How I Made 5-Figures Freelancing in 2011, Revealed

I’m on track to make even more this year.

This is all thanks to a very effective systematic approach I have in place, that a lot of other freelance writers ignore.

This is all thanks to BLOGGING!

The reality is that you probably know a dozen other freelance writers who have a blog, and you probably have one yourself, but blogging in itself isn’t going to bring the clients.

There’s a right way to it, and a very wrong way to it, too!

I have never believed in the idea of pitching clients to hire me, which is why I focused my efforts on making blogging work for me.

I have learned a lot over the years, and I’d like to think my business has improved by a long shot since last year.

After 3 days of hard work, I have finally released my first presentation.

It’s a 29-page presentation, titled How to Use Blogging to Fuel Your Freelance Writing Business, sharing how I’ve been using blogging to build my freelance writing business without ever having the need to pitch clients.

This presentation is as real as it gets, and I can say I gave it my all without trying to take too much space.

The tips in it are also very practical, and can be used with success no matter how old/popular your blog is.

You can view the presentation below.

It’s my goal for this presentation to make it to the homepage of Slideshare, and I know this is possible with your help.

If you enjoy the presentation, I’ll very much appreciate it if you can share it on Facebook and Twitter, especially to other freelance writers.

That’ll not only help get it into more hands and change more lives, but will also help land it on Slideshare’s homepage, and help me get more exposure.

I have a lot more stuff (similar to, and better than this) planned for the future, and your encouragement all along the way will be really appreciated!

Thanks to Carol Tice from the MakeaLivingWriting.com blog, I was recently featured on Forbes, and I’ll appreciate if you can visit the feature post (and hopefully share and comment on it) here!

We hate spam just as much as you

5 Guest Posting Strategies you can Steal

This guest post is written by Grant Hensel

Guest blogging is quite literally taking the world by storm. The model makes perfect sense: the host gets free content and the guest gets exposure.

If you already knew that, congratulations! You’ve mastered Guest Posting 1.0…and it’s time to take your game to a whole new level.

The following 5 guest posting strategies have been implemented successfully by some of the best bloggers in the industry. Each approach by itself will make your guest posts far more successful, but used together they can provide a quantum leap in effectiveness.

The first major mistake many bloggers make when guest posting is only focusing on generating traffic or links or attention. A good post will give you all of those benefits, so why not maximize overall effectiveness?

7 Ways to Write Clear, Attentive Content without Resorting to Fillers and Fluff

This is a guest post by Samantha

I have read lots of articles over the years that have been full of fluff. In fact, that includes some of my own articles. I’ve had my fair share of 700 word articles that could have been cut down to 300 words producing a more coherent, readable, and interesting article.

Clear writing has one huge advantage. It has a better chance of keeping our attention. A lack of fluff leaves our minds clear of confusion and boredom. No matter what type of writing you do, learn how to keep your readers’ attention with clear, concise writing.

Introductions are important. They tell readers what’s in store for them if they keep reading. It should pull them in. It should not be so overflowed with excessive explanations and planning that they fall asleep before they get halfway through the article.

Be direct. Introduce the main point of the article and immediately begin tackling the supporting points. Interesting writing and an attention-grabbing topic will get the reader’s initial attention just fine. Now you need to give them what you promised.

The same goes for individual paragraphs and sentences. Don’t write more than necessary. Here is an example of a proper direct sentence and a drawn-out one.

106 Powerful Quotes to Inspire Your Writing Today

Writing can be lonely sometimes.

You write and write but can’t get results, or you just can’t shake off the feeling that you’re inadequate.

You’re not alone.

We all feel the same way, and even successful writers and philosophers who were the best of their time couldn’t shake of these feelings either. No matter how much you achieve, it isn’t enough. And no matter how successful you are, that feeling of inadequacy will still be there.

The solution to this, however, is motivation. Instead of worrying about perfection or inadequacy, why not get inspiration from those you look up to? Why not see how they’re made, and what they’ll do in the same situation as you?

Here are 201 writing quotes to keep you motivated today.

How To Write An Article That Sells

This is a guest post by Anne

You’ve done the hard part. You found a brilliant idea for your article and you know exactly what your keywords are going to be. Now all you need to do is to put together an article that makes sense, one that gives all the information you want to share, in a way that is readable and succinct. You want to write an article that will be accepted by your editor or client – one that’s so impressive they’ll keep coming back to you for subsequent jobs. How do you do this? How do you write an article that makes your writing stand out above all the other brilliant writers on the web?

You can have great article structure with everything in the right place. You can also be the best at keyword-littering throughout your article. However, if you haven’t got the skill and technique for actually writing the article, your work is dead before you’ve begun. I really admire successful writers on the Internet who’ve to write competitively in English against native speakers like myself. There are millions of writers who fall into this category and we have to take our hats off to them. Developing the skill can be one of the hardest stumbling blocks to writers who publish online, but thankfully, there are lots of ways to combat this.

The Secret to Making Your Writing Stand Out Online

This guest post is awesomely written by Logan Marshall, who you should check out by the way!

In an attempt to hide the fact that we were all 98 pound weaklings…my friends and I used to challenge each other to see who was the bigger man.

We took it to the extreme.

We scaled our high school in the middle of the night, ran five miles completely barefoot through the woods and routinely attempted (extremely painful) acrobatics off a local bridge.

But that’s just the beginning. Compared to what you’re about to hear…that shit is tame. And far less dangerous.

Here’s how it went down.

It was mid January, the sun was sinking below the pine trees…and we had our dumbest idea yet. What started as “we should camp out in the yard” had somehow turned into “we should walk two miles into the forest and sleep on the riverbank…without a tent.”

Brilliant.

10 Real Ways to Beat the Beast that is Writer’s Block

This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti of Sparring Mind.

Writers of all types will deal with writer’s block, this we know to be inevitable.

Where things change is exactly how you’ll deal with things.

Will you let writer’s block eat up your productivity, and come back for seconds to devour more free time?

Fear not, if you’ve ever have the displeasure of running into writer’s block (and haven’t we all…), I’m serving up some fresh ideas.

(Image Credit)

No, I don’t mean make a white-flag truce with your future post (don’t surrender!)

What I’m talking about is literally sitting back and discussing, out loud, where you want the post the go, and what type of things it should address.

This works even better if you record your talks, as you will never have to interrupt your “flow” to write down something particularly genius.

Most of us have no problem speaking (when we’re comfortable), so talking out-loud (as if you were discussing the topic with someone) can be a great way to get your ideas flowing, as the process of conversation leads itself to ‘instant’ idea generation: you have to think of things quickly in order to speak.

This forces you to think on your feet, and with this pressure may come a great foundation for you new post, and if not, it costs you very little time.

Fate is a cruel mistress.

Dramatic intro aside, it can be quite cruel for writers to find themselves in a fantastic brainstorming session… only to be nowhere near their computer.

In fact, most of your best tidbits of genius will probably come this way.

Are you going to rely on your already busy and overloaded brain to remember each and every one? Even after you’ve flushed out some amazing details?

Rather than lose out on your best stuff, create a “post ideas journal” that will allow you revisit these nuggets of gold when the time is right.

