I have to confess that I hardly read any blogs in the money making online niche, because there is so much stuff written that will put me on the wrong path again, and I really want to stick to what I am doing right now and follow my own plan.

I noticed though that a lot of what is written out there is basically really bad advice, passed on from one blogger to the next and you can tell that whoever wrote it almost totally copied it from somebody else without adding any personal view or experience.

Now, this wouldn’t be bad if the information to start off with was sound advice, but I unfortunately have seen my share of wrong information on quite a few blogs these past months, which is what got me to the title of this post.

Would you read your own blog, seriously?

I mean, if your blog weren’t yours but somebody else’s, would you sign up for the rss or bookmark that blog to keep following all that the blogger was writing? Do you ever sit back and go through old posts, changing things that aren’t valid (anymore) or just delete posts for the sake of improving the content of your blog?

I have several blogs but not one of them is as “personal” as this one, this blog is my baby so to say, the blog I use to write down my thoughts, my findings, my experiences in the crazy mmo niche, and it is the blog that I promote under my own name, so I feel a big responsibility towards my readers, to provide posts that are entertaining and informative, posts that at times could help other people making money online or refer to great articles that I think need to be read if you are serious about your business online.

Like I said, I have several other blogs as well, in all sorts of niches that on one level or another are important to me and try to provide information on them that is worth reading if you are looking for information in that particular niche. However I must admit that not all information provided on there is solely written by me basically because I just don’t have the time to write everything myself. I do make sure though that everything on there is well researched and helpful for the reader, in other words I try to provide quality on all of my blogs.

Back to the initial question and more important, why I occasionally ask myself whether I would read my own blogs or not (if I would allow myself the time to spend reading blogs). I think that as a blogger or website owner, we have a responsibility towards our readers over what we put out in the world.

So I signed up for FirePow the other day, wanting to take my business to another level and adding more blogs to my portfolio in order to grow my business. It has been 3 weeks so far and once the first month is over I will surely share my experiences and thoughts with you guys.

There is one thing though that I wanted to mention right now. FirePow is a pretty powerful tool that can give your business a real big push into the right direction. Not only allows it to create a new blog within a matter of minutes, including the installation of wordpress and a theme (all is done from within one admin panel with a few clicks) but it also allows to pull content from 10 different resources so that you can instantly create blogs with content and cut down on research time in a big way. It also allows you to access all your blogs from one control panel without having to go to all different admin panels, another big time saver.

Probably the best of all though are the promotional tools it offers, a social bookmarking tool that will bookmark all your posts automatically, promotion through yahoo answers from within the admin panel as well plus a vast amount of blogs you can put a short post on, linking back to the blog you want to promote. Everything is explained through FirePow´s videos and it didn´t take a lot of time to learn quite a few nifty tricks to speed up business growth.

All in all pretty good I would say, especially if you go full into the whole process and take advantage of all tools, but like I said, a full review will be published once my first month is over.

The one thing that kept lingering on my mind was whether or not I would read the recently created blogs myself and for some reason I felt I was in way over my head to keep up with all that I am doing already. More about that in the near future as well but right now I want to finally get to the point:

I believe that 80% to 90% of all the bloggers out there would not read there own blog because they suck, and even that number might be on the low side!

Don’t get me wrong here, not saying they intentionally build bad blogs, but I think a lot of bloggers out there aren’t critical enough when it comes to their own work and what they publish on their blogs and if they were forced to read their blog for a month or two, they’d run away screaming!

So that was my thought for today, start reading your own blog through the eyes of your readers and ask yourself:

Would you read your own blog?

This morning I woke up and found an email from a dear friend of mine. We have been talking quite a bit these past few months (boy, seems like we have known each other for years LOL) and I have been trying to help her set up a few blogs and explain a few things.

In her email at one point she mentioned she had bought some software to make videos that would bring more traffic in than any other program (heck, that is something all of us want right, more traffic!). I received that sales email yesterday as well and decided to have a look, but after a few minutes I closed the screen and went on.

She on the other hand, decided to go ahead and buy the software.

As I was responding to her email, I noticed that all the things I said to her, actually applied to myself and that is what caused me to write this post.

