Making A Living Online – Day 17

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 17.

Day 17 – Get Those Article Directory Links Indexed (And Make Some Money Doing It)

If you are following along with this series then you may still be working on day 16. Hopefully you are about finished up or done completely but if you are like most people writing all this unique content can get tough especially after having written so much already. If you’re not done yet with submitting the 25 article directory links from day 16 then keep at it. Today’s task is a bit smaller and may help break up the monotony.

Over the past few days you’ve submitted a lot of content to article directories. 25 articles were submitted to backlink our revenue sharing articles on Day 14 and 25 more were submitted to backlink our actual money articles on day 16. That’s a total of 50 article directory links sitting out there and they all need some love.

First of all, as we did back in day 7, head over to Feedage and submit your article directory RSS feed to your Feedage account. This will get all your directory submissions some small time “easy” backlinks. If you setup accounts at all four article directories then this should mean you get to submit four feeds to Feedage – shouldn’t take you more than 10 min of your time.

Next you have to start submitting your article directory submissions to IMAutomator, again, this is quick and easy and although you’ve got about 50 submissions to make and it may take you a few days because of daily submission limitations it shouldn’t take up much of your time.

The last thing you have to do (which will actually help earn you money) is to start backlinking all 50 of these article directory publications on SheToldMe and InfoPirate. This will take some time but I have done well over fifty bookmark backlinks in a day so this should still be manageable.

Don’t underestimate this. These links will help get your directory submissions indexed and will help improve the quality of the links they are sending to your money articles and main backlink articles… and not only that but the bookmarks themselves will earn money. From my experience just getting 100 bookmarks up on InfoPirate is an easy income stream of $20-$40 a month. That sounds crazy I know but it is true. SheToldMe (from my experience) isn’t as good for revenue but you will make some money there so it’s worth it.

If you are not yet done getting your directory submissions submitted keep working at that too. This is very important. You need these backlinks. In the future we’ll start adding other types of backlinks in greater quantities but for now these are great backlinks to get and worth the effort.

A Glimpse Into The Future

The work we have done over the past few weeks has definitely been a lot. It is probably more work that you could have ever imagined doing and if you are actually doing it then congrats; your efforts will pay off. We are now earning a little money on SheToldMe, InfoPirate, Snipsly, InfoBarrel, HubPages, Squidoo, and Posturown and each of those sites is also passing links and authority to our money articles which are published on our own site. Our money articles may or may not be earning money yet but chances are that you’ve already started earning a trickle there as well.

The first month is the hardest – it’s a blind leap of faith. You devote a ton of time and energy into producing all this content and trust that you will be compensated for your efforts. Almost every time you will be compensated – some times more that others but you have to make the leap.

So far we haven’t spent any money except for setting up a website to put out initial money articles on. In the future we will start spending some money – not much but the money spent will be worth it and will be reasonable. Just fair warning.

Good luck and work hard – it’s not easy, if it was everyone would do it.

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Make A Living Online – Day 16

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 16.

Day 16 – Article Directory Links To Your Money Articles

By now you’ve surely had enough time to build all the backlinks to your revenue sharing articles as outlined in day 14 of this series. Basically we’ve got roughly 25 articles on a new site right now and they all have a few backlinks but we need to add some more.

In day 14 we started promoting more heavily the main backlinks to the money articles with article directory links at a clip of about 2 per article. We will now do the same things again except this time we will publish these article directory articles with links pointing directly at out money articles.

Previously I noted you wanted to publish on directories which gave you dofollow backlinks like Ezine, GoArticles, Article Dashboard, and Article Blast – this time we will use the same sites (other if you know of any you like) but point them at our 25 articles. At an average of two links per article we will need about 25 articles published over the new few days each sending out links to out money articles. Each “money article” should get about two links out of this.

Again this will take some time which completely depends on how fast you write but you should be able to punch these out in a few days at least, if not sooner. Sure it’s hard work and you may be getting burned out on the subject but that’s the way it goes. Don’t fret and don’t lose hope – this is how it’s done so you just have to suck it up and do the work.

For me I’ve been writing tons of stuff on diabetic shoes as I promote my relatively new diabetic shoes website, it’s a lot of info that I keep framing in different ways, it’s a lot of work but it pays off significantly – just do it and be pleased that it pays.

The next couple days should be slim days while you get this task done but I do have more in store for day 17 – see you then.

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How To Get Free Blog Content – Use PostRunner

Looking to get free content for your blog? Sure there’s always PLR content but seriously, that content is used all over the web. I’m talking about getting free blog content for your topical blog, general interest blog, or niche website.

This post is promotional but short - just a warning. It is not however just a flashy headline.

As many readers of this blog know by now I am a happy member of The Keyword Academy (TKA). So far in my 28 days to be a better IMer series I’ve discussed all the beginnings of getting a niche site going without the use of spinning or the use of paid tools. I’ve only discussed free techniques. Well imagine this. Getting the backlinks you need to your site is so much easier with the PostRunner system included with your TKA membership. As a refresher you can read my older post on using PostRunner to guestpost on other people’s blogs.

Today I’d like to introduce you to the other side of PostRunner, accepting free content from others. Not only do you get access to PostRunner as a member of The Keyword Academy but you also are able to include your own blog in the PostRunner system so that other bloggers and niche site owners can post to your site. This basically equates to you receiving free content to your blog on a constant basis.

Think of this – you find a niche that you think is awesome – let’s say it’s a site on office products. You go out and buy a domain for your site and put it on your hosting account, install Wordpress, and then what? You have to build the content out as well as backlink it to get it indexed and ranking with some authority.

How about this? After building some initial content to your office products site, join The Keyword Academy (free the first month + $33/month thereafter) and install the PostRunner plugin so that you can receive content to your site from other members. You are free to accept anything you want to the site and have complete discretionary control over what publishes.

