Here's The Big List Of IM Blogs I'm Currently Following

List Last Updated

10/10/2014

This is one of those pages that I'm publishing that is really geared more for me than for anyone else. I wanted to list out all the blogs IM blogs I'm currently visiting, reading, following, commenting on etc.

So without further ado, here's the list. No doubt it will grow as I take the time to actually re-inventory who I'm actually reading.

Blogs I'm Actively Reading

http://lostcyclist.me/ - By Quinton Hamp, a friend I know from The Pond. He's killing it right now and a big motivator for me.

http://www.jacobking.com/ - Awesome info on this blog for the more shady side of affiliate marketing. I don't know this guy outside of reading his blog.

http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/ - Another awesome blogger from the darker side. He's got a very inspiring delivery of material.

http://www.my4hrworkweek.com/ - Eric Gati writes this one. It's a good blog that I've read off and on for a few years. I first met Eric over on InfoBarrel.

http://zenduck.me/ - This is the blog of Zen Duck Dave, the man behind the curtain over at The Pond. He's had a few really great IM blogs over the years and this is his latest one... although most of the action is on the forum from the same domain.

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ - This is the well known Pat Flynn. He's darned inspirational and a wealth of information. Amazingly I first linked to his blog here from mine back in the late summer of 2009. Crazy!

http://lissowerbutts.com/ - A former MMO blogger who now blogs about travel, kindle publishing, and formatting. She's a good friend over on The Pond too and has been around the world of IM for a while.

Old Blogs

These are basically old sites that are not updated any longer. Even still the content on them (albeit dated) is still worth a read every now and then.

http://www.makingmoneyontheinternetfree.info/ - This is the old largely defunct blog of Dave a la Zen Duck Dave, the owner of The Pond IM Forum I am a member of and recommend.

http://www.makemoneyonlinewithseo.com/ - Another old defunct blog with tons of dated nuggets burried in it. Worth a read if only for nostalgia.

Podcasts I Listen To

This site will be populated eventually but I just don't want to take the time to do it now. Check back later; I will link to this post from time to time. You're not missing anything. ;)

http://empireflippers.com/podcasts/ - Quality business guys that are really building an empire and creating an industry in small site brokerage. I listen to these guys a lot.

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I'll plan on updating these lists from time to time dropping blogs/feeds that either no longer interest me or go defunct and adding new blogs I find particularly engaging to me.

Say hi in the comments guy!

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Going Ons & Updates: 1/22/14

Here's a recap of what I'm up to right now.

My BIG Niche Site

A few days back I introduced a project I'm starting where I'm going to build a big niche site designed to serve readers first and make me money second. You can read the post here if you want. I then posted about how I got my new site indexed quickly here in case you missed it.

Over the past couple days I've done a bit more work on the site. I expanded the front page to just shy of 600 words and started building out a bit more content on the main informational posts on the site. I have a lot of work to do to polish the main informational posts but it's better to start and not finish than never to start at all.

I started marketing the site by placing a single well made article on a Web2 site and inserting a contextual link back to the homepage. The link was not using anchor text but was rather just the naked url of the home page.

Since the keyword the homepage targets has very low competition I don't expect to have to do any more promotion like this at all. The domain is an EMD and by putting lots of good content on the site, linking out to authoritative sources that support my main claims, points, and opinions. Including relevant YouTube videos, and maybe setting up a basic Pinterest account to pin eventual images to I expect this site will start ranking for it's keywords in the next few months.

So far I haven't put a custom header or logo on the site but I signed up for Easy Product Displays (EPD) to help me make a responsive grid of affiliate links and thumbnails pointing to Amazon for some of my sales pages. I've traditionally made my code by hand but I'm not a coder and I've never been able to get it responsive by hand. I must say on first use EPD is darned easy to use and looks better than what I've ever created by hand.

At some point I'll probably do a review of the program and post it here on the blog but if you want to try their free trial anyway you can see the link on my ToolBox page.

EMD Sites? Do They Still Work?

I've mentioned Jason from The Pond before. He's inspired this BIG niche site idea of mine with his current method of building extremely profitable Adsense sites. You can see his method on this thread over at The Pond (members only).  Click here to learn more about the forum or to join.

For the most part Jason is doing a twist on the Empire Flippers method of building of building EMD sites. The site I mentioned above is an EMD but other than it and one other EMD that I started in the post-penguin era I don't have many at all right now.

Jason contends the EMD update in late 2012 wasn't as crazy as originally thought and that without spamming the crap out of them they still rank better than all other sites with all things being equal.

I've decide to marry his approach with my own preferences. I like big niche sites, sites with 30-100 pages or so. My site mentioned above will be part of my EMD project and will join my other EMD site (nearly two years old) and I will start building a large(ish) portfolio of big EMD sites based on Jason's methodology.

My two year old site is making around $100+ every month right now and it has zero links built to it. I think this new site will make some cash and I'll try to build out a bunch more of these.

Late in the Fall of 2013 I purchased 6 additional EMDs and installed Wordpress on them. Most sites are slightly developed and some are already starting to get a bit of traffic with zero links built. I will add a few new domains to my portfolio and try to focus on polishing up my Fall additions.

One additional note - Like lots of people I used to use GoDaddy for all my domains but these days I use NameSilo. They offer really affordable domains and they include privacy for free. can't beat that. I've added NameSilo to my ToolBox and one day I'll get around to putting up a review page here on the site for you to look at.

Bubblews

I mentioned a few days ago that I started using Bubblews after about a year of resisting. So far I've posted 27 articles on there, connected with a few of the big writers and long term writers, and I've started commenting on a few things I find interesting.

As of yet I haven't made payout so I can't say anything in regards to the redemption process but from what I read it should go fine so long as you play by their rules.

Assuming my first redemption goes smoothly I expect this to be a great place to pop in on occasion and make a few bucks by trading minutes for dollars.

Probably after my first redemption goes through smoothly I'll post up my full review of the site. For the time being though you can my initial thoughts on making money on the Bubblews platform right here.

InfoBarrel Clean-Up

Back on January 10th I started a thread on the InfoBarrel forums saying I was dedicated to cleaning up my old InfoBarrel articles. I was making over a $1000/month on the site and then panda hit, then penguin and now I'm making a little over $150 on the site. You can see my complete report on this fall right here: The Fall of an InfoBarrel Success Story.

Over the past 10 days or so I've dedicated some time (most days) to cleaning up an article here and there on the site. I'm bringing old "red" articles up by improving the keyword density, editing for grammar, removing bad links, and adding 2-3 pictures per post. I then pin all the pictures to related Pinterest boards in hopes of getting trickle traffic from Pinterest users. This is going well and although I've got A LOT more articles to clean up I think it will be worth it in the long run.

You can see my picture techniques in action by viewing my "door lock" series over on InfoBarrel. One such article from the series is this one. Pay careful attention to the pictures inserted and their corresponding media pages. IB Tip - The money is in the media pages.

PinWoot

This is another new tool for me. I started using it this week - about 4 days ago roughly. I've been getting in the habit of making Pinterest accounts for the majority of the sites I build these days and I've never really spent enough time on nay of them to build up a following.

Like many other things mentioned on this page I'll have to make a big review of this program for the site sometime in the future but in the mean time let me say this. This thing is amazing at getting you new followers quickly. I've gotten bunches of likes, repins, and general account activity and I see it all as real and beneficial. You have to give this a try.

I'm adding this with a huge thumbs up to my ToolBox if you want to give it a look prior to my big review post.

Plans For The Future

Taking a nudge from Justin & Joe and Empire Flippers with the title of this sub-heading but I wanted to close the post out with a bit about what I want to work on over the next week or so.

I really need to make some progress on two Kindle books I want to finish as soon as possible. One is halfway done, the other is in the outline stage.

