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If you had to choose between blogging for fame or blogging for money, which would it be?

I assume you are reading this blog because you are looking for ways to make money online, so I believe this is really a question you should think about.

Many people starting a blog with in the back of their head the idea of making money with it equal running a big blog with 1000 of readers with making money and when they see the big A-list bloggers with their enormous amount of readers, they try copying whatever they do, following all their advice and buying all the “must-have-tools” they talk about.

Now you might think, sure, that is the way to make money, but let’s face it, the MMO business is well saturated and the only people making real money on yet another MMO e-book, are the big A-list bloggers who get first shot at promoting yet another tool you can’t live without.

It almost looks like a group of sheep following their leader to the slaughter, not thinking about what they should really do to get to the nice green lush paddock.

Meanwhile, their so-called leader stays out on the pasture, creating an even better field for themselves.

Anyways, before I go off on a rant, let’s go back to the initial question. Is it fame you are after, having a pretty cool designed blog, spending hours, days or even weeks on tweaking and thinking about your next step or is it money you are after?

If it is the fame you want, please leave now, because you won’t find how to become famous in my blog.

If it is money you are after though, you might want to start thinking about what things are really important to do.

First and most important is to take real steps towards creating a business and treat it as such. Playtime is officially over for you. Fooling around online is too. Finished, finito, say bye bye to long hours online, reading blogs, communicating with others and playing nice, checking email and stats a zillion times a day and the list goes on.

First step:
Create Content for your website
Second step:
Create even more content for your website
Third step:
Create yet another bunch of content to submit to article directories, creating links
Fourth step:
Repeat step 1 to 3
Fifth step:
Submit to directories, creating links
Sixth step:
Submit to social book marking sites, creating links
Seventh step:
Go back to step 1 to 6

To sum it up so you won’t forget:
Create content and loads of it, than work on getting organic traffic.

You may get famous anyways someday, but focus on getting money in your pocket first!

When I first started writing this post, I had signed up for a lot of “Get Paid To” programs, thinking it would be the answer to my financial trouble. I mean, what would be easier than getting paid for giving my opinion, or write a simple review on some product, read some emails etc.

I had even prepared a nice little list for you guys of all the different options out there, giving my opinion on all the different companies that pay you to do a certain task, thinking that maybe I could get a few bucks out of the deal as well if I could persuade enough people to sign up for free.

I never finished the post, and even if I would have, I am sure I would have had it deleted by now, because I would not want to sucker you into trying something out that is a complete waste of time.

You have heard it right, I believe all those “Get Paid To” programs are a total and utter waste of time. Some of you might jump up now and say that I am crazy because they themselves are making a few bucks filling in surveys or reading emails, but let’s be honest here, do the math, calculate how much time you would spend to earn a few bucks and then think about whether your time really is that cheap.

Most programs are scams anyways, never allowing you to reach the minimum payout so you waste your time, and have others make money off of you, without ever seeing a dime.

If that does not sound bad enough already, there are two other more important reasons why I would never ever again sign up for a Get Paid To program and I would really want you to think about the following:

1. The whole reason I went into making money online, was to be able to start working less in the future, while my earnings would go up, instead of trading my time for money and therefore never achieve financial freedom, selling myself short and devaluating my time. I want to make sure I am actually creating a strong foundation I can keep improving and amplifying.
2. The whole Get Paid to Review deal is going to be detrimental to your website in the long run. Cool, you might be making a few bucks here and there, but what you are doing is selling links, or in other words, selling page rank, having to post several links to whomever is paying you to do a review. In the long run you will get penalized for doing so by the search engines, and thus breaking down the importance of your own website.

This last point can’t be stressed enough in my opinion, because many people just don’t seem to get it, until they actually get penalized. If you are running a blog with low PR you won´t land any big orders of writing reviews because the companies really aren’t after the quick buzz a review might give them, they are after high quality links, even dictating how they want to be linked to.

Now, you might want to argue with me on this point, saying there are blogs out there showing that they actually receive hundreds of dollars for a review, but I predict this amount will soon go down. The ones that have made big money doing paid reviews, have gotten in at the right time, before penalization became a big issue and they were slapped by google last year.

So, if you are thinking about making serious money with your website, you might want to reconsider just how you plan on doing it. Just make sure you don´t get paid to trade your time for money,  nor get paid to kill your own pagerank!

There are a lot of people in the blogosphere who want you to believe that it is almost impossible to make money from a blog, probably because they aren’t making hardly any money at all.

I am here to tell you though that it is possible and that in fact, it isn’t even that hard.

I would also say that it is possible for anyone to make money from a blog (I have seen people from many countries, of most ages - from children to elderly people - male and female, able bodied to people with a variety of physical hardships and people of different education and social levels make a go of blogging for an income).

It is very well possible but the reality is that most who try don’t make a lot of money.

