I don’t have a problem with people using automated software to build their business, but I really do believe that automatic commenting really is dead. I can’t even believe that this method is still alive considering how good the spam filters are now a days.

Back to the point of this short post, many of these comments truly are very nice and I’d like to thank all of you spammers for saying such nice things about by blog. Your comments still aren’t going to get approved, but I really appreciate the boost to my ego.

Until later,

Originally posted 2010-07-04 20:59:27. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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The timing could not have been better for this theme as I finally got around to setting up one of my favorite affiliate site ideas yet, that is Miche Bag Reviews. I’m confident exposing this site because it is a niche that is a personal passion of mine and I don’t think anyone would be able to match that, even if they decide to get into this niche.

Anyways, back to my review of the In Review theme. Just as all of the other themes from Elegant Themes go, this theme was simple to install and use. I prefer to upload all of my themes through FTP, so that’s how I installed it. I don’t know about you, but whenever I try to upload a theme or a plugin from my hard drive, I seem to run into problems.

Once uploaded, I had to change the logo on the theme for the header, I just used their blank template and typed in the name of my site using Gimp.

Then I went an updated my options through ePanel which I’ve shown here. Through the ePanel, you can pick and choose which pages are shown in the main menu of the site. You can also add Adsense code which would be shown on each page. Instead of using Adsense code, I decided to add a banner into this slot instead. It shows up right above the comments at the end of each post.

I also changed the navigation menu in ePanel to not show any of the categories in the navigation bar. I did this because I was getting duplicate navigation bars at the top of the blog and it looked real silly. One thing I could do is show my pages in the nav bar at the top of the blog and not show any categories, but for right now, I’m real happy with how things have turned out. Epanel is also where you would change the main color of your blog if you’re interested in that as well.

One thing I would like to point out if you are planning on using this theme, is you will need to add a thumbnail to every post in order to use the Timthumb script which is integrated right into the theme. This is real easy, all you have to do is add a custom field called “Thumbnail” at the end of your post, then enter the URL of your picture. If you choose not to use the thumbnail option, then this part is not necessary. Just like all of their other themes, this one is very well documented and I highly recommend reading through the help docs before getting too far into using this theme. They were very helpful for me. Otherwise, the forums at Elegant Themes are a great way to get answers to your questions as well, I have found it extremely helpful.

If you can’t guess, I would give the In Review Theme 5 stars if I was using it here at this blog. It is an excellent way to set up a review site if it’s in your plans for the future. AQ2BYRK9E73X

Originally posted 2011-05-14 14:45:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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I’m not going to rehash what they wrote, you can read more about the Blogpress SEO plugin scam at their blog.

If you are using WordPress, make sure you disable and delete this plugin right away and follow the instructions given to you at their website. Keeping WordPress secure is difficult enough, we don’t need to be letting the hackers in voluntarily.

That’s all I have for today, but I should have a lot more good stuff coming in the near future.

Until later,

Originally posted 2010-11-13 15:32:31. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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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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First of all, I’d like to state that the owners of Squidoo are just protecting their site and it’s value. They have seen the effects that bad writing has had on its site and realized that they can no long sit back and defend the junk lenses. This was kind of what I was getting at in my recent post about the difference between spam and poor or promotional writing, many times the two were getting confused and people were calling the junk spam and vice versa. What Squidoo no longer wants on their site are pure copies of sales pages for products or lenses that link to the same site 800 times within a lens as well as lenses on some certain subjects which I’m not going to go into detail about here. Visit the Squidoo policy update lens if you’d like to read more about what will or won’t be allowed.

When Potpiegirl wrote One Week Marketing, I’m pretty sure her intentions weren’t for people to go out and create a bunch of cookie cutter lenses with the same content that were overly promotional. She never did say if you don’t know something about a subject, just copy and paste it from somewhere else or go and get some PLR and reuse it directly on a lens. If you are building lenses with useful content written with your own voice, then you should be fine under the new rules. This is where their policies should help you; Squidoo killing off some of the junk lenses should make their site more valuable in Google’s eyes which will hopefully make it easier for your lens to be indexed. I don’t know about you, but I have been having a hell of a time getting a new lens indexed lately and my opinion is this policy update should help this problem. Of course, I could be totally wrong here too.