If you want the site to be only about Office Products then you will note that your site is only about office products and you will only accept topics on that subject. The next thing you know you will be receiving free posts on your exact niche on a constant basis day in and day out. You can monetize the site anyway you wish too so not only does the content get published to the site by others but it can and will make you money at the same time. And if the content submitted to your site is not up to your standard then you simply decline it with a single push of a button.

You can also do the same thing but be more inclusive and accept posts on just about anything – that decision is up to you but when all is said and done you can easily get a bunch of free content to your site which can in time pay for your entire membership fee and more.

My Experiences Owning A Site On PostRunner
I have been a happy member of The Keyword Academy for roughly a year now. I use their PostRunner tool all the time, more than anything else on their site and I can’t imagine not having it. If you want to take your Internet Marketing to a new level then try out TKA for a free month and see if it’s worth it to you. If it looks good then get your own blog hooked into the PostRunenr system, not only will it help the membership base but you will be well compensated from your PostRunner site in due time.

My own PostRunner site is only a few months old and it already pays for itself. It makes more than I pay every month in membership fees. I get around 2 posts a day of free content; there’s no reason why you can’t too. Click through to give TKA a first look for free.

You can also see my post on submitting to PostRunner for backlinks, using TKA’s Niche Refinery for keyword selection (off site).

Yes this is a promotional post but it is a system that I use to make all my money online. It is a tool that is worth using. There are many people that struggle for small gains every day; TKA can get you moving up in earnings faster. Good luck.

Check back in tomorrow for more on my IMer series and have a great weekend everyone!

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More On My Making A Living Online Series – Day 15

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 15.

Day 15 – Edit Your Money Articles

If you are following along with this series then you’re still probably backlinking your revenue sharing articles on the article directories as I outlined on my last post: How To Make A Living With Internet Marketing – Day 14. Backlinking all those articles takes some time so keep at it, you need somewhere around 25-50 articles published to send 1-2 backlinks to all 50 of those revenue sharing articles so keep at it.

In the mean time here is a simple task that won’t take nearly as long for you to do. Our main 25 “money articles” at this point have been published for 2-3 weeks now and we’ve probably received a trickle of traffic to these articles by now. Go into your analytics and for each article identify 1-2 keyword phrases that has already brought search traffic to that article. Check your article to see if that search phase appears exactly somewhere in the article and if not add it.

I like to do this by adding a complete paragraph to the article somewhere. Just go into your money articles and add a short paragraph which includes these exact keywords and maybe a couple related terms that you haven’t yet used in the article. Republish the article and then do the same for the other 24 “money articles”. This will take some time but it at least can be accomplished in less than a single day.

While you are at this task make sure to keep on publishing your articles to the article directories to get those revenue sharing articles of your backlinked and ranking better. Remember, the more you do the better. They don’t have to be the best articles in the world just make them well written with a solid point or two and maybe a little personal commentary on the topic. Keep at it and good luck!

FYI – In case you don’t get it the purpose of editing your money articles like this is to milk the low hanging fruit while the articles are still new and ranked poorly. This is a good task that can give you a break from article directory submissions… just don’t stop doing the directory submissions. Remember, keep at it. This is work, we’re trying to make a living at this, you can’t expect to make a living without doing some work.

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Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites

In early November I started a niche site when I joined many other bloggers in the Niche Site Duel. I have since posted five updates on my niche site: http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com. You can catch up on those posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Recently I’ve also been publishing a series on making a living online and a recent update on that series I noted the importance of building your initial backlinks to your niche sites on revenue sharing websites because they are relatively strong backlinks and they are capable of absorbing a bunch of backlinks right off the bat due to their being published on an established domain.

Today I wanted to drive this point home by showing you the results of my initial five backlinks to my diabetic shoes website. As I noted back in my second niche site update I posted five main backlinks to the niche site from InfoBarrel, HubPages, Snipsly, Posturown, and my own Longevity Blog. That is five sites which earn me money for my publications.

After publishing those five articles I went on to publish others and I also went on to backlink those articles to ensure they get indexed, stay indexed, gained some authority, and passed the best link juice possible to my new website. I published those five articles a little over 4 months ago in mid-November 2010. In that time my entire niche site has made a little over $100 but these five articles alone have made an additional $65.54. That doesn’t even include any of the other backlinks I’ve built on revenue sharing sites so adding those in would increase the numbers even more.

What is interesting is that I haven’t even gone gangbusters on backlinking these five articles. I have only sent 6 links at my longevity blog post and it’s indexed at PR0. I’ve sent 9 backlinks at my IB post and it’s indexed at PR0. My hub has gotten 10 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR0, Snipsly has 5 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR N/A. Lastly my Posturown article has 11 backlinks pointing at it and it too is indexed at PR0. All in all my backlinks have given most of these articles enough authority to get them past PR N/A and I haven’t even hit them hard with backlinks.

What is all of this to say? If you are building a niche site do not underestimate the power of building your main backlinks first from rev share sites. They are a great way to build your first backlinks because of their earning power and their ability to grow in authority quickly. In the last 30 days these five articles have made me almost $10 in Adsense income which is a drop in the bucket but quite significant considering my entire niche site only made $56 during the same time period.

If you are building a niche site make sure to not overlook this income source.  Write good articles to build these backlinks and then promote them with backlinks of their own through article marketing or through guestposting on blogs.  PostRunner is the best system around for this in my opinion.  Once your niche blog starts ranking better and pulling in revenue then your income will start growing exponentially.

All Other NSD Posts
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011


For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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How To Make A Living With Internet Marketing – Day 14

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 14.

Day 14 – Article Marketing – Backlinking Your Main Backlinks
As I said in my last post on day 13 we need to start promoting our main backlink articles on the revenue sharing websites in a more significant way. We should now have about 50 articles published on HubPages, InfoBarrel, Posturown, Snipsly, & Squidoo (10 per site) and they all should have some revenue sharing bookmarks pointing at them already but this simply isn’t enough.

