Ed Dale Thirty Day Challenge

Jason Moffat

Jeff Johnson Super Affiliate

Keywords - A Spider's Buffet

2009-04-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

Keywords make or break your blog … use them wisely and mother Google will deliver traffic to your site, and you know that the more traffic you get, the more money you can make.

Keywords is the diet of those crawlies on the internet – the spiders – that come visiting your website for relevant content and if they like the spread of the buffet which is your article they carry a favorable review back to their Search Engine. I tend to refer to Google as the mother of all search engines, but there are many, many out there. Two other biggies are MSN and Yahoo and they all have their army of spiders.

How to use keywords, and more importantly, how do I find the good ones for my topic?

Good question grasshopper.

Let’s use this blog as an example. The topic of this blog is blogging, so blog and blogging are my main keywords. As mentioned in an earlier post, this certainly defies my own suggestion and that of the gurus to select a topic that is inch wide and mile deep – OK… I am going for the long term. I love the topic and eventually, one day mother Google will smile kindly on this blog and maybe, just maybe put it on page one. But of the two, which keyword is more likely to earn that spot?

There are lots of ways to do keyword research, many of them requiring several steps. Wordtracker is a software program that many gurus recommend. I use Market Samurai. Both have a basic free option, which for the beginner at least gets you started. Both offer a for fee option. I took the latter with Market Samurai. It is a new program, indeed still in beta. I was introduced to it when I took the 30-Day Challenge last year (watch this space for the announcement of this year’s Challenge). It is a one time software program purchase which updates frequently. Here is what I found using Market Samurai:

Blog: daily searches: 1,827,945
Blogging: daily searches: 32,877

So of the two, Blogging has a better chance of eventually showing up on page one of Google. But if I do my marketing right (and therein lies the challenge my little chickadee), search engines will deliver traffic to this site for that keyword.

When I put in “blogging” into Market Samurai, it delivers 200 related keywords, including phrases. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

Blogging for money – 145
Blog for money – 145
Make money blogging – 595
Blogging tools – 217
Blogging for dollars – 33

And so on…………

So “blogging for money”, “blog for money” and “blogging for dollars” seem to be closer to my reach. In fact, ideally one of them should have been the domain name for this blog. Alas, the domains were all taken! But I can still fight for those phrases by frequently sprinkling my posts with them.

The next thing I want to know is who is my competition for those keyword phrases. I like Blogging for Money. I ask Market Samurai to deliver my top 10 competitors and here is a screen shot of what I am up against:

I see some interesting things:

Competitors no 9 and 10 seem to be within reach. Let me explain.

Competitor no. 10 has had the site up for 3 years, enjoys a Google Page Rank of 4 and has a total of 652 links pointing to a webpage (presumably one that says blogging for money), and 882 total number of links pointing to the entire domain.

Competitor no 9 on the other hand is only a 2 year old site, has a Google Page Rank of 2 yet outranks the 3 year old site. This may have something to do with the links which are 2340, and 4380 respectively - Links coming up in the future.

So there is hope in the land of “blogging for money” but I need to attack it aggressively as clearly No. 9 is going for the top and has a two year leg up over me.

Another interesting thing is that positions 4 through 7 do not show any hard data. I checked them out, but for now, will leave that alone.

What other relevant to blogging keywords might I use in my future posts? I just run down the 200 keywords that Market Samurai delivered, select a few and include those words in my posts – ideally using them in my title. My goal? Set out an ever changing keyword buffet to keep those hungry spiders visiting Blog Along With Me!

Happy Blogging!

PS… Heading out to San Diego to attend Frank Kern’s Massive Control seminar. Hmmm … can hardly wait to pick up lots of cheeseworthy morsels to post on here!

Quicklinks:
Wordtracker

Market Samurai:

Social Media Marketing & CRM - There's A Whole Lotta Tweetin' Goin' On

2009-04-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

This hot off the press … or should that be off the net?

I just had the pleasure of attending a webinar on Social Media Marketing. The guest speaker was Brent Leary, Co-Founder & Partner, CRM Essentials.

So?

So, Brent was behind the Barack 2.0 campaign which can be argued as having been the tipping point that helped Barack win the presidential race. That is POWERFUL.

I have to admit that Social Media Marketing is still something I am trying to wrap my noggin around. Like so much that is IM it is at once a curiosity and presents a huge learning curve for me. I thought that eventually I would fall into this discipline and apply it to my internet marketing mix. After attending the webinar today I realize that I have to pick up the pace. A lot.

You know what they say about when the student being ready the teacher will appear? I am honored to have been invited to participate in a product launch that will be using social media as its main marketing tool. The product is not an internet product but will be sold on the internet. So hands on, behind the scenes learning. How cool is that?

It is too early for me to be posting any tips on Social Media Marketing, or, as Brent calls it “Conversation Relationship Management” (CRM). If you are ready and/or want to leap ahead and start concentrating on that very crucial and increasingly important online marketing discipline go on over to Brent’s Social CRM Blog and subscribe to his RSS feed … you’ll be glad you did.

Happy Blogging!

PS… this is more than Big Cheese, this is LA GRANDE FROMAGE!

Quick Links:
Barack 2.0 Campaign
Brent's Social CRM Blog

There's Money in Them Thar Blogs!

2009-04-13T20:17:00.000-07:00

Blogs are virtual real estate and you know about real estate: there's always money to be made!

I was recently browsing through the net when suddenly my eyes popped out! I popped them back in again and reread:

“ … but while their dreams are fueled by high-profile Internet deals — Condé Nast’s $25 million purchase of Wired News, People.com’s acquisition of Celebrity Baby Blog and, most recently, a deal this….”

A quick check in my mental filing cabinet and I quickly shot a note off to my friend
David in New York:

"...Hey David! Wasn't that your friend that started the Celebrity Babies Blog?..."

"Yes" he replied. "She sold it to People Inc in 2007 or 2008 for an undisclosed amount."

"Undisclosed Amount" is always good. Read it any way you want but I can tell you it usually means that your bank balance has just been fattened.

I remember our conversation several years ago. David was telling me about a friend of theirs who started a blog on celebrity babies and how she was having so much fun and that the dollars were beginning to roll in. We chuckled and continued our conversation on something else.

As I started to learn more about Internet Marketing and the importance of blogging, I often thought of the Celebrity Baby Blog. I even visited it several times to get some tips on putting up a blog ... I had thought of maybe celebrity dogs or something along those lines. Never did it. I mean, I did start a dog site, but never a celebrity dogs. I'm not one for celebrities so it would not resonate strongly with me.

But that's not the point! The point is that blogs and websites get bought. Earlier this month I posted on your blog being Google Real Estate. ABSOLUTELY! Now there is a motivator. Blogs and websites are virtual real estate and you can buy and sell blogs and sites just like you do houses and land. It is a growing business on the internet and a very lucrative one.

Still in its infancy, you can buy existing sites for under $10K, do a little bit of work, add value,increase traffic volume and sales, and sell it to a bigger buyer.

Typically blogs and sites sell 2 to 8 times the annual net income derived from that blog or site. Now don't go bananananananas! 8 times is not likely unless you happen to be a You Tube or Twitter or some other online phenomena. But say you bought a blog for $10K and it was already producing that much in annual sales(sometimes owners of blogs just want to get rid of them without much thought as to their real value). With a little effort on your part you add value in the way of higher page ranking, increased daily unique visitors and the annual sales goes up to $40K ...you sell it for $80K. That's $70K in your jeans. Rinse and repeat. Can you say Blogger Mogul?

Its a neat way to make money. But you do need to know something about how to make a poorly performing blog into a star ... and that's what we are trying to do here!

Happy Blogging!

PS...Now that's the kinda cheese I like!

Quick Links:
Celebrity Baby Blog
Google Real Estate

Blogging and social media - through the eyes of Randy Gage

2009-04-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's blog I mentioned the importance of social media marketing. Frankly, I don't fully understand it. When I check out the posts on either Facebook or Twitter it leaves me nonplussed - I mean, how can the posting of having just had breakfast make any contribution to traffic to you business blog? And, I don't yet see the value of numbers and numbers of friends, be they tweeties or otherwise.

Then today I logged on to Randy Gage's rant blog - Randy was "ranting" long before it became the rage of the internet - I like reading just about anything that Randy writes, mainly because he makes sense and because not quite so coincidentally, he writes rather well.

On the heels of my post of yesterday, read Randy Gage's rant today and his very interestesting "manifesto" on social media:

http://www.randygage.com/blog/tweet-this-a-twitter-manifesto

Enjoy the read.

Happy Blogging!

PS... now that's what I call Big Cheese!

Quick Links:
http://www.randygage.com/blog/tweet-this-a-twitter-manifesto

Owning Google Real Estate

2009-04-04T19:12:00.000-07:00

How do you get to own Google real estate?

Here it was, early Saturday morning, the sun shining and the flowers finally beginning to show color, yet here we were, indoors, listening to a rock star talking to us about what? Google real estate?

I belong to a private marketing club called Smart Thinking. Once a month on a Saturday morning we meet. Every member is a business owner. We network, share stories and learn important marketing strategies that help us take our businesses to the next level. The power of this club is evidenced by the distance that members are willing to travel to attend. Each meeting we have a guest speaker. That guest speaker this morning was Colin Wiebe.

Colin is a singer and songwriter. He currently has 4 CDs released. Names like Bon Jovi and Kid Rock pepper his presentation like uncle Tom and best friend Jane would ours. We sit enthralled. Oh yeah! He played and sang with the legendary Randy Bachman of the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive for over decade.

So what is a rock star doing on a Saturday morning talking about Google real estate to a bunch of business owners? Lots.

Colin is also an Internet Marketer, the owner of Fast Creative and this morning he was talking about how to own the most expensive real estate on Google - that would be the top left hand corner of page one for the keyword you are fighting for. To bring that closer to home that would be the topic that you chose for your blog.

We haven't got there yet, but I hear it and read about it everywhere: social media marketing. That's what the internet is all a twitter about these days. Companies like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Technorati and myriads others can play a vital role in driving traffic to our sites.

