This idea lured me and I started thinking about creating a simple article directory site, where I could post the PLR articles I have collected up to now. Besides, I would be posting my own articles for backlink purposes and other article marketers might be interested in posting their articles on my article directory as well. For that reason, I brainstormed some domain names suitable for an article directory and checked if they were available or not. Luckily, found some good ones ready to register. But before registering the domain name, I checked the available article directory scripts.

Next step was to find a good article directory script. I didn’t want to pay a big amount for a custom created one so that I searched for free scripts in search engines and in forums. I’ve found a number of free article directory scripts and some of them had paid versions too.

What I realized after a few hours of search was that running an article directory as a business model might not be as lucrative as it first seemed to me. In most of the discussions, people told that article directories are not well performing as they were before because of the competition. Many article directory sites are opening and closing every year due to poor strategies. To be successful and make a name as an article directory, and in return make money, unique features should be offered to article writers to post articles on the directory. This idea discouraged me a bit and I realized that I will need to go with a custom build article directory script if I go on with this project.

Anyway, I made a list of article directory scripts and will talk about them briefly below for those of you who want to start an article directory business.

Article Dashboard

Article Dashboard is an article directory itself and it offers the script it uses for free as well. What I learned about this script is that it is no longer reliable and not preferred by serious people as it is open to hacks and attacks. It is really simple in design and although I will not recommend using it, for a first try, you may check how it looks and performs. The download link is here.

Article MS

Article MS is another free article management system, it seems to have a better design than article dashboard. It has different templates you can choose from and a WYSIWYG editor for article submissions. This script can also be tried, you can download it here.

Article Friendly

Article Friendly is a newer and more preferred script amongst others. It has two versions, standard for $25 and pro for $50. Most of the article directories I came across are using this script. I guess it is a good choice for someone who has a little money to invest in it. However, to distinguish from others, this is not exactly what you need.

AJ Articles

Another paid article directory script is AJ Articles, I haven’t seen much directories using this script, since it looks more like a news blog or portal rather than an article directory site. Nevertheless you may check it yourself and decide if you want to go with it.

Those were the article directory scripts that I came across during my search and I hope it helps on your decision. Just not forget that simply creating an article directory and loading it with tons of PLR content is not a wise business model anymore unless you have the time to waste.

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Before starting my post, let me tell you that you can find lots of high paying keyword lists around the internet if you search a bit. Lists of keywords with a CPC more than $50. Note that, targeting those keywords might not be a good plan to follow.

First of all, you should know that going after high paying keywords is not the best strategy most of the times, especially if you are a beginner to making money with Adsense. Those niches with high paying keywords are constantly being targeted by a great number of internet marketers, rendering the competition much tougher. Monetizing such a niche would require great effort on your side if you are not comfortable on what you are doing. Even sometimes, you may not see any return for some of the niches.

My suggestion in this case is to find your own high paying keywords for your Adsense sites. Using Google’s keyword tool, you can find high paying Adsense keywords easily. Below I will explain how I do this.

• Go to Google’s Keyword Tool

Think about a niche that you want to target or just use some seed keywords like “software”. Make a search within the keyword tool using the term “software”. And sort the results according to the “Estimated Avg. CPC” values. Check the most paying 10 or so keywords and see which ones have higher search volumes.

Choose the one with a high number of searches and that you want to target. In this case, I chose “marketing software”. Run another search using the term “marketing software”. Again, sort the result by Avg. CPC.

Did you notice the dramatic increase in the Avg. CPCs? Also, a decrease in the search volumes is observed. This is because as you go deeper, the more the search term is related to the product that is being advertised and the higher chance of monetizing the keyword for the advertiser. Same for you, as an Adsense publisher. You can now choose a keyword with high CPC value or continue digging to find better keywords. Don’t forget to check the competition before targeting any niches. Checking competition is a must after deciding about the niche. I am not going to explain how to check the competition here, maybe on another post.

You can apply this same concept to other niches as well. Now you know how to find high paying Adsense keywords easily, you can start putting up some Adsense niche sites. Good luck on that.

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Recently I started to work on a new website which will be mostly like a freebie and offers site and I am currently working on getting more traffic to it. I decided to try other networks as having more offers will give me more flexibility and in case if something goes wrong with one network then I can continue with the other.

