If you are trying to make money online but seem to be struggling, barely getting more than a few hundred bucks a month, The Keyword Academy might just be your missing link.

When I first started out trying to make money online, I thought it was going to be really simple. Just put up a site, get some traffic to it and money would start rolling in, or at least that is what many people wanted me to believe it would be like as long as I bought their product first. For some reason I have held on to the simple believe that making money online really isn´t that hard and my learning curve has been bumpy.

I would stay at the same level for months in a row, even though I was doing what I thought was right, and only the occasional “big hit” would keep me going, knowing for sure it was possible to make a living online, I just had to keep at it and plough away working long hours. Somehow though the work that I was doing wasn´t in a direct relation to the money I was earning and like many others I started looking for ways to improve on my return on investment.

I ran into the One Week Marketing Plan that thought me about the importance of keyword research and keep building and linking, and that plan really gave me a big jump ahead. I had been a member at Clickbank for years but it wasn´t untill I got hold of the OWM that I actually started receiving paychecks and seeing more and more sales coming in.

Sweet, really sweet and if anybody asks me what to do when wanting to start making money online, the OWM certainly comes recommended. There is however one glitch to this system and Potpiegirl mentions this herself as well, and that is that in fact you are building your business based on free sites. This shouldn´t have to be a big problem when you stick to the rules, but building your business around free sites has one big drawback… YOU are NOT in control!

I already mentioned having problems with this in the past, when Squidoo didn´t let me access my accounts and didn´t answer any of my attempts to get in touch with them. Since then the problem has been solved somehow, miraculously I would say and basically it looks like it was all based on a glitch in the system.

It did leave me with a stone in my stomach though, feeling I really needed to make sure I was spending more time on my own sites, seeing that I would have way more control over them and I would be able to sell sites and my content in case I wanted to as well.

So I started with FirePow, which I will be posting about in the near future to share my experiences, but right now I wanted to talk to you about The Keyword Academy because it has shown me a huge amount of things in a very short time which I feel could be very benificial to you. Look at it as the missing link in your internet marketing efforts if you aren´t making a lot of money yet.

I am sure you must have heard about the importance of doing keyword research before spending hours and hours working on your site and if you are anything like me, you may be trying to avoid what is probably the most fundamental part of making money online.

RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH

Yep, it is that important to do your research before anything else! But at the same token, don´t let this part freeze you up in your tracks, even though it is probably the most important thing to do when getting started, it is a START. Once you have done your research, you will have to put in the elbowgrease and get to work, creating sites and content and building links, which will take up quite a bit of time.

Back to the research part. Imagine you have an idea to build a site, and just go ahead working on it, writing content, spending hours creating backlinks, writing articles to submit to directories, asking for link exchanges and at one point you start seeing your site showing up on first page in google, receiving more and more traffic each day.

Now, that is a pretty awesome feeling right? Seeing your traffic going up, seeing the number of subscribers grow and your blog receiving more and more comments from peer bloggers. What a great feeling and boy does it grow your ego! But … does it really grow your bank account if all that movement around your site is coming from people that are not willing to spend some money, people that aren´t looking to buy the answer to their problem, don´t find the product they are looking for or are not clicking on any of your ads?

Nope … it won´t get you zilch unless you decide to sell advertisement space directly or offer to write reviews, basically selling link juice on your blog.

This is why you need to do your keyword research before anything else, to make sure that the keywords you are going to target in the future are profitable.

The Keyword Academy – The Missing Link

TKA is run by Court and Mark and both of them are making bick bucks with adsense. If you have ever done any research on making money with adsense and never came across their names, quite frankly I think you should be ashamed of yourself, because these guys have been giving away their information for free for years, high quality top notch information geared towards teaching people to make money online.

I remember when first opening this blog, I actually came across Court´s site and was hooked. I spent hours and hours and hours reading and over year ago I wrote a post about the 3 bloggers that have most helped me in this business. Court is one of them and when he opened The Keyword Academy I made sure I´d read all that came out from there.

