February 9th, 2013  Posted at   Internet Marketing Tidbits
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Regular readers will know about my struggle with technology. I am a 45 year old Mom of three, and I am not technically minded at all. I don’t mind having a go at things, but I really don’t understand exactly how things work in the world of html and website building.

I quite often rely on YouTube for videos explaining how to do things, so when I bought the download software (DLguard) for my PLR store, I thought that there would be a video on YouTube for me to work out how to set it all up.

WRONG! I have been struggling with it for ages, trying to set it all up correctly. It is supposed to have the software on the front, and wordpress on the back. It ended up with me giving up and getting a 500 error. Just a load of old files hanging on a domain with nothing to show for it.

The guy who wrote the software, Sam, has been an absolute star helping me. We have been messaging back and forth and now the website is looking much better than it did. It is amazing how much a little guidance can do.

I also needed a little help from hostgator who were brilliant as always. I am amazed at how courteous they are, even when (in this case) the mistake was mine!

So, there are just a few little things that I have to change, not too much at all, and then I will be able to announce the site. Just to let you know that I haven’t forgotten and I am still working on it.

Another thing I am still working are my Squidoo lenses. I have joined Jenn Dize 100 lens challenge. I am not aiming for 100 by the 1st March, but I am aiming for 60. I am on number 8 or 9, so I need to keep the pace up to finish my 60 for March 1st.

Jenn is really great at putting people at ease, and it is good to chat about what we are doing and being able to help people who need it. If you want to join the challenge then you can join on Jenns blog which is http://workathomeformoms.net/case-studies/join-100-lens-challenge/. I look forward to seeing you there!

Best wishes,

Ruth

January 29th, 2013  Posted at   Internet Marketing Tidbits
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Hi!

Well, now I have over seventy Squidoo lenses, I have been working at it for over six months now. Not all the time; when I wasn’t making any money at it I went off it for a while, and didn’t bother making lenses all the time.

Six months has to be the turning point for so many projects. It has taken me six months but now I make money every week with Squidoo. At first I just thought it was about Christmas time; it is much easier to make some money then. But no, through January I have been making sales. Not every day, but definitely a few per week.

Seventy lenses is not that many, and I have to say it is the top seven or eight lenses that make the money, which leaves plenty that are not making money just yet.

Many people will think that is a bit of a waste of time, all those that haven’t made a dime yet. But many of them are in niches that are seasonal. For instance, pop up tents are not really for this time of year – I have only sold one of them. But when the better weather gets here, I am confident that I will sell some more.

I had a bit of a life changing moment a couple of weeks ago. I spoke with Craig Desorcy on Skype, and got some business advice. I did think what can he say in 30 minutes that is going to help me – and I was so surprised that he did.

So, after having the domain for a very long time, I have decided to get my PLR store up and running. It is still in the early stages right now and is not properly ready to get going. So I will not give you the URL just yet. But, it is developing steadily and I hope to have an announcement about it very soon.

I hope everything is going well with your businesses too.

Best wishes,

Ruth

 

 

July 9th, 2012  Posted at   Internet Marketing Tidbits
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I have noticed that there seem to be more and more WSO  (warrior special offers) on squidoo lenses these days.  I personally used to use squidoo but when it changed and lots of my lenses got removed, I got ticked off and stopped using it.

However, I have read a recent WSO and it was talking about squidoo lenses. I thought I would give it a go, not least because this warrior said that ten squidoo lenses should earn you approximately $50 per day if you build them his way.

So far I have built six Squidoo lenses and I am pretty happy with them all. My only issue is that they are simply not getting picked up by the big G for love nor money.

I have backlinked them, with a variety of different types of links, and still nothing. So I Googled the issue and sure enough I got some rather old information from Pot Pie Girl. (For those of you who don’t know, Pot Pie Girl wrote a squidoo product about ooooooooooh 2009 ish? and has made many successful lenses that made a lot of money.)

Anyway, she recommends not adding your squidoo lens information within squidoo until it is indexed by Google. One of the ways she suggests getting your Squidoo lens indexed is by blogging about it on a platform away from Squidoo.

While this does go contrary to the advice from the WSO I bought, I am going to give it a whirl and see if I can get my lenses indexed any quicker.

If you are having the same problems with your Squidoo lenses, or you know a secret quick way to get them indexed then please let me know!

Best wishes,

Ruth

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March 8th, 2012  Posted at   Internet Marketing Tidbits
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Do you know what an AR Mod is? Nope, me either. Well I know it can help me build a really good website in a short space of time. That I do like.

My new site is at http://yourfitnessdvd.com

I made the header -  I like it. I chopped the sidebar down so it was all about the pages and what people like to look at.

