This time every year I sit down and put together a list of things I want to achieve the following year. The at the end of the year I look back and see how much i actually achieved. Looking back now at last years list it looks like I managed to achieve most of them.

Some I surpassed , some I didn’t quite achieve and some I never really started. But none of that matters what matters is that I have a plan to work to. This give me structure and stops me wandering aimlessly in circles darting from one project to another.

The key is to try to think longterm, I get constantly reminded that it doesn’t really matter what happens next month as long as the results are achieved in the long term. Recently sites I have built 3 or 4 months ago have started to earn some good income with very little input from me.

How many times have you started a hobby or an exercise program but given up after a few weeks because you aren’t seeing results? Think what position you’d be in now if you’d continued. It’s the same with Making money online , how many sites or projects have you started but not finished. If you’d started building just 1 site a week 2 years ago you’d have over 100 now and would potentially making a few hundred dollars a day?

Plan Ahead -Think Longterm

Here are a few practical things that might help you get your plan together.

1. Believe in Yourself and Think Longterm

2. Get yourself a white board if you don’t already have one.

3. Change the wallpaper on your PC to something you really want.

4. Remove email and IM tools from autostart. And set your default setting for IM to Busy or off line.

5. Have realistic monthly targets If you are earning $100 a month now don’t aim for $100,000 by march. When I first started I tried to double my income for the first 3 or 4 months then grow it 10-20% per month. Some of the members of Wpgoldmine find it good to bring forward the date that they make their targets every month so that they have to achieve it one day earlier each month.

6. Focus on income streams that use your strengths. Try to develop new strengths

7. Use as many free tools as you can.

8. Set a monthly budget for tools and reports. Don’t exceed it. You don’t need every tool that comes out.

9. Every Dollar you don’t spend means that profit is a dollar closer. So concentrate on value for money.

10. Cancel mailing list subscriptions if they aren’t giving you valuable information. if all you ever get is sales letters leave.

Some of the guys in the WordPress Goldmine forum are going to try to build 100 sites in 100 days, thats a very ambitious goal but I have no doubt that with the mutual support they are providing some of them will do it. Personally my goals for the next year are simpler.

100 new adsense sites

20 new clickbank sites

4 new products in clickbank

Continue to strive to make WordPress Goldmine the BEST value membership site in the world!

Happy New year Here to taking Action in 2010

WordPress Goldmine Version 2.00 is launching next week. On August 31st I’ll be removing the old videos and ebook and integrating Version 2.0 more closely with the forum.

There are several reasons for this obvious WordPress has changed a lot over the last 18 months so most of the old videos are getting out of date. I’ve also been adding the Step by step courses on a regularly basis and these have built up into quite an encyclopedia of Online marketing. If you want to research a way to make money online then it’s probably already in a video series or planned for a future series..

Another major consideration is that the Forum now has almost 10,000 posts and 1000 members and it has become the main focus of WordPress Goldmine so it’s time to shift the emphasis from the pdf and old slow loading flash videos to the new cloudfront based Mp4 Videos with professional quality sound and the forum .  Version 2  will still have a 115 page manual for those that prefer to read rather than view. It will also still have the web 2.0 reference guide and the site promotion blueprint.

Initially when we started we were focused entirely on using wordpress to create sites since then we’ve added various free courses which have increased the range of topics covered, We’ve had article marketing courses, Product creation courses and currently an outsourcing course all of these are free to members. Many of these are of higher quality and more relevant than courses being sold for between $47 and $97. WordPress Goldmine is fast becoming an encyclopedia of Money Making Techniques

One final major change is that we are changing from a one time payment  to a monthly subscription model.  If you would rather pay a one time payment (you’ll be grandfathered in and have access to V1 and V2) you can still join WordPress Goldmine for a single one time payment for the next 7 days.  I have been putting off this change for about 6 months now but I’ve finally seen sense and decided that this is the best way to move forward and include some cool features and tools I want to implement.

If you want to make money online with Internet Marketing it is really important that you get yourself a simple system that will work well and keep you focused.

That system should consist of a series of tasks that you perform daily. For example one of the things you could do is you could write a blog post. Another one could be to get 3 Do Follow links back to that post. You could also have a task of finding a clickbank product to promote. etc.

