8. You’re afraid. You may not know it, but you are afraid of failing. You are afraid of what others might think of you or that your family may laugh at you. You’re afraid to put yourself out there to try new things. I was afraid of writing for Ezinearticles for the longest time because of the manual review process, I didn’t want to be rejected because my writing wasn’t good enough. Once someone told me to just do it and held me accountable, I did it and realized that I had nothing to be afraid of. I now have about 85 articles at Ezine. I should have more, but I haven’t made the time to write more yet.

7. You’re desperate. When you need money now, nothing will work fast enough. Many times it takes years for a mega blog to become successful and even many of my lenses didn’t start earning me any money until they were at least 3 months old. Once you get the idea out of your head that you are going to be earning $2000 a day tomorrow, you will learn to become more patient and just keep building your empire.

6. You’re looking for a magic pill. Your desperation could lead you to jumping from blog to blog and buying ebook upon ebook leading to an extremely high credit card bill. Sit down and focus on one or two things to start. Learn everything you can about it and then keep at it. Once you’ve mastered what you’re working on, you should have enough money to expand your knowledge and earn even more money.

5. You’re not investing in your business. On the other hand, you have to run your business like it is one and sometimes you’ll find you need to spend some money. Things that come to mind which almost everyone should have would be hosting and an email list. Hosting to get you started shouldn’t cost a lot. If you are using WordPress, I recommend Page.ly, you do not need to worry about setup or maintenance on your WordPress sites. It will cost you a little more, but it’s well worth it. If you are looking for a low cost way to bust into email marketing, I recommend Mailchimp. You can get started for free and by the time you have to start paying for it,  you should be making enough to pay for it.

4. You’re over thinking things. This kind of goes along with being desperate, but when you start to over think what you are doing you will start to doubt what you are doing. Be confident and understand that you are going to learn from your mistakes. Once you get past this, you should start to see some rewards.

3. You check your emails constantly. Email is a time sink that doesn’t produce any money. Set aside time to check your email and keep it to 15 minutes or the end of your day once you are done with anything. This will keep you from feeling like you are being productive without getting anything done.

2. You’ve cut yourself off from the world. Everybody needs a break, which is why employers will often force you to take a vacation. When you are working online for yourself it’s easy to forget this. Time spent with your family or doing the things you enjoy will keep you refreshed and ready to tackle the world when you get back to your computer. You will also be surprised at how many niche ideas you can come up with when you are out and about being a real person.

1. You’ve set goals, but haven’t changed your habits. This is possibly your biggest problem. We all want to make $1000′s a month, but how are you going to get there. Think about your goals, then think about what method you are going to use to get there and then think of 2 or 3 habits that you need to change in order to start moving towards that goal. For example, this year I’ve set a goal to be making $500 per month by June. The first habit I’ll be changing is publishing one thing every day. It doesn’t matter if that thing published is a blog post, Squidoo lens, Hub, or article, I just need to do something. It takes at least 20 days to build a habit, so once I feel that this is ingrained in me, I will move on to the next habit. If I feel I’ve changed all of those habits, then I need to write down 2 or 3 more that I need to change.

One last note about changing habits, stick to only one habit at a time and don’t piggyback. What I mean is, if you’re goal is to publish one thing a day and you happen to do 7 on the first day, don’t stop for the week. This doesn’t help you change the way your mind thinks at all. If you happen to publish 7 things on day one, then you still need to publish one thing on day two and so forth. If you do everything the first day and don’t keep up with changing your habit, then by the time you get to day one of next week you will become frozen because your mind is now thinking you have to publish 7 things again.

I hope reading this post has helped you identify some things that you can do to help you along in your online business. Keep in mind that changing one thing can really make a difference, this has been one of the toughest lessons I’ve had to learn.

Do you feel that any of the things in this list are holding you back? What is it and what are you going to do to change it.

Until later,

Originally posted 2011-01-25 08:24:03. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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As you know, I have been selling on eBay since 2004. Over the years they have made many changes forcing sellers to change their business model, websites, listing template, about me pages, and many other things. Every time a change was announced I went to the Powersellers forum to see if I could find information to lead me in the right direction. All I ever found in that forum was a bunch of people complaining about the change and how it was going to kill their business. Reading information like this is like a cancer for someone just starting out online and even for someone with a lot of experience. Many times reading all of these negative posts would make me anxious and I wouldn’t do anything but the bare minimum to run my business for days or even weeks. I’m sure you can imagine how this affected me.

