For all you BUM marketers reading this - I thought you may be interested in Absolutely Articles. It’s interesting for a number of reasons.  Firstly - it’s a great big new article directory which serves as my base for over 200,000 articles - pretty neat huh?  Secondly all those articles are now sitting in my database and through a little creative php programming I have managed to automate their delivery to a number of my blogs.  What does that mean?  It means I can auto propagate and auto fill all my blogs, the have them automatically ping via Pinggoat and gain instant traffic.

Not bad at all.  We’ll see how it progresses.

  It’s been a funny few days and something quite unexpected has happened.  To try and unclutter my brain which was full from over researching some articles for a client I did my daily flip around the Warrior Forum to see if there was anything interesting.  It turns out there was.  There was a thread where someone offered to pay whoever could get him to the point he was earning $200/day a $2000 thank you.  I threw in my 10 cents and said if anyone could coach ME to that point I would throw them the full 2 weeks earnings($2800) and pretty much whatever else they asked for too.  Now, the thread is worth checking out just to read and get some ideas.  There’s a couple of posts in there that I feel really can get you on the way to earning the sort of income we all want.

What was really amazing for me was that a couple of people I really respect have stepped up and offered me some useful insights and solid direction on how to do this.  I won’t name them because I’m not sure if they want to be publicly named at this point.  But while both are developing quite different sides of my business, one thing is shining through crystal clear.  Success doesn’t happen accidentally, it happens when you follow through a process that has you at the start and success at the end.  We’re working on a really solid plan to take my business from where it is now, and get it to the point I have an income that can replace not only what I lost from my job recently, but also my wifes income when she leaves work in about six weeks time.

What is remarkable is that with the exception of one remarkably useful website, nothing I’ve been told is anything new to me, and I bet it wouldn’t be to most of you reading this either.  It’s just been presented in such a methodical and sensible way that makes so much sense.  So, while I’ll keep you posted on exactly how I progress, you don’t need to wait to hear from me.  Take a look at where your online business is today.  Write down an honest appraisal of it.  Now write down an honest statement of what you want your business to be like when you have ‘made it’.  How much of a gap is there between the two?  And what do you need to do to bring you from where you are to where you want to be?  All you need to do to succeed online is answer that simple question - then act on it and make it happen.

Hello All,

It’s been a busy week for me, and one marking a substantial change in direction.  I’ve completed two big assignments - one set of 50 articles and one e-book, so payday wise it’s been a very good week.  But a lot more than that has been happening.

To begin with Monday was scan day for my wife and we now know that September will bring with it two baby girls.  I have to admit we were both convinced we would be dealing with boys, and I had kind of mentally mapped all the dad and son activities.  Now I have to adjust my thinking to figure out what a dad is meant to do with girls.  I’m open to help on that by the way:)

Tuesday was also a big day because the phoneline finally got connected in my office, now I can get the internet set up there and free up a lot of space in the house by working from my nice swanky office in town.  It also brings an air of professionalism to the whole thing.

Over the next little while I will be concentrating hard on establishing regular customers by way of membership site packages.  I have ideas in my head on how to do this, so I’ll keep you all posted.  The first test will be a WSO in the warrior forums to see if I can get some interested parties on board.

An interesting thing happened today when a client used my payment page to pay for a job I completed, on returning to merchant he was redirected to a PLR site I put up some time ago.  It seems my payment buttons are not working as they should, so the first thing to do is to figure out why that is and what’s going wrong.

The next few months are going to be exciting ones for sure.  It will be a pleasure to have you along for the ride.

“6 Months Away From Becoming A Father For The First Time, I Was Living In A Tiny House With A Second Room Not Big Enough For One New Child - Let Alone The Two I Had On The Way. Then My Employer Stole $13,000 From Me And I Found Myself With No Job.”

Sound like the start to a sob story sales letter? Actually it’s where I am right at the moment. In September I am going to be a dad to twins, and I haven’t been paid since last year so had to resign from my job. It’s a pretty low point for me, in fact it’s probably as low as I have ever felt. I have six months to force myself to have created a full time income.

But I’m still smiling.

Because on Monday I got to see my babies on the ultrasound and I swear one of them was waving:) It’s hard to be negative when you have two healthy babies on the way. Sure, having your employer withhold $13k of wages and reimbursements from you sucks, but there are far worse things that could happen, and in the end - it’s only money.