That’s why I applied to Adscend Media CPA network. I don’t know much about that network yet, though they approved me in one day without a phone call. I strongly advise it to the ones who are uncomfortable with the phone calls.

They require a W8 form submission before you can get paid. There are about 600 campaigns in 14 categories in this network. Payments are made via Paypal, check, direct deposit in US, and wire transfer internationally. A good feature of the network is that they have content gateway and file gateway offers. This can be really powerful if you have some websites related to content like videos, software and other files.

I think Adscend Media is a good place to start for the newbies. If you consider joining, here is my referral link to Adscend Media.

Now I am on my way to check what type of offers they have and try them on one of my websites. I’ll update you about how it goes.

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5 Unique PLR Articles About Twitter Marketing

Please leave a review on the thread if you happen to buy a copy for yourself. There is a link to my Ezine Articles account on the thread so that you can see my article samples. In fact if you have been following this blog, you know about my writing. I am not an expert article writer; however, I am working on it and reading and writing a lot. You may remember my last post about My First Article on Ezine Articles, now I have 13 live articles and 596 views with a 2.6% CTR. 3 of them are published and 1 emailed.

Again, if you are going to target Twitter marketing niche, this articles will really help you.

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I was once like that. I was reading all the forums related to internet marketing, downloading all the ebooks with catchy titles, in short I was trying to make money without doing what was necessary to make money. That is to take consistent action until it works.

Now, I continue to search and learn about new methods and strategies, though the time I devote to taking action is much more than the time I spend learning. So, how was I able to change my mindset like this?

At one time, while I was reading an ebook, I realized that I knew what it was talking about. The only thing I lacked was the required action the book mentioned. Then, I decided to leave the ebook open and do what it suggested rather than just reading it. I followed every step the report talked about and finally I was at a point where I was taking more action than reading.

From that time, whenever I find something that grabs my attention, such as an ebook or a forum thread, I leave it open and do not read it until I finish taking action in my plan for that day. Because I know that no matter how incredible the ebook or thread is, it will tell me one thing only: Take action, whatever it is.

I got my lesson, and I am on my way to taking more and more action.

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This is a strategy I use to get backlinks and traffic to my blogs. Basically, the idea is to find popular blogs related to your niche and visit them occasionally and post comments on the articles that you are interested. This way I gained some PR juice as well as some traffic. This is something you will see the benefits in the long run, so do not expect a traffic overload in one day. Just, post your comments patiently and you will see it. On the table below, you can see the traffic that I got from blog commenting.

Recently, while organizing my bookmarks, I noticed that if I used Google Reader for that purpose, it would be faster and easier to comment on the blogs that I follow. So, what I did is I collected all the blogs that I am following in a folder in Google Reader and classified them according to their subjects. This way, now I am able to see all the new posts in one screen and choose the posts that interest me and comment on them.

You can see a screenshot of my Google Reader account where I have blogs related to affiliate marketing in a folder.

Note that what I talked about is not spamming others’ blogs with nonsense comments or posting thousands of automated comments at a time. What I do and urge you to do is to contribute to the discussion, this way, you will gain more traffic to your sites and establish your authority in the niche faster.

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This is my personal account and I want to go with it for my main marketing efforts. I don’t have any specific niche in my focus yet but I may promote anything like Commission Junction products or Clickbank products or whatever. I know the right way to go should be to choose a tightly targeted niche, though I can also market with my personal account right?

Anyway, I customized my account and started to follow people mostly from US and the western countries. I carefully chose the ones to follow to be  real persons and not just marketing accounts. Now I have over one thousand followers and I am tweeting both about personal stuff and some marketing in between. I don’t want to piss people off and want to establish my follower base in a healthier way. I didn’t got any sales or leads yet but I am getting clicks on my links, and that is good to start. In the near future I will experiment my Twitter account for list building.

At one point, I needed to unfollow the users which are not following me. This is because I don’t want to fill my following space with the uninterested ones. Deleting those will give me extra space and so that I will be able to follow other people.

I tried a number of tools like Friend or Follow, My Tweeple and finally found Twitter Karma to be the best for my needs. It shows all the people that you are following and also tells who follows you back and who does not. Using Twitter Karma, I will be able to unfollow those who do not follow me back easily.

