Having an Apple iPhone now for three months I fully understand what all the commotion is about. They have an excellent product that meets the needs of people in all walks of life. From my non tech savvy wife to my seven year old daughter they are both able to pick up the device and simply use it. I just wanted to give some of my thoughts on why I think Apple is and is going to be the one to beat when it comes to phones and mobile devices.

• Using the app store is as easy for a techie as it is for your wife.
• The iPad is an incredible tool from business to personal even though both the iPad and iPhone do not support flash they are still a powerful tool that is going to change they way we look at mobile devices.
• Good or bad in the app store purchasing your next application is only click away once you’ve setup your account. There has been more than 50 billion iphone and ipod touch customers through the store, with more than 2 billion downloads and over 85,000 apps available for download.
• Apple is usually the innovator not the follower unlike some other manufactures as long as they keep this edge there is no stoping them.
• Easy for kids to use and understand.
• It is simply a great looking device.

Let me know with a comment your experience with apple devices or iPhones.

Blogging is a process. Every process is systematic.  Blogging entails a systematic approach to it and most rookie bloggers don’t seem to get it. Buy a domain; buy a hosting account and slap some content with some makeshift graphics and then wait for the cash to drop in; it’s not going to work that way. Here are some secrets for you to get started with blogging:

Start professionally and don’t monetize for the first 6 months: Don’t monetize your blog with ad sense scripts and other things. One or two banners are fine, but don’t really bother with monetization for the first 6 months at least; even better if you can stretch for as far as one year. You do this because you don’t want to make your readers think that you are in this for the money (even if you are).  Also, ad sense and affiliate marketing ads tend to take your readers away from your blog even before they begin to show you some love. You want them to stay, read and begin to trust you.

Write content first and populate before publishing: One of the other mistakes most bloggers do is to write on the fly or just before the designated date of publishing. This happens because that’s how you got started in the first place – set the blog up, write content regularly. If you write content this way, you could face a lot of pressure trying to publish regularly. The clever thing is to buy yourself some time by creating ‘buffer content’ – write a lot of posts worth 2-3 months of posting and use the auto-schedule feature to post them on the designated days of the month. This gives you a lot of time to think about future posts and publish regularly.

‘Targeted’ traffic is everything: It’s been said often that traffic is the key to your success online. However, it isn’t any traffic that will work. For blogging elements, as an example, the blog is for rookies and veterans of blogging who would like to know the basics of blogging and also new insights, tips and techniques on blogging. Would people looking for gardening tips be a part of meaningful traffic for us? No, they don’t. Focus on generating targeted traffic which makes sense of the time and effort you expend.

Have you used any of these secrets before? What worked for you?

Beginners on the Internet – be it for Internet Marketing, Writing, Web designing, Blogging – are taught to go the ‘free’ route. Although starting for free is a really a no-headache, no-risk, no-heartache way of getting started, there is no so much impact you can make with it. For example, consider blogging. How much of an impact are you going to make when you start out with a free blog based on wordpress.com or blogger.com.

Please be warned that there are a few exceptions here as well. One of good old friends Dana Prince has been writing on her blog for a long time now and it has quite a dedicated following .Want something more sensational? Check out Seth Godin’s blog if you are looking for a truly successful example of a free blog rocking the Internet; well, it works if your name is Seth Godin).

Apart from those examples above, everyone else must make some investments and do some due diligence. Here’s a list of them:

Invest in a domain name and hosting: No, I am not going to recommend any hosts here. All I wanted to communicate was that with a self-hosted wordpress blog — or any other CMS like Joomla, Magento or Drupal – would give you tremendous amount of flexibility to do what you wanted. It’s not even about monetization; it’s about being professional and giving a serious image to your readers. A hosting account and domain name wouldn’t cost you much and if you did what you were supposed to, you will very well make up for the money spent many times over.