The bottom line though is, will it make money? Well it is as yet untested. This is where my dilema starts. I really do like this website but I originally made it to sell. It is a case of, the more I do with it, the more I like it, the less I want to sell it.

I have had a go at selling websites before, but I always felt that it took too long for me to actually let them go in my head. Yes, I would go and check up on them, see what they buyer did with them. Often, I didn’t like what they did.

So, that put me off selling them really. Plus I wasn’t getting the kind of cash for them that I wanted.

But this website didn’t take me long to put up, with the help of this plugin the content was easy to produce. The header was probably the fiddliest.

It is nearly eleven at night now and I think I am going to sleep on it. See how I feel in the morning.  With a clear head I will be better able to decide I think.

More tomorrow!

 

Ruth

 

I just wanted to add this, this morning. I am definitely going to sell this website, I need the cash for other projects and I think it will sell well. It has loads going for it, I don’t know if I have ever optimized a site so well, the load time is 0.99 seconds, its on an aged domain, the writing that I have done is original…..let’s see if it sells. If it doesn’t though, I am going to keep it for sure. People are only going to get one shot at buying this one!

I will update when it is up on flippa!

Ruth

March 3rd, 2012  Posted at   Internet Marketing Tidbits
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Are you beautiful? Are you drop-dead gorgeous? Most of us, by definition, are not beautiful, because beautiful is, by it’s very nature, a rarity.

And you and I both know that we feel better when we experience something beautiful. That’s why beautiful models are used to sell everything, from double glazing to aftershave.

We are more likely to buy something from a salesman who is better looking than their counterparts. Beauty is important to every single human being on the earth today. So what is that to do with internet marketing?

Two things. Firstly, we must have websites that look good. Not just look good, that look trustworthy. In the infamous Panda update, Google started to look at websites more closely, looking at them in a more human type way.

Websites are considered for their trustworthiness. Questions were put to people, lay people, about whether or not they would trust websites with their credit card information. This was one of many questions that these folk were asked to consider and then Google added this criteria to an already complicated algorithm.  This is the algorithm that is used to rank our websites.

So, the better our websites look, the more likely they are to be ranked higher in the search engines, and the higher in the search engines the more traffic we get. And of course, the more traffic we get, the more sales we get, the more money we make.

The second thing is, the more attractive our websites are, the more likely people are to stop and look at them. People will spend more time at our beautiful websites. This is also something that Google notices, and Google likes it when people linger on our sites. Google rewards us with higher rankings for this as well.

Well-known marketer Andy Fletcher, who has an extremely successful six figure internet marketing business, was saying something along these lines in his new eBook, called Digi Marketing Jedi:

“When you visit someone’s website, your mind is made up in a matter of seconds. Make sure your website has some va-­‐va-­‐voom and invest in some
custom design. The better it looks, the more authoritative your first impression will be…and the more authoritative it is, the more receptive your traffic will be to your offer.”

This was what was on my mind when I saw some website themes advertised recently. They are definitely some really lovely themes:

beautiful theme 2

 

You can see that will do just about everything you need. These themes normally cost about $45 each, but they are on offer at the moment, and I was lucky enough to get the three themes you see there for an amazing $9.98.

I am not normally a theme hound but this year I am concentrating on building some good Amazon websites so I wanted to get some great themes to use. I know I need to improve my bounce times (the length of time people spend on my websites) and I thought these might just do the trick. I think they would do well with adsense too.

I have been told that the price is going to go up soon, although I have no idea when that will be. I know that they are really popular, though, so I guess when the product creator, Neeraga, feels like he has given out enough at this ridiculously low price, he will raise it again.

If you would like to go and check it out, you can do so here:

3 inkthemes Premium WP themes for less than the price of one!

Hopefully you will be able to get in quick, like loads of us have.

Best wishes,

Ruth

March 1st, 2012  Posted at   Internet Marketing Tidbits
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Make Money Online Fast! That is what so many people want. People are turning to the internet to earn money, and because they are desperate, they spend what little money they have on products that the owners know will take a long time to make money, if ever they will at all.

This article is about types of internet marketing and the time period it takes to make money.  We all want to know how to make money fast, so this is how to make money, and how quickly it is possible to do so.

Service Provider

One of the quickest ways to make money online is to be a service provider. Can you do programming? Build a website? Write great articles? There is demand for all these skills.

If you can programme then you might find something you can do at elance.com. Elance.com is great because the person requiring a service has to put the money that you, the programmer, would be paid forward first. It is held by a company called Escrow.com, who “hold” the payment until the job is completed satisfactorily. This protects both the customer and the programmer.  You will earn the payment when the job is completed.