If you don’t think you can write your own useful content, then cut Squidoo out of the picture all together and find another free site you can use in its place, keeping all of the other steps the same. Build a blog on Blogger or sign up with Weebly. If you’re not comfortable writing good content, say away from Hub Pages, you will be eaten alive there. The best ideas are either build your own site on  your own webhosting service or learn to write. I know the idea behind OWM is making money online using free services, but the other idea behind it is to work towards owning your own sites; build your own site like you would build your lenses and then use the OWM techniques to drive traffic to your own site. Sorry if I sound a little harsh, but there is no quick way to making money online and you need learn to evolve or you will always be dreaming instead of doing.

Are you going to have to change the way you do things because of Squidoo’s new rules?

Originally posted 2009-06-19 07:08:06. 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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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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I would recommend going the article marketing route to start getting some cash flow in and to start learning how keywords and Google work together, but if you have a little bit of bankroll and time for research, then getting started with Pay-per-click affiliate marketing may be right for you.

Whatever you do, please don’t just dive into Adwords thinking you have it all figured out right away, you will need some help first so you don’t make the same mistake that I did. You will need as much help as you can get for the money and I found a way that you can get Beating Adwords for only $39 when it usually retails for $77.

What you will want to do is try out Wealthy Affiliate for just one month at their monthly rate of $39 and you will be able to download Beating Adwords for free. Not only will you be receiving a great guide about PPC affiliate marketing, but you will have a whole month of support where you can have your questions answered without being laughed at or feeling like a fool for not knowing something. You will also have saved yourself $38 which would be only $1 shy of another one month membership fee at Wealthy Affiliate.

Before you go out and buy another make money online course, I would really like you to consider this route. I do not want to see you throw any more money down the drain at false promises and hopes.

Until later.

Originally posted 2009-07-17 07:16:39. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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1. You own 50 domains that you have purchased on a whim. Only 6 of them are being used for anything.

2.  Your hard drive is littered with software that you just had to have because someone told you that it was needed.

3. You have 10 charges from “CLKBANK” on your credit card every month from all of the new latest and greatest making money online programs from the month.

4. Google sends you a thank you card every month for spending so much money with them.

5. You have 10 article drafts started, but you just can’t figure out how to finish them.

6. You have 10 Squidoo lenses in Work In Process because they were great ideas at the time, but you haven’t finished them. I am so guilty of this.

7. You’ve signed up for so many social bookmarking sites, you can’t remember the passwords.

If this sounds like you, decide what you are really going to focus on and just do it.

Once again, please have a safe 4th of July. While you’re spending time with friends and family, think like a marketer and you will more than likely have a great idea for the next niche you’d like to work on.

Originally posted 2009-07-03 18:21:41. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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The last time I posted the IM world was buzzing with eBay confirming that we would no longer be able to post eBay affiliate links on sites not owned by us. This news was announced in May, but I think many of us were taking a “wait and see” approach to see if Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages, and other similar sites would be included. Unfortunately, this was confirmed and many of us were left scrambling to get our eBay RSS feeds and links changed on many Lenses, Hubs, and blogs.

I had been trying to work out a way to use WordPress and some plugins to offer feeds from a site that I owned to use on my Squidoo lenses. I found a way that worked in theory, but I found myself editing the feed.php file as well as adding many other things to the core code of WordPress. I don’t mind doing this, but remembering what I added manually to the code is always a project for me when it comes to upgrading and then things tend to break which isn’t good.

In the end, the idea is working and I am using some of these feeds from a site that I own to power the RSS feeds offered on Squidoo, but everytime I pull from eBay to my WordPress site it is counting as a click which I’m sure eBay won’t be happy with. What I really need is to develop a plugin to do this or suck it up and buy PHPBay, but both of these are out of the question right now as my time and funds are limited. I will be adding something like this to my list of future projects though because it would be a great learning experience for me.

After I realized what was happening with the feeds I was using, I finally just went back to basics and started using the eBay Squidoo module that is offered for lenses. It’s not the best way to go as far as my affiliate revenue goes, but I’ll just have to build more similar lenses to make up for the difference. Besides, using my method will also cause more problems in the near future with a bloated database forming as well as a huge cache that I’ll have set up a cron job to empty automatically. My method would have also possibly caused some server overload if I had continued to use it for every lens that I had built.

In the end the best way for me to change all of my eBay links on Squidoo was to just get back to basics and use the Squidoo eBay module provided. Not that I worry a ton about lensrank, but my lenses will benefit from using the Squidoo eBay module because the clickouts and purchases will be registered through Squidoo and my lensrank on these lenses should get a boost over time. This is probably my way of putting a positive spin on something that could be a negative which my friends tell me is one of my best qualities.

Did you use a different method for your lenses and sites? If you feel comfortable enough, please share it here.

Originally posted 2009-08-05 11:28:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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