These rev sharing sites should be far more capable of taking a bunch of backlinks than your new site and new “money article” can so we are going to spend some time promoting them with article marketing. This should do two things: it should cause the revenue sharing articles to rank better and earn more for us and it will cause the links those revenue sharing article send to our “money articles” to be stronger and more significant.

Because we have 50 revenue sharing articles to backlink and most article directories let us include two links per submission it will take approximately 25 article directory submissions to backlink all our revenue sharing articles. Yeah, it’s a lot but this is work, you are trying to make a living at this so buckle down and get writing. You won’t be able to do 25 articles in one day but 10 a day should be doable.

One thing to note is that you want to publish these articles on major article directories which offer dofollow backlinks. Splitting yours submissions between Ezine Articles, ArticleBlast, GoArticles, and Article Dashboard is a good way to mix up the submissions and still get plenty of decent dofollow backlinks. Buzzle is another excellent site to use however they only let you link to one URL. Use this site at your own discretion.

Make sure to use keywords which are very closely related to the keyword articles you are linking to and if possible use a keyword which you know is easy to rank for based on your experiences over the last couple weeks.

Some of these sites article directories take some time before they actually publish your article so just roll with it. As articles publish on these directories make sure to submit them to IMautomator and publish a revenue sharing bookmark pointing at each one. You want them to be indexed otherwise they simply won’t help you out that much.

This will take time so get at it. Ideally you would want at least a couple article directory submissions pointing at each of your 50 revenue sharing backlinks so try to work on writing these up and submitting them for publication as much as you can over the next 3-5 days. Good luck all and get to work! :)

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Chezfat Is Getting Social – Join Me On Twitter

Over the past month I have been slowly implementing more conventional “blog” features into my blog here. Not long ago I implemented my own custom domain to get off the old dot blogspot domain and a couple days ago I switched over to a new template which is better for comments as my readership is starting to grow.

Today, I spent a good period of time setting up Twitter and implementing it into my template. I’ve got a Twitter feed for my longevity blog setup so I have a slight background for knowing how this works but even still I’ve never really been active on it.

I used a lot of guidance from Amanda over at BloggerBuster on how to implement a Tweet this post link in the bottom of all my posts. She’s got a lot of Twitter advice for Blogger publishers on this page: Twitter Tools For Blogspot Blogs. If you are hosting a site on Blogspot then her site is a goldmine.

Anyway, feel free to connect with me there on the big T and I’ll do my best to figure out optimal Twitter use and etiquette. We’ll see how quickly I can “get social”. :)

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How To Make A Living Online – Beginners Internet Marketing Day 13

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 13.

Day 13 – More Web 2.0 Submissions

Starting to sound a bit like a broken record here but today we need to publish a few more web 2.0 articles to send a few more backlinks at our main 25 “money articles”. To select what keywords to target with the ten publications for the day dig into your analytics and select a few keywords or keyword variants which are already driving traffic (even if it’s incredibly small traffic) to either your money articles or your previously published revenue sharing articles.

When you publish these articles on HubPages, Infobarrel, Squidoo, Posturown, and Snipsly make sure to not only link out a couple times to your “money articles” but do as much interlinking as you can on the site you are publishing on.

For instance you should have about 8 InfoBarrels published already. The two IB articles you publish today should be contextually interlinked with the other 8 IB articles. It may take some strategic word play to interlink all 8 of them contextually but make sure you do get them interlinked. Do the same on all the other sites too.

The thing to remember here is that these revenue share sites will earn money for you first and the links will strengthen if your build them up causing your site to rank better in the intermediate term. You can’t overload a new site with links so we build a few links from these revenue shareing sites and then make them stronger while our new site ages.

A good rule of thumb is to slowly build links to the main site over the course of the first month or so and then start accelerating them. In the mean time we will start promoting our rev share articles as we wait for the main “money articles” to age and for the links to pass strength to the main articles.

A lot of IM is simply waiting and doing things efficiently. If you trust it work in the long run you will be ahead of the game. Good luck all!

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Blog Template Changes

For anyone out there that has tried to leave comments over the last few days I am sorry that you were unable to. I didn’t even realize it for a few days until Christina informed me but my comments section on the blog simply disappeared.

For a while now my comments section has been performing poorly and I just haven’t felt like dealing with it as Blogger templates are hard to edit when it comes to dealing with comments. Anyhow, my old template, through I liked it a lot, was not exactly well designed for comments from the start and the code must have finally failed this week.

I suspect that Blogger must have been doing some tweaking of the backend code as they are planning on unveiling a new overhaul of the platform. See here for more details.

In any event most of my day yesterday was spent finding another good template which was more current and (hopefully) more stable as Blogger is in constant update. If you haven’t seen the new template, head on over and give it a look. I’ve still got some tweaking to do and I’ll have to consider whether or not if I want to implement a Twitter account and Facebook account so feel free to comment on that if you have an opinion. For now those icons don’t link to anything at all. :)

Now that I’ve got the majority of my template issues behind me I can get back to my series: 28 Days To be A Better IMer. Hope you have a good weekend!

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Making A Full Time Living Online With Internet Marketing – Day 12

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 12.

Day 12 – Backlink Your Support Blogs

Back on Day 5 we created one or two support blogs for our main set of “money articles” and on day 6 we submitted the posts to IMAutomator for help with indexing and to the revenue share bookmarking sites for a few backlinks that had the potential to earn. Today we want to send some more substantial backlinks to these support blogs.

Again, on the five major revenue sharing backlink sites, HubPages, InfoBarrel, Posturown, Squidoo, and Snipsly you want to publish two articles a piece each linking to two of your posts on the support blogs. 10 articles submitted in total should backlink each of your blog posts roughly twice so make them count – use proper anchor text and link to those posts in the body of your articles contextually.

Once you get your support blog posts backlinked you should know have about 35 revenue share articles published on the major Web 2.0 properties (8 per site) which should start generating some clicks every now and then giving you a small  (very small) stream of income.

