The sad thing is that they build these quick websites, trying to promote products to make a quick buck, but these websites end up ranking up with the good information sites, people read them and actually believe half of what they read.  Is it really fair for Internet Marketers to put up affiliate websites to promote products but their websites are full of lies.  Or not even so much lies, but just stuff that isn’t fully researched and so is not accurate.

Most of this stuff is written after doing a quick search of what else is out there on the topic and then whipping up a quick article about it and then people reading this stuff and believe it.

Is it right to take advantage of people in this way?

I guess it’s done all the time and all over the place though isn’t it?  It isn’t just online and it isn’t just internet marketers.  I guess when you think about it all salespeople take advantage of people to make a sale.

Maybe I’m not cut out to be an Internet Marketer or maybe that’s why I struggle to get as far ahead as some marketers, because I find it hard to cross that line of telling little white lies and taking advantage of people.

But I’m not giving up, I do believe that I can do it and I can do it without changing my beliefs and my morals.

Why I’m writing this post I don’t even know, I just had enough today of all the crap I’ve seen and hear and just wonder if maybe the reason there is so much crap out there is because there are just too many people wanting to make a buck online but really have no idea so just try and lie their way to the top!

When things go wrong as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh.
When care is pressing you down a bit.
Rest, if you must, but don’t you quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns
As every one of us sometimes learns.
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out:
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow -
You may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out -
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt.
And you never can tell how close you are.
It may be near when it seems so far:
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

-Unknown Author

Over the last couple of days I have added 6 pages (including a contact page and privacy policy page) and 5 blog posts.  I have enjoyed writing these pages and posts and hopefully will keep enjoying it.

I’ve planned my pages so that they have three or four keyword phrases on them.  I have a notebook where I’m keeping one page for each page of keywords that I add to my site, then I will record each time I create a backlink or an inbound link to those pages and for those particular keywords.

Today I went in and checked my stats and this is the first time that I’ve done that since I started the site three days ago and here is the result.

Blog #5 – $3.52

Not huge I know, but considering this site is only three days old then that makes it huge.  It is currently performing better than my other sites that I’ve had for weeks.  It’s possible that it might be because I’m continually working on the site so it’s attracting traffic as I have done social bookmarking on each page.  It’s possible that if I leave the site alone for a few days and not add any content or do any social bookmarking that the traffic might just slow right down.  I will worry about that when the time comes because at the moment I’m going to be working on it each day anyway.

So that’s my progress for blog #5, I haven’t checked my stats for the others today so I will give an update on them later.

Income for the last 7 days

Blog #1 – $3.74

That’s it!

But hey, it’s getting higher.  I’m really quite disappointed in this blog, even though it is actually making a little money which is more than I can say for the other three.  The other three are quite disappointing at the moment too but the reason I am so disappointed in this one is that this blog is ranking #2 on Google.

The main keyword phrase for this blog has 8100 searches every month and this is sitting at #2 and yet I’m only averaging around 20 visitors a day – WHY????  I have no idea why I’m not getting more traffic than that, you would think it would have more when it’s sitting at #2.

So here’s my slight change of plan and yes here I go moving on to something else once again instead of sticking to one project.  I know it’s the biggest mistake that Internet Marketers make to keep moving from one to another without sticking to one thing long enough, I’ve very aware of the mistake and that I’m doing it again.

However, while I’ve been creating these smaller websites and I think I may have mentioned in previous posts that I prefer to build these up into bigger websites, I just felt that I wasn’t happy with what I was doing.  I felt that I wanted more, that I wanted to be able to build a big site and I wanted to build a big site on a niche that I enjoyed writing about.

I’m sick of writing articles and blog posts on topics that don’t really interest me all that much and it makes it difficult to keep going with it when you have no interest in the topic.  So I really struggled to come up with a niche that I would be happy writing about and one that I thought could be BIG!

But the other day I came up with the niche – I finally found the niche that I want to work with.  I still didn’t realize then how big I wanted to go with this niche though until yesterday when someone on Warrior forum gave me a link to a video about SEO and also about building bigger sites.  I watched the video which went for about an hour, and was really inspired with it.  I thought about what I learned in this video and how I could use it for the niche that I found and I am now quite excited about created a ‘big’ site.

It’s true that it’s exciting because it’s a new idea and new ideas are always exciting, but this one involves something more, this niche is relating to something that I am doing physically in my own life at the moment so it is something that I could easily write about and share my own personal journey regarding this topic.

http://www.inlineseo.com/blog/2010/02/10/seo-secrets/

Above is the link to the seo video I watched, if you have an hour to spare then I do recommend watching it.  She does promote her own SEO product course at the end of it which I can’t give any comments on as I didn’t purchase it, I am working purely on what I learned from watching her video (this is not an affiliate link for her product either, in fact I don’t even know if she has an affiliate program).

