Today I wanted to let you know about the best password manager I have come across online. I only found it a few weeks ago, and I love it already.

When you get into internet or affiliate marketing, you will soon notice that you will very likely start signing up for many, many sites and services. Be it Affiliate programs, forums, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, article sites, squidoo, youtube  – you name it, you will sign up for it and need a user name and password.

Many people start out with writing their user names and passwords on pieces of paper (like me), or start writing up a notepad on the computer and just create one long (and usually disorderly) list of secret names and numbers. It can be hard to find what you need on that sometimes!

What an Internet Marketer really needs is a great password manager. One that remembers every single user name and password for you, no sweat. And Last Pass is exactly that (and no, this is not an affiliate link! )

Last Pass is literally the last password you will ever need! You will get one master password, and the program will remember all of  your user names and passwords for you, super easy. If you have a look at their home page, there are plenty of testimonials on there from enthusiastic users, and also some really good reviews from sites like PCMag.com, ZDNet Microsoft Report and PC World.

Now, I am not good at explaining any technical things or how exactly it works, but it does, and it’s brilliant! Oh – and did I mention that it’s free, too? I would suggest for you to just head over to their website, have a bit of a snoop around, and check it out!

Seriously, as Internet Marketer this is something you really need, and Last Pass is one of the best password managers you can get!

Kontera Payment

A little while ago I had an email in my account from a service I had forgotten about for a long time. It was Kontera, my in-text advertising program I had signed up with in January 2009. They were letting me know that they had paid me $107.29 in USD for the advertising on my sites http://www.mybeachdecor.com and http://www.healthydietweightloss.com. WOW! Happy Day!

Then I looked back to see for what time frame this payment really was. Yep, you guessed it, it was for the time from when I signed up (January 2009) to July 2010. That makes it 1 1/2 years, or 18 months. Spread the payment out over 18 months and it means I earned not quite $6 per month with Kontera. Whoopidoo!

Well, to be honest, whilst it seems very disappointing on first glance, it is still money I earned for doing absolutely nothing extra, just by installing Kontera In-Text Advertising on my blog. So as “bad” as the payout seems, I think it’s worth adding some In-Text Advertising to monetize your blog.

What exactly is in-text advertising? Well, have you ever seen a website where some of the words are underlined, or maybe dotted, highlighted in blue, and when you hover over them you get a little window pop up with some related information? (Have a look at my site about Lighthouse Home Decor you can see it there).

What you will have to consider is whether the extra advertising on your blog will actually turn people off. If you have a very loyal readers base or customer base, it might actually annoy them if there are too many links that point them away from your site.

There are quite a few different companies out there that offer this service. Opinions on these services differ quite a lot. Some Affiliate Marketers don’t seem to like Kontera, but swear by InfoLinks, – they seem to be paying out at a better rate. There are some others, but I have not investigated them yet.

What I have decided to do is to stop Kontera for now and sign up with Infolinks. I want to see for myself whether there is a big difference in the payout and service. I remember, what I don’t like about Kontera is that you can never look back more than 6 months for your earnings. Which makes it a bit difficult if it takes you more than 6 months to earn up to your payout threshold. So after about 6 months, whenever I wanted to know the total earned in my account, I had to email Kontera and request a figure. Which was a real pain in the butt.

Both companies have a payment threshold of $50 and pay straight into your paypal account.

So, if you are thinking of monetizing your blog or site, have a think about In-Text Advertising.

I would like to know also whether any of you have experience with this, and how your success rate is/was. Which company do you prefer? Do you know of others that might be better? Let me know!

Your WordPress Video Tutorials

I am very excited today because I have just come across something that quite blew me away, it is so fantastic! It is called WordPress Classroom 2.o. I absolutely wanted to see what it is all about, because I love WordPress and building blogs and websites with it, I think it’s the coolest blogging (and website) platform out there. So I signed up and got hooked!

I remember what a hard time I had when I wanted to learn the “How to” of WordPress, and all the associated options with it. There is a lot to learn, and it is just so much easier if you have a good guide that shows you how to do it. And that’s exactly what WordPress Classroom 2.o does. A pretty well known guy (in the Internet Marketing world, anyway named Matthew Wolfe created it, and the best part is it is all VIDEOS!!! – I personally learn a lot better if I can follow a video rather than just writing! His WordPress Classroom 2.o is packed with clever videos doing the “show all” and “tell all” of WordPress. You will really be a pro after going through all his stuff!