Other Easy Backlinks
After getting these articles published make sure to head over to Feedage.com if you didn't already do this on day 7 and  submit the RSS feed of your support blogs to Feedage to get the posts listed on Feedage’s site. These are small backlinks but they are very easy to setup and because it’s a onetime event make sure to do it. You want to get these support blogs indexed with a little bit of authority for their topics because they should be a good support system for your main money articles.

Obviously if you setup multiple support blogs then you’ll have to perform this step once for each support blog. As I’ve said a few times already it’s a lot of work but it can easily be done so just get to work and make some progress on it. Good luck.

I hope this is helping out a bit – I hope anyone reading this can eventually take control of their lives and truly make a living online one day.

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A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update (#5)

It’s been some time since I talked about my diabetic shoes website that I started as a part of Pat and Tyrone’s Niche Site Duel. In previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4) I discussed (among other things) my feelings about using spun content or mass auto generated article submissions. I know they work and all but I’ve never felt they were something I would feel comfortable doing… so I haven’t.

Instead I’ve built my site (and backlinks) up slowly with unique content I’ve written myself. I have also focused on building my backlinks by focusing on building up only a few backlinks from the major revenue sharing sites and a few strong article directories and then backlinking those URLs to make them strong pages on their own passing a lot of link juice.

What I’ve Been Publishing Lately
Lately I’ve been adding more content to the main diabetic shoes site and some of it I have been publishing based on long tails of things already drawing trickle traffic as well as on other keywords which will actually help the site be a better resource to real diabetics with real foot problems. Basically I do want this site to have a wealth of information on it that is helpful to anyone needing these products and this kind of information.

Some of the keywords I’ve gone after have also been carefully selected based on their difficulty level as defined by Niche Refinery (see my Niche Refinery Review for more), the proprietary keyword selection tool available to members of The Keyword Academy.

Site Indexing
As a result I have built a site of roughly 16 pages plus tags, categories, and administrative pages. The whole site is basically indexed just fine (107 results for the site found in Google as of today’s writing) and many of the pages are ranking well for many long-tail keywords and moderately well for some shorter keywords. One suggestion I may have in this area for you is to get each of your category feeds setup under Feedage as well as your main blog feed. I wrote this article on submitting your InfoBarrel RSS Feed to Feedage a while back which may not exactly be focused on blogs but should help you understand the process nonetheless.

At this pace it will be a while before I take any 1st place rankings for any major traffic keywords but in my book slow and steady, calculated and intelligent design of content publication and backlink promotion will always win in the long run.

Site Design

http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com

It took me a while but back in January I finally worked on the aesthetics of the site a bit by adding a (bit) more “attractive” header. I also set up an appropriate contact page complete with working email form. I should have done this from the get-go but simply didn’t. I have some trouble with building aesthetics when I know there is no search traffic coming in.

I still plan on working more on site design in the coming month but only a little at a time. As I build more content and work on better monetization the site design and aesthetics should slowly change for the better. In the end I want this to look professional but not flashy at all and I do want the site to remain largely text based. My idea is to make many of the pages on the site feel a bit like a store to stay in line with Dave’s Amazon layout for blogs.

Traffic And Monetization Methods
Today the site is roughly 3 ½ months old. I went live on November 4, 2010 and as of today’s writing is starting to make some decent gains in search traffic. I’m slowly adding backlinks to the site in general from the revenue sharing websites as well as the revenue sharing bookmark sites and will be starting to increase my backlinking effort from PostRunner guest blogging submissions (see my post explaining what PostRunner is). I expect in not too much time I’ll continue to see good improvement in the way the site responds to search traffic.

For months now I’ve had Adsense on the site in addition to Amazon affiliate links but as I get more and more involved with Amazon’s affiliate program every day I am starting to lean in the direction of Amazon.

I have also been reading Dave’s excellent material on Making Money On Amazon which I HIGHLY recommend you read (I’ve linked to it twice now already!) and have been slowly implementing some of his advice into my site in the way of side bar links to Amazon product categories and building some posts up as an Amazon store on top followed by an informational blog post on the bottom.

This is new for the site so I haven’t really been able to measure the results of these changes quite yet but I can see how they will help. On my next report I’ll have to add to this topic with my observations on the monetization layout.

In the future I’d like to build in some integration with some specific medical supply stores (diabetic supply affiliate programs I’m thinking) but as always I like to see some traffic first before trying to satisfy their needs with ads and products.

Results so Far
So how has the site been doing so far? Not bad but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Over the last 30 days the site has seen 489 unique visitors with 76 percent coming from search engines. My main low volume keyword: “best shoes for diabetics” brought 18 unique visitors to the site over that time period and I currently rank #3 for it according to Scroogle. Some other long tail keywords worth mention include “best diabetic shoes” and “shoes for diabetics” ranking 7 & 92 respectively. With my upcoming PostRunner submissions those numbers should improve notably.

Always do your searches in Scroogle as your personalization is stripped out of the search results and you get a more accurate picture of where you rank.

As far as earnings on those visitors goes, over the last 30 days I have made $30.60 in Adsense and $25.63 in Amazon earnings for a total of $56.23. Since inception the site has made $48.51 on Amazon and $53.57 with Adsense totaling $102.08 in its first 3 ½ months. Again, not bad but I really should have spent more time on this project considering my last month saw revenue of over fifty dollars on less than 500 unique visitors. That’s a rate of more than $100 for every 1000 visitors which is pretty darned good.

In the coming weeks and months I expect to do some heavy backlinking to the site from PostRunner submissions. That will start inching my search rankings higher and I’ll start seeing some really good traffic and earnings if this earnings pace continues. Obviously I will continue to edit my pages and tweak the placement of monetization links to maximize my revenue per visitor.

One Side Note
I have been busy publishing my 28 days to start making a living online series and much of what I have done for my Diabetic Shoes site has followed what I’ve been discussing over the last couple weeks. I haven’t followed it to the letter or anything but only because I am slowly building the site and because I have access to PostRunner for my backlinks. For a beginner with no cash flow, many people prefer to stick to the free methods before investing in any programs.