Invest time on continuous learning: This thing never stops; when you think you mastered the art of developing content, the question of knowing design inside out kicks in. When you think you mastered design, the field is forever changing with new technology such as jqueries, Javascripts and Ajax.The world of affiliate marketing is constantly changing. Blogging has evolved from simple online dairies to full-fledged informational powerhouses. If you aren’t investing in learning, you are still under a rock?

Invest in a great theme: Mike and I have always been debating whether a paid theme is better or a free wordpress theme is better. While we haven’t been able to come to a conclusion yet, what’s more important is the look and the presentation of your site. Be it paid or free, it’s important that it looks good. Design plays a vital role in your online success and hence you must invest in either a ready-made paid theme or pay up for proper customization.

Say, have you made these investments yet? What other things have you spent on?

We always blog about little things in life, don’t we? We think about the easy ways and quick ways. However, did you realize there is a lot more to publishing than just blogging and selling others’ products to your readers? What does it really to be a real publisher – the kinds who would have a product to sell and the blog just does the superhuman work of getting more leads in? Stop being an affiliate now and think of being the real publisher. Here’s how you can do it:

Do your due diligence (Niche Research): I won’t be able to do a better job that Ed Dale of Thirty Day Challenge (First 3 Modules) when it comes to doing research about the niche you want to focus in. Pick a niche most people love to throw money on, pick a relatively smaller niche within that large niche (also called as micro-niche) and finally, do keyword research to get you the foothold you need to start.

Have a website and set it up: Needless to say, you will need a website to be set-up for selling your product. Of course, selling without a website is the famous war cry you heard when you wanted to be an affiliate. The game is played differently here; you got to have a website. Pick wordpress and take it easy. You don’t need an award-winning design, you just need a domain name and a wordpress backed website. Set-it up and have it custom designed if you have the resources – people, money, time?

Create a product: Head over to this little program on your computer that helps you to write things down. Openoffice, Microsoft word or even a Google Document and start typing away about the subject you initially did research on. Start with a Table of Contents (TOC) because it helps you give the document a flow and structure to it. Do research and write with flavour.

Market the hell out of it: Here’s the tough part. You will now have to hustle to bring in your new customers for the product. Assuming you started off well with the niche research, you should at least be content the target customers you are looking at do have the intention and the ability to buy. However, they still need to pampered and convinced. We covered plenty of blogs on Blogging Elements on how to market and there is a lot more information out there. Some of the easiest places to get started?

Try E-junkie

Try a WSO( Warrior Special Offer) on the Warriorforum

Put it up on your blog or website, use e-junkie or any other e-commerce cart and peddle it on your blog/site.

How would you feel if you could just jump into a million dollar industry without spending much at all? Wouldn’t it be a great feeling if all you had to do is to flick those switches and cash in on opportunities? It does have a learning curve and it isn’t easy; but at least it isn’t like setting up steel plants, is it?

Assuming you are all geared up, ready to start and willing to give it everything, but you suddenly realize that you need to know things. Have access to information and be able to operate from a knowledge stand-point. But all of them cost you money. What would you do? Give up. Well, there’s no need to because there are incredibly informational and powerful resources and the best part is that all of them are free to use. Here they are:

Thirty Day Challenge: For me, one of the best programs on affiliate marketing has always been and will always be the Thirty Day Challenge or 30 DC. For once, it comes in as a fully-loaded course with videos and transcripts. It starts from the very basics about niches and micro-niches, how to research them, how to find tools that are extremely effective in helping you to dig for the right keywords, do effective keyword research and then a lot more about affiliate marketing. They could have charged anything for this, but they surprisingly don’t. In fact, their dojo gives you a high because all that knowledge could kill you with excitement.

Click Booth’s Educational Program: Most networks for affiliates and publishes are simple, programmed websites. Of course some of the bigger networks usually have some information and resources for affiliates and publishers to use and learn from but most of these articles aren’t deep and they rehash the same thing that is being paraded around on the web. What you don’t get are the secrets. You don’t get the real tips and tricks. You don’t get some insights that could have come to super affiliates only after a lot of failing. I found the Clickbooth’s Education program to be god sent – something you must go now and devour because it would be a sin not to.