Matthew is just such a nice guy, because he created these really cool instructional videos that teach you how to set up your own blogging business and now he is giving them away for free!! There are something like 15 videos that walk you through the whole thing step by step.

I only had to look at 2 of his free videos and already learned something really cool I had no idea about – it’s about hiding affiliate links (if you click on that, you will get to my “old” post about hiding affiliate links; that’s the hard way of doing it). Matthew has shown me something so simple in his tutorials, it’s crazy. No more stuffing around with .php files and FTP! — I won’t tell you what it is, that would somewhat spoil it for you .

If you have followed me for a while, you should know that I never recommend anything if I am not convinced it’s really good. After all, I have been burnt so many times, and I don’t want anybody else to go through what I did.

So, trust me,  if you really are serious about making money with WordPress blogs and websites, then head over to WordPress Classroom 2.0 and grab the free videos before Matthew decides to pull them down!

Now, when I say it is my biggest earner, that doesn’t mean much, really. I have been going along at an extremely slow pace over the past 2 years, if I can spend 1/2 hour a day on my Internet Marketing it’s already a lot (and that includes learning about new stuff!). So my site on Beach Decor still earns me around $150/month and has been doing so for the past year or so. But – earnings haven’t gone up. Unfortunately. Even though I have been doing a little bit of work on the site occasionally. Hm. Why?

Well, the thing is this: Pretty much all the time when I did my link building for the site, I concentrated on building backlinks to my home page. Every directory submission, every link exchange, most comments I left, I had them all pointing to my home page. Which is ok – I have been on page 1 of Google’s SERP’s for quite a while for my main keyword “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and am getting really steady traffic from it.

But at the same time I have forgotten about the other pages on my website, the pages that have also been built around specific keywords to be able to achieve good Google rankings in the SERP’s (what else do we do keyword research for???). So, here I have a website with a few pages centered around keywords that could potentially bring in a lot of traffic, but I have completely neglected building backlinks to those pages.

Because that is what a good Internet Marketer should do who takes care of his niche site: Build backlinks to all of his pages to get the most out of potential traffic.

I want to show you something; it is a few screenshots I have taken from my SEOQuake Toolbar to show you what kind of difference in links built back to my sites pages there is:

Backlinks To Home Page

Backlinks To Page "Tropical Home Decor"

Backlinks To Page "Lighthouse Home Decor"

(All these screen shots have been taken with the software “Jing” which I absolutely love it’s so easy to handle!)

As you can see, my home page has by far the most backlinks and thus ranks the best out of all my pages. Some of my pages have only 2 or 4 backlinks pointing directly to them, one or two might even have none! So it is no wonder that they do not rank for the keywords that I had originally designed them for…

So what I have decided to do now is to try and get the other pages of my site that is already doing ok to rank better by starting to build backlinks to them. Instead of building all the links to my home page, I will concentrate of getting backlinks to my internal pages, if possible with the anchor text being the actual keyword. This should, over time, increase the visibility of those pages in the SERP’s and start to bring in some extra search engine traffic through these keywords.

The reason for the earnings of my site not increasing in revenue is simply because there is only a certain number of people searching for “Beach Decor” or “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and I am getting all the traffic I can already from it. But I am not getting any traffic for my other keywords yet as they are not high up in the SERP’s yet, and that is due to the fact that I have very much neglected link building to those pages.

Building backlinks is a tedious process, especially if you do it yourself. But as boring it is, it is a vital – if not the most important – task if you want your websites to be successful and visible on the Internet. The more backlinks a site (or page ) has, the more value Google will put on it, generally, and the better it will rank.

So, even if it is one of the least exciting processes in the adventure of earning money online, I urge you not to forget your link building, especially also to any internal pages you might have within your website or blog, to reach it’s full potential.

Naturally curious, I had to check out the site, of course! And I am a bit of a sucker for plugins, especially free ones…

After downloading and activating the plugin (you will get video instructions on how to do this, if you should not know), I have to say that I am really impressed with the features! I think Mark Dulisse has done a great job with this plugin. It will make your SEO so much easier. I especially like the list of suggested plugins (for SEO purposes) you get within your wp-admin after installing the plugin (told you, – I’m a plugin-sucker!). I was very surprised that out of a list of 13 suggested plugins for SEO improvement I had only 2 installed!!!

