Recently in the WordPress Goldmine we’ve been looking at a tool which lets you know which pages are indexed, this works for your own sites and also articles you may have distributed.

Having checked lots of EzineArticles author feeds i was surprised at the low level of indexing. Watch the video below and I am sure you’ll also be surprised. You’ll also learn which article directory had 100% indexing for the articles I checked.

If you really want to find out which of your articles are indexed get Andy Blacks Index Checker

Then submit the unindexed urls to www.hostmyrss.com

You can then distribute the feed either manually to Feed aggregators or by using a tool like RSSbot

I am currently testing other methods of getting the unindexed articles indexed. I should be able to release a report about the best way of doing this later in the week , if you would like to receive this report then please sign up to my mailing list using the form on the right

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

Internet Marketing should always be about building a long term sustainable business not short term profits. Following these 7 Rules should help you achieve that long term sustainable business.

Firstly I have to admit that there aren’t just 7 rules of Internet marketing, Internet marketing is relatively new and as such you should discard all the rules and find what works for you. When I say discard the rules obviously stay within the law! So this is 7 guidelines that will help you succeed at Internet marketing but that title sucked!

Many of these guidelines are closely linked, for example building a business and controlling costs could be included in the same guideline but wheres the fun in that, this article would end up being a business manual with more content than an MBA.
If you are bored already and would like the next 450 words condensed into 1 word it is… Commonsense  (or is that actually 2 words?)

Right assuming you are still reading this let’s get started with rule 1.

1. Build a Business

Internet marketing shouldn’t be a hobby or a pastime it should be treated as a business. That means having a business plan and a long term objective. Build income streams, adsense, Amazon and eBay are great but you can’t build a stable business on them.

2. Focus on the task in hand.

Set aside a time for work and stick with it. Turn off all distractions such as e-mail, messaging software and twitter and concentrate on what you are working on. I find I can build a site in about 2 hours with no distractions or 2 days if I don’t focus on it.

3. Control Your Spending

Every cent you spend on new tools and software is a cent more you need to earn before you are in profit. Before you buy the latest product being promoted ask yourself do you really need it and how much extra will you need to earn to cover the cost.

4. Know your topic.

I’ve known internet marketers who bring out products on PPC one week, fish care the next and then a few weeks later launch a new product on selling via eBay. It’s obvious that they can’t be experts in all these areas so why would anyone want to buy the products. Learn everything you can about your niche and become an expert.

5.  Residual Income is the key.

One of the keys to being a successful Internet marketer is to generate residual income. Knowing that you are going to be having a regular income coming in from various sites or affiliate programs each month frees you up to try more speculative and potentially more financially rewarding ventures.

6. Provide Value.

No matter what you do try to provide value to your clients and customers if you produce an eBook don’t release a version 2 after 6 months update the current version and send it to all you existing customers. The more value you provide them the more they’ll be inclined to buy from you later on.

7. Be a Leader not a Follower

Don’t just follow the herd seek out the untapped markets and design your own unique products. Aim to have people copying what you are doing after all imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Keeping only a few of those rules in mind when you are working in the internet marketing field should help you to become more successful.

The birth of the Internet and the mass availability of personal Computers in the late 80′s changed peoples life forever, Everyone now has had the potential to be their own boss whether you are mother at home looking after your children or a manual laborer there are opportunities in abundance . Just a search on Google for business opportunities will bring up more offers than your parents would have had in their whole life. So it must be easy to make a living from the internet right?  Wrong!  No it’s not, you need a firm business plan and you need to work hard at it.

Lets make it clear from the start: To Make Money Online You Need To Work.

Setting up and running an online business does have several advantages over setting up a “normal” business. You can usually run it in conjunction with your current job, your potential market is bigger your initial overheads are usually smaller and you can operate it from the comfort of your own home. Once you decided that you want to enter into the world of E-commerce you then need to take a lesson from main stream business and create a business plan.

The very first thing you need to decide is what type of business is right for you and then research the market. Possible businesses open to you are.
Adsense Sites

Affiliate Sites

Selling Products

Creating Info Products

With an Affiliate Program you are paid a commission for selling a companies products. You have no contact with the customer, all you do is provide sales leads to the company of whom you are an affiliate.

An Adsense site is where you take an existing website of yours about a particular subject and add contextual Adverts from Google’s Adsense program. When a person clicks on an advert you then receive anything from a few a few cents to several dollars. There are 2 approaches to Adsense programs, build a well respected Niche site with lots of traffic the more traffic you get the higher the Click Through Rate (CTR) and thus the higher the income. The second method is sometimes referred to as the shotgun method, build lots of sites with less traffic but earning a smaller amount from each site. A $1 a day income from each of 50 sites is better than $40 from 1 site.