With technology nowadays, this doesn’t even have to be a real journal.

While I personally still prefer a nice moleskine notepad, I know people whose ideas live and die on Evernote, being stored away (or later trashed) until they have time to pan out.

Point is, don’t let insight pass you by: write good ideas down and save them for later.

As an added benefit, you’ll start to create a “backlog” of post ideas that you can use for upcoming articles, creating a “to-do” list that will never leave you thinking of what to write about next.

It’s been proven that changing up your daily routine can lead to more creative thoughts.

Have you been getting stuck in a rut lately?

Do you always have the same writing locale?

This is one of the easiest things to change, you might not even have to leave your house, a different room might be just what you need.

If you can manage it, a whole new location might also be a breathe of fresh air (quite literally, if you are able to take things outside).

Coffee shops, libraries, just a few of many places to enjoy a large, open space, all the while getting the new setting you need to switch things up while writing.

This is a neat technique that has started to be utilized for a lot of folks, but I think it works perfectly for writers.

If you have a large project ahead of you, instead of hitting the mental wall that your brain is bound to run into if you approach it “all at once”, use the Pomodoro Technique to split segments up into 25 minute work sessions.

The process works in half-hour intervals, because after the work session you get to enjoy a 5-minute break that can consist of getting a drink, stretching, and just plain getting up and moving around.

Check out tools like the FocusBooster app which allow you to use a timer right from your browser, great for getting started with the Pomodoro Technique right away.

This might sound goofy for those who have never tried it, but trust me, for some folks, this technique can be a godsend for getting things done.

As much as we’d like to grapple our writer’s block in a merciless headlock, that’s not what I’m talking about here.

It’s long been known that exercise has more benefits than just your physical health, it’s also good for the brain.

You shouldn’t have to engage in any power lifting to get your brain ready for work, some simple stretching or a quick walk will do.

This is especially important for writers who spend a large portion of their day in front of a computer, but it’s the advice they are least likely to take.

That’s a shame, because it doesn’t take a health expert to tell you about the stimulating benefits of exercise, many folks who work largely “static” jobs can relate just how much better they felt when incorporating a little fitness into their daily routine.

Taking care of yourself can lead to less stress and burnouts, and taking a little time each day to move your body will help when your brain seems to just run out of steam.

One of the most important steps for many great posts is comprehensive research.

There is somewhat of a danger to research that has to do with perfectionism, as many writers will use research as a way to procrastinate, telling themselves that they are getting things done (when really they are just browsing with no purpose).

More often than not, however, I’ve found that it’s a lack of research that leads to the glazed stare at a blank page.

Take the time to look into what you’re going to write about.

Find time to actually research, not browse the internet while you half-heartedly read 10 other open tabs.

Dive into some of the best (or closest in relevance) articles on the topic you are approaching, and see what makes sense, see what can be improved, and see what they might be missing.

You can’t cook up something good without the right recipe, and a well researched post will generally be a much easier post to write.

If writing is your profession (or if you want it to be), you need to take it seriously.

Writing “when you feel like it” is one way ticket to disaster.

Cultivating an established writing routine is the essential ingredient to getting past one of the main components of writer’s block: getting started.

Waiting for inspiration to strike takes the control away from you: put it in it’s place by treating your writing like you would anything else of note: practice it regularly and it will become a habit.

Just like getting to the gym can be the hardest part of the exercise, sitting down and FINALLY diving in to that new piece you need to write can be the hardest part about writing.

However, when you have a schedule to stick to, you won’t give it a second thought: with a specific time to write, you will learn to write at that time (rain or shine… ) and won’t be left with poor excuses like, “I’ll wait until I’m in the mood.”

This would seem like common sense, but when you’re on the computer and have finally sat yourself down to write, small interruptions can create writer’s block where none existed, because you will be constantly thrown off track.

Some of my absolute favorite tools for creating a stress free (and insulated) writing environment are:

SimplyNoise (white noise generator, you’d be surprised how much it blocks out those background noises, even in a “quiet” room)ZenWriter (this is my personal favorite tool for distraction free writing, but there are also free variants in WriteRoom (Mac) and DarkRoom (PC) that you can use)Noise cancelling headphones (not for everyone, but they really allow me to focus in and work steadily)

The other way to prevent distractions is to outright eliminate things that draw us away from writing.

If all that takes for you is a website blocking tool like StayFocusd, so be it.

But if it takes you disconnecting your internet for a while, or turning off your phone, or refusing to check your email, then that is what you have to do.

Don’t let the false rewards of checking small things like new messages distract you from the long term (but much more rewarding) accomplishments like getting your work done.

It may seem strange to recommend more reading to prevent writer’s block, but I’ve found that information consumption often directly effects output.

This is an important consideration for writer’s, because if what you’ve been consuming has become stale, your writing will reflect this.

Branch out of your reading comfort zone into styles, genres, and topics that you wouldn’t normally read.

Challenge yourself, and you’ll likely be rewarded with a new perspective.

Sometimes, you just need to get something creative “out of your system”, and that is where the brain dump comes in.

Don’t wait, don’t plan, don’t even outline… just write.

You don’t have to publish everything you write, keep that in mind.

Sometimes you just need to get words flowing and out of your system.

Sometimes you just need to see a blank page full of your own work.

Whatever the reason, don’t hesitate to “dump” your thoughts onto the page, disregarding your normal writing routine, because sometimes it will be absolutely essential in order to get back on the right track.

Gregory is the author of Sparring Mind, a blog that combines smart content marketing & clever insights into social psychology to get results and cut through the malarkey.

Take this 5 Minute Survey

by Bamidele Onibalusi

In an attempt to better serve you on this blog and via my email newsletter, I have created a short survey that will take you anything from 2 – 5 minutes to complete.

I have been blogging for 2 years now, and one thing I’ve realized is that the best ways to serve my readers is by letting them tell me what they want, and how to serve it to them.

I’m planning to revitalize my content and approach to serving you, and I want to make sure you are a huge part of the process; taking this 5 minute survey will help me have a better understanding of what you want, what you like, what you don’t, and how to better improve the experience you get via this blog.

Click here to take the survey!

It only takes 5 minutes (at most), and I can assure you that the time investment will be much more profitable for you on the long run in terms of the changes it will lead to on this blog.

12 Quality Job Boards Every Freelance Writer Should Check Out Today

I wrote an article on 30 websites that pay writers a few months ago, and the response to that article has surprised me.

The article not only became one of the most popular articles on this blog instantly, but it also gave me great insight into what you really want from this blog; it made me realize that you want solutions, not just tips.

As a result, I’ve been making a lot of changes to this blog lately, and one of those changes is to be giving you the exact resources you need to take your online writing career to the next level.

This article will be sharing with you 12 quality freelance job boards you should check out today if you want to grow your freelance writing business.

5 Places To Distribute Your Content On The Web for More Traffic

This is a guest post by Ray Wilson

Everyone knows that without content you cannot make any money online. You need to constantly crank it out if you want to run the information marketing business model.

You want information online and other people want it too!

But, we all know how hard it is to create valuable content, as it can take up most of your daily time.

Now, I’m not going to help you with content creation tips in this article, but I’m going to help you with the content distribution process.