Try to get as many single tasks that you can think of and place them in a list and then every day choose 4 or 5 of them and do those tasks by the end of the week you should make sure that you’ve performed each task at least once.

Here is the sort of things you could have in your Task list.

• Post in Forums for 30 minutes with a link in your signature file
• Comment on Blogs for 30 minutes
• Find a Clickbank product to promote and produce a review
• Spend 30 minutes submitting sites/pages to social bookmarking sites
• Write an article
• Check JV forums for new products coming out soon.
• Write a chapter of a Product you are creating
• Tweet 10 times on twitter include 1 affiliate link in one of the tweets
• Write a short report to give away
• Create a video for your tube
• Submit an article to 10 article directories.

I am sure you get the idea now, by getting a task list and sticking to it you will soon start to see increased visitors and increased income.

Moving on now, and I am happy to report that the Forum that members get access to as part of WordPress Goldmine has now had over 7500 posts. You won’t believe how proud I feel when I see people who 2 months ago were struggling to set up their first blog are now diving in and answering questions. I don’t often blow my own trumpet but even if you don’t want the e-book it’s worth buying WordPress Goldmine just for access to the forum.

Unlike most Internet Marketing forums with WPG there are no monthly fees.  One small payment gets you lifetime access to one of the friendliest and most helpful forums that you’ll find.

You’ll know If you’ve read my blog before that I  am I big supporter of EzineArticles and Article Marketing in general. Two months ago I bit the bullet and signed up for the premium ezine article service, I had been holding out as the $97 did seem a bit steep. However the additional stats and articles being accepted within hours rather than days pursuaded me to try it.

I decided that as I was paying almost $100 I had better make sure I submited at least 100 articles a months to get my moneys worths. In order to test the effectiveness of this level of article marketing I have focussed on 5 sites 3 of which are clickbank 2 are adsense/ebay sites.

I used one of my clickbank accounts that was earnign about $50 a week on average for the 3 clickbank products.  I also did nothing else to the sites, no new content or other forms of site promotion.

I also wrote articles in the style I advocated in my Article Marketing Step by Step in WordPress Goldmine, so in general the articles took less than 70 minutes a day to write I tried to write a minimum of 5 a day.

So 2 months down the line how are things going??

Well The clickbank account is now averaging around $400 a week with a best day of $137.  One of the Adsense/ebay sites with 3 content pages has earned almost $600 on it’s own.  The final site is a bit of a failure but it has had the lowest number of articles submitted for it so $150 is probably acceptable.

I’ll let you decide if you think that this proves that article marketing works… I know what I think!

Hi, my name is Mark and I am an idiot….

There I said it.  It’s true, last week I had an epiphony, a proper road to damascus moment..Actually in reality it was the road to the Kudu Bar but why let the facts ruin a good story.

I was walking up the hill to the bar thinking about some of my sites and admiring the views across to the Mountains in north Africa when I realised that I have been throwing away thousands of dollars.  Normally I build sites then pretty much leave them alone, I’ll do the odd bit of promotion once in a while but generally after the first month I’ll ignore them and leave them to their own devices.

This works well for me as they’ll continue to make sales or get clicks. There are some that do really well and will make sales almost every day or at least 3 a week and some that can make me $100 a day on a regular basis. So on the face of it everything is good the ones that only make 1 or 2 sales a month still earn me $300 -$600 a year which isn’t to be sniffed at.

My epiphony came to me when i realised that the sites that make me the most sales are obviously in very active markets and that I should be spending my time writing more articles about the topic and not leaving them alone.  Instead of patting myself on the back and saying “well done mark thats another $50 a day niche you have” I should be saying “right thats a good market to be in lets exploit it until i can’t squeeze another sale out of it.”

If a site isn’t making what it should make then sell it on. Take your good niches and try to get every cent you can out of them.  Be ruthless with your sites try to find the winners and promote the hell out of them, sell the poorly performing ones. Imagine being able to have only 10 sites that made 2 sales a day each of $30 commission clickbank items.  Or 20 adsense sites that made $20 a day each.

I am going to use this new thought process for the new step by step site i am going to create between the 14th and 28th of february. In the forum I’ll be documenting every step I take to build a site each day i’ll post a video and make a diary entry .  You’ll be watching over my shoulder as i build a new site from scratch. If you would like to see this sign up now. you’ll see a WordPress Goldmine advert in the sidebar.