Even if you don’t sell physical products, you can experience this anxiety. Recently, there was the recent Squidoo announcement and now this week there was an announcement at EPN. If you use direct eBay RSS feeds on your lenses linking directly to eBay, you will no longer be able to use this method of monetization on your lenses. This is a huge blow for me because the lenses where I link directly to eBay have been my main source of affiliate income recently.

As far as I can tell, you will still be able to use the eBay module on Squidoo to link to eBay because EPN has considered them a social networking model and not a revenue sharing module. You will still lose about half of your earnings because you will have to share them with Squidoo, but it’s better than losing a whole revenue source.

I am currently working on another option for those looking to build their own site, but still have eBay RSS feeds available on their Squidoo lenses. It will take a little front end setup, but you will be on your way to building your own website where you will own your own content.  I will be posting more on this method later this week once I am sure any bugs are worked out.

Meanwhile, I’d like to advise you not to freak out and keep working on your campaigns or making changes to keep you in compliance with all of the changes we’ve had to keep up with on Squidoo and other sites recently. Stay away from forum posts where there is a lot of negative energy because you will catch this bad energy. If you feel yourself getting anxious, just go do something else for the time being to get your mind off of things then come back to the computer once your mind has cleared.

I’d like to wish all of you a successful week.

Originally posted 2009-07-19 11:59:40. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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See more at I Can Has Cheezburger

If you are just starting out on your journey of learning to make money online, then you may have been reading a lot about the term affiliate marketing. On many of the websites and in the ebooks that I have read, the writer just assumes that you know what affiliate marketing is. Since this important definition is left out of the equation most of the time, my intention here is to give you a simple definition to help keep things straight for you.

In the simplest terms, affiliate marketing is earning money by referring your visitors to another website where the visitor performs some sort of action. Many times the intended action is a purchase, but it could also be filling out a form, entering an email address, or even clicking on a link.

Once your visitor performs the desired action, then you will be paid. How you are paid depends upon the terms of the affiliate website. Some sites require you to have a certain threshold of money built up in your account before they will send you a check. Other sites may pay you instantly into your Paypal account if it is set up with a program like the $7 script.

So, now that I have defined affiliate marketing for you, I hope you can assume that the affiliate in the whole equation is possibly you. The only way you can become an affiliate though, is to take action. Start building web properties and help people find the products and information they are looking for. There is not a short cut around this and you have to take action to get started.

Did I leave anything out of my simple definition? Do you have any other questions? Please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Until later,

Originally posted 2010-06-12 20:06:51. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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The other night I found myself having an occurance of IMADD when I found myself researching a PPC technique that I had learned about on Wealthy Affiliate. When I really started working at WA I had decided that I cannot afford PPC at this point in time so I was going to work on some article and bum marketing to get some cash flow going. This weekend I found myself in a little dip because some of the Squidoo lenses that I had built were not indexed yet and I found myself looking for a way to make money faster. I spent a lot of valuable time that I could have used writing articles or building lenses and in the end I only landed up with two small PPC campaigns out of 5 hours of time.

I’m still a little slow at article writing, but I could have written at least 3 original articles during this period of time and had a good start on a new lens expanding on my current series. At the end of the day when I was wondering where my time went I realized that I had suffered from another bout of IMADD and vowed that I would be getting back on track this week.

The only real cure for IMADD is success, but realizing the symptoms when they start will save you a lot of money in the long run. I was lucky this time because the report I was reading was already part of my Wealthy Affiliate membership fee so I didn’t spend anything extra learning about this particular PPC method.

My next post will be a list of all of the symptoms that pop up when I see internet marketing ADD start, but I’d like to hear about your struggles and successes with overcoming IMADD.

Originally posted 2009-06-24 06:46:04. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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What the owners of this site have done is take the best of Hubpages and the best of Squidoo and combined them all together to make this new site. Since I’m always looking for new places to write, I immediately signed up for this new site.

My first take on the site was that it looked eerily similar to Hubpages. The workshop is almost exactly the same except for the addition of a couple of very welcome income module additions.

Below is the text editing box that is used at Wizzley, see what I mean about it being similar to Hubpages? I really like this because I don’t have to learn how to use yet another site to start publishing right away.

