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

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!

Here is a really blatant post because I felt it important to get the word out.

I sincerely believe this is a great product that helps a lot of people making money online (including me!)

If you have recently thought of getting the One Week Marketing Plan, NOW is the time!

PotPieGirl is offering a special 50% discount meaning that instead of paying $47 you only pay half!

Plus, my offer still stands, buy it through my link and I will help you, just like I said in my last post!

For the special offer

valid untill 12:01 am EST, April 1, 2009

go here:

Get the Plan at 50% of the Regular Price!

So it has been little over a week that I decided to give MN a second run and have to say it has done a lot for my “learning curve” as well as my productivity level. When I first joined MN I had a quick look around at the free guides they are offering for the affiliate program but now that I am back there, I decided to actually give it a real shot and started reading the guides.

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

So what have I during last week?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you don´t have the basics though,

there is nothing to tweak nor improve!

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

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

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

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

To Our Success! 

If you have been online for a while I am sure you have run in to all different kinds of scams, especially when you were just starting out to make a living online.

Over a year ago, by accident I clicked on some link of what was supposedly to be an “investment opportunity” offering a 10% profit on money you would put in the program, the wonderful thing about it was that it would only take a day to get your money back, plus the 10%.

Yeah right, I thought, nobody is going to return that kind of money in a day! But… it did stay on my mind and like many others, I thought it would be fun to see what happened, after all, greed is what keeps these programs up and running… greed and stupidity I should add.

So, I put in a few bucks to play and surprise surprise, the next day they had actually sent me my bucks plus the 10% profit, which they had promised. I repeated the whole thing and after only a week or so, I had actually made a whopping $223 profit, paid into my egold account!

I decided to call it a day, not wanting to get overexcited and way greedy, losing the money I had earned. Instead I started talking about this program with a friend of mine because I could just not figure out how this was actually possible. He got all exited about it and decided to try it too, only with a bigger amount even after
Warning I was not really sure how it all worked, just that it had worked for me.

I got a call from him the day after he put his money in, saying that he was trying to log into the website in order to cash out, but that the website had disappeared… Now, you might have expected this turn of events, the saying “if it sounds to good to be true, it usually is” proved right yet another time.

We did continue to invest this kind of programs though; he even started a blog because of the whole scam Ponzi schemes and has learned a lot about investing the “right” way and actually making money on it, but learned it the hard way.

Nowadays, after personal experience with all different types of scams, ponzi schemes, pyramids and the lot, I see programs popping up which are a lot harder to recognize as such.
For example programs for which you are required to write reviews on whatever you decide yourself, and they are actually sending flat rates of a few bucks into your account for only a few minutes of your time. Great to see your account growing only until you reach your pay out minimum and find your account cancelled or banned for reasons nobody can explain. There are many variations on this one, especially with getting paid to read, getting paid to write, job opportunities you need to pay for in order to enrol and start making big bucks and the list goes on.

So today I just wanted to send out a little warning, before signing up for anything, before sending your money to some program which offers you big bucks when you participate, before spending hours and hours clicking mails, writing comments and the lot, do a search engine check on the program combined with the word “scam” …

It will save you a lot of time, sweat and money!

For the last few weeks I have been thinking about an investment idea of mine. Now, I must admit, none of my ideas so far have been very successful but I just refuse to give up on trying. This idea though is different. It has to do with one of my passions in life, and is related to a niche product. I had been reading in the past about starting online businesses and e-stores but never really came across anything that I felt would be a good product for me to promote.

A few weeks ago however, while navigating different sites to buy something for myself, within my passion, I came across a wholesaler in China, offering products which I personally wanted to buy, at only 5-10% of regular prices I had seen so far. After writing back and forth (in the beginning I did not realise it was a wholesale company) I found out that I would have to buy at least 10 units of every product I would like to order, which kind of has put me back for a bit.

Initial step would be around 110 euros for buying 10 units plus having them shipped to my home, which would set unit cost at 11 euros. I have been looking around at eBay and other shops selling this exact item and the lowest I have been able to find so far was 40 euros. Now, I would not want to go as high as 40 euros, I would rather set the price at 25 euros, seeing that I am passionate about my niche and believe products are way too expensive, making it too complicated for the “regular man” to buy them. Buying just 1 product at the time, something I would really want to have myself, so I would be passionate about promoting it both on another website of mine and on eBay and then when having sold at least 4 of them, having gained my initial investment back, I would buy 1o units from another item and so on.

I am 99% convinced this would possibly be a great investment with many possibilities of future growth, but …

I know, many online gurus recommend not investing any money you can’t afford to lose, and I am ashamed to admit that right now, I don’t even have the 110 euros to spare.  Maybe a good thing because it really pushes me to both think and rethink this idea, plus search advice from others while scraping those 110 together.

But, since I do not believe in coincidences, I decided to go ahead and publish this post, which I had already written last week, after reading Terence Chang´s Show me the Money and China series.Any comments and/or advice would be highly appreciated!!