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!!

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!

Funny how Murphy´s Law is getting in the way this week, planning a more intense promotional project to go “public” with and the exact same week I am experiencing major problems with my computer and especially accessing my squidoo account.

No Dennis… not being hit here with the “worm” (wasn´t that an April Fools Day joke??) and no Alex, I didn´t end up putting my laptop in the fridge. I wish solving this would have been as easy as just cooling my laptop off (note: I am not suggesting anybody should put their laptop in the fridge!!!!!!!)

So what have I done these past days, apart from starting up my squidoo lens project according to the One Week Marketing Plan and submitting articles left and right to different directories and what not?

I have spent 5 hours chatting with firefox tech support, going through the normal turmoil of trying all the “basic moves” to “de-bug” firefox, then trying to actually have the support guy understand what my real problem was and finally the last 2 hours of my chat doing all sort of maneouvres to locate if my problem had anything to do with firefox.

Well… 5 hours to figure out that firefox wasn´t at the base of me not being able to log in to my squidoo account, which I really needed to do to in order to follow all the OWM steps completely.

Plus being an aries (count down has started for my birthday wheehaaa) and vary hard headed, whenever something is not working I just can´t stop before I have figured out exactly what is going wrong. So, I could load the initial squidoo home page, even could get as far as the login page and then when putting my login details and wanting to enter my dashboard … nothing happened … all I got was a blank page …

First day this happened I just thought, oh well, I just keep working doing off page SEO for the lenses which should really be the biggest focus anyways, so I kept writing and writing. Second day though (yesterday, I still couldn´t log in and it started bugging me because there were still things I had to do on my lenses. I figured I´d better do article marketing first, but when finishing that part of my day I really felt I had to find a solution, resulting in all sorts of maneouvres on my laptop, my browsers, my internet connection, the lot.

Then I spent 5 hours with the FF support, so at least ruled that out, and another 2 hours on the phone with my internet provider… that always stresses me because it seems they don´t have a clue what they are talking about anyways so I was about ready to either throw my laptop against the wall or in fact follow Alex suggestion and cool it off …and I still could not enter.

By this time I had asked several friends to check if my lenses were still “alive” which they are, but I couldn´t even send a bug feedback message to squidoo because even that page showed me nothing but a blank page..

This situation does make me think though about a lot of issues I will be writing about in the near future and hopefully find out what the real cause is.

So far it seems though that I have figured out what is going on, but until I know for sure I better shut up LOL

By mid-day today I was so stressed out about it, that I completely turned off my laptop and close the door behind me, not doing anything but enjoying the Spanish spring sun and just relaxing to cool down and put things in perspective.

For those following this case study, you might have noticed a new button on the top of this page, “Case Study”. At present it is still pass word protected, sorry for that, but the work I have put into this project will be laid out over there, plus hopefully the number of sales it generates and the protection will come off in a few weeks time, but I will update you guys on that of course.

That´s about it for now, you win some battles and this week I´ve been losing some from technology, but the fight isn´t over till you-know-who sings.

Today is my first day of the personal challenge announced the other day and like I said before, it is giving me a bit of the jitters to record the progress publicly but I am hoping to show you some good results and what is more important, share what I have been learning from and doing with the One Week Marketing Plan. Who knows, it may just be that “secret golden plan” that will bring you internet riches too!

So far I have been working a few hours now, mainly on creating squidoo lenses. My initial idea was to create double the amount, but over the weekend I have decided to better create 5 lenses to be proud of, and focus all my efforts on link building and trying to get those lenses up in rankings to get organic traffic.

It was a choice between keeping my word, building 10 lenses and spread out the promotional efforts, or changing the challenge a bit, building 5 lenses and bust my ass promoting them more focused.

What would you have done?

Do you think I made the right decision by focusing more and making sure those lenses are ranking well before diverting my efforts onto other lenses, or should I have made the 10 which would have taking more combined work to rank well?

Anyways, even though today I should have been doing the prep work, I actually already got to do that, so this morning I started building the lenses, which are up now but not live yet, but wanted to get them “featured” as soon as possible in order to finish the last tidbits on them as soon as possible (yeah…you better get the One Week Marketing yourself or you´ll miss out on some valuable information Jennifer is giving to build some super duper lenses).

So what else will I be doing today… apart from finishing the lenses, I have also done the groundwork to set up a small site on wordpress, that still needs some work done to contain 10 articles and some sort of review or other idea I have in my mind to promote “the product”.

That leaves me with writing 10 new articles to submit to ezine, doing some more tweaking and setting up a free blog and other accounts to do more promotion tomorrow, just wanted to get this post out to you guys before going back to work. Wish me luck!

A quick reminder if you haven´t signed up for the One Week Marketing Plan yet, you can still get it at 50% of the regular price by buying it through my link before April 1st 12:01 am EST, now that is what I call an offer you shouldn´t resist, especially if you are struggling to make a decent income online!

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!

It is always so nice when things go according to the plan and even nicer to wake up and see money was added to your accounts.

