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?

If you are into affiliate marketing you must have heard about the Squidoo Policy changes by now, changes that I feel will make Squidoo a better place. As you know I have been “into” Squidoo ever since I got the One Week Marketing Plan a few months ago and so far my work of building squidoo lenses has proven to be very benificial.

I did run into problems a while back though when all of a sudden I couldn´t get into any of my lenses, which I wrote about while doing my squidoo study case, and the whole situation made me realize again just how important it is to keep control over your own content, especially if that content is created to make you money.

That little glitch a few months ago was actually a good thing even though I was pretty shocked and upset when it first happened and I couldn´t access my lenses, lenses that I had spent quite a bit of time on to create.

So I decided to create most of my content on my own domains so that no matter what happened I´d have the control over it, at the same time sticking with the One Week Marketing Plan to keep growing my business and building links to my own sites.

In come the Squidoo Policy Changes and to be honest, I am really glad that they are going to slap down the crappy content and spammy lenses. I am not too worried that a lot of my lenses being locked or deleted because when creating them I did put effort in the content, making sure it was totally unique and quality content, plus I have not been linking too much to products they now consider big no-no´s and I am pretty sure I am not linking out too much to the same domain, so that is gonna be fine too.

I will have to go over all of them before the 15th of July which is when they will turn on the “squidoo slapping machine” just to ensure my content is 100% ok, the linking is ok and my content will be protected. In order words this means making a back up of the content I have on Squidoo at present so that IF they decide something isn´t up to scratch, I can still use it somewhere else if I feel I should.

I am also not too worried about the squidoo slap because I started with the FirePow system 2 weeks ago in order to create more blogs of my own, on my own domains and just use squidoo for them as another way of building links.

My original thought was to use the FirePow system to create a whole load of blogs, put content on them and promote them through the nifty promotional tools FirePow offers and use OWM to give them another push up the rankings in combination with article marketing.

And now seeing the squidoo policy changes all I can say is that I am glad that I already started protecting the “eggs in my basket” by putting most of my content on my own pages already, and that I am looking forward to seeing Squidoo become a higher quality site again, taking care of all the spam practices that have been going on for too long!

What are your thoughts? Do you work with Squidoo? Are you scared to see your content be slapped and deleted?

After the big improvements I am seeing with One Week Marketing Plan I decided it was about time to start excelerating the growth of my online business and finally fell for FirePow. If you have read my last post on the CB Notify plugin and other tools you can use to make your job with ClickBank easier, you could see a screenshot of the earnings I made in a day with CB.

I am grateful for these earnings that I accomplished because of the One Week Marketing Plan but also realise that I am still far from where I want to go, there still are days that sales are slower and others that I see a big jump of 3, 4 or more sales a day. So I am working hard on making the process of money coming in more consistent and reliable.

If you have been a reader of this blog, you must have seen some “messages from the Universe” and this morning I received another one that made me write this post:

Very simply, Mirjam,

the more that you accept responsibility for,

the more power you have.

Doesn’t that rock?

Love,
The Universe

Thought that was a really good message, and it certains holds truth for me. See, I have been fluttering around for way too long, trying all sorts of things like many other people do when they first start out making money online. Many of these people never get any further than making a few bucks online and give up, thinking it isn´t possible for them.

But really, the only person responsible for your earnings online, is you.

The so called “money making products” aren´t responsable for your earnings (or lack of earnings in most cases) nor the advice you take from others. The only person responsable is you. YOU.

In a world that has come accostumed to blaming all the bad on others, the MMO scene really isn´t any different. So many people blame the bad products, the scams and whatever they can think of to not take responsability for slow results. They claim it can´t be done, that they work hours and hours a day, they have thrown away money on crappy products, they can´t afford to sign up for excellent services or training and the list of excuses goes on and end.

And of course, the latest newest excuse is a widely accepted one, the worldwide financial crisis.

Well, I have had enough of it! I have had enough of the excuses, I have had enough of all those negative thoughts and people, saying that “IT” can´t be done, holding on to their negative believes that in the end only bring them down even more!

See, in my area of Spain, unemployment has gone up in a shocking speed, latest news I´ve heard was that the percentage of people unemployed in my area is approaching 20% and unemployment in the whole of Spain belongs to the highest of Europe, yet one of the biggest Spanish football clubs was able to pay a total of over 150 million euros to buy only 2 new players (Kaka and Ronaldo) …

People around me all talk about the crisis, about so and so losing their job, about no money being available anywhere and I am seeing many foreigners trying to sell their homes so they can return to their countries and at times it seems the country has gone mad. The newspapers all feature horrible stories about people in need, disasters and accidents and yet another scam some political hotshot pulled off.

Yet, when digging deeper and skipping over to the job vacancies, I see plenty of jobs available, even more than say 6 months ago. I talked to a friend of mine who wanted to renovate part of his hotel and he kept complaining that it was impossible to find people to do the job. I think the crisis is in the head of many people, and of course I know many people have been laid off and many banks and big companies have fallen down from their pedestal, but really …

YOU are the one responsable for your own earnings when working online.

