Are Headlines Tangling Your Readers?

Don’t Be The Best… Be The First!

Thinking outside of the box

What ProBloggers Can Learn from TechCrunch 20

Google Stops Google Bombs

Campaign to Reduce Wikipedia’s PageRank to Zero via (jazzcatseo)

1. Hire a Traffic Assistant
Austin mentioned this site called www.trafficassistants.com to me the other day. I am looking for ways to outsource some of my tasks and this looks like it could be a very cost effective method of bringing in more traffic to my websites. This should free up some time to do other tasks. I do love getting traffic to my sites, so I will still do some work on it myself. It’s just that after I hire a traffic assistant, I won’t be doing as much of it myself. I will let you know how it works out.

2. Get Active on MyBlogLog.com
I joined it a month ago, but haven’t done anything with mybloglog yet. Now that Yahoo has bought it, I should definitely get started making use of it.

3. Do my Taxes
Any volunteers to do my taxes for free?

I am not a big of fan working on my taxes, but it’s something I have to do.

4. Promote our American Idol Blog and Homeschooling Wiki
Our American Idol blog is a pretty decent money maker during the season. Jill will be writing on it a lot. It is one of my favorite blogs, because I am big fan of American Idol and because Jill does the writing.

On the other hand, our homeschooling wiki is the site I want to focus the most on for the first quarter of 2007.

5. Work/mentor/network with Austin of Trust My Mechanic
Austin and I are working on a quick project that takes precedence over all my other work. I figure Austin is making his living online and if he has an idea that might help me get there faster I should try it. I am learning a lot from Austin, and I hope to continue building a friendship with him (as he is a very nice person).

6. Keep up with my Blogs
Keeping up with my blogs can be a lot of work.

7. Make a Solid Business Plan
Goes without saying that this is important.

8. Write my Next Newsletters
I put out a newsletter for an ebook I wrote about website traffic. It wasn’t exaxctly as successful as I had hoped at the time. I would do things WAY differently now than I did at the time I created that ebook. However, it was a great learning experience.

Anyway, I write a free monthly internet marketing newsletter, where I talk about some things that I don’t cover on this blog. This month, I plan on writing about a Search Engine Optimization technique that I use and see ton’s of other top ranking websites use to get higher rankings from the Search Engines.

9. Sort through the JV offers I got while I was on Vacation
I recieved about 4 Joint Venture offers while I was on vacation and I need to determine which ones look the best. They are all Internet Marketing related.

10. Pray
Yes, you read that right. I have to pray about my business. When I don’t pray about my business it seems to just putter along, when I do pray about it doors open up. At least that has been my experience so far.

I have a lot of work left for the rest of this month. The first part of this month was consumed by a vacation, but the vacation reinforced some things that I learned towards the end of 2006 (in particular this and this).

If you haven’t heard, Google announced this new way to create a custom search engine using the Google search engine. You can create one yourself by signing up for Google Co-op here.

I created a custom search engine for our homeschooling site and called it “The Homeschooling Search Engine”. When you use our Search Engine you are only searching from homeschooling sites that I or someone else has added to the Search Engine.

What is really cool is the whole social aspect. Anyone can sign up to be an editor for the search engine and add their favorite homeschooling sites.

You can even make money with it, by associating your Goolge Adsense account with the Search Engine.

Anyway, you can check out our Homeschooling Search Engine by clicking here. It’s a pretty cool technology that I have been meaning to play around with. I am glad I did!

Tags:

homeschool homeschooling Home education Home School google co-op co-op

I modeled the original design after wikipedia. It had featured articles, featured categories, etc. I think that the original design was too cluttered and from what I discovered non-techies found it hard to navigate.

In the redesign of the home page, I decided to follow the axiom: Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS). Instead of having featured articles and featured categories I made one big table with a list of the most popular categories, subcategories and articles. I find this layout much easier to navigate.

I also moved most of the introduction text to a separate page. Right at the top of the page, I direct new users to this new Introduction page.

