I didn’t get a chance to do hardly anything on the computer that I wanted to. I was busy with yard work, kids and other family responsibilities. Very busy. I’ve got a meeting Tuesday after work about a new jobs site that I have a 3% stake in. And no, I’m not ready for it either. It’s called Eng -short for Engineering. I’ll talk more about it later.

How was your weekend? Did you get to those projects that you wanted to. I signed up for someone else’s newsletter even though I most-likely knew that I was going to start getting emails that didn’t apply to my situation at all.

I get so tired of these so called Inet marketing experts and all their tips and tricks. It’s very alluring though. You know how they start:

Hey <name>, I’ve got something great that you need to see. Start by making $100 a day.

That sounds great. I mean who couldn’t use an extra $3k a month? I know I could. But if you’re knew to making money online then this is a knew thing and you have everyone telling you what to do and its your job to filter through all the crap. Good luck.

I’m still working on it and I have never hit the $100 a day mark. The most money I have made online per month has been around $125. That’s it and its mostly from link sales on one site that gets a lot of traffic. But in recent days it has been slacking. So that income stream as small as it is may be drying up. Sucks. So I’m back to square one.

I’ve also tried making some money with an article site. You know the process I’m sure. You start with 7-10 articles about your topic put them up on a domain. Then drive traffic to it via article marketing. Have 10 articles written or write them yourself and submit them to the top five or six article directories. The five I am speaking of are:

Ezinearticles
Article Dashboard
Buzzle.com (sucks, cause they take several days to approve one article. If you submit any articles while you have an article that is pending for approval they will delete it.)
Amazines.com
GoArticles.com

So after you submit all these wonderful articles you get 5 sites * 10 articles = 50 backlinks using your specified keyword. Then you need to mass submit the 10 articles to like 1,300 article directories. The software I use for this is called Article Post Robot. Here is a picture of the box: It’s pretty cool software. And after using it to submit 10 articles * 430 article directories (the current count of article directories in APR) you get 4,300 backlinks using your specified keyword. That’s pretty good. No hopefully you will rank in the search engines for the keyword you selected.

I’ve done all that except mass submit my 10 articles. So far I haven’t made crap. But I’m still working on it.

Relaxation
In the my down time which is yeah pretty much never. Ok, I force to give myself downtime, but I usually end up watching a movie on the computer of playing Halo on Xbox Live. Something to blow off steam and the frustration I get with Inet marketing.

Other Ideas and Projects
So in addition to that I have something another site that I am working on. There are easily 50,000 members that could join this site. It’s a very niche market and the site my partner and I are developing is specific to them. So hopefully we will be able to sell the sites services to these 50,000 members -most of which are affiliated with a company which will have multiple members.

Project Numero Uno
Also I have something else that I have been trying, but I stopped working on it. I just don’t have the time. Besides my dad once told me that if you have too many irons in the fire you will get no where fast, get frustrated with your lack of progress and burn yourself out. So I put the other stuff on hold to work on the project I mentioned above. But when it’s done I plan to work on project number 2.

Project 2
Project number two has 300,000 searches on it a month. If I can build this site and get it operational, then I can start selling to the 300,000. I would probably charge them $9.99 a month. It’s basically a software product that I wrote that is being converted to a service. I got tired of dealing with Microsoft and their stupid Windows Foundation Layer in Vista. Absolute crap and a nightmare to code against.

Anyway, if only 1% of the available market of searches became members that would be 3,000 members and around $28,350 after PayPal fees. Not bad. But the question again is not can I build it but can I get it ranked. People say article marketing is the way to do it, but the jury is still out on that for me.

I read somewhere that when you think of a good idea then you can safely assume that 10 other people are working on it. If its a great idea then 15 other people are working on it. These figures apply to companies as well. The point is there is a ton of competition out there. We should use these figures to stay motivated on our tasks and to accomplish what we set out to accomplish. Good luck.

Have you ever noticed how some sites just seem to grow and grow? One of the secrets is to give stuff away. One of my friends once told me, “what works in the brick and mortar world also works in the web world.” I’m not sure what he meant by that other than if you watch TV ads and other business advertisements you will see that someone is always trying to give something away for free. “Get a new checking account and we will give you this great shopping bag.” Other things you may have seen online, “Signup for my RSS feed or my newsletter and get this FREE ebook valued at $50.”

It works every time. Once I recognized this I started to use it on one of my other sites. That site has slowly risen from just a handful of members to over 10,000 members. And all I did was offer something free. I told the user what they would be getting and how it can help them. I’d say something like,”It’s all yours all you have to do is signup.” And they did signup, by the hundreds.

I recently read about an idea at Hamlet Batista’s Blog. In his post he talks about how he can get 800+ free backlinks. I’ll give you a brief description, but you really need to read his post to fully understand it.

The process is simple. You create a program or have someone else program a little application for you. You can then submit it to software directories online. Each directory has a place where you can specificy what your company link is. This is where the backlinks come in.

There are over 800+ software directories online. If you don’t want to submit them all by hand you can buy a software submission tool like PromoSoft – the automatic software promotion solution, to do it for you. It costs $97 though, which is pretty high. But you only have to buy it once.

If you think about it long term that’s not that much money. For example, let’s say you have 10 keyword phrases that you want to be listed under in the search engines. Create ten small free programs that you can submit to software directories using your tool. On each one, you can specific your ten different keyword phrases. Then wait for the search engines to update and you will see 800+ backlinks for each software product.

To read more about this click here.

Answer: Everywhere. Seriously, I’ve seen the pros at work and I can tell you that they leave no stone or web site unturned. There are different types of traffic out there, we all know this. There’s social, viral, organic, paid for, etc. One of the best things that is free that I have seen is to find someone who is doing really well and model them. That being said, here’s something that I am doing to help me out.

Use MyBlogLog, Twitter, TwitterFeed, Technorati, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace. The point is use anything and evertyhing to maximize your exposure online. Get your name, web site or company out there in front of as many people as possible.

The law of averages says that at some point you will com across a certain select group of people, one at a time, that will find your blog of interest. These are the people you want to take care of. Give them free helps and advice. Help them with whatever they need and they will tell others about you.

I just started this last week with IT-Ideas my main site. It’s doing pretty well. My traffic is up and I have over 10,300 members now and the site is growing by 10-20 members a day.

It’s easy to create special reports and ebooks. If you’ve been blogging for a while you could take several posts on a certain topic and bunch them together and create a PDF of the posts into a special report (usually 5-10 pages) or an ebook (20 pages plus).

Once you have the special reports or ebooks completed, you can use them to add people to your web site. Ask them to signup for your newsletter or for your RSS feed in turn you give them a special report that can help them in some way. Usually your report or eBook is geared to help them in the same topic that your blog is about.

Before you know it you’re RSS count will look like this: