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.

Many Comments

I have to say since my PR increased to 3 the amount of comments I get here on the blog has gone up quite a bit. So clearly my commentators want to take advantage of my DoFollow, CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and Top Commentator “offerings”! Which is great, that’s exactly what they are here for.

The only down side – for me – at this point is that I cannot keep up with replying to some of the comments. Not all require me to answer or reply to them, but there are always quite a few that I would like to reply to. But because of the sheer amount of comments and because I still do have a life apart from blogging (yes, I do!!! ), this has become a very time consuming and nearly impossible task.

I want to let you all know that even if I don’t reply to your comments, please don’t take it personally, I do read them and I do still hand approve all of them, I just cannot put all my time into responding any more. I will if there is anything really pressing, or I think I really need to answer or reply to a comment, but other than that I hope you will understand if your comment might not get a reply.

I have also looked into threaded (or “nested”) comments – this is when my reply to any comment appears straight after the comment and you do not have to scroll down any more to find the reply (have a look how it works on my Healthy Diet Weight Loss blog) -, but for some reason, even though I have the option ticked in my discussion settings, it does not change on my blog. I have to try and figure out why that is. Because some of my posts are getting so many comments, and it gets quite confusing to find the comments and replies that belong together.

Anyway, enough rambling.

If you are an avid blogger and you encourage your readers to interact with you on your blog, be prepared that keeping up with replying to the comments might take more and more time out of  your day. I love the interest all of you show in my blog posts, but please be understanding that I cannot reply all the time any more. Deal?

Please keep commenting, but I have to say now that any comments that just say “nice post” or “thanks for sharing” or something similar along those lines will be ruthlessly deleted, as this seems to take over at times and it will become quite boring for my readers to read through the comments on particular posts if I approve these empty comments.

I hope we have a deal here. Thanks!

HubSpot’s Website Grader is

“… a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.”

You can simply enter your websites address and your email address, and the Website Grader will generate a detailed report on the effectiveness of your website’s SEO. The report is clearly structured and you can see straight away where you might be able to improve your site’s ranking, and how. HubSpot’s website grader looks for example at On-page SEO, off-page SEO, your blog in the Blogosphere, in the Social MediaSphere, etc. I found it really enlightening to have a read through the results, and I can start to work on my blog’s shortcomings now!

Here you can read the summary the website grader came up with for petra-weiss.com (I am actually very happy with that result – even though I don’t really know how I got there! )

“…… A website grade of 95.5/100 for www.petra-weiss.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 95.5% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

The website www.petra-weiss.com ranks 70,984 of the 1,589,001 websites that have been ranked so far….”

So I suggest you head on over there sooner rather than later and get your site ranked… – it will probably surprise you what you have been missing out on regarding optimizing your site!

Seeing that it can be of tremendous value for us bloggers and website owners,  Hubspot’s Website Grader is definitely worth to join the ranks of best free website tools!

I think I will have to look at all my widgets, plugins and images – might have overloaded the site whilst trying to give you the best experience when visiting my blog Apparently that can happen – too many widgets, plugins and images etc. can considerably slow down loading time of a site.  We will see!

BTW, when I noticed that my site was having problems I immediately opened a support ticket with D9 Hosting (my brilliant hosting company), and they responded literally within minutes, personally! So, thanks, Paula and Dan, for your absolutely outstanding customer service, you have no idea how much it is appreciated!

IM Death Trap

The other day I got quite a shock – I discovered that I had actually fallen into one of the affiliate marketers death traps – once again! I am sure you can relate to what I am going to talk about – not having enough discipline to work on what is going to make you money,  and instead letting yourself get sidetracked by everything else, like checking stats (my oh my, I do that a lot! – Especially since my Adsense earnings have gone quite crazy!), checking out all the new programs that are being offered in the overstuffed inbox, and all the while thinking I am doing something useful. Because I was occupied and spent lots of time on my computer!