Just like blogging, social media is no longer the stronghold of teens and tweens writing about their piercings, goth getups or the latest heart throb. Corporate America has taken note, or more to the point, it may be argued that the newest President of the United States owes his win to the savvy online social media campaign his team launched. I gotta tell you, when politics and business find a new media format to promote their product, it has gone mainstream, and that means that you and I need to get to get our cohoons together and start learning how to use this powerful media to our advantage.

Happy Blogging!

PS...where are the best cheese bars in your city?

Quick Links:
Smart Thinking Inc.
Colin Arthur Wiebe
Fast Creative Inc.

March Blogging Results - Statistics Tumble

2009-04-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

March has been brutal ... I just did not expect that the anchor month for the first quarter of this project would deliver the worst performance since start up --- all three months of it!!! I looked with horror at my results and gulped, I mean, this is not a stock graph after all, but it could be.

On closer examination I think I have found part of the answer. More on that further. For starters, here are the stats

I must say I am a bit confused about something and will need to clear that up. As this blog is Adsense enabled, every time someone visits this site, Google captures that as an impression. The odd thing is that when I do some comparisons, I find that they just don't jive. For example, on one of the days where the analytics chart shows just one lonely visitor, my Google Impressions data tells me that it captured 38 impressions. Which got me wondering.

When I started this blog it had a different purpose and was called Rip Along With Me with a "blogspot" URL. When I decided to change tact, get a unique domain name and redirect that URL to the existing blogspot URL I thought that everything would fall into place nicely. I thought that Google Analytics would merge the two.

I was wrong! I just checked Analytics and note that I need to make changes to my tracking code if I want the statistics to reflect both URLs. There! Sooooooooo.... everything I have captured to date is not entirely accurate! The Analytics to date represent only the original RipAlongWithMe URL!

Since all my promotion has centered around the unique domain BlogAlongWithMe, none of those results have been captured! OK... that makes me feel better. No wonder the "sources" do not record any search engine traffic! Of course, I will make the necessary changes (here goes that techie thing again!)

I have gone over my posts, examined keywords and therein lies aother telling tale. I looked at the titles of the previous months' posts, and either the word "blog" or "blogging" has been in the title, whileas none of my March posts carried either word in the title. I used other keywords, but clearly this blog is not strong enough yet to get Mother Google's blessing for anything other than what I started out with: blog and blogging!

Details, details, details. It is always the small things the make the difference.

Happy Blogging!

PS. No cheese for the month of March!

Quick Links:

Original URL: http://www.ripalongwith.blogspot.com
Redirect URL: http://www.blogalongwithme.com

Traffic Generating Techniques - Part III

2009-03-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

Keyword Rich Articles

Article Marketing is a specialized discipline within Internet Marketing. Much has been written on this inch wide-mile deep subject and it is not my intention to go that deep here. What I want to emphasize is that article marketing is a powerful traffic generating technique. Yes, it requires writing, or hiring someone to do the writing for you.

Let’s go on the assumption that the reason you have turned to blogging for money is because you enjoy writing . You can use this skill to further the success on your blogging efforts as you submit your posts to article directories.

Later on we’ll go into greater detail on article marketing. For now lets just apply what in my mind is the most important thing to remember when writing your articles: keywords.

“Write a series of keyword-targeted articles in various niches and submit them to the elite authority sites online. Continually add these keyword-targeted articles and get ranked for them in Google. Monetize the traffic by sending them to an affiliate link you’re promoting in that niche” … Alvin Phang (or at leasted quoted in his material)

Keywords is what cyber spiders dine out on. They love them.

When you were researching your niche market, you undoubtedly came across common words within that niche. When I was looking at money as my broad topic for my Money Muscle Gym blog, I looked at the sub-topic of money management which gave me words like saving, budgeting, debt-free, investing and so on. Those are the keywords I will be targeting in that section. Those posts will be massaged and submitted to article directories.

Keywords should be in the title of your articles. An example of the money management sub-topic article might be:

How to be debt-free in one year or less.

Here is what happens out there in the world of the internet. You remember I wrote about how robots go web trolling looking for fresh content and report back to Search Engine when they find some and that when that happens, the site with the fresh content goes up in value in the eyes of Search Engine. Well, there is a step in between.

When the robots find fresh content they rush back to their command center and report to Search Engine that the Money Muscle Gym has fresh content. Search Engine dispatches spider to crawl the website for keyword relevancy --- spider comes back with a glowing report. Now you get the thumbs up from Search Engine.

For best results put your keywords in the title of the post and use it as your article title as well. Pepper your article with the keyword – a word of caution: don’t overdo it because Search Engine isn’t dumb, it doesn’t like keyword stuffing and may even penalize you for it. General rule of thumb is use the keyword two to three times - five at most if it is a long article. Now you can use other keywords from previous postings, this will give depth to your articles and to your blog.

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... no chees for the spiders please!

Go Daddy Founder a Biker?

2009-03-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

Yup! It's true. Go Daddy's Bob Parsons is a biker!
But what a bike he's got!

Actually, its a bike that was commissioned to Orange County Choppers, custom bike builders for the rich and famous - and certainly Bob Parsons of Go Daddy qualifies in spades.

The bike was unveiled at the 2007 Super Bowl game in Miami. It figured prominantly in the Go Daddy Commercial. I just caught it on one of the old Orange County Choppers reruns on TV this afternoon ... well, my husband watches the show and I don't ordinarily pay much attention to it, but Go Daddy sure got me ear, so watched the show.

Done in Go Daddy green and orange its a beautiful piece of hardware, the kind you can sit on and ride not the kind that sits in your computer. Its a beaut even if it is all about marketing.

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS. The New York Times called it a "cheesy commercial"

Quick Links
Go Daddy Bike
Orange County Choppers

Expiring Domain Names

2009-03-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

It's hard to come up with a snappy, memorable and short keyword dominated domain name these days particularly so if you want a dot com, and all the gurus tell us that it is the dot com that we want anchoring our URL. The obvious ones have long been gone, the creative ones are hard to come by.

This morning I was doing some work on one of the courses I recently bought and WHAM! It hit me right between the eyes! There it was. Expiring Domain Names! Each month there are good domain names not being renewed, some just might be what you are looking for. You can go to

www.makewords.com

and check out what's available.

Add this to your toolbox for future use.

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... hey, that's pretty good cheese I'd say!

Quick Links:

Expiring Domain Names: www.makewords.com

The 100 Hour Rule - Webcast

2009-03-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, March 18 to be exact, I wrote about the importance of picking your battles to win the war. What inspired that article was a posting by Kevin Wilke on the Nitro Marketing Blog “The 100 Hour Rule.”

As a student of the Nitro Marketing Blueprint Course, I receive emails from Kevin.
Yesterday this arrived in my inbox:

“Due to the extreme popularity of Nitro Marketing's
recent blog post about what it really takes to go
full-time in your online business, we are going to
do a full 1-hour LIVE webcast training and break it
down for you into even more detail….”

I thought this was one of those pieces of information that should be shared with you. Attending the webcast is free --- just an investment of one hour of your time.

Register here to attend
These are just some of the things they will be covering:

- What are the exact steps to go from scratch (or wherever you are right now) to having a full-time online business this year?

- How can you eliminate the 5 biggest pitfalls that are holding you back from going full-time online?

- What exactly does an insanely successful internet business look like? (the visual "map" will give you instant clarity the moment you lay your eyes on it)

- What do you need to do right now to see CONSTANT progress in your online business?
(And stop 'spinning your wheels' doing a lot of "busy" work and getting nowhere)

- What do the most successful business owners do to accomplish more in ONE DAY than you normally would in one MONTH? (Especially if you've got a super busy life)

And a few other surprises they have up their sleeve!

If you have a strong desire to succeed online then get registered. I have.

Just click: Register for The 100 Hour Rule webcast to reserve your "seat."

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... maybe they'll talk about cheese!

Quick Links:
To Register for the free webcast:The 100 Hour Rule free webcast
Pick Your Battles post: Pick Your Battles to Win The War

Traffic Generating Techniques - Part II

2009-03-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

ARTICLE MARKETING

Article Marketing in my view is one of the most powerful traffic generating techniques that you can employ. Why? It promotes the likelihood of having other sites point to yours, something that we know as backlinks and something that the search engines love.

Every time another site points to yours it is like a vote of confidence telling the search engines that your site is a good site for content, i.e., information, on the topic at hand.

Valentina. What are you talking about? How does article marketing point back to your sites and what exactly is article marketing anyway?

Glad you asked…

Lets start with article marketing. You already know the value of frequent fresh content on your blog. Now you can have that same content published as an article in Article Directories so that webmasters and bloggers can find good relevant information for their own sites or blogs.

First, take the fresh content that you just posted on your blog. Some say you can publish it as is to Article Directories, others say that you should massage it a bit so it is not a mirror image of your post. Why the two points of view?

Publishing the artivcle as is. Article Directories are hungry for original content. As long as you are the author of the article, you own it, and, the argument says, you can publish it anywhere you like, as is.

The nip & tuck proponents. The alternate argument is that you need to make it a little bit different – not much – from your blog post otherwise the search engines may not recognize it as an original. I prefer to make a few minor changes. This can easily be done by introducing a summary paragraph before cutting and pasting the rest of the article for submission. You might want to massage a word or two here and there as well. It really is a personal choice.

Article Directories are just like phone directories. They accept original articles and place them in the appropriate category for available content. Now here is the good part: every time you submit a piece to an Article Directory, they allow you to add a resource box which gives a little bit of information about you and allows you to put your site as part of that information. THAT’S FREE ADVERTISING FOR YOU AND YOUR BLOG!

But it doesn’t stop there.

Lets say you have chosen bird watching as your niche and you just published a post on your blog about the eagles in Squamish, BC. You massage the article a bit, add a summary – many article directories prompt you to do that at time of submission – and submit to an Article Directory. On approval that article is now available for others to publish on their bird sites with one caveat, they must include the full resource box, that is credit for the article is given to you. Since you included the URL back to your blog, then that eagle site is now pointing to your blog. That gives it a vote of credibility. It’s also called a backlink.

This process can happen over and over and over again. The more often your article is picked up, the more credibility you gain with the search engines. Eventually you are recognized as an authority in that field of bird watching, and the search engines reward you by driving traffic to your site for the keywords “bird watching.”