See… in my mind there is one big ugly beast that kills business for internet marketers and the only way to actually become a success online is to kill that beast.

That beast is the Internet marketer him/herself.

Not the person, but their actions or lack thereof…

Now the sales mail explained how to easily make “killer videos” to create a huge amount of traffic, sales pitches like “this video was created in 2 minutes”, “how many can you make a day”, referring to the amount of traffic each video surely was gonna get etc. So yeah, I could imagine anybody watching the sales pitch to start having visions of receiving thousands and thousands of uniques to all their affiliate sites per day, raking in the money as we speak. Besides, it was only a small investment, 40 or 50 dollar I believe, so hey, you would be crazy not to buy it, right?

I am sure that many people watching that sales video and listening to the voice telling he himself was technically challenged and all but with this software he was able to create a traffic monster video in a few minutes, would think they could do the same.

Please understand that I am not ditching the idea of creating videos in order to create traffic, nor am I saying that nobody should buy into the sales pitch, nothing like that.

What I am trying to get at is that before buying yet another piece of software, or yet another “big traffic generator” one stops and thinks about the reason they are not getting enough traffic as we speak.

I mean…there are just so many free resources online that will create targeted streams of traffic, as long as you are willing to put in the elbow grease and work them.

There is no magic pill, no magic formula, creating traffic no matter what anybody says, takes work, it takes time to do the research and find a proper niche, do the research and find proper keywords to rank, and it takes time to create links so that more and more people will find your affiliate site.

So as I was responding to my friend, saying that I wasn’t gonna buy that software because chances are, I am not going to use it, I started thinking about all the resources I already have at my disposal and am not using to the fullest potential myself.

See, after all this time online and seeing so many new launches, so many new products that would pave my way to everlasting riches, there is one thing that any product lacks. One big flaw that no product seems to be able to fix. And probably no product creator wants to fix that flaw because it would mean that any new launch would become redundant and useless.

The big flaw in any moneymaking product is the USER of that product.

And I am not referring to the lack of ability to actually use the product, rather am I referring to the lack of interest to really use whatever tools available already and keep working productively at creating more content and more links to websites to generate traffic.

Back to that video creating software, in the sales pitch it was said that it only takes 2 minutes to create that traffic pulling video, but really come on guys, anybody believes that?

Just a quick reality check here:

• You have to find the idea for the video
• You have to find the product to promote
• You have to find the text
• You have to find some images
• You have to find some background music
• You have to put the video together (which will take a bit longer then 2 minutes, especially in the beginning)
• You have to save the video (and then be able to find it on your computer )
• You have to upload it to youtube or any other video site

So yeah… it looks like a great piece of software, and probably if you are really motivated and able to figure out things really fast, work on caffeine and all you will be able to create one video in 15-30 minutes, maybe bring that down a bit the more you work with it and familiarize yourself with the how-to´s and short cuts.

My thought, chances are that after 2 or 3 videos, maybe some will even make it to 7 or 8, most people will throw in the towel or better said, get sidetracked by yet another new product that makes traffic generating even easier! My estimation is that only a very low percentage of those that buy the software will actually put it to the fullest potential and actually get to the stage where they see their hard work pay off, traffic streaming in, sales going up and get even more motivated to create more videos.

I actually made 40-50 dollars just by passing on and not buying the software cause I know that I belong to the group of people that would give up after a few videos, getting bored out of my head or just feeling it takes too long to keep going.

Acknowledging my flaw is one step on the right track, second step is getting back to work and be productive today, so I am off for now. I would really like to hear your thoughts on all this though!

Are you guilty of buying too many products and then not using them?

Are you guilty of having resources available and have them gather dust

Are you guilty of always looking out for the next best thing?

Are YOU killing your own business?

I was reading a post the other day on Massive Traffic Techniques written by Mitch from ImJustSharing and he was responding to another post he had read. Now before you go off on me saying “hey Mirjam, what happened to you not reading other blogs anymore?” let me explain that there are a small number of blogs that I do continue to read occasionally for a number of reasons, but overall I have severely cut down on the hours spent reading.