I also am reclaiming old PostRunner posts from 3-4 years ago. Yesterday I reclaimed around 35,000 words of material that I can re-purpose for new uses. It's all offline and deindexed so it's mine to use again as I see fit. If you used to use PostRunner you may have a bunch of old content sitting dormant too. This never occurred to me until it was mentioned by the smart folks over on The Pond.

I plan on segmenting what I have by topic and using the material to populate a bunch of new EMD domains to add to my EMD collection of sites. I may use some of the content for Web2 sites as well. Time will tell.

Get to work guys!

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Money Site Diversification: Focus Revisited

Way back in the dark ages of the internet - 6 months ago - I published a blog post titled "Why Do Internet Marketers Fail". My main point in that post was to really tell myself why I fail from time to time.

Those times when my income is slipping and my sites are falling in rank I tend to have poor focus. During those times I seem to be trying to learn too many new things and experiment with to many projects.

Often times the things that are working best for me are the things I set aside while I "work" on endless endeavors that don't really get me anywhere. They just occupy my time and make me feel like I'm spinning my wheels needlessly. Eventually that work without return causes me to want to take a break and then where does my business go?

Nowhere naturally.

Funny thing. In that post I called myself out and said that I needed to buckle down and do what was working right then and really go to town at it day in and day out for months on end.

I chose Squidoo as my vehicle as I had built up a $600/monthly stream there in about 5 months time and Lissie called me out in the comments saying in her own way to stay away from spending too much energy on a Web 2.0. Luckily for me Squidoo whet nuts only 2 months after that post and I didn't end up losing it all.

Like any one would have I changed my vehicle out. Although I did not keep pumping out good money lenses I did work on polishing up the majority of my lenses so that I wouldn't lose them and then I started a new site based on ideas from my own experience and some inspiration from my friends over on the Pond. That new site has been my rock all summer long and it's where I've spent most of my energy and it's already making me more money than my lenses ever did.

I can't reiterate enough that in the IM space to succeed you have to have focus. Sure, adjust your plan when major things happen but start one well defined project and work on it like it's the only thing that matters. For me at least it's the only way that I ever seem to have big successes.

When do you diversify?

I used to think you needed to diversify early but these days I say do it much later than you think you should. For the vast majority of post-penguin IMers dodgy link-building is a thing of the past. For the most part I think sites are far less likely to take major hits when you play by G's rules.

For me I've hit a home run with my newest site and instead of branching out into other niches and setting up other sites I've been working diligently on this one main site. I've got social accounts set up for it and even got some good activity going on one of those accounts too. I've even set up a small arsenal of related mini sites as a fallback plan or complimentary set of sister sites should I ever want to expand the project onto multiple domains for whatever reason.

For 2013 this really has been what I've been up to and I hope to continue with the focus. It helps the bottom line a ton... Now, if I could only get my home improvement projects behind me so that I can actually get more work done here at the PC.

If you are having trouble getting anywhere in IM or maybe you're looking to end a long plateau or slide in income maybe it's time you revisited what you are actually doing. Maybe it's time to pick one thing that's working right now and go all in for the foreseeable future.

At least consider it.

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Why Do Internet Marketers Fail To Achieve Their Dreams?

It's been ages since I really blogged. I make no excuses. I started out in this game as a blogger and quickly learned that internet marketing was far more interesting to me.

In March of 2011 I had a bad accident. I broker my knee really bad and I didn't even walk for a month or so. I didn't walk without crutches for almost 10 weeks and at that exact time my first son was born.

What happened next?

Life.

I was making decent money online. Not enough to support my family completely but quite a bit. With the challenges of injury recovery and a new baby, not to mention gearing up for an out of state move I just kind of dropped off the map socially.

Sure, I continued working a bit on my websites, this one not as much despite my occasional effort, and I continued working on InfoBarrel under different names predominantly, and I even dabbled in setting up a mini network of blogs.

I worked on a project for a couple of my "dark months" on a series of 1-page websites revolving around newly released products and aged domains.

I worked on learning the art of building a legitimate twitter following. I kind of did so too before I felt like I had learned what I wanted to learn.

Why Do So Many Marketers Fail?

They fail due to a lack of focus.

They fail because they think that focusing on internet marketing is something worth focusing on. They fail because they don't realize that knowing and dabbling in a bit of everything is akin to watching TV all day every day and not actually living life.

I still do pretty well online - financially speaking - but I still can't pay all the bills with IM income. My wife's a doctor for goodness sake. It's going to take a huge income for me to even rival her earning power in life.

What I can say is this - over my time in IM (which is fast approaching it's 4-year mark this May) the times I've been most successful is when I chose one "thing" and just did it without thinking.

I didn't learn. I didn't explore other ideas. I didn't do anything but that one thing.

In the beginning of my online mmo lifestyle I started a blog over at http://www.howtolivealongerlife.com which is actually still live. I didn't know IM when I started that. I wanted to develop a successful blog so I posted about 100 posts in 3 months and in my first 6 months I had a couple hundred RSS subscribers and a number of contacts that I regularly emailed back and forth with.

I focused on one thing and it worked... until I started looking for other outlets.

The next big thing I worked on was InfoBarrel. It was my primary source for backlinks until I started really learning a bit more. Quickly it became my primary source of income when I stopped using it for backlinks but instead used it for income generating articles.

I started writing like a mad man there doing basically nothing else but that and small backlinking campaigns to the Infobarrel articles and my earnings started soaring. I was featured as a success story at IB and my earnings climbed to over a grand a month... until I moved on and then they flatlined.

Niche sites became the next big thing followed by super niche sites and ad optimization strategies, and social strategies and this and that and this and that.

Today I'm looking into ebooks and just published my first but I can't help but think the times I've been most successful I've only done one thing.

Considering what many IMers have gone through in 2012 I have been relatively lucky. My earnings dipped about 50% from their peak after penguin but that's nothing compared to some people out there. I still feel exceptionally good about the cash I have coming in every month but as I figure out where exactly I want to go in 2013 I have to keep in mind focus.

Had I stuck with my original blog where would I be today?

Had I stuck with pumping out 60 InfoBarrel articles every month where would I be today - over 2000 articles actually and raking it in probably.

Had I stuck with my social experiments where would I be? Would I have an audience that I could actually influence by now? Maybe I was heading in that direction.

I'm tempted to start an ecommerce site these days and try to drive traffic through PPC. I think that would be good if I could figure out how to optimize everything well. I am analytical after all but that's just changing games again.

Right now I, and likely you too, need to stop, relax, and focus on one single thing that's working for you right now. It's called focus and it's what so many IMers lack - myself included.

What am I focusing on right now?

Squidoo.

Funny I first mentioned Squidoo in the fall of 2009 on this blog when I opened an account there to send a backlink or two to my human longevity blog. Had I only stuck with Squidoo where would I be now?

I am setting a public goal right now.

For 2013 I will focus 95% of my energy on Squidoo. I've read all the crazy numbers put up by Skeffling on her blog and over on the IB forums and I've started my process. It's been nearly my main focus over the past 5 months and I've done well - gone from $10 or so in Sept all the way to $600 in Jan this year. I will build this out to the max day in and day out without fear of anything.

Across all my Squid accounts I plan on buckling down and milking this cow for everything it's got. I will focus and I will succeed.

What's the end goal? I swear to you the end goal is 5 figures in December of 2013. Who knows if I'll get there but I believe I will and I will do everything in my power to make it happen.  Do I need that much money to get by in life? No. That's excessive to say the least but so long as I am at home with a toddler and he takes naps I refuse to sit idle doing nothing with my life. I do what I can to the best of my ability.

If can post a handful of lenses every day all year long just think where I'll be by Jan next year. I aim to exceed expectations. My goal is to get my focus back on one thing and keep it there for another 12 months.

Eventually the little guy will start heading off to preschool and I'll turn over a new leaf in life. I'll tackle that when it comes but for now I embrace the present and I face the future with my head held high.

The other 5% of my efforts?