There are many article directories. You can go on Google and type in “article directories” and Google will return pages and pages of them. Some of the bigger ones are

Ideamarketers
ezinearticles
articledashboard

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... you can always write about cheese.

Pick Your Battles and Win the War

2009-03-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

Pick your battles carefully if you want to win the war.

In the world of Internet Marketing the battles fought are over search engine rankings, traffic and lists. There are more. What we want to win is a big fat check - every month. A blog is a good starting point.

I just read Kevin Wilke's latest post on the Nitro Marketing Blog. It is so simple, yet so powerful ... and so wise. The title? The 100 Hour Rule.

What Kevin says is that to be successful in Inernet Marketing, you have to have razor sharp focus on one outcome and take action to support that outcome. He talks about the 100 hour rule: put in 100 hours of REAL focused work into your Internet Marketing and you will be rewarded for your efforts with MONEY, yessirree - isn't that what we are in this for? Depending on where you are in your Internet Marketing career, you may be looking for a different outcome. I for example am looking for my first $100 month from my Blog Along With Me project. That includes this blog and the spinoffs from it.

How does that translate when it comes to action? What action would deliver that amount month after month after month and continue to grow.

This is a young blog and my new one Money Muscle Gym is even younger. What I am looking for is more traffic, more subscribers. Nothing new there. Everyone looks for that --- even the gurus with their minions of subscribers are always looking for ways to increase traffic and increase their list. Well I think job one is to increase traffi, because sure as there are little green apples, more traffic will ultimately get more subscribers. So the outcome I am really gunning for is traffic.

There are many ways to increase traffic. Kevin's suggestion is to pick one and concentrate your efforts on that one way, until you really get good at it so that its almost on autopilot, then add another.

What am I going to do?

I am going to concentrate on my strength - writing. I may never win a Pulitzer but writing is something I enjoy, feel comfortable with. From now on you will see more posts here as well is on my Money Muscle Gym. I'll be blogging and I'll be submitting articles to Article Directories. Ahh! Stay tuned. The next posting is all about Article Marketing.

In the meantime, hop on over to Kevin Wilke's article ... it is brilliant

Happy Blogging!

PS... 100 hours to making money, 500 hours to kissing your nine to five goodbye!
Go read it!

PPS... Kissing 9 to 5 Goodbye is good ... you can buy all the cheese you want!

Quick Links:

Internet Marketing
The 100 Hour Rule
Money Muscle Gym

The Gurus Are Duking It Out in Space!

2009-03-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

Lo! What a feast of offerings from the gurus! It's as if all the top guns in the world of internet marketing have entered the virtual boxing ring in space and are duking it out for your dollars and mine. They tempt us with offerings worth thousands of dollars for free if we but buy their newest product that will take our own internet marketing up a notch or two.

Well, I gotta tell you. There is tons of good new stuff. Of course I bought some of the offerings hence my absence from my own blog. I have been reading, implementing and installing. The last of these for once and for all confirms that I am not a techie!!!

As I go through each piece that I have bought, if I think that the information/system/revelation will be of value to you I will post it along with my comments and observations.

Meanwhile, absense from this blog has indeed affected my modest statistical gains of February. While visits to this site from the search engines was almost 12% of total visits in February, that statistic has fallen prey to "no new content" which means that the robots are not taking anything back to the spiders to make it worth their while to come and crawl this site which means that Google and other search engines have siderailed their interest! More on that in some future blog - in the meantime, unless you too are up to your ears in new courses that you are trying to wade through, BLOG! Or the spiders will ignore you too!

I have also been working on a report to offer visitors that can be downloaded for free. It will be in a very simple format and is aimed for the wet behind the ears newbie. My observation is that beginners in Internet Marketing get so overwhelmed with everything out there, they simply do not know where to start. Many buy a full course (like I finally did a few years ago) only to find that once past the first three or four lessons they are in deep waters and barely tredding(like I was).

In my opinion, it is best to start with one simple program which helps you set some foundations - you know, start building your internet muscles. That report will be ready for downloading early April.

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... Wonder what kind of cheese the gurus buy?

How to Generate Traffic to Your Blog - Part I

2009-03-04T21:17:00.000-08:00

Web traffic is the holy grail of the internet – without traffic, there is no business.

Looking at my February statistics I could certainly use a healthy injection of traffic. There are many ways to generate traffic to your site. Over the next few postings I will cover a few of the basic ones.

Keyword Rich Fresh Content.

Fresh content is important for any site, including a static one that may be selling products, but it is doubly important for a blog. Remember those search engine spiders are hungry for news and information. They are busy crawling the depths of cyber space looking for fresh relevant content so that when visitors come to the search engine’s site, such as Google, looking for information, then the search engine can point the visitor to freshly minted quality content --- our objective is to make that “content” your blog site.

How do you select what content to write about? Of course it needs to be on topic, or something that is relevant to your topic. It could be about something you just read and then you can give your opinion on that article. This can be done for just about anything whether it is a book, a movie you saw or a wicked purse you saw at a cool boutique you just discovered!

Of course if you did as I said (and not as I did), you have a narrow niche blog. Lets stay with purses as an example. Lets say you chose as your niche Versace Purse which according to my research gets some 53 searches per day. Some on topic or related posts could be the latest Versace ad with this drop dead simply to drool over purse that can do double duty as an overnight valise for a quick spur of the moment getaway rendezvous. What about writing about you visit to the local Versace store to ogle over the latest designs. Another time you visit a Versace outlet and spy a to die for purse and are absolutely stunned at your good fortune for the price is oh so affordable. You can write about what it is about Versace purses that you like. The key is to decide on the keyword that you want to fight for and then use it at every instance that you know how. In this case your keyword(s) that you are fighting for is Versace Purse.

However, since I do not do as I say it will be a cold day in hell before I own front page listing on any search engine’s piece of virtual real estate for the term blog as there are close to one million daily searches for that blog and the front page has long been spoken for by the likes of Blogger and other seriously muscle bound blogs. Even keyword blogging generates over 33,000 daily searches. So what is my strategy going to be?

One – I am going to fight for a phrase which I have yet to select. I am considering several and at least one that is a long tail. In the meantime each of my postings will carry either the word blog or blogging in the title. For example the next series of postings will be on generating traffic to your blog. I have wrestled with the wording of this title. Originally I was going to use the word “drive traffic” but research showed that term was mostly connected with the road type of driving. By using the combination of blog/generate/traffic and a sprinkling of some well (I hope) chosen words, I am marketing to a daily search of between 9 and 487. So – micro niche and niche. I will have a better idea of how well this idea/strategy will play out and pay off when I look at my Google Analytics on March 31.

Happy Blogging!

Blog Launch Announcement

2009-03-02T13:49:00.000-08:00

“You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going”

So...I'm just getting it going - it sure isn't right. Not Yet! But the new blog is launched: Money Muscle Gym

One of my first mentors was ">Mike Litman – author of Conversations with Millionaires. I cut my internet marketing teeth with his Success Coaching. His outfit did the heavy lifting for me and I navigated through the course. My practicum website of that course is still up and has spawned others within that topic.

If someone were to ask me what was the biggest take away I got from that course I would have to say that it was not the course, but Mike Litman saying that you don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going. Having been at this thresheld many times now, I understand the wisdom of that saying. It is easy to get caught up in getting it right, but being "right" can paralyze you and you never get going.

There are gaping holes. If not exactly under construction, it is in dire need of completion. But I think I have some important things to say about it, things that I hope you will find useful.

1.Topic: money
This is one of those “Do as I say, not as I do” dictums. Talk about inch wide mile deep … NOT … more like mile wide - mile deep, no “niche” here. But I have an ulterior motive. I have a long term goal to be an authority on money, how to earn it online and become a multi-millionaire. This is not going to happen overnight.

What I will do instead is use the wheel system where the hub is money, and each spoke will be the niche, or specialty. Each one is then spoked out again … sort of like those big round firework displays that light up the sky on the Fourth of July.

- First Spoke: blueprint
- Second Spoke: money management

Ideally each spoke will be fully populated with articles with a call to action in an orderly fashion. Realistically, I may open a new spoke before finishing with the last one. As new information becomes available, I will post in spokes that have already been extensively covered. Each spoke will be monetized with affiliates and advertising.

I can generate a spoke by either using the “Category” function that is available, or set up a “page” for each spoke. For the time being I will go with the category option as you can see from the sidebar entry.

2. Wordpress:
Many times last week and the week before I had been sorely tempted to scrap the whole idea of Wordpress and just go and launch on Blogger where the territory while not conquered is at least familiar. I don’t think that the free version of Wordpress is as techie taxing as the paid version. I chose the latter because it allows me to monetize, that is it allows me to put up ads. It becomes a magazine or a billboard if you will. Now you can do that with the free Blogger, but its capacity is somewhat limited.

To be where you want to be, you have to follow those that have got there and most of the big time bloggers are on Wordpress.

The problem: I have no blinking idea how to put up those ads. You can see from the template I chose that there is plenty of room for banners and ads of all sorts. Moreover I cannot seem to find any instructions anywhere on that specific function…..aaaarrrrggghhh! But I will get there. At least, I can post. I can guarantee you that in 3 months’ time the look and feel will be much improved.

Quick Links:
Money Muscle Gym Blog

Conversations with Millionaires - Mike Litman

The Good, the Bad - but Not So Ugly! February Analytics

2009-03-01T15:27:00.000-08:00

Lessons one learns: before setting out goals have a foundation to support them.

What do you mean, Valentina?

In a minute. First, I am so pleased to announce my first earnings. My first month in business as a blogger I had the following income:

Adsense: $ 5.28
Nitro Marketing $48.50

Total: $53.78

What this amount does is take care of some small bills, for example Hostgator, Wordpress, purchasing Ewen Chia's new book How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business
and a coffee or two with my friends. Hey! Its a beginning!

Ok... on to the goals.

What I mean is that when I published my January Blogging Anaylitics I made a few goals to be achieved in February which in retrospect were not well founded. How I made these goals was to look at what January produced and simply doubled the results for February. What Results? What the analytics for February did was to bring me quickly to a realization: if I am going to make goals, there has to be a foundation for reaching them.