Are you participating in the Niche Site Duel, let me know in the comments because Pat’s list is too long for me to follow along with them all. Good luck and good work guys.

All Other NSD Posts
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011

For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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How To Start Making A Living Online With Internet Marketing - Day 11

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 11.

Where We Stand At Day 11

At this point you should have:

• roughly 25 “money articles” posted somewhere, preferably on your own new website. 
• You should have roughly 15 backlink articles posted on five major revenue sharing websites giving you about 30 backlinks to your money articles
• Each money article should have one backlink and a few others have two. 
• You should have your RSS Feeds submitted to Feedage. 
• You should have most of all your publications submitted to IMAutomator. 
• You should have many, if not all, of your revenue sharing “backlink articles” and “money articles” backlinked both on SheToldMe and on InfoPirate. 
• You should have a support blog or two or three live which are linking to your money articles
• Those support blog posts should also be submitted to IMAutomator and be backlinked a little bit through SheToldMe and InfoPirate. 

In general you should have a core of money articles which are supported by a wide, thin core of revenue earning support blogs, articles, and bookmarks.

At this point we can continue backlinking the "money articles" from day 1 but because new sites tend to do pretty well when you slowly build links in the beginning rather than quickly – with all the aforementioned support thus far - these money articles probably are fine for some time… the "backlink articles" however can be backlinked more heavily and since they do earn you money it is where we will now focus our attention.

Day 11 - Backlink Our Backlinks
Your articles that can be backlinked heavily with little chance of being overloaded are the main backlink articles previously published on InfoBarrel, HubPages, Posturown, Squidoo, and Snipsly. On these sites you should already have about 3 articles published each. If you write 2 more articles today for each of these same five sites but this time backlink the backlink articles (the ones you’ve already published) instead of the main money articles then you will start to get more traction and more authority from your backlinks.

As always, make sure to submit a few more of these new backlink articles to IMAutomator and bookmark them on SheToldMe (STM) and InfoPirate (IP).

This may start feeling like a lot of work but that is the point – you are trying to make a living online, not beer money. You are trying to feed a family and provide a roof, not trying to make some pocket change as a hobby. As a beginner this may feel like a lot of work but as you get accustomed to this work then you will find that it isn’t all that hard. When 300 words can be written in less than 10 minutes then anyone can write 10 articles a day.

At the end of today you should now have 25 support articles – good job – come back tomorrow and we’ll march on. Soon you’ll be starting to see the beginnings of a good steady source of income. Make sure to leave your comments and questions below and share the series with your friends and follow readers with a link – Thanks!

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Making A Living Online With Internet Marketing - Day 10

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 10.

Day 10 – More Web 2.0 Backlinks

In yesterday’s post I discussed the importance of mining your early analytic data for keywords which are driving the very first long-tail search traffic to your money articles. In that post: How To Make A Living Online With Internet Marketing I noted that of your 20 money articles there should be about five keywords that have obviously shown as candidates for driving traffic – even if it is an incredibly small amount of it.

If you are following along with action then you should have posted five more money articles yesterday (bringing you to 25 total) using those keywords and interlinked them with your other money articles ranking for the same search queries. Today we are going to write five more articles on the same keywords but post one to each of the five revenue sharing sites: Posturown, HubPages, InfoBarrel, Squidoo, and Snipsly.

Always Remember To Interlink Articles
As always, when publishing to the Web 2.0 properties make sure to interlink them contextually with your other published articles and also make sure to send properly anchored links from them to your two “money articles” using the exact (or very similar) keyword string as your anchor text. The goal here is to get two money pages ranking for these small keywords in addition to the Web 2.0 page you are writing and publishing today.

Quick And Easy Backlinks
Once you get all five posts published then take some more time to arbitrarily choose some more published articles to submit to IMAutomator and backlink some others in random order to the revenue sharing bookmark sites SheToldMe and InfoPirate.

Expectations To Keep In Check
Again, these bookmarks aren’t going to be big earners nor are they going to be especially strong backlinks but they will continue to help with marginal improvement in SERP ranking and indexing and will get a trickle of income while your pool of real money articles continue to mature.

You could always do more but for one day this should be just fine for a beginner. Good luck with all your work and as always, do not ever expect amazing results in mere days – always expect results months out instead. You may start getting a trickle of clicks or sales but remember the work you are doing today is all about generating income many months from now.

Leave your comments below and start getting to know each other – discussions amongst groups of people is far more interesting than dissertations from me. See you tomorrow with day 11.

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Have You Ever Purchased “Money Articles”?

I always intended this blog to revolve [mostly] around my blogging and IM business. Internet publications, content writing, and money sites were always my interest from the get-go after all. Back in August 2009, my focus was eHow and my Longevity Blog but the core intent of this site has always been the same – I just didn’t think about it as Internet Marketing (IM) at the start as I didn’t realize that’s what it really was.

I also have a deep interest in finance, economics, and the investment world. My favorite econ blog is Calculated Risk, my favorite stock picker is Jim Jubak's Stocks Blog, and my favorite money blogger is probably Jonathan from My Money Blog. My wife and I have recently gotten really involved in couponing and Money Saving Mom's Coupon Blog has also been invaluable.  We seriously just had a trip to Vons where we saved over a hundred dollars using coupons - total savings was around 70 percent off the bill!  Awesome!

I've toyed with starting a blog in this broad field for a while but lately I've been finding that owning money articles, niche sites, and revenue generating blogs really is an investment just like buying share of stocks, bonds and real estate or anything else is. We basically invest our time to create a revenue generating asset – a web page or website.  There is risk involved but that risk can be effectively managed with various types of due diligence and market analysis.