I do go to Mitch´s blog though because he gives me food for thought and more often than not I find stuff to discuss, but anyways, back to the posts on Massive Traffic Techniques…

Have you noticed that when it comes to this type of post, 95% of the bloggers are saying the same thing over and over again? The same techniques are shared and shared and shared and they supposedly all lead to massive traffic for our sites.

The first on the list of “massive traffic techniques” was article marketing and I am going to quote it here so you won´t leave just yet (you can always go check out the posts later, after commenting here, right?)

1) Write articles: believe it or not this is an incredible tool for driving traffic.

I have 10 articles on Ezine Articles and Evan Carmichael, and, according to Analytics, I’ve never gotten a single person to any of my sites because of them. They’ve been used elsewhere, though, so I’ve gotten links, but traffic,… nope.

That comment to me was … how to say it politically correct… different from what I have found.

So I actually decided to dive into my EzineArticles account and look at my own stats. Some are just too embarrassing to admit really, but hey, trying to make a point here and being humble once in a while can´t be all bad, right?

So I do have a few articles that did not get me one single click at all. None, zero, napa, zilch, niente… even though they had a decent amount of views, or at least enough to be expecting a few visits.

But lately, even though I am still not getting the thousands and thousands of views per article, yet…, there are also articles that received as much as 60-70% of clickthroughs per view. Now the percentage isn´t really that important when it comes to numbers, but it is actually important to find out myself how I need to write the articles I submit to EzineArticles in order to get people to my sites (and hopefully buy the products that are on there).

In total I have only submitted about 70 articles or so, received over 8300 views on them and as a result of that had 1,400 clicks to the different links in there. Far from great stats but if I look at them and compare the beginning of my article writing venue and where I am at now, those 70 articles have taught me quite a bit, (which I will be sharing here in the near future so stay tuned for that!) and both views and clickthroughs are improving from when I first started.

Back to the original reason for me writing this post:

Most Posts on “Massive Traffic Techniques” are Fooling You into Wrong Thinking!

Yep, that is my opinion and my personal opinion, and feel free to disagree with me here, but I will explain why I am thinking this. I hold my “grudge” not so much with the techniques themselves (although I do feel that some techniques are way more productive than others when it comes to making money) but with the overall stigma they keep alive: “the more traffic, the more money”

Right, I am sure you must have seen that hundreds of times already, that the more traffic you have, the more money you can make. And even though this might be true when you want to sell advertisement on your site (in order to do so, you will have to be able to show that the advertisement spots are placed on a site that gets plenty of traffic) I don´t think that the more traffic always gives you the more money.

I think it is way more subtle than that, you can create absolutely useless traffic in huge amounts without selling a thing and you can make a sale from only a few visitors (did you notice that my main reason for getting specific traffic is making sales?).

When I first started doing the “article thing” I did see a rise in statistics of traffic on different sites, I even saw a rise in certain keywords in the SERPs, but it stayed far from becoming a big earner and after having submitted 30-40 articles to EzineArticles, I thought it was not going to do anything for my business and ready to join the huge amount of people that proclaim that article marketing doesn´t work to create massive traffic to their sites.

But then I started looking at other authors on EzineArticles, have you ever noticed there are people with hundreds if not thousands articles to their name? Now call me stupid, but I firmly believe that people wouldn´t keep beating the article marketing path if it wasn´t working for them, so I decided to have a closer look at just what they were doing, how they wrote their articles (and very important too, their author boxes) and started reading the blog on EzineArticles that offers really good information on how to make article writing a success.

I took what I learned from that and actually changed not only the way I was writing those articles but also the author box information, made shorter articles, more catchy titles and author boxes that looked as if they were part of the articles themselves.

Can you guess what I saw changing in my stats? Come on now, give it a shot!

Back to why I think those Massive Traffic Techniques” posts are fooling you into believing you need huge traffic … I like to think more into percentages, productivity and ROI. And I will give you a specific example.

I have two articles that I published on the 18th of February and the 11th of February, both promoting a lens project I had been building. Now I know that according to the One Week Marketing Plan I should have submitted one article per lens but life got in the way and I got sidetracked a bit, but anyways, back to those 2 articles.