I feel like the new home page is WAY easier to navigate and much more user friendly. I think that often times technical types (like myself) forget that most of the people who use the web are not necessarily as web savvy as we are. It needs to be simple for people to a navigate your site. That’s actually a lesson I learned way back, but I was reminded of this by my wife Jill, a visitor to our site and from interviewing Austin of Trust My Mechanic. It didn’t sink in that our wiki was in violation of this rule, until others pointed it out. Easy navigation is very important.

I suggest taking a look at your sites and/or blogs and asking the question,

“How can I make it easier for my visitors to use this site?”

We should all probably ask that question on a regular basis….

Tags:

homeschool homeschooling Home education Home School

I still don’t get it. What can Squidoo can do for you to increase pagelink?

First of all, website traffic 101 tells us that the more links you get to your website the better.

How does Squidoo help you get links to your site?

When you create a Squidoo Lens you create tags for it. These tags are used to categorize your lens. Your lens and other lenses have links to these tag pages. The tag pages link back to all of the lenses that use that tag. This means that when you create a new lens your lens automaticly gets links from the tag pages on the Squidoo site. Which increases the PageRank for your Lens.

Now we have a Lens with Links to it. How does this Lens help your webiste?

Let’s use my first Squidoo lens as an example. Click here and take a look at the lens.

Notice that the first link on the Lens is a link to our homeschooling wiki.

If you do what I did and create a link on your lens to one of your websites, you will have a new link to your website. Which is good, because some people will find your lens, click on the link to your site, and bring your site traffic.

This link is also good, because almost every link you get to your site will help it rank higher for Search Engine terms.

Another way that this link helps is that you are getting a link from what is known as an Authority site. Most people believe that Squidoo is considered an authority site. Authority sites are sites that are considered an authority on a specific topic and have lots of links to them. For instance, I think it is pretty safe to say that CNN is an authority site for news.

When you get a link from an authority site it is considered more valuable than a link from a non-authority site.

The Search Engines will see the link on the Squidoo Lens as a link from an authority site. Therefore this link from the Squidoo lens is going to be a good quality link to your website. Ulitmately, this one link isn’t going to make any site rise to the top of the Search Engine rankings, but it will help.

I find those images annoying and feel like they clutter up the screen. So I went through the code and found out how to get rid of the arrow -> images.

If you own a wiki here’s what you do:

1. Go to the skins directory and into the directory of the skin you are using. For our homeschooling wiki it is the monobook directory.

2. Open up the style sheet file “main.css”.

3. Search for the word “external”.

You should see something that look like this:

4. Remove the 5 lines above, save the file and upload it back to your server

Then say goodbye to the annoying arrow images!

You can see the results on our wiki by clicking here. Notice that none of our links have those annoying images. Woohoo!

The next step is updating the navigation for our homeschool wiki. It is going to be much easier to navigate when we are done with it.

UPDATE:
You also need to do those same steps for the files: “IE60Fixes.css”, “Opera6Fixes.CSS”, and “Opera7Fixes.CSS”.

The game claims to teach all about Internet Marketing, earning residual income, affiliate marketing, joint ventures, list building, blogging, podcasting, etc. It also helps you get familiar with terms like wikis, social tagging, etc.

At first I wasn’t sure what to think of it, because it is not your normal Internet Marketing product. However, I am starting to think that I might want to buy it for my two oldest kids. It might be a fun way to teach them about Internet Marketing.

I had never really thought about creating an actual board game to teach others, but it is a very interesting idea. This product is definitely another example of a “Purple Cow“.

If you are interested in checking it out, you can click here to go learn more about it.

Thanks to Nash for letting me know about it.

What do you think about the idea of an Internet Marketing Board Game? Is it something you would want to buy, or do you just want to stick with videos, ebooks, and podcasts?

However, I think the title is misleading. Obviously, Internet Marketing is NOT dead. If it were then Mike would be quitting and he is not.

