I remember sitting up late watching her ride Bondfire in Sydney in 2000 with goosebumps all over just hoping she could send her 17-year old horse to pasture after such a succesful career winning just about any competition possible. The only thing missing was the Olympic Gold and when she did win it seemed like Dressage became a national sport in the Netherlands.

Athens 2004, another much younger horse and her chances were a lot slimmer, seeing that Salinero just did not have all the experience needed to win, but again she proved just how hard work, passion and dreams can bring people to reach outstanding heights.

A truely exceptional achievement, winning 3 Olympic Games in a row and it again shows just what people can do with the combination of talent, heart, soul, passion and hard work. What a dream come true and what an inspiration and motivation to work hard at what you believe in!

Enjoy!

If you can imagine it, you can have it!

This is the name of the game.

This is the lesson to learn.

It couldn’t be any easier.

Reality is not what your eyes show your mind, but what your mind creates for your eyes to see.

You are not limited by logic, the past, or the world around you.

You are not even of the world around you.

You are supernatural, pure spirit.

You came first.

Magic, miracles, and luck are the consequences of understanding this, the inevitable result of dreaming and acting in spite of appearances.

You are ever so close.

Simply stay the course.

It won’t be very much longer.

Resource: notes from the universe by www.tut.com

This is going out to virtually everyone in my address book and I am only
doing this because the people in my area of Northern California need help.

I am sure you have heard something on the news in the last month or so
about the wildfires in Northern California. I live in Chico, Ca which is
right in the middle of a lot of these fires. Our area is blanketed in
smoke an ash. There are thousands of people living in shelters not
knowing if they will have a home to go to after the fires have been put
out and other still that know they have lost everything. I am desperate
to find some way to help my fellow northstaters that have been hit by
this disaster and the only thing I could come up with was to contact all
of you and flat out beg for help for these people whose lives have been
turned up side down.

How can you help?

Make a donation to American Red Cross and North Valley Animal Disaster
Group below

http://american.redcross.org
http://www.nvadg.org/

Use whatever influence you have to bring attention to this disaster and
get help for these people. Encourage those you know to help out if they
can. Some of you have blogs and websites adn I would appreciate any
thing you can do with this medium to help as well.

I am not asking this for myself but for the victims and it is the only I
can sleep tonight knowing I tried to do something more than I already have.

I want to say thank you in advance for any help you are able to give and
I know it is appreciated by the families that will be receiving this
help. Many of these families will be rebuilding their lives after this
and could use every bit of help they can get.

Take care,

Jim

AKA
The Movie Whore

Before I start sharing, there are a few things I really need to confess:

• First of all, I am a pretty lazy person and prefer to do as little work as possible.

• Second, I have a big sense of perfectionism in my personality, so I tend to overthink things.

• Third, I have a very short span of concentration, too many ideas I want to put to work and lose interest rather quickly.

Now, in order to become more successful in my online business, I completely realize that these three character flaws desperately need to be corrected and I have spent way too much time trying to find solutions for these flaws, reading all sorts of advice, even self help programs are no strangers to me.

Having cleared that up, I found that the only way to actually be able to set up a linkbuilding and promotion strategy is to go step-by-step… teeny tiny steps that is.

If I would go “big and huge”, spending hours and hours at a time along a set strategy of many many links a day, the task at hand would seem way too big and I’d probably don’t even start.

So, something that is really important to me is build on consistency, make things a daily habit and breaking patterns instead of shying away from big efforts, becoming overwhelmed and thinking that it won’t work in the first place and all other excuses I make to myself in order to avoid taking action.

So here is what I am doing at the moment:

I have made a list of all the websites that need promotion and highlighted different things I want to do for each of them, whether it be article marketing, directory submission, social book marking, commenting strategies etc.

I made a pretty little worksheet so I can hold myself accountable each day and put a timer on my desk so I can work in short spurts, making it easier for me to focus. After all, I tell myself that I only need, say 15 minutes of submitting to directories on one site, 15 minutes of social bookmarking on another and after completion I tick off on the list.

