When Two Tribes Go To War… Which Online Tribe Are You?

The words of the iconic Frankie Goes To Hollywood song “Two Tribes” just about sum up the storm that’s brewing in the “make money online” world, with one tribe being the Internet Marketers and the other being the professional bloggers….

But before I tell you that story…first a bit of background…

Last weekend I went to Mark Anastasi’s ListBuilding Masterclass which, I have to tell you, was rammed to the rafters and a “who’s who” of internet marketing.  This was amazing in itself because this was a free three days, and usually when you give tickets away for free, you usually get less than 50% of the registrants turn up, while on Day 2, you only get 70% of those who were there on Day 1, with Day 3 being only 50-70% of those on Day 2.

In fact I think there might have been MORE people there on Day 3 than Day 1, as it was a Sunday!  The crowd was definitely a high proportion of self employed and business people with the employed forming perhaps a third?

Contrast  this hungry, up for it crowd at the Thistle Hotel with a much quieter little gig over the other side of town, which had been billed as a Wealth Creation seminar and was, unfortunately the gig I was booked to speak at!

The numbers  expected are usually 50- 100, only 30 odd showed up and when they found out that I was speaking on internet marketing, half left, having already booked themselves onto the stock trading workshop they wanted.

Great!  So I delivered my best material to a crowd of …….about 17.  I think they liked it!

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Why Tweeting Your Blog Is Not Enough For Big Traffic by Graham Jones

If you use a URL shortening script, such as Yourls, you can see “live” the people clicking on anything you add to Twitter. The statistical information reveals that within a second of posting your Tweet you get almost all of the click throughs from what you post on Twitter. A minute or so later, almost all of the clicks have dried up. You can measure the life of a Tweet in seconds; it doesn’t last very long at all.

Getting people to follow your blog takes effort

So why all the fuss about Twitter? A Tweet is clearly a single blast of a blunderbuss – you get loads of impact all over the place, but the effect doesn’t last long. Yet you can find all sorts of advice from so-called “gurus” telling you that Twitter gets you tons of traffic. If you want to get more readers to your blog, you need to Tweet, they say.

And these experts are right – and wrong…! True enough, you can get increased traffic from Tweeting your blog. But it’s not smooth traffic; you’ll get the occasional peak in traffic. Now that’s not to be sniffed at, of course, but it’s not going to achieve all you want for your blog.

Here’s the problem: along comes another piece of technology (Twitter) which appears to solve the problem of getting more traffic to a blog. Whoopee everyone shouts and before you know it there is ebook after ebook explaining how you can get shedloads of traffic to your blog if you use Twitter. The result is millions of people go “Hurray, here’s the answer” and off they trot to learn everything they can about Twitter and see those traffic numbers rise. Not.

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Are You Blocking Your Own Success?

You know how sometimes you are just meant to see / hear / read something?  Well, yesterday the very excellent blogger Yaro Starak send out a short email, linking to one of his latest blog articles entitled “Do Your Belief Structures & Behaviour Patterns Block Your Success” and as I love Yaro’s writing, I started to read it.

He talks about blind spots, being open minded and how your patterns of behaviour are anchors….all good useful and well written stuff…. and then I either got distracted or called away or started to feel guilty that I was reading for fun when I had so much to do, and I didn’t read the rest thinking I would come back to it later.

Later on, an email arrived from Steve with a link to the article, pointing out a couple of paragraphs nearer the end, that I had missed by not reading on, and which were particularly pertinent to something we had been discussing on Monday.

(Welcome home Steve, by the way!)

So, now another nudge to read this article, from the old Universe, so I did, I read it right to the end.

BANG! POW! KERZAP!

Very good indeed.  So good in fact, that I printed it out and have been carrying it around and mulling it over every since, now embellished with highlighted bits and underlinings.

SO GOOD in fact that the power of the thoughts that this article stirred up called for one thing and it’s something I’ve never done yet ……… I have started journalling.

Yep, manually writing in a book every day, something recommended by Julia Cameron in “The Artists Way” but never taken up by me, after my mother found my five year diary when I was a teen.

I’ve been thinking of starting a daily business journal, after an article I read last week by Todd Brown at Strategic Profits called “The Secrets To Greater Business Clarity” but was putting it off till the New Year, thinking I might get a lovely notebook for Christmas (it’s on my list!)