The final E-commerce method we will look at is the most similar to mainstream business, selling a product. You build a web site with a shopping cart and give as many details about the products as possible. The products can be something you make yourself, or a product you buy in bulk or a product from a drop shipper. With drop shipping you sell products which are then dispatched from a location elsewhere by a 3rd party.

Creating and selling Info products can be very profitable, whether you create your own or buy PLR products and make them unique this method can lead to a very good income in a short amount of time especially if you get lots of affiliate selling your products.

If all this sounds too easy it’s not. Setting up the business is just the start of it, the hard work needs to start now. You need to get traffic, the more traffic you get the higher your sales will be. In addition you need to look at the performance of your site and tweak the layout so you make more sales. You need to get your site onto the first page of Google and other search engines. You may need to write adverts and operate a Pay Per Click program or create multiple articles. In short you need to become an expert in many new subjects.

If you have the drive and dedication then it is possible to make a good income from E-commerce but don’t expect to spend an hour a day at the computer and the rest of your time on your Yacht.

I really don’t want to put anyone off starting an online business but there is work involved and if you are happy to work or outsource the work you don’t want to do then you can create a great lifestyle for yourself a few years down the line.

If Hard and a steep learning curve  doesn’t put you off and if you want a place where hundreds of like minded people hang out and help each other achieve their goals then we’d love to have you visit WordPress Goldmine

I was tempted to call this post “Article marketing Is dead long Live article marketing” But that would have just been plain ridiculous. Although reading some of the posts in some of the bigger forums you would be forgiven for thinking that Article marketing was on it’s death bed. One post referred to some posts about Ezinearticles and said that it was obvious that people should no longer use EZA and what were the alternatives. I have never so much rubbish spoken by people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

So lets get this straight Article Marketing is alive and kicking and going from strength to strength In fact 2010 is going to be bumper year for article marketers.

So before I look at what’s to come in 2010 and finish with a prediction lets have a look back at what happened in 2009. The most obvious things that had an affect on Article marketing was Ezinearticles and their bit of house cleaning. To listen to some people over react you would have thought the sky was falling. I admit I was very critical of some of the things that EZA announced and that was said by the management but they now seem to be being sensible about things. I suspect there was an initial knee jerk reaction on both sides.

For example When they initially announced the keyword density changes and the more stringent review policies I asked Chris if domain names would be counted as keywords. The answer I got was yes they would. This was obviously poorly thought out as surely an article about blue widgets pointing to a site about blue widgets was preferable to one pointing to a site about pink fluffy bunnies and yet because my sites are well targeted I get punished. However this doesn’t seem to be the case now so perhaps common sense has prevailed.

None of the changes are cause for concern , the only thing you need to do is to adapt your articles. If your keyword is 4 words long then you need to increase your word count to over 400 words. The great thing that the EZA changes did was to make people look elsewhere for links and post articles at other article directories. Personally I’ve slightly reduced my articles that go to EZA and increased the articles that go elsewhere and where I used to only give EZA unique content I now often include content that has been posted elsewhere. After all Article marketing Is a 2 way street.

So what for 2010?

Well the first thing that is already happening is that There is now more than 1 good article directory, ArticlesBase and GoArticles are making headway and challenging EZA. They are not quite there yet but it’s only a matter of time. Goarticles recently had a big SEO audit done and this can only mean that their articles will start to rank higher in future.

Access to stats will also become more prevalent, EZA recently started showing CTR which is an excellent step forward, I want to know my CTR and which links get clicks.

Articlesbase is an excellent directory and already starting to outrank EZA in some cases. I know very little about the management and ownership but I’ve had a very positive discussion with them after they rejected some articles. The great thing is that they are prepared to listen to common sense.

With sites like Go articles you can currently add links in the Body and also link directly to sales pages if you wish. The more visible links in an article the higher the CTR. So if you aren’t using these directories then it’s time to start.

My big prediction for 2010 is for a rise in the number of article directories who don’t have any adverts and allow 3 of 4 links in the body of the article in return for a small monthly fee. I can see this business model becoming prevalent. EZA state that a CTR of between 2 and 12% is normal, I can regularly get 3 or 4 times that so a site with no ads and well placed links and resource boxes should achieve 50-70% CTR I for one would happily pay for that!

Article marketing is as strong as it’s ever been and is going to get stronger, more competition is a good thing and can only help us article marketers.

Good luck with your article marketing in 2010