Looking back at the last few posts it seems i’ve been a bit Negative and “Preachy ” so to get some balance here is a list of 5 really great tools which will help you get your sites to the next level. The great thing about them is that they are free.  These aren’t listed in any particular order just whichever order I think of them!

1. Ponyfish  www.ponyfish.com

This is a great tool for creating rss feeds from sites that don’t have RSS feeds. Obviuosly if you are using wordpress then you won’t need it (you are distributing your wordpress feeds aren’t you??)  However on some of my sites I’ve added a Html page where I can do comparrision reviews. On these pages I use Ponyfish to create an rss feed and then distribute that.

2. Link Diagnosis  www.linkdiagnosis.com

I love this site, give it a url and it will tell you what back links there are, what anchor text they are using and even which links are no follow/do follow via a nice pie chart. I can’t emphasis just how useful this is if you want to boost your rankings. You can use it on your own site or those of your competitors.

3. Bubbl.  www.bubbl.us I’ve mentioned this before but it really is a great tool so deserves to be mentioned again. Since i’ve started to use Bubbl to track my daily tasks , create plans for sites and track site promotion I have increased the income from the sites i’ve used it on significantly.

4.  Tracking Guru  www.trackingguru.com

This is a great tool to use alongside LinkDiagnosis and Bubbl. It tracks the location of your sites ranking in various search engines for keywords . Allowing you to focus on the poorly performing ones.

For example One of my best performing sites targets 3 keywords  1 is ranked in google at #1 another ranks at #4 and the 3rd ranks at #7.  I can take this information from Tracking Guru, create a plan in Bubble on how to improve the ranking of the 2nd 2 keywords and then monitor the progress of the links and anchor text in Link diagnosis.. And it won’t cost a single penny.

Obviously you can also use it on competitors sites to see how they are ranking for the keywords link diagnosis found (anchor text)

5.  Ok i am going to cheat here I have a few ideas for tools that could go here but I want to hear from you, what are your favorite free tools? Use the comment link below to give me your suggestions and I’ll feature the best tools.

Over the past week the temperature has been in the 90′s /30′s so I thought to myself  yesterday  I’ll try this Internet Lifestyle thing I’ve been reading about , a few hours work in the morning and then sit by the pool and chill out.

So yesterday morning I did the bare minimum of work, loaded my iPod up with some Eban Pagan/Yanik Silver Mp3′s I wanted to listen to and dragged myself from the windowless cave that is my office and went and sat by the pool for a couple of hours with a few cold beers…Man was that nice….

…until I realised that I was sunburnt yesterday evening…

When I say sunburnt,I mean really burnt , redder than the reddest lobster that you ever saw.  That resultled in absolutly no sleep last night. So next time someone tells you about the internet lifestyle tell them they can keep it..

I’m now back in the cave and I’ll come out in september!

Over the past 10 days I have been reviewing all my old sites old tools and e-books i’ve bought. I try to do this once or twice a year and it always suprises me how valuable this excecise is. I’ll freely admit I make the same mistake that many people make, I get a great idea for a site then go ahead and build it but before i’ve got it as profitable as possible  I’ll have another idea and move on to another project.

These 2 to 3 weeks session where I review everything allows me to focus on the sites and get them profitable again. 2 sites I spent a day working on last week have already made me over $120 in the past 3 days .One of them was a domain I bought placed wordpress on and promptly forgot about it.

One week later it’s getting almost 40 visitors a day the sales alone would now make this site worth around $500 if I was to sell it. But whats even better is that I’ve built it in such a way that I can sell adverts in the form of review spots which rotate on the front page so as the traffic increases I can increase the charges for these. Without doing this review I would probably have left this site to expire.

What makes this whole process much easier is a free tool i’ve discovered called Bubbl.us this allows you to create a visual representation of your workload  . You can use it to plan sites or even use it to plan your work for the day.  I’ve been using it to plot the promotion I’ve been doing on each site. I was using whiteboards and spreadsheets for this but I usually forgot to put something on there.