Mark Ling’s Affilorama: I stumbled on this by accident and I am glad accidents like these happen because Mark Ling’s Affilorama is one those few things free that still give some excellent value — one of those few things that give you something for nothing. Mark’s site is more of a membership site which has a lot of information for a rookie affiliate marketer. When you subscribe to his newsletters, his information that comes in through the emails itself is worth signing up for.

Remember one thing though, reading up and listening to videos is one thing; but actually taking action is the difference between those who are already there and those who keep dreaming about these things.

If you started a blog, there is all likely hood that you would have considered monetizing it to enable it to fetch you returns in cash. One of the best ways of monetizing your blog is to take to affiliate programs and become an affiliate for products and services made by other companies or individuals. If affiliate marketing was on your mind, then there might just be a few things you might not have been doing all this way. It came as a stark realization to me at one point and I think it would help you too:

Keyword research: By happenstance, I was reading a lot recently and it occurred to me that there countless number of affiliates who don’t bother to take this crucial step even before they buy a domain and/or hosting account. Meticulous keyword research solely determines the fate of your business and without doing it, there is really no point in starting your business. If you want to get started right away, I would urge you to go ahead and fill your day today with some constructive reading on how to conduct keyword research the correct way from the dojo on Market Samurai. Yet, another place would be the Word Tracker Academy — armed with this knowledge and after having done the right investment, you can’t go wrong with this, can you?

Developing systems for online marketing: If you approach online advertising with the same kind of vigour as you would approach a glass of drink on the beach, you would know where you will be with your online business, wouldn’t you? I have been a major advocate of developing systems and even online marketing strategy has to have a system for it to work. What kind of systems have you developed? To help you do this better, perhaps you must head back to the following posts to help you with this step:

How to Run your Blog as a Business – Part 1

How to Run your Blog as a Business – Part 2

How to Run your Blog as a Business – Part 3

Coming back quickly enough after you fail: I assume that you will fail even after you approach your blogging cum affiliate marketing with this kind of a methodical approach. If everyone got it right the first time they tried everything, it would have been a different place –boring at best. What’s important is the learning that you derive out of doing these mistakes, falling down hard and getting back quickly enough – the essence of invincibility. Talking about being invincible, I think you should join Mark Joyner’s program on being Invincible because this is guaranteed to turn your life around.

What are your thoughts on Market Samurai? Have you done keyword research anytime? What your thoughts on Mark Joyner’s program on Invincibility? What are your thoughts on developing systems for online marketing?

This is a guest post by Brandon Connell who’s blog you can find at http://www.BrandonConnell.com

Creating a blog with the intention of generating a regular income is a noble task. When you start out with a marketing budget of zero, that task is more difficult than working a regular full time job. Actually turning a profit on such a blog takes time, and you must work with that intention from the beginning.

Your biggest asset from the start is wordpress because it has a wide variety of search engine friendly themes and free plugins at your instant disposal. You can easily find a free php hosting account through google that allows ftp access and sometimes c-panel. Having this type of hosting will allow you to easily upload new plugins, and additional stats tracking called webalizer within c-panel itself.

Once you have your blog installed and ready, you need to choose a design that allows widgets, and has ad slots in it. I recommend using a plugin called MyAdManager which will allow you to accept paypal payments, and instantly publishes advertisers upon receiving payment. When your blog gets popular, you can just sit back and collect the revenue without having to manage any of the ecommerce aspects.