Can you relate to that? This particular behaviour is actually quite common to many, many Internet Marketers. I mean, you do work from home (even if it’s at night time after your full day job and everything else that’s going on in your life), and it’s not like you “are going to work” for somebody else. You are working for yourself, and that quite often becomes a death trap, because even though the flexibility and working from home is what you ultimately want to achieve with Internet Marketing, when having the flexibility it can be quite hard to stick to a routine and actually get things done. That’s why it is so important to focus and work out a plan, schedule the tasks you want to achieve and discipline yourself to actually get through with it. I am just as guilty of not doing it as others!!!

Being Productive?

I just sat back today and suddenly thought – what am I actually DOING to make money at the moment; the last few weeks? Don’t I have great ideas on what my next steps are going to be? I am all fired up every day when I sit at the computer, ready to rock and roll, and a couple of hours later I realize that I have literally done nothing but surf. Not good if you want to build a business, I can tell you!

So, it is really important to discipline yourself if you are working from home in your own time. Here are some tips on what you can do to get back on track (no, should do):

1. Work out the best days and times in the day for you to sit down and work undisctractedly. Write them in your calendar if you have to! And then stick to them, just as if you were going to a job somewhere. I mean, if you work for Woolworths from 8 to 4 then that’s when you are at work and do your work – you should treat your Internet Marketing just the same, like a job, and assign an appropritate time to it.
2. Take the time to sit down and work out exactly what you want to achieve next (short term will do fine for starters) – like building a blog about Jack Russell Terriers -, and WRITE IT DOWN. Not just on scrap paper, make an effort to make it look nice.
3. Write down the steps of action you have to take to achieve that goal. Assign numbers to the steps, in the order you need to do them.
4. Give yourself a kick in the butt and discipline yourself (Ouch, I just did!)! Meaning – start using the lists you have just created, on the days and times you have assigned for your Internet work. Follow your own plans step by step. Stop being hitchhiked by other things. It is easy for the mind to wonder off if you haven’t got a structured plan laid out, but now you should have one so NO EXCUSES ANY MORE! Have the plan in front of you at all times. Stick it to the wall if you have to!
5. I am just going to say it once again, because this is so important: Do actually write everything down on a piece of paper. Write it down. And then write it down.  Oh, did I tell you to write it down??? Having your goal(s) and action steps on a piece of paper makes them much more tangible and will seriously help to “untangle” your mind and streamline your behaviour.

Hopefully you can find some useful advice for yourself in this post. I had the urge to write it because I discovered that I had slipped back into my old bad behaviour of spending hours in front of the computer, having all these great ideas in my head but because there was no structure, no “real” plan, nothing written down to guide me along, I never started with anything and just went “surfing”. Death, really, it is. Nothing is going to happen if you don’t make it happen. I was just so angry with myself that I had to get this off my chest. So please try not to fall into the same pit. Make me happy.

Everybody else, I promised to value the first 5 backscratchers with a personal “thank you” here on my blog, creating another backlink for you. Right now there are 2 gone, 3 to go!

To Blog Or Not To Blog...

With this post I want to give you my honest opinion about Niche Blogging and “Make Money With Blog” – and at the same time do a little experiment to show you how to optimize blog posts for the search engines – because this is a big factor if you want to be successful with niche blogging. It can determine how visible your site will be across the web and as a result how much traffic you will have and how many sales you will make!

You noticed that my first sentence has “make money with blog” in it and it doesn’t really read very well. Because of that it might not be the best example but it is the long tail keyword I have chosen for this post so I want to optimize this post for it. After doing my keyword marketing research (–> please notice this is a bit of internal linking within my blog, good for SEO ) by checking in Google Adwords I found that the keyword phrase “make money with blog” gets nearly 3000 searches every month, which is good, and when entering the keyword phrase into Google Search within quotation marks like this: “make money with blog”, I found that it has only  22,200 competing sites for the exact phrase, which is fantastic!