As you can see, it is really about taking baby steps at this point in time, crossing off every little task per site per day,

However, I have noticed that this seems to work for me at this point in time because of a few things:
1. Each task completed is one step in the right direction
2. I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore
3. I am noticing productivity level going up

I have set a list of minimum daily link building goals per site, very attainable goals which really only take around 2 hours to complete, again for building up daily consistency and try doing that first thing in the morning, breaking it down that would lead to about 50 new links per site per week, roughly, through directory submission, social bookmarking, commenting etc.

Apart from that I write a lot of articles daily, and submit part of them to article directories. 2-5 articles weekly per site, through article marketer, depending on whether a site is new or has been around for a longer time, which gives me another 50-100 links per article submitted.

Hope that gives you a basic idea of my linkbuilding strategies,

care to share yours?

Any comments are of course more than welcome

and *cough cough* needed!

Now, nothing wrong with people making a lot of money, I firmly believe there is enough to go round for people who are willing to do what it takes to become successful and I can only applaud those who really do.

However, I do have a problem with people selling stuff that is not up to scratch, which got me to think about the following.

In order to be a success online nowadays, it seems more important than anything else that your sales techniques are up to scratch and that even worthless products can generate a huge income as long as you know how to sell “air” (or freezers to Eskimo’s).

A few months ago, when starting this blog, I made a serious decision to not buy any more ebooks since most all of them only ended up crowding my hard disk and gather dust. Besides, if you are willing to spend some time, all information found in ebooks is readily available for free, and I have come to the believe there really is no secret to internet marketing, although so many guru’s are trying their hardest to make you believe there is.

Going back to the product my friend wrote about, it kind of did sound interesting enough to have another closer look and in the end I did sign up through his affiliate link, because after all, in his post he said the product looked good so far.

It is actually a real product instead of another ebook and all I needed to pay was $11.99 postage to get the book delivered to my door, and with summer offering plenty of time reading books while sunbathing a bit, I decided to go ahead and order.

Now, here is where things get tricky.

First of all I made sure to directly cancel a monthly subscription for a magazine about Internet marketing. I will receive the first copy for free along with the manual, but knowing myself, I better cancel straight away otherwise I forget and end up paying a monthly subscription without realising it (sorry pal!).

I did expect to see another offer page after ordering the initial book, after all, it seems to have become common practice to offer a “deal you will never see again” once signing up for a free product. This marketing guru however went a step too far in my opinion.

First he offered me another product for what he said “the best deal online” but after declining and wanting to go to the member area in order to download something that came along with the initial paper manual, he showed me another sales page for the same product, this time with a huge discount.

Yeah right, I thought, let’s skip straight to the member area, so again I optioned out of this “exceptional one time offer”.

Much to my surprise however, I landed on another sales page for the same product that had already been offered twice, but this time the price had actually gone down at least 75%! And as I was told on the sales page, I really could not live without this product if I were serious about making money online. And who would not believe this Guru, after all, he was showing his houses and cars and huge affiliate cheques and I could be just like him.

It was late though and I just wanted to get to the member area, so again I opted out of this offer, bad luck on me, now I will never make millions, but hey, I am pretty happy with what I do so far!

Guess what… apparently I had reached bottom price on product number one, because now I was lead to a sales page for product number 2, a marketing course that would normally go for thousands of dollars and wow it must have been my lucky day because now I could get full and exclusive access for only $997!

And even though I am like any other affiliate marketer and have thousands of dollars of cash saved under my pillow, I decided to pass up on this absolutely extraordinary offer, because I was sure I would see at least another few sales pages again lowering the price.

“No thanks (fill in name of IM Guru), I just want to go to the member area and I realise I will never ever see this great offer” and all of a sudden I had made 300 bucks!!!