The reasons why many who try don´t make much money blogging are many but here are 10 reasons that come to mind:

1. Not enough time - it is hard work and takes time on an ongoing (daily ideally) basis.
2. Giving Up too quickly - most successful blogs don’t hit their strides till they are at least 12 months old, but that does not mean your blog can´t make money starting the first month.
3. Non commercial Topic - some topics are easier than others to find significant income streams for.
4. Lack of writing skills - like it or not, blogging is a written form and unless you are able to write (or rewrite, or pay others to write for you) you’ll almost always struggle.
5. Breaking the Rules - some bloggers get greedy and break the rules, either of the ad programs they use or the unwritten rules of blogging.
6. Distractions for the core functions of a blog - many get caught up in one of the many distractions that challenge bloggers and forget to concentrate on their actual writing of quality content.
7. Unluckiness - sometimes a blog´s success hinges on a lucky moment - miss it or fail to take the opportunities that come and you might miss significant rewards.
8. Taking Readers for Granted - I have seen a couple of blogs over the last year or so that fell over because the blogger became so self absorbed that they forgot that a blog rises and falls upon whether it´s  readers find the blog useful to them.
9. Spreading yourself too thinly - many bloggers have the gift of being visionaries (a good thing) but fail to have the gift of realism. The result is that many start things that they have no way of seeing through or spread themselves across too many projects too quickly and by doing this, ensuring themselves of failure.
10. Lack of Focus - hyperactive bloggers who flit from one unfinished project or idea to another without seeing anything through tend to fail to build sustainable blogs.

Even as I write this list I realize that some of the above factors (and others that continue to come to mind even now) are within the blogger´s  grasp and some are not. Like any business there are both internal and external threats and risks - blogging for money is no different.

So let´s face it, anyone can make money through blogging. Fact remains that only a few actually do, because they are the ones determined to make it work and don´t mind putting in the elbowgrease it takes to build links and content continuosly.

One of the most powerful ways of promoting your site is article distribution. The most popular type of articles is the informative article. People are always looking to learn, finding interesting articles to read and grow in their knowledge, so that is certainly a type of article you should look into writing. Another type of article is of course the product review.

More and more people use Internet to get information about products they think about buying and before they do so, they are looking for reviews to make a better informed decision.

Apart from writing articles to become content on your website, you should also start thinking about submitting them to article directories, thus establishing yourself as an expert in your field, sending direct traffic to your site, but more importantly, create a huge amount of back links leading to your website.

Submitting your freshly written article to different directories can be done manually, but this is quite a tedious process, locating all different libraries and directories online, than having to go to each separate site and submit your article.

Now, I know that is the free way, but man, it is very time consuming!

In order to speed up the whole process there are a few things you can do.

There is of course the possibility of using software, however this can be a little limited, especially if it means that you would still have to go to every directory to submit your article.

I have tried a few different programs for this, but in the end they did not really do what I was looking for, so I kept looking for another solution to speed up this tedious process and get the most profit out of the time I was dedicating to article submission.

First, before submitting articles, make sure you have all information handy and write a good bio box with up to 3 links going straight to your site.

Then use an online article submission service, like for example Article Marketer. I started using their free service that submits articles to some 30 directories automatically, to check out how it is working for me, and soon decided to sign up for their paid version, after doing the math.

The paid version will actually create around at least 100 links per article you submit within a few weeks, but that number can go way up to thousands of links, since your article will be signed up at hundreds of directories. Now, you must be aware that not all directories will accept your article, that part depends on the actual quality of your article.

I consider article submission to be the secret behind marketing success many people are looking for. So, you might ask, why is it so important to use article submission?
1. It will establish you as an expert in your field, which in turn will gain the trust and credibility you need to reach more sales.
2. It will create back links, and lots of them, which will increase your page rank with google and therefore give you a better position in it’s search engine
3. It will bring people to your website through the links

As you see, there is no way around doing the work if you really want to make money online, you will have to produce articles with an ongoing rhythm.

You can write them yourself or use articles somebody else has written for you, the choice is of course up to you, but realize that time is money and you better make the best use of your time.

I decided to go the road of PLR articles and combine it with a good affiliate company like Moreniche. Moreniche offers free content for you to use and promote their products, so they take away the time-consuming part of researching and writing articles, all you need to do is re-write them and spin them to personal taste and you are off!

Cool thing is of course their free added service and their $45 sign up bonus, offering all the tools you need to become a successful marketer, and help you improve your business.

Are you spending hours submitting your website to directories? Or maybe I should better ask, have you ever submitted your website to directories at all?

If you are serious about making a success of your website, you should probably spend around 10% creating new content, up to 10% replying to emails etc and at least 80% building links and generating traffic.