The have respectively 58 and 127 views and a total of 100 click throughs. I did nothing to promote those articles, just wrote them and published them and that is it. They are both 250-260 words and have an adapted author box of around 200 words, so in total that is not even 900 words. Between having a really really slow internet connection, writing the article, making the links and writing the bio box, that took me about 30 minutes to do.

100 clickthroughs might seem like nothing if you are shooting for thousands and thousands of visitors, I know, but these articles actually lead to 2 sales, totalling 51.18…

This is where it becomes interesting for me because it is proving me a few things, and by doing so, turning most information that is rehashed on almost all of those MMO blogs into plain myths:

• It only took less than 200 views and 100 click throughs to make 2 sales
• 900 words were enough to drive the targeted traffic I needed to cash in on $50 for now
• I made those sales without doing the selling myself but left that to the vendor on his landingpage
• I did not spend hours and hours using “massive traffic techniques” like commenting, socializing nor submitting to directories or other things “people tell us to do to become a succes”
• The articles were published on a new account, so no “fame”, not being a “big trusted name” myself, no buzz no nothing, not even being popular, just 2 simple short articles.

Keep in mind that this is only one personal experience and example, but I am pretty sure that the better I get at picking the products, creating mini projects and improving on my articles on EzineArticles, the more sales will follow.

Thought that was enough food for thought for now, seeing that I want to get back to work and will be doing a personal challenge today that I might post on shortly (another reason to get back here or sign up for my rss as to not miss out on information that might actually help you make money or if the challenge fails, to save you from going through the same )

I do hope that you all start thinking for yourself without just copying what others tell you to do.

Don´t just buy into hype because it is fun to spend your time navegating and socializing, at least not if you are serious about your online ventures in terms of creating an income. And hey, more power to you if you are actually making big money already following all the “massive traffic techniques” and have a MMO that makes those big bucks, by all means, do what is already working for you and giving you a high return on investment. I´ll just continue working on what is bringing me personally a higher ROI and so should you!

Don´t even take what I am saying for granted, but check your own personal stats and see what you can improve on in order to make more money and build a solid business online. Find what really works for you and start building on your most productive ventures and ditch those that are just time-wasters.

As you might know I have recently changed tactics and the main goal of making these changes was to increase my productivity level. When I first started this blog I thought it to be very important to get in touch with other bloggers and comment on their blogs so that they would come back and put a comment on my blog.

Sure it was great to see the comments per posts increasing as well as getting more visitors to this blog. It was great for my ego, but that was about all that it would produce. An ego boost and wasting an aweful amount of time looking for new information to improve my blog and tweak and twitch the look and feel of it.

It sure was a fun time and I did learn quite a bit. There is however a negative side to contacting and reading a lot of MMO bloggers, and that is that they/we tend to overthink things and sooner or later instead of being really productive we can spend hours and hours working without getting anywhere.

Ok, we might be getting traffic from fellow bloggers and we might be getting a lot of comments, but really, be honest, where does that lead anyways? Does it put a lot of money in your pocket?

Last month I have been turning things upside down. Instead of doing the “social thing” I went into private mode so to say. I don´t want to become famous on twitter, myspace or whatever other social networks there are out there, so why would I bother spending hours connecting and wasting time that I could very well use to actually build a business?

I needed another plan. Another layout I could stick to and make it my work schedule.

The Schedule I am following today

So I got the One Week Marketing Plan… eventhough I had pledged to never ever in my whole life to buy another ebook. And even when writing this post I am laughing at myself, I mean, here I am telling that I want to become more productive and then I go out, buy another book on MMO and instead of acting I read even more. Oh well, you gotta be able to laugh at your own actions right?

Anyways, like I said, I needed a plan after all this time “working” online I had gotten so brainwashed by all the crap that can be found when it comes to making money online, that I had to make a fresh start and just go about things step by step.

That was about 3 weeks ago already and since then I must say my productivity level, even though it still isn´t where I want it to be, has improved dramatically. My daily activities have gone from commenting, researching, socializing, learning and posting (the fun way of spending work time that most MMO-ers are guilty of) to building websites/lenses and then promoting and building links to them through article marketing.

