It says “Are You Going To Heaven”.  Bit morbid don’t you think?

Does it have something to do with New Years Eve 2011?  Is it this year’s theme for the Sydney NYE Fireworks?

If anyone knows, please leave a comment below.

Tracey

P.S. They added more .. It was a message from some Church .. Seriously? Come on guys! Weird though, right!

Thanks for reading “Are You Going To Heaven” Skywriting Sydney NYE 2011. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

In this rare moment of peace I thought it was time to reflect on what happened this year and what my goals for next year are.

What happened this year?  Some Reflection …

Let’s start with having a look at this year first.  Going over last year’s goals post I planned to:

• Build more Squidoo lenses and point BMR’s at them
• Finish a traditionally published book
• Close down my Aweber account
• Write more EZA articles
• Continue to use BMR for backlinks
• Deleting many of the poor performing Amazon mini sites
• Write some eBooks

So how’d I do?

While the list wasn’t that long or challenging I did manage to complete all but one of my goals.  The goal I didn’t complete – mainly from lack of enthusiasm was to write more EZA articles.

Fortunately for me that probably saved me wasting a lot of time since Panda hit article sites like EZA hard this year and that time was better spent on my own sites or other backlinking services.

So what about 2012 – what are my plans for next year?

2012 is going to be all about stepping up. Dominating.  Becoming a force to be reckoned with.

The past year I’ve been too much all over the place.  Too many websites, too little focus.  I’ve just been putting the hours in and backlinking since that got the job done.  And while it did earn me a few pennies here and there I’m not where I want to be.

So not surprisingly my online income took a dive this year.  Not enough to put us in the poor house or anything, but enough that because we didn’t curb our spending caused us to rack up a bit of credit card debt (which I talk about in 30 Day Spending Detox).

That got me mad.  I’m supposed to be good at finance – heck I’ve got enough books and articles on the topic – so how the hell did I get into debt?

The answer.  I didn’t care enough (so my income dropped) and wasn’t organised enough (hence the out of control spending).

We are all fine and back on track again of course.  But it was definitely a wake-up call.  A big universe slap in the face that I need to get SERIOUS again.

Let’s get serious.  This isn’t a game anymore.

It’s time I need to make a name for myself in the finance niche.

So that means.

Write more books – 6 this year is the goal.

Write more awesome kickass blog posts (and more often).  1,000 words minimum.  Photos, graphs, video’s.  Whatever’s needed.

Videos.  Oh hell yes – I’m gonna step in front of the camera.  It’s about time.

Diversifying posts to catch a wider audience.  I already did this with my Christmas lights in North Ryde post.  Regular readers probably wondered WTF I was doing.  Don’t care.  It was useful.  Gained some good mentions and backlinks.  And my book sales went up – could have been a coincidence, don’t care.  I wrote about something real, unique and helpful.  So what if it wasn’t marketing related.

Taking my own pics when possible.  Originality.  Going that extra step.  Owning it baby.

Press Releases.  It’s time to bring it and let the world know.

So that’s it.  2012 is going to be the year when I jump out of my comfort zone and really go for it.

Watch this space.

Tracey

P.S. Some of my friends have already started their goals posts for next year.  Let me know by email or in the comments below if you want a link to your goals post below. 

Enough about me – here are some of my FRIENDS GOALS FOR 2012 ..

1. Tiffany’s 2012 Goals and Business Plans

2. Lis’s year in Review & Plans for 2012 & Here

3. Leo’s Year and Goals for 2012

4. Hospitalera’s Making Money in 2011 / 2012

5. James’s – 2011 Lessons and 2012 Goals

Thanks for reading 2012 Goals & Resolutions. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

This looks surprisingly a lot like me. Except for the snow.

Before I became an Internet Marketer, I was an author.  I had two traditionally published books in Australia in personal finance.  All my life I wanted to write, and even though at times I wasn’t always very good at it, it was my dream to become a full-time writer.

It was a no-brainer then that I studied Journalism and Media Communication at University (actually I did have one year in Commerce first before I moved to Journalism but I digress).  I never did get that TV job as a reporter though.  In fact most of my jobs post University were fairly standard secretarial type roles that really didn’t need any writing (unless you count boring reports).

It wasn’t until I was older (and wiser?) that I figured it was now or never and I wrote a book on the stock market (as that was something I was interested in at the time).  Fortunately it was easy to find a publisher and get it published and it went on to be a bestseller (which sounds far more impressive than it actually is: in Australia you only need to sell over ten thousand or so copies for a book to become a bestseller).

Chuffed with myself that I’d finally realised my dreams I sat back and waited for the cheques to roll in.  And I waited and waited.  A few cheques came but they weren’t all that impressive.  I found out that from my $24.95 book, I made royalties of a little over two dollars per book.  No wonder writers don’t make any money.  I did however go on to write another one, but again, while it was successful in bookstores, I wasn’t exactly rolling in the cash that I thought all author’s received.

So I got disillusioned by the whole writing books game and gave up my dreams.  It was a little after that I heard about this thing called internet marketing where you could write blogs and build websites and get paid commissions.  Heck you could even write your own stuff and have OTHER people sell it for you.  Could this be the answer I was looking for?

For a while it was.  And to some degree it still is (it still is the way I make the majority of my money online) however twelve months ago I heard about changes in the publishing world.  One of the biggest retailers in the world, Amazon, had opened up its Kindle Publishing arm to everyone.  You no longer needed a publisher to get listed on the giant, you could write a book and upload it yourself directly to the book giant.

And even better, if you priced your book between 2.99 and 9.99 you got 70% of the royalties.  Oh boy did this revelation make my heart sing again!

So around three months ago I started writing ebooks for the Kindle and published my first book on the Kindle, Nook and iPad (among others) and officially become a non-fiction indie author.

Now while book sales haven’t been breaking any records so far (I’m actually in the process or updating it AND releasing a second book) I can see the potential and with a background in internet marketing to help boost traffic and conversions I can see that this can be a very good way to make money in the future.

The world is only starting to move to reading digital books.  I recently read a statistic that only 10-15% of readers own an ereader such as the Kindle.  As ereaders and tablets become more mainstream then that number will rise.  Amazon has reported it now sells more ebooks than printed books, which is probably due to the fact that ereader and tablet owners buy more books than regular readers.  I know I buy AT LEAST one ebook a month now (often more) whereas before I’d be lucky if I bought two or three printed books a year.

With the rise in the number of readers wanting digital content the audience is only going to get bigger.

Do you have a book inside you just waiting to get out?

Doesn’t matter if it’s nonfiction or fiction (most of the self-publishing success stories so far have been fiction writers but I suspect that’s because most nonfiction authors are still quite happy to stick with their publishers at the moment).

If you’ve ever wanted to be a writer and get a book published right now is the best time to do it.  You can upload it directly to Kindle, Barnes & Noble (if you live in the US) and Smashwords (to distribute to the rest of the ereaders & tablet devices).

And you can FINALLY be getting the lionshare of profits from your own work.

God I love technology.

Thanks for reading I’m writing eBooks for the Kindle, Nook, iPad and more. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

However the reality is more like trying to convince my 4 year old that it’s mummy’s time on the computer while I steal fifteen minutes here and there when my 1 year old is napping in between dishes, laundry and cleaning up the banana that the baby just squashed into the TV remote.

To be honest I often am amazed that I have time to make any money online at all!

Internet marketing has taken a bit of a back seat lately while I work on ‘real’ books so I haven’t had the time to blog comment, social network, or check my Adsense account 20 times a day like I usually do.

I’ve still been lurking though (which is much easier now that I’ve set my Google reader subscriptions up on Flipboard on the iPad) (how awesome is Flipboard!) so I can read at my leisure. (did I say leisure? Ha!)

Is it possible to make money online even when you don’t have much time?

Absolutely.

But you need to work smarter. To make money online when you don’t have a lot of time you need:
1. A clear outline of what you want to achieve on a daily/weekly/monthly basis (I don’t plan anything longer than a month in advance).
2. A checklist, to do list or list of steps that are actionable to move you towards your goal.
3. Writing on a regular basis (even if that is broken up into small chunks of time)

My To Do list usually looks something like this:

DAILY

• Read / Answer emails
• Read / Answer blog comments
• Quickly check news / discussion sites / other blogs to see what info is currently topical / hot in the niche I’m working on.
• Check Twitter
• Brainstorm blog post ideas.

WEEKLY

• Choose which site/blog to focus on for that week (I have Internet Marketing ADD – so I usually work on a different site every week although I come back to my faves often).
• Write blog posts
• Get Backlinks from: articles / BMR / hubs / squids / commenting / wherever is good

MONTHLY

• Check traffic stats for all sites and compare increases/decreases from previous month . Concentrate efforts mostly on sites that are increasing in traffic.
• See if there are any domains I want to let go (because I either don’t have time to work on the project, lost interest in them, or they haven’t made me any money within a year (some sites I’m sure are just cursed).
• Start working through the SeoMoz Noob Guide to Internet Marketing (helps me keep focused and on track with those marketing steps I always seem to forget to do. And it has an infograpic.  Who doesn’t love an infographic!)