With my new strategies after watching this video I am looking at having at least 100 keyword phrases for this niche and in fact once I got started I got carried away and probably have around 300 keyword phrases at the moment.  Her idea is to have three or four (or even up to ten) keyword phrases in one page, then you can rank and receive visitors for those three or four keyword phrases all with one page.  Of course you will need to build backlinks using the different keyword phrases as anchor texts, which will all take time, but the ultimate goal is to be receiving traffic for lots of different keyword phrases and not just one long tail keyword phrase which is what the micro niche sites do.

So this will be blog #5 although I don’t expect to be able to give big results for a while as I know it will take time to build up this site, but I will keep you updated on what I’m doing.

I’m not giving up on my other blogs completely, they can sit and grow in age for a little while and I will get back to them at some stage.

Blog #1 – $0.68

Blog #4 – $0.54

So as you can see no big income coming in as yet.  I haven’t done much over the last week though due to sick kids and now that they are all better and back at school they have given me their cold so I feel terrible and am not getting much done at all.

I have done a couple of websites though that I’ve sold over the last week so I did have $90 income with those.  I’m considering whether I should just go back to the site flipping since it was at least making me money.  I wont give up just yet on the niche blogging though as I am hoping that if I can just get enough time and motivation to get stuck in and work on one blog that it should start earning some income.

It has to right???

To be honest at the moment I really feel like giving up.  I mean $1.22 income in 7 days is really pretty bad and is it really worth the effort?  Will it pay off in the long term?  How do I know that I’m not just completely wasting my time with this and it might never build up to a huge income?

I know I’m not very good for keeping you motivated if you are reading this so I hope that I do start seeing some results soon so I can motivate you.  I think that’s half my trouble is that I’m just not motivated enough.

Ok, thanks for reading, take care.  Hopefully I’ll have a more inspirational and motivating post next time.

So yesterday I decided to go through and check which websites could be deleted and deleted them all.  What I thought would be a reasonably quick job ended up taking me almost all day.  It’s all done now though other than a couple of sites that are my own that I need to backup and transfer to other hosting, then I will be able to close my reseller account and have a normal hosting account for them.  That should save me $25 a month!

So with my blog #2, all I managed yesterday was to write one article and post it on the blog.  Today I have rewritten that article and posted/submitted it to around 20 blogs and article directories.  It’s a fairly slow process for me as I’m not that fast at writing and rewriting articles.  Partly I think because I don’t really enjoy writing articles and partly because I’m a bit too fussy with my articles.

I’m going to try and write one more article today and post it to the blog and then tomorrow rewrite it and submit it to the blogs/article directories again.

Then on Monday I might work on blog #3 – no it’s not a new blog, blog #3 is one that I created a couple of months ago and for the main keyword phrase it is currently sitting at #8 in Google.  I have a second keyword phrase that the page took forever to get indexed by Google, but now that it has it went from not being in the top 1000 to #62, so I want to build a few more backlinks to that particular page on that site and try to get that up to page 1 in Google, as well as try to increase my main keyword from #8.

Traffic is still fairly slow and income almost non-existant – which I know isn’t what people want to hear if you are considering doing niche blogging yourself.  But…. having said that, blogging takes time to build up and these are new websites still so as they grow and the backlinks to them grow hopefully so will the traffic and the income.

All the backlinks that I’m building now need time to be indexed themselves before they will start affecting my site ranking, so it will take a bit of time.  The good thing about niche blogging is that if you are willing to put in the work and the time in the beginning then you should be able to build up a nice income over time.

My plan is to try and rank well for the other long tail keywords as well as the main keyword phrase.  By doing that I should receive more traffic to my blog than if it was just coming from one keyword phrase.

I then rewrote the articles on my blog posts and submitted them to some article directories and also some of my own backlinking blog sources.  I have a number of my own general purpose blogs like a general wordpress blog and one at SOSBlog and a couple of others, so I add my article to these blog sources for backlinks.

I also submit some blog posts to 3 Step Ads, Unique Article Database and Writers Block Unblocked.  As a member of these three sites you can go in and submit blog posts as often as you like to get backlinks to your website.

So with the blog posts and article directory submissions I think I’ve added around 36 backlinks over the last two days, although I will need to wait until the articles are accepted and the backlink pages indexed.

I also social bookmarked all my blog posts which helps to get them indexed a bit quicker.

I also went through and commented on some .edu blogs to try and gain some .edu backlinks which are great for having authority sites linking back to your site.

My site is still ranked #3, but I don’t expect it to rise too soon without some more work as the top 2 sites are a bit more established so it will take some more work to outrank those, but I’m quite confident that I can do it with this keyword phrase.  Perhaps once these backlinks are all indexed I may hit #2 or #1.

So that’s my progress, I haven’t touched site #2 over the last couple of days, other than adding a couple of backlinks by commenting on blogs.  I may focus on blog #2 tomorrow, I’m still a bit undecided whether to spend a couple more days solely on blog #1 or to let that go for a couple of days and work on blog #2.

Thanks for reading
Sheryl

At night there were kangaroos around and possums and my husband and one of the kids even caught a glimpse of a red belly black snake – needless to say they kept away from that area after that.  We took an extra child with us, my oldest boys friend came with us, which was good as it evened up the numbers with the kids and therefore we had a bit less fighting than normal.