To the right is a screenshot of the module picker, module organizer, and the Thumbnail uploader that is used for adding what is the equivalent to the “Lens intro picture” on Squidoo. I think the best part of the entire experience of building my first page at Wizzley, was the ease of moving modules around. You see, you can move the modules around and hit the save button, allowing you to save the order of the modules very easily. This was always a problem that I had with Hubpages; I didn’t like to drag my mouse all the way to the top of the page in order to move them around. I did learn after working with Wizzley that this is possible on Hubs as well, but it was a lot more obvious to me over at Wizzley.

Hubpages and Squidoo have both been around for a very long time, the best thing about Wizzley is they will be able to learn from the mistakes made at both sites. They already have a “trusted user” status that you can achieve by publishing 5 good pages. With the trusted status, the links in your pages on Wizzley will become “do follow” and I”m sure that is a big part of the reason you are considering writing there. I realize that right now the site is small, but they are hand reviewing every page that is written and ChefKeem has already written a post in the forum that spam and copied crap will not be tolerated. The authors of the crap they found were told to either shape up or get out. Since they were trying to take the easy way out, my guess is they “got out”.

While I don’t advocate using free sites as your only source of income, they do make great supplemental income to add to the money your main sites are bringing in. For example, I have decided to write some supplemental pages about shoes that I found to match the Miche Bags that I’ve been reviewing. It’s these types of pages that I’ll be writing at Wizzley, Squidoo, and Hubpages from now on. Will that change in a couple of months, maybe, since I seem to change with the wind and my IMADD.

No matter which way you decide to use free content sites, you should at least register at Wizzley to protect your online identity, especially if you have a following online that knows you by your online identity.

Originally posted 2011-06-02 06:21:43. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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It took me about 6 months of resiting before I signed up for Wealthy Affiliate and then I paid for it another couple of months before I really started visiting the site and forum regularly. Looking back, I have to wonder what the heck I was smoking because it’s the best money that I’ve ever spent. Other forums that I have belonged to were either too difficult to get an answer out of or they treated you like a total “noob” for asking such a silly question. This meant that I didn’t participate and wasted my money.

Just the other day I was in the forum talking about my fear of writing an Ezinearticle and someone popped in like a teacher giving me homework, expecting me to have an article submitted to Ezine the very next day. This hit just the right button for me because the “employee” in me is so used to having to answer to someone. I went right out, wrote that article and submitted it, no questions asked. Any other forum that I’ve been a member of would have either chastised me or ignored me.

So, more about this $1 trial. You get full access to all of the tools that are available to regular members which means the forum, link tracking tools, article spinner, keyword research, uploaded tutorials that other members have submitted, and Niche Q. Niche Q is actually the reason that I finally signed up, each month there is access to a fully researched niche with articles, emails, landing pages and more. I have been so busy with other things that I haven’t even had a chance to get into any of these niches yet. The research that goes into these niches is extremely thorough and you will have access one of your choice with your trial membership. The info you are given can be downloaded to your hard drive, so even if you choose to cancel before your 7 days is up, you will still have this valuable information which is definitely worth the $1 you’ll be spending on the trial. I have signed up for similar trials in the past for more than $1 and I didn’t even get access to the forums, so I felt like I couldn’t make an informed decision and I canceled.

If you think Wealthy Affiliate is a ripoff once you have tried it, then all you have to do is cancel. Feel free to come back and leave a comment here telling me how dumb I am as well. If you don’t want to miss June 1st for this $1 trial, then visit Wealthy Affiliate and sign up for the free report, I hope you will be happy that you did.

Originally posted 2009-05-25 13:34:22. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Now I know what you are saying, “I have published my first page, but I have no traffic”. This is where you must decide what you are going to do next. Do you start building links or do you move on to the next subject? I don’t really care what you do, just DO something. If you don’t feel like building links right now, then move on to your next page; getting links is tedious and boring so I understand why you don’t want to do it, but avoid the pitfall of languishing and checking your stats ever 5 minutes just to see if someone visited your page. Your stats aren’t going anywhere and this is not a profitable activity.

On the other hand, if writing a new page or article is causing you some anxiety than go and get some backlinks for a day or two in order to give your mind a break and get your muse back. Do not fall into a pitfall of getting links to just one page for the next month though; at some point in time you will need to publish another page.

