What I have started off with now is keep generating backlinks to  my websites. Over the past 2 years all I had done was mainly build backlinks to the home pages, and do a few posts every few weeks or so. So some of my homepages have been on page 1 of the Google search results for my main keywords for a while, and I have seen some consistent search engine traffic from it. But there I was, thinking how much more traffic I could generate if I managed to get my other pages on page 1 as well, for their keywords!

Luckily, I have been a subscriber for Backlink Builder for a while now, I just never did anything with them. Seriously, I was sitting on a Goldmine and just didn’t take the time to act on it. Well, when I finally decided to come out of my hiding a few weeks ago, that’s what I decided to do – go systematically through Backlink Builder and start building those all important backlinks to my inner pages, as well.

As I had the thought of reporting about it on my blog here, of course I wrote the “starting positions” of some of my pages down before I started. Here they are:

On March 24 I had:

And then I started with my backlink campaign. Just went systematically through the files that you get with Backlink Builder, linking back to my inner pages with the keywords for those particular pages as anchor text. I made a point of writing down which anchor text I used on which site, and which page on my site I linked back to. For that I designed a very simple table which I fill out as I go along (otherwise you lose track). If you click on the image you can see it in original size. I created it on Open Office.

My next date when I checked my keywords was April 6, so just about 2 weeks later. These are a few results:

Can you see the huge jump in those keywords? It’s nearly unbelievable.
These are the positions as of today (April 29):

I find this just amazing. Now, some of the rankings still jump around a little, but I am quite positive that it will come further up again. The jumping around at the beginning is quite normal.

You know what else happened now that my inner pages are up in the search results?

• My traffic has increased – from between 500-600 views a day to most days between 900-1000.
• My affiliate earnings have increased so far by about 30%. For example, one of my Affiliate Programs made me $72 yesterday:

So – all is green in my books, so to speak! This stuff really works. You build a niche site with a few relevant pages, create some good content on those pages, – it really pays off to put effort into making the site a site that your visitors will enjoy and benefit from! – and start building links to it. I’m chuffed!

Looking forward to your comments!

Today I wanted to let you know about the best password manager I have come across online. I only found it a few weeks ago, and I love it already.

When you get into internet or affiliate marketing, you will soon notice that you will very likely start signing up for many, many sites and services. Be it Affiliate programs, forums, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, article sites, squidoo, youtube  – you name it, you will sign up for it and need a user name and password.

Many people start out with writing their user names and passwords on pieces of paper (like me), or start writing up a notepad on the computer and just create one long (and usually disorderly) list of secret names and numbers. It can be hard to find what you need on that sometimes!

What an Internet Marketer really needs is a great password manager. One that remembers every single user name and password for you, no sweat. And Last Pass is exactly that (and no, this is not an affiliate link! )

Last Pass is literally the last password you will ever need! You will get one master password, and the program will remember all of  your user names and passwords for you, super easy. If you have a look at their home page, there are plenty of testimonials on there from enthusiastic users, and also some really good reviews from sites like PCMag.com, ZDNet Microsoft Report and PC World.

Now, I am not good at explaining any technical things or how exactly it works, but it does, and it’s brilliant! Oh – and did I mention that it’s free, too? I would suggest for you to just head over to their website, have a bit of a snoop around, and check it out!

Seriously, as Internet Marketer this is something you really need, and Last Pass is one of the best password managers you can get!

Enjoy!

Kontera Payment

A little while ago I had an email in my account from a service I had forgotten about for a long time. It was Kontera, my in-text advertising program I had signed up with in January 2009. They were letting me know that they had paid me $107.29 in USD for the advertising on my sites http://www.mybeachdecor.com and http://www.healthydietweightloss.com. WOW! Happy Day!

Then I looked back to see for what time frame this payment really was. Yep, you guessed it, it was for the time from when I signed up (January 2009) to July 2010. That makes it 1 1/2 years, or 18 months. Spread the payment out over 18 months and it means I earned not quite $6 per month with Kontera. Whoopidoo!

Well, to be honest, whilst it seems very disappointing on first glance, it is still money I earned for doing absolutely nothing extra, just by installing Kontera In-Text Advertising on my blog. So as “bad” as the payout seems, I think it’s worth adding some In-Text Advertising to monetize your blog.