What I had in mind for February was to double all statistical figures. It did not happen. Here is what did happen:

Screen shot #1

Screen shot #2

Comparative Data: February vs January 2009:
Number of visits declined by 25% Yikes!
Page views declined by 4.25% - sweating bullets now
Page visits up by 27.88% - redemption yet!
Bounce Rate declined by 7.19% - that's good
Average time on site up by 58.5% (to over 6.05 minutes) WOO HOO! That's really good!

Most popular posts were:
Avoid Time Thieves - Focus on Blogging
Oh Google My Google, Where has the Adsense Gone?
Bloghosting - To Pay or Not To Pay

Traffic Sources

I am encouraged that the search engines are finding this blog. The Search Engine generated traffic is up to 8.5%, up significantly from the January figure of 1.18%.

What do these statistics tell me and what can I do to improve in March?

The good stuff:

#1. I really find it encouraging that the average time on the site is now 6.05 minutes. What that tells me is that visitors are spending time reading the content. Moreover the bounce rate has declined by almost 8%, which again substantiates that visitors are coming to read.

#2. Search engine traffic up by 7.32%. I don't know what a guru's take on that would be, but I'll tell what mine is ... I'm doing cartwheels! I think ideally that one would want the traffic sources to be somewhat evenly spread ... but hey! I'll revisit that when I have a better understanding of the value of each type of traffic. But for a two month old blog, that ain't no chicken feed in my book!

March Focus for Improved Results:

#1. Post more frequently. Image #1 shows a decline in traffic towards the latter part of the month. I stopped posting when I could not deliver my new blog in the way that I wanted because of my technical challenges. So, it is true what the gurus say: post, post, post.

#2. Market my posts: I can do this in several ways:
a. Repurpose the blog post with just a few changes and publish it to Article Directories (at least one - more if possible). What this does is that it gives me valuable backlinks and it just might drive some traffic to this blog. In the long term it will give authority to this blog and drive it up in Google's and other Search Eginge's rankings.
b. Use social media more effectively.
c. Broadcast to my list every time there is a new post

#3 - Launch that new blog already!
As mentioned in a previous blog I opted to use the paid version of Wordpress as the platform for my next blog. It is the platform of choice for professional bloggers and offers many more options than Blogger --- it is also somewhat more complicated than Blogger. I've never done one. Wanting to save myself some techie time grief I accepted Nitro Marketing's offer to install a new blog on Wordpress.

I was impressed with how quickly it was installed for me. Then came the techie nightmare. The installed template was simple and easy to use, not only that but Nitro uploaded 14 more templates that I could easily switch to if I was not happy with the one I got.

Having spent some time on blogs authored by Caroline Middlebrook, Yaro Starak, John Chow and others that are pulling in better than a decent annual income, I decided I wanted something different ... and therein lies the tale of downloading and uploading, cpanel and FTP (never mind, you too will one day cross the bridge).

Jeff at Nitro was most helpful in trying to help me navigate through this maze (of course being the stubborn being that I am, I wanted to know every step that I needed to take so that it is indelibly ingrained in my noggin for the next time), except that for some inexplicable reason my screen was not showing the same as it was on Jeff's. Long story short - it's up. I just want to populate it with a few more items and then voila! We're live, baby! Not perfect, but live!

Till then, Happy Blogging:

Quick Links:
">January 2009 Analytics
">Avoid Time Thieves - Focus on Blogging
">Oh Google My Google - Where has the Adsense Gone
">BlogHosting - To Pay or Not To Pay

Recommended:

PS. Be sure to post your thoughts or comments on this post (or on the blog in general) below.

New Blog Launch Delayed!

2009-02-22T15:54:00.000-08:00

It just goes to show you ... taking short cuts is great, but you need to know what you are cutting short in order to continue.

In my last posting I mentioned that I took up Nitro's offer to set up my new blog in Wordpress, thereby saving myself a lot of techie type grief ... I do have a left brain, but it seems to have atrophied from lack of use!!! Nitro, true to their promise set it all up for me --- that is everything that is needed was installed. Now it's like arriving at an unfamiliar place and not knowing where to go. Some things are obvious, such as posting. But before I started posting I wanted to re-arrange a few things and had no idea how to proceed!

PANIC!

The first thought that ran through my mind was why did I not just stay with Blogger, I have learned by pecking and picking how to work the back end admin area and am quite familiar with all the options and setups. Noooooo.... I had to start on some other system where the back end admin area is like walking in a maze, or so it appears to me right now.

PANIC AGAIN! I am sure that there are instructions on Wordpress as to how to use it properly, but when panic sets it, the fingers go flying all over the keyboard with no results! AHA! I thought. I HAVE AN IDEA!

Some time ago I had downloaded some blogging stuff from Yaro Starak! He is the blogger that Caroline Middlebrook speaks so highly of. YES! There it was, in my blogging file, a whole set of videos on how to set up Wordpress. Indeed there is a God!

Grounded myself, took a few deep breaths, poured myself a coffee, drank it deeply and settled my nerves. Watched the first four videos. Its like Wordpress for Dummies! Thank you. Thank You. Now I know what Nitro did for me. Yes, they did save me a lot of techie type grief!

Next. I am going for a walk. Will I watch the next videos today? Maybe - but probably not. I just checked Yaro's blog entrepreneurs-journey to see if those videos were still availabe but did not see them. But its worth the visit and the newsletter signup!

Blog On!

Quick Links
Yaro Starak's Blog: Entrepreneurs Journey
Nitro Marketing Blueprint
Caroline Middlebrook's Blogger's Bible

Avoid Time Thieves - Focus on Blogging

2009-02-18T11:00:00.001-08:00

Avoid time thieves, focus on the job at hand: Blogging.

Valentina, What are you talking about?

Read on.

If you have been trolling on the internet for a while dollars to donuts says that you get a lot of emails in your inbox every day. I know I get gazillions and while a part of my wants to scream "stop the SPAM!" another part of me knows that at least half of those emails - if not more - are there because I subscribed to them. I talk to extremely successful internet marketers and they all tell me that they too have overflowing inboxes and that they even pay attention to the spam because they want to see how others are marketing and sometimes, there might even be a good idea.

But you are not a guru (yet), and neither am I. ( Hint: The gurus have staff) These are all time thieves. Every course I have ever taken told me to apply the brakes to the emails. Emails are a distraction and take away from productivity. Kevin Wilke told us to be ruthless and to unsubscribe to everything.

Avoid these Time Thieves

- Jokes sent by your friends - don't forward, better yet, don't open. In fact send an email to your buddies and tell them that you are going to focus on a project online and that in an effort to keep emails down to a minimum, to please withold sending the jokes, the chain letters, the beautiful poetry and whatever else it is that clutters your inbox from your well meaning and loving friends.

- Newsletters that have nothing to do with Internet Marketing or better yet, with blogging. If there are some newsletters that you really enjoy reading, take note of the URLs, and then when your blogging muscles begin to strengthen, then you can start re-suscribing again, s-l-o-w-l-y, one at a time!

- Clicking on an item that caught your eye on MSN ... it probably has nothing to do with Internet Marketing.

You will be surprised at just how much time you will have carved out for yourself, time that you will now be able to put to good use and focus on your blogging. Time is the biggest investment you can make in this business and while it does not take actual hard cash out of your pocket, applied properly, it will put money in your bank. Now, is that good or good?

Keep the On Topic Stuff:

There are some things you should continue to subscribe to, a prime example would be if you are currently taking a course then you need to accept and read continuing updates, new material and so on. That is a given. If you are shadowing this blog and setting one up yourself, you need to subscribe to the RSS feed or the "follow me" button.

I am currently on three courses. They are all related and are specific to Blogging. What I write here is a distillation of the three. I am writing about the baby steps that I think are the best way to start your blogging career. They are all courses for a fee. I don't like to recommend things that I have not either actually done myself or at least reviewed in detail.

A Course Recommendation:

I will however share one of those courses with you today. I got the idea for this blog from Caroline Middlebrook. I admit it, I am plain out and out copycatting her (though not necessarily each step) - and I have told her so. If you want to blog along faster, I can certainly recommend her Bloggers Bible. She has both a free and a paid version. The paid version is delivered all in one go and you can proceed as fast as you want ... you'll be ahead of the postings on this blog and perhaps banking dollars a lot quicker.

Quick Links:
Kevin Wilke - Nitro Marketing Blueprint
Caroline Middlebrook - Bloggers Bible

Blog Ready to Launch

2009-02-14T15:31:00.000-08:00

After considering all the options that are available to me re creating/hosting my new blog, I have made my decision based on the following:

1. Domain Name: to be announced when the blog is up & live (this coming week)

2. Niche Market: Money.
Whoa! That is not a niche market!!!! Yes, I know - this is one of those "Do as I say, not as I do" caveats. Indeed the Internet is flooded with blogs and sites on money, how to make it, how to manage it, how to invest it ... and much much more. My chances of becoming the Search Engines' Darling and be rewarded with top ranking are slim indeed. Having said that I am willing to take longer for this blog to become a money making site for me. The reasons I chose this very broad market are:

a. It is top of mind for just about everyone today.
b. The broad topic allows for many niches.
c. It is consistent with this blog, which is about making money blogging, so it builds on to an existing "product"
d. The niches lend themselves to my being able to promote some of my other existing businesses as options
e. Topic comfort - I write my own material so this will not be as time consuming as perhaps other narrower niches I was considering

3. Platform: Wordpress (paid version)
The reason I chose Wordpress is twofold:

a) Many more options available for development of blog especially as I intend to make this a signature blog. For this same reason I chose the paid version as it offers so many more features and functions that I will be growing into.
and,
b) Having taken a number of courses in Internet Marketing, I was able to capitalize on an offering by Nitro Marketing to set up my blog for free.

4. Host: Hostgator
While both Blue Host and HostGator are offer similar services and product I chose HostGator
because it is the host service that Nitro recommends.

OK.... I fudged a bit here. I was going to do the Wordpress thing from scratch - although I was definitely going for the paid version. Techie type stuff is not my strong suite. It would not be the best use of my time. I had other options for a "set it & post it" wordpress blog (I have a few of those with another program I purchased), but decided to go with Nitro. My experiences with Nitro Marketing courses have been that the content is always strong on detail, complete, and delivers great support. I have not had a blog set up by this group before so in a way I will be testing a new product. Actually you can sign up for their free newsletter. They have started to host free webinars which I highly recommend. You will be advised of those webinars in the newsletters.