I'll blog on occasion here, I'll spend some time in the IB and Pond forums for community and learning, and I'll be marketing some ebooks for a close friend. Anything else I do will be incidentals - tag on projects that tie into things that are more important to me or random stuff to occupy my mind when I need a break.

I suggest to all you folk out there to do the same thing. You don't ever see traditional business owners selling candy, shoes, baby clothes, laptop bags, while trying to become popular in the auto racing circles and quilters groups at the same time. Why should IMers be any different.

What do you think? Am I off my rocker? Why do you think so many IMers fail?

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Your 1st 10 Free Links With BMR

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I know not every country celebrates Thanksgiving but you can’t go wrong with giving thanks for what you have.

This morning I mentioned in a forum post or two on InfoBarrel that I have been seeing some fantastic growth in my InfoBarrel income this month. I am still trending just shy of my $1000 goal for the month but it’s close. Today is actually my best day for earnings there this month. With a little luck I may get to $1000 after all.

How am I doing it though you may ask? I built a bunch of media pages to existing articles and linked to them from the article they are attached to. This will be outlined in an upcoming post here on Chezfat.com and I am building links to my best earners with BuildMyRank (BMR) as outlined in my plan to bring more traffic to my  best earning articles on IB.

I noted on the forum and in many posts here on the blog that this service is quickly becoming my new favorite service. I’ve been a member for about 5-6 months or so and I used it quite extensively in the beginning and then less so over the summer – I had a new baby in the house otherwise I would have been all over that. :)

Link Building With BMR - A Breeze

Let’s just put it this way. You can only post up to on average 8.5 links per day to a given domain on BMR. For the InfoBarrel domain that means I can only get about 85 links in a 10 day period. I can have up to 5 domains that I submit to every day which means I can also link build to my own sites but for IB, which this post is about, I can only send so many links out every month.

Each link I build is only 150 words or more of text. That’s it. It only takes me around 3-4 minutes to crank out 150 words and I usually finish them up around 200+. Basically an hour’s worth of work every day can yield me links on IB for the entire day plus some more.

Is it worth it though…

YES

BMR is expensive; I can’t lie. I had reservations when I signed up but they offer 10 free links during their free trail.

A Few Of My Experiences With A Handfull Of BMR Links

In late October I had a brand new site (target Amazon), a few months old at least, that had no links built to it at all. It was receiving on average 4-6 unique visitors a day. I fired up BMR and sent 10 links to the home page, 10 links to an interior page with a “for men” modifier, and 10 links to a page with a “for women” modifier on my root keyword.

These 30 links went live in approximately 4 days and they took me about 3 hours to write. The site immediately, within a few days, started getting around 30-40 unique visitors a day and has already made me 10 Amazon sales of the product. It took me three hours worth of work. This should probably continue happening month after month for a long time. I will obviously be continuing to build this site out and build more links too but that's another topic all together.

On IB, I chose a handful of my best earning articles and started sending them BMR links (see my last post for details). I started out doing 30 links to each page. It takes about 4 days to publish 30 links to the same domain so I’ve only backlinked a few IB articles this month so far. Despite that my income has shot up around $670 per month and this month it’s approaching $1000. BMR links are ridiculous!

I make no apologies for linking to BMR with an affiliate link. Use it if you wish or plug the domain name into your browser and skip the affiliate link if you wish but if you haven’t tried BMR yet I urge you to try the ten link offer. It’s free and there are no commitments except about an hour of your time to write (from scratch) ten 150 word posts to build links with.

My Advice For Best Using Your 10 Free Links

Whether you do this on InfoBarrel or another site you own makes no difference. Identify (if you don’t know already) one of your best performing pages published online and link to this one page only with all 10 BMR links. This will maximize your efforts for promotion and give you results you should be able to measure with in a week to 10 days time.

Ideally you will find a page that ranks somewhere around #10 in Google for it’s keyword and has already shown the ability to earn you money. The 10 links will all go live within a couple days of you publishing them and your page will almost assuredly shoot up higher than before giving you better earnings than before.

This is not guaranteed by any means but it happens almost without fail for me. Vary the anchor text a little with your submissions but just push out 10 links as quick as possible and see what happens.

You have 15 days to publish the links and see what happens before you decide to subscribe or cancel the subscription. If you build all ten links immediately you should have more than a week to watch your rankings improve before deciding the program is worth your time and money.

Give it a shot; but let me say this.

If you try the free trial out and like it you should only subscribe if you are going to use it. The membership fee is steep - $59 per month. If you are not actually going to post anything then just get your 10 free links and move on. If you use it however you will be handsomely rewarded and your membership fee will not be wasted.

OK, enough from me. It’s back to pumping out more BMR links to my stuff. I’ve got student loan bills to pay down. :)

Chime in below with comments about your use of BMR or your questions about the tool.

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My Plan To Bring More Traffic To My Best Earning IB Articles

If you’ve read my last few posts I’ve been talking a lot about my plans for this month.

I want to make $1000 this month on InfoBarrel in addition to what I make elsewhere online. In October I made in excess of $670 so that means I need to make an additional $330 this month alone.

I’m doing that by doing three things:

• Publishing new Articles On The IB Domain
• Adding Media Pages To Existing Articles On The IB Domain (and linking to their media pages)
• Promoting my existing articles on the IB domain which have made the most money recently

For the purpose of this blog post I’m only going to be discussing the third item: promotion.

Identifying The Best Earning Articles

This is easy. If you have Google Analytics running through the background it’s easy to see what articles have made the most over the past day, week, month, year, or whatever. I decided to look at the past three months worth of data and see which articles have made the most.

I narrowed it down to about 10 articles I want to promote heavily. I chose ten because I will be doing a lot of the promoting with Build My rank (BMR) which will send between 7-10 posts a day to their network of blogs. That’s about 8 per day. Over the course of a 30 day month that’s 240 posts published. If I promote 10 articles then I can post between 20-30 BMRs to each one.

20-30 may be more than I need considering most of the articles I’m promoting have been published on the IB domain for some time now and they all are already receiving search traffic but I want to really apply the 80/20 rule here. in this case it’s more like the 95/5 rule. :)

How BMR Works

I’ve said this in recent posts but I will say this again. With BMR I can send between 7-10 links per day to a domain… or even a single URL. I can have 5 domains to submit to if I want or more if I pay for a more expensive membership to the program – basic membership is ($59/month) but as much as I wish it wasn’t the case I’ve never published 50 BMRs in a day. I usually max out at around 30 from brain fry.

The BMR posts allow you to add one link to your site or article for every 150 words you publish. The minimum word count for a publication is 150 words so I generally do 150 word posts for the one link. Sometimes I do the 300 word posts for 2 links but not usually.

Why BMR

Why BMR you may ask. Because they post your mini-articles to a network of blogs which have good page rank and which are filled with unique (non-spun, non-plagiarized, non-PLR) content. They then backlink each post to ensure it gets indexed and builds a pinch of authority so that your link actually matters. The end result is a link that actually holds a good deal of weight.

What About Post Runner

I still use PostRunner but for this experiment I’m mostly doing BMR simply because I am capable of writing more of these in a day than I am capable of writing PostRunners in a day. Also, the links are weightier so they take effect much sooner. PostRunner is hands down a must use tool but I am on a 1-month binge here so BMR is my main focus with PostRunner as a close second.

For these 10 articles I’ll be doing a few PostRunners but probably not a lot more than that unless I find I have more time and metal stamina for writing. (keep in mind I’m still building content for other sites I own). Gotta know when to say when.

Is This Really Worth My Time?

It may be tempting to ask whether this is worth your time after you’ve written 20-30 BMR’s in a single day knowing that you have a ton more to write but – I still ask myself this sometimes but I always snap myself back in place. This is doubling down on my proven winners with a tool that I know works.

