Within the past two months, I have really started pounding hard at some article marketing after reading the 4 Day Money Making Blueprint. After getting over my fear of writing about a subject that I’m not familiar with, I have to say that I have really enjoyed writing these articles. Getting over the research hump once I enter a niche is sometimes difficult for me, but once I do I have found that I am a lean mean article writing machine.

I’m not going to tell you my niches, but I do have to say that the two niches I have been working in so far have really helped me in my every day life. When I chose these niches, I knew one would benefit me, but the other one really surprised me once I started doing my research. Throughout the whole process in both niches I have learned tips to make me a better person and help out my husband as well, sometimes he knows I’m helping him and sometimes he doesn’t.

I just wanted to share the idea with you that while you are writing your articles for bum marketing you may learn something to help you out in your business or every day life and I think this is just a side benefit of affiliate marketing.

Originally posted 2009-09-02 21:47:43. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I love the quote that PotPieGirl promotes on the homepage of her blog:

“If you’re willing to do for a year what others won’t, you can do for a lifetime what other CAN’T!”

I like this quote because it’s inspirational and makes it think of where I would like to take my making money online efforts.

Since I started this blog a week ago, I’ve been thinking what I would like to use as a quote for myself and my blog. I tried to think of inspiring things and such, but that’s just not me. I kept on coming back to a saying that my dad always said to me growing up. It’s not inspirational, but it’s to the point and I think it really fits the making money online scene.

“Wish in one hand and poop in the other; see which one fills up faster!”

That’s my quote and I’m sticking to it.

Here’s why I think it’s fitting. Many people that are trying to make money online start out trying to find the pie in the sky, get rich overnight solution. Well, I hate to tell you this, but a solution like this doesn’t exist. You can just keep wishing for a solution like this, but you’d be better off saving your money and playing the lottery; the odds are that much against you.

So, stop wishing and start doing; odds are that your poopless hand that you wished in will start to fill up.

What have you done today to fill your wishing hand?

Originally posted 2009-05-31 15:17:00. 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

I have been in the make money online game off and on for a while now and I have seen it time and time again. A great blog comes around that is giving out excellent info to their readers about how to make money online; these people would post day in and day out trying to please the masses that have come to be their regular readers and they are different then John Chow or even the new John Cow because they truly want people to succeed. They are not blogging just collect a paycheck off of people like you and me. However, in a never to fail fashion there have to be a few bad apples that ruin it for everyone.

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

Squidoo has put the smackdown on porn and bad lenses with their recent policy update announcement. Within the next day, I started reading in several places that Squidoo has killed affiliate marketing and One Week Marketers aren’t going to be able to make the system work any more. I’m going to tell you two secrets, OWM should work better for you with their new rules and OWM can work without Squidoo.

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