If you asked me how to get your stuff in front of an audience, get more traffic and make more money, then here are some cool ways to do it…

One of the best ways to distribute your content is to do guest blogging. You’ve probably heard about this strategy a number of times recently.

It’s not without reason because guest blogging is rapidly becoming one of the most popular internet marketing strategies to get quality traffic.

The concept is simple.

You search for the popular blog owners in your niche (other niches too) and find out whether they offer the opportunity for other blog owners like you to publish content on their popular, traffic-rich blog.

10 Strategic Ways to Position Your Blog to Attract Clients Easily

Are you hardly getting by as a freelance writer by bidding on job boards? How about stepping up your game and getting a few clients of your own?

This guest post by Michael Chibuzor explains 10 strategic ways to position your blog to attract more clients, and I’m in total support of most of the tips explained – in fact, they’ve worked well for me!

“Attracting paying clients is tough!”

I can imagine the pain freelance writers go through, as they scour job boards looking for that gracious client who will gladly hire them.

You’ve worked your ass off – all in the name of marketing your writing skills. Oh, if only you understand how positioning your blog can cause a meteoric growth in your writing career.

Believe me, every successful freelance writer have paid handsomely to be where they’re today. I could recall how I sacrificed sleepless nights just to complete a $5 – $15 project.

Insulating Your Site From Spammy Backlink Penalties

You’ve probably been on one of the Internet marketing forums and heard people moaning about how they’ve blasted a lot of links at their site only to see a huge drop in rankings.

Maybe you’ve even seen this happen to your own sites?

Everyone  knows that backlinks are critical for higher search engine rankings, no one wants to see their hard work go down the drain for using backlinks.

So what’s an Internet marketer to do?

First of all, you  you want to refrain from using some of the common “spammy”  back link schemes for your money site.

You know the ones I mean, the ones that you scrape box or other automated tools to blast thousands of profile and blog comment links to your site. These won’t really help your money site that much and they can actually hurt.

The thing is, that if your site consists only of these types of links then you may end up getting a penalty.

Now I know a lot of people argue that if that were true then you could just blast these links that your competitor and give him a penalty and I actually once thought this myself however, someone pointed out to me that your competitor probably has a lot of high quality links and these will insulate him against this type of penalty.   Luckily, you can use the same technique to insulate yourself against the same type of penalty.

Of course, you should be aiming to get high quality links to your site anyway. By high quality I mean links on high PR pages as well as in context links which are links inside the article itself.  Ideally, you should be getting these links on websites that are in your niche. A good way to get these is from guest blogging and syndicating your articles on other high-profile websites.

Another thing you can do, is create Web 2.0 properties (like blogger, Squidoo and hubpages) that link back to your money site. These are usually more highly respected than new blogs or websites. Then, you blast your profile and blog comment links at the Web 2.0 properties.  Since the Web 2.0 properties already have a high amount of quality back links they are unlikely to get a penalty from this.  This will give your Web 2.0 properties a little more clout but since the spammy links are pointing  directly at your website, it insulates it from any spamming link penalties.

So what you really have is 2 tiers of linking. You have good quality sites linking to your money site and then you have lower quality links to those sites.

Yes, this does take a bit more work and planning, but it will be well worth it in the end!

View the original article here

Creating An Authority Presence

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As I mentioned in the video above, I think that creating an authority presence is going to be pretty important when it comes to Internet marketing and getting traffic online in the coming years,  so I decided to dedicate most of this year to one big project (in addition to my PLR  business,  of course).   This big project will depend heavily on social media and with me being a knowledgeable person in my niche as well as developing relationships with other people in the niche – both my potential customers and other experts and authorities.

My Plan

I recently become obsessed with publishing books on the Kindle so my big plan hinges around publishing a series of books in the healthy eating niche. Now I’m not saying that you HAVE to publish kindle books to be an authority – that’s just what I am choosing to do.  You can just have a regular ebook or no ebook at all.  You don’t need your own product to be an authority, but it can make you a lot of money if you do.

There’s a couple of reasons that I love publishing on the Kindle.  First of all they have a gazillion customers looking for books to read all day long so you can actually make sales without doing any promotion, and if you have your link to your blog and facebook fan page, you can gain new customers from the books they buy!

The second reason is that having a book published on Amazon gives you instant credibility in your potential customers eyes as well as the eyes of other authorities in the niche.  When it comes to asking for guest blog spots or connecting with people, it can go a long way to say you are the author of  “blah blah blah” instead of just some faceless person who has a blog in the niche.

The downside is that the price point for Kindle books really is only about 2 or $3 and when you compare that to what we are used to getting ($27 or more) for e-books that can seem like a mere pittance, however because of the volume of buyers over at Amazon you can really make a lot of money selling books at this price point if you can get enough people buying it because the way their search engine works over there is that the more sales you have for your book, the higher it is in the different categories and, therefore, the more people buy it.

So driving more people from your Blog/Facebook/Twitter to your books on Amazon will result in a higher ranking on Amazon which will result in more sales from people browsing the Amazon marketplace which will result in more customers that you can send to your blog and fan page!

Of course, it goes without saying that this is all predicated on having super high quality books that people love so that they want to hear more from you, visit your blog and buy more of your books (and maybe even click some affiliate links on your blog too – more on that later)

So my plan is to have these books, as well as a blog,  Twitter account, Facebook, Google plus and Pinterest.  I will be actively participating in all of these almost every single day – unlike my niche blogs that I usually set and forget.

The Blog

For the blog, I’m really trying to focus on only posting stuff that can really help my audience. I’m trying to put any thoughts of SEO and things like “buying keywords” out of my head and post stuff that I think the people who are interested in healthy food will want to read.

The design is pretty simple, no fancy stuff, no pop-ups, no exit pops, I just have  a featured post on the top and then the latest posts on the homepage and links to my books for sale on Amazon on the sidebar (I currently have two in the series published over there now).  Eventually I’ll add an e-mail capture form on the sidebar too but I haven’t gotten around to creating a freebie giveaway for this niche yet.

I actually just put the blog up all about 4 days ago and was shocked to find that I’ve already gotten a small trickle of visitors from organic search which is really astounding because I haven’t done any back linking or SEO on its aside from one article that I posted on e-zine articles.  The thing is that I’m writing about food, and not any “buying” type stuff so there is not much competition from people that do SEO in that area.

I’m going to try to post every day even if it’s a short post but once a week I’m going to make a bigger “ authority”  post like the one I made today that was 1600 words.

For the  small posts I’m not going to do any SEO or back linking other than Tweeting and posting to the Facebook fan page.

For the authority posts, what I’m going to do is a quick search in the Google keyword tool to see what keyword phrases will be appropriate. Then I’ll do a competition search using Market Samurai to figure out which one has the least competition and that will be my main keyword phrase that I work into the title and most of the backlinks.  I’d like to find 5 phrases that could work in the article and then work them in as much as I can but not enough so that they sound forced.

Then I’m going to do in e-zine article (totally different from the one on the site)  that links back to it (using the main keyword phrase).  I’m also going to make 5 posts over on the blogging underground system each having the anchor text of one of the phrases I dug out in the google keyword tool (so each one will have a different anchor text).  And, finally I will write a totally unique article to use as a guest blog post through myblogguest  and will link back to the article using my main keyword phrase.