I don’t expect these 240 links in 30 days to give me number one rankings but it should increase my traffic to my articles which are most efficient at earning me money. One page view on these articles is worth far more money to me than a single page view on the other 95% of my articles. I’m expecting to increase my traffic to these 10 articles and see if the earnings boost occurs in unison. It may not for every article of the 10 but it most likely will for the bunch as a whole.

So far I’ve completely backlinked 4 IB articles already – I got started in late October on this project and it’s one area where I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately. I’ve got about 6 more posts to fully backlink with BMR – that’s roughly 150 more to go. let’s see if I can get this done by the 14th (hopefully sooner) so I can focus on other things.

The posts won’t all go live at once, since I can only post about 8.5 per day it will take most of the rest of the month for them all to go live. For now they will sit in the queue waiting for their day.

Isn’t Link Building Dying?

There’s been a lot about the death of linkbuilding lately online and my take is this. I know link building is changing and maybe taking a less important role in ranking but it still counts a ton. I want to be building a business online that will last for years to come but I need money now and now link building still matters a ton so I’m going all out with BMR, PostRunner, and guest-posting when I can get to it.

The thing is I can’t be so social for everything I publish so I will do what works and adjust as I go. If you haven’t looked at BMR I have banners for it in my sidebar. Here’s another self-serving link. They give you a free trial (10 links) to see what you think. If you try it out make sure to post those links at something that is a proven money maker. make them count.

My next article will address my thoughts on one of the other two legs of my November IB plan. New Content or Media Page creation. I don’t know which one I’ll be inspired to write about next. Check back in to see.

So far this month I am not on track to hit $1000 for the month. I still have plenty of work to do. I am however on pace to surpass October’s earnings. Hopefully my pace accelerates – I have the quickly growing holiday shopping crowd to help with that so I think I’ll I better make it.

Good luck to you all and your efforts.

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How I’m Making The Most Of What I have On InfoBarrel

If you caught my last income report I made mention to the fact that I just had my best month ever on the site despite putting very little effort into it over the past 3 months.

I also noted my November goal of hitting $1000 for the month just on InfoBarrel. This post will start to outline what I’m doing to make this happen.

As always if I fail to hit my goal I will make a new goal in the future… but I don’t want to fail. My bank account needs the income. :)

How I Plan On Making More Money ON InfoBarrel

I plan on making money off of InfoBaarrel in three ways:

1. I Want To Build More Content On InfoBarrel – This means exactly what it sounds like. I plan on publishing more articles there.
   
   I originally (5 days ago) planned on publishing a lot more content on the site but I have since decided to publish only a moderate amount of new articles while pushing some of my focus on the next two points.
2. I Want To Make More Money Off My Current IB Library – This step can be further broken down into two points:
• Funnel Traffic From Articles To Media Pages – I have a lot of people landing on my articles every day. This is because I have nearly 400 articles published on the domain. Each of these articles makes me some revenue; many of them make money almost every day.
  
  What I’ve found however is that people love clicking on pictures and the media pages on Infobarrel convert into revenue for me roughly 3 times as much as the article pages. That means if I make $1 on my article it takes a third of the traffic to make $1 on my media pages.
  
  Put another way; if I can get one third of the traffic to my articles to click through to my media pages I should nearly double my income.
  
  Now, I don’t believe I can get a third of my visitors to click through to my media pages but if I can get more of them to click through then I will end up with more page views, a lower bounce rate, and more earnings.
  
  Since I already have traffic this is low hanging fruit and it’s where I’m spending a lot of my time right now.
• Funnel Traffic From High Traffic Pages To Related Pages With Affiliate Links – This is another play on optimizing the traffic I already get.
  
  On IB (and any site for that matter) we shouldn’t be looking to stuff affiliate links in every page and we shouldn’t be cluttering our affiliate sales pages with tons of links either.
  
  I do however have many pages on IB that get good traffic and if I can funnel some of them to my other IB articles that do have related affiliate links I can incrementally increase the page views on these articles and increase the clicks on the links.
3. I Want To Get More Page Views On My Best Performing IB Articles – Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your articles are getting tons of visitors and only a small amount of Adsense earnings. It’s similarly easy to see which of yoru articles make the lion share of your earnings.
   
   I have identified a number of my best performing articles on IB and I am promoting them with BuildMyRank (BMR) and with PostRunner.
   
   BMR is a bit pricy for the average person but it is well worth it for the simplicity of the system. You write 150 words or more, insert a link back to your article, and then publish. You can post between 7-10 per domain per day. Each post gets published on a different aged domain blog full of unique and non-spun or plagerized content and as a result the links have a good effect on the page you are promoting in a pretty quick way.
   
   I can only post about 8.5 a day of these on average so I’m only doing my best performing articles first. If I can get a bit more traffic to the articles that make the most money per visitor then I should see a notable gain in revenue for my energies spent.

There is something to be said for just writing a ton but a lot of the time it’s worth stepping back and massaging what you already have in place. I plan on massaging profits out of my existing library while slowly starting a new stream of revenue on the site.

A few days ago I thought about writing a good fifty articles on throw pillows over the next couple weeks but now I will probably stretch this publishing theme out over the next 6 weeks or so instead. This spreads myself out so that I can work on all of the three ways of building more IB income instead of just working on one leg.

More Detail On Addresing each Of The Three Legs

In future posts I’ll go over in a bit more detail each of the three legs I’m working on and provide some IB specific tips for both new writers on the InfoBarrel platform as well as experienced writers on the platform.

In the mean time I invite you to reread my article on making money on InfoBarrel using pictures. It’s a core technique that every writer should employ. Last month I made roughly 25% of my Adsense revenue just on the media pages. They are the simplest things to create; you just have to do it.

Just to illustrate in April and May of this year I added a bunch of media pages to some of my existing articles. My revenue from media pages increased from around $30/month in both April & May to around $80/month in June through Sept. Then in October I started adding more media pages to existing articles and I made $127 on those pages in October. It’s amazing what a little work on existing pages can accomplish.

In November if I keep adding media pages I can probably get to $200 a month (if not more) without publishing a single new article. Of course I will publish new articles but the power of media pages can’t be overlooked.

Good luck IB writers.

For those that aren’t with IB – please signup using my referral link – it will make me feel good about myself. If you do sign up then most of the above is pointless to you. Your first order of business is building a mass of articles on the site. Pure publication. Write, publish, repeat. In future posts I’ll discuss the writing process so check back for that.

For long term IB writers I’ll follow up with more detail on optimization and promotion. I already have a post on the topic of using PostRunner. That post is still accurate and worth reading. I’ve promised for a long time a bit more on BMR and although I’ve got a few banners for BMR on my blog I don’t have a page dedicated to discussing the system. I may (or may not) build that page in the near future.

If you want to check out BMR for free then use this link.

If you have tips to improving income on IB, please let us know in the comments below. I’m especially interested in people that have some knowledge about the tagging system there. I’ve not explored to very much.

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My InfoBarrel Income Report – October 2011

It’s been a while since I wrote an Income report for my InfoBarrel earnings. I won’t go back and detail out the last few months but I will say that despite taking largely a complete break from InfoBarrel for roughly 3 months or so my earnings climbed month over month over month as articles aged, as I built some media pages on the site, and as I built a few links to some of my previously published articles.

My last income report published in July for earnings in the month of June saw a monthly IB income of $518.78 with revenue split between Adsense, Chitika, and Amazon. At the end of June I was removed from the Amazon Affiliate program due to my residency in the state of California however in early October CA affiliates were let back into the program due to CA state politicking.

I won’t go into the details but for now it looks like I’m in the program until at least next Fall and then it’s up to legislation whether I will stay in. We all hear about business uncertainty – this is a perfect example of how government creates uncertainty. Should I invest my time and money into selling Amazon goods? I don’t know… I will marginally push forward on that front I suppose.