Your To Do list is probably completely different. As it should be since we all have different goals and working habits.

Although it doesn’t always go to plan, so I’ve also made a list of what not to do:

• Stare at a blank computer screen wondering what you are going to do next (me before coffee)
• Spend over an hour searching for the ‘perfect’ theme for your blog. Just choose one – you can always changing it later
• Think you need a professional looking logo so ‘research’ some design ideas – aahh that’s a pretty picture (no Tracey, focus)
• Get bored and make a controversial comment in a mother/baby forum – sooo fun, but not really conducive to getting work done.

Oh, I have to go – the baby just tipped out the breakfast cereal on the kitchen floor.

Thanks for reading How To Find Time To Write When You Have Two Kids Hanging Off You. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Thanks for reading I Want An Ipad 2. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

I’ll have to be honest with you though, I didn’t really get affected all that much. Sure my hubs are down, but traffic is actually only down about 15 or so %. My hub adsense income hasn’t really changed all that much (perhaps down a few cents per week – but nothing I would have normally even noticed unless I looked really hard).

Overall I think my adsense income across the board is actually slightly up. I’m guessing some of the rankings for sites that I haven’t touched in a while might have moved. Again I don’t know – I haven’t really looked.

This disinterest is mainly because I haven’t been focused so much on internet marketing lately.

With reading the Millionaire Fastlane and rewriting the first book I’ve started to even question whether the whole get links, pray for rankings, feel the love thing is really for me anymore. Maybe I should just stick to writing books – even though there is even less money in that unless you get featured on Oprah or something.

My income hasn’t moved from where it was 12 months ago. I do know I make a pretty decent monthly income from all the sites/hubs/lenses/etc that I have – a monthly income that many others would think is a dream and want to aspire to.

But after linking and praying for the last twelve months, I haven’t seen any real improvements. Still a great income for sure, but you would think I would have seen a few thousand a month (at least) improvement wouldn’t you?

I guess that sounds kind of selfish on my part. Perhaps I’m just having a bad day. I know what I do works, I just can’t seem to break through that barrier.

Ok. Enough venting.

Perhaps I just need to step away from the computer and go get a nice massage or something. Oh yes that’s it. And a facial. With nice relaxing music, candles and aromatherapy oils. Ahh now I feel better.

Thanks for reading Link, Pray, Love. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

I wrote this post at the start of the year about how I was going to write lots of articles, do lots more Squidoo lenses, and do lots of things to increase my rankings.

You know what; I didn’t do any of it.

And I don’t plan to either.

Because I’ve found being lazy is much more productive and much more profitable.

Instead of doing more lenses I just picked the ones that were already making money (about seven of them did the most money for me) and hired someone on fiverr to write some articles which I then broke up into 150 word snippets and posted them on Build My Rank. Those lenses are doing great now. Lazy work accomplished. Total work time, maybe 10 minutes? Total cost around $25. Total revenue earned (nice amazon $$)

And I gave up on EZA after a few people stole my articles without my resource box. I sent those scraping losers a firm email. I don’t want to write for EZA for people to steal my work.

So I got lazy and wrote for BMR instead. Because they will keep my links intact and it’s much easier to write 150 words than it is to write 500+ . Total work time, 1 hour a day writing BMR’s (I can usually crank out quite a few in an hour).

And lazy is paying off. My adsense income is increasing. It was my second highest earner for January. Yah.

I’m going to continue to be lazy and work smarter.

This post is only going to be short. I’m too lazy to write any more.

Thanks for reading The Lazy Girl’s Guide to Making Money Online. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Now while there isn’t an official definition of ‘content farms’ anywhere online, the general consensus is that it basically means sites that produce thousands of pages of low quality information. That’s why Demand Media was mentioned, because they typically add hundreds of thousands of pages to their site per month from different writers all producing crappy 300 or so word articles of dubious quality.

Autoblogs and scrapers especially are considered ‘content farms’ and it’s likely also true for anyone that produces sites based soley on PLR, republished EZA or spun articles.