Most of the time I get this done with the blindfolders on because as soon as I start doing any common MMO activity I am lost again.

Bloggers – “make money onliners” – waste so much time that they could easily be compared to the millions of 12 year olds who play video games six to eight hours per day. Why do video game addicts do what they do? Because it’s fun; it’s an escape from reality to get online with your buddies and kill aliens for hours at a time. While they’re playing video games they don’t have to think about anything that stresses them. Are bloggers any different?

read more

Are you guilty of being an MMO-er?

I never really understood the difference between the MMO movement and those marketers that were actually building their own business. I really thought they went hand in hand. Want to know what the difference is?

MMO-ers get sucked into the information highway by their fellow bloggers and start reading a lot of “how to get rich articles” written by people who aren´t putting their own words into practice themselves but think that if only they stick with that type of posting long enough, success will eventually rub off on them. After all, they are talking the right talk, right?

So I decided I did not want to get sucked into more information addiction, which is why I changed the path of this blog. I did get the One Week Marketing Plan because I needed to stick to something literally, plus I started using Unique Article Wizard apart from submitting articles to EzineArticles.com.

And just before you start wondering, I did actually already submit 5 articles to both UAW and EzineArticles.com before taking a break to write this post

Now my questions to you… can you guess what I see happening with my stats? Can you guess which way of promotion is getting me more click throughs to my affiliate programs, the former “blogcommenting-socializing-MMO-addiction” or my present “creating webpages-article submission combination”?

Which path will eventually lead to a substantial and steady income?

I just wanted to write a quick note about a blog I found today

and left me very impressed and emotional.

The blog is written by a woman who is fighting ovarian cancer for

the third time around

and in desperate need of your help.

Please read her story and, if you can, make a donation as well.

Together we can make a difference!

After reading my last posts you might think to yourself, “so Mirjam, would you kindly explain why you aren’t cashing in all those thousand $$$ checks yourself?” and all I can say is that you are completely right asking me that question.

You see, at the time when I first read the SAH my first stage was being completely overwhelmed with all this new information. I skipped through the manual quickly and then went back to really read it.
Read the rest of this entry

As a result of drastically wanting to change my life, I have started to put all my time and effort into learning about blogging and working hard on improving my own knowledge and skills. Over the last half year I have been doing a lot of research online, reading material of successful bloggers and people who are only just starting out, but what I mostly found was posts on how rich and happy they already were or on how rich and happy they wanted to become, without really sharing what to do in order to become succesful.

Some blogs sparked the light of hope and wanting to achieve things for myself, other blogs actually got me down and discouraged, thinking I would never make it.

A lot of material I came across felt like yet another post on the same, over and over again. The funny thing is that, once in a certain circle, you keep bumping in to the same bloggers, the same comments and the same blogs over and over again, which is curious if you come to think of the amount of blogs out there and diversity of interests all over the world.

But last night, when I was just about to reach my cut off time and ready to turn off my computer, I ran into a blog I wish I had found before. A blog packed with so many great posts and original content that it had me up and reading till 5 am this morning. A blog so inspirational that it had me going back when I finally woke up today.

Going back to its first post, dating the 12th of February 2007, I realised it has not even been online for a year and when it was started, it kind of felt it hadn´t found its own voice yet, although I believe the owner of the blog, Courtney Tuttle had his vision and goals well worked out.

I was searching for mistakes newbie bloggers make, because earlier that day I had seen a post of a Blogger Biggy making fun of newbies with a patronising and denigrating tone to it, an attitude I can´t stand in people. In retrospect, I actually am grateful he ticked me off, for it was because of that post that I came across Courts Internet Marketing School.

If I could only read one blog, this would definitely be the One, for it goes way beyond other blogs, offering sound advice, inspiration, motivation and tools to improve and keep improving my work. His list of 102 Ways to Make your Blog a backlink Superstar should be obligated material to read for any blogger out there who has a true desire to improve their blog.

So, if you could only read one blog, which one would it be?