So if investing our time in building these assets is so normal is it really that far-fetched to think of buying money articles from freelance writers is a similar activity to buying other revenue generating assets from people and institutions? I can buy an interest bearing savings bond. I can buy a dividend paying stock. I can invest in a rental property or own shares in a REIT. All of these investments are simple ways of quickly owning an asset that generates income. Why not online too.

My Experience “Investing” in “Money Articles”
Back in December 2010 I identified 18 keywords which I felt would be good revenue producing articles if they were written with good on-page SEO in mind. I can easily write 18 articles myself but it’s much faster for me to identify 18 keywords and pay someone else to write them for me. I average a 400 word article in 10 minutes so 18 articles would “cost” me 180 minutes – or 3 hours of my time.

In this experiment I paid freelance writers $108 ($6 each) to write these 18 400-word articles for me. My time was limited to about 10 min to place the order and about 30 minutes to publish the articles after they were delivered. This valued my time at: $108 investment to save 140 minutes worth of my time or $46.28 per hour. I think that’s fair - it certainly values my time as a professional but doesn’t make me look ridiculously more important that I really am.

Anyway, I figured these articles would make some money if I write them I just wanted to see if they would make money if someone else wrote them. Well, they were published all on the same site at roughly the same time and I didn’t even start tracking them as a group until the 1st of February. It’s also worth noting that I didn't send a single backlink to any of the 18 articles – not one.

In February the group of 18 articles made $6.90 meaning they were projected to have a full 100 percent return on investment in 15.7 months giving me a rough annual yield on investment of 77 percent. That sure seems better than any other investment I’ve ever purchased.

I don’t know what these 18 articles made in December or January because I wasn't tracking them but I know they are earning even more in March ($6.84 so far) and it’s only the 13th of the month so my actual results will probably be a bit better than a 77 percent yield.

Your Experiences
Have you ever purchased “money articles”? I have and I will be doing more of it. The trick is to know what keywords to target, have a good place to publish them, and make sure they are well written.  From a long term perspective it's probably best to invest in better writers and better material too.

I’ve been fine spending my time producing money generating assets over the past two years, I’m suggesting however that investing my money instead may be better for the long term as time is a valuable resource that I don’t want to waste if I don’t have to.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the topic. Fire away.

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How To Make A Living Online With Internet Marketing - Day 9

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 9.

Day 9 – Start Mining Your Analytics Info

8-9 days after the publication of your original 20 articles you should have a bit of [very small amount of] traffic data in your analytics account. Your 20 “money articles” from day 1 have probably got some traffic [but not much] but the traffic they do have needs to be analyzed because this is what search engines find important about it in the very beginning of a website/blog’s life.

Of your 20 articles one or two of them probably has noticeably more traffic than the others. We may be talking traffic in the teens and twenties compared to the single digits; we may be talking about 5-10 views for an article compared to 1-2 views of the other articles. The point is that whichever publications have some traction at this stage should be identified, noted, and worked on some more.

A good rule of thumb is to look at the basic search term that brought more unique visitors than any other to your top traffic articles and then make new posts using that search term as your keyword. If you have 20 published articles and five of then have already brought in a small handful of search visitors then post five related articles using the search terms used and make sure to interlink them with the original posts… make sure to interlink them with other pages on your blog too.

Basically you want to take your “money article” content and increase it from 20 to 25 or so but you want to do it strategically based on terms search engines have already been ranking your brand new material for. This helps build relevance in these areas and helps encourage the natural development of double listings.

Try not to over think this. If the topic of your 20 articles is “printer paper” and one of your articles on “legal printer paper” has brought in slightly more search traffic than any of your other articles then just do another article on “legal printer paper” just switch it up slightly… do it on the exact search term bringing those 3-10 visitors to your page or do it on something from your own intuition. Off the top of my head maybe “legal sized printer paper” or “off-white legal printer paper”. There aren’t hard rules just narrow it down and use your best judgment.

Once these five new articles are published you should now have 25 “money articles” all interlinked to each other and some backlink articles posted at various revsharing sites. Take this time as an opportunity to run a few more articles (of your random choosing) through IMAutomator and then sprinkle in a few more (5-20) revenue share bookmarks to various things you’ve published over the past week. How much work you put in this department is completely up to you but the more you do the more it helps and this early stage.

Lastly make sure you have your analytics code setup on the rev sharing sites that you can. InfoBarrel won’t allow analytics until you get to pre-approval publishing status (at least 10 published articles), HubPages and Snipsly allow it right away. Make sure these are set up as analytic data is key to increasing your targeted trickle traffic and building relevance.

That’s it, nothing said here is particularly challenging, you just have to put in the work of actually writing and publishing. As Nike says; “Just Do It”. As I say just do it as quickly as you can. Nothing in this area has to be perfect on publication – half the battle is publishing words, don’t get overwhelmed with thinking too much about what you publish and don’t get to overwhelmed producing the best material ever. Most things I publish are first draft material written in ten minutes or less. I don’t have fast typing skills, I just let the words fall out of my mind and onto my screen. Then I do a quick spell/grammar check and publish. Once you start getting more traffic you can always go back and edit for better grammar, inclusions of pictures and graphics, addition of references where needed, affiliate links, and formatting, etc.

Originally I wanted to keep these posts short – I struggle with that as I want to elaborate on everything here but I will stop. Just use your analytics to dictate the next five posts you publish and get them published today. Good luck and good work everyone that chooses to follow along. Check back in tomorrow for day 10 and please leave your comments, questions, and advice down below for everyone to see. Thanks.

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Making A Living Online In Internet Marketing – Day 8

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 Days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 8.

Day 8 – Build More Backlinks – I Like Using Revenue Sharing Sites

Remember day 3? On day 3 we went over to all the revenue sharing sites that allow you to link out to your sites. Sites like Snipsly, Posturown, HubPages, InfoBarrel, & Squidoo each allow you to earn money on the article and each will let you contextually link to your sites giving you anchored dofollow links.

Go to these same sites (and a few others of your choosing if you want) and write two more topical articles for each site and send links back to your main 20 articles. By posting 10 articles (2 per site) you are building one more link to every one of your main 20 articles.