Lets recap to date:
1. Topic/Niche selection
2. Domain Name
3. Ten Posts written & ready to post in weekly or semi-weekly intervals
4. Platform (Blogger or Wordpress)
5. Host (needed only if paid Wordpress selected).

Happy Blogging!

Quick Links:
Wordpress
HostGator
Nitro Marketing Blueprint

Blog Hosting - To Pay or Not To Pay

2009-02-12T11:34:00.000-08:00

You can start up a blog without spending a dime and that is fine if your intention is to simply publish it as a journal on a topic of your choosing. But if you are serious about this blog being a business then you need to put up a professional presence. Professional presence does not mean a fancy header and all sorts of bells and whistles that only a webmaster would be able to put up – no, professional presence means that it doesn’t look like a hobby or a dalliance, you know, something you do when the spirit moves you or when a spare half hour or so grabs you. If you are going to be giving information or doing reviews on products then you need to do that with authority. Consider it as your virtual image.

How do you do that?

One you hang out a professional shingle. In the world of internet marketing that means a proper domain name. This was covered in my previous posting of January 25, Domain Name Selection

As an example, what looks better to you?
http://www.ripalongwithme.blogspot.com/ .
the “blogspot” in the domain points to a free domain & hosting

or

http://www.blogalongwithme.com/

As mentioned in a previous post, I had originally started this blog with a different intention than that into which it morphed. The Blogalong title is more appropriate to this blog’s new role and I bought the domain name Blog Along With Me. I thought it would be easy to replace the original “Ripalong” domain name with the new one but found that while I could use the new domain name in marketing and have it redirected to the original one, the display at the top of the blog page will always be the Ripalong URL. I toyed with the idea of starting a fresh blog, but decided to keep it as is as an example of what not to do.

Hosting is another one of those “professional presence” items. Actually if this is your first blog don’t worry so much about how you look, you may just continue with the free option whether you choose to use Blogger or Wordpress. In the free options there is minimal backend administration. I like that you do not have to be a whiz bang kid with HTML, c-panel, FTP (see, I told you)….

If on the other hand you’ve got a blog or two going and are comfortable with the basics, this is a good time to step up and have your blog hosted elsewhere. You just get so many more options that will be important for you as you progress, things such as instant guest book, forums, instant portals, Fantastico, and more … too much to list here. As with blog platforms there are several hosting options. I like both Blue Host, and Hostgator. Their basic program starts at $6.95 and $4.95 respectively. Both by the way, offer affiliate programs so once you decide which one to go with, you can also make some money promoting that host. Me? I haven’t decided yet.

See Ya Soon!

Quick links:
Domain Name Selection
Hostgater
Blue Host

Oh Google My Google! Where has the Adsense Gone?

2009-02-08T14:37:00.001-08:00

The Google Adsense has really got me in a knot ... I just came back to it after a nice walk along the beach, determined to make it work. Just fiddling around I came to a strange result:

1. When I log on to the regular URL http://ripalongwithme.blogspot.com or the redirect URL http://blogalongwithme.com, the result is a site with no Adsense on the sidebars, just blank space where it ought to be.

HOWEVER

2. When on the site, whether through the original blogspot URL or the redirect dot com URL (.com) ........and I click on any title of any of the posts, and voila! there is Google Adsense, clear as clear can be! The additional wierd thing is that it then comes up as a page of its own, but the address bar does not change to show it as a unique page (every page on the net has its own unique address, or URL).

OK..........I am going to leave this alone for the time being and check with someone who is a techie and let you know what the outcome is so that you do not have the same problem.

Good Grief Google!

2009-02-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

In my last posting I set out a few goals for February one of which was to fix the Google "adsense" space on the sidebar of this blog. It appears very nicely at the end of each post, but for some reason the sidebar has given me nothing but grief. I fixed it for a nano second, or so it seems as it appeared for a while, then I went into my adsense management section in blogge to add another one and voila! It has disappeared again! Slavishly I have followed the instructions on how to activate it- but still no joy!!! aaaaarrrggghhhh!!!

Having said that I still think that Blogger is the easier platform upon which to build your blog. It is very forgiving and does not require you to learn anything about other types of software. So, if this is going to be your first blog or if you are new to blogging, it is Blogger hands down. .

On the other hand if you are a techie type or if in real life you find yourself gravitating towards Operations rather than Sales or Customer Service, then Wordpress is your platform - it is also the platform that most professional bloggers choose. For my next blog I have decided that I will use Wordpress, not because I am blessed with a left brain nor that I am a professional blogger - I am learning on the job in public view - but becuase I feel I need to stretch my muscles. Remember, if it doesn't scare you, its not much of a goal, just business as usual. If you don't exercise your muscles, atrophy sets in. Frequent visits to the gym builds healthy muscles.

I am being asked if I have selected my next niche topic and was I successful in finding a good domain name. Yes, and Yes. I am torn between revealing it now or waiting to make a full announcement as the new blog goes live. I think I'll defer this decision for a few more days.

Meanwhile if you are struggling between Blogger or Wordpress this may help: Blogger is free and money friendly, that is you can monetize it with Adsense and Affiliates; Wordpress has a free and paid version. The free version has limitations.

Till next time ...........

PS... sprinkled within this post are hints of the my next blog topic. See if you can find it and post in comments below:

REPLY WITH COMMENTS BELOW

Blogging Results for January 2009

2009-02-01T10:44:00.000-08:00

As promised, here are my results for the first month of my Project 2009 -

This is a modest start. When you start your blog, I venture that it too will have similar results at the beginning. Comments on the above chart:

1. Strong dates are Jan 08 when there were 21 visitors and again Jan 23, when there were 22 visitors. What happened on those two dates? Scrolling down the right hand sidebar you can see that the following posts were made:

January 08 - Blogging - How the Money is Made
January 23 - Choosing Your Niche Market

2. Average Time spent is 4 minutes and 4 seconds. I like this statistic, it means that visitors who stay are actually reading the content.

3. New Visits = 37.93% which means that returning visitors are slightly over 60%, which again is very encouraging as it tells me that there is a following forming with this blog.

There is another encouraging statistic form the screenshot below:

Once again, modest as the statistic is at 1.18%, search engines are beginning to take notice of this site.

My goal for February is to:
1. Double these results
2. Fix that annoying blank space on the side bars which should be google adsense.
3. Put up a prominant invitation to subscribe to blog updates
4. Launch the new blog
5. Add some valuable resources

Happy Blogging!

Quick Links:
Blogging - How the Money is Made
Choosing Your Niche Market

REPLY WITH YOUR COMMENTS

Blog Posts .... get 'em ready, post 'em often

2009-01-31T19:47:00.000-08:00

Before you start rolling the presses with your new blog --- whether you go with blogger or wordpress, do a little bit of planning. By now you have chosen the topic for your blog, now plan at least 10 posts. If you are doing a review style blog and say your topic is dog toys , you should at least have 10 topics on dog toys, written and ready to go. Here is what I mean

post 1 - How to choose good dog toys. What you look for when you are selecting toys for your dog.

post 2 - Review a new Kong dog toy.

post 3 - Soft Toys or Hard Toys?.

... well you get the idea. The reviews don't always have to be about a toy. What about reviewing a dog toy site you found on the website, what do you like about it. What in your opinion could improve it. Your overall impression.

This is an important step. Too often people launch a blog, all eager and ready to go. They post two, maybe three posts, and then have to come up with an idea for a fourth post and cannot find appropriate content. A degree of discomfort sets in and an ever so slight coolness begins to seep in. Soon, the posts are far and few in between. There is no traffic. The promise of making money on the blog is a distant memory. The blog languishes.

DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU.... this is a business - treat it like a business. Every business requires a plan. Plan a topic within a topic and expand. For example if you are writing about chocolates, then about mid to end January you should start writing articles on Valentines Day, where to buy the best chocolates online (your affiliates). Review some of your favorites. Post a picture of yourself munching on those decadent morsels. Ditto for March ... St Patricks Day, then there is Easter. If you plan basics for the whole year, you will never run out of content.

But Ten Articles? Come on Valentina?

Yes ... its a good way to get started. First it is a good discipline to develop. Then when you open your blog, post them 2 or at most 3 per week (nicely spaced), all the while writing additional articles. The spiders will love this. Here is a new active blog and the more relevant and fresh the postings, the better these cyber critters like to dine out on it and bring back good reports to the search engines.

More on posting articles on your site further down the road, for now write those articles and get ready to launch your site.

Coming soon .... ok, next week. Announcement of my next blog, its topic and related information.

Quick Links
Dog Toys World

Blogger or Wordpress?

2009-01-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

OK. You are ready, able and willing to go.

"LET ME AT IT! Let me start on that blog already!" you say.

Not so fast my little chickadee. We’re almost there, patience. Success is an 80-20 rule and like Dan Lok says, the 80% is the work that goes in at the beginning, the preparation, the research. When all is done your chance of success goes up when you are ready to launch.

So let’s recap:
- niche topic: you’ve got one
- buyers/advertisers exist for this topic
- available affiliates
- keyword rich title picked for blog
- keyword domain availability checked
- decision made to purchase the keyword domain
- READY TO GO!

Not quite!

Your next step is to decide whether you want to use Blogger or Wordpress as your host. Things to consider:

BLOGGER – www.blogger.com

What’s good about Blogger:
a) Easy to set up. Everything is done for you. You just open a Blogger account, register your blog, go through the tutorial, set up your specifications and you are ready to go. All this should take no more than two hours, I know some people who have done it in half an hour!
b) No need to know HTML (that’s a whole different internet language that webmasters are whiz bang kids at, but not you and certainly not me)
c) No need to worry whether you have a c-panel or an how to use FTP
d) No need to know when to upload and when to download --- yes Virginia, there is a difference!!!
e) FREE! Unlimited number of blogs.