But Yaro’s article was reverberating so loudly in my head, that I dug out a new notebook Steve bought me recently and just pasted in Yaro’s article and started writing.

Here’s the first part of Yaro’s article for you to enjoy too!  You need to read to the end, remember?

“Do Your Belief Structures And Behavior Patterns Block Your Success?” By Yaro Starak

Are You Aware Of Your Blind Spots? asks Yaro Starak.

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Having The Vision | Daring To Dream

In The Money Gym we find that one of the first hurdles our clients have to get over is that of envisaging and then writing down a detailed description of their “Ordinary Tuesday”.

We ask them to write down what they will be doing on an ordinary Tuesday in three years, five years, ten years time, when they have “made it”.  We want details; from the minute they wake up, to the moment they go to bed.

Where are they, what does it look like, how is the décor, which country are they in, what do they do in the morning, afternoon, evening.  Who are they with?  what are the smells, tastes, feelings around them?

It’s a powerful exercise because sometimes, it’s the first time they have ever done any visioning since they were a child – we all do it all the time when we are children (it’s called day dreaming).

Who teaches us as children to tone down the things we dream about doing, being, becoming?

I remember the very exciting day dreams I used to have – I either wanted to be a princess (but that involved marrying a prince then doing what he said, so slight snag there) or a successful business person with a big sunny corner office, in the City of London (my idea of business success was a little corporate in those days, I didn’t realise you could run a business from your spare bedroom).

So children are largely much better at day-dreaming, visioning than we are as adults but some grown-ups retain the ability.  There are also different personality types who are naturally more comfortable with this kind of thinking, and they are called Creatives.  They are found in ad agencies, the corporate world (it’s called blue sky thinking there) and lots of the creative industries like fashion or music.

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A Link & A List – How To Get Started Making Money Online

People who are very experienced at making money online always tend to forget the fact that most of the population don’t have a clue about the internet, beyond buying items on eBay or Amazon and using Facebook occasionally.

They certainly don’t know the potential for making money online, not as a full time job but as a second income.  And they certainly don’t know the basics of how to go about it.

All the infomation is available online, if you go to YouTube you can find a video to show you how to do just about anything, but the sheer enormity of the information is totally overwhelming, you don’t know who to trust and so nothing gets done.

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Skimboarding, Silver Elite & Susanne In Spain

This week has been absolutely mad!  We saw off five of them (phew!) at Malaga Aiport on Monday, and Susanne Jorgensen of  The Singles Gym joined us for a week as we packed them off at Gate 222.  She’s taken the town – no, the Costa – by storm and even the most grumpy waiter has not been able to resist her charms.

Nelson had to stay behind because he was three months too young to travel on his own, but he’s had a great time learning to skimboard and Susanne has turned out to be a great skimboard coach.

I had a great time turning the video footage and photos into a YouTube video for him as he’s all fired up now.  View his video and encourage him in his latest passion here

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Puerto Banus, Puerto De La Duquesa, Photos & Parasols

I’m very proud that I’ve managed to blog each day, while on holiday in Casares.

Why am I bothering you may ask?  Because one of the elements of the deal I’ve struck with my friends Rona & Adrian, who lent us their lovely house for three weeks, is that I’ve made them a Wordpress driven website to help them promote the rental of their property in Casares, short-term and long-term over the winter.

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How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up” by Yaro Starak

Nicola says: One of the people I most admire in the blogosphere is Yaro Starak, from the Entrepreneurs Journey blog.  He writes from the heart, and writes well and intersperses his blog postings with techie stuff (such as the execellent reviews of blog themes for affiliate orientated bloggers) and the heart warming stories of his own journey to success, and those of others.  Here’s a great article about how do you keep going – and keep taking action – when you really want to give up, and it’s particularly apt in a week when someone close to me, who I thought would NEVER get going, has started taking massive action.  So cool.

YARO’s ARTICLE STARTS

Like most people, some mornings I wake up and feel less than enthusiastic about working. Sometimes, this feeling doesn’t stem from laziness or apathy, it’s a stronger power, a sense of futility and helplessness.