July, August, & Sep In Short

In July I went and changed a few of my prominent Amazon links on IB so that I wasn’t leaking as much traffic to not monetized destinations and I got lucky that traffic started picking up that month allowing me to fully recoup that income.

The loss in Amazon affiliate earnings was definitely felt in all three months although Adsense did start picking up for various reasons including a better CTR on IB articles (thank you IB admin for getting the placement of ads right) as well, more media pages published on the site, and a recovery of traffic from the Spring algo updates.

In July I made $557.06 across all sources.
In August I made $557.25 across all sources.
In September I made $494.17 across all sources.

During this time I built some strategic media pages on my IB articles but I mostly focused my efforts, (writing & publishing) on other sites I own and maintain. These other sites of course make their own stream of income which I don’t typically report.

An October Surprise

Around the third of October I was happy to receive the email welcoming me back to Amazon Associates and I was really pleased that they reactivated all my existing affiliate links. This meant that I was essentially going to be making a good chunk of change on Amazon overnight with no extra effort at all. The income is completely based on work I did many months ago – it’s nice to get that back.

I also started building out more media pages on older existing articles here on IB which all convert into revenue much better than normal pages. I outlined how I do this in this post on using pictures on IB. In the end my traffic to media pages increase October over September by roughly 35% and my income on media pages alone topped $125 for the month.

During The Month of October 2011 I made:
Adsense - $534.94
Chitika - $66.70
Amazon - $75.51

For a grand total of $677.15 for the month – a 37% increase over Sept and 9.3% increase over my previous best month on IB, Feb. 2011.

This was not my best month ever online but it was my best month ever for InfoBarrel… and I was only at the 75% revenue sharing tier for the month.

November – A Look Ahead

I posted a bit on the IB forums the last week of October that I was planning on investing heavily into my IB portfolio over the next couple months and that I had set a $1000 goal for the month of November on the site. In future blog posts I cover some of the ways I intend on doing this but in the mean time I’ll shorten it to say I will be marketing my best earning posts, building media pages and linking to them internally, and publishing a ton of new content on the site.

To start off I finished up October by publishing a set of articles on Microsuede Throw Pillows which should do well with some time and love and this put me into the 80% revenue share tier for the month of November. That alone should boost my earnings by a bit month over month but I still will be needing to do a ton of work.

Look for more stimulating article on throw pillows which have yet to be published… and make sure to check out this awesome pet hair remover article for a look into how I like building affiliate sales on the InfoBarrel domain.

Good luck to you all, May November treat you all well.

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Writing Again On InfoBarrel & Setting A new IB Goal

For the few readers I have here I thought I'd take a minute to say I'm back on Infobarrel again publishing up a storm on various product related topics.

My current project revolves around "throw pillows". Not sure how it will do as I haven't even done any research on keywords - just using intuition here and the fact that there are so many ads on Google's front page for keywords revolving around the topic.

Anyway, the recent algo updates hit my diabetic shoes site so I have some income to make up for. My wifes student loan payments are kicking in in january and I had better have enough income to make those sky-high payments.

Yikes, they are crazy high.

Anyway, throw pillows will do it I'm sure. We shall see.

In any event I have published a bunch today and will publish a bunch more there this weekend and get my rev share up into the 85% range (up from 75% the past few months) and then hopefully with some BMR promotion, new publication, and the regained revenue from Amazon income (thank you Jerry Brown) I am setting a new goal for my IB income for the month of November.

$1000

In September I made around $600 on IB. This month I'll probably make around $700. $1000 is the new November goal. Let my fingers fly.

My next post - whenever I get to posting it - should cover som of my strategies which can be replicated by just about anyone. I hope they help, inspire, entertain, or at leats occupy the time of a few of you.

Update on my experiment last month:

I ended up sending somewhere around 3-4 BMR links to my glucose article. Panda hit between then and now so that had something to do with rankjing s but nonethe less I was ranked 119 for the term "Lower Blood Glucose Levels" and now I'm nomber 40. Nice.

See the original post on ranking an old publication on InfoBarrel and my 1st followup here.

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Ranking An Old InfoBarrel Post – Update #1

A little over two weeks ago I started a post on ranking an old publication. See that post first for a primer for this one.

To recap, the purpose of this is to take an existing post that I published well over a year ago and get it ranking better. I chose a post that targets a good keyword that was published over a year ago but was not ever promoted.

At the end of August my IB post on “blood sugar ranges for adults” was not ranked in the top 100 for its main keyword. Two days later after 8 BMR links it was ranked #96 and two weeks after that, this morning it is ranked number #39.

Not bad for whipping up 10 posts to BMR in three days and spending 20 minutes to add 10 internal backlinks to the post from other articles I previously published on the IB domain.

Has Traffic Increased?

No it hasn’t. Not yet at least.

So far my efforts on this old article have increased its ranking to #40 but it still hasn’t gotten any search traffic. Going through my Analytics it has received 3 visitors from search in all of 2011 and none so far in September of 2011.

It looks like I need it to be ranking better to start getting the eyeballs.

The Next Step In Ranking An Old Post

I could very easily pump out 10 more BMR links to this post over the next couple days and see what that does but I’d like to take the opportunity to build some authority to some other old pages in my IB portfolio which can indirectly improve the ranking and authority of this main article on the IB platform.

For this step I’m going to select one other article on IB which I added a link to two weeks ago and throw some short posts up linking to it.

Of the 10 articles I previously chose I’m choosing one that targets the keyword: “lower blood glucose levels” which is roughly 18 months old. To my knowledge it has approximately 2 links pointing at it that I built ages ago and it too gets no search engine traffic.

To date my article on “lower blood glucose levels” has received 6 entrances via 5 keywords in all of 2011. It is currently ranked #119 for its main keyword and now that it links directly to my article on “normal blood sugar ranges” I want it to have more authority and to start getting some eyeballs on it.

More “Simple” Link Building

This afternoon I plan on publishing 5 BMR posts (150-200 words each) linking to my article on “lowering blood glucose” and then publishing 5 more tomorrow giving me 10 links to that post. This should help get the ball rolling.

I will also write up five 300 word posts to be published on PostRunner with the goal of sending five links to each of the two backlinks I built to this post last year. I have their URLs saved in a tracking spreadsheet I made a year ago so this should be easy enough to do.

Basically this will accomplish a couple things. I will boost the authority of existing backlinks to my IB article while building 10 new backlinks to the same article via BMR. I will also hit the on-site SEO factor by adding a handful of links to the article from other articles I’ve published on the IB platform much like I did two weeks ago for the primary IB post.

Is This Really Worth The Effort?

First of all writing this blog post is more effort than actually doing the work. I enjoy it though and want to get blogging again.

Second, yes, it should be worth it but you never know. By boosting the authority of two offsite backlinks on other blogs and adding 10 more backlinks, my post on “lowering blood glucose levels” should be a more authoritative page in theory.

This ‘more authoritative page’ will then be more meaningful in regards to the internal link it gives to my main IB page on the “normal blood sugar range for adults”, which could help that post rank better for its main keyword. It is currently ranked #39 (as shown above) and I still want it to rank higher so that it starts getting some traffic.

Two weeks ago it took me a total of 50 minutes to make and post BMR links and 20 min to build internal links to the first post. This week it should take me 50 min to build and post 5 PostRunner posts, 50 min to build and post 10 BMR posts, and 20 min to build some internal links.

Combined that is 190 min in three weeks – a little over 1 hour a week. Let’s see if it’s worth it. I will revisit this in the near future so follow along.

For The Uninformed
Read these posts for more information on what PostRunner is and what BMR is.

Thanks for reading - send your friends my way. :)

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Priorities

For the few of you subscribers to this blog let me say thanks for sticking around. I’ve had a new set of priorities for some time now. If you have followed along I had major surgery in the Spring and then a new baby joined the family in early summer and ever since then my life has revolved around the baby and my day job. My priorities haven’t been online and I’m fine with that.