I just knew that working on the One Week Marketing Plan would be the right thing for me when I first bought it and I was right. Yes it is work and quite a bit of it, but it is starting to pay off faster than any of the other projects I have ever started and sales are starting to trickle in.

Last week I actually built 2 lens projects, although I have to add here that I did outsource some of the writing work in order to be able to finish the 2 projects. I wanted to work ahead to feel guilt free if I wouldn´t be able to finish another lens project this week, because I have to be working a lot on 2 of the websites I have, writing a lot of content and making them upto scratch.

Instead of my normal attitude of “ok, I will just catch up later” I felt I had to stick to my one OWM project a week so I decided last week to work ahead. This way I will be guilt free LOL and it will give me time to do some refreshing on my lenses as well.

A friend of me asked me last week what I was writing about when I told her about this “new venture” down in to Affiliate Marketing Lane so I gave her some of the topics of my lenses. She got this blank stare in her eyes and actually looked a bit puzzled, … and then asked me if this was really what I enjoyed doing, writing about topics I didn´t have a clue about and really didn´t sound all that exciting.

LOL, I can totally understand her question, and no, the writing part really isn´t always that pleasant. In fact, it will be the first thing that I will completely outsource once the clickbank payments are in.

I do like the building lenses part though, making them look pretty, making sure all lenses are linked, following the other steps of the OWM plan and the bit that is called “Getting Your Cash!!!”

And even more today, seeing that my projects actually made 3 sales…

Thank you One Week Marketing Plan, thank you for being so easily digestible and easy to finish within a week, and thank you PotPieGirl for sharing this system you use to make big bucks… I am on my way!!!

Today´s post will only be a short one, but I really didn´t want to pass up on the opportunity to get you a Free Squidoo Guide, because the more I learn and get to work with Squidoo, the more I am starting to love it!

If you have gotten to read my post on Socializing and Blog Commenting you already know that I am not too fond of using social sites as a means to do promotion for my websites and you might wonder why I like to Squidoo seeing that I am so against spending my time socializing.

True, that is a valid argument, after all, you can do quite a bit of socializing on Squidoo itself and get in touch with a huge amount of other lensmasters by adding favorites and commenting on their lenses, but for me that is not the main goal when building lenses.

My main goal is to provide good quality information and learn to build nice lenses that in turn will provide me with income and no matter how high you jump or how hard you scream, I keep believing that the most profitable traffic is the traffic that comes from search engines, in other words, people that are looking for an answer to their problem and are willing to pay once they can actually get that answer.

In my last post, Build a Business Online and Start Earning Money, I already outlined just what I am working on right now so I won´t get into any details on that anymore, but I will be sharing my earnings on that in the (hopefully near) future once my One Week Marketing projects are really starting to hit it big.

Anyways, in order to improve my lens building abilities I have found a Free Squidoo Guide that helped me create those first few lenses and made it so much easier to get around “Squidoo Space”, that I thought it would be a good idea to share this Free Squidoo Guide with you.

You can download this guide for free and even if you are not planning on building lenses using the One Week Marketing Plan, it is still a very useful guide to find your way around Squidoo and start building lenses to get your websites some extra push forward!

If you have been trying to build a business online and so far failed to make any money I would encourage you to read on. If you are struggling to get targeted traffic to your site and make affiliate sales this article will definitely be of interest to you.

But please don’t make the mistake of thinking that there is a magical program available that will make you rich without having to work for it, because this program does involve working in order to set up your own online business.

Following all the steps involved though will allow you to create multiple income streams without having to invest a huge amount of money to get started today and will allow you to create a solid business online over time.

Having chased the dream of getting rich quickly and jumping from one program to another without huge results myself has almost made me to give up on creating a business online. Fed up with investing my money and time I was close to throwing in the towel until I realized I myself was my worse enemy.

My way of continuously wasting my time on activities that did not get me any further had stopped me from finding a work schedule I could stick to and grow a business, instead I was coming up with a zillion ideas and projects without really seeing them through.

In comes the One Week Marketing Plan

I had been reading about this plan a few times already but thought it would just be another rehashed product like all the others that are coming out daily and being promoted by everybody and their dog, so I did not pay too much attention to it at first.

The more I got to think about it however, the more sense it started making sense to me, especially the credo of the author:
“If you’re willing to do for a year what others won’t, you can do for a lifetime what others can’t”

A few weeks ago I finally bought the OWM plan for one reason and one reason only, I needed a real plan I could stick to and start working on setting up a real online business instead of flying round from one thing to the next.

I needed a structure, a strategy, and a marketing plan that works.

Now that I have tested it for a few weeks myself and already see sales coming in I decided it was time to write a review on this program that is helping me to grow my online business and makes me work in a more productive way than ever before.

• What Does This Marketing Plan Consist Of?

• What are the Costs of the Marketing Plan?

• What I Don’t Like About this Marketing Plan

• What I Love About this Marketing Plan

What Does The Marketing Plan Consist Of?

The One Week Marketing Guide

The OWM guide consists of 65 pages loaded with all the information you need to start building different income streams using free methods.

