Chezfat's Essential IM Tools

Chezfat's IM Toolbox

I share a lot on my blog about how I go about making some decent money online. As I’ve noted periodic ally on my earnings page I make good money but I haven’t yet quit the day job. My online income (as of April 2011) is roughly half of what I make in the traditional job world. The goal however is to get to the point where I’m making more online than off and I don’t expect that to take too much longer.

Over the past couple years I’ve gone from not knowing much of anything to coaching a few people both online and off on how to make a run at this business. In my time working online I’ve come to find that the following IM tools are essential and if I were to start from scratch I would setup accounts (purchase) with all of these right off the bat and hit the road swinging.

Starting Off With Blogs

You need hosting and domains. I’ve always liked GoDaddy.com for their cheap domains and a good starting host is HostGator. You can easily get a site setup and running for less that $10 out of pocket and less than $10 a month thereafter with these two.

I tend to buy private registration which increases the cost of my domains and and I’ve recently opened up a reseller hosting account with Host Nine which allows me to host multiple sites on the same account but not have them all on the same IP. This is something I’m new at but I like that it also lets me hook multiple blogs into PostRunner and receive more free blog content written by other marketers.

Best practice is usually to open one hosting account, reseller if you are up for it, and then start 3-5 blogs all at once using Wordpress.org. This would be an investment of $30-$100 in domains depending on how you purchase them but having a selection of blogs to work on will spread your risk and keep your mind active.  You shouldn't have to worry about getting bored working on only one site at a time.

Marketing Your Blogs With The Best Tools

To market your blogs you have to build backlinks. To do this I highly recommend getting your membership to The Keyword Academy. With your membership you will have access to tools such as Niche Refinery which will help you identify good keywords to target on your blogs and will also give you access to PostRunner where you can publish blog content that you write. These publications can link back to you money blogs above. This is the best way to market your blogs in my opinion.

A more expensive version of The Keyword Academy is new to my arsenal. I’ve been using BuildMyRank (BMR) since late March and am loving it. It is like PostRunner in that you publish guest blog posts to BMR and they publish them linking back to your blogs. This is more expensive than The Keyword Academy but the posts are easier to write and the links are generally more visible and helpful.

Marketing Your Blogs With Revenue Sharing Sites and Social Media
I also recommend setting up free accounts with InfoBarrel, HubPages, Seekyt, Posturown, Squidoo, InfoPirate, and SheToldMe as these are revenue sharing websites which allow you to publish on them and link back to your blogs. To earn on each of these sites you will need advertising accounts which we will go over below.

Lastly you should market your blogs with basic social media as this helps with indexing of posts, guestposts you publish, and with credibility. It is often nicer to come across a website which has a social presence which is why we make sure to build one even if it is not the main focus of our websites.

To get socially plugged in make sure to open an Amplify account specific to your blog and then social media accounts at Tumbler, Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, and others if you wish. Each social account has to be specifically for your blogs. When a guestpost of yours is published then all you do is Amplify your post and Amplify then posts automatically to each of the social accounts you just created. Happy socializing. :)

Advertising Accounts For Monetization
Once we get our blogs setup and content published on them and then we start marketing them we need to monetize them. The easiest way to do this is to put Adsense on them. This is easy but is not always the best way. As a beginner it may make sense to start with Adsense and then work your way into other advertising methods. Chitika is another major advertiser that you should open as is Amazon Associates.

The above three will make the bulk of your revenue on all the revenue sharing websites you just opened up above and will also be the easiest way to start monetizing your main blogs too. You may want to open up some affiliate accounts at Commission Junction, Clickbank, Share-A-Sale as these are some of the industries largest affiliate management programs. Many marketers find that pages which make good money with Adsense will make far more with these affiliate programs so it pays to start learning about them and how to use them better.

Other Tools and Programs

Everything mentioned above can make for a healthy income if you dedicate yourself to this business for the next year or so. There are other tools like IMAutomator which can also help with indexing and other programs like content spinners, mass submitters of bookmarks and articles, and content creation software. Many big time marketers use all of these but I think of them as slightly shady tools. They do work it’s just a matter of your own preferences and how much you are really looking to make money.

One automatic submission tool which would fall into the marketing category above that I'm OK using is Backlinks Philippines which I’ve been dabbling with. This is a company that manually submits your URLs to forum profiles. It’s not automatic, which I like, and it’s akin to me doing the same thing on my own. The service is affordable and I’ve been liking it so far. This is really more about getting a diverse link profile but I’m seeing that it can help with marketing significantly if used conservatively.