I know a lot of people look to my story of success as a source of inspiration and that is one of the greatest benefits I enjoy as a blogger, but – and I’m not afraid to admit it – I don’t always feel energized to pursue business and sometimes in my darkest moments, I even consider throwing in the towel.

This feeling is not so common for me now as I have lifestyle flexibility, a more stable income and a better mindset about work, but earlier on, it definitely was a problem. I want to explain how I overcome these moments (and still do the same thing now on occasion) to stay on track and how you can even have a productive day when you are not really feeling the mojo on the inside.

I expect you have felt similar feelings of despair or a lack of motivation at different stages of your business development, especially if you are yet to establish an income stream online that is sufficient for you to live off, or if you are right at the beginning and you have not seen one cent of return for the work you have put in.
Inspired or Dejected

Depending on your world view and personality style, when you hear of the success of others you may either feel inspired or dejected, and while it’s obviously more fruitful to look at other people achieving what you desire as motivation, as a fallible human, jealousy, depression and anger may be your initial responses.

Your mind is your greatest asset for success in business, but it can be just as strong a force of hindrance, sabotaging your efforts, destroying your work ethic and leaving you with no option but to return to the soul destroying job you promised yourself that you would never go back to.
How To Work When You Don’t Feel Like It

One of the characteristics I believe is at the heart of my success and the success of most entrepreneurs, is an ability to keep working in the face of failure and an ability to force yourself to be productive when you don’t feel like it.
Forced Smile

I remember many a time promoting my proofreading business BetterEdit, walking around university campuses placing posters on boards, experiencing a feeling of impatience, a lack of confidence and a constant inner-questioning of whether what I was doing was a waste of time or not.

It’s very hard to be confident of success when you have yet to seriously experience it. In many ways, at this stage of your business career, faith and fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence in your idea has to carry you through the self doubt, the set-backs and the slow growth.

Nothing goes right all the time. Sometimes clients will ask for refunds, or they won’t be happy with what you provide or the universe creates a circumstance you had no way of predicting, which you just have to deal with.

For you beginners out there, one of the greatest challenges you face is your battle with self doubt. Others around you will scoff at your attempt to buck the trend to start a business, your own results will come slowly and for a long time you will have to work every day for little reward. Patience and willpower are necessary at this stage.

BetterEdit offered a great lesson for me. Placing posters on university campuses proved an effective marketing method, but the return on investment was delayed. I put up a poster and it would not elicit a response for months – sometimes even years – so my “pay off” for hard work was far in the future. This meant that I had to believe that clients would come if I just kept at it for long enough.

In hindsight faith in an outcome is easy because the experience is had, before this, you’re playing with chance and believing in the possibility of success without tasting it. If you don’t have tolerance for ambiguity, you better avoid the entrepreneur’s journey.
What Can You Create Today?

One of the things I did and still do whenever I feel less than enthusiastic is to focus on output, rather than the external elements that bring me down. I might feel utterly crushed, but I know if I create something or take any productive action, I continue towards my goals.

The great thing about output is the power it has over your mood. Negative emotion breeds negative actions – lying in your bed or watching TV for example – or a lack of any action at all. If you focus on creating something and just take one little …..

Read The Rest Of This Excellent Article By Yaro Starak Here >>

SEO For Beginners

You remember I talked about Raphael, my new taxi-service buddy from St Kitts, BVI?  I wrote about him on the blog recently and how well he looked after us….and just yesterday there was a comment on the blog from someone who wanted to book a taxi tour for six, on St Kitts in March.

Just think about that for a moment.

That’s pretty amazing isn’t it?  Some woman writes on her WEALTH CREATION blog about Empress Coaches, on St Kitts, over the other side of the world and within a week or so, he’s got a booking enquriry out of it.

How did that happen?  Because the search engines love blogs, especially Wordpress blogs.  They love the way they are set up apparently.  I also included

I just went to Google and put in “taxi service st kitts” and lo and behold, my blog post is No #5 on the organic search results.  If you put in just “taxi st kitts” it comes up No #8.  That’s amazing.  This is how it looks…

Need A Taxi Service On St Kitts BVI? | The Money Gym
Our New Friend Raphael Originally uploaded by TheMoneyGym We wandered out of the port, looking for the train station, for a tour of the island only to.
www.themoneygym.com/blog/2009/01/need-a-taxi-service-on-st-kitts-bvi/ – 45k -

So you can see that having the key words Taxi Service St Kitts in the title of the post, and the metatags, without it even being in the first line of the blog posting…hey!  I can improve the results even further by editing the first line of the description!  In the words of Gordon Ramsey……DONE!