I am not going into what this plugin will do for you – you can read all about it on the SEO Power website -, but I will attach a few screenshots from within my blog so  you can see what it will look like.

My suggestion is for you to get the plugin – you will not regret it. I can’t tell you any results yet – I had it only installed for a day so far, I need to give it a little bit of time – but I have no doubt that it will work.

This is just a little gem I couldn’t let pass you by! BTW – if you click on the screenshots, you will be able to have a better look at them.

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Keywords

Let's work out a plan of action!

Hey everybody, I am back online! Have been for about 3 or so weeks, to be honest. I just had to play “catch up” with my real life, after 5 weeks offline and a business to run it took (and still takes) a lot of time to re-organize and get up to date with everything. So my Internet Marketing has – again – taken a bit of a back seat.

If you have been reading my blog you have seen that, after lots of trials and errors, I have finally come to realize that the one way for me to earn a living of the Internet is “Building Niche Websites” and earning money through those sites with Google Adsense and Revenue from Affiliate Programs like Amazon.com or Ebay Partnernetwork.

Building Niche Websites is not the only way to earn money on the Internet, for example you can build email lists, too, but I have come to realize that it is not for me as I do not want to have to constantly write emails to my list to make money from it. It’s just not me. Admitted, if you do it right you can probably earn a hell of a lot of money from it, but you need to be prepared to put the expertise and hours into it.

When you build niche websites and monetize them, if you do it right you will have a fair bit of work to do at the beginning, but once you have got yourself established it will become a lot easier to maintain.

No matter what you decide to do – it is absolutely vitally important that you get yourself organized and have a plan. I just read through a post I made about getting organized back in July last year, and I am sad to say that I am back at exactly the same spot as last year. Stuffing around on the net but not achieving anything.

Have a good look at yourself – are you doing the same? Are most of us wasting heaps of time on the Internet trying to make more money but doing it without a proper plan of action, thus failing miserably and asking ourselves WHY?

For me, I also will have to sit down and think about my approach to establishing my niche websites and driving traffic to them. To date it is all over the place with no real direction, and that’s why nothing much has happened to my earnings over the past year. They have pretty much stayed the same, and that’s a pity as it could have been quite different if I was organized and focused.

So, make a plan, and work with it and on it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you can always make it better over time. You just need to start.

If you also work with niche websites, one plan of approach could be to set aside a day a week per site (depending how many you have) and just work on that site on that day. Even if it’s only 1/2 hour. Work out what’s important and when and how to do what you have to do.

Please, we have to make sure we do not end up as the next Internet Marketing Casualty – we all need more self discipline and less distraction.

A very good online tool to getting organized and creating “mind maps” to keep you on track is “MindMeister“. It is definitely worth having a look at.

I apologize to you all in case I sound like rambling on, it’s just something I find really, really important and have big trouble doing myself. I am very upset about it, and I want to just remind you all of how precious our time is and how we waste it so often by being unfocused, and therefore not getting any further to achieving our goals.

If you have a blog and are trying to maintain it, you will most likely be struggling with creating fresh content on a regular basis. That is at least my big downfall, I just lack the time to research and put together new and interesting posts in the field of Internet Marketing regularly. But we are all being told how important it is to continuously update our blogs or sites and add fresh and unique content, as this is what can push us up in Google rankings. And that’s the ultimate goal, right? To reach one of the front pages of Google.

So we do our best and try to come up with interesting or new stuff, but to be honest, I think anything we can possibly write about has already been told many times over by others, and will rarely be a real revelation. And we do want to provide good content, don’t we!?

Anyway, so at the beginning of this blog I tried to post every few days, and that turned into once a week or so, and now I am nearly down to once a month…. BUT – the funny thing is that my PR has gone up from a 2 to a 3, and I am still getting as many, if not more, visitors to my blog every day as before. What’s been happening?

It’s actually quite simple, and also quite brilliant, and I honestly have only just realized it. My blog has been updating itself.