Anyway, now we’re home and it’s time to get back to work, although I can’t see myself getting too much done today or tomorrow being the weekend and my youngest son and my oldest niece both had their birthday yesterday and both have their birthday parties tomorrow, so tomorrow will be a very busy day.

School holidays are coming to an end and the kids will be back at school on Monday so I will get stuck back into work on Monday.

Just a quick update on the blogs though as I checked the stats when I got back.  The two blogs that I created just before I left are both now ranking at #3 in Google which is great.  Not a lot of visitors as yet though which is a little disappointed given the #3 rankings, so I will continue to add posts to the blogs and create more backlinks.  I will also do some article marketing to build backlinks and visitor numbers and hopefully I may even climb to #1 spot.

I have reviewed my methods too – well still building on my methods as I read so much different information it is hard to know which path to follow, but I’m creating a little of my own taking some information from different methods.

I have read a lot recently about quick mini-sites that only include a couple of pages but have really good keyword research to give you that chance of ranking well with only a few pages.  Some people have only one page of content on their websites, but I’m not really willing to go down that path as I’m a bit concerned that Google might not like one page websites and I don’t want to risk having my sites sandboxed.

I also don’t want to build one page sites and then leave them and come back in a month or so to see if they are making money – because if they’re not, I could be building a heap of these sites and it could all be a waste of time.  So my plan is to build up my sites with more content and continue working on two or three sites at a time until they are making money and ranking well before moving onto new sites.  Otherwise I find that I just have too much going on at one time and lose track of things and never concentrate on one site long enough to make money with it, this is the mistake I’ve made in the past.

At the moment I have these two blogs I’ve created and I have another blog I created a couple of months ago that is currently ranking at #6 in Google.  I am going to continue with just these three blogs until I have them making some income before moving on to any new blogs.

Ok, so that is where I am at and I will continue to post about my progress as it happens.

Thanks for reading

Recently I have started doing some niche blogging to try and build up some more passive income streams.  I am still flipping websites and making money from doing so, I just felt like a bit of a change with the hope of building up some long term income.

Niche blogging isn’t hard but it is more involved than I originally thought.  Choosing the right niche that will be both profitable and without too much competition can be quite difficult.  Let’s face it, if a niche has too much competition then it can be really hard to get your site ranking high enough to really make any money from it.  However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make money from that niche.  You can if you are using the right keyword phrases.

This is the next difficult step in niche blogging, finding good keyword phrases that still have a lot of searches per month but less competition.

For example, if you wanted to create a blog on weight loss it would be really difficult to rank highly with a blog based on those highly competitive keywords ‘weight loss’.  You can still be successful in the weight loss niche, just by focusing on some less competitive keywords.  So you could perhaps concentrate on one type of weight loss product or diet or exercise program and use keywords that are more targeted to the sub-niche.

By focusing on a sub-niche within a niche it is much easier to rank higher in Google and the other search engines giving you a much better chance of having a successful money making blog.

I have started working on a couple of niche blogs and one of them has started making a little bit of money so far.  I will try to keep you updated on how I go with it all.  It can be fun too if you are working on a good niche that you enjoy writing about, then it takes the ‘work’ out of it a little if you are enjoying what you are doing.

My blogs are all set up and now I’m mainly working on updating them regularly and also on building backlinks to them.  Backlinking is very important for ranking well and although it isn’t the best job in the world, it does need to be done.

So that’s where I’m at.  I hope whatever you are doing online is working well for you.

Take care
Sheryl

Our blog is aimed at Mums (or Moms as spelled in US) that are home with young kids and would like to earn some money at home so they can delay or even prevent all together returning to the work force.

I have 3 children myself and they are all school aged now, but my aim was not just to be able to stay home while they were babies and preschool age, but I wanted to be able to earn enough money so I could stay home even when they were school aged.  I wanted to do this because I wanted to be there for my children to take them to school in the morning and to be there after school.

So basically, during school hours, that is my time for working online.

To be successful at working online, I have found that you have to stay focused, choose one business opportunity and be determined to make it work.  You need to treat your online business like a job and set aside the time to work on it and set some goals for each day and work hard to reach those goals.  If you don’t have goals to complete each day then you will find that you spend most of your time looking for new opportunities and checking your stats to see if you have made any money yet.  You will be surprised how much time you waste doing this and this is time that can be spent in a more productive way that will make you more successful.

It is also important not to give up on an opportunity too quickly as many online business opportunities will take time before they really start making a decent income.  The only business that I have been successful at making money in a short period of time is Site Flipping, my other businesses have taken more time to establish and start making money.

Niche blogging is my other main line of business but each blog really does require research to get a really good keyword phrase to build that blog around, then it requires a lot of hard work to build that blog up to the stage of making money.  The good think with niche blogging is that when you get a blog making money then it will usually continue to make you money for a long time.  It becomes more of a passive income once it is established, however, any blog can only increase in value and income the more and more work and effort that you put into it.

There are many other types of business opportunities out there also, so find what you would like to do and really put an effort into making it work.

I wish you much success
Sheryl
Site Flipping Guru