What exactly is in-text advertising? Well, have you ever seen a website where some of the words are underlined, or maybe dotted, highlighted in blue, and when you hover over them you get a little window pop up with some related information? (Have a look at my site about Lighthouse Home Decor you can see it there).

What you will have to consider is whether the extra advertising on your blog will actually turn people off. If you have a very loyal readers base or customer base, it might actually annoy them if there are too many links that point them away from your site.

There are quite a few different companies out there that offer this service. Opinions on these services differ quite a lot. Some Affiliate Marketers don’t seem to like Kontera, but swear by InfoLinks, – they seem to be paying out at a better rate. There are some others, but I have not investigated them yet.

What I have decided to do is to stop Kontera for now and sign up with Infolinks. I want to see for myself whether there is a big difference in the payout and service. I remember, what I don’t like about Kontera is that you can never look back more than 6 months for your earnings. Which makes it a bit difficult if it takes you more than 6 months to earn up to your payout threshold. So after about 6 months, whenever I wanted to know the total earned in my account, I had to email Kontera and request a figure. Which was a real pain in the butt.

Both companies have a payment threshold of $50 and pay straight into your paypal account.

So, if you are thinking of monetizing your blog or site, have a think about In-Text Advertising.

I would like to know also whether any of you have experience with this, and how your success rate is/was. Which company do you prefer? Do you know of others that might be better? Let me know!

It has just been so busy in my life lately, my partner and me are running several “offline” businesses, and I am trying to bring all the paperwork up to date, because we are soooo far behind it’s not funny. So whenever I am not at my TAFE college studying bookkeeping, I am sifting through piles of paperwork and purchase dockets trying to make sense of it all. In between I do all the stuff around the house (boooooring….) and take the dogs for long walks at the beach for relaxation (much needed!). In my other little free time I take care of the kids (slowly growing up, but still in need of lots of Mama ) and occasionally meet my friends (yes, I too do socialize!).

With the result that at night, when in the past I sat down to take care of my blogs and learning about Internet Marketing, I am just so tired once the kids are in bed that I fall asleep in front of the TV!!!! I guess it’s a little burn-out syndrome….

So that’s why you have been missing out big time!

Never mind, I will eventually get back into it. But for today I wanted to talk about one of the first steps you have to do when you are starting out with affiliate marketing, and that is “joining affiliate programs”.

When I started my very first website in February 2008 (Beach Decor), I had no idea about nothing. I was being taught by a company over the phone once a week, got homework and just had to build the website step by step, including writing content for the pages and – you guessed it – joining affiliate programs to promote products on my new site.

So I jumped right in and searched high and low for affiliate programs that fitted with my beachy decor theme. I was so excited by it all that I ended up joining 16 +/- different affiliate programs and plastering links to them all over my site. Mind you, the site did not look spammy or overstuffed or anything like that, I just had different programs for different pages on my site, depending what the theme was. It actually came together quite nicely!

Since those early days I have not touched the site too much apart from adding a page here and there, changing some “Feature Items” and adding a blog post occasionally.

But the other day I sat down and had  a think about how successful this site has been, and what kind of results I have had with the different programs, and what I could do to improve my site. And when I looked at my affiliate programs and their performance, I have to say it was a bit of an “AHA” moment.

There are only very few programs that have made me consistent sales and brought in consistent affiliate commissions. There are quite a few that have not had ONE sale in the past 2 1/2 years, not ONE! Even though when I look at the statistics they have had quite a good visitor turnout. And then there are some that have made some sales, but don’t seem to be able to reach the payment threshold that’s been put in place.

So what does that mean?

I think that one of life’s principles also applies to Affiliate Marketing: If you want to be successful, you must focus and concentrate your efforts, instead of spreading yourself too far and wide. Meaning, if you put all your efforts into a few select affiliate programs and promote their products on your site, you are more likely to receive more commissions more easily, and faster, than if you have your efforts spread out over too many.

If I had made the few sales that my “minor” programs have made through one of my better going programs, I would have reaped the rewards already! Instead, I might have to forgo the money I have earned in these programs, as I don’t think I can wait another 5 years before I make the next sale!

I hope you get what I am trying to say here. Just work out which programs will suit your site, sign up and then stay true to those few select ones, don’t get carried away because you see another great site with an affiliate program attached where you could possibly sell something on your site.