How? – Through my commentators leaving new comments, that is! See, not just post you make count as fresh content, but also the comments you get on your posts. Any posts. SO, the more comments you get, the more often your blog receives fresh content. I can’t believe I did not realize that before…. Hooray! The pressure to generate new posts has been released.

Now, there is still nothing better to get good Google rankings and to become a well known and liked blog than updating it often – with your own posts. I am just saying that you don’t have to feel so bad if you don’t get around to it all the time, as long as you get some comments you have a bit longer to make your next post.

Just one more word: to utilize your commentators input properly, you should have the following plugins installed on your blog, simply to give something back to your fellow bloggers who are helping you out on the content side:

DoFollow | CommentLuv | KeywordLuv | Top Commentator

You can read up on CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and DoFollow here.

If you are running a WordPress blog, you can find and install all these plugins in your Plugins section by searching for them, except KeywordLuv. KeywordLuv you will have to go to their site and install it manually. I believe that all these plugins are some of the most important plugins you should have installed as a blogger from a SEO and Internet Marketing point of view.

So, let your readers update your blog with fresh content!

Never mind, I still want you to have this post, I might just try and leave out the screen shots I did – you will still be able to follow, trust me. So here it goes:

Have you ever wondered how to create a flash looking banner or button to advertise your website? I certainly did, and a little while ago I actually found out, from one of my fellow webmasters Maya, who runs a very successful blog for beach lovers called Completely Coastal. I came across her blog searching for possible sites for a link exchange to my beach site. And there it was, in her sidebar on the right hand side – a great button to advertise your site, even with a copy-and-paste html code for anybody to grab it and display it on their site! Of course I needed to know how she did it. And Maya was so nice to explain it to me.

One thing I changed in her instructions, though – she said she created the button with Paint.net, and I tried that, but I have to say I found the program too complicated for me, I just couldn’t work it out. (Blonde? )

The software I have been using to create my banner is called XHeader, and it is probably one of the best free website tools I have downloaded so far. It is absolutely free and so easy to use, it’s not funny.   In fact, all the header graphics for this site and for my site Healthy Diet Weight Loss have been created with XHeader. It really comes in handy for all sorts of graphics for your site.

So after Maya explained to me how to create a banner or button for my sites to advertise them, I played around with XHeader for a while to create a nice 125×125 graphic. If you have a look at my website Lighthouse Home Decor

(note: this is my Beach Decor website, and I am starting to build backlinks to some of the inner pages of it now to get the pages ranked in the search engines, too, not just the home page, that’s why I use another one of my keyword phrases “Lighthouse Home Decor”; this will over time give me more visitors to the site through my other keywords, too),

you will notice the new “button to grab” on the left hand sidebar towards the bottom. This is exactly what Maya has on her site, too, and that’s what I want to show you. You can create all sorts of sizes of banners or logos with XHeader.

When you create a button or banner for your site, I believe it is important that you keep it in line with the theme of your site, like colors, pictures, etc. What I have done for my Lighthouse Home Decor site is just grab a piece of the site graphics and incorporated it into the button (you find the crab and the thong at the bottom of the site )

So, here is what you do:

1. Download your free software XHeader and install it on your computer.
2. Have a good play with the software – you can’t do anything wrong! Here is what I usually do:

• Click on “new”

• Click “Create a blank header”

• Enter the size of your graphic. Now, the square little button is 125 x 125 pixels. But you could really make it any size you want.

And then just start having a go at creating a nice button! I usually start by importing an image, then adding text and transparency etc.

Once  you have created your masterpiece, just save it as .jpg in a location of your choice. (I always go for “superb” size).

Once you have done that, you need to upload the image to your website. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog, so I uploaded it (from the folder I had saved it to) via my free FTP program FileZilla to my website (wp-admin/images/YourImageTitle.jpg). You need to do that because you will need an URL for the image.

TIP: If you do not know much about file transfers via FTP, there is another solution: Photobucket, a free image hosting site. Just become a member of photobucket, and you can upload any number of pictures or graphics from your computer to your account in photobucket, and each of the photos will then have an URL for you to use.

So, once your image is uploaded to your website (or Photobucket) and you know the URL, here is the magic:

To display the button on your site, including the Text window with html code for other people to “grab it”, you need to use this code:

<img alt=”Your keywords for your site” src=”the URL of your Image“/><br>
<textarea style=”width: 125px; height: 125px” name=”textfield”><a href=”The URL of your Website” target=”_blank” title=”The Title of your website“><img border=”0″ src=”the URL of your Image“/></a></textarea>

The red colored text is what you will have to fill in with your details. Voila!!! Isn’t that cool??? I thought so.