As many people reading this know eHow stopped paying out royalties in May and then California & Amazon shut the door on Amazon commissions for CA residents at the end of June. Being a CA resident and a recipient of eHow royalty income this cut off a nice stream of revenue out of my business just when I didn’t have the time to commit to my online business due to more pressing priorities – relationships.

Having said that I can still report that August represents the most residual income I’ve ever seen come through the doors. Even taking away two streams of income every other stream has accelerated and I’ve learned to adapt and find new ways to monetize and do business online.

I anticipate an upcoming adjustment to my priorities in the next couple months. Babies sleep better when they get past those first few months and mothers are less stressed at that stage as well. My wife even asked if I thought I could support the entire family on my online income alone. She was thinking about a timeframe of three years from now. :) I said honey, I can do that and I’ll do it much quicker than that.

To those who have kids – I finally understand where you all are coming from. They are the most important things in life. To those without I hope one day you’ll get to enjoy them. To those who are starting out online keep working hard and never quit. I’ve been listening to IBM’s podcast for the last couple months at the incessant recommendation of Pat Flynn and a recent episode I listened to mentioned perseverance being the best quality you can bring to your internet business.

It may seem like success online will never come but I guarantee you that if you stick at it and make your online endeavors a priority in your life one day your spouse or even yourself will realize that all your efforts have led to the greatest freedom of your life. I look forward to the last day of my day job. It’s getting closer every day.

A shout out to different people with very different philosophies which have inspired and taught me over the past few months: Keyword Academy 2.0, Leo Dimilo’s Internet Marketing blog, Lizzie’s Passive Income blog, Dave’s SEO Tips blog, and Felicia’s passive income blog No Job for Mom, Pat at Smart Passive Income, Sterling and Jay at Internet Business Mastery Podcast, and a few others who’s blogs I closely follow.

If you are an old friend from InfoBarrel I hope you’ll say hi and for the rest of you blog readers I hope you’ll stick around as I reprioritize this blog and my relationships online. I may start a new case study for InfoBarrel in September and I should probably do a followup on my niche site duel site which has done quite well as of late.

Say hi in the comments, I’ll be tending to them again.

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How To Make A Living With A Blog – Day 18 – Use Amplify

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 18.

Day 18 – Set Yourself Up On Amplify

Making a living online can be done in so many different ways. What I am suggesting is just one way and social media has to be a part of it. Many plans for online businesses center around social media but having a center there isn’t necessary, it is helpful however.

Amplify is a social media site that can syndicate your posts across many other social platforms. You can set up an Amplify account, and post to it linking back to your original article and get a dofollow backlink for your efforts. Amplify will also simultaneously autopost (if you set it up, which you should) to a whole host of social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Tumbler, Posterous, and many others. This is great because each of those sites will also be linking back to the original post helping with indexing of the original post and sending a mix of nofollow and dofollow backlinks to the original post.

On your main Amplify page you can also submit your blog’s RSS feed to receive more dofollow backlinks whenever you post to your actual blog, and you can do a lot of your networking (see this big Blog Networking Guide by Christina) that you might otherwise do on other social media sites. Some call Amplify the dofollow Twitter, or the Twitter for people who actually like conversations with people.  I call it social media with an emphasis on SEO.

What I suggest (which I learned from others - namely Lizzie in the TKA forums) is to setup an Amplify account for your niche blog, and then setup dedicated social media accounts at all the places that Amplify will autopost to and link those accounts to Amplify. On your Amplify sidebar you can setup your page to be SEOd to your main theme or your main keywords and then include your main blog’s RSS feed and possibly your Twitter feed.

It may take some time to figure it all out and get things setup but once you get it all going you can easily Amplify any backlink that you or anyone else creates to help get it indexed and ranking a little. After all, a backlink is more beneficial if it is indexed and when it has a little authority behind it.

The thing to keep in mind here is you should be using this Amplify account to Amplify your backlinks and other people's posts, not every blog post you publish. We can’t keep heavily promoting all of our backlinks forever, Amplify will make it easy for us to simply promote our backlinks in the future so we can spend the bulk of our time actually building backlinks and profitable content.

In the first month we can’t overrun our main revenue generating articles with backlinks which is why we spend some good time promoting our revenue sharing articles as well. In months two and three and beyond we can start focusing more on our own blog and let Amplify simply and easily build the authority of our backlinks and because each post we Amplify will be a backlink article from another site we won’t be simply linking to the same domain over and over again, which is a good thing.

Certainly by now you’ve had plenty of time to get everything published (from earlier days in this series) and take a healthy break so after today we’ll get back to writing and publishing so stay tuned to that. Slowly but surely these efforts will start turning into page views and income. Good luck all.

A Personal Note
If you’ve been following along with this for some time, you’ll know I mostly took the last three weeks off. I have deemphasized (temporarily) blogging and have been investing much more of my time building backlinks (and getting my taxes filed).

As many of you know I am a happy member of The Keyword Academy and am constantly using their flagship tool Postrunner (see my review of PostRunner here). Recently I joined another program BMR (similar to PostRunner) and have been experimenting with it to see if it’s worth it to me. That has naturally received much more of my attention as of late. I may or may not review it down the road here on this blog.

Lastly, the wife and I are getting much closer to the due date of our first little man.  One of these days's he'll come so we are in the last phases of "nesting".  This is a fun time in our lives.  6 weeks to go!

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Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns

http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com

I’ve been ramping up my efforts lately on my Diabetic Shoes website. If you have any experience with sites like these you probably know that they are a bit easier to rank after they’ve aged a bit than when they are new right out of the gate. I started my site back on the 4th of November and filled out the framework of the site back in 2010 including my initial backlinks. You can read more about that process in my earlier updates but largely the months of January and the first half of February saw me really sit on the site just waiting for it to age while I worked on other projects. Sometimes this is worth doing and so far it looks like it’s done well for me thus far.

Since mid-Feb I began looking through the traffic the site was getting and decided to add some more pages of content based on both traffic I was already getting to the site from search engines and based on new keywords I wanted to target which I identified using Niche Refinery, the keyword selection tool provided to members of The Keyword Academy (TKA).

How I Make Money On My Diabetic Shoes Website

Before I go on to what has kept me busy on this site over the month of March I wanted to talk about monetization. I posted a couple weeks back an update showing that my site had starting earning more efficiently; well it has continued to do so.

I have implemented three forms of monetization thus far but only two have converted as of yet. Adsense was the first form, followed by Amazon Associates, and most recently I added a few links to ClickBank in both the sidebar and on a single targeted post. ClickBank has yet to convert but I wouldn’t expect it to so soon after implementation.

Adsense

Considering Adsense is the easiest form of monetization possible it was the first form I implemented on the site. It earned for me immediately back in November and has continued to earn a bit every month until March where it took off. I included an ad on top right of my posts, a wide sidebar on the left of posts below the fold and an inline middle of the post ad which is only included on long posts. Each ad is tracked separately and so I can see which one is performing best.

Overall I made $58.20 with Adsense in March. The bulk of that came from the top ad, followed by the inline post ad, trailing by the sidebar ad. In the long run I want this site to pull further away from Adsense so I will take this into account while I decide on how to switch these Adsense ads out for other kinds of affiliate programs, banners, or other networks. You may wonder why when the return has been so good but it’s because the affiliate sales potential is likely much better as you can see with my Amazon earnings.

Amazon Associates

Somewhere in the middle of the month, I’m going to say around the 15th I made the change on this site to start focusing more on Amazon affiliate sales. After reading the bulk of Dave’s Make Money On The Internet Blog and more specifically his advice on Amazon I began to implement some of his techniques into this site.

Dave makes gobs of money online – he is an authority and he supposedly knows what he is talking about so having given some of his advice a try I can see why he does so well. I thank him immensely for the info he provides. If you haven’t read his blog then make sure to head over and start pouring through his archives. I read everything and it took me the better part of a month doing it a few posts a day. It will take a while but it’s better than any ebook you’ll ever read that’s for sure.