A few months ago they set up a private area for members but at the time I was so busy doing other things I put it on my “to-do list” but I kept it on my mind. Anyways, I have now been a member of the TKA for a few weeks and I can only say I am more than impressed with the information and videos they are handing out.

These past few years I have been a member on and off on different sites and programs, all with the thought in the back of my mind that I needed to be a member to learn how to make money, which is why I was a bit weary in the beginning to sign up for another membersite (other then my domains, hosting and the UAW I try to stay clear from recurring costs!) but the great thing about the TKA membership site is that you can test all the information for 1 dollar and if you decide you aren´t getting anything out of it, you cancel your membership through paypal before the month is over and that will be the end of the story.

Being able to cancel your membership through paypal, means you don´t have to contact anybody, you don´t have to give any reason for stopping the membership or anything like that. You just click on unsubscribe and you´re done.

There are two types of membership, the basic one that costs only $29 and the premium account at $33 that also gives you access to the member forum and allows you to download the monthly seminars with Court and Mark (just the seminars are worth that money already!) but both memberships give you access to the keyword crash course videos, showing you how to locate keywords that are worth persuing so that you only put effort in keywords that will make you money.

By the way, before I forget to mention, the links leading towards TKA in this post are my affiliate links and Court and Mark only allow paying members to become affiliates. This means that the only people allowed to promote the program are actually those people that know what they are talking about, because they are actively using the system.

And because I feel this system can really improve your business and I stand 100% behind the knowledge of these two guys and the quality of information they are offering I would like to invite you to try the TKA for FREE the first month.

Yes, you gotta pay the buck to get in, but if you are that short of cash, I would happily return you the buck to your paypal account. I just feel this is a too important opportunity to pass on and I just know from being a member myself that those 95% of the people online not able to make money would highly benefit from The Keyword Academy.

I would recommend you to go for the $33 option so that you can get support in the member forum, which is proving to be a very helpful place, members helping each other and Court and Mark giving away more of their tricks and insights.

Anyways, have a look at The Keyword Academy and let me know what you think. I´d be happy to answer any questions so let´s see those comments!

PS Just in case you didn´t quite get it, TKA teaches you how to find profitable keywords (with a minimum of $50 monthly earning potential per keyword), find if they are worth going after by looking at the competition and knowing whether you can rank well for those keywords before actually building your site. TKA also offers a step by step guide, breaking down the “homework” into digestible steps so that you know exactly what to do in order to build a profitable site and build links to generate traffic. PLUS you get access to the directory of an ever growing number of blogs where you can post short articles to build links PLUS join a private group of TKA members to facilitate blogroll exchanges.

Check it out!!

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?

When I first started learning about making money online, I got all hyped up by reading that there were these great opportunities to just sit behind your computer and fill in forms for companies. And of course I fell for the illusion that I could actually make a lot of money filling in these forms without having to do anything else.

I guess I am not the only person who ever spent money on this type of program because of the large amount of “online survey companies” you can find when googling around a bit. I thought it was a great opportunity, especially after reading all these excellent testimonials of people who were claiming to make hundreds of dollars a month filling in these surveys, working only an hour or so a day.
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Does that ever happen to you, that you have been sitting behind your computer screen with your mind completely blocked, not being able to come up with what to write next and than at the most inconvenient  moment possible, the ideas will come popping up.

That is what just happened to me, I had been working for quite a while and needed to come up with the next article to write on this blog. But after having stared at the screen with my mind completely blank I started looking around for inspiration.
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Still suffering from the flue I just can´t set my mind straight and do the jobs that really need doing, so I reside to reading other blogs and a combo of entrecard-dropping, commenting / stumbling to at least do a bit of linking and socializing.

Marcus got me thinking with his really great post about the way we value ourselves and even though I can only agree with him, I am not going to take my PW banners off, not even when they show it is only $0.02 to advertise on my blog. Why? Because it reminds me daily that I am worth much more than that, just like my Blog Value Widget says.