The downside of Blogger:
a) There is a limited selection of templates.
b) Tabulated pages are not an option
c) If you have a problem and need technical support, they expect you to rely on the forum for your answers – i.e., there does not appear to be a way to be able to connect with Google staff to help you with any technical problems you may be having.
d) Changes/additions you make sometimes don’t take. As an example if you look to the right hand side of this blog, you will notice that there are two gaps. Those gaps are supposed to be carrying Google ads, but for some reason I have not been successful in having them take.

WORDPRESS: www.wordpress.com

What’s good about Wordpress:
a) looks more like a website
b) functions more like a website
c) many more templates available
d) many more options
e) professional bloggers’ choice

Downside of Wordpress:
a) Not as much of a point and click system.
b) Offers two programs – one much more like the blogger, the other (the one with many more options) requires at least a familiarity for HTML, FTP and a c-panel
c) Up to three blogs free (after that it’s a for fee usage)

Most of my blogs are on Blogger. The few that I have with Wordpress were set up for me. My recommendation is that if you are new to Internet Marketing and to blogging, then you cannot go wrong with Blogger. I would go so far as to suggest that your first few blogs are with Blogger. Look at these as your “starter” businesses. As you begin to build your IM muscles, then go further a field.

If you are an experienced Internet Marketer and have some knowledge with HTML, FTP and c-panel, then I would recommend Wordpress … you know, as Mark Burnett says: Jump In! Even if You Don't Know How to Swim!

There are other places where you can have your blogs hosted, but the above two seem to be the industry standards.

ACTION: Open an account with either Blogger or Wordpress. Don’t go live yet. Take the time to go over the tutorials

Quick links:
Dan Lok
Blogger

Wordpress
Recommended Reading:
Jump In! Even If You Don't Know How to Swim! Mike Burnett of Survivor Series

Domain Name Selection

2009-01-25T09:34:00.000-08:00

Blog domain names can be assigned to the default designation of the server of your domain or, you can buy a domain name and the servers identity will not appear.

What exactly are you talking about? ... you say.

OK. Lets look at our options.

This blog is hosted by Blogger. You will note that the URL is shown as

http://www.ripalongwithme.blogspot.com

The word "blogspot" is the trade name for Blogger hosted blogs, and its inclusion in the URL shows everyone that this is a Blogger blog. As long as the title you want to give your blog has not already been taken, there is no cost for this blog or for the title. The same would apply if you chose to use Wordpress, the URL in that case would include "wordpress" or one of two other selections that Wordpress offers. Wordpress will give you up to 3 blogs for free.

Choosing the right domain, or "title" for your blog is important. It should have relevance to the topic upon which you will be blogging. Lets take this blog and another one I put up quite some time ago as examples.

The first blog is AppleSeeds Grow blog. This I put up a few years ago. The intention here was that I wanted to use the word AppleSeeds as an analogy to planting seeds of wealth, health and wisdom. The content carries some philosophical meandering, tips on good health and on growing wealth. I publish a newsletter by the same name and some of its content gets published on this blog.

The choice of AppleSeeds it turned out was poorly thought out. Originally this blog was devoid of any ads, then as I developed some Internet Marketing smarts I decided to monetize this site with Google Adsense.

While the title and word embody a powerful imagery on personal development, Google does not take to imagery too well. Even though I chose to allow Google Adsense for content, when Google went crawling through my blog, the first thing it picked up was apple and for the longest time the type of ads that were posted on this blog had to do with apple, the fruit, which of course had nothing to do with my content. Visitors who came to this blog certainly had not interest in apple seeds or apple sauce and so the ads were not being clicked, hence no income from Google. It has only been recently that the ads have turned more towards content rather than the title. Interestingly I never saw an ad that was for Apple Computers!

Rule No. 1: Keyword Blog Title should be relevant to your topic.

The second blog I want to call your attention to is this one. Once again when I put this blog up in November, its intent was somewhat different from what I have since turned it into. I and a number of my colleagues bought a program called Rip2 It. While it was promoted as a turnkey system that was as easy as ABC, many of us were having difficulties with the A B Cs and my intention was to post my progress through this program and in Internet Marketing. If you read the summary above under the title, you will understand the original direction or purpose of this blog.

Each December I review the year and make adjustments for the coming one. As I looked at this blog, I thought it could serve a better purpose, not just for a small group of people who were on the Rip2 It program, but to a larger audience who were just starting in Internet Marketing. It was then that I thought about setting out the step by step process of creating a blog. I have since decided on a different title, but will leave the current one up for a while so that readers understand what I mean.

Rule No. 2: Decide on the purpose of your blog.

An example of a good blog Domain: http://www.mercedesbenz.rip2itblogs.com There is no question about it. This is a blog on Mercedes Benz, the content supports it. But where are the ads? The purpose of this blog is to support and point traffic towards its website http://www.BuyMeAMercedesBenz.com. We'll talk about that later.

I strongly recommend that you check and see if the title of your blog is available as a dot com domain name, that is without the word "blogspot" or "wordpress" showing up in the URL. WHY? So you have full ownership of the name.

Someone I know started a travel blog. He called it Travel Sapien. Its a Blogger hosted blog. As travel blogs go this one is somewhat unusual and over time began to draw traffic. Someone checked to see if the dot com URL was available, it was and it was bought. Here is what happened:

My friend's blog URL published address: http://www.travelsapien.blogspot.com
Competitor boughtand owned this published address: http://www.travelsapien.com

Can you see the confusion that this caused the search engines? It took some finagling but my friend now owns the dot com domain name.

There are many sellers of domain names. One of the most popular and the one I use is Go Daddy

Rule No. 3 : Buy the dot com URL name

ACTION ONE: Decide on the Title of your Blog.
ACTION TWO: Check availability of dot com URL, if availble buy, if not, search for a different title/domain for your blog.

Quick Links:
Go Daddy
AppleSeeds Grow
Mercedes Benz
Buy Me A Mercedes Benz

Choosing Your Niche Market

2009-01-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

"What does it take to make big money on the internet these days?"

Is it traffic to your website?
Is it copywriting skills?
Is it traffic conversion?
Is it a killer website?

The above play an important role but none are the answer. The answer is:

IDEAS.

For our purposes on this blog, "ideas" means the topic we choose, the niche within which we want to play and gain prominance. If you've been following along with me then you have your five topics. How do you choose the right one?

One of my first mentors was Kevin Wilke, founder of Nitro Marketing Blueprint. Great course, steep learning curve.

Now Nitro have put together an introductory course on niche marketing and are offering it free. I like free. This course is exactly what we need to help us with the early stages of blogging, specifically on how to choose our topic, or "niche." Register for the introductory webcast. Leave your plastic in your wallet, you won't have to buy anything. Invest the time. I promise you, it will be worth it.

ACTION STEP: Register for Niche Marketing Webcast

Happy Blogging!

Resources:
Register for Niche Marketing Webcast
Nitro Marketing Blueprint

Choose a Better History - Choose a Better Future

2009-01-20T12:41:00.000-08:00

Nothing on blogging today.

Just finished watching the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.I don't spend much time in front of the TV, but this was a historical moment and I wanted to view it live.

Political pundits are already dissecting Barak Obama's Inaugural Address. The sound bites, the implications of certain words, the delivery are all being commented on. So far not a pundit has mentioned what to me is the most powerful sentence:

"...choose a better history ..."

It is the word choose that is so powerful. It is not only the powerful who can choose - we, every day people have the power to choose and make a difference in our own lives. We too can choose a better future, to live a life of fulfillment. We make that choice by deciding to take action that will take us to the destination we want to reach

Be debt free
Be financially free
Be stress free
Be the best that we can be

Full Text of Obama's Inaugural Address

Dan "The Man" Lok, Blogging & More

2009-01-18T22:19:00.000-08:00

In the world of Internet Marketing, Dan "The Man" Lok is a household name ... or should that be "cyberspace" name? Dan went from bagging groceries to banking big bucks for his efforts on the internet. He is now a self made multi-millionaire and I had the privilege of attending his seminar this weekend.

The seminar itself was nothing short of fabulous. It was classic Dan - two jam packed days of content, content, content, all by The Man himself. Limited to just 60 attendees the feeling of being in an inner circle was definitely clear and present. Some of what I learned will be covered later on in this series of blogging, some of it will unfold in due time.

I've known Dan for almost three years now. Met him at a friend's BBQ. We spent an hour chatting over a hot grill. I was just starting my internet marketing career, he was well into his, although at the time I had no idea just how well At the end of the conversation his sage advice to me was to blog and publish my articles.

I should have listened to Dan then. As I mentioned in my post Blogging, The First Step to Mastering the Internet, knowing what I know now, I would have started my Internet Marketing career by blogging. I think there is some inborn streak in most of us, we don't listen to our parents and we don't listen to the gurus in our own backyards!

I have also been researching five topics to launch my next blog. I have come up with a good niche market, something I know about and narrow enough that it could qualify for inch-wide, mile deep, but its not something I would want to carry on for the long term. If you are wondering about what that topic might be it is embroidery.

I know something about embroidery having learned it at school --- we started with the most basic stitchery in grade one and by the time we graduated highschool we had learned not only how to make french knots but cutouts, shadow stitchery and tedious cross stitching (the kind you counted by the squares on the fabric, not pre-printed). Amazon carries both books and a decent number of magazines. The term embroidery may be too broad as there are over 28 million results when googled, but I did note that there were sponsored links on the right hand side. Clickbank was a bit disappointing in that it did not seem to have many affiliates to offer and the pricing was low, so low profits.

I could have done more research on the subject, but decided against it for these reasons:

1. Incongruent: I have some 20 sites and blogs in total. Not all are themed, but they are grouped by topic themes. This is good for cross marketing which will be covered down the road. If this is your first blog, don't be concerned. If you already have several blogs and/or websites, a complementary topic is a good idea, an example might be if you have a site on travel, a good complementary topic would be something like canal tours, travel by cycle and so on. You could then post reviews on the various places you can take canal tours, the types of boats/barges/cruises that are available etc.

2. Little Personal Interest: Even though I have a good deal of personal knowledge and could write well on the topic, it is not one that grabs me.

3. Monetization seems to be somewhat limited. The magazines were well priced for annual subscriptions which is good and Google defintely has advertisers, but I was surprised at the somewhat limited affiliates through Clickbank. If I had my heart set on this topic however, I am sure that there are better affioliates that are available with Commission Junction.