So if that’s the case then, are big sites like EZA and eHow considered content farms? You bet! But I still think EZA and the better article directories will be given a bit of a free pass anyway. But if you own a site and get your articles from here, then it’s likely you might be affected. I wouldn’t be taking half the garbage off there anyway just to send my traffic to someone else’s crappy MFA site.

Now before all the article marketers reading this start whining that their 350 word article is genuine quality then I’ll have to say that’s bullsh*t. Look I know – I’ve got hundreds of 300 worders on places like EZA as well – all with the keyword mentioned three or four times, bolded where necessary, and a strong call of action at the end.

But it ain’t gonna work the same in the future.

You need to be looking at good quality 800+ articles on your own sites that ARE actually quality – in that they provide value to the reader, are original, offer a unique perspective or something else compelling. You know when your stuff is good. So does your reader. And now, so it seems, does Google.

I still plan on using EZA (and writing LONG quality articles), but I want to start using it for what it was originally intended for – for ezine publishers to find good information to include on their sites and in their newsletters. And once they publish one of my articles then it’s likely that they’ll take more too. (You can easily find out who publishes your articles by setting up a Google Alert on a phrase in the article). So then you can contact the sites directly and hopefully build up a good network of sites that will publish your articles and more importantly already have targeted traffic frequenting their sites.

99% of articles on article directories are what splork calls web sewer sludge. So if a publisher with a good PR site comes and finds one of my articles that’s decently written and doesn’t offer a free report on eliminating yeast infections in the resource box (yeah like anyone is going to publish that) and fills a good amount of space on their site then they’ll be publishing it all over the place. It will take time to build up a network of sites like that though. But you are in this for the long haul aren’t’ you?

You can also seek out sites that accept guest posts too. I’ve been looking closely at sites like MyBlogGuest.com as well as doing searches like “keyword” + “guest post” OR “write for us” OR “guest author” to find related blogs to write for.

The times they are a changin’ my friend and we need to adapt.

So what should you do? You should do what everyone has been harping on about for the past few months. Build up some good quality ‘authority sites’. Start writing some really good content for it. If you write a long post then it’s highly likely that you’ll naturally include lots of juicy longtails in it for Google to masturbate over.

LSI or ‘theme words’ as Xfactor calls them are becoming more important too. I wouldn’t bother with the software that he mentions in his latest $97 ripoff (the book is good, the price tag is NOT). If you want to find the top LSI keywords from the top 10 ranking sites just use these free sites: LSI Keywords, Keyword Finder. Just make it look natural and don’t stuff, yeah?

Now I’ve got to go. Got a million things to write – catch you soon. T xx

Thanks for reading What the F*&^ is a Content Farm? And What Does This Mean For Me?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

2010 was a mixed year, on one hand it was worse than 2009 because I lost about 2/3 of my Amazon sites (mini niche sites) so my income dropped significantly however I learnt so much more about SEO than I have at any other time because I tested out a lot of things for myself rather than just rely on what I had been told previously.

Mainly I learnt that the more you try and game the search engines the more you’ll hurt your own sites.  The further I got into black hat techniques the worst I actually fared.  That means that I’ll be going back to good old fashioned white hat (mostly) methods again.

Here are my plans for 2011:

Squidoo:

This year I plan on increasing the amount of Squidoo lenses I have, since over the past few months these have proved very profitable for me.  My typical lens has an intro of about 150-200 words with a text link to Amazon (nofollowed) high up in the text.  Followed by a squidutils amazon poster (very clickable) with some more text, a video, an amazon module and whatever else will bulk up the site.  (Wikipedia/rss feeds/news/other etc)

Then I’ll point a handful of Build My Rank links at them to get them to rank well.  I’ve been doing around 5-10 links to some of my lenses, but Dave has had very good results for sending around 20 links so I’ll be increasing the amount to my best lenses and trying to improve my worst lenses.

Real World Books:

Early in the year I won’t be able to do too much internet marketing work as I have to do a big update on one of my REAL books that I’ve got. (Publisher wants me to update it since it has been 5 years since it first came out).  Yes I’m a real author folks for those that didn’t know.  So most of my time will be spent on that – my deadline is April which is doable as long as the kids let me have some uninterrupted time at the computer so I can concentrate.

Email Marketing: 

I have an old Aweber account that people still find and sign up to to get advice from me, but the truth is that it only has a few emails that were written to promote an old ebook I wrote early 2008 (back when I blindly followed what I was supposed to do by the ‘promote anything and everything’ crowd).  The emails on that account are just part of an autoresponder series that have nothing to do with what I’m about now.