Continuing with the entrecard dropping, commenting and stumbling process I just feel the urge to check up on the contest going on at Slyvisions.com… a whopping $10.00 for the comment King or Queen of February…. I am running second, having a fierce fight with the present comment Queen who always seems to have 10 comments more than I have. I make a few comments, catching up slightly and when I check back in again, she made the exact number of comments, again 10 comments ahead.

Remembering Marcus´ words, I start calculating a bit and it turns out that even if I win, my time spent commenting will only be valued at $0.25 an hour or so. Worth it? Not really, not at all, … but this competitive monster inside is sticking it´s head up and I just can´t help it…

I keep at it with entrecard, dropping until something else catches my eyes… “Using your domain names in comments is bad too”. This is the one thing that bothers me more than a “great post” comment… a “great post” comment without a name yet instead a keyword or domain name plug. Isn´t that just another way of spamming?

They go on about how putting their domain name in blogs with do-follow is upping their google rank for keywords and how to make sure their comment is not taken as spam…

This tactic really bothers me, especially since I am giving all my commentators plenty of linkluv (between the do-follow, commentluv and most popular commentators, there are 2 links given for every post, plus, making it to the top of commentators, it is another 60-70 links and growing!).

So I have decided to be a bit stricter when allowing comments, not wanting to greet “Viagra for Cheap” nor “Grow your Dick 3 Inches” anymore and having to thank them for their participation in this blog…

Meanwhile I am still thinking about that contest, should I or shouldn´t I give it another go… Looking for some other contests online I soon find there are plenty of others that might be easier to win, and the list of the ones I need to check and see if I have won starts growing.

Only a few minutes left when I come across something that looks pretty exiting… a monthly $1,000.00 prize sponsored by the Thousand Dollar Project. Imagine that, a random winner gets $1,000.00 for commenting on their forum and blog which is about making money online …

Anyways… my daily hour of wasting time is over so somebody is getting back to business.

How cool would it be to have a way to automatically record all your thoughts?
It has happened to me so many times that I would be doing something away from the computer and all these great sentences and thoughts would get into my mind. Good ideas to blog about, interesting questions and different views, only to find they had vanished into thin air as soon as I turned on the old laptop.

I have notebooks and bits of paper just about everywhere you can imagine. The living room, kitchen and lately even in the bathroom; there is nothing like a relaxing shower to have my mind wonder off. My purse is filled with quick notes dotted down on napkins and the same goes for my car.

All these notebooks and bits of paper are filled with short keyword phrases that I can’t seem to be able to put together once I finally sit down and start typing. They are only causing more clutter and frustration.

Those wonderful sentences that lifted my spirit while still inside my head, turn into dry and empty string of words without a soul…

The day I bought this domain I thought it would serve me as a spot to collect all these random thoughts, a fixed place where I could gather all the information and advice found on the Internet and felt was interesting.

But after blogging only for a short period of time, it feels like that initial goal just is not enough anymore, or maybe it is because the process of growth has already started kicking in and I’d better catch up fast. At least that is how it feels to me.

The everlasting search for new input and knowledge has put my mind on overload, but at the same time I feel so enriched when I stumble upon a really awesome blog packed with little gems. Many times they have information on how to improve the quality of blogging, SEO tricks, design how-to´s or newbie blog no-no´s, making me laugh inside about my own stupidities.

The posts that really inspire me are the ones that give me a sense of recognition, letting me know there is actually a real person sitting on the other side of the screen, no matter how far away you can almost feel their passion for what they do, and reading between the lines you realize they really care about what they send out into the world.

And by doing so, they make you go back in time, read stuff they have written weeks, months or even years ago, not wanting to miss out on a single word. Every time you go back to their blog, you just hope there will be a new fresh post to enjoy and think about and if there isn’t, you know you are given some extra time to read through their archives, before taking in more freshly written content.

Today I had to think about the goal I have with my blog, and while the road hasn’t yet been completely set nor clarified, I know in my heart what I desire this blog to become: A Blog with a Soul, reaching out to others and maybe even touch them with my words.

I am convinced I will get there, one post at a time.

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?