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?

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!

Check out the FP blogging software

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 just wanted to give you a last update on my article marketing and One Week Marketing Plan challenge before I am off enjoying life offline for a bit.

As you could already have seen in the other updates, I didn´t get to work my regular schedule of setting up my promotional plan because of problems I have been experiencing with Squidoo. As it turns out, the problem is related to my internet access which is a really poor connection, seeing that I live out in the country side and have no landlines here to get a high speed connection.

Anyways I really do hope to get that sorted in the next few months or so, seeing that without a good connection, I am losing a lot of time as you might imagine.

At the start of the challenge I had set up 6 squidoo lenses and added content on them and then went on doing the steps in the One Week Marketing Plan. Now for any of you who is struggling to make money online, I really think it is worth to have a look at this program, it is not just great for beginners to get the idea of how to set up an online promotion, for those who have been working online and felt they were not getting good enough results, this program goes into a lot of detail and lays out a plan and working schedule. I know I got a lot out of it so far!

So, I had the lenses, went on to doing off site promotion and also set up a website of my own that would be supported by article marketing and the squidoo lenses, or at least that was the basic idea until I ran into my squidoo problems and wasn´t able to access my lenses to adapt them and link more.

That I gotta say, got me thinking big time about the use of free sites to promote a product. Now the basic idea behind the one week marketing is to use just sites that are free, so apart from investing some money into learning the ropes (investing in your own skills!) there is no other investment required because all the tools you use are free. However, and I think Jennifer, the author of this plan, is right when saying that as soon as you can, you should spend some money on buying your own website and use the free resources explained to promote that website, giving it more authority in Google because of the already set up pages on high PR sites.

Seeing that I could not fully use Squidoo for this project, I immediately set up a website on my own domain to make sure I could continue with my challenge and would use the squidoo lenses to back up that domain. Hope that makes sense to you all!

What I have seen so far

Keeping in mind that my project has only been “live” for a week now and a few article directories are still in the process of approving my articles that I submitted, and the initial problems I had with my squidoo lenses, I can only say that the project has been a success so far for a number of reasons:

• I was able to stick to my working schedule even though a lot of unforeseen things happened
• I am already seeing traffic coming in on my squidoo lenses and on my own site
• I am already getting hits on the product I am promoting
• And the best of all, I already got one sale!

Plus posting this challenge online has already done a few other things I wasn´t really thinking of when starting. I have gotten a few ideas for future posts that might be of interest for you, so if you haven´t signed up for my RSS you better do so now to make sure you don´t miss out on my future posts.

I have been doing quite a bit of article marketing over the past week and been playing around with different ways of distributing articles, how to write them to get more hits and what to do to increase views. So I think a post will be coming up soon, going more into depth on how to write articles for article submission, what to do and what not to do and things you need to understand when getting into article marketing.

Instead of just submitting to EzineArticles, I have been trying out different article directories, and another future post will be a more detailled post on different article directories, how to use them and what to look for. They are all different and offer different options when it comes to building links, so you better not miss those posts if you want to go into article marketing.

Another thing that has happened these last weeks is being invited as a guest writer on different blogs. Now I know I said a month or so ago that I wouldn´t be doing any promotion for this blog anymore, meaning I wasn´t going to be using any of the “social link building techniques” so widely promoted by everybody and their dog. It is still too early to tell what the impact will be for that decision, but for now I can share that my rss subscribers have gone up with 25 this last week, and google analytics is showing me an increase of 20% in visitors to my site.

I can only say that I am really happy with that and want to take this moment to give a thanks to all of you visitors, leaving interesting comments both here and in my mailbox, I highly appreciate any feedback and the support is wonderful.

Back to the invitation to do guest posts, I am still thinking of that and will probably send you an article if I find them good enough to post on another blogs, just know I am not forgetting about it

The last thing I saw actually made me chuckle, I was being called the “Buzz Killer” by Caleb because of my post on using massive traffic techniques and whether you should follow the hype or not. I would like to repeat here that if what you are doing right now is getting you the results you are after, by all means keep doing that.

If however you are not getting the wanted results by spending hours and hours of work and effort maybe it is time to think for yourself and analise those efforts in order to find a more productive way to work. I will be posting more of my own thoughts on that in the near future as well.

I will be keeping you guys updated of course on my little challenge project but for now I am going to prepare myself for a nice little break and enjoy life offline for a week or so. It will be my birthday this Sunday… time flies when you are having fun … and I am having my mom and a friend over for a week to celebrate and have a little holiday here on the sunny coast of Spain, so if you wonder why there aren´t any new posts for a while, it is because we are having a blast!

See you back next week!

Dennis Edell, my friend over at DirectSalesWebMarketing has recently (re-)started two blogs and because of that, and because he again proves to come up with some great ideas, he is holding a special contest that will end the 31st of January.

For more details on that please look at the end of this post, because right now I wanted to go straight to the bigger matter, Dennis Edell´s new blogs:

DennisEdell.com

Now I have to tell you, every time I buy a new domain at godaddy, I am told that the domain name with my own name is still available and every time I decline. Boy do I wish I had a marketable name like Dennis Edell has but that put to the site.

More important of course is that over the time that I have been reading Dennis over at DirectSalesWebMarketing, I have come to really appreciate him as a blogger and as a person.