There is a ton of money to be made on the net with all kinds of sites (blogs, wikis, forums, download sites, affiliate marketing, Adsense, ebooks, services, copywriting, seo, web design, software, games, membership sites, Internet Marketing, drop shipping, etc). There are all kinds of statistics out there about how fast the Internet is growing and how much money consumers will spend on the net.

So if you are trying to make money online, don’t worry. There is plenty of money to be made on the web and just like Google Adsense, Internet Marketing is NOT DEAD!

I just wanted to make sure I was clear about that.

That said, “The Death of Internet Marketing” is still a good read.

Most of my free time I have been working on my 9-5 job. I am still putting in a lot of overtime at it.

As far as my online business, I have been having trouble keeping up with my blogs because of my 9-5 job and the fact that my top business priority right now is to turn our Homeschooling Wiki into the best possible site it can be. I have started off by really putting in a lot of effort on our homeschool curriculum category. I just finished up most of my work on the homeschool christian curriculum and I am currently working on adding Hebrew sites. I have a lot left to do, but I want to try and make each current category of the wiki more complete than any other homeschooling site on the Internet.

I also plan on starting to work on getting more links to our wiki. That said, it has received some fairly decent natural links just by being the first of it’s kind homeschool wiki.

Anyway, planning the direction of our wiki and building content in our wiki has taken up most of my free time. My goal is for it to be producing the kind of money (or more) that our dinosaur site does in the next 3 months.

I am trying to keep up our OnOurTV blog, but it hasn’t been easy.

Also, I am writing a series of posts for this blog that I think will be very good. But, it’s keeping me from having as much content to post on this blog (only so much time in a day).

Once my 9-5 becomes a 9-5 again, I am going to finish my business plan and get an even clearer vision for the business. In the meantime, my wife Jill and I have come up with lots of really good business ideas. Which is one reason I need to accomplish the goal of getting our wiki lot’s of traffic. Once it is bringing in more money, I should be able to spend more money to get our other business ideas off the ground. For now, the goal is to stay focused on the sites we have and build them up.

Lastly, Jill surprised me the other day when she bought accounting software, so I no longer have to do my books by hand. It should be a good time saver until I can afford an accountant/bookkeeper. I installed it last night, but have not used it yet.

So what are you doing to make money online? Are you bogged down reading about making money online or are you taking action?

Make Something Happen NOW! (quick, and to the point excellent advice)

time the one thing we cant control (this has been very true for me lately)

Rich Schefren Final Chapter (awesome, free business changing ebook)

What skills are crucial to be a good SEO? (good discussion)

Performancing Partners Launch (cool news)

Citizendium – Wikipedia For Grownups. (interesting idea)

My 9-5 job has still been very busy, so I haven’t had much time for anything except for writing on a few blogs. However, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have learned so much from the past few weeks. It has been a good experience. I will write about the business lessons I have learned from the last several weeks, once more of my time frees up.

After writing the post, I had someone ask me:
“What is Squidoo?”.

Apparently, I didn’t do a good job of answering that question. So here is my brief definition of Squidoo:

Squidoo is kind of like a wiki, only when you create a page (called a lens) you are the only one who can edit it.

Then you split the profits from the money made by that page (lens). You can use it to create almost any kind of page. For instance, you could use it to create a business page advertisiing your business services, or a page on a particular topic like baby poop, or whatever topic you want to write about.

You can advertise and promote the page or just leave it alone and see if it gets natural traffic. Squidoo pays you every month for the money your pages make. You have the option to let all or a percentage of your earnings go to charity.

I also want to briefly mention that in the comments for my previous post, Seth Godin pointed out exactly how much Squiddo is growing (see details here).

It’s pretty impressive growth. Squidoo is definitely something to look into, even if you intend to use it only as another method of promoting your websites.

Tags:
squidoo seth godin lens

Bloggers have given our new wiki (Know Homeschooling) most of it’s traffic and we have been very happy with the results.

Update: One further note, several bloggers have gotten me to write about their business just by asking or by leaving comments on my blog.