4. Product Development : Eventually to up the ante it is a rule of thumb that one should develop a product of one's own. Now this could be something as simple as embroidery patterns that can be delivered digitally to DVDs showing how to execute certain stitches. Absolutely no personal interest.

So that is one down, four to go.

ACTION: Continue checking the viability of your niche.

Blogging - How the Money is Made

2009-01-07T14:38:00.000-08:00

OK…. So you now have 5 topics with which you feel fairly comfortable or in which you have a great deal of interest and would like to become an expert on. Lets get closer to selecting the topic, the niche within which you will become expert and upon which you will write your opinions, reviews, and pass on your knowledge.

Before you go leaping for the one closest to your heart you need to know if the topic is something that others are interested in. If one of your sources for coming up with your five topics was Amazon then it is. Now some people blog just for the shear joy of blogging and have no intention of ever making a penny at it

…THAT IS NOT YOU!

I don’t think it is a stretch on my part to make the assumption that the reason you are here is because you want to have a money making blog. We call that monetizing our blog.

Before going over your list and making that final decision there are a few things you need to know. How are you going to make money on your blog?

There are many ways but at the beginning we will concentrate on the very basic ones and that is through advertising and selling other people’s products. Each of these can be and will be expanded upon as we progress throughout the year. Lets just go over our potential money sources:

Advertising: The most common and easiest source of advertising is Google. Have you noticed on this page that there are ads by Google? How does that happen? Think of your blog as a publication, a mini magazine if you will. Now, what do you see on the pages of a magazine that you pick up off of the newsstand? Ads of course.

Google has many clients who want to place their ads on the net. Google is always looking for online publications in which to publish those ads, the important thing here is that publication contnent and ad content need to be complementary. The ads that Google places on sites are called Adsense and you will learn hot to get these on your site too. This is probably the easiest and fastest form of online income but to earn a four figure income from Adsense alone is a long stretch for beginners.

You can also have private placement ads, that is when a vendor comes to you and wants to advertise on your site. This is not likely to happen early on. You need to have at least some web presence and traffic before this begins to happen.

Affiliates: This is when you promote other people’s products on your blog, and when visitors buy those products through your blog, you will get a commission. When you were checking all those categories with Amazon did you notice that it is not just books and magazines that Amazon sells. You can become an affiliate or an associate of Amazon, so that if someone visits your site and then goes to Amazon and buys a product there, you get a commission.

How does this work. For ease of following, lets stay with Amazon Supposing you are a master embroiderer and you blog about embroidering. Check out the embroidery category under both books and magazines. Here is an example of an affiliate link for an embroidery magazine:. Hover your mouse over it, click it on and see where it takes you. Now if you decided to buy that magazine, Amazon would pay me up to 15% of that purhase.

You could write a review on the books on your blog, if your review reader buys the book from Amazon you will get a check. Magazine subscriptions typically cost more so your income will be higher and people tend to order magazine subscriptions because it is more economical than buying by the issue at the news stand.

There are many more sources of affiliates. Depending on the products you will be paid a commission ranging anywhere between 10% and 75%.

Now that we understand how we are going to make money on our blogs, review your topics. Which of those is most likely to sell? Here is what you need to do next:

1. For each topic chosen, go to Google and put the topic in the search bar. When Google delivers the results write down this information:

How many results (this will be in the hundreds of thousand and quite possibly in the millions)

Now, take a look at the Sponsored Links on the right hand side of the page. How many sponsored links are there? These are paid ads and indicate that there are
advertisers for your topic. Some topics have only a few, others have pages. The
important thing is to make sure that Google does indeed have advertising clients for your topic.

2.You can also do a search on Google for your particular topic by entering
embroidery lessons in quotes and add + affiliate . Will look like this “embroidery lessons”+ affiliate and you will get a list of vendors who have books, CDs, videos on embroidering and other
products that you can now promote on your site.

3. Go back to Amazon and search not just the books and magazines on your topic, but do they carry other products on your topic, is there anyone there selling embroidery thread, fabric with pre-printed designs, embroidery kits? Do the same thing with eBay

4.There are other sources of affiliates. I like going to Clickbank. Clickbank manages affiliate programs for many vendors. Same with Commission Junction, We'll go over these in greater detail later on.

Judgment Day is coming … patience is a virtue and the early steps help you set up a strong foundation. Soon you will make your choice

ACTION TODAY: Follow steps 1 through 4

Till next time …. Rip Along With Me.

Blogging - Select Your Topic

2009-01-02T10:45:00.000-08:00

Selecting the right topic for your blog is important yet it can be the first stumbling block to your online success. Often the first reaction is that you cannot even think of a topic quickly followed by a second reaction which is you cannot limit the number of topics that are suddenly flooding your mind. I confess that I ran into the latter when trying to come up with a topic for the blog which will be created here. Lets address each issue.

How do I find topics?
If this is your first blog top of mind is familiarity with the topic that you will be blogging on. The obvious choices that immediately spring to mind are things you like to do, what hobbies do you have, what sports do you play or like to watch. When you read, what do you reach for? What movies do you like to see? Is there something you are really passionate about? A friend of mine is a horticulturalist specializing in container gardening. Someone else I know is a master knitter, spins her own yarn and comes up with the most gorgeous wool knits. These topics are about passion. What are you passionate about?

Still having problems coming up with topics? I find that one of the best sources for getting topic ideas is through Amazon. Go to their categories directory.

Take your time navigating through all the categories. Because I like to read, I automatically gravitate towards the books and magazines and then go into sub categories. Lets take gardening as an example.

1. click on magazines
2. scroll down the categories to Home & Garden - click
3. scroll down the categories to Gardening & Horticulture - click

Now you've got lots of sub-categories. You can choose to specialize in shade gardening or Japanese gardens or herbs. The possibilities are endless.

While you are going through this exercise pay attention to the titles of books that are relevant to your topic and the magazines that are published on your topic. Amazon will be one of the sources of income on your blog. So, if you choose an obscure topic and there are few if any books and/or magazines on this topic, go back to square one. You must be able to monetize your topic easily. Later on when you become a whiz blogger you can go back to the obscure.

Narrowing down your topic selection
The floodgates have suddenly opened. No sooner do you think of one topic than another appears, followed by yet another seemingly better one. Don't worry about the best blog topic ever. This will not be your last blog, this is your practicum and while I wish each and every one of you to make heaps of money with this venture, the reality is that in all probablity this will not be your most profitable blog so edit, edit, edit your ideas ruthlessly otherwise you will never get started.

While it is probably better to select topics that you know something about, don't discount those that you have always had an interest in but on which you are not terribly knowledgeable about. One way to become knowledgeable about something is to write about it. I like Mike Litman's approach: "You don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going"

ACTION STEPS:
- explore topic options
- select five topics

That will do till the next posting.

Happy Blogging.

If you have questions you can either post them on the comments section here or by contacting me directly through this blog.

Blogging - step one

2008-12-26T17:33:00.000-08:00

Even though I have several blogs, most were thrown up in a higgledy piggledy way --- the purposes varied; as support to an existing website that I have, others are a commentary and still others are on personal development. I want to do this one differently. This one has to be an example on how to blog for money. With this as the prime reason for starting a new blog, I have to give more thought about the way I go about it.

Immediately questions need to be answered:-
- what is the topic going to be?
- who is my target audience?
- should I use blogger or wordpress?
- should this be a standalone blog or should it promote one of my online businesses?
- how do I best monetize it?

The first question that I am going to tackle is topic. There is no shortage of topics to write about. If I want to make money on this blog then I have to be able to rank high in the search engines, choose my keywords carefully, even the domain name makes a difference.

If the topic is too broad then I have a lot of competition out there. An example would be both my Buy Me a Mercedes Benz site and the corresponding Mercedes Benzblog. I threw both of these sites because I like the car and just wanted to write about it. Even though I am making some money on the site (the blog is not monetized for a reason)I don't expect that it will be up on page one of any of the search engines any time soon. This will be a labor of love and who knows, years hence it just might show up on page one!

The way to success is to "niche" your topic. The saying in the internet world is "inch wide and mile deep". An example of that, still staying on the topic of Mercedes, might have been on the McLaren.

Between now and the next time I post here, I will do some research on my topic and will post here on how I arrived at it. Till then .... happy blogging to you!

Blogging - the first step to Mastering the Internet

2008-12-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

If I were to launch my Internet Marketing career today, I would start by blogging.

Its been two years since I rolled up my sleeves and decided to become an Internet Marketer. No, the money truck has not pulled up to my driveway ... yet. An income is however becoming regular and I see that money truck pulling up.

In the two years that I have been a student of Internet Marketing, I have learned a lot. In retrospect I might have done things differently and perhaps would be further ahead by now. No matter. The foundation has been laid and it is solid.

Knowing what I now know, if I were starting in IM today, I would certainly start with a blog. To me this is the easiest entry into the Internet Marketing world. Consider these points:

Ease of Entry: The learning curve is not as steep as say starting your own online store but if that is your ultimate destination, a blog would be like the hot dog stand that eventually gets you to owning your own kick ass gourmet restaurant.

Affordability:Like the hot dog stand, blogging is cheap - sheesh! even free if you want. Blogservers such as Blogger and Wordpress are free and you do not need to learn any cyber language such as HTML or hire a webmaster to throw up a site for you. Both Blogger and Wordpress offer a wide choice of templates and quicker than you can say "what's a blog" you've got one!

Easy Back Office Management: You can take your time to familiarize yourself with all the options that are available to you to make your blog unique. The good thing about this is that as you become more confident on the net, you can always log into your backoffice and tweak both the appearance and other elements of your blog, such as comments, ads, social marking. As an example, this blog is not fully populated with many of the options that are available. Over time you will see small changes, changes which are meant to drive more traffic to this site.

Money:. You can start making money right away. It more than likely won't be high on the decible charts of WOW! but it will open the window to the view of the money truck pulling up to your driveway.

Time Friendly: Most people who look at the net as a potential source of income have a J.O.B. and would like to

a. earn and additional income and
b. to develop a secure financial safety net. Many want to quit their j.o.b.