Enough about Dave – He advises you to be overt about your affiliate links if you are building a product oriented website. Y diabetic shoes website has a lot of good information on the importance of practicing better diabetic foot care and wearing diabetic shoes and any readers of the site will be interested in the products and most likely looking to buy them. If that is the case why would you ever want to beat around the bush. If they search for “good shoes for diabetics” why would I ever give them a landing page that didn’t link out overtly to a good pair of shoes for diabetics to buy?

As such I added prominent links in the sidebar pointing directly to footwear appropriate for diabetics filtered by brand and price and then in many of the posts I took Adsense off completely and included a front and center link to the most applicable product the search visitor is looking for. As a result my Amazon earnings jumped up dramatically.

The first half of the month my Amazon earnings were $13.53 on 5 shipped items and the second half of the month my Amazon earnings were $30.85 on 9 shipped items. Overall I hit $44.38 on 14 shipped items which seems quite good to me. I think this is even better than Adsense so I’ll continue to make a slow transition away from Adsense and more to Amazon as a result.

ClickBank & Other Affiliate Programs

As previously mentioned I want this site to veer away from Adsense and into more of a free information site monetized by affiliate sales. Amazon is obviously part of this but there are many other companies with good applicable products for sale which have affiliate programs. Considering this is such a topical site I imagine these programs will pay well and convert well so I plan on pushing more into this arena. I’ve started off by offering a program from ClickBank which is something I can’t offer from Amazon and I intend on finding some other programs and companies to promote which offer better returns than Amazon sales. This will be an ongoing project for me.

Recent Site Promotion

In addition to the monetization strategies I’ve taken on this site I’ve begun to increase the velocity of promotion I’ve done on the site. In early Niche Site Duel updates I mentioned how I like to build up fewer high quality backlinks rather than blasting them with tons of low quality links. I started with a handful of backlink articles which I wanted to be authority links:

• Best Shoes For Diabetics – on InfoBarrel
• Diabetic Walking Shoes – on my longevity blog
• Diabetic Shoes For Men – on HubPages
• Best Socks for Diabetics – on Snipsly
• Good Diabetic Shoes – on Buzzle
• Good Diabetic Shoe – on Health For World

Each of these articles have been independently promoted and they all should be giving me good authoritative backlinks by now. Aside from Snipsly (which hasn’t been showing much promise lately) they all are doing well.

In addition to these main backlink articles I’ve also started promoting each and every post on the site. I’ve backlinked them all (all 18 of them) from SheToldMe, InfoPirate, Folkd, Posturown, and at least twice from InfoBarrel – all of these sites earn me money so my promotion of my niche site has also netted me a fair sum of earnings. Many of my 18 posts also have backlinks from other blogs as a result of my guestposting with PostRunner. As a result all my posts on my Diabetic Shoes website are starting to do very well in the search results and the main index page is being lifted with the tide.

Right now I rank:

• best shoes for diabetics – 3rd
• shoes for diabetics – 15th
• best diabetic shoes – 7th
• diabetic shoes – 17th

Obviously I also rank very well for a large laundry list of long tails because of my depth of content on site and my growing list of backlinks pointing at all of my pages.

Promotion for April

This month I should continue to increase my backlinking of the site with revenue sharing sources and will begin to ramp up my backlinking with guestposting on blogs, primarily through via PostRunner. I will probably add a few more pages to the blog as well based on current traffic trends. In case you don’t know you can almost always get a surge in new search traffic by posting a new post using a keyword or keyword derivative which is already sending traffic your way to an already existing post. This helps dramatically especially in the beginning when traffic is slow to begin with.

March saw search traffic increase to this site from 256 total visits in Feb to 653 total visits in March, an increase of 155 percent month over month. I’d like April to see another increase of over 100 percent as that could increase my earnings by over 100 percent. That would be nice.

I’ll cut this post here but leave you with my earnings history:

Total Income By Month

• Nov 2010 - $5.57 on 3 posts
• Dec 2010 - $15.86 on 5 posts
• Jan 2011 - $17.05 on 6 posts
• Feb 2011 - $15.48 on 15 posts
• Mar 2011 - $102.58 on 18 posts

Total Earnings to date: $156.54


Good luck on your own niche sites – work hard at them and make them helpful to your readers and you’ll be much better off in the long run. Feel free to leave any comments or questions in the comment section below.

For All Other Posts In This Niche Site Duel series:
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011


For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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Making A Living Online – Day 17

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 17.

Day 17 – Get Those Article Directory Links Indexed (And Make Some Money Doing It)

If you are following along with this series then you may still be working on day 16. Hopefully you are about finished up or done completely but if you are like most people writing all this unique content can get tough especially after having written so much already. If you’re not done yet with submitting the 25 article directory links from day 16 then keep at it. Today’s task is a bit smaller and may help break up the monotony.

Over the past few days you’ve submitted a lot of content to article directories. 25 articles were submitted to backlink our revenue sharing articles on Day 14 and 25 more were submitted to backlink our actual money articles on day 16. That’s a total of 50 article directory links sitting out there and they all need some love.

First of all, as we did back in day 7, head over to Feedage and submit your article directory RSS feed to your Feedage account. This will get all your directory submissions some small time “easy” backlinks. If you setup accounts at all four article directories then this should mean you get to submit four feeds to Feedage – shouldn’t take you more than 10 min of your time.

Next you have to start submitting your article directory submissions to IMAutomator, again, this is quick and easy and although you’ve got about 50 submissions to make and it may take you a few days because of daily submission limitations it shouldn’t take up much of your time.

The last thing you have to do (which will actually help earn you money) is to start backlinking all 50 of these article directory publications on SheToldMe and InfoPirate. This will take some time but I have done well over fifty bookmark backlinks in a day so this should still be manageable.

Don’t underestimate this. These links will help get your directory submissions indexed and will help improve the quality of the links they are sending to your money articles and main backlink articles… and not only that but the bookmarks themselves will earn money. From my experience just getting 100 bookmarks up on InfoPirate is an easy income stream of $20-$40 a month. That sounds crazy I know but it is true. SheToldMe (from my experience) isn’t as good for revenue but you will make some money there so it’s worth it.

If you are not yet done getting your directory submissions submitted keep working at that too. This is very important. You need these backlinks. In the future we’ll start adding other types of backlinks in greater quantities but for now these are great backlinks to get and worth the effort.

A Glimpse Into The Future

The work we have done over the past few weeks has definitely been a lot. It is probably more work that you could have ever imagined doing and if you are actually doing it then congrats; your efforts will pay off. We are now earning a little money on SheToldMe, InfoPirate, Snipsly, InfoBarrel, HubPages, Squidoo, and Posturown and each of those sites is also passing links and authority to our money articles which are published on our own site. Our money articles may or may not be earning money yet but chances are that you’ve already started earning a trickle there as well.

The first month is the hardest – it’s a blind leap of faith. You devote a ton of time and energy into producing all this content and trust that you will be compensated for your efforts. Almost every time you will be compensated – some times more that others but you have to make the leap.

So far we haven’t spent any money except for setting up a website to put out initial money articles on. In the future we will start spending some money – not much but the money spent will be worth it and will be reasonable. Just fair warning.

Good luck and work hard – it’s not easy, if it was everyone would do it.

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Make A Living Online – Day 16

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 16.

Day 16 – Article Directory Links To Your Money Articles

By now you’ve surely had enough time to build all the backlinks to your revenue sharing articles as outlined in day 14 of this series. Basically we’ve got roughly 25 articles on a new site right now and they all have a few backlinks but we need to add some more.

In day 14 we started promoting more heavily the main backlinks to the money articles with article directory links at a clip of about 2 per article. We will now do the same things again except this time we will publish these article directory articles with links pointing directly at out money articles.