Twitter

I plan to use Twitter to communicate with my customers as well as other people in the niche. I found that twitter can be a great place to find out what’s going on and get ideas for new blog posts as well as find interesting blog posts that you might want to point your subscribers to.

Basically I’ll be doing all the things I talk about in this post but so far all I’ve gotten around to doing is setting up the account and tweeting all my posts thus far.

My to-do list is getting it set up in HootSuite finding some good people to follow and setting up automated following I talk about in this post.

Facebook

I have a fan page for the niche already set up and eventually I’ll add my free giveaway and e-mail capture to this. I might consider doing some contests and even some Facebook ads to get fans but I haven’t really work this all out yet.

Google Plus

Admittedly, I should know more about Google plus but I really can barely even use the account that I have for IM stuff. That being said, I need to create some new circles or however it’s done for this new healthy eating niche and start posting  links to my videos and blog posts there.  That’s a little bit lower down on the list as I think some of the other social media platforms are more important right now.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a new social media platform where you have different pages where you “pin”  stuff that is “interesting”.   Now this might not work for every niche, but in the healthy eating niche I think I’m going to create a bunch of pages that have healthy recipes pinned to them. Now I’m not just going to pin my own healthy recipes even though I will have some of mine on there, I’m going to create themed pages that have healthy recipes that I find from all over the web. So I might have one page on healthy bread and I might have another one on healthy chocolate desserts etc…

I haven’t really used p interest at all actually I only got a set accepted a couple days ago but it’s high on my to-do list to check it out and see how it can be used to help connect with my subscribers. Notice how I’m not thinking about how to use it for marketing and selling stuff, but I’m thinking about how to use it to connect with people.

How I Plan To Make Money

Okay now for the good stuff, how I plan to make money. Obviously I’ll be putting a ton of effort into this project and I need it to be able to pay off.  Believe it or not, one of my main methods of monetizing it is going to be the books that I sell on Amazon. I’m going to have them available on the Kindle and also in print form through Create Space. Each book will have a link to the other books in the series inside so hopefully when people read them and like them they will buy more from that series. So, I’ll be using the Amazon site itself for marketing the books but also my website, Twitter, Facebook etc. for getting more buyers. On Amazon the more buyers you have the more buyers you get.

There’s also going to be additional opportunities for making money on the blog because I have a lot of recipes that use ingredients that may not be available everywhere so I’ll have links to buy those ingredients on Amazon. I’m also going to do a whole series of smoothies using the Vita mix which is a super high-powered blender and so I’ll have  my affiliate links to the Vita mix store. And I might also do a series on growing your own herbs and vegetables using the Aerogarden and, once again, I’ll have my affiliate link to that product to.

I may also sell advertising on the site once it is built up, or not depending on how much my other income is making.

Now I know that building an authority site isn’t going to be a quick overnight money maker. This is the kind of project that is going to take quite a while before I start to see some results and, to tell you the truth, that’s kind of scary because a lot of work is going to go into it before I will be able to see it paying off so I  have to be really stern with myself and keep working on it even when it seems like it’s not making a lot of money for the effort. I need to keep the faith and realize that my efforts will be rewarded in the end with a more passive type of income.

View the original article here

Making Money With Squidoo Lenses

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I’m always looking for different streams of income that I can add to my bottom line.  I like to diversify the sources that earn me money.  Some people would say I lack focus, but I prefer to consider it a purposeful strategic move to not have all my eggs in one basket.

Anyway, if you’ve visited this site at all in the past, you know that I use Squidoo lenses for providing backlinks to my money sites quite a bit.  In fact, I have over 60 lenses but the funny thing is that I never once considered actually using Squidoo to make money!

My lenses do earn me a couple of bucks a month, but I always thought of that as just extra “gravy” money.  Since I always thought of them primarily as a backlinking tool, I never considered creating one that was geared towards making sales until I discovered that you could use your own affiliate links AND that they even have tools that help you do that!

I actually thought they frowned on affiliate links in lenses because they wanted you to use the Squidoo links but that isn’t the case at all.  I stumbled across this page that has a bunch of tools for making ads with YOUR Amazon affiliate link in them and now I’m looking at Squidoo in a whole different light!

Once I saw that page, I got to thinking “Hmmm…. this could be an easy, quick and free way to test out new niches/keywords”!  I’m always coming across cool products I want to promote or keywords I want to try but I don’t always want to go through the trouble or expense of registering a domain and making a whole new website on them and for this Squidoo is perfect!

I’ve always loved how Squidoo makes it easy to add videos, pictures and other modules to a lens and you can build a nice looking lens in an hour or two so it’s pretty easy to get something up on the web that you can make money from right away.

Personally, I would focus on building each lens around one type of product.  For example, lets say you wanted to promote Desktop Aquariums.  What I would do is find 3 or 4 models of desk aquariums over on Amazon that I wanted to promote. Try to find some that have customer reviews and a high star rating.  Then do the usual keyword research to find some good keywords to focus your lens on.

Write a couple of paragraphs for the intro text module and include a photo of a desktop aquarium.  Use your main keyword in there and, of course, name your lens with your main keyword.  Add all your secondary keywords as tags and be sure to turn on the table of contents.

Then, below that make a text module for each of the products you want to promote.  In the case of the example here, it would be for each desk aquarium model.

In each text module, include a picture of the product (use the amazon code to get the picture with your affiliate link)  Write a description of the product and talk about the benefits as well as how high it is rated and what customers liked most about the product (to do this you need to read the customer reviews, of course).  Then at the bottom, include a buy button and/or text link that says something like “CLICK HERE to find out more about the xxx product and see customer reviews”.  You can get buy button graphics that Amazon allows you to use at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t6/a9

After these modules, add in some youtube modules with videos of your product (try to pick ones that aren’t sales pitches for someone’s website) and more text widgets with more unique content based on some of the other keywords you found in your research.  I like to add in some text widgets with helpful information on the product.  Sometimes I put in an ebay module and I always add a guest book.

The key is to focus on making your lens a good “authority” on the topic and not just be about selling something.  Gain the trust with authority content and the selling will follow!

Of course, once you publish your lens, you will need to do some backlinking in order to get it indexed and ranked.  I suspect they will rank more quickly and higher than a new blog due to the klout of the main domain – I’m experimenting on that right now but it’s too early to report any results (I will edit this later to add them in when I have them – Edit:  Got up the morning after making the lens and it is #43 for its main keyword … will now point some more backlinks to it!).

There is one caveat here and that is the same caution that I would give when using any property that isn’t on one of your own domains and that is that you do run a slight risk of it being taken down.  Most anything has this risk though so if you make quality lenses and aren’t spammy then you will probably be ok.  There are some topics that Squidoo hates so you might want to check out their http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont content policy to make sure you are not violating their policies.

Using Squidoo like this can be a great, inexpensive way to add another income stream and to test out new niches.  If you hit on some that do really well, then you can consider building out a full site on them and you can use your  lens as an authority backlink to that site which should give it a good boost to start off with!