This guide is focused on building squidoo lenses and goes into detail on how to set up different projects to promote affiliate products you want to promote. It is a step-by-step guide that is easy to follow and shows a lot of tricks of the trade the author is using herself and that earn her thousands of dollars each month.

The One Week Marketing Action Plan

The short version of the OWM guide, 5 pages of length that will keep you on track. It is set up to build one project in a week and has the daily tasks laid out easily so all you need to do is follow every step.

One week, now that really doesn’t sound too bad now does it? One week to focus on promoting one product. (A project I built actually made me a sale a week later and is looking promising for the future).

The One Week Marketing Mind Maps

A cool tool if you need to envision how to grow your different income streams and shows exactly how to set up a link network to promote and build those income streams.

The One Week Marketing Checklists

A checklist I would recommend you print out per week project so that you can tick off all the things you already did and see easily what still needs to be done. It also offers the room to track the progress of each project so that you can tweak and improve different aspects of it.

A Conversation with Nick

139 Pages of an actual conversation between the author and one of her students. This is actually a great addition to the OWM plan, because you can read and follow exactly how the student set up his first project and the advice given to improve. Very inspiring to see sales were made but you will find it even more inspiring once you start making those sales yourself.

And there is more:

Apart from these 5 guides you will also receive free lifelong updates and notifications, which will ensure your OWM, plan stays on top of the latest information available and just last week I also received an excellent 72-page guide that went into detail on how to perform productive keyword research.

A great addition to the program, which explains what to look for before starting a new product. But not just that, it is now helping me with any of my online activities in order to become more productive, in other words, creating more targeted traffic.

What are the Costs Involving this Marketing Plan?

The OWM itself costs only $47 but if you are still weary about investing in your future you can sign up to receive a free 18 page preview of the course. If you have been failing to make money with affiliate marketing though, I would certainly recommend you invest those $47 in OWM and thus in your future.

Apart from that initial investment, you don’t need to pay a dollar more, since the OWM plan is focusing on using free methods to create a multiple affiliate marketing income stream.

However, please realize that it is wise to re-invest some of the money in domains to redirect your affiliate links and later down the line use all the knowledge and learning experiences to create your own successful websites in combination with using the free techniques.

What I Don’t Like About this Marketing Plan

At present it is highly focusing on building squidoo lenses which was something I wasn’t used to creating so it took a bit to get the hang of finding my way around Squidoo, but once I started the process of creating more lenses, things started to become a lot easier so you will have to stick with it to start seeing results. (I made my first sale a week after the creation of a small project and it could have been a lot faster had I followed the steps exactly the way it is explained, now I do see though that it is working… the best motivation!)

Another thing I was a bit puzzled about was the way the keyword research was presented, and I had to go through quite a few of her posts to build a research sheet myself with the information I had collected in order to easily track the research before deciding on keywords to base my projects on.

If you decide to buy the OWM through this article, please feel free to contact me with your name and number of the receipt and I will send you the research sheet I created so that you can do your own research easier and faster and have long tail keywords for future promotion.

What I Love About this Marketing Plan

I had been looking for a plan, a strategy to productively build and grow my online business further and OWM is giving me just that: a real working schedule that brings results.

Please be aware that this is not a get rich quick scheme. You will have to put in the work and effort it takes to do research, to create lenses, to create articles and do promotion. If you are serious though about building a business online and create a more than decent income, this plan will set you on the right track.

I had almost lost faith and the energy to keep on working online and even though I was still convinced that affiliate marketing is the best way to create multiple income streams online, I was getting continuously side tracked by all the information out there.

Another thing I love about the plan, or maybe better said about the author, is that she really wants her OWM-ers to succeed and earn money. It is not like what I have seen in other programs that once I had bought into the program, there was hardly any support. In fact, in the few weeks I have been working with the system I contacted the author, PotPieGirl on several occasions and it blew my mind that she actually responded within 24 hours, answering my questions and solving my problems!

She is showing you exactly what has worked for her, how she created her thousands of dollars a month income and openly shares her strategies and well laid out plan with whoever buys the One Week Marketing Plan.

And last but not least… the plan is very doable. It is brought in bite-size chunks that are easy to digest. It is not daunting, you will actually be able to finish your first project in a week so you get a feel of accomplishment and progress in the short term, but it also offers the base to creating a long-term business if you stick with it.

The possibilities are endless and the knowledge I am acquiring right now, the better habits that I am now forming through sticking to a well laid out plan are helping me to grow in other areas of my online ventures as well.

So overall two thumbs up and certainly more than worth the investment!

Are You Ready to Take Action?

Update March 4 2009:

PotPieGirl rocks! She sent out a special keyword research guide last week and has yet another additional bonus to OWM member, so also sent out a complete guide to building Squidoo lenses today, only available to those people who were smart enough to buy the One Week Marketing Plan. This guide shows a few short curts and big time savers to build a squidoo lens so that sticking to the plan becomes even easier!

Now that is what I call, value for money! Get access to the One Week Marketing Plan!