The press release announces the winner of our homeschooling contest. (Note: I plan on writing a post on the things I learned from running the contest in the near future)

We have had mixed results with our press releases, but we did get at least one new link out of it and some extra traffic.

We submitted it both to PRWEB and to a few homeschooling news sites and blogs. According to our PRWEB statistics it was read 13,781 times and their estimated number of pickups is 107. In other words, they estimate that 107 sites picked up the story.

I recommend you try releasing a press release for your online business every now and then to boost your traffic and spark more interest in your site. It has worked for me, it will work for you too.

Be patient though, not every press release will get the same amount of attention. I also highly recommend that if you submit the release to PRWEB you spend at least 10 dollars to upgrade the release. I believe it is well worth it.

I have decided to cut this series short, because what most of you have told me in a previous poll is that you are interested in making Big Money.

You can’t expect to make big money online with some of these things. In fact, making big money online almost always takes hard work and a unique business idea. So with that said, I am going to drop this series and instead focus on other things like reviewing products that will help get both you and I to the point where we are making Big Money.

To start things off, here is my list of the top 10 things that I believe you and I need to do to make Big Money Online:

1. Be Remarkable!
2. Be Remarkable!
3. Be Remarkable!
4. Be Remarkable!
5. Be Remarkable!
6. Be Remarkable!
7. Be Remarkable!
8. Be Remarkable!
9. Be Remarkable!
10. Be Remarkable!

I have mentioned in the past Seth Godin’s book, the Purple Cow and how important it is to be remarkable. While there are many ways to monetize a site:

1. Adsense
2. Affiliate Links
3. Products (Software, ebooks, etc.)
4. Services
5. Various Pay Per Click services like Chitika, etc.
6. Selling advertising
etc.

The way I see it, you have to find a way to make your online business stand out over the long haul to make big money online. Whether you create a blog, website, wiki, etc. The bottom line is that to make Big Money online you have to be remarkable.

Start thinking of ways to make your current website or a new website remarkable, make it stand out from the crowd. That’s my current plan for making big money online. I will let you know how it goes…

I have listed many of the general goals that I have for my online business in the past (here , here, and here). We decided that any plans we made had to fit our long term business goals. I am going to list some of our long term business goals that are playing a big part in our short term plans. Here they are:

1. The business has to leverage our strengths (outsource and/or barter the rest).

2. Have Fun – do things we enjoy.

3. Help Others.

4. Needs to be able to provide Big Money.

5. Something that allows us to make a living without requiring too much time. For me that means an online business that long term only takes up to a maximum of 30 hours a week. Which means it needs to almost run on auto-pilot.

6. While Jill will be involved, Jill has no intention of being involved the amount of time I am involved. So the bulk of the income has to come by leveraging my strengths (see #1).

With those overall goals in mind, we came up with a list of ideas. We chose the following idea as our short term plan:

For now, just pick about 4 of our websites to revamp. Turn them into Purple Cows and decide where to go from there with the extra money this creates.

So, now we are at the stage of picking our top few websites to revamp. We may revamp all of them during this process and/or decide to dump one or two. On the top of both of our lists is our homeschooling wiki. Jill and I are both happy with the vision we have created for it and we both love it’s potential, are both involved in the community it targets, and in general have a really good feeling about it. So our primary business focus over the coming months will be promoting and working on our homeschooling wiki.

Next, on my list is this blog. I really enjoy writing on the topic of Internet Marketing and really enjoy discussing this journey. I am just starting to work on the new vision for this blog. I am going to make use of the feedback you have provided in my current poll. When I have completed the plan, I will let you know.

Third on our list is our Summer Olympics blog and Winter Olympics blog. We have a lot vested in them and have already made big plans for the upcoming olympics with them. We have a strong vision for them. It’s mostly an issue of implementation now.