Previously I noted you wanted to publish on directories which gave you dofollow backlinks like Ezine, GoArticles, Article Dashboard, and Article Blast – this time we will use the same sites (other if you know of any you like) but point them at our 25 articles. At an average of two links per article we will need about 25 articles published over the new few days each sending out links to out money articles. Each “money article” should get about two links out of this.

Again this will take some time which completely depends on how fast you write but you should be able to punch these out in a few days at least, if not sooner. Sure it’s hard work and you may be getting burned out on the subject but that’s the way it goes. Don’t fret and don’t lose hope – this is how it’s done so you just have to suck it up and do the work.

For me I’ve been writing tons of stuff on diabetic shoes as I promote my relatively new diabetic shoes website, it’s a lot of info that I keep framing in different ways, it’s a lot of work but it pays off significantly – just do it and be pleased that it pays.

The next couple days should be slim days while you get this task done but I do have more in store for day 17 – see you then.

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How To Get Free Blog Content – Use PostRunner

Looking to get free content for your blog? Sure there’s always PLR content but seriously, that content is used all over the web. I’m talking about getting free blog content for your topical blog, general interest blog, or niche website.

This post is promotional but short - just a warning. It is not however just a flashy headline.

As many readers of this blog know by now I am a happy member of The Keyword Academy (TKA). So far in my 28 days to be a better IMer series I’ve discussed all the beginnings of getting a niche site going without the use of spinning or the use of paid tools. I’ve only discussed free techniques. Well imagine this. Getting the backlinks you need to your site is so much easier with the PostRunner system included with your TKA membership. As a refresher you can read my older post on using PostRunner to guestpost on other people’s blogs.

Today I’d like to introduce you to the other side of PostRunner, accepting free content from others. Not only do you get access to PostRunner as a member of The Keyword Academy but you also are able to include your own blog in the PostRunner system so that other bloggers and niche site owners can post to your site. This basically equates to you receiving free content to your blog on a constant basis.

Think of this – you find a niche that you think is awesome – let’s say it’s a site on office products. You go out and buy a domain for your site and put it on your hosting account, install Wordpress, and then what? You have to build the content out as well as backlink it to get it indexed and ranking with some authority.

How about this? After building some initial content to your office products site, join The Keyword Academy (free the first month + $33/month thereafter) and install the PostRunner plugin so that you can receive content to your site from other members. You are free to accept anything you want to the site and have complete discretionary control over what publishes.

If you want the site to be only about Office Products then you will note that your site is only about office products and you will only accept topics on that subject. The next thing you know you will be receiving free posts on your exact niche on a constant basis day in and day out. You can monetize the site anyway you wish too so not only does the content get published to the site by others but it can and will make you money at the same time. And if the content submitted to your site is not up to your standard then you simply decline it with a single push of a button.

You can also do the same thing but be more inclusive and accept posts on just about anything – that decision is up to you but when all is said and done you can easily get a bunch of free content to your site which can in time pay for your entire membership fee and more.

My Experiences Owning A Site On PostRunner
I have been a happy member of The Keyword Academy for roughly a year now. I use their PostRunner tool all the time, more than anything else on their site and I can’t imagine not having it. If you want to take your Internet Marketing to a new level then try out TKA for a free month and see if it’s worth it to you. If it looks good then get your own blog hooked into the PostRunenr system, not only will it help the membership base but you will be well compensated from your PostRunner site in due time.

My own PostRunner site is only a few months old and it already pays for itself. It makes more than I pay every month in membership fees. I get around 2 posts a day of free content; there’s no reason why you can’t too. Click through to give TKA a first look for free.

You can also see my post on submitting to PostRunner for backlinks, using TKA’s Niche Refinery for keyword selection (off site).

Yes this is a promotional post but it is a system that I use to make all my money online. It is a tool that is worth using. There are many people that struggle for small gains every day; TKA can get you moving up in earnings faster. Good luck.

Check back in tomorrow for more on my IMer series and have a great weekend everyone!

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More On My Making A Living Online Series – Day 15

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 15.

Day 15 – Edit Your Money Articles

If you are following along with this series then you’re still probably backlinking your revenue sharing articles on the article directories as I outlined on my last post: How To Make A Living With Internet Marketing – Day 14. Backlinking all those articles takes some time so keep at it, you need somewhere around 25-50 articles published to send 1-2 backlinks to all 50 of those revenue sharing articles so keep at it.

In the mean time here is a simple task that won’t take nearly as long for you to do. Our main 25 “money articles” at this point have been published for 2-3 weeks now and we’ve probably received a trickle of traffic to these articles by now. Go into your analytics and for each article identify 1-2 keyword phrases that has already brought search traffic to that article. Check your article to see if that search phase appears exactly somewhere in the article and if not add it.

I like to do this by adding a complete paragraph to the article somewhere. Just go into your money articles and add a short paragraph which includes these exact keywords and maybe a couple related terms that you haven’t yet used in the article. Republish the article and then do the same for the other 24 “money articles”. This will take some time but it at least can be accomplished in less than a single day.

While you are at this task make sure to keep on publishing your articles to the article directories to get those revenue sharing articles of your backlinked and ranking better. Remember, the more you do the better. They don’t have to be the best articles in the world just make them well written with a solid point or two and maybe a little personal commentary on the topic. Keep at it and good luck!

FYI – In case you don’t get it the purpose of editing your money articles like this is to milk the low hanging fruit while the articles are still new and ranked poorly. This is a good task that can give you a break from article directory submissions… just don’t stop doing the directory submissions. Remember, keep at it. This is work, we’re trying to make a living at this, you can’t expect to make a living without doing some work.

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Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites

In early November I started a niche site when I joined many other bloggers in the Niche Site Duel. I have since posted five updates on my niche site: http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com. You can catch up on those posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Recently I’ve also been publishing a series on making a living online and a recent update on that series I noted the importance of building your initial backlinks to your niche sites on revenue sharing websites because they are relatively strong backlinks and they are capable of absorbing a bunch of backlinks right off the bat due to their being published on an established domain.

Today I wanted to drive this point home by showing you the results of my initial five backlinks to my diabetic shoes website. As I noted back in my second niche site update I posted five main backlinks to the niche site from InfoBarrel, HubPages, Snipsly, Posturown, and my own Longevity Blog. That is five sites which earn me money for my publications.

After publishing those five articles I went on to publish others and I also went on to backlink those articles to ensure they get indexed, stay indexed, gained some authority, and passed the best link juice possible to my new website. I published those five articles a little over 4 months ago in mid-November 2010. In that time my entire niche site has made a little over $100 but these five articles alone have made an additional $65.54. That doesn’t even include any of the other backlinks I’ve built on revenue sharing sites so adding those in would increase the numbers even more.

What is interesting is that I haven’t even gone gangbusters on backlinking these five articles. I have only sent 6 links at my longevity blog post and it’s indexed at PR0. I’ve sent 9 backlinks at my IB post and it’s indexed at PR0. My hub has gotten 10 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR0, Snipsly has 5 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR N/A. Lastly my Posturown article has 11 backlinks pointing at it and it too is indexed at PR0. All in all my backlinks have given most of these articles enough authority to get them past PR N/A and I haven’t even hit them hard with backlinks.

What is all of this to say? If you are building a niche site do not underestimate the power of building your main backlinks first from rev share sites. They are a great way to build your first backlinks because of their earning power and their ability to grow in authority quickly. In the last 30 days these five articles have made me almost $10 in Adsense income which is a drop in the bucket but quite significant considering my entire niche site only made $56 during the same time period.

If you are building a niche site make sure to not overlook this income source.  Write good articles to build these backlinks and then promote them with backlinks of their own through article marketing or through guestposting on blogs.  PostRunner is the best system around for this in my opinion.  Once your niche blog starts ranking better and pulling in revenue then your income will start growing exponentially.

All Other NSD Posts
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011


For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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