If you can build a website then you might be tempted to go and have a look at flippa.com. Many people sell websites on flippa.com, and make good money at it too. I have personally sold a couple of websites on flippa, and if you are good at design then you may be able to make some fast cash there. The quickest auction period is, I believe, three days. So if you do have a website to sell then, even if it is only making a small amount of money, then you can earn some cash selling it on flippa.

A website that is brand new? While lots of people do sell brand new websites on flippa, I have noticed that they put a great many sites up for sale, and only sell a small percentage of them for any great profit. For instance, if you put up ten sites for sale, and make $200 on two of them, it doesn’t matter if you make a ten dollar loss on the other eight; you are still up $120.

Flippa fees are $19, and it costs roughly $10 to buy a domain. So in order to sell on flippa.com you first need to fork out $29.  If you sell it for $5 – and I have seen sites sold at that price quite often- you may need to pay the sellers fee which is $5. (Sellers quite often absorb the cost of the fees but not always.)

One way which I have used to make money when I needed it is to go to iwriter.com. Iwriter.com is great because you make money writing.

However, at first you will only make a small amount of money. The better money comes when you have done your first 20 articles, and depending on your skills you will be ranked as either a standard writer, a premium writer, or a elite writer. This very much depends on the ratings that you get from customers. The higher you are ranked, the more offers of articles you can choose from, and the higher the value of the articles available.

For instance, if you are a standard writer, you can earn just $2.43 for 500 words. A premium writer could earn $4.07 for 500 words. An elite writer could earn $8.10 for 500 words. There are lots of different size articles, and different amounts available.

One of the good things about iwriter is that you do not have to bid for the articles. The articles are available and you can just pick the subjects you want to write about.  On elance.com you need to bid for the chance to write articles, and of course, sometimes you are not picked. Using a free account on elance.com you get 15 credits per month and putting forward a bid costs 1 or 2 credits. So to earn a huge amount of money you need to buy more credits.

These are just a few ways to make money online fast. I will leave you with this inspirational video which I enjoyed.

 

Just Do It

 

February 29th, 2012  Posted at   Internet Marketing Tidbits
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Do you have a favourite marketer? I sure do. And my favourites change over time, often I am with one marketer for a while, and then my favourite changes. Of course, there are some long term favourites too, such as Tiffany  Dow who is great. She is so honest and upfront about what she reviews, what she puts together. If you have never been to her blog, go take a look: http://www.tiffanydow.com/blog.

But one of my favourite marketers of the moment is Veit Schenk. He is of the same style, up front and honest. He really gets what people want online, and he is honest about the products he reviews.  That makes him trustworthy, to my point of view.

So, when he put up a new blog post I went over and had a look at it and boy am I glad I did. He had this link in his blog post:

 

http://www.doncrowther.com/featured/clear-google-search-history

I made that bold because this is important. Tomorrow, March 1st, is when Google can take all your browsing history and hang on to it. At the moment there is a lifetime cache until 2038. That means until I am 71! So anything that you have taken a look at since 2007 up until tomorrow is going to be Googles, to do what they want with.

Now, you might have nothing in your search history that you are not proud of. But think about this – how society changes, how it’s views change. What was once socially acceptable, no longer is. Think about how political correctness has changed things in the last few years. Better yet, instead of going forward twenty-six years and wondering how things will change; try going back twenty-six years and think how much society has changed.

Then think about how much more it could change in the next 26 years. See what I mean? What we do without thinking now, could be totally unacceptable in twenty years time. But Google will have a history that you did that, that you looked at that page, that you spent 3.33 minutes there……..whatever it was.

So, if you go to that page, the one I made bold, watch the video and follow the instructions and clear out your search history if you think that there is anything that might come back and haunt you. To be honest, I think you should do it whether you think something will come back and haunt you or not!

 

More later, my friends!

Ruth

 

January 15th, 2012  Posted at   Effective Tools
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Have you ever bought something (to do with internet marketing I mean)  and thought oh, yeah, I know about this? Or have you bought something that was way more advanced than you thought it would be?

I  have done both and I think  it is really very annoying. Ok of course we can request a refund, and there are many marketers who do refund immediately. But there are equally many people who don’t want to ask for a refund all the time. I can understand simply because for a small amount of money, relatively, it seems silly to complain.

I have decided that from now on I am going to write about the things that I buy and give them a review. Not sure if anyone but bots will read it but I am going to hope that someone out there will be helped by what I say. If it helps one person well then, it’s worth me putting my tuppence worth out there.

I have tried lots of ways to make money in internet marketing, which you can see by all the posts on this blog. There have been years where I have ignored the blog and gone and done things that are pretty much unsuccessful. Some I didn’t stick with even though I was doing ok – that is making micro sites with adsense – I just got bored and wanted to try something new. Some I got my head round but just didn’t take action on – CPA being one of them. Some I tried and things started off ok, but problems led to me not taking any more action.