That is right, by not taking up the offer; price had gone down to $697!  Needless to say I was very annoyed at this point and thought that I would finally reach the member area by passing up again, but this time I was lead to a sales page saying that maybe I did not have enough money to pay at once, so a convenient payment plan was offered and I could make 3 easy instalments, (because after all, if I couldn’t just dish out the initial big bucks, I really needed access to his exclusive program).

In a desperate attempt to finally go to the member area, although I really started thinking, “why would I even want to go to a member area?” and was about to just close the window, I again opted out of all these offers and free bonuses, “obviously” throwing away thousands of dollars, and clicked “go to the member area” button for the last time.

So why am I writing all this you might think, well there is a clue to this whole story.

The day after I received an email from my friend, saying that he had noticed I had signed up through his link and warning me to opt out of the subscription if I did not want the monthly magazine sent to my house. (Thank you for that!)

He said he had already received the paper manual which was supposedly filled with IM secrets and even though it was a pleasant read and nice to finally get something in print instead of all those e-books, he also said most information in the book is stuff we already now and he was yet to reach to the part were the real secrets were going to be revealed.

One comment he made though set off the trigger for me to write this long post, and it was down the line of “a lot to be learned from this guru’s sales techniques”.

Now, I am sure this guru is making a lot of money and I am sure not all he is selling is absolutely crap, but his sales page sequence and seeing just how much he was trying to sell his products for, and more importantly, see how much he was willing to drop his price, made me wonder.

Just how much can a product really be worth if there is a 75% drop in price within a few pages?

Plus…

If the free product he is giving out and obviously using in order to convince people to buy his (I believe well overpriced) program, does not really offer new information, will his program be any good to start with?

Maybe there is a lot to learn from this guru’s selling technique, but would I really be comfortable using this kind of stuff on people who just like me are trying to make a good living online?

The answer for me really is NO. I don’t want to trick people into signing up for monthly subscriptions along with a free offer, nor do I want to make money selling MMO products.

I still keep believing that the true secret of making money online can be put together in a few lines, no 100 page manual needed, no expensive exclusive programs needed, just common sense and a lot of hard work and dedication.

Plus, I am a bigger believer of Karma. What goes around comes around so I really don’t want to make money over the back of others.

And guess what? In order to be successful as an Internet marketer, there is no need to sell stuff you would not be caught dead buying yourself.

So what do YOU think is more important…. The product or the sales technique?

There are of course also times that we just have to step back and see the bigger picture more clearly, and I have found a few months ago that having a break really ups my spirit and energy levels again, ready for more action.

Last week I took another break and went to visit my family and take part in the annual family reunion, had a complete blast seeing all of them again, and even though Saturday wasn’t the highlight of the minibreak I had hoped for (the Dutch team lost in the quarter finals of the European championship) it was still a well needed and productive break.

So now I am back to business, once again I realize just how thankful I am to have found Internet marketing on my path. Before leaving, I had set up a distribution of articles on set dates so even though I wasn’t “holding the fort” myself, my work did continue.

One thing I have learned finally is not to sweat the small stuff and have patience.

Before I could get really discouraged if a site didn’t start making money the minute it was set up but now I am really focusing on the long run. Building up a site, adding content after doing my research, and getting it to an acceptable level.

Once at the point of having a site completed to a certain standard it goes into my schedule of promotion and link building and I go on to the next site to get it to the point where I can start promoting it as well.

I wrote a few weeks ago about More Niche and so far I can only say I am still impressed with the program. I am actually following all the steps and even though I haven’t had a sale coming in from the sites I build for that program, I am starting to become a lot more productive in matter of my overall work level and focus.

Following the right steps is actually showing me an increase in organic traffic and I am confident sales will start to get in sooner or later, so I am not too bothered about that part right now because I am confident about the outcome.

A really cool thing though is that I won a 40% commission lock in for life on one of the products, instead of the 30% this product gives normally, by winning in their competition in the category of best copy/layout.

A little cheer for me there!