I know that sounds hard, and I am probably kicking many people in the behind or offending them by saying it so bluntly, but before starting to shout at me, take a real honest look at your own situation, and instead of spending a lot of time complaining  and bitching, moaning and blaming others, put that time to work in a productive way and change your mindset!

If I am able to increase my earnings the way I have been doing lately, you can too!

Now, back to the title of this post, I really do believe this is the best time to start excelerating your business growth despite the financial crisis, I´d rather say that the financial crisis going on everywhere around us, should be the biggest impulse to grow your business and stay far ahead of others that aren´t willing to put in the elbow grease.

So, I have been building blogs, I have been building lenses and OWM projects, I have even started writing my own products to start selling online (and no, they don´t have anything to do with the MMO scene, rather the subject is my true passion, horses and all sorts of therapies) and been trying to streamline the process to get more done in less time.

A big step I have taken the other day was signing up for FirePow, a tool to put blogging on high speed. I had heard of it many times already and looked at what it would do for my business (or what it claims it could do for that matter) but to be honest I was constantly put off by one thing and only one thing, the monthly cost of $127 and I am sure many of you would be put off by that as well.

And yes, it did hurt a bit to pull out the ol´ credit card and put my words into action, but the way I see it is that I can completely combine the OWM with FirePow and but my whole blogging business on speed, saving a lot of time while taking advantage of the built in tools to increase promotion (and thus more sales coming in!)

So far it has been 3 days since I have signed up and in those 3 days I have managed to set up 2 new blogs and almost completed the work I want to do in order to have them being updated for the next 2 months on autopilot, with unique, interesting and informative quality content, videos and pictures. The actual set up took a few minutes which included installing wordpress, theme and plugins for both blogs so that was a big time saver. Actually amazing to see that being done from the same control panel inside FirePow without having to go all different places, cpanels and ftp servers.

Now, to be fair and honest, 3 days is far from enough time to have all the knowledge and experience to be able to give a full complete review, so I am only sharing my experiences and thoughts so far, at the end of my month you can expect to see a full review and results of what I have managed to do with FirePow so sign up for my RSS if you are interested in speeding up and growing your online business.

Some of the excellent features I have been using so far:

• Universal panel to control all your blogs at the same place
• Instant set up of new blogs complete with wp software, themes and plugins
• Free videos that explain all the features of FirePow in a visual manner
• Automatically pulling content for your keywords to build your blog
• Automatically find free stockpictures from within your post, keyword based and added to your posts
• Automatically adding RSS to different RSS directories
• Automatic bookmarking set up to 20 bookmarking sites

Like I said, I am still far from using all the tools that come in the FirePow control panel, but so far I can only say that I am well impressed and have good hopes for it paying for itself in the next month or so and more. I still have to explore all the tools to create many backlinks to my blogs, part of that is the private blog network they have in FirePow containing hundreds of blogs where you can post your short articles with links, and I haven´t fully explored the RSS and social bookmarking yet, although touching the surface on that is already proving to work.

So you might think, Mirjam, you always keep saying that you aren´t gonna spend another dime on mmo products and yet you forked out $127 for blogging software and yes, that is a very legit thought.

Maybe you remember that a few months ago I wrote about having problems with Squidoo and not being able to log in to any of my squidoo accounts. That problem has since been solved and it basically had to do with my internet connection, but still, it lingered in the back of my mind that all my work at squidoo could dissappear for just about any reason.

And yes, I still believe OWM is an excellent way to learn how to make money, how to do keyword research, find profitable niches and products to promote and set up promotional products. It has actually taken over most of my other online work and is starting to form a major part of my income, not just through Clickbank but other affiliate networks as well.

However I have come to the point that I don´t want to have free resources to become the major part of my income, especially since I don´t have any control over those resources so I want to use the OWM lenses created as a means of back up support to my own sites. After all, I do have control over my own sites, can sell them if I want to and build my website portfolio, and the squidoo lenses are a great way to give extra weight to them.

The FirePow blogging software now actually enables me to build new blogs in a very short period of time, promote them, automate them and take them along in my OWM projects and the way I see it now, it is looking to be the perfect combination.

I will be posting on this combination more over the course of the next few weeks as well as share my personal experiences with this blogging software, but I´d be happy to see your thoughts, questions and comments, maybe you have been working with FirePow already and want to share some insider tips with me!

One last note, if you do decide to have a look at the FirePow software, you will see that you can actually import your excisting blogs into the FirePow control panel and use the promotional tools on those blogs, but unfortunately this feature is under maintance at present so if that would be your only reason to sign up, wait. I have already contacted the online support (pretty cool to have online chat support as to not waste time waiting for your questions to be answered!) and they have told me it would be a few more days. I will of course let you know once this feature is up and running again.

If you are still reading (sorry this became a pretty long post nearing 2000 words LOL) I hope you have a great weekend and think about all the things I have said in this post…

You are the only one responsable for your online success!

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