Fourth, we have some things we will be doing for Jill and her friend’s Delightful Child site. Some of these changes will come sooner and some later. Some of the changes to their site are likely to be outsourced to a web designer. While I enjoy web design, ultimately I have to cut some of my tasks to focus on the strengths of mine that will bring us the most long term money.

During this process, we will continue to write posts on our blogs and to generaly maintain our sites, but we will be changing our focus to focus on what we enjoy the most and what fits with our long term goals.

Our long term business plans are yet to be determined. Some of the ideas we have for long term business plans will be affected by the results of our short term plans. I will keep you updated on our progress.

BTW - I am going to start going through the process of goal setting with other areas of my life in order to keep a good balance between my business and my life outside of my business.

I am still working on creating a compelling vision for our business. I will let you know what we decide, once we make a decision about that. The one thing I do know is that I will be asking for help from other people whose strengths are different than ours.

Also, an affiliate manager for a fairly underground Internet Marketer contacted me last week, and I have been looking through their products. So far I am very impressed and will tell you more about them in the near future.

One last thing, our $500 dollar giveaway on our homeschooling wiki ends in a week (August 10th). So if you want to contribute or know of any homeschoolers who would be interested in contributing to the wiki and be entered into the drawing, please forward this on to them.

I listened to part of Rick Schefren’s interview with Mike Filsame on my ipod on my way into work this morning. It’s a very interesting interview so far.

This week, my brother-in-law’s attempt at buying the sealing business went south. So it looks like the extreme sealers business might be on again. It’s a bit of a roller coast, not exactly the best start of a business I have been involved with.

I also worked on my wife and her friend’s baby site. I am preparing to move it to a new web host. Once I move it to the new web host, I will be redesigning it. After reading the Internet Manifesto I am starting to think we should just hire a different web designer to do the work of updating it. While I enjoy web design, I am not sure my time is best utilized desiging web sites.

Internet Manifesto – One word – AWESOME!

With my wedding anniversery, business discussions, my 9-5 job, my oldest son having science camp this week, and reading the Internet Manifesto, I have been very busy. Next week, I plan on re-organizing my business and coming up with new business goals. I also plan on putting more time into promoting our new homeschooling wiki.

That’s it for this week, hope everyone has an excellent weekend!

I will let you know how succesful our contest turns out to be, both from the standpoint of generating new content and more traffic.

Now, it’s time for me to head to bed…

The website for the business my wife and brother-in-law were creating is on hold, beause my brother-in-law is in negotiations to by the entire sealer business from the person we were going to be drop shipping from. So that business is on hold for us. This frees up some time for me over the next couple of weeks (which is a good thing).

We had a problem with the homeschooling wiki yesterday. Our web host changed something that made it so that we couldn’t edit pages. They fixed the problem quickly. I have been very happy with them for web hosting, because they always respond quickly to our questions.

It was interesting to see how Joel Comm launched his Instant Adsense Templates. He sold out of them in about 24 hours. I learned a few things about launching a new product from watching what he did. I don’t particularly like the limited supply (scaricity) hook he used, but it makes sense from both a customer point of view and a marketing point of view. From a customer point of view, you don’t want to have the web saturated with your template and similar content. From a marketing point of view, it helps you make sales if your customers have an incentive to buy now. Yanik Silver taught me that you will lose a lot of sales if your customers don’t have a reason to buy your product immediately. This is why so many businesses have limited offers, time sensitive offers, various sales, etc. It gives you a reason to buy now.

Anyway, next week I will probably spend most of the week working on promoting our homeschool wiki. Have a nice weekend…

This week has been busy from the start. I have been working on our new wiki, our concrete sealer site. Not to mention, the other day Joel Comm of Adsense Secrets fame, gave me the chance to sneak preview his new Instant Adsense Templates. How could I say no to that? Sure I was busy, but I had to take a look at them.

Anyway, things have been very busy this week. I plan on focusing most of my attention on the new homeschooling wiki and the concrete sealer site for the next couple of weeks.

That’s it for now, for those of you in the US I hope you have a Happy Fourth!