And Raphael doesn’t even have a website yet!  Just think, if he had a website with the key phrase in the title, the meta-description and the meta-tags…….wow!

The other interesting thing is that there are NO Google Adwords ads when you put that search term in Google.  If Raphael boned up on how to do Google Adwords, he could be the ONLY ad over on the right hand side.  And if he used the little known but totally legit trick of making sure his ad was shown, no matter WHAT key phrase the searcher typed in, he’d be there every single time.

Do you think that would help him grow from two Empress Coaches empire to three, then four….now I know there is probably not much competition for the key phrase “taxi st kitts”…actually there are 337,000 pages returned when you type that in, and most of them are not about St Kitts.

However, when you use a simple tool I know about, to search how many of them have the phrase “taxi st kitts” in the title of the page, you find only 114 pages competing with my blog post.  Or Raphael’s website, if he ever makes one.

What has all this to do with your business?

Just think for a second what your idea customer might be searching for on Google.  They usually have a problem, in which case they put in the solution they are looking for (if they know what it is) or they actually type the problem in.

So, for the Money Gym, the problems could be “how do I make more money” or “how can I pay off my mortgage” or “how can I get out of debt”.  Key phrases there are “make more money”, “my mortgage” or “get out of debt”.

There are 16,900,000 pages competing with you on the key phrase “pay off debt”.  But only 9,740 pages competing with you that have the key phrase in the title of the page or the URL itself.

That levels the playing field a bit doesn’t it?  Do you see how easy it might be to dominate the search engine results by blogging on topic and just paying attention to a few simple rules?

Front page of Google anyone?

Would it interest you to know that the majority of the new visitor traffic to our site comes from Twitter, Facebook and Ecademy?  So much for those who “don’t get” Twitter!

If you find this intriguing, and want to get more traffic to your business website, I’m going to be hosting a free 2-hour webinar this Wednesday 11th February from 6pm-8pm GMT.  This will be a visual presentation as well as audio, with a good amount of time allocated for questions and answers about your business.

I’ll be covering some totally simple traffic generation techniques, dead easy search engine optimisation, and the benefits of building a community around your business, in the form of social networking and a membership site for your visitors and customers, and you really need to be there.

It will be recorded so if you miss it, and you have registered, I’ll send you a link to the recording, so you can listen afterwards.  Line spaces ARE limited so don’t miss out and secure your seat now.

Just book yourself onto the webinar here>>>

There is no charge, but you will have to go through the shopping cart process (no credit card details needed though).  Then you will recieve an email that will tell you how to register for the webinar and get all the details to watch live, or view the recording later.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Which Is The Top Money Blog?

Which Is the Top Money Blog in the blogosphere?  Or should we look for the Top 10 Money Blogs?  And are they really?

According to the organic search results on Google today the Top 10 Money Blogs are:

1.  My Money Blog – Personal Finance and Investing Blog
Chronicles author’s journey and his goal of becoming a millionaire.
www.mymoneyblog.com/

USA based blogger, who is actually tracking his net worth and reporting results.  Seems to be focusing on stockmarket based investments, although he/she covers property (real estate), entrepreneurialism, and frugal living.  Well worth a look/read.

2.  How to Make Money From Your Blog
Seriously i think everyone of you who wanna make money from blog must read this. This is the classic, and i think it will be a guide for me to monetize this …
www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/

I don’t know Steve Pavlina personally but he’s got a good reputation and this article grabs your attention for sure!

Extract:  “StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004.  By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income.  Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06).  I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion.  In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there.  Would you like to know how I did it?”

Yes, Steve, I would, so I’ll be coming back to read this blog posting.

3.  How to make money from your blog: 5 tips
Learn 5 tips to make money from your blog to increase profitability of your small business.
www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/marketing/online-marketing/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog-5-tips.aspx

Touch on the dry side as you would expect from a corporate blog (Microsoft Small Business Center) but well worth a look.  Tends to assume you want to make money from your blog rather than using it establish yourself as a maven/expert and that you have traffic already.