Momentum is the key and if you enjoy writing your pages, just keep going with that. Then when the writing muse has left you, go out and get some links to your pages. Of course, you may need to write some articles to get those links, but that’s fine, by now you’ve had a lot of practice and you should be able to whip out an article pointing to your page in no time.

If you are having troubles finding subjects for your pages, please visit my last post about finding profitable niches. Another idea that I use which is not covered there is I plug in one of my favorite things into Micro Niche Finder and see what comes up. This way I’m writing about a familiar subject which makes my life a whole lot easier.

I hope this post helps you out a little bit, if you have any further questions, please post them in the comments below.

Until later,

Originally posted 2011-01-14 08:26:31. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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One blog that particularly comes to mind is Vic’s internet marketing blog at Blogger Unleashed. Vic would post almost everyday with a great tip about how to make money online and truly cared that people make it. One day Vic didn’t post and someone got pissed about it. Come on people, he was giving you his secrets for free and you were getting pissed about him not posting. This truly hurt him which is why he took his teachings to a private forum at The Affiliate Academy. Unfortunately, I had to move on from his private forum, but I really did learn a lot from him and I really do appreciate it. The story I just told is just the tip of the iceberg, the whole situation really stressed Vic out and eventually made him very sick.

If you can’t tell by now what I’m getting at then I’ll just spell it out for you. The main reason that a lot of the good info about how to make money online is charged for is the people giving out the information are not appreciated when they give out their secrets for free. The other main reason is to weed out the people that are just looking for a free ride or think that they are can just put a website up and bing they are rich. If you are willing to pay $29 for an ebook or $39 per month for a membership site, then you must be somewhat serious about starting an online business.

It saddens me to say that charging for information does not weed out all of those that are looking for a free ride to working at home; these are the people that will shell out their money and two days after finishing the book or reading through a membership forum they are yelling scam because they don’t have $5,000 in their bank account yet. If you are one of these people that thinks this way, please just keep working your 9-5 job everyday and don’t even try to get your online business started.

While it is true that a lot of the information about how to make money online is available on blogs and websites for free, it will take you a lot of time to gather all of this information together and then make any sense of it to put it to good use. So if you truly believe that a membership or ebook will help you, then by all means spend the money on it, but I beg you to put the information to good use to make sure you are not throwing your money out the window.

This is just a little rant that I’ve been meaning to write about for a really long time now.

Originally posted 2009-09-20 18:42:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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The dying off of traffic and the Google changes have really hit me hard. I was on a role of publishing a new lens or hub every 2 days (almost to my goal of 1 a day), but then this change came along and really made me start to rethink everything. When this happens, I become almost frozen, not doing a darn thing online or even at home because I have once again taken a hit in traffic which turns into a hit on my income.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me. Remember when eBay went from a per sale payout to a pay-per-click payout? That change really hit me hard because along with that change came a rule that you cannot use EPN affiliate links on a site that you do not own. I had to change about 30 lenses that were using EPN links from my own to Squidoo’s. My income took a dip by a ton. Once again, I was frozen not wanting to publish anything because my world was upside down.

My whole point of this is change happens fast in the affiliate marketing business and you need to be able to deal with change in order to be successful. If you can’t deal with change, then you should find a different way to build your online income.

I have started to add more content to the lenses that have taken a hit. This whole task is really daunting, I have 157 lenses and at least half of them need some editing to bring them up to par. This daunting task is what has frozen me which is why I needed to come up with a new action plan. I am more productive when I’m producing new content and then the editing comes easier, so what I’m going to do is get back on task to building a new page every day and then once I’m done, I’ll move on to editing my old content. I will also start to look for new opportunities to build my own websites because relying on what someone else owns is not a good idea.

Have you ever had a problem dealing with change in AM? How did you handle it? I’d like to know.

Until later,

Originally posted 2011-03-18 06:55:29. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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In case you are skeptical, I will not be charging anything for the setup services, as long as you sign up through one of the links offered on the page and then let me know that you did this through my contact form. I will make money as a commission from your monthly hosting fees, but I will never ask you for anything to set your site up.

As of today I have added Wealthy Affiliate as an option for my services. In case you didn’t know, WA offers hosting with their monthly fee and if you are a member, to not take advantage of the hosting services offered is just crazy since you are paying for it.

That’s all I have for now, I’ve been pretty busy working on a couple of projects, but I will make sure to post when I think of some other worthwhile subjects.

Until later,

Originally posted 2009-08-22 12:28:56. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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