…I am going to upload my new button for this site straight after doing this post, so check out my sidebar and let me know what you think!! And if you like, you can also grab my new button and put it on your site…

Thanks, Maya, for your very much appreciated help!

I would love to hear back from all of you who try this out, to see how you go. And of course, if you create a banner or button for your website or blog like I have done with this method, let me and my readers know and leave us a link to your site so we can check it out!

Busy Building Niche Websites

Well, it’s been a couple of months or so since I decided that building niche websites will be what I will do to create an income online for myself.  since I have put my new niche website about Mens Wrist Watches Online, and I am very slowly building backlinks to it to improve its rankings. I think it is important to take the time to do you SEO properly as it will pay back over time.

Here is what I have been doing and will continue to do to get the word out about my site and to get it bumped up to a better search engine rank:

(At present it is nowhere near page #1  (to be honest I haven’t seen it in the first 20 pages of Google yet, so I have some work cut out for me), so the traffic I am getting is extremely low.  I have seen though through StatCounter – you will see the little counter on the bottom right hand side of Mens Wrist Watches Online – that for some keywords which I haven’t even considered it did show up on page #1, and that’s good!)

• Continue to add new pages to the site – this is important as it shows that the site is expanding and “alive”, not stale. And we all know that the more quality and relevant content you have on your site the more the search engines will love you!
  • As I have a big problem with coming up with content for a wrist watch site I did outsource this task on Elance and got 11 content pages for mens wrist watches for $75, and I am very happy with it. It would have taken me months to do this and I would have really struggled. I still have to add some of the pages to my site, and will do so slowly over time.
• Keep commenting on other related blogs or internet marketing blogs and leaving a link to my site, preferably with one of my keywords as anchor text. These blogs should preferably have keywordluv enabled and be dofollow.
• Writing and submitting articles to Ezine Articles – these articles are purely there to provide backlinks to my site in the resources box. The articles are not optimized for any of my keywords that I have for my site, as I don’t want them to compete with my site. I just want great and valid backlinks to Mens Wrist Watches Online. The articles are related to anything that has relevance to watches, like accessories, watches (!), time management etc.
  • Here, as with creating content for my pages, I outsourced the writing of the articles on Elance and got 10 beautiful articles back within a week for $50. Again, I am prepared to pay this amount of money as the website will give me that money back and a lot more over time. Paying for the outsourcing of content and articles is the only money I have spent and will spend for this site. My other niche website about Beach Decor is making me a consistent $150/month from several sources, and I am confident that it will be the same with Mens Wrist Watches online. And I haven’t even started with optimizing for the keywords for all of my other pages, I have only been building backlinks for the main site! So there is a lot more to be gained still, on both sites.

So, there you have it. Building Niche Websites is really the optimal way to earn some money online for me, as I have found in the past that I am not good with keeping up with updating blogs, or writing emails to a list, or anything that requires a lot of time and creation of content on my part.

Mens Wrist Watches Online has already earned me a tiny little bit of money through ebay, so I am confident that it will grow, given time. I can only recommend to anybody with little time who wants to break into making money online to start doing the same as I do – building niche websites! Read my previous post on it, and act. I am sure you won’t be disappointed – I am not!

Hospitalera has written about the contest results on her blog, and I can only urge you to have a read about what she has learned from the competition regarding SEO and how to (or not to) optimize your blogs or websites for SEO. It is an interesting read and I have certainly learned a few new things from it.

SEO is a very fluid theme at best of times, but there are certain key factors in SEO that every blog/site owner should know and follow when building their sites. Things like picking the right domain name, or writing most of your posts with a keyword in mind. Or like linking within your site, with the right keywords as anchor text.  Or backlink building the right way.

Fact is that most site owners (the ones that do not do Internet Marketing) don’t have a clue about all this, and they will struggle to get their site seen because of missing SEO Optimization. Getting your site optimized for the search engines will give you a lot better chance of appearing on page #1 of Google. So whenever you can, learn about SEO! – I might actually write a post about it soon