I really do urge you to check it out and I’ve got a nice Gift for the best suggestion for using it so please post your comments below.

A few final notes today. Firstly if you are doing affiliate marketing how would you like to own a site that made over $5000 in the first 2 months? Or a site that makes $142 from 34 visitors before lunch? Chris Rempel the author of Confessions Of a Lazy Super Affiliate  has released a new VIP guide called The Conduit Method. The guide consists of 13 pages and a video there is no fluff and I’ll guarantee that you’ll get more information from it than most 100 page guides written by so called guru’s . It only costs $14.95 and is well worth the cost. You can read more about it by clicking the following link: The Conduit Method

Finally it’s my Birthday on July 1st and so to celebrate I’d though I’d open up another One to One mentoring Program. I usually only do this once every year as it takes up a lot of my time. Unlike other mentoring programs I am available to you via email or skype every day and there is no time limit on the mentoring. I still talk regularly with people I mentored 18 months ago! If you need a way to get motivated and really kick your earning up a gear then this is for you. As Ever I strive to keep the costs down so the cost will be $167 and will include various useful resources. Places are very limited as I find 5-10 people is the most that I can handle. If you are interested you can email at admin [at] income-academy.com  It would be helpful if you use the Subject mentoring . I’ll then send you more details

Until next time..stay lucky

Mark

Recently I’ve been noticing more and more WordPress Sites that contain nothing more than Adsense Adverts,and RSS Feeds and then maybe an Ebay or Amazon Store.  There is no content and absolutly nothing of value on these sites.  Now the crux of the matter is that these are sites that are sold like this, so who in their right mind would actually buy something like this?

As you will know If you’ve been reading this blog for a while I think wordpress is an excellent tool and the foremost platform for internet marketers. Build a site using wordpress and you have a piece of virtual real estate capable of earning you an good income for years to come. So what do you need to make a profitable site.

• Good content
• Carefully chosen monetization
• Good promotion
• A site that looks good and gives value

All that is pretty simple and straight forward, The sites that I’ve been seeing have no proper content just loads of lists of rss feeds and way too much monetization, looking at the site 80% is taken up with ads of 1 sort of another.  I seriously doubt that any promotion is being done apart from spamming a few social bookmarking sites.  All in all they are a complete waste of time and money.

I even found one that targets The  keyword Phrase “best west palm beach lawyer”in the domain name but Goolge tells me “No results found for “best west palm beach lawyer” What a complete waste of time!  (wonder If I’ll be ranking there tomorrow!! )

Do the people who buy these really think that Google is going to keep a site consisting of rss feeds and adverts in the rankings for long? They all seem to come with a couple of huge fingerprints that makes it incedibly easy to track them down.

 Finally before I work myself into a rabid lather… these sites have a translation plugin that supposedly translates the content into 8 different languages, have you ever tried google translate or bablefish on a piece of foreign language? The results are often unfathonable ..this is what foreign visitors will also get.

The sooner that Google removes adsense from these sites the better.

I recently created some new videos as part of WordPress Goldmine. One particular video had a big response within a few hours of posting it. It was suggested to me that I should create a version of it for my blog. So here are 2 videos for you to watch.

If you are looking for a quick and simple method of creating an online income then this may be of particular interest to you.

In video 1 I look at a method of adding regular unique content to your blogs.

Video 1 was only one piece of the jigsaw. In video 2 I look at how you can turn that content into an income. You can get the free UAW plugin for wordpress at http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/contact.html#addurl jusr scroll towards the bottom of the page and you’ll see a selection of plugins. Grab the one for wordpress.

The Plugin I use in Video 2 is the WordPress Link Cloak plugin just follow the link and you can read more about it.

By using these 2 simple plugins and a bit of website promotion you can almost have a semi automated income machine build and earning 24/7 for only a few minutes work every few days.