That was a really nice surprise to see, that the site I entered for this competition got this feedback and I have to say that I am really pleased with that result. Funny thing is that when looking at my stats for that winning site, it has an average visited number of pages per visitor of 4.8, average time spent is nearing 9 minutes, so hopefully sales will start coming in once promotional efforts are really starting to hit in.

I’ll keep you guys posted!

I have noticed a big change though in the comment section and I guess that has to do with the growing number of D-lists I seem to be on. Now, this blog has been a do-follow blog for quite some time now but recently I am seriously considering to turn off that option and go back to being a no-follow blog and it is not even because of SEO smarts and not wanting to spoil linkjuice anymore.

The reason I am considering going back to being a no-follow blog is the amount of crappy comments coming from some very lazy people who arrived here because of some D-list.

Comment strategies (posting on d-list blogs) are great in order to grow your blog and get more backlinks but man, some people just don´t seem to realize they are killing this whole system!

I have seen some complaints on how most d-list aren´t updated and are pointing in the direction of no-follow blogs and  even some angry comments on why so many blogs are no-follow eventhough they are on a d-list…

Well guys, the answer is really simple, it completely sucks to see your own blog being abused by some lazy ass commentators who think that just any comment  is appreciated!

My initial reason to turn on do-follow on my blog was to share some linkjuice with my regular visitors and people who were leaving good comments, adding to the value of my blog with some interesting points of view.

I don´t care if you use keywords instead of your name but man, atleast show some respect when using my blog in your comment strategies!! And by respect I don´t mean you gotta say “great blog”, “interesting post” or “I have signed up for your RSS” but what I want to say is atleast have the decency to READ the post and COMMENT with something useful to say! 

By being a lazy ass commentator with the only thing on your mind being to get some linkjuice, you are KILLING the Do Follow movement so  don´t whine and complain when one day you arrive on this blog through a do-follow list and find I have gone back to being a no-follow blog, because the only reason I would go back to no-follow is being completely fed up with seeing my blog abused by the do-follow abusers!

So cheers to you and think a little before commenting, if d-lists are part of your link building strategies, make sure you aren´t killing your own strategy!

Don´t bite the hand that feeds you!

A lot has changed since I started this blog. In the beginning I was mingling with others in the blogosphere, reading up on a lot of blogs and my inbox got crowdier and crowdier.

The traffic for this blog started growing steadily and I got more and more comments, gotta say, I loved the attention but at one point I was spending hours daily knowing that I was not going to make a penny with this particular blog and other projects that I was setting up got put on a sidetrack, eventhough the attention there was to actually make money.

What a stupid way to go in “business”, all play and no work!  If I were to do this working for a boss, I would have been sacked ages ago, but I kept telling myself I was just in the learning stage and trying to figure out what really worked.

So, I have gone through quite some changes recently, but the most important change is my focus. Instead of wanting to learn everything there is, instead of signing up for a zillion programs that were going to teach me, and others that were going to make me money for sure, and buying domain names left and right with the purpose of setting up that million dollar business thought that popped into my head, I am now sticking with what I already know and have at my disposal.

And I am wondering, just how many people are auto-sabotaging themselves?

In the first few months of running this blog, I met some really nice people in this field, all trying their hardest to make money, some do make a few bucks left and right, a few actually make a lot, and then others are having a hard time not to throw in the towel completely.

Most still are stuck at the level of being able to buy a cup of coffee from what they earn online, and are struggling to get where they could actually buy dinner from their earnings. I have gotten to the level of where I can pay my foodbill, but man, looking at return of investment, I have been a complete sucker so far!

So far, my paycheck is still way below minimum wage per hour, but I get by because of the huge amount of hours that I am putting in.

Think about… if I were to work for a boss, I would have been stamping my feet in a tantrum for the low hourly pay, and would have left ages ago.

If you have been reading my last entries, you know I have signed up for moreniche, yet another one of the affiliate programs out there.  So far I have not made a sale yet, I have some sites set up now that I am quite happy with though, and have started to systematically build links to them. I am convinced though that this time around it is all improving, because I am cutting out a lot of my time-wasters and focussing on the bigger picture and roadplan I have set out for myself.