Additional plugins you will need for seo, stats tracking, and expanding your functionality are:

• AddToAny: Subscribe Button - Help readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader or feed service.
• Akismet - Comes with the wordpress install but requires an api code to work. This protects your blog against spam.
• All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• CommentLuv - Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.
• flickrRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site.
• Follow My Links - Do not automatically add the rel=nofollow attribute to links in comments by the post author, strip nofollow from links to the post author’s web page. This encourages blog comments.
• Global Translator - Automatically translates a blog in 48 different languages. Brings in traffic from other countries and non-native speakers.
• Google Analytics for WordPress - This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
• Google Sitemaps - This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• BM KeywordLinks - A SEO plugin that helps you to automatically link keywords to articles.
• LiveJournal Crossposter Remix - Automatically copies all posts to a LiveJournal or other LiveJournal-based blog.
• MyAdManager – Manages 125×125 ads automatically. Also allows the ability to add new ads and make them live on the confirmation of payment from paypal.
• Newsletter - Newsletter is a cool plugin to create your own subscriber list, to send newsletters, to build your business.
• nStatistics - This plugin generate complex blog statistics for users and robots.
• Please Link 2 Me - This plugin adds a text box containing all the code necessary for visitors to easily create links back to your article from their website.
• SEO Friendly Images - Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.
• Smart Youtube - Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.
• Static Toolbar - Static Toolbar displays a static toolbar in the bottom of the page, like the facebook’s one. The toolbar may contain last posts, rss feed, search engine, social network and sharing links.
• WP-Sticky - Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.
• WP-UserOnline - Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).
• WP to Twitter - Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.

These are some of the plugins that I include on all of my blogs. They provide advanced functionality that allows me to build and maintain traffic, as well as enhance the media capabilities of my blog. Making your blog generate an income is more than adding a few plugins though.

Blog marketing is a huge deal, and something you must do on a daily basis if you are taking your blog seriously. I understand that it is discouraging to run a blog and post daily for months without making an income, but you are using that time to build a foundation for success. Persistence is what pays off, and you cannot lose sight of that. Keep in mind that while you cannot see an immediate income, things are going on that you cannot see which will make your blog a huge success if you just keep going with the routine.

Key blog marketing techniques include commenting on other blogs and including your link in the url field. Actually take part in the blog’s conversation and avoid spamming. Assume that the blog owner will notice spam right off the bat and delete it immediately, so it was a waste of your time to do so in the first place.

Forums are also a great way to generate some traffic and build links. Forums usually let you include your link in your signature. Your signature appears beneath every single forum post you make. Because the link is included in your signature, you don’t have to post it in your actual post because it will look like spam.

One of your biggest traffic sources will come from guest posting on other blogs. If you post a quality article on another blog which has traffic, you will bring in a new group of readers to your own blog. You can easily find blogs to guest post on by doing a google search for “guest blogging”. There are forums, social networks, and other sites dedicated to guest bloggers. This article you are reading now is a guest post, and I wrote this article specifically for this blog.

You can generate even more traffic by writing articles and posting them on article publishing websites. You can find a ton of such sites by doing a google search for “free article publishing”. You will establish yourself as an expert this way, and those kinds of websites always get good rankings in search engines. Some of them even allow re-publishing and any webmaster that does so is required to maintain a link to the authors website in order to use the article. This will help you build one-way links to your blog and increase your Google PageRank.

If your website is also in place to generate service business, you can publish press releases on free press release websites.

There are lots of free marketing methods available on the internet today, and it just takes a little research to find them. Start now by looking at what you have already done, and how you can improve upon it with the tips I provided. Don’t forget to stop by my blog for a free newsletter, and lots more tips.

There are posts on blogging and there are some really good posts on blogging. I happened to be reading a lot last weekend and I came across a post on Problogger – this is one blog you should read, if you haven’t yet done it – that made me stop and think about blogging as a business model, yet again. This is something I have always been thinking about and now David Risley drives the nail into my forehead. Soon after reading the post, I could help but think about some really valuable lessons those posts have to teach us:

Dude, where the hell is the product?

The one thing the post advocates: Have a real product you could sell, throw a blog for effect, value and marketing returns. Point made case closed. It is the product makes who make the most money and it is one model that has always been on the move. If you are running blogs as mini-newspapers on mini-subjects, you can only go so far – - a refreshing insight on Internet business. Isn’t it? Could you make a living on ads- here and there?