Now, most people have no problems at all with the first 2 big tasks I mentioned, but they will kind of “forget” about the most important thing that will be the difference between success and failure.

Link building …. I can’t seem to say it enough, because it has taken me too long to understand just how important this step is.

If your website does not attract organic traffic through search engines, you might make a few bucks but you will never make it into the bigger league unless you spend a fortune on ad words or other forms of paid advertisement.

The higher the link popularity of your website, the higher your Google PR will be and the better you will be positioned in search engines.

The higher you are positioned, the more people will actually visit your website and the more possibility you will have to make sales.

Now, back to the initial question… are you still submitting to directories manually, locating them and then filling out the submission form over and over again?

I used to up to a few months ago when I finally switched over to software designed to take a lot of tedious tasks of my hands and I have to say, If I had known back when I first started working online about the ease of use and hours I save using this software, it would have been on my list of first and most important things to buy for my business.

I thought I could beat the odds with a lot of hard work and dedication, never giving up because I just knew I could do it. I even thought these software promotions were just another trick to get their hands on my money, but boy, was I wrong!

I got a piece of software to start submitting my website to directories and started noticing an increase in popularity on of the websites I have used the software for.

I looked at a few different versions, since there are many out there, trying the free demo first to see if I could work out how they were running, and I am so glad that I took this step.

Gone are the days of going to each directory, filling in the complete forms and submitting to each and every on, getting bored out of my head and giving up.

Now, I won’t fool you, you will have to do some work, you will have to actually use the software for it to bring you results, but you can speed up this whole tedious process at least 100 times if not more.

The directory submission software that I use will give you access to over 2700 directories, at least 50% with a page rank between PR4 and PR7 without having to give reciprocal links.

So in fact you are getting hundreds and hundreds of high PR one-way links without spilling any link juice from your site.

Plus, you can submit all the sites you are running using different profiles, so you can schedule your directory submitting time. And another plus with the software I am using is that you will get a lifetime of free updates, being able to update your own database of directories with just a click of the button so in the future you will not run out of directories to submit to.

I had to adapt the way I was working in order to build a real business, so I have set a daily schedule of websites to submit, building the links to all different websites gradually and naturally so search engines won’t kick my out of the system for receiving too many links in a too short of time.

The best thing though is that I have cut down the time I was wasting, getting better results and return on the time spent.

Remember, the key to online success is the ability to dedicate your time to the right tasks, without wasting your time on things that won’t give any return.

Continuously Creating Content plus Keeping up with Building Links is the Secret!

I love affiliate marketing ever since I first started learning about it years ago, but I must admit it has been a hard learning curve to get where I am at today. After having bought many e-books thinking that was the way to learn how to become a successful affiliate marketer, I was very close to giving up.

You could very well say I was on complete information overload and as a result I started to become paralyzed, thinking there was a secret nobody really wanted to share, and that maybe this business was not right for me.

However, I hung in there, I kept trying different methods and things slowly started to pick up, but still the return I got for the time I was putting in was well below the minimum hourly wage.

I decided I had to take a closer look at what I was really spending my time on, and what things I should dedicate to more, cutting out on time wasting programs and tasks I was doing everyday.

I finally grew wise and started to treat my job as a real business.

Instead of dedicating a lot of hours to submitting manually to different directories to get my website out there online, I decided I had to automate several tasks so I could start working faster. Because sincerely, spending a whole day submitting to directories manually really is not the most things to do, and many people soon give up, getting completely bored when they don’t see fast results.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons so many people fail in affiliate marketing and give up without even giving themselves a real shot at the bigger money, without even realizing it!

You have to automate as many daily task possible so you can work faster and more dedicated, getting more links to your site and more authority in the search engines. I am referring here especially to directory submission and article directory submission.

Did you know there is software available that will let you submit to hundreds if not thousands of directories without having to fill in all the details of your website over and over again?

I will tell you more about the software I am now using in a future post, because I want to stress another mistake many people make when trying to make a buck online.

Not treating this as a business creates another mistake many make when first coming to affiliate marketing, which is not having their own websites. Nowadays getting your own website is fairly cheap and you should look at it as the foundation of your business. Owning your own domain has many advantages over free websites, since you will always have all control plus you can eventually sell your domain if you choose not to renew it anymore.

Investing in domains and websites, amplifying your portfolio is never money thrown away. Even if you hardly do anything with your domain, when it starts aging, its value go up because search engines prefer aged domains to new ones. Think about that!

And then the third biggest mistake too many affiliates make is that they try cold selling without preparing their visitor. When I say preparing, I mean to say that many try themselves selling the product they are marketing so when they do achieve sending their hard earned traffic off to the final product page, the visitor will feel like something is being sold again to them and will run away instead of actually going through with the sale.

If you want to become a success, treat your work as a real Business!