At this point you should have about 4 articles posted on each of these five revenue sharing sites – make sure to interlink your posts for maximum benefit. I won’t go into detail but in short if you have four articles on a single topic posted to a site like HubPages then make sure each hub contextually links to the other three hubs in addition to your main “money articles”.

If you have some energy left over after writing these 10 articles then spend some time sending some bookmark backlinks to random pieces from SheToldMe and InfoPirate which are dofollow revenue share and drop off some of your article posts into IMAutomator so that they can slowly get a few low quality bookmark backlinks.

As always, always publish good material. Use your best judgment but please make it good. It doesn’t have to be worthy of a peer-reviewed journal or dissertation, just make it good. There really is no need to further analyze quality, regardless of all the hoopla in the SEO blogosphere these days. Don’t worry about it; it’s needless stress and should be the last thing on your mind if you are writing original material with a shred of intelligence backed prose.

Looking Forward
At this point your main 20 articles should have all been published for at least a week. If they all went live on day 1 and it is now day 8 then they all should have gotten indexed by now and they all should have gotten a small trickle of search traffic from a few (super) long tails. In the coming days we are going to slowly start identifying these (super) long tails and start going after them.

---You probably have already registered a click or two too - if you really have done everything mentioned so far in this series then this is almost always the case - just don't get too down on yourself or excited about them clicks or lack of clicks yet.---

Hope this helps!  If so then please let me and any other readers here know about it down below... and just one more thing… remember you are a IMer, not a blogger, no tip here other than that. Blogging is about developing a following; IMing is about business and marketing. You don’t need to think like a blogger to be successful online. You can make a living doing this. Good luck all!

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Make A Living Online - Day 7 - Feedage

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 7.

Day 7 – Get Familiar with Feedage.com
If you are new to making income producing websites then you are probably new to the concept of RSS directories and have probably never used Feedage.com before.

Yesterday in day 6 of this beginners making a living online tutorial you should have started bookmarking your support blogs and a few of your main 20 “money” articles from revenue sharing bookmarking sites. This helps with their indexing and to some extent Feedage will also help with indexing and with the passage of small amounts of authority to your main pages.

What Feedage Does
What Feedage does in a nutshell is it displays every post from an RSS feed (roughly 25 I think) on a single URL. It gives anchored dofollow links back to the source with a little bit of context. This is great because every blog has an RSS feed, as does every Hubber, InfoBarreler, Squidooer, and user of Blogger, Wordpress, Squidoo, Snipsly, Posturown, and even bookmarker of sites like InfoPirate.

You can submit your feeds to Feedage from each of your accounts as well as from the source of your original 20 articles you posted back on day 1 be they on a self-hosted blog or aforementioned article site. This gives you a link to every URL you’ve posted thus far and to every article you will post on these accounts in the future.

Do This
Go to Feedage.com and open up an account. You want to submit your RSS feed for virtually every account you already setup. This may take some time finding the feed URLs to submit but you should be able to figure it out. Some will be trickier than others but with some fooling around, hunting, pecking, and experimenting you should be able to figure it out.

If you want to do more work you can also submit these RSS feeds to other RSS directories however I tend to only do it to Feedage because it is the best one there is in my opinion and they are dofollow links rather than nofollow.

I won’t go into the details of using Feedage here as I want to keep this simple but you can read more about Submitting Your InfoBarrel RSS Feed to Feedage here – the same principals will apply to other RSS feeds so get to work.

FYI – sorry for missing a day in this series, looks like this may be 27 days to be a better IMer instead of 28. :)  I guess I'm not much of a Blogger. ;)

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A Beginners Making A Living Online Tutorial - Day 6

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 6.

Day 6 – Get Your Support Blogs Indexed
Your support blogs won’t index as easily as the previous types of backlinks because they will becoming from a new domain rather than an established domain. You could build a bunch or backlink articles to get them indexed or you could go the simple route and submit each post to IMAutomator which will drip feed automatic (low quality) bookmark links to your blog posts to get them indexed and start building some slight authority.

Open a free account with IMAutomator (or a Pro account if you are willing to invest in your business) and follow their on-site tutorials to bookmark each one of your support blog posts. With the free account you can only set up 10 per day so if you set up multiple support blogs and only registered with a free account then you will have to split this up between a few different days.

Posting to IMAutomator will take you no longer than 10 minutes so this is an easy day. If you want to do more work, which you should, you can also send a few more bookmark links to your support blog posts from the revenue sharing bookmarking services we worked on in day five as well as to the main backlink articles from day 3. SheToldMe and InfoPirate are quick and easy to use for this and they can make you a small amount of money on their own.

Again don’t do too many backlinks from these bookmarking sites in a row to the same domain so mix them up between your support blog posts and some of your other articles you’ve published but not yet backlinked from these sources.

That’s it for day 6 – you can always do more but as a beginner you may need to do less so that you can understand it and do it well. No need to burn yourself out on day 6 – you’ll get the hang of this and you’ve got the ret of your life to make a make a living online… just stop by tomorrow for day 7 and leave me a comment below to let me know you’re still following along.

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How To Begin To Make A Living Online - Day 5

To continue with my series: Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 5.

Day 5 – Build A Couple Support Blogs On Blogger, Wordpress, and maybe Weebly
Whatever your topic was for your first 20 articles from day 1 choose a couple long tails for this topic and start a blog on each long tail on one of the three sites – or all of them if you are up from more work. If your topic was “printer paper” then make your support blogs on “legal printer paper” and another on “photo printer paper”. Doesn’t matter really, just do a long tail of the topic and set up a blog.

You can monetize it if you want (not with Wordpress.org) but with these free sites it’s often best to not monetize it with Adsense – maybe you can throw in some Amazon affiliate links instead.

Bottom line is setup the blog and post about 10 posts on each blog using long-tail keyword driven post titles. Include a link on the side bar to every post on your support blog.