I haven’t used any automation tools yet and I am not planning to but if you want to automate your Twitter marketing process I highly recommend you read Automation Rules & Best Practices of  Twitter before starting.

That’s all about Twitter for now, see you on another post. Do not forget to share your Twitter experience with us here.

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Firstly, I made my first Adsense money in the previous week. That was a $0.56 click and it came from a website I started after reading about XFactor Adsense method in Warrior Forum. The thread is closed now, though you can read and find a great deal of valuable information on how to make money with Adsense niche sites. After the first click, I started to put more content and create more backlinks to the site and the number of clicks are increasing slowly but now I know that I am on the right track.

Secondly, I continued to work on promoting CPA offers after seeing some success as I talked about on the post My First CPA Money Ever. And I was able to increase my earnings to just above $100 in January. In the post that I mentioned, I had said that what I was doing was scalable and although I am at the $5/day range now, I will work more on this and try to increase the earnings.

Another thing I had success is selling PLR and MRR products. Selling Master Resale Rights product is something I knew for a long time but hadn’t done anything about. About two months ago, I decided to give it a try and collected some MRR ebooks from the net. I uploaded about 5 products to Tradebit and waited a few days, after seeing no sales I simply gave up. Then one day in December, I got a message telling that I had a sale. That made me really happy and decided to work more on this. After the first sale, I searched the internet and found lots of PLR membership sites and downloaded lots of ebooks. I am now uploading them from time to time. I already got 3 sales in January, and I know I can increase this if I work more on this.

Lastly, I did some more freelance jobs that I like to do about wordpress and excel, and I earned enough money to pay my next three years of hosting. Doing freelance jobs is not my main interest and also not the subject of this blog however, when you need some urgent money, it can be really helpful.

As I said, I will talk about each subject in detail in the following days so stay tuned.

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That one is a Blogger blog and it is about general tips and news about different topics such as, internet, technology, world and things like that. You can see it here: Simple Web Tips. I haven’t been updating this blog for a long time, after this PR update I will definitely work on this a bit more.

Differently from DailyAffiliateTips.com, I did some link exchanges with other webmasters of similar blogs. Firstly, I found some similar blogs which are not much popular but have good content and I contacted to their webmasters asking if they would like a link exchange. Some of them responded as they would like to and from that time, I have their links on my site and they have my link on theirs too. Although there are only 3 websites that I exchanged links, I am pretty sure that they helped a lot in terms of PageRank juice. Because one of them is PR4, one is PR3 and the other is PR2.

This is a really nice example of how link exchanging will benefit your site in terms of PageRank and traffic.

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For me 2009 passed a bit fast, because I was in the military service in the first half and didn’t have much time to bother with online things. After that, in summer, some offline stuff took a lot of my time and again I couldn’t devote the necessary time to my affiliate marketing efforts. Yet, I never lose the spirit inside me and I always waited for the right time to come when I will be free to work hard on this. Thanks to that, now I started to see some promising results from my various internet marketing efforts.

Luckily, in the last three months of 2009, I had the time to spend some real effort on internet marketing and what I want to talk about now is the most important lesson I got after reading hundreds of ebooks, forums posts, blogs; and trying and failing lots of things. It is:

“Find something that works and scale it.”

I know this is obvious and you all know that, but this was something that I really ignored in the past and I bet most of the beginners do so too.

In the last 18 months of my internet marketing journey, I did lots of things from selling digital photos online to promoting Clickbank products, from Google Adsense to CPA offers and freelance jobs. Nearly all the methods worked less or more and I made between $0.10 to $100 from all these different methods that I implemented. However, I was always looking for a better method and a perfect way to make money online with less work in a shorter time.

Certainly, I would have been in a different position, if only I hadn’t done what I did and instead stick to one method at one time and push it forward to as much as I can, i.e. scale it as much as possible.

Now, I see myself lucky because although it took me a bit long to find things that work, I finally found them and now I am working on to scale them as much as possible. Lately, I have unsubscribed from lots of useless newsletters and stopped signing up for new ones. I am not sure but the number of ebooks I have downloaded in the last three months are not more than 10.

I am starting to the new year with a much more dedicated mindset that knows the importance of managing the time wisely and taking action no matter if it works or not.

I hope you also got your lessons from 2009 and you will enter 2010 accordingly. I wish you all the best in 2010.

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