You can also sell your lenses, so flipping Squidoo lenses could be another added income stream!

I think these lenses can be a great passive income stream that you can “set and forget” because a lot of my older lenses still get lots of traffic even though I don’t do a thing to them.

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Learn How To Leverage Your Backlinks

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One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was not leveraging my content to the fullest.  I would write an article and submit it to a couple of article directories, then write another article etc…

But this can get old pretty fast and, even if you love writing like I do, having to pump out article after article can seem like a chore.

Than I discovered that there was a “trick” that the big article marketers were using – they were leveraging their content by repurposing it and using it over and over again!  So instead of getting 1 back link for their efforts they were getting 10 or 20 times that!

Now, it took me a long time to learn all the ins and outs of doing this, but you won’t have to suffer like I did because renowned SEO hotshot Andy Fletcher has come out with a report that shows you exactly what to do in a simple step by step guide.

It doesn’t just tell you how to build more backlinks… he lays out a method for making those backlinks work harder.

So you’ve not only got more backlinks working for you, they’re also driving LOADS more traffic.
For instance, one thing he talks about is the 4 rules of creating controversy, which is a good way of getting traffic to your blog…

(I hope he is not mad when he finds out that I spilled this for free, but hey…)

Have an opinion (reading neutral stuff is boring… but people like to read stuff they agree with and feel compelled to if they don’t!)Don’t go overboard (admittedly, this ones fairly obvious – be too offensive, people don’t come back.  Andy’s got one neat example of someone who went a *bit* too far…)Be outrageous (the trick is to be provocative without crossing the line)Inspire passion (there’s a cool case study about a guy Andy works with, and how you could get him so riled up he would be forced to go look at your blog)

Of course, it covers a lot more than just that… it’s a whole system to make your content work harder at bringing you backlinks and traffic.

Not just how to syndicate, but WHAT to syndicate.  And he doesnt just “tell” you what to do, he provides you with links to the websites and tools that help you do it – and most of them are free!

Of course, I thought I already knew most of this stuff, but even an old hand like me learned a few things from the report and the resources to get the job done are priceless!

If you want to get more mileage from your articles then I highly recommend you pick this up:

http://www.websitepromotionblueprint.com/backlinkleverage.php

 Here’s some of the other stuff you will find inside:

What to syndicate to pull in the maximum amount of traffic into your blog (and I’ll give you a clue – if you’re syndicating the whole article, you’re missing a trick)How you can get the most out of your content, and how some companies are already using this trick on youThe five types of syndication that’ll let you tap into vast wells of trafficHow the world’s top copywriters compel their prospects to take action, and how you can do the same thing in your blog posts

Not only that, Andy’s found free software you can use for pretty much the whole process, and he shows you where to find it and how to use it, step by step.

If you are serious about making money online and getting free traffic, then this is one of the books you should read

Even if you don’t use all the leverage and syndication tips, the chapter on The “Article 1-2-3” method is worth more than the price of the report.  This is a method you should all be using for your articles because it will increase your click through rates like crazy!

http://www.websitepromotionblueprint.com/backlinkleverage.php

 BTW – that’s my affiliate link above and I sure do appreciate you using it!

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How To Survive The Google Panda Updates

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Earlier this year, Google unleashed an algorithm update aimed at reducing low quality, scraped and spammy sites from the top search engine rankings.   This update, is commonly called the Panda update (or sometimes the Farmer update) after the engineer who fathered it, Navneet Panda.

Panda is probably one of the biggest algorithm changes in recent years and has affected a lot of sites and will continue to affect them as new updates are rolled out. There have been 8 updates in 2011 and more to come in 2012 as Google tweaks the algo based on the search results.

This has been particularly brutal for article directories (Ezinearticles lost 90% of it’s traffic the day Panda was released) and affiliate sites that offer little value other than an affiliate link.

Perhaps some of your sites were hit?  I know some of mine were.

How Panda Works

Panda is a machine-learning algorithm that takes data based on human reviewers about which websites they though were high quality and which they thought were low quality.  The guidelines these reviewers went by were all outlined in a 125 page guide and included things like whether the user would trust the site with credit card information, whether it was easy to use and whether the information was useful.

Websites are sorted into 2 categories – those that were useful and those that were not.  The algorithm then goes about identifying certain common elements or footprints on each type of site and uses that data to apply to other sites or pages in the index to determine if they are good quality or bad and adjusts rankings accordingly.

Needless to say, if your site has some of the elements that the “bad” sites have then you will probably see a drop in rankings if you haven’t already.

No algorithm is perfect and some very high quality sites got hit with this update and some spammy ones got boosted up to the top of the serps.  That’s why there have been so many updates as Google keeps honing the algorithm to get it to more accurately categorize these results.  So, if your site is spammy and it hasn’t been hit, it is probably just a matter of time

This post on Seomoz, gives a great description of Panda and how it affects SEO.

Panda Is About High Quality User Experience

Let’s face it, Google has always been about providing searchers with the best sites possible for their search query.  The thing is that where they used to rely mostly on the links pointing to your site, and on page SEO metrics these are pretty easy to game which is why the SERPs have gotten so spammy.

Now they are turning to other methods, like the Panda algorithm, searchers’ behavior and social signals that are not so easy to game.

If you are building websites, it’s time to step up your game.

Here’s some other things that the latest algorithm changes are taking into consideration when ranking sites:

Is the site a thin affiliate site?  This means a site that exists solely to make money via affiliate sales and can be identified by the actual checkout being on a different domain with different whois registrants, images that originate from another domain and lack of original content.  Google doesn’t like thin affiliate sites.

Does the site have a high bounce rate?  Obviously if people click away as soon as they get to your site, it does not provide a good user experience.

Does the visitor read a lot of pages on the site?  One can make an assumption that if the visitor sticks around reading your articles then it is a useful and high quality site.

Number of times the site has been blocked.  If people keep using Google tools to block our site then, obviously, it can’t be good quality.

Ratio of ads to content.  If the site is loaded with lots of ads and little content, then this could be a signal of a low quality site that exists purely to make money and not to add value.

Length of articles.  There is some indication that if all your articles are short 350 word posts this could hurt the site.  I’m not sure about this one myself.

Quality of backlinks.  If your site has all spammy profile links pointing to it and nothing else this can harm your site.  A diverse linking pattern is best.

Anchor text.  If you are getting natural links from people that love your content, they probably won’t be all using the same anchor text.  I’ve heard a couple of people on forums say that they did get a penalty when the anchor text pointing to their site used a high percentage of the same phrase (their target keyword phrase that they were trying to rank for).  Better to diversify your anchor text and use many phrases.

Of course, there are tons of different metrics that they measure but these are some of the things you should be thinking about when building and linking to websites.  Now, I don’t think any one of the metrics will necessarily get you a penalty but if your site matches a bunch of them then the odds are higher you will get tagged.

I’ve also heard that when you make it to the top 10 for your keyword, this might trigger a manual review!  I’ve seen posts on more than one forum where the person finally got into the top 10 and then BAM, their site lost its ranking.  There is one indication that you have suffered a penalty from a manual review and you will see that inside your Google webmaster tools account – it will say your site was penalized due to not “meeting their quality standards”  If this happens to you, improve the quality of your site and ask for a re-review.