So I’m not sure what I plan on doing with this.  My thoughts sway from just shutting down Aweber entirely and trying to find all my lead capture pages scattered around and delete them, to cleaning up the autoresponder emails to provide some true real value.  I really am not sure what I plan on doing with this yet.  Any suggestions would be valued.

Perhaps I’ll send an email to those on my list asking them what they want (even though many will have long forgotten who I even am).

Article Marketing:

I have been a bit lazy when it comes to writing articles for EZA but looking back over my account I realise they send me a lot of traffic. It’s very true that article marketing doesn’t provide strong backlinks anymore but they are still good for traffic generation (or at least they have been for me).   

My plan for this year is to get back into writing around one article a week for the sites I’m working on.  And ever since Griz mentioned that using just the URL and not worrying too much about the anchor text, I think I’ll just write shorter articles and put the url of the page I want it to link to (most probably an inner page) rather than use any anchor text at all.  Obviously the articles will need to be decent to get the traffic to click through to your site.

At the moment I average around 500 views per article per year with a clickthrough of around 25%.  That means that every article I write brings me roughly 125 visitors over a year.  If I had 50 odd articles to the one site that’s an extra 6250 visitors to my site that I might not get. If we are talking an Amazon site my conversion is usually around 8-10% which means I’ll make around 600 extra sales.  That’s worth it to me.  Also I’ll get the benefit of some very white hat friendly backlinks which should help me a bit in the organic listings, not so much from EZA itself (article directories are not strong links) but hopefully if others pick up my articles to put on their blogs and keep the resource box intact.

Backlinking:

I’ll also continue to use Build My Rank because right now it works and even though it probably won’t last forever (these types of sites rarely do) because it’s one link for one original blog post it still looks quite natural.  I probably will keep these links to only 2 or 3 per day per site though in the beginning and build up slowly.

I also want to start getting really good quality links too.  That means analysing the top sites in the rankings for similar terms and seeing if they accept guest posts, blog comments, linking/resources pages etc.  It’s also worth reverse engineering these sites to see where they get their links from as you can often uncover some gems of places you might not have thought about.

My Amazon Mini Sites:

I plan on deleting a lot of these.  They were slapped bad this year and while I could wait it out and be patient, a lot of them have the product name in the domain and I think it would be best to just get rid of them and concentrate on building up a few really good authority sites instead.

For the short term I’ll use Squidoo and Hubpages for quick Amazon cash, but over time I’ll build up no more than five authority sites.  It’s crazy that I currently have well over 60 different sites.  Now I want to cut that right back and concentrate on quality rather than quantity.

Ebooks:

I want to write a few ebooks this year.  Mini guides for newbs except they’ll be totally free and probably won’t even have an opt-in.  I thought about just writing out some really great guides as blog posts but new marketers tend to trust ebooks more.  Not sure why that is though. Plus ebooks have more longevity (usually).  Or perhaps I’m still just an author at heart who likes the book format  

Well that’s it really, just more of the same except focusing more on good content, quality sites and very white hat backlinks.  Hmm so I guess 2011 is going to be a QUALITY year then.  Well I least I hope it is for me and for you all.

tracey xx

Thanks for reading 2011 Plans. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Now I could drag out this post and tease you along a bit before revealing the answer like it was some huge secret but really it ain’t anything you probably didn’t already know.

But on my sites. 60%’ish of the time it’s text links that get clicked and 40%’ish of the time the image link. Oh and yes that image over there is typical of how I do my images. A big pic of the item, the Amazon stars (only if it has a good rating LOL) and of course the buy from Amazon button. And for those that are wondering YES IT’S AN AFFILIATE LINK. Because to be a good internet marketer you NEED to own Cougar Town yeah? 

If you want the “buy from Amazon” buttons you get them from the associates site here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t6/a9

Oh but of course have both. The text link AND the image link. Good.

Backlink update week 3

Stats:

KW2 – 86 (last week 192 – it’s also jumping around a lot right now)
KW3 –27 (last week 138)
KW4 – 41 (last week 75)
KW6 – 111 (not ranked last week)

Backlinks indexed in YSE = 65

Nice jumps huh! And the article run still hasn’t been done (don’t ask – they lost my order and grrr it SHOULD be done this week) so these results so far are purely from forum profile links (Backlinks Philippines and MakeBacklinks.com) Who says those links are dead?

Thanks for reading More Clicks from Links or Images?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)