I am not sure if it was my lack of effort or simply my brain could not get a handle on being successful – I really think that the state of ones mind is a big part of having success in anything. But now I feel I have got my head in the right place, and this month I have been taking big actions.

Now, don’t get giddy – I am not sure if they are going to pay off. But I remain convinced that massive action is what it takes to have a decent amount of success in IM. I will let you know more especially if all turns out well.

In the meantime, I am going to do my best to write a bit more often here. Especially about the things that I buy, particularly if they are good.

Right now I am trying out Digi Traffic Accelerator. I used it once on a trial and it was good but then other things got in the way. But I figure that if it drives traffic – which it does – and gets backlinks, then it is something that everyone needs. Leave it with me for a few days and let’s see what happens.

I really like the things that the face of DigiResults, Andy Fletcher puts out. I have the plugins Digi Auto Links and Digi Article Blaster, both of which are really effective. With Digi Article Blaster it does take a while for Google to pick up on the links but software like Linkclaw will help with that.

Any questions? Leave me a comment!

Ruth

December 7th, 2010  Posted at   Uncategorized
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Much has been said about site flipping. If you have some websites that you want to sell and you can make some money flipping sites.It is something I have mentioned before as something I wanted to do.

However, this used to be something that worried me quite a bit. This is because all my sites are built using wordpress. And moving wordpress sites means you need to go into the databases and do a little bit of programming. Not a huge amount but it was enough to worry me. Technophobe, I know.

The alternative was to build websites using Komposer or one of the other website building tools. Which I don’t really know how to use either. Komposer websites are easy to flip, because they just need putting in a .zip file and sending out to the new owner.

There is a new answer, and that is WPTwin. This is a programme that will clone a website built with WP. It was amazing when the  identical site appears almost magically at the domain I had picked for it. It had taken just a few minutes, probably 7 at the outside. For someone like me, who had no idea how it all worked, it seemed almost miraculous.

So, I followed the SiteFlips formula and now I have an auction on flippa.com:

https://flippa.com/auctions/115226/Automated-Income—Become-a-Published-Author—NR#comment451572

I’m really excited about it. I know that without the confidence I got from doing John Carltons course, I would not have done it. And of course, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without WPtwin.

I will post again on how the auction went. When I do so I will also talk more about SiteFlips and their formula for making money with books on Amazon.com.

Best wishes,

Ruth

October 13th, 2010  Posted at   Copywriting
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It has been nearly a year since I have blogged on here. I notice that seventy of my seventy one posts have disappeared. Technologically challenged as I am, I have yet to figure out how to get them back, but I will continue to work on it now and again.

What happened with Adsense? Well, I made some money with Adsense, I have made more this year with Adsense than I have with anything else. But I can’t say I enjoy the “housework”, the backlinking constantly and always trying to get the sites to get to the top with new keywords etc.

The other thing that has happened while I have been away is that my original sites are doing rather well. They have moved up to the first page of Google and I have started to get checks (cheques) from Clickbank. It is great, I was really pleased. But, having had a look at the statistics, I have realised something. I did think of this two years ago, when I started in IM but kind of persuaded myself that it would be ok. I am talking about my copywriting skills.

To me, there is little point in having websites at the top (or near the top) of Google which are doing not as well as they could be,  because I simply haven’t learned to write well.

So, I decided that it was time to invest in myself and go to the best. I didn’t want to go to the US, it did not really fit around family commitments, and it wasn’t in the budget.  So I got John Carltons Simple Writing System home study course.

It is actually very intensive, the workshop was over just two days I believe, but John does cover a huge amounts. There are worksheets, so that I can do the same exercises as the attendees did. It’s a real learning experience, for sure. Less embarrassing when I make mistakes than the poor attendees, they got their mistakes videoed for everyone to see!

I am really enjoying Simple Writing System and I am learning a great deal. I have already tweaked some of my sites, it is too soon to say whether they are converting better or not. I will let you know!

The downside of Simple Writing System, the home study course, is that I don’t get my exercises critiqued, so I don’t get direct feedback from John himself. I watch him talk to the attendees about their results, which is helpful. But there is not the personal input.  This is actually quite a big downside, because there is no substitute for a personal mentor.

Fortunately, because of hanging out on the Warrior Forum, I have  come across a highly recommended copywriter by the name of Paul Hancox. He mentors students, and he is a great guy.  I have chatted to his students and he seems to be universally adored!  I contacted him and I will be joining his programme in the new year, if not before. I cannot wait!

So, by then I will be able to write good copy, not just for myself, but for other people also.  I do worry that I am flitting too much, but I know that ultimately, learning the skills to sell will benefit me in many different aspects of my life, including earning a living on here, the good old internet!

To our prosperity,

Ruth

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