I found that if you have a site which might promote products in several different areas it will be best to join one of the bigger networks like Amazon, Commission Junction, Linkshare or Shareasale (this is my favorite right now, it’s made me a few really good sales lately ). They have a huge array of different businesses within their system which you can promote (apart from Amazon, but they just have every product under the sun…), and every sale you make will be thrown together in the one pot. Easier to track, and a quicker way to get a payout, for sure!

So, time for me to start working on overhauling my Beach Theme Home Decor site!

Please, let me know what you think.

Well, I have been working overtime tonight (it’s 10pm…), so I am off to bed!!! Ready for an early paperwork start tomorrow…. Nite Nite…

Your WordPress Video Tutorials

I am very excited today because I have just come across something that quite blew me away, it is so fantastic! It is called WordPress Classroom 2.o. I absolutely wanted to see what it is all about, because I love WordPress and building blogs and websites with it, I think it’s the coolest blogging (and website) platform out there. So I signed up and got hooked!

I remember what a hard time I had when I wanted to learn the “How to” of WordPress, and all the associated options with it. There is a lot to learn, and it is just so much easier if you have a good guide that shows you how to do it. And that’s exactly what WordPress Classroom 2.o does. A pretty well known guy (in the Internet Marketing world, anyway named Matthew Wolfe created it, and the best part is it is all VIDEOS!!! – I personally learn a lot better if I can follow a video rather than just writing! His WordPress Classroom 2.o is packed with clever videos doing the “show all” and “tell all” of WordPress. You will really be a pro after going through all his stuff!

Matthew is just such a nice guy, because he created these really cool instructional videos that teach you how to set up your own blogging business and now he is giving them away for free!! There are something like 15 videos that walk you through the whole thing step by step.

I only had to look at 2 of his free videos and already learned something really cool I had no idea about – it’s about hiding affiliate links (if you click on that, you will get to my “old” post about hiding affiliate links; that’s the hard way of doing it). Matthew has shown me something so simple in his tutorials, it’s crazy. No more stuffing around with .php files and FTP! — I won’t tell you what it is, that would somewhat spoil it for you .

If you have followed me for a while, you should know that I never recommend anything if I am not convinced it’s really good. After all, I have been burnt so many times, and I don’t want anybody else to go through what I did.

So, trust me,  if you really are serious about making money with WordPress blogs and websites, then head over to WordPress Classroom 2.0 and grab the free videos before Matthew decides to pull them down!

Now, when I say it is my biggest earner, that doesn’t mean much, really. I have been going along at an extremely slow pace over the past 2 years, if I can spend 1/2 hour a day on my Internet Marketing it’s already a lot (and that includes learning about new stuff!). So my site on Beach Decor still earns me around $150/month and has been doing so for the past year or so. But – earnings haven’t gone up. Unfortunately. Even though I have been doing a little bit of work on the site occasionally. Hm. Why?

Well, the thing is this: Pretty much all the time when I did my link building for the site, I concentrated on building backlinks to my home page. Every directory submission, every link exchange, most comments I left, I had them all pointing to my home page. Which is ok – I have been on page 1 of Google’s SERP’s for quite a while for my main keyword “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and am getting really steady traffic from it.

But at the same time I have forgotten about the other pages on my website, the pages that have also been built around specific keywords to be able to achieve good Google rankings in the SERP’s (what else do we do keyword research for???). So, here I have a website with a few pages centered around keywords that could potentially bring in a lot of traffic, but I have completely neglected building backlinks to those pages.

Because that is what a good Internet Marketer should do who takes care of his niche site: Build backlinks to all of his pages to get the most out of potential traffic.

I want to show you something; it is a few screenshots I have taken from my SEOQuake Toolbar to show you what kind of difference in links built back to my sites pages there is:

Backlinks To Home Page

Backlinks To Page "Tropical Home Decor"

Backlinks To Page "Lighthouse Home Decor"

(All these screen shots have been taken with the software “Jing” which I absolutely love it’s so easy to handle!)

As you can see, my home page has by far the most backlinks and thus ranks the best out of all my pages. Some of my pages have only 2 or 4 backlinks pointing directly to them, one or two might even have none! So it is no wonder that they do not rank for the keywords that I had originally designed them for…

So what I have decided to do now is to try and get the other pages of my site that is already doing ok to rank better by starting to build backlinks to them. Instead of building all the links to my home page, I will concentrate of getting backlinks to my internal pages, if possible with the anchor text being the actual keyword. This should, over time, increase the visibility of those pages in the SERP’s and start to bring in some extra search engine traffic through these keywords.