As I grow older, I believe in karma more and more, and there’s no doubt in my mind that by doing right by this companies clients I will be paid what the company owes me many times over. And they will get what’s coming them as well. When life throws these things at you there is two ways you can respond. You can cry about it and tell anyone who listens how unfair it is, or you can assess where it leaves you, what resources remain for you to use, and how you can move forward.

I’ve always been one to take the second path. And while this is as low as I’ve found myself, I thank god I developed my internet business to the point that - if required - it can support my family. I’m grateful I had enough foresight to see it coming and position myself for it.

One of my little vices is watching WWE wrestling every few weeks. Last week the commentators made a few commentators about competitors with heart. Something along the lines of “You don’t show heart when you are winning, you show heart when you are getting beaten upon. And it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up again.”

Right now, I feel like I have been knocked down, but you can bet I will be getting up and back into the fight again.

I’ve had a few emails recently asking about why the blog hasn’t been updated in a little while.  Truth is I’ve been working on something quite big.  Extremely big in fact.  It’s a few days away from complete, but when it is, it’s going to be huge.  I’m talking $1000/week stuff which is my goal for online income(not least because it’s about $1500 in local money and replaces my current income).  Anyone can do it, it doesn’t rely on having any special skills and will only take about an hour per day.  Sound interesting?

Stay Tuned.

This was a response I gave to a enquiry from one of the members of my list.  It’s so good to hear that people are earning their first money online through freelancing, and if you have any questions I encourage you to drop me an email - I don’t bite.

First develop yourself a really nice looking site for your freelance services.  We know that online flashyness does not necessarily equate conversion, but to the offline crowd a site with a little eye candy can be a great sales tool.  If you look at mine www.gumptionfreelance.com you’ll see that it is just a template from css templates which I have adjusted to suit my own needs.  The samples section was a tricky adaption of Article MS script, but everything else is nothing you wouldn’t be able to do yourself.  Getting freelance web design work is not that easy online because quite frankly - there are people who can do much more than you or I for much less than we would be willing to accept.  But if you are prepared to put yourself out there in the local community there are still a lot of people who would love a fairly simple site ad are willing to pay a few hundred dollars for it.

I mentioned that I approached local businesses in my mailout, but let me tell you a great strategy for how I did this.  I walked into the local information center and looked through all the fliers and promotional pamphlets and picked out half a dozen that looked quite nice but didn’t have a web address on them.  These guys probably spent four figures on their fliers between design and printing costs.  Then I found out who the head of advertising was in each case, rang them up and said “I like your flier, is there any reason you don’t have a website?  I can have all the information on your flier on your flier online for you, looking fantastic for under $500.”  The first time I did this I got 4 jobs out of 6, the second time 3 out of 3.

It’s a little scary to talk to these people who are quite successful in their own business when you don’t feel like you are successful in yours.  Just remember that you are talking to them as an expert in your field.  When they indicate that they are willing to meet and talk then set up a time and place, dress nicely and do a little research on their industry and needs.  Don’t go in underprepared, have all your pricing information prepared and don’t be scared to quote high.  Listen to what their needs are and then tell them how you are going to deliver them.

I actually pass most of my web design jobs off to a friend now.  We live in a touristy area, and he has added booking into his websites.  He now has just under two dozen local operators who we have designed websites for and he manages a booking service for them all, taking in between 10 and 40% per booking.

The important thing is to conquer the initial fear and get out there and do it.  Once you have a couple of sites under your belt it becomes much easier.

Over the past few days I have started the active promotion of some of the sites I am working on.

One of the things this involves is experimenting with traffic exchanges. For those who haven’t come across them let me give you the run down. You submit your site to a traffic exchange, it is put in a queue and others who submit their sites will autosurf to your site before viewing the page for 10 seconds and being directed someone else(automatically). You can do the same, and each site you view gets you about half a credit. Visit two sites and you have earned a visit from someone else.

In other words it’s a great way of getting hits, but a terrible way of getting visitors. As I type this I have 5 of these autosurfers running, and obviously have not been viewing the sites on them. The reason I am doing this is to raise the number of hits my sites are getting, not because I expect anyone to take action while viewing. Why is this important? Mostly it’s not, but I have a few ideas as to how it could be, including alexa ranks, reselling pages and the like.

As it doesn’t cost me anything, I’m going to keep this going for a few days and see what happens.