A Bad business model is bad, no matter which medium you choose

The newspapers and magazines are going to be out of business what with all that paper, gloss, expensive printing systems, journalists, systems, processes and licenses. David opines that the newspapers are going to be out of business soon and I second his opinion. If you are blogging and focusing on just providing information, aren’t you doing the same thing the newspapers are doing but on a much reduced scale?

The Blogging Myth Reinforced

If you were the owner of Problogger or Copy Blogger, you would make money and if you aren’t in the top 100 listings of Technorati, you just have two choices. First, you do all you can to get there or you quit and create an actual product that you could sell. The only way a blogger can make money by making the “blog” itself as the product is to follow the first choice. An easier and much more rewarding way to make money is to create a product and sell it through your blog by invoking trust of your readers by providing valuable content.

Your SEO efforts might not be working full-steam and your blog barely gets any traffic. However, if you focus on link building, this long-term strategy and consistent effort can pay off in buckets.  How about spending just about 2 hours each day for a dedicated, consistent, relentless and a long-term strategy for link-building? Here are three really easy ways for you to get started:

1. Create Wikis or Q & A pages: One of the easiest and the simplest way to build steady links is to create wikis on subjects that have to something to do  with  your products and services.  For instance, if you deal with information on dogs only, you could manage a wiki that pushes out more information on it and links straight back to your blog. Similarly, you could have powerful, meaningful and effective links from Q & A sites. Answer a couple of questions on your Q & A site or perhaps write one wiki per week – you are on, aren’t you?
2. Squidoo, Bukisa and Hubpages: Seeding content all over the web is equivalent to building commercial property that has the potential to earn revenue for you (assets). One of the easiest ways to do that is to syndicate content on Bukisa and Hubpages. Perhaps, you might want to build a Squidoo lens that roughly takes about 15 minutes to do and link back to your blog from there. Not only will you establish authority on the Internet in your niche, but you will also earn legitimate links.
3. Yahoo Answers: Investing your one hour a day for Yahoo answers can pay off on a long-term basis. All you need to do is to pick the category or subcategory your blog talks about and start providing valuable answers to relevant questions people ask there. By doing so, you develop expertise, be rated as the best answers, enjoy exposure and finally earn your precious backlinks.

What methods have you tried for backlinking? Are your link building efforts long-term or short?

“Listen, just be yourself” Haven’t you heard this being thrown at you every now and then? Although I second that opinion and would have told all and sundry to be themselves at various points in my life, I seem to have second thoughts about bloggers “being themselves” especially when blogging. For various reasons, it might not be as great an idea as most people seem to think. Here are the reasons why being yourself could be bad for your blog:

If you don’t have an opinion, don’t blog: I have met many people for the past few years now and I happen to see that some people are just not opinionated. Well, my wife isn’t opinionated at all, for a start. She doesn’t seem to have an opinion on anything; it’s almost as if she is fine with the way the world is and she one of those few people who are completely at peace with themselves and the rest of the world. Well, that’s great. But she would be a terrible blogger. When you blog, you must have an opinion. You got to have the courage to say what you want and not be intimidated by hundreds of negative comments you might get.

Being Stubborn won’t help: While being opinionated is good for a blogger, being stubborn isn’t. If you are stubborn and if you are closed to any kind of input your readers give you, you aren’t going anywhere. You can’t afford to lock yourself in your little world and think that the rest of the world wouldn’t matter – that’s because you never know when you might want to step in there, would you?

If you are being yourself all the time, you wouldn’t change: Change is important; it makes you a different person every day. Change can make opportunities present themselves to you and show you ways to figure out what you want in your life. If you are being yourself all the time, where are you changing? How do you propose to improve yourself if you thought that you were the best? You got to keep your mind open and accept criticism gracefully, learn from your mistakes and move on.

Being yourself won’t let you succeed. Develop the ability to change, be flexible and move faster when you can. Do you?

Are you being yourself?