The reason for the earnings of my site not increasing in revenue is simply because there is only a certain number of people searching for “Beach Decor” or “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and I am getting all the traffic I can already from it. But I am not getting any traffic for my other keywords yet as they are not high up in the SERP’s yet, and that is due to the fact that I have very much neglected link building to those pages.

Building backlinks is a tedious process, especially if you do it yourself. But as boring it is, it is a vital – if not the most important – task if you want your websites to be successful and visible on the Internet. The more backlinks a site (or page ) has, the more value Google will put on it, generally, and the better it will rank.

So, even if it is one of the least exciting processes in the adventure of earning money online, I urge you not to forget your link building, especially also to any internal pages you might have within your website or blog, to reach it’s full potential.

Naturally curious, I had to check out the site, of course! And I am a bit of a sucker for plugins, especially free ones…

After downloading and activating the plugin (you will get video instructions on how to do this, if you should not know), I have to say that I am really impressed with the features! I think Mark Dulisse has done a great job with this plugin. It will make your SEO so much easier. I especially like the list of suggested plugins (for SEO purposes) you get within your wp-admin after installing the plugin (told you, – I’m a plugin-sucker!). I was very surprised that out of a list of 13 suggested plugins for SEO improvement I had only 2 installed!!!

I am not going into what this plugin will do for you – you can read all about it on the SEO Power website -, but I will attach a few screenshots from within my blog so  you can see what it will look like.

My suggestion is for you to get the plugin – you will not regret it. I can’t tell you any results yet – I had it only installed for a day so far, I need to give it a little bit of time – but I have no doubt that it will work.

This is just a little gem I couldn’t let pass you by! BTW – if you click on the screenshots, you will be able to have a better look at them.

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Keywords

Let's work out a plan of action!

Hey everybody, I am back online! Have been for about 3 or so weeks, to be honest. I just had to play “catch up” with my real life, after 5 weeks offline and a business to run it took (and still takes) a lot of time to re-organize and get up to date with everything. So my Internet Marketing has – again – taken a bit of a back seat.

If you have been reading my blog you have seen that, after lots of trials and errors, I have finally come to realize that the one way for me to earn a living of the Internet is “Building Niche Websites” and earning money through those sites with Google Adsense and Revenue from Affiliate Programs like Amazon.com or Ebay Partnernetwork.

Building Niche Websites is not the only way to earn money on the Internet, for example you can build email lists, too, but I have come to realize that it is not for me as I do not want to have to constantly write emails to my list to make money from it. It’s just not me. Admitted, if you do it right you can probably earn a hell of a lot of money from it, but you need to be prepared to put the expertise and hours into it.

When you build niche websites and monetize them, if you do it right you will have a fair bit of work to do at the beginning, but once you have got yourself established it will become a lot easier to maintain.

No matter what you decide to do – it is absolutely vitally important that you get yourself organized and have a plan. I just read through a post I made about getting organized back in July last year, and I am sad to say that I am back at exactly the same spot as last year. Stuffing around on the net but not achieving anything.

Have a good look at yourself – are you doing the same? Are most of us wasting heaps of time on the Internet trying to make more money but doing it without a proper plan of action, thus failing miserably and asking ourselves WHY?

For me, I also will have to sit down and think about my approach to establishing my niche websites and driving traffic to them. To date it is all over the place with no real direction, and that’s why nothing much has happened to my earnings over the past year. They have pretty much stayed the same, and that’s a pity as it could have been quite different if I was organized and focused.

So, make a plan, and work with it and on it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you can always make it better over time. You just need to start.

If you also work with niche websites, one plan of approach could be to set aside a day a week per site (depending how many you have) and just work on that site on that day. Even if it’s only 1/2 hour. Work out what’s important and when and how to do what you have to do.

Please, we have to make sure we do not end up as the next Internet Marketing Casualty – we all need more self discipline and less distraction.

A very good online tool to getting organized and creating “mind maps” to keep you on track is “MindMeister“. It is definitely worth having a look at.

I apologize to you all in case I sound like rambling on, it’s just something I find really, really important and have big trouble doing myself. I am very upset about it, and I want to just remind you all of how precious our time is and how we waste it so often by being unfocused, and therefore not getting any further to achieving our goals.