If you don’t think manual reviews are real, then read this post by Pot Pie Girl, where she cites a forum post where the poster claims to have worked for Google and that they do actively review sites that have peeked into the top 10 (it’s also a great post to learn more about algorithm changes and Google Panda).

What You Can Do To Survive Panda

OK, so now that we know that Google is favoring sites that provide a good user experience, surviving Panda should be easy – just give Google what it wants!

Easier said than done?  For sure, you will have to pay more attention to your sites, get better content and make sure to eliminate spam and a lot of your duplicate content.

Here’s some things you can do to make sure your sites get some Panda love:

Site Speed & Navigation – Make sure your site loads fast and is easy to navigate.  You can check the speed with Google analytics.  If your site is slow, it could be some of the plugins you are using so experiment with disabling them one at a time to see if it speeds things up.  I recently did that with this site as some pages were taking almost 20 seconds to load and I had a lot of plugins I wasn’t really using and it is a lot faster now – maybe you noticed?

Upgrade Your Low Quality Pages – According to a recent experiment over at Search Engine Watch, low quality pages on a site can bring the whole site down in the rankings – even the high quality pages!  The test seemed to indicate that the entire site would need more low quality pages then high quality so if your site is mostly high quality then don’t panic.  But if you have a lot of low quality ones (i.e scraped pages from YouTube, Amazon, etc. duplicate content found elsewhere, pages with little content or value) then you might consider improving the quality or giving them the no-index tag so they don’t drag down your site.

Focus on High Quality Backlinks – This same experiment mentioned above also indicated that sites with all low quality backlinks (i.e only profile links or only directory links or only blog commenting) could get penalized.  I mean, let’s face it if you only have one type of backlink it’s a sure bet you are creating those links yourself for the purpose of trying to rank high.  So, your best bet is to focus on high quality links – the best are in-context links that you get from related pages on related sites.  So, guest blogging and content syndication are ideal for these types of links.  ALSO, if you create great content, people will naturally link to you which will also provide you with  high quality links.

Forget about sending blasts of profile links or buying 10,000 blog comments to your money site.  If you must use these types of links, then send them to a buffer site (either a web2.0 site or another of your web properties that you use only for linking).

Note:  Not so long ago, I would have argued with you until my face was blue about low quality links affecting your site because if they did, then you could easily blast a bunch at your competitor so that he would lose his ranking.  But, then someone pointed out to me that it’s not so much the low quality links – its if you have only low quality links.  So, it stands to reason that if your competitor is a high quality site, they have a lot of high quality links and your spammy link blast won’t affect them at all. On the other hand, if they are a spammy site with only a spammy link profile they deserve to be affected so it’s a win-win.  Makes sense, right?

Vary Your Anchor Text – I mentioned above that using the same anchor text over and over with little variation can cause your site problems so when you are getting backlinks on your own, be sure you vary it widely.  Use 5 or 10 different keywords and alternate between them.

Create Content That People Want To Share – There’s a big misconception out there that unique content = quality content and that isn’t always the case.  Good quality content is stuff that people want to read and share.  It’s content that makes them think, or makes them laugh or even makes them cry.  When you have it on your site, people come back time and time again to read more of it.  They bookmark it, digg it, tweet it and link to it.  These are the best kinds of links you can get, and you don’t have to do a thing to get them except come up with the quality content in the first place.

Social Signals – Oh, did I forget to mention these?  I’m not sure if this is part of Panda or just something else Google is doing, but expect social signals like your stuff being tweeted, G+‘d and linked to on Facebook to be more important in the future. Again, if you write quality content, this will help but you should also create accounts on the social sites for your website (or you) and become active on those sites to help get your links out there.

Have Content That Is Unique And Focused To Your Site – Article directories which have mainly content found on other sites were the first to be hit by Panda.  Ezinearticles lost 90% of their traffic overnight.  Needless to say, you want to be sure you have unique content on your site and that it is focused to your niche (article directories also have a variety of topics).

Go Easy On The Ads – A site that has more ad space than it does content space is not deemed to be high quality, so take a good look at your site design and if it’s loaded with banners and advertising you might want to get rid of some of them.

Adhere To Google’s TOS – Make sure your site adheres to the Google webmaster guidelines.

No matter how hard you work at making your site a quality site, there will always be sites that are unfairly hit by algorithm updates so a good strategy going forward is to not depend on Google so much for traffic.  Syndicating articles to high traffic blogs in your niche, becoming known on social sites and participating in niche forums is a great way to get targeted traffic and not depend so much on search engines at the same time.  Plus all those activities can also improve your rankings so it’s a smart move either way!

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Twitter Really Does Work! Here’s My Results

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I have been delving into how effective Twitter is for online websites for the past month or so.  I’ve learned a lot about using it to build relationships and post content, but to tell you the truth, I was pretty skeptical at first about whether it was worth the effort or not.

Turns out that Twitter really can help you grow your business and I have proof!

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new twitter account for a hobby site in the pet niche that I have.  I tweeted a few informational tweets, linked to some of my articles and then I searched twitter for other Tweeters in the niche.  I found a few and followed them and some of their followers.

A few hours later, I had a few people follow me back, but here’s the really cool part – one of the people I had followed has a forum in the niche and he grabbed one of my articles and posted it on the forum with a link back to my site!  Of course he tweeted me to let me know and also commented on my blog.

How cool is that?  Instant article syndication on a related site!  I don’t know if you have tried to find niche related sites to syndicate your articles to but it can be a tedious and boring task, so I was amazed that I got one syndicated all because of a couple of 140 character tweets!

Another of my Twitter accounts is the one associated with my IM business (@leedobbins).  I’ve had that one for a while but I wasn’t really active on Twitter other than to blast out tweets about the latest thing I had for sale.

When I started researching Twitter, I decided to become more active and really try to connect with people and get good followers.  I really did all the things I talk about in my Twitter Book'>Twitter Book.  I also took advantage of automation tools to get followers like I talk about in this post.

I started to monitor my Twitter account a couple times a day – posting good stuff, retweeting interesting posts and trying to reply to people (at first this was actually kind of scary, it felt weird to reply to someone that I didn’t know!).  I used Hootsuite to manage my account and make it all easier just like I show in this video.

At first, I didn’t get much “action”  and I have to admit that after a few weeks I did kind of slack off and only posted sporadically and maybe not even every day.

But then, a funny thing happened, I noticed that people started to retweet my stuff (thanks guys, I know some of those retweets were from you!!)  AND people were starting to mention me.  Now, of course, this is kind of an ego boost, but I can see where this can eventually also boost my bottom line.  Enough people mentioning and retweeting me means more followers and more followers could eventually lead to more sales.

So, the bottom line is that Twitter is working for me and it can work for you too but you will have to give it some time (My niche site paid off right away but my other one took a good month before action started to kick in).

You have to make a commitment to use it daily though, it’s not something that you can totally automate I don’t think because you need to keep the human element in there to gain interest and a following but you can make the whole thing quicker and easier with tools.

