Well 2006 is finally gone. While it did fly by pretty fast I have to be happy about how things went. 2007 is my time to take things to the next level. I admit that this blog and entire web site is pretty neglected. I did help many people learn to start making money online in 2006, but this project is only one tiny fraction of my online business. While it is possible to make a lot of money online teaching other people how, it is not what I’m about.

This year will mark my move toward selling my own products and less affiliate marketing. I’m hiring some additional staff which should help the 25 or so web sites I must’ve built in 2006 start to take off. I made a lot of money last year don’t get me wrong, but I really believe that each of my web sites is running at about 5% of its potential.

I’m sort of an engineer by nature, so I have to force myself to stop making new stuff all the time. I’ve cranked out quite a number of web sites in the past 18 months and never even tried to get incoming links to most of them. Now that they’ve had a chance to age a bit, get indexed, go through all the Google Sandbox BS, etc it is time to turn it up.

I have to constantly remind myself that I know exactly what it takes to make money online (which is obvious since I’m already doing it pretty well), but I need to stop letting myself get distracted. Focus is crucial.

A couple of good quotes from some wise online people (I apologize if I get these wrong or attribute them to the wrong person):
“Since when is more a solution for too much” –Rich Schefren
“The Last thing we need is another good idea” –A sign on the wall of Bran Fallon’s office

SEO Elite Review

I’ve been a user of Axandra’s IBP for quite a while and honestly never thought I’d have a need for SEO Elite. Well after seeing some of the things it can do that IBP and ARELIS can’t I changed my mind and took the plunge. The entire purpose of this program is to analyze incoming links to your competition, and to find places that might be willing to link to you. After all, if you can get incoming links from all the sites that link to your competition, you should be able to catch up with them on the search engines right? Yes.. If your on-page optimization is good that is.

SEO Elite allows you to check the links for several web sites all at once and select which search engines you want to chcek for those incoming links. This is important because MSN and Yahoo typically show a lot more incoming links to a site than Google does, so it pays to check more than just Google! This program also grabs a lot of information about the link pages and sites it analyzes. It will show you the Alexra ranking, Google PageRank, and number of outgoing links on these pages that link to your competitors. It also attempts to figure out the email address of the site owner, making it much easier to contact them for a link exchange. It will even check the IP address of the sites and filter the results to only show a single page on 1 IP address. This is because it is widely accepted that Google and other search engines track sites on the same IP address and discount multiple links from the same IP.

Another thing you can do is analyze the anchor text of the incoming links to a specified site. You might think that in order to rank for the term “purple banana” you’d want to get a whole bunch of incoming links with that anchor text. This is only partially true however. You may find that the site that ranks #1 for your target keyword only has a few links pointing to them with that exact phrase. The overall percentage of links with that anchor text is probably a lot lower than you’d expect. This can give you a great guideline for how many links you want with that phrase, and some other anchor text phrases you may want to try. Getting 95% of your incoming links with the same anchor text is a sure way to get penalized for over-optimizing your site.

There are several other ways that SEO Elite can help you, such as checking your link partners to make sure they still link to you. Oh did I mention that it can also send out emails for link exchanges for you? It’ll also find link submission forms. This program is very sweet and I am just starting to scratch the surface of what it is capable of. The only drawback I can think of really is that it is not cheap. SEO Elite is much less expensive than IBP though. I would take a bunch of screen shots and whatnot but you can see those here.

This is an extremely valuable tool in my arsenal now. It dramatically increases my effectiveness when looking for link partners. I don’t regret my purchase even for a second.

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If you run a web site and have been considering running google adsense on your pages but don’t know where to start this post is for you!  Many people know what adsense is, and probably everyone that uses the internet with any kind of regularity has seen the Google ads cleverly planted inside the sites they visit.

What is AdSense?
Google Adsense is a contextual ad service that automatically puts ads related to your page’s content on your site.  You choose the ad style and colors and Google gives you a bit of javascript that you can paste into your HTML.  Google’s bot will visit your site, determine what it is about, and show an advertisement that is usually pretty relevant to the content of the page it is shown on.  This increases your ad clickthrough rate (CTR) dramatically over normal banner advertising. AdSense pays on a per click basis, the price of which varies wildly and is depedent on the topic of the site (how valuable those visitors are to the people purchasing the ads). 

What do I need to make money with adsense?
There are two main things required to make any decent kind of money running google adsense. The first is traffic.  Without visitors there’s nobody to click your ads.  This is obviously very important.  The second is good ad placement.  Even with bad ad placement some people will click them if you get enough traffic.  Good ad placement can make the difference between making a little bit of money or 3 to 4 times that much.  You have to make a good trade-off between ad revenue and annoying your visitors. 

How Do I get started running Google AdSense?
Click the big blue button below to get started right away.  Signing up doesn’t take very long, and you can soon be on your way to making hundreds or even thousands of extra dollars every month!

I’m not an SEO novice by any means, but I am still learning new things every day. A few days ago I undid some damage that I had caused on one of my sites over a year ago that was penalizing me. Unfortunately I have so many projects going at any given time that I didn’t really notice. Within a few days of fixing the problem my site came back to the top of the Google listings for all the appropriate keywords.

That one little thing might make me enough extra money every month to pay my mortgage. I’ve been doing this for a while now but it still amazes me when I see the power of small things on large scales. If you can create a page/site/product that makes $50 a day without requiring any work that adds up to $1500 every month.

Do that several times and you’ll be making a ton of money online without a lot of ongoing effort. It amazes me that everyone isn’t already doing this. Imagine paying off your car loan in a few months. Imagine paying cash for your next vehicle. Imagine not worrying about where the money for bills is coming from. You’d have to be crazy not to do it too.

Welll another huge deposit from my favorite affiliate program hit my bank account the other day and this time I decided to do something “useful” with the money. Instead of buying car upgrades, prime rib, and electronics like usual I ended up paying off half my car loan. By the end of this year I’ll have no debt other than my mortgage. None of that would be possible if it wasn’t for the money I make online.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this. I just wanted to let people know that I’m a real person. I’m not a phony persona hiding behind anonymity. I don’t claim to be a millionaire like many others do. This year has been pretty good to me, but I KNOW that next year is going to be even better. I’m going to blow the roof off my bank account making the money I made this year look like peanuts.

Once you get a good understanding of how to make money online and get the ball rolling you almost have to go out of your way to fail to make any money.

In fact I recently put my wife to work doing some things for me that I don’t have enough time for. She’s not a technical person by any means. I gave her a copy of my book and turned her loose on one of my sites. She’s going to be very shocked in a few months when the couple hours a day she’s been putting in generates more income than her previous full time job. The best part is that it is passive income. If she goes back to work we’ll continue to get paid for all the stuff she did while working from home.

If she’s going to be at home taking care of kids (what mother wouldn’t want to be?) it is nice to know there will always be work that pays well for her to do. She can generate more income for both of us while sitting on the couch with the laptop watching decorating shows, relaxing on the porch with our adorable dog Roxy, or wherever else the wifi can reach.

Sometimes I forget how fortunate we truely are.