When going into the support forum where other members join and ask for support, there is one thing that stands out to me.  It seems there are still a lot of people who think that affiliate marketing does not require having to work. They seem to think that as soon as they have set up a site, no matter how louzy it is, money will come rolling in, so they sit back and pray for traffic, eager people who are looking to buy.

However, when that doesn´t seem to happen after a day or a week, they are becoming upset and start screaming the program doesn´t work. They start looking around and some even start  buying “unique hits”, thinking that that traffic will get them sales. So they spend $25 on 10.000 unique hits, without realizing they are throwing away their money. At no point do they step back and have a closer look at their page, thinking whether or not they themselves would fall in their own “trap”.

Others leave a message saying they just signed up for the program and “what to do next”? They are asking for help and it seems they are still in the frame of mind of thinking there must be some “secret” to making big bucks, but nobody is willing to share it. So instead of reading the free guides the program offers and actually following the advice, they want to know the shortcut to bring in those bucks.

Well, there aren´t any shortcuts, especially not if you don´t have a few pennies to spend on outsourcing most of the work.

What happens? They give up, maybe go to another program, another way to make money, but as long as they don´t realize that affiliate marketing is just like any other job, they will not make it anywhere.

This morning I received an email from another blogger I have been in contact with over the past few months. We talked about MoreNiche a few times and about a program he had signed up for (read about it on here). And I noticed myself again just how volatile my own mind is, there still is a tiny part in my brain that wants me to think that there must be a secret to making money, although by now, fortunately a larger part of my brain knows there is only one secret and it is called “work at what brings you profit, ditch all activities that don´t bring in cash and keep working at building links”.

You see, too many of us want to do it all perfect and therefor don´t undertake action. We are tweaking and perfecting all sorts of projects without them making any money yet, while I believe we should find whatever works for ourselves, and only then start tweaking the projects that have started bringing in cash, no matter how little.

Instead, we tweak and perfect projects that are not working yet,  see no results, jump to the next “big thing to sign up for” without giving ourselves a real chance to make money.

Anyways, I´d be interested to see all your comments and experiences. I have been deleting a lot of comments lately though, because it seems this blog got onto different D-lists (lists of blogs that do-follow) and many posts seem to become spammed, with stupid “great post comments” or comments that just show the post wasn´t read at all.

If you arrived here because of one of those lists, realize I have no problem with giving away linkjuice, just don´t abuse me!

You want the free link, work for it! 

If you are looking for a place to learn and make money, you should consider signing up for moreniche, the free guides are offering some valuable information and blueprints on how to set up websites, how to build traffic, how to improve your website, improve SEO, good templates to set up professional looking websites, graphics, very good customer support, the lot!

And once you make your first sale, there is an extra bonus upto $45 to show how much they appreciate your work

Gotta say I am really impressed with all the free information and level of support they are offering, either through their affiliate forum or contacting them directly.

So what have I during last week?

I have actually set up 4 new websites, and only have to finish some details and then upload them which will be done later this day, plus starting promotion strategies in order to get the linkbuilding going.

Terence gave me some good points to look at when I first posted about this program last week and I will certainly keep his comment in mind, for now though I find there is a lot to learn in their affiliate forum.

I picked a few products which I have experience with from the past and started building sites with all the material they offer for promotion. Most product in the program come with several ready made templates, loads of content and designer help (banners, pictures you can use freely etc)  and other information given good ideas in order to promote.

Cool thing about this program is that they are now uploading a lot of review videos in their forum, actually reviewing sites made by affiliates in order to improve them and point out where a site is lacking in view of selling and promotion.

Even after all this time I have been into affiliate marketing, there was a lot of things I hadn´t thought of and it is proven to be of great value to have somebody else look at your site and show you where you could improve it. I was certainly impressed by the time they put in to offer this service to their customers.