I have been looking into the use of PLR articles (private label right) for quite some time now, because creating content is a very time consuming task. Not just time consuming, but I have to admit that at times it is just darn hard to come up with another 5, 10 articles during the span of a working day.

So a few weeks ago I decided I should have a closer look at some paid services, either to outsource completely or find a company that provided high quality articles I could use on a steady base.

Most services I have found did not really meet my standards, since I am not after crappy badly written articles used by thousands and thousands of people already.

In the end I decided to check out PLR Pro because I had seen them mentioned a few times already by some colleagues of mine as being the number 1 resource they were using to great success and contentment.

Well, I can tell you this, they hadn’t said one word too much and pretty soon I was very impressed with all the extra free services they offer their clients, apart from the monthly PLR content.

Something many starting article marketers seem to struggle with is getting into a set working schedule and stick with what they need to do, yet instead they drift off doing tasks that offer no return in relation to the time they put into their efforts.

PLR Pro however offers a set blueprint, a working schedule you can easily stick to and that will inspire you to become better in article marketing. They offer a lot of additional education and material so I decided to share what their basic membership contains:

440 articles across 11 niches (40 articles in each niche)
Full keyword research in each niche
Affiliate lists for each niche
Header Graphics for each niche
5 Website Templates each month
Articles done in 8 languages
50 PR4 sites that you can get links from to get your sites indexed and crawled
Site Builder
Automatic Wordpress Installer
Automatic Wordpress Uploader
VRE Handbook
SEO Training
PPC Training
Forum Support

As you can see, they offer a complete package for any person who has been struggling so far, and all you need to do is sticking to their outlined program, in order to set up your online business network.

Their monthly membership of $97 might sound a bit hefty to begin with, but you can get a free 14-day trial to see if you are as impressed as I am with all that they offer, plus, if you stick to their outline you will find that you can actually earn that money back in the first month or two already.

Now, let’s be honest, have you ever joined a program that actually did make you that money so soon?

So as far as the PLR content is concerned, I would definitely say they offer the best package you can find online if you are after creating unique content. Do yourself a small favour and have a closer look at this outstanding program, joining their free trial, do yourself an even bigger favour and stick to it!

If you are thinking of going into online marketing you must make sure you are able to follow and obey the 2 most important rules in order to become a success.

Let’s assume you belong to the huge crowd of people who dream of making a lot of money without having to leave your home or put on a suit and tie. To many people nothing sounds better than having a multiple stream of income ensuring their financial independence, without having to stick to a strict working schedule or following the orders of a boss.

Earning reports of successful online marketers make most of us dream away, thinking they were just lucky to get where they are today.

But nothing is further from the truth.

In order to cash in large affiliate checks, there are 2 things you have to really and completely understand and live by if you want a success as well.

The first thing you should never forget is: Content Rules.
Let me repeat it in case you did not understand… Content Rules!
It really isn’t all that hard to get people to your website, the more complicated issue is actually have them read more than just a few words before hitting the back button. This means you have to be able to produce quality stuff and come up with your own content. And keep producing quality content, over and over again.

The second most important thing is getting organic traffic to your site. Forget about cheap traffic you can buy in blocks of 100,000 hits, you need to make links pointing to your site so it goes up in all the search engine rankings. Building links should become your second nature and ideally you should be spending at least 80% of all your online activities on creating more and more quality links.

How to do it:

Identify the niche market you want to focus on, pick some topics and start creating your content. Write at least 10 articles and put them online before you start building your links to all separate articles, either by submitting to directories or creating links through article directories.

Keep creating new and fresh content and keep focussing on submitting the articles you wrote and after a few weeks you will start noticing how your traffic is building up. You might want to have a closer look at the first articles you wrote and rewrite them if you think they were poorly written, or you could actually link to those articles in-site as well.

Many people focus on looks just too much, wanting to have everything 100% perfect and in the end they will just give in and freeze. Remember it is better to keep refreshing your content and show people you are actually a real person with something interesting to say.

You really don’t need to worry too much about slick marketing campaigns, their importance is overrating in comparison to active link building and content creation.

You don’t need to spend a huge amount of money promoting your site either, just make sure you are using enough keywords throughout your articles and put in links to the merchants website you are promoting, and you will see that organic traffic that you have build up will start to create your bi-weekly or monthly pay check before you know it.

There you have the big secret to becoming a successful affiliate marketer, the 2 most important steps you need to do, over and over again, without overcomplicating things for yourself.

Does that sound too simple to you? Did you really think there was a hidden secret nobody wanted to share with you? Sorry to disappoint you then, it really is that simple, although it isn’t always as easy to do the work it takes.

Create your own strategy you can stick to or get the help from the guys at Making you Richer, where you will find an online marketing program that covers a lot of the affiliate marketing fundamentals. But, only do it if you are determined to achieve multiple income streams and financial independency!