The posts don’t have to be long, maybe a couple hundred words max, and with Blogger don’t bother including tags at all as they are automatically nofollow/noindex links – just avoid them all together.

In each blog post contextually with anchored keywords link to two of your original 20 articles (from day 1) giving you a single link to each one from each support blog you make. And for the love, use unique content on everything. No need to copy anything and there’s no need to spin anything. Just write 200 words 10 times per blog. Not a big deal.

That’s it for day 5. Check back in tomorrow for day 6 and if you are liking this series let me know about it below and others know about it with some link love. Thank guys.

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Starting To Make A Living Online - Day 4

To continue with my series: How To Begin Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 4.

Day 4 – Backlink Stacking Helps A Ton
Back on day two you should have opened accounts at SheToldMe, InfoPirate, and possibly some other bookmarking places. Bookmarking etiquette dictates that you don’t use a single bookmarking site to only bookmark one other site so take this opportunity to bookmark some of your original 20 articles from day as well as the 10 backlink articles you published yesterday.

When bookmarking make sure to use substantially identical titles or very similar titles as the post you are backlinking and make sure to use your keywords in the 50-100 words you use in the bookmark. Use the bookmark tags to add about five long tail keywords relating to your bookmark.

On this day you should bookmark all ten of your backlink articles from yesterday. This is link stacking as described by my friend Jade and as described in even more detail by Allyn Hayne of Blogger Illustrated on his post Introduction To BackLink Stacking (seriously - read his blog).

You will probably also backlink some of your original articles (from day 1) and possibly some of your free blog posts from Blogger and Weebly (if you set these up already).

FYI – these bookmarks will make you only small amounts of money but they will more importantly build some authority to your main backlink articles from day 3. They are important in the long run and they help you build authority while still starting slow. Do it.

That’s it for day 4. Check back in tomorrow for day 5 and let me know in the comments if you don’t understand anything. I’m trying to be brief and to the point – it’s kind of hard for me. :)

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How To Start To Make A Living Online - Day 3

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 3.

Day 3 – Contextual Links In the Body Of Articles (Not Bookmarks) Are The Best Links You Can Build
If you opened accounts at the places I recommended in my last post: How To Make A Living Online (Day 2) then you should have accounts at some places where you can publish articles like InfoBarrel, HubPages, Posturown, Squidoo, and Snipsly.

Each of these places allows you to include at least two contextual backlinks to wherever you want. By publishing two articles on each of these five sites (10 articles total) you can send a single backlink to each of your twenty original articles.

Publish highly related content to your original articles using nearly the exact same post titles and make sure your anchor text is for your keywords. Remember, each publication will both make you money and will send the best backlinks to your original 20 articles from day 1.

That’s it for day 3. Check back in tomorrow for day 4 and let’s see some action down in the comments section below. I hope you are starting to take some action here guys. Get to work.

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Farmer's Update - Go Check Out Lizzie

Wildly quick post this time around.

I have stayed away from posting on the big "farmers update" that occurred last week but this post by Lizzie is a real gem. If you aren't reading Lizzie's Passive Income blog then you should start - you'll learn a lot and her reporting on issues like this is top notch.

Check out here post on the Google Farmer's Update and how it seems to have failed miserably.

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How To Make A Living Online - Day 2

To continue with my series: How To Make A Living Online Series: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 2

Day 2 – Building Backlinks Is The Most Important Part In Ranking Well
Wherever you published your articles from day 1 open up some accounts at places where you can build some backlinks. Stick with other places where you can earn money so that you can kill two birds with one stone (i.e. making money and building backlinks).

Good options include InfoBarrel, HubPages, Squidoo, Posturown, SheToldMe, InfoPirate, Snipsly. There are of course many other places which have revenue sharing and they all pay you to publish there.

You can stick with just these places for now or you can browse this crazy long list of similar sites compiled by ClassicalGeek.

I recommend however just sticking to the few I noted above. If you are ambitious then you can also open up a blog at Blogger and Weebly as these are free accounts which you can stick Adsense on and can also work for building revenue while you publish backlink articles.

That’s it for day 2. Check back in tomorrow for day 3 and get busy in the comments below and send me some link love for goodness sake. :)

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How To Start Making A Living Online – 28 Days To Be A Better IMer

Albert Einstein once said a very famous quote:

“Make Everything As Simple As Possible, But Not Simpler.”

To that effect I’m going to do some daily publishing here on this blog and call it affectionately, with tongue-in-cheek, 28 Days To Be A Better IMer (and kinda blogger).

These posts will be short and to the point and will not go into detail. They are basic guidelines and they are what I consider to be the most important part of making money writing articles, blogging, and building websites.

We all know about the 31 days to be a better blogger philosophy brought to us by Darren over at PB but is that really what we should be doing if we are in this to make a living rather than make a name for ourselves?

For me, I don’t really want to make a name for myself – that’s why I go by Chezfat – I just want to feed my cats, take my wife on an annual cruise, help my grandparents and family out financialy, and afford a decent life for my baby who is due in June - I'd like to also have a good bottle of scotch in the cupboards at all time too. :) I don’t want fame; I just want to pay the bills and enjoy life and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Day 1 – Pick One Topic And Write 20 Articles On That Topic
Publish all twenty articles on the same website and contextually link between them all using keyword anchor text. Make sure each article links to at least 4-6 of the other articles and make sure every article has at least 4-6 backlinks coming from the other articles.

Of course following basic on-page SEO is important. Make sure to use keyword focused post titles but beyond that the internal linking should do very well in helping you index, rank, and build relevance and revenue.

Seriously, publish this info in a few days time and then sit back – let your analytics tracking code begin compiling traffic stats for you to use to your advantage later on. This will take time but you have to publish content to start getting traffic.

That’s it for day 1. Check back in tomorrow for day 2... and if you enjoy what you are reading let me know below in the comments and maybe even with a backlink.  Thanks.

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