Also, you need to develop what I call a “Twitter mindset” and that is to always be looking for good stuff to tweet.  When you are surfing around the web, if you find something that would be of interest to your followers tweet the link!  A lot of sites now have social sharing buttons on their posts that make it easy peasy, all you do is click and press “Tweet” so there really is no reason to not be tweeting this stuff.

It only makes sense that the Search Engines are going to depend more and more on these types of social signals in their ranking algorithms so it would be smart to start incorporating Twitter into your website promotion plan as soon as you can.  Not only that, but it will help lessen your dependence on the search engines because you will actually be getting traffic from twitter (my stats show 12 visits from twitter this month – not earth shattering but its early days yet!).

View the original article here

Using Pinterest For Fun And Profit

In my blog post last week about building authority sites, I mentioned Pinterest as a cool new social networking site and this week I too some time to take a better look at it.  It really is cool!

I made you a couple of videos that show you around the inside and how to make boards and pin stuff and I also have this very cool report for only $7 that shows you how to best use it to make money and gives you the top 10 niches on pinterest.  CLICK HERE to get the report.

Now, if you think that Pinterest is just some fly by night thing that won’t take off or that it is too small for your attention, go checkout the Google keyword tool and you will see that over 2 million people are searching for it every month!

And I can see why because after paying around with Pinterest, I’ve concluded that it could be one of the most fun ways to get traffic and make money ever.

Here’s a video that shows you a little bit about Pinterest :

And here’s one that shows you how to make boards and pin stuff:

Since I made this video about an hour ago, I’ve had 2 likes and 2 repins already!

The report below has some great ideas on how to make money with Pinterest (not spammy stuff, all white hat) and how it fits perfectly with using PLR:

CLICK HERE TO GET THE REPORT For $7

View the original article here

Are You Reeling From The Pain Of The Latest Google Slap?

If you’ve noticed a drop in traffic and income over the last couple of days, you could be a victim of the latest google slap!  This one looks at the number of ads you have above the fold, and if you have too many, you get slapped.

Sadly, if you follow the advice of some of the guru’s out there you might have sites with “above the fold” real estate that has more flashing banners and blinking lights than a christmas tree.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here,  what do you do when you land on a page that is all ads and no content above the fold?  You click away, right?  That’s because sites like that don’t provide good visitor value or a good visitor experience and you know that as soon as you land on one.  Your visitors know that too.

Google wants to rank sites that provide a good user experience and you must make sure your site fits the bill.

How do you do that?

You need to stop thinking “How can I make the most amount of money from my website?” and start thinking “How can I provide the most visitor value?”.  If you do this the money will follow.

This isn’t 2007 anymore and you can’t build out crappy sites and expect to gain and maintain rankings in the search engines.  That boat sailed a while back.  So if you want to make money from organic search engine traffic, you need to be building out authority sites.

Google plans on making up to 500 changes to it’s algorithm in 2012 and the facts are undeniable:

They’ve been slapping thin affiliate sites and made for Adsense/Amazon sites right and left.They strongly favor authority type sites in the rankings (search for any medical term and who comes up?  WebMD, right?  Do you see any on page SEO on that site? Don’t you wonder why they always rank so high with no on page SEO?)If you aren’t building an authority site, you’ll be stuck in the rut of chasing your rankings and working harder and harder for less money.

Why not just give Google what it wants?

It’s actually easier in some ways to focus on a handful of authority sites than to try to manage hundreds of micro niche sites.  One big reason is that you can leverage your link building efforts much better if you only had a couple of sites.  Imagine if all those links that you have been pointing at all those micro niche sites suddenly all pointed to one big authority site.  Do you think that would skyrocket your rankings?

And when it comes to social media, you can’t possibly manage 100 different twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages unless you have an army of outsourcers behind you.  What ends up happening is you just send out crappy tweets and fan page updates and don’t get any real followers because in order to get followers that turn into customers you need to actively engage them and communicate with them.

So, how do you build an authority site?

Why not learn from someone who has been building them himself since the late 1990's?  I happen to know just such a person, Dennis Gaskill and he has a great product on building an authority site!  Here’s my shameless affiliate link:

http://www.jvzoo.com/c/2953/670

Of course, I get a commission if you buy it but that’s not why I am recommending it here.   I’m recommending it because it is good – filled with over 70 pages of everything you need to know about authority sites by someone who has actually built them (BTW, did I mention that Dennis’s sites have never suffered from any of the Google slaps?  Wouldn’t that be nice if you could build a site that was free from google slap worries?)   He’ll show you how!

Dennis was way ahead of the game. What he’s been doing for years is where a large part of Internet marketing is heading. Especially for those of us who are just plain tired of chasing one hustle after another.

Check out his book and start to build a business that will gain momentum and grow over time:

Please let me know what you think below!  Do you have an authority site already?  Do you have a bunch of micro niche sites that have been affected by all these Google changes?

View the original article here

Authority Project Update – Unrealistic Goals

Things on my authority project are progressing nicely but a little slower than I would’ve hoped. Like most projects it’s turning out that it’s taking a lot longer to get things done and maybe my goals weren’t really that realistic. But I’m still pretty happy with the way the project is going.

I spent most of the week getting another book in the series listed on the Kindle. I now have 3 books in that healthy food series and between the 3  I’m averaging about 10 sales a day so that’s about 20 bucks a day which I’m pretty happy with.  Those sales are pretty much all coming from just being listed in Amazon and some of the techniques I am learning in a course I am taking on Kindle publishing.

Because I spent a lot of time working on that book plus some other projects I have on my plate,  I didn’t get as many blog posts up as I had thought I would. In fact I actually only got one blog post out and it was just a quickie post not an authority type. I also didn’t get any articles written for E-zinearticles or guest posting on other blogs. That being said, I am getting a trickle of traffic from organic search as well as other blogs,  E-zinearticles and pinterest. Only about 10 visitors a day but thats still pretty good considering I only have 5 blog posts and minimal promotion.

I am tracking hits to my books from the blog and am getting a lot of clicks to the books but no sales from actual blog yet. I  also have links inside each book to the others in the series and I am making sales from those links so writing a series of books  instead of just one book or unrelated books pays off!

I decided that I really need to get working on the freebie report and get a list started because, as we all know, the money is in the list. I’ve been kind of putting it off because the  free report is going have a lot of recipes in it and those are incredibly tedious and time-consuming ( don’t listen to all those WSO’s does that tell you recipe books are the easy way to make money on the Kindle – they one of the hardest types of books to write and if you don’t do it the right way, your sales will be killed with bad reviews)

Even though I didn’t get to work on my blog very much, I did spend quite a bit of time checking out pinterest (its addicting) and I added some pins to my healthy food boards which is resulting in a little traffic to my blog.  I made a couple of videos on how to use pinterest and have some ideas on how you can make money with it -  you can read that post here.

I only made a few basic tweets and fb posts- gotta work on getting that down to a system and doing some automation with it today so hopefully by next week I will be more organized in my social “presence”.

I also have another authority project going in the dog niche that I’ve been working on also so, of course, that takes away some of the time I would spend on the healthy foods project but I will have to continue to balance both of them since I don’t want to put all my eggs in one authority “basket”. I might outsource some of the writing even though I really feel like I should be writing it all myself, however there are only so many hours in the day and lots to get done.