Now, some might say “yeah right Mirjam, they just want to earn more money” and I believe that is a fair statement, they are after earning more money through their affiliates promoting their products, but they can only do so, if their affiliates make more sales too.

So basically that is a win-win situation. Plus think about this, if you have been struggling like I have to get those sales in, you are doing something wrong. I was doing a lot of things wrong, and finally found some place to actually point out where and what to improve on. This is all information I can take along with me into other ventures outside of the program, ie, information I can use and implement to promote other products from other affiliate programs since it is all about the basics and then tweaking it to improve sales.

Through MN I have found to have made mistakes in the basics of all the sites I have set up in the past, with the consequence of not getting higher returns on the efforts I was putting in.

Funny when I come to think about it, as soon as I started this blog months ago, I have actually started learning a lot more than the years before and it does feel like pieces are finally falling into its place.

When I first started learning about affiliate marketing, I thought I did not have enough knowledge so I kept buying and reading guides on how to make things happen and the more I read, the more I felt like there was a lot of knowledge lacking to become a “super affiliate”.

It actually started feeling like there was some sort of secret to success and that the next book I was going to buy and read, would give me that secret.

I have certainly wasted a lot of time and effort. If only I had started building on the foundations straight away, making it secure with the basic information I had at that time and only than started learning about how to improve on those basics, I would have been a lot further already, but it is never too late to start.

MN is putting a lot of pieces together though, and now, when looking at the forum, I see a lot of people asking for help to become a super affiliate. They are making the same mistake I was making, thinking there is this big secret out there which is holding them back as long as they don´t find out.

Again, the secret is in the basics, following some beginner guides which tell you exactly what to do before even thinking about tweaking and improving.

If you don´t have the basics though,

there is nothing to tweak nor improve!

It is like wanting to run without first knowing how to get on your feet and start going step for step.

Anyways, I am going back to work now, just wanted to give a little update so far on what I think about MN  and what I have done so far. If you have been looking for ways to make money and so far aren´t succeeding in affiliate marketing, I would certainly recommend you to check out their free beginner guides which you can access after signing up for the program. The free guides offer information on how to start, how to build a site, how to promote and build links etc, sort of a step by step program on how to get on. After that, there are more guides on how to improve everything, including a free SEO guide by Brad Callen which offers some great inside tips on how to get your site ranking high and fast.

Again, the sign up is free and they are offering bonuses (upto $45) when you sign up with them. You will only be able to get those bonuses by making your first sale, which is what you are after anyways, I suppose, right?

Feel free to leave any comments and questions, I will try to answer all of them:)

To Our Success! 

Setting up blogs and websites, writing content, promotion, link building, the lot and quite frankly, I was getting lost in the numerous projects lying around, needing to be finished.

Apart from coming to the conclusion that I really had to start automating a lot of the tedious jobs I was doing manually in order to work more efficiently, I had to face up to the fact that I really could not continue doing everything on my own.

Having a lot of tasks laying around, waiting desperately for my attention made me more nervous when time was going by, so I had to make a decision and make one fast.

Either keep going the way I was, not really with the best results you can imagine or make a complete switch and start recognizing some things were just better to be done by somebody else.

So I started adding up numbers, dividing them by time, my precious time that is, and went ahead looking at the possibilities of outsourcing the things that

Took up most of my time
I hate doing most

Now, maybe this is not the most professional way of going about things, but there is a reason behind doing it this way.

Motivation…. Motivation …. Motivation

I have found that if I have task hanging around in my head, dreading them, knowing that I really need to do them but just can’t find the motivation to actually take the action and get them done, they influence all the other tasks I really need to do.

Well, it seems that now a weight has been lift off my shoulders, the exact moment I went ahead and started contacting people to outsource the little stuff which was holding me back the whole time.

Great sensation and all of a sudden I am even more motivated to continue working on the rest, giving it my best!

So tell me, do you outsource jobs that keep lying around your desk, gathering dust?