The Biggest Lesson I Learned in 2009

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2009-to-2010As the new year starts, it is better for anyone to look back and evaluate the previous year in terms of what they learned and what they did good or bad in total.

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.

How Did I Achieve PageRank 1

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Great news here! My blog is now PR1. The last time I checked, it was PR0 and I guess it increased with the latest update. Well, this made me happy. :)

my-site-pagerank-1

I know this is not so big and doesn’t mean much but it is one of the steps that motivates me.

So, what did I do to reach a pagerank of 1? Let me tell you that I didn’t do any special things, no tricks or bulk backlink submissions. Mainly I have backlinks from two forums related to internet marketing as signatures. One is Warrior Forum and the other one is Digital Point Forum. Next, I have a few articles on ezinearticles.com and other article directories and I have some blog comments here or there. All done in a natural way, without a “how to increase PR” mindset. Adding all these contributed to PR1.

Now, I will try to get to PR2 but again in a natural way, doesn’t matter how much it takes.

See you.

Why You Should Diversify in Monetizing Your Traffic

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If you have a website which drives a consistent amount of traffic, either organic or paid and if you are monetizing this traffic with only one way, you should definitely try some other means of monetization. For example, let’s say your website is based on a niche and you serve adsense ads on your website. Let’s assume that you get a number of clicks and earn some money.

At this point, we can conclude that you have an active and interested crowd that click on ads on your site and it will be wise to test some other means of monetization which can bring an additional income each month to you.

One of the monetization methods is promoting affiliate products. You can try this by inserting affiliate links or banners on your site such as Amazon Associates or Clickbank. There are lots of other affiliate programs and networks to try but these two are the ones that convert really well if done properly.

Amazon affiliate program works really well on niche specific sites and blogs. Clickbank does also convert if the topics covered in your site are closely related to the product you promote.

Another thing you could try is to insert in text ads like Infolinks, Echo Topic or Clicksor. You can add to the list many more. On some topics in text advertising really works well and people click on those types of ads.

CPA offers are another thing to be tested with your traffic. Sometimes, you can’t imagine how well it can work. Finally, if you have a good amount of traffic, you could sell backlinks for a monthly price to those with related web sites. It could be really profitable.

As you see, there are lots of ways to monetize your blog, you can find much more if you do a little research on the subject. Of course, I am not telling you to fill your website with ads and banners and annoy your visitors. You should test each method slowly and make small changes on your site in order not to piss your visitors of. I mean do not put ten ad blocks on a single page or have both adsense, Amazon, Clickbank, CPA and in text links on your homepage. This will not work and you will start losing visitors even if they are paid ones.

Just test two methods at a time and see if it works. If it works well, try adding a third method. If it doesn’t, step to the next method and continue testing.

By diversifying your monetization, you will be not relying on a single source of income and this is what we prefer, since a wise marketer never puts all his eggs into one basket.

Farewell.

Remove “Category” Base from Permalinks in Your WordPress Blog

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Everyday I am learning new stuff about wordpress, such as new plugins new functions and my adoration to it grows by so. This one took a lot of my time to finally find a decent solution.

I was looking for a way to remove the “category” base from the permalinks on one of my other wordpress blogs. The link structure that wordpress inserts automatically is as follows:

http://www.yoursite.com/categories/category1

Although you can change the word “categories” to anything you like from the dashboard>permalinks by changing the category base in the optional section, I needed to completely remove it and have permalinks such as the following:

http://www.yoursite.com/category1

I searched how to do this a lot on the forums including the wordpress support forum, and tried all the things they suggested. Nothing worked. Finally, I found a plugin called WP No Category Base that did the job exactly as I needed. The good thing is that it is free and installable from inside the dashboard. Just do a search with the name of the plugin and you will find it. You simply install it and it is done, no modification needed.

You can also go to the official page of the plugin here to download it manually and read more about how it works.

As you can see, it works flawless on this blog too, however I can’t guarantee that it will work with any theme or any other plugins. You have to see it yourself.