This blog is all about saving you money as you work towards making money online and that’s why I want to tell you about a special offer that’s coming up which as never been done before. Between June 1st and June 8th, you can get full access to WA for 7 days at a low price of $1. I so want to get salesy here and say “That’s right, $1 folks”, but I’ll resist. You see Wealthy Affiliate is one of only 3 investments that I’ve made in my affiliate marketing business which I have found value in.

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

I originally started Da Money Page back in 1999 and it went dead around 2001. As you can see from the picture it was not a pretty website, but I taught myself HTML so I could learn how to get my site live. Just getting the pages done was an accomplishment that I don’t give myself enough credit for; probably because it ended in a dead end at the time like many of the things I start and never finish. I should look at that site as the beginning and not a dead end. As I was writing about my make money online past and present on Squidoo last week, I came up with a brilliant idea to revive this site.

I often wonder what would have happened if I had just stuck with things 8 years ago and stayed the course, but dwelling on the past will not get me to where I want to be in the future and I hope you are starting to think the same way.

Since 2001, I have strayed along the way with many “get rich quick” schemes and sites, but it seemed that I just never got the hint, “nothing worth doing comes easy or cheap”. If you take anything away from this site, I hope you learn this lesson because it will save you a lot of money.

I am just a normal person like you and I do not make enough online to call affiliate marketing my career yet, but I am finally serious about putting the time and effort in to make this work. I hope you’ll join me and learn something along the way.

Originally posted 2009-05-25 06:14:46. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I haven’t been promoting my free wordpress setup service as much as I should be, but the good news is, I am working on adding more hosting options for our free Wordpress setup services. I know that when you are looking for your Wordpress hosting, you may already have your heart set on a certain webhost that has caught your eye. This is the reason that we are expanding the options that we are offering.

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

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

If you want to be successful with your online business, you must be able to adapt. If you are not able to adapt, your business will die. I can understand the fear that many people go through when things change because I have been there.

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