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

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

I no longer make New Year’s Resolutions because in the past I have always failed and I feel that making a resolution is only setting myself up for failure. Looking back at 2009, the whole year was a setup for failure brought on by myself and myself alone.

I allowed my video gaming core business to go by the wayside and fall to the back burner because I decided that I wanted to start building websites and web properties for affiliate marketing purposes instead. This was all well and good, but I didn’t have focus for anything I was working on. I started feeling the pressure of having way too many domains and not having any developed, then I would get another case of IMADD and I started article marketing. Moving into these directions wasn’t a bad thing, but I failed to focus on selling down the inventory I have in our storage room which is like money sitting right in the bank.

I don’t know about you, but when I get way too overwhelmed with my own projects, I totally shut down. Then I don’t do anything. Add on top of this all of the changes that eBay made along with the FTC regulations and for a while I was just a total lump on a log when I got home from work. I have to say that this is not the way to make money online successfully and move towards my ultimate goal of being able to afford to quit my day job.

2010 brought in the start of a new decade and a new beginning for me. I’m not resolving to do anything different, but I can already tell that I have a new found life for my online business. My new life has come with my new interim goals that I have set for myself. I subscribe to a few blogs and they have talked about huge goals that they have set for themselves, but these huge goals don’t always work for everyone. Now let me explain for myself.

I set a goal at the beginning of 2009 to eventually be making $100,000 a year. That’s a great goal, but when you are in the hole, it is very difficult to imagine that. I still have this ultimate goal, but I have also set an interim goal of getting at least one credit card paid off this year with my income from internet marketing. I have the tools in place and I know what I should be doing, but now I just need to suck it up and do it. If I get the tools in place for this first goal, I will be well on my way to making it to my ultimate goal where I really want to be.

So, what am I really changing for 2010? Nothing and everything. The biggest change I will be making is to finish the projects that I start. No longer will I be littering the internet with the waste of my failed projects. Doing this along should get me well on my way to my goal. In fact, I am almost finished with my first project; I will be posting details here once everything is up and running.

Until later,

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