Of course, I still have my PLR site that I need to tend to and that does generate a lot of customer support questions so it takes up a lot of my time. But that’s where I make most of my money -  that’s my “ job”  so if you have a full-time job and your wondering how you can fit in time to write a book, make a website and create a social presence I can assure you it can be done because I also have a full-time job even though it’s working for myself online,  It takes up as much time as a regular paid job would and since it is how I pay all my bills, I can’t neglect it.

Okay, well that’s just a quickie update on how I’m doing so far on the projects. I think it’s doing good but maybe a little bit slower than I thought (hoped) it would but I tend to overestimate the amount of work I can get done in a week and I have to really learn to be more realistic about my goals. I hope your week was productive and you made forward progress towards your goals too!

View the original article here

Google Slaps SEO – Will Your Site Get Deindexed Next?

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Those of you who have been following me, know that I’ve been talking quite a bit about creating an authority presence and how the good old days of old time SEO are numbered. Well, apparently my predictions have come true in a big way just this past week.

It turns out that Google has really turned up the dials on their algorithm that detect if your linking patterns are trying to game the system. This is having a huge impact on a lot of webmasters and some of them have even been getting their websites de-indexed because of using the types of linking techniques that Google frowns on (you know the ones I mean – forum profiles, blog comment spam, private blog networks, spammy stuff that software does etc..).

While I do miss being able to throw up a bunch of micro niche sites and get them ranked simply by submitting articles to a blog network, I do think this is a change for the positive and I think it can actually help a lot of you out especially those of you who are committed to putting up really good content. I also think this can be a boon for article writers who write thought-provoking and interesting articles because this type of content is going to be in big demand and you’re going to be able to charge a lot more for your services in the future.

The future is all about filling your website with excellent content that people want to link to – Google is on top of this now and trying to game the system by creating your own back links is a dying method for getting your site ranked.

Google Steps Up “Unnatural Link Detection”

According to Matt Cutts, the head of Web spam over at Google, Google is releasing an algorithm that specifically targets sites that are overdoing their SEO .

What does that mean?

Nobody really knows for sure what that means because google keeps the specifics of their algorithms as a closely guarded secret, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that if all of your links are coming from places that Google knows you can manipulate such as link farms, private blog networks, Web 2.0 sites, blog comments and profile links then your site could be in the crosshairs.

In fact, they may already be implementing this change because reports around the web are that more and more web masters are waking up to this disturbing message in their Google Webmaster tools dashboard:

Notice of Detected Unnatural Links.

What this means is that Google didn’t like something about your linking profile and your site has gotten some sort of penalty. While it’s nice of them to tell you this, it’s pretty much impossible for you to remove these links that they find offending (I’m not even sure if they tell you which links they are because I haven’t gotten one of these notices … yet) so you are pretty much stuck with the penalty.

The thing is that a lot of the web masters getting this penalty, don’t really over do it with the spammy linking – sure, most of them that I have seen to admit to using a private blog network or buying cheap back links but they also have “good quality” links too. Hopefully Google will fine tune this algorithm as time goes on and not penalize web masters for a few transgressions if they are also making an honest effort to put out good content and get editorial links.

No one really knows what the message actually means either – it could really mean a lot of things – It could be link velocity (the rate at which you get links and whether that remains steady or not), anchor text (high percentage of the same keyword in anchor text), maybe lots of links from link farm type sites etc…

Private Blog Networks Getting Deindexed

Matt Cutts also says Google is aggressively targeting private blog networks.
And this is proven to by the de-indexing of some of the private blog networks including Build My Rank.

One of the supersecret blog networks that I was using homepage links to boost one of my sites was “discovered” by Google earlier this year and all their sites were reindexed too.

To make matters even more painful, some of the people whose sites were using these networks had their money sites de-indexed as well.

So at the very least, all the work and money you’ve put into getting these back links to your site will be wiped out when the private blog network gets de-indexed but if you are really unlucky YOUR blog might become the de-indexed as well.

But Wait! You Can Get Slapped Even If You Play By The Rules

Okay, so now you’re probably thinking if you write great content and only get links from reputable authority sites then your site should be safe, right?

Sadly, this may not be the case because it seems that your competitor may be able to point spamming links at your site and then report you for these linked practices, thus getting your site penalized.

In fact, Matt Cutts is asking people to report spamming links right here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/

Could your competitors be reporting you?

There also seems to be a bunch of other unfair ways that you can get penalized even if you’re playing by the rules and doing totally white hat stuff. Chris Rempel wrote a great blog post about this.

In that post he talks about how new blogs have a hard time ranking the content because their domain doesn’t have any authority yet. It’s kind of like a chicken and egg thing, you can write the best content out there but if you don’t have any authority you are not going to rank and no one will see your content so you can’t get the natural links that Google wants. He also talks a lot about how white hat link building is very difficult for new site and expounds on how your competitors can hurt your website.

What You Need To Do To Protect Yourself

There are some things you can do that insulate yourself. Of course one of these is to write excellent content don’t try to fill up your blog with a bunch of crappy articles because more is not better. It’s better to have one really outstanding article then 10 crappy ones. You want people to come to your blog and love your content so much that they link to it, tell their friends to read it and share it on social media sites – this is what Google is looking for.

But, like I said earlier, even if you do write great content you still may not get any traction in the search engines and your competitors still may be able to hurt you so probably one of the best things you can do to insulate yourself against this is to not depend on Google for traffic. The truth is that there’s a ton of ways to get traffic and some of them will be even better targeted then what you would get from the search engines.

One of the best ways to get traffic is to try to get your articles syndicated on some of the high-traffic blogs in your niche. This requires two things, writing a killer article and communicating with other blog masters. Both of those can be hard work, but the good news is that lazy web masters won’t want to do the work so this is where you can really stand out!

You can make getting syndicated a little bit easier by joining the directory of e-zines and also my blog guest – both places can help you find blogs that are willing to syndicate articles.

The other thing you can do is what a lot of people call “ passive syndication” and that is to submit your article to article directories like e-zine articles because this is a place where other webmasters go to find articles to publish on their sites. So by submitting your article there a webmaster of a highly trafficked site may stumble across it and syndicated on their site, thus gaining you traffic from the visitors. This won’t get you the quick results that finding high traffic blogs on your own will though, and it could end up that you get no results from this at all.

Having a good social media presence is also another way to get traffic but, of course this takes a lot of work to build up. You can’t build loyal followers with spammy tweets and Facebook posts – you have to put the work into post quality first and wait for your followers to build up.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that joining private blog networks and using spammy blog techniques is dying and you shouldn’t be using these techniques at all anymore.

It seems the days are finally coming where excellent content will be rewarded so you can feel free to build out a valuable blog that actually helps people and keep your fingers crossed that this good and valuable content is going to eventually be rewarded with high search engine rankings.

But don’t depend too much on those rankings, build yourself a following of people by submitting your article to be syndicated on high-traffic sites and building up a social network on social media sites.

Of course, you want to be building a list from these efforts because this list will consist of people who want to hear what you have to say and who you will be able to communicate with any time you want. That way you can get repeat traffic, let people get to know you and hopefully build the trust that takes to make money online.

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