  I’m not entirely sure I haven’t just bitten off more than I can chew.  My ECZEMA WEBSITE is nearing completion and will soon be fit for public consumption.  To begin some promotion I joined the digitalpoint forum, as the marketing I had done on the warrior forum had been so successful.  I thought I may be able to pick up 100 subscribers or so with some signature advertising.

However, Digital point has a rule that you have no signature until you have made at least ten posts and been a member for a week, so whilst killing time I browsed around and fell into their “Website For Sale” section.  What an unfortunate error that may have been.  I now have 6 more websites than I had 48 hours ago, and need to get them up and running as soon as possible to reimburse my spending.

Now I wasn’t entirely frivolous with my spending, there is a kind of a plan to the madness, and they do fit into my overall strategy.  Infact 2 of them will nicely complement the Finance website I wrote about a little over a week ago.  One is a credit card affiliate site, and another offers a debt consolidation product for sale.

So I have a little work to get through just getting these sites up and running.  Not to mention I need to read over the ebooks they are selling to see if they are worth the effort or need rewriting.  If they are quality stuff, I think I will offer them to my list as a free download for sticking with me.

Speaking of my list, the self-written autoresponder I have been writing seems to be holding up well as the list approaches 200.  Some of the more fiddly features(like unsubscribe - hurray I am not CAN SPAM compliant) are done.  The biggest missing feature is the ability to send out spot messages to the entire list.  I can’t imagine that will take me more than an hour, but I need to check the hostgator mailout rules first to see how many messages I can send per hour before they start thinking I am spamming.  Besides - it’s one more thing on the two do list.

Finally - over the next two days - I have to start PROMOTING a few of my sites.  Outside of a warrior forum signature file I have been very slack with this.  The goal is to get my creditorsdebt.com ready for public viewing and promoted first - and learn from what happens with it.  I’m hoping it’s PR3 will make things a little easier - but it’s time that project starting paying me some money back. 

Well, I posted earlier in the month about “the site that was never meant to be”.  I had a coder bail on the web design, then I had quite a large dispute through rentacoder when I found the writer I hired(lazily) had given me a pile of plagiarized work.  I thought there for a while that this site was never going to happen.

Well it has.

I had a list member contact me about the problems he was having getting writing gigs because everyone expected him to work for rubbish wages.  This was because he was an Indian and his english grammar is not perfect.  I gave this writer a shot on 5 articles, and the quality was pretty good.  More impressive was his attitude to the suggestions I made on how to improve his writing.  believe me this guy will be earning a few hundred bucks a week in no time.

Anyway, I grabbed a template from a free resource site and made a few tweaks and modifications to it.  Then I put up the first bunch of articles.  This is the start of a pretty good information resource, and I’m quite happy with what I achieved in about 90 minutes tonight.

The site itself has a few purposes.  First of all I wanted to work in this niche as I have suffered from eczema for my entire life.  Secondly, it is an experiment in getting a website up from scratch fast.  And finally it has an adsense block and an adsense searchbar on it so hopefully it will generate a bit of income.

While it’s not completed yet, it is fit for public consumption, so please check out my Cure Your Eczema website and let me know what you think.

  There’s a funny thing about Internet Marketing.  It is by nature very distracting.  One moment you are writing an article on something that requires research, and the page you are researching on will have an ad or link that catches your attention, next thing you find you have been reading something unrelated to the work you are doing and an hour has slipped past.  it’s frustrating, and it requires a lot of discipline to avoid doing it.

My two biggest time wasters are currently the warrior forum and the 5 bucks a day forum.  Anyone who has visited either will know what I am talking about.  These sites are loaded with fascinating information and you are learning stuff every time you read a post.  In other words it is procrastination that is easy to justify to yourself.

But ultimately, it is killing my productivity.  I have had to undergo a self imposed ban on the warrior forum these past few days because I had a backlog of over 50 articles and I just wasn’t getting them done.  With the distraction removed I have gotten through the majority of them.  Now I am able to say to myself get through my remaining articles and I can get onto my own websites, which is the work I really want to be doing.

Ultimately, internet marketing is not about reading, it is about doing.  My freelance business is taking up all the time I can dedicate to it at the moment, but it didn’t get to that point because I read thousands of articles or special reports on how to do it - I just went ahead and applied for jobs and figured out what worked and what didn’t.  I am at the same point with my Adsense sites as I was with freelancing all those months ago.  I have seen there is money there to be made, and now it is just a case of making it.

Now ere’s a thought for you.  Did you find this post worth the time to read, or is my writing it and your reading it merely another way of procrastinating?