I am actually glad that he decided to get DennisEdell.com back up and running because I think he will do well. If you are unfamiliar with this blogging legend, his about page will tell you more about him. What I hope for this blog to turn into, is another place I can visit daily knowing that there will be interesting posts.

So why do I think this blog is worth visiting?

I have been following Dennis Edell´s post on his other blog and have always enjoyed the posts he came up with. My hopes are set high for this new revamped blog since it will be covering a broader spectrum of things, not just internet marketing but anything that rocks his boat.

Cool thing is that he himself is asking his visitors exactly what they would like to read on his blog, so head over there and leave your comment! I am sure that will give him some more thoughts to write about, because quite frankly, the only thing really missing right now, is quantity of posts… the quality is already there!

EasyCashContests.com

Now to be honest, I have actually toyed with the idea quite a while ago to start a blog just like that, to cover all the contests going on online and be able to participate in all of them so that I wouldn´t have to use any of my own blogs to post.

If you have a good look around you will find a zillion contests going on every day and I am sure that a person dedicating his/her time to participating in all of them, would actually be able to make a pretty decent living out of.

But then again, who really has the time to go and find current updated contests that will get you cash instead of mumbojumbo?

It looks like Dennis Edell however is going to put in the work for everybody wanting to participate in cash contests at his EasyCashContests blog.

Like he says in his about page, only contests will be listed that actually offer cold hard cash and knowing Dennis a little bit, I am sure he will only list those contests that are really worth participating in. How is that for a time-saver?

I highly recommend his EasyCashContests blog if you are looking for big bucks to win online, right now he is featuring contests for people interested in creathing delish dishes,… first prizes …. $500!!

Now being the swell guy that he is, Dennis is holding his own contest as well to give his readers the opportunity to start off the year with an extra $100 first prize and loads of other prizes.

Meanwhile, I am keeping my fingers crossed to win the $100 myself or some other goodies!!

For more information about the contest that he is holding on his blog right now, you can go to the contest post or check out the huge amount of prizes to be won below. Remember, the contest finishes the 31st of January so put on your writing boots and take a shot at all the lovely goodies!

Sponsors & Prizes:

CASH VIA PAYPAL:

Dennis Edell @ Beginner Marketing Tips – $25

Dennis Edell @ Win Cash Online – $25

Dennis Edell @ DennisEdell.com – $25

Yep, he is personally putting up $75 .

Mirjam @ MeMyselfAndIBlog – $10

Wei Liang @ ABloggerBlog – $10

Rodel @ Lagahit.com – $25

Suzanne Franco @ SuzanneFranco.com – $30

BANNER ADS (1 month ea. w/value if available):

Sherry @ SherrysShopping – 125×125

Sherry @ PinkyPosh – 125×125

Sherry @ AnotherContest – 125×125

Wei Liang @ ABloggerBlog – 125 x 125 ($10)

Superman Joe @ PostBlogger – 300 x 250

Sharmin @ ContestSpot – 125×125

Erwin Tan @ ErwinTan.com – 125×125 ($20)

Jonathan @ How To Blog – 125×125 ($15)

Garry Conn @ GarryConn.com – 468×60 ($70)

ZK @ WebTrafficROI – 125×125 ($20)

Yan @ Blog Setup – 125×125 ($20)

Archie Pennies @ SomeExtraPennies – 125 x 125 for 4 months

TEXT LINKS:

Collin @ FeedFlare – life time blog roll link

Harish @ BloggingKid – 1 month text link ad

Archie Pennies @ SomeExtraPennies – site wide blog roll link for 4 months

EBOOKS:

Peter Lee @ Make Money Blogging – New Home Study Course,”Quit Being a Wage Slave in 10 Easy Steps” ($47)

Ben Pei – @ Make Money Online – Instant Blog Traffic ($47)

Kathy Hendershot-Hurd @ VirtualImpax – 8 Week Power Blog Launch product ($77)

BLOG REVIEWS:

Mirjam @ MeMyselfAndIBlog – Blog Review ($25)

Superman Joe @ PostBlogger – Blog Review

Nishadha @ rumblinglankan - Blog Review ($20)

ENTRECARD CREDITS:

Sherry @ Heart Random – 500 EC
Sherry @ Name Sherry – 500 EC
Sherry @ SherryGo – 500 EC

Rodel @ Cebupacificairphilippines – 1000 EC

Nishadha @ rumblinglankan – 1000 EC
Nishadha @ YeastInfectionInDogs – 1000 EC

Wiehanne @ Wiehanne Lounge – 500 EC
Wiehanne @ Medan Daily – 500 EC
Wiehanne @ SimplyWP – 500 EC

OTHER:

David R Young Jr @ Niche-It – custom squeeze page template package ($7)

Brian D. Hawkins @ ExtremeEzine – one year Pro membership to YourAdTracker ($39.95)

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.
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Now before you think this is the only book that completely influenced how I think, I have to say that is not true. During my time online I have come across several books that had a major impact on my life and way of thinking, but this book actually is responsible for the “Big Transition”.

So what do I mean to say by “Big Transition”?

I feel I can split my online existence, my experience and time online as you may say, in 2 periods.
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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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