So what I do is have the keyword in my title, and 2 to 3 times or so throughout the body of my post, once somewhere at the beginning, once towards the end, and once or twice in the middle. I have emphasized the keyword phrase by either making it bold, or hyper-linking it to another one of my posts (which will give that post another little seo boost!), or underlining. That way, the search engines can see that the phrase is important in my post. We will see what happens over time in the search engine placements, shall we?

Ok, niche blogging, here we go:

There is so much information and so many offers going around about setting up niche blogs and earning an income with them, you would think that it is one of the best ways of earning money online. Is that true?

Not A Walk In The Park!

I am not going to beat around the bush here: Setting up a blog in a certain niche can be very lucrative if it is done right. But it also requires a lot of hard work and dedication. It is certainly not a “walk in the park” as some Internet Marketers might make you believe.

Apart from having to do all your preliminary research for a profitable niche market to get into (which you should like a little, too, because there is nothing worse than to have to write about something you are not interested in!), you will also have to post to your blog on a regular basis. Best practice is probably to post every 3 – 4 days. Now I personally find that extremely hard, because I do not believe in just regurgitating other peoples articles or blog posts (and you shouldn’t, either, – remember: unique content is king in Google’s eyes!). I think when posting you should always make sure you deliver interesting and unique information, and be yourself. And if you struggle with writing (like me), it can be quite daunting, and easy to put off for another day. – This is one of the reasons why my blogs aren’t getting updated that regularly but when I do update them, I hope I bring something useful to my readers….you!

What you should also do if you want your blog to be successful and make money with blog ( )  is to optimize each blog post for a keyword phrase relevant to your niche.  That way, you are much more likely to have your single blog posts showing up in the Search Engine Result Pages and getting more traffic.

There are really a lot of factors to take into consideration when setting up niche blogs to make money, and it can be quite hard when you just start out to get it right, and it is easy to get discouraged. Especially when you have been expecting for it to be quick and easy, and you discover that it actually takes work, time and effort to be successful. If you need help, go and grab a copy of my book Affiliate Marketing S.O.S. where I go into great step-by-step detail about setting up a niche blog.

But niche blogging can also be one of the most rewarding ways to make money online, because of the interaction with your readers and the creativity that goes into a blog. It is easy to get addicted! And really, the more you give, the more you will get back, monetary and otherwise.

To sum it up I have to say that when I started out with niche blogging I was surprised at what was really required to make it work – I guess I had thought it would be easier. At the same time it took me by surprise how much I enjoyed doing it, and when I started to see the returns, I was hooked.

Fazit: Niche blogging is definitely one of the best ways to make money online - if you are prepared to put in the hard work and have the patience to wait the time it takes before you can see the results. But then you will be thrilled, I know it! Niche blogging is one of the big future money makers for Internet marketers, and if you are even slightly  interested in making money online you should definitely give it a go – make money with blog!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

A lot of WordPress blog owners were badly hit, because for many blogs Google AdSense is the main money earner. This in turn inspired one guy to create an ingenious plugin for WordPress users to automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies.

Eric Giguere’s WordPress Privacy Policy plugin is a fantastic and easy way to add the now so important privacy policy to your blog. I have downloaded the plugin and added it to my WordPress blog Healthy Diet Weight Loss (still under construction), and I really like it. It was very easy to do, and now I don’t have to worry about it any more.

When I created this blog (petra-weiss.com), I didn’t know about the plugin yet and had quite a bit of trouble to add a proper privacy policy to it, so I am quite glad I found this WordPress Privacy Policy plugin, which pretty much automates the whole process.

All you have to do is to download the plugin to your computer, unzip it, and then upload the unzipped folder to your webspace into “public_html” – “wp-content” – “plugins”. Once done, you need to head to your blog’s admin area and activate the plugin, and then create a page to display the privacy policy.

Eric Giguere gives quite detailed instructions on his blog, so if you want to make your life easier with your WordPress blog, and if you like to keep your ability to display AdSense ads, go and check it out.

Happy Blogging!