By just devoting a mere hour a day, you will be taking action and begin to build your IM Muscles. Equally important, a new brain power blueprint will begin to emerge.

While posting this I just talked myself into starting another blog (I have several). Here's the deal. I will be completely transparent. I will post the steps, the fine tuning, the tools, the results of that new blog on this one. Since it will be a fresh one, it will be easy to follow and measure the results. I will share the resources I use, bearing in mind that your money truck is still revving up, the tools and resources will either be free or nominally priced.

My challenge to you: subscribe to this blog by clicking on the RSS feed or registering in the "follow this blog" option on the right hand menu and follow in my footsteps. I do not promise a specific result in terms of income, but what I do promise is that if you lift when I lift and run when I run, you will be on your way to becoming an Internet Marketing Professional. There will be mistakes enroute, we learn from mistakes. There will be obstacles. We will learn how to overcome those obstacles. There will be celebrations ... we really like those. We'll surf the net, master the waves, and let 'er rip!

Four Bleeping Hours!

2008-12-21T18:31:00.000-08:00

Four Bleeping Hours! Daily!
Just to keep up with your emails.

I recently had a discussion with a colleague --- someone new to the world of Internet Marketing. Like so many newbies, she had subscribed to several guru newsletters and had bought a course or two, OK, make that three or four and maybe more. What this means of course is a very active Inbox. In the course of our conversation she fessed up that going through the emails took as much as four hours every day. Four hours? Four bleeping hours! She was frustrated that after half a year the results were abysmal and was wondering if she shouldn't throw in the towel with this latest venture and start something else.

Ok, four hours may be a bit on the high end of the spectrum for just “managing” your inbox, but honestly, don’t all of us fall victim to doing exactly what my friend did? Lets do a quick inventory. How many newsletter subscriptions do you have? How many courses have you signed up for – the freebie ones, the cheapie ones, and the not so cheapies? You get emails from all of those too even after the course has run its course (yes pun intended … ok, I just couldn’t help myself). Never mind the plethora of jokes from friends who obviously have no intention of making money on the internet. Then of course those jokes have to be forwarded to your own special inner joke circle.

STOP! This is insanity! If you’re serious about becoming an Internet Marketer – one that makes money that is – then you have to declutter, unsubscribe, don’t open the jokes – or at least save them for “break” time. I save mine for the weekends, and if some don’t get opened, so what. When I was going through the
Nitro Marketing Blueprint course, Kevin Wilke told us to be ruthless in unsubscribing. He told us that no matter how good the info may be that we are receiving, that is not what we are focusing on now, that they distract us from the job at hand, and steal our time from us … actually, it is we who are stealing time from ourselves. It even takes time to delete – so best not to receive in the first place.

The first thing that newbies need to know is that the internet is not a free ride. It is a continuous process of learning, and, unless you have the basics down pat, you're never going to join the ranks of the gurus whose newsletters you so readily subscribed to and from whom you bought the courses and for which you now have no time because it takes you four bleeping hours every day just to read all that good stuff that comes into your inbox. FOUR HOURS!!! … and there is so much information you don’t know where to start and then you get frustrated because nothing is working and you throw up your hands in frustration and start looking for the holy grail of the internet and you can’t find it! Whew! Months go by, even years and still nothing works.

Good News/Bad News. The good news is that you know more about the internet than you think you do. You’ve gone through kindergarten. You know the basics of being on the computer: open, close, send & receive emails, browse, google something. You might even be active on some social marketing sites ... you know, Facebook, My Space, Twitter and many more. Later on you will learn how to use these sites as valuable marketing tools, but not so fast Little Grasshopper! Some basics:

One: Unsubscribe. Yes, all those newsletters are full of great stuff, but you are not doing anything with it. These are time wasters. If you are married to some of them, save the subscription links or the name of the guru, and file them away to return to later… I mean, four bleeping hours! Give me a break!

Two: Go and review the courses you bought. Pick the easiest one and resolve to complete it, beginning to end. Not just reading it, but actually doing the exercises and implementing what you are reading. Hey babe! You’re building internet muscles!

Three: Email all your joke buddies. Tell them that you love them and appreciate their jokes but could they put them on hold for several months. Tell them that you are working on a very important project and are ridding yourself of all distractions.

Four: Calendar time to work on your course. Whether you decide to devote 3 or 4 hours a day schedule it. This is very important. I would recommend scheduling some time on a daily basis, but if the weekend is all that you can realistically devote to your course, then schedule about ten hours, five on Saturday and another five on Sunday.

Five: Resist the temptation to check on your inbox all the time. I check my inbox in the morning, at noon, and then before I close for the day (the time varies). I have heard that the gurus only check twice a day.

If the thought of going through your library of unopened e.courses is too staggering, I began with Nitro Marketing Blueprint. It is easy to follow and is updated every year. I often go back to a section just to refresh --- and surprise, surprise! It gets easier! Build them internet muscles. The time you invest will bare gifts of dollar deposits into your bank account. Don’t let the slow start discourage you. As your foundation builds, the growth will take on speed and the income too will begin to take on exponential growth

To Your Success!

The Beginning of the Entrepreneur Years

2008-11-20T20:45:00.000-08:00

My journey to financial independence was not so much chosen by me as it was thrust upon me. I remember it well. The day was Thursday. News was flying across the country. Like a rolling wave it started back east andended right here in the west ... at least that's the way it was for the company I was employed by. Employees were being ushered out the door faster than you can say Jimmy crack corn and I don't care. I knew my fate - it would be the same as the man who hired me. Usually is.

No one had done anything wrong. This was the era of multi-nationals buying other multi-nationals to become multi-more. Re-egineering. Redundancy. It seems like such a long time ago. It was. Today this same scenario is repeated time and time again. The reasons may be different, but the outcome is the same. No matter how they try to spin it, redundant, re-ingeneering, downsizing, streamlining; it still boils down to one thing: NO JOB.

I decided right then and then that I did not want another job. I understood at that time that business had just undergone a major shift and would never be the same again. The multi-national I was with was already exporting its call centers to third world countries. There were other changes blowing in the wind. I decided that I wanted a business of my own, one where I could control my own financial well being.

Off I went to meet with my accountant. I thought perhaps some of his clients might be selling their business and I was right. How much did I want to pay, my accountant asked ... hundred thousand? half a million?

As I picked my jaw up off the floor, he asked why I wanted to buy a business. We both laughed when I told him that he would be the first one to tell me not to start one. He then looked at me straight in the eyes and said something that I will never forget "Valentina, the reason a business is for sale is because it is not doing too well or if it is, its going to cost a lot of money. Either way, it will cost and no guarantee of success. Why don't you look at direct marketing?"

He didn't quite have the terminology right, but he did give me some criteria by which to judge such a business. I left feeling deflated, like someone just blew the wind right out of my sails. Oddly enough, several weeks later I was introduced to a business which I could work from home and it even met my accountant's criteria set. Aha! Said I to myself. This is what my accountant is talking about.

This was a business that gave me the best of both worlds: my own business without the risk of starting or owning one. I liked that it did not cost a hundred thousand, not even a thousand ... and, I thought, if this does not pan out, well I've spent more on bad dinners and clothes that didn't fit. Success was there for the grabbing and thus began a new chapter of my life: The Entrepreneur Years!

Rip Along With Me

2008-11-11T10:23:00.000-08:00

Every day the promise of fast, easy money lures people into starting a business on the Internet. Promises of big bucks and the lifestyle of the rich and famous flood the Internet. Many fall prey to this siren song of instant wealth.

You know what I mean.

Frustration and the feeling of having been taken soon set in.

But the lure is strong and somehow you feel that there's got to be a way ... I mean, look at all the gurus making truckloads of dough!

"If only I can find the silver bullet" you say to yourself. "I'm not looking to become a guru, not looking for a truckload, gosh, just a steady stream of a grand or two a month would do."

And so you can.

On this blog I will share with you my foils and foibles, my successes, the stumbling blocks along the way, the wins. There is no silver bullet --- at least I have not found one. What there is is an honest and true business that you can work from anywhere in the world, any time you want. It can pay you enormous sums of money, and it can provide you with a lifestyle that others only dream of. IT CAN. But it requires time, effort, and money.

Money?????

Yes, MONEY.

Let me explain.

Unless you are a brainiac, you need to spend some money and start with a basic course ... now if you've got lots of money, then you can leapfrog ahead of others by working one on one with one of the successful gurus. No seriously, if you have the bucks, there is no better way than pull out the plastic and taking on a mentor. Guaranteed: you will develop an income stream and it may even be a truckload or two within a year.

I did not have the big bucks. Mine is not the story of the lure of the siren song of instant riches. No, mine is a story of turning to the Internet to further my network marketing business. You see, I already had a successful network marketing business that I had built up the old traditional way. As the Internet began to gain prominence I felt that I had to turn to this method of marketing to promote my business. I became an instant freebie junkie!

I have a degree in marketing. I'm smart. How much more difficult, thought I, could it be to market on the Internet. Look at all the free information! I began to download every free e.book, subscribe to every free newsletter, attend free introductory teleclasses and webinars. I thought that I could go through the free material, pick out that which was appropriate, create a system, and voila! Quicker than you can say Bob's your uncle, I would have a system that would drive hungry schools of fish to my opportunity!

I soon came to the conclusion that if I am indeed smart, I am not smart enough to develop such a system. By now my computer was loaded with the largest e.book library (and some not so free e.books) in the world --- I know, I know, others lay claim to the same title. At least I was smart enough to realize that I needed help. Now, to be honest, there was undoubtedly some good content in all that free stuff, but most of the time I was jumping from one freebie to another and not really implementing anything at all, but more to the point, there are many freebies that I did not even open, and which to this day, remain unopened. I finally bit the bullet, scraped up enough shekels and signed up for a course!

I don't know why you decided to pursue Internet Marketing but I venture a wager that some of what I have just written rings a familiar bell for you. So join me in my venture. No promises of any sort. Along the way I have learned some basics which I will share with you. I am still learning and as I reach new gateposts, I will share those with you as well. An ocean surfer's battlecry is "Let 'er Rip" ... It should be that of an Internet Marketer as well. This is your invitation, to "Let 'er RIP ALONG WITH ME!