4. How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs
I want to make money from my blog but I also think that blogging should still be ….. Dispatches From Blogistan Blog Archive make money from blogs Says: [… …
www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/06/how-bloggers-make-money-from-blogs/

The ever excellent Problogger comes in at number 4 today, and has 708 responses on this one blog post alone!  Definately one to subscribe to, especially as I think Rich Schefren (no mean blogger himself!) is going to be working with Problogger in the New Year.

5. Learn How To Make Money Online With Your Blog
Don’t know how to blog for money? Not sure where to start? Not a problem – follow this roadmap to making money online with your blog right now! …
www.earnmoneytoblog.com/

Interesting site and not one I’ve come across before.  Seems to be a genuine blog but I find the Google Adsense right in your face like that, a bit distracting.  Some top tips on there though and some posts are divided up into beginner, intermediate and advanced which I thought was a good idea.  If it’s a junk site, it’s quite well done.  Not getting my traffic though.

6. MoneyBlog Make money OnLine

Make Money Online – How to Make Money Online and Work at Home by Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Affiliate Programs, …
afacereonline.ro/

JUNK SITE ALERT:  Strange URL, looks ok on first arrival, but a “junk site” actually.  Junk sites are those set up to scrape content from other sites, and make money from selling affiliate products and adsense.  You can tell because the posts don’t make sense and there is no discernable personality behind the site.  Ultimately Google will drop it down the rankings.  I’m not sending that traffic or links for sure!

7.  Money Blog
How To Make Money, Making Money Online, Investing, Saving, Money Managers – MoneyBlog.com.
www.moneyblog.com

JUNK SITE ALERT:  Another junky site, with no personality behind it, but they do take articles and comments from other bloggers.  Despite it’s high ranking on my search today, it’s only got a 2/10 page rank.  How long it will be there I’ve no idea, as most of the content presumably isn’t original.

8. ukmoneyblog.co.uk
I used to have one and then I decided to close it and invested the money in a retirement plan that doubles as an insurance policy. I consider that money …
www.ukmoneyblog.co.uk/

JUNK SITE ALERT:  Hmmmm, not sure about this one.  It’s written in the first person, but there is no about page, no photo, and it’s a Wordpress blog that has not been configured properly as it’s still got all the setup gubbins on the side.  However, the articles seem quite well written, and useful, so if it is scraping content, it’s using a good programme to do it.

9. Money Blog Site – The Personal Finance Blog You Can Invest In
By Money Blog. I just mentioned I was going to convert my Dad’s site to use ….. Money Blog Site is powered by WordPress | Using Tiga theme with a bit of Ozh.
www.moneyblogsite.com/

JUNK SITE ALERT:  Seems to be set up by a real person, with a view to selling it on.  He wants $750 for the domain name but the site needs some work as the template is all over the shop.  Another junk site really.

10. Make money – Make money online
Started this money blog because being an Economist I can blog for money,blog about money,blog money! Blogging for money is something we like a lot. …
www.themoneycosmos.com/

JUNK SITE ALERT:  Nice domain name, another rubbish site sadly.  Template all over the shop, completely devoid of personality.

Nicola’s Conclusion: On the key phrase “money blog” you have a great opportunity to come in and seize Google placement right there on the front page.

Important note:  The top 4 “money blog” orientated sites are by real people, delivering value and as such, they have earned some traffic from me.

Tips:  Choose a domain name with the words “money blog” included in it, put a picture up and something about yourself, configure your blog properly, inject some personality, use quality articles and blog regularly and in three months time, you could see your moneyg blog right up there.

I went through the first ten pages of Google and the Money Gym Blog is nowhere to be seen but I’m cool with that, as it’s not one of the phrases I’ve ever concentrated on, and I know that Google is still indexing our 1000+ postings, after we moved it to Wordpress.

Every day I get a Google Alert that they have indexed a few more pages or old postings, and our Page Rank has just been upped to 3/10 (we had a 4/10 ranking over at Typepad).

Patience and consistency will get us there.

Blogging is like property, a long term investment.

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